Humodour

Can't you order non-locked iPhones in Europe?

Aye, that's quite a worry that is.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the reason isn't.

I feel that at if least half of this thread's posts aren't blind Apple bashing this thread will have been worth it.

Although I do find it ridiculous that Apple still has the prices for the products in Australia set at the 1 AUD = 0.60 USD exchange rate considering that it only went that low for like a month and is now back to the 0.90 cent plus range. I'm totally going to order overseas. Except it looks like the iPhone is only sold with an AT&T plan in America. WTF? Tempted to buy this beast in America once the Aussie dollar goes above parity: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop...mco=MTAyNTQwMTk I'd save about $4000 compared to if I bought it via the Australia Apple store portal.

Apple made comments about releasing a new product before Christmas as well as working on lower-end products (admitting the margins will be smaller but saying they're dedicated to providing cheaper alternatives - read: stealing market share from companies like Microsoft and HP). Mac sales increased 19%. They also sold twice as many copies of their latest operating system (Snow Leopard) as they expected and they couldn't build enough iPhones to meet demand. All this in the middle of America's worst recession in decades (America accounts for 50% of Apple's revenue). http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...To_xhAD9BEJCA80

"You will need an Ubi.com account and you must live in the U.S. to play the game Update: The promotion is now closed and it is no longer possible to play the game for free. If you are interested in further information on this title, visit the Ubi official website at http://www.ubi.com/" Not anymore. And apparently never outside the US. Meh, just buy it for $10 on Good Old Games.

If anybody is wondering, here's Apple's latest quarterly earnings: Apple smashes forecasts, stock hits record. Mac sales grew 17%, iPhone sales only met expectations because they couldn't make enough to meet demand. Jesus.

Hmm, I'm using a Mac Mini so that would make sense.

And yet none of that required breaking fundamental physical laws. This isn't a matter of faith, though. This is a physical limit which requires breaking the speed of light to violate it. That's possibly the biggest thing that will ever happen in physics, if it's even possible. So while I'm perfectly willing to accept that scientists need to dream, to imagine the impossible, ignore limits, etc, I think vesting your faith in the continuation of Moore's law on the assumption of breaking the biggest fundamental law in the universe is misguided. Sometimes humans become very claustrophobic when confronted with the notion that the universe isn't infinite (in both time and length). I think this is a case of such claustrophobia.

Anyway, regarding what the actual speed that this limit represents is, here goes: 10^16 times faster than the fastest computer today, which is roughly 10^15 flops. So that gives about 10^31 flops. It's actually smaller than I thought. It's more than enough to perfectly simulate a human brain, though, including gene regulation and molecule movement. Which is good because I doubt we'll ever actually get as fast this limit.

He's luckier he didn't catch a prion disease. Like that one that makes you die of insomnia, slowly (over a period of years). That's so messed up.

Between people like Einstein and Planck, most of relativity and QM had been laid out and theorised by the start of the 20th century - id est: 100 years ago. What we have today in terms of technology is all advances in engineering, in a manner of speaking. We've not violated any fundamental principles that were laid out in relativity and QM 100 years ago, as magical as our technology might appear.

I think I speak for all of us when I say "**** causality" I follow Einstein's logic on why an object can't be accelerated beyond a certain speed. But that does not mean EFFECTs cannot be delivered at beyond that speed, as gravity demonstrates. e.g. if someone moved the sun the effects would be felt on Earth immediately, even if the change would not be seen for a while. Any computer whose computations are based on the speed of propagation of radiation (including gravitic radiation but not gravitic fields) has a maximum speed as defined by the Planck time. I thought the physorg article mentioned this, but it did not. Even if you could control the manipulation of the distortion of space-time to generate FTL communication (big if), I highly doubt it'd be possible to miniaturise that to Planck lengths (and hence Planck times) without tearing the device apart, making it rather meaningless as a concept. Unless you had some notion of building a gravitic computer the size of a planet or solar system or something. Edit: I distinguish between the speed of gravitic radiation and propagation of gravitic fields (distortions in space-time) because the latter is so hard to compute, given gravity is so weak. Evidence seems to suggest that gravitic fields travel at the speed of light, however. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Rela...grav_speed.html Edit 2: What I'm trying to say is that, along with numbers's observation that quantum teleportation isn't FTL, this really is the limit to computer speeds. Anything that intends to violate this fundamental limit of physics would have to invent FTL communication in the process, and I think that would be news in and of itself!

Even the speed of light in a vacuum isn't instantaneous, Wals. Did you know that if there were a vacuum metastability event which started annihilating this universe and rewriting the laws of physics, it would expand at the speed of light? That is: depending on where in the universe it began, humans might never know it was happening (even if we lived for millions, perhaps billions of years). But for the record, quantum computing isn't a panacea. In some classes of algorithms it's orders of magnitude faster, in some it's no faster at all. In general it's faster than binary computing. Here's a good article on some recent developments in quantum computing algorithm speeds: http://www.physorg.com/news174286879.html That doesn't make things faster per se, just more efficient (assuming the algorithm is parallelisable). Some algorithms are embarrassingly parallelisable. Some are impossible to parallelise. Parallelisation is more of an optimisation problem to be solved at a software level (although obvious it requires modifications at the hardware level such as extra cores and/or PUs).

