The Death Star's explosion ring could've at least been somewhat believable if it had radiated out along the equator/trench. It made no sense that it (and Alderaan) exploded with an expanding ring in only 2-dimensions, at such an odd angle.
Not the first with multiplayer support in general, but the Doom wiki credits Marathon as being the first with specific game modes (Capture the Flag and Oddball), as well as mouse-driven free-look with vertical aiming (in 1994, mice were probably not common enough in the DOS and Win3.1x platforms).
I can't speak to the specific use of WASD keys + mouse controls--that standard may indeed have started with Quake (first released mid-1996), but Marathon (released 1994) is credited as the first FPS with keyboard + mouselook (free look).
To clarify my own deathmatch comment (sigh...), the Doom wiki notes that it was the first FPS with specific multiplayer modes like Capture the Flag and Oddball.
Just want to clarify your "Doom-like" comment, in case anyone mistakenly thinks this meant it was a Doom clone for Mac.
Bungie's Marathon was based on their Pathways into Darkness game, which came out before Doom. Marathon is also credited as the first FPS to have vertical aiming and free-look/mouselook controls, and multiplayer deathmatches.
This was true for iPhone 3G and my own 3GS when they were upgraded to iOS4.
It is decidedly untrue for my 3GS upgraded to iOS5; it ran well, was extremely responsive (no touch-keyboard lag), the only downside was the battery life was shot to hell. I upgraded to the 4S before the first iOS5 update came out that supposedly helps with the battery issue.
Their strategy changed with iOS5--they HAD to make the performance (responsiveness) on the 3GS, their new entry-level free-on-contract iPhone, at least as good as its Android competitors. And for a phone running 2.5 year-old hardware, performance was excellent if you weren't in it for the latest and greatest games.
Leaving aside the physical exertion, it could be easier to evacuate a pyramid.
Traditional buildings have stair shafts straight up and down, so you bottleneck the closer you get to ground. With a pyramid, the "base" is always biggest at the surface level, so if designed properly you can add more escape stairways (along the sides) and shafts the closer to surface you are.
I agree, a shot that looks spectacular on the screen of my iPhone 4S (which has even better low-light capture than the iPhone 4), even zoomed in, can look grainy and motion-blurred once it's on my computer screen. But, this is the case with any digicam with a built-in screen.
However, the low light, flash-less shots I do take with the 4S kick the pants off those taken with my Canon Powershot A570. There's absolutely no comparison; the A570 cannot take flash-less pictures of friends at a pub, or a small stage performance. Granted the A570 is 4 years old and the latest models will be greatly improved, but no replacement P&S would be light or thin enough, *in addition to* my phone, that I'd take it with me all the time. So unless I'm going on a trip where I'll want optical zoom and image stability, or manual control over settings, the camera stays home.
If all this app does is display the weather, and display hardcoded recommendations based on that weather, any competent developer could have this done in a day... of course since this was a more professional job there is far more people involved, so with all the beurocratic nonsense that goes into your average disfunctional R&D unit I would be surprised if this took more than 2 weeks.
As another example, a big deal has been made about how Siri was duplicated in a mere 8 hours by the Iris team. This is very obviously sensationalized--they got the very bare essentials in place, but almost 2 months later Iris is still nowhere near where Siri was at launch, in features or polish. Their own blog post covers the work they needed to do before they released Iris 2, like location awareness, and optimizing it so their server wouldn't melt under the request load. Never mind that many Android users must install voice processing libraries to make Iris work.
Yes, many projects have wasteful spending, but that's the problem with people who always think $X is excessive to develop professional-quality apps and services (never mind for three different platforms), and Siri/Iris proves geeks aren't immune to that flaw in thinking either.
As with most things, it depends. My parents' Neon was stolen in '98 and taken for a joyride, but otherwise left intact and unmolested except the ignition had to be replaced, and we used it another 10 years afterwards. My brother's car was also stolen, but after being recovered it was fine until he sold it.
Don't know how "creative" the thieves were who stole your car, but it certainly doesn't apply to thefts everywhere.
Not to defend Obama or Democrats, but in a de facto 2-party system where there isn't a sufficiently strong 3rd choice (like there is in Canada for example), they were the better choice. At the time. And looking at the candidates so far for the Republican nomination for 2012, Obama and Democrats might still be the better choice next year.
