Come on, when was the last time you saw a battery life claim that wasn't slightly exaggerated, wasn't done under absolutely ideal (or even unrealistic) lab conditions, or otherwise didn't hold up under your own measurements?
Unfortunately, few if any manufacturers explain battery life testing methods, so it's impossible to compare between vendors. Still, I might be in the market for a similarly spec'd machine with good battery life by the time this comes out. I'd like to see how close it comes to this claim.
IANAP (I am not a pilot), but I know a few people going for their licenses right now, and I get the impression that pilot to tower communications are all business. Each side knows what the other is going to say when he says it, kind of like a script, and it's all both relevant and necessary to the task at hand (flying the plane). It's a bit different than the highly improvisational, distant-focused conversational style employed by multitasking commuters.
FAA regulations prohibit talking about non-flying related things between crew members during takeoff and landing approaches, and a violation of this reg was blamed for causing a crash near Buffalo earlier this year.
I agree that we'd be better off if people adopted the no-nonsense conversation style of pilots while talking on the road, but I doubt many would go through a certification as rigorous as pilot training to gain the privilege. That said, a study probably wouldn't hurt. Even if it fails, it might quiet those who insist "Well I can talk on the phone while driving quite safely enough, thank you very much! I need to call you back, there's a telephone pole in my engine compartment."
the introduction of the
iPhone has spurred many iPhone substitutes such as the HTC Touch, Blackberry Storm, Google
G1, and several Samsung and LG models.
-AT&T
In other words, exclusivity deals breed ripoffs. Yeah, that's one form of competition, but it doesn't really seem like "innovation" to me when the release of one product that everyone wants causes every manufacturer to try to make an exact copy with a different exclusivity deal. If everyone carried the iPhone, these companies would be trying to differentiate themselves by coming up with the next big thing, not making copies of the last big thing.
wireless carriers would have less incentive to develop and promote innovative handsets.
I'm not from this industry, but I don't believe wireless providers develop handsets. Handset manufacturers (e.g. LG, Samsung, Motorola, etc.) do.
Although your average laptop has quite enough computing horsepower to run a basic flight control system, I recall a similar project I saw demoed at college found that the downlink of telemetry and transmission through the radio introduced a little too much lag time for performance to be acceptable. Then again, that project was demoed on a helicopter. A fixed wing aircraft might be a bit more lag tolerant.
Although there is a case to be made for doing the math on the ground, for right now it's probably better to carry the flight control system on board.
Mod parent up. The designers in my club swear by that book. Definitely seek the advice of the local hobby shops (after all, you need the right off the shelf components from them).
The last time some of my friends tried doing an automatic control system, the plane turned straight toward the flight line and tried to kill us all!
Unless you have extensive experience designing them, I would recommend going with a kit plane for hardware rather than trying to build one from scratch out of foam boards. The reason for this is that you will start out with a design you know is flyable and has the stability properties you want. One of the classic errors in model-scale UAV design I've seen people make is trying to design the craft from scratch only to discover that their control surfaces are poorly sized, the thing is dynamically unstable, and it requires hand-made spare parts after every flight.
I think an ideal platform for a UAV like you describe would be a foam flying wing with maybe a 3-4 foot wingspan. The flying wing design would at least in theory allow you to decouple some equations which would be difficult to do in traditional fused aircraft and impossible to do in helicopters. Also, unibody construction makes it easier to land without landing gear. Landing without some pretty complex rangefinding hardware is tough, even for a computer system. Doing a skid landing on that huge wing surface with a rear-facing prop will add some margin of error to your landing sequence. If possible, get an ARF (Almost Ready to Fly) model. They come with airframe, power system, and sometimes all the servos. All you need to add is the radio equipment (I assume you are going to have a manual override backup. No, really. You're going to want a manual override.). Expanded polypropylene foam is actually more durable than a lot of people give it credit for, and replacement parts for these aircraft are easy to find.
Despite popular belief, IBM did not design the Model M as a melee weapon with keyboard functionality. Rather, it is a keyboard with melee weapon functionality, as required by their DoD contract.
Also, although legendary for their durability, they are not indestructible. A few well-placed armor piercing rounds from an anti-material rifle or a single high explosive antitank charge are often sufficient to disable one.
-Proud owner of a 1986 IBM Model M (pulled from a pile of keyboards scheduled to be scrapped).
