Londoners had the Tube tunnels to take refuge in. The blitz was nothing like Hiroshima - an entire city and its population obliterated in the wink of an eye- if it was Hiroshima Nagasaki first, it could be Tokyo next.
Forget superphones; I'd like to see what sort of batteries will power this, and the inevitable quad-core Android phones/tablets that will be on offer this year. All the horsepower and connectivity in the world isn't of any use if the mere act of your device getting through the day on a full charge seems like too much to ask for.
LiveJournal is primarily a blogging platform, with some limited 'social networking' features - if that's what you would call the ability to mention other users in your posts or control who gets to see what posts. It isn't competing with Facebook or Myspace or any of the rest.
It is just as shame that two other important initiatives, namely forcing manufacturers to standardise on USB micro/mini for charging and allow batteries to be replaced and removed for disposal, seem to have stalled.
Stalled where? From my own observation, every non Apple manufactured gadget(*) released within the last 2 years uses USB for charging, and you can freely interchange chargers and USB cables.
* - Apple uses a non standard way to charge the iPhone, so it won't work with anything but an Apple blessed charger.
I don't think it bodes well for Apple when nerds are running from their platform. Just read the/. comments.
Nerds have never been part of Apple's target demographic since the days of the IIe which shipped with circuit schematics. The vast majority of people are looking for a computer/phone that works like an appliance, and are never going to tinker with or tweak them in any way.
I'd say the 'browser should not be a part of the OS' is an obsolete argument now. IE was made as an HTML rendering engine for the OS, but with a browser interface tacked around it. I remember seeing a friend fool around with Visual Basic and create a new 'browser' by simply adding an IE control to a form and binding the back/forward etc buttons to it. The same thing is done on iOS now (on the iPhone at least, dunno about OS X) - where if an app wants to display internet content it uses the Safari renderer.
Now here's the distinction. Having a system level browser component that exposes APIs to let other apps use it is one thing, allowing the same thing to also act as a file browser a la Windows Explorer is madness. But then you can use the Nautilus file browser also as a web browser on Linux, so they must be doing something right.
'cos there's no one left. Just as some Americans point out that both R and D are only loyal to different sets of corporate masters and have no interest in the welfare of the common people, here it's all about naked power grab for its own sake. India has a multi party system, but all of them pander to various communities and vote banks. Educated urban Indians such as yours truly have simply dissociated themselves from the political process over the last 64 years since independence with the broad (and mostly true) argument that 'all politicians suck, and my vote isn't going to matter.' The rural poor who are the majority, take their voting rights seriously and come out to vote en masse. Politicians pander to them by doling out freebies, which are often at the expense of the middle class non voting tax payer.
That's the beauty of democracy, the tyranny of the majority ensures that the majority get the leaders they deserve.
I have been on SeaMonkey for the last 2 years and haven't really looked back. I've put on the classic skin for Netscape like nostalgia, and running as an internet suite with mail,news, browser,IRC and HTML editor in one package it still doesn't gobble as much RAM as Firefox. And after the new crazy versioning process of Firefox, the SM developers have stuck to the more sensible subversioning, 2.4.x or 2.5 as of now. I like how I can click a mailto link in the browser and have it pop up a new mail window, or click a link in a mail to have it immediately open in a browser tab. It's very well made, and for those who want to use the Gecko engine this is a saner alternative to Firefox.
Electronic Arts is an amazing place to work. The company is huge and has many studios and I have friends who have worked or do work at most of them over the past 15 years. If you don't mind the more corporate type of game company, EA is a dream job if you are someone that is important to game development: engineers and full-time artists.
As Wikipedia would say, [citation needed], dear anonymous EA shill.
Even Symbian stopped having any significant malware after they introduced S60 3rd edition in late 2005, which refused to install unsigned apps by default.
For simplicity's sake, let's say that the current lack of will to explore space among the general public is gone, and we are going to take Hawking's words seriously. Even then we're a few generations away from being able to cut loose from Earth, going by the current state of the space programme. There was a story here about a company planning to set up a fueling depot on the Moon by 2020. Whether they may succeed is one thing, but they're thinking in the right direction. We cannot obviously send another Apollo style one-shot mission, the costs are too high. And ultimately it has to be a commercial venture. My idea is to make lunar travel commercially viable first, both for practice in space travel/setting up a base (yeah I know that Moon and Mars are totally different environments, but it will still provide considerable experience in running a space base). Here's one path I can think of, over perhaps the next 70 years (partly inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy):
- Set up the fuel depot on the moon - mining ice at the poles and converting to hydrogen/oxygen. Use robots if need be, at first. Build an underground lunar base, and let it be manned the way Antarctic research stations currently are. Over time, Earth-Moon trips should drop in price. Perhaps lunar tourism can also take off. - In parallel, develop another Earth-Moon capable ship that can possibly do the trip faster than Apollo's 3 days. By now, the tourism should hopefully raise more money for other things, (He-3 mining, or mineral prospecting for one). - Start building a spaceship in orbit, using discarded rocket boosters or similar. Let this ship fly to the moon and stock up on fuel. - Send an advance mission to Mars comprising a prefabricated base, some sort of nuclear reactor, and robots to assemble everything. This will be used by the humans when they subsequently go there. - Finally, send the spaceship along. This would have to be a pretty advanced ship that has spinning sections for artificial gravity, and perhaps hydroponic gardens for growing plants during the long trip, not to mention heavy duty radiation protection for its living cargo.
