My main beef with them is that you are no longer talking at eye level. They are raised up above you.
The height is an advantage. Its not a 'birds eye view', but it gets them up over the crowd a bit, which is enough to make a big difference.
And of course they can cross an airport quickly without expending energy which can come in handy in an actual emergency.
The talking down thing is sort of a bonus, because its a 'position of power', while its annoying if you are just chatting, in theory it the height advantage might be useful for directing crowds and issuing instructions in an emergency. The height would give them a bit more authority and make them more visible... both which would make them more effective.
I saw a cop on a Segway at the airport a couple of weeks ago and for the life of me I couldn't understand what benefits such a clumsy way of moving around might have over walking. Save some of the calories from donuts? Employ disabled cops? I don't get it.
The height is a significant advantage. The ability to cross an airport quickly without expending energy is another.
You will find the price of the Mac, will be about the same price as the competitors.
Essentially true for the base model, when they are launched. And then it goes down hill, because the Apple specs are practically obsolete before its updated, and then on top of that, they grossly overcharge for upgrades.
For example, Take a look at the base 24" iMac. It comes with 2GB of RAM... it costs $150 to go to 4GB. You can easily buy 4GB outright for LESS than it costs to get an extra 2GB from Apple.
Another example... Hard drive... it starts with a 320GB HD. They want $300 to upgrade to a 1TB drive. You can get a 1TB for $100-150 outright. With Apple its $300 and that's on top of whatever they valued the 320GB at.
Yet another example... $150 to upgrade to a 8800GS? What the fuck? A 9800GT is $130.00 outright for crying out loud, and is a much stronger card. And they want $150 to UPGRADE to an 8800GS?
Ok... its an all in one... so sure, maybe the video card is a bit trickier... I get why a 9800GT might not be an option. But I shouldn't have to pay $150 to upgrade to an 8800GS. $50 over an HD2600pro, tops.
Apple gouges on upgrades 'nuff said.
So how about an actual product comparison:
Apple 24" 3.06 vs Dell XPS 24" bluetooth on both gigabit on both built in camera - 1.3MP vs 2MP built in mic - on both wifi - apple gives you b/g, dell b/g/n 4GB ram on both (apple upgrade / dell default) 750GB drive on both (apple upgrade / dell default) 24" screen - lets assume they are equal - who knows built in speakers - lets assume they are equal optical - dvdrw vs bluray cpu - cor2duo in the apple, dell gives you a quad video - 8800GS 512MB vs 9600M GT 512MB - i think the dell's is better os - osx vs vista ultimate
Ok... so the dell all-in-one is equal or better in each spec, how about price:
iMac 2449.00 vs 2199.00 [ dell XPS one 24 (product)red ]
so its $250 less, comes with a quad core, blu ray, wireless n, better video card, and a better camera.
Oh, and the dell has a TV tuner too.
Dell win hands down. Not even a contest. Apple's not in the ballpark.
Worse if we can drop the 'product (red)' thing, which drops the bluray drive, and gives us vista home premium, the dell is $1899, still markedly better than the Apple, and now $550 less.
Maybe not all Apple's are overpriced... but this one, at least IS.
Ultimately, these are different distributions of a distribution, no?
Maybe.
The first half dozen or so 'versions' of Ubuntu I mentioned are all available through Canonical.
So if you are going to call different versions of a distro from a single vender each its own distro, then you could say the same about Microsoft Windows too.
But either way it doesn't really change anything. The point of my argument was that a linux advocate criticizing Microsoft for providing two many choices of 'version' for Vista with the excuse that its confusing for the public is almost absurd, given that a layman choosing a version of Linux is MUCH harder. Even choosing a 'ubuntu' is confusing.
How exactly do they achieve this? do they send a cd out to Mr/Ms Public? I can't imagine they could just "apt-get upgrade Professional" and pop their CC details into to the pretty pop up...
Depends how you got Vista...
if your OEM loaded vista and didn't include anytime upgrade support, you can do it online, where yes, they send you a DVD.
But if you got your Vista at retail, or via an OEM that supports it, their is a control panel you can use to buy it, and all the files you need are already on the retail or OEM DVD.
I remember EQ in its heyday, but I really can't wax nostalgic about making sure I only wore gear that I wouldn't mind losing if my guild chose to raid Fear or another plane.
Fear should have had a small staging area. The early EQ1 zones definitely had design flaws.
EQ pre Kunark wasn't designed to make you wait forever to get a kill. It was simply that the game at launch didn't have enough high end content.
