Okay, that's not entirely true, but an AGA really is the Leica of cookers - people who know what they're doing can do amazing things with them, but the majority of purchasers just want to give the impression of skill without the tedious business of acquiring it.
I imagine that the iPad integration is aimed at this latter, larger, demographic. The crossover would be large.
"Are Premium-rate SMS used for anything except scamming? "
Yes,
For a start, they're the mechanism by which operator billing works in app stores. e.g., You pay €2.00 for an app, the phone sends a €0.30 "purchase" message that requests a €1.70 "receipt" message, so in total, you're charged €2.00. Operator billing is the lowest-friction method of buying mobile apps, and you reach anyone with a phone service plan, not just the ones with credit-cards.
Premium SMS is also useful for broad-market geographical services. Want a cab/pizza/etc. quickly? text to XXXX and for €1.00, deductable from your final bill, we'll pass on your location (with your permission) to the very nearest driver/restaurant/etc..
Not using premium SMS would make a service like this vulnerable to timewasters, and also make it harder for the location service provider to collect their commision on the sale.
By definition, image contrast is the difference between the amount of light coming from a "black" patch, and that coming from a "white" one. If there's no ambient light, then an OLED display *may* have infinite contrast in an ideal world, but in the real world it doesn't (like all LEDs, OLEDs emit a tiny, tiny amount of light in their "off" state).
Add ambient lighting, and the screen material comes into play. Now the "black" level depends on the amount of ambient light reflected back off the screen. Use a glossy screen, and you can redistribute this reflection, to make it look better when shadowed by the viewer (like in a shop, for instance), but you're only rearranging the problem, not solving it. [I'm typing this on a glossy-screened Apple product, with just such a stupid shiny screen, and I absolutely hate the display.]
Other manufactures using LED/OLED just quote insane contrast ratios, like 10,000,000:1, which are about right for an OLED panel.
Also, the reason for the fourth, white pixel is that this is most likely to be a Pentile display matrix (not the same one as used in phone panels). Here, the large white subpixel deals with the baseline illumination of the whole pixel, with the RGB trio there to colour it. A true RGB set gives better colour reproduction, but is susceptible to more noticable colour shift as the cells age.
I remember the first plasma sets coming in at this price, but then, they were competing against CRTs, which were utterly impractical at sizes over 30". Still, we have to start somewhere -- I'll look at them when my LCD set needs to be replaced, in about seven or eight years.
2"x4" timber is never 2 x 4 inches anyway: the dimensions are the freshly-cut size (and for European timber are metric 50x100mm). As the wood dries, it shrinks.
Half-inch pipe is actually 22mm OD . No, that's not half an inch, and neither is the bore (inner diameter of "half-inch" pipe is 10mm), but then, "old" half-inch pipe wasn't half an inch either...
I lived in Germany for a while, and often heard people asking the butcher for a "Pfund" of meat - they got 500g, not a pound, and a pound wouldn't have been 454g anyway - the old Bavarian "Pfund" weight was 560g. And that is the reason why we all gave up on "traditional" measures: they weren't the same everywhere.
Even now, compare US and UK mpg figures. American cars are thirsty, but not that thirsty (also, the testing regimes differ, but that's something you can only see if you convert the quoted figures to litres per km)
The inclusion of AirPlay without Bluetooth AptX or DLNA PlayTo means that this is going to be bought only by people with Apple hardware. Given that market, there really is no point in trying to be too inventive with the product design.
That said, it's nowhere near as sterile as Apple's assaults on the memory of Dieter Rams. The deliberate irregularilty of the grille, and the fact that you can buy in in *gasp* colours make it at least some way human, without scaring away the Apple fanbois...
True, although the reasons for this lack of success seem to be a reluctance on the part of Facebook to engage in large-scale advertising. Placement of Facebook ads on the right-hand column of their interface also makes them very easy to ignore.
This doesn't diminish the fact that Facebook has a capability that Google currently lacks: that of tying a user's viewing preferences to real-world demographic information. All that Google knows is that a person or persons who habitually use a particular browser have looked at a particular set of topics.
It's not what Facebook are doing now that worries Google, it's what Facebook could do. Also, the number of small businesses in my area (hardly the beating heart of the tech industry) who now just say "Find us on Facebook" rather than putting up a website (and thus having something that an AdWords campaign would link to) must be cause for concern for Google.
Facebook has sneaked up on Google and now has more of the internet users' attention than they do -- and unlike Google, Facebook can say to advertisers: "How about we run your ad to 18-25 year-old-females living in these six urban areas who like sushi restaurants and have a birthday coming up in the next three weeks".
This is why Google needed to do well in Social Networking: their current advert targeting cannot match what Facebook can offer, and Facebook's user base is now so large it is becoming a serious competitor to Google as an online ad platform, and to reiterate: online advertising is Google's only revenue generator. Nothing else, from all of the company's myriad products, produces one red cent of profit for Google.
Sure, G+ turning out to be a flop isn't going to shut them down next week, but this is yet another project from Google that has not delivered for the company, and is the third "social" product to fail. That kind of record risky for their long term survival.
Re: Great, I'm sure they'll sell quite a few in India etc.
They still make more on these phones, at this price, than anyone except HTC and Samsung are making from Android.
"platforms Nokia doesn't want to sell but people would rather buy"
Statistically speaking, nobody wants to buy Symbian phones. I say that as an owner of an N8, who is actively considering an 808 PureView as my next phone, but the fact remains that "Symbian" is now synonymous with "Shit" in the mind of anyone who reads a lot of tech blogs, and that's a good description of the sales-guys in Craphone Warehouse or Phones4U or in the operator stores, or the "pet nerd" people ask about these things. This reputation might not be true anymore, but reputations, both good and bad, hang around longer than the truth behind them.
You're still coming at this from a European perspective: assuming that people are buying what you see as a "cheap" phone because they don't want access to the web, Facebook or IM service. That's not where these will sell. (Although watch out for them in Tesco, who do a nice trade in cheap unlocked handsets). Phones like these two are offering access to the net for people who's budget did not stretch to that before.
An example of where this is aimed: India. This new Nokia 112 costs, before tax and subsidy, the equivalent of five or six meals for two in a casual-dining restaurant. In UK terms, that puts it at the equivalent of £200. Do the same sums with the price of an iPhone or high-end Android (around €450 before tax and subsidy), and see where it lies in the market.
The press launch for these two phones was in Pakistan -- not London, Berlin, San Francisco or Helsinki. That should give you an idea of the markets they're aiming for.
Or how about a gap where over three quarters of the Earth's population lives?
Take away the operators' subsidies, and the cheapest "Budget Android Job" is four times the price of either of these handsets, and has poor talk time, questionable build quality, and very likely no Dual-SIM support. And four times that €35 price is a lot of money in a country where you can get a decent meal for €2.00.
This is primarily a voice phone, but with added internet connectivity and instant messaging support. No 3G because there's limited 3G infrastructure in the places these will be bought.
There is a niche for these in markets like Western Europe too: there's a small but significant minority of customers who want a purely voice-call phone, or just something they can rely on to still be working even after a week of use. Also, there are people, even in "rich" nations, who cannot afford three-figure sums for a phone. They mightn't hang around in your local Starbucks (and this is one of the Starbucks USPs, but not one they explicitly mention), but they're out there.
To turn off that f**king "This file is not from a trusted source" dialog forever:
defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool NO
Now you'll be able to open multiple files using the command-line open command without the LaunchServices dialog stopping the operation after the first one. And if you don't already use the open command, look it up. Very handy for working between the shell and OS X apps [open -a <App> file file file... ], but also for opening directories as finder windows [ I particularly like "open ." ] or just emailing files [ open -a Mail <file> ] .
Also, for a file-by-file, manual, removal of the quarantine flag, use this:
xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine <filename>
And I have agree 100% with the AC above - Apple's hard-core fans have to be the worst in the world, to the point of being a religious cult. I think this has the result of making otherwise rational people hate the company irrationally, for fear of being associated with that cult.
Nokia bought marketshare in 2010 by offering carriers deeper and deeper discounts to stick with Symbian devices, as Symbian^3 got later and later, and then finally arrived half-finished. It was only the release of Symbian/Nokia Belle, in Summer 2011, that gave the platform a genuinely competitive user experience, but by then the damage had been done, and Nokia had already cut it loose (rightly, I think, although I'm not happy about it).
