I don't think the kids who you're talking about - the ones who are excessively medicated - are the ones with mental health problems. They're probably too far into a drugged-up stupor to get upset about anything. Besides, at least the parents are paying some sort of attention to the kid, if they've gone to the trouble to take them to doctor's appointments and paid the money to medicate them.
Mind you, this is anecdotal, but the most messed up people I have seen are the ones who had family problems. Their parents were either Dead, Distant, or Divorced. They were the children of mothers and/or fathers who had no time for them because the parent(s) were too busy working, cooking, cleaning, or watching TV to give their children the love they need to develop into healthy adults.
These kids were taught right and wrong not by mom or pop, but by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Final Fantasy. They learned about love from Disney, where people who don't know each other can live happily ever after when they first meet, and then they're thrust into a real world where 95% of humans will take advantage of that attitude.
Kids are not plants. Food, water, and shelter are not sufficient. Too many humans are having children that they aren't ready or willing to provide for, either financially or emotionally.
One human drags his finger around a few touch screen cell phones and starts making what appears to be "statements of fact" about the quality and accuracy of those phones. Excuse me if I don't consider the results to be rigorous.
Look at how loaded the headline is. It definitely deserves to be here on slashdot, that's for sure. Go look for topics where the Droid beats the iPhone and you see the exact opposite in effect; people offering apologies for the iPhone or denigrating, etc.
The guy in the linked article goes on about the quality of the construction of the touch screen. Since he's feeling ambitious, he should try the scratch test, to see how easy it is to scratch the various screens. I remember reading that Moto put a lot of money into making a quality screen that is very difficult to scratch...I wonder if that screen is partially responsible for the wavy lines. But due to lack of rigor, I don't think we'll know...
With that attitude, it's a good thing you don't do anything important, like build any devices that must conform to some sort of FCC standard. If you thought this was long, you'd probably die reading the USB standard or an RFC...
Leap years; did you know that leap years are every 4 years, except every one hundred years, except every four hundred years? (that's why 2000 was a leap year, but 2100 won't be)
Leap seconds.
Localization.
The libraries themselves have a storage size vs. resolution trade-off, so even Unix will have an Epoch Fail! in just a few dozen years.
The new NTP protocol is supposed to have 128 bit timestamps. 64-bit fractional second, 64-bit whole second. This is allegedly small enough to resolve the amount of time it takes a photon to pass an electron at the speed of light, while large enough to provide unambiguous time representation until the universe goes dim.
I often wondered what was so special about the iPhone. I have never got a satisfying answer.
It was the first compelling smart phone. That's about the only special thing about it. Before the iPhone, everything was too glitchy or clunky for the populace to tolerate. Now that Android has finally reached adolescence, the iPhone is just another smart phone locked onto AT&T's network.
One of the "features" I loathe about it is the fact that typical users including so called "light users" have to charge it daily
Charge it while you sleep. Buy a USB cord and plug it in at work. Buy a car charger and plug it in if you have a long drive or use the navigation function (GPS sucks down the battery power, and that's not the phone's fault; stand-alone GPS have the same problem).
AT&T has effectively admitted that the data usage growth for smartphones is above the rate that their data network will be able to grow
Maybe if they stop suing Verizon over commercials and start investing that money in infrastructure, growth won't be a problem.
In addition, what if this actually interferes with an emergency call?
This type of risk analysis should have been addressed during the design state of the network, because it's a very real possibility even outside of an attempt by users to fight back against their corporate rulers.
Why would you want to torrent over 3G? There are apps that can remotely administer some BitTorrent clients. Use your connection at home, which has meaningful bandwidth.
I live in Pittsburgh and I'll attest to the fact that downtown Oakland is pretty much CMU, Pitt, and UPMC, and a few establishments that cater to students. There really isn't a whole lot more besides that down there...bunch of bars on the other side of the river in South Side, though.
I'm actually quite surprised that the universities are so completely tax free. Certainly, though, off-campus students are paying property taxes and stuff, yeah?
That would be great, if they were only filing suit over the loss of XBL. The ban broke more than just XBL, though. Among other things, it corrupted save games.
This brings up the greater question of how old must a technology be before it is considered mature enough for purposes as mission-critical as air planes. 5 years? 10 years? 20?
I think that reasonably, you ought to be able to trust technology that's been around for a decade.
