I actually thought the balance board was rather counter intuitive as a controller, for certain things at least. For example when you are ski-ing or snowboarding, sure you have to balance (though if you are able to stand still in a certain position without falling over I'd say you were balanced okay), but your direction of movement is largely decided by the angle of your skis/board rather than where your center of gravity is - if you get your center of gravity in the wrong place you'd fall over sure, but your board or skis would be going in the direction that your feet had them carving. I found myself trying to push down on the board with my feet a lot more than just shifting my balance. Or I'd move my head but leave my center of gravity where it was for example. I've only used one for about half an hour, and I was getting used to just shifting my center of gravity around instead of doing anything else by the end, but I think it's a rather awkward control system in and of itself. Combined with other methods of input it could have some novel uses though..
It also predicted my body age as 33 which I was a bit miffed about, as I think my balance is pretty good. I was doing a lot of martial arts last year and still have noticeably better balance when standing on one foot than the years prior (I'd done a bit of martial arts when I was in primary school too but over the years my ankle strength and balance ability relative to my body mass obviously dropped off a bit!), though perhaps I tend to wave around a bit when I'm standing on both feet..
Not sure, but my Firefox is already at version 3.0 from automatic updates in Windows. Oops! May just download it anyway if I remember later - I'll need to get the update for OS X at some point anyway, I'm not sure if automatic updates count toward the total though..
The article has details on most of the stuff you are questioning there, it's probably worth a read just to brush up on what you already know. It is interesting to wonder what would have happened had WWII not got in the way of this guys work, it is pretty sad..
I found the end of the article quite amusing though:
"The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum," said the lead archivist, Stephanie Manfroid. "People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It's like, would you rather go see the latest 'Star Wars' movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?" Personally I'd much rather see a giant revolutionary card catalog system than watch the latest Star Wars movies again!:)
That's still earlier than those developing cancer late in life, the OP was talking about getting rid of all possible diseases and defects by not having children that were genetically more susceptible to them. I hadn't realised that he developed this after being born, I stand corrected there, but the point is, should his parents have aborted him even if they knew that he was going to be confined to a wheelchair for most of his life?
Fair enough, the fact remains that following the OP's line of reasoning, he may have been aborted if his parents could tell that he was going to develop a debilitating disease.. I'm still of the opinion that factors contributing to being susceptible to it could also be factors in making him more intelligent, genes can work together in strange ways.
I would have thought it would be more about ensuring that the child could lead a happy life rather than worrying about it draining resources:p One obvious argument against this is that we wouldn't have people Stephen Hawking if we just aborted everyone who was crippled, etc.. hopefully he is just happy to be alive and thinking but I don't know. Perhaps if he was more mobile then he wouldn't have developed such a keen mind. It's still a bit of a gamble though, I certainaly wouldn't want to feel responsible for someone leading a life as a cripple unless I knew that they were going to lead a happy one.
Personally, I feel I've got enough mental problems without being physically crippled too. I'd hate to be me inside a crippled body as well. Saying that, if I knew I'd be free of any possible hereditary mental problems then I'd seriously consider choosing being physically crippled rather than having mental issues though - there was one point in my life where I'd just come off anti-depressants (I later found out, from Wikipedia no less, that the type of anti-depressant I was taking was actually found to make people's symptoms worse in some cases, so I assume that some types of depression link in to OCD somehow too), but I'd done it far too abruptly and ended up having a period of pretty intense OCD. I didn't know why I was having all these weird worries about stupid things that I knew weren't true, but then someone told me about OCD and looking back I could see that I'd had it mildly all my life: obsession with certain numbers, always wanting to take the exact same route back as I took to get to a place, having to spin back the opposite way if I'd spun in one direction while doing stuff (like in the kitchen drying dishes for example, if I span round 360 one direction I'd make sure to go back the other direction soon after..), touching things a certain number of times; there was one point in my life where I used to have to bounce on a seat an odd number of times, preferably 3 or 7, before I would sit on it, I stopped after my dad kept yelling at me about it, it must have looked really weird >_> I wish I'd known that it was a recognised problem rather than just me being frickin weird, as it is I was 22 before I even found out what OCD was, and a lot of the things I'd worried about or done in life were classic OCD.
I guess most geeks probably have some level of autism, OCD or other mild mental problems that are beneficial in some ways (interest in numbers and patterns for example) as well as being debilitating in others..:/ And it may turn out that you can't have a genetic 'superhuman' that is super-healthy, super-smart, etc without also giving them some serious problems! Maybe the very thing that made Steven Hawking crippled also made him 'smart'..
