There are probably a few *nix admins that wonder why you would use a mouse when you have a perfectly good keyboard. I think that this device might have a place, but I don't think it's something that will be hugely successful.
I haven't used the device so I can't comment how well it works, but Apple's notebook trackpads are usually regarded as pretty good. Personally I always prefer to use a mouse, but I can see how a person might be able to be more productive if the device were really precise, the person was very familiar with it, and the software could take advantage of all of the gestures. Would probably be great for something like Photoshop or video editing.
Some of us are just too used to a mouse to change our ways. After watching new computer users struggle with using a mouse, it makes me think that if I spend enough time learning to become proficient with one of these devices, I might be able to improve my productivity in some cases. It would be interesting to find someone who's really good and compare their ability to use it precise with someone who has exceptional mouse control.
The only problem with that approach is that it doesn't prove that the theory holds for a general population. It's very possible that the theory holds true for those groups of people, but it doesn't really prove anything useful. We can't tell if membership of these groups results in the behavior or if the behavior results in people becoming members of these groups.
At first glance this seems obvious, but if you think about it enough you'll probably be able to remember a few successful relationships you've had with various people who did not share your beliefs at all. Anecdotal evidence of course, but perhaps some humans seek a certain amount of disruption in their lives. The real question is whether people who play online games are a good representation of the general population.
Go read the anandtech article and do some simple math. If you're right next to a tower even holding the phone in such a way as too make the signal as bad as possible, it'll still read five bars. If you're right on the edge of a five bar rating and do the same it can drop it to one or no bars. There are plenty of anecdotal accounts of people who can't reproduce the issue. These people have five bars and really god signal. The people who experience the issue probably have five bars and spotty service. You really can't trust the bars, even still since they aren't a very good indicator of signal. I'd prefer a straight numerical measurement.
The data backs up that ascertation pretty well though. If this were as big of an issue as people were making it sound, the numbers would show it. They probably should have responded sooner, but the phone has been out less than a month. It took Microsoft a lot longer to respond to an issue than impacted way more consumers and didn't manange to catch as much he'll as Apple seems to be getting. For whatever reason people get some kind of massive hardon about everything Apple and either rush to defend them or rush to attack them.
So unless you want to accuse Apple of hiding data, misrepresenting it, or some other diabolical plot just accept that the whole thing was overblown and don't expect them to grovel at your feet over a few anecdotal reports that spun into stories of a massively defective product that would need a recall. He'll, even though Consumer Reports didn't give it their recommendation, they still rated it the best phone on their site. Seems like a non-issue for most. If it is for you, enjoy your free case or just take the phone back and get something else.
It might not be overly funny, but I'm guessing it was a play on the colloquialism/phrase, "My shit don't stink." The title includes 'butt' which adds a some double entendre as well. Not overly funny, but I don't even know if this could be a troll. Judging by the author's posts he's not someone who frequently posts troll or flamebait-styled posts either.
I understand that one person's funny is another's not-so-humorous, but this isn't very deserving of a 'Troll' mod. If someone has some spare mod points at least correct this a bit. I'm not suggesting this deserves a +5 funny, but it surely doesn't rate lower than even.
I don't really know that for a lot of that type of content the disgust necessarily comes from the pornographic part. Most people would find a video of people shitting on each other disgusting regardless of whether or not it's pornographic. If you're into that, fair play to you, but it's probably something that the general population won't understand. Two girls, one cup could have been made without any nudity at all and it would be just as disturbing. I'm not sure if I've ever seen porn that I found disturbing simply because it was porn.
Funny thing about power. When you don't have any you deplore the use of it and decry those who abuse it. Once you accumulate a little and get a taste for wielding it, you just make room for the the next batch of squabblers without any power of their own yet.
Funny what $50 billion in revenue will do to a company.
There are a few free markets, but the goods and services offered are illegal. The fact that they are illegal means that there can be no regulation or government oversight because having such would legitimize them and it would be hard for the government to continue to maintain their position on the legality of the product or service. I think you could learn just as many interesting things about economics from a pimp as you could from a professor.
Funny story. When this news broke, I actually took my own phone and looked at the signal strength difference while leaving it set on the table and when I'm holding it. Sure enough, when holding it, it drops a bar, but because it never produced a noticeable degradation in voice quality or anything else. The impact may be noticeable depending on your carrier, but I've never noticed it to be a problem with Verizon in my area. If it's an issue with how the signal is displayed like Apple is claiming, it's not really a big deal.
