The old NES light gun didn't really have much problem with changing distance; neither did the Sega Genesis light gun, and that used a set top sensor like this one will. Of course, we can't say that technology will always improve, but it seems like this is a well understood problem.
Even fibre comes in a pill, as if eating raw oats and bran is some sort of trial too harsh for people to bear.
Great line. It's funny that when I was a kid one of my favorite technology predictions was that we would have an entire meal in a single pill. Oh, the things I would have missed.
Distrust of intellectuals is at an all time high, because it takes work to understand what they're saying.
Unfortunately, the black hole of post-modern thought has (at least in the eyes of popular culture) thrown academia into obsolescence. Not only are a lot of academics (usually the loudest ones) wrapped up in circular, navel-gazing, meta-scholarship, the post-modernist attack on, and misapplication of, the scientific method has been taken up by religious and political ideologues. I think people just got fed up with the drivel and apparent infighting and stopped listening. (I know it's unfair and inaccurate to characterize all intellectuals this way, but it definitely seems to be how popular culture portrays them)
I have to completely disagree with you. There are a lot of people that are more than willing to spend hundreds of dollars a month on crappy games, especially sequels. Even if they know the game is bad, they just have to own it, either because they're collectors or their friends have it. They're the same people that say things like, "Five hundred dollars is a lot for a PS3, but I know I'll buy it so I can have all three." These are the same people that not only went to the third Star Wars movie, but plan on buying the box set, even though they hated the movies, "just to finish the series."
We're never going to get back to quality games/music/movies until those millions and millions of people stop buying every little thing they see on TV.
I like the intent of your idea, but I think that requiring registration is an unfair barrier to small content producers since it takes a fair bit of money to have a lawyer go through the registration process.
Firefox will let you use any tag you want for formatting; you can even make up your own tags and give them style rules. (X)HTML is for structure, CSS is for style.
But a Big Mac is $3, and you've probably eaten them before so you know what you're getting into. If I was going to pay $1100 for a brand new sandwich, it sure as hell better look like the picture.
but I'm sure eventually the BR capacity will be used (pr0n?).
God, I hope not. Those DVDs with eight hours of scenes swept off the cutting room floor are bad enough, I'd hate to see how much crap they can stuff into a BR disc.
Basically they take the best results and use then to make better results, just like building houses.
For thousands of years, yes, people have passed down the knowledge of (continuing the example) how to build a house, and the state of the art was advanced slowly by a few adventurous men every generation that tried a small variation in house building; even fewer of them survived the winter. But eventually someone figured out that they could look at the different techniques for building houses and theorize why some houses stand up and some don't, then use that theory to predict which new designs should stand up. Sure, you still have to build a few to test your theory, but it's a lot different (and a lot cheaper) than making essentially random variations on the current best model.
That's what science is about: using our observations of what has happened to predict what will happen. You could argue that genetic algorithms do this implicitly, but without the theoretical model it's essentially a very fast, very extensive build-it-and-see cycle. Genetic algorithms (and similar techniques) are important and useful, but they aren't the most efficient way to solve a lot of problems.
If it's just a markup language, most professional scientists are probably savvy enough to use it themselves (they use LaTeX for god's sake). If it enters any kind of widespread use, there will undoubtedly be several software packages to generate the files, as well as plugins for all the popular data management packages.
From the language specification, it looks like it's meant to (at least) let computers notice connections between different research projects that might otherwise go unnoticed. Like if you had someone who could read every published paper in a field and remember every data point and every procedure.
That's not science, that's brute force trial and error. It might be useful, and in some cases even necessary, but avoiding it is exactly why science exists. E.g. we invented mechanics so we don't have to build a million houses and see which ones stand up.
I suspect this misapprehension will change only through hard experience.
Most average users couldn't care less about privacy, and a lot of them take it for granted that their every move is being watched, online and off. And really, there is almost nothing that the average user stands to lose from being spied on, outside of credit card and bank fraud, which were real threats that most people ignored before computers too. Hell, I worked at a restaurant that printed your entire credit card number on the slip that you sign and leave on the table, and only one person complained in the entire time I worked there.
You're right that average users don't understand that just because they can't see it happening doesn't mean it isn't. As a corollary to this, they wouldn't understand that their credit cards have been maxed out at a shoe shop in Buenos Aires because they accidentally installed a program by clicking the wrong thing to close a popup. Instead, they'll probably assume that Amazon was hacked, or that someone found their bank statement in the trash, etc. since something like that was in the news awhile ago.
I think that young males are key in legitimizing a technology once porn has proved that it's viable, but it's middle-aged men with a lot of time and money to experiment with new media delivery technologies that trail blaze. They also don't have to worry about parents or spouses (a lot of them, anyway) seeing an embarassing bill. It's not young men buying porn in hotels, or the porn on demand at home.
