What they're actually saying is that you can make an A4-sized print of a photo taken at 12mpix and still need a magnifying glass to see the pixels.
While there are still niche markets (digital poster art, ridiculous levels of digital zoom) that benefit from massive resolution pictures, for the vast majority of consumers they're better off taking blurry photos of their friends at a party at 3mpix than at 5mpix, let alone at 15mpix or more, simply because then the images take less space to store and less time to transmit.
Also, optics play a far larger part in the image quality equation than vendors generally admit. At one of my old workplaces, we had an Olympus 2MPix digital camera that had rather nice (for a non-SLR) optics. It took far better photos than the 2MPix Sony digital camera owned by a guy there, even though the Sony was 2-3 years newer. I'd say leaving the resolution at 10-15mpix and working on colour reproduction, light sensitivity and optics will have far more impact on image quality than simply pumping out more fuzzy pixels.
I've wanted to do something like this for years, the only thing that stops me exactly that - any focussed radiation powerful enough to pop a mosquito would do worse to my retina.
I'd guess focussed sound would be a better option, use 3-4 heavy duty subwoofers, phased so that they interfere constructively to produce a massive pressure spike where your mozzie is flying.
Something else to remember; refusing to answer simple, innocuous questions from a friendly officer is tantamount to saying you won't talk without your lawyer present. Which, in case you don't watch many crime shows, is code for "it was me but you'll have to prove it".
There are enough satellites up there that we can get *some* communications without cables. Those satellite links suck at the best of times, though - if nothing else they have horrible latency, and can't approach the huge bandwidth of an undersea cable full of optic fibres. Just like in your own apartment, wireless is cool for convenience and for when you have a kitten (or fishing trawler) messing with your wiring, but cabling is always faster and better for fixed installations.
Of course, it'll allow manufacturers to gyp 50-year-old men who aren't quite committed enough to their mid-life crises to buy sports cars into paying an extra $2k for Mobius bike frames that shave an extra 200 grammes off the weight of a 6kg bike. These men will then lean said bikes against the railings of expensive snobby coffee shops at 7am and drink coffee while pretending that it's OK to sit around wearing brightly coloured skintight lycra when you're over 50. Sadly, they will never actually realise that the whole point of a 'cafe racer' bike was that it HAD AN ENGINE.
Also, Mobius bike frames will have the added bonus that they even more easily pretzel into a mobius strip themselves when confronted with a kerb, pot-hole or other such part of the Real World.
Those are some pretty shonky results, to tell you the truth. Most of them focus on parents of very young children, or view babies as some kind of incontinent stock portfolio.
BellaOnline - a rant from a 'childfree' woman who is trying to convince the world and herself that babies are terrible, with an oblique reference to "a recent study conducted by the American Sociological Association"
Salon.com - the woman's main concern is whether a child will pay for itself financially. Hint: We don't reproduce for (our own) profit.
Independent.ie - at last something vaguely resembling data, but it's only based on pre-preschool aged children. That's the hard bit, when people say children are rewarding they don't mean that it's peachy from day 1.
Telegraph.co.uk - Again focussing on anecdotal evidence from one guy (Professor though he be) with little to back it up. Also concludes that financial stress is a large part of why childraising is difficult.
Newsweek - claiming that people find children disappointing because life as a parent isn't one big Napisan commercial.
If you put a survey in a friggin women's mag, you're going to get responses from a lot of frustrated, tired, cranky women who are dealing with a child in its terrible twos. Talk about selection bias. You're not going to get responses from the ones who are happily playing with their kids, or sitting cuddled up with hubby with a coffee and a book while the kid sleeps.
And most importantly, what all of the above are missing is that we have a deep psychological drive to reproduce, and unless it's satisfied, all the bigscreen TVs and fancy cars in the world won't make you really feel contented.
People who say "you can't try life both ways" are wrong - I had 26 years to experience life as single, and as part of a childless couple. I know what it's like. Other than getting a slightly faster car, or a bigger house, there's nowhere really to go. Sure, the world's your playground, but while playgrounds are fun to visit, you have to grow up eventually.
What I can say from experience is that there's no feeling in the world like holding your baby for the first time. Suddenly your life isn't all about you any more. It's an experience that could greatly benefit a lot of people, IMO.
Further, assuming your numbers are correct, I fail to see the problem unless you believe there is something wrong with non Europeans.