If you're going to make a workbench designed for kids, a neat design feature would be to make it possible to grow with the kids. Maybe some nesting tubes for legs would allow it to change in height over time.
Apart from that, look at the surface of the bench. Whether you want to use wood, laminated particle board, or lego base plates, making the surface extendable can help small arms reach the back, then expand horizontally as they need more bench space.
As others have said, communication is key here. I think the direction of the conversation hinges on whether or not he helps pay for the connection. If not, remind him that it is your connection and that you have to set some rules. If he does, suggest that he either adopts a bandwidth cap or gets his own connection.
The people at the IACC seem like your typical corporate droids, but they can't be stupid. The must have known when they first commandeered the course that the truth would come out after the course ended ("Heidi" herself admitted she was fake May 2007, at the end of the spring semester), and that guerrilla marketing has a failure mode which frequently involves consumer backlash.
This makes me wonder: Was this whole thing (or at least part of it) an experiment to gauge the intensity and duration of our backlash?
If so, I hope they get the message. The comments on Heidi's blog aren't much more forgiving than the ones on slashdot.
A stock (gasoline-only) BMW 7-series easily starts at over $75,000 USD. The top-end ones with V12 gasoline engines start at $120k, and people still buy them. Granted, it's a niche market, but these things still sell. I understand your point, though; The ones modded to run on rocket fuel will cost a lot more, possibly out of the price range of everyone except collectors.
If I recall correctly, there was a "Pinky and the Brain" episode in which the lab mice tried to join an illuminati-style international conspiracy group called "T.H.E.Y.". THEY consisted of world leaders (Bill Clinton and the like).
Even the name was an elaborate cover-up designed to deceive the public. It was an acronym; I think the "Y" stood for "Yodelers".
My primary linux box has a FireGL T2. I've been through this level driver hell, and yet I am inclined to agree. The weekend after ATI releases the source code (which, when reverse engineered, may reveal in great detail the workings of the proprietary stuff in their chips that makes them go real fast), every chip manufacturer in China will be making unlicensed knockoffs of their chips (Every chip manufacturer in China is making mostly licensed knockoffs for now). A lot of R&D went into making the stuff that would be revealed in the source code.
You can't just expect a company like ATI/AMD to give up the secrets, garnered by expensive R&D, which comprise a great deal of their income just to please a (let's face it) very small fraction of their installed customer base. Sure, if it was released, the linux community would jump on the code and make a driver roughly a million times better than anything ATI could produce, but realistically I just don't see it happening any time soon for a very good reason.
We do harness the kinetic energy of the larger bodies of the solar system for practical use. One more obvious use of this is tidal power (generated by slowly affecting the kinetic energy of the Moon, IIRC, and harnessed by small turbines in coastal areas). One less obvious use of this is the planetary flyby technique used by spacecraft. By decreasing the velocity of Jupiter by [insert mathematically insignificant number here], a small space probe can go into a Jovian orbit at one velocity and exit this orbit at a significantly higher one in a different direction while using virtually no fuel.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "energy storage" with natural magnets and rotational kinetic energy (Remember, the vast majority of ferrous material on this planet, and thus the source of the Earth's magnetic field, is in the core, not the crust), but there are techniques for using the Earth's magnetic field to produce energy. I saw a test of an apparatus on the NASA channel (Now that's good television) which used the spacecraft's movement through Earth's magnetic field to induce a current in a tether outside the spacecraft, which they then used to power stuff on board the spacecraft. But this was still not "free energy", because the magnetic field generated by the current interacted with that of Earth and decreased the spacecraft's velocity and altitude (as expected by NASA engineers and the law of conservation of Energy). This was mostly recoverable, though, because feeding current the other way through the cable increased the spacecraft's altitude again. The only way to get current out of a magnetic field is to move charged particles through it, which is convenient, because everything is made of charged particles. Energy must be expended to get those charged particles in motion in the first place, and once the current has been generated, the kinetic energy of the charged particles drops to zero.
My point is, even by harnessing the kinetic energy or magnetic properties or what have you of the cosmos, you do affect them in a small way. Try that fly-by trick enough, and Jupiter will fall out of orbit. Some energy in space looks "free", but in actuality it's really just "insanely cheap" energy.
The conversion from electron volts to Joules is the value of a coulomb, which is another important metric unit in electrical calculations (although "metric" and "electrical" may be redundant; I have yet to encounter english units in circuits). The point is, if you know what a coulomb is (and you should, if you are doing this sort of calculation), you know how to convert between electron volts and Joules.
