Didn't this already happen with his cancer sabatical? And by this, I mean dropping major announcements with no warning and no real explanation?
They've done everything they can to make the company a cult of Steve Jobs (I mean, have they ever had *anyone* else doing or even assisting with the product demos on that big, dark stage?), and then when Jobs is sick or changing roles or whatever they fuck around and won't tell people what's actually going on. It's complete fiduciary misconduct, in my opinion, consistently playing coy with or outright withholding the specifics of major changes like this. They're responsible to their stockholders and to their customers to tell people what the hell is really going on.
Plus, every time Steve gets a friggin head cold the stock price plunges; they know this by now, and yet they said exactly nothing about why he's moving on this time around. We're forced to wonder whether no news is in fact very, very bad news they're hoping to hide for as long as possible; what if Steve's cancer is back and he's going to die within 6 months, but they're shoving Tim Cook up to the firing squad and hoping he can prove his worth before it happens so that the stock price doesn't *completely* vaporize?
Don't forget that ten years is the standard length of time for bullshit PR spin.
Want to make a bold claim with no evidence whatsoever? No problem! Just prophecy that it will happen "in ten years" and you'll enjoy the infinite respect and worship afforded to the likes of St. Peter, Confucious, and Warren Buffet.
Worried about being wrong? Again, no problem! When the ten year mark rolls around you'll have a wealth of available options for deflecting the shame. Your best hope is that you'll be dead by then. If by some grave misfortune you are still alive, you'll still have an average of 2.7 presidential administrations (adjusting for the assassination coefficient), dozens of religious leaders, and countless others to blame for derailing the path to paradise in the prior decade!
Bet on ten years and no one can ever prove you wrong! Guaranteed or your money back! Thank you for shopping Ronco, operators are standing by!
I absolutely love any story that gives self-righteous atheists an excuse to say, for the umpteenth time, that religion is categorically an evil, that organized religion is clinically insane, that religion has caused more suffering in human history than all biological and political causes combined, etc.
Before you get started this time, how about you give it a rest? We understand your opinions, but most of us are agnostic if we even care one way or another; likewise most of us realize that religion inspires good as well as evil, and see no need to throw the baby out with the bath water. Most of all it just gets really fucking boring listening to your hate fest.
You hate "religionists" and they hate you. The rest of us would rather you all shut the fuck up.
I mean, it's hard to keep track of any genre entirely. Nor can you blame me for being lax these days, what with the exhausting amount of work it takes sorting out real science fiction from the endless parade of tired paranormal works, PKD clones, and space operas.
But still, I feel like the ghost of Arthur C. Clarke just sneaked into my bedroom and shredded my nerd card. No need to turn it in; I abdicated by placidity and had to be punished.
Yeah, I guess you could argue that many types of surveillance rival those of 1984 in penetration and effectiveness, all while being less obtrusive.That's probably a good point.
I do feel that many conspiracy minded folks miss an important point, however. Government surveillance isn't new or particularly surprising; power corrupts, and sooner or later all governments come to believe they have legitimacy unto themselves rather than legitimacy granted by citizens. Sooner or later all governments intrude heavily in public life, whether it's citizen-supported acts of decency like universal healthcare and strict labor protections or massive pro-corporate economic manipulation in the name of small government or Gestapo.
Highly involved, highly curious government isn't very scary most of the time, though.
The real terror of 1984, however, was the sharp division between those who didn't care one way or another and those who actually liked the degree of control and surveillance imposed on them. Those were the only camps allowed to exist. Today, we don't show too many serious signs that the vocal minority who do care about privacy are withering away or being effectively oppressed, in my opinion, and I also think the number of people dumb enough to prefer heavy surveillance is much smaller than in 1984.
