I think that the revolutionary change that Apple brings to this situation is the accessibility. For Palm, and WinMob, a PC was usually necessary to install new applications. (Not sure about BlackBerry, Symbian, or the other common Phone OS environments.)
For an iPhone user it's 2 taps and maybe a password, and boom, there's your app. Microsoft has obviously seen what this means for users; they have an app store coming. Google made it a launch feature for Android too, and IIRC even Nokia will be getting into the act for Symbian.
IMO The current crop at 1024x600 is useable, if not ideal. Like the OP implied, if I have to do anything resembling heavy lifting, I'll tether my phone to my Aspire One, and do the job from a "real" machine. Much like how my phone is always at my hip when I leave the house, the A1 is small enough that I usually just grab it on the way out of the house and toss it in the back seat of the car, just-in-case. (And in lieu of my much larger, but much more capable ASUS notebook.)
But 90% of my mobile web use is fine from the phone itself. The A1 still isn't really usable standing upright, or any place where I can't locate a surface on which to place it.
Ya know, a 15 inch screen sure is nice when I've got a place to sit. And yeah, it does provide a nicer browsing experience than my little WinMob phone.
But firing up my notebook is not at all as convenient or quick for doing a quick price check, whipping off a one or two line e-mail, checking a quick headline, checking movie showtimes, or doing a restaurant search. Even given Opera for WinMob's slower render times (to speak nothing of Pocket IE which is slower, or Safari which appears to be significantly faster) I can still get most MOBILE tasks done in less time than it takes your typical notebook PC to finish boot device detection.
Apple users might get there quicker from sleep with a macbook, and I know how much y'all love your macs, but even the staunchest of fanboys isn't gonna lug around a 2lb air where an 8oz iPhone would do the job. More to the point, the macbook isn't a constantly connected device either; it'll need a data card or wifi to get there.
Different needs, different users. iPhone users obviously value portability over browser experience. (Being a longtime WinMob user, I don't necessarily agree with the device choice, but I agree with the sentiment...)
But hey, thanks for assuming that our mobile data needs and wants are nothing more than "ooh shiny thing."
- DS apps cost a heck of a lot more than your typical iPhone app. Perceived value alone will account for more usage of most DS games. - DS apps can be traded in for credit, or even returned to some retailers if sub-par. AFAIK you can't do that with the appstore. - Barring signal range, the iPhone is constantly connected. The DS needs wifi to get online. (Yes, iTouch, blah blah...) Since it's so easy to get AppStore products, the perceived investment is lower.
All that aside, this might also just indicate your taste in gaming. I own all of the current and previous generation of consoles, and more than a smattering of handheld devices, including a DSLite, and an iPod Touch. And I can say in all truthfulness that when it comes to hours spent gaming per console, I've spent more time gaming on my DSLite than I have on all the other systems.
I'd be able to say all the other systems COMBINED, but the number is skewed......because I'm on my second DSLite having worn out the controls on the first one. (I've got the parts and it's scheduled for a refurb as soon as I get around to grabbing my soldering iron.) IMHO, that says more about me and my gaming habits than it does about the viability of any of the particular platforms. I like to squeeze gaming into times between other tasks. I'll sneak a few minutes in while I'm on the can, while waiting for meetings to start, while in line, or when traffic grinds to a halt on the commute. I'm not however a casual gamer; I like a little more meat to my games.
The DS offers just the right combo of portable convenience and depth to its gaming that it wins my attention. Most of the iPhone games I've tried have been just a little to lite for my tastes.
Now all that said, if Nintendo has proven anything with it's Wii, it's that there's quite an audience of people who like to play lighter, more casual fare. Apple is doing a great job of capturing large swaths of that market. IMHO, these are also folks who are just as likely to move right on to the next neat game. (That's merely my observation, not an indictment or accusation.) And if so, so what?
Apple has been paid. The developer has been paid. The user received the application. By my standards, this is the best possible conclusion!
All the reports I've been reading on this topic seem to judge this to be a bad thing; I'm not sure it's bad at all, merely a reflection of the tastes of the iPhone community. The parent poster likes his games on PS2, with all the advantages (complexity, control, graphics) that it confers. I prefer a little more meat than the iPhone, but place portability at a premium. iPhone users obviously like things fresh and new.
Isn't it nice that this market is big enough to fill all our needs?
I can see the video folder on your media server...
"2006.07.21 - Cancun vacation" "2006.11 - Winter Storm: The tree comes down" "Pron" "2007.04.15 - Cops beat me to a pulp" "2007.06.31 - Mikey's first piano recital"
WE already HAVE the technology to grow plants on the moon. We have the technology to grow plants in just about any reasonable medium. It's called hydroponics.
Now quit worrying about whether or not we can use moon rocks for growing medium, and start looking for moon ice we can render liquid.:-)
Last number I heard, the dumb/smart bomb ratio was at 50/50 and rising. Correct. As we USE more and more of the conventional ordinance, and replace it with JDAM/Smart ordinance, of course the ratio will go up.:-(
The area that went through the richer white areas (I476 "The blue route") were bogged down for decades. The only difference there was that the white suburbanite residents of the blue route's purposed route could afford lawyers. And they STILL got a damned pittance for their properties compared to market value.
