lmao! okay okay, I think I've stopped laughing enough to type now. Thanks for proving my point about people with advanced degrees though. You think you're so superior because you know more about stupid useless crap.
If your point was that there is a place in this world for people who have varying degrees of schooling and real world experience, then I certainly hope I proved it. If you believe I did nothing other than belittle your degree, you're way off base. The only kind of person I think I'm better than is the same kind of person as me but with more ego. I don't know if I'm better than you, but if you're less than 25 and with an ego that size (and a matching chip on your shoulder?), I'm betting you're not experienced enough to justify it.
Your ego and inexperience will kill you. You need to set them aside to learn. There are highly successful people in this world without any degrees at all-- they get there by setting aside their inexperience, leveraging their aptitude and charisma (if you have some, it doesn't come through in text) and taking advantage of the experienced people who lack the other areas. Jobs and Woz are one such team. You should go work for yourself. Either I'm going to be at your door in 15 years with my resume in hand, or you're going to fold within 2 years having learned a great deal about yourself and far better suited for this world.
Unplanned extra features? Not in the real world. Done early? Go to market early or redouble your validation / testing efforts. Being done early is a failure to predict your team.
I'm 19, been in college since I was 17 cuz they made me go early since I was so smart.
Son, I have news for you. Despite what mommy tells you, they sent you there because they couldn't breathe with your ego in the room.
I spent 5 years at a private engineering school (bachelors and masters degrees). If you're 19, you don't even know what programming is yet. Maybe you can look at really complex projects and understand segments of them, or even rewrite them. That's the easy stuff, and that's the kind of stuff we hire a 2 year graduate technician to do for us. The hard stuff-- the stuff that gets easier if you understand heritage and history (like when Unix was invented) is less about programming a given goal, and more about meeting needs of the customer.
At 19, you may have been on a successful professional project. You weren't the lead on it though. The stuff you look at the lead and say, "that's stupid"? That's the trade-off that knowing about history helped make.
There are some people who can be very successful without higher education, and some people who only need a 2 year degree to get off their feet to soar with the eagles, but those people are few and very far between. I've worked with a lot of 2 year graduates -- fine people, hard workers and smart employees all of them -- and I really value their work. Most of them have chosen this place in life, and they excel at it, but they underscore the value of my education. I am grateful they have chosen to work with us; doubly so that I spent more time on my education before "heading out".
1. Get with direct link interconnects, FSB is teh stupid
2. Stop making a new core every other Tuesday, m'kay?
3. 4MB of cache is nice, but it has to be hella expensive right? [*]
4. Merge with Nvidia, totally mess up the PC scene, it'll be fun:-)
1. You're purposefully mis-spelling "the" and can call Intel stupid on what grounds? How many CPU architectures have you done that are half as competitive as Core? Direct links are excellent for UP and small SMP systems. When scaling up, the situation is far less clear. In the Hot Chips conference it is clear that Intel is looking at 16+ way systems.
2. Why stop making new cores? Because it makes their compiler people keep working hard? Aren't each core good at something? You need fast floating point, you get a Itanic. You need fast general purpose 2-4 threads, you get a Core. You need moderate performance in an igloo that's too cold, you get a Pentium IV (and a free sunroof in a few hours)*. New cores, in theory, represent markets with clear needs. Chipzilla has a lot of markets to cater to. This implies personalized cores -- or a market for someone else who will.
3. 4MB of cache can be expensive-- but once you add sufficient redunandancy to it, the yield hit isn't that bad. From there, performance will speak for itself and the market will determine if the performance is worth the extra die area.
4. Merge with nVidia? Intel should send a team of people to make a DirectX 12 tuned core (see 1. above) and another to study the future of OpenGL so the other team doesn't screw things up for them. This probably implies a core that concentrates on 32 or 64 bit vectors with a moderate frame buffer -- but if this team can collaborate with the CPU team, they can together come up with a combined MCM (or SCM if they're playing it risky), that will do fantastic things. Again, it's not redoing 15 years of graphics chips that will make Intel greatER -- it's taking 15 years of graphics market experience and tuning the interaction between the CPU and the GPU that will be the next great thing. Game developers are saying that Cell's SPUs are as powerful as the GPU so they have the flexibility of doing stuff in either place -- with sufficient DirectX library support, there are many performance benefits to skipping a completely separate GPU.
