It sounds like all this machine does is send a text message to the specified recipient with a code they can punch in to redeem their soda. The article doesn't specify if these machines are networked together or if you can only redeem the soda at the machine the gift was originally purchased at.
This seems a lot like the way the car wash works at my local gas station. I buy a car wash at the pump and it prints out a redeemable code on my receipt; the only difference being that the code is sent via SMS instead of printed locally.
It seems like they could take this even farther by adding the ability to purchase drink codes online, or over the phone. Why stop there, lets make gift cards that only work at vending machines; or even better, thumb print recognition for the gift card account.
When I ran a server that contained sensitive customer data, I left the database open and without a password. That way if someone was going to hack me, I didn't have to buy a new password.
Analogy fail.
When Chrome first came out, a friend of mine jumped on it right away and exclaimed at how fast and awesome it was. I tried it and didn't care for the simplistic UI and so stayed with Firefox. Months later, he looks over my shoulder and exclaims, "WTF! how did you load that (gadget blog website) so fast?" So we compared in real time, his Chrome loading the same page against my Firefox, and it took his Chrome ages to load this page, whereas mine was displayed nearly instantly.
The answer was simple: NoScript. I was using the NoScript plugin on Firefox, and had only allowed the base domain of the website I was viewing, and one other domain that controlled the user account details. This particular gadget blog was loading scripts from 15 other domains. All these scripts were completely extra, and mostly ads/analytics. Combined with Ad Block, you can cut your web page loading times way more than 50%.
I think that optimizing the way web servers communicate with web clients is imperative, as the way we use web pages has changed drastically in the past 20 years, but this should be something that Google collaborates with the other big entities; not something they push out on their own and hope everyone adopts. This will likely lead to Microsoft developing their own speed reduction code that only works in IIS and Internet Explorer, and further fragmentation.
The TCP endpoint IS the phone, the phone uses NAT to forward the request to any other devices. All network traffic should look as if it is coming from and going to the phone. The only way to detect if the traffic is not originating form the phone is to do deep packet scans and, with uncertainty, determine that some types of traffic are not likely to originate from a phone that is designed to have limited functionality.
Utilizing flash content while tethered through an iPhone would be a dead giveaway.
While I agree that the app would be immensely more useful if you could use it over 3G or on the free WiFi at Starbucks or at my friends house, I also believe that this app still holds a place for usefulness.
If your house doesn't have enough TVs for everyone and you all want to watch something different then this will come in handy. You can now watch TV while cooking in the kitchen without buying one of those little counter top TVs. You can go outside for a smoke break without missing any of 'the game.' You can watch TV on your patio while BBQing or supervising the kids while they swim in the pool. You can prop it up on your desk in your home office so you can watch while you work.
There are all sorts of places in and around a home that don't normally have TV access. If anything this could be a reasonable argument to a spouse or parent for justifying getting one "But mom, it's a TV too!"
65,000 apps sounds good until you break down how many of them are useless fat-sound apps, how many of them are functionally redundant to hundreds of other apps, and how many of them are borderline scams designed to trick people into unwittingly making in-app purchases. It doesn't matter if an app has been downloaded once, 100 times, or 1 million times, every app is counted into that precious marketing-friendly total. I would prefer not to have to sort through 65,000 apps to find the 12 that I want.
This brings up the issue, will there be apps sold that are marked iPad2 required?
Probably not.
Judging by how much IOS updates have slowed down my iPhone 3G, I'm willing to bet that Apple is not concerned about iPad1 users having a sluggish experience by running apps it not fast enough for. Apple probably WANTS you to have a sluggish experience on your previous generation model, because the solution is simple: buy a NEW iDevice!
We don't even have to turn this into a car analogy. The equivalent would be going into a Game Stop, paying for a game, bad-mouthing Game Stop's ripoff policies on used games, then having the cashier refuse to give you the game even though he is holding it in his hands in front of your face.
Obviously having plenty of choices and options is a good thing, but there is such a thing as too many.
iPhone may have 300k apps in their store, but that just means you have to sift through 80k poorly named fart noise apps, 30k calculators, etc, etc..
