Posts by Epobirs 175 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Dec 2011
It's really just down to C.
A doesn't matter because this is a handheld. No great shock that its GPU trails the settops and desktop PCs. It needs to work under much greater constraints.
B is a given in the original model and thus neither here nor there. The resolution is a constant across both.
It's all C. Existing games were designed to look their best on the original screen. This isn't a new development. Playing games optimized for a 25" NTSC/PAL CRT would have this drawback if a big 36" tube of the same resolution were used. OTOH, you could comfortably play at a greater distance and companies got to sell controller extension cords before wireless took over.
What surprises me is the number of people, including the reviewer, who act surprised the resolution hasn't changed. The price difference is far too small to expect anything else. To produce a higher resolution model with no compatibility issues would require quadrupling the resolution (aka doubling it in each real dimension) in order for the system to scale things up transparently to software. Anything else would produce ugly visual glitches. This alone would make for a much higher price for the screens. Allowing the higher resolution to be driven directly would mean upgrading the innards as well, for yet more added cost.
I'm looking forward to trying one of these out. I have a 3DS but my aging eyes could do with bigger screens. If it feels good I expect I'll get the XL and see what price I can get for my 3DS. If the XL had been released just a few months ago it's probably what I would gotten in the first place.
That source listing complicated things for producing a legal BIOS that offered full compatibility. It made it that much harder for Compaq to assemble a team of coders to work on their clean room BIOS that had not been tainted by any exposure to those documents. This meant finding guys who were very good at 8088 code while having had no exposure to the most popular implementation of an 8088 system in the market.
Valve doesn't sue Microsoft because they have no basis for complaint. The idea that Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to offer a channel for their customers to purchase software on the Microsoft OS they already bought is completely mad. If Microsoft took some action that prevented Steam from running on Windows 8 there would be a legit complaint but Steam works perfectly well on Windows 8.
Microsoft is hardly alone in incorporating ideas that were first seen in third party products. The majority of function I once relied upon add-ins to provide in Firefox are now built-in features. Must suck to be a Firefox add-in developer. You never know when Mozilla is going to steal your idea.
Apple was in serious financial trouble before the licensing program began and it's problem were due to a severely limited market interest in a Mac OS that was severely showing its age in the years before OS X (which is really the NeXT OS with Mac APIs bolted on) offered a desperately needed update.
Apple tried to claim at one point that they were losing money on each OS license sold but this was revealed to be based on an accounting methodology that could get you thrown in jail in most businesses. Jobs ended licensing because he wanted absolute control over anything calling itself a Mac. It's that simple.
Microsoft made tens of $Billions letting vendors do whatever they wanted in terms of systems running the OS. But that only worked for specific markets and few companies want to stay put when new product categories are proven viable by a competitor. Microsoft has seen the result of their traditional licensing approach in the tablet market, where tons of awful bargain basement Android devices are cluttering up the market. They draw customers with very low prices and those customers blame Android rather than the specific hardware implementation when it turns out to be crap.
The PC market could prosper with systems of lesser and greater quality but the expectations are difference in the tablet market where a single brand with a very narrow product line sets the standard.
This article offered very little in the way of Gabe Newell's opinion and rather more of Gavin Clarke's.
Why would Secure boot on Windows RT tablets be something that mattered to Newell, or kill any OEMs? There is nothing stopping Dell from shipping a tablet running Linux or Android or any other available OS. The only thing Secure Boot means is that people who buy a Windows RT tablet should intend to only run Windows RT on it.
Shocking revelation time: That is already how the vast majority of consumer expect to use any computing device they buy. How many people who aren't trusted with sharp objects go shopping for an iPad on the basis of what other than iOS might be made to run on it? The Linux contingent has been so dependent on Windows PC to have a place to run they've developed a mindset alien to how most of the world actually works.
It doesn't make sense market-wise to push SSD in low-end laptops. The cost premium is still too great and too many of the shoppers in that price range don't appreciate the difference.
