So you have some better project in mind that's "so good" that no one has ever been enthusiastic about it enough to bother trying to write a book for people who need such guidance?
You do realize that every single Blu-Ray player made up until that point would need its own separate firmware copy/version on the Blu-Ray disc, don't you?
I am not sure whether this is just a sign of NASA design stupidity (impossible to repair parts), or a reason why space travel will always just be an overblown luxury niche and will never become mainstream.
"I'm probably at least a few years from buying a Blu-Ray or other ultra-high definition device, so beating the 720x480 resolution of typical NTSC DVDs meets most of my movie- and Hulu-watching demands."
Not if you're watching widescreen DVDs. At worse, watching a 2.35:1 movie inside of a 800x600 (4:3) screen means you only get 340 lines vertical resolution, by my math. That's a lost of 20%.
The OS you are looking for is called Windows Mobile. Its been around a pretty long time and does not restrict anything you put on it.
As long as you don't mind running Windows on your cell phone. A lot of us have issues with it, and not just bias.
Sprint has the cheapest, fastest internet and pretty good coverage as well.
Cheapest. Fastest. Best. Choose 2. Oh wait, you have.
Sprint also has like no decent (usable) coverage to speak of in my state. Unless you happen to live in a city. And this is a state where our biggest "city" is only about 200,000 people.
Humans have been around for some 200,000 years. Nice, but that is not exactly a long time span. Dinosaurs were around for more than 160 million years - 160,000,000, you notice the difference? And they still vanished.
The reason that dinosaurs survived so long was because they were too stupid to engineer their own extinction.
I don't see how the benefits are minor, considering how much press and excitement is triggered each time the winds clean the dust off. Also considering the massive longevity to the mission that more runtime creates. More life = more science, and since the whole point of these missions is "science", that's more bang for your buck.
It's not easy to get stuff to Mars, and there are only occasional windows of opportunity. Best to get as much as you can out of the missions you DO send.
I don't see how there can be much "static cling" if just wind can dust them off.
The fact that the different browsers render basic sites differently should be warning enough.
I would think the fact that people might not want their ability to do work and use their computer be dependent on a broadband connection, wired or otherwise.
One of my main gripes about "smartphones" versus PDAs.
There are a few left. I gave Adelphia (now Comcast) the boot and went with DSL from a local telecom. 6Mbit down, 1MBit up... but it tends to be faster than Adelphia ever was with their supposed 8Mbit, and I get some of the best tech-support and customer-service I've ever experienced.
Might as well enjoy it while it lasts I suppose. I had the same thing recently with my cell company (Unicel) until they were just bought out by AT&T *barf*.
So the point of homebrew is to constantly emulate the same games you've played for years
Actually, the things that interest me the most about the Wii homebrew scene are:
1) The ability to back-up certain savegames that Nintendo and the game developers think shouldn't be backed up, despite the Wii having a facility for backing up savegames.
2) The fact that it supports SDHC, which is an embarrassing slap-in-the-face at Nintendo and maybe will shame them into providing a real update of their own to support it.
So how do those fit into your narrow-minded version of how you see the world?
The quality of the service depends on what line you decide to go with.
If you go for the crappy low-end (Inspiron and Dimension), which are meant to price-compete with Gateway, etc... then yes, those come with crappy service.
If you go for the good stuff (Latitude and Optiplex), you get entirely an different support channel, one that I've had zero trouble with in the 7+ years I've been using them to supply businesses and individuals with computers.
That said, the first thing people are going to do when they get an HD set is pay for HD cable or satellite. They arent going to spend 600 dollars on some fancy player for movies. What are you talking about? I myself and plenty of other people who watch more movies than TV would do precisely that. If I'm going HD, why would I go halfway and settle for a measly 720 lines and stereo sound, limiting myself to whatever crap the satellite provider feels like pushing down the airwaves at that moment? When I can get the movie I want now, in 1080p and fully-discreet digital surround-sound? Movies are where its at for us home theater fans... watching TV is a secondary thing.
"Flash & Java pretty much everywhere,.NET and Silverlight only where Microsoft sees fit"
How is this any different than Adobe? I use FreeBSD. Adobe doesn't "see fit" to produce a Flash player/plugin for FreeBSD. As a result, we are forced to hack on the Linux ones, which (due to a number of fundamental OS differences) are prone to numerous problems and incompatibility. The only Flash we can get working mostly on FreeBSD is Flash 7 but that's becoming more and more useless as more sites start requiring Flash 8 or Flash 9.
