The Wii was by and large a failure. Nintendo made money on it, but the piles that Microsoft did this generation. The reality here is gaming is staying exactly where it always has - with the interesting side-effect at the moment that the new generation of consoles look like they'll be running mid-level hardware from the get-go, rather then the usual next-gen hardware which PCs then catch up to later.
Linux still desperately needs a solid graphics stack that OEMs will actually target for drivers in a serious way.
This has been predicted since the 90s and has failed to materialize. It has failed to materialize further in the current generation of gaming consoles, which aren't even ahead in terms of hardware to PCs anymore: the chips and processors powering the new generation are approximately mid-level graphics which can be obtained today. Not in the near future - but now.
While what we consider "the PC" may change, it seems pretty apparent that the future is more platform diversity using off-the-shelf components, not less. So long as people still game with a keyboard and mouse, on a machine they might also use for other things, "the PC" as a gaming platform will exist. And with the current trends, it seems likely that PC market-share is only going to increase.
It is also worth noting that centralized coal-fired power stations ae a good deal more efficient then individual ICEs, and a hell of a lot easier to regulate and keep that way.
No the point of deliberately diluting value is to promote lending. All the "real businesses" you talk about generally require a liquid short and medium term loan market in order to survive since they can't hold enough capital to cover shortfalls in sales or conversely to expand to meet demand they can see but not service quickly.
And you know, meanwhile against all of this more people are lost more money to BitCoin then they have holding actual US dollars invested in real business enterprises.
You can commit genocide rapidly with artillery and airstrikes too - that's not really the issue.
At it's core this is really a debate over liability and perception. If you setup a perimeter gun, who's liable when it kills someone? If it's supposed to have IFF and it fails then who's liable? The guy who set it up? The manufacturer? etc.
But more important then that is very much perception: the law of armed conflict exist because war is not eternal, it has to end someday and we'd like that to be sooner. Where robots fit into this is an interesting question: indiscriminate machines that you know group X unleashed on you probably is somewhat worse then group X's soldiers showing up, since the perception of who was responsible isn't clear - if it's not just the soldiers, it might as well be all of them so let's go kill all their civilians when we get the chance.
But conversely robots offer some weird modifiers to that possibility - after all, it's conceivable you could build an armored soldier which would only ever fire back at muzzle flashes with pinpoint fire (maybe lasers?) meaning it would be staggeringly unlikely to ever hit a civilian. This sure would help a lot in asymmetric warfare, but then, if the robot can't "die" should it kill at all or should we only use tazer and dispersal weapons?
This seems entirely at odds with the reality of US treasuries in certain categories experiencing negative yields for the past few months and China continnuing to hoover them up like its going out of style. Meanwhile, EU countries are actually experiencing debt refinancing issues, hence all the bail outs.
Where exact;y do you imagine all this capital can actually flee to?
Oh woe is you, considering Mt Gox has been taken down as well on similar charges. You put your money in unregulated, opaque non-physical assets - you got what you deserved.
Except the Ubuntu phone is on to a fairly good concept here: smartphones are getting powerful enough to become desktop PCs. This is an obvious area where you'd actually want a desktop OS running - or at least very compatible - with the phone.
Where they may get tripped up is the trend towards augmented reality type systems, but that's a ways off and there's plenty of low-level work to be done (since AR falls more into the desktop OS design scale then the phone one).
This is the first I've heard of the project, but from a cursory glance at http://www.ubuntu.com/phone , I'm pretty excited. Have the phone for on the go, then dock it and use it as a full PC when at home. Definitely, sign me up!
Yeah I love this concept. With the dock for my S4, I can plug in all the peripherals just fine - what I need is the OS support to run full desktop apps on it in this mode. An Ubuntu-like OS would be ideal (though I'd probably try to run Cinnamon or something instead for a DE).
With the point being, that it's not a problem with either approach since it depends on an app developer thinking "I should monitor my configuration for changes".
