yea, you're good, wearing a helmet and all - but you aren't wearing anything else but sneakers, shorts and a wife beater.
Back when I was in my teens, a friend of mine offered me a ride home on his brand new sport-bike. I was wearing cut-offs, a T-shirt, and sneakers but I said, "Sure!" He handed me a helmet and we took off.
As he roared down US Route 5, I took an opportunity to look down and notice the pavement zooming by about two inches below me at 60 MPH. And it occurred to me that if I were to come off this motorcycle, I would be one giant scab--with a head. A troubling thought...
My iPhone has music stored on the phone. I start the iPod app and choose "Play." I can then ask the phone, "What song is this?" and it will tell me the name of the song and the band playing it. It isn't listening to the song and figuring it out, like Shazam does, because it already knows this information--it's playing the song. It doesn't show me the title or anything, it just replies: "Police State in the USA by Anti-Flag" (for example).
This is what I mean when I say "Can it answer questions?" Obviously, some questions may not lend themselves to textual answers. But something like, "How much battery life do I have left?" might be a useful thing to ask a phone sitting in a backpack...
Well, what your droid does is send the audio off to Google's servers to interpret it. So if you said, "Navigate to Fred Smith's House" (because Fred Smith is in your local contacts list, including his address) would it give you directions to his house or would it try to find an appropriate "Fred Smith" in a google search?
While there are iPhone apps for doing voice search, they aren't integrated into the voice search on the iPhone.
Assuming that it works similarly to speech recognition on the Mac, it recognizes a fixed list of words which can be followed by other words which can be followed by other words and so on.
So, for example, the iPhone could hear "Find" and know that it needs to do a google search. It could hear "nearest" after find and know that it should only get map information from the Google search. "Gas Station" would be something it couldn't cope with, unfortunately, unless it was in a humongous list along side "airport", "Best Buy", "campground", "DMV", "emergency room", "family planning clinic", "Honda dealer", "internet cafe", "jenny craig", "KFC", "mosque", "Office Depot", "police station", "restaurant", "subway", "tennis court", "unemployment office", "White Castle", and "YMCA." That's a bit much for a phone to handle.
Many years ago, I worked with a company that ran a ship's bridge simulator for training and certification purposes. Walk into a particular room in their facility and it was laid out like a ship's bridge--real radar scopes and engine controls and all that. And, as you looked through the "windows," you would see other boats and bridges and buildings and things like that.
Of course, this was probably 1990 or so. The graphics were not all that great. But they were "good enough."
See, they weren't necessary for training and certification. You had to be able to identify a ship in your path as being a tugboat or an ocean liner. You had to identify bridges and such. But you didn't need to see the people walking around the decks or waving to you from the pier. You didn't need to have the coloring change depending on the angle of the sun and reflections off the glass of the tugboat bridge. Not for what they were doing, which was training you to bring a cargo ship into the port of Long Beach.
But this wasn't for entertainment purposes--this was for training.
You're right that a fun game is a fun game, regardless. Great graphics won't make an unfun game fun. However, I would say that great graphics can make a fun game more fun.
You sign up for iPhone development and give them your name and address.
And I'm certain that Apple checks to make sure that those names and addresses are completely legit.
Of course, I also believe in the Easter Bunny.
A couple of years ago, I used one of my developer discounts to buy a machine for a co-worker. We had it shipped to his house. For the next six months, when I signed on, my account listed my first name and his last name.
Oh, but you can always look up the info? Here's a copy of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy [Redirects to iTunes]. Go click on "Jeffrey Beyer Web Site." Hell, if Apple can't even catch things like that in their own store, I don't hold much stock in them being able to ferret out a clever hacker.
For reasons both aesthetic and practical, some directors often do not want to convert a film to color or go to the trouble and expense of shooting with color cameras [...]
Back when color first came out, there was no "converting to color"--it was either shot with color film or black-and-white film. There was no way to shoot it in black-and-white and then convert it.
"Colorizing" movies didn't really start up until the 1980s and it was mostly for viewing on television. Films had already gone to color.
As for the expense part, there's a movie I enjoy a lot called "Roman Holiday." and it was filmed in black-and-white. The studio wanted to film it in color in Hollywood and the Director wanted to film it in Italy for authenticity. The studio agreed to let him film in Italy, but wouldn't give him the extra money. So in order to save money, he filmed it in black-and-white. I don't think the movie suffered too much from that decision and would have suffered more if it had been shot in color on a Hollywood soundstage.
