If any of your friends use Facebook, they can easily tag you in a photo without your ass ever knowing it. If any relatives use Facebook, they can easily mark your birthday as an event. If a boyfriend/girlfriend uses Facebook, they can boast about where you ate dinner.
I don't see how this changes much. The same information was/is still acquired without facebook. People take out the family album all the time and people (especially parents) are happy to tell the world about children's birthdays called "birthday parties". Your girlfriend also probably tells her friends about where you went for your dinner. People are also known to spread random facts and lies about you. They're called rumors.
If you stay off of Facebook, your friends and colleagues assume it's because of some anti-social horrible problem with you and treat you very differently.
Perhaps the younger generations do this but I don't think anything of it. I do know one person that refuses to use many of the "modern" forms of communication including facebook and text messaging. That is fine except that this person also expects us to call her (voice call) and invite her individually for random small events like say watching a movie. That is bologna because I'm not going to go out of my way to call everyone else and invite them personally for something so trivial when the current mode of operation is to blast out a text message to everyone and see who's interested, THEN start communicating with those people individually. Even then I don't really treat this individual any differently, I do give her crap about making us jump through hoops to satisfy her availability.
iPhone OS authors collect from the very same app versions running on all three devices
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The ipad is distinctively different from the other devices. A developer probably isn't going to not make an ipad specific version because you can have a quarter size iphone version running. You also can't go the other way and have your ipad specific app run on an iphone. To me, this is fragmentation but somehow Apple gets a "pass" as usual.
And of course it's international sales that matter.
I love this. First it is sales "here" or there, and now it is international sales because there's no numbers on that. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say Apple is winning internationally at the moment. But let's suppose that changes because Google does have some players hitting other markets like Dell hitting the china market. What are you going to do then? Claim "it's the quality of the device that matters, not market share"?
Also it's obviously wrong because the size of the market for apps is: "apps sold", not "devices sold".
Marketing failure. The size of a market is defined by the target market. Just because you sold more on one market doesn't necessarily mean the size of that market is limited to your sales. What you are saying is equivalent to GM saying "we have 100% market share because the market is our customers and only them."
Developers are dojng far better on iPhone than Android for versions of the same app. Orders of magnitude better.
I'll give you a hint as to why. It isn't because Apple sells phones, it has more to do with the itunes store and the marketing they do for you. Right now the Android market application is basically crap in comparison. You can only search and browse. There are ratings but there is no way to look for "top rated" apps. There are no genres. There's no commercial on TV featuring your app. All of the marketing has to be done by you. With Apple, they help you do some of the marketing. That's what people don't get. The value isn't just in the phone, it is in how you do your marketing. If Google updates their marketing for apps or developers learn to market apps themselves, or a better middle man comes in with a better store, then you will start seeing more volume on android apps.
It always was able to tether if you got away from a sociopath carrier. Unlock it to go to t-mobile and you can add a tethering app or more recently use the built in function.
That's a BS argument when a lot of people in the iphone camp claim "AT&T only because it makes life easier" then you go around and tell them "hey, if you unlock your phone and use T-Mobile, everything is good now." If you're going to argue for the "average" user then the average user doesn't jailbreak or move their iphone off AT&T.
I also still have not found a single Apple-hater that does not change their mind when I actually show them what I do with my phone that they CANT do with theirs.
All right, make a ringtone from an mp3 without itunes. Can you? On my android phone I install ring droid and I can make a ringtone on my phone right there without touching a computer. I can even have it be longer than 40 seconds if I'd like.
Transitions should be made to other forms of power, but my Lord, what else is there to substitute for oil for transportation in the short-mid term? Nothing.
The substitute is higher taxes on oil to accelerate transition to alternative infrastructure.
But it's unavoidable that we drill. Let's manage risk better.
The more you "manage risks" the more you drive up costs. No matter what you do, you're increasing the price of oil. Why not put that money to the right solution rather than band-aiding the old one?
The egomaniacal, all-controlling, all-censoring explanation suffers from at least two major flaws. First, it isn't terribly consistent. Webkit being open source and html5 being an open standard as well as the many other open source and open standards that Apple supports (many of which Apple created), all contradict this view.
Apple is a corporation and they will make the best choice that benefits their duty as a corporation. They will only contribute to open standards when it benefits them and they will close anything and control anything when it benefits them. For the situation right now, they cannot control the web, therefore it is to their benefit to "play along" and "contribute" (or poison) the web till they can control it or have it work in their favor. When they don't have control of course they will agree to a standard; the standard benefits smaller players much more than bigger players. So by agreeing to "standards" they can guarantee that they can play. But when they become the big fish, I guarantee that the standard will be theirs, come with an license agreement, and probably cost an arm and leg.
Frankly for most people the existing 'HDTV' resolution has more than enough pixels, to get full benefit from increased number of pixels you would need a larger screen and sit closer to it.
He's not complaining about HDTV resolution. He is complaining about HDTV resolution slowing down the R&D for computer displays because everyone wants to sell "HD" displays now instead of computer LCDs. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but there is definitely a slow down in increasing computer display DPI.
As it is, reading text on these high DPI screens is hard enough, and I often find myself increasing the default font size. This issue is particularly pronounced in laptop screens.
As many others have stated, this is due to poor implementation of software/hardware for adjusting to the display DPI. In a realistic world, 10pt font would be 10pt no matter where it was. But the truth is most computer displays have their DPI settings incorrect because the display device doesn't tell the computer whatever it is hooked up to what DPI it has. Furthermore it wasn't till recent OSes that the OS has started to get DPI scaling correct everywhere. WinXP had DPI settings, but lots of things wouldn't look right. In short, the way it should work is your OS sets the DPI automatically based on your display, and a 10pt font will appear the same size no matter what the display device. Instead we have been dragging on with low DPI hacks (low dpi designed) such that people want to stick with the lower resolutions since the higher resolutions don't look right.
What I do want is more vertical resolution.
Rotate a 16:9 display to it's side. Now you have more vertical pixels.
The Accord is still the cheaper larger-sized sedan offering while the Civic is the small/mid-sized sedan. A correct analogy would be a Honda Accord compared to an Acura TL or any other luxury brand like Audi A4, BMW 3 series, Lexus etc.
