As one of the links in the article stated, Apple also is not know for making products that can withstand abuse (ie the first-gen Nano screen).
My cell phone is already very scratched (and I take decent care of it).
And you're right - what's the point of running OS X on the phone, yet not offering any way write nifty little chunks of code to make your phone more functional.
In Canada, we only have one GSM cellular service (Rogers), and they aren't going to be ready for this until the end of 2008, according to an article in this mornings Vancouver Sun. That we'll be stuck with a single carrier is due more to the fact that there is only one GSM carrier in the country.
If some other civilization has the power to get here, and we don't have the power to get there, I'd say they have a technological advantage that would be overwhelming. If F16s are the most potent weapon in the universe, then I would say that we are not about to be visited any time soon, and thus we have nothing to worry about.
But if you want to plan on the contingency of fighting an inter-galactic war, you should be technologically advanced enough to fight it - we can barely get off our own planet.
"If, hypothetically, you found yourself to have evolved first or to exist in an otherwise empty galaxy - then you might look for an easy way to get the attention of any civilizations in any other galaxies."
Like the Borg?
Greg Bear hypothesized in Darwin's Radio that it might be unwise to announce your presence before you are able to defend yourself. Think of a baby bird in a nest, chirping loudly when it's mother is not around.
Of course, in your scenario, the civilization has the power to move stars, and to cause super novas - perhaps not a helpless civilization...
for smaller databases, but limiting the tablespace to a single file per database/schema doesn't sound very flexible, and won't allow DBAs to maximize their disk throughput.
I am guessing that this is more of a MyISAM replacement than an InnoDB replacement, so it's not really a shot across Oracle's bow (as some comments make it sound like).
was canceled because people half a dozen people were three minutes late to a meeting back in November. One of those meetings where senior management droned on about projections for the next year, presentations they had given, etc.
It was a no-spouse Christmas party, so I was going to skip anyway, but still - nice holiday spirit.
The wild stock get too close, and pick up lice, and die. The diet they are fed is not very healthy (I've heard a rumor that the fish are starved for a few days before going to market to try to get rid of the poisons), so it's not very good for us.
Not all fish are full of PCBs, etc. The big, long-living fish (specifically tuna, swordfish, etc), pick it up. Wild salmon from the west coast of Canada or the US is in good shape.
Talapia is a good choice if you find it too expensive; farmed, but with an environmental stamp of approval.
You will find Portuguese fishing boats off the east coast of Canada, and Chinese boats off the west coast. They go anywhere, including (illegally) inside the territorial waters of another country.
Most fish are international in nature. They might spawn in one country, but then spend the majority of their life outside national boundries.
Here, in BC, we have to work on fishing treaties with Washington state and Alaska, because the salmon travel through each others waters.
I don't think the report said that the oceans will be barren of fish, but rather that stocks will be so low that they won't be commercially viable, and many species will go extinct.
Unfortunately, it's pretty much open season outside national boundaries, and the mismanagement hasn't helped (our cod stocks are pretty much gone).
Can someone from the UK fill us ignorant North Americans in on Tesco?
It sounds like a public company (they announce profits). Who owns them (the big stake holders)?
Are they a company (like Ikea) that makes an effort to have their products recyclable? Do they donate money to charities? Do they outsource their jobs to India and use Chinese labour to make most of their products? Are they know for poor labour practices and letting split-open bags of fertilizer sit in a parking lot next to a river (both of which Walmart does).
What does cheap value food mean? If you get a "value" edition, it means stripped down OR a good price for what you get. Cheap is obvious.
If I was to get a console, I'd want one more family-friendly, something my wife would like. A controller with umpteen buttons, multiple analog and digital sticks, triggers, yada yada, wouldn't work.
Something she can swing around to approximate some sort of real-world action would be something she would try and quickly pick up.
"No no no - press the X-button twice while pushing up on the stick, and then press the left trigger....". No chance that she'd try that more than two or three times before asking, "What shows are on tv right now?"
Ya, sure, some interesting scientific insights on surgery in a no-gravity environment can be learned, but when could they actually be used on even a moderate scale? I've heard of no cheap zero-gravity breakthroughs...
