There's a learning curve for developers to understand and properly use this new interface. The first FPS that used the Wiimote (Red Steel) only sorta worked, but with the Metroid game, the experience was much better. There was a rush at first to try and shove motion controls into everything, but I think that was more just because it was new and trendy and a bullet point on the back of your game box. Now that motion control novelty has started to wear off, hopefully developers won't feel that they need to force it into their games in order to get people to notice.
But anyways, the ratio of really good games to crap games has always been in the neighborhood of 50:1, particularly for whichever system is dominating the market at the time. Shovelware will always exist, and in that sense it doesn't matter whether your interface uses buttons, motion control, or sexbots.
I'm pretty sure I saw a video or podcast or something where they talked about this. They could make it work, but as you suggested, it was a big performance hit and so it got cut.
While I'm hoping (and maybe even expecting) that Valve will offer some sort of discount to people who already own L4D, I think it's interesting to note that in general, a good video game is pretty damn cheap compared to the amount of entertainment that it can provide. If you spend 50 bucks on a game and get 25 hours of decent playtime out of it, then that works out to $2/hour. That compares very favorably to movies, concerts, sporting events, and even books (depending on how fast you read). And that's not to mention how quickly the prices of games tend to drop.
In one sense, Valve has almost shot themselves in the foot with TF2, by creating a situation where some of their bigger fans almost demand hundreds of hours worth of playtime out of a game, and now years of free new content releases. It's interesting to see how quickly people get accustomed to freebies and then complain when the flow of goodies gets turned down.
I think it depends on the context of the suggestion. If you say that here's a relatively easy first step towards sustainability, I'd say good for you, let's go for it. On the other hand, if you say, here's a quick easy fix to our global warming problems, so stop worrying about coal plants, then you're just going to piss me off. Not only are you not solving the problems, but you're treating me like a little kid that you think doesn't know any better.
No I completely understand. You didn't even read what I wrote. Of course people end up paying all the taxes in the end, because what's a business except a bunch of people working together? That's not in doubt, so what's your point?
Why is paying taxes on your purchases so much worse than having a bigger deduct from your paycheck? I'd argue that it's not. In fact, I argue that it's better. The production of goods and services requires extensive use of the sorts of infrastructure that taxes pay for. That infrastructure is going to be built, taxes are going to pay for it, and yes somewhere down the line those taxes are going to come out of my pocket. But if the cost of those taxes are passed through in the price of the goods/services, then they price tag that I see more accurately reflects the true cost of that item. That allows me to make a more informed decision about my purchase. In a properly set up system, a product that made more extensive or even excessive use of our shared infrastructure would have a higher cost, and if that bothered me, the price could help me decide not to make that purchase. And since competition tends to drive costs down, that factor would push producers to utilize the infrastructure the least amount possible, because it'd make their products more appealing via lower costs.
And your healthcare argument is just silly. I don't want free health care, I want universal healthcare.
If you eliminate business taxes, then customers are still going to pay those taxes, the government is going to get that money somehow. It's just that instead of paying through the purchases of goods and services, we'd get taxed directly to make up the difference.
I'd prefer that the businesses pay for their share of the nation's infrastructure via taxes. Sure, they're going to pass that cost along to me in their prices, but then when I'm spending money, I'm making a more informed decision, because what I'm being charged better reflects the true cost of the production of those goods/services.
A billion years is a bit extreme, and is such a long period of time as to be mostly meaningless in the day-to-day lives of your average person. But that being said, I personally have plenty of digital photos and such that I'd like to be able to save for at least the next 40 years or so, and right now I don't have any financially reasonable way of doing that with any confidence.
Whether this nanotech memory is good for a billion years or only a million years isn't all that important to me, other than the fact that both of those are well past the 40 years I'm looking for. If the price can be reasonable and the media doesn't require a specialized storage environment, then they should have a problem finding a market.
I think the obvious conclusion is that you have a second brain, most likely hidden amongst the tangle of intestines down in your gut. Not really a big deal, except that when you ride a bike, you should wear at least two helmets.
I'm assuming you meant to say "daydreaming about what I am working on at that moment", and if that's the case, I'd argue that that's not daydreaming, it's thinking about your task.
Whether or not you're daydreaming has less to do with how much brain activity you've got going on, and more to do with whatever it is that that activity is revolving around.