The previous majority Liberal government agreed to fight in Afghanistan, but refused to get browbeat into the war in Iraq. The current Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper (who was opposition leader in 2003) wanted nothing more than to follow the Americans (and British) in at the time. Of course he flip-flopped once he found out the Bush administration was lying about WMDs in Iraq.
Parts of Harper's big "tough on crime" bill has been derided by right-wing elected and prison officials in Texas as being unworkable. Texans should know, they tried the extreme tough-on-crime route, and it's not working for them, even with capital punishment. The Conservatives are going ahead anyway; apparently Texas Republicans are too left-wing and socialist to know what they're talking about.
This is par for the course for the Conservatives--dogma over science and facts.
Yes, your mistake. I don't see why you continue insisting on making the same mistake, perhaps you didn't read the rest of my comment?
Apple or Microsoft or any other company inlining images and direct-linking to their product pages, on their own websites, is "good" because is not "advertising" in the context of buying space on a site to generate revenue from impressions or click-throughs. This is the context inKubus argued Apple "rely on a LOT" and is demonstrably false. Microsoft does however have the additional section at the bottom of their homepage that very clearly is not hosted on their own server, serves a banner ad, and generates a tracking hit when you click through.
Actually, if Microsoft is getting money showing ads for their products on their own website, that sounds like a pretty clever idea.
And that goes back to my previous point: Apple does not subject you to 3rd party ad farms within their own products/services, just to make a few extra cents per visitor.
Actually, a parasite takes without asking, and without providing anything in return.
Asking or even demanding "where's my share" (they don't outright take it, they try to make you give it away) is the act of either a socialist with an entitlement complex, or extortionist middlemen like the RIAA and MPAA.
Re:The culprit is gonna be associated with Android
on
Siri Protocol Cracked
·
· Score: 1
Just like the iPod and iPhone, Apple seems to specialize in evolutionary implementation, but revolutionary in usage.
It remains to be seen if Siri is the latter, and I don't use it much myself, but the Iris project demonstrates that even if all the necessary tech was available on Android already, no one took it the (supposedly obvious) next step.
Despite claims that the Iris project "duplicated" Siri in only 8 hours, that was a wild exaggeration. A month later it is still very much something that regular users won't bother with. Their latest blog entry (from Oct 29) says most Android phones don't ship with the required speech libraries and users must download/install it themselves, they're missing multilingual support (Apple's own is far from complete, of course), and they're still implementing the framework to let it do certain voice actions like add calendar appointments.
I think it's great that they're trying with Iris, but they are obviously copying the Siri implementation, and it's disingenuous that some claim "Android had all those things first". They had most or maybe even all the parts, but they did not have a working car, because the parts were from different manufacturers that didn't fit together properly.
Don't be deliberately obtuse. Images of and links to a company's own products, inline on its own website do NOT count as ads.
Do adblockers catch these? No, therefore they are not banner ads in any sense of the term. These image/links are not served from an ad server, they get no money from ad impressions on their own site or services.
Compare with the homepage for Microsoft, a company the GP claimed did NOT rely on ad revenue. At the very bottom is a banner ad for Office 2010 or other MS product/service, and to be clear, this one IS served in an iframe, by a 3rd party ad farm, and MS gets money from ad impressions to it.
The GP may have been thinking of iAds and ads within iTunes, and Apple obviously does advertise on other sites and other media (TV/print), but within the context of Siri and most of their own products and services there is no advertising to speak of.
That may be, but I still want an automatic fallback for offline work. A little (more) inaccuracy when creating an event, reminder, playing a song or playlist, etc is preferable to "sorry, can't do that since internet isn't available"
Where do you get that Apple relies on ads? Never mind "relying on ads a LOT"?
Results from Wolfram Alpha are ad-free. In-Siri search results are ad-free. Creating events, reminders, call/texting, are all ad-free. The only time the user might see an ad is when you click on the Web Search for something Siri couldn't get an answer for right away, but that sends you to the browser where ads are fair game. Apple's own website is devoid of ads (can't say the same for Microsoft--bottom of their homepage was a banner ad for MS Office 2010. Yes, served from an ad farm).
