"Turned-off (black) pixels don't drain the battery"
True on an OLED phone. But actually, on non-OLED screens, black pixels are turned on, while white are turned off.
Confusing? For anything to show, the backlight must be lit (which of course takes power). The "screen" then blocks the light from the backlight in a negative fashion, so that you only see the light/colours that get through.
On computers, that means that those lovely CRT-day screensavers that just set the screen to black (or maybe black with stars), actually may use slightly *MORE* power an LCD. A power-setting that turns off the backlight is the best way to save your screen.
For OLED screens, pixels are lit individually and no backlight is required, so if you've got an app like "noled" - which creates a notification icon the screen of phones that don't have a blinky LED - you're only paying for the power to a few pixels (though you may also be paying for CPU cycles). IIRC, for a plasma screen TV, black is also lower consumption (nothing lit, no power).
"Replaceable batteries mean the battery has to have some sort of battery well, battery door and consumer-friendly connector. Every single one of those things adds size and weight to the product"
Seriously? The only thing that they might add is a slightly-less-asthetically-pleasant seam, which when done right doesn't even create an aesthetics issue. Similar devices are about the same thickness/weight as an iDevice (heck, if you're looking at phones the SG2 is *thinner*), so added bulk/weight really isn't a big issue.
And to add a caveat to #3:
"3. Needs to be disposed of properly, so as not to create toxic waste. Again, we're talking about a pretty big battery here. How many "consumers" would take the time to make sure it doesn't just end up in the dustbin?"
It's not just the disposal of the battery, but of the overall device. When recycle centers get these devices, being able to easily separate the battery is quite helpful. Beyond that, having an easily replaceable battery enhances the lifetime of the device. My old 3G has long since been replaced as a phone, but it still makes a dandy mp3 player. Replacing the battery was a bit of a PITA , and I have experience with electronics. A normal user would probably have just tossed the thing out, whereas previously many older electronics ended up being re-used in other fashions or became hand-me-downs.
That was one thing I quite enjoyed about my milestone... that little aluminum cover was elegant and durable. I'd guess that it's also good for heat-transfer from the battery/innards.
Going back to that same phone - which one day decided to frag the charging circuit - taking things apart is a big PITA. Underneath that lovely battery cover are parts that seem to be part of the body, but are actual plastic film stickied on. Getting at the screws underneath involves prying them off, and I daresay they aren't likely to go back on nicely.
So what happens if somebody DDOS's Netflix, hacks them, or whatever. If that person himself/herself has a Netflix account... then it would be interesting to see what might happen when this clause is brought up.
Even if the perp isn't involved in a single big-crime, there's also the question of whether the perp is involved in a *lot* of small crime. So while you might not find a meth op every time you bust some dude for a stolen iPad, you may find an apartment full of other stolen stuff, with a large total value.
One stolen iPad is worth about $400-600. If the thief stole about 100 of similarly-priced items, then you're looking at 40000-60000 worth of stolen goods, not an inconsiderable amount. Perhaps the possibility of leading to big busts (drugs, chop-shops, etc) will push police to focus more on the lesser-value-but-easily-solved type crimes.
Except nowadays you often can't. Even supposed "full" games are now coming out with what's almost 0-day DLC. There's also the one-time-DLC/download issues preventing you from reselling the full game, etc).
What if you're paying for the game and then downloading the DRM'less version? I know plenty of people who do this, though I prefer GoG (no DRM, though older games) or Steam (DRM but value-added and not intrusive/damaging IMHO) myself.
If a game is worth playing, it's worth paying for. That being said, the pirate versions often remove things that make the paid-for version less playable (DRM, etc). Thankfully things like Steam make this less of an issue, but then things like EA's Origin seem to be a step backwards again by scanning your whole hard drive, etc.
Beyond the issues of not paying+downloading, there's also the issues of legitimacy if you buy the game then download a copy that doesn't have the irritating DRM or what is essentially unadvertised spyware/malware packaged by the game studio. At the moment I would truly love to play Mass Effect 3 on the PC due to better graphics and mouse-control etc, but I won't install anything that requires the spy-fest known as Origin.
