Also, Blackberries are significantly cheaper than Androids or Iphones (especially Iphones!), at least at the low end. This, I believe, has been a significant factor in their popularity.
The reason is simple - Blackberries are significantly cheaper than any other smartphones in the market. This makes them appeal to young people with not much money, and from there it's a network effect - people get them because their friends have them. And, presumably, because they don't want to miss out on the "hot new thing" of BBM.
How do you compare the reception quality with the different phones? That's one of the biggest problems I've had with phones - there's no way to test it sufficiently before getting stuck in a 2 year contract with it. If you've found a reliable way to find the phone with the best reception, I'd be very interested to hear it!
I'm strongly reminded of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Specifically the bit where his dad's saying how wonderful the new RFID based car scanning system is, and that the problems people are having are just due to bugs, and they should be happy to help get the system working perfectly. Then he gets caught in one of the false positives and blows his top.
The €200 video card is instead of the €200 Wii (or is the Wii a little more than €200? Unsure), he can then get games on Steam for €20 or €30, instead of €60 or €70. Same upfront investment in hardware, cheaper games.
He's not saying that the people who got drunk and stupid should be let off... He's saying that the police need to make sure they get the core of violent instigators because they were the actual cause of the riot. Besides, there are always more stupid drunk people...
I'm fully aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, but to provide another point, I know a number of people who've bought PS2s with the intent to use them as DVD players, with the ability to play games as a happy bonus. I've also heard stories of people doing the same with PS3s for bluray, although I don't think I actually know anyone who cares about Bluray in real life.
Colour of Magic. Rincewind describing Twoflower's tendancy to poke things to see what would happen:
Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'
Agreed, I've seen a 90BHP MX-5 (small engine, mk1) go round in a hair under 10 minutes. You'd think more than 3 times the power would gain you a little more time than that! That was driven by an amateur driver on her first (or possibly second) trip to the 'ring as well.
How does this plugin differ (in effect, rather than methodology) from an independant DNS server? From the description I've read, the plugin looks at the urls you enter, checks them with the server and if (say) demonoid.com has appeared on their list, they send back demonoid.me instead, so you get forwarded to the still-live site. Why not just run another DNS server and keep pointing demonoid.com to the correct IP address?
Assuming a fixed chance of 20% of being caught every time, there's an 80% chance of not being caught, so the chance of not being caught 5 times is 0.8^5 = 0.32 (2sf), so the chances of being caught at some point in your first 5 crimes is 1-0.32 = 0.68, 68%
The chance of being caught on the 5th crime (but not before) is 0.8^4 * 0.2 = 0.082, 8%
Firstly, this wouldn't affect me personally as I'm in the UK, and therefore have a GSM phone, rather than a 3 Phone or a Vodafone Phone or whatever. Yay for sane systems.
That said, if I was a Yank, stuck with a Verizon smartphone, I would either get a new Verizon contract which didn't include a phone (if they do those?) or I'd sell it to someone else on Verizon, probably via the magic of Ebay.
You can do that, can't you? Or is the phone actually locked to your individual contract? I admit not having full knowledge of the US systems...
Interesting, I've had both a Garmin and a TomTom (both on a palmtop and a standalone device) and I much prefer the TomTom. The UI is much easier to use, it supports more waypoints, it'll let you plan arbitrary routes (ie, point A to point B, instead of just current location to point A) and I think there were other things as well.
When my Garmin died, having used a TomTom elsewhere, it was a no-brainer to get a TomTom to replace it. And for reference, I was using the entry level of both units. I basically just want it to tell me where to go, playing music or working as a hands free kit is unnecessary for me.
I know this is a workaround, rather than an in place fix, but I'm using a prog called Talika for my task bar. It shows icons instead of icons-and-program-names, which is actually the reason I started using it. It also can be (trivially) configured to show all open programs. I've got it grouping multiple windows of the same program together, I'm not sure if that's fixed or an option.
On my laptop (HP, running Ubuntu), pressing both mouse buttons simulates a middle click, which I use for pasting, closing tabs, opening links in new tabs and so on. I believe the same can be achieved on a Mac (or this HP, for that matter) by tapping the touchpad with/3/ fingers.
Which isn't as hard as it sounds. And probably is easier on the macbooks 'cos they've got bigger touchpads. I think.
Max bandwidth? Rubbish... My one complaint about Steam is how slow the downloads are. My connection maxes out at around 17Mb/s, which I regularly get with torrents, http downloads and so on, Steam is usually a fraction of that. I'll get bursts of 1MB (ie, 8Mb), normally it's down around 400-500 kB.
No, I checked into that when it first started happening... I thought it might have been an app I'd installed recently, but it carried on doing it even after I'd uninstalled it.