In fact, Apple's philosophy on this seems to be "pay slightly more up front, we then make enough money that we won't subject you to 3rd party ads in our products or services." You'll therefore not find 3rd-party shovelware pre-installed on a Mac or iPhone, or ads in iCloud or the Siri service.
Re:The culprit is gonna be associated with Android
on
Siri Protocol Cracked
·
· Score: 1
You say "incremental" as if it's a bad thing. Most of the world's consumer tech revolutions are merely increments and/or well-polished amalgamations of existing tech that made it more accessible to more people. The truly bleeding-edge technologies are too far outside the worldview of most people for them to bother with.
Depends how old your iPhone is. My brother's ancient 3G is barely usable. My 2+ year-old 3GS on iOS4 was frustratingly laggy until I found out that early this year that hard-resetting it every month or two fixes that (probably kills any caches that have built up over time).
And before anyone says I shouldn't have to do that, consider that 1) coworkers' Blackberries were notorious for needing the remove-battery-to-reset method at least once a week, and 2) my 3GS ran for months with no shutdown or restart, probably only needing to restart when updating the firmware.
The update to iOS5 was like a new lease on life for the 3GS. Everything was as responsive as before the iOS4 update--only very rarely now is there even a split-second delay between a screen-touch and the expected action.
As for the glass coating--it's oil resistant, not oil proof. Whenever I handle Androids or Blackberries the smudges I leave behind are far worse than on my own iPhone, even after I've wiped away existing residue.
I don't mean this as challenging your opinion, just giving some of my own experiences.
All the reviews DO say it's the first iPad competitor they've seen, and mark it highly.
This is the *first* iPad competitor they've seen? What the heck were the Galaxy Tab, Playbook, Asus Transformer and other post-iPad tablets? Or do they mean the first "respectable" (i.e. non-Chinese knock-off) competitor at a much cheaper price, with all the warts that go with it?
Less than 24 hours after you bought it, Logitech terminated the Revue, the CEO even claiming that GoogleTV was a "gigantic" mistake for them.
If you didn't get it on sale, I'd try post-purchase price matching it once the firesales start, or even return it if you're concerned about long-term support by Logitech.
Slashdot Mirror
The Death Star's explosion ring could've at least been somewhat believable if it had radiated out along the equator/trench. It made no sense that it (and Alderaan) exploded with an expanding ring in only 2-dimensions, at such an odd angle.
Not the first with multiplayer support in general, but the Doom wiki credits Marathon as being the first with specific game modes (Capture the Flag and Oddball), as well as mouse-driven free-look with vertical aiming (in 1994, mice were probably not common enough in the DOS and Win3.1x platforms).
I can't speak to the specific use of WASD keys + mouse controls--that standard may indeed have started with Quake (first released mid-1996), but Marathon (released 1994) is credited as the first FPS with keyboard + mouselook (free look).
To clarify my own deathmatch comment (sigh...), the Doom wiki notes that it was the first FPS with specific multiplayer modes like Capture the Flag and Oddball.
Just want to clarify your "Doom-like" comment, in case anyone mistakenly thinks this meant it was a Doom clone for Mac.
Bungie's Marathon was based on their Pathways into Darkness game, which came out before Doom. Marathon is also credited as the first FPS to have vertical aiming and free-look/mouselook controls, and multiplayer deathmatches.
This was true for iPhone 3G and my own 3GS when they were upgraded to iOS4.
It is decidedly untrue for my 3GS upgraded to iOS5; it ran well, was extremely responsive (no touch-keyboard lag), the only downside was the battery life was shot to hell. I upgraded to the 4S before the first iOS5 update came out that supposedly helps with the battery issue.
Their strategy changed with iOS5--they HAD to make the performance (responsiveness) on the 3GS, their new entry-level free-on-contract iPhone, at least as good as its Android competitors. And for a phone running 2.5 year-old hardware, performance was excellent if you weren't in it for the latest and greatest games.
The first iPhone in 2007 had Safari that used Google as its default (only?) search engine. It remains the default now.
I fail to see how we have Android to thank for this happening.
Leaving aside the physical exertion, it could be easier to evacuate a pyramid.
Traditional buildings have stair shafts straight up and down, so you bottleneck the closer you get to ground. With a pyramid, the "base" is always biggest at the surface level, so if designed properly you can add more escape stairways (along the sides) and shafts the closer to surface you are.
