I don't see how a shortage of stock and rampant hoarding equates to a successful product launch. Had Nintendo not botched the launch supply, they probably would have sold far more Wiis. A lot of people got tired of waiting and bought something else, or they waited for the early adopters to get bored (they all do), and bought one second-hand.
The problem with the Wii is it has no staying power. It has too few "killer games", thus is relegated to being that thing you fire up when you have company over, who have never played it before. They toss a few rounds of bowling, maybe torture a few Rabbids until they leave, at which point you continue playing it for a day or two, then unplug the cursed thing. I don't think there's any Wii title right now, that you could say you'll remember fondly in 10 years. No Final Fantasy 7, no Super Mario 3, no Goldeneye... I have a pile of old PS2 games I could play for days, but I can't think of a single Wii title that would entertain me for more than a few hours.
I don't call that a win, because today's game developers know the Wii community isn't very spendy. They'd much rather release a PS3 or X360 title that will be far more lucrative in the long run, which again leads to the chicken and egg problem of Wii not having enough great software.
A high reliance on the motion gimmick, plus a lack of hardcore games, results in a console that everyone wants to try but no one really sticks to. Had Nintendo been able to sell more at launch, they would have gotten those sales in before the suck factor became widely known. The bigger numbers might have convinced more developers to jump on the bandwagon.
Now with a bunch of me-too DS variants, yet no real progress, Nintendo is playing the old GB/GBC/GBP shell game. Spend more money for an old portable with a fresh coat of paint... Come on, are we that gullible as consumers ?
When a potentially harmful vulnerability is discovered in a piece of software, it takes nearly a month on average for human engineers to come up with a fix and to push the fix out to affected systems
Yes. It takes us 5 seconds to an hour to actually come up with the fix, the remainder of the month is spent in bureaucratic hell - sitting in a trouble ticket queue, sitting in a verification queue, sitting in a QA manager's inbox, sitting with the communications team.
Clearview, if it does what it says on the tin, only addresses the 5 second problem. Any "sane" dev shop would still run the resultant patch through the many cogs and loops of modern software management. You won't get your hole patched any quicker, you'll just have shifted the coders' attention away from your own app's bugs, and onto Clearview's bugs. Net gain: less than zero.
Theoretically and conceptually, it's an interesting tool (you know, like Intercal). It just doesn't really fit in the industry, IMHO.
No one is holding a gun to these women's heads. They willingly engage in sexually suggestive behaviour in exchange for money. It is a perfectly legal thing to do.
Would you react differently if they had been male entertainers ? Now, now; don't be a hypocrite!
In the end, Yahoo hired "booth babes", like we see at every other tech event, where they are usually tasked with holding up some new gadget or delivering a marketing pitch. If you're so opposed to the practice (I am, though for entirely different reasons), why don't you go harass the E3 and CES organizers and participants too ? Why only Yahoo ?
You talk about women not being comfortable in our field, presumably because the guys are socially inept or even hostile. What about men being uncomfortable, from having to work with other socially inept guys ? I don't need someone to flirt with me, in order to think of them as pathetic self-centered losers. Women can be unpleasant too, you know. Sex/gender has nothing to do with it. I don't care what a coworker has between their legs. I don't go to work to get laid; I go to work to get Paid. The lack of women in my workplace doesn't have any adverse effect on my productivity.
The problems with water are numerous: leaks, evaporation, rust/corrosion, dead/weak pumps, fungus/algae, even just the weight of all that water can cause big problems and complicate room layouts.
Air is easy. A fan is a simple device: it either spins, or it doesn't. A compressor is also rather simple. Having fewer failure modes in a system makes it easier to monitor and maintain.
You also can't just "dispose of the hot water". It's not like you can leave the cold faucet open, and piss the hot water out as waste. Water cooling systems are closed loops. You cool your own water via radiators, which themselves are either passively or actively cooled with fans and peltiers. You could recirculate the hot water through the building and recycle the heat, but for most datacenters you'd still have a huge thermal surplus that needs to be dissipated. Heat doesn't just vanish because you have water, it only allows you to move it faster.
