They both come with books that explain exactly how EVERYTHING works. The XGS uses a SX-Key processor so you can program it in ASM or even C and such. The Propeller processor in the HYDRA can be programmed in it's ASM or a special language they made to make development easy to teach and learn but powerful called Spin that is based on Pascal, IIRC.
No better way to learn how stuff works than programming the metal. I learned a TON when I used to experiment with programming GBA games on how consoles worked.
They exist. They are not nearly as advanced as even the PS1 in most respects, but they exist.
The X Games Station was the first that I know of. Not terrifically powerful, but there, and designed by Andre LaMothe.
Then there is the recently released HYDRA (which I can't find the official link for) which is based on the Parallax Propeller chip which is like the Cell in that it has 8 SPEs so it's very multiprocessor but you can do all sorts of interesting things. Obviously, it's no where near as powerful though. This was also designed by Andre LaMothe.
I agree fully. This is one of those things I hate hearing about. It's always "Help the poor", "the poor need X", etc. I remember a survey a few years ago where people below the federal poverty level have (on average) a washer and driver, color TV, microwave, iPod, car, often cable/satellite, and all sorts of other stuff. Some of this is because the poverty level may be too high. Some of this is just because of the choices those people make (hint: When you only make 12k a year, don't go getting yourself a $300 monthly car payment).
There are truly poor people out there, and for various reasons (lazy, mental illness, hard times, etc). But you can't decided someone has a bad life just because they are below the government's arbitrary poverty line. As you said, there are people all around the world who would think some of our poor live like kings.
As for income inequity, it matters the more skewed it is. While we have people earning minimum wage and CEOs and athletes earning ridiculous amounts of money, there is a great spread in the middle. We're not like some countries where you are either very rich or very poor with next to no middle class.
As you point out, I think this is a priorities problem. People decide they "must have" that iPod/xbox/new car/whatever that they can't/can barely afford and so they buy it and then struggle under the payments. They may have no savings or very little. This is a problem of learning to handle money and put off instant-gratification as much as it is CEOs getting paid too much.
This has been on/. before, but you can't call the war based on this.
When VHS/Beta came around, there was no real way to watch that kind of content at home before. That was HUGE. Right now, that exists in the form of VHS and DVDs.
People wanted VHS. Going from nothing to a way to record TV or watch movies at home when you want was HUGE. DVD->Whatever is just going to higher quality. There is no massive benefit like before.
Then there is the computer factor. You know where I could watch high quality content without buying a $500+ player? My computer. You know where I can find tons of FREE content? My computer. The only competition that VHS had was "those kind" of theaters in the "bad part of town". People already are in the privacy of their homes
Then there is the higher quality is not better argument.
Let's face is, no one cares that much about this battle. It's almost NOTHING LIKE VHS/BETA. Same field (home video), same circumstance (two competing formats), same players (Sony on one side, this time with other people). But the reasons why people will choose a format are different. VHS was longer. Blu-ray is longer, but but since HD-DVD isn't limited to 60min like Beta was that isn't as much of an issue.
Can't compare the situations. Doesn't hold up.
Random theory: Blu-ray will win in end. Why? Cooler name. I have no idea.
No, the iPod didn't become a big success until they released iTunes for Windows. It was popular, but limited to the Mac market. If you wanted to, there were 3rd party programs you could buy (at least 2 or 3 big ones) that would let you use a iPod with Windows.
But it was when "Hell froze over" and the other 98% of the computer using public could actually use the device easily that it really exploded. It could have easily done quite good at revision one, and the second revision was extremely good as well.
As for the iPhone, I'm more interested in the competition it will push. It's a neat gadget, and I'd take one in a heartbeat, but it's just too much for me, especially since that's the price WITH the contract discount.
Like the F16 thing. Let's not forget that the shuttle has NEVER been in space during a new-years. It is untested (at least in space) and they are not positive what will happen. That's why they were worried in December, they didn't want bad weather to force the shuttle to stay in space during the transition.
