No. It's fairly normal Mario game. The only "twist" is that you don't have much of a speed control.
There are "pause" tiles, and tiles which move you backwards. Otherwise, Mario walks to the right constantly.
It's a "one button" game -- the player can jump. It's a fun game, but you can't go backwards and get every coin, kill every enemy, destroy every block, and find every secret in one playthrough.
It's a godsend for gamers who only have one thumb free. (feeding a newborn baby can get... dull.)
It's well made -- easily up to Nintendo's normal standards of excellence. The interaction to "sign up" or "log in" to a Nintendo account is shockingly well done: It's hard to describe, but you know how many games make you switch to your mobile browser, sign up for an online account, go to your email, get the validation code, go back to the web page, validate, and finally go back to the app and log in (again). Nintendo went way above and beyond, and made the process the most smooth, fluid experience I've ever seen on any platform.
I love it, and spent the $10 in-app-purchase on it.
By the time we can build these at scale, solar and wind might be so cheap that Thorium isn't going to replace them
Between wind, wave, solar, and hopefully fusion, I have a feeling thorium reactors will fill a specific niche: Burning/disposing of spent fuel. Electricity generated is just gravy.
But it turns out that it's not easy building a viable Thorium reactor. There are a few ideas about how to build such a reactor, but there are still many engineering problems to overcome.
Employees should be retained on the basis of adequacy of their performance, inadequate performance should be corrected, and employees should be separated who cannot or will not improve their performance to meet required standards. Employees should be protected against arbitrary action, personal favoritism, or coercion for partisan political purposes
And for an even longer version, read up about the US "Spoils System", and how it lead to the assassination of a President. It was then replaced by the Merit System, in 1883.
But the fact is it's their content and they should be able to dictate the terms that it is consumed.
A good is only worth what a buyer is willing to spend.
I can say my turd is worth fourteen trillion dollars, and try to get listed as the richest man alive, but unless somebody is willing to spend that money for my effluent, the rest of the world would rightly laugh in my face.
The same is true for copyright holders. They may think they have something worth billions, but it's ultimately only valuable if buyers pay for it.
So the real problem is that the RIAA is in possession of the copyright for something that can be trivially and undetectably violated at a massive scale. Buyers only spend what they think it's worth, and there's the rub: the RIAA is trying to price thier goods above what buyers are willing to spend, and they get nothing.
Manyf producers in every industry price themselves out of the market. If they continue to price themselves out of the market, they can't sustain thier business. The RIAA is simply pricing themselves out of the market, and thier revenue suffers as a result.
Because of the Loudness War, Vinyl really does sound better, because it can't be abused the same way digital recordings can. There's only so much the needle will tolerate.
It's not because Vinyl is "better" -- it's because the mastering on the digital formats is appalling.
Or, perhaps, headphones will start including their own DAC & Amp, and plug in via USB -- which means their performance isn't limited to the circuit on a portable device where the design priority is portability, not quality.
Or maybe people will switch to Bluetooth headphones and stop the getting the cord caught in clothes & yanking on your head.
Any cost conscious product manufacturer uses another NRTL for the small USA market.
Um... no. The US represents the single largest single market in the world, and is roughly 25% of the entire world. No manufacturer can afford to ignore a quarter of the market, any more than they can ignore the E.U. or China.
There are plenty of PSUs which have good safety, and are not UL listed (but UL certified by another NRTL).
That makes NO sense: UL Certification means Underwriters Laboratory did the testing. Another NRTL cannot by definition, UL certify anything
But assuming you meant that the product is certified by a different NRTL: You're ignoring the scope and purpose of an NRTL.
An NRTL can do testing for OSHA compliance. OSHA is only an authority for workplace safety, and nothing else. An NRTL's certification is only valid for an industrial or commercial application, and has no value for products intended for a home.