A better example of a pyhrric marketshare victory would be YouTube. It dwarfs its competitors in video [source: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/12/More_than_200_Billion_Online_Videos_Viewed_Globally_in_October ] but it makes not a red cent (net) for its parent company.
I think Apple's biggest risk isn't from Google, but rather from the sustainability of the market they've created. Right now, they are the linchpin in the current mobile-apps bubble economy: millions of dollars of VCs' money is flowing through startups, to app developers, and Apple - those startups launch on iOS first, use Apple hardware and software for development, and make Apple's iOS platform more attractive for end-users - people don't buy iPhones because they're the best experience (they're not, anymore), but because EVERY third-party app worth having is on iPhone. The problem is that these apps are cloud-based, requiring an online service, and a vanishingly small number of these services are viable. Sooner or later, the VCs will wake up to this. If (and when) this bubble bursts, Apple's $80+ billion cash reserve means they'll be fine, but they certainly won't have that $500 billion market-cap anymore.
Google run just as great a risk of being disrupted as Apple do, as they are still heavily reliant on a single commodity service. They have what they believe to be a monopoly on online advertising, and it's bankrolling everything else they do, from Android to GMail to YouTube. If another company were to take this revenue away from them (Facebook, maybe?), then they're in trouble, but again, like Apple, they've built up a nice pile of cash to cushion that fall.
I've now bookmarked this on my mobile browser... for the few times I use Twitter.
The idea of "feature" phones is really out of date these days - on a technical analysis, both Nokia's Series40 and Samsung's Bada check all the boxes for being called "Smartphones" (especially if you accept the argument that any iOS version below 4 was a smartphone OS). Very soon, this distinction will be more a question of market positioning than technical ability.
Of course, Apple's one will be completely different. It'll be aluminium for a start, with a fully-flush black gloss front, and there'll be an oversized mirror-effect Apple logo centered at the bottom lest anyone forget what brand of consumer product it is.
I like the case design (reminds me a little of Nokia 603 or 701, but both of those are good designs), but I wonder about the material quality, which has always been Samsung's downfall - previous Galaxy phones have been classy tech, but let down badly by how they felt in the hand.
Very nice display, and MirrorLink is also good to see - there's no point in having a standard unless big players join in. The other interaction stuff (voice, eye-tracking) strikes me as gimmickry, but the rest of the device is so good, you can just not use it, no big deal.
Deal-breaker for me is Android, which has always left me cold, but lots of people love it, so good luck to them. With the one proviso of build and material quality, this probably will be the best smartphone on the market when it gets here.
Re: quite confused ... till I read the comments...
I agree - if you don't know the story, the first two sentences don't really explain that the two names are the same person. On the other hand, I can see why the author is (rightly) trying to concentrate on her work, rather than the details of her personal life.
But as for it being retrospective, I would suspect that Roger was always Sophie, long before she used the name. You don't go to the trouble and pain of a sex-change just because you fancy paying a few quid a year less for your car insurance...
I stand corrected. To be honest, though, as long as the support hardware is fast enough to deal with the image without resorting to dirty tricks (cropping, interlacing or interpolating), I'm happy.
Photos are no good, when you consider how little time a merchant has your card for. It's in their hands for less than 5 seconds for a Chip+PIN transaction, and it's not in their hands at all when the PIN terminal is presented to the customer directly.
In early trials of Photo ID cards in the USA, where merchants were informed of the trial and told to check photos on the cards, the control group participants had nearly every transaction accepted despite using a card that had a picture of a gorilla in the box marked "CARDHOLDER PHOTO".
Signatures aren't so hot either. I have a friend who, when he got a new card years ago, decided to sign every docket "not me" (not the sig on the card), to see how long he could go before someone challenged him (he himself works in a business that is pretty much 100% card payments, and so he keeps an eye on these things). When he was eventually challenged for the first time by a sales assistant, she turned out to be a trainee, who'd just started her job. This was four months later.
I'm only quoting from a document written by the engineers who designed the camera. If you've other information to disprove their claims, please post it.
Perhaps there's some spin here in calling the sensor's scaling circuitry a "companion processor", as no sensor is ever just a grid of photo-sites, but there has to be something scaling the video frame images before they hit the GPU, because that GPU cannot handle the amount of data produced by the sensor without it being scaled first. Whether that's a pixel-skipping readout, or the same oversampling used in the PureView stills mode, something needs to be done so as not to swamp the GPU's ISP.
This system has been very explictly described as "lossless zoom", and the description given of how it works doesn't allow for it to be based on pixel interpolation, so either they're telling a barefaced lie, or we're arguing about minutiae. As this is the internet, I strongly suspect the latter.
Nope, the BCM-2763 doesn't handle the camera stream alone; only when the sensor image has been downsampled to its output resolution does it go through the GPU. From the horse's mouth:
"For video, the amount of pixels handled through the processing chain is staggering — over 1 billion pixels per second, and 16x oversampling. That’s a throughput of pixels 16 times greater than many other smartphones.
Most smartphone manufacturers crop off a section of the sensor to ease the processing load. By contrast, the Nokia 808 PureView has no limited field of view. Plus, it provides lossless zooming capability, which is output resolution dependent. Full HD 1080p gives you 4x zoom.
For 720p HD video, you’re looking at 6x lossless zoom. And for nHD (640x360) video, an amazing 12x zoom! In addition, we are encoding at up to 25mbps in high profile H.264 format.
To make this all happen, we developed a sensor with a special companion processor that handles pixel scaling before sending the required number to the main image processor."
It is this "companion processor", in the imaging pipeline between the sensor and the BCM-2763, that does the PureView work, and allows the full sensor area to be used for video.
@Chris 19, yeah the "camera companion GPU" is an Imaging System Processor, but it's a very, very powerful one. Nokia don't reveal their suppliers, but it's been repeatedly said unofficially that Toshiba were the silicon developer for the PureView system.
"Restricted" is probably the best word, but it's not a technical restriction. There's nothing within Symbian that limits it to nHD resolution (The E6 uses a 4:3 640x480 display, for instance), and there's nothing with Qt/QtQuick either. The extensive use of SVG images also makes the UI quite scalable. I believe that keeping to nHD is a conscious choice by Nokia to avoid fragmenting their phone range (a serious problem with Symbian before was that there were so many screen sizes you could never test your designs on all of them).
With that in mind, the only sensible increase would be straight to 720x1280 to allow a simple doubling of the layout dimensions in every app, but 720x1280 panels at 4" or below are rare (Nokia almost exclusively use AMOLED displays now, but OLED displays with small pixels have shorter working lives than those with larger pixels) .. Samsung are rumoured to be making an approx. 4" AMOLED panel of this resolution, but even if it's not a rumour, it'll be an internal supply to Samsung's Mobile division until long after this phone goes on sale.
It's a 41 megapixel sensor, with a site-size as large as those on any competing camera (only the N8 has bigger photosites). Not all pixels are used, but 16:9 and 4:3 images are of similar resolution (everyone else just letterboxes the 16:9 image out of the 4:3 sensor)
The images are 3, 5, 10 or 39 Megapixels ( you get to choose). Oversampling occurs only on the lower resolutions.
Video is full resolution, 1080p, and the same oversampling occurs here to reduce noise and improve zoomed images and low-light shooting. Also, unlike many other devices, video is shot with the full sensor area, not just a central crop.
You are confusing "oversampling" (recording the input signal more than once per output sample, and using the extra data to improve accuracy) with "interpolation" (generating extra, synthetic, output samples from only one measurement of the input). Oversampling is a good thing.
The 808 has not one, but two GPUs, one dedicated to the camera processing (a custom part, but the performance is quoted as over a billion pixels per second throughput on video), and one to drive the display and video playback (a Broadcom 2763 with 128 Mbyte VRAM).
It would have been nice to see a 720p screen, sure, but those extra pixels exact a heavy price on your battery.
This really is a leap forwards in portable cameras, of all kinds, but that really won't matter to the people who think Instagram is photography.
You get 16 Gbyte flash inside the phone, plus up to 32 Gbyte max that you can add with an external SD card, so 48 Gbyte in total.