Having been exposed to far too many million-dollar apps that require another 50k in billable support just to get installed and working, I can tell you those "expensive consultants" are doing just fine. They're not selling Linux, they're just charging to fix the app they sold you, that was broken in the first place.
You know what's even more lucrative ? Fixing the flaws yourself, and selling the tool(s) you created in the process. I know a guy who floated himself post-bubble by selling software swiss-army-knives for Oracle and Peoplesoft sysadmins. Hell, some people do just fine selling GUIfied WAMP stacks. User friendly is a 3rd-party industry.
You already live in a police state. Those CHUDs you speak of are often harmless people who were imprisoned for not being white enough, or not being conservative enough.
Oppressivists like Joe Arpaio are not making your country safer. They are profiting off the dismissal and suppression of social elements they personally dislike. Spending 5 years in jail with a pink jumpsuit, just because you were caught selling hash to stoners who are also harmless, that's not justice and it sure as shit isn't security. It's abuse.
The US has a high prison population because there are too many arbitrary laws to break, too many cops to feed, and too many profitable taboos to exploit. For every psychopathic, dangerous detainee there are 10 harmless ones that are being made examples of. Jails are profitable, contracted businesses, and that is several degrees of fucked up right there. High prison population is not the side-effect of proper crime fighting, it is a symptom of a dysfunctional society.
Tell ya what: let's make a trade. You can come live up here in Canada, and we'll send down one of our dumb sheeple to take your place down south.
Canada ain't great, but it's a little bit better at all of the things you've listed. Prison population is relatively low, we have measures in place to gently discourage wealth-hoarding, our health care sucks but it sucks in an egalitarian way for everyone, and we're usually the ones trying to help other nations with their problems, be they medical, educational or military.
Canada's not perfect, and your 8 years of Bush idiocy have left us with some sympathetic retardation at many levels of government, but I wouldn't trade my "expensive hippie socialist" country for any other. Up here, we wouldn't hate Obama for his ethnicity, we'd ridicule him for his inefficiency, but frankly he's no worse than the average.
The real meat of the matter here is this Kaspersky guy's business is kind of in the dumps. He's being eaten alive by AVG and Clam, so a bit of trolling gets his name around the e-rags and a few people go "WOW they're still around ? ZOMG I'll try their A/V again".
If Kaspersky "ends online anonymity", they will end their revenue stream. It would seem logical that a company thriving off the constant threat of malware, would not want to see that malware willed away via draconian ID mandates and exclusionary tactics. Then we'll all know the Kaspersky guys were the ones writing viruses all along...
If your wife is a party pooper, tell her to fuck off eh ? Replace her with a game-positive friend. You have the rest of your life to be annoyed by her, a few hours apart won't kill you.
And if your Wii isn't getting enough love, I'll say this: booze. 4-5 geeks half-tanked can have a riot with any party game, good or bad. Did you think all those pubs hosting Guitar Hero nights were completely insane ? There's a method to the madness.
Rule #1 of the office: You do not talk about Bejeweled Blitz. Rule #2 of the office: You DO NOT talk about Bejeweled Blitz. Rule #3 of the office: If you beat my score, all work will stop until I beat yours again.
As someone who played the crap out of the original Metroid, I have to say that Zero Mission, while quite good, is nothing like the classic version. It borrows certain screen layouts and the overall progression (weapons, bosses), but I feel they completely ruined the exploration aspect and made it too linear.
Part of the fun of the first Metroid was to get stuck and look around for shortcuts and secret passageways, or clever ways to get around tough spots. People would spend hours trying to freeze bugs in just the right spot to jump on them, or practice the bomb-jump until perfect and "fly" up those long shafts into areas previously unexplored. It was also a very glitchy game, and those glitches became part of the experience. People would draw maps of the places they'd find via door jumping, and swap notes with their friends. With practice and good memory, it was possible to skip entire areas and beat the game in a matter of minutes, without using silly rerecording emulators and their frame-accurate speedruns and sync abuses.