It seems that government and large entities aren't very good at securing existing high-security infrastructure. So to add to the other issues of eVoting, do you really want to trust that the vote isn't going to be Lulz-hacked once they go online because some idiot forgot to sanitize DB inputs or left the equivalent to register_globals on?
Indeed. Try playing the older "3d" Playstation FF games on an emulator. The backgrounds won't really change, but on a decent graphics card the character/monster/etc models rendered nicely.
Zelda has always been a neat series. It's got RPG subtones, arcade elements, and overall is somewhat of a puzzler game. I had a discussion about the various RPG sub-genre's recently actually. Nowdays you've got stuff like Skyrim/Mass Effect which mixes storytelling/RPG elements with shooter type stuff, and a bit of puzzle. It's a bit hard to classify games nowadays. Is ME3 a shooter/action game with a really good storyline, or an RPG with lots of action. Skyrim was cool, but to be honest a lot of the deeper character subplots were lost. There were *lots* of little sub-stories but few deep ones.
What happens to older JRPG style games, with turn-based combat. The last game I played that kept true to that form was "Lost Odyssey" (which IMHO is great), but I would sure love to see some other goodies along that style.
Space Quest was great for giggles as well. "Never send a mandroid to do a womandroid's job", spot the face-hugger as a pet, etc
That and QFG fell under the higher category of "adventure games" (which Sierra pretty much defined at the time).
I know that the SQ series had a graphical facelift/remake and was later sold as a collection. Apparently QFC2 had a remake authorized in '98... anyone know what happened to it?
Which is exactly the problem I had with stuff from EA. Bought "NFS shift", found that it needed extra data files. Wasn't able to download the extra data until I had wifi, and then found out that it wouldn't download at all (the downloader or content site was broken for months).
Of course by that time the time-for-refund had passed. Within a week the comments had all become "piece of crap won't download content", but the rating remained high due to comments before the glitch.
Actually, that's not the issue. Calibrating+testing the devices properly would still have likely led to large amounts of convictions with large fines. If they were deliberately calibrating them to read 0.08 when the actual reading should have been 0.05 that's different.
There's still plenty of illegal/immoral behavior yet with the filing false reports and not doing their job. In this case, though, the evidence is no longer valid, they probably just lost a bunch of convictions/fines.
Physics does seem to be building towards more realism lately, but still isn't as much focus as graphics.
However, full physics realism in most games wouldn't work well. It takes away from the gameplay a bit if you can just point the MonsterBlaster 10000 at the wall and blow a hole to the nearest exit:-)
I found that wine similarly kicked butt over my windows machine, which was mostly due to the laptop manufacturer not updating nVidia drivers, and nVidia's windows drivers not necessarily working well. The Linux install had newer drivers that performed much *better*
For LAN parties, I have a PXE server with various games built in that run via wine (also a component which manages which serial keys are in-use at a given time).
There were some initial wrangles getting the Nvidia/ATI blobs to install-on-demand, but with that running it's quite nice. I wouldn't be able to do quite the same thing with VirtualBox/VMware, not to mention the network overhead of loading a full VM image (each app has its own wine directory, so only the necessary files for that app are needed, plus there are no conflicts)
Some businesses do allow this in Canada, though often it's "limited" personal use. The caveat though: it's a taxable benefit. In fact, just having a company vehicle and going to/from work is taxable (unless you don't have a fixed work site)
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Heck, in Canada, they want warrant-less surveillance of internet, and to pay for it they want an extra addon to internet bills.
So in essence Canadians will get to pay extra to be spied upon...
Good thing he didn't read that one out, or he'd be charged with dissemination of child pr0n...
"Turned-off (black) pixels don't drain the battery"
True on an OLED phone. But actually, on non-OLED screens, black pixels are turned on, while white are turned off.