I thought that claim sounded fishy, so I looked it up: Apple's market cap: 168.46B MS' market cap: 236.13B Market cap is probably the best way to determine "size", wealth, or value of a corporation. So Apple's a big company, no doubt, but MS is significantly bigger. And, if MS needed the cash, they could relatively easily raise it by issuing stock. So I don't think it's really valid to say that Apple is richer - Apple has a lot of cash on hand. It's not like, however, if they then proceeded to buy back a bunch of stock and thus raised their stock price that they would be poorer. I honestly just don't think that Apple really sees the computer as the place that people want to play games. Honestly, seeing sales figures of PC games over the past few years, I don't think that's a bad assumption. Yeah, I did point this out later on in my post by saying Microsoft is worth 50% more than Apple (the gap is actually smaller if you go by market cap but whatever). Microsoft is theoretically richer than Apple because they can raise more, however Microsoft is extremely constrained by its shareholders. The last time they had significant amounts of cash lying around (about 2004) their shareholders forced them to get rid of it and they've been decreasing it ever since. Apple doesn't face such problems from their shareholders because they're currently growing a lot faster than Microsoft and the shareholders are content. I guess that can all change, though. That's a bit of a fail pet theory. PC hasn't declined as a gaming platform, it's actually increased, both in terms of annual profit and market share (spurred on by fresh new markets like Poland and Brazil). I haven't seen any evidence for this. In fact, all the reports I've seen say that PC sales have steadily been in decline for several years, however there is a significant question as to the accuracy of those reports because they do not include digital distribution. I've heard from different people in the industry (both analysts and publishers) that PC gaming is a growth industry. Just the latest person is the CEO of EA: "PC... is actually growing faster than console, but it’s appealing to a bigger and different audience" - EA CEO John Riccitiello But from what I recall, the gaming industry for 2008 grew at double digit rates for all sectors - PC, console, and mobile gaming. It comes back to zero sum games: this ain't one. PC gaming growth is stagnant (but I don't think declining) in developed countries but big in all the emerging markets (and there is a lot of them), while consoles are big in developed markets (but basically ignored in emerging markets). I've also heard (from Valve, IIRC) that Europe in general prefers PC gaming to console gaming (unlike America and I guess Japan). I'll have to try and dig up some of the articles I'm thinking of later today, because I don't want this to just sound like a collection of anecdotes. Edit: Of course, I don't have any special knowledge of how Obsidian's PC sales have performed, and if you do that would largely trump any other data for the purposes of this thread.

Physicists determine the smallest possible communication distance/time and extrapolate how long it will take to get there. If Moore's law continues at its current rate (and it has so far), we'll hit the physical wall in the next 75 years. This isn't the same as the thermodynamic limit or such - those are physical barriers which smart design and engineering have so far been able to overcome. This is instead a sort of absolute, like the speed of light (in fact it's tied intimately to the speed of light). Won't that be a novel concept? Computers that can't go faster... http://www.physorg.com/news174750105.html

Hmm. I'm fairly over BSG but I might try it.

Cheers, so patch my current version to 1.13 and don't bother with Wildfire or Unfinished Business, is that it?

Just out of curiosity, are you overweight? Anyway, if you can't understand the allure of doing something like this, than I'm at a loss to explain it to you. Once again obvious sarcasm completely lost on you. The best bit is how you always feel the need to throw in some random insult, which just totally backfires on yourself. I love it Because sarcasm is very obvious on the Internet, right? Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me at all if you were deadly serious when you posted that. You need only take a look at the likes of Volourn or Visceris to see why. If it was sarcasm as you claim, then I'll take your word for it and what I posted shouldn't bother you in the slightest.

Thanks again guys. Could someone tell me how I should play JA2? I got 1/3 of the way through it once then lost it in a disk reformat. I'm guessing JA2 off GOG is patched to the latest version. Should I just play that or should I buy Wildfire and/or Unfinished Business too? I vaguely remember hearing that they're not real xpacks and not worth it.

I bought this for $10 on Good Old Games. Seems fun so far. Quite advanced graphics. Wasn't expecting that. Bit miffed that it autodetects all my graphics settings as "very low", though. Just to see if it was correct, I set all graphical options to 'very high' and put the resolution to 1680 by 1050. The game ran flawlessly, and at 30fps. So much for autodetect. Just a question, though it's not really urgent: does it matter if I don't use stealth? I started using it, but then I realised I could get away with just blowing people away. Does it get a lot harder later and thus make stealth useful? Or should I perhaps increase the difficulty? Currently at normal but that's second easiest out of like 5 difficulties.

Eh, fair enough, perhaps I was being a bit tetchy.

No. Reading comprehension, Hurlshot! Geez. Deraldin said (in a manner which implies he doesn't really care much either way and is simply explaining the stance of people who support Interplay over Bethesda): "I think it's less "Interplay is awesome" than "Interplay is the lesser of two evils"." Now, when someone says "x is the lesser of two evils", they almost universally don't mean that x is evil. This is because "the lesser of two evils" is an idiom that means "the least bad choice of two bad choices". Deraldin clearly wasn't calling Bethesda evil. Because I was oh so serious when I called Interplay the devil incarnate, right? I mean, you can tell I really, truly believe that Interplay will bring on the apocalypse and rain down fire and brimstone on Earth at the end of days. It couldn't possibly have been a jocular hyperbole? No! Even so, it was Interplay I was calling the devil, not Bethesda! But heck yes I bashed Bethesda. Does that bother you? My point is that you should either read threads more carefully, or not try to paint other peoples's views as extremist by putting words in their mouth when you disagree.

Just out of curiosity, are you overweight? Anyway, if you can't understand the allure of doing something like this, than I'm at a loss to explain it to you.