And I thought it was because they were taught to blow themselves up and that we were not human since the age of 5. I thought it was because they have a culture that celebrates death and has absolutely no compunction about lying blatant
That is not what Islam teaches, it is what those who hijacked the religion are trying to get people to believe, with some success also it seems.
This is hardly a new thing, and not something unique for Islam. Please dig a bit into European history, equally evil and misguided things have been done in the name of christianity.
No, this doesn't mean whe should just let it be, but blaming Islam for things done in its name by people who don't follow its teachings doesn't seem like the right approach really.
Skipping part of your post, you make a good point about Bush and commitment there, but one thing at the end of your post demands a response:
And even the "westernized" Saudi Arabia were still doing all this as recently as last year.
As a matter of fact, they are a large part of the problem. See for example:
The rules for impeachment are pretty tough for any party to utilize.
Maybe so, but seen from outside the USA, the whole Clinton case was just hilarious and strongly suggesting that the rules for impeachment are anything but tough..
I'm sorry, but there is no moral or logical justification for the argument that, because a non-essential item of goods is over-priced, you are entitled to steal it.
A CD is a non-essential item, but is its content? You can definitely live without the content of any CD as such, but can you live without the culture it represents in general?
There is another issue with your argument. Lets assume that the liberal way of using the word stealing is correct then we have the problem of the recording and movie industries having stolen decades of public domain material from us, the public. Two wrongs don't make a right, sure, but they are in a rather bad position to complain now. If you don't like calling this stealing, fine, give it another name, but do so in both cases.
So while your sister and millions like her may be willing to spend their pennies on the music when its available, its very difficult to actually argue she isn't hurting the industry by receiving a free option to wait. The downward price pressure the weaker sales environment is providing does cut into profits.
The problem with this reasoning is that if she doesn't wait she doesn't have the money to begin with, meaning no sale at all, and overall she won't magically have more money available when the 'free' option isn't there.
Not to mention that it could multitask, presumably making the execution of viruses that much easier and more transparent to the user, especially compared to a DOS box where a lot of hacks were required to create a so-called TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident, for those lucky enough not to have encountered those ugly beasts) program.
A memory resident virus on DOS needs techniques somewhat similar to a TSR, but much simpler. All it needs to do is allocate a bit of memory for itself and hook one of the interupts used for calling DOS. Not a very difficult thing to do, and on DOS there are no provisions for managing multiple programs, so there was no need to try and hide from those either.
Not to mention that there were a lot of viruses on DOS as well as AmigaOS that were not memory resident, and did not need such features at all.
The hard part about viruses isn't creating them, it's getting them to spread. When only one in 100 machines is a target, it's not going to spread very fast.
Yet there are thousands of viruses for AmigaOS for example..
Any examples of third party batteries being unsafe? FM transmitters can short out and melt their casings too, but I have no problem using a third party FM transmitter on my iPod.
Nokia claims that all cases of phones from their brand exploding or setting themselves on fire were caused by 3rd party batteries. While they have an obvious stake in making such a claim, it seems that all cases investigated by them did indeed turn out to involve 3rd party batteries. See for example http://www.snopes.com/horrors/techno/cellcharge.as p
From the relatively few incidents with li-ion batteries despite their inherent instability, is the result of proper management of the technology, and as long as you do that, they are quite safe and fine. This includes making very sure you are using the proper battery pack for your device. Whomever you trust for providing that is absolutely upto you.
I think this discussion is pretty much at it's end. You like AAs, that's fine. For a lot of things I like built in battery packs, that's fine too. Isn't it nice we can both get what we want?
Choice is fine, but devices with artificially limited lifetime cause enough problems (waste being one) to argue against using them, hence I disagree that internal battery packs are 'fine' in general. The ipod with its battery replacement programs and from what you say good 3rd party battery packs and such, is the exception, not the rule in this (but then, as some teens around me clearly demonstrate, for now Apple doesn't have to make current ipods unusable after a while in order to keep selling newer models to the same people)
Anyway.. guess you are right, no point in discussing this any further.
For over twenty years we were assaulted as Americans, and ONE time a US president had the balls to stand up, and the world chastised us
Oh really?
After the 9/11 attacks, NATO activated article 5, that the USA thought evidentely that they could handle it alone does not change that its allies were quite ready to jump in and help.
The 'world' chastised the USA for invading Iraq on very dubious grounds (not saying there were no good reasons imaginable for invading Iraq, but the ones presented were not very good) and a general attitude problem of the administration of the USA with regards to anyone who might not agree with them completely on everything.
Right now you are undoubtedly using a multitasking operating system, meaning that you can run more than one process at once. It is really non-obvious that such a thing is even possible, let alone can be done efficiently.
