Can I daisy chain 2 displays and a little RAID array over USB? Can USB hold an external graphic card (and do a good job of it)? What about a custom accelerator card?
Thunderbolt does things USB can't. They aren't used for the same thing, their uses just overlap some.
No, because they are active. That's what will allow people to transparently switch to optical cables in a few years. You won't have to replace any of your equipment, the cables handle that.
This is somewhat stupid though. USB has moved into hard drives and such, but it aims at the low end of the market. Mice, keyboard, etc. up through hard drives and scanners. On the other hand, Thunderbolt aims at the top of the market. It aims at displays, large RAID arrays down through hard drives and scanners. Thunderbolt is basically PCIe in a cable. This isn't an either-or. No one in their right mind would ever make a Thunderbolt mouse or USB SAN, there is no reason to think both ports won't be on computers in a few years.
So is the question "What will people use for connecting external storage in 2 years"? Because that's basically the only question people ever argued over with USB vs. FireWire. I'd say the answer is "USB for most, ThunderBolt for those who really care about performance".
Remember that since ThunderBolt is faster and PCIe, you can make bridge to let you plug USB SuperSpeed stuff into Thunderbolt ports, just like Apple's Thunderbolt monitors have USB2 and FireWire bridge chips.
I'm quite happy they changed it, I was planning on quitting Netflix when this was implemented. That said, this one action (which never even happened) immediately trashed all 7+ years of good will I had with them. In August, they were one of my favorite companies. Now I don't trust them.
Irony of all this? I didn't mind the price increase. It wasn't bad for me. I thought they $8 DVD + Streaming plan was very underpriced, so I wasn't surprised at that move.
The browser on the Kindle doesn't scroll, it just jumps one page at a time, at least when you use the page buttons. It may jump in small bits if you move the cursor over the bottom of the page. I honestly haven't used it enough to remember. But it does have a reader mode which reformats the web page to strip out all the unnecessary junk and make it easy to read on the screen. It works just like the reader mode in Safari, which I think was based on Instapaper (as the top comment suggested).
That mode actually works very well, and if you wanted to read some long article on the Kindle I wouldn't mind using it. But between the network connection, the CPU, and the eInk refresh rate the browser is very painful to use. To load any moderately complicated web site to the point you can navigate to find what you're after is an exercise in patience.
Maybe the submitter should consider accessing the mobile versions of websites (where available). That would help.
This is a service called Overdrive which has been around for quite a while. My understanding is that each library has to "buy" the eBooks, and can only lend out each of their "copies" that they "purchased". They can't lend out 2000 copies of a book if they only bought 3. It's basically setup to mirror the physical book model.
MS is kinda jerky about controllers, for some reason. If you get the RockBand Fender Stratocaster, it's got buttons and a dpad for navigating the menus in the game, which would make it really easy to use.
But due to some MS requirement (I'm guessing "You must have an XBox button and a license for every controller") the buttons are disabled on the 360. You have to use the buttons on the MIDI interface box, which either clips to the bottom of the guitar (awkward), on your belt (awkward), or you set somewhere (more cables, not on your physically). It makes things much more obnoxious than they need to be, because MS won't be flexible on that policy.
Specs only matter to the point that they improve the games. RAM is cheap, but can have a big effect on gameplay. More RAM means you can hold more a level in memory at a time, meaning you have less loading screens. I've had a blast with my GBA and DS despite their specs being orders of magnitude less than the PSP, iPhone, etc.
iPhone games are mostly little 5 minute time fillers, but there is some good stuff in there. Boardgames work especially well. I think having additional control options above the touchscreen would allow much better games. Very few action games work with a touchscreen.
I agree with the 3DS. The DS had a big game draught after launch, but there were enough good GBA games that it wasn't that bad. The price on the 3DS was a big mistake, the lack of a single must-have game was a mistake. It's been out for ~6 months and the only game I'm lusting after is the next Professor Layton game, which isn't out and probably won't need 3D.
Re:Finally, something that doesn't record in 720p.
on
PS Vita Specs Announced
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· Score: 4, Insightful
512MB is pretty good. The PS3 only has 256MB of RAM (plus another 256MB for graphics). That's the same amount that's in the XBox 360, but on the Vita there is another 128MB of dedicated graphics RAM. In this respect, the Vita is very well specced.
I usually wish consoles had more memory when they came out. Imagine the difference doubling the ram on the PS3 or 360 would have. Doubling the Wii's RAM would make a big difference too. RAM tends to end up so cheap, it just seems like a lack of foresight not to put more in.
