I have to say that while he did an excellent job describing much of the aspects of how we believe the brain works today as opposed to the over-simplified model presented by the original article's author, the mistake made is that people able to understand what he wrote were not the people needing the debunking.
Let's face it, if you're able to read at the level which this guy wrote, then you're probably more than capable of understanding from the get-go that the original article was similar to "By 1975, we'll all be shooting around the skies in flying cars". I would like to see someone with good writing skills... at the popular mechanics level of writing take his response and phrase it in a way which would have an impact on the audience of people he was most likely concerned "would take the bait".
Either way, nice article. I know some about genetics and some about biochemistry, however I lack the ability to judge for myself what is fact and what is credible scientific speculation from his response. Sadly, while I learned a great deal from his response, I lack the knowledge to even know where to pursue this train of though in order to more clearly understand the issue. Either way, thanks for the education and something to think about.
Films like Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate factory use a much broader range of colors than other films. In fact, they exaggerate colors a great deal. I was responsible for compressing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for VoD consumption in Scandinavia a few years back and the film was a nightmare.
Standard definition VoD is typically streamed at 4.5mbits/sec including a MPEG-2 video stream, an AC-3 audio stream (possibly 2), an MPEG-1 layer II audio stream (possibly 2) and multiple subtitle tracks. This leaves at best 3.75Mbits/sec for video. Compressing Charlie, I finally managed by manually tuning the bit rate allocation and sometimes the quantization matrices in up to 40 places in the film. And this includes using pristine source material (270Mbit raw 4:2:2 SD). I used CinemaCraft Encoder SP2 and run 15 passes to do the rest. The results were less than spectacular and mediocre at best.
Encoding a film like Batman Begins took 5 passes and no manual tuning to get near pristine results, far better than the 7.5 mbit/sec DVD that was released in the Scandinavian market.
These days, the companies I used to stream for would never consider paying for the extra hours to compress an SD stream when the solution for people demanding higher quality is to get them to buy Blu-ray or to download from iTunes. In fact, the theory is that since DVD is so damn easy to rip and a full film can be 2 pass re-encoded in near equal quality on a laptop in an hour, it's better to keep the DVD quality low, I feel as if Disney is particularly guilty of this.
Also, services like netflix certainly are not sending 30 gigabyte streams for a film. In fact, they're probably sending closer to 3 gigabyte streams having used the Blu-ray as a master in the first place. The quality of this will be painfully obvious the larger the screen gets. Services are constantly selling "HD" when in reality, they're simply pushing more pixels and the quality would have been 10 times better if they sent SD at the same frame rate. But, you'll pay more for HD. They take advantage of the fact that the average consumer thinks that HD means more pixels as opposed to higher definition at a particular resolution. The name is sadly a terrible misnomer.
I recently saw there was a Bluray for Casablanca and asked myself "Why?". I have a fairly terrible DVD copy released by a company famous for paying $200 to a college student to master a DVD from whatever they can send. The audio is in sync with the video and that's pretty much all that matters. But if you were to buy a film like "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs", then you need a 3D set and glasses since the film was designed from the very beginning as a demo reel for 3D video, the film just isn't good enough to buy the disc unless you're trying to show all your friends how great a 3D TV is.
Sadly, these days, I often have to wait for films to come out on DVD or VoD to watch them since it's the only way I can see them in 2D anymore as the cinemas here in Oslo have almost completely converted over to 3D projection now:(
This is pretty obvious in my opinion (as a iPhone lover and user myself). With devices like the HTC Tattoo which sells for a third the price, it's bound to be a higher volume product. You can get Android phones for free (financed through the contract) with normal phone plans as well. So when you go to the store and decide "Do I want to buy my kid a basic do nothing phone or a phone which they can play games and music or surf the web on?" the answer becomes pretty clear pretty fast when you're paying the same price for either of them. You just get more value for the money that way.
On the other hand, if you go to a store to get an iPhone, even if it's with a "Free phone with plan" scenario, the cost of the plan will be MUCH higher.
It would be great if they differentiated based on price ranges and not just operating systems. Android is going to be on pretty much every inexpensive smart phone on the planet because of the cost of the OS and the fact that it is competitive with the iPhone.
This statistic is pretty frigging useless in my opinion. It generates some buzz, but as an iPhone lover/Apple hater, I have to say that it's not the OS or the phone which makes me buy the iPhone. It's the fact that my 1st generation iPod is working like a champ 9 years later and still works with iTunes and the latest music I download. It's the fact that Apple releases one phone a year and having worked with Nokia, Ericsson, HTC and most others in the business, I've learned that once they start shipping one phone, they move onto the next and leave the worst developers on the old one to fix problems that might come up. The other guys simply have no loyalty to the devices they make. I've even worked on phones with some of these vendors where they found out after a "critical bug" came up, they couldn't fix it because apparently their subversion repository for the project got lost and noone had the code to fix.
Apple might not be the best phone maker or the best OS maker, but they probably have the best overall product/service at the moment, so I pay the extra money for it. I don't trust the loyalty of the hardware vendors to Android phones. I don't trust them to keep their board support packages or drivers up to date and fixed. Android itself will keep being great, but I don't trust the hardware makers selling them.
Here in Norway, I'm forced to choose between 3D in English or 2D in dubbed Norwegian for many films (certainly all children's films), so unless I was to lose about 90% of the experience of seeing a film like Shrek with Eddie Murphay, Mike Meyers etc..., I have to go see it in 3D.
I HATE 3D! I HATE WEARING GLASSES! I HATE MY EYES BLURRING AND REFOCUSING AFTER NEARLY EVERY FILM CUT.
Seriously, 3D should be reserved for crappy films which no one would go see otherwise. Films with good scripts and good actors and good productions can be shown on crappy old 8mm B&W film with scratches and they'd still be great films.
So, if I'm force to sit with a pair of cheap crap plastic glasses squeezing the sides of my oversized skull, then at least give me the option of getting a pair of them with matching polarity for both eyes so I can filter out the 3D effect and actually enjoy the film.
There is a 50/50 chance each time a woman is pregnant. The ordering is irrelevant. The explanation in the linked article applies an implied need to suggest that ordering is necessary, but without making the case for it. Child A is a boy, this makes no impact on child B unless we consider that the pregnancy is specifically identical twin related. The day of the week and the order they're born on make no difference.
So to accurately answer the question based on the facts provided, we'd say that the chances of the second child being a boy is 50% plus an accepted percentage to account for identical twins derived from birth statistics which are not provided.
I agree with your reasoning assuming I were willing to take a leap of faith, however in a purely mathematical scenario where a specific answer is expected from a specific question, the data supplied does not allow for considering ordering in my opinion. Of course if the question was "What is the likelyhood that my youngest child is a boy" then the problem is adjusted to compensate for what appears to be the desired result.
Yes, I know this is Slashdot, but you got the first post and the first thing I read when I clicked on the to read comments is your somewhat counterproductive answer.
I would imagine that the instructor has already decided that the topic would match the students. If it were a regular level course, then it's likely he'd show a video on the topic and it would be good enough. Instead he's chosen to broach the math involved by attempting to simulate a fluid dynamics scenario.