Its non obvious? when looking at a program as a stream of instructions, it just becomes a special case of multiplexing, which might have been non obvious at some point, but has been in use in for example the telecom industry since long before computers had enough memory and cpu power to make multitasking something worth considering.
For those of you who don't know how it is done (and I bet even on Slashdot, most people do not), how would you overcome this problem? How are you going to make sure that once the kernel gives a time slice to an application, the application will give it back? How are you going to make sure the application doesn't corrupt the location in memory the kernel resides on?
When I first tried to implement a form of multitasker I was 14 and all I was familiar with was a 6510 cpu in a C64 computer, and while the solution to protecting memory was obvious, it was not possible to implement it on that a C64 because it did not support a usefull way to manipulate memory addressing. Later on a C128 which had a mmu (abeit a very limited one), this became a bit easier, but it still lacked full memory protection.
While my multitasker lacked any kind of priority management, the concept of a run queue and using some kind of timed interupt mechanism to take back control were basicly the first thing that came to mind for getting multiple programs running.
Sure, someone came up with the idea first, and at the time, the usefullness of it was not entirely clear, and while the basic concepts are pretty simple, implementing them in a usefull way is not. Also, making a usefull multitasker involves a few other problems that are less easy to solve (scheduling and priority management for example).
Multitasking existed way before anyone thought of the uses it might have on 'personal computers' if only because at the time personal computers were non existant, so the multitasking you are using on your pc is merely a new application of a pre-existing idea.
As with many developments in software, implementation happened after it became a realistic option with regards to existing hardware. It became in widespread use when an actual application turned up that made it usefull, till then it had been somewhat of a solution looking for a problem.
This is related to one of the imho biggest issues with 'software patents'. It is very cheap and easy to try many different things on a computer, which makes that many things are tried just to see what happens, and without having an intended application. This makes that many new ideas that turn up come in the form of discoveries, not inventions.
You must have been specifically selecting your phones then. Both of the cordless handsets in the house use AA battery packs with a special connector. One is a Uniden, probably about three years old, the other is a Motorola, about a year and a half old. All the VTechs I've ever seen use them as well.
As I already mentioned, I bought my phone with this in mind (hence I ended up with the more common AA size batteries), the other 2 were not bought with this in mind at all.
Apple charges $59 for a replacement, but they overcharge for all accessories. Third parties charge less. IPodBattery.com is $16 and has a one year warranty. Lithium ion batteries really don't set themselves on fire that often. As far as I know, around here you're more likely to be mauled by a bear while listening to your iPod and not paying attention to where you're going on your bike (one incident in this area last year) than you are to have your battery catch fire (no incidents in this area last year).
As mentioned for example in this wikipedia article, li-ion batteries are inherently unstable and unless proper measures are taken, prone to setting themselves on fire.
That this does not happen very often is the result of an array of safety devices. Sometimes those safety devices are in the battery, sometimes they are external, and at times they are duplicated. Having the proper safety measures in place and working properly depends on a good match between what the battery has internally and external safety devices, the properties of the cells in the battery and the typical usage conditions (especially temperature). This is the main reason why you cannot buy generic li-ion cells, but only battery packs made for specific applications.
Of course a reputable provider of after-market li-ion batteries is likely to do a good job at making this match, and would face some serious problems if they did not, at least where I live, but it is extremely likely that the original manufacturor of the device can do a better job at that, and is going to be a lot more helpfull when it goes wrong anyway. Does it go wrong even in that case? Go ask Sony about that, they just did the last huge recall, but their situation is hardly unique, just at a larger scale then previous such incidents.
On another note, from that same article, you can see that your ipod battery might be pretty close to its end of life, but if you have treated it well and stored it properly, it might as well have many years of use left.
I have an older T39m phone from Ericsson with 3 batteries. One li-ion 'high capacity' battery, and 2 li-po 'standard' batteries. All those batteries are normally stored at approx 40% charge in a cool place untill I need them. They have lasted some 5 years now, and while they did lose some capacity over the years, they are still getting over 80% of their original capacity.
Yes, I was referring to devices that are made to take alkaline batteries. Their low battery warnings are voltage based, and they tend to kick in when NiMH or NiCads still have lots of juice. THAT'S annoying. Building your device to only work properly with alkaline batteries has got to be some kind of ploy by battery manufacturers.
There are at times good reasons for this, but generally 'accepts nicad batteries' is a selling argument for me. I have not encountered devices that don't in the last couple of years other then flashlights (those are just not very good for nimh batteries, but work perfectly fine initially)..
