There is a 3D release. I'm not sure if this is just a fault of the technology in use at the theatre I was at, or the fault of the movie, but gigantic scenes had very little depth. Everything past certain distance was just a very flat wall. It felt very much like a 3D conversion where they only spent time on the foreground, but since I know nothing about how the movie was made, that's just my theory.

However, in terms of 3D there were very few scenes that shouted "We're doing this for the 3D", so despite generally hating 3D, I didn't actually find it that bad in this movie. Lackluster, but not bad. There were other things that bugged me more. Two full scenes were clearly either shot at a different frame rate, or a different F-stop or SOMETHING because there were definitely times that the movie shifted from film look to video look. That probably only bugs a certain set of people who are sensitive to such issues, but if you are, well... the scenes are pretty protracted, and one of them is an action scene. Most of the "wrong" looking stuff looks the kind of thing that would have been filmed by the second unit director.

Besides that, the glaringly inaccurate map of North America that included a territory in Canada that most definitely didn't exist in the 40s kind of bugged me, because besides that it did look very period. And there were a few plot holes... being unfamiliar with the original comic, I'm not sure how many of those were a result of being faithful to source material...

But yeah, it's not a "great movie". It's an average one, that you shouldn't bother seeing in 3D at the increased ticket price unless you're a huge fan of the genre in which case... it still doesn't seem overly stunning in 3D, and a 2D version would probably still be just as good.

I love being a fringe case! (Though I suppose the ratio of published to unpublished works in my music library is pretty small. or big. whichever means I have lots of published music.)

Wait, I'm sorry, since when is BlackBerry Bridge "Hard"? It has an additional requirement of having a BlackBerry phone, but that's not hard, it's an additional requirement.

And is getting media on or off the Playbook that hard? Certainly Blackberry Desktop Manager supports the playbook, no?

I think you're confusing "hard" and "different than what I want". If you don't want to do things the way the PlayBook does things, well then, don't buy a PlayBook. If you have to deal with one for work, well, can you honestly say that in an enterprise type environment where the business decides what device you're using, every other aspect of your job is exactly doing things the way you would want? All the health and safety regs, etc.?

Look, I really like what RIM does. I don't have a Playbook not because I would be frustrated with how it works, but because I don't have a use case for a tablet that's particularly compelling or worth spending the money. But I do have a BlackBerry phone, and will be replacing it with another. Because it works for me like no other solution does. And if that's not why you would buy something... well gosh... I guess I just feel sorry for people who let things other than financial and use considerations be the primary guide for their purchases. Doesn't seem very efficient.

Hmm. If you have a blackberry, the playbook can do email. So for organizations that are 100% blackberry, does the e-mail issue strike you as particularly relevant?

Really? I don't recall RIM capitulating on BES encryption, only BIS where they actually have access to the keys. BES is encrypted with keys not held by RIM, so how would RIM give them access? I suppose if you happen to crack the keys... but it's not like they're relying on encryption methods and key generation methods that aren't known... and there's a reason Governments force RIM to give them BIS access instead of just cracking it themselves...

And in terms of government and business, users are pretty much connected via BES, not BIS. Heck, even home users could theoretically roll their own BES setup if they wanted to (You can get free versions of BES, though of course the software and hardware that requires isn't exactly free)

Ah yes, but if you don't ask someone else then when people think your policy is crap, you can't say "Well, it was developed with input from outside consultation." It's much harder to pass the buck if you admit to doing something out of your own authority. Lucky for Australia that in this case it's just video game ratings. The Canadian government is playing a similar game with our immigration policy right now, which is a good deal more serious.

There are tonal differences between where you position a chord though on a guitar. Maybe not at the elementary levels, but not all E chords are the same, and a lot of the "cheat" chords guitarists use either are suspensions that can actually make a song sound muddy when played with other instruments, or leave out important notes that actually indicate the color of the chord. Or a certain progression might introduce too much parallelism compared to other instruments, or not enough. Thankfully most of my guitar playing friends have gotten past the point where they are just learning basic chords, and have moved on to learning where all the chords are all across the neck, and when and why they would play one chord over another... it makes playing with them a lot more fun and interesting.

As for games that fail hard on chord recognition, I don't see why the Rock Band 3 pro-guitar would fail. Sure in terms of a real guitar you have to buy one specific real guitar, and it's expensive I guess, but it has individual sensors for each string on the fret board, so it's actually pretty damn good at picking up what chord you're playing.

No, because it is, specifically, better. There are improvements in Windows 7 over Windows XP. It's not hard to find out about them. Hell, there are improvements in OSX over XP, and Linux over XP, and BSD over XP...

I'll be impressed if they manage to figure out how to do string detection. Given that on a guitar you can play the same note as an open high E on... well, every string... it's not that simple. There are a plethora of notes you can play on pretty much every string of a guitar and only I think about 9 that are actually unique? (4 semitones on the lowest string, 3 on the highest - at least in standard EADGBE tuning).

