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Based on a few other articles that I've read, the owner of the phone would need to install an app that contains this rootkit first. Either users would need to sideload the application or someone would need to sneak an app containing it into the Android Marketplace, which is possible considering that developers have snuck apps with hidden tethering functionalities into the iPhone's App Store in the past.

Wow. Your fandroid response is pretty funny. Instead of pointing out an example from the Android Marketplace, downloaded by millions, which does exactly what you are talking about, you choose to go after a harmless iPhone app.

How does that Android Kool Aid taste, anyhow?

It all depends on who you are and what your deal is. Generally, if you've released anything since the e-book thing has blown up, then you dealt with it in your original contract, and you may see as much as 25% of the 70% that Amazon pays your publishing house coming back to you...Which isn't bad but isn't good either.

Some literary agents have started bypassing the publishing houses altogether which is good for the authors' e-book percentages, but bad if they want to sell paper books as well. On-demand printing may offset some of this.

If you did your deal 5 or 10 years ago, it's unlikely that you're going to get anywhere near as good a deal. A number of people who I've talked to, who've sold books that have sold more than 100,000 copies, but less than 1,000,000 copies...They're getting crap deals. Publishing houses make the RIAA look like a bunch of saints.

The original VentureBeat article claimed the wallpaper app had been downloaded 50k times. So where is the new figure from?

I'd rather not.

Does the Bible say something about windmills being evil? Not much going on in the southeast according to that GIF.

I can assure you the Bible has nothing literally against wind mills ... no more than anything else that requires a lot of science to build. I will, however, point out that oftentimes wind farms require state government subsidization to get started. I don't think Minnesota is any different from Texas (wow, never thought I'd say that) in the respect that the state government is mighty interested in magic cheap electricity to prime the economy. In fact, I don't have the numbers on hand but I'd bet most of the states in that GIF were taxing citizens on the logic that tax you pay now will make your energy cheaper in the future ... and also come up to snuff with regulations for renewable energy goals. You might agree with it, you might not. That's not what I'm trying to argue.

I will state, however, that the states in the Southeast are not particularly rich states, have a lower population to tax and their (predominantly Republican) governments tend to promise lower taxes. Well, you can write off wind subsidization then. Not to mention that Minnesota is hilariously flat and probably a better place to pour bases for wind mills than the everglades or Appalachians. Not too informed about the geography of those states but it helps that Minnesota is a carpenter's dream. I kinda gotta wonder what the hell South Dakota is doing but again, it's got a low population and probably has a slower economy. That's some prime prairie grassland I would imagine so if the federal government starts subsidizing alternative energy, I bet you'd see companies move in there and appeal to federal money.

It's not all perfect, either. The very wind farm I listed was installed by Kinitec out of California and their hydraulic lines froze last winter. Gotta prepare for tornados, ice and antarctic temps if you wanna play ball there.

Religion don't have much to do with it, look at Texas lead the way.

You are years behind. Pacemakers with remote connectivity began being installed in 1999 and DefCon addressed the issue back in '08.

http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/08/defcon-excuse-me-while-i-turn-off-your-pacemaker/

Welcome to a brave new world, one where your pacemaker can be disabled or instructed to deliver a fatal shock to your heart...remotely.

How's growth doing for RIM? I'll tell you: not well. Not well at all.

I wouldn't tell me that if i were you, as it would make you wrong. RIM is showing record growth, as is Apple.

I'm not saying that Apple and Android aren't threats -- there's a real possibility that RIM will find itself in trouble in the consumer market, if they don't start pushing their app world and their development platform. (The one that's free, and doesn't require you to build on a niche OS.)

Even if that happens, in the worst case - "they hang out as a niche player for business users". They're not going anywhere in the business market. Apple is making no significant gains there, nor is Android. Aside from that, the business market is good for a lot more than trying to sell your $1.99 oh-look-my-app-is-just-like-everyone-else's product.

And in the most likely scenario, an equilibrium will be reached. None of the big three is going anywhere; Android will make gains against both RIM and Apple, but I suspect those two will remain market leaders for a long time to come.

