While people in an urban area are in malls buying things, playing laser tag, eating at a restaurant, and doing whatever it is urban people do, people in rural and remote areas are spending time outdoors, cooking their own food and having simple social pleasures.
I smell a lot of your own hatred in that comment. You can stereotype city people just like you can rural people. I've met both and experienced both.
Are city people out at malls? Yes, but in a true city it is more just window shopping or scenery. If you really do live in the city, you have a tiny place so there isn't anywhere to pile that crap up. The city person's mentality when they buy something is usually "do I even have a need for this?" Usually the answer is "no" because there is no place to put it and the city provides most of what they need anyway.
Are city people at restaurants? Sure, but it is more because their space at home is very small and it is much easier to have a social gathering somewhere else where more people can be accommodated. The next thing you will want to say is "well they have to travel far to get there" and usually that's not the case. Most of a restaurant's business is from the local area. I forget the numbers exactly but if I had to guess it is around 5 miles for an American city. For a real city, it is more like the place that is just down the street or block.
Laser tag? Actually most people don't play that.
If you had to ask me what most city people do they usually just go outside and walk around and have simple social interactions. Oh wait, you said rural people do that too. I'm sorry.
Now maybe you didn't have true city folks in mind. The people that have the most wasteful lifestyles are actually the suburb people. They're not much different than city people or rural people, but they do choose a lifestyle that I think is very inefficient because it tries to pick the best of both worlds at the cost of efficiency. Suburb folks usually have to drive more than 5 miles to get to the "city". Within 5 miles is usually only a strip mall that provides the basics. It isn't uncommon for a suburb adult to have a 30 minute commute to work. That's easily 25 miles in one direction. Similarly, the nearest mall is often the same distance or the fancy restaurant they want to go to. They also have large houses which they stock full of stuff like multiple TVs, lots of furniture, and gigantic kitchens bigger than some small eateries. Multiple cars are a must and the wealthier areas have children that have special activities they need to be driven to rather than playing outside with the neighbors.
Suburb people try to take a rural home and plant it right next to the city. That often means a McMansion with minimum 2 car driveway/garage and a front and backyard big enough for a pool or miniture playground. They try to live the city life but with a rural feel as they dress up their communities with planted trees, grass, and other useless foliage. There's often a 4 or 6 lane parkway that feeds into the suburb since nobody wants to live next to the noisy freeway. It certainly isn't convenient, but it looks pretty.
For some reason that is the lifestyle many Americans strive for. I'm not sure exactly how we got here to the point where the suburb is more important than the farm or the city. But that's the way it is.
They have smoking cars on the Japanese Shinkansen (bullet train) and also on some Europe trains.
There's no reason why it wouldn't be possible here. Except that we have a culture of turning everything black and white rather than negotiating a solution for both sides.
That wouldn't solve anything. You'd want to change the properties depending on if the driver is trying to stop or not. Such a tire you're suggesting wouldn't do anything for me if I'm trying to stop at 70mph.
The best I can imagine is a self-inflating/deflating tire. If the driver presses the brakes and the tire starts to lose grip, the tire would deflate some to increase contact with the road. Similarly, when the tire is not in any pressure to stop/accelerate or turn, the tire would over inflate to reduce resistance.
Such a device might be feasible. It would require a wirelessly controlled pump attached to the tire and it would probably be integrated with the TPMS system (which is already wireless). But the pump would need to be powered somehow. Seems a bit complicated and expensive to design and another point of failure. Who knows, maybe we'll hit a point where fuel/energy is that much more expensive so implementing a device is worth it.
We could also simplify the problem and just over inflate in optimal conditions and have a special valve that resets tire pressure to normal when bad conditions are detected. A pump would still be necessary, it just wouldn't have to be as demanding since the under-inflated case is out of the equation.
But for some people this system could be a net loss. Some drivers jam the hell out of their brakes that their brake pads go like nothing. I knew a friend's dad that burned through new brake pads in just a few months. The system would probably spend more energy adjusting tire pressure because it could never tell when the driver really needed to stop.
No, keep making it bigger. When we had floppy disks, it easy to fill up your floppy disks with documents. With hard drives, that became much harder so hard drives made document storage nearly infinite. As computers got faster, we started listening to mp3s and taking pictures. But it was still possible to fill up your hard drive with mp3s or pictures. The drives kept getting bigger and now at about 2TB, I'd think it would be pretty hard for most people to fill that up with mp3s or pictures, so now for music, pictures, and documents, hard drives are nearly infinite for most people.
But let's not stop there. It is still easy to fill that 2TB hard drive with video like dvds and bluray. So let's keep going to petabytes and maybe then a single drive ought to be enough for anyone.
In the old days the people that used perl were mostly script kids and because there wasn't much else on the web for doing fancy server stuff. All the resources at the time pointed to perl this perl that, because it was the easiest path. Nobody bothered to fire up the c compiler and write their CGI programs that way. This was the mid to late 90s and at that time object oriented programming was starting to pickup steam with C++ and Java. For that time, perl was certainly a competitor but all languages still carried major faults.
A few years back I was browsing through job listings for perl positions and not surprisingly there weren't many. I had also done some Java based stuff so I also took a look at the Java positions. But most of the positions available were PHP positions and maybe a few Python positions here and there. Ruby was available but still too new to be in use; I didn't see any Ruby positions.
Between the interviews the surprising thing to note is the Java positions were largely big corporate based things and people would grill you on the intricacies of Java instead of talking about what the job really was about. It was very not personal, not that it needed to be, that's just the vibe I got. The perl interviews still grilled you but I noticed a huge difference in the demeanor of the interviewers. They were much humbler Maybe it was the fact that perl5 really was that big of a pain therefore made you humbler as a software dev or maybe it was the fact that they couldn't find any *good* perl developers. Anyway, I also made it a point to ask the perl shops why they chose perl. The answer is largely the same, "we were stuck with it". Somehow, someway, perl was chosen and nobody wanted to rewrite everything just so they could use ruby or python. After all, the language is a tool, not necessarily the actual solution.
