Yes, Safari is at least competitive in every category except script speed, and this will be sped up in Safari 2.0. And running on a 400 MHz G4, it is also generally competitive with Windows and Linux browsers running on an 800 MHz Pentium 3.
I wish he'd upped the memory, though. 256M is pretty tight for OS X, even though that's Apple's standard low end memory configuration. Most people got to at least 512M as soon as they can. It might not be such a big deal with only one program running, however.
Re:My prediction for the DVR market
on
MythTV 0.17 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't believe it. I would not be surprised to see Apple come out with a DVR, probably when the CableCard 2.0 standard becomes final, but I don't see what it gains Apple to buy TiVo. What would TiVo bring to the table? User interface? Apple's perfectly capable of doing that on their own, and as good as the TiVo interface is, it is beginning to look dated. Apple would want something new. Profits? TiVo is losing money. Affiliation with DirecTV? DirecTV is switching to a non-TiVo DVR. Userbase? Most TiVo customers will probably be looking to upgrade to a HD DVR with at least two tuners some time in the next couple of years, and it won't necessarily be a TiVo. It seems like the only thing TiVo really has to offer Apple is the TiVo name, but Apple's name recognition is at least as good.
And yes, I have a TiVo too (I even have one of the new HD models).
That's not what I said. Copyright is irrelevant here- the thing is, if they're going to change even one little thing about the gameplay, then there is NO reason to use any of the original code whatsoever.
Whether or not they use the actual code, the fact that they have seen it means that it would be hard for them to prove, or even to be sure themselves, that they have not used algorithms from the original code. This is why reverse engineering is generally done under "clean room" conditions by people who have not seen the source of the code to be functionally reproduced.
Moreover, this is a classic game. Many people are going to want at least an option to have the game play like the original. The best way to do that is to reproduce the original play. Perhaps they can improve on the game's algorithms, but the original game actually played quite well, so they may end up only doing tweaks, and keeping a substantial part of the original logic, if not the actual code.
Re:8 bit propritary code ... hm ...
on
Archon to be Revived
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· Score: 2, Informative
Right on the front page, they brag: "Improved computer AI". That's a change. And once you make one change to the gameplay experience (aside from just prettier graphics and sound), there is no reason to keep on with the old code.
One change does not cancel out copyright, it just creates a derivative work. The same goes for a reimplementation based in part on the original code. And in any case, if the original source was donated on the basis that it not be divulged, it would seem that the project is ethically obliged to honor that. And even if they implement new logic, they may well decide to provide an option to play with the original game logic, in the interests of authenticity.
It's not nearly as cut-and-dried as you believe. For example, a person could make the claim that by using embryonic stem cells to heal diseases caused by genetic defects, we are preventing natural selection from weeding out those genetic defects, causing more people to suffer from those diseases in the (very) long run.
Except that if the diseases are healed, nobody suffers. And eventually, it will be possible to correct such disorders at the genetic level far more effectively than selection can weed them out.
Also, some people believe that human embryos are human lives (and they don't have to be Religious to feel that way), and feel that sacrificing some lives for the prolonging of other lives is unethical.
You don't have to be religious. But to make sense, you do have to be consistent. After all, every single cell in your body is human and alive. So I'll listen to the people who moan about the "human life" of a zygote when they start holding funerals for every menstruation and amputation, and for the thousands of epithelial human lives that each of us sheds every day.
The question is, is it ethical to kill life and intentionally create deformed life in order to save other life? Specifically, creating and killing human life? At what point is something human?
Biologically, the answer is simple. Every single cell in your body is human or alive. As we normally shed cells every where we go, we are each surrounded by the deaths of thousands and thousands of human lives.
OK, so "human life" per se obviously is not so important. So what is? We don't regard it as murder to cut off a finger. The only thing that we count as murder is the destruction of a brain. The brain of course is where the personality resides. In other words, our society does not value human life, it values human personality. It follows, therefore, that anything, whether living or not or human or not, without a brain is not a person, and there are no particular ethical concerns with whether it lives or dies.
We also recognize the concept of cruelty. But that leads us to the same conclusion. Cruelty only exists when something suffers, and the ability to feel pain is a property of the brain. So once again, it is not cruel to injure or destroy something that lacks the neural capacity to feel pain.
Not out in the open. Unfortunately, I think our present news system prevents a priori the possibility of open, public debates. The closest you get are shouting matches, or just summaries which completely miss the major points made by both sides.
