Wow. That ad is really the opposite of charisma. And I don't mean their version of Eric Schmidt, I mean the ad itself. That thing is so creepy it makes me want to stay away from Consumer Watchdog.
Also, is it me or is there a bad jump cut when the one girl throws away her ice cream? One ball falls off and then the other suddenly disappears. You even see how she moved a bit between the frames. Are they trying to be endearing by looking like a bady-made live action ad?
Actually, I think that Apple had some valid arguments against including Flash. I'm not saying that these arguments trump all but they're there.
First off, Flash video is really slow and resource-hungry unless GPU-accelerated. Flash only started to support GPU acceleration after the iPhone came out and even then only on Windows. Bad playback performance and a rapidly drained battery aren't part of a good user experience and Apple has a tendency to leave out functionality entirely if they can't get it to work well enough.
Secondly, even if Apple retooled i(Phone )OS and begged Adobe until they supported hardware acceleration they'd have trouble on their hands. Having Flash on their device would completely sink their "no interpreted code" position, weakening their grip on the app market. Perhaps nothing the users worry about but a very real business concern for Apple.
Also, Apple has learned the hard way that bending over backwards for Adobe doesn't lead to Adobe doing anything for you. They keep supporting the Mac OS 9 backwards compatibility UI toolkit and Adobe still screamed bloody murder when Apple informed them that it wouldn't be a first-class API anymore on 64 bit systems. Adobe had almost a decade to adjust to the OS X APIs and only managed to do so for CS5 because Apple lost their patience and forced them to.
Now imagine iOS like that: They would be forced to keep around an ages-old version of their graphics API because Adobe certainly wouldn't change a single line in Flash just because Apple thinks about perhaps retiring the iPhone OS 1.0 graphics API with the 5.0 update. They'd tell Apple to keep around the 1.0 API for another two or three major revisions while they think about how they could upgrade, maybe.
That's it: Flash is better at animations because that's what Flash was designed for. Adobe developers have said as much: Flash's video performance is bad because Flash needs to composit the video with animation elements, which means color space conversions.
Adobe says that HTML5-capable browser need to do the same conversions but for some reason they can do so without dropping frames while Flash can't. It's possible that they simply go the same route standalone video players go: Present an empty box where the content goes and have the video card fill in the blank.
Actually, every modern Mac I've heard of ships with two white Apple stickers. The difference is that they're in the little box with the paperwork and the DVDs instead of stuck onto your computer.
I certainly wouldn't mind the other manufacturers doing it like that.
Interestingly, sex shops can be a source of the stuff, although not in pure form. There are various kinds of cleaning sprays for toys and I know of one that's essentially water, isoprop alcohol and a few additives. It's not going to dissolve paint but I found that it works well on most organic stains, having used it successfully on everything from dirty glasses to a fridge bearing a crust of former ice cream.
Now if they only sold the stuff in liter bottles...
Hell, my mom's low-end Vaio has compatibility problems with the preinstalled Windows! But that's mostly because Sony couldn't write a working WiFi driver if their lives depended on it (but insist that you use their driver instead of the chipset manufacturer's). Or implement Num-Lock properly.
You feel a lot less bad about paying 1000 Euros for a notebook after you've seen what 300 EUR notebooks are like.
I assume they'll go with option 4: Ignore that anything happened. Maybe they'll play it down in the media. Either way they'll all act very surprised when someone manages to break the cards once they're out in the wild.
No, his words were pretty clear: No farming, no reproduction, no society. He demanded that the Discovery Channel somehow talk all of humanity into dying off.
The weird thing is that unlike most nutjobs he had some valid points. However, he then took them and ran straight off towards the most extreme conclusion he could find.
Everyone in the home user OS market? Windows only reads Microsoft FSes; OS X only reads Apple FSes plus FAT32, NFS and CIFS. Linux has more compatiblity (not neccessarily part of the base distro) but is usually used via a non-commercial distro.
Sadly, none of the commercial OS makers cares about the fact that FAT32 is a horrible way of handling interoperability.
Plus, if the sattelite for some reason mistakes a functioning sattelite for spae debris (for example because of a problem with the distance tracking that leaves it unable to distinguish between "small and close" and "large and far away") the results could be very expensive.
I have heard about cases where families have a pickup truck for hauling stuff and a small car for normal driving. That doesn't mean they don't care about how much fuel their pickup uses; they just found that a Ford Fiesta isn't useful for hauling bulky items on a regular basis.
Unlikely. The appeal of pen-and-paper RPGs is the immense freedom the players have to do whatever they want, usually involving stuff not covered by the rules. Also, most groups have their own house rules. The only thing that would reliably work yould be a dumb display with the GM doing all the work. You can abstract out checks (unless houseruled) but everything else is a bit too volatile.