Building a device that has a specialized battery pack made up of soldered in NiMH AAs is annoying too. There's no reason for it. Cordless phones still do that, and notebook computers used to before they switched to lithium.
I have a Siemens gigaset cordless phone here, which uses standard AA size batteries. My gf has some akg cordless which uses AAA size batteries, my parents have some Phillips cordless which uses AAA size batteries.. Of those, I was the only one specifically selecting my phone for this. I'm sure those battery packs exist, but they seem not that common nowadays.
I have seen the battery packs you mention indeed, that was in some imported AT&T 5400 cordless from 15 years ago.. Very annoying indeed.
Now, the battery in my iPod (also the one in my cell phone) is too thin for standard sized batteries. I like those devices being that thin, so a built in battery pack is a good solution. The battery in my iPod has lasted two years and is still going with no problems, and a replacement is available, including the tool to install it, for $16.
Li-ions have their advantages, sure. I like my thin razr phone, I like my light and thin pda, and yeah, in both cases thanks to a li-ion battery. That said, I hate devices with internal batteries like the ipod, I hate that design decision so much that it is an absolute show stopper for as far as I am concerned with regards to the ipod. If a tiny bit of extra weight and thickness is the price to pay for easy availability and replacement of batteries then that is really a tiny price to pay. I never payed for my phone or pda, so its not a concern there (not to mention that the phone at least has a very easy to replace battery)
Oh, and for all I know, an out of warranty battery replacement from Apple costs $59 excluding shipping and handling. I'm sure buying the replacement battery and replacing it yourself will be quite a bit cheaper, but I have to ask, what kind of battery are you buying for $16? is it REALLY absolutely 100% identical? Or do you get a good enough guarantee that it is absolutely going to be compatible with the charging and battery management of the ipod? If not, you may find yourself with a solution that has a good chance of setting itself on fire sometime in the future.
Clarification: It's not whether it's known to the manufacturer, it's whether it's known to the customer. If the customer expects and accepts failure within a couple of months, then it is not a quality issue if the product does just that.
Absolutely.
The problem comes in when the manufacturer designs for months, but the customer expects years.
The problem usually is caused by the manufacturer being extremely unwilling to suggest to the customer that their expensive fashionable gadget is designed for months. Hwen manufacturers are open and honest about this, there is no problem indeed.
As opposed to building it with AAAs where you can either buy new ones every few days or use rechargeable ones with lower voltages that claim to be dead every few hours?
There are two possible issues that result in the problem you mention:
1. The device is not made to accept rechargable batteries. 2. You use poor quality rechargables.
I have many devices which accept standard size batteries, and those made to accept rechargables specifically (ie, my powershot 530 digicam, a set of handheld 2 way radios and a portable mp3 player) run longer on decent rechargables then on a set of duracells (in case of the camera the difference is quite extreme, upto 3 times more pictures). I also have a few devices that are not made for use with rechargables, and those usually have the issue you mention.
Of course using poor quality rechargable batteries also results in poor performance and having to replace batteries often.
Try this again with a device made to accept rechargables (so it takes their slightly different behavior into account) with a set of high quality rechargables and you'll see that this can behave almost as well as your li-ion battery fed device initially, and will do as good or better 1 year down the road.
Li-ion batteries have initial advantages in energy density, but have big disadvantages with regards to the number of charges they can handle, not to mention that they deteriorate quickly from being stored empty or fully charged (or actually, from anything other then being 40% charged and kept cool) and for many uses are no good anymore after somewhere between a year and 2 years of use.
A good set of mimh batteries have a lower energy density initially, but typically last at least 3 times as many charges, are way less sensitive to storage conditions, don't get damaged as easily from keeping them topped off at 100% charge or being empty, and as a nice bonus they don't have the tendency to set themselves on fire when mismanaged.
If something fails in an unexpected manner, that's a quality issue.
If you make something of poor quality and expect it to fail in a couple of months, that might be a marketing decision, but it is still a quality issue for as far as the consumer is concerned. Keep in miund that 'the consumer is always right', and that your motivation does not change the technical issue.
Your ethic is that nobody can "push" their ethic onto anybody else. You then proceed to tell somebody to follow your ethic by not trying to get you to follow their ethic.
In other words, you are pushing your own ethic on somebody else by expecting them not to push theirs on you.
Think about it.
Your freedom ends where mine begins (and the other way around).
Asking someone to refrain from intruding on my freedom can indeed be explained as pushing my ethics onto someone, sure. I hope you don't mind if I dismiss that point of view as 'technically correct but absurd' because it also works the other way, as soon as you believe you can push your ethics onto me, you thereby acknoledge that I can push my ethics onto you.
