Don't worry, it's a rhetorical question Well, you took my subject, although for me, its not a rhetorical quesiton.
Strange though, wasn't there an article in the last couple of days about how with IE8, they were trying to become more standards compliant? Then this article comes up
Redmond, Wash.-based Microvision is unveiling a full functioning, self-contained prototype
Hannigan explained that SHOW is plug and play and should work with any video-out capable devices, including laptops, the iPod touch, and some phones. Hmmm, a Redmond-based company starting with the name "Micro" that makes a plug and play device (hmmm, Windows only possibly) that makes it easier to display a PowerPoint presentation. Any connection, I wonder?
Seriously, though, if this was put into an iPhone, think how cool it could be... I could edit the presentation AND project it on my Cell Phone and then spend half an hour trying to upload it to the server afterwards over the Edge network so that others could look at it.
a sperm's flagellum can propel it at about 7 inches an hour I am pretty sure my sperm travels much faster than that, and pretty sure I can go farther in under a second
Yeah, and then USA can get copyrights on Canyons, any house that is white, any monument that resembles a fallace, and the adobe brick. Oh, while we are at it, lets copyright any invention that we have invented (even though others have since copied it) such as the telephone, television, color television, the radio, and the personal computer. Heck, lets copyright the internet, as it was originally ARAPA.
Seriously, I wonder if Egypt, if they can copyright this, will sue Mexico over their pyrimids, and then sue the Luxor in Las Vegas
I was waiting for someone to say this. However, it should be pointed out that in "His Dark Materials" (of which the first book, The Golden Compass is currently in the theater), "Dust" is not the same thing as "dust". Not only is it a cause of the Northern Lights, but its also an elementary particle. As such, the pun is "The cause of the Northern Lights comes from a stream of charged particles, or 'Dust' from the sun...."
From wikipedia.org
Dust (His Dark Materials) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Dust in Philip Pullman's trilogy of novels His Dark Materials is a fictional form of dark matter, an elementary particle that is of fundamental importance to the novels. Dust is invisible to the human eye and cannot be seen without the use of special instruments such as the The Amber Spyglass or a special film. However, while humans cannot see dust without the use of outside devices, creatures such as the mulefa are able to see dust with their own eyes.
Unlike ordinary particles, Dust is conscious. It falls from the sky and is attracted to people (especially adults) and objects made by people. This makes it of great interest to the Church, which believes that it may be the physical manifestation of Original Sin. We later learn that Dust actually confers consciousness, knowledge and wisdom, and that Dust is formed when matter becomes conscious. This allows creatures who have the ability to see dust to identify other sentient and intelligent creatures. An example of this is when the mulefa are able to distinguish Mary Malone as an intelligent being, because of the dust surrounding her, when compared to the other animals in the mulefa's world.
It is Dust that provides the answers given by the alethiometer, the I Ching system of divination and also the computer that Dr Mary Malone creates in order to communicate directly with these particles.
Dust has various names among the various different worlds within the trilogy. Dust was previously known (in Lyra Belacqua's universe) as Rusakov particles after their discoverer, Boris Mikhailovitch Rusakov. It is known also as Shadows in our world (Pullman relates Dust to Dark Matter), and the mulefa's word sraf accompanied by a leftward flick of the trunk (or arm for humans).
Angels, including The Authority, are formed when Dust condenses, but they are not in reality the human-like figures they appear to be.
Vangelis' evocative soundtrack, remastered for The Final Cut in 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound, sounds better than ever, complimenting the story perfectly, from the fast paced action sequences to the slow, haunting scenes in Deckard's smoke filled apartment. I am crushed. Someone please tell me that they at least but Dolby Digital ES on there, and we are not limited to the old 1995 Dolby Digital standard.
Are you going to give him a 387 math co-processor to go with it? Also, are you planning to give him Dos 3.3, or be really nice and give him Dos 5? If he is bad, you can setup Dosshell (or was that Dos 6?). If he is really good, you can give him Stacker to double the size of his 20 meg hard drive.For Christmas, you can upgrade him to four meg of memory, and when he reaches manhood, he can have a SoundBlaster Pro, a VGA video card and monitor, and the MM compatable CD-Rom (with a substained data transfer rate of 150k a second). With the 2400 baud modem running Trumpet Winsock and NCSA Mosaic, he might be able to get on eBay to find used copies of the 7th Guest, Myst, and King's Quest 5.
