The upgrade process was pretty flawless so far... Though I notice that google chrome doesn't play well with their unity setup (dual window controls and the top menu only closes it). The ubuntu button now opens a nautilus folder and all your apps are just crammed in there. No sorting. Something they might want to work on. Performance isn't too bad on my gaming laptop (nvidia gtx 260m 1gb dedicated, 4 gigs of ram, 2.1 ghz core2duo). Missing my favorite keyboard shortcut (alt+f2). This is going to take some getting used to. It's a little more "macish" than I am used to.
Did you try vlc? I have tested dvd's in mplayer, vlc and "movie player" which I think is totem, and all seem to work (10.10 x86_64). Though I used to ultimate edition dvd from distrowatch that came preloaded with all codecs and such pre-installed. Though I think VLC does not need any additional codecs installed. Good luck.
Weird! Maybe the "netbook edition" will have a lighter version of unity. If they do what they have done in the past (unstable initial release) and it isn't running well on netbooks, they could anger quite a few people (again?). This is still alpha 1 though, it's hard to say at this time what the final rc will look like, so I guess I should keep my comments to myself.
Doing an upgrade at this moment from 10.10 with the upgrade-manager -d option... hopefully it will be a little better. Did you check the bug site to see if your bug was on that list? It would help the dev team a lot for you to report it.
Perhaps because our government is accountable to us. We pay their bills. They are our employees, not the other way around. If we want to check in to see what is really going on and they get caught with their pants down, who's fault is that? It's not Assange's fault that our secretary of state is spying on our UN allies no matter how much they spin it.
I use my gaming laptop on the sofa, on the bed, at work at the desk, in the car sometimes, on a plane. Funny, it doesn't work like crap. Even when I use a mouse on my sofa or bed it doesn't act like crap. Sounds to me like you are just a fanboy that doesn't have a real argument. I own currently... gamecube, wii, 360, xbox 1, a ps2, a ds, a gba sp and a psp slim. Funny part is I keep turning back to be laptop for the gaming (asus g60vx with an nvidia gtx 260m 1gb, 4gb of ram, dual hard drives) so I can get the freedom to play where I want (I don't have to be glued to my 42" 1080p), with games of high quality (can't really play mass effect on a gameboy), with whatever control scheme I like, without having to haul around all my games in a dvd pack, without having to pay yearly for the right play online, without being told I can't open my case and change out faulty hardware. Look at the choices you have for xbox anymore. You have what, 2 companies you can buy joysticks from, microsoft or madcatz? I can use with adaptors a nes/snes/ps2/ps3/wii/pc/etc. What kind of wifi adaptor can you get? 2 brands? I can hop on any pc parts store and have the choice of hundreds. Need a new dvdrom drive? hahaha. How much are those 360 hard drives anyway compared to pc ones? They have 2tb drives yet? No? Please. Leave the toys for the kiddies.
Because those mythical $400 gamings PCs only exist in theory, not in practice. Neither can you go out and buy those PC in your average store nor is there an OS that is "TV ready" for games. Nobody wants to mouse around in menus from the couch to get his gamepad properly configured, people want to insert the DVD and be ready to play. There is that whole "Games for Windows" thing that forces developers to support the Xbox360 controller out of the box, but quite a few games don't support that and Microsoft support for the Xbox360 controller has also been lackluster at best (drivers suck, no Chatpad support, etc.).
>>What? People want to insert dvd's? People don't want to use mice? People give a crap about games for windows? I guess the 2.5 million people logged into steam this morning are all sadist. Because I'm pretty sure they didn't pay at least the same but probably much more for a gaming pc because they'd rather cheap out and get an xbox for 199usd and play with their joystick. Contrary to popular belief, for many, a keyboard and mouse is the only way to do many games if you want precise controls. Mostly because pc games don't have thing thing we call auto-aim that was invented so you wouldn't look so bad with your joysticks. And we also have a larger selection of joysticks that 99.9% of all games use. Even that xbox controller uses standard pc drivers that work on even much older games than came out before 360. Though if I were to use a gamepad it would just be for driving/simulation games and emulators of older consoles. I'm not going to say that a decent gaming pc is 400 unless you are actually into computers and know how to build your computer though, because we know that's too hard. And we do have chatpad support, we call it a keyboard. We also have these nice things called headsets and many if not most games have voice support. Mix that with the fact you can build a pc that has a 6 core 2 thread per core cpu, 3 sli video cards, multi-monitor setup, custom controls with infinate setup schemes.......I don't think I have to continue here.
