The Apple video shows that you can scroll faster by moving your finger rapidly - guess what, you can do that with a normal scroll too, just by rapidly firing the scroller to either direction (the logitech software actually releases the tick for a bit so it works even better)
Maybe Logitech mice have special hardware to handle fast scrolling but most mice can't really handle very fast scrolling - you scroll just as far as with regular scroll speed; the additional revolutions of the wheel are swallowed.
Lets face it, the touch area is going to get dirty. Will it function the same way after that and can you clean it as easily?
Much easier than the scroll wheel you just smeared a combination of grease, mayonnaise and ice cream into. The Magic Mouse just needs to be wiped. Your mouse needs to be disassembled and if you're unlucky you need to get the stuff out of bearings in order to get the scroll wheel back into action.
However, Blu-Ray is also technologically superior to DVD, yet I still know plenty people that will most likely not get a Blu-Ray player/drive in the next five years. Why? DVD is adequate, HDTVs are expensive and on the storage side BD-R is both much too expensive and much too slow.
DVD and modern HDDs hit the sweet spot of "good enough". They're fast enough for most people, they're resilient enough for most people (granted, this is helped by the little long-term data we have on SSDs being inconsistent) and they're really cheap. SSDs are faster, lighter, quieter, possibly more resilient and take lesser power - but they're nowhere near the pricing sweet spot and that's enough to make people settle for HDDs.
It's all about priority. Most people are happy with the performance of their 7200 RPM drive so speed doesn't factor in. Weight and power drain appeals to netbook users but few want their netbook to go outside the 100-200 USD range just because of a storage option. Resilience is great for notebooks but again the high USD/GB figure means that storage is either small or very expensive (which is fine with those who don't need much space and unacceptable with those who do).
SSDs are getting there but like Blu-Ray they need to displace a technology that is already "good enough" for most users. SSDs' advantages are essentially "soft skills"; until they can become competitive in what many people are primarily looking after (cheap storage), they won't displace them.
The mistake all those people complaining about SSD complainers make is that they assume everyone has lots of money to spend on equipment. People on a budget go for what gives them the most bang for the buck. So far, many people take only storage size to contribute to the bang, therefore SSDs are nowhere near competitive for the budget buyer.
I'd assume that the United States have a survival rate close to zero. After all I'd assume that, from the time they have been founded until today, more people have died than there are alive today. In fact, I haven't heard of a single person that managed to survive permanently.
Oh, your link shows that you got your data about cancer survival rates. And it suddenly makes sense.
As for your speed ratings: [citation needed]. I find it curious that Japan and South Korea don't show up at all, both being known for their high-speed networks.
Because a psychatrist examined her and told them she's depressive? And, as he's treating her, most likely gives them periodic status updates?
Plus, "we've got a hunch you might be scamming us" is not a reason to immediately stop all payments. Neither is "you appeared to be happy at various points in time". The former is a reason to get a second opinion from another psychatrist. The latter should be told to the second psychatrist but not used directly as evidence.
No person without appropriate training should attempt to figure out whether a certain datum contradicts a prior diagnosis.
That's as if an IT department requests new servers and gets shot down by a manager because "the reports are still generated quickly so our servers are obviously fast enough". The reports being generated quickly might be an indicator that the servers are fast enough but it might also be because reports are not handled by the main servers at all so they're useless as a metric. An IT worker with knowledge of the network would know what the observation means; the manager doesn't.
However, most people focus only on the functions-to-number ratio (how many functions per device I get). The probem with that is that the functions-to-price ratio is ignored. While a cutting edge smartphone will do a lot of things for me, it will also carry a hideous price tag. One could argue that equivalents of today's 700 USD phone will be available for 70 USD in ten years but I doubt that - Bluetooth is a good example of how technology is used to enable price discrimination. A BT chipset and the appropriate licensing makes a phone only very slightly more expensive to manufacture, yet it's very rarely found in phones for less than 100 USD.
It's going to be like that with smartphones. In 10 years, a smartphone will still be five times as expensive as an average mobile phone. Not because it's so expensive to manufacture but because they can get away with it. And that means it's most likely still more expensive than just buying specialist devices for everything - especially if it's coupled to some kind of mandatory plan.
This might not mean much with people who don't have to worry about spending 500+ USD on a device but there are plenty of people who can't afford that luxury. If one's expendable income runs to 100 USD/month one simply can't buy a smartphone and thus won't replace much cheaper specialist devices with it.
