"Starting with an intense fight scene" is vague enough that I don't mind at all. It's not "start with an intense fight scene that involves a reptile inside a boat, where you swing around it and then have to attack it with a conveniently placed spear", it's just . . . "an intense fight scene".
Considering that the game is about fighting, this is basically saying "I hope all the games start out strongly", and seriously I can't object to that.
The classic Metroid series actually has a much, much more specific start - it always starts off with you exploring a relatively small area, attacking a boss, and then running away as the small area explodes around you. And that certainly hasn't gotten tired yet because, let's face it, it's fun. I can live with "an intense fight scene".
(Hell, what's the alternative? A boring fight scene?)
I would. I personally don't plan to do anything that would make the ID card system bad for me personally - I'm not afraid of the government knowing who I am.
I still think it's an awful idea, but that's in aggregate, not for individual people. Even if I'm likely to never be affected by it, thousands upon thousands will, and I'd be willing to put myself slightly more on the line in order to help protect them.
In some ways it's a pity I'm not in the UK, so I can't make my voice heard, but on the other hand . . . I'm really glad I'm not in the UK, honestly.
Random idea for happy medium, that AFAIK has never been tried:
Elect a group of representatives (at least ten, possibly more for larger cities, more than a hundred is likely overkill.) On all major decisions, first they vote. Then it's given to popular vote also. To overrule the representative vote, the popular vote must equal or exceed their threshold (perhaps minus some adjustment factor, so you can never require 100% of the popular vote). So, for example, there's a bill which is a really good idea, and 80% of the Representatives vote for it. Now 80% or more of the people must vote against it to overrule their decision. So unless it's unbelievably unpopular, it'll pass.
Basically, it gives the reps "more votes", but leaves them still liable to the people's decisions. Hopefully things like "Poowoomba" wouldn't exist because they'd need 95% naysayers, but more controversial votes would end up nearer to 50/50 and be easily swayed by the people.
Not sure if it would be really practical in the end.
Another issue is that, if IBM buys them, they probably end up having to deal with SCO's various madcap lawsuits. It's quite possible SCO is worth literally less than nothing right now, considering all the reverse lawsuits they're liable for.
Yes, that could legally happen. It probably wouldn't. But it could.
The line is drawn at 18 in most states. Some have more complex laws that work better, but in many cases, if two people under 18 have sex, legally speaking they are raping each other.
I've downloaded "perfectly legal disc images" that turned out to be porn movies. I mean, I thought they were legal when I was starting to download them . . . when things don't work I generally try renaming them to.mpg or.avi or.zip just to see what I actually got. Sometimes it's surprising.
Wouldn't surprise me if the reverse happened once in a while - some dude took an Ubuntu image and renamed it to Mission Impossible 3.whatever just to fuck with people. Filenames are easy to change. If you really wanted to check what was going on you might be able to compare hashes (the one letter of that type I got included hashes with the files.)
(And referred to an IP that I'd never ever had - at that point I was using a dynamic DNS manager that logged, so I knew I'd never had that IP. Sigh.)
It's also possible it was the [i]other way around[/i] - that one of the files you downloaded happened to be used as a fake of Mission Impossible 3. So the MPAA comes along, sees who is downloading "Mission Impossible 3", grabs your IP (since after all you're downloading a file that they see as MI3), and sends you a nastygram.
We've seen them send cease and desist notices for people keeping text files on their website with words in the filename that could be mangled to form movie names. If your download was about the right size for a movie . . . well, that'd actually be [i]more[/i] accurate than they'd been in the past.
. . . How am I wrong? I didn't say it didn't. I said I was curious. There's a very large difference.
Also, your original point was that people would gladly pay more for a computer which doesn't have the features that this does. My point was that you got an entire bucket of features with a more expensive computer that this doesn't support. If you'd like to change your original argument, however, go for it. Just remove the "World of Warcraft" comment, and insert any slightly less recent game that would run fine on a $600 computer.
Even though I suspect you could build a $600 PC that would run WoW fine - your original argument didn't restrict to the Mac either.
Worth is relative. There are things this does that a $600 PC doesn't. There are things a $600 PC does that this doesn't. That's my point.