No, I agree with you. But the fact that you can't steer it in "useful" directions doesn't mean that your brain isn't working. It's just that it's busy solving problems that only exist because it made them up (it's trying to make sense of the wandering thoughts you're experiencing), instead of working on some actual task that's sitting on your desk.
Some people have argued that the brain uses dreams to abstractly work through real problems that you've experienced awake (and we certainly do sometimes have dreams that reflect our real lives), but I don't know much about that.
I'd say it depends on the task. If it's an interesting task that requires some serious thought, sure you can "get in the zone" and shut out the world and concentrate on what you're doing. But that's a different case than some menial task that you've done a million times, where you're basically on autopilot, working almost on muscle memory.
But being "in the zone" is different from "zoning out" and letting your mind wander. They both share a symptom (shutting out your surroundings), but they're entirely different states of mind.
Daydreaming is basically shutting off (or at least ignoring) the bulk of the sensory inputs into your brain, and letting your imagination run the show for a period of time. Is it really surprising that having to create an ongoing reality that replaces a bunch of those ignored sensory inputs requires the brain to do some serious work? Especially when compared to performing a routine task that you've already done hundreds of times?
Laziness isn't really connected in any meaningful way to how hard your brain is working. I could give my brain a pretty serious workout by staying home, sitting on the couch, and doing crossword puzzles until next thursday, but that's still a pretty lazy way to spend a week.
Unfortunately, my boss isn't impressed by general problem solving as much as he's impressed by the solving of the specific problems that he's paying me to figure out.
The "media industry" is a pretty broad term, and might not even be that useful of a grouping for this discussion, but either way I'm not sure that big budget movies are the best example. While it's certainly true that the costs of giant blockbusters has been increasing pretty steadily, there's whole sections of the media industry, and even the movie industry specifically, where costs have come down a lot, or at least stayed about the same.
It doesn't cost any more to write a book now than it did before. If anything, it's probably cheaper than any time in history, because making edits and copies with a computer is so darn easy compared to dealing with actual sheets of paper. Digital technology has also drastically reduced the costs of making decent music recordings. A few thousand bucks worth of equipment and software, and just about anybody can build out a passable studio in their basement. Digital photography can cut out a bunch of costs that regular film needs. And for smaller and independent film makers, there's affordable editing software running on consumer level computers with abilities that were unimaginable just a decade ago. Factor in all the new ways being explored to distribute media digitally, and there's a giant amount of cost savings potential there as well.
There are a few very specific costs that are continually climbing, but it's nothing that's 100% to the production or distribution of any sort of media. Special effects don't come cheap, big name actors cost a bundle, and advertising blitzes can eat money endlessly. But you don't need any of that stuff to make something good or profitable.
Media is cheaper than ever. Don't let the extreme cases define the entire landscape for you.
Ah, you could make any of those designs entirely structurally sound. Technically it's easier than you'd think. It'd just require many dump trucks full of money to be able to actually afford to build it.
I think you're seriously overestimating the power of celebrities. Particularly when dealing with something as mundane as a mass produced cell phone. Trent Reznor or anybody else famous can say whatever they want about how much the iPhone sucks, but just as easily as I can listen to them, I can walk over to one of the handful of coworkers in my office that have iPhones, try it out, and make my own decision.
True enough, but don't think that they're letting the elected CSM members actually develop the game patches, or letting them mess with the databases. There's still CCP acting as a filter between these ideas thrown out by the players and what finally makes it into the game.
And despite the animosity between some of the different player-run alliances, I don't think that's where the big divide would be in what the player base wants the developers to focus their efforts on. The big player divide is between people who operate in 0.0 space, and those who operate in empire.
I kind of see your point, but given the lack of funding that NASA is generally dealing with these days, I'd imagine they'd probably rather spend their research dollars solving newer problems, rather than having to find another solution to something that was basically solved. It was a good solution too. RTG's are reasonably simple as far as nuclear technology goes, they're durable, and they last a long time.
Also, there's plenty of earth-bound activities which would benefit from a power source of similar capabilities, so there's long been incentives beyond space-flight which could help convince people to develop alternative power sources. There might not be a good answer out there.
Well yeah, if your standard sucks, it's going to cause problems down the road. If it sucks so bad that you have to ignore it 80% of the time in order to get anything done, then it's not really a standard anymore.
I wasn't defending a particular standard for this application as much as I was trying to express that very often the benefits of having a standard easily outweigh the downsides.
