Sony's done some great consumer electronics stuff, but they've just been so damn stupid when it comes to anything having to do with computers.
They can't resist making everything proprietary, and they can't shake the Not-Invented-Here disease that used to plague Apple.
You know they could make a killer device - but two years late they delivery that POS. I'm sure they'll get some mileage off their reputation amongst non-geeks and the Walkman name, but what a dissapointment...
Last month I did a lot of travelling for work and thought I'd try the whole eBook thing. I had just started reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, and I knew The Confusion was out. Both are available only in hardcover, so I didn't feel like lugging them around with me. As anyone that's packed a small libary into boxes and moved can tell you, the only thing heavier than books is lead.
But I did have this spiffy new 3.5 lb. subnotebook which I was bringing anyway so decided I'd try an eBook.
Now I don't know a lot about the whole eBook thing, so I settled on Acrobat - it seems people might have issues with it - but it was easy to use and there was a pretty good selection, available through Amazon or Adobe's own store, including both of the books I wanted.
Now first problem here is I'm re-purchasing a book I already own in dead tree format. Blah...
So I go through Adobe's annoying activation and get it loaded up, and it's pretty decent. Whenever I reopen the eBook it remembers where I was. It even has the same page numbers and typeface as the print version. I can go full-screen, zoom in and out, rotate it. I find the best solution is to display half a page at a time otherwise the type is just too small. It's sort of like reading a large print book, but it makes up for the piss-poor resolution of LCDs compared to paper.
Before I left I tried loading Acrobat on my Palm Tungsten T3, eventually figured out how to activate it, and loaded my eBooks. Ugh, I don't know how anyone can read anything on a Palm-sized device. It ended up being something like 52,000 little mini-pages with two sentences each.
So I start travelling (with an extra laptop battery). It's a little annoying to have to "wake" my book every time I want to read, but it's not awful. Printed books however have that whole instant-on thing down.
Then of course the stewardess makes me shut off my laptop during takeoff and until we've been in the air for 10 minutes. Blah...
But while it's not as easy to read on an LCD as it is to read paper, it's not bad. I usually stare out the window at the clouds every chapter or so to let my eyes rest. I get a couple hundred pages read on a cross-country flight.
Then I have to shut it down again during landing...
But over the course of the next week the novelty starts to wear off, and it starts to get more and more annoying to use. Trying to pull out and wake the laptop whenever I feel like reading gets old; trying to read at an outdoor cafe in full sunlight, no chance - but if it were winter and cold and overcast I could keep the laptop on my lap and stay warm; taking the laptop into the bathroom to read while sitting on the toilet, it's just not really that much fun.
After a week, I just went to a bookstore and bought a paperback of something else, and when I got home I finished reading the Quicksilver hardcover.
So I dunno, a dedicated eBook device would be good I guess - but it'd have to be cheap, light, with good battery life, have the resolution of paper and be readable in full sunlight. And cost no more than $500.
Then of course someone needs to work out the whole DRM thing, and find some sort of common format and get all the publishers to buy in on it.
Then Amazon needs to stop charging (on a lot of titles) $5-10 more than the hardcover edition. Because as we all now, the costs of printing, binding, storing and shipping eBooks is just so much more than printed books...
I guess it's one of those things that will hopefully be in my lifetime, but not now, and not anytime soon.
While your CIO's reasoning sounds flawed, I think I'd recommend WinZip over 7-Zip for end users as well - it's a hell of a lot easier to use, which is very important when you're considering your average user.
The latest version of WinZip will even warn you when you try and run one of these files named "blah.jpg [30 spaces].exe" that come in a Zip attachment from many viruses.
And as others pointed out, while Zip is old and has poor compression and features compared to some newer alternatives, it's something that will work for everyone.
I think maybe 5% of the IT staff at my company would know what to do with a.7z file - which may just be a sad statement about the IT staff where I work. =)
Ah, but if you become a customer (i.e. gave them money) then I imagine it'll be much easier to download files from them without any hassle.
Once you figure out how to host lots of downloads for free, without annoying advertising, give them a call, I'm sure they'd love to hear from you because that 90s business model just didn't work after VC funding ran out:
9600 XT? I never understood why Apple keeps shipping such shitty default video cards in their high end Macs. If you really want to enjoy Doom 3 do yourself a favor and choose one of the upgrades available when you configure your system in their store.