We're also doing a pretty good job overall of resisting the "everybody watch your neighbor" bullshit, and that's what worries me a lot more than technological surveillance and what I meant to reference with the turning in your parents thing. The number of random Arabic-looking people beaten or harassed since 9/11 is really surprisingly small, for example, considering the number of skinheads and paranoid Republicans we have. It still happens, along with train watchers and other hobbyists being harassed by idiots and the entire department of Homeland Security and completely batshit transportation policies, but even all of that really isn't so bad for the sort of incidents that supposedly herald our descent into an Orwellian nightmare. It sucks, but it's hardly Oceania.
Maybe it will get worse (and I'm sure someone is already writing their vicious rebuttal, attacking me for not noticing the growing conspiracies and looking skyward away from the slippery slope on which we stand on), but today isn't that bad.
Yeah...nice try with the Orwell hyperbole, but until we're voluntarily installing always-on public webcams in our homes and sending our parents to reeducation camps underneath the Department of Justice building I think we're a little short.
You can make some good comparisons here, no doubt, but it's pure idiocy to say we've gone past 1984.
And yes, I read the book. Four times. I'm not saying that make me an expert; I'm just staving off the inevitable question.
I'm not referring to racism, I'm referring to the part where he bitches about collectivism destroying civilization. If you think *that's* not a feature of her writing then you haven't read a word of it, at least not with your eyes open. You're awfully smug for a guy who completely misses the point and can't construct a coherent sentence.
I don't think her theories have *anything* to do with ethinicity: I was referring to the poster's bitching that collectivism is driving civilization into the ground. If you think *that's* not part of her work then you haven't read a single word of it.
Trolling is something said exclusively to piss people off. You, and every moderator on slashdot, *really* need to review the definitions of trolling and flaming.
Just because it's weird, controversial, or outright wrong doesn't make it trolling.
Now, for the topic at hand, please examine this quote
Now this might have changed somewhat in recent years; I'm not a communications engineer. But I don't think it has. And I'd bet my life that even if it has, texts still don't cost the carriers more than 0.1 cents.
I openly admitted that everything could have changed since I was last informed on the topic. Not one of you assholes who spouts off about the XYZ spectrum and control channels and new hardware has contested that profits are patently absurd or that carriers are lying their asses off.
That's the underlying concern. Now get off my damn back about things I already admitted I could be wrong about.
I did say quite plainly that I'm not a communications engineer and that things could have changed. I'm absolutely certain that text messages began as something that cost the carriers nothing more than they already paid; your claims that it does in fact, cost serious money today don't make me a liar or cancel out my original admissions of partial ignorance.
You also haven't disputed my - admittedly ass-pulled - number of 0.1 cents per text as a maximum actual cost. Are you claiming texts aren't making profits of more than ten fold, or a hundred fold, or a thousand fold? What percentage are the profits? We never expected to get it for *free* just because it is or was free to the carrier; we do sure as hell expect to get it for less than 100,000% of what landline bandwidth costs, however.
Absolutely nothing justifies the current price of SMS or data plans, no matter how many licenses and servers and different spectrum costs you throw out to challenge my claim. You're full of shit and you know it. They wouldn't have built that much infrastructure at all if it was so expensive they had to charge this much to make a profit; the risk they'd be taking on would get such a plan laughed out of any American boardroom within fifteen seconds.
Soooo.....everyone who says blacks are getting screwed is actually a racist? Is mere awareness of race and any response to it at all what constitutes racism in your book, or what?
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with anything else you said; I just cannot fathom that last sentence no matter how I try.
I'm willing to assume a difference of 9-12% is well more than one standard deviation, myself....and I'm damn near the last guy who wants to "play the race card", if that's what you'd like to call it.
Massive discrimination, in grant reviewing and in every other area, is as old as science itself.
I read about a study in which the authors took the exact same papers under the exact same completely fictional student names and submitted them in massive round-robin cycles to all the applicable journals. Sometimes, they put Harvard, UNC, or Vanderbilt down as the university source and sometimes WSU, East Carolina, or Buttfucksville University of the Holy Trinity.
I'll let you just imagine how acceptance rates came out.
