I work for a wireless company, developing WiMax and WiFi. It's pretty hard to beat the raw speed we can get out of 802.11 (WiFi), and we can stretch WiFi to fairly long distances as we can with WiMax.
However, WiMax has one huge advantage for system design - because transfers are a mix of scheduled and free-for-all instead of only free-for-all like WiFi, you can actually guarantee service. You can lock clients down to a fixed bandwidth _without_ letting them flood the channel, or you can guarantee minimum throughput, and you can classify packets into multiple service flows at the protocol level (prioritizing ACKs as an example). WiFi has 4 levels of service with WME, but the client gets to decide and can lie for advantage.
With WiFi you can throttle flows at the gateway, but you can't stop some greedy dick from completely swamping the channel. With WiMax you can throttle at the client. Some of you are obviously going to think that's a bad thing, but if we want to set up a public deployment we really need to be able to make sure that someone torrenting with 512 connections open isn't going to knock everyone else off the air and make it unusable for everyone. WiMax does a far superior job to WiFi of sharing the bandwidth so more total clients get at least a reasonable amount of throughput even if one greedy S.O.B. _really_ wants to eat up the entire channel and then more. And this is the assurance provisioners need when deciding they're going to offer the service.
I don't know about Intel's claims, but you are certainly able to guarantee a better experience with WiMax than you are with WiFi as long as your product doesn't suck.
To be fair, a major WiMax disadvantage is that there's really no equivalent of mesh networks. It's all server/client, no useful ad-hoc like WiFi has. You can simulate it with each node having a server and a client, but they're very asymmetrical, so it's currently pretty wasteful to do so.
We have certainly replaced C/C++ with Python wherever we can. This is about 90% of our software. Except where C is absolutely needed (which is mostly just in our kernel/device driver stuff), the 10x faster Python development and far easier code maintenance just outweighs everything else. That the Python is much less prone to crashing for programs beyond tiny one-offs is another big positive (yes, yes, if you write perfect C/C++ and don't use glib you'll never crash either, but in practice this never happens).
In practice the speed difference doesn't matter for almost every application we've run into - we have a high speed network load tester in Python, which sounds ridiculous, but it works and it makes it insanely easier to add new tests or behaviors. If we ever hit a bottleneck, we just write a small C extension module and call that from the Python.
I'm saying Python here, but insert your higher level language of choice.
I can't wait till they try to turn this into a closed shop system like the WGA, where you'd have to belong to blog. And then the net returns to what seems to be its lowest entropy state: Google, MS and/or Yahoo being sued.
Perhaps the reason for the crappy sound on your iPod has less to do with the mp3 format and more to do with the crap-ass white earphones that Apple packs in there because they know you're a putz who cares more about appearances than sound quality?
Sorry, rereading this I sound more hostile towards Java than I really am. Especially since 1.5 I think the language itself is quite nice for things like the interoperability and especially for the amazing sandboxing, but it's undeniably the language of choice now for really bad and mediocre programmers (unless you want to argue for Javascript or VB, and I won't press on that).
Ideally you would: Start with a semester of python - it's easy, it's fun, it's very productive and readable, and if you can't do this, go home. Then we throw you into C so you can see what's making this all work, to have some appreciation for low level and managing memory, and to make you realize how easy you had it. After that, C++, Java, whatever. You should know how to write well, how traditional software development works, how agile software development works, and how version control works.
You should have designed and implemented several projects from start to finish. This is possibly one of the most important things - all the classes in the world won't help you if they don't involve full projects.
After that, well, then it depends on what you want to specialize in. Java programmers are always in demand if you really want to be toiling on projects with legions of interchangable monkeys who are dumber than you - it really is the new COBOL, designed to let lots of idiots work together without doing too much damage. I know some fantastic Java programmers, but they're real exceptions. C# is quite hot these days if you like apps stuff. Embedded Linux is extremely in demand. Web devs seem to be doing pretty well.
You personally seem to be doing quite well - I thought the Java screed missed the point in that it wasn't the Java that was the fault, it was the lack of any C or C++ or ASM to go with it. If you're not comfortable with C, you probably want to learn some more of that - it's still the language of choice for systems, and small and clean enough that you don't have to fight it much while learning concepts. As someone who is fairly good at C and C++, I am going to say that you will waste so much time learning and working around C++'s ugliness (instead of getting things done) that it's not worth it unless you think you will be doing a lot of it.