The huge difference was, the perl people of today were no longer the script kids of the 90s. They were actual software engineers. Perl was typically just one piece of the puzzle and they were using a bunch of technologies together to get to their solutions. Meanwhile the Java shops were hooked to whatever the latest framework happened to be. At the PHP job listings seemed tailored to script kids. All kinds of widely varying positions from full blown systems to cheesy scripts for some person or small website. So to me it seemed that PHP slurped up all of the script kids that perl once was popular for and Java was still trying to be fashionable (not sure why).
Sure I understand your point and accept it; people today, right now, don't care about perl6. But not all of them are sysadmins. Some of them actually are legitimate software houses.
Now will all of these people move to perl6? That's a tough question. I sometimes ask myself if that would be a good business decision. For the business, having readily available devs for your language of choice means more candidates available to hire. In that sense Perl6 and even Ruby aren't good choices. You will definitely be forced to use what is mainstream if you are a seasoned or senior developer. The risks in using a new cutting edge technology aren't worth it if you don't need the cutting edge features to implement your solution.
But I don't doubt that history will repeat itself and some young software dev will make the same age old mistake and proclaim "we should use *this* because it is the newest and it is cool." That is after all how Ruby and Python got their starts. Some sort of fancy project called Ruby on Rails got a lot of publicity and suddenly everyone was interested.
Perl6 does have a lot to offer that is cutting edge so it does have a chance. Take a look at the PDF and the Regex Grammars section where they implement JSON in a few pages. And it isn't in "one liner" style. It is in true language grammar style just like everyone learns (or should learn) in their compiler studies. That's at least worthy of something.
I am also *very* interested in the perl6 object model as it seems to understand objects in a
Android supports something called live wallpaper. This is how animated wall papers or dynamic wall papers are achieved. It basically runs an app and provides functionality for changing the wallpaper.
I've made a live wallpaper myself and of course it doesn't just display a single jpeg. But for an app to request all of those permissions, users should be skeptical when installing the app. Unfortunately I don't think many users really read those messages or understand what they're getting into.
First off, rooting android is not the same as jailbreaking iphone. If your android comes with "enable unknown sources" which most devices do (except some ATT versions) then you can get most of the functionality you need through 3rd party apps or apk files. For example if I develop a new app, I don't need to go through the provisioning BS that apple makes you go through. I just get a device, drop the apk on it, and test it. I don't need to have the phone hooked up to a computer or anything.
Most of the people rooting android are interested in a fully customized/3rd party rom, not just root privileges. That's way different than Apple because most of the people jailbreaking iphones are interested in apps that aren't blessed by Apple.
When I was there there was a really cool and simple shower knob design. It had two knobs, one for adjusting the ratio of hot/cold and another knob for adjusting pressure. So instead of having to twist either one knob or two knobs like here in the States to get the right ratio, you can leave the hot/cold knob on the setting you normally use then just use the other pressure knob to turn on the shower. In fact the pressure knob even have a movable marker that you could use to mark the ideal pressure you like. I found with this design, I had to test the water less. Here in the states I have a single knob that controls both hot/cold ratio and pressure but I can only get low pressure with cold water. Since there are no markings, I have to repeatedly guess and feel the water before I know it is set right.
The other thing is while the toilets are really complicated, it is really awesome once you figure it out. For starters the best models have an automatic toilet seat (push a button to have it drop or raise the seat). Second you no longer get toilet paper burn and your skin feels much better from the water. Third, you feel much much cleaner down below.
The Apple app store has a 96% approval rate and 98% of those are available within a week.
So there's a 4% rejection rate. Where as on android there is no rejection rate because you can distribute it yourself. Let's not even get into the type of stuff that Apple has explicitly said will never be approved, therefore it is useless for you to even try (Flash, emulators, tethering).
Haters gotta hate, I guess.
This isn't about hate. This is about putting up with unnecessary bs that Apple created to maintain control.
And to bring this thread back on topic, you could always tether with android, you just needed to install an app that enabled tethering. On an Android 1.6 phone for example you could get pdanet and tether your phone for free. There were some limitations by the pdanet dev (no https) but that didn't prevent you from rolling your own and installing it on your device.
On 2.2 tethering is built-in unless your carrier doesn't want you to.
Rooting is only necessary if you want to change the ROM or tamper with the system. But on a device like a Nexus One this is largely pointless because Google will provide you with the latest production ready image. The ROMs out do add small tweaks in functionality but nothing "must have" that I've seen.
Most of the customization already comes from installing apps either through the market or outside of the market. Here's a list of things I've been able to do since I've had my Nexus One without root: install Wii Controller to enable using a Wiimote over bluetooth with the N1, emulators, installing multiple software keyboards, installing a different app launcher (LauncherPro).
So I don't know how this got to comparing android root to iphone jailbreak. They're totally different. Android root = ROMs. iphone jailbreak = yay, now you can install any apps regardless of what Steve Jobs says.
Yes, there is a huge lack of awareness regarding the N1. I own one and am repeatedly asked what phone it is. I always say "it's the Google phone" but everyone usually has a blank face when they hear that. Part of the reason the "droid" phones are so successful is because they have Verizon branding and correctly advertising the hell out of the product. It isn't too hard to find someone that owns some kind of Verizon droid. I do think being able to go to the store and see one also helps hesitant buyers, but it is fairly obvious that a good marketing strategy also needs an ad campaign to be successful for phones. Even Apple/AT&T has iphone 4 ads on TV despite already being a popular product.
Consider Consumer Reports for example. They don't have advertisers therefore they can operate with no allegiance to anyone except their viewers/customers and their customers expect them to be highly unbiased. As a subscriber, I would say they do a decent job of trying to provide objective data, much better than the quality of many online reviews. With online reviews it can be hard to tell what the reviewer really thinks or if he was tipped. In fact in many reviews, I see many flashy big dollar words that nobody really uses stuffed in in order to either confuse the reader or impress someone affiliated with the product or advertisements. Or better yet the testing environment was slightly modified to give the product a better review or worse review. So instead of having controlled tests against all competing products, you have varied tests parameters and results that cannot be directly compared.