Confusing? For anything to show, the backlight must be lit (which of course takes power). The "screen" then blocks the light from the backlight in a negative fashion, so that you only see the light/colours that get through.
On computers, that means that those lovely CRT-day screensavers that just set the screen to black (or maybe black with stars), actually may use slightly *MORE* power an LCD. A power-setting that turns off the backlight is the best way to save your screen.
For OLED screens, pixels are lit individually and no backlight is required, so if you've got an app like "noled" - which creates a notification icon the screen of phones that don't have a blinky LED - you're only paying for the power to a few pixels (though you may also be paying for CPU cycles).
IIRC, for a plasma screen TV, black is also lower consumption (nothing lit, no power).
"Replaceable batteries mean the battery has to have some sort of battery well, battery door and consumer-friendly connector. Every single one of those things adds size and weight to the product"
Seriously? The only thing that they might add is a slightly-less-asthetically-pleasant seam, which when done right doesn't even create an aesthetics issue. Similar devices are about the same thickness/weight as an iDevice (heck, if you're looking at phones the SG2 is *thinner*), so added bulk/weight really isn't a big issue.
And to add a caveat to #3:
"3. Needs to be disposed of properly, so as not to create toxic waste. Again, we're talking about a pretty big battery here. How many "consumers" would take the time to make sure it doesn't just end up in the dustbin?"
It's not just the disposal of the battery, but of the overall device. When recycle centers get these devices, being able to easily separate the battery is quite helpful. Beyond that, having an easily replaceable battery enhances the lifetime of the device. My old 3G has long since been replaced as a phone, but it still makes a dandy mp3 player. Replacing the battery was a bit of a PITA , and I have experience with electronics. A normal user would probably have just tossed the thing out, whereas previously many older electronics ended up being re-used in other fashions or became hand-me-downs.
That was one thing I quite enjoyed about my milestone... that little aluminum cover was elegant and durable. I'd guess that it's also good for heat-transfer from the battery/innards.
Going back to that same phone - which one day decided to frag the charging circuit - taking things apart is a big PITA. Underneath that lovely battery cover are parts that seem to be part of the body, but are actual plastic film stickied on. Getting at the screws underneath involves prying them off, and I daresay they aren't likely to go back on nicely.
So what happens if somebody DDOS's Netflix, hacks them, or whatever. If that person himself/herself has a Netflix account... then it would be interesting to see what might happen when this clause is brought up.
Even if the perp isn't involved in a single big-crime, there's also the question of whether the perp is involved in a *lot* of small crime.
So while you might not find a meth op every time you bust some dude for a stolen iPad, you may find an apartment full of other stolen stuff, with a large total value.
One stolen iPad is worth about $400-600. If the thief stole about 100 of similarly-priced items, then you're looking at 40000-60000 worth of stolen goods, not an inconsiderable amount. Perhaps the possibility of leading to big busts (drugs, chop-shops, etc) will push police to focus more on the lesser-value-but-easily-solved type crimes.
Except nowadays you often can't. Even supposed "full" games are now coming out with what's almost 0-day DLC.
There's also the one-time-DLC/download issues preventing you from reselling the full game, etc).
What if you're paying for the game and then downloading the DRM'less version?
I know plenty of people who do this, though I prefer GoG (no DRM, though older games) or Steam (DRM but value-added and not intrusive/damaging IMHO) myself.
If a game is worth playing, it's worth paying for.
That being said, the pirate versions often remove things that make the paid-for version less playable (DRM, etc). Thankfully things like Steam make this less of an issue, but then things like EA's Origin seem to be a step backwards again by scanning your whole hard drive, etc.
Beyond the issues of not paying+downloading, there's also the issues of legitimacy if you buy the game then download a copy that doesn't have the irritating DRM or what is essentially unadvertised spyware/malware packaged by the game studio. At the moment I would truly love to play Mass Effect 3 on the PC due to better graphics and mouse-control etc, but I won't install anything that requires the spy-fest known as Origin.
