HIIT and sprint/shot training is great and all, but most people will quickly shrug it off (or try it for a little while and quit it). Many (I'd argue most) people equate exercise to work, and many people hate work. Instead, most people envy those with fast metabolisms (even in they're "skinny fat" and are, on average, about as healthy as someone pushing obesity) and attempt to copy their lifestyles by becoming skinny with as little work and time investment as possible without changing eating patterns.
It's the same reason why microwave ownership exploded and is the raison d'etre for the oil change and car wash businesses, amongst many other things. Most people would rather pay a heap of money for other people to do the easy, simple things they can't/don't want/don't have time to do than take the few minutes and do it themselves. If people could pay other people to manage their own weight and make them look good, they would; a $60B strong weight-loss market proves this. It's not entirely their fault; it's very, very difficult to make time for things with work, kids and wife around unless the body is put first and foremost.
To make matters worse, a lot of people who try to lose weight or "look good for the beach" have horribly unreasonable plans for getting there. ("Looking good for the beach/girls/Facebook" feeds into that.) If many people (I'm tempted to say most) didn't think they could lose 30 pounds in 30 months or get rock-hard solid abs (and nothing else!) in a few weeks, then things like the South Beach diet and P90X would have failed immediately. It doesn't help that lots of parents, who were also very busy and didn't make the time to care for their bodies, didn't make the time to teach their kids proper eating habits and forewent breakfast and simple, reasonably-portioned dinners for McDonald's and frozen TV dinners. (The biggest irony about most people's weight-loss ideologies is that instead of eating the most sugary, fattening crap at breakfast time when their bodies need it the most, they make breakfast the lightest meal of the day and eat heavier as the day progresses! Willing to bet it's all because skipping breakfast became a habit.)
Staying in good shape and good weight isn't rocket science and isn't something made exclusive to sports professionals and Olympians. (Funny enough, a lot of these people have HUGE problems maintaining their figure post-career. Michael Jordan and Greg LeMond are kind of fat now, for example.) Eating reasonable portions appropriate to workload and moving around a bit are all that's needed to NOT gain weight. Moving around a LOT and/or eating reasonably is the way to lose weight, and working, stressing and RECOVERING muscles is the way to gain muscle. (Lots of dudes hit the gym and over-stress their bodies with barely enough sleep to let their muscles recover and grow.)
That's it. It's so easy, but is a HUGE mental challenge for lots of people.
Disclaimer: I lost 30 pounds from biking and walking a lot, dropped 3" from my waistline and have been able to keep it off for the last 4 years now. My metabolism isn't naturally great, but I don't think I've ever gained holiday weight.
iOS might not, but good chance the management tool that will be baked into their phones is. I'm also confident that Apple's staunch refusal to accommodate corporate customers got pushed to the side here.
A few days ago, I was in Best Buy looking for a new external hard drive. While I was trying to get over the insane price markups, a very svelte-looking laptop caught the corner of my eye. It was one of Samsung's newestmodels, and it was beautiful. Maybe a little too beautiful, as it reminded me up, down and center of the MacBook Pro it was obviously trying to compete with.
Anyone that has good working vision can see that Samsung, more or less, copies Apple's designs wholesale. They might not be complete replicas of their products, but the "nods" they include in their designs are pretty obvious. Not a bad thing when you consider the technological advancements they provide with their clone-killers, but not surprising when Apple throws down the legal gauntlet as a response.
Its been well known that RFID cards are suspectible to this kind of threat. The only reason why jammers and blocks havent been enforced as much is because there haven't been enough cases of this happening to justify wide-scale enforcement.
I really like the convenience of contactless payment systems and hope jammers and guards become ubitquitous enough for banks to provide them along with these cards.
You can still downgrade to pre-iOS 5 releases if you have SHSH blobs saved for those revisions. Downgrading has been rendered "impossible" because the APticket used to verify ipsw's is now generated randomly instead of being solely comprised of data from the phone's ECID and firmware version.
On one hand, these kinds of sites have made it stupidly easy to host and download all sorts of different data, legal and illegal. It's funny how the powers that be think that shutting these guys down will curb piracy when (a) there are so many ways people can get illegal data and (b) new and more anonymous ones will pop up as the older ones fall.
On the other hand, it's not a terribly huge loss on the material scheme of things. There are still plenty of other sites that people can use to host data, including wider-range services like Dropbox and Sugarsync. The other funny thing is that Megaupload et. al. did shut down links to any media that infringed on copyright policies, so it's scary to see how far these laws will go. I'm hoping that Dropbox and partners will not start telling people what can/can't be backed up.
Yeah...a lot of really good stuff is written by people just like the OP that are just learning. The other good thing about software is that it's an evolving work. Nobody cares if it's bloated or whatever; if it's a cool idea, helps in some way and is acceptable enough to use, people will like it. The other awesome thing is that if you do reach that point, you learn as you improve and everyone benefits!
It's not like being a doctor where you have to be GOOD right out the gate since people's lives are at stake. Unless, of course, you want to code medical instruments or things for planes...
