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Comment My wishlist. (Score 1) 453

Things I want to see: 1. An Android tablet with a 1TB hard drive. Even if it were bulkier, or with a 4" screen and shaped like a 3.5" disk enclosure. I want an Android device with tons of capacity, that can be used as both a media player as well as portable photo/video offloading device - so I can quickly dump photos from my Vixia or Sony camera flash cards while I'm traveling. 2. Normal PC Laptop that contains a low-power ARM-based Android "accessory" PC that I can jump to (either full-screen via keypress or via client window under Windows/Linux), because let's face it - Android apps like gmail/yelp/fandango/gmaps/facebook/etc/etc/etc/etc/etc beats the holy living sh!tf*ck out of navigating their respective websites or apps (if they even exist), even without a touchscreen interface. In fact, I'm quite happy with bringng along my Motorola Lapdock and MK802 dongle in lieu of a laptop on many occasions - but having both in a single device would be beautiful. And better, a mode for booting up in Android only, only powering up the ARM board, screen and a few accessories. Off a typical laptop battery, that should run for days.

Comment Re:Stallman bitches, film at eleven (Score 1) 597

"Objective C compilers were only GPL because RMS refused a request from Jobs to let NeXT make a proprietary fork."

You shouldn't just lie like that, especially when your lies are so easily detected.

According to Wikipedia, Hobart is right and you are out of your scope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#Popularization_through_NeXT

Comment There's a good reason why... (Score 1) 1

The reason Netflix isn't watchable on Linux is fairly understandable. You just can't protect content on a system that is top down open-source. Even if Netflix were to provide closed-source modules or players, there are still APIs that can be patched, replaced that can record all output from the player, even snoop out video from the framebuffer, transcoding that into a nicely, unprotected video stream. Think of how quickly you'd see Netflix rippers appear.

But that isn't even remotely the real reason, this could happen in Windows just as well. The real reason is that Microsoft provides the entire streaming framework and content protection, so this is Microsoft's responsibility. Who could Netflix blame if say the fault lied somewhere gstreamer? Microsoft can push out updates very quickly to close up loopholes and even enforce new driver-level DRM protections that would never happen universally on Linux.

Of course, if you really want the movies for yourself, you could just rent and dupe them like everyone else. ;)

Image

4chan Declares War On Snow 201

With all the recent hacktivism in the news, Anonymous has decided to take on a new and powerful enemy: snow. On Sunday the group announced that it will "do everything in its power to shut snow down by attacking the Weather Channel and North Face websites, boycotting outerwear, and voting for the sun as Time’s 2010 Person Of The Year." I'm sure there are a lot of people in Minneapolis right now that would wish them luck.
Hardware

Submission + - Stephen Fry and DVD Jon back USB Sniffer Project (kickstarter.com)

An anonymous reader writes: bushing and pytey of the iPhone DevTeam and Team Twiizers have created a Kickstarter project to fund the build of an open-source/open-hardware high-speed USB protocol analyzer. The board features a high-speed USB 2.0 sniffer that will help with the reverse engineering of proprietary USB hardware, the project has gained the backing from two high-profile individuals Jon Lech Johansen (DVD Jon) and Actor and Comedian Stephen Fry

Comment 1920x1200 not enough for you?!? (Score 1) 618

UNDER 1920x1200?!? What, did I fall into a coma and wake up in the era of 20 megabit computer displays? If it's an RPG with a considerable amount of on-screen text, I can see how this would be an issue. For most games, you just don't notice much difference after a few minutes of gameplay. I'd much rather have silky-smooth framerates at 1024x768. Yeah, the fillrates on most decent modern GPUs can easily handle smooth gameplay at extreme resolutions, but what really kills is when multiple layers of post-processing effects are being used. This hype for running PC games at high resolution is unfortunate because one of the great things about console development was that you focused on making your graphics look as good as possible and play as smoothly within the constraints of a fixed screen buffer at a fixed frame-rate. I see this as becoming more of an issue as GPUs become more and more like general processors, and inevitably use more painterly-like rendering techniques.

Comment Woot - I didn't bother to read the article (Score 1) 158

I don't see fully ray-traced game engines being that big a deal in the future. It's a bit like in those early 3D movies having shit poked in your eye for WOW factor, going overboard with reflective surfaces in a fully raytraced 3D FPS would look like a mess. Look around you(tm), how many surfaces are fully reflective, how many of those reflect something recognizable? Answer: Very little... A simple static sphere map is perfectly sufficient to create the "illusion" of a reflective surface in most games. A separate thread could render a sphere map for any reflective surface in a scene on an as-needed basis for a scene. Or in real-time, creating a much more convincing raytracing effect without much overhead - as GTA IV does, for cars f'instance. As a bonus, you can do a more diffuse reflective mapping for surfaces like plastic. I think technology like Larabee will be much better used in game engines for accurate lighting models. Again, I simply point to GTA IV.

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