As someone who lusted after the elusive Wii for months before finding one, I can tell you first-hand it is a fad product. It was fun, we bring it to boring family parties and everyone tries the bowling, but it is dead to me.
It's fun to play, once in a while, but having every single goddamned game require you to either point at the screen or flail your arms, means I will never play it when I just want to "veg". There is no way to play Wii in a relaxed position, you can't just lay back in the sofa (or stretch out) and casually mash buttons. Call me lazy, but I'm not always in the mood to burn calories when I'm bored.
In contrast, I'm perfectly capable of playing Street Fighter, Resident Evil, many driving games, puzzle, RTS any many others with a cordless controller (or lap-style kb/trackball). Don't tell my guild, but sometimes I even play World of Warcraft while stretched out on the couch.
That fact alone makes the Wii far more tiring to play, thus discouraging extended play periods. I couldn't stand the new Zelda, and that right there should be a big hint. The only games I am willing to play are party-style, play for a minute then pass it to your buddy (and/or have another drink).
If Sony/MS add the gyro/motion controllers and a few party games to their existing library, it will make their platforms appealing to the casuals, without shutting it out from more traditional gamers like myself. Just don't make Halo 4 require a stupid gun controller I have to aim at the flood, or I will shove that controller AND the console up some designer's ass.
Difference being: we're not going to hunt down and kill Charles Stross, his family, his entire lineage and anyone sharing his last name and/or skin colour.
Star Trek fans just shrug and label him as a pompous imbecile, then go on with their lives (or lack thereof).
Knowing what Mr Stross thinks of Trek doesn't make me any more or less skeptical of tachyon emissions.
I love the insinuation that places that don't already have wireless internet coverage "don't matter". Self-centred asshole, much ? And that is why we have terrorism in this world.
You need to step outside your San-Fran iPhone bubble. Not everyone has cellular broadband is anything but "ubiquitous", and I see a great fallacy in your mention of "everywhere (that matters)". When talking about communication abilities, everywhere matters.
This gadget sounds like a great idea. Not tethered to the inefficient and cartel-driven cellular network. Not tied to a flimsy cell phone designed to break so you'll buy another in a year. Not associated with any device or service requiring a monthly fee for subscription.
This gadget is simple, but it sounds perfect for its intended purpose.
Think about what you just did: you posted on Slashdot.
You used a web browser, which sent a few HTTP requests, represented as TCP/IP packets over an ethernet cable, which then traveled to an internet router, possibly via DSL or DOCSIS, got routed via OSPF and BGP, to a server running Apache and Perl.
Every step of that journey involved one or more open, freely-available standards-based protocols that have been embraced by hundreds if not thousands of vendors so they could all communicate with each other. Without all those open protocols, you would be stuck on a Microsoft internet, or an Apple internet, or maybe even a boring conservative IBM internet, and they would all be walled gardens, completely blocked off from each other.
In a market where most people are trying very hard to be compatible with as many others as possible, Apple continues to shut the world out. If users want to sync iTunes with their Palm, or their Rio, or their Samsung, or even their crappy chinese knockoff MP3/Phone/Video/sex-toy, Apple should welcome them with open arms, inviting them in to drink the kool-aid. Shutting them out only means they will stay completely away from Apple's products, hardware AND software.
You get someone like me, I can't stand iPods, I think their sound quality is absolutely shameful, especially considering the premium they're charging for the Apple brand. That said, if I were to find a competing music player that suited my tastes, I might want to hit up iTMS, after all, it is the largest digital music store. Oh noes, iTunes won't sync to my player and I need to jump through hoops with some ghetto 3rd party app ? Screw that, I'll hop onto Rhapsody and Apple gets ZILCH!
