What do you gain by owning those things? The value of things is what you do with them, not what they are. If I'm buying the car and I've got a choice of pay now or interest free over three years, you bet I'm gonna take the loan and put the money in stocks. And hell, if it ever gets to the stage where I can make more money by defaulting then why the hell not? The bank agreed to the terms (they wrote them, even), and they wouldn't hesitate to screw me over if there was more profit for them in it.
Also, if you bought your home without a loan then you're already pretty damn privileged. I'm guessing top-5% income-wise, and most likely a similar family background. Tell me I'm wrong.
Ok, but that's not apples to apples. An economist would say you could make up (at least some of) the difference by renting out what would otherwise be their rooms.
If federal bailouts are distorting the markets, that's a problem with federal bailouts. When making a bad loan really does cost you the amount of the loan, people get pretty smart about figuring out who to lend to.
I only carry my less-powerful tablet when travelling, just for size and weight reasons, unless I know I'm going somewhere specifically to do computer gaming. I would expect it to be similar for photographers given how bulky those cameras get.
It's not like they restricted it to men before, they just called it woman of the year when they gave it to a woman. Post switching to person of the year, it's gone entirely to men (except when it's not gone to specific people at all). So changing it to person hasn't meant more people were represented - it's just meant phrasing the title unnaturally. It's a completely superficial change which does nothing to actually address inequality - like political correctness usually is.
I seriously preferred windows mobile as an OS. It was much easier to port obscure windows programs I used over to it, compared to android. If a good modern phone comes out running windows mobile that has as good integration with google/facebook/et al as my android (which may well never happen, MS being MS), I'll be switching.
You can't modify and redistribute things you download from the app store, therefore the app store is incompatible with open source. Of course you might use open source to make the things you put in the app store, just like IE uses open source libraries, but the version you put in the app store isn't and can't be open source.
Sure, there are some good open source products, but they're usually backed by huge corporations like Google or Apple. They both contribute to Webkit and Chromium. Firefox comes from Netscape and is currently a joke.
My experience is that the programs that started out as open-source are the better ones, while those that were originally from a big corp and then released as open source. Firefox came from Netscape and the codebase was always crap, which is why apple and then google used khtml instead (and konqueror's still a pretty good browser). Likewise with openoffice; very few people not paid by sun ever wanted to work on it.
"crown jewels", sure. But all four companies you list have also made enormous parts of their code open-source. Keep your USP to yourself, but if it's something generally useful and not your core business competency, open it. (And if your core business competency is the hardware, then that probably means open all the software).
/used to work at a pretty big name who ran everything on facebook's open-sourced thrift.
The few places that still use flash for video are coming around.
Perhaps, but it only takes one to spoil your day; for me, animeondemand.com makes up a significant proportion of my video watching. For other people it'd be different sites, but there are enough barely-maintained smaller sites that use flash videos that I'd expect not having flash to get irritating. (In fact, I know it gets irritating, because I run freebsd on my main machine. Though I guess that also shows it's possible to live without it)
I don't know what "proper keyboard" means, but I assume you mean physical. In that case, you can just buy any Bluetooth kbd or Apple's.
Sure, but that's more fiddly and less practical; with the transformer the keyboard folds snugly together with it and I can put both halves in a single ordinary case, and I can unfold it and have the thing in a natural shape for typing on.
Still, if you want a physical keyboard, a tablet probably isn't what you want.
Shrug; I like to write, at length (though even an email is fiddly on an onscreen keyboard), with a machine that I can carry around with me, and the transformer does that perfectly. And while I could probably buy a laptop in approximately the same size for that (though I haven't seen any so small/light with as good a battery life - and wouldn't expect to, x86 being that much more power-hungry than arm), watching videos or reading ebooks is much better with the transformer in tablet form. I think if I had a tablet without a keyboard, I'd still be carrying my netbook around as well, but I never found my netbook comfortable enough for reading ebooks on, whereas the transformer is.
I guess the disappointment is mostly on my end. I'm a huge Linux user and fan of OSS in-general. I'm hoping regular consumers don't associate Android with Linux and think all OSS is disappointing.
