Well, that's sad, but you do realize that common OSes nowadays (e.g. Windows) by default also fetch massive amounts of updates in the background. So it's a reasonable expectation today.
At least with Linux you can control this somewhat, e.g. if you do have have high speed access somewhere (office, university,...) you can play sneakernet:
root@andidesk:~# apt-get upgrade -y --print-uris Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut Status-Informationen einlesen... Fertig Die folgenden Pakete werden aktualisiert:
tzdata tzdata-java 2 aktualisiert, 0 neu installiert, 0 zu entfernen und 0 nicht aktualisiert. Es müssen 777kB an Archiven heruntergeladen werden. Nach dieser Operation werden 0B Plattenplatz zusätzlich benutzt. 'http://ubuntu.inode.at/ubuntu/pool/main/t/tzdata/tzdata-java_2011n-0ubuntu0.10.04_all.deb' tzdata-java_2011n-0ubuntu0.10.04_all.deb 143370 SHA256:c5a127acf36eb975207cf47dc51ce584dec0040c3a33d7dc7a7e580c2e247797 'http://ubuntu.inode.at/ubuntu/pool/main/t/tzdata/tzdata_2011n-0ubuntu0.10.04_all.deb' tzdata_2011n-0ubuntu0.10.04_all.deb 633454 SHA256:f2e8443db5f0ef92f564fc0a281ed361c36ccd99f0911f2e25aa17e287b2d2e2
This prints out what apt would like to fetch, you can fetch it somehow, put it in the apt spool, and rerun apt-get upgrade.
Well, MS Access is clearly the most dangerous Weapon of Mass Data corruption in corporate IT. And no, I don't mean the JET engine that has year long data corruption bugs, I'm thinking more about the application layer data corruption that happens when people (not all, but MS Access has certainly the highest percentage of users that fit) that have no idea about databases start manipulate data, create db schemas without even rudimentary understanding of relational databases,...
OTOH, as the joke about the lawyer goes ("son, the mandate you solved today, has paid for your law degree and that of your elder brothers"), databases done by end users, when they gain popularity usually end up needing cleaning up from somebody who knows databases a little bit better, hence usually causing some freelancing contracts.:)
Not THE users. SOME users. Cyanogenmod, Streakdroid, and a number of adhoc images come to mind.
So it's not a fantasy. It's only a fantasy if you misquote it. It's not about "you know how to fix it", it's about "you can fix it, or someone else with a shorter cycle than your carrier can fix it or you can pay someone to fix it".
Furthermore it's also about user choice (so if you want your iPhone, throw away your money, it's yours:) ):
From a price comparison site I usually use, UMTS phones without contract: Windows Mobile (19) Symbian Series 60 (89) Android (238) Maemo (1) WebOS (5) Bada (18) Symbian^3 (30) Symbian Belle (7) Windows Phone 7 (15) iOS (18) MeeGo (6)
Beside suggesting that model-wise more than 50% of the offered phones are Droids, the interesting part is that I can get 200 more or less different phones. (the rest are only carrier rebranded).
The display size goes the range from about 2.5" to 5.3", with resolutions up to 316ppi with 4.65" screen. The technologies go simple LCD to 3D display.
The CPUs go from 400MHz to 2x1.4GHz (with different generation CPUs), 29 devices have a physical keyboard. The weight goes from below 100g to 250g. Prices range from 90€ to 630€ without contract.
And the funny part is, when an user knows how to use one of these devices, he is proficient with the next one in minutes, be it kids or retirement age people.
I mean, iOS is clearly the odd one here, with less functionality and less customizable. And naturally, if you have been using phones with a physical keyboard for the last decade, well, please visit the back office of your next Apple store for reeducation, touch screen keyboards are best and even better with average sized screens, no point in seeing more than the entry line and the keyboard at the same time, context information on what you are entering is worthless.
If you have big hands, 3.5" is the perfect screen size. If you have small hands like a small kid, 3.5" is the perfect size. We also know how much you should use your phone during the day, so why would you want to carry a second battery for switching? And as you are a cool kid, and you only associate with cool kids, any where you go, the local cool kid will have an Apple dock connector to recharge your phone (never mind that over 50% of the above Droids have already the new standard connector, also called microUSB). Nor do cool Apple users like to print out their photos, hence there is no need for a SD card slot. I mean waiting half an hour at the photo service booth to transfer the files via Bluetooth is COOL. And should somebody claim that it's uncool, well, it's the photo service fault, they should pay big bucks to Apple so that they are allowed to use the holy Dock connector (never mind that the dock connectors are not 100% compatible between generations).
The funny thing is that despite two S2 in the house hold, the 3rd battery that I bought has not yet been used. That shatters somehow my normal usage pattern that relies on having 1-2 extra batteries and an external charger.
Trust me, 11 years are way more difficult to get happy than even adult females. You can reason with adult ones on technical grounds, at least about major points. 11 years are pure emotional bundles, heavy influenced by their peer group. My daughter went through 4 phones (Samsung Star, Dell Streak, iPhone 3GS, Samsung i5500) before declaring being happy with a S2. So the fact that the S2 is cooler than the iPhone by her implies that her peers at school concur (or a subset, I guess the iPhone carrying subset has a different opinion), and a short sample suggests that these kids usually get the toys they want. (But then what shall I say, I spend over 1K€ in 14 months on her mobile experiments,...)