But most people hate hate hate everything that makes good programmers good programmers. They hate the tediousness, the methodicalness, the breaking-things-down-into-tiny-steps, the 8+ hours of keeping your brain in an alpha state. What "real" programmers view as fun and almost a form of meditation, the average Joe views as nothing short of self-imposed torture.
Everyone loves and wishes they could sing, dance or draw. But will everyone love the hours and hours and hours and HOURS of training that goes into becoming a singer, dancer or "professional artist," only to find out that you have to work really, really, REALLY hard to get noticed because a lot of people can sing, dance AND draw? If you're a singer, you get paid like shit and will probably have to work two or three jobs to make rent and side money in hopes that an A&R guy discovers your talent, submits your demo, really pushes for the exec to drop an advance for you, all of which will probably be eaten up by "overhead" and will leave you broke anyway. If you're a dancer, you'll probably mess up your feet and be practicing just about ALL the time. If you're an artist, you're struggling almost everyday...even if your stuff makes gallery.
Nobody loves real work except those that love the work.
Most people grow to hate programming because most teachers teach it badly. Perfect example: all engineers at my alma mater (Stevens) needed to go through a programming course with the idea that everyone would become a better engineer with a little bit of programmer in their system. That probably would be the case IF they didn't C++, arguably the most unfriendly language for beginners to learn. It's fine for Computer Engineering students like myself to take that because we will actually need those concepts later on. Does a Chemical Engineer who's bound for doing pure chemistry research really need to know what pointers are and how to use them? (This alone confused most of the people in the class.) Does anyone that isn't doing this for a living need to do this if they just want to write an Android app?
If CodeAcademy can teach people the basics in ways that are actually interesting and worthwhile (Project Euler doesn't count...a lot of people hate math too), more people *will* learn how to code. Tons and tons of people of varying intelligence come up with great ideas every minute of the day but fail to execute because they not only don't know how to code, but are afraid of learning because "it looks hard." Google tried working around this with App Inventor, but that never really took off. This initiative probably won't make people Google-quality coders in a year, but it will spark the innovative light our country has been direly looking for lately.
(You can definitely start making serious money as a programmer or IT guy with a year or two of education and a good connection. People admire doctors and lawyers for what they make, but I know guys who make just as much as they do or more with no degrees and WAY less stress...as contractors anyway. IT in general still pays really nice money, especially if you know where to look.)
If anything, I'm hoping this will make those with the IT pursestrings up those budgets a little easier...
There are a couple of problems I've noticed from this statement that tells me they'll need to do a LOT of maturing here.
InfoWorld: Will you compete with Google Android, Apple iOS [4], and others?
Silber: Yes. And we think we can do that effectively because of characteristics of Ubuntu as a platform, industry dynamics, and an increased wariness around the walled gardens of Apple and to some extent Google and even Amazon, as they are increasingly in this game as well. There is a demand for a platform that has characteristics that Ubuntu meets. The characteristics in my mind that are important are openness, and by openness I don't just mean open source code, I mean the governance structure, the ability to collaborate, the ability for there to be multiple devices from multiple vendors.
There is? Last time I checked, the things people care about most are getting nice phones at a good price that they can play Angry Birds on and snap pictures with to upload to their Facebook/Twitter accounts.
This is the first quote that frustrates me from this snippet: I mean the governance structure, the ability to collaborate, the ability for there to be multiple devices from multiple vendors.. Do they not realise that this is exactly the status quo? Collaboration and governance are HUGE objectives for all of the major players in this game. Apple has iCloud, Microsoft has Windows Live and Office 365. Android has Google account synchronisation, control and access deeply ingrained into its fundamentals. All of these are free. Ubuntu's offering costs money. Umm...
This is the second most frustrating quote: we think we can do that effectively because of characteristics of Ubuntu as a platform. Let's not forget that this is the platform that's changed their stance on the minimise/close button three times in between, what, the last three releases?
There has to be a strong developer ecosystem, and we've spent a lot of effort and time in the last couple years building up that developer ecosystem. Building up our software center, building tools to be able to connect the dots between developers and users so that a developer can write an app and submit it through a website and get it into the hands of users very quickly. A free app or a commercially paid app.
Like Android's NDK with Eclipse integration or Apple's iPhone/iOS SDK with XCode or Windows Phone's leveraging of.NET with Visual Studio? Still wondering what they're bringing to the table at this point.
There's a certain level of quality and features that is needed in order to be a viable platform in this category, and Ubuntu has that, whereas some of the projects that have come and gone in the last couple years have never really cracked that. We've seen Moblin [5] come and go from Intel, Maemo [6], MeeGo [7]. Tizen [8] is the latest incarnation -- we'll see if they ever produce anything.
No, those projects never cracked the marketing required to reach the big time. Nokia could have really flaunted Maemo/MeeGo but chose to ride the sidelines while Apple and Android made themselves known everywhere. MeeGo, as far as I undersatand it, was actually a pretty reliable mobile OS and had a lot of potential.
This "advantage" is weak at best. In fact, I'm hard pressed to rely on this since I can't trust Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution) enough to install it for my non-technical peers and clients. While it certainly offers the nicest GNU/Linux UX experience available, there are some things still left to be desired on the hardware side.
