This also allows Comcast to absorb Time Warner while aligning their interests with Charter. It helps the continuing solidification of the industry into a cartel of a small number of businesses.
...and you can pass it on to your kids as a family heirloom.
And I think this is an important part of the puzzle. The idea of buying an expensive watch mostly makes sense if you assume you're going to keep it for a long time. Most expensive watch-makers are selling something built to last a lifetime, while gadget-makers are building things to be replaced every 2 years. You might keep your Rolex for 25 years, but I guarantee that your Pebble watch will be ridiculously obsolete in less than 5 years.
They're different sorts of businesses servicing different markets. There really isn't an overlap at this point.
I think that's essentially the same peripheral I linked to, but you linked to the version that uses the old dock connector instead of the Lightning connector.
I'm arguing more of the general point that we should *always* be careful when basing decisions on statistics, because statistics can be very biased depending on how you collect an analyze them. Unfortunately, while statistics can be analyzed to say almost anything and a poorly selected sample invalidates any analysis, using numbers give the illusion of objective certainty.
So in response to this, you're presenting me with statistics that black people own smartphones, and drawing the conclusion that therefore rich people take more personal responsibility for their environment.
Really, I'm not even interested in arguing that you're wrong. Your conclusion may possibly be true. I'm just surprised that your response to my post was to present such a dodgy statistical analysis.
After all, it isn't like poor people don't have smart phones. I live in a lower income city and most other family's kids in my area had smart phones before I got one.
Putting your anecdotal evidence aside for a minute, I don't know if it's true that poor people own smart phones at the same rate. Also, are they equally likely to have a phone with the features that make it easy for them to report these issues? Are they as likely to have the proper app installed? Are they as likely to be driving around their own low-income neighborhood?
The thing is, I'm not pretending to know the answer to questions like these. There may even be good reasons why a city may prioritize fixing roads in areas where more wealthy people live-- maybe those areas are more heavily trafficked? But it seems to me that's not really what we're discussing here. It seems like the White House was saying, "We should be careful when collecting these kinds of statistics to make sure the statistics aren't leading to some kind of unintentional discrimination." In response, people here are acting as though that's a crazy thing to say.
So in response to *that*, I'm arguing more of the general point that we should *always* be careful when basing decisions on statistics, because statistics can be very biased depending on how you collect an analyze them. Unfortunately, while statistics can be analyzed to say almost anything and a poorly selected sample invalidates any analysis, using numbers give the illusion of objective certainty.
The "stay-at-home moms" in poor families are probably busy and may even have jobs. Poor unemployed people may not have money to be driving around with smart phones.
So, exploit the demographics (e.g. profile and discriminate) when it helps your party, but wag your finger at the rest of the world when they do it even "inadvertently".
Maybe it's more like, "Exploit demographics when determining who you can persuade and sell things to, but use the same level of analysis when analyzing demographics to hand out public benefits, in order to make sure the benefits are provided equitably."...?
Because it seems to me that they're not saying, "We shouldn't analyze this data," but more that, "We should be careful when analyzing this data to prevent bias that would result in unjust public policy." So therefore in that line of thinking, targeting your campaign ads to likely voters would be fine. Targeting your tax cuts to the same likely voters would not be fine. Targeting your tax cuts to only benefit rich white men would be even less fine.
In poorer neighborhoods, people are not taking the personal responsibility to report the problems.
Or maybe they don't have the time and resources to do that. It's easier for an unemployed trust-funder to have his smart-phone automatically report the problem than for someone who's working 2 different shitty full-time jobs to take time to call in to report the problem. It's also important to note that the poor sometimes creates even more work and expenses. You might need to be a lot more careful in timing your commute for public transportation because you can't afford a car. You might need to spend more time or money going to the bank or grocery store because your neighborhood doesn't have those things. Being poor isn't all fairy-dust and gumdrops.
I don't see what the problem here is. If you're going to be collecting statistics for decision-making, you should be looking for bias. If you're collecting those statistics from smartphone apps, you should be asking whether there are populations who will be over-represented or under-represented based on who owns smart phones, and who's likely to install apps. Otherwise it doesn't make sense to create policy based on those statistics.