This makes me think of an old Robin Williams' bit. To paraphrase, the idea was that every driver on the road is issued a gun that will shoot a flag that says "Asshole." When you see someone do something stupid, you fire the gun at the car and they end up with a little flag that says "Asshole" on their car.
One advantage of this is you'd be able to tell who the idiot drivers are and give them a wide berth. Kind of like a few years ago back in Florida when all the rental-car license plates started with 'Y'--if you saw a car with a 'Y' license plate, there was a good chance they didn't know where they were going and might change lanes at any moment.
Also, it would make it easier for the police to eventually catch these people. Heck, just make a law that says if you have more than 5 "Asshole" flags on your car, you get a ticket for being an asshole.
(Obviously this wouldn't really work--it's a comedy bit. But one can dream...)
It's amazing what this sort of thing does to the thought processes. My Dad passed away last year. Whenever I'd call home, I'd ask my Mom, "How's Dad doing?" "Oh, he has his good days and his bad days." To me, a "Good Day" was he was perfectly normal and a "Bad Day" was that he had problems remembering things. The reality was that a "Good Day" was that he remembered where the bathroom was and how to use the toilet before he shit himself.
Suicide? He was hardly able to contemplate eating. Forget such a complex emotion as ending ones own life.
The commercial is--perhaps unintentionally--humorous. The old person is a horrible actor. The spokesperson walks into the room and starts talking to the camera, giving it a somewhat Rod Serlingesque feel from "The Twilight Zone." Hey Buddy! Why don't you help the old lady before you start talking to us!? (Newer versions of the commercial use a different approach)
It's something we laugh about because the young don't like to face the eventuality that they will ever need such a thing.
They didn't have "billions" in the bank at the time, and according to the news $150 million kept Apple from going out of business or being bought out.
As I understand it, Apple did have "billions" in the bank at the time. The problem was, though, they were having to spend those billions.
Back in 1997, Apple was going out of business. Everybody knew it. And Nobody wanted to be left holding the bag. Which means that Apple was getting really bad terms on parts. Nobody wanted to ship Apple a million hard drives to make Macintoshes and then have Apple go belly-up and have to stand in line with the other creditors for pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy court. So everyone was demanding lots of money up front for parts.
The 150 million, while paltry, gave the impression that Microsoft was backing Apple. So Apple wouldn't go bankrupt--they'd get bought out by Microsoft. So you could sell stuff to Apple and not worry about getting paid.
I'm a Mac developer and I'd just quit at a company back in 1997. I went away for two weeks to a foreign country so I was pretty far out of the loop. When I got in the plane to return home, I grabbed a copy of the Asian Wall Street Journal. And right there on the front page was a headline that heavily implied that Microsoft had bought Apple for $150 Million. I almost had a heart attack in my airplane seat. As I read the article, it became a bit more clear what had happened. But I wouldn't necessarily trust the newspapers at the time to get the details right.
The really bizarre thing is I've had an iPhone 4 since day 1, I've seen the glitch and until I got a case it had been affecting my data connections, but I still really like this phone! Is Apple turning us all into battered wives?
I prefer to think of it as Cognitive Dissonance. You made a decision to get an iPhone and now you have to justify it somehow.
It doesn't make them any more evil, I suppose. But it does irk me when some fanboi says, "Gosh! They sold 1,000,000 iWhatevers in one weekend!" Because it isn't really true. It isn't really true when other people do it as well.
This is sort of wandering off-topic, I suppose, but one thing I always liked about Apple is that they were a little bit more honest than other manufacturers. I'm an old Mac user--my first Mac was a Macintosh--and I remember Apple selling 14" and 16" displays back when everyone else was selling 15" and 17" displays. Of course, these were the same displays--Apple was telling you the viewable area and the other vendors were telling you the size of the screen. It became a lawsuit eventually and display vendors started having to do the small print saying that 17" was not the viewable area. Apple had to do this, too, because at this point they realized that bigger numbers sell and had started selling 17" displays like everyone else.
Keep in mind that it is most likely that the target area will be the ocean--since oceans cover 71% of the Earth. Of the remaining 29%, 90% of the world's population lives in 3% of that 29%. So that works out to a less than 1% chance of it hitting a heavily populated area.
Of course, if it hits the ocean, we might have to deal with Tsunamis and things like that which will affect a whole bunch of people. So it would be more like "how do you evacuate the west coast of North America?"