Or just buy one off-the-shelf and stick it in, though I'm not sure how easy that is to do. I'm *assuming* it's possible, just never done it... =)
This is probably expected at any sort of secure military or defense contracting site.
I remember helping my father burn a CD full of MP3s once so he'd have something to listen to in the secure section where he worked. No portable radios or music players were allowed, no PDAs, no portable storage devices, nothing. The systems didn't have floppy drives or recordable CD drives and (obviously) weren't on the internet. I think that's just standard operating procedure.
For the private sector, depends on the paranoia level I guess. You could fit a lot of data on a 40GB iPod... =)
The Treo is about as close as anyone has come, but compared to the Tungsten T3 it has a smaller, dimmer, lower resolution screen and half the horsepower.
I've used one, and to me it feels like it's almost but not quite there yet. I look forward to their next few models though...
If all you ever used a PDA for is a glorified address book, yeah, it's pretty much dead. Most "smart" phones can do all that, along with devices like the BlackBerry and Palm's own Treo.
The article has a point in that it survives as a niche device for enterprise applications. At my company most everyone has gone over to using BlackBerries, but the Palm still survives in Field Sales where they use it for a custom SFA application.
Smart phones just don't have the horsepower or screen real estate to run it, but a Palm Tungsten does - at least for the time being.
The holy grail is there for someone to grab - a device that integrates standard PDA capabilities, a phone, email, MP3 listening and a powerful application platform with a usable UI. Everything seems to be moving in that direction, but no one is there yet...
MPlayer, BSPlayer, Media Player Classic and VideoLAN are all very good. I'll chime in for Zoom Player, of which I'm very fond, mostly because of the insane level of customization and control.
The website has great information as well on the different codecs, how and where to get them and the player itself can check and make sure all the most common codecs/formats are working - DivX, XviD, Ogg, Matroska, etc.
http://www.inmatrix.com/
It's not Open Source, but the standard version is free (as in beer) and the only thing it lacks over the $20 Pro version is DVD support.
It doesn't seem as popular as other players, and don't see many skins for it (if you care about that sort of thing). And I wouldn't say it's any better or worse than other players in handling the different formats (codec packs are system level, so they work in any player, even WMP). But it's the one player I can get to behave exactly like I want it to - if you can think of something, it's probably somewhere in the copious configuration options. =)
IBM, like most software/hardware companies, creates software and provides services in order to sell more hardware. IBM doesn't make money selling Linux the same well Dell doesn't make money selling Windows.
...part of me hopes the RIAA can ban this. I am so @#$% sick of having to listen to long, annoying song clip ringtones erupting out of coworkers cubes at maximum volume, especially when they aren't there and left their cellphone on their desk, and it just plays over and over and over...
You know, I was just over reading Gamespot, thinking, "Damn, their site is slow, they don't usually have problems like this..." After a couple timeouts, got fed up, come over to Slashdot. "Oh, that's why..." =)
Well, sorta. Weta is actually two companies in one that seem to operate somewhat independently of each other. Weta Digital does the computer stuff, Weta Workshop builds models and minatures, costumes, weapons, props, etc.
Yeah, I never found much worth buying on iTunes until they added those labels along with Thievery's ESL and even some Studio K7 and G-Stone now. It's getting better... =)
Haven't logged into my Blogger account for at least a year - from before Google bought them. After much effort finally remembered my user/pass and logged in, no invite for me. Guess I don't qualify as "active." =)
And no more van Goghs... oh, wait. He didn't make any money.
Not necessarily a valid comparison. There's very few prohibitive costs associated with painting. Maybe a few hundred (if that) on brushes, paints and canvases. A TV show requires a bit more capital... =)
The pirate is not taking revenue from HBO and it is uncertain whether he/she would purchase HBO were the option to pirate it unavailable.
Hard to say. If I couldn't download the episodes I *might* subscribe to HBO. Though probably I'd just rent them after they came out on DVD... =)
To be honest, I've always thought of PC and Console gaming as two fairly separate things that each had their place and unique styles. But I'm disturbed by the extent to which PC gaming is being shaped by console gaming these days.
Using a recent example, Deus Ex was a great PC game. Its sequel was a disaster - it was obviously designed with a console's limitations in mind and the PC version was saddled with a console interface and dumbed down gameplay.
The recent Splinter Cell demo was a similar experience - a giant UI taking up too much of the screen because it's designed for a TV.
And of course Halo, I couldn't believe how frustrating it was trying to play that game with a controller instead of keyboard and mouse. I haven't even tried the PC port, I played it on a friend's XBox.
