@7 -- Pocket PCs have tried the "emulated screen buttons" approach for years. It just doesn't work precisely or reliably.

I think we'll see some wonderful games on the iPhone, but will it take on the DS or PSP for the portable gaming crown? I don't think so.

Lack of traditional controls really hurt the iPhone as a real contender, I don't care what the Apple fans say. They point to the Wii as a device that transcends traditional controls, but it's not like Nintendo eschewed putting buttons and directional pads on the Wii. You are very limited to what you can do on an iPhone: it's a fantastic device, but accelerometers and screen pinching will only get you so far.

For me, the main advantage of a Pocket PC is the backlight: I love reading in bed in the dark. I've picked up the e-ink devices, and while I'll probably get one at some point, I really will miss the Pocket PC as a way to do that. I've never found reading an eBook on a Pocket PC hard either, though admittedly, I turn the font size way up (although studies show that the less words there are per page, the better your retention rate is, so maybe that's not a bad thing)

Stratosfyr, the keys are actually a bit bigger than the EEE's, I've read. Do you have any reason to think the boot time on the Linux flavor would be slow?

Mappq, christ, thanks for spotting that. Yeesh! What ugly phrasing. The remnants of a revision, no doubt.

Bardfin, absolutely agreed. But usually they don't lie up to 6 hours. They say 3-4 when they mean 1.5-2. Optimistically, I'm hoping this means we'll get 4 from a Wind.

Ha! I love it. They may as well have just said magic.

That's a fair point, and in truth, I doubt I would use Kindle's download anywhere abilities much. But I am not so fervently anti-DRM that I wouldn't be willing to make the occasional impulse buy on one.

James: genius!

Ha. Yes. I don't know why I thought it had a "z" in it. Maybe because they're so EXTREME!

No, it marks pretty much the center of your forehead. Which, admittedly, wouldn't make it a very good clock: he'd probably really want to punch it through his nose.

We have this server for the next month, and we'll probably schedule specific times for weekend games for all that time.

Luc: yes... outrageously prejudiced against my own continent and citizenship.

Wurp, most commenters never come out of the wood work unless they are saying "Actually..." It's just a rule of blogging. This is fine: we're glad to hear from people regardless, and fair's fair -- I fucked up. Thanks for that sweet response, though!

Who isn't? Those mutton chops! What a dreamboat!

Wurp, you're right, not sure how I made the mistake. And I wasn't actually all that happy with the "less than" phrasing myself. I'll let it all stand though, as a testament to my idiocy. Like you guys needed another!

Sorry! It's certainly never been my attention to give our readers THE VAPORS!

Anonymous, that's an awesome point which I somehow completely overlooked: if they can master this tech, it's great for the handicapped. And for the arthritic gamer, even waggling the forehead is better than not playing at all. I'll try to keep that in mind, although I wish these companies would just market these devices as such.

Chipslug:

"John and Rob's responses were limp, defensive and ill-conceived"

What a bizarre little comment. I haven't defended myself. The only time I commented was to point out that my MOTHER had just defended me, just to point out she might be biased. There's nothing to defend myself against: responses are split down the middle between people who may disagree but see where I'm coming from, and those simply eager to evacuate their bladders by being "offended." The latter sort of people are a dime a dozen. This is hardly a contentious post for reasonable people: "Apple's marketing is insufferably hip and its reps sometimes act like jerks." And I said that as an Apple FAN. It's not like I just denied the Holocaust or something.

You guys who want BBG to have the same tone as BB are going to be perpetually disappointed, so you may as well make your exit now, because things are only going to get more different. This is our warm-up month. No one was unaware of my style, or Joel's style, or Rob's style when we were hired: it was why we were hired. Aping the same tone, being the same kind of site as Boing Boing was not what we were hired to do, nor is BBG meant to reach out to the exact same readers. It is a different site entirely, and you can either accept that, or move on. You've chosen to move on. Sorry to see you go, but we're not losing any sleep over it.

Anonymous is a pretty clear astroturfer. Anyway, I link the review where Engadget states it mostly seems to measure forehead contortion, not brainwaves. That's hardly a "lie..." I'm citing someone with direct experience with the product.

DAD?!?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? HAVE YOU BEEN DRINKING AGAIN?

Just to be fully open: JMudder is my saintly, aged mother, so she may well have a better opinion of me than the average Apple store employee who encounters me standing on top of their display desks urinating on a MacBook Air while pumping my fist in the air and screaming "ATTICA!"