I've just checked again, actually, and it's now saying "25% cell standby, 25% bluetooth, 25% wifi, 25% phone idle", which sounds much more reasonable, so I think it must have been fixed in an update. That's in just over 4 hours and it's used 3% of the battery. I've not really used it at all today so far, but even that can't really explain the projected >100 hours battery life. I don't think the battery indicator is entirely linear.
Yeah, I don't really understand why BB Messenger caught on to quite the extent it did - what does it offer that any of the alternatives (texting, MSN, Facebook chat, etc) don't? There just seems to have been a sudden mass adoption of it, and that rarely happens...
Yeah, that was pretty much my thought. I get about 36 hours out of my Desire too, but I wouldn't trust the battery usage thing, it keeps blaming it all on Google Maps, even when I've not been using it.
I've noticed Blackberries becoming a lot less popular with the business drones (taken over by iPhones, as was said upthread), but where I have seen a lot of Blackberries is with teenage girls. Some of them are/really/ cheap with contracts these days (cheaper than Android phones, massively cheaper than iPhones) and a lot of them have keyboards, and given the amount teenage girls text, that works perfectly for them.
Oh, and they've all got Blackberry Messenger accounts these days, despite the user IDs being something like 5876ISUD234...
What if you took a cheap Android phone and ripped out a good portion of the UI and massively underclocked the processor? You could call it a dumbphone and yet it would be exactly the same hardware at the cheap smartphone. Even better, you could have this as a software option, so you could use your phone as a smartphone most of the time, and flick it to dumbphone mode when you needed more battery life, but didn't care about the smartphone features.
I don't know how much the underclocking and so forth would increase the battery life though... What are the main things that eat the battery when the screen's off? Whatever they are, I'm sure most of them could optionally be turned off.
This assumes that the "cheap android phone" comes down in price to the same level as the generic dumbphone, which I think is still some way off.
There's an easy way to spot the best Doctor Who episodes (at least from the first few series of the revamp). Check the writing credits, if it says "Steven Moffat" the episode will be fantastic, and also creepy.
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Also, Blackberries are significantly cheaper than Androids or Iphones (especially Iphones!), at least at the low end. This, I believe, has been a significant factor in their popularity.
The reason is simple - Blackberries are significantly cheaper than any other smartphones in the market. This makes them appeal to young people with not much money, and from there it's a network effect - people get them because their friends have them. And, presumably, because they don't want to miss out on the "hot new thing" of BBM.
How do you compare the reception quality with the different phones? That's one of the biggest problems I've had with phones - there's no way to test it sufficiently before getting stuck in a 2 year contract with it. If you've found a reliable way to find the phone with the best reception, I'd be very interested to hear it!
Wasn't that answered over the weekend?
I'm strongly reminded of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Specifically the bit where his dad's saying how wonderful the new RFID based car scanning system is, and that the problems people are having are just due to bugs, and they should be happy to help get the system working perfectly. Then he gets caught in one of the false positives and blows his top.
*facepalm*
The €200 video card is instead of the €200 Wii (or is the Wii a little more than €200? Unsure), he can then get games on Steam for €20 or €30, instead of €60 or €70. Same upfront investment in hardware, cheaper games.
Come on, people, it's not rocket surgery.
He's not saying that the people who got drunk and stupid should be let off... He's saying that the police need to make sure they get the core of violent instigators because they were the actual cause of the riot. Besides, there are always more stupid drunk people...
I'm fully aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, but to provide another point, I know a number of people who've bought PS2s with the intent to use them as DVD players, with the ability to play games as a happy bonus. I've also heard stories of people doing the same with PS3s for bluray, although I don't think I actually know anyone who cares about Bluray in real life.
Last time I went to a pawn shop, Lulzsec told everybody about it.
Sorry.
I'll get my coat.
Colour of Magic. Rincewind describing Twoflower's tendancy to poke things to see what would happen:
Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'
Yeah, this. I turned the "draw a pattern to unlock" feature on about a day after I got my Desire, after the second time my pocket called someone.
The vertical swipe to unlock is nice and different to Apple's horizontal swipe to unlock, but it's rather easy for my phone to do in my pocket.
Agreed, I've seen a 90BHP MX-5 (small engine, mk1) go round in a hair under 10 minutes. You'd think more than 3 times the power would gain you a little more time than that! That was driven by an amateur driver on her first (or possibly second) trip to the 'ring as well.
How does this plugin differ (in effect, rather than methodology) from an independant DNS server? From the description I've read, the plugin looks at the urls you enter, checks them with the server and if (say) demonoid.com has appeared on their list, they send back demonoid.me instead, so you get forwarded to the still-live site. Why not just run another DNS server and keep pointing demonoid.com to the correct IP address?