Openness benefits everyone, even the greedy bastards who have to loosen their grip. For them to not see it, in this day and age, is a sign of tunnel-vision and obliviousness.
That's why we need more development in RAM-based disk emulators. Much like the now-archaic Gigabyte i-Ram, I would kill for a PCI-E card that takes 8 or more registered RAM modules and spits out a bunch of SAS or SATA connectors to be Raid-0'ed, with battery backup. It would be cheaper than a high-end SSD and much much faster.
I don't know of any Linux distro that does it (unless you call Gentoo's stage-1 bootstrap "caching")
The closest I've seen is a Linux installer that copies itself to Ram, so you can yank out the CD or USB key right away and get started on the next box.
In what way is air-conditioning a luxury ? A room-sized A/C costs less than a modest HDTV! Only in the U.S. would TV come before comfort...
From my own anecdotal evidence, I don't think we can realistically draw any correlation between hardcore gamers and HDTV. I've known mad gamers with small TVs, I've know mad gamers with huge TVs (and no furniture!). I have people with big houses and shiny 60" plasmas that are quite content to play the occasional game of NHL 2009 via a the DVI output on their PC, and I'm sure they've played bejeweled on it too, they're just too shallow to admit it.
The thing is, gamers aren't in love with big TVs, they're in love with games. The TV is just a required accessory, not the focus of their hobby.
I watch a bit of HD content on my PC, and while it is indeed sharper and more detailed than SD video, unless I'm watching something excessively flashy (and well-rendered), the HD doesn't really add much past the first few seconds of wow factor. I sure as shit don't spend my time going frame-by-frame to gaze at the individual hairs on SJP's massive she-cock.
I see one place where HD matters a lot: sports. Not that I want to see some russian guys' busted up faces in full detail, but that damned puck is too small so HD makes it distinguishable from dust, whereas in SD it's a single pixel of blurry fanaticism.
Big screen or small, if you're staring at humans acting various contrived scenes, a human is a human. You don't need 2 million pixels to tell the head from the ass.
Perhaps your memory is a bit spotty, but I clearly recall 1999. I was 19, living with a roommate, and my PC was an overclocked P3-500 with a 20" Philips CRT and 256mb of Ram. First driven by a pair of Voodoo2s at 1024x768, then a Geforce 256 at 1280x1024, and finally in mid 2000 I splurged on a Geforce 2 GTS, which finally got me up to 1600x1200. Quake III held a steady 30fps at that resolution. Keep in mind, I was barely out of college, living on my own and earning a modest salary, so really anyone in the PC world back then could afford what I had.
A bit earlier in the mid-90s, games all ran at 320x200, or 320x240 if they drank Michael Abrash's kool aid. I ran my Windows 3.1 desktop at 1024x768 (interlaced:P), but most GUI apps were designed for 640x480. I even remember playing around with VESA graphics back in the summer of 1994, having spent many sleepless nights listening to jungle beats on the university radio station, while tweaking the bejeezus out of my assembler loops.
I am, without a doubt, an early adopter, but I was never more than one or two steps ahead of the masses. In 2009, when you can buy a brand new 22" 16:9 LCD for $150, 1680x1050 should be the mid-range. 1920x1200 is just slightly higher up, and 2560x1600 is way up in the enthusiast range. You kids with your HDTV half-assed resolutions and 1080i nonsense, the PC was there 7-8 years ago, brighter, faster and cheaper. My old 2002 laptop did 1680x1050, with a hobbled GPU and mainstream PC games. So really, why can't consoles today handle what PCs could manage effortlessly seven years ago ?
Yes, we have our share of dirty rotten self-righteous political fuckwits. They're mostly concentrated in Ontario and Alberta... As to why, well I'm afraid that's up to speculation.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how a shortage of stock and rampant hoarding equates to a successful product launch. Had Nintendo not botched the launch supply, they probably would have sold far more Wiis. A lot of people got tired of waiting and bought something else, or they waited for the early adopters to get bored (they all do), and bought one second-hand.
