You could have it in a bag and run into someone at the store, library, subway, airport... heck, even out on the street. When was the last time you thought twice about someone bumping into you accidentally?
When you land, you'll have a small armada of armed officers waiting to clobber the perp, too. This is a good situation because these crazies don't usually just wake up one day and independently decide to do it... they are part of a system, which can be worked against by getting intelligence from captive agents. I'm betting that we'd see a lot fewer attempts if attempts were so much better known to be futile.
You gotta watch out for those weaponized garden rakes. Especially the plastic ones. The thwack noise they make could potentially frighten small animals!
It's true. I use Photoshop occasionally and I know how large uncompressed image data can be. I'm thinking that the "Undo everything I did in this whole entire session" button (as I mentioned) is a different idea than unlimited Undo steps though. It's more like the Revert command you see in some apps. Checkpointing when you start your session is probably useful for many applications.
The idea isn't necessarily a one-size-fits-all. In Photoshop your work can be so complex and subjective that you need a ton of checkpoints (aka saving the document) to rewind your work a few minutes/hours back during an all-day session. But now we're talking about version control which is kind of a different subject and could also be handled differently than it is currently.
Well the point was more like this... You don't need to 'save' it explicitly, because it stays in the same state until you do something different to it. You can't go back in time with it, though, which is why a Revert function gives a computer an advantage.
Those scanner-whiteboards are pretty cool. I've seen them in another office where I work. I've had the privilege of using Smartboards as well. It was definitely a step forward for technology to be able to sync whiteboards across the country during a conference call, for sure.
As one designer I follow thinks, we need to get rid of the idea of "Save" altogether, and just have some sort of "Undo everything I did in this whole entire session" button. Saving is not a concept that people without computers are familiar with, so it's an idea that was invented FOR computers, and it's becoming increasingly unnecessary. It's not as scary as you think after you get used to it. Objects IRL like a whiteboard/todo list/grocery list on your fridge don't need to be saved. Construction workers don't "save" a building while they're working. Your changes are effective as soon as you make them. Look at GDocs, you don't save there, it just makes changes right away. And how many times have people lost work because the program crashed and they didn't save? Did you know people are still turning off Autosave because of some voodoo mythology that it might crash the program?
Now. Come on now, you really want to go there? "Just works"? If you want to spend all day researching why libfoo-4.2.1-5r3.1.so isn't good enough for suparbar-3.6.1.35-r5.3-custom, that's cool, I'll be over here getting work done.
The software repository you seek is called "just about every store" and "most of the Internet". It takes about an hour to install everything you really need to get productive on Windows, including the updates. Maybe more if you need Cygwin for some reason, because its installer downloads serially from one site. (Ugh.)
But if we're going for hyperbole, then let me tell you a story of a previous Linux nightmare I lived... It takes like a week of configuring and compiling to get Gentoo running to the point where you can log in and get a desktop environment. Add another day if you want your wireless adapter to work (whoops, that particular kernel version doesn't work with the driver after all and none of the included modules are compatible!). Add another day if you want to enable your video card for gaming. Forget about games, that'll take all day for each one. Then it takes half a day to compile Firefox just so you can have a browser so you can do something while you wait for other things to be done... but wait, if you want features like antialiasing and stuff, you have to reconfigure and recompile! Gotta do it every time they release an update! But what about productivity again? I nuked a motherboard once when a fan quit while it was doing a 3-day compile of OpenOffice. Yeah, it took 3 days to install an Office clone from their repository. By the way, that clone turned out to be slow and buggy, didn't work right with some of my documents, and didn't have any of the fonts everyone else uses. Fonts that weren't in their repository. Fonts that I couldn't get from the manufacturer except by a script someone wrote to essentially steal them. So I wanted to make a PDF so other people could see my documents the way I saw them, ugly Linux fonts and all. That software took a day to compile, and it still didn't pull in all the dependencies from the repository. I had to dig online to find all the particular dot-dot-dash-dot-dot-revision versions that were compatible with each other, and you know what? Screw it, Office with CutePDF doesn't take this much hassle. Half an hour clicking Next five times and watching two installers' progress bars on Windows and it "just works" with PDF output, the right fonts, scripting and everything. Reminds me slightly of the good old days of Debian where "a chicken could install it" except I don't have to hunt down broken dependencies and figure out why that one package is blocked and the other one won't install without pulling in a whole new desktop environment.
