Well, Linksys wasn't able to fix a fatal wi-fi flaw in the WAG160N ADSL gateway I bought a couple years ago. It would not keep up a connection to ANY wi-fi device for more than a few minutes at best. Over and over, new firmwares and settings tweaks promised hope... but in the end they never did fix it and a lot of people who bought this model were left in the cold without a fully functioning product. I wasted 6 months on this piece of crap before finally shutting off the wi-fi for good and getting a separate AP to handle wireless duties at home (an Apple Airport Extreme, which by the way has been flawless).
As a result, I will never touch another Linksys or Cisco product. Linksys, at least, do not stand behind their products. They should have issued a recall for this model, it clearly has a hardware or un-fixable software defect but they never admitted fault and obviously never will. On a side note, it has actually been a decent and reliable router, if I discount the wi-fi non-functionality. It's still in use today as my ADSL gateway.
He actually does have a point. If you take your average small indie developer, which could very likely be one guy sitting in his parent's basement cranking away on a small game... this guy will never have the development costs of a company making commercial releases. No lawyers, no marketing department, no no art people, no advertising, no support people... basically it's one or a few guys doing these small indie games. They are happy they can get their app/game into an app store where people will discover it, like it, and recommend it to friends. This is very different than commercial development where there are a lot of upfront costs not to mention normal "running a business" costs. Like it or not, most of these small indie developers will either a) eventually be bought out by a larger company and no longer be a small indie developer anymore, or b) go out of business, or c) survive on a tiny income of residual sales.
I'm not saying one or the other is the correct way to do games, that is for another discussion. But the guy really does have a point.
It's all a tradeoff, or more accurately a price-shift that occurs with consoles. Ever notice that console games tend to cost quite a bit more than their PC equivalent? Thanks, but I'll take my general purpose PC that I can use for many different tasks, is upgradeable, can run games with better graphics than any console (unless it's a damn cross-platform title), and games that are cheaper.
On a related note, practically every major RPG released for PC recently has been crippled as a cross-platform "port". I'm getting sick and tired of buying games built for lowest common denominator consoles, they are holding back PC gaming. Sure, be happy if you have a console and you like it, I'm fine with that. The problem is that the developers are holding back PC gaming which could be advancing a lot quicker were it not for consoles. I'm not only talking about graphics here, but things like physics, better and more intelligent AI, better storylines, etc. The capacity of the PC is far greater than any console and the possibilities are almost endless, but since everything has to be simultaneously developed for consoles, major compromises are made during development that hold back the PC version and limit what can go into the game development. It's all about fitting the game within the console's limitations.
Screen resolution may not be increasing by much these days, but that does not mean graphics capabilities and image quality are not improving. Higher and better levels of AA, anisotropic filtering, tessellation, increased geometry of models and world objects... all of these require more graphics card horsepower. Look at Crysis, even today... years after it's release, there is still not a single GPU that is capable of pushing 60fps when running at the native resolution of a 30" panel on enthusiast setting. Not a single card.
Consolitis is real, and it's starting to turn me off of once-great PC gaming. Poor controls are probably the worst offenders and some of the biggest games suffer from it, Bioshock 1&2 being a prime example. I was appalled at the mouse control in Bioshock 2 when I started playing it recently. It was horrible out of the box, laggy and unresponsive or hyper aggressive were the only possible settings in-game. Even with some hacks to the ini files to calm down the mouse, it's still far from ideal. I read a preview of Dungeon Siege III yesterday in PC Gamer, still in alpha, but anyway it had no keyboard/mouse controls at all! Only gamepad. This is a game being developed for cross-platform, and they have a playable game state and still no working keyboard or mouse control on the PC!
I have reached the point where when I hear an upcoming game is going to be cross-platform, I have to immediately lower my expectations for the game in the areas of controls and graphics, because it will obviously be dumbed-down to run on consoles. Please bring back the good old days of games developed FOR the PC, not shooting for lowest common denominator consoles. Crappy ports from consoles have become the norm for most AA titles in the last few years.