Which brings me back to my point: BB App World is a good, stable platform - it's getting new feature and updates, but you also get a clear picture of your installed user base distribution. You know which features you can use, and roughly how many people you'll be excluding if you *do* choose to use a given feature set. The requirements for entry into app world are also stable, and -- thus far -- not subject to random whims, parent company's marketing plans, or corporate censorship.

No, it's not the most glamorous platform to develop for. But it's a stable one, and a good app can bring significant income -- all the more so because in spite of the installed (and growing) user based, there's a shortage of both business and good consumer apps.

To be fair, it does appear to be related: Adobe built this app in Flash for Wired, intending to use the beta CS5's iPhone compilation. Once Apple banned that, they did a fairly hasty port, which appears to still use some sort of auto-compilation from InDesign.

Has anyone been following the Facebook case between Zuckerberg and the founders? I don't have a Facebook (I've always been turned off by the privacy policies of social networking websites), and I don't know all the facts in the case yet, but I found the situation very intriguing after reading this article:

http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/19/facebook-connectu-securities-fraud

The Harvard students suing Zuckerberg/Facebook are the founders. Zuckerberg clearly owed them a fiduciary duty, or at least full disclosure under the securities law Rule 10b(5). I'll try to dig up the text of the rule and sec. 10b(5) of the Securities & Exchange Act of 1934 later, but the text of it is something that I would expect attorneys -- especially Zuckerberg's attorneys -- to know by heart.

If Zuckerberg comes under 10(b)5, then he has big problems... bigger than the privacy complaints he is presently dealing with.

> Why does this strike me that this is more about a bunch of so-called, "developers," who are getting all huffy about not being able to easily whack out Whack-A-Mole and Fart apps for the i(Pad|Touch|Phone), than about a true fight for a "right" to develop as you please?

Huh? Those are the one kind of app that Apple isn't restricting. There are plenty of them. Most people are miffed that Apple allows these apps, but won't let you show political cartoons (unless you win a Pulitzer). And they didn't just restrict Flash, they restricted everything but Objective C and a few other languages. A bit of overkill, no?

Feel free to argue against what imaginary idiots are arguing for, though. It's a lot easier than actually addressing the real reasons why people don't like this. I don't like it because it's the latest in a long line of dick moves by Apple. I don't care if they're going after Adobe. I care that they're being dicks. That's why I don't do business with them.

Until we can use Google Apps on an Airplane, we'll be sticking with Office for Mac for the foreseeable future.

I thought that if you installed Google Gears then you could use things like Docs in an airplane. They've dropped support for it currently but I think that it was designed to store your documents and mail locally and then when you were "working offline" in the browser Gears would kick in and provide you the same experience and then sync up once you were back online.

I also personally believe that airlines will soon begin to offer in flight wi-fi but right now it's just a few where I live.

> You are free to use whatever you want, as long as the code is originally written in one of those languages and not ported from a different platform.

But the purpose of these restrictions is to force iPhone development to be exclusive or nearly so. Their technical arguments are mostly bogus (they have a few points, but those points have *nothing* to do with the reasons Apple is doing this). The whole reason they're doing this is to keep the wall up around their walled garden.

They don't want anybody developing applications without them being under their thumb. So no Flash and no emulators, otherwise people could make applications that weren't under Apple's control. Yes, they can use that control to give a good user experience (see all the quality iPhone fart software, or all that other great stuff), but they want it for purely financial reasons.

Insightful? Regardless of how you actually meant that and what you were attacking, I'll take the bait as though you were attacking Linux and/or Linux on iPads specifically.

I doubt Apple really wanted the iPad to be jailbroken in less than a day after release, nor do I think Apple expects the average computer user to jailbreak it even if certain individuals do figure out how to.

If you want Linux pre-installed on an iPad-like, or really simply a touch-screen computer, then you shouldn't be paying for some hardware and software combination and trying to jailbreak and unlock it and whatnot, you should be instead buying one with Linux pre-installed or a truly open computer which allows you to install whatever you want i.e. barebones.

