If anyone has a right to tax Second Life it's its creators. Nobody else has such a right. I don't see what the purpose would be other than to be annoying though. If they're smart they take the real money they collect and put it into a money fund or some similar safe place where it can collect interest for the company. As it is the number one thing that keeps me from developing more stuff in SL is that they charge a monthly fee which I am not going to pay. They're turning away exprienced programmers that would contribute for free if allowed to - a bad choice IMO. They need a special type of account for developers willing to make stuff and not use it for commercial gain - that grants a certain amount of free land and rights to upload textures and stuff without paying. If anything taxes would make people even more likely not to participate. It's just one more hassle. If I want taxes I'll stick to real life.
Solid but takes some tweaking.
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Fedora Linux
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· Score: 1
Fedora and Debian are fine if you understand their development process enough to hang back from the bleeding edge a little and not to use unstable or testing packages. I've ran both on servers under heavy load, for years, and have never had a crash or a major security issue. The Enterprise editions are mostly useful if you want support.
My biggest complaint is that they often compile software with to many dependicies, that aren't needed, required. This gets to be a pain when you have to compile half of your software yourself in order to keep things running with low overhead and little wasted space. Just because a program can use an optional feature doesn't mean it needs to be enabled by default. Also you tend to get a lot of cruft installed by default, even if you do a minimal install, that you don't need. I'm forced to keep track of these things and make sure they're removed myself - not very user friendly.
The biggest productivity limitation of today's computers is the user interface. The desktop metaphor simply is not powerful enough to make accessing and manipulating large amounts of information effecient. Anyone that is good at using the command-line, working through scripts, etc knows that you can accomplish much more using these methods than you can using a desktop enviroment and that when the task is even possible on the desktop it's quite a bit slower than working on the command-line.
What we need to do is stop making it okay to be computer illiterate. It's not okay to not know how to read, write, or do at least basic math but at one point in our history people really believed that the average person didn't need to know those things. It's not even unique to require knowledge of a machine to live - in most places you can't live without knowing how to use an automobile and if you try people think there is something wrong with you. Why aren't we teaching basic skills like common Unix commands, bash, Perl, and SQL in schools? Why don't we allow the desktop to evolve to work more seamlessly with the command-line and scripting and to handle task management better?
Just because an interface is command-line and script driven doesn't mean it can't have powerful graphical interfaces too. A lot of CAD packages have graphical interfaces, command-line interfaces, and scripting tied together. Why can't more applications work that way? Or even the whole OS?
I don't really think time would be an obstacle to a god so when god does evolve it will exist in all times past, present, and future. So it doesn't really matter if it's evolved yet or not - god would still exist in all parts of time.;)
By not providing an offical client they are making people choose between flakey Wine and crappy Windows. If Second Life can have a Linux client it should shame WoW not to have a Linux client. Obviously they have a significant number of people trying to play WoW under Linux - that should be a good hint that a Linux client would be good for them to provide. Companies that ignore the needs of a significant numbers of their own customers are making a mistake.
I think the article tries to have a point but fails short even if they may be right. FOSS projects do need a strong leader if they are going to do well. Projects without strong leadership go all over and tend to die or splinter. Just having any leader is not an improvement over no leader though. Neither is having any vision instead of a good vision. The vast majority of PHB projects are never completed or never go anywhre commercially. Mostly because the people in charge are bad leaders or have a bad vision. FOSS projects are evolution at work - what works continues on and what doesn't eventually dies off. Having good leadership just creates a nexus around which the project can grow and take direction. Most FOSS leaders don't know exactly where their project is going but they help to recognize the good and cut out the bad sooner rather than later. The best leaders create other leaders around themselves which makes their project into a multiheaded beast that is difficult to kill and with the ability to have multiple, but coherent, visions of what needs to happen for the project to evolve.
Gnome and KDE have mostly sucked because their vision was to copy features from Windows and Mac OS. They are growing away from that limited and faulty vision but I'd agree that their problem has been a lack of leadership with vision. I would not say PHB alternatives such as Windows and Mac OS have any better vision though. The problem with the desktop, and many desktop apps, is that people are locked into a metaphor and they are having trouble stepping outside that box. It'll take a strong leader with vision and major coding skills to break people out of their metaphor mind block. FOSS has a better chance to invent this future though because FOSS projects can afford to be wrong where as commercial projects usually can't.
