Re:Like Woz didn't move on a LONG time ago?
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He means that cheapish all-purpose tape, usually in grey, which is far more like cheap gaffer's tape than anything you'd use to actually tape ducts. The original tape of this kind was created in the 1940s for sealing ammunition cases -- thus, the water resistance. In German, you'd probably call is "Panzertape".. other names include "Hurricane tape" or "Rigger's tape". Good for just about anything other than taping ducts.
"Duck Tape" is a brand of this sort of tape, though they make other tapes. And you can get this in many other colors, not just green or grey.. even "tye-dye" from the Duck Tape people.
Real "duct tape" is made of metallic aluminum, and isn't very strong. It's also got temperature resistant adhesive, and is nearly impossible to remove once correctly applied.
Re:Like Woz didn't move on a LONG time ago?
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A rose by any other name...
Re:Web Research right at the Store
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And the "bigger screen" is just that.. bigger. But not always more.
Ok, it's 4.5x more pixels than an iPhone... but the iPhone is seriously behind the times, much has happened in a year. On my Droid, I get slightly more than half the screen pixels as the iPad. Sure, smaller, but it also fits in my pocket.
When using the iPad, some things benefit from the larger size... two or three people looking at a video, rather than one. But once you get to text entry, you've cut the screen in half, or worse. The Droid... oh, I pull out this keyboard, and get the whole screen. So there's no real advantage to that big screen device anymore. Sure, you can add an external keyboard, in either case... but that kind of misses the point.
Re:"Apple Inc -- creator of the personal computer"
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The statement that Commodore, and specifically, Chuck Peddle, created the personal computer is even more correct.
To start with, the microprocessor in the Apple I and Apple ][ was the MOS Technology 6502. This was, in fact, designed by Mr. Peddle, as an alternative to the far more expensive Motorola 6800. Peddle had personal computers in mind, thus, he oversaw the design of a bunch of other chips, I/O devices needed to put together a full computer. The first 6502-based computer was Peddle's KIM-1, introduced in 1975.
Both the Apple ][ was introduced on April 14, 1977, and went on sale June 5th. It came with 4K of RAM, the machine language monitor from the Apple I, and a very simple integer BASIC. There was a cassette interface, which let you hook up a separate cassette recorder, and a composite video output, which let you hook up someone else's monitor (Apple didn't make one) or RF modulator for use with a TV (ditto). It cost $1295
The Commodore PET 2001, Peddle's full home computer, was introduced in January of 2001. This came with 4K or 8K of RAM, a full BASIC with screen editing in 14K of ROM, cassette interface, and built-in monochrome screen for about $799. The computer had BASIC because Peddle had used BASIC on timeshare systems, and though the individual ought to have the same capability (the BASIC was an enhanced version of a BASIC interpreter from an unknown company called Microsoft... Commodore bought permanent rights to it for about $10,000).
Re:Like Woz didn't move on a LONG time ago?
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There's some logic in the idea that the iPad (and certainly the tablets to follow) will be potentially useful "only computers" for the non-demanding out there. But you absolutely need to remove the tether. So, let's pretend you can have it set up for you, in-store, and you have no other computer to dock. Does it actually work that way, or does the tethering have to come back?
* Ok, presumably, you can hook the iPad in to a wireless network, whether at home or the local coffee shop, without any assistance. That's the first key, particularly given the lack of any ports.
* Can you download apps and app-updates directly to your iPad? Does the iPad notify you of updated applications?
* Music, apps, and videos download, sure. But lets say, on the way to the coffee shop to hook to the internet, you drop that iPad and it's run over by a truck (or attacked by a wild band of iPad smashers). Can you go back to the Apple store, have it set up for you, and basically re-sync to everything from the net? How about things you're working on -- documents, etc. And your contacts? All that has to be backed up online, since there's no other option.
* Prints.. people do need to print. Can you print to ANYTHING? I mean, I have digital cameras that'll print to nearly any old printer these days, directly. Will it print via any of the standard Wifi or Bluetooth printer protocols?
* NAS interfacing. I did suggest there's no way to hook up a device, but NAS drives are getting cheap. Many home routers now support attachment of a USB drive as a NAS drive. So, let's say I set up that NAS drive on Gramma's wireless. Can the iPad back itself up to that, completely, and can I easily re-import that to restore it, or at least the stuff that can't be put online.
I know most of this stuff is possible using an Android-based tablet... you really can live "stand-alone" on Android, there are several printing solutions, it's easy to copy out to other networked devices, and most things automatically sync over any network connection.
