iTunes is the real Player of this decade, it's slow, breaks easily, takes up huge amounts of resources and locks up for no reason. It's a terrible application and I firmly believe Apple have coded it that way for windows so they can show people how wonderful Mac OS-X is.
This isn't a subjective opinion, compare response times to other software like Nokia's Ovi Suite and you will find it worse in every possible metric. Consider how it forces a Apple usb driver over the standard windows one which does break some USB devices, how it now has to have at least 4 processes running constantly in the background each using 50Mb+. How Apple update tries to force Safari on you. Lastly if you un-install it from a windows machine that machine will suffer slow down.
I'm finding the Guardians website is pretty good for UK news, they actually seem interested in doing investigative journalism. More than a few times the seem to have covered things the BBC and other newspapers won't touch.
You will never find a news organisation which isn't biased. I'd suggest using multiple sources with biases you can determine. I used to use the Guardian, BBC and The Times. The Guardian because its left wing, BBC because their biases are insanely obvious and the Times because it's right wing.
Most people don't perceive a bias if it matches their own. It's why Fox News can exist in the first place.
His referencing of BP as British Petroleum has ignited a lot of anti-American feeling in England at least. Personally after watching some of his outbursts during that crisis I've lost all respect for him. He appears to be nothing more than a self serving political animal, rather than the man of principle he sold himself as.
The Anti-Americanism's only gotten worse since UK PM Cameron's "Junior Partner in 1940" comment (hint USA weren't even in the war then). I'd gauge most people as disappointed but my own opinions might be biasing that.
Giving up moderation to post, your right most people on here moaning probably don't own an iPhone, but Apple has managed to very slowly annoy/irritate/wind up the tech crowd.
It can be for a variety of reasons, the PR, walled garden, attitude to developers, cost, etc... but it seems anti-Apple feeling is growing.
Personally I dislike Apple products because I' tired of people buying into the Apple RDF. Last night I had a software engineering friend tell me Apple tell me he was awaiting a fix for his call problems because Apple said it was a signal bar display issue. I showed him the actual issue people were complaining about and asked him how he would fix antenna de-tuning with software. Only at then did he stop paying attention to Apple's marketing and engage his brain.
From what I have seen that seems true. When I started work there were CS graduates who started with me. One of them had managed to completely avoid doing any theoretical modules or even coding ones. He spent the entire time doing business modules and it showed in his inability to do anything. The company has been going for over 25 years and he was the second person they've fired during that time.
The N95 was pants, every iteration of Symbian has a version of Skype for it, from the original 7650 all the way to the current x6.
Although I agree with the parent a Nokia is probably the best way to go, it will be cheaper than an iPhone/Andriod phone. Symbian supports pretty much every protocol you can think off (I'm including 3rd party applications). The Symbian OS on Series 60 phones is designed to care about power usage so you'll have a decent battery life and for the ideological among us Symbian is now Open Source and you can get the SDk for free.
This whole male are sexist oppressors attitude allows makes me laugh. I used to work in the Plymouth (UK) Woolworths store. This had ~90-120 employees of which there were ~20 men (usually less). During my time there I was frequently told that as a man I was unable to clean anything, told I'd never be promoted to supervisor because retail wasn't for men, was given the dirty jobs because you couldn't ask a girl to do it. My personnal favorite was being ordered to move 4 piece patio packs by myself because I "was a big strong lad" when the same boss would arrange 4 girls to move the same item if I or one of the other guys were busy. The sexism there was obvious, constant and minor*.My little sister works in a clothing chain and from listening to her work stories exactly the same sort of stuff happens there. I've had to point out how extraordinarily sexist she's been sometimes.
Both sexes can be horribly sexist claiming it's an IT geek problem is insane. There are sexist managers out there they need to be stopped, just as people (both sexes) need to be told how sometimes they can come off sexist unintentionally.
*I put up with the job for the hours and the fact my social skills sucked and it helped me improve them.
3G phones with video calling have existed in the UK since 2004/2005. Ignoring the iPhone it's hard to find a phone which doesn't support Video calling.
I own a Nokia 5800 which is capable of video calling and everyone in my family is capable of making video calls, none of us do. I personally don't bother because holding the phone in front of you isn't as easy a having auto answer on my bluetooth stereo headset. For other people the cost of the calls is what's stopping them.
Whatever the reason it isn't technical, if I select a number in my contact list my Nokia will ask if I want to make a voice or video call. This iPhone "feature" like so many others isn't new or revolutionary.
