IN 1973 RLDS HISTORIAN PAUL M. EDWARDS identified a fundamental deficiency of Mormon historical studies: “We have not allowed,” says Edwards speaking of Mormon historians, “the revolutionary nature of the movement from which we have sprung to make us revolutionaries.” He continued:

The one thing about which we might all agree concerning Joseph Smith is that he was not the usual sort of person. He did not approach life itself–or his religious commitment–in a usual way. Yet the character of our historical investigation of Joseph Smith and his times has been primarily traditional, unimaginative, and lacking in any effort to find or create an epistemological methodology revolutionary enough to deal with the paradox of our movement. The irony of our position is that many of our methods and interpretations have become so traditional that they can only reinforce the fears of yesterday rather than nurture the seeds of tomorrow’s dreams.

Indeed – the church is based on someone asking some of the most difficult questions theology has to offer “what is real, what is true etc”, but as they say with all things like this – the truth will set you free.

I think the immediate result will be that people will stop using the forums completely and revert back to 3rd party forums. Blizzard would then lose a lot of valuable feedback and in some cases have to use 3rd party forums to deal with a lot of the existing issues that are solved on Blizzard’s own forums (an issue Aion has). The other thing is I think people will lose trust in Blizzard themselves – which as I’ve said before is a far more serious issue.

Favorite quote from the link above:

Syncaine, blogger:

Can this thing launch already? This is like watching a car accident, only instead of seeing the flaming wreck after it happens, you’re like Nicolas Cage in that movie no one saw where he can predict the future, and you actually get to wait for the car wreck to happen right in front of you.

Train wreck indeed. Based on the backlash I’ve seen so far – it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they delayed launching this.

And if you don’t think its so bad – someone has already tested the waters – with hilarious results.

Don’t tell that to these guys: http://www.cushcraftamateur.com/

More likely explanation is that stainless steel is far more rigid.

The video quality itself is quite good – especially for its size. See below:

One of the reasons however I cannot recommend this camera outright is because of the numerous firmware bugs in the camera software and the build quality itself. The build I guess is ok, but it feels like cheap plastic, and the audio quality is so bad I’m not even sure why it bothers recording sound. The firmware bugs are far more annoying.

Bug 1) USB connection is flakey. On more than one PC I switch the camera on while its connected to the PC it connects, disconnects, connects and finally disconnects – and the camera is still on displaying “USB” on the LCD, however you cannot do anything with it (including switch it off) unless you pull the battery out to reset it. The only PC this seems to work on (tested on 3 different machines) is my laptop… In most cases its less painful to just connect the card reader and pop the SD card out of the camera to copy the videos over. Otherwise you’ll find you have to pop the battery out of the camera, turn it back on and try again.

Bug 2) The files it creates are continuous. This by itself isn’t so bad, except most editing apps on Windows will only import files less than 2 gigabytes. In order to edit a 2.5 gig clip (tested on Windows Movie Maker and Adobe Premier CS4) I had to use a tool to split the file into 2 gig chunks.

If there is a better camera out there (I don’t know of any really) – wonderful, if not – buy this.

And make no mistake – sport bikes are really just street legal racing bikes. The article mentions how you could buy a bike in a dealership and make it race worthy and win races in one afternoon – which seems plausible.

Ego does get in the way of recommendation – I’d be hesitant to recommend the GSX 650F I ride now to anyone new at this. It’s a very powerful bike, and without a lot of attention on the road I can see myself getting into trouble. Honestly though – if you were a responsible lad, had done all the safety classes, what genuinely interested in motor biking (not just because you saw some cool video of someone doing tricks and decided it was for you) I would totally recommend a 600-1000cc bike.

Every now and then I hear about some kid locally who bought a bike (or more likely his parents bought a bike) didn’t realize that 1/16th of a inch on the throttle can mean about 4k more RPM ran it off the road and messed himself up. I think someone posted on that same forum that he finds salvage bikes all the time at a store near where he works and that one had 2 miles on it before it was wrecked. That’s a bike that didn’t even make it home from the dealership.

This article I spotted confirms that notion:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/11183_Video_Anssi_Vanjoki_on_the_N97.php

"The N97 has been a tremendous success for us when it comes to how many we have shipped and how much money we did collect, but it has been a tremendous disappointment in terms of the experience quality for the consumers and something we did not anticipate. It happens every now and then in a big company, like Nokia, even if you have the most stringent quality control mechanisms. Something slips, and you notice one thing, [it] leads to another thing, you fix that, and actually you make things worse and so forth… and this has been an unbelievable cycle of things for us that has taken far too long to repair and mitigate.”

I guess thanks for being honest with us. I’ll tell you what’s worse though – losing a customer by losing trust in a brand or a product. There was a time when you could buy a Nokia flagship product and know that it was solid. The UI (like all things Symbia) probably wasn’t perfect, but it never crashed, had lots of cool features and tons of talk time. I probably couldn’t buy another Nokia phone unless every single review knocked it out of the park.

I’m pretty much convinced Derek Smart’s elevator doesn’t go to the top floor. I had my doubts back in the Battle Cruiser 3000 vs. the Internet saga, but these recent rants confirm it.

Which begs the question – how does he keep getting investors to give him money? The more insane the pitch – the more money? I still can’t say his name with out saying “Desktop Commander”:

1. Flash is unstable…

I honestly cannot remember the last time it crashed for me. I guess it might be unstable if your machine has several not up to date versions of the runtime installed.

2. Flash eats the battery alive…

Maybe on the Mac which doesn’t have support for hardware acceleration. When I used to use a Mac as my main machine I never really did understand this – why Apple wouldn’t make the API public for 3rd party apps to use hardware acceleration on the video card. There apps can use it (Safari and the DVD player – but that is about it), but 3rd party apps cannot. In fact if you want to play back video on OSX you have to do so over the Quicktime libraries – which don’t support hardware acceleration. Maybe Apple does this deliberately to cripple Flash.

As a matter of fact – Hulu running in HD mode on my ancient Dell Optiplex 745 uses around 15-20% of the cpu resources – where playing video on my Mac in any program outside of Safari uses over 95% of the cpu, not just in Flash. Sounds like Steve should blame is OS engineers for the cpu time wasted.

No the reality is that Flash is an application platform these days – not at all unlike Java (which has also been barred from the iPhone). If Flash ran on the iPhone it would open up the device to applications that ran on it over the web without app-store approval and revenue. I suspect it’s as simple as that.