Well, let's take a look: The iPhone 4S is a slightly retouched iPhone 4. It has still the same small screen (which is okay for phones that do have a physical keyboard, but you did notice that the onscreen keyboard eats into screen real estate. On screen keyboards are somewhat okay with screens well beyond 4"), it's still not OLED (which means that many end users when you compare it side by side with an OLED device prefer the OLED device, so Apple being the consumer focused company seems to be doing something wrong), the CPU is now dual core (wow, let me check in the archive when this was introduced on the Android side of the world), it still uses a non-standard connector (irritating if all other phones are standardizing but then, you pay extra do be an Apple fanboy), the case has been modified just enough to make you rebuy accessories, So that leaves us the antenna thing, which I cannot sensibly assess (well, it still has no coverage in our elevator, and outside the house, the expectation in our country has been full coverage since over a decade, guess it might make a difference when you go mountaineering outside the usual places), and Siri where we've got the word of the a board member of Siri that it's a break through. (Hint even if it were so, with the current IP climate you cannot assess the state of art just by looking at peer-reviewed journals, I don't think that the Siri guys published their results before being ready.) Well it's certainly a break through for journalists looking for funny dialogs, or for people with to much time spending their evenings figuring out to which keywords Siri can say something else than "I don't understand that" (to cite some reviews). Plus it's a complete new UI method (people need to get used to it first) AND it has a number of drawbacks e.g. privacy in public spaces. So yes, Apple has been overtaken, and their answer "iPhone 4S" has been not exactly the great leap forwards either. (The current, or let's say the last and current generation of Android devices have reached the point where the UI is not suffering even if you try to abuse multitasking. Enough CPU, enough RAM. So what's Apple reasoning again to not allow true multitasking on their devices? Even on a pad?)
Not really, I've been running Skype on my Dell Streak, usually in 5-6hours near nonstop usage sessions, and despite using a non-standard Android image, (that is not even current), and usually sticking maximum brightness plus UMTS, it went into orange seldom before hour 5. Skype did not even show up as battery user on the battery usage screen without scrolling down.
Geniuses, perhaps. But not geniuses having hardware specs. Notice how perfect Androids (that DO have a Linux kernel, although the power saving infrastructure is Android-specific), where the hardware specs are known handle power management.
Well, the Samsung S2 is that "feature phone" that managed to switch my 11 years daughter from "I want an iPhone" to "What, this phone is way cooler than an iPhone". And concerning battery life, not even my daughter manages to drain the S2, despite her "instinctive" understanding of battery saving, e.g. using a 3D animated background or watching youtube videos for hours.
So, as hard as it might seem, Apple just lost most if not all it's technological superiority (arguable that this has happened earlier as in some ways even a T-Mobile G1 has been superior to the Apple phone of the day), so I guess Apple fanboys should start to concentrate on it's ugly^H^H^H^Hbeautiful design.
Hint, some cable services really insist that you use the settop box that they provided to you. (really insist => they encrypt not only premium channels, they encrypt free to receive over the air channels)
And even if I'd be in an area where the cable provider do not encrypt free channels, that leaves the premium channels where you have to pay in effect per channel received (because the decoding smart card can be only in one device, and some smart cards are locked to do only one channel at the time no matter what).
Last but not least, it's just way more convenient, I mean the torrents are fetched automatically from a RSS feed, scripts decide how long to keep the torrent seeding, scripts unpack and transcode the videos, moving them to the multimedia filesystem, where mediatomb serves them. Little manual work, beyond watching free space, and either deleting some torrents if it runs out or adding a new n-TB disc to the volume group as needed.
Btw, Hulu is a pure US-only service, the rest of the world mostly has nothing comparable. And no premium channels do not come with on-demand service, and the general on-demand service does not carry all series.
And no, it's not really fault of the cable provider, it's the producers that still to refuse to setup a common European licensing setup, and it's just a question of when they'll get spanked by the EU commission for that.
Not in every country, there are places where "judge" is one of the possible career tracks for law students, and they basically end up judges with less practice that lawyers need to be lawyers;)
Sorry, but law studies (at least here around) are mostly "learning by heart", which is not exactly proof of intelligence, IMHO. Furthermore beside "finish university" I managed all of your items, and while I cannot compete with star lawyers, I certainly make more than the average lawyer locally. And to further the original argument, locally, law students that do not manage to make a living as a lawyer, usually turn to "civil servant" positions, e.g. judge. Combine that with legal protections (which is okay, they are there for a reason) means that a dummy that entered civil service as judge (because at the time judges were needed and so hiring standards were lowered) will stay a judge till pension. He might stay at some lower court for life, but nobody can even contemplate to remove him till he reaches retirement.
So yes, while wielding quite a bit of power, judges and lawyers are not necessary intelligent. And the legal system has been known to issue really funny/crazy orders when processing technical subject matter, e.g. IT & Internet. (E.g. German law practice treated faxes differently depending upon how they were received/sent, with a paper machine or a computer => which is somehow stupid as there is no way to recognized the type of fax endpoint via the protocol, and for long years considered a printout of a 196x204 dpi black/white image with transmissions errors to be a legal document. Another funny thing to watch was how courts handle linking, caching and other technical issues. Well, it's funny and sad usual, the funny part is seeing these guys having no understanding at all of the issues, and at the same time the weeping part is how such a collection of gits can affect every day life in a negative way for many people)
Worse, while there are clear cut examples (like 9/11), it's often hard to differentiate the labels "terrorist" and "freedom fighter". Technically, I'm almost sure that the legal authorities at the time would have considered the American "freedom fighters" (notice how the winning side defines which label is correct) "terrorists" if the word would have been known back then.