Judging by the samples online, it's about 9--14 Mbyte a picture if you choose to use the sensor's full resolution. But the camera defaults to images of 5 Megapixels (which are calculated by applying the image-processing to all 39M usable pixels on the sensor -- it's this clever processing tech that Nokia are calling "PureView", not the humongous sensor). The low noise in these images allows better JPEG compression even at high quality settings -- again, from online samples, it seems to be about 1.5 Mbyte per image
(Comparison, my N8's 12 Mpix images are around 1.6 Mbyte)
And here are the samples: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nokiaofficial/
Graphene is one of the most likely materials to take over from Silicon, I think, but even if it doesn't, it has so many other useful properties that you're going to be seeing it in lots of products long before Silicon runs out of steam.. first out, as a replacement for the difficult to source Indium used in touch displays (where it will allow capacitive and capacitive+resistive designs), but also as an engineering and surfacing material.
But Kaku did say that the problem is with the physics of *Silicon*, and it's pretty hard to dispute this argument. There's a certain critical mass of atoms below which a semiconductor junction won't work. Semiconductors junctions work on the principle of doping pure silicon with other elements - these impurities are what provide the "one-way current" behaviour that all digital electronics relies on.
Make these features too small, and the absolute number of doping atoms becomes significant, rather than their ratio (a Silicon atom has a diameter of a touch over 0.2 nanometres, so a 5 nm feature size is less than 25 Si atoms across)..
Of course, this doesn't preclude three-dimensional construction of devices (although cooling is a major problem here), or hybrid Silicon/Something-else designs, but I think that's his point: using Silicon alone, you cannot go on forever reducing feature sizes. My guess is that it'll be economics, not physics that prevents us reaching the theoretical limit of Silicon.
... and that's cited as the number one reason why men don't get involved in primary-school teaching anymore.
On women in IT - The "nerd" image is possibly due to the larger portion of people with mild Autism-spectrum disorders who work in IT compared to other industries (compare with the disproportionate number of building architects who have dyslexia, or the number of social workers who are innumerate), but most of the people I work with are male, but also communicative, empathic, understanding and friendly. However, as such, they don't stick out from the general population. Stereotypes are always exaggerated, but they come to define industries.
This isn't a female thing, either: I (a male) feel the same way about the image of IT. Despite being a programmer for nearly 30 years, I have never identified with the "nerd", "geek" or "hacker" stereotypes. In fact, I think they're ultimately bad for the industry, because they are self-fulfilling, and will eventually leave us with a population of obsessive monomaniacs who will struggle to meet the needs of customers who are drawn from a much more diverse population.
If only "nerds" are valued in programming roles (and I'm looking at Google, here, as one of the worst examples of this hiring policy), eventually that's all you'll get in the industry.
You don't need to be super-brainy to be a programmer: imagination, a grasp of logical reasoning and an ability to write clearly will get you very far. The thing is, at the age where kids make their university (and thus career) choices, girls and boys have very different values. Girls of this age value community and friendship much more highly - often excessively so - than boys do, and any career that has such strong connotations with being an outsider will never appeal to them, regardless of their ability to do well in it.
Yep.. Me to. Went from a CPC 464 (Christmas '84) to an Atari ST (Summer '88).
I learned to program in BASIC on the 464, but never made the leap to assembler until the ST. I think it was that the assembler for the CPC was on a cartridge, and thus more expensive than my limited budget could afford.
(And now I've got the music from Thing On A Spring in my head. ARRGGH!)
For what it's worth, I think Sony's problems are deeper and more fundamental than Nokia's, and that Sony are still in denial about them, but as neither of us really have any privileged insight into either company, it's all opinion really.
To me, Sony have struggled since Akio Morita retired, and the successor managment have done nothing but harm to the brand he built. I liked Morita's Sony - management realised that it was selling to customers, and that the customer's was therefore the only opinion that mattered. Buying into the media business was the start of the end for that view. They lost their focus on keeping customers happy by producing good products, and instead began to treat their customers as "recurring revenue streams" rather than people. Big, big mistake. Once that idea permeates an organisation, you start to get cynical, start to push things onto your customers that you wouldn't accept yourself. Basically, like Nokia, they have been making stuff that customers don't want because they think they're too big for customers' needs to matter anymore. However, unlike Nokia, this realisation has not yet sunk in.
Nokia is in a similar, but different problem, and it's very like the situation Apple was in in the late 1990's (which I know quite well from inside, as I worked for Apple at this time). They believed they would always be the biggest, most important company in their business, and didn't see their competitor slide in and steal that market from under them with an "inferior" product that met customer's needs better (with Apple, it was that customers wanted something cheap that would work with their office systems; with Nokia it was that customers would pay big money for something flashy, even if it had next to no features). Like Nokia, Apple had a scattergun approach to product development that mainly bamboozled the customer, and left the company with so many niches that there was no one "good" product that you could put your marketing budget behind (and, oh dear God, that marketing -- Apple's was appallingly bad, touchy-feely garbage). However, like Apple had, Nokia have a good set of tools to get out of their mess: they have some excellent R&D outputs (both in manufacturing techniques and also software), a large cash reserve to fund a new set of projects, a highly talented product design capability, and finally, a CEO who knows there's a problem and is taking unpopular, but correct, decisions to fix it. A lot of today's Apple fans probably weren't around to see how much anger there was when Apple killed stuff like HyperCard, MacApp, OpenDoc, the entire Newton line, and the whole OS 8/Copland/Gerswhin project roadmap, or even when Apple struck deals with arch-enemy Microsoft... but these were necessary decisions to focus the company on making things people wanted. Apple's stellar success is down to that one strategy - stop beancounting, stop listening to wishy-washy brand consultants: if you just trust your own people to make the best products they can, your customers will respond.
I believe Nokia are further along this recovery plan than Sony are.
You cannot be charged for something you "might" do, only for what you have actually done. Microsoft DID use their OS monopoly to limit the adoption of other web browsers and inhibit competition, and they were brought to court for it, and later lost. Facebook, to date, have done nothing to inhibit photo-sharing services' integration with Facebook. Right now: no act, no crime, no charge, but of course this could change, at which point a complaint would be in order.
No doubt the regulators will keep looking at Facebook, just as they examine other dominant players in other sectors of industry, but until they abuse their monopoly (e.g., by limiting the access to Facebook APIs that are granted to other photo services), there's no need for any formal proceedings to begin.
But, then again, maybe the mergers commission *will* look into the takeover... now that they've heard about it. The unorthodox negotiations here didn't give them much notice.
However, the article still overstates Instagram's place in photo sharing. If you're in the Valley Bubble, it might have seemed to be the big thing, but it was very much an "iPhone-owners-only" club until last month, and other services exist that do the same basic thing (twitpic, flickr, hipstamatic, molome, picasa, and let's not forget... facebook) - buying Instagram does not really give Facebook any more dominance in this area than it already had.
Personally, I thought Instagram pictures always ended up looking like shit --- literally so in the case of a friend's pic of what he later told me was a Danish pastry.
... the Ghanaian footballer, or Chris Dixon the champion yachtsman. (These were the top two results when I looked up the name). In other words, he might be a friend of yours, but he's a long way from being so famous that anyone could get away without putting a one-clause bio after his name.
On the article, a fair point, but only up to a point: photo-sharing is not fundamental to using the Internet in the way a browser or search engine is.
Put it this way: if you own the one-and-only browser, it doesn't matter how many content discovery systems there are, you can dictate which one is used. If you own the one-and-only content discovery system, it doesn't matter how many photo sharing applications there are, you can dictate which one people find. But if you own the dominant photo sharing application? Well, someone else can start a new one and compete with you. Instagram managed this against Flickr (or beneath them).
Google "Vertu Ascent Liquidmetal" and look at the dates (2004). This was already a production-ready product, and even in mobile phones, long before Apple were sold a license to use it.
And "licence" is the key word, here -- they get to be the only CE company using the material; they didn't get access to the IP behind its manufacture.
The uppercase restriction was because the earliest decoders didn't handle lowercase text very well (the descenders didn't descend, making the text less legible).
The US ones have technically improved, but programme-makers tend to use a backward-compatible subset of the more modern standard, as this makes it easier to generate old Line-21 and the newer ATSC title streams from the same source material.