Yeah I'd always thought she was pretty hawt, but I prefer my chicks to be hawt+smart rather than hawt+dumb. I do indeed like Macs too, did you have a point my dear? I mean my man. I mean.. meh
PS here is something 'funny' that has been doing the rounds for 15 years, if you do not pass it on to 1000 more people in the next 2 hours then wild dogs will chew off your testicles.
My first website was actually done in Word, it's funny looking back:s That was a few years before I learned HTML as part of my University course - I'd never been interested in HTML, I guess I considered it 'below' me or something since I could code in C and Pascal. The history of HTML is pretty interesting though, and it is obviously a very powerful/useful standard for laying out pages and is one of the main building blocks for the internet as we all know it today.. these days I do my HTML coding with Perl:) There was one point a few months ago where I was generating dynamic Javascript menus with Perl, I found it quite amusing writing code in an interpreted high level language that then generated code in another high level interpreted language that then generated some dynamic HTML for a menu structure:P That was just using a menu system I'd nabbed from somewhere else though, I probably would have been better off learning more about dynamic HTML and writing my own. I looked into it a few years ago and it seemed like a complex nightmare with all the differences between IE/Netscape DOMs etc - these days it's better though, browsers are a lot better at handling dynamic changes. Meh I always drift waaaay offtopic! Basically you're right, these kids need to learn what real programming is, and how the internet actually works..
programming is a dead end job. I'm hoping that's only true if 'programming' means writing HTML (I have heard people refer to that as programming, yep!). Someone's got to write the software for all that shiny new hardware:) If you're in the right market then you'll get paid okay for it too. I started off helping out with IT support for an Engineering company, but now I'm happily developing and maintaining a few in-house apps for them. I already get paid more than I really need, so I'd expect anyone who is lead programmer for a successful application or games company probably does pretty well for themselves..
And are you saying that it says something negative, or that it shows that this person understands how society currently operates, whether you like it or not?;)
I think there will be women who write better code than some men, and men who write better code than some women. Obviously most of the coders in the world are male though, that is just how it has turned out so far.
I have only met one woman who I know must have been a half-decent coder. She often got among the top marks in all of our classes at University, and obviously put more effort in than most, as well as being bright, so I expect her code must have been okay. And then again there was another girl in our classes, who once came over and tried to get me to basically do her assignment for her. I politely tried to help her along without actually giving her the answer (as I think any good teacher would/should do when asked for help), but could tell that she didn't actually care and was just trying to get me to do it for her, so I eventually got pretty pissed off and thankfully she just took the hint and moved on to the next unsuspecting sex-deprived geek. I was confused as to why someone like that would even do Computer Science at University level.. and how she managed to get so far. She probably was quite bright too, but just lazy.
Anyway, anecdotal evidence can always be found to argue one way or the other, it doesn't mean much at all. I have met plenty of smart guys and girls, and plenty of dumb ones. This article is just flame bait. I would say that I believe that women in all societies are naturally more empathetic and considerate, for whatever reason, but I personally comment my code or try to make it as obvious as possible what is happening with sensible variable names, etc. Not all guys are macho jerks out to show that they are 'smarter' than the rest. In fact I'd say the truly smarter guys are the ones who are sensible enough to write their code in a way that it can easily be maintained by themselves or others in future. I know I've come back to my code after weeks/months and been like wtf!? I then proceed to delete a line of code that looks like it is completely extraneous, only to find that a completely different section of my program relies on it being there, it's just that everything has been modified so many times (either through my own fault or by management always asking for things in the program to be changed far beyond the original agreed implementation..) that it is in a mess.
It kind of depends on what you're going for. If you want to be happy then getting fed a lot of half-truths or lies is probably the way to go (as long as they're positive of course, I'm thinking people would be happier if they believed that certain famous people had just retired rather than died, or that there are no poor third world countries, etc).
If you want to only believe in what is known to be factual then it would be better to know nothing than to know something that is flawed, unless you are going to do a study into finding and fixing the flaws. If you're reading a wikipedia article then there's a chance you are wanting to get acquainted with a topic in order to go into it in more depth, and then you will be able to fix the flaws in the articles.
On the flip side there will also be the odd person who treats a wiki article as gospel and doesn't do any more research.
For someone like an engineer, using wikipedia as a primary source of research is bad, but for someone just looking up an explanation of slashdot memes for example, it's probably not so important..