In fact, I'd totally agree with the article. Even Google came out and said Android 2.x was not intended for tablets, and everyone went off and designed tablet products around it anyway, after seeing the iPad sales take off.
Huge mistake, imho. I would not buy into the first wave of 2.2-based tablets, and even when Honeycomb arrives I will wait a while for the kinks to be worked out. Let's not forget that iPad was based on the same OS as the iPhone, so it was more-or-less proven working technology that was re-used for the iPad with practically no changes. Android 2.2 was only ever intended for smartphones, and forcing it onto tablets was a bad decision by everyone involved. Unfortunately it did not stop the companies from seeing $$$$, and I pity the first adopters. You are not guaranteed an upgrade path and anyone expecting such is only dreaming.
Because these are SATA ports, that carry DATA, which could become corrupted on the way to or from the hard drive. There is a risk of data corruption that could go on undetected before the part actually fails and becomes unusable. How would you like to lose a couple years worth of valuable work documents thanks to a simple component failure that could have been prevented by the manufacturer taking appropriate steps? Remember, these chips are going into more than just game PC's... many of them are used in critical business applications where data corruption can be a significant issue, not just in lost work but lost time and revenue if the component fails. And before someone mentions backup... backup is useless if data corruption occurs undetected over a period of time. Your backups will also be corrupted, because you are backing up corrupted data in the first place.
Intel is taking the wise approach here and recalling all the chipsets. Props to them for handling this the right way.
You are not serious about covering the 3Gbps ports over with duct tape and selling them as cheaper models, are you? Seriously?
Also, why would Intel be worried about other parts of the chip? They specifically identified the failure down to the actual component, a transistor, that is part of the 3Gbps circuit and does not exist in the 6Gbps circuit. The transistor fails over time because too high a voltage is driving it. It's a simple mistake caused by circuit re-use from an older design that nobody caught. Probably because it was rushed to market to meet an artificial sales-driven deadline. You can be sure this would have been caught if engineering was determining when a new product is "ready", not sales. I've seen this kind of failure time and again when sales and marketing force a product onto the market before it's fully baked and ready.
Like cartoon characters, fictional characters from movies/TV and celebrities. Because nobody would every use one of these as their facebook photo./sarcasm
I'm not sure you can consider Xbox Live "open to the public". After all, it's not available to non-Xbox owners, and if I'm not mistaken, you pay to play (subscription). How is this public again? Sounds pretty private to me. Just because it uses the interwebs to deliver the private content, does not make the content public.
I don't know, it sounds like he cheated. Whether or not the kid has a disability is really irrelevant. The ADA provides protection for the disabled so that they have EQUAL access to public services and businesses open to the public. It does not mean you give them special treatment... you give them EQUAL treatment. The point is to *not* discriminate against anyone with a disability. That also means that just because you have a disability, you are not entitled to special treatment above a person who may not have a disability, which is exactly what some posters are calling for here. If the kid cheated, then he violated the TOS and got what he deserved.
Naturally, this will get spun the wrong way by the media as the media is so good at doing, MS will have a PR nightmare on their hands, and the kid will get the cheater label dropped and his points restored.
I have a 24mbit down, 1mbit up connection over ADSL here in Finland. My gateway reports a line speed of just over 18mbits, which considering the "historical" nature of the copper where I live, is acceptable. If I download from a regional server, I can easily hit download throughputs of 12-16mbit/s continuously. So while I'm not quite reaching peak numbers for an 18mbit connection, I'm getting pretty good utilization of available bandwidth.
This is also enforced by law here. The ISP has to be able to provide a certain percentage of the marketed bandwidth over a 24 hour period. I don't recall exactly the specific details, but I believe they have to deliver something like 80% of the marketed numbers averaged over a day, or the ISP may face fines. Basically, it means they have to deliver what they are selling. Over in the US, you know this as regulation, which everyone seems to be against for some strange reason (regulation = bad). Over here on the other side of the pond, we enjoy our regulated high-speed internet access, which is really fast (regulation = good).
What about the energy that was stored in the fibers of the paper? It certainly took a lot more energy to grow the trees used in making the paper, hence you are not getting more energy out that you put in.
