They could be pushing the absolute performance envelope, but the technology has been kept back by rules and regulations in order to improve competition. The sport is, afterall, about road racing and passing, even though there might not be a lot of passing at the moment.
My guess is that if all out development were allowed, with slick tires, unlimited aerodynamics, and prototype tech, there would be even less passing than there is now.
they aren't normally available street cars either
There are plenty of racing series based on stock cars. SpeedChannel has its own SpeedGT. The SCCA puts on many events. If you're looking for such a series, you have plenty of choices. F1 is what it has been for 50 years: a sport of pure race-bred machines that few can afford or even get close to.
Personally I don't really pay attention to the story. I have the DS and GBA episodes of Castlevania and mostly fly through the dialogue, only stopping if my next step appears to be outlined.
I dunno, I'm not very interested in the plot which already is pretty derivitive and bland. All I want from the series is good old side scrolling action.
I'm not so sure that those people even gave other products a passing glance, much less enough to make an informed choice. Their only concern during purchase is the color.
To say that everything out there pales in comparison to the iPod isn't very fair. The iPod has some usability shortcomings just as other players. I've owned the great 5GB Rio Carbon, and got a color iPod solely for the space. And I do miss the ability to bookmark a 5 hour mp3, start to play music in shuffle mode, then switch back to the bookmark, all without taking my Rio out of my pocket.
What's with the iPod only bookmarking "podcasts" and audiobooks, and not any old mp3 file?
What's with the iPod only having one shuffle option, and no option to shuffle based on genre, artist, etc?
So I don't think other players are getting their fair share of attention or respect. Maybe it's too much work to compare the available units to make a truly independant decision.
From what I understand, the study was completed a number of months ago. The RIAA/MPAA have been sitting on the numbers for all this time, not knowing whether to release them. On the one hand, it can help their lobby efforts by making them look the victim. On the other, it can put to shame all the anti piracy measures, all the lawsuits, etc.
It apparently caused a big rift within management on whether to release the numbers to the public, so I don't they were all that excited about the figures.
Sure, ThinkPads for years have been manufactured in the same places that other laptops are. But with Lenovo's purchase, the design and decision making would likely move from US engineers and designers and to Lenovo's.
Would that make a difference? I tend to think so. IBM didn't rely on the ThinkPads for most of its revenue. As a result, there was a slow cycle of development where proven things were kept in the laptop and it hadn't changed in many major ways for years. Still black, still the same awesome keyboard, still the trackpoint.
Now with Lenovo, you have a hardware company that is keen on outperforming its rivals and being the biggest PC supplier. I haven't been considering a new laptop purchase, but from what I've seen on Lenovo's website, they are already adding gimmicky things like white marks on the top to indicate where various ports are, making bulky wide screen models, etc. How long til the built-in multi card readers, and blue neon lights all around the case? The risk is that with a reliance on the ThinkPad brand, and a market share to grow, the T line will start undergoing very short developmental cycles with lenovo throwing in any new ideea they think up and seeing how it works out, breaking what makes ThinkPads ThinkPads. At that point, you might as well get an HP.
You know, for trying not to sound like flamebait, you did a pretty poor job.:P
I'm not comlaining about Google. Only the holier-than-thou light that many people on the Internet are putting Google in.
I did not hear the praises when Verizon refused to hand over personal, identifying information on its users to the RIAA which took down an IP from Kazaa. Verizon even went to court to protect that information. In my opinion that was a far more important event in the privacy and anonymity issue than this.
> huge part of their value as a company, and giving it away would be equivalent to suicide.
The huge value to Google is the algorythm to their searches, the seeking of news stories from various sources, locating businesses local to you and combining that with a map and driving directions, etc. It isn't in their Apache access log file.
From what I understand, the government asked for web search strings alone. No identifying information at all.
Google claims to be fighting the good fight of protecting their users' data, but how different is the data that the government wants, from the data the Google itself uses to comprise the various lists of most popular searches, the 'popular topics' are in news.google.com, etc? I'm not sure that I'd like my search to be part of such a public display. Is Google's users' data being user improperly in that case, too?
