Yep. That's why Apple TV is such a success. My local stores can't keep 'em in stock.
Oh, wait.
Back on topic, why would anyone buy a netbook? I'd say 95% of netbook buyers fit into one of two categories. The first just wanted to buy the cheapest computer looking thing possible, the rest just want a cheap device to surf on.
The people who want the cheapest computer possible won't be satisfied with the iPad. This seems to be the/. crowd. "I can't install Linux". "But it won't play Borderlands." "I need Eclipse, Putty, and a keyboard at all times." The iPad doesn't cut it for these uses, it's not designed to be a normal computer. Of course, many people who buy netbooks just because they are so cheap get mad when the little 1 GHz Atom processor can't edit 1080p video or play complex games. Netbooks are not full laptops at $400 off, they're a different category.
If you just want a device to surf on, read your email, and maybe play a few games, the iPad seems to really fit the bill. I know of a couple of my relatives (not young) who this thing would be PERFECT for. No complicated filesystem. No confusing "where'd my program go" 30 window multitasking. The web works, email works, you can type up little things to email people either on screen or with the keyboard dock.
The thing really sounds like what most people want for a computer. If I didn't keep my laptop next to my couch for surfing, I'd buy one of these and it use it for that use. That alone would be enough to get me to buy it. Since it looks so different, Apple won't have the "this computer is way underpowered" problem, because I don't think anyone will see it as a MacBook Jr.
I find the iPad really interesting. It may take off like a rocket and change the industry (like the iPhone and iPod) or it could be and interesting thing that sits around but doesn't make a huge impact (like the Apple TV, although that wasn't nearly as groundbreaking, or MS's tablets, which survive but haven't really made a big difference for most people). Either way, this should be fun to watch.
Can anyone tell me how close we are to being able to render Toy Story in real time? Say 1080p?
I know the state of the art keeps moving, Avatar is far better looking than the original Toy Story, but with the limited visual "feature set" used in Toy Story, are we very far from being able to do something close looking in real time?
Can we do it raster, now that we have so many GPU based effects?
It looks pretty simple to me. You put it in and it snaps shots of the 6 sides of the cube. Those are interpreted by the computer which probably uses a standard solving algorithm. The solution is translated into movements for the robot, and off it goes.
My guess would be if it was impossible to solve, it wouldn't start doing anything, the software would complain. No Rubik's cube is impossible to solve without physically messing with the cube (as you pointed out, swapping stickers for example). If you start with a solved cube, no amount of twisting can make an impossible cube.
The video is quite impressive, far better than most lego solving robots. I'd love to see this thing solve a bigger cube.
Or how about a feeding device? You put 10 cubes in, each is automatically placed in, solved, and popped out.
The lucky ones got to play with it for 20 minutes in an Apple controlled environment. That's not a review, it's a hands-on. And there is basically no software for it, except for one or two apps Apple got converted. First impressions by tech journalists who had ideas of what the thing should be just minutes after finding out about the "changes" is not really a fair way to judge a device.
Let's wait until about the time it's released. There will be software. People will get to use it in real life, the way it's meant to be used. I really wonder if the "it doesn't have a keyboard" or "but it can't multitask" things really matter, or if the market will decide if those are features like the old "but the iPod doesn't have an FM tuner, people will avoid it".
The iPad hasn't exactly had fawning reviews and...
What is wrong with you?
The iPad was announced 3 weeks ago. No one has reviewed it. In fact, next to no one has touched the thing. We're getting these stories like "iPad becoming less popular" but you can't buy one for another 3 months.
I know people like to bash Apple (and MS, and....) but why not wait until you've touched the thing to declare it a failure of a netbook without a keyboard.
"The Mercedes Personal Jetpack is widely known as not being the game changer they say. Everyone knows a 200 mile range is too short, and the I hear the exhaust smells like bananas. The controls (which I've never felt) feel awkward and the Mercedes emblem isn't chrome-y enough. I look forward to a more thorough bashing it once the product is announced."
Is it? The manufacturer only provides one bit of information?
The manufacturer says you should consider replacing your battery when it loses x% of it's rated watt-hours. The error message says your battery has reached x% of it's rated watt-hours and may need to be replaced. Sounds right to me.