Honestly, I like whore red.

We're a different site, Qozmiq. We all try not to dupe each other as sort of a vague rule of thumb (although we both inevitably do, when we see fit), but it's not like a post on one site is exclusive to it.

Maybe if you're a douche you spell it "LEGO" but I'm not in the habit of letting PR departments dictate the rules of capitalization in the English language.

Audaxaxon:

"Many devices don't include file/directory navigation, or make it less convenient. That design choice influences the likelihood of a device being used in some particular way."

What way is that? I hear many people bemoaning this feature's absence on iPod. I simply don't grok: across the board, these are people who simply don't have their MP3 tags filled in correctly. I'm not being a dick, I'd just like to know why people care about this feature so much.

"Could this "friend" be a journalistic . . . ahh . . . composite? Based on the friend of a friend who knew a deaf girl and a character on a prime time soap? Just asking."

No.

...

I'M A'STAYIN!

Astute observation. Yet I'd rather be the writer who accidentally muffed a single definite article, then corrected it, then the sort of guy for whom the question of whether or not meconium "spurts" can only be responded to with a bladder-evacuating temper tantrum. But keep raging against the machine, champ.

That really wasn't what I was getting at.

Jitrobug:

"Along with my ubuntu computer at work, I have an 800mhz g4 imac - it's a cute little box, and I could see being an osx user someday.... except that I love having somebody else manage software packages and hate having to manually run installers and do all of that fiddly clicking."

You don't have to do any of that in OS X to install apps. You download a DMG file, double click it, drag it to your applications folder, and everything's automatically installed. If you want to uninstall, you just delete the app and it removes everything. Simple.

Joel, so by your logic, any fiction that features alien races more advanced than our own is retro-futurism, even if it takes place in the past or contemporary times. War of the Worlds? Retro-futurism. Independence Day? Retro-futurism. Thundercats? Retro-futurism.

You're just arguing this to be a dick. You totally know you're wrong. :)

No, I don't really listen to many songs as songs. I mean, I do... there are some albums that just aren't interesting to listen through, except for one three minute snatch of genius. But for the most part, I make a conscious effort to listen to full albums, without shuffling them. I may cycle back to re-listen to a specific song, but I usually start at track 1 and end at track whatever. I certainly don't BUY individual songs: I'll only ever purchase music by album. And, as Mark points out so well, there are enough honest-to-god albums to reward the approach. But clearly, iTunes and the like are eventually going to kill it off.

Joel, you make like it is absurd to point out that a science-fiction film that says, in the first five seconds, that it takes place in the distant past can not be a movie that is supposed to take place in the future, which is the absolute pre-requisite of retro-futurism.

I did. I corrected. Thanks!

It's there, it is just more subtle!

Anonymous, I live in Europe. Over here, phones don't get crazy proprietary UIs based upon which carrier you're on.

"I'm still waiting for a phone that I can, y'know, make a fucking phone call on. They pack so many "value-added" features, that they completely disregard the one functional thing that it was originally designed to do."

I'm no expert, but I hear you can place phone calls on numerous mobile phones!

And for the sake of that very same family-friendliness, I have changed the joke to be both more obtuse and more pretentious.

I'd love to enlighten you, but this is a family blog, Jake!

OP, there are days where I will treat the subject matter that comes through more seriously than others. A day in which I feel more strongly about certain subjects (like blind people accessing the internet, or disposable DVDs, or what have you) doesn't mean I've turned over a new leaf thanks to your irrefutable criticism. It simply means that when I am talking about things I have serious things to say about, I'll say them seriously; when I am talking about things I feel can be treated lightly, I will treat them lightly.

Ultimately, as a writer, the best I can do is handle the day's subjects in the way that is most interesting for me to write, in the hopes that that way will also be the most interesting for people to read. What that means for you guys is, over time, an ultimately equal mixture of serious commentary, profane rambling and bizarre anecdotes, from all of us. But trying to write in a far different format from current gadget blogs is the new M.O. of BBG: we want to be a gadget blog that even people who don't like gadget blogs want to read. You may not like that format, but that's the way it's going to be.

Great game, guys! I'm particularly amazed at the guy who came up with the Rockbiter porn! I'll post a log this weekend!

Dean, that's why I said his legs are TWICE the length of his torso. He is definitely not "Mr. Normal"

Qozmiq: I'm in Berlin, and I've seen deposits as high as 25 cents, I'm pretty sure. Not that I know, honestly: I tend to just toss them in the "glass" bin without actually returning them.

