Ever considered that not everybody wants to play online?
Believe it or not, there are a lot of people out there that don't have their Core 360 hooked up to broadband, that aren't particularly interested in playing last-generation games (or perhaps they already own an Xbox 1), but who are interested in saving $100. Why should they be required to scrape up 30% more for a HDD they don't care about?
It's called "market choice", and it's generally held to be a good thing. But since PS3 fans apparently prefer "hardware potential" even over playing games, you're having trouble seeing the point of view of those who can't afford that luxury.
Wow, that's the craziest "advantage" I've ever heard anyone cite:-) "PS3 is slow right now because it's hard to program for, but you should buy it anyway because one day hopefully they'll figure it out" - where do I sign?
Here's a thought - why not just wait until when/if they do figure it out, and then buy it? It'll be cheaper too.
You're about their least-favourite kind of customer - you like their heavily-subsidised hardware, but for running Linux on, not for the games. You'll cost them $200-300 with no hope of making back even close to that on game licence fees.
leat
I never really understood why Sony went to the trouble of making Linux available for the PS3 (at least, not why they did it for free). I can only think it was Krazy Ken's engineer training overriding his good sense. Yes, they got some good PR from it, but only in a small segment of the market, and that segment almost by definition isn't interested in buying games for their new toy.
They also ran the very real risk of universities etc buying up thousands of PS3s to build cheap HPC clusters, which would have been a financial disaster far outweighing any kudos they gained.
HTC Hermes, also known as the TyTn, iMate Jasjam, Cingular 8525, Dopod 838 Pro etc. I got it through Telstra (Australian carrier) on a 2 year business plan. It's unlocked, though of course I'm still committed to the remainder of the contract.
It takes MicroSD cards, but as of recent builds of Windows Mobile 6 it also supports SDHC, including the new Sandisk 4GB and 8GB cards.
You know, my current phone doesn't have a slick, animated UI. Its touchscreen only listens to a single finger at a time. The music playback isn't as intuitive, and I have to pay extra for a 4GB or 8GB memory card for its external slot.
OTOH, I can cut and paste from an Exchange-pushed email into a Word doc, and annotate it with a real keyboard. I can record video & send it via MMS. I can dial by voice alone, handsfree from my stereo bluetooth headset. I can replace a dead battery and switch carriers on a whim. I can read ebooks, play games (Java or native), run a shell & SSH or VLC over VPN, use an OSS browser, stream music from a DNLA server or divx movies from a Windows share. I can use Google Maps or Tomtom Navigator with a Bluetooth GPS, and I can do it all over Wifi or HSDPA/3G - and it was *FREE* with a two-year contract.
If all you want to do is listen to music & browse the web, enjoy your iPhone. If, like me, you want to do any of the above, you'll quickly realise that a nice UI doesn't get you very far. Maybe iPhone 2.0?
All those things you mentioned - huge storage, huge touch screen etc - are great things for gamers... except for one downside.
They're expensive as hell. Which is why the iPhone costs $499, and why it's not going to sell to casual gamers. There's a reason other manufacturers went with cheaper screens.
The DS & GBA are selling well because they're *cheap*. The PSP is pushing the price barrier. iPhone is well past it.
Don't confuse this OPEL proposal with the recent G9 vs Telstra fibre-to-the-node arguments. This is an entirely separate thing, and much anticipated by the rural community (many of whom are still on dialup).
Country towns are small - most houses are easily within close range of the exchange, and should have little trouble getting 12 Mbps. Outlying farms can use WiMax, and since there's relatively few of them, RF bandwidth contention should be minimal. And none of this affects the metro broadband debate one bit - this project is entirely independent of who builds out the FTTN backbone in metro areas.
Nobody is suggesting that fibre to the node for the whole country is remotely practical - it's only being considered in built-up areas. The argument comes down to whether you trust Telstra/BigPond (and their unbroken record of monopoly abuse) to manage it, or an independent consortium of ISPs. Funding will be paid for by the public, ultimately, one way or another - but you do get to choose whether to chip in for Trujillo's next massive bonus or not.
Does iChat have an equivalent to SkypeOut? Can you call other phones, and not just computers? If so, then yeah, perhaps that's all you need.
Personally I prefer SIP-based VoIP clients, as that's non-proprietary and in much more widespread use. A lot of ADSL modems have SIP-based VoIP built-in these days, and SIP clients are widely available, for PCs and many smartphones too. Plus, international calls for under 10c untimed are not to be sneezed at.
I love the iPhone's UI, and multitouch is a marvellous thing. I'm sure it'll sell very well indeed, especially once the price gets down. I'm just waiting for a "smartphone" version with 3G, a scrollwheel (very convenient for one-handed operation), perhaps a keyboard, full third-party app support... that sort of thing.
if a feature is inconvientent enough to use, it may as well not be there.
