You sir, severely underestimate the power of my aunt, who has a tendency to forward EVERY rumor, story, hoax, scam, slide show, pdf, zip, and jpeg file she ever receives to me. YOU may write your e-mails in plain text, but she would have NO problems ensuring that 15GB of e-mail lands in my inbox every month.
Actually, I modded mine about a year ago and, despite purchasing Splinter Cell and burning out a few old USB flash drives in the process, I found out that there are methods of soft modding the xbox by using a desktop PC that still has a PATA controller. I don't have a link ATM, but it is possible. My bigger issue is that I'm an idiot and haven't looked up how to update it, so the build is over a year old, but it ain't broke right now.
While I realize it's a bit of a semantic debate, realize that a five year sale window would have been a huge issue for Microsoft - Windows XP was the only version on store shelves between 2001 and 2007, so Vista would have been released in barely an alpha state to make sure that paid XP wasn't literally competing with public-domain-released XP. The other problem is how to incorporate patches: would XP SP2 be public domain from 2001 or 2004? If 2001, then the bar of what constitutes a point-release would inevitably go down as companies do their best to keep a sellable piece of software on the shelves. If 2004, then every patch would reset the timer, unless patches are individually timed. I think the better version of what you're talking about would be a three-release sunset. i.e. XP, Vista, and 7 have been released, 2K becomes public domain. It gives manufacturers incentive to improve the current offerings for free to stay competitive. Feature Creep is curtailed, but new sales are inhibited until a new version comes out, giving incentive to make their product better than the one that's getting released into public domain.
In my case, I was using an AS/400 client. The AS/400 was designed for exactly one type of input: a keyboard. Anything else is just as much a crutch as a stylus. Yeah, pecking with the thing wasn't much of a picnic, but I don't think I would have liked an iPad sized device, either. Similarly, I had the pleasure of using Terminal on my iPhone when I had one. The touch keyboard for terminal input is barely more than an academic step forward in that regard. I agree that industrial software could stand a huge redesign for touch uses, but the WinMo apps and the industrially priced software they interact with are going to dictate the chosen platform, and by that metric WinMo, stylus and all, is deemed "good enough".
In a more general sense, Win7 actually had plenty of touch-oriented features to it. The taskbar is big enough to be touched by a finger, desktop icons can be sized to finger-friendly sizes, and every Explorer window supports kinetic scrolling; no digging for taskbars. It's not perfect, and it's still definitely a desktop OS, but the implementation of touch/multitouch/stylus input is def closer to demonstrating half a thought being put into the design, rather than retrofitting XP with a set of obviously bolted on applications.
they likely would. But also remember that the applications dictate the OS, not the other way around. In my case, Staples was using WinMo 'cuz they needed it access an AS/400 server and interact with our point-of-sale software. The question wasn't "does it do it well", but "does it do it at all". Good, bad, or indifferent, you need to get big, niche software devs to code for a given platform before their multi-thousand licensing clients shell out for new hardware and new platforms.
MS is so backward-looking they couldn't innovate, and, worse, they're so aggressive and powerful they managed to drive the competition away. The rewards are going to be plentiful for the few remaining mobile players... and be ready for a big laugh as WinMob 7 gets released. MS has, has had for a while, great stuff in their labs... They're just fearful or releasing innovating stuff that doesn't immediately work for they users, fit with their legacy stuff, and/or only makes sense with standards that competitiors could graft onto. Apple obsoleted PPC, MacOS pre-X, broke backwards compatibility, came up with the very different interface for their media consumption devices, bullied their devs to ensure control and consistency... MS never had the balls to do any of this, though I'm sure a bunch of Softies knew that was needed.
This is EXACTLY the problem. I own a WinMo 6.5 phone myself. It's laggy in comparison to the iPhone. Apps are, in many cases, written on a per-device basis, despite two devices having the same OS and similar-enough-to-technically-work input methods. I'm by no means blind to the issues it has. While I love my phone (HTC's SenseUI is sheer awesomeness, and there's no faster way to text than Swype), I doubt I'll be getting a WinPho7 device. It looks all nice and flashy, but I for one don't mind having a file explorer on my phone, or a mass storage mode, or the fact that my phone is QUITE usable without any data plan from the Cellco. WinPho7 is the cut-the-cord, Band-Aid ripping shift you're talking about. The problem is that since none of my WinMo apps will work on it, and it takes out many of the features that I DO like about the current WinMo release, it puts them on otherwise level footing with RIM, Apple, and Android. My next phone will likely be running some flavor of Android, because I'd be starting from scratch no matter which platform I end up on.