The way I see it is that Google is simply grandstanding. There have been some voices recently that Google has been getting too powerfull and encompassing. They have your email, they know what you search for, and they search your entire hard drive and call back home with their toolbar.
From what I understand, the government asked them for similar search data, with no identifying information, for their own statystical analysis. Is this Google's chance to get back to the good graces of the Internet's geeks, stick to their missions to "do no evil" and retain their image of the anti-corporation, the underdog, and the rebel, while trying to get back to their $150 billion market cap?
Yahoo fought hard the request from RIAA a while ago for identifying information of owners of IPs that they logged on Kazaa. In the end they lost and a court ordered them to provide such information. In this case, the information provided contained no identifying data. Only statystics on searches.
Now, if you put in identifying information on the web search, then that is your own folly. My startup page is on my own domain, which is comprised of my last name. You can be sure that I never pull up any pages from that startup page becase I don't want my domain -- and my last name as a result -- to pop up on various sites' Referrer field.
It is amazing to me that this discussion is even taking place. Has everyone lost common sense?
If you come home from a long commute, take off your headphones, your head is buzzing around, and your ears are ringing, it might be a sign that you've overused a product. It can be an iPod, it can be a jack hammer, it can be the clunking 45lb weights at your weight training job. At that point you recognize the symptoms, and either listen for shorter periods of time, lower the volume, or get ear plugs.
I never had a problem with Carpal Tunel with my PowerBook. But as soon as I switched to a ThinkPad, it hit me very hard. Should I have NOT bought that hand brace, and contnued to abuse my wrist, cursing IBM for making a product that is so damaging to me? It isn't IBM's job to tell me how I use their product, or even if I do at all. What happened to individual choice and responsability.
Let's hope they make this guy and his lawyer pay for the time that the judge and the lawyers for Apple spend on this ridiculous claim.
I think there is a difference between using electricity and wasting it. Ever take a walk in Times Square? You couldn't tell if it is day or night. Every skyscraper is lit up almost to its top. Earnst & Young have some electric billoard n the side of their building advertising their name. As if the people frequenting Times Square are really their core demographic.
And what about all these office buildings with millions of square feet of office space. The minions just leave the lights on overnight even through there probably isn't anyone inside.
You could argue that the billboards incease tourism and people are working all kinds of shifts at night. But I doubt that in reality any of this is neessary. Do we really need to use as much power it takes to light up a small town so that some people from Britain buy a stale, overpriced, $2 pretzel from a street vendor?
The prefix "Power" isn't necessarily tied to the CPU. When you look at the name Powerbook, you assume that it is for power users. Sure the prefix might have been born of the processor name, but from a practical standpoint, they didn't really have to change it.
I found that as your vision gets a bit worse, you compensate by lowering your forehead to get a better focus on the screen. This is doubly dangerous with laptops as your arms and the focal point are close to eachother. You put great strain on the back of your neck.
As a result of always using my laptop, the middle of my back would feel strained, and I would feel pressure on the top/middle of my chest and neck.
My hands were also suffering from CTS to the point of not being able to lie on my bed with hands behind my head without them getting the pins-and-needles literally 5 minutes later.
I wound up buying a 20" CRT and plugging in the laptop to it. I am also using a desk with adjustable height, and have it at a nice 31". Additionally I have a monitor stand that is about 6 inches, so that my eyes are on the level of the bottom half of the monitor. I can also sit upright with my back straight, and shoulderblades flat.
All these things are mentioned in any computer ergonomics study and they help greatly.
The upshot is that I can always change up and use my laptop for a while, so I'm not stuck in the same position or with the same hardware. And CRT monitors are dirt cheap now and you should be able to get a decent one for under $200.
As for the eyes, any doctor will recommend that you rest your eyes regularly. Eyes are muscules. If they are forced into one position, they'll find it harder to change positions to focus on far away objects. I'm not sure what the concensus is, but try to take a minute break a few times per hour. As far as reading, try what an above poster said: print articles out. Just use the smallest type you can, and possibly lay the text out in 3 columns, so that short sentences don't waste the width of a line. You can paste article text into Word and make a 3 column, newspaper type layout.
