I imagine there's also physical exhaustion (not to mention pain). It's a lot easier to run around at 20mph with five weapons, 2000 rounds of ammo, and body armor in "America's Army" than real life.
Wishing for novels or computer games to be made into movies, or better movies, is to be ridiculously naive about the moviemaking process. The problem with, say, the DOOM movie is that it's a dumb concept so it doesn't attract good people. Good people are a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition for a halfway decent movie. You options are to pay lots of money to find someone obviously good (e.g. Ridley Scott) and try to get them interested in your movie, or try to pick someone you think will be good, and hope...
Why has StarCraft not been made into a movie? It's not so incredibly well-known that someone with $50,000,000 can be reasonably sure that folks will watch it despite it having a no-name director and no-name actors, and it isn't that interesting a concept. Aliens, only bigger. People in power armor. More aliens. Big deal. Any fool can come up with this concept, and many have.
And even if you have a great concept, there are other obstacles.
Why has Snowcrash not been made into a movie? Not because of any conspiracy, but because it's in creative purgatory somewhere. I guarantee you that (a) someone owns the movie rights, (b) that person has been trying to put the project together since the book was written (or he/she got the rights from the last person), and (c) the project has looked like it might happen at least ten times. The same thing happens to pretty much every halfway decent novel. "Forever War" -- for example -- has been optioned since it was published, and has had directors such as Ridley Scott interested in it, but there are only so many projects a top guy (like Paul Verhoeven, for example) can take on, and stuff gets left by the wayside. Meanwhile, do you want your brilliant SF movie directed by Ridley Scott in ten years or whoever's available today? Down one path lies a movie that never gets made; down the other lies DOOM: The Movie.
Look at the books that do get made into movies... They're either something that has grabbed the attention of someone with serious clout (e.g. Clint Eastwood or Oprah or whoever) or they're absolute no-brainers ("The Da Vinci Code").
Aside:
Hitchhiker's Guide was originally a radio play, so statements (from TFA) such as "since most of the comedy was in the narrative language and descriptions" are baloney. This reminds me of the director of "The Saint" (the version with Val Kilmer) who referred to having researched "the original TV series" (sorry, bud, it was originally a series of books).
First: the price quoted does not reflect underlying manufacturing costs, just what Sony thinks it can get for premium titles. I can't find any information on production costs, which is kind of how things were in the early days of CD and DVD where the companies with the big factories (e.g. Sony) were also content owners (e.g. Sony) and hid all their internal cost structures.
You can make 500 DVDs, including packaging and inserts, for $1,395.00 -- that's $2.80 per unit in quantities of 500, e.g. http://www.digitalcdr.com/. To make 1000 CDs (including case and artwork) costs around $1,300.00, or $1.30 per unit in quantities of 1000.
Blu-ray disks are, ultimately, supposed to be no more expensive to produce than DVDs.
I would assume that Sony isn't going to compete with low-end titles (which will stay on DVD for the time being -- I assume that Blu-Ray players will be compatible with existing DVDs).
Bill Gates has referred to the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD format as "the last format". It may turn out that dual layer DVD is the last format at this rate, and that neither these formats will ever successfully establish the volumes necessary to drive their prices down to the point where they sell. A $100 hard disk can currently hold the equivalent of eight FULL single layer blu-ray disks (25GB each -- http://www.blu-ray.com/). It's not unreasonable to expect that in three years a $100 hard disk will be able to hold the equivalent of 32 disks... Will there be any significant Blu-Ray penetration by then? Will 32 blank disks cost less than $100?
There's a nice story on "This American Life" about a guy with a high school education who, in the process of trying to invent something, tries to teach himself Theoretical Physics and "realises" in the course of his autodidacticiousness that all of modern Physics is wrong. He sends letters to Famous Physicists and is annoyed that they Won't Pay Attention to him. It turns out, just for starters, he doesn't understand the difference between energy and momentum. Thus his "one line proof" of the wrongness of Physics is based on not understanding the difference between two fundamental concepts.
This chap has put together an extensive website based on applying what appears to be his rather paltry and simplistic understanding of Physics and a conflation of the term "time travel" as used casually by, say, Stephen Hawking, with "velocity" as more-or-less defined by, say, Newton. (Note that he also claims "Black Holes" are voodoo science.)
