The Nokia N7xx-8xx were really, really nice for a smartphone
They weren't smartphones, they were internet tablets.
But the N900 is. I own one, and am holding onto it tight for now. Is it perfect? No, mostly because a lot of its applications are a bit too slow. But it's a good start, I'm thinking if they had invested real money into improving and polishing this, and done that early enough, maemo could have been a competitive platform. Keeping Qt as the glue between their two platforms (symbian and maemo) during a potentially long transition phase was also a reasonable strategy. The dumb- or dumbish- phone market is less profitable, but it's not gone, and Nokia always had a good position in it. The thing I find most baffling with the WP7 switch is that I do not see what they plan to sell to replace their low-end phones...
...And the ONLY reason it got as far as it did, was because of all the lame-ass website admins. who got infected by the fake banner ad, and then the genius move of then poisoning several Search Engines' Page Rank systems, so those sites came up high in search results. So, the REAL SUCCESSFUL "attack" was on those websites.
Clearly, you are not very informed about modern cybercrime. Mass website compromises are probably the main way malware is distributed nowadays (on any platform), either through drive-by downloads or by tricking the users (trojans). Macs are no different, now that they are big enough to be a target.
If word processing is computer science, then learning to type on a keyboard is English Literature. The first time a kid has to write an essay and deliver it, he will learn how to use a word processor.
Wow, I think you need to provide a link to a credible site for this one. I am betting myself that the housing industry requires far more trees to be cut than the cattle industry. Most grazing pastures are at altitudes that typically on pines/spruces like to grow, plus, they (ranch managers) like the trees in the pastures to provide weather coverage for the animals.
The meat industry does not feed cattle by letting them graze. What kind of world do you think you live in? The cattle are fed feed crops that are farmed on acres of land that could otherwise be used for crops for humans, or forests, or whatever. I am not an anti-meat integralist, I am not even a vegetarian, but it is a fact that beef is practically the least efficient of all food sources, in terms of the number of humans that can subsist per acre. Pork is more efficient than beef, poultry is more efficient than pork, and vegetables are more efficient than poultry.
The housing industry is not even a blip on the radar. Fertile land is used for agriculture. Did you know that the majority of trees in the world are cultivated?
The economist recently did a report on how we are going to be able to feed the world's growing population (or not). Here is a link to the main article:
http://www.economist.com/node/18200618. And here is another one: http://www.economist.com/node/18200678. But there were many other articles on specific subjects.
The take-away lessons I got from reading all that, was that we have a very limited supply of non-used, fertile land, mostly concentrated in places like brazil where recent technological advances have made previously useless land viable. Water is the other bottleneck. And the expansion of meat-eating habits is also a problem,
because it requires more land and more water per person than a vegetarian diet. So yes, your hamburger puts more pressure on the forests than the lumber industry.
If I were still in high school, I would agree with you. What I took away from 1984 after the first reading is all the technological nightmarish oppression that Orwell depicted. When I read the book again, though, that changed. I'm not at all saying that Orwell wasn't warning about invasive technology, but the bigger point of the book is the control the state has over the people's hearts and minds. It's not about the surveillance, it's about what the surveillance is meant to achieve. All the totalitarian measures seemed to be more of a stopgap until the language was finally reduced to meaninglessness via Newspeak and people's ability for thought was so hemmed in by the basic language filled with all sorts of shades of meaning. When Orwell writes about the Two Minutes Hate and the anti-sex propaganda, he makes it clear that those are the more dangerous dangers, because instead of people's having better outlets for their energiesâ"namely, sexâ"all their passions and energies were put toward the service of Big Brother and the government above them. The surveillance is to help enforce that, but the ultimate goal is to make it impossible for people to think about anything else, to want to think about anything else. If all that we get from 1984 is that surveillance is bad, we're not reading it right.
I agree that newspeak is the most interesting (and scary) part of 1984...
For example, and yes, this is real, they make crops that have weaknesses so that you need to buy more pesticides of the kind they sell.
