suddenly a phone rings and 12 people dive head first into their bag
Which is exactly why I have a custom ringtone - so I don't have to dive into my bag when someone else's phone rings. Noone else has the same ringtone as me, because I made my own and and sent it over bluetooth as an mp3 to my phone.
Even if you accept that RFID should be incorporated in passports (and the concept of terrorists and criminals owning a hand-held US-passport detector should be more than enough reason to realise it's a completely dumb idea), then why on earth should there be any locally stored data?
If the passport held a unique ID number and nothing else, then sensitive data could be stored somewhere safe off-site, rather than in the back pocket of a potential terrorist.
This tradgedy happened here in Britain, where we have orders of magnitude less shootings and guns are illegal. All ID badges at Dunblaine would have done is ensure that the badge-checker got shot first.
You'll find this sort of thing is widely used by the pro-audio recording industry. Most high-end units will be loaded with features you don't need though, like 8 channel recording or 24-bit 96Khz playback, although if you are an 'audiophile' with an unlimited budget / drive space, you might like to consider ripping your vinyl at better than CD quality!
Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) are well respected in the industry, but their prices are steep compared to normal soundcards. Take a look at their 828 mk II to see what $800-ish buys you.
Not all monitors have the same range of brightness/contrast and colour* gamut (range of colours they can display). If you do achiveve your stated goal, it will only be by making the best monitor you have display the brightness/contrast and gamut of the worst.
Colour perception depends a lot on environmental conditions. On identical perfectly calibrated monitors, colours will not look the same if one is in a room with white walls and the other isn't... and the same goes for one being in a room with flourescent lighting, one being in the shade, one with a window behind it, or one being somewhere there is a pretty sunset happening outside the window.
Users will disagree about the extent of variations caused by environmental conditions, and will disagree about colours. If you do calibrate with the best calibration tool on earth, users will simply not believe that you've done it right, and will resent their monitors being 'wrong' (ie different to the way they were before calibration).
Monitors drift, especially cheap ones... as they warm up, as room temperature varies, and as they get old. Calibration is a neverending job.
* I'm English, from England, and I know how to spell English words. It's not my fault the founding fathers didn't take a decent dictionary to America.
I'm breaking section 6 of your stupid and unenforceable rules by not getting a 'separate linking agreement' with you before posting that link, and I'm not going to edit this post if you ask me to, becasue slashdot doesn't let anyone edit posts.
I challenge you to try and enforce your new terms and conditions, or drop them.
You are not comparing like with like. If there was one Auto seller with a 95% share of the market for cars, then yes they should be prohibited from leveraging that monopoly into a new area, by subsidising their floormats (or making them non-optional) to wipe out the competition.
If you've written a third party app that breaks when microsoft starts obeying the law, then I'd assume you'd have a resonably good chance of suing the hell out of them!
Indestructable cars are mandated by car manufacturers. Every racing game (perhaps excluding a few single marque titles?) has either licenced recognisable cars with no damage, or fictional cars with damage. Blame the auto industry for this, not the makers of GT4. The same also applies to cars rolling over - in all the Gran Turismo games, you can tilt a car to 89.9999 degrees but no further, the manufacturers will not allow their cars to be shown flipping over.
The good news is that in GT4 there is a slow-down penalty for collisions, so ricocheting off your opponents (or walls) is no longer a useful exploit.
The accuracy of the physics is not in the controls, it's in the acurracy with which the physics is simulated. In GT3, you get realistically modelled inertia, and you can save precious fractions of a second by getting the hang of weight transferrence over bumps, or by stiffening suspension, or altering toe-in... the attention to detail is really amazing, and when you make a change such as fitting a lighter racing clutch, you can really feel the difference in the responsiveness of your car, accurately modelled.
As for PS2 quality graphics, GT4 pushed the PS2 frther than any other game. Take a look at some of the screenshots before complaining.
The author doesn't bother explaining that Linux is free, that updates to Linux are free, or that Windows is a thousand times more likely to suffer from trojans and viruses. That article continues by marking down OSX for not having a 'live cd' despite there being no conceivable reason for a Mac owner to need one, marks OSX down further for lack of help files without commenting that it needs them less, marks Windows down for lack of built in Excel support (jesus, how monolithic do you want your OS?), then adds marks to a Linux distro for having a windows emulator without saying how well it works, or that Windows doesn't need one! Most of the marks are dependent on the bundled software, not one word is given to the possibility of adding more software, and practically no marks are given for stability or security, which leads me to wonder if the author even knows what an OS is - certainly any non tech-savvy readers won't know after reading the article.