In order to test to what extent holding the phone produces an actual loss of signal strength, it would be necessary to place a large number of calls while the device is not being held and record the number of dropped calls and to compare that against the number of dropped calls recorded while the device is being held in the hand. I'd wager that there are likely to be more dropped calls while holding it, based off of the technical information I've heard regarding the way the antenna was designed, but I don't believe the difference will be overly large.
Funny thing is that it's not the first time. Some reproduced the issue with an old Nokia candy-bar style phone and put a video of it up on youtube. I don't have the link handy, but some site pointed out a Nexus One discussion thread from several months ago that discussed a the same issue. Just for fun I just took my own phone out of my pocket and observed the different in signal strength when it's just sitting on my desk and when I hold it. It loses a bar, but I've never noticed before because I've never thought to look at it, most likely due to the fact that I generally good good reception on Verizon and wouldn't think to look at it that closely. The only reason so many people are experiencing it for the first time are because the people who buy Apple products have a greater tendency to obsess over shit like this and post about it on the internet. Then the internet denizens, who collectively get hardons over all things Apple, endless talk about it. If it weren't for Apple, this would almost be a non-event that ends of being drowned out by all the other noise.
You could let other companies deliver first-class mail under the condition that they must accept all first-class mail and deliver it at a fixed cost regardless of point of origin or delivery. If a private company can do it more efficiently and charge less, by all means let them.
I'm not terribly familiar with the cellphone situation outside of the US, but it's been my understanding that the rest of the world uses GSM (And gets better service at a lower cost, but that's another rant for a different day.) for the most part. While the US market is large and nice to have, it's not the be-all-end-all that the US would like to think of itself as. Even if Verizon were to offer the N900, I can't imagine it suddenly joining the millions-sold club.
The N900 is a device made for the/. crowd, which if you were to step outside of/. and take a good look around you would realize is a very small percentage of the population. The take-away from this is that you can't run the world's largest phone manufacturer and be successful marketing a device that only a minority of the world will love or be able to use. Yeah, it's easy enough for you or I to get by with, but a lot of people don't understand the extent to which the majority of the world's population are technically inept or apathetic. Hell, some Linux users are still skeptical about it being ready for the mass market on the desktop. Should we be surprised that it's not going to fly when put on a phone?
The geek crowd needs to realize that the average Joe is incapable of using Linux on a mobile device and absolutely has even less desire to learn. Fun car analogy: how many/. readers actually change their own oil? I suspect it's a minority, even though most of the community is probably able to do it or learn how to do it by themselves. I suspect that the majority of us just take it to a shop and pay someone else to do it just so we don't have to fuss with it. I imagine that's how most people feel about their phones. The want something that's very simple and works without a lot of grief. Anything else falls into the realm of crap with which they prefer not to deal.
Like a lot of things (e.g. cars, televisions, etc.) it will start off as a luxury item for the rich and well to do, but eventually we'll find a way to make it cheap enough for the common person. Somebody has to pay the high initial costs while the technology is in its infancy and unless society is down with spending millions on a charity case, it's probably going to be the rich asshole who smoked five packs a day who gets the new lungs.
It's not exactly just, but then again neither is life.
Good for 100 years or your first fire, flood, or other natural disaster that destroys the physical media.
Also, even if these do last for 100 years, it's a certainty that there won't be any hardware left that's capable of reading SD cards. Even if there's some piece of hardware in a museum, it won't be able to interface with existing technology. Given the rapid pace of the tech industry, anything beyond 25 years is just fodder for marketing.
And at the same time managed to be a critical failure because it wasn't usable for the 95% of the population that don't have the technical sophistication to actually use the device in an appreciable manner. The N900 is a nerd's dream phone, but it would seem that the vast majority of people prefer Android phones.
Reuters has the sales pegged at 100,000 or so tops and say that during the same time 8.75 million iPhones were sold. According to this Slashdot article Android phones outsold the iPhone in that quarter. Basic math suggests that roughly 11.6 million Android phones were sold, a full two orders of magnitude greater than the N900. It may be a toy OS compared to what amounts to Debian Linux, but it's actually something normal people can use.
I'm glad you like your phone, but let's not pretend that it's changing the world. Android is something that's actually useful outside of the niche tech-geek market that is Slashdot. If this is what the year of the Linux Smartphone is supposed to be, I wouldn't call it good by any standards.
