The fact that the battery could not be swapped out without being sent to the manufacturer was public knowledge 2 months ago. I'm surprised you dont have to buy a completely new iPhone, which was the implication back then.
I had a $200 Norelco electric razor. When the rechargeable battery wore out, Norelco told me to throw the razor away and buy a new one.
Funny, I see the SIM card slot right on top of the iPhone, with a little hole that, presumably, I can push something pointy into and get the card to pop out.
Yep, poke in a paperclip wire and it pops right out.
Of course, you could have an HTC Wizard (T-Mobile MDA) that has all of the functions the iPhone does plus soon-to-come (sometime this summer) free calls over WIFI hotspots (and a free WIFI router for your home for signing up) for the same $500, and the replacement batteries aren't soldered in and are only $50.
ALL the functions? The iPhone function that I most appreciate is the touch screen and the intuitive gestural touch interface. Will the HTC Wizard have that? That's certainly worth more to me than a $30 battery savings (assuming there aren't third parties who will do it much cheaper, as with iPods).
I agree that the price doesn't seem out of line for the amount of work it takes to replace the battery, but that's not the point. The point is that if Apple had designed the phone properly with an easily replaceable battery, none of that work would be required and you could be replacing the battery for more like $20-40, not to mention you'd be able to keep extra batteries around to swap around if that's your thing.
Everything I've ever seen with an easily replaceable high capacity battery is thicker than the iPhone. If it's a choice between small size and easy replacement, I'll live with the dealer replacement.
It's not surprising to me because I've bought cell phone batteries before. They were expensive, and they had lower capacity than the iPhone battery. The real question is how long until it needs replacement. My experience with cell phone batteries has been that they are good for a year, maybe two. If I have to send it in to be fixed (and they aren't doing it while-you-wait at the Apple Store by then), I hope it lasts more than a year.
I'd definitely pay $10/month if Apple/AT&T decide to offer a comparable feature on the iPhone. Presumably, this would be just a software upgrade for the iPhone, since it already has cell/WiFi switching. This would be enough incentive to give up my landline, so I'd save money overall.
I don't see how it would impact the EDGE data plan, which is flat monthly rate for data. It could potentially impact their voice income, since I'd use less cell minutes, but I don't expect to ever go over on my minutes anyway--I have 6 times as many minutes as on my old Cingular plan, and I virtually never used all of those (and they didn't roll over).
By the way, I've been pleasantly surprised by the speed of EDGE for browsing typical internet sites. Much better than the complaints led me to expect.
Four legs provide the simplest way for a large animal to locomote on dry land. And standing on the hind legs frees up two limbs to use for manipulation. Sensory organs in front makes sense for a 4-legged creature, and when it stands on its hind legs, they end up on top. So while a more-or-less humanoid appearance is doubtless not universal, it is probably a fairly common evolutionary pathway.
I can't help wondering what sort of psychological problem leads a person to click on a topic that they know they have no interest in, apparently for the sole purpose of posting a "Who cares?" comment.
A two button mouse is great, but a 2-button trackpad is a bad idea, and always was--the result of trying to port a mouse interface to a trackpad without thinking it through. The fundamental problem is obvious; with a mouse, you use your hand to track, so your fingers are all available to click, but with a pad, you use your fingers to track, which means that your fingers are in the wrong position to push a button, so you end up using your thumb to click. Unfortunately, most of us only have a thumb on one side of our hand. So you end up contorting your hand into awkward and probably harmful positions to reach that second button with your thumb. Of course, you could use your other hand to click, but since that hand is probably already on the keyboard, it's actually more convenient to hit a modifier key. Apple's two-finger chording approach seems to be the best solution to date, with a system-standardized modifier key available if for some reason you find that awkward.
I think the author's point is a good one, though poorly expressed.
Probably a better way to put it is,
"Should there be more games that are cerebral or contemplative rather than action oriented"
Put that way, the answer is probably yes. There are a lot of activities that people enjoy that are not excitement-oriented. And there have always been games that tapped into this kind of entertainment: board games, puzzle games, virtual pets, classic adventure games, resource management games, weird abstract games. Games like Brain Age reveal that this category is hardly mined out. But the factors that make such games enjoyable tend to be more unique and difficult to anticipate than, say, first person shooters, so they will probably always remain a minor component of the market.
that is a limitation of the signal source, not the monitor.
I don't think that the user much cares at what stage the limitation arises. There is no instance in which a computer display, whether implemented with digital or analog technology, provides other than a finite number of colors.