You could just change your user prefs to mod down funny posts and mod up the insightful ones? I am here to learn and keep up with news, but I must admit I tend to try to go for humour rather than insightfulness myself. Sometimes I even get modded funny!
And here I was thinking that id were one of the most prominent software houses for any geek to know;) I mean I wouldn't say I knew exhaustively who made what, but I knew Codemasters made Colin Mcrae and released Operation Flashpoint, Valve make Half-Life, id make Doom/Quake, 3D Realms make Duke Nukem (well, they used to;) ), EA make a never ending multitude of yearly sports games, and need for speed, Naughty Dog make Crash Bandicoot games (which I generally am not that interested in, but Crash Team Racing is an excellent alternative to MarioKart for the PlayStation consoles) and recently did 'Uncharted!' which is a great game on the PS3.. uh.. Atari make Test Drive and probably some other games as well as re-releasing old classics like pong. Outside of people who make old-skool FPSes and racing games I probably don't know many developers though >_>
Are you serious? Worms was an awesome and massively famouse game that spawned a large series of games - done in Blitz Basic like AC says, I think Worms was winner of a competition in Amiga Format, I'd got blitz basic myself but I was about 14 and it was unstable enough even without a budding programmer trying to get to grips with it. I liked Super Skid Marks to though again it tended to crash a lot on my Amiga. It was a racing game in case your mind is still pondering. The TOCA series is great, Rainbow Island was amazing (sequel to Bubble Bobble), Micro Machines is a hilarious multiplayer classic for up to 4 players using only 2 console controllers.. Sensible World of Soccer (SWOS) is regarded by even one of the hardcore football fans I know as one of the best football games in history just for sheer fun and playability. Cannon Fodder was also good fun and used a similar style of graphics to SWOS. I would have thought that Colin McRae Rally especially was famous the world round, it would be weird if it was all just a british phenomenon (despite the fact that it has a scottish rally driver as its name) since World Rally obviously involves many countries. Star Trek: Elite Force was also a pretty good FPS based on the Quake III engine in the Star Trek universe, I only played the demo but I think my brother has the full thing and the sequel somewhere..
I wonder if that Maelstrom game is the same one that I played on the Mac that had all the funny sound effect clips from Aliens etc..
Oops. Here I was waiting for the Sequel (rather than an expansion pack) all these years! OpFlashpoint was one of the best games I've ever ever ever played, so immersive that I stayed up for almost 3 days solid until I'd completed it. Thanks for the heads up, I should probably get that even if it will tempt me to spend money on my old PC gaming rig just for one game. Armed Assault 2 looks like it will be out on PS3 at least:)
For some reason I've just never liked Nokia - that first started probably just because *everyone* seemed to have one and were obsessed with Snake, which I had already played and got bored of years before with QBasic's 'nibbles' and similar (but better) games on my Amiga. Then they all had the standard crappy candybar design - I have always thought clamshells are damn cool, fun to use, and as a practical benefit they sidestep the need for a keylock. It's better to look for the best you can get for your money and not just copy everyone else, ie I got an iRiver instead of an iPod way back when, ending up with the same amount of storage, twice the battery life, and more functionality for less money..
Anyway, this really isn't helping to improve my opinion of Nokia. The most interesting manufacturer at the moment seems to be HTC, they make some awesome devices with heaps of functionality (the slide out keyboards and touchscreens were the first thing that drew me to them a couple of years ago) and reasonable prices. They're using Windows Mobile at the moment, which I don't actually have that much of a problem with. It's a bit slow sometimes, which pisses me off when I know that the phone is powerful enough and it's just the OS that's causing the problems, but meh it works. When HTC complete the move to Android I'm expecting some really great things for them though:)
I have gotten used to the joypad after years of using it for driving games on the PSX and PS2 when I was younger - while steering wheels are good when you need neatness, you can do some pretty impressive stuff with a joypad too, considering it takes very little effort to quickly apply opposite lock to correct oversteer or do a scandinavian flick for example. Using a proper steering wheel setup is more enjoyable for a more realistic experience, though only if the game supports it properly. GT5 is pretty good apart from you can't redefine the buttons for a wheel, and it didn't support the gated gearshifting either.
