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More than just stopped supporting the chipset, they dropped out of mobile chipsets entirely!

about 20 hours ago on Speculate Please! Will My Nexus 4 Get Android L?

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And a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

about 20 hours ago on David pierce always contradicts himself ?

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Sweet; I had foolishly erased them myself. Did the geeky thing and wrote a shell script one-liner to download them all, assuming one has wget installed (and what self-respecting geek wouldn’t?):

for i in {01..30}; do wget -c http://cdn0.sbnation.com/podcasts/TIMNP_0${i}.mp3; done

Cheers!

5 days ago on Original "This Is My Next" podcast feed? 1 reply 2 recommends

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Honestly, when they’re cynical and unimpressed it can be equally as entertaining and informative. Sometimes the exasperated response to thoroughly unimpressive or completely misguided products was pure gold on the Vergecast (not to mention the Mobile Show, which made a running joke of almost always ending on a depressing note, and I loved them for it).

I mean honestly, I had great times just listening to Vlad trying to persuade the rest of the Mobile Show about how fantastic vegetables are! I do find tech interesting, sometimes in the details and always in the wider movements and trends, so it’s appreciated when that’s ostensibly the topic of conversation, but much of the Verge staff is witty and interesting enough that a podcast where they play off of eachother is going to be interesting, regardless of the topics.

5 days ago on The Josh-Nilay handover: some belated thoughts 1 reply 3 recommends

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Unfortunately, in my area that doesn’t tend to be the case; from Telus, for example, they’re currently using VDSL2, which requires a cryptographic certificate on the modem. So only hardware provided by them will work. They also don’t actually support any full disabling of the routing functionality on their router+modem combo hardware—-and worse, when people do find way or even just have it configured as well as can ‘legitimately’ be done, they have a bad habit of pushing out firmware that breaks this.

Fiber (or Fibre, as it’s called here in Canada ;) is my big hope, because right now they just provide an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) and then they insist on also providing what they call the “modem”, but it’s really just one of their modem+router boxes which is only doing the router bit, since the ONT is the actual modem equivalent in fibre networking. I just hope they roll out fiber in my area before they find someone to supply them with ONT+router boxes . . .

5 days ago on The future is awesome, unless you're following politics

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Perfect Dark was pretty great, though, and has features that to this day still aren’t in any other console FPSes. First of all, it was very customizable, where you could choose the specific set of weapons and the prevalence thereof, your character look, etc etc. Secondly, it not only had multiplayer bots (which puts it above pretty much any console FPS before or since) but more than just various difficultly levels of bots it had outright personalities, so you could populate a match with suicidal bots, cowardly bots, vengeful bots, bots that would go after whomever was currently leading the scoreboard, etc.

As for Goldeneye, well, I was always far more of a PC FPS player myself, but the ability to use one box and one screen for a four-player game was pretty great as a kid. Never owned an N64 myself, but had many great times at friends’ houses where four of us would get together and play Goldeneye or, later, Perfect Dark. Setting up a 4-player LAN was, at the time, both somewhat impractical and beyond our means (although I think those Goldeneye sessions, especially when we started having more people than controllers, did start us down the path of eventually setting up LAN parties).

6 days ago on Watch Jimmy Fallon kill Pierce Brosnan in N64 'GoldenEye' showdown

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Or maybe Vox Media is going “…wait, they don’t make any money? No podcasts for you!”

6 days ago on Patent troll drops suit against Adam Carolla after discovering podcasts don't make any money

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Funny thing is, Silicon Valley completely fails to solve easy problems, too. It’s depressing how many things my N9 does better than any other smartphone OS out there right now, for example, or how we have a proliferation of proprietary communication standards rather than interoperability (Google having put the final nail in the coffin when they replaced XMPP with their own protocol rather than extending it). We have all the parts to make smart homes, but nothing talks in a universal language that would allow such interactivity. All of my local ISPs won’t even sell me a new internet connection with just a modem, I have to use their own modem+router combo hardware whose routing capabilities are hilariously inferior to my existing router, not to mention pathetically buggy and unstable.

And the list goes on and on and on . . .

6 days ago on The future is awesome, unless you're following politics 2 replies

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The problem is, the Democrats are that moderate party. There’s just no far-left party to counterbalance the far-right that has taken over the Republicans. And the longer the Republicans refuse to compromise on anything and frame the debate as split between them and the Democrats, the further it all shifts to the right.

6 days ago on The future is awesome, unless you're following politics 1 recommend

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Fiction sure seems to, though.

I honestly think that the Democrats have been less successful this past few decades because they’ve failed to adopt the far-right’s tactics. Same goes for moderate Republicans.

6 days ago on The future is awesome, unless you're following politics 2 recommends

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No no, you’ve got it backwards. I’m saying that Top Shelf is Skynet.

6 days ago on The Josh-Nilay handover: some belated thoughts 1 recommend

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And a PG-13 one, at that. To be clear, I really don’t understand why commenters here thought it was such a big deal either.

6 days ago on The Josh-Nilay handover: some belated thoughts

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That’s certainly not armchair, though. I have serious respect for any journalists who actually go to places to report on them.

7 days ago on Ferguson? Yes, I get it in on Vox already. 1 recommend