All science funding and publishing is bullshit. Black scientists may get extra fucked over, but no one is treated fairly outside of the Ivy League and maybe another 20 top R1 schools.
That would be true if there was a well functioning market. A market of essentially two companies armed with contracts does not make for a well functioning market. It would be better to say:
They extract monopoly profits because they can.
And yet I never see people cursing out Intel/AMD or ATI/Nvidia on slashdot (and of course, now it's just three companies). If you ask an economist, anything less than five competitors of exactly equal capability (not implementation skills or resources, mind you, but the theoretical ability to compete) is a disaster. I don't think any telecommunications market or pc component arena has that many matched competitors right now.
But SMS messages use so little bandwidth, their incremental cost is basically zero.
From what I understand, the incremental cost actually is zero. SMS hides in the spare bandwidth of maintenance packets used to check for reception and synchronize with towers. I've always heard that the 140 bytes for a text was simply wasted before they figured out how to monetize it (at four-figures a megabyte, no less).
Don't forget that text message costs are exclusively determined by lying to you and constant bullshit experiments in "what the market will bear".
Texting is almost completely free for carriers. The messages piggyback to and from your phone in the spare bandwidth of the tower synchronization signals the phone uses to check reception and select towers for voice/data transmission. The only infinitesimal cost that might exist to the carrier is transmitting 140 lousy bytes from one tower to another tower; the capacity on the towers themselves is free.
Now this might have changed somewhat in recent years; I'm not a communications engineer. But I don't think it has. And I'd bet my life that even if it has, texts still don't cost the carriers more than 0.1 cents.
This is the very picture of evil corporate overlords plotting in a dark tower to see how much money they can squeeze out of you for nothing and avoid advancing technology as long as possible. Real technology entrepreneurs like George Eastman struggled constantly against themselves, trying to make things cheaper and better for the consumer. Eastman in particular tried desperately to obsolete his own products in favor of offering consumers even better, years before the prior product would otherwise have dropped in sales; today we call that cannibalism, and most tech companies struggle like hell to avoid a whit of it. (People acted like Apple was batshit crazy for not better managing their product line when iphones started to cannibalize ipods. Nevermind that iphones cost hundreds more, so even that cannibalism is pure profit.)
When's the last time you saw a company that put out everything they had, every time, and didn't hold something back for upgrade cycles or a magical September festival of worship?
I'm definitely talking about the synthetic stuff, like the synthesizing necessary for the organic transistors discussed in TFA. All the side products, unofficial hunches, unpredictable results and all that weirdness combined with having only a moderate understanding (good way of saying it, I guess) of the theory underneath it made me feel like organic was just this side of total loopiness. I mean, in how many other productive fields do you feel awesome when you get 3% yield of something? Maybe a lot, in some kinds of research; I don't know. It just seems weird and unscientific in so many ways.
I don't know anything about quantum mechanics; I was just thinking about all the really crazy things you hear about with wormholes and time travel and shit that seems (from popular literature and slashdot articles) to have almost certain mathematical proof but almost zero measurable evidence.
Take a few years of organic chemistry courses, especially the labs, and you'll become astounded that they've gotten even this far.
Organic chemistry, compared to all other things considered "hard" science, is so difficult and the fundamentals so poorly understand that compared to physics or inorganic chemistry it might as well be mysticism. I struggled with it, trying to treat it like a science, for a whole year before my professor finally admitted that they don't know exactly how anything works; the core theories are good science, but have little more real-world proof than quantum physics. And succeeding at something novel in applied organic is far more art than science, despite the need for a post-doctoral scientific background.
They deserve serious credit for this kind of breakthrough, not questions about why it's "taken so long".
There are managers who've become famous for "beating the market" simply because they rationally examine what other people refuse to see and leave a field once they realize the ratings are all shit or they realize that data-driven investing has yielded to emotional positive-feedback loops.
