Well, even Apple can push the arrogance too far. Rumor has it that Steve had Sony as a role-model (talk about reversed roles these days). Regardless, Apple should pay some heed to what happened with Sony. Back in the day, they were regarded as superior and could extract their "Sony tax" with imprudence. After a while, product development centered more around what was good for Sony rather than good for the customer. People still bought Sony products... for a while. Then, it had gone to far and the Sony didn't actually provide premium product anymore. After a while, the buying public actually got wise to that.
These days, Sony has learned the error of its, my Reader now even has an SD card slot in addition to the MemoryStick. This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
I see the same happening with Apple. The products look nice in the ads, but when you actually use them, they look like small squids with all the dongles you have to plug into them (yes, I'm looking at you, MacBook DisplayPort dongle, and you "iPad camera connectivity pack"). My Dell may not look so good in the ads, but it looks better in actual use as it has an internal SD card slot, PCMCIA slot and enough USB and display connectors that I don't need to carry a ton of crap to connect it to do something useful.
Why did Apple do this? It's obvious to all except the most fanatic fanboi that it is a question of maximizing Apple's profit, not "improving the user experience". Apple is by no means the only company doing this - Microsoft has taken greed to another level with the Xbox memory accessories, for example.
Time for a really customer-centric company to take over the throne, methinks.
Basically, the basis for thin clients making sense is the supposition that computing power is expensive (just as in the old mainframe days, when the premise was that making lots of terminals and then one big machine made economic sense). Guess what? That doesn't hold true anymore. Computing power is cheap. The "nicities" of good graphics support, decent I/O etc is more expensive than the processor. So why not include some decent processing power in the "thin client". In this case, it is just a regular low-end PC (stationary equivalent of a netbook) running terminal software.
WTF? An inch is fine, but a cm is too short? What kind of argument is that? And what's wrong in saying 30 cm rather than a foot? You are just stating this crap because you've been raised on US Standard, anybody raised on metric will find your "arguments" crazy.
Actually,it is OK to call 10 centimeters a decimeter if your brain hurts by having to count farther than ten.
"Artificial contrived distance" is just crap, an inch is no more "natural" than an inch. And if you try to tell me that Imperial is based on body parts, have you noticed that people's thumbs/feet/whatever have very different sizes? My pinky is around 1 cm across, I'm sure you can find something on your body that matches up.
No doubt that metric is based on arbitrary basic measurements, so is Imperial. The difference is that metric is set up so all the units are connected logically, while Imperial is just a mess. For example: 1 liter=1 dm^3=1 kg
I call bull. The only reason you find fractions convenient, is that you are used to them. In the metric world (that's the rest of the world, man) fractions are not used that much. Who says a 1/12 of something is so damn useful? I would rather have 0.08 of something instead (or 8%).
In the rest of the world, we have our 3mm bolts rather than 1/16th inch or something else ridiculous like that. Metric works just fine for everyday measurements.
The really crazy side of imperial-style measurement is that every country had their (slightly different) measurement system. Imagine the chaos which would have reigned in today's global world if metric hadn't come along...
I would rather say that the only valid argument for using US standard system is that you are used to it. At least metric has two advantages.
Sounds like a safety nightmare to me. Just a couple weeks ago, some French anti-terror troops seriously injured a bunch of onlookers at an "open-day" event because some moron had loaded their weapons with regular rounds instead of blanks.
Under the stress of the moment, I wonder how often the users will forget to adjust the dial?
IMHO gun safety requires very simple, very absolute rules, the foremost of which is: You DO NOT aim at a person unless you are prepared to kill or seriously hurt said person.
For regular LEDs, they do lose brightness over time, but as you say this time is getting longer and longer. Usually, the lifetime is spec'ed as the average time where they have lost 50% of their brightness.
I'm not really that familiar with OLEDs, I saw some details on the Sony OLED TV, and they figured that it was going to last a few years of regular use (if you kept it on all the time, it wouldn't last long).