I would really like to see "application processor" devices other than PCs that can live entirely alone, without the need to serve as peripherals to PCs. Even the iPad... I would never use this device myself, but maybe it's a good solution for computer-phobes who still need to use a computer of some kind. But it also has to be completely self-contained, and just as easy in all of those things, or it's going to fail at this niche.
Don't believe the rumors on the net -- there most certainly is a GPU in the Nexus One.
The Nexus One is based around the Qualcomm QSD8250 SOC, which does in fact includes the AMD/ATi Z430 (Qualcomm bought AMD's mobile graphics division), versus the PowerVR SGX used on the Droid and iPhone 3GS and pretty much every other modern smart phone, as well as bunch of the netbooks (Intel licenses a higher-end version, for example). Qualcomm claims "up to 22M triangles/sec and 133M 3D pixels/sec". Actual benchmarks put the Droid GPU at around 18.5M triangles and about 662M pixels per second... there's your weak link. The Nexus One's CPU is nearly twice the speed (1GHz vs. 550MHz), but the 3D's definitely going to suffer.
Without any GPU, you'd be waiting around for 3D to occur, frame by frame. Ok, maybe not quite so bad, but it would be bad. And bad on power, too... general purpose CPU cycles take far more power doing graphics than application-specific GPU hardware.
The iPhone 3GS may do a bit better still, all things considered. It's got a similar GPU to the Droid's, but of course, only 37% of the pixels to paint for any given frame. And the 3GS is usually programmed in native code (compiled Objective-C), which includes use of the ARM Cortex A8's NEON SIMD instructions. The Android NDK allows use of native instructions, but so far, no support for NEON.
This was clearly a test. If Jarvis were a true Jedi, his mind tricks would have worked just dandy on his coworkers, and no one would have questioned his wearing of the hood in the first place. Clearly, he's a pretender, just using the system to let him keep pretending. Similarly, I think high level Scientologists who can't fly or shoot mind bullets or whatever else they claim need to be exposed as pretenders. Science Fiction-based religions are hard enough to keep going, without fake followers adding to the problem.
I take his religion far more seriously than those other science-fiction-based religions (particularly Scientology, 7th Day Adventism, and Raëlism). After all, they don't have anywhere near the box office... and while "The Phantom Menace" was bad, it wasn't even close to being "Battlefield Earth" bad. That's got to have some cosmic significance. And I think George Lucas at least had help on the first three stories, while L. Ron Hubbard did all his own writing, tragically enough.
And I think it's great that, as a society, we can finally afford the same treatment to these very, very obviously fiction-founded religions that we afford to those others, based on ancient folktales of long forgotten authorship.
Yeah, I agree. Tolkien spent something like ten years establishing his world, before he set any of the major stories in it. While the Hollywood inclination is probably just to milk this for all it's worth, it's actually possible that the right writer could do justice to Tolkien in new stories. Neil Gaiman would be my first choice, too... I've read pretty much everything he's written, starting with the "Sandman" series.
Avatar was brilliant in 3D.. Cameron actually designed a better 3D camera for the live capture parts of it. "Alice" was decent... I didn't have any problem with it. Even when the 3D was a little weird, I found that just suited the surreal story anyway. I liked it.. then again, I have liked everything Tim Burton's done. I do realize he's not for everyone.
It's pretty clear that 3D is here to stay, at least in the theaters. Not only are many films doing more business in 3D than 2D, but at least at "Alice" last weekend, every preview was for a 3D film... and there were way too many previews to sit through.
The technology has improved... most theaters use RealD glasses, which are essentially just a specialized pair of sunglasses (circular polarizers in each eye). Dolby also has a competing technology which is fairly good. The film you're thinking of, "Shark Boy and Lava Girl" was done in anaglyphic 3D... that's the old red/cyan tinted glasses they've been using since those horrible 3D exploitation films of the 50s, 60s, and 70s... you know, the films with all those stuff coming directly at the viewer, saying "hey, lookie here, 3D!". These were funky enough for B&W films, but they're worthless for color.
In the VHS days, yeah, pre-recorded tapes were often priced at $90-$100 on release. There were actually two tape releases, once pre-recorded tapes and video rental shops got to be commonplace. The $90 tape was usually sold directly to rental stores, while you had to wait for the cheaper $25-ish release if you didn't want to pay the rental industry price.
Once the rental outlets grew into gigantic national companies, they negotiated directly with the studios, and eliminated any real need for the rental-only phase.
Nearly all the modern 3D films are on digital projectors, from hard disc, using high speed DLPs with a polarizing 3D adapter. IMAX and some higher-end theaters use dual synchronized digital projectors.