Or, less likely, hyper-sensitive skin. If using a stainless steel backplate or applying nail polish won't work, applying body lotion to the affected area each day might.
Phone booths - Still in service in certain environments like on factory or freight terminal premises for intra-premise communication. Unlikely to go away.
Wristwatches - Extremely unlikely to go away. "Most people" still wear one and most likely will until someone comes up with a mobile phone small enough to always have a glance away without having to hold it.
Bedside alarm clocks - Possible to replace but they will still stick around because slamming your hand on your phone to activate the snooze function only works a couple times before your break the thing.
MP3 players - The iPond Shuffle suggests that mobile phones will have to get much smaller if they want to completely take over that segment. In fact, the Compact Flash based player I had aeons ago was much smaller and a fair deal cheaper than even a small MP3-capable mobile today.
Landline home phones - Because I want my 911 to go down if there's a thunderstorm. Or heavy snowfall. Or just about anything else that might interfere with the operation of the tower. (Before you comment that the telephone mast in front of your house could be knocked down as well, note that in more civilized areas such cables usually run underground.) Sounds just like a dream.
Compact digital cameras - Why use a 50 USD 5 Mpixel camera if I can use one with the same resolution for five times the price? Why use a 10 MPixel camera for 120 USD when I can pay twice that for half the resolution? Yeah, high-end mobile phones will have to become much cheaper if they want to displace compact digital cameras. Maybe for teenagers who want to take pictures of their latest bingeand are okay with blurry 1 MPixel shots but not for anyone who wants to take holiday pictures, do amaetur photography or create just about anything of any aesthetic value.
Netbooks - If they come up with a mobile phone with a 10" screen, maybe. Then again, no; nobody would buy that monster. As weird as it may sound, not everyone is content to use a platform with a miniscule screen at an equally miniscule resolution that is unable to run any of the applications they normally use.
Handheld game consoles - The NGage showed how well that works. The iPhone has more promise but still can't offer what regular portable consoles have to offer. Like a d-pad. Any game that doesn't rely on tilting for movement control (or has no need for movement control at all) feels extremely awakward on the iPhone and adding decent gaming controls is going to destroy its low profile. The "advantage" TFA cites (being able to connect to mobile networks) is no differentiating advantage either: The DSi does it, the PSP Go does it and the Pandora will do it.
Paper - Erm, no. Maybe they will take a bite out of print media (although I don't expect them to impact the book market nearly as much as eBook readers do) but they're hardly going to replace paper. Whether for quick notes or sketches, paper is still vastly superior to mobile phones and print books can be used in places where you wouldn't want to have your phone running all the time (or at all) like on a camping trip (you need to conserve battery charge) or in the bathtub (mobiles tend to take a lot more damage in hot, damp areas than paper does).
Thinking - Everything they attribute to mobile phones has been provided by ther technologies before; smartphones merely offer many of those things at once.
Most of what they said is nonsense and they forgot the most important one:
Money - Between the price of that shiny new high-end smartphone and the mandatory data plan, you notice that with a 40 USD wristwatch, a 20 USD alarm clock, a 50 USD MP3 player, a 30 USD landline phone, a 50 USD camera, a 150 USD netbook, a 150 USD handheld console and 200 USD worth of books, you still could've used phone booths for the next two years and paid less.
Either the GP was talking bollocks or what they saw were spoofed UA strings. The only way to run IE 6+ on OS X is through a VM. Or possibly Wine/Crossover, although I doubt you could get IE and Silverlight to work under Wine.
In which way is the iPod a bad music platform? I find the sound quality of my second-generaion iPod touch to be fairly good and, well, that's really all there is to a good PMP. Okay, that and playlists, which the iPod also does. There's the iTunes requirement but I've seen good arguments both for and against it and would count it as net neutral.
The Zune does WMA but that's just as much a fringe format as AAC is. I don't know if the Zune has higher quality DACs but, being that the iPod already fulfils the criteria for "good" (good sound quality, has playlists), I don't consider your statement to be true. Maybe the Zune HD has qualities that make you consider it superior to the iPod family (the screen being one component that gets a lot of praise) but those are rather tangential to the business of playing music.
Maybe you based them on an older model? Some of the first few iPod generations were known to contain low quality DACs.
Well, it makes sense. The college crowd gets offer like Back to School, which gives you a huge mail-in rebate on an iPod touch (when I got my 8GB one it was ca. 88%) if you buy a Mac. Getting what amounts to a full-featured PDA for thirty-five bucks is very attractive.