Personally, I think that OLED is going to be primarily a display technology for a long time. It has a long way to go before it can match the brightness of regular LEDs.
Personally, I've switched browsers twice, both times because of too much crashing (OK, I started out using Mosaic, but web use in those days was really just for kicks).
First, I switched from Netscape to IE, as Netscape had serious issues with reliability. The release I was using was so bad that if you left it open for 24 hours, it crashed due to a memory leak. In addition, IE had much better printing of web pages.
Two months ago, I switched from IE to FF, as IE7 was so unstable as to be very irritating (two-three crashes a week). I've had FF crash on me a couple of times, but since it can bring back the pages you were looking at, it doesn't feel as painful (you can tell I keep a lot of pages open at once:-)
Overall, I'm very impressed. A few pages have issues, but overall rendering is very good.
The chemical definition of organic is (almost) anything that contains carbon. So, organic substances are not alive, and they don't die. That OLED displays have a short lifespan does not have anything to do with them being made of organic substances.
Ordinary LEDs do stop working eventually. Take a look at some of the early streetlights, you will see dead LEDs (somebody suggested they be called DEDs - Dark Emitting Devices). They have a finite lifespan, and gradually become more dim. That said, they will often last 10-20 years in ordinary usage.
What are all the luddites doing on a forum for geeks? Seriously, for any geek worth his/her salt, just replacing a vacuum-state technology with solid-state should be reason enough?:-)
I just got a new vehicle with Xenon headlights, and I don't notice any blue tinge at all - perhaps this was just a problem with the early ones (I remember this a few years ago as well).
The difference in light is amazing - out in the countryside where I live Xenon headlights have just got to be a major safety feature - especially once winter season kicks in.
Completely agree. I have started to realize that I am more sensitive to flicker than the average, I absolutely loved going from CRT to LCD as my viewing comfort went way up.
I have also definitely seen flicker in both CFLs and regular fluorescent tubes (which, BTW, is still the dominating light fixture in commercial buildings). I'm not saying all of them are bad, I'm sitting in a room lit by a CFL right now, and have no issues with that bulb.
I have a more long-term philosophical argument for LEDs to win to - lighting is the only remaining area where vacuum-state technology is still dominant. Semiconductors killed vacuum tubes outside of niche applications a long time ago, LCDs have killed CRT over the last 10 years (and this happened quicker than even the most optimistic LCD proponents predicted), now the only battlefield left is LED vs. Edison's bulb (looks to become extinct very soon, IMHO) and CFL/regular fluorescent lighting.
Sure LEDs still have some issues, but these are minor compared to those that have been overcome over the last 10 years or so (color, intensity). LEDs gain all the economic advantages of wafer-type manufacturing, and just like we saw with LCD, I am confident the price is going to go WAY down compared to today.
Besides, LEDs have the potential to enable things that are just not possible with vacuum-state lighting - sealed lamps because you don't need to change bulbs (once lifetime is improved), completely different form factors as well as colored light. Once this becomes fashion (the LED headlights on Audi cars are already becoming a fashion statement), the LED market will explode.
The only party who "CDMA is a better technology for", is the carriers. CDMA allows them to squeeze in more voice channels than does GSM. For the end-customer, it doesn't matter. Better coverage? No way, there are sparsely populated countries in Europe with significantly better coverage than exists in the US.
Of course, GSM actually meant that Europe had a digital cell phone network while US was still using the really stone-age AMPS.
If anything, many of these examples are just brute force in action. Unfortunately, there are a lot more Windows PC programmers than real embedded programmers around, so people will just use the only tool they know about to solve every problem they have. They don't see the silliness of using a 1GB+ OS to do something that could be done in 32 kB of code.
You could make a decent hobby out of spotting BSoDs in the wild, I have seen more than I care for.
IMHO, this really becomes dangerous when you are actually stupid enough to plug your "embedded" Windows box into the Internet.
Very good comment. The signal-noise ratio for games has always been bad - there was a horrible number of crappy arcade games in the boom era, the same happened with the Atari 2600 (which almost killed electronic gaming off).