You're saying that because most people are stupid that having choices available is bad? You can't run society so that it's easy for idiots.
I like having choices and investigating them to see which is best. What I don't like is choices that are supposed to be different but when you investigate they are really pretty much the same. Examples range from politics where I usually feel my vote doesn't matter because both canidates are creeps who are just out for their own benefit to the M$ Office vrs OpenOffice comparison where OpenOffice has been designed to be almost as buggy and bloated as M$ Office just so idiots don't have to think about the differences.
Making all the choices similar is a trick done to confuse stupid people and make it easier for them to be pushed from one choice to another. Sure it works but it leaves us with all our choices being worthless to us. I ask not only for more choices but also for better choices. I want options that will make a difference.
I used to go a week at a time without sleep when I was a little younger and it didn't have much of a negative effect on my work. In fact I'd say it made my work much better. What did suffer was my health and social skills. I'd say it's a worthy trade off for short periods of time where you need to be glued to a project but not for extended periods. The main benefits besides being awake is stat your brain functionality seems to change a little the longer you go without sleep. It's easier to focus on a single problem and make mental leaps. The downside is you often end up with mental leaps that work but are hard to explain and multitasking becomes narly impossible. You get extremely grumpy too as you tend tos tart having fits of anger if anyone disturbs you. When you finally try to sleep it's difficult to do and you have dreams that are twisted and a bit deranged where your brain keeps trying to work on what you were doing but weird dream-like things keep creeping in. If you wake back up and work while in this dream-state your work is even more bizarre to figure out later. Often it's hard to remember afterwards exactly what you were working on. It fries your mind and sends you into depression if you keep going without sleep so use it sparingly.
Or at least that was what it was like for me. Unfortunately the health side effects mean I can't go without sleep entirely anymore so I sleep around four hours a day now.
Re:Slasbots don't understand Google either
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GoogleOS Scenarios
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Wouldn't it be nice if all employers did that. That policy of Google's is my number one reason for wishing they'd hire me. Finally time and resources to work on pet projects and if they don't suck then millions of people could end up using my project. That'd be awesome.
I don't know why it should be such a big change that it means starting over. Certainly they should be able to break out certain sub-systems so that they can scale over several systems (possibly shared) without needing to rewrite the whole thing. For example if they use some sort of database to store the data a machine is tracking they could modify it to invisible split that task across several machines. If they use a standard db like MySQL or Oracle this could be as easy as making some configuration changes. If they can store and access such data when stored on multiple machines then a lot of tasks such as object movement should be able to be processed by multiple machines.
Having a machine per area does seem an odd design decision. I can see that it might speed things up a little when overhead is low, as you'd have less passing of data around their internal network, but as overhead rises it seems it'd be better to have everything distributed across multiple machines.
Re:Treat old browsers to plain looking sites.
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CSS Cookbook
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· Score: 1
I've never had a client that cared so long as the site was usable for everyone. Most are very happy not to double or triple their costs just to support a few losers who are still using browsers from 1997.
I think there needs to be a line between real aethists that really think there is no higher being, that there can be no higher being, and that life is essentially meaningless and the rest of us that think that popular religion is insane, emotional, unrealistic, and stupid. I don't consider myself an aethist although most religious people would. I don't believe in any specific god or doctrine but I do believe that a god is likely and is probably the end result of evolution. In my mind, the evolution of god is a meaning of life, if not the meaning of life, and the beauty of a Universe that runs by such wonderful precise and complex mechanism (science and math) is amazing. I'm not a true aethist because science and math is my religion.
If you buy any new console and think you're going to get a really different experience then you've misled yourself. It's all been done before. I remember using motion sensing with the original Nintendo and I'd not be surprised if it wasn't done before that. Light guns, motion sensing, etc can be a fun distraction but they are unlikely to ever create a truely different type of game and they've been tried several times over the many generations of gaming. Better graphics is not going to create a different type of game. For that matter video games are just modifications of real life things to do so there has never been a game that was really entirely new.
