PC gaming absolutely has technical superiority in terms of ability to drawing detailed graphics at high FPS rates. But consoles have more control options. I prefer to shoot at enemies by aiming a gun at them, not moving a mouse. My consoles are also hooked up to a much superior AV system in terms of screen size and surround sound. I miss the old days of PC gaming, when games actually supported game controllers. I remember buying a crazy beast of a contraption just to play Descent. Kinect for PC opens up more choices. If the resulting games aren't fun, people won't buy it, so what are you afraid of?
If TiVo can't record due to the "Copy never" flag, I suspect you'll run into the same problem with your HDHomeRun Prime and Windows 7. It's been a very long road getting encrypted digital TV into Media Center; I suspect MS plays by the rules.
I don't think the concept of recording TV to a hard drive was particularly innovative. Video capture cards had been around for a long time. I remember setting up timers on a PC to record certain shows well before having my first TiVo. The Live TV buffer was interesting, but I don't think it was the heart of the system. What made TiVo revolutionary was the manner in which it made recording effortless. In an era where "12 o'clock flashers" had to beg their neighbor's kids to program their VCR, TiVo offered something very unique. Just tell it the name of the show you want, and it will figure out when to record it. The real magic was in the integration with Tribune guide data. They pioneered show based recording as opposed to timer-based recording.
TiVo managed to package up a lot of technical complexity into something everyday people can understand and enjoy. Unfortunately, at least to me it seems like TiVo has not really improved much over the years. I used Premiere at a friend's house and it was a painful experience. Meanwhile, competitor's systems have to suffer with weird workarounds to TiVo's patents. Something obvious like "overshoot correction" should not earn a patent. While I do think TiVo earned the right to enjoy patent protection, it's been long enough now that the patents are now stifling innovation instead of improving it. 20 years is way, way too long.
I think Kagato meant the Whole Home DVR option which allows DVRs to stream recorded content from each other (in a peer-to-peer fashion). It's extremely useful, and I couldn't dream of going back to TiVo without it. My two DirecTV DVRs "merge" their playlists together and act like a 1TB, 4 tuner DVR. It gives much more purpose to our bedroom DVR that saw light usage before this feature was available, and I don't need to worry about conflicts during prime time.
DirecTV's DVRs are really pretty good. They've done a good job of steadily improving them and getting feedback from users through their open beta program. I can't see paying an additional monthly fee for the TiVo interface, when I can do almost everything it does and more with DirecTV's software for less.
I have to disagree with "People didn't want the iPhone before it was out there". At a time when clunky Windows Mobile phones were popular, I think just about everyone knew that the cell phone experience left a lot to be desired, especially when it came to browsing the web. They call it the Jesus Phone for a reason: When rumors came about that Apple was working on a phone, many followers demonstrated their near-religious faith in Apple that their phone would save everyone from the awful crap that preceded it. While not perfect, it largely delivered.
Definitely Robot Odyssey! I've never met anyone IRL who's played it, but it's one of the greatest games I've ever played. The graphics weren't pretty, but the design of the game was so clever. I received a plaque from the Learning Company for having completed it back in the day.
Apple has regularly failed ergonomics, especially when trying to simplify. Look at their one button mice. Ever since that "invention", they've cooked up all sorts of strange alternatives that do the same thing, just not as well - sensors that sense where your finger is when you click the one button, three finger clicking on touchpads, etc. I know so many Mac enthusiasts that use third party mice and keyboards (often from MIcrosoft.. oh the irony).
Doing away with the home button is a very very bad idea. The primary reason we bought an iPad is that it's simple enough to use that my Mom can use it to participate with the rest of us. "If you ever get lost, press this button to start over" really made the experience simple for her.
I didn't care much for Doom as a single player game. NetDOOM was where it was at. Pray your network card's IPX drivers didn't suck and crash out all the time, and make sure all your T's and terminators are tight for that awesome coax 10-base-2 network goodness. 10-base 2 because - lets face it - you can't afford a hub. But, hearing your buddies drop the f-bomb in the next room over when you fragged them was GOLD. Lan parties were so much fun.
Also, if he played it without music, he was doing it wrong. The music of DOOM was simply awesome with the SB16 with the MIDI daughterboard attached.
I haven't had a single problem with this jailbreak. I have no problems with home screen bookmarks (or MMSes, or Facetime). The only reported issue I see are some tiny graphical specs on the Apple logo at boot time.
It's a support forum. How does Consumer Reports' article contribute to supporting existing customers? Do you guys really think CR's duct tape solution is so ingenious that poor helpless Apple victims are missing out on a vital solution?