The iPod touch isn't the iPhone but it uses the same App Store. Therefore, B2S is relevant.
No other vendor makes Num-Lock keys as reliable as Sony's. In fact, Sony's Num-Lock keys are so reliable they randomly turn them off just to show you the key still works!
I know, it's not that much of a fault but I'm just too annoyed at Num-Lock enabling itself randomly on my mother's Vaio. Bites me every time I have to do tech support for her.
That's true but I'd expect live tests of the broadcast system to either be conducted at odd times (I'd expect few people to play at monday morning, 6AM) or unobtrusive (the game doesn't display the test warning but tells the server it did receive and process it; the company is liable for their game displaying actual warnings).
Given geolocation and assuming a sane implementation, all real warnings you receive would only be applicable to your area and most likely something you'd rather be warned about. Even if it's just a "severe thunderstorm" warning - thunderstorms have a bad habit of frying expensive electronic devices if you leave them running and I'd rather get killed by an instance boss than having my gaming rig reduced to a doorstop.
Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn't trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer.
Guess what: Chrome OS happens to use Chrome as a browser. Yes, we know it's surprising. We can hardly believe it ourself.
Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code.
A very large segment of home users need iTunes to sync with their iPod and iPhone,
Cloud app. We just send the USB packets over the internet.
play video games,
Cloud app. We just send the USB packets and the screen contents over the internet.
take photos off their cameras
See iTunes.
work from home
All apps you will ever user will be cloud apps. Period. You will use Google Docs and be happy with it. All hail the mighty might of cloud computing. The cloud is truth.
But what if we leveraged our core competencies to dynamically shift paradigms on a go-forward basis while perfoming a level five diagnostic on the main deflector?
That's why I have essentially given up on new games: Compelling or - god forbid! - complex gameplay went out of style; nowadays most games are all graphics, all the time. Occasionally you get games that tout their AI or physics simulation but what everyone seems to focus on is the graphics. As a result we get saddled with games like Bioshock that the Halo generation calls a very good and engaging game while the System Shock generation calls it a dumbed-down game stuck on easy mode.
They still make a lot of good games; they're just hard to find because the games everyone talks about, those with high test scores everywhere, are usually graphics-optimized AAA releases. I don't have the time to sift through them all and recommendations are usually useless. When I do find a good game it's usually because I heard about it by coincidence.
It's no wonder I don't need a top-of-the-line graphics card when I take two or three years to finally recognize a good modern game as being so.
Actually, I was most probably playing UFO: Enemy Unknown. I wouldn't have gone to an arcade because I think they have age restrictions there and I was definitely a minor in 1995.
Plus, it's pretty hard to argue specs with me, anyway. For me, an HD4650 is a really good card capable of delivering more than I an possibly want from it. The XBox 360 is a system completely unable to deliver anything I want from it. For instance, I'd rather play MW2 in 1280x1024 at low settings on my PC than in 1080p on a 360. Why? Because I think that gamepads are fundamentally unable to control first-person shooters. Yes, I've seen Halo 1, 2 and 3. They were horrible. Unless they add first-class mouse support I'm not going to like consoles for anything involving aiming. Perhaps if they went controller/lightgun.
It's all about whether the setup does what you want. If, like me, you can't stand shooters with stick controls, a 360 is no better than a Commodore 64 at playing modern FPSes. If, like me, you value gameplay over graphics, a 300 USD GPU is virtually indistinguishable from an 80 USD one. If, unlike me, you value graphics over all, you might be happier with a console.
I explicitly said in my post "unless you want to play on 1080p". Because I am aware that a cheap GPU won't play the latest and greatest on very high resolutions. But that's not necessarily what everyone wants. I know I'm in a minority with my "graphics aren't the sole important thing about a game" rhethoric but there are people who are perfectly happy to just play the damn game even if they don't get to push the engine to its limits.
I'm a PC gamer. I will most likely remain one, handhelds excepted (BTW, the NDS is the only console with decent FPS controls I know of). Yes, I'm apparently of a dying breed, but the games industry has stopped catering to me anyway.
Be more subtle. Write your JavaScript for standards-compliant browsers and use conditional comments to have IE load a static version of the site. Upon entering the site, the user is presented with an unobtrusive info box notifying them that due to the too high cost of supporting both standards compliant browsers and Internet Explorer, IE users get a simpler but completely functioning version of the website.
Don't insult the user, politely inform them that their browser is making it harder and (due to additional work) more expensive to develop good websites and it's recommended (but not ordered!) that they consider one of the free alternatives.