If you understand time travel as meaning "things occuring in apparently the wrong order", this is something that is an intrinsic feature of Quantum Mechanics and has been observed many times experimentally (a particle may appear "before" the phenomenon which brings it into being; or to put it more precisely, may interact before the interaction which brought it into being). Does this require motion described in terms of "dt/dt"? The question is meaningless, because the elapsed time is an observation and particles do not observe time passing except in the form of interacting with other particles.
In general, the reason that the Christian Right has a problem with Evolution is that a *simple-minded* interpretation of the Bible clearly and directly contradicts a *simple-minded* interpretation of Darwinism. The fact that this simple-minded interpretation of the Bible clearly and directly contradicts pretty much *every* field of human inquiry, whether its Physics estimating the age of the Universe or History and Literature telling us how the Bible was most likely written.
The problem here isn't Evolution or Christianity, it's simple-mindedness.
How is any argument about ethics not simply an assertion of someone's beliefs as facts?
RMS argues that "if copyright prevents sharing then copyright is wrong". From this you can infer that he believes sharing is good therefore anything preventing sharing is bad. This is a simple, consistent point of view. It's also unworkable. To (roughly) quote H. L. Mencken -- "For every complex problem there's a simple solution. And it's wrong."
The problem with actual workable laws of pretty much any kind is that they tend to be nuanced. E.g. killing people is illegal, but there are all kinds of cases where you are allowed to kill, e.g. in war, by genuine accident, in self-defense, or if you're a surgeon who performs a procedure known to be dangerous. Similarly, copyright was constructed as a necessary evil -- give people a temporary monopoly over the fruits of their intellectual labors so that, in the long term, a free public good is created.
All the interesting and useful arguments about copyright (or any law) are about nuances. In the case of copyright law we have on the one hand folks who decry all copyright and on the other people who want to extend copyright in perpetuity. The compromise we used to have: copyright lasts for a fixed period and does not provide total protection (e.g. you can quote for purposes of criticism and parody) seems to work well... it would be nice to preserve it.
I hate to say it, but Corel, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and several other large companies with good reputations have tried this. The result has always been the exact reverse of what was expected. Instead of Linux being risen up, the company is dragged down. Next thing you know, the company is ejecting Linux faster than you can say "What happened?"
All of these companies were in a downward slide and tried to save themselves by jumping on the Linux bandwagon. They weren't trying to build a credible Linux by using their shiny aura, they were trying to bask in Linux's shiny aura.
The problem (I think) is a lack of corporate control. Linux has always been a hobbiest's OS. When big companies come in and start trying to help improve areas where they feel Linux is lacking, there's often a lot of pushback. For example, the Sun GNOME engineers have often complained about how hard it was to get many of their usability improvements into the main trunk.
My guess is that the problem faced by SUN is that they know jack, diddly, and squat about usability. The GNOME team is, basically, a bunch of folks trying to clone Mac OS X and the KDE team is a bunch of folks trying to Clone Windows; while this is hardly ideal, it's a heck of a lot better than trying to do whatever Sun thinks is a good idea. I fondly remember Sun fanbois trying to explain to me why it's a GOOD thing for focus to follow the mouse pointer.
It's not so much that one side is right and the other side is wrong (though arguments could be made both ways), but rather an extreme culture clash. The corporates say, "Our customers need this, do it" while the hobbiests say, "I think this is a cool feature, I want to work on it, you should know more about XYZ if you want to do ABC."
What does this have to do with anything? If Google wants to build its own Linux distro it can do whatever the heck it wants and so can hobbyists.
Google isn't stupid. I'm betting dollars to donuts that their new desktop is nothing more than a cool network configuration tool or kiosk type scheme. Meanwhile Google will continue to benefit from all these boneheads who continue to think that they're doing a consumer desktop. Mark my words: This isn't what people think it is.