So a bit more C, do what's fun and *design and make some products from scratch*. Polish some of them up enough that you would feel proud if you released them. The problem solving that goes with this is the single best skill you can have, is what separates the software engineers from the programmers, and is one of the best ways to get a job. I walked into my interview at this company with a pile of things I'd written (some released) on my own and was pretty much hired on the spot, and if more interviewees would do this we would be likely to hire them on the spot too barring any glaring issues.
I also can't say strongly enough that going for Java, DB, or Data Warehouse stuff just because you think there will be a lot of jobs in it is the worst mistake you could make if you don't actually like doing it. It may be a good living, but you're too young to do something that soul-crushing on purpose so soon. There are lots and lots of jobs for software engineers who are good at what they do - pick what you want to do and get really good at it and have fun and a quite comfortable living will follow. It's the code pigs whose jobs are at risk for outsourcing, not people who can actually solve problems.
This is completely normal - high school and college students (in general, there are always exceptions) have no appreciation whatsoever for property rights of any kind or the idea that money or products might be worth something. We're just fleshy entitlement machines at that stage. There's just no context for it until you're out on your own and hold down a 'real' job for a while and learn the basics of budgeting and the idea of fair worth.
When I was in high school and college we made mix tapes (yes we had CDs, but burning wasn't cheap or easy) and pirated software with no concern at all. Now that I make my own living off software I appreciate the value of paying for useful software which has value added over open source. I also buy CDs because I want to support the artists I listen to; of course the value proposition there is changing, but there's still the basic idea of buying a product.
Asking college students if piracy is wrong is like asking Buddhists about Catholic heresies. It's just not meaningful except as a curiousity.
I have the X360 and PS3 hooked up to a 802.11g hub in the living room which talks to the 802.11g access point in the computer closet. I haven't noticed any performance problems when the X360 is on. Heck, the X360 still downloads demos and what have you faster than the PS3 does (though I suspect this is just PSN's crappy servers).
Honestly, the spectrum is already so polluted (I count 8 APs on a netstumbler scan) that I don't think the controllers are a big deal. And the X360 controllers perform much better than the PS3's wireless bluetooth controllers. I've never seen the X360 controllers lose sync, and the PS3 controllers glitch about once an hour or so, locking up the controls for about 5 seconds while it resyncs (resulting in untold deaths).
Please see what a real physicist thinks of this. There's always a chance that he's stumbled onto something awesome of course, but odds are low. Basically he takes some stuff that looks cool and extracts physics from it in various ways.
'That's pretty cute!:-) The author is not constrained by any old "conventions" and simply adds Grassmann fields together with ordinary numbers i.e. bosons with fermions, one-forms with spinors and scalars. He is just so skillful that he can add up not only apples and oranges but also fields of all kinds you could ever think of. Every high school senior excited about physics should be able to see that the paper is just a long sequence of childish misunderstandings.'
I just tried the Opera 9.5 alpha. It's quite impressive, very fast (noticably faster than Firefox with lots of tabs open), it does adblock, it has undo close tab...
But I just can't get over how much space is wasted. If you block an ad there's a big gaping white hole on the page. With Firefox (with adblock), that entire element is gone and the content flows in. FF (with greasemonkey) lets you get rid of all the extra crap on offender sites like boingboing and slashdot where only half the page is real content and the other half is useless crud. And the ability to not see comments on youtube... well that's godly.
I know this seems like a little thing, but it's quite jarring to go from a page full of useful content to half a page of content interspersed with random gaping holes. Firefox is slower but not annoyingly so, so I'll probably end up sticking with it.
Earthlink badly overreached themselves here with two major mistakes - first, deciding to use Tropos equipment to paint an entire city. Most of the money you burn in setting up a wifi installation is in the install and then trying to get everything to work when your planning tools are out of sync with reality (which is almost always). Tropos's mesh equipment is crap, so they've wasted months and burned untold money trying to nail jello to a wall.
Second, trying to blanket an entire city at once is doable, but it's far more practical to grow the network from little seed areas (while keeping future growth in mind) - blanket a six block area of downtown, for instance, and then expand from that. This lets you get everything right for a small area before you apply that to larger areas - it's the way almost all WISP (wireless ISPs) operate and it works fairly well.
I think Earthlink finally realized it wasn't gonna work, which of course makes all the assumptions under which they signed contracts not so great for them.
Gee, it's so hard to know who to believe here. Major retailers like Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, Sears who have even printed up fliers to perpetuate this fraud on poor Sony, or the unthinkable... that Sony is lying to us yet again.