And it's kind of shame, especially in IMAX. An actual IMAX film is shown on IMAX's special 70mm system, which runs horizontally, delivering a 69.6 mm × 48.5 mm image. This is a spectacular image, which can resolve an equivalent of at least 6120 × 4500 actually discernible pixels. For IMAX Digital 3D, they currently use dual Christie 2K projectors, 2000x1000 pixels each... one for each eye, of course.
The glasses are nearly always recycled. Sure, you can take 'em along, but if you drop 'em in the drop box, they reuse them.
They have 144fps digital projectors in the theater... and they're projectors. So adapting the 3D effect to the projector is far easier than anything you can do to your TV to enable the same effect. Or just use a second, synchronized projector. These are all via digital projectors (some 4K, but most in use are 2K projectors, essentially the same resolution as a good HDTV).
Most of the projectors are DLP. Home DLP televisions could easily employ the same technology. Before LED or laser DLP models, they used a single projection bulb and spinning color wheel to time division multiplex a single DLP chip... they're wicked fast. To get 3D, the same effect could be achieved using a wheel with alternating clockwise and counterclockwise polarization.. just like the Real3D glasses. So then yeah, you could use the cheap theater style glasses.
The one flaw in this... DLP has kind of lost in the market. Not because it's inferior (very comparable to modern dynamic LCD or Plasma) or expensive (nope, actually cheaper).. but the one inexcusable flaw... they don't hang on your wall. Kind of a shame. You can't do the polarizing trick with either plasma or LCD... in fact, LCDs already do polarizing tricks (try 'em out with those 3D glasses).
Hey.. don't diss Robert Rodríguez.. the guy is frickin' one-man film crew: he does production, direction, writing, editing, camera, music composition, production design, visual effects, sound editing, and probably gaffing on many of his films. Sure, "The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl" is a kids film (in fact, the story was originally his then seven-year-old son's story), but let's see you make a film that grosses nearly $40 million, practically in your garage:-)
Not only that, but on his DVDs, Rodríguez gives both filmmaking lessons ("Ten Minute Film School") and a recipe ("Ten Minute Cooking School"). And he was cool enough to quit the Directors Guild of America, as they wouldn't allow him to share directing credit with Frank Miller on "Sin City".
The problem with unlocked smart phones in the USA is the 3G network. GSM's 3G protocols demanded more bandwidth than you had for EDGE/2G/Voice. AT&T, being a mixture of two companies (Cingular and the old AT&T Mobility) had both 850MHz and 1900MHz slots in many areas, so they could roll out 3G using both (regular HSPA need 10MHz of bandwidth, versus the 2.5MHz used for EDGE, Voice, and CDMA 3G, the new HSPA+ needs 20MHz of bandwidth). T-Mobile didn't have any 850MHz slots and less bandwidth at 1900MHz, so they had to wait for new spectrum... that's now 1700MHz and 2100MHz (a full 3G connection will use both).
So, simply put, most GSM phones will support at most one of either T-Mobile or AT&T on 3G protocols. Like healthcare, this was handled much better in Europe.
As opposed to the previous MS-OS for phones, which could play 3D games? Yeah, this is "Windows Phone 7", which is apparently what happens when you turn the Zune version of WinCE into a cellphone OS, rather than the old PalmPC version of WinCE (eg, the basis for Windows Mobile). They completely changed the GUI, so it looks, well, just like the ZuneHD... probably better for consumers, and definitely better for finger-touch interfaces, than the old WinMo.
Of course, one might also view this in a negative light. This is Microsoft once again copying Apple, turning their MP3 player into a phone. And it's also kind of a "Hail Mary" pass... the old WinMo has been steadily losing market share. So they introduce this new version of Windows for phones, which requires a totally new API. Old code won't work in the new OS, period.. as Gizmodo put it, "Windows Mobile isn't just dead, the body's been dumped, buried and paved over by a rainbow brick road." You have to write you apps using Silverlight or some other Microsoft nonsense... none of the old WinMo stuff is carried over. Check it out here. MS at least understands that WinMo was so far behind, the only way to catch up with iPhone and Android was a clean, new, Zune-shaped slate.
You could have that BASIC prompt, but sadly, Apple saw the Commodore 64 Emulator as a major threat to the future of the iPhone, and outlawed it. Works just dandy in Android.
Actually, apps in the background can run just dandy.. it's just that most are interactive and/or well behaved, and simply get put on the wait queue when they lose focus. That's what they're supposed to do. There are a few that are not correctly written, though, and it's completely possible for an app to drop to the background and keep churning away under Android. I found this out the hard way with a GPS monitoring program... of those things that gives a nice compass and satellite view. This particular one (can't recall the name) didn't process the "going to background" message, and kept churning away... not at all good for one's battery life.