There are only 17 NRTL's, but even then, they are limited in scope. Each NRTL is only licensed to test a specific set of criteria: For example, the NSF is an NRTL, but it's wholly inappropriate for the group to certify an electrical product. There only a couple of NRTL's licensed to test electrical products.
It's also important to note the origin and continued primary business of UL: UL was formed by and works primarily for the American fire/homeowner's insurance industry. They are the laboratory that the insurance industry goes to in order to underwrite the safety of a product.
UL listing of consumer products isn't, and should never be mistaken for any sort of governmental certification. It's an insurance industry approval, and means you're likely to get a payout should the product cause damage.
It's not the government's job to repair the damage. They stop the criminals, and impound their stuff — including domains, and clear the roads so the rest of us can use them again.
They don't undo or make reparations for the damage the criminals did during thier spree.
So yeah, the backdoor changed hands, to a set the government feels is more responsible. Depending on the behavior of the botnet, it may be a bad idea to zero out the domain's DNS. We're into design a botnet, I'd certainly make it do something horrible if the command and control became unreachable. It may be better to just set up a long term honeypot to keep the swarm mollified.
Whether we like the decision or not is irrelevant unless you can convince enough of the population to make an issue of it. My money's on an an overwhelming attitude of "The police stopped hackers? Keep up the good work!"
So point your ire in the right direction: A population that doesn't care about computers, doesn't care about security, and wants stuff cheap. Blame manufacturers who pump out lousy insecure products and only give lip service to security in order to sell more insecure garbage.
It's a bad situation because neither consumers or producers have a reason to change thier behavior.
It's politically easy in a lot of nations to penalize manufacturers by creating regulations. Unless those against regulations come up with a better idea, regulation is likely what we'll get, because it's the most effective solution offered.
Electronic voting as a whole is a gigantic boondoggle. There are only three reasons for it to exist: People who are too impatient to wait for manual counting, people who are looking to make a tidy profit selling a broken solution to a problem that doesn't need solving, and people who are interested in a way to fuck with the polls without getting caught.
You forgot: It exists to make a lot of money for those who sell machines.
The standard of integrity and validation is higher for slot machines. When the average Vegas casino is more transparent than election machines, there's a pretty serious problem.
And an entirely different campaign will be accused of being a bad loser...
Still, if it's paid for, then it'll be worthwhile: It'll either increase confidence in the results (and maybe get some to accept their candidate lost), or it'll identify weakness that can be fixed.
I don't really expect it to change the results of the election - I'd bet faithless electors in the Electoral College is more likely to change the result than this.
Jony Ive is too heavily into style over substance, IMHO, and he's the closest Apple has to a "product person."
I don't think anybody can honestly argue that consumers can be expected to maintain their system properly. Virtually every consumer is unable to make the correct decision anyway. If clicking on a link can open malware or compromise your customer's system, your product is shit. That goes for everybody - including Apple.
There are exceptions, but designing for the 0.1% that can actually maintain a computer is a loser's strategy.
People may complain about not being able to service their devices, while being completely two-faced about it.
Go ahead and try to find somebody who fixes TV's. Try to find somebody who fixes a $5,000 home theatre amplifier. Try to find somebody who fixes a refrigerator. And even if you do find one, compare the repair cost against a replacement.
Mass production inevitably marches to the point where it's more expensive to repair than to replace, and automated production is accelerating the trend.
Once you accept that, features for human maintenance and replacement (ie. user-replaceable RAM and Hard Disks) start to make no sense.
Apple doesn't care if somebody makes a Darwin ISO. There's nothing they can do to prevent it anyway.
The bottom line is nobody wants to go to the significant amount of time and energy required to produce a Darwin ISO.
A huge part of the problem is supporting non-Apple hardware (drivers), and you need a significant amount of skill to do it, even if you are re-using code from FreeBSD. They can't use any of the drivers from Linux for the same reason FreeBSD can't use Linux drivers.