Hmm. Surface projecting on a Battletech playing field + knowledge of playing field topography + 'mech recognition (perhaps via small patterned labels on the 'mechs) + Battletech rules = realtime display of movement ranges, to-hit chances etc.
Or, more involved, use hexes with blank tops and project the terrain onto them so you can even use the optional rules for fires and cleaning out terrain.
The large thing is a touchscreen-driven digital notepad. It doesn't have storage capabilities but it will help you be more engineery by wiping itself unless you write your notes in RPN.
The small thing is a next-generation printer cartridge with built-in "retina" display, which not only enables it to show you how much ink it has left in realtime but also makes it more expensive by a full order of magnitude than the printer itself.
While "has buttons" is a bad criterion, it is true that the iPhone was not designed to be a portable console. This is evident both in the interface (the touchscreen/tilt sensor combination is not very well suited for precise input and control schemes involving more than three or four buttons) and in the fact that at launch Apple didn't allow third-party software, which would be fairly devastating to a console. Third-party software - and thus games - was entirely an afterthought.
The iPhone/iPod touch/iPad are not primarily intended to be portable consoles. They are, respectively, a smartphone, a PDA and a tablet. They happen to play games and they have accumulated a large library over time (enough to advertise as a feature) but they are no more consoles than the Palm V or the Nokia N900 are. I think that a comparison between portable consoles makes the most sense when all involved devices were designed and intended as portable consoles. For instance, a lot of iPhone buyers bought it as a smartphone and not for its gaming capabilities (although I do admit that the PS3 has a similar problem as some people buy it just as a Blu-ray player.).
Semantics aside, more relevant to the discussion is that the NDS had easily twice as many sales as the PSP. In fact, the measuring stick would be the original Game Boy series (Game Boy/Pocket/Color/Light). It's widely known as a raging success, having enjoyed good sales on virtually unchanged hardware for a full decade.
Using Nintendo's 2008 annual financial report as a source we see that in 2008 Nintendo has sold about 81 million Game Boy Advances and about 119 million classic Game Boys. Even if we assume that the classic Game Boy continued to get sales it's unlikely to be far above 120 million units today. So Nintendo has sold more DSes in six years than classic Game Boys in twelve years (assuming that all classic Game Boy sales stopped when the GBA was introduced in 2001). The PSP doesn't even measure up against the Game Boy Advance although it's newer and can still overtake it. It's obvious that the NDS fares tremendously better in the market than the PSP does.
Also of interest are the other figures: As of 2008, Nintendo sold 25 million Wiis, 22 million Gamecubes, 33 million N64s, 49 million SNESes and 62 million NESes. Even allowing for the Wii being new and the N64 and the GameCube being failures, this illustrates that stationary consoles don't sell as many units as portable ones. The markets seem to behave differently, thus a direct comparison between the respective sales numbers may be pointless.
Nah. DARPA has done extensive studies in the first X-COM game and has concluded that explosions are entirely two-dimensional. This new project shouldn't cost much anyway; DARPA reasons that all they need to do is take the turret off a Hovertank/Plasma and replace it with a bulletproof box for the soldiers to stand in, like the one on the Pope's car.
Of course, the first major speed bump of the project has been that for some reason all other agencies they've asked have been unwilling to provide any Elerium-115. Additionally, even though they've put 100 scientists in a laboratory they were told that the scientists wouldn't know what to do with a UFO power source even if they had one. The scientists promised to think really hard about it, though, as they appreciate earning a flat 50.000 Dollars per month each.
Does USB 3 finally have a controller? I mean a real one, not the "let's just offload half our work to the CPU" nonsense USB 1, 1.1 and 2 have. Yes, it's cheap but it's also a recipe for horrible throughput (see FireWire S400 being faster then USB 2.0) and puts an unneccessary burden on the CPU.
I'd like USB better if it wasn't implemented in such a half-assed way. The connectors are horrible (whoever thought that a symmetric-looking but really asymmetric connector was a good idea?), it's incapable of daisy-chaining without hubs, it's strictly host-peripheral and its reliance on the CPU degrades its own performance.
USB is a nice idea but sometimes I wish FireWire had made the cut instead. Apart from the fact that it can DMA wherever it wants it's essentially USB done right. Likewise, I hope that Light Peak makes its way to the market soon as it doesn't seem to share many of USB's shortcomings.
USB is great for HID. Everything else not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. That ad is really the opposite of charisma. And I don't mean their version of Eric Schmidt, I mean the ad itself. That thing is so creepy it makes me want to stay away from Consumer Watchdog.
Also, is it me or is there a bad jump cut when the one girl throws away her ice cream? One ball falls off and then the other suddenly disappears. You even see how she moved a bit between the frames. Are they trying to be endearing by looking like a bady-made live action ad?
Obviously, the result must then be 24.
