I got what you meant, but my point is that people in general will keep using tablets until someone comes up with an invention that defeats the benefit of owning multiple devices with multiple screens. If the tablet market dies it will be because we're all wearing contact lenses that paint images directly to our retinas.

Saying that tablets have found a niche is a bit like saying that hamburgers have found a niche. Tablets are cheap, or will be cheap once the surge in demand has been satisfied and the manufacturers have recouped their investments, and tablets can do 75% of what an average user does on a laptop, and more.

If you look at it from a hardcore user on a budget angle it makes sense to spend a little less on your laptop or desktop and monitor and direct some money towards a tablet or two. More machines and more screens make you more productive.

Then you're almost old enough to remember when IRC was created in 1988. I'm 29 and I clearly remember the splash that mIRC made on TV and in the newspapers when it came out in 1995 and IRC took off among normal people, or semi-normal people, and I clearly remember how everyone in school was trying to learn how to use it in 1996. Hell, you could be 18 and still have learned to use mIRC when significant numbers of people where still using it, if you were an early writer/typer and started using it at age 6.

I guess it could be that the rate at which software and electronics is changing causes us to over estimate the amount of time that has passed since technology x was hot.

So I guess in North Carolinian schools they only teach twin primes that consist of one odd prime and one even prime.

What about the idea that was popular a few years ago about making stuff fail gracefully, both at the hardware level and the software level, so that the system could swallow the error and go on calculating without completely ruining the result? Could failures be reduced to essentially just another source of error?

Here's an early preview... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v91m_F2NhfU

Yeah, in-game purchases and chapters could work in theory. It probably will work at some point in the future, as soon as most customers have gotten used to in-game purchases and don't perceive it as scammy, which could take a while.

But I don't think you can ever get around the basic problem, which is that it's hard to make money selling designer vases through stores that focus on plastic souvenirs.

Either drowning in $0.99 crap or not released because game companies predict that they will be drowning in $0.99 crap.

I think there needs to be a carefully curated invite-only game store for phones and tablets where game companies would agree to charge at least $9.99 for a game.

Because Python != Java Script. I don't even know that Python runs in Firefox, but I could be wrong...

"Terrorists can make these guns and do some horrible things to an individual and then walk away scott-free [...]"

Now I'm not an expert on American law and I'm not an American and English is not my native language, but it sounds just a little bit implausible to me that there would be a law that said that it is not illegal to murder people if you make the gun yourself...

Or I guess maybe scott-free means something completely different than scot-free, like you're free like a character in a Scott movie, or something.

Or maybe the senator's best friend owns a gun factory.

Or I guess maybe the senator has a wildly inaccurate idea of what a 3-d printer is. I mean, it's probably easier to get fingerprints and DNA off of a metal gun than a plastic gun. A metal gun is really hard to destroy, but it would not exactly be trivial to destroy a plastic gun without the neighbors noticing.

Unless you have a good quality file and a lot of time...

Parent got modded funny, but I for one always needed a glass to stand my guild mates for more than 45 minutes. People who get "management" positions in guilds are like people in real life management, but with slightly squeakier voices.

Pay to play MMO:s are basically like a second job. If you play them with a group of awesome people they're fun and rewarding and may end up giving you one or two friends for life, otherwise, and much more commonly, they will slowly grind your life down until you're ready to cry.

I quit the game soon after realizing this.

Something like that is sure to happen in the research community, certainly in the military research community, but it's pretty unlikely to become a consumer product. Consumers tend to go for ease of use. 20 years from now the most popular consumer VR products will probably be small lightweight headsets that look like a pair of large sunglasses.

You could also create some pretty convincing additional effects for cheap. Imagine having a $30 variable speed fan pointed at your face while you're playing a game.

That, and how the competition won't catch up with you. Be sure to mention any and all patents that you have.

My first thought was Mario. You gotta love being able to break bricks with your head. (Or your fist if you're to believe the instruction booklets, but we all know he really does it with his head.)

ZTE is a corporation with close to 100k employees with growing hardware and software businesses. All they lack is a brand, but if Samsung (which used to be the Yugo of home electronics) can be turned into a popular brand, then why not ZTE or Huawei?

But yeah, Firefox OS looks like it's going to be DOA. The fact that this comment is only the 60:th comment is a bad sign. If Mozilla can't get people who read Slashdot excited about their OS then there's probably no hope for it. I suppose ZTE is primarily working with Firefox OS because they want to absorb knowledge from it for their own closed-source in house OS project, or projects, that they are sure to be working on.