Perhaps, but people are too chickenshit these days to be honest. They never learned the basic rules of integrity. Integrity means doing the right thing no matter how hard. The people who do these leaks have integrity to stand up against an army of liars. Fuck your public facade, man up and tell us the truth. You will be respected for it. But the US won't. They will continue what they have done since probably before vietnam. They will make up some bullshit to cover up their bullshit because they are too cool to have integrity. And then they will wonder why all the rest of the world hate us. Then when we are getting invaded like berlin because we were acting like genocidal nazi's we will all cry, "why?", because we don't know why, our government didn't tell us their secrets.
Probably too late now, now they will probably treat every package from this guy like a newborn baby. I don't have a problem with any shipping company personally except for UPS' residential delivery boys not even knocking on my door before they leave my 700 dollar laptops on my doorstep in the rain, in a neighborhood of people that would gladly steal it. I work 3rds so when I check and see my package is out for delivery, I wait next to the door for the package, but they just ninja up, drop it at my door and walk off. WTF UPS. But I don't blame UPS though, it's probably not in their company policy to be morons, just some local bad eggs. I mean, I get laziness problems of delivery boys of the newspaper (drive up on the sidewalk, throw the paper in a puddle without a bag), bread company (guy drives up, waits for me to leave my desk for 2 seconds, then runs up, drops the bread racks at the door and runs away) because he doesn't feel he has to deliver only 2 racks of bread to a company, that our cooks need to drive out to the thrift shop every morning to save him 5 minutes), the local fast food places (don't feel like actually giving you what you ordered... ever). Everyone just thinks they don't get paid enough money to actually do their jobs anymore.
Now since I have worked as a shipper in the past, shipping everything from car stereos to commercial stoves, I can tell you that good packaging will save you a headache. If it's an item you don't want to break, use a new or at least solid clean 200lb crush test box. Shake the box, if it doesn't move, it should be good. Packing goes on all sides of the object. It should be as a coffin, completely surrounded in hard foam. Bubble wrap is useless for most things large (over a foot in any direction). Peanuts give and sway causing your item to end up next to the cardboard at some point making it useless. If you bought it in a box on the shelf at the store, put it in another box. Those boxes aren't used to ship, they come in a case like that attached to a skid that is handled carefully with a forklift. They aren't meant for shipping in the mass mess (compared to a neat skid) that is a ups truck.
Since this was developed by acer, I am also going to assume the build quality will be on par with a crushed beer can. WTF is this thing, I don't know if they are trying to rip off nintendo DS or the ipad. No keyboard!! you touch the screen here instead! I'm sure it works just peachy with all the touch based software designed for it. And I'm sure the rest will be making you want to murder someone. I can just see someone trying to play a fullscreen video game on this thing, it messing up and the user having to hard reset the thing since they can't ctrl+alt+delete and pull up a task manager. And when I mean the game or whatever messing up, it taking both screens or something and not working with the virtual keyboard very well. A desktop/notebook OS on a tablet that looks like a notebook... what a head trip.
Not that I'm unhappy for the IOS users... but I hope the pc version ships soon. The QuakeCon coverage of it had me drooling. Carmack is pretty excited with mobile development at the moment though, so I understand why he released it on IOS first.
Those are some good points there. And I'm not saying my kids are jumping into refridgerators or stealing beer, or standing in front of the fridge for an hour, but I am just trying to think of practical uses for such a thing on a fridge. They aren't great examples I know, but it was more of an attempt to make people really think of what real use in the kitchen would a computerized fridge really be. Personally I have an older fridge that came with the apartment, that I wish the landlord would replace for a more energy efficient one to save a little on the power bill and I would be happy.
Sod having to come home to a flooded, smelly, damp kitchen because the damn fridge crashed because it was 2038.