The other problem I have with this is that Unity, compared to Android or iOS, does not really offer any real usability advantages over those other platforms. As far as I see it, it offers an OS-X like icon dock (that doesn't work nearly as nicely) and a focus on searching for things. It's a good starting point, but it's hard to see where they are going with it and how
Nokia's strong point (or given their performance lately, least weak point) is very much in their mobile phone business. If you look at their latest quarterly earnings, the net sale of mobile phones decreased (-14% from last) significantly less than their smart phones (-39% from last). On top of that, their smartphone sales dropped significantly in NA since last year, presumably because of the competition in the market and their lack of a real offering lately.
Furthermore, it's pretty clear (as in their only choice at the moment) that they will use Windows Phone as their only smartphone platform and are dropping any commitments to any alternatives they had on the shelf. There is a good chance they will make deep system changes in their ROMs to enhance the experience as well, further enveloping their relationship with them. I doubt they will commit to Android sometime down the line, since (a) Elop has obvious ties with MS and (b) it will be way more work for them to "Nokia"-ize the UI to make it appealing to people like every other manufacturer did.
So what if they sold that division to Microsoft? Their bread-and-butter won't change and won't be influenced by the move. Microsoft won't build any devices; if anything, they will have an easier hand in making sure the hardware gels perfectly with Windows Phone to make the experience as awesome as possible. Both companies would be better positioned to compete with Apple and Android since they will be able to use them as the "Nexus" of Windows Phone and, if they don't step on Nokia's toes, provide an awesome experience that neither company can match AND have manufacturer variety that gives people just enough choice to be appealing without being overwhelming. It's a win-win, though I'm probably being naive and overly simplistic.
I know the news is fake, but I'm really excited about this collaboration. I love Nokia and I think this will finally make them relevant again if they don't let Microsoft run the hardware design show too much. They already did the right thing by setting a tight hardware baseline; Nokia can handle the rest.
As it reads right now, this sounds like a huge game-change for the worse. Here are my questions:
Third-tier newspapers. How will this impact third-tier (neighborhood, college, special interest group) newspapers that relay their original content? Will they have to pay for partnerships to simply get their news? What if they "steal" it from a news aggregator like Yahoo! News or Google? Do they get penalised?
Paraphrasing. Let's say I'm a blogger and want to avoid getting fined by the news media cartel, so I buy a newspaper (or, again, take it from Google et. al) and paraphrase it. Or deep-link it so that's it far away from the original source. What happens then?
It sounds like this is an attempt to create the MPAA of news. On one hand, I feel like this won't really affect the casual reader since most folks get their news through a source that would not have problems with this (e.g. local channels, newspapers, Google News,e tc.) On the other hand, I feel like it's an immoral attempt to control the flow of information.
Here in NYC, TaskRabbit is doing, more or less, the same thing. If you have free time and want to make a few bucks, you go to their website and sign up for something to do. Works great for college students and people who really need the money.
I know I've seen ads for other services that do the same thing.
The big difference is that these sites take real money. Apart from Bitcoin, I don't understand the lure of using virtual currency that requires real currency to obtain. What does this accomplish?
If you buy an Android phone, there is a decent chance you'll never get an update for it - often phones are sold long after they get their last update, and it is rare to get an update even one year after it FIRST goes on sale.
There are two caveats to this:
Only applies to low-end devices. Historically, flagship devices have always had a clear-cut and well-supported upgrade path for at least one or two iterations.
For example, this chart highlights the upgrades available for Motorola devices. All of the flagship devices they've sold, such as the Droid, Droid X and Xoom, have gotten carrier-supported upgrades to Gingerbread. I know that flagship HTC and Samsung devices, like the Droid Incredible, Desire HD/Inspire and Galaxy S (Vibrant, Epic, Captivate, Fascinate and International i9000), have all gotten similar treatments as well. This is, in part, because of:
Lack of customer demand. People that purchase lower-end devices usually get them to have a phone more capable than a regular phone for a decent price. Many of these folks don't know what upgrades are. Additionally, it takes real effort for these carriers to update and test every single CPU and/or GPU, sound DAC and USB controller (some of which run on hacks, as some ports to Cyanogenmod et. al. demonstrate) on top of updates to the UI (which some of these devices can barely run). Consequently, they focus those efforts on the higher-end devices and let the others have cake.
It's sort of messed up, but when you consider that the point of Android was to give "the masses" a better alternative to smartphone computing, it's a lot better than shelling a few hundred bucks for a shiny iPhone or waiting a few years for the hand-me-downs to drop price.
Fortunately, and unlike iPhone, because of Android's strong community support model and its openness, lower-end devices usually get upgrade options anyway.
Two months ago, I traded my wonderful G2 for a HD7 to get a taste of the Windows Phone experience. I've used Windows Mobile since the 2003 version on the MPx200 (solid flip-phone; absolutely loved it) and wanted to see how far Microsoft has matured in the mobile arena.
