Seriously, did anyone with any common sense think these things were going to work out first try? We're not even at the point where display tech can take a decent drop and not fail or crack. I know OLEDs are supposed to be more durable but asking a screen to take god know's how many fold and unfolds a day on top of the other abuse phones take throughout a day and survive as long a modern phone does (and many don't last more than a couple years as it is)
They should really just call something like this "early access" for hardware and let people know what they're getting. I think folding screen tech will be really interesting and useful, but we are least 2 or 3 more generations from it being everyday ready.
It's nice if you actually use all the features, but if you end up just using it as a big display, then you really just overpaid. Its nice that it's all in one with a PC, cameras and speakers rather than a hodge-podge of equipment, but in my experience people who want "The Surface" really want that particular one for the prestige since they are hard to get rather then the many many equivalent corporate collaboration systems out there.
Surface table was cool but once large multi-touch systems became somewhat easy to buy and make there wasnt really a need for it. As i recall that table used a slick but complicated optical system for touch, now you can do it easy with a PCAP or IR based touch frame. You can buy them for any LCD and put it on a table and get the same effect.
Back in the 2G/3G days the CDMA carriers Verizon/Sprint did this very thing. Phones had no SIM slots, just a mobile equipment identifier (MEID) which was hard coded into the phone. Those phones were totally carrier locked with no way to change it. I mean if WiMax hadn't failed they would probably still be doing that but i believe supporting LTE required the use of SIM cards.
I got this email from Corvalent's mailing list (Corvalent is an industrial/embedded manufacturer). Had some of their insight into the whole ordeal which i found interesting.
What is Corvalent’s Insight on Hardware Hacking?
“It is our technical opinion that modifications of hardware, firmware and/or software are all possible ways to interfere with the normal operation of boards. Each of them has advantages and disadvantages, including technical complexity, ease of detection, and cost of implementation,” said Martin Rudloff, Corvalent’s CTO. “Typically this means that for someone to deploy an attack of the scope reported by Bloomberg in its Super Micro feature, the target must be specific and worthwhile in order to justify the high cost involved. Targeting only one or a few major companies would also minimize the risk of discovery.”
“Without deeper knowledge of the hardware and the software running on a server, information gathered from it may not allow a thief to decode or understand what the data means. And without knowing the end users’ security measures, we find it unlikely that the information could be forwarded to an external recipient,” added Rudloff.
Curiosity kicked in when we were discussing the level of difficulty in modifying the RJ45, so we decided to open one and check it out firsthand. As you can see below, it is very hard to open the metal enclosure without damaging it. The interior is fully packed, leaving little space to add additional circuitry. A fully assembled modified unit would probably be a better choice, but would involve the highly sophisticated effort of tapping into the supply chain and replacing the original parts with counterfeits.
Should we Question Such a Significant Story?
Bloomberg is a trusted new source with impeccable standards for truth and accuracy in reporting. Even so, it is possible that the story is incorrect. Sources provided data they understood to be accurate and truthful based on reports seen by them only; however, these were not shared with Bloomberg directly. There are technical inconsistencies to consider as well.
It should be possible to detect oddities in network traffic coming from a BMC behaving in unexpected ways. Alterations to the kernel and software stack should also set off alarms during or after system boot.
The chip pictured in the Bloomberg story fits on the tip of a pencil, yet it purportedly holds enough data to replace the data extracted from the BMC, alter the existing OS, and implement backdoor system access. This means the chip must either be larger than pictured or is using new lithography.
Why go to the trouble of placing a new chip on the board instead of a backdoor version of one already certified as part of the design?
Strong and specific denials by Amazon and Apple – different from the usual ‘we do not discuss issues of security as a matter of policy’– further stress the story’s validity.
Optimistically you are in 4th place in self driving tech Behind Waymo Cruise and Tesla (and really no-one is close to Waymo with 7M miles logged and 80k vehicles on order) This accident showed how far behind they really are and from the details of their legal fight it shows how Waymo was really right all along about Levandowski and the methods he wanted to take. He wanted to push the envelope and get vehicles on the road when they wanted to be conservative and test as much as possible. Now that $500M for Otto is down the tubes with nothing to show for it. Give it up and focus on competing with Lyft and improving your core service.