Google has made Android a polished experience that's acceptable for the everyman. It might be a thin strand of yarn compared to what's possible with the N900, but to the majority of people buying smartphones, the N900 is just rope with which to hang themselves.
What a brutish approach to politics."So a few million die" - so why haven't you resorted to violence against anything your government does that you don't like?
I don't know about you, but if the government does something I don't like, I can peacefully protest without being hauled off or driven over with a tank. Perhaps MightyMartian is lucky enough to live in a country where it is unnecessary to resort to violence in order to protest against the government. When you have a government that won't use violent force against protesters you get the million man march instead of the Boston tea party.
When the strong oppress the weak and no one does anything about it, it's unlikely that the situation will change in any appreciable manner. The weak don't deserve what they get, but they're going to keep on getting it until they stand up for themselves. If you want rights and freedoms you currently don't have, you'd better be willing to die for them because the powers that be aren't just going to give to you freely. Sugarcoating the sad truths of life doesn't magically make the world a better place.
It's horribly depressing, but if the Chinese people want to enjoy a greater level of freedom, a lot of people must be willing to die for it, and a lot of them probably will. As conditions in their country continue to improve, the greater thirst for freedom and subsequent revolution will be as inevitable as the sunset.
That's actually a better signal to noise ratio than most forms of communication. Given that 90% of anything is crud, is is really surprising that Twitter isn't any different?
Yes, but you could just give them multiple sequential workloads. It won't speed up any individual sequential workload very much, but you still get more work done overall.
I wouldn't worry too much. We've been pretty good at finding things to help us keep up with the effects of Moore's law.
Hell, half of the world's population is below the median for competency. I'd wager more than half is below the mean. This is especially true regarding competency regarding computers and the internet.
The only reason it doesn't happen more often is that stupidity-exploiting malice seems to be supply limited at this time.
Slashdot Mirror
Send him off to jail. It's his turn to get a lot of unsolicited male in his inbox.
Other than beauty being in the eye of the beholder (Or beer-holder if you prefer), she's pretty cute for a dictionary editor.
Just use the pinch to zoom to make the target area larger.
As an added bonus you can yell "Enhance!" every time you zoom-in.
There are probably a few *nix admins that wonder why you would use a mouse when you have a perfectly good keyboard. I think that this device might have a place, but I don't think it's something that will be hugely successful.
I haven't used the device so I can't comment how well it works, but Apple's notebook trackpads are usually regarded as pretty good. Personally I always prefer to use a mouse, but I can see how a person might be able to be more productive if the device were really precise, the person was very familiar with it, and the software could take advantage of all of the gestures. Would probably be great for something like Photoshop or video editing.
Some of us are just too used to a mouse to change our ways. After watching new computer users struggle with using a mouse, it makes me think that if I spend enough time learning to become proficient with one of these devices, I might be able to improve my productivity in some cases. It would be interesting to find someone who's really good and compare their ability to use it precise with someone who has exceptional mouse control.
The only problem with that approach is that it doesn't prove that the theory holds for a general population. It's very possible that the theory holds true for those groups of people, but it doesn't really prove anything useful. We can't tell if membership of these groups results in the behavior or if the behavior results in people becoming members of these groups.
At first glance this seems obvious, but if you think about it enough you'll probably be able to remember a few successful relationships you've had with various people who did not share your beliefs at all. Anecdotal evidence of course, but perhaps some humans seek a certain amount of disruption in their lives. The real question is whether people who play online games are a good representation of the general population.
Go read the anandtech article and do some simple math. If you're right next to a tower even holding the phone in such a way as too make the signal as bad as possible, it'll still read five bars. If you're right on the edge of a five bar rating and do the same it can drop it to one or no bars. There are plenty of anecdotal accounts of people who can't reproduce the issue. These people have five bars and really god signal. The people who experience the issue probably have five bars and spotty service. You really can't trust the bars, even still since they aren't a very good indicator of signal. I'd prefer a straight numerical measurement.
The data backs up that ascertation pretty well though. If this were as big of an issue as people were making it sound, the numbers would show it. They probably should have responded sooner, but the phone has been out less than a month. It took Microsoft a lot longer to respond to an issue than impacted way more consumers and didn't manange to catch as much he'll as Apple seems to be getting. For whatever reason people get some kind of massive hardon about everything Apple and either rush to defend them or rush to attack them.
