The three UK retailers (Apple, 02 and Carphone Warehouse) have all dropped the price from £269 to £169 a few days ago. They claim this price is valid till the 1st of June. It's still stupidly priced - I can go into a shop, buy one for £169, go home, jailbreak it and that's it. If I follow what they want me to do and sign up for the semi-unrelated contract, I get screwed for £35/month and for some reason have to agree to being screwed monthly.
By comparison, my current phone contract which gave me a free HTC Tytn II is £15/month for free internet and £60+ worth of calls and texts.
Say no to the new pricing model - if you have to, buy an iPhone, but get another phone for free on a new contract and sell it to recoup the costs.
He's always annoyed me. As said elsewhere, he presents half-baked arguments as facts, glossing over technicalities or other possible explanations. It makes for impossible reading as you don't know which bits can be backed up and which can't. In my opinion, we need a better poster boy for Science Vs. Religion.
Templates are great, my personal favourite is Template Monster. I find the best process to take is to take a brief, search through for some template options that are likely, print them out or Powerpoint a presentation of them to the customer. Let them choose from that subset (or send you off for more).
Don't even consider trying to design yourself - in addition to rules and standards, there is a 'leap' you have to make to get a good design. If you customise a website with content, templates are cheap as you can use a non-unique one and have a great look for very little money. My personal favourite is Template Monster - It's got great designs, the possibility to buy sites unique if teh customer wants it, and delivered in all sorts of formats (including HTML, layered PSD etc..)
Jeez - buy some headphones. In a lot of the world office space is expensive - as the PP says, it's for those who need to have meetings regularly or whom clients visit. Give a junior programmer an office and soon he'll be playing flash games half his day with impunity.
I do object to not paying new employees over scale though. Programming is a skills based activity, not an experience based activity. If you want to hold onto good programmers that have just been introduced to the market, you'll have to pay them more.
My wife was recently in a town near Tokyo - the local grocery/superstore has Wiis stocked to the ceilings for about $240 each.
This is Nintendo controlling the marketplace, possibly in co-horts with some of the major retailers to allow them to forced-bundle. It also creates massive demand as people buy it BECAUSE it's rare if they happen to see one in stock somewhere. Add to that the flippers and you've got a massive increase in basic sales.
OK - I just tried it out - it put me 650-750 meters from my actual location. It seems to have drawn a 1k radius around the dot indicating that you are in that general area. To be honest, this looks very useful to me - Roll on a windows mobile API for me to use it in my own apps without paying license to someone. There isn't a pizza, taxi, video store or motorway (freeway) junction that would be selected incorrectly from using this location rather than my actual one.
Although the 40% efficiency doesn't sound too bad (though it puts it at about 20% efficency between the power station and your laptop), that 60% loss of power is going on regardless of whether your laptop is using it or not.
I'd also love to know what this does to wireless data around the home. Constant high wattage frequency can't have zero side effects. IANAEE, but seriously - this is very old technology, the improvements that can be made for efficiency will be minimal, we're all better off abandoning this now.
That'd be great - we could all then own iPods and iPod rip-offs, and the associated court time involved. It might even bring Apple to the critical mass where the number of lawyers in the company outstrips the entire staff, I'm sure that'd cause a meltdown.
The reason you beleive this is because you're so used to how your iPod works. Sure, in some ways it may be better (the click wheel for instance is very good), but in many ways it's just what you've gotten used to.
The same argument works for IE vs FF, vi vs Emacs, Word vs LaTeX, C#.net vs ASM. It's simply what you are used to.
For what it's worth, tomorrow when I'm re-installing XP on this laptop that spent 48hrs infected by the piece of crap that is Vista, I'll find out if there's a key problem or not. I very much doubt there will be.
Seriously though, Vista is terrible terrible terrible, slow, unweildy, incomprehensible, incompatible and prone to "Not responding" windows left, right and center.
Doonesbury has a great take on the 419 scammers which works on this. When are we going to be able to invest in mutual funds encompassing all of the pump and dump stocks that we receive in our inbox. Take the legwork out of purchasing penny stocks for all of us:)
All this does is demonstrate a fundemental flaw in the mechanisms and operation of all stock markets. There are plenty of 'legal' mechanisms that operate in much the same way (half of the UK venture capital market), it's a broken system, it needs to be fixed.