In short, instead of assisting the teacher in his attempt to try and broaden the minds of ambitious youngsters, it almost appears that you're simply recommending that he stops doing his job, packs up and maybe instead teaches ABCs and 123s.
Let's face it, if he's a teacher who is "qualified" to teach a topic like computational fluid dynamics, I'd imagine that he wasn't hired to teach just the average "who gives a shit" student. There are enough useless teachers who wouldn't bother out there already. This guy at least makes the effort of trying to figure out how he can best accomplish the task of teaching a complex subject.
Please don't EVER!!!! stop an ambitious teacher from attempting to educate ambitious students in the future. Especially not under the premise of suggesting that it shouldn't be done.
Intel development, well, they're more intelligent in many ways. I found myself in a video conference with desktop sharing with an Intel instruction set engineer within hours of filing a request. How much did it cost? Nothing as a matter of fact. We worked together for several hours and optimized some code dramatically, in fact, by a factor of nearly 2200% since we counted cycles and calculated cache misses, etc... It was a VERY productive session.
Why did they help? Well, we needed the help. That's why. We didn't give them any money. Whether they helped us or not, we'd still have shipped the product, though it would have taken longer. But in reality, they helped make our product MUCH better and it might have even decreased their sales for the year since people wouldn't have to upgrade their PCs to run our stuff.
Comparing Intel to Samsung is painfully stupid though. It's better to compare Intel to ARM. ARM is getting fat and lazy and their support of the GCC or LLVM project is mediocre at best and their compilers are some of the worst I've ever encountered. Where Intel depends on companies like HP, Dell, etc... to make sales and they don't care who wins the war, ARM depends on Samsung, TI and others to make their sales and they don't care which one wins either.
ARM is in fact probably killing the mobile market just as badly as Intel is killing the desktop market. In the mobile processor market, you can choose between ARM and... well that's it. Why? Because you have to run ARM to be compatible with the Android store. You have to run ARM to be compatible with the Symbian applications out there. You have to run ARM to be compatible with the Windows Mobile market. ARM dominates all these markets and if Intel will ever make it onto portable devices, it will be running Windows 7, not Windows CE.
The PC processor market is controlled very much by Intel (and to a much lesser extend AMD), but let's face it, noone else is even trying to compete. PC emulation works these days. It's entirely possible to write an x86 emulator in software. It's not going to be as fast, but with it is possible to design an instruction set perfectly suited to improving performance to the degree that it's competitive. Using the same technologies that Rosetta (power PC emulation for Intel Mac) is based on, it should be possible to run x86 programs at near native speeds on ARM (thanks to similar endianess). All you need is a company like nVidia for example to pay the license fee to Microsoft to port Windows 7 to ARM, pay IBM for the Rosetta emulation, then jam 4-12 ARM cores into a single die with nVidia technologies on top and you'll actually have a non Intel x86 system without the need for hardware based instruction set licensing.
Problem is, no one wants to bother. It's just not worth the effort. Back in the 90's and early 21st century, Microsoft used to get like $121 million (the number rings a bell in my head) annually for maintaining a port of Windows, Office and Visual Studio for a separate platform. In 2010 money, that's probably up to $200 million. Windows 2000 was in fact very portable, Windows 7 shouldn't be too difficult to port.
I don't think we should be blaming Intel for these problems. The problems are identical on the mobile platform. The competition for design wins in that market is based on power consumption and component integration, NOT on the technologies similar to what Intel offers. I think you'll find that Intel still struggles to sell their integrated graphics platform. In fact, there are still a lot of people that won't by netbooks unless they can get Ion graphics on them.
On the desktop, the hold up on competition is due to lack of initiative by ARM and/or nVidia to develop a competing architecture against Intel. With techologies like LLVM,.NET and (heaven forbid) Java, the amount of code which needs to be developed architecture specific is decreasing rapidly. Even now, I would say that compiling games with LLVM would be better in most cases than compiling nativ
No, the problem with Stallman is he's our own worst enemy. His lack of tact and cooth makes pretty much anything he preaches untouchable by the decision makers. If he says he's against ACTA, it's almst guaranteed to pass because no one wants to look like they're siding with a complete nut job.
Are his predictions right? Obviously. But they're also painfully obvious.
I had hope reasonable politicians would vote against ACTA out of principle. But if Stallman makes a big enough stink, people will instead choose to stay away from it altogether as opposed to being seen "as under Stallman's thumb".
He might have good intentions, but NO ONE with any sanity would want him in their office. Listening to him is like listening to a guy wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants try to convince you that there are martians among us.
I have a 2004 Toyota Prius with a more or less keyless operation. I just keep the key on my person and as I approach the car, the doors unlock. When I sit down in the car and press a button, the car starts. When I walk away from the car, the car beeps at me to tell me that it's still running and I should turn it off.
I'm already investigating the possibility of altering the lock of the front door of my house to electronically open as I approach the door and I would like to do the same with my laptop. I think controlling the door of the garage would also be nice like this.
For convenience, this sounds a lot nicer and even more secure than facial recognition. Of course, it wouldn't be suitable for government use as passwords are still able to hold up against physical theft or murder/abduction of the laptop owner and putting them within proximity of the machine.
Let's face it. Governments are spending tons of money on high tech toys which are entirely ineffective at best and a total waste of time at the least.
High end tech to detect liquids still can't tell the difference between combustables, biological weapons and tooth paste. Batteries which are encased in materials which can easily conceal pretty much everything from a X-ray (all varieties) are permitted through at all times without real limits. Chemicals which can be mixed together to produce a bomb are inane by themselves and can easily pass through security unchecked and assembled afterwards.
Fact is, that there are infinite methods of passing explosives through security unchecked. More extravegant methods of destroying an airplane can be accomplished by purchasing everything needed after passing through check points. Knives can be formed from glass and prison style "shivs" can be made by melting the filters of cigarette butts and pressing them flat.
The only thing these overly expensive and majorly inconveniencing methods of terrorism deterance accomplishes is filling the wallets of security hardware vendors. A single "possible risk" concern raised by someone transporting incendiaries (some kid tried to sneak some sparklers through in his bags) will "tighten security" straight across the world on all US and British flights.
Profiling is possibly the only effective method of detecting genuine terrorist events in action. Does this mean it actually works? Hell, who knows. The biggest problem is that the security companies providing these "trained professionals" typically use employees that barely qualify for work more advanced than day labor. Let's face it. There aren't any really smart kids saying to mom and dad "When I grow up, I want to work in airport security". In fact, it's the type of career you find yourself in when there's no positions open at McDonalds.
If however you happen to land on someone who actually appears to be competant in this career and not overly paranoid, this person could be trained to watch a series of video cameras and identify people who are behaving suspiciously. Then the person can be visually followed and additional assistance can be used to help identify whether the person in question is a likely threat or just scared of flying or his mom catching him with a Playboy in his backpack (I'd imagine the behaviour would all look similar). Then the person can be spot checked before getting on the plane.
I'd imagine that Interpol, the FBI and MI-? all have legitimate profilers on staff that could be consulted on more difficult cases. Additionally, if there's someone in question that you just "get a feel is trouble" then there should be some undercover, armed military security that can be boarded onto the flight just in case.
