Geez..what happened to the good old days in the late 70's, when people would just light up a doobie and listen to Pink Floyd on the headphones...?
Because the man made my doobie unpopular and modern music is shit.
Back in the 70's they used to play Kiss backwards and claim it was the devils voice. Today they play "Dude looks like a lady" backwards and we get the likes of Lady Ga Ga and Kesha.
I recently stopped playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. The game sucks, even if it were "k-rad", I still wouldn't be playing it. They want to charge me for a handful of new maps.
That's why Activision got so upset at the PC. This just will not fly with PC gamers and we invented the expansion pack. Sell us a full game, if it's good enough we'll pay a little for a lot of extra content (ye olde expansion pack), Battlefield 1942 and 2 had two expansion packs which added quite a bit. When I bought Starcraft Broodwar, it had 25 extra missions, days of entertainment for A$30 in 1999 dollars.
But console players are a different breed. They will pony up $10 in proxy MicroSony points for a single map and maybe a shiny bauble without a second thought. That is the cause of the DLC problem, Microsoft will not let you give away content for free over XBL. Valve tried to give Xbox players the same free content as PC players but MS shot that idea down pretty quick and said they had to charge 400 MS points for it. So essentially your being done three ways, 1 for an unfinished game, 2 for the DLC to finish that game and 3. for XBL to download the DLC.
The idea the codemasters is talking about is already here, embedded in the very notion of DLC.
at least civ 5 will be mod open and steam drm that way better then most of the other drm carp.
But one unit per tile.
I know we have to deal with the old stack o doom issue but seriously this is insane. It's like saying that because one German turned out to be Kaiser Wilhelm we have to get rid of all Germans.
I guess as an 80's generation gamer, I have different expectations. I still like going to the store (gasp!) to buy games. Hell, if there were still arcades around me, I might even go and drop a few dollars there.
With you there, except today the store is a web page and I don't go to the store, it comes to me courtesy of my ISP and FedEx (which is horrible, why does everyone in Hong Kong use FedEx).
What the hell are you smoking? First of all, the current price is roughly in line with other nations.
Nope, the petrol price in Malaysia is below 2.5 Ringit per litre, in fact it's as low as 1.75 RM. 3.2 RM is 1 USD today.
Further more Petronas runs the government because Petronas is the government (Petronas is short for Petroliam Nasional Berhad, or in English "National Petroleum Company") and supply Malaysia with fuel. The Petronas board have an awesome sway in government policy. INPEX is similar in Japan but due to Japans larger commercial sector INPEX does not have the sway Petronas has.
Petronas may export at market prices, but internal supply is well below as it doesn't even touch the open market.
It would really piss me off if it didn't consider me a woman. I don't need billboards screaming that I'm a goddamned tranny to the world. Being 6'2" is bad enough as it is.
and the facial hair.
BILLBOARD: Gillette, the best a...
BILLBOARD: Well they're really really good, trust us on that.
Those of us who will see these billboards everywhere in 30 years and start dressing lie ninjas in public.
BILLBOARD: New Sword(TM) from BladeTek(R). 40% sharper then other swords using BladeTek's(R) patented double blade system. A 7% greater curve allows for faster slicing then previous models resulting in a three second decrease per decapitation. Buy new Sword(TM) from BladeTek(R) today!
Isn't the main reason it is so expensive in most of the world is due to taxes, and not the oil companies themselves?
No.
Oil companies set regional prices the same as media companies. Governments that don't bend over for them and actually enforce rules as to safety, ethical conduct and standards get shafted. Why do you think petrol in Malaysia is still so cheap, because Petronas runs the government.
I know its a popular thing on/. to blame taxes for every thing but many places have no more tax on oil then the US, but are paying up to 50% more.
I mean, the iPhone isn't out even one month yet, the antenna issue is in no way clearly understood by anyone
Actually, the antenna issue is understood by a great many people. Most notably electrical engineers.
The issue is that when you touch the antenna you become part of the antenna, this changes the electrical length of the antenna. This is important as electrical length determines the frequency of the signal you can pick up using that antenna, so changing the electrical length changes the frequency the antenna expects to receive. This is why up to 80% of the signal is lost, not because the signal is gone but because the phone is no longer interpreting that signal as the signal it wants.
A lot of work has been done on antennas in the last 100 years, this one has been known for most of that time. To anyone with any understanding of how radio signals work, this is not surprising and it is just bad design work.
Will be a hard pill for Apple to swallow after the hyped up outlandish claims about the new antenna design
It's never been done before and it's really cool engineering."
