My dad has been a long time fan of Apple and is a proud owner of a Macbook Pro (brand new, March last year). Before that he had a PowerBook G4. The G4 and the bluetooth Apple mouse he got with it died about the same time. He never really liked the Apple mouse. It felt cheap and clackety and didn't fit his hand right. He does like having that second mouse button.
It was around that time I wanted to buy a present for my dad and looked into getting a mouse that was bluetooth and kinda fit the Mac theme and didn't take up a USB slot. So I got my dad a white V470 bluetooth mouse. It was even advertised in the store as being Mac friendly. That mouse was horrible. It never gave the correct amount of battery charge and you pretty much couldn't tell if it was turned on or not. I kept swapping out batteries on it and it greatly annoyed my dad who just wanted to get on with his work. I never figured out if it was a fault with the mouse or the Macbook but it never remembered it's pairing. Everytime the Macbook was booted up, the mouse had to be manually paired again as if it was a new mouse. I recommend that no one here ever look twice at a V470. My dad ended up using a cheap little Taiwanese corded mouse with flashy LEDs I got for free from some store offer.
A couple of months later my dad's original Apple Bluetooth Keyboard also died. So we decided to look into getting a wireless combo deal. This time, we didn't try for bluetooth. We looked at RF. We went for the Microsoft Wireless Laser Keyboard 6000 V2.0. It was on a heavily discounted offer price and initially we were just focused on the big chunky mouse. Turns out to be a really nice product. It's a big full-size keyboard, nice rubbery wrist rest and came with some extra function keys that are perfect for my dad. There's zoom-in and zoom-out buttons on the side that work globally and are especially useful for websites with small writing. No more hunting for the options in Firefox or Safari. The OS also recognized the big pair of volume controls above the function keys making it much easier to change volume. The chunky mouse is perfect for my dad. My only gripe is that for some reason, the polling or DPI isn't handled correctly and so the mouse pointer moves half the speed it usually does for a given setting. So right now, the pointer speed is maxed out in the system preferences and it's just a tad too slow....but my dad has gotten used to it now. Again, I have no idea if this a fault in the mouse or the Macbook.
Everyone is pretty clear that we did (mostly) the right things and the good guys won.
You couldn't possibly be that naive. I wish to -1 your score but there isn't an appropriate mod choice. You aren't a troll and your comment can't be described as overrated.
I can't claim to have discovered the term "handwavium". I saw it on a/tg/ thread on the billionth discussion about Warhammer 40K fluff. I immediately had this mental picture of a DM with an apathetic expression on his face, lazily waving his hand in the face of an irate player demanding that the fluff be internally consistent. I adopted the term forthwith.
Back on-topic though, I agree with your idea that SF/Fantasy can be a spectrum, not two utterly separate sets of a Venn diagram. All I need do is point one towards one of my favourite collections of fluff: Shadowrun. A dragon for President of UCAS who gets assassinated JFK-style, a German dragon who ignores magic and prefers to surf the net (as if the stereotype of Germans and technology stopped merely at species boundaries, "Vorsprung durch Drachen" anyone?), Elves taking over Ireland, being arrogant and pretty and driving Maseratis and holding investment portfolios, Corporate Mages ("Did you get the memo?", "My imp ate it, sorry."), industrial waste and urbanization are so potent it actually manifests animist tendencies i.e. there are toxic waste shamans. It was pretty solid right until I lost track somewhere before 4th edition.
I wonder if you've ever heard of Anarchy Online, because your tech history of hereditary nanomachines granting "magic powers" is a distant cousin of the handwavium Funcom used to explain magic-like powers and abilities in their MMO.
I am not as cynical and worried as you are with regards to Blue-Ray. I mean, how much will the market put up with? Really?
Add to that, Blue-Ray is too little too late. It isn't that great a leap from DVDs and I am not paying obscenely inflated prices for Blue-Ray versions of movies that don't actually benefit from Hi-Def. People love their old DVD collections and - this is just a gut feeling, not studied opinion - but I think people will prefer DVDs for a long while yet. Especially for $4.99 in the discount bin. Nobody is seeing Blue-Ray films in the discount bin.
We're actually making the leap to SSDs as we speak and USB flash drives are a dime a dozen. If the broadband revolution can't provide HD-on-demand, then a day will come when you can get at 50,000 24GB flash chips on the dollar that will make up for that. Trust me, the Blue-Ray Disc Association is not going get a decent ROI on the technology.
Remember, Blue-Ray was spearheaded by Sony. The same morons who tried to corner the digital music market with ATRAC, long after mp3 became ubiquitous, and actually had the arrogance to believe people would be happy to be locked down to their proprietary format. A format that made working with MiniDiscs and clunky mp3 player software a real bitch.