It's frustrating, because so much development that is going on today targets multiple plaforms (specifically EA and Ubisoft) and because all the consoles pale compared to a current PC in terms of power and flexibility, we have this rash of dumbed down games targeted to the least common denominator.
But maybe it's just this long drought that PC gaming has had. Maybe HL2 and WoW can shake things up a bit... =)
Ignoring the obvious - for the most part you don't have any choice but to use those apps without shelling out major $$$ - I personally don't like them that much.
Don't get me wrong, I think Apple has done a great job with them - they're well made pieces of software and integrate better than anything available in the Windows (or Linux) world. There's a big advantage to being a integrated software/hardware developer.
That said, I may like to do things differently, maybe I don't want to be foreced to do things a certain way, and perhaps the iLife way doesn't work for me.
This is what always bugs me when talking with Mac people - not you specifically, hehe, mostly my co-workers - I can respect that they prefer the Mac and more power to them - but they can't respect that I don't and they don't understand why I don't think the Mac is the greatest thing since sliced bread... =)
Well, I'd refrain from posting in a thread like that, even though I like ribbing my Mac friends when they tell me about a new game and I say, "Ooh, I had fun playing that... two years ago." =)
But that's just friendly trash talking. I have a PowerBook here on my desk next to my PC - I just don't game much on it. =)
That said, there's literally 10-20 or more DVD authoring packages available for Windows. I can't speak as well for Linux. So it wasn't really a "what's the best platform for DVD authoring" post.
Personally I'd rather not download and try out all those different packages to try them out, and reviews don't always tell you everything you want to know. I'm interested in hearing other people's opinions. Perhaps on the Mac the choice is easy - iDVD or DVD Studio Pro - but it's not quite as simple on Windows.
As for what tools are better or easier to use, that gets into the realm of opinion which always takes on a quasi-religious overtones as far as platforms are concerned, so I'm not gonna touch that. =)
But I'd wager in terms of features, whatever DVD tools can do on a Mac they can do on Windows - it's just a question of finding the right one.
Both the Mac and Windows have come a long way in the past few years, and Windows isn't the multimedia joke it was compared to the Mac any more.
And coming from someone that *loathed* OS9 and its predecessors, I like OS X a lot - but my DVD burner is in my PC. =)
Not trying to flame or troll, but I mean, seriously, if you posted asking about a software solution for your Mac and people started posting about all sorts of Windows and Linux software, wouldn't you be annoyed? Why is it that Mac people feel compelled to do this all the time? =)
That said, there's lots of packages for the PC like iDVD that work very well. The Nero tools are very well done, but I think have the same limitations as iDVD - very simplistic and template driven for the average user, with a lot of limitations as to what you can do.
DVD Studio Pro looks very nice, but aside from it not running on his computer, it's $500... =)
Personally I'm interested in what people say in this thread as I recently got a DVD burner and ran into the same problem. Of the few packages I've looked at, they all work very well, and I can make a nifty DVD with an animated menu with a few mouse clicks and drag-n-drop, but I'd be interested in hearing about tools that provide a lot more power and flexibility, specifically as regards menu creation.
Yeah, I noticed that, but it sounded patently ridiculous, and the fact that it was stated by Infinium and not HardOCP makes it suspect. We see how they outright lied regarding the PA strip...
If HardOCP actually thinks they're in physical danger they're smoking crack, or their reporter is fond of tinfoil hats, hehe, but I'd be interested in why they think that in any case. If Infinium is lying again they should point it out...
While I'll admit on the surface Infinium looks like BS (and probably is) and that letter from their lawyers is laughable, I can't say I'm impressed with HardOCP's efforts with the initial article or their follow-up.
Maybe it's forthcoming, but I'd like to see them address the points one-by-one, because while many of them are silly they do refer to their article. I know this is Slashdot, but I actually read it... =)
And one big point that's not very clear - is HardOCP saying that they *weren't* invited to come visit the labs? Because if they were I'd expect them to follow up on that, or give a reason why they declined.
Ah, I fondly remember my MP2000, but it was way ahead of it's time - it tried to do too much and was too large. Palm got it right - started with just core functionality in a small size and grew from there.
The other thing that killed the Newton is Apple's other big problem - it was damn expensive. =)
Slashdot Mirror
Sony's done some great consumer electronics stuff, but they've just been so damn stupid when it comes to anything having to do with computers.