If you were expecting a full-scale linux PC then I can see the transformer being disappointing. But even then, it seems closer to a "real PC" than an ipad is. Not to get into a fanboy argument but I really am curious, what is it the ipad's got that the transformer hasn't?
I'm not sure where the myth that these sorts of devices cost buttons to make and are just sold at crazy high "all gravy" margins? Oh wait, it's what they think Apple are doing with the iPad. Even the really good Android competitors to the iPad are only $100 or so less - so still in the $400 range.
Sure, but it's easy to perceive those as being crazy-high margin too. The specs of many of these things are comparable to a sub-$200 netbook - does a touchscreen and better battery life really cost that much?
/has a transformer and loves it, but still can't help wondering if he's a mug for buying it
If you rely solely on expensive accelerometers, gyros, etc. without a gps signal then there's no way you are going to make it 50+ miles back to a safe landing zone without a significant amount of inaccuracy in your position.
Really? We had submarines that could reliably navigate their way to the north pole back in the '70s; granted it's probably harder to position your INS away from all vibration on a drone this size, but it seems perfectly feasible. (Not that I imagine we do, but for price reasons rather than anything else).
First, most people have a stereotyped idea of what psychology is, because they don't actually know what it is. It's the scientific study of human behavior and experience. If you think it's couches and Freud, you're uninformed. My guess is that Feynman took psychology courses and had his primary exposure to the field during the mid-20th century, when psychoanalysis was dominant in *one branch of psychology*, and isn't even dominant in that area anymore.
Freud and his descendants are still taught, even in top-flight universities. It's possible to approach psychology scientifically, and much good (and surprising) research has been done - but it's also still very possible to call yourself a psychologist and teach the subject without even a basic understanding of the scientific method.
I use my transformer at home and on the move; occasionally miss the lack of a DVD drive but it's not like I buy new dvds in the age of streaming. The screen looks better than my laptop, and holding it feels more comfortable than watching a laptop on a table, so even at home I find myself watching videos on the transformer rather than on the 16" laptop screen. And not just watching video, if we're talking about regular web use or typing an email the screen is plenty big enough.
It may not be perfect - it's probably not a big enough screen for photo editing, for example. But it really is a very good device, much better than I expected.
Not sure what you mean by CEV. Maybe you want that fancy (conventional-fuelled) BMW enclosed motorcycle, though that doesn't give you any passenger room. I'd expect electric to not really get into this space until after full-scale cars are mainstream, because the big advantage of electric is cheaper fuel prices, and if you're talking about a small light short-range vehicle then fuel price is a much smaller issue at the moment,
By measuring strong nonclassical correlations between Raman-scattered photons, we showed that the quantum state of the diamonds has positive concurrence with 98% probability.
I'm guessing that the two diamonds scattered photons the same way, proving that they were in the same state, even though we also know "only one of them" was vibrating. But since I don't have access to read the full paper I can't be sure.
Nope. What you're missing is that giving people binaries without source isn't wrong because it's a violation of copyright, it's wrong because it's wrong. (I will say that if you donated to some coders then doing it with ubuntu is no worse than doing it with your own code).
At least with the music industry's drm'ed files they could be played on a multitude of devices from various companies. Amazon's ebooks only work on amazon hardware.
No, it was exactly the same for music. Amazon's kindle format is the equivalent of Apple's FairPlay, and the Adobe format is the equivalent of MS' PlaysForSure. We all remember how that turned out, but it seems the publishing industry doesn't.
Not necessarily. If you do that you get to support twice as many types of hardware, and the overhead involved in switching someone's machine when they want to start working at home could easily eat your savings.
Laptop rant: Our office has a policy of using laptops instead of desktops (who knows why?) and probably 20% of the coworkers that have and use laptops tote the beast between work and home (the rest don't even bother taking them home) and even then, the benefit of having a device on the go becomes pretty much irrelevant since its only used in fixed locations that could've been using cheaper equipment to begin with.