So this isn't really just the journalists' problem. It is also the consumer's problem. The quality of "free" material on the internet is non-existent because the journalists don't have to please viewers, but please advertisers. They have essentially become a second hand way of delivering products by enticing you in to a bit of "free" information. If readers really are tired of this quality of journalism, then perhaps it is time for the subscriber model to return.
The subscriber model isn't without it's own flaws either. It is true that the target demographic of a subscriber base will likely have trends and journalists can tailor their articles to keep that demographic interested. But I would certainly say that's better than short bites of information about the latest iphone or gossip with 9 paragraphs of regurgitated information just to drive traffic. I'd rather read a well constructed argument even from an opposing view point than what we have today.
I've been to Tokyo. They already have people standing on the streets handing out fliers or shouting at you to buy stuff. In fact the second you walk into a Yodobashi or Bic Camera they have a woman on a microphone droning on and on about products. In Akihabara they have girls dressed up in costumes handing out fliers for their maid cafes. The metro is filled with ads along the ceiling, hanging, stuck to the wall, even on certain stops the wall outside of the train has an ad. I even saw someone swing into a train, swap out one of the ads with a new one, and step out.
This is nothing new. The only difference is a computer doesn't get tired talking all day and the data can be analyzed later. With a person you have to train them, keep them somewhat happy, and hope they give you enough data you can work with. Even after all the automation they'll still probably have the maid girls standing outside passing fliers and women on mics in the camera stores.
It isn't like America is much better. The 5+4 zip code is actually used by marketers to target more specific areas. The extra four digits in the zip code bring down the general location A LOT. The "club cards" for supermarkets are a marketing tool for tracking purposes. I wouldn't be surprised if the coupons printed at the register are a direct result from your buying history. Even webpages are tracking all of your clicks and travels through their site.
The purpose of all this data mining isn't necessarily bad. Yes they know a lot about you, but that's the whole point. The more they know about you, the better they can decide whether or not an ad will be effective when shown to you. For example there's not much of a point in showing Viagra ads at women or young men. Same thing for showing a Justin Bieber ad to say an old man. It is the same reason why the maid cafe girls primarily hand out their fliers to every young man walking along the street in Akihabara.
Want fewer bars in fewer places? There's an app for that.
Hold it different.
It just doesn't work.
One year later at WWDC 2011...
Steve Jobs: We've been doing a lot of hard work to make wonderful things happen. One thing we've done was hire the world's best RF engineers. Apple now employs the world's best radio specialists. And now that investment is finally going to pay off with our new line of products.
*crowd applauds*
Steve Jobs: Introducing, the iPhone 5.
*crowd applauds and cheers*
*screen switches to a black rectangular piece of black glass with no buttons*
Steve Jobs (shouting over the crowd): Isn't that beautiful?
*crowd continues to applaud and cheer*
Steve Jobs: The iPhone 5 now comes with the latest and best antenna technology. It has an vertical "omni-directional" antenna built right into the device; because you should be able to make phone calls. From your phone. Isn't that wonderful?
*crowd uproars applauds, cheers, and get on their feet*
AAPL stock goes to infinity.
Apple announces enough pre-order sales to keep factories at 200% capacity for 10 years.
Unemployment rates spike as people quit their jobs and camp outside of Apple stores across the country.
Interview with an iphone camper:
Interviewer: So what's so great about the iPhone 5 that makes you want to camp outside?
iPhone fanatic: Well for starters, it's just gorgeous, aaaaand it let's me make voice calls with my boyfriend! I've always wanted to hear my boyfriend's voice on my phone!
Interviewer: You do know that phones have been able to do that for more than 100 years?
iPhone fanatic: What? No way. Don't lie to me. Why else would millions of people be out here waiting just like I am? Besides, this is the iPhone. I'd do anything for the iPhone.
I don't see your argument. You've already proven that at the $50k price point, fuel is not a factor. But you've fumbled on the reason why people buy cars at the $50k price point. It has more to do with exclusivity, brand, and image than "sense" or "money". It is the same reason why people buy expensive jewelry, certain brands of clothing, and such. The same reason why people show up at Morton's and pay the prices. It isn't just the service or quality, it also has to do with "I can do this because I'm so rich and you can't" philosophy.
The $50k price point for autos is also an interesting one for upper middle class areas like the coastal region of southern California. You'll find lots of professionals around here that are willing to blow their cash or take a loan just to be part of the "cool club." Now you tell them they can stop using oil and help out the environment a bit while expressing themselves, yeah, they'll line up and buy your car like ipads, iphones, True Religion jeans, and Burberry sweaters.
The people in the target market you've describe are still driving Corollas and Camrys because they simply don't care about image.
First of all, marketing is not just advertising. There is a lot to marketing that is not advertising like focus groups, surveys, strategies, and measurement.
And although you claim that Microsoft spent more as a percentage of revenue on advertising, they also spent way more than Apple on R&D:
all numbers in millions
AAPL (52 weeks ending 2009-09-26)
Total Revenue 42,905.00 Research & Development 1,333.00 R&D percentage of revenue: 3.1%
MSFT (12 months ending 2009-06-30)
Total Revenue 58,437.00 Research & Development 9,010.00 R&D percentage of revenue: 15.4%
DELL (52 weeks ending 2010-01-29)
Total Revenue 52,902.00 Research & Development 617.00 R&D percentage of revenue: 1.16%
Financial information taken from http://www.google.com/finance
You're talking about developer freedom, and it's true that developers are heavily restricted on the iPhone (ad-hoc distribution is limited to 100 users). It's not really clear that this "sucks" for users though. For one thing, people have seemed satisfied with devices and services that are completely closed (cable/satellite TV, effectively) as well as platforms that are way more restrictive than Apple's (like all video game consoles from 1985 to the present).
