I've heard they really love the iPhone. Here is an example article.
When I was in school a few years ago I had a blind gentlemen in a few of my classes. I remember him telling me about how hard (and insanely expensive) it was to get a new cell phone (Symbian based) that included voice software so he could use the menus and such, and that it was basically pretty bad.
The iPhone works as a phone, a web browser, a music player, a compass, and tons of other things, and doesn't cost $3k.
I wasn't very anti-PSP when it launched, I was willing to give it a chance. I bought the PS on the Sony name and it worked out great. I bought a PS2 based on the PS1 and the future possibility, and it worked great.
I bought a PSP based on the Playstation Brand and I've been rather disappointed. There have been some amazing games to be sure, but none of them are really PSP specific. Games like Loco Roco can be done elsewhere. There's a clone of it for the iPhone. Patapon could be done on any other platform, the PSP's best asset there was the wide screen. Hot Shots Golf could be done on the DS. Katamari was done on other platforms.
The PSP is powerful. The DS couldn't pull of God of War or Ratchet and Clank, but those are few and far between. God of War worked very well, but R&C felt small and hobbled by the lack of a second stick for the camera. They are also both Sony properties.
The PSP was clearly powerful, but to my mind Sony has really failed to live up to it's potential. The problems I had earlier this year with my PSP trying to update the firmware and buy a downloadable game only cemented that (short version: had to buy memory card, then new battery, downloads took forever). I've always felt like it has had a game drought (which the DS had initially, but it's quite gone now).
At this point I'm highly skeptical. I waited until this year for the PS3 and I don't fell I missed much. I was able to go buy the games I cared about, and I paid 1/2 what I would have at launch. I just don't think the PSP2 will be different enough from it's competitors or even the PSP to make me think it will be a good idea to buy near launch. The PSP Go has not helped my confidence. Higher price? Killing your "killer feature" of high storage? Still no second stick? Lower battery life? No.
I'll buy one. I've yet to buy a Nintendo system I didn't love. Between first party titles and all the amazing 3rd party stuff that has come out for the GB, GBA, and DS over the years it seems like a slam dunk. Even if the system ends up just being a new DS with the 3D stuff being mostly unused, I could still have a lot of fun with it.
I even really liked my VirtualBoy, but I bought it on clearance for $50 and many games for $5. It wouldn't have been worth the full MSRP. The WarioLand game for it was great, each level having two planes to play on at different depths you could switch between. Mario Tennis worked so well because you could judge the ball so well. Mario Clash felt like the original Mario Brothers arcade in semi 3D.
Really, the DS's biggest problem at this point is the iPhone. Over the last 2.5 years (since I bought my 3G) there have been so many amazing games to come out. They're often very cheap but can be a total blast. Some (like Flight Control) end up being ported to the DS but the barrier to develop on the iPhone (and Android) is just so low. If Nintendo would lower the barrier to entry for developing for DSi Ware, I think they could get some amazing stuff. Unfortunately Nintendo requires DSi Ware people to basically be big real companies. Smaller games like Doodle Jump, Flight Control, and Trism simply couldn't be released on DSi Ware (at least initially) because they weren't "real" game developer.
Maintaining quality is important, but I think the homebrew scenes and the App store have shown that there are some amazing diamonds in the rough.
As of earlier this year, the PSP had sold a total of 17 million units in the US. At the same time (March) the DS had sold 46 million. That's nearly 3x as many.
At the same time, I've seen DSes all over the place. My little sister, all her friends, some of their parents, and many other people have DSes. On the other hand, it's relatively rare I see a PSP out in public. It was more common closer to launch.
Let's put it this way. In the last two years, Sony sold 7 million PSPs. Nintendo sold 24 million DSes. More than 3x as many. I think PSP sales have been slowing down, while the DS has stayed about the same or gone up. I view the PSP as having lost all momentum in the market.
It hasn't been a total flop. It seems more like a Dreamcast to me. A console that was OK and had decent sales, and was totally eclipsed by it's competitors.
I've been dissapointed with mine. I haven't seen a ton of games that appeal to me, and many that do are hobbled by trying to shoehorn games onto a console without the second analog stick, giving them view problems. Some of the best PSP games have been those with fixed cameras: Loco Roco (2D), Katamari (3D behind the head), Patapon (2D), Hot Shots Golf (3D behind the avatar). Games that don't follow this model (Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters) often suffer for the lack of better camera controls.