You don't beat the market with bold declarations about a coin flip, you beat it with cynicism and independent thought; few if any people can predict the economy or the performance of a particular company, but many people can make more rational decisions than most given the available data or detect and respond to increasingly emotional behavior in other investors.
Sometimes this means making better investments than others; quite often it's as simple as getting off the train two stops before everyone else. I know it's considered a myth that you can time your entry and exit in the market, but sometimes it's really very possible, especially with the exit.
So by following Twitter trends he can make investments that beat other funds in the short run? Are we supposed to be even remotely surprised here?
Everyone knows the stock market responds faster to fear and to delusions of sudden prosperity than to hard data; that's a large part of its problem.
Detecting and exploiting those fears and delusions accurately is a good trick (and I'm sure it isn't easy, even with this method). But it doesn't make the man a genius by a long shot. Nor does it make him a useful investor: banking on the current "mood" means he's actually inflating the dangerous cycles of emotionally driven, short-term investment decisions rather than making any kind of long-term decisions.
I've been ripped before for criticizing short term trading, including HFT trading, but I still think the people who keep the market even remotely stable and the people who make the market useful for it's true purpose (giving corporations a bond market and investors a place for potentially stable returns) are long term investors who follow the data.
And following twitter isn't what I mean by data-driven decisions.
All I really know about id Tech 5 is that many posters here on slashdot claim to have seen previews and tech demos already, and they say it absolutely sucks.
I recall people saying it pales in comparison to any modern game engine, and in fact doesn't even hold up against Source, which is now 7 years old. Specifics included complaints about the polygon count being so low that you could see visible spikes on the heads, shoulders, etc. of characters and such.
Maybe that was just demos; maybe id is the only company in the world to demo the relevant rendering advances without obsessing over technically trivial things like polygon count in non-production projects. Nevertheless, usually the demos and gameplay movies look way *better* than production product, so this seems like a serious concern.
In fact, if these complainers are truthful and accurate, id Tech 5 is truly nothing more than a very early April Fool's joke.
Reversing the loss of subscribers with 'fresh' content would be offering a drowning man a glass of water. The game doesn't need more of the same, nor does it need more of the suspiciously similar.
The game is simply over. Eventually the whole Red Queen-syndrome of an MMO gets really, really old. Most players can put up with the invisible hand in the sky - that one that occasionally tells them all their end-game gear is suddenly vendor trash and they should go fight a bigger, differently colored monster which has conveniently appeared in the next village over- for exactly as long as the game remains interesting. The problem is that with the same engine, the same art direction, the same development team, the same corporate overlords, etc. the game can't remain interesting forever. You can't come up with truly new, practical ideas ad infinitum without reaching the point where the software can't take it or where with every New Thing (tm) you're changing the core experience and consequently losing at least as many players as you gain.
Blizzard needs to prevent WoW from becoming The X-Files here; they need to notice that the interest level (and the natural story arc) are winding down and create a proper ending before the whole thing becomes a bloated mess destined to a messy, horribly unsatisfying conclusion.
For those who read this and think "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if we did this in the US", I've heard that getting official communications and financial statements in electronic form can really fuck you over. Perhaps someone can enlighten us as to exactly how (or inform me that I'm completely wrong).
From what I recall hearing, though, when you get a credit card statement or a bank disclosure or a tax bill in hard copy via US mail it's a legal document; when you get a pdf of the same thing sent to your gmail it's in many ways just a pile of ones and zeros. IANAL so I don't understand exactly how, but I've heard there are many legal advantages to not only preferring but demanding hard copy of everything important, because if anything goes wrong you can't protect yourself as well (or sometimes at all) with electronic documentation. Not because it says any less the paper copy, obviously, but because the law is so antiquated that for many important purposes it can't be considered valid documentation by any judge or auditor who truly follows said law.
So it wouldn't be just technical challenges to overcome if we made a national Important Official Email system, we'd also have to drag the US Code from way back there in 1998 (for the most technically literate portions) up into 2011 and beyond.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't this already happen with his cancer sabatical? And by this, I mean dropping major announcements with no warning and no real explanation?