It's all going to come down to consumers being fed up and the equivalent of DVD Jon and his Merry Men coming up with their own format, right product at the right time. Throw in some good old "Guerilla Engineered" Shanzhai chinese knockoff (Here's looking at you William Gibson, turns out Chiba is in China) that plays it and our money will do the talking. Kinda like how mp3 is really a Fraunhofer project that got into the "wild" and became a force all it's own and inspired a flash cartoon about Metallica and "Beer Good, Fire Bad."
Ask a driver in the US or Europe what he might consider as suicidal to drive without, he might answer "No lights", "Bald tyres" or "Worn brake pads".
A friend told me that in India, that answer would be "No car horn". The audio is too crappy on that YouTube video to convey the cacophony that keeps the traffic flowing with minimal mishap.
I wonder how long it'll be before somebody cracks on commercializing the idea of transferring "weight loss bacteria" from skinny people who seem to be able to process transfats and high fructose corn syrup without ever gaining weight, to fat people who bloat up from the mere smell of cabbage, in the convenient form of a capsule at premium cost.
I'll agree it's a breakthrough, insofar as it's highly divergent from an existing model.
I would argue that it isn't a technological breakthrough. Rather it is really a marketing, eCommerce or customer psychology breakthrough. A pretty interface that looks like iTunes that people are already familiar with and nurtures that brand loyalty factor. As is said elsewhere and you yourself seem to acknowledge, its all old ideas given that Apple polish.
Bear in mind the memristor is a completely new technology. It didn't even exist beyond being a theoretical element of electronic circuits until this year.
Priya Ganapati (the hack responsible for this list) seems to have taken a page out of classic 4chan anonymous pranking. She has been an immensely successful troll. We are all raging quite appropriately and its generating hits for that article, ensuring that "Apple App Store" is burned into our minds whether we like it or not.
I have nothing against the actual products that come through iTunes i.e the music, the tv episodes etc. My friends keep up with their favourite shows that way. It is rather convenient and no ads. My problem is the lock-in that comes with the whole iTunes gestalt and the inordinate power it places in Apple's hands.
This is the biggest reason why I will not buy an iPhone. It is a nice little piece of hardware but I hate that everything I do with it requires iTunes on my PC without extra effort on my part with the various jailbreaking kits online. I might consider the iPhone if they released an iPhone desktop manager that had the footprint of a hummingbird with no attempt to shove their inventory down my throat. All the recent news about Apple quashing iPhone apps in a supposedly "open development environment" and kill switches...that makes me nervous because now my iPhone experience comes with an "Approved by Apple" sticker....which disgusts me.
Really, the DRM is not the worst that Apple can do....
It is a problem just like this that makes me wonder why the wonderful things for the DIY micro-label indie music scene have not happened yet for old-fashioned flattened tree corpse authors.
There's lots of competitively priced options for bashing out 500 CDs or 50 vinyl complete with covers and inserts.
The web has never been a better for putting your little basement label up for all to see.
Lots of options for handling payment and some even throw in the shipping and handling on behalf of the vendor.
I know there is that whole self-publishing thing like Lulu.com and Print-On-Demand services but the publishing houses dominate the marketing and shelf space. Nor can I think of a modern example of success through this path. Let's face it, there isn't exactly a MySpace for budding authors out there.
In the end, the authors need to be aware, informed and most of all, possess a desire to continue making it easy for them to be paid or just thanked for their work long after the publishing deal expired.
Just who exactly are SecureROM? Does anybody here know?
Maybe I forgot to put on my tinfoil hat to avoid the beams from outer space, but it feels like an awful lot of developers are jumping on the SecureROM wagon despite all their flaws and dislike from a certain demographic. It feels conspiratorial.
I always felt that EA and SecureROM were in bed together from the start. I'd bet good money a few people in EA's executive have shares or stake in SecureROM so they are always going to promote that company to the other (which I think is illegal but not sure).
But now Rockstar is on board and I just can't imagine anyone from there having anything to do with SecureROM beyond a formal business relationship.
Doesn't anyone else here get the heebie-jeebies with SecureROM?
I don't know. They could win underdog points if they decided to make a very public last stand against Royal Marines, a couple of Westland Lynxes and a Her Majesty's Frigate. No one likes a bully.
I agree with this. The cyberpunk concept of a monomolecular-edged blade or whip (Johnny Mnemonic anyone?) isn't farfetched anymore with nanotech manufacturing processes around the corner and carbon nanotubes in today's science press.