Maybe that's how they claim they work but that's not what I've observed. I pass through an intersection at least twice a day that is equipped with red-light cameras. During low-light the cameras will often flash when there is NO motion and NO vehicles entering or in the intersection. Sometimes the flash goes off randomly even while a signal light is still on yellow or has been green/red for a long time.
One morning while I was waiting to get through this intersection, the light went from red to green to allow cars through but IMMEDIATELY turned yellow and this yellow duration was MUCH MUCH shorter than normal. In fact it was no more than a second such that no more than 1 or 2 cars could get through the intersection. It was total bullshit because it was obvious the lights had been set to randomly do that just to catch more people in the intersection while it was red.
Another night when I was driving home the same intersection had a wonderful collision where a left-turn driver ran right into a driver going the adjacent direction.
The intersection and many similar to it are dangerous because the lights are not consistent and everyone is aware of the cameras. Therefore drivers begin to act unpredictable with a large group going too fast through the intersection and a large group going to slow through the intersection such that they can stop if the light turns yellow. This leads to more accidents and wasted time on the driver's part, all just for additional revenue for the city.
The grand parent should have left out the part about firmware. It is possible to root an android phone install a custom firmware but that's obviously not the intended feature.
Every so often iTunes pops up and tells you there's an OS update. It downloads and installs in a few minutes automatically like every other sync.
Whenever there is an update to the firmware on the phone by the phone distributer (in my case technically T-Mobile), my android phone will notify me that a firmware update is available and ready to install (it downloads it automatically). I don't have to connect it to a computer or anything. I don't pay $5 or whatever. It just works.
If you get an app from the App Store it just work on your phone. No need to worry about which version of the OS is on it, whether your carrier has installed their own UI mods, or whether your phone supports the features.
The first part is partially wrong. In android you can set a minimum version level your application will support. This prevents it from getting distributed in the Market to phones with older versions of android. It is possible to have two version of your application, one for older versions of android with features stripped out, and one for newer versions such that newer phones see both version of the application as compatible. But this will also begin to exist in the iphone world since not all iphones are getting updated to support every new feature.
Now the part about UI mods and features, sure, that's true. But I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. If the newest android phone comes with a feature that is unheard of (even for iphones) then it is a good thing because it means the hardware is improving. With the iphone you're stuck with what the iphone comes with, no more no less.
Re:Pound and a half and its too heavy?
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iPad Review
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· Score: 4, Informative
Yes. Even a magazine is too heavy, but usually you can rest it on your chair/lap until you need to turn the page. Now you have this gadget that needs lots of user input/interaction...hello gorilla arms. It isn't the ability to lift and hold the device or media, it is the need to continuously hold it and interact with it for long periods of time that becomes the problem. Sure, you can life a 20lbs or even 30lbs dumbbell a few times with one arm. But can you hold it there for 10 to 15 minutes with no effort? It is the reason why we don't have touch screen monitors for work and we continue to use keyboards and mice. Keyboards and mice simply take less muscle effort.
Now from the article:
Finally let me talk about the device itself. It's heavy. I mean, surprisingly heavy. The specs say that it is 1.5lbs, which sounded very light on paper. For the first few minutes, I liked the heft; I felt that I was holding a solid, well-crafted item in my hands. But then I started trying to figuring out ways to type. I wrote a number of emails of moderate length and slowly realized that I just don't like typing on this thing.
I saw this a mile away. The reason an "pad" device will never work is because of weight. Even a plain plastic clip board is annoying without a desk or surface to support it. Similarly it is why devices the size of a cell phone will continue to dominate. You can comfortably hold your phone in your hand and it isn't going to feel heavy because there is no lever force. All of the weight is in your hand. Now you have this pad device in your hand but you need to hit a point on the opposite side with your hand that's not holding the device. That "tap" will feel a lot heavier than it is because of physics. Now you need to do this a 100 or 200 times? 10 minutes? Nevermind, it'll be worth it to get the laptop in 1 or 2 minutes and not have to use so much energy just to hold the device.
Sorry everyone, it is going to continue to be phone size devices or laptops and full size keyboards for a while.
Of course the ipad will have a convenient stand at the Apple store so you don't actually have to hold it. You have to admit, they do know how to sell something.
But there is a solution to the ipad input, and Apple is not going to like it. It involves using your thumbs instead of your index finger similar to a gameboy. Apple is never going to like this because it isn't "friendly" enough. Just like their one-button mice and cmd clicking.
I'll start you off with the following link for reference that talks about just the ships.
That link only talks about sulfur emissions and not anything else. If we're talking emissions that's a different debate. The debate here is fuel efficiency or fuel consumption.
The regulation won't lead to having everyone drive an econobox. It will only force manufacturers to either stop producing inefficient vehicles or produce more econoboxes in their lineup to offset the inefficient offerings. It doesn't mean that the buyer will purchase those models. It will certainly drive up the cost to build a fleet of cars.
On my family's computers... I forced Ubuntu upon those I could, and left the others to fend for themselves.
Here's what you do for those other family members:
Tell them to run Windows 7
When they get their machine, put a password on the default administrator account (usually the first account created).
Setup a new account for them to use that does not have admin privileges (password not required).
Tell them to use the regular account and call you when the admin uac account pops up.
Now when a program does something fishy, they will call you because they don't know the password on the admin account. So you can ask them what they're trying to do and if it sounds reasonable (install some purchased software, hookup a digital camera, whatever), you tell them to type the password and they're back on their way. If they're doing something and uac randomly pops up, they can't hit the 'ok' button because they need the password so they'll be forced to hit the cancel button. They'll rarely call you in these instances and this will protect them from most malware.
Also setup windows 7 to automatically download and updates in the background and sleep after a few hours of being idle (even if it is a desktop). Don't let them plug directly to the internet. Have a router in between with firewall enabled. That'll keep them clean for a good while.
Now maybe if you moved the workplaces to the suburbs, rather than concentrating them all inside the city, you could find a solution.
Mixed zoning doesn't work because people can't pickup their houses and move when their company flops or they lose their job. So instead they end up driving ridiculous distances and unpredictable paths in order to keep their family together. It is even worse when a married couple needs to have both adults working. Now they need room for 2 cars, take up 2 commutes, and it will be really unlikely for both people live next to work.
