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  • Joshua Ochs
  • Member Since Oct 15th, 2007
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Recent Comments:

@baze: When it's better, sure they do. This one isn't - the compromises they chose make this a terrible laptop. 2 hours is simply unforgivable when just about ANY other model has 5 hours plus. And laptops are kind of hard to use when they're searing your lap and wrists.
Wait a minute - let's look at this for a second...

1.6GHz
No optical
2 hour battery life
Integrated toaster

Why do people BUY these things? Who cares if it's light-ish and thin, if the battery is dying instantly? An HD screen, but no way of playing a Blu-Ray? And so hot you have to put it on a desk? And a Core i7... at a measly 1.6Ghz? WTF?

So many terrible compromises, you might as well just get a desktop that would blow it out of the water.

Or compare the aforementioned MacBook Pro 15". Better compromises for a laptop - the screen has a lower resolution, and "only" 4GB of memory. But a usable battery (7 hours - which multiple reviews have confirmed - only the previous generation got 4), a much faster processor (2.5Ghz Penryn), optical drive of course (but no Blu-Ray). And it won't burn your lap or wrists.

You know - a usable laptop.
Actually, speaking as someone working in technology - and networking and datacenter design specifically - yes, these things can be avoided and mitigated. They are not a given, just like crashing software is not a given. Given the amount of money Blizzard takes in, they definitely have extra cash to add more server capacity. Worst case is it goes unnoticed.
When you see those three lanes overwhelmed every morning and evening, then yes, you add more lanes. Just because rush hour is a small fraction of the day doesn't mean it's not critically important. Blizzard just built a new interface explicitly designed to get more people to run instances more frequently, and did seemingly nothing to improve capacity.

I'm a network/datacenter architect. You plan for these things and have excess capacity. I was actually quite surprised than when all of those thousands of players were dumped back into Northrend that the servers hosting Northrend for some realms didn't crash from *that* load.
Rather a MacBook Pro, but this would play WoW just as well.
A few years? You do realize that iPhone app development is only 18 months old (since June 2008), and there are over 100,000 apps. Meanwhile, Android is a year old and there... aren't.
I love it when people rant about the conformity and "sheeple" nature of the iPhone, when all they can point to is "I'm not them". Reminds me of Steve Martin's "non-conformist pledge"...

It's been 8 years now and they're still irrationally hating. People use the iPhone (and iPod before it) because it's a better product. It's time to get over it. Android will provide some much needed competition, but it's not game changer, sorry.
From the article above:
Fact 1: The iPhone has 7 times the marketshare as Android.
Fact 2: Sales on the iPhone of their products are 400 times Android.

That means, phone for phone, the iPhone results in over 50 TIMES as many sales as an Android phone. I can see why that would give developers pause.

It probably doesn't help that all of the different models with significantly differing capabilities, hardware, software, and even firmware make it much more difficult to treat the Android as a single platform. It likely increases testing and support costs, and prevents developers from using the best features on top-end phones since they may not exist on others. Sure, there are some differences on the iPhone, but they're vanishingly small compared to the fractured nature of the Android market.
I had no problem creating the virtual machine in VMware Fusion 2.0, but networking support failed, and there's no offline login support. So I got as far as a very plain login screen (which disturbingly had no mouse support and non-standard text entry - tab and arrows didn't work as expected), and no farther. I'll wait until we get more official sources and builds that reflect what was demo'ed.
Let the hive mind of Engadget get that for you.
"I am trying to configure out a really dumbed down and intuitive PC for my grandmother. She recently had a stroke and while she is under my care I would like to repurpose a laptop for her to surf and email her children. Anyone have any experience with what input devices and UI's are really understandable for the over 80 crowd?"
 

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