This is not the case of all 6-bit panels. Some use actual dithering while others use FRC (Frame Rate Control), which is what you described.
This could turn out to be a crucial point. Apple advertises millions of colors; they don't say how they do it, and it could reasonably be argued that no LCD panel is capable of producing more than 256 colors at a given point, anyway, so a combinatorial approach to producing a larger number of colors is an accepted practice.
But they also advertise a particular resolution. If they are using temporal dithering, then they are indeed achieving millions of colors at that resolution. But if they are using spacial dithering, then they may indeed be achieving millions of colors, but not at the claimed resolution.
History, repeat thyself. Honestly, there's a legitimate point to that. If the advertised specs say that it can display "millions of colors", then there's a reasonable expectation that a given pixel will be able to represent over 1 million colors (most likely 16MiColors, but who's counting?). Yeah, this might seem a little silly, but if you can't deliver then don't promise it.
However, even with an 8 bit panel, any give point on the screen can display only 256 colors. The appearance of any more colors than that is also dithering. So the question reduces to "What kinds of dithering are acceptable for a "millions if colors" display?
The answer is simple: Microsoft has no taste. They never have. Presumably, this reflects the limitations of its founder. Even when Microsoft produces the only product that does exactly what they need to do, and you'd think that people would be grateful, they swear at it, because they can't help thinking, "This is great, but it would have been so much better it it had been done by almost anybody else." Microsoft has always been rather good at envisioning useful features, but absolutely dreadful at implementing them in such a way that they are actually useful. Their programs are ugly, operations are implemented in an awkward way, with strange, non-obvious limitations that invariably crop up when you are in a hurry. User interface features are almost always cribbed from somewhere else, and even when the concept is good, they are often implemented in such an clumsy way that it is obvious that Microsoft never really understood them in the first place. These simply are not things that inspire affection.
As an example, I just looked up the Wikipedia entry on Group Theory [wikipedia.org]. The first paragraph is comprehensible, but virtually information-free. The second paragraph uses technical terms that I would have to look up for them to mean enough to be informative.
I don't have any kind of math degree. But I followed your link to "Group Theory," followed the link there to "Group" and found a definition that I could easily understand based on the mathematics that I learned in high school. I'm curious: what university would award a mathematics BS to somebody who could not understand such a basic and clear explanation?
The notion also that one can only focus on a small circular area, which they characterise as "the straw" is slightly flawed. This would be true if you had only one eye. Since most of us are binocular, we tend to be able to focus on a more oval area. Speed reading techniques take advantage of that.
"Focus" is the wrong word, anyway. The eye works pretty much like a camera lens, so that everything at the same distance from the eye is equally in focus. What the article refers to is the higher resolution of foveal vision as compared to peripheral vision. Both eyes are directed toward the same point when reading, so the area of foveal vision is the same as if you had only one eye. It's true that your peripheral vision does not have sufficient resolution to distinguish all letter shapes reliably, but it can certainly tell the difference between an "o" and an "i", for example. So, even when you are not looking directly at a word, your brain is gathering information about letter shapes and subconsciously formulating hypotheses about upcoming words. Speed reading techniques work by teaching readers to make greater use of this information. By the time your foveal vision gets to a word, your brain already has a pretty good idea of what that word is, and it only takes a brief glance of foveal vision to confirm that guess. This is a lot faster than the way people usually read. It does feel a bit strange to read in this way, because it is somewhat nonlinear and holistic, and for certain types of writing--poetry or really skillful prose--it kind of spoils it.
Where's the problem here? Emergency responses are expensive. I'd rather not give any more leeway than the constitution requires to some punks working for a marketing agency wasting my tax dollars, thanks.
Because it doesn't seem like the onus should be on citizens to inform their public officials that they are acting like idiots.
In the case of the mooninite hysteria, it was idiotic in the first place not to realize that terrorist devices are not normally designed to call attention to themselves, and the idiocy was compounded by not bothering to consult any kind of expert on explosives or demolition, who would have informed them that the signs posted on buildings and bridges were not large enough to pose any kind of risk to the structures.
I think rather that the law should be changed so that public officials responsible for such an egregious and negligent waste of public funds could be personally liable for reimbursing the city for such an outrageous waste of tax funds.
Just like you can't scream "FIRE" in a crowded theatre and expect there to be no consequences.
But this case is really a bit more like somebody shouting "DOWN IN FRONT" at the crowded movie theater, and the city responding by shutting down all of the movie theaters in the city under the mistaken impression that "DOWN IN FRONT" actually means "FIRE"--and then arresting the guy who shouted because he didn't immediately rush to inform them that he was only trying to get the guy in front of him to sit down?
