Every time the U.N. comes up, in any capacity, the rah-rah America faction-- especially, I find, the portion of that faction with "blogs"-- just explodes falling all over themselves to denounce the U.N. and talk about how horrible and evil it is and how everything it does is wrong.
Looking at the U.N. myself though I don't really see an organization consistent enough to draw any conclusions about it. It is an evolving entity. Look at its state over time since oh, say, 1985, and you'll realize there are almost no points over this time period where the U.N. in practice clearly resembles the entity it was just five years before. The U.N. had a clearly defined role during the Cold War; now that the Cold War is over that role no longer applies, and it is trying to find its new role. I don't think there's any way to predict right now what that role is going to be. The U.S. has the option of taking an active hand in shaping the U.N.'s new role, if we want (there have been parts of the last 20 years where we've done this, though right now is not one of them); however, what we can't do is make the U.N. go away. It's going to stay around, and it's going to develop into something. That isn't our choice. Our only choice is, will it develop into something with us or without us.
One thing that it occasionally worries me the U.N. might develop into is a bloc organization that basically represents "everyone but the U.S.". That is, I think it is possible that as the U.S. increasingly acts only in its own immediate interest to the exclusion of anyone else's interests, other countries will use the U.N. as a platform on which to band together and represent their interests in common, until the U.N. eventually becomes something which pens in the U.S. the way NATO penned in the USSR. As an American, I don't think this situation would be good for me or my country. However, I think it is possible. I also think that trying to push hard against or de-emphasize the U.N. does more to make the above "U.N. vs U.S." outcome likely than it does to make the U.N. weaker. The U.N.'s potential strength stems from the countries which wish to align with it; it's exactly as strong if the U.S. appears hostile toward it as it is if the U.S. appears apathetic toward it. However if the U.S. appears hostile toward the U.N. we do begin to set the stage for a situation where the U.N. begins to behave antagonistically back.
I see this DNS thing as a small but noteworthy step toward this situation.
Four or five years ago if the U.N. expressed an interest in controlling the DNS servers (and they did) there would be no point in taking this suggestion seriously (and no one did) because there was already an independent and international body (ICANN) on track toward running the DNS system. Now the U.S. has decided to make ICANN no longer a meaningfully independent body, and the governance of the DNS servers a U.S. national issue rather than an international one. And now, as a result, we are starting to see movements where service providers and governments outside the U.S. are starting to look into ways to break away from the U.S.-commerce-department-controlled ICANN system and into nameserver independence. In this light, the U.N. proposing they control nameservers takes on a very different tone. It underscores that if the U.S. does not wish to administer the nameservers under its control in an international fashion, there are other entities perfectly willing to assume that job.
If other nations choose to break away from the U.S. controlled nameservers, well, it's likely they'll do so together, meaning that we will have the U.S. commerce department running DNS for the U.S. and an international body running DNS for "everybody else". And who will run this international body? Well, the U.N. is a likely choice. The steady smear campaign against the U.N. doesn't exist in the same way outside the
I wonder if Nintendo originally intended to go without any TCP/IP and only allow for adhoc LANs and using 802.11b chipsets was the way to go 'coz they're off the shelf and cheap
Nintendo announced TCP/IP/internet support on the same day the announced the Nintendo DS itself. I believe they were discussing internet games and web browsers even before Sony was. Sony just beat them to market with it.
We have plenty of words which mean uncertain, why destroy the specific meaning of a word like ambiguous?
Hm?
Well, here's dictionary.com's take on the word:
ambiguous adj.
1. Open to more than one interpretation: an ambiguous reply.
2. Doubtful or uncertain: "The theatrical status of her frequently derided but constantly revived plays remained ambiguous" (Frank Rich).
[From Latin ambiguus, uncertain, from ambigere, to go about : amb-, ambi-, around; see ambi- + agere, to drive; see ag- in Indo-European Roots.]ambiguously adv.
So it seems we've got two equally valid definitions here, neither explicitly makes use of the idea of a "contrary positioning", and only one definition (the first) implies this idea. Neither in any way makes necessary use of the idea of value judgements.
You seem to want to strengthen the first of these definitions and eliminate the other; however, it is a bit odd to act as if doing otherwise is "destroying" the meaning of the word "ambiguous", since the meaning you are trying to promote here is not necessarily part of the historical usage of the word. (M-w.com says for the word "ambiguous": "Etymology: Latin ambiguus, from ambigere to be undecided").