It's about time that someone starts using their brains to solves these problems. I'm sure that I'm thoroughly underqualified for this, but I'd imagine that there's someone with 30 years military intelligence background that could come up with something.
I have no idea if they are really low quality. I'd imagine that any firm that is counterfeiting the American drug technology probably has done a relatively precise job of reverse engineering what they are copying. I can only image that it would be bad business for them to do an imprecise job of it.
I also don't think the American drug producers wouldn't be so pissed about it if the pills weren't relatively accurate facsimiles of the originals. After all, they'd have no problem battling the Indian firms if they could just get some of the counterfeits and say "Here look, they're not even doing it right" by showing the breakdown of the original vs. the fake.
If a drug company is going to open source any type of data, it makes sense to open the most likely to be profitless in the future. With the Bill and Melinda Foundation targeting Malaria as strongly as they are with the intention of giving the vaccination (and possibly cures) away for free, it's really only a matter of time before either the market for the Malaria drugs are worth nothing at all or GSK finds themselves in a 20 year long patent dispute with Bill who has plenty of experience fighting these things.
I'm pretty sure that even if the Gates' family is doing everything more or less for free, they're almost certainly rapidly developing a huge IP pool to use as leverage against companies like GSK in case they find themselves being sued.
On top of that, Malaria related medications are generally targeted at 3rd world countries who depend on WHO and other "charitable government organizations" to wheel and deal to provide the drugs to them. The prices are rapidly driven down and then Indian pharmaceutical companies counterfeit the medications making them worth even less under the "We'd love to buy them from you the legitimate developers of the drug, but at those prices, we might just have to go with the India produced alternative, so take what we're offering or thank you for your time".
GSK could probably give away tons of their cures and save themselves the related headaches under these circumstances just to gain favorable press and have a little more leverage in Washington since they are "no longer evil... see?"
True, but in my case, it was an issue of trust. They knew me well enough to know that I wouldn't infringe.
Of course, if I pissed someone off along the way, which with my "charming" personality certainly is something to be concerned about, then I'd have to worry. So, it really depends mostly on whether I can keep my mouth shut long enough not to make enemies in the wrong places.
Been doing this for 17 years now... the hardest thing I ever learned in my career is that I am not actually God... next I'll have to learn that I'm not one of his disciples either hehe
Well, I released the rewrite under the BSD license. I did the rewrite on the weekends, on my time. I cleared that with my boss before hand. He seemed ok with it as long as it wasn't our production code.
The project wasn't licensed as BSD or GPL before hand, but 12,000 lines of it came with me to the job. He seemed to feel that since our product was now based on it, that he should have control over whether it would be open sourced.
They didn't want the responsibility of maintaining an open source project. Given the complexity of the code involved (real-time multimedia processing etc...) they felt that there was a much higher likelihood that instead of receiving the benefits of the open source community, they would instead bare the burdens of it. In hindsight, the point was valid. They had nothing to gain from open sourcing, so they'd prefer that it weren't a distraction.
As a result, I spent my weekends rewriting instead of improving what we had, but it also gave me a great sandbox to experiment in. This way I was making major architectural modifications to the open source project... (which I just check isn't even online anymore:() so this way I was able to prove the code before implementing the changes in the company's product.
I'm doing something similar now, actually writing a C++ alternative to GStreamer, having a blast doing it and although I maintain two copies (one for the office, one for my open source project) it's great since the open source to-be implementation is really very versatile while the one we use at work is more specialized as it is optimized to work on DSPs (which require entirely different optimizations from x86). I'm looking forward to releasing it soon as well. So far, it's a pretty reliable platform for IPTV (transport stream, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 etc...) and it's REALLY easy to code for. It'll be modified BSD something like "if you use it, please put my name in the license somewhere" kind of thing.
Well, I'd say that there are multiple issues at hand. First of all, I'm pretty sure you can release the original code that was around before you started the job without any issues. If you were to release the additions and modifications you made after the employment started, that code is rightfully theirs. After all, they hired you to work on the project for them, they didn't contract you to make changes to your open source project.
Location is an issue that might come up with the GPL. Different countries would interpret the GPL differently. Just because it's been tested (more or less) in the states doesn't mean that it's been tested elsewhere. Given the time of your posting, I'm assuming you're somewhere outside of the U.S. and therefore the requirements of the GPL aren't necessarily clear.
I had a similar project at one point. I would never use the GPL as I believe in free software, so I use a modified BSD license. But when my employer decided they didn't want to continue making my code open, I wrote it over (it was only 15,000 lines, so it took a few weekends) and BSD'd it. It's still not as complete as the original, but it's functional enough to be useful to others now.
I recommend that you keep in mind that you work for your employer and if you feel your employer has violated your trust, you're welcome to leave. Additionally, if you violate their trust, they're welcome to release you from your agreement.
While it may be legally OK to release the code as GPL, it doesn't mean that your employer will agree with your decision and may decide that they'd prefer to work with someone who's more attuned to their wants and needs.
Canadian's have a robot in space that's there for hire to help fix problems with satellites and other space craft. I was under the impression that it was supposed to be mobile enough to maneuver into place and deal with this. Wouldn't using Mr. Dextre to alter the course of an out of control satellite be good enough?
I wonder if something should be done to limit the deployment of straight Ethernet as opposed to OC-[0-9]+, ATM, Sonet, etc... for Tier-1 backbone traffic.
I don't have real numbers or statistics I can back up my claims with, but having experimented with implementing SONET and ethernet VLSI simulations, I'm convinced that SONET maintains a much more reliable connection and is able to recover from glitches MUCH quicker than Ethernet. Sure, we're talking about milliseconds, but over long distances, glitches must be common enough to allow these glitches to screw up UDP traffic on a massive scale.
On the other hand, maybe it's time for a new extension for Ethernet to be made which re-frames Ethernet packets for easy redundancy. So, basically an Ethernet wrapper which simply numbers the packets and passes it over two separate lines or over two different wavelengths in the same fiber. Then the receive discards the packets which come late. It obviously won't resolve bottleneck related packet loss, but it will help to resolve the issue of glitch related packet loss.
Things like trying to force proliferation of BGP (or similar) routing technologies on an international scale would simply be irresponsible. Though, I'd imagine that governments would love it as it would simplify line snooping substantially for them.
Both replies so far mention the ability to use SD cards up to 32gigs.
Great, but a full game is typically 3-4 gigs in size. That would be very limiting. I'm thinking of something more suitable to replacing the DVDs themselves.
Also, I'm familiar with the Wii Points Card, and that's the general idea, but some people like to have a more tangible asset. A box with a book might be good enough. It also helps to satisfy the people (like myself) who still prefer to walk into a store and see stuff and walk out with a bag of something. The Wii points card is more like a gift certificate or a voucher card. The thing I really don't like about it is that you either buy too little or too much when you do it that way. If I buy the game, then I know what I got. I don't have to guess at how much value the card is actually worth.
And the Wii points card is nice, but it doesn't tell you what you're getting for the money.
Somehow, I see in the future that there will be store fronts, kinda like how book stores are. These days, you walk into the book store, you find a book that you like or that suites your needs. You break out your iPhone and buy it using the Kindle app and leave.
