What "good old days" where those? When you read the newspaper that conformed to your political viewpoint; the weekly magazine that covered any world events only as far as it affected you and others like you; watched only the TV shows that reinforced what you thought you already knew and believed?
It was just a link to a large fish landing net with a long handle. No idea why slashdot refuses that link when the other one to a box of matches was OK.
Wear a mask. Not a Halloween prop or anything, but a medical mask, as you would wear when you are running a cold or something. No, it won't really prevent automated face identification, but it will prevent any casual recognition or incidental appearances in other people's online albums.
As a bonus, if you do happen to carry a cold or the flu at the time, you're also helping prevent the spread.
So, I'm not a fan of Google Glass, and I doubt I'd ever get one.
With that said, banning Glass while allowing phones is ridiculous. Every day on my commute, I've got dozens of people around me holding their phones to their faces. At a lunch restaurant I see the same thing. At dinner, in bars, on the street - you've got people fiddling with their phones everywhere.
They could be checking their email, posting to some social site, reading the news, playing a game - or taking pictures or film clips where I appear. I have no way to know. By comparison, Google Glass is much more obvious about it, with flashing lights and stuff to warn people you're taking a picture.
If these people really are concerned about their customers privacy, they'd forbid smartphones, not eyewear.
but our brains are hardwired to seek high calorie foods,
It's not quite that simple. I mean, very few of us actually spend much time hunting for high calorie foods (or any foods) after all.
We're creatures of habit, more than anything else, and what that sugar kick does to you is reinforce a habit of snacking on sugary foods. Sugar may give you a jolt, but it's the habit that makes you snack.
And refraining from doing something can become a habit just as well; it's just not as straightforward to set up. In a way, creating a "one and one only" habit is really all about teaching yourself that the chocolately kick is a signal to stop, not to take another one.
We keep plenty of snacks of all kinds at home. You get a lot of snacks as gifts here, and a lot of really high-quality chocolates are only sold here during Valentine's and White Day, so my wife stocks up then.
The trick is to set a limit, and make it a part of your routine. Convince your mind that no, it actually doesn't want any more because another piece would break the daily routine. We have a snack, candy or chocolate every evening after dinner. A snack, singular. One piece of chocolate, one candy drop, one cookie or whatever. Since it's routine, there's no craving for a second one.
PDAs had a considerable market presence for a time, even Apple had the Newton.
PDAs are a good argument actually. A phone/tablet before the smartphone that went mainstream big-time. And you might argue that smartphones really are the direct successors to the PDA.
Laplets (tabtops?) generate a lot of interest out in the wild. I think they're held back by price and the chicken and egg problem. The ones worth having are still up in the $2000 range, last I looked.
The price is a definite factor. But the price point of a device is every bit as much part of the overall design as weight, storage or the colour of the on-screen icons.
A tablet-as-laptop will need the hardware features and performance of a "real" laptop in order not to fail. In addition, the demand for very low weight and volume means the price is going to be higher than an equivalent, but less compact laptop. Which means you can't make the equivalent of a 300-dollar laptop as a tablet, since it will (rightly) be seen as far overpriced for what it does.
And that means it has to be designed as a premium device or people won't swallow the cost increase. But then it becomes, as you say, much more expensive than any tablet-as-phone device, without actually offering a better tablet gestalt.
It's a very hard design nut to crack; I suspect it is not doable at all at this time. In another hardware generation or two (5-10 years) things may change of course.
Who is to say which is best, or that either is best? Isn't that the failure of RT? It's neither, but tries to offer a middle-ground?
As you say, it tries to offer both a phone/tablet and a laptop/tablet experience and fails with both.
With that said, I would guess we already know what a successful tablet is. We've had keyboardless touch-screen devices for many years before iPad and Android devices. They were always designed as keyboardless laptops, and they always, without exception failed in the general marketplace.
Now, you might have guessed that iPad is an aberration; it succeeded not becuase the phone/tablet gestalt is superior but because a guy in a turtleneck sprinkled magic design dust on it. But then the iPad would remain the only successful tablet, and that's simply not the case. Android tablets sell as well as Apple devices today, and there's many models all selling better than the RT devices, and much better than any of the earlier laptop/tablet designs ever did.
Seems to be a fairly strong vote in favour of the tablet-as-phone approach by consumers. Add in the phablet segment and there seems to be little doubt. I'm sure RT could do well as a niche device, but it's clear that's not something MS would be content with, and also seems clear the tablet-as-laptop concept doesn't have enough mass-market appeal.