But I am going to disagree with using the open source software (with the exception, maybe, of the GIMP). These old versions are not so old that they are unusable. You can still make animations and websites in Flash 5 and Dreamweaver 2000, and you can still do graphic editing in your old version of Photoshop. Teach them the industry standard. While I am a big fan of open source, substituting Open Souce software when you are trying to prepare students for the real world is, well, stupid. While you will be teaching them the concepts with the open source software, when they go off to art school or try to get a job somewhere and someone wants to know if they know Photoshop, and they say, no but I know the Gimp, they are going to be laughed out of the door. However, if you teach them the older versions of the software, its not going to be too difficult for them to transition to new versions later in life.
Now my answer would be quite different if you were building computer labs across 12 schools and all the students needed to do was to internet research and write papers - yes, by all means, give them Linux and Open Office and save a hundred thousand dollars. But please, don't try giving your students Komposer and try to claim that its an industry standard alternative to Dreamweaver - they are not in the same league. Gimp is a great program, and I use it quite often, and in fact I would encourage that you teach it along side Photoshop, but please do not deprive your kids of learning Photoshop. And Movie Maker is not THAT bad for probably what your students will be doing. No, it is not Final Cut, it is not Premiere, but it will teach them the basics. In fact, if you know that your school district is going to buy Premiere next year, toward the end of the class, may want to consider downloading the 30 day trial version and use that. But, IMHO, the students will learn more by using Windows Movie Maker that they will have on their home computers as opposed to some open source alternative that they will probably never use again.
Here's a table that lists support of various CSS styles on a per-browser basis. IE doesn't look good I think everyone is being a little harsh here. Yes there are things that IE7 does not support right, but the thing is, it has NEVER supported it right. Unless you are doing some very weird coding, its not like stuff worked in IE6 and is now broke in IE7, and the few things that are broke tend to be from stupid webprogrammers who write these stupid apps that are IE6 compatable only, and will not work in Firefox or Opera or any of the other browsers.
I have had the headaches with Internet Explorer as well when designing pages, but these are not unique to IE7. In fact, if you want true standards compliance, I do not think any one browser supports everything. How many browsers out there can successfully render the acid2 test?
On the table scroll down to the bottom table. Look, there are things that Safari, Firefox, and Konqour do not support as well. First line and First letter are only supported by IE , Safari and iCab, the others are not quite there. + selctor works in IE and Opera and iCab and Konqour but not fully in Firefox or Safari.
Seems as if there is no perfect browser, and if there was, if it was a browser that most people have not used (wtf is iCab anyways), its still useless. If the majority of our users are using IE and Firefox, what is the point of programing a fully standards complient website that can only be properly rendered by, say, Opera?
Yes, TracPhones are ridicoulously inexpensive. Cingular to go is not that much more, and you tend to get better coverage.
They are not all that expensive in other countries either.
SEVEN years ago in Europe, I had MaxMobile, and I paid roughly $80 USD for it. It came with like 200 shillings of minutes, but I NEVER had to buy more minutes, and I called the US on it. Why was it so cheap? Because it did not count against your minutes if you recieved calls, and it did not count against your minutes if you called 0-800 numbers, which AT&T had. Since we had a calling plan with AT&T, it cost a whole 3 cents a minute for me to call the states from Austria. Like I said, this was seven years ago. I am sure it is ridicoulusly cheaper now than it was then.
Seven years ago in Europe, the only people I saw who used the payphones were Americans, and they had their little tour books with them trying to figure out how to dial AT&T or MCI. No European ever used a payphone - Everyone had a cell. It seemed in Italy if you were old enough to walk, you had a cell phone. It seemed more people had cell phones as it was cheaper to have a cell phone than to have a land line in several of the countries.
What was all that ranting saying? In a nutshell, in my experience, cell phones are cheaper in Europe than in the US.
LOL, and this is what I get for responding to quickly, I sped read this. Its talking about cheaper DVDs, not cheaper DVD players, which is a whole other issue. We all know that paying between $7.50 - $15 a disc is absolutely unreasonable!
I mean, I could actually get something cheaper than the $27 Durabrand that I bought at WalMart (regular price) that supports digital out, so I get Dolby Digital and DTS, progressive scan, is hackable and will output PAL on my discs that I bought in Europe instead of trying to convert to NTSC like most players do (surprisingly my TV supports both 576i and 576P at 50 Hertz on an American HDTV). We just all know that $27 for a DVD player is outragious, and we must have some type of commercial support to make them cheaper!