I'm quite glad that they did and by such a large margin, but the lower court's opinion had logic behind it. If you license the patent, then you are agreeing that it's valid (you licensed it, after all), and thus have no right to challenge it's validity. That logic makes sense, however, this decision makes quite a bit more sense. You shouldn't be forced to either fight a patent and not be able to produce whatever the patent covers during the multi-year suit (or risk massive fines) or just basically giving up and licensing the patent so you can stay in business.
This is a GREAT decision, and should help with software patents ("Sure we've been paying you for your patent on the window close button, but it's obvious so we are challenging it").
The one catch: As a patent holder I'm not required by law to license to you. I believe I can even revoke (or refuse to renew) your license. So patent holders could use that as leverage to prevent suits by declining to let people license the patent while they were actively challenging it in court.
They probably have more clamor for the games. The fact is that most accountant types probably don't care enough about switching to a Mac that they ask for this. They are either stuck on the PC and happy there, or stated on a Mac and use something else.
You could use Parallels (especially with the new Coherence thing), although I realize that's quite a bit more expensive.
PS: Tried any of the free Parallels replacements like QEMU or the Cocoa QEMU port?
OK, I've gotta ask, why would I care if it worked with iTV? My TiVo is already attached to my TV. What point would there be in moving the file from the TiVo to the Mac to the iTV?
People keep paying for it. Look, if you don't know what "The program is closing, do you want to save the changes since your last save or discard them?" means, you shouldn't be using a computer. They bring up the car analogy (I read this elsewhere), but they leave out one crucial part:
Anyone can use a computer, you need to study for a license to use a car.
That's why people accept the way cars generally work, they've been taught about it. They have experience. If you sit down at a computer, try your best never to learn how it work or what the terminology (even drive, file, folder, etc) is, you're not qualified to design software and say that way X is better than Y. Just because you don't know the jargon doesn't mean it's bad. Computers have a LOT of superfluous jargon, but a save dialog is not one of them.
What do you do? Automatically save? They didn't want to do that, you just overwrote their changes. Automatically close? They've been typing for two hours, you just lost all that work.
The save dialog exists for a reason and is well thought out, in my opinion.
As others have stated here, users are not qualified to design software, and those that complain often barely know enough to open the program. There are problems deeper in software (like the advanced features of Office), but really.
My biggest complaint with software is bugs, and people can vote that kind of thing with their wallet. You don't like your tax software (I helped someone with TaxCut last year, that threw me for a COMPLETE LOOP, it made NO SENSE; where TurboTax is quite sensible). I know you don't always have that choice (Office, for example) but when you do, STOP BUYING CRUD HOPING THEY'LL FIX IT. FIND SOMETHING BETTER, OR RETURN IT WHEN IT'S BUGGY.
I'm guessing they were referring to the OTHER side of the corporate network (authentication, web serving, database, e-mail, etc) instead of the client boxes. Of course this ignores the argument that Macs are cheaper because of the lack of spyware/viruses/etc which you may or may not buy.
There is no dispute that most custom business apps are written to Windows, although Parallels can fix that (though not cheaply at $80 for Parallels and $75 for an OEM windows).
<morganfreemanvoice>
How much time have you spent teaching your son how to kick a football?
A soccer ball?
How to kick to the limit?
Kick a door in? ...
How much time have you spent teaching him what NOT to kick?
...
Please, don't kick the Roombas. </morganfreemanvoice>
I hereby declare January 15th international "Don't Kick The Roombas" day.
I just got a Roomba Sage off Woot about two weeks ago. I've got to say I love the little thing. It does a fantastic job and is actually fun to watch, especially if you're a gadget person.
"I love robots!"
It does a very good job and picked up and AMAZING amount of crud off my floors and filled up it's lint filter. I really ought to go over those rooms again to see how much more it can find. But it's great to be able to put it in a room, push a button, and come back later to have it vacuumed and the Roomba happily sitting and charging on it's little home base.
As for the servant robot to bring me drinks or something like that, I think it's a while off. But there is a robot for homes that is here now and is great.
This is one of the arguments for a language running on a VM like Java, C#, or Python. They can do runtime checking of array bounds and such and throw an exception or crash instead of silently overwriting some other variable that only may or may not cause a crash or some other noticeable side effect later.