Yeah, I tried it on platforms with precompiled binaries. It still took a couple days to get it running with versions of everything that played nice together. And what did I get after those couple days? Occasional keyboard latency. Laggy, flickering mouse pointer. Stuttering MP3 playback when I scrolled in a web browser. Screen refreshing at a glacial pace sometimes for no reason. Random hitches and freezes. Huge temperature spikes. Poorly behaved Flash. Couldn't watch video full screen. No antialiasing in XY apps, ugly antialiasing in Z app. Nothing was smooth. C'mon, Linux should be better than this. Back when I used it as a command-line-only OS, it was. All the searches I perform tell me that I *could* get it working better, but I'll have to tweak endlessly and recompile various pieces of everything with new configurations. Yeah, changing timer frequencies, installing 'tainted' driver binaries, recompiling Firefox with support for etc etc, should I really have to do this?
Metro UI? Meet Unity. I've used both. Bleh, I'll take Metro, it's far less buggy. Things do what they're supposed to when I click them, they stay put, and it's fairly obvious what will happen when I don't know what something does. At least I only have to interact with that infrequ
This guy is a little behind with his prediction, since it's already happening. I remember seeing those predatory lenders outside college campuses with their "Sign up for our credit card, get a free mp3 player" booths *at least* ten years ago. Car dealers have been giving out iPhones and such as promo deals for years. Some banks have advertised free stuff like that to my snail mail. Sign up for a 2-year phone contract, you get a ~$450 subsidy towards a phone. Right now in September 2012, you can get an iPhone 4 or lower-end Android / WinMo free. It's a giveaway to entice you into purchasing a service.
We put a man on the moon, and I still get tangled in my phone cord! Gosh! (What does that have to do with the issue?)
People go to jail for traffic misdemeanors and worse. There's little to no punishment for losing a highly radioactive source. These things have to be reported and monitored, and the subsequent search for the object consumes tons of taxpayers' money. If the government represents the people's collective wealth, and the people don't want their money wasted, then shouldn't the people say hey, penalize these guys for wasting our money?
Wait. Who's saying that "the loss of radioactive rods occurs from time to time" in such a nonchalant way, like they're trying to convince the readers that it's no big deal? It's a big deal. You don't just lose stuff like that.. they're transported in large, heavy packages!
I have a friend who dropped her iPhone off the kitchen counter and that impact shattered the glass. She's done this twice, once with an iPhone 4 and once with an iPhone 4S. I think I'll take my chances with a better-constructed device.
In other words, playing 480p Wii content over HDMI will still look nicer.
A digital signal on a digital panel is going to be measurably sharper. Nicer is subjective, though. Cheaper 7-bit-per-channel panels don't look nicer to me, hence I still have a CRT since large digital panels with truer color reproduction are still rather expensive. A 24" with 99+% sRGB is still $400 or more.
I don't want my Wii content up-scaled so much as presented to my TV with larger square pixels. No idea if Wii U will output 1080p all the time such that 480p Wii content is scaled to 960p with black bars or if it switches display modes to 480p and leaves the rest up to the TV.
That would be really cool. I'd be happy with that.
HDMI 1.3 has more than the NTSC color range in its gamut. Not sure if deep color will be used by Wii U, but certainly wouldn't be for existing Wii games. There's also issues with saturation levels and overall brightness in the NTSC spec (enforced to prevent phosphor bleed) that affect component but don't affect HDMI.