There's a nice discussion of business strategy 101 here http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLet terV.html which goes something like this: every other business out there is either a competitor (someone who does what you do), a collaborator (someone who offers services that complement your services or are required for you to provide your services), or a potential customer (everyone else). If you're in Google's business then a competitor looks like, say, msn or yahoo, a collaborator looks like Internet Explorer, HP, Comcast, or the Electrical Utility, and Joe Sixpack, Brooks Brothers, Walmart, and Starbucks are potential customers.
You want your competitors to suck and be expensive -- so you can (relatively) be excellent and cheap AND you want your collaborators to be excellent, ubiquitous, and cheap or better yet free. For Google to make money, anything that makes computers, web browsers, computer networks, electricity, etc. better, cheaper, and more ubiquitous is a Good Thing. So giving away an excellent operating system actually makes perfect sense. Will they do it? Shrug. But I wouldn't start counting dollars or donuts.
If Microsoft or anyone else wanted to argue that this was "obvious" or that they were "just doing what Paradox did" or whatever, then they would need to content with the following:
1) They claimed that their engineers STARTED working on it in 1989.
2) They released it as a new feature in 1995.
If it's obvious, it shouldn't take "engineers" six years to implement.
The Ten Commandments are from the Old Testament -- It's Christians, not Jews, putting monuments to the Ten Commandments in state courthouses, etc.
The Creationist (or "Intelligent Design") drivel that is destroying our school system is from the Old Testament. It's Christians, not Jews, who want this and not the Theory of Evolution taught in schools.
Sure, Christians don't stone people to death for planting the wrong crops side-by-side -- but who does?
In general, the number one thing you can do to help people in poor countries is improve education (particularly of girls/women). Pretty much every other positive social/economic outcome follows from this.
Now, if you want to argue that there are more cost-effective ways of educating people in poor countries, then there may be valid points to make there. Is it easier to provide information via textbooks and teachers than laptops? Will this reduce the amount of money available for other education programs. I don't know.
Microsoft "PlaysForSure" was something they came up with when iPods *already* dominated the "MP3" player market and PlaysForSure doesn't play, at all, do not pass go, on iPods. So it's Orwellian. The one thing PlaysForSure isn't is something that plays for sure. Arguing that Apple could license the technology if it wanted to is just hooey. Every car company could make its cars parts compatible with Toyota if they wanted to, but Toyota can't claim that its parts fit any car based on this hypothesis.
This isn't new. "Plug and Play" was a trademark Microsoft obtained to cover a technology that didn't work at the time, and barely works now, over ten years later. Apple's stuff (at the time, and today) actually *was* "plug and play", but Microsoft trademarked the phrase.
FairPlay -- you can burn up to 10 CDs containing the files without changing the track setup (but assuming you permute or modify the tracklist you can burn as many as you like); you can authorize up to three different computers to play the track simultaneously; you can copy and backup the files as you like; you own the files...
OK -- that sounds fair to me.
PlaysForSure -- doesn't play AT ALL on the most popular music player on the market.
1. The emergency services issue has been solved. (OK, it requires the end-user to pay a little attention.) In any event, it's not really worse for VoIP than, say, cell phones.
2. Power cuts are an issue, sure. Of course, a UPS for the VoIP box, router, and cable modem (which would probably keep going for a LONG time) would solve this issue. Most folks I know use cordless phones which -- guess what -- don't work during power cuts either (the handsets are battery-powered, but the base stations aren't).
Your assumptions are somewhat flawed here. The Core Duo chips don't save power vs the G4, but versus the G5 which simply wouldn't work in a laptop at all.
The G4 had a great processing/watt ratio -- for its time. So did the G3. So did the 603. However, each new generation of laptop used MORE power to get FAR MORE processing done.
Now it would be nice if we can get Nikon out of the 35mm frame mindset when designing future SLR gear.
No... I suspect 35mm will become *the standard* in digital for the same reason that it did for analog. The only reason smaller sensors are being used in some 35mm form-factor cameras right now is that larger sensors are too expensive. Olympus has made a new camera system around a smaller sensor, and it isn't much smaller or cheaper than 35mm cameras.
The size of the light-sensitive area dictates the size of the lens. The size of the lens dictates the size of the camera, the user interface, etc. 35mm cameras were the smallest film cameras that were still not too fiddly to use. Indeed, since a digital camera doesn't need to spool film or (necessarily) require a complex shutter assembly -- a 35mm sensor can give you a FAR smaller camera than it currently does (and take a look at some of the Minox 35mm cameras from the early 80s -- they were already too small to use comfortably).