It does it when something is a "remove" and not an upgrade operation I've found. apt treats a remove and install for two packages that provide the same dependency as two separate operations - it tries to remove and normalize the system, before it installs the new one. So when it's something like xscreensaver it tries to remove the entire DE.
I think it's just a case of "because different" and "not developed here". I don't see how they could make any significant improvements over apt, but it doesn't surprise me from this group of hipsters.
Stop pissing in the pool Ubuntu.
It does seem a trifle odd because, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't anything preventing existing tools from working normally with.deb packages that just happen to include everything, and have no defined dependencies. There might be some modest changes needed to allow you to process packages that don't do anything requiring root privileges without being asked for them; but that hardly seems like enough to justify an entire new tool.
Isn't there a D-Bus interface specifically for doing "root-less" installations of new packages - i.e. you say "install this!" and it can check if you're allowed to, then do it?
Also isn't this an app-problem? There's no specific reason any Windows app will actually re-read a changed registry key. It's easy enough to stick an inotify on your config files (and tons of daemons do exactly this).
apt still has a tendency to create circular rings of dependencies ("remove one package, watch as it tries to remove your entire desktop environment"). Although within that context, this still feels like the wrong answer since the real issue is apt can be very silly about inspecting the operation you ask it to perform and concluding that everything will be fine (and there's no decent user tools to say "I'm breaking this, it's ok, let it stay broken").
Online dedup is the wrong solution to the problem since you have to keep the hash tables in memory. All you need is some install-time intelligence to reference count the files.
Pulse drives aren't exactly that efficient anyway. For the effort and manpower to build one (probably already in space) we could also develop suitable reactors for an nuclear thermal-lightbulb type engine (Project Pluto). That's also old technology, by and large - the engine was tested and functioned, and the principles of operating it with monopropellant in space are hardly an insurmountable challenge and essentially related to other technology (the Skylon engine or any of the other types of scramjets the US military is building)
When on-line tax returns first appeared, one had to get a session certificate first. That disappeared and now I hope the e-tax software does the encryption.
HTTP submission is pretty common, since it's structurally easier to manage then SSL. You just use RSA encrypted payloads instead.
given you only have to take "reasonable steps" to secure customer data, there's not going to be too many $1.7 million repeat-offender fines meted out.
You also need higher penalties for not reporting the breach.
Or Australians will simply never hear about any data losses ever again...
The point of the law is to shutdown the "notified of security flaw, did nothing" issue which shows up on/. repeatedly often in relation to things like banks.
You notify the company, if they do nothing you notify the government, who in turn now have the power to fine the company if they get breached. Cue companies actually reacting to security-flaw notifications rather then ignoring them till something happens.
Well the working idea is you take a wormhole that pops into existence due to quantum foaminess, stabilize it and blow it up to a usable size - and yeah, deal with the tidal forces by kind of the same means. I'm not sure anyone regards the process as especially likely or easy, but still.
Implanted Contact Lenses are the way to go IMO. 20 minute procedure, removable and replaceable if your eyes change substantially. Expensive though - but I'm looking into getting them since my own eyes are starting to fall on the "really can't see" side of things.
Though I suspect I'll be doing the augmented for technology thing soon: my new S4 has NFC and the first thing I looked up for it was how I could have an NFC activated lockscreen. You can buy the implantable chips for that cheaply, and with that and device encryption it would be an incredibly convenient solution.
There's a fair amount of effort focused this way, but the punchline is that you're not going to see 50% efficiency easily. Then you've got waste heat, fire-hazard issues and at that level of effort and expense you're better off going full on with methanol fuel cells (which can do 80%+ efficiency fairly easily).
A battery around the neck is not going to be light. Most of the weight of current-gen devices is now tied up in the batteries.
I think a better solution would be for us to actually put some thought into workflow of hot-swapping rechargeable batteries for a device used for long periods - the iPaq had this with a secondary NiMH cell so you could swap the Li-Ion battery way back in 2000. Surely, with some attention paid to design, the swap action etc. this could actually be made smoothly usable.
Slashdot Mirror
Functionally it's identical to blocking ads to prevent.