Don't use phrases like "terrible, non-standards-compliant browser"; those read like fanboy speak. Let's see if I can come up with a decent rant...
<div style="border: 2px solid black; background: #ffffdd" id="iesucks">
<a href="#" onclick="document.getElementById('iesucks').style.display = 'none'" style="float: right; display: inline-block; border: 1px outset; background: #cccccc">X</a>
<b>Some features of this website have been disabled.</b>
<p>You are using Internet Explorer (IE). IE does not follow established internet standards as well as other web browsers, requiring web developers to spend additional effort to specially make sites IE-compatible. This raises the cost of creating good websites and thus lowers the quality of the World Wide Web in general.</p>
<p>Due to the cost of adding special IE support being too high, we have disabled some convenience features of our website for IE users. Don't worry; you can still do everything, it just won't be as pretty.</p>
<p>If you want to make web developers' lifes easier, please consider switching to a different browser. There are various free alternatives for you to choose from, all of which follow the web standards much more closely than Internet Explorer. We recommend <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/" onclick="window.open('http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/', '_blank'); return false;">Mozilla Firefox</a>, although <a href="http://www.google.com/chrome" onclick="window.open('http://www.google.com/chrome', '_blank'); return false;">Google Chrome</a> and <a href="http://www.opera.com/" onclick="window.open('http://www.opera.com/', '_blank'); return false;">Opera</a> are worth a look, as well.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/" onclick="window.open('http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/', '_blank'); return false;">Get Firefox</a> <a href="#" onclick="document.getElementById('iesucks').style.display = 'none'">Continue using Internet Explorer</a></p>
</div>
This informs people about why not being standards-compliant is terrible and what kind of standards you're talking about. It encourages them to try out Firefox without bossing them around.
If you choose to deploy my rant, you should put all those style attributes into a proper stylesheet and play a bit with the formatting of those last two links. A clean messsage deserves clean code. Also, make sure not to show the box more than once per visitor per day in order no keep obtrusiveness to a minimum.
Be polite, unobtrusive and informative instead of zealous. You wouldn't accept words of wisdom from someone with foam on their mouth. Don't expect your visitors to do so. Deliver the facts, calmly make your point and only suggest to them what you'd like them to do.
Seconded. Admittedly, the last Photoshop I've worked with was CS3 on OS X but unless Adobe has completely restructured the entire UI I'd still maintain that GIMP is far more intuitive than Photoshop. Yes, the GIMP UI takes some thime getting used to but Photoshop's crams dozens of options, tools and preferences down your throat with few pointers as to which to use.
Photoshop is a professional graphics editing program. It's the graphics equivalent of EMACS, Visual Studio or AutoCAD. Casual users are not expected to immediately understand it because casual users are in no way the target audience. The only reason Photoshop is considered normal is because it's been pirated to hell and back and everyone somehow assumes that you need effect layers in RGB16 in order to do any graphics editing at all.
The GIMP is in some ways trying to do similar things to Photoshop but it's a lot more basic and it shows. It's much harder to get lost in the GIMP's user interface because it doesn't expose as much advanced functionality to the user. In fact, most things I hear about the GIMP being unintuitive boil down to "Photoshop does it differently" and "GIMP 0.5 had this weird behavior".
Well, it's his own fault. He should've posted about something unoffensive like killing people for fun and then defecating on their cooling bodies. But no, he had to go on and talk about reproduction! That kind of talk corrupts little children (everyone below the age of 21) into thinking thta sex is somehow acceptable!
Yeah, it's a very slight case of misuse of school property amplified by the aversion to sex the Americans have. Makes one wonder is something traumatic happened in America's past... Maybe the Brits threw dildos at them during the Revolutionary War or something? Maybe crude remarks by the English king?
"I, the king of England (insert other titles here), hereby declare that I still consider the American colonies my personal property. And my bitch, so bend over and take my epic schlong, an accurate model of which will be delivered with this letter so you can train your soon-to-be-devastated sphincters. Washington, your ass is mine."
Well, longbows were used as area-denial weapons: Take a lot of longbow archers and have them pelt the area the enemy army is traveling through; this will get a lot of them (the enemies, not the archers) dead before they come into melee range. Therefore it's not far off to assume that an archers-vs.-noble fight involves a lot of archers.