Sigh...if it has Chinese looking characters it must be from CHINA right!?
Let me introduce you to a place called Taiwan:
HTC Corporation, formerly High Tech Computer Corporation, is a Taiwan-based manufacturer of smartphones.
Foxconn is the trade name of the Taiwan based firm Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (Ltd.). Foxconn is the largest manufacturer of electronics and computer components worldwide, and mainly manufactures on contract to other companies. Among other things, Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod and the iPhone for Apple Inc.; Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard; motherboards for UK computer manufacturer Zoostorm; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo; the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, the Amazon Kindle, and Cisco equipment.
The company opened its first manufacturing plant in China in 1988, a factory in Shenzhen that is now the company's largest, with more than 270,000 employees.[3] Beginning in 1994, Foxconn purchased development centres in the United States and Japan. In 1997 and 1998, Foxconn established additional manufacturing plants in the UK and the US. As of 2007, the company and its subsidiaries owned plants in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Brazil, India and Vietnam.
ASUSTeK Computer Incorporated (ASUS), a multinational corporation centered in Taiwan, produces computer products: motherboards, laptops, servers, mobile phones and others.
The bigger questions are, is Taiwan really part of China, and what percentage of iphone or whatever really is from China. For the first question the answer is maybe.
Ask a native Taiwanese and they will say Taiwan is definitely not China. Ask a native Chinese and they will say Taiwan is part of China. Here's why: "Upon losing the Chinese civil war in 1949, the ROC government retreated to Taipei, and kept control over a few islands along the coast of mainland China and in the South China Sea. The People's Republic of China (PRC) was established in mainland China on October 1, 1949, claiming to be the successor to the ROC."
For the second question, Foxconn does have plants in China. But it also owns plants in other parts of the world like Mexico. But even then you would have to go down to each component and trace it's place of manufacture because suppliers have their own manufacturing plants. But then again, Foxconn doesn't make HTC phones so I don't know how you get to blame Google for something Apple is contracting out.
I hope it is now all cloudy for you but I at least hope you won't say things are "probably" made in China.
Our testing hardware for the iPhone/iPod Touch has been $1600 over the past two years. (iPhone 3G, iPhone 3Gs, iPod Touch). We've spent over $2500 acquiring Android hardware just in the last six months of last year and have already spent another $1400 this year.
But it costs money (an annual subscription) to be a part of the iphone developer program (gain access to the development tools and software for device provisioning). You're also restricted to running it on certain versions of OSX (OSX upgrades are not free). Meanwhile Android software costs are essentially zero; android dev libraries and emulator are free.
the logical reason for not allowing other corners ad edges to be grabbed is that there is no window borders or dressings other than the tab in the lower right corner
The logical reason for allowing all borders to resize the window is to make the interface more usable. Consider this use case: if a window is on the right side of the screen, a mac user must first move the window to the left, and then resize it. If all borders were resizable, the user would simply drag the left border and the "move the window" step is eliminated. So I guess you're saying "looks" trump usability in this case?
How does collocating menu bars with windows visually tie functionality to an application?
Because it is clear that that menu belongs to that window. In mac it is not always clear which window is focused. Suppose you have two windows side by side and both are displaying some kind of document. If you are not careful in this context, you may confuse which window the current menu is set to. Not that it matters much anyway since the mac standard is to avoid the menu and even on windows the menu concept is on its way out.
Ok, I'm just going to stop, have you even used Expose?
I've used expose and I think it is overrated. The good thing about it is it displays each window as it visually appears. That's great. The bad thing is it doesn't display and miniture queue as to what that window specifically and clearly is part of. So when you crowd up your system with tons of windows, expose's functionality gets less useless as the time for you to find your app grows and the pictures of the windows get too small.
Squeeze a Mighty Mouse?
All right, this is one area that really annoys me because Apple gets a big giant pass on using things like gestures and such even though they are not that intuitive and they're solutions to problems Apple created. For example for the longest time Apple never had more than one mouse button. You were expected to command-click to get that functionality which totally did not make sense nor was usable. Then they came out with multi-touch pads to address this and suddenly something Apple is now "golden" for something they should have fixed decades ago. So I guess the winning formula here is to start with something shiny or stupid (think puck-mouse) and then fix it so now everyone is thoroughly impressed with a fault that should have never been there to begin with.
Those were your BIG issues?? To each his own I guess, some people just don't know a good thing when they see it. Personally, I think who borrows who's UI elements is a more interesting topic.
My BIG issue with Apple and many interfaces is the interfaces are so dumbed down that an advanced user will find it very hard to gain efficiency. Their systems are generally designed for short learning curves but when you want to do something reasonably advanced with the GUI, it becomes a burden. To give you an example of this, we were once assigned evaluated usability for websites for an HCI class. One of the volunteers was a Mac user but all that we had in the labs were windows computers at the time. The user had no problem using the windows machine but I observed one interesting bit despite that this assignment was not intended to address the OS platform usability. Every time she (the user) opened a browser window, she would spend 3 or 5 clicks moving and resizing the window to her liking. The exact process went like this: click the browser icon to open the window, drag the window to the position desired, drag the bottom right corner to resize, drag the window again to center it.
So when you poo-poo things like maximize as "lazy solutions" I think you have your own issues. Maximize may not be the most elegant solution but it works and it is fast. The problem with the "zoom" function in mac is that it is often hard or impossible to guess the optimal si
When bikers pay into the highway system, then they can have bike lanes. It costs money to build and maintain bike lanes
Gas taxes and user taxes aren't fully subsidizing the roads: "About 70% of the construction and maintenance costs of highways in the U.S. are covered through user fees (net of collection costs), primarily gasoline taxes collected by the federal government and state and local governments, and to a much lesser extent tolls collected on toll roads and bridges. The rest of the costs are borne by general fund receipts, bond issues, and designated property and other taxes." (emphasis mine) Source.
Let's also not bring up the argument that your 3000+ pound vehicle does a whole lot more damage to a road than a 180 pound man and his 30 pound bicycle.