PC games already have this, I walk into the store, pick out a game I like. Break out my Vaio UX pocket (big pocket) PC, connect via BlueTooth through my iPhone to the net and see if the game is cheaper on Steam or EA Online or whatever, then I download the game and sit in the cafe next door and play it.
The retailers will have problems when companies like Nintendo find out they can get a bigger chunk of the pie for themselves and kill the used game market at the same time.
P.S. - As for the network adapter... I live in a townhouse community where from my living room, I can see 45 B/G/N wireless access point and 12 A/N access points. I've run Cat-6 through all the walls into switches since channel saturation guarantees a max of 5mbit/sec. I know that nintendo offers a wired adapter and theoretically works with tons of 3rd party ones, but if they make a hard drive box, it would be nice to have the network adapter included in that. I still feel it should have been a minimum feature for a box that costs as much as it does and probably already has it as part of the chipset they're using and just didn't wire it up.
The money in gaming consoles is typically in the licensing fees attached to each disc sold. The biggest problem that Nintendo faces is that there is now a great deal of either inexpensive, "oldies but goodies", or used games in the Wii market. Just look at it this way. People are still buying PS2 games like they're the hottest thing out there. Publishers are still producing PS2 games as well. The reason is, market saturation.
Head to your local GameStop, the used game section is incredibly active for PS2, yet the PS3 selection is piss poor in comparison.
Nintendo has managed to achieve tremendous market proliferation and has placed a Wii in more houses than anyone would have ever imagined. A new Wii, which costs a bunch more money may sell well to many people, but in reality, it won't achieve the same levels as Wii. Nintendo knows this. They need to focus on making the current console more attractive. A simple external storage device for downloadable games would be the next real logical step for them.
Downloadable games are really the way to go for them. They already do quite well selling old games (and a few new) through their online store, but there are no new and fancy games for the console out there. The console vendors are desperate for solutions through downloadable content since they can full control over how the game is resold after the fact. If they make the games less expensive by selling them online, they can close the "used game" hole which is hurting them.
With an external harddrive/network adapter combination device (wired network should have been standard to start), they could then run a HUGE marketing campaign to get people to start buying the games online instead of in the stores. It would increase margins across the board for everyone. Additionally, to get past the typical nervous online consumers issue (meaning people not liking using credit cards online), they could sell a package from a game at a store like GameStop with a serial number to allow them to download the game to their Wii.
The important thing they must do though is to lock the store to a user instead of a console. This way if a device breaks down, the consumer would be able to transfer their purchases to the new unit.
So, a Wii 2 would do nothing more than introduce new hardware which they would have to try and get into everyone's homes where there is still so much more to be done with the Wii before it's "old and crappy".
There are just WAYYY too many of these people that become tax burdens to the state or start off as such. With the exception of the retirees, most of the guys at the horse track during the day have "crippling injuries preventing them from work" meaning that while they can spend the day at the track and jumping up and down when excited, they can't be bothered to get a job at least licking stamps and posting letters.
I'd rather tax the shit out of these people to recoup at least part of their expenses. The only thing I think is REALLY screwed is that it should be 50% not 8%
Literacy has been a terrible thing for most churches. After all, the more people who can read, the more who might be tempted to think for themselves about what something means. Classically, when only the educated minority could read, the church has been able to feed any message they wanted to the people and they would have to take it on faith that they weren't being misled.
In a modern age when the Internet is widening our horizons, people are learning to communicate with people who would otherwise be their enemies. Games like World of Warcraft have given people common enemies that were purely fictional and I believe are causing them to fight less among themselves and instead work together towards accomplishing a common goal.
The problem with the Internet isn't that it's transparent, it's that linguistic diversity makes it too opaque. It's time to reform languages and genuinely make an effort to unify instead of diversifying. The Pope would have believe there are tons of problems being caused by all this "transparent communication", but in fact, the problem is, we're still not proficient enough in communicating with one another and there are major misunderstandings that occur.
The answer isn't to stop the transparency, but to use the transparency to open up new lines of education and understanding that will allow us to better communicate with one another. Over time, this should allow us to stop seeing other people with different beliefs as a different sort of animal.
The Church however has nothing to fear, there are still billions of people who will simply choose to hold a book in their hands and thump it with their thumbs while telling everyone they're right and everyone else is wrong. Sadly, a closer look at the spine of the book will show no wear.
Umm... I was looking for someone who commented on this one.
When did Microsoft start over? Am I the only one who remembers Mac OS Classic? The operating system you needed to buy all new software for with every release?
Did anyone else program for Mac OS X from YellowBox through 10.4? The rule was "Use Carbon! It's easy and you don't need to start over". There is NO migration path from Carbon to Cocoa except... write over. And Carbon is now dead. Sure you can still use it, but only for 32-bit apps.
Mac OS X APIs are such a moving target that your software that you buy is only good as long as the company making it is still in business since Apple is likely to deprecate APIs with each new release of their OS that it depended on.
Spent a year porting a web browser to carbon, busted my ass to find out that the reason Safari was so much faster was that ATSUI was SOOOO dog slow that you had to bypass it altogether using undocumented system calls to get performance. Then Apple deprecated those APIs and the only option was to rewrite the whole app in Cocoa or just abandon Mac.
Almost every program I've written for Windows since Windows 3.0 runs on Windows XP and 7 32-bit. 16-bit support appears to finally be dead on 64-bit editions. The APIs on Windows have been stable for nearly 20 years. Except when moving from 16-bit to 32-bit or 32-bit to 64-bit, you can bank on everything being able to work with little or no changes between Windows versions.
I have been working on my own version of the Very Sleepy profiler (for 64-bit) these days, and I do admit that MS could have documented the CPU context a little better, but that stuff is so low level that you can make some allowances for that.
I still have books from 1996 on Windows NT programming which are still valuable resources for programming Windows since the foundations are still in tact. Every word of those books still apply. I also have the original Windows NT API Reference manuals on my bookshelf which I occasionally use when I'm programming on a small screen where reading docs and task swapping are less than friendly.
If you want to bash Microsoft for something, bash them for not having made a set of C++ libraries similar to.NET for native code development. MFC and ATL are still crap.
I highly recommend that instead of focusing on VirtualBox, VMWare or VirtualPC, you instead focus on all 3.
Using the VHD container format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHD_(file_format) you can create scripts to load a single virtual machine image in Virtual Box, VMWare or Virtual PC. These images are quite efficient as they can dynamically grow with needs. Then students can just move them to a bigger stick if they so choose.
I do agree with many posts regarding using SUSE since their agreement with Microsoft makes them possibly the most "windows integration friendly" solution at the moment.
So, you don't need to struggle entirely based on size or based on which program to use. After all, if a student comes and complains "virtual box is crashing on my system" then you can say "try vmware player instead". It might end up being a pain in the rear initially, but it won't take long to work out the kinks.
Companies like VMWare are pretty good at fixing compatibility issues and so are the guys on the VMWare mailing lists.
I would pressure you however to make sure the virtual machine format is targetted specifically to use only a single core since this is still a major compatibility problem between vendors.
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I have to say that while he did an excellent job describing much of the aspects of how we believe the brain works today as opposed to the over-simplified model presented by the original article's author, the mistake made is that people able to understand what he wrote were not the people needing the debunking.
