I was really hoping this was going to be a fully programmable system that would allow a programmer to dynamically elevate arbitrary parts of the screen, but it seems to be completely static, so I don't really see the point. Ultimately, what I think people would want for devices like an iPhone would be to have fully dynamic "buttons" that are programmed using the windowing/widget API so that you maintain the application-specific dynamic UI that makes devices like the iPhone awesome while adding the tactile feedback that so many people seem to enjoy. I think the requisite of a pneumatic or hydraulic pumping system would make it extremely difficult to get something like this into a small package, though. Maybe there's a material that will expand suitably from electrical stimulation rather than pneumatics.

The really great news about this card is that it's relatively inexpensive compared to what most top end cards cost at launch. The 5870 is going for $380 just about everywhere, while typical high-end cards launch closer to $500. I hope this is an indication that prices will drop across the board and therefore affect the low end, as well. As far as better graphics getting in to SFF PCs, we've long since left the realm of the "sane" when it comes to thermal requirements on decent graphics chips, but if you poke around, there are some compact, passively-cooled solutions that might not perform as well, but would definitely be considered acceptable by most people.

echo "Cowboy Neal" | wall
would let you share the wealth with everyone!

Why is it irrational to fear guns? They have the potential to hurt people, whether intentionally or unintentionally. If I pointed a loaded gun at your head and promised you that I wouldn't pull the trigger, would you not feel nervous anyway? You don't know if I adhere to gun safety rules. You don't know if I'm malicious. It's silly to be afraid of beetles because beetles can't do anything to you, even if they tried. People with guns can hurt you _without_ even trying if they don't know what they're doing, and you can't trust an arbitrary person on the street to know how to handle a fire arm in a safe fashion.

I think it's important to recognize that this philosophical divide regarding binary drivers has collateral damage as exemplified here. Personally, the debate seems rather petty in the grand scheme of FOSS, but if something like this is legitimately keeping a potentially huge software title from making it to the platform, then I think some attitudes need to be adjusted a bit. At the end of the day, a platform is only as good as the software that runs on it.

Welcome to the free market. If you think the pricing structure is unfair, don't buy it. If enough people feel the way that you do, they won't buy it either and Blizzard will change the pricing structure. I'm tired of hearing this ridiculous argument. If people are willing to pay, then the price is fair! That's how this system works.

If you would bother to read a few paragraphs from the Wikipedia article, you'd understand a little better what they've accomplished. They promised a $100k electric sports car that would perform comparably to a $100k gasoline sports car (sub-4 second 0-60 time, less than 13 second quarter mile, although top speed is a little weak at 125 mph) and delivered 600 of them. Oh and by the way, they go about 240 miles on one charge, which is much farther than any other electric vehicle, so there must be something to this "efficiency" thing. So who's being duped here? The people who bought it got what they were promised and now the investors are seeing profits.

If you think what makes electric cars more efficient is just the batteries, you're pretty off base. A lot of the same things that make gasoline cars efficient have to be re-done for an electric version. For example, since the entire drive train and power system are completely different, it has to be designed in such a way to fit in the chassis properly and keep the car's weight balanced, otherwise you get undesirable handling characteristics. Electric cars use a completely different type of transmission. The Roadster originally used a 2-speed, but then changed (and retrofitted existing cars) to a single speed that shaved 1.7 seconds off its 0-60 time, which is a huuuuuuuge amount. There are cooling and ventilation issues that needed to be solved. There is software that monitors and adjusts a zillion parameters all the time to keep from wasting power. So no, it's not as simple as just having better batteries, even though that is a major factor in efficiency.

Honestly, you sound like someone that doesn't know the first thing about automobiles, physics, or anything mechanical, but you're choosing to troll the one company in the US that's coming anywhere close to walking the walk with regard to electric vehicles.

I disagree. I think it absolutely puts pressure on major car makers because Tesla has proven (with a fraction of the capital and manufacturing resources) that manufacturing a viable electric car is not only possible, but profitable. What this does is make the consumer ask, "what the hell is wrong with all these big companies with more money and more manufacturing infrastructure? Why can't they do this and make these cars at 10x the volume and half the price?" The end result is the devaluation of the brands of the major manufacturers because they look incompetent when faced with Tesla's results, and rightfully so. Now that Tesla has shown profitability, there is no excuse anymore for the major manufacturers not to get their acts together.

It has been quite some time since this NDA has been lifted, which is why there are plenty of books and tutorials readily available for anyone to buy/read (this wasn't the case when the SDK was first released). These publications generally contain a healthy dose of source code, so obviously it's fine to share. The only significant NDA that still exists regarding the iPhone SDK only covers beta releases of the SDK, which are only available to people who have signed up for the paid developer program.

Not quite accurate. Apple does not allow duplicating the functionality of Apple's apps. They don't care if you're the 1000th person to create a twitter client or a "flashlight". They still may reject an app for a million other reasons, but they only care about people impinging on their own territory.

Logistically, solar and wind are perfect for an application like an electric car since the energy can be stored in the car's batteries. The biggest drawback to solar and wind is that they're not "always on", but the car can be charged during times where solar and wind are at peak output and hold that energy for later use. I'm not ragging on nuclear (I think it's great and we should be trading coal for nuclear, in the very short term), but I think you're being a little naive by thinking that wind and solar can't generate electricity at utility scale. They're already doing it in many places. You don't want to be the guy who says something will "never" happen, only to be proved wrong.

Similarly, you can do integer division or multiplication by 2 as a bit shift, since a bit shift is a far less costly operation:

SHR EAX,1
instead of
DIV EAX,2

I don't agree with this perspective about PCs. Both consoles and PCs are effectively of the same overarching design: a general purpose CPU, a GPU, some general purpose memory, and some graphics memory. In fact, consoles are generally less capable machines than PCs because they do lots of things to reduce the component costs like stripping out branch prediction from the CPU cores, sharing memory between systems all over the place, etc. The reason that console games appear to be "optimized" is because they're uniform. A developer knows exactly what hardware specs he/she will be writing code for and can therefore maximize a game's performance to that spec. For example, if you know you have exactly 16 MB of texture memory, you can make your textures fit exactly in that foot print and not have to worry about managing it by moving it between other types of memory. PC developers have to do a great deal of work to make a game scale to the wide range of hardware that's out there. Unfortunately, this idealized steps on the scale are never perfect because systems are so dissimilar. While most modern PC games try to auto-detect your specs and use that info to scale the game detail to a certain level, it's never quite perfect and the discerning end user will spend some time tweaking settings until he/she is satisfied. The developers aren't relying on a PC's "brute force", as you describe it. Instead, they're trying their best to accommodate its versatility.

I'd say that it's most likely the fact that AT&T is trying to find a new and unusual way to gouge people by altering their MMS price plants. They're probably just taking some extra time to optimize their rape-to-profit ratio.

I suppose that's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that there's only one assembly line, and some PCBs come off it with a second flash chip soldered on, while others come off with bare contacts and it costs next to nothing to do one over the other beyond the cost of the chip.