Newsstand: November 23, 2009
The Making of a Medley
The Daily Photoist: November 23, 2009
Urban Planner: November 23, 2009
Apple unveils the iPhone. Entire bunches of interwebs go nuts over possibilities created by what is, when you get right down to it, just another fancy cellphone. Seriously, this isn't the iPod. This isn't a new class of product. This is at best a slight improvement on existing things to which we already had access. The iPhone will not do your hair, manage your diet or make you generally sexier. (Okay, it might make you sexier to technology fetishists.)
Opposition MPs criticize the Tories for refusing to release Wajid Khan's report on the Middle East. Khan promised that the report would be open to all, but Stephen Harper says that releasing the report would make Khan a pundit as opposed to a foreign policy adviser. When asked about his campaign pledge of a transparent and open government, Harper replied "well, I think the only thing to say to that is that I - OH MY GOD IT'S A MOOSE" and then ran away when everybody turned to look for the moose.
Lynn Johnston isn't going to retire and stop For Better Or For Worse. Instead, she's just going to stop aging the family in real-time, thus removing the gimmick which made the strip unique, and steadily killing off everybody's interest in it that way. Devious, Lynn Johnston! Devious!
Commission finds that the final outbreaks of SARS were not preventable, but more could have been done to protect health care workers. The report notes a number of systemic flaws in Ontario's healthcare structure, but also pointed out that Vancouver was simply luckier than Toronto in a number of respects. Damn lucky left-coast hippies!
Don't flush your dental floss! Because it is clogging up Toronto's waste-water treatment plants and pumping stations! (Seriously, this story is that rarity: it is both a public service story and inexplicably hilarious.)
In sports news, the Hurricanes smacked the Leafs last night.
And finally, if anybody wanted to perhaps nominate Torontoist in the 2007 Bloggies, we'd be ever so grateful. We would even buy everybody punch and pie. (Disclaimer: Punch and pie offer good only until December 7th, 2005.)
Image via Apple.
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I can only imagine how unpleasant a task it must be to disassemble a giant sewage pump on a weekly basis to remove clumps of floss bound to sewage waste.
And to think, I've always flushed my floss, not realizing it was a problem... Thanks Torontoist! :)
When I watched the demos of the iPhone on Apple's site, I knew I wanted one. When I watched the iPhone introduction clip from Steve Jobs' keynote, I knew I had to have one.
I wouldn't likely use the web browsing and it looks a bit slow, but man, it's sexsay. Can you imagine that paired with Toronto Hydro's city-wide wireless internet with no email push fees (like the Blackberry)? It would probably be Rogers that gets it, though (GSM), and they'll lock that shit up tight, especially the charges for the extra "percieved value" of non-voice data.
Canadians should hold our breaths, though. The U.S. won't even get FCC approval for another half year, and then it has to get approval here, and then the wireless carrier has to extensively test it on their network, then market it and obtain sufficient inventory across the country. We don't even have the massively popular Sidekick 3 yet, which was released six months ago in the U.S.
I always flush my floss too, and now I guess I'll have to stop. I hate putting it in the garbage can because it's like a whole procedure. Holding the floss over the garbage can, I feel like those machines where the claw hovers over the stuffed animals to find the right spot before dropping down. Perhaps I should just get a bigger trash can in the bathroom.
On a side note of useless trivia, you know your breath smells if you smell the floss and it stinks. [Shudder] And always brush your tongue.
I always flush my floss too, and now I guess I'll have to stop. I hate putting it in the garbage can because it's like a whole procedure. Holding the floss over the garbage can, I feel like those machines where the claw hovers over the stuffed animals to find the right spot before dropping down. Perhaps I should just get a bigger trash can in the bathroom.
On a side note of useless trivia, you know your breath smells if you smell the floss and it stinks. [Shudder] And always brush your tongue.
Dear Marc: GSM? GPRS? EDGE? Forget all that! This year, we're rolling out 3G, which is supposed to rock the proverbial block.
I've never flushed my floss, but I had no idea that it didn't decompose until I read that article. I always assumed it did. Boo.
why would you ever flush floss? i find that very odd... i mean, do you spit your toothpaste in the toilet too?
Downside of the iPhone, via Engadget:
First party software only - Apple decides what you can add.
No 3G.
No over the air iTunes Store downloads or WiFi syncing to your host machine.
No expandable memory.
No removable battery.
No Exchange or Office support.