Let's face it, if you're able to read at the level which this guy wrote, then you're probably more than capable of understanding from the get-go that the original article was similar to "By 1975, we'll all be shooting around the skies in flying cars". I would like to see someone with good writing skills... at the popular mechanics level of writing take his response and phrase it in a way which would have an impact on the audience of people he was most likely concerned "would take the bait".
Either way, nice article. I know some about genetics and some about biochemistry, however I lack the ability to judge for myself what is fact and what is credible scientific speculation from his response. Sadly, while I learned a great deal from his response, I lack the knowledge to even know where to pursue this train of though in order to more clearly understand the issue. Either way, thanks for the education and something to think about.
Films like Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate factory use a much broader range of colors than other films. In fact, they exaggerate colors a great deal. I was responsible for compressing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for VoD consumption in Scandinavia a few years back and the film was a nightmare.
:(
Standard definition VoD is typically streamed at 4.5mbits/sec including a MPEG-2 video stream, an AC-3 audio stream (possibly 2), an MPEG-1 layer II audio stream (possibly 2) and multiple subtitle tracks. This leaves at best 3.75Mbits/sec for video. Compressing Charlie, I finally managed by manually tuning the bit rate allocation and sometimes the quantization matrices in up to 40 places in the film. And this includes using pristine source material (270Mbit raw 4:2:2 SD). I used CinemaCraft Encoder SP2 and run 15 passes to do the rest. The results were less than spectacular and mediocre at best.
Encoding a film like Batman Begins took 5 passes and no manual tuning to get near pristine results, far better than the 7.5 mbit/sec DVD that was released in the Scandinavian market.
These days, the companies I used to stream for would never consider paying for the extra hours to compress an SD stream when the solution for people demanding higher quality is to get them to buy Blu-ray or to download from iTunes. In fact, the theory is that since DVD is so damn easy to rip and a full film can be 2 pass re-encoded in near equal quality on a laptop in an hour, it's better to keep the DVD quality low, I feel as if Disney is particularly guilty of this.
Also, services like netflix certainly are not sending 30 gigabyte streams for a film. In fact, they're probably sending closer to 3 gigabyte streams having used the Blu-ray as a master in the first place. The quality of this will be painfully obvious the larger the screen gets. Services are constantly selling "HD" when in reality, they're simply pushing more pixels and the quality would have been 10 times better if they sent SD at the same frame rate. But, you'll pay more for HD. They take advantage of the fact that the average consumer thinks that HD means more pixels as opposed to higher definition at a particular resolution. The name is sadly a terrible misnomer.
I recently saw there was a Bluray for Casablanca and asked myself "Why?". I have a fairly terrible DVD copy released by a company famous for paying $200 to a college student to master a DVD from whatever they can send. The audio is in sync with the video and that's pretty much all that matters. But if you were to buy a film like "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs", then you need a 3D set and glasses since the film was designed from the very beginning as a demo reel for 3D video, the film just isn't good enough to buy the disc unless you're trying to show all your friends how great a 3D TV is.
Sadly, these days, I often have to wait for films to come out on DVD or VoD to watch them since it's the only way I can see them in 2D anymore as the cinemas here in Oslo have almost completely converted over to 3D projection now
http://www.bricklink.com/browseList.asp?itemType=P&catString=5
Pretty good selection of purple and dark purple
This is pretty obvious in my opinion (as a iPhone lover and user myself). With devices like the HTC Tattoo which sells for a third the price, it's bound to be a higher volume product. You can get Android phones for free (financed through the contract) with normal phone plans as well. So when you go to the store and decide "Do I want to buy my kid a basic do nothing phone or a phone which they can play games and music or surf the web on?" the answer becomes pretty clear pretty fast when you're paying the same price for either of them. You just get more value for the money that way.
On the other hand, if you go to a store to get an iPhone, even if it's with a "Free phone with plan" scenario, the cost of the plan will be MUCH higher.
It would be great if they differentiated based on price ranges and not just operating systems. Android is going to be on pretty much every inexpensive smart phone on the planet because of the cost of the OS and the fact that it is competitive with the iPhone.
This statistic is pretty frigging useless in my opinion. It generates some buzz, but as an iPhone lover/Apple hater, I have to say that it's not the OS or the phone which makes me buy the iPhone. It's the fact that my 1st generation iPod is working like a champ 9 years later and still works with iTunes and the latest music I download. It's the fact that Apple releases one phone a year and having worked with Nokia, Ericsson, HTC and most others in the business, I've learned that once they start shipping one phone, they move onto the next and leave the worst developers on the old one to fix problems that might come up. The other guys simply have no loyalty to the devices they make. I've even worked on phones with some of these vendors where they found out after a "critical bug" came up, they couldn't fix it because apparently their subversion repository for the project got lost and noone had the code to fix.
Apple might not be the best phone maker or the best OS maker, but they probably have the best overall product/service at the moment, so I pay the extra money for it. I don't trust the loyalty of the hardware vendors to Android phones. I don't trust them to keep their board support packages or drivers up to date and fixed. Android itself will keep being great, but I don't trust the hardware makers selling them.
Here in Norway, I'm forced to choose between 3D in English or 2D in dubbed Norwegian for many films (certainly all children's films), so unless I was to lose about 90% of the experience of seeing a film like Shrek with Eddie Murphay, Mike Meyers etc..., I have to go see it in 3D.
I HATE 3D! I HATE WEARING GLASSES! I HATE MY EYES BLURRING AND REFOCUSING AFTER NEARLY EVERY FILM CUT.
Seriously, 3D should be reserved for crappy films which no one would go see otherwise. Films with good scripts and good actors and good productions can be shown on crappy old 8mm B&W film with scratches and they'd still be great films.
So, if I'm force to sit with a pair of cheap crap plastic glasses squeezing the sides of my oversized skull, then at least give me the option of getting a pair of them with matching polarity for both eyes so I can filter out the 3D effect and actually enjoy the film.
There is a 50/50 chance each time a woman is pregnant. The ordering is irrelevant. The explanation in the linked article applies an implied need to suggest that ordering is necessary, but without making the case for it. Child A is a boy, this makes no impact on child B unless we consider that the pregnancy is specifically identical twin related. The day of the week and the order they're born on make no difference.
So to accurately answer the question based on the facts provided, we'd say that the chances of the second child being a boy is 50% plus an accepted percentage to account for identical twins derived from birth statistics which are not provided.
I agree with your reasoning assuming I were willing to take a leap of faith, however in a purely mathematical scenario where a specific answer is expected from a specific question, the data supplied does not allow for considering ordering in my opinion. Of course if the question was "What is the likelyhood that my youngest child is a boy" then the problem is adjusted to compensate for what appears to be the desired result.
Yes, I know this is Slashdot, but you got the first post and the first thing I read when I clicked on the to read comments is your somewhat counterproductive answer.
I would imagine that the instructor has already decided that the topic would match the students. If it were a regular level course, then it's likely he'd show a video on the topic and it would be good enough. Instead he's chosen to broach the math involved by attempting to simulate a fluid dynamics scenario.
In short, instead of assisting the teacher in his attempt to try and broaden the minds of ambitious youngsters, it almost appears that you're simply recommending that he stops doing his job, packs up and maybe instead teaches ABCs and 123s.