It's rare to be multitasking, much, on an iPhone because, well, you can't. If you use an Android phone, you'll probably find yourself multitasking all the time. I certainly do, on a daily basis. Works great. And yeah, I might not be too likely to compile code, but I could certainly be playing MP3s while running an ftp daemon (not to mention a dozen other daemons, for GPS and communications features), while reading a document.
Already being on Verizon, the Droid cost me an additional $30/month over the cost of service for a non-smart phone. It's a family plan.. we have four phones on for slightly over $100 per month. The general prices between AT&T and Verizon aren't significantly different... one may be better or worse, depending on the specifics of what you want. The data plan, at least for individuals, is the same... "unlimited" data for smart phones (where "unlimited" in both cases is subject to arbitrary definitions, both companies will go after you if you're using more data than they think possible under their license... like tethering)
As for coverage, the entire Verizon network is 3G, only about 20% of AT&T's (by area, not by population) is 3G. That's nothing more than the difference between CDMA and GSM... the CDMA 3G protocols run over the same frequencies and bandwidth used for 2G/Voice, while GSM always requires additional bandwidth, and often, additional frequencies. This is further compounded by today's AT&T being a mix of two previous companies, Cingular and AT&T Mobility. Cingular bought AT&T Mobility to become the country's second largest cellular network, after Verizon. But AT&T Mobility was using DAMPS (they called it "TDMA"), not GSM. So the company has spent many years just establishing full 2G GSM coverage and phasing out DAMPS (the DAMPS network went dark in mid 2008). This is also why AT&T's slightly more likely to drop calls than other GSM networks... DAMPS has slightly better coverage than GSM, so upgraded DAMPS cells are often not ideally placed for GSM.
At its peak, the AT&T network is faster than Verizon's. Regular HSPA cells deliver up to 3.6Mb/s down to clients, versus 3.1Mb/s down to clients for CDMA's EvDO Rev A. By this summer, AT&T will have HSPA+ coverage in as many as 40 cities, which can deliver 7.2Mb/s down to clients, if you have a fast enough phone (you'll need an iPhone 3GS for this, and the iPhones are all still crippled on the upload side... HSPA+ can go upstream at up to 2Mb/s, but iPhones only do 384kb/s). All networks degrade over distance, and all fall back to "EDGE" speeds if you're too far from a cell site for 3G performance. AT&T and Verizon both have an advantage in range, though, generally being the companies owning one of the two 850MHz slots available in any area of the USA. You get much better range at 850MHz than at 1900MHz... Sprint does its 3G at 1900MHz (and WiMax 4G at 2500MHz, though they don't have any 4G phones out yet), T-Mobile does 2G at 1900MHz and 3G split between 1700MHz and 2100MHz. Verizon is starting 4G service at 700MHz this summer, using the LTE standard; AT&T will be starting 4G next year, also at 700MHz (Verizon won the largest 700MHz spectrum block, 20MHz of spectrum, while AT&T got the other big win here, 12MHz worth of spectrum).
It's quite true that Apple's system of alerts is completely broken when it comes to multitasking. But hey, the Android alerts system works exceptionally well... Apple can certainly copy that kind of behavior, if they can't figure out something for themselves.
I don't think it's got anything to do with battery life. It's "Apple" vs. "everyone else"... Apple wants their apps to be special, no one else's. It's fairly trivial to ensure multitasking works fine. And given Apple's heavy hand in the iTunes store, they could easily demand that all apps behave properly as multitasking apps (eg, they go quiescent when they lose focus, other than in the case of daemons, and are otherwise well behaved), or they get booted from the store. Apple's contract with developers already gives them the ability to kick out any app for any reason, and even to kill those already out and installed on iPhones. Surely this isn't a problem of their level of control. Thus, not a real power issue... that's just the excuse some people make.
The reason you want a chat client is obvious... you're talking to others using that specific chat protocol. My company uses Yahoo messaging for regular communications during business hours. That's our standard, and the ability to have that on my Droid, keep myself logged in, get a beep when a new message comes in, is very useful.
The big advantage of smart phones over other devices is that they function, ideally, as universal communicators. So do PCs, but they rarely fit in one's pocket and last all day on a single change. And yet, new forms of communication keep being invented: chat, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Sure, not everyone needs every new form, but a smart phone ought to be able to hook in any new form as a perfectly first class form of communications. That means things like background notifications, just as you get with SMS or phone calls. If your device can't do this for arbitrary new forms of communications, it's broken.