Why does the school require laptops in the first place? I've read the article and it seems a cost cutting measure for schools. They don't want to buy computers for computer labs, which personally I think is a bad excuse.
They also talk about rolling out WiFi and don't mention any specific technologies that I can see as platform dependent. In fact WiFi seems to be the only thing they are doing, in University my IT department had guides for connecting to a rather specialised VPN for Windows ME, XP, Vista, Mobile 2003, Mobile 5 as well as Debian, Suse, OS X, Symbian and I'm told their is even an iPhone guide.
These things aren't complicated and WiFi doesn't exactly require much in the way of support. As for preparing kids for the future the kids are far more likely to have to deal with Office than iWorks. I bet they'll try to force Objective C on them rather than teach a platform independent language like Java or C.
No it's more like Google saying any website that appears in Google search results must use Adwords. If a website doesn't use Adwords then that website will be removed from Google search indexes and fined.
What Apple are saying is any application in the iTunes App store must use iAds, if the application talks to another analytic company that application will be removed from the App store and the company will be forced to refund everyone who bought the application including Apple's 30% cut (hence the fine).
See how there isn't any stretch of logic or imagination required to make my comparison?
Lord of War by Momentum Pictures, there is a 30 second Mars bar advert that is unskippable. I've tried every button, top menu, root menu, fast forward, next chapter, etc.. and nothing works.
Which is why I no longer buy Mars bars or Momentum Pictures DVD's
I would suggest the BBC iPlayer shows people will use legal means if such means are available. BBC iPlayer with a few controls allowing you to buy media forever would be perfect. Especially if I couldn't download them onto my PS3.
I gave up on music downloads because buying an MP3 album was usually more expensive than buying the CD. I've not bothered with TV downloads for the same reason.
Whatever your definition of cheap is, they are trying to sell digital media in a marketplace. I would think given the lower production costs, generally lower quality (e.g. 128kbps MP3's) digital media should cost less than physical media. It usually costs more if you don't believe me go to play.com and look at their £4-7 cd range the MP3 version is always more expensive.
I use chrome because of the minimalist UI, I don't want a web browser to take up screen real estate. Before that I used IE because it used the least screen real estate.
I own a netbook, like most netbooks it has a 1024*768 resolution. Firefox and Opera can take up to a third of the screen just to show my File dialogs, etc.., 99% of browsing doesn't involve these dialogs so why should they continously take up space?
The real question is, if your coding safety critical applications why aren't you using the appropriate language e.g. Ada?
Java is a good programming language if you know how to use it and you can write some very efficient and small code. I'm tired of people attacking it for being slow when the people who use don't have a clue how to use it properly and just iterate their way through array lists (probably the most common mistake I see).
You should always use the right language for the right job.
The benefits don't have to be purely in the netbook space, I own a Samsung AC10 which uses a x64 n230 chip and I manage to get somewhere between 4 - 6 hours battery life out of the thing. Since DRM killed my interest in PC Gaming I replaced my Intel Core 2 Duo Quad Core with two Nvidia 9600GT's gaming rig with a Nvidia ION N330 machine. It's half the size, fan-less, cost £200 and while my old system would burn more than 100 watts on idle the new machine uses 60 watts at peak.
The main reason I made the change was because the Nvidia ION chipset had a Nvidia 9400, which isn't a particularly powerful graphics card but is good enough to play all my older PC games well and the dual core N330 is more than enough to do everything I want on a PC.
I agree having dual/quad core netbooks does defeat the point of netbooks, but those chips make sense in the desktop space.
How many journalists do what you describe now? How many newspapers/news channels just resort to sensationalism? The only major investigative journalism I can think of in the last 10 years is the Guardian and the MP expenses scandal. They managed to mess up "climategate" through shoddy investigation. Most journalists seem to take reuters/press releases add opinions to them and don't check the actual facts.
I keep hearing various new organisations spout the investigative journalism card you have but then when I turned on the TV yesterday morning the big story on GMTV and BBC Breakfast was the fact the Daily Mail is shouting about the violence an 11 year old does in the "Kick Ass" film. I've yet to see any major news organisation shout about ACTA, the only places covering that are sites like the register and slashdot. Almost 95% of MEP's demanded to see the text and the only coverage I saw was a three or four paragraph article on the BBC News website I found through TheReg.
