If the rumor is indeed true that a custom firmware has been used to get some people free stuff, take note how Sony has handled the situation -- A small, small portion of people (the few that run custom firmware, and the fewer that run this particular custom firmware) are getting a few free (virtual) goods, and they shut down the entire network, screwing 100% of their customers.
It's Sony's custom.
Think about it. GeoHot did a mostly theoretical demonstration of a possible flaw in the PS3 hardware (RAM glitching - something that's almost impossible to protect against at the consumer level). It was unreliable, it didn't work 100%, and it required special hardware and physical modification to your PS3. But showing the demo once, Sony decided OtherOS was a security risk and removed it on all consoles afterwards.
All for a tiny hard to use and accomplish hack. Even if it was put in modchip form somehow it would still not work 100%.
For that, they remove OtherOS. Because it "might" lead to piracy.
To top it off, the PS3 security was broken not using OtherOS (it was removed, remember?) but using some other vulnerability by guys trying to get OtherOS back, leaving the entire system broken.
So no, Sony overreacting isn't unusual. And sometimes the skilled people who'll hack your hardware anyways should be given their due. Microsoft learned it for the original Xbox (they were given ample opportunity to allow Linux on it, otherwise they'd have to use a vulnerability which was kept secret until Microsoft denied their request, at which point it was public and the pirates then took the next step at enabling piracy via the vulnerability).
Considering these e-mail addresses are meant for communication with the government, I see no problem with them being hosted by the government. Just do all your normal e-mailling with a regular provider and communicate with the government using either your own e-mail address or the government-hosted one. They could spy all they want; all e-mail in these boxes is either from or to them anyway.
Or consider it's Malaysia, and they're a pretty religious (Islam) lot as well. It's could very well be a stepping stone to full on email surveillance. You can use this email, or your own email, doesn't matter either way. The government will just introduce a law saying all email must go through them and all the ISPs will comply.
We talk about the Great Firewall of China, but many other Asian countries have their own firewalls and such things, and authoritatian governments. We just don't hear too much about them because for the most part, the people are happy enough and things run well. (Well, the other thing is they tend to nip opposition in the bud. A political "opposition" leader getting a bit too much sway with things? Fabricate false charges of homosexuality...)
The "free market" you describe is not what you think. Having a government-set monopoly almost guarantees that the markets will need to be regulated.
No, remember one of the goals of a business is monopoly. How they get that monopoly is irrelevant. With governments around, having a government set monopoly is one of the nirvanas for a free-market capitalist.
Of course, in a more sane world where people want regulation to protect them from the evil side of free markets, yes, a government-granted monopoly needs a set of conditions to regulate that monopoly.
If you want to see what happens in the absence, take a look north to Canada. Without government intervention, you get cable companies that require you to buy *their* cable boxes to watch their programming (they refuse to suppose boxes that weren't sold by them, nevermind not supporting CableCARD or any sort of thing that'll allow third-party devices onto "their" network). They strangle internet services to avoid having Netflix etc. compete with their core business (Rogers reduced their caps, and UBB isn't dead yet), yadda yadda yadda.
And let's not forget the huge telecommunications companies - Rogers, Bell and Shaw, ownt he whole stack of content creation (they own channels and stations), and content distribution (satellite, cable, phone lines).
Hell, when one of our media companies (content creation) shut down, it was sold off quicker than the whole Comcast-NBC merger. IIRC, they went bankrupt after Comcast announced its merger and the government looked into it, and the whole thing was done before the US DOJ released its conditions for the Comcast-NBC merger.
Yes, oddly Canada is an example of what happens in the content industry minus all those pesky FCC and FTC rules.
The solution, whether you switch now or in the future is to have a road map which outlines the risks and the steps. One of the simplest approaches is simply to start with the intranet border, concentrating on stuff in the DMZ, such as public facing webservers and using a proxy server to allow systems on your IPv4 intranet to to access external IPv6 base web servers. You won't ever eliminate risk, so the best thing to do is to find out how to minimise it.