If you foolishly actually expected to be able to easily install Linux or whatever you wanted to on an iPad, then you need to understand the difference between a "normal computer" i.e. "PC", and an "appliance". The difference is non-standardization at some point, locking you out on purpose. The iPad could function like a normal computer, the BIOS could look for and allow booting from a different device in order to install a new operating system like normal computers, but it has been artificially barred from doing so. The solution is to buy and support open devices which do give you this freedom, because having to install custom-tailored images to devices once, and if, you can get them unlocked is B.S.. Now, if part of the reason was due to having small embedded memory chips in the past, there's no excuse now days for that when you have tiny microSD cards with 16GBs on them, and there never was much of an excuse with Linux any way since you can have functional Linux environments (kernel and shell) as small as a few MBs, and fully graphical X environments for only what, 100 MBs? 50?

ever heard of the word "limited"? I never said it's completely useless. Obviously you can fingerpaint, and yes, I'm aware of brush and the New Yorker covers. I'm also aware thanks to Kantara (246758) of that story and the sentence "While Lee complained that it was “fun and frustrating at the same time cuz half the time yer going this would be so easy to do by hand or wacom [a pen tablet device],” he also said he “was digging the primitive feeling of using yer hands.”. Hint : a Wacom tablet's main control is a stylus (although they tend to support touch *too*)

“fun and frustrating at the same time cuz half the time yer going this would be so easy to do by hand or wacom [a pen tablet device],

The "real danger" isn't youthful indiscretion. It's profiling in a giant model by Government AND commercial interests in ways that will forever affect your ability to get a job, find insurance or even your ability to freely travel.

How do you build a panopticon, a prison for a society in which real power lies outside of government, in the hands of private commercial and financial interests? Honeypots. Google and Facebook and whatnot. Everyone is so anti-Government, like the stupid Reaganites. That's like being against a small-town cop. He's got the gun, alright - but he works for the man in the big house, at the edge of town. Hired. The enemy isn't Barney Fife - It's Old Man Potter.

How does this relate to Facebook?

You present a real, but minor threat, versus the real evil Facebook represent - along with the darkest nightmare of Google.

Remember, Watson, at IBM supplied tabulation equipment for improving the German Census in the 1930's. Technology was welcomed, and was going to modernize, to improve every German life. Except for a minority or two, of 11 million...

Cypher: "All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead."

Facebook has been gradually boosting its profile in Washington D.C. over the past year and is on the hunt for a second senior lobbyist to add to its office of four. Disclosures released a few days ago show that, on top of lobbying the usual suspects Internet companies reach out to like the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. senators and representatives, the fast-growing social network has also been busy deepening ties to government intelligence and homeland security agencies. ...
What's interesting about Facebook's lobbying in D.C. is what it spends money on despite its small size. It was the only consumer Internet company out of Google, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple to reach out to intelligence agencies last year, according to lobbying disclosure forms. It has lobbied the Office of the Director of National Intelligence -- an umbrella office founded in the wake of Sept. 11 that synthesizes intelligence from 17 agencies including the CIA and advises the President -- for the last three quarters on privacy and federal cyber-security policy. It has reached out to the Defense Intelligence Agency too.

Well, Facebook has always been an "op" http://cryptogon.com/?p=13749

Now, combine those observations with the next two pieces of information:
Virginia Tech Is Building an Artificial America in a Supercomputer

As many as 163 variables, mostly drawn from the U.S. Census, come into play for each synthetic American. Called EpiSimdemics, the model almost perfectly matches the demographic attributes of groups with at least 1500 people, according to Keith Bisset, a senior research associate who works on the simulation's software. The software generates fake people to populate real communities and assigns each person characteristics such as age, education level, and occupation to mirror local statistics derived from the most recent national census. In accordance with the data, some individuals are clustered into families, while others live alone.

Every synthetic household is assigned a real street address, based on land-use information from Navteq, a digital-mapping company. Using data from a business directory, each employed individual is matched to a specific job within a reasonable commute from the person's home. Similarly, actual schools, supermarkets, and shopping centers identified through Navteq's database are also linked to households based on their proximity to the home. When an artificial American goes grocery shopping, the simulation algorithm assigns probabilities that

Once this generation is over, I'm back to PC gaming. Fucking Sony.

They thought of that. What do you think "cloud computing" is about? Better "service"? Just substitute "lives", "energy charges", "spells", or what have you for the spelling errors in the cartoon - and then go see the dark cloud forming which will eventually absorb all gamers.

