Comment Susan Kare Demonstrating the Mac (Score 3, Informative) 173
For all you computer history geeks out there, here is a clip from Computer Chronicles of Susan Kare demonstrating the Mac back in 1984:
For all you computer history geeks out there, here is a clip from Computer Chronicles of Susan Kare demonstrating the Mac back in 1984:
I agree, I wish there was a kit I could buy to build a functional computer that could run a modern Linux distro. I know that they make a kit called "Replica 1" that you can build an Apple I clone, but I wonder if there is something out there more advanced. I was thinking how awesome it would be to assemble something like a Raspberry Pi and put it into a case with a similar formfactor as a ZX Spectrum.
Ever since Oracle bought out Sun, they went overboard with the licensing costs for Solaris. Remember a few years back when Sun will let you run Solaris 10 for free? Well no more, if you have a non-Oracle two processor server it will cost you $2,000 per year. You don't own a license, you are basically renting the privilege to run Solaris on a server for one year. Also, you only get one flavor of support which they laughably call "premium". Their support is a joke now, and in my experience the good Sun engineers left a long time ago. For starters, you now get to talk to an overseas helpdesk which logs your call and for severity one issues, they give you a call back in an hour (if you're lucky). It used to be you will call an easy to remember number (1-800-USA-4SUN) and you will get a live transfer to a knowledgeable engineer to fix your problem. A few years ago I used to be a staunch supporter of Sun and Solaris but it seems like Oracle has done everything to drive me away from Sun's hardware and software. I am pretty sure I am not the only one either.
Not to mention that they charge $45/month for just 4gb of data. I just priced out an iPhone 4 with 450 voice minutes, unlimited text, and 4gb of data and it came out to a whopping $104.99/month PLUS taxes. I pay T-Mobile $70/month for the same service. I'm not looking forward to being an AT&T customer once they acquire T-Mobile.
This is false. I own both a HTC G1 and a Samsung Vibrant which both have the US T-Mobile 3G frequencies and I had no problems using T-Mobile's prepaid 3G network in the UK. The only caveat is to make sure that the phones are unlocked so they will accept a UK SIM card.
What brand? Oracle has already re-branded everything that has to do with Sun. Try installing the latest update of Solaris 10 and looking at
Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 s10x_u9wos_14a X86
Copyright (c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Assembled 11 August 2010
Granted, they haven't renamed all of the acronyms (built-in packages are still SUNW*) but I wouldn't put it past them. Sun Microsystems is a completely dead brand and means nothing now. I kind of wish IBM would of bought them after all.
Nintendo didn't pull the Virtual Boy because of its headache inducing red LED display, they pulled it because it was a shitty console that nobody bought.
Have you checked out the Lenovo Thinkpad USB keyboard yet? Supposedly it's the same keyboard ripped right from the notebook:
Part of the reason why your petrol prices are so high is that your government charges 56.19 pence per litre in taxes. In the US, the taxes are far less and vary by state. In my state (Illinois), the taxes come out to about 0.10 pence per liter. If you buy 100 liters of fuel, you will be paying 56.19 GDP in just taxes while in Illinois it will only be 10 GDP. If we raised taxes to the same levels here, it would definitely force to buy more fuel efficient fuel cars today instead of waiting until the next fuel crisis (and subsequently whining about fuel prices).
They have already started doing that. The funny thing is that you need to purchase an activation code to access each movie that is already on the disk:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/12/seagate-teams-with-paramount-pre-loads-movies-onto-500gb-freeag/
What about rural villages where electricity is scarce? Wouldn't you rather have more talk/standby time then a color screen? What about poor people who can't afford a basic phone? The cheaper mobile phones become, it enables more people who never had a phone in their entire lives to get one. And by the way, Motorola isn't the only maker of cell phones. For example, Nokia has a whole line of low-cost phones including the super-cheap 1203, which has 636 hours of standby and 9 hours of talk time. http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-1203
I think it would be possible, you have to remember that there are still a lot of developing countries that are being introduced to mobile phones for the first time, and they have to be affordable. For example, Motorola released the F3 a few years ago and it has an eink display: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_FONE_F3. It's super cheap and it's not sold in the US or Canada. I thought about ordering one online to serve as a backup phone or for when I want to go on a bike ride and don't want to lug around my expensive smart phone.
I would argue that one weakness is that Apple is the only maker of the iPhone and thus you are stuck with their hardware if you like it or not. With Android you have choice of hardware. I like hardware keyboards myself, so I can buy a phone that has one, like the HTC Dream, or Motorola Droid. For people that like software keyboards, you can get the HTC Dream or Hero for example. I can guarantee that Apple will never release a version of the iPhone with a hardware keyboard.
OpenTTD (which is based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe) is a great game and you can quickly loose track of the time building intricate train networks. You do need the original game files but this is pretty easy to do with the help of Google.
No, Palm shouldn't be checking apps and they should keep webOS as open as possible. Anybody in the world should be able to write an application for a phone and the end user should be able to run it with no restrictions, just like I can on my computer. I am not a baby and shouldn't be treated as such by my phone company/headset maker. I can download applications to my Android phone from anywhere (by enabling a checkbox in my phone's settings) and yet to encounter any malware. I like how people keep throwing this argument that by letting users download any application is going to perpetuate malware/viruses when it doesn't. How many people do you know gotten malware/viruses from Android?
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
