Well, initially XP was 2k in bad. They fixed that with XP SP1 and by SP2 it had enough staying power to compete with the next two Windows versions.
Then we got Vista, which was bloated as all hell, had more compatibility issues than early XP and gave us joys like UAC, which is kind of like gksudo or OS X's admin password dialog except that it takes ten seconds to load, tosses up a modal dialog that blocks the entire desktop and occasionally makes the modal dialog appear to be on top of the other windows while actually placing it behind them, leaving it (and the application that triggered UAC) unclickable until you bring it to the front. On the plus side, ctrl-alt-del became much more powerful, capable of breaking out of misbehaving programs that would've prevented access to the Task Manager in earlier versions of Windows.
Windows 7 is essentially what Vista should have been at launch. Many of the worse kinks have been ironed out and you can now change the network setup (such as reordering NICs) without rebooting, which is very welcome. Few complaints here except for UAC still taking ages to load. Privilege escalation is not a trivial task in Windows-land, it seems. It's certainly not as easy as "verify user password, confirm that user is in appropriate group, become root". Oh, and Windows 7 revamped the VFS, making it a bit convoluted. Still, it's a fairly solid release.
Windows 8 assumes that everyone uses a desktop with a touchscreen monitor. If you don't use that configuration parts of the UI won't work particularly well. The Metro UI (or however they call it this week) is built around touchscreen gestures while the desktop mode still assumes that you have a mouse and can perform precise clicks with at least three buttons. Oh, and no start menu; you're expected to use Metro instead. There's a reason why they're talking about adding a start menu and a "boot to desktop" option to the next Windows.
As you can see, Windows release quality got really spotty after Windows XP. It's no longer a question of how big an improvement the next version is; these days you consider how long you can possibly last with your current setup because half of the new versions are severely unappealing. Of course it doesn't help that Windows seems to have run out of killer features as far as the ohme user is concerned. Vista gave us window tiling, 7 gave us "now with 80% less horribleness" and 8 gave us a user interface that virtually no computer on Earth is really compatible with... and the killer feature for 9 seems to be "we removed Windows 8's killer feature".
Sure, there's new DirectX versions but many people don't even care to do the research neccessary to notice the difference between DX 10, 11 and 11.1.
Well, between Episode One, Star Trek: Enterprise and Stargate Universe we've seen three big sci-fi franchises turn to crap without recovering. We could've had a new one but of course they had to axe Firefly after the first season. I don't expect any new quality programming anytime soon.
Well, perhaps whatever they do with Trek next will be entertaining... as long as J.J. Abrams isn't involved; everything that man touches turns into non-stop lens flares. Seriously; Star Trek was as bad with pointless lens flares as Battlefield Earth was with Dutch angles. And Battlefield was actually less ugly than Trek.
STAR WARS
Episode PSD: Attack of the Lens Flares
With the DEATH STAR destroyed again,
peace has come over the galaxy. However,
a new threat has arisen: LENS FLARES
have begun popping up everywhere, almost
as if THE DIRECTOR had been playing
around with PHOTOSHOP during
POST-PROCESSING. With no one able to
see anything, the galaxy is descending into
chaos...
*the camera pans down to briefly reveal a planet just before then entire screen is covered in garish lens flares for the next ninety minutes*
Oh yes. As a web developer in a small company I occasionally end up doing tech support. It's really fun to troubleshoot a customer's Outlook troubles over the phone while simultaneously googling for information and making wild guesses about where they hid the account settings this time. Then you meet a customer with an ancient copy of Thunderbird and you immediately know where to navigate and what to check.
I will give credit where it's due. Microsoft are very good at IDEs and they make decent peripherals. The NT kernel is respectable, as are NTFS and CIFS. But one thing Microsoft really can't do is make a reasonable user interface or at least stick with what works - cf. their bizarre decision to make the file menu an unlabeled sphere in some variants of the ribbon UI.
Well, "indie" comes from "independent" (as far as I know). Yes, it does have a number of more or less vaguely defined additional connotations depending on who you ask but the most basic definition is "a game released by a person or company not affiliated with a traditional publisher". Currently, self-publishing is a rather popular thing and we will see a number of new game development companies arise from this (cf. Mojang), some of which will subsequently be acquired by big publishers. Later, the current indie wave will come to an end.
