DISQUS

I don't think he's referring to network congestion, since Cingular all kids of phones on their networks, many of which can run custom apps (like Dan said).

No, this is just Steve spreading more FUD. Either he actually believes what he's saying is true and therefore has a horrible handle on technology (at least for someone in his position), or he knows he's outright lying to people and hoping they believe him.

Myth can capture HD as long as it gets it from somewhere; so yes, if you wanted to record HD yourself you would need an HD tuner and receiver still.

However, you and I (and everyone else) know there are plenty of other options for getting most HD shows you'd want onto your MythBox, often within an hour or so of when they air live.

Yeah, I guess you would need quite a bit more storage space if you're going to watch a lot of video. I've never been into portable video (at least in an iPod size device) so that wouldn't be a big deal for me.

The installing your own apps thing would be a huge deal for me, though. IMHO, "the best internet tablet" must allow you to install other apps on it, aside from just a web browser (ssh, VPN client, etc.)

Lots of laptops (specifically the higher end ones you mentioned above) have graphics cards that are good enough to handle most of the games that are out. Paired with an external monitor, I don't see why they wouldn't be just as good as desktop machines.

If I were into gaming, I doubt I'd buy a whole separate computer when a laptop suits all my other needs, I'd be much more likely to just get a laptop that could handle it.

I guess the main advantage of desktop machines for gamers is that they're easier to upgrade, since games usually push the limits of the hardware and any laptop you buy now may not be able to play next years games as well as an upgraded desktop could. But, as far as it relates to this discussion, I don't think that makes much difference since you'd have that problem regardless of whether the laptop is a PC or a Mac.

Probably people with laptops that don't want to buy two computers.

I wasn't going to comment on this one, but I though I should just to let you know that your permalinks for this post are screwed up, but the others seem fine.

The links in the comments feed (as well as your "Activity" section) start with http://dancameron.org//845 instead of http://dancameron.org/general/845

Christian just finished the game.

Vindication is sweet.

As far as I know, it's only Linux as the host OS for the 3.0 version.

Yeah, I'm going to start using roman numerals and see if it catches on.

I'm just waiting for the Wii network exploit that lets you steal other people's points if you know their Wii code, now that you've published yours.

After looking more closely at the graph (and adding a vertical line @ 42" for clarity), it looks to me like 42" intersects with 1080 (the red line) at about 6 feet, and is in "becoming noticeable" territory at about 7.5.

Assuming the data in that article is correct, it doesn't seem that the human eye (even if you did have really good vision) is capable of perceiving those differences in resolution at 9 or ten feet, so it isn't really a matter of preference as far as that goes.

That being said, I'm sure there are probably lots of other differences in color, saturation, etc. between different content sources, and I would propose that perhaps the varying content you are comparing is of differing quality in those areas as well (not just resolution). In other words, the Prison Break content may "look better" than Lost for reasons other than just resolution.

In any event, you and Jason definitely know a lot more than I do about all that HD stuff. I do know that for me, if I ever do eventually want to get an HD TV, I will definitely pay a lot of attention to those other aspects of picture quality and clarity (such as the ones you mentioned). According to this article, I won't pay much attention to resolution, since I plan to do most of my viewing from around 10 feet away, and I'd probably even go less than 42" if possible.

Oh, yeah. I think you told me about that, actually. I forgot.

Isn't the oldest post always going to be the same exact post, or are you saying that out of the X number of posts currently visible on the page, keep moving the one currently on the bottom to the top, so it cycles through?

It's not the brilliant yet good intentioned employees who currently work at Google that you have to worry about, so much as the fact that that kind of data is all stored in one place, which makes it a prime target for people who aren't as interested in preserving your privacy.

These could be "bad apple" employees or people not officially / legitimately affiliated with Google at all who find some way to access the information, at any point in the present OR in the future. Google might be a great company today (by most accounts they are), but there's no guarantee what they'll be like in the next ten years.

Not unless you're already e-mailing and/or forwarding them to (or through) your gmail account.

Yeah, now you can give Google access not only to all your conversations, but your passwords to other accounts as well!

full site index, I'd suggest just directing your searches to Google, and limiting the results to only those found on your site. That's what I do for my blog. They just started a new service where you can further customize (style, etc) this kind of thing to make it appear more integrated into your site.

The nice part about doing that is that Google will already index everything in your site for you, regardless of whether the content came from a post, a comment, or a plugin.