As an American with an engineering degree who has been living abroad for more than 10 years, I wholeheartedly agree. It's one of the prime reasons I left in the first place, engineers are just not respected... or rather valued enough, in the US. I lay part of the blame on the religious right-wing mentality of many in the US, where religion, or merely saying you are religious, irregardless of actually going to church, holds a far more important role in society than fact-based fields of science and engineering. The separation of church and state, as intended by the founding fathers, practically no longer exists. The broken two-party political system and corruption of politics and business (lobbies have far too much control and influence) are also big turn-offs in the US. In every measure of quality of life, I am happier and more content that when I was living in the US. I am treated fairer by my employer and have more rights as an employee, I work fewer hours per week than my American counterparts and have far more time off and paid vacation each year.
Bottom line, I live to work, rather than work to live. The US is falling behind and is rapidly losing competitiveness with the rest of the world. I only hope things will turn around, but I have seen no signs of it recently.
Except it's not so simple. If you have network hardware and software that don't support IPv6, you have a lot of cost involved to upgrade. Gateway devices, DSL and cable modems, routers... all need to support the protocol. Not to mention OS's and the software running on top of the network infrastructure.
You make it sound like we can all switch overnight to IPv6 based purely on the cost of the addresses, when there are a LOT more things to consider than simply addressing.
The problem with the skype toolbar, is that it generally cannot know what is a phone number and what is just a number. Shortly after they released this crap, I removed it since it wanted to highlight practically any number more than a couple digits in length as a callable number, even when the number was obviously NOT a phone number.
It's really just a cheap way to drive traffic and usage to skype. I use skype regularly for both work and personal use, but this toolbar was garbage from the beginning. Unfortunately, their software quality seems to be slipping even in the main client app. For example, it never shows me as "away", even though I have configured it to go into away mode after 5 minutes of inactivity. The client insists I am always available and online, even when I am away from the computer for hours at a time. I get tired of explaining to friends and family that, really, I was away from my computer and not ignoring their calls. Again, I believe this is a sneaky tactic by skype to drive usage up.
Just because it's "standard practice", does not make it the right thing to do. Would you prefer that the police shoot first and then ask questions later? Perhaps they can withdraw their bullets?
This is irresponsible behavior by the Bliz legal department at best. We are talking about someone's reputation here, and a C&D letter, even if retracted, will always be a tarnish mark.
Think about people who have been imprisoned for crimes they did not commit based on bad evidence or mis-trial, and then later released after appeals or a re-trial that proves their innocence. Even though they are no longer guilty of a crime within the legal system, they have the original conviction on their record and subsequently will have difficulties getting a job for the rest of their life. Even a full pardon, which is rarely granted, does not erase the harm done to the individual.
Yeah, like we really need another thing that can be used to pay for overpriced Starbucks coffee... like cash, credit cards, debit cards and the like are completely useless.
I'd also like to state that "cash" means paper money, mainly large denomination bills of course, not coins. You'd need a pack donkey to carry enough coins around to pay for Starbucks coffee.
I was right there with Jim until he basically said the accused parties are guilty until proven innocent. Sounds kinda bass-ackwards to how I was raised...
Personally, I don't have a problem with D'Addario's position, I use only GHS strings on my guitar:P
Nowhere in the US is sales tax even approaching 20%. As an ex-pat living abroad, I don't really keep up with sales tax in the US but I believe it is averaging around 8% across the US.
Yet once more, the US gets cheap devices while the rest of the world pays more, sometimes a LOT more. I'm really getting tired of companies launching products with the same "price" in US dollars and euros. The currencies are NOT valued the same, the euro is currently much stronger than the US dollar (~1.35:1 as of this morning). Luckily not everyone is doing this, the smarter companies will price appropriately for the market and local currency, such as offering something in the US for $249 while the same product in Europe is 199€ or 219€ which is much more inline with the currency's actual value. I acknowledge that our VAT is higher than US sales tax but we do enjoy better consumer protection than the US and better warranties, e.g. most consumer electronics are warranted for 2 full years, and if something breaks within the "expected lifetime" of the product, I can ask for a replacement even after the warranty period.