DVB also has some quite clever subtitling features, but most European broadcasters have stuck with using Teletext embedded into the programme stream, because they have an infrastructure in place to produce Teletext streams.
...if it was, it'd be the first perfume ever to come with its own Material Safety Data Sheet.
I bought a wired Apple keyboard recently, and the stink of volatile chemicals from it was so bad it actually gave me headaches - and I'm not sensitive to solvents generally. What it smelled like was electronic switch cleaner, which is hexane/pentane -- neither of which are at all pleasant to inhale.
Beware of domestic Gaggias, they're trading on the reputation of their commercial cousins - Lovely to look at, and great while they're working, but the pumps and seals don't hold up well. Strangely, the machines branded as Saeco (who own Gaggia) are more robust, if less trendy looking.
In any case, I think that once you've got an acceptable level of quailty in the machine, a good grinder, that can produce consistently-sized grounds probably makes more difference for espresso than spending on a more expensive machine.
Agree with you on the Aeropress, but I've always found it a bit fiddly.
And finally, two more names for your roasters list: Matthew Algie & Co., and Badger & Dodo. The former does great rich, dark roasts, but I'm not sure if they sell direct; the latter has some really interesting single-origin light roasts, and they definitely do sell direct.
Well, if we're getting technical... "is kaput" is subordinate to "US Judge rules [that]", so you'd have to push the verb to the end, and say "kaput ist" instead.
Now, just change "rulen" to "hat gerult" (as the action has been completed), and that sentence will be a bastardised mashing of two different languages, that is nicely incomprehensible to both German and English speakers alike... just like a depressing amount of recent German marketing slogans :(
The Linux kernel gets on pretty well with if statements and C-structs.
MapReduce, Strategy and Composite are patterns, not languages. As such, they can be implemented in any language - even assembly language if you so desire (I have recognised Visitor, Composite, Factory, Facet and Flyweight in really old 68k code). However, I have seen too many contrary examples to believe your assertion that using design patterns extensively is the mark of good code - good coders like patterns because they solve common problems; bad coders like patterns because they can be used to obscure how ill-thought-out their code really is.
...and incidentally, Windows Phone 7 uses the same architectural pattern as Android - a bytecode VM running in a lightweight native-code VM.
Offering the $100 rebate was probably unnecessary, as simply apologising, giving a fix date and offering an exchange would have satisfied pretty much all but the most unrealistic customers.
Still, it shows how important this launch is for Nokia. This phone is their main product for the US market, so everthing needs to go well.
They lost over 70% in one evening in September 2000, if I remember correctly. Yes, I did have options, yes I was bitter (furious would be more like it, as said options were compensation for losing a very good holiday package), and no, I still wouldn't work for them again.
Maybe they were only using a signed 16-bit integer to hold the dollar value, and the thought of it dropping to -32,768 in after-hours trading would be too horrifying to contemplate :)
(Joke alert, lest this descends into a discussion about BCD...)
It was a selection of Atari computers that I really learned to program on. An STFM, a couple of STEs and Falcon030 -- the latter was, to the best of my knowledge, one of the first (only?) two in Ireland - the other was bought by my friend. We were definitely "the masses", not "the classes". In my home town, you had to make an appointment to even LOOK at a Mac in the dealership, and even then, a system you could use to develop on was the cost of a small car.
It was also the ST that brought me my first paid programming work - a magazine cover-disk game many years ago. Seventy quid, but you've got to start somewhere!
I wonder if I still have my copy of "Atari ST Internals" by Bruckmann, Gerits and Englisch. Ah for the days when you could fully describe a system in 491 pages, including a disassembly of the boot ROM.
Trivia: The ST came to the market in the days before properly standardised 8-bit character sets - you got the basic ASCII and then 128 characters of the manufacturer's choice from 0x80 to 0xFF. Given the Tramiels' background, it was hardly surprising to see that there was a complete Hebrew alphabet in this. (no, they couldn't do right-to-left layout, though).
Re: Software SIM - good on paper, but would hinder competition
If you didn't look beyond technology, then software SIM makes sense. In the real world, it's a bad idea, because it allows operators to convince customers into thinking that their new "Vodafone" phone is somehow incompatible with a Telefonica, Orange, or even "No-frills Mobile Service X" service plan in future.
That removable SIM, the one they had to insert into the new phone, and the only part of the package that bore any operator branding, makes it very clear which bit of the experience is being provided by the operator, and it's something that's clear even to people who have so little use for computers that "another login" would be one login too many to manage.
Apple have long been a proponent of software SIM, but they brought us that abomination of an activation process using iTunes (Go to operator store, sign contracts, get new iPhone and SIM, be unable to use said phone until you get to your own PC and install and run iTunes and give it your credit card details - WTF?) - is that what we'll have to put up with in future?
It was the Secure Element part of the NFC spec that was to be housed in the SIM, not the entire antenna, so that isn't derailed by these new standards. With current processes, there's plenty of room on even Nokia's tiny design for a very complex piece of circuitry.
There are two problems with putting an antenna in a mini SIM. The first is pure physics, the second is more to do with how phones are constructed.
First, the size of coil needed for accurate NFC is only just small enough to fit on a mini SIM, and isn't really great once you take into account the distance between SIM and casework, or any additional protective cases on both the phone and the terminal. (As a guide, the coil radius should be around 1.414 times the read distance - as it deviates from this, sensitivity decreases).
However, the second problem is bigger: Even if you could get by with a smaller coil, you have to overcome the problem that many phone designs deliberately place the SIM behind RF shielding along with the rest of the baseband and general computing circuitry. This shielding, as well as the large battery that invariably lies between the SIM and the rear casing of the device, will further reduce the sensitivity of your antenna - quite possibly to the point of it not working at all.
The first SIM formfactor was designed at a time when most "mobile" phones were like every other "mobile {noun}" in the English language: something housed in a vehicle. The credit-card sized SIM was no hardship then -- in fact it made it easier to insert the thing while pulling out of a garage.
Making it an ISO 7816 smart card also allowed SIMs to be cheaply sourced from multiple vendors, many of whom were already supplying smart car phone cards to the telephone operators (in the UK, BT was rather late to adopt chip cards for payphones, but these were widely used elsewhere from the early 1990s).
I seem to remember that my very first phone, a Nokia 1631, used a 1FF SIM, as did the first Motorola StarTAC GSM phones, but they were already in the minority: by the time I changed to a Nokia 6110 in late 1998, 2FF SIMs were ubiquitous.
MicroSIM is something I don't see the point of. It's not sufficiently smaller than 2FF to warrant all the messing around.
"(mistake 2, particularly since most film downloads don't involve money changing hands in the first place) "
Not quite: You don't pay, but advertisers whose ads appear on the link and download sites do pay. Google takes their cut, the hosting company is given their cut, and the remainder goes to someone who may or may not be up to no good.
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379 posts • joined Tuesday 10th April 2007 16:04 GMT
Page:
Again, "cooking?"
What on earth are you talking about?? We order in.
Re: Easily amused?
Me too. Best subhead this month.
Re: Puzzled...
Always on, never used.
Okay, that's not entirely true, but an AGA really is the Leica of cookers - people who know what they're doing can do amazing things with them, but the majority of purchasers just want to give the impression of skill without the tedious business of acquiring it.
I imagine that the iPad integration is aimed at this latter, larger, demographic. The crossover would be large.
Re: Premium-rate SMS
"Are Premium-rate SMS used for anything except scamming? "
Yes,
For a start, they're the mechanism by which operator billing works in app stores. e.g., You pay €2.00 for an app, the phone sends a €0.30 "purchase" message that requests a €1.70 "receipt" message, so in total, you're charged €2.00. Operator billing is the lowest-friction method of buying mobile apps, and you reach anyone with a phone service plan, not just the ones with credit-cards.
Premium SMS is also useful for broad-market geographical services. Want a cab/pizza/etc. quickly? text to XXXX and for €1.00, deductable from your final bill, we'll pass on your location (with your permission) to the very nearest driver/restaurant/etc..
Not using premium SMS would make a service like this vulnerable to timewasters, and also make it harder for the location service provider to collect their commision on the sale.
