Someone is obviously working on the idea, which is grand, but that's all we can tell at this point. The number of projects that are started and eventually canned because they're either to hard to finish, too costly, or just too expensive to bother marketing that they won't turn a profit is pretty vast.

The fact code exists does not necessarily mean we'll ever get to play the games.

But let's be optimistic. A native version of Steam would be pretty awesome. Here's hoping whoever is behind the project is successful. :)

The article states, with a distinct air of knowledge and authority, that the working conditions of an Apple engineer on the core iPad team are this and that. Take the "90 hours a week" claim as an example. The author then goes on to state that they work in total secrecy. Well, which is it? Either it's known to be, for example, 90 hours a week, and therefore Apple isn't working in complete secrecy, or it is completely secret and noone knows what the conditions are like.

It can't be both.

No one thinks 'well, we've sold a bunch of these, we'd better stop innovating now in case we annoy the people who bought Version 1'. Buying something, then a few years later a better version coming along is not a "kick in the teeth". It's progress.

If the best argument you can come up with against "super ID cards" is that they're not fair on people with ordinary ID cards then you need to go back to Civil Liberties School.

I go to the cinema a lot. I watch pretty much all the new releases. I always have. I don't agree that all 2D-to-3D releases are bad. I've rather enjoyed them. Ok, Avatar's 3D effect was better than Alice's. Nevermind, I paid my money and I walked away at the end of it feeling I'd had a good time nonetheless.

I certainly wasn't under the impression anyone had scammed me. I've read the article. I'm still not. I got what I paid for.

If that comment was on any other website besides /. I'd think it was a joke, but I'm not so sure here...

It's the first anti-social network.

There aren't really any more production-ready frameworks for PHP as any other language. It's just a good deal easier to 'promote' a new PHP framework because people are so willing to put the story on a tech news website knowing that it'll generate plenty of chatter (mostly about how awful PHP is).

When a framework developer starts selling their code on the basis of execution speed rather than ease of use, flexibility or completeness you know you can ignore it. Any proper framework will cache templates into native code, or maybe cache content into static HTML, so the speed of the framework itself is meaningless - a good one does at little as possible for each page view.

I hate "up to". Anything that claims an improvement of "up to" something is a essentially misleading. You won't get a real world improvement anywhere close.

While there's nothing wrong with standing on a single issue 'point of principle', and it's admirable that you've been able to raise money enough to stump up the deposit(s) required and you're willing to give up your own time and energy to further the cause, isn't it moronically stupid to then torpedo* your chances running under a banner that will conjure such negative associations for most of the electorate?

In my opinion "Fair Use" copyright infringement should not be a crime, and those who do it should not be labelled criminals. So don't call them pirates. Pirates are criminals.

* Pun not really intended but what the hell, it's Monday morning.

In reverse order... The second problem is relatively easy to overcome simply by nature of the tumbleweed rover's size and shape. If it's big enough not to fall between the sorts of rocks on Mars' surface, and it has no protrusions to snag on things, then it won't get stuck.

The first problem is really about the nature of the mission. The idea of a tumbleweed rover is to gather large datasets about large areas, it's not designed to examine small, interesting things. It's rather like saying Google Earth isn't the right tool to see what beetles are living under the rocks in my garden. True, it's not, but neither is it supposed to be.

These days more than ever the hardware only makes one difference - what inputs are available. There are a few other minor considerations like which APIs are enabled for developers, but really the only significant factor is how you can get information into the machine. Everything else like CPU speed, RAM, storage, etc are problems that, for the ordinary user at least, are solved.

The iPad is designed to make it easy to enter spacial information (where you're pressing on the screen) compared to a mouse or a keyboard. That's why it'll make a great reader, web browsing tool, and gaming device, but a relatively poor word processor or data entry device. A netbook on the other hand isn't really optimised for information entry at all. The keyboard isn't as good as a laptop, it's harder to operate a touchscreen on one than a tablet, and there's usually a pretty rubbish trackpad. Netbooks are a great compromise but they're not going to win in the long term when we can make laptops fold up smaller (somehow!).

In the future there will be a place for tablet PCs while there won't be for netbooks. I'm sure Bill is right that for now MSFT's interest lies in the netbook, but looking to the longer term he's dead wrong.

95% of user-generated posts on Web sites are spam or malicious.

The fact is that there are millions of old blogs, unused forums, ancient guestbooks, etc that are easy to spam automatically. While it might very well be true that 95% of comments on the internet are spam of some sort, they're probably read by a tiny fraction of internet users. People tend to stick to about a dozen big sites that get very little rubbish posted on them at all.

Car analogy: 95% of cars are rusty old heaps of crap that can't move. Thankfully they're in scrapyards and not on the roads.

I'm sure that should be http://ministry_of_love.direct.gov.uk/ .

(If you've not read Orwell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Love )

No internet access for 45 days? But there's nothing else to do!

It's true enough that a tablet PC that's essentially just a scaled up iPhone would be pretty cool. If it's based on something similar to iPhone OS it'd be easy for developers to port existing apps too, so the App Store would fill up with software for it relatively quickly too. A tablet scale version of Orbital would be brilliant.

But...

It'd cost a lot. It wouldn't be particularly usable for traditional apps like email. It'd be great for watching films and stuff, but not as good as a TV. I guess it'd appeal to a narrow band of Apple nerds; even fewer than bought into the Macbook Air. While I'm sure Apple are capable of releasing something like that, and making a profit out of it, I can't help but think they're cleverer than that. Whatever is coming is going to have to be bigger (in the sense of appealing to the populace rather than a tiny subset of it) than a mere tablet even if they make it super snazzy.