The 'skin colour' and latitude argument has been dismissed already by evolutionary biologists, not least because humans haven't actually been in Northern Europe for long enough for evolution to have played a role in developing the pale skin colour found there. In fact, American Indians have lived on the Equator in America for longer, yet they are lighter coloured than say, Africans. As Jared Diamond puts in his book The Third Chimpanzee [wikipedia.org] The variations we see in humans are more likely caused by the genetic variation of a few early settlers.
But why do some settlements succeed and others fail? Is it purely coincidental that light-skinned settlers in a new land (who are likely to have a limited diet and be vulnerable to vitamin deficiencies) are more likely to succeed in northern latitudes than dark-skinned ones? It seems more likely that the selection pressure for pale skin in northern latitudes is greater than has been realized--strong enough to make a difference over a few generations in whether a settlement survives or fails.
But all this aside, I'm not sure I like the experiment. Why bore people? Why have so many in the room. the 4,12 number is way too high, I'd say the were better off looking at narrow time slices and natural yawns (i.e. do yawns happen at random or do they set off avalanches)
Yes, boring people may bring up the background frequency of yawns without increasing triggered yawns, in which it would reduce the sensitivity of the experiment. One could imagine, for example, that there is a category of "yawn prone" individuals, who are most likely to yawn in boring situations, or upon seeing somebody else yawn. In this case, the boring context would "use up" the yawn prone individuals--i.e. most of those who do not yawn from the boring context are "yawn resistant" individuals, who also are less likely to be triggered by seeing somebody else yawn.
Once again, those aren't by any means bad things (unless Idiocracy was a doumentary), just saying we've been immune to most aspects of natural selection for a long time now.
The only way humans could be immune to natural selection would be if your genes had no effect at all on how many children you have.
Carnegie Mellon's media people seem to have done a very good job of publicizing some fairly routine work. Database searches to identify targets of transcription factors are fairly routine. The authors may have an improved approach, but the paper contains no experimental validation. And while there is plenty of evidence implicating these transcription factors in learning and memory, it does not necessarily follow that every gene regulated by these factors is involved in learning and memory. There are other transcription factors, both positive and negative, and transcription factors can interact in complex combinatorial ways.
In this scenario, the trend will be towards more and more complicated organisms. The reason is that the starting point is a very small region of DNA state space (short DNA sequences), and most of the state space consists of very long sequences. This is a property of random walks, and is related to the second law of thermodynamics.
It is important to distinguish between the idea that "things evolve toward greater complexity" and the idea that "evolution results in an increase in complexity over time." Going back to brownian motion, there is a thermodynamic trend for air molecules to fill a space and equalize pressure, yet there it is not true to say that an individual air molecule moves toward regions of lower pressure. So while one might predict, based upon the idea that the earliest organisms were simple, that complexity will increase over time (at least early on), one cannot predict for any individual species whether its complexity will increase, decrease, or remain the same.
Ah, the perennial "is another game crash around the corner?" article. Always a good bet if you can't think of anything substantive to say.
The answer, of course, is no. The "game crash" of '83 marked the end of the game fad. Electronic games had become a novelty, and virtually anything would sell...and then the novelty wore off. And like the end of any fad, what was once cool became decidedly uncool for a time.
But something is only a fad once. Videogames are now just one more form of entertainment, competing with movies, TV, music, etc. The industry is transforming. Improved technology has driven up the cost of development, so that game production is more and more characterized by the same hit-driven economics that is typical of the entertainment industry as a whole, posing new challenges for the industry.
But at least we don't have to worry that everybody is going to simultaneously lose interest in videogames.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a $200 Norelco electric razor. When the rechargeable battery wore out, Norelco told me to throw the razor away and buy a new one.
Yep, poke in a paperclip wire and it pops right out.
ALL the functions? The iPhone function that I most appreciate is the touch screen and the intuitive gestural touch interface. Will the HTC Wizard have that? That's certainly worth more to me than a $30 battery savings (assuming there aren't third parties who will do it much cheaper, as with iPods).
Everything I've ever seen with an easily replaceable high capacity battery is thicker than the iPhone. If it's a choice between small size and easy replacement, I'll live with the dealer replacement.
It's not surprising to me because I've bought cell phone batteries before. They were expensive, and they had lower capacity than the iPhone battery.
