Activity for July 31

Comment - Craig Mundie: The future of the PC is 'a room'
(Jul 30, 2009 - 5:41 PM)

Heh, ok, it is probably excessive for a home user, but i can see multiple apps in both corporate and government/military use. The main problem i can see is that i suspect it would be hideously expensive to retrofit in.

Though i can also see it being used in a commercial setting for immersive gaming without having to wear VR goggles that were cheesy when they were new. Hell, the biggest hurdle i can see to this is the display surfaces. Maybe as OLED technology matures, especially if it can be combined with reflective displays. Then it is a matter of making sure that the main hardware is upgradeable,and the display hardware is repairable in small enough units.

Any indication that MS was thinking in these lines? or was this "House of the FUTURE!" wankery?

S.A.R.A.H.'s voice is sultry? The voice is the same actor who plays Doug Fargo.
Comment - VoloMedia claims it holds patent on podcasting, drawing howls of protest
(Jul 30, 2009 - 2:47 PM)

Did VoloMedia used to be known as SCO?

Does the vetting process at the US Ptent office involve anyone who even knows what a computer looks like?

I don't care much for Apple, but i really hope that they have enough sense to tell these schmucks to go screw.
Comment - Gun control laws get applied to pre-paid phones
(Jul 17, 2009 - 3:14 PM)

And i am sure that cell phone registration will work just as well as it does for guns too.

The law abiding will be tracked, the bad guys will use stolen phones, cloned phones, and legit phones obtained using stolen identities.

Or at the absolute most difficulty for the bad intentioned, they may have to switch to using VOIP applications through onion routers.
Comment - What's Now: Ballmer on Chrome, Google in Labs, and a Twitter novel
(Jul 15, 2009 - 11:45 AM)

An Kindle in every backpack? Amazon would love that. Me, i am not so sanguine. Tying a huge piece of the learning infrastructure to one vnedor for hardware and the same vendor for content strikes me a a very freaking bad idea.

Help switch kids over to electronic textbooks, sure, i like that, but use a more open archetecture that will work with multiple content vendors, and that is open enough that kids and parents can also use their own hardware.

Netbooks would be good for this sort of thing, so would something like the OLPC XO, hell give it a larger keyboard and better battery and storage and the and the XO might be almost perfect.

And i really hope that if this takes off in any form they have the brains to start off in the most cash strapped school districts first.
Comment - Solid Oak Software and the Chinese deserve each other
(Jun 18, 2009 - 10:46 AM)

Heh, Brit may well be a technophile, in the most inclusive. least useful and depressingly increasingly common sense of the word, anyone who isn't actively technophobic.

The older and more useful definition, someone who love technology enough to seek to grok it in fullness, is becoming less and less common, in much the same way the the phrase "computer geek" is becoming more and more diluted.