Whenever the Register covers stories it seems they go into further depth and analysis than Channel4 news, BBC news, Sky News, etc... and thats just sad because the register is supposed to be a micky take of the news.
Umm your sarcastic point is actual truth, the Nokia n95 was Nokia's flagship phone for years because it sold really well. It was only replaced by the Nokia n97 last year and it was released back in 2006. Personally I never got why people loved it so much, I thought the 1st version was too large and heavy and they'd pushed the processor so much the phone seemed slow.
It is easy to blame the original iPhone gaining success on the shiny Apple logo because they do own so much media mind share people don't think about the alternatives. A lot of my tech friends owned the iPhone/iPhone3G and they were phones heavily lacking in basic features. I used to enjoy the fact my cheap 5800 could navigate us to random pubs while they couldn't, I could use bluetooth in a multitude of ways e.g. my home setup used winAmp/Outlook (now its pretty much all Ovi based) over bluetooth. I already had things like snails, mario, doom on my phone while the iPhone had fart apps.
I think the iPhone 3GS is just as good as my 5800 just as I think the Driod phone I played with is as good as my 5800. Because the top OS are as good as each other they have to distinguish themselves somehow and Apple's way of distinguishing themselves is iTunes and the cool factor.
On the actual topic, the iPad is a non starter for the same reason all tablets are non starters and that's to do with the form factor itself. I'm a geek who has to have the latest cool gadget and the closet I've come to wanting a tablet is the MS tablet book that was prototyped and even then I wasn't that fussed about it.
To achieve your goal it's best to stop thinking in a way the politicians want you to. Most people in this country seem to think there are only 3 valid choices (usually 2), there aren't.
When everyone was angry with Labour, their share of the European elections placed them 4th with UKIP taking the 3rd place. I am continuously coming across people who am making their choice not because they like a party but because they see it as blocking Labour/Conservatives/Liberal democrats whose polices they don't like.
A vote for an independent is not a wasted vote, voter turn out is low in this country. I don't care what small party/independent people vote for as long as they don't vote for someone in the "big 3".
I think this can cut two ways, during the first two years of university I used a windows mobile phone with a Bluetooth keyboard. This solution worked beautifully because it was small, light and forced me to restructure my notes each evening and put them into a sane format (basically redoing the class). Switching to a laptop hurt me in someways because I didn't need to redo the notes, but then again I suddenly had access to Proteus and Maple (Computer engineering degree) and spent my time using those to improve them.
The downside is they provide a great distraction when your stuck with a dull lecturer. My business lecturers mostly covered case studies I had done for A-Level, read directly from powerpoint slides and took themselves enormously seriously over simple and obvious concepts. The ability to play Tron while they droned on and repeated themselves probably took a easy 70+% grade down to ~65%. The again I never fell asleep in their class.
What I think is daft in this article is the type of students they are complaining about would be the same no matter what the medium. Writing with a pen won't add magical qualities to the students that writing with a keyboard took away.
Lastly I don't know if the US is like the UK but a lot of kids do various University courses because they didn't know what else to do and school told them they were good at that subject. I've always thought unless you have a passion for the subject your never going to have any incentive to learn or study properly.
I have no issue with platform specific titles, my issue is when Microsoft put artificial limits on things. For example thanks to Microsoft's interference the PS3 version of Rock Band didn't arrive in the UK until Rock Band 2 was available for the PS3 in the USA. The GTAIV expansion packs which are coming to the PS3 1 year after Microsoft paid money for exclusivity, as another poster mentioned they delayed Fallout 3.
My issue isn't with exclusivity it's when Microsoft pay a publisher to delay a PS3 version for a year and there's no actual technical reason, in the three cases I've mentioned PS3 versions existed (some were released) but were delayed.
Your missing a something and thats cost. Uru: Ages Beyond Myst was developed by Cyan Worlds back in 2004 and they used the Havok Physics engine. Several years later Gametap approached Cyan and gave them money to remake the Uru:Live (online MMO) part of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. Cyan had to ditch Havok because it cost an arm and a leg to license it, as a *Beta tester I can tell you most of the 1 year redevelopment was spent on ripping out Havok and putting Physx in (most of the other enhancements were done during development of Myst V).
Physx is cheap, it does 99% of what people are interested in and does it quite well. When your a small development house, price can mean a lot.
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iTunes is the real Player of this decade, it's slow, breaks easily, takes up huge amounts of resources and locks up for no reason. It's a terrible application and I firmly believe Apple have coded it that way for windows so they can show people how wonderful Mac OS-X is.
