There are plenty of "phone only" models out there that will last 2 weeks on one charge and never crash. Just don't buy this kind of multitasking phone if you don't really need one.
While that is true, most of people start to be satisfied with the quality mobile phones are offering. Few years back regular point and shoot digital cameras didn't have that great picture quality but convenience of "unlimited" film and instant ability to view the result were enough to get people switch from film cameras. I could argue that current level of image quality combined with the fact that the camera is always with me is enough for me to not carry regular point and shoot camera at all.
I do have a DSLR with proper lenses that I keep up to date and take pictures with regularly, but for normal situation photos mobile phone is enough. Of course I would like my mobile phone to take same quality of images as my DSLR but I don't see that happening ever. Bottom line is that mobile phone camera has made point and shoot camera obsolete for my purposes and I believe I'm not in minority on this.
In Reality B the question is not that oil suddenly doesn't exist. The mismatch between increased oil consumption and declining production and declining storages will cause oil price to jump to a level where ordinary people will have to make significant compromises to reduce oil consumption. Balance will be found, no doubt about that, but it won't be clean and easy.
The reason why IEA would be cooking the books is a lot simpler to explain with the fact that countries themselves report their oil reserves to IEA. While some reports might be accurate the actual oil reserves are considered state secret in many countries. Especially OPEC rules have incentive to overstate the reserves and production capacity.
EIA (US Government data) has international figures on oil reserves: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/oilreserves.html. If you look at the Middle East where most of the world's oil is and look the reserves from end of 1980's up until today, you can see that someone is cooking the books. Can you imagine a situation where UAE for example could maintain constant 98bbl reserve while producing significant amounts of oil? Same goes for most of other countries in that region. Maybe they find new oil fields at exactly same pace as they pump the oil... who knows. When you look at the steady declines in Europe and N. America I think there is going to be some nasty surprises coming up.
Big oil controls roughly 5% of gas and oil reserves. Their profits come from earnings that happen due to changes in production or demand. Big oil cannot control these changes, but they can profit/lose money because of them. From wikipedia:
"As a group, the supermajors control about 5% of global oil and gas reserves with largest supermajor, ExxonMobil, ranked 14th. Conversely, 95% of global oil and gas reserves are controlled by state-owned oil companies, primarily located in the middle east."
For me buying a book is not matter of DRM or no-DRM. I buy book because I want to read the book, regardless of the inconveniences involved in reading it. So I don't think the sales numbers will show any benefit for being non-DRM. I have tried to find a place that sells audiobooks that I want without DRM, but cannot, therefore I buy them with DRM and listen them on iPod/iTunes. If I ever need to I will remove the DRM using tools that are widely available.
True, and many fading stars on that top500 list are already old computers that at one point of their life held much higher position. Like you said supercomputer title cannot be taken away by some desktop computer that outperforms this old supercomputer.
To look at this problem from different point of view we could evaluate the criteria of being a superstar, supermodel, world champion, and the best. None of these are very easy words to define and will be source of endless debate. We cannot define the word as it changes all the time, but we can agree that someone or something needs to be exceptional to achieve that title.
Indeed, supercomputer is not strictly defined with any of the characteristics other than being one of the most powerful computers available at a given time. We cannot take away 90's supercomputer titles just because current desktops outperform them. Supercomputer is not a term that describes performance, it's all about prestige and engineering prowess to be one of the best in the world.
This Asus can be technologically more advanced or faster than any supercomputer of 90's but it will never has such prestige. We can talk about high performance workstations and mean around 1 TFLOPS of computing power, but that's about it. We can also compare this Asus to some supercomputer of 90's and say it's more powerful than that, but still it doesn't mean it is supercomputer.
And all this comes down to the fact that if a computer wants to claim supercomputer title it should be able to be in top500, or at least have comparable performance. Not small fraction of the performance like this Asus has.
Supercomputer is a computer that is one of the most powerful computers available at a given time. Therefore referring top500 list is very valid when determining what is supercomputer and what isn't. Top500 list can very well be used in determining whether we have a supercomputer or not. If the modern computer isn't faster (at least in certain specific tasks) than the lowest performing computer on the list I wouldn't consider it being a supercomputer. I don't understand the need to dilute supercomputer word to include cheap hacks like this, there are valid names for these such as minicomputer. What do we call the best performing computer? superdupercomputer?
I haven't worked for AT&T but at one point I tried to see what traceroute from San Diego to Finland would show me because ping was really slow. The traceroute I run jumped from west coast to east coast twice before going over the atlantic. I suspect that routing rules might need some fine tuning as well. It doesn't really matter if you have very fast network if the data keeps on jumping between servers creating extra traffic, I can imagine in my case the packet could have reached the destination with much fewer jumps.
