I think Seumas is commenting in part on the announcers' apparent lack of concern for the safety of the drivers. Yes, the crash could be a pivotal moment in the race - but it's arguably a little warped to be audibly excited about an event that could lead to the injury/death of several of the people involved. It's a fair criticism, whether you enjoy the sport or not.
Standard 2.5" - it'd fit most laptops and netbooks, but not ultra-slim ones like the Macbook Air. The one I had in mind specifically is the Samsung 840, which supposedly draws 0.071W when active and has read/write speeds of 540MB/s and 250MB/s, respectively (manufacturer's claims - probably does worse in real-world). I couldn't tell you how much of that 2.5" is casing / padding or whether it'd be possible to arrange the internal chips in an iPad-friendly fashion, but I suspect a strongly motivated corporation could fit something comparable into the iPad form factor for an awful lot less than $300 per device (and still make a sizeable profit).
All that said, Apple's not going to have much trouble finding buyers for this iPad, even at this price.
Logarithmic pricing or not, if you're paying a $300 premium for this version of the iPad (vs. the 16GB version), that's a seriously lousy price on flash storage; typical SSD prices these days are on the order of $180 for a 250GB SSD (and I've seen sale prices as low as $140-150). Apple's doing this with a lot of other products these days, too: the RAM on their laptops isn't user-serviceable any more, so you have to buy it built-in at hugely inflated prices.
My understanding is that wind exposure increases temperature change. If the air temperature is below your body temperature, wind will actually cool you down faster (hence the weather report's inclusion of a 'wind chill factor' during the winter months). That said, if it's warmer than your body temperature, exposure to wind will increase your body temperature, and in warm climates (like India) such temperatures are entirely possible.
Air cooling is almost always effective for devices like your computer's CPU/GPU as they're generally much warmer than air temperature.
I've heard rumors that Nintendo might go to an app-store model for the Wii U that would presumably be a lot more open and XBLIG-ish than their current system (wherein they won't even consider giving you a dev kit unless you're an established development company with a dedicated office, etc.). If they actually did that they'd have to eat a bit of crow, though; Iwata and co. have come out against the app store model in the past pointing at all the crap that winds up making it through. Perhaps they're realizing that being an 'established' company doesn't prevent one from dishing out the shovelware, though, even as they lose out on indie hits like Tiny Towers that might not have made their licensing cut.
The continued popularity of the iPad (and decent success enjoyed by Asus and Samsung with their respective Android tablets) would tend to put the lie to this claim. Acer's own entry into the tablet race was by all accounts a bit crap, so this sounds like some serious sour grapes to me. Also, I haven't heard from anybody in the real world who's excited about these 'ultrabooks' ; they sound like a sad marketing scheme from Intel, along the lines of their old 'Viiv' branding.
The bit that complicates it for me in this case is that this is knowing that I'm paying $20 to piggy-back on packets that are already being sent constantly anyhow. There's no incremental bandwidth usage and no real infrastructure cost associated - charging for texting is close to pure profit.
I'm not sure when they changed it (I remember downloading it for free too), but the most recent version of XCode was a $5 purchase on the Mac App Store for me. It really doesn't appear to be free any more.
To be fair: Nintendo has come up with something of a solution re: the "nine-year-old's difficulty" bit. Their more recent games (Mario Galaxy 2, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Ocarina of time 3D) have all had "super guide" functionality - basically, a system that will optionally take over and play part of the game for you if you suck at nine-year-old levels. Seems like they've used that as leverage to start making their games properly challenging again for the rest of us.
(Good thing, too; I don't think I died once during Twilight Princess or Wind Waker.)
If we had unlimited power all the other problems are probably solvable through application of more power (for noise reduction, for instance, some sort of active noise-cancelling system, like a giant pair of Bose headphones). It would be a pain in the ass to maintain, and it would probably cause nasty environmental problems in the colder parts of the world (barring further application of our hypothetical unlimited power source).
Part of it is fixed costs - it's expensive to roll out fiber to the home, and that expense doesn't change whether you're buying the 15Mbps tier or the 150Mbps tier. The other part is naked greed; Verizon is a telco, after all.