The only thing more processing power and new controllers can do is bring us closer to having come full circle where video games are more like real life. It can make playing easier and more give us special effects we're unlikely to see in real life (Prey's gravity fields and portals are unlikely to happen in real life anytime soon.) and not actually dying when you get blasted by an alien is nice but it's still not going to be anything really new.
I'm kind of amussed that people who won't get off their ass to go outside and play tennis with a friend (and get to see those hot girls in short tennis skirts) will sit at home with their little Wii virtual racket and play virtual tennis with cartoon characters. At some point if you really want realism I have to wonder why you don't just go do these things for real.
Treat old browsers to plain looking sites.
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CSS Cookbook
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· Score: 2, Informative
IE7 is compatible with most of the CSS stuff I use at least so usually there are only a few bugs that have to be worked out rather than the tons that I had to deal with under IE6. I suggest just making one standard style sheet that works with Firefox, Safari, and Opera, a IE7 stylesheet that tweaks the minor bugs out, and then a stylesheet for all outdated IE browsers which should make the site usable but plain. So long as the site is usable who cares if people still using IE4 like how it looks? If they haven't cared to update their browser then obviously they don't know the difference anyway.
It was just amazing that they could do all three LoTR movies so that even a big fan of the books, like myself, could be pretty happy with the movies. (My only real complaint being that there were no hobbit wars in the movie.) If they do the Hobbit or other middle earth movies and mess them up it'll just be such a loss for fans and nobody involved will make as much money as they will if they do it right. Somehow I doubt anybody involved is going broke after making the LoTR movies so why not say the hell with accounting practices and just make some more movies?
I don't want to see LoTR follow the path of Harry Potter where the first two movies were perfect adaptions of the books and the rest of the movies are pale knockoffs or even like Star Wars where the prequels feel like they don't quite work.
Caution is not a good way to make rapid advancements. Danger is inherit in discovery. Not that I'd suggest they not do lab work first to try to make products safe before exposure to the public but I think we do more harm to ourselves by being overly cautious. How many more people will die by slowing nanotech development to half speed compared to the people who might die if we race ahead at full speed? I get so angry when I see people protesting nanotech, genetics, stem cell research, etc. These have a strong likelyhood to provide wonder drugs in the near future but stupid people want to stop their advancement because there are minor risks. Not that the article is doing that - but I've seen a lot of people do it. IMO even if these technolgoies kill 95% of the population in the short-term it'd be worth it in the long-term because they'll make future generations so much stronger and more advanced. Consider it making us extinct for the benefit of those that evolve from us if you like.
And people twirly eyed over Wii do so based on what exactly? (Besides the three, very lame characters, W I I.) I personally think the Wii will be cool but that the PS3 will be cooler. I think both units are over priced for their target market but that each will sell plenty of units to their diehard fans and more units later when the prices drop.
Besides their interesting controller what is there to be interested about the Wii? Why should I play it other than my Gamecube? If I'm going to shell out bucks for a console I want the most powerful one so that seems to be a PS3. I've seen plenty of articles on all the consoles and I've yet to see anything even try to claim that the Wii will be anywhere as powerful as the PS3 or even the XBox 360. It has a controller that may or may not be innovative but such things are easily copied if they work well - the PS3 already borrowed some of the motion tracking stuff and I'm sure they're ready to borrow more if needed. I haven't been a fan of many Nintendo games since the N64 - Gameboy offerings left me wanting although there were a few games I liked. Meanwhile Playstation has thousands of available games and dozens that I really like.
When the prices drop I might buy a Wii for party games if they do well in those like the Gamecube did. Otherwise I don't see what there is to be interested in.
My one bitch about the PS3 so far.. are they really making you buy adapters to save from PS1/PS2 titles? C'mon guys it has a fricken 60GB hdd. I was mad enough that I got a PS2 with a hdd and it wouldn't let me save directly the the hdd.
While I don't think they shouldn't study the dangers of these new materials I think the extremist that start calling for us to abandon such new technologies are idiots that ought to be ignored. As with anything new we should carefully study it and see what the risks and benefits are and how we can lower the risks while increasing the benefits. Science isn't always safe. What major breakthrough has ever happened where someone wasn't hurt along the way? How many people died or suffered horrible damage from X-Rays for example? Would we have been better off having never developed X-Ray technology into working products?