So unless you want to accuse Apple of hiding data, misrepresenting it, or some other diabolical plot just accept that the whole thing was overblown and don't expect them to grovel at your feet over a few anecdotal reports that spun into stories of a massively defective product that would need a recall. He'll, even though Consumer Reports didn't give it their recommendation, they still rated it the best phone on their site. Seems like a non-issue for most. If it is for you, enjoy your free case or just take the phone back and get something else.
Troll, for this?
It might not be overly funny, but I'm guessing it was a play on the colloquialism/phrase, "My shit don't stink." The title includes 'butt' which adds a some double entendre as well. Not overly funny, but I don't even know if this could be a troll. Judging by the author's posts he's not someone who frequently posts troll or flamebait-styled posts either.
I understand that one person's funny is another's not-so-humorous, but this isn't very deserving of a 'Troll' mod. If someone has some spare mod points at least correct this a bit. I'm not suggesting this deserves a +5 funny, but it surely doesn't rate lower than even.
I don't really know that for a lot of that type of content the disgust necessarily comes from the pornographic part. Most people would find a video of people shitting on each other disgusting regardless of whether or not it's pornographic. If you're into that, fair play to you, but it's probably something that the general population won't understand. Two girls, one cup could have been made without any nudity at all and it would be just as disturbing. I'm not sure if I've ever seen porn that I found disturbing simply because it was porn.
Funny thing about power. When you don't have any you deplore the use of it and decry those who abuse it. Once you accumulate a little and get a taste for wielding it, you just make room for the the next batch of squabblers without any power of their own yet.
Funny what $50 billion in revenue will do to a company.
I'm moving to Sweden and starting the Hooker Party.
The party supporters will still get screwed, but not in the way usually associated with politics.
There are a few free markets, but the goods and services offered are illegal. The fact that they are illegal means that there can be no regulation or government oversight because having such would legitimize them and it would be hard for the government to continue to maintain their position on the legality of the product or service. I think you could learn just as many interesting things about economics from a pimp as you could from a professor.
Funny story. When this news broke, I actually took my own phone and looked at the signal strength difference while leaving it set on the table and when I'm holding it. Sure enough, when holding it, it drops a bar, but because it never produced a noticeable degradation in voice quality or anything else. The impact may be noticeable depending on your carrier, but I've never noticed it to be a problem with Verizon in my area. If it's an issue with how the signal is displayed like Apple is claiming, it's not really a big deal.
In order to test to what extent holding the phone produces an actual loss of signal strength, it would be necessary to place a large number of calls while the device is not being held and record the number of dropped calls and to compare that against the number of dropped calls recorded while the device is being held in the hand. I'd wager that there are likely to be more dropped calls while holding it, based off of the technical information I've heard regarding the way the antenna was designed, but I don't believe the difference will be overly large.
Funny thing is that it's not the first time. Some reproduced the issue with an old Nokia candy-bar style phone and put a video of it up on youtube. I don't have the link handy, but some site pointed out a Nexus One discussion thread from several months ago that discussed a the same issue. Just for fun I just took my own phone out of my pocket and observed the different in signal strength when it's just sitting on my desk and when I hold it. It loses a bar, but I've never noticed before because I've never thought to look at it, most likely due to the fact that I generally good good reception on Verizon and wouldn't think to look at it that closely. The only reason so many people are experiencing it for the first time are because the people who buy Apple products have a greater tendency to obsess over shit like this and post about it on the internet. Then the internet denizens, who collectively get hardons over all things Apple, endless talk about it. If it weren't for Apple, this would almost be a non-event that ends of being drowned out by all the other noise.
What a bunch of asshats.
You could let other companies deliver first-class mail under the condition that they must accept all first-class mail and deliver it at a fixed cost regardless of point of origin or delivery. If a private company can do it more efficiently and charge less, by all means let them.
I'm not terribly familiar with the cellphone situation outside of the US, but it's been my understanding that the rest of the world uses GSM (And gets better service at a lower cost, but that's another rant for a different day.) for the most part. While the US market is large and nice to have, it's not the be-all-end-all that the US would like to think of itself as. Even if Verizon were to offer the N900, I can't imagine it suddenly joining the millions-sold club.