You are acting like this machine runs windows 95 xD
Not sure here, but I am guessing even if the kernel crashed the designers would be smart enough to setup the fridge portion of the machine to stay on. And I'm sure it was stress tested before the release. But I could be wrong. Since the gui on the screen *isn't* playing games or running web servers or running wine, you *really* shouldn't have to worry about any crashes. Most linux desktops these days are pretty hard to crash if you keep it simple as I suspect the design is.
Sounds a bit like my 2001 Ford Taurus. An aftermarket car stereo (which was installed before I bought it, I don't listen to music in the car) ended up blowing out my a/c and heater controls (according to the guy at the repair shop). Apparently they were all tied together somehow and the car stereo was pulling more power than the stock causing some issues, ultimately burning out the controls.
Well, it would be cool to have a list of contents with the date they were put in so you can keep track of things that need to be thrown out (useful for foodservice industry to keep only fresh foods on hand). A timer app to beep when you need to pull the turkey out in case your stove doesn't have a timer (I know my gas stove doesn't). Of course the recipe app they mentioned is a good idea. Temp contols aswell. An app that checks the compressor status and other things (like those industrial air conditioners they use in server rooms to track humidity and such) with suggestions for optimal performance at low power cost for your fridge like, "Hey don't hold the door open kid!" for my son when it detects the door has been sitting there open for 2 minutes. A passworded door lock so your kids don't try to climb in playing "hide and seek" or try to take a beer out when you go outside for 2 minutes. Any other cool ideas?
...not someone's personal religious blogspot page. If you haven't been on xbox live, let me fill you in. It is not filled with nice people that have a fun game, then talk about their cultural differences in a calm manner over tea. When you turn on your headset, you hear screaming 9 year olds telling their mothers to fuck off when asked to do homework, then tell you how they are going to teabag your corpse. Then they blast gangster rap in your ears over the mic and make it so your team can't talk to each other. You hear people shouting over the microphone's at each other screaming racial slurs every 2 seconds. In my experiance with xbox live, I saw more racism and hate than anywhere else in my life. So if I saw a clan with a swastika as their logo, *yes* I would automatically assume it was the racist/nazi version. And I would also wonder why in the hell I ever went *back* to xbox live in the first place compared to my relatively tame gaming experiance on pc.
I'm mostly a fan of opera though for their opera turbo function since it saves quite a bit of bandwidth when I'm running off my usb 3G modem on the road, making pages load up much quicker. It's good to see extensions added though to help against the tons of annoying ads and such. Cheers to the opera team for their hard work.
I mean it's not for everyone for sure, but I don't go for phones with alot of glitsy features. My first cell had a mono screen, no camera, it didn't do text messaging. It sent and recieved calls. It was to the point and functional. I am not the type though that look at my phone as a camera, a gameboy, a internet browser and such. I find texting to be insane for me since I can say, "Hey, I will meet you at 8" alot quicker with my mouth than texting with my number pad. I like the personal touch of actually hearing people's voice, so I can get tone of voice to tell what that person means much better. It's harder to get confused when someone pops off a joke or if they are serious or whatever. To me, texting seems like a step backwards than digital voice communication though. I look at it like the telegraph vs. the telephone. But of course, everyone is different. Before you go and tell me I must be a senior or something, I'm 28. And what I want in a phone is the best battery life, the clearest voice, and the best reception. All else to me is just a waste.
...to save the hassle of what twitter went though with the fail whale issue of their servers just getting slammed. Which is a good thing. Also I think google has tried the same things when rolling out a new web product like gmail/google voice/etc where you get invited to keep the load down to a manageable amount while you work out the kinks. Smart thinking on their part. I know I tried Orkut when I left facebook as an alternative and I noticed all the time I would update something on my page or change a profile picture, and orkut would report to me some sort of server error, leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth as to how stable the platform really was. With all the work that goes into a social networking site, I don't envy all the work ahead for diaspora. But I applaud their efforts. One question that lies in my mind since it's an open source site is, if it becomes popular, how easy would it be for people to find exploits to the system since they have the source right there to like pull all of your personal info or hijack accounts. But being opensource, the community can easily pitch in and say, "Hey, that method you are using is a giant security hole!". We'll see.