Getting rid of Beck would be like getting rid of Hitler
You destroy everything he's built up until he commits suicide in his basement?
But he's doing it all wrong. There's only one waypoint and I don't think many people will bring their cars. Some rally that is!
Actually, I think that Apple had some valid arguments against including Flash. I'm not saying that these arguments trump all but they're there.
First off, Flash video is really slow and resource-hungry unless GPU-accelerated. Flash only started to support GPU acceleration after the iPhone came out and even then only on Windows. Bad playback performance and a rapidly drained battery aren't part of a good user experience and Apple has a tendency to leave out functionality entirely if they can't get it to work well enough.
Secondly, even if Apple retooled i(Phone )OS and begged Adobe until they supported hardware acceleration they'd have trouble on their hands. Having Flash on their device would completely sink their "no interpreted code" position, weakening their grip on the app market. Perhaps nothing the users worry about but a very real business concern for Apple.
Also, Apple has learned the hard way that bending over backwards for Adobe doesn't lead to Adobe doing anything for you. They keep supporting the Mac OS 9 backwards compatibility UI toolkit and Adobe still screamed bloody murder when Apple informed them that it wouldn't be a first-class API anymore on 64 bit systems. Adobe had almost a decade to adjust to the OS X APIs and only managed to do so for CS5 because Apple lost their patience and forced them to.
Now imagine iOS like that: They would be forced to keep around an ages-old version of their graphics API because Adobe certainly wouldn't change a single line in Flash just because Apple thinks about perhaps retiring the iPhone OS 1.0 graphics API with the 5.0 update. They'd tell Apple to keep around the 1.0 API for another two or three major revisions while they think about how they could upgrade, maybe.
That's it: Flash is better at animations because that's what Flash was designed for. Adobe developers have said as much: Flash's video performance is bad because Flash needs to composit the video with animation elements, which means color space conversions.
Adobe says that HTML5-capable browser need to do the same conversions but for some reason they can do so without dropping frames while Flash can't. It's possible that they simply go the same route standalone video players go: Present an empty box where the content goes and have the video card fill in the blank.
Someone has to find and squash all those bugs that cause Adobe plugins to occasionally perform adequately.
Actually, the toaster was just waiting for you to respond.
"The heating assembly is attempting to draw power. [Cancel][Allow]"
Actually, every modern Mac I've heard of ships with two white Apple stickers. The difference is that they're in the little box with the paperwork and the DVDs instead of stuck onto your computer.
I certainly wouldn't mind the other manufacturers doing it like that.
Interestingly, sex shops can be a source of the stuff, although not in pure form. There are various kinds of cleaning sprays for toys and I know of one that's essentially water, isoprop alcohol and a few additives. It's not going to dissolve paint but I found that it works well on most organic stains, having used it successfully on everything from dirty glasses to a fridge bearing a crust of former ice cream.
Now if they only sold the stuff in liter bottles...
Hell, my mom's low-end Vaio has compatibility problems with the preinstalled Windows! But that's mostly because Sony couldn't write a working WiFi driver if their lives depended on it (but insist that you use their driver instead of the chipset manufacturer's). Or implement Num-Lock properly.
You feel a lot less bad about paying 1000 Euros for a notebook after you've seen what 300 EUR notebooks are like.
You should also insist on cold-pressed baby oil. The other stuff is crud and could as well be made of seniors.
I assume they'll go with option 4: Ignore that anything happened. Maybe they'll play it down in the media. Either way they'll all act very surprised when someone manages to break the cards once they're out in the wild.
No, his words were pretty clear: No farming, no reproduction, no society. He demanded that the Discovery Channel somehow talk all of humanity into dying off.
The weird thing is that unlike most nutjobs he had some valid points. However, he then took them and ran straight off towards the most extreme conclusion he could find.
Speak for yourself. One day my plan to create human-tissue hybrids will succed and then I'll take over THE WOOOOORLD! MWAHAHAHAHA!
Well, either that ot I'll get a reality show on Discovery.
The enchantments in question all have "Enchanted app gets cumulative upkeep 1 MB" in their text box. Not worth it in my opinion.
Everyone in the home user OS market? Windows only reads Microsoft FSes; OS X only reads Apple FSes plus FAT32, NFS and CIFS. Linux has more compatiblity (not neccessarily part of the base distro) but is usually used via a non-commercial distro.
Sadly, none of the commercial OS makers cares about the fact that FAT32 is a horrible way of handling interoperability.
Plus, if the sattelite for some reason mistakes a functioning sattelite for spae debris (for example because of a problem with the distance tracking that leaves it unable to distinguish between "small and close" and "large and far away") the results could be very expensive.
I have heard about cases where families have a pickup truck for hauling stuff and a small car for normal driving. That doesn't mean they don't care about how much fuel their pickup uses; they just found that a Ford Fiesta isn't useful for hauling bulky items on a regular basis.