Today, a lot of competition is centered on the size of the preview LCD, which is now getting large enough that it is the dominant design element.
There's a huge difference here... Apple designed the original PowerPCs on their own. This is just a state-of-the-art PC in an iMac box with a little hardware magic to handshake with the OS.
It's also worth nothing that when the first generation PowerPCs came out, they were just dandy. It's not like contemporary PCs had a better expansion bus (Apple was pretty close to the leading edge in adopting PCI) or graphics or whatever. For that matter the 8100 et al went through two generations before being supplanted by the 604-based boxes.
For about five years Apple insisted on, for example, referring to its monitor sizes by the size of the image rather than the picture tube, so Apple's 14" monitor corresponded to everyone else's 15" monitors. Its 25MHz 68040 was called a 25MHz 68040.
At some point they must have gotten tired of explaining that really the Sony trinitron they sold as a 16" monitor was really just as big as the trinitrons everone else was selling as a 17" monitor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_stage#Bet a
The summary version: alpha -- feature complete beta -- first pass through full QA process final candidate -- no known showstopper bugs
These days "beta" seems to mean "meh, just send it live", but really -- if it doesn't tell you WHAT you're getting (e.g. available formats) until after you've completed a purchase... that sucks.
An error made by a human using software is no less an error than an error made by a computer using software.
Assessing an operating system purely on its "technical merits" and ignoring usability is faulty reasoning. Software runs on both its user and the computer -- a bad UI will causes errors every bit as damaging as bad kernel code.
Please enter parachute deployment altitude IN KILOMETERS.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine there's also physical exhaustion (not to mention pain). It's a lot easier to run around at 20mph with five weapons, 2000 rounds of ammo, and body armor in "America's Army" than real life.
Wishing for novels or computer games to be made into movies, or better movies, is to be ridiculously naive about the moviemaking process. The problem with, say, the DOOM movie is that it's a dumb concept so it doesn't attract good people. Good people are a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition for a halfway decent movie. You options are to pay lots of money to find someone obviously good (e.g. Ridley Scott) and try to get them interested in your movie, or try to pick someone you think will be good, and hope...
Why has StarCraft not been made into a movie? It's not so incredibly well-known that someone with $50,000,000 can be reasonably sure that folks will watch it despite it having a no-name director and no-name actors, and it isn't that interesting a concept. Aliens, only bigger. People in power armor. More aliens. Big deal. Any fool can come up with this concept, and many have.
And even if you have a great concept, there are other obstacles.
Why has Snowcrash not been made into a movie? Not because of any conspiracy, but because it's in creative purgatory somewhere. I guarantee you that (a) someone owns the movie rights, (b) that person has been trying to put the project together since the book was written (or he/she got the rights from the last person), and (c) the project has looked like it might happen at least ten times. The same thing happens to pretty much every halfway decent novel. "Forever War" -- for example -- has been optioned since it was published, and has had directors such as Ridley Scott interested in it, but there are only so many projects a top guy (like Paul Verhoeven, for example) can take on, and stuff gets left by the wayside. Meanwhile, do you want your brilliant SF movie directed by Ridley Scott in ten years or whoever's available today? Down one path lies a movie that never gets made; down the other lies DOOM: The Movie.
Look at the books that do get made into movies... They're either something that has grabbed the attention of someone with serious clout (e.g. Clint Eastwood or Oprah or whoever) or they're absolute no-brainers ("The Da Vinci Code").
Aside:
Hitchhiker's Guide was originally a radio play, so statements (from TFA) such as "since most of the comedy was in the narrative language and descriptions" are baloney. This reminds me of the director of "The Saint" (the version with Val Kilmer) who referred to having researched "the original TV series" (sorry, bud, it was originally a series of books).
Google also has some catch-up work to do on getting Chinese dissidents imprisoned.
OK OK mod me flamebait.