When I stick a tire gauge in my tire, it doesn't say "bad"
But I said the tire pressure warning light. They come on and say "your tires may have a problem". Your car may show your pressure (like the warning message does), or you can look it up yourself (like you can on the battery with the right tool). But the warning message here functions exactly like a tire pressure warning light. This isn't an all consuming battery infocenter, it's a warning that things may have reached a critical level.
40% implies the battery is still useful. Unlike a gas tank which the 2nd to last gallon is as good as the first, once a battery hits 60% or so it gets useless. Worse, the drop is exponential, so you can't say "60% = 0%" and scale things out. And since the time left depends on the current draw, 60% for a typist compared to a YouTube addict.
I'd say the real problem is this technology has been around for years but users haven't seen it until now. Their battery has been dying for years, their computer knew it, but it didn't tell them.
The software isn't trying to be smart. It's telling you exactly what your manufacturer did. Let's use another car analogy.
"Your tires are too low"
You don't wait until your tires are at 2psi to fix them, you fix them THEN. It's a warning something catastrophic will happen soon (you can't rely on a charge to power your laptop long), not that something bad might happen sooner or later if maybe you don't do a ton. This seems better than someone charging their laptop and taking it on a business trip and finding out it's only good for 1/2 hour. "But the software said I had 60% of my rated watt hours!"
Microsoft: Bring out your dead batteries.
Microsoft: Here's one.
Customer: It's not dead.
Microsoft: Yes it is.
Customer: But it still holds a little charge.
Microsoft: Not really. It's as good as dead.
Customer: Look! It plays YouTube for over 2 minutes.
Microsoft: It's dead. Do we need to come back later?
Customer: But it's still good. It's happy!
Microsoft: *THWACK*
Microsoft: There. Now it's dead.
Customer: You killed my battery!
Microsoft: No we didn't. It was already dead.
Not entirely. While you can do that, the chip in a laptop still has some real limits. You can't put off more than X watts of heat, because the laptop just can't dissipate it.
But if the GPU used for high intensity activities (such as games) is external to the laptop, you can have it give off 150 watts of heat because it can provide the necessary cooling capacity.
I'd love something like this. I have my MacBook Pro which I really like, but don't do much in the way of 3D. I'd love to be able to plug in a good external card once in a while to use for gaming sessions, and let the internal GPU be lower powered. There are others with enthusiast/desktop replacement laptops this would be very good for as well.
Have any web comics caught your attention? What comics do you like?
Are there any comics that you think are relatively groundbreaking today, doing something really innovative?
Do you follow comics much?
Ever think of doing a graphic novel about something? A normal novel?
What subjects interest you today? (Iraq war, plight of the mango tree, ancient Chinese cookware, whatever)
There are some questions you could ask, this was basically a fluff piece. There is no substance in it. The only useful thing is that Watterson stopped before Calvin got bad, and he said that 15 years ago.
I would imagine that while simple vacuum seal dentures (the kind that people end up using SeaBond for) it wouldn't work too well. But if you have the kind that lock onto metal attached to your jaw, it should work perfectly.
I've already got a log of games I'm playing through (I'm currently going to through the Ratchet and Clank series, among others), and ~40 hours for a game that isn't quite my style is just a lot of time. I'm not sold on playing this either (it does look a little too third person shooter), but I'm currently interested.
I haven't played the first, and don't really intend to based on the reviews I've read. I'm thinking of getting this game though.
Has anyone who hasn't played the first picked up this game? Will I be lost? Does it explain things well enough for people who don't have all that training in the way the game works?
The important thing about this hack is that they can dump the hypervisor (which has now been done). Obviously this would be a pain to use to load homebrew.
But with the hypervisor code, they can disassemble it and try to find bugs. If they find one, then they can exploit that. That method may make it possible to find a way to root any console, including the slim.
This is certainly interesting, but it's not at the "download this and you have root" stage.
Fine with me. Most spam I get is obviously a template, since I get the same one for weeks. This would stop those additional sent copies. The false positive rate on this kind of thing is effectively 0%, so I'm willing to have it be an additional check on my email.