* The Pentium IV was pipelined to scale to 6+GHz, but physics won and lessons were learned. While the architecture indeed can handle that with a sufficient power supply and cooling, both of those are far greater than expected.
When I graduated with a B.S., I had a 2.4 GPA. Nobody was interested. I wasn't particuarly interested in the dregs that didn't hang up on me either. My 2.4 was because I don't test well -- I would get a D on a test where my friends would get As, and then the next year we'd be pulling information from previous years and I'd regurgitate it like it was yesterday and they'd still be looking for their books. Maybe I'm generating excuses for myself. I don't know at this point. Anyway, I heard that Masters at my school didn't have exams. The classes were largely project oriented and "exams" were distributed throughout the year and actually catered to the oratorical responses that I could handle.
I received my M.E. from a private engineering school (the oldest in the country, actually), and it set me back a pretty penny. I came out with a 3.5 GPA and got my dream job. The salary paid for the degree in 2 years, judging from my peers who graduated at the same time (factoring in the year it took for school, it may have been more like 6 years). After that, the salary gap starts to close because graduate degrees are only a membership card after a few years. What I learned wasn't really so much the engineering (which was interesting, but not closely relevant to my employment because of the gap between abstracted academia and practicing on bleeding edge technologies). Instead of taking a research project and thesis (M.S.), I took 2 MBA classes (M.E.) -- and let me tell you, what I learned there has already paid for the Masters again. Understanding the time value of money, mortgage tables and the like has been very useful.
Getting a graduate degree really paid off for me.
I did some analysis and talked to some alums and never found a payoff for PhD.
Of course they sold more DS Lites in Europe. They get to buy a black one. Offer me a black, blue, or some other dark color of the DS Lite and I'll go out and buy it right now. It may seem silly but I can just imagine how tore up that shiney white finish will look after a month. Give me a black one too!
I heard the black one was much bigger than the white one. But that yellow one was so tiny!
When the Wiimote is pointed at the screen, you obviously intend to be aiming, so that's your fine control. The analog joystick is probably for directions -- forward back side to side like the keyboard is today. Left to resolve, of course, is the fast turnarounds. I'd like to suggest that you could be running around pointed ahead, ready to fire. You're motivated to turn, so you point the gun off the screen to one side (left, right, up, down, whatever). The speed at which you move the Wiimote suggests how fast you want to turn. When you're done, you either want to switch to fine aim mode (Wiimote back at the screen), or want to be able to shoot at people in the way (also forward). So, it's easy to use "at screen" and "just flipped away from the screen" as the commands to indicate what you request. I think it would feel very intuitive too.
But not disclosing your passphrase, password or keys IS the crime in this case.
The first person to be charged with this crime can fight The Man all the way up to the Supreme Court. A quick look suggests that the past 4 administrations each have two people there, so one has a glimmer of hope that their integrity remains. From there, one would have a good battle citing the 4th and 5th amendments and actually strike down the law in question. The EFF and ACLU would probably help with this.
Of course, the need to go to this battle in the first place is offensive and reminds us of the second amendment.
In the 1970s, my mother was one of the programmers for the University of Maine's computer. They used the SSN behind the scenes as a student ID number (like so many universities today). Turned out, they had two accepted applicants with the same number. After some phone calls to verify that each applicant was certain, they talked to the SSA. In the 1970s, their story was that the SSN was not guaranteed to be unique. Nobody should be assuming it to be such. Long story short, the University of Maine couldn't switch student ID schemes fast enough, and they told the second student to accept that he had to get a new number if he wanted to attend -- he did get a new number.
If we can share the software updates between macs, it would be a good thing. With 3 macs in my house, why should I have to download the updates 3 times? I should be able to get a copy from the mac on my local net that downloaded it first. I just hope they allow the torrent client to have a throttle on it.
What if the torrent didn't leave the local network? Azureus can detect machines on the local network -- who needs to throttle when only one machine is downloading over the thin pipe and all the machines in the house share the fat pipe to spread the wealth.
I'd bet Apple isn't looking for help with their bandwidth costs -- with their user base, the support issues may be difficult. But the user experience for multi-Mac households would vastly improve if only one Mac did the slow download (100-200KBps for most of us on cable?) and the rest quickly distributed the patches at local network speed (1-10MBps or more?).