I wonder if these people ever pitched a fit when you got to play nazi's in return to castle wolfenstein in multiplayer, or Playing is Viet Cong in Battlefield Vietnam, or terrorists planting bombs and taking hostages in counter-strike? Well, actually, now thinking about it, wolfenstein was banned in germany (tell me if I'm wrong). If I was the MoH guys, I wouldn't have changed a damn thing. The people complaining aren't the ones even buying the game anyway and freedom of speech/expression might actually apply here. Some people just need a reason to complain.
What I think is messed up is the console games don't get any DRM, and they are pirated just as much. Pirates will pirate DRM or not, they will just remove it. I give it up to CD Project and GOG for this setup. If you can't afford the game, don't buy it, don't steal it, play something you can afford or play something free. There's tons of free games.
I'd guess the thing could also be used at parties: no flying wii-motes to hit expensive TV's:D
Just flying kids to hit em xD
But these days, any serious gamer knows that PC is where it's at. Many games offer free DLC. You can use any input device you wish (great for people with motor-control disabilities even), You don't pay a yearly tax, you have access to *way* better hardware than the consoles. You can setup crazy schemes of playing a game on like 2-3 or more monitors for a full immersion. You have access to non-drm options, you have the largest library of games going all the way back to dos. There isn't someone telling you "you can't do that!" every 2 seconds.
The thing that angers me is these game companies tell me, "No, pc won't get this game". Saying we are all pirates. Yet you look at steam, they are making TONS of money. They act like no one hacks their 360's or ps3's or psp's or gameboys. Every other day I see someone who hacked their console. So now they are all hacked? Can we pc gamers get our games yet?
Maybe if we hate china so much and think they are soo evil we should stop borrowing their money. You don't bum some guy for a smoke then say, "You need to get your shit together". Like someone said earlier, at least china doesn't give their people the illusion of choice. If you think you actually have any say in our government you are crazier than a fruit bat. You can write Obama a million letters to stop the wars, give us canada style health insurance paid for with the extreme tobacco tax, get rid of the TSA, and guess what will happen? Not a damn thing. That being said, I voted for the guy, and we was better than the palin dunce. But you still have no choice in the matter, no matter who you vote for, we lose.
Slashdot Mirror
The upgrade process was pretty flawless so far... Though I notice that google chrome doesn't play well with their unity setup (dual window controls and the top menu only closes it). The ubuntu button now opens a nautilus folder and all your apps are just crammed in there. No sorting. Something they might want to work on. Performance isn't too bad on my gaming laptop (nvidia gtx 260m 1gb dedicated, 4 gigs of ram, 2.1 ghz core2duo). Missing my favorite keyboard shortcut (alt+f2). This is going to take some getting used to. It's a little more "macish" than I am used to.
Did you try vlc? I have tested dvd's in mplayer, vlc and "movie player" which I think is totem, and all seem to work (10.10 x86_64). Though I used to ultimate edition dvd from distrowatch that came preloaded with all codecs and such pre-installed. Though I think VLC does not need any additional codecs installed. Good luck.
Weird! Maybe the "netbook edition" will have a lighter version of unity. If they do what they have done in the past (unstable initial release) and it isn't running well on netbooks, they could anger quite a few people (again?). This is still alpha 1 though, it's hard to say at this time what the final rc will look like, so I guess I should keep my comments to myself.
Doing an upgrade at this moment from 10.10 with the upgrade-manager -d option... hopefully it will be a little better. Did you check the bug site to see if your bug was on that list? It would help the dev team a lot for you to report it.
Via wikileaks twitter: Canadian Harper advisor calls for the assassination of Julian Assange http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtIafdoH_g
Perhaps because our government is accountable to us. We pay their bills. They are our employees, not the other way around. If we want to check in to see what is really going on and they get caught with their pants down, who's fault is that? It's not Assange's fault that our secretary of state is spying on our UN allies no matter how much they spin it.