That doesn't mean that independent game development will come to a screeching halt, possession of a 3D engine will be outlawed for noncorporate entities and someone will burn all copies of "The C++ Programming Language" out of fear of the language being used for unsanctioned game development. It just means that starting your own video game company will be less attractive for a while until the next indie wave starts. There will always be hobbyist game developers. There will always be people writing and selling their own games. There just won't be a big deluge of them for a while.
I think, however, that you're conflating indie games with freeware games and are critical of anyone who sells their games and dares call them "indie", similar to how a music band is either "underground" or "a sellout" according to some people. However, not everyone agrees that "indie" automatically implies "freeware"; to many it just means "without a traditional publisher" - or "independent", if you will.
That depends. Work in a small enough shop and "developer" also includes things like tier 2 tech support (with tier 1 being the sales guy) and making sure the server works properly, even if it's a hosted server and you don't even have shell access. This is even more fun if it's your first actual tech job and you have zero experience in everything.
I concede that point. Looks like it comes down to either the various JS implementations or the various canvas implementations. JS-wise it's not surprising to see Chrome lead - V8 is heavily speed-optimized and I don't think SquirrelFish and SpiderMonkey are quite that fast (and I have no ides where Chakra is these days). Seeing that speed is one of Chrome's main design goals that's not surprising.
My point still stands, though: It's not a slashvertisement to point out that Chrome happens to be faster than Safari (and usually most other browsers too). Chrome is. That doesn't mean that Chrome is better at everything, though.
Nah, Chrome just happens to be the only browser with a fast 3D renderer right now. On the other hand, I find Firefox's renderer to be more compatible. I've seen a few 3D demos that work well (if dog-slow) on Firefox while looking like a mess in Chrome. No links, though; that was a while back.
All browsers' 3D implementations aren't quite ready for prime time just yet; they are just lacking in different aspects.
The correct solution, of course, is to have vast basins of liquid CO2 and methane in order to force CO2 and methane levels into equilibrium, as well. A basin the size of Canada should suffice.
And if you're too much of a hipster to touch anything with "Bioshock" in the name, this is the perfect time to go to GOG, buy System Shock 2 and patch it with the latest SS2Tool. If you haven't played it for a while you might not know that half a year ago someone has actually produced a new version of the engine out of thin air, which seems to fix a lot of the crashing issues, adds compatibility with muticore systems, enables antialiasing, uses OpenAL to enable EAX-like effects etc.
With that and the SHMUP, SHTUP, Rebirth and Tacticool mods installed the game feels quite a bit more modern, even if there are a few blurry old textures left in the game. Plus, apparently it does't crash at the drop of a hat anymore. The only noticeable downside is that existing mod managers aren't supported; these days you dump all mod files in one of two override folders and manage them yourself. Perhaps someone will write a new one, though.
(Note: In case you want to patch the GOG release with SS2Tool 5.0: Delete the "gog.ico" file first; otherwise the SS2Tool installer will use compatibility code that isn't compatible with GOG's latest release. SS2Tool 5.1 is expected to fix this but hasn't been released yet. )
I am aware that this is somewhat off topic but seeing that until yesterday I had never heard about the engine update it might stand to reason that other Shock fans might be interested.
Oh, golly. Samsung didn't fully understand the tech they're working with and implemented it in a braindead way that enters an embarassing failure mode almost immediately after hitting the market. Between this and/dev/exynos-mem I think I'll stop trusting Samsung with anything involving firmware for the time being...
That applied back in the old MS-DOS days. With the graphics cards computers are expected to have today porting software to the southern hemisphere basically just boils down to writing a shader that flips the display upside down.
KDE 4 even has this built in (even though it accidentally flipped the screen sideways for the first few versions) while Gnome only did so in 2.x; Gnome 3.x doesn't have it anymore because supporting more than one hemisphere would run against Gnome's UX brand. Windows only allows it for Metro^W Modern UI apps in an attempt to somehow get anyone interested in the platform and Apple sells a 100.000 AUD mirroring accessory that most users buy because it adds a negligible amount to the total cost of purchasing a Mac down under.
I preordered one game in my whole life (Borderlands 2) and that was only after they made a statement to the effect that the game wouldn't have restrictive DRM. (The details elude me now but I think it was "no always-on DRM".) I certainly wouldn't otherwise.
I'm kickstarting several games and those are either indie games from small companies or games from seasoned developers who are making a commitment to making their backers happy. Could they burn me? Sure they could, but if, say, Shadowrun Returns turns out to be a DRM hellhole that keeps its savegames on the server, would you expect Harebrained Schemes to get as much money for their next campaigns? It would reflect negatively on both the company and Jordan Weisman (who prominently puts himself at the center stage of the funding campaign), which is unwise in a direct funding scenario.