Seriously, stop looking for an argument - you're so eager to defend and champion this product that you're coming across kind of psycho. This is not "just as good as a $600 computer only smaller", and claiming that it is - which is what your original argument seems to be geared towards - merely makes you look dumb.
* Play World of Warcraft * Provide a software development platform * Store a terabyte of music * Have a screen which is 19" wide * Act as a private web server
So, thanks, but I'd rather pay $1500 for a computer that does what I need than $600 for a much smaller computer which doesn't.
I'm interested in whether this will allow people to develop their own software. If so, I'm very interested. If not, I'll wait until it does.
What makes you think indirection involves a speed hit? If it's not a virtual function, it's nearly free, and it only gets really bad if you start making virtual functions that do very little work.
Do you avoid functions in your code?
Abstraction doesn't require virtual functions, remember. A simple class, or even a set of functions labeled "use these functions", is a level of abstraction. OpenGL, for example, is a perfectly functional abstraction barrier without necessarily involving a single virtual function call. (It could, in theory, be inlined entirely, if you had a software OpenGL.)
I agree that there's nothing inherently wrong with pointers, and I do in fact use them when I think it's worth the hassle. But they are moderately errorprone and you do have to be very careful with them. I feel they're better avoided as much as possible unless you have an extremely good reason to use them. (These do exist.)
I've seen, and written, a lot of complex C++ that didn't use pointers directly. I try to avoid pointers in general - any case where I use pointers is carefully hidden behind abstraction.
(This doesn't count pointers-as-function-parameters, as long as they're not stored anywhere. I use those pretty often. But I've found that generally stored pointers are just plain difficult to deal with properly, unless ownership and invalidation semantics are utterly 100% clear, and even then they're tough.)
David Allen also discourages the use of traditional todo lists (hierarchical or otherwise) because they can be demoralizing when you don't accomplish some of your daily todos. What he does suggest is the use of a project list. A project is something that has a definite outcome like "Take Vacation in Hawaii." Every project has "next actions" associated with it, where a "next action" is the next physical thing you can do to move the project forward.
. . .
This methodology is useful because projects are no longer monolithic blobs of time and effort sitting on an arbitrary list. Projects become a sequence of discrete executable actions which lead to a goal. The idea is that you think about things only as much as necessary. You won't need to rethink the project everytime you do something associated with it.
So, what he's suggesting is . . . you take your larger goals, and then you break them up into a sequence of smaller subgoals?
Sort of like a hierarchy?
This is how I've been organizing my own stuff for quite a while, and it works great. Of course, I end up with huge lists sometimes - the todo file for a single one of my projects is 85 lines long right now - but that's OK, because the top 20 or 30 lines are all pretty simple things. I can easily go through half a dozen or more in a day.:)
Completely made-up numbers that may show why your logic there is flawed:
Let us say that 2% of humanity finds the idea sexually interesting. Let us say that 50% of the people who go looking for child porn can find it. Let us imagine that 80% of the people who find the idea sexually interesting but are not able to find child porn end up molesting children, while 20% of the people who find the idea sexually interesting but are not able to find child porn do.
Our end results: 98% of humanity never gets interested in it in the least. 0.2% of humanity is interested in it but never finds child porn or molests children. 0.8% of humanity molests children but has no child porn. 0.8% of humanity has child porn, but does not molest any children. 0.2% of humanity both molests children and has child porn.
Out of the 99% of non-molestors, ~0.81% of them (0.8/0.99) has child porn. Out of the 1% of molestors, 20% of them have child porn. In this imaginary situation, child porn is far more common among molestors, and yet the existence of child porn also decreases molestation significantly. In fact, if child porn was available to 100% of the population in this scenario, the molestation percentage would drop to 0.4% from 1%.
I do not claim any of these numbers are accurate in any way shape or form, I'm just pointing out the apparent mathematical paradox and why it's mistaken.
Rechargeable batteries work quite well. On keyboards, a pair of batteries will last literally months. Mice are trickier, however, since your average optical mouse does a nontrivial amount of processing work. Logitech is coming up with new inventive solutions for making it bearable - the recent G7 mice come with a little charger and a pair of replaceable batteries, so your charging downtime is mere seconds.