Oh, and surprisingly, as I do not have HDMI and therefore cannot upconvert, the $27 player actually seems to play nicer than my PS3 with my TV, for some odd reason with the PS3 the tv keeps trying to redetect the resolution at 480p every couple of minutes, which means you loose picture every few minutes. Quality wise, the $27 player looks and sounds just as good as the more expensive players.
I was thinking the same thing. Surely Steam / Sierra would not release such a horribly buggy version of the game. Sierra (at least in the past) has always been excellent at quality control, and this is a MUCH anticipated release.
It should be interesting to noted that not one place in here does it mention which firmware was used. Firmware 2.01 was just released a couple of days ago, and it does say that two of the main things fixed was better support for PS2 games, and major improvements for certain PS3 titles (although it does not say which ones). Most of the issues I have seen with poor game performance for new PS3 games has always been resolved almost immediately after release(but not always, sometimes they take a while) with a firmware update.
if you do not increase the size of the pipe to the backbone. And I am not just talking about fiber to the home, the ISPs need to increase bandwidth capacity to the backbone or wherever they purchase their bandwidth from.
I think we are kinda not understanding the console wars. This is NOT the same thing as the HD war, whereas there will be a winner and a looser. Even if Sony comes in third in console sales, if they sale enough (what they have sold is nothing to be ashamed about, its actually quite good for a console thats only a year old, its just not selling AS WELL IN THE US as the other two. I wish I had a site to point to, but Sony is actually doing quite well in Japan) there will be games and exclusives. This is why I hate the phrase "console wars" as I think its clear from history that not coming in first does not mean that you will fail. Look at the Sega Genesis. While not selling as good as the Super Nintendo, that does not mean the Genesis was a failure. The PSP has a 25% market share, that does not mean its a failure. Shoot, nowadays I see way more people with PSPs than DSs.
That does not mean that there haven't been failures in the gaming market. I think we can point to Colecovision, Intelevision, the Atari 7800, Sega 32x, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, and 3DO as being failures. IMHO, Sega did not fail at first from not having top market sales or developers, Sega failed because they kept releasing new systems and it scared people from buying new systems. However, according to wikipedia, the Saturn did extreamely well in Japan, outselling both the Playstation and the N64.
According to this article on Macworld (btw, Happy Birthday PS3), the console has over 200 games available for it (although I swear that I have not seen that many games), but if that is true, 200 games in a year, over 5 million units sold in under a year, and a major push for the BluRay market, I would not say that the PS3 was a failure, nor do I expect it to die, but rather come stronger over the coming year.
It is amazing how long it takes some things to show up on Slashdot. This was reported on hpana.com last Friday. Actually, that was an update to the story, which was reporting an article she wrote on her website. There is an an older update from November 1st that also talks about it. I cannot find the original article, it has rolled off of the old news page.
I am waiting to see the November sales figures. Sony has really been pulling out the advertising lately, has had a couple of kick-ass system exclusives, and had a huge price drop (at the cost of loosing backwards combatability). I am really interested to see how Sony's plan worked out.
And its amazing that over a year after the introduction, people still wait in lines to get Wii's. I just happened to go to the store on the right day and got mine..
True, but the Wii does not have a built-in hard drive. I mean, there is a big difference between downloading an 8k NES rom to your 512 meg SD gard, and trying to download a 1 gig Gamecube game to your SD card. Nintendo could prbably get around this if they came up with some kind of streaming content download system, where you only download the part of the game you are in at the time (for example, with Zelda, the Windwaker, you would download the current dugeon you are in, along with textures and models of enemies).
Nah, I agree with Pixel, this is EXACTLY like what Sony is doing with the Playstation Network. OMG, Microsoft copied someone else's idea and tried to market it like its this new grand inovation they are giving people! Who would have thought that Microsoft would do such a thing!