Five years ago, my opinion is that the next revolution in technology would be some sort of home lathe. You could buy or create designs of any 3d object, buy a block of material put it into the home lathe and the object would come out. It would be revolutionary because transport of complicated, fragile objects would be dramatically reduced. Excess material could be returned for recycling (and credit), distribution networks for many objects would be dramatically simplifed.
When I saw this, it was my first thought. I had it wrong - you don't need to lathe anything from a block, you can form it in this way. All that's needed is mass production of the technology and development of newer better liquid setting materials.
Not only can the big version build your house, but your home version can make your bathroom fittings, ready to upholster furniture and many more fixtures and fittings.
I've watched some of the animations and videos available on one of the creator's website and can answer that question.
There are two predomenant designs for the robots. Wall riders and a metal superstructure. The former actually uses the building it is making to gain height. It "draws" the wall structure, then rides up it collecting concrete from an elevated ground based pourer. once it's finished, it's rescued from the top of the wall structure. These appear to have pretty minimal potential as they've no way of leaving gaps for doors or windows and they're limited to concrete as a material (they can't lift in lintels, beams etc.. However, there's no limit to the size of building they could do (given multiple waypoints for re-filling with concrete)
The latter is a re-usable robot structure that can build a building up to the width of the jig and the length of it's tracks. This can also have a "picker" that can use other materials and place them on the top of the building as it's being built. Lintels, floor beams etc. Some of the more complicated designs even pick up re-inforcing materials to be embedded in the walls, pre-fab electrical units, plumbing units etc.
When it's finished, disassemble the jig, move it to the new location, re-assemble and get building.
Why attack not only an entire profession but, indeed, anyone who has ever passed on the knowledge and experience they have to another, when all you really mean is "just like any profession, teaching has some bad apples" ?
Because in the case of teachers, bad teachers are supported by the unions and the rank and file of all teachers. Apart from major transgressions, teachers close ranks on any percieved threat.
Although many teachers spend a lot of time outside the classroom doing related work for the benefit of the school and the students, many do the minimum and work 9-3:30, monday-friday with huge summer, easter and christmas breaks. The fabric of education is set up to enable this to happen.
There are some great teachers out there, but the system stinks.
just go to a Starbucks and order black coffee or straight espresso. The looks the employees and other customers give you are priceless.
I have to strongly disagree. I'm not a coffee gourmet, in fact I now drink decaf for health reasons, but I've gone into coffee shops for the last decade and asked for a 'black coffee, fairtrade if you have it'. I've had no odd reaction other than asking what size (to which I respond small and that's no problem either).
The idea that all of these coffee related drinks confuse the perfectly intelligent staffers as to what "black coffee" means is completely fictional, probably coming from lazy stand up comedians' acts. I've never had anyone give me anything but a filter coffee straight from the jug.
I'm personally going the other way. Ideally I'd like a decent DSLR and a super-compact. The latter would live in my bag and the former would be for specific opportunities. In reality, what would happen is that the latter would be in my bag, and the DSLR would be in the cupboard.
DSLRs have lots of problems, even ignoring the technical ones (dust being the biggest). Pull one out in public and you'll get treated differently (usually negatively). Pull out a good quality compact and everyone will ignore you. The one above, they're just NOT everyday-portable.
I see his point, but just to rebuff some of them..
Creative Control:
Not seen the Casio Z1000 or Z800, the Canon S70 or S80, the Panasonic LX1, LX2, the Leica Digilux 1 or 2 or many more then? There are quite a few very small cameras that give you lots of camera control.
Accessories Galore:
Plenty of cameras either have after-market add ons to give them a standard fitting, or even manufacturer add-ons. However, try getting a manageable underwater case for your new D80 - it'll cost a fortune and act as it's own personal float.
No Shutter Lag
Instant Startup
Sure, but there are plenty of the DSLRs that are pretty crap in this respect too. The latest generation are the first you can reasonably rely on.
Higher Build Quality
See above list for pretty well constructed, metal bodied cameras.
Viewfinder
I'm not sure you'll get many Electronic View Finders in the smallest compacts, but there are increasing numbers as the size increases. Other than that, you often get reasonable rangefinders. Not SLR, but you get used to it very quickly
Ergonomics
Seriously? It's not always better to have a huge luggable camera to hold.
Price
Seriously? No really, SERIOUSLY? The price of the compacts is lower than the DSLRs. End of story.