I could imagie that a hundred archers firing nonstop at a single heavily armored target will have a decent chance of hitting an unprotected area - many small chances can make a large one.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe Logitech mice have special hardware to handle fast scrolling but most mice can't really handle very fast scrolling - you scroll just as far as with regular scroll speed; the additional revolutions of the wheel are swallowed.
Much easier than the scroll wheel you just smeared a combination of grease, mayonnaise and ice cream into. The Magic Mouse just needs to be wiped. Your mouse needs to be disassembled and if you're unlucky you need to get the stuff out of bearings in order to get the scroll wheel back into action.
Don't put both in the same computer, though. Otherwise you'll be swamped with "THERE IS ANOTHER DRIVE" messages.
They'll actually just cram an HDD in there, add "Power" to the name and sell the vibrations as a feature.
However, Blu-Ray is also technologically superior to DVD, yet I still know plenty people that will most likely not get a Blu-Ray player/drive in the next five years. Why? DVD is adequate, HDTVs are expensive and on the storage side BD-R is both much too expensive and much too slow.
DVD and modern HDDs hit the sweet spot of "good enough". They're fast enough for most people, they're resilient enough for most people (granted, this is helped by the little long-term data we have on SSDs being inconsistent) and they're really cheap. SSDs are faster, lighter, quieter, possibly more resilient and take lesser power - but they're nowhere near the pricing sweet spot and that's enough to make people settle for HDDs.
It's all about priority. Most people are happy with the performance of their 7200 RPM drive so speed doesn't factor in. Weight and power drain appeals to netbook users but few want their netbook to go outside the 100-200 USD range just because of a storage option. Resilience is great for notebooks but again the high USD/GB figure means that storage is either small or very expensive (which is fine with those who don't need much space and unacceptable with those who do).
SSDs are getting there but like Blu-Ray they need to displace a technology that is already "good enough" for most users. SSDs' advantages are essentially "soft skills"; until they can become competitive in what many people are primarily looking after (cheap storage), they won't displace them.
The mistake all those people complaining about SSD complainers make is that they assume everyone has lots of money to spend on equipment. People on a budget go for what gives them the most bang for the buck. So far, many people take only storage size to contribute to the bang, therefore SSDs are nowhere near competitive for the budget buyer.
I'd assume that the United States have a survival rate close to zero. After all I'd assume that, from the time they have been founded until today, more people have died than there are alive today. In fact, I haven't heard of a single person that managed to survive permanently.
Oh, your link shows that you got your data about cancer survival rates. And it suddenly makes sense.
As for your speed ratings: [citation needed]. I find it curious that Japan and South Korea don't show up at all, both being known for their high-speed networks.
Because a psychatrist examined her and told them she's depressive? And, as he's treating her, most likely gives them periodic status updates?
Plus, "we've got a hunch you might be scamming us" is not a reason to immediately stop all payments. Neither is "you appeared to be happy at various points in time". The former is a reason to get a second opinion from another psychatrist. The latter should be told to the second psychatrist but not used directly as evidence.
No person without appropriate training should attempt to figure out whether a certain datum contradicts a prior diagnosis.
That's as if an IT department requests new servers and gets shot down by a manager because "the reports are still generated quickly so our servers are obviously fast enough". The reports being generated quickly might be an indicator that the servers are fast enough but it might also be because reports are not handled by the main servers at all so they're useless as a metric. An IT worker with knowledge of the network would know what the observation means; the manager doesn't.
However, most people focus only on the functions-to-number ratio (how many functions per device I get). The probem with that is that the functions-to-price ratio is ignored. While a cutting edge smartphone will do a lot of things for me, it will also carry a hideous price tag. One could argue that equivalents of today's 700 USD phone will be available for 70 USD in ten years but I doubt that - Bluetooth is a good example of how technology is used to enable price discrimination. A BT chipset and the appropriate licensing makes a phone only very slightly more expensive to manufacture, yet it's very rarely found in phones for less than 100 USD.
It's going to be like that with smartphones. In 10 years, a smartphone will still be five times as expensive as an average mobile phone. Not because it's so expensive to manufacture but because they can get away with it. And that means it's most likely still more expensive than just buying specialist devices for everything - especially if it's coupled to some kind of mandatory plan.
This might not mean much with people who don't have to worry about spending 500+ USD on a device but there are plenty of people who can't afford that luxury. If one's expendable income runs to 100 USD/month one simply can't buy a smartphone and thus won't replace much cheaper specialist devices with it.
Or, less likely, hyper-sensitive skin. If using a stainless steel backplate or applying nail polish won't work, applying body lotion to the affected area each day might.