I'm guessing you're being sarcastic, but democracy will be kind of racist if the voters are racist. It does seem like a problem. The question would be, what's the best thing to do about it?
Or, you know, it's possible that the screenwriter and director they hired to work on the new movies thought that Timothy Zahn's work didn't provide the groundwork for the sort of movie they wanted to make, and so they went another direction. It may be as simple as "going a different direction.
Last I heard, the movie was being directed by Abrams, who I'd imagine would like to write his own story. One of his more recent projects included a reboot of a scifi series that was badly in need of an overhaul. If I had to guess, I'd guess that the new movies may capture the spirit of the original 3 movies, while breaking substantially from the associated canon. I think you may find that the new movies are disappointing to the super-nerds who have spent years studying the exact science and star charts of the Star Wars universe. If there's already an explanation of how lightsabers work, or exactly which race exists on what planet, Abrams might not stick to it. That doesn't seem to be what Abrams does. But on the other hand, I predict it will be less stupid, and a hell of a lot more fun, than the prequels.
I'm sure they'll also work quite well alongside the copy of Windows 8 you got stuck with, including the installation of IE you'll never use and the copy of Microsoft Office you wish you didn't need.
Well there are certainly problems with normal printers, of the 2D variety. Essentially, most of them are crotchety pieces of shit. People don't want to spend very much, so manufacturers have often focused on producing cheap models, and those cheap models are often not well designed. Even the well-designed kind tend to need some maintenance now and then.
As a general product, printers are stagnant and awful. Maybe it's because people are sending around PDFs instead of printing things out? Either way, the devices themselves are still huge and heavy. They still require drivers, which is insane. The drivers are often crappy and lacking support for a lot of platforms. I mean, really, what do printers do? They put ink or toner onto a sheet of paper. You'd think we could develop a standard interface and move away from drivers entirely. You'd think major printer manufacturers could at least make solid drivers that were trouble free. Nope. It's still a nightmare.
And don't even get me started on scanners. Network scanners are still completely retarded unless you shell out for a Fujitsu Scansnap or something comparable. Multi-function printers are a mess. I've given up on scanners altogether and started using one of those smartphone apps that lets you take a picture of your documents and dump it on Dropbox.
So yeah, I think the GP post has a point. An awful lot of consumer devices are crap.
I think if you want to sell them to people, you may need a useful consumer application first. I don't mean "application" like a software program. I mean a use-case.
Really, right now, 3D printing has been developed and marketed for hobbyists, even if the marketing people didn't know that's what they were doing. They've said, "Make your own designs and share them with others!" Admittedly, that's great stuff, but most people don't want to design their own products. They want their products to be designed by someone who knows what they're doing.
So if... Let's say Amazon released a 3D printer, along with an extensive library of real, useful products that could be printed out-of-the-box, without any difficult setup or calibration, then you might have a product. It would have to be something like, "I unpacked it from the box and plugged it in. And then the next day, I was shopping on Amazon, and along with the option to 'buy' the doodad I wanted for $11, there was an option to 'print' for free! I even got to select my color." That there is a workable business model. Sell the printers, sell the printing material, as well as selling the same products via mail-order for those who don't own a printer.
Of course, there's an obvious objection that occurs to me: Someone might say, "But can you really make a whole Amazon store of objects that can also be printed? Sure, I can print out some crappy little plastic toy, but nobody is going to bother to buy that same thing online!" Well there's your problem right there. If you can't come up with a large selection of real products that can be printed with these things, products which people would otherwise buy from retail/online stores, then the printer is not a consumer product. It's a more of a toy, or a machine that hobbyists can use to produce things, or businesses can use for prototyping or other purposes.
I think it really depends on whether or not the first twenty times go things wrong.
I'd agree, there's not much point in starting from scratch when things are working exactly how you'd want. However, if there's nothing that does things correctly, you might need to start over. Or even if everything else works well enough, it still might be that you have other needs, different from the intended audience for the previous solutions.
I have also invented several new shapes. One of them, I draw part of a circle, and then it turns into a squiggly line for a while, and then a quarter of a square, followed by a third of an asymptote. Another time, I drew 3 squiggly lines connected to a 4th line that was almost straight but still a little squiggly. I call it a squiggle-square.