The only other complaint is having to upgrade to a wireless data service when I'd prefer to use only WiFi
I, too, thought just like you. Then, one day, where there was no wifi, I needed Internet. As much as it sucks to pay $30/month for something you already have, it really is awesome to have Internet EVERYWHERE.
It's funny, too, that my 3G data connection has more upstream bandwidth than my cable connection at home.
Technically, the charging bug (which is weird..are you sure your battery isn't bad?) is a hardware thing. But your point is well taken. The OS still needs more time to fully mature, but looking at the G1 back then and the Droid now, I must say my hopes are high.
I was surprised to learn about this "on device encryption" stuff mentioned in the sibling post. I guess my company doesn't use that...which makes sense, since IT and management almost all have iPhones.
I love the phone, but the software was clearly rushed to market.
Yeah, because no one else ever has launch bugs. No one else ever launched a product into the world with a time-sensitive bug.
Here's a tip. If you don't want to ever have anything go wrong with your electronics, then perhaps you should wait until something has been out at least six months before buying it.
Exchange works great for me. So does navigation. I had no problem charging my phone with my netbook's USB port. I did, however, notice that changing the orientation can cause not-yet-applied settings to be forgotten (happened to me while setting up Exchange).
I don't have any Bluetooth stuff so I can't comment on Bluetooth support, but I imagine it will improve. Bluetooth seems like a very temperamental protocol. That said, hands-free Bluetooth voice dialing is actually a showstopper for a lot of important business types, so that should get fixed right away.
If you don't like the native Contacts application, I'm sure you can find some others. Personally, I use the Favorites tab of the Contacts widget, and that handles 95% of the times I want to make a phone call in two clicks.
The engadget poster mentions a rounding bug, not a sign-extension bug. (and for it to be a sign-extension bug, they would need to be extending from 32-bit timestamps to 64-bit timestamps).
That doesn't mean it's not the 2^31 ms ~= 24.5 days. It could be that the platform "rounds toward zero", and the developers anticipated that to mean "round down" in the context of numbers that are always positive...and when the numbers become negative, it rounds up instead, and screws them.
The best theory I've heard so far was that a timestamp is being used to figure out where to move the lens. Other than that, perhaps it's being used in some GUID-like fashion and the rounding causes a violation of the uniqueness requirement?
But in the real world, forcing source to be open helps users far more than hurts them.
In "the real world", more people use closed-source programs than open-source programs. This is slowly starting to change, but so long as you're obsessed with "the real world", you can't ignore this fact. There would be a lot less software written if you were forced to share your source code, and I totally fail to see how less software helps users in any way.
Why do all you types say this, as if it isn't clear?
Because "all you types" seem to be obsessed with this complete fallacy that someone will grab the open-source, close it, and then try to prevent you from using the open source version. That's just a fantasy that you use to justify your belief that closed source is evil.
In reality, we have no problem with keeping open source open. We just want to keep our source closed, so that competitors cannot bear the fruits of our labor. This is why the LGPL or MIT or BSD license are so much more useful for end users than the GPL; the code is still open for those users who care, and commercial entities can use the code to satisfy the demands of their customers, and everyone wins.
Yeah, because nobody ever built a product around an open product before.
I said if I wanted to build a product for my company. Did I say anything about anyone else? Please, take your words back out of my mouth, they don't fit.
Or, if we do, we care to thwart you more than help you, because you always consider yourselves and never your users.
All you care about is getting to use everyone else's hard-earned work for free. Why are you so greedy that you would demand my code? I do not demand or nor do I take it from you without your permission, I only use what is offered, just as Dijkstra offered his wisdom to the world without forcing everyone to publish their code when they use his algorithm.
You don't care about feeding the families of those programmers who are striving to make a product for a market, nor do you care for their users for whom such software would not exist without financial incentives.
No one is stopping you from playing with the code. If you fork an open-source project and close that source, the original still exists. If the closed one gets improvements that make the open one look quaint, certainly there are more than enough uber-coders to reverse engineer the changes and add them back into the public domain.
I am certain you could have learned to program by reading a different set of source code had the one that you read not been available. Certainly there will always be open-source programs, public domain or not.