Ambiguity is being internally contradictory or open to multiple different interpretations.
It can also mean "doubtful or uncertain".
The article is referring to the fact that Google's future and future plans are ambiguous. It is unclear what Google is going to do next, and as the article notes not entirely clear at times what they're doing now. Google gives the constant impression they're about to do something fantastic and creative, any moment now, just wait for it. However, what this implied thing will be, when it will happen, and whether it will even happen at all (though Google certainly does seem to keep following through on randomly pulling rabbits out of their hats) is ambiguous. Hence the article's choice of words.
In order to see what will happen in this upcoming generation, we simply have to look at the last generation, when the Dreamcast came out nearly a year before the PS2; and the Dreamcast was released with a programmer-friendly focus, while the PS2 (at and around launch) had an unclearly documented and byzantine architecture which required writing large chunks of assembly code to get many basic things done. And so what happened?
Of course, the Playstation 2 failed horribly and Sega went on to dominate the market for four years.
Considering what happened to the PS2, we can only imagine what will happen to the PS3-- which incorporates such horrors as "having to write in 256k code/memory chunks when you want to use the auxilliary processors", and "a GPU".
What will the market look like by the time that PS3 programmers finally learn to use this newfangled "shader" technology nvidia is pushing (well, newfangled except that it has been present in the Gamecube and XBox for their entire respective lifespans, but you know what I mean)?
My opinion, based on vague things I've seen and heard and a lot of guessing, is that IBM never really wanted Apple's business in the first place. The plan for the PPC alliance always seemed to be that IBM would take the high-end kinda stuff, Motorola would target the PPC area, and Apple would buy chips from Motorola.
Unfortunately then Motorola lost interest in the CPU market, their CPU group started getting neglected and sucky, Motorola spun off their CPU group into Freescale, and Freescale turned out to be sucky as well. So Apple wound up pretty much having to buy from IBM instead. But IBM never seemed very enthusiastic about this-- for example there were reports they didn't really want to bother with altivec/VMX/"velocity engine", and altivec was the or a cornerstone of Apple's CPU strategy. (Though, ironically, VMX is a really big part of all those new video game CPUs IBM is making, so I guess that kinda turned out well for IBM...) When I heard Apple really was going to Intel, honestly one of my first responses was to wonder whether this happened because Apple was pushing IBM away, or because IBM was trying to push Apple away and Apple was just complying..
I really wonder what's going to happen to Freescale at this point.
I would assume the games will provide the TCP/IP stacks, or possibly Nintendo will provide one in the dev kits which will then be used in the games. Since there exist TCP/IP stacks which are free and use less than 10 kilobytes of memory, I'd imagine the lack of TCP/IP in the DS firmware is only an inconvenience for tunnelers...
On the same day Sony dropped a feature from the PS3, Nintendo announced a feature on the Revolution (with next to nothing known about it)
Actually.. no. Nintendo didn't announce anything today.
If you'll look at the article slashdot links, it's a personal blog. The blog gives no source for its assertion whatsoever. Since he doesn't show it's been confirmed by Nintendo, for all we know from reading that blog it may not even be true.
The news about the Nintendo USB wifi router thing is actually over a month old-- I'm not sure if Nintendo's ever confirmed it's true or if it's just a rumor, but whichever it is, it's been around for awhile.
So, aside from the fact that the article author wasn't upset at Ion Storm or anything, and only brought this point in to make a point about the impossibility of value neutrality in video games...
Deus Ex?
Isn't that the game series where no matter whether you choose the pacifist or violent options, the world ends in a horrible and dystopian fashion by the end of the game, and the most choice you have is that you get to choose which dystopian fashion it ends in?
Some "bias".
I'm just finding it interesting... if we're in a situation where people are slinging around labels like "politically liberal" just because somebody made nonviolent problem resolution look in some way "nicer" than violent problem resolution, I think maybe this indicates some.. odd things about where our culture is at. Will we next have the American Arbitration Association denounced as "politically liberal" because they advocate nonviolent resolutions to corporate disputes, as opposed to IBM and Bechtel hiring gunslinging corporate mercenaries like the one you role-play as in Deus Ex?
I think misunderstood that: the Revolution has built-in WiFi and Nintendo is selling a WiFi router so PCs can access that WiFi net... they use their own WiFi network
The Nintendo DS uses 802.11. This USB wirelessy thing is almost certainly going to just be a totally normal 802.11 router, just it plugs into USB instead of sitting between your modem and computer the way a Netgear would.