I'm not sure how closely one would want to pattern a data center standard after the system that lego uses. I think that using lego as an example is less about the specifics, and more about just providing an abstract example that everyone has at least some basic familiarity with.
As an interesting aside, I have degrees in Architecture, and in school if someone ever suggested using lego to build a model, they were very strongly advised against it, usually with the argument that the limited selection of pieces limits the design opportunities. Although in that particular case I thought a more useful argument was that at the model scales that we generally used, lego pieces rarely served as an appropriately sized representation of any real world materials.
I think the solution is pretty much similar to the solution that Lego uses when they come up against the limitations of their pieces. They introduce additional pieces. You could even think of the glue that is used on larger structures in this way. It wasn't one of the original elements, but all of those original elements were designed with enough flexibility that they can be glued together.
The point of standardization isn't necessarily to come up with a complete system that will cover any and every possible need throughout the past, present, and future. It's to provide some useful building blocks to make the easy 90% of a project even easier. And if done well, the standardization will allow for enough flexibility to make that last 10% possible. And since you saved so much time and money on that first 90% because you had all those nice standard and mass produced parts to choose from, you'll have extra resources to really get the final details right.
If a corporation has to raise its prices to pay its fair share of the taxes, then so be it. At least then I can make a more informed purchasing decision when deciding whether or not to buy their product. Corporations require the national infrastructure just as much as I do. It really should be part of their cost of business, and that cost should be reflected in their product.
If you don't make them pay those taxes, then someone else is going to have to pay for that infrastructure. And that someone else is the taxpayers. So either way, the consumer is going to end up paying for it all. I happen to think that with the corporations paying their fair share and then having those costs reflected in their prices, we consumers can make better decisions about what we're buying.
Meh, at the end of the day, the numbers might end up being the same if those increased business costs get passed on to the consumer, but at least then I could see the real cost of what I'm buying, and then I can make a more informed decision. These businesses use the infrastructure that the government provides, they should pay for it. If that makes their products more expensive, then so be it. That part of the cost of production should be reflected in the product price.
We can basically turn your argument around. Cutting taxes on businesses lets them lower their prices, so consumers should benefit, right? Not really, because someone still has to pay for all of that infrastructure that the producers use, and so the consumers end up getting taxed directly to make up that lost income.
#4 leads to a pretty key point. An issue that I've seen on some bigger projects is when the project manager has a hard time accepting the fact that their job isn't as much to "do the work" as it is to manage the people who are doing the work. There's something to be said for leading by example, staying involved, and not losing touch with the grunt work, but it's important to realize that on a project that's continually progressing, project management is a full-time job.
If the project manager is putting 20 hours of their work-week into grunt work, it might feel to them that they're making their best contribution to the team, but that's not necessarily the case. That time might have been better spent helping the other members of the project team get their work done more efficiently, or making sure that the proper communication takes place to avoid mistakes, or keeping outside forces at bay.
Sometimes you just want to sit at your desk, put headphones on, tune out the world, and just do some work. But that's a luxury that project managers often don't have, and it's one that's sometimes hard to give up.
It's a two way street, both sides are to blame. Celebrity gossip is cheap and easy to produce, not controversial in any significant way, and somewhat interesting.
There is a market for hard news. Whether or not it's bigger or smaller than the fluff audience, I'm not really sure. But even if 90% of Americans completely turned their brains off, there's still tens of millions of people looking for a news product to serve them. That's a workable market.
But the fluff is easier, so the news drifted that way, and created the negative feedback loop that they use to justify this shift to themselves and others. Their news program becomes more inane, so I go find my news elsewhere. The media says that nobody is watching them for hard news, so why would they bother producing it?
I think a confusing aspect about this whole thing is the idea of applying our basically arbitrary start and end dates for the year to what the sun is doing. Even if the sun operates on a cycle that basically does just happen to match up with a whole number of our earth years, the fact that we decided to start calling the present 2009 instead of 2008 doesn't mean much to the sun.
The sort of time cycles that we experience on a regular basis (day, week, month, year) aren't particularly relevant to the sun, and they're generally only useful in a science like astronomy in that they create a common system of measurement to compare data. They don't have much inherent meaning for the sun (beyond the effects of earth orbiting around it in a periodic fashion.
The idea that 2008 had really low sunspot activity, but now it's 2009 and so we should see the sun changing doesn't really make any sense.