Almost all ericsson and now sony ericsson phones I have seen have a 'whitelist' feature. Enable it and only add people you trust to not disturb you with nonsense, and you can both be reachable and not get disturbed by your phone all the time.
Furthermore, the company announced that it's next version would be able to accurately transcribe a conversation between two people without getting confused.
That would be interesting.
I think you're going to see speech-powered devices increase in popularity dramatically now that there's no training involved. The expansion of voice-powered systems in cars, cockpits, home security systems, etc, is probably the logical first-step since it's already being done to some extent. I think these niche markets will let the technology mature while rolling it out to the masses. Along these lines, I think that transcription in cell phones for SMS messages will also become commonplace. And once speech-recog is used by hundreds of millions of people every day you'll see progress at an ever-increasing clip.
Well, there are a few other potential issues with transcribing text.
Back when I was very busy with this stuff, there were customers for whom training wasn't such a barrier because the potential payoff was big. Think about medics being able to keep their hands free while taking notes or people accustomed to dictating with a dictation machine being able to bypass typists for many things. In many cases that worked out well, but in quite a few cases it introduced issues of people in the same office talking to their computers, and finding the resulting environment annoying and/or disturbing for their working capabilities.
Also, quite a few of those customers found it mostly usefull for things like taking quick notes and filling out forms. For writing more official documents, they said to prefer creating and manipulating the text visually with help of keyboard and mouse. This of course could well be a consequence of what they are used to, but I suspect it also has to do with it seemingly being easier to organize your thoughts that way.
That said, for 'command' purposes it works very well, and already has become somewhat 'for the masses' in the form of voice controlled operation of phones and such. I'm not so sure however that transcription will be used a lot outside specific situations. For example, being able to dictate a sms message while driving a car seems usefull enough, and a much better (and less dangerous) alternative for typing it. In many other cases I believe the relative silence and privacy of keyboard based input is desirable.
Consider over farming. Using artificial means to contunire growing food on land that SHOULD have been allowed to lay fallow for many years.
Well, I don't know about that, but I do know the position the Netherlands holds in this list is pretty much due to a much higher productivity in agriculture being possible then is achieved almost anywhere else in the world. (Note that this productivity is achieved on a small part of a tiny and quite densely populated country, and by approx 60000 people (4% of the population of that country)).
In other words, a very dramatic increase of productivity is quite possible in agriculture, and happens where there is a real need or motive for it. I somehow doubt also that this is the end of such development.
Maybe when computers can repsond to the word "dicate:" and it doesn't make any mistakes while I speak and then it offers better ways to word something
Been there, done that.. at least to the point of it making fewer mistakes then I'd do myself. When I started experimenting with dictation some 15 years ago, it required special hardware, not so anymore.
I took it to the point of writing many letters and articles that way, and even using it for text based games (mud).
Interesting? sure. Usefull also in specific cases (trying to get a computer to do something without needing your hands), but unless you do a lot of dictation and are a bad typer, it is not more efficient.
The biggest thing holding people back is having to train such a system properly in order to achieve any kind of accuracy. The most important reason why I am not using it anymore is because of having to train a new system, which isn't worth the efford to me.
Right- and if you're one of those people who don't want to be tied down by student loans and actually want to (god forbid) pay your own way through college? Why should that be illegal?
In that case you go study somewhere on a permit that allows you to work and have income I'd suggest.
I never used the word "all." I did, however, explicitly use the word "recreational." Medical use is not recreational.
First, recreational or medical depends on the use, not on the drug. Next, medical use is just obvious, but it in no way suggests that the only possible good thing about drug use is medical.
And incidentally, seriously: Stuff the insults up your ass.
Excuse me? what insults? maybe you feel insulted by something I said, but I did not intentionally insult you.
It occurs to me that this 'grey area' between 16 and 18 exists in many places in Europe, at least I know it does here in the Netherlands. Age of consent is 16, but this can become a bit complicated when the other half happens to be over 18.
As Ayn Rand was so fond of saying, the only moral functions of government are national defense, police protection, and a judicial system. The politicians in ths country over the last 100 years might as well have torn up and shit on the Constitution, because that is what they were doing to the concepts behind the document.
So, how do you propose those things get payed for if not from taxes?
On another note, the consitution of the USA provides for a few more things, like granting the federal government a say in interstate trade and promoting prosperity and equality and such, your rant and the believes you promote in it, is in fact 'shitting on the constitution' with regards to that.
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And I thought it was because they were taught to blow themselves up and that we were not human since the age of 5. I thought it was because they have a culture that celebrates death and has absolutely no compunction about lying blatant
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That is not what Islam teaches, it is what those who hijacked the religion are trying to get people to believe, with some success also it seems.