The keyboard could easily use the same batteries, though I don't know if they're going to bother with that. It's not as critical with keyboard.
My point is that, yes, price shifts the demand curve, as does PR. However, once you move outside a single instant of "here is what the demand curve is at this moment", they behave quite differently. Good PR is much harder and slower to gain than good price. Price can be changed overnight. But there are many companies that couldn't make me want to buy their system overnight.
If Nintendo and Sony both released identical consoles for $400, I would buy Nintendo's. If Sony reduced their price to $300, I would buy Nintendo's. If Sony announced that they were going to donate a thousand dollars to a Save The Fuzzy Mammals campaign, I would buy Nintendo's. If Sony did all of that, then stopped fucking with DRM and started working to extricate themselves from the RIAA, then I'd buy Sony's . . . after several years had passed, once I was convinced they were serious.
PR is tougher to change than price, even though they modify the same curve, and must be considered separately. High initial prices can create bad PR. Seeming to fuck over your customers [i]does[/i] create bad PR. Making your customers think that they'll get a better deal if they just wait reduces demand (I'm not sure if I'd categorize that under PR, but it is similar.) These are things that can't just be fixed by lowering the price - often "the highest price the market can bear" turns out to be a blisteringly stupid idea.
Except supply and demand isn't the only factor. There's also longer-term issues like PR.
For example, imagine Sony announced their new console at $2000. They might have still sold out. Let's imagine, for the purpose of example, they did. And imagine they then said "okay, now we're dropping the price to $600!"
First off, they piss off everyone who bought a console for $2000. Second, there will be a nontrivial number of people who think of the PS3 as "the two thousand dollar console" - even though it isn't. And third, *next* time they release a console, everyone would be waiting for them to pull the same trick . . . even if they had no intention of doing so.
The Gamecube is *still* referred to as a kiddy console. Consumers remember things for a long time, even when they're not true.
Sony's price may not have been too high, but I strongly doubt it was too low.
I actually just picked up a 60" LCD TV for a mere $2800. Note that this wasn't a low-end one - this was the high-end Sony XBR2 SXRD model. (You can tell it's good because it has a lot of X's and R's.) Full 1080p and all. Cheaper models could easily hit $2k USD or less.
I suspect one of the reasons plasma screens still do well is that they're wall-mountable - the unit is something like two or three feet deep, so obviously that's not very practical unless you can knock a hole in your wall. But unless you need that, I'm not sure why I'd bother with a plasma now. LCD's kind of dominating.
So now you've actually just proven my point. I said that you'd need two 32768 base digits and a 1024 base digit. (The numbers are slightly different when you're working with 32640 bit digits, obviously, but they're quite close.) Which is roughly what you ended up with. So you need three digits for a 40-bit number.
See why I'm a little skeptical of your claim that you can cram a 10kilobyte file - eighty thousand bits - into two 32,640 base digits when you can't even squeeze 40 bits into two?
See why I utterly disbelieve you when you claim that a 125 MB file - a whopping billion bits - can be crammed into those same two 32,640 base digits?
If you scan an 8.5" by 11" piece of paper at 300dpi, with 24 bits per pixel, you get slightly more than 24 megabytes. No matter what calculations you do, no matter how much CPU power you spend, you will never be able to retrieve more information than that from the piece of paper. That's simple mathematics and computer science.
(This assumes your data is already compressed - you can of course compress terabytes of 0's into a very small amount of space, and easily store that on the piece of paper. But then you're still not storing very much information.)
Aha - you pasted "10110101 10011010 10010100 01101111 11010100" into a binary-to-decimal converter, am I right?
Your binary to decimal converter doesn't strip whitespace, and terminates when it hits the first space. "10110101" is equal to 181. "1011010110011010100101000110111111010100" is equal to 779982499796. I'm pretty sure that doesn't fit into a set of 32,640 glyphs.
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"Starting with an intense fight scene" is vague enough that I don't mind at all. It's not "start with an intense fight scene that involves a reptile inside a boat, where you swing around it and then have to attack it with a conveniently placed spear", it's just . . . "an intense fight scene".