I agree, a shot that looks spectacular on the screen of my iPhone 4S (which has even better low-light capture than the iPhone 4), even zoomed in, can look grainy and motion-blurred once it's on my computer screen. But, this is the case with any digicam with a built-in screen.
However, the low light, flash-less shots I do take with the 4S kick the pants off those taken with my Canon Powershot A570. There's absolutely no comparison; the A570 cannot take flash-less pictures of friends at a pub, or a small stage performance. Granted the A570 is 4 years old and the latest models will be greatly improved, but no replacement P&S would be light or thin enough, *in addition to* my phone, that I'd take it with me all the time. So unless I'm going on a trip where I'll want optical zoom and image stability, or manual control over settings, the camera stays home.
>
If all this app does is display the weather, and display hardcoded recommendations based on that weather, any competent developer could have this done in a day... of course since this was a more professional job there is far more people involved, so with all the beurocratic nonsense that goes into your average disfunctional R&D unit I would be surprised if this took more than 2 weeks.
As another example, a big deal has been made about how Siri was duplicated in a mere 8 hours by the Iris team. This is very obviously sensationalized--they got the very bare essentials in place, but almost 2 months later Iris is still nowhere near where Siri was at launch, in features or polish. Their own blog post covers the work they needed to do before they released Iris 2, like location awareness, and optimizing it so their server wouldn't melt under the request load. Never mind that many Android users must install voice processing libraries to make Iris work.
Yes, many projects have wasteful spending, but that's the problem with people who always think $X is excessive to develop professional-quality apps and services (never mind for three different platforms), and Siri/Iris proves geeks aren't immune to that flaw in thinking either.
Finally, professional Starcraft players from other countries finally have a chance!
(based on the single "Barcraft" I've been to, iirc the semifinals were all South Koreans)
As with most things, it depends. My parents' Neon was stolen in '98 and taken for a joyride, but otherwise left intact and unmolested except the ignition had to be replaced, and we used it another 10 years afterwards. My brother's car was also stolen, but after being recovered it was fine until he sold it.
Don't know how "creative" the thieves were who stole your car, but it certainly doesn't apply to thefts everywhere.
Not to defend Obama or Democrats, but in a de facto 2-party system where there isn't a sufficiently strong 3rd choice (like there is in Canada for example), they were the better choice. At the time. And looking at the candidates so far for the Republican nomination for 2012, Obama and Democrats might still be the better choice next year.
This. Big time this.
The previous majority Liberal government agreed to fight in Afghanistan, but refused to get browbeat into the war in Iraq. The current Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper (who was opposition leader in 2003) wanted nothing more than to follow the Americans (and British) in at the time. Of course he flip-flopped once he found out the Bush administration was lying about WMDs in Iraq.
Parts of Harper's big "tough on crime" bill has been derided by right-wing elected and prison officials in Texas as being unworkable. Texans should know, they tried the extreme tough-on-crime route, and it's not working for them, even with capital punishment. The Conservatives are going ahead anyway; apparently Texas Republicans are too left-wing and socialist to know what they're talking about.
This is par for the course for the Conservatives--dogma over science and facts.
Yes, your mistake. I don't see why you continue insisting on making the same mistake, perhaps you didn't read the rest of my comment?
Apple or Microsoft or any other company inlining images and direct-linking to their product pages, on their own websites, is "good" because is not "advertising" in the context of buying space on a site to generate revenue from impressions or click-throughs. This is the context inKubus argued Apple "rely on a LOT" and is demonstrably false. Microsoft does however have the additional section at the bottom of their homepage that very clearly is not hosted on their own server, serves a banner ad, and generates a tracking hit when you click through.
Actually, if Microsoft is getting money showing ads for their products on their own website, that sounds like a pretty clever idea.
And that goes back to my previous point: Apple does not subject you to 3rd party ad farms within their own products/services, just to make a few extra cents per visitor.
Ah. Thanks. I'll have to turn in my geek card...
Actually, a parasite takes without asking, and without providing anything in return.
Asking or even demanding "where's my share" (they don't outright take it, they try to make you give it away) is the act of either a socialist with an entitlement complex, or extortionist middlemen like the RIAA and MPAA.
Just like the iPod and iPhone, Apple seems to specialize in evolutionary implementation, but revolutionary in usage.