I've read and heard extensive debate on the ethics of this issue, from politicians and private citizens to professional ethicists. And I'm not privy to any secret, private debates. Everything has been out in the open. In this single, very public, forum, it has been debated dozens of times.
But first you have to decide the ethical standards for doing the tests, which seems to have been long overlooked.
I disagree. People have been thinking about the ethical standards for a long time. All relevant issues have been extensively debated. I haven't heard anybody with anything new to say on the topic for many years. Since there are no plans for creating organisms with a functioning nervous system capable of suffering, the experiments clearly meet established standards of scientific ethics. And the basic manipulations of human embryos in vitro have long been carried out for in vitro fertilization, so we have already decided as a society that this sort of manipulation is ethically acceptable.
Of course there are some people with religious objections to this, just as there are some people with religious objections to eating beef or pork. They will at some point have to decide whether their personal ethics permit them to take advantage of the benefits of this research.
How certain can they be that these embryos, grown to possess the characteristic genome of an MND victim, will effectively emulate the conditions they need? Dolly, in many respects, raised questions over how clones react to their existence: she died prematurely as if she had aged too fast. Who's to say that these embryos don't possess unknown characteristics simply as a function of being cloned?
One cannot be sure until one does the experiment. but there are plenty of things that can be tested to determine whether the model of MND is a good one. And if they do possess "unknown characteristics," that make them different, that will provide important information about epigenetic factors that are relevant to MND.
Strangely, astronomy is a science, though we've never created a supernova of ourselves, or travelled for a lightyear to get a feel for the distance.
I think there is a lot that can simply be learnt by studying and observing and THEN we can start thinking about how to change things.
We've been studying and observing for decades. The research is really at a point where it is impossible to carry it appreciably further without experimental results to test the theories, which we finally have the technology to do. There's really no reason to imagine that at some future time we'd be in a better position to decide how to do these experiments. At some point, you just have to try it and see if it works.
Then the more savvy will begin to realize that the G4 is bottlenecked by its slow bus speed, and there'll be a lot of pissed off people having spent money on a computer that, even by Apple's own standards, is outdated.
It hardly makes sense to criticize a budget model for not having the latest state-of-the-art processor. Apple certainly is not treating the G4 as outdated. In practice, the G4 is a good performer. It is included in all of Apple's iBooks and Powerbooks as well as in the eMac. benchmarks put it pretty squarely in the middle of the pack as far as Apple's offerings go, and not that far below the G5 models.
Yes but again you compare two different things. Next time you can put your laptop in your pocket, power it up and play content or use it without going through a "long" boot process please come back to the table.
The PSP is a bit big for my pocket. I could fit it into my carry-on bag when I travel, but that is one more thing to carry in addition to my laptop. And it doesn't have a flip top like the DS, so it'll need some kind of case to protect the screen from scratches.
I don't know what you mean about a long boot process. Maybe this is something that you do with Windows laptops? Mine is a Mac running OS X, so there's really no reason to ever reboot it. You just flip it open and it's ready to go.
It's stuck between the GBA-SP and PSP. The GBA SP may be too popular for the DS's own good. I'm not talking games, I'm talking form factor and design. People almost universally agree it's an outstanding design - tiny with the perfect feature set.
The way I see it, the DS offers most of the advantages of the GBA-SP, such as the built in lid and backlight, with the capability of playing even more games and the availability of wireless multiplayer. I think it will appeal to a lot of owners of the original GBA who weren't willing to shell out again for the same system in a better package.
I doubt major game developers will do anything neat with the second screen, as the vast majority of games are multi-platform.
I'm not interested in playing scaled down versions of multiplatform games on a handheld; I'll play those on console with a large-screen TV, which is really what they were designed for. I'm interested in titles that are designed specifically for the hand-held format. Nintendo is always the big draw for a Nintendo console. I have no doubt that they will find good uses for the second screen. I was very impressed by how well the supplied Metroid game plays with both screens. I imagine that more creative 3rd party developers will also come up with good uses for the second screen.
I've played on a DS - I can't watch two screens at once. The stylus, while potentially very interesting, so far seems to be a crutch for the lack of analog control. Anyone who's played a racing game will tell you that nothing can replace analog control.