This is a problem in the mobile space, where Microsoft hasn't had a commanding market share and can afford to throw Jell-O at the wall. This is suicide on the desktop, where the most significant thing keeping me tied to Windows are the programs that run on it.
I've thought for a long time now that stylus' are crutches that allow you to use the wrong kind of UI on a portable device. The iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad only serve to reinforce that belief.
That depends. Wacom seems to be making a living for themselves making it possible for graphic designers to use a stylus on their laptops. A general purpose input, it is not. But if Wacom can make their existence dependent on adding a stylus to a computer, there IS in fact a demographic that WANTS one. Personally, I've been saying it for ages - HP, Toshiba, and Fujitsu have all had tablet PCs since 2004, they've all cost an arm and a leg (though I've seen some decent HP units cost south of $1,000 recently), and they all had low end CPUs/GPUs/HDDs/RAM, because it was assumed that they were intended to be carried around like five subject notebooks. What one of them needed to do was to make a desktop replacement tablet (i.e. one that CAN, in fact, run Crysis) and target the media design people.
Similarly, the iPad may get all kinds of media coverage and consumer acceptance, but WinMo is still very entrenched in retail and industrial applications. The stylus reigns supreme in warehouses, shipping yards, and your local Wal-Mart, and like it or not, virtually every one of those devices is running some flavor of WinMo. Someone needs to make a slate with a barcode scanner, an AS/400 client, and a few other niceties, let Apple have the consumer space, but get half a dozen of their devices into every Wal-Mart, Staples, and UPS truck instead. The two CAN, in fact, coexist.
I used to work for Staples. I talked to the reps for all the major companies (Canon, Epson, Lexmark, and HP). We stocked more HP machines than virtually any other kind, and many people bought one machine or another. As a quick aside, it was humorous helping people find the ink when it was time to get new cartridges. Popular answers to the requisite "which machine do you have" were "It's the one that scans, copies, and faxes". After a while I got a bit cynnical and would bring them over to the entire aisle of multifunction machines and said "Every single one of the machines here fit that description, can you give me anything more specific?". Other times, the customers would come in like walking car analogies: "I have a 2006 HP Photosmart". I had another lady come in, needing ink for a four year old printer, figuring that we'd still stock them because "it's a great printer". I kept thinking to myself, "these machines are several years old, have these people REALLY never bought ink before?" But I digress.
HP is the poster child for a plethora of issues with inkjet printing in general. First off, many of their newer models have less than 10mL of ink in the cartridges. I slightly envy people who have machines that take the 45/78 inks, since those cartridges have something like 42mL of ink and cost $30, whereas the newer 94 catridges have 11mL and cost $20. I'm sure the 94's are a bit more efficient, but I doubt that any of the customers I helped with printers knew to ask "how much ink is in the cartridge?" before they bought it, though some knew to at least look at how much the refills cost. It's a really misleading game, which is kinda depressing.
The other thing that irks me about HP (as they are the most guilty of it), is their ridiculous driver install packages requiring several hundred MB, and the ridiculous amount of crap that finds its way into the device manager. I mean seriously, when Epson and Canon can both have 9MByte driver installers, there's no reason to not at least make a custom install more than "add icon to desktop". Ugh, I hate installing them; they take the longest and because of all the crap, I have spent more time beating HP drivers into submission than any other printer brand.