I think they mean "supply" as in upload or originate, which they clearly didn't do in this case. They do supply some of their own content in the form of stuff like YouTube Live or various partnered offerings, but they're not directly responsible what users upload, which is most of the content on the site.
Support for flash is available under Android 2.2, as is running apps from external storage. External storage has always been accessible for media, caching, etc. It would be pretty hard to find a modern phone chipset out there that doesn't support 3D acceleration of some sort, particularly on something as high end as a 2GHz chip. Can't comment on the document editing - there's definitely apps out there for it, but I'd rather work with something closer to a full-sized keyboard.
Basically, it sounds like there's two things here. Blocking P2P software that interferes with other P2P software in a malware-esque fashion, and enforcing clear notifications that shared files are, well, shared. Seems dumb, but a lot of folks out there don't realize that if they share "My Documents," everything from their tax records to their secret porn stash is going to be on the web for all and sundry to download. This hits home particularly hard for gov't employees, considering some of the sensitive stuff that's leaked through LimeWire and the like over the years.
Just wanted to note that Microsoft does actually have a 'Microsoft Update' system that will update other Microsoft products (Office, Visual Studio, etc) installed on the system. I don't think it's available for pre-Vista systems, and it's a far cry from apt-get and the like, but it's a step in the right direction.
...Jim Davis? Really? I can see making an argument for the first three on that list, but Davis has long since given himself over to hackdom. The best thing he's done recently is let the "Garfield without Garfield" book be published. I can remember some ingenuity in his early strips, but he has largely been recycling the same joke templates for years now, and his characters rarely if ever show any interesting new facets. Why not Schulz, or (if we're not limiting ourselves to American cartoonists) 4-koma master Kiyohiko Azuma?
There's an unauthorized play with the Peanuts characters called "Dog sees God" that does rather a lot with the theme of Charlie Brown's hopefulness. Some of it's just for shock value (Linus has become a stoner, Pigpen develops a nasty mean streak), but the show is worth it for the ending, where CB's hopefulness is, after sixteen or seventeen years of repeated disappointment, vindicated just a tiny bit.
Simple fix: grab Dosbox. It probably has better compatibility than your '95 based computer ever did, although I admit that the fiddling was part of the fun of those old games.
More or less my point exactly (2DBoy satisfied Nintendo's requirements even as a tiny two-many indie outfit). Actually, all things considered Nintendo is doing *fantastic* with indie PC devs - they have 2DBoy (World of Goo), Nicalis (Cave Story, La Mulana, and Night Game), and the Super Meat Boy guys. Microsoft's presently got Jonathan Blow for Braid and Derek Yu for Spelunky, and Sony has Jenova Chen (flOw, Flower, etc) and Jonathan Mak (Everyday Shooter).
All in all, a good time to be a talented indie dev.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: what truly amazing stuff have we seen from the "not-a-day-job" indie devs on the Microsoft and Apple stores? There have been several excellent indie games of late (Braid and World of Goo come to mind immediately), but I notice that they came from small teams who put their money where their mouths were and took on game dev full-time. The biggest exception I can think of is the fabled Cave Story, which saw enough success as a freeware game on Win/Mac/PSP that it's getting a WiiWare port from Nicalis... and Nicalis qualifies under Nintendo's requirements.
OK, no more devil's advocate. I think Nintendo is using their dev requirements as a crude quality filter. It doesn't feel fair (speaking as a sometimes indie dev myself), and there's a chance that they'll miss the next big thing that somebody cooks up in their garage... but they appear to be willing to take that risk. Guess it wouldn't sting quite as much in my case if there wasn't so much first-party crapware on the DSiWare store... clocks and calculators? I definitely prefer open platforms, even with the attendant flood of me-too crap.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Seumas is commenting in part on the announcers' apparent lack of concern for the safety of the drivers. Yes, the crash could be a pivotal moment in the race - but it's arguably a little warped to be audibly excited about an event that could lead to the injury/death of several of the people involved. It's a fair criticism, whether you enjoy the sport or not.