Steve Jobs pulled the company back from extinction. During his reign we've seen the rise of OS X, the iMac phenomenon, the iPod juggernaut, iTunes, and other great software. The fact is the design and implementation of nearly all of Apple's products (especially the big ones) owe at least something to Jobs tweaking. Don't forget his massive performances every Macworld (less than 2 weeks, yea!).
The loss of Steve Jobs would be devastating to the company's stock, if not the company it's self.
In fact, not too long after they announced Steve Job's cancer and successful surgery last year there was an opinion piece in Forbes that made a very strong case that they were wrong not to tell the stockholders about it until after it was fixed because he was such an important part of the company that his health really mattered, compared to the financial results if the CEO of Bank of America got cancer. BoA has other capable people and could survive.
True or false, Apple is basically perceived by a great many people to be an extension of Steve of sorts. Without him there, it's not the same Apple.
There was something a bit like this on Dirty Jobs as I remember. It was a research project that took the output of a power plant (a portion of it) and ran it though tubes of algae that would filter it and remove CO2 and grow, then they could burn the algae afterwards. That way they could get the "free" energy (from the sun that the algae was storing) plus is was carbon neutral if implemented on a large scale.
We just have to be careful that while we enslave the algae, they don't know it's happening so they don't start an uprising. I don't want a very thin layer of mad green goo covering everything.
Widescreen? Nope. HDTV? Nope. Dual tuners? Doesn't look like it. Display on front to show what it's recording? Nope. Support for digital cable (cable card)? Nope. Downloadable programs over the 'net? Nope. Suggestions based on other users TV viewing? Nope. "Season Pass" like recording? Doesn't seem like it. Fits nicely in a rack of home theater equipment (doesn't look like a PC)? Nope. Ability to hack? Yes. Monthly fee? No.
Yeah, I'll drop my Series 3 for this thing. Heck, I wouldn't drop a Series 2. You can hack a Series 2 to add other stuff, and still have the great TiVo UI and service.
I've yet to see what I consider to be even a mildly compelling alternative to a TiVo. Unless you have all the parts sitting around and want to build a MythTV box for free, they just aren't there. I mean, why should I choose this over a cable company DVR which would give me things like On Demand and HD?
TiVo: Still #1, no serious competitors since the death of ReplayTV.
In mobile processors, that may indeed be the case (I hadn't thought of that). But I know that there are low power versions of server/desktop chips that are designed for blades and such that obviously they don't pull such tricks on. You'd have to look up the specs at Intel's site, I'd guess, to be sure.
My understanding is that they should perform identically. The low voltage one was just able to pass the test at that voltage where the "normal" one would have failed the test at that low voltage. They make them all the same, then bin them based on which tests they pass. The exception to this is if they have high demand for 1.6 GHz chips but are producing lots of extra 1.8 GHz chips they may re-mark them and sell them as 1.6 chips (which is why sometimes the slow speed grades overclock so well).
This is my understanding. It's a bit like military spec chips. They perform identically, they are just designed for different conditions (in this case, less voltage).
I saw the notice this morning (the blue light flashing) but I won't get a chance to try it until after work. Has anyone here tried it? How does the text look on an HDTV (I know it's only 480p)? How easy/hard is it to navigate with the Wiimote? Does it feel fast or slow?
the Wii console, the wrist strap broke and caused the remote to leave the user's hand.
OK. The strap physically moved the remote out of people's grasp? That's one powerful strap.
I wonder why the strap on MY Wiimote didn't do that. Maybe it was defective?
The strap was intended to prevent the Wiimote from going flying if you accidentally lost your grip so it would slip at most a few inches and not go flying. It's also there so if you lose your grip it stays where you can get it instead of falling to the floor and possibly damaging the remote in the process (playing on concrete maybe?).
It was NOT designed to let you THROW the Wiimote and rely on the strap to keep the thing on your wrist. Every video I've seen online where a strap breaks, someone is being an incredible idiot.
Besides which, Nintendo fix it in new Wiimotes and offered to send you a replacement strap for free.
