India was my first thought also. Not only is turnabout fair play, but you're going to need the culture exposure and contacts if you hope to get a job in computer science.
Many biofules are said to take more energy to produce them than they provide, so with dropping oil prices they are actually more feasible than they were when oil prices were high. Now if they can only pass laws mandating the use of these fuels then they will become extremely feasible.
Yes, lots of the memory mapping is done by the CPU. But it still needs to be done. One important issue is if the manipulation of addresses and page tables has a cost in cycle time. Sure, this is much less than the cost of swapping pages in and out of main memory from and to a hard disk, but it's still a cost. If every single instruction (or most of them) cost extra cycles because virtual memory is being used without any valid reason to do so, then that cost adds up fast.
I don't know of the exact timing issues in this case. It likely even depends on the processor make being used (AMD vs. Intel) and even the processor family. There may also be extra costs involved in how cache memory is dealt with. But I certainly expect that there is an overhead cost, and no real justification to doing things this way except that some programmers don't appreciate the issues involved at a low level.
No, dehumidifiers can be had for $50 or so, this costs $1200. And it includes an air filter (It would cost me at east a couple of bucks to add one to my dehumidifire), and an ultra purple light. Phineas Taylor Barnum would be proud.
Well, it's not as if coning trails are all that new. They hardly bothered most of the alarmists for years (except of course the ones with secret chemicals in them that the conspiracy theorists tried to warn us about). It comes as a shock to me that any eco-kook that would worry about these trails would not be more worried about the microwave scheme.
a possible solution to help address air transport's effects on the climate........ so the "a possible solution" to those little white trails behind jets that usually dissipate quite quickly is to shoot a powerful microwave beam in the sky. What could possibly go wrong?
If you RTFA you find "The Commission's complaint seeks to permanently enjoin Cuban from future violations of the federal securities laws....". So am I to understand that part of Mark Cuban's "punishment" is that in the future he will not be allowed to violate the same laws that everyone else is already expected to not violate?
You would better support your statement by providing a link to the other site that you say exists. The problem that I have with the article is that he completely ignores the issue of irregular gourd shape, both outside and in. Lots of babble about converting the image to a depth map, but no mention at all of the bigger issue of how to map that to a irregular round surface. I don't believe this was done on this system either, but I find it hard to understand how you could make your claim and not provide a link.
despite widespread poverty, India has the world's fastest-growing cellphone market
I'm guessing that cellphonr technology must be a lot more affordable in India than it is in the U.S.A. Can anyone tell us what cellphone costs are in India, and, if I'm right, why someone can't offer a similar price structure in the United States?
Sure, encrypt everything. It's not like we live in some oppressive country where the boarder guards are likely to say "Why would you want privacy if you have nothing to hide?". It's not like they would confiscate you laptop out of spite, and make sure that when and if you got it back that it wasn't working or that all of the important files were gone. No one thinks that America has become that kind of oppressive society, do they? And if you know anyone who is so un-American to think that, turn them into the secret police for further scrutiny, they are most likely terrorists.
I didn't get the impression that this was a DRM issue. I took it more as an anti-cheat measure for on-line play. Given that there are huge numbers of players who think it's neat to win by loading up some warez that gives your game an unfair advantage against other on-line players, it's not too unreasonable to have code that detects some of the more common cheats. Unfortunately, when monitoring software starts hooking itself in places where it's not expected, it can look a lot like the cheating software.
What amazes me is that so many people believe that there just can't be cheating in on-line poker, a game where you have to trust the operators to not be in the game and looking at all of the cards. When I even mentioned that this could be happening a few times years ago on Slashdot I got modded down and flamed because it just "couldn't happen" and the nice people who ran the games would be perfectly content to take their cut and would never think of cheating. And people also ignored the fact that multiple players who know each other (or one player who plays several hands, even with different Internet connections) can share data about their cards with each other, giving them a small edge against other players who think that all players have the same information available to them. I have since learned from a friend who does play on-line that he and his wife often play in the same hands even from the same IP address and this certainly does go on and is not prevented from the "on-line casinos" that run the games.
