Now for $99, I can damn sure buy a cheap digital camera for each station, (and an SD card for each of them, if necessary), and have larger sensors, better glass, and crazy features like not being fixed-focus vs. the Raspberry Pi camera module.
Except, after every run, you'd have to extract the SD cards from each camera and download them one-by-one to a PC to turn into a movie. With this, you can download all the images over the network in a few seconds.
Anyway - you weren't listening to TFA: this idea is primarily aimed at schools & colleges that already have or want class sets of Pi's for teaching programming and computer control, and the idea is that students will get involved in the programming to make it all work. As others have posted before: when you've had fun with this you tear it apart and use the Pis for the next project.
As for the boring videos: having kids moving or throwing things without 15cm of woodchips on the floor and padded helmets would probably waken the dreaded Safety 'Elf. Hopefully they had some actual fun in the clips that didn't get published on the internet. Actually, having a bunch of kids practicing scissor-kicks in the workshop does sound like an accident waiting to happen...
I think tablets and smartphones did provide the coup-de-grace for the "original" netbook - but the original fatal wound was caused long before, when the market decided (with a bit of, ahem, nudging from Microsoft) that it wanted full-blown Windows on their netbooks, not some stripped-down Linux distro that actually ran well on cheap hardware. From that point on, netbooks started creeping up in price, gradually morphing into Ultrabooks.
To be fair, it didn't help that Asus - who came out with the original EEEPC - seem to be the absolute master of the Osbourne Effect - by the time the much-vaunted new EEEPC or (later) Transformer tablet actually made it into the shops they'd usually announced the new/improved/fixed version.
That said, I had an original EEEPC, and they really hadn't put enough effort into (e.g.) re-skinning the standard Linux apps like OpenOfffice, Firefox and Thunderbird to work sensibly on the small screen, or putting enough apps on the repository to maintain interest. I then got an iPod touch that, even with its even tinier screen, was a better web/email/casual gaming appliance than the EEE.
The PC market (where P = personal and 'PC' includes Mac,Windows,Linux etc.) has had a 30 year honeymoon period during which specifications were increasing exponentially and real-time prices were dropping. Customers had a real incentive to upgrade their hardware and software every 18 months or so, because they were trying to to jobs that were pushing at the limits of their hardware.
Now, that has come to an end. Your 3-year old PC can effortlessly run a GUI-based OS like Windows 7, OS X 10.6 or your Linux distro of choice. It can do non-linear HD video editing fast enough for 'pro-sumers'. It can render web pages as fast as your broadband can deliver them. It can play FPS video games at 60 frames/sec, at levels of detail that are just this side of 'uncanny valley'. The only reason it would even break a sweat doing wordprocessing, DTP or spreadsheets is if the software is a bloated mess mentioning no names). The 4GB-8GB RAM you got is probably still enough and the only thing that can really fill up a 500G+ HDD for personal use is your video pr0n collection - for which cheap external HDs (convenient to lock in a cupboard) are available.
Of course, there are still specialist niches who need Moore's Law to keep rolling - but they will increasingly be looking at things like multi-GPU computing, clusters and the Cloud (£1 in the swear jar) rather than traditional Personal Computers.
Upgrading might get you a 10% improvement, but that's not going to turn your movie render from "coffee break" to "instant". I think the last, great upgrade for most people will be to switch from spinning rust to SSD (which does produce a dramatic speed up for many users) - after that, the only reason to upgrade will be if your computer breaks, suffers planned obsolescence or if the vendor sells you a stylish new model on non-technical grounds (Apple are the only real masters of that - possibly why they are doing less badly than others).
Sure, tablets and smartphones are part of the picture, but I suspect that it is more a case of people spending their spare cash on the latest fondleslab as a supplement to their 2 year-old PC rather than junking PCs for tablets.
There's also a case of self-fulfilling prophecy, with manufacturers obviously spending their R&D money on mobile devices rather than coming up with anything new in the PC line (beyond bunging touch-screens on their laptops) and software houses screwing up their offerings in a misguided attempt to make them more tablet-like (Windows 8, Gnome 3, Unity).
The only reason the PC will die is if modern hypercapitalist corporations decied that they can't be arsed to support a mature market that is no longer in its boom years and unlikely to generate short term windfall profits.
Quite frankly, computing could do with a few years respite from 'if it works it is obsolete' to give people a chance to finish upgrading their DOS software to a system that may still be around when they finish the job.
Frankly, ebooks are a pain. When I'm reading, I frequently flip back to previous material that I've read for reference.
Sounds like you're talking about reference books.
I find my e-reader great for 'linear' reading for novels etc. but useless for reference, for the reasons you state,
However, the competition for printed reference books is surely not Kindles et. al. but the web? I wonder how many of the people surveyed rely on Wikipedia, Google etc. for reference?
Is it just me that's struggling to see how a 'solution' is to charge people more for something they already use?
