Uh..the PS3 consumes more power when idle than active? Is there an explanation for that somewhere?
If we're talking efficiency, it's better to talk about something like FLOPS/Watt. The Wii certainly uses less power, but how efficiently is it using that power to deliver compute performance?
The Wii supposedly has 2.9 GFLOPS of processing, the 360 has 115, and the PS3 has 218. With that in mind, the processing efficiency of each is:
That would mean that the PS3 has the best compute bang for your energy buck. (8x the Wii's GFLOP/Watt)
The Wii really isn't in the same compute class as the other two, which doesn't mean it can't be a lot of fun, but the SNES and PS1 were a lot of fun too. I don't think anyone should be lauding Nintendo for their efficiency here when most of it is due to their tiny CPU.
As we move towards mobile computing and get off the wire again, the whole conversation becomes moot -- the US will just intercept your communications directly out of the air as you navigate from your blackberry.
Why not get a 4gb memory stick and a $100 digital frame, and put the data and a standalone player together? Many digital frames also have USB technology, and could transfer the files to a USB if that technology is easier to find in 25 years. Some of these have battery backup, which you could also include in case electrical systems change.
People have been putting information of technology that they knew would be outdated in 25 years in time capsules for a long time. What would you do if you opened one up and it had a old vinyl record in it? A cassette tape? Probably find a record or cassette player. I think the easiest thing you could do to help them out is make sure that you have a standalone player included.
Just make sure the media you put in there won't lose its data integrity within your time frame.
"All parts of the Internet" includes a huge array of technologies, some of which a phone can't handle, or Apple probably wouldn't put on their platform (Silverlight?). Governments should be in the business of making sure that businesses are not allowed to mislead the public. Businesses certainly aren't going to police their own advertising for truth.
Who cares if it's "essential" content? That word is completely subjective. Apple said someone could access any kind of media put on the Internet via iPhone - all parts of the Internet. If that iPhone user can't access it, or obtain a player/runtime to access it by legal means, then the statement is not true.
Having played in closed beta, I can say that the game (from a PvPers point of view) is in a much more completed state than any MMO I've seen, including WoW.
It's all live, and ready to go day one. You won't have to wait a year for battlegrounds, pvp ranks, or pvp gear. There are already more than 15 battlegrounds in the game with variations on objectives and scoring. There are realm ranks (pvp ranks), which not only allow you to purchase pvp gear, but also give you access to something like a pvp talent point system. Sieges are in and have been stress tested for days.
Battles are epic and because of the design choices they made with regard to player clipping, push backs, and knockdowns, you will find that position matters a lot more in this game than others you may have played. The "tactic" system is very good and adds another level of depth to the game. Tactics are like passive abilities that might improve certain skills or resists, but you can only have a few active at once while in combat. Combining tactics with talents and the pvp renown points makes for a high degree of variety in what build you want for your character.
Lingering issues are some class imbalances and the graphics, plus the cities and classes they took out. The game as it is is very, very enjoyable for a beta.
I'm interested to know what this means:
"In fact, all universes can support the existence of stars, provided that the definition of star is interpreted broadly."
Doesn't "star" already have a real, scientific and black-and-white definition somewhere? Like, I don't know, maybe an astrophysics textbook? If you don't know what is a star and what is not a star, trying to count them or determine if they exist in another universe or not is meaningless.
Maybe someone should figure out a definition of star that isn't open to broad interpretation.
Any simulations done with an alternate rule set probably fail to take into account a number of things affected by that change that we don't really know about. These constants are taken for granted throughout all of science, we never see them as anything else, so we don't know all of the interactions they may be having an impact on. We have no frame of reference to determine *everything* that changes when one of these rules changes. Until we find a few real alternate universes with different rule sets and determine what has been modified by modifying the rules, any guesses we make are probably pretty bad ones.
So basically, all you have to do to shut Youtube down is start filing copyright complaints against any popular or interesting video, however baseless they may be?
Cool.
That really depends on the industry. In the IT field, it seems pretty rare to not get paid. Or, if they don't pay you, I would imagine you would at least get room and board somewhere while you were working there. I've heard of several internship programs like that.