Not sure about that, though they definitely make plants resistant to a herbicide that they then sell you. But for me the worse is the fact that they sell seeds such that the next generation is not fertile (will not grow). So you cannot just plant some of last year's crop, as farmers have done for millennia. Instead, you need to buy more. If there is a serious economic/social or natural disruption to this supply chain, people will starve. This is mass murder waiting to happen. There is no possible justification for this. In my opinion it should be illegal to develop or sell such stunted seeds.
Letting a company be in charge of the raw material for your food is a very bad idea, because they think on a short term for profit basis, and do not care if they mess up the nutritional value of the food or otherwise make things worse for everyone around them.
Exactly. I do not have anything against GM crops in general, I just do not trust the interests of the corporations who develop these crops to be aligned with the interests of humanity, though there is some overlap of course (more productive crops are profitable can help feed the world).
Windows XP was a stable, hugely popular operating system that has had over a decade of bug and security patches. Give me XP over the latest xnix flavor any day.
The thing is, there is essentially only one flavor of windows, despite the differently packaged and priced versions. And it is essentially an OS for end-users that privileges usability over security. They only step back from obviously bad security practices after it has become a widely exploited and publicized problem. (C: shared by default over SMB? Auto-run? The holes that windows 7 put to make Vista's annoying UAC policy less annoying?).
Your latest ubuntu flavor may face similar trade-offs, but there are UNIX versions out there that have not been making such compromises because they target a different audience (the military and other highly paranoid organizations).
This means that the longer one type of slot at a casino doesn't pay out, the higher the odds are that they will soon.
It is for exactly this lack of comprehension of odds that the casinos put up the "recent numbers" boards at the roulette tables, and people bet based on what numbers or colors haven't shown up for a while.
Casinos make money when you gamble stupidly.
Casinos make money when you gamble. Remember that green 0 on the roulette?
If you learn the syntax inside and out, perl has some of the most concise verbs I've ever used. 90% of the perl scripts I've written were 1 liners (where a line can exceed 200 characters).
perl -ne 'chomp; (/start/.../end/) && $words{$_}++; END { print join "\n", map { "$_ : $words{$_}" } keys %words }' file.txt
200+ char perl one-liner scripts? That's software engineering for you. Hurray for debuggability and maintainability...
For a large enterprise, the TCO of Windows may be lower because of all the management tools available for the platform.
For a home user, the TCO of a Mac may be lower because Macs tend not to have to be reinstalled (few home users actually keep their Windows media, so it necessitates a new copy of the OS). Combine this with the fact that Apple is the only game in town for decent consumer level CS [1], and at that level, Macs can be worth the price of admission.
You may be right, I'm not saying Linux is the best option for everyone (though it is for me). My point is that TCO is hard to measure and, as you say, context-dependent: I am sure if you try hard enough you can come up with any numbers marketing requires of you, and prove that horse-and-cart's TCO is much lower than your SUV's.
"Total cost of ownership (TCO) for a Mac vs a comparable Wintel device over 3-4 years is actually lower!" Think about that."
That's just an Apple variant of the usual Microsoft marketing drivel against Linux... None of it is based on facts of any kind. My bullshit filter also goes off when anyone says "think about that" after producing some very vague and unsubstantiated numbers.
FYI, destruction of the temple was around 70 A.D. Within the timing of the current generation prophecy.
Except that the gospels, that contain the prophecy in question, where written a couple centuries later... Let me see... I can make a prophecy that civil war will break out on the united states, and the slavers will lose...
I'd love to choke the hell out of the next wank who takes an old idea and files a patent for "$foo, on a $bar device" then sues all the little guys using that prior art.
Is $foo known? Is $bar known? Then the combination - "all elements" - is unpatentable. But, contrary to your beliefs, there are no patents that claim "$foo, on a $bar device."
Oh yeah? What about all those patents on doing $foo on the internet? or on the web? or on a wireless device?
