And you know what Mojang's opinion means at this point? Absolutely NOTHING. They can't tell their new owner to honor their intended promises, even if it were written into the deal. All they have to do is replace the boss with someone willing to change the company on Microsoft's behalf and POOF! It's happened with every other developer that's been bought out thus far that came out and said they were told/promised nothing would be changing.

Depends on how good their lawyers are. If they write into the contract a term that says that all rights revert to the original authors if the new owner violates such a term, then yes, they can force the new owners to honor those promises.

Neither am I willing to take the word of some random dude on the Internet. Barring any more proof, I don't think we should be putting any stock in this.

You can to think about that. So it doesn't prevent gun suicides. The fact aside that someone can commit suicide with something else, the person doing it would be an authorized user of the gun. So no help there.

It doesn't prevent gun homicides. Again, these are done by authorized users of the gun, or people who have time to modify the gun. Remember for all the clever electronics, in the end guns are mechanical devices. So ultimately the electronics have to be something that mechanically disables the gun like a standard mechanical safety. A trigger disconnect, a firing pin block, that kind of thing. Ya well those are dead simple to bypass. So no help for stolen guns, the criminals would just remove the safety.

It doesn't prevent accidental shooting by any authorized user of the gun. Since they are authorized, it will fire. So any drunken games, etc, are still just as dangerous as they were before.

Already here we have, by far, most of the shootings that happen.

It may not prevent shooting where a gun is taken away from someone. Depends on how it works. If it has some way of reading the fingerprint when the trigger is depressed, then ok it could work. However if it works like a safety where you disengage it when you grab the gun, it'll still be disengaged if someone takes it away.

It would prevent accidental shootings where an unauthorized user gets their hands on the gun, like a kid coming across it.

Ok well, that doesn't seem very useful to me. The correct answer to the problem of kids is to lock up your guns. That is much more secure, particularly since something like this would only be effective if you didn't authorize you kids to use it, or remembered to remove their authorization when they were done at the range. Having them secured in a safe fixes the problem nicely. Likewise, that provides pretty good protection against theft.

So I really don't see what this will solve, and it will make things more expensive and complicated. It just doesn't strike me as very useful.

Okay, here's a link to the research paper from 2012.

Ebola may not be easy to transmit, but it sure as heck isn't hard to transmit. It's not pedantically known to be airborne, but it is believed to be spread by droplets (e.g. sneezes). There's a very, very, very fine line between the two.

And yes, I can provide citations if you'd like, but it's not like they're very hard to find with a Google search.

Apple's done a lot of work with Grand Central Dispatch (is that the right technology?) to help developers offload as much as possible to the GPU ...

You're probably thinking of OpenCL. GCD is a pipelining engine for enqueuing work.

Yeah, I was about to say that the reasoning behind the decision was shrouded in mystery, but same idea. Oh well.

Maybe 6-10 hours of staff time. What I mean is you have to factor what your people cost you. If someone costs $50/hour when you count in salary + ERE (meaning payroll tax, benefits, insurance and all other expenses) then 6 hours of their time costs $300. So, if your transition wastes more than 6 hours of their time, it is a net loss.

You always have to keep that cost in mind when you talk about anything: What does it cost your employees to do? This is the same deal with old hardware. It can actually cost you more money, because it takes more IT time to support. Like if you have an IT guy whose salary + ERE is $30/hour and you have them spend 20 hours a year repairing and maintaining an old P4 system that keeps failing, well that is a huge waste as that $600 could have easily bought a new system that would work better and take up little, if any, of their time.

That is a reason commercial software wins out in some cases. It isn't that you cannot do something without it, just that it saves more staff time than it costs. That's why places will pay for things like iDRAC or other lights-out management, remote KVMs, and so on. They cost a lot but the time they save in maintenance can easily exceed their cost.

Just remember that unless employees are paid very poorly, $300 isn't a lot of time. So you want to analyze how much time your new system will cost (all new systems will cost some time in transition if nothing else) and make sure it is worth it.

Then you've never worked in an enterprise environment that uses it. You'll have a ton of tech support and maintenance costs with Linux. You not only have all the regular user shit, people who can't figure out how to use their computer, administrative stuff, etc. However I've also observed that a good bit of the stuff in Linux requires a lot of sysadmin work, scripting and such. We do Linux and Windows in our environment and we certainly make Linux work on a large enterprise scale, but our Linux lead spends an awful lot of time messing with puppet, shell scripts, and so on to make it all happen. A lot more than we spend with AD and group policy to make similar things happen in Windows.

Licensing savings are certainly something you can talk about savings for, however you aren't getting out of support and maintenance. That is just part of running an enterprise. The question is what would their costs be, compared to Windows? that is likely to vary per environment.

The leg pains have nothing to do with exercise or DVTs. Statins are known to cause severe muscle damage (rhabdomyolysis) if too much of it stays in your system for too long a period of time. The pharmaceutical companies say that this side effect is relatively rare, but even if the claimed half a percent is correct, that still adds up to a lot of people when you're talking about a medicine that's as overprescribed as statins are.