If it can stop a lot of this kind of spam, that's fine with me. Let it be an arms race. If the spammers have to make up new templates every 4 hours, that's going to make things a lot harder.
This isn't a cure for all spam, it's a fantastic filter for one (of the biggest) kinds of spam. Only headline makes it sound like it will solve all spam.
The problem with attorneys' fees is not unlike the problem in the medical profession. They usually get paid per hour. This gives them incentives to drag cases out and not do their best work up front. After all, if you end the case fast, you don't get much money.
I've seen advocation from some (including in Forbes in a column by a lawyer) that hiring an attorney should be more of a flat fee model. Based on previous cases, your law firm should be able to guess how much it will cost to run your case. So you pay them $10k (for example) and they try it. If they are good and get it done faster than expected, they've made more profit. If they underbid, they'll pay the price and have to eat a bunch of extra time.
Now you would have to have some provisions in there to revisit the fee every 6 months, or that fee only covers up to 2000 hours (on an expected 500 hour case), or something so cases that go to the Supreme Court don't earn the lawyer only $250, but it would at least give lawyers a better incentive to do good work.
That would lower legal costs, making fees returned for frivolous lawsuits lower.
As a bonus, if fees are lower, judges are more likely to make one side pay for the other's legal expenses in pointless cases.
I realize these errors are rare, but I would think it would still be more cost effective to test every time.
When the patient claims that they got overdosed and they didn't, you'd have two separate measurements showing they were wrong, on top of whatever other medical evidence you might have (i.e. lack of burns). That could save you money.
When they do get overdosed, you know exactly how much. You know if it's by a small margin (maybe 2x) or a large one (100x). You can make the appropriate treatments. They patient might not even realize something went wrong, but if it did you know what happened and your safety systems caught it.
Surely that would cost less than the settlement when you overdose someone by a large margin 3 times and get dragged into court. Studies have even shown that when doctors are proactive about this kind of stuff and tell patients what's going on they are less likely to sue.
It seems like the increased cost would pay for themselves.
If you're deciding a malpractice case, which one sounds better. "We caught the error and treated immediately, she had slight burns" or "Something went wrong but we didn't know the extent until his skin was sloughing off, he'll be in pain for the rest of his life"?
Is there some reason they aren't required to put a radiation probe of some kind on the patient for each treatment, to double check they are getting the prescribed dose?
Wouldn't that prevent all these accidental overdoses, so the only people who suffer are people with doctors who accidentally prescribe 1000x the normal dose because they're idiots?
Surely the savings in catching these things early and the malpractice cases that come out of it would be cheaper then when you burn giant holes in peoples chests from overdoses and don't even have the brains to realize what happened.
The Motorola Droid has some of the features (like voice navigation).
I used Google Maps because it's what I'm familiar with, and it works fine for my light needs. But there is better software out there for the iPhone (and other phones) to provide the additional features a stand alone GPS device has such as mapping data without relying on the cell network.
People may still upgrade their GPS software if they have bigger needs, but what's been happening in cell phones (as well as, to a lesser degree, more and more cars with reasonably priced GPS) seems to be causing big problems for the $200 GPS market. Many people who bought they just don't need them often enough (or in strange enough areas) that a cell phone wouldn't work.
That's what I've seen, at least. I'm in the US so some issues (like out of country data rates) don't really apply much.
Most aren't, but they can be. A GPS device could be made quite small, where as a phone has to be big enough to be usable against the face. Most today seem to be designed for use in-car where larger size is beneficial. For a hiker/jogger/etc, a small map gizmo, perhaps the size of a large men's watch could be useful.
As for durable, I'm thinking of the ruggedized versions made for hikers/campers/etc.
At this point, the stand alone GPS industry is in trouble. It came of age too late. A stand alone GPS has a few advantages, some of which may disappear:
It's cheaper than a phone with an equivalent screen/storage... for now.
Better accuracy (phones probably won't need to ever be as accurate)
Smaller / more durable
Works without cell network (although phones are capable of that
GPS will stick around for some applications. A in-dash GPS will always have a bigger screen than your phone. No one would be stupid enough to use a cell phone as their marine/aviation GPS (even if they made it legal).