HDMI can pass signals like that, but whether you get it depends on the whole chain: what the video adapter is given to output, whether the video adapter can output it, whether any intermediate devices like receivers will pass it through, and whether your display can display it. Games are probably (reasonable assumption alert) going to be coded with one code path, rather than multiple GFX engine code paths and texture sets to support larger color gamuts. It gets really expensive to have someone take the time and do color-correction for a full texture set. Indie games might make it happen first, and I'll be happy to see it. Usually you wind up with Y'CbCr color (equivalent to YPbPr which is what component video uses), and HDTV's color space specs are in fact based on modern phosphor characteristics. They are truly having a lot of trouble providing affordable digital panels that can even come close to the color reproduction of phosphor-based screens, so staying under that limit is still necessary to avoid color blowout issues on cheap displays. Personally I wish xvYCC was more prevalent, but Blu-ray doesn't even allow it. I know the PS3 can do it and lots of higher-end video cards can do it too but I've never seen it demonstrated.
What you're saying, probably, is that you can't tell the difference between VGA (roughly equivalent to component, if not better) or DVI/HDMI on a digital flat panel. That's fine for you, but not for me. Eye fatigue from trying to refocus the slight blur of the VGA signal is gone with a digital connection for me. And again, black levels are an issue with analog sources.
Hang on, that's not what I said at all, and I resent the assumption. Why assume things like that? My eyes are plenty good enough to see the difference when the system is capable of reproducing it. My CRT is not due to various factors explained below. What I'm saying is that upscaling a non-native resolution to the panel's native resolution still isn't as sharp as it ought to be on a flat panel. I think we could agree on that.
Analog signals are never as clear as a digital signal, obviously, since you can only approximate a square wave (hard edge) and hardware capable of better approximations cost more money than a consumer's going to pay. When an analog signal's loss is equal to or less than the loss inherent to the analog CRT, you'll never notice anything related to the analog signal quality because the CRT's loss is greater - which is probably the case in my system. Hooking up a digital panel to a digital signal is the ideal situation because it has that digital nature, discrete pixels that don't bleed into each other. (Inter-pixel light bleed is a different story but mostly negligible for this discussion since CRTs have the same problem.) Hooking up a digital panel with poor analog sampling, IE a consumer grade TV/monitor, to an analog signal will immediately look blurry compared to what you'd get with a decent CRT. It will still look blurry until you spend thousands of dollars on the scaling equipment, which nobody in their right mind is going to do unless they are doing professional video archiving or restoration or feed-switching work. They have room to grow with video ADCs in consumer/prosumer level equipment but nobody's going to do it because of the poor cost/benefit ratio. So... you're always going to see it...
Black levels are defined by the specs, so it's up to you to calibrate the output device using the input source. Blu-ray, DVD, broadcast DTV (see Rec.709) etc have a digital range of 16-235 per channel to accommodate filter overshoots and such, so you never get true black or true white in the first place. Computer video devices, digital and analog, have no such restrictions. Calibrate your screen to a computer, and you'll have black level complaints when you hook up a blu-ray player or cable box. Calibrate it to the other system, and you'll have the opposing complaint.
Well, hopefully someone finds some of this information useful.
Is there even an official HDMI cable for the Wii? I haven't seen one. That being said, I only observed 'dot crawl' with composite and to a lesser extent with S-Video. Component cables seem to eliminate the issue entirely on my 1080i CRT TV and it looks decent to me. Upscaling is still pretty bad on flat panels, but they don't have much of a reason to make that a strong selling point, do they? Maybe the problem needs to be addressed from both ends instead of exclusively blaming one or the other.
I just wanted to play Raving Rabbids. Yeah, imagine my embarrassment when I had to tell my girlfriend's family, who gave not-financially-well-off me the gift card for Christmas, that I'd bought a game I couldn't play and basically their money was wasted. Telling her was bad enough. I couldn't even return the game since it was already open. Ubisoft wouldn't help, the store wouldn't help. So they don't get any more of my money and I'm happy to tell the story.
