Microsoft's last two quarterly reports haven't been exactly encouraging, for
Q4 2009 over Q4 2008, they saw -33% reductions in the Client (windows) division, -1% in Server and Tools, -16% in Business (Office), -51% in online services (bing), and 25% growth in entertainment (xbox). The kicker here is that the growth in the entertainment division is actually mitigating a loss: Both that division and the online services are losing them money, i.e. they're in the red and are not making a profit.
I suspect that their stock hasn't tanked because Wall Street has faith that their core businesses are such a huge cash cow that they will soon recover their former glory. I have my doubts though, I think the shine is gone and a lot more people have now come to see MS as a blunderer, like GM.
Also the physioelectronic structure of the cu(111) is diffuse enough such that you can't easily resolve individual atoms. Each copper atom is so heavily bonded to it's neighbor that there is very little difference from one atom to the next. If you think about it, that makes sense since copper is a conductor, so the electrons must be able to move from one atom to the next easily. Graphite on the other hand (polymerized carbon like the pentacene here) is an insulator -- much less overlap between the orbitals of neighboring atoms.
The summary and the linked article are misleading. This is not the "first time a single molecule has been imaged." It's the first time a single molecule has been imaged using AFM. Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) has been used for about a decade now to image single molecules. Just a simple google image search will show you lots of them. My favorite is this guy who is imaging something he's calling "nanocars" which are single molecules. These finding are in no way less impressive due to resolution they've achieved, but you really don't need to overstate the conclusions by making these classic science-journalism blunders.
But if the trial goes through and the judge supports the climate change data, will this actually convince these people that the data is correct?
It worked for the Scopes Monkey Trial. That was waayyyy back in 1925 and we haven't heard anything about teaching creationism in science classes since then, right?
My question is this: What is the EPA _really_ trying to accomplish with this? Covering CO2 under the Clean Air Act would completely hamstring American businesses, forcing them to severely cut CO2 emissions
This is completely and utterly false. In other words, it isn't true. Case in point: Germany, like many other EU states has implemented a carbon tax to limit CO2 emissions. It's working in that Germany's emissions are now below the Kyoto accord requirements. All this, yet Germany's economy is recovering from their recession, and the recovery is faster than the U.S. recovery is. Lastly, the carbon taxes have all been projected to increase the number of jobs, not "hamstring" businesses like you say:
The positive effects of the ecological tax reform were highlighted by the Federal Environmental Bureau (Umweltbundesamt) in early 200210 when it stated that by the end of that year, its projections showed that ecotaxes would have reduced CO2 emissions by more than 7 million tonnes while at the same time creating almost 60,000 new jobs. Other researchers 11 were even more positive, saying that between 176,000 and 250,000 new jobs would be created. These figures were based on the assumption that the trade unions would moderate their wage demands by linking any increases in gross pay to changes in prices and productivity.
So when you look at the actual evidence, carbon taxes do pretty much precisely exactly the opposite of what you said. Do yourself a favor and stop reading talking points written by Exxon.
I'd expect to see a sruge of malware targeted for the Mac platform.
...For instance AV software itself is often dangerously close to being malware. Ever tried removing Norton antivirus on a Mac? Try it once, you'll figure out why I think that. Moreover, the last time I saw any AV software actually find something on a computer I administered was in back in about 2002 or so and it was on Windows 2000. Even when it does find something, often you just have to reinstall anyway. I have also seen (admittedly underpowered) PCs made nearly unusable by XP and AV software. Meh, thanks but no thanks. I'll be careful to keep my firewall up and not allow Safari to open any programs, "safe" or not and not head over to malware sites, or any social networking site for that matter.
Anyone that thinks Macs (or any other platform) is immune to malware is living one helluva naive pipe dream.
I don't think they're immune, but I have yet to get any (that I know about). I even run windows sometimes. But then, I at least keep my exposure to such things to a minimum. The same cannot be said for everyone, but just so long as I can keep using the computers the way I want to use them, I don't care what others are doing.