Lexmark has different issues. Besides their pathetic Linux support (I'm a Windows user, but I do prefer seeing a flag, a fruit, and a penguin on my peripherals), their inkjet print quality is beyond craptastic. I remember when those portable photo printers where the hot gift item one year (2006, I think, perhaps 2007). Epson, Canon, and Kodak all had dye sublimation printing, and they all looked really good. I was partial to the Epson prints myself, but they all produced nice results. HP had essentially a single-cartridge inkjet job, which wasn't spectacular, but was acceptable. Then, Lexmark came out with their model. They were late in the season; we didn't have them until after Black Friday. They brought something to the table that no one else did - integrated CD burning. As techs, we all thought it was a great idea - bring the printer on vacation along with a 5-pack of CD-R media, and do card dumps at the hotel and leave the laptop at home. Keep in mind that this was back when 1GB cards were over $100 retail and 512MB was at a sweet spot in price, so it really worked out well in that regard. We were all so stoked about this printer. Even though we all had a disdain for Lexmark's standard fare, most of us took a serious look at this thing - then one day, we saw it print, and we were horrified that Lexmark would actually sell this crap to customers. There was banding, a canvas-like pattern, a yellowish tint, terrible blacks, and they took forever. I cannot TELL you the letdown that we all had when customers came in looking at it and we said, "if you're looking for a portable camera card dumper, go for it. If you want something that spits out photos you'll WANT to look at, there's this Epson over here...". Chalk it up to whatever you want, but "good enough for color in Excel" and "good enough to hang on your
Congratuations sir, you both correctly depict the average technology user and incorrectly account for it at the same time.
We both agree that on-device security is necessary. We both agree that a false sense of security is bad. The biggest problem is still between the keyboard and chair.
User downloads Dancing Bunnies app. RIM very granularly lets you set permissions. Eventually, users figure out that the "Always Allow" options let the application run without being nagged to death with prompts. Nevermind that Dancing Bunnies both wants to access the internet (understandable) and send SMS and make calls, because dammit just show the dancing bunnies and quit nagging me!!
I'll take your word that Android is much more user friendly in this regard (i.e. only showing prompts for APIs the app accesses, using plain English terms, and denoting which apps can literally cost money), but ultimately you can't fix stupid.
I think that Apple has painted itself into a corner though. So far, there hasn't really been a widespread infection on the iPhone (well technically every jailbreak app has essentially been malware, but with the exception of the swiftly-remedied TIFF exploit, they've all been intentional). Apple is very well known as the gatekeeper that's removed apps at a whim. To add some sort of user-definable permissions prompt would imply that there is a problem, and that the vetting process isn't comprehensive. If Apple does that, they admit to being a fallible system. Whether it's true or not, what *is* difficult to refute is that Apple's mindshare is largely based on being less attack ridden than the PC. The question is which would cost them more: proactively putting a level of security into users' hands implying some is necessary, or retrofitting it AFTER the first major malware attack.
1.) My local power plant burns oil. I'd simply replicate oil and trade them for its value in electricity.
2.) What would you pay designers with? Money? Precious metals? Xena tapes and Hot Pockets? the concept of currency more or less flies out the window when everyone can generate anything they need for free. A replicator would essentially bring us right back to the and barter system.
3.) Anyone wanna bet that there will be DRM baked into the replicator?
4.) While manufacturing would basically be a moot task, there would still be many service industries. Anyone want a replicator large enough to replicate a fully furnished office building? If a pipe bursts in your house, do you replicate an entirely new house, or have a plumber fix it? To make this personal, I'm a DJ. How does one 'replicate' a performance? Replicators would solve manufacturing issues and creativity is human nature, but many tasks being performed can't simply be replicated away.
Why can't we just move on and apply the sweet R&D money on the SSDs?
They are.
I guess that the "classic" hard drives will reach some sort of physical limit sometime in the (not so distant) future.
Of course they will. But at that point they'll start talking about alternative form factors if they can't squeeze more bits into the same space.
Why won't the big boys start to work hard on the SSDs?
They are. The problem is that they're still expensive to manufacture and they still need to pay off their R&D.
It's almost as reading a headline like this "New awesome floppies will be released in a new 10 MB size! - 'USB flash disks are overrated and expensive, nothing beats a good old floppy disk' a spokesperson for a floppy disk manufacturer said"
More like "New awesome floppies will be released in 500MB size and cost 10 bucks a pop" circa 2002 when 128MB USB flash disks cost nearly $100. the proportions might be off, but ultimately flash media outran the floppy disk 'cuz it quickly outpaced it in cost/MB, transfer rates were dog slow, and they were incredibly unreliable. Note that in 2010, I bought a 250GB external hard drive for $50 at Wal-Mart, whereas a 256GB flash drive costs over $800 on Newegg. A 1TB Seagate spinning platter drive costs $85 on Newegg, wheras 1TB of OCZ flash memory costs over $3,000 and is the highest I've seen commercially avaialable. I personally don't mind saving $2,915 by using an older technology.