Re:But if you've been "blessed by the hi-def gods"
on
PS3 Problems Parried
·
· Score: 1
We bought a CRT-32" Toshiba Cinema Series tv about 6 years ago. Cost was $1300.
We replaced it with a 40" Daytek LCD about 2 weeks ago. Cost was $1800. I could have gotten a 42" plasma (Hitachi, I think) for about $1500.
Include inflation, and I'm sure it's even closer.
And those are Canadian dollars. Divide by 1.2 to get your US dollar cost.
Regarding homebrew - that issue with the NCAA 2007 football game, where a critical bug was released, EA had two solutions (this from a friend who works at EA) - replace all the UMDs, or allow it to be patched. The second would have opened a hole in the BIOS for all time (allowing code to be run from a memory stick), as future BIOSs would need to be backwards compatible. Unfort, they decided to replace UMDs (via snail-mail).
I don't think a UMD reader/writer would have done much - a reusable 1 gig memory stick is pretty cheap now.
UMD movies for $5 would be cool, but that doesn't screw consumers out of enough money.
The battery works ok for me, and there are better batteries after-market.
I thought the touchscreen on the DS was stupid when I first saw it. I've revised that opinion to the point where I wish I had a DS, not a PSP.
I think what they really need to do is get a decent developer kit out to the game companies early (both large and small companies - not just the EAs of the world); this is biting them in the ass for the PS3 as well, I've heard. Hopefully this will result in some good games. Right now, there are a handful of good games, and most of them are racing games (and most of those are ports of PS2 games). Kind of limits playability if that's not what you're interested in.
"Ironically, compact fluorescent bulbs are responsible for less mercury contamination than the incandescent bulbs they replaced, even though incandescents don't contain any mercury. The highest source of mercury in America's air and water results from the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, at utilities that supply electricity. Since a compact fluorescent bulb uses 75 percent less energy than an incandescent bulb, and lasts at least six times longer, it is responsible for far less mercury pollution in the long run. A coal-burning power plant will emit four times more mercury to produce the electricity for an incandescent bulb than for a compact fluorescent."
But before you take all the wonderful things I've said about them at face value, there is something I learned the hard way: check the color of light the bulb produces.
* "Warm white" (2,700 K) provides a light extremely similar to that of an incandescent bulb, somewhat yellow in appearance;
* "Soft white" (3,500 K) bulbs produce a yellowish-white light;
* "Cool white" (4,100 K) bulbs emit more of a pure white tone; and
* "Daylight" (6,400 K) is slightly bluish-white.
I accidentally bought "Daylight" bulbs for the bathroom. It made the room a psychotic blue-ish tint (I imagined Jack was going to start chopping through the bathroom door with an axe - "Here's Johnny"). Warm white seems like the color to get. Unfortunately, I bought an 8-pack, but fine for utility lighting, etc.
"Ironically, compact fluorescent bulbs are responsible for less mercury contamination than the incandescent bulbs they replaced, even though incandescents don't contain any mercury. The highest source of mercury in America's air and water results from the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, at utilities that supply electricity. Since a compact fluorescent bulb uses 75 percent less energy than an incandescent bulb, and lasts at least six times longer, it is responsible for far less mercury pollution in the long run. A coal-burning power plant will emit four times more mercury to produce the electricity for an incandescent bulb than for a compact fluorescent."
Too many proprietary formats (memory stick, mini-discs), too rigid with the "security" of the device (PSP), too many root-kits, and in general over-priced compared to the competition.
The only Sony gadget I have is a PSP, and I am wishing I had a DS.
I had (lost it at the dump) audiovox smart phone with Windows Mobile. I also carry a Blackberry on a rotating basis for support at work.
My Audiovox phone had a about 2 days before it needed a recharge, doing pretty much nothing (the screen was in sleep-mode). The Blackberry goes a week (and it's constantly downloading email from our Nagios server, and replying to acknowledge issues, etc), all with the screen on.
The Blackberry did everything with a scroll-wheel that was also a button. The windows-mobile needed a stylus to scroll, etc.