Of course a kickstarted project can just plain fail. I'm comfortable taking that risk if it means that most of the games I invest in are actually delivered and are free of publisher meddling. It's still a risk, though, and I'm aware of that. I can always receive nothing or a piece of crap not worth the money.
Kickstarting games essentially works because while the publishers don't have much goodwill left, the developers do. We'll see whether that works out in geneeral.
The issue is the application, not the connector or protocol. 1080p video content plays fine at 1920x1080. Screen mirroring is what's not running at 1080p, nothing more or less than that.
Ah, right. So their screen mirroring doesn't like the way the adapter does things. That makes a bit more sense (and might actually be fixed in software later).
When TFA says "AirPlay connection" they probably mean "AirPlay connection over Lightning". They don't have enough pins to just send an HDMI signal through the line (Lightning has 8 while HDMI has 19) so they essentially create an MPEG stream on the device, then send it to the adapter, which upscales the stream and sends it down the cable. Apparently they lack the computing power to do a realtime encode/decode for a 1080p stream, which is why you get 1600x900 at most.
Bizarrely, MHL (which also has 8 or 11 pins depending on whether your device comes from Samsung; the connector is not part of the standard) can do 1080p HDMI while having much cheaper (and probably much simpler) cables to boot. It appears that either Lightning is noticeably inferior to MHL or Apple just managed to badly screw up the adapter.
If you won't consider Wargames and Terminator, perhaps you will consider Stanislav Petrov. A fully-automated system probably would have recommended a retaliatory strike as the satellites' flaws weren't known at the time. No system is perfect, unforseen problems can always arise and you don't want to find out that your autonomous combat drone has buggy target recognition code when it's in the air with its weapons active and the enemy jamming the control link.
Of course the military could demand that all hardware and software is formally proven correct but I doubt that they're going to pay for that. Plus, the equipment would still lack the ability to make reasonable decisions in complex, unfamiliar scenarios. It's only going to be as smart as the people who programmed it and you can be certain that there will be eventualities the code is not prepared for.
I work for a company deeply involved with software (us being a web design/hosting company) but that doesn't mean that my boss has any idea of how software or the internet works. He has another (non-tech) company and at some point decided that instead of paying someone to build him a website he'd hire a couple techies and open a web design company, leaving the implementation to us while making all the business decisions.
Yes, that leads to a things like deciding that mobile websites are "a big new thing" (which happened last week) and not understanding responsive design despite us explaining it to him several times. At this point we're implementing responsive design and will be selling it as if it was a separate mobile website (complete with a second contract and everything) because that's easier than convincing the boss that it's just a bit of CSS that we can include and exclude at our convenience. The second contract was a business decision made without any input from the developers and we just have to make it happen.
I'm already looking forward to someone canceling their regular contract but wanting to keep their "mobile website". Bonus points if they expect their "mobile website" to remain at the same domain as their new, externally-hosted website. But hey, mobile websites are the future.
So yeah, cluelessness in your field of business is very much possible and is not antithetical to success.
Well, I'm from Germany where there are usually better non-subsidized plans around, even for power users. You generally only go with a subsidized plan if you can't afford the device up-front. The up-front prices are a bit higher and less favourable for Apple.
I'll compare the last three iPhones with the last three devices in the Samsung Galaxy S family. All prices are for new devices. I omitted third-party prices for the Apple devices because they aren't significantly different form what the Apple Store offers. Only phones without SIM lock were considered.
iPhone 4: 399 EUR (~ 530 USD) at apple.com
Galaxy S: 249 EUR (~ 330 USD) at ebay.de, 331 EUR (~440 USD) at amazon.de
iPhone 4S: 579 EUR (~ 770 USD) at apple.com
Galaxy S2: 320 EUR (~ 440 USD) at ebay.de, 332 EUR (~ 440 USD) at amazon.de
iPhone 5: 679 EUR (~910 USD) at apple.com
Galaxy S3: 400 EUR (~530 USD) at ebay.de, 449 EUR (~ 600 USD) at amazon.de
Galaxy S3 LTE: 440 EUR (~590 USD) at ebay.de, couldn't find at amazon.de
In short, 2010's iPhone 4 is barely outpriced by 2012's Galaxy S3, with 2011's Galaxy S2 coming in at 60 EUR less. The iPhone 5 is a whopping 51% more expensive than Amazon's price for a new S3.