Typically, you will make pretty decent money for your work. The United States has a very high variability in pay scale depending on where you are working. If you work around certain big cities like San Francisco or New York, you're likely to make around double what you would in a smaller, less expensive place to work. Around here in Texas, interns at the IT company I work for are regularly paid $23 / hour and work full time, with flex time options.
As for getting to the US -- no clue. Good luck though.
Honestly, who wants to watch the USA go in, and then sit there for another 3 hours while the other 150 nations march in with their 4 athletes a piece, and THEN come back to watch them light the torch?
Who wants to learn that there's a place called "Micronesia", or that Georgia gets its own Olympic team if you aren't anxiously awaiting the your country's entrance? The Parade of Nations is good TV only if you're waiting for your country to show up. After that, most people probably don't care if you see the 4 guys from Mozambique. Light the torch already.
On a side note, I didn't realize that the entire USA Olympic squad had just been out golfing before their entrance to the ceremonies. The USA squad looked even more dapper than the French, and that's just not right.
As previously stated, I'll be impressed when a computer uses something approaching a "strategic" approach to the game and wins using standard rules as if it were a human. You shouldn't need a 800 core computer to play a game you can teach a child to play.
In this case, when he says "there's never really any thought behind it", he's pretty accurate. This guy doesn't try to come up with the *right* answer. He just comes up with a lot of *possible* answers.
It would be like if a computer tried to solve a multiplication problem by guessing the answer a million times, then comparing those results with something the programmer had told it "approximated" the right answer to figure out what it was going to report back. I doubt anyone would be very impressed with that, since it wasn't really doing multiplication. All it was doing was guessing and checking.
800 kindergartners could probably get close to solving some complex definite integrals by this same method.
Humans who "play Go" use techniques and strategies that they are taught or devise themselves to improve their play. They don't come up with a bunch of solutions and then pick the best one randomly -- they are able to apply their knowledge of the rules and the game at hand to eliminate almost all possible choices instantly, and then apply heuristics and judgment to the very small subset left over.
That's why he says this machine did not "play Go". Just like 800 kindergartners who all guessed the answer to a calculus problem and getting pretty close didn't "do calculus".
Also, Crisis Core is another great example of FF done right, even though its single character / action. Tactics is still one of my favorite strategy games ever. If you have a choice though, get the PSP version for an amazingly improved translation.
I personally had this problem after an update about a year ago. If it does happen to you, and you don't want to wipe your HD to fix it, just give the PS3 support line a call. They'll make you do all the really stupid things you already did within the first 5 minutes of noticing the problem (is your PS3 plugged in?), but in the end they took the old PS3 back and gave me a new one at no cost. The whole process took maybe two weeks.
But like you said the consoles were becoming more like computers, so how long before I have to upgrade my RAM in a PS3 to play a new game? How long before they come out with different CPU models? This is killing what made console gaming popular in the first place the fact that you didn't need to upgrade the RAM to play a new game, the fact that everyone was equal whether you bought your console on launch or bought it near the end of the console's lifetime you could all play the same games, with the same performance. One of the reasons I don't play many computer games (aside from a few games of Wesnoth here and there and OpenArena) is that you have to upgrade your system every few months to play the newest games. With consoles the big point was you could play every game within the console's lifetime and that being about 5-7 years that was a lot of games. Now tell me, will a stock PC from 2001 play a game released in 2007? No, but a PS2 bought in 2000 will play the games made in 2006 the exact same as a PS2 bought in 2006 will play a game made in 2006. That is why console gaming has increased so much and computer gaming has declines.
We had a console with a required memory upgrade already, it was called the Nintendo 64.
They still sell raw veggies and lean cut meat at your grocery store. Probably even tofu, sushi, etc. As long as you don't reach for the corn syrup, all that stuff should be as healthy for you in America as it would be anywhere else. Lots of people manage healthy eating habits in the US; put the tuna down and grab a cookbook.
By the way..don't try to switch to raw potatoes (Solanine poisoning) or crawfish (Iodine poisoning) now that your all-tuna diet has failed you. Everything in moderation is probably a good bet.
"The pact would make clear that it is lawful for European governments and companies to transfer personal information to the United States, and vice versa."
So it's an information sharing agreement. I guess the summary is true, but misleading.
And no, I don't want you Euro crazies getting a hold of my personal information either. Especially anyone around here with their blind hatred of Americans stoked up by bullshit like this.