I was a bit annoyed at Colin McRae because it didn't even support a clutch pedal, and it could only use 200 degree steering mode rather than the full 900 that you get on the G25:/ So I ended up just using the controller and treating it more as just another arcade game, and it's fun enough, with some beautiful graphics even if the frame rate isn't always perfectly smooth:p
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I actually thought the balance board was rather counter intuitive as a controller, for certain things at least. For example when you are ski-ing or snowboarding, sure you have to balance (though if you are able to stand still in a certain position without falling over I'd say you were balanced okay), but your direction of movement is largely decided by the angle of your skis/board rather than where your center of gravity is - if you get your center of gravity in the wrong place you'd fall over sure, but your board or skis would be going in the direction that your feet had them carving. I found myself trying to push down on the board with my feet a lot more than just shifting my balance. Or I'd move my head but leave my center of gravity where it was for example. I've only used one for about half an hour, and I was getting used to just shifting my center of gravity around instead of doing anything else by the end, but I think it's a rather awkward control system in and of itself. Combined with other methods of input it could have some novel uses though..
It also predicted my body age as 33 which I was a bit miffed about, as I think my balance is pretty good. I was doing a lot of martial arts last year and still have noticeably better balance when standing on one foot than the years prior (I'd done a bit of martial arts when I was in primary school too but over the years my ankle strength and balance ability relative to my body mass obviously dropped off a bit!), though perhaps I tend to wave around a bit when I'm standing on both feet..
Not sure, but my Firefox is already at version 3.0 from automatic updates in Windows. Oops! May just download it anyway if I remember later - I'll need to get the update for OS X at some point anyway, I'm not sure if automatic updates count toward the total though..
I found the end of the article quite amusing though: "The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum," said the lead archivist, Stephanie Manfroid. "People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It's like, would you rather go see the latest 'Star Wars' movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?" Personally I'd much rather see a giant revolutionary card catalog system than watch the latest Star Wars movies again!
That's still earlier than those developing cancer late in life, the OP was talking about getting rid of all possible diseases and defects by not having children that were genetically more susceptible to them. I hadn't realised that he developed this after being born, I stand corrected there, but the point is, should his parents have aborted him even if they knew that he was going to be confined to a wheelchair for most of his life?
Fair enough, the fact remains that following the OP's line of reasoning, he may have been aborted if his parents could tell that he was going to develop a debilitating disease.. I'm still of the opinion that factors contributing to being susceptible to it could also be factors in making him more intelligent, genes can work together in strange ways.
I would have thought it would be more about ensuring that the child could lead a happy life rather than worrying about it draining resources :p One obvious argument against this is that we wouldn't have people Stephen Hawking if we just aborted everyone who was crippled, etc.. hopefully he is just happy to be alive and thinking but I don't know. Perhaps if he was more mobile then he wouldn't have developed such a keen mind. It's still a bit of a gamble though, I certainaly wouldn't want to feel responsible for someone leading a life as a cripple unless I knew that they were going to lead a happy one.
:/ And it may turn out that you can't have a genetic 'superhuman' that is super-healthy, super-smart, etc without also giving them some serious problems! Maybe the very thing that made Steven Hawking crippled also made him 'smart'..
Personally, I feel I've got enough mental problems without being physically crippled too. I'd hate to be me inside a crippled body as well. Saying that, if I knew I'd be free of any possible hereditary mental problems then I'd seriously consider choosing being physically crippled rather than having mental issues though - there was one point in my life where I'd just come off anti-depressants (I later found out, from Wikipedia no less, that the type of anti-depressant I was taking was actually found to make people's symptoms worse in some cases, so I assume that some types of depression link in to OCD somehow too), but I'd done it far too abruptly and ended up having a period of pretty intense OCD. I didn't know why I was having all these weird worries about stupid things that I knew weren't true, but then someone told me about OCD and looking back I could see that I'd had it mildly all my life: obsession with certain numbers, always wanting to take the exact same route back as I took to get to a place, having to spin back the opposite way if I'd spun in one direction while doing stuff (like in the kitchen drying dishes for example, if I span round 360 one direction I'd make sure to go back the other direction soon after..), touching things a certain number of times; there was one point in my life where I used to have to bounce on a seat an odd number of times, preferably 3 or 7, before I would sit on it, I stopped after my dad kept yelling at me about it, it must have looked really weird >_> I wish I'd known that it was a recognised problem rather than just me being frickin weird, as it is I was 22 before I even found out what OCD was, and a lot of the things I'd worried about or done in life were classic OCD.
I guess most geeks probably have some level of autism, OCD or other mild mental problems that are beneficial in some ways (interest in numbers and patterns for example) as well as being debilitating in others..