This show has the potential to be exceptionally expensive. In BSG, we see the result of the Cylon war: Battlestar Galactica is a non-networked machine. There are isolated computers, but everyone works with printouts and handsets. Computers are not trusted.
Let's see a show from the creators of the Cylon. Those who can create an AI that's capable of running off, cloning its creators and switching to monotheism ("I typed 'God'? I meant 'Gods'!"). Let's see what a piece of technological marvel the Viper Mark I is. Let's see what taught the lesson to stop networking computers.
For God's sake, let it rest for a while. Generate some fresh ideas. In this age of real war, and more gritty realistic fare like Battlestar Galactica and Firefly, Star Trek has become hokey and stale. Let it rest until its time comes around again.
Battlestar Galactica. An excellent point of comparison. Graphics aren't fantastic, but they're good. What SFX shots are shown seem to appear to have some realism. Writing is interesting, although certain episodes stick out as forced. Certain SciFi appeal -- which limits the audience. While it's setting records fro the SciFi channel, it's not being bought out by bigger networks.
Firefly. My personal favorite of recent fare. The SFX are a notch below Battlestar Galactica, but the writing makes up for it. There are some inconsistencies which as of yet stand to be reasoned away (like why Zoe really respects Mal). Certain SciFi appeal, although the movie performed like "a below average genre picture" if I recall correctly. The show couldn't sustain the audience to pay the production costs.
You've chosen to compare a hypothetical Star Trek prequel to modern underperforming SciFi. Nemesis, arguably the worst Star Trek movie, required back story and had trouble standing on its own. The appeal to the mass market was zilch, and the appeal to those who watched ST:TNG when it was first run was mediocre, because it seemed to imply that we'd never stopped watching reruns on TNT/Spike. I believe that movies can be an escape from realism. I think that's partially why Star Wars did so well in the face of terrible acting, groundbreaking but horrible SFX and wooden writing -- it was during the cold war. There was an epic story.
How about a Star Trek that stands on its own? A few references here and there for the fans, but largely something that doesn't require a huge back story? Don't make me need to know why it's significant Riker and Troi are marrying (and don't make me remove myself from the story for a reality check, "What happend to Troi and Warf?"). There's no problem with a Kahn tossed in -- a minor character from a single episode to act as a nod to the fanatics -- as long as the movie briefly summarizes in all the right places the gist of the conflict.
Wait... you put 10 2.5M graphics on your web page describing an escalation of rivalries between two cross-continental engineering schools, and we killed your web server?
I used to agree with you. I used to believe that patents were necessary for innovations to see the mass market, necessary for companies to see the return on investment necessary to put forth the effort. These days, however, I'm less certain -- and I hold 6 patents and am about to file for #7.
In theory, companies put forth a pile of R&D and in return receive some exclusivity over the idea. In practice, a whole lot of companies race towards the same goals, and filing the patent is the finish line. At that point, sometimes exclusivity creates prices so high that the population can't benefit only the elite. Beyond that, there are companies which exist solely to patent ideas and license out the implementation (even when the implementation is the expensive part).
If Sweden abolished patents, they'd probably see some innovation suffer-- but they'd see a whole bunch of industries moving in to take advantage. For example, generic drug makers would love to do business there. Reading patent applications from the rest of the world and then using that as a list of things to explore, they'd do great business from Europeans who travel over the border to get their Rx at lower prices (how much lower would be a question for competition).
There are many companies today which believe that patent portfolios are actually a liability -- they're an advertisement for less scrupulous companies in other countries (see above paragraph), and they're limited to 17 years of protection. A tight company with good control over trade secrets can see the advantage for decades.
The Blue Screen of Death inducer--a service that allows Microsoft to trigger your machine remotely to BSOD on you. Why try to recover from an error when you can just reboot?
My neighbor in college had one of those. Every time he woke me up playing MP3s on his Windows 95 machine too loud, it would blue screen. Of course, the "service" ran on my Linux box... and may have been manual...
And, is anyone else sick of the un-"stoppable" macromedia flash ads that suck up cpu and battery life? I see one now on/. from Neumont University... and it's using 50% of my 1.6GHz cpu, and I can't turn it off.... Fuck Neumont! Fuck Flash ads!