5/16/2010 10:15:20 PM HTTP filter file http://cristgaming.com/pirate.swf BAT/ZEP.A virus connection terminated - quarantined Threat was detected upon access to web by the application:
Actually, Soulseek could have landed itself on the radar in slightly different circumstances. I remember the pre-firmware 2.0 days of the iPhone when the ONLY way to get native applications was by jailbreaking and running installer.app. One of the available applications: Soulseek. Back in those days, the iPhone even left the on board music library more-or-less accessible, so Soulseek was able to download MP3's, add them to your iPod library, and share them when you left the client resident. I don't know how many people actually installed it, but access to the iTunes library was hampered to the point that, to my knowledge, there was never a release of the app to any successive revision of the firmware. While I haven't checked recently, the last P2P app I am aware of that's still available for the iPhone is cTorrent, which for me was a guaranteed way to make sure that I didn't have any battery life in two hours and was a very effective means of keeping my hands nice and warm in the winter. While I don't think Apple is too concerned with an app that requires one to type commands on a command line and navigate the file structure after downloading a Safari download plugin in order to download files that most likely wouldn't play on the phone, something as simple to use as Soulseek was definitely a threat to the iTMS. Add to that AT&T screaming bloody murder about all the P2P traffic happening on their network if Soulseek was released on subsequent firmware revisions, and you've got a case that most def would have incurred the wrath of Steve had it been available much longer.
It's just a dumb cell phone. Do we get Slashdot articles every time a Noikia prototype goes missing in the lab?
Last I checked, the iPhone was classified as a SMARTphone. And I'm pretty sure that we DO, in fact, get Slashdot articles every time a Nokia prototype goes missing. Note the lack of said articles, though...
I mean not for nothing, but I don't think I've ever seen a movie being distributed on the internet that's been ripped from a cable box. There isn't even a Scene spec for it. By time movies hit Pay-Per-View, there's almost always a version of the film circulating the internet. Maybe somewhere, somehow, there's an exception, but the only piracy I could possibly see this deterring is Joe Sixpack using a set-top DVD recorder to lend to Frank Furter. Stopping piracy is one thing, but I'm wondering how much further this string of ridiculousness can go. Actually, that's probably a bad thing to wonder...
1.) www.gethuman.com - type in a company name, and follow the instruction to get an actual person.
2.) I feel that button-pressing and voice recognition can and should coexist. I remember having an issue with my old iPhone where the screen didn't recognize button presses properly for 4, 5, and 6, so i saved myself many a headache being able to speak. just in general, there are a multitude of cases where button pressing isn't practical.
2b.) Voice recognition would work better with a few minor tweaks. It'd have to be more natural, since menu selections with voice really aren't much simpler than repeating the menu selection. If voice systems are to yield an advantage over "press 1" menus, they have to be able to accurately parse whatever the user says. Also, each system seems to be different in when it will allow you to speak - some systems don't mind if you "interrupt" the recording, while others will completely ignore you until they decide they're ready to listen to you. This needs to either be made consistent, or stated at the beginning.
3.) I think the conversational phrases are annoying too, but I think that's an uncanny valley thing. The voice is technically human, but its lack of ability to react to what you say beyond what amounts to an if/then statement makes those phrases seem completely empty and bother us.
Slashdot Mirror
You sir, severely underestimate the power of my aunt, who has a tendency to forward EVERY rumor, story, hoax, scam, slide show, pdf, zip, and jpeg file she ever receives to me. YOU may write your e-mails in plain text, but she would have NO problems ensuring that 15GB of e-mail lands in my inbox every month.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
Jake 2.0 reference? I def miss that show...
Your C.O. will be Captain Jack.
If they wanted the C.O. to be Captain Jack, I think that this is the song that they'd be more concerned with.
Then again, that just might represent a conflict of interest.
*sigh* up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start.