You have probably heard that Nintendo has some kind of "propreitary wi-fi protocol". This is true. However this protocol is used for DS to DS multiplayer. Like, if you have two DSes in a room. This "propreitary" protocol will also, as you note, probably be used to connect the DS to the Revolution.
However, when the DS needs to go onto the internet-- i.e. when you buy one of the online-enabled games such as Animal Crossing or Mario Kart coming later this year-- it switches to 802.11 TCP/IP.
I think we can completely assume that the Revolution will work the same way.
This is mere unnecessary conveniences. What exactly are they giving us here? Well, if I'm reading this right, "C++0x"* will give us:
Some cases where you can type ; where previously {} was necessary, saving as many as two keystrokes.
The lexer ambiguity where a<b<c>> and a<b<c> > meant entirely different things is fixed, saving as many as one keystroke.
EVEN MORE "free" constructors which may or may not work quite the way you wanted them to in practice.
More "fancy cast" operators, which sounds nice until you remember that if there's ever a time you find yourself using the C++ "fancy cast" operators, then there is a damn good chance that it's because you're doing something unwise enough it really would be a better idea to refactor the code to make the "fancy cast" unnecessary.
...in the meantime the fundamental issues with C++ remain not only unresolved, but unaddressed. The template system is still not a generics system, but an ugly cut & paste macro system which can incidentally be used for generics, with some caveats. The class system is still fundamentally brittle and unfriendly to simple things such as upgrading a DLL or determining at runtime if two objects are of the same type. The syntax is still a forest of features whose features interact in ways so crazy and unpredictable it approaches Perl in its chaos; references are still gimped; the distinctions in behavior and use between static and dynamic objects remain awkward and newbie-unfriendly. The features that people obviously desire to have in the language as demonstrated by their tendency to hack them in with third-party libraries (like BOOST) are-- they tell us-- a good thing, and they tell us we should continue to hack them in with libraries (like BOOST). That's nice. You know, that would be a lot easier though if we had a macro system** capable of anything smarter than blind code cut and paste-- or at least a macro system** fundamentally designed to be used for anything at all other than generics.
Meanwhile, it appears if I'm reading this right that the most important differences in C++0x will be changes to the standard library. Great. The STL was defined how many years ago, and it's only just in the last few years that compliant implementations have become commonplace? How many decades will it be before the "C++0x" library changes have become common in a cross-platform compatible way?
C++ is an extremely useful language, and making an update to C++ which changes as little as possible so as to follow some kind of "if it aint broken don't fix it" principle is an idea which makes a whole lot of sense. However it seems likely to me from reading this that C++0x will offer so little significant difference from C++ as to make itself simply redundant.
* ("C++0x". Were they specifically trying to come up with a name less convenient than "C#"? Ah well, I guess we can call it "COX" or "cocks" for short.) ** "Template system"
SunRay is actually a truly fantastic product if you can get an opportunity to use it. There is something just absolutely fantastic about being able to pull your little card out of the machine in front of you, walk to an entirely other part of the building to where someone you know is sitting, say "I'm having trouble with this, could you take a look at it?", stick your card into the machine sitting next to him, and have whatever you were doing just pop up there. Those little cards change the entire PC computing dynamic, and the new dynamic makes way more sense pretty much anywhere except in the home.
Unfortunately Sun
Charges about as much as a low-end PC for the SunRay thin client
Charges about as much as a mid-range business PC for the SunRay thin client if you want little frills like, y'know, a monitor.
More or less requires the use of Solaris to use Sunray, which makes quite a bit of sense when you consider SunRay necessarily requires a hugeass multiproc server stowed somewhere, but which, seriously, is not something many people would want to use as a desktop OS. You could maybe sell the end user on Linux, if you set it up quite specifically. Solaris, um, that's a lot harder. The upshot of this is that SunRay probably only appeals to that small number of companies where everyone is or can expected to be a UNIX user.
So between these things, the only places I've aware of in the entire world using SunRay in a way that demonstrates its potential are large universities with big Sun contracts, and, um, Sun itself. If there's another business using this system I don't know what it is.