I do not know what is written in patent law, but in practice obvious combinations of known things are patented all the time, such as "using $foo to solve problem $bar" when $foo is one of the first couple things that an engineer would think of when faced with problem $bar. I recall reading a patent on using regular expressions and logical operators (I kid you not) to do network intrusion detection.
they fail to address the matrix of which service and format is support/authorized for which device
Matrix, schmatrix.
Calibre finds, downloads, converts, views, organizes, tweaks, and edits just about every kind of digital book from/into just about every format. And it's free.
So long as you are willing to crack the DRM first, which is morally irreprehensible, but illegal in jurisdictions with stupid laws like the DMCA.
I can give you a real world example. Virgin Media claims that their broadband is "unlimited" but actually the package I am on (10 meg) is max 1.5GB between 4PM and 9PM.
If they advertise that as unlimited then they are in for a good spanking...
I wouldn't be sure about the going down part. Many telco-executives have talked about instituting data caps because people use too much
They can talk all they want, but in a competitive market (which some european countries have, like finland and austria and even the UK) they would not be able to raise prices without losing customers and money. Of course, if the US had a competitive market people wouldn't be paying 100$ a month for a plan... in europe nobody pays more than say 35 euros a month, and that's for a bells-and-whistles plan with free ponies on the side.
OMG, it's costs jobs. Yeah, so do cars, and buses, and whatever YOU do for a living.
Less costs to the company always reduces prices over all.
Hey, you want to waste your time waiting in line, fine., But don't make shit up to excuse your Luddite behavior.
GP Poster's second point is not luddite: if I don't get a discount for using self-checkout, why should I use it?
In Italy, the highway system has toll stations where you pay, and to reduce costs and queues they have introduced a wireless thingy you can use so you don't have to stop at the toll booths, just slow down to a reasonable speed and go through a gate that charges you automatically.
I have nothing against that, it makes perfect sense, but I refuse to have to pay extra (a yearly fee, not just the cost of the device!) to allow them to cut jobs. I should get a discount for helping them reduce their costs.
The "main stream" media has been deliberately neutral for a very long time (despite having overwhelming "conservative" ownership). We have not had truly polarized mainstream media since William Randolph Hurst was alive and in control of a lot of the media.
Mainstream media has been neutral in the sense that it does not state its opinions, and instead repeats the opinions of pundits and experts on both sides of the debate, and tries to give the impression of sitting somewhere in the reasonable middle between two extremes... as if the truth always did lie in the middle.
Or in other, and better, words:
Today’s mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, unbiased and objective, presenting both or all sides as if they were on the sidelines in a game in which only the players—the government and its opponents—can participate. They have increasingly become common carriers, transmitters of other people’s ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance and at times even accuracy.
Leslie Lamport' s comment on distributed systems applies:
"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get something done because a machine I've never heard of is down."
This is even more so with the "Cloud". Think 99.99% uptime?
(In many cases) The question is not whether the cloud gets you 99.99% uptime. It is whether it gets you better up-time than what you can run in-house for the same price. It's easy to insult the amazon guys when they fuck up, but the availability they offer is certainly better than what a small company can get from their single part-time admin who does something else as a day job. And even if you are a small tech company, where in theory anybody has the knowledge to run a few services, in practice it is very easy to make mistakes, even for smart people.
And when you scale up, the cloud can scale up with you. Of course, by the time you're google you'll be running your own data centers...
Back in 2001 or so I visited a robotics lab at a tokyo university, and was shown some demos. There were several things that seem to be along the same line of thought as the hugginator.
A "video-conference" system for very low bandwidth applications, meant to be used for customer service in transport systems and the like. It did not transmit images: instead, it recognized your expression (smile, frown, etc) and produced a manga-style depiction of the expression at the other end.
An experiment on human-computer interaction based on rat-robot real-rat interaction. Basically a rat is sitting in a box together with two vaguely rat-like robots. The evil rat robot electroshocks the rat whenever it comes near. The good rat robot leads the rat to food. We were shown a video of the two robots spinning around in the box, with the rat always keeping the good robot between himself and the bad one.
A flute playing robot that actually blew into a flute with some kind of mouth.