I remember drawing the map for the original Zelda. Many "squares" were special in that they warped you around, and it was pretty disorienting because you didn't know if you moved to the next square, or if you were repeating the same square. So I pretty much abandoned the map drawing at that poing.
The impression that I get is that the DS has a lot of extra "bulk" that it should be able to easily shed.
Maybe use a thinner, stronger plastic compound. Reshuffle the insides so that the base can be made slimmer. And I am sure they would be able to make the top screen shell thinner.
The DS looks too much like a toy, partly because of the bulky plasticky look, versus the PSP.
Not sure if you noticed, but if you go to any store with a DS demo unit, it is at like 3 feet off the ground. For a kid, it is probably the perfect placement, but for a 6'2" guy like me, who is also wearing boots, it is placed impossibly low.
Similarly with the buttons, you have to remember who Nintendo's main audience is and who they are targeting.
Having said that, I saw at a game shop a kit that, among other things, contains black handle type things that attach to the back and serve to extend the sides of the DS. So that might be something one might wanna look at.
Page 1:
Sports game
Sports game
Sports game
Sports game
Page 2:
Sports game
Sports game
Racing game
First Person Shooter -- probably a mistake
This is a trend that caused me to lose interest in console gaming. Pretty happy with my DS now, especially for the 2D GBA platformers and shooters. And thank god for the PC and the eclectic selection of games available.
The article mentioned that some of the games had new features, and felt more immersive. But that should be expected with any version of any new game, no matter whether the graphics have tripple the resolution. I don't really see pixel-pushing as a revolutionary step, the way the PS was. It's just an upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
The cars don't break any records
They could be pushing the absolute performance envelope, but the technology has been kept back by rules and regulations in order to improve competition. The sport is, afterall, about road racing and passing, even though there might not be a lot of passing at the moment.
My guess is that if all out development were allowed, with slick tires, unlimited aerodynamics, and prototype tech, there would be even less passing than there is now.
they aren't normally available street cars either
There are plenty of racing series based on stock cars. SpeedChannel has its own SpeedGT. The SCCA puts on many events. If you're looking for such a series, you have plenty of choices. F1 is what it has been for 50 years: a sport of pure race-bred machines that few can afford or even get close to.
Why look at one meteorite up there in the sky, when you can look at two, right there on her chest, in high resolution!
Personally I don't really pay attention to the story. I have the DS and GBA episodes of Castlevania and mostly fly through the dialogue, only stopping if my next step appears to be outlined.
I dunno, I'm not very interested in the plot which already is pretty derivitive and bland. All I want from the series is good old side scrolling action.
> Those people bought iPods.
I'm not so sure that those people even gave other products a passing glance, much less enough to make an informed choice. Their only concern during purchase is the color.
To say that everything out there pales in comparison to the iPod isn't very fair. The iPod has some usability shortcomings just as other players. I've owned the great 5GB Rio Carbon, and got a color iPod solely for the space. And I do miss the ability to bookmark a 5 hour mp3, start to play music in shuffle mode, then switch back to the bookmark, all without taking my Rio out of my pocket.
What's with the iPod only bookmarking "podcasts" and audiobooks, and not any old mp3 file?
What's with the iPod only having one shuffle option, and no option to shuffle based on genre, artist, etc?
So I don't think other players are getting their fair share of attention or respect. Maybe it's too much work to compare the available units to make a truly independant decision.
Being black doesn't seem to have helped PSP sales on account of the black iPod video and nano being released recently.
From what I understand, the study was completed a number of months ago. The RIAA/MPAA have been sitting on the numbers for all this time, not knowing whether to release them. On the one hand, it can help their lobby efforts by making them look the victim. On the other, it can put to shame all the anti piracy measures, all the lawsuits, etc.
It apparently caused a big rift within management on whether to release the numbers to the public, so I don't they were all that excited about the figures.
Can't avoid going off on a tangent...
How do you like Tetris DS? Does it have a lot of replayability? Does it pull you into trying to beat the high score?
Rumor has it that Apple will be releasing a 13.3" widescreen laptop soon. Not sure myself, so check out the rumor sites.