I think this is kind of representative of Sun as a whole right now. They've got a WHOLE bunch of promising ideas and services and products. But they're not quite where they can be useful in a real world situation-- there's just those two or three simple-but-difficult-to-solve issues that hold it back from people buying it. In every case Sun could probably address these issues if they thought really hard about exactly who they wanted to buy this and why-- that is, they've got the neat tech but they don't have a clear picture of exactly what (not "it could be used in a multimedia telecommunications infrastructure!", an actual exact product) this tech should be used for in the real world.
In the meantime, the energy that could be used on figuring out how to leverage or market the things that Sun offers but no one else does (SunRay-ish stuff) is all being diverted into fighting uphill battles, mostly trying to keep a market presence for Sun's not-so-unique products-- for example, the Solaris vs. Linux fight-- which are still the cornerstone of Sun's business, but aren't necessarily the company's strength anymore now that similar or interchangeable products have become more commonplace.
I'm sure they're trying to figure this out also, and I'm sure there's some way Sun can change this situation, but I don't know when or if it will happen.
In order to do this of course you must write your own cgi frontend, so you could say this isn't as much as Office would hypothetically give you. However all Office would be hypothetically giving you here is a prepared drop-in CGI script, and I'm relatively certain were there need for such a thing there would be several free prepared drop-in CGI scripts for doing this with Acrobat already; and certainly it would likely be quicker and cheaper for any organization with access to at least one programmer to write such a thing internally than to wait for, then upgrade to, a new version of MS-Office.
I would imagine however that no one would ever really bother with such a thing, however, since, well, pretty much everyone in the world except Microsoft considers a PDF viewer a necessary part of a modern desktop system and web browser, so few people would particularly think of "requires PDF support" as "requiring plugin"...
One could say there is significant conceptual and practical difference between editing a simple configuration file in a text editor, and having to actually insert or extract blocks of hex within game binary files to insert code paths or extract images.
Re:Try reading more varied sci-fi
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· Score: 1
If you have to actually mod the game to "unlock" this then I don't see why this is the ESRB's business. The game Rockstar shipped deserved the rating it received. The game with the porn in it is a result of modification by the end user and therefore a different game from the ESRB's perspective. You could easily mod quake 3 so that, I don't know, all the textures are hardcore pornography, but that doesn't earn quake 3 an "adult" rating.
But, of course-- and this incident just goes to show this-- the ESRB isn't actually about allowing gamers to be informed about their purchases, or about allowing parents to responsibly monitor and regulate the video game usage of their children. Those things are just halfhearted side effects. The ESRB is about feeding and indulging hysteria and media hype concerning video games. With this goal in mind, of course, the ability to mod a game to unlock or insert porn becomes very much the ESRB's business.
What drives me nuts about most sci fi
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What drives me nuts about most sci fi, and one of the big reasons I stopped reading sci fi for a long time, is how they absolutely insist on putting little "look, it's future technology, see" signifiers on absolutely everything. Characters in sci fi novels never just take a piece of toast out of the toaster which, the writing somehow casually reveals, is for some dumb reason based on nanotechnology. No, they take a piece of toast out of the NanoToast.
It's like all the authors seem to be trying really hard to outline differences between the present and future in a casual and subtle way, so as to make the future seem simultaneously alien but immediate and real... but then they do it so bluntly and unsubtly it's just painful, jarring, and entirely anathemic to the idea of suspension of disbelief. And then they make this even worse by slapping stupid brand names on everything, brand names that would never catch on in real life. Like, "Phoenix handheld". Or "holographic touch screen". In a future where PDAs had holographic touch screens, nobody would ever, ever call them this except the manuals for the actual PDAs. We'd just call them screens.
Nobody in normal fiction insists on mentioning the brand name of every single product that passes before the reader, or adding adjectives to every object to make to note some specific new technology of the last ten years which they utilize. Why must science fiction? It's like trying to watch a movie where all the characters are walking around with NASCAR-style logos plastered all over their clothing.
It looks like if they'll be doing this, they'll just be piggybacking on Sprint or CDMA or whatever those wacky kids are using these days. The acronym "MVNO" was used.
So if you were hoping for someone to finally break down and start providing 802.16, or make steps toward some other real city-scale wireless internet access protocol becoming a consumer reality, looks like you'll still be waiting awhile.
And from my limited knowlege of the subject, it seems like someone sitting in that MVNO seat rather than taking the step forward into something WiMax-like would be okay with periodic for-pay one-shot downloads like downloading an MP3, but not so okay with allowing some kind of continuous data stream operation (like internet radio would represent) without charging a relatively hefty fee...
