loire280

The backwards-compatibility with PS2 games was facilitated by the presence of the PS2 CPU and GPU in the PS3 hardware. Newer revisions of the system eliminated first the CPU and then the GPU. I think it's fair to assume this was done for cost reasons -- it's not like they removed the functionality through software update.

If you really want to play PS2 games, buy a used PS2 on Craigslist for a fraction of the cost of a PS3. Heck, you can still get them new.

Reserving a micro instance only means that you get discounted usage hourly usage of that instance. You have to pay usage fees on top of that. By my math, 24 hours * 365 days * $.007 per usage hour (VA datacenter) = $61.32 in usage fees. Don't forget the cost of elastic block storage, too, especially if you're going to save snapshots. A full-time micro instance will cost ~$150/yr.

AWS pricing can be complicated, so make sure you read:

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

Satisfied customers can give their discs to friends and family. In fact, sending discs to existing customers might be more effective, since a disc given to you by someone you trust must have a significantly higher success rate.

There must be more than "release Humble Bundle n+1" in their gameplan. I can think of three long-term strategies:

1. Sell the platform. They have a pretty slick payment/delivery system that could be expanded into selling other digital assets -- ebooks, music, videos. A small number of successful customers could generate profit if they're taking a cut from each sale. Nonprofits might be a good niche to sell to, since they're already associated with the charity angle.

2. Expand types of bundles. As noted in #1, games aren't the only digital asset that would work with this model.

3. The team has put together a nice product, so a few more high-profile bundles might be enough to convince a medium-sized player to make a talent acquisition.

For me, there isn't much difference in friction between a <$5/month subscription and a <$20/year subscription. Both fall below the impulse-buy threshold for an interesting-looking service.

More than $20/year, however, and there has to be a compelling discount or a solid trial before I'll shell out for a whole year.

Webdev celebs like Zeldman and Gruber helped fan the flames, too, by quickly spreading the news over Twitter. I watched this unfold through my Twitter feed; first I heard of it was a retweet from Zeldman.

Oh, cool, this is generated using docco. http://jashkenas.github.com/docco/

I like the way the documentation is written -- two columns, with the code on the right and the documentation for that section of code on the left. Very easy to read, and perfectly suited for a short piece of code like this.

http://kolber.github.com/audiojs/docs/

It's probably worth plugging http://prgmr.com/xen/, run by fellow HN member lsc. If you prepay for the year, a 256MB VPS is only $6.40/mo. I've had good luck with it so far; it's a perfect always-on dev environment.

(I'm just a customer, no affiliation)

Edit: looks like they're not accepting new customers right now. sorry.

Or he needs to implement caching on his Wordpress site.

Almost every day there's a popular blog post that misses a large portion of its audience because the author wasn't caching. You'd think that more authors would plan for a traffic spike from aggregators, since that's sort of the holy grail of blogging.

It's worth having a VPS around as your dev environment. The laptop you're carrying around is extremely likely to get lost, stolen, dropped, or otherwise damaged. A VPS isn't a backup solution, but it's not at constant risk of physical harm.

Work in a screen session and you'll be able to pick up where you last left off --from any machine. Not to mention your VPS is almost certainly faster than your laptop and connected to a bigger pipe than whatever wifi you're borrowing, so downloading a .tar.gz or a git clone will be fast, and compiling won't eat up your battery life.

It's written using NanoBlogger, which generates static HTML files. They're being served from a university server, which means powerful web server with nearly unlimited bandwidth. Hardly anything's static HTML nowadays...

Also it doesn't have dozens of plugins like so many blogs, so it's not hitting Facebook, addthis, last.fm, etc.

Anyone who is offended by a sexist title (this one is an apt historical reference as well) is probably going to have a problem in a startup where employees "[t]ell jokes that would make sailors blush". I bet a fair number of those jokes are sexist, too.

This may be an effective filter for a sexual harassment lawsuit.

A subscription plan with heavy discounts would go a long way to making me feel better about the DRM on books.

Most books are disposable to me: a tech book that is obsolete in a year, novels that are not worth rereading, a popular career or business book I read for context. $10/book is a little too much for something I'm only going to read once.

I agree, as a novel it's frustrating at best. I usually give science fiction a pass on plot and characters if the ideas are good. The science is generally sound, the ideas (especially the terraforming techniques) are very interesting, and the descriptions of the Martian topography help anchor the planet in reality in a way that maps or even the rover images can't.

It does essentially give you number portability.