Below, you call out a sibling poster for raising a straw man, and yet here you do exactly the same thing. Europe is home to an incredible diversity in culture, with many ancient and unique small towns/villages which will disappear without increased birth rates. Immigrant populations can't completely maintain the culture of the destination even if they want to, which by observation they very seldom do.
So when the GP post said
Most places in Europe would be well served by a doubling or tripling of the number of native babies.
and you countered with
Second, you are a racist.
I have no choice but to paraphrase your own response:
I fail to see the problem unless you believe there is something wrong with Europeans.
I've become convinced that the reason America has been on top is our peculiar form of laziness. We're always looking for a better, smarter, and most of all easier way to do things, and that is precisely where innovation comes from.
In fact, here you're echoing a chap called Larry Wall, I think you may have heard of him. From the second edition of Programming Perl (sourced from his wiki page:
The Three Virtues of a Programmer: 1. Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris.
2. Impatience - The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and hubris.
3. Hubris - Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and impatience.
These qualities, while beneficial to the tech industry, are somewhat at odds with the traditional mindset in some more diligent cultures.:)
That sounds like it might have been Dodo, back in the 256k days. Telstra also used to charge like a wounded bull for over-cap usage, and only implemented shaping in 2002-2003 iirc.
TPG also springs to mind, not so much with the low quotas and hideous excess charges, but with overly punitive exit fee clauses... like signing users up for "no upfront cost" for a 24 month period, then not even bothering to activate the service, and when the user cancels the contract they're told to pay the rest of their 24 months upfront as severance fee. The TIO was busy with them for a while.
If it were non-invasive (ie. without physical or mental side effects) then why not? Because it might unearth further wrongdoing? Don't get me wrong, I tend to be more on the side of freedom than the side of safety, but from a purely utilitarian point of view, if you COULD read minds, wouldn't it be the simplest way to determine guilt? Except in the case of the insane, of course... but they're treated differently anyway, and presumably if one could read thoughts one could determine sanity.
Of course, if you find someone who was _planning_ something big, that's another story... but then, the concept of thoughtcrime is so bad because we _can't_ prove intentionality. If we could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a person was mentally prepared and planning to bomb a building / kidnap a child / go on a shooting rampage, would we still consider it unpunishable until after the act?
Anything you share with third parties, even to a limited audience, can no longer be considered private.
Never could, really. It's just that this information, just like most other information, is now much more readily accessible because it's indexed online. Twenty years ago they'd have had a P.I. snooping around hoping to snap photos of the guy frolicking with buxom wenches. Now they just check his Facebook page for said photos that he's snapped himself.
Actually, from what I've heard from people with experience outsourcing that it is indeed social factors that make offshoring not worth it. Your average Indian tech is just as smart as your average American tech, and a hell of a lot more motivated. The problem is, he tells his boss "It's nearly done, we just have a few bugs to iron out" and the boss passes on a message of "Yes, sir, it is all very exceedingly good and ready for production straight away!". He has to - if he doesn't he gets fired and one of the hundreds waiting in line takes his place.
In the same way, when outsourcing to China, problems aren't reported because doing so means you lose face, and/or are seen as less loyal to your company.
That said, I don't think that you can say China has a "lack of growth", up until last year they were lightyears ahead of anywhere else in terms of economic growth and they're still chugging forward while everyone else starts sliding backwards. They're rapidly making the transition from ripping off existing tech to being the innovators in their own right.
If you told me I could have unlimited *anything* (unless it was actually limited by the other terms of the contract, like "unlimited downloads 56k dialup" which can't download more than a few hundred MB a week) I'd think they needed their head examined. If you tell me I can have an unlimited number of pies for $10, I don't expect to be able to back up a truck and take 10,000 of them.
Yes, but telcos tend to charge for usage of their mobile networks. So while in your little internet-centric world it's not much, if you're paying 1c per message that's $20k-$30k per day of additional overhead to provide a free service.
Your obsession with unlimited-service-for-fixed-fee contracts in America is quite frankly puzzling. It's like you have to make every part of your capitalistic society and make it into pseudo-communism.
It's never going to be possible to charge people a flat fee for all-you-can-use X without the bulk of the consumers overpaying for their moderate usage of X to subsidise the few who exploit the service. This holds for values of X such as bandwidth, pasta, text messaging, icecream, whatever.
Mutilate is still the best dagger spec (IMO). After levelling to 50 as subtlety I can't imagine going back to being so horribly combo-point poor.
