I think they mean that Unity isn't going to support legacy (pre-2009ish) video hardware. That makes sense. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do on the desktop, but you need the oomph to push it. At some point you need a cutoff, otherwise you end up making a lot of comprimises to help the perhaps 1-2% of your userbase.
I imagine all planes currently in the pipeline, or at least post-F-35, will have the option to be unmanned. Jet fighter pilots cost an absolute insane amount of money to train. Their salary is within the margin of error of their total training costs. Do you want to send someone with $60 million in training up in a jet with a 2% chance of getting blown up (or in more recent cases, losing consiousness due to malfunctioning oxygen systems and crashing)? No. Just leave them on the ground, the jet can probably fly itself better than the human operator anyways. Just stick them in front of a simulator with a live feed with the ability to make corrections as the situation changes. It's already happened with survilence vehicles, it's happening with bombers, it will happen with fighters soon enough. Only the most critical/black ops missions will have a human in the pilot's seat in 20 years time.
Yeah that was my first thought scanning it, "Slash Bi", "Leisure Suit Larry", "Swing on Over"...
To quote the simpsons:
Fox turned into a hard core porn station so gradually I didn't even notice
How soon until Slashdot goes NSFW when they realize they can triple their profits by using a combination of their high google page rank and streaming cut rate porn instead of hawking News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters?
Agreed. I was considering switching my netbook back to Windows so I could play some monkey-island style games on there, but now it looks like I might not have to. Right now I have steam running under Wine, which is a bit of a crutch, but it at least gives me chat functionality.
There's historical works, and then there are works meant to be studied and absorbed by students of this century. Yes, you and I would have no trouble at all with an Algebra book written in 1975, laugh at some of the rather dated soviet russia cartoons explaining parabolic arcs, and probably pass the state standardized test as a result, but how well can you comprehend the Harvard 1899 Entrance Exam at a glance?
It takes considerable skill and effort to write a text for the appropriate age group, make it engaging, easy to read, yet cover all the material required without losing the 50th percentile students who are struggling to pass so they can stay on the football team (or insert stereotype here).
Tools that modern students can relate to aren't simply slapped together in an afternoon, and require a serious editorial staff.
My friend works for that research group. They upgrade the teen's phones every year to the newest "flagship" phone. Keep in mind that the kids opting in to this need a reason to continue with the project. That means a new iPhone2, iPhone 3, iPhone 3S, iphone4, iPhone4s etc. I think most of the kids switched off blackberries a long time ago.
I'm not sure how big the research team is, but there's at least 4 full time non-students in the group. They don't keep an archive of all the data, interestingly. Probably for privacy reasons. They do classify the data in to positive/negative text messages, and identify who in the group are the alphas, betas, etc.
I honestly wouldn't worry about the kid's data privacy/rights, knowing who works in that group, they're all a really good group of people and outstanding citizens overall.
Assume your users will stream 4x1080p 3d @ 60fps for the rest of their lives, Assume your users will be able to access any of this data at any time Assume your users will expect all their data to be auto-meta tagged with full geoip data
And by "older cars" you mean those manufactured prior to 1950. Even the common lawnmower engine has a mechanical rev limiter that disables the spark above X rpm (usually X = 3600rpm).
If you can't train people to turn off the car in these situations, training them to use an alternate, less effective tool isn't going to help the problem.
I have read slashdot pretty much daily, for the last 10 years. The first time I heard about it was after some mac event, my mac buddy couldn't wait to tell me about how thunderbolt was ~THE FUTURE~. I can't recall a single/. article about the technology (though I'm sure someone with more time than me will do their best to prove me wrong). Thunderbolt is a pretty low priority for PC owners right now as you need a) a mac and b) a very expensive mac display to take advantage of it, and I can't think of any pc video cards that support the technology yet. As far as PC users are concerned it's still "theoretical vaporware" for us.
The real reason is that it's much harder to kill the telescope project once it's in two separate jurisdictions. The B-2 bomber had parts made in all 50 states so nobody could vote to kill the project without killing jobs in their state when the project went horrendously over budget (it's still a cool plane, though).
There's quite a bit of vetting process involved in promoting someone from $12,000/yr to $6,000,000/yr. Clearly he had some worthwhile ideas along the way, as he expanded the company by 300%+ over a decade against some pretty stiff competition (Circuit City, Incredible Universe, CompUSA and others are now defunct).
I mean, I hate corporate america as much as the next guy, but clearly his growth strategy worked, because we're talking about him today and not CompUSA. The main problem here was that the company failed to transition from a growth strategy to a stable revenue stream, which is pretty common in the retail sector.