The ironic thing is, an external aerial has been done before, hundreds of times, WWII tanks often had unshielded aerials because shielding was too expensive and they suffered from reception problems all the time.
Electrical length with regards to radio transmission is a well known subject for electrical engineers. knowing that touching an exposed aerial will change it's electrical length extremely basic knowledge and it's clear Apple never consulted an engineer before designing this really cool engineering
There are good reasons to fear it even if you ARE informed; that's why there's this little science called "Health Physics".
Even low-level waste is capable of causing disease and mutations that can pass to the next generation.
For crying out loud, this is the problem I was talking about.
Do you know just how much radiation you need to be exposed to for this to happen and in what time frame. You do know that you are bathed in radiation each day, right. Everything from microwave to visible light to an amount of ionising radiation caused by that giant nuclear explosion in the sky (Alpha and Beta particles as well as X-rays and Gamma rays are forms ionising radiation). Even a Banana contains beta particles, the same type of radiation that killed Alexander Litvinenko, a beta emitter only dangerous if you ingest it and people eat banana's every day. Just saying "radiation is bad mmmkay" is counter productive as you have context (how much radiation, what type of radiation, safe exposure times), its as bad as saying "going out into the sun is bad mmmkay" because the sun is far more likely to kill you (via cancer, melanoma is a killer especially if untreated) then ionising radiation yet time in the sun is actually beneficial (best source of Vitamin D).
If you are informed, you can take measures to mitigate the risks like we do with nuclear power and medical radioactive material and devices. There is no need to fear radiation as long as you understand and have a healthy respect for it.
why thousands of small to medium size hydro-electric side diversion dams aren't built on all the rivers in the USA where it makes sense? Not sexy enough? Boring technology?
1. not powerful enough. You need a massive amount of water to gain any useful amount of electrical energy. This does scale well at the high end which is why the Hoover and Three Georges dams produce a large amount of power.
2. people depend on that water for drinking, fishing et al. If you dam up rivers you'll end up changing the ecology more/faster then CO2 in some cases. Big dams good, small dams bad.
Basically, in the case of a uncontrolled sinking, crew or automatic systems SCRAM the reactors. The vessel sinks to the bottom, where the residual heat from the reactor is taken care of by the vast amounts of cold ocean water.
I know reactors are built tough but...
If a nulcear sub or carrier goes down in the mid Atlantic or pacific, exactly how much pressure could a reactor casing take (fair to assume the reactor will go intact, the Bismarck took one hell of a pounding before the magazine blew up). If breached what would be the ultimate result (explosion, fission will continue, fission will stop). I'm asking out of sheer curiosity, I'm not a nuclear scientist but I know enough to know that a Chernobyl type accident requires several failures to occur in and that a nuclear explosion at 4000 metres will do little to affect much of anything.
It's one thing I'm pissed off at a lot of environuts for,
It's not the environuts in Australia. It's the uninformed populous.
Our environuts are too busy trying to ram whaling vessels then actually doing anything about nuclear power. It's the NIMBY's and BANANA's who don't have a clue how safe nuclear power is and how damaging coal power is. All these idiots here is blah, blah, RADIATION, blah. regardless of the actual fact that nuclear power will result in less toxin's and pollutants being released into the air and groundwater even if there is a Three Mile Island. Not to mention the reduction in costs over the long run, the problem is that Bob and Sheila Q Moron doesn't understand nuclear technology thus are a afraid of it.
Uninformed fear of radiation is so bad that people will complain to high heaven about mobile phones yet will put their microwaves at head height and stand near them for 10 minutes or go out into the sun for hours at a time with no sunscreen (not like that's ever caused a melanoma).
Then there's the case of Jon Stewart, who keeps reminding people that he's a professional comedian, and still so many people treat him as a serious journalist.
The thing is in the US, Jon Stewart is doing a better job of keeping people informed of the facts then the actual news broadcasters who are more interested in pushing a political agenda.
Jon is a comedian and not a journalist but that makes him more of a serious journalist then the actual journalists in America.
Chalk me up as somebody who didn't regret upgrading. I'm not blown away by anything, but it's working fine on my 3GS. I haven't noticed any problems.
Sample size of one registered.
Meanwhile, 3 out of the 4 people I know with Iphones are having problems with IOS4, the fourth is pretending the problems dont exist in between bouts of saying "Iphone4 will be better". I haven't heard from him in a while, maybe his phone isn't working. These problems are making it easier for people to switch to phones like the HTC Legend.
I have to support hundreds of iMacs and MacBooks at work, and I've had to call in tons of warranty repairs the last couple years (easily 10x than from our pool of HP and Dell machines).
