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Comment XNA? (Score 1) 331

If you are doing mainly drawing, and not GUI (ie traditonal GUI widgets on a traditional window with with traditional GUI events) you might want to look into XNA. It is basically a managed version of DirectX. Because it is .NET you can hook into winforms and WPF to create the occasional "traditonal" GUI.

Otherwise, if it is a windows app, there is no better choice than WPF. It is intimidating at first because with WPF you can easily reskin just about any uielement (and create UIelements from any class you create). But once you realize how classes and the actual UI are separate concerns that are joined only through very sophisticated data binding, you will be in love.

Complicated little beast though and if you come from a winforms background be prepared to do some major unlearning as how you bind data and events to the GUI is conceptually different. If you simply bind to "Button_OnClick" like you did in winforms you are doing it wrong. If you find yourself writing this.textbox1.text = myData.price in your code you are doing it very, very wring.

Comment Re:Nice, now why (Score 1, Flamebait) 314

Now you are trolling. I'll pull this out of my ass but most of us are lucky to get above 3mbit. Here in Seattle, I can't get more though DSL.

If you can't see why people would want to burst to 150mbit and beyond, you have a serious lack of imagination. Here, I will use mine with tangible things i could do better if I could burst above 150mbit:

1) better VPN into work. It would be quicker to check the source code repository out.
2) faster online backup, and more important, backups that down slow down the Internet for everything else.
3) Uploading stuff to client FTP sites would be orders of magnitude faster.
4) software distribution would be faster thus people would do it more.

Nobody will be saturating their Internet, but the fact that everybody will be able to burst to speeds approximating that of a LAN will open many new doors and enable things that were not feasable before. I don't understand what is so hard to imagine about that.

Comment Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive? (Score 1) 314

That is only true if your SLA promises you can saturate that sweet ass gig link you have in your home. A business class account might have that kind of thing, but a residential account does not. If 100 residential people download something at the same time, combined they might saturate the backhaul, but their downloads would each be 1gb/100=10mb. And 10mbit is still better than what most of us shmucks get.

Basically, they charge $200 because they can. It has nothing to do with the actual cost of service.

Comment Re:Nice, now why (Score 2, Insightful) 314

Because people who buy an OC3 are actually using the capacity of their link. The end user—us Joe Shmoe's in our apartments, we barely use it at all. But when we do use it (say to watch an HD Netflix movie) we want it delivered fast.

So really, per gig used, $200 is very, very, very expensive if you pull down a dozen gigs a month (which is probably within reason for a netflix user)

Comment Re:Kinda pricy (Score 1) 314

I'll pay actual use if it is reasonable. Better would be to pay the same way Internet providers charge each other—95th percentile billing. Charge something like 50/mo for 1mbit. Give me a gigabit port, and 95% of the time I and most people wont go anywhere near that amount.

The problem is anybody but people who buy "real" Internet know what 95th percentile billing is—and even if they did they wouldn't understand it (nor should they need to, honestly). That is why most consumer grade Internet is either flat rate with five pages of small print, or it is charged per gig used.

Comment Re:Kinda pricy (Score 1) 314

Yes. Because investing in your nations infrastructure is a form if socialism. Well, at least according to enough tea party idiots in the US to block any attempt.

Well, that and the telcos have their hands far up the asses of our government. But doing away with that is messing with the free market, and thus also socialism. Basically, making things better==socialism. The only people who should have it good are corporations, which are also people—anything else is socialism.

Comment Re:Kinda big? (Score 1) 102

Grand Theft Auto for the iPad is some 600 megs. It could have been more but they didn't use full motion cut scenes like they do on their bigger console-based cousins. The lady routinely buys these Myst-like games that are around 500mb.

750mb ain't much for a good game provided you play it enough. Plus the trick is to buy them in iTunes on your PC and just sync them up to the I*.

Comment Re:One change I'd like (Score 1) 102

It isn't a shoddy gyro, it is just plain momentum. The iPad has a larger footprint than the iPhone and trying to rotate and shift it around to control a game in a precise manner is pretty difficult.

It sounds good in theory, and many apps have tried, but almost none if them work well.

Comment Clap clap clap. (Score 1) 314

Good news for some small sect of the US. Wake me when I can finally get more than 3mbit in the middle of Seattle up on Capitol Hill.

Qwest has been promising "OMG mega-fast Internet" for years now and they have yet to deliver. What gives?

Course I remember it being the same way when DSL was the new kid on the block. Took years before that was deployed everywhere. Remember trying to work out your distance to your central office to see if you would ever qualify?

Comment Re:Too Easy (Score 1) 291

Too bad that isn't netflix's call. The movie studios are the ones to blame, and I'm pretty sure they don't give a rusty rats ass if you can watch any movie on any media besides BluRay.

Though I have to wonder if Netflix has the political clout to tell the movie studios to piss off. I doubt it, they are completely dependent on said studios and making a hardline stance like "fuck you, we womt do business unless you remove the DRM" would be an easy to spot bluff. The movie studios have nothing to lose (in their mind) and everything to gain telling Netflix to take a hike.

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