Of course, one death would set you back hours
It gave you motivation not to die. And/or gave you motivation to group with a Cleric/Paladin, or at least make friends with other players, even if you played solo. WoW is dull because I simply don't care if I die, it costs an in game nickle; and outside of instances I simply don't ever need help. That really kind of sucks.
I will agree that EQ combined painful deaths with arbitrary deaths, and THAT wasn't fair. (Zoning into oasis and getting stomped by a giant and getting sent back to qeynos and losing a few hours worth of xp, and having to do a corpse recovery... was unfair.)
I don't mind getting punished for making a tactical combat mistake. I do mind getting punished for zoning in at the wrong time.
Of course, all it would take for a group wipe is one person running through a zone with a nice train of mobs behind them, and pretty much there was nothing to be done about griefers like that unless a GM or guide was actively watching and caught them in the act.
I thought you said you had to wait half an hour to get a kill, because every spawn point in the zone was being camped?;) Seriously though, yes, that both sucked, and was awesome at the same time. The trains in blackburrow, guk, and sola/b were legendary and usually weren't even intentional, and actually getting griefed - meh it wasn't -that- common. They had a saying in EQ... if you don't want to be hit by a train, stay off the tracks.
Greifing sucked, but it also enabled the stuff that made the game great. 3 or 4 independant groups getting together and fighting off a train (intentional or otherwise) for example... that made lasting memories, and started lasting friendships... it can't really happen in WoW and it doesn't happen. Sure some friendly passerby might wander by and assist... but its just not the same. Because there is no meaningful death penalty I don't really care if I die so heroically banding together and surviving doesn't mean much.
In EQ we were all in it together against the game. In WoW, the game is so easy, you aren't forced to rely on others so there is no real impetus to be sociable. Two groups in EQ fighting in the same general area often made contact and chatted and talked; you had downtime so there was time, and it was well worth your time too -- if you wiped, maybe they could rez you and save you hours... and vice versa... or maybe they'd come to each others rescue, or join forces together to take out a rare spawn named or work together to break a multi-spawn. That's the sort of stuff that made classic EQ great... that WoW and other new games simply don't have.
Kunark made things easier to find stuff to kill, but the exp curve for 50-60, especially for a soloer, was painful.
If you "played the game" instead of "rushed to 60" the level curve was a non-issue. Who cares how long it takes to level? Its not like you get a prize for reaching 60... you just to play the same game, but now without the xp reward. Whoop-de-doo.
I like modern EQ. Even classes that were unable to solo (and when I say unable, I mean *unable* because HP regeneration was so slow without a healer) can hire mercenaries and go hit somewhere to work on exp.
EQ wasn't designed for solers. The fact that any class could solo well was almost an accident.
If you want an instanced dungeon all to yourself (although boring), there is always Nedaria's Landing and the Forgotten Halls which scales to your level, and if mobs are too hard, you can shroud down to a lower level, get the instance,
90k per ATM also seems a bit high. I'd be surprised if the average ATM had anywhere near that much cash in it. Especially ones that would 'not busy enough' that you could spend half an hour doing chain withdrawals without arousing any suspicion.
I just heard it on NPR that IBM will be paying for the move.
That can mean anything from "IBM will pay your real estate fees, legal fees, cover the loss you took on your home, and then put you on a plane, pack all your stuff for you and have it waiting when you arrive" to "IBM will pay for your airplane tickets and the cost to have your stuff shipped to you... on a ship."
IBM is big enough that they'll probably at least cover the actual transportation of people and stuff in style... whether they'll cover the stuff like real estate fees etc is a completely separate question... a question easily worth $20,000+...
I can't help but think of some handy uses for it, such as your meeting friends at the game, and don't know where in the crowded parking lot they are, or what bar their sitting in downtown, and your trying to join them.
So send them an sms with your gps location embedded in it, they can pull it up in their map app, and walk right to you. Integrated it all slickly so its easy to use and auto-magical.
You hardly need google tracking your every movement for any of this.
Other reasons are some of the port sizes are too large/small for the device to be useful. For example, a tiny MP3 player might not have room for even a mini USB plug,
Yep. My Motorola Razr2 has 'micro USB'. Whole new set of of chargers for car and home, my old Razr and wifes Krzr use 'mini USB'.
Similarly larger electronics may need more secure connections (as in not falling out, not like encryption) than others. Some might need to be designed to be easily yanked out, others might need ways of making sure it doesn't fall out.
Ok ok... so a -single- universal one-size-fits-all standard is probably a bad idea. But how about a standard family? Laptops, printers, lcd panels, scanners all use one, cell phones mp3s etc all use another... etc? Anything under 10Volts / 3amps could use one...25 Volts / 10amps another... even color code them.
