Except for the lack of tuners, you just described my PS3. It's been the media player at home for years. Oh, and you can buy an official BT remote for it, which has all the options needed for most things. Now if they could only add a tuner, it'd be perfect!

Nice!

That means that the Blackberry is still the only one actually caring about security. The app launches at idle time, always.

Slight difference...

"A cousin of mine is currently using a combination of macrobiotic foods and chemo to deal with an inoperable brain tumour."

Notice the "and chemo" part. That's why it works, it isn't replacing the other stuff and actually helps the chemo process. Jobs not only had an operable thing, he neglected everything for his diet stuff. Having already lost someone near to our family to "switch chemo for naturist solution", I know that anyone doing this switch is probably a Darwin Award nominee.

Doing the naturist stuff + chemo does seem to work. But don't cut the treatment!!!

Security Settings

BT has a "High Security" setting which forces the device to do "device pairing" before being able to connect to the other device. Some smartphones are even locked into said mode for security reasons.

You mean the iPhone can't do that?

Re: How old??

Have you tried to send/receive files to/from another handset, one that isn't an iPhone? THAT is the thing that doesn't work. And yes, we tried to do this with an iPhone4.

Yes, reallyi.

The problem being that Ritchie was rarely mentioned, if at all, in the news while Jobs' death "shook the world". Jobs was both a good salesman and a First Class Jerk. While he has done stuff worthy of admiration, hs bad stuff has been pretty bad.

You can't talk about Good Steve without talking about Bad Steve.

The first thing that happened when I read "MC Hammer search engine" was that my mind started playing U can't touch this with "U can't search this".

The 3DS was a lackluster because people don't give a flying fudge for 3D, and aren't going to pay the 3D tax optiong for a DSi or PSP instead.

PS Vita might actually have a good chance among gamers.

who U calling fanboi, iFanboi?

Both the DS and PSP mobile console lines have been chugging along pretty well. Detractors saying that the 3DS lackluster reception spells DOOOOOM to Nintendo and Sony are ignoring the fact that the DSi has sold pretty well, and that one came after the release of the Jesus Phone; the PSP has been selling pretty well during all this time.

Also, some of the titles are PS3 ports (like MGS4) or based on already bestselling titles like Uncharted or God of War, so it isn't like the roster is full of unknown games. It also helps that the big iOS games are also on the PS3/PSP (Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies). Even buying an iToy doesn't exclude someone from having a portable gaming console! Same argument was given with the Wii when the truth was that most people buying a Wii were actually outside the traditional "gamer" market. Sony and MS are still selling consoles.

"Millions of game sales put you on the wrong end of this argument." Millions of Big Macs are sold daily. Does that make them the best burgers in the world? Nope. They're cheaper, so they sell more.

You wanted to build A.M.? Yipes. Just don't hook it up to the nukes...

Remote Control over mobile devices

I suppose you can do a Remote Wipe through IMAP then.

it depends

Video conferencing has been possible for years now; even during the dialup era we had crappy videoconf capabilities using crappy webcams. My laptop totes a webcam as well... and it has never been used.

Most of us smartphone-toting people tend to use email/IM/SMS much more than actual calls. It is less intrusive than a call, never mind a videocall. Yes, I sometimes wish we had "Total Recall" or even "Evangelion" style vidphones, but it seems that they took long enough for people to simply not care about them now that we do have the tech.

Server Side.

It might not be really visible on desktop PCs, but Linux has taken over what could've been a juicy server market for MS. It is a threat to existing Windows Servers, especially when there are OSS stacks that are capable of serving as a drop-in substitute for Active Directory.

However....

ITER is being built, and the roadmap to DEMO is pretty much outlined to be on schedule by 2050. Unless NIF beats ITER to the game, which would bring fusion closer...

Stallman?

every time you run a GNU tool, it'll happily show the GNU credits. It isn't Linus' fault that the GNU project got stalled short of releasing the full GNU OS.

The Apple is a lie!

Re: Closed mind

"So if Apple released a product that did EXACTLY what you wanted and was at a price that you were willing to pay, you wouldn't buy it just because Apple did it?"

Given that as long as Apple clings to the SJ walled garden policy, it won't release a true open system, I doubt *any* Apple product will do EXACTLY what I want.

You sir, fail at logic.