My thoughts exactly, although it doesn't need to be marketing based. Many years ago there were a number of locations on the Internet that would accept requests by email and email back the requested information. This ranged from file transfers to web pages. No marketing was involved, just the overall internet philosophy that information wants to be free and the realization that some people at the time had email access but not complete Internet access. I remember dialing into an email server (not a full Internet gateway) and sending my mail and requests, and later getting responses back when I dialed in again. If this truns out a true report with no strings attached then it would be nice if some people would start back up services for email users.
If people pay money to support DRM products, this is exactly what they deserve. Maybe if enough people pay enough for this kind of low quality junk and then the DRM gods take it away from them, they will finally learn to not buy into the scheme. As long as the studios can see a revenue stream from this kind of crippled product they are not likely to deal with their customers on a more reasonable basis. So "hats of to Sony" for trying to help show the consumer just how bad DRM can be if you buy into it.
I'm not going to hype the place that I bought it, but I'm hard pressed to believe that you are having any trouble Googling it. I even provided a link in my original post to the wikipedia article on both versions.
Yea, but they didn't affect game play, at least not in a positive way (a bug in the game would keep the award around even when the rest of the player was invisible!!!) And Unreal can give out some extra point awards for many things, like "first blood", "revenge" or killing sprees. I wouldn't object to such awards that spanned rounds of the game (those that you speak of only persist in the instance of a single round AFAIK), but I simply have no interest in games where awards build up your character, or as I think of it, an in-game economy exists that is used to build up the power of the character rather than expecting the players to actually increase the skill as they play.
It would be kind of like if PacMan could tell how many quarters you spent and after so many hundred quarters it gave you a super weapon to kill the ghosts or gave your character more speed. To me that would diminish the game, not make it more interesting.
Thank for the feedback and insight. Please note that, as you quoted, I said that I had not seen such systems, not that they didn't exist. Unfortunately, since WOW does indeed have a major emphasis of the game focused around repetitive tasks and "building up" the character, I've avoided it and still will avoid it, so that they have also included some non-impacting rewards becomes a non-issue for me.
While I grant you that games like WOW are extremely popular, even to the point of adiction, there are some players who avoid such games. I'm one and I want to say why I hope this "all games must have this" approach does not, in fact, come to pass.
I get a different type of achievement out of playing on-line games. I build my skill. I enjoy playing First Person Shooter games like Quake 3, Unreal, and other similar FPS games. But as long as I'm not playing against cheaters (and there definitely cheaters on-line), I can start any individual game on a fair footing against my opponents, the only factor that will influence who wins and who loses is player skill, not stupid repetitive tasks to build up some in-game form of currency that is then used to unbalance players. Even worse (IMHO) are the games that will sell players an edge for hard cash, making everyone who doesn't cough up money their licking boy. I see this as little more than a ligitimized and sanctioned cheat. I'm not going to buy the super weapon from some game supplier to over power the other players, and I'm not going to play in a game against people who do.
In a sense, even games like WOW sell the player better weapons or tools, they just do it by a rewards system (called loot here) that doles the advantages out over time. Thus the stupid requirements of repeditive tasks, "kill 1000 chipmunks and tan their pelts". So while the rich and vast world of WOW greatly appeals to me in eye candy value, I completely have no interest in playing it based on it's Hammurabi economy type of play. I neither wish to be some one's cannon fodder nor to be given what I consider an unfair advantage against others just because I completed some (usually extremely repetitive and boring) tasks.