First: the price quoted does not reflect underlying manufacturing costs, just what Sony thinks it can get for premium titles. I can't find any information on production costs, which is kind of how things were in the early days of CD and DVD where the companies with the big factories (e.g. Sony) were also content owners (e.g. Sony) and hid all their internal cost structures.
You can make 500 DVDs, including packaging and inserts, for $1,395.00 -- that's $2.80 per unit in quantities of 500, e.g. http://www.digitalcdr.com/. To make 1000 CDs (including case and artwork) costs around $1,300.00, or $1.30 per unit in quantities of 1000.
Blu-ray disks are, ultimately, supposed to be no more expensive to produce than DVDs.
I would assume that Sony isn't going to compete with low-end titles (which will stay on DVD for the time being -- I assume that Blu-Ray players will be compatible with existing DVDs).
Bill Gates has referred to the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD format as "the last format". It may turn out that dual layer DVD is the last format at this rate, and that neither these formats will ever successfully establish the volumes necessary to drive their prices down to the point where they sell. A $100 hard disk can currently hold the equivalent of eight FULL single layer blu-ray disks (25GB each -- http://www.blu-ray.com/). It's not unreasonable to expect that in three years a $100 hard disk will be able to hold the equivalent of 32 disks... Will there be any significant Blu-Ray penetration by then? Will 32 blank disks cost less than $100?
I couldn't agree more.
There's a nice story on "This American Life" about a guy with a high school education who, in the process of trying to invent something, tries to teach himself Theoretical Physics and "realises" in the course of his autodidacticiousness that all of modern Physics is wrong. He sends letters to Famous Physicists and is annoyed that they Won't Pay Attention to him. It turns out, just for starters, he doesn't understand the difference between energy and momentum. Thus his "one line proof" of the wrongness of Physics is based on not understanding the difference between two fundamental concepts.
This chap has put together an extensive website based on applying what appears to be his rather paltry and simplistic understanding of Physics and a conflation of the term "time travel" as used casually by, say, Stephen Hawking, with "velocity" as more-or-less defined by, say, Newton. (Note that he also claims "Black Holes" are voodoo science.)
If you understand time travel as meaning "things occuring in apparently the wrong order", this is something that is an intrinsic feature of Quantum Mechanics and has been observed many times experimentally (a particle may appear "before" the phenomenon which brings it into being; or to put it more precisely, may interact before the interaction which brought it into being). Does this require motion described in terms of "dt/dt"? The question is meaningless, because the elapsed time is an observation and particles do not observe time passing except in the form of interacting with other particles.
In general, the reason that the Christian Right has a problem with Evolution is that a *simple-minded* interpretation of the Bible clearly and directly contradicts a *simple-minded* interpretation of Darwinism. The fact that this simple-minded interpretation of the Bible clearly and directly contradicts pretty much *every* field of human inquiry, whether its Physics estimating the age of the Universe or History and Literature telling us how the Bible was most likely written.
The problem here isn't Evolution or Christianity, it's simple-mindedness.
How is any argument about ethics not simply an assertion of someone's beliefs as facts?
... it would be nice to preserve it.
RMS argues that "if copyright prevents sharing then copyright is wrong". From this you can infer that he believes sharing is good therefore anything preventing sharing is bad. This is a simple, consistent point of view. It's also unworkable. To (roughly) quote H. L. Mencken -- "For every complex problem there's a simple solution. And it's wrong."
The problem with actual workable laws of pretty much any kind is that they tend to be nuanced. E.g. killing people is illegal, but there are all kinds of cases where you are allowed to kill, e.g. in war, by genuine accident, in self-defense, or if you're a surgeon who performs a procedure known to be dangerous. Similarly, copyright was constructed as a necessary evil -- give people a temporary monopoly over the fruits of their intellectual labors so that, in the long term, a free public good is created.
All the interesting and useful arguments about copyright (or any law) are about nuances. In the case of copyright law we have on the one hand folks who decry all copyright and on the other people who want to extend copyright in perpetuity. The compromise we used to have: copyright lasts for a fixed period and does not provide total protection (e.g. you can quote for purposes of criticism and parody) seems to work well
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2006/02/20060203 _a_main.asp covered this in considerable detail.