I use my gaming laptop on the sofa, on the bed, at work at the desk, in the car sometimes, on a plane. Funny, it doesn't work like crap. Even when I use a mouse on my sofa or bed it doesn't act like crap. Sounds to me like you are just a fanboy that doesn't have a real argument. I own currently... gamecube, wii, 360, xbox 1, a ps2, a ds, a gba sp and a psp slim. Funny part is I keep turning back to be laptop for the gaming (asus g60vx with an nvidia gtx 260m 1gb, 4gb of ram, dual hard drives) so I can get the freedom to play where I want (I don't have to be glued to my 42" 1080p), with games of high quality (can't really play mass effect on a gameboy), with whatever control scheme I like, without having to haul around all my games in a dvd pack, without having to pay yearly for the right play online, without being told I can't open my case and change out faulty hardware. Look at the choices you have for xbox anymore. You have what, 2 companies you can buy joysticks from, microsoft or madcatz? I can use with adaptors a nes/snes/ps2/ps3/wii/pc/etc. What kind of wifi adaptor can you get? 2 brands? I can hop on any pc parts store and have the choice of hundreds. Need a new dvdrom drive? hahaha. How much are those 360 hard drives anyway compared to pc ones? They have 2tb drives yet? No? Please. Leave the toys for the kiddies.
Because those mythical $400 gamings PCs only exist in theory, not in practice. Neither can you go out and buy those PC in your average store nor is there an OS that is "TV ready" for games. Nobody wants to mouse around in menus from the couch to get his gamepad properly configured, people want to insert the DVD and be ready to play. There is that whole "Games for Windows" thing that forces developers to support the Xbox360 controller out of the box, but quite a few games don't support that and Microsoft support for the Xbox360 controller has also been lackluster at best (drivers suck, no Chatpad support, etc.).
>>What? People want to insert dvd's? People don't want to use mice? People give a crap about games for windows? I guess the 2.5 million people logged into steam this morning are all sadist. Because I'm pretty sure they didn't pay at least the same but probably much more for a gaming pc because they'd rather cheap out and get an xbox for 199usd and play with their joystick. Contrary to popular belief, for many, a keyboard and mouse is the only way to do many games if you want precise controls. Mostly because pc games don't have thing thing we call auto-aim that was invented so you wouldn't look so bad with your joysticks. And we also have a larger selection of joysticks that 99.9% of all games use. Even that xbox controller uses standard pc drivers that work on even much older games than came out before 360. Though if I were to use a gamepad it would just be for driving/simulation games and emulators of older consoles. I'm not going to say that a decent gaming pc is 400 unless you are actually into computers and know how to build your computer though, because we know that's too hard. And we do have chatpad support, we call it a keyboard. We also have these nice things called headsets and many if not most games have voice support. Mix that with the fact you can build a pc that has a 6 core 2 thread per core cpu, 3 sli video cards, multi-monitor setup, custom controls with infinate setup schemes.... ...I don't think I have to continue here.
Perhaps people should try being honest?
Perhaps, but people are too chickenshit these days to be honest. They never learned the basic rules of integrity. Integrity means doing the right thing no matter how hard. The people who do these leaks have integrity to stand up against an army of liars. Fuck your public facade, man up and tell us the truth. You will be respected for it. But the US won't. They will continue what they have done since probably before vietnam. They will make up some bullshit to cover up their bullshit because they are too cool to have integrity. And then they will wonder why all the rest of the world hate us. Then when we are getting invaded like berlin because we were acting like genocidal nazi's we will all cry, "why?", because we don't know why, our government didn't tell us their secrets.
Probably too late now, now they will probably treat every package from this guy like a newborn baby. I don't have a problem with any shipping company personally except for UPS' residential delivery boys not even knocking on my door before they leave my 700 dollar laptops on my doorstep in the rain, in a neighborhood of people that would gladly steal it. I work 3rds so when I check and see my package is out for delivery, I wait next to the door for the package, but they just ninja up, drop it at my door and walk off. WTF UPS. But I don't blame UPS though, it's probably not in their company policy to be morons, just some local bad eggs. I mean, I get laziness problems of delivery boys of the newspaper (drive up on the sidewalk, throw the paper in a puddle without a bag), bread company (guy drives up, waits for me to leave my desk for 2 seconds, then runs up, drops the bread racks at the door and runs away) because he doesn't feel he has to deliver only 2 racks of bread to a company, that our cooks need to drive out to the thrift shop every morning to save him 5 minutes), the local fast food places (don't feel like actually giving you what you ordered... ever). Everyone just thinks they don't get paid enough money to actually do their jobs anymore. Now since I have worked as a shipper in the past, shipping everything from car stereos to commercial stoves, I can tell you that good packaging will save you a headache. If it's an item you don't want to break, use a new or at least solid clean 200lb crush test box. Shake the box, if it doesn't move, it should be good. Packing goes on all sides of the object. It should be as a coffin, completely surrounded in hard foam. Bubble wrap is useless for most things large (over a foot in any direction). Peanuts give and sway causing your item to end up next to the cardboard at some point making it useless. If you bought it in a box on the shelf at the store, put it in another box. Those boxes aren't used to ship, they come in a case like that attached to a skid that is handled carefully with a forklift. They aren't meant for shipping in the mass mess (compared to a neat skid) that is a ups truck.