Buying two desktops for 20% of users and one for everyone else would probably cost more than buying laptops for everyone these days. And for all the cloud hype going around, it's still a lot easier to use the same computer than two different computers when doing the same piece of work at home and work.
This being the open-source world, you work with them to improve it, or worst case fork it to add the functionality you need. It's hard to say exactly what's going on without more details, but it seems like that should be easier and better than reimplementing it all from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, if you bought your home without a loan then you're already pretty damn privileged. I'm guessing top-5% income-wise, and most likely a similar family background. Tell me I'm wrong.
Ok, but that's not apples to apples. An economist would say you could make up (at least some of) the difference by renting out what would otherwise be their rooms.
If federal bailouts are distorting the markets, that's a problem with federal bailouts. When making a bad loan really does cost you the amount of the loan, people get pretty smart about figuring out who to lend to.
I only carry my less-powerful tablet when travelling, just for size and weight reasons, unless I know I'm going somewhere specifically to do computer gaming. I would expect it to be similar for photographers given how bulky those cameras get.
It's not like they restricted it to men before, they just called it woman of the year when they gave it to a woman. Post switching to person of the year, it's gone entirely to men (except when it's not gone to specific people at all). So changing it to person hasn't meant more people were represented - it's just meant phrasing the title unnaturally. It's a completely superficial change which does nothing to actually address inequality - like political correctness usually is.
I seriously preferred windows mobile as an OS. It was much easier to port obscure windows programs I used over to it, compared to android. If a good modern phone comes out running windows mobile that has as good integration with google/facebook/et al as my android (which may well never happen, MS being MS), I'll be switching.
You can't modify and redistribute things you download from the app store, therefore the app store is incompatible with open source. Of course you might use open source to make the things you put in the app store, just like IE uses open source libraries, but the version you put in the app store isn't and can't be open source.
Microsoft are, and pretty much always have been, where IBM were 5-10 years ago.
Sure, there are some good open source products, but they're usually backed by huge corporations like Google or Apple. They both contribute to Webkit and Chromium. Firefox comes from Netscape and is currently a joke.
My experience is that the programs that started out as open-source are the better ones, while those that were originally from a big corp and then released as open source. Firefox came from Netscape and the codebase was always crap, which is why apple and then google used khtml instead (and konqueror's still a pretty good browser). Likewise with openoffice; very few people not paid by sun ever wanted to work on it.
/used to work at a pretty big name who ran everything on facebook's open-sourced thrift.
I would imagine they're concerned about air pollution, that's the usual reason why just burning something full of random chemicals is illegal.
The few places that still use flash for video are coming around.
Perhaps, but it only takes one to spoil your day; for me, animeondemand.com makes up a significant proportion of my video watching. For other people it'd be different sites, but there are enough barely-maintained smaller sites that use flash videos that I'd expect not having flash to get irritating. (In fact, I know it gets irritating, because I run freebsd on my main machine. Though I guess that also shows it's possible to live without it)
I don't know what "proper keyboard" means, but I assume you mean physical. In that case, you can just buy any Bluetooth kbd or Apple's.
Sure, but that's more fiddly and less practical; with the transformer the keyboard folds snugly together with it and I can put both halves in a single ordinary case, and I can unfold it and have the thing in a natural shape for typing on.
Still, if you want a physical keyboard, a tablet probably isn't what you want.
Shrug; I like to write, at length (though even an email is fiddly on an onscreen keyboard), with a machine that I can carry around with me, and the transformer does that perfectly. And while I could probably buy a laptop in approximately the same size for that (though I haven't seen any so small/light with as good a battery life - and wouldn't expect to, x86 being that much more power-hungry than arm), watching videos or reading ebooks is much better with the transformer in tablet form. I think if I had a tablet without a keyboard, I'd still be carrying my netbook around as well, but I never found my netbook comfortable enough for reading ebooks on, whereas the transformer is.
I guess the disappointment is mostly on my end. I'm a huge Linux user and fan of OSS in-general. I'm hoping regular consumers don't associate Android with Linux and think all OSS is disappointing.