Back when there was a community Darwin ISO, producing drivers to make a generic distribution, Apple took note:
* Demonstrated talent? Check * Knowledge of the XNU kernel? Check * Able to work as a team? Check * Passion for our OS? Double-Check
That's a recipe for an easy hire -- and they were hired.
Those who actually contributed work to produce a Darwin ISO became Apple employees, supporting Apple hardware.
After spending x hours per day coding for OS X, they likely want to do something else -- like spend time with their families and friends.
And OpenDarwin thus withered.
Was it hostility on Apple's part? It's kind of hard to say it was, because they hired most of the contributors instead of threatening or suing them.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on your geography.
Some cities get inversions, which bottles up all of the cities pollution for weeks.
In my hometown, I've seen it so bad visibility was 10 ft/3 meters and you could taste the air.
Even in a deep red state, people can care a lot about clean air.
Especially when it prevents you from driving.
And not only that I'll build a wall to stop our smog going to Mexico!
That is the first reasonable way I've heard to get Mexico to pay for the wall. You, sir, have my respect.
For the record, I hate temple run type games. Mario on iOS isn't remotely similar.
No. It's fairly normal Mario game. The only "twist" is that you don't have much of a speed control.
There are "pause" tiles, and tiles which move you backwards. Otherwise, Mario walks to the right constantly.
It's a "one button" game -- the player can jump. It's a fun game, but you can't go backwards and get every coin, kill every enemy, destroy every block, and find every secret in one playthrough.
It's a godsend for gamers who only have one thumb free. (feeding a newborn baby can get... dull.)
It's well made -- easily up to Nintendo's normal standards of excellence. The interaction to "sign up" or "log in" to a Nintendo account is shockingly well done: It's hard to describe, but you know how many games make you switch to your mobile browser, sign up for an online account, go to your email, get the validation code, go back to the web page, validate, and finally go back to the app and log in (again). Nintendo went way above and beyond, and made the process the most smooth, fluid experience I've ever seen on any platform.
I love it, and spent the $10 in-app-purchase on it.
You are correct, and you have my sincere apology.
By the time we can build these at scale, solar and wind might be so cheap that Thorium isn't going to replace them
Between wind, wave, solar, and hopefully fusion, I have a feeling thorium reactors will fill a specific niche: Burning/disposing of spent fuel. Electricity generated is just gravy.
But it turns out that it's not easy building a viable Thorium reactor. There are a few ideas about how to build such a reactor, but there are still many engineering problems to overcome.
Just ask the Radioactive Boy Scout.
Oh. Wait. Is it too soon?
I realize the table may be confusing -- the first number is the mills/kWh -- you divide by 10 to get the cents per kWh.
The first clue for me is that his numbers for coal is lower than natural gas. That hasn't been true for years.
The EIA (Energy Information Administration) publishes costs for the total operation, maintenance, fuel, and total cost per kWh.
The site uses "mills per kWh" - or thousandths of a dollar per kWh.
The total costs are: /kWh /kWh /kWh /kWh
Nuclear: 25.71 - 2.57
Fossil (Oil & Coal) 37.26 - 3.73
Hydroelectric 13.42 - 1.34
Gas Turbine (Natural Gas) 33.24 - 3.32
It doesn't cover solar, but the actual 2015 costs are nowhere near what whoever57 claimed.
How, exactly, are they discounting all of the debit, credit card, and ACH transfers in the US?
It's trivial to get your own card reader, there are various Apple and Android payment systems, PayPal, Google Wallet...
They're cherry-picking the hell out what it means to be an "electronic" payment.
Short version: There is more than a century of precedent to protect federal employees, both their privacy, as well as their employment.
Longer version:
From the US Merit System Protection Board
Employees should be retained on the basis of adequacy of their performance, inadequate performance should be corrected, and employees should be separated who cannot or will not improve their performance to meet required standards.
Employees should be protected against arbitrary action, personal favoritism, or coercion for partisan political purposes
Also see the Wikipedia Article
And for an even longer version, read up about the US "Spoils System", and how it lead to the assassination of a President. It was then replaced by the Merit System, in 1883.