Phone booths - Still in service in certain environments like on factory or freight terminal premises for intra-premise communication. Unlikely to go away.
Wristwatches - Extremely unlikely to go away. "Most people" still wear one and most likely will until someone comes up with a mobile phone small enough to always have a glance away without having to hold it.
Bedside alarm clocks - Possible to replace but they will still stick around because slamming your hand on your phone to activate the snooze function only works a couple times before your break the thing.
MP3 players - The iPond Shuffle suggests that mobile phones will have to get much smaller if they want to completely take over that segment. In fact, the Compact Flash based player I had aeons ago was much smaller and a fair deal cheaper than even a small MP3-capable mobile today.
Landline home phones - Because I want my 911 to go down if there's a thunderstorm. Or heavy snowfall. Or just about anything else that might interfere with the operation of the tower. (Before you comment that the telephone mast in front of your house could be knocked down as well, note that in more civilized areas such cables usually run underground.) Sounds just like a dream.
Compact digital cameras - Why use a 50 USD 5 Mpixel camera if I can use one with the same resolution for five times the price? Why use a 10 MPixel camera for 120 USD when I can pay twice that for half the resolution? Yeah, high-end mobile phones will have to become much cheaper if they want to displace compact digital cameras. Maybe for teenagers who want to take pictures of their latest bingeand are okay with blurry 1 MPixel shots but not for anyone who wants to take holiday pictures, do amaetur photography or create just about anything of any aesthetic value.
Netbooks - If they come up with a mobile phone with a 10" screen, maybe. Then again, no; nobody would buy that monster. As weird as it may sound, not everyone is content to use a platform with a miniscule screen at an equally miniscule resolution that is unable to run any of the applications they normally use.
Handheld game consoles - The NGage showed how well that works. The iPhone has more promise but still can't offer what regular portable consoles have to offer. Like a d-pad. Any game that doesn't rely on tilting for movement control (or has no need for movement control at all) feels extremely awakward on the iPhone and adding decent gaming controls is going to destroy its low profile. The "advantage" TFA cites (being able to connect to mobile networks) is no differentiating advantage either: The DSi does it, the PSP Go does it and the Pandora will do it.
Paper - Erm, no. Maybe they will take a bite out of print media (although I don't expect them to impact the book market nearly as much as eBook readers do) but they're hardly going to replace paper. Whether for quick notes or sketches, paper is still vastly superior to mobile phones and print books can be used in places where you wouldn't want to have your phone running all the time (or at all) like on a camping trip (you need to conserve battery charge) or in the bathtub (mobiles tend to take a lot more damage in hot, damp areas than paper does).
Thinking - Everything they attribute to mobile phones has been provided by ther technologies before; smartphones merely offer many of those things at once.
Most of what they said is nonsense and they forgot the most important one:
Money - Between the price of that shiny new high-end smartphone and the mandatory data plan, you notice that with a 40 USD wristwatch, a 20 USD alarm clock, a 50 USD MP3 player, a 30 USD landline phone, a 50 USD camera, a 150 USD netbook, a 150 USD handheld console and 200 USD worth of books, you still could've used phone booths for the next two years and paid less.
Either the GP was talking bollocks or what they saw were spoofed UA strings. The only way to run IE 6+ on OS X is through a VM. Or possibly Wine/Crossover, although I doubt you could get IE and Silverlight to work under Wine.
In which way is the iPod a bad music platform? I find the sound quality of my second-generaion iPod touch to be fairly good and, well, that's really all there is to a good PMP. Okay, that and playlists, which the iPod also does. There's the iTunes requirement but I've seen good arguments both for and against it and would count it as net neutral.
The Zune does WMA but that's just as much a fringe format as AAC is. I don't know if the Zune has higher quality DACs but, being that the iPod already fulfils the criteria for "good" (good sound quality, has playlists), I don't consider your statement to be true. Maybe the Zune HD has qualities that make you consider it superior to the iPod family (the screen being one component that gets a lot of praise) but those are rather tangential to the business of playing music.
Maybe you based them on an older model? Some of the first few iPod generations were known to contain low quality DACs.
Well, it makes sense. The college crowd gets offer like Back to School, which gives you a huge mail-in rebate on an iPod touch (when I got my 8GB one it was ca. 88%) if you buy a Mac. Getting what amounts to a full-featured PDA for thirty-five bucks is very attractive.
The iPod touch isn't the iPhone but it uses the same App Store. Therefore, B2S is relevant.
