I wonder how the recently-acquired Samsung mindshare will affect this particular iPhone's sales. I imagine the die hard fans will purchase the latest version with an increased sense that Apple is the righteous"original" and the best way to spend money on a phone, like always, while there will be a minority who have taken a look at the Samsung Galaxy S2 or even the S3 and would actually pause to do a side-by-side comparison. I hope that the latter category of consumer increases and dents iPhone sales.
What about that part where Apple basically looked at the pull-down notifications in Android and just copied it in iOS 5? Oh wait, OUR soldiers are freedom fighters, but THEIRS are despicable terrararists, right?
If you look at the styling of the pull-down notifications on iOS and Android, they actually look different. ICS pull downs looks significantly different than iOS. However, if you google images of samsung galaxy products, you'll see that many of their interfaces are identical.
For example, take a look at the samsung galaxy keyboard, the buttons & layout are identical to the iphone, why would you throw away the Android keyboard and replace it with something that looks identical to the iphone? The galaxy dock connector is also identical to the iphone, so much that one can actually plug the samsung connector into an iphone. Personally, I like the usb connectors better -- they're more versatile and I don't need to carry a bunch of specialized cables around, but samsung would rather copy apple than pick a sane default.
In addition, to deal with the issue that programs others than vi may require the use of arrow keys, I use Autohotkey on Windows to map Caps Lock + hjkl to the arrow keys! Thus, both in vi and outside(, in Word, say), I just use Caps Lock + hjkl to navigate. Thus, I never have to move my hand away from the "home" position to use the arrow keys.
BTW, outsourcing isn't just about call centres. Hinglish may not be a hindrance. For example, the IT arm of the NYC-based hedge fund I used to work for now pays $40k USD per Indian employee (in Indian Rupees, of course, I just converted the number back to USD) or more, and gets top-notch developers to work for them. The same skills would cost $80k in the US, and probably > $100k in NYC (very conservative estimates).
Hinglish may not be English, but C++ is C++, algorithms are algorithms, intelligence is intelligence, but INR is not USD. Outsourcing is (quasi-)arbitrage!
IMHO, with a billion people, I believe that BOTH a) your generalization is true, i.e., the majority is disinterested AND b) not relevant w.r.t. Olympic medal-winning potential : it is enough for a small minority to be interested in sport / fitness & glory to make the cut for the olympics. I believe that the 80/20 rule applies, and is actually more of a 95/5 rule in most societies and most achievements : 5% of the population account for the glory (, the rest just wake the flag and feel proud, conveniently forgetting that one cannot be proud of what one did not achieve personally).
I suspect you might find a similar proportion of everday Chinese equally disinterested in "poses" (not sure, just speculation).
I believe that the core reason is our usual friend, corruption and red tape. It's not just sports; in general, the meritocratic lose out because wherever there is an opportunity in India, whatever be the form of opportunity. That includes what is rightfully yours, such as welfare handouts, your passport, etc; An Indian's everyday life consists of jumping through hoops to get basic things done.
There certainly is some 95/5 rule, or probably a 999/1 rule. But you need to apply the 999/1 rule to the people actually interested in going for the gold. I.e., in the US that might be 0.001 x 25% whereas in India it might be closer to 0.001 x 5%.
My issue with theories like corruption/red tape/etc is that India is not unique in this regard. India is pretty bad with corruption, but Jamaica is too. Yet Jamaica tends to perform pretty well - running is popular there. You can find plenty of corrupt and poor countries that outperform India, particularly if you adjust for population.
China is a special case since the government basically forces people to shoot for Olympic gold in marginal sports (e.g., discus, javelin) and trains them from early ages to do so. They also use eugenics to breed top athletes (Yao Ming is one famous result of this), and similar things.
> China is a special case since the government basically forces people to shoot for Olympic gold in marginal sports
This is a common misconception. No one is "forced" to participate in the Olympics in China. Poor parents send their children to Olympic trainers because if their children do well, they'll get to go to college for free and have a good, middle-class job.
OP wrote in another message that "her account got temporarily disabled within a short time of her posting that comment". Is that possible for non-Facebook employees to effect somehow? If not, then it was one of your colleagues, not a troll.
