I think you would have gotten a better response if you introduced your subject by saying you practice a memorization technique that works better if all number pads are the same, so you rebuilt your calculator's number pad to match your phone's number pad. Even so, one has to wonder why a phone number problem and a math problem would be considered in the same category
On a calculator, you'll rarely have to remember the same sequence of numbers. And if you have to remember a number, there's probably already a button for it on the calculator like the PI key.
Finally, as others have said, it probably would have been easier to find an alternate keyboard to load on your phone than it would be to rebuild your calculator. No soldering required.
I'd like to have a scaled down model that could fit in my room. After pouring a glass of water into it, I could probably entertain myself for hours, feeding it punch cards and watching it go.
I think the worst case would be that Babbage had no patent, and some company from the 20th century was "first to file" and actually gets to win the case.
...and I work for a state govt. I have to cover all my insurance costs, all the SS and other mandatory deductions, plus vacation and other paid time off. Some states are trying to mandate paid vacations and health insurance - even for baby sitters. This raises the costs considerably. PLUS - we are actually accountable: if we don't perform up to spec, we can lose money. A govt employee, esp. a federal employee has (in essence) a sinecure.
So basically all the same expenses as the Federal Government with its own employees, except you get paid much more.
What scares me about net neutrality is that people actually believe a private company running a private network doesn't have the right to regulate its network traffic however they see fit.
Keep in mind, along with these private companies getting government deals to shut out competition, these private companies tend to sue governments who want to provide similar service paid for with tax dollars. If they want the government to make them the sole source of the service, they should be subject to regulation.
If that 1.5 megabits is actually "up to" 1.5 megabits then all they have to do is cut it down to dialup speed and offer a more expensive plan with a promist of "up to some number bigger than 1.5" that actually gets them closer to 1.5 again.
Or to put it in English, when I was in high school in the 90's they still had math books from the 70's. They had computer programming books that featured code in the BASIC language. We had Tandy computers with 8086 processors. And this was high school in the 90's. And these kids who are getting iPads at 5 years old are the ones who will grow up and say kids from my neighborhood are having the world handed to them and don't deserve a chance to go to college.
I personally think the older sister, brother or parent, who will probably be using the device much more often than the 5-year-old it's assigned to, should be responsible for taking care of it.
HTC's "Friend Stream" will already post to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Other apps will post to more social networks simultaneously. The contact list in the phone already shows you everybody's latest Tweet, Facebook post, and QIK video status, among other things.
What exactly are these people doing that is so special?
Is it now? If the CPU spends half its time unparallellizable preparing its computation and that preparation can just be copied to the other cores, the max theoretical speedup is just under 16x.
If every process is going to work with exactly the same data then it doesn't matter if you have 1 core or 8. The data only has to be prepared one time. So the multiple cores won't save you time preparing that data with each cycle.
The touchscreen keyboards are good to me. In landscape mode, I'm able to go almost as fast as on a real keyboard, with few errors. My problem is all of the "office productivity" apps for Android are crap. If I load a file, I should not have to select "edit" from a menu to start typing (Polaris). I also would like if the keyboard was just always on the screen until I specifically told them to take it away. It's as if the office software for phones is meant to be primarily a viewer until you tell it to become an editor. If they had an app that was an editor first and viewer second, the phone might be better than the laptop just because it's always there exactly when you find your inspiration.
That was the concern I expressed to my guy. Windows has a way of making you eventually need more memory. You can't add more memory to a tablet. I'm not convinced Windows can deal with an environment in which (the software has to be efficient and can't get bigger).
I wonder if it became unauthorized before, or after, it cost them $2 billion. I wonder if they even have an authorization process, or if they just allow their traders to do what they will until they see something that loses money.
I see a few things going on here. One is you're saying a $1 app isn't going to be worth its price for 30 days. Others are basically saying the same thing, that people will finish or become bored within the 30-day period, and app developers would be bankrupted by returned apps.
There are games, such as Pac-Man, Frogger, Super Mario Bros. and Tetris, that people have been playing for 20 or 30 years. If a game can't even remain fun for 30 days, I personally think the customer deserves a refund.
Also, possibly the most popular game for any tablet or Android device is Angry Birds. It's price is $1, and people play it addictively every day. They could probably survive a 30-day return policy. The makers of Bejeweled could also survive it.
I don't think people's ability to return apps would be a problem. I think a refund policy, that exploits people's impulse buying habits and inability to assess the value of an app in 15 minutes, is a problem.
I'm thinking they could make this a much smaller problem if all apps have a refund policy. If you notice an app has been purchased that you didn't want, you have time to notice the problem, undo the purchase, and change your password if you suspect the purchase was made without your permission. Of course the 15 minutes you get from the Android market would be inadequate. But a real refund policy, such as a 30-day policy, would do the job. Anybody who actually pays attention to their bank account probably looks at it at least once per month.
Perhaps the writer is just trying to write an article for regular people rather than people who spend all day in their basement, tweaking the hanging bicycle they're using as an antenna to process radio waves from distant stars.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you would have gotten a better response if you introduced your subject by saying you practice a memorization technique that works better if all number pads are the same, so you rebuilt your calculator's number pad to match your phone's number pad. Even so, one has to wonder why a phone number problem and a math problem would be considered in the same category
On a calculator, you'll rarely have to remember the same sequence of numbers. And if you have to remember a number, there's probably already a button for it on the calculator like the PI key.