That said I'm a prot warr by nature, just levelling a rogue because my warrior (who was rolled just after the first expansion purely to be a PvP character) got so thorougly screwed by Blizz that I need a new PvP character.:/
I think we're looking at different quality levels here. A game always needs background code in order to work, yes, but that's not really an "engine" unless it's an abstracted, generalised framework within which the game is built. If the engine flat-out doesn't work, or has critical bugs, then of course the game won't work. Commercial games work, though, in the vast majority. If a game is struggling to even install and run, it's not going to be competing for peoples' precious leisure time even if it's free.
If the game does have a distinct, general purpose engine, then things like the camera, game mechanics, and controls are all configurable, so if they're behaving badly it's usually a design issue rather than a technical flaw with the engine. I'd put it this way - think of the engine as being 'hardware' and the game as being 'software' that's run on the engine. If the hardware doesn't work, obviously the system won't work. But the hardware's the easy bit to get right compared to the software, which is a lot more complex and determines almost everything about the actual behaviour of the system.
I'll concede that the interface was the least crucial of the systems I was talking about as 'essential', but what I was trying to get at is that no matter how _technologically_ cruddy the code behind the pretty pictures is, what matters to the user is their gameplay experience. It could be powered by zombie hamsters pulling pieces of string to animate your character, but if to the user it looks smooth, responsive, engaging, and enjoyable, then it's a good game.
New raid instance in 3.1: Fortress of Zul'Enseesoft.
In the heart of the desert wasteland of Tek Saas, the foreboding fortress looms. Balanced for teams of 10 to 25 players, this raid offers dynamic legal battles, devious new patent challenges and exciting new loot!
Example Loot:
[Attaché Case of Litigation]
Off Hand Briefcase
Increases intellect by 52
Decreases social conscience by 22
"This case looks expensive"
[The Mighty Pen]
One Hand Dagger
Increases writer's strike by 28
On use: Wraps target in red tape, immobilizing them for 4 seconds.
"This pen is very sharp."
It's rule 82 of the Internet. If you find a way to make a living doing something that someone else can only do as a hobby, they will post on Slashdot and call you a sellout and a greedy corporate whore.
Slashdot Mirror
Spelling police.
Grammar police!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_stop
What they're actually saying is that you can make an A4-sized print of a photo taken at 12mpix and still need a magnifying glass to see the pixels.
While there are still niche markets (digital poster art, ridiculous levels of digital zoom) that benefit from massive resolution pictures, for the vast majority of consumers they're better off taking blurry photos of their friends at a party at 3mpix than at 5mpix, let alone at 15mpix or more, simply because then the images take less space to store and less time to transmit.
Also, optics play a far larger part in the image quality equation than vendors generally admit. At one of my old workplaces, we had an Olympus 2MPix digital camera that had rather nice (for a non-SLR) optics. It took far better photos than the 2MPix Sony digital camera owned by a guy there, even though the Sony was 2-3 years newer. I'd say leaving the resolution at 10-15mpix and working on colour reproduction, light sensitivity and optics will have far more impact on image quality than simply pumping out more fuzzy pixels.
I've wanted to do something like this for years, the only thing that stops me exactly that - any focussed radiation powerful enough to pop a mosquito would do worse to my retina.
I'd guess focussed sound would be a better option, use 3-4 heavy duty subwoofers, phased so that they interfere constructively to produce a massive pressure spike where your mozzie is flying.
Something else to remember; refusing to answer simple, innocuous questions from a friendly officer is tantamount to saying you won't talk without your lawyer present. Which, in case you don't watch many crime shows, is code for "it was me but you'll have to prove it".
There are enough satellites up there that we can get *some* communications without cables. Those satellite links suck at the best of times, though - if nothing else they have horrible latency, and can't approach the huge bandwidth of an undersea cable full of optic fibres. Just like in your own apartment, wireless is cool for convenience and for when you have a kitten (or fishing trawler) messing with your wiring, but cabling is always faster and better for fixed installations.
On the internets?
Of course, it'll allow manufacturers to gyp 50-year-old men who aren't quite committed enough to their mid-life crises to buy sports cars into paying an extra $2k for Mobius bike frames that shave an extra 200 grammes off the weight of a 6kg bike. These men will then lean said bikes against the railings of expensive snobby coffee shops at 7am and drink coffee while pretending that it's OK to sit around wearing brightly coloured skintight lycra when you're over 50. Sadly, they will never actually realise that the whole point of a 'cafe racer' bike was that it HAD AN ENGINE.