Slashdot Mirror
dammit.
There's a learning curve for developers to understand and properly use this new interface. The first FPS that used the Wiimote (Red Steel) only sorta worked, but with the Metroid game, the experience was much better. There was a rush at first to try and shove motion controls into everything, but I think that was more just because it was new and trendy and a bullet point on the back of your game box. Now that motion control novelty has started to wear off, hopefully developers won't feel that they need to force it into their games in order to get people to notice.
But anyways, the ratio of really good games to crap games has always been in the neighborhood of 50:1, particularly for whichever system is dominating the market at the time. Shovelware will always exist, and in that sense it doesn't matter whether your interface uses buttons, motion control, or sexbots.
I'm pretty sure I saw a video or podcast or something where they talked about this. They could make it work, but as you suggested, it was a big performance hit and so it got cut.
While I'm hoping (and maybe even expecting) that Valve will offer some sort of discount to people who already own L4D, I think it's interesting to note that in general, a good video game is pretty damn cheap compared to the amount of entertainment that it can provide. If you spend 50 bucks on a game and get 25 hours of decent playtime out of it, then that works out to $2/hour. That compares very favorably to movies, concerts, sporting events, and even books (depending on how fast you read). And that's not to mention how quickly the prices of games tend to drop.
In one sense, Valve has almost shot themselves in the foot with TF2, by creating a situation where some of their bigger fans almost demand hundreds of hours worth of playtime out of a game, and now years of free new content releases. It's interesting to see how quickly people get accustomed to freebies and then complain when the flow of goodies gets turned down.
I think it depends on the context of the suggestion. If you say that here's a relatively easy first step towards sustainability, I'd say good for you, let's go for it. On the other hand, if you say, here's a quick easy fix to our global warming problems, so stop worrying about coal plants, then you're just going to piss me off. Not only are you not solving the problems, but you're treating me like a little kid that you think doesn't know any better.
No I completely understand. You didn't even read what I wrote. Of course people end up paying all the taxes in the end, because what's a business except a bunch of people working together? That's not in doubt, so what's your point?
Why is paying taxes on your purchases so much worse than having a bigger deduct from your paycheck? I'd argue that it's not. In fact, I argue that it's better. The production of goods and services requires extensive use of the sorts of infrastructure that taxes pay for. That infrastructure is going to be built, taxes are going to pay for it, and yes somewhere down the line those taxes are going to come out of my pocket. But if the cost of those taxes are passed through in the price of the goods/services, then they price tag that I see more accurately reflects the true cost of that item. That allows me to make a more informed decision about my purchase. In a properly set up system, a product that made more extensive or even excessive use of our shared infrastructure would have a higher cost, and if that bothered me, the price could help me decide not to make that purchase. And since competition tends to drive costs down, that factor would push producers to utilize the infrastructure the least amount possible, because it'd make their products more appealing via lower costs.
And your healthcare argument is just silly. I don't want free health care, I want universal healthcare.
If you eliminate business taxes, then customers are still going to pay those taxes, the government is going to get that money somehow. It's just that instead of paying through the purchases of goods and services, we'd get taxed directly to make up the difference.
I'd prefer that the businesses pay for their share of the nation's infrastructure via taxes. Sure, they're going to pass that cost along to me in their prices, but then when I'm spending money, I'm making a more informed decision, because what I'm being charged better reflects the true cost of the production of those goods/services.
A billion years is a bit extreme, and is such a long period of time as to be mostly meaningless in the day-to-day lives of your average person. But that being said, I personally have plenty of digital photos and such that I'd like to be able to save for at least the next 40 years or so, and right now I don't have any financially reasonable way of doing that with any confidence.
Whether this nanotech memory is good for a billion years or only a million years isn't all that important to me, other than the fact that both of those are well past the 40 years I'm looking for. If the price can be reasonable and the media doesn't require a specialized storage environment, then they should have a problem finding a market.
I think the obvious conclusion is that you have a second brain, most likely hidden amongst the tangle of intestines down in your gut. Not really a big deal, except that when you ride a bike, you should wear at least two helmets.
I'm assuming you meant to say "daydreaming about what I am working on at that moment", and if that's the case, I'd argue that that's not daydreaming, it's thinking about your task.
Whether or not you're daydreaming has less to do with how much brain activity you've got going on, and more to do with whatever it is that that activity is revolving around.