The evolution of technology is changing; whereas it once developed naturally to fill a need and so bettered the lives of humankind, it increasingly is developed solely to separate the prey from their money faster.

According to various internet sources (so take with a grain of salt):
Mark Zuckerberg's net worth: $2 billion. Made entirely from Facebook.
Twitter's net worth: $589 million.
Digg's net worth: $24.34 million.

Even if each individual datum is nearly worthless, the combined value is far from it. Do you think any of those companies would still be worth what they are if they're databases were irretrievably wiped?

It seems it's more like 1cm. Here are Prime Sense sensor (which reportedly licensed by Microsoft) specs:
Field of View (Horizontal, Vertical, Diagonal) 58 H, 40 V, 70 D
Depth image size VGA (640x480)
Spatial x/y resolution (@ 2m distance from sensor) 3mm
Depth z resolution (@ 2m distance from sensor) 1cm
Maximum image throughput (frame rate) 60fps
Operation range 0.8m - 3.5m
Color image size UXGA (1600x1200)
And here is tech description

Sony's motion tracking technology also reportedly has sub-millimeter accuracy, which could be better for games (along with the fact that controllers could have real buttons which would give you finer action control while moving).

I'm still dubious if either system really ends up being better for games than the Wii though. It's fun to flail around for a while, but the Wii is nice in that for really long gaming sessions you don't have to exhaust yourself with full-body motion.

Can a single bottle of soda decimate your company? Absolutely.

when I was a student engineer I worked at a division of Philips Electronics where no drinks were provided for free except water, there was a drink machine which wasn't too expensive (presumably to deter waste) - about 4 cents or 2 UKpence a cup. in one of the secure labs where only authorised people were allowed (high voltage and RF power) there was a clandestine kettle and tea/coffee kit, as kettles were not normally allowed due to "safety".
A lot of time was lost due to engineers interrupting each other to change money for the machines, and quite frequently whole groups of people would gather to chat for quite a while. One day when the company passed an important test of quality (ISO9000 IIRC) the machines were set to "free" for a week as a reward. I noticed the number of people chatting dropped and productivity must have risen, far in advance of the cost of the coffee.
I commented to a senior manager about that, and he somewhat agreed, but I don't think anything changed.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139250/Snow_Leopard_bug_deletes_all_user_data

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=031001SMSU6O

http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/27/apples-snow-leopard-may-stop-you-from-doing-your-job/

I can go on forever....

Unable or unwilling admins is more like it.

A side effect of buying into the so-simple a monkey could run it sales pitch from Microsoft: You end up with monkeys that can only stroke the big boss telling him or her to sit tight till the next free t-shirt^H^H^H^H^H^H^H service pack. As these monkeys are able to bullshit their way into training positions, they will do what any other weak or insecure monkey will do: bogart their already limited knowledge. Thus with each iteration you get progressively more ignorant monkeys, that have to rely and specialize more and more in social engineering and keeping the managers away from real it staff to keep their jobs. That same level of skill and knowledge permeate that one vendor's products and services. When the products or services get enough bad press, they just rename them. Enough of that though.

There are some good interviews about the DNS flaw, like the one at Black Hat. For the details of the 2008 flaw, not the x.509 cert flaw, Steve Friedl has An Illustrated Guide to the Kaminsky DNS Vulnerability. If you played with DNS during 2006 or 2007 you probably at least spotted symptoms of the flaw as it seemed to be in growing use.

Frustratingly, the solution has been there in front of us for many years and most systems have been more than capable of deploying DNSSEC, either as part of IPv4 or IPv6, for many years. Except for one vendor that can't. Take a guess which one. Take a guess how much it has cost us to let them hold back the net.

Sounds like Microsoft was doing this already to promote Bing, and that they've snagged O'Hare.

I'm curious tho - if they're picking up the tab for Boingo and so forth, are they also picking up the user registration information?

Absolute nonsense.

Steve Jobs got on a stage in front of an audience of millions and could not have made it any clearer.

"And boy have we patented it!"

Oh oh look at all the "tinfoil hat" loonies who think Apple might actually sue someone. NO WAI. That's just a crazy conspiracy theory. It's not like they go on earnings calls and promise their shareholders they will sue anyone who...