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Every time the U.N. comes up, in any capacity, the rah-rah America faction-- especially, I find, the portion of that faction with "blogs"-- just explodes falling all over themselves to denounce the U.N. and talk about how horrible and evil it is and how everything it does is wrong.
Looking at the U.N. myself though I don't really see an organization consistent enough to draw any conclusions about it. It is an evolving entity. Look at its state over time since oh, say, 1985, and you'll realize there are almost no points over this time period where the U.N. in practice clearly resembles the entity it was just five years before. The U.N. had a clearly defined role during the Cold War; now that the Cold War is over that role no longer applies, and it is trying to find its new role. I don't think there's any way to predict right now what that role is going to be. The U.S. has the option of taking an active hand in shaping the U.N.'s new role, if we want (there have been parts of the last 20 years where we've done this, though right now is not one of them); however, what we can't do is make the U.N. go away. It's going to stay around, and it's going to develop into something. That isn't our choice. Our only choice is, will it develop into something with us or without us.
One thing that it occasionally worries me the U.N. might develop into is a bloc organization that basically represents "everyone but the U.S.". That is, I think it is possible that as the U.S. increasingly acts only in its own immediate interest to the exclusion of anyone else's interests, other countries will use the U.N. as a platform on which to band together and represent their interests in common, until the U.N. eventually becomes something which pens in the U.S. the way NATO penned in the USSR. As an American, I don't think this situation would be good for me or my country. However, I think it is possible. I also think that trying to push hard against or de-emphasize the U.N. does more to make the above "U.N. vs U.S." outcome likely than it does to make the U.N. weaker. The U.N.'s potential strength stems from the countries which wish to align with it; it's exactly as strong if the U.S. appears hostile toward it as it is if the U.S. appears apathetic toward it. However if the U.S. appears hostile toward the U.N. we do begin to set the stage for a situation where the U.N. begins to behave antagonistically back.
I see this DNS thing as a small but noteworthy step toward this situation.
Four or five years ago if the U.N. expressed an interest in controlling the DNS servers (and they did) there would be no point in taking this suggestion seriously (and no one did) because there was already an independent and international body (ICANN) on track toward running the DNS system. Now the U.S. has decided to make ICANN no longer a meaningfully independent body, and the governance of the DNS servers a U.S. national issue rather than an international one. And now, as a result, we are starting to see movements where service providers and governments outside the U.S. are starting to look into ways to break away from the U.S.-commerce-department-controlled ICANN system and into nameserver independence. In this light, the U.N. proposing they control nameservers takes on a very different tone. It underscores that if the U.S. does not wish to administer the nameservers under its control in an international fashion, there are other entities perfectly willing to assume that job.
If other nations choose to break away from the U.S. controlled nameservers, well, it's likely they'll do so together, meaning that we will have the U.S. commerce department running DNS for the U.S. and an international body running DNS for "everybody else". And who will run this international body? Well, the U.N. is a likely choice. The steady smear campaign against the U.N. doesn't exist in the same way outside the
I wonder if Nintendo originally intended to go without any TCP/IP and only allow for adhoc LANs and using 802.11b chipsets was the way to go 'coz they're off the shelf and cheap
Nintendo announced TCP/IP/internet support on the same day the announced the Nintendo DS itself. I believe they were discussing internet games and web browsers even before Sony was. Sony just beat them to market with it.
Hm?
Well, here's dictionary.com's take on the word:So it seems we've got two equally valid definitions here, neither explicitly makes use of the idea of a "contrary positioning", and only one definition (the first) implies this idea. Neither in any way makes necessary use of the idea of value judgements.
You seem to want to strengthen the first of these definitions and eliminate the other; however, it is a bit odd to act as if doing otherwise is "destroying" the meaning of the word "ambiguous", since the meaning you are trying to promote here is not necessarily part of the historical usage of the word. (M-w.com says for the word "ambiguous": "Etymology: Latin ambiguus, from ambigere to be undecided").
Ambiguity is being internally contradictory or open to multiple different interpretations.
It can also mean "doubtful or uncertain".
The article is referring to the fact that Google's future and future plans are ambiguous. It is unclear what Google is going to do next, and as the article notes not entirely clear at times what they're doing now. Google gives the constant impression they're about to do something fantastic and creative, any moment now, just wait for it. However, what this implied thing will be, when it will happen, and whether it will even happen at all (though Google certainly does seem to keep following through on randomly pulling rabbits out of their hats) is ambiguous. Hence the article's choice of words.