There are much better tablets out there for your money. The iPad doesn't have a (Micro)SD card slot, so they only way to get more storage is to pay $100 at each increment.
Well first, there is a potential for reading MicroSD cards, though I'm not sure how useful it actually is. Either way, I think you may be making the mistake that tech-guys on/. have been making for many years, often when criticizing Apple products-- confusing technical specs with end-user utility.
Taking to an extreme, it's like, "Ha, Ha! Snort! My home-built computer is obviously better than your home-built computer. My computer has a Generation 7 Cube X284 Doodad included, while yours only has a Generation 6 Cube X284 Doodad. As a result, I can get 123 frames per second while running Crysis 3 while you can only get 117 frames per second!" And the guy you're talking to is like, "Dude, I use this thing to write email. It's way overpowered for what I need anyway."
Now it's not as bad as that. I'm sure some people do use their MicroSD card readers. But many people don't care about technical specs and don't need a bunch of ports, because they won't use it. You have a Surface, and you like it, so it sounds like that's the right product for you. Many people would be upset about the lack of available apps, and meanwhile for many people the ability to run a powershell script means nothing, because they don't know how to read, write, or run a powershell script.
So all I would want to point out is that it's not as simple as "there are much better tablets out there for your money." I would sooner say, "There are a handful of good, high quality tablets out there, and depending on how you're going to use your tablet, one of them may be a better purchase *for you* than the iPad. On the other hand, if you have a Mac and iPhone, use iTunes and iCloud and the iTunes store, have a bunch of iPhone apps already purchased, and you essentially just wish your iPhone had a bigger screen, than the iPad is a no-brainer." Believe it or not, there are people like that.
The lack of playing files from a network share out of the box is likely Apple ecosystem lock-in. They want you to use iCloud. Meanwhile every cheapo Android device usually has support for DLNA.
I don't believe so. There's a VLC media player for iOS, which I assume will stream media from some kind of streaming source other than iCloud. Apple happens to not support DLNA in their product lines, but I don't think there's anything to stop someone from writing their own apps. But maybe I'm just wrong here. Do you have a basis for your complaints, or are you just speculating that it must be "Apple ecosystem lock-in" because you're an Apple-hater?
Yeah, and the main reason people want them larger is to accommodate larger screens. People always want larger screens, assuming they can view things on those screens.
And I agree that this might cannibalize part of the tablet market. If you have to choose between buying a 4" phone and 7" tablet, or getting a 5-6" phone that can serve both purposes, I could see people going with the larger phone. Maybe. You still have to be able to carry the thing comfortably in your pocket. However, I think the larger tablet market (e.g. the full sized iPad) is going to stick around for a while because I predict the functionality is going to be increased. I think within the next few years, you'll see a 10" or 11" device that replaces the low-end Macbook Air, but has a form more resembling the iPad, with the ability to run full desktop apps. Whether that happens because Apple chips have become powerful enough for desktop use, or because Intel x64 chips have gotten efficient enough for mobile use, I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure it's coming, though, and so the larger iPad will be around for a while.
When I was a kid, there was so much "by the year 2000". Space stations. Moon bases. Mars colonies. Mining asteroids. Deep space missions. Fleets of spacecraft. Hypersonic travel around the earth.
We were also supposed to have flying cars and hoverboards. Or depending on which movie you're going on: time machines, androids that could pass for human, and FTL travel.
But are you really getting angry at NASA because science fiction isn't a reality?
I am impressed by probes. They are cool toys. But they can't replace a person standing there, making decisions. Asking "what if..." We learn from being and doing. The rover we have on Mars now has a mostly busted wheel. A wheel that a human could have riveted a patch over in a few minutes.
I think you're overestimating the ease with which humans can do things. A human could have fixed the rover if he had all the right tools and replacement parts, assuming that we could get him to Mars, surviving the trip there in good health, surviving the years it takes for one of those rovers to break down. He would also need the mobility to go around on the surface of an uninhabitable landscape over distances long enough to find the rover, and then have the flexibility in his suit to enact the repairs without danger to himself. All of that stuff is hard.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to working on all of those problems, and trying to figure out how we can put a man on Mars. It's just that I don't think it's as simple as loading a guy into a rocket, pointing it at Mars, and hoping for the best. The fact that we've gotten the rovers there safely is an achievement in itself, and is paving the way for a potential manned mission. So I'd say let's figure it out, plan it out, and send a person to Mars when we feel semi-confident that we can do that.