(Disclosure: I'm a Springfield (DELCO) PA resident.)
Exactly. Who would possibly want this -- do I want the channel changing when my wife walks in the room and in front of the couch? Well *I* want this, specifically to change to a channel of your wife walking in to the room and changing in front of the couch.:-)
That would be like insurance companies wanting auto insurance to be mandatory. Oh heaven forbid we want people to be financially responsible for their actions!
I've driven without a license. I've driven on expired registrations.
But I've never once driven without insurance.
Sure, you wanna skip out on your own medical? Then don't cry to me when you lose a leg in an accident. But if you hit me, you're damn well gonna pay. And if you can't afford to do it, then you can't afford to be on the damn road, and AFAIC, the government ought to damn well take you off the road.
No it's not that simple. You have to know whether or not the frame in question that you're selecting is a keyframe. If it's not, you're getting only the updated pixels, not the whole frame.
Worse yet, if it's not a valid keyframe, you'll need to track back to the previous keyframe, or forward to the next one, neither of which is a simple matter, especially when the copy subsystem is locking portions of the file.
And that doesn't even take into account malformed container files, or non-standard codecs. Some particularly badly encoded mpeg4 variants,and some of the streaming optimized video don't even have keyframes. How do you expect to get a meaningful thumbnail out of that?
Now if *I* were writing the thumbnail routines, I'd have them generated AFTER the copy completed. , not in the middle of I/O intensive operations. IMHO, that's the real WTF factor here.
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. And they do have voice recognition -- just doesn't work that well... but I'm not sure that's due to slow chips. Having worked with Dragon, and Microsoft's new Vista Voice Recognition, I'll go out on a limb and say that chips were a contributing factor in our situation at least. Granted it wasn't top of the line hardware at the time (Pentium M (Banias) 1.7, 2GB) but a system that was idling around 30% CPU utilization would spike to 100% any time we gave it voice commands.
Are you keeping edible varieties? And if so, how often do you harvest?
I've got a couple of cacti at home, but none at the office. The only plants in my cube are cuttings from our leased philodendrons, and a lonely aloe plant grown from cuttings of the one that lived with me at my last consulting job.
As opposed to being inducted, subjected, injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected for the school-for-learning-to-talk-through-your-teeth? So you came to talk about the draft?:-)
As a Drexel University alumni, I still have the same access to all of their library materials, including the print and online journals that the current students do.
The difference is that the glass catfish you linked to is a complete PITA to breed comparatively speaking, while the zebra fish engages in free (and prolific) love.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious, are you still on the same device?
I think that the revolutionary change that Apple brings to this situation is the accessibility. For Palm, and WinMob, a PC was usually necessary to install new applications. (Not sure about BlackBerry, Symbian, or the other common Phone OS environments.)
For an iPhone user it's 2 taps and maybe a password, and boom, there's your app. Microsoft has obviously seen what this means for users; they have an app store coming. Google made it a launch feature for Android too, and IIRC even Nokia will be getting into the act for Symbian.
IMO The current crop at 1024x600 is useable, if not ideal. Like the OP implied, if I have to do anything resembling heavy lifting, I'll tether my phone to my Aspire One, and do the job from a "real" machine. Much like how my phone is always at my hip when I leave the house, the A1 is small enough that I usually just grab it on the way out of the house and toss it in the back seat of the car, just-in-case. (And in lieu of my much larger, but much more capable ASUS notebook.)
But 90% of my mobile web use is fine from the phone itself. The A1 still isn't really usable standing upright, or any place where I can't locate a surface on which to place it.
Ya know, a 15 inch screen sure is nice when I've got a place to sit. And yeah, it does provide a nicer browsing experience than my little WinMob phone.
But firing up my notebook is not at all as convenient or quick for doing a quick price check, whipping off a one or two line e-mail, checking a quick headline, checking movie showtimes, or doing a restaurant search. Even given Opera for WinMob's slower render times (to speak nothing of Pocket IE which is slower, or Safari which appears to be significantly faster) I can still get most MOBILE tasks done in less time than it takes your typical notebook PC to finish boot device detection.
Apple users might get there quicker from sleep with a macbook, and I know how much y'all love your macs, but even the staunchest of fanboys isn't gonna lug around a 2lb air where an 8oz iPhone would do the job. More to the point, the macbook isn't a constantly connected device either; it'll need a data card or wifi to get there.
Different needs, different users. iPhone users obviously value portability over browser experience. (Being a longtime WinMob user, I don't necessarily agree with the device choice, but I agree with the sentiment...)
But hey, thanks for assuming that our mobile data needs and wants are nothing more than "ooh shiny thing."
Never heard of blackface?
But seriously, wasn't there a Fox show about just this sort of "Racial Trading Places" kinda thing recently?