I have the same experience, per machine Apple got double the warranty returns then the next closest manufacturer. HP machines requires 1 service call per 3.5 machines (7 machines, 2 calls) in a 3 year life. Dell required 1 service call between 8 machines in their 3 year service life, Apple required more then 1 call per 2 machines in the same service life.
Worse yet, dell and HP were easy to deal with, call or email them and they'd come to me and fix the problem. Apple's response was, go to an Apple store (my nearest Apple store is 5000 KM's away). An Imac that had it's PSU blown out in a surge (1. amazingly none of the Dells, HP's or white boxes were affected, 2. if the user listened to me and shut down his machine this would never have happened) it took 5 days for an "approved Apple service centre" to replace a PSU in an Imac. The next one took 2 weeks to claim they couldn't find an issue with a MacBook that failed Memtest (AFAIK that macbook is still an A$2000 doorstop).
Anand found that gripping the iPhone 4 a certain way could indeed cause up to 24dB of signal drop. This was worst-case, with a sweaty deathgrip. Touching more lightly or with less moisture had less of an effect. Gripping other smartphones near their antennas also caused a drop in signal.
Which means exactly nothing.
First, successful connections are not determined by signal strength (that's dBm (decibels per Miliwatt) not dB (decibels)), they are determined by Signal to Noise, an area with a high signal strength and a high SNR are more likely to drop calls then an area with low signal strength and low SNR.
Secondly, it fails to actually test the antenna. Anand is only testing the strength output signal not an actual connection. The problem with the Iphones aerial is not that it is dropping signal, that's just the easily visible side effect. The problem with the Iphone aerial is that when you make contact with it your hand becomes part of the aerial which changes the electrical length of the aerial. The electrical length determines which frequencies the aerial receives and transmits on. This means that out of the same signal you had before, most of it is now being interpreted as noise. The drop in dBm in just the obvious part, the electrical length is the real problem and why the phone drops calls/signal.
The anandtech article is nothing but an Apple fluff piece that is trying to obfuscate the problem.
I had a motorola phone where the pull-up antenna was metal, and silver. I can't remember the model name, but it was before the stub antennas came out.
Citation needed.
I don't have 10 years of antenna design experience like the GP but I have some knowledge in electrical engineering and that is more then enough to tell me that when you change the electrical length of an antenna it changes the frequency the antenna is designed to pick up. Signal strength doesn't mean squat when the antenna is interpreting the correct signal as noise.
I work in a building on the edge of my telco's tower range, Iphone 3G's do not get 3G signals at all in my office. My Milestone constantly switches between 3G and 2G. The Iphone 4 will have no chance in this scenario and it's not unusual for a person to be in an area with a bad signal.
And what about Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India Philippines and China. There are more smartphone users in China then phone users in Japan. As PrimaryConsult pointed out the article is misleading.
That article is misleading, as it is only talking about "smartphones". Japanese "dumbphones" have most of the features that we use smartphones for, and then some (email, web, QR codes, camera, video, watch HDTV off air, gps, etc). Considering 40-50 million phones are sold in Japan each year, the numbers in that article total less than 10% of the phone market.
BTW, MediaTek who provides about 80-90% of phone chipsets in Asia have just signed onto the OHA.
By the time they class action is done, all the customer is likely to see will be a $50 credit on their next iPhone.
Forget a class action, governments that work for their people like in Australia and Europe can force Apple to withdraw a product from sale if it is not
"fit for purpose" which entitles each owner capable of producing a receipt to a full refund.
A voluntary recall and fixing the actual design would be cheaper but as the GP said, Jobs' hubris will prevent him from doing that.
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Because the man made my doobie unpopular and modern music is shit.
Back in the 70's they used to play Kiss backwards and claim it was the devils voice. Today they play "Dude looks like a lady" backwards and we get the likes of Lady Ga Ga and Kesha.
That's why Activision got so upset at the PC. This just will not fly with PC gamers and we invented the expansion pack. Sell us a full game, if it's good enough we'll pay a little for a lot of extra content (ye olde expansion pack), Battlefield 1942 and 2 had two expansion packs which added quite a bit. When I bought Starcraft Broodwar, it had 25 extra missions, days of entertainment for A$30 in 1999 dollars.
But console players are a different breed. They will pony up $10 in proxy MicroSony points for a single map and maybe a shiny bauble without a second thought. That is the cause of the DLC problem, Microsoft will not let you give away content for free over XBL. Valve tried to give Xbox players the same free content as PC players but MS shot that idea down pretty quick and said they had to charge 400 MS points for it. So essentially your being done three ways, 1 for an unfinished game, 2 for the DLC to finish that game and 3. for XBL to download the DLC.