Windows Phone 7 has, hands down, the best mobile UI experience you can get right now. Everything is fluid, fast and easy. The stock applications and voice controls gel perfectly and make Android look like a total mess, though it's cleaned up its act with Ice Cream Sandwich. App switching is WebOS-like and will make multi-tasking awesome when it comes to life in the next version. It's integration with Windows Live and Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is the best I have ever seen and used and totally antiquates the need for their dedicated apps. (This might not matter for many Slashdot folks, but it matters for most people.) Forget iPod and iTunes; the Zune is just as easy to use and is much prettier to use. (It helps that the Zune software runs great on Windows, unlike iTunes.) The camera has ZERO lag, though the lens on the HD7 absolutely sucked. It's experience is absolutely beautiful and I can totally see iPhone users defecting to this once the app ecosystem.
Microsoft's strategy to use Nokia as their flagship supplier makes much more sense after you use it for a while; Nokia still has huge brand recognition and will shake up the market really nicely when they release (and market) their ace device.
The biggest obvious problem is that Apple and Android both had first-mover's advantage and, thus, own the space at the moment. However, this is not as problematic as it seems. People are getting tired of iOS (it hasn't changed very much since 1.0, despite great hardware advances) and Windows Phone offers a very cool and equally smooth alternative that a lot of people will feel comfortable moving to, especially with its strong Facebook integration. It's going to be very difficult for Apple to match this and Android's UI improvements and they can't depend on making killer hardware leaps anymore since both fronts have caught up there. (Kind of like how Intel can't really market GHz anymore since every processor is "fast enough.")
Apple is, finally, in trouble, but that's what happens when you're on top for so long.:)
Even worse, the ability for users to "Interop Unlock" their phones was mostly based on the manufacturer. I think there is one available for Samsung and LG; HTC got the shaft after the Mango update.
How can newspapers prioritise accuracy and fairness when its patrons prioritise sensationalism and shock? The fact that nuances in the lives of celebrities can, at times, be more valuable to people than current events around them pronounces this. This element of our society needs to change first before we can begin talking about ways of nurturing accuracy.
The trivial and common response to this (and the original post I was going to write) is that it needs to GO because its competitors don't do this and, thus, don't have to worry about losing internet and email service if one cluster of huge servers somewhere in their country goes dark for a bit. Many consumers might have agreed with this school of thought with their wallet and went elsewhere.
The thing to keep in mind, however, is that this centralised model was NEVER meant to "serve" regular home consumer usage patterns. Remember their devices from yesteryear? You know, the business-only, no bullshit phones that would be totally useless for Joe Consumer? That, if anything, showed that their target market was for people who needed really good phone and email device with extra high security, if required. Their centralised model (outages aside) ensures the highest quality for both of these requirements with a battery life that is still unmatched by iOS or Android
The problem is that the market has shown that most people are fine with "good enough," and Blackberry devices are FAR from that. Their Their work phones might still rule with email, but their iPhone or Droid does that and much more satisfactorily enough to meet their needs. It's also cheaper per month and has more "apps." Additionally, they are, slowly but surely, becoming secure enough to be seriously considered for the workplace. Once this happens, Blackberry has no leg to stand on.
I think RIM needs to worry about moving their phones to the 21st century. Outages happen; bad market strategy shouldn't.
Actually, it's pretty well-known that ROTC has several terms and conditions on what you do after you graduate and scholarships gained from doing National Reserve et. al. can only be used in the schools they chose.
Here in Minnesota you can go to college and complete your undergrad for very little money. You start as a PSEO student in HS and the state pays your way through many of your first two years of college undergraduate credit without your taking out any loans. They count towards your HS diploma AND your college degree.
If you don't choose to go that way (or even if you do) you can enter the state's community college system and live at home (working part time hopefully) while taking college courses at costs far lower than you'd spend elsewhere--especially out of state.
This is absolutely true. However, when you as a high school student see that Goldman Sachs, NASA, Google, Microsoft and tons of other colleges like go shopping at the "out-of-state or in-state private institutions" most others with "dreams of grandeur" flock to, can you blame them for taking up these huge loans?
To worsen matters, it's also super easy for students to get loans; you can even get pre-approved for them! It's also easy to keep taking out more loans without any restraints whatsoever. For someone taking up a degree that actually pays out after college, this isn't a terrible investment since those kids can actually pay it back and still live reasonably comfortably. Unfortunately, it's just as easy for kids taking up degrees that are ONLY useful for graduate school, a nice way to incur even more debt.
Why aren't loan applications also judged by school studies, performance and real-world expectations for paying them back?
Let's say that Paul was elected and got his way. Schools will still be uber-expensive, and the only way lots of kids will be able to pay (especially the many, MANY kids whose parents are strapped between making too much for financial aid and not making enough to actually pay for school) is with private loans from the bank. Let's see what they get with that:
Loans that start at about 7% interest and typically go up as the student gets deeper and deeper into debt (since the principal isn't capitalised but the interest is; your credit score gets affected by this),
No income-based repayment options and certainly no loan forgiveness options,
Practically no options for traditional loan conslidation.
Admittedly, one can take out a lot more money through private loans than government loans (up to $200,000). Is an undergraduate education worth that much, though?
Android might have "ripped [them] off wholesale," but the truth is that Android delivers a great smartphone OS to everyone instead of everyone that can save enough for an iPhone with its special data/voice plan. Did they really expect OEMs to do like RIM and just sit there while Apple designs and builds awesome hardware from the same factories they use?