For some anecdotal evidence my wife was skeptical when I wanted to watch Battlestar Galactica (the 2004 version) but ended up loving it greatly and with good reason. It's an excellent written show with a great cast that includes several strong women roles. Much stronger female roles than say TNG had (which she also enjoyed after some coaxing to give it a chance).
If anything i find that only 15% of women reviewed as a case that maybe more women should give it a shot and it's probably one of the best shows for introducing Sci-fi to women, who in my experience are just as quick to write things like that off as men are of writing off something like Sex and the City without giving a chance first.
I am with you, I would love to see more Displayport connectors out in the consumer field. The connector is better than DVI/HDMI and it's an open VESA standard. Unfortunately it seems the media companies and the consumer electronics manufacturers decided on HDMI due to content protection and wanting to control the signal path (never-mind that Displayport has and does support HDCP) even though HDCP hasn't prevented anything and is really just a huge PITA for anyone working with it in a commercial AV setting.
Not exactly what you are getting at but the main technology that separate Displayport from previous display standards is that the video signal is in fact packetized (but it uses as they call it "micro-packets"). This is how they've been able to get up to 8k/60hz now without changing the cables or the connector. It's not quite as high level as an IP connection but more akin to PCI-Express rather then just a raw stream of bits over a wire.
Carriers: The numbers all go to 5G. Look, right across the board, 5G, 5G, 5G and...
Customers: Oh, I see. And most networks go up to 4G?
Carriers: Exactly.
Customers: Does that mean it's faster? Is it any faster?
Carriers: Well, it's one faster, isn't it? It's not 4G. You see, most blokes, you know, will be surfing at 4G. You're on 4G here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on 4G on your phone. Where can you go from there? Where?
Customers: I don't know.
Carriers: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Customers: Put it up to 5G.
Carriers: 5G. Exactly. One faster.
Customers: Why don't you just make 4G faster and make 4G be the top number and make that a little faster?
Carriers: [pause] These go to 5G.
I think there's a few reasons they went that route:
- Apple has some degree of patents on Lightning, the USB-IF likely wanted to just avoid that altogether
- Lightning connectors I've read had some issues with corrosion with their pins being exposed and this likely mitigates that by keeping the cables pins somewhat protected from fingers and such
- I believe the encapsulated design was also introduced to make the board mount socket connectors sturdier as I am likely not the only one who has had Micro-USB sockets break off a PCB
- Overall I would imagine there's benefits for the connector manufacturers to working within a similar framework as they can apple lessons they learned from MicroUSB for manufacturing. I'm sure they also had a say in the design as it moved forward.
As mentioned elsewhere in here, Thunderbolt is fine as it's an open spec and is intended for different use cases than USB, and it also shares a port design with mini-Displayport (which we can thank Apple for openly releasing that connector standard).
Lightning, while a very good physical design for a connector will likely fall soon as the power benefits of USB-C are too good to pass up and iPad/Macbook Airs without it are going to seem antiquated when every other tablet and ultrabook will be sharing a universal charging system. However Apple is no worse a shape than every other phone manufacturer. They'll release new models with USB-C along with every other manufacturer as then every user can complain equally for the next couple years that they need all new cables and chargers.
If Apple double downs on Lightning and sticks with it I would be extremely impressed with their level of stubbornness.
I used uTorrent when it was fairly new and it was excellent but in this day and age does it offer anything versus the number of matured open-source alternatives out there? I'm really asking if it has some special sauce that gives it an edge. When it was released one could look past it's closed source nature since it made it's mark being lightweight yet feature packed. Once the major update that brought advertising on-board I saw no reason to use it anymore.
I've been using qBittorent for a couple years and it gives me all the relevant functionality without the mess as well as Transmission QT for Windows and Deluge, I can see no reason to use uTorrent when it's been shown repeatedly to be scum-ware.
SpaceX is not allowed by the FAA (and I assume NASA/USAF have something to say as well) to to perform landings on land until they can prove that the system works reliably, so the way around that is use the barge. I believe they are already prepping a landing pad in Cape Canaveral and eventually they will likely land back to their launch site in Texas once completed. I would say 2016 is an optimistic date to see a land-landing if they get a few landed on the barge this year.
