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User: am+2k

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Comments · 1,219

  1. Re:Apple Always Screws Up the Supply Chain on iPhone 4S Pre-Orders Sell Out · · Score: 1

    I'm not an expert in this area, but there's a fundamental problem for Apple here: It's obvious that they have a huge amount of preorders compared to the regular sales later. If they'd equip enough production lines to get an iPhone 4S to everyone who wants to preorder, they'd have a lot of overproduction later on. If they'd stockpile a lot of them, they'd delay the release date and they'd have high warehouse renting costs. Apple has to find a balance there, and that's very tricky to get right. They can't please everyone who wants to preorder. Most of those potential customers will just buy it two weeks later at the same price anyways, so Apple doesn't lose anything.

  2. Re:Apple Always Screws Up the Supply Chain on iPhone 4S Pre-Orders Sell Out · · Score: 1

    Apple seems to be even more business-unfriendly these days. I'm pretty sure that the professional product line (now only MacPro and Logic, since Xserve, WebObjects and Final Cut Pro are already gone) will be extinguished in the mid term. They have found greener grass on another side (consumers), and so they want to focus on that. As Guy Kawasaki said in his speech about what Steve Jobs taught him, Apple got where it is today by not clinging to the old ways.

  3. Re:Thank . on Oil May Be Finite, But U.S. Production Is Ramping Up · · Score: 1

    Given that oil price is a large part of the inflation calculation, that's kinda obvious.

  4. Re:"The Inmates are Running the Asylum" (Alan Coop on Ask Slashdot: Good, Relevant Usability Book? · · Score: 1

    One more vote from me. "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" completely changed the way I think about usability. Now I consider user testing as part of usability design a flawed idea, because once you've got something to test and see that doesn't work, you either have to scrap months of work, or you just go with it anyways (making the whole testing useless). That book teaches the reader how to get it right in the first place, and conceive interfaces you wouldn't even have thought of (which user testing can't do either).

  5. Re:Just like the Kindle Fire on RIM Changes Stance On PlayBook's Android Support · · Score: 1

    None of these features work on any non-Google-experience devices, including [...] all the cheapo crappy tablets too.

    See the marketing problem for RIM there?

  6. Re:People need to stop equating software to buildi on Outlining a World Where Software Makers Are Liable For Flaws · · Score: 1

    You could also argue that defensive programming contributed to the AF447 crash, because from what I've read the stall warning turned off if the aircraft was flying too slow for a reliable angle of attack measurement, leading to the paradoxical result that increasing speed -- even though it was the correct thing to do -- caused the stall warning to come on as the inputs suddenly became valid.

    What I see here is an error condition that the user was not informed about. It's not defensive programming when you simply discard a critical error you successfully identified.

  7. Re:Traffic stops and such on FBI Leaves Cleared Names On Terrorist Watch List · · Score: 2

    In my country, DUI convicts who lose their license (which happens when they harm any person while in that state) just keep on driving without it... They can't lose it again, can they?

    They're driving under the assumption that they aren't held up by the police anyways (otherwise, they wouldn't do it while drunk).

  8. Re:Interesting... on HP Spent Over $80M To Get Rid of Its CEOs · · Score: 2

    Plenty of people think he (further?) ruined the company with cuts that made for nice short term financial statements and completely ignored the long term.

    Doesn't mean that he wasn't the best, compared to the others :)

  9. Re:Well there's your problem... on Aussie Researcher Cracks OS X Lion Passwords · · Score: 1

    I just checked, dscl is not a daemon and the suid bit is also not set. This issue seems to be at a lower level.

  10. Re:what on earth are you talking about on Could Open Source Investment Save HP? · · Score: 1

    Don't forget people working for 1/3 of what is payed in the so-called first world, and putting them into labor camps (sleeping in a small room with 5 other workers), where they can only go to their families once a year.

  11. Re:No, it won't replace installed games. on Game Devs Predict Death of Flash, Installed Games · · Score: 1

    Casual games and MMOs were never about pushing the limits, their requirements probably won't grow with the hardware. WoW is still going strong, with graphics competing with Quake 3 Arena.

    Of course, what is now known as AAA games have to be native code by definition, since they're all about getting as much technology into a game as possible on the given hardware.

  12. Re:No, it won't replace installed games. on Game Devs Predict Death of Flash, Installed Games · · Score: 1

    That behavior won't cause any problems when more than a tiny minority of users start doing it.

    That's what I thought when I heard about youtube for the first time. Video streaming via the Internet for everybody, for free? How the hell are they able to afford the bandwidth for it?

  13. Re:No, it won't replace installed games. on Game Devs Predict Death of Flash, Installed Games · · Score: 1

    The whole game itself weighs in at about 25 gigabytes, you still load about 2 gigabytes of stuff at once. That's way, way too much for even the fastest connections still.

    Yes, right now. When I started using the Internet at home, 10MB of data was an unimaginable amount that would have taken days to download.