They've done everything they can to make the company a cult of Steve Jobs (I mean, have they ever had *anyone* else doing or even assisting with the product demos on that big, dark stage?), and then when Jobs is sick or changing roles or whatever they fuck around and won't tell people what's actually going on. It's complete fiduciary misconduct, in my opinion, consistently playing coy with or outright withholding the specifics of major changes like this. They're responsible to their stockholders and to their customers to tell people what the hell is really going on.
Plus, every time Steve gets a friggin head cold the stock price plunges; they know this by now, and yet they said exactly nothing about why he's moving on this time around. We're forced to wonder whether no news is in fact very, very bad news they're hoping to hide for as long as possible; what if Steve's cancer is back and he's going to die within 6 months, but they're shoving Tim Cook up to the firing squad and hoping he can prove his worth before it happens so that the stock price doesn't *completely* vaporize?
Want to make a bold claim with no evidence whatsoever? No problem! Just prophecy that it will happen "in ten years" and you'll enjoy the infinite respect and worship afforded to the likes of St. Peter, Confucious, and Warren Buffet.
Worried about being wrong? Again, no problem! When the ten year mark rolls around you'll have a wealth of available options for deflecting the shame. Your best hope is that you'll be dead by then. If by some grave misfortune you are still alive, you'll still have an average of 2.7 presidential administrations (adjusting for the assassination coefficient), dozens of religious leaders, and countless others to blame for derailing the path to paradise in the prior decade!
Bet on ten years and no one can ever prove you wrong! Guaranteed or your money back! Thank you for shopping Ronco, operators are standing by!
I absolutely love any story that gives self-righteous atheists an excuse to say, for the umpteenth time, that religion is categorically an evil, that organized religion is clinically insane, that religion has caused more suffering in human history than all biological and political causes combined, etc.
Before you get started this time, how about you give it a rest? We understand your opinions, but most of us are agnostic if we even care one way or another; likewise most of us realize that religion inspires good as well as evil, and see no need to throw the baby out with the bath water. Most of all it just gets really fucking boring listening to your hate fest.
You hate "religionists" and they hate you. The rest of us would rather you all shut the fuck up.
I haven't heard of any of these people.
I mean, it's hard to keep track of any genre entirely. Nor can you blame me for being lax these days, what with the exhausting amount of work it takes sorting out real science fiction from the endless parade of tired paranormal works, PKD clones, and space operas.
But still, I feel like the ghost of Arthur C. Clarke just sneaked into my bedroom and shredded my nerd card. No need to turn it in; I abdicated by placidity and had to be punished.
Yeah, I guess you could argue that many types of surveillance rival those of 1984 in penetration and effectiveness, all while being less obtrusive.That's probably a good point.
I do feel that many conspiracy minded folks miss an important point, however. Government surveillance isn't new or particularly surprising; power corrupts, and sooner or later all governments come to believe they have legitimacy unto themselves rather than legitimacy granted by citizens. Sooner or later all governments intrude heavily in public life, whether it's citizen-supported acts of decency like universal healthcare and strict labor protections or massive pro-corporate economic manipulation in the name of small government or Gestapo.
Highly involved, highly curious government isn't very scary most of the time, though.
The real terror of 1984, however, was the sharp division between those who didn't care one way or another and those who actually liked the degree of control and surveillance imposed on them. Those were the only camps allowed to exist. Today, we don't show too many serious signs that the vocal minority who do care about privacy are withering away or being effectively oppressed, in my opinion, and I also think the number of people dumb enough to prefer heavy surveillance is much smaller than in 1984.
We're also doing a pretty good job overall of resisting the "everybody watch your neighbor" bullshit, and that's what worries me a lot more than technological surveillance and what I meant to reference with the turning in your parents thing. The number of random Arabic-looking people beaten or harassed since 9/11 is really surprisingly small, for example, considering the number of skinheads and paranoid Republicans we have. It still happens, along with train watchers and other hobbyists being harassed by idiots and the entire department of Homeland Security and completely batshit transportation policies, but even all of that really isn't so bad for the sort of incidents that supposedly herald our descent into an Orwellian nightmare. It sucks, but it's hardly Oceania.