The real question is how long until it needs replacement. My experience with cell phone batteries has been that they are good for a year, maybe two. If I have to send it in to be fixed (and they aren't doing it while-you-wait at the Apple Store by then), I hope it lasts more than a year.
I'd definitely pay $10/month if Apple/AT&T decide to offer a comparable feature on the iPhone. Presumably, this would be just a software upgrade for the iPhone, since it already has cell/WiFi switching. This would be enough incentive to give up my landline, so I'd save money overall.
I don't see how it would impact the EDGE data plan, which is flat monthly rate for data. It could potentially impact their voice income, since I'd use less cell minutes, but I don't expect to ever go over on my minutes anyway--I have 6 times as many minutes as on my old Cingular plan, and I virtually never used all of those (and they didn't roll over).
By the way, I've been pleasantly surprised by the speed of EDGE for browsing typical internet sites. Much better than the complaints led me to expect.
Four legs provide the simplest way for a large animal to locomote on dry land. And standing on the hind legs frees up two limbs to use for manipulation. Sensory organs in front makes sense for a 4-legged creature, and when it stands on its hind legs, they end up on top. So while a more-or-less humanoid appearance is doubtless not universal, it is probably a fairly common evolutionary pathway.
I can't help wondering what sort of psychological problem leads a person to click on a topic that they know they have no interest in, apparently for the sole purpose of posting a "Who cares?" comment.
A two button mouse is great, but a 2-button trackpad is a bad idea, and always was--the result of trying to port a mouse interface to a trackpad without thinking it through. The fundamental problem is obvious; with a mouse, you use your hand to track, so your fingers are all available to click, but with a pad, you use your fingers to track, which means that your fingers are in the wrong position to push a button, so you end up using your thumb to click. Unfortunately, most of us only have a thumb on one side of our hand. So you end up contorting your hand into awkward and probably harmful positions to reach that second button with your thumb. Of course, you could use your other hand to click, but since that hand is probably already on the keyboard, it's actually more convenient to hit a modifier key. Apple's two-finger chording approach seems to be the best solution to date, with a system-standardized modifier key available if for some reason you find that awkward.
I think the author's point is a good one, though poorly expressed.
Probably a better way to put it is,
"Should there be more games that are cerebral or contemplative rather than action oriented"
Put that way, the answer is probably yes. There are a lot of activities that people enjoy that are not excitement-oriented. And there have always been games that tapped into this kind of entertainment: board games, puzzle games, virtual pets, classic adventure games, resource management games, weird abstract games. Games like Brain Age reveal that this category is hardly mined out. But the factors that make such games enjoyable tend to be more unique and difficult to anticipate than, say, first person shooters, so they will probably always remain a minor component of the market.
I don't think that the user much cares at what stage the limitation arises. There is no instance in which a computer display, whether implemented with digital or analog technology, provides other than a finite number of colors.
This could turn out to be a crucial point. Apple advertises millions of colors; they don't say how they do it, and it could reasonably be argued that no LCD panel is capable of producing more than 256 colors at a given point, anyway, so a combinatorial approach to producing a larger number of colors is an accepted practice.
But they also advertise a particular resolution. If they are using temporal dithering, then they are indeed achieving millions of colors at that resolution. But if they are using spacial dithering, then they may indeed be achieving millions of colors, but not at the claimed resolution.
Not when driven by a digital computer that uses a finite number of pixels in its frame buffer.
However, even with an 8 bit panel, any give point on the screen can display only 256 colors. The appearance of any more colors than that is also dithering. So the question reduces to "What kinds of dithering are acceptable for a "millions if colors" display?
The answer is simple: Microsoft has no taste. They never have. Presumably, this reflects the limitations of its founder. Even when Microsoft produces the only product that does exactly what they need to do, and you'd think that people would be grateful, they swear at it, because they can't help thinking, "This is great, but it would have been so much better it it had been done by almost anybody else." Microsoft has always been rather good at envisioning useful features, but absolutely dreadful at implementing them in such a way that they are actually useful. Their programs are ugly, operations are implemented in an awkward way, with strange, non-obvious limitations that invariably crop up when you are in a hurry. User interface features are almost always cribbed from somewhere else, and even when the concept is good, they are often implemented in such an clumsy way that it is obvious that Microsoft never really understood them in the first place. These simply are not things that inspire affection.
I don't have any kind of math degree. But I followed your link to "Group Theory," followed the link there to "Group" and found a definition that I could easily understand based on the mathematics that I learned in high school. I'm curious: what university would award a mathematics BS to somebody who could not understand such a basic and clear explanation?