What happens is that when enough time has passed, people have forgotten about all of the bad games and only remember the good ones.
If anything, these days you are starting to see playable demos being available on Xbox live and Sony connect. If anything, this is the solution to the problem.
The cool thing about station wagons is that you get virtually the same handling and gas milage as a sedan, but much more interior space - especially if you fold down the rear seat. For some strange reason, it seems that Americans don't care much about handling, I find this strange. I tried a Mustang a few months ago, and while the big engine was fun, the handling was really unimpressive.
Right, "Station Wagon" does kind of bring up an image of a paltry, boring monster from the early 80s/late 70s. In the UK they call them "Estates", maybe this is more catchy? The European station wagons really don't look much different from the sedans (usually car models are available as both sedan and station wagon, and sometimes as a hatchback as well).
Well, I've heard the comment from some Americans that they were concerned a 4-cylinder engine was "underpowered" compared to a V6 (or even V8), and this was from people that didn't mention the "fun" aspect of it at all.
And when it comes to the "fun" factor, I'd make the point that this is more about power/weight ratio than the actual power of the engine. I'm sure that my paltry 1.6l car is actually as quick when it comes to accelleration as a 3 ton V8-powered monster SUV.
Probably, most people are going "with the flow" instead of thinking for themselves (I'm not implying that Americans are any worse than anybody else in this regard).
We had the same thing here (in Norway), but the government cut the tax breaks for the trucks (or rather, rephrased them so that they did not apply to SUVs etc).
Should work in the US too, if the government wasn't completely bought by special interest (car companies).
The solution should be quite easy - start buying vehicles with small-displacement 4-cylinder engines instead of the gas-guzzling monsters you are using right now. Even for commercial use, this should be possible. I have quite a few friends who are builders, and they drive European-style vans with ~2 liter diesel engines, these vehicles lets them keep all their tools in the back and haul what they need (long 2x4s go on the roof) - no 6 liter V8 required.
I guess it all boils down to the "big is beautiful" attitude.
The most interesting thing is that the auto companies have managed to make the average American believe he/she needs a huge engine just to haul their car around.
OK, if you have a huge trailer to haul around on a regular basis, you might need a big engine. But, for the daily commute, I would make the case that 100-120 HP is enough to power a standard-sized sedan. This means an engine displacement of 1.6-2.0 liters, not the huge 3 liter engine that you often see in American sedans. My moderately-sized French-made station wagon has a 1.6 liter engine, giving me a fuel consumption of 0.07 l/km (it's a 2000 model, a newer one would probably be 0.06 or even 0.05 l/km) - this is 47 mpg in US terms. No need for hybrids, just moderately sized standard diesel or gasoline engines.
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Well, even Apple can push the arrogance too far. Rumor has it that Steve had Sony as a role-model (talk about reversed roles these days). Regardless, Apple should pay some heed to what happened with Sony. Back in the day, they were regarded as superior and could extract their "Sony tax" with imprudence. After a while, product development centered more around what was good for Sony rather than good for the customer. People still bought Sony products... for a while. Then, it had gone to far and the Sony didn't actually provide premium product anymore. After a while, the buying public actually got wise to that.
These days, Sony has learned the error of its, my Reader now even has an SD card slot in addition to the MemoryStick. This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
I see the same happening with Apple. The products look nice in the ads, but when you actually use them, they look like small squids with all the dongles you have to plug into them (yes, I'm looking at you, MacBook DisplayPort dongle, and you "iPad camera connectivity pack"). My Dell may not look so good in the ads, but it looks better in actual use as it has an internal SD card slot, PCMCIA slot and enough USB and display connectors that I don't need to carry a ton of crap to connect it to do something useful.
Why did Apple do this? It's obvious to all except the most fanatic fanboi that it is a question of maximizing Apple's profit, not "improving the user experience". Apple is by no means the only company doing this - Microsoft has taken greed to another level with the Xbox memory accessories, for example.
Time for a really customer-centric company to take over the throne, methinks.