But for the end user? Google Map's interface is way better than any GPS I've seen. Having street view and satellite view is very useful, and having the cell network means it can find any business, pull up their website, etc.
The prices on stand alone GPS units stayed high much longer than I ever expected. As they started getting cheap, phones came along and made them useless for many people. I'm happy with Google Maps on my phone.
I agree. This sounds like the old "criminals can pick weak locks so security is worthless" fallacy. Sure any door can be opened, but that doesn't mean you should just remove the door.
That said, even if it was true, I'd still want people to abandon IE. Anything that gets people on browsers that render stuff half-decently without gobs of extra code is good.
Even getting people to IE8 would be a big improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. That's why Apple TV is such a success. My local stores can't keep 'em in stock.
Oh, wait.
Back on topic, why would anyone buy a netbook? I'd say 95% of netbook buyers fit into one of two categories. The first just wanted to buy the cheapest computer looking thing possible, the rest just want a cheap device to surf on.
The people who want the cheapest computer possible won't be satisfied with the iPad. This seems to be the /. crowd. "I can't install Linux". "But it won't play Borderlands." "I need Eclipse, Putty, and a keyboard at all times." The iPad doesn't cut it for these uses, it's not designed to be a normal computer. Of course, many people who buy netbooks just because they are so cheap get mad when the little 1 GHz Atom processor can't edit 1080p video or play complex games. Netbooks are not full laptops at $400 off, they're a different category.
If you just want a device to surf on, read your email, and maybe play a few games, the iPad seems to really fit the bill. I know of a couple of my relatives (not young) who this thing would be PERFECT for. No complicated filesystem. No confusing "where'd my program go" 30 window multitasking. The web works, email works, you can type up little things to email people either on screen or with the keyboard dock.
The thing really sounds like what most people want for a computer. If I didn't keep my laptop next to my couch for surfing, I'd buy one of these and it use it for that use. That alone would be enough to get me to buy it. Since it looks so different, Apple won't have the "this computer is way underpowered" problem, because I don't think anyone will see it as a MacBook Jr.
I find the iPad really interesting. It may take off like a rocket and change the industry (like the iPhone and iPod) or it could be and interesting thing that sits around but doesn't make a huge impact (like the Apple TV, although that wasn't nearly as groundbreaking, or MS's tablets, which survive but haven't really made a big difference for most people). Either way, this should be fun to watch.
Can anyone tell me how close we are to being able to render Toy Story in real time? Say 1080p?
I know the state of the art keeps moving, Avatar is far better looking than the original Toy Story, but with the limited visual "feature set" used in Toy Story, are we very far from being able to do something close looking in real time?
Can we do it raster, now that we have so many GPU based effects?
It looks pretty simple to me. You put it in and it snaps shots of the 6 sides of the cube. Those are interpreted by the computer which probably uses a standard solving algorithm. The solution is translated into movements for the robot, and off it goes.
My guess would be if it was impossible to solve, it wouldn't start doing anything, the software would complain. No Rubik's cube is impossible to solve without physically messing with the cube (as you pointed out, swapping stickers for example). If you start with a solved cube, no amount of twisting can make an impossible cube.
The video is quite impressive, far better than most lego solving robots. I'd love to see this thing solve a bigger cube.
Or how about a feeding device? You put 10 cubes in, each is automatically placed in, solved, and popped out.
The lucky ones got to play with it for 20 minutes in an Apple controlled environment. That's not a review, it's a hands-on. And there is basically no software for it, except for one or two apps Apple got converted. First impressions by tech journalists who had ideas of what the thing should be just minutes after finding out about the "changes" is not really a fair way to judge a device.
Let's wait until about the time it's released. There will be software. People will get to use it in real life, the way it's meant to be used. I really wonder if the "it doesn't have a keyboard" or "but it can't multitask" things really matter, or if the market will decide if those are features like the old "but the iPod doesn't have an FM tuner, people will avoid it".
What is wrong with you?
The iPad was announced 3 weeks ago. No one has reviewed it. In fact, next to no one has touched the thing. We're getting these stories like "iPad becoming less popular" but you can't buy one for another 3 months.
I know people like to bash Apple (and MS, and....) but why not wait until you've touched the thing to declare it a failure of a netbook without a keyboard.