Finally, as others have said, it probably would have been easier to find an alternate keyboard to load on your phone than it would be to rebuild your calculator. No soldering required.
I'd like to have a scaled down model that could fit in my room. After pouring a glass of water into it, I could probably entertain myself for hours, feeding it punch cards and watching it go.
I think the worst case would be that Babbage had no patent, and some company from the 20th century was "first to file" and actually gets to win the case.
...and I work for a state govt. I have to cover all my insurance costs, all the SS and other mandatory deductions, plus vacation and other paid time off. Some states are trying to mandate paid vacations and health insurance - even for baby sitters. This raises the costs considerably. PLUS - we are actually accountable: if we don't perform up to spec, we can lose money. A govt employee, esp. a federal employee has (in essence) a sinecure.
So basically all the same expenses as the Federal Government with its own employees, except you get paid much more.
What scares me about net neutrality is that people actually believe a private company running a private network doesn't have the right to regulate its network traffic however they see fit.
Keep in mind, along with these private companies getting government deals to shut out competition, these private companies tend to sue governments who want to provide similar service paid for with tax dollars. If they want the government to make them the sole source of the service, they should be subject to regulation.
The best part is you would be the first to file, so who cares if you were the first to stop at a red light?
If that 1.5 megabits is actually "up to" 1.5 megabits then all they have to do is cut it down to dialup speed and offer a more expensive plan with a promist of "up to some number bigger than 1.5" that actually gets them closer to 1.5 again.
So how long will it be before there is software that extracts the key from the copy of Windows 8 installed on the computer?
Does anybody know how the WNDR4000 compares to the 3700?
Trust that, while it may not be Christian or Islamic, Slashdot is every bit as religious as everybody else.
Then you have to factor in the cost of accessories.
Or to put it in English, when I was in high school in the 90's they still had math books from the 70's. They had computer programming books that featured code in the BASIC language. We had Tandy computers with 8086 processors. And this was high school in the 90's. And these kids who are getting iPads at 5 years old are the ones who will grow up and say kids from my neighborhood are having the world handed to them and don't deserve a chance to go to college.
I personally think the older sister, brother or parent, who will probably be using the device much more often than the 5-year-old it's assigned to, should be responsible for taking care of it.
HTC's "Friend Stream" will already post to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Other apps will post to more social networks simultaneously. The contact list in the phone already shows you everybody's latest Tweet, Facebook post, and QIK video status, among other things.
What exactly are these people doing that is so special?
Is it now? If the CPU spends half its time unparallellizable preparing its computation and that preparation can just be copied to the other cores, the max theoretical speedup is just under 16x.
If every process is going to work with exactly the same data then it doesn't matter if you have 1 core or 8. The data only has to be prepared one time. So the multiple cores won't save you time preparing that data with each cycle.
The touchscreen keyboards are good to me. In landscape mode, I'm able to go almost as fast as on a real keyboard, with few errors. My problem is all of the "office productivity" apps for Android are crap. If I load a file, I should not have to select "edit" from a menu to start typing (Polaris). I also would like if the keyboard was just always on the screen until I specifically told them to take it away. It's as if the office software for phones is meant to be primarily a viewer until you tell it to become an editor. If they had an app that was an editor first and viewer second, the phone might be better than the laptop just because it's always there exactly when you find your inspiration.
That was the concern I expressed to my guy. Windows has a way of making you eventually need more memory. You can't add more memory to a tablet. I'm not convinced Windows can deal with an environment in which (the software has to be efficient and can't get bigger).
But does this thing perform any better than the processor in a solar powered calculator?
I wonder if it became unauthorized before, or after, it cost them $2 billion. I wonder if they even have an authorization process, or if they just allow their traders to do what they will until they see something that loses money.
Don't forget Yar.
I see a few things going on here. One is you're saying a $1 app isn't going to be worth its price for 30 days. Others are basically saying the same thing, that people will finish or become bored within the 30-day period, and app developers would be bankrupted by returned apps.
There are games, such as Pac-Man, Frogger, Super Mario Bros. and Tetris, that people have been playing for 20 or 30 years. If a game can't even remain fun for 30 days, I personally think the customer deserves a refund.
Also, possibly the most popular game for any tablet or Android device is Angry Birds. It's price is $1, and people play it addictively every day. They could probably survive a 30-day return policy. The makers of Bejeweled could also survive it.
I don't think people's ability to return apps would be a problem. I think a refund policy, that exploits people's impulse buying habits and inability to assess the value of an app in 15 minutes, is a problem.
I'm thinking they could make this a much smaller problem if all apps have a refund policy. If you notice an app has been purchased that you didn't want, you have time to notice the problem, undo the purchase, and change your password if you suspect the purchase was made without your permission. Of course the 15 minutes you get from the Android market would be inadequate. But a real refund policy, such as a 30-day policy, would do the job. Anybody who actually pays attention to their bank account probably looks at it at least once per month.
Perhaps the writer is just trying to write an article for regular people rather than people who spend all day in their basement, tweaking the hanging bicycle they're using as an antenna to process radio waves from distant stars.
I don't see any real issues with PHP. Anything it lacks seems to be insignificant for the inner workings of a webpage.
Or better yet, they're creating the same effect as people who log off before hibernating their computers.