Part of me thinks this is a bad idea - a guy known for his over the top stylistic violence and profanity epics handling the next entry in a popular pop sci-fi franchise just seems like a bad fit.

However, part of me thinks this would be great because Tarantino's strength is making solid movies with interesting and compelling plots while at the same time paying homage to old movie styles and in the process coming up with a great example of the same.

For example Kill Bill is a really great movie in the style of old kung fu flicks. Death Proof has maybe the best car chase scene ever filmed. Jackie Brown is a great homage to blaxploitation films.

Everyone agrees Star Trek II: Wrath of Kahn is the best entry in the series. They tried to remake it twice (Nemesis and STID), with the second time even using a rebooted Kahn, and they both missed the mark. I don't think WoK needs to be attempted again but if Tarantino could pull off a new movie with an original plot that brought back the elements we loved about the old movies, it could be pretty interesting.

The one thing I hope though is this doesn't count as one of his ten films. He's said his thought process is that after he's done ten films he's retiring. Pretty much just for the fuck of it. He counts the two Kill Bill movies as one entry, so The Hateful Eight is his eighth film (it's even in the title). That means he has two more to go. I would hope his entry in a sci-fi anthology movie series wouldn't count against the ten. He's said he wouldn't completely rule out another film outside the ten if he felt like it so maybe he wouldn't count this one. Who knows.

...though not really Slashdot's fault as they're just passing the message along.

Microsoft Office is available on all Chromebooks that support running the Google Play Store and whatever Android apps it has in it

If you have a Chromebook not on the supported list and/or running the wrong kind of processor (though mostly just old Chromebooks) then you can't run the Google Play Store and therefore you can't run Office in the manner described here.

What the article was really trying to say is that for some period of time only selected Chromebooks that ran the Google Play Store could run it, artificially limited due to testing purposes. That's done now. But if you're like me and you still have some ancient Acer Chromebook you're not getting it. I know, I tried last night thinking this was an "app" in the way that most ChromeOS "apps" are (i.e., just web pages pretending to be apps)

The iPhone X is the entire reason why they did that.

Not a player piano but Beck did release an entire album once in the form of piano sheet music. At the time it was deemed pretty pretty damned hipster

How to use new technology to reproduce old, obsolete technology. It's interesting in an engineering, logistical, historical and technical sense while at the same time it's the sort of thing that's going to drive a lot of the people on Slashdot fucking insane because it's a ton of effort to solve a problem that the forward thinking engineer believes should not exist.

I guess in a way it's the same way I feel every time there's some new JavaScript framework designed to help further pretend that you're making an app instead of a webpage.

The real reason is hipsters. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but once the CD took over and things like vinyl records and cassette tapes left stores, hipsters who wanted to be different kept buying vinyl whenever and however they could. There's arguments to be made about sound quality and at the very least an album can sound different on vinyl under the right (read: expensive) circumstances but for the most part the novelty was in the fact that they had their music in some non-mainstream format.

And then Record Store Day came along and was actually successful in the long run. Sure, the Independent Record Store is still an endangered species but the long term effect was that people started wanting to buy records again in mainstream numbers. Now you can buy vinyl records everywhere from Best Buy to Target. We had a story just like this one a while back about how the last vinyl record presses were made back in the 80's and how we were just now seeing enough demand to create new technology to replicate something for old technology.

To some extent the vinyl record is the Mexicoke of the music industry - the utility and benefits are arguable, but the consumers are willing to spend more on it (a new CD costs like $11.99, the same album on vinyl can go for over $35 or more) so they keep getting made.

And to some extent if you buy an album on CD you're buying something you can make yourself or you have to turn into the version you want (digital) yourself. If you're going to spend money might as well buy something you can't make yourself, plus as a bonus they tend to come with download codes for the format you really want. Today if you buy physical music to some extent you're buying a souvenir.

But if you're a hipster, the vinyl record becoming mainstream is a problem for you since the whole point is to not be mainstream. So, the next frontier in differentness is cassettes. The pioneer of this for the most part was Urban Outfitters, they've wound up being the exclusive retailer of a number of albums on cassette, like the Run The Jewels album or the Hamilton Mixtape.

So naturally we're now seeing the same problem the vinyl industry faced.