It's not really "free". The cost of OSX and the associated apps (e.g. Pages, iPhoto) is rolled into the price of the original laptop/desktop purchase. Apple is now providing free *upgrades* to the bundled software.
I wonder, would a truly unlimited interactive novel be fun to play? It could be tested out by a kind of Turing test scenario. Have a player play such a game, and have a real novelist provide the "game" text. Of course such a thing would entail the player waiting a considerable time between "moves". But it would mean that their input would be boundless, they could do anything in the "game".
Well when I've thought about it in the past, I imagined it a bit like having an old-school D&D game with a dungeon master. Of course, that'd be a hard thing to do.
I always loved the old text adventures, but it's annoying that they were restricted to canned responses. You might come up with a great solution to a problem, but if it wasn't what the programmer had anticipated, you'll get get a message saying something like, "I'm sorry, but you can't do that." I would think coming up with something that allowed you more freedom would be an interesting problem to tackle and a good challenge for an AI researcher.
Roughly 70 percent accepted that we have a genome and that mental illness is seated in the brain; about 20 percent were uncertain on these subjects, and the doubters were few.
Honestly, I don't know what it means to say "we have a genome". Is that a meaningful statement? I would be uncertain about agreeing with that just because it seems like a weird thing to ask if I accept it. And "mental illness is seated in the brain"? Does anyone actually feel like we can sum that up so easily? We don't even understand what mental illness is half the time, and I don't know what it means for "mental illness" to be "seated" anywhere.
It seems like a dumb survey and the motivations are suspect. I feel uncertain about the Big Bang, not because I'm a creationist, but because we had to rewrite our understanding of time and space about 100 years ago, and we still haven't really settled the issue in a conclusive way. The Big Bang seems like the most likely explanation we have, but if you told me that we'll make a discovery in the next 100 years that will lead us to a significantly different explanation, I wouldn't be too extremely shocked.
So maybe we shouldn't be so quick to jump on the "everyone is stupid!" bandwagon.
If there's a door there, it should open. If it won't open, there shouldn't be a door there. How hard is this? Putting a door there that's never going to open just frustrates the player and destroys the suspension of disbelief.
I don't know if I agree. Games are, in many ways, about presenting the player with illusions. If you have a big open world, you might put stars in the night sky with no way to reach them. The stars aren't really there, and you're artificially limited to traveling along the ground, but you're being presented with the illusion of being immersed in a complete world.
For another example, in the Grand Theft Auto games, there were many buildings that the player couldn't enter, but a few that he could. Should they have gotten rid of all the buildings that couldn't be entered? Then you have a big empty world.
With doors, I think it's often stupid to add doors that can't be opened, but sometimes that's part of the game-- to find out which doors can be opened. Sometimes it's just adding texture so that you can imagine that there are many things beyond those doors you can't open, adding to the realism and immersiveness of the game. If you're going to add doors that can't open, then the person designing the video game needs to make sure that they play the appropriate role in the game. If you're supposed to know that you can't open the doors, then there might be an appropriate visual cue. If you're supposed to try to open them, then you don't want an obvious cue, but you do want there to be something to indicate whether the player should give up or keep trying to open the door.
I think what's being pointed out is that there are many subtle decisions made by game developers that game players don't notice. It's not that they're necessarily hard decisions, but if you're presented with 100 of these decisions, it can be hard to have your choices result in a game that's both technically feasible and fun to play.
I'd rather have a game that didn't look as nice, but had things that reacted much more as they do in the real world.
I sometimes wonder, what if, back in the days of text adventure games, video game designers had not put all the money and effort into graphics, but instead put it into natural language recognition, world models, and artificial intelligence? Like imagine the millions of dollars we put into graphics, instead going to make a super-advanced text-based adventures where you can really explore a world and do whatever you want.
Of course, knowing our civilization audience, those games would all be procedural military games anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
This also allows Comcast to absorb Time Warner while aligning their interests with Charter. It helps the continuing solidification of the industry into a cartel of a small number of businesses.