Standard 2.5" - it'd fit most laptops and netbooks, but not ultra-slim ones like the Macbook Air. The one I had in mind specifically is the Samsung 840, which supposedly draws 0.071W when active and has read/write speeds of 540MB/s and 250MB/s, respectively (manufacturer's claims - probably does worse in real-world). I couldn't tell you how much of that 2.5" is casing / padding or whether it'd be possible to arrange the internal chips in an iPad-friendly fashion, but I suspect a strongly motivated corporation could fit something comparable into the iPad form factor for an awful lot less than $300 per device (and still make a sizeable profit).
All that said, Apple's not going to have much trouble finding buyers for this iPad, even at this price.
Logarithmic pricing or not, if you're paying a $300 premium for this version of the iPad (vs. the 16GB version), that's a seriously lousy price on flash storage; typical SSD prices these days are on the order of $180 for a 250GB SSD (and I've seen sale prices as low as $140-150). Apple's doing this with a lot of other products these days, too: the RAM on their laptops isn't user-serviceable any more, so you have to buy it built-in at hugely inflated prices.
My understanding is that wind exposure increases temperature change. If the air temperature is below your body temperature, wind will actually cool you down faster (hence the weather report's inclusion of a 'wind chill factor' during the winter months). That said, if it's warmer than your body temperature, exposure to wind will increase your body temperature, and in warm climates (like India) such temperatures are entirely possible.
Air cooling is almost always effective for devices like your computer's CPU/GPU as they're generally much warmer than air temperature.
I've heard rumors that Nintendo might go to an app-store model for the Wii U that would presumably be a lot more open and XBLIG-ish than their current system (wherein they won't even consider giving you a dev kit unless you're an established development company with a dedicated office, etc.). If they actually did that they'd have to eat a bit of crow, though; Iwata and co. have come out against the app store model in the past pointing at all the crap that winds up making it through. Perhaps they're realizing that being an 'established' company doesn't prevent one from dishing out the shovelware, though, even as they lose out on indie hits like Tiny Towers that might not have made their licensing cut.
The continued popularity of the iPad (and decent success enjoyed by Asus and Samsung with their respective Android tablets) would tend to put the lie to this claim. Acer's own entry into the tablet race was by all accounts a bit crap, so this sounds like some serious sour grapes to me. Also, I haven't heard from anybody in the real world who's excited about these 'ultrabooks' ; they sound like a sad marketing scheme from Intel, along the lines of their old 'Viiv' branding.
Bow ties are cool. Or Stetsons. Stetsons are cool, too.
The bit that complicates it for me in this case is that this is knowing that I'm paying $20 to piggy-back on packets that are already being sent constantly anyhow. There's no incremental bandwidth usage and no real infrastructure cost associated - charging for texting is close to pure profit.
I'm not sure when they changed it (I remember downloading it for free too), but the most recent version of XCode was a $5 purchase on the Mac App Store for me. It really doesn't appear to be free any more.
To be fair: Nintendo has come up with something of a solution re: the "nine-year-old's difficulty" bit. Their more recent games (Mario Galaxy 2, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Ocarina of time 3D) have all had "super guide" functionality - basically, a system that will optionally take over and play part of the game for you if you suck at nine-year-old levels. Seems like they've used that as leverage to start making their games properly challenging again for the rest of us. (Good thing, too; I don't think I died once during Twilight Princess or Wind Waker.)
If we had unlimited power all the other problems are probably solvable through application of more power (for noise reduction, for instance, some sort of active noise-cancelling system, like a giant pair of Bose headphones). It would be a pain in the ass to maintain, and it would probably cause nasty environmental problems in the colder parts of the world (barring further application of our hypothetical unlimited power source).
Today's XKCD strip seems appropriate here. Granted, there's no guarantee that Microsoft actually plans on implementing this ever...
Part of it is fixed costs - it's expensive to roll out fiber to the home, and that expense doesn't change whether you're buying the 15Mbps tier or the 150Mbps tier. The other part is naked greed; Verizon is a telco, after all.