The last step above can easily take half a century from now. The mistake being made is the assumption that we have to get to that stage immediately, which we obviously cannot.
Precisely. There's no value in such puzzle questions that are binary - you either know the answer from having heard it before, or you don't. Joel Spolsky says as much in his guerilla guide to interviewing.
I really don't think that Steve Jobs survival or death would've made a difference to what Slashdotters everywhere feel about Dennis Ritchie. He was far too much of a giant in the field of computer science to be ignored here, one of the oldest geek gatherings on the net, of all places.
By itself the word soon doesn't seem rather quote worthy. Putting it in air quotes makes it sound as though it's completely vague. They have said it will be released once ICS based devices hit the market, not in a 'When it's done' sense that the Duke Nukem Forever team used to say when asked about the game's release.
What's with the superfluous air quotes? It's not like there's any ambiguity in Google's statement. At least wait for the devices to hit the market before judging them.
So I guess something like this won't be sold in the US. Dual SIM phones are quite popular here (India), but they tend to be mostly dumbphones. People use one operator for long distance calls and another for local, or one's a company provided SIM and the other's their personal one, obviating the need to carry 2 phones.
Haven't seen any smartphones with this though - apart from a few no name Chinese ripoffs of Nokia handsets.
Slashdot Mirror
Londoners had the Tube tunnels to take refuge in. The blitz was nothing like Hiroshima - an entire city and its population obliterated in the wink of an eye- if it was Hiroshima Nagasaki first, it could be Tokyo next.
Forget superphones; I'd like to see what sort of batteries will power this, and the inevitable quad-core Android phones/tablets that will be on offer this year. All the horsepower and connectivity in the world isn't of any use if the mere act of your device getting through the day on a full charge seems like too much to ask for.
LiveJournal is primarily a blogging platform, with some limited 'social networking' features - if that's what you would call the ability to mention other users in your posts or control who gets to see what posts. It isn't competing with Facebook or Myspace or any of the rest.
Hi Paul Christoforo!!
Eastern minds typically grow up playing "Go", which teaches a very different way of "winning" (by encirclement) than Western Chess
Er, chess also originated in the 'east', specifically India, before being brought West around the first millennium.
It is just as shame that two other important initiatives, namely forcing manufacturers to standardise on USB micro/mini for charging and allow batteries to be replaced and removed for disposal, seem to have stalled.
Stalled where? From my own observation, every non Apple manufactured gadget(*) released within the last 2 years uses USB for charging, and you can freely interchange chargers and USB cables.
* - Apple uses a non standard way to charge the iPhone, so it won't work with anything but an Apple blessed charger.
I don't think it bodes well for Apple when nerds are running from their platform. Just read the /. comments.
Nerds have never been part of Apple's target demographic since the days of the IIe which shipped with circuit schematics. The vast majority of people are looking for a computer/phone that works like an appliance, and are never going to tinker with or tweak them in any way.
I'd say the 'browser should not be a part of the OS' is an obsolete argument now. IE was made as an HTML rendering engine for the OS, but with a browser interface tacked around it. I remember seeing a friend fool around with Visual Basic and create a new 'browser' by simply adding an IE control to a form and binding the back/forward etc buttons to it.
The same thing is done on iOS now (on the iPhone at least, dunno about OS X) - where if an app wants to display internet content it uses the Safari renderer.
Now here's the distinction. Having a system level browser component that exposes APIs to let other apps use it is one thing, allowing the same thing to also act as a file browser a la Windows Explorer is madness. But then you can use the Nautilus file browser also as a web browser on Linux, so they must be doing something right.
'cos there's no one left. Just as some Americans point out that both R and D are only loyal to different sets of corporate masters and have no interest in the welfare of the common people, here it's all about naked power grab for its own sake. India has a multi party system, but all of them pander to various communities and vote banks.
Educated urban Indians such as yours truly have simply dissociated themselves from the political process over the last 64 years since independence with the broad (and mostly true) argument that 'all politicians suck, and my vote isn't going to matter.'
The rural poor who are the majority, take their voting rights seriously and come out to vote en masse. Politicians pander to them by doling out freebies, which are often at the expense of the middle class non voting tax payer.