And how is the US bombing all kind of places with drones, because they "knew" (like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?) that a guy on the "list" was there, the list being secret and created without legal oversight, and to hell with civilian collateral deaths. I mean if they were near the bad guy (who warrants a death penalty without legal review), they are at least a little bit bad, right? Ooops, our knowledge turned out wrong. (and that presumes that being part of that list has been decided on correct facts, and not similarities in name. I mean how many guys on death row turned out to be innocent after more than a decade? But the guys in Washington DC do know perfect who is the bad guys, so why do they nothing to lower the error rate in the legal system?) => So how does that not meet the definition of state sponsored terrorism?
Not that airlines are overly sueable, (well perhaps in the US), they've got a strictly limited liability even in cases of death. So it's mostly not about being sued, it's about PR.
So now stuff done in an introduction to numerics class is news.
Not much known to the general population, there are problems that cannot be calculated numerically, usually because a change of input magnifies immensely on the output. So an error of 1 on input becomes an error of 10^n (with n in the two digit range and bigger). The issue here is that basically by definition all numerical systems used to calculate in a computer have builtin error sources, and errors do accumulate.
The pain becomes even bigger if you consider that in floating point numerics basic mathematical laws do not apply, e.g. (a + b) + c = a + (b + c) is true in mathematical sense, but is in general untrue for floats. Using fixed point arithmetics, while in theory better, implies a rigorous error analysis (floating point is kind the "automatic" solution to the required analysis for fixed point arithmetics), which is especially in such "fantasy" models hard to do. (For many coefficients the "designer" of the model has no idea what the range of valid values might be. If you do not know the value range, you basically are forced to floating point, implicitly accepting that you have no real idea about the error to be expected, beyond the general knowledge of the used floating point system.)
Not really. If they plaster the broadcast via putting advertisements around the football field, it's irrelevant. And the Greek (or whoever) sat provider won't be adding Sky commercials. The only way for Sky to have an exclusive product would be to add some value itself, e.g. having a known and liked moderator.
Actually, the ruling is not really about exclusivity. It's about cracking down on rights owners that try segment the European market into tiny national segments. The ruling is not surprising, as the common market has been one of the basic fundamental dogmas of the EU. Any other ruling would have been akin to the Pope introducing female priests and bishops. Or declaring Jesus to be just a human.
Well, proof enough for the BSA to audit companies. Such an audit in itself is a punishment, even if it's not declared so, because you need to provide the resources to handle the audit on your side. (Same applies to an IRS audit btw, where the handling of it can cost a bundle in working hours of your tax advisor/accountant to answer the audit).
So by the standard the IP industry uses, it's more than enough to raid their offices, bother their employees, wreak havoc on them. Does not matter to much if it's true or not, right? A claim from a disgrunted ex-employee is enough.
Well, not exactly, the truth is always written by the winner, and the truth that looser had, well, is forgotten.
"The Truth" is always something linked to the point of view. (E.g. there are enough situations where obviously all parties or none of them are responsible for something, still the parties claim it's the fault of the others. In a subjective view, their truth is certainly correct, and in an objective view you cannot easily cast the situation either as a simple 2-state boolean affair)
Well, the public (most/.-ers are more enlightened despite all their failings, first!!!) gets what they want. I'm not sure that characterizing an upstanding company that specializes in deriving value from patents as a troll is correct, I mean they just do what the system is setup to allow them to do. That's what you get if you allow to monopolize even the most trivial thoughts. (And you thought that your thoughts are free, lucky for you there is not yet a way to extract them, hence it's hard to prove that you are infringing,....)
Complaining about undesirable results of a system that is clearly setup to favour these results sounds somehow stupid:
-) The PO basically issues patents for anything. Wonder if they would even detect it if someone would try to submit a filing done mostly by a clever text generator.
-) There is no incentive for the PO to generally control the quality of patents, they get their fees, and any fallout from stupid patents is paid by somebody else. Doing their job correctly actually would lower their "ROI". (And even being a public office, I think that many administrators would like to be able to point out that they did not use tax money, they could finance themselves from their fees, right?)
-) The fees of the PO are big enough that a private person might have troubles creating patents on the fly, but for many corporations, these costs are trivial.
-) The cost of invalidating a blatantly bad patent is paid by the defendants. The owner/filer of a fraudulent patent has basically no liability, the worst that can happen is that their patent gets invalidated. With the costs associated with the legal system, for many defendants, no matter if they infringe, or if the patent is obviously wrong, it's economically cheaper to pay highwaymen than to fight them.
To summarize, "patent trolls" are inherent in the patent system as practiced in the US. Given the conditions it's a low cost, no liability way to generate potentially huge windfalls. The lawyers trolling can point out that they are no experts in the subject matter, and they bought the "IP" in good faith. And the inventors can point to the official PO approval. And the PO, when confronted with an invalidated patent, can point out that this only proves that the system works as intended,...
Well, judges love it if you try to circumvent laws.