This is hardly a new thing, and not something unique for Islam. Please dig a bit into European history, equally evil and misguided things have been done in the name of christianity.
No, this doesn't mean whe should just let it be, but blaming Islam for things done in its name by people who don't follow its teachings doesn't seem like the right approach really.
Skipping part of your post, you make a good point about Bush and commitment there, but one thing at the end of your post demands a response:
And even the "westernized" Saudi Arabia were still doing all this as recently as last year.
As a matter of fact, they are a large part of the problem. See for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahabism
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=18429&p
The rules for impeachment are pretty tough for any party to utilize.
Maybe so, but seen from outside the USA, the whole Clinton case was just hilarious and strongly suggesting that the rules for impeachment are anything but tough..
The people and equipment there still has to be payed for.
While you are probably right about tricks to present a number totally different from their real cost, they do have real cost there.
I'm sorry, but there is no moral or logical justification for the argument that, because a non-essential item of goods is over-priced, you are entitled to steal it.
A CD is a non-essential item, but is its content? You can definitely live without the content of any CD as such, but can you live without the culture it represents in general?
There is another issue with your argument. Lets assume that the liberal way of using the word stealing is correct then we have the problem of the recording and movie industries having stolen decades of public domain material from us, the public. Two wrongs don't make a right, sure, but they are in a rather bad position to complain now. If you don't like calling this stealing, fine, give it another name, but do so in both cases.
So while your sister and millions like her may be willing to spend their pennies on the music when its available, its very difficult to actually argue she isn't hurting the industry by receiving a free option to wait. The downward price pressure the weaker sales environment is providing does cut into profits.
The problem with this reasoning is that if she doesn't wait she doesn't have the money to begin with, meaning no sale at all, and overall she won't magically have more money available when the 'free' option isn't there.
Not to mention that it could multitask, presumably making the execution of viruses that much easier and more transparent to the user, especially compared to a DOS box where a lot of hacks were required to create a so-called TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident, for those lucky enough not to have encountered those ugly beasts) program.
A memory resident virus on DOS needs techniques somewhat similar to a TSR, but much simpler. All it needs to do is allocate a bit of memory for itself and hook one of the interupts used for calling DOS. Not a very difficult thing to do, and on DOS there are no provisions for managing multiple programs, so there was no need to try and hide from those either.
Not to mention that there were a lot of viruses on DOS as well as AmigaOS that were not memory resident, and did not need such features at all.
Probably because the Amiga was, in its past, one of the most popular computing platforms in the world.
r e.ars
Uh no, it has never been anywhere close to 'one of the most popular computing platforms in the world', see http://www.pegasus3d.com/total_share.html and http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-sha
The hard part about viruses isn't creating them, it's getting them to spread. When only one in 100 machines is a target, it's not going to spread very fast.
Yet there are thousands of viruses for AmigaOS for example..
So you've mentioned one instance where the original manufacturer hasn't done such a good job of making their batteries safe.
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As I also mentioned, it is not the first such incident, see for example http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/networking/?cat
Any examples of third party batteries being unsafe? FM transmitters can short out and melt their casings too, but I have no problem using a third party FM transmitter on my iPod.
Nokia claims that all cases of phones from their brand exploding or setting themselves on fire were caused by 3rd party batteries. While they have an obvious stake in making such a claim, it seems that all cases investigated by them did indeed turn out to involve 3rd party batteries. See for example http://www.snopes.com/horrors/techno/cellcharge.a
From the relatively few incidents with li-ion batteries despite their inherent instability, is the result of proper management of the technology, and as long as you do that, they are quite safe and fine. This includes making very sure you are using the proper battery pack for your device. Whomever you trust for providing that is absolutely upto you.
I think this discussion is pretty much at it's end. You like AAs, that's fine. For a lot of things I like built in battery packs, that's fine too. Isn't it nice we can both get what we want?
Choice is fine, but devices with artificially limited lifetime cause enough problems (waste being one) to argue against using them, hence I disagree that internal battery packs are 'fine' in general. The ipod with its battery replacement programs and from what you say good 3rd party battery packs and such, is the exception, not the rule in this (but then, as some teens around me clearly demonstrate, for now Apple doesn't have to make current ipods unusable after a while in order to keep selling newer models to the same people)
Anyway.. guess you are right, no point in discussing this any further.
For over twenty years we were assaulted as Americans, and ONE time a US president had the balls to stand up, and the world chastised us
Oh really?
After the 9/11 attacks, NATO activated article 5, that the USA thought evidentely that they could handle it alone does not change that its allies were quite ready to jump in and help.