You can actually meet people who are interesting and fun to be around, and you can actually play the game to have fun and explore, experience various places and quests, etc., instead of the self-centered manner you point out. You can actually meet people in an MMORPG who become real life friends.
Not everyone's goals in an MMO are the same. Some are explorers, some are achievement oriented and want to be the best [insert class name here], some want to have a ton of friends and basically use the game as a huge chat system with mini-games that you can do with them.
Some people just make new characters over and over and try out all the cool abilities, and then eventually quit when they've tried every class up to say level 30.
That's part of what makes some MMOs (WoW is included) a lot of fun for a lot of people. You can create your own goals, there's no "Mission Objective". You may decide you want to be a crafter, or have a billion gold and an epic mount. Or you want to be known as a great Player vs. Player character. To say every MMO is only about leveling up and getting your next gear fix unrealistically narrows the game.
If performance was the reason you didn't like Vanguard, then you will be very pleasantly surprised if you log back in.
The performance is greatly improved, and appears to be ready to take another leap forward with the next update, but some of the things which made the game more interesting have been scaled back, pushed aside, or neglected. A lot of the mechanics of the game have changed, not all for the better (imo).
Travel has been simplified to essentially EQ Plane of Knowledge levels, with a minor charge for using the portals (called "riftways"). The original faction system (which made certain races kill on sight in other race's territory, ie high elves hate dark elves and vis versa) has been scrapped -- everyone is at least neutral with everyone else. These things may not matter to some people at all.
Reliability in the game can still be an issue -- depending on your set up, you may see graphics glitches, client crashes, or in some cases even a hard freeze. Content is also an issue, but the real content wasteland has been pushed up to the high 30s / mid 40s now.
All that said, if you are sick and tired of your 4 level 70 toons on WoW and are looking for an interesting PvE experience, it's certainly worth some time playing if you have an extra $20.
The majority of Chinese and Indians got along fine without cars or cell phones or electricity or enough food to be above the starvation level for thousands of years. Now they're all changing their ways and creating enormous demand for energy and food.
If the Chinese, Indians, and other countries such as the African nations would just accept their place as starving, poor nations, then food prices would plummet and we wouldn't have to worry about their lax environmental standards enabling them to produce with so many emissions.
Their increased body mass will make them less efficient to transport, and their increased affluence will allow them the opportunity to travel in other ways, further worsening global warming.
I'm a lot more worried about 2 billion+ poor people getting cars, iPods and a sense that they shouldn't have to starve than I am 3 million people eating one more Big Mac a day.
Some kind of normalization of wealth and living standards has to happen eventually if our planet is going to support so many.
No other sentient species could have devised math any differently, or could successfully disagree with proven mathematical properties.
If math is not objectively and universally true, then no science which makes observations, correlations, predictions and translates these into mathematical formulas makes any sense, because all such science would not be true to any other society where they have devised some other "math".
If our observations, translated correctly into our mathematical system, were not true in some other mathematical system, then our correct observations must not match their correct observations, which would require that we were living in separate realities.
Even if some other society used a different base, a different set of standard operations, etc., they would still be expressable with our operations using some set of conversion functions.
Math is a good example of things which are true but cannot be observed in the physical world.
Not this situation explicitly, but in general:
Sometimes people need berating; in today's politically correct, play nice culture we sometimes forget that. Sometimes people need to be told emphatically and yes, even rudely, that their actions or responses were not what was expected and that they need to improve themselves in the future.
The best way to determine if there is such a thing as free will is to try to take it away. If you can take it away, then it exists. If you cannot, then it still may exist. Either way, you can't prove that it does not come into play, somewhere. The most you could say is "There is no evidence to suggest that free will exists."
I'm not sure why you think it's an incoherent concept. Is it because such an outside controller would apparently lack a physical, examinable component? Otherwise, free will/the mind/the soul is to the brain as the brain is to the arm. It's not incoherent to say that the brain controls the arm, so why is it incoherent to suggest something controls the brain?
The weather is a poor analogy in this case. The weather does not make choices, learn from past experience, or play at philosophy on the weekends.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh..the PS3 consumes more power when idle than active? Is there an explanation for that somewhere?