Have you tried PowerTop? Discussed here. I haven't tried it myself, since my linux laptop is an ancient PPC. I have noticed a somewhat short battery life on my linux laptop though. Not sure why.
The grand-parent's fear is groundless I suspect. I don't know how many, but at least some of the torrents have their trackers set to openbittorrent already, or other trackers such as demonoid or sumotracker.
Large companies by necessity will bow to government pressures
I'd just like to point out that there's one particular political party in the U.S. and their well-financed backers (that includes the most-often watched "news" station) that scream bloody murder and calling people nazis whenever anyone tries to get the government to provide more adequate oversight for anything, much less corporations. Maybe if that party would STFU we might have more consumer rights in the U.S. and we might have more control over our own products.
And half-true witticisms aren't either. The Parent provided evidence that some people make money selling linux, and you responded a generalized statement. You did absolutely nothing to advance your point, in fact I can't even figure out what your point is, do you mean to say that RedHat and CrossOver Office don't exist? That the Parent didn't buy linux games? I myself bought nwn because they offered a linux port and no other reason. So far I have see not one piece of evidence OR even anecdote supporting that linux users don't buy games, only a constant stream of unsubstantiated witty remarks.
It's kinda like the situation of Office on the Mac back in the 90's when MS threatened to kill Office which would have basically ended corporate use of Macs.
That's a very good point, along with what the AC said below about, "What if Google really is evil?" But why didn't Apple go out and say that then? Oh wait, they did:
The Google Voice application replaces Apple's Visual Voicemail by routing calls through a separate Google Voice telephone number that stores any voicemail, preventing voicemail from being stored on the iPhone, i.e., disabling Apple's Visual Voicemail. Similarly, SMS text messages are managed through the Google hub--replacing the iPhone's text messaging feature. In addition, the iPhone user's entire Contacts database is transferred to Google's servers, and we have yet to obtain any assurances from Google that this data will only be used in appropriate ways. These factors present several new issues and questions to us that we are still pondering at this time.
Well shit, no wonder Apple is pissed, Google's app comes in and boots out all their own applications! If it were my phone I was selling, I'd be pissed too. From Apple's account, it sounds more like Google's app is acting more like a virus or malware than an application. I had thought that Google's app was installed alongside the Apple one, but it seems that Google is acting a lot more viciously here.
Oh and incidentally, I was just thinking about why I thought that jailbreaking was such a boon, and there's a couple of reasons. First, winterboard just rocks my socks. I love screwing around with themes, fonts and icons. Second, the ssh functionality. Ever since Google released fuse for the mac I've been hooked. I now use rsync and sshfs to backup everything on my desktop, to make certain folders on my laptop mirror my desktop, and seamlessly share files with my home linux cluster, PC, and laptop that run debian. I just started using leopard lately and haven't even gotten around to looking at time machine because rsync works so well --it an incredibly good file sharing solution, much easier than AFS, SFTP, samba or anything else I've tried. By installing openssh on the iphone, I can extend all that great functionality to the ipod touch and it's just wonderful.
Multiple sources at Google tell us that in informal discussions with Apple over the last few months Apple expressed dismay at the number of core iPhone apps that are powered by Google. Search, maps, YouTube, and other key popular apps are powered by Google. Other than the browser, Apple has little else to call its own other than the core phone, contacts and calendar features.
Heh, that's a funny situation for Apple to be in. I guess Apple is no longer interested in just selling you the hardware and a good OS, they want to sell you a substantial number of the applications as well. I seem to recall Microsoft engaging some similar behavior awhile back, something about web browsers and being able to remove them.
I just got an ipod touch recently (it was free with rebate) and frankly, I find that Apple is unnecessarily confining the device. I've been using their laptops and desktops for years, with OS X, I've always thought that it was an incredible benefit to them to have it run on BSD, run MS Office, run Photoshop, run X11 so I can run GIMP and just about every other linux app out there, etc. etc. etc. With the phone, they confine you so much that if it weren't for the possibility to jailbreak it, I probably would have given it away to a family member.