I recall reading a BBC report of it last week, but due to the unique way the BBC is funded, I can't for the life of me find it using their search engines.
Can't help thinking you're not a parent. Our consumer culture runs with guns blazing towards kids. They're easy targets. To just about any age, but more universally in the young, choices are made on a "what I want now" basis, rather than "what's good for me".
In England, we're finally cleaning up our school meal system so that kids aren't being fed complete crap. The ideal is to remove all the rubbish from the available choices, but failing that, some way of making sure that our kids are given restricted choice is about the only control we're ever going to get when kids are out of our direct care.
Personally I think this merits a non-co-operation assault on eBay - maybe reporting all auctions that offer paypal as fraudulent through their systems.
eBay need the users to continue - there's no way we should accept this obvious attempt to reap unfair rewards.
So - starting today, every day, everyone report a couple of paypal auctions as fraudulent, and put the reason as "Doesn't appear to accept Google Checkout". See if we can't change policy on their behalf.
I certainly won't be using ebay until they remove this.
I've always thought that shops that have well dressed dolls dotted around the shop probab have less of a security problem. If you're doing something wrong, you're aware of bodies watching - whether or not they're real is immaterial, out of the corner of your eye, it could be the latest dkny clothing, or it could be a man in blue with ego issues.
Sorry - remind me, what use is a keyboard that doesn't have a numeric keypad beside it? Simply designed to slow us down, seems a bit pointless, especially that that uber l33t pricetag.
I type quite accurately at about 80wpm - I buy the cheapest keyboard the local PC store sells every time the old one dies (about every three years, unless it's a Dell laptop in which case every three months). Frankly I know that there were typists using manual typewriters and going at 150-200wpm - it's not a hardware issue....
Why can't it have news merit too? In fact, getting the players to advertise is part of the point... I personally think that its part of the beauty of the whole thing. Tell me why this isn't an interesting new form of entertainment that fits in Games/Media on/.?
Slashdot Mirror
What scared me about that one is the sheer similarity between the linked onion article and http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/14/news/fortune500/gillette/
The three UK retailers (Apple, 02 and Carphone Warehouse) have all dropped the price from £269 to £169 a few days ago. They claim this price is valid till the 1st of June. It's still stupidly priced - I can go into a shop, buy one for £169, go home, jailbreak it and that's it. If I follow what they want me to do and sign up for the semi-unrelated contract, I get screwed for £35/month and for some reason have to agree to being screwed monthly.
By comparison, my current phone contract which gave me a free HTC Tytn II is £15/month for free internet and £60+ worth of calls and texts.
Say no to the new pricing model - if you have to, buy an iPhone, but get another phone for free on a new contract and sell it to recoup the costs.
He's always annoyed me. As said elsewhere, he presents half-baked arguments as facts, glossing over technicalities or other possible explanations. It makes for impossible reading as you don't know which bits can be backed up and which can't. In my opinion, we need a better poster boy for Science Vs. Religion.
Templates are great, my personal favourite is Template Monster. I find the best process to take is to take a brief, search through for some template options that are likely, print them out or Powerpoint a presentation of them to the customer. Let them choose from that subset (or send you off for more).
Don't even consider trying to design yourself - in addition to rules and standards, there is a 'leap' you have to make to get a good design. If you customise a website with content, templates are cheap as you can use a non-unique one and have a great look for very little money. My personal favourite is Template Monster - It's got great designs, the possibility to buy sites unique if teh customer wants it, and delivered in all sorts of formats (including HTML, layered PSD etc..)
Jeez - buy some headphones. In a lot of the world office space is expensive - as the PP says, it's for those who need to have meetings regularly or whom clients visit. Give a junior programmer an office and soon he'll be playing flash games half his day with impunity.
I do object to not paying new employees over scale though. Programming is a skills based activity, not an experience based activity. If you want to hold onto good programmers that have just been introduced to the market, you'll have to pay them more.
My wife was recently in a town near Tokyo - the local grocery/superstore has Wiis stocked to the ceilings for about $240 each.
This is Nintendo controlling the marketplace, possibly in co-horts with some of the major retailers to allow them to forced-bundle. It also creates massive demand as people buy it BECAUSE it's rare if they happen to see one in stock somewhere. Add to that the flippers and you've got a massive increase in basic sales.