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He means that cheapish all-purpose tape, usually in grey, which is far more like cheap gaffer's tape than anything you'd use to actually tape ducts. The original tape of this kind was created in the 1940s for sealing ammunition cases -- thus, the water resistance. In German, you'd probably call is "Panzertape".. other names include "Hurricane tape" or "Rigger's tape". Good for just about anything other than taping ducts.
"Duck Tape" is a brand of this sort of tape, though they make other tapes. And you can get this in many other colors, not just green or grey.. even "tye-dye" from the Duck Tape people.
Real "duct tape" is made of metallic aluminum, and isn't very strong. It's also got temperature resistant adhesive, and is nearly impossible to remove once correctly applied.
A rose by any other name...
And the "bigger screen" is just that.. bigger. But not always more.
Ok, it's 4.5x more pixels than an iPhone... but the iPhone is seriously behind the times, much has happened in a year. On my Droid, I get slightly more than half the screen pixels as the iPad. Sure, smaller, but it also fits in my pocket.
When using the iPad, some things benefit from the larger size... two or three people looking at a video, rather than one. But once you get to text entry, you've cut the screen in half, or worse. The Droid... oh, I pull out this keyboard, and get the whole screen. So there's no real advantage to that big screen device anymore. Sure, you can add an external keyboard, in either case... but that kind of misses the point.
The statement that Commodore, and specifically, Chuck Peddle, created the personal computer is even more correct.
To start with, the microprocessor in the Apple I and Apple ][ was the MOS Technology 6502. This was, in fact, designed by Mr. Peddle, as an alternative to the far more expensive Motorola 6800. Peddle had personal computers in mind, thus, he oversaw the design of a bunch of other chips, I/O devices needed to put together a full computer. The first 6502-based computer was Peddle's KIM-1, introduced in 1975.
Both the Apple ][ was introduced on April 14, 1977, and went on sale June 5th. It came with 4K of RAM, the machine language monitor from the Apple I, and a very simple integer BASIC. There was a cassette interface, which let you hook up a separate cassette recorder, and a composite video output, which let you hook up someone else's monitor (Apple didn't make one) or RF modulator for use with a TV (ditto). It cost $1295
The Commodore PET 2001, Peddle's full home computer, was introduced in January of 2001. This came with 4K or 8K of RAM, a full BASIC with screen editing in 14K of ROM, cassette interface, and built-in monochrome screen for about $799. The computer had BASIC because Peddle had used BASIC on timeshare systems, and though the individual ought to have the same capability (the BASIC was an enhanced version of a BASIC interpreter from an unknown company called Microsoft... Commodore bought permanent rights to it for about $10,000).
There's some logic in the idea that the iPad (and certainly the tablets to follow) will be potentially useful "only computers" for the non-demanding out there. But you absolutely need to remove the tether. So, let's pretend you can have it set up for you, in-store, and you have no other computer to dock. Does it actually work that way, or does the tethering have to come back?
* Ok, presumably, you can hook the iPad in to a wireless network, whether at home or the local coffee shop, without any assistance. That's the first key, particularly given the lack of any ports.
* Can you download apps and app-updates directly to your iPad? Does the iPad notify you of updated applications?
* Music, apps, and videos download, sure. But lets say, on the way to the coffee shop to hook to the internet, you drop that iPad and it's run over by a truck (or attacked by a wild band of iPad smashers). Can you go back to the Apple store, have it set up for you, and basically re-sync to everything from the net? How about things you're working on -- documents, etc. And your contacts? All that has to be backed up online, since there's no other option.
* Prints.. people do need to print. Can you print to ANYTHING? I mean, I have digital cameras that'll print to nearly any old printer these days, directly. Will it print via any of the standard Wifi or Bluetooth printer protocols?
* NAS interfacing. I did suggest there's no way to hook up a device, but NAS drives are getting cheap. Many home routers now support attachment of a USB drive as a NAS drive. So, let's say I set up that NAS drive on Gramma's wireless. Can the iPad back itself up to that, completely, and can I easily re-import that to restore it, or at least the stuff that can't be put online.
I know most of this stuff is possible using an Android-based tablet... you really can live "stand-alone" on Android, there are several printing solutions, it's easy to copy out to other networked devices, and most things automatically sync over any network connection.
I would really like to see "application processor" devices other than PCs that can live entirely alone, without the need to serve as peripherals to PCs. Even the iPad... I would never use this device myself, but maybe it's a good solution for computer-phobes who still need to use a computer of some kind. But it also has to be completely self-contained, and just as easy in all of those things, or it's going to fail at this niche.