Re: Maybe the white takes some of the strain from the blue
I guess it's this, or a variation of it: Pentile RGBW -- http://www.nouvoyance.com/technology.html
Fewer subpixels = bigger OLED cells = longer display life.
They're almost lying.
By definition, image contrast is the difference between the amount of light coming from a "black" patch, and that coming from a "white" one. If there's no ambient light, then an OLED display *may* have infinite contrast in an ideal world, but in the real world it doesn't (like all LEDs, OLEDs emit a tiny, tiny amount of light in their "off" state).
Add ambient lighting, and the screen material comes into play. Now the "black" level depends on the amount of ambient light reflected back off the screen. Use a glossy screen, and you can redistribute this reflection, to make it look better when shadowed by the viewer (like in a shop, for instance), but you're only rearranging the problem, not solving it. [I'm typing this on a glossy-screened Apple product, with just such a stupid shiny screen, and I absolutely hate the display.]
Other manufactures using LED/OLED just quote insane contrast ratios, like 10,000,000:1, which are about right for an OLED panel.
Also, the reason for the fourth, white pixel is that this is most likely to be a Pentile display matrix (not the same one as used in phone panels). Here, the large white subpixel deals with the baseline illumination of the whole pixel, with the RGB trio there to colour it. A true RGB set gives better colour reproduction, but is susceptible to more noticable colour shift as the cells age.
I remember the first plasma sets coming in at this price, but then, they were competing against CRTs, which were utterly impractical at sizes over 30". Still, we have to start somewhere -- I'll look at them when my LCD set needs to be replaced, in about seven or eight years.
Measure them...
2"x4" timber is never 2 x 4 inches anyway: the dimensions are the freshly-cut size (and for European timber are metric 50x100mm). As the wood dries, it shrinks.
Half-inch pipe is actually 22mm OD . No, that's not half an inch, and neither is the bore (inner diameter of "half-inch" pipe is 10mm), but then, "old" half-inch pipe wasn't half an inch either...
I lived in Germany for a while, and often heard people asking the butcher for a "Pfund" of meat - they got 500g, not a pound, and a pound wouldn't have been 454g anyway - the old Bavarian "Pfund" weight was 560g. And that is the reason why we all gave up on "traditional" measures: they weren't the same everywhere.
Even now, compare US and UK mpg figures. American cars are thirsty, but not that thirsty (also, the testing regimes differ, but that's something you can only see if you convert the quoted figures to litres per km)
Re: Beautiful aesthetics ????
The inclusion of AirPlay without Bluetooth AptX or DLNA PlayTo means that this is going to be bought only by people with Apple hardware. Given that market, there really is no point in trying to be too inventive with the product design.
That said, it's nowhere near as sterile as Apple's assaults on the memory of Dieter Rams. The deliberate irregularilty of the grille, and the fact that you can buy in in *gasp* colours make it at least some way human, without scaring away the Apple fanbois...
Re: GM Anyone.
True, although the reasons for this lack of success seem to be a reluctance on the part of Facebook to engage in large-scale advertising. Placement of Facebook ads on the right-hand column of their interface also makes them very easy to ignore.
This doesn't diminish the fact that Facebook has a capability that Google currently lacks: that of tying a user's viewing preferences to real-world demographic information. All that Google knows is that a person or persons who habitually use a particular browser have looked at a particular set of topics.
It's not what Facebook are doing now that worries Google, it's what Facebook could do. Also, the number of small businesses in my area (hardly the beating heart of the tech industry) who now just say "Find us on Facebook" rather than putting up a website (and thus having something that an AdWords campaign would link to) must be cause for concern for Google.
Not entirely a joke, I think.
Search is not Google's business. Advertising is.
Facebook has sneaked up on Google and now has more of the internet users' attention than they do -- and unlike Google, Facebook can say to advertisers: "How about we run your ad to 18-25 year-old-females living in these six urban areas who like sushi restaurants and have a birthday coming up in the next three weeks".
This is why Google needed to do well in Social Networking: their current advert targeting cannot match what Facebook can offer, and Facebook's user base is now so large it is becoming a serious competitor to Google as an online ad platform, and to reiterate: online advertising is Google's only revenue generator. Nothing else, from all of the company's myriad products, produces one red cent of profit for Google.
Sure, G+ turning out to be a flop isn't going to shut them down next week, but this is yet another project from Google that has not delivered for the company, and is the third "social" product to fail. That kind of record risky for their long term survival.
Re: Great, I'm sure they'll sell quite a few in India etc.
They still make more on these phones, at this price, than anyone except HTC and Samsung are making from Android.
"platforms Nokia doesn't want to sell but people would rather buy"
Statistically speaking, nobody wants to buy Symbian phones. I say that as an owner of an N8, who is actively considering an 808 PureView as my next phone, but the fact remains that "Symbian" is now synonymous with "Shit" in the mind of anyone who reads a lot of tech blogs, and that's a good description of the sales-guys in Craphone Warehouse or Phones4U or in the operator stores, or the "pet nerd" people ask about these things. This reputation might not be true anymore, but reputations, both good and bad, hang around longer than the truth behind them.
Re: "a gap where nobody actually lives."
You're still coming at this from a European perspective: assuming that people are buying what you see as a "cheap" phone because they don't want access to the web, Facebook or IM service. That's not where these will sell. (Although watch out for them in Tesco, who do a nice trade in cheap unlocked handsets). Phones like these two are offering access to the net for people who's budget did not stretch to that before.
An example of where this is aimed: India. This new Nokia 112 costs, before tax and subsidy, the equivalent of five or six meals for two in a casual-dining restaurant. In UK terms, that puts it at the equivalent of £200. Do the same sums with the price of an iPhone or high-end Android (around €450 before tax and subsidy), and see where it lies in the market.
The press launch for these two phones was in Pakistan -- not London, Berlin, San Francisco or Helsinki. That should give you an idea of the markets they're aiming for.
"a gap where nobody actually lives."
Or how about a gap where over three quarters of the Earth's population lives?
Take away the operators' subsidies, and the cheapest "Budget Android Job" is four times the price of either of these handsets, and has poor talk time, questionable build quality, and very likely no Dual-SIM support. And four times that €35 price is a lot of money in a country where you can get a decent meal for €2.00.
This is primarily a voice phone, but with added internet connectivity and instant messaging support. No 3G because there's limited 3G infrastructure in the places these will be bought.
There is a niche for these in markets like Western Europe too: there's a small but significant minority of customers who want a purely voice-call phone, or just something they can rely on to still be working even after a week of use. Also, there are people, even in "rich" nations, who cannot afford three-figure sums for a phone. They mightn't hang around in your local Starbucks (and this is one of the Starbucks USPs, but not one they explicitly mention), but they're out there.
Re: A useful way to show how great the S3 really is
If you want to troll, do try to read back over what you've written before posting.. you just called your beloved Galaxy S3 a piece of shit.
In any case, based on the published specs, this is going to be priced around €100 before taxes and subsidy. Hardly in the same class.
For users of the 'open' command...
To turn off that f**king "This file is not from a trusted source" dialog forever:
defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool NO
Now you'll be able to open multiple files using the command-line open command without the LaunchServices dialog stopping the operation after the first one. And if you don't already use the open command, look it up. Very handy for working between the shell and OS X apps [open -a <App> file file file... ], but also for opening directories as finder windows [ I particularly like "open ." ] or just emailing files [ open -a Mail <file> ] .
Also, for a file-by-file, manual, removal of the quarantine flag, use this:
xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine <filename>
And I have agree 100% with the AC above - Apple's hard-core fans have to be the worst in the world, to the point of being a religious cult. I think this has the result of making otherwise rational people hate the company irrationally, for fear of being associated with that cult.
Re: Two seperate races being run here
Nokia bought marketshare in 2010 by offering carriers deeper and deeper discounts to stick with Symbian devices, as Symbian^3 got later and later, and then finally arrived half-finished. It was only the release of Symbian/Nokia Belle, in Summer 2011, that gave the platform a genuinely competitive user experience, but by then the damage had been done, and Nokia had already cut it loose (rightly, I think, although I'm not happy about it).
A better example of a pyhrric marketshare victory would be YouTube. It dwarfs its competitors in video [source: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/12/More_than_200_Billion_Online_Videos_Viewed_Globally_in_October ] but it makes not a red cent (net) for its parent company.