For me, the Blackberry won hands down: the screen was nice, the performance was great, and the keyboard is very usable with a bit of practice. And this is a 2 year old model, that has been dropped in the toilet (and survived) and is dropped probably once a week.
I don't know if I agree. The PS3 had huge hype. People were going to not buy the XBox360 not too long ago, and wait for the PS3.
Remember that most game cycles are at least a year, and with new techology (and Sony's inability to ship developer kits), it might be longer. When games were being planned out, and resources allocated, the PS3 looked like an awesome bet for most publishing houses.
That things have changed recently doesn't mean those games will be scrapped - way too much money has been spent over the last year or so.
This article makes it sound like Sony might have a chance if they can convince some development companies to make some innovative titles in the next few months for the release. Won't happen. Can't be done.
Innovation in gaming should have been Sony's priority a year ago. Instead, it looks like it was Nintendos.
"But Sony must put more effort into differentiating its games from those of rival platforms, both in terms of original compelling titles as well as overall quality."
So... EA won't be making any PS3 games?
Not really fair - everyone does it - a hit game has to have a sequel. If that sells well, yada yada. We're on Quake 4, Doom 3, but I never hear anyone complaining about id.
I think EA is going to try to change a bit, but I bet there's a whole shelf of Madden/NFS/NBA games on their way out for the PS3.
"It does not say that Sun's Java platform is free software, or even open source. Available, that is, as proprietary software, on terms that deny your freedom."
Sun owes me nothing; they paid the salaries of the people that developed and implemented Java. And Sun's current financial situation, in spite of the hugely popular language, is evidence that they aren't laughing all the way to the bank as a result of controlling Java.
So what freedom of mine is Sun denying? People and/or corporations who create intellectual property are under no obligation to give it away for free.
Go use C++, or PHP, or PERL, or Ruby if you can't abide by Sun's terms.
My PC at work, on a corporate XP license fails the "authenticity check" we were asked/forced to perform (some ActiveX virus you have to download and run from the Microsoft site).
My legit, paid-for copy of XP Pro at home requires a call to India every time I have to format the hard drive.
Crap like this had me googling "Battlefield 2 wine linux" - the last thing holding me to Windows.
Postgres doesn't have built-in replication, non-commercial, yet MySQL has had it since 3.x and they are on 5.x now. Yes, there is SLONY, but it's an add on.
Postgres has had views, triggers and stored procedures for a while now, and MySQL just got them in 5.0.
MySQL has clusters since 4.1, and I don't believe Postgres has anything equivilent.
Postgres just beat MySQL to data partitioning (MySQL 5.1 is in beta, but 8.1 is production I think).
MySQL had 64-bit support (I love the Opteron) since 4.0; Postgres just got it in 8.1. The ability to utilize large amounts of memory is a big deal for databases.
Ya, MySQL was missing more of the "core" features, but for us, replication and large database buffers was more important two years ago than stored procedures, triggers or views.
MySQL and Postgres have the features that most projects need. Most databases are relatively small (in the 50 gigabyte range), and do fine with a standard database with triggers, views and stored procedures.
Oracle has features that are absolutely essential to some projects. And MySQL and Postgres are slowly (or more quickly in the case of MySQL) adding features, turning Oracle into a niche product.
Long gone are the days where, to paraphrase, "No one was ever fired for implementing Oracle".
MySQL 5.1 (beta) has data-partitioning, row-based replication (and statement based), event scheduler (like Oracle jobs), and the ability to replication between non-clustered databases and clustered databases (clustered databases don't support foreign keys in MySQL 5.0 and 5.1, so this is a good thing).
Slashdot Mirror
I did read the RTFA. Twice.
Notice the question mark in the subject? And the last line of my submission? "Spooky and sinister, or sublime and smart?"
Maybe you should RTFS (where S stands for Submission - you seem to need to have things spelled out for you, so I'll do it this one time).
As one of the links in the article stated, Apple also is not know for making products that can withstand abuse (ie the first-gen Nano screen).
My cell phone is already very scratched (and I take decent care of it).