But once the mainstream media providers have started noticing a technology is valid, young men have a good excuse to talk their parents/spouses into the technology. I think you can see this cycle in a lot of wildly popular content-delivery technologies.
This article is obviously an ad, but I still take issue with the overly rosy portrait of OSS leaders it paints. The benevolent dictator idea is nice, but it misses the most important point in the comparison between OSS and commercial softare: OSS contributors can make a fork.
A lot of management is about politics, trying to promote your own preferences/ideas while appeasing the other people who have power over you. OSS is rife with this kind of crap, especially since a lot of people put ideological and emotional stake in their projects. The difference is that the leaders of an OSS project have to appease the contributors or they'll have the project taken away from them. Corporate managers can make decisions that their underlings don't like, because they are in control; OSS leaders have to make compromises, even if it's not what they really want for the software.
Both options in OSS can be good or bad -- forks make a more fine-grained set of solutions to the same problem, but they make several similar options that are hard for new users to choose between; compromises can make software appeal to a larger user base, but they can also dilute the vision for the software -- but it is the inherent democracy of OSS that more than anything makes it unique.
Microsoft then spends more money making crippled versions of Vista.
That might apply in the manufacture of physical products, but making crippled versions of their software should take no more than changing an option in the build process. The way Windows seems to be built, they might not even have to recompile anything, but rather just change which components are packaged. Of course there's a little extra testing and product design effort, but that would be a small added cost since that stuff was already happening for the other version.
And I, for one, will be bitterly complaining about it. Damn kids with their metaverses just don't appreciate a good regularverse when they see one. It was good enough for me, it should be good enough for them.
It's useful in businesses where it's like a long-distance intercom, i.e. people have very short conversations, they don't need any introductory talk, they can reasonably expect the person at the other end to respond quickly. Marketing the service for the general public was just stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
help explain it to the laymen who is used to the 8bit.8bit.8bit.8bit representation of ipv4.
I'd wager that anyone who is used to any representation of ipv4 is not a layman.
The old NES light gun didn't really have much problem with changing distance; neither did the Sega Genesis light gun, and that used a set top sensor like this one will. Of course, we can't say that technology will always improve, but it seems like this is a well understood problem.
Even fibre comes in a pill, as if eating raw oats and bran is some sort of trial too harsh for people to bear.
Great line. It's funny that when I was a kid one of my favorite technology predictions was that we would have an entire meal in a single pill. Oh, the things I would have missed.
Distrust of intellectuals is at an all time high, because it takes work to understand what they're saying.
Unfortunately, the black hole of post-modern thought has (at least in the eyes of popular culture) thrown academia into obsolescence. Not only are a lot of academics (usually the loudest ones) wrapped up in circular, navel-gazing, meta-scholarship, the post-modernist attack on, and misapplication of, the scientific method has been taken up by religious and political ideologues. I think people just got fed up with the drivel and apparent infighting and stopped listening. (I know it's unfair and inaccurate to characterize all intellectuals this way, but it definitely seems to be how popular culture portrays them)
Not only can they run Linux, they can be condescending to the dogs that don't.
I have to completely disagree with you. There are a lot of people that are more than willing to spend hundreds of dollars a month on crappy games, especially sequels. Even if they know the game is bad, they just have to own it, either because they're collectors or their friends have it. They're the same people that say things like, "Five hundred dollars is a lot for a PS3, but I know I'll buy it so I can have all three." These are the same people that not only went to the third Star Wars movie, but plan on buying the box set, even though they hated the movies, "just to finish the series."
We're never going to get back to quality games/music/movies until those millions and millions of people stop buying every little thing they see on TV.
I like the intent of your idea, but I think that requiring registration is an unfair barrier to small content producers since it takes a fair bit of money to have a lawyer go through the registration process.
Firefox will let you use any tag you want for formatting; you can even make up your own tags and give them style rules. (X)HTML is for structure, CSS is for style.
Customer: Hey, Google stopped working.
Friend: Yeah, it doesn't work for me either. I guess Google sucks now, just use Yahoo.
But a Big Mac is $3, and you've probably eaten them before so you know what you're getting into. If I was going to pay $1100 for a brand new sandwich, it sure as hell better look like the picture.
It'll never work! Madness, I say!
God, I hope not. Those DVDs with eight hours of scenes swept off the cutting room floor are bad enough, I'd hate to see how much crap they can stuff into a BR disc.
Be careful though, I hear those nano-splinters are impossible to get out of your hands.
Basically they take the best results and use then to make better results, just like building houses.