You hit it right on the nose. I have a 60D with a couple nice lenses on it and for my hobby purposes I will be hanging onto this for the next 5 years at least and that's a camera that's just above the low end of the DSLR market. Something like the 5DMkII is built like such a tank and puts out images that only the top-end gear could beat it and even then it's closer than what Canon/Nikon would like you to believe.
I would imagine with the lens and camera rentals becoming more mainstream more people will shoot with their phone and can rent a high end kit for vacations or when they feel they need it.
I've been using it for years now with the Android app and it's been terrific. You can also just use it via SMS. Other software vendors can even leverage Google's app for their own products (One example I know is Guild Wars 2 can use Google's app for 2 factor on your game account)
Agreed it likely varies by state and city, but at the end of the day your municipality had to grant some form of monopoly to someone for utility delivery. Where i am (Central FL) if you live in one part of the city you have OUC and in the other parts you have Duke and that's that for power. The system you describe is hopefully part of what we'll see in internet delivery. Comcast could in theory be forced to wholesale their cable lines for other ISP's to compete with service over.
Therein lies the point. Your gas/water/power utility is a natural monopoly granted by your municipality as it makes sense in many cases to have one source for those items due to the huge capital involved in deployment and not wanting to have a mess of pipes and wires criss-crossing the city from every provider.
Now with those utilities when they are granted that monopoly it carries certain regulations. Rates are negotiated and fixed and cannot be increased without approval from the city. Service has to be provided equally and throughout (The power/water companies cant deny you service because you are out of the way or one block too far from the water line, unlike your ISP). Right now the your local ISP gets all the benefits from the local monopoly but without any of the regulations. This just puts them under the same sets of rules.
Before the internet there were these things called "telephones" and being the most crucial communication medium we had it was in everyone's best interest to make sure all people could get service. If you wanted a phone in your house the local telco was obligated to provide service at a regulated rate. The internet has replaced the phone as the communication utility every household needs. It should be regulated as such.
This isn't about Sony jumping in with F2P, it's about the high cost of developing MMO games. When a game costs north of $100,000,000 to develop as well as the high number of servers and support staff you need to be able to reach as many gamers as possible. Being restricted to Sony/PC platform still leaves out the XBox audience (while smaller than PS4/PC it's still a large enough chunk to not ignore) and being under Sony's control means cross-platform is something of a conflict of interest.
Sony will still be more than amicable with having the new studios games on it's hardware it just gives the developers more flexibility. Sony still collects it's license fees by the game being on PS4 and they'd rather collect those fees (the bread and butter of consoles) and not be responsible for the day-to-day operations, which will likely operate better as an entity who does and only does MMO as opposed to cog in a huge corporate umbrella.
I think Android tablets were all set to be huge but a couple things happened:
- The phablet boom came in and seems to dominating the Android ecosystem. Many people i know have a Note3/4 and that fills both needs "well enough". - The tablet app ecosystem for Android is still a bit lacking. Android goes punch for punch with the iPhone nowadays but the iPad seems to have so many more dedicated tablet apps and for high end apps like audio production and AAA mobile games the iPad gets most of the support (likely since iPad users seem far more willing to put actual dollars for expensive dedicated apps).
I have an Android Tablet and an iPad Air and the iPad's apps are great and polished and built for the platform whereas the Android tablet while still quite useful and has some killer apps it still seems to be treated as "a big phone".
Couple things for the naysayers to consider though, and why I believe Episode 7 will be good (but not near the hype):
- Abrams himself said he is a much bigger fan of Star Wars than Star Trek. You can see that in the Trek films. They are far more "space action" akin to W than Trek.
- Disney is the big mouse and certainly has and can screw with production they have really let the Marvel folks run their own system and it's working to great effect. The hot thing for studios these days is a more hands off approach and that's good for everyone.
- Kathleen Kennedy is running SW and shes been around for the golden years for Lucas and Spielburg. Disney will let her and Abrams run the show.
- Dear god the script. Both ST reboots were penned by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. They are responsible for quite a bit of the new hollywood schlock (Look at their IMDB's). Hell you could make a case that Abrams direction is what made the new Treks at least somewhat enjoyable and not just Transformers in space (and Into Darkness came close). Lawrence Kasdan who wrote TESB is involved. Basically everyone who's had their hands on the SW script has far more talent then those two.