Certainly true for some segments of the market. However, if the feature you need isn't there at all, it doesn't matter how good the UI is.
BTW, by "paradigm shift" I was referring to the GP's mention of Skype, and mobile VoIP in general. Basically, it's not going to happen until we either have 3G & cheap data plans, ubiquitous free wifi, or something completely new & exciting...
The whole point of Cocoa widget plug-ins is to escape the sandbox & allow widgets greater access to the underlying OS - exactly what Apple would be trying to avoid.
No, really. And as soon as Apple make an iPhone with the features I actually want, then I'll gladly buy one. They look like lots of fun.
OS, CPU, screen, etc are all just icing on the cake. They don't do anyone any good without real underlying features that the user wants - "potential" doesn't sell hardware to anyone except early adopters. However, if the user just happens to want an iPod and a wifi browser with their phone, then the slick UI will make it very accessible.
Something that is already fairly well-defined & well-known, something that is sandboxed away from the underlying newness. That'll give customers some satisfaction while giving you the time to clean up and prepare the full SDK (which you're already trialling with a few close partners).
In fact, why not some sort of HTML-based mini-apps, like widgets perhaps? Oh wait...
Hers is from Nokia, mine is from HTC (I'm posting from it). They both have wifi and run Skype (and SIP, which IMO is better). They both have 3G too. Mine also has a full touchscreen and keyboard.
What you're asking for has been available for years. All Apple has done is put a (very) slick UI on it. It's nice, but I'm still waiting for the paradigm shift to kick in.
The projector resolution is currently 1024 x 768, according to the Popular Mechanics article. The "touchscreen" camera resolution works out to about 1280 x 960. Not exactly high; hopefully this can be improved by the time I need to replace my coffee table...
There's some good details in that article, a nice diagram and some more in-depth videos too.
Check out the asteroid belt, next time you're in the vicinity. It's a gold mine, in every sense. The amount of wealth out there is "beyond imagination".
Just one moderate-sized asteroid (Eros) is estimated to contain $1,000 billion in gold alone - more than has been mined (or indeed could ever be mined ) from Earth's crust in recorded history. Then there's the platinum and the other metals, minerals and rare earths, roughly $20,000 billion in total. And there's millions of asteroids in the belt.
It's not just the mineral wealth that has people interested. It's estimated that maybe half of the asteroids are carbonaceous, containing 20% water and a further 10% oxygen extractable from other sources (good fuel source stuff). Additionally, there are significant amounts of carbon and nitrogen - in total, enough basic resources to support human life on a huge scale. It's likely going to be easier to colonise the asteroids than to colonise Mars.
Due to weather and difficulty getting local permissions, Google was only able to capture a small part of the Sydney area they planned, and at different times than they'd stated, too.
As a result, there's no user-created ads visible at all in the new imagery, anywhere.
Due to the limits of optics, you wouldn't want to carry around something that big very much.
You may have to settle for a good camera, and a mostly acceptable camera on a good phone, for when you can't be bothered carrying around your good camera.
That is until someone gets away from this whole lens idea and invents a directional optics patch instead.
But you agreed to stick to them
on
Is Your GPS Naive?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
police will usually let a local resident off with a warning while ripping others off
OK, unfair/discriminatory/whatever, sure. But "ripping others off"? Did they break the speed limit or didn't they?
a real bane of highway travel
I would have said "unsafe drivers" were more of a real problem. A ticket when you break the speed limit may be annoying, but having your family wiped out by (e.g.) a drunk driver or a trucker pushing his alertness limits or a speeding NJ Governor, now THAT's a problem.
The speed laws are not reasonable -- they take neither car's age and quality nor the driver's experience and health into consideration.
True enough. Of course, it gets complicated if you try to write legislation that codifies something as subjective as car quality and driver experience. The commonly accepted approach is to set the limits at a reasonably low average and to let the cop use his/her discretionary judgment. Perhaps your own car or apparent experience are not sufficiently reassuring - or perhaps the cops have just seen too many middle-aged corpses in wrecked BMWs.
You & I can argue about where the limits are set, but it's pointless. The roads are common property, the rules for sharing them are the rules we agreed to abide by when we got our licenses, and there really aren't many times when one simply must drive that fast (hint: they usually involve sirens and flashing lights).
Yeah, I agree that other species will likely be affected (and perhaps they are, anyone know?) at least to some extent (maybe not so catastrophically), but it sounds like honey bees will be a primary indicator.
The geomagnetic field isn't particularly uniform, however. Check out this animated map (flash), or the others. It declines in spots all over, and we may even see localised temporary reversals in some areas.
Slashdot Mirror
And that would be different to the PS2, how?
Ever considered that not everybody wants to play online?