The 'world' chastised the USA for invading Iraq on very dubious grounds (not saying there were no good reasons imaginable for invading Iraq, but the ones presented were not very good) and a general attitude problem of the administration of the USA with regards to anyone who might not agree with them completely on everything.
Right now you are undoubtedly using a multitasking operating system, meaning that you can run more than one process at once. It is really non-obvious that such a thing is even possible, let alone can be done efficiently.
Its non obvious? when looking at a program as a stream of instructions, it just becomes a special case of multiplexing, which might have been non obvious at some point, but has been in use in for example the telecom industry since long before computers had enough memory and cpu power to make multitasking something worth considering.
For those of you who don't know how it is done (and I bet even on Slashdot, most people do not), how would you overcome this problem? How are you going to make sure that once the kernel gives a time slice to an application, the application will give it back? How are you going to make sure the application doesn't corrupt the location in memory the kernel resides on?
When I first tried to implement a form of multitasker I was 14 and all I was familiar with was a 6510 cpu in a C64 computer, and while the solution to protecting memory was obvious, it was not possible to implement it on that a C64 because it did not support a usefull way to manipulate memory addressing. Later on a C128 which had a mmu (abeit a very limited one), this became a bit easier, but it still lacked full memory protection.
While my multitasker lacked any kind of priority management, the concept of a run queue and using some kind of timed interupt mechanism to take back control were basicly the first thing that came to mind for getting multiple programs running.
Sure, someone came up with the idea first, and at the time, the usefullness of it was not entirely clear, and while the basic concepts are pretty simple, implementing them in a usefull way is not. Also, making a usefull multitasker involves a few other problems that are less easy to solve (scheduling and priority management for example).
Multitasking existed way before anyone thought of the uses it might have on 'personal computers' if only because at the time personal computers were non existant, so the multitasking you are using on your pc is merely a new application of a pre-existing idea.
As with many developments in software, implementation happened after it became a realistic option with regards to existing hardware. It became in widespread use when an actual application turned up that made it usefull, till then it had been somewhat of a solution looking for a problem.
This is related to one of the imho biggest issues with 'software patents'. It is very cheap and easy to try many different things on a computer, which makes that many things are tried just to see what happens, and without having an intended application. This makes that many new ideas that turn up come in the form of discoveries, not inventions.
You must have been specifically selecting your phones then. Both of the cordless handsets in the house use AA battery packs with a special connector. One is a Uniden, probably about three years old, the other is a Motorola, about a year and a half old. All the VTechs I've ever seen use them as well.
As I already mentioned, I bought my phone with this in mind (hence I ended up with the more common AA size batteries), the other 2 were not bought with this in mind at all.
Apple charges $59 for a replacement, but they overcharge for all accessories. Third parties charge less. IPodBattery.com is $16 and has a one year warranty. Lithium ion batteries really don't set themselves on fire that often. As far as I know, around here you're more likely to be mauled by a bear while listening to your iPod and not paying attention to where you're going on your bike (one incident in this area last year) than you are to have your battery catch fire (no incidents in this area last year).
As mentioned for example in this wikipedia article, li-ion batteries are inherently unstable and unless proper measures are taken, prone to setting themselves on fire.
That this does not happen very often is the result of an array of safety devices. Sometimes those safety devices are in the battery, sometimes they are external, and at times they are duplicated. Having the proper safety measures in place and working properly depends on a good match between what the battery has internally and external safety devices, the properties of the cells in the battery and the typical usage conditions (especially temperature). This is the main reason why you cannot buy generic li-ion cells, but only battery packs made for specific applications.
Of course a reputable provider of after-market li-ion batteries is likely to do a good job at making this match, and would face some serious problems if they did not, at least where I live, but it is extremely likely that the original manufacturor of the device can do a better job at that, and is going to be a lot more helpfull when it goes wrong anyway. Does it go wrong even in that case? Go ask Sony about that, they just did the last huge recall, but their situation is hardly unique, just at a larger scale then previous such incidents.
On another note, from that same article, you can see that your ipod battery might be pretty close to its end of life, but if you have treated it well and stored it properly, it might as well have many years of use left.
I have an older T39m phone from Ericsson with 3 batteries. One li-ion 'high capacity' battery, and 2 li-po 'standard' batteries. All those batteries are normally stored at approx 40% charge in a cool place untill I need them. They have lasted some 5 years now, and while they did lose some capacity over the years, they are still getting over 80% of their original capacity.
Yes, I was referring to devices that are made to take alkaline batteries. Their low battery warnings are voltage based, and they tend to kick in when NiMH or NiCads still have lots of juice. THAT'S annoying. Building your device to only work properly with alkaline batteries has got to be some kind of ploy by battery manufacturers.