We have similar problems with bike riders in Phoenix, which actually HAS bike lanes. I guess bikers are too insecure to ride in single file, I see packs of them on the weekends riding 4 and 5 deep, taking up half the right lane in their funny outfits, even with a clearly marked bike lane.
When it was possible for me to commute on my bicycle in California, I generally rode alone. I do see packs of cyclists (bikers generally refers to motorcyclists) in what you call "funny outfits" but by California driving rules, each one of them is supposed to be treated as a vehicle and likewise each one of them must abide by rules on the road. I'm not sure how it works in Arizona, but it is true in California that a cyclists can take up a lane and other drivers have to respect that cyclist. I also think the "funny outfits" are useful for two purposes: bright colors help people see you, and the tight spandex actually helps a lot for efficiency.
The problem is when you're on a bicycle, people in autos don't think of you as a "vehicle" and appropriately neglect your safety. They will purposely drive close to you, zoom by at ridiculously fast speeds, and cut you off to beat you on right turns. For those reasons, many cyclists ride in groups in order to increase their safety and force others to treat them more like vehicles.
They run stop lights, and dart out across traffic without hand signals.
I generally don't do the former because I know that I'm not going to win any collision with an auto that has a 15x mass advantage. The latter is harder to do than it sounds but I try to give hand signals whenever possible. There was a section of road I used to travel where the bike lane ended and turned into a two lane right turn for autos getting onto the freeway. The bike lane continued on the left of these two lanes but for a short distance, I had to jump across normal lanes where the speed limit was 50MPH. In California, that translates to cars normally going 60MPH so I was competing at a 35-40MPH difference. When you're on a bicycle peddling at full speed it is much harder to give a hand signal and maintain your velocity and direction while looking back. In fact when I give hand signals most people just ignore me or take it as a cue to accelerate past me because they don't want to slow down to let me in. So the reason you see lots of cyclists dart out is the same reason why nobody uses their blinkers to change lanes in traffic in southern California. If they used them they'd either be ignored or get into an even more dangerous situation.
I visited in October. You probably have more experience than I, but while I was there I saw a number of things:
I met a japanese guy in my hostel that was looking for work. He found jobs but I'm guessing none of them were "full time" jobs. He was young and wasn't really a salaryman so his situation was a little different. But he did stay at the hostel dormitory pretty much the entire time I was in Japan (weeks).
I saw plenty of homeless. By that I mean people sleeping in boxes on the street.
A train ride on a single line can be about 290yen within the city but if you transfer it starts to go up. Plus you need to commute both directions so that can easily put you around $6 or more for the day. The only benefit I can think of by staying in the center is if you are in a place like shinjuku, you have access to more subway lines so it is easier/cheaper to get around the city.
A lot of locals and Japanese (but not local to Tokyo) didn't know everything about the city. In fact a lot of them get just as lost as foreigners do. So it isn't surprising that they aren't staying in the best places you would think.
A lot of Japanese are not as smart as you would think. In fact a lot of them are pretty average so I wouldn't expect all of them to make the smartest or most practical decisions.
But I mean a lot of it is simply our perceptions. For example if someone asked me about the homeless situation where I live (California), I'd certainly say they exist but I don't know how they are living. From my point of view all I see are an increase in the number of bums begging for money and whatever is in the news.
Just because it is currently a hobby language doesn't mean something popular might be made with it later. That would result in a naming collision for people (which go language?) and a complex legal battle if both products became successful.
Here's what would happen if nobody says anything: Google's Go gets popular and now has trademark weight. Go! hobby language gets popular because basement developer makes new popular app. Google sees this as a threat to trademark and is forced to use legal action.
Of course, the hobby language Go! could dwindle and produce nothing of value but we don't know that yet. He's actually doing everyone a favor by bringing up this topic right now while both languages don't have much weight to defend. It eliminates the possibility of expensive arguments in the future.
Everything the parent said is correct. I visited Japan for 3 weeks and when I came back I lost 5lbs without even trying. Here's what I have to add:
Most drinks in Japan are low calorie or the diet variant. In fact if you go to their popular Mos Burger fast food restaurant, they only have Pepsi Nex, not even regular Pepsi. Pepsi Nex is basically a diet pepsi.
Japanese favor "light" flavors. Americans tend to favor "heavy" flavors. Heavy = high fat, high sugar. You can eat a large meal in Japan, feel very full, and still not get the same afternoon crash or weight gain as one would in the U.S. A good example is their donut chain called Mister Donut. As an American, if you walk in you think, "yum! heavy sugar and fat filled pastry!" but the second you bite into their donut, you realize their donut is light with little sugar and not much fat. Even the cream filled ones don't make you feel satisfied (which is actually a good thing in terms of weight).
A cup of coffee at a cafe in Shibuya (not starbucks) is really just a small cup of coffee (maybe half the size of a standard U.S. mug). The result is you drink half the coffee which means half the calories assuming you add the same portions of sugar and cream. And yes, people there are satisfied with that size.
You can easily spend half an hour or more walking everyday in Japan. And this isn't slow walking, this is pretty fast almost workout walking. If you live in the city (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, etc.) you'll probably start bringing a bag with you everywhere (men included). Because everyone uses public transit, they need a bag to lug all of their stuff around.
The Japanese seem to value appearance heavily. They go to great lengths to make things look good including themselves. Most places will wrap the products you buy again even though it may already be packaged. This is both good and bad. It leads to a lot of wasted material but at the same time puts social pressure on everyone to look and act nice.
The clothing sizes in Japan are smaller. Everyone over there wears clothes that are exactly their size while people in the States tend to wear clothes that are too big for them (giving the appearance that Americans are smaller than they really are). In Japan a medium size shirt would probably be labeled as small. It is also hard to find extra large or oversize sizes in most stores. But in the States one can have a hard time finding small sizes.
Without trying, you can easily lose weight in Japan. Even though I didn't need to lose weight (I'm thin to begin with), you'll feel "alive" again after eating their food. After coming back to the states, I realized that the food here genuinely sucks and I even live in Southern California. The food in America is loaded with sugar and fat and makes you lethargic. In Japan anything like that would fail because people need to be active to live their lives. They're always walking and moving around so they can't eat heavy foods. In fact they probably walked at least 10 to 15 minutes to get to the restaurant and will need to walk at least that much to get back home or wherever they're going next.