The features listed here are not that far out there. I mean, come on, if Adobe Acrobat can add a button to a toolbar, how hard would it be for Microsoft to add to Vista the ability to show or hide hidden files from the operating system? Infinite Virtual Desktops? If Microsoft was smart, the number of virtual desktops would be as simple as changing a line of code from a constant to an integer that gets increased each time the user rightclicks and chooses "Create new virtual desktop" (my bet is that Microsoft was not that smart). Virtual folders? If this is like symbolic links, there are third party applications that will do this already, it should not be too hard for MS to embed it into the operating system. Truthfully, it seems that the only big thing is the intergrated font manager, and knowing Microsoft, they would not write their own, but rather buy out some third party developer that already has an app for this, and intergrate it. This may actually make it feasable for more creatives to use a Windows PC to do graphic art and stuff on. Right now, all your fonts are either on or off. I notice slowdowns with this, and I only have maybe 150 fonts installed. The concept of something like Suitcase or Fusion intergrated into Windows would be HUGE.
The one thing I really wanted off of that list was for the taskbar to be able to take advantage of multiple monitors (and the ability to turn that feature off if I do not want my toolbar extending onto my HDTV). I use multi-displays at work (the laptop display and an external monitor), and the secondary monitor has way more real-estate than the primary display. Of course, I could always invert my primary and secondary displays, so the taskbar would show up on the secondary monitor, but it would be REALLY adventagious to have the taskbar span multi-screens, but even more so, be able to move an open program from the taskbar on one screen to the other. This may be the big thing that may not make it into a Vista service pack, as this would require almost a complete rewrite of the toolbar. Not quite sure how much coding goes into the toolbar, but I am willing to bet that this is an integral part of Explorer, and trying to do a quick-and-dirty patch to this could have reprecautions throughout Explorer.
Maybe instead of looking at the iPhone, you should look at the Blackberry. These things are EVERYWHERE!It seems as if everyone has a Blackberry these days. I wish I could go back in time a couple of years and purchase stock in RIMM.
It seems as if the author of the blurb badly summorized the article. My first reaction was, "What an idiot Dvorak is, there is no gPhone". I opened up the article, and not ONCE does Dvorak use the term "gPhone". He seems to have a pretty good understanding of what Google is actually doing. While he did say "the Google Phone is coming", it seems as if he used the term jokingly, as right before that he mentions that the Open Handset Alliane is what actually became of the rumored gPhone. I just briefly skimmed the article, and he also seems to admit that Blackberry is very dominate in our society.
The term Google Phone was also used in the title. I am willing to bet that the title is not something Dvorak came up with, but rather something the editor did. Dvorak may be an idiot, but he seems to follow the news enough to know not to use that term.
So in other words, its a backup with system restore points with a pretty interface.
You know, I am using Leopard, and just fired up Time Machine. I do not see a way to create a backup unless you have a secondary disk. It looks like you point it to a backup drive, and it creates a disc image of your computer at regular intervals.
Hmmmm, this reminds me a LOT of Deja Vu, which I have been using for a while to create daily backups of our XServe to another location (in addition to the RAID that is built into the server, which I do not entirely trust as its a software raid). So, can someone tell me, featurewise, what is the difference?
I know my co-worker was talking about all these new features in Leopard, and I was like, um, Windows (or third party windows apps) has been doing that for years.
"Oh sorry, we can't get the data today because its cloudy" You are assuming that the recieving station would be on the ground. No, in a case like this, you would have your recieving station in orbit, then simply have a satellite link to ground controlers. You could easily get the speed you are looking for, just don't expect to play a deathmatch of Unreal with someone 1.5 million miles away.
In the vacume of space, you would not have to deal with light scattering either. However, I do see a problem with this. This looks like it would be great with, say, a moonbase, which is going to stay stationary on the surface of the moon. However, I do not see a real practical use for planetary spacecraft that are constantly in motion. With a laser communication system over that distance, you would have to have amazing pointing accuracy between the sender and reciever. If its off by even a hair, the laserbeam is going to miss the reciever by hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. With radio, you can at least point your high gain antennas "toward Earth", and anyone with an antenna on the ground pointing in that general direction at that frequency could pick up the signal. With laser, if you are pointing toward a satelite, you are no longer pointing at a huge circular object 24,000 miles in diameter, you are pointing at a satellite roughly 50 feet across to a reciever on that satelite that is roughly a few inches. IF, by some miracle, you were able to line it up, the spacecraft will have moved before you can even get verification of a successful link. So, no highdef realtime video from a planetary flyby.