I hate to say it, but Corel, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and several other large companies with good reputations have tried this. The result has always been the exact reverse of what was expected. Instead of Linux being risen up, the company is dragged down. Next thing you know, the company is ejecting Linux faster than you can say "What happened?"
t terV.html which goes something like this: every other business out there is either a competitor (someone who does what you do), a collaborator (someone who offers services that complement your services or are required for you to provide your services), or a potential customer (everyone else). If you're in Google's business then a competitor looks like, say, msn or yahoo, a collaborator looks like Internet Explorer, HP, Comcast, or the Electrical Utility, and Joe Sixpack, Brooks Brothers, Walmart, and Starbucks are potential customers.
All of these companies were in a downward slide and tried to save themselves by jumping on the Linux bandwagon. They weren't trying to build a credible Linux by using their shiny aura, they were trying to bask in Linux's shiny aura.
The problem (I think) is a lack of corporate control. Linux has always been a hobbiest's OS. When big companies come in and start trying to help improve areas where they feel Linux is lacking, there's often a lot of pushback. For example, the Sun GNOME engineers have often complained about how hard it was to get many of their usability improvements into the main trunk.
My guess is that the problem faced by SUN is that they know jack, diddly, and squat about usability. The GNOME team is, basically, a bunch of folks trying to clone Mac OS X and the KDE team is a bunch of folks trying to Clone Windows; while this is hardly ideal, it's a heck of a lot better than trying to do whatever Sun thinks is a good idea. I fondly remember Sun fanbois trying to explain to me why it's a GOOD thing for focus to follow the mouse pointer.
It's not so much that one side is right and the other side is wrong (though arguments could be made both ways), but rather an extreme culture clash. The corporates say, "Our customers need this, do it" while the hobbiests say, "I think this is a cool feature, I want to work on it, you should know more about XYZ if you want to do ABC."
What does this have to do with anything? If Google wants to build its own Linux distro it can do whatever the heck it wants and so can hobbyists.
Google isn't stupid. I'm betting dollars to donuts that their new desktop is nothing more than a cool network configuration tool or kiosk type scheme. Meanwhile Google will continue to benefit from all these boneheads who continue to think that they're doing a consumer desktop. Mark my words: This isn't what people think it is.
There's a nice discussion of business strategy 101 here http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLe
You want your competitors to suck and be expensive -- so you can (relatively) be excellent and cheap AND you want your collaborators to be excellent, ubiquitous, and cheap or better yet free. For Google to make money, anything that makes computers, web browsers, computer networks, electricity, etc. better, cheaper, and more ubiquitous is a Good Thing. So giving away an excellent operating system actually makes perfect sense. Will they do it? Shrug. But I wouldn't start counting dollars or donuts.
If Microsoft or anyone else wanted to argue that this was "obvious" or that they were "just doing what Paradox did" or whatever, then they would need to content with the following:
1) They claimed that their engineers STARTED working on it in 1989.
2) They released it as a new feature in 1995.
If it's obvious, it shouldn't take "engineers" six years to implement.
The Ten Commandments are from the Old Testament -- It's Christians, not Jews, putting monuments to the Ten Commandments in state courthouses, etc.
The Creationist (or "Intelligent Design") drivel that is destroying our school system is from the Old Testament. It's Christians, not Jews, who want this and not the Theory of Evolution taught in schools.
Sure, Christians don't stone people to death for planting the wrong crops side-by-side -- but who does?
In general, the number one thing you can do to help people in poor countries is improve education (particularly of girls/women). Pretty much every other positive social/economic outcome follows from this.
Now, if you want to argue that there are more cost-effective ways of educating people in poor countries, then there may be valid points to make there. Is it easier to provide information via textbooks and teachers than laptops? Will this reduce the amount of money available for other education programs. I don't know.
I've heard rumors that some small PC manufacturers, such as Dell and Gateway are selling computers using this cpu.
This is just an idiotic statement :-)
To the extent that movies are art, how are games not also art? Paintings? Stained glass windows? Music?
All arts are services by that definition. Go design games and stop giving interviews.
