Since there wouldn't be a vertical or horizontal blanking interval for the TV to try to latch onto, it would just be static like unused stations used to be. No fun pictures.
I would think that while you could easily receive the signal, transmitting back to the tower would be a problem since TV antennas were designed to be receive only.
Or do they plan to do a satellite-TV type thing where upstream is a modem and downstream is the wireless? Downloading family pictures takes 2 minutes, uploading 6 hours.
That was my first though too. "It's just a
boxer."
If you watch the little video linked to from the article (and I emphasize little, what is that, 160x120?), they show you it's like a boxer but the cylinder heads (I guess) move in opposition to the pistons. It's a little like having two pistons that would hit each other on the head in the shaft, both tied to the crankshaft.
I'm a little unclear, I don't have sound on my computer so I could only watch the little animation.
Yes. I wasted dozens and dozens of hours on TF2 since I got a computer that could play it.
TF2 is multiplayer, but it's designed as multiplayer. There are games like Uncharted 2: Drake's Fortune. Why does it need multiplayer? Because it can and it's a marketing bullet point. Then there are games like TF2 and Q3 that are multiplayer games. Adding a single player is kinda pointless.
People playing TF2 can be jerks or just focus on playing deathmatch, but that's what servers are for. You can usually find one pretty quickly that's good. I always played on the VooGru servers as JohnnySaucepan. I got to know the other players, and people generally played as a team, even as everyone was popping in and out. The admins were nice and kept things in control. When I couldn't get on my preferred servers things were a crap-shoot. Sometimes the servers were fun, other times they were just full of crazy people playing like it was a solo FPS and the mods didn't keep them under control. Thanks to being a team game and being on a good server where people played co-op, we could carry a terrible guy or two. If you weren't a rockstar player you could still have a blast and help the team.
That's one of my problems with XBL. On the PC I've always found a handful of servers I like, with good people, and I can keep going back there. With XBL you can't do that. You have to do things like on Quake Live where you build a list of nice players and follow them, in hopes you end up on a server with players who make the game fun.
I got kinda tired of TF2 after playing it most nights for months. I wasn't a fan of the additional weapons being added, I kinda felt they made the game more complicated, and you had to avoid playing for a week or so after each came out because everyone was trying to achievement grind to get the new stuff.
I'm kinda TF2ed out at this point. I've played so many FPSes in my life I generally avoid them like the plague now. They all kinda feel the same, and I'm just over it. TF2 is one of the games I broke that rule for (because I adored playing Team Fortress Classic) and I had a blast.
When I was a kid and had my NES, games were TOUGH. Old Atari games were tough as well. Even into the Genesis and SNES games were often still hard.
Now, I'm older, and better at games, so that makes a difference. But I'd say that the average game now, even on 'normal', is easier than it was.
There are a couple of reasons. First is games aren't coin-ops now. When I was a kid, most games were either coin-op conversions, or designed by companies who were used to them. They were used to designing games to make you fail, so you had to stick in more quarters.
Second, hard games turn people off. Battletoads was fun, but I couldn't get past the elevator stage as a kid, even in two player. Contra is famously hard. Super Ghouls and Ghosts? Tough! There were some easier games, but that could be killer. Rent a game and it's too hard, you give it up. You don't buy the game. You don't buy the sequels. When it feels like you're being punished by the game, it's not fun.
Games are evolving. Super Mario Galaxy had some very tough moments (especially getting all the stars). But you could die until you game over and lose basically nothing. The lives are irrelevant. Today most FPSes have regenerative shields (thanks to Halo) so you don't get stuck somewhere with 1 health, unable to move.
Games have moved on. They can still be punishing. Some are designed that way (Ninja Gaiden for the XBox), some can just be set that way (various songs in Rock Band on expert). Are things like Ratchet & Clank easier than older platformers? I'm not sure.
I'm happy about this. I enjoyed FF X and XII, but I never finished them. They got too hard, and I had to grind and grind and grind just to get to the next area. It stopped being fun. Last summer I played The Legendary Starfy on the DS. The game was easy as heck, but it was quite enjoyable. I expect the same thing out of the new Kirby game. That isn't always a bad thing. A game can be easy and still a ton of fun. We've learned replay value doesn't just come from forcing you to replay the game over and over just to survive to a new area.
What I really hate is what other commenters have noted: online play. When Q3 did it they had a good reason: it was a FPS with no story and the bots weren't that great. But today, it's an excuse to make less content. It's an excuse to make a buggy game. It's an excuse to try to force me to buy an XBox Live subscription. I almost never care. The only times I've really enjoyed online games where when I ended up stumbling upon a server I could play on all the time, with people I knew who would take care of griefers and generally played the game.
