Yes
See "New Zealand", land of the "Fush and Chups"
2482 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Mar 2008
"also seeing further expansion of hard drive sizes at a fast rate"
Now that's funny, because where I'm at hard drives have been stuck on 2TB for quite some time now.
In fact I think I remember reading that there is some sort of technical impediment to going larger and some sort of completely different encoding technology is required to increase capacities.
I myself run a 4Tb LVM made up of 4 1tb drives, I can't imagine I am Robinson Crusoe in that respect.
Another big fail from MS. Get over it fanboys, this is what happens when you lock yourself in to a pretty looking closed source prison.
"The thing I actually like about BDs is that there is now only 1 region for the American continent, instead of splitting it into Region 1 and Region 4"
Wow, what a ringing endorsement. You "like" BD because the artificial barriers to trade that allow prices to be inflated according to your purchase location are slightly less confusing.
Yes, that sure is a lot to like. Thank god one of the few not insane laws we have down here in Australia makes it mandatory for manufacturers to provide region code unlocking on request making that whole anti-competitive load of consumer raping crap irrelevant in this country.
it was originally the U.S. who put nice friendly Saddam in power because he was good at hatin' on the Iranians after.
The same thing applies to the Taliban too, because they became our new best friends the moment the Russkies moved in there.
So yes, you are right, it would be ironic, but it would not be the first time such irony has occurred when U.S. foreign policy backfires, which it does more often than not.
"So while the underlying hardware will probably be Winhoze on most installs"
Don't even understand what that means. Winhoze is hardware? Maybe you meant "Windows compatible hardware"
"nothing prevents Dell from slapping a more modern visual shell on it"
I wasn't aware that MS had altered their OEM agreements in this regard. Are you able to provide any evidence of this?
"or dual-booting it into an Android"
Again, OEM agreements in the past have precluded doing this. See the BeOS antitrust trial for details. Are you sure this has changed?
"or running Android as a VM and flapping between Android and Windows as the screen flaps"
Why on earth would anyone want to do that? I can see a few use cases such as having quick and dirty access to the internet when in tablet mode but I really cant see the average Joe Sixpack being impressed by it. Monumentally confused, yes, but not impressed.
Say what?
Isn't he SGT almost the same price as the Ipad? Or is there some serious high street discounting going on?
If so, that should tell us something about where the SGT sits versus the ipad in the eyes of consumers / retailers too.
Know nothing about the Toshiba, but I have trouble believing that their tablet would be
a) Good
b) Cheap
I expect this sort of epic fail from entrenched players in the IT industry but then to have a newcomer come along and produce Just Another Craptastic Netbook (albeit sans the Windows Tax) it is truly disheartening.
These people had the opportunity to come into the market with zero baggage and offer up something different. A low cost, ARM + Flash based device might have been quite interesting, and if cheap enough would probably have flown off the shelves.
Instead, what do they do? They release a "me too", not cheap, not interesting, run of the mill Netbook whose only differentiator is that you don't have to pay for Windows.
Not that that seems to be reflected in the ticket price mind you.
PS. What is with all the 503 errors emanating from the Vulture Central servers today? Is the Amstrad you have running in the closet overheating perhaps? Maybe somebody could open the door a touch and let some air in for the poor dear.
"Traditionally for new products Microsoft has waited for someone to create a radical new product that fails, found out why it failed and then produced their own version."
"Traditionally for new products Microsoft has waited for someone to create a radical new product and then copied it (either honestly or dishonestly: See Stacker), produced their own version and then leveraged their existing Win+Office monopoly against the originators until they failed."
There, I fixed it for you.
"either have a two-step process (an "I accept" checkbox to enable the "OK" button), or a couple of seconds countdown on the button (a la Firefox's addon confirmation)."
do what *nix does and make the user move their hand away from the mouse and enter a password for a privileged user in order to proceed.
Hopefully the fact that the normal clicking frenzy that overcomes Joe Public whenever UAC pops up is interrupted for a moment will provide enough time for the brain to engage and more rational behaviour will ensue.
Fail is for Microsoft for simply training their idiot users to just keep clicking the annoying boxes until they stop.
has a maximum TDP of 73W.
Yes, I realise you included the caveat "when idle" but does it really drop back to single digit watts when idle? (assuming mobo, RAM, disk and other gubbins are using at least 15W at idle)
I have an atom based server myself and I have been considering going to the i3 but I am having trouble finding data on power use other than the max TDP figure mentioned above. Any info regarding idle you have would be appreciated.
would be "absolutely magical"
Ignoring the poor phrasing here I hope he is right but current Tegra tablets are nothing but vapourware. I haven't even seen a prototype being demo'ed.
I do like nvidias products however. I would love to see some decent tablets based on nvidia chips, here's hoping Android 3 adds the missing part required in order to create an "absolutely magical" product.
but I expect people will buy these in droves and then go straight to loading Windoze on them.
I hope these people are prepared for that and not expecting to subsidize the purchase price of the unit through some other revenue source based on users accessing their cloud with it.