DDR *is* made by Konami, after all.
Actually, I modded mine about a year ago and, despite purchasing Splinter Cell and burning out a few old USB flash drives in the process, I found out that there are methods of soft modding the xbox by using a desktop PC that still has a PATA controller. I don't have a link ATM, but it is possible. My bigger issue is that I'm an idiot and haven't looked up how to update it, so the build is over a year old, but it ain't broke right now.
Why not just have Seth Green play him?
Woosh!
While I realize it's a bit of a semantic debate, realize that a five year sale window would have been a huge issue for Microsoft - Windows XP was the only version on store shelves between 2001 and 2007, so Vista would have been released in barely an alpha state to make sure that paid XP wasn't literally competing with public-domain-released XP.
The other problem is how to incorporate patches: would XP SP2 be public domain from 2001 or 2004? If 2001, then the bar of what constitutes a point-release would inevitably go down as companies do their best to keep a sellable piece of software on the shelves. If 2004, then every patch would reset the timer, unless patches are individually timed.
I think the better version of what you're talking about would be a three-release sunset. i.e. XP, Vista, and 7 have been released, 2K becomes public domain. It gives manufacturers incentive to improve the current offerings for free to stay competitive. Feature Creep is curtailed, but new sales are inhibited until a new version comes out, giving incentive to make their product better than the one that's getting released into public domain.
I think will bring in characters/Actors from Mass effect 2 Adam Baldwin...Yvonne Strahovsky...
And I'm voting to have Zachary Levi as Joker and have EDI downloaded into his brain.
In my case, I was using an AS/400 client. The AS/400 was designed for exactly one type of input: a keyboard. Anything else is just as much a crutch as a stylus. Yeah, pecking with the thing wasn't much of a picnic, but I don't think I would have liked an iPad sized device, either. Similarly, I had the pleasure of using Terminal on my iPhone when I had one. The touch keyboard for terminal input is barely more than an academic step forward in that regard. I agree that industrial software could stand a huge redesign for touch uses, but the WinMo apps and the industrially priced software they interact with are going to dictate the chosen platform, and by that metric WinMo, stylus and all, is deemed "good enough".
In a more general sense, Win7 actually had plenty of touch-oriented features to it. The taskbar is big enough to be touched by a finger, desktop icons can be sized to finger-friendly sizes, and every Explorer window supports kinetic scrolling; no digging for taskbars. It's not perfect, and it's still definitely a desktop OS, but the implementation of touch/multitouch/stylus input is def closer to demonstrating half a thought being put into the design, rather than retrofitting XP with a set of obviously bolted on applications.
they likely would. But also remember that the applications dictate the OS, not the other way around. In my case, Staples was using WinMo 'cuz they needed it access an AS/400 server and interact with our point-of-sale software. The question wasn't "does it do it well", but "does it do it at all". Good, bad, or indifferent, you need to get big, niche software devs to code for a given platform before their multi-thousand licensing clients shell out for new hardware and new platforms.
MS is so backward-looking they couldn't innovate, and, worse, they're so aggressive and powerful they managed to drive the competition away. The rewards are going to be plentiful for the few remaining mobile players... and be ready for a big laugh as WinMob 7 gets released. MS has, has had for a while, great stuff in their labs... They're just fearful or releasing innovating stuff that doesn't immediately work for they users, fit with their legacy stuff, and/or only makes sense with standards that competitiors could graft onto. Apple obsoleted PPC, MacOS pre-X, broke backwards compatibility, came up with the very different interface for their media consumption devices, bullied their devs to ensure control and consistency... MS never had the balls to do any of this, though I'm sure a bunch of Softies knew that was needed.
This is EXACTLY the problem. I own a WinMo 6.5 phone myself. It's laggy in comparison to the iPhone. Apps are, in many cases, written on a per-device basis, despite two devices having the same OS and similar-enough-to-technically-work input methods. I'm by no means blind to the issues it has. While I love my phone (HTC's SenseUI is sheer awesomeness, and there's no faster way to text than Swype), I doubt I'll be getting a WinPho7 device. It looks all nice and flashy, but I for one don't mind having a file explorer on my phone, or a mass storage mode, or the fact that my phone is QUITE usable without any data plan from the Cellco. WinPho7 is the cut-the-cord, Band-Aid ripping shift you're talking about. The problem is that since none of my WinMo apps will work on it, and it takes out many of the features that I DO like about the current WinMo release, it puts them on otherwise level footing with RIM, Apple, and Android. My next phone will likely be running some flavor of Android, because I'd be starting from scratch no matter which platform I end up on.