Unlikely. The appeal of pen-and-paper RPGs is the immense freedom the players have to do whatever they want, usually involving stuff not covered by the rules. Also, most groups have their own house rules. The only thing that would reliably work yould be a dumb display with the GM doing all the work. You can abstract out checks (unless houseruled) but everything else is a bit too volatile.
Hmm. Surface projecting on a Battletech playing field + knowledge of playing field topography + 'mech recognition (perhaps via small patterned labels on the 'mechs) + Battletech rules = realtime display of movement ranges, to-hit chances etc.
Or, more involved, use hexes with blank tops and project the terrain onto them so you can even use the optional rules for fires and cleaning out terrain.
The wrist thing is a wireless ESD armband.
The large thing is a touchscreen-driven digital notepad. It doesn't have storage capabilities but it will help you be more engineery by wiping itself unless you write your notes in RPN.
The small thing is a next-generation printer cartridge with built-in "retina" display, which not only enables it to show you how much ink it has left in realtime but also makes it more expensive by a full order of magnitude than the printer itself.
While "has buttons" is a bad criterion, it is true that the iPhone was not designed to be a portable console. This is evident both in the interface (the touchscreen/tilt sensor combination is not very well suited for precise input and control schemes involving more than three or four buttons) and in the fact that at launch Apple didn't allow third-party software, which would be fairly devastating to a console. Third-party software - and thus games - was entirely an afterthought.
The iPhone/iPod touch/iPad are not primarily intended to be portable consoles. They are, respectively, a smartphone, a PDA and a tablet. They happen to play games and they have accumulated a large library over time (enough to advertise as a feature) but they are no more consoles than the Palm V or the Nokia N900 are. I think that a comparison between portable consoles makes the most sense when all involved devices were designed and intended as portable consoles. For instance, a lot of iPhone buyers bought it as a smartphone and not for its gaming capabilities (although I do admit that the PS3 has a similar problem as some people buy it just as a Blu-ray player.).
Semantics aside, more relevant to the discussion is that the NDS had easily twice as many sales as the PSP. In fact, the measuring stick would be the original Game Boy series (Game Boy/Pocket/Color/Light). It's widely known as a raging success, having enjoyed good sales on virtually unchanged hardware for a full decade.
Using Nintendo's 2008 annual financial report as a source we see that in 2008 Nintendo has sold about 81 million Game Boy Advances and about 119 million classic Game Boys. Even if we assume that the classic Game Boy continued to get sales it's unlikely to be far above 120 million units today. So Nintendo has sold more DSes in six years than classic Game Boys in twelve years (assuming that all classic Game Boy sales stopped when the GBA was introduced in 2001). The PSP doesn't even measure up against the Game Boy Advance although it's newer and can still overtake it. It's obvious that the NDS fares tremendously better in the market than the PSP does.
Also of interest are the other figures: As of 2008, Nintendo sold 25 million Wiis, 22 million Gamecubes, 33 million N64s, 49 million SNESes and 62 million NESes. Even allowing for the Wii being new and the N64 and the GameCube being failures, this illustrates that stationary consoles don't sell as many units as portable ones. The markets seem to behave differently, thus a direct comparison between the respective sales numbers may be pointless.
Nah. DARPA has done extensive studies in the first X-COM game and has concluded that explosions are entirely two-dimensional. This new project shouldn't cost much anyway; DARPA reasons that all they need to do is take the turret off a Hovertank/Plasma and replace it with a bulletproof box for the soldiers to stand in, like the one on the Pope's car.
Of course, the first major speed bump of the project has been that for some reason all other agencies they've asked have been unwilling to provide any Elerium-115. Additionally, even though they've put 100 scientists in a laboratory they were told that the scientists wouldn't know what to do with a UFO power source even if they had one. The scientists promised to think really hard about it, though, as they appreciate earning a flat 50.000 Dollars per month each.
Does USB 3 finally have a controller? I mean a real one, not the "let's just offload half our work to the CPU" nonsense USB 1, 1.1 and 2 have. Yes, it's cheap but it's also a recipe for horrible throughput (see FireWire S400 being faster then USB 2.0) and puts an unneccessary burden on the CPU.
I'd like USB better if it wasn't implemented in such a half-assed way. The connectors are horrible (whoever thought that a symmetric-looking but really asymmetric connector was a good idea?), it's incapable of daisy-chaining without hubs, it's strictly host-peripheral and its reliance on the CPU degrades its own performance.
USB is a nice idea but sometimes I wish FireWire had made the cut instead. Apart from the fact that it can DMA wherever it wants it's essentially USB done right. Likewise, I hope that Light Peak makes its way to the market soon as it doesn't seem to share many of USB's shortcomings.
USB is great for HID. Everything else not so much.