The sliding idea to unlock the device was new and the engineer who has invented it should has his or her invention protected for a while.
The company doing the innovation already has a big jump start because they where the first one doing the thing and if it's a thing of reasonable complexity, it will take everybody a while to catch up, which is really all that is needed to profit from innovation. See the iPad, everybody is struggling to match it, no need to throw in patents to make it even harder and stifle the competition.
Also about the iPhone lock I might want to point you to this little NintendoDS demo I wrote before the iPhone was even announced: Windstille: Demonstration of door interaction, notice how the door is opened at 0:20? Doing a trivial slide to unlock action is not rocked science, it comes pretty natural when you toy around with touch interfaces.
You would greatly increase the job market (and raise the median income significantly) in this country with every one burger flipper replaced by technology.
That logic makes no sense. The reason you buy the machine is because its cheaper then the human burger flipper and it is cheaper because it needs much less workforce to be build then that burger flipper provides. If you would create more jobs the machine would be more expensive and there would be no reason to buy it in the first place.
The sales guy, the programmer and the engineer will of course be there and will be well paid, but they don't replace just one burger flipper, they replace thousands of them. Thus you have a small team creating all the burger flipping workforce that is needed and a whole bunch of jobless human ex-burger flipper.
The only reason why the whole "better tech creates jobs" worked in the past is because the production and consumption has been ramped up constantly, but you can have that exponential growth forever.
GameCube was fantastic for it's time, but the NintendoDS already wasn't that big a jump from the GBA and the 3DS also looks already a bit outdated on arrival.
I doubt that 4K will kick of in the same way that HD has, as current TV sizes are just to small and the viewing distances to large. The difference between 720p and 1080p is already tiny, go much higher up and the difference won't be observable. Furthermore, there just isn't much material for 4K, with HD you could take a lot of old films and rerelease them in noticeably better quality. But most movies are 2K, so a 4K display won't help and even rescanning the films might just give you bigger film grain, not better resolution. Equally for games it's just a waste of GPU, if you can make a noticeably better looking picture at 1080P, then just making a hires, but worse looking one, at 4K, then developers will chose the low res one that allows more lighting effects and other post processing tricks. It's already the case with modern consoles, they are fully capable of 720p, but a lot of devs chose to go lower then that to allow more effects. And TV and Internet broadcasting would have some bandwidth issues at 4K.
So unless display tech changes drastically, OLED wallpaper screens covering your whole wall instead of just a tiny TV area or virtual reality glasses covering your whole field of view, I don't see much use for 4K.
Re:Is the past is viewable in one direction or all
on
Ask The Bad Astronomer
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· Score: 1
1) Light takes a while to travel, so everything you see is in "the past", as light always takes a while to reach your eye, it just takes longer for objects further away. Direction doesn't matter.
2) It's the space that is expanding, not the stars flying away from each other. Have two ants staying on a rubber band and pull the rubber band apart, the ants will get further away from each other, even when neither of them moves. The more interesting question would be: How do you tell the two apart? If you see an object moving away from you, how can you tell it's the object moving, not the expansion of space that is doing the job.
You make it sound easy, but the line can get blurry the more complex the game gets. Take Eve Online, people have been running pyramid schemes and other frauds in that game. Is such a fraud real or just part of the game? Even in sport the line can get blurry, as not every foul, is just a foul, sometimes it might be a case of battery if it gets to extreme to be considered part of the game.
In most cases you will of course have a clear distinction about what is part of the game and what is not, like stealing things from the game character is ok, stilling the account password probably not. But with all the Facebook and Twitter integration I expect the lines between "game-action" and "realworld-fraud" to get a good bit more blurry.
Another interesting thing with these cases: The game developer has an undo switch. So while a fraud might be real, the damage is not and can be undone by the developer without much problems in most cases. But the developer is a third party that neither had the damage nor did commit the fraud, can a law force him to roll back a character or give equipment back?
Is it so hard to understand? The more context the compiler has, the better he can optimize. Thus throwing all the.cpp files at once at the compile will lead the best results and use naturally more resources then compiling each file alone. That's not "masking the problem", that's simply getting the best possible results with the tools you have available.