I don't buy that. Plenty of people are annoyed with their cable service but they put up with it because they have no other choice. When you're in that situation as a consumer, it really does "suck". You now play the cable company's game, not the other way around. The same is true in any situation. When a monopoly takes over, it really does "suck" for the consumer's available choices.
What you're suggesting is that everyone is perfectly happy with one option. But that's far from the truth. Let's take grocery stores for example. Safeway seems to provide what most people need, yet we still have direct competitors as well as niche competitors that provide services Safeway will simply never provide. For example the area I live in has many Asian grocery stores that offer many Asian products that Safeway will never carry.
The Apple policy and model is detrimental to users. A good example is Google Voice. Apple users do not have access to Google Voice therefore they cannot use it and in many cases don't even know about it despite their device having the capability of doing such a task. Yet Apple managed to convince the masses that the iphone can do anything with "there's a app for that" ad campaign. So when people go into the market for a new phone, they think their iphone can do everything when it can't.
Oh there is plenty of hate for Microsoft and Sony around here. It is just accepted. Try defending Microsoft with an honest and logical argument and you're immediately called a shill.
They both have a number of machines for which you must pass a draconian test to even get a dev kit. Basically, if Apple made the devkit $10k then you'd all be happy?
Nice try at making this black and white. But the standard still stays. It doesn't matter if you're Sony, Apple, Microsoft, or even Google. A closed market is still closed. Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo are still in the same boat as Apple. The only difference is there seems to be a group of Apple lovers here that try to paint Apple as the best thing ever.
Locked in systems have been around for more than a decade. The difference with Apple is that the devkit is $100 and anyone can publish on them.
Yes, as long as you agree to the terms of the program, which in the terms say that you cannot disclose the terms to anyone outside of the program. And you cannot publish unless Apple approves. Therefore no-one can publish except Apple. You are free to develop for the platform, you'll just never get published if they happen to disagree with you. The $100 is also only for a 1 year subscription to the program. If you want to continue next year, you have to pony up more cash. It also doesn't mean that next year it will only be $100. It could be $200, $1000, or whatever they think is right at the time.
DisplayPort 1.2 can do 17.28Gbit/s. That's a little more than halfway there.
I'd even be happy with 200ppi on a computer display. It would make 6pt fonts readable and make digital camera pictures look more like printed photographs. Your mouse cursor would also glide much smoother across the screen which is great for photo editing and diagram apps. Zooming out also wouldn't dissolve into a blurry/pixelated mess, it would still maintain a lot of fidelity.
I'd like to see high dpi displays for computer displays. It is kinda funny running the android emulator at 800x480 and having it almost not fit on a 1600x900 laptop display.
By choosing their products and harsh requirements for software reliability I'm forcing vendors to jump through hoops to sell me something. Maybe that's the trade-off for a device that just works.
Then why can't Google have Google Voice or Adobe have Flash on an iphone? Oh, I know why, only apps Apple thinks are "ok" are allowed. This isn't just a quality issue. This is a control issue where control refers to what Apple wants to control. And before you get back to the "but something like Flash isn't good quality for the user" we aren't just talking about users here. We are also talking about developers. The Apple deal for developers has always been the short end of the stick. They can pretty much tell you to fuck off anytime they want. The door is only open for you as long as your business matches their business interests.
As an aside, before my iPhone I had several Windows Mobile phones that also did multitasking before WebOS and Android or iPhone even existed. From what I've seen, I'll take Apple's version.
I have an ipod touch and an android phone. From what I've seen, I'll take android's version.
However, on my phone, I want it to work & be stable.
I don't know how android gets a bad rap for being 'unstable' and 'not working'. Yes, the older phones on older hardware are slower but so was iphone 2g. If you want to do a fair comparison, you'd have to compare a Nexus 1 with 2.2 to a non-existent iphone 4 (but we can reasonably guess what iphone 4 is at this point). Android doesn't 'crash'. My phone doesn't need reboots. It isn't windows. 3rd party Apps sometimes do crash, but it doesn't bring your phone down.
The multitasking in android is correct and designed into the system at the developer level. Most users don't even know they're multitasking because it just works. For example you can have last.fm playing the the background while browser the web. And no, there are no popups or focus stealing apps.
I don't mind Apple being draconian on my phone.
I do mind. For example I wanted to upgrade some of the apps on my ipod touch, but the my ipod tells me i have to use itunes to get it updated. But the computer that I used to sync with itunes was in the closet so I can to install itunes on my current computer. Then when I connect to itunes, it tells me that that computer is not authorized to update my ipod or whatever non-sense. At this point I had already spent half an hour or so trying to get a stupid app on my ipod updated.
On my android phone non of that nonsense exists. The phone updates its own apps without any bother. You don't need a PC ever and based on Google's features in 2.2, they don't want you to need a PC ever. In 2.2, the new market let's you download apps to your phone remotely. There's no tethering or syncing nonsense. It just works.
Maybe that's their point? Now you can watch "monkees washing cats" on youtube on your TV instead of your computer? Maybe now normal people will realize they don't need cable subscriptions?
Suddenly it's your right not only to go further but to also have Apple spend its resources and risk its business and reputation supporting you? Sense of entitlement have you?
I am the customer. I can demand anything I want like ponies shooting rainbows. It doesn't matter, because I am the customer. For this reason, I did not buy an iphone and more importantly I have stopped any attempt to develop for an iphone. Steve Jobs has made it perfectly clear that everyone that owns an iphone and develops an iphone is basically "his bitch". I don't want that kind of relationship.
Apple isn't stopping you from doing what you want with your iPhone or iPad, they are just refusing to help or support you.
I'd say Apple is doing a fine job of screwing over developers and anyone that wants a piece of the Apple products and services.
You have more computing power in a Toyota Prius and many other cars than you do in an iPad. Why aren't slashdotters demanding free development tools, etc. for cars?