And I do not think that you can circumvent this directive as easily, as in fact it clears up handling of cookies, and allows cookies in some situations. The generic data protection directive that this directive amends, is still law, and it's more strict (although in more generic terms) on cookie usage. And I do not think that Facebook has any legitimate legal purpose to track non-users. Or to create shadow profiles from data other users have provided them, even potentially linking it with an identifying cookie. So paragraph 66 of the directive does not help Facebook.
Well, the US does not place any legal requirement on companies related to privacy in general. (There are a number of niche laws, e.g. HIPAA, but in general companies can collect, mix, sell,... data about your person, and you have basically no say in that.)
The EU does have a privacy directive, and at least some member countries consider "having control about your personal data" a human right. Still violating the EU data protection directive usually means only an administrative fine, although if they piss of the Irish authorities, 100K€ (>100US$) per complaint, potentially repetitively if they don't stop to violate the law, could make it very expensive for Facebook. And moving out of Ireland would be expensive tax wise (Ireland is a corporate tax heaven, which officially as an EU member is not a tax heaven, as are certain US states, that would probably meet the objective criteria for a tax heaven, but still are not on any official list, as they are US states. So facebook might move out Ireland, but that would mean a hit on profitability, not sure how the IRS thinks about certain "official" tax heavens in the Caribbean.)
Before somebody cries "but Google is doing the same" => well, not exactly, for non-logged in users they've worked out a compromise. dropping part of the IP address (and potentially other stuff). The operative word is that they did contact the German data protection authorities on their own, worked with them, and did not mail out notices to citizens that they do not even plan to keep their legal requirements. (Hint: If they really need a human to assemble the personal information PDF, then they are doing it wrong. Checking that the personal data matches => well that's what you hire temps for.)
So Facebook corporate officers won't be arrested entering the EU, but their Irish subsidiary might be fined quite a bit. The Irish data protection authority already planned to audit them, which suggests that the public available information indicates to them that there might be a problem. And now they have at least two dozen formal complaints. So if they manage to piss the authority off, they could issue slightly over 2 million € fines immediately, plus one fine per user that does not get his/her data inside the 40 days. Not very probable in the first round that the authority will go for maximum fines, but the real issue is that a number of complaints will make it necessary to redo the facebook technical design to get in compliance. And a number of complaints point to core business ideas of FB, and are completely incompatible with Union law. So if people continue to complain about them, and FB does not fix their systems and their business model, they are bound to piss off the data protection authority, no matter how business-friendly authorities usually are.
And I guess the patent won't help them either, it documents their business practices publicly. They could probably manage to track their own users by having a ToS that allows that, although they didn't even bother to change the boilerplate ToS from US to EU legal standards (and an US-style ToS will most certainly not fly in Europe), but they also track non-users, and for non-users there is no way they can assume consent. So they need to implement either similar precautions that anonymize the data enough (what Google does), or to stop the tracking completely.
Well, and the difference is that producing hardware is not exactly cheap. So we've got the N900 running Maemo5 which is rather strongly different from earlier releases on the N8xx devices. Then we were told, after the N900 was received nicely (as a mobile, not a tablet), from Nokia that they'll merge Maemo into Meego. At the same time, the whole distribution was changing over from Gtk to Qt, because Nokia wanted one toolkit that works on all it's platforms. Than Nokia decided to get paid for committing suicide (well, the "new" Nokia will almost certainly loose market share even faster in it's strong points, while it's completely unclear how well Windows Phone will work out. Especially as many long time of older MS mobile offerings do not associate good things with the name), and as we were told, the Intel guys responsible for MeeGo, read about this in their newspapers. Now Intel does a similar move, it drops MeeGo and merges it yet again.
There are also some interesting data points:
- the N900 was a fully end user (non-hacker) compatible phone, better than all other offerings (Symbian^3) from Nokia. - the N900 turned into this cool ARM based Linux supermini laptop only when one enabled the devel repositories. - Maemo, having existed for some time (the version number is 5), does have a functional open source community. - The community crowd is already much smaller with MeeGo, and we'll see how many Tizen guys will be left over. - Changing the rules of the game has a tradition for Nokia (basically compatibility between different releases of Symbian have been at best source-level), but the game overall has changed, Nokia is not top of the field anymore, so developers won't take abuse as easily as they have in the past. So Nokia sold their developer community on Qt, and a multiplatform strategy (which is as such not a bad thing, considering all the nice things Nokia has done in the past). Then, overnight, "Windows Phone is our future. No Qt on Windows Phone, sorry, our "partner" MS takes our and through us your concerns seriously. Btw, just keep developing Qt, will be still supported on Symbian, at least till we stop the production of that junk" => guess that makes for good relations with developers.
Because it takes some time to kick the bad guys in the ass. And/or they are realistic, Bluray players are way not so important as DVD, which was a monopolistic universal format. (You don't loose much in quality by going DVD from BD, and HD content is a hassle because of it's bulk when you are building your own useable video collection, and useable in my eyes involves not using physical media, they are pure bother. And who wants to discuss what to watch by going to the other end of the room and looking through 1000+ DVD/BD cases?)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's sad, but you do realize that common OSes nowadays (e.g. Windows) by default also fetch massive amounts of updates in the background. So it's a reasonable expectation today.