For thousands of years, yes, people have passed down the knowledge of (continuing the example) how to build a house, and the state of the art was advanced slowly by a few adventurous men every generation that tried a small variation in house building; even fewer of them survived the winter. But eventually someone figured out that they could look at the different techniques for building houses and theorize why some houses stand up and some don't, then use that theory to predict which new designs should stand up. Sure, you still have to build a few to test your theory, but it's a lot different (and a lot cheaper) than making essentially random variations on the current best model.
That's what science is about: using our observations of what has happened to predict what will happen. You could argue that genetic algorithms do this implicitly, but without the theoretical model it's essentially a very fast, very extensive build-it-and-see cycle. Genetic algorithms (and similar techniques) are important and useful, but they aren't the most efficient way to solve a lot of problems.
If it's just a markup language, most professional scientists are probably savvy enough to use it themselves (they use LaTeX for god's sake). If it enters any kind of widespread use, there will undoubtedly be several software packages to generate the files, as well as plugins for all the popular data management packages.
From the language specification, it looks like it's meant to (at least) let computers notice connections between different research projects that might otherwise go unnoticed. Like if you had someone who could read every published paper in a field and remember every data point and every procedure.
That's not science, that's brute force trial and error. It might be useful, and in some cases even necessary, but avoiding it is exactly why science exists. E.g. we invented mechanics so we don't have to build a million houses and see which ones stand up.
Maybe.
I suspect this misapprehension will change only through hard experience.
Most average users couldn't care less about privacy, and a lot of them take it for granted that their every move is being watched, online and off. And really, there is almost nothing that the average user stands to lose from being spied on, outside of credit card and bank fraud, which were real threats that most people ignored before computers too. Hell, I worked at a restaurant that printed your entire credit card number on the slip that you sign and leave on the table, and only one person complained in the entire time I worked there.
You're right that average users don't understand that just because they can't see it happening doesn't mean it isn't. As a corollary to this, they wouldn't understand that their credit cards have been maxed out at a shoe shop in Buenos Aires because they accidentally installed a program by clicking the wrong thing to close a popup. Instead, they'll probably assume that Amazon was hacked, or that someone found their bank statement in the trash, etc. since something like that was in the news awhile ago.
I think that young males are key in legitimizing a technology once porn has proved that it's viable, but it's middle-aged men with a lot of time and money to experiment with new media delivery technologies that trail blaze. They also don't have to worry about parents or spouses (a lot of them, anyway) seeing an embarassing bill. It's not young men buying porn in hotels, or the porn on demand at home.
But once the mainstream media providers have started noticing a technology is valid, young men have a good excuse to talk their parents/spouses into the technology. I think you can see this cycle in a lot of wildly popular content-delivery technologies.
It seems like the grant money would have been better spent funding an OSS code analysis tool instead of this one shot deal. Bureaucracy in action.
At infinity the bug rate will in fact reach zero, or so says the theory.
At which point you throw out the code base and start over, because "the code is too ugly."
This article is obviously an ad, but I still take issue with the overly rosy portrait of OSS leaders it paints. The benevolent dictator idea is nice, but it misses the most important point in the comparison between OSS and commercial softare: OSS contributors can make a fork.
A lot of management is about politics, trying to promote your own preferences/ideas while appeasing the other people who have power over you. OSS is rife with this kind of crap, especially since a lot of people put ideological and emotional stake in their projects. The difference is that the leaders of an OSS project have to appease the contributors or they'll have the project taken away from them. Corporate managers can make decisions that their underlings don't like, because they are in control; OSS leaders have to make compromises, even if it's not what they really want for the software.
Both options in OSS can be good or bad -- forks make a more fine-grained set of solutions to the same problem, but they make several similar options that are hard for new users to choose between; compromises can make software appeal to a larger user base, but they can also dilute the vision for the software -- but it is the inherent democracy of OSS that more than anything makes it unique.
Microsoft then spends more money making crippled versions of Vista.
That might apply in the manufacture of physical products, but making crippled versions of their software should take no more than changing an option in the build process. The way Windows seems to be built, they might not even have to recompile anything, but rather just change which components are packaged. Of course there's a little extra testing and product design effort, but that would be a small added cost since that stuff was already happening for the other version.
we can have our web 2.0 applications just fine without the dregs of humanity that are advertiser messing things up for us.
Who do you think is footing the bill for those applications and the infrastructure to support them?
when we turn 60, that maybe the social norm.
And I, for one, will be bitterly complaining about it. Damn kids with their metaverses just don't appreciate a good regularverse when they see one. It was good enough for me, it should be good enough for them.
It's useful in businesses where it's like a long-distance intercom, i.e. people have very short conversations, they don't need any introductory talk, they can reasonably expect the person at the other end to respond quickly. Marketing the service for the general public was just stupid.