And that's the problem. Everyone doing the transition is imagining a world where end-to-end connectivity is back in vogue again like it was in the late 90s. Active development of such things like NAT-PT and other v4-to-v6 gateways is discouraged.
The problem is IPv6 adoption relies on everyone changing their end node devices at once. Back in the 90s, when everyone was using a PC this could just mean a small upgrade to the network stack. These days, when you literally have everything from toasters to supercomputers with IP stacks, it's not so easy.
And yet, I can guarantee you even if everything in the world gets a publicly routable IPv6 address, we still won't have end-to-end connectivity. We'll have ISP firewalling all but maybe one IP address (to prevent accidentally exposing other PCs, you see, and you can buy additional IPv6 routable addresses at $5/month. And blocking everything but::1 is trivial at any level - additional IPs get you additional prefixes). We'll have firewalls at the inter-intranet borders. We'll have firewalls on the machines. End-to-end connectivity was broken before NAT offered simplistic "firewalling".
The easiest way to speed IPv6 adoption is to trivially implement something like NAT-PT in a box, and package it it so I can run down to Best Buy or whatever, buy a router, and plop it in place of my existing home router. I don't have to mess with re-IP'ing anything at home, I shouldn't even have to care if I'm accessing sites via IPv4 or IPv6 and my PCs don't have to care if they're IPv4-only, IPv6-only, or IPv4/v6 dual stack (a number of issues are related to dual-stack implementations).
And oh yeah, I want IPv6 NAT. I don't care for the half a million IPv6 addresses on my network. I want my router to be FC00::1, my PCs to take on a range within there. Just like my router is 192.168.1.1. I shouldn't have to know there's a link-local at some random huge garbage of an address, that my ISP has given me some other huge garbage of an address. Just a nice simple IPv6 address that I can access every PC on my network, and my PCs on my network can use to access the internet. Otherwise finding that troublesome PC can be a PITA since the addresses to most people is basically a random number. Might as well just use a SHA-1 hash - it makes as most sense to them.
believe consoles have it ass-backwards. i think their licensed development model, in its entirety, is retarded. i say we let consumers pay full price for the hardware and not have developers subsidize them. then, we just let anyone develop for them. it would seem that the established publishing houses would not like that very much. if we can blur the lines between pc and consoles going one way, why not the other way, too? would you prefer os vendors to start charging development fees? goose, gander, etc.
OS vendors used to charge development fees. On Unix, nonetheless, too. Want a C compiler with your new hardware? $$$. Want an assembler/linker? $$$. The FSF didn't help much because they only shipped sources, or for $5000, you could maybe possibly get binaries.
Heck, Apple was one of the few commercial OS vendors to ship a full development environment in the box. Microsoft quickly followed with Visual Studio Express.
As for your console ass-backwards argument - neither the Xbox, Wii, nor PS3 are the most popular gaming device on the market today. Your perfect console does exist, and it's called a "PC". Developers don't subsidize them, consumers pay full price for hardware, and anyone can (and does) develop for them. Heck, there's a choice of API sets as well.
PC gaming market is huge, too. And if you target 5 year old hardware like consoles, you can be reasonably well assured that most recent PCs can play it.
Okay, I didn't read your links, but is there evidence of your previously claimed assault by the U.S. somewhere in there?
The CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) is made up primarily of the big 3 US labels. The Canadian labels have withdrawn from CRIA a few years ago after CRIA expressed interest in suing music pirates. CRIA's also the big sponsor of the Canadian DMCA (which thankfully is kept out because of minority governments and elections).
When the Canadian labels have withdrawn from a Canadian trade group and left it mostly represented by American interests...
Anything that wakes up the phone (phone call, incoming SMS, alarm, etc) probably also causes the data to be dumped to the database. Which can explain odd flashes of location information here and there.
Still waiting for an Apple statement on why (is it a bug in the opt-in? why?), but there are some things that just a bit of rational thinking would do about this...