But it's pretty simple to just image copy the hard drive to an SSD, install the SSD, and use the hard drive in an external enclosure. On a laptop with USB 3.0 you'll get pretty good performance and lots of storage from the combination.
The big change will be when mSATA becomes a standard element in inexpensive laptops to allow for the OS to live on a small SSD while everything else resides on a platter drive. It will give a big performance boost for a large portion of usage without giving up storage capacity and minimizing added cost. Alternatively, the mSATA volume might be used solely as a cache for acceleration, ala Intel's SRT.
No thanks. One of the more miserable experiences I had last year was trying to get an Accu-Med app for the Palm working under StyleTap on an iPaq unit. Instead of porting the app to something in active development within the last three years, I was dealing with multiple levels of obsolescence.
It's little wonder another of my clients is giving Accu-Med the boot entirely in favor of a web based service living on a server in their main office. Just one update to install instead of touching every single client system. And the software doesn't look like a Win95 shell over a DOS app.
Simple rule for buying consumer electronics: Does it have enough stuff right now to make it worth the money?
If you make a purchase based on a future and largely unknown update and that update doesn't happen or isn't what you were hoping for, you've only yourself to blame.
Existing Windows Phone owners bought a 7.x device, not a 7.x but 8.x will make it so much better device. And 7.x users are getting a significant update in 7.8.
Anyone paying attention knew WP7.x was targeting a low-end smartphone market and will continue to do in developing markets that are more price sensitive and feature phones still dominate. For the near term, WP8 will be for the affluent markets looking for more bells and whistles.
Having some standards well in advance of mainstream gear is a big help in getting that gear to reality. It may be a very long time before we have much of a home market for 8K but that will work very nicely for theatrical presentations while scaling very simply to the 4K and 2K used in homes. It will be a nice change to have one big file that can be pointed at a wide wide variety of playback systems and just work with no noticeable delay.
I mainly want to see 4K catch on fast for monster home screens just to accelerate the availability of better resolutions for computer use. Right now there is a big premium for anything above 2K horizontal and the sooner that changes the better.
Scarcely any of your complaints have any bearing on e-book work. Your product's appearance is going to be more dependent on the device than on Word and what fonts you have installed. You're going to use the fonts the user of the e-reader has set it to use.
Plus, an e-book is like a web page: the display parameters can vary widely and the book has to adjust gracefully. You aren't doing typography. More like making strong suggestions as to how the book should look on the most likely display device and try to make it scale to others. I've already had a lot of case where I threw up my hands and said screw the cell phone readers. They're just going to have to pan about a bit to see this page properly.
For more complex designs, such as a tablet-oriented magazine or 'coffee table book with much greater complexity than a simple paperback of the sort the common e-readers emulate, there are apps like Adobe InDesign. For things like novels, Word is fine for bringing the manuscript up to the stage of creating the EPUB file. I do 90% of the work in Word, load to Atlantis for EPUB output, then final tweaks in Sigil.
Having EPUB output from Word would be great. I currently use Atlantis, a word processor that greatly resembles Word2003, for its save as EPUB function. I'd use Atlantis for everything but it has some huge gaping deficiencies that have gone unmitigated in a decade of broken promises. The big one is a complete lack of support for tables. But then, Kindle doesn't support tables either. This makes a lot of formatting very difficult. In a place where I'd use a table in a layout, I instead have to create a graphic image of a table and insert that.
This is very undesirable because it doesn't scale. But there is no other choice for Kindle work right now. The newer K* format isn't supported by the installed base and will only be usable on
niche products for a few more years.
The Xbox 360 shipped in 2005. Is it still 2010 in the twisted place you live?
Xbox 360 developers were never restricted by the existence of a model without hard drive. It just didn't have much meaning for most games beyond caching and good design takes care of that easily. It isn't like the early days of the PS3 where the new issues introduced by Blu-ray made the hard drive a necessity to compensate.