For just about all popular gadgets, it is very very easy to walk into almost any store and get a replacement or third party cable.
Try a 2 year old cell phone. Unless the particular cable was carried forward to a current generation product, your shit-out-of-luck. Nokia if I recall used to be REALLY bad for this every model had its own set of power adapters. Motorola was really good; dozens of products usually shared power adapters.
For just about all popular gadgets, it is very very easy to walk into almost any store and get a replacement or third party cable. About the only industry that I would see benefiting from this is laptops, a standard laptop connection cable (like desktops) would be a lifesaver some times.
Or scanners, lcd panels, portable phones, inkjet printers, routers, dsl modems, portable hard drives... how many of those "powerbricks" do you have on the floor under your desk? I have like 20 in my office it seems, each with a different power rating, and plugs.
Wouldn't it be just heavenly if they could all be interchangable. Or better still, you could buy one powerbrick with a dozen leads off it, and use it to power all the gadgets in your office... like a mid-high end power supply inside your PC has multiple lines to power all the devices inside your PC, with modular cable support?
Of course while I'm having this dream, I can wish for DC power making a re-appearance, making all these transformers irrelevant.
I hope that was sarcasm. Speaking for myself, I'd rather accept a job overseas than be sitting on my ass (like I'm doing now). You can always continue the U.S. job search from India, and then when you find a U.S. job (if you find a U.S. job), you quit India and come back home.
Sure if your single and you rent and your life fits in a cardboard box, go for it, its little more than a plane ticket. Try doing it when you own a home and have a family. The financial costs alone, never mind the stress...
Last time I moved it cost over 20k. (And that's not with an expensive moving company... that's just all the hits from real estate fees, lawyers fees, inspections, etc ad nauseum.) To move with a moving company, probably would have been closer to 40k+. Do that twice in a couple years... you'd probably be further ahead not moving and spending the time unemployed.
Give me a "semantic" desktop like my desktop at home: The ability to quickly, and visually, rifle through documents stacked on my desk so I can find that recent copy of my dissertation I made. I don't need a filename -- just give me the document based upon some quantifiable characteristic about the document, such as keywords, format,
Ever heard of Desktop Search?
Windows Vista this is done by pressing the start button and then typing a few letters or words. It will pull up results that match filenames, file contents, keywords, ID3 tags for MP3s, email messages, etc.
There is an advanced mode where you can specify things like when you last modified it or how big it is... etc.
OSX has spotlight which does essentially the same thing.
Do you not use computers?
or even the visual layout.
Ok, yeah, this isn't here yet. But give it time. They are still trying to figure out how to give you a useful way of specifying 'visual layout' as a search criteria. However, the document thumbnail preview in Vista or OSX is pretty good... so if you can narrow it down to a few dozen docs some other way, you can probably identify the the one you are looking for by the icon preview if it has distinctive layout. I've done it.
Folders? I don't keep the stuff on my real desktop in a file cabinet, so why the hell would I want to use folders on my virtual desktop?
I shudder to imagine what your desktop looks like. Either you don't do much. Don't keep much. Or its a holy friggen mess. I have files for different clients (real files) for paper materials. I have files for tax related items. A lot of us use real files.
And my PC is full of files and folders too. Again for different projects with countless subfolders, and clients, etc. It makes it easy to find, and to copy/move/backup them in neat blocks too.
The other 90% should redeploy themselves to other markets...
Stop right there. Lets say we have 10,000 people in the market.
1) That means that the 10% of the workers are all that's left in the industry. The other 90% redeployed in other markets. 1000 remain, 9000 leave the market.
2) Meaning all the work that all of them did, now has to be satisfied by 10% of that original number. Its the top 10% sure, but still... 1000 doing the work of 10000.
3) Worse, a bunch of people from other markets will also be redepolying into this market. If they can't manage to be in the top 10% they need to look elsewhere. If they do manage to be in the top 10% that pushes someone else who is already into the top 10% out, and he should deploy elsewhere. So the number of people in the market is not swelled by other people entering the market. 1000 doing the work of 10000.
4) Worst of all: After 90% of the people in the market leave. The remaining 10% now make up the entire market. 90% of that amount are no longer in the top 10% and they should leave...shrinking the market by another 90%. Now that the entire market is 1000, 900 of them aren't in the top 10%... better redeploy them somewhere else. Go to step one, except now the entire market is serviced by 100 people... and keep looping.
Clearly having everyone try to be in the top 10% of their market or redeploy is mathematically impossible.
