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This guy could use a drink!

Where have you been?

Round, phft. That's 2 dimensional thinking. Now a spherical monitor,...where's Tim Cook when you need him?

I'm still waiting for the cylindrical display.

There used to be a pacman game that ran in excel.
http://technabob.com/blog/2008...
http://www1.plala.or.jp/chikad...
Not sure if it still works.

Probably many other excel games if you look around.

upgrade the motherboard.

Unless the animation in this game looks _exactly_ the same

Define '_exactly_'.

Do the back of a Samsung Galaxy S and an iPhone 4 look '_exactly_' the same?
http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/samsung_galaxy_s_vs_iphone_back.jpg

The jury certainly believed it did. Yet there's also obvious differences.

So if I make a page turn with obvious differences, but that still looks sort of similar (and let's face it, out of the few reasonable ways a 1-page page turn can be shown that at least somewhat mimics real life page turns, a great many of them will easily end up looking similar), why wouldn't I be faced with a citation of this design patent?
Even if Apple doesn't come after me, who's to say some other entity that holds a design patent on another page turn animation wouldn't?
That's one of the reasons this design patent - and, really, any design patent on page turns by any other company - is lambasted. Not because people want to make an animation that is '_exactly_' like it, but because '_exactly_' is not defined, variants may also be covered by design patents, and eventually you're left with making a page turn animation that actually more closely resembles crumbling the page and setting it on fire at the same time just to evade all the design patents, leaving the end-user wondering just wtf is going on when they turn pages.

THe lock screen page turn on an Acer Liquid MT can be made to look extremely similar to the design patent in question here. It requires a very particular swipe motion (the page curl is dynamically generated based on touch position), but it can be done. Should Acer have to exclude a particular array of (similar) touch positions so as to prevent the end-user from causing infringement?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqK0vLIsHuM#t=130s

imho, once you have a limited animation algorithm (and I'd say a 2-parameter input algorithm is limited), any and all results produced by inputs to that algorithm should never be able to be considered for a design patent.
Of course then the question becomes when an algorithm is considered limited, etc.

OS X Maru is way nicer

Are you seriously trying to compare this and say it's on par with this?

Or that this is even in the same ballpark as this?

But maybe pictures don't spell it clearly enough. The top-of-the-line Quadrocopter from the site you linked has a flight time of ~20 minutes, a payload of 5 pounds, and a range of 500 meters. The Global Hawk and Predator measure flight time in hours and days, and can carry payloads in thousands of pounds and cover 10s of thousands of square miles. So yeah, conceptually we can call a lot of things "drones," but there are several orders of magnitude between what you or I can build regardless of money, and what the Air Force has. If the cops want to use a beefed up Quadrocopter, or some other variant, I couldn't care less. When they want to start deploying real drones over civilian populations, they can fuck right off.

Oh, and final thought, on your C4 strawman: I could strap explosives to a freaking frisbee. Doesn't put little disks o' plastic in the same category as Military Grade drones, nor does it improve the standing of your $10,000 hobby-copter. Admittedly a pretty sweet hobby-copter, as those things go ... but still, just a toy.

http://technabob.com/blog/2008/07/13/das-keyboard-no-letters-faster-typing/

You are, of course, severely late to the party; a lot of interesting discussion on this point happened way back in August. Here's the Slashdot conversation from then. I believe the consensus is that since this is Blizzard and not EA, no boycott like the one that marred Spore's release will transpire, and the loss of flexibility will simply be accepted.

Another controversy from about the same time (which didn't receive Slashdot attention) is that all gameplay-altering modifications are banned in D3, a somewhat harsher stance than the one Blizzard took with WoW interface mods. There has been some concern that DarkD3, a mod that diminishes the game's 'painted' look to make it clearer and crisper graphics may be cause for a ban, but so far the word is "probably not".

Everyone knows it was created in Aperature Labs created them. http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/plush_glados_potato.jpg

You can buy peripherals for the PS3 and 360 (and others) that allow M+K on games that support the controller only. There is even a PS3 controller emulator that you can use on a Linux PC that allows you to use your PC's M+K on the PS3 via bluetooth.

Easy to make your own using two pairs of 3d glasses: http://technabob.com/blog/2011/02/10/turn-3d-glasses-into-2d-glasses-how/

If everybody in the future plans on selling micro-games with abysmal graphics, then maybe. There's really not that many situations that I can see where developing for a web browser would be more advantageous than developing a game for a native OS architecture, whether it be for a console (xbox, PS3, etc.) or computer (Mac, Windows, etc.). Even for mobile devices, if you design for a browser, what does that leave you with? Native application SDKs exist for android, iOS, and the like, which I'm sure provide better performance capabilities for rendering and whatnot than Flash or something yet-to-be-developed. That leaves ChromeOS, which I assume will use HTML5 or Flash. But, if the day it comes, it would be glorious to see Black Ops playing in a browser tab. Call me skeptical, but I just don't see this really make a dent in the hardcore-gaming market.