Somebody please mod the parent up? :-)
Several fundamental differences:
- DS apps cost a heck of a lot more than your typical iPhone app. Perceived value alone will account for more usage of most DS games.
- DS apps can be traded in for credit, or even returned to some retailers if sub-par. AFAIK you can't do that with the appstore.
- Barring signal range, the iPhone is constantly connected. The DS needs wifi to get online. (Yes, iTouch, blah blah...) Since it's so easy to get AppStore products, the perceived investment is lower.
All that aside, this might also just indicate your taste in gaming. I own all of the current and previous generation of consoles, and more than a smattering of handheld devices, including a DSLite, and an iPod Touch. And I can say in all truthfulness that when it comes to hours spent gaming per console, I've spent more time gaming on my DSLite than I have on all the other systems.
I'd be able to say all the other systems COMBINED, but the number is skewed... ...because I'm on my second DSLite having worn out the controls on the first one. (I've got the parts and it's scheduled for a refurb as soon as I get around to grabbing my soldering iron.) IMHO, that says more about me and my gaming habits than it does about the viability of any of the particular platforms. I like to squeeze gaming into times between other tasks. I'll sneak a few minutes in while I'm on the can, while waiting for meetings to start, while in line, or when traffic grinds to a halt on the commute. I'm not however a casual gamer; I like a little more meat to my games.
The DS offers just the right combo of portable convenience and depth to its gaming that it wins my attention. Most of the iPhone games I've tried have been just a little to lite for my tastes.
Now all that said, if Nintendo has proven anything with it's Wii, it's that there's quite an audience of people who like to play lighter, more casual fare. Apple is doing a great job of capturing large swaths of that market. IMHO, these are also folks who are just as likely to move right on to the next neat game. (That's merely my observation, not an indictment or accusation.) And if so, so what?
Apple has been paid. The developer has been paid. The user received the application. By my standards, this is the best possible conclusion!
All the reports I've been reading on this topic seem to judge this to be a bad thing; I'm not sure it's bad at all, merely a reflection of the tastes of the iPhone community. The parent poster likes his games on PS2, with all the advantages (complexity, control, graphics) that it confers. I prefer a little more meat than the iPhone, but place portability at a premium. iPhone users obviously like things fresh and new.
Isn't it nice that this market is big enough to fill all our needs?
Your problem however is exactly what SanDisk likes to hear. :-)
I can see the video folder on your media server...
"2006.07.21 - Cancun vacation"
"2006.11 - Winter Storm: The tree comes down"
"Pron"
"2007.04.15 - Cops beat me to a pulp"
"2007.06.31 - Mikey's first piano recital"
Barbarian Archers. S'okie. I've got a nice stack of Combat I Swordsmen coming down the road in short order.
WE already HAVE the technology to grow plants on the moon. We have the technology to grow plants in just about any reasonable medium. It's called hydroponics.
:-)
Now quit worrying about whether or not we can use moon rocks for growing medium, and start looking for moon ice we can render liquid.
The nanny state? I'll pass, thx. But a city sized inflatable jumper room? BRING IT ON! :-)
(Disclosure: I'm a Springfield (DELCO) PA resident.)
I've driven without a license. I've driven on expired registrations.
But I've never once driven without insurance.
Sure, you wanna skip out on your own medical? Then don't cry to me when you lose a leg in an accident. But if you hit me, you're damn well gonna pay. And if you can't afford to do it, then you can't afford to be on the damn road, and AFAIC, the government ought to damn well take you off the road.
I can't even begin to count how many times I've gone on site for a job, and seen people stretching 4:3 images on a 16:9 screen.
No it's not that simple. You have to know whether or not the frame in question that you're selecting is a keyframe. If it's not, you're getting only the updated pixels, not the whole frame.
Worse yet, if it's not a valid keyframe, you'll need to track back to the previous keyframe, or forward to the next one, neither of which is a simple matter, especially when the copy subsystem is locking portions of the file.
And that doesn't even take into account malformed container files, or non-standard codecs. Some particularly badly encoded mpeg4 variants,and some of the streaming optimized video don't even have keyframes. How do you expect to get a meaningful thumbnail out of that?
Now if *I* were writing the thumbnail routines, I'd have them generated AFTER the copy completed. , not in the middle of I/O intensive operations. IMHO, that's the real WTF factor here.
Are you keeping edible varieties? And if so, how often do you harvest?
I've got a couple of cacti at home, but none at the office. The only plants in my cube are cuttings from our leased philodendrons, and a lonely aloe plant grown from cuttings of the one that lived with me at my last consulting job.
As a Drexel University alumni, I still have the same access to all of their library materials, including the print and online journals that the current students do.
Is this not the norm at other universities?
The problem is, the crayfish would also quickly eliminate any and all plantlife in my tank.
http://limitofx.com/
I keep my tank very heavily planted, so that would be just too sad!
I lurk there from time to time.
:-)
I also keep a pretty healthy bluegill, who gets a pretty steady diet of kitchen scraps.
The difference is that the glass catfish you linked to is a complete PITA to breed comparatively speaking, while the zebra fish engages in free (and prolific) love.