The smartphone is still a fraction of overall market sales, a sizeable fraction, but still not the end-all be-all of sales
I think the general feeling is that smartphone ownership is growing and has the potential to become the dominant type of phone on the market. Whether or not that will happen, no-one knows, but I think there's a parallel being drawn between the increase of smartphone use and the increase of PC ownership during the mass-acceptance of the internet. In any event, I think the phrase 'kill' is being used too literally. Typewriters have been 'killed' long ago, but you can still purchase them.
Besides, not everyone wants to shell out hundreds of dollars when they can just pay ~$30 for a phone from the Verizon kiosk at the mall.
Demand is growing for internet-in-your-pocket.
a GPS stays mounted on the Dashboard of the car
I agree. This is a really really really good reason why the GPS will be hard to totally kill. Even if most cars come with in-dash navigation units, it'll be a while before the market of people that don't have those will be too small to support. However, the value of products like the Nuvi diminishes if you already have something in your pocket that's "good enough".
Try glancing at a map on a 1 inch cellphone screen while driving.
My iPhone screen isn't that much smaller than my GPS screen. Frankly, while driving with the GPS, I don't really look at the map anyway. Basically I use the audio cues and occasionally glance to get a few bits of info that could be text based anyway. I'll concede, though, that I don't represent the masses.
I agree that you'll still be able to buy stand-alone GPS's for the next.. say.. 10 years at least. I don't agree that they'll be a sizable market-share by then. Smart Phones are becoming more and more ubiquitous, the extra size of a GPS isn't buying it anything (like better whiz-bang features), and it's not like the needs of the GPS users are growing much like, for example, the demands of PC users over the years.
I think the idea of two screens the way it's setup is kind of annoying to me, I like having one big screen rather than multiple screens
Can't say I agree. I play GBA games on mine (one screen only) and it annoys me that I have to stop the game to see things like maps or inventory. Give me two screens any-day.
My main gripe is that only one of the screens is touch sensitive.
Now with it's two wide screens they will finally listen to my demands for it to play two movies at the same time! or watch a movie on the top wile playing an old 1 screen game on the bottom, the options are endless mwaahahahha!.... seriously two screen even bigger... don't really see how this is going to improve their sales, they might as well make a four screen device...
I haven't purchased a DSi yet, but I want one. Truth be told, I'd probably lean towards the one with the bigger screen. I think I'm part of their target market, one of those people who haven't purchased a DSi yet.
Taking the same old DS and making the screen bigger isn't going to boost sales the way that going in a new direction would.
No, but it's not like they'd make more money by shifting focus away from a platform that is very popular right now.
They're not doing anything here they haven't done before. See GameBoy Pocket, GameBoy Advance SP, GameBoy Micro, and DS-Lite. You're not offering them anything they don't know already.
Yeah, I can't stand people who say accurate things. They just think they're sooooooooooo smart...
My favorite are those people who are sooOOOo smart that they cannot understand anything unless it's utterly precise. "I cannot work out what you meant when you used the term 'urs'!" Yep, there goes a problem solving machine right there.
Now we're going to have to deal with a rehash of all of that "You shouldn't call it the Millennium Bug, the new Millennium doesn't start until 1/1/2001, morons" BS...
We've definitely turned into a bunch of whiners. We didn't have it near as bad as they did two thousand years ago when they had to convert from BC to AD. I heard that on year zero there was a group of people who didn't want either BC or AD to be used because adding zero to before or after was redundant. Then there was the noisy bunch of dudes that didn't believe in the existence of zero. Carumba.
The public has shown repeatedly that it will value cost above quality.
Then why are people flocking to AT&T for the IPhone? It certainly isn't the least expensive smartphone out there. Perhaps it is because it is the best smartphone out there, and people are willing to put up with a crappy provider to get the device. Perhaps quality does sell, at least for devices.
I think a fundamental problem with discussing this here is that there are (at least) two different perspectives at work. There's the Slashdotter who has read "AT&T network problem" time and time again over the last few months and then there's the iPhone customer who, rather than basing his decision solely on these headlines, knows several people with an iPhone who have never complained about the network. Somebody who has made up their mind that they don't want to touch it at all cannot understand the decision made to do it, who did their research in a different manner.
I'm probably jinxing myself here, but since I'm both a Slashdotter and an iPhone customer, I can tell you what it's like. I've only really seen a network problem once. I went to a party at Venice Beach on the 4th of July. We all got full bars and were trying to call people to help them find their way in. We found that we couldn't make calls! Full bars but no calls? I discovered that if we turned 3G off, the phones would suddenly work. My theory, which is wholly unscientific, is that so many people in the vicinity had iPhones that the tower was effectively DOS'd. That's my whole 'network outage' story in the 11 or so months I've had the service.