They seem to base it on your IP address. When I was in Japan it would come up in Japanese and it was pretty annoying. But now that I'm back in the U.S. and I want to learn Japanese it will default to English.
Eventually I figured out that you can set your homepage to "Google in English" instead of the plain google.com.
But sometimes though when you switch areas on Google it goes back to guessing your language from your IP and defaulting to something else again.
I don't know how last.fm works but I downloaded the android application on my phone and so far it is treating me well. It is much faster than pandora and allows me to listen either by entering an artist, tag, or user. So in tags if I type in Jpop I get a bunch of japanese pop songs. I can find stuff from other countries as well which is cool.
It almost feels like iPods are overrated now. It would be cool if I just subscribed to a service and used my phone to stream in music based on my preferences or playlist. Then all music available on the internet (world) would be accessible as long as I had a 3G signal.
Finally someone that gets it. Connecting computers to HDTVs and other displays via HDMI is a great experience. The video and sound automatically go through, the plug isn't giant, and it only goes in one way. If you have a 1080P display, your TV instantly becomes a giant screen. This is great for presentations and home media and internet activities. In fact if everyone would bother, it would make connecting to a "workstation area" that much easier. Now if only there were some USB connections bundled into the same plug...
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If any of your friends use Facebook, they can easily tag you in a photo without your ass ever knowing it. If any relatives use Facebook, they can easily mark your birthday as an event. If a boyfriend/girlfriend uses Facebook, they can boast about where you ate dinner.
I don't see how this changes much. The same information was/is still acquired without facebook. People take out the family album all the time and people (especially parents) are happy to tell the world about children's birthdays called "birthday parties". Your girlfriend also probably tells her friends about where you went for your dinner. People are also known to spread random facts and lies about you. They're called rumors.
If you stay off of Facebook, your friends and colleagues assume it's because of some anti-social horrible problem with you and treat you very differently.
Perhaps the younger generations do this but I don't think anything of it. I do know one person that refuses to use many of the "modern" forms of communication including facebook and text messaging. That is fine except that this person also expects us to call her (voice call) and invite her individually for random small events like say watching a movie. That is bologna because I'm not going to go out of my way to call everyone else and invite them personally for something so trivial when the current mode of operation is to blast out a text message to everyone and see who's interested, THEN start communicating with those people individually. Even then I don't really treat this individual any differently, I do give her crap about making us jump through hoops to satisfy her availability.
iPhone OS authors collect from the very same app versions running on all three devices
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The ipad is distinctively different from the other devices. A developer probably isn't going to not make an ipad specific version because you can have a quarter size iphone version running. You also can't go the other way and have your ipad specific app run on an iphone. To me, this is fragmentation but somehow Apple gets a "pass" as usual.
And of course it's international sales that matter.
I love this. First it is sales "here" or there, and now it is international sales because there's no numbers on that. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say Apple is winning internationally at the moment. But let's suppose that changes because Google does have some players hitting other markets like Dell hitting the china market. What are you going to do then? Claim "it's the quality of the device that matters, not market share"?
Also it's obviously wrong because the size of the market for apps is: "apps sold", not "devices sold".
Marketing failure. The size of a market is defined by the target market. Just because you sold more on one market doesn't necessarily mean the size of that market is limited to your sales. What you are saying is equivalent to GM saying "we have 100% market share because the market is our customers and only them."
Developers are dojng far better on iPhone than Android for versions of the same app. Orders of magnitude better.
I'll give you a hint as to why. It isn't because Apple sells phones, it has more to do with the itunes store and the marketing they do for you. Right now the Android market application is basically crap in comparison. You can only search and browse. There are ratings but there is no way to look for "top rated" apps. There are no genres. There's no commercial on TV featuring your app. All of the marketing has to be done by you. With Apple, they help you do some of the marketing. That's what people don't get. The value isn't just in the phone, it is in how you do your marketing. If Google updates their marketing for apps or developers learn to market apps themselves, or a better middle man comes in with a better store, then you will start seeing more volume on android apps.
It always was able to tether if you got away from a sociopath carrier. Unlock it to go to t-mobile and you can add a tethering app or more recently use the built in function.
That's a BS argument when a lot of people in the iphone camp claim "AT&T only because it makes life easier" then you go around and tell them "hey, if you unlock your phone and use T-Mobile, everything is good now." If you're going to argue for the "average" user then the average user doesn't jailbreak or move their iphone off AT&T.
I also still have not found a single Apple-hater that does not change their mind when I actually show them what I do with my phone that they CANT do with theirs.
All right, make a ringtone from an mp3 without itunes. Can you? On my android phone I install ring droid and I can make a ringtone on my phone right there without touching a computer. I can even have it be longer than 40 seconds if I'd like.
Transitions should be made to other forms of power, but my Lord, what else is there to substitute for oil for transportation in the short-mid term? Nothing.
The substitute is higher taxes on oil to accelerate transition to alternative infrastructure.
But it's unavoidable that we drill. Let's manage risk better.
The more you "manage risks" the more you drive up costs. No matter what you do, you're increasing the price of oil. Why not put that money to the right solution rather than band-aiding the old one?
The egomaniacal, all-controlling, all-censoring explanation suffers from at least two major flaws. First, it isn't terribly consistent. Webkit being open source and html5 being an open standard as well as the many other open source and open standards that Apple supports (many of which Apple created), all contradict this view.
Apple is a corporation and they will make the best choice that benefits their duty as a corporation. They will only contribute to open standards when it benefits them and they will close anything and control anything when it benefits them. For the situation right now, they cannot control the web, therefore it is to their benefit to "play along" and "contribute" (or poison) the web till they can control it or have it work in their favor. When they don't have control of course they will agree to a standard; the standard benefits smaller players much more than bigger players. So by agreeing to "standards" they can guarantee that they can play. But when they become the big fish, I guarantee that the standard will be theirs, come with an license agreement, and probably cost an arm and leg.
Frankly for most people the existing 'HDTV' resolution has more than enough pixels, to get full benefit from increased number of pixels you would need a larger screen and sit closer to it.
