I live in Finland and honestly I've not seen a fax machine in use for a decade or so. Had some luls at a previous work place a few years ago when some americans asked to fax a contract. Analog landlines are also very rare nowadays and the old copper wiring is usually recycled for dsl-based broadband modems in places where optical fiber isn't present. I'm pretty sure my grandmother is the only one I know who still has a landline, but I'm not sure if she actually uses it for anything else than a back-up in case she forgets to charge her cell phone and needs to do a emergency call or something.
I'd guess one limiting factor is the resistance of the wiring on the backplane of the screen. Also, the this part (amongst others) is wrong:
Kindle E Ink display is already capable of much higher resolutions, up to 12x SVGA in fact. The bottleneck isn’t the screen tech, but the underlying electronics capable of handling such a high resolution display.
The limiting factor is very much the screen techology, because the limitation is how fine a mesh of wiring they are able to print on the back of the display, not "electronics capable of handling it".
The interviewer apparently knows nothing about technology. Asks a lot of questions, but not so good questions geek-wise. "Are those like plus and minus?" "Micro-ants?" etc..
This feature is going to make Facebook even more annoying. I, like probably most people exposed to several languages rather read the original, which I fully understand than something fucked up by machine translation. If people are your "friends", you are likely to share their language(s) too, even if you have set your user interface language to something like english.
Usually the translations work on a comprehensible level between languages that are fairly similar, like between swedish and norwegian or UK and US english. When the languages share at least some similarities, like german, swedish and english, makes the result almost comprehensible. However, languages with no similarity, like english to finnish always produces just gibberish.
If you choose to auto-translate your site, at least make sure it's an optional opt-in feature and verify its results are working correctly by consulting an actual person who knows the languages. I'm pretty sure anyone who knows even a bit of english prefers english over something garbled by auto-translation, is localized poorly or has incomplete translation. Most software localizations are awful and is one of the reasons why I choose "US English" over my first language. Sometimes it's not even an option and counts as epic fail, especially if the translation is machine translation or outsourced to a third world country where the result is usually the same machine translation, making it a wasted effort. Using the same setting for country, language and other locale settings, like units and number formatting rules may also result in broken software. Always keep those separate.
Of course any device takes some practice to master, that includes touch screens too. With sufficient practice, you can type with them faster than most do their sorry hunting and pecking on physical keyboards. Here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNcTE5WJGdw
486SX's were released at a time when SE/30's were discontinued (late 1991). At that time, the budget mac of choice would have been the LC, which supported color screens. Anyway, I built several PC's in early 90's, including 486's. It was a pretty fun and cool thing to do as a teenager's hobby and I earned some profit from doing it, which I spent on some macs and their peripherials amongst other things. In 1992 I built a mac around a (68040) Quadra 900 motherboard, which was left over from a Quadra 950 upgrade. The rest of it was some generic parts (custom case, AT PSU, SCSI HDD's, standard 30pin SIMM's) for an equivalent of US$2000, which was around the same price as a IIsi. I over-clocked it later from 25MHz to 33MHz to make it essentially the same as a Quadra 950. Lightning (via modem and phone line) destroyed its I/O ports in late 1990's, but I do have an almost maxed-out Quadra 950 in my collection. (I couldn't source 16MB 30-pin SIMM's, so I have just 16x4MB; 64MB.) It's a quad-head machine (equipped with three extra display adapters, leaving just two spare nu-bus expansion slots and one PDS slot). The high-end Quadras are pretty awesome machines for their age and are the best choice for using software and peripherials designed for 68k macs. If someone wants to donate a bunch of 16MB 30-pin SIMM's to me, it would be cool to upgrade the machine to its maximum supported memory configuration of 256MB. That would be enough to boot System 8.1 off a RAM disk as well as running practically any common app of that era, including Photoshop 3.
like the Apple II, that competition is a lot more open than Apple is. Cheap PC clones is what helped shoot PCs to the forefront.
Apple II was a remarkably open hardware platform, the ROM was open and well documented too but not public domain and copying it would have been a copyright infringement. IBM, like many others, including Apple, had a proprietary ROM, but MS-DOS (known as IBM-DOS back then) didn't really depend on it. Re-writing just the BIOS parts enabled the almost-IBM-compatible clone PC's along with Microsoft willing to license MS-DOS to those companies. Software depending on other features in IBM's ROM (like BASIC) didn't run on the clones.
Exquisite? It's fucking consumer electronics. Exquisite doesn't come from a factory in China.
Yes it does. Amazing hardware design plans goes into factory, out comes amazing hardware. Also, don't forget Apple's software. You know, the software is the main reason people buy their hardware in the first place.
hahaha.. clearly you don't remember what happen when he left before and the company needed to be saved my Microsoft?
Oh, you mean the deal where Microsoft paid Apple $100M to settle the huge copyright infringement lawsuit and agreed to develop new versions of Microsoft Office for Macs?
Actually, on top of the flash, there is a picture of a floppy disk (who remembers those?). Clicking that lets you save the contents as a pdf, but you still need the flash plugin to "download" it.
Slashdot Mirror
The description of the cheap kindle reminds me of this:
http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-laptop-with-no,14299/
Safari was out before Firefox. Camino was out before Firefox. The Mozilla guys saw the benefits of dropping the bloat and created Firefox.
120
Socially Awkward Penguin ?
Probably not "a" plugin for the 1%, more likely several, depending on the processor architectures and lib versions and such.
As a Mac user, I'm disappoint too. The plugin doesn't work, just crashes.
Apparently the plugin is windows-only. On a OSX (10.7 here), the plugin just crashes.
