First off, although apparently a recent thread on HN showed others have more problems than me, I don´t pay for texting; I use a combination of IM and Google Voice with my smartphone to get the job done on one bill.
However, I was travelling in a Latin American country recently and was talking to one fellow who worked for the government who had been given a Blackberry Storm (it was the only smartphone I had seen there). I asked him about his data plan; he said he got 5MB a month that he basically just used for texting, e-mailing, and checking Facebook. Apparently this was some kind of combined plan, or he was mistaken one.
I don´t know if that´s fair, as the Nokia smartphones I´ve used are really quite nice. Their high-end options like the N8 and N900 are phones I would rather have than my Droid 2.
I think there are far too many happen chances in evolutionary biology to say that an advanced civilization is inevitable; my rational mind has a LOT of trouble accepting that our current development is a long history of happen-stances beginning from life´s first development, but I see no viable alternative. But to think that given another Earth with life it would happen again? With all of the stretches that happen all along the evolutionary tree I find this absurd.
For those complaining about the details: I think this represents the code and general work on a new interface that is coming out. The applications that it is working with are the utilities that have been included in Gnome for quite a while and the names worked fine with the old menu system; clearly the work being demonstrated is on the interface level. The current interface only takes the default application names it is being fed. I´m sure a finished ¨product¨ will take into account these details, but I don´t find it unreasonable that it looks how it does in an Alpha product. Simply changing what the name appears as in the shell isn´t going to be the long term solution.
When I first got my iPod Touch and was looking for applications, I started asking around to friends who had Touches and iPhones to find applications. I found the people who could recommend me the best selection of applications were those who had pirated a lot of applications, as they had tried the most. I based my applications I bought mostly on 3 friends with jailbroken phones with a plethora of applications.
With iOS, you get one choice of hardware and (for US markets, at least since it´s come out) one choice of carrier. The hardware and software are controlled by the same company and you can get updates.
With Android, this option is also available in the form of the Nexus series... you get Google hardware, T-Mobile, and you can get updates. However, you can also get hundreds of other phones across different carriers and manufacturers and also varying upgrade options.
Stick with the single company option if you don´t want to get ¨screwed¨ as it´s available too.
Interesting. I´ve found better, free ¨physics¨ games in the past with simple exercises in kinematics. The engine seems slightly off from my limited playing after seeing this article, and the graphics almost detract from the game. It´s just odd that this particular game ended up with so much popularity.
>these unquoted/unspecified typographers
There are quotes from several specified typographers and style manuals. I do not understand why they are unquoted and unspecified. See especially paragraphs five, six, and eight.
The MLA handbook has some interesting information about spacing after the period. Here is section 3.2.12 "Spacing after Concluding Punctuation marks" in my physical copy of the sixth edition.
Publications in the United States today usually have the same spacing after a period, a question mark, or an exclamation mark, or an exclamation point as between words on the same line. Since word processors make available the same fonts used by typesetters for printed works, many writers, influenced by the look of typeset publications, now leave only one space after a concluding punctuation mark. In addition, most publishers' guidelines for preparing a manuscript on disk ask professional authors to type only the spaces that are to appear in print.
Because it is increasingly common for papers and manuscripts to be prepared with a single space after all concluding punctuation marks, this spacing is shown in the examples in this handbook. As a practical matter, however, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after concluding punctuation marks unless an instructor requests that you do otherwise. Whichever spacing you choose, be sure to use it consistently in all parts of your paper--the works-cited list as well as the main text. By contrast, internal punctuation marks, such as a colon, a comma, and a semicolon, should always be followed by one space.
My problem is with teachers who insist on using double spaces after a period. I have had a few teachers in recent years demand double space and will not accept papers that do not use the convention. Because it feels entirely unnatural for me to hit the space bar twice, I can never remember to do it consistently. I just wrote a python script to convert it for me afterwards.
On a similar note, I got a 0 on a paper once because it was not in the required font, Times New Roman. I had written it on my netbook while on vacation and printed directly from it and had not realized that the Linux distro installed automatically called Liberation Serif "Times New Roman" inside of Abiword.
The caption on the image of the iPad is misleading. If I´m not mistaken, virtualisation is not permitted on iPads even if they were capable; the picture seems to be illustrating remote desktop.