Yup, their DRM makes their games unplayable on my computer. Standard Windows PC with the only optical drive being a DVD burner. You know, one of the standard choices available on most PCs. Their customer support people got angry that I kept pressing the issue and told me to read the box more carefully next time I buy a game... Guess what, I will do that: I will skip anything that says Ubisoft on the box. It didn't say anything about not working if a burner was present.
That's a really interesting thing to say. It's hugely abstract. So much so that at first, my reaction was akin to "check out this guy slashdottin' from the looney bin" but upon further reflection, it gets really deep and is actually quite intelligent. Well done.
Also, you'll never be able to verify that your algorithm is working by manually processing sample inputs. That's a tremendously useful ability to have. See the following thought process:
>> "See if I give it A, it should give B, but instead it gives C"
>> "Let me try it by hand"
>> "My algorithm is wrong" or "My implementation of the algorithm is wrong" or "I'm using the wrong algorithm to solve this problem" (knowing the difference saves you notable amounts of time)
>> "I now have an understanding of the actual problem and can solve it"
Having larger than average hands myself, I definitely find that the larger phones fit better in my hands. I'm with you on that one.
I haven't really seen anything powerful in a small-person-friendly factor. The size-to-power ratio seems to decrease at an unfair rate. That, I think, is the general gripe reflected by the post. Maybe people want to have modern apps / games on a smaller screen, but there's a limit to what they can use because they get underpowered devices? Maybe they want to run multiple apps at once, or not be running out of memory all the time. I dunno, it seems fair to want a more powerful small-screen phone.
By the way... Does anybody remember how big mobile phones were in the 1980s and early 1990s?:)
Slashdot Mirror
You could have it in a bag and run into someone at the store, library, subway, airport... heck, even out on the street. When was the last time you thought twice about someone bumping into you accidentally?
When you land, you'll have a small armada of armed officers waiting to clobber the perp, too. This is a good situation because these crazies don't usually just wake up one day and independently decide to do it... they are part of a system, which can be worked against by getting intelligence from captive agents. I'm betting that we'd see a lot fewer attempts if attempts were so much better known to be futile.
You gotta watch out for those weaponized garden rakes. Especially the plastic ones. The thwack noise they make could potentially frighten small animals!
Who brings that on a plane?!
It's true. I use Photoshop occasionally and I know how large uncompressed image data can be. I'm thinking that the "Undo everything I did in this whole entire session" button (as I mentioned) is a different idea than unlimited Undo steps though. It's more like the Revert command you see in some apps. Checkpointing when you start your session is probably useful for many applications.
The idea isn't necessarily a one-size-fits-all. In Photoshop your work can be so complex and subjective that you need a ton of checkpoints (aka saving the document) to rewind your work a few minutes/hours back during an all-day session. But now we're talking about version control which is kind of a different subject and could also be handled differently than it is currently.
Well the point was more like this... You don't need to 'save' it explicitly, because it stays in the same state until you do something different to it. You can't go back in time with it, though, which is why a Revert function gives a computer an advantage.
Those scanner-whiteboards are pretty cool. I've seen them in another office where I work. I've had the privilege of using Smartboards as well. It was definitely a step forward for technology to be able to sync whiteboards across the country during a conference call, for sure.
As one designer I follow thinks, we need to get rid of the idea of "Save" altogether, and just have some sort of "Undo everything I did in this whole entire session" button. Saving is not a concept that people without computers are familiar with, so it's an idea that was invented FOR computers, and it's becoming increasingly unnecessary. It's not as scary as you think after you get used to it. Objects IRL like a whiteboard/todo list/grocery list on your fridge don't need to be saved. Construction workers don't "save" a building while they're working. Your changes are effective as soon as you make them. Look at GDocs, you don't save there, it just makes changes right away. And how many times have people lost work because the program crashed and they didn't save? Did you know people are still turning off Autosave because of some voodoo mythology that it might crash the program?
Comments like this make reading Slashdot worth while. Thanks for such a good writeup.