Einstein's theory stands or falls with the speed of light being constant.
Yeah, and so far our experiments have confirmed that over and over again. That doesn't mean that the theory is right, in fact we know that it is very likely wrong, as it doesn't play nice with quantum mechanics, but science isn't about right or wrong or finding absolute truth, it's about finding the best theory to explain and predict our observations and so far the theory is the best we got. If our experiments get more detailed and unexplainable reproducible errors show up, then we might need to update the theory, but that hasn't happened yet.
Most recent developments point towards the mundane cause of thermal radiation pressure forces inherent in the spacecraft.
What you are doing is Anomaly Hunting, one tiny unreproducible glitch in the data doesn't mean that we have to through all our working theories out of the window, it means that we have to either explain the glitch or look for a way to reproduce it.
Currently theories assume there was a land bridge.
My point is, as technology advances I have no doubt it will be possible to travel between planets.
No doubt about that, but then you are just sitting on Mars or whatever where you have no air to breath, no water to drink and no soil to grow plants in. As said, the problem isn't the journey, that's the easy part, the hard part is staying there and staying alive. If the way to stay alive is by regular supply from earth then it's just a giant waste of time and money. Building a self sustaining habitat might certainly not be impossible, but that is essentially one step harder then solving all of Earth energy and resource problems and so far we haven't even figured out that.
Once upon a time sailing from Europe to the Americas was considered a long, highly dangerous, expensive voyage.
The difference is that with Americas it was only the journey that was dangerous and expensive, once you had arrived you had plenty of uncharted and fertile land at your hands and could make a self sustained living pretty easily. The problem with space is that the journey never ends, you never reach the point where you can just settle down and go kill some buffalo when you are hungry, you will always be incredible short on resources and reaching self sustainability will be extremely hard, if possible at all.
can't give up on every idea simply because it doesn't make sense -today-.
You shouldn't give up on it, but you should stay realistic. There is little point in trying to cross the Atlantic when all you have is a tiny inflatable boat.
The problem with playlist is that, while they allow you to group videos, those groups are essentially invisible in the regular interface. If you come across a video that is part of a playlist, you don't actually see any hint that there exist a playlists with that video, instead you just see the random related videos. Right now I have no idea how I am even supposed so find a playlist, I can see them on the users account page, but I don't see any way to actually search for them or come across them. The only use right now of playlist seems to be that you mark the playlist as "official" for that video, which will make it show up on the video player page, but even there, that playlist is very easy to miss and not exactly well integrated.
And of course, even with that said, playlist still miss all the more advanced features, you can't subscribe to them, you can't include other playlists in them, you can't include channels in them, etc. All of that makes them rather useless right now.
Just like how we used to surf the web.
Except that's not how we use the web, most people just go to their favorite blog, news site or forum to see what's up. By far most of the web pages you look at are not stuff you found on Google, but stuff somebody else linked to.
The most popular way to link content together on Youtube right now seems to be via video descriptions and clickable annotations, as it's the only way that actually somewhat works, but then of course that only works for the original video creator, a third party can't do a best-of collection that way.
Original content is surely interesting, but how about fixing the interface to bring it closer to a regular TV viewing experience or just improving it in general? One thing for example currently completely missing for no good reasons are user created channels, i.e. content of similar topic, but from different creators. What Youtube currently calls channels is all just content from the same creator, running on a single account. Want to merge the work of multiple people into a single channel? Not possible. Want to run multiple regular channels from a single account? Can't do that either. The subscription system is also rather terrible, as it allows no grouping sorting or prioritizing, thus a high traffic channel will completely flood the subscription list and make it way to easy to missing new content on low traffic channels. Even something that should be completly trivial like watching a multi part video on Youtube is a complete clusterfuck, as you end up having to manually search for all the other parts as Youtubes doesn't really provide good ways to group videos together.
I do like the random user created content on Youtube quite a bit, but viewing it is far harder then it should be.