The manufacturer says you should consider replacing your battery when it loses x% of it's rated watt-hours. The error message says your battery has reached x% of it's rated watt-hours and may need to be replaced. Sounds right to me.
But I said the tire pressure warning light. They come on and say "your tires may have a problem". Your car may show your pressure (like the warning message does), or you can look it up yourself (like you can on the battery with the right tool). But the warning message here functions exactly like a tire pressure warning light. This isn't an all consuming battery infocenter, it's a warning that things may have reached a critical level.
40% implies the battery is still useful. Unlike a gas tank which the 2nd to last gallon is as good as the first, once a battery hits 60% or so it gets useless. Worse, the drop is exponential, so you can't say "60% = 0%" and scale things out. And since the time left depends on the current draw, 60% for a typist compared to a YouTube addict.
I'd say the real problem is this technology has been around for years but users haven't seen it until now. Their battery has been dying for years, their computer knew it, but it didn't tell them.
The software isn't trying to be smart. It's telling you exactly what your manufacturer did. Let's use another car analogy.
"Your tires are too low"
You don't wait until your tires are at 2psi to fix them, you fix them THEN. It's a warning something catastrophic will happen soon (you can't rely on a charge to power your laptop long), not that something bad might happen sooner or later if maybe you don't do a ton. This seems better than someone charging their laptop and taking it on a business trip and finding out it's only good for 1/2 hour. "But the software said I had 60% of my rated watt hours!"
Microsoft: Bring out your dead batteries.
Microsoft: Here's one.
Customer: It's not dead.
Microsoft: Yes it is.
Customer: But it still holds a little charge.
Microsoft: Not really. It's as good as dead.
Customer: Look! It plays YouTube for over 2 minutes.
Microsoft: It's dead. Do we need to come back later?
Customer: But it's still good. It's happy!
Microsoft: *THWACK*
Microsoft: There. Now it's dead.
Customer: You killed my battery!
Microsoft: No we didn't. It was already dead.
Not entirely. While you can do that, the chip in a laptop still has some real limits. You can't put off more than X watts of heat, because the laptop just can't dissipate it.
But if the GPU used for high intensity activities (such as games) is external to the laptop, you can have it give off 150 watts of heat because it can provide the necessary cooling capacity.
I'd love something like this. I have my MacBook Pro which I really like, but don't do much in the way of 3D. I'd love to be able to plug in a good external card once in a while to use for gaming sessions, and let the internal GPU be lower powered. There are others with enthusiast/desktop replacement laptops this would be very good for as well.
What do you have against Garf-Eel?
There are some questions you could ask, this was basically a fluff piece. There is no substance in it. The only useful thing is that Watterson stopped before Calvin got bad, and he said that 15 years ago.
I would imagine that while simple vacuum seal dentures (the kind that people end up using SeaBond for) it wouldn't work too well. But if you have the kind that lock onto metal attached to your jaw, it should work perfectly.
I've already got a log of games I'm playing through (I'm currently going to through the Ratchet and Clank series, among others), and ~40 hours for a game that isn't quite my style is just a lot of time. I'm not sold on playing this either (it does look a little too third person shooter), but I'm currently interested.
I haven't played the first, and don't really intend to based on the reviews I've read. I'm thinking of getting this game though.
Has anyone who hasn't played the first picked up this game? Will I be lost? Does it explain things well enough for people who don't have all that training in the way the game works?
He figured out a way to read all of the memory. Can you provide a link to someone who did that last year?
The important thing about this hack is that they can dump the hypervisor (which has now been done). Obviously this would be a pain to use to load homebrew.
But with the hypervisor code, they can disassemble it and try to find bugs. If they find one, then they can exploit that. That method may make it possible to find a way to root any console, including the slim.
This is certainly interesting, but it's not at the "download this and you have root" stage.
The more annoying it is to spam, the fewer people will do it. If writing software to get past this (or buying the software) costs a fortune, good.
Fine with me. Most spam I get is obviously a template, since I get the same one for weeks. This would stop those additional sent copies. The false positive rate on this kind of thing is effectively 0%, so I'm willing to have it be an additional check on my email.