> But it would become another closed de facto standard, just like IE6.
Huh? IE6 is a browser not a standard.
Well, neither can H.264 be a standard, it is a non-free codec for video. The key was de facto..
Internet Explorer 6, at the peak of its dominance, became the standard that many web developers developed for. Even though it wasn't a standard, when it had over 90% of the market, it was often the only browser that was developed for and other browsers were locked out or suffered. Browsers like Opera spoofed as IE by default, Netscape had quirks to behave similar to IE in some respects...
It's saying that everyone who wasn't on H.264 would suffer or be forced to conform, as was the case with IE6 for some time.
Couldn't the same argument be made, even more so, with other areas of the technology market? When is the last time there has been a must have entry level digital camera? Or that one laptop that everyone has to have (although certain models stand out, keep in mind that the average consumer is spending in the under $800 range). Even devices where this is less of a choice, such as with iPods, there is still a range for what different feature choices people want, as well as other moderately successful devices. I'm just not understanding the point... walking into a Best Buy to get a gadget has always been this way.
Not to mention that it´s free on Verizon´s webOS phones. Virtually all of the smartphones that had a wifi card in the Verizon store when I last went had Wifi-tethering, although it usually cost extra. Not to mention that bluetooth and USB tethering has been available for ages, although not as fast (in case of Bluetooth) or convenient.
I usually just pull it up on my phone a few times a day and bookmark relevant links to read later (Opera Mobile syncs with my desktop). It depends on how many times I am in a position to randomly check on my phone more than anything and it´s not too often that I get on from my computer.
for a citation, the preface to the second edition includes this:
[A. Square] has himself modified his own personal views, both as regards to Women and as regards the Isosceles or Lower Classes...But, writing as a Historian, he has identified himself (perhaps too closely) with the views generally adopted by Flatland, and (as he has been informed) even by Spaceland Historians; in whose pages (until very recent times) the destinies of Women and of the masses of mankind have seldom been deemed worthy of mention and never of careful consideration.
In the preface to Flatterland, a sequel of sorts, Ian Stewart explains that ¨Abbott was, in fact, a social reformer who believed in equal education opportunity for all social classes and genders; Flatland´s narrow-minded social system is his cry of frustration¨ as he wished to ¨satirize the rigid social structure of Victorian England...especially the lowly status accorded to women.¨
It said the site would load but the video would not in the original article, which was part of where I was coming from. Plus, features like Opera Turbo inside of Opera Mobile, for instance, would make such proxies transparent to the user.
I´m pretty sure that´s part of the point of the book; in addition to the obvious, it is also social commentary on views on women at the time of its writing.
They restrict in different ways. GPL restricts in order to give more freedom to people who wish to use software in certain ways; apple is protecting developer rights, in a blanket way that not all developers want.
Well, considering most of the cloud integration goodness on iPhone is only possible with Google products, I don't think you can complain too much. iPhone is just as Google-dependent for the full experience as is Android. I will say that Google needs to develop a G-Mail app on par with its Android equivalent for iOS, but using the default mail client with IMAP works just fine in reality; it is the same basic experience as any other third party client.
This is certainly going to increase some iPhone marketshare in my area where AT&T has essentially no service. I know some people already that have iPhones and an additional cheap phone from Verizon or somebody to be able to reliably communicate.
This is one reason why I have no desire to use Apple products and have essentially retired my iOS device. This restricts a great library of possible software from ever making it to my device and restricts the possibility of a decent freedom that some developers wish to give. This would not be a big deal if you could distribute software like on a normal computer (or most other mobile OSs.. including Blackberry, Palm OS (historical at least), Android, Windows Mobile (historical at least), Maemo, and so on). I shouldn't have to worry about the official distribution channel's restrictions imposing on what is essentially my computer as a whole.
Have you ever tried running Office with a little network latency? The 10x slowdown is barely usable and unavoidably annoying, especially if you're used to a faster computer.
I am in a suburb a good ways south of Atlanta, Georgia. Apple seems to have a relatively low market in general in my immediate vicinity except for iPods.
On the Internet, reading speed becomes less important than the level of skimming. Even a very fast reader, if they really read an article, are going to be "slower" than most who approach the article, I think.