Considering that the game is about fighting, this is basically saying "I hope all the games start out strongly", and seriously I can't object to that.
The classic Metroid series actually has a much, much more specific start - it always starts off with you exploring a relatively small area, attacking a boss, and then running away as the small area explodes around you. And that certainly hasn't gotten tired yet because, let's face it, it's fun. I can live with "an intense fight scene".
(Hell, what's the alternative? A boring fight scene?)
I would. I personally don't plan to do anything that would make the ID card system bad for me personally - I'm not afraid of the government knowing who I am.
I still think it's an awful idea, but that's in aggregate, not for individual people. Even if I'm likely to never be affected by it, thousands upon thousands will, and I'd be willing to put myself slightly more on the line in order to help protect them.
In some ways it's a pity I'm not in the UK, so I can't make my voice heard, but on the other hand . . . I'm really glad I'm not in the UK, honestly.
Random idea for happy medium, that AFAIK has never been tried:
Elect a group of representatives (at least ten, possibly more for larger cities, more than a hundred is likely overkill.) On all major decisions, first they vote. Then it's given to popular vote also. To overrule the representative vote, the popular vote must equal or exceed their threshold (perhaps minus some adjustment factor, so you can never require 100% of the popular vote). So, for example, there's a bill which is a really good idea, and 80% of the Representatives vote for it. Now 80% or more of the people must vote against it to overrule their decision. So unless it's unbelievably unpopular, it'll pass.
Basically, it gives the reps "more votes", but leaves them still liable to the people's decisions. Hopefully things like "Poowoomba" wouldn't exist because they'd need 95% naysayers, but more controversial votes would end up nearer to 50/50 and be easily swayed by the people.
Not sure if it would be really practical in the end.
Another issue is that, if IBM buys them, they probably end up having to deal with SCO's various madcap lawsuits. It's quite possible SCO is worth literally less than nothing right now, considering all the reverse lawsuits they're liable for.
Yes, that could legally happen. It probably wouldn't. But it could.
The line is drawn at 18 in most states. Some have more complex laws that work better, but in many cases, if two people under 18 have sex, legally speaking they are raping each other.
That's when the correct reaction is to change the speed limit back - not stop enforcing it.
I've downloaded "perfectly legal disc images" that turned out to be porn movies. I mean, I thought they were legal when I was starting to download them . . . when things don't work I generally try renaming them to .mpg or .avi or .zip just to see what I actually got. Sometimes it's surprising.
Wouldn't surprise me if the reverse happened once in a while - some dude took an Ubuntu image and renamed it to Mission Impossible 3.whatever just to fuck with people. Filenames are easy to change. If you really wanted to check what was going on you might be able to compare hashes (the one letter of that type I got included hashes with the files.)
(And referred to an IP that I'd never ever had - at that point I was using a dynamic DNS manager that logged, so I knew I'd never had that IP. Sigh.)
It's also possible it was the [i]other way around[/i] - that one of the files you downloaded happened to be used as a fake of Mission Impossible 3. So the MPAA comes along, sees who is downloading "Mission Impossible 3", grabs your IP (since after all you're downloading a file that they see as MI3), and sends you a nastygram.
We've seen them send cease and desist notices for people keeping text files on their website with words in the filename that could be mangled to form movie names. If your download was about the right size for a movie . . . well, that'd actually be [i]more[/i] accurate than they'd been in the past.
That was referring to a compiler and keyboard and debugger and such. It might be technically able to do that, but I certainly wouldn't *want* to.
:)
I didn't know if it could run user developed programs, but I'm sure as hell not going to write the code on the device itself.
. . . How am I wrong? I didn't say it didn't. I said I was curious. There's a very large difference.
Also, your original point was that people would gladly pay more for a computer which doesn't have the features that this does. My point was that you got an entire bucket of features with a more expensive computer that this doesn't support. If you'd like to change your original argument, however, go for it. Just remove the "World of Warcraft" comment, and insert any slightly less recent game that would run fine on a $600 computer.