Throwing experimental materials into cosmetics is a little rash but I expect they ran lab tests on the materials first. If it's not immediately dangerous then you might as well give it a shot. Maybe it's sad but mass product releases often are the best test. It could take 30 years of careful testing to find out the results you'd get by just releasing it on the public. People get sick and die from eatting vegetables so you have to realize that life is never going to be fully safe.
If it doesn't kill us all in it's infancy I expect nano to make most of us live a lot longer and higher quality of life. It's worth a few risks.
I don't know if that's really true anymore. When I upgrade either my CPU or GPU these days I usually end up upgrading both along with mobo and RAM. Unless you're making a very minor upgrade of either CPU or GPU, and who can afford that unless you're buying crappy outdated stuff anyway, you'll likely have a hard time not needing to upgrade your mobo in the process and if you do that you usually have to upgrade everything else. Just package everything together and make it really powerful so I won't have to upgrade more than every other year to play the coolest new games.
It does make me wonder about the multi-core multi-gpu future though. Can they manage to pack 16 cores and 4 gpus into a single package that won't melt a hole through the mobo? If they can then I'll be sure to buy one. They better make the GPU specs as open as the CPU specs though because I use Linux and won't buy it if it doesn't have opensource drivers available.
It's much easier to keep someone from forging a document than to keep them from copying a document. Digital signing works pretty well and for that matter such records can be kept by the maker and displayed say as a public viewable, but not editable, web page. So far as Second Life goes they could even provide a register that makers could sign up to that would track their items. Obviously the first person registered is the original maker. Pretty much the same process as defending copyrights, patents, etc.
You're definately right. I remember the Atari 2600 being around $250 (I could be wrong) which is probably not to different from a $600 console today.
I'm mostly interested in the amount of bang total. If they make it so you can daisy chain units together to increase the output of the system I'd be likely to buy more than one.
It's his money to lose. Flickr and similar sites have been around quite a while and YouTube isn't much more than Flickr for video. So long as YouTube makes a legitimate effort to remove copyright violations when copyright holders report them I don't know how they can lose a lawsuit. It'd be pretty easy to keep repeats from happening but as it's so easy to slightly modify a video and bypass most basic filters I don't see that there is a legitimate way to blame YouTube for this happening.
Only idiots fight the future. Smart players see what the new trends are and find ways to make them work to their advantage. Online access to all IP isn't going anywhere despite the whiners.
Some years ago I bought a unit from an ad in Circuit Cellar Inc magazine that worked reasonable well given it's very low cost. It had dos drivers that didn't do much more than interface with their custom program for displaying the output but we were able to write our own drivers without to much pain. Maybe your friend could do the same?
Affordable to me equals crappy. Might as well grab a Flashback Atari and have yourself some affordable fun. Affordable is buying a $15 video card and a $50 CPU and sitting around playing three year old games. Yeah, there were some good games three years ago but do I want to choose to play old favorites or be forced to?
I think the 'cool' ads are a marketing mistake. They don't catch your attention, they don't come easily to mind later, and they just don't make you lust for the machine. I'd put it on the same level of marketing mistake as renaming the Revolution to Wii. These things won't stop fans from buying these consoles but they'll hurt their perspective companies penetration among casual buyers.
Although for a $600 PS3 I'm not sure how many casual buyers there will be anyway - it'll be mostly hardcore geeks and gamers I think. For a $600 console to reach the casual buyer Sony will have to make the PS3 look really sexy - it has to be in the same consideration as a luxary car or the jumbo sized flat tv. If the PS3 isn't a status symbol then Sony won't reach the casual buyer.
In a year or so though I wonder if Sony won't lower the PS3 price quite a bit as they have a history of doing with earlier consoles. Then their prices will be within reach of the casual buyer and they'll have the sexiest next gen console. Release isn't when most consoles are sold. It's over the next few years up to the next next gen console that most are sold. All they have to do is slash prices during that time period and they'll be gold. Still, they need ads that make the machine look good now so that people will want it when they do cut the price.
I think they need to show off the games that are ready at launch but also show off upcoming games and even demos that show off the power of their systems. I'm not overly worried about exclusive content when I buy a game. If anything I like not being forced to own a certain console to play a game. What I do like is if a game takes full advantage of the power of whatever system it's on. So I could play the game on Wii or XBox but it'll offer more on PS3. IMO the losser consoles tend to try to push that they have exclusive titles while the best console just does everything better.