There are at times good reasons for this, but generally 'accepts nicad batteries' is a selling argument for me. I have not encountered devices that don't in the last couple of years other then flashlights (those are just not very good for nimh batteries, but work perfectly fine initially)..
Building a device that has a specialized battery pack made up of soldered in NiMH AAs is annoying too. There's no reason for it. Cordless phones still do that, and notebook computers used to before they switched to lithium.
I have a Siemens gigaset cordless phone here, which uses standard AA size batteries. My gf has some akg cordless which uses AAA size batteries, my parents have some Phillips cordless which uses AAA size batteries.. Of those, I was the only one specifically selecting my phone for this. I'm sure those battery packs exist, but they seem not that common nowadays.
I have seen the battery packs you mention indeed, that was in some imported AT&T 5400 cordless from 15 years ago.. Very annoying indeed.
Now, the battery in my iPod (also the one in my cell phone) is too thin for standard sized batteries. I like those devices being that thin, so a built in battery pack is a good solution. The battery in my iPod has lasted two years and is still going with no problems, and a replacement is available, including the tool to install it, for $16.
Li-ions have their advantages, sure. I like my thin razr phone, I like my light and thin pda, and yeah, in both cases thanks to a li-ion battery. That said, I hate devices with internal batteries like the ipod, I hate that design decision so much that it is an absolute show stopper for as far as I am concerned with regards to the ipod. If a tiny bit of extra weight and thickness is the price to pay for easy availability and replacement of batteries then that is really a tiny price to pay. I never payed for my phone or pda, so its not a concern there (not to mention that the phone at least has a very easy to replace battery)
Oh, and for all I know, an out of warranty battery replacement from Apple costs $59 excluding shipping and handling. I'm sure buying the replacement battery and replacing it yourself will be quite a bit cheaper, but I have to ask, what kind of battery are you buying for $16? is it REALLY absolutely 100% identical? Or do you get a good enough guarantee that it is absolutely going to be compatible with the charging and battery management of the ipod? If not, you may find yourself with a solution that has a good chance of setting itself on fire sometime in the future.
Clarification: It's not whether it's known to the manufacturer, it's whether it's known to the customer. If the customer expects and accepts failure within a couple of months, then it is not a quality issue if the product does just that.
Absolutely.
The problem comes in when the manufacturer designs for months, but the customer expects years.
The problem usually is caused by the manufacturer being extremely unwilling to suggest to the customer that their expensive fashionable gadget is designed for months. Hwen manufacturers are open and honest about this, there is no problem indeed.
As opposed to building it with AAAs where you can either buy new ones every few days or use rechargeable ones with lower voltages that claim to be dead every few hours?
There are two possible issues that result in the problem you mention:
1. The device is not made to accept rechargable batteries.
2. You use poor quality rechargables.
I have many devices which accept standard size batteries, and those made to accept rechargables specifically (ie, my powershot 530 digicam, a set of handheld 2 way radios and a portable mp3 player) run longer on decent rechargables then on a set of duracells (in case of the camera the difference is quite extreme, upto 3 times more pictures). I also have a few devices that are not made for use with rechargables, and those usually have the issue you mention.
Of course using poor quality rechargable batteries also results in poor performance and having to replace batteries often.
Try this again with a device made to accept rechargables (so it takes their slightly different behavior into account) with a set of high quality rechargables and you'll see that this can behave almost as well as your li-ion battery fed device initially, and will do as good or better 1 year down the road.
Li-ion batteries have initial advantages in energy density, but have big disadvantages with regards to the number of charges they can handle, not to mention that they deteriorate quickly from being stored empty or fully charged (or actually, from anything other then being 40% charged and kept cool) and for many uses are no good anymore after somewhere between a year and 2 years of use.
A good set of mimh batteries have a lower energy density initially, but typically last at least 3 times as many charges, are way less sensitive to storage conditions, don't get damaged as easily from keeping them topped off at 100% charge or being empty, and as a nice bonus they don't have the tendency to set themselves on fire when mismanaged.
If something fails in an unexpected manner, that's a quality issue.
If you make something of poor quality and expect it to fail in a couple of months, that might be a marketing decision, but it is still a quality issue for as far as the consumer is concerned. Keep in miund that 'the consumer is always right', and that your motivation does not change the technical issue.
Your ethic is that nobody can "push" their ethic onto anybody else. You then proceed to tell somebody to follow your ethic by not trying to get you to follow their ethic.
In other words, you are pushing your own ethic on somebody else by expecting them not to push theirs on you.
Think about it.
Your freedom ends where mine begins (and the other way around).