On the whole, online play is usually tacked-on and not that great. When I see a preview for a game that's not dedicated online, and online is one of the first features they talk about, I know I'm not going to care much.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I read that post, but the thing that stood out to me was "what about natural keyboards?" I think that was one of the first comments someone posted.
I've had my original model MS Natural for 14 years. I'd hate to have to try to replace it.
It is, but they're quite nice. Certainly better than the $5 dome-switch junk most bundled keyboards are.
I've used MS Natural keyboards for a long time. My 1996 original PS/2 Microsoft Natural is sitting at my office right now, I've used it every day at work for years, and most days at home for years before that. Still works great. I can't imagine how many novels worth of typing I've done on that thing.
Natural keyboard selection is very difficult. There are very few naturals for Macs, for example. You can use any USB keyboard, but if you want one with the correct key symbols, be ready to pay quite a bit and go on a hunt.
They haven't announced anything, and such a small detail isn't the kind of thing Apple tends to make a big deal about. That said, they've been selling SSDs for a few years now and now have an SSD only computer.
I'd fully expect TRIM support in Lion (10.7). It's a standard feature now and SSDs are only going to become more common.
I doubt it. Switching to AMD (especially for only part of their line) seems like it would have a lot of ancillary costs such as the R&D help I know Intel has given Apple. Apple stuck by Intel for years through their abysmal "GPUs" (I've got one, along with an nVidia, in my MacBook Pro). Intel's latest round of integrated GPUs is actually supposed to be pretty good, to the point that on lower end computers (like MacBooks) it may not be necessary to include even a low-end GPU.
Also, don't forget the right now AMD has the Phenom, which is a good chip, and Intel has their current Core line, which is an amazing line of chips. To go to AMD means sacrificing performance/watt on the CPU side.
Two years ago maybe it would have mattered. Today? Too little too late.
Just like when AOL bought Llamasoft. No, you know what would be a better example? When Fox bought MySpace. That worked out well, right?
This is moronic. This is "I need column inches, and Apple has money and gets pageviews, and Facebook gets page views, so I'll write a column..." nonsense.
What would Apple get out of this? A big messy architecture (in maintaining all those servers, integrating OS X with FB)? A giant target on it's back for even more privacy lawsuits? I don't see any value to Apple in buying Facebook. It would make a ton more sense to just buy up some good ISVs or more hardware companies to help design their products in house.
Be careful. Caps don't always work the way you want them to.
It used to be that payday loans could have basically unlimited interest rates. Companies competed on interest rates, so rates were 150-600%. (rates are examples) Then the state AGs got involved and lawmakers made laws and capped the interest rates at 250%.
Thanks to those laws, companies all have their interest rates at about 250%, because it's the cap. If they are under it, they can't be sued for usury. If they go farther under it, they'll lose money. So everyone stays right at it to maximize their profit and not start a price war.
It used to be you could (depending on your credit/payday loan history) get a loan for 150%. Thanks to the 'cap' to prevent these problems, the minimum is now 250%. The cap helped a few people, and hurt a lot.
If we make such a law, that may only encourage phone companies to make it easier to hit that $500 cap when you exceed your plan. After all, you don't need to worry, because your bill will never be $2000, so it's not a bad thing.
Sounds like an excellent reason to force them to open their networks. They can charge a little more (but not much) to cover costs. That way, I can chose between a scummy $40 bill that is actually $62 and nickle-and-dimes me, or a $50 clear cut bill that treats me well.
Basically, use policy to make the MVNO thing work.
Generally, the phone companies say they can't do that because it's so hard to calculate all the taxes on the plan based on where you live.
The fact that they magically gain the ability to calculate those taxes the instant you sign a contract shouldn't lead you to think it's actually possible.
I totally agree with you. If you can't figure out the price due to taxes, then post the price with the maximum taxes, and I can know it may be cheaper, instead of a sudden and unexpected extra $23 fee.
I remember them opening the dock connector, I didn't know it applied to bluetooth also.
Does anyone know of any other special purpose bluetooth devices that connect to the iPhone (i.e. not keyboards, headsets, etc)? Perhaps this is the first one to make it to market?
Some of the disability related stuff the iPhone can do (such as bluetooth connection to a wireless pocket braille display) seems more interesting though. I wonder how well it's known just how accessible the iPhone is. I was quite impressed when I first read an article about it.
I read the summary, it's kind of interesting. The graphs in the actual article look pretty definitive. But a sentence stood out to me:
Cats are the only animal besides humans that can be born deaf.