The idea the codemasters is talking about is already here, embedded in the very notion of DLC.
But one unit per tile.
I know we have to deal with the old stack o doom issue but seriously this is insane. It's like saying that because one German turned out to be Kaiser Wilhelm we have to get rid of all Germans.
With you there, except today the store is a web page and I don't go to the store, it comes to me courtesy of my ISP and FedEx (which is horrible, why does everyone in Hong Kong use FedEx).
Nope, the petrol price in Malaysia is below 2.5 Ringit per litre, in fact it's as low as 1.75 RM. 3.2 RM is 1 USD today.
Further more Petronas runs the government because Petronas is the government (Petronas is short for Petroliam Nasional Berhad, or in English "National Petroleum Company") and supply Malaysia with fuel. The Petronas board have an awesome sway in government policy. INPEX is similar in Japan but due to Japans larger commercial sector INPEX does not have the sway Petronas has.
Petronas may export at market prices, but internal supply is well below as it doesn't even touch the open market.
and the facial hair.
BILLBOARD: Gillette, the best a...
BILLBOARD: Well they're really really good, trust us on that.
BILLBOARD: New Sword(TM) from BladeTek(R). 40% sharper then other swords using BladeTek's(R) patented double blade system. A 7% greater curve allows for faster slicing then previous models resulting in a three second decrease per decapitation. Buy new Sword(TM) from BladeTek(R) today!
*not mandatory*
James Hardie could recomend some good lawyers.
No.
/. to blame taxes for every thing but many places have no more tax on oil then the US, but are paying up to 50% more.
Oil companies set regional prices the same as media companies. Governments that don't bend over for them and actually enforce rules as to safety, ethical conduct and standards get shafted. Why do you think petrol in Malaysia is still so cheap, because Petronas runs the government.
I know its a popular thing on
Actually, the antenna issue is understood by a great many people. Most notably electrical engineers.
The issue is that when you touch the antenna you become part of the antenna, this changes the electrical length of the antenna. This is important as electrical length determines the frequency of the signal you can pick up using that antenna, so changing the electrical length changes the frequency the antenna expects to receive. This is why up to 80% of the signal is lost, not because the signal is gone but because the phone is no longer interpreting that signal as the signal it wants.
A lot of work has been done on antennas in the last 100 years, this one has been known for most of that time. To anyone with any understanding of how radio signals work, this is not surprising and it is just bad design work.
Regulatory and Consumer protection agencies. Well if the US had any of those.
/. defend it.
But the thing is, almost 4 out of every 5 Iphone's being sold are to existing Iphone owners so the the audience is unlikely to be thinking subjectively. Just look at how the fanboys on
Give him a break, he's probably posting from his Iphone.
The ironic thing is, an external aerial has been done before, hundreds of times, WWII tanks often had unshielded aerials because shielding was too expensive and they suffered from reception problems all the time.
Electrical length with regards to radio transmission is a well known subject for electrical engineers. knowing that touching an exposed aerial will change it's electrical length extremely basic knowledge and it's clear Apple never consulted an engineer before designing this really cool engineering
For crying out loud, this is the problem I was talking about.
Do you know just how much radiation you need to be exposed to for this to happen and in what time frame. You do know that you are bathed in radiation each day, right. Everything from microwave to visible light to an amount of ionising radiation caused by that giant nuclear explosion in the sky (Alpha and Beta particles as well as X-rays and Gamma rays are forms ionising radiation). Even a Banana contains beta particles, the same type of radiation that killed Alexander Litvinenko, a beta emitter only dangerous if you ingest it and people eat banana's every day. Just saying "radiation is bad mmmkay" is counter productive as you have context (how much radiation, what type of radiation, safe exposure times), its as bad as saying "going out into the sun is bad mmmkay" because the sun is far more likely to kill you (via cancer, melanoma is a killer especially if untreated) then ionising radiation yet time in the sun is actually beneficial (best source of Vitamin D).
If you are informed, you can take measures to mitigate the risks like we do with nuclear power and medical radioactive material and devices. There is no need to fear radiation as long as you understand and have a healthy respect for it.
1. not powerful enough. You need a massive amount of water to gain any useful amount of electrical energy. This does scale well at the high end which is why the Hoover and Three Georges dams produce a large amount of power.
2. people depend on that water for drinking, fishing et al. If you dam up rivers you'll end up changing the ecology more/faster then CO2 in some cases. Big dams good, small dams bad.
I know reactors are built tough but...