I still think we need class-action reform in this country. Some cases are good. Some are debatable. Some are stupid.
And some are like this one: Some lawyer probably made it up and went fishing for "victims" who were "harmed" by their innabilty to follow directions, including those IN THE MANUAL, IN GAME MANUALS, and EVER TIME YOU START A GAME.
There is a difference there. OS X and the Mac are both made by Apple. However HP doesn't make Windows. They require you to purchase it, but they don't make it. I think that's what makes this illegal (I live in the US, so obviously I don't know this law). It's the fact that it's two parties. The HP computer won't function without another company's product, but they don't give you a choice as to which company (MS, or buy a Linux distro or something else).
You may be thinking of the fantastic Ken Burns documentary "Empire of the Air", based on the book by the same name. I agree, it shows just how far he'd go. Armstrong offered FM to RCA (who he worked for). But the head of RCA was busy pushing his new baby, TV (which used FM for sound modulation which he HATED and refused to pay royalties on) and he thought (and probably quite rightly so) that American's couldn't afford to purchase both an new expensive FM radio and expensive TV. As I remember, the main reason FM got so successfully is that Armstrong basically gave it the military for free and they bolstered use and development (because it was so superior). Armstrong's FM eventually won out over AM as we all know, but he suffered patent fights for the rest of his life.
The clout to get the FCC to move an entire, in use, part of the spectrum is nearly unimaginable. Look at the interoperability hijinks and such that go on now that you think are bad, and just try to imagine one company getting the FCC to make every satellite radio useless overnight.
Where are you from? In the US the NTSC color signal was specifically developed to maintain compatibility with B&W sets so that no one needed to buy a new TV if they didn't want to. I was under the impression that PAL/SCEAM were developed to do the same thing, but carrying the color information in a different way so it was more stable and immune to noise.
I know early FM radios don't work now (because RCA got the FCC to move the FM dial's portion of the spectrum in a deliberate attempt to kill the technology), but I've never heard of that with color TV.
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They both come with books that explain exactly how EVERYTHING works. The XGS uses a SX-Key processor so you can program it in ASM or even C and such. The Propeller processor in the HYDRA can be programmed in it's ASM or a special language they made to make development easy to teach and learn but powerful called Spin that is based on Pascal, IIRC.
No better way to learn how stuff works than programming the metal. I learned a TON when I used to experiment with programming GBA games on how consoles worked.
They exist. They are not nearly as advanced as even the PS1 in most respects, but they exist.
The X Games Station was the first that I know of. Not terrifically powerful, but there, and designed by Andre LaMothe.
Then there is the recently released HYDRA (which I can't find the official link for) which is based on the Parallax Propeller chip which is like the Cell in that it has 8 SPEs so it's very multiprocessor but you can do all sorts of interesting things. Obviously, it's no where near as powerful though. This was also designed by Andre LaMothe.
I agree fully. This is one of those things I hate hearing about. It's always "Help the poor", "the poor need X", etc. I remember a survey a few years ago where people below the federal poverty level have (on average) a washer and driver, color TV, microwave, iPod, car, often cable/satellite, and all sorts of other stuff. Some of this is because the poverty level may be too high. Some of this is just because of the choices those people make (hint: When you only make 12k a year, don't go getting yourself a $300 monthly car payment).
There are truly poor people out there, and for various reasons (lazy, mental illness, hard times, etc). But you can't decided someone has a bad life just because they are below the government's arbitrary poverty line. As you said, there are people all around the world who would think some of our poor live like kings.
As for income inequity, it matters the more skewed it is. While we have people earning minimum wage and CEOs and athletes earning ridiculous amounts of money, there is a great spread in the middle. We're not like some countries where you are either very rich or very poor with next to no middle class.
As you point out, I think this is a priorities problem. People decide they "must have" that iPod/xbox/new car/whatever that they can't/can barely afford and so they buy it and then struggle under the payments. They may have no savings or very little. This is a problem of learning to handle money and put off instant-gratification as much as it is CEOs getting paid too much.
This has been on /. before, but you can't call the war based on this.
