Of course, it is cheaper to just use the record right now. However, it isn't that simple.

What I find, is that the situation is similar to animated videos. You can draw some cartoonish character, a few cuts manually, and send the whole stuff to some country with massive number of people drawing all the in-between scenes *manually*. Just like 'The Simpsons' or 'South Park' or whatsoever.

On the other side, you can just generate everything using your computer. Create some 3D model of some character, create a virtual world, and then make it act. Examples are those stuff from Pixar or Dreamworks.

The problem isn't just whether it is realistic or not. Another aspect of this stuff is productivity. For example, if you are playing some kind of MMORPG and you want to have every character to have some kind of voice, good luck hiring a horde of voice actors for a gazillion number of lines. Instead, you can write some kind of 'voice simulator' which does text-to-speech remarkably well, and let it create all the recordings. No actors, just computers. Much cheaper.

Actually, recording realistic sound effects are really difficult, because it isn't just 'stick the microphone to the stuff that emits the sound'. Recording the perfect sound effect actually takes a lot of engineering and trial-and-error, which can be really expensive if you want to take a lot of sound effects.

In conclusion, real-time synthesis - probably not yet. Content generation - definitely yes.

noop scheduler isn't SSD support. Seems like you didn't RTFA, which means that you didn't understand what TRIM is.

From the article, page 4:

"If the drive broadcasts itself as a solid state drive (which can be done through the latest ATA specification), Windows 7 can make adjustments to ensure that the drive performs at its best. For example, if Windows 7 can verify that you're running a solid state disk, it will disable defragmentation for that drive (as defragging puts un-necessary wear on SSD's and doesn't help performance). Windows 7 will also enable support for "TRIM", also known as DisableDeleteNotify, an add-on to the ATA specification which allows for enhanced performance and decreased strain on the drive. According to Microsoft, here's what TRIM brings to the table.

        * Enhancing device wear leveling by eliminating merge operation for all deleted data blocks
        * Making early garbage collection possible for fast write
        * Keeping deviceâ(TM)s unused storage area as much as possible; more room for device wear leveling.

Basically, Windows 7 will send TRIM commands down the storage chain, but it's up to the drive to accept the commands and utilize them. In order for TRIM to work, you not only need Windows 7, but you'll need a solid state hard disk which has support for TRIM via its Firmware."

Every time I install Windows, it takes three or four hours to complete setup - install drivers, install patches, install cygwin, MS office and whatsoever, restore backup data, and I'm ready to work.

Every time I install Linux, it takes three or four days to complete setup - install Linux, install packages, change font configurations because the default rendering is so ugly, search on the net to figure out how I can get (insert some hardware here) working on my PC, search on the net to figure out why my PC doesn't shut down properly, search on the net why XXXX doesn't work anymore, search on the net for an older version of some package so that I don't need to touch some old code (that I don't intend to fix), search for this, that, etc. Have to do the same thing for every distribution, because one method that worked for one distribution doesn't work for the other one.

Even after the settings are done, I have to cope with poor localizations. Typing in other languages such as Korean or Japanese is still horrible, though I must admit the situation has improved vastly. Messages are badly translated, or some messages aren't translated at all. Now I just gave up using any language other than English on my Ubuntu desktop.

Yes, they are indoctrinated to a world of horrible things. They refuse to open their mind to anything else. So what? They find their computer as a tool, and if the tool does what they need to do, that's enough. I can't teach my wife how to configure SCIM, how to deal with the messages not translated properly, and how to deal with the website that doesn't get rendered properly on Firefox (though in this case, the website is to blame), while all she uses is some simple word processing and web surfing (total 2 hrs per week) which all works perfectly well on Windows. I'd rather deal with the malwares than teaching her all that stuff.

What is worse, is that the original code doesn't even looks like it is 'supposed to give better performance on x86'.

The code was assuming that struct alignments are done in four bytes. Good luck when it becomes something larger, because I guess it will increase to something bigger in a not-so-distant future.

Although not mentioned on the article, I am damn sure that the guys on iSuppli will be thinking something like 'OMG how can they do business with such a high material cost?'. 50% looks tooooooo high to me, and I am damn sure that they are selling it for a loss.

Believe me, iSuppli did many, many, and many work something like this before, and their purpose is to understand how those companies operate.