But forcing all derivative works to be open is no better than forcing all derivative works to be closed. If I am building a product for my company to sell, I have to avoid GPL code like it was HIV positive. That can hurt the user, by prolonging or altogether preventing a useful application from coming into existence. Seriously, do most users care more if A) the program works or B) if the source is open?
I said that code in the public domain can't be locked away by someone who then puts it in their closed-source system. I said absolutely nothing about the merits or flaws of the GPL.
Here, you can have your words back now, they don't fit in my mouth very well.
I wonder if the free market will help naturally select Android phones with features that are popular among the most users, with possible niche phones serving niche markets (like that fellow up there who doesn't want a camera on his phone)
Man, I love this stuff. Thanks for chatting with me.
I bring up the bus master stuff because the Cypress FX2 has an embedded 8051, and the 8051 has an I2C bus, but Cypress put some extra logic in the silicon that checks the I2C bus for an EEPROM during boot, and if it finds an EEPROM, it checks a byte, and if that byte is correct, it loads the EEPROM contents into memory.
I was considering maybe there's another logic block that's not on the Wii hardware architecture diagram, that could check for the existence of external storage, and if it found such storage, it could dump the contents to SRAM or NAND. There would be no way to know if this was what happens, except that there would be some brief activity on the peripherals of a dead-boot2 Wii, as the alternative logic interrogated for external storage.
As far as multiple power rails, I can almost assure you that's not how they would do it, because that's quite a dirty way to program a flash chip. If they did do it that way, wouldn't the chip clip leave some subtle marks on the pads or pins of the chip?
I guess I'm just too used to FPGAs. You're right, they wouldn't bother making an ASIC's output tri-state-able if it was never going to be an input....maybe they do just pitch the motherboard on broken ones. Some marketing jerk might have done a calculation showing it's cheaper to discard then pay someone to repair.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the kids who you're talking about - the ones who are excessively medicated - are the ones with mental health problems. They're probably too far into a drugged-up stupor to get upset about anything. Besides, at least the parents are paying some sort of attention to the kid, if they've gone to the trouble to take them to doctor's appointments and paid the money to medicate them.
Mind you, this is anecdotal, but the most messed up people I have seen are the ones who had family problems. Their parents were either Dead, Distant, or Divorced. They were the children of mothers and/or fathers who had no time for them because the parent(s) were too busy working, cooking, cleaning, or watching TV to give their children the love they need to develop into healthy adults.
These kids were taught right and wrong not by mom or pop, but by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Final Fantasy. They learned about love from Disney, where people who don't know each other can live happily ever after when they first meet, and then they're thrust into a real world where 95% of humans will take advantage of that attitude.
Kids are not plants. Food, water, and shelter are not sufficient. Too many humans are having children that they aren't ready or willing to provide for, either financially or emotionally.
One human drags his finger around a few touch screen cell phones and starts making what appears to be "statements of fact" about the quality and accuracy of those phones. Excuse me if I don't consider the results to be rigorous.
Look at how loaded the headline is. It definitely deserves to be here on slashdot, that's for sure. Go look for topics where the Droid beats the iPhone and you see the exact opposite in effect; people offering apologies for the iPhone or denigrating, etc.
The guy in the linked article goes on about the quality of the construction of the touch screen. Since he's feeling ambitious, he should try the scratch test, to see how easy it is to scratch the various screens. I remember reading that Moto put a lot of money into making a quality screen that is very difficult to scratch...I wonder if that screen is partially responsible for the wavy lines. But due to lack of rigor, I don't think we'll know...
With that attitude, it's a good thing you don't do anything important, like build any devices that must conform to some sort of FCC standard. If you thought this was long, you'd probably die reading the USB standard or an RFC...
Eye tracking typically uses infrared light to detect the subject's gaze, and eye trackers usually run at 60 hz. Some run even faster.
Leap years; did you know that leap years are every 4 years, except every one hundred years, except every four hundred years? (that's why 2000 was a leap year, but 2100 won't be)
Leap seconds.
Localization.
The libraries themselves have a storage size vs. resolution trade-off, so even Unix will have an Epoch Fail! in just a few dozen years.
The new NTP protocol is supposed to have 128 bit timestamps. 64-bit fractional second, 64-bit whole second. This is allegedly small enough to resolve the amount of time it takes a photon to pass an electron at the speed of light, while large enough to provide unambiguous time representation until the universe goes dim.