You're not the only one. An increasingly large number of us are doing something about it. When Flash ads started making noise, that was it. "If I want your website to make noise, I'll lick my finger and squeak it accross the screen." Check out Flashblock.
Want to see the flash? Click the icon and it loads. Don't? Just look at all the icons of flash files not loaded. You can add entire domains to your whitelist if you need.
For you old farts(i'm 26) who seem to think old games were better than new games remember the following: point Your memeory doesn't serve you well (neither does my spelling)
you don't remember the bad things, and you will make the good things seem even better than they were. When you remember that really good game that you spend hours playing when you were younger,
you forget about both the bad sides of the game and the other bad games.
I've got you by 3-4 years. I'll take your challenge. I didn't have much money growing up (never poor, I mean, we had an IBM PC in 1981, but it didn't get a single upgrade until 1990). I had to choose my games carefully. I argue that, even if you choose carefully, you can't find "sweet spot" games like those from 20 years ago when plot and game play had to make up for graphical and technical deficiencies. The article steps back ~20 years, so let's do the same.
Test Drive and Test Drive II: The Duel. Today, we might compare it to Burnout and the ilk, but honestly, the controls are mostly the same. Sure, we've got snazzy instant replays and stuff, but we had a really great game 20 years ago. Graphics were... suitable. Test Drive II even had expansion packs for cars and maps.
Starflight. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm still sore over seeing Starflight III get turned into Star Control II. The story could have used another sequel. This game had excellent plot, game play and depth. There were real characters to interact with. Dialogue was somewhat repetitive at times, but there were real twists and turns in how the whole thing played out. You can't show me an equivalent game today. Remember that moment when you figured out who the Uhleghk were?! The Umanu?! (The next person who argues with me about SCII not being SFIII may just force me to break out the star maps of SFII and start pointing out plot "coincidences".)
Starcraft. Even stepping back 10 years ago (we can go a bit further if you want to call Starcraft "Warcraft II.IV" if you like). Intense replayability. This game has no equal. Some of the graphics are dated -- but honestly the 2D graphics would suit just fine today if they were updated to higher resolution monitors.
The reason that the past always appear more glorious than the present,
is that we're repeating the past and this time we have the experience to see the flaws and are too stubborn to revise the past.
No, games today don't have the same appeal. Perhaps I'm handicapping myself by restricting myself from the OCD-fest that MMPORG games (I'm OCD enough that I think one game session would eat my brain for a long time). Honestly, compare whatever games you like. But consider what could have happened with game plot designers from 20 years ago leading a team of modern artists and engine developers. Today it seems like the engine guys lead the artists and the plot guy is a preteen pulled from Myspace.
yeah, like in 6 to 12 months you'll be able to afford it.
Your surplus cash days are over the same time your escrow begins.
Don't worry, it's worth it.
I'm not sure you did it right. When I bought my first house, we found one we could afford to make payments on and still put something away at the end of the month for emergencies. When enough emergencies don't happen for long enough, we buy something like a TV. Since the end of 2003 and the first half of 2004 had enough emergencies that we got in the habit of just saving all we could, we now have enough to be able to get a slightly bigger house far closer to my work.
If your "surplus cash days are over", then you can't afford to lose your job. You can't afford to have any car problems. You can't afford a new sofa, TV or kitchen table (whatever you don't have) to go in your shiny new house. For me, my surplus cash days started the day after I closed on my first house. A responsible mortgage payment equals long term stability and security, even if it isn't a McMansion in the 'burbs.
I'm trying to close on buying a house! And Samsung, Apple's iPod Nano flash supplier comes out with this?
APPLE, please PLEASE do not come out with an Intel Mac portable featuring a flash drive (with its tasty power consumption, lower power and low low low seek times) after I clean out my savings! I would have been exceptionally happy to have a PowerPC flash computer a year ago or 6 months ago, or even maybe 3 months ago, but I'm cleaning out my savings here for the part of a house that the bank won't cover!
Wait 6-12 months for a flash based portable and I'll forgive you for going to Intel.
Let me rephrase what you just said: "iTunes lacks features! They should add features! And use less memory!"