Yeah I'd always thought she was pretty hawt, but I prefer my chicks to be hawt+smart rather than hawt+dumb. I do indeed like Macs too, did you have a point my dear? I mean my man. I mean.. meh
PS here is something 'funny' that has been doing the rounds for 15 years, if you do not pass it on to 1000 more people in the next 2 hours then wild dogs will chew off your testicles.
BadAnalogyGuy, is that you on another account?
Quit harrassing the Microsoft employees!
I thought that was a way over the top joke until I looked at TFA.. wow. Just wow.
My first website was actually done in Word, it's funny looking back :s That was a few years before I learned HTML as part of my University course - I'd never been interested in HTML, I guess I considered it 'below' me or something since I could code in C and Pascal. The history of HTML is pretty interesting though, and it is obviously a very powerful/useful standard for laying out pages and is one of the main building blocks for the internet as we all know it today.. these days I do my HTML coding with Perl :) There was one point a few months ago where I was generating dynamic Javascript menus with Perl, I found it quite amusing writing code in an interpreted high level language that then generated code in another high level interpreted language that then generated some dynamic HTML for a menu structure :P That was just using a menu system I'd nabbed from somewhere else though, I probably would have been better off learning more about dynamic HTML and writing my own. I looked into it a few years ago and it seemed like a complex nightmare with all the differences between IE/Netscape DOMs etc - these days it's better though, browsers are a lot better at handling dynamic changes. Meh I always drift waaaay offtopic! Basically you're right, these kids need to learn what real programming is, and how the internet actually works..
And are you saying that it says something negative, or that it shows that this person understands how society currently operates, whether you like it or not? ;)
I think there will be women who write better code than some men, and men who write better code than some women. Obviously most of the coders in the world are male though, that is just how it has turned out so far.
I have only met one woman who I know must have been a half-decent coder. She often got among the top marks in all of our classes at University, and obviously put more effort in than most, as well as being bright, so I expect her code must have been okay. And then again there was another girl in our classes, who once came over and tried to get me to basically do her assignment for her. I politely tried to help her along without actually giving her the answer (as I think any good teacher would/should do when asked for help), but could tell that she didn't actually care and was just trying to get me to do it for her, so I eventually got pretty pissed off and thankfully she just took the hint and moved on to the next unsuspecting sex-deprived geek. I was confused as to why someone like that would even do Computer Science at University level.. and how she managed to get so far. She probably was quite bright too, but just lazy.
Anyway, anecdotal evidence can always be found to argue one way or the other, it doesn't mean much at all. I have met plenty of smart guys and girls, and plenty of dumb ones. This article is just flame bait. I would say that I believe that women in all societies are naturally more empathetic and considerate, for whatever reason, but I personally comment my code or try to make it as obvious as possible what is happening with sensible variable names, etc. Not all guys are macho jerks out to show that they are 'smarter' than the rest. In fact I'd say the truly smarter guys are the ones who are sensible enough to write their code in a way that it can easily be maintained by themselves or others in future. I know I've come back to my code after weeks/months and been like wtf!? I then proceed to delete a line of code that looks like it is completely extraneous, only to find that a completely different section of my program relies on it being there, it's just that everything has been modified so many times (either through my own fault or by management always asking for things in the program to be changed far beyond the original agreed implementation..) that it is in a mess.
He should maybe change his name to Java
It kind of depends on what you're going for. If you want to be happy then getting fed a lot of half-truths or lies is probably the way to go (as long as they're positive of course, I'm thinking people would be happier if they believed that certain famous people had just retired rather than died, or that there are no poor third world countries, etc).
If you want to only believe in what is known to be factual then it would be better to know nothing than to know something that is flawed, unless you are going to do a study into finding and fixing the flaws. If you're reading a wikipedia article then there's a chance you are wanting to get acquainted with a topic in order to go into it in more depth, and then you will be able to fix the flaws in the articles.
On the flip side there will also be the odd person who treats a wiki article as gospel and doesn't do any more research.
For someone like an engineer, using wikipedia as a primary source of research is bad, but for someone just looking up an explanation of slashdot memes for example, it's probably not so important..
You could just change your user prefs to mod down funny posts and mod up the insightful ones? I am here to learn and keep up with news, but I must admit I tend to try to go for humour rather than insightfulness myself. Sometimes I even get modded funny!