I could see a loot system in games appeal to me, but it would have to be a system that doesn't affect overall game play, and as yet I have not seen such a system in play. In a game like Unreal, such a system could acknowledge players accomplishments with eye candy rewards that don't affect the actual game is any significant way. Perhaps extra and special skins granted to players for special acchevements (hopefully none that give an edge in being harder to see though, like all back ninja suits) or special flame paint jobs for a character' vehicles. Or a noble title added to a player's name (obviously not to be permitted when the name is first created). Granted, these type of things are harder to come up with than just "leveling up" a player to a level 95 Knight Elf Mohawk, or giving him a sword that has a +23 kick ass factor, but they prevent the games from favoring the players who have played the longest rather than favoring the better players (usually related but certainly not always). Loot systems have unfortunately come to replace the gaining of actual skill in the game play, and for that reason I hope that the prediction that is made in this article, while obviously a growing trend, does not come to completely dominate gaming.
The Linux geeks are not going to miss out on the G15. There's been a G15 linux toolkit for several years now. And a search on Google for G15 and Linux gets over 400,000 hits (no, I have not read all of them, yet). Yea, The MSRP is a bit high, but I've seen the keyboard (newer style) for around $70 at several sites in the last week. Picked up mine at $60 on sale when I was looking for a USB keyboard. Those willing to wait and search should likely be able to find a similar sale or some kind of store coupon that will get it at about this price.
If cost is no object (it is to me), then Logitech also has a Keyboard / Mouse combo called the MX 5500 that also includes a LCD display. I don't know much about this display, and suspect it may not be completely compatable with the G15 display, but it's a nice looking Keyboard. Should be at a MSRP of $170.
I keep seeing the terms SlideShow and LCDProc thrown around, but I'm not clear on the exact applications. It seems curious to me that something that is 4 lines of alphanumeric text can be used by something called SlideShow. Anyway, I can concede that to my knowledge the G15 display doesn't work dierectly with these applications, but the development kit is available and I would expect that if there was a reason to do so someone would build the software (or perhaps already has). Certainly the G15 display can display anything that this thing can, while this little box can't come near doing what the G15 display will. As to limited utility for non-gamers, that's not quite accurate. Along with the handful of small utilities that come in the G15 package, there are several free ones available on-line. One will display any bitmap (of suitable size), so it shouldn't take much work to wrap whatever you want displayed around that. Others include a utility from AMD that gives info on the CPU (I suspect it doesn't work with Intel CPUs though but have no way to try that). There's a great utility for showing lots of status information called SirReal's panel that is configurable as to what info it shows (mine is currently showing time and date, cpu and memory usage, network bandwidth, network statistics, a stopwatch, any hung program (and a button that will kill it), and my Teamspaeak status (yea, that last one is rather gamer related). All this at one time on a graphic display. There are network monitor utilities, email monitors, weather monitors, stock monitors (I'm pretty sure I've seen one but can't find it now), multimedia based utilities, and many system based utilities. The last few versions of PCwizard will optionally display their system status to the G15 display when the program is minimized. And, since the development kit is available and free, you certainty are free to program anything for it that you want. So rather than spend time making SlideShow or LCDproc display what you want, you could be coding for a much nicer display built right into a pretty nice keyboard. But the choice, of course, belongs to the user. I just can't see this price as being inexpensive in contrast to what else is available (the G15 being a pretty good alternative). This "story: just strikes me as another example of the editors letting an advertisement for a dubious product slip through as if it were a real story. Nothing new there.
The good deal was that it was the first version. The first version is extremely hard to find now, I can't find it for anywhere near that price now (I don't deal with the Evil Bay of Thieves). The newer version can be easily found around $70 with some simple searching, at east it could about a week ago when I last looked). For $20 more than the 4 line text gimmic, I think the illuminated keyboard, graphical LCD display, 2 extra usb ports, and even just 6 extra function keys (and a really handy place to mount the LCD) is a far better deal.