They can't resist making everything proprietary, and they can't shake the Not-Invented-Here disease that used to plague Apple.
You know they could make a killer device - but two years late they delivery that POS. I'm sure they'll get some mileage off their reputation amongst non-geeks and the Walkman name, but what a dissapointment...
Last month I did a lot of travelling for work and thought I'd try the whole eBook thing. I had just started reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, and I knew The Confusion was out. Both are available only in hardcover, so I didn't feel like lugging them around with me. As anyone that's packed a small libary into boxes and moved can tell you, the only thing heavier than books is lead.
But I did have this spiffy new 3.5 lb. subnotebook which I was bringing anyway so decided I'd try an eBook.
Now I don't know a lot about the whole eBook thing, so I settled on Acrobat - it seems people might have issues with it - but it was easy to use and there was a pretty good selection, available through Amazon or Adobe's own store, including both of the books I wanted.
Now first problem here is I'm re-purchasing a book I already own in dead tree format. Blah...
So I go through Adobe's annoying activation and get it loaded up, and it's pretty decent. Whenever I reopen the eBook it remembers where I was. It even has the same page numbers and typeface as the print version. I can go full-screen, zoom in and out, rotate it. I find the best solution is to display half a page at a time otherwise the type is just too small. It's sort of like reading a large print book, but it makes up for the piss-poor resolution of LCDs compared to paper.
Before I left I tried loading Acrobat on my Palm Tungsten T3, eventually figured out how to activate it, and loaded my eBooks. Ugh, I don't know how anyone can read anything on a Palm-sized device. It ended up being something like 52,000 little mini-pages with two sentences each.
So I start travelling (with an extra laptop battery). It's a little annoying to have to "wake" my book every time I want to read, but it's not awful. Printed books however have that whole instant-on thing down.
Then of course the stewardess makes me shut off my laptop during takeoff and until we've been in the air for 10 minutes. Blah...
But while it's not as easy to read on an LCD as it is to read paper, it's not bad. I usually stare out the window at the clouds every chapter or so to let my eyes rest. I get a couple hundred pages read on a cross-country flight.
Then I have to shut it down again during landing...
But over the course of the next week the novelty starts to wear off, and it starts to get more and more annoying to use. Trying to pull out and wake the laptop whenever I feel like reading gets old; trying to read at an outdoor cafe in full sunlight, no chance - but if it were winter and cold and overcast I could keep the laptop on my lap and stay warm; taking the laptop into the bathroom to read while sitting on the toilet, it's just not really that much fun.
After a week, I just went to a bookstore and bought a paperback of something else, and when I got home I finished reading the Quicksilver hardcover.
So I dunno, a dedicated eBook device would be good I guess - but it'd have to be cheap, light, with good battery life, have the resolution of paper and be readable in full sunlight. And cost no more than $500.
Then of course someone needs to work out the whole DRM thing, and find some sort of common format and get all the publishers to buy in on it.
Then Amazon needs to stop charging (on a lot of titles) $5-10 more than the hardcover edition. Because as we all now, the costs of printing, binding, storing and shipping eBooks is just so much more than printed books...
I guess it's one of those things that will hopefully be in my lifetime, but not now, and not anytime soon.
While your CIO's reasoning sounds flawed, I think I'd recommend WinZip over 7-Zip for end users as well - it's a hell of a lot easier to use, which is very important when you're considering your average user.
.exe" that come in a Zip attachment from many viruses.
.7z file - which may just be a sad statement about the IT staff where I work. =)
The latest version of WinZip will even warn you when you try and run one of these files named "blah.jpg [30 spaces]
And as others pointed out, while Zip is old and has poor compression and features compared to some newer alternatives, it's something that will work for everyone.
I think maybe 5% of the IT staff at my company would know what to do with a
Ah, but if you become a customer (i.e. gave them money) then I imagine it'll be much easier to download files from them without any hassle.
Once you figure out how to host lots of downloads for free, without annoying advertising, give them a call, I'm sure they'd love to hear from you because that 90s business model just didn't work after VC funding ran out:
1. Host downloads for free
2. ?
3. Profit!
9600 XT? I never understood why Apple keeps shipping such shitty default video cards in their high end Macs. If you really want to enjoy Doom 3 do yourself a favor and choose one of the upgrades available when you configure your system in their store.
Or just buy one off-the-shelf and stick it in, though I'm not sure how easy that is to do. I'm *assuming* it's possible, just never done it... =)
This is probably expected at any sort of secure military or defense contracting site.