...and you can pass it on to your kids as a family heirloom.
And I think this is an important part of the puzzle. The idea of buying an expensive watch mostly makes sense if you assume you're going to keep it for a long time. Most expensive watch-makers are selling something built to last a lifetime, while gadget-makers are building things to be replaced every 2 years. You might keep your Rolex for 25 years, but I guarantee that your Pebble watch will be ridiculously obsolete in less than 5 years.
They're different sorts of businesses servicing different markets. There really isn't an overlap at this point.
I think that's essentially the same peripheral I linked to, but you linked to the version that uses the old dock connector instead of the Lightning connector.
I'm arguing more of the general point that we should *always* be careful when basing decisions on statistics, because statistics can be very biased depending on how you collect an analyze them. Unfortunately, while statistics can be analyzed to say almost anything and a poorly selected sample invalidates any analysis, using numbers give the illusion of objective certainty.
So in response to this, you're presenting me with statistics that black people own smartphones, and drawing the conclusion that therefore rich people take more personal responsibility for their environment.
Really, I'm not even interested in arguing that you're wrong. Your conclusion may possibly be true. I'm just surprised that your response to my post was to present such a dodgy statistical analysis.
After all, it isn't like poor people don't have smart phones. I live in a lower income city and most other family's kids in my area had smart phones before I got one.
Putting your anecdotal evidence aside for a minute, I don't know if it's true that poor people own smart phones at the same rate. Also, are they equally likely to have a phone with the features that make it easy for them to report these issues? Are they as likely to have the proper app installed? Are they as likely to be driving around their own low-income neighborhood?
The thing is, I'm not pretending to know the answer to questions like these. There may even be good reasons why a city may prioritize fixing roads in areas where more wealthy people live-- maybe those areas are more heavily trafficked? But it seems to me that's not really what we're discussing here. It seems like the White House was saying, "We should be careful when collecting these kinds of statistics to make sure the statistics aren't leading to some kind of unintentional discrimination." In response, people here are acting as though that's a crazy thing to say.
So in response to *that*, I'm arguing more of the general point that we should *always* be careful when basing decisions on statistics, because statistics can be very biased depending on how you collect an analyze them. Unfortunately, while statistics can be analyzed to say almost anything and a poorly selected sample invalidates any analysis, using numbers give the illusion of objective certainty.
The "stay-at-home moms" in poor families are probably busy and may even have jobs. Poor unemployed people may not have money to be driving around with smart phones.
So, exploit the demographics (e.g. profile and discriminate) when it helps your party, but wag your finger at the rest of the world when they do it even "inadvertently".
Maybe it's more like, "Exploit demographics when determining who you can persuade and sell things to, but use the same level of analysis when analyzing demographics to hand out public benefits, in order to make sure the benefits are provided equitably."...?
Because it seems to me that they're not saying, "We shouldn't analyze this data," but more that, "We should be careful when analyzing this data to prevent bias that would result in unjust public policy." So therefore in that line of thinking, targeting your campaign ads to likely voters would be fine. Targeting your tax cuts to the same likely voters would not be fine. Targeting your tax cuts to only benefit rich white men would be even less fine.
In poorer neighborhoods, people are not taking the personal responsibility to report the problems.
Or maybe they don't have the time and resources to do that. It's easier for an unemployed trust-funder to have his smart-phone automatically report the problem than for someone who's working 2 different shitty full-time jobs to take time to call in to report the problem. It's also important to note that the poor sometimes creates even more work and expenses. You might need to be a lot more careful in timing your commute for public transportation because you can't afford a car. You might need to spend more time or money going to the bank or grocery store because your neighborhood doesn't have those things. Being poor isn't all fairy-dust and gumdrops.
I don't see what the problem here is. If you're going to be collecting statistics for decision-making, you should be looking for bias. If you're collecting those statistics from smartphone apps, you should be asking whether there are populations who will be over-represented or under-represented based on who owns smart phones, and who's likely to install apps. Otherwise it doesn't make sense to create policy based on those statistics.
I'm guessing you're being sarcastic, but democracy will be kind of racist if the voters are racist. It does seem like a problem. The question would be, what's the best thing to do about it?