This is a problem in the mobile space, where Microsoft hasn't had a commanding market share and can afford to throw Jell-O at the wall. This is suicide on the desktop, where the most significant thing keeping me tied to Windows are the programs that run on it.
I've thought for a long time now that stylus' are crutches that allow you to use the wrong kind of UI on a portable device. The iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad only serve to reinforce that belief.
That depends. Wacom seems to be making a living for themselves making it possible for graphic designers to use a stylus on their laptops. A general purpose input, it is not. But if Wacom can make their existence dependent on adding a stylus to a computer, there IS in fact a demographic that WANTS one. Personally, I've been saying it for ages - HP, Toshiba, and Fujitsu have all had tablet PCs since 2004, they've all cost an arm and a leg (though I've seen some decent HP units cost south of $1,000 recently), and they all had low end CPUs/GPUs/HDDs/RAM, because it was assumed that they were intended to be carried around like five subject notebooks. What one of them needed to do was to make a desktop replacement tablet (i.e. one that CAN, in fact, run Crysis) and target the media design people.
Similarly, the iPad may get all kinds of media coverage and consumer acceptance, but WinMo is still very entrenched in retail and industrial applications. The stylus reigns supreme in warehouses, shipping yards, and your local Wal-Mart, and like it or not, virtually every one of those devices is running some flavor of WinMo. Someone needs to make a slate with a barcode scanner, an AS/400 client, and a few other niceties, let Apple have the consumer space, but get half a dozen of their devices into every Wal-Mart, Staples, and UPS truck instead. The two CAN, in fact, coexist.
I used to work for Staples. I talked to the reps for all the major companies (Canon, Epson, Lexmark, and HP). We stocked more HP machines than virtually any other kind, and many people bought one machine or another. As a quick aside, it was humorous helping people find the ink when it was time to get new cartridges. Popular answers to the requisite "which machine do you have" were "It's the one that scans, copies, and faxes". After a while I got a bit cynnical and would bring them over to the entire aisle of multifunction machines and said "Every single one of the machines here fit that description, can you give me anything more specific?". Other times, the customers would come in like walking car analogies: "I have a 2006 HP Photosmart". I had another lady come in, needing ink for a four year old printer, figuring that we'd still stock them because "it's a great printer". I kept thinking to myself, "these machines are several years old, have these people REALLY never bought ink before?" But I digress.
HP is the poster child for a plethora of issues with inkjet printing in general. First off, many of their newer models have less than 10mL of ink in the cartridges. I slightly envy people who have machines that take the 45/78 inks, since those cartridges have something like 42mL of ink and cost $30, whereas the newer 94 catridges have 11mL and cost $20. I'm sure the 94's are a bit more efficient, but I doubt that any of the customers I helped with printers knew to ask "how much ink is in the cartridge?" before they bought it, though some knew to at least look at how much the refills cost. It's a really misleading game, which is kinda depressing.
The other thing that irks me about HP (as they are the most guilty of it), is their ridiculous driver install packages requiring several hundred MB, and the ridiculous amount of crap that finds its way into the device manager. I mean seriously, when Epson and Canon can both have 9MByte driver installers, there's no reason to not at least make a custom install more than "add icon to desktop". Ugh, I hate installing them; they take the longest and because of all the crap, I have spent more time beating HP drivers into submission than any other printer brand.