And lastly my biggest hope is that this is a movie being made by a generation that grew up on SW. They had to eat what Lucas was giving them like the rest of us and should want to start anew. Every fan has thought "if i made a SW sequel..." and now some of those folks are getting to, with some help from those that helped in the beginning.
Could it all go south? Very much so, but I am keeping restrained excitement.
While I would be pissed if I owned an RT device, the whole thing had the classic Ballmer "me too!" strategy all over it.
x86 can't support a tablet for more than 4 hours? Better use ARM! Everyone else is! Screw compatibility!
Whats that Intel? You've new chips coming in 8 months that will give Windows tablets 9 hour run-times with no real work on our part? You left a voicemail? Our WinPhone 7 never upgraded to voicemail and we didn't want to ditch it for WinPhone 8. Oops.
I don't know what 1990s you were living in but in the one I was in I sure wasn't able to own a compelling virtual reality experience for less than $500. All those developers who don't care at all about VR? I don't suppose they're the ones who sold out the Oculus DK2 for months? I know i'm never going to want to check out a HoloLens, the one I got 23 years ago still works just great over my parallel port. Sure there was VR in 1992 but there was also an automobile in 1886, not exactly accurate to say an Acura is just a rehash of an old idea.
One of my main issues with mandatory drug testing, especially before one even has the job, is it's still unfairly selective. Lets say you had 3 job candidates:
#1 - An alcoholic with a real issue. They sober up the night before the interview/test.
#2 - A cocaine addict who stopped using a few days before the interview/test.
#3 - An occasional marijuana user who smoked a joint 2 weeks ago.
Assuming everything else about those candidates is equal only one of those people is going to fail the test and not get the job. All 3 of them could be perfectly fine at it and never present an issue but some common sense and risk analysis would tell you the one who failed is probably the least likely to present an issue down the line.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, did anyone with any common sense think these things were going to work out first try? We're not even at the point where display tech can take a decent drop and not fail or crack. I know OLEDs are supposed to be more durable but asking a screen to take god know's how many fold and unfolds a day on top of the other abuse phones take throughout a day and survive as long a modern phone does (and many don't last more than a couple years as it is)
They should really just call something like this "early access" for hardware and let people know what they're getting. I think folding screen tech will be really interesting and useful, but we are least 2 or 3 more generations from it being everyday ready.
It's nice if you actually use all the features, but if you end up just using it as a big display, then you really just overpaid. Its nice that it's all in one with a PC, cameras and speakers rather than a hodge-podge of equipment, but in my experience people who want "The Surface" really want that particular one for the prestige since they are hard to get rather then the many many equivalent corporate collaboration systems out there.
Surface table was cool but once large multi-touch systems became somewhat easy to buy and make there wasnt really a need for it. As i recall that table used a slick but complicated optical system for touch, now you can do it easy with a PCAP or IR based touch frame. You can buy them for any LCD and put it on a table and get the same effect.
This company makes some really nice ones.
https://ideum.com/
Back in the 2G/3G days the CDMA carriers Verizon/Sprint did this very thing. Phones had no SIM slots, just a mobile equipment identifier (MEID) which was hard coded into the phone. Those phones were totally carrier locked with no way to change it. I mean if WiMax hadn't failed they would probably still be doing that but i believe supporting LTE required the use of SIM cards.
I got this email from Corvalent's mailing list (Corvalent is an industrial/embedded manufacturer). Had some of their insight into the whole ordeal which i found interesting.
What is Corvalent’s Insight on Hardware Hacking?
“It is our technical opinion that modifications of hardware, firmware and/or software are all possible ways to interfere with the normal operation of boards. Each of them has advantages and disadvantages, including technical complexity, ease of detection, and cost of implementation,” said Martin Rudloff, Corvalent’s CTO. “Typically this means that for someone to deploy an attack of the scope reported by Bloomberg in its Super Micro feature, the target must be specific and worthwhile in order to justify the high cost involved. Targeting only one or a few major companies would also minimize the risk of discovery.”
“Without deeper knowledge of the hardware and the software running on a server, information gathered from it may not allow a thief to decode or understand what the data means. And without knowing the end users’ security measures, we find it unlikely that the information could be forwarded to an external recipient,” added Rudloff.