I don't mind paying a bit more, but many companies are gouging customers by playing the currency game. I would put Sony in this category based on their pricing.
Sorry, I disagree, and there's the problem outlined in your last sentence. Why the fuck should you need to hack or modify something, to add missing functionality like a bluetooth keyboard or mouse to such a device? It clearly needs alternative input devices and it's great that you and I can mod it, but the point is it shouldn't be necessary. Joe Sixpack isn't going to do that. Your 61-year old mother certainly isn't going to do that.
This issue is closely related to the walled-garden approach that most of these new devices are following today. The feature-set is intentionally limited by the manufacturer, for any number of reasons. Market control, application control, ego control, whatever the reason is... it's about controlling what you are able to do with your device and limiting your choices. Probably most of you young whippersnappers here on/. were not even wetting your diapers at the time, but this control-freak level of closed-mindedness is exactly what gave rise the the PC in the first place. Sure some of these devices are useful for certain tasks and they can compliment a PC. But, completely replace it? I don't think so, at least not in any reasonable time-frame and not by any of the gadgets that are currently on the market. Pure FUD.
These 3D printers are for rapid prototyping, and they are far from new. They have been around for years.
They do NOT create durable goods. You will NOT be able to print working cars, bikes, computers, houses, women or whatever else you want. The output of these printers do not serve any real purpose other than a 3-dimensional prototype of an object. Even if this so-called flute is playable today, it likely won't be in a year's time if it's handled a lot.
I guess your username says it all, but how exactly do you think this will somehow magically be cheaper than printing in 2D on plain paper with standard ink?
Bottom line: You cannot "manufacture" durable goods using 3D printer technology. It's nice to dream, but dreams have their place.
I can back this up 100%. I work in medical imaging (20+ years), where stereo (3D) viewing of radiographs and other medical images is fairly widely used in various specialties. Whether the stereo viewing is done un-aided or using various aids such as special stereo binoculars or displays, there is an effect to your vision when you have performed "synthetic" stereo viewing for even a short time. It's very taxing on your eyes and brain, because they are being forced to "work" in ways which are un-natural. This synthetic 3D is very different from what our eyes and brains have learned over the years of our own life and indeed the thousands of years of human development and evolution.
I would not allow my kids to use these "3D" devices as being popularized today, unless they are old enough that it will not likely affect their vision and brain development. While we have not yet established an appropriate age where damage is unlikely to be permanent, I would say it's at least 12-14 years old. Any younger and it's more likely that extensive use of these 3D technologies will cause permanent damage.
Note that I would not include 3D movies viewed in a theater. It's a matter of viewing distance, where the rays of light enter the eyes at near parallel, narrow angles. At a short viewing distance, such as at home, the angles are MUCH greater and the work needed to be done by your vision system (including brain) is much greater at these short viewing distances. There is also the time factor, a movie tends to fall within a 90 minute viewing period. 3D games can and will be played much longer than that and possibly several days in a row. We don't go see 3D movies every day, multiple times a day, to have enough exposure. Plus the exposure is less severe due to the distance and angles as stated.
I definitely will not be buying into this 3D hype for home use. Not for my home theater setup and not for my PC and console gaming. I have seen several 3D movies in the past year but none of them really blew me away, as in I really have to see this movie in 3D. Sure, some of the effects were pretty cool, but it's really only a gimmick to draw people into theaters. It doesn't add anything really meaningful to the experience for me, and it's not because I do not see 3D well. Some people's vision is less susceptible to seeing synthetic 3D in full effect. I predict this round of 3D will fail long-term, just as it has every other single time before (people seem to have short memories).
It's fine for medical and scientific use under controlled circumstances, but controlled circumstances do not really exist in the home. Much more study needs to go into the long-term effects of synthetic 3D over long periods of time before it can be considered safe. And appropriate guidelines need to be developed for safe use.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Linksys wasn't able to fix a fatal wi-fi flaw in the WAG160N ADSL gateway I bought a couple years ago. It would not keep up a connection to ANY wi-fi device for more than a few minutes at best. Over and over, new firmwares and settings tweaks promised hope... but in the end they never did fix it and a lot of people who bought this model were left in the cold without a fully functioning product. I wasted 6 months on this piece of crap before finally shutting off the wi-fi for good and getting a separate AP to handle wireless duties at home (an Apple Airport Extreme, which by the way has been flawless).