Plus, Apple's products are amazing until you start "thinking different." Then you run into HUGE walls. Example: In Android, I can install an application that controls battery usage by controlling all interfaces on the phone. This seems to be impossible on the iPhone, which is bad because there are days when it will use most of the battery in less than half a day and others in about two days. Another example is adding a Windows print queue on OS X, though this might have been made easier with Lion. I'm not sure.
His frustrations are thinly warranted, though I do agree that most of Google's products are either crappy or great for two months after release. It would be great if they made APIs along with their products, but I suppose that's not the Google way.
Slashdot Mirror
HIIT and sprint/shot training is great and all, but most people will quickly shrug it off (or try it for a little while and quit it). Many (I'd argue most) people equate exercise to work, and many people hate work. Instead, most people envy those with fast metabolisms (even in they're "skinny fat" and are, on average, about as healthy as someone pushing obesity) and attempt to copy their lifestyles by becoming skinny with as little work and time investment as possible without changing eating patterns.
It's the same reason why microwave ownership exploded and is the raison d'etre for the oil change and car wash businesses, amongst many other things. Most people would rather pay a heap of money for other people to do the easy, simple things they can't/don't want/don't have time to do than take the few minutes and do it themselves. If people could pay other people to manage their own weight and make them look good, they would; a $60B strong weight-loss market proves this. It's not entirely their fault; it's very, very difficult to make time for things with work, kids and wife around unless the body is put first and foremost.
To make matters worse, a lot of people who try to lose weight or "look good for the beach" have horribly unreasonable plans for getting there. ("Looking good for the beach/girls/Facebook" feeds into that.) If many people (I'm tempted to say most) didn't think they could lose 30 pounds in 30 months or get rock-hard solid abs (and nothing else!) in a few weeks, then things like the South Beach diet and P90X would have failed immediately. It doesn't help that lots of parents, who were also very busy and didn't make the time to care for their bodies, didn't make the time to teach their kids proper eating habits and forewent breakfast and simple, reasonably-portioned dinners for McDonald's and frozen TV dinners. (The biggest irony about most people's weight-loss ideologies is that instead of eating the most sugary, fattening crap at breakfast time when their bodies need it the most, they make breakfast the lightest meal of the day and eat heavier as the day progresses! Willing to bet it's all because skipping breakfast became a habit.)
Staying in good shape and good weight isn't rocket science and isn't something made exclusive to sports professionals and Olympians. (Funny enough, a lot of these people have HUGE problems maintaining their figure post-career. Michael Jordan and Greg LeMond are kind of fat now, for example.) Eating reasonable portions appropriate to workload and moving around a bit are all that's needed to NOT gain weight. Moving around a LOT and/or eating reasonably is the way to lose weight, and working, stressing and RECOVERING muscles is the way to gain muscle. (Lots of dudes hit the gym and over-stress their bodies with barely enough sleep to let their muscles recover and grow.)
That's it. It's so easy, but is a HUGE mental challenge for lots of people.
Disclaimer: I lost 30 pounds from biking and walking a lot, dropped 3" from my waistline and have been able to keep it off for the last 4 years now. My metabolism isn't naturally great, but I don't think I've ever gained holiday weight.
iOS might not, but good chance the management tool that will be baked into their phones is. I'm also confident that Apple's staunch refusal to accommodate corporate customers got pushed to the side here.
Now we know that RIM is dead. You heard it here first.
A few days ago, I was in Best Buy looking for a new external hard drive. While I was trying to get over the insane price markups, a very svelte-looking laptop caught the corner of my eye. It was one of Samsung's newest models, and it was beautiful. Maybe a little too beautiful, as it reminded me up, down and center of the MacBook Pro it was obviously trying to compete with.
Anyone that has good working vision can see that Samsung, more or less, copies Apple's designs wholesale. They might not be complete replicas of their products, but the "nods" they include in their designs are pretty obvious. Not a bad thing when you consider the technological advancements they provide with their clone-killers, but not surprising when Apple throws down the legal gauntlet as a response.
Its been well known that RFID cards are suspectible to this kind of threat. The only reason why jammers and blocks havent been enforced as much is because there haven't been enough cases of this happening to justify wide-scale enforcement. I really like the convenience of contactless payment systems and hope jammers and guards become ubitquitous enough for banks to provide them along with these cards.
You can still downgrade to pre-iOS 5 releases if you have SHSH blobs saved for those revisions. Downgrading has been rendered "impossible" because the APticket used to verify ipsw's is now generated randomly instead of being solely comprised of data from the phone's ECID and firmware version.
More info here.
Sent from my easily jailbroken Android tablet.
On one hand, these kinds of sites have made it stupidly easy to host and download all sorts of different data, legal and illegal. It's funny how the powers that be think that shutting these guys down will curb piracy when (a) there are so many ways people can get illegal data and (b) new and more anonymous ones will pop up as the older ones fall.
On the other hand, it's not a terribly huge loss on the material scheme of things. There are still plenty of other sites that people can use to host data, including wider-range services like Dropbox and Sugarsync. The other funny thing is that Megaupload et. al. did shut down links to any media that infringed on copyright policies, so it's scary to see how far these laws will go. I'm hoping that Dropbox and partners will not start telling people what can/can't be backed up.