1. Set up Google Voice to forward your GV # to your cell phone.

2. Install the Google Voice app to get push notifications for SMS messages sent to your GV #.

3. Give out your GV # instead of your cell phone number.

4. Change the forwarding rules at will -- you can even use the same number for multiple phones.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Series is a very detailed trilogy about the colonization of Mars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

The first book, Red Mars, follows the colonization from an initial expedition of 100 scientists to the building of a space elevator and the development of an independent culture.

It's a good mix of hard science, politics, and the interpersonal relationships of the original 100 colonists.

The only technological assumption I thought was a bit of a stretch is independent robotic machinery. They can use these to perform public-works scale construction or filter minerals out of the dust with little human input.

On the other hand, streamlining the software-buying process and making buying software a regular activity is huge for the software market.

I'd bet there's a huge number of computer owners who don't understand or don't care to buy and install software. They get their computer from Dell preloaded with Office 20XX and never (intentionally) install software again. Apple is creating a market of normal people who impulse-buy software.

Maybe the admins could be coasting at some big company for the same salary but a small fraction of the responsibility.

The official release name is Ubuntu Y.MM (10.10 just came out, replacing 10.4 released in April). The... err... fanciful names are development codenames.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DevelopmentCodeNames

The worst news about this phone is the web browser: IE7 based with IE8 technology. IE7's still-buggy, slow rendering; glacial Javascript performance; no support for forward-thinking web technologies ("HTML5", canvas or webGL, CSS3). I hope this doesn't take off, or this will ruin the currently fun, Webkit-based mobile web development for modern smartphones..

Also, from a user's perspective: no Flash (at least initially) OR HTML5 video tag support? It's like Microsoft's totally missed the last few years of mobile phone flamewars.

In my experience, suspend/resume breaks because of device drivers failing to put their components to sleep properly. The biggest culprit is wireless drivers.

It may be that as they improve wireless support by including more drivers and making it easier to use proprietary ones, they're making the suspend/resume problem harder and harder.

I've fixed several problems like this on a per-machine basis, but the fixes are specific to each piece of hardware (read: "this obviously would break something for someone else if included in the distro").

A game with the action shown on the TV and the interface shown on an iPad would be awesome. Imagine the incredible UI ideas that would be possible if you had the entire screen as your canvas.

Reminds me of the Optimus Tactus keyboard concept: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-tactus/

Logistically, it seems extremely unlikely that a new version of the iPad would be introduced in time for the holidays. It's only been 5 months since launch, after all, and they would have already had to be building them to be ready in time for the holidays. Ramping up production in April to catch up with supply, while simultaneously preparing the next model for production just a few months later? Madness!

Is the purpose of the fee to filter out spammers and trolls in the same way that attaching your Facebook credentials creates some amount of social accountability for your actions in the service?

I don't think you can use Instapaper as a model, unless you can be Marco.

His Internet fame originally came about because of his status as the (late) lead developer on Tumblr. Marco frequently writes insightful posts on Apple products that are linked by John Gruber of Daringfireball, who reads his blog attentively. This means his blog posts show up on HN and echo across the entire Apple-focused blogosphere. Apple bloggers are a great audience to have, because they are used to promoting paid products. So Marco has a huge blog readership, and his frequent mentions of his experience with Instapaper in his writing create a huge awareness of the product.

If you're smart enough to get code from github working on your own box, paranoid enough to worry about facebook's control of your data and be interested in an alternative, and savvy enough to get wind of such an early release, I don't think you're going to put anything that sensitive in this network!

I, for one, forget to appreciate the fact that one of the fastest web apps I regularly use is the one that searches the entire* internet.

*kinda

I expect the idea behind that is for the user experience. A non-Apple mail client, for example, won't have the level of integration into the system (send mail from apps/camera/etc., notifications, background process that never quits) that Apple's will, and they seem unwilling to expose that level of functionality to developers. There's plenty of things wrong with that kind of thinking, but it's consistent with Apple's philosophy about core functionality.

It's also beneficial for things like the browser and email client to be consistent, so that services targeting iPhone have an easy testing platform. As a web developer I like knowing that every iPhone is using Safari and renders HTML email using the mail app. I already have enough platforms (4 versions of IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, WinMo) without the mobile platforms becoming fragmented.

The startup is http://www.challengepost.com/ (the linked site uses their software/platform). This isn't the first government initiative to use their platform: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/us_government_taps_chal...

They really should fix the post title, I was confused and had to look it up.