The N900 is a device made for the /. crowd, which if you were to step outside of /. and take a good look around you would realize is a very small percentage of the population. The take-away from this is that you can't run the world's largest phone manufacturer and be successful marketing a device that only a minority of the world will love or be able to use. Yeah, it's easy enough for you or I to get by with, but a lot of people don't understand the extent to which the majority of the world's population are technically inept or apathetic. Hell, some Linux users are still skeptical about it being ready for the mass market on the desktop. Should we be surprised that it's not going to fly when put on a phone?
The geek crowd needs to realize that the average Joe is incapable of using Linux on a mobile device and absolutely has even less desire to learn. Fun car analogy: how many /. readers actually change their own oil? I suspect it's a minority, even though most of the community is probably able to do it or learn how to do it by themselves. I suspect that the majority of us just take it to a shop and pay someone else to do it just so we don't have to fuss with it. I imagine that's how most people feel about their phones. The want something that's very simple and works without a lot of grief. Anything else falls into the realm of crap with which they prefer not to deal.
Like a lot of things (e.g. cars, televisions, etc.) it will start off as a luxury item for the rich and well to do, but eventually we'll find a way to make it cheap enough for the common person. Somebody has to pay the high initial costs while the technology is in its infancy and unless society is down with spending millions on a charity case, it's probably going to be the rich asshole who smoked five packs a day who gets the new lungs.
It's not exactly just, but then again neither is life.
Good for 100 years or your first fire, flood, or other natural disaster that destroys the physical media.
Also, even if these do last for 100 years, it's a certainty that there won't be any hardware left that's capable of reading SD cards. Even if there's some piece of hardware in a museum, it won't be able to interface with existing technology. Given the rapid pace of the tech industry, anything beyond 25 years is just fodder for marketing.
And at the same time managed to be a critical failure because it wasn't usable for the 95% of the population that don't have the technical sophistication to actually use the device in an appreciable manner. The N900 is a nerd's dream phone, but it would seem that the vast majority of people prefer Android phones.
Reuters has the sales pegged at 100,000 or so tops and say that during the same time 8.75 million iPhones were sold. According to this Slashdot article Android phones outsold the iPhone in that quarter. Basic math suggests that roughly 11.6 million Android phones were sold, a full two orders of magnitude greater than the N900. It may be a toy OS compared to what amounts to Debian Linux, but it's actually something normal people can use.
I'm glad you like your phone, but let's not pretend that it's changing the world. Android is something that's actually useful outside of the niche tech-geek market that is Slashdot. If this is what the year of the Linux Smartphone is supposed to be, I wouldn't call it good by any standards.
Google has made Android a polished experience that's acceptable for the everyman. It might be a thin strand of yarn compared to what's possible with the N900, but to the majority of people buying smartphones, the N900 is just rope with which to hang themselves.
What a brutish approach to politics."So a few million die" - so why haven't you resorted to violence against anything your government does that you don't like?
I don't know about you, but if the government does something I don't like, I can peacefully protest without being hauled off or driven over with a tank. Perhaps MightyMartian is lucky enough to live in a country where it is unnecessary to resort to violence in order to protest against the government. When you have a government that won't use violent force against protesters you get the million man march instead of the Boston tea party.
When the strong oppress the weak and no one does anything about it, it's unlikely that the situation will change in any appreciable manner. The weak don't deserve what they get, but they're going to keep on getting it until they stand up for themselves. If you want rights and freedoms you currently don't have, you'd better be willing to die for them because the powers that be aren't just going to give to you freely. Sugarcoating the sad truths of life doesn't magically make the world a better place.
It's horribly depressing, but if the Chinese people want to enjoy a greater level of freedom, a lot of people must be willing to die for it, and a lot of them probably will. As conditions in their country continue to improve, the greater thirst for freedom and subsequent revolution will be as inevitable as the sunset.
That's actually a better signal to noise ratio than most forms of communication. Given that 90% of anything is crud, is is really surprising that Twitter isn't any different?
Yes, but you could just give them multiple sequential workloads. It won't speed up any individual sequential workload very much, but you still get more work done overall.
I wouldn't worry too much. We've been pretty good at finding things to help us keep up with the effects of Moore's law.
Hell, half of the world's population is below the median for competency. I'd wager more than half is below the mean. This is especially true regarding competency regarding computers and the internet.
The only reason it doesn't happen more often is that stupidity-exploiting malice seems to be supply limited at this time.
You fool, there is no girl eating a banana. It was all a ruse, a nasty trick designed to play on your insatiable curiosity for the bizarre!
:(
I know because I tried clicking on it
Reminds me of this bash.org quote.