At least in the UK, the big supermarkets are already making quite a bit of progress*: they have racks of cheap re-usable bags prominently displayed by the till, sometimes with 'bag for life' free replacement deals, and give extra loyalty card points for customers who bring their own bags.
Charging for bags isn't going to make any significant financial impact on anybody, but the mere existence of a charge for something that was once free might be just enough to nudge people into changing their habits (remember to stuff the bags back into the car when you've finished unpacking - it's not a big deal). Having the charge mandated by government as a 'tax on bags' helps prevent any one company trying to get an advantage by offering free bags.
Maybe it will work better in UK/Europe, where displayed prices for consumer goods are always inclusive of tax and 'what you see is what you pay' compared with the US where consumers are used to sales tax and other random 'state surcharge evaluation fee assessment contribution' surcharges materialising at the checkout.
(* apart from the local Spar which was fairly recently re-fitted with a brilliant checkout design dependent on the plastic bag dispenser that completely fails if the shopper brings their own bag - it does mean they fit 6 checkouts in the space previously occupied by 3, which would be fine and dandy if they ever had more than 3 employees in the shop).
Not always. The price of fuel has skyrocketed in recent years, and most people do not commute on a daily basis further than the range of an electric car, but even households with more than one car (where the other can remain petroleum-powered) have not switched over to electric cars for at least one vehicle
Well, there are also a few other issues like (a) the problem of how to re-charge overnight if you don't have a garage/driveway (or if the garage/driveway is occupied by your second car) or (b) the sky-high price of EVs that makes it touch-and-go whether you'll ever save any money c.f. a modern, economical gasoline car - especially if you need a loan to raise the purchase price and/or pay a lease for the batteries. Plus, you can always walk, cycle or take the bus (maybe not so much in the US).
Now you'll be able to read your kindle on the plane,
Its ebooks that make the no-electronics-below 10000 feet rule intolerable. I can survive for an hour* without music or twitter, but the amount of entertainment that can be extracted from the in-flight magazine, duty free catalogue, in-flight safety card, back of the 'motion discomfort' bag etc. is strictly limited. Especially if its a return flight and you memorised it all on the way out...
*Anybody who talks about '10 minutes during takeoff and landing' is clearly flying from different airports than me...
Here we have Soulskill yet again trying to act like skeuomorphic artistic design is some sort of big, bad thing which we should be concerned about.
I think whaling on skeuomorphic design completely misses the point.
Good skeuomorphic design gives the user cues about how things work, what you can click, what you can slide etc.
Bad design (skeuomorphic or otherwise) paints a pretty picture on the screen for the hell of it. The form doesn't suggest function and well-established conventions from other software are ignored.
At worst, bad design creates false cues that misdirect users.
Unfortunately, recent versions of iOS and OS X have included several glaring examples of just plain bad design: As noted in TFA, iOS5/OSX 10.7 Calendar and Contacts are pin-up examples of how to misuse skeuomorphism (TL,DNR: if an app doesn't work like a book, don't make it look like a book). There are also more subtle issues - Dock icons that are all some variations on a blue circluar thingy (ISTR Apple used to recommend giving app icons a distinct silhouette) or advanced features buried in context menus (when - at least on Apple - established convention from the 1-button-mouse days was that context menus were only ever shortcuts to features available elsewhere).
One of the main advantages of GUIs, initially, was that a medley wildly different Visicalc-style, Wordstar-style, WordPerfect-style, Lotus-style, EMACS-style... interface conventions were swept away by a single set of convention. In recent years, there has been terrible backsliding to a world in which every app has a gratuitously different UI, sometimes for no better reason than to make it "patentable" (step up and take a bow, Microsoft Office Ribbon).
Open source package manager: OS X doesn't come with one, so no change.
...which means it is probably wise to wait for Macports and/or Fink to support Mavericks (I'm sure they're working on it, but currently their websites stop at 10.8)
It's somewhat baffling that anyone these days would want an iPad 2. The Mini outstrips it in every area but screen size, at the same price. I would also imagine that continuing to support it is obnoxious for developers.
I'm guessing that they've got a niche market for it that needs the screen size but doesn't want to pay for retina displays - probably schools.
Seriously, the whole "do we have free will" case is a prime example of trying to find an answer without knowing what the question is.
If its about determinism, then quantum mechanics and chaos theory deliver a double whammy to that: one says that you can't predict the behaviour of many complex systems unless you can measure the parameters to perfect accuracy... the other limits what you can measure to perfect accuracy...
Passengers are where the weight is a real concern. Fatbodies cost the airlines money way more than life preservers. Charge by the pound.
Fine, on the following conditions:
1. Do the math fairly. Someone 20% heavier than you doesn't use a 20% larger share of the fuel than you - even making the (almost certainly false) assumption that fuel consumption is entirely based on total weight, everybody needs seats, air, food, crew, toilets, blankets, headphones etc. all of which add to the weight and need maintaining/replacing/paying as appropriate. I've never seen them strap on an extra engine or bolt on a new wing when a fatty gets on. Not to mention your contribution to advertising, insurance, new planes, the CEOs annual bonus and senator rental. You're probably subsidising a few of the senior corporate customers up in nob class, too: you don't get that rich by paying your way.
