Interesting part of the story I'd never heard before. I always think of John Cash and David Kirsch as the network guys.

Anyone curious about networking changes in Quake should also look up Quakeworld and client-side prediction.

I'm not familiar with the specifics, but the lag can be more than 17ms. I'm not too familiar with the source on consoles these days either, but I know 1080p is rare.. are they 60fps?
Either way, a quick google of "hdtv lag" leads to some additional causes of delay.

Considering some gamers, who know very little about technology, instantly notice lag when they try their new TV, whatever the delay is it's not quick enough.

I agree 120Hz is great since it's a common product of frame rates, but the interpolation of any "good system" can be bad for games. The interpolation introduces lag because it delays the picture display while creating the artificial frames. That's bad for any interactive situation, but what's really bad is that some of these TV's don't give you the option to disable it.

I recently overheard somebody trying different types of video cables for his Xbox360 because there was lag on his new LCD. He had no idea it was the new TV causing the problem. And how many salespeople are knowledgeable enough to warn people?

I loved biking to work. Even when raining (I'm in Portland) it worked pretty well.

If you can't move, understandable since it's 1.5hrs away, maybe there's a good combo route you can take. Drive to some public park or some place easy-going, then pull out your bike and ride to the NOC. Going back to the relaxing place at the eod will be nice, too.

AT&T is effectively stopped from offering the Pre because of the radio communications the Pre was designed around. Palm could, of course, make a modified or subsequent Pre with AT&T compatible hardware, but until then it flat out won't work on AT&T's network.

The two radio "families" in the US are used by AT&T & T-Mobile (GSM), and Sprint & Verizon (CDMA).

Indeed.. I'm now wondering how exactly a sombrero cookie is made..

There will be a moat, with a drawbridge, just because that's cool. But on the gate will be a sign to inform intruders that gravity exists because our perception of reality is 180 degrees off, and the Earth's surface is actually on the inside; its rotation keeps us planted on the ground due to centrifugal force.

Then as they scratch their head, I'll throw chickens at them.

Seriously? A company like Apple would never pull a silly trick like that to grab attention. If that was really their intent, they'd be doing all kinds of crap to garner attention:
-Make a new product custom-milled from a block of some cool metal!
-Name a boring industry number, say 1394, to something exciting that suggested its blazing speed!
-Call a standard media device Super to set it apart from others!
-They'd even name stuff after crazy-cool sci-fi machines and append current product names with the word "extreme"!

Yep, that's a vital point because Nehalem Xeons currently are not available anywhere else, and the Nehalem Core i7 is not comparable. They are newer than the Xeon platform that is available and support 3 channel memory. That sounds nice, but the _older_ Xeon platform supported 4 channel memory with RAID and sparing (just like hard drives) and ECC to mention only a couple things. Desktop and Workstation/Server hardware are not in the same world.

Unless they've changed their EULA or other agreement, no, you can't do that at all. OSX may only be legally installed on hardware purchased from Apple.

The Dreamcast could do 480p in 1998, albeit via VGA which wasn't available on TV's at the time.

Gamers, the kind you're talking about, are just like any other group of people waiting to slurp up the latest marketing drivel. They think games are neat but aren't attentive enough to realize resolution and graphics power don't make a video game. Their interest is sparked by cool "new" things like WiiFit; they just don't realize the same thing was made for the Amiga in the 80's because games weren't "cool" then.

Shorter attention spans are disturbingly codependent with marketing.

It's shiny.

Sorry.. had to. But it's sorta true:
It's nice from a design standpoint. If a page is always rendered as the designer intends, they know the exact environment into which their page will be displayed. All variances and plan b's can be ignored and the layout and render will be exactly as the designer intended.

There's more to it than "1.2GHz". We don't know much about the Shiva architecture. According to the article it's "ARM9-like" because it's based on Feroceon and XScale. How many ARM9 encoders or transcoders have you heard of?
Also consider that although the Xbox can decode most everything, it's a closed system, which I'm sure added a little to the performance of XBMC code. I doubt a similar 733MHz Celeron desktop would be as capable even if it had more than 64MB of RAM.

Aside from serving video, the system may not be able to saturate its gigabit ethernet either. I read that spec as Marvell saying the CPU and SoC can push more than 100mbits, so they used gbit ethernet. Maybe its throughput is limited to, say, 20MBytes/s.

This is a sweet little toy, especially for its price, but it's not going to compare to most x86 mini-computers.

In a 3 drive RAID 0 array 350MB/s isn't that impressive. That's 116 2/3 MB/s per drive which is only slightly higher than the 1TB SATA spindles that were on sale months ago for less than a SSD. (Those speeds were maximums, though. Min was in the upper 60's I believe.)

That performance is cool but its price premium is huge for a drive that provides only a fraction of spindles' capacity. Until they drop in price or are handled more efficiently to improve their performance, they may be ready for prime time but they're being sold for PPV prices.

I don't think a Microsoft store would be like an Apple store. At an Apple store the salespeople think a chipset is a processor and the higher cost is justified because Apple uses different "premium" hardware in their computers that's not available in others. They're designed to sell nice features like MagSafe, glossy screens, and multi-finger touchpads.

I'm not saying the salespeople at the Microsoft store are going to be experts, just that Microsoft has never highlighted their similarities to Apple. They'll sell their products as devices rather than parts of a unique computing experience. The failed ad campaign you mentioned surely made them aware that their userbase is not interested in computing experiences; they're interested in things, and don't care too much about image or the emotional states promoted by some experience.

Not trying to sound like some weird Microsoft fan or rant nonsensically, just in a metaphorical mood..