Let's not forget that the 3DS will come out in March next year, the DS launched in the US just over 6 years ago.
As for the PSP... it never caught on. I have one, but with ~5 years of experience with it, I probably wouldn't have bought it given the choice again.
I have a DS, but it's more involved. It's so easy to pull out my iPhone for a few moments. The iPhone is also far more powerful at this point. The only thing I wish it had was a few physical buttons somewhere. The images of the PSP phone with the slide-out gamepad look great to me. That said, I won't be ditching the ipHone platform, especially for something labeld "Playstation Phone". I'd rather just buy a sleeve for my iPhone that has broad game support.
Wil Shipley posted a (ficticious) interview with the TSA that I think covers the problem perfectly.
There was also a post on Reddit today that pointed out that the TSA would save more lives (statistically) if all they did was listen to people's hearts, check their blood pressure, and refer them to a doctor if it was outside the normal range.
Those were meant as "general traffic fatality reduction" suggestions, not suggestions specific to backing into people. I've never done 45 in reverse and I don't want to find out what it's like.
The low speed proposal (which was facetious) was based on the idea that fewer people will be killed in 45 mph crashes than the 75 mph crashes that can occur now.
I understand the problem here, but my worry is exactly what someone else posed above. "I have a rear-view camera" doesn't mean "now I can check my blindspot", it means "now I don't have to turn my head at all". So unless these cameras are setup with 180+ degree field of views, I worry this will make things worse.
Seems kinda stupid to me. Car makers overcharge for the things already. Consumer Reports just did some article about how big the blind spot in cars is and depending on model and driver height it varies between 6 and 150+ feet (for spotting a toddler).
So how about either mandating a better view out the back of the car, or only requiring then on cars where the blindspot is over 15 feet for an average height person?
Better ideas for cutting down on deaths: bigger bumpers, lower speed limit (like 45), tougher driving tests, taking away licenses more aggressively, mandating disc brakes (probably more effective at safety), or just some public safety commercial. Those would probably all be more effective at saving lives.
Supply and demand doesn't work when supply is constrained by the government and one sided contracts lock demand so that it can't chose another supplier if being taken advantage of.
Capitalism IS a self-correcting system. It isn't instantaneous, but given a level playing field, it is fair.
The difference is that Cogent was sending traffic across Level 3's network, when in this case Level 3 is sending traffic to Comcast.
If Level 3 and Comcast were peers in between two other endpoints, I could understand this. But that's not the case, Comcast is one of the end points. Doesn't Comcast owe their customers the ability to receive the traffic they want?
Also, it's not like Level 3 is suddenly going to quintuple traffic to Comcast and everything else stays the same. The fact that Netflix movies are going to be served from Level 3 means they are not being served by someone else, which should free up some of the ports they are so worried about.
I doubt the Prius made money when it was first released, at least in Japan. At a certain point, GM will have to learn to design and build electric cars. It may make sense for GM to get this learning experience going, so that they won't be far behind Nissan and will be ahead of some of the other manufactures because they'll be on generation 2 or 3 when Honda is on generation 1. This will also get their name out there. For a long time, Toyota was hybrid car. Honda had one, but it didn't sell as well and didn't get the mind share. Heck, despite the fact many people sell them, Toyota is still the hybrid car thanks to the Prius, just to a lesser degree.
If GM hadn't needed a bailout, I think people would be applauding the move. It's risk taking, trying to move forward past what they've been doing for 50+ years. The problem is it's not their money anymore so people are unhappy with them risking it.
I wasn't a fan of the GM bailout. I would have liked to see them split up and sold out to other car makers or something else. I'm just not sure GM needed to keep being GM.
That said, I think this is a good move. While they are risking money, they are taking risks. The Volt is interesting, and if they just spent the next 10 years waiting for other manufacturers to make electric cars common, they'd just be wasting a big opportunity. Getting ahead of this market could be quite a bit easier than taking back a big chunk of the normal ICE car market. Plus they are only selling/making 10,000. It's not like they are starting with 200,000. It's a good toe-dip start.
I love that show, but no. It was just a little humor interlude during Morning Edition or may the Marketplace Morning Report to fill a few seconds of air. It's was part of a news show.