But what I can't comprehend is how people are pissed off that we're trying to make the games fun.
People are not pissed of at others making games that are meant to be fun, people are pissed of at developer who make games with the sole goal of maximizing profit. A lot of features that get implemented into free games are there to do the exact opposite of fun, they are there to maximize the player annoyance and willingness to pay to skip or speed up that step in the fast. Essentially these games are exploits of human psychology and they work damn well when you look at the amount of money Zynga is making. Jonathan Blow has held a few good talks on the subject, look them up if you still have a problem understanding what people are complaining about.
- Regular calls to spam your friends for in-game reward - true of many shareware games
Could you name some? The only cases I have seen are a few games that require twitter spam to get them for free, but then those are rather recent games and essentially part of the whole free-to-play games thing that is currently evolving.
As for the rest, yes, none of these ideas are fundamentally new, but none of the examples combine all those elements. A Tamagotchi annoys you in realtime, it however doesn't have a pop up that ask for real world money to speed up the process. Also a Tamagotchi has a defined end, the online free-to-play games don't, they want to keep you hooked as long as possible.
That "niche" is worth billions of dollar and when a company like Zynga is valued more then EA, you should really start to worry.
but I don't see this being the model of choice for console and PC markets.
It's already starting to make it's way into mainstream games, see Diablo3 with it's in-game auction for real world money. Playstation Home will sell you a new virtual hat for more money then it would cost to buy a real hat. The last Need for speed also had plenty of "social" components. Achievements are also going into a direction similar to those social-games, using cooperative behavior of humans to make them play games that they would otherwise not touch. It's not that big of an issue right now as achievements are not yet directly exploited for cash and micro-payment and free-to-play games are a tiny minority on consoles if they exist at all, but don't kid yourself, publishers are looking real close at those business model and once they find a good way to exploit it in regular PC and console games, they will.
Re:So they are making there game fun and engrossin
on
Who Killed Videogames?
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· Score: 1
So they are making there game fun and engrossing in the hope that, upon playing it, you will decide that it is so much fun and engrossing that you are willing to part with some real world money for some additional perks- rewards as it were for keeping the game going.
They are not making them more fun and engrossing, quite the opposite, they are optimizing things like random-loot drops and level up intervals to maximize your exchange from real world money into in-game currency. Essentially they are trying to maximize the amount of annoyance the player can take, so that he doesn't outright quits the game, but instead uses his cash to buy game progress to speed up the slow gameplay up. And the evil part with cash: Once the player has invested money into the game, he will have an even harder time to give up on it, he has after all to justify the purchase to himself thanks to cognitive-dissonance.
Finally the large studios may, possibly, see new game markets and FINALLY make something that is not 'FPS game with narrow boxy corridors #X'
Well, the good part is, yes, you will totally see more non-FPS games, the bad part is that those will be variants of FarmVille and grind heavy things that require no skill other then time and money.
How is this fundamentally ANY different from what video games have been doing since the dawn of time?
Ever played FarmVille? No? Give it a try. Within the first few minutes you will learn that that games works quite different from anything you played in the past. Among other things:
* based on realtime, forcing you to revisit the game to not spoil your crop * regular calls to spam your friends, for in-game reward * regular calls to exchange your real world money for in-game currency * randomized in-game reward whenever you start the game * essentially free of challenge, all the game requires is clicking on stuff to get rewards
None of those elements have been present in that form in traditional games.
Certain elements of course overlap a bit, Civ has some of those addicting elements, Diablo had them, etc. But the way they are directly exploited and analyzed in free to play games is quite a different thing then what you had in the past.
Arcade games where of course somewhat similar in trying to exploit the player, but they where limited by needing an expensive arcade machine that could only serve one or two players. Online games not only no longer have that limitation, they also allow regular changes to the games to optimize them for maximum revenue.
You DO know you can easily install a different window manager?
It's easy to install any other window manager, yes, except of course the one you actually want. Right now there is no easy way to get Gnome2 on Ubuntu 11.10, just messy bunch of workarounds. The joy with the Linux package management systems is that they can't handle two versions of the same packages, thus you are essentially forced to use Gnome3 or completly bypass the distribution and roll your own stuff, neither of one is a pretty solution.