This isn't a subjective opinion, compare response times to other software like Nokia's Ovi Suite and you will find it worse in every possible metric. Consider how it forces a Apple usb driver over the standard windows one which does break some USB devices, how it now has to have at least 4 processes running constantly in the background each using 50Mb+. How Apple update tries to force Safari on you. Lastly if you un-install it from a windows machine that machine will suffer slow down.
I'm finding the Guardians website is pretty good for UK news, they actually seem interested in doing investigative journalism. More than a few times the seem to have covered things the BBC and other newspapers won't touch.
You will never find a news organisation which isn't biased. I'd suggest using multiple sources with biases you can determine. I used to use the Guardian, BBC and The Times. The Guardian because its left wing, BBC because their biases are insanely obvious and the Times because it's right wing.
Most people don't perceive a bias if it matches their own. It's why Fox News can exist in the first place.
His referencing of BP as British Petroleum has ignited a lot of anti-American feeling in England at least. Personally after watching some of his outbursts during that crisis I've lost all respect for him. He appears to be nothing more than a self serving political animal, rather than the man of principle he sold himself as.
The Anti-Americanism's only gotten worse since UK PM Cameron's "Junior Partner in 1940" comment (hint USA weren't even in the war then). I'd gauge most people as disappointed but my own opinions might be biasing that.
Giving up moderation to post, your right most people on here moaning probably don't own an iPhone, but Apple has managed to very slowly annoy/irritate/wind up the tech crowd.
It can be for a variety of reasons, the PR, walled garden, attitude to developers, cost, etc... but it seems anti-Apple feeling is growing.
Personally I dislike Apple products because I' tired of people buying into the Apple RDF. Last night I had a software engineering friend tell me Apple tell me he was awaiting a fix for his call problems because Apple said it was a signal bar display issue. I showed him the actual issue people were complaining about and asked him how he would fix antenna de-tuning with software. Only at then did he stop paying attention to Apple's marketing and engage his brain.
Nokia has already done one.
From what I have seen that seems true. When I started work there were CS graduates who started with me. One of them had managed to completely avoid doing any theoretical modules or even coding ones. He spent the entire time doing business modules and it showed in his inability to do anything. The company has been going for over 25 years and he was the second person they've fired during that time.
The N95 was pants, every iteration of Symbian has a version of Skype for it, from the original 7650 all the way to the current x6.
Although I agree with the parent a Nokia is probably the best way to go, it will be cheaper than an iPhone/Andriod phone. Symbian supports pretty much every protocol you can think off (I'm including 3rd party applications). The Symbian OS on Series 60 phones is designed to care about power usage so you'll have a decent battery life and for the ideological among us Symbian is now Open Source and you can get the SDk for free.
This whole male are sexist oppressors attitude allows makes me laugh. I used to work in the Plymouth (UK) Woolworths store. This had ~90-120 employees of which there were ~20 men (usually less). During my time there I was frequently told that as a man I was unable to clean anything, told I'd never be promoted to supervisor because retail wasn't for men, was given the dirty jobs because you couldn't ask a girl to do it. My personnal favorite was being ordered to move 4 piece patio packs by myself because I "was a big strong lad" when the same boss would arrange 4 girls to move the same item if I or one of the other guys were busy. The sexism there was obvious, constant and minor*.My little sister works in a clothing chain and from listening to her work stories exactly the same sort of stuff happens there. I've had to point out how extraordinarily sexist she's been sometimes.
Both sexes can be horribly sexist claiming it's an IT geek problem is insane. There are sexist managers out there they need to be stopped, just as people (both sexes) need to be told how sometimes they can come off sexist unintentionally.
*I put up with the job for the hours and the fact my social skills sucked and it helped me improve them.
3G phones with video calling have existed in the UK since 2004/2005. Ignoring the iPhone it's hard to find a phone which doesn't support Video calling.
I own a Nokia 5800 which is capable of video calling and everyone in my family is capable of making video calls, none of us do. I personally don't bother because holding the phone in front of you isn't as easy a having auto answer on my bluetooth stereo headset. For other people the cost of the calls is what's stopping them.
Whatever the reason it isn't technical, if I select a number in my contact list my Nokia will ask if I want to make a voice or video call. This iPhone "feature" like so many others isn't new or revolutionary.
Why does the school require laptops in the first place? I've read the article and it seems a cost cutting measure for schools. They don't want to buy computers for computer labs, which personally I think is a bad excuse.