Yeah...a lot of really good stuff is written by people just like the OP that are just learning. The other good thing about software is that it's an evolving work. Nobody cares if it's bloated or whatever; if it's a cool idea, helps in some way and is acceptable enough to use, people will like it. The other awesome thing is that if you do reach that point, you learn as you improve and everyone benefits!
It's not like being a doctor where you have to be GOOD right out the gate since people's lives are at stake. Unless, of course, you want to code medical instruments or things for planes...
But most people hate hate hate everything that makes good programmers good programmers. They hate the tediousness, the methodicalness, the breaking-things-down-into-tiny-steps, the 8+ hours of keeping your brain in an alpha state. What "real" programmers view as fun and almost a form of meditation, the average Joe views as nothing short of self-imposed torture. Everyone loves and wishes they could sing, dance or draw. But will everyone love the hours and hours and hours and HOURS of training that goes into becoming a singer, dancer or "professional artist," only to find out that you have to work really, really, REALLY hard to get noticed because a lot of people can sing, dance AND draw? If you're a singer, you get paid like shit and will probably have to work two or three jobs to make rent and side money in hopes that an A&R guy discovers your talent, submits your demo, really pushes for the exec to drop an advance for you, all of which will probably be eaten up by "overhead" and will leave you broke anyway. If you're a dancer, you'll probably mess up your feet and be practicing just about ALL the time. If you're an artist, you're struggling almost everyday...even if your stuff makes gallery.
Nobody loves real work except those that love the work.
Most people grow to hate programming because most teachers teach it badly. Perfect example: all engineers at my alma mater (Stevens) needed to go through a programming course with the idea that everyone would become a better engineer with a little bit of programmer in their system. That probably would be the case IF they didn't C++, arguably the most unfriendly language for beginners to learn. It's fine for Computer Engineering students like myself to take that because we will actually need those concepts later on. Does a Chemical Engineer who's bound for doing pure chemistry research really need to know what pointers are and how to use them? (This alone confused most of the people in the class.) Does anyone that isn't doing this for a living need to do this if they just want to write an Android app?
If CodeAcademy can teach people the basics in ways that are actually interesting and worthwhile (Project Euler doesn't count...a lot of people hate math too), more people *will* learn how to code. Tons and tons of people of varying intelligence come up with great ideas every minute of the day but fail to execute because they not only don't know how to code, but are afraid of learning because "it looks hard." Google tried working around this with App Inventor, but that never really took off. This initiative probably won't make people Google-quality coders in a year, but it will spark the innovative light our country has been direly looking for lately.
(You can definitely start making serious money as a programmer or IT guy with a year or two of education and a good connection. People admire doctors and lawyers for what they make, but I know guys who make just as much as they do or more with no degrees and WAY less stress...as contractors anyway. IT in general still pays really nice money, especially if you know where to look.)
If anything, I'm hoping this will make those with the IT pursestrings up those budgets a little easier...
InfoWorld: Will you compete with Google Android, Apple iOS [4], and others?
Silber: Yes. And we think we can do that effectively because of characteristics of Ubuntu as a platform, industry dynamics, and an increased wariness around the walled gardens of Apple and to some extent Google and even Amazon, as they are increasingly in this game as well. There is a demand for a platform that has characteristics that Ubuntu meets. The characteristics in my mind that are important are openness, and by openness I don't just mean open source code, I mean the governance structure, the ability to collaborate, the ability for there to be multiple devices from multiple vendors.
There is? Last time I checked, the things people care about most are getting nice phones at a good price that they can play Angry Birds on and snap pictures with to upload to their Facebook/Twitter accounts.
This is the first quote that frustrates me from this snippet: I mean the governance structure, the ability to collaborate, the ability for there to be multiple devices from multiple vendors.. Do they not realise that this is exactly the status quo? Collaboration and governance are HUGE objectives for all of the major players in this game. Apple has iCloud, Microsoft has Windows Live and Office 365. Android has Google account synchronisation, control and access deeply ingrained into its fundamentals. All of these are free. Ubuntu's offering costs money. Umm...
This is the second most frustrating quote: we think we can do that effectively because of characteristics of Ubuntu as a platform. Let's not forget that this is the platform that's changed their stance on the minimise/close button three times in between, what, the last three releases?
There has to be a strong developer ecosystem, and we've spent a lot of effort and time in the last couple years building up that developer ecosystem. Building up our software center, building tools to be able to connect the dots between developers and users so that a developer can write an app and submit it through a website and get it into the hands of users very quickly. A free app or a commercially paid app.
Like Android's NDK with Eclipse integration or Apple's iPhone/iOS SDK with XCode or Windows Phone's leveraging of .NET with Visual Studio? Still wondering what they're bringing to the table at this point.
There's a certain level of quality and features that is needed in order to be a viable platform in this category, and Ubuntu has that, whereas some of the projects that have come and gone in the last couple years have never really cracked that. We've seen Moblin [5] come and go from Intel, Maemo [6], MeeGo [7]. Tizen [8] is the latest incarnation -- we'll see if they ever produce anything.