As an Indian, I'd like to put in a word about spirituality and "seeking" : getting trapped by the spiritual tourism hawkers is the worst way to go about it. Please do not just land up and ask, "So where is the latest and greatest ashram?". You'll probably get scammed, or worse, physically or mentally abused. Do not underestimate the charisma and level of brainwashing techniques that fake gurus are capable of. Even level-headed people can be made to "give up this wretched materiality" (i.e., write away their property to the ashram) after a few sessions of strange chemicals in your food, and some effective brainwashing / hypnotic sessions.
Before coming to India, please have an exact idea of the particular person / people (guru, gurus, enlightened people, etc;) you are going to meet, what you seek from them, etc; Please spend time researching the person you want to meet on the Internet, YouTube, etc; Please try to have Indian friends, or just register with someone who will check up on you regularly (ideally a local, or at least by phone) who can help as an emergency contact in case of any disaster (malaria, hypnotised by the scammer-guru, etc;).
It is a sad fact that this country has some gems of philosophers, but is equally filled with scammers and worse.
Lastly, a personal opinion : just read Jiddu Krishnamurthi and think for yourself, you don't need a harrowing India trip! :-)
Magical concepts from science fiction, sorry theoretical concepts from educated guesses based on current (incomplete, unproven, un-seen) understandings of the universe. If such things existed intelligent life would have used them to reach us.
"If such things existed intelligent life would have used them to reach us."
For what reason would we be a magnet for everything out there to have to come visit us (the assumption being that if they don't visit us it can't be possible because we are somehow too important to ignore)? It's a rather flawed basis for an argument.
Our communications out don't speed up getting to them because their ability to get to us has. There is no reason to assume anyone knows we exist yet.
The assumption is if you have a FTL civilization you vary quickly grow to the point where you go just abut everywhere you can reach with FTL travel, unless something else was already there to defend it. Extinction becomes really hard when individuals are being sent out faster than just about anything that could catch them.
Maybe they wouldn't be interested in us. Certainly there are some people here on this Earth that I wouldn't want to meet (for instance some of my relatives).
They have may be a very correct prediction that we are a parasite-like race in terms of spiritual advancement and do not live in harmony with our provided environment, and thus, it is best to not touch us till we learn to not kill everything we touch for our own pleasure.
There may be many reasons why an alien race does not automatically make contact, some of which are actually unknown to us. If you have difficulty swallowing the "some things can be unknown to us" thought, believe it or not, you have an ego problem.
Am I the only one who is as excited about new releases of Eclipse as Apple fans are about new Apple products?
I just love the combination of the static typing and huge class library of Java and the amazing tooling that Eclipse delivers. I know, I know, oh, the verbosity. JDK8's lambdas look quite sweet, and should help a lot with that. http://openjdk.java.net/projects/lambda/
Nope, I'm always there on day 1 also :D. They always do such a great job, I'm always around poking installing/trying out new enhancements and sub projects for at least a week.
I've heard a lot about IntelliJ, but I suppose I'm too used to Eclipse at this point. Eclipse's market (http://marketplace.eclipse.org/) is another big draw : so many nice toys in there! It elevates Eclipse to Emacs terrority : "It's not just an editor, it's more like an operating system!" :-)
I used to feel identically about Eclipse but then I gave IntelliJ a try for a week and once I got past the initial learning curve it blew me away, and I've been using it since.
It's ironic how Java was created by Lisp gurus, yet it only gets lambdas 16 years after its creation while Lisp had them all along! Aspects (or Advices as called by Lisp) are another example :)
I suppose you use only "the good parts" of Scala, but if one considers the entirety of it, it feels like a kitchen sink, "Perl for the JVM : can you read it one week later?", to put it in one way. For example, can you comprehend a program written using Scalaz. (I remain aware that this could be MY issue, i.e., I may be too dumb to grok advanced stuff. I deeply regret that I do not understand Scalaz Promises enough to use it, for example, because it solves a very real problem that has bugged the design of my systems from many years (non-composability of asynchronously executing tasks)).