The problem with the Wii is it has no staying power. It has too few "killer games", thus is relegated to being that thing you fire up when you have company over, who have never played it before. They toss a few rounds of bowling, maybe torture a few Rabbids until they leave, at which point you continue playing it for a day or two, then unplug the cursed thing. I don't think there's any Wii title right now, that you could say you'll remember fondly in 10 years. No Final Fantasy 7, no Super Mario 3, no Goldeneye... I have a pile of old PS2 games I could play for days, but I can't think of a single Wii title that would entertain me for more than a few hours.
I don't call that a win, because today's game developers know the Wii community isn't very spendy. They'd much rather release a PS3 or X360 title that will be far more lucrative in the long run, which again leads to the chicken and egg problem of Wii not having enough great software.
A high reliance on the motion gimmick, plus a lack of hardcore games, results in a console that everyone wants to try but no one really sticks to. Had Nintendo been able to sell more at launch, they would have gotten those sales in before the suck factor became widely known. The bigger numbers might have convinced more developers to jump on the bandwagon.
Now with a bunch of me-too DS variants, yet no real progress, Nintendo is playing the old GB/GBC/GBP shell game. Spend more money for an old portable with a fresh coat of paint... Come on, are we that gullible as consumers ?
When a potentially harmful vulnerability is discovered in a piece of software, it takes nearly a month on average for human engineers to come up with a fix and to push the fix out to affected systems
Yes. It takes us 5 seconds to an hour to actually come up with the fix, the remainder of the month is spent in bureaucratic hell - sitting in a trouble ticket queue, sitting in a verification queue, sitting in a QA manager's inbox, sitting with the communications team.
Clearview, if it does what it says on the tin, only addresses the 5 second problem. Any "sane" dev shop would still run the resultant patch through the many cogs and loops of modern software management. You won't get your hole patched any quicker, you'll just have shifted the coders' attention away from your own app's bugs, and onto Clearview's bugs. Net gain: less than zero.
Theoretically and conceptually, it's an interesting tool (you know, like Intercal). It just doesn't really fit in the industry, IMHO.
No one is holding a gun to these women's heads. They willingly engage in sexually suggestive behaviour in exchange for money. It is a perfectly legal thing to do.
Would you react differently if they had been male entertainers ? Now, now; don't be a hypocrite!
In the end, Yahoo hired "booth babes", like we see at every other tech event, where they are usually tasked with holding up some new gadget or delivering a marketing pitch. If you're so opposed to the practice (I am, though for entirely different reasons), why don't you go harass the E3 and CES organizers and participants too ? Why only Yahoo ?
You talk about women not being comfortable in our field, presumably because the guys are socially inept or even hostile. What about men being uncomfortable, from having to work with other socially inept guys ? I don't need someone to flirt with me, in order to think of them as pathetic self-centered losers. Women can be unpleasant too, you know. Sex/gender has nothing to do with it. I don't care what a coworker has between their legs. I don't go to work to get laid; I go to work to get Paid. The lack of women in my workplace doesn't have any adverse effect on my productivity.
Political correctness is bullshit.
You mean like Crays used to have ?
The problems with water are numerous: leaks, evaporation, rust/corrosion, dead/weak pumps, fungus/algae, even just the weight of all that water can cause big problems and complicate room layouts.
Air is easy. A fan is a simple device: it either spins, or it doesn't. A compressor is also rather simple. Having fewer failure modes in a system makes it easier to monitor and maintain.
You also can't just "dispose of the hot water". It's not like you can leave the cold faucet open, and piss the hot water out as waste. Water cooling systems are closed loops. You cool your own water via radiators, which themselves are either passively or actively cooled with fans and peltiers. You could recirculate the hot water through the building and recycle the heat, but for most datacenters you'd still have a huge thermal surplus that needs to be dissipated. Heat doesn't just vanish because you have water, it only allows you to move it faster.