The Wii was by and large a failure. Nintendo made money on it, but the piles that Microsoft did this generation. The reality here is gaming is staying exactly where it always has - with the interesting side-effect at the moment that the new generation of consoles look like they'll be running mid-level hardware from the get-go, rather then the usual next-gen hardware which PCs then catch up to later.
Linux still desperately needs a solid graphics stack that OEMs will actually target for drivers in a serious way.
And in fact they do do this (and Microsoft Mice have always been my favorite to - I've never gotten along with Logitech ones).
This has been predicted since the 90s and has failed to materialize. It has failed to materialize further in the current generation of gaming consoles, which aren't even ahead in terms of hardware to PCs anymore: the chips and processors powering the new generation are approximately mid-level graphics which can be obtained today. Not in the near future - but now.
While what we consider "the PC" may change, it seems pretty apparent that the future is more platform diversity using off-the-shelf components, not less. So long as people still game with a keyboard and mouse, on a machine they might also use for other things, "the PC" as a gaming platform will exist. And with the current trends, it seems likely that PC market-share is only going to increase.
It is also worth noting that centralized coal-fired power stations ae a good deal more efficient then individual ICEs, and a hell of a lot easier to regulate and keep that way.
No the point of deliberately diluting value is to promote lending. All the "real businesses" you talk about generally require a liquid short and medium term loan market in order to survive since they can't hold enough capital to cover shortfalls in sales or conversely to expand to meet demand they can see but not service quickly.
And you know, meanwhile against all of this more people are lost more money to BitCoin then they have holding actual US dollars invested in real business enterprises.
You can commit genocide rapidly with artillery and airstrikes too - that's not really the issue.
At it's core this is really a debate over liability and perception. If you setup a perimeter gun, who's liable when it kills someone? If it's supposed to have IFF and it fails then who's liable? The guy who set it up? The manufacturer? etc.
But more important then that is very much perception: the law of armed conflict exist because war is not eternal, it has to end someday and we'd like that to be sooner. Where robots fit into this is an interesting question: indiscriminate machines that you know group X unleashed on you probably is somewhat worse then group X's soldiers showing up, since the perception of who was responsible isn't clear - if it's not just the soldiers, it might as well be all of them so let's go kill all their civilians when we get the chance.
But conversely robots offer some weird modifiers to that possibility - after all, it's conceivable you could build an armored soldier which would only ever fire back at muzzle flashes with pinpoint fire (maybe lasers?) meaning it would be staggeringly unlikely to ever hit a civilian. This sure would help a lot in asymmetric warfare, but then, if the robot can't "die" should it kill at all or should we only use tazer and dispersal weapons?
This seems entirely at odds with the reality of US treasuries in certain categories experiencing negative yields for the past few months and China continnuing to hoover them up like its going out of style. Meanwhile, EU countries are actually experiencing debt refinancing issues, hence all the bail outs.
Where exact;y do you imagine all this capital can actually flee to?
Oh woe is you, considering Mt Gox has been taken down as well on similar charges. You put your money in unregulated, opaque non-physical assets - you got what you deserved.
Because how do you think petrol gets from point A to point B?
Except the Ubuntu phone is on to a fairly good concept here: smartphones are getting powerful enough to become desktop PCs. This is an obvious area where you'd actually want a desktop OS running - or at least very compatible - with the phone.
Where they may get tripped up is the trend towards augmented reality type systems, but that's a ways off and there's plenty of low-level work to be done (since AR falls more into the desktop OS design scale then the phone one).
This is the first I've heard of the project, but from a cursory glance at http://www.ubuntu.com/phone , I'm pretty excited. Have the phone for on the go, then dock it and use it as a full PC when at home. Definitely, sign me up!
Yeah I love this concept. With the dock for my S4, I can plug in all the peripherals just fine - what I need is the OS support to run full desktop apps on it in this mode. An Ubuntu-like OS would be ideal (though I'd probably try to run Cinnamon or something instead for a DE).
With the point being, that it's not a problem with either approach since it depends on an app developer thinking "I should monitor my configuration for changes".