First - it can't use GPS - otherwise your battery will be dead in a few hours. So its location mechanism must be non-GPS based. Common reports are that it's based on the towers your phone attaches to.
Second - it's probably not recording all the time. Again, your battery will be dead way too quickly because powering up the main CPU to record the data down into the filesystem database takes a lot of power. It's probably recording the times you actually are using the phone - playing music, watching movies, surfing, using an app, etc. Locked and quiescent, it's probably not recording anything.
This would explain the widly different results people are seeing. Some people get tons of missing tracks because their phone's in standby state, and any towers you pass by are lost.
Others see their every move because their phones are playing MP3s and other things, where the main CPU is alive and can do these things.
Still doesn't make it right, though. But some food for thought on why people seem to have wildly different results.
Wasn't Virgin Internet one of the few ISPs in the UK that is definitely into the 3-strikes thing and all that? Plus, actively managing traffic to prioritize paying content producers?
Personally, I'd like them to make the lectures available cheaply on DVD or available via download; because the bigger issue, for me, is I'd like to watch them when I don't have net access, such as an 8 hour plane flight.
Or more fundamentally, in a format usable by portable devices. Like tablets.
These days, I save the long YouTube videos for my iPad where instead of sitting down at the computer watching it, I can rest somewhere else with the iPad on my lap and watch the video in comfort. Yeah, I could also watch them on my TV as well.
It's just nicer to watch video on my iPad than to carry my laptop around, rest it on my stomach and watch the screen lying down. I suppose I'm supposed to take notes so I should be at a desk, but still.
I don't think any tablet out there can play this video, other than PC tablets. (Windows Phone 7 can probably play the video, but it's not a tablet).
What we have here is content suitable for media consumption that doesn't work on devices designed for media consumption.
I think you're ignoring the fact in the case of Fukashima, they were set up to be self-sufficient -- it's just that the tsunami knocked out their backup generators.
Only due to cost savings. The tsunami wall required was half the height required (6M instead of 12M). Naturally, a 10M high tsunami hit. And no placement of the generators would've helped (they were in the basement, and that got flooded, but if they were outside, they could've gotten washed away).
I didn't even think twice about buying Portal 2 earlier this week, and it was worth every penny.
This is like the movie industry being worried about television - they are two different products, loosely related to each other
I'm thinking over Portal 2 for many reasons.
First, it's $50. (Sorry, not buying PS3 version because none of my PS3s can play it). Orange Box was $50, and Portal separately was $20. Ignoring the sales, I don't think I can justify such an increase in price. Especially how Portal 1 would go on sale and was even free for a stretch. (And Steam runs sales so often, there's very little reason to not wait for one if you don't have to have it release day)
Second, the only reason I'm thinking about is is a coupon I got that gives me $20 off 2 new games. It beats Steam's $5 off if I can find another game I want. If not, I'll live.
Third, apparently some early comments was Portal 2 was a port from consoles, including such things as "Please don't turn off your console" messages.
Will I get it? Eventually. I'm just deciding if I want it now.
Now that Gamefly has won they can close up shop because everyone directly downloads their games directly from the Nintendo, Sony, or Steam stores now......
Microsoft, too. Xbox Live has offered both original Xbox and many Xbox360 games for sale online as well (I can't remember what they call it). Only bad thing is they aren't available on release day - it takes a few months for it to appear on Xbox Live as a downloadable game.
I guess it's a concession to the physical stores...
I think this depends on your device - providers have very limited scope to mess with the software on the iPad (yes they could force you to install an App, but if that were the case I would tell my provider where to go).
As for ROM upgrade - not an issue for the provider on iPad/iPhone/iPod as it comes from Apple and is nothing to do with the provider.
They have limited scope to mess with the iPhone too. The iPhone 4 for Verizon is probably the least-branded phone Verizon sells, and all the Verizon apps are optional. No Verizon branding (just the apple logo on back, but that can be covered), and none of the crapware carriers insist you need. Though I've wondered what happens someone installs one of those Verizon apps on an AT&T iPhone (iTunes will let you download it). Not that you'd want to.