Remaining still and whining is a sure way to stay unemployed.
But a file in Phantom is simply an object whose state is persisted.
Persisted to a file?
You don't have to explicitly open it. As long as your program has some kind of reference to that object, all you need to do is call methods on it, and the data is there as you would expect.
I've written countless classes that work the same way. When I want to read the settings file for my app for example, I just instantiate my settings object and start reading the settings, the object handles actually opening the file (creating it if necessary), opening it if necessary, etc. If I set new settings, the object handles persisting them.
So all they've done is taken my (and anyone else who does any OO programming) model, and moved it into the OS API?
I'm not usually one to say, "no big deal, this has been done before" but seriously... this time it really is no big deal, its been done before. Hell, lots of API's for this sort of stuff even already exist, some of them even come with OSes.
The only thing that might be novel is if this phatomOS goes whole hog, and forces you to use that api and actually denies you all access directly to files using more traditional methods. But I have my doubts... that would make it needlessly incompatible with a lot of existing software.
In a LAN game the communication latency is insignificant,
The games themselves however are still all tuned for internet play, so the timing window is still there. And most games are played over the internet.
Unless you are playing that competitively, it simply doesn't matter. And if you ARE playing that competitively in a lan tournament, you are usually provided standardized hardware anyway.
and if that quad SLI guy is using the default Alternate Frame Rendering mode then he's at a latency disadvantage. Increased graphics detail might even be a competitive disadvantage, making it harder to pick targets out of the visual clutter.
That all REALLY depends on the game, and exactly what options it has, and what you can turn on and off.
Agreed, having individual leaf movement can be slightly distracting and confers no tactical advantage -- but I've also played games where having things like shadows, reflections, and water ripples turned, or advanced smoke (vs the default 'Haze'), has conferred competitive advantages vs players who had those things turned off.
And even if you leave it all off, when you throw a bunch of smoke grenades and fire a rocket into room, half the players will have their framerates spike down, while the more extreme rigs won't.
If you're going to count all those in the Ubuntu column, you'll have to count all the different Windows OEM versions in the Windows column.
Not really. This is about 'confusion' due to giving the consumer too many choices. In reality, consumers have less choices with Windows because most of them buy from companies like Dell or at stores like best buy, where the OS choice is actually unusually limited to a couple, or even just one.
Consider a mutual surprise situation where both players react with identical 180ms reaction times. One has hardware with total latency of 30ms, while the other's hardware chain has total latency of 40ms. The latter player probably thought that extra 10ms latency wasn't worth worrying about, but here it is responsible for his loss.
Not likely. Most games have to cope with 100+ ms communications times, yet have to provide players sub 10ms response times to input. So in the case you describe, in most games, they'd probably still both get their shots off, with time to spare.
That said, I'm sure you could construct some scenario where the difference does result in the slower hardware players loss. But so what, unless you are playing for money, you probably need 'good enough'?
If I'm using a wireless mouse, and a core 2 quad, and a geforce 260core216, I'm already "hardware hosed" by the wired-lasermouse i7 overclocked extrme, quad sli gtx295 guy. So really, whats the point in freaking out about the monitor Hz refresh rate.
It just needs to be good enough not to give me a head ache, not to be visibly or noticeably lagging behind my movements. A cheap fast TN panel can do that.
Me, I use an S-IPS panel, because I value the color accuracy and wide viewing angles in addition to the good performance. But the fastest TN panels are still easily faster than my SIPS. I suppose I could get a CRT, but I don't want a 24" CRT thank you very much, even if it features slightly better response times, and can run at a higher Hz rating.
If that means I lose an one extra game of Quake in the next 3 years - I can live with that.
No, the difference you don't get limited by your original choice. The price is just convenient.
You aren't limited by your original choice of Windows either. If you buy a higher version, you have everything. If you buy a lower version, you can do an inplace upgrade to a higher version by simply paying the upgrade amount and using windows update to add what's missing.
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My main beef with them is that you are no longer talking at eye level. They are raised up above you.
The height is an advantage. Its not a 'birds eye view', but it gets them up over the crowd a bit, which is enough to make a big difference.
And of course they can cross an airport quickly without expending energy which can come in handy in an actual emergency.
The talking down thing is sort of a bonus, because its a 'position of power', while its annoying if you are just chatting, in theory it the height advantage might be useful for directing crowds and issuing instructions in an emergency. The height would give them a bit more authority and make them more visible... both which would make them more effective.