At least with Linux you can control this somewhat, e.g. if you do have have high speed access somewhere (office, university, ...) you can play sneakernet:
root@andidesk:~# apt-get upgrade -y --print-uris
Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig
Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut
Status-Informationen einlesen... Fertig
Die folgenden Pakete werden aktualisiert:
tzdata tzdata-java
2 aktualisiert, 0 neu installiert, 0 zu entfernen und 0 nicht aktualisiert.
Es müssen 777kB an Archiven heruntergeladen werden.
Nach dieser Operation werden 0B Plattenplatz zusätzlich benutzt.
'http://ubuntu.inode.at/ubuntu/pool/main/t/tzdata/tzdata-java_2011n-0ubuntu0.10.04_all.deb' tzdata-java_2011n-0ubuntu0.10.04_all.deb 143370 SHA256:c5a127acf36eb975207cf47dc51ce584dec0040c3a33d7dc7a7e580c2e247797
'http://ubuntu.inode.at/ubuntu/pool/main/t/tzdata/tzdata_2011n-0ubuntu0.10.04_all.deb' tzdata_2011n-0ubuntu0.10.04_all.deb 633454 SHA256:f2e8443db5f0ef92f564fc0a281ed361c36ccd99f0911f2e25aa17e287b2d2e2
This prints out what apt would like to fetch, you can fetch it somehow, put it in the apt spool, and rerun apt-get upgrade.
Well, MS Access is clearly the most dangerous Weapon of Mass Data corruption in corporate IT. And no, I don't mean the JET engine that has year long data corruption bugs, I'm thinking more about the application layer data corruption that happens when people (not all, but MS Access has certainly the highest percentage of users that fit) that have no idea about databases start manipulate data, create db schemas without even rudimentary understanding of relational databases, ...
OTOH, as the joke about the lawyer goes ("son, the mandate you solved today, has paid for your law degree and that of your elder brothers"), databases done by end users, when they gain popularity usually end up needing cleaning up from somebody who knows databases a little bit better, hence usually causing some freelancing contracts. :)
But if you really want to give WMDs to endusers:
http://www.kexi-project.org/wiki/wikiview/index.php@KexiFAQ.html
Not THE users. SOME users. Cyanogenmod, Streakdroid, and a number of adhoc images come to mind.
So it's not a fantasy. It's only a fantasy if you misquote it. It's not about "you know how to fix it", it's about "you can fix it, or someone else with a shorter cycle than your carrier can fix it or you can pay someone to fix it".
Furthermore it's also about user choice (so if you want your iPhone, throw away your money, it's yours :) ):
From a price comparison site I usually use, UMTS phones without contract:
Windows Mobile (19) Symbian Series 60 (89) Android (238) Maemo (1) WebOS (5) Bada (18) Symbian^3 (30) Symbian Belle (7) Windows Phone 7 (15) iOS (18) MeeGo (6)
Beside suggesting that model-wise more than 50% of the offered phones are Droids, the interesting part is that I can get 200 more or less different phones. (the rest are only carrier rebranded).
The display size goes the range from about 2.5" to 5.3", with resolutions up to 316ppi with 4.65" screen. The technologies go simple LCD to 3D display.
The CPUs go from 400MHz to 2x1.4GHz (with different generation CPUs), 29 devices have a physical keyboard. The weight goes from below 100g to 250g. Prices range from 90€ to 630€ without contract.
And the funny part is, when an user knows how to use one of these devices, he is proficient with the next one in minutes, be it kids or retirement age people.
I mean, iOS is clearly the odd one here, with less functionality and less customizable. And naturally, if you have been using phones with a physical keyboard for the last decade, well, please visit the back office of your next Apple store for reeducation, touch screen keyboards are best and even better with average sized screens, no point in seeing more than the entry line and the keyboard at the same time, context information on what you are entering is worthless.
If you have big hands, 3.5" is the perfect screen size. If you have small hands like a small kid, 3.5" is the perfect size. We also know how much you should use your phone during the day, so why would you want to carry a second battery for switching? And as you are a cool kid, and you only associate with cool kids, any where you go, the local cool kid will have an Apple dock connector to recharge your phone (never mind that over 50% of the above Droids have already the new standard connector, also called microUSB). Nor do cool Apple users like to print out their photos, hence there is no need for a SD card slot. I mean waiting half an hour at the photo service booth to transfer the files via Bluetooth is COOL. And should somebody claim that it's uncool, well, it's the photo service fault, they should pay big bucks to Apple so that they are allowed to use the holy Dock connector (never mind that the dock connectors are not 100% compatible between generations).
The funny thing is that despite two S2 in the house hold, the 3rd battery that I bought has not yet been used. That shatters somehow my normal usage pattern that relies on having 1-2 extra batteries and an external charger.
Trust me, 11 years are way more difficult to get happy than even adult females. You can reason with adult ones on technical grounds, at least about major points. 11 years are pure emotional bundles, heavy influenced by their peer group. My daughter went through 4 phones (Samsung Star, Dell Streak, iPhone 3GS, Samsung i5500) before declaring being happy with a S2. So the fact that the S2 is cooler than the iPhone by her implies that her peers at school concur (or a subset, I guess the iPhone carrying subset has a different opinion), and a short sample suggests that these kids usually get the toys they want. (But then what shall I say, I spend over 1K€ in 14 months on her mobile experiments, ...)