This is Nintendo controlling the marketplace.
OK - I just tried it out - it put me 650-750 meters from my actual location. It seems to have drawn a 1k radius around the dot indicating that you are in that general area. To be honest, this looks very useful to me - Roll on a windows mobile API for me to use it in my own apps without paying license to someone. There isn't a pizza, taxi, video store or motorway (freeway) junction that would be selected incorrectly from using this location rather than my actual one.
Although the 40% efficiency doesn't sound too bad (though it puts it at about 20% efficency between the power station and your laptop), that 60% loss of power is going on regardless of whether your laptop is using it or not.
I'd also love to know what this does to wireless data around the home. Constant high wattage frequency can't have zero side effects. IANAEE, but seriously - this is very old technology, the improvements that can be made for efficiency will be minimal, we're all better off abandoning this now.
Rupert Murdoch
/ \
/ | |
/ \
News International Sky One-----COMPETITOR--------BBC
/ | |
The Sun Various----LOWER RATINGS----Doctor Who
Do you see what's happening here?
That'd be great - we could all then own iPods and iPod rip-offs, and the associated court time involved. It might even bring Apple to the critical mass where the number of lawyers in the company outstrips the entire staff, I'm sure that'd cause a meltdown.
The reason you beleive this is because you're so used to how your iPod works. Sure, in some ways it may be better (the click wheel for instance is very good), but in many ways it's just what you've gotten used to.
The same argument works for IE vs FF, vi vs Emacs, Word vs LaTeX, C#.net vs ASM. It's simply what you are used to.
For what it's worth, tomorrow when I'm re-installing XP on this laptop that spent 48hrs infected by the piece of crap that is Vista, I'll find out if there's a key problem or not. I very much doubt there will be.
Seriously though, Vista is terrible terrible terrible, slow, unweildy, incomprehensible, incompatible and prone to "Not responding" windows left, right and center.
Doonesbury has a great take on the 419 scammers which works on this. When are we going to be able to invest in mutual funds encompassing all of the pump and dump stocks that we receive in our inbox. Take the legwork out of purchasing penny stocks for all of us :)
All this does is demonstrate a fundemental flaw in the mechanisms and operation of all stock markets. There are plenty of 'legal' mechanisms that operate in much the same way (half of the UK venture capital market), it's a broken system, it needs to be fixed.
Five years ago, my opinion is that the next revolution in technology would be some sort of home lathe. You could buy or create designs of any 3d object, buy a block of material put it into the home lathe and the object would come out. It would be revolutionary because transport of complicated, fragile objects would be dramatically reduced. Excess material could be returned for recycling (and credit), distribution networks for many objects would be dramatically simplifed.
When I saw this, it was my first thought. I had it wrong - you don't need to lathe anything from a block, you can form it in this way. All that's needed is mass production of the technology and development of newer better liquid setting materials.
Not only can the big version build your house, but your home version can make your bathroom fittings, ready to upholster furniture and many more fixtures and fittings.
I've watched some of the animations and videos available on one of the creator's website and can answer that question.
There are two predomenant designs for the robots. Wall riders and a metal superstructure. The former actually uses the building it is making to gain height. It "draws" the wall structure, then rides up it collecting concrete from an elevated ground based pourer. once it's finished, it's rescued from the top of the wall structure. These appear to have pretty minimal potential as they've no way of leaving gaps for doors or windows and they're limited to concrete as a material (they can't lift in lintels, beams etc.. However, there's no limit to the size of building they could do (given multiple waypoints for re-filling with concrete)
The latter is a re-usable robot structure that can build a building up to the width of the jig and the length of it's tracks. This can also have a "picker" that can use other materials and place them on the top of the building as it's being built. Lintels, floor beams etc. Some of the more complicated designs even pick up re-inforcing materials to be embedded in the walls, pre-fab electrical units, plumbing units etc.
When it's finished, disassemble the jig, move it to the new location, re-assemble and get building.
Because in the case of teachers, bad teachers are supported by the unions and the rank and file of all teachers. Apart from major transgressions, teachers close ranks on any percieved threat.
Although many teachers spend a lot of time outside the classroom doing related work for the benefit of the school and the students, many do the minimum and work 9-3:30, monday-friday with huge summer, easter and christmas breaks. The fabric of education is set up to enable this to happen.