I saw a cop on a Segway at the airport a couple of weeks ago and for the life of me I couldn't understand what benefits such a clumsy way of moving around might have over walking. Save some of the calories from donuts? Employ disabled cops? I don't get it.
The height is a significant advantage.
The ability to cross an airport quickly without expending energy is another.
You will find the price of the Mac, will be about the same price as the competitors.
Essentially true for the base model, when they are launched. And then it goes down hill, because the Apple specs are practically obsolete before its updated, and then on top of that, they grossly overcharge for upgrades.
For example, Take a look at the base 24" iMac. It comes with 2GB of RAM... it costs $150 to go to 4GB. You can easily buy 4GB outright for LESS than it costs to get an extra 2GB from Apple.
Another example... Hard drive... it starts with a 320GB HD. They want $300 to upgrade to a 1TB drive. You can get a 1TB for $100-150 outright. With Apple its $300 and that's on top of whatever they valued the 320GB at.
Yet another example... $150 to upgrade to a 8800GS? What the fuck? A 9800GT is $130.00 outright for crying out loud, and is a much stronger card. And they want $150 to UPGRADE to an 8800GS?
Ok... its an all in one... so sure, maybe the video card is a bit trickier... I get why a 9800GT might not be an option. But I shouldn't have to pay $150 to upgrade to an 8800GS. $50 over an HD2600pro, tops.
Apple gouges on upgrades 'nuff said.
So how about an actual product comparison:
Apple 24" 3.06 vs Dell XPS 24"
bluetooth on both
gigabit on both
built in camera - 1.3MP vs 2MP
built in mic - on both
wifi - apple gives you b/g, dell b/g/n
4GB ram on both (apple upgrade / dell default)
750GB drive on both (apple upgrade / dell default)
24" screen - lets assume they are equal - who knows
built in speakers - lets assume they are equal
optical - dvdrw vs bluray
cpu - cor2duo in the apple, dell gives you a quad
video - 8800GS 512MB vs 9600M GT 512MB - i think the dell's is better
os - osx vs vista ultimate
Ok... so the dell all-in-one is equal or better in each spec, how about price:
iMac 2449.00 vs 2199.00 [ dell XPS one 24 (product)red ]
so its $250 less, comes with a quad core, blu ray, wireless n, better video card, and a better camera.
Oh, and the dell has a TV tuner too.
Dell win hands down. Not even a contest. Apple's not in the ballpark.
Worse if we can drop the 'product (red)' thing, which drops the bluray drive, and gives us vista home premium, the dell is $1899, still markedly better than the Apple, and now $550 less.
Maybe not all Apple's are overpriced... but this one, at least IS.
Ultimately, these are different distributions of a distribution, no?
Maybe.
The first half dozen or so 'versions' of Ubuntu I mentioned are all available through Canonical.
So if you are going to call different versions of a distro from a single vender each its own distro, then you could say the same about Microsoft Windows too.
But either way it doesn't really change anything. The point of my argument was that a linux advocate criticizing Microsoft for providing two many choices of 'version' for Vista with the excuse that its confusing for the public is almost absurd, given that a layman choosing a version of Linux is MUCH harder. Even choosing a 'ubuntu' is confusing.
How exactly do they achieve this? do they send a cd out to Mr/Ms Public? I can't imagine they could just "apt-get upgrade Professional" and pop their CC details into to the pretty pop up...
Depends how you got Vista...
if your OEM loaded vista and didn't include anytime upgrade support, you can do it online, where yes, they send you a DVD.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/get/anytime-upgrade-overview.aspx
But if you got your Vista at retail, or via an OEM that supports it, their is a control panel you can use to buy it, and all the files you need are already on the retail or OEM DVD.
I remember EQ in its heyday, but I really can't wax nostalgic about making sure I only wore gear that I wouldn't mind losing if my guild chose to raid Fear or another plane.
Fear should have had a small staging area. The early EQ1 zones definitely had design flaws.
EQ pre Kunark wasn't designed to make you wait forever to get a kill. It was simply that the game at launch didn't have enough high end content.
Of course, one death would set you back hours
It gave you motivation not to die. And/or gave you motivation to group with a Cleric/Paladin, or at least make friends with other players, even if you played solo. WoW is dull because I simply don't care if I die, it costs an in game nickle; and outside of instances I simply don't ever need help. That really kind of sucks.
I will agree that EQ combined painful deaths with arbitrary deaths, and THAT wasn't fair. (Zoning into oasis and getting stomped by a giant and getting sent back to qeynos and losing a few hours worth of xp, and having to do a corpse recovery... was unfair.)
I don't mind getting punished for making a tactical combat mistake. I do mind getting punished for zoning in at the wrong time.