And you're right - what's the point of running OS X on the phone, yet not offering any way write nifty little chunks of code to make your phone more functional.
In Canada, we only have one GSM cellular service (Rogers), and they aren't going to be ready for this until the end of 2008, according to an article in this mornings Vancouver Sun. That we'll be stuck with a single carrier is due more to the fact that there is only one GSM carrier in the country.
It's a little simpler than that.
If some other civilization has the power to get here, and we don't have the power to get there, I'd say they have a technological advantage that would be overwhelming. If F16s are the most potent weapon in the universe, then I would say that we are not about to be visited any time soon, and thus we have nothing to worry about.
But if you want to plan on the contingency of fighting an inter-galactic war, you should be technologically advanced enough to fight it - we can barely get off our own planet.
"If, hypothetically, you found yourself to have evolved first or to exist in an otherwise empty galaxy - then you might look for an easy way to get the attention of any civilizations in any other galaxies."
Like the Borg?
Greg Bear hypothesized in Darwin's Radio that it might be unwise to announce your presence before you are able to defend yourself. Think of a baby bird in a nest, chirping loudly when it's mother is not around.
Of course, in your scenario, the civilization has the power to move stars, and to cause super novas - perhaps not a helpless civilization...
for smaller databases, but limiting the tablespace to a single file per database/schema doesn't sound very flexible, and won't allow DBAs to maximize their disk throughput.
I am guessing that this is more of a MyISAM replacement than an InnoDB replacement, so it's not really a shot across Oracle's bow (as some comments make it sound like).
was canceled because people half a dozen people were three minutes late to a meeting back in November. One of those meetings where senior management droned on about projections for the next year, presentations they had given, etc.
It was a no-spouse Christmas party, so I was going to skip anyway, but still - nice holiday spirit.
You're right about the fish farms here in BC.
The wild stock get too close, and pick up lice, and die. The diet they are fed is not very healthy (I've heard a rumor that the fish are starved for a few days before going to market to try to get rid of the poisons), so it's not very good for us.
Not all fish are full of PCBs, etc. The big, long-living fish (specifically tuna, swordfish, etc), pick it up. Wild salmon from the west coast of Canada or the US is in good shape.
Talapia is a good choice if you find it too expensive; farmed, but with an environmental stamp of approval.
You will find Portuguese fishing boats off the east coast of Canada, and Chinese boats off the west coast. They go anywhere, including (illegally) inside the territorial waters of another country.
Most fish are international in nature. They might spawn in one country, but then spend the majority of their life outside national boundries.
Here, in BC, we have to work on fishing treaties with Washington state and Alaska, because the salmon travel through each others waters.
I don't think the report said that the oceans will be barren of fish, but rather that stocks will be so low that they won't be commercially viable, and many species will go extinct.
Unfortunately, it's pretty much open season outside national boundaries, and the mismanagement hasn't helped (our cod stocks are pretty much gone).
Can someone from the UK fill us ignorant North Americans in on Tesco?
It sounds like a public company (they announce profits). Who owns them (the big stake holders)?
Are they a company (like Ikea) that makes an effort to have their products recyclable? Do they donate money to charities? Do they outsource their jobs to India and use Chinese labour to make most of their products? Are they know for poor labour practices and letting split-open bags of fertilizer sit in a parking lot next to a river (both of which Walmart does).
What does cheap value food mean? If you get a "value" edition, it means stripped down OR a good price for what you get. Cheap is obvious.
I agree. I have to have a PC for work.
If I was to get a console, I'd want one more family-friendly, something my wife would like. A controller with umpteen buttons, multiple analog and digital sticks, triggers, yada yada, wouldn't work.
Something she can swing around to approximate some sort of real-world action would be something she would try and quickly pick up.
"No no no - press the X-button twice while pushing up on the stick, and then press the left trigger....". No chance that she'd try that more than two or three times before asking, "What shows are on tv right now?"
and the potential threat of global warming, which even George Bush now acknowledges, flying a large plane up and down to create small windows of zero-g to do surgery on a single individual sounds absolutely moronic.