Now the english unit for energy, on the other hand, is the Btu. Converting it to the next "logical" english unit is a factor of about 778 Btu in a ft*lbf. Anyone who has taken thermodynamics knows the Btu as an enemy because using it with things like pressure (usually lbf/in^2) and mass flow rate (remember, there are many types of pounds in English, some for mass and some for force) requires inches, feet, and two types of pounds. Now let's try to convert from Btus to electron volts for even more fun! Because english has failed to come up with any useful electric units (even in the US), this calculation gets extra-nasty.
I suppose my point is as follows: Does the metric system always mesh nicely with physics? No. That's just the way the universe works. FSM made it that way. But some English units just seem to fit together with no rhyme or reason whatsoever! It's as if they made it up as they went along.
"In fact, 70 percent of the time, the robot understood that the mirror image was itself. Takeno's goal is to reach 100 percent in the coming year." Oh, no. I've seen this movie. Humans lose. Oh, well. I'd better start stockpiling EMP generators and tesla coils.
I've seen a lot of questions so far about myths you would like to do if you had an unlimited budget, if you were invincible like Superman, or if danger to people, property, or reality in general was no object. But is there a myth that you would NOT do even if you had all those things? Do you believe that there are myths that are better left unsolved or too controvertial (basically flamebait myths)?
I think a laptop makes all the sense in the world [because sharing one desktop] with a family is not at all possible.
The article assumes a lot in saying this. My family of four shared a single mac desktop until I was about to leave for college. Sure, there were fights over it (mainly caused by my sister monopolizing 20 threads at a time serving her AIM away messages while I was on and my retaliation by killing all her CPU-hungry processes and logging her off using root powers). But no one ever got seriously hurt.
Bad example. My point is that unless one person is a very heavy computer user (constantly using it for work or coding), sharing a desktop until the kids need a computer for college could very well work.
The poll cited New York City residents only.
Headline says NY state.
This story is really only about one city. Too bad, too. The effect would be much more drastic on a state level. I wouldn't mind seeing green taxis in Albany or Rochester, either.
I agree with Gigs. If you want to bring math to the masses, you have to embrace new techniques. I am one success story. My horrible sense of memory for trigonometric identities and roots guaranteed that lots of doors in calculus and beyond would be shut for me if not for my little Z80 box. How could more people learning higher math possibly be a bad thing?
Graphing calculators especially give students a new way of looking at problems. It is breathing new life into solving things like polynomial roots, intersection, and differential optimization problems graphically instead of symbollically.
Newsflash:
Cars are made of matter (shocking as it may seem to people who sit in front of the abstract of the computer screen all day). Thus, most laws of physics still apply to them. I think DARPA's cross-desert vehicle challenge proved how well computers understand these laws and apply them to driving.
A car can also be in a crash if it is parked and off. Inhabited car-on stopped or parked car collisions happen often in crowded cities. Let's see all that fancy-pants hardware and software prevent accidents when there is no current running through it.
I'm going to have to agree on this one. Let's look at the study's own "facts", shall we? The study said that "only" 83% of students thought unpopular views should be expressed.
It then compared this to 99% of principals and 97% of teachers with the same opinion.
Wake up and smell the Bawls! Comparing the interpretation of the 1st amendment of people who have not graduated from high school to the interpretation of teachers and administrators who have all gone to college (Including no doubt some history teachers with American history degrees) makes for a biased survey.
It is also the nature of high school students not to want to express unpopular opinions, at the risk of becoming unpopular. I'll bet the a good deal of the 17% of students against unpopular expression are the "popular" kids who are used to always getting their views expressed.
Using the internet decreases facetime spent with coworkers, family, and friends.
In a related study, scientists find that fire is hot.
Re:They are marketing to teens...
on
Hip-e All-In-One PC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"...the way they have made it makes it look as if it was targeted towards 10 year olds and tweens."
Excellent observation. That might be kinda the whole point. They might be marketing it to tweens on the premise that the 10-12 year olds "think" it's what the older, cooler kids are using.
On some level, little kids look up to teens because while teens command a similar kind of respect as adults do, their way of wielding authority is completely different. This makes them cool.
I have seen this kind of marketing before in dolls and clothes that no self-respecting teen would have but that "seem" to be directed at teens.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot 6) Typical exaggerated tech promises.