Maybe it will get worse (and I'm sure someone is already writing their vicious rebuttal, attacking me for not noticing the growing conspiracies and looking skyward away from the slippery slope on which we stand on), but today isn't that bad.
Yeah...nice try with the Orwell hyperbole, but until we're voluntarily installing always-on public webcams in our homes and sending our parents to reeducation camps underneath the Department of Justice building I think we're a little short.
You can make some good comparisons here, no doubt, but it's pure idiocy to say we've gone past 1984.
And yes, I read the book. Four times. I'm not saying that make me an expert; I'm just staving off the inevitable question.
I'm not referring to racism, I'm referring to the part where he bitches about collectivism destroying civilization. If you think *that's* not a feature of her writing then you haven't read a word of it, at least not with your eyes open. You're awfully smug for a guy who completely misses the point and can't construct a coherent sentence.
I don't think her theories have *anything* to do with ethinicity: I was referring to the poster's bitching that collectivism is driving civilization into the ground. If you think *that's* not part of her work then you haven't read a single word of it.
Just because it's weird, controversial, or outright wrong doesn't make it trolling.
Now, for the topic at hand, please examine this quote
Now this might have changed somewhat in recent years; I'm not a communications engineer. But I don't think it has. And I'd bet my life that even if it has, texts still don't cost the carriers more than 0.1 cents.
I openly admitted that everything could have changed since I was last informed on the topic. Not one of you assholes who spouts off about the XYZ spectrum and control channels and new hardware has contested that profits are patently absurd or that carriers are lying their asses off.
That's the underlying concern. Now get off my damn back about things I already admitted I could be wrong about.
I did say quite plainly that I'm not a communications engineer and that things could have changed. I'm absolutely certain that text messages began as something that cost the carriers nothing more than they already paid; your claims that it does in fact, cost serious money today don't make me a liar or cancel out my original admissions of partial ignorance.
You also haven't disputed my - admittedly ass-pulled - number of 0.1 cents per text as a maximum actual cost. Are you claiming texts aren't making profits of more than ten fold, or a hundred fold, or a thousand fold? What percentage are the profits? We never expected to get it for *free* just because it is or was free to the carrier; we do sure as hell expect to get it for less than 100,000% of what landline bandwidth costs, however.
Absolutely nothing justifies the current price of SMS or data plans, no matter how many licenses and servers and different spectrum costs you throw out to challenge my claim. You're full of shit and you know it. They wouldn't have built that much infrastructure at all if it was so expensive they had to charge this much to make a profit; the risk they'd be taking on would get such a plan laughed out of any American boardroom within fifteen seconds.
Reading a lot of Ayn Rand lately?
Soooo.....everyone who says blacks are getting screwed is actually a racist? Is mere awareness of race and any response to it at all what constitutes racism in your book, or what?
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with anything else you said; I just cannot fathom that last sentence no matter how I try.
I'm willing to assume a difference of 9-12% is well more than one standard deviation, myself....and I'm damn near the last guy who wants to "play the race card", if that's what you'd like to call it.
Massive discrimination, in grant reviewing and in every other area, is as old as science itself.
I read about a study in which the authors took the exact same papers under the exact same completely fictional student names and submitted them in massive round-robin cycles to all the applicable journals. Sometimes, they put Harvard, UNC, or Vanderbilt down as the university source and sometimes WSU, East Carolina, or Buttfucksville University of the Holy Trinity.
I'll let you just imagine how acceptance rates came out.
All science funding and publishing is bullshit. Black scientists may get extra fucked over, but no one is treated fairly outside of the Ivy League and maybe another 20 top R1 schools.