Yesterday, some show on NPR asked their correspondents to to guess what the announcement would be, and I liked theirs better. Here are the three I can remember:
It's actually pronounced NAY-sa, not NA-sa
All astronauts can actually fly. If you put a normal person in space, they would still be bound by gravity
We've known the moon was made of cheese, but no one suspected it is actually made of Cheeze-Wiz
While it's entirely possible for something like this to happen and the FTC to use large fines to make US companies avoid some tracking, tracking provides LARGE benefits to businesses.
I'd immediately expect many ad networks to host their ads from oversees so they could claim not to be under the jurisdiction of this law. How will the FTC stop that? And what if Google Ireland decides to host all the Google ads? Are you going to go after the parent company?
This is a nice idea that seems completely unenforceable.
"Every public alert system's status indicator rises until it reaches its disaster imminent setting and remains at that setting until it is retired from service."
Quite true. But I would be willing to bet that most NICs don't have a very big program in EEPROM, but have at least 8 to 32 megabits of the stuff. After all, flash prices have dropped a ton and it's probably a better idea when building something to go with the 1.0078 cent flash rom that gives you lots of space you probably don't need than the 1.0072 cent one that gives you a constraint and may be hard to source next year due to it's small size.
I'd be willing to bet that for this reason, most NICs have lots of extra space. Even 256k can hold a LOT of special purpose code.
On the other hand, I wanted to put a iPod connection in my 2001 Honda Odyssey. Honda made no such part, so I bought an aftermarket one. I took it to the dealership and after I swore up and down that I understood it was an aftermarket part and they couldn't support it or be liable if it broke my stereo, they were glad to put it in for me for the cost of labor. They did a great job, I've been using it for about 5 years.
I was glad to do it. I'd like to try doing it myself, but the way may dash is designed (due to a nav unit) I would have literally had to take off about 1/3 or 1/2 of the dash (one BIG piece) to be able to get to the back of the stereo. That was a big job and would have given me a big opportunity to mar or crack the plastic, which I didn't want to do.
The kernel has a mechanism to schedule groups of processes, and it has for years. By grouping tasks together, you can make one process (video playing) get the same cpu share as a group of processes put together (compiling code). By doing this (instead of the video processing being equal to just one of the compiling processes), everything feels more interactive, even though it's actually slightly slower.
No one uses scheduling groups because they have to be setup by root and it's not the easiest thing in the world (you have to write stuff into sysfs, I think). No distributions set them up.
The magic kernel patch just adds a simple rule to the scheduler. When a process starts, it goes into a group with the rest of the processes in that TTY (virtual terminal). This means the user doesn't have to do anything and the groups are setup automatically.
Poettering thinks this is somewhat hackish, and that things shouldn't be based on what TTY a process is started on. He made the little script to prove that this can easily be done in userspace.
Linus has rejected this, basically saying that we've had years for people to make something like this and no one did until the kernel patch came along. The patch is simple, reasonable, and doesn't require distributors to ship updated userland files to put processes in groups.
I should note that my understanding comes from LWN, which has had excellent coverage of this on their kernel page, as always. You'll be able to see their articles in two weeks if you're not a member (which is worth it if you like this kind of stuff).
That was my thought as well. In the article, they seem to have a 90 degree adapter on the SATA cable to plug into the DIMM. My immediate reaction (besides "that's kinda neat") was that RAM is stacked, so if you put 4 of these in a bank of RAM, the 2-4th's SATA cables would hit the cable from the 1st. You'd need cables that connect at 90 degrees in one way and 45 in another.
If you have empty RAM slots and you want to add one or two, it's not that bad. The idea of using banks of it to put terabytes in a 1U case... seems unlikely.
I know we all like to hate Apple but... really? They're fighting against Flash! Yes, they support DRM, but they also pushed for $1 song downloads. I'm not saying their great, but they can't be the number 1 danger.
I think the idea of the Comcast/NBC merger is far more dangerous. That would be one company with control from content creation all the way to distribution. They could block your access to Fox.com streaming. They could prevent Time Warner customers from viewing NBC shows on Hulu or NBC.com. They would have their own news media outlets to spin the stories about how that blocking is good for customers.