Well, let's take a look:
The iPhone 4S is a slightly retouched iPhone 4. It has still the same small screen (which is okay for phones that do have a physical keyboard, but you did notice that the onscreen keyboard eats into screen real estate. On screen keyboards are somewhat okay with screens well beyond 4"), it's still not OLED (which means that many end users when you compare it side by side with an OLED device prefer the OLED device, so Apple being the consumer focused company seems to be doing something wrong), the CPU is now dual core (wow, let me check in the archive when this was introduced on the Android side of the world), it still uses a non-standard connector (irritating if all other phones are standardizing but then, you pay extra do be an Apple fanboy), the case has been modified just enough to make you rebuy accessories, So that leaves us the antenna thing, which I cannot sensibly assess (well, it still has no coverage in our elevator, and outside the house, the expectation in our country has been full coverage since over a decade, guess it might make a difference when you go mountaineering outside the usual places), and Siri where we've got the word of the a board member of Siri that it's a break through. (Hint even if it were so, with the current IP climate you cannot assess the state of art just by looking at peer-reviewed journals, I don't think that the Siri guys published their results before being ready.) Well it's certainly a break through for journalists looking for funny dialogs, or for people with to much time spending their evenings figuring out to which keywords Siri can say something else than "I don't understand that" (to cite some reviews). Plus it's a complete new UI method (people need to get used to it first) AND it has a number of drawbacks e.g. privacy in public spaces. So yes, Apple has been overtaken, and their answer "iPhone 4S" has been not exactly the great leap forwards either. (The current, or let's say the last and current generation of Android devices have reached the point where the UI is not suffering even if you try to abuse multitasking. Enough CPU, enough RAM. So what's Apple reasoning again to not allow true multitasking on their devices? Even on a pad?)
Not really, I've been running Skype on my Dell Streak, usually in 5-6hours near nonstop usage sessions, and despite using a non-standard Android image, (that is not even current), and usually sticking maximum brightness plus UMTS, it went into orange seldom before hour 5. Skype did not even show up as battery user on the battery usage screen without scrolling down.
Geniuses, perhaps. But not geniuses having hardware specs. Notice how perfect Androids (that DO have a Linux kernel, although the power saving infrastructure is Android-specific), where the hardware specs are known handle power management.
Well, the Samsung S2 is that "feature phone" that managed to switch my 11 years daughter from "I want an iPhone" to "What, this phone is way cooler than an iPhone". And concerning battery life, not even my daughter manages to drain the S2, despite her "instinctive" understanding of battery saving, e.g. using a 3D animated background or watching youtube videos for hours.
So, as hard as it might seem, Apple just lost most if not all it's technological superiority (arguable that this has happened earlier as in some ways even a T-Mobile G1 has been superior to the Apple phone of the day), so I guess Apple fanboys should start to concentrate on it's ugly^H^H^H^Hbeautiful design.
Just carry a second (or third) charged battery and switch it when the battery is drained.
Hint, some cable services really insist that you use the settop box that they provided to you.
(really insist => they encrypt not only premium channels, they encrypt free to receive over the air channels)
And even if I'd be in an area where the cable provider do not encrypt free channels, that leaves the premium channels where you have to pay in effect per channel received (because the decoding smart card can be only in one device, and some smart cards are locked to do only one channel at the time no matter what).
Last but not least, it's just way more convenient, I mean the torrents are fetched automatically from a RSS feed, scripts decide how long to keep the torrent seeding, scripts unpack and transcode the videos, moving them to the multimedia filesystem, where mediatomb serves them. Little manual work, beyond watching free space, and either deleting some torrents if it runs out or adding a new n-TB disc to the volume group as needed.
Btw, Hulu is a pure US-only service, the rest of the world mostly has nothing comparable. And no premium channels do not come with on-demand service, and the general on-demand service does not carry all series.
And no, it's not really fault of the cable provider, it's the producers that still to refuse to setup a common European licensing setup, and it's just a question of when they'll get spanked by the EU commission for that.
Not in every country, there are places where "judge" is one of the possible career tracks for law students, and they basically end up judges with less practice that lawyers need to be lawyers ;)
Sorry, but law studies (at least here around) are mostly "learning by heart", which is not exactly proof of intelligence, IMHO. Furthermore beside "finish university" I managed all of your items, and while I cannot compete with star lawyers, I certainly make more than the average lawyer locally. And to further the original argument, locally, law students that do not manage to make a living as a lawyer, usually turn to "civil servant" positions, e.g. judge. Combine that with legal protections (which is okay, they are there for a reason) means that a dummy that entered civil service as judge (because at the time judges were needed and so hiring standards were lowered) will stay a judge till pension. He might stay at some lower court for life, but nobody can even contemplate to remove him till he reaches retirement.
So yes, while wielding quite a bit of power, judges and lawyers are not necessary intelligent. And the legal system has been known to issue really funny/crazy orders when processing technical subject matter, e.g. IT & Internet. (E.g. German law practice treated faxes differently depending upon how they were received/sent, with a paper machine or a computer => which is somehow stupid as there is no way to recognized the type of fax endpoint via the protocol, and for long years considered a printout of a 196x204 dpi black/white image with transmissions errors to be a legal document. Another funny thing to watch was how courts handle linking, caching and other technical issues. Well, it's funny and sad usual, the funny part is seeing these guys having no understanding at all of the issues, and at the same time the weeping part is how such a collection of gits can affect every day life in a negative way for many people)
Worse, while there are clear cut examples (like 9/11), it's often hard to differentiate the labels "terrorist" and "freedom fighter". Technically, I'm almost sure that the legal authorities at the time would have considered the American "freedom fighters" (notice how the winning side defines which label is correct) "terrorists" if the word would have been known back then.