I think Apple's biggest risk isn't from Google, but rather from the sustainability of the market they've created. Right now, they are the linchpin in the current mobile-apps bubble economy: millions of dollars of VCs' money is flowing through startups, to app developers, and Apple - those startups launch on iOS first, use Apple hardware and software for development, and make Apple's iOS platform more attractive for end-users - people don't buy iPhones because they're the best experience (they're not, anymore), but because EVERY third-party app worth having is on iPhone. The problem is that these apps are cloud-based, requiring an online service, and a vanishingly small number of these services are viable. Sooner or later, the VCs will wake up to this. If (and when) this bubble bursts, Apple's $80+ billion cash reserve means they'll be fine, but they certainly won't have that $500 billion market-cap anymore.
Google run just as great a risk of being disrupted as Apple do, as they are still heavily reliant on a single commodity service. They have what they believe to be a monopoly on online advertising, and it's bankrolling everything else they do, from Android to GMail to YouTube. If another company were to take this revenue away from them (Facebook, maybe?), then they're in trouble, but again, like Apple, they've built up a nice pile of cash to cushion that fall.
Hardly do-or-die stuff, but there you go...
Hurrah!
I've now bookmarked this on my mobile browser... for the few times I use Twitter.
The idea of "feature" phones is really out of date these days - on a technical analysis, both Nokia's Series40 and Samsung's Bada check all the boxes for being called "Smartphones" (especially if you accept the argument that any iOS version below 4 was a smartphone OS). Very soon, this distinction will be more a question of market positioning than technical ability.
Not on sale in the USA, but...
Philips already have a range of TVs that look very much how you'd expect an Apple set to.
http://www.philips.co.uk/c/designline/286683/cat/#filterState0=DESIGN_LINE_SU_GB_CONSUMER%3Dtrue
Of course, Apple's one will be completely different. It'll be aluminium for a start, with a fully-flush black gloss front, and there'll be an oversized mirror-effect Apple logo centered at the bottom lest anyone forget what brand of consumer product it is.
Wouldn't the 7000 be more review-worthy?
It's mentioned in passing, but it seems to be a better specified unit, with DLNA support too...
In price and features it's more like the AppleTV or WD... how about a group-test?
Looks good
I like the case design (reminds me a little of Nokia 603 or 701, but both of those are good designs), but I wonder about the material quality, which has always been Samsung's downfall - previous Galaxy phones have been classy tech, but let down badly by how they felt in the hand.
Very nice display, and MirrorLink is also good to see - there's no point in having a standard unless big players join in. The other interaction stuff (voice, eye-tracking) strikes me as gimmickry, but the rest of the device is so good, you can just not use it, no big deal.
Deal-breaker for me is Android, which has always left me cold, but lots of people love it, so good luck to them. With the one proviso of build and material quality, this probably will be the best smartphone on the market when it gets here.
Well done all round.
Re: quite confused ... till I read the comments...
I agree - if you don't know the story, the first two sentences don't really explain that the two names are the same person. On the other hand, I can see why the author is (rightly) trying to concentrate on her work, rather than the details of her personal life.
But as for it being retrospective, I would suspect that Roger was always Sophie, long before she used the name. You don't go to the trouble and pain of a sex-change just because you fancy paying a few quid a year less for your car insurance...
Re: @Kristen Walsh
I stand corrected. To be honest, though, as long as the support hardware is fast enough to deal with the image without resorting to dirty tricks (cropping, interlacing or interpolating), I'm happy.
Re: It doesn't fix the basic problem..
Photos are no good, when you consider how little time a merchant has your card for. It's in their hands for less than 5 seconds for a Chip+PIN transaction, and it's not in their hands at all when the PIN terminal is presented to the customer directly.
In early trials of Photo ID cards in the USA, where merchants were informed of the trial and told to check photos on the cards, the control group participants had nearly every transaction accepted despite using a card that had a picture of a gorilla in the box marked "CARDHOLDER PHOTO".
Signatures aren't so hot either. I have a friend who, when he got a new card years ago, decided to sign every docket "not me" (not the sig on the card), to see how long he could go before someone challenged him (he himself works in a business that is pretty much 100% card payments, and so he keeps an eye on these things). When he was eventually challenged for the first time by a sales assistant, she turned out to be a trainee, who'd just started her job. This was four months later.
Re: @Chris 19, @Kristen Walsh
I'm only quoting from a document written by the engineers who designed the camera. If you've other information to disprove their claims, please post it.
Perhaps there's some spin here in calling the sensor's scaling circuitry a "companion processor", as no sensor is ever just a grid of photo-sites, but there has to be something scaling the video frame images before they hit the GPU, because that GPU cannot handle the amount of data produced by the sensor without it being scaled first. Whether that's a pixel-skipping readout, or the same oversampling used in the PureView stills mode, something needs to be done so as not to swamp the GPU's ISP.
This system has been very explictly described as "lossless zoom", and the description given of how it works doesn't allow for it to be based on pixel interpolation, so either they're telling a barefaced lie, or we're arguing about minutiae. As this is the internet, I strongly suspect the latter.
Re: @Chris 19, @Kristen Walsh
Nope, the BCM-2763 doesn't handle the camera stream alone; only when the sensor image has been downsampled to its output resolution does it go through the GPU. From the horse's mouth:
"For video, the amount of pixels handled through the processing chain is staggering — over 1 billion pixels per second, and 16x oversampling. That’s a throughput of pixels 16 times greater than many other smartphones.
Most smartphone manufacturers crop off a section of the sensor to ease the processing load. By contrast, the Nokia 808 PureView has no limited field of view. Plus, it provides lossless zooming capability, which is output resolution dependent. Full HD 1080p gives you 4x zoom.
For 720p HD video, you’re looking at 6x lossless zoom. And for nHD (640x360) video, an amazing 12x zoom! In addition, we are encoding at up to 25mbps in high profile H.264 format.
To make this all happen, we developed a sensor with a special companion processor that handles pixel scaling before sending the required number to the main image processor."
[source: http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf ]
It is this "companion processor", in the imaging pipeline between the sensor and the BCM-2763, that does the PureView work, and allows the full sensor area to be used for video.
@Chris 19, yeah the "camera companion GPU" is an Imaging System Processor, but it's a very, very powerful one. Nokia don't reveal their suppliers, but it's been repeatedly said unofficially that Toshiba were the silicon developer for the PureView system.
Re: Thanks for the Flickr link Kristian
"Restricted" is probably the best word, but it's not a technical restriction. There's nothing within Symbian that limits it to nHD resolution (The E6 uses a 4:3 640x480 display, for instance), and there's nothing with Qt/QtQuick either. The extensive use of SVG images also makes the UI quite scalable. I believe that keeping to nHD is a conscious choice by Nokia to avoid fragmenting their phone range (a serious problem with Symbian before was that there were so many screen sizes you could never test your designs on all of them).
With that in mind, the only sensible increase would be straight to 720x1280 to allow a simple doubling of the layout dimensions in every app, but 720x1280 panels at 4" or below are rare (Nokia almost exclusively use AMOLED displays now, but OLED displays with small pixels have shorter working lives than those with larger pixels) .. Samsung are rumoured to be making an approx. 4" AMOLED panel of this resolution, but even if it's not a rumour, it'll be an internal supply to Samsung's Mobile division until long after this phone goes on sale.
Re: Decent OS, screen, and GPU needed first!
It's a 41 megapixel sensor, with a site-size as large as those on any competing camera (only the N8 has bigger photosites). Not all pixels are used, but 16:9 and 4:3 images are of similar resolution (everyone else just letterboxes the 16:9 image out of the 4:3 sensor)
The images are 3, 5, 10 or 39 Megapixels ( you get to choose). Oversampling occurs only on the lower resolutions.
Video is full resolution, 1080p, and the same oversampling occurs here to reduce noise and improve zoomed images and low-light shooting. Also, unlike many other devices, video is shot with the full sensor area, not just a central crop.
You are confusing "oversampling" (recording the input signal more than once per output sample, and using the extra data to improve accuracy) with "interpolation" (generating extra, synthetic, output samples from only one measurement of the input). Oversampling is a good thing.