As for putting a spinny hard disk in it that just beggars belief. The atom processor is a bit iffy too but at least it is understandable given the easy access to atom mobo reference designs for them to use.
I pine for the old days when innovation was king and anyone who had an idea could whack together a prototype and run with it. Geeks ruled and hacking abounded.
These days PC developments have been repressed by the dead hand of corporate greed and suppressed by monopolist control.
The hackers of the OSS community are the evolution of the Computer Clubs of the 70's and 80's and thank god they are still doing OK. For me, playing with Linux evokes some of the geeky fun that was common back then and it would be a shame if the likes of Microsoft are able to ever shut them down for good to suit their own bottom line.
that when you used the phrase "technically superior" you were NOT referring to this particular monstrosity?
"The tablet contains 384MB of Ram but seemingly no storage - you need SDHC cards for that. It has two USB 2.0 ports - one big, one mini - 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, a 3MP camera, and GPS. It runs Android 2.1 [and has a] resistive touch screen"
Ewww, if I got one in the proverbial Corn Flakes packet I very much doubt I would use it for one second longer than the time it took to ascertain how truly terrible it is.*
Paris, because she is technically superior.
* But it does have two USB ports! LOOK, MY TABLET, IT HAS TEH PORTS!!!!! YOU'RE FAGGIT IPAD SUX0RS LOL H4H4 P0WNED LUSERS
Every CoD game so far has played out a lot faster than it needs to due that one design flaw. I played Farcry and then Crysis for hours before finishing. Each "level" was generally pretty huge and you had free and unfettered access to almost every nook and cranny in it. This allows the player to explore and sneak around to find the best way to defeat the enemy. For some folk the best way is always full frontal assault with guns blazing Rambo style but for others like me I prefer to scout around, pick off sentries and generally find the spots from which to cause chaos and mayhem.
In the CoD games you don't have this option. All you have is a narrow play "corridor" that you need to fight through. If you stay in one spot and try and clear out the enemy in order to move forward then the enemy just keeps respawning as you kill them until you eventually get bored or run out of ammo. There is usually no way of flanking the enemy either so the only way to play it is to charge forward Rambo style until you reach a hidden checkpoint that turns off the enemy spawning for that section. Because this is all you can do it is easy to play through the whole game in short order and there is little replay value either.
On the whole I would say that CoD style is fun in the same way that a one night stand might be fun.
Short, exciting and unmemorable.
I avoid buying them until they reach the "Platinum Release" or equivalent and pick them up for $20. There is no way I would pay a super premium for the game equivalent of a quick romp in the hay.
What I fear is that none of the established mobo manufacturers will play with this for fear of upsetting their Wintel masters and it will be relegated to specialty uses and appliance style products.
I want what has been listed above. TX form factor boards that take standard memory SIMMS, and provide all the usual PCI, USB and networking goodies.
Then I want a Debian port to install on it.
it would seem that Facebook is trying to have it both ways.
I have no doubt that Google would really like to grow the already gargantuan amount of data it has in its databases but the bottom line is if you don't like it then don't use Google. Or Twitbook.
If Facebook want to allow users to get their google data into facebook then it seems only fair that they provide Google with the necessary API to allow users to do the reverse procedure.
and hope that they make up the difference in software licence fees. If hackers buy them at below cost and use them to do, whatever, without MS getting a cut then their business model goes out the window.
Serves them right. If you can't sell it for an honest price up front then you are doing it wrong.
"Microsoft is none too amused by the tinkering of a device that it has spent years to ensure isn't easily tampered with"
They spent years attempting to "ensure" it is tamper proof and it is cracked before it is even widely available? That's priceless.
" (we will) continue to make advances in these types of safeguards"
Perhaps they need to "make advances" in totally different types of safeguards. These ones don't appear to be working very well at all.
"and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”
Ummm, what exactly do "law enforcement groups" have to do with this? Yes, I know they are probably referring to the DMCA and this guy is ILLEGALLY BRAKING MAH ENCRYPTIONS!!! but for gods sake guys, get real. As the article says, courts in the US have already recognised jailbreaking as legal, and this is essentially what this guy is doing. Besides, who are they going to sue? From the NUI website "The NUI Group is a global research community" Do MS think that the DCMA applies to the entire planet perhaps? Probably.
I never thought there was much point in the Xserves. Unless you had a specific reason to use them then it always seemed that using off the shelf x86 servers with some flavour of Linux was always going to be just as good and considerably less expensive.
However, now that apple are investing so much into ARM products, it seems that they were in a perfect position to transition their few existing Xserve customers over to low power, high density blade servers based on their own A4 processors.
Having such a product out there would have been another market leading move from Apple and would have likely attracted attention of a lot of new server buyers who are interested in power savings in the server room and are not currently well served in that regard by intel. Somebody would quickly port a linux distro to such a platform and if apple were smart they could have picked up a lot of sales from the freetards as well.
What they should have done is refresh the existing products to take the 5600 xeons as suggested in the article. This would have bought them some time and not pissed off their existing customers as well as avoid reinforcing the "apple is not serious about servers" attitude that already existed in the market.
If they ever want to reentering the server market it will be a lot harder.