If you were expecting a full-scale linux PC then I can see the transformer being disappointing. But even then, it seems closer to a "real PC" than an ipad is. Not to get into a fanboy argument but I really am curious, what is it the ipad's got that the transformer hasn't?
I found I missed the "HTC Sense" interface when I got an android without it. Agreed in the general case though.
Why? I'm really curious, what am I missing on the iPad, and how do you get buy without flash and a proper keyboard?
I'm not sure where the myth that these sorts of devices cost buttons to make and are just sold at crazy high "all gravy" margins? Oh wait, it's what they think Apple are doing with the iPad. Even the really good Android competitors to the iPad are only $100 or so less - so still in the $400 range.
Sure, but it's easy to perceive those as being crazy-high margin too. The specs of many of these things are comparable to a sub-$200 netbook - does a touchscreen and better battery life really cost that much?
/has a transformer and loves it, but still can't help wondering if he's a mug for buying it
If you rely solely on expensive accelerometers, gyros, etc. without a gps signal then there's no way you are going to make it 50+ miles back to a safe landing zone without a significant amount of inaccuracy in your position.
Really? We had submarines that could reliably navigate their way to the north pole back in the '70s; granted it's probably harder to position your INS away from all vibration on a drone this size, but it seems perfectly feasible. (Not that I imagine we do, but for price reasons rather than anything else).
First, most people have a stereotyped idea of what psychology is, because they don't actually know what it is. It's the scientific study of human behavior and experience. If you think it's couches and Freud, you're uninformed. My guess is that Feynman took psychology courses and had his primary exposure to the field during the mid-20th century, when psychoanalysis was dominant in *one branch of psychology*, and isn't even dominant in that area anymore.
Freud and his descendants are still taught, even in top-flight universities. It's possible to approach psychology scientifically, and much good (and surprising) research has been done - but it's also still very possible to call yourself a psychologist and teach the subject without even a basic understanding of the scientific method.
It may not be perfect - it's probably not a big enough screen for photo editing, for example. But it really is a very good device, much better than I expected.
Not sure what you mean by CEV. Maybe you want that fancy (conventional-fuelled) BMW enclosed motorcycle, though that doesn't give you any passenger room. I'd expect electric to not really get into this space until after full-scale cars are mainstream, because the big advantage of electric is cheaper fuel prices, and if you're talking about a small light short-range vehicle then fuel price is a much smaller issue at the moment,
By measuring strong nonclassical correlations between Raman-scattered photons, we showed that the quantum state of the diamonds has positive concurrence with 98% probability.
I'm guessing that the two diamonds scattered photons the same way, proving that they were in the same state, even though we also know "only one of them" was vibrating. But since I don't have access to read the full paper I can't be sure.
Nope. What you're missing is that giving people binaries without source isn't wrong because it's a violation of copyright, it's wrong because it's wrong. (I will say that if you donated to some coders then doing it with ubuntu is no worse than doing it with your own code).
At least with the music industry's drm'ed files they could be played on a multitude of devices from various companies. Amazon's ebooks only work on amazon hardware.
No, it was exactly the same for music. Amazon's kindle format is the equivalent of Apple's FairPlay, and the Adobe format is the equivalent of MS' PlaysForSure. We all remember how that turned out, but it seems the publishing industry doesn't.
Not necessarily. If you do that you get to support twice as many types of hardware, and the overhead involved in switching someone's machine when they want to start working at home could easily eat your savings.
Laptop rant: Our office has a policy of using laptops instead of desktops (who knows why?) and probably 20% of the coworkers that have and use laptops tote the beast between work and home (the rest don't even bother taking them home) and even then, the benefit of having a device on the go becomes pretty much irrelevant since its only used in fixed locations that could've been using cheaper equipment to begin with.
Buying two desktops for 20% of users and one for everyone else would probably cost more than buying laptops for everyone these days. And for all the cloud hype going around, it's still a lot easier to use the same computer than two different computers when doing the same piece of work at home and work.
This being the open-source world, you work with them to improve it, or worst case fork it to add the functionality you need. It's hard to say exactly what's going on without more details, but it seems like that should be easier and better than reimplementing it all from scratch.