Basically, the basis for thin clients making sense is the supposition that computing power is expensive (just as in the old mainframe days, when the premise was that making lots of terminals and then one big machine made economic sense). Guess what? That doesn't hold true anymore. Computing power is cheap. The "nicities" of good graphics support, decent I/O etc is more expensive than the processor. So why not include some decent processing power in the "thin client". In this case, it is just a regular low-end PC (stationary equivalent of a netbook) running terminal software.
WTF? An inch is fine, but a cm is too short? What kind of argument is that? And what's wrong in saying 30 cm rather than a foot? You are just stating this crap because you've been raised on US Standard, anybody raised on metric will find your "arguments" crazy.
Actually,it is OK to call 10 centimeters a decimeter if your brain hurts by having to count farther than ten.
"Artificial contrived distance" is just crap, an inch is no more "natural" than an inch. And if you try to tell me that Imperial is based on body parts, have you noticed that people's thumbs/feet/whatever have very different sizes? My pinky is around 1 cm across, I'm sure you can find something on your body that matches up.
No doubt that metric is based on arbitrary basic measurements, so is Imperial. The difference is that metric is set up so all the units are connected logically, while Imperial is just a mess. For example: 1 liter=1 dm^3=1 kg
I call bull. The only reason you find fractions convenient, is that you are used to them. In the metric world (that's the rest of the world, man) fractions are not used that much. Who says a 1/12 of something is so damn useful? I would rather have 0.08 of something instead (or 8%).
In the rest of the world, we have our 3mm bolts rather than 1/16th inch or something else ridiculous like that. Metric works just fine for everyday measurements.
The really crazy side of imperial-style measurement is that every country had their (slightly different) measurement system. Imagine the chaos which would have reigned in today's global world if metric hadn't come along...
I would rather say that the only valid argument for using US standard system is that you are used to it. At least metric has two advantages.
Compared to what Bush/Cheney have "accomplished" in the last 8, it should be a walk in the park...
Hello, antitrust lawsuit. Welcome to Microsoft's shoes, Apple.
Except that Apple isn't a monopoly. Try again when iTMS is the only (viable) music store in the world.
Eh, when was Windows the only (viable) operating system in the world? Me thinks you have a too high bar for anti-trust...
11. 10 to argue which lighting technology is best, and one to change the bulb. Or did you have a different suggestion?
Under the stress of the moment, I wonder how often the users will forget to adjust the dial?
IMHO gun safety requires very simple, very absolute rules, the foremost of which is: You DO NOT aim at a person unless you are prepared to kill or seriously hurt said person.
I'm not really that familiar with OLEDs, I saw some details on the Sony OLED TV, and they figured that it was going to last a few years of regular use (if you kept it on all the time, it wouldn't last long).
Personally, I think that OLED is going to be primarily a display technology for a long time. It has a long way to go before it can match the brightness of regular LEDs.
Two months ago, I switched from IE to FF, as IE7 was so unstable as to be very irritating (two-three crashes a week). I've had FF crash on me a couple of times, but since it can bring back the pages you were looking at, it doesn't feel as painful (you can tell I keep a lot of pages open at once :-)
Overall, I'm very impressed. A few pages have issues, but overall rendering is very good.
Ordinary LEDs do stop working eventually. Take a look at some of the early streetlights, you will see dead LEDs (somebody suggested they be called DEDs - Dark Emitting Devices). They have a finite lifespan, and gradually become more dim. That said, they will often last 10-20 years in ordinary usage.
What are all the luddites doing on a forum for geeks? Seriously, for any geek worth his/her salt, just replacing a vacuum-state technology with solid-state should be reason enough? :-)
The difference in light is amazing - out in the countryside where I live Xenon headlights have just got to be a major safety feature - especially once winter season kicks in.
I have also definitely seen flicker in both CFLs and regular fluorescent tubes (which, BTW, is still the dominating light fixture in commercial buildings). I'm not saying all of them are bad, I'm sitting in a room lit by a CFL right now, and have no issues with that bulb.