Sure, ThinkPads for years have been manufactured in the same places that other laptops are. But with Lenovo's purchase, the design and decision making would likely move from US engineers and designers and to Lenovo's.
Would that make a difference? I tend to think so. IBM didn't rely on the ThinkPads for most of its revenue. As a result, there was a slow cycle of development where proven things were kept in the laptop and it hadn't changed in many major ways for years. Still black, still the same awesome keyboard, still the trackpoint.
Now with Lenovo, you have a hardware company that is keen on outperforming its rivals and being the biggest PC supplier. I haven't been considering a new laptop purchase, but from what I've seen on Lenovo's website, they are already adding gimmicky things like white marks on the top to indicate where various ports are, making bulky wide screen models, etc. How long til the built-in multi card readers, and blue neon lights all around the case? The risk is that with a reliance on the ThinkPad brand, and a market share to grow, the T line will start undergoing very short developmental cycles with lenovo throwing in any new ideea they think up and seeing how it works out, breaking what makes ThinkPads ThinkPads. At that point, you might as well get an HP.
Or "I'm too poor to afford it myself."
You know, for trying not to sound like flamebait, you did a pretty poor job. :P
I'm not comlaining about Google. Only the holier-than-thou light that many people on the Internet are putting Google in.
I did not hear the praises when Verizon refused to hand over personal, identifying information on its users to the RIAA which took down an IP from Kazaa. Verizon even went to court to protect that information. In my opinion that was a far more important event in the privacy and anonymity issue than this.
> huge part of their value as a company, and giving it away would be equivalent to suicide.
The huge value to Google is the algorythm to their searches, the seeking of news stories from various sources, locating businesses local to you and combining that with a map and driving directions, etc. It isn't in their Apache access log file.
Or am I just cynikal?
From what I understand, the government asked for web search strings alone. No identifying information at all.
Google claims to be fighting the good fight of protecting their users' data, but how different is the data that the government wants, from the data the Google itself uses to comprise the various lists of most popular searches, the 'popular topics' are in news.google.com, etc? I'm not sure that I'd like my search to be part of such a public display. Is Google's users' data being user improperly in that case, too?
The way I see it is that Google is simply grandstanding. There have been some voices recently that Google has been getting too powerfull and encompassing. They have your email, they know what you search for, and they search your entire hard drive and call back home with their toolbar.
From what I understand, the government asked them for similar search data, with no identifying information, for their own statystical analysis. Is this Google's chance to get back to the good graces of the Internet's geeks, stick to their missions to "do no evil" and retain their image of the anti-corporation, the underdog, and the rebel, while trying to get back to their $150 billion market cap?
Yahoo fought hard the request from RIAA a while ago for identifying information of owners of IPs that they logged on Kazaa. In the end they lost and a court ordered them to provide such information. In this case, the information provided contained no identifying data. Only statystics on searches.
Now, if you put in identifying information on the web search, then that is your own folly. My startup page is on my own domain, which is comprised of my last name. You can be sure that I never pull up any pages from that startup page becase I don't want my domain -- and my last name as a result -- to pop up on various sites' Referrer field.
It is amazing to me that this discussion is even taking place. Has everyone lost common sense?
If you come home from a long commute, take off your headphones, your head is buzzing around, and your ears are ringing, it might be a sign that you've overused a product. It can be an iPod, it can be a jack hammer, it can be the clunking 45lb weights at your weight training job. At that point you recognize the symptoms, and either listen for shorter periods of time, lower the volume, or get ear plugs.
I never had a problem with Carpal Tunel with my PowerBook. But as soon as I switched to a ThinkPad, it hit me very hard. Should I have NOT bought that hand brace, and contnued to abuse my wrist, cursing IBM for making a product that is so damaging to me? It isn't IBM's job to tell me how I use their product, or even if I do at all. What happened to individual choice and responsability.
Let's hope they make this guy and his lawyer pay for the time that the judge and the lawyers for Apple spend on this ridiculous claim.
... what are you saying?