The 808 has not one, but two GPUs, one dedicated to the camera processing (a custom part, but the performance is quoted as over a billion pixels per second throughput on video), and one to drive the display and video playback (a Broadcom 2763 with 128 Mbyte VRAM).
It would have been nice to see a 720p screen, sure, but those extra pixels exact a heavy price on your battery.
This really is a leap forwards in portable cameras, of all kinds, but that really won't matter to the people who think Instagram is photography.
Re: hmmm lets see
You get 16 Gbyte flash inside the phone, plus up to 32 Gbyte max that you can add with an external SD card, so 48 Gbyte in total.
Judging by the samples online, it's about 9--14 Mbyte a picture if you choose to use the sensor's full resolution. But the camera defaults to images of 5 Megapixels (which are calculated by applying the image-processing to all 39M usable pixels on the sensor -- it's this clever processing tech that Nokia are calling "PureView", not the humongous sensor). The low noise in these images allows better JPEG compression even at high quality settings -- again, from online samples, it seems to be about 1.5 Mbyte per image
(Comparison, my N8's 12 Mpix images are around 1.6 Mbyte)
And here are the samples: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nokiaofficial/
He was talking about Silicon, though...
Graphene is one of the most likely materials to take over from Silicon, I think, but even if it doesn't, it has so many other useful properties that you're going to be seeing it in lots of products long before Silicon runs out of steam.. first out, as a replacement for the difficult to source Indium used in touch displays (where it will allow capacitive and capacitive+resistive designs), but also as an engineering and surfacing material.
But Kaku did say that the problem is with the physics of *Silicon*, and it's pretty hard to dispute this argument. There's a certain critical mass of atoms below which a semiconductor junction won't work. Semiconductors junctions work on the principle of doping pure silicon with other elements - these impurities are what provide the "one-way current" behaviour that all digital electronics relies on.
Make these features too small, and the absolute number of doping atoms becomes significant, rather than their ratio (a Silicon atom has a diameter of a touch over 0.2 nanometres, so a 5 nm feature size is less than 25 Si atoms across)..
Of course, this doesn't preclude three-dimensional construction of devices (although cooling is a major problem here), or hybrid Silicon/Something-else designs, but I think that's his point: using Silicon alone, you cannot go on forever reducing feature sizes. My guess is that it'll be economics, not physics that prevents us reaching the theoretical limit of Silicon.
Re: Bill Watterstone...
Nah.. Following this latest Google update, he was happy to see that he finally ranks above that Bill Watterson guy.
@deadlockvictim
... and that's cited as the number one reason why men don't get involved in primary-school teaching anymore.
On women in IT - The "nerd" image is possibly due to the larger portion of people with mild Autism-spectrum disorders who work in IT compared to other industries (compare with the disproportionate number of building architects who have dyslexia, or the number of social workers who are innumerate), but most of the people I work with are male, but also communicative, empathic, understanding and friendly. However, as such, they don't stick out from the general population. Stereotypes are always exaggerated, but they come to define industries.
This isn't a female thing, either: I (a male) feel the same way about the image of IT. Despite being a programmer for nearly 30 years, I have never identified with the "nerd", "geek" or "hacker" stereotypes. In fact, I think they're ultimately bad for the industry, because they are self-fulfilling, and will eventually leave us with a population of obsessive monomaniacs who will struggle to meet the needs of customers who are drawn from a much more diverse population.
If only "nerds" are valued in programming roles (and I'm looking at Google, here, as one of the worst examples of this hiring policy), eventually that's all you'll get in the industry.
You don't need to be super-brainy to be a programmer: imagination, a grasp of logical reasoning and an ability to write clearly will get you very far. The thing is, at the age where kids make their university (and thus career) choices, girls and boys have very different values. Girls of this age value community and friendship much more highly - often excessively so - than boys do, and any career that has such strong connotations with being an outsider will never appeal to them, regardless of their ability to do well in it.
@RyokuMas Re: Oh yeah...
Yep.. Me to. Went from a CPC 464 (Christmas '84) to an Atari ST (Summer '88).
I learned to program in BASIC on the 464, but never made the leap to assembler until the ST. I think it was that the assembler for the CPC was on a cartridge, and thus more expensive than my limited budget could afford.
(And now I've got the music from Thing On A Spring in my head. ARRGGH!)
Re: LOL
For what it's worth, I think Sony's problems are deeper and more fundamental than Nokia's, and that Sony are still in denial about them, but as neither of us really have any privileged insight into either company, it's all opinion really.
To me, Sony have struggled since Akio Morita retired, and the successor managment have done nothing but harm to the brand he built. I liked Morita's Sony - management realised that it was selling to customers, and that the customer's was therefore the only opinion that mattered. Buying into the media business was the start of the end for that view. They lost their focus on keeping customers happy by producing good products, and instead began to treat their customers as "recurring revenue streams" rather than people. Big, big mistake. Once that idea permeates an organisation, you start to get cynical, start to push things onto your customers that you wouldn't accept yourself. Basically, like Nokia, they have been making stuff that customers don't want because they think they're too big for customers' needs to matter anymore. However, unlike Nokia, this realisation has not yet sunk in.
Nokia is in a similar, but different problem, and it's very like the situation Apple was in in the late 1990's (which I know quite well from inside, as I worked for Apple at this time). They believed they would always be the biggest, most important company in their business, and didn't see their competitor slide in and steal that market from under them with an "inferior" product that met customer's needs better (with Apple, it was that customers wanted something cheap that would work with their office systems; with Nokia it was that customers would pay big money for something flashy, even if it had next to no features). Like Nokia, Apple had a scattergun approach to product development that mainly bamboozled the customer, and left the company with so many niches that there was no one "good" product that you could put your marketing budget behind (and, oh dear God, that marketing -- Apple's was appallingly bad, touchy-feely garbage). However, like Apple had, Nokia have a good set of tools to get out of their mess: they have some excellent R&D outputs (both in manufacturing techniques and also software), a large cash reserve to fund a new set of projects, a highly talented product design capability, and finally, a CEO who knows there's a problem and is taking unpopular, but correct, decisions to fix it. A lot of today's Apple fans probably weren't around to see how much anger there was when Apple killed stuff like HyperCard, MacApp, OpenDoc, the entire Newton line, and the whole OS 8/Copland/Gerswhin project roadmap, or even when Apple struck deals with arch-enemy Microsoft... but these were necessary decisions to focus the company on making things people wanted. Apple's stellar success is down to that one strategy - stop beancounting, stop listening to wishy-washy brand consultants: if you just trust your own people to make the best products they can, your customers will respond.
I believe Nokia are further along this recovery plan than Sony are.
Habaeus Corpus...
You cannot be charged for something you "might" do, only for what you have actually done. Microsoft DID use their OS monopoly to limit the adoption of other web browsers and inhibit competition, and they were brought to court for it, and later lost. Facebook, to date, have done nothing to inhibit photo-sharing services' integration with Facebook. Right now: no act, no crime, no charge, but of course this could change, at which point a complaint would be in order.
No doubt the regulators will keep looking at Facebook, just as they examine other dominant players in other sectors of industry, but until they abuse their monopoly (e.g., by limiting the access to Facebook APIs that are granted to other photo services), there's no need for any formal proceedings to begin.
But, then again, maybe the mergers commission *will* look into the takeover... now that they've heard about it. The unorthodox negotiations here didn't give them much notice.
However, the article still overstates Instagram's place in photo sharing. If you're in the Valley Bubble, it might have seemed to be the big thing, but it was very much an "iPhone-owners-only" club until last month, and other services exist that do the same basic thing (twitpic, flickr, hipstamatic, molome, picasa, and let's not forget... facebook) - buying Instagram does not really give Facebook any more dominance in this area than it already had.
Personally, I thought Instagram pictures always ended up looking like shit --- literally so in the case of a friend's pic of what he later told me was a Danish pastry.
Is that Chris Dixon...
... the Ghanaian footballer, or Chris Dixon the champion yachtsman. (These were the top two results when I looked up the name). In other words, he might be a friend of yours, but he's a long way from being so famous that anyone could get away without putting a one-clause bio after his name.
On the article, a fair point, but only up to a point: photo-sharing is not fundamental to using the Internet in the way a browser or search engine is.