These days, memory footprint doesn't matter. I don't know what iTunes does with all its space, but I suspect most of it is the Quicktime video codecs. That just gets swapped out to disk and doesn't impact the system. Although most of us can spare the RAM, certainly all of us can spare the disk space for 30 megs to get swapped out... Do you actually have performance issues where you think the memory iTunes is using would make a difference? Or is this a pragmatic thing? If we're starting with pragmaticism, it's an interesting place to start with a media player made by a novelty computer maker with eyes wide on RIAA (and arguably soon MPAA) products.
Uh... I know what a "shocker" is, and I'll state here that it's explicitly not "family friendly". Suffice it to say I recommend not doing a Google Image search.
I've lived in my current house for 5 years. I do not get Radio Shack catalogs or advertisements -- obviously they don't have my address. Does this mean that I haven't shopped in a Radio Shack for at least as long? My teenage self -- the one who built a resistor network to get sound out his parallel port on his 286 -- couldn't imagine this situation.
My father went to Radio Shack a few weeks ago looking for a 47uF capacitor for a minor repair, only to find that Radio Shack no longer carries capacitors. At least Fry's was merely out of stock.
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If your point was that there is a place in this world for people who have varying degrees of schooling and real world experience, then I certainly hope I proved it. If you believe I did nothing other than belittle your degree, you're way off base. The only kind of person I think I'm better than is the same kind of person as me but with more ego. I don't know if I'm better than you, but if you're less than 25 and with an ego that size (and a matching chip on your shoulder?), I'm betting you're not experienced enough to justify it.
Your ego and inexperience will kill you. You need to set them aside to learn. There are highly successful people in this world without any degrees at all-- they get there by setting aside their inexperience, leveraging their aptitude and charisma (if you have some, it doesn't come through in text) and taking advantage of the experienced people who lack the other areas. Jobs and Woz are one such team. You should go work for yourself. Either I'm going to be at your door in 15 years with my resume in hand, or you're going to fold within 2 years having learned a great deal about yourself and far better suited for this world.
Unplanned extra features? Not in the real world. Done early? Go to market early or redouble your validation / testing efforts. Being done early is a failure to predict your team.
Son, I have news for you. Despite what mommy tells you, they sent you there because they couldn't breathe with your ego in the room.
I spent 5 years at a private engineering school (bachelors and masters degrees). If you're 19, you don't even know what programming is yet. Maybe you can look at really complex projects and understand segments of them, or even rewrite them. That's the easy stuff, and that's the kind of stuff we hire a 2 year graduate technician to do for us. The hard stuff-- the stuff that gets easier if you understand heritage and history (like when Unix was invented) is less about programming a given goal, and more about meeting needs of the customer.
At 19, you may have been on a successful professional project. You weren't the lead on it though. The stuff you look at the lead and say, "that's stupid"? That's the trade-off that knowing about history helped make.
There are some people who can be very successful without higher education, and some people who only need a 2 year degree to get off their feet to soar with the eagles, but those people are few and very far between. I've worked with a lot of 2 year graduates -- fine people, hard workers and smart employees all of them -- and I really value their work. Most of them have chosen this place in life, and they excel at it, but they underscore the value of my education. I am grateful they have chosen to work with us; doubly so that I spent more time on my education before "heading out".
1. You're purposefully mis-spelling "the" and can call Intel stupid on what grounds? How many CPU architectures have you done that are half as competitive as Core? Direct links are excellent for UP and small SMP systems. When scaling up, the situation is far less clear. In the Hot Chips conference it is clear that Intel is looking at 16+ way systems.
2. Why stop making new cores? Because it makes their compiler people keep working hard? Aren't each core good at something? You need fast floating point, you get a Itanic. You need fast general purpose 2-4 threads, you get a Core. You need moderate performance in an igloo that's too cold, you get a Pentium IV (and a free sunroof in a few hours)*. New cores, in theory, represent markets with clear needs. Chipzilla has a lot of markets to cater to. This implies personalized cores -- or a market for someone else who will.
3. 4MB of cache can be expensive-- but once you add sufficient redunandancy to it, the yield hit isn't that bad. From there, performance will speak for itself and the market will determine if the performance is worth the extra die area.