If we compare the specs the S3 has a similar display, a similar camera, a similar SoC, the same amount of RAM, the same amount of internal storage and an SD slot. The only spec where the iPhone 5 clearly leads is in LTE support, which the S3 only got with a later and more expensive release that also bumped its RAM to twice what the iPhone 5 has. That version seems to retail for 40 EUR more than the non-LTE version (eBay price only; I I couldn't find it on Amazon) as opposed to the iPhone 5's 230 EUR markup.
(I will admit, however, that the iPhone 5 doesn't have a badly designed chipset driver. Hello,/dev/exynos-mem.)
Let's face it: Apple's handheld devices are quite good but they're also quite expensive.
Well, it depends - for instance, Cyanogenmod doesn't buy you upgradability. While I like my Android I made the mistake of buying a Samsung. The specs are nice but Samsung offers zero support to the homebrew community. The CM devs have all but given up on getting out a stable version of JB for it because they have no idea how the SoC works and Samsung isn't going to make a JB kernel available.
It is true that Apple devices more reliably offer you a good upgrade path. Of course Apple devices are also very expensive and don't give you as much control. It's a tradeoff between having little hope for upgrades beyond the currently used major version of Android and having little control over your device.
"Optical media" means "DVDs". I know two or three guys wh even have a BluRay drive and those drives are all inside PS3s. For data transfer I'd call BluRay non-viable.
Now, admittedly my friends are all techies who usually build their computers themselves, thus omitting a BD drive they don't see a need for. Regular off-the-shelf desktop computers may come with a BD drive by now but regular off-the-shelf notebooks most certainly don't.
Even if we assume ubiquity, a BluRay burner is 75 bucks and a 150 GB rewritable disk is ten bucks. The same kind of money buys me a big-name brand 64 GB USB 3.0 stick that I can expect to to work on nearly every system I plug it into (excluding Linux if formatted with exFAT or requiring a free third-party driver for OS X if formatted with NTFS), that is much more compact, quieter, scratch resistant, uses less energy...
Perhaps BluRay is nice for data archival but for data transfer I don't really see the advantage. If I need to move more than 64 GB at a time I'll just use one of the bunch of external HDDs I've got lying around. Even if I had to buy a new one, 90 bucks would buy me a 2 TB USB 3.0 external from Seagate (3.5") or a 1 TB one (2.5"). The same kind of storage in rewritable BluRays (without a burner) would set me back 140 bucks or 70 bucks, respectively. And I'd take a 90 bucks HDD over 70 bucks for rewritable optical media.
I simply fail to see the attractiveness of BluRay as a data transfer medium.
50 bucks for talk and text is really expensive from a German point of view. With my carrier I could have that for 20 EUR/month (~27 USD/month). Add 1 GB of data* and you end up with 30 EUR/month (~40 USD/month). I also have the option of going with a (more expensive and limited) plan that gives me a smartphone at a reduced price, with something between 50-100% of the up-front price folded into the plan. Free SIM cards are usual, too.
If you don't go for a flatrate, my carrier's normal non-flat contract will never** charge more than 39 EUR/month (~52 USD/month); if that limit is reached further calls, text messages and data services are free but data is throttled. For light use that's vastly cheaper than your plan and for heavy use it's still the same price.
And that's just what my carrier offers (except for the plan with the smartphone; those are only offered by the big-name carriers). I'm certain I could find a better data flat if I actually looked for it. Availability is not an issue; you can generally assume that every area is being serviced by every carrier even if only with GPRS. Plus, no carrier over here charges you for incoming calls or text messages, which I hear is somewhat common in the States.
The United States are good at a lot of things but cheap telecommunication is unfortunately not really one of them.
* Once the data cap is reached I don't pay anything extra, they just throttle the speed to GPRS level for the rest of the month. If I want faster data after that I can order a "temporary flatrate", which jut means that my data cap is increased by the specified amount for thirty days.
** Of course they exclude a few things like international calls, roaming, premium phone services and me ordering a temporary flatrate. Regular calls, text messages and data services are explicitly covered, though, which should cover the needs of most "normal" people.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, initially XP was 2k in bad. They fixed that with XP SP1 and by SP2 it had enough staying power to compete with the next two Windows versions.