Because people aren't connecting their cars to the net and doing "PC like things" with their car. Fine, ipad is a toy. I get it. But when Steve Jobs decides his device is king and decides not to support certain web standards, then web developers around the world will get stuck conforming to his game, not the standards set forth by the web. It will be IE6 all over again and once again progress will be slowed thanks to your "toy".
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait till he tries to connect his ipod and download/install itunes.
While people in an urban area are in malls buying things, playing laser tag, eating at a restaurant, and doing whatever it is urban people do, people in rural and remote areas are spending time outdoors, cooking their own food and having simple social pleasures.
I smell a lot of your own hatred in that comment. You can stereotype city people just like you can rural people. I've met both and experienced both.
Are city people out at malls? Yes, but in a true city it is more just window shopping or scenery. If you really do live in the city, you have a tiny place so there isn't anywhere to pile that crap up. The city person's mentality when they buy something is usually "do I even have a need for this?" Usually the answer is "no" because there is no place to put it and the city provides most of what they need anyway.
Are city people at restaurants? Sure, but it is more because their space at home is very small and it is much easier to have a social gathering somewhere else where more people can be accommodated. The next thing you will want to say is "well they have to travel far to get there" and usually that's not the case. Most of a restaurant's business is from the local area. I forget the numbers exactly but if I had to guess it is around 5 miles for an American city. For a real city, it is more like the place that is just down the street or block.
Laser tag? Actually most people don't play that.
If you had to ask me what most city people do they usually just go outside and walk around and have simple social interactions. Oh wait, you said rural people do that too. I'm sorry.
Now maybe you didn't have true city folks in mind. The people that have the most wasteful lifestyles are actually the suburb people. They're not much different than city people or rural people, but they do choose a lifestyle that I think is very inefficient because it tries to pick the best of both worlds at the cost of efficiency. Suburb folks usually have to drive more than 5 miles to get to the "city". Within 5 miles is usually only a strip mall that provides the basics. It isn't uncommon for a suburb adult to have a 30 minute commute to work. That's easily 25 miles in one direction. Similarly, the nearest mall is often the same distance or the fancy restaurant they want to go to. They also have large houses which they stock full of stuff like multiple TVs, lots of furniture, and gigantic kitchens bigger than some small eateries. Multiple cars are a must and the wealthier areas have children that have special activities they need to be driven to rather than playing outside with the neighbors.
Suburb people try to take a rural home and plant it right next to the city. That often means a McMansion with minimum 2 car driveway/garage and a front and backyard big enough for a pool or miniture playground. They try to live the city life but with a rural feel as they dress up their communities with planted trees, grass, and other useless foliage. There's often a 4 or 6 lane parkway that feeds into the suburb since nobody wants to live next to the noisy freeway. It certainly isn't convenient, but it looks pretty.
For some reason that is the lifestyle many Americans strive for. I'm not sure exactly how we got here to the point where the suburb is more important than the farm or the city. But that's the way it is.
They have smoking cars on the Japanese Shinkansen (bullet train) and also on some Europe trains.
There's no reason why it wouldn't be possible here. Except that we have a culture of turning everything black and white rather than negotiating a solution for both sides.
That wouldn't solve anything. You'd want to change the properties depending on if the driver is trying to stop or not. Such a tire you're suggesting wouldn't do anything for me if I'm trying to stop at 70mph.
The best I can imagine is a self-inflating/deflating tire. If the driver presses the brakes and the tire starts to lose grip, the tire would deflate some to increase contact with the road. Similarly, when the tire is not in any pressure to stop/accelerate or turn, the tire would over inflate to reduce resistance.
Such a device might be feasible. It would require a wirelessly controlled pump attached to the tire and it would probably be integrated with the TPMS system (which is already wireless). But the pump would need to be powered somehow. Seems a bit complicated and expensive to design and another point of failure. Who knows, maybe we'll hit a point where fuel/energy is that much more expensive so implementing a device is worth it.
We could also simplify the problem and just over inflate in optimal conditions and have a special valve that resets tire pressure to normal when bad conditions are detected. A pump would still be necessary, it just wouldn't have to be as demanding since the under-inflated case is out of the equation.
But for some people this system could be a net loss. Some drivers jam the hell out of their brakes that their brake pads go like nothing. I knew a friend's dad that burned through new brake pads in just a few months. The system would probably spend more energy adjusting tire pressure because it could never tell when the driver really needed to stop.
Then how about Calpis?
No, keep making it bigger. When we had floppy disks, it easy to fill up your floppy disks with documents. With hard drives, that became much harder so hard drives made document storage nearly infinite. As computers got faster, we started listening to mp3s and taking pictures. But it was still possible to fill up your hard drive with mp3s or pictures. The drives kept getting bigger and now at about 2TB, I'd think it would be pretty hard for most people to fill that up with mp3s or pictures, so now for music, pictures, and documents, hard drives are nearly infinite for most people.
But let's not stop there. It is still easy to fill that 2TB hard drive with video like dvds and bluray. So let's keep going to petabytes and maybe then a single drive ought to be enough for anyone.
In the old days the people that used perl were mostly script kids and because there wasn't much else on the web for doing fancy server stuff. All the resources at the time pointed to perl this perl that, because it was the easiest path. Nobody bothered to fire up the c compiler and write their CGI programs that way. This was the mid to late 90s and at that time object oriented programming was starting to pickup steam with C++ and Java. For that time, perl was certainly a competitor but all languages still carried major faults.
A few years back I was browsing through job listings for perl positions and not surprisingly there weren't many. I had also done some Java based stuff so I also took a look at the Java positions. But most of the positions available were PHP positions and maybe a few Python positions here and there. Ruby was available but still too new to be in use; I didn't see any Ruby positions.
Between the interviews the surprising thing to note is the Java positions were largely big corporate based things and people would grill you on the intricacies of Java instead of talking about what the job really was about. It was very not personal, not that it needed to be, that's just the vibe I got. The perl interviews still grilled you but I noticed a huge difference in the demeanor of the interviewers. They were much humbler Maybe it was the fact that perl5 really was that big of a pain therefore made you humbler as a software dev or maybe it was the fact that they couldn't find any *good* perl developers. Anyway, I also made it a point to ask the perl shops why they chose perl. The answer is largely the same, "we were stuck with it". Somehow, someway, perl was chosen and nobody wanted to rewrite everything just so they could use ruby or python. After all, the language is a tool, not necessarily the actual solution.