Agreed; it's really hard to find quality electronics in meatspace stores these days. Whatever is on shelves now, is 6+ months old tech and not at all competitively priced against the bleeding edge tech you can find on amazon, newegg and elsewhere. It's really hard to buy a camera in a store, when if you go online you can see actual "raw" images of the camera right on your screen. At any one time there's only maybe 2-3 models of laptops in each category (netbook, laptop, desktop replacement) actually worth buying, and often you can only find one of each at a store... if you're lucky. Retail electronics too often == worst quality, whereas you can find high quality electronics in great number, and at lower prices online. It's been said before, but Best Buy really is Amazon's showroom.
To be fair, he started as a $5.15/hr minimum wage employee at one of their stores and worked his way up the ladder through literally every department before being named CEO. There are many CEO salaries and pensions to guffaw at, but this guy deserved at least half of what he gets.
I remember going to see Return of the Jedi in theaters when I was 12 or so, probably 5-10 years after it's initial release. I was shocked to see all sorts of things going on in the periphery of the scenes, The Executor star destroyer's engines being on screen, all sorts of things. I'd grown up on 4:3 television and it only then dawned on me that different aspect ratios required cutting out huge chunks of the video to make it fit on what was then a standard TV. I'm sure you could buy the widescreen version out of a specialty catalog if you knew about that sort of thing, but because the internet didn't exist as it does today, widescreen versions of films just didn't exist for the home market then.
I'm pretty sure that the average user stopped seeing new features added sometime around win98 or 2000. Other than UAC in vista, I can't really point to a feature that my mom uses in win7 that wasn't there in 98.
Just because someone has the title of "head of state" doesn't mean that Gaddafi can't go on a spending spree and blow a few million on some french fighter trainer jets (which he did about a year before the revolution). Russian tanks are another favorite.
Absolutely; I will read an interesting article at my desk at work, but I'll be damned if let my boss catch me watching tv at work, unless it's another balloon boy or 9/11 event. Maybe some bored slashdotter will post the transcript for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they mean that Unity isn't going to support legacy (pre-2009ish) video hardware. That makes sense. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do on the desktop, but you need the oomph to push it. At some point you need a cutoff, otherwise you end up making a lot of comprimises to help the perhaps 1-2% of your userbase.
The EULA only protects Adobe against users like you who don't know it has no legal standing in court.
I imagine all planes currently in the pipeline, or at least post-F-35, will have the option to be unmanned. Jet fighter pilots cost an absolute insane amount of money to train. Their salary is within the margin of error of their total training costs. Do you want to send someone with $60 million in training up in a jet with a 2% chance of getting blown up (or in more recent cases, losing consiousness due to malfunctioning oxygen systems and crashing)? No. Just leave them on the ground, the jet can probably fly itself better than the human operator anyways. Just stick them in front of a simulator with a live feed with the ability to make corrections as the situation changes. It's already happened with survilence vehicles, it's happening with bombers, it will happen with fighters soon enough. Only the most critical/black ops missions will have a human in the pilot's seat in 20 years time.
Didn't slashdot just post this exact article yesterday?
I'm pretty sure they do this already using microwave
Can we just skip to the "please come back, we're still cool and returning to our roots stage" and finally .. acceptance and forgiveness." stage?
Yeah that was my first thought scanning it, "Slash Bi", "Leisure Suit Larry", "Swing on Over"...
To quote the simpsons:
How soon until Slashdot goes NSFW when they realize they can triple their profits by using a combination of their high google page rank and streaming cut rate porn instead of hawking News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters?
Agreed. I was considering switching my netbook back to Windows so I could play some monkey-island style games on there, but now it looks like I might not have to. Right now I have steam running under Wine, which is a bit of a crutch, but it at least gives me chat functionality.
I think gtalk absorbed aol's userbase at some point, but you can still login using the old OSCAR client.
There's historical works, and then there are works meant to be studied and absorbed by students of this century. Yes, you and I would have no trouble at all with an Algebra book written in 1975, laugh at some of the rather dated soviet russia cartoons explaining parabolic arcs, and probably pass the state standardized test as a result, but how well can you comprehend the Harvard 1899 Entrance Exam at a glance?
It takes considerable skill and effort to write a text for the appropriate age group, make it engaging, easy to read, yet cover all the material required without losing the 50th percentile students who are struggling to pass so they can stay on the football team (or insert stereotype here).
Tools that modern students can relate to aren't simply slapped together in an afternoon, and require a serious editorial staff.
My friend works for that research group. They upgrade the teen's phones every year to the newest "flagship" phone. Keep in mind that the kids opting in to this need a reason to continue with the project. That means a new iPhone2, iPhone 3, iPhone 3S, iphone4, iPhone4s etc. I think most of the kids switched off blackberries a long time ago.