Unfortunately the dimensions of an image alone are meaningless when quantifying the quality of the image. Facebook still compresses their images far greater than any base line point and shoot camera does.
The 13" doesn't have discrete graphics, the 15" discrete amd card is worse performing than the 330m in my last years 13", thunderbolt is slower than the displayport that it replaces, and they are all still shipping with 5400rpm drives. As if all of this wasn't bad enough, there is no USB3.
Why anyone would bother with a new MBP instead of trying to find one of last years models is beyond me.
Anyone who is the slightest bit tech savvy knows that app is just short for application, and application means just about any standalone program that isn't explicitly coded to be a part of another existing program (which would be something like a plug-in). Apple used the term correctly in their marketing, as all these little programs are indeed applications.
The problem is that the people who make up the majority of Apple Culture are technologically retarded and misuse tech related words all the time. When all these people misuse a word in tandem it begins to shape itself into another meaning entirely.
I've heard people call web pages apps, and not even the kind that are almost apps (like the web version of ms office), just plain old regular web pages. Power Point presentations and the "guide" button on a comcast remote are now apps according to these kind of people.
I would rather have two vastly different operating systems with each tailored to the device it is supposed to be on rather than what Apple has done. An iPad is literally just a huge iPod Touch, the world doesn't need more of that.
So playing chess, which is just memorization of moves and move possibilities in advance, and the ability to change strategy on the fly, is bettering yourself; but playing a video game, which is just memorization of moves and move possibilities in advance, and the ability to change strategy on the fly, is not?
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like all this machine does is send a text message to the specified recipient with a code they can punch in to redeem their soda. The article doesn't specify if these machines are networked together or if you can only redeem the soda at the machine the gift was originally purchased at.
This seems a lot like the way the car wash works at my local gas station. I buy a car wash at the pump and it prints out a redeemable code on my receipt; the only difference being that the code is sent via SMS instead of printed locally.
It seems like they could take this even farther by adding the ability to purchase drink codes online, or over the phone. Why stop there, lets make gift cards that only work at vending machines; or even better, thumb print recognition for the gift card account.
When I ran a server that contained sensitive customer data, I left the database open and without a password. That way if someone was going to hack me, I didn't have to buy a new password. Analogy fail.
If I were forced to choose between storing in the cloud and storing on Seagate, I would choose the cloud.
The right thing would have been to support flash but have it disabled by default.
I'd rather have the option to enable it then be forced to live without it.
When Chrome first came out, a friend of mine jumped on it right away and exclaimed at how fast and awesome it was. I tried it and didn't care for the simplistic UI and so stayed with Firefox. Months later, he looks over my shoulder and exclaims, "WTF! how did you load that (gadget blog website) so fast?" So we compared in real time, his Chrome loading the same page against my Firefox, and it took his Chrome ages to load this page, whereas mine was displayed nearly instantly.
The answer was simple: NoScript. I was using the NoScript plugin on Firefox, and had only allowed the base domain of the website I was viewing, and one other domain that controlled the user account details. This particular gadget blog was loading scripts from 15 other domains. All these scripts were completely extra, and mostly ads/analytics. Combined with Ad Block, you can cut your web page loading times way more than 50%.
I think that optimizing the way web servers communicate with web clients is imperative, as the way we use web pages has changed drastically in the past 20 years, but this should be something that Google collaborates with the other big entities; not something they push out on their own and hope everyone adopts. This will likely lead to Microsoft developing their own speed reduction code that only works in IIS and Internet Explorer, and further fragmentation.
saying that any of those games have a story mode is a stretch
African elephants can get to be 4 meters tall and 6 tonnes (12 feet and 13,000 pounds). This is about the height of a Tyrannosaurus's hips.
The problem with anonymity, of course, is that it can be used for good or for bad.
Then the solution is clear! We must only allow things that can only be used for good!
AOL survives because the majority of their users are paying for features they don't need or use
If people stop visiting MySpace then they won't make as much ad revenue and will eventually collapse.