"Focus" is the wrong word, anyway. The eye works pretty much like a camera lens, so that everything at the same distance from the eye is equally in focus. What the article refers to is the higher resolution of foveal vision as compared to peripheral vision. Both eyes are directed toward the same point when reading, so the area of foveal vision is the same as if you had only one eye. It's true that your peripheral vision does not have sufficient resolution to distinguish all letter shapes reliably, but it can certainly tell the difference between an "o" and an "i", for example. So, even when you are not looking directly at a word, your brain is gathering information about letter shapes and subconsciously formulating hypotheses about upcoming words. Speed reading techniques work by teaching readers to make greater use of this information. By the time your foveal vision gets to a word, your brain already has a pretty good idea of what that word is, and it only takes a brief glance of foveal vision to confirm that guess. This is a lot faster than the way people usually read. It does feel a bit strange to read in this way, because it is somewhat nonlinear and holistic, and for certain types of writing--poetry or really skillful prose--it kind of spoils it.
Because it doesn't seem like the onus should be on citizens to inform their public officials that they are acting like idiots.
In the case of the mooninite hysteria, it was idiotic in the first place not to realize that terrorist devices are not normally designed to call attention to themselves, and the idiocy was compounded by not bothering to consult any kind of expert on explosives or demolition, who would have informed them that the signs posted on buildings and bridges were not large enough to pose any kind of risk to the structures.
I think rather that the law should be changed so that public officials responsible for such an egregious and negligent waste of public funds could be personally liable for reimbursing the city for such an outrageous waste of tax funds.
But this case is really a bit more like somebody shouting "DOWN IN FRONT" at the crowded movie theater, and the city responding by shutting down all of the movie theaters in the city under the mistaken impression that "DOWN IN FRONT" actually means "FIRE"--and then arresting the guy who shouted because he didn't immediately rush to inform them that he was only trying to get the guy in front of him to sit down?
This has long been suspected due to the strong correlation of cancer incidence statistics with distance from the equator.
But why do some settlements succeed and others fail? Is it purely coincidental that light-skinned settlers in a new land (who are likely to have a limited diet and be vulnerable to vitamin deficiencies) are more likely to succeed in northern latitudes than dark-skinned ones? It seems more likely that the selection pressure for pale skin in northern latitudes is greater than has been realized--strong enough to make a difference over a few generations in whether a settlement survives or fails.
Yes, boring people may bring up the background frequency of yawns without increasing triggered yawns, in which it would reduce the sensitivity of the experiment. One could imagine, for example, that there is a category of "yawn prone" individuals, who are most likely to yawn in boring situations, or upon seeing somebody else yawn. In this case, the boring context would "use up" the yawn prone individuals--i.e. most of those who do not yawn from the boring context are "yawn resistant" individuals, who also are less likely to be triggered by seeing somebody else yawn.
The only way humans could be immune to natural selection would be if your genes had no effect at all on how many children you have.
Carnegie Mellon's media people seem to have done a very good job of publicizing some fairly routine work. Database searches to identify targets of transcription factors are fairly routine. The authors may have an improved approach, but the paper contains no experimental validation. And while there is plenty of evidence implicating these transcription factors in learning and memory, it does not necessarily follow that every gene regulated by these factors is involved in learning and memory. There are other transcription factors, both positive and negative, and transcription factors can interact in complex combinatorial ways.
It is important to distinguish between the idea that "things evolve toward greater complexity" and the idea that "evolution results in an increase in complexity over time." Going back to brownian motion, there is a thermodynamic trend for air molecules to fill a space and equalize pressure, yet there it is not true to say that an individual air molecule moves toward regions of lower pressure. So while one might predict, based upon the idea that the earliest organisms were simple, that complexity will increase over time (at least early on), one cannot predict for any individual species whether its complexity will increase, decrease, or remain the same.
Ah, the perennial "is another game crash around the corner?" article. Always a good bet if you can't think of anything substantive to say.
The answer, of course, is no. The "game crash" of '83 marked the end of the game fad. Electronic games had become a novelty, and virtually anything would sell...and then the novelty wore off. And like the end of any fad, what was once cool became decidedly uncool for a time.
But something is only a fad once. Videogames are now just one more form of entertainment, competing with movies, TV, music, etc. The industry is transforming. Improved technology has driven up the cost of development, so that game production is more and more characterized by the same hit-driven economics that is typical of the entertainment industry as a whole, posing new challenges for the industry.
But at least we don't have to worry that everybody is going to simultaneously lose interest in videogames.