A nano-manipulation robot for handling small object, base on the principle of chopsticks.
Oh and the ticket machines in the tokyo underground show an animation of a lady bowing to you to say thank you... so it's obviously deeply ingrained.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that Elop has a Blackberry or a Windows 7 phone. It starts at the top. He should own and use the N8.
I guess the E7 or something would be more appropriate: that's their top end business phone. The N8 is consumer.
They weren't smartphones, they were internet tablets.
But the N900 is. I own one, and am holding onto it tight for now. Is it perfect? No, mostly because a lot of its applications are a bit too slow. But it's a good start, I'm thinking if they had invested real money into improving and polishing this, and done that early enough, maemo could have been a competitive platform. Keeping Qt as the glue between their two platforms (symbian and maemo) during a potentially long transition phase was also a reasonable strategy. The dumb- or dumbish- phone market is less profitable, but it's not gone, and Nokia always had a good position in it. The thing I find most baffling with the WP7 switch is that I do not see what they plan to sell to replace their low-end phones...
...And the ONLY reason it got as far as it did, was because of all the lame-ass website admins. who got infected by the fake banner ad, and then the genius move of then poisoning several Search Engines' Page Rank systems, so those sites came up high in search results. So, the REAL SUCCESSFUL "attack" was on those websites.
Clearly, you are not very informed about modern cybercrime. Mass website compromises are probably the main way malware is distributed nowadays (on any platform), either through drive-by downloads or by tricking the users (trojans). Macs are no different, now that they are big enough to be a target.
If word processing is computer science, then learning to type on a keyboard is English Literature. The first time a kid has to write an essay and deliver it, he will learn how to use a word processor.
Wow, I think you need to provide a link to a credible site for this one. I am betting myself that the housing industry requires far more trees to be cut than the cattle industry. Most grazing pastures are at altitudes that typically on pines/spruces like to grow, plus, they (ranch managers) like the trees in the pastures to provide weather coverage for the animals.
The meat industry does not feed cattle by letting them graze. What kind of world do you think you live in? The cattle are fed feed crops that are farmed on acres of land that could otherwise be used for crops for humans, or forests, or whatever. I am not an anti-meat integralist, I am not even a vegetarian, but it is a fact that beef is practically the least efficient of all food sources, in terms of the number of humans that can subsist per acre. Pork is more efficient than beef, poultry is more efficient than pork, and vegetables are more efficient than poultry.
The housing industry is not even a blip on the radar. Fertile land is used for agriculture. Did you know that the majority of trees in the world are cultivated?
The economist recently did a report on how we are going to be able to feed the world's growing population (or not). Here is a link to the main article: http://www.economist.com/node/18200618. And here is another one: http://www.economist.com/node/18200678. But there were many other articles on specific subjects.
The take-away lessons I got from reading all that, was that we have a very limited supply of non-used, fertile land, mostly concentrated in places like brazil where recent technological advances have made previously useless land viable. Water is the other bottleneck. And the expansion of meat-eating habits is also a problem, because it requires more land and more water per person than a vegetarian diet. So yes, your hamburger puts more pressure on the forests than the lumber industry.
If I were still in high school, I would agree with you. What I took away from 1984 after the first reading is all the technological nightmarish oppression that Orwell depicted. When I read the book again, though, that changed. I'm not at all saying that Orwell wasn't warning about invasive technology, but the bigger point of the book is the control the state has over the people's hearts and minds. It's not about the surveillance, it's about what the surveillance is meant to achieve. All the totalitarian measures seemed to be more of a stopgap until the language was finally reduced to meaninglessness via Newspeak and people's ability for thought was so hemmed in by the basic language filled with all sorts of shades of meaning. When Orwell writes about the Two Minutes Hate and the anti-sex propaganda, he makes it clear that those are the more dangerous dangers, because instead of people's having better outlets for their energiesâ"namely, sexâ"all their passions and energies were put toward the service of Big Brother and the government above them. The surveillance is to help enforce that, but the ultimate goal is to make it impossible for people to think about anything else, to want to think about anything else. If all that we get from 1984 is that surveillance is bad, we're not reading it right.
