Yes - though they're called something else - hobie cats. Blue water sailing catamarans have been avalible for decades. Removing the sails and adding a bigger fuel tank isn't what I'd call "innovative"...
Sailboats get infinite miles to the gallon, can go three times around the globe without stopping to restock on food, and the technology's been avalible for over a thousand years. As late as the 80's people were circumnavigating the globe in wooden boats without engines (see the book Cruising in Seraphim).
Most people refuel in Bermuda and the Canary islands when sailing across the Atlantic. That's pretty close to the middle of the ocean. Nuclear powered aircraft carriers go 20 years on a fillup.
and the (hopefully) imminent flash based mac sub-notebook
Shit, what did you think the touchpod was supposed to be? Not only is it a music player, but mobile internet device (which you can run any number of AJAX (gmail, docs & spreadsheets) web apps from) and PDA. Tweak this UI for about a year, and it wouldn't suprise me at all if the sub-notebook ends up being an iphone-looking device about the size of a notecard with no lid or hinge. drop the voice plan and keep the unlimited data and you've got a great device.
Microsoft copies and pastes their game plan for the Xbox vs. Playstation, uses find and replace for the terms Sony::Adobe, Xbox::Silverlight, Playstation::Flash, 2002:2008
Low quality versions of the venture brothers, south park, and futurama clock in between 11.7 and 23mb. At 20min per episode, that's about 60mb/hr. "But that low quality video looks like crap blown up on my tv!" yeah, but in two years your computer will be powerful enough to compress the original down to ipod size on the fly as it syncs with your ipod.
But in the meantime divx compresses a 40 min episode of lost, studio 60 or other down to 345mb that looks pretty damn good for luddites, even on a 55" tv. (i should know, my roommate is currently using up half our living room with his rediculous 65" tv).
From a software developer's point of view, yes. You even have to pay to play (cost of windows, software dev tools, etc), making the windows analogy even more complete.
Yeah, I went to his keynote Friday night; there were a lot of technical questions, and at the same time a lot of questions about steam, etc. At one point someone asked him about porting Doom to Steam and he flat out said "wow, that's pretty cool, I hadn't heard about that yet, but it seems neat".... He's very much on the research side of things and made it very clear that while he's still the posterboy for iD, he has very little control or even desire to muck about with marketing and corperate politics, though at the same time he also said that they were very proud of their decision to ultimately open source everything, and have made many design decisions in the past that have limited them because they wouldn't then be able to open source fully at a later point (he also pointed out that at some point in the future, iD tech 5 would become open source, too).
Probably to make it easier to do red vs. blue episodes. Considering how much extra buisness they brought microsoft, it's the least they could do to improve sales...
Hell, I can't even run photoshop useably under OS X on my home machine, and it's a 1ghz G4 with a gig of ram.
I take offense to this statement. PS CS2 runs like a dream on my 550mhz G4 powerbook with 512mb of ram. With the rare occasion of doing full frame filter effects on 4+ MP pictures, it runs just as fast as on any other computer.
I just started at a new company. My computer runs Win2000. The lady next to me who's been there much longer has a newer computer that runs WinXP. She also has a flatscreen monitor. Since our DB program (and firefox/ie/email app of choice) runs on pretty much any iteration of windows, nobody cares, or needs to upgrade. I'm sure when we loose the Win2000 CD and my computer becomes virus infested, I'll get a new computer, but for the next 2-3 years I'll likely continue on with Win2000.
People tend to buy new electronic/home entertainment shit when they buy/move in to a 'new' house for themselves. Peak in any middle class home in an established neighborhood and you'll find plenty of SDTVs bought in the last decade serving proudly.
48 hours or less?... Maybe if you're apple, with billions in the bank and can sit on a bunch of inventory. I work in the accounting department of a commercial furniture distribution company, and for items as simple as chairs, desks and tables, there's still even a 2-4 week lead time on these items. If you want anything at all customized beyond the four color choices and six fabric samples, you can garuntee it's going to be 4-6 weeks minimum. Laptops might not be much more complex with their sub assemblies, but they're certianly more delicate, and require folks who are trained to manufacture small electrionics. Anyone can bolt together a desk.
I helped staff a convention for the Texas Association for School Nutrition (The Lunch Lady Club), and by god, those were some of the ugliest, fattest women I'd ever seen. Not a single woman under 200 pounds, I swear. We sold Tshirts and I was shocked to find out that they stocked almost entirely 4XL tshirts, and less than 10 mediums (for a convention of 2500 people). They tended to roam about with other women from their local TASN chapter, and within their band of heffers, they all seemed to be roughly the same circumference, as if one of them had gotten that large, so the others decided it was ok to let themselves to That Much More.