Oh wait. NM!

Well, maybe we're still crazy and paranoid. Why wouldn't Apple just license one of their UI crown jewels to a competing smartphone maker? I'm sure they do that all the time.

Google and/or HTC has licensed multitouch, right?

Right?

Funny, when you google that, all you get are articles where Google team members contradict this guy.

Here. And here.

But no, this is crazy. He must still be right. The Android team was just so goddamn busy that they couldn't possibly find the time to do multitouch. I mean, sure, they ship phones with multitouch hardware. And have a kernel with a device driver that supports it. That sort of thing is happening by accident all the time.

I mean, it's practically any phone where a lone hacker can reenable multitouch in the APIs _and_ get it working with a few of the apps in a few weekends.

Google was just so busy, who had a few weekends to spare?

After all, it's not like anyone really cares about multitouch... right?

Right?

Hello? Is this thing on?

The guy's ridiculous. Why defend them? Google was chicken on this, and they caved. They didn't want a feud with Apple - that's bad for business. Google could come out of safari. Out of the iphone. Oh the humanity. Maybe it was even a smart business decision. Who knows.

Now Palm, I respect.

Yeah, they intentionally violated Apple's patent. They probably sent Steve a free Pre just to taunt him.

Oh Apple and their sacred patents. We sometimes forget that by making any smartphone at all, you intentionally violate about 4,000 Palm patents. Doh!

Apple has been down that road, with Microsoft for instance. It ends up with a lot of fat 2nd, 3rd and 4th homes occupied by the children and wives and girlfriends of patent lawyers. And Palm has much less to lose in a feud with Apple. So, cest la vie.

I think the dipshit author is trying to channel this article: A Netscape moment for the commercial space industry? Which is actually quite a nice article, and if you were to remove Netscape from the title it might even be accurate.

Just don't expect long term (5+ year) success out of it.

It seems that he doesn't expect that long term success can be had anymore, for a single game. In a much more detailed report of another talk by Hilleman, the reporter says (I assume paraphrasing Hilleman):

Piracy and sales of used games have taken their toll. The latter means that game sales have no long tail; most sales happen in the first three to six weeks; thereafter, used game sales where publishers get no percentage of the cut take over. Burnout Paradise has twice as many users as it has games sold, a fact that is explained by the sales of used games and by game piracy.

There are ways, though! Shortly thereafter was a rather sickening line:

There are new categories like Webkinz, where you buy a plush toy and get a code where you can log in online to play games. For kids, "those games are like crack," Hilleman said. "Don't you wish you invented that?"

I've been working in games for 10 years, and I really, *really* wish I could agree with you.

Did you know that it's only been in the last few years that review scores and sales started to correlate? Until recently, there was virtually no connection between the review scores of your game and how well it sold, and it's still somewhat tenuous.
(see http://games.venturebeat.com/2009/05/29/does-game-quality-translate-into-better-financial-performance/ and http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/features/sales_vs_score.php for some backup on that.)

If I could show you a graph of marketing budget vs sales, you'd see that the correlation is much stronger. Making a great game doesn't immediately make people aware of it, and the public isn't the most sophisticated video game consumer.

Remember Daikatana? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana (I can't believe I'm posting a wp link in case people on Slashdot don't know what Daikatana is. No one click that.)) It was famous for being over-hyped and a total mess. It looked good once, but by launch anyone who knew about games knew that it would not be good. And it was still a top-10 seller for 3 months on the back of name recognition. Because the majority of game buyers don't know much about games (just like most industries). People had heard of the game, and they forgot that what they heard was a joke, so they bought it. Oh yeah, it had a big marketing budget too...

The reality is, sales (and therefore income) are better correlated to investment in advertising than the game itself. That pains me (as a game designer) deeply, but it's true. Things like this article used to peg my rage meter, but there's no point in getting upset at EA for realizing the way the market works.

Luckily, that's changing. The market is becoming more savvy, and quality is finally becoming important to publishers. I'm not spilling inside secrets when I say that WB is very excited about the high quality of Arkham Asylum. They knew it would be good, but you can never be sure that a game will be great, and their faces light up whenever they talk about it. It's very encouraging to me to see executives this excited about quality; that's new.