2. Any surcharge is based on the total weight of passenger + hand luggage (including those massive wheeled suitcases that seem to count as "hand luggage" nowadays) + checked luggage.
3. If you're going to charge extra for large people they should get extra space in return.
Of course, on a typical flight there's probably a 50%+ variance in what people in the same class actually paid for the seats depending on where and when they booked them. AFAIK ticket prices are mainly based on supply, demand and the dark arts of modern accountancy rather than the actual cost of running that particular flight. So be prepared for any fairly calculated weight surcharge to be pretty negligible.
The way to do it would be to require a micro-USB, but they can also use any other charging method you want. How many phones are going to have wireless charging ONLY?
Thin phones, flexible phones, waterproof phones, tiny in-ear phones, wearable phones, phones that can be fitted nasally, 2016's "if I'd thought of it now I'd be down at the patent office now not posting on Slashdot" ones? Any kind of device for which eliminating a hole in the case, exposed contacts and a mechanically-robust fixing for the socket is a Good thing.
This is classic EU "shutting the stable door after the milk has been spilt policy." I don't know if they've noticed, but the world has pretty much standardised on having a USB 'A' socket [i]on the charging device[/i] to the extent that they're tuning up on multi-way mains adapters, in hotel rooms and cars (I have a car-lighter socket to USB-A socket adapter). This solves 99% of the problem plus it is also a no-brainer for manufacturers since many devices need a data cable anyway. There's no need to specify how the cable connects to the device.
I haven't had to pack more than one power supply to charge my Android phone, iPad, eReader, headphones, mouse... for a couple of years now.
Carrying a few different cables is something that I, and the Earth, can cope with.
Why stop there? Why not just get rid of the lights?
Presumably, the lights were there for a good reason. In the (unlikely, but not impossible) event that they were gratuitous lights put there purely to raise red-light-camera revenue then they are a hazard that will draw drivers' attention away from the road, and should be removed.
While we're at it, why not just get rid of all intersections everywhere and make the road a large, continuous loop? After all, if there are no intersections, then nobody can stop at an intersection to get rear-ended.
Apart from the "continuous loop" I think you'll find that's called a "Motorway", "Freeway", "Autobahn" or something, depending on where you live. Guess what? it turns out that they are indeed safer than regular roads with lots of lights and junctions, especially considering the speed and higher fatality rate if you do crash.
It's legally 100% the following car's fault when rear-ending a vehicle, here in NSW Australia, anyway. The reasoning?
The reasoning: it is far more practical to have simple rules for determining financial liability for road accidents than to get bogged down in long investigations and litigation in an attempt to portion out blame on a case-by-case basis.
That may be the least worst solution for sorting out which insurance company pays - without the cost of the investigation exceeding the damages from the accident - but in many cases both parties will have contributed to the situation.
Drivers should be ready to stop in time to avoid any accident - but in reality, cars are driven by fallible human beings and it only takes a moment's distraction to fail to react to an unexpected situation. If you wilfully create a hazard on the road, don't act all surprised and innocent when somebody runs into it.
You dont' know that. Just what do you think people will do if you keep jumping all over them when they're trying to be a lot safer while stopped at the light? I'm not talking about some idealist stance, but what people will actually do.
I'd wager it'd be going back to texting while moving where they're less likely to be caught.
I think if you're so compulsively addicted to texting that you do it at red lights, you'll probably do it while moving anyway.
If we were talking about changing channels on the car radio, taking a bite from a candy bar, glancing at the sheet of directions on the passenger sheet or some other momentary distraction then I'd have some sympathy - none of those win any prizes for safe driving, but if someone claims never to do any of them they're probably lying. No we're talking about texting here. People shouldn't walk and text (watch them sometime - totally unaware of their surroundings). Texting while driving is the gold standard of absolute stupidity.
Children walk onto the roadway, the car doesn't move and gets rear-ended? Crash is the fault of the driver who stopped.
Who the hell mentioned children? The guy was texting, not avoiding running down a kid. Child in front of car = good reason for stopping that justifies the risk. Need to send a text = stupid reason for stopping that doesn't justify the risk.
Yes, the driver behind was at fault because they were obviously going too fast/not looking/whatever. The concept that seems to elude people is that the car in front can be at fault as well for being stopped in the middle of the road for no good reason.
Why this bizarre notion that placing some of the blame on one party has to totally absolve the other?
The vast majority of those reasons are legitimate.
Sure... and sending a text message isn't one of them. Being stopped in the middle of the road is a serious risk - you need a good reason. If you only have a stupid reason then why shouldn't you share some of the blame for the consequences? My whole point was that this doesn't let the other guy off the hook.