Of course, all it would take for a group wipe is one person running through a zone with a nice train of mobs behind them, and pretty much there was nothing to be done about griefers like that unless a GM or guide was actively watching and caught them in the act.
I thought you said you had to wait half an hour to get a kill, because every spawn point in the zone was being camped? ;) Seriously though, yes, that both sucked, and was awesome at the same time. The trains in blackburrow, guk, and sola/b were legendary and usually weren't even intentional, and actually getting griefed - meh it wasn't -that- common. They had a saying in EQ... if you don't want to be hit by a train, stay off the tracks.
Greifing sucked, but it also enabled the stuff that made the game great. 3 or 4 independant groups getting together and fighting off a train (intentional or otherwise) for example... that made lasting memories, and started lasting friendships... it can't really happen in WoW and it doesn't happen. Sure some friendly passerby might wander by and assist... but its just not the same. Because there is no meaningful death penalty I don't really care if I die so heroically banding together and surviving doesn't mean much.
In EQ we were all in it together against the game. In WoW, the game is so easy, you aren't forced to rely on others so there is no real impetus to be sociable. Two groups in EQ fighting in the same general area often made contact and chatted and talked; you had downtime so there was time, and it was well worth your time too -- if you wiped, maybe they could rez you and save you hours... and vice versa... or maybe they'd come to each others rescue, or join forces together to take out a rare spawn named or work together to break a multi-spawn. That's the sort of stuff that made classic EQ great... that WoW and other new games simply don't have.
Kunark made things easier to find stuff to kill, but the exp curve for 50-60, especially for a soloer, was painful.
If you "played the game" instead of "rushed to 60" the level curve was a non-issue. Who cares how long it takes to level? Its not like you get a prize for reaching 60... you just to play the same game, but now without the xp reward. Whoop-de-doo.
I like modern EQ. Even classes that were unable to solo (and when I say unable, I mean *unable* because HP regeneration was so slow without a healer) can hire mercenaries and go hit somewhere to work on exp.
EQ wasn't designed for solers. The fact that any class could solo well was almost an accident.
If you want an instanced dungeon all to yourself (although boring), there is always Nedaria's Landing and the Forgotten Halls which scales to your level, and if mobs are too hard, you can shroud down to a lower level, get the instance,
CCP is encouraging users of the Linux EVE client to upgrade to the OpenOffice.org Calc application.
It would be a true upgrade too. Better color and font defaults for starters...
i scrfcd accrc 4 spd a lng tm ago
and it was going so well too... until you got thirsty and told your friend ..
"hy! I wnt sm ck!"
Another facet: How many dollars per ATM is that?
90k per ATM also seems a bit high. I'd be surprised if the average ATM had anywhere near that much cash in it. Especially ones that would 'not busy enough' that you could spend half an hour doing chain withdrawals without arousing any suspicion.
I just heard it on NPR that IBM will be paying for the move.
That can mean anything from "IBM will pay your real estate fees, legal fees, cover the loss you took on your home, and then put you on a plane, pack all your stuff for you and have it waiting when you arrive" to "IBM will pay for your airplane tickets and the cost to have your stuff shipped to you ... on a ship."
IBM is big enough that they'll probably at least cover the actual transportation of people and stuff in style... whether they'll cover the stuff like real estate fees etc is a completely separate question... a question easily worth $20,000+...
I can't help but think of some handy uses for it, such as your meeting friends at the game, and don't know where in the crowded parking lot they are, or what bar their sitting in downtown, and your trying to join them.
So send them an sms with your gps location embedded in it, they can pull it up in their map app, and walk right to you. Integrated it all slickly so its easy to use and auto-magical.
You hardly need google tracking your every movement for any of this.
We've all said it before: obscurity is not security.
However obscurity IS crucial for privacy.
A micro USB->mini USB adapter is about $2 online. It probably costs more to ship it than to buy one.
The razr2 actually came with one. I lost it within 3 days.
Other reasons are some of the port sizes are too large/small for the device to be useful. For example, a tiny MP3 player might not have room for even a mini USB plug,
Yep. My Motorola Razr2 has 'micro USB'. Whole new set of of chargers for car and home, my old Razr and wifes Krzr use 'mini USB'.
Similarly larger electronics may need more secure connections (as in not falling out, not like encryption) than others. Some might need to be designed to be easily yanked out, others might need ways of making sure it doesn't fall out.