Believe it or not, there are a lot of people out there that don't have their Core 360 hooked up to broadband, that aren't particularly interested in playing last-generation games (or perhaps they already own an Xbox 1), but who are interested in saving $100. Why should they be required to scrape up 30% more for a HDD they don't care about?
It's called "market choice", and it's generally held to be a good thing. But since PS3 fans apparently prefer "hardware potential" even over playing games, you're having trouble seeing the point of view of those who can't afford that luxury.
Wow, that's the craziest "advantage" I've ever heard anyone cite :-) "PS3 is slow right now because it's hard to program for, but you should buy it anyway because one day hopefully they'll figure it out" - where do I sign?
Here's a thought - why not just wait until when/if they do figure it out, and then buy it? It'll be cheaper too.
You're about their least-favourite kind of customer - you like their heavily-subsidised hardware, but for running Linux on, not for the games. You'll cost them $200-300 with no hope of making back even close to that on game licence fees.
leatI never really understood why Sony went to the trouble of making Linux available for the PS3 (at least, not why they did it for free). I can only think it was Krazy Ken's engineer training overriding his good sense. Yes, they got some good PR from it, but only in a small segment of the market, and that segment almost by definition isn't interested in buying games for their new toy.
They also ran the very real risk of universities etc buying up thousands of PS3s to build cheap HPC clusters, which would have been a financial disaster far outweighing any kudos they gained.
HTC Hermes, also known as the TyTn, iMate Jasjam, Cingular 8525, Dopod 838 Pro etc. I got it through Telstra (Australian carrier) on a 2 year business plan. It's unlocked, though of course I'm still committed to the remainder of the contract.
It takes MicroSD cards, but as of recent builds of Windows Mobile 6 it also supports SDHC, including the new Sandisk 4GB and 8GB cards.
You know, my current phone doesn't have a slick, animated UI. Its touchscreen only listens to a single finger at a time. The music playback isn't as intuitive, and I have to pay extra for a 4GB or 8GB memory card for its external slot.
OTOH, I can cut and paste from an Exchange-pushed email into a Word doc, and annotate it with a real keyboard. I can record video & send it via MMS. I can dial by voice alone, handsfree from my stereo bluetooth headset. I can replace a dead battery and switch carriers on a whim. I can read ebooks, play games (Java or native), run a shell & SSH or VLC over VPN, use an OSS browser, stream music from a DNLA server or divx movies from a Windows share. I can use Google Maps or Tomtom Navigator with a Bluetooth GPS, and I can do it all over Wifi or HSDPA/3G - and it was *FREE* with a two-year contract.
If all you want to do is listen to music & browse the web, enjoy your iPhone. If, like me, you want to do any of the above, you'll quickly realise that a nice UI doesn't get you very far. Maybe iPhone 2.0?
Here.
Things that surprised me were:
Obviously they've found the Ark, or some other Forerunner facility.
When Google mentioned the Great Journey on their prospectus & SEC filings, I really didn't think we'd be seeing this as the next Google Datacenter...
All those things you mentioned - huge storage, huge touch screen etc - are great things for gamers... except for one downside.
They're expensive as hell. Which is why the iPhone costs $499, and why it's not going to sell to casual gamers. There's a reason other manufacturers went with cheaper screens.
The DS & GBA are selling well because they're *cheap*. The PSP is pushing the price barrier. iPhone is well past it.
Don't confuse this OPEL proposal with the recent G9 vs Telstra fibre-to-the-node arguments. This is an entirely separate thing, and much anticipated by the rural community (many of whom are still on dialup).
Country towns are small - most houses are easily within close range of the exchange, and should have little trouble getting 12 Mbps. Outlying farms can use WiMax, and since there's relatively few of them, RF bandwidth contention should be minimal. And none of this affects the metro broadband debate one bit - this project is entirely independent of who builds out the FTTN backbone in metro areas.
Nobody is suggesting that fibre to the node for the whole country is remotely practical - it's only being considered in built-up areas. The argument comes down to whether you trust Telstra/BigPond (and their unbroken record of monopoly abuse) to manage it, or an independent consortium of ISPs. Funding will be paid for by the public, ultimately, one way or another - but you do get to choose whether to chip in for Trujillo's next massive bonus or not.
Does iChat have an equivalent to SkypeOut? Can you call other phones, and not just computers? If so, then yeah, perhaps that's all you need.
Personally I prefer SIP-based VoIP clients, as that's non-proprietary and in much more widespread use. A lot of ADSL modems have SIP-based VoIP built-in these days, and SIP clients are widely available, for PCs and many smartphones too. Plus, international calls for under 10c untimed are not to be sneezed at.
I love the iPhone's UI, and multitouch is a marvellous thing. I'm sure it'll sell very well indeed, especially once the price gets down. I'm just waiting for a "smartphone" version with 3G, a scrollwheel (very convenient for one-handed operation), perhaps a keyboard, full third-party app support... that sort of thing.