Now there's a concept. Imagine: The new revolutionary OS/2 Phone from IBM.
First, I think your sig is awesome.
Now. Come on now, you really want to go there? "Just works"? If you want to spend all day researching why libfoo-4.2.1-5r3.1.so isn't good enough for suparbar-3.6.1.35-r5.3-custom, that's cool, I'll be over here getting work done.
The software repository you seek is called "just about every store" and "most of the Internet". It takes about an hour to install everything you really need to get productive on Windows, including the updates. Maybe more if you need Cygwin for some reason, because its installer downloads serially from one site. (Ugh.)
But if we're going for hyperbole, then let me tell you a story of a previous Linux nightmare I lived... It takes like a week of configuring and compiling to get Gentoo running to the point where you can log in and get a desktop environment. Add another day if you want your wireless adapter to work (whoops, that particular kernel version doesn't work with the driver after all and none of the included modules are compatible!). Add another day if you want to enable your video card for gaming. Forget about games, that'll take all day for each one. Then it takes half a day to compile Firefox just so you can have a browser so you can do something while you wait for other things to be done... but wait, if you want features like antialiasing and stuff, you have to reconfigure and recompile! Gotta do it every time they release an update! But what about productivity again? I nuked a motherboard once when a fan quit while it was doing a 3-day compile of OpenOffice. Yeah, it took 3 days to install an Office clone from their repository. By the way, that clone turned out to be slow and buggy, didn't work right with some of my documents, and didn't have any of the fonts everyone else uses. Fonts that weren't in their repository. Fonts that I couldn't get from the manufacturer except by a script someone wrote to essentially steal them. So I wanted to make a PDF so other people could see my documents the way I saw them, ugly Linux fonts and all. That software took a day to compile, and it still didn't pull in all the dependencies from the repository. I had to dig online to find all the particular dot-dot-dash-dot-dot-revision versions that were compatible with each other, and you know what? Screw it, Office with CutePDF doesn't take this much hassle. Half an hour clicking Next five times and watching two installers' progress bars on Windows and it "just works" with PDF output, the right fonts, scripting and everything. Reminds me slightly of the good old days of Debian where "a chicken could install it" except I don't have to hunt down broken dependencies and figure out why that one package is blocked and the other one won't install without pulling in a whole new desktop environment.
Yeah, I tried it on platforms with precompiled binaries. It still took a couple days to get it running with versions of everything that played nice together. And what did I get after those couple days? Occasional keyboard latency. Laggy, flickering mouse pointer. Stuttering MP3 playback when I scrolled in a web browser. Screen refreshing at a glacial pace sometimes for no reason. Random hitches and freezes. Huge temperature spikes. Poorly behaved Flash. Couldn't watch video full screen. No antialiasing in XY apps, ugly antialiasing in Z app. Nothing was smooth. C'mon, Linux should be better than this. Back when I used it as a command-line-only OS, it was. All the searches I perform tell me that I *could* get it working better, but I'll have to tweak endlessly and recompile various pieces of everything with new configurations. Yeah, changing timer frequencies, installing 'tainted' driver binaries, recompiling Firefox with support for etc etc, should I really have to do this?
Metro UI? Meet Unity. I've used both. Bleh, I'll take Metro, it's far less buggy. Things do what they're supposed to when I click them, they stay put, and it's fairly obvious what will happen when I don't know what something does. At least I only have to interact with that infrequ
This guy is a little behind with his prediction, since it's already happening. I remember seeing those predatory lenders outside college campuses with their "Sign up for our credit card, get a free mp3 player" booths *at least* ten years ago. Car dealers have been giving out iPhones and such as promo deals for years. Some banks have advertised free stuff like that to my snail mail. Sign up for a 2-year phone contract, you get a ~$450 subsidy towards a phone. Right now in September 2012, you can get an iPhone 4 or lower-end Android / WinMo free. It's a giveaway to entice you into purchasing a service.
We put a man on the moon, and I still get tangled in my phone cord! Gosh! (What does that have to do with the issue?)