Then we got Vista, which was bloated as all hell, had more compatibility issues than early XP and gave us joys like UAC, which is kind of like gksudo or OS X's admin password dialog except that it takes ten seconds to load, tosses up a modal dialog that blocks the entire desktop and occasionally makes the modal dialog appear to be on top of the other windows while actually placing it behind them, leaving it (and the application that triggered UAC) unclickable until you bring it to the front. On the plus side, ctrl-alt-del became much more powerful, capable of breaking out of misbehaving programs that would've prevented access to the Task Manager in earlier versions of Windows.
Windows 7 is essentially what Vista should have been at launch. Many of the worse kinks have been ironed out and you can now change the network setup (such as reordering NICs) without rebooting, which is very welcome. Few complaints here except for UAC still taking ages to load. Privilege escalation is not a trivial task in Windows-land, it seems. It's certainly not as easy as "verify user password, confirm that user is in appropriate group, become root". Oh, and Windows 7 revamped the VFS, making it a bit convoluted. Still, it's a fairly solid release.
Windows 8 assumes that everyone uses a desktop with a touchscreen monitor. If you don't use that configuration parts of the UI won't work particularly well. The Metro UI (or however they call it this week) is built around touchscreen gestures while the desktop mode still assumes that you have a mouse and can perform precise clicks with at least three buttons. Oh, and no start menu; you're expected to use Metro instead. There's a reason why they're talking about adding a start menu and a "boot to desktop" option to the next Windows.
As you can see, Windows release quality got really spotty after Windows XP. It's no longer a question of how big an improvement the next version is; these days you consider how long you can possibly last with your current setup because half of the new versions are severely unappealing. Of course it doesn't help that Windows seems to have run out of killer features as far as the ohme user is concerned. Vista gave us window tiling, 7 gave us "now with 80% less horribleness" and 8 gave us a user interface that virtually no computer on Earth is really compatible with... and the killer feature for 9 seems to be "we removed Windows 8's killer feature".
Sure, there's new DirectX versions but many people don't even care to do the research neccessary to notice the difference between DX 10, 11 and 11.1.
Well, between Episode One, Star Trek: Enterprise and Stargate Universe we've seen three big sci-fi franchises turn to crap without recovering. We could've had a new one but of course they had to axe Firefly after the first season. I don't expect any new quality programming anytime soon.
Well, perhaps whatever they do with Trek next will be entertaining... as long as J.J. Abrams isn't involved; everything that man touches turns into non-stop lens flares. Seriously; Star Trek was as bad with pointless lens flares as Battlefield Earth was with Dutch angles. And Battlefield was actually less ugly than Trek.
STAR WARS
Episode PSD: Attack of the Lens Flares
With the DEATH STAR destroyed again,
peace has come over the galaxy. However,
a new threat has arisen: LENS FLARES
have begun popping up everywhere, almost
as if THE DIRECTOR had been playing
around with PHOTOSHOP during
POST-PROCESSING. With no one able to
see anything, the galaxy is descending into
chaos...
*the camera pans down to briefly reveal a planet just before then entire screen is covered in garish lens flares for the next ninety minutes*
Oh yes. As a web developer in a small company I occasionally end up doing tech support. It's really fun to troubleshoot a customer's Outlook troubles over the phone while simultaneously googling for information and making wild guesses about where they hid the account settings this time. Then you meet a customer with an ancient copy of Thunderbird and you immediately know where to navigate and what to check.
I will give credit where it's due. Microsoft are very good at IDEs and they make decent peripherals. The NT kernel is respectable, as are NTFS and CIFS. But one thing Microsoft really can't do is make a reasonable user interface or at least stick with what works - cf. their bizarre decision to make the file menu an unlabeled sphere in some variants of the ribbon UI.
Well, "indie" comes from "independent" (as far as I know). Yes, it does have a number of more or less vaguely defined additional connotations depending on who you ask but the most basic definition is "a game released by a person or company not affiliated with a traditional publisher". Currently, self-publishing is a rather popular thing and we will see a number of new game development companies arise from this (cf. Mojang), some of which will subsequently be acquired by big publishers. Later, the current indie wave will come to an end.
That doesn't mean that independent game development will come to a screeching halt, possession of a 3D engine will be outlawed for noncorporate entities and someone will burn all copies of "The C++ Programming Language" out of fear of the language being used for unsanctioned game development. It just means that starting your own video game company will be less attractive for a while until the next indie wave starts. There will always be hobbyist game developers. There will always be people writing and selling their own games. There just won't be a big deluge of them for a while.