Also, Mobius bike frames will have the added bonus that they even more easily pretzel into a mobius strip themselves when confronted with a kerb, pot-hole or other such part of the Real World.
Those are some pretty shonky results, to tell you the truth. Most of them focus on parents of very young children, or view babies as some kind of incontinent stock portfolio.
BellaOnline - a rant from a 'childfree' woman who is trying to convince the world and herself that babies are terrible, with an oblique reference to "a recent study conducted by the American Sociological Association"
Salon.com - the woman's main concern is whether a child will pay for itself financially. Hint: We don't reproduce for (our own) profit.
Independent.ie - at last something vaguely resembling data, but it's only based on pre-preschool aged children. That's the hard bit, when people say children are rewarding they don't mean that it's peachy from day 1.
Telegraph.co.uk - Again focussing on anecdotal evidence from one guy (Professor though he be) with little to back it up. Also concludes that financial stress is a large part of why childraising is difficult.
Newsweek - claiming that people find children disappointing because life as a parent isn't one big Napisan commercial.
If you put a survey in a friggin women's mag, you're going to get responses from a lot of frustrated, tired, cranky women who are dealing with a child in its terrible twos. Talk about selection bias. You're not going to get responses from the ones who are happily playing with their kids, or sitting cuddled up with hubby with a coffee and a book while the kid sleeps.
And most importantly, what all of the above are missing is that we have a deep psychological drive to reproduce, and unless it's satisfied, all the bigscreen TVs and fancy cars in the world won't make you really feel contented.
People who say "you can't try life both ways" are wrong - I had 26 years to experience life as single, and as part of a childless couple. I know what it's like. Other than getting a slightly faster car, or a bigger house, there's nowhere really to go. Sure, the world's your playground, but while playgrounds are fun to visit, you have to grow up eventually.
What I can say from experience is that there's no feeling in the world like holding your baby for the first time. Suddenly your life isn't all about you any more. It's an experience that could greatly benefit a lot of people, IMO.
Further, assuming your numbers are correct, I fail to see the problem unless you believe there is something wrong with non Europeans.
Below, you call out a sibling poster for raising a straw man, and yet here you do exactly the same thing. Europe is home to an incredible diversity in culture, with many ancient and unique small towns/villages which will disappear without increased birth rates. Immigrant populations can't completely maintain the culture of the destination even if they want to, which by observation they very seldom do.
So when the GP post said
Most places in Europe would be well served by a doubling or tripling of the number of native babies.
and you countered with
Second, you are a racist.
I have no choice but to paraphrase your own response:
I fail to see the problem unless you believe there is something wrong with Europeans.
I've become convinced that the reason America has been on top is our peculiar form of laziness. We're always looking for a better, smarter, and most of all easier way to do things, and that is precisely where innovation comes from.
In fact, here you're echoing a chap called Larry Wall, I think you may have heard of him. From the second edition of Programming Perl (sourced from his wiki page:
The Three Virtues of a Programmer:
1. Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris.
2. Impatience - The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and hubris.
3. Hubris - Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and impatience.
These qualities, while beneficial to the tech industry, are somewhat at odds with the traditional mindset in some more diligent cultures. :)
That sounds like it might have been Dodo, back in the 256k days. Telstra also used to charge like a wounded bull for over-cap usage, and only implemented shaping in 2002-2003 iirc.
TPG also springs to mind, not so much with the low quotas and hideous excess charges, but with overly punitive exit fee clauses... like signing users up for "no upfront cost" for a 24 month period, then not even bothering to activate the service, and when the user cancels the contract they're told to pay the rest of their 24 months upfront as severance fee. The TIO was busy with them for a while.
If it were non-invasive (ie. without physical or mental side effects) then why not? Because it might unearth further wrongdoing? Don't get me wrong, I tend to be more on the side of freedom than the side of safety, but from a purely utilitarian point of view, if you COULD read minds, wouldn't it be the simplest way to determine guilt? Except in the case of the insane, of course... but they're treated differently anyway, and presumably if one could read thoughts one could determine sanity.
Of course, if you find someone who was _planning_ something big, that's another story... but then, the concept of thoughtcrime is so bad because we _can't_ prove intentionality. If we could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a person was mentally prepared and planning to bomb a building / kidnap a child / go on a shooting rampage, would we still consider it unpunishable until after the act?
Anything you share with third parties, even to a limited audience, can no longer be considered private.
Never could, really. It's just that this information, just like most other information, is now much more readily accessible because it's indexed online. Twenty years ago they'd have had a P.I. snooping around hoping to snap photos of the guy frolicking with buxom wenches. Now they just check his Facebook page for said photos that he's snapped himself.