The Vita is going to have big problems though. It's nice, but it's still a portable console, and those seem to be dying. The only real thing I'd say this has going for it above an iPhone is the controls, and someone could fix that on the iPhone with a shell. The 3DS isn't doing well, and the PSP was never that big here in the states. In the last year or two, it's barely felt like an also-ran. The only people I know who love them do so because they hacked it. My PSP gathers a ton of dust, coming out once in a blue moon.
Good luck Sony. Even if the Vita is a kick-ass product, you've got a hell of a battle in front of you.
For S3, you have to specify the home region of your storage. As far as I know, your storage is not copied in the other regions, that's what CloudFront is for. I believe EC2 is also setup in regions and your VM stays where you created it.
Why do you think that signing up for Amazon's cloud means your data will go overseas?
Subject says it all. My first thought from seeing the picture of that thing is "Why the pointy corners?". They look like they'd be uncomfortable to rest on my leg or hold in my hand some times.
And it did a great job. Aren't the patents on PostScript expired by now? And the microprocessor and memory needed to run it is now dirt cheap.
Years ago getting printers to work on Linux was a major pain, and often the output didn't look that great. But if you had a postscript printer, it was a 3 second setup. Quite a bit like configuring a real SoundBlaster for Linux compared to some no-name 3rd party piece of junk.
That doesn't mean that there can't be bad reprocussions to over-use of a real drug that can cure a large number of illnesses, assuming the drug works out in trials. How useful is Penicillin these days? How much worse is MRSA compared to the weaker infections that people used to get? Fiction could end up being sadly prophetic, if we're not careful.
That would actually be my worry. Enough people already take drugs when they have the slight discomfort or to cure their flu (despite anti-bacterials having no effect on the flu). What's going to happen when they can take a drug for all that stuff? At the rate we use drugs, it seems like this one would be burned out and ineffective pretty fast unless the government really restricts it (more the Cipro or other other drugs that are left).
The idea of bugs that become resistant to all this stuff, or a drug that people can't stop taking because of horrible side effects... that sounds like great news. Can we please be careful not to invent/breed ourselves into a pseduo-Descolada?
I've been playing with various cad programs to design things for my MakerBot (my standard is OpenSCAD and TinkerCAD for example) and last night I watched some of the videos of 123CAD and it looked quite nice. I went to the download page and... nope. Windows only.
So I checked their forum and it seems that a Mac version is the most requested feature.
You seem to have a small possible race condition that may cause you to need multiple Shotguns when you should only ever need one. Shouldn't Shotgun be a singleton?
They protect bandwidth. AT&T protects bandwidth on U-Verse for phone calls and television signals. FIOS protects space on the line for the same reasons. I wouldn't be surprised if Comcast/TWC do it for their phone service.
"You are getting a 22 mbps line, we're just using 21.937 mbps for our stuff" - Your ISP
That's what my desktop at work is like, but I listen to music on my laptop while surfing all the time.
But this isn't a problem there because I use ClickToFlash (a flash blocker for Safari) so nothing gets to try to play audio that I don't authorize first. I can't remember the last time I ran into a midi file or some other way that sound was played without using flash.
I've got a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic, and it's quite a bit of fun. I can tell you that I bought it for two reasons: it was a kit, and there is a large community around it.
DLP seems like a nice way to go, but it also seems quite a bit more complicated. As far as I know, no one is selling ready-to-build kits so the time investment is quite a bit larger on startup.I'd also imagine that due to the additional complexity they'd have trouble competing with the Makerbot on price. While the quality is much higher, if you are thinking of getting into the hobby that may not be something people are willing to splurge on to start.
That's what I did. I held on to my DirecTiVo for a little while, until I purchased an HD TV and a Series 3 the same day. I signed up for Comcast, who are only incompetent and haven't actively made me hate them any more than I expected.
I'm glad the Cable Card mandate is there, but it's still a horrid system. I wish Google (et. al.) would get their way with their video-over-ip in the home system where the cable company is only responsible for a gateway box on the edge of the network and any device on the home network could receive video. It would be so much nicer.
Netflix - Company that's been great to me, and still has rather reasonable prices. That $9 plan seemed to good to be true, I'm not surprised it didn't last long.
Blockbuster - Famous for being rented out, poor service, high prices, and going bankrupt because Netflix was so much better all their customers ran away.
DirectTV - Provided nice satellite service to me, but not known for great customer service. I left them because they ditched their great DirecTiVo boxes for their own in-house garbage to save $1/month/subscriber. Hint: I would have gladly paid $2 to get a real TiVo.
