If India has better and cheaper phones then why are people buying iPhones? Obviously your opinion about "better" is not the same as some other people. Maybe you shouldn't get to decide what's good for them?
The nasty cretins. Ruining the party for everyone just because they want to keep the copyright on Mickey Mouse. They are ramping up their lobbying organization so they can fight to re-extend copyright terms once again. Mickey Mouse would pass into the public domain in 2028 if they did nothing. Anyone remember the nightmare of Disney lobbying in the early 2000s as they fought to extend the copyrights. Why couldn't they get Congress to grant them an exemption instead of ruining copyright law for everyone?
India's government is making a mistake with its protectionist policy. The taxing of the iPhone for importing it is detrimental to the Indian people. The iPhone offers a value to the Indian consumer that in turn would help them economically (easier communication, entertainment etc). Putting a tax on the iPhone makes a better quality of life only available to Indian elites.
By making the phones in India it is only a slight improvement on the idea of import taxation, there will be some cost to Apple (and therefore the consumer). Either the phone will be of slightly less quality or the phone's price itself will be higher than it needs to be. By having to pay more for a less quality iPhone (in comparison to tax-free import), it means less people will be able to afford iPhones. In addition it will make it harder for Apple to innovate because it will have to re-tool and manage multiple sites.
Every X months or years someone can find some of the missing gitlabs data on a server somewhere. Just when you thought that was all they would recover, someone finds a few kilobytes of missing gitlabs data on an SD card floating in a sewer.
If I understood this right they are calling the lack of attraction, repulsion. There's no negative force, or dark energy style shit involved. Shouldn't they call it a non-attractor unless they show active repulsion? If I drop an object and it moves towards the ground I am not going to say my hand repelled it.
Anytime someone touts a new battery technology find out the answer to these basic questions:
1. What is the energy density in terms of watt hours per kilogram? 2. How many discharge cycles can it take before capacity drops to 80%? 3. What is its flammability?
Then we can move on to things like cost and manufacturability (which can usually be solved with enough will).
The charge time issue shouldn't be a problem once we get to 600+ mile ranges. That's enough time on the road to either into a hotel for the night, or at least have a relaxed dinner? I mean, travel (i wont say drive, because cars are less than a decade from level 5 autonomy) for 8 hours.. have dinner for 45 minutes. Then go a further 2 to 4 hours then check into a hotel for the overnight full charge... is that unreasonable? How often do you need to drive faster than that in a hurry but couldn't take an airplane?
The thing that is preventing 600 mile range electric cars is not the limited capacity of lithium ion, it's the cost. I mean, 750 kilograms of lithium ion battery is the equivalent of a 15 gallons of gasoline in a regular car. A Tesla 85D carries a 540 kg battery and gets 270 miles range. You can easily make a vehicle that can carry 1200 kg of battery. A Tesla with 1000 kg of battery would weigh about 3000 kilograms -- but even accounting for the increased weight, it get well over 600 miles of range (that's enough to comfortably drive between any two big towns in most if not all of the US). The problem is that 1200 kilograms of lithium ion battery costs a shit-ton of money. That's the whole point of the gigafactory. What I am saying is that if we had zero new advances in battery technology other that making it much cheaper than it costs today.. we could have electric cars that outperform gasoline cars in miles travelled before refilling.
So if there is an advance in batteries I want to know, what will it cost in the medium term?
It's not the price of the thing. If it was 5K per eye rolling at 120 fps.. it would have sold at $1000 each. VR done properly would be a mega hit. The current generation of VR is vomit inducing. It should never have been released. Oculus, Sony, HTC, and Microsoft have killed VR for a generation or two. We probably won't see VR emerge again for another 25 years. They could have avoided this by waiting 5 years until we had the technology to do it. Why release something before it works?
What if the Ford Model T didn't have brakes? Automobiles would have been banned, the public would have gotten disgusted. Normally I am a libertarian but fuck that, we need government intervention to stop VR headsets from being released. Call the UN, call the FBI.. the FTC. The World Health Organization, the CDC.. I don't give a fuck. Ban VR for 10 years so that the technology can be ready.