You'll see it on Ginsu kitchen knives as soon as someone figures out an efficient way to get carbon atoms to line up nicely on a ceramic substrate.
I apologise for the Games Workshop geekiness but...if monomolecular edges become possible and railgun mass launcher technology soon after, then an Eldar Shuriken Cannon would be a distinct possibility. Place a molecular edge on an atoms-thick ferrous disc and accelerate it to 6 times the speed of sound. There won't be much left of whatever organic you point it at.
The only way I know to check is to just click on the score itself which opens a pop-up window. No timestamp, any mod points are anonymous and only a breakdown into percentages of category of mod points.
A Dune MMO would probably best suit that elusive hybrid of EVE Online and traditional PvE/RvR. A hardcore economy engine based on spice, psychic warp travel, a chance to run a member corporation of C.H.O.A.M., encouragement to play politics. One potential end game is to be knighted or whatever it is they call being elevated to the status of Nobility by the Emperor and then own a planet. Bring back one of the traits that made SWG so charming in the beginning: legitimate non-combat non-PvE leveling. You can buy and sell, buy and sell, send assassins to rival players, gain Mercantile and Bribery levels and sell your products to traditional PvE Fremen or Sardaukar toons.
Use the in-game mail system to just post the items to the other player.
Perhaps that particular home had two different PCs or even his laptop logged on as himself and he just gave the items to himself, acknowledging and accepting the transaction on the laptop.
True, there are bots available to endlessly kill and loot for money. The thing I like about WAR (I play it) is that so far, the gold is actually relatively meaningless. You only really need it for the mount and then some guild costs and maybe a little bit of auctioning. So having those private tells offering me gold is laughable since the economy just doesn't need you to be a gazillionaire. And if you accept a toon that was leveled for you to lvl 40 in 7 days, you've just cheated yourself of all the lore which is pretty good and treats the established fluff very well. The developers have avoided the Curse of Goto.
Slashdot Mirror
My dad has been a long time fan of Apple and is a proud owner of a Macbook Pro (brand new, March last year). Before that he had a PowerBook G4.
The G4 and the bluetooth Apple mouse he got with it died about the same time. He never really liked the Apple mouse. It felt cheap and clackety and didn't fit his hand right. He does like having that second mouse button.
It was around that time I wanted to buy a present for my dad and looked into getting a mouse that was bluetooth and kinda fit the Mac theme and didn't take up a USB slot. So I got my dad a white V470 bluetooth mouse. It was even advertised in the store as being Mac friendly.
That mouse was horrible. It never gave the correct amount of battery charge and you pretty much couldn't tell if it was turned on or not. I kept swapping out batteries on it and it greatly annoyed my dad who just wanted to get on with his work. I never figured out if it was a fault with the mouse or the Macbook but it never remembered it's pairing. Everytime the Macbook was booted up, the mouse had to be manually paired again as if it was a new mouse. I recommend that no one here ever look twice at a V470. My dad ended up using a cheap little Taiwanese corded mouse with flashy LEDs I got for free from some store offer.
A couple of months later my dad's original Apple Bluetooth Keyboard also died. So we decided to look into getting a wireless combo deal. This time, we didn't try for bluetooth. We looked at RF. We went for the Microsoft Wireless Laser Keyboard 6000 V2.0. It was on a heavily discounted offer price and initially we were just focused on the big chunky mouse.
Turns out to be a really nice product. It's a big full-size keyboard, nice rubbery wrist rest and came with some extra function keys that are perfect for my dad. There's zoom-in and zoom-out buttons on the side that work globally and are especially useful for websites with small writing. No more hunting for the options in Firefox or Safari. The OS also recognized the big pair of volume controls above the function keys making it much easier to change volume.
The chunky mouse is perfect for my dad. My only gripe is that for some reason, the polling or DPI isn't handled correctly and so the mouse pointer moves half the speed it usually does for a given setting. So right now, the pointer speed is maxed out in the system preferences and it's just a tad too slow....but my dad has gotten used to it now. Again, I have no idea if this a fault in the mouse or the Macbook.
You couldn't possibly be that naive. I wish to -1 your score but there isn't an appropriate mod choice. You aren't a troll and your comment can't be described as overrated.
I can't claim to have discovered the term "handwavium". I saw it on a /tg/ thread on the billionth discussion about Warhammer 40K fluff. I immediately had this mental picture of a DM with an apathetic expression on his face, lazily waving his hand in the face of an irate player demanding that the fluff be internally consistent. I adopted the term forthwith.
Back on-topic though, I agree with your idea that SF/Fantasy can be a spectrum, not two utterly separate sets of a Venn diagram. All I need do is point one towards one of my favourite collections of fluff: Shadowrun.