No, those projects never cracked the marketing required to reach the big time. Nokia could have really flaunted Maemo/MeeGo but chose to ride the sidelines while Apple and Android made themselves known everywhere. MeeGo, as far as I undersatand it, was actually a pretty reliable mobile OS and had a lot of potential.
This "advantage" is weak at best. In fact, I'm hard pressed to rely on this since I can't trust Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution) enough to install it for my non-technical peers and clients. While it certainly offers the nicest GNU/Linux UX experience available, there are some things still left to be desired on the hardware side.
The other problem I have with this is that Unity, compared to Android or iOS, does not really offer any real usability advantages over those other platforms. As far as I see it, it offers an OS-X like icon dock (that doesn't work nearly as nicely) and a focus on searching for things. It's a good starting point, but it's hard to see where they are going with it and how
Nokia's strong point (or given their performance lately, least weak point) is very much in their mobile phone business. If you look at their latest quarterly earnings, the net sale of mobile phones decreased (-14% from last) significantly less than their smart phones (-39% from last). On top of that, their smartphone sales dropped significantly in NA since last year, presumably because of the competition in the market and their lack of a real offering lately.
Furthermore, it's pretty clear (as in their only choice at the moment) that they will use Windows Phone as their only smartphone platform and are dropping any commitments to any alternatives they had on the shelf. There is a good chance they will make deep system changes in their ROMs to enhance the experience as well, further enveloping their relationship with them. I doubt they will commit to Android sometime down the line, since (a) Elop has obvious ties with MS and (b) it will be way more work for them to "Nokia"-ize the UI to make it appealing to people like every other manufacturer did.
So what if they sold that division to Microsoft? Their bread-and-butter won't change and won't be influenced by the move. Microsoft won't build any devices; if anything, they will have an easier hand in making sure the hardware gels perfectly with Windows Phone to make the experience as awesome as possible. Both companies would be better positioned to compete with Apple and Android since they will be able to use them as the "Nexus" of Windows Phone and, if they don't step on Nokia's toes, provide an awesome experience that neither company can match AND have manufacturer variety that gives people just enough choice to be appealing without being overwhelming. It's a win-win, though I'm probably being naive and overly simplistic.
I know the news is fake, but I'm really excited about this collaboration. I love Nokia and I think this will finally make them relevant again if they don't let Microsoft run the hardware design show too much. They already did the right thing by setting a tight hardware baseline; Nokia can handle the rest.
It sounds like this is an attempt to create the MPAA of news. On one hand, I feel like this won't really affect the casual reader since most folks get their news through a source that would not have problems with this (e.g. local channels, newspapers, Google News,e tc.) On the other hand, I feel like it's an immoral attempt to control the flow of information.
Here in NYC, TaskRabbit is doing, more or less, the same thing. If you have free time and want to make a few bucks, you go to their website and sign up for something to do. Works great for college students and people who really need the money. I know I've seen ads for other services that do the same thing. The big difference is that these sites take real money. Apart from Bitcoin, I don't understand the lure of using virtual currency that requires real currency to obtain. What does this accomplish?
If you buy an Android phone, there is a decent chance you'll never get an update for it - often phones are sold long after they get their last update, and it is rare to get an update even one year after it FIRST goes on sale.
There are two caveats to this:
For example, this chart highlights the upgrades available for Motorola devices. All of the flagship devices they've sold, such as the Droid, Droid X and Xoom, have gotten carrier-supported upgrades to Gingerbread. I know that flagship HTC and Samsung devices, like the Droid Incredible, Desire HD/Inspire and Galaxy S (Vibrant, Epic, Captivate, Fascinate and International i9000), have all gotten similar treatments as well. This is, in part, because of:
It's sort of messed up, but when you consider that the point of Android was to give "the masses" a better alternative to smartphone computing, it's a lot better than shelling a few hundred bucks for a shiny iPhone or waiting a few years for the hand-me-downs to drop price.
Fortunately, and unlike iPhone, because of Android's strong community support model and its openness, lower-end devices usually get upgrade options anyway.
Two months ago, I traded my wonderful G2 for a HD7 to get a taste of the Windows Phone experience. I've used Windows Mobile since the 2003 version on the MPx200 (solid flip-phone; absolutely loved it) and wanted to see how far Microsoft has matured in the mobile arena.
:)
Windows Phone 7 has, hands down, the best mobile UI experience you can get right now. Everything is fluid, fast and easy. The stock applications and voice controls gel perfectly and make Android look like a total mess, though it's cleaned up its act with Ice Cream Sandwich. App switching is WebOS-like and will make multi-tasking awesome when it comes to life in the next version. It's integration with Windows Live and Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is the best I have ever seen and used and totally antiquates the need for their dedicated apps. (This might not matter for many Slashdot folks, but it matters for most people.) Forget iPod and iTunes; the Zune is just as easy to use and is much prettier to use. (It helps that the Zune software runs great on Windows, unlike iTunes.) The camera has ZERO lag, though the lens on the HD7 absolutely sucked. It's experience is absolutely beautiful and I can totally see iPhone users defecting to this once the app ecosystem.