I don't have any trouble watching two screens. I drive, and am in the habit of monitoring the road ahead and 3 mirrors, so two screens both in my immediate field of view is trivial. As for analog control, I am really impressed by how much better the touch screen works that an analog stick. In many respects, it seems closer to a mouse than a joystick. FPS games have never appealed to me on console because the joystick control feels so clumsy, but Metroid with the stylus actually seems to work. And I really appreciate not having to switch back and forth to the map, or having a "head-up" map obscuring the action.
I am particularly interested in Atari's re-releases of some of their old arcade games with trackball or knob controls. I have a feeling that this may be the system of choice for Tempest. I want to play Reactor, as well. If somebody comes out with Arkanoid or Tailgunner, I'll really be happy.
On the other hand, playing a racing game on a handheld seems like a very bad match to me--I'll stick with Ridge Racer on console.
Why does the PSP get such a bad rap on rehashes? Because it looks so much like a PS2?
No, because most of us already have a PS2. To rope me in, it has to offer me something different. So far, I've seen little indication of that.
That should be a compliment. Meanwhile, the DS is offering us N64 and GameCube rehashes, scaled down to the DS's capabilities with some minor changes.
As it happens, I don't have a N64, so versions of N64 games have some appeal to me. I'm interested in finding out how Mario DS plays with the touchpad. Console games have gone more and more into impressive graphical effects. I like that on a big screen where I can fully appreciate it. On a small screen handheld, I want games with clear action. I've been happy to see classic 2D Castlevania and Metroid series find a home on the GBA, and I see even more potential for such games on the DS.
The screen is NOT tiny. You get a good angle of view when held normally, quite good for watching movies, in fact. Quality is really superb, picture size is 480x272 pixels
Remember that I was comparing it to my laptop, which has a resolution of 1280 x 854. In terms of number of pixels, that means that the PSP screen is about 12% of my laptop. I think "tiny" is a reasonable characterization. I'm simply not likely to want to want to watch movies on the PSP.
Yea, Nintendo DS is fine, if you're a TEN year old. What a load of crap.
Well, as a 50+ year old gamer, I see it exactly the other way around. The DS offers some real innovation, with features such as dual screens and touch/stylus control that aren't available elsewhere. The games aren't all just rehashes of console games. And it looks like it will have a good mix of 3D and 2D games, especially since it plays GBA games (in fact, you can have a GBA and DS game plugged in at the same time), while the Metroid demo demonstrates that its 3D capabilities are good.
A portable PS2 missing one of the analog sticks just doesn't excite me. I don't do that much gaming on the go, and if I want to play PS2 style games, I'll play it on my big screen TV and PS2 at home. Nor am I all that interested in watching movies on that little tiny screen. If I want to watch a DVD while traveling, I'd rather watch it on my laptop, which at least has a decently sized screen. But I think that the PSP will sell well with the kiddies. Features like movie play that aren't that appealing to adults will be more successful with kids who don't have their own TVs, laptops, and DVD players. I can imagine a parent setting a kid up with a movie on a memory stick to keep him quiet on a long auto trip.
I want one. badly. But the Mac mini is a perfect example.. I can't justify paying 500 dollars just for an operating system.
Actually, it's not just an OS. There's word processing, presentation, photo, video editing, and music creation applications provided as well. And I hear that they even throw in a cute little computer as a bonus.
First of all, the mac mini is cooled passively... It is designed to dispate the heat of what stuff Apple put in there. I know the attitude might be to do it for the sake of doing it, but why ruin a perfectly good mac-mini through overheating with it, with a relatively small gain in performance. I hope people don't do this in the long run as a permanent solution.
Although the Mac mini is said to be extremely quiet, it does have a fan. considering that Apple does produce a 1.42 MHz model, speeding up the 1.25 is probably not going to produce more heat than the system can handle.
Seems to me you'd have to spend on the order of $1500/yr in merchandise in order to make this worthwhile. And then, it'd only be worth it if you would have paid for two-day shipping otherwise.
I don't know where you get this number. It is obviously most beneficial for people who order a lot of small items, who could easily run up shipping costs of $80 even for standard shipping while spending considerably less than you estimate. Of course, even without this, you can always avoid Amazon's shipping fees if you are willing to wait until you've accumulated $25 in each order, so it is mainly a convenience feature.