They also talk about rolling out WiFi and don't mention any specific technologies that I can see as platform dependent. In fact WiFi seems to be the only thing they are doing, in University my IT department had guides for connecting to a rather specialised VPN for Windows ME, XP, Vista, Mobile 2003, Mobile 5 as well as Debian, Suse, OS X, Symbian and I'm told their is even an iPhone guide.
These things aren't complicated and WiFi doesn't exactly require much in the way of support. As for preparing kids for the future the kids are far more likely to have to deal with Office than iWorks. I bet they'll try to force Objective C on them rather than teach a platform independent language like Java or C.
No it's more like Google saying any website that appears in Google search results must use Adwords. If a website doesn't use Adwords then that website will be removed from Google search indexes and fined.
What Apple are saying is any application in the iTunes App store must use iAds, if the application talks to another analytic company that application will be removed from the App store and the company will be forced to refund everyone who bought the application including Apple's 30% cut (hence the fine).
See how there isn't any stretch of logic or imagination required to make my comparison?
Front facing camera's aren't new. Video calling was the original selling point of 3G networks
Lord of War by Momentum Pictures, there is a 30 second Mars bar advert that is unskippable. I've tried every button, top menu, root menu, fast forward, next chapter, etc.. and nothing works.
Which is why I no longer buy Mars bars or Momentum Pictures DVD's
I would suggest the BBC iPlayer shows people will use legal means if such means are available. BBC iPlayer with a few controls allowing you to buy media forever would be perfect. Especially if I couldn't download them onto my PS3.
I gave up on music downloads because buying an MP3 album was usually more expensive than buying the CD. I've not bothered with TV downloads for the same reason.
Whatever your definition of cheap is, they are trying to sell digital media in a marketplace. I would think given the lower production costs, generally lower quality (e.g. 128kbps MP3's) digital media should cost less than physical media. It usually costs more if you don't believe me go to play.com and look at their £4-7 cd range the MP3 version is always more expensive.
I use chrome because of the minimalist UI, I don't want a web browser to take up screen real estate. Before that I used IE because it used the least screen real estate.
I own a netbook, like most netbooks it has a 1024*768 resolution. Firefox and Opera can take up to a third of the screen just to show my File dialogs, etc.., 99% of browsing doesn't involve these dialogs so why should they continously take up space?
The real question is, if your coding safety critical applications why aren't you using the appropriate language e.g. Ada?
Java is a good programming language if you know how to use it and you can write some very efficient and small code. I'm tired of people attacking it for being slow when the people who use don't have a clue how to use it properly and just iterate their way through array lists (probably the most common mistake I see).
You should always use the right language for the right job.
The benefits don't have to be purely in the netbook space, I own a Samsung AC10 which uses a x64 n230 chip and I manage to get somewhere between 4 - 6 hours battery life out of the thing. Since DRM killed my interest in PC Gaming I replaced my Intel Core 2 Duo Quad Core with two Nvidia 9600GT's gaming rig with a Nvidia ION N330 machine. It's half the size, fan-less, cost £200 and while my old system would burn more than 100 watts on idle the new machine uses 60 watts at peak.
The main reason I made the change was because the Nvidia ION chipset had a Nvidia 9400, which isn't a particularly powerful graphics card but is good enough to play all my older PC games well and the dual core N330 is more than enough to do everything I want on a PC.
I agree having dual/quad core netbooks does defeat the point of netbooks, but those chips make sense in the desktop space.
Judging by my workplace it went out today around 17:00 GMT, our entire office of 500 people decided to go home early.
I recently entered Solaris in a worst film off, it was against Webs and Imaginarium of Dr. Parnasses. The film conversion (both)are terrible.
How many journalists do what you describe now? How many newspapers/news channels just resort to sensationalism? The only major investigative journalism I can think of in the last 10 years is the Guardian and the MP expenses scandal. They managed to mess up "climategate" through shoddy investigation. Most journalists seem to take reuters/press releases add opinions to them and don't check the actual facts.
I keep hearing various new organisations spout the investigative journalism card you have but then when I turned on the TV yesterday morning the big story on GMTV and BBC Breakfast was the fact the Daily Mail is shouting about the violence an 11 year old does in the "Kick Ass" film. I've yet to see any major news organisation shout about ACTA, the only places covering that are sites like the register and slashdot. Almost 95% of MEP's demanded to see the text and the only coverage I saw was a three or four paragraph article on the BBC News website I found through TheReg.