Don't believe the rumors on the net -- there most certainly is a GPU in the Nexus One.
The Nexus One is based around the Qualcomm QSD8250 SOC, which does in fact includes the AMD/ATi Z430 (Qualcomm bought AMD's mobile graphics division), versus the PowerVR SGX used on the Droid and iPhone 3GS and pretty much every other modern smart phone, as well as bunch of the netbooks (Intel licenses a higher-end version, for example). Qualcomm claims "up to 22M triangles/sec and 133M 3D pixels/sec". Actual benchmarks put the Droid GPU at around 18.5M triangles and about 662M pixels per second... there's your weak link. The Nexus One's CPU is nearly twice the speed (1GHz vs. 550MHz), but the 3D's definitely going to suffer.
Without any GPU, you'd be waiting around for 3D to occur, frame by frame. Ok, maybe not quite so bad, but it would be bad. And bad on power, too... general purpose CPU cycles take far more power doing graphics than application-specific GPU hardware.
The iPhone 3GS may do a bit better still, all things considered. It's got a similar GPU to the Droid's, but of course, only 37% of the pixels to paint for any given frame. And the 3GS is usually programmed in native code (compiled Objective-C), which includes use of the ARM Cortex A8's NEON SIMD instructions. The Android NDK allows use of native instructions, but so far, no support for NEON.
This was clearly a test. If Jarvis were a true Jedi, his mind tricks would have worked just dandy on his coworkers, and no one would have questioned his wearing of the hood in the first place. Clearly, he's a pretender, just using the system to let him keep pretending. Similarly, I think high level Scientologists who can't fly or shoot mind bullets or whatever else they claim need to be exposed as pretenders. Science Fiction-based religions are hard enough to keep going, without fake followers adding to the problem.
And many, many more trapped inside.
I take his religion far more seriously than those other science-fiction-based religions (particularly Scientology, 7th Day Adventism, and Raëlism). After all, they don't have anywhere near the box office... and while "The Phantom Menace" was bad, it wasn't even close to being "Battlefield Earth" bad. That's got to have some cosmic significance. And I think George Lucas at least had help on the first three stories, while L. Ron Hubbard did all his own writing, tragically enough.
And I think it's great that, as a society, we can finally afford the same treatment to these very, very obviously fiction-founded religions that we afford to those others, based on ancient folktales of long forgotten authorship.
Yeah, I agree. Tolkien spent something like ten years establishing his world, before he set any of the major stories in it. While the Hollywood inclination is probably just to milk this for all it's worth, it's actually possible that the right writer could do justice to Tolkien in new stories. Neil Gaiman would be my first choice, too... I've read pretty much everything he's written, starting with the "Sandman" series.
Avatar was brilliant in 3D.. Cameron actually designed a better 3D camera for the live capture parts of it. "Alice" was decent... I didn't have any problem with it. Even when the 3D was a little weird, I found that just suited the surreal story anyway. I liked it.. then again, I have liked everything Tim Burton's done. I do realize he's not for everyone.
It's pretty clear that 3D is here to stay, at least in the theaters. Not only are many films doing more business in 3D than 2D, but at least at "Alice" last weekend, every preview was for a 3D film... and there were way too many previews to sit through.
The technology has improved... most theaters use RealD glasses, which are essentially just a specialized pair of sunglasses (circular polarizers in each eye). Dolby also has a competing technology which is fairly good. The film you're thinking of, "Shark Boy and Lava Girl" was done in anaglyphic 3D... that's the old red/cyan tinted glasses they've been using since those horrible 3D exploitation films of the 50s, 60s, and 70s... you know, the films with all those stuff coming directly at the viewer, saying "hey, lookie here, 3D!". These were funky enough for B&W films, but they're worthless for color.
In the VHS days, yeah, pre-recorded tapes were often priced at $90-$100 on release. There were actually two tape releases, once pre-recorded tapes and video rental shops got to be commonplace. The $90 tape was usually sold directly to rental stores, while you had to wait for the cheaper $25-ish release if you didn't want to pay the rental industry price.
Once the rental outlets grew into gigantic national companies, they negotiated directly with the studios, and eliminated any real need for the rental-only phase.
Nearly all the modern 3D films are on digital projectors, from hard disc, using high speed DLPs with a polarizing 3D adapter. IMAX and some higher-end theaters use dual synchronized digital projectors.