If the phone is in a cradle, in hands-free navigation mode, giving directions, fine.
If, by "using" you mean trying to type in an address or adjust the route... how is that any less dangerours than texting?
If the law really says that "dedicated GPS=good, smartphone GPS=bad" then the law truly is an ass - but that's what you get when you pass lots of redundant, knee-jerk laws specifically banning certain activities. I'm pretty sure that, in most jurisdictions, a cop can book anybody who isn't "fully in control of their vehicle" or "driving without due care and attention" etc.
In some other countries where most have manual transmissions, drivers are trained to place the car into neutral and engage the handbrake at a red light. That at least makes this a somewhat safer practice.
ROTFL.
Yeah, that's what you're taught in the UK. You're also taught to check all of your tyres, coolant levels and windscreen washers before starting a journey, to only use the middle and right-hand lanes of a motorway for overtaking and that flashing your headlights is equivalent to sounding your horn. Generally, people don't start ignoring such things until they've passed their driving test and put at least one corner between themselves and the driving examiner. If you're a goody two-shoes you actually use the brake pedal at a red light rather than wearing out your clutch.
That said, there's something to be said for a system whereby, if you take both of your feet of the pedals, no power goes to the wheels.
Despite what lawyers and insurance companies would like you to think, blame doesn't follow some sort of conservation principle. There's more than enough for everybody to have some.
If the first car hadn't been stationary at a green light, the accident wouldn't have happened. The first driver created a dangerous situation. If people make a habit of this there will be more accidents - so deterring people from doing it is a good idea. Stating that doesn't stop the second driver being responsible for not looking where they were going.
And if you forget the "iPhone charging cable" on the go, you can't borrow a standard USB cable which are pretty ubiquitous to recharge your phone, you need to find someone that has the proprietary cable.
Right, because nobody else in the world owns an iPhone or iPad and you can't buy third-party Apple charge cables at the local BuyMore. Yeah, that was true for a few months after Apple switched from the old iPod connector to the new, smaller connector.
Can the iPhone now play Flac and OGG files and other open source formats without transcoding?
Well, there's this... or you can just transcode everything to Apple Lossless (which is open source now, and since it is lossless, transcoding is no big deal).
But Apple prefers to force their users to use their proprietary formats.
Except that iTunes and iOS have always supported the ubiquitous.mp3, and the default AAC may not be Free but it isn't proprietary either (and Apple dropped audio DRM long ago). It's nice that.ogg is properly Free (until some troll fishes around under their bridge and finds a patent to assert against it) but the reality is that 99% of punters don't give a fig.
For a company that prides itself on providing a good user experience, this behavior is clearly putting Apple's desires ahead of their users.
Ha! A good user experience is plugging your device into your computer and having all your music, videos, playists and photos sync reliably. iTunes does that. Android, however, gives you a wide choice of alternative programs that almost do some of those things, downhill and with a following wind. NB: I have and use both Android and iOS devices - I've tried.
How well does that work on Windows? From what I've heard, that experience is significantly degraded.
Remind me how you sync your Android phone with email, calendars and contacts on Windows - other than using Gmail or a MS Exchange server (which both work with iOS, too).
I agree, I wouldn't call the iOS interface clumsy, but it is restrictive as hell. On my Android phone, I have the top news stories, my stocks, the weather, and my calendar all on home screens that I scroll through with a simple swipe that lets me put my finger on the pulse of all that I care about with a few quick swipes.
I think Apple do need to up their game here. The "spartan" functionality of iOS (no user app multitasking, no widgets) made sense for a few years after the iPhone was released - I had what you might call a "second generation" Android phone - a HTC hero - and it was all to easy to bring it to its knees by loading up too many widgets, and it did seem to need a "task killer" to stop background tasks piling up. However, todays smartphones (I have a Galaxy Note 2) are vastly more powerful and can deal with multiple widgets, animated wallpapers and background processes until the cows come home. Apple should re-visit the idea of widgets (except they'd be accused of ripping off Android).
rather than shortcuts to all my apps cluttering up my home screen with icons I rarely use.
You can drag apps between screens, and create groups, on iOS, you know...
A better question is "what was Microsoft thinking?"
Probably:
"Oohh, look at all those delicious patents we're acquiring from Nokia. Hey, Apple, Samsung, Google... tell your IP lawyers to cancel their vacations! Fol-de-rol!"
Slashdot Mirror
The data is sent to a smartphone app, which then alerts users about their mood.
The upcoming Google version will respond by connecting to the user's Google glasses and popping up a Ben & Jerry's ad.
New banana and anchovy flavour If their Google Loo thinks they might be pregnant...
Now for $99, I can damn sure buy a cheap digital camera for each station, (and an SD card for each of them, if necessary), and have larger sensors, better glass, and crazy features like not being fixed-focus vs. the Raspberry Pi camera module.