Why is it doing so well? Because the Wii is Video Games You Can Play With Your Girlfriend(tm)(slashdotters not included)
Imagine you're married, or engaged, right out of college. You want to play video games like The Good Ole' Days, but the wife is bitching about you blowing $700 (half the mortgage payment) on a PS3. Not only is a Wii cheaper, but she gets some benefit out of it too. Which do you buy? The constant nagging every time you play, or a happy housemate?
Actually they're working on a cross platform standard that should someday link facebook and myspace so that when you update one, the other is updated also. I would assume that messaging would be opened up somewhat, too.
I just can't shut up about how great gmail is. Since all my friends recently, finally got 'real' jobs, we always have gchat conversations going on in the background at work. It's fantastic to have your email and chat integrated in to one "app", especially if that app is hosted somewhere else and accessible anywhere these days.
Hell, I'm a guy, and honestly, I don't want to be able to see my computer when I walk in to my small apartment after work. The laptop without a specific office setting becomes a communications tool, rather than a significant part of your life. The laptop is there on the dresser, sleep light glowing, letting me know it's there if I want to use it.
I have a desktop in my closet, that I use for archival and general file storage, and gets turned on once a week or so. No monitor, just VNC in to it if need be.
Agreed; I have a Powerbook G4 circa 2001, and it's still my primary machine. I have three external firewire drives I use with it now, and both of my USB hubs are full, but it gets the job done, even with one hinge broken.
Depends on how many nutrients bamboo sucks out of the soil. As I understand it hemp actually replaces some nutrients (nitrogen?) in to the soil as it grows, which is why it's such a wonder crop.
Indeed! I figured for the cost and time expense of learning/mastering Guitar Hero, I might as well spend an extra $100 bucks and buy an electric guitar (the variance in quality between a crappy and expenseive electric is much smaller than that of acoustics) and go jam at my friend's house, and still have 80% of it's retail value 10 years later. Actually with gig bag, 12", 15w amp and cable, I ended up spending $320 total with my butterscotch blond squier telecaster. I'm still fairly terrible at Guitar Hero though. On the flip side, It's actually helped pick up chicks. "I play computer games" girls can't relate with "I'm learning the guitar" means "I have real hobbies" and piques their interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes - though they're called something else - hobie cats. Blue water sailing catamarans have been avalible for decades. Removing the sails and adding a bigger fuel tank isn't what I'd call "innovative"...
Sailboats get infinite miles to the gallon, can go three times around the globe without stopping to restock on food, and the technology's been avalible for over a thousand years. As late as the 80's people were circumnavigating the globe in wooden boats without engines (see the book Cruising in Seraphim).
Most people refuel in Bermuda and the Canary islands when sailing across the Atlantic. That's pretty close to the middle of the ocean. Nuclear powered aircraft carriers go 20 years on a fillup.
and the (hopefully) imminent flash based mac sub-notebook
Shit, what did you think the touchpod was supposed to be? Not only is it a music player, but mobile internet device (which you can run any number of AJAX (gmail, docs & spreadsheets) web apps from) and PDA. Tweak this UI for about a year, and it wouldn't suprise me at all if the sub-notebook ends up being an iphone-looking device about the size of a notecard with no lid or hinge. drop the voice plan and keep the unlimited data and you've got a great device.
Even more likely:
Microsoft copies and pastes their game plan for the Xbox vs. Playstation, uses find and replace for the terms Sony::Adobe, Xbox::Silverlight, Playstation::Flash, 2002:2008
Low quality versions of the venture brothers, south park, and futurama clock in between 11.7 and 23mb. At 20min per episode, that's about 60mb/hr. "But that low quality video looks like crap blown up on my tv!" yeah, but in two years your computer will be powerful enough to compress the original down to ipod size on the fly as it syncs with your ipod.
But in the meantime divx compresses a 40 min episode of lost, studio 60 or other down to 345mb that looks pretty damn good for luddites, even on a 55" tv. (i should know, my roommate is currently using up half our living room with his rediculous 65" tv).
/watches tv on his 15" powerbook
Maybe it's just because I grew up in Plano, Tx, but did anyone else read that as "Hardy Heroin"?
From a software developer's point of view, yes. You even have to pay to play (cost of windows, software dev tools, etc), making the windows analogy even more complete.
Yeah, I went to his keynote Friday night; there were a lot of technical questions, and at the same time a lot of questions about steam, etc. At one point someone asked him about porting Doom to Steam and he flat out said "wow, that's pretty cool, I hadn't heard about that yet, but it seems neat".... He's very much on the research side of things and made it very clear that while he's still the posterboy for iD, he has very little control or even desire to muck about with marketing and corperate politics, though at the same time he also said that they were very proud of their decision to ultimately open source everything, and have made many design decisions in the past that have limited them because they wouldn't then be able to open source fully at a later point (he also pointed out that at some point in the future, iD tech 5 would become open source, too).