The point is that, as a long time Apple user, I'm really starting to get a little bothered by their increasing amount of attempts to force me to use their stuff the way they want me to rather than the way I want to use it. That sort of behavior earned MS my distrust long, long ago.
First, they have been found GUILTY of willful patent infringement, not just accused. Second, if you would actually take the time to read about what MS did instead of giving a knee-jerk reaction "Ooh patents are bad!" and comprehend it, you'll see that MS approached i4i about working together on national security issues and then STOLE THEIR CODE.
Muddying the differences between patents, copyright, and trademark is part of the reason why debates about "intellectual property" is often confused.
The only person muddying the waters here is you, because you are trying to paint MS' actions in a decent light, when they are clearly, clearly in the wrong. I can only think that i4i went to court under patent law instead of copyright infringement because they thought it was a more open and shut case. That or, the MS Office programmers were smart enough to cover their tracks and that copyright infringement wasn't possible to prove unequivocally.
Why do I get the feeling that MS will find a way to weasel out of this? They seem to have been caught directly lifting code from someone else's stuff who was relying on that to make money and putting it into their own. No uncertainty, no sympathy -- This is a classic Embrance, Extend, Extinguish move for which they are famous. It's premature to say justice has failed (again!) so maybe I'm just being cynical but history has taught me that might makes right in the U.S. and too often in the courts the winner is the one with the most cash and the one who is willing to use the most dirty tricks.
AT&T denies any role in rejecting the google voice application. Apple, also denies rejecting the application, but claims it is still studying it.
This is sort of interesting to watch, whose business relationship is decaying faster, Apple and Google's or Apple and AT&T's? (Or Microsoft's and Dell or MS and HP, but that's a different thread.)
(Of course, it's possible that MS have done their UI homework and have actually made this all work and the story is based on excitement from OEMs wanting to shift all this stuff. If so, I'll be watching out for the flying pigs too.)
Of course this is just more me-too-ism from MS and the real devices that have ignited the touch-screen market are this and this and this. They are doing it because they have shown that modern trackpads and displays can be made less clumsy and responsive to more than one input type. E.g., on my macbook, if I want to scroll down, I use two fingers on the trackpad instead of 1, if I want to scroll horizontally, I move them horizontally. Easy. At this point, the trackpads on the laptops recognize up to four fingers and can can interpret some other motions like rotations. A tablet is like a mouse, but with only one really big button. Apple has given that "mouse" more buttons and that has made it much more useful. So much so that I feel confined and restricted when I use PC laptops now, even the ones with the little scroll slider on the side feel silly and clumsy.
You know, I've been to some nice fancy grocers that specialize in all organic foods and such, and I've also been to a lot of run down supermarkets in bad neighborhoods. While the ratio of healthy to unhealthy food is certainly different in each case, I've NEVER seen a since store that didn't have healthy items.
What your post is totally missing is the difference in the amount of processed food. Grocery stores in poor areas have mostly highly-processed food, which often is dressed up to look healthy. These are things like the high fructose corn syrup in the "juices" along just about everything else, and lots of other chemical substitutes in the food, even if it's supposed to be "nutritious". In the lawsuit against McDonald's by the fat people, McDonald's even admitted that highly processed foods are unhealthy:
That upon information and belief, the attributes, processing, ingredients, added fats, calories, beef flavorings and its cholesterol effects(trans fatty acids) of said French Fries by the Defendant, and the dangers of consumption of said product on a continual basis, several times per week, were in whole or in part, unknown, and not common knowledge, to Plaintiffs, Class Member purchasers and consumers.
There you go. McDonald's argued that if you eat processed food like theirs on a regular basis, you will be unhealthy and moreover that they shouldn't be held responsible because everybody knows it's unhealthy. Now, given that in order to buy unprocessed food you have to go to Whole Foods (or Whole Wallet as it's called around here), tell me again how poor people are supposed to get healthy food? The bottom line in that we die earlier in part because we keep shooting each other (guns are easy to get and thus are easily stolen by cirminals who use them to shoot people) and that we're eating bad food that is slowly but surely making us into fat, diabetic, walking heart-attacks that don't have the energy to walk a mile, but must drive there in our SUVs. If our health care system were working properly, the private medical insurance companies would lobby for more truth in advertising about the real nutrition value of foods because this would result in lower health care costs. However, they find it more profitable to just drop unhealthy people. Face it, capitalism does not work for some things and public health is one of them. The U.S. is living proof of that.