I wish someone would port the Tex Murphy series to the DS, sans the video and most of the audio. Those games are some of my favorite overall.
But one can only dream.
I think there is a difference between using electricity and wasting it. Ever take a walk in Times Square? You couldn't tell if it is day or night. Every skyscraper is lit up almost to its top. Earnst & Young have some electric billoard n the side of their building advertising their name. As if the people frequenting Times Square are really their core demographic.
And what about all these office buildings with millions of square feet of office space. The minions just leave the lights on overnight even through there probably isn't anyone inside.
You could argue that the billboards incease tourism and people are working all kinds of shifts at night. But I doubt that in reality any of this is neessary. Do we really need to use as much power it takes to light up a small town so that some people from Britain buy a stale, overpriced, $2 pretzel from a street vendor?
The past few months actually. And they've even figured out how to dualboot OSX with Windows, through I haven't delved into the details myself.
The prefix "Power" isn't necessarily tied to the CPU. When you look at the name Powerbook, you assume that it is for power users. Sure the prefix might have been born of the processor name, but from a practical standpoint, they didn't really have to change it.
I found that as your vision gets a bit worse, you compensate by lowering your forehead to get a better focus on the screen. This is doubly dangerous with laptops as your arms and the focal point are close to eachother. You put great strain on the back of your neck.
As a result of always using my laptop, the middle of my back would feel strained, and I would feel pressure on the top/middle of my chest and neck.
My hands were also suffering from CTS to the point of not being able to lie on my bed with hands behind my head without them getting the pins-and-needles literally 5 minutes later.
I wound up buying a 20" CRT and plugging in the laptop to it. I am also using a desk with adjustable height, and have it at a nice 31". Additionally I have a monitor stand that is about 6 inches, so that my eyes are on the level of the bottom half of the monitor. I can also sit upright with my back straight, and shoulderblades flat.
All these things are mentioned in any computer ergonomics study and they help greatly.
The upshot is that I can always change up and use my laptop for a while, so I'm not stuck in the same position or with the same hardware. And CRT monitors are dirt cheap now and you should be able to get a decent one for under $200.
As for the eyes, any doctor will recommend that you rest your eyes regularly. Eyes are muscules. If they are forced into one position, they'll find it harder to change positions to focus on far away objects. I'm not sure what the concensus is, but try to take a minute break a few times per hour. As far as reading, try what an above poster said: print articles out. Just use the smallest type you can, and possibly lay the text out in 3 columns, so that short sentences don't waste the width of a line. You can paste article text into Word and make a 3 column, newspaper type layout.
I remember drawing the map for the original Zelda. Many "squares" were special in that they warped you around, and it was pretty disorienting because you didn't know if you moved to the next square, or if you were repeating the same square. So I pretty much abandoned the map drawing at that poing.
The impression that I get is that the DS has a lot of extra "bulk" that it should be able to easily shed.
Maybe use a thinner, stronger plastic compound. Reshuffle the insides so that the base can be made slimmer. And I am sure they would be able to make the top screen shell thinner.
The DS looks too much like a toy, partly because of the bulky plasticky look, versus the PSP.
Not sure if you noticed, but if you go to any store with a DS demo unit, it is at like 3 feet off the ground. For a kid, it is probably the perfect placement, but for a 6'2" guy like me, who is also wearing boots, it is placed impossibly low.
Similarly with the buttons, you have to remember who Nintendo's main audience is and who they are targeting.
Having said that, I saw at a game shop a kit that, among other things, contains black handle type things that attach to the back and serve to extend the sides of the DS. So that might be something one might wanna look at.
Page 1:
Sports game
Sports game
Sports game
Sports game
Page 2:
Sports game
Sports game
Racing game
First Person Shooter -- probably a mistake
This is a trend that caused me to lose interest in console gaming. Pretty happy with my DS now, especially for the 2D GBA platformers and shooters. And thank god for the PC and the eclectic selection of games available.
The article mentioned that some of the games had new features, and felt more immersive. But that should be expected with any version of any new game, no matter whether the graphics have tripple the resolution. I don't really see pixel-pushing as a revolutionary step, the way the PS was. It's just an upgrade.