A dragon for President of UCAS who gets assassinated JFK-style, a German dragon who ignores magic and prefers to surf the net (as if the stereotype of Germans and technology stopped merely at species boundaries, "Vorsprung durch Drachen" anyone?), Elves taking over Ireland, being arrogant and pretty and driving Maseratis and holding investment portfolios, Corporate Mages ("Did you get the memo?", "My imp ate it, sorry."), industrial waste and urbanization are so potent it actually manifests animist tendencies i.e. there are toxic waste shamans. It was pretty solid right until I lost track somewhere before 4th edition.
I wonder if you've ever heard of Anarchy Online, because your tech history of hereditary nanomachines granting "magic powers" is a distant cousin of the handwavium Funcom used to explain magic-like powers and abilities in their MMO.
Sounds like it might be Haemochromatosis
My family has it too, though I may be lucky as just a carrier or non-carrier since it is a recessive gene
Thanks for sharing that. One of the sexiest hard engineering stories I've ever read.
I am not as cynical and worried as you are with regards to Blue-Ray. I mean, how much will the market put up with? Really?
Add to that, Blue-Ray is too little too late. It isn't that great a leap from DVDs and I am not paying obscenely inflated prices for Blue-Ray versions of movies that don't actually benefit from Hi-Def. People love their old DVD collections and - this is just a gut feeling, not studied opinion - but I think people will prefer DVDs for a long while yet. Especially for $4.99 in the discount bin. Nobody is seeing Blue-Ray films in the discount bin.
We're actually making the leap to SSDs as we speak and USB flash drives are a dime a dozen. If the broadband revolution can't provide HD-on-demand, then a day will come when you can get at 50,000 24GB flash chips on the dollar that will make up for that. Trust me, the Blue-Ray Disc Association is not going get a decent ROI on the technology.
Remember, Blue-Ray was spearheaded by Sony. The same morons who tried to corner the digital music market with ATRAC, long after mp3 became ubiquitous, and actually had the arrogance to believe people would be happy to be locked down to their proprietary format. A format that made working with MiniDiscs and clunky mp3 player software a real bitch.
It's all going to come down to consumers being fed up and the equivalent of DVD Jon and his Merry Men coming up with their own format, right product at the right time. Throw in some good old "Guerilla Engineered" Shanzhai chinese knockoff (Here's looking at you William Gibson, turns out Chiba is in China) that plays it and our money will do the talking. Kinda like how mp3 is really a Fraunhofer project that got into the "wild" and became a force all it's own and inspired a flash cartoon about Metallica and "Beer Good, Fire Bad."
Ask a driver in the US or Europe what he might consider as suicidal to drive without, he might answer "No lights", "Bald tyres" or "Worn brake pads".
A friend told me that in India, that answer would be "No car horn". The audio is too crappy on that YouTube video to convey the cacophony that keeps the traffic flowing with minimal mishap.
I wonder how long it'll be before somebody cracks on commercializing the idea of transferring "weight loss bacteria" from skinny people who seem to be able to process transfats and high fructose corn syrup without ever gaining weight, to fat people who bloat up from the mere smell of cabbage, in the convenient form of a capsule at premium cost.
Have you any links to back this up? You're saying the crew toilet in the upstairs section of a 747 has buttons the passenger toilets don't have?
I'll agree it's a breakthrough, insofar as it's highly divergent from an existing model.
I would argue that it isn't a technological breakthrough. Rather it is really a marketing, eCommerce or customer psychology breakthrough. A pretty interface that looks like iTunes that people are already familiar with and nurtures that brand loyalty factor. As is said elsewhere and you yourself seem to acknowledge, its all old ideas given that Apple polish.
Bear in mind the memristor is a completely new technology. It didn't even exist beyond being a theoretical element of electronic circuits until this year.
Priya Ganapati (the hack responsible for this list) seems to have taken a page out of classic 4chan anonymous pranking. She has been an immensely successful troll. We are all raging quite appropriately and its generating hits for that article, ensuring that "Apple App Store" is burned into our minds whether we like it or not.
I personally hope she never lives this down.
FITB? Fucking In The Boardroom?
I have nothing against the actual products that come through iTunes i.e the music, the tv episodes etc. My friends keep up with their favourite shows that way. It is rather convenient and no ads. My problem is the lock-in that comes with the whole iTunes gestalt and the inordinate power it places in Apple's hands.