And how is the US bombing all kind of places with drones, because they "knew" (like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?) that a guy on the "list" was there, the list being secret and created without legal oversight, and to hell with civilian collateral deaths. I mean if they were near the bad guy (who warrants a death penalty without legal review), they are at least a little bit bad, right? Ooops, our knowledge turned out wrong. (and that presumes that being part of that list has been decided on correct facts, and not similarities in name. I mean how many guys on death row turned out to be innocent after more than a decade? But the guys in Washington DC do know perfect who is the bad guys, so why do they nothing to lower the error rate in the legal system?) => So how does that not meet the definition of state sponsored terrorism?
Not that airlines are overly sueable, (well perhaps in the US), they've got a strictly limited liability even in cases of death. So it's mostly not about being sued, it's about PR.
So now stuff done in an introduction to numerics class is news.
Not much known to the general population, there are problems that cannot be calculated numerically, usually because a change of input magnifies immensely on the output. So an error of 1 on input becomes an error of 10^n (with n in the two digit range and bigger). The issue here is that basically by definition all numerical systems used to calculate in a computer have builtin error sources, and errors do accumulate.
The pain becomes even bigger if you consider that in floating point numerics basic mathematical laws do not apply, e.g. (a + b) + c = a + (b + c) is true in mathematical sense, but is in general untrue for floats. Using fixed point arithmetics, while in theory better, implies a rigorous error analysis (floating point is kind the "automatic" solution to the required analysis for fixed point arithmetics), which is especially in such "fantasy" models hard to do. (For many coefficients the "designer" of the model has no idea what the range of valid values might be. If you do not know the value range, you basically are forced to floating point, implicitly accepting that you have no real idea about the error to be expected, beyond the general knowledge of the used floating point system.)
Not really. If they plaster the broadcast via putting advertisements around the football field, it's irrelevant. And the Greek (or whoever) sat provider won't be adding Sky commercials. The only way for Sky to have an exclusive product would be to add some value itself, e.g. having a known and liked moderator.
Actually, the ruling is not really about exclusivity. It's about cracking down on rights owners that try segment the European market into tiny national segments. The ruling is not surprising, as the common market has been one of the basic fundamental dogmas of the EU. Any other ruling would have been akin to the Pope introducing female priests and bishops. Or declaring Jesus to be just a human.
Well, proof enough for the BSA to audit companies. Such an audit in itself is a punishment, even if it's not declared so, because you need to provide the resources to handle the audit on your side. (Same applies to an IRS audit btw, where the handling of it can cost a bundle in working hours of your tax advisor/accountant to answer the audit).
So by the standard the IP industry uses, it's more than enough to raid their offices, bother their employees, wreak havoc on them. Does not matter to much if it's true or not, right? A claim from a disgrunted ex-employee is enough.
Well, not exactly, the truth is always written by the winner, and the truth that looser had, well, is forgotten.
"The Truth" is always something linked to the point of view. (E.g. there are enough situations where obviously all parties or none of them are responsible for something, still the parties claim it's the fault of the others. In a subjective view, their truth is certainly correct, and in an objective view you cannot easily cast the situation either as a simple 2-state boolean affair)
Well, the public (most /.-ers are more enlightened despite all their failings, first!!!) gets what they want. I'm not sure that characterizing an upstanding company that specializes in deriving value from patents as a troll is correct, I mean they just do what the system is setup to allow them to do. That's what you get if you allow to monopolize even the most trivial thoughts. (And you thought that your thoughts are free, lucky for you there is not yet a way to extract them, hence it's hard to prove that you are infringing, ....)
Complaining about undesirable results of a system that is clearly setup to favour these results sounds somehow stupid:
-) The PO basically issues patents for anything. Wonder if they would even detect it if someone would try to submit a filing done mostly by a clever text generator.
-) There is no incentive for the PO to generally control the quality of patents, they get their fees, and any fallout from stupid patents is paid by somebody else. Doing their job correctly actually would lower their "ROI". (And even being a public office, I think that many administrators would like to be able to point out that they did not use tax money, they could finance themselves from their fees, right?)
-) The fees of the PO are big enough that a private person might have troubles creating patents on the fly, but for many corporations, these costs are trivial.
-) The cost of invalidating a blatantly bad patent is paid by the defendants. The owner/filer of a fraudulent patent has basically no liability, the worst that can happen is that their patent gets invalidated. With the costs associated with the legal system, for many defendants, no matter if they infringe, or if the patent is obviously wrong, it's economically cheaper to pay highwaymen than to fight them.
To summarize, "patent trolls" are inherent in the patent system as practiced in the US. Given the conditions it's a low cost, no liability way to generate potentially huge windfalls. The lawyers trolling can point out that they are no experts in the subject matter, and they bought the "IP" in good faith. And the inventors can point to the official PO approval. And the PO, when confronted with an invalidated patent, can point out that this only proves that the system works as intended, ...