Come on, when was the last time you saw a battery life claim that wasn't slightly exaggerated, wasn't done under absolutely ideal (or even unrealistic) lab conditions, or otherwise didn't hold up under your own measurements?
Unfortunately, few if any manufacturers explain battery life testing methods, so it's impossible to compare between vendors. Still, I might be in the market for a similarly spec'd machine with good battery life by the time this comes out. I'd like to see how close it comes to this claim.
IANAP (I am not a pilot), but I know a few people going for their licenses right now, and I get the impression that pilot to tower communications are all business. Each side knows what the other is going to say when he says it, kind of like a script, and it's all both relevant and necessary to the task at hand (flying the plane). It's a bit different than the highly improvisational, distant-focused conversational style employed by multitasking commuters.
FAA regulations prohibit talking about non-flying related things between crew members during takeoff and landing approaches, and a violation of this reg was blamed for causing a crash near Buffalo earlier this year.
I agree that we'd be better off if people adopted the no-nonsense conversation style of pilots while talking on the road, but I doubt many would go through a certification as rigorous as pilot training to gain the privilege. That said, a study probably wouldn't hurt. Even if it fails, it might quiet those who insist "Well I can talk on the phone while driving quite safely enough, thank you very much! I need to call you back, there's a telephone pole in my engine compartment."
In other words, exclusivity deals breed ripoffs. Yeah, that's one form of competition, but it doesn't really seem like "innovation" to me when the release of one product that everyone wants causes every manufacturer to try to make an exact copy with a different exclusivity deal. If everyone carried the iPhone, these companies would be trying to differentiate themselves by coming up with the next big thing, not making copies of the last big thing.
I'm not from this industry, but I don't believe wireless providers develop handsets. Handset manufacturers (e.g. LG, Samsung, Motorola, etc.) do.
Although your average laptop has quite enough computing horsepower to run a basic flight control system, I recall a similar project I saw demoed at college found that the downlink of telemetry and transmission through the radio introduced a little too much lag time for performance to be acceptable. Then again, that project was demoed on a helicopter. A fixed wing aircraft might be a bit more lag tolerant.
Although there is a case to be made for doing the math on the ground, for right now it's probably better to carry the flight control system on board.
Mod parent up. The designers in my club swear by that book. Definitely seek the advice of the local hobby shops (after all, you need the right off the shelf components from them).
For more info on programming flight control systems and simulations, see Flight Stability and Automatic Control, by Robert Nelson. http://www.amazon.com/Flight-Stability-Automatic-Control-Robert/dp/0070462739
The last time some of my friends tried doing an automatic control system, the plane turned straight toward the flight line and tried to kill us all!
Unless you have extensive experience designing them, I would recommend going with a kit plane for hardware rather than trying to build one from scratch out of foam boards. The reason for this is that you will start out with a design you know is flyable and has the stability properties you want. One of the classic errors in model-scale UAV design I've seen people make is trying to design the craft from scratch only to discover that their control surfaces are poorly sized, the thing is dynamically unstable, and it requires hand-made spare parts after every flight.
I think an ideal platform for a UAV like you describe would be a foam flying wing with maybe a 3-4 foot wingspan. The flying wing design would at least in theory allow you to decouple some equations which would be difficult to do in traditional fused aircraft and impossible to do in helicopters. Also, unibody construction makes it easier to land without landing gear. Landing without some pretty complex rangefinding hardware is tough, even for a computer system. Doing a skid landing on that huge wing surface with a rear-facing prop will add some margin of error to your landing sequence. If possible, get an ARF (Almost Ready to Fly) model. They come with airframe, power system, and sometimes all the servos. All you need to add is the radio equipment (I assume you are going to have a manual override backup. No, really. You're going to want a manual override.). Expanded polypropylene foam is actually more durable than a lot of people give it credit for, and replacement parts for these aircraft are easy to find.
Despite popular belief, IBM did not design the Model M as a melee weapon with keyboard functionality. Rather, it is a keyboard with melee weapon functionality, as required by their DoD contract .
Also, although legendary for their durability, they are not indestructible. A few well-placed armor piercing rounds from an anti-material rifle or a single high explosive antitank charge are often sufficient to disable one.
-Proud owner of a 1986 IBM Model M (pulled from a pile of keyboards scheduled to be scrapped).
If you're going to make a workbench designed for kids, a neat design feature would be to make it possible to grow with the kids. Maybe some nesting tubes for legs would allow it to change in height over time.