However, and it would be tricky, and probably longer distances then they are planning on, but if you put a satelite in Earth orbit, and one in Mars orbit, and have them stationary (not geosynchronous, I guess stationary is the word I am looking for), then you might be able to establish a long term laser communication between the two. You could then have your landers on Mars uplink with the Mars orbiter when they come into view using satellite communications. This would lead to higher date rates to Martian ground vehicles, meaning less time needed to send and verify commands, and we no longer have to wait several minutes to get a high res picture, as it could probably send us high res video (with a strong enough antenna on the ground).
My question is, is this really a new concept? I am pretty sure I have read about similar technologies in Sci-Fi novels. This may be just the first time that they actually tried it.
Darn it, the article does not say where I can get one. I guess i will have to turn to Google!
Truthfully, I want like a directional jammer. Many people are considerate using the cell phone. At least around here. I just want to jam that one person who is talking to their friend on the phone while riding the train at the top of their voice. I mean, there are times I get emergancy calls and have to go to different area to be able to hear because that one dolt is yelling into their cell phone. Just give me like a little remote that I can point at the guy, turn on for a few seconds to make them loose signal, then put it up.
Slashdot Mirror
Strange though, wasn't there an article in the last couple of days about how with IE8, they were trying to become more standards compliant? Then this article comes up
Seriously, though, if this was put into an iPhone, think how cool it could be... I could edit the presentation AND project it on my Cell Phone and then spend half an hour trying to upload it to the server afterwards over the Edge network so that others could look at it.
Yeah, and then USA can get copyrights on Canyons, any house that is white, any monument that resembles a fallace, and the adobe brick. Oh, while we are at it, lets copyright any invention that we have invented (even though others have since copied it) such as the telephone, television, color television, the radio, and the personal computer. Heck, lets copyright the internet, as it was originally ARAPA.
Seriously, I wonder if Egypt, if they can copyright this, will sue Mexico over their pyrimids, and then sue the Luxor in Las Vegas
From wikipedia.org Dust (His Dark Materials)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Dust in Philip Pullman's trilogy of novels His Dark Materials is a fictional form of dark matter, an elementary particle that is of fundamental importance to the novels. Dust is invisible to the human eye and cannot be seen without the use of special instruments such as the The Amber Spyglass or a special film. However, while humans cannot see dust without the use of outside devices, creatures such as the mulefa are able to see dust with their own eyes.
Unlike ordinary particles, Dust is conscious. It falls from the sky and is attracted to people (especially adults) and objects made by people. This makes it of great interest to the Church, which believes that it may be the physical manifestation of Original Sin. We later learn that Dust actually confers consciousness, knowledge and wisdom, and that Dust is formed when matter becomes conscious. This allows creatures who have the ability to see dust to identify other sentient and intelligent creatures. An example of this is when the mulefa are able to distinguish Mary Malone as an intelligent being, because of the dust surrounding her, when compared to the other animals in the mulefa's world.
It is Dust that provides the answers given by the alethiometer, the I Ching system of divination and also the computer that Dr Mary Malone creates in order to communicate directly with these particles.
Dust has various names among the various different worlds within the trilogy. Dust was previously known (in Lyra Belacqua's universe) as Rusakov particles after their discoverer, Boris Mikhailovitch Rusakov. It is known also as Shadows in our world (Pullman relates Dust to Dark Matter), and the mulefa's word sraf accompanied by a leftward flick of the trunk (or arm for humans).
Angels, including The Authority, are formed when Dust condenses, but they are not in reality the human-like figures they appear to be.
Are you going to give him a 387 math co-processor to go with it? Also, are you planning to give him Dos 3.3, or be really nice and give him Dos 5? If he is bad, you can setup Dosshell (or was that Dos 6?). If he is really good, you can give him Stacker to double the size of his 20 meg hard drive.For Christmas, you can upgrade him to four meg of memory, and when he reaches manhood, he can have a SoundBlaster Pro, a VGA video card and monitor, and the MM compatable CD-Rom (with a substained data transfer rate of 150k a second). With the 2400 baud modem running Trumpet Winsock and NCSA Mosaic, he might be able to get on eBay to find used copies of the 7th Guest, Myst, and King's Quest 5.
But I am going to disagree with using the open source software (with the exception, maybe, of the GIMP). These old versions are not so old that they are unusable. You can still make animations and websites in Flash 5 and Dreamweaver 2000, and you can still do graphic editing in your old version of Photoshop. Teach them the industry standard. While I am a big fan of open source, substituting Open Souce software when you are trying to prepare students for the real world is, well, stupid. While you will be teaching them the concepts with the open source software, when they go off to art school or try to get a job somewhere and someone wants to know if they know Photoshop, and they say, no but I know the Gimp, they are going to be laughed out of the door. However, if you teach them the older versions of the software, its not going to be too difficult for them to transition to new versions later in life.