Having been exposed to far too many million-dollar apps that require another 50k in billable support just to get installed and working, I can tell you those "expensive consultants" are doing just fine. They're not selling Linux, they're just charging to fix the app they sold you, that was broken in the first place.
You know what's even more lucrative ? Fixing the flaws yourself, and selling the tool(s) you created in the process. I know a guy who floated himself post-bubble by selling software swiss-army-knives for Oracle and Peoplesoft sysadmins. Hell, some people do just fine selling GUIfied WAMP stacks. User friendly is a 3rd-party industry.
You already live in a police state. Those CHUDs you speak of are often harmless people who were imprisoned for not being white enough, or not being conservative enough.
Oppressivists like Joe Arpaio are not making your country safer. They are profiting off the dismissal and suppression of social elements they personally dislike. Spending 5 years in jail with a pink jumpsuit, just because you were caught selling hash to stoners who are also harmless, that's not justice and it sure as shit isn't security. It's abuse.
The US has a high prison population because there are too many arbitrary laws to break, too many cops to feed, and too many profitable taboos to exploit. For every psychopathic, dangerous detainee there are 10 harmless ones that are being made examples of. Jails are profitable, contracted businesses, and that is several degrees of fucked up right there. High prison population is not the side-effect of proper crime fighting, it is a symptom of a dysfunctional society.
Tell ya what: let's make a trade. You can come live up here in Canada, and we'll send down one of our dumb sheeple to take your place down south.
Canada ain't great, but it's a little bit better at all of the things you've listed. Prison population is relatively low, we have measures in place to gently discourage wealth-hoarding, our health care sucks but it sucks in an egalitarian way for everyone, and we're usually the ones trying to help other nations with their problems, be they medical, educational or military.
Canada's not perfect, and your 8 years of Bush idiocy have left us with some sympathetic retardation at many levels of government, but I wouldn't trade my "expensive hippie socialist" country for any other. Up here, we wouldn't hate Obama for his ethnicity, we'd ridicule him for his inefficiency, but frankly he's no worse than the average.
The real meat of the matter here is this Kaspersky guy's business is kind of in the dumps. He's being eaten alive by AVG and Clam, so a bit of trolling gets his name around the e-rags and a few people go "WOW they're still around ? ZOMG I'll try their A/V again".
If Kaspersky "ends online anonymity", they will end their revenue stream. It would seem logical that a company thriving off the constant threat of malware, would not want to see that malware willed away via draconian ID mandates and exclusionary tactics. Then we'll all know the Kaspersky guys were the ones writing viruses all along...
If your wife is a party pooper, tell her to fuck off eh ? Replace her with a game-positive friend. You have the rest of your life to be annoyed by her, a few hours apart won't kill you.
And if your Wii isn't getting enough love, I'll say this: booze. 4-5 geeks half-tanked can have a riot with any party game, good or bad. Did you think all those pubs hosting Guitar Hero nights were completely insane ? There's a method to the madness.
Rule #1 of the office: You do not talk about Bejeweled Blitz.
Rule #2 of the office: You DO NOT talk about Bejeweled Blitz.
Rule #3 of the office: If you beat my score, all work will stop until I beat yours again.
As someone who played the crap out of the original Metroid, I have to say that Zero Mission, while quite good, is nothing like the classic version. It borrows certain screen layouts and the overall progression (weapons, bosses), but I feel they completely ruined the exploration aspect and made it too linear.
Part of the fun of the first Metroid was to get stuck and look around for shortcuts and secret passageways, or clever ways to get around tough spots. People would spend hours trying to freeze bugs in just the right spot to jump on them, or practice the bomb-jump until perfect and "fly" up those long shafts into areas previously unexplored. It was also a very glitchy game, and those glitches became part of the experience. People would draw maps of the places they'd find via door jumping, and swap notes with their friends. With practice and good memory, it was possible to skip entire areas and beat the game in a matter of minutes, without using silly rerecording emulators and their frame-accurate speedruns and sync abuses.