Corrections: Looks like applets are still there, you have to Alt-Rightclick to get to the menu, as normal Rightclick won't work. Still don't see a way to actually position them. And I am not sure if the panels still support multiple monitors like the Gnome2 ones, as I haven't yet found a way to move them to the other monitor.
Wrong, all that gives you is a broken shitty lookalike of the Gnome2 panel. You can't move icons, you don't have applets and in general you can't configure anything. In essence its an unusable piece of junk.
As it looks right now, there is no way to get a working Gnome2 install easily on Ubuntu 11.10, the upgrade will wreak your system.
Exactly, there seems to be a serious lack of understanding what the Startmenu and menus in general are good for. Menus are not there to be used on a regular basis, they exist to provide a reference of all the functions (and shortcuts) a given program can do, or in the case of the Startmenu, of what is installed on the given system. Menus are essentially the place where you go when you want to explore what other things you can do with a computer that isn't the stuff you already know and they provide that information in a nicely organized fashion.
For daily use, sure, keyboard shortcuts or shortcuts in the dock are much faster, but to get the shortcuts there and to learn the shortcuts in the first place, you need good old menu. This isn't just a Microsoft problem, Firefox suffers from it as well, as they have removed functions from the menu that are available via other means, such as View->Reload for example (its still in the menu when you open the menu with a keyboard shortcut, but not when you open it with a mouse, so much for UI consistency...).
Huh? Kinect is a 3D camera. It gives you a nice depth map along with the regular video picture and it should be able to easily pick out a flat cardboard from a full 3D human.
It's not that unusual for example for video game reviews to allow rich formating, images and stuff like that, even Amazon allows you to upload images and add some metadata to them. Essentially none of that can be properly saved by regular means without losing the metadata or the formating, as that kind of stuff happens via Javascript hackery, not via a classical HTML form textarea.
Slashdot Mirror
The sliding idea to unlock the device was new and the engineer who has invented it should has his or her invention protected for a while.
The company doing the innovation already has a big jump start because they where the first one doing the thing and if it's a thing of reasonable complexity, it will take everybody a while to catch up, which is really all that is needed to profit from innovation. See the iPad, everybody is struggling to match it, no need to throw in patents to make it even harder and stifle the competition.
Also about the iPhone lock I might want to point you to this little NintendoDS demo I wrote before the iPhone was even announced: Windstille: Demonstration of door interaction, notice how the door is opened at 0:20? Doing a trivial slide to unlock action is not rocked science, it comes pretty natural when you toy around with touch interfaces.
You would greatly increase the job market (and raise the median income significantly) in this country with every one burger flipper replaced by technology.
That logic makes no sense. The reason you buy the machine is because its cheaper then the human burger flipper and it is cheaper because it needs much less workforce to be build then that burger flipper provides. If you would create more jobs the machine would be more expensive and there would be no reason to buy it in the first place.
The sales guy, the programmer and the engineer will of course be there and will be well paid, but they don't replace just one burger flipper, they replace thousands of them. Thus you have a small team creating all the burger flipping workforce that is needed and a whole bunch of jobless human ex-burger flipper.
The only reason why the whole "better tech creates jobs" worked in the past is because the production and consumption has been ramped up constantly, but you can have that exponential growth forever.
GameCube was fantastic for it's time, but the NintendoDS already wasn't that big a jump from the GBA and the 3DS also looks already a bit outdated on arrival.
I doubt that 4K will kick of in the same way that HD has, as current TV sizes are just to small and the viewing distances to large. The difference between 720p and 1080p is already tiny, go much higher up and the difference won't be observable. Furthermore, there just isn't much material for 4K, with HD you could take a lot of old films and rerelease them in noticeably better quality. But most movies are 2K, so a 4K display won't help and even rescanning the films might just give you bigger film grain, not better resolution. Equally for games it's just a waste of GPU, if you can make a noticeably better looking picture at 1080P, then just making a hires, but worse looking one, at 4K, then developers will chose the low res one that allows more lighting effects and other post processing tricks. It's already the case with modern consoles, they are fully capable of 720p, but a lot of devs chose to go lower then that to allow more effects. And TV and Internet broadcasting would have some bandwidth issues at 4K.