It's now common to hear people say things like "They're an 80+ developer" or "We're targetting 85+", which is also really encouraging. People used to talk about making good games, but now it's important that you be able to clearly establish that. It used to be only sales that mattered, but now people are more willing to accept that if you make quality games, the sales will come. That's huge, and you can expect to see it shift more resources from marketing to production, where they belong.

The accepted submission on this story was pretty good, although here's the one I wrote up, which has a few more relevant links. In particular, the first link, to an article by Alan Boyle on MSNBC, is probably the best summary of this I've seen so far:

NASA Begins Commercial Crew Initiative

NASA is using an initial $50M to 'stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate human spaceflight capabilities.' NASA originally planned to use $150M, which was blocked by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) until it was largely redirected to the ~$35B Ares rocket program based at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. The Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO) will reward multiple competitive contracts, with the goals of promoting job growth, lowering the cost of spaceflight, and helping reduce the post-Shuttle gap in US human spaceflight capability.

The ad network misbehavior that fueled this rumor was covered by VentureBeat in early June, when these networks were banned by Facebook.

From http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/06/30/firefox-35-takes-you-back-to-a-time-before-browser-add-ons/

Update: Mozillaâ(TM)s add-ons director, Mike Nguyen, emailed [Ha] to say that Google had a version of Gears ready that was compatible with Firefox 3.5, but it was delayed due to some âoelast-minute bugs.â There should be a new version out next week, he said

and many add-ons seem to be fine or can be forced to work with dev builds or Nighly Tester Tools https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6543

I'm still waiting on google gears, myself.

http://venturebeat.com/2007/01/15/ethanol-use-causing-corn-shortages-spiking-price-price-of-tortillas/

Well, I haven't done the direct research myself, I just know what I've read.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-07-10-ethanol-study_x.htm

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119258870811261613.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/business/05ethanol.html
http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/20947/Biotech_to_Ease_EthanolRelated_Corn_Shortage.html

And to further your argument (again, I'm more interested in the truth than being right)
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/may/10/ethanol-as-cause-of-food-crisis-flat-out-wrong/
http://www.gminsidenews.com/forums/f81/definitive-proof-ethanol-not-creating-food-corn-shortage-61448/

nyone have anecdotes for green technology IP that originates in the U.S.?

Efficient polymer solar cells UCLA

Angle-independent anti-reflective coating for solar cells RPI

Printed solar cells Semiprius

Concentrating photovoltaic technology Greenvolts

Shallow drilling geothermal GroundSource Geothermal

Check your facts. Those numbers are large but not so much compared to their revenue streams.

Microsoft earned a lot of money last year, almost 16 billion in the fourth quarter alone. The 20 billion it has in cash then represents just over one fiscal quarter of revenues.

That's not exactly "weathering a recession" kind of money.

Hmm, come to think of it, I might know something about this. But yeah, I'd get in big trouble if I leaked any of it. I can point out that we've only owned the remnants of Montalvo for a few months, which is way too soon for the kind of they-wrecked-my-product rant that TheSunbeam describes.

This article is instructive on the dangers of entering the x86 market based only on a cool idea:

http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/23/post-mortem-the-real-story-of-how-chip-startup-montalvo-went-down-in-flames/

You're so right. Not to mention that the market is fiercely competitive, and pulls in 6 figures in a week. Whodathunkit?

It doesn't surprise anyone but you'd think they could have learned a lesson from Gabe Newell:

http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/18/valves-gabe-newell-kicks-off-dice-summit-with-digital-downloading-talk/

You apparently missed this part of my post:"It also stems from the "save every last penny" attitude that has our landfills full of cheap Chinese junk.". Which fits this case to a T. The PHBs at MSFT used substandard cooling on the 360 and they knew about the problems before launch, and simply decided not to spend the time and money.

This is EXACTLY the short term, profit above the customer kind of thinking I was speaking of. To save some bucks and get to the market quicker MSFT has forever tarnished this generation Xbox and there is no telling how many sales it has cost them from wary consumers. And of course when the Xbox 720 comes out(if they even bother to make another console. Ballmer has had that company bouncing from one idea to the next like the corp has ADHD) and MSFT no longer supports it you will see countless 360s end up in the dump. I wonder how many have already made it into the trash from customers getting sick of dealing with the thing?