It is pretty ridiculous. I'm also wondering how anyone needs to wipe so far as to get near their balls. I mean accidents can happen, but o_0
Eww. You just managed to give me a whole new meaning to 'junk mail'
Well, looks like Worms 4: Mayhem is Team 17 as well (just saw it on their website), Codemasters must just be the publisher.
And here I was thinking that id were one of the most prominent software houses for any geek to know ;) I mean I wouldn't say I knew exhaustively who made what, but I knew Codemasters made Colin Mcrae and released Operation Flashpoint, Valve make Half-Life, id make Doom/Quake, 3D Realms make Duke Nukem (well, they used to ;) ), EA make a never ending multitude of yearly sports games, and need for speed, Naughty Dog make Crash Bandicoot games (which I generally am not that interested in, but Crash Team Racing is an excellent alternative to MarioKart for the PlayStation consoles) and recently did 'Uncharted!' which is a great game on the PS3.. uh.. Atari make Test Drive and probably some other games as well as re-releasing old classics like pong. Outside of people who make old-skool FPSes and racing games I probably don't know many developers though >_>
Are you serious? Worms was an awesome and massively famouse game that spawned a large series of games - done in Blitz Basic like AC says, I think Worms was winner of a competition in Amiga Format, I'd got blitz basic myself but I was about 14 and it was unstable enough even without a budding programmer trying to get to grips with it. I liked Super Skid Marks to though again it tended to crash a lot on my Amiga. It was a racing game in case your mind is still pondering. The TOCA series is great, Rainbow Island was amazing (sequel to Bubble Bobble), Micro Machines is a hilarious multiplayer classic for up to 4 players using only 2 console controllers.. Sensible World of Soccer (SWOS) is regarded by even one of the hardcore football fans I know as one of the best football games in history just for sheer fun and playability. Cannon Fodder was also good fun and used a similar style of graphics to SWOS. I would have thought that Colin McRae Rally especially was famous the world round, it would be weird if it was all just a british phenomenon (despite the fact that it has a scottish rally driver as its name) since World Rally obviously involves many countries. Star Trek: Elite Force was also a pretty good FPS based on the Quake III engine in the Star Trek universe, I only played the demo but I think my brother has the full thing and the sequel somewhere..
I wonder if that Maelstrom game is the same one that I played on the Mac that had all the funny sound effect clips from Aliens etc..
Oops. Here I was waiting for the Sequel (rather than an expansion pack) all these years! OpFlashpoint was one of the best games I've ever ever ever played, so immersive that I stayed up for almost 3 days solid until I'd completed it. Thanks for the heads up, I should probably get that even if it will tempt me to spend money on my old PC gaming rig just for one game. Armed Assault 2 looks like it will be out on PS3 at least :)
For some reason I've just never liked Nokia - that first started probably just because *everyone* seemed to have one and were obsessed with Snake, which I had already played and got bored of years before with QBasic's 'nibbles' and similar (but better) games on my Amiga. Then they all had the standard crappy candybar design - I have always thought clamshells are damn cool, fun to use, and as a practical benefit they sidestep the need for a keylock. It's better to look for the best you can get for your money and not just copy everyone else, ie I got an iRiver instead of an iPod way back when, ending up with the same amount of storage, twice the battery life, and more functionality for less money..
:)
Anyway, this really isn't helping to improve my opinion of Nokia. The most interesting manufacturer at the moment seems to be HTC, they make some awesome devices with heaps of functionality (the slide out keyboards and touchscreens were the first thing that drew me to them a couple of years ago) and reasonable prices. They're using Windows Mobile at the moment, which I don't actually have that much of a problem with. It's a bit slow sometimes, which pisses me off when I know that the phone is powerful enough and it's just the OS that's causing the problems, but meh it works. When HTC complete the move to Android I'm expecting some really great things for them though
I have gotten used to the joypad after years of using it for driving games on the PSX and PS2 when I was younger - while steering wheels are good when you need neatness, you can do some pretty impressive stuff with a joypad too, considering it takes very little effort to quickly apply opposite lock to correct oversteer or do a scandinavian flick for example. Using a proper steering wheel setup is more enjoyable for a more realistic experience, though only if the game supports it properly. GT5 is pretty good apart from you can't redefine the buttons for a wheel, and it didn't support the gated gearshifting either.
:/ So I ended up just using the controller and treating it more as just another arcade game, and it's fun enough, with some beautiful graphics even if the frame rate isn't always perfectly smooth :p
I was a bit annoyed at Colin McRae because it didn't even support a clutch pedal, and it could only use 200 degree steering mode rather than the full 900 that you get on the G25