The one thing that iTunes lacks that annoys me is the ability to remotely control another copy of iTunes (like on the server) from my laptop. I actually have a script to do this through the shell, but I'd really like to be doing it through the iTunes interface.
The program you want is called NetTunes. It provides a remote iTunes window for your music server, although the remote iTunes is not as responsive as a local copy. I'm using it to run a "headless" beige G3 as a music server.
Such unauthorized copies may be downloaded by users in many countries including Japan from such web sites without charge.
This seems like a key issue. Companies that might be willing to turn a blind eye toward people exchanging videotapes in a foreign country may feel very different when those episodes are available over the internet where they might potentially erode sales in their home market.
Actually, the chart suggests that the act produced a short-lived decrease in spam volume, after which spam continued to increase at about the same rate as before the law.
Yes, this was a serious failure. When Apple badly needed to transition from home/hobby to a serious business computer, the unreliability of the Apple/// was a major blow. The problem was the use of socketed chips. The socketed chips were one thing that made the Apple II such a great hobbyist machine--you could fix most motherboard problems by swapping off-the-shelf chips. But thermal cycling caused the chips to gradually work their way out of the sockets, and the pins tended to build up corrosion. To keep our Apple II's running reliably, I used to pop all the chips halfway out of their sockets and plug them back in once a year. That's OK for a hobbyist machine, but a business system like the Apple/// was expected to just run without that sort of hands-on routine maintenance.
I think the collapse of Communism was a good deal more complex than the claims that Reagan outspent the Soviets. The system hadn't really worked all that well for decades.
No, Khruschev threatened to bury us economically in Soviet products, but it worked out the other way around. While our chaotic capitalist system reaped huge profits off of technological innovation, the Soviet Union's vaunted planned economy fell further and further behind. The great benefits of Communism that supposedly justified all of that repression never materialized.
Re:We have a Tivo and a Cox DVR
on
TiVo to Offer SDK
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, if they were smart (they being Apple) they'd just buy TiVo
I'm not sure what that really buys Apple, unless TiVo has patents critical to making a well-designed DVR. After all, Apple is fully capable of developing user-friendly software on their own. Apple's brand-name recognition is at least as good as Tivo's. And getting Tivo's current money-losing business hardly seems like a big plus. It's a new world when the CableCard standard comes in, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Safari is at least competitive in every category except script speed, and this will be sped up in Safari 2.0. And running on a 400 MHz G4, it is also generally competitive with Windows and Linux browsers running on an 800 MHz Pentium 3.
I wish he'd upped the memory, though. 256M is pretty tight for OS X, even though that's Apple's standard low end memory configuration. Most people got to at least 512M as soon as they can. It might not be such a big deal with only one program running, however.
I don't believe it. I would not be surprised to see Apple come out with a DVR, probably when the CableCard 2.0 standard becomes final, but I don't see what it gains Apple to buy TiVo. What would TiVo bring to the table? User interface? Apple's perfectly capable of doing that on their own, and as good as the TiVo interface is, it is beginning to look dated. Apple would want something new. Profits? TiVo is losing money. Affiliation with DirecTV? DirecTV is switching to a non-TiVo DVR. Userbase? Most TiVo customers will probably be looking to upgrade to a HD DVR with at least two tuners some time in the next couple of years, and it won't necessarily be a TiVo. It seems like the only thing TiVo really has to offer Apple is the TiVo name, but Apple's name recognition is at least as good.
And yes, I have a TiVo too (I even have one of the new HD models).
That's not what I said. Copyright is irrelevant here- the thing is, if they're going to change even one little thing about the gameplay, then there is NO reason to use any of the original code whatsoever.
Whether or not they use the actual code, the fact that they have seen it means that it would be hard for them to prove, or even to be sure themselves, that they have not used algorithms from the original code. This is why reverse engineering is generally done under "clean room" conditions by people who have not seen the source of the code to be functionally reproduced.
Moreover, this is a classic game. Many people are going to want at least an option to have the game play like the original. The best way to do that is to reproduce the original play. Perhaps they can improve on the game's algorithms, but the original game actually played quite well, so they may end up only doing tweaks, and keeping a substantial part of the original logic, if not the actual code.
Right on the front page, they brag: "Improved computer AI". That's a change. And once you make one change to the gameplay experience (aside from just prettier graphics and sound), there is no reason to keep on with the old code.