Nor were developers required to support the Arcade model. Games that required the hard drive, due to very large player data, were released in the first year. Such games are atypical of consoles but Microsoft never ruled them out.
Please point to an example of a game that was impaired due tot he need to run without a hard drive. And make sure it wasn't due to bad work by the developer before you commit to a name.
Agreed. I call bullsh*t on this rumor.
A new platform based on WOA could be of value for those looking for multimedia and light gaming for a low cost of entry. It won't run Xbox 360 games but quite a few could be ported quickly that were done in XNA.
I expect there is a considerable market for whom the Xbox is overkill but they'd like some of what it does for the right price.
$500 iPads now come with a 2048x1536 resolution screen. Somehow, I think things have advanced to the point that a $250 netbook can have a small 1366x768 touchscreen that flips around to lie flat, as convertible-style tablet PCs have done for nearly a decade.
A cheap semi-tablet with a real keyboard and usable if low-end performance could do quite well.
MS is upscaling too. WP8 is the answer for a serious list of WP deficiencies. Going forward, I believe it's going to be two closely related operating systems, kind of like the days when Win9.x and NT were both in use. Unless they can make WP8 superbly modular and able to scale remarkably well, I think it will be aimed at a much higher baseline than the marrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrWP7.x will focus on.
You have got to be kidding. WinXP at 256 MB was torturous. 512 MB was entry level among sane folk and that number stayed good for several years. I remember the first time I built a new machine with 1 GB RAM because it was so cheap and felt like I was just showing off. But things progressed and what we expected of our machines grew at a rapid pace.
There is a big difference in functionality for the iPhone generations. The additional memory isn't there just for show. Those WP apps needing more than 256 mostly have good reason for it. Some could likely be fixed to use less and Microsoft is trying to make developers aware but some things just need more.
When the difference in cost is less than I make in a day for a phone I'm committing to for two years, I'll spend the money. But for a third worlder who is looking at a major investment weighed against his earning for the whole year, giving up some of those heavy duty apps is a very small price to pay.
You gotta be kidding. I carry much more than 100 GB in my cargo pants pocket. I no longer bother with flash drives less than 16 GB. I look forward to when it's all 32 GB or great with USB 3.0 support. I sure as hell wants as much storage as I can get in my laptop if it isn't an ultra-lite model.
The cloud is all very well and good in concept but too much of my work puts me in situations where there is no service available. Often because I'm there to fix it or establish it for the first time.
Do I like carrying an absurd amount of stuff? You bet. I remember working with 5.25" floppies storing a whopping 88 Kilobytes per side. Everything worth mentioning ever produced for that old Atari would now fit in a fraction of a single flash drive in my pocket. I want it all. I'm the kind of guy who put a 16 GB microSD in my first gen Nook within days of getting it.
I like having my stuff and having it go where I go. A hybrid drive fulfills my needs better than an SSD at this point.
Cost of entry is a huge issue in getting uptake of a new product that relies on software sales for its profits. I imagine Amazon has played with the idea of giving them away with an obligation to make a certain minimum number of purchases, like so many book club enticements to get people to join.
Peter Hamilton had a recent novel, 'Misspent Youth,' that was a bit of a clinker but had a excellent subplot regarding the future of creative arts when you can buy a multi-terabyte flash drive to go on your keychain for a few bucks. His projection is that authors will become far more dependent on the good will of their readers as nobody will pay in advance for the material but will rewards those who please them at varying levels.
The trick for Amazon is to keep themselves in the loop and earn rewards by helping connect people to worthy new items to read, view, or listen to.
Magnavox was selling TVs with a feature to avoid this problem twenty years ago. John Cleese pitched them in ads. Since any patents should have expired by now, why doesn't every TV now sold have this?
Does anyone know if this was effective? Or was it discouraged by those with an interest towards forcing people to notice their ads?
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