Close. Well, closer than the GP. :-)
Assuming a fixed chance of 20% of being caught every time, there's an 80% chance of not being caught, so the chance of not being caught 5 times is 0.8^5 = 0.32 (2sf), so the chances of being caught at some point in your first 5 crimes is 1-0.32 = 0.68, 68%
The chance of being caught on the 5th crime (but not before) is 0.8^4 * 0.2 = 0.082, 8%
Firstly, this wouldn't affect me personally as I'm in the UK, and therefore have a GSM phone, rather than a 3 Phone or a Vodafone Phone or whatever. Yay for sane systems.
That said, if I was a Yank, stuck with a Verizon smartphone, I would either get a new Verizon contract which didn't include a phone (if they do those?) or I'd sell it to someone else on Verizon, probably via the magic of Ebay.
You can do that, can't you? Or is the phone actually locked to your individual contract? I admit not having full knowledge of the US systems...
Interesting, I've had both a Garmin and a TomTom (both on a palmtop and a standalone device) and I much prefer the TomTom. The UI is much easier to use, it supports more waypoints, it'll let you plan arbitrary routes (ie, point A to point B, instead of just current location to point A) and I think there were other things as well.
When my Garmin died, having used a TomTom elsewhere, it was a no-brainer to get a TomTom to replace it. And for reference, I was using the entry level of both units. I basically just want it to tell me where to go, playing music or working as a hands free kit is unnecessary for me.
I know this is a workaround, rather than an in place fix, but I'm using a prog called Talika for my task bar. It shows icons instead of icons-and-program-names, which is actually the reason I started using it. It also can be (trivially) configured to show all open programs. I've got it grouping multiple windows of the same program together, I'm not sure if that's fixed or an option.
Works pretty nicely. :-)
On my laptop (HP, running Ubuntu), pressing both mouse buttons simulates a middle click, which I use for pasting, closing tabs, opening links in new tabs and so on. I believe the same can be achieved on a Mac (or this HP, for that matter) by tapping the touchpad with /3/ fingers.
Which isn't as hard as it sounds. And probably is easier on the macbooks 'cos they've got bigger touchpads. I think.
Max bandwidth? Rubbish... My one complaint about Steam is how slow the downloads are. My connection maxes out at around 17Mb/s, which I regularly get with torrents, http downloads and so on, Steam is usually a fraction of that. I'll get bursts of 1MB (ie, 8Mb), normally it's down around 400-500 kB.
No, I checked into that when it first started happening... I thought it might have been an app I'd installed recently, but it carried on doing it even after I'd uninstalled it.
I've just checked again, actually, and it's now saying "25% cell standby, 25% bluetooth, 25% wifi, 25% phone idle", which sounds much more reasonable, so I think it must have been fixed in an update. That's in just over 4 hours and it's used 3% of the battery. I've not really used it at all today so far, but even that can't really explain the projected >100 hours battery life. I don't think the battery indicator is entirely linear.
Yeah, I don't really understand why BB Messenger caught on to quite the extent it did - what does it offer that any of the alternatives (texting, MSN, Facebook chat, etc) don't? There just seems to have been a sudden mass adoption of it, and that rarely happens...
Yeah, that was pretty much my thought. I get about 36 hours out of my Desire too, but I wouldn't trust the battery usage thing, it keeps blaming it all on Google Maps, even when I've not been using it.
I've noticed Blackberries becoming a lot less popular with the business drones (taken over by iPhones, as was said upthread), but where I have seen a lot of Blackberries is with teenage girls. Some of them are /really/ cheap with contracts these days (cheaper than Android phones, massively cheaper than iPhones) and a lot of them have keyboards, and given the amount teenage girls text, that works perfectly for them.
Oh, and they've all got Blackberry Messenger accounts these days, despite the user IDs being something like 5876ISUD234...
What if you took a cheap Android phone and ripped out a good portion of the UI and massively underclocked the processor? You could call it a dumbphone and yet it would be exactly the same hardware at the cheap smartphone. Even better, you could have this as a software option, so you could use your phone as a smartphone most of the time, and flick it to dumbphone mode when you needed more battery life, but didn't care about the smartphone features.
I don't know how much the underclocking and so forth would increase the battery life though... What are the main things that eat the battery when the screen's off? Whatever they are, I'm sure most of them could optionally be turned off.
This assumes that the "cheap android phone" comes down in price to the same level as the generic dumbphone, which I think is still some way off.
There's an easy way to spot the best Doctor Who episodes (at least from the first few series of the revamp). Check the writing credits, if it says "Steven Moffat" the episode will be fantastic, and also creepy.