Now my answer would be quite different if you were building computer labs across 12 schools and all the students needed to do was to internet research and write papers - yes, by all means, give them Linux and Open Office and save a hundred thousand dollars. But please, don't try giving your students Komposer and try to claim that its an industry standard alternative to Dreamweaver - they are not in the same league. Gimp is a great program, and I use it quite often, and in fact I would encourage that you teach it along side Photoshop, but please do not deprive your kids of learning Photoshop. And Movie Maker is not THAT bad for probably what your students will be doing. No, it is not Final Cut, it is not Premiere, but it will teach them the basics. In fact, if you know that your school district is going to buy Premiere next year, toward the end of the class, may want to consider downloading the 30 day trial version and use that. But, IMHO, the students will learn more by using Windows Movie Maker that they will have on their home computers as opposed to some open source alternative that they will probably never use again.
I have had the headaches with Internet Explorer as well when designing pages, but these are not unique to IE7. In fact, if you want true standards compliance, I do not think any one browser supports everything. How many browsers out there can successfully render the acid2 test?
On the table scroll down to the bottom table. Look, there are things that Safari, Firefox, and Konqour do not support as well. First line and First letter are only supported by IE , Safari and iCab, the others are not quite there. + selctor works in IE and Opera and iCab and Konqour but not fully in Firefox or Safari.
Seems as if there is no perfect browser, and if there was, if it was a browser that most people have not used (wtf is iCab anyways), its still useless. If the majority of our users are using IE and Firefox, what is the point of programing a fully standards complient website that can only be properly rendered by, say, Opera?
Just some food for thought.
Yes, TracPhones are ridicoulously inexpensive. Cingular to go is not that much more, and you tend to get better coverage.
They are not all that expensive in other countries either.
SEVEN years ago in Europe, I had MaxMobile, and I paid roughly $80 USD for it. It came with like 200 shillings of minutes, but I NEVER had to buy more minutes, and I called the US on it. Why was it so cheap? Because it did not count against your minutes if you recieved calls, and it did not count against your minutes if you called 0-800 numbers, which AT&T had. Since we had a calling plan with AT&T, it cost a whole 3 cents a minute for me to call the states from Austria. Like I said, this was seven years ago. I am sure it is ridicoulusly cheaper now than it was then.
Seven years ago in Europe, the only people I saw who used the payphones were Americans, and they had their little tour books with them trying to figure out how to dial AT&T or MCI. No European ever used a payphone - Everyone had a cell. It seemed in Italy if you were old enough to walk, you had a cell phone. It seemed more people had cell phones as it was cheaper to have a cell phone than to have a land line in several of the countries.
What was all that ranting saying? In a nutshell, in my experience, cell phones are cheaper in Europe than in the US.
LOL, and this is what I get for responding to quickly, I sped read this. Its talking about cheaper DVDs, not cheaper DVD players, which is a whole other issue. We all know that paying between $7.50 - $15 a disc is absolutely unreasonable!
I mean, I could actually get something cheaper than the $27 Durabrand that I bought at WalMart (regular price) that supports digital out, so I get Dolby Digital and DTS, progressive scan, is hackable and will output PAL on my discs that I bought in Europe instead of trying to convert to NTSC like most players do (surprisingly my TV supports both 576i and 576P at 50 Hertz on an American HDTV). We just all know that $27 for a DVD player is outragious, and we must have some type of commercial support to make them cheaper!
Oh, and surprisingly, as I do not have HDMI and therefore cannot upconvert, the $27 player actually seems to play nicer than my PS3 with my TV, for some odd reason with the PS3 the tv keeps trying to redetect the resolution at 480p every couple of minutes, which means you loose picture every few minutes. Quality wise, the $27 player looks and sounds just as good as the more expensive players.
I was thinking the same thing. Surely Steam / Sierra would not release such a horribly buggy version of the game. Sierra (at least in the past) has always been excellent at quality control, and this is a MUCH anticipated release.