That's the beauty of democracy, the tyranny of the majority ensures that the majority get the leaders they deserve.
I have been on SeaMonkey for the last 2 years and haven't really looked back. I've put on the classic skin for Netscape like nostalgia, and running as an internet suite with mail,news, browser,IRC and HTML editor in one package it still doesn't gobble as much RAM as Firefox.
And after the new crazy versioning process of Firefox, the SM developers have stuck to the more sensible subversioning, 2.4.x or 2.5 as of now.
I like how I can click a mailto link in the browser and have it pop up a new mail window, or click a link in a mail to have it immediately open in a browser tab. It's very well made, and for those who want to use the Gecko engine this is a saner alternative to Firefox.
Unfortunately, the masses vote with their wallets and clicks, which is how Zynga's made a pile of cash so far.
Electronic Arts is an amazing place to work. The company is huge and has many studios and I have friends who have worked or do work at most of them over the past 15 years. If you don't mind the more corporate type of game company, EA is a dream job if you are someone that is important to game development: engineers and full-time artists.
As Wikipedia would say, [citation needed], dear anonymous EA shill.
Even Symbian stopped having any significant malware after they introduced S60 3rd edition in late 2005, which refused to install unsigned apps by default.
For simplicity's sake, let's say that the current lack of will to explore space among the general public is gone, and we are going to take Hawking's words seriously. Even then we're a few generations away from being able to cut loose from Earth, going by the current state of the space programme.
There was a story here about a company planning to set up a fueling depot on the Moon by 2020. Whether they may succeed is one thing, but they're thinking in the right direction. We cannot obviously send another Apollo style one-shot mission, the costs are too high. And ultimately it has to be a commercial venture. My idea is to make lunar travel commercially viable first, both for practice in space travel/setting up a base (yeah I know that Moon and Mars are totally different environments, but it will still provide considerable experience in running a space base).
Here's one path I can think of, over perhaps the next 70 years (partly inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy):
- Set up the fuel depot on the moon - mining ice at the poles and converting to hydrogen/oxygen. Use robots if need be, at first. Build an underground lunar base, and let it be manned the way Antarctic research stations currently are. Over time, Earth-Moon trips should drop in price. Perhaps lunar tourism can also take off.
- In parallel, develop another Earth-Moon capable ship that can possibly do the trip faster than Apollo's 3 days. By now, the tourism should hopefully raise more money for other things, (He-3 mining, or mineral prospecting for one).
- Start building a spaceship in orbit, using discarded rocket boosters or similar. Let this ship fly to the moon and stock up on fuel.
- Send an advance mission to Mars comprising a prefabricated base, some sort of nuclear reactor, and robots to assemble everything. This will be used by the humans when they subsequently go there.
- Finally, send the spaceship along. This would have to be a pretty advanced ship that has spinning sections for artificial gravity, and perhaps hydroponic gardens for growing plants during the long trip, not to mention heavy duty radiation protection for its living cargo.
The last step above can easily take half a century from now. The mistake being made is the assumption that we have to get to that stage immediately, which we obviously cannot.
Excellent!.
Precisely. There's no value in such puzzle questions that are binary - you either know the answer from having heard it before, or you don't. Joel Spolsky says as much in his guerilla guide to interviewing.
..compared to the reaction to the iPhone 4 antenna problem by Steve 'You're holding it wrong' Jobs.
I really don't think that Steve Jobs survival or death would've made a difference to what Slashdotters everywhere feel about Dennis Ritchie. He was far too much of a giant in the field of computer science to be ignored here, one of the oldest geek gatherings on the net, of all places.
*puts on glasses*
Sony lost their Erection.
YEAAAH!
not only that, Mitsubishi was also responsible for hiding the defective fuel tank of its A6M aircraft from the American public.
Er, why would Mitsubishi be obliged to disclose the shortcomings of the Zero to the American public during WW2?
By itself the word soon doesn't seem rather quote worthy. Putting it in air quotes makes it sound as though it's completely vague. They have said it will be released once ICS based devices hit the market, not in a 'When it's done' sense that the Duke Nukem Forever team used to say when asked about the game's release.
What's with the superfluous air quotes? It's not like there's any ambiguity in Google's statement. At least wait for the devices to hit the market before judging them.
You could build one, then it would have to be FCC (or equivalent) certified, and that's the stumbling block.
So I guess something like this won't be sold in the US. Dual SIM phones are quite popular here (India), but they tend to be mostly dumbphones. People use one operator for long distance calls and another for local, or one's a company provided SIM and the other's their personal one, obviating the need to carry 2 phones.
Haven't seen any smartphones with this though - apart from a few no name Chinese ripoffs of Nokia handsets.
Be happy they didn't name this one Onanic Orangutan.