It's no secret that material cost is only a tiny fraction of the retail price on this kind of high-tech business. Screaming socialism on this kind of article is completely laughable.

Yes, you can lie and submit a fake name/number combination. How they implement the verification system is their problem. Some never check at all, many others just check the hash value (the national ID number has its last digit generated from a simple hash function), others check against other databases suchas ones from credit rating agencies, and ask for a photocopy of their ID card if it doesn't exist on the database. Sadly, records occasionally leak due to incompetent server admins, rouge employees, and even careless people posting their ID publicly on the net. There actually has been some class action lawsuits regarding ID leaks, and several prosecutions related to databasae leaks.

The only thing that prevents you from using a fake or somebody else's name/number is that doing so is a criminal offense.

I think that the national ID number must be abolished or make it practically useless other than as a hash number, since it is so easy to obtain someone else's ID number and abuse it.

(ps : I am a South Korean.)

However, the problem is that he didn't have any stocks or any assets. He was merely a jobless man on his early thirties who didn't have any formal education on economy. That's why the DA is not convicting him for some kind of law on securities or market arbitration, which is far more severe than publishing false information. what he claims is that the DA is charging him because he was merely grumbling that the government is a stupid big liar, though some of the information was not throughoutly fact-checked.

Of course, there are conspiracy theories that there are other people behind him, since they was shocked that his real-world identy was a jobless man who merely graduated community college, and still could post articles with in-depth analysis on the current financial situation. However, that's another story.

I am a native South Korean who live in Seoul, and maybe I can (sort of) explain a bit about the law.

Yes, the websites hate the law pretty much (because it requires the companies to add 'ID authentication system', which isn't cheap in a market with razor-thin profits), and many Koreans who do care about privacy also hate it, too. I also feel sort of sad when that law passed.

Well, the reason behind this law was something like this. In slashdot, if you see a troll, you simply moderate that reply a '-1, troll', and move along. In Korea, people start 'feeding' the troll in more cruel ways, e.g. track down the real-world identy of that guy, bomb his personal website with hate spams, bomb his e-mail, and in some occasions, even e-mails of people close to him. Yup, the replies on that troll became the real-world identy of that guy, rather than another troll, or any reasonable reply.

The horrifying thing was that this phenomenom wasn't limited to real-world celeberities. It could be you, or me, or anybody on the net. Yes, being a troll, or saying something stupid isn't a good thing to do, but we all do make mistakes. I've seen people ranging from teenage girls to senior citizens getting horribly bullied by anonymous mobs. Occasionally, there were news reports on people commiting suicide because of the mental horror they had to undergo. It got so serious that people needed to stay completely anonymous on all occasions, or having some way to stop this maddness.

Yes, I feel that many of the Korean people don't think political freedom is such an important thing compared to things such as security or wealth. This may be because their history of democracy has been so short, and they have been living a hard life for many years suffering from poverty, hunger, and North Korea. Republic of Korea is merely some 60-years old, and approximately half of that period was under the rule of dictators. In such a society, it is difficult to teach why political freedom is important and dictatorship is bad, because those people who benefited a lot from the dictatorship still exists in many core positions of the society. I believe it may take some time, patience, education, and continuous struggling.

...and how about the cost of living in California?

As many others said, the simple reason is because the headphone is meant to work as a remote controller, so that Apple can eliminate all controls from the surface of the iPod. Nothing so innovative - we had CD players and tape recorders with remotes for years. The remotes disappeared because, I think, the media players got compact enough, so that they no longer need to have remotes to control the players that previously had to stay somewhere inside a pocket or some kind of bag.

Just think of the smallest media players - they are already as small as the remote controllers we used decades ago. why in world do we need a remote when the media player itself is small enough? Looks like a flawed design decision.

Nah, I'll never buy it anyway.

That's exactly why they want (and need) the kill switch - protecting the radio spectrum, and the phone itself. (Many parts of the phone, including batteries, can be damaged by misbehaving software) Of course, the right way to protect them is to implement a thin hypervisor layer, but security holes, program errors, conceptual flaws, etc. etc. all do happen. I believe Google probably needs the 'remote termination' as a last resort.

I just hope Google doesn't abuse the kill switch just like Apple did.