There's already plenty of discussion about iPhone 4's antenna problems. And there are plenty of other places to discuss Consumer Reports' thoughts on AntennaGate.
Whining about censorship is weak on when it comes to privately owned internet forums. It's almost as bad as invoking Godwin's law.
People with less than perfect vision find modern screens with high DPI tough to read - and frustratingly, the only fix that works with everything is running at non-native resolution.
Vista definitely improved higher-DPI support. IE8 was another huge step. But large fonts support still breaks lots of applications, even popular ones. Try using large fonts with Trillian or many Adobe products.
OSX still doesn't support DPI changing at all. It seems to be a dropped Leopard feature. There's some hacks you can do to modify DPI, but the result is more broken than XP's large font mode.
I really don't get why we've been able to have printers scale documents beautifully from 150DPI to 1200DPI, but we're unable to solve the same problem on the display!
We now live in a connected world. There is no longer a need to keep re-inventing the wheel. When it comes to the building blocks of a program, chances are someone has already implemented what you want to do, has done it better than you can, and their solution has been time-tested. There's just no need to implement your own Malloc routine.
I think of it more like graduating from basic Lego bricks to the more exciting "Expert Builder" series with a greater palette of modules that can make more interesting creations quickly.
What does scare me is that a new generation of programmers might take all of this for granted, and never try and understand things at a machine level. High level languages are great, but there's a lot to be said for understanding what's going on behind the scenes. When things go wrong, being able to "think like the machine" enables you to solve things quickly
Every cell phone I've owned has had a liquid sensor. It's usually in the battery compartment. The iPhone's is just more exposed, being in the headphone socket.
If they ban jailbreakers from the app store, that percentage can only go up. As it stands I have no pirated apps, but I won't lose sleep over pirating them if Apple removes my ability to pay for them.
I don't recall V.42 / MNP being popular with 2400 baud modems. The data rate was so slow that enabling error correction resulted in too much latency when "browsing" text. MNP could be done in software also, and a few comm programs offered it.
They missed the whole Courier HST vs. v.32bis battle. The v.32 and v.32bis modems were way more expensive than USR's modems for a long time because implementing that standard required an echo canceling chip. This allowed full speed bidirectional transfers where USR's didn't. Most didn't care because they weren't usually doing both upload and download at the same time.
That is, unless they were using Bimodem, which allowed two-way transfers. And you could chat with the SysOp during the transfer! Good times, good times...
Device ID is not a sufficient indicator of piracy. Purchases work on any device associated with the iTunes account. So if someone upgrades their phone, their purchases continue to work. Or if they have both an iPhone and an iPod Touch, they can use the same purchase on both devices.
Apple has an excellent point. The cell towers need to be protected at all costs. How on earth can we get all these hackers to quit breaking into the baseband? Hey wait, that's easy! Just officially unlock the phone for everyone. That would curtail the majority of baseband hacking efforts.
Of course, jailbreaking has little to do with baseband hacking. A jailbroken phone is not much different from a Windows Mobile or Blackberry phone that allows you to run abrtrary code without approval. But nice try, Apple.
In 1993 blanks were about $40 a piece. Mighty expensive spindle you got there!
My first audio CD-R made in 1995 still works, despite NOT being kept in ideal conditions and being pretty banged up.
You're right, iPhone doesn't have turn by turn, but that doesn't mean it's not useful while driving. I have turn by turn in my car's navigation system, but the majority of the time I use my iPhone's Google maps, because it's quicker and easier to specify an address.
iPhone's map does what I need - it shows me where I am and where I need to go. I don't need a reminder at every intersection.
With Cingular/AT&T I had to opt-in to MMS, even if the phone supported it Without opting in, you get the viewmymessage.com text messages. Every WinMo phone I had supported it. Of course, they usually got stuck trying to download the messages, requiring a reboot to actually see them, but that's a separate issue.:)
The Phatnoise Phatbox car MP3 system used voice for navigation and track titles also. Voice was used because it integrated with factory CD car changer systems that often don't have the ability to show text. Worked very well. Was nice to navigate without taking my eyes off the road.
Sirius/XM would be easily worth $13/month, if the sound quality wasn't so atrocious. Many people compare it to a 128kbps mp3, but I find it to be much worse than even that. XM sounds slightly better than Sirius but they're both pretty bad. I realize some people don't care about quality that much, but it's bad enough you can hear the deficiencies on even the most basic factory car radio.
Sort of - the other problem is Apple is slow to refresh their product line, or drop the price of their existing hardware.
The Mac Pro was actually cheaper than a comparable Dell Precision Workstation when it came out.