It remains to be seen if Siri is the latter, and I don't use it much myself, but the Iris project demonstrates that even if all the necessary tech was available on Android already, no one took it the (supposedly obvious) next step.
Despite claims that the Iris project "duplicated" Siri in only 8 hours, that was a wild exaggeration. A month later it is still very much something that regular users won't bother with. Their latest blog entry (from Oct 29) says most Android phones don't ship with the required speech libraries and users must download/install it themselves, they're missing multilingual support (Apple's own is far from complete, of course), and they're still implementing the framework to let it do certain voice actions like add calendar appointments.
I think it's great that they're trying with Iris, but they are obviously copying the Siri implementation, and it's disingenuous that some claim "Android had all those things first". They had most or maybe even all the parts, but they did not have a working car, because the parts were from different manufacturers that didn't fit together properly.
Don't be deliberately obtuse. Images of and links to a company's own products, inline on its own website do NOT count as ads.
Do adblockers catch these? No, therefore they are not banner ads in any sense of the term. These image/links are not served from an ad server, they get no money from ad impressions on their own site or services.
Compare with the homepage for Microsoft, a company the GP claimed did NOT rely on ad revenue. At the very bottom is a banner ad for Office 2010 or other MS product/service, and to be clear, this one IS served in an iframe, by a 3rd party ad farm, and MS gets money from ad impressions to it.
The GP may have been thinking of iAds and ads within iTunes, and Apple obviously does advertise on other sites and other media (TV/print), but within the context of Siri and most of their own products and services there is no advertising to speak of.
That may be, but I still want an automatic fallback for offline work. A little (more) inaccuracy when creating an event, reminder, playing a song or playlist, etc is preferable to "sorry, can't do that since internet isn't available"
Where do you get that Apple relies on ads? Never mind "relying on ads a LOT"?
Results from Wolfram Alpha are ad-free. In-Siri search results are ad-free. Creating events, reminders, call/texting, are all ad-free. The only time the user might see an ad is when you click on the Web Search for something Siri couldn't get an answer for right away, but that sends you to the browser where ads are fair game. Apple's own website is devoid of ads (can't say the same for Microsoft--bottom of their homepage was a banner ad for MS Office 2010. Yes, served from an ad farm).
In fact, Apple's philosophy on this seems to be "pay slightly more up front, we then make enough money that we won't subject you to 3rd party ads in our products or services." You'll therefore not find 3rd-party shovelware pre-installed on a Mac or iPhone, or ads in iCloud or the Siri service.
You say "incremental" as if it's a bad thing. Most of the world's consumer tech revolutions are merely increments and/or well-polished amalgamations of existing tech that made it more accessible to more people. The truly bleeding-edge technologies are too far outside the worldview of most people for them to bother with.
Depends how old your iPhone is. My brother's ancient 3G is barely usable. My 2+ year-old 3GS on iOS4 was frustratingly laggy until I found out that early this year that hard-resetting it every month or two fixes that (probably kills any caches that have built up over time).
And before anyone says I shouldn't have to do that, consider that 1) coworkers' Blackberries were notorious for needing the remove-battery-to-reset method at least once a week, and 2) my 3GS ran for months with no shutdown or restart, probably only needing to restart when updating the firmware.
The update to iOS5 was like a new lease on life for the 3GS. Everything was as responsive as before the iOS4 update--only very rarely now is there even a split-second delay between a screen-touch and the expected action.
As for the glass coating--it's oil resistant, not oil proof. Whenever I handle Androids or Blackberries the smudges I leave behind are far worse than on my own iPhone, even after I've wiped away existing residue.
I don't mean this as challenging your opinion, just giving some of my own experiences.
All the reviews DO say it's the first iPad competitor they've seen, and mark it highly.
This is the *first* iPad competitor they've seen? What the heck were the Galaxy Tab, Playbook, Asus Transformer and other post-iPad tablets? Or do they mean the first "respectable" (i.e. non-Chinese knock-off) competitor at a much cheaper price, with all the warts that go with it?
Bad timing on getting a Revue.
Less than 24 hours after you bought it, Logitech terminated the Revue, the CEO even claiming that GoogleTV was a "gigantic" mistake for them.
If you didn't get it on sale, I'd try post-purchase price matching it once the firesales start, or even return it if you're concerned about long-term support by Logitech.