Let's face it, if he's a teacher who is "qualified" to teach a topic like computational fluid dynamics, I'd imagine that he wasn't hired to teach just the average "who gives a shit" student. There are enough useless teachers who wouldn't bother out there already. This guy at least makes the effort of trying to figure out how he can best accomplish the task of teaching a complex subject.
Please don't EVER!!!! stop an ambitious teacher from attempting to educate ambitious students in the future. Especially not under the premise of suggesting that it shouldn't be done.
Intel development, well, they're more intelligent in many ways. I found myself in a video conference with desktop sharing with an Intel instruction set engineer within hours of filing a request. How much did it cost? Nothing as a matter of fact. We worked together for several hours and optimized some code dramatically, in fact, by a factor of nearly 2200% since we counted cycles and calculated cache misses, etc... It was a VERY productive session.
.NET and (heaven forbid) Java, the amount of code which needs to be developed architecture specific is decreasing rapidly. Even now, I would say that compiling games with LLVM would be better in most cases than compiling nativ
Why did they help? Well, we needed the help. That's why. We didn't give them any money. Whether they helped us or not, we'd still have shipped the product, though it would have taken longer. But in reality, they helped make our product MUCH better and it might have even decreased their sales for the year since people wouldn't have to upgrade their PCs to run our stuff.
Comparing Intel to Samsung is painfully stupid though. It's better to compare Intel to ARM. ARM is getting fat and lazy and their support of the GCC or LLVM project is mediocre at best and their compilers are some of the worst I've ever encountered. Where Intel depends on companies like HP, Dell, etc... to make sales and they don't care who wins the war, ARM depends on Samsung, TI and others to make their sales and they don't care which one wins either.
ARM is in fact probably killing the mobile market just as badly as Intel is killing the desktop market. In the mobile processor market, you can choose between ARM and... well that's it. Why? Because you have to run ARM to be compatible with the Android store. You have to run ARM to be compatible with the Symbian applications out there. You have to run ARM to be compatible with the Windows Mobile market. ARM dominates all these markets and if Intel will ever make it onto portable devices, it will be running Windows 7, not Windows CE.
The PC processor market is controlled very much by Intel (and to a much lesser extend AMD), but let's face it, noone else is even trying to compete. PC emulation works these days. It's entirely possible to write an x86 emulator in software. It's not going to be as fast, but with it is possible to design an instruction set perfectly suited to improving performance to the degree that it's competitive. Using the same technologies that Rosetta (power PC emulation for Intel Mac) is based on, it should be possible to run x86 programs at near native speeds on ARM (thanks to similar endianess). All you need is a company like nVidia for example to pay the license fee to Microsoft to port Windows 7 to ARM, pay IBM for the Rosetta emulation, then jam 4-12 ARM cores into a single die with nVidia technologies on top and you'll actually have a non Intel x86 system without the need for hardware based instruction set licensing.
Problem is, no one wants to bother. It's just not worth the effort. Back in the 90's and early 21st century, Microsoft used to get like $121 million (the number rings a bell in my head) annually for maintaining a port of Windows, Office and Visual Studio for a separate platform. In 2010 money, that's probably up to $200 million. Windows 2000 was in fact very portable, Windows 7 shouldn't be too difficult to port.
I don't think we should be blaming Intel for these problems. The problems are identical on the mobile platform. The competition for design wins in that market is based on power consumption and component integration, NOT on the technologies similar to what Intel offers. I think you'll find that Intel still struggles to sell their integrated graphics platform. In fact, there are still a lot of people that won't by netbooks unless they can get Ion graphics on them.
On the desktop, the hold up on competition is due to lack of initiative by ARM and/or nVidia to develop a competing architecture against Intel. With techologies like LLVM,
No, the problem with Stallman is he's our own worst enemy. His lack of tact and cooth makes pretty much anything he preaches untouchable by the decision makers. If he says he's against ACTA, it's almst guaranteed to pass because no one wants to look like they're siding with a complete nut job.
Are his predictions right? Obviously. But they're also painfully obvious.
I had hope reasonable politicians would vote against ACTA out of principle. But if Stallman makes a big enough stink, people will instead choose to stay away from it altogether as opposed to being seen "as under Stallman's thumb".
He might have good intentions, but NO ONE with any sanity would want him in their office. Listening to him is like listening to a guy wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants try to convince you that there are martians among us.
I have a 2004 Toyota Prius with a more or less keyless operation. I just keep the key on my person and as I approach the car, the doors unlock. When I sit down in the car and press a button, the car starts. When I walk away from the car, the car beeps at me to tell me that it's still running and I should turn it off.
I'm already investigating the possibility of altering the lock of the front door of my house to electronically open as I approach the door and I would like to do the same with my laptop. I think controlling the door of the garage would also be nice like this.
For convenience, this sounds a lot nicer and even more secure than facial recognition. Of course, it wouldn't be suitable for government use as passwords are still able to hold up against physical theft or murder/abduction of the laptop owner and putting them within proximity of the machine.
So you steal a laptop and want to get into it.
Can you just open your cell phone, go to FaceBook, get a profile image of the laptop owner onto the screen and hold it in front of the camera?
Let's face it. Governments are spending tons of money on high tech toys which are entirely ineffective at best and a total waste of time at the least.
High end tech to detect liquids still can't tell the difference between combustables, biological weapons and tooth paste. Batteries which are encased in materials which can easily conceal pretty much everything from a X-ray (all varieties) are permitted through at all times without real limits. Chemicals which can be mixed together to produce a bomb are inane by themselves and can easily pass through security unchecked and assembled afterwards.
Fact is, that there are infinite methods of passing explosives through security unchecked. More extravegant methods of destroying an airplane can be accomplished by purchasing everything needed after passing through check points. Knives can be formed from glass and prison style "shivs" can be made by melting the filters of cigarette butts and pressing them flat.
The only thing these overly expensive and majorly inconveniencing methods of terrorism deterance accomplishes is filling the wallets of security hardware vendors. A single "possible risk" concern raised by someone transporting incendiaries (some kid tried to sneak some sparklers through in his bags) will "tighten security" straight across the world on all US and British flights.
Profiling is possibly the only effective method of detecting genuine terrorist events in action. Does this mean it actually works? Hell, who knows. The biggest problem is that the security companies providing these "trained professionals" typically use employees that barely qualify for work more advanced than day labor. Let's face it. There aren't any really smart kids saying to mom and dad "When I grow up, I want to work in airport security". In fact, it's the type of career you find yourself in when there's no positions open at McDonalds.
If however you happen to land on someone who actually appears to be competant in this career and not overly paranoid, this person could be trained to watch a series of video cameras and identify people who are behaving suspiciously. Then the person can be visually followed and additional assistance can be used to help identify whether the person in question is a likely threat or just scared of flying or his mom catching him with a Playboy in his backpack (I'd imagine the behaviour would all look similar). Then the person can be spot checked before getting on the plane.
I'd imagine that Interpol, the FBI and MI-? all have legitimate profilers on staff that could be consulted on more difficult cases. Additionally, if there's someone in question that you just "get a feel is trouble" then there should be some undercover, armed military security that can be boarded onto the flight just in case.