Microsoft "PlaysForSure" was something they came up with when iPods *already* dominated the "MP3" player market and PlaysForSure doesn't play, at all, do not pass go, on iPods. So it's Orwellian. The one thing PlaysForSure isn't is something that plays for sure. Arguing that Apple could license the technology if it wanted to is just hooey. Every car company could make its cars parts compatible with Toyota if they wanted to, but Toyota can't claim that its parts fit any car based on this hypothesis.
This isn't new. "Plug and Play" was a trademark Microsoft obtained to cover a technology that didn't work at the time, and barely works now, over ten years later. Apple's stuff (at the time, and today) actually *was* "plug and play", but Microsoft trademarked the phrase.
FairPlay -- you can burn up to 10 CDs containing the files without changing the track setup (but assuming you permute or modify the tracklist you can burn as many as you like); you can authorize up to three different computers to play the track simultaneously; you can copy and backup the files as you like; you own the files...
OK -- that sounds fair to me.
PlaysForSure -- doesn't play AT ALL on the most popular music player on the market.
Now, that sounds Orwellian to me.
1. The emergency services issue has been solved. (OK, it requires the end-user to pay a little attention.) In any event, it's not really worse for VoIP than, say, cell phones.
2. Power cuts are an issue, sure. Of course, a UPS for the VoIP box, router, and cable modem (which would probably keep going for a LONG time) would solve this issue. Most folks I know use cordless phones which -- guess what -- don't work during power cuts either (the handsets are battery-powered, but the base stations aren't).
Your assumptions are somewhat flawed here. The Core Duo chips don't save power vs the G4, but versus the G5 which simply wouldn't work in a laptop at all.
The G4 had a great processing/watt ratio -- for its time. So did the G3. So did the 603. However, each new generation of laptop used MORE power to get FAR MORE processing done.
Now it would be nice if we can get Nikon out of the 35mm frame mindset when designing future SLR gear.
... I suspect 35mm will become *the standard* in digital for the same reason that it did for analog. The only reason smaller sensors are being used in some 35mm form-factor cameras right now is that larger sensors are too expensive. Olympus has made a new camera system around a smaller sensor, and it isn't much smaller or cheaper than 35mm cameras.
No
The size of the light-sensitive area dictates the size of the lens. The size of the lens dictates the size of the camera, the user interface, etc. 35mm cameras were the smallest film cameras that were still not too fiddly to use. Indeed, since a digital camera doesn't need to spool film or (necessarily) require a complex shutter assembly -- a 35mm sensor can give you a FAR smaller camera than it currently does (and take a look at some of the Minox 35mm cameras from the early 80s -- they were already too small to use comfortably).
Today, a lot of competition is centered on the size of the preview LCD, which is now getting large enough that it is the dominant design element.
Quartz Compositor mainly runs on the GPU so the CPU shouldn't make a significant difference.
There's a huge difference here ... Apple designed the original PowerPCs on their own. This is just a state-of-the-art PC in an iMac box with a little hardware magic to handshake with the OS.
It's also worth nothing that when the first generation PowerPCs came out, they were just dandy. It's not like contemporary PCs had a better expansion bus (Apple was pretty close to the leading edge in adopting PCI) or graphics or whatever. For that matter the 8100 et al went through two generations before being supplanted by the 604-based boxes.
For about five years Apple insisted on, for example, referring to its monitor sizes by the size of the image rather than the picture tube, so Apple's 14" monitor corresponded to everyone else's 15" monitors. Its 25MHz 68040 was called a 25MHz 68040.
At some point they must have gotten tired of explaining that really the Sony trinitron they sold as a 16" monitor was really just as big as the trinitrons everone else was selling as a 17" monitor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_stage#Bet a
... that sucks.
The summary version:
alpha -- feature complete
beta -- first pass through full QA process
final candidate -- no known showstopper bugs
These days "beta" seems to mean "meh, just send it live", but really -- if it doesn't tell you WHAT you're getting (e.g. available formats) until after you've completed a purchase
They've collaborated on some really awful implementations of Java.
An error made by a human using software is no less an error than an error made by a computer using software.
Assessing an operating system purely on its "technical merits" and ignoring usability is faulty reasoning. Software runs on both its user and the computer -- a bad UI will causes errors every bit as damaging as bad kernel code.
Please enter parachute deployment altitude IN KILOMETERS.