If you touched the top of the phone, the signal strength dropped dramatically.
I would have no problem believing this. The question is, how often do you touch the top of your phone?
Obviously, other phones have this problem. Not only did Jobs show video of this, you can find plenty of examples of it on YouTube. The problem is that that Apple put the antenna where it is more likely, just through holding the phone in a "normal" fashion, that you will end up affecting the antenna.
I am struggling to recall RIM selling a million of anything in a weekend.
This is something that always bothers my "reality versus accounting" soul.
See, here's the thing: Apple opens a product up for pre-orders a few weeks before it ships. A bunch of people buy it on pre-order. Then, the first weekend, Apple ships all those orders and, on Monday, Apple announces having sold millions of whatevers the first weekend.
Now, from an accounting perspective, this is accurate. You can't book sales until you ship the item. So even though Apple got money over a few weeks, they couldn't actually put it on their books as income until they shipped out the devices. So when Apple shipped out the devices is when they booked the revenue, all of which occurred that first weekend. Plus whatever they sold in the stores over the weekend. So, from an accounting standpoint, it's accurate--they made the money that first weekend.
However, the reality perspective says that the item was available for sale a few weeks beforehand. If I had a product and I offered it for sale one year before it finally shipped, and I had one person per day buying it, on the day I shipped I could claim that 365 bought it in one day. But realistically, I had one sale per day. Based on past history, I would have a hard time believing that I would have 365 sales on the day after I shipped those 365. It's more likely that I would continue having 1 per day.
Apple releases these numbers to look impressive. And, don't get me wrong, selling a million or so devices in a few weeks is impressive--I've never sold that many things in a few years! But it wasn't "one weekend"--that's an accounting trick.
Changing base boot and operating software would be like swapping the engine (or ECU) from a BMW into a Toyota and expecting the manufacturer to honor the warranty.
Actually, they do. Or they have to be able to prove that the modification is what caused the problem.
For example, I have a third-party ECU in my Audi. If I have a problem with, say, the suspension, Audi would have to prove that the ECU modifications were the cause of my suspension problems. It's not up to me to prove that they weren't.
Slashdot Mirror
yea, you're good, wearing a helmet and all - but you aren't wearing anything else but sneakers, shorts and a wife beater.
Back when I was in my teens, a friend of mine offered me a ride home on his brand new sport-bike. I was wearing cut-offs, a T-shirt, and sneakers but I said, "Sure!" He handed me a helmet and we took off.
As he roared down US Route 5, I took an opportunity to look down and notice the pavement zooming by about two inches below me at 60 MPH. And it occurred to me that if I were to come off this motorcycle, I would be one giant scab--with a head. A troubling thought...
Never got on the back of a motorcycle again.
...and pretty soon, Google will have enough samples of your voice to be able to impersonate you to security systems!
Nope. Let me try this again.
My iPhone has music stored on the phone. I start the iPod app and choose "Play." I can then ask the phone, "What song is this?" and it will tell me the name of the song and the band playing it. It isn't listening to the song and figuring it out, like Shazam does, because it already knows this information--it's playing the song. It doesn't show me the title or anything, it just replies: "Police State in the USA by Anti-Flag" (for example).
This is what I mean when I say "Can it answer questions?" Obviously, some questions may not lend themselves to textual answers. But something like, "How much battery life do I have left?" might be a useful thing to ask a phone sitting in a backpack...
Well, what your droid does is send the audio off to Google's servers to interpret it. So if you said, "Navigate to Fred Smith's House" (because Fred Smith is in your local contacts list, including his address) would it give you directions to his house or would it try to find an appropriate "Fred Smith" in a google search?
While there are iPhone apps for doing voice search, they aren't integrated into the voice search on the iPhone.
Assuming that it works similarly to speech recognition on the Mac, it recognizes a fixed list of words which can be followed by other words which can be followed by other words and so on.
So, for example, the iPhone could hear "Find" and know that it needs to do a google search. It could hear "nearest" after find and know that it should only get map information from the Google search. "Gas Station" would be something it couldn't cope with, unfortunately, unless it was in a humongous list along side "airport", "Best Buy", "campground", "DMV", "emergency room", "family planning clinic", "Honda dealer", "internet cafe", "jenny craig", "KFC", "mosque", "Office Depot", "police station", "restaurant", "subway", "tennis court", "unemployment office", "White Castle", and "YMCA." That's a bit much for a phone to handle.
Actions are nice, but so is the ability to ask questions.