But the sort version to your question is: it's the latest way to be hip and different.

Just a little correction here. AT&T wasn't desperate. Cingular Wireless was desperate. They made the deal with Apple, but didn't happen fast enough to save them, and they were acquired by AT&T between the time that the iPhone was announced and the time it was released. I believe that Apple went to AT&T after being rebuffed by Verizon, only to get the same response.

So while the iPhone launched on AT&Ts network, it was only because AT&T bought Cingular and was forced to honor its contract, not because of negotiations between Apple ant AT&T.

Technically you're both incorrect and correct.

The short version is that when AT&T was declared a monopoly back in the day they were broken up into a bunch of smaller companies (the "Baby Bells", with the former AT&T being the "Ma Bell"). Cingular was formed by two of the Baby Bells (SBC and BellSouth) and through a series of mergers and acquisitions, AT&T acquired most of the Baby Bells back and effectively re-formed. In particular the Cingular merger/acquisition occurred before the iPhone launch.

So it's true that I've thought of AT&T as this one blob of a company when really for a while there they were separate companies and the whole web of who acquired who is enough to make your head spin.

My wife actually worked at Cingular corporate during some of this and the amount of work that went into rebranding AT&T Wireless locations into Cingular locations and then back to just AT&T locations was tremendous. It would be good to be in the businesses that benefited from rebranding at that time (sign creation, business card printing, etc.) because they had to go back to them twice within about six months.

i don't get it, if AT&T wasn't desperate wouldn't Apple have moved onto to the next national carrier that was desperate?

Yeah I should have clarified - AT&T was the only one desperate at the time. I mean, the wireless market was and is competitive but AT&T was the main one hurting.

It's true they would have gone on to the next desperate national carrier except I don't think there was one. But if all four major national carriers (in the USA anyway) were comfortable to the point of saying no like Verizon did then the iPhone as we know it wouldn't have happened - it would have ether never seen the light of day or it would have been watered down with logos on it or it would be a niche product only Apple sold. Kinda like how for a few years the iPod was just the MP3 player you used if you had a Mac (there were ways to run it on Windows but few people bothered)

There was a guy who used to work at RIM (BlackBerry) R&D who posted on a game forum I frequent. He had some good insight on the mobile market.

He said the real issue is not that the phone industry couldn't have come up with something like the iPhone before Apple did (though apparently RIM had a "explain why it can't be done" culture instead of a "figure out how it can be done" culture). The real problem was the carriers. If the carriers didn't carry your phone you were toast.

If you think back on it, prior to the iPhone and Apple selling phones in their stores, probably 99% of cell phone purchases were made by people at the carrier stores (as in, you went to the local AT&T store). And so if the carrier wouldn't carry or sell your phone, you were toast (and I think there's actually been some law changes since then, could be that in 2007 you couldn't just carry any network-compatible phone into a store and have them put it on their network, they may have forced you to buy a phone from them).

The carriers wanted cheap feature phones, preferably ones that lasted about a year before needing to be replaced. They liked deals where people could come in and they'd sell them a cheap phone or four and so they weren't interested in expensive phones with useful features.

Apple went to Verizon first with the iPhone. When they told Verizon that Apple would control the phone, the updates, the eventual App Store, and they wouldn't be able to put their logos on it, Verizon told them to go fuck themselves.

AT&T though, they were desperate. They were losing land line subscribers left and right and their two different cell phone companies were flailing. So they let Apple do its thing.

If AT&T hadn't been desperate we may have never seen the iPhone. And cell phones today would likely not resemble what they do today. Your Prada phone there gives no mention as to what network it was on. It may not have been carried by a carrier for that reason (too expensive). There's a reason almost no one has ever heard of it.

Apple really did change everything, or at the very least move things forward much quicker than they would have ordinarily.

The web browsers on iOS like Firefox and Chrome are actually using the WebKit rendering engine. Chrome brings the material design look and feel and both of them let you just keep the bookmarks and whatever other niceties but the actual renderer is no different than Safari on iOS.

Opera, however, was different - they would render the page server-side as an image and then send that image to your phone. This let them ship a browser on iOS as well as get around Apple's no-rendering-engines rule.