As someone who lusted after the elusive Wii for months before finding one, I can tell you first-hand it is a fad product. It was fun, we bring it to boring family parties and everyone tries the bowling, but it is dead to me.
It's fun to play, once in a while, but having every single goddamned game require you to either point at the screen or flail your arms, means I will never play it when I just want to "veg". There is no way to play Wii in a relaxed position, you can't just lay back in the sofa (or stretch out) and casually mash buttons. Call me lazy, but I'm not always in the mood to burn calories when I'm bored.
In contrast, I'm perfectly capable of playing Street Fighter, Resident Evil, many driving games, puzzle, RTS any many others with a cordless controller (or lap-style kb/trackball). Don't tell my guild, but sometimes I even play World of Warcraft while stretched out on the couch.
That fact alone makes the Wii far more tiring to play, thus discouraging extended play periods. I couldn't stand the new Zelda, and that right there should be a big hint. The only games I am willing to play are party-style, play for a minute then pass it to your buddy (and/or have another drink).
If Sony/MS add the gyro/motion controllers and a few party games to their existing library, it will make their platforms appealing to the casuals, without shutting it out from more traditional gamers like myself. Just don't make Halo 4 require a stupid gun controller I have to aim at the flood, or I will shove that controller AND the console up some designer's ass.
Difference being: we're not going to hunt down and kill Charles Stross, his family, his entire lineage and anyone sharing his last name and/or skin colour.
Star Trek fans just shrug and label him as a pompous imbecile, then go on with their lives (or lack thereof).
Knowing what Mr Stross thinks of Trek doesn't make me any more or less skeptical of tachyon emissions.
Country ? More like home suburb.
I love the insinuation that places that don't already have wireless internet coverage "don't matter". Self-centred asshole, much ? And that is why we have terrorism in this world.
You need to step outside your San-Fran iPhone bubble. Not everyone has cellular broadband is anything but "ubiquitous", and I see a great fallacy in your mention of "everywhere (that matters)". When talking about communication abilities, everywhere matters.
This gadget sounds like a great idea. Not tethered to the inefficient and cartel-driven cellular network. Not tied to a flimsy cell phone designed to break so you'll buy another in a year. Not associated with any device or service requiring a monthly fee for subscription.
This gadget is simple, but it sounds perfect for its intended purpose.
Think about what you just did: you posted on Slashdot.
You used a web browser, which sent a few HTTP requests, represented as TCP/IP packets over an ethernet cable, which then traveled to an internet router, possibly via DSL or DOCSIS, got routed via OSPF and BGP, to a server running Apache and Perl.
Every step of that journey involved one or more open, freely-available standards-based protocols that have been embraced by hundreds if not thousands of vendors so they could all communicate with each other. Without all those open protocols, you would be stuck on a Microsoft internet, or an Apple internet, or maybe even a boring conservative IBM internet, and they would all be walled gardens, completely blocked off from each other.
In a market where most people are trying very hard to be compatible with as many others as possible, Apple continues to shut the world out. If users want to sync iTunes with their Palm, or their Rio, or their Samsung, or even their crappy chinese knockoff MP3/Phone/Video/sex-toy, Apple should welcome them with open arms, inviting them in to drink the kool-aid. Shutting them out only means they will stay completely away from Apple's products, hardware AND software.
You get someone like me, I can't stand iPods, I think their sound quality is absolutely shameful, especially considering the premium they're charging for the Apple brand. That said, if I were to find a competing music player that suited my tastes, I might want to hit up iTMS, after all, it is the largest digital music store. Oh noes, iTunes won't sync to my player and I need to jump through hoops with some ghetto 3rd party app ? Screw that, I'll hop onto Rhapsody and Apple gets ZILCH!
Openness benefits everyone, even the greedy bastards who have to loosen their grip. For them to not see it, in this day and age, is a sign of tunnel-vision and obliviousness.