While you may have identified a very small niche market for this thing, I would suggest that if you have a server farm, there are far better ways to monitor such information remotely from a central point that greatly beat out buying one of these gimmicks for each server. And you should be doing that before playing with this toy. If you actually have to walk up to the server, you very likely do want to be able to see a real monitor (likely a smallish LCM monitor that may not cost much more than this box if you shop around). I also wouldn't bet on the future availability of this device, there just isn't a big market for it at the price. So I would be very cautious about designing a server farm that depended on it, unless I had so much cash that I could afford to buy enough units to cover any future growth and a reasonable allowance for device failure.
As far as I can tell, this device is only alpha numeric, no real graphics capabilities.
While I'm sure that a very small number of people will buy into this, I find it very disappointing and very limited, and pretty damn expensive for what you get. I compare this to my Logictech G15 LCD graphic display device. I paid $60 for mine a little over a year ago, it runs on USB, has similar input buttons near the display, but it does full graphics, and a number of nice aplets are already written for it (although far too few). Oh yea, it also happens to include a full illuminated keyboard, multimedia volume knob and mute button, and 18 user definable macro keys (expandable to 54 or more using the 3 "bank" buttons - but unfortnately the newer version of the Logitech G15 reduces this to just 6 user definable buttons). And they throw in a few extra USB ports too. While some people might not want to use a keyboard with their computer, I kind of suspect that most do, and that mounting a full graphic capable similar sized LCD on a Luminated keyboard is a far better way to go for the vast majority of users, and that a $50 price for just an alpha-numeric display is a bit expensive. Too bad they didn't make it Logitech G15 compatible and put it out at a lower price, but I don't see a likely broad use for this gimic when the G15 is still available, even with it's reduced number of fumction keys in the new version.
It shouldn't even be an issue of a lack of research skills, it should just be common sense in an HTML medium that one would include a link in such a serious statement. Yea, Google comes up pretty dry unless you find the magic words to key on, but if you are doing web journalism, as/. claims they are doing, (as well as calling the people who somewhat arbitrarily pick stories to be "editors"), then it's not unreasonable to set an expectation that links would be provided in such statements. I'm as peeved about this as I am when Associated Press or Reuters run a story on the world's ugliest dog, or fattest cat, or how much Rielle Hunter's baby looks like John Edwards, without actually showing a photo of the subject. Perhaps more peeved, because (not to excuse the others) Slashdot is exclusively web based and should be more technical and should know better.
Slashdot Mirror
India was my first thought also. Not only is turnabout fair play, but you're going to need the culture exposure and contacts if you hope to get a job in computer science.
Many biofules are said to take more energy to produce them than they provide, so with dropping oil prices they are actually more feasible than they were when oil prices were high. Now if they can only pass laws mandating the use of these fuels then they will become extremely feasible.
Yes, lots of the memory mapping is done by the CPU. But it still needs to be done. One important issue is if the manipulation of addresses and page tables has a cost in cycle time. Sure, this is much less than the cost of swapping pages in and out of main memory from and to a hard disk, but it's still a cost. If every single instruction (or most of them) cost extra cycles because virtual memory is being used without any valid reason to do so, then that cost adds up fast.
I don't know of the exact timing issues in this case. It likely even depends on the processor make being used (AMD vs. Intel) and even the processor family. There may also be extra costs involved in how cache memory is dealt with. But I certainly expect that there is an overhead cost, and no real justification to doing things this way except that some programmers don't appreciate the issues involved at a low level.
No, dehumidifiers can be had for $50 or so, this costs $1200. And it includes an air filter (It would cost me at east a couple of bucks to add one to my dehumidifire), and an ultra purple light. Phineas Taylor Barnum would be proud.
Well, it's not as if coning trails are all that new. They hardly bothered most of the alarmists for years (except of course the ones with secret chemicals in them that the conspiracy theorists tried to warn us about). It comes as a shock to me that any eco-kook that would worry about these trails would not be more worried about the microwave scheme.
a possible solution to help address air transport's effects on the climate........ so the "a possible solution" to those little white trails behind jets that usually dissipate quite quickly is to shoot a powerful microwave beam in the sky. What could possibly go wrong?