This is the biggest reason why I will not buy an iPhone. It is a nice little piece of hardware but I hate that everything I do with it requires iTunes on my PC without extra effort on my part with the various jailbreaking kits online. I might consider the iPhone if they released an iPhone desktop manager that had the footprint of a hummingbird with no attempt to shove their inventory down my throat. All the recent news about Apple quashing iPhone apps in a supposedly "open development environment" and kill switches...that makes me nervous because now my iPhone experience comes with an "Approved by Apple" sticker....which disgusts me.
Really, the DRM is not the worst that Apple can do....
It is a Scandinavian word, so the correct plural form would be kraker.
I am so very tempted to twist this into a crack aimed at Caucasians and derogatory euphemisms for them.....but it would be far too easy.
I am shocked! No Lifeforce references? Giant phallic space ships hiding in comets? I thought slashdotters liked B-movie goddesses.
I for one welcome our naked Mathilda May space vampires.
It is a problem just like this that makes me wonder why the wonderful things for the DIY micro-label indie music scene have not happened yet for old-fashioned flattened tree corpse authors.
There's lots of competitively priced options for bashing out 500 CDs or 50 vinyl complete with covers and inserts.
The web has never been a better for putting your little basement label up for all to see.
Lots of options for handling payment and some even throw in the shipping and handling on behalf of the vendor.
I know there is that whole self-publishing thing like Lulu.com and Print-On-Demand services but the publishing houses dominate the marketing and shelf space. Nor can I think of a modern example of success through this path. Let's face it, there isn't exactly a MySpace for budding authors out there.
In the end, the authors need to be aware, informed and most of all, possess a desire to continue making it easy for them to be paid or just thanked for their work long after the publishing deal expired.
Just who exactly are SecureROM? Does anybody here know?
Maybe I forgot to put on my tinfoil hat to avoid the beams from outer space, but it feels like an awful lot of developers are jumping on the SecureROM wagon despite all their flaws and dislike from a certain demographic. It feels conspiratorial.
I always felt that EA and SecureROM were in bed together from the start. I'd bet good money a few people in EA's executive have shares or stake in SecureROM so they are always going to promote that company to the other (which I think is illegal but not sure).
But now Rockstar is on board and I just can't imagine anyone from there having anything to do with SecureROM beyond a formal business relationship.
Doesn't anyone else here get the heebie-jeebies with SecureROM?
I don't know. They could win underdog points if they decided to make a very public last stand against Royal Marines, a couple of Westland Lynxes and a Her Majesty's Frigate. No one likes a bully.
it's possible to youthen your brain
I suddenly remember the scene from My Cousin Vinny when the judge couldn't understand Joe Pesci when he said "two yoots"
I agree with this. The cyberpunk concept of a monomolecular-edged blade or whip (Johnny Mnemonic anyone?) isn't farfetched anymore with nanotech manufacturing processes around the corner and carbon nanotubes in today's science press.
You'll see it on Ginsu kitchen knives as soon as someone figures out an efficient way to get carbon atoms to line up nicely on a ceramic substrate.
I apologise for the Games Workshop geekiness but...if monomolecular edges become possible and railgun mass launcher technology soon after, then an Eldar Shuriken Cannon would be a distinct possibility. Place a molecular edge on an atoms-thick ferrous disc and accelerate it to 6 times the speed of sound. There won't be much left of whatever organic you point it at.
I have no points to give so I'll just say that was a brilliant post.
Dammit! No mod points. That's a good one.
The only way I know to check is to just click on the score itself which opens a pop-up window. No timestamp, any mod points are anonymous and only a breakdown into percentages of category of mod points.
A Dune MMO would probably best suit that elusive hybrid of EVE Online and traditional PvE/RvR. A hardcore economy engine based on spice, psychic warp travel, a chance to run a member corporation of C.H.O.A.M., encouragement to play politics. One potential end game is to be knighted or whatever it is they call being elevated to the status of Nobility by the Emperor and then own a planet. Bring back one of the traits that made SWG so charming in the beginning: legitimate non-combat non-PvE leveling. You can buy and sell, buy and sell, send assassins to rival players, gain Mercantile and Bribery levels and sell your products to traditional PvE Fremen or Sardaukar toons.
*sigh* It'll never happen....
There are two ways that immediately leap to mind:
True, there are bots available to endlessly kill and loot for money. The thing I like about WAR (I play it) is that so far, the gold is actually relatively meaningless. You only really need it for the mount and then some guild costs and maybe a little bit of auctioning. So having those private tells offering me gold is laughable since the economy just doesn't need you to be a gazillionaire. And if you accept a toon that was leveled for you to lvl 40 in 7 days, you've just cheated yourself of all the lore which is pretty good and treats the established fluff very well. The developers have avoided the Curse of Goto.