That's why we need more development in RAM-based disk emulators. Much like the now-archaic Gigabyte i-Ram, I would kill for a PCI-E card that takes 8 or more registered RAM modules and spits out a bunch of SAS or SATA connectors to be Raid-0'ed, with battery backup. It would be cheaper than a high-end SSD and much much faster.
Really ? Please name three.
Windows doesn't do it.
Mac OS doesn't do it.
I don't know of any Linux distro that does it (unless you call Gentoo's stage-1 bootstrap "caching")
The closest I've seen is a Linux installer that copies itself to Ram, so you can yank out the CD or USB key right away and get started on the next box.
Newest ThinkGeek gadget: WiFi-enabled detonators!
Yes and Yes
Or you could just use the versatility of an older PC to run Linux, on a regular ass monitor that costs a third as much.
In what way is air-conditioning a luxury ? A room-sized A/C costs less than a modest HDTV! Only in the U.S. would TV come before comfort...
From my own anecdotal evidence, I don't think we can realistically draw any correlation between hardcore gamers and HDTV. I've known mad gamers with small TVs, I've know mad gamers with huge TVs (and no furniture!). I have people with big houses and shiny 60" plasmas that are quite content to play the occasional game of NHL 2009 via a the DVI output on their PC, and I'm sure they've played bejeweled on it too, they're just too shallow to admit it.
The thing is, gamers aren't in love with big TVs, they're in love with games. The TV is just a required accessory, not the focus of their hobby.
I watch a bit of HD content on my PC, and while it is indeed sharper and more detailed than SD video, unless I'm watching something excessively flashy (and well-rendered), the HD doesn't really add much past the first few seconds of wow factor. I sure as shit don't spend my time going frame-by-frame to gaze at the individual hairs on SJP's massive she-cock.
I see one place where HD matters a lot: sports. Not that I want to see some russian guys' busted up faces in full detail, but that damned puck is too small so HD makes it distinguishable from dust, whereas in SD it's a single pixel of blurry fanaticism.
Big screen or small, if you're staring at humans acting various contrived scenes, a human is a human. You don't need 2 million pixels to tell the head from the ass.
Perhaps your memory is a bit spotty, but I clearly recall 1999. I was 19, living with a roommate, and my PC was an overclocked P3-500 with a 20" Philips CRT and 256mb of Ram. First driven by a pair of Voodoo2s at 1024x768, then a Geforce 256 at 1280x1024, and finally in mid 2000 I splurged on a Geforce 2 GTS, which finally got me up to 1600x1200. Quake III held a steady 30fps at that resolution. Keep in mind, I was barely out of college, living on my own and earning a modest salary, so really anyone in the PC world back then could afford what I had.
A bit earlier in the mid-90s, games all ran at 320x200, or 320x240 if they drank Michael Abrash's kool aid. I ran my Windows 3.1 desktop at 1024x768 (interlaced :P), but most GUI apps were designed for 640x480. I even remember playing around with VESA graphics back in the summer of 1994, having spent many sleepless nights listening to jungle beats on the university radio station, while tweaking the bejeezus out of my assembler loops.
I am, without a doubt, an early adopter, but I was never more than one or two steps ahead of the masses. In 2009, when you can buy a brand new 22" 16:9 LCD for $150, 1680x1050 should be the mid-range. 1920x1200 is just slightly higher up, and 2560x1600 is way up in the enthusiast range. You kids with your HDTV half-assed resolutions and 1080i nonsense, the PC was there 7-8 years ago, brighter, faster and cheaper. My old 2002 laptop did 1680x1050, with a hobbled GPU and mainstream PC games. So really, why can't consoles today handle what PCs could manage effortlessly seven years ago ?
Good timing :
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/09/01/toronto-cyclist-collision-death481.html
Yes, we have our share of dirty rotten self-righteous political fuckwits. They're mostly concentrated in Ontario and Alberta... As to why, well I'm afraid that's up to speculation.