As a result, I will never touch another Linksys or Cisco product. Linksys, at least, do not stand behind their products. They should have issued a recall for this model, it clearly has a hardware or un-fixable software defect but they never admitted fault and obviously never will. On a side note, it has actually been a decent and reliable router, if I discount the wi-fi non-functionality. It's still in use today as my ADSL gateway.
He actually does have a point. If you take your average small indie developer, which could very likely be one guy sitting in his parent's basement cranking away on a small game... this guy will never have the development costs of a company making commercial releases. No lawyers, no marketing department, no no art people, no advertising, no support people... basically it's one or a few guys doing these small indie games. They are happy they can get their app/game into an app store where people will discover it, like it, and recommend it to friends. This is very different than commercial development where there are a lot of upfront costs not to mention normal "running a business" costs. Like it or not, most of these small indie developers will either a) eventually be bought out by a larger company and no longer be a small indie developer anymore, or b) go out of business, or c) survive on a tiny income of residual sales.
I'm not saying one or the other is the correct way to do games, that is for another discussion. But the guy really does have a point.
It's all a tradeoff, or more accurately a price-shift that occurs with consoles. Ever notice that console games tend to cost quite a bit more than their PC equivalent? Thanks, but I'll take my general purpose PC that I can use for many different tasks, is upgradeable, can run games with better graphics than any console (unless it's a damn cross-platform title), and games that are cheaper.
On a related note, practically every major RPG released for PC recently has been crippled as a cross-platform "port". I'm getting sick and tired of buying games built for lowest common denominator consoles, they are holding back PC gaming. Sure, be happy if you have a console and you like it, I'm fine with that. The problem is that the developers are holding back PC gaming which could be advancing a lot quicker were it not for consoles. I'm not only talking about graphics here, but things like physics, better and more intelligent AI, better storylines, etc. The capacity of the PC is far greater than any console and the possibilities are almost endless, but since everything has to be simultaneously developed for consoles, major compromises are made during development that hold back the PC version and limit what can go into the game development. It's all about fitting the game within the console's limitations.
Screen resolution may not be increasing by much these days, but that does not mean graphics capabilities and image quality are not improving. Higher and better levels of AA, anisotropic filtering, tessellation, increased geometry of models and world objects... all of these require more graphics card horsepower. Look at Crysis, even today... years after it's release, there is still not a single GPU that is capable of pushing 60fps when running at the native resolution of a 30" panel on enthusiast setting. Not a single card.
Consolitis is real, and it's starting to turn me off of once-great PC gaming. Poor controls are probably the worst offenders and some of the biggest games suffer from it, Bioshock 1&2 being a prime example. I was appalled at the mouse control in Bioshock 2 when I started playing it recently. It was horrible out of the box, laggy and unresponsive or hyper aggressive were the only possible settings in-game. Even with some hacks to the ini files to calm down the mouse, it's still far from ideal. I read a preview of Dungeon Siege III yesterday in PC Gamer, still in alpha, but anyway it had no keyboard/mouse controls at all! Only gamepad. This is a game being developed for cross-platform, and they have a playable game state and still no working keyboard or mouse control on the PC!
I have reached the point where when I hear an upcoming game is going to be cross-platform, I have to immediately lower my expectations for the game in the areas of controls and graphics, because it will obviously be dumbed-down to run on consoles. Please bring back the good old days of games developed FOR the PC, not shooting for lowest common denominator consoles. Crappy ports from consoles have become the norm for most AA titles in the last few years.
Citation needed.
In fact, I'd totally agree with the article. Even Google came out and said Android 2.x was not intended for tablets, and everyone went off and designed tablet products around it anyway, after seeing the iPad sales take off.