Does IBM taking the Xbox II away from Intel count as making a big dent? I believe IBM sees it's Power archtecture (possibly accompanied by Sony's Cell as in the PS3) as the natural successor to the x86 line, and is therefore at war with Intel.
This seems a bit penny-pinching, given that the 17" is aiming to be the ultimate money-no-object portable, and Apple are famous for selling machines that are at the high quality/high cost end of the market.
Am I the only one who finds that peole are throwing tags around at random in slashdot articles? This one has a link to the BBC's report, and no link to the Gates Foundation's confirmation. Why is the link in the part about the Gates foundation and not round at least the words 'BBC' and 'reporting'? As for the other link, it's hardly useful to be told that the submitter's email address is nobody@127.0.0.1
While the point about not sitting centrally is definitely valid, take a look at this picture of the 15" machine and compare it to the standard Apple keyboard. The inverted T is half-height, the function keys are half height (and not all 15 are there), there is no numeric pad, no pageup/down/home/end/help/del block, the return is single height not double, the control alt, space and apple keys are smaller than usual, there is an extra key to the left of the spacebar and the gaps betwen all the blocks that I'm used to on my desktop mac keyboard (which, incidentally measures 17" across) have gone.
I can see why they have had to compromise like this on the 12" machine, but the 17" could have been far closer to the desktop layout, if not identical. Learning the new layout is certainly possible, and after a bit of use I'm sure it would feel 'just right', but why do I need to relearn when the extra space is there?
Like the MacMini, it ships WITHOUT a mouse. If you want one with 2 or more buttons, just plug one in, Apple have supported multi-button mice since OS8. Before you do, you might want to take a look at the following list of Mac software that requires multiple mouse buttons:
Slashdot Mirror
suddenly a phone rings and 12 people dive head first into their bag
Which is exactly why I have a custom ringtone - so I don't have to dive into my bag when someone else's phone rings. Noone else has the same ringtone as me, because I made my own and and sent it over bluetooth as an mp3 to my phone.
Even if you accept that RFID should be incorporated in passports (and the concept of terrorists and criminals owning a hand-held US-passport detector should be more than enough reason to realise it's a completely dumb idea), then why on earth should there be any locally stored data?
If the passport held a unique ID number and nothing else, then sensitive data could be stored somewhere safe off-site, rather than in the back pocket of a potential terrorist.
This tradgedy happened here in Britain, where we have orders of magnitude less shootings and guns are illegal. All ID badges at Dunblaine would have done is ensure that the badge-checker got shot first.
It's worth noting that the next model up from the 2496 is the Audiophile 192.
If you want to go down the SPDIF optical out > external DAC route, take a look at M-Audio's SuperDAC 2496
You'll find this sort of thing is widely used by the pro-audio recording industry. Most high-end units will be loaded with features you don't need though, like 8 channel recording or 24-bit 96Khz playback, although if you are an 'audiophile' with an unlimited budget / drive space, you might like to consider ripping your vinyl at better than CD quality!
Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) are well respected in the industry, but their prices are steep compared to normal soundcards. Take a look at their 828 mk II to see what $800-ish buys you.
... and how do we get them sacked / made into a laughing stock?
It will take a stable environment and software complement to break the 4 GB barrier, though.
Such as Apple's OSX, their Power PC and Xserve ranges have supported 8Gb ram configurations for ages.
Not all monitors have the same range of brightness/contrast and colour* gamut (range of colours they can display). If you do achiveve your stated goal, it will only be by making the best monitor you have display the brightness/contrast and gamut of the worst.
Colour perception depends a lot on environmental conditions. On identical perfectly calibrated monitors, colours will not look the same if one is in a room with white walls and the other isn't... and the same goes for one being in a room with flourescent lighting, one being in the shade, one with a window behind it, or one being somewhere there is a pretty sunset happening outside the window.
Users will disagree about the extent of variations caused by environmental conditions, and will disagree about colours. If you do calibrate with the best calibration tool on earth, users will simply not believe that you've done it right, and will resent their monitors being 'wrong' (ie different to the way they were before calibration).
Monitors drift, especially cheap ones... as they warm up, as room temperature varies, and as they get old. Calibration is a neverending job.
* I'm English, from England, and I know how to spell English words. It's not my fault the founding fathers didn't take a decent dictionary to America.
The first one hasn't even dropped off the front page yet.
What's it going to be worth when Google block it for being a link farm?