Honestly, Sony, this is just next week. Whatever the minor statute of limitations on being arrogant lying sacks of crap is, it is definitely more than 7 days.
A lot of cities got sold a sucker deal by companies like Tropos which have some badly performing and hard to deploy equipment (among other things they think one radio is sufficient for mesh and access points). But they also have a huge sales, marketing and schmoozing staff to wine and dine officials into signing contracts. So Earthlink is up to its neck in its deployments just trying to get the equipment to function at all.
Whereas other deployments that chose decent equipment like Tranzeo's two radio wifi mesh stuff are doing okay.
Everyone I know who has this game loves it. One has even temporarily given up Burning Crusade for it. The physics and the jumping (and searching for agility orbs) really make it for me.
It's more of a two week game than a two month game, but I think you get your money worth in sheer fun and 'Ahahaha did you see THAT?'
Who really couldn't have guessed that Sony would badmouth and then copy Xbox Live Achievements and Miis while passing it off as innovation? And of course several people have. Really, being dicks like this just adds more credence to the rumor than ignoring it would have.
Next up: WHOOPS I guess rumble isn't so last-gen after all.
IMO the PS2 has the best games library ever (and yes, I go way back so I'm including NES, SNES, Genesis, etc). Until (if) the PS3 games library is so superior to the PS2 library that you'll never want to play one of those great old PS2 games, backwards compatibility is hugely important. It sucks that I have to keep an XBox 360/and/ an XBox so I can play games like Panzer Dragoon Orta. It'll suck just as hard to have to have a PS2 and a PS3.
Furthermore, since the PS3 game library is so sad on its own, without the added weight of 'Well I can play my PS2 games on it, so what the hell' goes out the door. It is a great selling point this early in the system's life, even if 5 years down the road nobody will care.
[conspiracy theory on] Maybe leaking this is a desperate attempt to get first gen PS3s off the shelves so they don't embarrass Tretton any more. Suddenly they're much more desirable. [/conspiracy]
Boy, if you ever thought a large number of/. commenters were flat out stupid (as opposed to ones who just disagree with you), following that link to YouTube will certainly make you feel much better about/. commenters!
Kutaragi specifically said they were considering doing the upgrade instead of price drop life cycle because it's a computer and not just a console. Once he said that, this is fair speculation.
And PS2, PS1 just don't apply any more. I love my PS2 and still think it's the best console on the market right now if you were only going to own one. I thought Sony was great and was looking forward to the PS3. But it's been a year of such stupidity from them that all bets are off. Now that they think they own the market completely, they think they've got free rein. Yes, obviously I'm a little bitter.
Yeah, it's sort of expected in the computer world. When you buy a console, though, you expect your investment to last for 4-5 years or so. You don't expect that you have to upgrade your PS2 or the hottest new games won't play on it because it's last year's PS2. IF they did it it would be a whole new trend of badness like MS started with the two levels of console pricing.
(Though now I remember the RAM expansion pack for the N64...)
It would be ludicrous, but Kutaragi's talked before about never reducing the price of the PS3 but instead upgrading it with more memory, bigger hard drives, etc. It would be pretty damned amusing if, a year and a half after PS3 launch, instead of cutting prices with a new easier to produce Cell and Blu-ray they upgraded the PS3 with the Cell2(and hosed everyone who'd already bought one). This would be so stupid and arrogant that it's only plausible because it's Sony.
If you need all the features of Azureus there's nothing else that can match it.
On the other hand, uTorrent does just about every damn thing most people need and it does it in 1/10th the CPU usage and 1/100th the memory usage of Azureus.
I like never having to worry about whether my torrent program is running in the background while I'm doing foreground tasks so I love uTorrent. I just leave it on all the time, running away, and never even notice it while I'm playing NWN2 or editing photos or watching videos or whatever. And that's the big win.
This article is utterly useless, like pretty much anything 1up does.
However - the Wii and PS3 dinosaur renders, like http://www.1up.com/media?id=3087879 are awesomely cute and well worth your time to view. Kudos to the artist.
There's a simple compromise for all this. You can vote and leave blank the issues you have no idea on. I do this with most of the Judge candidates - I am totally unqualified to vote on whether Judge John Smith is competent for his job in the 18th Circuit Court of Small Claims Appeals so I just leave those items empty.
I do research all the propositions and statewide office candidates, but if you don't want to take the effort on that then just leave those blank and just vote for Governor or whoever else you're damn sure about.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a wireless company, developing WiMax and WiFi. It's pretty hard to beat the raw speed we can get out of 802.11 (WiFi), and we can stretch WiFi to fairly long distances as we can with WiMax.