If we're talking efficiency, it's better to talk about something like FLOPS/Watt. The Wii certainly uses less power, but how efficiently is it using that power to deliver compute performance?
The Wii supposedly has 2.9 GFLOPS of processing, the 360 has 115, and the PS3 has 218. With that in mind, the processing efficiency of each is:
Wii - 0.18 GFLOP / Watt
360 - 0.97 GFLOP / Watt
PS3 - 1.45 GFLOP / Watt
(from http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37621/128/, May 2008)
That would mean that the PS3 has the best compute bang for your energy buck. (8x the Wii's GFLOP/Watt)
The Wii really isn't in the same compute class as the other two, which doesn't mean it can't be a lot of fun, but the SNES and PS1 were a lot of fun too. I don't think anyone should be lauding Nintendo for their efficiency here when most of it is due to their tiny CPU.
The top green supercomputers all use Cell processors, so I'd assume the power / FLOP is pretty darn good.
As we move towards mobile computing and get off the wire again, the whole conversation becomes moot -- the US will just intercept your communications directly out of the air as you navigate from your blackberry.
Why not get a 4gb memory stick and a $100 digital frame, and put the data and a standalone player together? Many digital frames also have USB technology, and could transfer the files to a USB if that technology is easier to find in 25 years. Some of these have battery backup, which you could also include in case electrical systems change.
People have been putting information of technology that they knew would be outdated in 25 years in time capsules for a long time. What would you do if you opened one up and it had a old vinyl record in it? A cassette tape? Probably find a record or cassette player. I think the easiest thing you could do to help them out is make sure that you have a standalone player included.
Just make sure the media you put in there won't lose its data integrity within your time frame.
"All parts of the Internet" includes a huge array of technologies, some of which a phone can't handle, or Apple probably wouldn't put on their platform (Silverlight?). Governments should be in the business of making sure that businesses are not allowed to mislead the public. Businesses certainly aren't going to police their own advertising for truth.
Who cares if it's "essential" content? That word is completely subjective. Apple said someone could access any kind of media put on the Internet via iPhone - all parts of the Internet. If that iPhone user can't access it, or obtain a player/runtime to access it by legal means, then the statement is not true.
Just go to your local game store.. it's right next to your lunch spot, and you don't have to worry about shipping.
Having played in closed beta, I can say that the game (from a PvPers point of view) is in a much more completed state than any MMO I've seen, including WoW.
It's all live, and ready to go day one. You won't have to wait a year for battlegrounds, pvp ranks, or pvp gear. There are already more than 15 battlegrounds in the game with variations on objectives and scoring. There are realm ranks (pvp ranks), which not only allow you to purchase pvp gear, but also give you access to something like a pvp talent point system. Sieges are in and have been stress tested for days.
Battles are epic and because of the design choices they made with regard to player clipping, push backs, and knockdowns, you will find that position matters a lot more in this game than others you may have played. The "tactic" system is very good and adds another level of depth to the game. Tactics are like passive abilities that might improve certain skills or resists, but you can only have a few active at once while in combat. Combining tactics with talents and the pvp renown points makes for a high degree of variety in what build you want for your character.
Lingering issues are some class imbalances and the graphics, plus the cities and classes they took out. The game as it is is very, very enjoyable for a beta.
I'm interested to know what this means: "In fact, all universes can support the existence of stars, provided that the definition of star is interpreted broadly."
Doesn't "star" already have a real, scientific and black-and-white definition somewhere? Like, I don't know, maybe an astrophysics textbook? If you don't know what is a star and what is not a star, trying to count them or determine if they exist in another universe or not is meaningless.
Maybe someone should figure out a definition of star that isn't open to broad interpretation.
Any simulations done with an alternate rule set probably fail to take into account a number of things affected by that change that we don't really know about. These constants are taken for granted throughout all of science, we never see them as anything else, so we don't know all of the interactions they may be having an impact on. We have no frame of reference to determine *everything* that changes when one of these rules changes. Until we find a few real alternate universes with different rule sets and determine what has been modified by modifying the rules, any guesses we make are probably pretty bad ones.
So basically, all you have to do to shut Youtube down is start filing copyright complaints against any popular or interesting video, however baseless they may be? Cool.