He's not complaining about HDTV resolution. He is complaining about HDTV resolution slowing down the R&D for computer displays because everyone wants to sell "HD" displays now instead of computer LCDs. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but there is definitely a slow down in increasing computer display DPI.
As it is, reading text on these high DPI screens is hard enough, and I often find myself increasing the default font size. This issue is particularly pronounced in laptop screens.
As many others have stated, this is due to poor implementation of software/hardware for adjusting to the display DPI. In a realistic world, 10pt font would be 10pt no matter where it was. But the truth is most computer displays have their DPI settings incorrect because the display device doesn't tell the computer whatever it is hooked up to what DPI it has. Furthermore it wasn't till recent OSes that the OS has started to get DPI scaling correct everywhere. WinXP had DPI settings, but lots of things wouldn't look right. In short, the way it should work is your OS sets the DPI automatically based on your display, and a 10pt font will appear the same size no matter what the display device. Instead we have been dragging on with low DPI hacks (low dpi designed) such that people want to stick with the lower resolutions since the higher resolutions don't look right.
What I do want is more vertical resolution.
Rotate a 16:9 display to it's side. Now you have more vertical pixels.
The Accord is still the cheaper larger-sized sedan offering while the Civic is the small/mid-sized sedan. A correct analogy would be a Honda Accord compared to an Acura TL or any other luxury brand like Audi A4, BMW 3 series, Lexus etc.
Maybe that's how they claim they work but that's not what I've observed. I pass through an intersection at least twice a day that is equipped with red-light cameras. During low-light the cameras will often flash when there is NO motion and NO vehicles entering or in the intersection. Sometimes the flash goes off randomly even while a signal light is still on yellow or has been green/red for a long time.
One morning while I was waiting to get through this intersection, the light went from red to green to allow cars through but IMMEDIATELY turned yellow and this yellow duration was MUCH MUCH shorter than normal. In fact it was no more than a second such that no more than 1 or 2 cars could get through the intersection. It was total bullshit because it was obvious the lights had been set to randomly do that just to catch more people in the intersection while it was red.
Another night when I was driving home the same intersection had a wonderful collision where a left-turn driver ran right into a driver going the adjacent direction.
The intersection and many similar to it are dangerous because the lights are not consistent and everyone is aware of the cameras. Therefore drivers begin to act unpredictable with a large group going too fast through the intersection and a large group going to slow through the intersection such that they can stop if the light turns yellow. This leads to more accidents and wasted time on the driver's part, all just for additional revenue for the city.
The grand parent should have left out the part about firmware. It is possible to root an android phone install a custom firmware but that's obviously not the intended feature.
Every so often iTunes pops up and tells you there's an OS update. It downloads and installs in a few minutes automatically like every other sync.
Whenever there is an update to the firmware on the phone by the phone distributer (in my case technically T-Mobile), my android phone will notify me that a firmware update is available and ready to install (it downloads it automatically). I don't have to connect it to a computer or anything. I don't pay $5 or whatever. It just works.
If you get an app from the App Store it just work on your phone. No need to worry about which version of the OS is on it, whether your carrier has installed their own UI mods, or whether your phone supports the features.
The first part is partially wrong. In android you can set a minimum version level your application will support. This prevents it from getting distributed in the Market to phones with older versions of android. It is possible to have two version of your application, one for older versions of android with features stripped out, and one for newer versions such that newer phones see both version of the application as compatible. But this will also begin to exist in the iphone world since not all iphones are getting updated to support every new feature.
Now the part about UI mods and features, sure, that's true. But I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. If the newest android phone comes with a feature that is unheard of (even for iphones) then it is a good thing because it means the hardware is improving. With the iphone you're stuck with what the iphone comes with, no more no less.
Yes. Even a magazine is too heavy, but usually you can rest it on your chair/lap until you need to turn the page. Now you have this gadget that needs lots of user input/interaction...hello gorilla arms. It isn't the ability to lift and hold the device or media, it is the need to continuously hold it and interact with it for long periods of time that becomes the problem. Sure, you can life a 20lbs or even 30lbs dumbbell a few times with one arm. But can you hold it there for 10 to 15 minutes with no effort? It is the reason why we don't have touch screen monitors for work and we continue to use keyboards and mice. Keyboards and mice simply take less muscle effort.
Now from the article:
Finally let me talk about the device itself. It's heavy. I mean, surprisingly heavy. The specs say that it is 1.5lbs, which sounded very light on paper. For the first few minutes, I liked the heft; I felt that I was holding a solid, well-crafted item in my hands. But then I started trying to figuring out ways to type. I wrote a number of emails of moderate length and slowly realized that I just don't like typing on this thing.
I saw this a mile away. The reason an "pad" device will never work is because of weight. Even a plain plastic clip board is annoying without a desk or surface to support it. Similarly it is why devices the size of a cell phone will continue to dominate. You can comfortably hold your phone in your hand and it isn't going to feel heavy because there is no lever force. All of the weight is in your hand. Now you have this pad device in your hand but you need to hit a point on the opposite side with your hand that's not holding the device. That "tap" will feel a lot heavier than it is because of physics. Now you need to do this a 100 or 200 times? 10 minutes? Nevermind, it'll be worth it to get the laptop in 1 or 2 minutes and not have to use so much energy just to hold the device.
Sorry everyone, it is going to continue to be phone size devices or laptops and full size keyboards for a while.
Of course the ipad will have a convenient stand at the Apple store so you don't actually have to hold it. You have to admit, they do know how to sell something.
But there is a solution to the ipad input, and Apple is not going to like it. It involves using your thumbs instead of your index finger similar to a gameboy. Apple is never going to like this because it isn't "friendly" enough. Just like their one-button mice and cmd clicking.
I'll start you off with the following link for reference that talks about just the ships.
That link only talks about sulfur emissions and not anything else. If we're talking emissions that's a different debate. The debate here is fuel efficiency or fuel consumption.
The regulation won't lead to having everyone drive an econobox. It will only force manufacturers to either stop producing inefficient vehicles or produce more econoboxes in their lineup to offset the inefficient offerings. It doesn't mean that the buyer will purchase those models. It will certainly drive up the cost to build a fleet of cars.