So unless display tech changes drastically, OLED wallpaper screens covering your whole wall instead of just a tiny TV area or virtual reality glasses covering your whole field of view, I don't see much use for 4K.
1) Light takes a while to travel, so everything you see is in "the past", as light always takes a while to reach your eye, it just takes longer for objects further away. Direction doesn't matter.
2) It's the space that is expanding, not the stars flying away from each other. Have two ants staying on a rubber band and pull the rubber band apart, the ants will get further away from each other, even when neither of them moves. The more interesting question would be: How do you tell the two apart? If you see an object moving away from you, how can you tell it's the object moving, not the expansion of space that is doing the job.
You make it sound easy, but the line can get blurry the more complex the game gets. Take Eve Online, people have been running pyramid schemes and other frauds in that game. Is such a fraud real or just part of the game? Even in sport the line can get blurry, as not every foul, is just a foul, sometimes it might be a case of battery if it gets to extreme to be considered part of the game.
In most cases you will of course have a clear distinction about what is part of the game and what is not, like stealing things from the game character is ok, stilling the account password probably not. But with all the Facebook and Twitter integration I expect the lines between "game-action" and "realworld-fraud" to get a good bit more blurry.
Another interesting thing with these cases: The game developer has an undo switch. So while a fraud might be real, the damage is not and can be undone by the developer without much problems in most cases. But the developer is a third party that neither had the damage nor did commit the fraud, can a law force him to roll back a character or give equipment back?
Is it so hard to understand? The more context the compiler has, the better he can optimize. Thus throwing all the .cpp files at once at the compile will lead the best results and use naturally more resources then compiling each file alone. That's not "masking the problem", that's simply getting the best possible results with the tools you have available.
Einstein's theory stands or falls with the speed of light being constant.
Yeah, and so far our experiments have confirmed that over and over again. That doesn't mean that the theory is right, in fact we know that it is very likely wrong, as it doesn't play nice with quantum mechanics, but science isn't about right or wrong or finding absolute truth, it's about finding the best theory to explain and predict our observations and so far the theory is the best we got. If our experiments get more detailed and unexplainable reproducible errors show up, then we might need to update the theory, but that hasn't happened yet.
Take the Pioneer anomaly, for example.
This one?
What you are doing is Anomaly Hunting, one tiny unreproducible glitch in the data doesn't mean that we have to through all our working theories out of the window, it means that we have to either explain the glitch or look for a way to reproduce it.
This means people somehow traveled via boats,
Currently theories assume there was a land bridge.
My point is, as technology advances I have no doubt it will be possible to travel between planets.
No doubt about that, but then you are just sitting on Mars or whatever where you have no air to breath, no water to drink and no soil to grow plants in. As said, the problem isn't the journey, that's the easy part, the hard part is staying there and staying alive. If the way to stay alive is by regular supply from earth then it's just a giant waste of time and money. Building a self sustaining habitat might certainly not be impossible, but that is essentially one step harder then solving all of Earth energy and resource problems and so far we haven't even figured out that.
Once upon a time sailing from Europe to the Americas was considered a long, highly dangerous, expensive voyage.
The difference is that with Americas it was only the journey that was dangerous and expensive, once you had arrived you had plenty of uncharted and fertile land at your hands and could make a self sustained living pretty easily. The problem with space is that the journey never ends, you never reach the point where you can just settle down and go kill some buffalo when you are hungry, you will always be incredible short on resources and reaching self sustainability will be extremely hard, if possible at all.
can't give up on every idea simply because it doesn't make sense -today-.
You shouldn't give up on it, but you should stay realistic. There is little point in trying to cross the Atlantic when all you have is a tiny inflatable boat.
They call it a "playlist".