Curiosity kicked in when we were discussing the level of difficulty in modifying the RJ45, so we decided to open one and check it out firsthand. As you can see below, it is very hard to open the metal enclosure without damaging it. The interior is fully packed, leaving little space to add additional circuitry. A fully assembled modified unit would probably be a better choice, but would involve the highly sophisticated effort of tapping into the supply chain and replacing the original parts with counterfeits.
Should we Question Such a Significant Story?
Bloomberg is a trusted new source with impeccable standards for truth and accuracy in reporting. Even so, it is possible that the story is incorrect. Sources provided data they understood to be accurate and truthful based on reports seen by them only; however, these were not shared with Bloomberg directly. There are technical inconsistencies to consider as well.
It should be possible to detect oddities in network traffic coming from a BMC behaving in unexpected ways. Alterations to the kernel and software stack should also set off alarms during or after system boot.
The chip pictured in the Bloomberg story fits on the tip of a pencil, yet it purportedly holds enough data to replace the data extracted from the BMC, alter the existing OS, and implement backdoor system access. This means the chip must either be larger than pictured or is using new lithography.
Why go to the trouble of placing a new chip on the board instead of a backdoor version of one already certified as part of the design?
Strong and specific denials by Amazon and Apple – different from the usual ‘we do not discuss issues of security as a matter of policy’– further stress the story’s validity.
Optimistically you are in 4th place in self driving tech Behind Waymo Cruise and Tesla (and really no-one is close to Waymo with 7M miles logged and 80k vehicles on order) This accident showed how far behind they really are and from the details of their legal fight it shows how Waymo was really right all along about Levandowski and the methods he wanted to take. He wanted to push the envelope and get vehicles on the road when they wanted to be conservative and test as much as possible. Now that $500M for Otto is down the tubes with nothing to show for it. Give it up and focus on competing with Lyft and improving your core service.
For some anecdotal evidence my wife was skeptical when I wanted to watch Battlestar Galactica (the 2004 version) but ended up loving it greatly and with good reason. It's an excellent written show with a great cast that includes several strong women roles. Much stronger female roles than say TNG had (which she also enjoyed after some coaxing to give it a chance). If anything i find that only 15% of women reviewed as a case that maybe more women should give it a shot and it's probably one of the best shows for introducing Sci-fi to women, who in my experience are just as quick to write things like that off as men are of writing off something like Sex and the City without giving a chance first.
I am with you, I would love to see more Displayport connectors out in the consumer field. The connector is better than DVI/HDMI and it's an open VESA standard. Unfortunately it seems the media companies and the consumer electronics manufacturers decided on HDMI due to content protection and wanting to control the signal path (never-mind that Displayport has and does support HDCP) even though HDCP hasn't prevented anything and is really just a huge PITA for anyone working with it in a commercial AV setting.
Not exactly what you are getting at but the main technology that separate Displayport from previous display standards is that the video signal is in fact packetized (but it uses as they call it "micro-packets"). This is how they've been able to get up to 8k/60hz now without changing the cables or the connector. It's not quite as high level as an IP connection but more akin to PCI-Express rather then just a raw stream of bits over a wire.
https://w00tsec.blogspot.com.a...
The article in the summary doesnt list which modems are affected as i have an Arris Modem myself, but looks to be the TG862A, TG862G, and DG860A.
Also notable that a quick glance of reviews on Amazon says there is no end user support for these, they are always ISP controlled.
Carriers: The numbers all go to 5G. Look, right across the board, 5G, 5G, 5G and...
Customers: Oh, I see. And most networks go up to 4G?
Carriers: Exactly.
Customers: Does that mean it's faster? Is it any faster?
Carriers: Well, it's one faster, isn't it? It's not 4G. You see, most blokes, you know, will be surfing at 4G. You're on 4G here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on 4G on your phone. Where can you go from there? Where?
Customers: I don't know.
Carriers: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Customers: Put it up to 5G.
Carriers: 5G. Exactly. One faster.
Customers: Why don't you just make 4G faster and make 4G be the top number and make that a little faster?
Carriers: [pause] These go to 5G.