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If anyone has a right to tax Second Life it's its creators. Nobody else has such a right. I don't see what the purpose would be other than to be annoying though. If they're smart they take the real money they collect and put it into a money fund or some similar safe place where it can collect interest for the company. As it is the number one thing that keeps me from developing more stuff in SL is that they charge a monthly fee which I am not going to pay. They're turning away exprienced programmers that would contribute for free if allowed to - a bad choice IMO. They need a special type of account for developers willing to make stuff and not use it for commercial gain - that grants a certain amount of free land and rights to upload textures and stuff without paying. If anything taxes would make people even more likely not to participate. It's just one more hassle. If I want taxes I'll stick to real life.
Fedora and Debian are fine if you understand their development process enough to hang back from the bleeding edge a little and not to use unstable or testing packages. I've ran both on servers under heavy load, for years, and have never had a crash or a major security issue. The Enterprise editions are mostly useful if you want support.
My biggest complaint is that they often compile software with to many dependicies, that aren't needed, required. This gets to be a pain when you have to compile half of your software yourself in order to keep things running with low overhead and little wasted space. Just because a program can use an optional feature doesn't mean it needs to be enabled by default. Also you tend to get a lot of cruft installed by default, even if you do a minimal install, that you don't need. I'm forced to keep track of these things and make sure they're removed myself - not very user friendly.
The biggest productivity limitation of today's computers is the user interface. The desktop metaphor simply is not powerful enough to make accessing and manipulating large amounts of information effecient. Anyone that is good at using the command-line, working through scripts, etc knows that you can accomplish much more using these methods than you can using a desktop enviroment and that when the task is even possible on the desktop it's quite a bit slower than working on the command-line.
What we need to do is stop making it okay to be computer illiterate. It's not okay to not know how to read, write, or do at least basic math but at one point in our history people really believed that the average person didn't need to know those things. It's not even unique to require knowledge of a machine to live - in most places you can't live without knowing how to use an automobile and if you try people think there is something wrong with you. Why aren't we teaching basic skills like common Unix commands, bash, Perl, and SQL in schools? Why don't we allow the desktop to evolve to work more seamlessly with the command-line and scripting and to handle task management better?
Just because an interface is command-line and script driven doesn't mean it can't have powerful graphical interfaces too. A lot of CAD packages have graphical interfaces, command-line interfaces, and scripting tied together. Why can't more applications work that way? Or even the whole OS?
I don't really think time would be an obstacle to a god so when god does evolve it will exist in all times past, present, and future. So it doesn't really matter if it's evolved yet or not - god would still exist in all parts of time. ;)
By not providing an offical client they are making people choose between flakey Wine and crappy Windows. If Second Life can have a Linux client it should shame WoW not to have a Linux client. Obviously they have a significant number of people trying to play WoW under Linux - that should be a good hint that a Linux client would be good for them to provide. Companies that ignore the needs of a significant numbers of their own customers are making a mistake.
I think the article tries to have a point but fails short even if they may be right. FOSS projects do need a strong leader if they are going to do well. Projects without strong leadership go all over and tend to die or splinter. Just having any leader is not an improvement over no leader though. Neither is having any vision instead of a good vision. The vast majority of PHB projects are never completed or never go anywhre commercially. Mostly because the people in charge are bad leaders or have a bad vision. FOSS projects are evolution at work - what works continues on and what doesn't eventually dies off. Having good leadership just creates a nexus around which the project can grow and take direction. Most FOSS leaders don't know exactly where their project is going but they help to recognize the good and cut out the bad sooner rather than later. The best leaders create other leaders around themselves which makes their project into a multiheaded beast that is difficult to kill and with the ability to have multiple, but coherent, visions of what needs to happen for the project to evolve.
Gnome and KDE have mostly sucked because their vision was to copy features from Windows and Mac OS. They are growing away from that limited and faulty vision but I'd agree that their problem has been a lack of leadership with vision. I would not say PHB alternatives such as Windows and Mac OS have any better vision though. The problem with the desktop, and many desktop apps, is that people are locked into a metaphor and they are having trouble stepping outside that box. It'll take a strong leader with vision and major coding skills to break people out of their metaphor mind block. FOSS has a better chance to invent this future though because FOSS projects can afford to be wrong where as commercial projects usually can't.