The huge difference was, the perl people of today were no longer the script kids of the 90s. They were actual software engineers. Perl was typically just one piece of the puzzle and they were using a bunch of technologies together to get to their solutions. Meanwhile the Java shops were hooked to whatever the latest framework happened to be. At the PHP job listings seemed tailored to script kids. All kinds of widely varying positions from full blown systems to cheesy scripts for some person or small website. So to me it seemed that PHP slurped up all of the script kids that perl once was popular for and Java was still trying to be fashionable (not sure why).
Sure I understand your point and accept it; people today, right now, don't care about perl6. But not all of them are sysadmins. Some of them actually are legitimate software houses.
Now will all of these people move to perl6? That's a tough question. I sometimes ask myself if that would be a good business decision. For the business, having readily available devs for your language of choice means more candidates available to hire. In that sense Perl6 and even Ruby aren't good choices. You will definitely be forced to use what is mainstream if you are a seasoned or senior developer. The risks in using a new cutting edge technology aren't worth it if you don't need the cutting edge features to implement your solution.
But I don't doubt that history will repeat itself and some young software dev will make the same age old mistake and proclaim "we should use *this* because it is the newest and it is cool." That is after all how Ruby and Python got their starts. Some sort of fancy project called Ruby on Rails got a lot of publicity and suddenly everyone was interested.
Perl6 does have a lot to offer that is cutting edge so it does have a chance. Take a look at the PDF and the Regex Grammars section where they implement JSON in a few pages. And it isn't in "one liner" style. It is in true language grammar style just like everyone learns (or should learn) in their compiler studies. That's at least worthy of something.
I am also *very* interested in the perl6 object model as it seems to understand objects in a
Android supports something called live wallpaper. This is how animated wall papers or dynamic wall papers are achieved. It basically runs an app and provides functionality for changing the wallpaper.
I've made a live wallpaper myself and of course it doesn't just display a single jpeg. But for an app to request all of those permissions, users should be skeptical when installing the app. Unfortunately I don't think many users really read those messages or understand what they're getting into.
First off, rooting android is not the same as jailbreaking iphone. If your android comes with "enable unknown sources" which most devices do (except some ATT versions) then you can get most of the functionality you need through 3rd party apps or apk files. For example if I develop a new app, I don't need to go through the provisioning BS that apple makes you go through. I just get a device, drop the apk on it, and test it. I don't need to have the phone hooked up to a computer or anything.
Most of the people rooting android are interested in a fully customized/3rd party rom, not just root privileges. That's way different than Apple because most of the people jailbreaking iphones are interested in apps that aren't blessed by Apple.
When I was there there was a really cool and simple shower knob design. It had two knobs, one for adjusting the ratio of hot/cold and another knob for adjusting pressure. So instead of having to twist either one knob or two knobs like here in the States to get the right ratio, you can leave the hot/cold knob on the setting you normally use then just use the other pressure knob to turn on the shower. In fact the pressure knob even have a movable marker that you could use to mark the ideal pressure you like. I found with this design, I had to test the water less. Here in the states I have a single knob that controls both hot/cold ratio and pressure but I can only get low pressure with cold water. Since there are no markings, I have to repeatedly guess and feel the water before I know it is set right.
The other thing is while the toilets are really complicated, it is really awesome once you figure it out. For starters the best models have an automatic toilet seat (push a button to have it drop or raise the seat). Second you no longer get toilet paper burn and your skin feels much better from the water. Third, you feel much much cleaner down below.
The Apple app store has a 96% approval rate and 98% of those are available within a week.
So there's a 4% rejection rate. Where as on android there is no rejection rate because you can distribute it yourself. Let's not even get into the type of stuff that Apple has explicitly said will never be approved, therefore it is useless for you to even try (Flash, emulators, tethering).
Haters gotta hate, I guess.
This isn't about hate. This is about putting up with unnecessary bs that Apple created to maintain control.
And to bring this thread back on topic, you could always tether with android, you just needed to install an app that enabled tethering. On an Android 1.6 phone for example you could get pdanet and tether your phone for free. There were some limitations by the pdanet dev (no https) but that didn't prevent you from rolling your own and installing it on your device.
On 2.2 tethering is built-in unless your carrier doesn't want you to.
Rooting is only necessary if you want to change the ROM or tamper with the system. But on a device like a Nexus One this is largely pointless because Google will provide you with the latest production ready image. The ROMs out do add small tweaks in functionality but nothing "must have" that I've seen.
Most of the customization already comes from installing apps either through the market or outside of the market. Here's a list of things I've been able to do since I've had my Nexus One without root: install Wii Controller to enable using a Wiimote over bluetooth with the N1, emulators, installing multiple software keyboards, installing a different app launcher (LauncherPro).
So I don't know how this got to comparing android root to iphone jailbreak. They're totally different. Android root = ROMs. iphone jailbreak = yay, now you can install any apps regardless of what Steve Jobs says.
Yes, there is a huge lack of awareness regarding the N1. I own one and am repeatedly asked what phone it is. I always say "it's the Google phone" but everyone usually has a blank face when they hear that. Part of the reason the "droid" phones are so successful is because they have Verizon branding and correctly advertising the hell out of the product. It isn't too hard to find someone that owns some kind of Verizon droid. I do think being able to go to the store and see one also helps hesitant buyers, but it is fairly obvious that a good marketing strategy also needs an ad campaign to be successful for phones. Even Apple/AT&T has iphone 4 ads on TV despite already being a popular product.
Not likely at all. That's like biting the hand that feeds you.