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PC gaming absolutely has technical superiority in terms of ability to drawing detailed graphics at high FPS rates. But consoles have more control options. I prefer to shoot at enemies by aiming a gun at them, not moving a mouse. My consoles are also hooked up to a much superior AV system in terms of screen size and surround sound. I miss the old days of PC gaming, when games actually supported game controllers. I remember buying a crazy beast of a contraption just to play Descent. Kinect for PC opens up more choices. If the resulting games aren't fun, people won't buy it, so what are you afraid of?
If TiVo can't record due to the "Copy never" flag, I suspect you'll run into the same problem with your HDHomeRun Prime and Windows 7. It's been a very long road getting encrypted digital TV into Media Center; I suspect MS plays by the rules.
I don't think the concept of recording TV to a hard drive was particularly innovative. Video capture cards had been around for a long time. I remember setting up timers on a PC to record certain shows well before having my first TiVo. The Live TV buffer was interesting, but I don't think it was the heart of the system. What made TiVo revolutionary was the manner in which it made recording effortless. In an era where "12 o'clock flashers" had to beg their neighbor's kids to program their VCR, TiVo offered something very unique. Just tell it the name of the show you want, and it will figure out when to record it. The real magic was in the integration with Tribune guide data. They pioneered show based recording as opposed to timer-based recording.
TiVo managed to package up a lot of technical complexity into something everyday people can understand and enjoy. Unfortunately, at least to me it seems like TiVo has not really improved much over the years. I used Premiere at a friend's house and it was a painful experience. Meanwhile, competitor's systems have to suffer with weird workarounds to TiVo's patents. Something obvious like "overshoot correction" should not earn a patent. While I do think TiVo earned the right to enjoy patent protection, it's been long enough now that the patents are now stifling innovation instead of improving it. 20 years is way, way too long.
I think Kagato meant the Whole Home DVR option which allows DVRs to stream recorded content from each other (in a peer-to-peer fashion). It's extremely useful, and I couldn't dream of going back to TiVo without it. My two DirecTV DVRs "merge" their playlists together and act like a 1TB, 4 tuner DVR. It gives much more purpose to our bedroom DVR that saw light usage before this feature was available, and I don't need to worry about conflicts during prime time.
DirecTV's DVRs are really pretty good. They've done a good job of steadily improving them and getting feedback from users through their open beta program. I can't see paying an additional monthly fee for the TiVo interface, when I can do almost everything it does and more with DirecTV's software for less.
I have to disagree with "People didn't want the iPhone before it was out there". At a time when clunky Windows Mobile phones were popular, I think just about everyone knew that the cell phone experience left a lot to be desired, especially when it came to browsing the web. They call it the Jesus Phone for a reason: When rumors came about that Apple was working on a phone, many followers demonstrated their near-religious faith in Apple that their phone would save everyone from the awful crap that preceded it. While not perfect, it largely delivered.
Definitely Robot Odyssey! I've never met anyone IRL who's played it, but it's one of the greatest games I've ever played. The graphics weren't pretty, but the design of the game was so clever. I received a plaque from the Learning Company for having completed it back in the day.
Apple has regularly failed ergonomics, especially when trying to simplify. Look at their one button mice. Ever since that "invention", they've cooked up all sorts of strange alternatives that do the same thing, just not as well - sensors that sense where your finger is when you click the one button, three finger clicking on touchpads, etc. I know so many Mac enthusiasts that use third party mice and keyboards (often from MIcrosoft .. oh the irony).
Doing away with the home button is a very very bad idea. The primary reason we bought an iPad is that it's simple enough to use that my Mom can use it to participate with the rest of us. "If you ever get lost, press this button to start over" really made the experience simple for her.
I didn't care much for Doom as a single player game. NetDOOM was where it was at. Pray your network card's IPX drivers didn't suck and crash out all the time, and make sure all your T's and terminators are tight for that awesome coax 10-base-2 network goodness. 10-base 2 because - lets face it - you can't afford a hub. But, hearing your buddies drop the f-bomb in the next room over when you fragged them was GOLD. Lan parties were so much fun. Also, if he played it without music, he was doing it wrong. The music of DOOM was simply awesome with the SB16 with the MIDI daughterboard attached.
I haven't had a single problem with this jailbreak. I have no problems with home screen bookmarks (or MMSes, or Facetime). The only reported issue I see are some tiny graphical specs on the Apple logo at boot time.
It's a support forum. How does Consumer Reports' article contribute to supporting existing customers? Do you guys really think CR's duct tape solution is so ingenious that poor helpless Apple victims are missing out on a vital solution? There's already plenty of discussion about iPhone 4's antenna problems. And there are plenty of other places to discuss Consumer Reports' thoughts on AntennaGate. Whining about censorship is weak on when it comes to privately owned internet forums. It's almost as bad as invoking Godwin's law.