Except, after every run, you'd have to extract the SD cards from each camera and download them one-by-one to a PC to turn into a movie. With this, you can download all the images over the network in a few seconds.
Anyway - you weren't listening to TFA: this idea is primarily aimed at schools & colleges that already have or want class sets of Pi's for teaching programming and computer control, and the idea is that students will get involved in the programming to make it all work. As others have posted before: when you've had fun with this you tear it apart and use the Pis for the next project.
As for the boring videos: having kids moving or throwing things without 15cm of woodchips on the floor and padded helmets would probably waken the dreaded Safety 'Elf. Hopefully they had some actual fun in the clips that didn't get published on the internet. Actually, having a bunch of kids practicing scissor-kicks in the workshop does sound like an accident waiting to happen...
You mean like what happened to affordable 10" laptops a year ago?
I think tablets and smartphones did provide the coup-de-grace for the "original" netbook - but the original fatal wound was caused long before, when the market decided (with a bit of, ahem, nudging from Microsoft) that it wanted full-blown Windows on their netbooks, not some stripped-down Linux distro that actually ran well on cheap hardware. From that point on, netbooks started creeping up in price, gradually morphing into Ultrabooks.
To be fair, it didn't help that Asus - who came out with the original EEEPC - seem to be the absolute master of the Osbourne Effect - by the time the much-vaunted new EEEPC or (later) Transformer tablet actually made it into the shops they'd usually announced the new/improved/fixed version.
That said, I had an original EEEPC, and they really hadn't put enough effort into (e.g.) re-skinning the standard Linux apps like OpenOfffice, Firefox and Thunderbird to work sensibly on the small screen, or putting enough apps on the repository to maintain interest. I then got an iPod touch that, even with its even tinier screen, was a better web/email/casual gaming appliance than the EEE.
The PC market (where P = personal and 'PC' includes Mac,Windows,Linux etc.) has had a 30 year honeymoon period during which specifications were increasing exponentially and real-time prices were dropping. Customers had a real incentive to upgrade their hardware and software every 18 months or so, because they were trying to to jobs that were pushing at the limits of their hardware.
Now, that has come to an end. Your 3-year old PC can effortlessly run a GUI-based OS like Windows 7, OS X 10.6 or your Linux distro of choice. It can do non-linear HD video editing fast enough for 'pro-sumers'. It can render web pages as fast as your broadband can deliver them. It can play FPS video games at 60 frames/sec, at levels of detail that are just this side of 'uncanny valley'. The only reason it would even break a sweat doing wordprocessing, DTP or spreadsheets is if the software is a bloated mess mentioning no names). The 4GB-8GB RAM you got is probably still enough and the only thing that can really fill up a 500G+ HDD for personal use is your video pr0n collection - for which cheap external HDs (convenient to lock in a cupboard) are available.
Of course, there are still specialist niches who need Moore's Law to keep rolling - but they will increasingly be looking at things like multi-GPU computing, clusters and the Cloud (£1 in the swear jar) rather than traditional Personal Computers.
Upgrading might get you a 10% improvement, but that's not going to turn your movie render from "coffee break" to "instant". I think the last, great upgrade for most people will be to switch from spinning rust to SSD (which does produce a dramatic speed up for many users) - after that, the only reason to upgrade will be if your computer breaks, suffers planned obsolescence or if the vendor sells you a stylish new model on non-technical grounds (Apple are the only real masters of that - possibly why they are doing less badly than others).
Sure, tablets and smartphones are part of the picture, but I suspect that it is more a case of people spending their spare cash on the latest fondleslab as a supplement to their 2 year-old PC rather than junking PCs for tablets.
There's also a case of self-fulfilling prophecy, with manufacturers obviously spending their R&D money on mobile devices rather than coming up with anything new in the PC line (beyond bunging touch-screens on their laptops) and software houses screwing up their offerings in a misguided attempt to make them more tablet-like (Windows 8, Gnome 3, Unity).
The only reason the PC will die is if modern hypercapitalist corporations decied that they can't be arsed to support a mature market that is no longer in its boom years and unlikely to generate short term windfall profits.
Quite frankly, computing could do with a few years respite from 'if it works it is obsolete' to give people a chance to finish upgrading their DOS software to a system that may still be around when they finish the job.
Frankly, ebooks are a pain. When I'm reading, I frequently flip back to previous material that I've read for reference.
Sounds like you're talking about reference books.
I find my e-reader great for 'linear' reading for novels etc. but useless for reference, for the reasons you state,
However, the competition for printed reference books is surely not Kindles et. al. but the web? I wonder how many of the people surveyed rely on Wikipedia, Google etc. for reference?
I think we have a winner for todays first world problem.
A first-world solution like an electric car needs a first-world problem.
Is it just me that's struggling to see how a 'solution' is to charge people more for something they already use?