I remember helping my father burn a CD full of MP3s once so he'd have something to listen to in the secure section where he worked. No portable radios or music players were allowed, no PDAs, no portable storage devices, nothing. The systems didn't have floppy drives or recordable CD drives and (obviously) weren't on the internet. I think that's just standard operating procedure.
For the private sector, depends on the paranoia level I guess. You could fit a lot of data on a 40GB iPod... =)
Point taken. =)
The Treo is about as close as anyone has come, but compared to the Tungsten T3 it has a smaller, dimmer, lower resolution screen and half the horsepower.
I've used one, and to me it feels like it's almost but not quite there yet. I look forward to their next few models though...
If all you ever used a PDA for is a glorified address book, yeah, it's pretty much dead. Most "smart" phones can do all that, along with devices like the BlackBerry and Palm's own Treo.
The article has a point in that it survives as a niche device for enterprise applications. At my company most everyone has gone over to using BlackBerries, but the Palm still survives in Field Sales where they use it for a custom SFA application.
Smart phones just don't have the horsepower or screen real estate to run it, but a Palm Tungsten does - at least for the time being.
The holy grail is there for someone to grab - a device that integrates standard PDA capabilities, a phone, email, MP3 listening and a powerful application platform with a usable UI. Everything seems to be moving in that direction, but no one is there yet...
MPlayer, BSPlayer, Media Player Classic and VideoLAN are all very good. I'll chime in for Zoom Player, of which I'm very fond, mostly because of the insane level of customization and control.
The website has great information as well on the different codecs, how and where to get them and the player itself can check and make sure all the most common codecs/formats are working - DivX, XviD, Ogg, Matroska, etc.
http://www.inmatrix.com/
It's not Open Source, but the standard version is free (as in beer) and the only thing it lacks over the $20 Pro version is DVD support.
It doesn't seem as popular as other players, and don't see many skins for it (if you care about that sort of thing). And I wouldn't say it's any better or worse than other players in handling the different formats (codec packs are system level, so they work in any player, even WMP). But it's the one player I can get to behave exactly like I want it to - if you can think of something, it's probably somewhere in the copious configuration options. =)
IBM, like most software/hardware companies, creates software and provides services in order to sell more hardware. IBM doesn't make money selling Linux the same well Dell doesn't make money selling Windows.
...part of me hopes the RIAA can ban this. I am so @#$% sick of having to listen to long, annoying song clip ringtones erupting out of coworkers cubes at maximum volume, especially when they aren't there and left their cellphone on their desk, and it just plays over and over and over...
You know, I was just over reading Gamespot, thinking, "Damn, their site is slow, they don't usually have problems like this..." After a couple timeouts, got fed up, come over to Slashdot. "Oh, that's why..." =)
Well, sorta. Weta is actually two companies in one that seem to operate somewhat independently of each other. Weta Digital does the computer stuff, Weta Workshop builds models and minatures, costumes, weapons, props, etc.
Yeah, I never found much worth buying on iTunes until they added those labels along with Thievery's ESL and even some Studio K7 and G-Stone now. It's getting better... =)
Haven't logged into my Blogger account for at least a year - from before Google bought them. After much effort finally remembered my user/pass and logged in, no invite for me. Guess I don't qualify as "active." =)
And no more van Goghs... oh, wait. He didn't make any money.
Not necessarily a valid comparison. There's very few prohibitive costs associated with painting. Maybe a few hundred (if that) on brushes, paints and canvases. A TV show requires a bit more capital... =)
The pirate is not taking revenue from HBO and it is uncertain whether he/she would purchase HBO were the option to pirate it unavailable.
Hard to say. If I couldn't download the episodes I *might* subscribe to HBO. Though probably I'd just rent them after they came out on DVD... =)
To be honest, I've always thought of PC and Console gaming as two fairly separate things that each had their place and unique styles. But I'm disturbed by the extent to which PC gaming is being shaped by console gaming these days.
Using a recent example, Deus Ex was a great PC game. Its sequel was a disaster - it was obviously designed with a console's limitations in mind and the PC version was saddled with a console interface and dumbed down gameplay.
The recent Splinter Cell demo was a similar experience - a giant UI taking up too much of the screen because it's designed for a TV.
And of course Halo, I couldn't believe how frustrating it was trying to play that game with a controller instead of keyboard and mouse. I haven't even tried the PC port, I played it on a friend's XBox.