Huge mistake, imho. I would not buy into the first wave of 2.2-based tablets, and even when Honeycomb arrives I will wait a while for the kinks to be worked out. Let's not forget that iPad was based on the same OS as the iPhone, so it was more-or-less proven working technology that was re-used for the iPad with practically no changes. Android 2.2 was only ever intended for smartphones, and forcing it onto tablets was a bad decision by everyone involved. Unfortunately it did not stop the companies from seeing $$$$, and I pity the first adopters. You are not guaranteed an upgrade path and anyone expecting such is only dreaming.
Yeah, let the invisible hand of the free market decide... oh wait. Nevermind.
Because these are SATA ports, that carry DATA, which could become corrupted on the way to or from the hard drive. There is a risk of data corruption that could go on undetected before the part actually fails and becomes unusable. How would you like to lose a couple years worth of valuable work documents thanks to a simple component failure that could have been prevented by the manufacturer taking appropriate steps? Remember, these chips are going into more than just game PC's... many of them are used in critical business applications where data corruption can be a significant issue, not just in lost work but lost time and revenue if the component fails. And before someone mentions backup... backup is useless if data corruption occurs undetected over a period of time. Your backups will also be corrupted, because you are backing up corrupted data in the first place.
Intel is taking the wise approach here and recalling all the chipsets. Props to them for handling this the right way.
You are not serious about covering the 3Gbps ports over with duct tape and selling them as cheaper models, are you? Seriously?
Also, why would Intel be worried about other parts of the chip? They specifically identified the failure down to the actual component, a transistor, that is part of the 3Gbps circuit and does not exist in the 6Gbps circuit. The transistor fails over time because too high a voltage is driving it. It's a simple mistake caused by circuit re-use from an older design that nobody caught. Probably because it was rushed to market to meet an artificial sales-driven deadline. You can be sure this would have been caught if engineering was determining when a new product is "ready", not sales. I've seen this kind of failure time and again when sales and marketing force a product onto the market before it's fully baked and ready.
Like cartoon characters, fictional characters from movies/TV and celebrities. Because nobody would every use one of these as their facebook photo. /sarcasm
I'm not sure you can consider Xbox Live "open to the public". After all, it's not available to non-Xbox owners, and if I'm not mistaken, you pay to play (subscription). How is this public again? Sounds pretty private to me. Just because it uses the interwebs to deliver the private content, does not make the content public.
I don't know, it sounds like he cheated. Whether or not the kid has a disability is really irrelevant. The ADA provides protection for the disabled so that they have EQUAL access to public services and businesses open to the public. It does not mean you give them special treatment... you give them EQUAL treatment. The point is to *not* discriminate against anyone with a disability. That also means that just because you have a disability, you are not entitled to special treatment above a person who may not have a disability, which is exactly what some posters are calling for here. If the kid cheated, then he violated the TOS and got what he deserved.
Naturally, this will get spun the wrong way by the media as the media is so good at doing, MS will have a PR nightmare on their hands, and the kid will get the cheater label dropped and his points restored.
Short answer, yes it's possible.
I have a 24mbit down, 1mbit up connection over ADSL here in Finland. My gateway reports a line speed of just over 18mbits, which considering the "historical" nature of the copper where I live, is acceptable. If I download from a regional server, I can easily hit download throughputs of 12-16mbit/s continuously. So while I'm not quite reaching peak numbers for an 18mbit connection, I'm getting pretty good utilization of available bandwidth.
This is also enforced by law here. The ISP has to be able to provide a certain percentage of the marketed bandwidth over a 24 hour period. I don't recall exactly the specific details, but I believe they have to deliver something like 80% of the marketed numbers averaged over a day, or the ISP may face fines. Basically, it means they have to deliver what they are selling. Over in the US, you know this as regulation, which everyone seems to be against for some strange reason (regulation = bad). Over here on the other side of the pond, we enjoy our regulated high-speed internet access, which is really fast (regulation = good).
What about the energy that was stored in the fibers of the paper? It certainly took a lot more energy to grow the trees used in making the paper, hence you are not getting more energy out that you put in.
Except that we may actually see DNF this year...
