Astronauts belong in elementary schools, urging kids to study science and engineering! (At least until we can get some robots that are more spitball-resistant)

Is autonomous tech really that difficult now? At the very least couldn't it fall back to remote control? I could swear the Sovs did some work like this back in the 70s.

I know a family who would have no problem spending the money on a table like this. They play games all the time, and $8500 for an heirloom-quality piece is nothing to them. They spend about that much on computer hardware every year anyway.

I don't think the owners of this company -- like any other company -- really care that there is an enthusiast market out there that is more than willing to build its own gaming tables. They probably would never match this table, feature-for-feature, anyway.

Re: ditching windows...I suppose if you REALLY want to ditch windows, you wouldn't use Virtualbox. But seriously, it's better than using Windows full-time, believe me :-)

Just run it natively in VirtualBox...am I missing something here? I do that with Flash CS4 and Netflix online streaming, a flight simulator, and even a commercial video editor (don't have Vegas, but I'm sure it'd work)...

Look on eBay and you'll find some pretty awesome little game systems that are cheap and open. Problem is, they come from HK stock with gazillions of pirated game ROMs...heh

Your dumb ISP: "OK sir, thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue for you. Sir, next can you please tell me what happens when you open your firewall?"

This reminds me of when Matsumura Fishworks and Tamaribuchi Heavy Manufacturing Concern merged.

One of my colleagues in China recently bought one of these for his college-age daughter, as a sort of joke. OK, so in the first 10 minutes of owning it he finds this app with the lady...not so good. But still maybe worth gifting to SOMEBODY as a joke. So he puts it in his pants pocket, gets back to his hotel, and falls asleep watching TV.

Next day he comes into work with a strange rash on his neck. He looks surprised, says something about it being the same undershirt he wore yesterday. Somebody says, "hey Len take your shirt off," so he does, and LO AND BEHOLD the rash is like 50x worse down by his belt. He takes his trousers off, peeks beneath his boxers and sort of yelps.

There the "iphone" he bought had partially merged into his leg -- he now has a touch screen in his lower hip. Freaking disgusting.


Alright, so I made that whole story up. But man, if Chinese technology isn't so exciting and freaking scary at the same time!!!! Let that be a lesson to you.

Nah, I wasn't talking about people who are so much like myself ;-)

Right, but presumably when you're NOT MAKING A WEBSITE, "don't do an intro, I hate Flash intros on websites" may not be the most appropriate thing to say...

To my surprise, most Linux-related podcasts are really, really bad.

This surprises you how exactly? Linux users are almost never involved in media production, most coming from orthodox IT-related areas. I do a lot of creative production work, and I have to laugh every time I talk to somebody who is both a Linux user (as I am), really into tech, and somehow passionate about getting something produced. They really have no clue what is up or down, and most of their anecdotes come from being really pissed off by Flash-driven websites, even when they ARE dealing with time-bound, linear media where something like an "animated intro" is considered a staple of production. I still chuckle about it.

More structure = paid = lynda.com

More free = various collections = here

That's what I do when I use Photoshop. :-) Still not the same though.

This is the first time I've actually heard of people complain about actual lose-your-work crashes.

Actually I think most of the lost work in our case comes from factors external to Photoshop. In our labs, we usually see hardware problems crop up and cause loss of work long before a Photoshop stability problem occurs.

However, if Adobe kept a big Trac or Bugzilla site somewhere, and even if it just showed bugs from labs where I teach, I think the reliability point would get across. There are just some awful bugs in the software, and as you mentioned, Photoshop is complex enough that workarounds aren't hard to find once the issue has been isolated. But man, you should see some of my students when they lose work. I think this is why Adobe provide versioning software now. Support can say, "so do your backups not work then?" [long pause, phone line goes dead] ;-)