No other vendor makes Num-Lock keys as reliable as Sony's. In fact, Sony's Num-Lock keys are so reliable they randomly turn them off just to show you the key still works!
I know, it's not that much of a fault but I'm just too annoyed at Num-Lock enabling itself randomly on my mother's Vaio. Bites me every time I have to do tech support for her.
That's true but I'd expect live tests of the broadcast system to either be conducted at odd times (I'd expect few people to play at monday morning, 6AM) or unobtrusive (the game doesn't display the test warning but tells the server it did receive and process it; the company is liable for their game displaying actual warnings).
Given geolocation and assuming a sane implementation, all real warnings you receive would only be applicable to your area and most likely something you'd rather be warned about. Even if it's just a "severe thunderstorm" warning - thunderstorms have a bad habit of frying expensive electronic devices if you leave them running and I'd rather get killed by an instance boss than having my gaming rig reduced to a doorstop.
I'd assume that the game automatically pauses when a broadcast is made, requiring you to unpause afterwards.
Guess what: Chrome OS happens to use Chrome as a browser. Yes, we know it's surprising. We can hardly believe it ourself.
Trusted Computing rocks!
Cloud app. We just send the USB packets over the internet.
Cloud app. We just send the USB packets and the screen contents over the internet.
take photos off their cameras
See iTunes.
All apps you will ever user will be cloud apps. Period. You will use Google Docs and be happy with it. All hail the mighty might of cloud computing. The cloud is truth.
But what if we leveraged our core competencies to dynamically shift paradigms on a go-forward basis while perfoming a level five diagnostic on the main deflector?
That's why I have essentially given up on new games: Compelling or - god forbid! - complex gameplay went out of style; nowadays most games are all graphics, all the time. Occasionally you get games that tout their AI or physics simulation but what everyone seems to focus on is the graphics. As a result we get saddled with games like Bioshock that the Halo generation calls a very good and engaging game while the System Shock generation calls it a dumbed-down game stuck on easy mode.
They still make a lot of good games; they're just hard to find because the games everyone talks about, those with high test scores everywhere, are usually graphics-optimized AAA releases. I don't have the time to sift through them all and recommendations are usually useless. When I do find a good game it's usually because I heard about it by coincidence.
It's no wonder I don't need a top-of-the-line graphics card when I take two or three years to finally recognize a good modern game as being so.
Actually, I was most probably playing UFO: Enemy Unknown. I wouldn't have gone to an arcade because I think they have age restrictions there and I was definitely a minor in 1995.
Plus, it's pretty hard to argue specs with me, anyway. For me, an HD4650 is a really good card capable of delivering more than I an possibly want from it. The XBox 360 is a system completely unable to deliver anything I want from it. For instance, I'd rather play MW2 in 1280x1024 at low settings on my PC than in 1080p on a 360. Why? Because I think that gamepads are fundamentally unable to control first-person shooters. Yes, I've seen Halo 1, 2 and 3. They were horrible. Unless they add first-class mouse support I'm not going to like consoles for anything involving aiming. Perhaps if they went controller/lightgun.
It's all about whether the setup does what you want. If, like me, you can't stand shooters with stick controls, a 360 is no better than a Commodore 64 at playing modern FPSes. If, like me, you value gameplay over graphics, a 300 USD GPU is virtually indistinguishable from an 80 USD one. If, unlike me, you value graphics over all, you might be happier with a console.
I explicitly said in my post "unless you want to play on 1080p". Because I am aware that a cheap GPU won't play the latest and greatest on very high resolutions. But that's not necessarily what everyone wants. I know I'm in a minority with my "graphics aren't the sole important thing about a game" rhethoric but there are people who are perfectly happy to just play the damn game even if they don't get to push the engine to its limits.
I'm a PC gamer. I will most likely remain one, handhelds excepted (BTW, the NDS is the only console with decent FPS controls I know of). Yes, I'm apparently of a dying breed, but the games industry has stopped catering to me anyway.
Be more subtle. Write your JavaScript for standards-compliant browsers and use conditional comments to have IE load a static version of the site. Upon entering the site, the user is presented with an unobtrusive info box notifying them that due to the too high cost of supporting both standards compliant browsers and Internet Explorer, IE users get a simpler but completely functioning version of the website.
Don't insult the user, politely inform them that their browser is making it harder and (due to additional work) more expensive to develop good websites and it's recommended (but not ordered!) that they consider one of the free alternatives.