As another poster says, there's no way to find the DRM-free titles. And general fiction publishers (to me, SF is most definitely "general") don't seem to sell directly to customers outside their own country - probably due to distribution rights deals with publishers elsewhere.
Rakuten Books here in Japan does sometimes mark things when they're DRM free. I got Charles Stross' new edition of his Traders series DRM-free from there. The problem with Rakuten is that the website is a confusing, aggravating mess and finding anything there is almost impossible. You can't search with DRM-free as a search criterion, for instance.
Even if you accept that a mass market paperback only costs $1 to print, and warehousing and shipping are zero (they're not) it still wouldn't explain how the mass market paperback of Game of Thrones: A Feast For Crows is $5.49 and the kindle version is $11.93.
That's a rip-off. I fully agree. I guess that what happens is that they release the ebook at the same time as the hardcover, and price it relative to that. Then they never drop the ebook price when the paperback comes out; they might have a system based on "editions" that don't change their price over time.
But the poster I replied to seems to, like many others, think that most of the cost is in the printing and shipping, so an ebook would cost a lot less than a paperback. My point is that you likely reasonably can't expect that to happen.
A fair price is probably slightly below the same-title trade paperback. The work to create an eBook is effectively the same as creating a new mass-market edition on paper. Printing and warehousing are so efficient today they only add a small bit to the final price even for the cheapest titles.
The reason I mostly don't buy ebooks is DRM. I want to buy my books, not long-term rent them. I want to know I can still pick it up and reread it in twenty years whether I'm still a customer of Amazon or not - or whether Amazon even still exists (not a given, with the average lifetime of a corproration).
I find I buy plenty of programming ebooks from O'Reilly, for instance, since I actually buy them. If there was a good source for general fiction I'd be all over it.
I'm on my fourth postdoc, eleven years after graduation. Honestly, I don't even aim for a faculty job any more. That train left the station long ago.
So why do I do it? Fairly long working days (but so are industry jobs), and no secure future of any kind. But the pay is decent, at least here in Japan, and I do get to work on things that interest me a lot more than I'd do outside academia.
Still, left to decide by myself I would have left a few years ago already. The uncertainty is really the big issue, and I often feel I'd prefer even a language-teaching or convenience-store job if it came with job security. But my wife points out that we're not hurting for money, and doing what I love is not a chance that will come again. So better to rowk in research while I still can and while it's still fun. Hard to argue with that.
I'm curious: what kind of features would you recommend I look for in a used oscilloscope? I'm a rank amateur, learning electronics as I go. Mostly doing small Arduino-based stuff (doing a bonsai plant watering system right now, that involves some easy motor control and making a moisture meter), though I have some robotics-related ideas as well.
I'm not all that concerned about cost - it's a hobby so ROI doesn't really apply - but there's a bewildering array of features on scopes I've looked at, and I don't know enough to make an intelligent, informed decision. So features basic enough that I have a chance to learn how to use it properly, but not so limited that I end up wishing for a new unit in another year or two.
Firefox Mobile (at least the tablet Beta) has a "reader" mode for that. You see a small "book" icon in the address bar; it makes a "book" style reflow of the site without a lot of the navigation cruft for easier reading, but if you long-press it, it will also save the document for later offline reading.
I put tmp and the Firefox cache on RAM. It really makes an enormous amount of difference in overall system responsiveness. More RAM and an SSD really are a lot more important than CPU speed for general-use machines.
Any research like this you will need to show you have IRB approval (or some equivalent) in order to get it published. No reputable journal will accept your paper unless you have it.
But if this is not academic research but marketing research for hire then it's different. No intention to publish so no ethics approval needed.
Why should you have roaming charges at all in the EU?
Because they can (different countries).
And different companies. I suspect that's really a larger part of the reason. In the US, don't you pay extra if your own provider is unreachable in some particular spot and your phone switches to one of the others?
Helsinki to southern Spain takes about 6:30. If you start from one of the northern Swedish or Finnish cities you can add another hour or two of in-flight time, but you'd need to transfer on the way.
And of course, if you don't restrict yourself to the contiguous continental EU you can get much longer flight times than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh a few percent here and there; what could it possibly matter? On an unrelated note, I'm open for any job offers in the investment banking sector. :-)
It better be, considering that it's a 25% price increase, with most of the value - screen, case, power supply and so on - practically the same.