Lexmark has different issues. Besides their pathetic Linux support (I'm a Windows user, but I do prefer seeing a flag, a fruit, and a penguin on my peripherals), their inkjet print quality is beyond craptastic. I remember when those portable photo printers where the hot gift item one year (2006, I think, perhaps 2007). Epson, Canon, and Kodak all had dye sublimation printing, and they all looked really good. I was partial to the Epson prints myself, but they all produced nice results. HP had essentially a single-cartridge inkjet job, which wasn't spectacular, but was acceptable. Then, Lexmark came out with their model. They were late in the season; we didn't have them until after Black Friday. They brought something to the table that no one else did - integrated CD burning. As techs, we all thought it was a great idea - bring the printer on vacation along with a 5-pack of CD-R media, and do card dumps at the hotel and leave the laptop at home. Keep in mind that this was back when 1GB cards were over $100 retail and 512MB was at a sweet spot in price, so it really worked out well in that regard. We were all so stoked about this printer. Even though we all had a disdain for Lexmark's standard fare, most of us took a serious look at this thing - then one day, we saw it print, and we were horrified that Lexmark would actually sell this crap to customers. There was banding, a canvas-like pattern, a yellowish tint, terrible blacks, and they took forever. I cannot TELL you the letdown that we all had when customers came in looking at it and we said, "if you're looking for a portable camera card dumper, go for it. If you want something that spits out photos you'll WANT to look at, there's this Epson over here...". Chalk it up to whatever you want, but "good enough for color in Excel" and "good enough to hang on your
Going on 6 years over here and I still have way more sex than my single friends :) And yes, my wife IS hot AND real ;)
Pics on an ISP other than 3FN or it didn't happen.
...Fine, I'll replicate Wall-E with the Mr. Fusion expansion.
Congratuations sir, you both correctly depict the average technology user and incorrectly account for it at the same time.
We both agree that on-device security is necessary. We both agree that a false sense of security is bad. The biggest problem is still between the keyboard and chair.
User downloads Dancing Bunnies app. RIM very granularly lets you set permissions. Eventually, users figure out that the "Always Allow" options let the application run without being nagged to death with prompts. Nevermind that Dancing Bunnies both wants to access the internet (understandable) and send SMS and make calls, because dammit just show the dancing bunnies and quit nagging me!!
I'll take your word that Android is much more user friendly in this regard (i.e. only showing prompts for APIs the app accesses, using plain English terms, and denoting which apps can literally cost money), but ultimately you can't fix stupid.
I think that Apple has painted itself into a corner though. So far, there hasn't really been a widespread infection on the iPhone (well technically every jailbreak app has essentially been malware, but with the exception of the swiftly-remedied TIFF exploit, they've all been intentional). Apple is very well known as the gatekeeper that's removed apps at a whim. To add some sort of user-definable permissions prompt would imply that there is a problem, and that the vetting process isn't comprehensive. If Apple does that, they admit to being a fallible system. Whether it's true or not, what *is* difficult to refute is that Apple's mindshare is largely based on being less attack ridden than the PC. The question is which would cost them more: proactively putting a level of security into users' hands implying some is necessary, or retrofitting it AFTER the first major malware attack.
1.) My local power plant burns oil. I'd simply replicate oil and trade them for its value in electricity.
2.) What would you pay designers with? Money? Precious metals? Xena tapes and Hot Pockets? the concept of currency more or less flies out the window when everyone can generate anything they need for free. A replicator would essentially bring us right back to the and barter system.
3.) Anyone wanna bet that there will be DRM baked into the replicator?
4.) While manufacturing would basically be a moot task, there would still be many service industries. Anyone want a replicator large enough to replicate a fully furnished office building? If a pipe bursts in your house, do you replicate an entirely new house, or have a plumber fix it? To make this personal, I'm a DJ. How does one 'replicate' a performance? Replicators would solve manufacturing issues and creativity is human nature, but many tasks being performed can't simply be replicated away.
Why can't we just move on and apply the sweet R&D money on the SSDs?
They are.
I guess that the "classic" hard drives will reach some sort of physical limit sometime in the (not so distant) future.
Of course they will. But at that point they'll start talking about alternative form factors if they can't squeeze more bits into the same space.
Why won't the big boys start to work hard on the SSDs?
They are. The problem is that they're still expensive to manufacture and they still need to pay off their R&D.