At least in the UK, the big supermarkets are already making quite a bit of progress*: they have racks of cheap re-usable bags prominently displayed by the till, sometimes with 'bag for life' free replacement deals, and give extra loyalty card points for customers who bring their own bags.
Charging for bags isn't going to make any significant financial impact on anybody, but the mere existence of a charge for something that was once free might be just enough to nudge people into changing their habits (remember to stuff the bags back into the car when you've finished unpacking - it's not a big deal). Having the charge mandated by government as a 'tax on bags' helps prevent any one company trying to get an advantage by offering free bags.
Maybe it will work better in UK/Europe, where displayed prices for consumer goods are always inclusive of tax and 'what you see is what you pay' compared with the US where consumers are used to sales tax and other random 'state surcharge evaluation fee assessment contribution' surcharges materialising at the checkout.
(* apart from the local Spar which was fairly recently re-fitted with a brilliant checkout design dependent on the plastic bag dispenser that completely fails if the shopper brings their own bag - it does mean they fit 6 checkouts in the space previously occupied by 3, which would be fine and dandy if they ever had more than 3 employees in the shop).
Not always. The price of fuel has skyrocketed in recent years, and most people do not commute on a daily basis further than the range of an electric car, but even households with more than one car (where the other can remain petroleum-powered) have not switched over to electric cars for at least one vehicle
Well, there are also a few other issues like (a) the problem of how to re-charge overnight if you don't have a garage/driveway (or if the garage/driveway is occupied by your second car) or (b) the sky-high price of EVs that makes it touch-and-go whether you'll ever save any money c.f. a modern, economical gasoline car - especially if you need a loan to raise the purchase price and/or pay a lease for the batteries. Plus, you can always walk, cycle or take the bus (maybe not so much in the US).
Now you'll be able to read your kindle on the plane,
Its ebooks that make the no-electronics-below 10000 feet rule intolerable. I can survive for an hour* without music or twitter, but the amount of entertainment that can be extracted from the in-flight magazine, duty free catalogue, in-flight safety card, back of the 'motion discomfort' bag etc. is strictly limited. Especially if its a return flight and you memorised it all on the way out...
*Anybody who talks about '10 minutes during takeoff and landing' is clearly flying from different airports than me...
Here we have Soulskill yet again trying to act like skeuomorphic artistic design is some sort of big, bad thing which we should be concerned about.
I think whaling on skeuomorphic design completely misses the point.
Good skeuomorphic design gives the user cues about how things work, what you can click, what you can slide etc.
Bad design (skeuomorphic or otherwise) paints a pretty picture on the screen for the hell of it. The form doesn't suggest function and well-established conventions from other software are ignored.
At worst, bad design creates false cues that misdirect users.
Unfortunately, recent versions of iOS and OS X have included several glaring examples of just plain bad design: As noted in TFA, iOS5/OSX 10.7 Calendar and Contacts are pin-up examples of how to misuse skeuomorphism (TL,DNR: if an app doesn't work like a book, don't make it look like a book). There are also more subtle issues - Dock icons that are all some variations on a blue circluar thingy (ISTR Apple used to recommend giving app icons a distinct silhouette) or advanced features buried in context menus (when - at least on Apple - established convention from the 1-button-mouse days was that context menus were only ever shortcuts to features available elsewhere).
One of the main advantages of GUIs, initially, was that a medley wildly different Visicalc-style, Wordstar-style, WordPerfect-style, Lotus-style, EMACS-style... interface conventions were swept away by a single set of convention. In recent years, there has been terrible backsliding to a world in which every app has a gratuitously different UI, sometimes for no better reason than to make it "patentable" (step up and take a bow, Microsoft Office Ribbon).
Open source package manager: OS X doesn't come with one, so no change.
...which means it is probably wise to wait for Macports and/or Fink to support Mavericks (I'm sure they're working on it, but currently their websites stop at 10.8)
It's somewhat baffling that anyone these days would want an iPad 2. The Mini outstrips it in every area but screen size, at the same price. I would also imagine that continuing to support it is obnoxious for developers.
I'm guessing that they've got a niche market for it that needs the screen size but doesn't want to pay for retina displays - probably schools.
Seriously, the whole "do we have free will" case is a prime example of trying to find an answer without knowing what the question is.
If its about determinism, then quantum mechanics and chaos theory deliver a double whammy to that: one says that you can't predict the behaviour of many complex systems unless you can measure the parameters to perfect accuracy... the other limits what you can measure to perfect accuracy...
Passengers are where the weight is a real concern. Fatbodies cost the airlines money way more than life preservers. Charge by the pound.
Fine, on the following conditions:
1. Do the math fairly. Someone 20% heavier than you doesn't use a 20% larger share of the fuel than you - even making the (almost certainly false) assumption that fuel consumption is entirely based on total weight, everybody needs seats, air, food, crew, toilets, blankets, headphones etc. all of which add to the weight and need maintaining/replacing/paying as appropriate. I've never seen them strap on an extra engine or bolt on a new wing when a fatty gets on. Not to mention your contribution to advertising, insurance, new planes, the CEOs annual bonus and senator rental. You're probably subsidising a few of the senior corporate customers up in nob class, too: you don't get that rich by paying your way.