You're saying that because most people are stupid that having choices available is bad? You can't run society so that it's easy for idiots.
I like having choices and investigating them to see which is best. What I don't like is choices that are supposed to be different but when you investigate they are really pretty much the same. Examples range from politics where I usually feel my vote doesn't matter because both canidates are creeps who are just out for their own benefit to the M$ Office vrs OpenOffice comparison where OpenOffice has been designed to be almost as buggy and bloated as M$ Office just so idiots don't have to think about the differences.
Making all the choices similar is a trick done to confuse stupid people and make it easier for them to be pushed from one choice to another. Sure it works but it leaves us with all our choices being worthless to us. I ask not only for more choices but also for better choices. I want options that will make a difference.
They could produce a Linux client rather than making people use crappy for-pay versions of Wine that is unsupported.
I used to go a week at a time without sleep when I was a little younger and it didn't have much of a negative effect on my work. In fact I'd say it made my work much better. What did suffer was my health and social skills. I'd say it's a worthy trade off for short periods of time where you need to be glued to a project but not for extended periods. The main benefits besides being awake is stat your brain functionality seems to change a little the longer you go without sleep. It's easier to focus on a single problem and make mental leaps. The downside is you often end up with mental leaps that work but are hard to explain and multitasking becomes narly impossible. You get extremely grumpy too as you tend tos tart having fits of anger if anyone disturbs you. When you finally try to sleep it's difficult to do and you have dreams that are twisted and a bit deranged where your brain keeps trying to work on what you were doing but weird dream-like things keep creeping in. If you wake back up and work while in this dream-state your work is even more bizarre to figure out later. Often it's hard to remember afterwards exactly what you were working on. It fries your mind and sends you into depression if you keep going without sleep so use it sparingly.
Or at least that was what it was like for me. Unfortunately the health side effects mean I can't go without sleep entirely anymore so I sleep around four hours a day now.
Wouldn't it be nice if all employers did that. That policy of Google's is my number one reason for wishing they'd hire me. Finally time and resources to work on pet projects and if they don't suck then millions of people could end up using my project. That'd be awesome.
I don't know why it should be such a big change that it means starting over. Certainly they should be able to break out certain sub-systems so that they can scale over several systems (possibly shared) without needing to rewrite the whole thing. For example if they use some sort of database to store the data a machine is tracking they could modify it to invisible split that task across several machines. If they use a standard db like MySQL or Oracle this could be as easy as making some configuration changes. If they can store and access such data when stored on multiple machines then a lot of tasks such as object movement should be able to be processed by multiple machines.
Having a machine per area does seem an odd design decision. I can see that it might speed things up a little when overhead is low, as you'd have less passing of data around their internal network, but as overhead rises it seems it'd be better to have everything distributed across multiple machines.
I've never had a client that cared so long as the site was usable for everyone. Most are very happy not to double or triple their costs just to support a few losers who are still using browsers from 1997.
I think there needs to be a line between real aethists that really think there is no higher being, that there can be no higher being, and that life is essentially meaningless and the rest of us that think that popular religion is insane, emotional, unrealistic, and stupid. I don't consider myself an aethist although most religious people would. I don't believe in any specific god or doctrine but I do believe that a god is likely and is probably the end result of evolution. In my mind, the evolution of god is a meaning of life, if not the meaning of life, and the beauty of a Universe that runs by such wonderful precise and complex mechanism (science and math) is amazing. I'm not a true aethist because science and math is my religion.
If you buy any new console and think you're going to get a really different experience then you've misled yourself. It's all been done before. I remember using motion sensing with the original Nintendo and I'd not be surprised if it wasn't done before that. Light guns, motion sensing, etc can be a fun distraction but they are unlikely to ever create a truely different type of game and they've been tried several times over the many generations of gaming. Better graphics is not going to create a different type of game. For that matter video games are just modifications of real life things to do so there has never been a game that was really entirely new.
The only thing more processing power and new controllers can do is bring us closer to having come full circle where video games are more like real life. It can make playing easier and more give us special effects we're unlikely to see in real life (Prey's gravity fields and portals are unlikely to happen in real life anytime soon.) and not actually dying when you get blasted by an alien is nice but it's still not going to be anything really new.