That really depends on the industry. In the IT field, it seems pretty rare to not get paid. Or, if they don't pay you, I would imagine you would at least get room and board somewhere while you were working there. I've heard of several internship programs like that.
Typically, you will make pretty decent money for your work. The United States has a very high variability in pay scale depending on where you are working. If you work around certain big cities like San Francisco or New York, you're likely to make around double what you would in a smaller, less expensive place to work. Around here in Texas, interns at the IT company I work for are regularly paid $23 / hour and work full time, with flex time options.
As for getting to the US -- no clue. Good luck though.
Honestly, who wants to watch the USA go in, and then sit there for another 3 hours while the other 150 nations march in with their 4 athletes a piece, and THEN come back to watch them light the torch?
Who wants to learn that there's a place called "Micronesia", or that Georgia gets its own Olympic team if you aren't anxiously awaiting the your country's entrance? The Parade of Nations is good TV only if you're waiting for your country to show up. After that, most people probably don't care if you see the 4 guys from Mozambique. Light the torch already.
On a side note, I didn't realize that the entire USA Olympic squad had just been out golfing before their entrance to the ceremonies. The USA squad looked even more dapper than the French, and that's just not right.
As previously stated, I'll be impressed when a computer uses something approaching a "strategic" approach to the game and wins using standard rules as if it were a human. You shouldn't need a 800 core computer to play a game you can teach a child to play.
In this case, when he says "there's never really any thought behind it", he's pretty accurate. This guy doesn't try to come up with the *right* answer. He just comes up with a lot of *possible* answers.
It would be like if a computer tried to solve a multiplication problem by guessing the answer a million times, then comparing those results with something the programmer had told it "approximated" the right answer to figure out what it was going to report back. I doubt anyone would be very impressed with that, since it wasn't really doing multiplication. All it was doing was guessing and checking.
800 kindergartners could probably get close to solving some complex definite integrals by this same method.
Humans who "play Go" use techniques and strategies that they are taught or devise themselves to improve their play. They don't come up with a bunch of solutions and then pick the best one randomly -- they are able to apply their knowledge of the rules and the game at hand to eliminate almost all possible choices instantly, and then apply heuristics and judgment to the very small subset left over.
That's why he says this machine did not "play Go". Just like 800 kindergartners who all guessed the answer to a calculus problem and getting pretty close didn't "do calculus".
12, no...
6 or 9, yes.
Also, Crisis Core is another great example of FF done right, even though its single character / action. Tactics is still one of my favorite strategy games ever. If you have a choice though, get the PSP version for an amazingly improved translation.
Can we send a probe to drill for soil? Sure.
No Blood For Soil!
I personally had this problem after an update about a year ago. If it does happen to you, and you don't want to wipe your HD to fix it, just give the PS3 support line a call. They'll make you do all the really stupid things you already did within the first 5 minutes of noticing the problem (is your PS3 plugged in?), but in the end they took the old PS3 back and gave me a new one at no cost. The whole process took maybe two weeks.
But like you said the consoles were becoming more like computers, so how long before I have to upgrade my RAM in a PS3 to play a new game? How long before they come out with different CPU models? This is killing what made console gaming popular in the first place the fact that you didn't need to upgrade the RAM to play a new game, the fact that everyone was equal whether you bought your console on launch or bought it near the end of the console's lifetime you could all play the same games, with the same performance. One of the reasons I don't play many computer games (aside from a few games of Wesnoth here and there and OpenArena) is that you have to upgrade your system every few months to play the newest games. With consoles the big point was you could play every game within the console's lifetime and that being about 5-7 years that was a lot of games. Now tell me, will a stock PC from 2001 play a game released in 2007? No, but a PS2 bought in 2000 will play the games made in 2006 the exact same as a PS2 bought in 2006 will play a game made in 2006. That is why console gaming has increased so much and computer gaming has declines.
We had a console with a required memory upgrade already, it was called the Nintendo 64.
They still sell raw veggies and lean cut meat at your grocery store. Probably even tofu, sushi, etc. As long as you don't reach for the corn syrup, all that stuff should be as healthy for you in America as it would be anywhere else. Lots of people manage healthy eating habits in the US; put the tuna down and grab a cookbook.
By the way..don't try to switch to raw potatoes (Solanine poisoning) or crawfish (Iodine poisoning) now that your all-tuna diet has failed you. Everything in moderation is probably a good bet.