People go to jail for traffic misdemeanors and worse. There's little to no punishment for losing a highly radioactive source. These things have to be reported and monitored, and the subsequent search for the object consumes tons of taxpayers' money. If the government represents the people's collective wealth, and the people don't want their money wasted, then shouldn't the people say hey, penalize these guys for wasting our money?
Wait. Who's saying that "the loss of radioactive rods occurs from time to time" in such a nonchalant way, like they're trying to convince the readers that it's no big deal? It's a big deal. You don't just lose stuff like that.. they're transported in large, heavy packages!
I have a friend who dropped her iPhone off the kitchen counter and that impact shattered the glass. She's done this twice, once with an iPhone 4 and once with an iPhone 4S. I think I'll take my chances with a better-constructed device.
In other words, playing 480p Wii content over HDMI will still look nicer.
A digital signal on a digital panel is going to be measurably sharper. Nicer is subjective, though. Cheaper 7-bit-per-channel panels don't look nicer to me, hence I still have a CRT since large digital panels with truer color reproduction are still rather expensive. A 24" with 99+% sRGB is still $400 or more.
I don't want my Wii content up-scaled so much as presented to my TV with larger square pixels. No idea if Wii U will output 1080p all the time such that 480p Wii content is scaled to 960p with black bars or if it switches display modes to 480p and leaves the rest up to the TV.
That would be really cool. I'd be happy with that.
HDMI 1.3 has more than the NTSC color range in its gamut. Not sure if deep color will be used by Wii U, but certainly wouldn't be for existing Wii games. There's also issues with saturation levels and overall brightness in the NTSC spec (enforced to prevent phosphor bleed) that affect component but don't affect HDMI.
HDMI can pass signals like that, but whether you get it depends on the whole chain: what the video adapter is given to output, whether the video adapter can output it, whether any intermediate devices like receivers will pass it through, and whether your display can display it. Games are probably (reasonable assumption alert) going to be coded with one code path, rather than multiple GFX engine code paths and texture sets to support larger color gamuts. It gets really expensive to have someone take the time and do color-correction for a full texture set. Indie games might make it happen first, and I'll be happy to see it. Usually you wind up with Y'CbCr color (equivalent to YPbPr which is what component video uses), and HDTV's color space specs are in fact based on modern phosphor characteristics. They are truly having a lot of trouble providing affordable digital panels that can even come close to the color reproduction of phosphor-based screens, so staying under that limit is still necessary to avoid color blowout issues on cheap displays. Personally I wish xvYCC was more prevalent, but Blu-ray doesn't even allow it. I know the PS3 can do it and lots of higher-end video cards can do it too but I've never seen it demonstrated.
For the Wii U, there is.
I was talking about the Wii, not the Wii U.
What you're saying, probably, is that you can't tell the difference between VGA (roughly equivalent to component, if not better) or DVI/HDMI on a digital flat panel. That's fine for you, but not for me. Eye fatigue from trying to refocus the slight blur of the VGA signal is gone with a digital connection for me. And again, black levels are an issue with analog sources.
Hang on, that's not what I said at all, and I resent the assumption. Why assume things like that? My eyes are plenty good enough to see the difference when the system is capable of reproducing it. My CRT is not due to various factors explained below. What I'm saying is that upscaling a non-native resolution to the panel's native resolution still isn't as sharp as it ought to be on a flat panel. I think we could agree on that.
Analog signals are never as clear as a digital signal, obviously, since you can only approximate a square wave (hard edge) and hardware capable of better approximations cost more money than a consumer's going to pay. When an analog signal's loss is equal to or less than the loss inherent to the analog CRT, you'll never notice anything related to the analog signal quality because the CRT's loss is greater - which is probably the case in my system. Hooking up a digital panel to a digital signal is the ideal situation because it has that digital nature, discrete pixels that don't bleed into each other. (Inter-pixel light bleed is a different story but mostly negligible for this discussion since CRTs have the same problem.) Hooking up a digital panel with poor analog sampling, IE a consumer grade TV/monitor, to an analog signal will immediately look blurry compared to what you'd get with a decent CRT. It will still look blurry until you spend thousands of dollars on the scaling equipment, which nobody in their right mind is going to do unless they are doing professional video archiving or restoration or feed-switching work. They have room to grow with video ADCs in consumer/prosumer level equipment but nobody's going to do it because of the poor cost/benefit ratio. So... you're always going to see it...