Also, how big are your "two by fours"? Because they aren't two inches by four inches. If you've got names for things that don't fit, you have no reason to hold onto the old measurement system.
Actually, two-by-fours start off (are raw cut) to be 2" x 4". It's just they are run through a planer that removes 1/4" off each side, leading to a 1.5"x3.5" block of lumber.
You can get unfinished 2x4s which really are that, but they're rough and splintery. The planer makes them nice and neat and pretty.
I would not call killing off online play for Halo2 robust and stable. I and many others still play the original counterstrike online for a timeline comparison
So you would hobble a service used by millions daily, just to satify 1000 users? Yes, Halo 2 multiplayer was tops of the charts of Original Xbox Live gamers, but you're still talking about a very small minority of users holding back everyone else.
Live had to evolve, and unfortunately, it had to evolve in ways that was not compatible with the original Xbox.
I'd bet Counter Strike would die pretty rapidly if there were only 1000 users in total worldwide playing it...
I can't find anything in any of those links that describes technical details of Whitespace wifi? Max bandwidth? Positives/Negatives? The Wiki article talks about a suit filed by broadcasters against the FCC for licensing this tech, as they assert devices in these frequencies cause interference, but says a result was expected Feb 2011...with no update.
"White Space" is about using the unused broadcast TV bands that (may) exist - if you look at the bandplan, a wide swatch of bandwidth is reserved for broadcast (OTA) TV. In many places, much of that band is empty (but in crowded urban areas, there is also a chance there is no space available).
The problem is that these devices need to know what frequencies are in use so they don't interfere with existing licensees' traffic (i.e., TV stations). The problem is, short of a comprehensive site survey, it's very difficult. If you're in a valley deploying these devices, someone on the hill could get interfered with if your device picks a frequency that's in use (as it can't pick up the signal the person on the hill can).
Many solutions have been proposed, besides a reception test - including a geolocated database where a white space device would use its built-in GPS to determite its location, then use a database to query what frequences are clear. The problem is, of course, how to query such a database with no connection (any built in one will be obsolete quite rapidly).
Google is a big proponent and has offered to host such a database.
iOS is losing market share to Android, yet Apple is still printing money hand-over-fist at an ever-increasing rate in those very markets its "losing share" in.
Incorrect.
The iPhone is losing marketshare to Android. iOS is pretty strong because there's two other iOS platforms that are not counted in phone marketshare. Yes, the iPod Touch sells hand-over-fist and is selling way more than the iPhone. The iPad is doing somewhat worse than the iPhone, but that really is more supply limited than anything.
There are tons of reasons to buy an iPod Touch over an iPhone - notably, lack of contracts, cheaper, and until recently, avoiding AT&T.
Exactly. It's also hurt by early adopters to Blu-Ray which had horrible mastering. I believe Talledega Nights was worse on Blu-Ray than DVD (and not just extras - picture quality too!).
Upscaling DVD players do a remarkable job these days (and if you got one of the old discounted HD-DVD players back in the day, wow it's hard to tell).
And Blu-Ray really only benefits new movies. Catalog movies often suffer worse on Blu-Ray due to poor mastering. (Compare the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray releases of Apollo 13 - yikes. The Blu-Ray has blown highlights, extensive DNR and other crap that despite a 66% increase in available storage capacity, it has less details than the HD-DVD version - at times it's so bad signs in the background are blurry).
Blu-Ray doesn't offer much these days - in the early days they were often worse than DVDs (if you're an extras buff like me the Blu-Ray would be 50% more expensive for just the movie alone) when they were mastered well, and for the vast majority of people, a DVD is far more convenient because there are players everywhere - cars, portable (there are a few Blu-Ray portable players, but there are far more DVD ones), computers, and attached to practically every TV in the household. A Blu-Ray player is rarer, can probably only be watched on the "good" TV, and doesn't offer much more for most people.