So they're all excited about the lowest-precision, smallest-size floating point math in IEEE 754?
Not only that, but FP16 is intended for storage (of many floating-point values where higher precision need not be stored), not for performing arithmetic computations.
Kudos to AMD's marketing department for boasting about their compute performance with a number format that was never meant for computation.
Tell them to get back to me with their 64, 128, and 256-bit IEEE floating point performance..
But the fact is it's their content and they should be able to dictate the terms that it is consumed.
A good is only worth what a buyer is willing to spend.
I can say my turd is worth fourteen trillion dollars, and try to get listed as the richest man alive, but unless somebody is willing to spend that money for my effluent, the rest of the world would rightly laugh in my face.
The same is true for copyright holders. They may think they have something worth billions, but it's ultimately only valuable if buyers pay for it.
So the real problem is that the RIAA is in possession of the copyright for something that can be trivially and undetectably violated at a massive scale. Buyers only spend what they think it's worth, and there's the rub: the RIAA is trying to price thier goods above what buyers are willing to spend, and they get nothing.
Manyf producers in every industry price themselves out of the market. If they continue to price themselves out of the market, they can't sustain thier business. The RIAA is simply pricing themselves out of the market, and thier revenue suffers as a result.
You know, the headline looks identical to the thousands of "this investment will go through the roof!" spam I've been receiving for decades.
How is this any different?
At what point did consumer generation come into play? The only data is that Vinyl is outselling digital downloads.
I certainly know my share of Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers who are also think earbuds & youtube are amazing.
Ah yes, let's compare that Adele album to Vinyl
So a DR range of 4 ("high def" digital, vs 11 on vinyl).
A DR of 11 is still pretty bad, but it's not as horrifying as you get with the "high def" audio.
You can judge for yourself by looking at a database that quantifies it
Go ahead and look up most of your albums.
An example: Adele's 25, in "High Definition" 24/192 format
Every single track is a victim of the Loudness War.
Because of the Loudness War, Vinyl really does sound better, because it can't be abused the same way digital recordings can. There's only so much the needle will tolerate.
It's not because Vinyl is "better" -- it's because the mastering on the digital formats is appalling.
Or, perhaps, headphones will start including their own DAC & Amp, and plug in via USB -- which means their performance isn't limited to the circuit on a portable device where the design priority is portability, not quality.
Or maybe people will switch to Bluetooth headphones and stop the getting the cord caught in clothes & yanking on your head.
Any cost conscious product manufacturer uses another NRTL for the small USA market.
Um... no. The US represents the single largest single market in the world, and is roughly 25% of the entire world. No manufacturer can afford to ignore a quarter of the market, any more than they can ignore the E.U. or China.
There are plenty of PSUs which have good safety, and are not UL listed (but UL certified by another NRTL).
That makes NO sense: UL Certification means Underwriters Laboratory did the testing. Another NRTL cannot by definition, UL certify anything
But assuming you meant that the product is certified by a different NRTL: You're ignoring the scope and purpose of an NRTL.
An NRTL can do testing for OSHA compliance. OSHA is only an authority for workplace safety, and nothing else. An NRTL's certification is only valid for an industrial or commercial application, and has no value for products intended for a home.
There are only 17 NRTL's, but even then, they are limited in scope. Each NRTL is only licensed to test a specific set of criteria: For example, the NSF is an NRTL, but it's wholly inappropriate for the group to certify an electrical product. There only a couple of NRTL's licensed to test electrical products.
It's also important to note the origin and continued primary business of UL: UL was formed by and works primarily for the American fire/homeowner's insurance industry. They are the laboratory that the insurance industry goes to in order to underwrite the safety of a product.
UL listing of consumer products isn't, and should never be mistaken for any sort of governmental certification. It's an insurance industry approval, and means you're likely to get a payout should the product cause damage.