Don't use phrases like "terrible, non-standards-compliant browser"; those read like fanboy speak. Let's see if I can come up with a decent rant...
<div style="border: 2px solid black; background: #ffffdd" id="iesucks">
<a href="#" onclick="document.getElementById('iesucks').style.display = 'none'" style="float: right; display: inline-block; border: 1px outset; background: #cccccc">X</a>
<b>Some features of this website have been disabled.</b>
<p>You are using Internet Explorer (IE). IE does not follow established internet standards as well as other web browsers, requiring web developers to spend additional effort to specially make sites IE-compatible. This raises the cost of creating good websites and thus lowers the quality of the World Wide Web in general.</p>
<p>Due to the cost of adding special IE support being too high, we have disabled some convenience features of our website for IE users. Don't worry; you can still do everything, it just won't be as pretty.</p>
<p>If you want to make web developers' lifes easier, please consider switching to a different browser. There are various free alternatives for you to choose from, all of which follow the web standards much more closely than Internet Explorer. We recommend <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/" onclick="window.open('http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/', '_blank'); return false;">Mozilla Firefox</a>, although <a href="http://www.google.com/chrome" onclick="window.open('http://www.google.com/chrome', '_blank'); return false;">Google Chrome</a> and <a href="http://www.opera.com/" onclick="window.open('http://www.opera.com/', '_blank'); return false;">Opera</a> are worth a look, as well.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/" onclick="window.open('http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/', '_blank'); return false;">Get Firefox</a> <a href="#" onclick="document.getElementById('iesucks').style.display = 'none'">Continue using Internet Explorer</a></p>
</div>
This informs people about why not being standards-compliant is terrible and what kind of standards you're talking about. It encourages them to try out Firefox without bossing them around.
If you choose to deploy my rant, you should put all those style attributes into a proper stylesheet and play a bit with the formatting of those last two links. A clean messsage deserves clean code. Also, make sure not to show the box more than once per visitor per day in order no keep obtrusiveness to a minimum.
Be polite, unobtrusive and informative instead of zealous. You wouldn't accept words of wisdom from someone with foam on their mouth. Don't expect your visitors to do so. Deliver the facts, calmly make your point and only suggest to them what you'd like them to do.
Seconded. Admittedly, the last Photoshop I've worked with was CS3 on OS X but unless Adobe has completely restructured the entire UI I'd still maintain that GIMP is far more intuitive than Photoshop. Yes, the GIMP UI takes some thime getting used to but Photoshop's crams dozens of options, tools and preferences down your throat with few pointers as to which to use.
Photoshop is a professional graphics editing program. It's the graphics equivalent of EMACS, Visual Studio or AutoCAD. Casual users are not expected to immediately understand it because casual users are in no way the target audience. The only reason Photoshop is considered normal is because it's been pirated to hell and back and everyone somehow assumes that you need effect layers in RGB16 in order to do any graphics editing at all.
The GIMP is in some ways trying to do similar things to Photoshop but it's a lot more basic and it shows. It's much harder to get lost in the GIMP's user interface because it doesn't expose as much advanced functionality to the user. In fact, most things I hear about the GIMP being unintuitive boil down to "Photoshop does it differently" and "GIMP 0.5 had this weird behavior".
It includes an organ conceivably used during reproduction. That makes it an evil somewhere between "eating babies" and "global thermonuclear war".
Well, it's his own fault. He should've posted about something unoffensive like killing people for fun and then defecating on their cooling bodies. But no, he had to go on and talk about reproduction! That kind of talk corrupts little children (everyone below the age of 21) into thinking thta sex is somehow acceptable!
Yeah, it's a very slight case of misuse of school property amplified by the aversion to sex the Americans have. Makes one wonder is something traumatic happened in America's past... Maybe the Brits threw dildos at them during the Revolutionary War or something? Maybe crude remarks by the English king?
"I, the king of England (insert other titles here), hereby declare that I still consider the American colonies my personal property. And my bitch, so bend over and take my epic schlong, an accurate model of which will be delivered with this letter so you can train your soon-to-be-devastated sphincters. Washington, your ass is mine."
Well, longbows were used as area-denial weapons: Take a lot of longbow archers and have them pelt the area the enemy army is traveling through; this will get a lot of them (the enemies, not the archers) dead before they come into melee range. Therefore it's not far off to assume that an archers-vs.-noble fight involves a lot of archers.
I could imagie that a hundred archers firing nonstop at a single heavily armored target will have a decent chance of hitting an unprotected area - many small chances can make a large one.