Even though I have both players, even I have to sit down and figure out if the extras are worth the extra cost, see if the mastering is any good (avsforum.com is good for this), etc. Even then I often buy DVD copies and reserve the Blu-Ray for movies I want (unless the differential is small).
DVDs plus DVRs replaced inconvenient VHS. Blu-Ray doesn't add as much value to the mix these days for its cost.
Remember, a movie's sole purpose is to put asses in seats. Sure there's some kinds of asses they'd prefer over others, but in general, a movie that makes people feel smart (spoon feeding them until they can draw their own conclusion) will appeal to the masses, as are the ones that provide relief from the world for a couple of hours, hence the summer blockbuster.
The origin story attempts to put nostalgic asses in seats, by appealing to people's childhood days when they read the comics or other such things. And for recent franchises (e.g., video games), it's meant to appeal to those who want a deeper backstory.
It's all about putting asses in seats. And those asses are getting extremely tight these days, so filmmakers are trying to appeal to different groups of asses to get them to spend money. Broadening the market, really.
Glass is merely an alternative platter base material to aluminum. There are advantages to it (very good heat stability, for example) so it depends on the model. They've been around since the 90s.
IBM DeskStars were probably the most common consumer drives with them, but the other manufacturers all had their own as well. These days it's probably even more a mess trying to figure out if a drive has glass or aluminum platters. I'm willing to bet even submodels of a particular model line vary - one submodel will have it, another submodel won't, etc.
They exist in all formfactors now. I remember an old Screensavers TV epsiode where Patrick Norton was showing how to destroy a hard drive with a sledgehammer, and the first hit sprayed glass everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, my iPod (iPod! From the competitor!) works fine.
And I guess thumbdrives aren't storage devices, either
It's Sony's custom.
Think about it. GeoHot did a mostly theoretical demonstration of a possible flaw in the PS3 hardware (RAM glitching - something that's almost impossible to protect against at the consumer level). It was unreliable, it didn't work 100%, and it required special hardware and physical modification to your PS3. But showing the demo once, Sony decided OtherOS was a security risk and removed it on all consoles afterwards.
All for a tiny hard to use and accomplish hack. Even if it was put in modchip form somehow it would still not work 100%.
For that, they remove OtherOS. Because it "might" lead to piracy.
To top it off, the PS3 security was broken not using OtherOS (it was removed, remember?) but using some other vulnerability by guys trying to get OtherOS back, leaving the entire system broken.
So no, Sony overreacting isn't unusual. And sometimes the skilled people who'll hack your hardware anyways should be given their due. Microsoft learned it for the original Xbox (they were given ample opportunity to allow Linux on it, otherwise they'd have to use a vulnerability which was kept secret until Microsoft denied their request, at which point it was public and the pirates then took the next step at enabling piracy via the vulnerability).
No, remember one of the goals of a business is monopoly. How they get that monopoly is irrelevant. With governments around, having a government set monopoly is one of the nirvanas for a free-market capitalist.
Of course, in a more sane world where people want regulation to protect them from the evil side of free markets, yes, a government-granted monopoly needs a set of conditions to regulate that monopoly.
If you want to see what happens in the absence, take a look north to Canada. Without government intervention, you get cable companies that require you to buy *their* cable boxes to watch their programming (they refuse to suppose boxes that weren't sold by them, nevermind not supporting CableCARD or any sort of thing that'll allow third-party devices onto "their" network). They strangle internet services to avoid having Netflix etc. compete with their core business (Rogers reduced their caps, and UBB isn't dead yet), yadda yadda yadda.
And let's not forget the huge telecommunications companies - Rogers, Bell and Shaw, ownt he whole stack of content creation (they own channels and stations), and content distribution (satellite, cable, phone lines).
Hell, when one of our media companies (content creation) shut down, it was sold off quicker than the whole Comcast-NBC merger. IIRC, they went bankrupt after Comcast announced its merger and the government looked into it, and the whole thing was done before the US DOJ released its conditions for the Comcast-NBC merger.
Yes, oddly Canada is an example of what happens in the content industry minus all those pesky FCC and FTC rules.