4. Merge with nVidia? Intel should send a team of people to make a DirectX 12 tuned core (see 1. above) and another to study the future of OpenGL so the other team doesn't screw things up for them. This probably implies a core that concentrates on 32 or 64 bit vectors with a moderate frame buffer -- but if this team can collaborate with the CPU team, they can together come up with a combined MCM (or SCM if they're playing it risky), that will do fantastic things. Again, it's not redoing 15 years of graphics chips that will make Intel greatER -- it's taking 15 years of graphics market experience and tuning the interaction between the CPU and the GPU that will be the next great thing. Game developers are saying that Cell's SPUs are as powerful as the GPU so they have the flexibility of doing stuff in either place -- with sufficient DirectX library support, there are many performance benefits to skipping a completely separate GPU.
* The Pentium IV was pipelined to scale to 6+GHz, but physics won and lessons were learned. While the architecture indeed can handle that with a sufficient power supply and cooling, both of those are far greater than expected.
When I graduated with a B.S., I had a 2.4 GPA. Nobody was interested. I wasn't particuarly interested in the dregs that didn't hang up on me either. My 2.4 was because I don't test well -- I would get a D on a test where my friends would get As, and then the next year we'd be pulling information from previous years and I'd regurgitate it like it was yesterday and they'd still be looking for their books. Maybe I'm generating excuses for myself. I don't know at this point. Anyway, I heard that Masters at my school didn't have exams. The classes were largely project oriented and "exams" were distributed throughout the year and actually catered to the oratorical responses that I could handle.
I received my M.E. from a private engineering school (the oldest in the country, actually), and it set me back a pretty penny. I came out with a 3.5 GPA and got my dream job. The salary paid for the degree in 2 years, judging from my peers who graduated at the same time (factoring in the year it took for school, it may have been more like 6 years). After that, the salary gap starts to close because graduate degrees are only a membership card after a few years. What I learned wasn't really so much the engineering (which was interesting, but not closely relevant to my employment because of the gap between abstracted academia and practicing on bleeding edge technologies). Instead of taking a research project and thesis (M.S.), I took 2 MBA classes (M.E.) -- and let me tell you, what I learned there has already paid for the Masters again. Understanding the time value of money, mortgage tables and the like has been very useful.
Getting a graduate degree really paid off for me.
I did some analysis and talked to some alums and never found a payoff for PhD.
I heard the black one was much bigger than the white one. But that yellow one was so tiny!
When the Wiimote is pointed at the screen, you obviously intend to be aiming, so that's your fine control. The analog joystick is probably for directions -- forward back side to side like the keyboard is today. Left to resolve, of course, is the fast turnarounds. I'd like to suggest that you could be running around pointed ahead, ready to fire. You're motivated to turn, so you point the gun off the screen to one side (left, right, up, down, whatever). The speed at which you move the Wiimote suggests how fast you want to turn. When you're done, you either want to switch to fine aim mode (Wiimote back at the screen), or want to be able to shoot at people in the way (also forward). So, it's easy to use "at screen" and "just flipped away from the screen" as the commands to indicate what you request. I think it would feel very intuitive too.
The first person to be charged with this crime can fight The Man all the way up to the Supreme Court. A quick look suggests that the past 4 administrations each have two people there, so one has a glimmer of hope that their integrity remains. From there, one would have a good battle citing the 4th and 5th amendments and actually strike down the law in question. The EFF and ACLU would probably help with this.
Of course, the need to go to this battle in the first place is offensive and reminds us of the second amendment.
In the 1970s, my mother was one of the programmers for the University of Maine's computer. They used the SSN behind the scenes as a student ID number (like so many universities today). Turned out, they had two accepted applicants with the same number. After some phone calls to verify that each applicant was certain, they talked to the SSA. In the 1970s, their story was that the SSN was not guaranteed to be unique. Nobody should be assuming it to be such. Long story short, the University of Maine couldn't switch student ID schemes fast enough, and they told the second student to accept that he had to get a new number if he wanted to attend -- he did get a new number.
Watch it with a child who has never before seen it.
What if the torrent didn't leave the local network? Azureus can detect machines on the local network -- who needs to throttle when only one machine is downloading over the thin pipe and all the machines in the house share the fat pipe to spread the wealth.
I'd bet Apple isn't looking for help with their bandwidth costs -- with their user base, the support issues may be difficult. But the user experience for multi-Mac households would vastly improve if only one Mac did the slow download (100-200KBps for most of us on cable?) and the rest quickly distributed the patches at local network speed (1-10MBps or more?).