In my opinion, a better solution is to untie yourself from the requirements of having advertisers as your primary customer and find a different customer. But whom? Slashdot is apparently quick to claim turning your viewers into customers is a failure. But I think this is the only reasonable option.
Consider Consumer Reports for example. They don't have advertisers therefore they can operate with no allegiance to anyone except their viewers/customers and their customers expect them to be highly unbiased. As a subscriber, I would say they do a decent job of trying to provide objective data, much better than the quality of many online reviews. With online reviews it can be hard to tell what the reviewer really thinks or if he was tipped. In fact in many reviews, I see many flashy big dollar words that nobody really uses stuffed in in order to either confuse the reader or impress someone affiliated with the product or advertisements. Or better yet the testing environment was slightly modified to give the product a better review or worse review. So instead of having controlled tests against all competing products, you have varied tests parameters and results that cannot be directly compared.
So this isn't really just the journalists' problem. It is also the consumer's problem. The quality of "free" material on the internet is non-existent because the journalists don't have to please viewers, but please advertisers. They have essentially become a second hand way of delivering products by enticing you in to a bit of "free" information. If readers really are tired of this quality of journalism, then perhaps it is time for the subscriber model to return.
The subscriber model isn't without it's own flaws either. It is true that the target demographic of a subscriber base will likely have trends and journalists can tailor their articles to keep that demographic interested. But I would certainly say that's better than short bites of information about the latest iphone or gossip with 9 paragraphs of regurgitated information just to drive traffic. I'd rather read a well constructed argument even from an opposing view point than what we have today.
I've been to Tokyo. They already have people standing on the streets handing out fliers or shouting at you to buy stuff. In fact the second you walk into a Yodobashi or Bic Camera they have a woman on a microphone droning on and on about products. In Akihabara they have girls dressed up in costumes handing out fliers for their maid cafes. The metro is filled with ads along the ceiling, hanging, stuck to the wall, even on certain stops the wall outside of the train has an ad. I even saw someone swing into a train, swap out one of the ads with a new one, and step out.
This is nothing new. The only difference is a computer doesn't get tired talking all day and the data can be analyzed later. With a person you have to train them, keep them somewhat happy, and hope they give you enough data you can work with. Even after all the automation they'll still probably have the maid girls standing outside passing fliers and women on mics in the camera stores.
It isn't like America is much better. The 5+4 zip code is actually used by marketers to target more specific areas. The extra four digits in the zip code bring down the general location A LOT. The "club cards" for supermarkets are a marketing tool for tracking purposes. I wouldn't be surprised if the coupons printed at the register are a direct result from your buying history. Even webpages are tracking all of your clicks and travels through their site.
The purpose of all this data mining isn't necessarily bad. Yes they know a lot about you, but that's the whole point. The more they know about you, the better they can decide whether or not an ad will be effective when shown to you. For example there's not much of a point in showing Viagra ads at women or young men. Same thing for showing a Justin Bieber ad to say an old man. It is the same reason why the maid cafe girls primarily hand out their fliers to every young man walking along the street in Akihabara.
One year later at WWDC 2011...
Steve Jobs: We've been doing a lot of hard work to make wonderful things happen. One thing we've done was hire the world's best RF engineers. Apple now employs the world's best radio specialists. And now that investment is finally going to pay off with our new line of products.
*crowd applauds*
Steve Jobs: Introducing, the iPhone 5.
*crowd applauds and cheers*
*screen switches to a black rectangular piece of black glass with no buttons*
Steve Jobs (shouting over the crowd): Isn't that beautiful?
*crowd continues to applaud and cheer*
Steve Jobs: The iPhone 5 now comes with the latest and best antenna technology. It has an vertical "omni-directional" antenna built right into the device; because you should be able to make phone calls. From your phone. Isn't that wonderful?
*crowd uproars applauds, cheers, and get on their feet*
Interview with an iphone camper:
Interviewer: So what's so great about the iPhone 5 that makes you want to camp outside?
iPhone fanatic: Well for starters, it's just gorgeous, aaaaand it let's me make voice calls with my boyfriend! I've always wanted to hear my boyfriend's voice on my phone!
Interviewer: You do know that phones have been able to do that for more than 100 years?
iPhone fanatic: What? No way. Don't lie to me. Why else would millions of people be out here waiting just like I am? Besides, this is the iPhone. I'd do anything for the iPhone.
I don't see your argument. You've already proven that at the $50k price point, fuel is not a factor. But you've fumbled on the reason why people buy cars at the $50k price point. It has more to do with exclusivity, brand, and image than "sense" or "money". It is the same reason why people buy expensive jewelry, certain brands of clothing, and such. The same reason why people show up at Morton's and pay the prices. It isn't just the service or quality, it also has to do with "I can do this because I'm so rich and you can't" philosophy.
The $50k price point for autos is also an interesting one for upper middle class areas like the coastal region of southern California. You'll find lots of professionals around here that are willing to blow their cash or take a loan just to be part of the "cool club." Now you tell them they can stop using oil and help out the environment a bit while expressing themselves, yeah, they'll line up and buy your car like ipads, iphones, True Religion jeans, and Burberry sweaters.
The people in the target market you've describe are still driving Corollas and Camrys because they simply don't care about image.
First of all, marketing is not just advertising. There is a lot to marketing that is not advertising like focus groups, surveys, strategies, and measurement.
And although you claim that Microsoft spent more as a percentage of revenue on advertising, they also spent way more than Apple on R&D:
You're talking about developer freedom, and it's true that developers are heavily restricted on the iPhone (ad-hoc distribution is limited to 100 users). It's not really clear that this "sucks" for users though. For one thing, people have seemed satisfied with devices and services that are completely closed (cable/satellite TV, effectively) as well as platforms that are way more restrictive than Apple's (like all video game consoles from 1985 to the present).
I don't buy that. Plenty of people are annoyed with their cable service but they put up with it because they have no other choice. When you're in that situation as a consumer, it really does "suck". You now play the cable company's game, not the other way around. The same is true in any situation. When a monopoly takes over, it really does "suck" for the consumer's available choices.