On my family's computers... I forced Ubuntu upon those I could, and left the others to fend for themselves.
Here's what you do for those other family members:
Now when a program does something fishy, they will call you because they don't know the password on the admin account. So you can ask them what they're trying to do and if it sounds reasonable (install some purchased software, hookup a digital camera, whatever), you tell them to type the password and they're back on their way. If they're doing something and uac randomly pops up, they can't hit the 'ok' button because they need the password so they'll be forced to hit the cancel button. They'll rarely call you in these instances and this will protect them from most malware.
Also setup windows 7 to automatically download and updates in the background and sleep after a few hours of being idle (even if it is a desktop). Don't let them plug directly to the internet. Have a router in between with firewall enabled. That'll keep them clean for a good while.
Now maybe if you moved the workplaces to the suburbs, rather than concentrating them all inside the city, you could find a solution.
Mixed zoning doesn't work because people can't pickup their houses and move when their company flops or they lose their job. So instead they end up driving ridiculous distances and unpredictable paths in order to keep their family together. It is even worse when a married couple needs to have both adults working. Now they need room for 2 cars, take up 2 commutes, and it will be really unlikely for both people live next to work.
Sigh...if it has Chinese looking characters it must be from CHINA right!?
Let me introduce you to a place called Taiwan:
HTC Corporation, formerly High Tech Computer Corporation, is a Taiwan-based manufacturer of smartphones.
Foxconn is the trade name of the Taiwan based firm Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (Ltd.). Foxconn is the largest manufacturer of electronics and computer components worldwide, and mainly manufactures on contract to other companies. Among other things, Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod and the iPhone for Apple Inc.; Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard; motherboards for UK computer manufacturer Zoostorm; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo; the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, the Amazon Kindle, and Cisco equipment.
The company opened its first manufacturing plant in China in 1988, a factory in Shenzhen that is now the company's largest, with more than 270,000 employees.[3] Beginning in 1994, Foxconn purchased development centres in the United States and Japan. In 1997 and 1998, Foxconn established additional manufacturing plants in the UK and the US. As of 2007, the company and its subsidiaries owned plants in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Brazil, India and Vietnam.
ASUSTeK Computer Incorporated (ASUS), a multinational corporation centered in Taiwan, produces computer products: motherboards, laptops, servers, mobile phones and others.
Sources: Wikipedia: HTC Corporation, Wikipedia: Foxconn, Wikipedia: Asus.
The bigger questions are, is Taiwan really part of China, and what percentage of iphone or whatever really is from China. For the first question the answer is maybe.
Ask a native Taiwanese and they will say Taiwan is definitely not China. Ask a native Chinese and they will say Taiwan is part of China. Here's why: "Upon losing the Chinese civil war in 1949, the ROC government retreated to Taipei, and kept control over a few islands along the coast of mainland China and in the South China Sea. The People's Republic of China (PRC) was established in mainland China on October 1, 1949, claiming to be the successor to the ROC."
For the second question, Foxconn does have plants in China. But it also owns plants in other parts of the world like Mexico. But even then you would have to go down to each component and trace it's place of manufacture because suppliers have their own manufacturing plants. But then again, Foxconn doesn't make HTC phones so I don't know how you get to blame Google for something Apple is contracting out.
I hope it is now all cloudy for you but I at least hope you won't say things are "probably" made in China.
Our testing hardware for the iPhone/iPod Touch has been $1600 over the past two years. (iPhone 3G, iPhone 3Gs, iPod Touch). We've spent over $2500 acquiring Android hardware just in the last six months of last year and have already spent another $1400 this year.
But it costs money (an annual subscription) to be a part of the iphone developer program (gain access to the development tools and software for device provisioning). You're also restricted to running it on certain versions of OSX (OSX upgrades are not free). Meanwhile Android software costs are essentially zero; android dev libraries and emulator are free.
the logical reason for not allowing other corners ad edges to be grabbed is that there is no window borders or dressings other than the tab in the lower right corner
The logical reason for allowing all borders to resize the window is to make the interface more usable. Consider this use case: if a window is on the right side of the screen, a mac user must first move the window to the left, and then resize it. If all borders were resizable, the user would simply drag the left border and the "move the window" step is eliminated. So I guess you're saying "looks" trump usability in this case?
How does collocating menu bars with windows visually tie functionality to an application?
Because it is clear that that menu belongs to that window. In mac it is not always clear which window is focused. Suppose you have two windows side by side and both are displaying some kind of document. If you are not careful in this context, you may confuse which window the current menu is set to. Not that it matters much anyway since the mac standard is to avoid the menu and even on windows the menu concept is on its way out.
Ok, I'm just going to stop, have you even used Expose?
I've used expose and I think it is overrated. The good thing about it is it displays each window as it visually appears. That's great. The bad thing is it doesn't display and miniture queue as to what that window specifically and clearly is part of. So when you crowd up your system with tons of windows, expose's functionality gets less useless as the time for you to find your app grows and the pictures of the windows get too small.
Squeeze a Mighty Mouse?
All right, this is one area that really annoys me because Apple gets a big giant pass on using things like gestures and such even though they are not that intuitive and they're solutions to problems Apple created. For example for the longest time Apple never had more than one mouse button. You were expected to command-click to get that functionality which totally did not make sense nor was usable. Then they came out with multi-touch pads to address this and suddenly something Apple is now "golden" for something they should have fixed decades ago. So I guess the winning formula here is to start with something shiny or stupid (think puck-mouse) and then fix it so now everyone is thoroughly impressed with a fault that should have never been there to begin with.
Those were your BIG issues?? To each his own I guess, some people just don't know a good thing when they see it. Personally, I think who borrows who's UI elements is a more interesting topic.
My BIG issue with Apple and many interfaces is the interfaces are so dumbed down that an advanced user will find it very hard to gain efficiency. Their systems are generally designed for short learning curves but when you want to do something reasonably advanced with the GUI, it becomes a burden. To give you an example of this, we were once assigned evaluated usability for websites for an HCI class. One of the volunteers was a Mac user but all that we had in the labs were windows computers at the time. The user had no problem using the windows machine but I observed one interesting bit despite that this assignment was not intended to address the OS platform usability. Every time she (the user) opened a browser window, she would spend 3 or 5 clicks moving and resizing the window to her liking. The exact process went like this: click the browser icon to open the window, drag the window to the position desired, drag the bottom right corner to resize, drag the window again to center it.