Points to Matt for grokking the homage! We're all HUGE OMM fans here.

You guys are right, much to my discredit. I just assumed any Asians with such delight in the Mario Bros. theme simply HAD to be Japanese. I'll fix!

Thanks, D, but honestly, even if it was a criticism, that's well within your right and I wouldn't hold it against you.

But man, I want to hear more about this Grumpy Old Man Monthly O.P. says is hiring. As a freelancer, I could always use another outlet to try to sell my particular brand of literary stylings to. It never even occurred to me that angry geriatrics would dig reading a story about how I'd use an exo-skeleton to beat up people until their limbic system was disengorged. Thanks for the tip, OP! I'll send them my portfolio.

And OP, lest you think I'm totally ignoring your points, "I read gadget blogs for the blind cut-and-pasting of technical specifications, not for [voice dripping with contempt] words and vocabulary" is certainly food for thought. I think we've all taken it on board. Thanks!

I saw my first Asus EEE the other day. It is cute as a bug. I really WOULD like one as a portable writing machine that I could take everywhere without thinking, a paperback-sized laptop I never have to sweat about dropping or losing (as I do my MBP). And the keyboard seems absolutely fine for the purpose. But I know, just KNOW that someone is going to come out with an Atom Asus EEE killer in the next few months... possibly even Asus themselves. Now's not the time to be buying. Every laptop manufacturer is going to want in on this game.

"Many people don't realize that this is exactly what causes a lot of old newsreels and silent footage to have that speeded up look: it was filmed at 16 fps. The equipment used to show it now usually can't do 16, so it plays at 24 fps, and is thus sped up -- people walking funny, waving their arms erratically, and so on. Quite funny, and no, that's not how people would have seen it back in the day."

Additionally, most projectors up until the sound era weren't motorized, they were hand-cranked. It was the need to sync sound with film that made them standardize.

The Pre-Cog was cha0tic!

Murray, presumably these bots control a number of hijacked machines on different IPs? That's what I got from the article, at any rate.

Small, I'm on 3.71-M33-4. Honestly, I haven't had a single problem, but I know your pain: the official PSP hacking community seems to be made entirely up of teenage l337-speak clods able to leap intuitively from one illiterate sentence of nebulous instruction to another.

Luckily, the guy at StyleMo has put together a pretty great tutorial. I've followed all of his tutorials and they've always been clear, concise and absolutely error free.

To get up to the latest version of Dark-Alex's Custom Firmware, first you need to bring your CFW up to 3.52 M33-4. Here's the tutorial on how to do that on any pre-3.52 custom firmware:

http://www.stylemo.com/2007/09/14/how-to-install-352-m33-4-on-your-psp/

Once that's done, follow the rest of his tutorials to upgrade to the latest version. Just make sure to always follow in order, ie: you can't jump to 3.90 from 3.52.

Drop me a line if there's any problems, I'll try to help! And God of War (and Jeanne D'Arc) are worth the effort, trust me.

Yeah, the principal's reaction is just typical ignorant anti-drug hysteria, but what makes it even more perplexing is they specifically make markers that smell like fruit and stuff. They're totally harmless.

Xeni's calling us fatties, I think. We can't all be lithe, frosted-hair sylphs, Xeni!

Closetpacifist, you're not the only one: root beer is one of those specifically American drinks that makes it pretty much entirely unavailable in the rest of the world, but it is -- by far -- my favorite soda. I drink liters of the stuff when I go home.

Cream Soda, on the other hand... blecch.

Actually, Jenn, I'm just saying that for MY nose hairs, a gas-powered chainsaw is the tool of minimum requirement. Flamethrowers also work, but exacerbate my hayfever.

I figured it must have been, Semiotix, but its nice to have it confirmed. I assume -- as usual -- Matheson did it best, though.

Well, I have an obligation to the Ectomites!

You've got to twist it for it to work? That dog won't hunt. These engorged tentacles slithering out of my nasal cavities aren't exactly the gossamer nasal lanugo of a neonate, you know.

The "worlds destroyed before your very eyes!" thing is curious. It seems to be referring to the sci-fi trope that if you shrink down small enough, sub-atomic particles become planets, covered in life forms. But I'm not sure if that idea was really played around with much before Richard Matheson wrote "The Incredible Shrinking Man" in the 50s.

In case anyone is wondering, I'm the kid in the yellow spacesuit with the face melted by chemical burns.

But it was the best line!