Apart from that, look at the surface of the bench. Whether you want to use wood, laminated particle board, or lego base plates, making the surface extendable can help small arms reach the back, then expand horizontally as they need more bench space.
As others have said, communication is key here. I think the direction of the conversation hinges on whether or not he helps pay for the connection.
If not, remind him that it is your connection and that you have to set some rules. If he does, suggest that he either adopts a bandwidth cap or gets his own connection.
The people at the IACC seem like your typical corporate droids, but they can't be stupid. The must have known when they first commandeered the course that the truth would come out after the course ended ("Heidi" herself admitted she was fake May 2007, at the end of the spring semester), and that guerrilla marketing has a failure mode which frequently involves consumer backlash.
This makes me wonder: Was this whole thing (or at least part of it) an experiment to gauge the intensity and duration of our backlash?
If so, I hope they get the message. The comments on Heidi's blog aren't much more forgiving than the ones on slashdot.
A stock (gasoline-only) BMW 7-series easily starts at over $75,000 USD. The top-end ones with V12 gasoline engines start at $120k, and people still buy them. Granted, it's a niche market, but these things still sell. I understand your point, though; The ones modded to run on rocket fuel will cost a lot more, possibly out of the price range of everyone except collectors.
If I recall correctly, there was a "Pinky and the Brain" episode in which the lab mice tried to join an illuminati-style international conspiracy group called "T.H.E.Y.". THEY consisted of world leaders (Bill Clinton and the like).
Even the name was an elaborate cover-up designed to deceive the public. It was an acronym; I think the "Y" stood for "Yodelers".
My primary linux box has a FireGL T2. I've been through this level driver hell, and yet I am inclined to agree. The weekend after ATI releases the source code (which, when reverse engineered, may reveal in great detail the workings of the proprietary stuff in their chips that makes them go real fast), every chip manufacturer in China will be making unlicensed knockoffs of their chips (Every chip manufacturer in China is making mostly licensed knockoffs for now). A lot of R&D went into making the stuff that would be revealed in the source code.
You can't just expect a company like ATI/AMD to give up the secrets, garnered by expensive R&D, which comprise a great deal of their income just to please a (let's face it) very small fraction of their installed customer base. Sure, if it was released, the linux community would jump on the code and make a driver roughly a million times better than anything ATI could produce, but realistically I just don't see it happening any time soon for a very good reason.
We do harness the kinetic energy of the larger bodies of the solar system for practical use. One more obvious use of this is tidal power (generated by slowly affecting the kinetic energy of the Moon, IIRC, and harnessed by small turbines in coastal areas). One less obvious use of this is the planetary flyby technique used by spacecraft. By decreasing the velocity of Jupiter by [insert mathematically insignificant number here], a small space probe can go into a Jovian orbit at one velocity and exit this orbit at a significantly higher one in a different direction while using virtually no fuel.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "energy storage" with natural magnets and rotational kinetic energy (Remember, the vast majority of ferrous material on this planet, and thus the source of the Earth's magnetic field, is in the core, not the crust), but there are techniques for using the Earth's magnetic field to produce energy. I saw a test of an apparatus on the NASA channel (Now that's good television) which used the spacecraft's movement through Earth's magnetic field to induce a current in a tether outside the spacecraft, which they then used to power stuff on board the spacecraft. But this was still not "free energy", because the magnetic field generated by the current interacted with that of Earth and decreased the spacecraft's velocity and altitude (as expected by NASA engineers and the law of conservation of Energy). This was mostly recoverable, though, because feeding current the other way through the cable increased the spacecraft's altitude again. The only way to get current out of a magnetic field is to move charged particles through it, which is convenient, because everything is made of charged particles. Energy must be expended to get those charged particles in motion in the first place, and once the current has been generated, the kinetic energy of the charged particles drops to zero.
My point is, even by harnessing the kinetic energy or magnetic properties or what have you of the cosmos, you do affect them in a small way. Try that fly-by trick enough, and Jupiter will fall out of orbit. Some energy in space looks "free", but in actuality it's really just "insanely cheap" energy.
The conversion from electron volts to Joules is the value of a coulomb, which is another important metric unit in electrical calculations (although "metric" and "electrical" may be redundant; I have yet to encounter english units in circuits). The point is, if you know what a coulomb is (and you should, if you are doing this sort of calculation), you know how to convert between electron volts and Joules.