+5, informative.
Probably to make it easier to do red vs. blue episodes. Considering how much extra buisness they brought microsoft, it's the least they could do to improve sales...
I just started at a new company. My computer runs Win2000. The lady next to me who's been there much longer has a newer computer that runs WinXP. She also has a flatscreen monitor. Since our DB program (and firefox/ie/email app of choice) runs on pretty much any iteration of windows, nobody cares, or needs to upgrade. I'm sure when we loose the Win2000 CD and my computer becomes virus infested, I'll get a new computer, but for the next 2-3 years I'll likely continue on with Win2000.
People tend to buy new electronic/home entertainment shit when they buy/move in to a 'new' house for themselves. Peak in any middle class home in an established neighborhood and you'll find plenty of SDTVs bought in the last decade serving proudly.
Clearly you've never worked in food service... or it's been so long you've forgotten the feeling of nausea that food can give you.
48 hours or less? ... Maybe if you're apple, with billions in the bank and can sit on a bunch of inventory. I work in the accounting department of a commercial furniture distribution company, and for items as simple as chairs, desks and tables, there's still even a 2-4 week lead time on these items. If you want anything at all customized beyond the four color choices and six fabric samples, you can garuntee it's going to be 4-6 weeks minimum. Laptops might not be much more complex with their sub assemblies, but they're certianly more delicate, and require folks who are trained to manufacture small electrionics. Anyone can bolt together a desk.
I helped staff a convention for the Texas Association for School Nutrition (The Lunch Lady Club), and by god, those were some of the ugliest, fattest women I'd ever seen. Not a single woman under 200 pounds, I swear. We sold Tshirts and I was shocked to find out that they stocked almost entirely 4XL tshirts, and less than 10 mediums (for a convention of 2500 people). They tended to roam about with other women from their local TASN chapter, and within their band of heffers, they all seemed to be roughly the same circumference, as if one of them had gotten that large, so the others decided it was ok to let themselves to That Much More.
Suprisingly clean and stink-free, though.
Why is it doing so well? Because the Wii is Video Games You Can Play With Your Girlfriend(tm)(slashdotters not included)
Imagine you're married, or engaged, right out of college. You want to play video games like The Good Ole' Days, but the wife is bitching about you blowing $700 (half the mortgage payment) on a PS3. Not only is a Wii cheaper, but she gets some benefit out of it too. Which do you buy? The constant nagging every time you play, or a happy housemate?
Actually they're working on a cross platform standard that should someday link facebook and myspace so that when you update one, the other is updated also. I would assume that messaging would be opened up somewhat, too.
i know for sprint it's number@messaging.sprintpcs.com. there are pages that list the rest...
It was either on Conan or Jay Leno, in the last year. I forget wether or not they allowed the txt message guy to use T9.
I just can't shut up about how great gmail is. Since all my friends recently, finally got 'real' jobs, we always have gchat conversations going on in the background at work. It's fantastic to have your email and chat integrated in to one "app", especially if that app is hosted somewhere else and accessible anywhere these days.
Hell, I'm a guy, and honestly, I don't want to be able to see my computer when I walk in to my small apartment after work. The laptop without a specific office setting becomes a communications tool, rather than a significant part of your life. The laptop is there on the dresser, sleep light glowing, letting me know it's there if I want to use it.
I have a desktop in my closet, that I use for archival and general file storage, and gets turned on once a week or so. No monitor, just VNC in to it if need be.
Agreed; I have a Powerbook G4 circa 2001, and it's still my primary machine. I have three external firewire drives I use with it now, and both of my USB hubs are full, but it gets the job done, even with one hinge broken.
Depends on how many nutrients bamboo sucks out of the soil. As I understand it hemp actually replaces some nutrients (nitrogen?) in to the soil as it grows, which is why it's such a wonder crop.
Indeed! I figured for the cost and time expense of learning/mastering Guitar Hero, I might as well spend an extra $100 bucks and buy an electric guitar (the variance in quality between a crappy and expenseive electric is much smaller than that of acoustics) and go jam at my friend's house, and still have 80% of it's retail value 10 years later. Actually with gig bag, 12", 15w amp and cable, I ended up spending $320 total with my butterscotch blond squier telecaster. I'm still fairly terrible at Guitar Hero though. On the flip side, It's actually helped pick up chicks. "I play computer games" girls can't relate with "I'm learning the guitar" means "I have real hobbies" and piques their interest.