I often wondered what was so special about the iPhone. I have never got a satisfying answer.
It was the first compelling smart phone. That's about the only special thing about it. Before the iPhone, everything was too glitchy or clunky for the populace to tolerate. Now that Android has finally reached adolescence, the iPhone is just another smart phone locked onto AT&T's network.
One of the "features" I loathe about it is the fact that typical users including so called "light users" have to charge it daily
Charge it while you sleep. Buy a USB cord and plug it in at work. Buy a car charger and plug it in if you have a long drive or use the navigation function (GPS sucks down the battery power, and that's not the phone's fault; stand-alone GPS have the same problem).
I take it you didn't read the part about 6% of people polled wanting an Android smartphone to 21% of people polled wanting an Android smartphone.
6 * 3.5 = 21.
(remember, a 250% increase represents 3.5 times as much as the previous number)
AT&T has effectively admitted that the data usage growth for smartphones is above the rate that their data network will be able to grow
Maybe if they stop suing Verizon over commercials and start investing that money in infrastructure, growth won't be a problem.
In addition, what if this actually interferes with an emergency call?
This type of risk analysis should have been addressed during the design state of the network, because it's a very real possibility even outside of an attempt by users to fight back against their corporate rulers.
Why would you want to torrent over 3G? There are apps that can remotely administer some BitTorrent clients. Use your connection at home, which has meaningful bandwidth.
I live in Pittsburgh and I'll attest to the fact that downtown Oakland is pretty much CMU, Pitt, and UPMC, and a few establishments that cater to students. There really isn't a whole lot more besides that down there...bunch of bars on the other side of the river in South Side, though.
I'm actually quite surprised that the universities are so completely tax free. Certainly, though, off-campus students are paying property taxes and stuff, yeah?
If it really was a consequence of some "impossible-to-predict" side effect, then MS should have nothing to fear.
Now, what do you think a judge might say if MS intentionally and maliciously ran code that corrupted your saves?
That would be great, if they were only filing suit over the loss of XBL. The ban broke more than just XBL, though. Among other things, it corrupted save games.
This brings up the greater question of how old must a technology be before it is considered mature enough for purposes as mission-critical as air planes. 5 years? 10 years? 20?
I think that reasonably, you ought to be able to trust technology that's been around for a decade.
The only other complaint is having to upgrade to a wireless data service when I'd prefer to use only WiFi
I, too, thought just like you. Then, one day, where there was no wifi, I needed Internet. As much as it sucks to pay $30/month for something you already have, it really is awesome to have Internet EVERYWHERE.
It's funny, too, that my 3G data connection has more upstream bandwidth than my cable connection at home.
Technically, the charging bug (which is weird..are you sure your battery isn't bad?) is a hardware thing. But your point is well taken. The OS still needs more time to fully mature, but looking at the G1 back then and the Droid now, I must say my hopes are high.
I was surprised to learn about this "on device encryption" stuff mentioned in the sibling post. I guess my company doesn't use that...which makes sense, since IT and management almost all have iPhones.
I love the phone, but the software was clearly rushed to market.
Yeah, because no one else ever has launch bugs. No one else ever launched a product into the world with a time-sensitive bug.
Here's a tip. If you don't want to ever have anything go wrong with your electronics, then perhaps you should wait until something has been out at least six months before buying it.
Exchange works great for me. So does navigation. I had no problem charging my phone with my netbook's USB port. I did, however, notice that changing the orientation can cause not-yet-applied settings to be forgotten (happened to me while setting up Exchange).
I don't have any Bluetooth stuff so I can't comment on Bluetooth support, but I imagine it will improve. Bluetooth seems like a very temperamental protocol. That said, hands-free Bluetooth voice dialing is actually a showstopper for a lot of important business types, so that should get fixed right away.
If you don't like the native Contacts application, I'm sure you can find some others. Personally, I use the Favorites tab of the Contacts widget, and that handles 95% of the times I want to make a phone call in two clicks.
Finally...Motorola made the phone, not Google.
The engadget poster mentions a rounding bug, not a sign-extension bug. (and for it to be a sign-extension bug, they would need to be extending from 32-bit timestamps to 64-bit timestamps).