And it's kind of shame, especially in IMAX. An actual IMAX film is shown on IMAX's special 70mm system, which runs horizontally, delivering a 69.6 mm × 48.5 mm image. This is a spectacular image, which can resolve an equivalent of at least 6120 × 4500 actually discernible pixels. For IMAX Digital 3D, they currently use dual Christie 2K projectors, 2000x1000 pixels each... one for each eye, of course.
The glasses are nearly always recycled. Sure, you can take 'em along, but if you drop 'em in the drop box, they reuse them.
They have 144fps digital projectors in the theater... and they're projectors. So adapting the 3D effect to the projector is far easier than anything you can do to your TV to enable the same effect. Or just use a second, synchronized projector. These are all via digital projectors (some 4K, but most in use are 2K projectors, essentially the same resolution as a good HDTV).
Most of the projectors are DLP. Home DLP televisions could easily employ the same technology. Before LED or laser DLP models, they used a single projection bulb and spinning color wheel to time division multiplex a single DLP chip... they're wicked fast. To get 3D, the same effect could be achieved using a wheel with alternating clockwise and counterclockwise polarization.. just like the Real3D glasses. So then yeah, you could use the cheap theater style glasses.
The one flaw in this... DLP has kind of lost in the market. Not because it's inferior (very comparable to modern dynamic LCD or Plasma) or expensive (nope, actually cheaper).. but the one inexcusable flaw... they don't hang on your wall. Kind of a shame. You can't do the polarizing trick with either plasma or LCD... in fact, LCDs already do polarizing tricks (try 'em out with those 3D glasses).
Hey.. don't diss Robert Rodríguez.. the guy is frickin' one-man film crew: he does production, direction, writing, editing, camera, music composition, production design, visual effects, sound editing, and probably gaffing on many of his films. Sure, "The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl" is a kids film (in fact, the story was originally his then seven-year-old son's story), but let's see you make a film that grosses nearly $40 million, practically in your garage :-)
Not only that, but on his DVDs, Rodríguez gives both filmmaking lessons ("Ten Minute Film School") and a recipe ("Ten Minute Cooking School"). And he was cool enough to quit the Directors Guild of America, as they wouldn't allow him to share directing credit with Frank Miller on "Sin City".
The problem with unlocked smart phones in the USA is the 3G network. GSM's 3G protocols demanded more bandwidth than you had for EDGE/2G/Voice. AT&T, being a mixture of two companies (Cingular and the old AT&T Mobility) had both 850MHz and 1900MHz slots in many areas, so they could roll out 3G using both (regular HSPA need 10MHz of bandwidth, versus the 2.5MHz used for EDGE, Voice, and CDMA 3G, the new HSPA+ needs 20MHz of bandwidth). T-Mobile didn't have any 850MHz slots and less bandwidth at 1900MHz, so they had to wait for new spectrum... that's now 1700MHz and 2100MHz (a full 3G connection will use both).
So, simply put, most GSM phones will support at most one of either T-Mobile or AT&T on 3G protocols. Like healthcare, this was handled much better in Europe.
EDGE only? EvDO is the 3G protocol on CDMA networks... it's not part of the N900 on GSM.
As opposed to the previous MS-OS for phones, which could play 3D games? Yeah, this is "Windows Phone 7", which is apparently what happens when you turn the Zune version of WinCE into a cellphone OS, rather than the old PalmPC version of WinCE (eg, the basis for Windows Mobile). They completely changed the GUI, so it looks, well, just like the ZuneHD... probably better for consumers, and definitely better for finger-touch interfaces, than the old WinMo.
Of course, one might also view this in a negative light. This is Microsoft once again copying Apple, turning their MP3 player into a phone. And it's also kind of a "Hail Mary" pass... the old WinMo has been steadily losing market share. So they introduce this new version of Windows for phones, which requires a totally new API. Old code won't work in the new OS, period.. as Gizmodo put it, "Windows Mobile isn't just dead, the body's been dumped, buried and paved over by a rainbow brick road." You have to write you apps using Silverlight or some other Microsoft nonsense... none of the old WinMo stuff is carried over. Check it out here. MS at least understands that WinMo was so far behind, the only way to catch up with iPhone and Android was a clean, new, Zune-shaped slate.
You could have that BASIC prompt, but sadly, Apple saw the Commodore 64 Emulator as a major threat to the future of the iPhone, and outlawed it. Works just dandy in Android.
Actually, apps in the background can run just dandy.. it's just that most are interactive and/or well behaved, and simply get put on the wait queue when they lose focus. That's what they're supposed to do. There are a few that are not correctly written, though, and it's completely possible for an app to drop to the background and keep churning away under Android. I found this out the hard way with a GPS monitoring program... of those things that gives a nice compass and satellite view. This particular one (can't recall the name) didn't process the "going to background" message, and kept churning away... not at all good for one's battery life.