Black levels are defined by the specs, so it's up to you to calibrate the output device using the input source. Blu-ray, DVD, broadcast DTV (see Rec.709) etc have a digital range of 16-235 per channel to accommodate filter overshoots and such, so you never get true black or true white in the first place. Computer video devices, digital and analog, have no such restrictions. Calibrate your screen to a computer, and you'll have black level complaints when you hook up a blu-ray player or cable box. Calibrate it to the other system, and you'll have the opposing complaint.
Well, hopefully someone finds some of this information useful.
Is there even an official HDMI cable for the Wii? I haven't seen one. That being said, I only observed 'dot crawl' with composite and to a lesser extent with S-Video. Component cables seem to eliminate the issue entirely on my 1080i CRT TV and it looks decent to me. Upscaling is still pretty bad on flat panels, but they don't have much of a reason to make that a strong selling point, do they? Maybe the problem needs to be addressed from both ends instead of exclusively blaming one or the other.
I just wanted to play Raving Rabbids. Yeah, imagine my embarrassment when I had to tell my girlfriend's family, who gave not-financially-well-off me the gift card for Christmas, that I'd bought a game I couldn't play and basically their money was wasted. Telling her was bad enough. I couldn't even return the game since it was already open. Ubisoft wouldn't help, the store wouldn't help. So they don't get any more of my money and I'm happy to tell the story.
Yup, their DRM makes their games unplayable on my computer. Standard Windows PC with the only optical drive being a DVD burner. You know, one of the standard choices available on most PCs. Their customer support people got angry that I kept pressing the issue and told me to read the box more carefully next time I buy a game... Guess what, I will do that: I will skip anything that says Ubisoft on the box. It didn't say anything about not working if a burner was present.
Why no 3d rendered Lemmings? It was the best selling video game ever at the time, let's revisit it.
Been there, done that in 1995: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Lemmings
Dragonflies and Daddy Longlegs spiders too. Various birds as well.
Perhaps the security team KNOWS this. And perhaps the authors knew that they would know that.
Reminds me of a scenario played out in a movie. "Clearly, I cannot drink from the cup in front of you."
That's a really interesting thing to say. It's hugely abstract. So much so that at first, my reaction was akin to "check out this guy slashdottin' from the looney bin" but upon further reflection, it gets really deep and is actually quite intelligent. Well done.
Also, you'll never be able to verify that your algorithm is working by manually processing sample inputs. That's a tremendously useful ability to have. See the following thought process:
>> "See if I give it A, it should give B, but instead it gives C"
>> "Let me try it by hand"
>> "My algorithm is wrong" or "My implementation of the algorithm is wrong" or "I'm using the wrong algorithm to solve this problem" (knowing the difference saves you notable amounts of time)
>> "I now have an understanding of the actual problem and can solve it"
It would be great if Xerox would rise up and strongarm everyone who's patented their prior art, and invalidate the patents.
Having larger than average hands myself, I definitely find that the larger phones fit better in my hands. I'm with you on that one.
I haven't really seen anything powerful in a small-person-friendly factor. The size-to-power ratio seems to decrease at an unfair rate. That, I think, is the general gripe reflected by the post. Maybe people want to have modern apps / games on a smaller screen, but there's a limit to what they can use because they get underpowered devices? Maybe they want to run multiple apps at once, or not be running out of memory all the time. I dunno, it seems fair to want a more powerful small-screen phone.
By the way... Does anybody remember how big mobile phones were in the 1980s and early 1990s? :)