However, WiMax has one huge advantage for system design - because transfers are a mix of scheduled and free-for-all instead of only free-for-all like WiFi, you can actually guarantee service. You can lock clients down to a fixed bandwidth _without_ letting them flood the channel, or you can guarantee minimum throughput, and you can classify packets into multiple service flows at the protocol level (prioritizing ACKs as an example). WiFi has 4 levels of service with WME, but the client gets to decide and can lie for advantage.
With WiFi you can throttle flows at the gateway, but you can't stop some greedy dick from completely swamping the channel. With WiMax you can throttle at the client. Some of you are obviously going to think that's a bad thing, but if we want to set up a public deployment we really need to be able to make sure that someone torrenting with 512 connections open isn't going to knock everyone else off the air and make it unusable for everyone. WiMax does a far superior job to WiFi of sharing the bandwidth so more total clients get at least a reasonable amount of throughput even if one greedy S.O.B. _really_ wants to eat up the entire channel and then more. And this is the assurance provisioners need when deciding they're going to offer the service.
I don't know about Intel's claims, but you are certainly able to guarantee a better experience with WiMax than you are with WiFi as long as your product doesn't suck.
To be fair, a major WiMax disadvantage is that there's really no equivalent of mesh networks. It's all server/client, no useful ad-hoc like WiFi has. You can simulate it with each node having a server and a client, but they're very asymmetrical, so it's currently pretty wasteful to do so.
How about we call this an 'FPGA'? Now all we need is a backronym....
We have certainly replaced C/C++ with Python wherever we can. This is about 90% of our software. Except where C is absolutely needed (which is mostly just in our kernel/device driver stuff), the 10x faster Python development and far easier code maintenance just outweighs everything else. That the Python is much less prone to crashing for programs beyond tiny one-offs is another big positive (yes, yes, if you write perfect C/C++ and don't use glib you'll never crash either, but in practice this never happens).
In practice the speed difference doesn't matter for almost every application we've run into - we have a high speed network load tester in Python, which sounds ridiculous, but it works and it makes it insanely easier to add new tests or behaviors. If we ever hit a bottleneck, we just write a small C extension module and call that from the Python.
I'm saying Python here, but insert your higher level language of choice.
I can't wait till they try to turn this into a closed shop system like the WGA, where you'd have to belong to blog. And then the net returns to what seems to be its lowest entropy state: Google, MS and/or Yahoo being sued.
Perhaps the reason for the crappy sound on your iPod has less to do with the mp3 format and more to do with the crap-ass white earphones that Apple packs in there because they know you're a putz who cares more about appearances than sound quality?
Sorry, rereading this I sound more hostile towards Java than I really am. Especially since 1.5 I think the language itself is quite nice for things like the interoperability and especially for the amazing sandboxing, but it's undeniably the language of choice now for really bad and mediocre programmers (unless you want to argue for Javascript or VB, and I won't press on that).
We see lots of gawdawful candidates.
Ideally you would: Start with a semester of python - it's easy, it's fun, it's very productive and readable, and if you can't do this, go home. Then we throw you into C so you can see what's making this all work, to have some appreciation for low level and managing memory, and to make you realize how easy you had it. After that, C++, Java, whatever. You should know how to write well, how traditional software development works, how agile software development works, and how version control works.
You should have designed and implemented several projects from start to finish. This is possibly one of the most important things - all the classes in the world won't help you if they don't involve full projects.
After that, well, then it depends on what you want to specialize in. Java programmers are always in demand if you really want to be toiling on projects with legions of interchangable monkeys who are dumber than you - it really is the new COBOL, designed to let lots of idiots work together without doing too much damage. I know some fantastic Java programmers, but they're real exceptions. C# is quite hot these days if you like apps stuff. Embedded Linux is extremely in demand. Web devs seem to be doing pretty well.
You personally seem to be doing quite well - I thought the Java screed missed the point in that it wasn't the Java that was the fault, it was the lack of any C or C++ or ASM to go with it. If you're not comfortable with C, you probably want to learn some more of that - it's still the language of choice for systems, and small and clean enough that you don't have to fight it much while learning concepts. As someone who is fairly good at C and C++, I am going to say that you will waste so much time learning and working around C++'s ugliness (instead of getting things done) that it's not worth it unless you think you will be doing a lot of it.