Well, judges love it if you try to circumvent laws.
And I do not think that you can circumvent this directive as easily, as in fact it clears up handling of cookies, and allows cookies in some situations. The generic data protection directive that this directive amends, is still law, and it's more strict (although in more generic terms) on cookie usage. And I do not think that Facebook has any legitimate legal purpose to track non-users. Or to create shadow profiles from data other users have provided them, even potentially linking it with an identifying cookie. So paragraph 66 of the directive does not help Facebook.
Well, the US does not place any legal requirement on companies related to privacy in general. (There are a number of niche laws, e.g. HIPAA, but in general companies can collect, mix, sell, ... data about your person, and you have basically no say in that.)
The EU does have a privacy directive, and at least some member countries consider "having control about your personal data" a human right. Still violating the EU data protection directive usually means only an administrative fine, although if they piss of the Irish authorities, 100K€ (>100US$) per complaint, potentially repetitively if they don't stop to violate the law, could make it very expensive for Facebook. And moving out of Ireland would be expensive tax wise (Ireland is a corporate tax heaven, which officially as an EU member is not a tax heaven, as are certain US states, that would probably meet the objective criteria for a tax heaven, but still are not on any official list, as they are US states. So facebook might move out Ireland, but that would mean a hit on profitability, not sure how the IRS thinks about certain "official" tax heavens in the Caribbean.)
Before somebody cries "but Google is doing the same" => well, not exactly, for non-logged in users they've worked out a compromise. dropping part of the IP address (and potentially other stuff). The operative word is that they did contact the German data protection authorities on their own, worked with them, and did not mail out notices to citizens that they do not even plan to keep their legal requirements. (Hint: If they really need a human to assemble the personal information PDF, then they are doing it wrong. Checking that the personal data matches => well that's what you hire temps for.)
So Facebook corporate officers won't be arrested entering the EU, but their Irish subsidiary might be fined quite a bit. The Irish data protection authority already planned to audit them, which suggests that the public available information indicates to them that there might be a problem. And now they have at least two dozen formal complaints. So if they manage to piss the authority off, they could issue slightly over 2 million € fines immediately, plus one fine per user that does not get his/her data inside the 40 days. Not very probable in the first round that the authority will go for maximum fines, but the real issue is that a number of complaints will make it necessary to redo the facebook technical design to get in compliance. And a number of complaints point to core business ideas of FB, and are completely incompatible with Union law. So if people continue to complain about them, and FB does not fix their systems and their business model, they are bound to piss off the data protection authority, no matter how business-friendly authorities usually are.
And I guess the patent won't help them either, it documents their business practices publicly. They could probably manage to track their own users by having a ToS that allows that, although they didn't even bother to change the boilerplate ToS from US to EU legal standards (and an US-style ToS will most certainly not fly in Europe), but they also track non-users, and for non-users there is no way they can assume consent. So they need to implement either similar precautions that anonymize the data enough (what Google does), or to stop the tracking completely.
You are trying to circumvent copyright protections that enforce region restrictions
Not really, my N900 is almost as much in Nokia service than with me.
Well, and the difference is that producing hardware is not exactly cheap. So we've got the N900 running Maemo5 which is rather strongly different from earlier releases on the N8xx devices. Then we were told, after the N900 was received nicely (as a mobile, not a tablet), from Nokia that they'll merge Maemo into Meego.
At the same time, the whole distribution was changing over from Gtk to Qt, because Nokia wanted one toolkit that works on all it's platforms. Than Nokia decided to get paid for committing suicide (well, the "new" Nokia will almost certainly loose market share even faster in it's strong points, while it's completely unclear how well Windows Phone will work out. Especially as many long time of older MS mobile offerings do not associate good things with the name), and as we were told, the Intel guys responsible for MeeGo, read about this in their newspapers. Now Intel does a similar move, it drops MeeGo and merges it yet again.
There are also some interesting data points:
- the N900 was a fully end user (non-hacker) compatible phone, better than all other offerings (Symbian^3) from Nokia.
- the N900 turned into this cool ARM based Linux supermini laptop only when one enabled the devel repositories.
- Maemo, having existed for some time (the version number is 5), does have a functional open source community.
- The community crowd is already much smaller with MeeGo, and we'll see how many Tizen guys will be left over.
- Changing the rules of the game has a tradition for Nokia (basically compatibility between different releases of Symbian have been at best source-level), but the game overall has changed, Nokia is not top of the field anymore, so developers won't take abuse as easily as they have in the past. So Nokia sold their developer community on Qt, and a multiplatform strategy (which is as such not a bad thing, considering all the nice things Nokia has done in the past). Then, overnight, "Windows Phone is our future. No Qt on Windows Phone, sorry, our "partner" MS takes our and through us your concerns seriously. Btw, just keep developing Qt, will be still supported on Symbian, at least till we stop the production of that junk" => guess that makes for good relations with developers.
Because it takes some time to kick the bad guys in the ass. And/or they are realistic, Bluray players are way not so important as DVD, which was a monopolistic universal format. (You don't loose much in quality by going DVD from BD, and HD content is a hassle because of it's bulk when you are building your own useable video collection, and useable in my eyes involves not using physical media, they are pure bother. And who wants to discuss what to watch by going to the other end of the room and looking through 1000+ DVD/BD cases?)