From the article:
"The pact would make clear that it is lawful for European governments and companies to transfer personal information to the United States, and vice versa."
So it's an information sharing agreement. I guess the summary is true, but misleading.
And no, I don't want you Euro crazies getting a hold of my personal information either. Especially anyone around here with their blind hatred of Americans stoked up by bullshit like this.
You can actually meet people who are interesting and fun to be around, and you can actually play the game to have fun and explore, experience various places and quests, etc., instead of the self-centered manner you point out. You can actually meet people in an MMORPG who become real life friends.
Not everyone's goals in an MMO are the same. Some are explorers, some are achievement oriented and want to be the best [insert class name here], some want to have a ton of friends and basically use the game as a huge chat system with mini-games that you can do with them.
Some people just make new characters over and over and try out all the cool abilities, and then eventually quit when they've tried every class up to say level 30.
That's part of what makes some MMOs (WoW is included) a lot of fun for a lot of people. You can create your own goals, there's no "Mission Objective". You may decide you want to be a crafter, or have a billion gold and an epic mount. Or you want to be known as a great Player vs. Player character. To say every MMO is only about leveling up and getting your next gear fix unrealistically narrows the game.
If performance was the reason you didn't like Vanguard, then you will be very pleasantly surprised if you log back in.
The performance is greatly improved, and appears to be ready to take another leap forward with the next update, but some of the things which made the game more interesting have been scaled back, pushed aside, or neglected. A lot of the mechanics of the game have changed, not all for the better (imo).
Travel has been simplified to essentially EQ Plane of Knowledge levels, with a minor charge for using the portals (called "riftways"). The original faction system (which made certain races kill on sight in other race's territory, ie high elves hate dark elves and vis versa) has been scrapped -- everyone is at least neutral with everyone else. These things may not matter to some people at all.
Reliability in the game can still be an issue -- depending on your set up, you may see graphics glitches, client crashes, or in some cases even a hard freeze. Content is also an issue, but the real content wasteland has been pushed up to the high 30s / mid 40s now.
All that said, if you are sick and tired of your 4 level 70 toons on WoW and are looking for an interesting PvE experience, it's certainly worth some time playing if you have an extra $20.
The majority of Chinese and Indians got along fine without cars or cell phones or electricity or enough food to be above the starvation level for thousands of years. Now they're all changing their ways and creating enormous demand for energy and food.
If the Chinese, Indians, and other countries such as the African nations would just accept their place as starving, poor nations, then food prices would plummet and we wouldn't have to worry about their lax environmental standards enabling them to produce with so many emissions.
Their increased body mass will make them less efficient to transport, and their increased affluence will allow them the opportunity to travel in other ways, further worsening global warming.
I'm a lot more worried about 2 billion+ poor people getting cars, iPods and a sense that they shouldn't have to starve than I am 3 million people eating one more Big Mac a day.
Some kind of normalization of wealth and living standards has to happen eventually if our planet is going to support so many.
No, but you shouldn't report it as "news"
No other sentient species could have devised math any differently, or could successfully disagree with proven mathematical properties.
If math is not objectively and universally true, then no science which makes observations, correlations, predictions and translates these into mathematical formulas makes any sense, because all such science would not be true to any other society where they have devised some other "math".
If our observations, translated correctly into our mathematical system, were not true in some other mathematical system, then our correct observations must not match their correct observations, which would require that we were living in separate realities.
Even if some other society used a different base, a different set of standard operations, etc., they would still be expressable with our operations using some set of conversion functions.
Math is a good example of things which are true but cannot be observed in the physical world.
Not this situation explicitly, but in general: Sometimes people need berating; in today's politically correct, play nice culture we sometimes forget that. Sometimes people need to be told emphatically and yes, even rudely, that their actions or responses were not what was expected and that they need to improve themselves in the future.
I'm not sure why you think it's an incoherent concept. Is it because such an outside controller would apparently lack a physical, examinable component? Otherwise, free will/the mind/the soul is to the brain as the brain is to the arm. It's not incoherent to say that the brain controls the arm, so why is it incoherent to suggest something controls the brain?
The weather is a poor analogy in this case. The weather does not make choices, learn from past experience, or play at philosophy on the weekends.