Predators shouldn't announce their presence. There's a scene in the trailer where a dino-thing jumps out of the bushes, roars, and runs after people.
If you look closely in the first scene, the creature roars and then jumps over the main character. That would be a very strange behavior for a predator indeed. I suspect the creature is something else.
In general though, you're absolutely spot on, I'll never forget that velociraptor that politely waited for the hunter to get out his witty remark, "Oh you're a clever girl" before attacking. Goofy.
What are you even talking about? The first trailer release for any movie is a teaser, they NEVER give you any indication of the plot. They're just trying to generate some interest. In a few weeks or months we'll get some more informative trailers. In any case, if you look closely you can see some potential interesting plot/character development bits, like how the main mech driver that you see seems to be in a wheel chair at first and then gets converted into one of the night-elf looking guys, thus regaining the use of his legs. How's that for a mind-trip? Also, did you notice there's a war on and what appears to be an inter-species love story as well? Jeez.
As for the graphics, get off your AOL dial-up connection and watch it at 1080p and then tell me it looks like an xbox. As someone who owns Beowulf in blu-ray and Final Fantasy, and whose gaming PC can play FarCry2 at 1920x1200 resolution, 2xAA with ~47 fps average framerates, I can say that this stuff looks better than any of those. I was surprised at just how little uncanny valley there is in the human characters. The aliens looked a little weird, but I reserve judgement until I've seen it. It could be that they're well aliens and we're not supposed to closely identify with their movements.
So just out of curiosity, if 54% of the people in the voluntary survey wanted to bitch and moan, why would the reported rates of failure of the PS3 and Wii be 11% and 7%, respectively? Do Sony and Nintendo customers like to bitch less?
I'm not a console gamer in anyway way shape or form. Yet, even I have heard about the Xbox 360 problems like the red light of death. Show me another product model that you can recall off the top of your head as a real lemon. Usually that type of thing is reserved for things like cars (Ford Pinto or Exploder), or OSes (WinMe) that have failure rates above and beyond normal consumer electronics. Also, given that Microsoft is losing money on its Xbox division, this is not inconsistent with a higher than normal return rate.
I have the iPod Touch and I think it may be one of the greatest devices I have used, when I have wifi, and it is still lacking many of the iPhones features.
Precisely. I also just got a free ipod touch with a recent laptop purchase and to my huge surprise, I think the thing is as cool as all get out. I'm a serious computer dork and I didn't want one of these things at all because I didn't think that having one of these was worth bothering with when I can just use a regular computer just as easily. However, I've found I'm using the ipod touch to do more and more of my non intensive tasks and just leaving the computer off. Once you jailbreak it, you can do quite a bit of things that a normal computer would do (e.g. mount it with sshfs, transfer files to it, etc.)
The difference between the iphones and other cell phones is that the iphone is actually a really cool device, not just a phone. The last cell phones I have gotten from Motorola have gotten progressively worse (!) in terms of UI and even just plain reliability. Not to mention just about any kind of phone is much more limited than what the ipod touch does. E.g. my girlfriend's "smart" phone does e-mail, but no web-browser, and even if you have a web-browser, often it's a crippled in functionality and not nearly as nice to use as the zooming features on Safari. We get articles about the ipod and iphone because they blow just about every other device out of the water. Other phones might have similar functionality, but tend to not be as easy to use, or aren't designed well, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's last two quarterly reports haven't been exactly encouraging, for Q4 2009 over Q4 2008, they saw -33% reductions in the Client (windows) division, -1% in Server and Tools, -16% in Business (Office), -51% in online services (bing), and 25% growth in entertainment (xbox). The kicker here is that the growth in the entertainment division is actually mitigating a loss: Both that division and the online services are losing them money, i.e. they're in the red and are not making a profit.