I see the editors took the day off.
If you RTFA you find "The Commission's complaint seeks to permanently enjoin Cuban from future violations of the federal securities laws....". So am I to understand that part of Mark Cuban's "punishment" is that in the future he will not be allowed to violate the same laws that everyone else is already expected to not violate?
You would better support your statement by providing a link to the other site that you say exists. The problem that I have with the article is that he completely ignores the issue of irregular gourd shape, both outside and in. Lots of babble about converting the image to a depth map, but no mention at all of the bigger issue of how to map that to a irregular round surface. I don't believe this was done on this system either, but I find it hard to understand how you could make your claim and not provide a link.
despite widespread poverty, India has the world's fastest-growing cellphone market
I'm guessing that cellphonr technology must be a lot more affordable in India than it is in the U.S.A. Can anyone tell us what cellphone costs are in India, and, if I'm right, why someone can't offer a similar price structure in the United States?
Sure, encrypt everything. It's not like we live in some oppressive country where the boarder guards are likely to say "Why would you want privacy if you have nothing to hide?". It's not like they would confiscate you laptop out of spite, and make sure that when and if you got it back that it wasn't working or that all of the important files were gone. No one thinks that America has become that kind of oppressive society, do they? And if you know anyone who is so un-American to think that, turn them into the secret police for further scrutiny, they are most likely terrorists.
(subject line done in illiterate speak to fit)
I didn't get the impression that this was a DRM issue. I took it more as an anti-cheat measure for on-line play. Given that there are huge numbers of players who think it's neat to win by loading up some warez that gives your game an unfair advantage against other on-line players, it's not too unreasonable to have code that detects some of the more common cheats. Unfortunately, when monitoring software starts hooking itself in places where it's not expected, it can look a lot like the cheating software.
What amazes me is that so many people believe that there just can't be cheating in on-line poker, a game where you have to trust the operators to not be in the game and looking at all of the cards. When I even mentioned that this could be happening a few times years ago on Slashdot I got modded down and flamed because it just "couldn't happen" and the nice people who ran the games would be perfectly content to take their cut and would never think of cheating. And people also ignored the fact that multiple players who know each other (or one player who plays several hands, even with different Internet connections) can share data about their cards with each other, giving them a small edge against other players who think that all players have the same information available to them. I have since learned from a friend who does play on-line that he and his wife often play in the same hands even from the same IP address and this certainly does go on and is not prevented from the "on-line casinos" that run the games.
My thoughts exactly, although it doesn't need to be marketing based. Many years ago there were a number of locations on the Internet that would accept requests by email and email back the requested information. This ranged from file transfers to web pages. No marketing was involved, just the overall internet philosophy that information wants to be free and the realization that some people at the time had email access but not complete Internet access. I remember dialing into an email server (not a full Internet gateway) and sending my mail and requests, and later getting responses back when I dialed in again. If this truns out a true report with no strings attached then it would be nice if some people would start back up services for email users.
If people pay money to support DRM products, this is exactly what they deserve. Maybe if enough people pay enough for this kind of low quality junk and then the DRM gods take it away from them, they will finally learn to not buy into the scheme. As long as the studios can see a revenue stream from this kind of crippled product they are not likely to deal with their customers on a more reasonable basis. So "hats of to Sony" for trying to help show the consumer just how bad DRM can be if you buy into it.
I'm not going to hype the place that I bought it, but I'm hard pressed to believe that you are having any trouble Googling it. I even provided a link in my original post to the wikipedia article on both versions.
Yea, but they didn't affect game play, at least not in a positive way (a bug in the game would keep the award around even when the rest of the player was invisible!!!) And Unreal can give out some extra point awards for many things, like "first blood", "revenge" or killing sprees. I wouldn't object to such awards that spanned rounds of the game (those that you speak of only persist in the instance of a single round AFAIK), but I simply have no interest in games where awards build up your character, or as I think of it, an in-game economy exists that is used to build up the power of the character rather than expecting the players to actually increase the skill as they play.