I do occasionally get dropped calls. I have not had this happen any more often than it did with Sprint or any other carrier I've had. Most of the time when it does, I've already been on the phone like 2 hours. I think one night it was particularly bad. Like the call dropped 3 or four times. That was unusual. With the exception of the silliness on the 4th of July, it has never made me say "wow, this is the worst service I've ever had!" Given how radios work, I'd be surprised if I ever had a service that had a once-a-year dropped call or something like that.
Most of my coworkers have iPhones. The only ones I've ever heard complain about reception were the ones that bought the original ones. That's not a huge surprise, they don't support 3G (AT&T is shifting resources at the expense of the EDGE network) and they have the metal plate in the back that is suspected of lowering signal quality. Beyond that, everybody's been happy. Word of mouth spreads, more and more people get iPhones. Frankly, nearly all of the complaints I've heard about AT&T and/or the iPhone come from Slashdot.
Maybe AT&T has better service is Los Angeles. I don't know. I'm not claiming to have the answers, here. I don't think 'fashion' has much to do with the people I know having iPhones. I think it's because they know that when they get a phone they're stuck with it for two years, so they want one other people are happy with. That's why before the iPhone, everybody I knew had Treos. (Blackberries and RAZRs being second and third place, respectively.)
I don't think many people are really fighting with AT&T's network. I'll concede, though, that it's difficult to generalize about millions of people.
If it's more convenient to shoehorn every activity into a single monolithic application than "switch between applications," then your desktop environment is built wrong.
That stops being true if there is a lot of overlap between those apps.
Linux, for example, is technically superior to Windows, but its 'gaming quality' is very poor.
Care to back that statement up? You might be surprised at how "technically superior" the Linux kernel is compared to the Windows 2008 Server kernel. In fact you might be surprised at how inferior the Linux kernel might actually be...
The whole point of my post was that 'quality' is subjective. All it takes is for a kernel to have an advantage that works in your favor to be 'superior'.
To put it another way: Higher quality products don't lose because people are masochists.
For one thing, it's annoying because it's almost exactly the same as the mainframe-terminal model, which has been around for decades. Calling it a "cloud" in an effort to make it sound modern and sexy is just marketing drivel and makes it sound like it's something new and fresh...
It's almost exactly the same except for the whole 'being on the internet' thing. That distinction is not so subtle.
do you think they care that their spreadsheet calculations are being performed at another location and then being updated on their screen, versus being performed on the mysterious blinking box on the floor under the desk?
Yes. Look at how many people have Hotmail accounts.
"The cloud" differs from the mainframes of yore in only one important aspect that I can determine -- its potential for scalability and near-instant rollout of additional "servers".
Really? That's all the differentiation you can see? You think a business wouldn't see much difference between using Google Docs on-line and using a Google Docs server in their own building?
but since when does anyone listen to us when we say "This is a bad idea"?
Why would they? It's not like they're being told it's a bad idea by somebody sees the difference between a mainframe and a server on the internet.
Everything is a 'bad idea' on Slashdot. That's how people earn Insightful mods.
So, let me see, if I get this right. For some reason my web hosting (collocated dedicated server, visualization, load balancing servers) has just become "cloud computing" because they take place somewhere other than my desktop?
No. They became cloud computing when the servers were doing the job your desktop normally did and you were using your computer as basically just a forwarder for keyboard inputs. Your blog? Not 'cloud'. Using Google Docs? Cloud.
It is a silly piece of marketing to rebrand the client / server paradigm.
I don't really disagree. Can't say my panties are bunched about it, either. Now that we have the masses using these services 'cloud' is easier to pass on to Joe Sixpack than 'client/server-your-work-is-over-there-and-not-over-here'.
In any event, which side of your NIC your program runs on matters. Ignorance of this is comical.
Slashdot Mirror
The smartphone is still a fraction of overall market sales, a sizeable fraction, but still not the end-all be-all of sales
I think the general feeling is that smartphone ownership is growing and has the potential to become the dominant type of phone on the market. Whether or not that will happen, no-one knows, but I think there's a parallel being drawn between the increase of smartphone use and the increase of PC ownership during the mass-acceptance of the internet. In any event, I think the phrase 'kill' is being used too literally. Typewriters have been 'killed' long ago, but you can still purchase them.
Besides, not everyone wants to shell out hundreds of dollars when they can just pay ~$30 for a phone from the Verizon kiosk at the mall.
Demand is growing for internet-in-your-pocket.
a GPS stays mounted on the Dashboard of the car
I agree. This is a really really really good reason why the GPS will be hard to totally kill. Even if most cars come with in-dash navigation units, it'll be a while before the market of people that don't have those will be too small to support. However, the value of products like the Nuvi diminishes if you already have something in your pocket that's "good enough".
Try glancing at a map on a 1 inch cellphone screen while driving.