That would be true if there was a well functioning market. A market of essentially two companies armed with contracts does not make for a well functioning market. It would be better to say:
They extract monopoly profits because they can.
And yet I never see people cursing out Intel/AMD or ATI/Nvidia on slashdot (and of course, now it's just three companies). If you ask an economist, anything less than five competitors of exactly equal capability (not implementation skills or resources, mind you, but the theoretical ability to compete) is a disaster. I don't think any telecommunications market or pc component arena has that many matched competitors right now.
But SMS messages use so little bandwidth, their incremental cost is basically zero.
From what I understand, the incremental cost actually is zero. SMS hides in the spare bandwidth of maintenance packets used to check for reception and synchronize with towers. I've always heard that the 140 bytes for a text was simply wasted before they figured out how to monetize it (at four-figures a megabyte, no less).
Don't forget that text message costs are exclusively determined by lying to you and constant bullshit experiments in "what the market will bear".
Texting is almost completely free for carriers. The messages piggyback to and from your phone in the spare bandwidth of the tower synchronization signals the phone uses to check reception and select towers for voice/data transmission. The only infinitesimal cost that might exist to the carrier is transmitting 140 lousy bytes from one tower to another tower; the capacity on the towers themselves is free.
Now this might have changed somewhat in recent years; I'm not a communications engineer. But I don't think it has. And I'd bet my life that even if it has, texts still don't cost the carriers more than 0.1 cents.
This is the very picture of evil corporate overlords plotting in a dark tower to see how much money they can squeeze out of you for nothing and avoid advancing technology as long as possible. Real technology entrepreneurs like George Eastman struggled constantly against themselves, trying to make things cheaper and better for the consumer. Eastman in particular tried desperately to obsolete his own products in favor of offering consumers even better, years before the prior product would otherwise have dropped in sales; today we call that cannibalism, and most tech companies struggle like hell to avoid a whit of it. (People acted like Apple was batshit crazy for not better managing their product line when iphones started to cannibalize ipods. Nevermind that iphones cost hundreds more, so even that cannibalism is pure profit.)
When's the last time you saw a company that put out everything they had, every time, and didn't hold something back for upgrade cycles or a magical September festival of worship?
I'm definitely talking about the synthetic stuff, like the synthesizing necessary for the organic transistors discussed in TFA. All the side products, unofficial hunches, unpredictable results and all that weirdness combined with having only a moderate understanding (good way of saying it, I guess) of the theory underneath it made me feel like organic was just this side of total loopiness. I mean, in how many other productive fields do you feel awesome when you get 3% yield of something? Maybe a lot, in some kinds of research; I don't know. It just seems weird and unscientific in so many ways.
I don't know anything about quantum mechanics; I was just thinking about all the really crazy things you hear about with wormholes and time travel and shit that seems (from popular literature and slashdot articles) to have almost certain mathematical proof but almost zero measurable evidence.
though I do have to ask why it has taken so long.
Take a few years of organic chemistry courses, especially the labs, and you'll become astounded that they've gotten even this far.
Organic chemistry, compared to all other things considered "hard" science, is so difficult and the fundamentals so poorly understand that compared to physics or inorganic chemistry it might as well be mysticism. I struggled with it, trying to treat it like a science, for a whole year before my professor finally admitted that they don't know exactly how anything works; the core theories are good science, but have little more real-world proof than quantum physics. And succeeding at something novel in applied organic is far more art than science, despite the need for a post-doctoral scientific background.
They deserve serious credit for this kind of breakthrough, not questions about why it's "taken so long".
It sounds like great research.
On the other hand, these computers they're using sound pretty damn smart.
Like smart enough maybe to sabotage the search for their own replacements....
I don't agree with you.
There are managers who've become famous for "beating the market" simply because they rationally examine what other people refuse to see and leave a field once they realize the ratings are all shit or they realize that data-driven investing has yielded to emotional positive-feedback loops.