I'm not sure how big the research team is, but there's at least 4 full time non-students in the group. They don't keep an archive of all the data, interestingly. Probably for privacy reasons. They do classify the data in to positive/negative text messages, and identify who in the group are the alphas, betas, etc.
I honestly wouldn't worry about the kid's data privacy/rights, knowing who works in that group, they're all a really good group of people and outstanding citizens overall.
Assume your users will stream 4x1080p 3d @ 60fps for the rest of their lives,
Assume your users will be able to access any of this data at any time
Assume your users will expect all their data to be auto-meta tagged with full geoip data
And by "older cars" you mean those manufactured prior to 1950. Even the common lawnmower engine has a mechanical rev limiter that disables the spark above X rpm (usually X = 3600rpm).
If you can't train people to turn off the car in these situations, training them to use an alternate, less effective tool isn't going to help the problem.
I have read slashdot pretty much daily, for the last 10 years. The first time I heard about it was after some mac event, my mac buddy couldn't wait to tell me about how thunderbolt was ~THE FUTURE~. I can't recall a single /. article about the technology (though I'm sure someone with more time than me will do their best to prove me wrong). Thunderbolt is a pretty low priority for PC owners right now as you need a) a mac and b) a very expensive mac display to take advantage of it, and I can't think of any pc video cards that support the technology yet. As far as PC users are concerned it's still "theoretical vaporware" for us.
The real reason is that it's much harder to kill the telescope project once it's in two separate jurisdictions. The B-2 bomber had parts made in all 50 states so nobody could vote to kill the project without killing jobs in their state when the project went horrendously over budget (it's still a cool plane, though).
There's quite a bit of vetting process involved in promoting someone from $12,000/yr to $6,000,000/yr. Clearly he had some worthwhile ideas along the way, as he expanded the company by 300%+ over a decade against some pretty stiff competition (Circuit City, Incredible Universe, CompUSA and others are now defunct).
I mean, I hate corporate america as much as the next guy, but clearly his growth strategy worked, because we're talking about him today and not CompUSA. The main problem here was that the company failed to transition from a growth strategy to a stable revenue stream, which is pretty common in the retail sector.
Agreed; it's really hard to find quality electronics in meatspace stores these days. Whatever is on shelves now, is 6+ months old tech and not at all competitively priced against the bleeding edge tech you can find on amazon, newegg and elsewhere. It's really hard to buy a camera in a store, when if you go online you can see actual "raw" images of the camera right on your screen. At any one time there's only maybe 2-3 models of laptops in each category (netbook, laptop, desktop replacement) actually worth buying, and often you can only find one of each at a store... if you're lucky. Retail electronics too often == worst quality, whereas you can find high quality electronics in great number, and at lower prices online. It's been said before, but Best Buy really is Amazon's showroom.
To be fair, he started as a $5.15/hr minimum wage employee at one of their stores and worked his way up the ladder through literally every department before being named CEO. There are many CEO salaries and pensions to guffaw at, but this guy deserved at least half of what he gets.
I remember going to see Return of the Jedi in theaters when I was 12 or so, probably 5-10 years after it's initial release. I was shocked to see all sorts of things going on in the periphery of the scenes, The Executor star destroyer's engines being on screen, all sorts of things. I'd grown up on 4:3 television and it only then dawned on me that different aspect ratios required cutting out huge chunks of the video to make it fit on what was then a standard TV. I'm sure you could buy the widescreen version out of a specialty catalog if you knew about that sort of thing, but because the internet didn't exist as it does today, widescreen versions of films just didn't exist for the home market then.
I'm pretty sure that the average user stopped seeing new features added sometime around win98 or 2000. Other than UAC in vista, I can't really point to a feature that my mom uses in win7 that wasn't there in 98.
Just because someone has the title of "head of state" doesn't mean that Gaddafi can't go on a spending spree and blow a few million on some french fighter trainer jets (which he did about a year before the revolution). Russian tanks are another favorite.
Err sorry, jumped the gun. It's been a while since I looked at the document. It's on page 29:
P.S. "shortfall in supply" == skyrocketing prices as consumers compete with their dollars to fuel their farm tractors and war tanks
Sure, but the Joint Forces Command (aka the US millitary) even said that we hit peak oil in 2010.
No, really. Click this link and skip ahead to page 24
http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf
Absolutely; I will read an interesting article at my desk at work, but I'll be damned if let my boss catch me watching tv at work, unless it's another balloon boy or 9/11 event. Maybe some bored slashdotter will post the transcript for the rest of us.