The problem with playlist is that, while they allow you to group videos, those groups are essentially invisible in the regular interface. If you come across a video that is part of a playlist, you don't actually see any hint that there exist a playlists with that video, instead you just see the random related videos. Right now I have no idea how I am even supposed so find a playlist, I can see them on the users account page, but I don't see any way to actually search for them or come across them. The only use right now of playlist seems to be that you mark the playlist as "official" for that video, which will make it show up on the video player page, but even there, that playlist is very easy to miss and not exactly well integrated.
And of course, even with that said, playlist still miss all the more advanced features, you can't subscribe to them, you can't include other playlists in them, you can't include channels in them, etc. All of that makes them rather useless right now.
Just like how we used to surf the web.
Except that's not how we use the web, most people just go to their favorite blog, news site or forum to see what's up. By far most of the web pages you look at are not stuff you found on Google, but stuff somebody else linked to.
The most popular way to link content together on Youtube right now seems to be via video descriptions and clickable annotations, as it's the only way that actually somewhat works, but then of course that only works for the original video creator, a third party can't do a best-of collection that way.
That's fixed, moving videos up and down a playlist is now possible.
Original content is surely interesting, but how about fixing the interface to bring it closer to a regular TV viewing experience or just improving it in general? One thing for example currently completely missing for no good reasons are user created channels, i.e. content of similar topic, but from different creators. What Youtube currently calls channels is all just content from the same creator, running on a single account. Want to merge the work of multiple people into a single channel? Not possible. Want to run multiple regular channels from a single account? Can't do that either. The subscription system is also rather terrible, as it allows no grouping sorting or prioritizing, thus a high traffic channel will completely flood the subscription list and make it way to easy to missing new content on low traffic channels. Even something that should be completly trivial like watching a multi part video on Youtube is a complete clusterfuck, as you end up having to manually search for all the other parts as Youtubes doesn't really provide good ways to group videos together.
I do like the random user created content on Youtube quite a bit, but viewing it is far harder then it should be.
But what I can't comprehend is how people are pissed off that we're trying to make the games fun.
People are not pissed of at others making games that are meant to be fun, people are pissed of at developer who make games with the sole goal of maximizing profit. A lot of features that get implemented into free games are there to do the exact opposite of fun, they are there to maximize the player annoyance and willingness to pay to skip or speed up that step in the fast. Essentially these games are exploits of human psychology and they work damn well when you look at the amount of money Zynga is making. Jonathan Blow has held a few good talks on the subject, look them up if you still have a problem understanding what people are complaining about.
- Regular calls to spam your friends for in-game reward - true of many shareware games
Could you name some? The only cases I have seen are a few games that require twitter spam to get them for free, but then those are rather recent games and essentially part of the whole free-to-play games thing that is currently evolving.
As for the rest, yes, none of these ideas are fundamentally new, but none of the examples combine all those elements. A Tamagotchi annoys you in realtime, it however doesn't have a pop up that ask for real world money to speed up the process. Also a Tamagotchi has a defined end, the online free-to-play games don't, they want to keep you hooked as long as possible.
It might fill the niche market of mobile apps,
That "niche" is worth billions of dollar and when a company like Zynga is valued more then EA, you should really start to worry.
but I don't see this being the model of choice for console and PC markets.
It's already starting to make it's way into mainstream games, see Diablo3 with it's in-game auction for real world money. Playstation Home will sell you a new virtual hat for more money then it would cost to buy a real hat. The last Need for speed also had plenty of "social" components. Achievements are also going into a direction similar to those social-games, using cooperative behavior of humans to make them play games that they would otherwise not touch. It's not that big of an issue right now as achievements are not yet directly exploited for cash and micro-payment and free-to-play games are a tiny minority on consoles if they exist at all, but don't kid yourself, publishers are looking real close at those business model and once they find a good way to exploit it in regular PC and console games, they will.
So they are making there game fun and engrossing in the hope that, upon playing it, you will decide that it is so much fun and engrossing that you are willing to part with some real world money for some additional perks- rewards as it were for keeping the game going.