So I like Netflix, still hate BB, and I'm still mad at DirecTV. I think I'll stick with Netflix. Besides, if I really want it now, there's always RedBox.
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Can I daisy chain 2 displays and a little RAID array over USB? Can USB hold an external graphic card (and do a good job of it)? What about a custom accelerator card?
Thunderbolt does things USB can't. They aren't used for the same thing, their uses just overlap some.
No, because they are active. That's what will allow people to transparently switch to optical cables in a few years. You won't have to replace any of your equipment, the cables handle that.
This is somewhat stupid though. USB has moved into hard drives and such, but it aims at the low end of the market. Mice, keyboard, etc. up through hard drives and scanners. On the other hand, Thunderbolt aims at the top of the market. It aims at displays, large RAID arrays down through hard drives and scanners. Thunderbolt is basically PCIe in a cable. This isn't an either-or. No one in their right mind would ever make a Thunderbolt mouse or USB SAN, there is no reason to think both ports won't be on computers in a few years.
So is the question "What will people use for connecting external storage in 2 years"? Because that's basically the only question people ever argued over with USB vs. FireWire. I'd say the answer is "USB for most, ThunderBolt for those who really care about performance".
Remember that since ThunderBolt is faster and PCIe, you can make bridge to let you plug USB SuperSpeed stuff into Thunderbolt ports, just like Apple's Thunderbolt monitors have USB2 and FireWire bridge chips.
How many million more would have fled had they pushed Quickster into production?
I'm quite happy they changed it, I was planning on quitting Netflix when this was implemented. That said, this one action (which never even happened) immediately trashed all 7+ years of good will I had with them. In August, they were one of my favorite companies. Now I don't trust them.
Irony of all this? I didn't mind the price increase. It wasn't bad for me. I thought they $8 DVD + Streaming plan was very underpriced, so I wasn't surprised at that move.
They've been trying to. I believe they are about to launch new stuff that does PTT over CDMA. The iden network is expensive and a pain for them.
The browser on the Kindle doesn't scroll, it just jumps one page at a time, at least when you use the page buttons. It may jump in small bits if you move the cursor over the bottom of the page. I honestly haven't used it enough to remember. But it does have a reader mode which reformats the web page to strip out all the unnecessary junk and make it easy to read on the screen. It works just like the reader mode in Safari, which I think was based on Instapaper (as the top comment suggested).
That mode actually works very well, and if you wanted to read some long article on the Kindle I wouldn't mind using it. But between the network connection, the CPU, and the eInk refresh rate the browser is very painful to use. To load any moderately complicated web site to the point you can navigate to find what you're after is an exercise in patience.
Maybe the submitter should consider accessing the mobile versions of websites (where available). That would help.
This is a service called Overdrive which has been around for quite a while. My understanding is that each library has to "buy" the eBooks, and can only lend out each of their "copies" that they "purchased". They can't lend out 2000 copies of a book if they only bought 3. It's basically setup to mirror the physical book model.
My first though was one word: "cramming."
MS is kinda jerky about controllers, for some reason. If you get the RockBand Fender Stratocaster, it's got buttons and a dpad for navigating the menus in the game, which would make it really easy to use.
But due to some MS requirement (I'm guessing "You must have an XBox button and a license for every controller") the buttons are disabled on the 360. You have to use the buttons on the MIDI interface box, which either clips to the bottom of the guitar (awkward), on your belt (awkward), or you set somewhere (more cables, not on your physically). It makes things much more obnoxious than they need to be, because MS won't be flexible on that policy.
Specs only matter to the point that they improve the games. RAM is cheap, but can have a big effect on gameplay. More RAM means you can hold more a level in memory at a time, meaning you have less loading screens. I've had a blast with my GBA and DS despite their specs being orders of magnitude less than the PSP, iPhone, etc.
iPhone games are mostly little 5 minute time fillers, but there is some good stuff in there. Boardgames work especially well. I think having additional control options above the touchscreen would allow much better games. Very few action games work with a touchscreen.
I agree with the 3DS. The DS had a big game draught after launch, but there were enough good GBA games that it wasn't that bad. The price on the 3DS was a big mistake, the lack of a single must-have game was a mistake. It's been out for ~6 months and the only game I'm lusting after is the next Professor Layton game, which isn't out and probably won't need 3D.
512MB is pretty good. The PS3 only has 256MB of RAM (plus another 256MB for graphics). That's the same amount that's in the XBox 360, but on the Vita there is another 128MB of dedicated graphics RAM. In this respect, the Vita is very well specced.