Asking someone to refrain from intruding on my freedom can indeed be explained as pushing my ethics onto someone, sure. I hope you don't mind if I dismiss that point of view as 'technically correct but absurd' because it also works the other way, as soon as you believe you can push your ethics onto me, you thereby acknoledge that I can push my ethics onto you.
Almost all ericsson and now sony ericsson phones I have seen have a 'whitelist' feature. Enable it and only add people you trust to not disturb you with nonsense, and you can both be reachable and not get disturbed by your phone all the time.
Furthermore, the company announced that it's next version would be able to accurately transcribe a conversation between two people without getting confused.
That would be interesting.
I think you're going to see speech-powered devices increase in popularity dramatically now that there's no training involved. The expansion of voice-powered systems in cars, cockpits, home security systems, etc, is probably the logical first-step since it's already being done to some extent. I think these niche markets will let the technology mature while rolling it out to the masses. Along these lines, I think that transcription in cell phones for SMS messages will also become commonplace. And once speech-recog is used by hundreds of millions of people every day you'll see progress at an ever-increasing clip.
Well, there are a few other potential issues with transcribing text.
Back when I was very busy with this stuff, there were customers for whom training wasn't such a barrier because the potential payoff was big. Think about medics being able to keep their hands free while taking notes or people accustomed to dictating with a dictation machine being able to bypass typists for many things. In many cases that worked out well, but in quite a few cases it introduced issues of people in the same office talking to their computers, and finding the resulting environment annoying and/or disturbing for their working capabilities.
Also, quite a few of those customers found it mostly usefull for things like taking quick notes and filling out forms. For writing more official documents, they said to prefer creating and manipulating the text visually with help of keyboard and mouse. This of course could well be a consequence of what they are used to, but I suspect it also has to do with it seemingly being easier to organize your thoughts that way.
That said, for 'command' purposes it works very well, and already has become somewhat 'for the masses' in the form of voice controlled operation of phones and such. I'm not so sure however that transcription will be used a lot outside specific situations. For example, being able to dictate a sms message while driving a car seems usefull enough, and a much better (and less dangerous) alternative for typing it. In many other cases I believe the relative silence and privacy of keyboard based input is desirable.
Consider over farming. Using artificial means to contunire growing food
on land that SHOULD have been allowed to lay fallow for many years.
Well, I don't know about that, but I do know the position the Netherlands holds in this list is pretty much due to a much higher productivity in agriculture being possible then is achieved almost anywhere else in the world. (Note that this productivity is achieved on a small part of a tiny and quite densely populated country, and by approx 60000 people (4% of the population of that country)).
In other words, a very dramatic increase of productivity is quite possible in agriculture, and happens where there is a real need or motive for it. I somehow doubt also that this is the end of such development.
Maybe when computers can repsond to the word "dicate:" and it doesn't make any mistakes while I speak and then it offers better ways to word something
Been there, done that.. at least to the point of it making fewer mistakes then I'd do myself. When I started experimenting with dictation some 15 years ago, it required special hardware, not so anymore.
I took it to the point of writing many letters and articles that way, and even using it for text based games (mud).
Interesting? sure. Usefull also in specific cases (trying to get a computer to do something without needing your hands), but unless you do a lot of dictation and are a bad typer, it is not more efficient.
The biggest thing holding people back is having to train such a system properly in order to achieve any kind of accuracy. The most important reason why I am not using it anymore is because of having to train a new system, which isn't worth the efford to me.
Right- and if you're one of those people who don't want to be tied down by student loans and actually want to (god forbid) pay your own way through college? Why should that be illegal?
In that case you go study somewhere on a permit that allows you to work and have income I'd suggest.
I never used the word "all." I did, however, explicitly use the word "recreational." Medical use is not recreational.
First, recreational or medical depends on the use, not on the drug.
Next, medical use is just obvious, but it in no way suggests that the only possible good thing about drug use is medical.
And incidentally, seriously: Stuff the insults up your ass.
Excuse me? what insults? maybe you feel insulted by something I said, but I did not intentionally insult you.
It occurs to me that this 'grey area' between 16 and 18 exists in many places in Europe, at least I know it does here in the Netherlands. Age of consent is 16, but this can become a bit complicated when the other half happens to be over 18.
As Ayn Rand was so fond of saying, the only moral functions of government are national defense, police protection, and a judicial system. The politicians in ths country over the last 100 years might as well have torn up and shit on the Constitution, because that is what they were doing to the concepts behind the document.
So, how do you propose those things get payed for if not from taxes?
On another note, the consitution of the USA provides for a few more things, like granting the federal government a say in interstate trade and promoting prosperity and equality and such, your rant and the believes you promote in it, is in fact 'shitting on the constitution' with regards to that.