Does anyone know what that is? I've never heard this before. My natural assumption would be that most animals could be born deaf, and that it's just selected out of the population by natural selection. But if that were the case, we'd expect other animals (especially those without natural selection pressures, such as domesticated Dogs) to be born deaf.
But just cats and humans? What about other primates?
Some people may not like this, but it doesn't seem that bad to me. After hearing that some Android apps report a user's physical location up to every 30s... this seems pretty tame.
5,579,517 and 5,758,352 Common name space for long and short filenames. Let's write a file system that contains long file names. But we need to let people use short ones too. I know, we'll put them in the same namespace! Obvious
6,826,762 Radio interface layer in a cell phone with a set of APIs having a hardware-independent proxy layer and a hardware-specific driver layer. We need to be able to swap out radio modules! No problem, we'll stick a new layer in there to blackbox the radio. Obvious
The rest I'm unsure about. The "scheduling from a mobile device", "offline syncing", and "context sensitive menu" things may have been innovative, but that's been around for 10+ years so at this point it shouldn't count. The flash monitoring sounds kind of obvious, but the implementation may not be (I don't know much in the area).
It's odd to argue how patents are squashing innovation and then go and use obvious patents that at this point (10+ years since devices started doing that function) are extraordinarily common.
I know I've seen blurbs indicating that software piracy on the iPhone/iPod (due to jailbreaks) is huge. Does anyone know if the problem is better or worse on one side of the fence?
Just reading the summary it comes across as something like "Android pirate's heaven (thus iPhone good for developers)", when I suspect the real case is "Android pirate's heaven (just like PC/Mac/iPhone)".
My first through when reading the specs was the "symmetric multiprocessing support". I'm not sure tablets really need dual cores. My first thought when seeing that in something like a 7" tablet is they can't get their software to run smoothly enough on a single core, which would be worrying.
But the thing that REALLY stands out is the battery life. I isn't mentioned anywhere, but that was one of Apple's big selling points on the iPad. The fact that it has dual cores makes me think it's not going to last long. The smaller screen should help.
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Since there wouldn't be a vertical or horizontal blanking interval for the TV to try to latch onto, it would just be static like unused stations used to be. No fun pictures.
I would think that while you could easily receive the signal, transmitting back to the tower would be a problem since TV antennas were designed to be receive only.
Or do they plan to do a satellite-TV type thing where upstream is a modem and downstream is the wireless? Downloading family pictures takes 2 minutes, uploading 6 hours.
That was my first though too. "It's just a boxer."
If you watch the little video linked to from the article (and I emphasize little, what is that, 160x120?), they show you it's like a boxer but the cylinder heads (I guess) move in opposition to the pistons. It's a little like having two pistons that would hit each other on the head in the shaft, both tied to the crankshaft.
I'm a little unclear, I don't have sound on my computer so I could only watch the little animation.
That's not an analogy.
You fail to live up to your Reddit namesake.
Yes. I wasted dozens and dozens of hours on TF2 since I got a computer that could play it.
TF2 is multiplayer, but it's designed as multiplayer. There are games like Uncharted 2: Drake's Fortune. Why does it need multiplayer? Because it can and it's a marketing bullet point. Then there are games like TF2 and Q3 that are multiplayer games. Adding a single player is kinda pointless.
People playing TF2 can be jerks or just focus on playing deathmatch, but that's what servers are for. You can usually find one pretty quickly that's good. I always played on the VooGru servers as JohnnySaucepan. I got to know the other players, and people generally played as a team, even as everyone was popping in and out. The admins were nice and kept things in control. When I couldn't get on my preferred servers things were a crap-shoot. Sometimes the servers were fun, other times they were just full of crazy people playing like it was a solo FPS and the mods didn't keep them under control. Thanks to being a team game and being on a good server where people played co-op, we could carry a terrible guy or two. If you weren't a rockstar player you could still have a blast and help the team.
That's one of my problems with XBL. On the PC I've always found a handful of servers I like, with good people, and I can keep going back there. With XBL you can't do that. You have to do things like on Quake Live where you build a list of nice players and follow them, in hopes you end up on a server with players who make the game fun.
I got kinda tired of TF2 after playing it most nights for months. I wasn't a fan of the additional weapons being added, I kinda felt they made the game more complicated, and you had to avoid playing for a week or so after each came out because everyone was trying to achievement grind to get the new stuff.
I'm kinda TF2ed out at this point. I've played so many FPSes in my life I generally avoid them like the plague now. They all kinda feel the same, and I'm just over it. TF2 is one of the games I broke that rule for (because I adored playing Team Fortress Classic) and I had a blast.
