Heh. Just re-read that and realized it should have said "to use a smartphone outside than there is to use a laptop". It's late and I've been up since 5AM local time.

Dear PixelQi guys:

Please make a screen suitable for smartphones. There is a lot more need to use a smartphone than there is to use a laptop, as you can't control when you get incoming calls.

Thanks,
Ender Stonebender

I agree. 16:10 is slightly better, but not much. I'd love to get a massive 4:3 monitor. 2048x1536 monitors exist, but they're "medical grade" and cost like it.

You bought a tablet at a price point where you could expect a dog's breakfast, and you're surprised that you got one? I fail to understand what you think is wrong with the world here. There are always going to be hardware makers that are willing to put out shoddy (and possibly knock-off) products at super-discount prices.

I suspect that you bought the tablet on the self-fulfilling prophecy "Android is terrible, even this cheap tablet can't do anything properly!" Next time, either spend 10 minutes playing with the device in the store, or spend enough money to get a product that goes through proper quality assurance (both hardware and software).

I've had an Android phone for most of year now - never had a problem with it until I loaded CyanogenMod, and even the one problem I have had is relatively minor and easily worked around.

"Cloud computing" is this decade's "The Network Is the Computer". (Remember that?) It got slightly more traction because the network has actually considerably improved since the late 1990s, but the problems are essentially the same. I suspect we'll get another round of this bullshit, under a new name, sometime around 2024.

Then you get into another definition of how to define "working computer". My cable is also a DVR, and has a function that lets my pay my cable bill, so it's obviously got some fairly capable hardware - but it doesn't let me browse the internet or write programs to run on it's hardware, so is it a "working computer"? What about my learning remote with LCD screen and macro functions? That's got some limited programmability, so is it a working computer?

That doesn't mean that they can't fund a genuinely objective study... But there's a good chance that things are going to be biased.

Keep in mind that Microsoft is a really big corporation. They may have funded 15 different studies, and only this one showed that Microsoft solutions could compete with F/OSS, so this is the only one that they're publicizing. If they really wanted us to believe that the study was objective, they would have announced the study at the time that funding was provided, and then given us the results when they were available. I think this radical idea should be called "transparency".

Having over 100% per capita usage just means that there are more people with two (or more) mobile phones than there are without mobile phones. Given that in the office I work in (~25 people), at least 5 have both corporate issued phones (Blackberries) and personal phones (mostly iPhones, to my great dismay), I don't find this all that surprising.

Because it's the least bad of the three, at least as far as "making total asses of themselves while enforcing policy" goes. I mean, if I have to live with something (which in the case of games, it certainly seems that I do), I'm going to pick the least bad option. PC games are, if anything, worse than consoles. (And don't even get me started on the stupidity of Blizzard's recent actions.)

Sony's the company that threatened to sue people who "circumvented digital locks" by holding down the Shift key to prevent Windows Auto-Run feature from installing a rootkit in their PC, and has taken away support for Linux on the PS3, not to mention their involvement with HDCP and AACS. Microsoft is currently in court because they think its illegal to mod the XBox360 hardware (to be fair, they may be correct about it being illegal - but it's not unjust, which is a separate issue). Nintendo has...uh...occasionally made a fuss about people selling blank cartridges onto which pirated ROMs (or homebrew software equally well) could be loaded and then those games played on their various cartridge-based systems.

[Full disclosure: The only modern system I own is the Wii.]

Nintendo seems to be the only one that needs to upgrade the capabilities of their current console. There's lots of games coming out for PS3 or XBox360 that I'd like to play, but these games are not coming out on the Wii because it's simply not powerful enough. I may pick up one of the other ones used after Christmas - not because I can't afford them new, but because I don't want my money going to the prop up companies that approve of DRM laden software and sue people for modding the hardware they sell.

Sony may have some hardware issues that need to be fixed, and Microsoft's XBox360 has some very well-known issues that should be fixed - and the next generation of the XBox series including a BD-ROM drive would be a nice touch. But as someone else mentioned, current-gen consoles can max out the resolution of most (HD)TVs that are out there, so why put a bunch of money into R&D that isn't going to affect the end experience that much?

So basically, you've seen ONE movie where it wasn't thrown in "just because". UP and Coraline were entirely computer-generated video, and re-rendering with the "camera" in a different position is a matter of tweaking a couple of settings. They could re-make ANY all-CGI film (Ice Age, Wall-E, etc) as 3D if they still had the original files and rendering programs. And probably make money on them.

(Note: Avatar used lots of computer-generated imagery...but not exclusively, and did a lot more with motion capture than is normal.)

As I use neither Unity nor Ubuntu One, I'm going to be sticking with 10.04, which is the latest long term support version. In fact, I think I'll even install 10.04 instead of 10.10 when I buy a new computer later this year.

I seem to recall previous, preliminary announcements claiming that there would be more items upgraded in 10.10. I wonder if I was imagining that, or if Canonical decide some of the other upgrades were not worth the effort? (Or maybe I was thinking of Xubuntu.)

I have a great way to protect the power grid against cyber-attacks: Don't connect it to the internet!

If there's no route to the power grid's control computers via the internet, then there's no way that a cyber-attack could affect it. And no, this doesn't mean that power companies can't connect to the internet to accept bill payment or requests to connect/disconnect service - just that they shouldn't allow anything critical to be CONTROLLED over the internet - and it also doesn't mean that they can't have a private TCP/IP network that for sharing information among their various systems, which obviously is something that they will want to optimize the power grid and power production to get maximum return on their high capital investments.

Slashdot story in 2152: MPAA asks again for control of brain-implanted memory remapping devices

The MPAA is arguing that if they could directly control consumer's neural recall pathways, the could make more money by reselling you movies you've already seen.

Where's the +2 Both Prescient and Scary mod when you need it?