It would be kind of like if PacMan could tell how many quarters you spent and after so many hundred quarters it gave you a super weapon to kill the ghosts or gave your character more speed. To me that would diminish the game, not make it more interesting.
Thank for the feedback and insight. Please note that, as you quoted, I said that I had not seen such systems, not that they didn't exist. Unfortunately, since WOW does indeed have a major emphasis of the game focused around repetitive tasks and "building up" the character, I've avoided it and still will avoid it, so that they have also included some non-impacting rewards becomes a non-issue for me.
While I grant you that games like WOW are extremely popular, even to the point of adiction, there are some players who avoid such games. I'm one and I want to say why I hope this "all games must have this" approach does not, in fact, come to pass.
I get a different type of achievement out of playing on-line games. I build my skill. I enjoy playing First Person Shooter games like Quake 3, Unreal, and other similar FPS games. But as long as I'm not playing against cheaters (and there definitely cheaters on-line), I can start any individual game on a fair footing against my opponents, the only factor that will influence who wins and who loses is player skill, not stupid repetitive tasks to build up some in-game form of currency that is then used to unbalance players. Even worse (IMHO) are the games that will sell players an edge for hard cash, making everyone who doesn't cough up money their licking boy. I see this as little more than a ligitimized and sanctioned cheat. I'm not going to buy the super weapon from some game supplier to over power the other players, and I'm not going to play in a game against people who do.
In a sense, even games like WOW sell the player better weapons or tools, they just do it by a rewards system (called loot here) that doles the advantages out over time. Thus the stupid requirements of repeditive tasks, "kill 1000 chipmunks and tan their pelts". So while the rich and vast world of WOW greatly appeals to me in eye candy value, I completely have no interest in playing it based on it's Hammurabi economy type of play. I neither wish to be some one's cannon fodder nor to be given what I consider an unfair advantage against others just because I completed some (usually extremely repetitive and boring) tasks.
I could see a loot system in games appeal to me, but it would have to be a system that doesn't affect overall game play, and as yet I have not seen such a system in play. In a game like Unreal, such a system could acknowledge players accomplishments with eye candy rewards that don't affect the actual game is any significant way. Perhaps extra and special skins granted to players for special acchevements (hopefully none that give an edge in being harder to see though, like all back ninja suits) or special flame paint jobs for a character' vehicles. Or a noble title added to a player's name (obviously not to be permitted when the name is first created). Granted, these type of things are harder to come up with than just "leveling up" a player to a level 95 Knight Elf Mohawk, or giving him a sword that has a +23 kick ass factor, but they prevent the games from favoring the players who have played the longest rather than favoring the better players (usually related but certainly not always). Loot systems have unfortunately come to replace the gaining of actual skill in the game play, and for that reason I hope that the prediction that is made in this article, while obviously a growing trend, does not come to completely dominate gaming.
If cost is no object (it is to me), then Logitech also has a Keyboard / Mouse combo called the MX 5500 that also includes a LCD display. I don't know much about this display, and suspect it may not be completely compatable with the G15 display, but it's a nice looking Keyboard. Should be at a MSRP of $170.