The TCP endpoint IS the phone, the phone uses NAT to forward the request to any other devices. All network traffic should look as if it is coming from and going to the phone. The only way to detect if the traffic is not originating form the phone is to do deep packet scans and, with uncertainty, determine that some types of traffic are not likely to originate from a phone that is designed to have limited functionality. Utilizing flash content while tethered through an iPhone would be a dead giveaway.
While I agree that the app would be immensely more useful if you could use it over 3G or on the free WiFi at Starbucks or at my friends house, I also believe that this app still holds a place for usefulness.
If your house doesn't have enough TVs for everyone and you all want to watch something different then this will come in handy. You can now watch TV while cooking in the kitchen without buying one of those little counter top TVs. You can go outside for a smoke break without missing any of 'the game.' You can watch TV on your patio while BBQing or supervising the kids while they swim in the pool. You can prop it up on your desk in your home office so you can watch while you work.
There are all sorts of places in and around a home that don't normally have TV access. If anything this could be a reasonable argument to a spouse or parent for justifying getting one "But mom, it's a TV too!"
Apple gets to eat the scrumptious $99/yr that it costs to host your free app
65,000 apps sounds good until you break down how many of them are useless fat-sound apps, how many of them are functionally redundant to hundreds of other apps, and how many of them are borderline scams designed to trick people into unwittingly making in-app purchases. It doesn't matter if an app has been downloaded once, 100 times, or 1 million times, every app is counted into that precious marketing-friendly total. I would prefer not to have to sort through 65,000 apps to find the 12 that I want.
This brings up the issue, will there be apps sold that are marked iPad2 required?
Probably not. Judging by how much IOS updates have slowed down my iPhone 3G, I'm willing to bet that Apple is not concerned about iPad1 users having a sluggish experience by running apps it not fast enough for. Apple probably WANTS you to have a sluggish experience on your previous generation model, because the solution is simple: buy a NEW iDevice!
This is Slashdot, where the ISO defined YYYY-MM-DD should be the only way to represent a date other than maybe Epoch.
YYYY-MM-DD is the ISO standard
We don't even have to turn this into a car analogy. The equivalent would be going into a Game Stop, paying for a game, bad-mouthing Game Stop's ripoff policies on used games, then having the cashier refuse to give you the game even though he is holding it in his hands in front of your face.
Obviously having plenty of choices and options is a good thing, but there is such a thing as too many. iPhone may have 300k apps in their store, but that just means you have to sift through 80k poorly named fart noise apps, 30k calculators, etc, etc..
Unfortunately the dimensions of an image alone are meaningless when quantifying the quality of the image. Facebook still compresses their images far greater than any base line point and shoot camera does.
The 13" doesn't have discrete graphics, the 15" discrete amd card is worse performing than the 330m in my last years 13", thunderbolt is slower than the displayport that it replaces, and they are all still shipping with 5400rpm drives. As if all of this wasn't bad enough, there is no USB3. Why anyone would bother with a new MBP instead of trying to find one of last years models is beyond me.
How much does the electric generator weigh?
Anyone who is the slightest bit tech savvy knows that app is just short for application, and application means just about any standalone program that isn't explicitly coded to be a part of another existing program (which would be something like a plug-in). Apple used the term correctly in their marketing, as all these little programs are indeed applications.
The problem is that the people who make up the majority of Apple Culture are technologically retarded and misuse tech related words all the time. When all these people misuse a word in tandem it begins to shape itself into another meaning entirely.
I've heard people call web pages apps, and not even the kind that are almost apps (like the web version of ms office), just plain old regular web pages. Power Point presentations and the "guide" button on a comcast remote are now apps according to these kind of people.
I would rather have two vastly different operating systems with each tailored to the device it is supposed to be on rather than what Apple has done. An iPad is literally just a huge iPod Touch, the world doesn't need more of that.
"news for nerds", not "really big news"
So playing chess, which is just memorization of moves and move possibilities in advance, and the ability to change strategy on the fly, is bettering yourself; but playing a video game, which is just memorization of moves and move possibilities in advance, and the ability to change strategy on the fly, is not?