No, I agree with you. But the fact that you can't steer it in "useful" directions doesn't mean that your brain isn't working. It's just that it's busy solving problems that only exist because it made them up (it's trying to make sense of the wandering thoughts you're experiencing), instead of working on some actual task that's sitting on your desk.
Some people have argued that the brain uses dreams to abstractly work through real problems that you've experienced awake (and we certainly do sometimes have dreams that reflect our real lives), but I don't know much about that.
I'd say it depends on the task. If it's an interesting task that requires some serious thought, sure you can "get in the zone" and shut out the world and concentrate on what you're doing. But that's a different case than some menial task that you've done a million times, where you're basically on autopilot, working almost on muscle memory.
But being "in the zone" is different from "zoning out" and letting your mind wander. They both share a symptom (shutting out your surroundings), but they're entirely different states of mind.
Daydreaming is basically shutting off (or at least ignoring) the bulk of the sensory inputs into your brain, and letting your imagination run the show for a period of time. Is it really surprising that having to create an ongoing reality that replaces a bunch of those ignored sensory inputs requires the brain to do some serious work? Especially when compared to performing a routine task that you've already done hundreds of times?
Laziness isn't really connected in any meaningful way to how hard your brain is working. I could give my brain a pretty serious workout by staying home, sitting on the couch, and doing crossword puzzles until next thursday, but that's still a pretty lazy way to spend a week.
Unfortunately, my boss isn't impressed by general problem solving as much as he's impressed by the solving of the specific problems that he's paying me to figure out.
The "media industry" is a pretty broad term, and might not even be that useful of a grouping for this discussion, but either way I'm not sure that big budget movies are the best example. While it's certainly true that the costs of giant blockbusters has been increasing pretty steadily, there's whole sections of the media industry, and even the movie industry specifically, where costs have come down a lot, or at least stayed about the same.
It doesn't cost any more to write a book now than it did before. If anything, it's probably cheaper than any time in history, because making edits and copies with a computer is so darn easy compared to dealing with actual sheets of paper. Digital technology has also drastically reduced the costs of making decent music recordings. A few thousand bucks worth of equipment and software, and just about anybody can build out a passable studio in their basement. Digital photography can cut out a bunch of costs that regular film needs. And for smaller and independent film makers, there's affordable editing software running on consumer level computers with abilities that were unimaginable just a decade ago. Factor in all the new ways being explored to distribute media digitally, and there's a giant amount of cost savings potential there as well.
There are a few very specific costs that are continually climbing, but it's nothing that's 100% to the production or distribution of any sort of media. Special effects don't come cheap, big name actors cost a bundle, and advertising blitzes can eat money endlessly. But you don't need any of that stuff to make something good or profitable.
Media is cheaper than ever. Don't let the extreme cases define the entire landscape for you.
Ah, you could make any of those designs entirely structurally sound. Technically it's easier than you'd think. It'd just require many dump trucks full of money to be able to actually afford to build it.
I think you're seriously overestimating the power of celebrities. Particularly when dealing with something as mundane as a mass produced cell phone. Trent Reznor or anybody else famous can say whatever they want about how much the iPhone sucks, but just as easily as I can listen to them, I can walk over to one of the handful of coworkers in my office that have iPhones, try it out, and make my own decision.
True enough, but don't think that they're letting the elected CSM members actually develop the game patches, or letting them mess with the databases. There's still CCP acting as a filter between these ideas thrown out by the players and what finally makes it into the game.
And despite the animosity between some of the different player-run alliances, I don't think that's where the big divide would be in what the player base wants the developers to focus their efforts on. The big player divide is between people who operate in 0.0 space, and those who operate in empire.
I kind of see your point, but given the lack of funding that NASA is generally dealing with these days, I'd imagine they'd probably rather spend their research dollars solving newer problems, rather than having to find another solution to something that was basically solved. It was a good solution too. RTG's are reasonably simple as far as nuclear technology goes, they're durable, and they last a long time.
Also, there's plenty of earth-bound activities which would benefit from a power source of similar capabilities, so there's long been incentives beyond space-flight which could help convince people to develop alternative power sources. There might not be a good answer out there.
Well yeah, if your standard sucks, it's going to cause problems down the road. If it sucks so bad that you have to ignore it 80% of the time in order to get anything done, then it's not really a standard anymore.
I wasn't defending a particular standard for this application as much as I was trying to express that very often the benefits of having a standard easily outweigh the downsides.