And that's the problem. Everyone doing the transition is imagining a world where end-to-end connectivity is back in vogue again like it was in the late 90s. Active development of such things like NAT-PT and other v4-to-v6 gateways is discouraged.
The problem is IPv6 adoption relies on everyone changing their end node devices at once. Back in the 90s, when everyone was using a PC this could just mean a small upgrade to the network stack. These days, when you literally have everything from toasters to supercomputers with IP stacks, it's not so easy.
And yet, I can guarantee you even if everything in the world gets a publicly routable IPv6 address, we still won't have end-to-end connectivity. We'll have ISP firewalling all but maybe one IP address (to prevent accidentally exposing other PCs, you see, and you can buy additional IPv6 routable addresses at $5/month. And blocking everything but ::1 is trivial at any level - additional IPs get you additional prefixes). We'll have firewalls at the inter-intranet borders. We'll have firewalls on the machines. End-to-end connectivity was broken before NAT offered simplistic "firewalling".
The easiest way to speed IPv6 adoption is to trivially implement something like NAT-PT in a box, and package it it so I can run down to Best Buy or whatever, buy a router, and plop it in place of my existing home router. I don't have to mess with re-IP'ing anything at home, I shouldn't even have to care if I'm accessing sites via IPv4 or IPv6 and my PCs don't have to care if they're IPv4-only, IPv6-only, or IPv4/v6 dual stack (a number of issues are related to dual-stack implementations).
And oh yeah, I want IPv6 NAT. I don't care for the half a million IPv6 addresses on my network. I want my router to be FC00::1, my PCs to take on a range within there. Just like my router is 192.168.1.1. I shouldn't have to know there's a link-local at some random huge garbage of an address, that my ISP has given me some other huge garbage of an address. Just a nice simple IPv6 address that I can access every PC on my network, and my PCs on my network can use to access the internet. Otherwise finding that troublesome PC can be a PITA since the addresses to most people is basically a random number. Might as well just use a SHA-1 hash - it makes as most sense to them.
OS vendors used to charge development fees. On Unix, nonetheless, too. Want a C compiler with your new hardware? $$$. Want an assembler/linker? $$$. The FSF didn't help much because they only shipped sources, or for $5000, you could maybe possibly get binaries.
Heck, Apple was one of the few commercial OS vendors to ship a full development environment in the box. Microsoft quickly followed with Visual Studio Express.
As for your console ass-backwards argument - neither the Xbox, Wii, nor PS3 are the most popular gaming device on the market today. Your perfect console does exist, and it's called a "PC". Developers don't subsidize them, consumers pay full price for hardware, and anyone can (and does) develop for them. Heck, there's a choice of API sets as well.
PC gaming market is huge, too. And if you target 5 year old hardware like consoles, you can be reasonably well assured that most recent PCs can play it.
Microsoft usually compensates people by giving them a month or two of free service if you call and complain.
Ditto if you send your Xbox in for replacement - they'll credit you an extra month of Live for the week or two that your Xbox was unusuable.
The CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) is made up primarily of the big 3 US labels. The Canadian labels have withdrawn from CRIA a few years ago after CRIA expressed interest in suing music pirates. CRIA's also the big sponsor of the Canadian DMCA (which thankfully is kept out because of minority governments and elections).
When the Canadian labels have withdrawn from a Canadian trade group and left it mostly represented by American interests...
More on this...
Anything that wakes up the phone (phone call, incoming SMS, alarm, etc) probably also causes the data to be dumped to the database. Which can explain odd flashes of location information here and there.
Interestingly, TFA contains a link to an Android version of this as well. Anyone try it? Does it contain similar information?
Still waiting for an Apple statement on why (is it a bug in the opt-in? why?), but there are some things that just a bit of rational thinking would do about this...
First - it can't use GPS - otherwise your battery will be dead in a few hours. So its location mechanism must be non-GPS based. Common reports are that it's based on the towers your phone attaches to.