I'm kind of amussed that people who won't get off their ass to go outside and play tennis with a friend (and get to see those hot girls in short tennis skirts) will sit at home with their little Wii virtual racket and play virtual tennis with cartoon characters. At some point if you really want realism I have to wonder why you don't just go do these things for real.
IE7 is compatible with most of the CSS stuff I use at least so usually there are only a few bugs that have to be worked out rather than the tons that I had to deal with under IE6. I suggest just making one standard style sheet that works with Firefox, Safari, and Opera, a IE7 stylesheet that tweaks the minor bugs out, and then a stylesheet for all outdated IE browsers which should make the site usable but plain. So long as the site is usable who cares if people still using IE4 like how it looks? If they haven't cared to update their browser then obviously they don't know the difference anyway.
It was just amazing that they could do all three LoTR movies so that even a big fan of the books, like myself, could be pretty happy with the movies. (My only real complaint being that there were no hobbit wars in the movie.) If they do the Hobbit or other middle earth movies and mess them up it'll just be such a loss for fans and nobody involved will make as much money as they will if they do it right. Somehow I doubt anybody involved is going broke after making the LoTR movies so why not say the hell with accounting practices and just make some more movies?
I don't want to see LoTR follow the path of Harry Potter where the first two movies were perfect adaptions of the books and the rest of the movies are pale knockoffs or even like Star Wars where the prequels feel like they don't quite work.
Caution is not a good way to make rapid advancements. Danger is inherit in discovery. Not that I'd suggest they not do lab work first to try to make products safe before exposure to the public but I think we do more harm to ourselves by being overly cautious. How many more people will die by slowing nanotech development to half speed compared to the people who might die if we race ahead at full speed? I get so angry when I see people protesting nanotech, genetics, stem cell research, etc. These have a strong likelyhood to provide wonder drugs in the near future but stupid people want to stop their advancement because there are minor risks. Not that the article is doing that - but I've seen a lot of people do it. IMO even if these technolgoies kill 95% of the population in the short-term it'd be worth it in the long-term because they'll make future generations so much stronger and more advanced. Consider it making us extinct for the benefit of those that evolve from us if you like.
And people twirly eyed over Wii do so based on what exactly? (Besides the three, very lame characters, W I I.) I personally think the Wii will be cool but that the PS3 will be cooler. I think both units are over priced for their target market but that each will sell plenty of units to their diehard fans and more units later when the prices drop.
Besides their interesting controller what is there to be interested about the Wii? Why should I play it other than my Gamecube? If I'm going to shell out bucks for a console I want the most powerful one so that seems to be a PS3. I've seen plenty of articles on all the consoles and I've yet to see anything even try to claim that the Wii will be anywhere as powerful as the PS3 or even the XBox 360. It has a controller that may or may not be innovative but such things are easily copied if they work well - the PS3 already borrowed some of the motion tracking stuff and I'm sure they're ready to borrow more if needed. I haven't been a fan of many Nintendo games since the N64 - Gameboy offerings left me wanting although there were a few games I liked. Meanwhile Playstation has thousands of available games and dozens that I really like.
When the prices drop I might buy a Wii for party games if they do well in those like the Gamecube did. Otherwise I don't see what there is to be interested in.
My one bitch about the PS3 so far.. are they really making you buy adapters to save from PS1/PS2 titles? C'mon guys it has a fricken 60GB hdd. I was mad enough that I got a PS2 with a hdd and it wouldn't let me save directly the the hdd.
While I don't think they shouldn't study the dangers of these new materials I think the extremist that start calling for us to abandon such new technologies are idiots that ought to be ignored. As with anything new we should carefully study it and see what the risks and benefits are and how we can lower the risks while increasing the benefits. Science isn't always safe. What major breakthrough has ever happened where someone wasn't hurt along the way? How many people died or suffered horrible damage from X-Rays for example? Would we have been better off having never developed X-Ray technology into working products?
Throwing experimental materials into cosmetics is a little rash but I expect they ran lab tests on the materials first. If it's not immediately dangerous then you might as well give it a shot. Maybe it's sad but mass product releases often are the best test. It could take 30 years of careful testing to find out the results you'd get by just releasing it on the public. People get sick and die from eatting vegetables so you have to realize that life is never going to be fully safe.