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that once, I believe in season 2 of The Muppet Show, it was revealed that the Swedish Chef was only faking speaking Mock Swedish., and that his primary language was actually Mock Japanese.
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I've heard they really love the iPhone. Here is an example article.
When I was in school a few years ago I had a blind gentlemen in a few of my classes. I remember him telling me about how hard (and insanely expensive) it was to get a new cell phone (Symbian based) that included voice software so he could use the menus and such, and that it was basically pretty bad.
The iPhone works as a phone, a web browser, a music player, a compass, and tons of other things, and doesn't cost $3k.
I wasn't very anti-PSP when it launched, I was willing to give it a chance. I bought the PS on the Sony name and it worked out great. I bought a PS2 based on the PS1 and the future possibility, and it worked great.
I bought a PSP based on the Playstation Brand and I've been rather disappointed. There have been some amazing games to be sure, but none of them are really PSP specific. Games like Loco Roco can be done elsewhere. There's a clone of it for the iPhone. Patapon could be done on any other platform, the PSP's best asset there was the wide screen. Hot Shots Golf could be done on the DS. Katamari was done on other platforms.
The PSP is powerful. The DS couldn't pull of God of War or Ratchet and Clank, but those are few and far between. God of War worked very well, but R&C felt small and hobbled by the lack of a second stick for the camera. They are also both Sony properties.
The PSP was clearly powerful, but to my mind Sony has really failed to live up to it's potential. The problems I had earlier this year with my PSP trying to update the firmware and buy a downloadable game only cemented that (short version: had to buy memory card, then new battery, downloads took forever). I've always felt like it has had a game drought (which the DS had initially, but it's quite gone now).
At this point I'm highly skeptical. I waited until this year for the PS3 and I don't fell I missed much. I was able to go buy the games I cared about, and I paid 1/2 what I would have at launch. I just don't think the PSP2 will be different enough from it's competitors or even the PSP to make me think it will be a good idea to buy near launch. The PSP Go has not helped my confidence. Higher price? Killing your "killer feature" of high storage? Still no second stick? Lower battery life? No.
I'll buy one. I've yet to buy a Nintendo system I didn't love. Between first party titles and all the amazing 3rd party stuff that has come out for the GB, GBA, and DS over the years it seems like a slam dunk. Even if the system ends up just being a new DS with the 3D stuff being mostly unused, I could still have a lot of fun with it.
I even really liked my VirtualBoy, but I bought it on clearance for $50 and many games for $5. It wouldn't have been worth the full MSRP. The WarioLand game for it was great, each level having two planes to play on at different depths you could switch between. Mario Tennis worked so well because you could judge the ball so well. Mario Clash felt like the original Mario Brothers arcade in semi 3D.
Really, the DS's biggest problem at this point is the iPhone. Over the last 2.5 years (since I bought my 3G) there have been so many amazing games to come out. They're often very cheap but can be a total blast. Some (like Flight Control) end up being ported to the DS but the barrier to develop on the iPhone (and Android) is just so low. If Nintendo would lower the barrier to entry for developing for DSi Ware, I think they could get some amazing stuff. Unfortunately Nintendo requires DSi Ware people to basically be big real companies. Smaller games like Doodle Jump, Flight Control, and Trism simply couldn't be released on DSi Ware (at least initially) because they weren't "real" game developer.
Maintaining quality is important, but I think the homebrew scenes and the App store have shown that there are some amazing diamonds in the rough.
As of earlier this year, the PSP had sold a total of 17 million units in the US. At the same time (March) the DS had sold 46 million. That's nearly 3x as many.
At the same time, I've seen DSes all over the place. My little sister, all her friends, some of their parents, and many other people have DSes. On the other hand, it's relatively rare I see a PSP out in public. It was more common closer to launch.
Let's put it this way. In the last two years, Sony sold 7 million PSPs. Nintendo sold 24 million DSes. More than 3x as many. I think PSP sales have been slowing down, while the DS has stayed about the same or gone up. I view the PSP as having lost all momentum in the market.
It hasn't been a total flop. It seems more like a Dreamcast to me. A console that was OK and had decent sales, and was totally eclipsed by it's competitors.