I mean, that's assuming there's any sort of competitive scoring element in the game, like Rock Band 3 has. Of course Rock Band 3 though they don't let you use ANY guitar, also has Pro-Drums, vocals, and Pro-Keys and Pro-Bass (yeah OK playing bass on a guitar isn't ideal so the experience of pro-bass is probably the least realistic). And having the option of playing with your friends can make life fun!

Also I love how the promo video talks about effects and amps being expensive. I suppose that's true... but at the same time, that's part of the joy of playing an instrument... saving up to get that one distortion pedal from the 70s that really wails, or finally buying a gong, or getting that vocal mic that perfectly suits your voice... and virtual effects and amps are of course limited by the output device you have... home theatre systems tend to make pretty crappy guitar amps....

To be fair, Rocks the 80s was only made to fulfill contract requirements, not because Harmonix really wanted to make it...

It's not baseless, because Mozilla isn't backporting security patches to older releases, so if you want a secure browser, you have to upgrade to the latest major version. Because the major version changes every couple of months, and plugins have to check against browser version instead of an internal plugin API version, plugins, especially old but still working plugins, break across major versions when they shouldn't, and that means they're going to break often now.

So if you're using a plugin, and the developer no longer updates it, even if it should still work, the plugin will break on the upgrade between 4 and 5, or 5 and the forthcoming 6, or the forthcoming 7, or the forthcoming 8 (all of which have builds available right now, and I'd imagine all of which will be rolled out as the latest stable version by the end of the year). Even if all that changes between 4 and 5 are minor security patches, or support for some new HTML element. Beyond that, Mozilla keeps changing the name of the setting that disables the compatibility check so you can run the tested and working plugin on a higher version - AND disabling that flag is global for all plugins, you can't just "run this one plugin anyway."

In the old numbering system you wouldn't have had a problem, but the new numbers don't mean "Major version" they mean "Arbitrary different number"

Hell, even Windows 7, which didn't change a lot of underlying API goodness, only changed the kernel number from 6.0 to 6.1 - it may have opened them up to be mocked by the community, but given the differences between Vista and 7 from a compatibility perspective, it was the appropriate thing to do (especially since the average user never sees that number.)

I'm all for old stuff, but I really don't think it applies to XP. I think it would be hard to prove that Vista and 7 were built worse than XP, or will last less long, or something of that nature. First of all, it's software, so it's not like any bit of code disintegrates over time or something, your operating system is never going to wear out per se (activation servers aside. But XP has activation, so that's kind of a moot point.) But XP does get less relevant over time. Especially once long term support ends, and there are no more security patches. Plus it's not like Windows 7 is actually just a change of face on XP, because there are differences, differences that maybe not everyone appreciates, but differences nonetheless. So many that it caused driver hell for Vista if you didn't do your research ahead of time, but you do have to question "Why did they do things differently for sound/video/printers/etc." and "Does any of what they did make sense?" Frankly I think a lot of what they did DOES make sense. And I mean, I really appreciate the way Windows works, and that it runs the programs I need it to run, so when I moved from XP I moved to Vista then 7, but it's not like there aren't alternatives - OSX is one I guess... though that generally would involve a new machine, or you could go BSD or Linux or whatever... and pretty much any modern OS will have features that are in fact actually better by some measurable standard when compared to XP. For instance, compare administrator accounts in XP to administrator accounts in OSX/Vista/Linux. The security model is better in all of those more modern examples. It's different between the three, but all three offer something better, a reason to change. Desktop composting - that's a reason to switch. Video drivers that don't crash the system when they bail - not a bad idea right? So I think it is an uninformed person that claims that nothing has improved since Windows XP. Windows XP may be faster on your current setup, but you can spend the money to buy new components that won't fail immediately, if you need to upgrade to switch to something different. And by the time XP support ends, you will have had, what 13-14 years to plan for such upgrades, finance the upgrades, and implement them. That's if you even need to upgrade to switch to something different - my 2003 laptop that shipped with XP is running Windows 7. And I wouldn't say it's particularly slower than XP even though it's running 512MB of RAM, and the processor is a Celeron 1.3GHz, and the hard drive runs at 4200RPM. I mean, sure, the screen is dead, and the power connection is finicky, so I do have a newer laptop, but hooked up to an external display, it runs Windows 7 pretty darned fine. It can't do everything that 7 is capable of, but it can do more than XP is capable of (for instance, UAC - no I don't turn off UAC, never did even during the Vista betas.) So yeah, not entirely convinced that Windows 7 is a product of "short term profit thinking".

And the NT kernel is old too. But XP is built around a particularly old release of that kernel, and there have been two releases since then.

I think the reference might be to the current race to the next major version number borking plugins even when the plug-in API remains stable.

Not having two screens is going to be less heavy though. Obviously, if you want less screen real-estate you're going to have less weight. I'm not convinced that laptops today couldn't afford to be a bit heavier (albeit less heavier than having 2 screens) in order to solve the issue of consumption focused design. After all, I'm fairly sure that the transition from 4:3 screens to 16:9 screens wasn't driven by concerns that laptops were too heavy.