I think there's a few reasons they went that route:
- Apple has some degree of patents on Lightning, the USB-IF likely wanted to just avoid that altogether
- Lightning connectors I've read had some issues with corrosion with their pins being exposed and this likely mitigates that by keeping the cables pins somewhat protected from fingers and such
- I believe the encapsulated design was also introduced to make the board mount socket connectors sturdier as I am likely not the only one who has had Micro-USB sockets break off a PCB
- Overall I would imagine there's benefits for the connector manufacturers to working within a similar framework as they can apple lessons they learned from MicroUSB for manufacturing. I'm sure they also had a say in the design as it moved forward.
As mentioned elsewhere in here, Thunderbolt is fine as it's an open spec and is intended for different use cases than USB, and it also shares a port design with mini-Displayport (which we can thank Apple for openly releasing that connector standard).
Lightning, while a very good physical design for a connector will likely fall soon as the power benefits of USB-C are too good to pass up and iPad/Macbook Airs without it are going to seem antiquated when every other tablet and ultrabook will be sharing a universal charging system. However Apple is no worse a shape than every other phone manufacturer. They'll release new models with USB-C along with every other manufacturer as then every user can complain equally for the next couple years that they need all new cables and chargers.
If Apple double downs on Lightning and sticks with it I would be extremely impressed with their level of stubbornness.
I used uTorrent when it was fairly new and it was excellent but in this day and age does it offer anything versus the number of matured open-source alternatives out there? I'm really asking if it has some special sauce that gives it an edge. When it was released one could look past it's closed source nature since it made it's mark being lightweight yet feature packed. Once the major update that brought advertising on-board I saw no reason to use it anymore.
I've been using qBittorent for a couple years and it gives me all the relevant functionality without the mess as well as Transmission QT for Windows and Deluge, I can see no reason to use uTorrent when it's been shown repeatedly to be scum-ware.
SpaceX is not allowed by the FAA (and I assume NASA/USAF have something to say as well) to to perform landings on land until they can prove that the system works reliably, so the way around that is use the barge. I believe they are already prepping a landing pad in Cape Canaveral and eventually they will likely land back to their launch site in Texas once completed. I would say 2016 is an optimistic date to see a land-landing if they get a few landed on the barge this year.
You hit it right on the nose. I have a 60D with a couple nice lenses on it and for my hobby purposes I will be hanging onto this for the next 5 years at least and that's a camera that's just above the low end of the DSLR market. Something like the 5DMkII is built like such a tank and puts out images that only the top-end gear could beat it and even then it's closer than what Canon/Nikon would like you to believe.
I would imagine with the lens and camera rentals becoming more mainstream more people will shoot with their phone and can rent a high end kit for vacations or when they feel they need it.
You can enable it once you have created an account: https://www.google.com/landing/2step/
I've been using it for years now with the Android app and it's been terrific. You can also just use it via SMS. Other software vendors can even leverage Google's app for their own products (One example I know is Guild Wars 2 can use Google's app for 2 factor on your game account)
Agreed it likely varies by state and city, but at the end of the day your municipality had to grant some form of monopoly to someone for utility delivery. Where i am (Central FL) if you live in one part of the city you have OUC and in the other parts you have Duke and that's that for power. The system you describe is hopefully part of what we'll see in internet delivery. Comcast could in theory be forced to wholesale their cable lines for other ISP's to compete with service over.
Therein lies the point. Your gas/water/power utility is a natural monopoly granted by your municipality as it makes sense in many cases to have one source for those items due to the huge capital involved in deployment and not wanting to have a mess of pipes and wires criss-crossing the city from every provider.
Now with those utilities when they are granted that monopoly it carries certain regulations. Rates are negotiated and fixed and cannot be increased without approval from the city. Service has to be provided equally and throughout (The power/water companies cant deny you service because you are out of the way or one block too far from the water line, unlike your ISP). Right now the your local ISP gets all the benefits from the local monopoly but without any of the regulations. This just puts them under the same sets of rules.
Before the internet there were these things called "telephones" and being the most crucial communication medium we had it was in everyone's best interest to make sure all people could get service. If you wanted a phone in your house the local telco was obligated to provide service at a regulated rate. The internet has replaced the phone as the communication utility every household needs. It should be regulated as such.