Ya, sure, some interesting scientific insights on surgery in a no-gravity environment can be learned, but when could they actually be used on even a moderate scale? I've heard of no cheap zero-gravity breakthroughs...
We bought a CRT-32" Toshiba Cinema Series tv about 6 years ago. Cost was $1300.
We replaced it with a 40" Daytek LCD about 2 weeks ago. Cost was $1800. I could have gotten a 42" plasma (Hitachi, I think) for about $1500.
Include inflation, and I'm sure it's even closer.
And those are Canadian dollars. Divide by 1.2 to get your US dollar cost.
Regarding homebrew - that issue with the NCAA 2007 football game, where a critical bug was released, EA had two solutions (this from a friend who works at EA) - replace all the UMDs, or allow it to be patched. The second would have opened a hole in the BIOS for all time (allowing code to be run from a memory stick), as future BIOSs would need to be backwards compatible. Unfort, they decided to replace UMDs (via snail-mail).
I don't think a UMD reader/writer would have done much - a reusable 1 gig memory stick is pretty cheap now.
UMD movies for $5 would be cool, but that doesn't screw consumers out of enough money.
The battery works ok for me, and there are better batteries after-market.
I thought the touchscreen on the DS was stupid when I first saw it. I've revised that opinion to the point where I wish I had a DS, not a PSP.
I think what they really need to do is get a decent developer kit out to the game companies early (both large and small companies - not just the EAs of the world); this is biting them in the ass for the PS3 as well, I've heard. Hopefully this will result in some good games. Right now, there are a handful of good games, and most of them are racing games (and most of those are ports of PS2 games). Kind of limits playability if that's not what you're interested in.
We have about half a dozen in our 20-bulb house (I counted - it's a small house).
I read some, "They whine and buzz" - might have been older versions.
"They're dark" - ditto.
"They have mercury in them" - true, but as TreeHugger.com put it:
"Ironically, compact fluorescent bulbs are responsible for less mercury contamination than the incandescent bulbs they replaced, even though incandescents don't contain any mercury. The highest source of mercury in America's air and water results from the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, at utilities that supply electricity. Since a compact fluorescent bulb uses 75 percent less energy than an incandescent bulb, and lasts at least six times longer, it is responsible for far less mercury pollution in the long run. A coal-burning power plant will emit four times more mercury to produce the electricity for an incandescent bulb than for a compact fluorescent."
But before you take all the wonderful things I've said about them at face value, there is something I learned the hard way: check the color of light the bulb produces.
From the Wikipedia,
* "Warm white" (2,700 K) provides a light extremely similar to that of an incandescent bulb, somewhat yellow in appearance;
* "Soft white" (3,500 K) bulbs produce a yellowish-white light;
* "Cool white" (4,100 K) bulbs emit more of a pure white tone; and
* "Daylight" (6,400 K) is slightly bluish-white.
I accidentally bought "Daylight" bulbs for the bathroom. It made the room a psychotic blue-ish tint (I imagined Jack was going to start chopping through the bathroom door with an axe - "Here's Johnny"). Warm white seems like the color to get. Unfortunately, I bought an 8-pack, but fine for utility lighting, etc.
From a site called Treehugger:
"Ironically, compact fluorescent bulbs are responsible for less mercury contamination than the incandescent bulbs they replaced, even though incandescents don't contain any mercury. The highest source of mercury in America's air and water results from the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, at utilities that supply electricity. Since a compact fluorescent bulb uses 75 percent less energy than an incandescent bulb, and lasts at least six times longer, it is responsible for far less mercury pollution in the long run. A coal-burning power plant will emit four times more mercury to produce the electricity for an incandescent bulb than for a compact fluorescent."
Too many proprietary formats (memory stick, mini-discs), too rigid with the "security" of the device (PSP), too many root-kits, and in general over-priced compared to the competition.
The only Sony gadget I have is a PSP, and I am wishing I had a DS.
I had (lost it at the dump) audiovox smart phone with Windows Mobile. I also carry a Blackberry on a rotating basis for support at work.
My Audiovox phone had a about 2 days before it needed a recharge, doing pretty much nothing (the screen was in sleep-mode). The Blackberry goes a week (and it's constantly downloading email from our Nagios server, and replying to acknowledge issues, etc), all with the screen on.