Sony accounts hacked
Steam accounts hacked
Insecure DieBold machines
etc
etc
It seems that government and large entities aren't very good at securing existing high-security infrastructure. So to add to the other issues of eVoting, do you really want to trust that the vote isn't going to be Lulz-hacked once they go online because some idiot forgot to sanitize DB inputs or left the equivalent to register_globals on?
Indeed. Try playing the older "3d" Playstation FF games on an emulator. The backgrounds won't really change, but on a decent graphics card the character/monster/etc models rendered nicely.
Zelda has always been a neat series. It's got RPG subtones, arcade elements, and overall is somewhat of a puzzler game.
I had a discussion about the various RPG sub-genre's recently actually. Nowdays you've got stuff like Skyrim/Mass Effect which mixes storytelling/RPG elements with shooter type stuff, and a bit of puzzle.
It's a bit hard to classify games nowadays. Is ME3 a shooter/action game with a really good storyline, or an RPG with lots of action.
Skyrim was cool, but to be honest a lot of the deeper character subplots were lost. There were *lots* of little sub-stories but few deep ones.
What happens to older JRPG style games, with turn-based combat. The last game I played that kept true to that form was "Lost Odyssey" (which IMHO is great), but I would sure love to see some other goodies along that style.
Space Quest was great for giggles as well. "Never send a mandroid to do a womandroid's job", spot the face-hugger as a pet, etc
That and QFG fell under the higher category of "adventure games" (which Sierra pretty much defined at the time).
I know that the SQ series had a graphical facelift/remake and was later sold as a collection. Apparently QFC2 had a remake authorized in '98... anyone know what happened to it?
Which is exactly the problem I had with stuff from EA.
Bought "NFS shift", found that it needed extra data files. Wasn't able to download the extra data until I had wifi, and then found out that it wouldn't download at all (the downloader or content site was broken for months).
Of course by that time the time-for-refund had passed. Within a week the comments had all become "piece of crap won't download content", but the rating remained high due to comments before the glitch.
Actually, that's not the issue. Calibrating+testing the devices properly would still have likely led to large amounts of convictions with large fines.
If they were deliberately calibrating them to read 0.08 when the actual reading should have been 0.05 that's different.
There's still plenty of illegal/immoral behavior yet with the filing false reports and not doing their job. In this case, though, the evidence is no longer valid, they probably just lost a bunch of convictions/fines.
I second that.
The best way not to get caught engaging in dangerous illegal behavior is to NOT engage in dangerous illegal behavior.
Physics does seem to be building towards more realism lately, but still isn't as much focus as graphics.
However, full physics realism in most games wouldn't work well. It takes away from the gameplay a bit if you can just point the MonsterBlaster 10000 at the wall and blow a hole to the nearest exit :-)
You probably would have had more luck in the podunk town.
Let me guess, a slightly older laptop?
I found that wine similarly kicked butt over my windows machine, which was mostly due to the laptop manufacturer not updating nVidia drivers, and nVidia's windows drivers not necessarily working well.
The Linux install had newer drivers that performed much *better*
For LAN parties, I have a PXE server with various games built in that run via wine (also a component which manages which serial keys are in-use at a given time).
There were some initial wrangles getting the Nvidia/ATI blobs to install-on-demand, but with that running it's quite nice. I wouldn't be able to do quite the same thing with VirtualBox/VMware, not to mention the network overhead of loading a full VM image (each app has its own wine directory, so only the necessary files for that app are needed, plus there are no conflicts)
I've had good luck with Hogan in general. I haven't read the "Giant" series, but a lot of his other stuff is also quite good.
I want one that looks like R2D2!
Would it be fun to have one of those following you around.
In some ways, I think it has been getting more and more true as generations pass...
Some businesses do allow this in Canada, though often it's "limited" personal use.
The caveat though: it's a taxable benefit. In fact, just having a company vehicle and going to/from work is taxable (unless you don't have a fixed work site)