So a bit more C, do what's fun and *design and make some products from scratch*. Polish some of them up enough that you would feel proud if you released them. The problem solving that goes with this is the single best skill you can have, is what separates the software engineers from the programmers, and is one of the best ways to get a job. I walked into my interview at this company with a pile of things I'd written (some released) on my own and was pretty much hired on the spot, and if more interviewees would do this we would be likely to hire them on the spot too barring any glaring issues.
I also can't say strongly enough that going for Java, DB, or Data Warehouse stuff just because you think there will be a lot of jobs in it is the worst mistake you could make if you don't actually like doing it. It may be a good living, but you're too young to do something that soul-crushing on purpose so soon. There are lots and lots of jobs for software engineers who are good at what they do - pick what you want to do and get really good at it and have fun and a quite comfortable living will follow. It's the code pigs whose jobs are at risk for outsourcing, not people who can actually solve problems.
This is completely normal - high school and college students (in general, there are always exceptions) have no appreciation whatsoever for property rights of any kind or the idea that money or products might be worth something. We're just fleshy entitlement machines at that stage. There's just no context for it until you're out on your own and hold down a 'real' job for a while and learn the basics of budgeting and the idea of fair worth.
When I was in high school and college we made mix tapes (yes we had CDs, but burning wasn't cheap or easy) and pirated software with no concern at all. Now that I make my own living off software I appreciate the value of paying for useful software which has value added over open source. I also buy CDs because I want to support the artists I listen to; of course the value proposition there is changing, but there's still the basic idea of buying a product.
Asking college students if piracy is wrong is like asking Buddhists about Catholic heresies. It's just not meaningful except as a curiousity.
I have the X360 and PS3 hooked up to a 802.11g hub in the living room which talks to the 802.11g access point in the computer closet. I haven't noticed any performance problems when the X360 is on. Heck, the X360 still downloads demos and what have you faster than the PS3 does (though I suspect this is just PSN's crappy servers).
Honestly, the spectrum is already so polluted (I count 8 APs on a netstumbler scan) that I don't think the controllers are a big deal. And the X360 controllers perform much better than the PS3's wireless bluetooth controllers. I've never seen the X360 controllers lose sync, and the PS3 controllers glitch about once an hour or so, locking up the controls for about 5 seconds while it resyncs (resulting in untold deaths).
(Troll hat on)
Well it's not like the Russian mafia could be any worse at customer relations than Six Apart anyhow.
Please see what a real physicist thinks of this. There's always a chance that he's stumbled onto something awesome of course, but odds are low. Basically he takes some stuff that looks cool and extracts physics from it in various ways.
:-) The author is not constrained by any old "conventions" and simply adds Grassmann fields together with ordinary numbers i.e. bosons with fermions, one-forms with spinors and scalars. He is just so skillful that he can add up not only apples and oranges but also fields of all kinds you could ever think of. Every high school senior excited about physics should be able to see that the paper is just a long sequence of childish misunderstandings.'
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/exceptionally-simple-theory-of.html
'That's pretty cute!
I just tried the Opera 9.5 alpha. It's quite impressive, very fast (noticably faster than Firefox with lots of tabs open), it does adblock, it has undo close tab...
But I just can't get over how much space is wasted. If you block an ad there's a big gaping white hole on the page. With Firefox (with adblock), that entire element is gone and the content flows in. FF (with greasemonkey) lets you get rid of all the extra crap on offender sites like boingboing and slashdot where only half the page is real content and the other half is useless crud. And the ability to not see comments on youtube... well that's godly.
I know this seems like a little thing, but it's quite jarring to go from a page full of useful content to half a page of content interspersed with random gaping holes. Firefox is slower but not annoyingly so, so I'll probably end up sticking with it.
Earthlink badly overreached themselves here with two major mistakes - first, deciding to use Tropos equipment to paint an entire city. Most of the money you burn in setting up a wifi installation is in the install and then trying to get everything to work when your planning tools are out of sync with reality (which is almost always). Tropos's mesh equipment is crap, so they've wasted months and burned untold money trying to nail jello to a wall.
Second, trying to blanket an entire city at once is doable, but it's far more practical to grow the network from little seed areas (while keeping future growth in mind) - blanket a six block area of downtown, for instance, and then expand from that. This lets you get everything right for a small area before you apply that to larger areas - it's the way almost all WISP (wireless ISPs) operate and it works fairly well.
I think Earthlink finally realized it wasn't gonna work, which of course makes all the assumptions under which they signed contracts not so great for them.
Gee, it's so hard to know who to believe here. Major retailers like Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, Sears who have even printed up fliers to perpetuate this fraud on poor Sony, or the unthinkable... that Sony is lying to us yet again.