It's about time that someone starts using their brains to solves these problems. I'm sure that I'm thoroughly underqualified for this, but I'd imagine that there's someone with 30 years military intelligence background that could come up with something.
I have no idea if they are really low quality. I'd imagine that any firm that is counterfeiting the American drug technology probably has done a relatively precise job of reverse engineering what they are copying. I can only image that it would be bad business for them to do an imprecise job of it.
I also don't think the American drug producers wouldn't be so pissed about it if the pills weren't relatively accurate facsimiles of the originals. After all, they'd have no problem battling the Indian firms if they could just get some of the counterfeits and say "Here look, they're not even doing it right" by showing the breakdown of the original vs. the fake.
If a drug company is going to open source any type of data, it makes sense to open the most likely to be profitless in the future. With the Bill and Melinda Foundation targeting Malaria as strongly as they are with the intention of giving the vaccination (and possibly cures) away for free, it's really only a matter of time before either the market for the Malaria drugs are worth nothing at all or GSK finds themselves in a 20 year long patent dispute with Bill who has plenty of experience fighting these things.
I'm pretty sure that even if the Gates' family is doing everything more or less for free, they're almost certainly rapidly developing a huge IP pool to use as leverage against companies like GSK in case they find themselves being sued.
On top of that, Malaria related medications are generally targeted at 3rd world countries who depend on WHO and other "charitable government organizations" to wheel and deal to provide the drugs to them. The prices are rapidly driven down and then Indian pharmaceutical companies counterfeit the medications making them worth even less under the "We'd love to buy them from you the legitimate developers of the drug, but at those prices, we might just have to go with the India produced alternative, so take what we're offering or thank you for your time".
GSK could probably give away tons of their cures and save themselves the related headaches under these circumstances just to gain favorable press and have a little more leverage in Washington since they are "no longer evil... see?"
True, but in my case, it was an issue of trust. They knew me well enough to know that I wouldn't infringe.
Of course, if I pissed someone off along the way, which with my "charming" personality certainly is something to be concerned about, then I'd have to worry. So, it really depends mostly on whether I can keep my mouth shut long enough not to make enemies in the wrong places.
Been doing this for 17 years now... the hardest thing I ever learned in my career is that I am not actually God... next I'll have to learn that I'm not one of his disciples either hehe
Well, I released the rewrite under the BSD license. I did the rewrite on the weekends, on my time. I cleared that with my boss before hand. He seemed ok with it as long as it wasn't our production code.
:() so this way I was able to prove the code before implementing the changes in the company's product.
The project wasn't licensed as BSD or GPL before hand, but 12,000 lines of it came with me to the job. He seemed to feel that since our product was now based on it, that he should have control over whether it would be open sourced.
They didn't want the responsibility of maintaining an open source project. Given the complexity of the code involved (real-time multimedia processing etc...) they felt that there was a much higher likelihood that instead of receiving the benefits of the open source community, they would instead bare the burdens of it. In hindsight, the point was valid. They had nothing to gain from open sourcing, so they'd prefer that it weren't a distraction.
As a result, I spent my weekends rewriting instead of improving what we had, but it also gave me a great sandbox to experiment in. This way I was making major architectural modifications to the open source project... (which I just check isn't even online anymore
I'm doing something similar now, actually writing a C++ alternative to GStreamer, having a blast doing it and although I maintain two copies (one for the office, one for my open source project) it's great since the open source to-be implementation is really very versatile while the one we use at work is more specialized as it is optimized to work on DSPs (which require entirely different optimizations from x86). I'm looking forward to releasing it soon as well. So far, it's a pretty reliable platform for IPTV (transport stream, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 etc...) and it's REALLY easy to code for. It'll be modified BSD something like "if you use it, please put my name in the license somewhere" kind of thing.
Well, I'd say that there are multiple issues at hand. First of all, I'm pretty sure you can release the original code that was around before you started the job without any issues. If you were to release the additions and modifications you made after the employment started, that code is rightfully theirs. After all, they hired you to work on the project for them, they didn't contract you to make changes to your open source project.
Location is an issue that might come up with the GPL. Different countries would interpret the GPL differently. Just because it's been tested (more or less) in the states doesn't mean that it's been tested elsewhere. Given the time of your posting, I'm assuming you're somewhere outside of the U.S. and therefore the requirements of the GPL aren't necessarily clear.
I had a similar project at one point. I would never use the GPL as I believe in free software, so I use a modified BSD license. But when my employer decided they didn't want to continue making my code open, I wrote it over (it was only 15,000 lines, so it took a few weekends) and BSD'd it. It's still not as complete as the original, but it's functional enough to be useful to others now.
I recommend that you keep in mind that you work for your employer and if you feel your employer has violated your trust, you're welcome to leave. Additionally, if you violate their trust, they're welcome to release you from your agreement.
While it may be legally OK to release the code as GPL, it doesn't mean that your employer will agree with your decision and may decide that they'd prefer to work with someone who's more attuned to their wants and needs.
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=14892157-1f2f-4dfc-81e4-0b4120e299f7
Canadian's have a robot in space that's there for hire to help fix problems with satellites and other space craft. I was under the impression that it was supposed to be mobile enough to maneuver into place and deal with this. Wouldn't using Mr. Dextre to alter the course of an out of control satellite be good enough?
I wonder if something should be done to limit the deployment of straight Ethernet as opposed to OC-[0-9]+, ATM, Sonet, etc... for Tier-1 backbone traffic.
I don't have real numbers or statistics I can back up my claims with, but having experimented with implementing SONET and ethernet VLSI simulations, I'm convinced that SONET maintains a much more reliable connection and is able to recover from glitches MUCH quicker than Ethernet. Sure, we're talking about milliseconds, but over long distances, glitches must be common enough to allow these glitches to screw up UDP traffic on a massive scale.
On the other hand, maybe it's time for a new extension for Ethernet to be made which re-frames Ethernet packets for easy redundancy. So, basically an Ethernet wrapper which simply numbers the packets and passes it over two separate lines or over two different wavelengths in the same fiber. Then the receive discards the packets which come late. It obviously won't resolve bottleneck related packet loss, but it will help to resolve the issue of glitch related packet loss.
Things like trying to force proliferation of BGP (or similar) routing technologies on an international scale would simply be irresponsible. Though, I'd imagine that governments would love it as it would simplify line snooping substantially for them.
Both replies so far mention the ability to use SD cards up to 32gigs.
Great, but a full game is typically 3-4 gigs in size. That would be very limiting. I'm thinking of something more suitable to replacing the DVDs themselves.
Also, I'm familiar with the Wii Points Card, and that's the general idea, but some people like to have a more tangible asset. A box with a book might be good enough. It also helps to satisfy the people (like myself) who still prefer to walk into a store and see stuff and walk out with a bag of something. The Wii points card is more like a gift certificate or a voucher card. The thing I really don't like about it is that you either buy too little or too much when you do it that way. If I buy the game, then I know what I got. I don't have to guess at how much value the card is actually worth.
And the Wii points card is nice, but it doesn't tell you what you're getting for the money.