I suspect that their stock hasn't tanked because Wall Street has faith that their core businesses are such a huge cash cow that they will soon recover their former glory. I have my doubts though, I think the shine is gone and a lot more people have now come to see MS as a blunderer, like GM.
Also the physioelectronic structure of the cu(111) is diffuse enough such that you can't easily resolve individual atoms. Each copper atom is so heavily bonded to it's neighbor that there is very little difference from one atom to the next. If you think about it, that makes sense since copper is a conductor, so the electrons must be able to move from one atom to the next easily. Graphite on the other hand (polymerized carbon like the pentacene here) is an insulator -- much less overlap between the orbitals of neighboring atoms.
The summary and the linked article are misleading. This is not the "first time a single molecule has been imaged." It's the first time a single molecule has been imaged using AFM. Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) has been used for about a decade now to image single molecules. Just a simple google image search will show you lots of them. My favorite is this guy who is imaging something he's calling "nanocars" which are single molecules. These finding are in no way less impressive due to resolution they've achieved, but you really don't need to overstate the conclusions by making these classic science-journalism blunders.
It worked for the Scopes Monkey Trial. That was waayyyy back in 1925 and we haven't heard anything about teaching creationism in science classes since then, right?
This is completely and utterly false. In other words, it isn't true. Case in point: Germany, like many other EU states has implemented a carbon tax to limit CO2 emissions. It's working in that Germany's emissions are now below the Kyoto accord requirements. All this, yet Germany's economy is recovering from their recession, and the recovery is faster than the U.S. recovery is. Lastly, the carbon taxes have all been projected to increase the number of jobs, not "hamstring" businesses like you say:
So when you look at the actual evidence, carbon taxes do pretty much precisely exactly the opposite of what you said. Do yourself a favor and stop reading talking points written by Exxon.
I don't think they're immune, but I have yet to get any (that I know about). I even run windows sometimes. But then, I at least keep my exposure to such things to a minimum. The same cannot be said for everyone, but just so long as I can keep using the computers the way I want to use them, I don't care what others are doing.
Have you tried PowerTop? Discussed here. I haven't tried it myself, since my linux laptop is an ancient PPC. I have noticed a somewhat short battery life on my linux laptop though. Not sure why.
It's posted here.
The grand-parent's fear is groundless I suspect. I don't know how many, but at least some of the torrents have their trackers set to openbittorrent already, or other trackers such as demonoid or sumotracker.
I'd just like to point out that there's one particular political party in the U.S. and their well-financed backers (that includes the most-often watched "news" station) that scream bloody murder and calling people nazis whenever anyone tries to get the government to provide more adequate oversight for anything, much less corporations. Maybe if that party would STFU we might have more consumer rights in the U.S. and we might have more control over our own products.
And half-true witticisms aren't either. The Parent provided evidence that some people make money selling linux, and you responded a generalized statement. You did absolutely nothing to advance your point, in fact I can't even figure out what your point is, do you mean to say that RedHat and CrossOver Office don't exist? That the Parent didn't buy linux games? I myself bought nwn because they offered a linux port and no other reason. So far I have see not one piece of evidence OR even anecdote supporting that linux users don't buy games, only a constant stream of unsubstantiated witty remarks.
That's a very good point, along with what the AC said below about, "What if Google really is evil?" But why didn't Apple go out and say that then? Oh wait, they did:
Well shit, no wonder Apple is pissed, Google's app comes in and boots out all their own applications! If it were my phone I was selling, I'd be pissed too. From Apple's account, it sounds more like Google's app is acting more like a virus or malware than an application. I had thought that Google's app was installed alongside the Apple one, but it seems that Google is acting a lot more viciously here.
er, make that linux cluster (at work), home linux PC and linux laptop. I don't really run a linux cluster at home.