It's almost as reading a headline like this "New awesome floppies will be released in a new 10 MB size! - 'USB flash disks are overrated and expensive, nothing beats a good old floppy disk' a spokesperson for a floppy disk manufacturer said"
More like "New awesome floppies will be released in 500MB size and cost 10 bucks a pop" circa 2002 when 128MB USB flash disks cost nearly $100. the proportions might be off, but ultimately flash media outran the floppy disk 'cuz it quickly outpaced it in cost/MB, transfer rates were dog slow, and they were incredibly unreliable. Note that in 2010, I bought a 250GB external hard drive for $50 at Wal-Mart, whereas a 256GB flash drive costs over $800 on Newegg. A 1TB Seagate spinning platter drive costs $85 on Newegg, wheras 1TB of OCZ flash memory costs over $3,000 and is the highest I've seen commercially avaialable. I personally don't mind saving $2,915 by using an older technology.
Actually, NOD32 flagged that...
5/16/2010 10:15:20 PM
HTTP filter file
http://cristgaming.com/pirate.swf BAT/ZEP.A virus
connection terminated - quarantined
Threat was detected upon access to web by the application:
Actually, Soulseek could have landed itself on the radar in slightly different circumstances. I remember the pre-firmware 2.0 days of the iPhone when the ONLY way to get native applications was by jailbreaking and running installer.app. One of the available applications: Soulseek. Back in those days, the iPhone even left the on board music library more-or-less accessible, so Soulseek was able to download MP3's, add them to your iPod library, and share them when you left the client resident. I don't know how many people actually installed it, but access to the iTunes library was hampered to the point that, to my knowledge, there was never a release of the app to any successive revision of the firmware. While I haven't checked recently, the last P2P app I am aware of that's still available for the iPhone is cTorrent, which for me was a guaranteed way to make sure that I didn't have any battery life in two hours and was a very effective means of keeping my hands nice and warm in the winter. While I don't think Apple is too concerned with an app that requires one to type commands on a command line and navigate the file structure after downloading a Safari download plugin in order to download files that most likely wouldn't play on the phone, something as simple to use as Soulseek was definitely a threat to the iTMS. Add to that AT&T screaming bloody murder about all the P2P traffic happening on their network if Soulseek was released on subsequent firmware revisions, and you've got a case that most def would have incurred the wrath of Steve had it been available much longer.
It's just a dumb cell phone. Do we get Slashdot articles every time a Noikia prototype goes missing in the lab?
Last I checked, the iPhone was classified as a SMARTphone. And I'm pretty sure that we DO, in fact, get Slashdot articles every time a Nokia prototype goes missing. Note the lack of said articles, though...
There is no porn on Slashdot? Man, am I in the wrong place!
Rule 34 and all that, but I sincerely doubt you'd want to see Slashdot porn.
I mean not for nothing, but I don't think I've ever seen a movie being distributed on the internet that's been ripped from a cable box. There isn't even a Scene spec for it. By time movies hit Pay-Per-View, there's almost always a version of the film circulating the internet. Maybe somewhere, somehow, there's an exception, but the only piracy I could possibly see this deterring is Joe Sixpack using a set-top DVD recorder to lend to Frank Furter. Stopping piracy is one thing, but I'm wondering how much further this string of ridiculousness can go. Actually, that's probably a bad thing to wonder...
"Here's a link for the top 10 things that computers can do in movies but can't do in real life"
*clicks link*
"A rendering error occured"
A few thoughts...
1.) www.gethuman.com - type in a company name, and follow the instruction to get an actual person.
2.) I feel that button-pressing and voice recognition can and should coexist. I remember having an issue with my old iPhone where the screen didn't recognize button presses properly for 4, 5, and 6, so i saved myself many a headache being able to speak. just in general, there are a multitude of cases where button pressing isn't practical.
2b.) Voice recognition would work better with a few minor tweaks. It'd have to be more natural, since menu selections with voice really aren't much simpler than repeating the menu selection. If voice systems are to yield an advantage over "press 1" menus, they have to be able to accurately parse whatever the user says. Also, each system seems to be different in when it will allow you to speak - some systems don't mind if you "interrupt" the recording, while others will completely ignore you until they decide they're ready to listen to you. This needs to either be made consistent, or stated at the beginning.
3.) I think the conversational phrases are annoying too, but I think that's an uncanny valley thing. The voice is technically human, but its lack of ability to react to what you say beyond what amounts to an if/then statement makes those phrases seem completely empty and bother us.