I agree that newspeak is the most interesting (and scary) part of 1984...
For example, and yes, this is real, they make crops that have weaknesses so that you need to buy more pesticides of the kind they sell.
Not sure about that, though they definitely make plants resistant to a herbicide that they then sell you. But for me the worse is the fact that they sell seeds such that the next generation is not fertile (will not grow). So you cannot just plant some of last year's crop, as farmers have done for millennia. Instead, you need to buy more. If there is a serious economic/social or natural disruption to this supply chain, people will starve. This is mass murder waiting to happen. There is no possible justification for this. In my opinion it should be illegal to develop or sell such stunted seeds.
Letting a company be in charge of the raw material for your food is a very bad idea, because they think on a short term for profit basis, and do not care if they mess up the nutritional value of the food or otherwise make things worse for everyone around them.
Exactly. I do not have anything against GM crops in general, I just do not trust the interests of the corporations who develop these crops to be aligned with the interests of humanity, though there is some overlap of course (more productive crops are profitable can help feed the world).
Windows XP was a stable, hugely popular operating system that has had over a decade of bug and security patches. Give me XP over the latest xnix flavor any day.
The thing is, there is essentially only one flavor of windows, despite the differently packaged and priced versions. And it is essentially an OS for end-users that privileges usability over security. They only step back from obviously bad security practices after it has become a widely exploited and publicized problem. (C: shared by default over SMB? Auto-run? The holes that windows 7 put to make Vista's annoying UAC policy less annoying?).
Your latest ubuntu flavor may face similar trade-offs, but there are UNIX versions out there that have not been making such compromises because they target a different audience (the military and other highly paranoid organizations).
Latin for "law that let's us put whoever the fuck we want in jail"
It's not latin, it's french.
This means that the longer one type of slot at a casino doesn't pay out, the higher the odds are that they will soon.
It is for exactly this lack of comprehension of odds that the casinos put up the "recent numbers" boards at the roulette tables, and people bet based on what numbers or colors haven't shown up for a while.
Casinos make money when you gamble stupidly.
Casinos make money when you gamble. Remember that green 0 on the roulette?
If you learn the syntax inside and out, perl has some of the most concise verbs I've ever used. 90% of the perl scripts I've written were 1 liners (where a line can exceed 200 characters). perl -ne 'chomp; (/start/ ... /end/) && $words{$_}++; END { print join "\n", map { "$_ : $words{$_}" } keys %words }' file.txt
200+ char perl one-liner scripts? That's software engineering for you. Hurray for debuggability and maintainability...
The TCO is so dependant on conditions.
For a large enterprise, the TCO of Windows may be lower because of all the management tools available for the platform.
For a home user, the TCO of a Mac may be lower because Macs tend not to have to be reinstalled (few home users actually keep their Windows media, so it necessitates a new copy of the OS). Combine this with the fact that Apple is the only game in town for decent consumer level CS [1], and at that level, Macs can be worth the price of admission.
You may be right, I'm not saying Linux is the best option for everyone (though it is for me). My point is that TCO is hard to measure and, as you say, context-dependent: I am sure if you try hard enough you can come up with any numbers marketing requires of you, and prove that horse-and-cart's TCO is much lower than your SUV's.
"Total cost of ownership (TCO) for a Mac vs a comparable Wintel device over 3-4 years is actually lower!" Think about that."
That's just an Apple variant of the usual Microsoft marketing drivel against Linux... None of it is based on facts of any kind. My bullshit filter also goes off when anyone says "think about that" after producing some very vague and unsubstantiated numbers.
FYI, destruction of the temple was around 70 A.D. Within the timing of the current generation prophecy.
Except that the gospels, that contain the prophecy in question, where written a couple centuries later... Let me see... I can make a prophecy that civil war will break out on the united states, and the slavers will lose...