When VHS/Beta came around, there was no real way to watch that kind of content at home before. That was HUGE. Right now, that exists in the form of VHS and DVDs.
People wanted VHS. Going from nothing to a way to record TV or watch movies at home when you want was HUGE. DVD->Whatever is just going to higher quality. There is no massive benefit like before.
Then there is the computer factor. You know where I could watch high quality content without buying a $500+ player? My computer. You know where I can find tons of FREE content? My computer. The only competition that VHS had was "those kind" of theaters in the "bad part of town". People already are in the privacy of their homes
Then there is the higher quality is not better argument.
Let's face is, no one cares that much about this battle. It's almost NOTHING LIKE VHS/BETA. Same field (home video), same circumstance (two competing formats), same players (Sony on one side, this time with other people). But the reasons why people will choose a format are different. VHS was longer. Blu-ray is longer, but but since HD-DVD isn't limited to 60min like Beta was that isn't as much of an issue.
Can't compare the situations. Doesn't hold up.
Random theory: Blu-ray will win in end. Why? Cooler name. I have no idea.
No, the iPod didn't become a big success until they released iTunes for Windows. It was popular, but limited to the Mac market. If you wanted to, there were 3rd party programs you could buy (at least 2 or 3 big ones) that would let you use a iPod with Windows.
But it was when "Hell froze over" and the other 98% of the computer using public could actually use the device easily that it really exploded. It could have easily done quite good at revision one, and the second revision was extremely good as well.
As for the iPhone, I'm more interested in the competition it will push. It's a neat gadget, and I'd take one in a heartbeat, but it's just too much for me, especially since that's the price WITH the contract discount.
Like the F16 thing. Let's not forget that the shuttle has NEVER been in space during a new-years. It is untested (at least in space) and they are not positive what will happen. That's why they were worried in December, they didn't want bad weather to force the shuttle to stay in space during the transition.
I'm quite glad that they did and by such a large margin, but the lower court's opinion had logic behind it. If you license the patent, then you are agreeing that it's valid (you licensed it, after all), and thus have no right to challenge it's validity. That logic makes sense, however, this decision makes quite a bit more sense. You shouldn't be forced to either fight a patent and not be able to produce whatever the patent covers during the multi-year suit (or risk massive fines) or just basically giving up and licensing the patent so you can stay in business.
This is a GREAT decision, and should help with software patents ("Sure we've been paying you for your patent on the window close button, but it's obvious so we are challenging it").
The one catch: As a patent holder I'm not required by law to license to you. I believe I can even revoke (or refuse to renew) your license. So patent holders could use that as leverage to prevent suits by declining to let people license the patent while they were actively challenging it in court.
They probably have more clamor for the games. The fact is that most accountant types probably don't care enough about switching to a Mac that they ask for this. They are either stuck on the PC and happy there, or stated on a Mac and use something else.
You could use Parallels (especially with the new Coherence thing), although I realize that's quite a bit more expensive.
PS: Tried any of the free Parallels replacements like QEMU or the Cocoa QEMU port?
OK, I've gotta ask, why would I care if it worked with iTV? My TiVo is already attached to my TV. What point would there be in moving the file from the TiVo to the Mac to the iTV?
People keep paying for it. Look, if you don't know what "The program is closing, do you want to save the changes since your last save or discard them?" means, you shouldn't be using a computer. They bring up the car analogy (I read this elsewhere), but they leave out one crucial part:
Anyone can use a computer, you need to study for a license to use a car.
That's why people accept the way cars generally work, they've been taught about it. They have experience. If you sit down at a computer, try your best never to learn how it work or what the terminology (even drive, file, folder, etc) is, you're not qualified to design software and say that way X is better than Y. Just because you don't know the jargon doesn't mean it's bad. Computers have a LOT of superfluous jargon, but a save dialog is not one of them.
What do you do? Automatically save? They didn't want to do that, you just overwrote their changes. Automatically close? They've been typing for two hours, you just lost all that work.
The save dialog exists for a reason and is well thought out, in my opinion.