This show has the potential to be exceptionally expensive. In BSG, we see the result of the Cylon war: Battlestar Galactica is a non-networked machine. There are isolated computers, but everyone works with printouts and handsets. Computers are not trusted.
Let's see a show from the creators of the Cylon. Those who can create an AI that's capable of running off, cloning its creators and switching to monotheism ("I typed 'God'? I meant 'Gods'!"). Let's see what a piece of technological marvel the Viper Mark I is. Let's see what taught the lesson to stop networking computers.
Battlestar Galactica. An excellent point of comparison. Graphics aren't fantastic, but they're good. What SFX shots are shown seem to appear to have some realism. Writing is interesting, although certain episodes stick out as forced. Certain SciFi appeal -- which limits the audience. While it's setting records fro the SciFi channel, it's not being bought out by bigger networks.
Firefly. My personal favorite of recent fare. The SFX are a notch below Battlestar Galactica, but the writing makes up for it. There are some inconsistencies which as of yet stand to be reasoned away (like why Zoe really respects Mal). Certain SciFi appeal, although the movie performed like "a below average genre picture" if I recall correctly. The show couldn't sustain the audience to pay the production costs.
You've chosen to compare a hypothetical Star Trek prequel to modern underperforming SciFi. Nemesis, arguably the worst Star Trek movie, required back story and had trouble standing on its own. The appeal to the mass market was zilch, and the appeal to those who watched ST:TNG when it was first run was mediocre, because it seemed to imply that we'd never stopped watching reruns on TNT/Spike. I believe that movies can be an escape from realism. I think that's partially why Star Wars did so well in the face of terrible acting, groundbreaking but horrible SFX and wooden writing -- it was during the cold war. There was an epic story.
How about a Star Trek that stands on its own? A few references here and there for the fans, but largely something that doesn't require a huge back story? Don't make me need to know why it's significant Riker and Troi are marrying (and don't make me remove myself from the story for a reality check, "What happend to Troi and Warf?"). There's no problem with a Kahn tossed in -- a minor character from a single episode to act as a nod to the fanatics -- as long as the movie briefly summarizes in all the right places the gist of the conflict.
Snobs?
"Hey, you're one of those condescending Unix computer users!"
"Here's a nickel, kid, go buy yourself a better computer."
Wait... you put 10 2.5M graphics on your web page describing an escalation of rivalries between two cross-continental engineering schools, and we killed your web server?
I used to agree with you. I used to believe that patents were necessary for innovations to see the mass market, necessary for companies to see the return on investment necessary to put forth the effort. These days, however, I'm less certain -- and I hold 6 patents and am about to file for #7.
In theory, companies put forth a pile of R&D and in return receive some exclusivity over the idea. In practice, a whole lot of companies race towards the same goals, and filing the patent is the finish line. At that point, sometimes exclusivity creates prices so high that the population can't benefit only the elite. Beyond that, there are companies which exist solely to patent ideas and license out the implementation (even when the implementation is the expensive part).
If Sweden abolished patents, they'd probably see some innovation suffer-- but they'd see a whole bunch of industries moving in to take advantage. For example, generic drug makers would love to do business there. Reading patent applications from the rest of the world and then using that as a list of things to explore, they'd do great business from Europeans who travel over the border to get their Rx at lower prices (how much lower would be a question for competition).
There are many companies today which believe that patent portfolios are actually a liability -- they're an advertisement for less scrupulous companies in other countries (see above paragraph), and they're limited to 17 years of protection. A tight company with good control over trade secrets can see the advantage for decades.
My neighbor in college had one of those. Every time he woke me up playing MP3s on his Windows 95 machine too loud, it would blue screen. Of course, the "service" ran on my Linux box... and may have been manual...
You're not the only one. An increasingly large number of us are doing something about it. When Flash ads started making noise, that was it. "If I want your website to make noise, I'll lick my finger and squeak it accross the screen." Check out Flashblock. Want to see the flash? Click the icon and it loads. Don't? Just look at all the icons of flash files not loaded. You can add entire domains to your whitelist if you need.