Holy crap, it is! O.o
Uh, left half is the analytical side. Right side does the 'creative' work. :P
My ISP (one of the better ones in Australia) charges $2.50/GB for additional data blocks purchased. WTB better broadband service. :(
Actually, from what I've heard from people with experience outsourcing that it is indeed social factors that make offshoring not worth it. Your average Indian tech is just as smart as your average American tech, and a hell of a lot more motivated. The problem is, he tells his boss "It's nearly done, we just have a few bugs to iron out" and the boss passes on a message of "Yes, sir, it is all very exceedingly good and ready for production straight away!". He has to - if he doesn't he gets fired and one of the hundreds waiting in line takes his place.
In the same way, when outsourcing to China, problems aren't reported because doing so means you lose face, and/or are seen as less loyal to your company.
That said, I don't think that you can say China has a "lack of growth", up until last year they were lightyears ahead of anywhere else in terms of economic growth and they're still chugging forward while everyone else starts sliding backwards. They're rapidly making the transition from ripping off existing tech to being the innovators in their own right.
If you told me I could have unlimited *anything* (unless it was actually limited by the other terms of the contract, like "unlimited downloads 56k dialup" which can't download more than a few hundred MB a week) I'd think they needed their head examined. If you tell me I can have an unlimited number of pies for $10, I don't expect to be able to back up a truck and take 10,000 of them.
Yes, but telcos tend to charge for usage of their mobile networks. So while in your little internet-centric world it's not much, if you're paying 1c per message that's $20k-$30k per day of additional overhead to provide a free service.
Your obsession with unlimited-service-for-fixed-fee contracts in America is quite frankly puzzling. It's like you have to make every part of your capitalistic society and make it into pseudo-communism.
It's never going to be possible to charge people a flat fee for all-you-can-use X without the bulk of the consumers overpaying for their moderate usage of X to subsidise the few who exploit the service. This holds for values of X such as bandwidth, pasta, text messaging, icecream, whatever.
Mutilate is still the best dagger spec (IMO). After levelling to 50 as subtlety I can't imagine going back to being so horribly combo-point poor.
:/
That said I'm a prot warr by nature, just levelling a rogue because my warrior (who was rolled just after the first expansion purely to be a PvP character) got so thorougly screwed by Blizz that I need a new PvP character.
Not to be quasipedantic but isn't FUBAR... well... SN? As in AFU? ;)
I think we're looking at different quality levels here. A game always needs background code in order to work, yes, but that's not really an "engine" unless it's an abstracted, generalised framework within which the game is built. If the engine flat-out doesn't work, or has critical bugs, then of course the game won't work. Commercial games work, though, in the vast majority. If a game is struggling to even install and run, it's not going to be competing for peoples' precious leisure time even if it's free.
If the game does have a distinct, general purpose engine, then things like the camera, game mechanics, and controls are all configurable, so if they're behaving badly it's usually a design issue rather than a technical flaw with the engine. I'd put it this way - think of the engine as being 'hardware' and the game as being 'software' that's run on the engine. If the hardware doesn't work, obviously the system won't work. But the hardware's the easy bit to get right compared to the software, which is a lot more complex and determines almost everything about the actual behaviour of the system.
I'll concede that the interface was the least crucial of the systems I was talking about as 'essential', but what I was trying to get at is that no matter how _technologically_ cruddy the code behind the pretty pictures is, what matters to the user is their gameplay experience. It could be powered by zombie hamsters pulling pieces of string to animate your character, but if to the user it looks smooth, responsive, engaging, and enjoyable, then it's a good game.
New raid instance in 3.1: Fortress of Zul'Enseesoft.
In the heart of the desert wasteland of Tek Saas, the foreboding fortress looms. Balanced for teams of 10 to 25 players, this raid offers dynamic legal battles, devious new patent challenges and exciting new loot!
Example Loot:
[Attaché Case of Litigation]
Off Hand Briefcase
Increases intellect by 52
Decreases social conscience by 22
"This case looks expensive"
[The Mighty Pen]
One Hand Dagger
Increases writer's strike by 28
On use: Wraps target in red tape, immobilizing them for 4 seconds.
"This pen is very sharp."
It's rule 82 of the Internet. If you find a way to make a living doing something that someone else can only do as a hobby, they will post on Slashdot and call you a sellout and a greedy corporate whore.