Of course that visual traceroute I used might not really give accurate locations of the servers.
When someone just lists the programming languages like this I always feel sad. Why not just say kick-ass programmer with well structured thinking to be an outstanding software architect. I mean you won't be needing all those programming languages in your next job. If specific programming language expertise would be important then a person with 10 years of Java programming experience should be better than you in programming Java. In reality that is not the case, programmers have significant differences in performance and I haven't yet figured out how to measure that accurately without having them make a project. If your next project needed Rails developer, what would you do? Of course you would learn it and add it to your list of languages. That's all...
I think this tiered approach on interest rates is the source of all evil. It increases the likelihood of default, allows more to be borrowed, and is based on faulty statistics with poor oversight. The credit rating comes from arbitrary past performance that someone thinks correlates with reality. Usually I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but credit rating system seems to be designed to make people drift between different credit ratings quite easily, to maximize interest rates on otherwise financially solvent people. Otherwise it shouldn't be possible to be able to have credit score of 600 and 750 during same year without any missed payments.
I have no idea how to replace this system, but to me it just seems silly how people are fixated in thinking that higher interest is somehow justified to compensate the imaginary credit unworthiness. How about just allowing smaller loans and more guarantees? If those are not enough then most likely that person needs to save some more.
If I understood this issue correctly all the data on the server was safe and local only data was lost. Therefore users did have an easy way to backup their data, should have just synced with the server. The data would have been also lost if phone was stolen, broken, or well, reprogrammed.
I don't know how Sidekick works, but something made the system think local data was older than server data. Or the server just sent out massive reprogram command to all devices devices asking reboot sync. To me this sounds like a dumb mistake on Danger side that could have been avoided easily.
I believe the number of people each country can send to ISS is established in the contracts between the participating countries. NASA personnel may prefer to do experiments that prepare NASA for long duration space flight, ESA might be just happy to get there, Russian space program seems to be happy to serve vodka on space station to highest bidder. I'm not saying any of these goals are wrong, but maybe Russians just believe that this tourism experiment is more important/beneficial than cultivating bean sprouts. They did run MIR for many years and now are stepping into next level of space travel.
I'm running Windows using Parallels on my Mac. I use the Windows side to do development for Windows Mobile, debugging on device works at least for my purposes. I guess with any laptop USB is the preferred way to have hardware access and that seems to work well. Serial ports are pretty rare these days.
Nordic Passport union and other multinational treaties have been working prior to Schengen treaty, besides the comparison to EU doesn't make sense. EU is not treated as one country, and it will take a while before it will be.
This comes quite late, but of course I know the difference is approximately 8%. The reason why I call this significant is that with Hindenburg's over 200 tons of lift the difference was 16 tons. Each ton can carry close to 10 passengers, when including cabins and other supplies for these passengers difference is still tens of passengers compared to helium filled airship. There is no such thing as abundant lift in an airship, once the dead weight and mandatory operational items (fuel, water ballast, crew) has been covered the added 8% can save you.
Also on operational side hydrogen could be vented out to counter fuel consumption where helium couldn't. This caused extra weight and loss of power to engines because they needed to be fitted with water collectors to cover fuel loss. That alone caused many tons of dead weight compared to hydrogen ships.
I was wrong about Hindenburg though, originally it was thought to be helium filled, but then switched (and redesigned) to hydrogen because of the trade issues. Also Graf Zeppelin II did fly, but only inside Germany and then later some military missions.
Actually Hindenburg was designed to be filled with hydrogen and wouldn't have flown effectively using helium. Graf Zeppelin II was the one that was designed to be filled with helium and start operation after Hindenburg, but it never got off the ground because of US trade restrictions on helium. Change from hydrogen to helium wasn't easy, lots of design changes had to be done and passenger capacity reduced. Hydrogen has significantly more lift and since it's cheap airships could vent it out easily to reduce buoyancy.
Most of the code you would come across as an application developer will be just recompiled to support new architecture if all other things stay the same. In case of operating systems things get a bit more complex as you need to think about hardware specific optimizations, new hardware abstraction layer code and fix any silly platform specific assumptions. It's not as bad as it sounds, bulk of the code is not related to the underlaying hardware at all. That's why hobbyist have been able to port operating systems / drivers (porting to new hardware) and other applications (porting to new OS) on various new platforms.
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There are plenty of "phone only" models out there that will last 2 weeks on one charge and never crash. Just don't buy this kind of multitasking phone if you don't really need one.
http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-1202/specifications
It's not the ability to present time, it's the calculator that they are using most.
