Because an abusive or tyrannical government will force you to abide by its rules; and often times will require you to take action against your will. On the other hand a corporation offering consumer electronic devices hardly has such power. They can merely control the devices you buy from them.
Then you can alter the packet data to your heart's content.
Well, that form of cheating can be trivially prevented with basic cryptography. There are other data verification steps (various forms of sanity checking) typically done on the server end as well.
My guess is this device would also need more expensive CPU/GPU hardware to decompress 720p video data. Thus, a 720p screen by itself would not be an incredibly marketable feature. I'd sure be upset if I bought something with "720p!!!" that couldn't actually play a 720p video file.
Huh? According to Wikipedia, 21 million iPhones had been sold as of Q2 2009. The iPhone was released in Q3 2007. 21 million / 2 years > 10 million/year...
Sure, a tone generator can be used as an instrument, but if you believe that you can compose an entire orchestra with a bunch of tone generators, you're either an idiot, tone deaf, or don't understand what music is.
I suppose you're in a position to distinguish what is music and what isn't. Do you know how long what we now call Western classical music has been around? Less than 1000 years. Do you know how long people have been making music? At least 35000 years. More than 99% of the music listened to and cherished in the Western world has existed for less than 3% of the history of music. Music is constantly evolving and changing, always has and always will be.
That's fine. Once your generation passes on, your commonly held values will be replaced by the next generation's values, who will be increasingly amenable to this type of music. As they age they will become close-minded like you, but they will be replaced by the next generation.
My grandparents loved Frank Sinatra and thought The Rolling Stones sounded like horrible noise. My parents love The Rolling Stones and think Jay-Z is total noise.
Do you notice a pattern?
Who wants an electronic instrument that sounds like an acoustic instrument? We already have plenty of acoustic instruments that do that.
I can imagine people like you back when wind instruments were first invented. "I haven't heard very many flutes that actually sound very much like a live rock-banging performance using traditional rocks."
The down side of this approach is that it consumes a bit more disk space because you have a copy of all of the data (not just the code) in every binary.
I'm not terribly familiar with GNUstep, but, in Mac OS X's implementation of application bundles, this is simply not true. Of course, architecture-dependent compiled executable code must necessarily be duplicated for each supported architecture, but the application data (which almost always is the most significant fraction of an application's size) is shared. The only reason data would have to be duplicated is if for some reason it is compiled into the binary. Though compiling data into the binary is common in many systems, application bundles render this practice unnecessary.
And I'll bet that Apple doesn't use this "universal binary" thing on their iPhone, either.
You'd lose that bet. Apple provides complete support for universal binary on iPhone, allowing developers to compile for ARMv6 (compatible with every iDevice) and ARMv7 (newer ISA; works on iPhone 3GS + iPod Touch 3G).
It makes sense for Apple, which only has to worry about 2 architectures on the desktop
Actually, 4: PowerPC, PowerPC 64, x86, and x86 64. Though for the purposes of your argument its probably an immaterial difference.
Modern consoles put an end to that. They're just the thing for when you have some friends over; you don't want to play games sitting in the den crowded around a keyboard
That hasn't been the case since about 2000. By that time, every new PC came with a port for a multitap that takes four controllers.
The hardware exists, but what about software? Do any PC FPS's even support non-network multiplyer? In my experience, the only real use-cases for local multiplayer with USB game pads are MAME and... console emulators.
it will be flexed a lot more often than people move their laptop screens.
You mean more often than people close the lid of their laptop to put it in their bag and carry with them? Suffice it to say, running video signals through a regularly exercised hinge is a solved problem.
I don't think you understand how consumer technology works. Right now maybe one of these screens cost ~$1.00 each for advertisers, and $0.10 for the manufacturers. If the popularity of these screens grows, advertisers will press on manufacturers to lower their cost (to allow themselves greater profit) and manufacturers will invest in lowering their own costs to lure business away from their competitors. As volumes increase, manufacturers will also be able to bring costs closer to the actual per-unit cost, since they can still have sufficient profit to recoup the sizable upfront R&D costs.
No, the advertisers will not magnanimously decide to decrease their profits in order to make the technology cheaper. But the nature of technology is that more widgets == lower cost per widget. If it gets cheap enough it may become affordable for less profitable ventures than advertising. How else do you think libraries, one of the most underfunded and neglected public institutions around, will be able to afford this? Or universities, whose endowments/funding are getting slashed in the current economic meltdown?
Lastly, despite your smug use of "capitalistic" as a pejorative term, the fact is without "capitalistic" folks investing in technology none of us would be here on this website having this discussion.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