They are not making them more fun and engrossing, quite the opposite, they are optimizing things like random-loot drops and level up intervals to maximize your exchange from real world money into in-game currency. Essentially they are trying to maximize the amount of annoyance the player can take, so that he doesn't outright quits the game, but instead uses his cash to buy game progress to speed up the slow gameplay up. And the evil part with cash: Once the player has invested money into the game, he will have an even harder time to give up on it, he has after all to justify the purchase to himself thanks to cognitive-dissonance.
Finally the large studios may, possibly, see new game markets and FINALLY make something that is not 'FPS game with narrow boxy corridors #X'
Well, the good part is, yes, you will totally see more non-FPS games, the bad part is that those will be variants of FarmVille and grind heavy things that require no skill other then time and money.
How is this fundamentally ANY different from what video games have been doing since the dawn of time?
Ever played FarmVille? No? Give it a try. Within the first few minutes you will learn that that games works quite different from anything you played in the past. Among other things:
* based on realtime, forcing you to revisit the game to not spoil your crop
* regular calls to spam your friends, for in-game reward
* regular calls to exchange your real world money for in-game currency
* randomized in-game reward whenever you start the game
* essentially free of challenge, all the game requires is clicking on stuff to get rewards
None of those elements have been present in that form in traditional games.
Certain elements of course overlap a bit, Civ has some of those addicting elements, Diablo had them, etc. But the way they are directly exploited and analyzed in free to play games is quite a different thing then what you had in the past.
Arcade games where of course somewhat similar in trying to exploit the player, but they where limited by needing an expensive arcade machine that could only serve one or two players. Online games not only no longer have that limitation, they also allow regular changes to the games to optimize them for maximum revenue.
There are also tablets before the iPad that looked quite remarkably like the iPad.
You DO know you can easily install a different window manager?
It's easy to install any other window manager, yes, except of course the one you actually want. Right now there is no easy way to get Gnome2 on Ubuntu 11.10, just messy bunch of workarounds. The joy with the Linux package management systems is that they can't handle two versions of the same packages, thus you are essentially forced to use Gnome3 or completly bypass the distribution and roll your own stuff, neither of one is a pretty solution.
Corrections: Looks like applets are still there, you have to Alt-Rightclick to get to the menu, as normal Rightclick won't work. Still don't see a way to actually position them. And I am not sure if the panels still support multiple monitors like the Gnome2 ones, as I haven't yet found a way to move them to the other monitor.
Wrong, all that gives you is a broken shitty lookalike of the Gnome2 panel. You can't move icons, you don't have applets and in general you can't configure anything. In essence its an unusable piece of junk.
As it looks right now, there is no way to get a working Gnome2 install easily on Ubuntu 11.10, the upgrade will wreak your system.
Exactly, there seems to be a serious lack of understanding what the Startmenu and menus in general are good for. Menus are not there to be used on a regular basis, they exist to provide a reference of all the functions (and shortcuts) a given program can do, or in the case of the Startmenu, of what is installed on the given system. Menus are essentially the place where you go when you want to explore what other things you can do with a computer that isn't the stuff you already know and they provide that information in a nicely organized fashion.
For daily use, sure, keyboard shortcuts or shortcuts in the dock are much faster, but to get the shortcuts there and to learn the shortcuts in the first place, you need good old menu. This isn't just a Microsoft problem, Firefox suffers from it as well, as they have removed functions from the menu that are available via other means, such as View->Reload for example (its still in the menu when you open the menu with a keyboard shortcut, but not when you open it with a mouse, so much for UI consistency...).
Huh? Kinect is a 3D camera. It gives you a nice depth map along with the regular video picture and it should be able to easily pick out a flat cardboard from a full 3D human.
It's not that unusual for example for video game reviews to allow rich formating, images and stuff like that, even Amazon allows you to upload images and add some metadata to them. Essentially none of that can be properly saved by regular means without losing the metadata or the formating, as that kind of stuff happens via Javascript hackery, not via a classical HTML form textarea.