That doesn't mean it's not the 2^31 ms ~= 24.5 days. It could be that the platform "rounds toward zero", and the developers anticipated that to mean "round down" in the context of numbers that are always positive...and when the numbers become negative, it rounds up instead, and screws them.
The best theory I've heard so far was that a timestamp is being used to figure out where to move the lens. Other than that, perhaps it's being used in some GUID-like fashion and the rounding causes a violation of the uniqueness requirement?
If you're going to go grammar nazi on him you should have picked "defer" instead.
But in the real world, forcing source to be open helps users far more than hurts them.
In "the real world", more people use closed-source programs than open-source programs. This is slowly starting to change, but so long as you're obsessed with "the real world", you can't ignore this fact. There would be a lot less software written if you were forced to share your source code, and I totally fail to see how less software helps users in any way.
Why do all you types say this, as if it isn't clear?
Because "all you types" seem to be obsessed with this complete fallacy that someone will grab the open-source, close it, and then try to prevent you from using the open source version. That's just a fantasy that you use to justify your belief that closed source is evil.
In reality, we have no problem with keeping open source open. We just want to keep our source closed, so that competitors cannot bear the fruits of our labor. This is why the LGPL or MIT or BSD license are so much more useful for end users than the GPL; the code is still open for those users who care, and commercial entities can use the code to satisfy the demands of their customers, and everyone wins.
Yeah, because nobody ever built a product around an open product before.
I said if I wanted to build a product for my company. Did I say anything about anyone else? Please, take your words back out of my mouth, they don't fit.
Or, if we do, we care to thwart you more than help you, because you always consider yourselves and never your users.
All you care about is getting to use everyone else's hard-earned work for free. Why are you so greedy that you would demand my code? I do not demand or nor do I take it from you without your permission, I only use what is offered, just as Dijkstra offered his wisdom to the world without forcing everyone to publish their code when they use his algorithm.
You don't care about feeding the families of those programmers who are striving to make a product for a market, nor do you care for their users for whom such software would not exist without financial incentives.
No one is stopping you from playing with the code. If you fork an open-source project and close that source, the original still exists. If the closed one gets improvements that make the open one look quaint, certainly there are more than enough uber-coders to reverse engineer the changes and add them back into the public domain.
I am certain you could have learned to program by reading a different set of source code had the one that you read not been available. Certainly there will always be open-source programs, public domain or not.
But forcing all derivative works to be open is no better than forcing all derivative works to be closed. If I am building a product for my company to sell, I have to avoid GPL code like it was HIV positive. That can hurt the user, by prolonging or altogether preventing a useful application from coming into existence. Seriously, do most users care more if A) the program works or B) if the source is open?
What stance?
I said that code in the public domain can't be locked away by someone who then puts it in their closed-source system. I said absolutely nothing about the merits or flaws of the GPL.
Here, you can have your words back now, they don't fit in my mouth very well.
If it's in the public domain, how is anyone robbed of freedom? Go grab yourself gcc, download the source, and build it yourself.
Or did you post as AC because you know that argument holds no water?
I wonder if the free market will help naturally select Android phones with features that are popular among the most users, with possible niche phones serving niche markets (like that fellow up there who doesn't want a camera on his phone)
Man, I love this stuff. Thanks for chatting with me.
I bring up the bus master stuff because the Cypress FX2 has an embedded 8051, and the 8051 has an I2C bus, but Cypress put some extra logic in the silicon that checks the I2C bus for an EEPROM during boot, and if it finds an EEPROM, it checks a byte, and if that byte is correct, it loads the EEPROM contents into memory.
I was considering maybe there's another logic block that's not on the Wii hardware architecture diagram, that could check for the existence of external storage, and if it found such storage, it could dump the contents to SRAM or NAND. There would be no way to know if this was what happens, except that there would be some brief activity on the peripherals of a dead-boot2 Wii, as the alternative logic interrogated for external storage.
As far as multiple power rails, I can almost assure you that's not how they would do it, because that's quite a dirty way to program a flash chip. If they did do it that way, wouldn't the chip clip leave some subtle marks on the pads or pins of the chip?
I guess I'm just too used to FPGAs. You're right, they wouldn't bother making an ASIC's output tri-state-able if it was never going to be an input. ...maybe they do just pitch the motherboard on broken ones. Some marketing jerk might have done a calculation showing it's cheaper to discard then pay someone to repair.