On my iPhone, if I'm listening to my music, I can ask "What song is this?" and the phone will tell me the name of the song and the band playing it.
Many years ago, I worked with a company that ran a ship's bridge simulator for training and certification purposes. Walk into a particular room in their facility and it was laid out like a ship's bridge--real radar scopes and engine controls and all that. And, as you looked through the "windows," you would see other boats and bridges and buildings and things like that.
Of course, this was probably 1990 or so. The graphics were not all that great. But they were "good enough."
See, they weren't necessary for training and certification. You had to be able to identify a ship in your path as being a tugboat or an ocean liner. You had to identify bridges and such. But you didn't need to see the people walking around the decks or waving to you from the pier. You didn't need to have the coloring change depending on the angle of the sun and reflections off the glass of the tugboat bridge. Not for what they were doing, which was training you to bring a cargo ship into the port of Long Beach.
But this wasn't for entertainment purposes--this was for training.
You're right that a fun game is a fun game, regardless. Great graphics won't make an unfun game fun. However, I would say that great graphics can make a fun game more fun.
You sign up for iPhone development and give them your name and address.
And I'm certain that Apple checks to make sure that those names and addresses are completely legit.
Of course, I also believe in the Easter Bunny.
A couple of years ago, I used one of my developer discounts to buy a machine for a co-worker. We had it shipped to his house. For the next six months, when I signed on, my account listed my first name and his last name.
Oh, but you can always look up the info? Here's a copy of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy [Redirects to iTunes]. Go click on "Jeffrey Beyer Web Site." Hell, if Apple can't even catch things like that in their own store, I don't hold much stock in them being able to ferret out a clever hacker.
You mean he has money coming out the wazzoo?
So I can smoke my cigarette and fuel my car at the same time?
I don't expect those things to actually happen because people have morality [...]
You must be new here...
Back when color first came out, there was no "converting to color"--it was either shot with color film or black-and-white film. There was no way to shoot it in black-and-white and then convert it.
"Colorizing" movies didn't really start up until the 1980s and it was mostly for viewing on television. Films had already gone to color.
As for the expense part, there's a movie I enjoy a lot called "Roman Holiday." and it was filmed in black-and-white. The studio wanted to film it in color in Hollywood and the Director wanted to film it in Italy for authenticity. The studio agreed to let him film in Italy, but wouldn't give him the extra money. So in order to save money, he filmed it in black-and-white. I don't think the movie suffered too much from that decision and would have suffered more if it had been shot in color on a Hollywood soundstage.
But what about the sold-out Droid X?
This makes me think of an old Robin Williams' bit. To paraphrase, the idea was that every driver on the road is issued a gun that will shoot a flag that says "Asshole." When you see someone do something stupid, you fire the gun at the car and they end up with a little flag that says "Asshole" on their car.
One advantage of this is you'd be able to tell who the idiot drivers are and give them a wide berth. Kind of like a few years ago back in Florida when all the rental-car license plates started with 'Y'--if you saw a car with a 'Y' license plate, there was a good chance they didn't know where they were going and might change lanes at any moment.
Also, it would make it easier for the police to eventually catch these people. Heck, just make a law that says if you have more than 5 "Asshole" flags on your car, you get a ticket for being an asshole.
(Obviously this wouldn't really work--it's a comedy bit. But one can dream...)
Godzilla is not real.
Yet.
I have and I agree with the GP.
I'd also add "not sure what that noise is."
It's amazing what this sort of thing does to the thought processes. My Dad passed away last year. Whenever I'd call home, I'd ask my Mom, "How's Dad doing?" "Oh, he has his good days and his bad days." To me, a "Good Day" was he was perfectly normal and a "Bad Day" was that he had problems remembering things. The reality was that a "Good Day" was that he remembered where the bathroom was and how to use the toilet before he shit himself.
Suicide? He was hardly able to contemplate eating. Forget such a complex emotion as ending ones own life.
I'm sure it's a combination of the two.
They didn't have "billions" in the bank at the time, and according to the news $150 million kept Apple from going out of business or being bought out.
As I understand it, Apple did have "billions" in the bank at the time. The problem was, though, they were having to spend those billions.
Back in 1997, Apple was going out of business. Everybody knew it. And Nobody wanted to be left holding the bag. Which means that Apple was getting really bad terms on parts. Nobody wanted to ship Apple a million hard drives to make Macintoshes and then have Apple go belly-up and have to stand in line with the other creditors for pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy court. So everyone was demanding lots of money up front for parts.