Or, you know, it's possible that the screenwriter and director they hired to work on the new movies thought that Timothy Zahn's work didn't provide the groundwork for the sort of movie they wanted to make, and so they went another direction. It may be as simple as "going a different direction.
Last I heard, the movie was being directed by Abrams, who I'd imagine would like to write his own story. One of his more recent projects included a reboot of a scifi series that was badly in need of an overhaul. If I had to guess, I'd guess that the new movies may capture the spirit of the original 3 movies, while breaking substantially from the associated canon. I think you may find that the new movies are disappointing to the super-nerds who have spent years studying the exact science and star charts of the Star Wars universe. If there's already an explanation of how lightsabers work, or exactly which race exists on what planet, Abrams might not stick to it. That doesn't seem to be what Abrams does. But on the other hand, I predict it will be less stupid, and a hell of a lot more fun, than the prequels.
I'm sure they'll also work quite well alongside the copy of Windows 8 you got stuck with, including the installation of IE you'll never use and the copy of Microsoft Office you wish you didn't need.
Well there are certainly problems with normal printers, of the 2D variety. Essentially, most of them are crotchety pieces of shit. People don't want to spend very much, so manufacturers have often focused on producing cheap models, and those cheap models are often not well designed. Even the well-designed kind tend to need some maintenance now and then.
As a general product, printers are stagnant and awful. Maybe it's because people are sending around PDFs instead of printing things out? Either way, the devices themselves are still huge and heavy. They still require drivers, which is insane. The drivers are often crappy and lacking support for a lot of platforms. I mean, really, what do printers do? They put ink or toner onto a sheet of paper. You'd think we could develop a standard interface and move away from drivers entirely. You'd think major printer manufacturers could at least make solid drivers that were trouble free. Nope. It's still a nightmare.
And don't even get me started on scanners. Network scanners are still completely retarded unless you shell out for a Fujitsu Scansnap or something comparable. Multi-function printers are a mess. I've given up on scanners altogether and started using one of those smartphone apps that lets you take a picture of your documents and dump it on Dropbox.
So yeah, I think the GP post has a point. An awful lot of consumer devices are crap.
I think if you want to sell them to people, you may need a useful consumer application first. I don't mean "application" like a software program. I mean a use-case.
Really, right now, 3D printing has been developed and marketed for hobbyists, even if the marketing people didn't know that's what they were doing. They've said, "Make your own designs and share them with others!" Admittedly, that's great stuff, but most people don't want to design their own products. They want their products to be designed by someone who knows what they're doing.
So if... Let's say Amazon released a 3D printer, along with an extensive library of real, useful products that could be printed out-of-the-box, without any difficult setup or calibration, then you might have a product. It would have to be something like, "I unpacked it from the box and plugged it in. And then the next day, I was shopping on Amazon, and along with the option to 'buy' the doodad I wanted for $11, there was an option to 'print' for free! I even got to select my color." That there is a workable business model. Sell the printers, sell the printing material, as well as selling the same products via mail-order for those who don't own a printer.
Of course, there's an obvious objection that occurs to me: Someone might say, "But can you really make a whole Amazon store of objects that can also be printed? Sure, I can print out some crappy little plastic toy, but nobody is going to bother to buy that same thing online!" Well there's your problem right there. If you can't come up with a large selection of real products that can be printed with these things, products which people would otherwise buy from retail/online stores, then the printer is not a consumer product. It's a more of a toy, or a machine that hobbyists can use to produce things, or businesses can use for prototyping or other purposes.
I think it really depends on whether or not the first twenty times go things wrong.
I'd agree, there's not much point in starting from scratch when things are working exactly how you'd want. However, if there's nothing that does things correctly, you might need to start over. Or even if everything else works well enough, it still might be that you have other needs, different from the intended audience for the previous solutions.
No, it's a new shape, dammit!
I have also invented several new shapes. One of them, I draw part of a circle, and then it turns into a squiggly line for a while, and then a quarter of a square, followed by a third of an asymptote. Another time, I drew 3 squiggly lines connected to a 4th line that was almost straight but still a little squiggly. I call it a squiggle-square.