Seems pretty obvious to me.
When I was a kid and had my NES, games were TOUGH. Old Atari games were tough as well. Even into the Genesis and SNES games were often still hard.
Now, I'm older, and better at games, so that makes a difference. But I'd say that the average game now, even on 'normal', is easier than it was.
There are a couple of reasons. First is games aren't coin-ops now. When I was a kid, most games were either coin-op conversions, or designed by companies who were used to them. They were used to designing games to make you fail, so you had to stick in more quarters.
Second, hard games turn people off. Battletoads was fun, but I couldn't get past the elevator stage as a kid, even in two player. Contra is famously hard. Super Ghouls and Ghosts? Tough! There were some easier games, but that could be killer. Rent a game and it's too hard, you give it up. You don't buy the game. You don't buy the sequels. When it feels like you're being punished by the game, it's not fun.
Games are evolving. Super Mario Galaxy had some very tough moments (especially getting all the stars). But you could die until you game over and lose basically nothing. The lives are irrelevant. Today most FPSes have regenerative shields (thanks to Halo) so you don't get stuck somewhere with 1 health, unable to move.
Games have moved on. They can still be punishing. Some are designed that way (Ninja Gaiden for the XBox), some can just be set that way (various songs in Rock Band on expert). Are things like Ratchet & Clank easier than older platformers? I'm not sure.
I'm happy about this. I enjoyed FF X and XII, but I never finished them. They got too hard, and I had to grind and grind and grind just to get to the next area. It stopped being fun. Last summer I played The Legendary Starfy on the DS. The game was easy as heck, but it was quite enjoyable. I expect the same thing out of the new Kirby game. That isn't always a bad thing. A game can be easy and still a ton of fun. We've learned replay value doesn't just come from forcing you to replay the game over and over just to survive to a new area.
What I really hate is what other commenters have noted: online play. When Q3 did it they had a good reason: it was a FPS with no story and the bots weren't that great. But today, it's an excuse to make less content. It's an excuse to make a buggy game. It's an excuse to try to force me to buy an XBox Live subscription. I almost never care. The only times I've really enjoyed online games where when I ended up stumbling upon a server I could play on all the time, with people I knew who would take care of griefers and generally played the game.
On the whole, online play is usually tacked-on and not that great. When I see a preview for a game that's not dedicated online, and online is one of the first features they talk about, I know I'm not going to care much.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I read that post, but the thing that stood out to me was "what about natural keyboards?" I think that was one of the first comments someone posted.
I've had my original model MS Natural for 14 years. I'd hate to have to try to replace it.
It is, but they're quite nice. Certainly better than the $5 dome-switch junk most bundled keyboards are.
I've used MS Natural keyboards for a long time. My 1996 original PS/2 Microsoft Natural is sitting at my office right now, I've used it every day at work for years, and most days at home for years before that. Still works great. I can't imagine how many novels worth of typing I've done on that thing.
Natural keyboard selection is very difficult. There are very few naturals for Macs, for example. You can use any USB keyboard, but if you want one with the correct key symbols, be ready to pay quite a bit and go on a hunt.
They haven't announced anything, and such a small detail isn't the kind of thing Apple tends to make a big deal about. That said, they've been selling SSDs for a few years now and now have an SSD only computer.
I'd fully expect TRIM support in Lion (10.7). It's a standard feature now and SSDs are only going to become more common.
I doubt it. Switching to AMD (especially for only part of their line) seems like it would have a lot of ancillary costs such as the R&D help I know Intel has given Apple. Apple stuck by Intel for years through their abysmal "GPUs" (I've got one, along with an nVidia, in my MacBook Pro). Intel's latest round of integrated GPUs is actually supposed to be pretty good, to the point that on lower end computers (like MacBooks) it may not be necessary to include even a low-end GPU.
Also, don't forget the right now AMD has the Phenom, which is a good chip, and Intel has their current Core line, which is an amazing line of chips. To go to AMD means sacrificing performance/watt on the CPU side.
Two years ago maybe it would have mattered. Today? Too little too late.
It's ingenious! How could it not work?
Just like when AOL bought Llamasoft. No, you know what would be a better example? When Fox bought MySpace. That worked out well, right?
This is moronic. This is "I need column inches, and Apple has money and gets pageviews, and Facebook gets page views, so I'll write a column..." nonsense.
What would Apple get out of this? A big messy architecture (in maintaining all those servers, integrating OS X with FB)? A giant target on it's back for even more privacy lawsuits? I don't see any value to Apple in buying Facebook. It would make a ton more sense to just buy up some good ISVs or more hardware companies to help design their products in house.