As others have stated here, users are not qualified to design software, and those that complain often barely know enough to open the program. There are problems deeper in software (like the advanced features of Office), but really.
My biggest complaint with software is bugs, and people can vote that kind of thing with their wallet. You don't like your tax software (I helped someone with TaxCut last year, that threw me for a COMPLETE LOOP, it made NO SENSE; where TurboTax is quite sensible). I know you don't always have that choice (Office, for example) but when you do, STOP BUYING CRUD HOPING THEY'LL FIX IT. FIND SOMETHING BETTER, OR RETURN IT WHEN IT'S BUGGY.
I'm guessing they were referring to the OTHER side of the corporate network (authentication, web serving, database, e-mail, etc) instead of the client boxes. Of course this ignores the argument that Macs are cheaper because of the lack of spyware/viruses/etc which you may or may not buy.
There is no dispute that most custom business apps are written to Windows, although Parallels can fix that (though not cheaply at $80 for Parallels and $75 for an OEM windows).
<morganfreemanvoice>
...
How much time have you spent teaching your son how to kick a football?
A soccer ball?
How to kick to the limit?
Kick a door in?
How much time have you spent teaching him what NOT to kick?
...
Please, don't kick the Roombas.
</morganfreemanvoice>
I hereby declare January 15th international "Don't Kick The Roombas" day.
Please, don't kick the poor Roombas.
I just got a Roomba Sage off Woot about two weeks ago. I've got to say I love the little thing. It does a fantastic job and is actually fun to watch, especially if you're a gadget person.
"I love robots!"
It does a very good job and picked up and AMAZING amount of crud off my floors and filled up it's lint filter. I really ought to go over those rooms again to see how much more it can find. But it's great to be able to put it in a room, push a button, and come back later to have it vacuumed and the Roomba happily sitting and charging on it's little home base.
As for the servant robot to bring me drinks or something like that, I think it's a while off. But there is a robot for homes that is here now and is great.
This is one of the arguments for a language running on a VM like Java, C#, or Python. They can do runtime checking of array bounds and such and throw an exception or crash instead of silently overwriting some other variable that only may or may not cause a crash or some other noticeable side effect later.
Really?
Steve Jobs pulled the company back from extinction. During his reign we've seen the rise of OS X, the iMac phenomenon, the iPod juggernaut, iTunes, and other great software. The fact is the design and implementation of nearly all of Apple's products (especially the big ones) owe at least something to Jobs tweaking. Don't forget his massive performances every Macworld (less than 2 weeks, yea!).
The loss of Steve Jobs would be devastating to the company's stock, if not the company it's self.
In fact, not too long after they announced Steve Job's cancer and successful surgery last year there was an opinion piece in Forbes that made a very strong case that they were wrong not to tell the stockholders about it until after it was fixed because he was such an important part of the company that his health really mattered, compared to the financial results if the CEO of Bank of America got cancer. BoA has other capable people and could survive.
True or false, Apple is basically perceived by a great many people to be an extension of Steve of sorts. Without him there, it's not the same Apple.
Have you seen him lately?
There was something a bit like this on Dirty Jobs as I remember. It was a research project that took the output of a power plant (a portion of it) and ran it though tubes of algae that would filter it and remove CO2 and grow, then they could burn the algae afterwards. That way they could get the "free" energy (from the sun that the algae was storing) plus is was carbon neutral if implemented on a large scale.
We just have to be careful that while we enslave the algae, they don't know it's happening so they don't start an uprising. I don't want a very thin layer of mad green goo covering everything.
Widescreen? Nope. HDTV? Nope. Dual tuners? Doesn't look like it. Display on front to show what it's recording? Nope. Support for digital cable (cable card)? Nope. Downloadable programs over the 'net? Nope. Suggestions based on other users TV viewing? Nope. "Season Pass" like recording? Doesn't seem like it. Fits nicely in a rack of home theater equipment (doesn't look like a PC)? Nope. Ability to hack? Yes. Monthly fee? No.
Let's compare that to a TiVo series 3.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, soon, yes, yes, yes, no, yes.
It only won in the last two categories.