Don't release a cheaper phone. Why make a half baked phone? People who want a cheap phone should just buy the older generation model. Having to make a cheaper phone depletes the ability and focus on a good product. Make a good phone for $850. That is affordable by 95% of people. It's only about $70 a month. Who can't afford $70 a month? That's less than two days of work on minimum wage for the ability to communicate with anyone and to watch youtube and post crap on slashdot. It's a good deal. What else does anyone need?
In 5 years, that phone that cost $850 will be $199. A $199 phone from today costs the same as an $850 phone from 2012.
A Blu Life One X2 64GB with a fingerprint reader and HD resolution (available since last year on Amazon) costs only $199 and it is the more powerful than an iPhone 5 64GB released in late 2012 that didn't have a fingerprint reader and had a smaller screen with lower resolution screen.
I mean, look the GRT8 cpu from next thing co costs only $6 and includes an ARM7 cpu (presumably made by Allwinner) with a Mali GPU and 256 MB of RAM. That's about as powerful as a high end phone CPU from 2012.
Umm, have a basic map on the phone. It doesn't have to be super detailed though it could have a cache of your neighborhood. That won't take up that much memory. I mean they could easily do it for a few hundred megs. At least the main roads and nearest highways.. if not an approximate location on the planet. Currently neither Apple nor Google will even show you what town you are in without asking the cloud.
I'm sure there are a lot of people who could would be entertained by Ultimate Hands. Entertainment increases one's ability to be creative and productive.
Nowadays everything wants to connect to the cloud. I mean you pull up Apple or Google maps on a phone and it can't even display a generic map showing where you are. It insists on asking the cloud. Yet somehow the OS is like 16 gigabytes in size. How can it take up 16 gigabytes when it doesn't know anything?
Did you read what 10% of what I said? I am saying don't release it all if we don't have the technology to make it usable.
Anyway, first let's make cars with brakes that don't work so that it will be more accessible to people? Accessibility to the masses isn't a good thing if what they are getting is a rip off. It does a huge disservice to VR technology. Nobody will invest in it if it keeps flopping.
Actually I was (mostly) kidding. But I can justify my position, even though --again I was just joking. It's usually the "well known" brands advertising. I don't think I have seen an ad from my favorite soda brand since maybe the 90s. Now that I think of it, most of the products I have purchased I haven't done it by advertising even in the subtle sense. I usually read the amazon reviews online or ask people who may be knowledgeable. It takes discipline but one can immunize oneself from advertising. I like watching infomercials.. the successful ones.. still have not purchased one thing off an infomercial.. but i like watching them cause they are entertaining in how they try to convince people.
I don't see why they would release VR without getting to 5K per eye? Or fine, 4K per eye. At resolutions below 4K per eye.. the screen door effect is far too prominent to stand for more than a few minutes (10 minutes being the Guiness world record, do not attempt -- the poor guy puked to death afterwords). Anyway, my point is that VR is basically not usable until we have the technologies to display, at absolute minimum 120 fps at 4K per eye. And that's for enthusiasts.. if it is for the mainstream we need it to be 180fps and 5K per eye.
Today, we are at less than HD resolution at 90 fps.. it's irresponsible to release a product half baked so early.
Umm, I'll take schizophrenia instead. So will myself. And me.
*Yes Yes I know you can inject nicotine instead of smoking cigarettes and getting lung cancer. There are after all other types of cancer one could want.
College students are always complaining about the price of textbooks. Why can't Chan Zuckerberg pay some of the best textbook authors to publish their textbooks for free? They should pay authors based on distribution and some other metrics such that the incentive and competition to create really great textbooks remains.
They've got $45 billion. If they were willing to spend $100 million they could easily offer online textbooks for the top 50 college courses for free (and book versions for the printing cost). I don't think any of the top 50 textbooks were produced over $2 million each.
Slashdot Mirror
If India has better and cheaper phones then why are people buying iPhones? Obviously your opinion about "better" is not the same as some other people. Maybe you shouldn't get to decide what's good for them?