Doesn't ComWave own the trademark on the iPhone? Part of me really likes it, but I hate Rogers so if that's who ends up getting it, I'll have to pass. Not to mention: $600 plus a 2 year contract!
Yeah, I'm a little shocked by all you floss-flushers too. I mean, only pee and poo and tp go down there...vomit maybe.....but nothing else.
What else do people flush?
(acursed server!)
Doesn't Comwave hold the trademark on the name iPhone?
$600(US!) plus a 2 year contract? Forget about it. If they go with Rogers, double forget about it.
I flush everything from floss to old light bulbs.
I didn't think flushing floss was that weird, since I hate having in the trash can. It always hangs over the edge and sticks in there when dumping it, etc. I flush gum sometimes when I don't just swallow it.
Anne: I don't spit my toothpaste in the toilet, but then again, I also don't leave my floss in the sink! ;-)
Speaking of flushing, wet wipes for an extra swipe after wiping with paper will change your life. I didn't believe someone when they told me until I started using them and now I'm hooked. Shoppers and Cottonelle make them. Highly recommended.
Danielle, your comment forced me to stifle a large laugh at my desk. It was so frank and matter-of-fact.
As for the iPhone, the announcement made me sad that I just signed a three year contract on my phone. But then I realized that Marc is right, and it will be a long time before it hits Canada. Maybe by that time I will be out of contract and have saved up enough pennies to buy an iPhone. I'll be happy if the people who are saying the OSX on the phone might convince non-Mac computer users to switch from PCs are right.
Or just dampen the toilet paper with some water. Not too much though, or it disintegrates.
A lot of people seem to treat their toilets as second garbage cans.
Actually, I just looked into it, and apparently we're getting HSDPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSDPA), which is supposed to be like 3G and a half...
As far as mobile web browsing is concerned, actually, the iPhone does appear to be a substantially innovative product... not just a "slight improvement".
It's an iPod that's better than a nano or 5G iPod /w video in terms of features (if not storage size in the latter case) and a semi-smart phone that's apparently leaps and bounds more usable than any competitor.
I'm not looking for a "new class of product". I want a phone with web browsing and multimedia capabilities that don't suck. This oughtta fit the bill nicely, and for the same price as my old nano and old-ish motorola flip phone combined but with more memory and way more features.
But doesn't HSDPA run on CDMA cell networks, gather than GSM?
"The HS-DSCH channel does away with two basic features of other W-CDMA channels - the variable spreading factor and fast power control - and instead uses
1. Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC),
2. fast packet scheduling at the Node B (Base Station) and
3. fast retransmissions from Node B (known as HARQ-Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request)
to deliver the improved downlink performance. The concept of "incremental redundancy" is used in HARQ, where retransmissions contain different codings of the user data, relative to the original transmission. When a corrupted packet is received, the user device saves it, and combines it with subsequent retransmissions, to formulate an error-free packet as quickly and efficiently as possible. Even if the retransmitted packet(s) is itself corrupted, the combination of the sum of the errored transmissions can yield an error-free packet."
What that means is anyones guess. I work in A/R...
Greg: HSDPA is a 3G standard, GSM and CDMA are 2G issues. 3G implies a new network, none of the 3G standards can use a GSM derived radio interface, once you get to 3G it's all stuff that follows on from CDMA, mostly W-CDMA.
Bell is deplying EVDO as their 3G and it's already out there in the big cities and Fort McNowhere. I assume the expectation is Rogers will go HSDPA but it's behind.
Having only GSM/EDGE or GSM/GPRS only is this thing's achilles heel. Same as the Pearl. Now a version with a real 3G network? That could be interesting.
We're on the cusp of a sea change, within a decade, there won't be PC's or Macs as anything but relics or special purpose machines for business, Joesephine Average internet user will exclusively use something handheld and networked as their exclusive computing access.
well the ipod wasn't a totally new thing--apple just made the portable digital music player more user friendly and ubiquitous (and yes, sexy), which it probably intends to do with iphone.
Brian is right, ipod wasn't entirely new. But at least the name was original. iPhone? What kind of a name is that? Like I've mentioned elsewhere, they didn't call it the "iMp3 Player", so why "iPhone"??
It seems very uncreative, along with the phone. No keys, just a screen? Give it a few months and everyone will have it.
In regards to chester pape's comment about handhelds replacing personal home computers, he doesn't seem to notice that the rising popularity of gaming, video editing (think youtube), digital photography. All these require large hard drives, high resolution screens, fast processors (less so for photography). I think that at best, big computer cases will become a thing of the past (being replaced by laptops).