The only downside would be the delay in accurate results depending on how often Google crawls your blog and updates its indexes, but I don't see any other way of truly getting everything, unless you wrote your own type of "spider" component that would maintain your own index of your site on a more frequent basis than Google does and then have a plugin go against that.

Is this GWB trying to start more WMD rumors?

Nah. Grahpics? Sure, technically, but most people don't care. Gameplay? Again, for most people (kids and adults alike who aren't interested in games like Gears of War and Halo) I don't see any advantage with the X-Box.

Granted, a lot of the Wii games are simple, but for many people that's what makes a fun game. Wii sports comes with an assortment of very simple sports games. The games themselves would be mediocre if not for the revolutionary new control style, which WILL draw in a lot of people to this system, just from what I've seen personally and heard so far.

Relatively few people in our society are obsessed with gaming enough to dedicate hours of time into a game with a large story behind it and lots of detailed strategy and tactics to learn. I know there are a lot of hard-core gamers, but I'm talking about in the context of the larger general population, they are still few.

If a system can reach into a bigger cut of that general population, they will easily win this contest, and from what I've seen and experienced, the Wii is the perfect candidate for that.

Cool, I will have to check that out.

On a related (but seriously depressing) note, I just saw this on youtube today.

Good point, I didn't think about that, but it might be difficult to find some of the more obscure characters, unless I guess you have a page somewhere that just has every character already out there, copy/paste ready.

But copy/paste from what? If you aren't typing in any passwords on that system you would have to have them in an unencrypted file on a portable drive (USB or whatever). Then you have even bigger problems to worry about than keyloggers.

There are apps out there (similar to keyloggers but even easier to write and distribute) that will copy the contents of any files on such a portable drive and store them (or send them over the network) for later perusal. There are also ones that will dump the contents of the clipboard any time something new is added. That, especially in combination with a keylogger, would (I think) render the copy/paste technique insecure.

Even the technique described here has its issues. They basically recommend switching the focus to something else and typing random gibberish characters in between typing your password, and going back and forth. I think they need to test this on more keyloggers, though, because I've personally seen ones that (in addition to recording raw text) will record any time you switch focus to any other element on the screen, and identify it by name (which every text box, form field, etc. will have, as far as the OS is concerned).

Basically, the summary is that there is almost no good way to be safe on a system you don't own. I have to get the kids breakfast right now, but I'll come back later and write my proposal on a system which I think would work very well for public access like this. I'll either comment here or post it on my blog and trackback.

First - Dave, re: eBay I wouldn't know much, since I've never personally sold anything on eBay. Martha has sold a lot and has an excellent rating, and I'm pretty sure Dan has sold quite a lot of tech stuff there, so he'd probably be the best one to answer. One thing I can tell you is that there is an eBay France site (ebay.fr), but I don't know whether it's legit and it's all in French anyway so it's not much use to me. I'd recommend just going with the standard eBay.com - the audience is almost guaranteed to be orders of magnitude larger (and still includes international visitors) which means that you'd probably get a better price on whatever you're selling.

As for the assesment of the short term future (Wii taking the lead and then PS3 overtaking them after a year or so), I've said it before and I'll say it again - I think it all depends on the games; specifically whether they're fun or not, not the graphics quality, etc. A secondary factor could be living room media integration stuff (like the XBox does).

As for HD and/or next gen DVD (blue ray, etc), I don't think the general public could care less about either. A very small percentage of the public even has a TV capable of viewing HD content (whether it's from a game or a DVD). Maybe people who are more into TV than I am would disagree, but HD is still too expensive for my tastes. Sure it's nice, but not worth the money in my book.

I don't think I talked about conditional comments in that original discussion. It might have been before I was aware of them. I do think it's OK to use this technique, since it's an intended feature that is guaranteed not to break in other standards compliant browsers, and it's forwards compatible, meaning you can write a workaround for IE 6 and below that won't get jacked up when people start using IE7.

You could always do browser detection (at least of this nature - what version of IE they're running) at the server side without requiring any javascript, but the technique I'm talking about is conditional comments.

As described in that link, it's a mechanism (officially supported by IE as opposed to hacks) which allows you to add stuff to the page inside specially formatted HTML comments, so that all other browsers will ignore it and IE will pick it up. You can use this to reliably put script or CSS (or links to script/CSS files) that will only ever be read by the version of Internet Explorer that you're targeting.

The great thing is that it doesn't require anything special (javascript or non-standard / "hacked" CSS), and it is automatically ignored by all other browsers.