While that is true, most of people start to be satisfied with the quality mobile phones are offering. Few years back regular point and shoot digital cameras didn't have that great picture quality but convenience of "unlimited" film and instant ability to view the result were enough to get people switch from film cameras. I could argue that current level of image quality combined with the fact that the camera is always with me is enough for me to not carry regular point and shoot camera at all.
I do have a DSLR with proper lenses that I keep up to date and take pictures with regularly, but for normal situation photos mobile phone is enough. Of course I would like my mobile phone to take same quality of images as my DSLR but I don't see that happening ever. Bottom line is that mobile phone camera has made point and shoot camera obsolete for my purposes and I believe I'm not in minority on this.
Car analogy of your rant would be that you don't buy Toyota Camry to be your cement truck.
In Reality B the question is not that oil suddenly doesn't exist. The mismatch between increased oil consumption and declining production and declining storages will cause oil price to jump to a level where ordinary people will have to make significant compromises to reduce oil consumption. Balance will be found, no doubt about that, but it won't be clean and easy.
The reason why IEA would be cooking the books is a lot simpler to explain with the fact that countries themselves report their oil reserves to IEA. While some reports might be accurate the actual oil reserves are considered state secret in many countries. Especially OPEC rules have incentive to overstate the reserves and production capacity.
EIA (US Government data) has international figures on oil reserves: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/oilreserves.html. If you look at the Middle East where most of the world's oil is and look the reserves from end of 1980's up until today, you can see that someone is cooking the books. Can you imagine a situation where UAE for example could maintain constant 98bbl reserve while producing significant amounts of oil? Same goes for most of other countries in that region. Maybe they find new oil fields at exactly same pace as they pump the oil... who knows. When you look at the steady declines in Europe and N. America I think there is going to be some nasty surprises coming up.
Big oil controls roughly 5% of gas and oil reserves. Their profits come from earnings that happen due to changes in production or demand. Big oil cannot control these changes, but they can profit/lose money because of them. From wikipedia:
"As a group, the supermajors control about 5% of global oil and gas reserves with largest supermajor, ExxonMobil, ranked 14th. Conversely, 95% of global oil and gas reserves are controlled by state-owned oil companies, primarily located in the middle east."
For me buying a book is not matter of DRM or no-DRM. I buy book because I want to read the book, regardless of the inconveniences involved in reading it. So I don't think the sales numbers will show any benefit for being non-DRM. I have tried to find a place that sells audiobooks that I want without DRM, but cannot, therefore I buy them with DRM and listen them on iPod/iTunes. If I ever need to I will remove the DRM using tools that are widely available.
True, and many fading stars on that top500 list are already old computers that at one point of their life held much higher position. Like you said supercomputer title cannot be taken away by some desktop computer that outperforms this old supercomputer.
To look at this problem from different point of view we could evaluate the criteria of being a superstar, supermodel, world champion, and the best. None of these are very easy words to define and will be source of endless debate. We cannot define the word as it changes all the time, but we can agree that someone or something needs to be exceptional to achieve that title.
Indeed, supercomputer is not strictly defined with any of the characteristics other than being one of the most powerful computers available at a given time. We cannot take away 90's supercomputer titles just because current desktops outperform them. Supercomputer is not a term that describes performance, it's all about prestige and engineering prowess to be one of the best in the world.
This Asus can be technologically more advanced or faster than any supercomputer of 90's but it will never has such prestige. We can talk about high performance workstations and mean around 1 TFLOPS of computing power, but that's about it. We can also compare this Asus to some supercomputer of 90's and say it's more powerful than that, but still it doesn't mean it is supercomputer.
And all this comes down to the fact that if a computer wants to claim supercomputer title it should be able to be in top500, or at least have comparable performance. Not small fraction of the performance like this Asus has.
Supercomputer is a computer that is one of the most powerful computers available at a given time. Therefore referring top500 list is very valid when determining what is supercomputer and what isn't. Top500 list can very well be used in determining whether we have a supercomputer or not. If the modern computer isn't faster (at least in certain specific tasks) than the lowest performing computer on the list I wouldn't consider it being a supercomputer. I don't understand the need to dilute supercomputer word to include cheap hacks like this, there are valid names for these such as minicomputer. What do we call the best performing computer? superdupercomputer?
I haven't worked for AT&T but at one point I tried to see what traceroute from San Diego to Finland would show me because ping was really slow. The traceroute I run jumped from west coast to east coast twice before going over the atlantic. I suspect that routing rules might need some fine tuning as well. It doesn't really matter if you have very fast network if the data keeps on jumping between servers creating extra traffic, I can imagine in my case the packet could have reached the destination with much fewer jumps.