What "good old days" where those? When you read the newspaper that conformed to your political viewpoint; the weekly magazine that covered any world events only as far as it affected you and others like you; watched only the TV shows that reinforced what you thought you already knew and believed?
It was just a link to a large fish landing net with a long handle. No idea why slashdot refuses that link when the other one to a box of matches was OK.
..and for whatever reason, Slashdot refuses to show the first link. Just forget it.
Steal from a drone?
First time around, order item (A):
Next time around order item (B): http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Strike-Anywhere-Matches-1-Box/dp/B00DII0BA0/>
Crouch in the bushes and use (A) to catch the drone. Then resell it on eBay. Use (B) to burn (A) to get rid of the evidence.
As many point out BASIC has a lot of problems, and it's easy to acquire bad habits with it.
So how about Scheme? Seriously; there's very little boilerplate code, and kids don't know the language is supposed to be hard:
(for-each sendmessage users)
Wear a mask. Not a Halloween prop or anything, but a medical mask, as you would wear when you are running a cold or something. No, it won't really prevent automated face identification, but it will prevent any casual recognition or incidental appearances in other people's online albums.
As a bonus, if you do happen to carry a cold or the flu at the time, you're also helping prevent the spread.
So, I'm not a fan of Google Glass, and I doubt I'd ever get one.
With that said, banning Glass while allowing phones is ridiculous. Every day on my commute, I've got dozens of people around me holding their phones to their faces. At a lunch restaurant I see the same thing. At dinner, in bars, on the street - you've got people fiddling with their phones everywhere.
They could be checking their email, posting to some social site, reading the news, playing a game - or taking pictures or film clips where I appear. I have no way to know. By comparison, Google Glass is much more obvious about it, with flashing lights and stuff to warn people you're taking a picture.
If these people really are concerned about their customers privacy, they'd forbid smartphones, not eyewear.
It's not quite that simple. I mean, very few of us actually spend much time hunting for high calorie foods (or any foods) after all.
We're creatures of habit, more than anything else, and what that sugar kick does to you is reinforce a habit of snacking on sugary foods. Sugar may give you a jolt, but it's the habit that makes you snack.
And refraining from doing something can become a habit just as well; it's just not as straightforward to set up. In a way, creating a "one and one only" habit is really all about teaching yourself that the chocolately kick is a signal to stop, not to take another one.
We keep plenty of snacks of all kinds at home. You get a lot of snacks as gifts here, and a lot of really high-quality chocolates are only sold here during Valentine's and White Day, so my wife stocks up then.
The trick is to set a limit, and make it a part of your routine. Convince your mind that no, it actually doesn't want any more because another piece would break the daily routine. We have a snack, candy or chocolate every evening after dinner. A snack, singular. One piece of chocolate, one candy drop, one cookie or whatever. Since it's routine, there's no craving for a second one.
PDAs are a good argument actually. A phone/tablet before the smartphone that went mainstream big-time. And you might argue that smartphones really are the direct successors to the PDA.
The price is a definite factor. But the price point of a device is every bit as much part of the overall design as weight, storage or the colour of the on-screen icons.
A tablet-as-laptop will need the hardware features and performance of a "real" laptop in order not to fail. In addition, the demand for very low weight and volume means the price is going to be higher than an equivalent, but less compact laptop. Which means you can't make the equivalent of a 300-dollar laptop as a tablet, since it will (rightly) be seen as far overpriced for what it does.
And that means it has to be designed as a premium device or people won't swallow the cost increase. But then it becomes, as you say, much more expensive than any tablet-as-phone device, without actually offering a better tablet gestalt.
It's a very hard design nut to crack; I suspect it is not doable at all at this time. In another hardware generation or two (5-10 years) things may change of course.
As you say, it tries to offer both a phone/tablet and a laptop/tablet experience and fails with both.
With that said, I would guess we already know what a successful tablet is. We've had keyboardless touch-screen devices for many years before iPad and Android devices. They were always designed as keyboardless laptops, and they always, without exception failed in the general marketplace.
Now, you might have guessed that iPad is an aberration; it succeeded not becuase the phone/tablet gestalt is superior but because a guy in a turtleneck sprinkled magic design dust on it. But then the iPad would remain the only successful tablet, and that's simply not the case. Android tablets sell as well as Apple devices today, and there's many models all selling better than the RT devices, and much better than any of the earlier laptop/tablet designs ever did.