I think it was pretty clear that I was talking about Apple's lineup.
There are much better tablets out there for your money. The iPad doesn't have a (Micro)SD card slot, so they only way to get more storage is to pay $100 at each increment.
Well first, there is a potential for reading MicroSD cards, though I'm not sure how useful it actually is. Either way, I think you may be making the mistake that tech-guys on /. have been making for many years, often when criticizing Apple products-- confusing technical specs with end-user utility.
Taking to an extreme, it's like, "Ha, Ha! Snort! My home-built computer is obviously better than your home-built computer. My computer has a Generation 7 Cube X284 Doodad included, while yours only has a Generation 6 Cube X284 Doodad. As a result, I can get 123 frames per second while running Crysis 3 while you can only get 117 frames per second!" And the guy you're talking to is like, "Dude, I use this thing to write email. It's way overpowered for what I need anyway."
Now it's not as bad as that. I'm sure some people do use their MicroSD card readers. But many people don't care about technical specs and don't need a bunch of ports, because they won't use it. You have a Surface, and you like it, so it sounds like that's the right product for you. Many people would be upset about the lack of available apps, and meanwhile for many people the ability to run a powershell script means nothing, because they don't know how to read, write, or run a powershell script.
So all I would want to point out is that it's not as simple as "there are much better tablets out there for your money." I would sooner say, "There are a handful of good, high quality tablets out there, and depending on how you're going to use your tablet, one of them may be a better purchase *for you* than the iPad. On the other hand, if you have a Mac and iPhone, use iTunes and iCloud and the iTunes store, have a bunch of iPhone apps already purchased, and you essentially just wish your iPhone had a bigger screen, than the iPad is a no-brainer." Believe it or not, there are people like that.
The lack of playing files from a network share out of the box is likely Apple ecosystem lock-in. They want you to use iCloud. Meanwhile every cheapo Android device usually has support for DLNA.
I don't believe so. There's a VLC media player for iOS, which I assume will stream media from some kind of streaming source other than iCloud. Apple happens to not support DLNA in their product lines, but I don't think there's anything to stop someone from writing their own apps. But maybe I'm just wrong here. Do you have a basis for your complaints, or are you just speculating that it must be "Apple ecosystem lock-in" because you're an Apple-hater?
Yeah, and the main reason people want them larger is to accommodate larger screens. People always want larger screens, assuming they can view things on those screens.
And I agree that this might cannibalize part of the tablet market. If you have to choose between buying a 4" phone and 7" tablet, or getting a 5-6" phone that can serve both purposes, I could see people going with the larger phone. Maybe. You still have to be able to carry the thing comfortably in your pocket. However, I think the larger tablet market (e.g. the full sized iPad) is going to stick around for a while because I predict the functionality is going to be increased. I think within the next few years, you'll see a 10" or 11" device that replaces the low-end Macbook Air, but has a form more resembling the iPad, with the ability to run full desktop apps. Whether that happens because Apple chips have become powerful enough for desktop use, or because Intel x64 chips have gotten efficient enough for mobile use, I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure it's coming, though, and so the larger iPad will be around for a while.
When I was a kid, there was so much "by the year 2000". Space stations. Moon bases. Mars colonies. Mining asteroids. Deep space missions. Fleets of spacecraft. Hypersonic travel around the earth.
We were also supposed to have flying cars and hoverboards. Or depending on which movie you're going on: time machines, androids that could pass for human, and FTL travel.
But are you really getting angry at NASA because science fiction isn't a reality?
I am impressed by probes. They are cool toys. But they can't replace a person standing there, making decisions. Asking "what if..." We learn from being and doing. The rover we have on Mars now has a mostly busted wheel. A wheel that a human could have riveted a patch over in a few minutes.
I think you're overestimating the ease with which humans can do things. A human could have fixed the rover if he had all the right tools and replacement parts, assuming that we could get him to Mars, surviving the trip there in good health, surviving the years it takes for one of those rovers to break down. He would also need the mobility to go around on the surface of an uninhabitable landscape over distances long enough to find the rover, and then have the flexibility in his suit to enact the repairs without danger to himself. All of that stuff is hard.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to working on all of those problems, and trying to figure out how we can put a man on Mars. It's just that I don't think it's as simple as loading a guy into a rocket, pointing it at Mars, and hoping for the best. The fact that we've gotten the rovers there safely is an achievement in itself, and is paving the way for a potential manned mission. So I'd say let's figure it out, plan it out, and send a person to Mars when we feel semi-confident that we can do that.