One change does not cancel out copyright, it just creates a derivative work. The same goes for a reimplementation based in part on the original code. And in any case, if the original source was donated on the basis that it not be divulged, it would seem that the project is ethically obliged to honor that. And even if they implement new logic, they may well decide to provide an option to play with the original game logic, in the interests of authenticity.
It's not nearly as cut-and-dried as you believe. For example, a person could make the claim that by using embryonic stem cells to heal diseases caused by genetic defects, we are preventing natural selection from weeding out those genetic defects, causing more people to suffer from those diseases in the (very) long run.
Except that if the diseases are healed, nobody suffers. And eventually, it will be possible to correct such disorders at the genetic level far more effectively than selection can weed them out.
Also, some people believe that human embryos are human lives (and they don't have to be Religious to feel that way), and feel that sacrificing some lives for the prolonging of other lives is unethical.
You don't have to be religious. But to make sense, you do have to be consistent. After all, every single cell in your body is human and alive. So I'll listen to the people who moan about the "human life" of a zygote when they start holding funerals for every menstruation and amputation, and for the thousands of epithelial human lives that each of us sheds every day.
The question is, is it ethical to kill life and intentionally create deformed life in order to save other life? Specifically, creating and killing human life? At what point is something human?
Biologically, the answer is simple. Every single cell in your body is human or alive. As we normally shed cells every where we go, we are each surrounded by the deaths of thousands and thousands of human lives.
OK, so "human life" per se obviously is not so important. So what is? We don't regard it as murder to cut off a finger. The only thing that we count as murder is the destruction of a brain. The brain of course is where the personality resides. In other words, our society does not value human life, it values human personality. It follows, therefore, that anything, whether living or not or human or not, without a brain is not a person, and there are no particular ethical concerns with whether it lives or dies.
We also recognize the concept of cruelty. But that leads us to the same conclusion. Cruelty only exists when something suffers, and the ability to feel pain is a property of the brain. So once again, it is not cruel to injure or destroy something that lacks the neural capacity to feel pain.
Not out in the open. Unfortunately, I think our present news system prevents a priori the possibility of open, public debates. The closest you get are shouting matches, or just summaries which completely miss the major points made by both sides.
I've read and heard extensive debate on the ethics of this issue, from politicians and private citizens to professional ethicists. And I'm not privy to any secret, private debates. Everything has been out in the open. In this single, very public, forum, it has been debated dozens of times.
If we de-humanize full clones and experiment on them are we really any different?
Nobody is proposing to create full adult clones, or even embryonic clones with a nervous system capable of feeling pain or suffering.
But first you have to decide the ethical standards for doing the tests, which seems to have been long overlooked.
I disagree. People have been thinking about the ethical standards for a long time. All relevant issues have been extensively debated. I haven't heard anybody with anything new to say on the topic for many years. Since there are no plans for creating organisms with a functioning nervous system capable of suffering, the experiments clearly meet established standards of scientific ethics. And the basic manipulations of human embryos in vitro have long been carried out for in vitro fertilization, so we have already decided as a society that this sort of manipulation is ethically acceptable.
Of course there are some people with religious objections to this, just as there are some people with religious objections to eating beef or pork. They will at some point have to decide whether their personal ethics permit them to take advantage of the benefits of this research.
How certain can they be that these embryos, grown to possess the characteristic genome of an MND victim, will effectively emulate the conditions they need? Dolly, in many respects, raised questions over how clones react to their existence: she died prematurely as if she had aged too fast. Who's to say that these embryos don't possess unknown characteristics simply as a function of being cloned?
One cannot be sure until one does the experiment. but there are plenty of things that can be tested to determine whether the model of MND is a good one. And if they do possess "unknown characteristics," that make them different, that will provide important information about epigenetic factors that are relevant to MND.
Ever heard of "theoretical" research?
Strangely, astronomy is a science, though we've never created a supernova of ourselves, or travelled for a lightyear to get a feel for the distance.
I think there is a lot that can simply be learnt by studying and observing and THEN we can start thinking about how to change things.
We've been studying and observing for decades. The research is really at a point where it is impossible to carry it appreciably further without experimental results to test the theories, which we finally have the technology to do. There's really no reason to imagine that at some future time we'd be in a better position to decide how to do these experiments. At some point, you just have to try it and see if it works.
Then the more savvy will begin to realize that the G4 is bottlenecked by its slow bus speed, and there'll be a lot of pissed off people having spent money on a computer that, even by Apple's own standards, is outdated.