I've been dissapointed with mine. I haven't seen a ton of games that appeal to me, and many that do are hobbled by trying to shoehorn games onto a console without the second analog stick, giving them view problems. Some of the best PSP games have been those with fixed cameras: Loco Roco (2D), Katamari (3D behind the head), Patapon (2D), Hot Shots Golf (3D behind the avatar). Games that don't follow this model (Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters) often suffer for the lack of better camera controls.
Let's not forget that the 3DS will come out in March next year, the DS launched in the US just over 6 years ago.
As for the PSP... it never caught on. I have one, but with ~5 years of experience with it, I probably wouldn't have bought it given the choice again.
I have a DS, but it's more involved. It's so easy to pull out my iPhone for a few moments. The iPhone is also far more powerful at this point. The only thing I wish it had was a few physical buttons somewhere. The images of the PSP phone with the slide-out gamepad look great to me. That said, I won't be ditching the ipHone platform, especially for something labeld "Playstation Phone". I'd rather just buy a sleeve for my iPhone that has broad game support.
Wil Shipley posted a (ficticious) interview with the TSA that I think covers the problem perfectly.
There was also a post on Reddit today that pointed out that the TSA would save more lives (statistically) if all they did was listen to people's hearts, check their blood pressure, and refer them to a doctor if it was outside the normal range.
Those were meant as "general traffic fatality reduction" suggestions, not suggestions specific to backing into people. I've never done 45 in reverse and I don't want to find out what it's like.
The low speed proposal (which was facetious) was based on the idea that fewer people will be killed in 45 mph crashes than the 75 mph crashes that can occur now.
I understand the problem here, but my worry is exactly what someone else posed above. "I have a rear-view camera" doesn't mean "now I can check my blindspot", it means "now I don't have to turn my head at all". So unless these cameras are setup with 180+ degree field of views, I worry this will make things worse.
Seems kinda stupid to me. Car makers overcharge for the things already. Consumer Reports just did some article about how big the blind spot in cars is and depending on model and driver height it varies between 6 and 150+ feet (for spotting a toddler).
So how about either mandating a better view out the back of the car, or only requiring then on cars where the blindspot is over 15 feet for an average height person?
Better ideas for cutting down on deaths: bigger bumpers, lower speed limit (like 45), tougher driving tests, taking away licenses more aggressively, mandating disc brakes (probably more effective at safety), or just some public safety commercial. Those would probably all be more effective at saving lives.
Supply and demand doesn't work when supply is constrained by the government and one sided contracts lock demand so that it can't chose another supplier if being taken advantage of.
Emphasis mine.
The difference is that Cogent was sending traffic across Level 3's network, when in this case Level 3 is sending traffic to Comcast.
If Level 3 and Comcast were peers in between two other endpoints, I could understand this. But that's not the case, Comcast is one of the end points. Doesn't Comcast owe their customers the ability to receive the traffic they want?
Also, it's not like Level 3 is suddenly going to quintuple traffic to Comcast and everything else stays the same. The fact that Netflix movies are going to be served from Level 3 means they are not being served by someone else, which should free up some of the ports they are so worried about.
I doubt the Prius made money when it was first released, at least in Japan. At a certain point, GM will have to learn to design and build electric cars. It may make sense for GM to get this learning experience going, so that they won't be far behind Nissan and will be ahead of some of the other manufactures because they'll be on generation 2 or 3 when Honda is on generation 1. This will also get their name out there. For a long time, Toyota was hybrid car. Honda had one, but it didn't sell as well and didn't get the mind share. Heck, despite the fact many people sell them, Toyota is still the hybrid car thanks to the Prius, just to a lesser degree.
If GM hadn't needed a bailout, I think people would be applauding the move. It's risk taking, trying to move forward past what they've been doing for 50+ years. The problem is it's not their money anymore so people are unhappy with them risking it.
I wasn't a fan of the GM bailout. I would have liked to see them split up and sold out to other car makers or something else. I'm just not sure GM needed to keep being GM.
That said, I think this is a good move. While they are risking money, they are taking risks. The Volt is interesting, and if they just spent the next 10 years waiting for other manufacturers to make electric cars common, they'd just be wasting a big opportunity. Getting ahead of this market could be quite a bit easier than taking back a big chunk of the normal ICE car market. Plus they are only selling/making 10,000. It's not like they are starting with 200,000. It's a good toe-dip start.
I love that show, but no. It was just a little humor interlude during Morning Edition or may the Marketplace Morning Report to fill a few seconds of air. It's was part of a news show.