If you aren't a known developer, people want to see some evidence that you have the ability to make good on your plans. Game development isn't simple, and many people are not prepared for what they are going to have to do to bring a successful game to market.

So Doublefine or inXile can get a good bit of funding with nothing but a design doc for a game because people have faith they'll be able to deliver since they are experienced game devs. New crews are going to have to show something to get people to trust them.

Particularly in light of past KS failures in that regard. I've backed a number of games on KS and two of them I knew were fairly high risk: They were being done by an individual who hadn't done a game before, and there wasn't any sort of demo up front, just some basic concepts. I decided to take a risk on it, but fully understood that failure was likely.

Sure enough, both are floundering/failing. One hasn't had any updates in months, the other does update periodically but it is still extremely rudimentary, despite being way past the planned launch date, and it is pretty clear the dev just doesn't have a good idea how to proceed from here.

On the flip side, the games by established studios have either delivered or are well on track (Shadowrun Returns was brilliant, Wasteland 2 ships next Friday, Pillars of Eternity is in beta, etc). Likewise the indy titles that had a demo and were a good bit along with development have delivered, like FTL.

So no surprise many people aren't willing to take the risk. They want a better chance of return so they stick with established devs or with things that have some proof.

That's certainly a reasonable way of looking at it, too. The thing is, though, it's the base price that determines how quickly and broadly something will be adopted; the price of the top model mainly just affects the profitability. :-)

And although the drop happened more slowly, the iPad line, originally starting at $499, now starts at $299 in a smaller form factor, or $399 in a full-size version. One reason its price wasn't inflated much at launch is that it was relatively mature technology when first released—other than software differences, it's basically an iPod Touch or iPhone with a larger screen, and as we all know, making things bigger is a lot easier than making them smaller. :-)

I don't think Apple generally reduces prices. Usually they keep the price and margin steady but improve the hardware.

Let's see.

• The iPod started at $400. Within a year or so, the price had dropped to $300. Four years later, you could get one for $200, and $150 just a year after that.
• The original iPhone started at $500 and $600 (subsidized price). Within a couple of months, they killed the $500 version and lowered the $600 version to $400. One year later, they released the iPhone 3G that started at $200 (for the same capacity as the original $600 version). And of course, you can now get much better iPhone hardware for free.

So then there may be hope for this product, because somewhere out there is a richer/foolhardier version of yourself who thinks of $350 just like you think of $100.

Doubtful. I'm in the Silicon Valley, where we already think of $350 like an average person thinks of $100. It's hard for most people to justify spending more for an accessory than they spent on the phone they're using it with. :-)

Like I said, I'll probably buy one after the inevitable price drop.

If price is the only hurdle, then Apple will be fine. Your line of $100 is someone else's line at $350.

Not necessarily. I drew my line at $100, too, and I've spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 on a watch before. Based on Apple's product history, there are likely to be several major differences between this and a nice watch that diminish its value from my perspective:

• Most people who can afford a nice watch already own one. So to justify its cost, it would need to be worth as much as its purchase price plus the cost of the nice watch you'll no longer be using. For me, with an atomic-clock-synchronized watch, that's a hard problem to overcome.
• Nice watches that cost $300 typically have warranties that start at five years, because people wear them for decades. This will probably have a one-year warranty.
• Nice watches will be usable for decades. You can expect this one to become unsupported in the first OS after its third birthday. At that point, its usefulness will begin to diminish rapidly, as the unpatched security holes and lack of new app support turn it into an anachronism.
• Nice watches are timeless in their design. Their design changes at a speed that can only be described as glacial by tech standards. I'd expect this watch, by contrast, to be supplanted by a thinner version within about a year.
• Nice watches don't have to be charged every night, or even every couple of days. This watch would mean one more device-specific charge cable to carry with me on every trip, one more poorly made cable to break where the wire goes into the plug on either end, one more power outlet that I have to find in a hotel that tries to hide them from you, one more outlet adapter if I'm in Europe, one more thing to remember to pick up when I leave.... Every extra rechargeable device adds a lot of hassle.

This is how I arrived at a hundred bucks—maybe $125 if it had a camera and reliably ran for at least two or three weeks on a single charge. Mind you, this is all speculation about a product that doesn't exist yet, so there's a small chance that Apple will prove me wrong on many of these points.

Of course, what most folks here are missing is that this is a first-generation product. Apple builds those mostly as a proof of concept. Not many people buy them, but the products get them real-world testing, and they get a year or so to find ways to cut manufacturing costs. Then, they release a second-generation product at a third the price, and pull in several times the volume. For me, it will start to be interesting at that point.

But I'm not sure I'd bother wearing it after the first few days even if it was given to me. That is a bigger problem than "too expensive".

As one of the few people on Slashdot who still wears a watch, I'd definitely use one, but I can't see myself buying the first generation—particularly given that you just know they're working on a second-generation version with a camera, and if they release such a product, the resale value on the first-generation version will drop to almost nothing.