The nasty cretins. Ruining the party for everyone just because they want to keep the copyright on Mickey Mouse. They are ramping up their lobbying organization so they can fight to re-extend copyright terms once again. Mickey Mouse would pass into the public domain in 2028 if they did nothing. Anyone remember the nightmare of Disney lobbying in the early 2000s as they fought to extend the copyrights. Why couldn't they get Congress to grant them an exemption instead of ruining copyright law for everyone?
India's government is making a mistake with its protectionist policy. The taxing of the iPhone for importing it is detrimental to the Indian people. The iPhone offers a value to the Indian consumer that in turn would help them economically (easier communication, entertainment etc). Putting a tax on the iPhone makes a better quality of life only available to Indian elites.
By making the phones in India it is only a slight improvement on the idea of import taxation, there will be some cost to Apple (and therefore the consumer). Either the phone will be of slightly less quality or the phone's price itself will be higher than it needs to be. By having to pay more for a less quality iPhone (in comparison to tax-free import), it means less people will be able to afford iPhones. In addition it will make it harder for Apple to innovate because it will have to re-tool and manage multiple sites.
Every X months or years someone can find some of the missing gitlabs data on a server somewhere. Just when you thought that was all they would recover, someone finds a few kilobytes of missing gitlabs data on an SD card floating in a sewer.
If I understood this right they are calling the lack of attraction, repulsion. There's no negative force, or dark energy style shit involved. Shouldn't they call it a non-attractor unless they show active repulsion? If I drop an object and it moves towards the ground I am not going to say my hand repelled it.
Oops I left out volume .. but that is usually reasonable .. but u never know.
Anytime someone touts a new battery technology find out the answer to these basic questions:
1. What is the energy density in terms of watt hours per kilogram?
2. How many discharge cycles can it take before capacity drops to 80%?
3. What is its flammability?
Then we can move on to things like cost and manufacturability (which can usually be solved with enough will).
The charge time issue shouldn't be a problem once we get to 600+ mile ranges. That's enough time on the road to either into a hotel for the night, or at least have a relaxed dinner? I mean, travel (i wont say drive, because cars are less than a decade from level 5 autonomy) for 8 hours .. have dinner for 45 minutes. Then go a further 2 to 4 hours then check into a hotel for the overnight full charge ... is that unreasonable? How often do you need to drive faster than that in a hurry but couldn't take an airplane?
Internal combustion engine.
The thing that is preventing 600 mile range electric cars is not the limited capacity of lithium ion, it's the cost. I mean, 750 kilograms of lithium ion battery is the equivalent of a 15 gallons of gasoline in a regular car. A Tesla 85D carries a 540 kg battery and gets 270 miles range. You can easily make a vehicle that can carry 1200 kg of battery. A Tesla with 1000 kg of battery would weigh about 3000 kilograms -- but even accounting for the increased weight, it get well over 600 miles of range (that's enough to comfortably drive between any two big towns in most if not all of the US). The problem is that 1200 kilograms of lithium ion battery costs a shit-ton of money. That's the whole point of the gigafactory. What I am saying is that if we had zero new advances in battery technology other that making it much cheaper than it costs today .. we could have electric cars that outperform gasoline cars in miles travelled before refilling.
So if there is an advance in batteries I want to know, what will it cost in the medium term?
Why don't they get more proactive about banning obnoxious people?
Well a lot of people didn't for various reasons. Dumb luck isn't a great strategy.
It's not the price of the thing. If it was 5K per eye rolling at 120 fps .. it would have sold at $1000 each. VR done properly would be a mega hit. The current generation of VR is vomit inducing. It should never have been released. Oculus, Sony, HTC, and Microsoft have killed VR for a generation or two. We probably won't see VR emerge again for another 25 years. They could have avoided this by waiting 5 years until we had the technology to do it. Why release something before it works?
What if the Ford Model T didn't have brakes? Automobiles would have been banned, the public would have gotten disgusted. Normally I am a libertarian but fuck that, we need government intervention to stop VR headsets from being released. Call the UN, call the FBI .. the FTC. The World Health Organization, the CDC .. I don't give a fuck. Ban VR for 10 years so that the technology can be ready.