If it doesn't kill us all in it's infancy I expect nano to make most of us live a lot longer and higher quality of life. It's worth a few risks.
I don't know if that's really true anymore. When I upgrade either my CPU or GPU these days I usually end up upgrading both along with mobo and RAM. Unless you're making a very minor upgrade of either CPU or GPU, and who can afford that unless you're buying crappy outdated stuff anyway, you'll likely have a hard time not needing to upgrade your mobo in the process and if you do that you usually have to upgrade everything else. Just package everything together and make it really powerful so I won't have to upgrade more than every other year to play the coolest new games.
It does make me wonder about the multi-core multi-gpu future though. Can they manage to pack 16 cores and 4 gpus into a single package that won't melt a hole through the mobo? If they can then I'll be sure to buy one. They better make the GPU specs as open as the CPU specs though because I use Linux and won't buy it if it doesn't have opensource drivers available.
It's much easier to keep someone from forging a document than to keep them from copying a document. Digital signing works pretty well and for that matter such records can be kept by the maker and displayed say as a public viewable, but not editable, web page. So far as Second Life goes they could even provide a register that makers could sign up to that would track their items. Obviously the first person registered is the original maker. Pretty much the same process as defending copyrights, patents, etc.
You're definately right. I remember the Atari 2600 being around $250 (I could be wrong) which is probably not to different from a $600 console today.
I'm mostly interested in the amount of bang total. If they make it so you can daisy chain units together to increase the output of the system I'd be likely to buy more than one.
It's his money to lose. Flickr and similar sites have been around quite a while and YouTube isn't much more than Flickr for video. So long as YouTube makes a legitimate effort to remove copyright violations when copyright holders report them I don't know how they can lose a lawsuit. It'd be pretty easy to keep repeats from happening but as it's so easy to slightly modify a video and bypass most basic filters I don't see that there is a legitimate way to blame YouTube for this happening.
Only idiots fight the future. Smart players see what the new trends are and find ways to make them work to their advantage. Online access to all IP isn't going anywhere despite the whiners.
Some years ago I bought a unit from an ad in Circuit Cellar Inc magazine that worked reasonable well given it's very low cost. It had dos drivers that didn't do much more than interface with their custom program for displaying the output but we were able to write our own drivers without to much pain. Maybe your friend could do the same?
Affordable to me equals crappy. Might as well grab a Flashback Atari and have yourself some affordable fun. Affordable is buying a $15 video card and a $50 CPU and sitting around playing three year old games. Yeah, there were some good games three years ago but do I want to choose to play old favorites or be forced to?
I think the 'cool' ads are a marketing mistake. They don't catch your attention, they don't come easily to mind later, and they just don't make you lust for the machine. I'd put it on the same level of marketing mistake as renaming the Revolution to Wii. These things won't stop fans from buying these consoles but they'll hurt their perspective companies penetration among casual buyers.
Although for a $600 PS3 I'm not sure how many casual buyers there will be anyway - it'll be mostly hardcore geeks and gamers I think. For a $600 console to reach the casual buyer Sony will have to make the PS3 look really sexy - it has to be in the same consideration as a luxary car or the jumbo sized flat tv. If the PS3 isn't a status symbol then Sony won't reach the casual buyer.
In a year or so though I wonder if Sony won't lower the PS3 price quite a bit as they have a history of doing with earlier consoles. Then their prices will be within reach of the casual buyer and they'll have the sexiest next gen console. Release isn't when most consoles are sold. It's over the next few years up to the next next gen console that most are sold. All they have to do is slash prices during that time period and they'll be gold. Still, they need ads that make the machine look good now so that people will want it when they do cut the price.
I think they need to show off the games that are ready at launch but also show off upcoming games and even demos that show off the power of their systems. I'm not overly worried about exclusive content when I buy a game. If anything I like not being forced to own a certain console to play a game. What I do like is if a game takes full advantage of the power of whatever system it's on. So I could play the game on Wii or XBox but it'll offer more on PS3. IMO the losser consoles tend to try to push that they have exclusive titles while the best console just does everything better.