I have a more long-term philosophical argument for LEDs to win to - lighting is the only remaining area where vacuum-state technology is still dominant. Semiconductors killed vacuum tubes outside of niche applications a long time ago, LCDs have killed CRT over the last 10 years (and this happened quicker than even the most optimistic LCD proponents predicted), now the only battlefield left is LED vs. Edison's bulb (looks to become extinct very soon, IMHO) and CFL/regular fluorescent lighting.
Sure LEDs still have some issues, but these are minor compared to those that have been overcome over the last 10 years or so (color, intensity). LEDs gain all the economic advantages of wafer-type manufacturing, and just like we saw with LCD, I am confident the price is going to go WAY down compared to today.
Besides, LEDs have the potential to enable things that are just not possible with vacuum-state lighting - sealed lamps because you don't need to change bulbs (once lifetime is improved), completely different form factors as well as colored light. Once this becomes fashion (the LED headlights on Audi cars are already becoming a fashion statement), the LED market will explode.
The only party who "CDMA is a better technology for", is the carriers. CDMA allows them to squeeze in more voice channels than does GSM. For the end-customer, it doesn't matter. Better coverage? No way, there are sparsely populated countries in Europe with significantly better coverage than exists in the US. Of course, GSM actually meant that Europe had a digital cell phone network while US was still using the really stone-age AMPS.
If anything, many of these examples are just brute force in action. Unfortunately, there are a lot more Windows PC programmers than real embedded programmers around, so people will just use the only tool they know about to solve every problem they have. They don't see the silliness of using a 1GB+ OS to do something that could be done in 32 kB of code. You could make a decent hobby out of spotting BSoDs in the wild, I have seen more than I care for. IMHO, this really becomes dangerous when you are actually stupid enough to plug your "embedded" Windows box into the Internet.
Very good comment. The signal-noise ratio for games has always been bad - there was a horrible number of crappy arcade games in the boom era, the same happened with the Atari 2600 (which almost killed electronic gaming off).
What happens is that when enough time has passed, people have forgotten about all of the bad games and only remember the good ones.
If anything, these days you are starting to see playable demos being available on Xbox live and Sony connect. If anything, this is the solution to the problem.
Wouldn't a nice sedan actually provide better comfort? Better ride, better seats etc...
The cool thing about station wagons is that you get virtually the same handling and gas milage as a sedan, but much more interior space - especially if you fold down the rear seat. For some strange reason, it seems that Americans don't care much about handling, I find this strange. I tried a Mustang a few months ago, and while the big engine was fun, the handling was really unimpressive.
Right, "Station Wagon" does kind of bring up an image of a paltry, boring monster from the early 80s/late 70s. In the UK they call them "Estates", maybe this is more catchy? The European station wagons really don't look much different from the sedans (usually car models are available as both sedan and station wagon, and sometimes as a hatchback as well).
And when it comes to the "fun" factor, I'd make the point that this is more about power/weight ratio than the actual power of the engine. I'm sure that my paltry 1.6l car is actually as quick when it comes to accelleration as a 3 ton V8-powered monster SUV.
Probably, most people are going "with the flow" instead of thinking for themselves (I'm not implying that Americans are any worse than anybody else in this regard).
Should work in the US too, if the government wasn't completely bought by special interest (car companies).
You don't even need the guns. The only security measure needed to prevent another 9-11 is a locked, reasonably sturdy cockpit door.
I guess it all boils down to the "big is beautiful" attitude.
OK, if you have a huge trailer to haul around on a regular basis, you might need a big engine. But, for the daily commute, I would make the case that 100-120 HP is enough to power a standard-sized sedan. This means an engine displacement of 1.6-2.0 liters, not the huge 3 liter engine that you often see in American sedans. My moderately-sized French-made station wagon has a 1.6 liter engine, giving me a fuel consumption of 0.07 l/km (it's a 2000 model, a newer one would probably be 0.06 or even 0.05 l/km) - this is 47 mpg in US terms. No need for hybrids, just moderately sized standard diesel or gasoline engines.