Yes, but between a faster CPU and HSPUA radio, the iPhone 4 is noticeably faster 3G in supported areas. I don't know about on WiFi.
Example test
Be careful. Caps don't always work the way you want them to.
It used to be that payday loans could have basically unlimited interest rates. Companies competed on interest rates, so rates were 150-600%. (rates are examples) Then the state AGs got involved and lawmakers made laws and capped the interest rates at 250%.
Thanks to those laws, companies all have their interest rates at about 250%, because it's the cap. If they are under it, they can't be sued for usury. If they go farther under it, they'll lose money. So everyone stays right at it to maximize their profit and not start a price war.
It used to be you could (depending on your credit/payday loan history) get a loan for 150%. Thanks to the 'cap' to prevent these problems, the minimum is now 250%. The cap helped a few people, and hurt a lot.
If we make such a law, that may only encourage phone companies to make it easier to hit that $500 cap when you exceed your plan. After all, you don't need to worry, because your bill will never be $2000, so it's not a bad thing.
How to make money as a phone company:
Congratulations. You've made $195 in profit, plus an extra $30 every month!
You're now an official phone company.
Sounds like an excellent reason to force them to open their networks. They can charge a little more (but not much) to cover costs. That way, I can chose between a scummy $40 bill that is actually $62 and nickle-and-dimes me, or a $50 clear cut bill that treats me well.
Basically, use policy to make the MVNO thing work.
Generally, the phone companies say they can't do that because it's so hard to calculate all the taxes on the plan based on where you live.
The fact that they magically gain the ability to calculate those taxes the instant you sign a contract shouldn't lead you to think it's actually possible.
I totally agree with you. If you can't figure out the price due to taxes, then post the price with the maximum taxes, and I can know it may be cheaper, instead of a sudden and unexpected extra $23 fee.
That would be like trying to get a hippo to dance the cha-cha.
I remember them opening the dock connector, I didn't know it applied to bluetooth also.
Does anyone know of any other special purpose bluetooth devices that connect to the iPhone (i.e. not keyboards, headsets, etc)? Perhaps this is the first one to make it to market?
Some of the disability related stuff the iPhone can do (such as bluetooth connection to a wireless pocket braille display) seems more interesting though. I wonder how well it's known just how accessible the iPhone is. I was quite impressed when I first read an article about it.
I read the summary, it's kind of interesting. The graphs in the actual article look pretty definitive. But a sentence stood out to me:
Does anyone know what that is? I've never heard this before. My natural assumption would be that most animals could be born deaf, and that it's just selected out of the population by natural selection. But if that were the case, we'd expect other animals (especially those without natural selection pressures, such as domesticated Dogs) to be born deaf.
But just cats and humans? What about other primates?
Ym/Dy/Md, where the capital letters are the first digits.
It's an odd system, really. Hard to use, but you get used to it.
So, IgnoramusMaximus pointed out that the N900 doesn't work at 3G in the US, and thus has a serious shortcoming for much of the /. audience.
Your rebuttal, in which you says he's wrong, states that your N900 only works at 2.5G in the US on AT&T's network.
Wow. Really convinced me there.
Some people may not like this, but it doesn't seem that bad to me. After hearing that some Android apps report a user's physical location up to every 30s... this seems pretty tame.
The rest I'm unsure about. The "scheduling from a mobile device", "offline syncing", and "context sensitive menu" things may have been innovative, but that's been around for 10+ years so at this point it shouldn't count. The flash monitoring sounds kind of obvious, but the implementation may not be (I don't know much in the area).
It's odd to argue how patents are squashing innovation and then go and use obvious patents that at this point (10+ years since devices started doing that function) are extraordinarily common.
I think Steve is just mad about his bonus.
- Homer Simpson
I know I've seen blurbs indicating that software piracy on the iPhone/iPod (due to jailbreaks) is huge. Does anyone know if the problem is better or worse on one side of the fence?
Just reading the summary it comes across as something like "Android pirate's heaven (thus iPhone good for developers)", when I suspect the real case is "Android pirate's heaven (just like PC/Mac/iPhone)".
My first through when reading the specs was the "symmetric multiprocessing support". I'm not sure tablets really need dual cores. My first thought when seeing that in something like a 7" tablet is they can't get their software to run smoothly enough on a single core, which would be worrying.
But the thing that REALLY stands out is the battery life. I isn't mentioned anywhere, but that was one of Apple's big selling points on the iPad. The fact that it has dual cores makes me think it's not going to last long. The smaller screen should help.