Put it this way: if you own the one-and-only browser, it doesn't matter how many content discovery systems there are, you can dictate which one is used. If you own the one-and-only content discovery system, it doesn't matter how many photo sharing applications there are, you can dictate which one people find. But if you own the dominant photo sharing application? Well, someone else can start a new one and compete with you. Instagram managed this against Flickr (or beneath them).
Less impressive in reality
Google "Vertu Ascent Liquidmetal" and look at the dates (2004). This was already a production-ready product, and even in mobile phones, long before Apple were sold a license to use it.
And "licence" is the key word, here -- they get to be the only CE company using the material; they didn't get access to the IP behind its manufacture.
Re: How are we going to impress Americans now?
The uppercase restriction was because the earliest decoders didn't handle lowercase text very well (the descenders didn't descend, making the text less legible).
The US ones have technically improved, but programme-makers tend to use a backward-compatible subset of the more modern standard, as this makes it easier to generate old Line-21 and the newer ATSC title streams from the same source material.
DVB also has some quite clever subtitling features, but most European broadcasters have stuck with using Teletext embedded into the programme stream, because they have an infrastructure in place to produce Teletext streams.
Re: too expensive?
Based on analysis of various with-phone and SIM-free price-plans, I think it's about €350 before VAT.
Of course it's not for sale...
...if it was, it'd be the first perfume ever to come with its own Material Safety Data Sheet.
I bought a wired Apple keyboard recently, and the stink of volatile chemicals from it was so bad it actually gave me headaches - and I'm not sensitive to solvents generally. What it smelled like was electronic switch cleaner, which is hexane/pentane -- neither of which are at all pleasant to inhale.
@ Chewy
Beware of domestic Gaggias, they're trading on the reputation of their commercial cousins - Lovely to look at, and great while they're working, but the pumps and seals don't hold up well. Strangely, the machines branded as Saeco (who own Gaggia) are more robust, if less trendy looking.
In any case, I think that once you've got an acceptable level of quailty in the machine, a good grinder, that can produce consistently-sized grounds probably makes more difference for espresso than spending on a more expensive machine.
Agree with you on the Aeropress, but I've always found it a bit fiddly.
And finally, two more names for your roasters list: Matthew Algie & Co., and Badger & Dodo. The former does great rich, dark roasts, but I'm not sure if they sell direct; the latter has some really interesting single-origin light roasts, and they definitely do sell direct.
Re: Ja, ich spreche top Business-englisch...
Well, if we're getting technical... "is kaput" is subordinate to "US Judge rules [that]", so you'd have to push the verb to the end, and say "kaput ist" instead.
Now, just change "rulen" to "hat gerult" (as the action has been completed), and that sentence will be a bastardised mashing of two different languages, that is nicely incomprehensible to both German and English speakers alike... just like a depressing amount of recent German marketing slogans :(
Heard of "the right tool for the job"?
The Linux kernel gets on pretty well with if statements and C-structs.
MapReduce, Strategy and Composite are patterns, not languages. As such, they can be implemented in any language - even assembly language if you so desire (I have recognised Visitor, Composite, Factory, Facet and Flyweight in really old 68k code). However, I have seen too many contrary examples to believe your assertion that using design patterns extensively is the mark of good code - good coders like patterns because they solve common problems; bad coders like patterns because they can be used to obscure how ill-thought-out their code really is.
...and incidentally, Windows Phone 7 uses the same architectural pattern as Android - a bytecode VM running in a lightweight native-code VM.
A good example. Any one else care to follow it?
Offering the $100 rebate was probably unnecessary, as simply apologising, giving a fix date and offering an exchange would have satisfied pretty much all but the most unrealistic customers.
Still, it shows how important this launch is for Nokia. This phone is their main product for the US market, so everthing needs to go well.
Apple have form.
They lost over 70% in one evening in September 2000, if I remember correctly. Yes, I did have options, yes I was bitter (furious would be more like it, as said options were compensation for losing a very good holiday package), and no, I still wouldn't work for them again.
Re: Lets bet on a stock price!
"stuck at 32,767.5"
Maybe they were only using a signed 16-bit integer to hold the dollar value, and the thought of it dropping to -32,768 in after-hours trading would be too horrifying to contemplate :)
(Joke alert, lest this descends into a discussion about BCD...)
So long...
It was a selection of Atari computers that I really learned to program on. An STFM, a couple of STEs and Falcon030 -- the latter was, to the best of my knowledge, one of the first (only?) two in Ireland - the other was bought by my friend. We were definitely "the masses", not "the classes". In my home town, you had to make an appointment to even LOOK at a Mac in the dealership, and even then, a system you could use to develop on was the cost of a small car.
It was also the ST that brought me my first paid programming work - a magazine cover-disk game many years ago. Seventy quid, but you've got to start somewhere!
I wonder if I still have my copy of "Atari ST Internals" by Bruckmann, Gerits and Englisch. Ah for the days when you could fully describe a system in 491 pages, including a disassembly of the boot ROM.
Trivia: The ST came to the market in the days before properly standardised 8-bit character sets - you got the basic ASCII and then 128 characters of the manufacturer's choice from 0x80 to 0xFF. Given the Tramiels' background, it was hardly surprising to see that there was a complete Hebrew alphabet in this. (no, they couldn't do right-to-left layout, though).
Re: Software SIM - good on paper, but would hinder competition
If you didn't look beyond technology, then software SIM makes sense. In the real world, it's a bad idea, because it allows operators to convince customers into thinking that their new "Vodafone" phone is somehow incompatible with a Telefonica, Orange, or even "No-frills Mobile Service X" service plan in future.
That removable SIM, the one they had to insert into the new phone, and the only part of the package that bore any operator branding, makes it very clear which bit of the experience is being provided by the operator, and it's something that's clear even to people who have so little use for computers that "another login" would be one login too many to manage.
Apple have long been a proponent of software SIM, but they brought us that abomination of an activation process using iTunes (Go to operator store, sign contracts, get new iPhone and SIM, be unable to use said phone until you get to your own PC and install and run iTunes and give it your credit card details - WTF?) - is that what we'll have to put up with in future?
Re: NFC
It was the Secure Element part of the NFC spec that was to be housed in the SIM, not the entire antenna, so that isn't derailed by these new standards. With current processes, there's plenty of room on even Nokia's tiny design for a very complex piece of circuitry.
There are two problems with putting an antenna in a mini SIM. The first is pure physics, the second is more to do with how phones are constructed.
First, the size of coil needed for accurate NFC is only just small enough to fit on a mini SIM, and isn't really great once you take into account the distance between SIM and casework, or any additional protective cases on both the phone and the terminal. (As a guide, the coil radius should be around 1.414 times the read distance - as it deviates from this, sensitivity decreases).
However, the second problem is bigger: Even if you could get by with a smaller coil, you have to overcome the problem that many phone designs deliberately place the SIM behind RF shielding along with the rest of the baseband and general computing circuitry. This shielding, as well as the large battery that invariably lies between the SIM and the rear casing of the device, will further reduce the sensitivity of your antenna - quite possibly to the point of it not working at all.
Re: 4FF - will we need tweezers?
The first SIM formfactor was designed at a time when most "mobile" phones were like every other "mobile {noun}" in the English language: something housed in a vehicle. The credit-card sized SIM was no hardship then -- in fact it made it easier to insert the thing while pulling out of a garage.
Making it an ISO 7816 smart card also allowed SIMs to be cheaply sourced from multiple vendors, many of whom were already supplying smart car phone cards to the telephone operators (in the UK, BT was rather late to adopt chip cards for payphones, but these were widely used elsewhere from the early 1990s).
I seem to remember that my very first phone, a Nokia 1631, used a 1FF SIM, as did the first Motorola StarTAC GSM phones, but they were already in the minority: by the time I changed to a Nokia 6110 in late 1998, 2FF SIMs were ubiquitous.
MicroSIM is something I don't see the point of. It's not sufficiently smaller than 2FF to warrant all the messing around.
Re: Bait and Switch
"(mistake 2, particularly since most film downloads don't involve money changing hands in the first place) "
Not quite: You don't pay, but advertisers whose ads appear on the link and download sites do pay. Google takes their cut, the hosting company is given their cut, and the remainder goes to someone who may or may not be up to no good.
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