Ok ok... so a -single- universal one-size-fits-all standard is probably a bad idea. But how about a standard family? Laptops, printers, lcd panels, scanners all use one, cell phones mp3s etc all use another... etc? Anything under 10Volts / 3amps could use one...25 Volts / 10amps another... even color code them.
For just about all popular gadgets, it is very very easy to walk into almost any store and get a replacement or third party cable.
Try a 2 year old cell phone. Unless the particular cable was carried forward to a current generation product, your shit-out-of-luck. Nokia if I recall used to be REALLY bad for this every model had its own set of power adapters. Motorola was really good; dozens of products usually shared power adapters.
For just about all popular gadgets, it is very very easy to walk into almost any store and get a replacement or third party cable. About the only industry that I would see benefiting from this is laptops, a standard laptop connection cable (like desktops) would be a lifesaver some times.
Or scanners, lcd panels, portable phones, inkjet printers, routers, dsl modems, portable hard drives... how many of those "powerbricks" do you have on the floor under your desk? I have like 20 in my office it seems, each with a different power rating, and plugs.
Wouldn't it be just heavenly if they could all be interchangable. Or better still, you could buy one powerbrick with a dozen leads off it, and use it to power all the gadgets in your office... like a mid-high end power supply inside your PC has multiple lines to power all the devices inside your PC, with modular cable support?
Of course while I'm having this dream, I can wish for DC power making a re-appearance, making all these transformers irrelevant.
I would have thought firewire would be better suited since it can handle a higher voltage. Oh well.
Ubiquity trumps suitability.
This is why networking over powerlines, power over ethernet, broadband over pots (ADSL) and a great many other technologies exist.
I hope that was sarcasm. Speaking for myself, I'd rather accept a job overseas than be sitting on my ass (like I'm doing now). You can always continue the U.S. job search from India, and then when you find a U.S. job (if you find a U.S. job), you quit India and come back home.
Sure if your single and you rent and your life fits in a cardboard box, go for it, its little more than a plane ticket. Try doing it when you own a home and have a family. The financial costs alone, never mind the stress...
Last time I moved it cost over 20k. (And that's not with an expensive moving company... that's just all the hits from real estate fees, lawyers fees, inspections, etc ad nauseum.) To move with a moving company, probably would have been closer to 40k+. Do that twice in a couple years... you'd probably be further ahead not moving and spending the time unemployed.
Give me a "semantic" desktop like my desktop at home: The ability to quickly, and visually, rifle through documents stacked on my desk so I can find that recent copy of my dissertation I made. I don't need a filename -- just give me the document based upon some quantifiable characteristic about the document, such as keywords, format,
Ever heard of Desktop Search?
Windows Vista this is done by pressing the start button and then typing a few letters or words. It will pull up results that match filenames, file contents, keywords, ID3 tags for MP3s, email messages, etc.
There is an advanced mode where you can specify things like when you last modified it or how big it is... etc.
OSX has spotlight which does essentially the same thing.
Do you not use computers?
or even the visual layout.
Ok, yeah, this isn't here yet. But give it time. They are still trying to figure out how to give you a useful way of specifying 'visual layout' as a search criteria. However, the document thumbnail preview in Vista or OSX is pretty good... so if you can narrow it down to a few dozen docs some other way, you can probably identify the the one you are looking for by the icon preview if it has distinctive layout. I've done it.
Folders? I don't keep the stuff on my real desktop in a file cabinet, so why the hell would I want to use folders on my virtual desktop?
I shudder to imagine what your desktop looks like. Either you don't do much. Don't keep much. Or its a holy friggen mess. I have files for different clients (real files) for paper materials. I have files for tax related items. A lot of us use real files.
And my PC is full of files and folders too. Again for different projects with countless subfolders, and clients, etc. It makes it easy to find, and to copy/move/backup them in neat blocks too.
10% of the original pool would dominate a market.
ok
The other 90% should redeploy themselves to other markets...
Stop right there. Lets say we have 10,000 people in the market.
1) That means that the 10% of the workers are all that's left in the industry. The other 90% redeployed in other markets. 1000 remain, 9000 leave the market.
2) Meaning all the work that all of them did, now has to be satisfied by 10% of that original number. Its the top 10% sure, but still... 1000 doing the work of 10000.
3) Worse, a bunch of people from other markets will also be redepolying into this market. If they can't manage to be in the top 10% they need to look elsewhere. If they do manage to be in the top 10% that pushes someone else who is already into the top 10% out, and he should deploy elsewhere. So the number of people in the market is not swelled by other people entering the market. 1000 doing the work of 10000.