It hardly makes sense to criticize a budget model for not having the latest state-of-the-art processor. Apple certainly is not treating the G4 as outdated. In practice, the G4 is a good performer. It is included in all of Apple's iBooks and Powerbooks as well as in the eMac. benchmarks put it pretty squarely in the middle of the pack as far as Apple's offerings go, and not that far below the G5 models.
Yes but again you compare two different things. Next time you can put your laptop in your pocket, power it up and play content or use it without going through a "long" boot process please come back to the table.
The PSP is a bit big for my pocket. I could fit it into my carry-on bag when I travel, but that is one more thing to carry in addition to my laptop. And it doesn't have a flip top like the DS, so it'll need some kind of case to protect the screen from scratches.
I don't know what you mean about a long boot process. Maybe this is something that you do with Windows laptops? Mine is a Mac running OS X, so there's really no reason to ever reboot it. You just flip it open and it's ready to go.
It's stuck between the GBA-SP and PSP. The GBA SP may be too popular for the DS's own good. I'm not talking games, I'm talking form factor and design. People almost universally agree it's an outstanding design - tiny with the perfect feature set.
The way I see it, the DS offers most of the advantages of the GBA-SP, such as the built in lid and backlight, with the capability of playing even more games and the availability of wireless multiplayer. I think it will appeal to a lot of owners of the original GBA who weren't willing to shell out again for the same system in a better package.
I doubt major game developers will do anything neat with the second screen, as the vast majority of games are multi-platform.
I'm not interested in playing scaled down versions of multiplatform games on a handheld; I'll play those on console with a large-screen TV, which is really what they were designed for. I'm interested in titles that are designed specifically for the hand-held format. Nintendo is always the big draw for a Nintendo console. I have no doubt that they will find good uses for the second screen. I was very impressed by how well the supplied Metroid game plays with both screens. I imagine that more creative 3rd party developers will also come up with good uses for the second screen.
I've played on a DS - I can't watch two screens at once. The stylus, while potentially very interesting, so far seems to be a crutch for the lack of analog control. Anyone who's played a racing game will tell you that nothing can replace analog control.
I don't have any trouble watching two screens. I drive, and am in the habit of monitoring the road ahead and 3 mirrors, so two screens both in my immediate field of view is trivial. As for analog control, I am really impressed by how much better the touch screen works that an analog stick. In many respects, it seems closer to a mouse than a joystick. FPS games have never appealed to me on console because the joystick control feels so clumsy, but Metroid with the stylus actually seems to work. And I really appreciate not having to switch back and forth to the map, or having a "head-up" map obscuring the action.
I am particularly interested in Atari's re-releases of some of their old arcade games with trackball or knob controls. I have a feeling that this may be the system of choice for Tempest. I want to play Reactor, as well. If somebody comes out with Arkanoid or Tailgunner, I'll really be happy.
On the other hand, playing a racing game on a handheld seems like a very bad match to me--I'll stick with Ridge Racer on console.
Why does the PSP get such a bad rap on rehashes? Because it looks so much like a PS2?
No, because most of us already have a PS2. To rope me in, it has to offer me something different. So far, I've seen little indication of that.
That should be a compliment. Meanwhile, the DS is offering us N64 and GameCube rehashes, scaled down to the DS's capabilities with some minor changes.
As it happens, I don't have a N64, so versions of N64 games have some appeal to me. I'm interested in finding out how Mario DS plays with the touchpad. Console games have gone more and more into impressive graphical effects. I like that on a big screen where I can fully appreciate it. On a small screen handheld, I want games with clear action. I've been happy to see classic 2D Castlevania and Metroid series find a home on the GBA, and I see even more potential for such games on the DS.
The screen is NOT tiny. You get a good angle of view when held normally, quite good for watching movies, in fact. Quality is really superb, picture size is 480x272 pixels
Remember that I was comparing it to my laptop, which has a resolution of 1280 x 854. In terms of number of pixels, that means that the PSP screen is about 12% of my laptop. I think "tiny" is a reasonable characterization. I'm simply not likely to want to want to watch movies on the PSP.
Yea, Nintendo DS is fine, if you're a TEN year old. What a load of crap.