I'd love to be able to search the web without specifiying -about.com, -kelkoo, -pricerunner, -pricegrabber etc. etc.
and that post will still be there in March!
I'm breaking section 6 of your stupid and unenforceable rules by not getting a 'separate linking agreement' with you before posting that link, and I'm not going to edit this post if you ask me to, becasue slashdot doesn't let anyone edit posts.
I challenge you to try and enforce your new terms and conditions, or drop them.
You are not comparing like with like. If there was one Auto seller with a 95% share of the market for cars, then yes they should be prohibited from leveraging that monopoly into a new area, by subsidising their floormats (or making them non-optional) to wipe out the competition.
If you've written a third party app that breaks when microsoft starts obeying the law, then I'd assume you'd have a resonably good chance of suing the hell out of them!
Anyone for a class action lawsuit?
What makes you think it won't be cheaper? As I understand it, the EU ruling forces MS to make this version cheaper.
You see to be forgetting the reason that MS's opponents cannot beat them in the marketplace, which is that MS broke the law by abusing their monopoly.
Do you think MS should be above the law?
It would take a lot to make them topple from the top spot
MacMini?
Indestructable cars are mandated by car manufacturers. Every racing game (perhaps excluding a few single marque titles?) has either licenced recognisable cars with no damage, or fictional cars with damage. Blame the auto industry for this, not the makers of GT4. The same also applies to cars rolling over - in all the Gran Turismo games, you can tilt a car to 89.9999 degrees but no further, the manufacturers will not allow their cars to be shown flipping over.
The good news is that in GT4 there is a slow-down penalty for collisions, so ricocheting off your opponents (or walls) is no longer a useful exploit.
The accuracy of the physics is not in the controls, it's in the acurracy with which the physics is simulated. In GT3, you get realistically modelled inertia, and you can save precious fractions of a second by getting the hang of weight transferrence over bumps, or by stiffening suspension, or altering toe-in... the attention to detail is really amazing, and when you make a change such as fitting a lighter racing clutch, you can really feel the difference in the responsiveness of your car, accurately modelled.
As for PS2 quality graphics, GT4 pushed the PS2 frther than any other game. Take a look at some of the screenshots before complaining.
The author doesn't bother explaining that Linux is free, that updates to Linux are free, or that Windows is a thousand times more likely to suffer from trojans and viruses. That article continues by marking down OSX for not having a 'live cd' despite there being no conceivable reason for a Mac owner to need one, marks OSX down further for lack of help files without commenting that it needs them less, marks Windows down for lack of built in Excel support (jesus, how monolithic do you want your OS?), then adds marks to a Linux distro for having a windows emulator without saying how well it works, or that Windows doesn't need one! Most of the marks are dependent on the bundled software, not one word is given to the possibility of adding more software, and practically no marks are given for stability or security, which leads me to wonder if the author even knows what an OS is - certainly any non tech-savvy readers won't know after reading the article.
Does IBM taking the Xbox II away from Intel count as making a big dent? I believe IBM sees it's Power archtecture (possibly accompanied by Sony's Cell as in the PS3) as the natural successor to the x86 line, and is therefore at war with Intel.
This seems a bit penny-pinching, given that the 17" is aiming to be the ultimate money-no-object portable, and Apple are famous for selling machines that are at the high quality/high cost end of the market.
Am I the only one who finds that peole are throwing tags around at random in slashdot articles? This one has a link to the BBC's report, and no link to the Gates Foundation's confirmation. Why is the link in the part about the Gates foundation and not round at least the words 'BBC' and 'reporting'? As for the other link, it's hardly useful to be told that the submitter's email address is nobody@127.0.0.1
Yes, I have tried it, and I hated it :-)
Everyone's experience is different, but I'm sure Apple wouldn't lose any sales by using the extra space the 17" 'machine has to offer.
While the point about not sitting centrally is definitely valid, take a look at this picture of the 15" machine and compare it to the standard Apple keyboard. The inverted T is half-height, the function keys are half height (and not all 15 are there), there is no numeric pad, no pageup/down/home/end/help/del block, the return is single height not double, the control alt, space and apple keys are smaller than usual, there is an extra key to the left of the spacebar and the gaps betwen all the blocks that I'm used to on my desktop mac keyboard (which, incidentally measures 17" across) have gone.
I can see why they have had to compromise like this on the 12" machine, but the 17" could have been far closer to the desktop layout, if not identical. Learning the new layout is certainly possible, and after a bit of use I'm sure it would feel 'just right', but why do I need to relearn when the extra space is there?