As an American with an engineering degree who has been living abroad for more than 10 years, I wholeheartedly agree. It's one of the prime reasons I left in the first place, engineers are just not respected... or rather valued enough, in the US. I lay part of the blame on the religious right-wing mentality of many in the US, where religion, or merely saying you are religious, irregardless of actually going to church, holds a far more important role in society than fact-based fields of science and engineering. The separation of church and state, as intended by the founding fathers, practically no longer exists. The broken two-party political system and corruption of politics and business (lobbies have far too much control and influence) are also big turn-offs in the US. In every measure of quality of life, I am happier and more content that when I was living in the US. I am treated fairer by my employer and have more rights as an employee, I work fewer hours per week than my American counterparts and have far more time off and paid vacation each year.
Bottom line, I live to work, rather than work to live. The US is falling behind and is rapidly losing competitiveness with the rest of the world. I only hope things will turn around, but I have seen no signs of it recently.
Except it's not so simple. If you have network hardware and software that don't support IPv6, you have a lot of cost involved to upgrade. Gateway devices, DSL and cable modems, routers... all need to support the protocol. Not to mention OS's and the software running on top of the network infrastructure.
You make it sound like we can all switch overnight to IPv6 based purely on the cost of the addresses, when there are a LOT more things to consider than simply addressing.
The problem with the skype toolbar, is that it generally cannot know what is a phone number and what is just a number. Shortly after they released this crap, I removed it since it wanted to highlight practically any number more than a couple digits in length as a callable number, even when the number was obviously NOT a phone number.
It's really just a cheap way to drive traffic and usage to skype. I use skype regularly for both work and personal use, but this toolbar was garbage from the beginning. Unfortunately, their software quality seems to be slipping even in the main client app. For example, it never shows me as "away", even though I have configured it to go into away mode after 5 minutes of inactivity. The client insists I am always available and online, even when I am away from the computer for hours at a time. I get tired of explaining to friends and family that, really, I was away from my computer and not ignoring their calls. Again, I believe this is a sneaky tactic by skype to drive usage up.
Just because it's "standard practice", does not make it the right thing to do. Would you prefer that the police shoot first and then ask questions later? Perhaps they can withdraw their bullets?
This is irresponsible behavior by the Bliz legal department at best. We are talking about someone's reputation here, and a C&D letter, even if retracted, will always be a tarnish mark.
Think about people who have been imprisoned for crimes they did not commit based on bad evidence or mis-trial, and then later released after appeals or a re-trial that proves their innocence. Even though they are no longer guilty of a crime within the legal system, they have the original conviction on their record and subsequently will have difficulties getting a job for the rest of their life. Even a full pardon, which is rarely granted, does not erase the harm done to the individual.
What kind of standard is a standard if nobody but a single vendor supports it?
Around here, it's called a Microsoft standard...
Yeah, like we really need another thing that can be used to pay for overpriced Starbucks coffee... like cash, credit cards, debit cards and the like are completely useless.
I'd also like to state that "cash" means paper money, mainly large denomination bills of course, not coins. You'd need a pack donkey to carry enough coins around to pay for Starbucks coffee.
I was right there with Jim until he basically said the accused parties are guilty until proven innocent. Sounds kinda bass-ackwards to how I was raised...
Personally, I don't have a problem with D'Addario's position, I use only GHS strings on my guitar :P
Nowhere in the US is sales tax even approaching 20%. As an ex-pat living abroad, I don't really keep up with sales tax in the US but I believe it is averaging around 8% across the US.
Yet once more, the US gets cheap devices while the rest of the world pays more, sometimes a LOT more. I'm really getting tired of companies launching products with the same "price" in US dollars and euros. The currencies are NOT valued the same, the euro is currently much stronger than the US dollar (~1.35:1 as of this morning). Luckily not everyone is doing this, the smarter companies will price appropriately for the market and local currency, such as offering something in the US for $249 while the same product in Europe is 199€ or 219€ which is much more inline with the currency's actual value. I acknowledge that our VAT is higher than US sales tax but we do enjoy better consumer protection than the US and better warranties, e.g. most consumer electronics are warranted for 2 full years, and if something breaks within the "expected lifetime" of the product, I can ask for a replacement even after the warranty period.