So when you poo-poo things like maximize as "lazy solutions" I think you have your own issues. Maximize may not be the most elegant solution but it works and it is fast. The problem with the "zoom" function in mac is that it is often hard or impossible to guess the optimal si
I think very few people would find use for a mouse with this thing.
The major benefit of the mouse is that you can rest your hand on the desk rather than keep your arm lifted to touch a screen.
When bikers pay into the highway system, then they can have bike lanes. It costs money to build and maintain bike lanes
Gas taxes and user taxes aren't fully subsidizing the roads: "About 70% of the construction and maintenance costs of highways in the U.S. are covered through user fees (net of collection costs), primarily gasoline taxes collected by the federal government and state and local governments, and to a much lesser extent tolls collected on toll roads and bridges. The rest of the costs are borne by general fund receipts, bond issues, and designated property and other taxes." (emphasis mine) Source.
Let's also not bring up the argument that your 3000+ pound vehicle does a whole lot more damage to a road than a 180 pound man and his 30 pound bicycle.
We have similar problems with bike riders in Phoenix, which actually HAS bike lanes. I guess bikers are too insecure to ride in single file, I see packs of them on the weekends riding 4 and 5 deep, taking up half the right lane in their funny outfits, even with a clearly marked bike lane.
When it was possible for me to commute on my bicycle in California, I generally rode alone. I do see packs of cyclists (bikers generally refers to motorcyclists) in what you call "funny outfits" but by California driving rules, each one of them is supposed to be treated as a vehicle and likewise each one of them must abide by rules on the road. I'm not sure how it works in Arizona, but it is true in California that a cyclists can take up a lane and other drivers have to respect that cyclist. I also think the "funny outfits" are useful for two purposes: bright colors help people see you, and the tight spandex actually helps a lot for efficiency.
The problem is when you're on a bicycle, people in autos don't think of you as a "vehicle" and appropriately neglect your safety. They will purposely drive close to you, zoom by at ridiculously fast speeds, and cut you off to beat you on right turns. For those reasons, many cyclists ride in groups in order to increase their safety and force others to treat them more like vehicles.
They run stop lights, and dart out across traffic without hand signals.
I generally don't do the former because I know that I'm not going to win any collision with an auto that has a 15x mass advantage. The latter is harder to do than it sounds but I try to give hand signals whenever possible. There was a section of road I used to travel where the bike lane ended and turned into a two lane right turn for autos getting onto the freeway. The bike lane continued on the left of these two lanes but for a short distance, I had to jump across normal lanes where the speed limit was 50MPH. In California, that translates to cars normally going 60MPH so I was competing at a 35-40MPH difference. When you're on a bicycle peddling at full speed it is much harder to give a hand signal and maintain your velocity and direction while looking back. In fact when I give hand signals most people just ignore me or take it as a cue to accelerate past me because they don't want to slow down to let me in. So the reason you see lots of cyclists dart out is the same reason why nobody uses their blinkers to change lanes in traffic in southern California. If they used them they'd either be ignored or get into an even more dangerous situation.
I visited in October. You probably have more experience than I, but while I was there I saw a number of things:
But I mean a lot of it is simply our perceptions. For example if someone asked me about the homeless situation where I live (California), I'd certainly say they exist but I don't know how they are living. From my point of view all I see are an increase in the number of bums begging for money and whatever is in the news.
If you're going to build a box, why not use FreeNAS with ZFS? It installed to a USB stick and everything is configurable from a web interface.
Just because it is currently a hobby language doesn't mean something popular might be made with it later. That would result in a naming collision for people (which go language?) and a complex legal battle if both products became successful.
Here's what would happen if nobody says anything: Google's Go gets popular and now has trademark weight. Go! hobby language gets popular because basement developer makes new popular app. Google sees this as a threat to trademark and is forced to use legal action.
Of course, the hobby language Go! could dwindle and produce nothing of value but we don't know that yet. He's actually doing everyone a favor by bringing up this topic right now while both languages don't have much weight to defend. It eliminates the possibility of expensive arguments in the future.
Everything the parent said is correct. I visited Japan for 3 weeks and when I came back I lost 5lbs without even trying. Here's what I have to add:
Without trying, you can easily lose weight in Japan. Even though I didn't need to lose weight (I'm thin to begin with), you'll feel "alive" again after eating their food. After coming back to the states, I realized that the food here genuinely sucks and I even live in Southern California. The food in America is loaded with sugar and fat and makes you lethargic. In Japan anything like that would fail because people need to be active to live their lives. They're always walking and moving around so they can't eat heavy foods. In fact they probably walked at least 10 to 15 minutes to get to the restaurant and will need to walk at least that much to get back home or wherever they're going next.
They seem to base it on your IP address. When I was in Japan it would come up in Japanese and it was pretty annoying. But now that I'm back in the U.S. and I want to learn Japanese it will default to English.
Eventually I figured out that you can set your homepage to "Google in English" instead of the plain google.com.
But sometimes though when you switch areas on Google it goes back to guessing your language from your IP and defaulting to something else again.
I don't know how last.fm works but I downloaded the android application on my phone and so far it is treating me well. It is much faster than pandora and allows me to listen either by entering an artist, tag, or user. So in tags if I type in Jpop I get a bunch of japanese pop songs. I can find stuff from other countries as well which is cool.
It almost feels like iPods are overrated now. It would be cool if I just subscribed to a service and used my phone to stream in music based on my preferences or playlist. Then all music available on the internet (world) would be accessible as long as I had a 3G signal.
Finally someone that gets it. Connecting computers to HDTVs and other displays via HDMI is a great experience. The video and sound automatically go through, the plug isn't giant, and it only goes in one way. If you have a 1080P display, your TV instantly becomes a giant screen. This is great for presentations and home media and internet activities. In fact if everyone would bother, it would make connecting to a "workstation area" that much easier. Now if only there were some USB connections bundled into the same plug...