Well, as a 50+ year old gamer, I see it exactly the other way around. The DS offers some real innovation, with features such as dual screens and touch/stylus control that aren't available elsewhere. The games aren't all just rehashes of console games. And it looks like it will have a good mix of 3D and 2D games, especially since it plays GBA games (in fact, you can have a GBA and DS game plugged in at the same time), while the Metroid demo demonstrates that its 3D capabilities are good.
A portable PS2 missing one of the analog sticks just doesn't excite me. I don't do that much gaming on the go, and if I want to play PS2 style games, I'll play it on my big screen TV and PS2 at home. Nor am I all that interested in watching movies on that little tiny screen. If I want to watch a DVD while traveling, I'd rather watch it on my laptop, which at least has a decently sized screen. But I think that the PSP will sell well with the kiddies. Features like movie play that aren't that appealing to adults will be more successful with kids who don't have their own TVs, laptops, and DVD players. I can imagine a parent setting a kid up with a movie on a memory stick to keep him quiet on a long auto trip.
I want one. badly. But the Mac mini is a perfect example.. I can't justify paying 500 dollars just for an operating system.
Actually, it's not just an OS. There's word processing, presentation, photo, video editing, and music creation applications provided as well. And I hear that they even throw in a cute little computer as a bonus.
First of all, the mac mini is cooled passively... It is designed to dispate the heat of what stuff Apple put in there. I know the attitude might be to do it for the sake of doing it, but why ruin a perfectly good mac-mini through overheating with it, with a relatively small gain in performance. I hope people don't do this in the long run as a permanent solution.
Although the Mac mini is said to be extremely quiet, it does have a fan. considering that Apple does produce a 1.42 MHz model, speeding up the 1.25 is probably not going to produce more heat than the system can handle.
Seems to me you'd have to spend on the order of $1500/yr in merchandise in order to make this worthwhile. And then, it'd only be worth it if you would have paid for two-day shipping otherwise.
I don't know where you get this number. It is obviously most beneficial for people who order a lot of small items, who could easily run up shipping costs of $80 even for standard shipping while spending considerably less than you estimate. Of course, even without this, you can always avoid Amazon's shipping fees if you are willing to wait until you've accumulated $25 in each order, so it is mainly a convenience feature.
The one thing that iTunes lacks that annoys me is the ability to remotely control another copy of iTunes (like on the server) from my laptop. I actually have a script to do this through the shell, but I'd really like to be doing it through the iTunes interface.
The program you want is called NetTunes. It provides a remote iTunes window for your music server, although the remote iTunes is not as responsive as a local copy. I'm using it to run a "headless" beige G3 as a music server.
Such unauthorized copies may be downloaded by users in many countries including Japan from such web sites without charge.
This seems like a key issue. Companies that might be willing to turn a blind eye toward people exchanging videotapes in a foreign country may feel very different when those episodes are available over the internet where they might potentially erode sales in their home market.
Actually, the chart suggests that the act produced a short-lived decrease in spam volume, after which spam continued to increase at about the same rate as before the law.
Yes, this was a serious failure. When Apple badly needed to transition from home/hobby to a serious business computer, the unreliability of the Apple /// was a major blow. The problem was the use of socketed chips. The socketed chips were one thing that made the Apple II such a great hobbyist machine--you could fix most motherboard problems by swapping off-the-shelf chips. But thermal cycling caused the chips to gradually work their way out of the sockets, and the pins tended to build up corrosion. To keep our Apple II's running reliably, I used to pop all the chips halfway out of their sockets and plug them back in once a year. That's OK for a hobbyist machine, but a business system like the Apple /// was expected to just run without that sort of hands-on routine maintenance.
I think the collapse of Communism was a good deal more complex than the claims that Reagan outspent the Soviets. The system hadn't really worked all that well for decades.
No, Khruschev threatened to bury us economically in Soviet products, but it worked out the other way around. While our chaotic capitalist system reaped huge profits off of technological innovation, the Soviet Union's vaunted planned economy fell further and further behind. The great benefits of Communism that supposedly justified all of that repression never materialized.
Well, if they were smart (they being Apple) they'd just buy TiVo
I'm not sure what that really buys Apple, unless TiVo has patents critical to making a well-designed DVR. After all, Apple is fully capable of developing user-friendly software on their own. Apple's brand-name recognition is at least as good as Tivo's. And getting Tivo's current money-losing business hardly seems like a big plus. It's a new world when the CableCard standard comes in, anyway.