I've got you by 3-4 years. I'll take your challenge. I didn't have much money growing up (never poor, I mean, we had an IBM PC in 1981, but it didn't get a single upgrade until 1990). I had to choose my games carefully. I argue that, even if you choose carefully, you can't find "sweet spot" games like those from 20 years ago when plot and game play had to make up for graphical and technical deficiencies. The article steps back ~20 years, so let's do the same.
Test Drive and Test Drive II: The Duel. Today, we might compare it to Burnout and the ilk, but honestly, the controls are mostly the same. Sure, we've got snazzy instant replays and stuff, but we had a really great game 20 years ago. Graphics were... suitable. Test Drive II even had expansion packs for cars and maps.
Starflight. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm still sore over seeing Starflight III get turned into Star Control II. The story could have used another sequel. This game had excellent plot, game play and depth. There were real characters to interact with. Dialogue was somewhat repetitive at times, but there were real twists and turns in how the whole thing played out. You can't show me an equivalent game today. Remember that moment when you figured out who the Uhleghk were?! The Umanu?! (The next person who argues with me about SCII not being SFIII may just force me to break out the star maps of SFII and start pointing out plot "coincidences".)
Starcraft. Even stepping back 10 years ago (we can go a bit further if you want to call Starcraft "Warcraft II.IV" if you like). Intense replayability. This game has no equal. Some of the graphics are dated -- but honestly the 2D graphics would suit just fine today if they were updated to higher resolution monitors.
No, games today don't have the same appeal. Perhaps I'm handicapping myself by restricting myself from the OCD-fest that MMPORG games (I'm OCD enough that I think one game session would eat my brain for a long time). Honestly, compare whatever games you like. But consider what could have happened with game plot designers from 20 years ago leading a team of modern artists and engine developers. Today it seems like the engine guys lead the artists and the plot guy is a preteen pulled from Myspace.
I'm not sure you did it right. When I bought my first house, we found one we could afford to make payments on and still put something away at the end of the month for emergencies. When enough emergencies don't happen for long enough, we buy something like a TV. Since the end of 2003 and the first half of 2004 had enough emergencies that we got in the habit of just saving all we could, we now have enough to be able to get a slightly bigger house far closer to my work.
If your "surplus cash days are over", then you can't afford to lose your job. You can't afford to have any car problems. You can't afford a new sofa, TV or kitchen table (whatever you don't have) to go in your shiny new house. For me, my surplus cash days started the day after I closed on my first house. A responsible mortgage payment equals long term stability and security, even if it isn't a McMansion in the 'burbs.
I'm trying to close on buying a house! And Samsung, Apple's iPod Nano flash supplier comes out with this?
APPLE, please PLEASE do not come out with an Intel Mac portable featuring a flash drive (with its tasty power consumption, lower power and low low low seek times) after I clean out my savings! I would have been exceptionally happy to have a PowerPC flash computer a year ago or 6 months ago, or even maybe 3 months ago, but I'm cleaning out my savings here for the part of a house that the bank won't cover!
Wait 6-12 months for a flash based portable and I'll forgive you for going to Intel.
Let me rephrase what you just said: "iTunes lacks features! They should add features! And use less memory!"
These days, memory footprint doesn't matter. I don't know what iTunes does with all its space, but I suspect most of it is the Quicktime video codecs. That just gets swapped out to disk and doesn't impact the system. Although most of us can spare the RAM, certainly all of us can spare the disk space for 30 megs to get swapped out... Do you actually have performance issues where you think the memory iTunes is using would make a difference? Or is this a pragmatic thing? If we're starting with pragmaticism, it's an interesting place to start with a media player made by a novelty computer maker with eyes wide on RIAA (and arguably soon MPAA) products.
Uh... I know what a "shocker" is, and I'll state here that it's explicitly not "family friendly". Suffice it to say I recommend not doing a Google Image search.
In a row?
I've lived in my current house for 5 years. I do not get Radio Shack catalogs or advertisements -- obviously they don't have my address. Does this mean that I haven't shopped in a Radio Shack for at least as long? My teenage self -- the one who built a resistor network to get sound out his parallel port on his 286 -- couldn't imagine this situation.
My father went to Radio Shack a few weeks ago looking for a 47uF capacitor for a minor repair, only to find that Radio Shack no longer carries capacitors. At least Fry's was merely out of stock.
Son, do you even know what an acoustic coupler is?