Actually, thanks to that post you can now claim credit for this invention.
While it's entirely possible for something like this to happen and the FTC to use large fines to make US companies avoid some tracking, tracking provides LARGE benefits to businesses.
I'd immediately expect many ad networks to host their ads from oversees so they could claim not to be under the jurisdiction of this law. How will the FTC stop that? And what if Google Ireland decides to host all the Google ads? Are you going to go after the parent company?
This is a nice idea that seems completely unenforceable.
It's Blakley's Law:
Quite true. But I would be willing to bet that most NICs don't have a very big program in EEPROM, but have at least 8 to 32 megabits of the stuff. After all, flash prices have dropped a ton and it's probably a better idea when building something to go with the 1.0078 cent flash rom that gives you lots of space you probably don't need than the 1.0072 cent one that gives you a constraint and may be hard to source next year due to it's small size.
I'd be willing to bet that for this reason, most NICs have lots of extra space. Even 256k can hold a LOT of special purpose code.
On the other hand, I wanted to put a iPod connection in my 2001 Honda Odyssey. Honda made no such part, so I bought an aftermarket one. I took it to the dealership and after I swore up and down that I understood it was an aftermarket part and they couldn't support it or be liable if it broke my stereo, they were glad to put it in for me for the cost of labor. They did a great job, I've been using it for about 5 years.
I was glad to do it. I'd like to try doing it myself, but the way may dash is designed (due to a nav unit) I would have literally had to take off about 1/3 or 1/2 of the dash (one BIG piece) to be able to get to the back of the stereo. That was a big job and would have given me a big opportunity to mar or crack the plastic, which I didn't want to do.
The kernel has a mechanism to schedule groups of processes, and it has for years. By grouping tasks together, you can make one process (video playing) get the same cpu share as a group of processes put together (compiling code). By doing this (instead of the video processing being equal to just one of the compiling processes), everything feels more interactive, even though it's actually slightly slower.
No one uses scheduling groups because they have to be setup by root and it's not the easiest thing in the world (you have to write stuff into sysfs, I think). No distributions set them up.
The magic kernel patch just adds a simple rule to the scheduler. When a process starts, it goes into a group with the rest of the processes in that TTY (virtual terminal). This means the user doesn't have to do anything and the groups are setup automatically.
Poettering thinks this is somewhat hackish, and that things shouldn't be based on what TTY a process is started on. He made the little script to prove that this can easily be done in userspace.
Linus has rejected this, basically saying that we've had years for people to make something like this and no one did until the kernel patch came along. The patch is simple, reasonable, and doesn't require distributors to ship updated userland files to put processes in groups.
I should note that my understanding comes from LWN, which has had excellent coverage of this on their kernel page, as always. You'll be able to see their articles in two weeks if you're not a member (which is worth it if you like this kind of stuff).
That was my thought as well. In the article, they seem to have a 90 degree adapter on the SATA cable to plug into the DIMM. My immediate reaction (besides "that's kinda neat") was that RAM is stacked, so if you put 4 of these in a bank of RAM, the 2-4th's SATA cables would hit the cable from the 1st. You'd need cables that connect at 90 degrees in one way and 45 in another.
If you have empty RAM slots and you want to add one or two, it's not that bad. The idea of using banks of it to put terabytes in a 1U case... seems unlikely.
I know we all like to hate Apple but... really? They're fighting against Flash! Yes, they support DRM, but they also pushed for $1 song downloads. I'm not saying their great, but they can't be the number 1 danger.
I think the idea of the Comcast/NBC merger is far more dangerous. That would be one company with control from content creation all the way to distribution. They could block your access to Fox.com streaming. They could prevent Time Warner customers from viewing NBC shows on Hulu or NBC.com. They would have their own news media outlets to spin the stories about how that blocking is good for customers.
With who, techies? With the general public, I'd bet 95%+ have never heard of the thing and thus have no opinion in either direction.
And a lot of that profit goes to the over $200 million they spent to license and develop the technology. The plans didn't appear out of thin air.
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that once, I believe in season 2 of The Muppet Show, it was revealed that the Swedish Chef was only faking speaking Mock Swedish., and that his primary language was actually Mock Japanese.
And know you know, the rest of the story.