Just because Adobe "sees fit" to produce Flash on a handful of more platforms than Microsoft does with Silverlight doesn't mean Flash is innocent on this point. I consider Flash to be evil in this regard the same as Silverlight. It's just Silverlight is more-so.
Incorrect. Both track the main FreeBSD tree. Consider them "value add" packages of software and tweaks layered on top of the official FreeBSD. A fork would be traced to a single point in time with ever-growing divergence (think DragonflyBSD). Both DesktopBSD and PC-BSD include updated bases of the main FreeBSD with their own updates. For example, PC-BSD 1.0 was based on FreeBSD 6.0. The current version of PC-BSD, 1.4.1, is based on FreeBSD 6.3. PC-BSD 2.0 will be based on FreeBSD 7.0.
I agree that on the surface, the differences can sometimes seem trivial (minor differences in commands), political (licenses), or just obscure (claims of stability, performance, etc). However that last one is major. There is a lot different under the hood, and just because something doesn't translate well to a consistent reproducible metric or an earth-shattering feature, doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.
Some people don't look beneath the surface, so unless something has massive obvious user-side differences, they won't change. I'm not that sort... I look beneath. For example, if faced with two coffees and one is fair-trade organic, I'll go with the fair trade organic one, even though it might cost more and not taste different. I support what I believe in, not what's "convenient" or "what everyone else is doing".
That said, the ports system is what I would call "an earth-shattering feature". I've known plenty of people who've chosen FreeBSD for that reason alone. For me, it wasn't just that, but also the different structure of the development group and the different design philosophies. Linux and FreeBSD go about it differently. I personally agree with and prefer the way FreeBSD does things, and feel that FreeBSD has many advantages (ports, documentation, etc). If someone else prefers Linux, well that's fine I suppose... in the end we're both still running Apache et al and it sure beats running Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked Newegg doesn't sell them yet
Well, I just bought a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 from NewEgg and immediately slapped Tomato on it:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833162134
So you have some better project in mind that's "so good" that no one has ever been enthusiastic about it enough to bother trying to write a book for people who need such guidance?
You do realize that every single Blu-Ray player made up until that point would need its own separate firmware copy/version on the Blu-Ray disc, don't you?
This is a lot different than the Wii, my friend.
I am not sure whether this is just a sign of NASA design stupidity (impossible to repair parts), or a reason why space travel will always just be an overblown luxury niche and will never become mainstream.
"I'm probably at least a few years from buying a Blu-Ray or other ultra-high definition device, so beating the 720x480 resolution of typical NTSC DVDs meets most of my movie- and Hulu-watching demands."
Not if you're watching widescreen DVDs. At worse, watching a 2.35:1 movie inside of a 800x600 (4:3) screen means you only get 340 lines vertical resolution, by my math. That's a lost of 20%.
The OS you are looking for is called Windows Mobile. Its been around a pretty long time and does not restrict anything you put on it.
As long as you don't mind running Windows on your cell phone. A lot of us have issues with it, and not just bias.
Sprint has the cheapest, fastest internet and pretty good coverage as well.
Cheapest. Fastest. Best. Choose 2. Oh wait, you have.
Sprint also has like no decent (usable) coverage to speak of in my state. Unless you happen to live in a city. And this is a state where our biggest "city" is only about 200,000 people.
Being paid to have sex IS legal... as long as you videotape it and sell the videos.
Sort THAT one out.
Not bad for a "dead" OS:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee
Humans have been around for some 200,000 years. Nice, but that is not exactly a long time span. Dinosaurs were around for more than 160 million years - 160,000,000, you notice the difference? And they still vanished.
The reason that dinosaurs survived so long was because they were too stupid to engineer their own extinction.
Apparently humans don't "suffer" from that issue.
I don't see how the benefits are minor, considering how much press and excitement is triggered each time the winds clean the dust off. Also considering the massive longevity to the mission that more runtime creates. More life = more science, and since the whole point of these missions is "science", that's more bang for your buck.
It's not easy to get stuff to Mars, and there are only occasional windows of opportunity. Best to get as much as you can out of the missions you DO send.
I don't see how there can be much "static cling" if just wind can dust them off.
The fact that the different browsers render basic sites differently should be warning enough.
I would think the fact that people might not want their ability to do work and use their computer be dependent on a broadband connection, wired or otherwise.