There are some great teachers out there, but the system stinks.
I have to strongly disagree. I'm not a coffee gourmet, in fact I now drink decaf for health reasons, but I've gone into coffee shops for the last decade and asked for a 'black coffee, fairtrade if you have it'. I've had no odd reaction other than asking what size (to which I respond small and that's no problem either).
The idea that all of these coffee related drinks confuse the perfectly intelligent staffers as to what "black coffee" means is completely fictional, probably coming from lazy stand up comedians' acts. I've never had anyone give me anything but a filter coffee straight from the jug.
I'm personally going the other way. Ideally I'd like a decent DSLR and a super-compact. The latter would live in my bag and the former would be for specific opportunities. In reality, what would happen is that the latter would be in my bag, and the DSLR would be in the cupboard.
..
DSLRs have lots of problems, even ignoring the technical ones (dust being the biggest). Pull one out in public and you'll get treated differently (usually negatively). Pull out a good quality compact and everyone will ignore you. The one above, they're just NOT everyday-portable.
I see his point, but just to rebuff some of them
Creative Control:
Not seen the Casio Z1000 or Z800, the Canon S70 or S80, the Panasonic LX1, LX2, the Leica Digilux 1 or 2 or many more then? There are quite a few very small cameras that give you lots of camera control.
Accessories Galore:
Plenty of cameras either have after-market add ons to give them a standard fitting, or even manufacturer add-ons. However, try getting a manageable underwater case for your new D80 - it'll cost a fortune and act as it's own personal float.
No Shutter Lag
Instant Startup
Sure, but there are plenty of the DSLRs that are pretty crap in this respect too. The latest generation are the first you can reasonably rely on.
Higher Build Quality
See above list for pretty well constructed, metal bodied cameras.
Viewfinder
I'm not sure you'll get many Electronic View Finders in the smallest compacts, but there are increasing numbers as the size increases. Other than that, you often get reasonable rangefinders. Not SLR, but you get used to it very quickly
Ergonomics
Seriously? It's not always better to have a huge luggable camera to hold.
Price
Seriously? No really, SERIOUSLY? The price of the compacts is lower than the DSLRs. End of story.
I recall reading a BBC report of it last week, but due to the unique way the BBC is funded, I can't for the life of me find it using their search engines.
Can't help thinking you're not a parent. Our consumer culture runs with guns blazing towards kids. They're easy targets. To just about any age, but more universally in the young, choices are made on a "what I want now" basis, rather than "what's good for me".
In England, we're finally cleaning up our school meal system so that kids aren't being fed complete crap. The ideal is to remove all the rubbish from the available choices, but failing that, some way of making sure that our kids are given restricted choice is about the only control we're ever going to get when kids are out of our direct care.
Got this from another forum:
Personally I think this merits a non-co-operation assault on eBay - maybe reporting all auctions that offer paypal as fraudulent through their systems.
eBay need the users to continue - there's no way we should accept this obvious attempt to reap unfair rewards.
So - starting today, every day, everyone report a couple of paypal auctions as fraudulent, and put the reason as "Doesn't appear to accept Google Checkout". See if we can't change policy on their behalf.
I certainly won't be using ebay until they remove this.
I've always thought that shops that have well dressed dolls dotted around the shop probab have less of a security problem. If you're doing something wrong, you're aware of bodies watching - whether or not they're real is immaterial, out of the corner of your eye, it could be the latest dkny clothing, or it could be a man in blue with ego issues.
But unlike folding@home - any results from grid.org DO go into commercial only hands....
:) http://www.13thlabour.tk/
Unless they've changed their terms recently at least...
Personally I use my cycles hacking a puzzle for an ARG
Sorry - remind me, what use is a keyboard that doesn't have a numeric keypad beside it? Simply designed to slow us down, seems a bit pointless, especially that that uber l33t pricetag.
I type quite accurately at about 80wpm - I buy the cheapest keyboard the local PC store sells every time the old one dies (about every three years, unless it's a Dell laptop in which case every three months). Frankly I know that there were typists using manual typewriters and going at 150-200wpm - it's not a hardware issue....
then again, I can't think that quickly either....
Why can't it have news merit too? In fact, getting the players to advertise is part of the point... I personally think that its part of the beauty of the whole thing. Tell me why this isn't an interesting new form of entertainment that fits in Games/Media on /.?