I think, however, that you're conflating indie games with freeware games and are critical of anyone who sells their games and dares call them "indie", similar to how a music band is either "underground" or "a sellout" according to some people. However, not everyone agrees that "indie" automatically implies "freeware"; to many it just means "without a traditional publisher" - or "independent", if you will.
That depends. Work in a small enough shop and "developer" also includes things like tier 2 tech support (with tier 1 being the sales guy) and making sure the server works properly, even if it's a hosted server and you don't even have shell access. This is even more fun if it's your first actual tech job and you have zero experience in everything.
I concede that point. Looks like it comes down to either the various JS implementations or the various canvas implementations. JS-wise it's not surprising to see Chrome lead - V8 is heavily speed-optimized and I don't think SquirrelFish and SpiderMonkey are quite that fast (and I have no ides where Chakra is these days). Seeing that speed is one of Chrome's main design goals that's not surprising.
My point still stands, though: It's not a slashvertisement to point out that Chrome happens to be faster than Safari (and usually most other browsers too). Chrome is. That doesn't mean that Chrome is better at everything, though.
No, I'm talking about 3D transforms, which are plain CSS3. Should've been more precise about that.
Nah, Chrome just happens to be the only browser with a fast 3D renderer right now. On the other hand, I find Firefox's renderer to be more compatible. I've seen a few 3D demos that work well (if dog-slow) on Firefox while looking like a mess in Chrome. No links, though; that was a while back.
All browsers' 3D implementations aren't quite ready for prime time just yet; they are just lacking in different aspects.
The correct solution, of course, is to have vast basins of liquid CO2 and methane in order to force CO2 and methane levels into equilibrium, as well. A basin the size of Canada should suffice.
And if you're too much of a hipster to touch anything with "Bioshock" in the name, this is the perfect time to go to GOG, buy System Shock 2 and patch it with the latest SS2Tool. If you haven't played it for a while you might not know that half a year ago someone has actually produced a new version of the engine out of thin air, which seems to fix a lot of the crashing issues, adds compatibility with muticore systems, enables antialiasing, uses OpenAL to enable EAX-like effects etc.
With that and the SHMUP, SHTUP, Rebirth and Tacticool mods installed the game feels quite a bit more modern, even if there are a few blurry old textures left in the game. Plus, apparently it does't crash at the drop of a hat anymore. The only noticeable downside is that existing mod managers aren't supported; these days you dump all mod files in one of two override folders and manage them yourself. Perhaps someone will write a new one, though.
(Note: In case you want to patch the GOG release with SS2Tool 5.0: Delete the "gog.ico" file first; otherwise the SS2Tool installer will use compatibility code that isn't compatible with GOG's latest release. SS2Tool 5.1 is expected to fix this but hasn't been released yet. )
I am aware that this is somewhat off topic but seeing that until yesterday I had never heard about the engine update it might stand to reason that other Shock fans might be interested.
Oh, golly. Samsung didn't fully understand the tech they're working with and implemented it in a braindead way that enters an embarassing failure mode almost immediately after hitting the market. Between this and /dev/exynos-mem I think I'll stop trusting Samsung with anything involving firmware for the time being...
That applied back in the old MS-DOS days. With the graphics cards computers are expected to have today porting software to the southern hemisphere basically just boils down to writing a shader that flips the display upside down.
KDE 4 even has this built in (even though it accidentally flipped the screen sideways for the first few versions) while Gnome only did so in 2.x; Gnome 3.x doesn't have it anymore because supporting more than one hemisphere would run against Gnome's UX brand. Windows only allows it for Metro^W Modern UI apps in an attempt to somehow get anyone interested in the platform and Apple sells a 100.000 AUD mirroring accessory that most users buy because it adds a negligible amount to the total cost of purchasing a Mac down under.
I preordered one game in my whole life (Borderlands 2) and that was only after they made a statement to the effect that the game wouldn't have restrictive DRM. (The details elude me now but I think it was "no always-on DRM".) I certainly wouldn't otherwise.
I'm kickstarting several games and those are either indie games from small companies or games from seasoned developers who are making a commitment to making their backers happy. Could they burn me? Sure they could, but if, say, Shadowrun Returns turns out to be a DRM hellhole that keeps its savegames on the server, would you expect Harebrained Schemes to get as much money for their next campaigns? It would reflect negatively on both the company and Jordan Weisman (who prominently puts himself at the center stage of the funding campaign), which is unwise in a direct funding scenario.