Dennis Ritchie

Given the media coverage of Jobs, you'd think he invented boolean logic. Yet Ritchie has much, much, much more to do with modern OS and programming, yet he is being overshadowed by the iCult.

... says a follower of the iCult.

Relevant.

Apple made the "clusterfuck of icons in the background" popular, hence Microsoft copying the UI over. But true, it is more of a case of passing off the touch interface into non-touch devices.

But wait, Apple is *also* doing that in Lion: reverse scrolling.

Meh.

Not a brute force attack

More likely someone nicked either a hashed pwd list, or applying the infamous Gizmodo list on the PSN. It is bound to end up scoring with people who use the same password for everything. That's the reason why I now use random passwords on most sites and keep said passwords on a Password Safe.

This sounds familiar

... isn't it the plot of "Inconstant Moon"? Half the planet gets fried, the other half suffers major cataclysms resulting from the frying of the other side. In the end, people in the "dark" half survive, though in small numbers, including the scientist that discovered it. Though the event in that one was a solar flare, not gamma radiation bursts.

Firewalls

I assume they're talking about SIPRNet. If that's the case, then yes, it is completely separated from the "public" internet.

Then again, Manning was able to get stuff out of there via "sneakernet".

It's much better

to strike down the law before it becomes law, instead of doing clever workarounds on said draconian laws. The latter course of action is commonplace in countries ruled by dictators, tyrants, or military juntas ... what does this say about Italy?

Lack of SIM

To me, the lack of a SIM card is what makes CDMA a "shit" technology, as I haven't had to worry about handset auth since 2003. GSM was actually welcomed as 'freedom from telcos' because of the SIM card; this freedom was threathened by Apple and their "virtual SIM" thingy, thankfully it got blocked by the GSMA.

MSX

.. was pretty popular in Japan. In fact, the Metal Gear series was originally made for the MSX2.

Probably will still have good demand.

Java landed me most of my well paid jobs. The thing that is actually helping us Java devs to keep getting decent salaries is the fact that shitty languages are still luring the sheep, who will ditch Java for something awful like Visual Basic, something interesting but rarely used in the business sector (Ruby! PHP!), something useless outside of web2.0 sites (JavaScript) or the Apple-centric Objective-C.

By the time these guys find out they went to a saturated market, or one that is slowly dying (VB), the Java devs have taken all the good jobs.

@Steven Gray

""...when you got home you had... oh that's right, two batteries to charge sequentially"

You seem to have missed the "went out hiking 92 miles" part. I think there's no way he was going to be able to charge his phone at all, given the lack of power outlets during said 92-mile hike.

I remember having two batteries for my Fujitsu Lifebook 280Dx; thanks to this, I was able to cope with a long flight running on both batteries. :)

Bad substitute

MS pimps off their users by charging for online play, overcharging for HDDs and locking out third-party HDDs (Sony lets you stick any HDD on your PS3). If you really want to stick it to the man ... switch your PS3 for a PC, not an Xbox.

They do make money

Parked domains will usually have some kind of advertising, which will tran$late into $$$ to the domain's owner.

Oh dear no. VB.NET was kept because of VB6ers whining at MS. Of course, they "fixed" the language, throwing away all the crap and hacking it so it would mostly match C#'s syntax. And C# is basically a pirated Java version which added nifty things that Java lacked, but then tied the whole thing to the MS stack.

Fortunately, the new wave of programmers have a true programming language background, which means C-like languages, that is C/C++/Java/C#; that and having C# being easy to make GUI apps for Windows meant VB wasn't the only easy path for Win32 apps and thus VB is finally dying off. But at least what passes for VB.NET these days is infinitely better than VB6.

VB must die

VB "classic" was a pile of steaming doo-doo. It infected a whole generation of devs with sloppy syntax and bad coding practices (ON ERROR RESUME NEXT). IIRC, MS was going to kill VB and go for C# as a forced replacement for VB, but the VB dudes didn't want to move.

So then Microsoft did something awesome; they left "VB" but actually made it so that VB.NET is actually C# with enforced syntactic sugar. Fortunately, the new generations have mostly gone C# or Java; others with PHP, Ruby, some go C++ but the trend does seem to be that most people are finally putting VB out to pasture.

HP

It seems that what I had been saying for years has finally been proven right: HP fucked up abandoning PA-RISC and betting on Intel's Itanium. But then I think that one can be chalked to Carly's Follies...