You don't beat the market with bold declarations about a coin flip, you beat it with cynicism and independent thought; few if any people can predict the economy or the performance of a particular company, but many people can make more rational decisions than most given the available data or detect and respond to increasingly emotional behavior in other investors.
Sometimes this means making better investments than others; quite often it's as simple as getting off the train two stops before everyone else. I know it's considered a myth that you can time your entry and exit in the market, but sometimes it's really very possible, especially with the exit.
So by following Twitter trends he can make investments that beat other funds in the short run? Are we supposed to be even remotely surprised here?
Everyone knows the stock market responds faster to fear and to delusions of sudden prosperity than to hard data; that's a large part of its problem.
Detecting and exploiting those fears and delusions accurately is a good trick (and I'm sure it isn't easy, even with this method). But it doesn't make the man a genius by a long shot. Nor does it make him a useful investor: banking on the current "mood" means he's actually inflating the dangerous cycles of emotionally driven, short-term investment decisions rather than making any kind of long-term decisions.
I've been ripped before for criticizing short term trading, including HFT trading, but I still think the people who keep the market even remotely stable and the people who make the market useful for it's true purpose (giving corporations a bond market and investors a place for potentially stable returns) are long term investors who follow the data.
And following twitter isn't what I mean by data-driven decisions.
All I really know about id Tech 5 is that many posters here on slashdot claim to have seen previews and tech demos already, and they say it absolutely sucks.
I recall people saying it pales in comparison to any modern game engine, and in fact doesn't even hold up against Source, which is now 7 years old. Specifics included complaints about the polygon count being so low that you could see visible spikes on the heads, shoulders, etc. of characters and such.
Maybe that was just demos; maybe id is the only company in the world to demo the relevant rendering advances without obsessing over technically trivial things like polygon count in non-production projects. Nevertheless, usually the demos and gameplay movies look way *better* than production product, so this seems like a serious concern.
In fact, if these complainers are truthful and accurate, id Tech 5 is truly nothing more than a very early April Fool's joke.
Reversing the loss of subscribers with 'fresh' content would be offering a drowning man a glass of water. The game doesn't need more of the same, nor does it need more of the suspiciously similar.
The game is simply over. Eventually the whole Red Queen-syndrome of an MMO gets really, really old. Most players can put up with the invisible hand in the sky - that one that occasionally tells them all their end-game gear is suddenly vendor trash and they should go fight a bigger, differently colored monster which has conveniently appeared in the next village over- for exactly as long as the game remains interesting. The problem is that with the same engine, the same art direction, the same development team, the same corporate overlords, etc. the game can't remain interesting forever. You can't come up with truly new, practical ideas ad infinitum without reaching the point where the software can't take it or where with every New Thing (tm) you're changing the core experience and consequently losing at least as many players as you gain.
Blizzard needs to prevent WoW from becoming The X-Files here; they need to notice that the interest level (and the natural story arc) are winding down and create a proper ending before the whole thing becomes a bloated mess destined to a messy, horribly unsatisfying conclusion.
It's probably too late now.
For those who read this and think "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if we did this in the US", I've heard that getting official communications and financial statements in electronic form can really fuck you over. Perhaps someone can enlighten us as to exactly how (or inform me that I'm completely wrong).
From what I recall hearing, though, when you get a credit card statement or a bank disclosure or a tax bill in hard copy via US mail it's a legal document; when you get a pdf of the same thing sent to your gmail it's in many ways just a pile of ones and zeros. IANAL so I don't understand exactly how, but I've heard there are many legal advantages to not only preferring but demanding hard copy of everything important, because if anything goes wrong you can't protect yourself as well (or sometimes at all) with electronic documentation. Not because it says any less the paper copy, obviously, but because the law is so antiquated that for many important purposes it can't be considered valid documentation by any judge or auditor who truly follows said law.
So it wouldn't be just technical challenges to overcome if we made a national Important Official Email system, we'd also have to drag the US Code from way back there in 1998 (for the most technically literate portions) up into 2011 and beyond.