Mine is five digits only because this is my second slashdot account.
I live in Finland and honestly I've not seen a fax machine in use for a decade or so. Had some luls at a previous work place a few years ago when some americans asked to fax a contract. Analog landlines are also very rare nowadays and the old copper wiring is usually recycled for dsl-based broadband modems in places where optical fiber isn't present. I'm pretty sure my grandmother is the only one I know who still has a landline, but I'm not sure if she actually uses it for anything else than a back-up in case she forgets to charge her cell phone and needs to do a emergency call or something.
I'd guess one limiting factor is the resistance of the wiring on the backplane of the screen. Also, the this part (amongst others) is wrong:
Kindle E Ink display is already capable of much higher resolutions, up to 12x SVGA in fact. The bottleneck isn’t the screen tech, but the underlying electronics capable of handling such a high resolution display.
The limiting factor is very much the screen techology, because the limitation is how fine a mesh of wiring they are able to print on the back of the display, not "electronics capable of handling it".
The interviewer apparently knows nothing about technology. Asks a lot of questions, but not so good questions geek-wise. "Are those like plus and minus?" "Micro-ants?" etc..
Think about the new dimension of the "facebook failure" screen shot funny pics.
Yes, good point. I do prefer Google+ anyway, it allows me to control what I say to whom much better than Facebook ever did (and maybe ever will).
This feature is going to make Facebook even more annoying. I, like probably most people exposed to several languages rather read the original, which I fully understand than something fucked up by machine translation. If people are your "friends", you are likely to share their language(s) too, even if you have set your user interface language to something like english.
Usually the translations work on a comprehensible level between languages that are fairly similar, like between swedish and norwegian or UK and US english. When the languages share at least some similarities, like german, swedish and english, makes the result almost comprehensible. However, languages with no similarity, like english to finnish always produces just gibberish.
If you choose to auto-translate your site, at least make sure it's an optional opt-in feature and verify its results are working correctly by consulting an actual person who knows the languages. I'm pretty sure anyone who knows even a bit of english prefers english over something garbled by auto-translation, is localized poorly or has incomplete translation. Most software localizations are awful and is one of the reasons why I choose "US English" over my first language. Sometimes it's not even an option and counts as epic fail, especially if the translation is machine translation or outsourced to a third world country where the result is usually the same machine translation, making it a wasted effort. Using the same setting for country, language and other locale settings, like units and number formatting rules may also result in broken software. Always keep those separate.
Of course any device takes some practice to master, that includes touch screens too. With sufficient practice, you can type with them faster than most do their sorry hunting and pecking on physical keyboards.
Here's an example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNcTE5WJGdw
486SX's were released at a time when SE/30's were discontinued (late 1991). At that time, the budget mac of choice would have been the LC, which supported color screens. Anyway, I built several PC's in early 90's, including 486's. It was a pretty fun and cool thing to do as a teenager's hobby and I earned some profit from doing it, which I spent on some macs and their peripherials amongst other things.
In 1992 I built a mac around a (68040) Quadra 900 motherboard, which was left over from a Quadra 950 upgrade. The rest of it was some generic parts (custom case, AT PSU, SCSI HDD's, standard 30pin SIMM's) for an equivalent of US$2000, which was around the same price as a IIsi.
I over-clocked it later from 25MHz to 33MHz to make it essentially the same as a Quadra 950. Lightning (via modem and phone line) destroyed its I/O ports in late 1990's, but I do have an almost maxed-out Quadra 950 in my collection. (I couldn't source 16MB 30-pin SIMM's, so I have just 16x4MB; 64MB.) It's a quad-head machine (equipped with three extra display adapters, leaving just two spare nu-bus expansion slots and one PDS slot). The high-end Quadras are pretty awesome machines for their age and are the best choice for using software and peripherials designed for 68k macs.
If someone wants to donate a bunch of 16MB 30-pin SIMM's to me, it would be cool to upgrade the machine to its maximum supported memory configuration of 256MB. That would be enough to boot System 8.1 off a RAM disk as well as running practically any common app of that era, including Photoshop 3.
like the Apple II, that competition is a lot more open than Apple is. Cheap PC clones is what helped shoot PCs to the forefront.
Apple II was a remarkably open hardware platform, the ROM was open and well documented too but not public domain and copying it would have been a copyright infringement.
IBM, like many others, including Apple, had a proprietary ROM, but MS-DOS (known as IBM-DOS back then) didn't really depend on it. Re-writing just the BIOS parts enabled the almost-IBM-compatible clone PC's along with Microsoft willing to license MS-DOS to those companies.
Software depending on other features in IBM's ROM (like BASIC) didn't run on the clones.
That's probably true to a large extent, but it will take some time.
Exquisite? It's fucking consumer electronics. Exquisite doesn't come from a factory in China.
Yes it does. Amazing hardware design plans goes into factory, out comes amazing hardware. Also, don't forget Apple's software. You know, the software is the main reason people buy their hardware in the first place.
hahaha.. clearly you don't remember what happen when he left before and the company needed to be saved my Microsoft?
Oh, you mean the deal where Microsoft paid Apple $100M to settle the huge copyright infringement lawsuit and agreed to develop new versions of Microsoft Office for Macs?
Actually, on top of the flash, there is a picture of a floppy disk (who remembers those?). Clicking that lets you save the contents as a pdf, but you still need the flash plugin to "download" it.
Just take screen shots of each page and OCR them. Problem?
Apple pushed HTML5 as the primary application development platform for iPhones long before they had an AppStore.
To be honest; we are all going to die, WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!
Not at all. Iraq wasn't authorized by UN.