It should be interesting to noted that not one place in here does it mention which firmware was used. Firmware 2.01 was just released a couple of days ago, and it does say that two of the main things fixed was better support for PS2 games, and major improvements for certain PS3 titles (although it does not say which ones). Most of the issues I have seen with poor game performance for new PS3 games has always been resolved almost immediately after release(but not always, sometimes they take a while) with a firmware update.
if you do not increase the size of the pipe to the backbone. And I am not just talking about fiber to the home, the ISPs need to increase bandwidth capacity to the backbone or wherever they purchase their bandwidth from.
I think we are kinda not understanding the console wars. This is NOT the same thing as the HD war, whereas there will be a winner and a looser. Even if Sony comes in third in console sales, if they sale enough (what they have sold is nothing to be ashamed about, its actually quite good for a console thats only a year old, its just not selling AS WELL IN THE US as the other two. I wish I had a site to point to, but Sony is actually doing quite well in Japan) there will be games and exclusives. This is why I hate the phrase "console wars" as I think its clear from history that not coming in first does not mean that you will fail. Look at the Sega Genesis. While not selling as good as the Super Nintendo, that does not mean the Genesis was a failure. The PSP has a 25% market share, that does not mean its a failure. Shoot, nowadays I see way more people with PSPs than DSs.
That does not mean that there haven't been failures in the gaming market. I think we can point to Colecovision, Intelevision, the Atari 7800, Sega 32x, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, and 3DO as being failures. IMHO, Sega did not fail at first from not having top market sales or developers, Sega failed because they kept releasing new systems and it scared people from buying new systems. However, according to wikipedia, the Saturn did extreamely well in Japan, outselling both the Playstation and the N64.
According to this article on Macworld (btw, Happy Birthday PS3), the console has over 200 games available for it (although I swear that I have not seen that many games), but if that is true, 200 games in a year, over 5 million units sold in under a year, and a major push for the BluRay market, I would not say that the PS3 was a failure, nor do I expect it to die, but rather come stronger over the coming year.
Digital rights would be awful! I should be able to share my memories with whomever I want!
It is amazing how long it takes some things to show up on Slashdot. This was reported on hpana.com last Friday. Actually, that was an update to the story, which was reporting an article she wrote on her website. There is an an older update from November 1st that also talks about it. I cannot find the original article, it has rolled off of the old news page.
I am waiting to see the November sales figures. Sony has really been pulling out the advertising lately, has had a couple of kick-ass system exclusives, and had a huge price drop (at the cost of loosing backwards combatability). I am really interested to see how Sony's plan worked out.
And its amazing that over a year after the introduction, people still wait in lines to get Wii's. I just happened to go to the store on the right day and got mine..
True, but the Wii does not have a built-in hard drive. I mean, there is a big difference between downloading an 8k NES rom to your 512 meg SD gard, and trying to download a 1 gig Gamecube game to your SD card. Nintendo could prbably get around this if they came up with some kind of streaming content download system, where you only download the part of the game you are in at the time (for example, with Zelda, the Windwaker, you would download the current dugeon you are in, along with textures and models of enemies).
Nah, I agree with Pixel, this is EXACTLY like what Sony is doing with the Playstation Network. OMG, Microsoft copied someone else's idea and tried to market it like its this new grand inovation they are giving people! Who would have thought that Microsoft would do such a thing!
The features listed here are not that far out there. I mean, come on, if Adobe Acrobat can add a button to a toolbar, how hard would it be for Microsoft to add to Vista the ability to show or hide hidden files from the operating system? Infinite Virtual Desktops? If Microsoft was smart, the number of virtual desktops would be as simple as changing a line of code from a constant to an integer that gets increased each time the user rightclicks and chooses "Create new virtual desktop" (my bet is that Microsoft was not that smart). Virtual folders? If this is like symbolic links, there are third party applications that will do this already, it should not be too hard for MS to embed it into the operating system. Truthfully, it seems that the only big thing is the intergrated font manager, and knowing Microsoft, they would not write their own, but rather buy out some third party developer that already has an app for this, and intergrate it. This may actually make it feasable for more creatives to use a Windows PC to do graphic art and stuff on. Right now, all your fonts are either on or off. I notice slowdowns with this, and I only have maybe 150 fonts installed. The concept of something like Suitcase or Fusion intergrated into Windows would be HUGE.