2. Any surcharge is based on the total weight of passenger + hand luggage (including those massive wheeled suitcases that seem to count as "hand luggage" nowadays) + checked luggage.
3. If you're going to charge extra for large people they should get extra space in return.
Of course, on a typical flight there's probably a 50%+ variance in what people in the same class actually paid for the seats depending on where and when they booked them. AFAIK ticket prices are mainly based on supply, demand and the dark arts of modern accountancy rather than the actual cost of running that particular flight. So be prepared for any fairly calculated weight surcharge to be pretty negligible.
Enter search: yahoo.com
Result: Take me to the humorous cat videos
Enter search: piratebay.org
Result: Where can I watch Game of Thrones?
Enter search: www.bankofamerica.com.fouronenine.ng?
Result: How should I invest my inheritance?
Enter search: www.goatse.cx
Result: Does my bum look big in this?
Oh, and to get back to your original question:
42?
What do you get if you multiply six by nine?*
(* Yes, I know - blame the hairdressers)
The way to do it would be to require a micro-USB, but they can also use any other charging method you want. How many phones are going to have wireless charging ONLY?
Thin phones, flexible phones, waterproof phones, tiny in-ear phones, wearable phones, phones that can be fitted nasally, 2016's "if I'd thought of it now I'd be down at the patent office now not posting on Slashdot" ones? Any kind of device for which eliminating a hole in the case, exposed contacts and a mechanically-robust fixing for the socket is a Good thing.
This is classic EU "shutting the stable door after the milk has been spilt policy." I don't know if they've noticed, but the world has pretty much standardised on having a USB 'A' socket [i]on the charging device[/i] to the extent that they're tuning up on multi-way mains adapters, in hotel rooms and cars (I have a car-lighter socket to USB-A socket adapter). This solves 99% of the problem plus it is also a no-brainer for manufacturers since many devices need a data cable anyway. There's no need to specify how the cable connects to the device. I haven't had to pack more than one power supply to charge my Android phone, iPad, eReader, headphones, mouse... for a couple of years now.
Carrying a few different cables is something that I, and the Earth, can cope with.
Why stop there? Why not just get rid of the lights?
Presumably, the lights were there for a good reason. In the (unlikely, but not impossible) event that they were gratuitous lights put there purely to raise red-light-camera revenue then they are a hazard that will draw drivers' attention away from the road, and should be removed.
While we're at it, why not just get rid of all intersections everywhere and make the road a large, continuous loop? After all, if there are no intersections, then nobody can stop at an intersection to get rear-ended.
Apart from the "continuous loop" I think you'll find that's called a "Motorway", "Freeway", "Autobahn" or something, depending on where you live. Guess what? it turns out that they are indeed safer than regular roads with lots of lights and junctions, especially considering the speed and higher fatality rate if you do crash.
It's legally 100% the following car's fault when rear-ending a vehicle, here in NSW Australia, anyway. The reasoning?
The reasoning: it is far more practical to have simple rules for determining financial liability for road accidents than to get bogged down in long investigations and litigation in an attempt to portion out blame on a case-by-case basis.
That may be the least worst solution for sorting out which insurance company pays - without the cost of the investigation exceeding the damages from the accident - but in many cases both parties will have contributed to the situation.
Drivers should be ready to stop in time to avoid any accident - but in reality, cars are driven by fallible human beings and it only takes a moment's distraction to fail to react to an unexpected situation. If you wilfully create a hazard on the road, don't act all surprised and innocent when somebody runs into it.
You dont' know that. Just what do you think people will do if you keep jumping all over them when they're trying to be a lot safer while stopped at the light? I'm not talking about some idealist stance, but what people will actually do.
I'd wager it'd be going back to texting while moving where they're less likely to be caught.
I think if you're so compulsively addicted to texting that you do it at red lights, you'll probably do it while moving anyway.
If we were talking about changing channels on the car radio, taking a bite from a candy bar, glancing at the sheet of directions on the passenger sheet or some other momentary distraction then I'd have some sympathy - none of those win any prizes for safe driving, but if someone claims never to do any of them they're probably lying. No we're talking about texting here. People shouldn't walk and text (watch them sometime - totally unaware of their surroundings). Texting while driving is the gold standard of absolute stupidity.
That is amazing logic.
Children walk onto the roadway, the car doesn't move and gets rear-ended? Crash is the fault of the driver who stopped.
Who the hell mentioned children? The guy was texting, not avoiding running down a kid. Child in front of car = good reason for stopping that justifies the risk. Need to send a text = stupid reason for stopping that doesn't justify the risk.