The Blackberry did everything with a scroll-wheel that was also a button. The windows-mobile needed a stylus to scroll, etc.
For me, the Blackberry won hands down: the screen was nice, the performance was great, and the keyboard is very usable with a bit of practice. And this is a 2 year old model, that has been dropped in the toilet (and survived) and is dropped probably once a week.
Rim had done an amazing job.
So you're the reason for 2.5% growth in the US trade deficit......
"the US also imported more goods from China, leading to an increased deficit of $17bn with that country alone."
I don't know if I agree. The PS3 had huge hype. People were going to not buy the XBox360 not too long ago, and wait for the PS3.
Remember that most game cycles are at least a year, and with new techology (and Sony's inability to ship developer kits), it might be longer. When games were being planned out, and resources allocated, the PS3 looked like an awesome bet for most publishing houses.
That things have changed recently doesn't mean those games will be scrapped - way too much money has been spent over the last year or so.
This article makes it sound like Sony might have a chance if they can convince some development companies to make some innovative titles in the next few months for the release. Won't happen. Can't be done.
Innovation in gaming should have been Sony's priority a year ago. Instead, it looks like it was Nintendos.
"But Sony must put more effort into differentiating its games from those of rival platforms, both in terms of original compelling titles as well as overall quality."
So... EA won't be making any PS3 games?
Not really fair - everyone does it - a hit game has to have a sequel. If that sells well, yada yada. We're on Quake 4, Doom 3, but I never hear anyone complaining about id.
I think EA is going to try to change a bit, but I bet there's a whole shelf of Madden/NFS/NBA games on their way out for the PS3.
"It does not say that Sun's Java platform is free software, or even open source. Available, that is, as proprietary software, on terms that deny your freedom."
Sun owes me nothing; they paid the salaries of the people that developed and implemented Java. And Sun's current financial situation, in spite of the hugely popular language, is evidence that they aren't laughing all the way to the bank as a result of controlling Java.
So what freedom of mine is Sun denying? People and/or corporations who create intellectual property are under no obligation to give it away for free.
Go use C++, or PHP, or PERL, or Ruby if you can't abide by Sun's terms.
May 1st is the Bosnian April Fools Day?
My PC at work, on a corporate XP license fails the "authenticity check" we were asked/forced to perform (some ActiveX virus you have to download and run from the Microsoft site).
My legit, paid-for copy of XP Pro at home requires a call to India every time I have to format the hard drive.
Crap like this had me googling "Battlefield 2 wine linux" - the last thing holding me to Windows.
Yes and no.
Postgres doesn't have built-in replication, non-commercial, yet MySQL has had it since 3.x and they are on 5.x now. Yes, there is SLONY, but it's an add on.
Postgres has had views, triggers and stored procedures for a while now, and MySQL just got them in 5.0.
MySQL has clusters since 4.1, and I don't believe Postgres has anything equivilent.
Postgres just beat MySQL to data partitioning (MySQL 5.1 is in beta, but 8.1 is production I think).
MySQL had 64-bit support (I love the Opteron) since 4.0; Postgres just got it in 8.1. The ability to utilize large amounts of memory is a big deal for databases.
Ya, MySQL was missing more of the "core" features, but for us, replication and large database buffers was more important two years ago than stored procedures, triggers or views.
as is MySQL/InnoDB and Postgres.
MySQL and Postgres have the features that most projects need. Most databases are relatively small (in the 50 gigabyte range), and do fine with a standard database with triggers, views and stored procedures.
Oracle has features that are absolutely essential to some projects. And MySQL and Postgres are slowly (or more quickly in the case of MySQL) adding features, turning Oracle into a niche product.
Long gone are the days where, to paraphrase, "No one was ever fired for implementing Oracle".
MySQL 5.1 (beta) has data-partitioning, row-based replication (and statement based), event scheduler (like Oracle jobs), and the ability to replication between non-clustered databases and clustered databases (clustered databases don't support foreign keys in MySQL 5.0 and 5.1, so this is a good thing).