My iPhone screen isn't that much smaller than my GPS screen. Frankly, while driving with the GPS, I don't really look at the map anyway. Basically I use the audio cues and occasionally glance to get a few bits of info that could be text based anyway. I'll concede, though, that I don't represent the masses.
I agree that you'll still be able to buy stand-alone GPS's for the next .. say.. 10 years at least. I don't agree that they'll be a sizable market-share by then. Smart Phones are becoming more and more ubiquitous, the extra size of a GPS isn't buying it anything (like better whiz-bang features), and it's not like the needs of the GPS users are growing much like, for example, the demands of PC users over the years.
If MS included this in Windows, you'd never get to see the login screen because the CPU would be so busy fixing bugs.
Geez... imagine the sheer volume of .CONF files a Linux user would have to waft through just to get this to check a distro for bugs.
you want my opinion? get an Ipod Touch. save yourself some time and money, and become part of the Apple wave.
I have an iPod Touch and it's no Nintendo DS.
I think the idea of two screens the way it's setup is kind of annoying to me, I like having one big screen rather than multiple screens
Can't say I agree. I play GBA games on mine (one screen only) and it annoys me that I have to stop the game to see things like maps or inventory. Give me two screens any-day.
My main gripe is that only one of the screens is touch sensitive.
Great, I can just imagine all the corny jokes Slashdotters are goin[NO CARRIER]
lo[NO CARRIER]
Ha! Now you'll never know if I was laughing out loud or just correcting you!
Now with it's two wide screens they will finally listen to my demands for it to play two movies at the same time! or watch a movie on the top wile playing an old 1 screen game on the bottom, the options are endless mwaahahahha!.... seriously two screen even bigger... don't really see how this is going to improve their sales, they might as well make a four screen device...
I haven't purchased a DSi yet, but I want one. Truth be told, I'd probably lean towards the one with the bigger screen. I think I'm part of their target market, one of those people who haven't purchased a DSi yet.
Taking the same old DS and making the screen bigger isn't going to boost sales the way that going in a new direction would.
No, but it's not like they'd make more money by shifting focus away from a platform that is very popular right now.
They're not doing anything here they haven't done before. See GameBoy Pocket, GameBoy Advance SP, GameBoy Micro, and DS-Lite. You're not offering them anything they don't know already.
When your portable costs more then your home system, something is wrong with your pricing path.
To be fair, the DSi is cheaper than a Wii. This is the 'premium' edition for those who want it to look a little nicer cosmetically.
I wonder if somebody drove around looking for unpatched routers if they'd call it Turkey Bombing.
New Improvements On the Attacks On WPA/TKIP
... in Cincinatti!!
*Frrppbptbtbptbpt!*
Flame on!
Yeah, I can't stand people who say accurate things. They just think they're sooooooooooo smart...
My favorite are those people who are sooOOOo smart that they cannot understand anything unless it's utterly precise. "I cannot work out what you meant when you used the term 'urs'!" Yep, there goes a problem solving machine right there.
Now we're going to have to deal with a rehash of all of that "You shouldn't call it the Millennium Bug, the new Millennium doesn't start until 1/1/2001, morons" BS...
We've definitely turned into a bunch of whiners. We didn't have it near as bad as they did two thousand years ago when they had to convert from BC to AD. I heard that on year zero there was a group of people who didn't want either BC or AD to be used because adding zero to before or after was redundant. Then there was the noisy bunch of dudes that didn't believe in the existence of zero. Carumba.
Give it a break, shillboy
We've all seen more than enough paid endorsements of Microsoft's latest exercise in blandness.
Settle down, Linus.
Then why are people flocking to AT&T for the IPhone? It certainly isn't the least expensive smartphone out there. Perhaps it is because it is the best smartphone out there, and people are willing to put up with a crappy provider to get the device. Perhaps quality does sell, at least for devices.
I think a fundamental problem with discussing this here is that there are (at least) two different perspectives at work. There's the Slashdotter who has read "AT&T network problem" time and time again over the last few months and then there's the iPhone customer who, rather than basing his decision solely on these headlines, knows several people with an iPhone who have never complained about the network. Somebody who has made up their mind that they don't want to touch it at all cannot understand the decision made to do it, who did their research in a different manner.
I'm probably jinxing myself here, but since I'm both a Slashdotter and an iPhone customer, I can tell you what it's like. I've only really seen a network problem once. I went to a party at Venice Beach on the 4th of July. We all got full bars and were trying to call people to help them find their way in. We found that we couldn't make calls! Full bars but no calls? I discovered that if we turned 3G off, the phones would suddenly work. My theory, which is wholly unscientific, is that so many people in the vicinity had iPhones that the tower was effectively DOS'd. That's my whole 'network outage' story in the 11 or so months I've had the service.