Since this was developed by acer, I am also going to assume the build quality will be on par with a crushed beer can. WTF is this thing, I don't know if they are trying to rip off nintendo DS or the ipad. No keyboard!! you touch the screen here instead! I'm sure it works just peachy with all the touch based software designed for it. And I'm sure the rest will be making you want to murder someone. I can just see someone trying to play a fullscreen video game on this thing, it messing up and the user having to hard reset the thing since they can't ctrl+alt+delete and pull up a task manager. And when I mean the game or whatever messing up, it taking both screens or something and not working with the virtual keyboard very well. A desktop/notebook OS on a tablet that looks like a notebook... what a head trip.
Not that I'm unhappy for the IOS users... but I hope the pc version ships soon. The QuakeCon coverage of it had me drooling. Carmack is pretty excited with mobile development at the moment though, so I understand why he released it on IOS first.
Very cool looking. A part of the ikitchen, wonder if Apple is going to hop on them for that name?
Those are some good points there. And I'm not saying my kids are jumping into refridgerators or stealing beer, or standing in front of the fridge for an hour, but I am just trying to think of practical uses for such a thing on a fridge. They aren't great examples I know, but it was more of an attempt to make people really think of what real use in the kitchen would a computerized fridge really be. Personally I have an older fridge that came with the apartment, that I wish the landlord would replace for a more energy efficient one to save a little on the power bill and I would be happy.
Sod having to come home to a flooded, smelly, damp kitchen because the damn fridge crashed because it was 2038.
You are acting like this machine runs windows 95 xD Not sure here, but I am guessing even if the kernel crashed the designers would be smart enough to setup the fridge portion of the machine to stay on. And I'm sure it was stress tested before the release. But I could be wrong. Since the gui on the screen *isn't* playing games or running web servers or running wine, you *really* shouldn't have to worry about any crashes. Most linux desktops these days are pretty hard to crash if you keep it simple as I suspect the design is.
Sounds a bit like my 2001 Ford Taurus. An aftermarket car stereo (which was installed before I bought it, I don't listen to music in the car) ended up blowing out my a/c and heater controls (according to the guy at the repair shop). Apparently they were all tied together somehow and the car stereo was pulling more power than the stock causing some issues, ultimately burning out the controls.
Well, it would be cool to have a list of contents with the date they were put in so you can keep track of things that need to be thrown out (useful for foodservice industry to keep only fresh foods on hand). A timer app to beep when you need to pull the turkey out in case your stove doesn't have a timer (I know my gas stove doesn't). Of course the recipe app they mentioned is a good idea. Temp contols aswell. An app that checks the compressor status and other things (like those industrial air conditioners they use in server rooms to track humidity and such) with suggestions for optimal performance at low power cost for your fridge like, "Hey don't hold the door open kid!" for my son when it detects the door has been sitting there open for 2 minutes. A passworded door lock so your kids don't try to climb in playing "hide and seek" or try to take a beer out when you go outside for 2 minutes. Any other cool ideas?
...not someone's personal religious blogspot page. If you haven't been on xbox live, let me fill you in. It is not filled with nice people that have a fun game, then talk about their cultural differences in a calm manner over tea. When you turn on your headset, you hear screaming 9 year olds telling their mothers to fuck off when asked to do homework, then tell you how they are going to teabag your corpse. Then they blast gangster rap in your ears over the mic and make it so your team can't talk to each other. You hear people shouting over the microphone's at each other screaming racial slurs every 2 seconds. In my experiance with xbox live, I saw more racism and hate than anywhere else in my life. So if I saw a clan with a swastika as their logo, *yes* I would automatically assume it was the racist/nazi version. And I would also wonder why in the hell I ever went *back* to xbox live in the first place compared to my relatively tame gaming experiance on pc.