One of my main gripes about "smartphones" versus PDAs.
Which begs the question why not just
No it doesn't. It raises the question.
Presumably a let down to know she was choosing cardigans whilst you got off.
That's ok, I was on the other end reading Slashdot. So we're even.
There are a few left. I gave Adelphia (now Comcast) the boot and went with DSL from a local telecom. 6Mbit down, 1MBit up... but it tends to be faster than Adelphia ever was with their supposed 8Mbit, and I get some of the best tech-support and customer-service I've ever experienced.
Might as well enjoy it while it lasts I suppose. I had the same thing recently with my cell company (Unicel) until they were just bought out by AT&T *barf*.
Agreed. The first thing that jumped to my mind after reading this article was that it would not scale well past a few characters.
Neat trick, though.
What absence?
http://www.softpedia.com/screenshots/Yahoo-Toolbar-for-Mozilla-Firefox_1.png
So the point of homebrew is to constantly emulate the same games you've played for years
Actually, the things that interest me the most about the Wii homebrew scene are:
1) The ability to back-up certain savegames that Nintendo and the game developers think shouldn't be backed up, despite the Wii having a facility for backing up savegames.
2) The fact that it supports SDHC, which is an embarrassing slap-in-the-face at Nintendo and maybe will shame them into providing a real update of their own to support it.
So how do those fit into your narrow-minded version of how you see the world?
"I'm a PC... and I don't run Windows."
He then asks me if I have another version of "Unix" that is more difficult.
FreeBSD? ;)
Worth the effort, though.
The quality of the service depends on what line you decide to go with.
If you go for the crappy low-end (Inspiron and Dimension), which are meant to price-compete with Gateway, etc... then yes, those come with crappy service.
If you go for the good stuff (Latitude and Optiplex), you get entirely an different support channel, one that I've had zero trouble with in the 7+ years I've been using them to supply businesses and individuals with computers.
If you don't at least know what a BBS is, turn in your geek card now.
"Flash & Java pretty much everywhere, .NET and Silverlight only where Microsoft sees fit"
How is this any different than Adobe? I use FreeBSD. Adobe doesn't "see fit" to produce a Flash player/plugin for FreeBSD. As a result, we are forced to hack on the Linux ones, which (due to a number of fundamental OS differences) are prone to numerous problems and incompatibility. The only Flash we can get working mostly on FreeBSD is Flash 7 but that's becoming more and more useless as more sites start requiring Flash 8 or Flash 9.
Just because Adobe "sees fit" to produce Flash on a handful of more platforms than Microsoft does with Silverlight doesn't mean Flash is innocent on this point. I consider Flash to be evil in this regard the same as Silverlight. It's just Silverlight is more-so.
Incorrect. Both track the main FreeBSD tree. Consider them "value add" packages of software and tweaks layered on top of the official FreeBSD. A fork would be traced to a single point in time with ever-growing divergence (think DragonflyBSD). Both DesktopBSD and PC-BSD include updated bases of the main FreeBSD with their own updates. For example, PC-BSD 1.0 was based on FreeBSD 6.0. The current version of PC-BSD, 1.4.1, is based on FreeBSD 6.3. PC-BSD 2.0 will be based on FreeBSD 7.0.
In fact, a lot of the DesktopBSD components are available as an add-on in the Ports collection:
http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/desktopbsd-tools/
I agree that on the surface, the differences can sometimes seem trivial (minor differences in commands), political (licenses), or just obscure (claims of stability, performance, etc). However that last one is major. There is a lot different under the hood, and just because something doesn't translate well to a consistent reproducible metric or an earth-shattering feature, doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.
Some people don't look beneath the surface, so unless something has massive obvious user-side differences, they won't change. I'm not that sort... I look beneath. For example, if faced with two coffees and one is fair-trade organic, I'll go with the fair trade organic one, even though it might cost more and not taste different. I support what I believe in, not what's "convenient" or "what everyone else is doing".
That said, the ports system is what I would call "an earth-shattering feature". I've known plenty of people who've chosen FreeBSD for that reason alone. For me, it wasn't just that, but also the different structure of the development group and the different design philosophies. Linux and FreeBSD go about it differently. I personally agree with and prefer the way FreeBSD does things, and feel that FreeBSD has many advantages (ports, documentation, etc). If someone else prefers Linux, well that's fine I suppose... in the end we're both still running Apache et al and it sure beats running Windows.