But you can see the issue with this, right? Is Opera caching the images on their servers? Probably not but you can't know. For all you know, JPEGs of your bank website are on their servers. SSL doesn't matter as much anymore because the rendering isn't being done on your device.

So this is different than if they were abandoning an iOS web browser that was a WebKit wrapper like the others, this is Opera saying they no longer want to deal with this render-on-the-server mess.

To say nothing about the fact that Opera as a company has to be struggling right now, they've got less desktop market share than Edge, which no one uses on purpose. They have less market share than Safari which is only on the Mac. I think their switch from Presto to Blink was less that they agreed with Google's standards and more that they just couldn't afford to keep developing Presto anymore. It must be so weird to work for a company that makes a product so few people use.

is Device limited to mobile phone & purchasing apps? Because we sure as hell have 'Devices' in the house older than 2013 that came with those titles for free. On desktops & laptops. That's why OP's original question is still valid.

Do you mean the mobile apps are now finally free too? (know yer history son).

There's a few different things going on here with regards to the Mac versions.

Versions of iWork prior to 2011 were traditional boxed commercial products - as in, you went to the store and bought a disc. The Mac App Store had been introduced in 2010 and in 2011 Apple released iWork '09, the then most recent version, on the Mac App Store as three separate apps at $19.99 a piece (which meant that the three together were cheaper than the $79 they had been charging for the iWork DVD-ROM).

In October 2013 they released new versions of all three, now just called "iWork" with no particular year or version designation, and now exclusively on the Mac App Store. They also made this version a free upgrade for iWork '09 users both to reward existing owners but also because this allowed them to transition to using the Mac App Store as their central software update platform. At this time, however, they were still three $19.99 applications.

The way the free upgrade worked was that the Mac App Store looked to see if you had iWork '09 installed and if so it would install the newer iWork (leaving the old one intact) and associate your Apple ID account in the Mac App Store as having owned the apps. At the time there was a trick people discovered - by accident or design the Mac App Store was incapable of determining whether or not your copy of iWork '09 was the full version or the 30-day trial, which Apple had rescinded from their website but which was still floating around. If you installed iWork '09's trial and rebooted, the Mac App Store would start installing the new version of iWork and your account would now own the latest iWork even though you had not purchased iWork '09. In a statement, Apple acknowledged that this was possible but that they thought the convenience of upgrading and Mac App Store association was worth the potential loss in sales they might suffer as a result.

In October 2014 Apple announced that the three iWork apps would be free with new hardware purchases. Prior to this point you had to either qualify for the free iWork '09 upgrade or purchase the apps, and anyone who didn't do the trick above would still need to buy the apps.

What's changed today is that now the three iWork apps are outright free to everyone, not just people who bought a Mac after 2014 or were willing to perform the iWork '09 trial trick. If you had them on devices prior to 2013 for "free" then either you had taken advantage of some promotion or some bundling, or you may have gotten the upgrade as a result of the 2013 rollout.

The iOS versions of iWork followed a similar trajectory, though skipping the part about being on DVD prior to 2013 and any upgrade tricks - they were released as three $9.99 apps, free with hardware purchases past 2014, and now just free to anyone.

I bought one of these at launch, as I was looking for a cheap Android tablet that wasn't total garbage. Since B&N seems to be willing to take a hit or sell it at break-even in order to promote their Nook ecosystem, it's actually a really good tablet considering the price. It's basically a stock Android 6.0 tablet with Nook apps installed and Google Play, unlike Amazon's entry which is stuck with FireOS.

That said, to be clear, this is basically a relabeled off-brand tablet. In adb it shows up as "Southerntelecom". I'm willing to bet this same basic tablet is available for a few dollars more without the Nook logo on the back.

All of this to say that it's maybe less likely that B&N wanted to pinch pennies on the charger and more that the charger was a cheap POS to begin with because the whole gimmick with this tablet is that it's cheap. It may be why that issue with ADUPS showed up a while back (they have since patched it out). B&N sells cases for it at $22.99, nearly half the cost of the tablet itself.

Presumably you won't be able to run 10.3 and newer.

Looks like 10.3 will still be usable, the "future version" of iOS is likely iOS 11.

Nothing. But that's not what the assertion was.

That's a good point, I bet that's it. They could have type inference or they could drop the let keyword and they chose type inference