Don't release a cheaper phone. Why make a half baked phone? People who want a cheap phone should just buy the older generation model. Having to make a cheaper phone depletes the ability and focus on a good product. Make a good phone for $850. That is affordable by 95% of people. It's only about $70 a month. Who can't afford $70 a month? That's less than two days of work on minimum wage for the ability to communicate with anyone and to watch youtube and post crap on slashdot. It's a good deal. What else does anyone need?
In 5 years, that phone that cost $850 will be $199. A $199 phone from today costs the same as an $850 phone from 2012.
A Blu Life One X2 64GB with a fingerprint reader and HD resolution (available since last year on Amazon) costs only $199 and it is the more powerful than an iPhone 5 64GB released in late 2012 that didn't have a fingerprint reader and had a smaller screen with lower resolution screen.
I mean, look the GRT8 cpu from next thing co costs only $6 and includes an ARM7 cpu (presumably made by Allwinner) with a Mali GPU and 256 MB of RAM. That's about as powerful as a high end phone CPU from 2012.
Umm, have a basic map on the phone. It doesn't have to be super detailed though it could have a cache of your neighborhood. That won't take up that much memory. I mean they could easily do it for a few hundred megs. At least the main roads and nearest highways .. if not an approximate location on the planet. Currently neither Apple nor Google will even show you what town you are in without asking the cloud.
I'm sure there are a lot of people who could would be entertained by Ultimate Hands. Entertainment increases one's ability to be creative and productive.
Nowadays everything wants to connect to the cloud. I mean you pull up Apple or Google maps on a phone and it can't even display a generic map showing where you are. It insists on asking the cloud. Yet somehow the OS is like 16 gigabytes in size. How can it take up 16 gigabytes when it doesn't know anything?
How about getting 64 bit x86 to work instead of emulating 32 bit x86 which is 1980s technology?
Did you read what 10% of what I said? I am saying don't release it all if we don't have the technology to make it usable.
Anyway, first let's make cars with brakes that don't work so that it will be more accessible to people? Accessibility to the masses isn't a good thing if what they are getting is a rip off. It does a huge disservice to VR technology. Nobody will invest in it if it keeps flopping.
Actually I was (mostly) kidding. But I can justify my position, even though --again I was just joking. It's usually the "well known" brands advertising. I don't think I have seen an ad from my favorite soda brand since maybe the 90s. Now that I think of it, most of the products I have purchased I haven't done it by advertising even in the subtle sense. I usually read the amazon reviews online or ask people who may be knowledgeable. It takes discipline but one can immunize oneself from advertising. I like watching infomercials .. the successful ones .. still have not purchased one thing off an infomercial .. but i like watching them cause they are entertaining in how they try to convince people.
I don't see why they would release VR without getting to 5K per eye? Or fine, 4K per eye. At resolutions below 4K per eye .. the screen door effect is far too prominent to stand for more than a few minutes (10 minutes being the Guiness world record, do not attempt -- the poor guy puked to death afterwords). Anyway, my point is that VR is basically not usable until we have the technologies to display, at absolute minimum 120 fps at 4K per eye. And that's for enthusiasts .. if it is for the mainstream we need it to be 180fps and 5K per eye.
Today, we are at less than HD resolution at 90 fps .. it's irresponsible to release a product half baked so early.
If it has to be advertised I don't need it.
So if I get this straight, it means nobody wants to pay for an Uber?
Umm, I'll take schizophrenia instead. So will myself. And me.
*Yes Yes I know you can inject nicotine instead of smoking cigarettes and getting lung cancer. There are after all other types of cancer one could want.
College students are always complaining about the price of textbooks. Why can't Chan Zuckerberg pay some of the best textbook authors to publish their textbooks for free? They should pay authors based on distribution and some other metrics such that the incentive and competition to create really great textbooks remains.
They've got $45 billion. If they were willing to spend $100 million they could easily offer online textbooks for the top 50 college courses for free (and book versions for the printing cost). I don't think any of the top 50 textbooks were produced over $2 million each.