Second - it's probably not recording all the time. Again, your battery will be dead way too quickly because powering up the main CPU to record the data down into the filesystem database takes a lot of power. It's probably recording the times you actually are using the phone - playing music, watching movies, surfing, using an app, etc. Locked and quiescent, it's probably not recording anything.
This would explain the widly different results people are seeing. Some people get tons of missing tracks because their phone's in standby state, and any towers you pass by are lost.
Others see their every move because their phones are playing MP3s and other things, where the main CPU is alive and can do these things.
Still doesn't make it right, though. But some food for thought on why people seem to have wildly different results.
Wasn't Virgin Internet one of the few ISPs in the UK that is definitely into the 3-strikes thing and all that? Plus, actively managing traffic to prioritize paying content producers?
Or more fundamentally, in a format usable by portable devices. Like tablets.
These days, I save the long YouTube videos for my iPad where instead of sitting down at the computer watching it, I can rest somewhere else with the iPad on my lap and watch the video in comfort. Yeah, I could also watch them on my TV as well.
It's just nicer to watch video on my iPad than to carry my laptop around, rest it on my stomach and watch the screen lying down. I suppose I'm supposed to take notes so I should be at a desk, but still.
I don't think any tablet out there can play this video, other than PC tablets. (Windows Phone 7 can probably play the video, but it's not a tablet).
What we have here is content suitable for media consumption that doesn't work on devices designed for media consumption.
Only due to cost savings. The tsunami wall required was half the height required (6M instead of 12M). Naturally, a 10M high tsunami hit. And no placement of the generators would've helped (they were in the basement, and that got flooded, but if they were outside, they could've gotten washed away).
I'm thinking over Portal 2 for many reasons.
First, it's $50. (Sorry, not buying PS3 version because none of my PS3s can play it). Orange Box was $50, and Portal separately was $20. Ignoring the sales, I don't think I can justify such an increase in price. Especially how Portal 1 would go on sale and was even free for a stretch. (And Steam runs sales so often, there's very little reason to not wait for one if you don't have to have it release day)
Second, the only reason I'm thinking about is is a coupon I got that gives me $20 off 2 new games. It beats Steam's $5 off if I can find another game I want. If not, I'll live.
Third, apparently some early comments was Portal 2 was a port from consoles, including such things as "Please don't turn off your console" messages.
Will I get it? Eventually. I'm just deciding if I want it now.
Microsoft, too. Xbox Live has offered both original Xbox and many Xbox360 games for sale online as well (I can't remember what they call it). Only bad thing is they aren't available on release day - it takes a few months for it to appear on Xbox Live as a downloadable game.
I guess it's a concession to the physical stores...
They have limited scope to mess with the iPhone too. The iPhone 4 for Verizon is probably the least-branded phone Verizon sells, and all the Verizon apps are optional. No Verizon branding (just the apple logo on back, but that can be covered), and none of the crapware carriers insist you need. Though I've wondered what happens someone installs one of those Verizon apps on an AT&T iPhone (iTunes will let you download it). Not that you'd want to.
Actually, two-by-fours start off (are raw cut) to be 2" x 4". It's just they are run through a planer that removes 1/4" off each side, leading to a 1.5"x3.5" block of lumber.
You can get unfinished 2x4s which really are that, but they're rough and splintery. The planer makes them nice and neat and pretty.
So you would hobble a service used by millions daily, just to satify 1000 users? Yes, Halo 2 multiplayer was tops of the charts of Original Xbox Live gamers, but you're still talking about a very small minority of users holding back everyone else.
Live had to evolve, and unfortunately, it had to evolve in ways that was not compatible with the original Xbox.
I'd bet Counter Strike would die pretty rapidly if there were only 1000 users in total worldwide playing it...
"White Space" is about using the unused broadcast TV bands that (may) exist - if you look at the bandplan, a wide swatch of bandwidth is reserved for broadcast (OTA) TV. In many places, much of that band is empty (but in crowded urban areas, there is also a chance there is no space available).