It's not really "free". The cost of OSX and the associated apps (e.g. Pages, iPhoto) is rolled into the price of the original laptop/desktop purchase. Apple is now providing free *upgrades* to the bundled software.
I wonder, would a truly unlimited interactive novel be fun to play? It could be tested out by a kind of Turing test scenario. Have a player play such a game, and have a real novelist provide the "game" text. Of course such a thing would entail the player waiting a considerable time between "moves". But it would mean that their input would be boundless, they could do anything in the "game".
Well when I've thought about it in the past, I imagined it a bit like having an old-school D&D game with a dungeon master. Of course, that'd be a hard thing to do.
I always loved the old text adventures, but it's annoying that they were restricted to canned responses. You might come up with a great solution to a problem, but if it wasn't what the programmer had anticipated, you'll get get a message saying something like, "I'm sorry, but you can't do that." I would think coming up with something that allowed you more freedom would be an interesting problem to tackle and a good challenge for an AI researcher.
Also:
Roughly 70 percent accepted that we have a genome and that mental illness is seated in the brain; about 20 percent were uncertain on these subjects, and the doubters were few.
Honestly, I don't know what it means to say "we have a genome". Is that a meaningful statement? I would be uncertain about agreeing with that just because it seems like a weird thing to ask if I accept it. And "mental illness is seated in the brain"? Does anyone actually feel like we can sum that up so easily? We don't even understand what mental illness is half the time, and I don't know what it means for "mental illness" to be "seated" anywhere.
It seems like a dumb survey and the motivations are suspect. I feel uncertain about the Big Bang, not because I'm a creationist, but because we had to rewrite our understanding of time and space about 100 years ago, and we still haven't really settled the issue in a conclusive way. The Big Bang seems like the most likely explanation we have, but if you told me that we'll make a discovery in the next 100 years that will lead us to a significantly different explanation, I wouldn't be too extremely shocked.
So maybe we shouldn't be so quick to jump on the "everyone is stupid!" bandwagon.
If there's a door there, it should open. If it won't open, there shouldn't be a door there. How hard is this? Putting a door there that's never going to open just frustrates the player and destroys the suspension of disbelief.
I don't know if I agree. Games are, in many ways, about presenting the player with illusions. If you have a big open world, you might put stars in the night sky with no way to reach them. The stars aren't really there, and you're artificially limited to traveling along the ground, but you're being presented with the illusion of being immersed in a complete world.
For another example, in the Grand Theft Auto games, there were many buildings that the player couldn't enter, but a few that he could. Should they have gotten rid of all the buildings that couldn't be entered? Then you have a big empty world.
With doors, I think it's often stupid to add doors that can't be opened, but sometimes that's part of the game-- to find out which doors can be opened. Sometimes it's just adding texture so that you can imagine that there are many things beyond those doors you can't open, adding to the realism and immersiveness of the game. If you're going to add doors that can't open, then the person designing the video game needs to make sure that they play the appropriate role in the game. If you're supposed to know that you can't open the doors, then there might be an appropriate visual cue. If you're supposed to try to open them, then you don't want an obvious cue, but you do want there to be something to indicate whether the player should give up or keep trying to open the door.
I think what's being pointed out is that there are many subtle decisions made by game developers that game players don't notice. It's not that they're necessarily hard decisions, but if you're presented with 100 of these decisions, it can be hard to have your choices result in a game that's both technically feasible and fun to play.
I'd rather have a game that didn't look as nice, but had things that reacted much more as they do in the real world.
I sometimes wonder, what if, back in the days of text adventure games, video game designers had not put all the money and effort into graphics, but instead put it into natural language recognition, world models, and artificial intelligence? Like imagine the millions of dollars we put into graphics, instead going to make a super-advanced text-based adventures where you can really explore a world and do whatever you want.
Of course, knowing our civilization audience, those games would all be procedural military games anyway.