If a nulcear sub or carrier goes down in the mid Atlantic or pacific, exactly how much pressure could a reactor casing take (fair to assume the reactor will go intact, the Bismarck took one hell of a pounding before the magazine blew up). If breached what would be the ultimate result (explosion, fission will continue, fission will stop). I'm asking out of sheer curiosity, I'm not a nuclear scientist but I know enough to know that a Chernobyl type accident requires several failures to occur in and that a nuclear explosion at 4000 metres will do little to affect much of anything.
It's not the environuts in Australia. It's the uninformed populous.
Our environuts are too busy trying to ram whaling vessels then actually doing anything about nuclear power. It's the NIMBY's and BANANA's who don't have a clue how safe nuclear power is and how damaging coal power is. All these idiots here is blah, blah, RADIATION, blah. regardless of the actual fact that nuclear power will result in less toxin's and pollutants being released into the air and groundwater even if there is a Three Mile Island. Not to mention the reduction in costs over the long run, the problem is that Bob and Sheila Q Moron doesn't understand nuclear technology thus are a afraid of it.
Uninformed fear of radiation is so bad that people will complain to high heaven about mobile phones yet will put their microwaves at head height and stand near them for 10 minutes or go out into the sun for hours at a time with no sunscreen (not like that's ever caused a melanoma).
The thing is in the US, Jon Stewart is doing a better job of keeping people informed of the facts then the actual news broadcasters who are more interested in pushing a political agenda.
Jon is a comedian and not a journalist but that makes him more of a serious journalist then the actual journalists in America.
Sample size of one registered.
Meanwhile, 3 out of the 4 people I know with Iphones are having problems with IOS4, the fourth is pretending the problems dont exist in between bouts of saying "Iphone4 will be better". I haven't heard from him in a while, maybe his phone isn't working. These problems are making it easier for people to switch to phones like the HTC Legend.
There, fixed that for you.
I have the same experience, per machine Apple got double the warranty returns then the next closest manufacturer. HP machines requires 1 service call per 3.5 machines (7 machines, 2 calls) in a 3 year life. Dell required 1 service call between 8 machines in their 3 year service life, Apple required more then 1 call per 2 machines in the same service life.
Worse yet, dell and HP were easy to deal with, call or email them and they'd come to me and fix the problem. Apple's response was, go to an Apple store (my nearest Apple store is 5000 KM's away). An Imac that had it's PSU blown out in a surge (1. amazingly none of the Dells, HP's or white boxes were affected, 2. if the user listened to me and shut down his machine this would never have happened) it took 5 days for an "approved Apple service centre" to replace a PSU in an Imac. The next one took 2 weeks to claim they couldn't find an issue with a MacBook that failed Memtest (AFAIK that macbook is still an A$2000 doorstop).
Which means exactly nothing.
First, successful connections are not determined by signal strength (that's dBm (decibels per Miliwatt) not dB (decibels)), they are determined by Signal to Noise, an area with a high signal strength and a high SNR are more likely to drop calls then an area with low signal strength and low SNR.
Secondly, it fails to actually test the antenna. Anand is only testing the strength output signal not an actual connection. The problem with the Iphones aerial is not that it is dropping signal, that's just the easily visible side effect. The problem with the Iphone aerial is that when you make contact with it your hand becomes part of the aerial which changes the electrical length of the aerial. The electrical length determines which frequencies the aerial receives and transmits on. This means that out of the same signal you had before, most of it is now being interpreted as noise. The drop in dBm in just the obvious part, the electrical length is the real problem and why the phone drops calls/signal.
The anandtech article is nothing but an Apple fluff piece that is trying to obfuscate the problem.
Citation needed.
I don't have 10 years of antenna design experience like the GP but I have some knowledge in electrical engineering and that is more then enough to tell me that when you change the electrical length of an antenna it changes the frequency the antenna is designed to pick up. Signal strength doesn't mean squat when the antenna is interpreting the correct signal as noise.
I work in a building on the edge of my telco's tower range, Iphone 3G's do not get 3G signals at all in my office. My Milestone constantly switches between 3G and 2G. The Iphone 4 will have no chance in this scenario and it's not unusual for a person to be in an area with a bad signal.
BTW, MediaTek who provides about 80-90% of phone chipsets in Asia have just signed onto the OHA.
Forget a class action, governments that work for their people like in Australia and Europe can force Apple to withdraw a product from sale if it is not "fit for purpose" which entitles each owner capable of producing a receipt to a full refund.
A voluntary recall and fixing the actual design would be cheaper but as the GP said, Jobs' hubris will prevent him from doing that.