Seems to be a fairly strong vote in favour of the tablet-as-phone approach by consumers. Add in the phablet segment and there seems to be little doubt. I'm sure RT could do well as a niche device, but it's clear that's not something MS would be content with, and also seems clear the tablet-as-laptop concept doesn't have enough mass-market appeal.
As another poster says, there's no way to find the DRM-free titles. And general fiction publishers (to me, SF is most definitely "general") don't seem to sell directly to customers outside their own country - probably due to distribution rights deals with publishers elsewhere.
Rakuten Books here in Japan does sometimes mark things when they're DRM free. I got Charles Stross' new edition of his Traders series DRM-free from there. The problem with Rakuten is that the website is a confusing, aggravating mess and finding anything there is almost impossible. You can't search with DRM-free as a search criterion, for instance.
That's a rip-off. I fully agree. I guess that what happens is that they release the ebook at the same time as the hardcover, and price it relative to that. Then they never drop the ebook price when the paperback comes out; they might have a system based on "editions" that don't change their price over time.
But the poster I replied to seems to, like many others, think that most of the cost is in the printing and shipping, so an ebook would cost a lot less than a paperback. My point is that you likely reasonably can't expect that to happen.
A fair price is probably slightly below the same-title trade paperback. The work to create an eBook is effectively the same as creating a new mass-market edition on paper. Printing and warehousing are so efficient today they only add a small bit to the final price even for the cheapest titles.
The reason I mostly don't buy ebooks is DRM. I want to buy my books, not long-term rent them. I want to know I can still pick it up and reread it in twenty years whether I'm still a customer of Amazon or not - or whether Amazon even still exists (not a given, with the average lifetime of a corproration).
I find I buy plenty of programming ebooks from O'Reilly, for instance, since I actually buy them. If there was a good source for general fiction I'd be all over it.
Used CDs and DVDs are cheaper than downloads too, and people still prefer the digital version.
I'm on my fourth postdoc, eleven years after graduation. Honestly, I don't even aim for a faculty job any more. That train left the station long ago.
So why do I do it? Fairly long working days (but so are industry jobs), and no secure future of any kind. But the pay is decent, at least here in Japan, and I do get to work on things that interest me a lot more than I'd do outside academia.
Still, left to decide by myself I would have left a few years ago already. The uncertainty is really the big issue, and I often feel I'd prefer even a language-teaching or convenience-store job if it came with job security. But my wife points out that we're not hurting for money, and doing what I love is not a chance that will come again. So better to rowk in research while I still can and while it's still fun. Hard to argue with that.
Yes. common sense, not good sense. Seems like the perfect approach for that to me.
I'm curious: what kind of features would you recommend I look for in a used oscilloscope? I'm a rank amateur, learning electronics as I go. Mostly doing small Arduino-based stuff (doing a bonsai plant watering system right now, that involves some easy motor control and making a moisture meter), though I have some robotics-related ideas as well.
I'm not all that concerned about cost - it's a hobby so ROI doesn't really apply - but there's a bewildering array of features on scopes I've looked at, and I don't know enough to make an intelligent, informed decision. So features basic enough that I have a chance to learn how to use it properly, but not so limited that I end up wishing for a new unit in another year or two.
Firefox Mobile (at least the tablet Beta) has a "reader" mode for that. You see a small "book" icon in the address bar; it makes a "book" style reflow of the site without a lot of the navigation cruft for easier reading, but if you long-press it, it will also save the document for later offline reading.
I put tmp and the Firefox cache on RAM. It really makes an enormous amount of difference in overall system responsiveness. More RAM and an SSD really are a lot more important than CPU speed for general-use machines.
Any research like this you will need to show you have IRB approval (or some equivalent) in order to get it published. No reputable journal will accept your paper unless you have it.
But if this is not academic research but marketing research for hire then it's different. No intention to publish so no ethics approval needed.
And different companies. I suspect that's really a larger part of the reason. In the US, don't you pay extra if your own provider is unreachable in some particular spot and your phone switches to one of the others?
Helsinki to southern Spain takes about 6:30. If you start from one of the northern Swedish or Finnish cities you can add another hour or two of in-flight time, but you'd need to transfer on the way.
And of course, if you don't restrict yourself to the contiguous continental EU you can get much longer flight times than that.