The 150 million, while paltry, gave the impression that Microsoft was backing Apple. So Apple wouldn't go bankrupt--they'd get bought out by Microsoft. So you could sell stuff to Apple and not worry about getting paid.
I'm a Mac developer and I'd just quit at a company back in 1997. I went away for two weeks to a foreign country so I was pretty far out of the loop. When I got in the plane to return home, I grabbed a copy of the Asian Wall Street Journal. And right there on the front page was a headline that heavily implied that Microsoft had bought Apple for $150 Million. I almost had a heart attack in my airplane seat. As I read the article, it became a bit more clear what had happened. But I wouldn't necessarily trust the newspapers at the time to get the details right.
The really bizarre thing is I've had an iPhone 4 since day 1, I've seen the glitch and until I got a case it had been affecting my data connections, but I still really like this phone! Is Apple turning us all into battered wives?
I prefer to think of it as Cognitive Dissonance. You made a decision to get an iPhone and now you have to justify it somehow.
It doesn't make them any more evil, I suppose. But it does irk me when some fanboi says, "Gosh! They sold 1,000,000 iWhatevers in one weekend!" Because it isn't really true. It isn't really true when other people do it as well.
This is sort of wandering off-topic, I suppose, but one thing I always liked about Apple is that they were a little bit more honest than other manufacturers. I'm an old Mac user--my first Mac was a Macintosh--and I remember Apple selling 14" and 16" displays back when everyone else was selling 15" and 17" displays. Of course, these were the same displays--Apple was telling you the viewable area and the other vendors were telling you the size of the screen. It became a lawsuit eventually and display vendors started having to do the small print saying that 17" was not the viewable area. Apple had to do this, too, because at this point they realized that bigger numbers sell and had started selling 17" displays like everyone else.
How do we safely evacuate the target area?
Keep in mind that it is most likely that the target area will be the ocean--since oceans cover 71% of the Earth. Of the remaining 29%, 90% of the world's population lives in 3% of that 29%. So that works out to a less than 1% chance of it hitting a heavily populated area.
Of course, if it hits the ocean, we might have to deal with Tsunamis and things like that which will affect a whole bunch of people. So it would be more like "how do you evacuate the west coast of North America?"
Of course, the definition has changed. Wyse makes most of it's money nowadays on "thin-clients."
If you touched the top of the phone, the signal strength dropped dramatically.
I would have no problem believing this. The question is, how often do you touch the top of your phone?
Obviously, other phones have this problem. Not only did Jobs show video of this, you can find plenty of examples of it on YouTube. The problem is that that Apple put the antenna where it is more likely, just through holding the phone in a "normal" fashion, that you will end up affecting the antenna.
I am struggling to recall RIM selling a million of anything in a weekend.
This is something that always bothers my "reality versus accounting" soul.
See, here's the thing: Apple opens a product up for pre-orders a few weeks before it ships. A bunch of people buy it on pre-order. Then, the first weekend, Apple ships all those orders and, on Monday, Apple announces having sold millions of whatevers the first weekend.
Now, from an accounting perspective, this is accurate. You can't book sales until you ship the item. So even though Apple got money over a few weeks, they couldn't actually put it on their books as income until they shipped out the devices. So when Apple shipped out the devices is when they booked the revenue, all of which occurred that first weekend. Plus whatever they sold in the stores over the weekend. So, from an accounting standpoint, it's accurate--they made the money that first weekend.
However, the reality perspective says that the item was available for sale a few weeks beforehand. If I had a product and I offered it for sale one year before it finally shipped, and I had one person per day buying it, on the day I shipped I could claim that 365 bought it in one day. But realistically, I had one sale per day. Based on past history, I would have a hard time believing that I would have 365 sales on the day after I shipped those 365. It's more likely that I would continue having 1 per day.
Apple releases these numbers to look impressive. And, don't get me wrong, selling a million or so devices in a few weeks is impressive--I've never sold that many things in a few years! But it wasn't "one weekend"--that's an accounting trick.
Changing base boot and operating software would be like swapping the engine (or ECU) from a BMW into a Toyota and expecting the manufacturer to honor the warranty.
Actually, they do. Or they have to be able to prove that the modification is what caused the problem.
For example, I have a third-party ECU in my Audi. If I have a problem with, say, the suspension, Audi would have to prove that the ECU modifications were the cause of my suspension problems. It's not up to me to prove that they weren't.