Of course a kickstarted project can just plain fail. I'm comfortable taking that risk if it means that most of the games I invest in are actually delivered and are free of publisher meddling. It's still a risk, though, and I'm aware of that. I can always receive nothing or a piece of crap not worth the money.
Kickstarting games essentially works because while the publishers don't have much goodwill left, the developers do. We'll see whether that works out in geneeral.
Neither.
The issue is the application, not the connector or protocol. 1080p video content plays fine at 1920x1080. Screen mirroring is what's not running at 1080p, nothing more or less than that.
Ah, right. So their screen mirroring doesn't like the way the adapter does things. That makes a bit more sense (and might actually be fixed in software later).
When TFA says "AirPlay connection" they probably mean "AirPlay connection over Lightning". They don't have enough pins to just send an HDMI signal through the line (Lightning has 8 while HDMI has 19) so they essentially create an MPEG stream on the device, then send it to the adapter, which upscales the stream and sends it down the cable. Apparently they lack the computing power to do a realtime encode/decode for a 1080p stream, which is why you get 1600x900 at most.
Bizarrely, MHL (which also has 8 or 11 pins depending on whether your device comes from Samsung; the connector is not part of the standard) can do 1080p HDMI while having much cheaper (and probably much simpler) cables to boot. It appears that either Lightning is noticeably inferior to MHL or Apple just managed to badly screw up the adapter.
Objects in Mirror are bluer than they appear.
FTFY
If you won't consider Wargames and Terminator, perhaps you will consider Stanislav Petrov. A fully-automated system probably would have recommended a retaliatory strike as the satellites' flaws weren't known at the time. No system is perfect, unforseen problems can always arise and you don't want to find out that your autonomous combat drone has buggy target recognition code when it's in the air with its weapons active and the enemy jamming the control link.
Of course the military could demand that all hardware and software is formally proven correct but I doubt that they're going to pay for that. Plus, the equipment would still lack the ability to make reasonable decisions in complex, unfamiliar scenarios. It's only going to be as smart as the people who programmed it and you can be certain that there will be eventualities the code is not prepared for.
I work for a company deeply involved with software (us being a web design/hosting company) but that doesn't mean that my boss has any idea of how software or the internet works. He has another (non-tech) company and at some point decided that instead of paying someone to build him a website he'd hire a couple techies and open a web design company, leaving the implementation to us while making all the business decisions.
Yes, that leads to a things like deciding that mobile websites are "a big new thing" (which happened last week) and not understanding responsive design despite us explaining it to him several times. At this point we're implementing responsive design and will be selling it as if it was a separate mobile website (complete with a second contract and everything) because that's easier than convincing the boss that it's just a bit of CSS that we can include and exclude at our convenience. The second contract was a business decision made without any input from the developers and we just have to make it happen.
I'm already looking forward to someone canceling their regular contract but wanting to keep their "mobile website". Bonus points if they expect their "mobile website" to remain at the same domain as their new, externally-hosted website. But hey, mobile websites are the future.
So yeah, cluelessness in your field of business is very much possible and is not antithetical to success.
I think that naming moons after bands is a great idea. Hence I propose calling the moons Styx and Stones.
I don't think you need to be that athletic to chop up a corporate exec with a cleaver. It's a nice suggestion, though.
Well, I'm from Germany where there are usually better non-subsidized plans around, even for power users. You generally only go with a subsidized plan if you can't afford the device up-front. The up-front prices are a bit higher and less favourable for Apple.
/dev/exynos-mem.)
I'll compare the last three iPhones with the last three devices in the Samsung Galaxy S family. All prices are for new devices. I omitted third-party prices for the Apple devices because they aren't significantly different form what the Apple Store offers. Only phones without SIM lock were considered.
iPhone 4: 399 EUR (~ 530 USD) at apple.com
Galaxy S: 249 EUR (~ 330 USD) at ebay.de, 331 EUR (~440 USD) at amazon.de
iPhone 4S: 579 EUR (~ 770 USD) at apple.com
Galaxy S2: 320 EUR (~ 440 USD) at ebay.de, 332 EUR (~ 440 USD) at amazon.de
iPhone 5: 679 EUR (~910 USD) at apple.com
Galaxy S3: 400 EUR (~530 USD) at ebay.de, 449 EUR (~ 600 USD) at amazon.de
Galaxy S3 LTE: 440 EUR (~590 USD) at ebay.de, couldn't find at amazon.de
In short, 2010's iPhone 4 is barely outpriced by 2012's Galaxy S3, with 2011's Galaxy S2 coming in at 60 EUR less. The iPhone 5 is a whopping 51% more expensive than Amazon's price for a new S3.