What you're suggesting is that everyone is perfectly happy with one option. But that's far from the truth. Let's take grocery stores for example. Safeway seems to provide what most people need, yet we still have direct competitors as well as niche competitors that provide services Safeway will simply never provide. For example the area I live in has many Asian grocery stores that offer many Asian products that Safeway will never carry.
The Apple policy and model is detrimental to users. A good example is Google Voice. Apple users do not have access to Google Voice therefore they cannot use it and in many cases don't even know about it despite their device having the capability of doing such a task. Yet Apple managed to convince the masses that the iphone can do anything with "there's a app for that" ad campaign. So when people go into the market for a new phone, they think their iphone can do everything when it can't.
Why no complaints about Sony and Microsoft?
Oh there is plenty of hate for Microsoft and Sony around here. It is just accepted. Try defending Microsoft with an honest and logical argument and you're immediately called a shill.
They both have a number of machines for which you must pass a draconian test to even get a dev kit. Basically, if Apple made the devkit $10k then you'd all be happy?
Nice try at making this black and white. But the standard still stays. It doesn't matter if you're Sony, Apple, Microsoft, or even Google. A closed market is still closed. Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo are still in the same boat as Apple. The only difference is there seems to be a group of Apple lovers here that try to paint Apple as the best thing ever.
Locked in systems have been around for more than a decade. The difference with Apple is that the devkit is $100 and anyone can publish on them.
Yes, as long as you agree to the terms of the program, which in the terms say that you cannot disclose the terms to anyone outside of the program. And you cannot publish unless Apple approves. Therefore no-one can publish except Apple. You are free to develop for the platform, you'll just never get published if they happen to disagree with you. The $100 is also only for a 1 year subscription to the program. If you want to continue next year, you have to pony up more cash. It also doesn't mean that next year it will only be $100. It could be $200, $1000, or whatever they think is right at the time.
DisplayPort 1.2 can do 17.28Gbit/s. That's a little more than halfway there.
I'd even be happy with 200ppi on a computer display. It would make 6pt fonts readable and make digital camera pictures look more like printed photographs. Your mouse cursor would also glide much smoother across the screen which is great for photo editing and diagram apps. Zooming out also wouldn't dissolve into a blurry/pixelated mess, it would still maintain a lot of fidelity.
I'd like to see high dpi displays for computer displays. It is kinda funny running the android emulator at 800x480 and having it almost not fit on a 1600x900 laptop display.
By choosing their products and harsh requirements for software reliability I'm forcing vendors to jump through hoops to sell me something. Maybe that's the trade-off for a device that just works.
Then why can't Google have Google Voice or Adobe have Flash on an iphone? Oh, I know why, only apps Apple thinks are "ok" are allowed. This isn't just a quality issue. This is a control issue where control refers to what Apple wants to control. And before you get back to the "but something like Flash isn't good quality for the user" we aren't just talking about users here. We are also talking about developers. The Apple deal for developers has always been the short end of the stick. They can pretty much tell you to fuck off anytime they want. The door is only open for you as long as your business matches their business interests.
As an aside, before my iPhone I had several Windows Mobile phones that also did multitasking before WebOS and Android or iPhone even existed. From what I've seen, I'll take Apple's version.
I have an ipod touch and an android phone. From what I've seen, I'll take android's version.
However, on my phone, I want it to work & be stable.
I don't know how android gets a bad rap for being 'unstable' and 'not working'. Yes, the older phones on older hardware are slower but so was iphone 2g. If you want to do a fair comparison, you'd have to compare a Nexus 1 with 2.2 to a non-existent iphone 4 (but we can reasonably guess what iphone 4 is at this point). Android doesn't 'crash'. My phone doesn't need reboots. It isn't windows. 3rd party Apps sometimes do crash, but it doesn't bring your phone down.
The multitasking in android is correct and designed into the system at the developer level. Most users don't even know they're multitasking because it just works. For example you can have last.fm playing the the background while browser the web. And no, there are no popups or focus stealing apps.
I don't mind Apple being draconian on my phone.
I do mind. For example I wanted to upgrade some of the apps on my ipod touch, but the my ipod tells me i have to use itunes to get it updated. But the computer that I used to sync with itunes was in the closet so I can to install itunes on my current computer. Then when I connect to itunes, it tells me that that computer is not authorized to update my ipod or whatever non-sense. At this point I had already spent half an hour or so trying to get a stupid app on my ipod updated.
On my android phone non of that nonsense exists. The phone updates its own apps without any bother. You don't need a PC ever and based on Google's features in 2.2, they don't want you to need a PC ever. In 2.2, the new market let's you download apps to your phone remotely. There's no tethering or syncing nonsense. It just works.
Maybe that's their point? Now you can watch "monkees washing cats" on youtube on your TV instead of your computer? Maybe now normal people will realize they don't need cable subscriptions?
Suddenly it's your right not only to go further but to also have Apple spend its resources and risk its business and reputation supporting you? Sense of entitlement have you?
I am the customer. I can demand anything I want like ponies shooting rainbows. It doesn't matter, because I am the customer. For this reason, I did not buy an iphone and more importantly I have stopped any attempt to develop for an iphone. Steve Jobs has made it perfectly clear that everyone that owns an iphone and develops an iphone is basically "his bitch". I don't want that kind of relationship.
Apple isn't stopping you from doing what you want with your iPhone or iPad, they are just refusing to help or support you.
I'd say Apple is doing a fine job of screwing over developers and anyone that wants a piece of the Apple products and services.
You have more computing power in a Toyota Prius and many other cars than you do in an iPad. Why aren't slashdotters demanding free development tools, etc. for cars?
Because people aren't connecting their cars to the net and doing "PC like things" with their car. Fine, ipad is a toy. I get it. But when Steve Jobs decides his device is king and decides not to support certain web standards, then web developers around the world will get stuck conforming to his game, not the standards set forth by the web. It will be IE6 all over again and once again progress will be slowed thanks to your "toy".