This isn't about Sony jumping in with F2P, it's about the high cost of developing MMO games. When a game costs north of $100,000,000 to develop as well as the high number of servers and support staff you need to be able to reach as many gamers as possible. Being restricted to Sony/PC platform still leaves out the XBox audience (while smaller than PS4/PC it's still a large enough chunk to not ignore) and being under Sony's control means cross-platform is something of a conflict of interest.
Sony will still be more than amicable with having the new studios games on it's hardware it just gives the developers more flexibility. Sony still collects it's license fees by the game being on PS4 and they'd rather collect those fees (the bread and butter of consoles) and not be responsible for the day-to-day operations, which will likely operate better as an entity who does and only does MMO as opposed to cog in a huge corporate umbrella.
I think Android tablets were all set to be huge but a couple things happened:
- The phablet boom came in and seems to dominating the Android ecosystem. Many people i know have a Note3/4 and that fills both needs "well enough".
- The tablet app ecosystem for Android is still a bit lacking. Android goes punch for punch with the iPhone nowadays but the iPad seems to have so many more dedicated tablet apps and for high end apps like audio production and AAA mobile games the iPad gets most of the support (likely since iPad users seem far more willing to put actual dollars for expensive dedicated apps).
I have an Android Tablet and an iPad Air and the iPad's apps are great and polished and built for the platform whereas the Android tablet while still quite useful and has some killer apps it still seems to be treated as "a big phone".
Couple things for the naysayers to consider though, and why I believe Episode 7 will be good (but not near the hype):
- Abrams himself said he is a much bigger fan of Star Wars than Star Trek. You can see that in the Trek films. They are far more "space action" akin to W than Trek.
- Disney is the big mouse and certainly has and can screw with production they have really let the Marvel folks run their own system and it's working to great effect. The hot thing for studios these days is a more hands off approach and that's good for everyone.
- Kathleen Kennedy is running SW and shes been around for the golden years for Lucas and Spielburg. Disney will let her and Abrams run the show.
- Dear god the script. Both ST reboots were penned by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. They are responsible for quite a bit of the new hollywood schlock (Look at their IMDB's). Hell you could make a case that Abrams direction is what made the new Treks at least somewhat enjoyable and not just Transformers in space (and Into Darkness came close). Lawrence Kasdan who wrote TESB is involved. Basically everyone who's had their hands on the SW script has far more talent then those two.
And lastly my biggest hope is that this is a movie being made by a generation that grew up on SW. They had to eat what Lucas was giving them like the rest of us and should want to start anew. Every fan has thought "if i made a SW sequel..." and now some of those folks are getting to, with some help from those that helped in the beginning.
Could it all go south? Very much so, but I am keeping restrained excitement.
While I would be pissed if I owned an RT device, the whole thing had the classic Ballmer "me too!" strategy all over it.
x86 can't support a tablet for more than 4 hours? Better use ARM! Everyone else is! Screw compatibility!
Whats that Intel? You've new chips coming in 8 months that will give Windows tablets 9 hour run-times with no real work on our part? You left a voicemail? Our WinPhone 7 never upgraded to voicemail and we didn't want to ditch it for WinPhone 8. Oops.
I don't know what 1990s you were living in but in the one I was in I sure wasn't able to own a compelling virtual reality experience for less than $500. All those developers who don't care at all about VR? I don't suppose they're the ones who sold out the Oculus DK2 for months? I know i'm never going to want to check out a HoloLens, the one I got 23 years ago still works just great over my parallel port. Sure there was VR in 1992 but there was also an automobile in 1886, not exactly accurate to say an Acura is just a rehash of an old idea.
One of my main issues with mandatory drug testing, especially before one even has the job, is it's still unfairly selective. Lets say you had 3 job candidates:
#1 - An alcoholic with a real issue. They sober up the night before the interview/test.
#2 - A cocaine addict who stopped using a few days before the interview/test.
#3 - An occasional marijuana user who smoked a joint 2 weeks ago.
Assuming everything else about those candidates is equal only one of those people is going to fail the test and not get the job. All 3 of them could be perfectly fine at it and never present an issue but some common sense and risk analysis would tell you the one who failed is probably the least likely to present an issue down the line.