I do occasionally get dropped calls. I have not had this happen any more often than it did with Sprint or any other carrier I've had. Most of the time when it does, I've already been on the phone like 2 hours. I think one night it was particularly bad. Like the call dropped 3 or four times. That was unusual. With the exception of the silliness on the 4th of July, it has never made me say "wow, this is the worst service I've ever had!" Given how radios work, I'd be surprised if I ever had a service that had a once-a-year dropped call or something like that.
Most of my coworkers have iPhones. The only ones I've ever heard complain about reception were the ones that bought the original ones. That's not a huge surprise, they don't support 3G (AT&T is shifting resources at the expense of the EDGE network) and they have the metal plate in the back that is suspected of lowering signal quality. Beyond that, everybody's been happy. Word of mouth spreads, more and more people get iPhones. Frankly, nearly all of the complaints I've heard about AT&T and/or the iPhone come from Slashdot.
Maybe AT&T has better service is Los Angeles. I don't know. I'm not claiming to have the answers, here. I don't think 'fashion' has much to do with the people I know having iPhones. I think it's because they know that when they get a phone they're stuck with it for two years, so they want one other people are happy with. That's why before the iPhone, everybody I knew had Treos. (Blackberries and RAZRs being second and third place, respectively.)
I don't think many people are really fighting with AT&T's network. I'll concede, though, that it's difficult to generalize about millions of people.
I was under the impression that 1080p resolution was just a hair lower than 2K resolution. So wouldn't 4K be roughly 2x HD res?
4096 * 2048 = 8388608
2048 * 1024 = 2097152
8388608 / 2097152 = 4 (as opposed to 2)
When you double the number, you double both dimensions. Double 2 = 4. :)
I didn't defend anything. Reread his post, then mine.
Why do breathless writers always say "saving lives" when they refer to military applications? They're about taking lives. Just taking different ones.
The lives they're saving are on our side. Also, this article isn't talking about Android being used as a weapon.
shut your filthy fucking sewer, you fucking shitbag pud whacker.
Do you kiss your mom the same way I do with that mouth?
If it's more convenient to shoehorn every activity into a single monolithic application than "switch between applications," then your desktop environment is built wrong.
That stops being true if there is a lot of overlap between those apps.
Linux, for example, is technically superior to Windows, but its 'gaming quality' is very poor.
Care to back that statement up? You might be surprised at how "technically superior" the Linux kernel is compared to the Windows 2008 Server kernel. In fact you might be surprised at how inferior the Linux kernel might actually be...
The whole point of my post was that 'quality' is subjective. All it takes is for a kernel to have an advantage that works in your favor to be 'superior'.
To put it another way: Higher quality products don't lose because people are masochists.
Popularity != Quality
When talking about something as complex as a smart-phone, quality is not an objective measurement.
Linux, for example, is technically superior to Windows, but its 'gaming quality' is very poor.
It may be a distinction... But not a new or relevant one unless you have been living under a rock for the last 20 years.
Okay, you're right. We're still doing things exactly the way we were back in 1989.
For one thing, it's annoying because it's almost exactly the same as the mainframe-terminal model, which has been around for decades. Calling it a "cloud" in an effort to make it sound modern and sexy is just marketing drivel and makes it sound like it's something new and fresh...
It's almost exactly the same except for the whole 'being on the internet' thing. That distinction is not so subtle.
do you think they care that their spreadsheet calculations are being performed at another location and then being updated on their screen, versus being performed on the mysterious blinking box on the floor under the desk?
Yes. Look at how many people have Hotmail accounts.
"The cloud" differs from the mainframes of yore in only one important aspect that I can determine -- its potential for scalability and near-instant rollout of additional "servers".
Really? That's all the differentiation you can see? You think a business wouldn't see much difference between using Google Docs on-line and using a Google Docs server in their own building?
but since when does anyone listen to us when we say "This is a bad idea"?
Why would they? It's not like they're being told it's a bad idea by somebody sees the difference between a mainframe and a server on the internet.
Everything is a 'bad idea' on Slashdot. That's how people earn Insightful mods.
So, let me see, if I get this right. For some reason my web hosting (collocated dedicated server, visualization, load balancing servers) has just become "cloud computing" because they take place somewhere other than my desktop?
No. They became cloud computing when the servers were doing the job your desktop normally did and you were using your computer as basically just a forwarder for keyboard inputs. Your blog? Not 'cloud'. Using Google Docs? Cloud.
It is a silly piece of marketing to rebrand the client / server paradigm.
I don't really disagree. Can't say my panties are bunched about it, either. Now that we have the masses using these services 'cloud' is easier to pass on to Joe Sixpack than 'client/server-your-work-is-over-there-and-not-over-here'.
In any event, which side of your NIC your program runs on matters. Ignorance of this is comical.