It's rare to be multitasking, much, on an iPhone because, well, you can't. If you use an Android phone, you'll probably find yourself multitasking all the time. I certainly do, on a daily basis. Works great. And yeah, I might not be too likely to compile code, but I could certainly be playing MP3s while running an ftp daemon (not to mention a dozen other daemons, for GPS and communications features), while reading a document.
Already being on Verizon, the Droid cost me an additional $30/month over the cost of service for a non-smart phone. It's a family plan.. we have four phones on for slightly over $100 per month. The general prices between AT&T and Verizon aren't significantly different... one may be better or worse, depending on the specifics of what you want. The data plan, at least for individuals, is the same... "unlimited" data for smart phones (where "unlimited" in both cases is subject to arbitrary definitions, both companies will go after you if you're using more data than they think possible under their license... like tethering)
As for coverage, the entire Verizon network is 3G, only about 20% of AT&T's (by area, not by population) is 3G. That's nothing more than the difference between CDMA and GSM... the CDMA 3G protocols run over the same frequencies and bandwidth used for 2G/Voice, while GSM always requires additional bandwidth, and often, additional frequencies. This is further compounded by today's AT&T being a mix of two previous companies, Cingular and AT&T Mobility. Cingular bought AT&T Mobility to become the country's second largest cellular network, after Verizon. But AT&T Mobility was using DAMPS (they called it "TDMA"), not GSM. So the company has spent many years just establishing full 2G GSM coverage and phasing out DAMPS (the DAMPS network went dark in mid 2008). This is also why AT&T's slightly more likely to drop calls than other GSM networks... DAMPS has slightly better coverage than GSM, so upgraded DAMPS cells are often not ideally placed for GSM.
At its peak, the AT&T network is faster than Verizon's. Regular HSPA cells deliver up to 3.6Mb/s down to clients, versus 3.1Mb/s down to clients for CDMA's EvDO Rev A. By this summer, AT&T will have HSPA+ coverage in as many as 40 cities, which can deliver 7.2Mb/s down to clients, if you have a fast enough phone (you'll need an iPhone 3GS for this, and the iPhones are all still crippled on the upload side... HSPA+ can go upstream at up to 2Mb/s, but iPhones only do 384kb/s). All networks degrade over distance, and all fall back to "EDGE" speeds if you're too far from a cell site for 3G performance. AT&T and Verizon both have an advantage in range, though, generally being the companies owning one of the two 850MHz slots available in any area of the USA. You get much better range at 850MHz than at 1900MHz... Sprint does its 3G at 1900MHz (and WiMax 4G at 2500MHz, though they don't have any 4G phones out yet), T-Mobile does 2G at 1900MHz and 3G split between 1700MHz and 2100MHz. Verizon is starting 4G service at 700MHz this summer, using the LTE standard; AT&T will be starting 4G next year, also at 700MHz (Verizon won the largest 700MHz spectrum block, 20MHz of spectrum, while AT&T got the other big win here, 12MHz worth of spectrum).
It's quite true that Apple's system of alerts is completely broken when it comes to multitasking. But hey, the Android alerts system works exceptionally well... Apple can certainly copy that kind of behavior, if they can't figure out something for themselves.
I don't think it's got anything to do with battery life. It's "Apple" vs. "everyone else"... Apple wants their apps to be special, no one else's. It's fairly trivial to ensure multitasking works fine. And given Apple's heavy hand in the iTunes store, they could easily demand that all apps behave properly as multitasking apps (eg, they go quiescent when they lose focus, other than in the case of daemons, and are otherwise well behaved), or they get booted from the store. Apple's contract with developers already gives them the ability to kick out any app for any reason, and even to kill those already out and installed on iPhones. Surely this isn't a problem of their level of control. Thus, not a real power issue... that's just the excuse some people make.
The reason you want a chat client is obvious... you're talking to others using that specific chat protocol. My company uses Yahoo messaging for regular communications during business hours. That's our standard, and the ability to have that on my Droid, keep myself logged in, get a beep when a new message comes in, is very useful.
The big advantage of smart phones over other devices is that they function, ideally, as universal communicators. So do PCs, but they rarely fit in one's pocket and last all day on a single change. And yet, new forms of communication keep being invented: chat, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Sure, not everyone needs every new form, but a smart phone ought to be able to hook in any new form as a perfectly first class form of communications. That means things like background notifications, just as you get with SMS or phone calls. If your device can't do this for arbitrary new forms of communications, it's broken.