Yeah, I'll drop my Series 3 for this thing. Heck, I wouldn't drop a Series 2. You can hack a Series 2 to add other stuff, and still have the great TiVo UI and service.
I've yet to see what I consider to be even a mildly compelling alternative to a TiVo. Unless you have all the parts sitting around and want to build a MythTV box for free, they just aren't there. I mean, why should I choose this over a cable company DVR which would give me things like On Demand and HD?
TiVo: Still #1, no serious competitors since the death of ReplayTV.
In mobile processors, that may indeed be the case (I hadn't thought of that). But I know that there are low power versions of server/desktop chips that are designed for blades and such that obviously they don't pull such tricks on. You'd have to look up the specs at Intel's site, I'd guess, to be sure.
My understanding is that they should perform identically. The low voltage one was just able to pass the test at that voltage where the "normal" one would have failed the test at that low voltage. They make them all the same, then bin them based on which tests they pass. The exception to this is if they have high demand for 1.6 GHz chips but are producing lots of extra 1.8 GHz chips they may re-mark them and sell them as 1.6 chips (which is why sometimes the slow speed grades overclock so well).
This is my understanding. It's a bit like military spec chips. They perform identically, they are just designed for different conditions (in this case, less voltage).
I saw the notice this morning (the blue light flashing) but I won't get a chance to try it until after work. Has anyone here tried it? How does the text look on an HDTV (I know it's only 480p)? How easy/hard is it to navigate with the Wiimote? Does it feel fast or slow?
OK. The strap physically moved the remote out of people's grasp? That's one powerful strap.
I wonder why the strap on MY Wiimote didn't do that. Maybe it was defective?
The strap was intended to prevent the Wiimote from going flying if you accidentally lost your grip so it would slip at most a few inches and not go flying. It's also there so if you lose your grip it stays where you can get it instead of falling to the floor and possibly damaging the remote in the process (playing on concrete maybe?).
It was NOT designed to let you THROW the Wiimote and rely on the strap to keep the thing on your wrist. Every video I've seen online where a strap breaks, someone is being an incredible idiot.
Besides which, Nintendo fix it in new Wiimotes and offered to send you a replacement strap for free.
I still think we need class-action reform in this country. Some cases are good. Some are debatable. Some are stupid.
And some are like this one: Some lawyer probably made it up and went fishing for "victims" who were "harmed" by their innabilty to follow directions, including those IN THE MANUAL, IN GAME MANUALS, and EVER TIME YOU START A GAME.
There is a difference there. OS X and the Mac are both made by Apple. However HP doesn't make Windows. They require you to purchase it, but they don't make it. I think that's what makes this illegal (I live in the US, so obviously I don't know this law). It's the fact that it's two parties. The HP computer won't function without another company's product, but they don't give you a choice as to which company (MS, or buy a Linux distro or something else).
You may be thinking of the fantastic Ken Burns documentary "Empire of the Air", based on the book by the same name. I agree, it shows just how far he'd go. Armstrong offered FM to RCA (who he worked for). But the head of RCA was busy pushing his new baby, TV (which used FM for sound modulation which he HATED and refused to pay royalties on) and he thought (and probably quite rightly so) that American's couldn't afford to purchase both an new expensive FM radio and expensive TV. As I remember, the main reason FM got so successfully is that Armstrong basically gave it the military for free and they bolstered use and development (because it was so superior). Armstrong's FM eventually won out over AM as we all know, but he suffered patent fights for the rest of his life.
The clout to get the FCC to move an entire, in use, part of the spectrum is nearly unimaginable. Look at the interoperability hijinks and such that go on now that you think are bad, and just try to imagine one company getting the FCC to make every satellite radio useless overnight.
Where are you from? In the US the NTSC color signal was specifically developed to maintain compatibility with B&W sets so that no one needed to buy a new TV if they didn't want to. I was under the impression that PAL/SCEAM were developed to do the same thing, but carrying the color information in a different way so it was more stable and immune to noise.
I know early FM radios don't work now (because RCA got the FCC to move the FM dial's portion of the spectrum in a deliberate attempt to kill the technology), but I've never heard of that with color TV.