Even though I suspect you could build a $600 PC that would run WoW fine - your original argument didn't restrict to the Mac either.
Worth is relative. There are things this does that a $600 PC doesn't. There are things a $600 PC does that this doesn't. That's my point.
Seriously, stop looking for an argument - you're so eager to defend and champion this product that you're coming across kind of psycho. This is not "just as good as a $600 computer only smaller", and claiming that it is - which is what your original argument seems to be geared towards - merely makes you look dumb.
On the other hand, this tiny computer does not:
* Play World of Warcraft
* Provide a software development platform
* Store a terabyte of music
* Have a screen which is 19" wide
* Act as a private web server
So, thanks, but I'd rather pay $1500 for a computer that does what I need than $600 for a much smaller computer which doesn't.
I'm interested in whether this will allow people to develop their own software. If so, I'm very interested. If not, I'll wait until it does.
What makes you think indirection involves a speed hit? If it's not a virtual function, it's nearly free, and it only gets really bad if you start making virtual functions that do very little work.
Do you avoid functions in your code?
Abstraction doesn't require virtual functions, remember. A simple class, or even a set of functions labeled "use these functions", is a level of abstraction. OpenGL, for example, is a perfectly functional abstraction barrier without necessarily involving a single virtual function call. (It could, in theory, be inlined entirely, if you had a software OpenGL.)
I agree that there's nothing inherently wrong with pointers, and I do in fact use them when I think it's worth the hassle. But they are moderately errorprone and you do have to be very careful with them. I feel they're better avoided as much as possible unless you have an extremely good reason to use them. (These do exist.)
I've seen, and written, a lot of complex C++ that didn't use pointers directly. I try to avoid pointers in general - any case where I use pointers is carefully hidden behind abstraction.
(This doesn't count pointers-as-function-parameters, as long as they're not stored anywhere. I use those pretty often. But I've found that generally stored pointers are just plain difficult to deal with properly, unless ownership and invalidation semantics are utterly 100% clear, and even then they're tough.)
That's true. Personally, that's not something I commonly want to do :) but I agree that it's a tradeoff.
I don't know about him, but I'd sure as hell want a compiletime error. The earlier your errors can show up, the easier they are to fix.
So, what he's suggesting is . . . you take your larger goals, and then you break them up into a sequence of smaller subgoals?
Sort of like a hierarchy?
This is how I've been organizing my own stuff for quite a while, and it works great. Of course, I end up with huge lists sometimes - the todo file for a single one of my projects is 85 lines long right now - but that's OK, because the top 20 or 30 lines are all pretty simple things. I can easily go through half a dozen or more in a day.
Completely made-up numbers that may show why your logic there is flawed:
Let us say that 2% of humanity finds the idea sexually interesting. Let us say that 50% of the people who go looking for child porn can find it. Let us imagine that 80% of the people who find the idea sexually interesting but are not able to find child porn end up molesting children, while 20% of the people who find the idea sexually interesting but are not able to find child porn do.
Our end results: 98% of humanity never gets interested in it in the least. 0.2% of humanity is interested in it but never finds child porn or molests children. 0.8% of humanity molests children but has no child porn. 0.8% of humanity has child porn, but does not molest any children. 0.2% of humanity both molests children and has child porn.
Out of the 99% of non-molestors, ~0.81% of them (0.8/0.99) has child porn. Out of the 1% of molestors, 20% of them have child porn. In this imaginary situation, child porn is far more common among molestors, and yet the existence of child porn also decreases molestation significantly. In fact, if child porn was available to 100% of the population in this scenario, the molestation percentage would drop to 0.4% from 1%.
I do not claim any of these numbers are accurate in any way shape or form, I'm just pointing out the apparent mathematical paradox and why it's mistaken.
Rechargeable batteries work quite well. On keyboards, a pair of batteries will last literally months. Mice are trickier, however, since your average optical mouse does a nontrivial amount of processing work. Logitech is coming up with new inventive solutions for making it bearable - the recent G7 mice come with a little charger and a pair of replaceable batteries, so your charging downtime is mere seconds.