I don't mind paying a bit more, but many companies are gouging customers by playing the currency game. I would put Sony in this category based on their pricing.
Sorry, I disagree, and there's the problem outlined in your last sentence. Why the fuck should you need to hack or modify something, to add missing functionality like a bluetooth keyboard or mouse to such a device? It clearly needs alternative input devices and it's great that you and I can mod it, but the point is it shouldn't be necessary. Joe Sixpack isn't going to do that. Your 61-year old mother certainly isn't going to do that.
This issue is closely related to the walled-garden approach that most of these new devices are following today. The feature-set is intentionally limited by the manufacturer, for any number of reasons. Market control, application control, ego control, whatever the reason is... it's about controlling what you are able to do with your device and limiting your choices. Probably most of you young whippersnappers here on /. were not even wetting your diapers at the time, but this control-freak level of closed-mindedness is exactly what gave rise the the PC in the first place. Sure some of these devices are useful for certain tasks and they can compliment a PC. But, completely replace it? I don't think so, at least not in any reasonable time-frame and not by any of the gadgets that are currently on the market. Pure FUD.
These 3D printers are for rapid prototyping, and they are far from new. They have been around for years.
They do NOT create durable goods. You will NOT be able to print working cars, bikes, computers, houses, women or whatever else you want. The output of these printers do not serve any real purpose other than a 3-dimensional prototype of an object. Even if this so-called flute is playable today, it likely won't be in a year's time if it's handled a lot.
I guess your username says it all, but how exactly do you think this will somehow magically be cheaper than printing in 2D on plain paper with standard ink?
Bottom line: You cannot "manufacture" durable goods using 3D printer technology. It's nice to dream, but dreams have their place.
I've always wondered why they call it animal "husbandry"... I mean, c'mon, the animals are not married. Wouldn't "fatherdry" be more accurate?
I can back this up 100%. I work in medical imaging (20+ years), where stereo (3D) viewing of radiographs and other medical images is fairly widely used in various specialties. Whether the stereo viewing is done un-aided or using various aids such as special stereo binoculars or displays, there is an effect to your vision when you have performed "synthetic" stereo viewing for even a short time. It's very taxing on your eyes and brain, because they are being forced to "work" in ways which are un-natural. This synthetic 3D is very different from what our eyes and brains have learned over the years of our own life and indeed the thousands of years of human development and evolution.
I would not allow my kids to use these "3D" devices as being popularized today, unless they are old enough that it will not likely affect their vision and brain development. While we have not yet established an appropriate age where damage is unlikely to be permanent, I would say it's at least 12-14 years old. Any younger and it's more likely that extensive use of these 3D technologies will cause permanent damage.
Note that I would not include 3D movies viewed in a theater. It's a matter of viewing distance, where the rays of light enter the eyes at near parallel, narrow angles. At a short viewing distance, such as at home, the angles are MUCH greater and the work needed to be done by your vision system (including brain) is much greater at these short viewing distances. There is also the time factor, a movie tends to fall within a 90 minute viewing period. 3D games can and will be played much longer than that and possibly several days in a row. We don't go see 3D movies every day, multiple times a day, to have enough exposure. Plus the exposure is less severe due to the distance and angles as stated.
I definitely will not be buying into this 3D hype for home use. Not for my home theater setup and not for my PC and console gaming. I have seen several 3D movies in the past year but none of them really blew me away, as in I really have to see this movie in 3D. Sure, some of the effects were pretty cool, but it's really only a gimmick to draw people into theaters. It doesn't add anything really meaningful to the experience for me, and it's not because I do not see 3D well. Some people's vision is less susceptible to seeing synthetic 3D in full effect. I predict this round of 3D will fail long-term, just as it has every other single time before (people seem to have short memories).
It's fine for medical and scientific use under controlled circumstances, but controlled circumstances do not really exist in the home. Much more study needs to go into the long-term effects of synthetic 3D over long periods of time before it can be considered safe. And appropriate guidelines need to be developed for safe use.