Yes, the driver behind was at fault because they were obviously going too fast/not looking/whatever. The concept that seems to elude people is that the car in front can be at fault as well for being stopped in the middle of the road for no good reason.
Why this bizarre notion that placing some of the blame on one party has to totally absolve the other?
The vast majority of those reasons are legitimate.
Sure... and sending a text message isn't one of them. Being stopped in the middle of the road is a serious risk - you need a good reason. If you only have a stupid reason then why shouldn't you share some of the blame for the consequences? My whole point was that this doesn't let the other guy off the hook.
Citing for using the GPS is fucking stupid.
Define "using".
If the phone is in a cradle, in hands-free navigation mode, giving directions, fine.
If, by "using" you mean trying to type in an address or adjust the route... how is that any less dangerours than texting?
If the law really says that "dedicated GPS=good, smartphone GPS=bad" then the law truly is an ass - but that's what you get when you pass lots of redundant, knee-jerk laws specifically banning certain activities. I'm pretty sure that, in most jurisdictions, a cop can book anybody who isn't "fully in control of their vehicle" or "driving without due care and attention" etc.
In some other countries where most have manual transmissions, drivers are trained to place the car into neutral and engage the handbrake at a red light. That at least makes this a somewhat safer practice.
ROTFL.
Yeah, that's what you're taught in the UK. You're also taught to check all of your tyres, coolant levels and windscreen washers before starting a journey, to only use the middle and right-hand lanes of a motorway for overtaking and that flashing your headlights is equivalent to sounding your horn. Generally, people don't start ignoring such things until they've passed their driving test and put at least one corner between themselves and the driving examiner. If you're a goody two-shoes you actually use the brake pedal at a red light rather than wearing out your clutch.
That said, there's something to be said for a system whereby, if you take both of your feet of the pedals, no power goes to the wheels.
And that is the stationary car's fault?
Despite what lawyers and insurance companies would like you to think, blame doesn't follow some sort of conservation principle. There's more than enough for everybody to have some.
If the first car hadn't been stationary at a green light, the accident wouldn't have happened. The first driver created a dangerous situation. If people make a habit of this there will be more accidents - so deterring people from doing it is a good idea. Stating that doesn't stop the second driver being responsible for not looking where they were going.
And if you forget the "iPhone charging cable" on the go, you can't borrow a standard USB cable which are pretty ubiquitous to recharge your phone, you need to find someone that has the proprietary cable.
Right, because nobody else in the world owns an iPhone or iPad and you can't buy third-party Apple charge cables at the local BuyMore. Yeah, that was true for a few months after Apple switched from the old iPod connector to the new, smaller connector.
Can the iPhone now play Flac and OGG files and other open source formats without transcoding?
Well, there's this... or you can just transcode everything to Apple Lossless (which is open source now, and since it is lossless, transcoding is no big deal).
But Apple prefers to force their users to use their proprietary formats.
Except that iTunes and iOS have always supported the ubiquitous .mp3, and the default AAC may not be Free but it isn't proprietary either (and Apple dropped audio DRM long ago). It's nice that .ogg is properly Free (until some troll fishes around under their bridge and finds a patent to assert against it) but the reality is that 99% of punters don't give a fig.
For a company that prides itself on providing a good user experience, this behavior is clearly putting Apple's desires ahead of their users.
Ha! A good user experience is plugging your device into your computer and having all your music, videos, playists and photos sync reliably. iTunes does that. Android, however, gives you a wide choice of alternative programs that almost do some of those things, downhill and with a following wind. NB: I have and use both Android and iOS devices - I've tried.
How well does that work on Windows? From what I've heard, that experience is significantly degraded.
Remind me how you sync your Android phone with email, calendars and contacts on Windows - other than using Gmail or a MS Exchange server (which both work with iOS, too).
I agree, I wouldn't call the iOS interface clumsy, but it is restrictive as hell. On my Android phone, I have the top news stories, my stocks, the weather, and my calendar all on home screens that I scroll through with a simple swipe that lets me put my finger on the pulse of all that I care about with a few quick swipes.
I think Apple do need to up their game here. The "spartan" functionality of iOS (no user app multitasking, no widgets) made sense for a few years after the iPhone was released - I had what you might call a "second generation" Android phone - a HTC hero - and it was all to easy to bring it to its knees by loading up too many widgets, and it did seem to need a "task killer" to stop background tasks piling up. However, todays smartphones (I have a Galaxy Note 2) are vastly more powerful and can deal with multiple widgets, animated wallpapers and background processes until the cows come home. Apple should re-visit the idea of widgets (except they'd be accused of ripping off Android).
rather than shortcuts to all my apps cluttering up my home screen with icons I rarely use.
You can drag apps between screens, and create groups, on iOS, you know...
A better question is "what was Microsoft thinking?"
Probably:
"Oohh, look at all those delicious patents we're acquiring from Nokia. Hey, Apple, Samsung, Google... tell your IP lawyers to cancel their vacations! Fol-de-rol!"