Whenever the Register covers stories it seems they go into further depth and analysis than Channel4 news, BBC news, Sky News, etc... and thats just sad because the register is supposed to be a micky take of the news.
Umm your sarcastic point is actual truth, the Nokia n95 was Nokia's flagship phone for years because it sold really well. It was only replaced by the Nokia n97 last year and it was released back in 2006. Personally I never got why people loved it so much, I thought the 1st version was too large and heavy and they'd pushed the processor so much the phone seemed slow.
It is easy to blame the original iPhone gaining success on the shiny Apple logo because they do own so much media mind share people don't think about the alternatives. A lot of my tech friends owned the iPhone/iPhone3G and they were phones heavily lacking in basic features. I used to enjoy the fact my cheap 5800 could navigate us to random pubs while they couldn't, I could use bluetooth in a multitude of ways e.g. my home setup used winAmp/Outlook (now its pretty much all Ovi based) over bluetooth. I already had things like snails, mario, doom on my phone while the iPhone had fart apps.
I think the iPhone 3GS is just as good as my 5800 just as I think the Driod phone I played with is as good as my 5800. Because the top OS are as good as each other they have to distinguish themselves somehow and Apple's way of distinguishing themselves is iTunes and the cool factor.
On the actual topic, the iPad is a non starter for the same reason all tablets are non starters and that's to do with the form factor itself. I'm a geek who has to have the latest cool gadget and the closet I've come to wanting a tablet is the MS tablet book that was prototyped and even then I wasn't that fussed about it.
To achieve your goal it's best to stop thinking in a way the politicians want you to. Most people in this country seem to think there are only 3 valid choices (usually 2), there aren't.
When everyone was angry with Labour, their share of the European elections placed them 4th with UKIP taking the 3rd place. I am continuously coming across people who am making their choice not because they like a party but because they see it as blocking Labour/Conservatives/Liberal democrats whose polices they don't like.
A vote for an independent is not a wasted vote, voter turn out is low in this country. I don't care what small party/independent people vote for as long as they don't vote for someone in the "big 3".
I think this can cut two ways, during the first two years of university I used a windows mobile phone with a Bluetooth keyboard. This solution worked beautifully because it was small, light and forced me to restructure my notes each evening and put them into a sane format (basically redoing the class). Switching to a laptop hurt me in someways because I didn't need to redo the notes, but then again I suddenly had access to Proteus and Maple (Computer engineering degree) and spent my time using those to improve them.
The downside is they provide a great distraction when your stuck with a dull lecturer. My business lecturers mostly covered case studies I had done for A-Level, read directly from powerpoint slides and took themselves enormously seriously over simple and obvious concepts. The ability to play Tron while they droned on and repeated themselves probably took a easy 70+% grade down to ~65%. The again I never fell asleep in their class.
What I think is daft in this article is the type of students they are complaining about would be the same no matter what the medium. Writing with a pen won't add magical qualities to the students that writing with a keyboard took away.
Lastly I don't know if the US is like the UK but a lot of kids do various University courses because they didn't know what else to do and school told them they were good at that subject. I've always thought unless you have a passion for the subject your never going to have any incentive to learn or study properly.
I have no issue with platform specific titles, my issue is when Microsoft put artificial limits on things. For example thanks to Microsoft's interference the PS3 version of Rock Band didn't arrive in the UK until Rock Band 2 was available for the PS3 in the USA. The GTAIV expansion packs which are coming to the PS3 1 year after Microsoft paid money for exclusivity, as another poster mentioned they delayed Fallout 3.
My issue isn't with exclusivity it's when Microsoft pay a publisher to delay a PS3 version for a year and there's no actual technical reason, in the three cases I've mentioned PS3 versions existed (some were released) but were delayed.
Your missing a something and thats cost. Uru: Ages Beyond Myst was developed by Cyan Worlds back in 2004 and they used the Havok Physics engine. Several years later Gametap approached Cyan and gave them money to remake the Uru:Live (online MMO) part of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. Cyan had to ditch Havok because it cost an arm and a leg to license it, as a *Beta tester I can tell you most of the 1 year redevelopment was spent on ripping out Havok and putting Physx in (most of the other enhancements were done during development of Myst V).
Physx is cheap, it does 99% of what people are interested in and does it quite well. When your a small development house, price can mean a lot.
*My 2 year NDA agreement expired last year