Somehow, I see in the future that there will be store fronts, kinda like how book stores are. These days, you walk into the book store, you find a book that you like or that suites your needs. You break out your iPhone and buy it using the Kindle app and leave.
PC games already have this, I walk into the store, pick out a game I like. Break out my Vaio UX pocket (big pocket) PC, connect via BlueTooth through my iPhone to the net and see if the game is cheaper on Steam or EA Online or whatever, then I download the game and sit in the cafe next door and play it.
The retailers will have problems when companies like Nintendo find out they can get a bigger chunk of the pie for themselves and kill the used game market at the same time.
P.S. - As for the network adapter... I live in a townhouse community where from my living room, I can see 45 B/G/N wireless access point and 12 A/N access points. I've run Cat-6 through all the walls into switches since channel saturation guarantees a max of 5mbit/sec. I know that nintendo offers a wired adapter and theoretically works with tons of 3rd party ones, but if they make a hard drive box, it would be nice to have the network adapter included in that. I still feel it should have been a minimum feature for a box that costs as much as it does and probably already has it as part of the chipset they're using and just didn't wire it up.
The money in gaming consoles is typically in the licensing fees attached to each disc sold. The biggest problem that Nintendo faces is that there is now a great deal of either inexpensive, "oldies but goodies", or used games in the Wii market. Just look at it this way. People are still buying PS2 games like they're the hottest thing out there. Publishers are still producing PS2 games as well. The reason is, market saturation.
Head to your local GameStop, the used game section is incredibly active for PS2, yet the PS3 selection is piss poor in comparison.
Nintendo has managed to achieve tremendous market proliferation and has placed a Wii in more houses than anyone would have ever imagined. A new Wii, which costs a bunch more money may sell well to many people, but in reality, it won't achieve the same levels as Wii. Nintendo knows this. They need to focus on making the current console more attractive. A simple external storage device for downloadable games would be the next real logical step for them.
Downloadable games are really the way to go for them. They already do quite well selling old games (and a few new) through their online store, but there are no new and fancy games for the console out there. The console vendors are desperate for solutions through downloadable content since they can full control over how the game is resold after the fact. If they make the games less expensive by selling them online, they can close the "used game" hole which is hurting them.
With an external harddrive/network adapter combination device (wired network should have been standard to start), they could then run a HUGE marketing campaign to get people to start buying the games online instead of in the stores. It would increase margins across the board for everyone. Additionally, to get past the typical nervous online consumers issue (meaning people not liking using credit cards online), they could sell a package from a game at a store like GameStop with a serial number to allow them to download the game to their Wii.
The important thing they must do though is to lock the store to a user instead of a console. This way if a device breaks down, the consumer would be able to transfer their purchases to the new unit.
So, a Wii 2 would do nothing more than introduce new hardware which they would have to try and get into everyone's homes where there is still so much more to be done with the Wii before it's "old and crappy".
There are just WAYYY too many of these people that become tax burdens to the state or start off as such. With the exception of the retirees, most of the guys at the horse track during the day have "crippling injuries preventing them from work" meaning that while they can spend the day at the track and jumping up and down when excited, they can't be bothered to get a job at least licking stamps and posting letters.
I'd rather tax the shit out of these people to recoup at least part of their expenses. The only thing I think is REALLY screwed is that it should be 50% not 8%
Literacy has been a terrible thing for most churches. After all, the more people who can read, the more who might be tempted to think for themselves about what something means. Classically, when only the educated minority could read, the church has been able to feed any message they wanted to the people and they would have to take it on faith that they weren't being misled.
In a modern age when the Internet is widening our horizons, people are learning to communicate with people who would otherwise be their enemies. Games like World of Warcraft have given people common enemies that were purely fictional and I believe are causing them to fight less among themselves and instead work together towards accomplishing a common goal.
The problem with the Internet isn't that it's transparent, it's that linguistic diversity makes it too opaque. It's time to reform languages and genuinely make an effort to unify instead of diversifying. The Pope would have believe there are tons of problems being caused by all this "transparent communication", but in fact, the problem is, we're still not proficient enough in communicating with one another and there are major misunderstandings that occur.
The answer isn't to stop the transparency, but to use the transparency to open up new lines of education and understanding that will allow us to better communicate with one another. Over time, this should allow us to stop seeing other people with different beliefs as a different sort of animal.
The Church however has nothing to fear, there are still billions of people who will simply choose to hold a book in their hands and thump it with their thumbs while telling everyone they're right and everyone else is wrong. Sadly, a closer look at the spine of the book will show no wear.
Umm... I was looking for someone who commented on this one.
... write over. And Carbon is now dead. Sure you can still use it, but only for 32-bit apps.
.NET for native code development. MFC and ATL are still crap.
When did Microsoft start over? Am I the only one who remembers Mac OS Classic? The operating system you needed to buy all new software for with every release?
Did anyone else program for Mac OS X from YellowBox through 10.4? The rule was "Use Carbon! It's easy and you don't need to start over". There is NO migration path from Carbon to Cocoa except
Mac OS X APIs are such a moving target that your software that you buy is only good as long as the company making it is still in business since Apple is likely to deprecate APIs with each new release of their OS that it depended on.
Spent a year porting a web browser to carbon, busted my ass to find out that the reason Safari was so much faster was that ATSUI was SOOOO dog slow that you had to bypass it altogether using undocumented system calls to get performance. Then Apple deprecated those APIs and the only option was to rewrite the whole app in Cocoa or just abandon Mac.
Almost every program I've written for Windows since Windows 3.0 runs on Windows XP and 7 32-bit. 16-bit support appears to finally be dead on 64-bit editions. The APIs on Windows have been stable for nearly 20 years. Except when moving from 16-bit to 32-bit or 32-bit to 64-bit, you can bank on everything being able to work with little or no changes between Windows versions.
I have been working on my own version of the Very Sleepy profiler (for 64-bit) these days, and I do admit that MS could have documented the CPU context a little better, but that stuff is so low level that you can make some allowances for that.
I still have books from 1996 on Windows NT programming which are still valuable resources for programming Windows since the foundations are still in tact. Every word of those books still apply. I also have the original Windows NT API Reference manuals on my bookshelf which I occasionally use when I'm programming on a small screen where reading docs and task swapping are less than friendly.
If you want to bash Microsoft for something, bash them for not having made a set of C++ libraries similar to
I highly recommend that instead of focusing on VirtualBox, VMWare or VirtualPC, you instead focus on all 3.
Using the VHD container format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHD_(file_format) you can create scripts to load a single virtual machine image in Virtual Box, VMWare or Virtual PC. These images are quite efficient as they can dynamically grow with needs. Then students can just move them to a bigger stick if they so choose.
I do agree with many posts regarding using SUSE since their agreement with Microsoft makes them possibly the most "windows integration friendly" solution at the moment.
So, you don't need to struggle entirely based on size or based on which program to use. After all, if a student comes and complains "virtual box is crashing on my system" then you can say "try vmware player instead". It might end up being a pain in the rear initially, but it won't take long to work out the kinks.
Companies like VMWare are pretty good at fixing compatibility issues and so are the guys on the VMWare mailing lists.
I would pressure you however to make sure the virtual machine format is targetted specifically to use only a single core since this is still a major compatibility problem between vendors.