I'm not sure how closely one would want to pattern a data center standard after the system that lego uses. I think that using lego as an example is less about the specifics, and more about just providing an abstract example that everyone has at least some basic familiarity with.
As an interesting aside, I have degrees in Architecture, and in school if someone ever suggested using lego to build a model, they were very strongly advised against it, usually with the argument that the limited selection of pieces limits the design opportunities. Although in that particular case I thought a more useful argument was that at the model scales that we generally used, lego pieces rarely served as an appropriately sized representation of any real world materials.
I think the solution is pretty much similar to the solution that Lego uses when they come up against the limitations of their pieces. They introduce additional pieces. You could even think of the glue that is used on larger structures in this way. It wasn't one of the original elements, but all of those original elements were designed with enough flexibility that they can be glued together.
The point of standardization isn't necessarily to come up with a complete system that will cover any and every possible need throughout the past, present, and future. It's to provide some useful building blocks to make the easy 90% of a project even easier. And if done well, the standardization will allow for enough flexibility to make that last 10% possible. And since you saved so much time and money on that first 90% because you had all those nice standard and mass produced parts to choose from, you'll have extra resources to really get the final details right.
If a corporation has to raise its prices to pay its fair share of the taxes, then so be it. At least then I can make a more informed purchasing decision when deciding whether or not to buy their product. Corporations require the national infrastructure just as much as I do. It really should be part of their cost of business, and that cost should be reflected in their product.
If you don't make them pay those taxes, then someone else is going to have to pay for that infrastructure. And that someone else is the taxpayers. So either way, the consumer is going to end up paying for it all. I happen to think that with the corporations paying their fair share and then having those costs reflected in their prices, we consumers can make better decisions about what we're buying.
Meh, at the end of the day, the numbers might end up being the same if those increased business costs get passed on to the consumer, but at least then I could see the real cost of what I'm buying, and then I can make a more informed decision. These businesses use the infrastructure that the government provides, they should pay for it. If that makes their products more expensive, then so be it. That part of the cost of production should be reflected in the product price.
We can basically turn your argument around. Cutting taxes on businesses lets them lower their prices, so consumers should benefit, right? Not really, because someone still has to pay for all of that infrastructure that the producers use, and so the consumers end up getting taxed directly to make up that lost income.
#4 leads to a pretty key point. An issue that I've seen on some bigger projects is when the project manager has a hard time accepting the fact that their job isn't as much to "do the work" as it is to manage the people who are doing the work. There's something to be said for leading by example, staying involved, and not losing touch with the grunt work, but it's important to realize that on a project that's continually progressing, project management is a full-time job.
If the project manager is putting 20 hours of their work-week into grunt work, it might feel to them that they're making their best contribution to the team, but that's not necessarily the case. That time might have been better spent helping the other members of the project team get their work done more efficiently, or making sure that the proper communication takes place to avoid mistakes, or keeping outside forces at bay.
Sometimes you just want to sit at your desk, put headphones on, tune out the world, and just do some work. But that's a luxury that project managers often don't have, and it's one that's sometimes hard to give up.
It's a two way street, both sides are to blame. Celebrity gossip is cheap and easy to produce, not controversial in any significant way, and somewhat interesting.
There is a market for hard news. Whether or not it's bigger or smaller than the fluff audience, I'm not really sure. But even if 90% of Americans completely turned their brains off, there's still tens of millions of people looking for a news product to serve them. That's a workable market.
But the fluff is easier, so the news drifted that way, and created the negative feedback loop that they use to justify this shift to themselves and others. Their news program becomes more inane, so I go find my news elsewhere. The media says that nobody is watching them for hard news, so why would they bother producing it?
I think a confusing aspect about this whole thing is the idea of applying our basically arbitrary start and end dates for the year to what the sun is doing. Even if the sun operates on a cycle that basically does just happen to match up with a whole number of our earth years, the fact that we decided to start calling the present 2009 instead of 2008 doesn't mean much to the sun.
The sort of time cycles that we experience on a regular basis (day, week, month, year) aren't particularly relevant to the sun, and they're generally only useful in a science like astronomy in that they create a common system of measurement to compare data. They don't have much inherent meaning for the sun (beyond the effects of earth orbiting around it in a periodic fashion.
The idea that 2008 had really low sunspot activity, but now it's 2009 and so we should see the sun changing doesn't really make any sense.