Microsoft's strategy to use Nokia as their flagship supplier makes much more sense after you use it for a while; Nokia still has huge brand recognition and will shake up the market really nicely when they release (and market) their ace device.
The biggest obvious problem is that Apple and Android both had first-mover's advantage and, thus, own the space at the moment. However, this is not as problematic as it seems. People are getting tired of iOS (it hasn't changed very much since 1.0, despite great hardware advances) and Windows Phone offers a very cool and equally smooth alternative that a lot of people will feel comfortable moving to, especially with its strong Facebook integration. It's going to be very difficult for Apple to match this and Android's UI improvements and they can't depend on making killer hardware leaps anymore since both fronts have caught up there. (Kind of like how Intel can't really market GHz anymore since every processor is "fast enough.")
Apple is, finally, in trouble, but that's what happens when you're on top for so long.
Even worse, the ability for users to "Interop Unlock" their phones was mostly based on the manufacturer. I think there is one available for Samsung and LG; HTC got the shaft after the Mango update.
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How can newspapers prioritise accuracy and fairness when its patrons prioritise sensationalism and shock? The fact that nuances in the lives of celebrities can, at times, be more valuable to people than current events around them pronounces this. This element of our society needs to change first before we can begin talking about ways of nurturing accuracy.
The trivial and common response to this (and the original post I was going to write) is that it needs to GO because its competitors don't do this and, thus, don't have to worry about losing internet and email service if one cluster of huge servers somewhere in their country goes dark for a bit. Many consumers might have agreed with this school of thought with their wallet and went elsewhere.
The thing to keep in mind, however, is that this centralised model was NEVER meant to "serve" regular home consumer usage patterns. Remember their devices from yesteryear? You know, the business-only, no bullshit phones that would be totally useless for Joe Consumer? That, if anything, showed that their target market was for people who needed really good phone and email device with extra high security, if required. Their centralised model (outages aside) ensures the highest quality for both of these requirements with a battery life that is still unmatched by iOS or Android
The problem is that the market has shown that most people are fine with "good enough," and Blackberry devices are FAR from that. Their Their work phones might still rule with email, but their iPhone or Droid does that and much more satisfactorily enough to meet their needs. It's also cheaper per month and has more "apps." Additionally, they are, slowly but surely, becoming secure enough to be seriously considered for the workplace. Once this happens, Blackberry has no leg to stand on.
I think RIM needs to worry about moving their phones to the 21st century. Outages happen; bad market strategy shouldn't.
Actually, it's pretty well-known that ROTC has several terms and conditions on what you do after you graduate and scholarships gained from doing National Reserve et. al. can only be used in the schools they chose.
Here in Minnesota you can go to college and complete your undergrad for very little money. You start as a PSEO student in HS and the state pays your way through many of your first two years of college undergraduate credit without your taking out any loans. They count towards your HS diploma AND your college degree.
If you don't choose to go that way (or even if you do) you can enter the state's community college system and live at home (working part time hopefully) while taking college courses at costs far lower than you'd spend elsewhere--especially out of state.
This is absolutely true. However, when you as a high school student see that Goldman Sachs, NASA, Google, Microsoft and tons of other colleges like go shopping at the "out-of-state or in-state private institutions" most others with "dreams of grandeur" flock to, can you blame them for taking up these huge loans?
To worsen matters, it's also super easy for students to get loans; you can even get pre-approved for them! It's also easy to keep taking out more loans without any restraints whatsoever. For someone taking up a degree that actually pays out after college, this isn't a terrible investment since those kids can actually pay it back and still live reasonably comfortably. Unfortunately, it's just as easy for kids taking up degrees that are ONLY useful for graduate school, a nice way to incur even more debt.
Why aren't loan applications also judged by school studies, performance and real-world expectations for paying them back?
Admittedly, one can take out a lot more money through private loans than government loans (up to $200,000). Is an undergraduate education worth that much, though?
16GB RAM recommended, more preferred, anything less will measurably benefit from using an SSD.
Emphasis mine. Still pretty beast, though.
"Good artists borrow; great artists steal." -Steve Jobs
Android might have "ripped [them] off wholesale," but the truth is that Android delivers a great smartphone OS to everyone instead of everyone that can save enough for an iPhone with its special data/voice plan. Did they really expect OEMs to do like RIM and just sit there while Apple designs and builds awesome hardware from the same factories they use?
Plus, Apple's products are amazing until you start "thinking different." Then you run into HUGE walls. Example: In Android, I can install an application that controls battery usage by controlling all interfaces on the phone. This seems to be impossible on the iPhone, which is bad because there are days when it will use most of the battery in less than half a day and others in about two days. Another example is adding a Windows print queue on OS X, though this might have been made easier with Lion. I'm not sure.
His frustrations are thinly warranted, though I do agree that most of Google's products are either crappy or great for two months after release. It would be great if they made APIs along with their products, but I suppose that's not the Google way.
The apps include: SIMS 3, Bejeweled, N.O.V.A., Texas Hold'em Poker 2, Bubble Bash 2, Photo Editor Ultimate, DriveSafe.ly Pro, iSpeech Translator Pro, Drive Safe.ly Enterprise, Nobex Radio Premium, Shazam Encore, and Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant.