Re:Video Game Music Terribly Underrated
on
Video Game Mixlist
·
· Score: 1
ACTRAISER!
ACTRAISER!
I've been trying to remember the name of that game for, like, almost ten years, now. Thank you, kind sir.
Re:When I was a little boy...
on
Makers of MAKE
·
· Score: 1
You have made my day. I haven't read those books in ten years, and seeing it -- in OCR PDF no less -- has brought a tear to my eye. Some things shouldn't be forgotten.
Plus, check out the editor's note:
Another class of projects illustrate the caviler attitude toward environment and health in
1913. These projects involve items such as gunpowder, acetylene, hydrogen, lead, mercury,
sulfuric acid, nitric acid, cadmium, potassium sulfate, potassium cyanide, potassium
ferrocyanide, copper sulfate, and hydrochloric acid. Several involve the construction of
hazardous electrical devices. Please view these as snapshots of culture and attitude, not as
suggestions for contemporary activity.
Whenever I see references to HDR, it always seems to be a DirectX thing.
Now, since HDR is really just floating point chicanery ( I'm not criticizing it ) is there any intent for support in OpenGL? I do a fair bit of GL programming, and, sadly am on OS X where GL is, like, a whole *year* behind linux and windows... but it would be nice to know that the underlying mechanisms ( I suppose texture formats, pixel ops in shaders, etc ) could be exposed in GL. So that I could use them in 2031, when Apple exposes the ARB_xyz etensions.
Anybody know?
When I was a little boy...
on
Makers of MAKE
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
When I was about 8 or 10, my father ( a machinist, and DIY type, though of a mechanical nature, not techy ) bought me four volumes of _The Boy Mechanic_ -- a *beautiful* set of books by Popular Mechanics, from the 1920's.
These books had *everything* from simple things like making your own arc-lamp to radios, to steam engines, to stirling-cycle engines, to lightweight gasoline airplane engines ( for free flight ) to chassis for a go-kart, to simple transmissions, to making your own lathe, and so on. Plus, a *lot* of pyrotechnics. A LOT of pyrotechnics.
All gorgeously illustrated in the clean slightly-post-art-nouveau style of the 20's, with little boys and teenagers doing things that would get you arrested today.
What broke my heart were paragraphs that would say "Just go to your local chemist's and buy 12 pounds of insert-highly-toxic-explosive-compound". I'd ask my dad and say, "where can I get insert-highly-toxic-explosive-compound". He'd say, "Son, we live in a pussy age where you'd get arrested for just asking about that stuff."
I guess this is how we grow up today. Sterile, hairless wimps.
Actually, I agree with you 100% -- I was just saying why I believe Qt still relies on the MOC.
Now, one thing I can't help but wonder -- since I haven't done any Qt programming in 2 years ( moved to Cocoa/OSX, never looked back ) -- is wether the moc is doing things that simply aren't available in a standards based manner. For example, I recall writing a test app that enumerated the signals and slots on an anonymous QObject. I don't think you can do that at *all* with plain old ( even modern ) C++.
But, I could be wrong, I haven't kept up to date with Boost, since most of my work is AI and game programming, where I don't have the luxury to use most of the really hairy modern stuff.
I tend to agree, but the issue here is: Will the elegant solution work on a million random compilers, like those made by SUN, or Intel's C++ compiler, or HPUX's compiler, and so on.
Sure, some of the clever and typesafe and modern signal-slot implementations work on GCC 3 and up, and on whatever MS has these days. But that's not the entire world of c++ compilers.
I develop AI and robotics in my free time. I'm also an amateur game programmer. I'm a capable programmer, having been writing C++ for ten years. I ran linux and BeOS for 5 years as my sole OS, until moving to OS X.
If one defines "Nerd" or "Geek" as a consumer of media technology, then sure, I oughta get off this board. But on the other hand, if one defines them as the traditional hacker archetype, I suggest *you* get off this board, because it sounds like you're just a consumer gadget whore.
Yeah, well, I do like to watch TV and a movie now and then. I'm not a 100% black-wearing kill-your-tv type. Sure, I'd generally prefer to read a book but TV is nice, now and then...
At one point, these were the equivalent of Tivo, media centres, DVD players, cable television, and 42" digital TVs - all of which you deride.
True. But, in the mid nineties I could get a TV and VCR for a few hundred. To get a 42" TV, a Tivo, a DVD player, a media center, and cable would set me back at least a thousand, probably more. Not to mention monthly cable fees and whatnot.
What is the major reason for people still sticking with VHS?
Well, perhaps some of us don't cream our pants for every new technology. Perhaps some of us don't feel like cable is worth the cost, and therefore devices like Tivo are worthless. Perhaps some of us don't have DVD recorders. Perhaps some of us don't feel like making a "media center".
Perhaps some of us have VCRs that work, and don't feel like it's money well spent to invest in a something new which isn't useful to us. Perhaps some of us don't really like TV so that we consider it worthwhile to invest in something new when something we have works.
I really am insulted sometimes when people act as if I'm not doing my patriotic duty when I don't rush out and buy a 42" digital television and cable and tivo and x and y and z. My 20 year old zenith and VHS are good enough for me to watch a rented flick every now and then.
So, I drank the coolaid and thought I might give it a shot.
Then, I looked at all the keyboard shortcuts I depend on in my work ( graphic designer, working on a mac ). I, like a lot of people, value my muscle memory for tool switching in photoshop and illustrator and flash, and so on highly, and I think, somewhat interestingly, that it'd be *easier* for me to relearn typing than for me to relearn illustrator et al with new keyboard layout.
I mean, it may be a mac thing, but you can do *so* much with your right hand on the mouse and your left in the lower left hand side of the keyboard, just for copy/paste, closing windows, etc.
Copy/cut/paste select-all,select-none, save, save-as, close-window, quit, and so on ( this is a short list, there's more I'm not thinking of ), don't require me to move my left hand. Interestingly, this is why Mac apologist argue we don't need a 2 button mouse. Fooey -- I like my MS scrollwheel.
What a strange situation -- I really would like to learn Dvorak, since when I'm not at work, I write code and it might make things easier for me. But I'm not certain I'm willing to unlearn muscle-memory for keyboard shortcuts.
I've had *so* many binary incompatibility issues with Linux that it blows my mind. Sure, a recompile is great, but there is *some* pay software for linux. ( for example: I had trouble with Hexxen which I bought from Loki before they went under ).
And, for what it's worth, your 30 year old Unix apps will probably work with OS X (PPC or Intel) after a recompile, too. Or with Cygwin under XP. And so on.
( I'm not certain about which direction, though. Does marketing make a 100 dollar card seem to be worth 400? Or does marketing allow a 1000 dollar console to be sold for 400? The answer is probably both. )
1) Who else will punish and ostracize the geeks? If I wasn't ostracized in high-school, I'd never have learned to program, or have done my homework. I'd have been getting stoned, and having sex. Things which rightfully belong to my college years.
2) Who will distract the TV watching, Dorito-stuffing, SUV-driving masses? I mean, we all could be rioting on Pennsylvania Ave right now, fighting for our rights, but, wait, TheBigGame/Sitcom81-g/MovieWithExplosions#2118 is on...
3) Who will die by droves in meaningless wars for us, while we complain on slashdot?
Meh. As far as I see it, when we have designer babies, we'll get lots of super-smart jocks. Very few parents are going to say, "Yeah, I want a throwing-arm, 20/20 vision, and, oh, make him dumb as a brick".
What I'm afraid of, is, no more lefties. ( that's me looking around scared )
God, I just sort of assumed Iomega was dead at this point.
If this is for real ( and not as a previous poster suggested patent-guarded future-ware ) Iomega might actually be relevant again. How odd that would be.
Wait, no, no that's not what I meant. Rather, I've met people who use windows, but who ridicule with maximum contempt anybody who *doesn't* run windows.
E.g., people who say: "Wait, you're a programmer, and you use a *mac*? Do they even have compilers for macs?!" I'm not kidding.
So, in my personal experience, I've never met somebody who had anything good to say about windows, only ill to say about anything else. Which is funny because I have a lot of good things to say about windows -- good OpenGL implementations, good support for 3rd party devices, good development toolchains, it's *fast*, etc etc -- and you couldn't pay me to run windows.
Finally, this all ties into my hypothesis regarding windows usage: It's nothing but stockholm syndrome ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome ). People have been abused by windows, for so long, that they feel some sort of sympathy for Microsoft.
They can't imagine any other situation, because it seems natural to them. And anybody who doesn't experience that situation, is either an idiot, or is up to no good.
OK, sure, I've had some fun with pyrotechnics. My father -- being a machinist -- had welding equipment, so he and I would fill balloons with mapp gas and oxygen and would shoot them with burning bolts from a home-made crossbow. Good times. Not to mention my blacksmith uncle who would, on the fourth of july, take a special anvil he'd hollowed out the bottom of and fill the hollow with gunpowder. You can imagine the fun. Again, good times.
But, come on. Fluorescent light tubes?! You would have to be some sort of catastrophically stupid person to not realize how fragile those tubes are. I mean, for christ's sake! Filling a fragile glass tube with a burning liquid and then hitting things with it! Oh my god. If you *have* to do this, and obviously, you do because it's cool and fun, at least put some thought behind the mechanics.
The only thing I can really think about all this is that, somewhere, modern culture isn't teaching people important, basic, rules about material properties.
On a side note, I previously associated this kind of behavior with my fellow Americans. We're a stupid, raucous bunch. I'm glad to open my arms to the UK, I welcome you to our stupid bosom. May you whittle your gene pool alongside us.
Joe Sixpack? Hell, I'm a white collar worker, I make reasonable money, but frankly I can't afford such a thing. I live in a city and I'd like to say I'm pretty thrifty, but when it comes down to it, life's expensive and dropping more than a few hundred for a TV is simply not worth it.
That said, I don't have cable and I barely watch the TV anyway. But I shouldn't have to go into massive credit debt just to watch HD.
I'll go to the sushi bar in my neighborhood if I want to watch HDTV.
When I installed Tiger I thought to myself "why hasn't apple provided a mechanism for Widget management?"
Secondly, I thought to myself "it would be so easy for a widget to do nasty things"
So, here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to write a preference pane to manage widgets. It'll come in a few phases:
Phase 1) Preference pane which will allow you to turn on/off particular widgets in your ~/Library/Widgets folder by moving turned-off widgets to, say, ~/Library/Widgets (Disabled). I just did a test and discovered that the parent process of Widgets is the Dock, which means that the Dashboard is just a Dock mechanism. So, killing the dock ( politely, even ) will give Dashboard a chance to reload, since the Dock restarts automatically.
Phase 2) Write a widget scanner -- something which greps the widget source for keywords like widget.System() and whatever parameters are required for custom binaries which widgets can run. Now, I recognize I can't tell *what* those calls do, but I can at least put up a big red exclamation point next to the widget in the preference pane saying "This widget is potentially dangerous"
Phase 3) Write a small bundled app to be packaged with the preference pane which associates itself with the.wdgt extension, and (somehow) gets higher association relevance than the Dock for execution. Then, when a widget is double-clicked on it gets copied directly into ~/Library/Widgets ( Disabled ) -- giving you the chance to enable it or not before the Dashboard gets it.
This sounds like a PITA, but Apple shoulda done this in the first place.
Apple: You're drunk on the perceived security of your platform. Don't keep making the stupid mistakes.
A -- potentially better -- option is to have something like an "approved" widget download area. Say, apple's servers, where you know widgets hosted there have been given the thumbs up. Doesn't Firefox do something sort of like this for extensions?
I read _Perdido Street Station_ and _The Scar_ and I thought they were marvelous. If this is... well, not so good... oh well. Nobody's able to write good stuff forever.
Seems a shame to peter out after only two books, though.
I used to own an inspiron, long ago, 1999 I think. It was a piece of shit. The screen hinges broke, then the fan blew, then the mobo blew. The primary mouse button (touchpad) broke off after only 6 months. The damn thing lasted only about 1.5 years. I will *never* buy a dell again. Cumulatively, I must have spent ten hours on tech support calls to get replacement parts.
In contrast, my Thinkpad and my powerbook have lasted several years, trouble free.
Note, I paid probably about $1600 for my POS inspiron. They sell for, what, $600 or $700 hundred now? I can't imagine the quality could be worse, but at a price like that, something has to have been compromised.
Also, note, I take my laptop with me *everywhere*. An inspiron, just sitting on a desk would probably last longer, but I expect a portable to be durable.
Thinkpads, in my experience, are the only truly *good* pc laptops. They're ugly, but they do the job and if you need to you can beat a rhinoceros to death with one.
But, looking at the swivel, and knowing that IBM's selling off the Thinkpad line to the chinese company Lenovo (???), I can't help but wonder if the quality will still be what it was. This isn't meant to be a cut against the Chinese -- really it's my concern that without IBM looking over their shoulders, will the quality remain high? And it's not like the Chinese are famous for high quality manufacturing.
Regarding the form factor, the swivel seems like a good way to have your screen break off. I've seen some swivel laptops in stores, and -- for god's sake -- the demo units are creaky and nearly broken. Sure, people mess with the demo units, but those units aren't being put in backpacks or being taken everywhere you go. On *all* the demos I've seen the screens have several degrees of free play, and look like they'll break off if you look at them too hard. On a few I actually saw breakage as the friction clamp torqued out the plastic housing. Not good.
If anybody can pull this off, IBM can, but I'm not holding my breath.
And, one more rant factor -- can't anybody make a laptop which doesn't look like a frankenstein's monster of parts thrown together? There's so many air vents, access panels and other hoo hah that the damn thing looks like the death-star, but flattened into a laptop form factor. There's too many things to catch on your bag, or break off. Apple does this right -- their laptops are smooth and have nothing to catch on anything or break off.
Slashdot Mirror
ACTRAISER!
ACTRAISER!
I've been trying to remember the name of that game for, like, almost ten years, now. Thank you, kind sir.
You have made my day. I haven't read those books in ten years, and seeing it -- in OCR PDF no less -- has brought a tear to my eye. Some things shouldn't be forgotten.
Plus, check out the editor's note:
Gold.Whenever I see references to HDR, it always seems to be a DirectX thing.
Now, since HDR is really just floating point chicanery ( I'm not criticizing it ) is there any intent for support in OpenGL? I do a fair bit of GL programming, and, sadly am on OS X where GL is, like, a whole *year* behind linux and windows... but it would be nice to know that the underlying mechanisms ( I suppose texture formats, pixel ops in shaders, etc ) could be exposed in GL. So that I could use them in 2031, when Apple exposes the ARB_xyz etensions.
Anybody know?
When I was about 8 or 10, my father ( a machinist, and DIY type, though of a mechanical nature, not techy ) bought me four volumes of _The Boy Mechanic_ -- a *beautiful* set of books by Popular Mechanics, from the 1920's.
These books had *everything* from simple things like making your own arc-lamp to radios, to steam engines, to stirling-cycle engines, to lightweight gasoline airplane engines ( for free flight ) to chassis for a go-kart, to simple transmissions, to making your own lathe, and so on. Plus, a *lot* of pyrotechnics. A LOT of pyrotechnics.
All gorgeously illustrated in the clean slightly-post-art-nouveau style of the 20's, with little boys and teenagers doing things that would get you arrested today.
What broke my heart were paragraphs that would say "Just go to your local chemist's and buy 12 pounds of insert-highly-toxic-explosive-compound". I'd ask my dad and say, "where can I get insert-highly-toxic-explosive-compound". He'd say, "Son, we live in a pussy age where you'd get arrested for just asking about that stuff."
I guess this is how we grow up today. Sterile, hairless wimps.
Actually, I agree with you 100% -- I was just saying why I believe Qt still relies on the MOC.
Now, one thing I can't help but wonder -- since I haven't done any Qt programming in 2 years ( moved to Cocoa/OSX, never looked back ) -- is wether the moc is doing things that simply aren't available in a standards based manner. For example, I recall writing a test app that enumerated the signals and slots on an anonymous QObject. I don't think you can do that at *all* with plain old ( even modern ) C++.
But, I could be wrong, I haven't kept up to date with Boost, since most of my work is AI and game programming, where I don't have the luxury to use most of the really hairy modern stuff.
I tend to agree, but the issue here is: Will the elegant solution work on a million random compilers, like those made by SUN, or Intel's C++ compiler, or HPUX's compiler, and so on.
Sure, some of the clever and typesafe and modern signal-slot implementations work on GCC 3 and up, and on whatever MS has these days. But that's not the entire world of c++ compilers.
I develop AI and robotics in my free time. I'm also an amateur game programmer. I'm a capable programmer, having been writing C++ for ten years. I ran linux and BeOS for 5 years as my sole OS, until moving to OS X.
If one defines "Nerd" or "Geek" as a consumer of media technology, then sure, I oughta get off this board. But on the other hand, if one defines them as the traditional hacker archetype, I suggest *you* get off this board, because it sounds like you're just a consumer gadget whore.
Yeah, well, I do like to watch TV and a movie now and then. I'm not a 100% black-wearing kill-your-tv type. Sure, I'd generally prefer to read a book but TV is nice, now and then...
True. But, in the mid nineties I could get a TV and VCR for a few hundred. To get a 42" TV, a Tivo, a DVD player, a media center, and cable would set me back at least a thousand, probably more. Not to mention monthly cable fees and whatnot.Well, perhaps some of us don't cream our pants for every new technology. Perhaps some of us don't feel like cable is worth the cost, and therefore devices like Tivo are worthless. Perhaps some of us don't have DVD recorders. Perhaps some of us don't feel like making a "media center".
Perhaps some of us have VCRs that work, and don't feel like it's money well spent to invest in a something new which isn't useful to us. Perhaps some of us don't really like TV so that we consider it worthwhile to invest in something new when something we have works.
I really am insulted sometimes when people act as if I'm not doing my patriotic duty when I don't rush out and buy a 42" digital television and cable and tivo and x and y and z. My 20 year old zenith and VHS are good enough for me to watch a rented flick every now and then.
So, I drank the coolaid and thought I might give it a shot.
Then, I looked at all the keyboard shortcuts I depend on in my work ( graphic designer, working on a mac ). I, like a lot of people, value my muscle memory for tool switching in photoshop and illustrator and flash, and so on highly, and I think, somewhat interestingly, that it'd be *easier* for me to relearn typing than for me to relearn illustrator et al with new keyboard layout.
I mean, it may be a mac thing, but you can do *so* much with your right hand on the mouse and your left in the lower left hand side of the keyboard, just for copy/paste, closing windows, etc.
Copy/cut/paste select-all,select-none, save, save-as, close-window, quit, and so on ( this is a short list, there's more I'm not thinking of ), don't require me to move my left hand. Interestingly, this is why Mac apologist argue we don't need a 2 button mouse. Fooey -- I like my MS scrollwheel.
What a strange situation -- I really would like to learn Dvorak, since when I'm not at work, I write code and it might make things easier for me. But I'm not certain I'm willing to unlearn muscle-memory for keyboard shortcuts.
Those are all valid points.
But.
I've had *so* many binary incompatibility issues with Linux that it blows my mind. Sure, a recompile is great, but there is *some* pay software for linux. ( for example: I had trouble with Hexxen which I bought from Loki before they went under ).
And, for what it's worth, your 30 year old Unix apps will probably work with OS X (PPC or Intel) after a recompile, too. Or with Cygwin under XP. And so on.
Yes. Target mode is *fantastic* -- I will sorely miss it should it go away. I think a lot of people will miss it should it go away.
It should be noted that Expression 3 -- the software this was based on -- had a Mac client, where Acrylic does not, and probably will not.
Bummer, it looks like a nice drawing tool.
Objective C++ is a bridge, allowing you to ( fairly ) seamlessly call C++ from objective-c and visa versa.
E.g., with ObjectiveC++ you don't need to write a pure-C bridge, to get Objective-C and C++ to interoperate.
Now, that said, it's not like you can write a C++ subclass of an Objective-C class, but it's useful. Really useful.
Marketing.
( I'm not certain about which direction, though. Does marketing make a 100 dollar card seem to be worth 400? Or does marketing allow a 1000 dollar console to be sold for 400? The answer is probably both. )
Like it or not, society *needs* jocks.
1) Who else will punish and ostracize the geeks? If I wasn't ostracized in high-school, I'd never have learned to program, or have done my homework. I'd have been getting stoned, and having sex. Things which rightfully belong to my college years.
2) Who will distract the TV watching, Dorito-stuffing, SUV-driving masses? I mean, we all could be rioting on Pennsylvania Ave right now, fighting for our rights, but, wait, TheBigGame/Sitcom81-g/MovieWithExplosions#2118 is on...
3) Who will die by droves in meaningless wars for us, while we complain on slashdot?
Meh. As far as I see it, when we have designer babies, we'll get lots of super-smart jocks. Very few parents are going to say, "Yeah, I want a throwing-arm, 20/20 vision, and, oh, make him dumb as a brick".
What I'm afraid of, is, no more lefties. ( that's me looking around scared )
God, I just sort of assumed Iomega was dead at this point.
If this is for real ( and not as a previous poster suggested patent-guarded future-ware ) Iomega might actually be relevant again. How odd that would be.
I've met a fair number of windows fans.
Wait, no, no that's not what I meant. Rather, I've met people who use windows, but who ridicule with maximum contempt anybody who *doesn't* run windows.
E.g., people who say: "Wait, you're a programmer, and you use a *mac*? Do they even have compilers for macs?!" I'm not kidding.
So, in my personal experience, I've never met somebody who had anything good to say about windows, only ill to say about anything else. Which is funny because I have a lot of good things to say about windows -- good OpenGL implementations, good support for 3rd party devices, good development toolchains, it's *fast*, etc etc -- and you couldn't pay me to run windows.
Finally, this all ties into my hypothesis regarding windows usage: It's nothing but stockholm syndrome ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome ). People have been abused by windows, for so long, that they feel some sort of sympathy for Microsoft.
They can't imagine any other situation, because it seems natural to them. And anybody who doesn't experience that situation, is either an idiot, or is up to no good.
OK, sure, I've had some fun with pyrotechnics. My father -- being a machinist -- had welding equipment, so he and I would fill balloons with mapp gas and oxygen and would shoot them with burning bolts from a home-made crossbow. Good times. Not to mention my blacksmith uncle who would, on the fourth of july, take a special anvil he'd hollowed out the bottom of and fill the hollow with gunpowder. You can imagine the fun. Again, good times.
But, come on. Fluorescent light tubes?! You would have to be some sort of catastrophically stupid person to not realize how fragile those tubes are. I mean, for christ's sake! Filling a fragile glass tube with a burning liquid and then hitting things with it! Oh my god. If you *have* to do this, and obviously, you do because it's cool and fun, at least put some thought behind the mechanics.
The only thing I can really think about all this is that, somewhere, modern culture isn't teaching people important, basic, rules about material properties.
On a side note, I previously associated this kind of behavior with my fellow Americans. We're a stupid, raucous bunch. I'm glad to open my arms to the UK, I welcome you to our stupid bosom. May you whittle your gene pool alongside us.
Joe Sixpack? Hell, I'm a white collar worker, I make reasonable money, but frankly I can't afford such a thing. I live in a city and I'd like to say I'm pretty thrifty, but when it comes down to it, life's expensive and dropping more than a few hundred for a TV is simply not worth it.
That said, I don't have cable and I barely watch the TV anyway. But I shouldn't have to go into massive credit debt just to watch HD.
I'll go to the sushi bar in my neighborhood if I want to watch HDTV.
When I installed Tiger I thought to myself "why hasn't apple provided a mechanism for Widget management?"
.wdgt extension, and (somehow) gets higher association relevance than the Dock for execution. Then, when a widget is double-clicked on it gets copied directly into ~/Library/Widgets ( Disabled ) -- giving you the chance to enable it or not before the Dashboard gets it.
Secondly, I thought to myself "it would be so easy for a widget to do nasty things"
So, here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to write a preference pane to manage widgets. It'll come in a few phases:
Phase 1) Preference pane which will allow you to turn on/off particular widgets in your ~/Library/Widgets folder by moving turned-off widgets to, say, ~/Library/Widgets (Disabled). I just did a test and discovered that the parent process of Widgets is the Dock, which means that the Dashboard is just a Dock mechanism. So, killing the dock ( politely, even ) will give Dashboard a chance to reload, since the Dock restarts automatically.
Phase 2) Write a widget scanner -- something which greps the widget source for keywords like widget.System() and whatever parameters are required for custom binaries which widgets can run. Now, I recognize I can't tell *what* those calls do, but I can at least put up a big red exclamation point next to the widget in the preference pane saying "This widget is potentially dangerous"
Phase 3) Write a small bundled app to be packaged with the preference pane which associates itself with the
This sounds like a PITA, but Apple shoulda done this in the first place.
Apple: You're drunk on the perceived security of your platform. Don't keep making the stupid mistakes.
A -- potentially better -- option is to have something like an "approved" widget download area. Say, apple's servers, where you know widgets hosted there have been given the thumbs up. Doesn't Firefox do something sort of like this for extensions?
I read _Perdido Street Station_ and _The Scar_ and I thought they were marvelous. If this is... well, not so good... oh well. Nobody's able to write good stuff forever.
Seems a shame to peter out after only two books, though.
Yes, but, he *knew* it was going to happen...
I used to own an inspiron, long ago, 1999 I think. It was a piece of shit. The screen hinges broke, then the fan blew, then the mobo blew. The primary mouse button (touchpad) broke off after only 6 months. The damn thing lasted only about 1.5 years. I will *never* buy a dell again. Cumulatively, I must have spent ten hours on tech support calls to get replacement parts.
In contrast, my Thinkpad and my powerbook have lasted several years, trouble free.
Note, I paid probably about $1600 for my POS inspiron. They sell for, what, $600 or $700 hundred now? I can't imagine the quality could be worse, but at a price like that, something has to have been compromised.
Also, note, I take my laptop with me *everywhere*. An inspiron, just sitting on a desk would probably last longer, but I expect a portable to be durable.
Thinkpads, in my experience, are the only truly *good* pc laptops. They're ugly, but they do the job and if you need to you can beat a rhinoceros to death with one.
But, looking at the swivel, and knowing that IBM's selling off the Thinkpad line to the chinese company Lenovo (???), I can't help but wonder if the quality will still be what it was. This isn't meant to be a cut against the Chinese -- really it's my concern that without IBM looking over their shoulders, will the quality remain high? And it's not like the Chinese are famous for high quality manufacturing.
Regarding the form factor, the swivel seems like a good way to have your screen break off. I've seen some swivel laptops in stores, and -- for god's sake -- the demo units are creaky and nearly broken. Sure, people mess with the demo units, but those units aren't being put in backpacks or being taken everywhere you go. On *all* the demos I've seen the screens have several degrees of free play, and look like they'll break off if you look at them too hard. On a few I actually saw breakage as the friction clamp torqued out the plastic housing. Not good.
If anybody can pull this off, IBM can, but I'm not holding my breath.
And, one more rant factor -- can't anybody make a laptop which doesn't look like a frankenstein's monster of parts thrown together? There's so many air vents, access panels and other hoo hah that the damn thing looks like the death-star, but flattened into a laptop form factor. There's too many things to catch on your bag, or break off. Apple does this right -- their laptops are smooth and have nothing to catch on anything or break off.