If we compare the specs the S3 has a similar display, a similar camera, a similar SoC, the same amount of RAM, the same amount of internal storage and an SD slot. The only spec where the iPhone 5 clearly leads is in LTE support, which the S3 only got with a later and more expensive release that also bumped its RAM to twice what the iPhone 5 has. That version seems to retail for 40 EUR more than the non-LTE version (eBay price only; I I couldn't find it on Amazon) as opposed to the iPhone 5's 230 EUR markup.
(I will admit, however, that the iPhone 5 doesn't have a badly designed chipset driver. Hello,
Let's face it: Apple's handheld devices are quite good but they're also quite expensive.
Well, it depends - for instance, Cyanogenmod doesn't buy you upgradability. While I like my Android I made the mistake of buying a Samsung. The specs are nice but Samsung offers zero support to the homebrew community. The CM devs have all but given up on getting out a stable version of JB for it because they have no idea how the SoC works and Samsung isn't going to make a JB kernel available.
It is true that Apple devices more reliably offer you a good upgrade path. Of course Apple devices are also very expensive and don't give you as much control. It's a tradeoff between having little hope for upgrades beyond the currently used major version of Android and having little control over your device.
I meant a 50 GB rewritable BluRay disc, not a 150 GB one.
"Optical media" means "DVDs". I know two or three guys wh even have a BluRay drive and those drives are all inside PS3s. For data transfer I'd call BluRay non-viable.
Now, admittedly my friends are all techies who usually build their computers themselves, thus omitting a BD drive they don't see a need for. Regular off-the-shelf desktop computers may come with a BD drive by now but regular off-the-shelf notebooks most certainly don't.
Even if we assume ubiquity, a BluRay burner is 75 bucks and a 150 GB rewritable disk is ten bucks. The same kind of money buys me a big-name brand 64 GB USB 3.0 stick that I can expect to to work on nearly every system I plug it into (excluding Linux if formatted with exFAT or requiring a free third-party driver for OS X if formatted with NTFS), that is much more compact, quieter, scratch resistant, uses less energy...
Perhaps BluRay is nice for data archival but for data transfer I don't really see the advantage. If I need to move more than 64 GB at a time I'll just use one of the bunch of external HDDs I've got lying around. Even if I had to buy a new one, 90 bucks would buy me a 2 TB USB 3.0 external from Seagate (3.5") or a 1 TB one (2.5"). The same kind of storage in rewritable BluRays (without a burner) would set me back 140 bucks or 70 bucks, respectively. And I'd take a 90 bucks HDD over 70 bucks for rewritable optical media.
I simply fail to see the attractiveness of BluRay as a data transfer medium.
50 bucks for talk and text is really expensive from a German point of view. With my carrier I could have that for 20 EUR/month (~27 USD/month). Add 1 GB of data* and you end up with 30 EUR/month (~40 USD/month). I also have the option of going with a (more expensive and limited) plan that gives me a smartphone at a reduced price, with something between 50-100% of the up-front price folded into the plan. Free SIM cards are usual, too.
If you don't go for a flatrate, my carrier's normal non-flat contract will never** charge more than 39 EUR/month (~52 USD/month); if that limit is reached further calls, text messages and data services are free but data is throttled. For light use that's vastly cheaper than your plan and for heavy use it's still the same price.
And that's just what my carrier offers (except for the plan with the smartphone; those are only offered by the big-name carriers). I'm certain I could find a better data flat if I actually looked for it. Availability is not an issue; you can generally assume that every area is being serviced by every carrier even if only with GPRS. Plus, no carrier over here charges you for incoming calls or text messages, which I hear is somewhat common in the States.
The United States are good at a lot of things but cheap telecommunication is unfortunately not really one of them.
* Once the data cap is reached I don't pay anything extra, they just throttle the speed to GPRS level for the rest of the month. If I want faster data after that I can order a "temporary flatrate", which jut means that my data cap is increased by the specified amount for thirty days.
** Of course they exclude a few things like international calls, roaming, premium phone services and me ordering a temporary flatrate. Regular calls, text messages and data services are explicitly covered, though, which should cover the needs of most "normal" people.