The one thing I really wanted off of that list was for the taskbar to be able to take advantage of multiple monitors (and the ability to turn that feature off if I do not want my toolbar extending onto my HDTV). I use multi-displays at work (the laptop display and an external monitor), and the secondary monitor has way more real-estate than the primary display. Of course, I could always invert my primary and secondary displays, so the taskbar would show up on the secondary monitor, but it would be REALLY adventagious to have the taskbar span multi-screens, but even more so, be able to move an open program from the taskbar on one screen to the other. This may be the big thing that may not make it into a Vista service pack, as this would require almost a complete rewrite of the toolbar. Not quite sure how much coding goes into the toolbar, but I am willing to bet that this is an integral part of Explorer, and trying to do a quick-and-dirty patch to this could have reprecautions throughout Explorer.
Maybe instead of looking at the iPhone, you should look at the Blackberry. These things are EVERYWHERE!It seems as if everyone has a Blackberry these days. I wish I could go back in time a couple of years and purchase stock in RIMM.
It seems as if the author of the blurb badly summorized the article. My first reaction was, "What an idiot Dvorak is, there is no gPhone". I opened up the article, and not ONCE does Dvorak use the term "gPhone". He seems to have a pretty good understanding of what Google is actually doing. While he did say "the Google Phone is coming", it seems as if he used the term jokingly, as right before that he mentions that the Open Handset Alliane is what actually became of the rumored gPhone. I just briefly skimmed the article, and he also seems to admit that Blackberry is very dominate in our society.
The term Google Phone was also used in the title. I am willing to bet that the title is not something Dvorak came up with, but rather something the editor did. Dvorak may be an idiot, but he seems to follow the news enough to know not to use that term.
That is the most useful and insightful description of Time Machine I have ever seen
So in other words, its a backup with system restore points with a pretty interface.
You know, I am using Leopard, and just fired up Time Machine. I do not see a way to create a backup unless you have a secondary disk. It looks like you point it to a backup drive, and it creates a disc image of your computer at regular intervals.
Hmmmm, this reminds me a LOT of Deja Vu, which I have been using for a while to create daily backups of our XServe to another location (in addition to the RAID that is built into the server, which I do not entirely trust as its a software raid). So, can someone tell me, featurewise, what is the difference?
I know my co-worker was talking about all these new features in Leopard, and I was like, um, Windows (or third party windows apps) has been doing that for years.
In the vacume of space, you would not have to deal with light scattering either. However, I do see a problem with this. This looks like it would be great with, say, a moonbase, which is going to stay stationary on the surface of the moon. However, I do not see a real practical use for planetary spacecraft that are constantly in motion. With a laser communication system over that distance, you would have to have amazing pointing accuracy between the sender and reciever. If its off by even a hair, the laserbeam is going to miss the reciever by hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. With radio, you can at least point your high gain antennas "toward Earth", and anyone with an antenna on the ground pointing in that general direction at that frequency could pick up the signal. With laser, if you are pointing toward a satelite, you are no longer pointing at a huge circular object 24,000 miles in diameter, you are pointing at a satellite roughly 50 feet across to a reciever on that satelite that is roughly a few inches. IF, by some miracle, you were able to line it up, the spacecraft will have moved before you can even get verification of a successful link. So, no highdef realtime video from a planetary flyby.
However, and it would be tricky, and probably longer distances then they are planning on, but if you put a satelite in Earth orbit, and one in Mars orbit, and have them stationary (not geosynchronous, I guess stationary is the word I am looking for), then you might be able to establish a long term laser communication between the two. You could then have your landers on Mars uplink with the Mars orbiter when they come into view using satellite communications. This would lead to higher date rates to Martian ground vehicles, meaning less time needed to send and verify commands, and we no longer have to wait several minutes to get a high res picture, as it could probably send us high res video (with a strong enough antenna on the ground).
My question is, is this really a new concept? I am pretty sure I have read about similar technologies in Sci-Fi novels. This may be just the first time that they actually tried it.
Darn it, the article does not say where I can get one. I guess i will have to turn to Google!
Truthfully, I want like a directional jammer. Many people are considerate using the cell phone. At least around here. I just want to jam that one person who is talking to their friend on the phone while riding the train at the top of their voice. I mean, there are times I get emergancy calls and have to go to different area to be able to hear because that one dolt is yelling into their cell phone. Just give me like a little remote that I can point at the guy, turn on for a few seconds to make them loose signal, then put it up.
BTW, I am being sarcastic.