Of course that visual traceroute I used might not really give accurate locations of the servers.
When someone just lists the programming languages like this I always feel sad. Why not just say kick-ass programmer with well structured thinking to be an outstanding software architect. I mean you won't be needing all those programming languages in your next job. If specific programming language expertise would be important then a person with 10 years of Java programming experience should be better than you in programming Java. In reality that is not the case, programmers have significant differences in performance and I haven't yet figured out how to measure that accurately without having them make a project. If your next project needed Rails developer, what would you do? Of course you would learn it and add it to your list of languages. That's all...
I think this tiered approach on interest rates is the source of all evil. It increases the likelihood of default, allows more to be borrowed, and is based on faulty statistics with poor oversight. The credit rating comes from arbitrary past performance that someone thinks correlates with reality. Usually I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but credit rating system seems to be designed to make people drift between different credit ratings quite easily, to maximize interest rates on otherwise financially solvent people. Otherwise it shouldn't be possible to be able to have credit score of 600 and 750 during same year without any missed payments.
I have no idea how to replace this system, but to me it just seems silly how people are fixated in thinking that higher interest is somehow justified to compensate the imaginary credit unworthiness. How about just allowing smaller loans and more guarantees? If those are not enough then most likely that person needs to save some more.
Or could it be that international students are just smarter and work harder?
Nevermind, it seems that Sidekick doesn't have any data stored locally during boot...
If I understood this issue correctly all the data on the server was safe and local only data was lost. Therefore users did have an easy way to backup their data, should have just synced with the server. The data would have been also lost if phone was stolen, broken, or well, reprogrammed.
I don't know how Sidekick works, but something made the system think local data was older than server data. Or the server just sent out massive reprogram command to all devices devices asking reboot sync. To me this sounds like a dumb mistake on Danger side that could have been avoided easily.
Maybe because it's the first WM6.5 phone out there? Other options require installation of new firmware and that's not really consumer review anymore.
What are these new features you are talking about?
You pay extra for the training and privilege of getting flight engineer diploma.
I believe the number of people each country can send to ISS is established in the contracts between the participating countries. NASA personnel may prefer to do experiments that prepare NASA for long duration space flight, ESA might be just happy to get there, Russian space program seems to be happy to serve vodka on space station to highest bidder. I'm not saying any of these goals are wrong, but maybe Russians just believe that this tourism experiment is more important/beneficial than cultivating bean sprouts. They did run MIR for many years and now are stepping into next level of space travel.
I'm running Windows using Parallels on my Mac. I use the Windows side to do development for Windows Mobile, debugging on device works at least for my purposes. I guess with any laptop USB is the preferred way to have hardware access and that seems to work well. Serial ports are pretty rare these days.
Nordic Passport union and other multinational treaties have been working prior to Schengen treaty, besides the comparison to EU doesn't make sense. EU is not treated as one country, and it will take a while before it will be.
This comes quite late, but of course I know the difference is approximately 8%. The reason why I call this significant is that with Hindenburg's over 200 tons of lift the difference was 16 tons. Each ton can carry close to 10 passengers, when including cabins and other supplies for these passengers difference is still tens of passengers compared to helium filled airship. There is no such thing as abundant lift in an airship, once the dead weight and mandatory operational items (fuel, water ballast, crew) has been covered the added 8% can save you.
Also on operational side hydrogen could be vented out to counter fuel consumption where helium couldn't. This caused extra weight and loss of power to engines because they needed to be fitted with water collectors to cover fuel loss. That alone caused many tons of dead weight compared to hydrogen ships.
I was wrong about Hindenburg though, originally it was thought to be helium filled, but then switched (and redesigned) to hydrogen because of the trade issues. Also Graf Zeppelin II did fly, but only inside Germany and then later some military missions.
Actually Hindenburg was designed to be filled with hydrogen and wouldn't have flown effectively using helium. Graf Zeppelin II was the one that was designed to be filled with helium and start operation after Hindenburg, but it never got off the ground because of US trade restrictions on helium. Change from hydrogen to helium wasn't easy, lots of design changes had to be done and passenger capacity reduced. Hydrogen has significantly more lift and since it's cheap airships could vent it out easily to reduce buoyancy.
Most of the code you would come across as an application developer will be just recompiled to support new architecture if all other things stay the same. In case of operating systems things get a bit more complex as you need to think about hardware specific optimizations, new hardware abstraction layer code and fix any silly platform specific assumptions. It's not as bad as it sounds, bulk of the code is not related to the underlaying hardware at all. That's why hobbyist have been able to port operating systems / drivers (porting to new hardware) and other applications (porting to new OS) on various new platforms.