Honestly, Sony, this is just next week. Whatever the minor statute of limitations on being arrogant lying sacks of crap is, it is definitely more than 7 days.
A lot of cities got sold a sucker deal by companies like Tropos which have some badly performing and hard to deploy equipment (among other things they think one radio is sufficient for mesh and access points). But they also have a huge sales, marketing and schmoozing staff to wine and dine officials into signing contracts. So Earthlink is up to its neck in its deployments just trying to get the equipment to function at all.
Whereas other deployments that chose decent equipment like Tranzeo's two radio wifi mesh stuff are doing okay.
Everyone I know who has this game loves it. One has even temporarily given up Burning Crusade for it. The physics and the jumping (and searching for agility orbs) really make it for me.
It's more of a two week game than a two month game, but I think you get your money worth in sheer fun and 'Ahahaha did you see THAT?'
Who really couldn't have guessed that Sony would badmouth and then copy Xbox Live Achievements and Miis while passing it off as innovation? And of course several people have. Really, being dicks like this just adds more credence to the rumor than ignoring it would have.
Next up: WHOOPS I guess rumble isn't so last-gen after all.
IMO the PS2 has the best games library ever (and yes, I go way back so I'm including NES, SNES, Genesis, etc). Until (if) the PS3 games library is so superior to the PS2 library that you'll never want to play one of those great old PS2 games, backwards compatibility is hugely important. It sucks that I have to keep an XBox 360 /and/ an XBox so I can play games like Panzer Dragoon Orta. It'll suck just as hard to have to have a PS2 and a PS3.
Furthermore, since the PS3 game library is so sad on its own, without the added weight of 'Well I can play my PS2 games on it, so what the hell' goes out the door. It is a great selling point this early in the system's life, even if 5 years down the road nobody will care.
[conspiracy theory on] Maybe leaking this is a desperate attempt to get first gen PS3s off the shelves so they don't embarrass Tretton any more. Suddenly they're much more desirable. [/conspiracy]
Boy, if you ever thought a large number of /. commenters were flat out stupid (as opposed to ones who just disagree with you), following that link to YouTube will certainly make you feel much better about /. commenters!
Relevant xkcd
Kutaragi specifically said they were considering doing the upgrade instead of price drop life cycle because it's a computer and not just a console. Once he said that, this is fair speculation.
And PS2, PS1 just don't apply any more. I love my PS2 and still think it's the best console on the market right now if you were only going to own one. I thought Sony was great and was looking forward to the PS3. But it's been a year of such stupidity from them that all bets are off. Now that they think they own the market completely, they think they've got free rein. Yes, obviously I'm a little bitter.
Yeah, it's sort of expected in the computer world. When you buy a console, though, you expect your investment to last for 4-5 years or so. You don't expect that you have to upgrade your PS2 or the hottest new games won't play on it because it's last year's PS2. IF they did it it would be a whole new trend of badness like MS started with the two levels of console pricing.
(Though now I remember the RAM expansion pack for the N64...)
It would be ludicrous, but Kutaragi's talked before about never reducing the price of the PS3 but instead upgrading it with more memory, bigger hard drives, etc. It would be pretty damned amusing if, a year and a half after PS3 launch, instead of cutting prices with a new easier to produce Cell and Blu-ray they upgraded the PS3 with the Cell2(and hosed everyone who'd already bought one). This would be so stupid and arrogant that it's only plausible because it's Sony.
If you need all the features of Azureus there's nothing else that can match it.
On the other hand, uTorrent does just about every damn thing most people need and it does it in 1/10th the CPU usage and 1/100th the memory usage of Azureus.
I like never having to worry about whether my torrent program is running in the background while I'm doing foreground tasks so I love uTorrent. I just leave it on all the time, running away, and never even notice it while I'm playing NWN2 or editing photos or watching videos or whatever. And that's the big win.
This article is utterly useless, like pretty much anything 1up does.
However - the Wii and PS3 dinosaur renders, like http://www.1up.com/media?id=3087879 are awesomely cute and well worth your time to view. Kudos to the artist.
There's a simple compromise for all this. You can vote and leave blank the issues you have no idea on. I do this with most of the Judge candidates - I am totally unqualified to vote on whether Judge John Smith is competent for his job in the 18th Circuit Court of Small Claims Appeals so I just leave those items empty.
I do research all the propositions and statewide office candidates, but if you don't want to take the effort on that then just leave those blank and just vote for Governor or whoever else you're damn sure about.