Anecdotal evidence: I have been able to recover data from a dieing HDD. Of course, when the magnetic head is scratching the surface of the drive, there's not much to be done about it except to open it up for the free magnet and new potential clock

You mean the fact that you get less storage on an HTC Evo (8 GB vs 16 GB on the iPhone 4) for the same price of $299? That's assuming you send in the $100 dollar 'rebate' and a 2 year commitment.

http://technabob.com/blog/2010/05/12/htc-evo-4g-price-release-date-specs/

I wish that movies/music/software "sharing" was separated from movie/music/software counterfeiting and fake medicine and goods of course, but either way the American public needs to be protected from those threats.

They used to be. It used to be that the entire point of a trademark is to make sure customers got what they ordered. And such things make sense and are -beneficial- to customers. Imagine the confusion if we had 5 different products known as the "Nintendo Wii" and a parent heard their kid wanting a Nintendo Wii so they go in and ask for a Nintendo Wii and they get http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/miwi_wii_knock_off.jpg instead. With trademarks if it says Nintendo Wii it (should) be a Nintendo Wii.

Patents also used to be beneficial to the public. It used to be that guilds would control trade and monopolize the market effectively with "trade secrets" that would stay in the guild. Patents helped change this because the guild would disclose information while granted a temporary monopoly to use it (after all, someone who left one shop could have taken the trade secret to another and it would have been legal) and the public would get valuable information. Unfortunately, we've gone beyond that to theoretical, common-knowledge patents that prevent work-arounds. It used to be that if Joe Inc. had a patent on, say, a black and white CRT monitor, you could create a color CRT monitor and compete with Joe Inc. However, now, Joe Inc. would hold a patent on the ability to make CRT displays work, thus cutting out access to any work-arounds.

Copyright was also seen as a compromise, especially when it was sane. The author would be compensated for his work, the public wasn't offended (after all, no one was stopping hand-written copies, it was only if you owned a printing press that it mattered) and it gave the work to the public in a timely manner. However, ironically the company who depends the most on the public domain (Disney) has lobbied for effectively infinite copyright that harms the artist and the public.

Counterfeit goods should not be judged on IP issues (after all, if there was an iPhone clone that -really was- just like an iPhone no one is being harmed it simply increases competition for Apple) but rather for fraud. Quite honestly, I'd like to see a few of the Chinese knockoff phones and MP3 players appear in stores for disposable, feature-filled items.

Better error.

If you prefer the ergonomically researched original XBox controller, someone hacked one into a 360 wireless version

http://technabob.com/blog/2007/09/18/xbox-controller-swallows-xbox-360-controller/

Really, the controller that ships with the console needs to be sized so most people can use it. Even Microsoft ended up agreeing and shrank the controller. You can always find 3rd party controllers for the people with oddball like you.

The later controllers are fine, although I may still prefer the PS2/PS3 style. They shrank the XBox1 controllers a short while after introducing the XBox.

http://technabob.com/blog/2007/09/18/xbox-controller-swallows-xbox-360-controller/

You could always use it as for a casemod

You're just saying that because I'm blue...

You think that's bad... The jerk down the street who is half black, half white thinks he's all that. Here is a picture of him (on the left, me on the right). Look at that smug expression. What a prick. Just like the rest of his kind.

Everyone knows that my people, those of us who are half white, half black are the superior ones!

The Windows BSOD is the equivalent of a kernel panic, i.e. it's an unrecoverable error detected by the kernel. In XP and 2003 the default setting is to automatically reboot (possibly after dumping a contents of kernel memory) so one doesn't normally see it for any length of time. It looks like this (or if you'd prefer, like this).

The "blank blue screen" while the system is starting up or logging in isn't normally referred to as a "Blue Screen of Death", it's just a crappy buggy OS hanging in a way which makes it dang difficult to identify what the actual problem is.

The William Gates building...

I think I know who is really to blame for the cracked leaky building of death

Sorry, I'm a Linux lover and all, but the sheer volume of crap in your post forces me to respond. I'll take a few choice tidbits:

Microsoft knows that they have peaked in the software industry, and they are desperately seeking a way to continue their unprecedented growth.

Except that it IS precedented by 20 years of.... growth!

We all know it's not going to happen; most of Microsoft's hardware products (aside from keyboards, joysticks, and mice) have been duds in the marketplace.

Eh, like the XBox? An "I'm feeling lucky" searching for "XBOX sales wii" returns this website - and even if the sales figures are a few months old, they're nothing to shake a stick at.

They tried search engines and failed miserably, even though the MSIE default page was MSN.

I have a tough time calling the 4th most popular website in the United States a "miserable failure". No, they aren't FIRST, but that's a long way from some of the worst.


I think the Novell deal is something different though. I think that they want to focus more on services and become a solutions provider like IBM did, so that way no matter WHAT the techology choice is, Microsoft still get at least a slice of the pie, and then other forces at Microsoft who are desperate to maintain their positions and power at Microsoft are using this development to spread anti-Linux FUD.

Wow! Something insightful! No, not really. It's been industry mantra for at least 5-10 years: "SERVICES! SERVICES! SERVICES!". They're a tad late to the game, but they certainly aren't going the way of DEC.

Everything above may be totally off base, but really, I do think that these moves are out of desperation because they see the strength of their stock eroding very quickly.

Hmmm. Up by almost 50% in the last year. Yep. Definite erosion. They're probably getting ready to jump out of the window.

Your post is actually very reminiscent of another post I've seen from time to time here on slashdork. It usually starts like this: "It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying..."