It's frustrating, because so much development that is going on today targets multiple plaforms (specifically EA and Ubisoft) and because all the consoles pale compared to a current PC in terms of power and flexibility, we have this rash of dumbed down games targeted to the least common denominator.
But maybe it's just this long drought that PC gaming has had. Maybe HL2 and WoW can shake things up a bit... =)
Ignoring the obvious - for the most part you don't have any choice but to use those apps without shelling out major $$$ - I personally don't like them that much.
Don't get me wrong, I think Apple has done a great job with them - they're well made pieces of software and integrate better than anything available in the Windows (or Linux) world. There's a big advantage to being a integrated software/hardware developer.
That said, I may like to do things differently, maybe I don't want to be foreced to do things a certain way, and perhaps the iLife way doesn't work for me.
This is what always bugs me when talking with Mac people - not you specifically, hehe, mostly my co-workers - I can respect that they prefer the Mac and more power to them - but they can't respect that I don't and they don't understand why I don't think the Mac is the greatest thing since sliced bread... =)
Well, I'd refrain from posting in a thread like that, even though I like ribbing my Mac friends when they tell me about a new game and I say, "Ooh, I had fun playing that... two years ago." =)
But that's just friendly trash talking. I have a PowerBook here on my desk next to my PC - I just don't game much on it. =)
That said, there's literally 10-20 or more DVD authoring packages available for Windows. I can't speak as well for Linux. So it wasn't really a "what's the best platform for DVD authoring" post.
Personally I'd rather not download and try out all those different packages to try them out, and reviews don't always tell you everything you want to know. I'm interested in hearing other people's opinions. Perhaps on the Mac the choice is easy - iDVD or DVD Studio Pro - but it's not quite as simple on Windows.
As for what tools are better or easier to use, that gets into the realm of opinion which always takes on a quasi-religious overtones as far as platforms are concerned, so I'm not gonna touch that. =)
But I'd wager in terms of features, whatever DVD tools can do on a Mac they can do on Windows - it's just a question of finding the right one.
Both the Mac and Windows have come a long way in the past few years, and Windows isn't the multimedia joke it was compared to the Mac any more.
And coming from someone that *loathed* OS9 and its predecessors, I like OS X a lot - but my DVD burner is in my PC. =)
Not trying to flame or troll, but I mean, seriously, if you posted asking about a software solution for your Mac and people started posting about all sorts of Windows and Linux software, wouldn't you be annoyed? Why is it that Mac people feel compelled to do this all the time? =)
That said, there's lots of packages for the PC like iDVD that work very well. The Nero tools are very well done, but I think have the same limitations as iDVD - very simplistic and template driven for the average user, with a lot of limitations as to what you can do.
DVD Studio Pro looks very nice, but aside from it not running on his computer, it's $500... =)
Personally I'm interested in what people say in this thread as I recently got a DVD burner and ran into the same problem. Of the few packages I've looked at, they all work very well, and I can make a nifty DVD with an animated menu with a few mouse clicks and drag-n-drop, but I'd be interested in hearing about tools that provide a lot more power and flexibility, specifically as regards menu creation.
Studio K7 has some limited offerings in MP3 as well.
I think both sell internationally - Warp is in the UK and K7 is in Germany.
Yeah, I noticed that, but it sounded patently ridiculous, and the fact that it was stated by Infinium and not HardOCP makes it suspect. We see how they outright lied regarding the PA strip...
If HardOCP actually thinks they're in physical danger they're smoking crack, or their reporter is fond of tinfoil hats, hehe, but I'd be interested in why they think that in any case. If Infinium is lying again they should point it out...
While I'll admit on the surface Infinium looks like BS (and probably is) and that letter from their lawyers is laughable, I can't say I'm impressed with HardOCP's efforts with the initial article or their follow-up.
Maybe it's forthcoming, but I'd like to see them address the points one-by-one, because while many of them are silly they do refer to their article. I know this is Slashdot, but I actually read it... =)
And one big point that's not very clear - is HardOCP saying that they *weren't* invited to come visit the labs? Because if they were I'd expect them to follow up on that, or give a reason why they declined.
I think you mean Duke Nukem Forever...
Ah, I fondly remember my MP2000, but it was way ahead of it's time - it tried to do too much and was too large. Palm got it right - started with just core functionality in a small size and grew from there. The other thing that killed the Newton is Apple's other big problem - it was damn expensive. =)