I'm mostly a fan of opera though for their opera turbo function since it saves quite a bit of bandwidth when I'm running off my usb 3G modem on the road, making pages load up much quicker. It's good to see extensions added though to help against the tons of annoying ads and such. Cheers to the opera team for their hard work.
I mean it's not for everyone for sure, but I don't go for phones with alot of glitsy features. My first cell had a mono screen, no camera, it didn't do text messaging. It sent and recieved calls. It was to the point and functional. I am not the type though that look at my phone as a camera, a gameboy, a internet browser and such. I find texting to be insane for me since I can say, "Hey, I will meet you at 8" alot quicker with my mouth than texting with my number pad. I like the personal touch of actually hearing people's voice, so I can get tone of voice to tell what that person means much better. It's harder to get confused when someone pops off a joke or if they are serious or whatever. To me, texting seems like a step backwards than digital voice communication though. I look at it like the telegraph vs. the telephone. But of course, everyone is different. Before you go and tell me I must be a senior or something, I'm 28. And what I want in a phone is the best battery life, the clearest voice, and the best reception. All else to me is just a waste.
...to save the hassle of what twitter went though with the fail whale issue of their servers just getting slammed. Which is a good thing. Also I think google has tried the same things when rolling out a new web product like gmail/google voice/etc where you get invited to keep the load down to a manageable amount while you work out the kinks. Smart thinking on their part. I know I tried Orkut when I left facebook as an alternative and I noticed all the time I would update something on my page or change a profile picture, and orkut would report to me some sort of server error, leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth as to how stable the platform really was. With all the work that goes into a social networking site, I don't envy all the work ahead for diaspora. But I applaud their efforts. One question that lies in my mind since it's an open source site is, if it becomes popular, how easy would it be for people to find exploits to the system since they have the source right there to like pull all of your personal info or hijack accounts. But being opensource, the community can easily pitch in and say, "Hey, that method you are using is a giant security hole!". We'll see.
I wonder if these people ever pitched a fit when you got to play nazi's in return to castle wolfenstein in multiplayer, or Playing is Viet Cong in Battlefield Vietnam, or terrorists planting bombs and taking hostages in counter-strike? Well, actually, now thinking about it, wolfenstein was banned in germany (tell me if I'm wrong). If I was the MoH guys, I wouldn't have changed a damn thing. The people complaining aren't the ones even buying the game anyway and freedom of speech/expression might actually apply here. Some people just need a reason to complain.
What I think is messed up is the console games don't get any DRM, and they are pirated just as much. Pirates will pirate DRM or not, they will just remove it. I give it up to CD Project and GOG for this setup. If you can't afford the game, don't buy it, don't steal it, play something you can afford or play something free. There's tons of free games.
I'd guess the thing could also be used at parties: no flying wii-motes to hit expensive TV's :D
Just flying kids to hit em xD
But these days, any serious gamer knows that PC is where it's at. Many games offer free DLC. You can use any input device you wish (great for people with motor-control disabilities even), You don't pay a yearly tax, you have access to *way* better hardware than the consoles. You can setup crazy schemes of playing a game on like 2-3 or more monitors for a full immersion. You have access to non-drm options, you have the largest library of games going all the way back to dos. There isn't someone telling you "you can't do that!" every 2 seconds.
The thing that angers me is these game companies tell me, "No, pc won't get this game". Saying we are all pirates. Yet you look at steam, they are making TONS of money. They act like no one hacks their 360's or ps3's or psp's or gameboys. Every other day I see someone who hacked their console. So now they are all hacked? Can we pc gamers get our games yet?
Maybe if we hate china so much and think they are soo evil we should stop borrowing their money. You don't bum some guy for a smoke then say, "You need to get your shit together". Like someone said earlier, at least china doesn't give their people the illusion of choice. If you think you actually have any say in our government you are crazier than a fruit bat. You can write Obama a million letters to stop the wars, give us canada style health insurance paid for with the extreme tobacco tax, get rid of the TSA, and guess what will happen? Not a damn thing. That being said, I voted for the guy, and we was better than the palin dunce. But you still have no choice in the matter, no matter who you vote for, we lose.