Certainly true for some segments of the market. However, if the feature you need isn't there at all, it doesn't matter how good the UI is.
BTW, by "paradigm shift" I was referring to the GP's mention of Skype, and mobile VoIP in general. Basically, it's not going to happen until we either have 3G & cheap data plans, ubiquitous free wifi, or something completely new & exciting...
The whole point of Cocoa widget plug-ins is to escape the sandbox & allow widgets greater access to the underlying OS - exactly what Apple would be trying to avoid.
Don't expect support for those for a while.
No, really. And as soon as Apple make an iPhone with the features I actually want, then I'll gladly buy one. They look like lots of fun.
OS, CPU, screen, etc are all just icing on the cake. They don't do anyone any good without real underlying features that the user wants - "potential" doesn't sell hardware to anyone except early adopters. However, if the user just happens to want an iPod and a wifi browser with their phone, then the slick UI will make it very accessible.
Something that is already fairly well-defined & well-known, something that is sandboxed away from the underlying newness. That'll give customers some satisfaction while giving you the time to clean up and prepare the full SDK (which you're already trialling with a few close partners).
In fact, why not some sort of HTML-based mini-apps, like widgets perhaps? Oh wait...
And so does my wife.
Hers is from Nokia, mine is from HTC (I'm posting from it). They both have wifi and run Skype (and SIP, which IMO is better). They both have 3G too. Mine also has a full touchscreen and keyboard.
What you're asking for has been available for years. All Apple has done is put a (very) slick UI on it. It's nice, but I'm still waiting for the paradigm shift to kick in.
Pre-Surface, but shows some more cool applications for a multi-touch interface.
The projector resolution is currently 1024 x 768, according to the Popular Mechanics article. The "touchscreen" camera resolution works out to about 1280 x 960. Not exactly high; hopefully this can be improved by the time I need to replace my coffee table...
There's some good details in that article, a nice diagram and some more in-depth videos too.
Yeah, I was wondering why they were so pleased about searching Steve Jobs' keynote addresses (and where they found 7 billion of them too).
Check out the asteroid belt, next time you're in the vicinity. It's a gold mine, in every sense. The amount of wealth out there is "beyond imagination".
Just one moderate-sized asteroid (Eros) is estimated to contain $1,000 billion in gold alone - more than has been mined (or indeed could ever be mined ) from Earth's crust in recorded history. Then there's the platinum and the other metals, minerals and rare earths, roughly $20,000 billion in total. And there's millions of asteroids in the belt.
It's not just the mineral wealth that has people interested. It's estimated that maybe half of the asteroids are carbonaceous, containing 20% water and a further 10% oxygen extractable from other sources (good fuel source stuff). Additionally, there are significant amounts of carbon and nitrogen - in total, enough basic resources to support human life on a huge scale. It's likely going to be easier to colonise the asteroids than to colonise Mars.
Due to weather and difficulty getting local permissions, Google was only able to capture a small part of the Sydney area they planned, and at different times than they'd stated, too.
As a result, there's no user-created ads visible at all in the new imagery, anywhere.
If our brains were so simple we could understand them, we'd be so simple we couldn't.
Due to the limits of optics, you wouldn't want to carry around something that big very much.
You may have to settle for a good camera, and a mostly acceptable camera on a good phone, for when you can't be bothered carrying around your good camera.
That is until someone gets away from this whole lens idea and invents a directional optics patch instead.
OK, unfair/discriminatory/whatever, sure. But "ripping others off"? Did they break the speed limit or didn't they?
I would have said "unsafe drivers" were more of a real problem. A ticket when you break the speed limit may be annoying, but having your family wiped out by (e.g.) a drunk driver or a trucker pushing his alertness limits or a speeding NJ Governor, now THAT's a problem.
True enough. Of course, it gets complicated if you try to write legislation that codifies something as subjective as car quality and driver experience. The commonly accepted approach is to set the limits at a reasonably low average and to let the cop use his/her discretionary judgment. Perhaps your own car or apparent experience are not sufficiently reassuring - or perhaps the cops have just seen too many middle-aged corpses in wrecked BMWs.
You & I can argue about where the limits are set, but it's pointless. The roads are common property, the rules for sharing them are the rules we agreed to abide by when we got our licenses, and there really aren't many times when one simply must drive that fast (hint: they usually involve sirens and flashing lights).
Yeah, I agree that other species will likely be affected (and perhaps they are, anyone know?) at least to some extent (maybe not so catastrophically), but it sounds like honey bees will be a primary indicator.
The geomagnetic field isn't particularly uniform, however. Check out this animated map (flash), or the others. It declines in spots all over, and we may even see localised temporary reversals in some areas.