I usually wish consoles had more memory when they came out. Imagine the difference doubling the ram on the PS3 or 360 would have. Doubling the Wii's RAM would make a big difference too. RAM tends to end up so cheap, it just seems like a lack of foresight not to put more in.
The Vita is going to have big problems though. It's nice, but it's still a portable console, and those seem to be dying. The only real thing I'd say this has going for it above an iPhone is the controls, and someone could fix that on the iPhone with a shell. The 3DS isn't doing well, and the PSP was never that big here in the states. In the last year or two, it's barely felt like an also-ran. The only people I know who love them do so because they hacked it. My PSP gathers a ton of dust, coming out once in a blue moon.
Good luck Sony. Even if the Vita is a kick-ass product, you've got a hell of a battle in front of you.
For S3, you have to specify the home region of your storage. As far as I know, your storage is not copied in the other regions, that's what CloudFront is for. I believe EC2 is also setup in regions and your VM stays where you created it.
Why do you think that signing up for Amazon's cloud means your data will go overseas?
Subject says it all. My first thought from seeing the picture of that thing is "Why the pointy corners?". They look like they'd be uncomfortable to rest on my leg or hold in my hand some times.
And it did a great job. Aren't the patents on PostScript expired by now? And the microprocessor and memory needed to run it is now dirt cheap.
Years ago getting printers to work on Linux was a major pain, and often the output didn't look that great. But if you had a postscript printer, it was a 3 second setup. Quite a bit like configuring a real SoundBlaster for Linux compared to some no-name 3rd party piece of junk.
That doesn't mean that there can't be bad reprocussions to over-use of a real drug that can cure a large number of illnesses, assuming the drug works out in trials. How useful is Penicillin these days? How much worse is MRSA compared to the weaker infections that people used to get? Fiction could end up being sadly prophetic, if we're not careful.
That would actually be my worry. Enough people already take drugs when they have the slight discomfort or to cure their flu (despite anti-bacterials having no effect on the flu). What's going to happen when they can take a drug for all that stuff? At the rate we use drugs, it seems like this one would be burned out and ineffective pretty fast unless the government really restricts it (more the Cipro or other other drugs that are left).
The idea of bugs that become resistant to all this stuff, or a drug that people can't stop taking because of horrible side effects... that sounds like great news. Can we please be careful not to invent/breed ourselves into a pseduo-Descolada?
Shiny pants!
I've been playing with various cad programs to design things for my MakerBot (my standard is OpenSCAD and TinkerCAD for example) and last night I watched some of the videos of 123CAD and it looked quite nice. I went to the download page and... nope. Windows only.
So I checked their forum and it seems that a Mac version is the most requested feature.
It's a neat looking program though.
You seem to have a small possible race condition that may cause you to need multiple Shotguns when you should only ever need one. Shouldn't Shotgun be a singleton?
I know at least one "Bad Cops" theme first broadcast December 17th, 1992. Once again, a Simpsons reference saves the day.
They protect bandwidth. AT&T protects bandwidth on U-Verse for phone calls and television signals. FIOS protects space on the line for the same reasons. I wouldn't be surprised if Comcast/TWC do it for their phone service.
"You are getting a 22 mbps line, we're just using 21.937 mbps for our stuff" - Your ISP
That's what my desktop at work is like, but I listen to music on my laptop while surfing all the time.
But this isn't a problem there because I use ClickToFlash (a flash blocker for Safari) so nothing gets to try to play audio that I don't authorize first. I can't remember the last time I ran into a midi file or some other way that sound was played without using flash.
I've got a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic, and it's quite a bit of fun. I can tell you that I bought it for two reasons: it was a kit, and there is a large community around it.
DLP seems like a nice way to go, but it also seems quite a bit more complicated. As far as I know, no one is selling ready-to-build kits so the time investment is quite a bit larger on startup.I'd also imagine that due to the additional complexity they'd have trouble competing with the Makerbot on price. While the quality is much higher, if you are thinking of getting into the hobby that may not be something people are willing to splurge on to start.
That's what I did. I held on to my DirecTiVo for a little while, until I purchased an HD TV and a Series 3 the same day. I signed up for Comcast, who are only incompetent and haven't actively made me hate them any more than I expected.
I'm glad the Cable Card mandate is there, but it's still a horrid system. I wish Google (et. al.) would get their way with their video-over-ip in the home system where the cable company is only responsible for a gateway box on the edge of the network and any device on the home network could receive video. It would be so much nicer.
I'm a Netflix user. Let's see what I think.
So I like Netflix, still hate BB, and I'm still mad at DirecTV. I think I'll stick with Netflix. Besides, if I really want it now, there's always RedBox.