If it can stop a lot of this kind of spam, that's fine with me. Let it be an arms race. If the spammers have to make up new templates every 4 hours, that's going to make things a lot harder.
This isn't a cure for all spam, it's a fantastic filter for one (of the biggest) kinds of spam. Only headline makes it sound like it will solve all spam.
The problem with attorneys' fees is not unlike the problem in the medical profession. They usually get paid per hour. This gives them incentives to drag cases out and not do their best work up front. After all, if you end the case fast, you don't get much money.
I've seen advocation from some (including in Forbes in a column by a lawyer) that hiring an attorney should be more of a flat fee model. Based on previous cases, your law firm should be able to guess how much it will cost to run your case. So you pay them $10k (for example) and they try it. If they are good and get it done faster than expected, they've made more profit. If they underbid, they'll pay the price and have to eat a bunch of extra time.
Now you would have to have some provisions in there to revisit the fee every 6 months, or that fee only covers up to 2000 hours (on an expected 500 hour case), or something so cases that go to the Supreme Court don't earn the lawyer only $250, but it would at least give lawyers a better incentive to do good work.
That would lower legal costs, making fees returned for frivolous lawsuits lower.
As a bonus, if fees are lower, judges are more likely to make one side pay for the other's legal expenses in pointless cases.
I realize these errors are rare, but I would think it would still be more cost effective to test every time.
Surely that would cost less than the settlement when you overdose someone by a large margin 3 times and get dragged into court. Studies have even shown that when doctors are proactive about this kind of stuff and tell patients what's going on they are less likely to sue.
It seems like the increased cost would pay for themselves.
If you're deciding a malpractice case, which one sounds better. "We caught the error and treated immediately, she had slight burns" or "Something went wrong but we didn't know the extent until his skin was sloughing off, he'll be in pain for the rest of his life"?
Is there some reason they aren't required to put a radiation probe of some kind on the patient for each treatment, to double check they are getting the prescribed dose?
Wouldn't that prevent all these accidental overdoses, so the only people who suffer are people with doctors who accidentally prescribe 1000x the normal dose because they're idiots?
Surely the savings in catching these things early and the malpractice cases that come out of it would be cheaper then when you burn giant holes in peoples chests from overdoses and don't even have the brains to realize what happened.
The Motorola Droid has some of the features (like voice navigation).
I used Google Maps because it's what I'm familiar with, and it works fine for my light needs. But there is better software out there for the iPhone (and other phones) to provide the additional features a stand alone GPS device has such as mapping data without relying on the cell network.
People may still upgrade their GPS software if they have bigger needs, but what's been happening in cell phones (as well as, to a lesser degree, more and more cars with reasonably priced GPS) seems to be causing big problems for the $200 GPS market. Many people who bought they just don't need them often enough (or in strange enough areas) that a cell phone wouldn't work.
That's what I've seen, at least. I'm in the US so some issues (like out of country data rates) don't really apply much.
Most aren't, but they can be. A GPS device could be made quite small, where as a phone has to be big enough to be usable against the face. Most today seem to be designed for use in-car where larger size is beneficial. For a hiker/jogger/etc, a small map gizmo, perhaps the size of a large men's watch could be useful.
As for durable, I'm thinking of the ruggedized versions made for hikers/campers/etc.
At this point, the stand alone GPS industry is in trouble. It came of age too late. A stand alone GPS has a few advantages, some of which may disappear:
GPS will stick around for some applications. A in-dash GPS will always have a bigger screen than your phone. No one would be stupid enough to use a cell phone as their marine/aviation GPS (even if they made it legal).
But for the end user? Google Map's interface is way better than any GPS I've seen. Having street view and satellite view is very useful, and having the cell network means it can find any business, pull up their website, etc.
The prices on stand alone GPS units stayed high much longer than I ever expected. As they started getting cheap, phones came along and made them useless for many people. I'm happy with Google Maps on my phone.
I agree. This sounds like the old "criminals can pick weak locks so security is worthless" fallacy. Sure any door can be opened, but that doesn't mean you should just remove the door.
That said, even if it was true, I'd still want people to abandon IE. Anything that gets people on browsers that render stuff half-decently without gobs of extra code is good.
Even getting people to IE8 would be a big improvement.