This kind of thinking has to stop. And I know I'll probably be unpopular with the greens for saying this, but we need to bring back the old solder. The new solder is frankly shit and will cost us more damage in the long run due to dead electronics than simply coming up with a responsible reclamation plan. Of course the greens don't realize they are playing right into the corporation's plans. As long as the new solder lasts just past the warranty they are fine with it, as they will get to sell you more tech crap to replace the garbage they are putting out. My mom's old DVD player with the old solder lasted nearly a decade before the motor finally gave out. With the new solder? She has gone through 3 in 3 years. They are just disposable crap. If we don't change this we are ALL going to be buried in disposable tech crap.

Normally, I'd agree that this makes perfect sense... but video games are certainly a luxury sale that's very similar to music, and sales actually went UP a reported 18% as of last October (reference: http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/13/in-the-middle-of-economic-storm-us-video-game-sales-grew-18-percent-in-october/).

You'd think video game sales would suffer even more than music sales with the economic woes, since they cost $50 - $60 a purchase compared to an album's $12 - $20 sticker price.

Since this study points to last year, it's in the same time frame as the video game analysis.

Sorry to go off-topic, but

Always Innovating's Touch Book Might interest you. It is coming out soon. It's a netbook who's screen seperates from it's keyboard (like the HP TC1100). It will be ARM based, lots of battery life (10-15 hours), etc. If I recall correctly, the price point will also be around $200. Sounds right up your alley.

Wasn't this done? answers.com, askjeeves.com (now ask.com)

the answer to your question is yes.

There's also the pathetic Powerset, which was sold to microsoft for 100 million bucks. Very pleasing see ms burning money on such hyped shit.

Even if that wasn't the case this device and OS was announced Jan. 8th 2009 at CES.

Perhaps this will help you understand a little about what Microsoft's afraid of.

And if you look at news from 2003 or 2004, and then fast forward to 2008 you need not be too good at math to realize that Microsoft just ain't what they used to be.

While they may have only recently published the article, people in bioinformatics have been going crazy about Pacific Biosciences for at least a year.

I recently went to a series of talks on Next Generation Sequencing, and there was an interesting chart that showed that when you factor in sequencing cost, read length, and accuracy, high throughput sequencing is actually *outperforming* Moore's law by a factor of 5 or so!

Regarding the error rate, just a few years ago, 454 had error rates of almost 5% but with redundancy it became negligible. Since then, error rates have gone down dramatically.

Also, an Anonymous Coward up there is wrong -- (0.993)^3 is *less* than 0.993. It should be (1 - 0.993) vs. (1 - 0.993)^3. I don't know why it's been modded to informative. Check your math!!

Here's an article from earlier this year that explains a lot of the problems. The article interviews a tester who worked at Microsoft and had some good first hand knowledge of what went wrong.

Hope that helps.

Microsoft closes the quarter with less cash than Apple-10/28/2008

They don't have Microsoft's kind of money, they had MORE of it.

Okay: seriously? You and five guys you know haven't had problems, so therefore his opinion is skewed because he reads Slashdot?

My anecdote: My second unit in two years just burned out. I keep it on a shelf elevated about two feet from the floor, with little stone coasters under its feet to give it a little extra elevation.

The actual data: scary. And that was in 2007.

(That said, I've long since given up PC gaming, with the exception of little confections like the Penny Arcade games.)

This winning flight is welcome good news at a time when many have concerns about a down-turn in commercial space and Obama, the likely next President of the United States has recently said of such prizes, "When John F. Kennedy decided that we were going to put a man on the moon, he didn't put a bounty out for some rocket scientist to win â" he put the full resources of the United States government behind the project..."

Read this retard. Stop sucking on Steve Job's cock you apple fanboi cunt.

How is this bad publicity?

THIS is bad publicity: http://venturebeat.com/2008/09/05/xbox-360-defects-an-inside-history-of-microsofts-video-game-console-woes/

The Jerry Seinfeld ad just puts them in the spotlight again. With a kind of strange set-up ("A commercial about nothing"), but it works for what they intended - keep MS in the public eye. And associate them with Churros and "we have a sense of humor".