Oh and incidentally, I was just thinking about why I thought that jailbreaking was such a boon, and there's a couple of reasons. First, winterboard just rocks my socks. I love screwing around with themes, fonts and icons. Second, the ssh functionality. Ever since Google released fuse for the mac I've been hooked. I now use rsync and sshfs to backup everything on my desktop, to make certain folders on my laptop mirror my desktop, and seamlessly share files with my home linux cluster, PC, and laptop that run debian. I just started using leopard lately and haven't even gotten around to looking at time machine because rsync works so well --it an incredibly good file sharing solution, much easier than AFS, SFTP, samba or anything else I've tried. By installing openssh on the iphone, I can extend all that great functionality to the ipod touch and it's just wonderful.
Heh, that's a funny situation for Apple to be in. I guess Apple is no longer interested in just selling you the hardware and a good OS, they want to sell you a substantial number of the applications as well. I seem to recall Microsoft engaging some similar behavior awhile back, something about web browsers and being able to remove them.
I just got an ipod touch recently (it was free with rebate) and frankly, I find that Apple is unnecessarily confining the device. I've been using their laptops and desktops for years, with OS X, I've always thought that it was an incredible benefit to them to have it run on BSD, run MS Office, run Photoshop, run X11 so I can run GIMP and just about every other linux app out there, etc. etc. etc. With the phone, they confine you so much that if it weren't for the possibility to jailbreak it, I probably would have given it away to a family member.
The point is that, as a long time Apple user, I'm really starting to get a little bothered by their increasing amount of attempts to force me to use their stuff the way they want me to rather than the way I want to use it. That sort of behavior earned MS my distrust long, long ago.
First, they have been found GUILTY of willful patent infringement, not just accused. Second, if you would actually take the time to read about what MS did instead of giving a knee-jerk reaction "Ooh patents are bad!" and comprehend it, you'll see that MS approached i4i about working together on national security issues and then STOLE THEIR CODE.
The only person muddying the waters here is you, because you are trying to paint MS' actions in a decent light, when they are clearly, clearly in the wrong. I can only think that i4i went to court under patent law instead of copyright infringement because they thought it was a more open and shut case. That or, the MS Office programmers were smart enough to cover their tracks and that copyright infringement wasn't possible to prove unequivocally.
Why do I get the feeling that MS will find a way to weasel out of this? They seem to have been caught directly lifting code from someone else's stuff who was relying on that to make money and putting it into their own. No uncertainty, no sympathy -- This is a classic Embrance, Extend, Extinguish move for which they are famous. It's premature to say justice has failed (again!) so maybe I'm just being cynical but history has taught me that might makes right in the U.S. and too often in the courts the winner is the one with the most cash and the one who is willing to use the most dirty tricks.
AT&T denies any role in rejecting the google voice application. Apple, also denies rejecting the application, but claims it is still studying it.
This is sort of interesting to watch, whose business relationship is decaying faster, Apple and Google's or Apple and AT&T's? (Or Microsoft's and Dell or MS and HP, but that's a different thread.)
Of course this is just more me-too-ism from MS and the real devices that have ignited the touch-screen market are this and this and this. They are doing it because they have shown that modern trackpads and displays can be made less clumsy and responsive to more than one input type. E.g., on my macbook, if I want to scroll down, I use two fingers on the trackpad instead of 1, if I want to scroll horizontally, I move them horizontally. Easy. At this point, the trackpads on the laptops recognize up to four fingers and can can interpret some other motions like rotations. A tablet is like a mouse, but with only one really big button. Apple has given that "mouse" more buttons and that has made it much more useful. So much so that I feel confined and restricted when I use PC laptops now, even the ones with the little scroll slider on the side feel silly and clumsy.