The keyboard could easily use the same batteries, though I don't know if they're going to bother with that. It's not as critical with keyboard.
My point is that, yes, price shifts the demand curve, as does PR. However, once you move outside a single instant of "here is what the demand curve is at this moment", they behave quite differently. Good PR is much harder and slower to gain than good price. Price can be changed overnight. But there are many companies that couldn't make me want to buy their system overnight.
If Nintendo and Sony both released identical consoles for $400, I would buy Nintendo's. If Sony reduced their price to $300, I would buy Nintendo's. If Sony announced that they were going to donate a thousand dollars to a Save The Fuzzy Mammals campaign, I would buy Nintendo's. If Sony did all of that, then stopped fucking with DRM and started working to extricate themselves from the RIAA, then I'd buy Sony's . . . after several years had passed, once I was convinced they were serious.
PR is tougher to change than price, even though they modify the same curve, and must be considered separately. High initial prices can create bad PR. Seeming to fuck over your customers [i]does[/i] create bad PR. Making your customers think that they'll get a better deal if they just wait reduces demand (I'm not sure if I'd categorize that under PR, but it is similar.) These are things that can't just be fixed by lowering the price - often "the highest price the market can bear" turns out to be a blisteringly stupid idea.
That's my point.
No they aren't - the price can be changed in a matter of days. Your PR can't.
I agree they have similar effects, but they're very fundamentally different beasts when you want to start manipulating them.
Except supply and demand isn't the only factor. There's also longer-term issues like PR.
For example, imagine Sony announced their new console at $2000. They might have still sold out. Let's imagine, for the purpose of example, they did. And imagine they then said "okay, now we're dropping the price to $600!"
First off, they piss off everyone who bought a console for $2000. Second, there will be a nontrivial number of people who think of the PS3 as "the two thousand dollar console" - even though it isn't. And third, *next* time they release a console, everyone would be waiting for them to pull the same trick . . . even if they had no intention of doing so.
The Gamecube is *still* referred to as a kiddy console. Consumers remember things for a long time, even when they're not true.
Sony's price may not have been too high, but I strongly doubt it was too low.
*grins* No problem. 'Least you figured it out and admitted it :)
I know I've done dumb things pretty often too.
I actually just picked up a 60" LCD TV for a mere $2800. Note that this wasn't a low-end one - this was the high-end Sony XBR2 SXRD model. (You can tell it's good because it has a lot of X's and R's.) Full 1080p and all. Cheaper models could easily hit $2k USD or less.
I suspect one of the reasons plasma screens still do well is that they're wall-mountable - the unit is something like two or three feet deep, so obviously that's not very practical unless you can knock a hole in your wall. But unless you need that, I'm not sure why I'd bother with a plasma now. LCD's kind of dominating.
So now you've actually just proven my point. I said that you'd need two 32768 base digits and a 1024 base digit. (The numbers are slightly different when you're working with 32640 bit digits, obviously, but they're quite close.) Which is roughly what you ended up with. So you need three digits for a 40-bit number.
See why I'm a little skeptical of your claim that you can cram a 10kilobyte file - eighty thousand bits - into two 32,640 base digits when you can't even squeeze 40 bits into two?
See why I utterly disbelieve you when you claim that a 125 MB file - a whopping billion bits - can be crammed into those same two 32,640 base digits?
If you scan an 8.5" by 11" piece of paper at 300dpi, with 24 bits per pixel, you get slightly more than 24 megabytes. No matter what calculations you do, no matter how much CPU power you spend, you will never be able to retrieve more information than that from the piece of paper. That's simple mathematics and computer science.
(This assumes your data is already compressed - you can of course compress terabytes of 0's into a very small amount of space, and easily store that on the piece of paper. But then you're still not storing very much information.)
Aha - you pasted "10110101 10011010 10010100 01101111 11010100" into a binary-to-decimal converter, am I right?
Your binary to decimal converter doesn't strip whitespace, and terminates when it hits the first space. "10110101" is equal to 181. "1011010110011010100101000110111111010100" is equal to 779982499796. I'm pretty sure that doesn't fit into a set of 32,640 glyphs.
Again, you may want to recheck your math.