I keep seeing the terms SlideShow and LCDProc thrown around, but I'm not clear on the exact applications. It seems curious to me that something that is 4 lines of alphanumeric text can be used by something called SlideShow. Anyway, I can concede that to my knowledge the G15 display doesn't work dierectly with these applications, but the development kit is available and I would expect that if there was a reason to do so someone would build the software (or perhaps already has). Certainly the G15 display can display anything that this thing can, while this little box can't come near doing what the G15 display will. As to limited utility for non-gamers, that's not quite accurate. Along with the handful of small utilities that come in the G15 package, there are several free ones available on-line. One will display any bitmap (of suitable size), so it shouldn't take much work to wrap whatever you want displayed around that. Others include a utility from AMD that gives info on the CPU (I suspect it doesn't work with Intel CPUs though but have no way to try that). There's a great utility for showing lots of status information called SirReal's panel that is configurable as to what info it shows (mine is currently showing time and date, cpu and memory usage, network bandwidth, network statistics, a stopwatch, any hung program (and a button that will kill it), and my Teamspaeak status (yea, that last one is rather gamer related). All this at one time on a graphic display. There are network monitor utilities, email monitors, weather monitors, stock monitors (I'm pretty sure I've seen one but can't find it now), multimedia based utilities, and many system based utilities. The last few versions of PCwizard will optionally display their system status to the G15 display when the program is minimized. And, since the development kit is available and free, you certainty are free to program anything for it that you want. So rather than spend time making SlideShow or LCDproc display what you want, you could be coding for a much nicer display built right into a pretty nice keyboard. But the choice, of course, belongs to the user. I just can't see this price as being inexpensive in contrast to what else is available (the G15 being a pretty good alternative). This "story: just strikes me as another example of the editors letting an advertisement for a dubious product slip through as if it were a real story. Nothing new there.
The good deal was that it was the first version. The first version is extremely hard to find now, I can't find it for anywhere near that price now (I don't deal with the Evil Bay of Thieves). The newer version can be easily found around $70 with some simple searching, at east it could about a week ago when I last looked). For $20 more than the 4 line text gimmic, I think the illuminated keyboard, graphical LCD display, 2 extra usb ports, and even just 6 extra function keys (and a really handy place to mount the LCD) is a far better deal.
While you may have identified a very small niche market for this thing, I would suggest that if you have a server farm, there are far better ways to monitor such information remotely from a central point that greatly beat out buying one of these gimmicks for each server. And you should be doing that before playing with this toy. If you actually have to walk up to the server, you very likely do want to be able to see a real monitor (likely a smallish LCM monitor that may not cost much more than this box if you shop around). I also wouldn't bet on the future availability of this device, there just isn't a big market for it at the price. So I would be very cautious about designing a server farm that depended on it, unless I had so much cash that I could afford to buy enough units to cover any future growth and a reasonable allowance for device failure.
While I'm sure that a very small number of people will buy into this, I find it very disappointing and very limited, and pretty damn expensive for what you get. I compare this to my Logictech G15 LCD graphic display device. I paid $60 for mine a little over a year ago, it runs on USB, has similar input buttons near the display, but it does full graphics, and a number of nice aplets are already written for it (although far too few). Oh yea, it also happens to include a full illuminated keyboard, multimedia volume knob and mute button, and 18 user definable macro keys (expandable to 54 or more using the 3 "bank" buttons - but unfortnately the newer version of the Logitech G15 reduces this to just 6 user definable buttons). And they throw in a few extra USB ports too. While some people might not want to use a keyboard with their computer, I kind of suspect that most do, and that mounting a full graphic capable similar sized LCD on a Luminated keyboard is a far better way to go for the vast majority of users, and that a $50 price for just an alpha-numeric display is a bit expensive. Too bad they didn't make it Logitech G15 compatible and put it out at a lower price, but I don't see a likely broad use for this gimic when the G15 is still available, even with it's reduced number of fumction keys in the new version.
It shouldn't even be an issue of a lack of research skills, it should just be common sense in an HTML medium that one would include a link in such a serious statement. Yea, Google comes up pretty dry unless you find the magic words to key on, but if you are doing web journalism, as /. claims they are doing, (as well as calling the people who somewhat arbitrarily pick stories to be "editors"), then it's not unreasonable to set an expectation that links would be provided in such statements. I'm as peeved about this as I am when Associated Press or Reuters run a story on the world's ugliest dog, or fattest cat, or how much Rielle Hunter's baby looks like John Edwards, without actually showing a photo of the subject. Perhaps more peeved, because (not to excuse the others) Slashdot is exclusively web based and should be more technical and should know better.