The problem is that these devices need to know what frequencies are in use so they don't interfere with existing licensees' traffic (i.e., TV stations). The problem is, short of a comprehensive site survey, it's very difficult. If you're in a valley deploying these devices, someone on the hill could get interfered with if your device picks a frequency that's in use (as it can't pick up the signal the person on the hill can).
Many solutions have been proposed, besides a reception test - including a geolocated database where a white space device would use its built-in GPS to determite its location, then use a database to query what frequences are clear. The problem is, of course, how to query such a database with no connection (any built in one will be obsolete quite rapidly).
Google is a big proponent and has offered to host such a database.
Already happened.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/the-next-napster-copyright-questions-as-3d-printing-comes-of-age.ars
DMCA takedown notices applied to a reverse-engineered puzzle whose plans were posted online.
Incorrect.
The iPhone is losing marketshare to Android. iOS is pretty strong because there's two other iOS platforms that are not counted in phone marketshare. Yes, the iPod Touch sells hand-over-fist and is selling way more than the iPhone. The iPad is doing somewhat worse than the iPhone, but that really is more supply limited than anything.
There are tons of reasons to buy an iPod Touch over an iPhone - notably, lack of contracts, cheaper, and until recently, avoiding AT&T.
Exactly. It's also hurt by early adopters to Blu-Ray which had horrible mastering. I believe Talledega Nights was worse on Blu-Ray than DVD (and not just extras - picture quality too!).
Upscaling DVD players do a remarkable job these days (and if you got one of the old discounted HD-DVD players back in the day, wow it's hard to tell).
And Blu-Ray really only benefits new movies. Catalog movies often suffer worse on Blu-Ray due to poor mastering. (Compare the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray releases of Apollo 13 - yikes. The Blu-Ray has blown highlights, extensive DNR and other crap that despite a 66% increase in available storage capacity, it has less details than the HD-DVD version - at times it's so bad signs in the background are blurry).
Blu-Ray doesn't offer much these days - in the early days they were often worse than DVDs (if you're an extras buff like me the Blu-Ray would be 50% more expensive for just the movie alone) when they were mastered well, and for the vast majority of people, a DVD is far more convenient because there are players everywhere - cars, portable (there are a few Blu-Ray portable players, but there are far more DVD ones), computers, and attached to practically every TV in the household. A Blu-Ray player is rarer, can probably only be watched on the "good" TV, and doesn't offer much more for most people.
Even though I have both players, even I have to sit down and figure out if the extras are worth the extra cost, see if the mastering is any good (avsforum.com is good for this), etc. Even then I often buy DVD copies and reserve the Blu-Ray for movies I want (unless the differential is small).
DVDs plus DVRs replaced inconvenient VHS. Blu-Ray doesn't add as much value to the mix these days for its cost.
Remember, a movie's sole purpose is to put asses in seats. Sure there's some kinds of asses they'd prefer over others, but in general, a movie that makes people feel smart (spoon feeding them until they can draw their own conclusion) will appeal to the masses, as are the ones that provide relief from the world for a couple of hours, hence the summer blockbuster.
The origin story attempts to put nostalgic asses in seats, by appealing to people's childhood days when they read the comics or other such things. And for recent franchises (e.g., video games), it's meant to appeal to those who want a deeper backstory.
It's all about putting asses in seats. And those asses are getting extremely tight these days, so filmmakers are trying to appeal to different groups of asses to get them to spend money. Broadening the market, really.
Glass is merely an alternative platter base material to aluminum. There are advantages to it (very good heat stability, for example) so it depends on the model. They've been around since the 90s.
IBM DeskStars were probably the most common consumer drives with them, but the other manufacturers all had their own as well. These days it's probably even more a mess trying to figure out if a drive has glass or aluminum platters. I'm willing to bet even submodels of a particular model line vary - one submodel will have it, another submodel won't, etc.
They exist in all formfactors now. I remember an old Screensavers TV epsiode where Patrick Norton was showing how to destroy a hard drive with a sledgehammer, and the first hit sprayed glass everywhere.