4) Worst of all: After 90% of the people in the market leave. The remaining 10% now make up the entire market. 90% of that amount are no longer in the top 10% and they should leave...shrinking the market by another 90%. Now that the entire market is 1000, 900 of them aren't in the top 10%... better redeploy them somewhere else. Go to step one, except now the entire market is serviced by 100 people... and keep looping.
Clearly having everyone try to be in the top 10% of their market or redeploy is mathematically impossible.
Remaining still and whining is a sure way to stay unemployed.
Being unable to understand basic math is another.
But a file in Phantom is simply an object whose state is persisted.
Persisted to a file?
You don't have to explicitly open it. As long as your program has some kind of reference to that object, all you need to do is call methods on it, and the data is there as you would expect.
I've written countless classes that work the same way. When I want to read the settings file for my app for example, I just instantiate my settings object and start reading the settings, the object handles actually opening the file (creating it if necessary), opening it if necessary, etc. If I set new settings, the object handles persisting them.
So all they've done is taken my (and anyone else who does any OO programming) model, and moved it into the OS API?
I'm not usually one to say, "no big deal, this has been done before" but seriously... this time it really is no big deal, its been done before. Hell, lots of API's for this sort of stuff even already exist, some of them even come with OSes.
The only thing that might be novel is if this phatomOS goes whole hog, and forces you to use that api and actually denies you all access directly to files using more traditional methods. But I have my doubts... that would make it needlessly incompatible with a lot of existing software.
In a LAN game the communication latency is insignificant,
The games themselves however are still all tuned for internet play, so the timing window is still there. And most games are played over the internet.
Unless you are playing that competitively, it simply doesn't matter. And if you ARE playing that competitively in a lan tournament, you are usually provided standardized hardware anyway.
and if that quad SLI guy is using the default Alternate Frame Rendering mode then he's at a latency disadvantage. Increased graphics detail might even be a competitive disadvantage, making it harder to pick targets out of the visual clutter.
That all REALLY depends on the game, and exactly what options it has, and what you can turn on and off.
Agreed, having individual leaf movement can be slightly distracting and confers no tactical advantage -- but I've also played games where having things like shadows, reflections, and water ripples turned, or advanced smoke (vs the default 'Haze'), has conferred competitive advantages vs players who had those things turned off.
And even if you leave it all off, when you throw a bunch of smoke grenades and fire a rocket into room, half the players will have their framerates spike down, while the more extreme rigs won't.
If you're going to count all those in the Ubuntu column, you'll have to count all the different Windows OEM versions in the Windows column.
Not really. This is about 'confusion' due to giving the consumer too many choices. In reality, consumers have less choices with Windows because most of them buy from companies like Dell or at stores like best buy, where the OS choice is actually unusually limited to a couple, or even just one.
Consider a mutual surprise situation where both players react with identical 180ms reaction times. One has hardware with total latency of 30ms, while the other's hardware chain has total latency of 40ms. The latter player probably thought that extra 10ms latency wasn't worth worrying about, but here it is responsible for his loss.
Not likely. Most games have to cope with 100+ ms communications times, yet have to provide players sub 10ms response times to input. So in the case you describe, in most games, they'd probably still both get their shots off, with time to spare.
That said, I'm sure you could construct some scenario where the difference does result in the slower hardware players loss. But so what, unless you are playing for money, you probably need 'good enough'?
If I'm using a wireless mouse, and a core 2 quad, and a geforce 260core216, I'm already "hardware hosed" by the wired-lasermouse i7 overclocked extrme, quad sli gtx295 guy. So really, whats the point in freaking out about the monitor Hz refresh rate.
It just needs to be good enough not to give me a head ache, not to be visibly or noticeably lagging behind my movements. A cheap fast TN panel can do that.
Me, I use an S-IPS panel, because I value the color accuracy and wide viewing angles in addition to the good performance. But the fastest TN panels are still easily faster than my SIPS. I suppose I could get a CRT, but I don't want a 24" CRT thank you very much, even if it features slightly better response times, and can run at a higher Hz rating.
If that means I lose an one extra game of Quake in the next 3 years - I can live with that.
The difference is the similiar program on windows, has an Preferences menu item where you can set the 'check for updates' frequency to 'never'.
This is pure fantasy when applied to the human race as a whole.
Not at all. I said the "same level of agreeability" not "eternal blissful peace".
No, the difference you don't get limited by your original choice. The price is just convenient.
You aren't limited by your original choice of Windows either. If you buy a higher version, you have everything. If you buy a lower version, you can do an inplace upgrade to a higher version by simply paying the upgrade amount and using windows update to add what's missing.
The price is just convenient.
The price is the only difference.