I can still read the CDs I burned in 1994. Philips CDD521 burner, Ricoh media. Blanks were around $35 a piece.
People with less than perfect vision find modern screens with high DPI tough to read - and frustratingly, the only fix that works with everything is running at non-native resolution. Vista definitely improved higher-DPI support. IE8 was another huge step. But large fonts support still breaks lots of applications, even popular ones. Try using large fonts with Trillian or many Adobe products. OSX still doesn't support DPI changing at all. It seems to be a dropped Leopard feature. There's some hacks you can do to modify DPI, but the result is more broken than XP's large font mode. I really don't get why we've been able to have printers scale documents beautifully from 150DPI to 1200DPI, but we're unable to solve the same problem on the display!
We now live in a connected world. There is no longer a need to keep re-inventing the wheel. When it comes to the building blocks of a program, chances are someone has already implemented what you want to do, has done it better than you can, and their solution has been time-tested. There's just no need to implement your own Malloc routine. I think of it more like graduating from basic Lego bricks to the more exciting "Expert Builder" series with a greater palette of modules that can make more interesting creations quickly. What does scare me is that a new generation of programmers might take all of this for granted, and never try and understand things at a machine level. High level languages are great, but there's a lot to be said for understanding what's going on behind the scenes. When things go wrong, being able to "think like the machine" enables you to solve things quickly
Every cell phone I've owned has had a liquid sensor. It's usually in the battery compartment. The iPhone's is just more exposed, being in the headphone socket.
I just dismantled the cube and reassembled it in the correct order. Once you get one brick off the rest are easy. :)
If they ban jailbreakers from the app store, that percentage can only go up. As it stands I have no pirated apps, but I won't lose sleep over pirating them if Apple removes my ability to pay for them.
I don't recall V.42 / MNP being popular with 2400 baud modems. The data rate was so slow that enabling error correction resulted in too much latency when "browsing" text. MNP could be done in software also, and a few comm programs offered it. They missed the whole Courier HST vs. v.32bis battle. The v.32 and v.32bis modems were way more expensive than USR's modems for a long time because implementing that standard required an echo canceling chip. This allowed full speed bidirectional transfers where USR's didn't. Most didn't care because they weren't usually doing both upload and download at the same time. That is, unless they were using Bimodem, which allowed two-way transfers. And you could chat with the SysOp during the transfer! Good times, good times...
Device ID is not a sufficient indicator of piracy. Purchases work on any device associated with the iTunes account. So if someone upgrades their phone, their purchases continue to work. Or if they have both an iPhone and an iPod Touch, they can use the same purchase on both devices.
Apple has an excellent point. The cell towers need to be protected at all costs. How on earth can we get all these hackers to quit breaking into the baseband? Hey wait, that's easy! Just officially unlock the phone for everyone. That would curtail the majority of baseband hacking efforts. Of course, jailbreaking has little to do with baseband hacking. A jailbroken phone is not much different from a Windows Mobile or Blackberry phone that allows you to run abrtrary code without approval. But nice try, Apple.
In 1993 blanks were about $40 a piece. Mighty expensive spindle you got there! My first audio CD-R made in 1995 still works, despite NOT being kept in ideal conditions and being pretty banged up.
You're right, iPhone doesn't have turn by turn, but that doesn't mean it's not useful while driving. I have turn by turn in my car's navigation system, but the majority of the time I use my iPhone's Google maps, because it's quicker and easier to specify an address. iPhone's map does what I need - it shows me where I am and where I need to go. I don't need a reminder at every intersection.
With Cingular/AT&T I had to opt-in to MMS, even if the phone supported it Without opting in, you get the viewmymessage.com text messages. Every WinMo phone I had supported it. Of course, they usually got stuck trying to download the messages, requiring a reboot to actually see them, but that's a separate issue. :)
The Phatnoise Phatbox car MP3 system used voice for navigation and track titles also. Voice was used because it integrated with factory CD car changer systems that often don't have the ability to show text. Worked very well. Was nice to navigate without taking my eyes off the road.
Sirius/XM would be easily worth $13/month, if the sound quality wasn't so atrocious. Many people compare it to a 128kbps mp3, but I find it to be much worse than even that. XM sounds slightly better than Sirius but they're both pretty bad. I realize some people don't care about quality that much, but it's bad enough you can hear the deficiencies on even the most basic factory car radio.
Sort of - the other problem is Apple is slow to refresh their product line, or drop the price of their existing hardware. The Mac Pro was actually cheaper than a comparable Dell Precision Workstation when it came out.