It's not the government's job to repair the damage. They stop the criminals, and impound their stuff — including domains, and clear the roads so the rest of us can use them again.
They don't undo or make reparations for the damage the criminals did during thier spree.
So yeah, the backdoor changed hands, to a set the government feels is more responsible. Depending on the behavior of the botnet, it may be a bad idea to zero out the domain's DNS. We're into design a botnet, I'd certainly make it do something horrible if the command and control became unreachable. It may be better to just set up a long term honeypot to keep the swarm mollified.
Whether we like the decision or not is irrelevant unless you can convince enough of the population to make an issue of it. My money's on an an overwhelming attitude of "The police stopped hackers? Keep up the good work!"
So point your ire in the right direction: A population that doesn't care about computers, doesn't care about security, and wants stuff cheap. Blame manufacturers who pump out lousy insecure products and only give lip service to security in order to sell more insecure garbage.
It's a bad situation because neither consumers or producers have a reason to change thier behavior.
It's politically easy in a lot of nations to penalize manufacturers by creating regulations. Unless those against regulations come up with a better idea, regulation is likely what we'll get, because it's the most effective solution offered.
Electronic voting as a whole is a gigantic boondoggle. There are only three reasons for it to exist: People who are too impatient to wait for manual counting, people who are looking to make a tidy profit selling a broken solution to a problem that doesn't need solving, and people who are interested in a way to fuck with the polls without getting caught.
You forgot: It exists to make a lot of money for those who sell machines.
The standard of integrity and validation is higher for slot machines. When the average Vegas casino is more transparent than election machines, there's a pretty serious problem.
And an entirely different campaign will be accused of being a bad loser...
Still, if it's paid for, then it'll be worthwhile: It'll either increase confidence in the results (and maybe get some to accept their candidate lost), or it'll identify weakness that can be fixed.
I don't really expect it to change the results of the election - I'd bet faithless electors in the Electoral College is more likely to change the result than this.
Jony Ive is too heavily into style over substance, IMHO, and he's the closest Apple has to a "product person."
I don't think anybody can honestly argue that consumers can be expected to maintain their system properly. Virtually every consumer is unable to make the correct decision anyway. If clicking on a link can open malware or compromise your customer's system, your product is shit. That goes for everybody - including Apple.
There are exceptions, but designing for the 0.1% that can actually maintain a computer is a loser's strategy.
People may complain about not being able to service their devices, while being completely two-faced about it.
Go ahead and try to find somebody who fixes TV's. Try to find somebody who fixes a $5,000 home theatre amplifier. Try to find somebody who fixes a refrigerator. And even if you do find one, compare the repair cost against a replacement.
Mass production inevitably marches to the point where it's more expensive to repair than to replace, and automated production is accelerating the trend.
Once you accept that, features for human maintenance and replacement (ie. user-replaceable RAM and Hard Disks) start to make no sense.
Apple doesn't care if somebody makes a Darwin ISO. There's nothing they can do to prevent it anyway.
The bottom line is nobody wants to go to the significant amount of time and energy required to produce a Darwin ISO.
A huge part of the problem is supporting non-Apple hardware (drivers), and you need a significant amount of skill to do it, even if you are re-using code from FreeBSD. They can't use any of the drivers from Linux for the same reason FreeBSD can't use Linux drivers.
Back when there was a community Darwin ISO, producing drivers to make a generic distribution, Apple took note:
* Demonstrated talent? Check
* Knowledge of the XNU kernel? Check
* Able to work as a team? Check
* Passion for our OS? Double-Check
That's a recipe for an easy hire -- and they were hired.
Those who actually contributed work to produce a Darwin ISO became Apple employees, supporting Apple hardware.
After spending x hours per day coding for OS X, they likely want to do something else -- like spend time with their families and friends.
And OpenDarwin thus withered.
Was it hostility on Apple's part? It's kind of hard to say it was, because they hired most of the contributors instead of threatening or suing them.