What your post is totally missing is the difference in the amount of processed food. Grocery stores in poor areas have mostly highly-processed food, which often is dressed up to look healthy. These are things like the high fructose corn syrup in the "juices" along just about everything else, and lots of other chemical substitutes in the food, even if it's supposed to be "nutritious". In the lawsuit against McDonald's by the fat people, McDonald's even admitted that highly processed foods are unhealthy:
There you go. McDonald's argued that if you eat processed food like theirs on a regular basis, you will be unhealthy and moreover that they shouldn't be held responsible because everybody knows it's unhealthy. Now, given that in order to buy unprocessed food you have to go to Whole Foods (or Whole Wallet as it's called around here), tell me again how poor people are supposed to get healthy food? The bottom line in that we die earlier in part because we keep shooting each other (guns are easy to get and thus are easily stolen by cirminals who use them to shoot people) and that we're eating bad food that is slowly but surely making us into fat, diabetic, walking heart-attacks that don't have the energy to walk a mile, but must drive there in our SUVs. If our health care system were working properly, the private medical insurance companies would lobby for more truth in advertising about the real nutrition value of foods because this would result in lower health care costs. However, they find it more profitable to just drop unhealthy people. Face it, capitalism does not work for some things and public health is one of them. The U.S. is living proof of that.
If you look closely in the first scene, the creature roars and then jumps over the main character. That would be a very strange behavior for a predator indeed. I suspect the creature is something else.
In general though, you're absolutely spot on, I'll never forget that velociraptor that politely waited for the hunter to get out his witty remark, "Oh you're a clever girl" before attacking. Goofy.
What are you even talking about? The first trailer release for any movie is a teaser, they NEVER give you any indication of the plot. They're just trying to generate some interest. In a few weeks or months we'll get some more informative trailers. In any case, if you look closely you can see some potential interesting plot/character development bits, like how the main mech driver that you see seems to be in a wheel chair at first and then gets converted into one of the night-elf looking guys, thus regaining the use of his legs. How's that for a mind-trip? Also, did you notice there's a war on and what appears to be an inter-species love story as well? Jeez.
As for the graphics, get off your AOL dial-up connection and watch it at 1080p and then tell me it looks like an xbox. As someone who owns Beowulf in blu-ray and Final Fantasy, and whose gaming PC can play FarCry2 at 1920x1200 resolution, 2xAA with ~47 fps average framerates, I can say that this stuff looks better than any of those. I was surprised at just how little uncanny valley there is in the human characters. The aliens looked a little weird, but I reserve judgement until I've seen it. It could be that they're well aliens and we're not supposed to closely identify with their movements.
So just out of curiosity, if 54% of the people in the voluntary survey wanted to bitch and moan, why would the reported rates of failure of the PS3 and Wii be 11% and 7%, respectively? Do Sony and Nintendo customers like to bitch less?
I'm not a console gamer in anyway way shape or form. Yet, even I have heard about the Xbox 360 problems like the red light of death. Show me another product model that you can recall off the top of your head as a real lemon. Usually that type of thing is reserved for things like cars (Ford Pinto or Exploder), or OSes (WinMe) that have failure rates above and beyond normal consumer electronics. Also, given that Microsoft is losing money on its Xbox division, this is not inconsistent with a higher than normal return rate.
Precisely. I also just got a free ipod touch with a recent laptop purchase and to my huge surprise, I think the thing is as cool as all get out. I'm a serious computer dork and I didn't want one of these things at all because I didn't think that having one of these was worth bothering with when I can just use a regular computer just as easily. However, I've found I'm using the ipod touch to do more and more of my non intensive tasks and just leaving the computer off. Once you jailbreak it, you can do quite a bit of things that a normal computer would do (e.g. mount it with sshfs, transfer files to it, etc.)
The difference between the iphones and other cell phones is that the iphone is actually a really cool device, not just a phone. The last cell phones I have gotten from Motorola have gotten progressively worse (!) in terms of UI and even just plain reliability. Not to mention just about any kind of phone is much more limited than what the ipod touch does. E.g. my girlfriend's "smart" phone does e-mail, but no web-browser, and even if you have a web-browser, often it's a crippled in functionality and not nearly as nice to use as the zooming features on Safari. We get articles about the ipod and iphone because they blow just about every other device out of the water. Other phones might have similar functionality, but tend to not be as easy to use, or aren't designed well, etc.