    Sure, in about 10-15 years.

    Yes, that's what I understand under the term "long-term".

    But it won't be HTML5/JS then, and the claim here is all about HTML5/JS, ie. right now.

    Why not? HTML5 is claimed to be the last HTML version ever (since it will be updated piecewise instead of an all-encompassing version). Even so, HTML4 was released in 1997, and it's still widely in use.

  14. Re:No, it won't replace installed games. on Game Devs Predict Death of Flash, Installed Games · · Score: 1

    The hard truth is that your "sinister future" is exactly where we're heading. Casual games like Farmville and Doodle Jump are much easier (read: cheaper, lower risk) to produce than AAA titles, but the target market is several orders of magnitude larger (b/c the games are played by more than only the 15-35 years-old male demography), and so the income isn't any worse.

    I think the AAA titles will stay where they are now, but the casual games market has a huge growth potential. In the end, "computer game" will refer to casual games first in the public eye, and AAA titles second.

    Considering the bad publicity that AAA titles (read: mostly killing) generate, maybe that's not a bad thing.

  15. Re:No, it won't replace installed games. on Game Devs Predict Death of Flash, Installed Games · · Score: 1

    I mean, take for example WoW and Rift: even just the map data itself takes closer to one gigabyte of space, not to mention textures and all the data and textures needed by all the models in the world.

    You don't need them all at once. Just stream in the background.

    I think you missed the "long-term" part of the statement. If you have a computer that's 1000x as fast as the current top of the line and a 10GBit/s-connection to the internet, it's definitely possible.

    Back in my youth, games came on 1.44MB floppy disks, and I'm not even that old (I know that there are some here where the games fit into 32kB of memory). Nowadays, I could stream such a game without any issues and play in my browser. Oh wait, I actually can!

  16. Re:Windows 8 on Game Devs Predict Death of Flash, Installed Games · · Score: 1

    Was Apple ever expected to support Flash in Windows 8?

    Uh, what? :)

  17. Re:Don't stand between a congressman and your taxe on Tax Loopholes No Longer Patentable · · Score: 1

    A patent examiner I know told me that they get patent applications for devices that do things like this all of the time ;)

  18. Re:Don't stand between a congressman and your taxe on Tax Loopholes No Longer Patentable · · Score: 1

    Hmm the GIF patents expiring were a pretty big deal (but not due to the technological superiority, just because everyone had a lot of those files) and Apple's expired font hinting patents are still relevant as well, but those are the only ones I can remember, which is a pretty bad ratio for the number of software patents expiring all of the time.

  19. Re:Don't stand between a congressman and your taxe on Tax Loopholes No Longer Patentable · · Score: 1

    It wasn't hundreds of years, the time span was originally pretty short and got extended (20 years in the US now I believe). The issue in the IT sector is that after such a long time span, the inventions are irrelevant. Nobody cares about patents that are only applicable to 5MHz supercomputers nowadays.

  20. Re:Not very fast? on Hackers Break Browser SSL/TLS Encryption · · Score: 1

    At least with my bank, I can sign multiple transactions with a single OTP. If you can intercept the connection, you can insert another transfer into the list and then alter the HTML to not display that entry, but I'd still sign it along with the others I actually want to do.

  21. Re:quote from the article.... on Microsoft Taking Apple's Walled Garden Approach For Metro Apps · · Score: 1

    This tidbit is NOT like how apple does things.

    It is pretty much, if you consider that Win8 is a combination of the Mac OS X-concept (traditional desktop apps) with the iOS-concept (metro-style apps). Apple strictly separates the two, even in the development workflows.

    The one thing i hate about Apples walled garden is that I have to pay $99 a year to test an app on an actual device that I OWN.

    I can test my Mac apps on the Mac I own quite fine for free.

  22. Re:Out of their minds? on HTC Considering Buying Own OS · · Score: 1

    Yes, I know that one. You have to press three of those in a row to change the environment variables in Vista and 7. Annoying as hell for advanced users.

  23. Re:Al Gore wanted to restrict access to games on Why Aren't There More Civilians In Military Video Games? · · Score: 1

    Here's Fox "News", just last week, talking about how educational games such as Sim City are produced by a left wing conspiracy with the goal of frightening young children into protecting the environment

    If you want to argue with Fox, you've already lost :)

  24. Re:Out of their minds? on HTC Considering Buying Own OS · · Score: 1

    Samsung has since announced that it is still heavily developing its own Bada OS, and now HTC is talking of their own OS as well. Coincidence? Of course not!

    Its not that they will ditch Android, they wont, at least for now. But they need something there so that if Google ever play dodgy with Android, for example giving "Motorola" an unfair advantage, then they have something to fall back on.

    Yes, but without the app infrastructure, they have a steep hill to climb. How should they ever hope to get market acceptance without it?

  25. Re:Out of their minds? on HTC Considering Buying Own OS · · Score: 1

    It just uses the system-wide settings.