Now the english unit for energy, on the other hand, is the Btu. Converting it to the next "logical" english unit is a factor of about 778 Btu in a ft*lbf. Anyone who has taken thermodynamics knows the Btu as an enemy because using it with things like pressure (usually lbf/in^2) and mass flow rate (remember, there are many types of pounds in English, some for mass and some for force) requires inches, feet, and two types of pounds. Now let's try to convert from Btus to electron volts for even more fun! Because english has failed to come up with any useful electric units (even in the US), this calculation gets extra-nasty.
I suppose my point is as follows: Does the metric system always mesh nicely with physics? No. That's just the way the universe works. FSM made it that way. But some English units just seem to fit together with no rhyme or reason whatsoever! It's as if they made it up as they went along.
"In fact, 70 percent of the time, the robot understood that the mirror image was itself. Takeno's goal is to reach 100 percent in the coming year."
Oh, no. I've seen this movie. Humans lose. Oh, well. I'd better start stockpiling EMP generators and tesla coils.
I've seen a lot of questions so far about myths you would like to do if you had an unlimited budget, if you were invincible like Superman, or if danger to people, property, or reality in general was no object. But is there a myth that you would NOT do even if you had all those things? Do you believe that there are myths that are better left unsolved or too controvertial (basically flamebait myths)?
I think a laptop makes all the sense in the world [because sharing one desktop] with a family is not at all possible.
The article assumes a lot in saying this. My family of four shared a single mac desktop until I was about to leave for college. Sure, there were fights over it (mainly caused by my sister monopolizing 20 threads at a time serving her AIM away messages while I was on and my retaliation by killing all her CPU-hungry processes and logging her off using root powers). But no one ever got seriously hurt.
Bad example. My point is that unless one person is a very heavy computer user (constantly using it for work or coding), sharing a desktop until the kids need a computer for college could very well work.
The poll cited New York City residents only. Headline says NY state.
This story is really only about one city. Too bad, too. The effect would be much more drastic on a state level. I wouldn't mind seeing green taxis in Albany or Rochester, either.
I agree with Gigs. If you want to bring math to the masses, you have to embrace new techniques. I am one success story. My horrible sense of memory for trigonometric identities and roots guaranteed that lots of doors in calculus and beyond would be shut for me if not for my little Z80 box. How could more people learning higher math possibly be a bad thing?
Graphing calculators especially give students a new way of looking at problems. It is breathing new life into solving things like polynomial roots, intersection, and differential optimization problems graphically instead of symbollically.
Newsflash:
Cars are made of matter (shocking as it may seem to people who sit in front of the abstract of the computer screen all day). Thus, most laws of physics still apply to them. I think DARPA's cross-desert vehicle challenge proved how well computers understand these laws and apply them to driving.
A car can also be in a crash if it is parked and off. Inhabited car-on stopped or parked car collisions happen often in crowded cities. Let's see all that fancy-pants hardware and software prevent accidents when there is no current running through it.
I'm going to have to agree on this one. Let's look at the study's own "facts", shall we?
The study said that "only" 83% of students thought unpopular views should be expressed.
It then compared this to 99% of principals and 97% of teachers with the same opinion.
Wake up and smell the Bawls! Comparing the interpretation of the 1st amendment of people who have not graduated from high school to the interpretation of teachers and administrators who have all gone to college (Including no doubt some history teachers with American history degrees) makes for a biased survey.
It is also the nature of high school students not to want to express unpopular opinions, at the risk of becoming unpopular. I'll bet the a good deal of the 17% of students against unpopular expression are the "popular" kids who are used to always getting their views expressed.
Using the internet decreases facetime spent with coworkers, family, and friends.
In a related study, scientists find that fire is hot.
"...the way they have made it makes it look as if it was targeted towards 10 year olds and tweens."
Excellent observation. That might be kinda the whole point. They might be marketing it to tweens on the premise that the 10-12 year olds "think" it's what the older, cooler kids are using. On some level, little kids look up to teens because while teens command a similar kind of respect as adults do, their way of wielding authority is completely different. This makes them cool.
I have seen this kind of marketing before in dolls and clothes that no self-respecting teen would have but that "seem" to be directed at teens.
"...reviewed by HomeCinemaChoice whereby they declared the Xenium 'The creators of the easiest Xbox modification - the complete package.'"
I'm guessing HomeCinemaChoice is not affiliated with Microsoft?