I think they mean "supply" as in upload or originate, which they clearly didn't do in this case. They do supply some of their own content in the form of stuff like YouTube Live or various partnered offerings, but they're not directly responsible what users upload, which is most of the content on the site.
Considering prices for FiOS went up this year to $55/month for me, Verizon definitely does have the requisite testicular fortitude.
Support for flash is available under Android 2.2, as is running apps from external storage. External storage has always been accessible for media, caching, etc. It would be pretty hard to find a modern phone chipset out there that doesn't support 3D acceleration of some sort, particularly on something as high end as a 2GHz chip. Can't comment on the document editing - there's definitely apps out there for it, but I'd rather work with something closer to a full-sized keyboard.
Basically, it sounds like there's two things here. Blocking P2P software that interferes with other P2P software in a malware-esque fashion, and enforcing clear notifications that shared files are, well, shared. Seems dumb, but a lot of folks out there don't realize that if they share "My Documents," everything from their tax records to their secret porn stash is going to be on the web for all and sundry to download. This hits home particularly hard for gov't employees, considering some of the sensitive stuff that's leaked through LimeWire and the like over the years.
Just wanted to note that Microsoft does actually have a 'Microsoft Update' system that will update other Microsoft products (Office, Visual Studio, etc) installed on the system. I don't think it's available for pre-Vista systems, and it's a far cry from apt-get and the like, but it's a step in the right direction.
I think I remember Slashdot being forced to turn over details in a Scientology case, but I don't remember any others.
...Jim Davis? Really? I can see making an argument for the first three on that list, but Davis has long since given himself over to hackdom. The best thing he's done recently is let the "Garfield without Garfield" book be published. I can remember some ingenuity in his early strips, but he has largely been recycling the same joke templates for years now, and his characters rarely if ever show any interesting new facets. Why not Schulz, or (if we're not limiting ourselves to American cartoonists) 4-koma master Kiyohiko Azuma?
There's an unauthorized play with the Peanuts characters called "Dog sees God" that does rather a lot with the theme of Charlie Brown's hopefulness. Some of it's just for shock value (Linus has become a stoner, Pigpen develops a nasty mean streak), but the show is worth it for the ending, where CB's hopefulness is, after sixteen or seventeen years of repeated disappointment, vindicated just a tiny bit.
Simple fix: grab Dosbox. It probably has better compatibility than your '95 based computer ever did, although I admit that the fiddling was part of the fun of those old games.
You'll need to go buy another goat first, obviously.
More or less my point exactly (2DBoy satisfied Nintendo's requirements even as a tiny two-many indie outfit). Actually, all things considered Nintendo is doing *fantastic* with indie PC devs - they have 2DBoy (World of Goo), Nicalis (Cave Story, La Mulana, and Night Game), and the Super Meat Boy guys. Microsoft's presently got Jonathan Blow for Braid and Derek Yu for Spelunky, and Sony has Jenova Chen (flOw, Flower, etc) and Jonathan Mak (Everyday Shooter).
All in all, a good time to be a talented indie dev.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: what truly amazing stuff have we seen from the "not-a-day-job" indie devs on the Microsoft and Apple stores? There have been several excellent indie games of late (Braid and World of Goo come to mind immediately), but I notice that they came from small teams who put their money where their mouths were and took on game dev full-time. The biggest exception I can think of is the fabled Cave Story, which saw enough success as a freeware game on Win/Mac/PSP that it's getting a WiiWare port from Nicalis... and Nicalis qualifies under Nintendo's requirements.
OK, no more devil's advocate. I think Nintendo is using their dev requirements as a crude quality filter. It doesn't feel fair (speaking as a sometimes indie dev myself), and there's a chance that they'll miss the next big thing that somebody cooks up in their garage... but they appear to be willing to take that risk. Guess it wouldn't sting quite as much in my case if there wasn't so much first-party crapware on the DSiWare store... clocks and calculators? I definitely prefer open platforms, even with the attendant flood of me-too crap.