I'd love to choke the hell out of the next wank who takes an old idea and files a patent for "$foo, on a $bar device" then sues all the little guys using that prior art.
Is $foo known? Is $bar known? Then the combination - "all elements" - is unpatentable. But, contrary to your beliefs, there are no patents that claim "$foo, on a $bar device."
Oh yeah? What about all those patents on doing $foo on the internet? or on the web? or on a wireless device?
I do not know what is written in patent law, but in practice obvious combinations of known things are patented all the time, such as "using $foo to solve problem $bar" when $foo is one of the first couple things that an engineer would think of when faced with problem $bar. I recall reading a patent on using regular expressions and logical operators (I kid you not) to do network intrusion detection.
they fail to address the matrix of which service and format is support/authorized for which device
Matrix, schmatrix.
Calibre finds, downloads, converts, views, organizes, tweaks, and edits just about every kind of digital book from/into just about every format. And it's free.
So long as you are willing to crack the DRM first, which is morally irreprehensible, but illegal in jurisdictions with stupid laws like the DMCA.
I can give you a real world example. Virgin Media claims that their broadband is "unlimited" but actually the package I am on (10 meg) is max 1.5GB between 4PM and 9PM.
If they advertise that as unlimited then they are in for a good spanking...
I wouldn't be sure about the going down part. Many telco-executives have talked about instituting data caps because people use too much
They can talk all they want, but in a competitive market (which some european countries have, like finland and austria and even the UK) they would not be able to raise prices without losing customers and money. Of course, if the US had a competitive market people wouldn't be paying 100$ a month for a plan... in europe nobody pays more than say 35 euros a month, and that's for a bells-and-whistles plan with free ponies on the side.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/cdc-officials-announce-free-ice-cream-for-everyone,17611/
OMG, it's costs jobs. Yeah, so do cars, and buses, and whatever YOU do for a living.
Less costs to the company always reduces prices over all.
Hey, you want to waste your time waiting in line, fine., But don't make shit up to excuse your Luddite behavior.
GP Poster's second point is not luddite: if I don't get a discount for using self-checkout, why should I use it?
In Italy, the highway system has toll stations where you pay, and to reduce costs and queues they have introduced a wireless thingy you can use so you don't have to stop at the toll booths, just slow down to a reasonable speed and go through a gate that charges you automatically.
I have nothing against that, it makes perfect sense, but I refuse to have to pay extra (a yearly fee, not just the cost of the device!) to allow them to cut jobs. I should get a discount for helping them reduce their costs.
The "main stream" media has been deliberately neutral for a very long time (despite having overwhelming "conservative" ownership). We have not had truly polarized mainstream media since William Randolph Hurst was alive and in control of a lot of the media.
Mainstream media has been neutral in the sense that it does not state its opinions, and instead repeats the opinions of pundits and experts on both sides of the debate, and tries to give the impression of sitting somewhere in the reasonable middle between two extremes... as if the truth always did lie in the middle.
Or in other, and better, words:
Today’s mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, unbiased and objective, presenting both or all sides as if they were on the sidelines in a game in which only the players—the government and its opponents—can participate. They have increasingly become common carriers, transmitters of other people’s ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance and at times even accuracy.
Give these a read: http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/1851 http://archive.pressthink.org/2008/03/14/pincus_neutrality.html
Leslie Lamport' s comment on distributed systems applies:
"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get something done because a machine I've never heard of is down."
This is even more so with the "Cloud". Think 99.99% uptime?
(In many cases) The question is not whether the cloud gets you 99.99% uptime. It is whether it gets you better up-time than what you can run in-house for the same price. It's easy to insult the amazon guys when they fuck up, but the availability they offer is certainly better than what a small company can get from their single part-time admin who does something else as a day job. And even if you are a small tech company, where in theory anybody has the knowledge to run a few services, in practice it is very easy to make mistakes, even for smart people.
And when you scale up, the cloud can scale up with you. Of course, by the time you're google you'll be running your own data centers...
hmpf.. slashdot seems to have a very odd interpretation of html lists...