It does it when something is a "remove" and not an upgrade operation I've found. apt treats a remove and install for two packages that provide the same dependency as two separate operations - it tries to remove and normalize the system, before it installs the new one. So when it's something like xscreensaver it tries to remove the entire DE.
I think it's just a case of "because different" and "not developed here". I don't see how they could make any significant improvements over apt, but it doesn't surprise me from this group of hipsters.
Stop pissing in the pool Ubuntu.
It does seem a trifle odd because, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't anything preventing existing tools from working normally with .deb packages that just happen to include everything, and have no defined dependencies. There might be some modest changes needed to allow you to process packages that don't do anything requiring root privileges without being asked for them; but that hardly seems like enough to justify an entire new tool.
Isn't there a D-Bus interface specifically for doing "root-less" installations of new packages - i.e. you say "install this!" and it can check if you're allowed to, then do it?
Also isn't this an app-problem? There's no specific reason any Windows app will actually re-read a changed registry key. It's easy enough to stick an inotify on your config files (and tons of daemons do exactly this).
apt still has a tendency to create circular rings of dependencies ("remove one package, watch as it tries to remove your entire desktop environment"). Although within that context, this still feels like the wrong answer since the real issue is apt can be very silly about inspecting the operation you ask it to perform and concluding that everything will be fine (and there's no decent user tools to say "I'm breaking this, it's ok, let it stay broken").
Online dedup is the wrong solution to the problem since you have to keep the hash tables in memory. All you need is some install-time intelligence to reference count the files.
Pulse drives aren't exactly that efficient anyway. For the effort and manpower to build one (probably already in space) we could also develop suitable reactors for an nuclear thermal-lightbulb type engine (Project Pluto). That's also old technology, by and large - the engine was tested and functioned, and the principles of operating it with monopropellant in space are hardly an insurmountable challenge and essentially related to other technology (the Skylon engine or any of the other types of scramjets the US military is building)
When on-line tax returns first appeared, one had to get a session certificate first. That disappeared and now I hope the e-tax software does the encryption.
HTTP submission is pretty common, since it's structurally easier to manage then SSL. You just use RSA encrypted payloads instead.
given you only have to take "reasonable steps" to secure customer data, there's not going to be too many $1.7 million repeat-offender fines meted out.
You also need higher penalties for not reporting the breach.
Or Australians will simply never hear about any data losses ever again...
The point of the law is to shutdown the "notified of security flaw, did nothing" issue which shows up on /. repeatedly often in relation to things like banks.
You notify the company, if they do nothing you notify the government, who in turn now have the power to fine the company if they get breached. Cue companies actually reacting to security-flaw notifications rather then ignoring them till something happens.
Well the working idea is you take a wormhole that pops into existence due to quantum foaminess, stabilize it and blow it up to a usable size - and yeah, deal with the tidal forces by kind of the same means. I'm not sure anyone regards the process as especially likely or easy, but still.
Implanted Contact Lenses are the way to go IMO. 20 minute procedure, removable and replaceable if your eyes change substantially. Expensive though - but I'm looking into getting them since my own eyes are starting to fall on the "really can't see" side of things.
Though I suspect I'll be doing the augmented for technology thing soon: my new S4 has NFC and the first thing I looked up for it was how I could have an NFC activated lockscreen. You can buy the implantable chips for that cheaply, and with that and device encryption it would be an incredibly convenient solution.
There's a fair amount of effort focused this way, but the punchline is that you're not going to see 50% efficiency easily. Then you've got waste heat, fire-hazard issues and at that level of effort and expense you're better off going full on with methanol fuel cells (which can do 80%+ efficiency fairly easily).
A battery around the neck is not going to be light. Most of the weight of current-gen devices is now tied up in the batteries.
I think a better solution would be for us to actually put some thought into workflow of hot-swapping rechargeable batteries for a device used for long periods - the iPaq had this with a secondary NiMH cell so you could swap the Li-Ion battery way back in 2000. Surely, with some attention paid to design, the swap action etc. this could actually be made smoothly usable.