In order to see what will happen in this upcoming generation, we simply have to look at the last generation, when the Dreamcast came out nearly a year before the PS2; and the Dreamcast was released with a programmer-friendly focus, while the PS2 (at and around launch) had an unclearly documented and byzantine architecture which required writing large chunks of assembly code to get many basic things done. And so what happened?
Of course, the Playstation 2 failed horribly and Sega went on to dominate the market for four years.
Considering what happened to the PS2, we can only imagine what will happen to the PS3-- which incorporates such horrors as "having to write in 256k code/memory chunks when you want to use the auxilliary processors", and "a GPU".
What will the market look like by the time that PS3 programmers finally learn to use this newfangled "shader" technology nvidia is pushing (well, newfangled except that it has been present in the Gamecube and XBox for their entire respective lifespans, but you know what I mean)?
And, uh... just curious... is this any different at all from how things work with ATI chips right now? It doesn't really sound like it...
You had my interest with this, really, you did.
Then you said the word "Cringely".
Now I don't care about this anymore.
;shrug;
My opinion, based on vague things I've seen and heard and a lot of guessing, is that IBM never really wanted Apple's business in the first place. The plan for the PPC alliance always seemed to be that IBM would take the high-end kinda stuff, Motorola would target the PPC area, and Apple would buy chips from Motorola.
Unfortunately then Motorola lost interest in the CPU market, their CPU group started getting neglected and sucky, Motorola spun off their CPU group into Freescale, and Freescale turned out to be sucky as well. So Apple wound up pretty much having to buy from IBM instead. But IBM never seemed very enthusiastic about this-- for example there were reports they didn't really want to bother with altivec/VMX/"velocity engine", and altivec was the or a cornerstone of Apple's CPU strategy. (Though, ironically, VMX is a really big part of all those new video game CPUs IBM is making, so I guess that kinda turned out well for IBM...) When I heard Apple really was going to Intel, honestly one of my first responses was to wonder whether this happened because Apple was pushing IBM away, or because IBM was trying to push Apple away and Apple was just complying..
I really wonder what's going to happen to Freescale at this point.
I would assume the games will provide the TCP/IP stacks, or possibly Nintendo will provide one in the dev kits which will then be used in the games. Since there exist TCP/IP stacks which are free and use less than 10 kilobytes of memory, I'd imagine the lack of TCP/IP in the DS firmware is only an inconvenience for tunnelers...
On the same day Sony dropped a feature from the PS3, Nintendo announced a feature on the Revolution (with next to nothing known about it)
Actually.. no. Nintendo didn't announce anything today.
If you'll look at the article slashdot links, it's a personal blog. The blog gives no source for its assertion whatsoever. Since he doesn't show it's been confirmed by Nintendo, for all we know from reading that blog it may not even be true.
The news about the Nintendo USB wifi router thing is actually over a month old-- I'm not sure if Nintendo's ever confirmed it's true or if it's just a rumor, but whichever it is, it's been around for awhile.
So, aside from the fact that the article author wasn't upset at Ion Storm or anything, and only brought this point in to make a point about the impossibility of value neutrality in video games...
Deus Ex?
Isn't that the game series where no matter whether you choose the pacifist or violent options, the world ends in a horrible and dystopian fashion by the end of the game, and the most choice you have is that you get to choose which dystopian fashion it ends in?
Some "bias".
I'm just finding it interesting... if we're in a situation where people are slinging around labels like "politically liberal" just because somebody made nonviolent problem resolution look in some way "nicer" than violent problem resolution, I think maybe this indicates some.. odd things about where our culture is at. Will we next have the American Arbitration Association denounced as "politically liberal" because they advocate nonviolent resolutions to corporate disputes, as opposed to IBM and Bechtel hiring gunslinging corporate mercenaries like the one you role-play as in Deus Ex?
I think misunderstood that: the Revolution has built-in WiFi and Nintendo is selling a WiFi router so PCs can access that WiFi net... they use their own WiFi network
The Nintendo DS uses 802.11. This USB wirelessy thing is almost certainly going to just be a totally normal 802.11 router, just it plugs into USB instead of sitting between your modem and computer the way a Netgear would.
You have probably heard that Nintendo has some kind of "propreitary wi-fi protocol". This is true. However this protocol is used for DS to DS multiplayer. Like, if you have two DSes in a room. This "propreitary" protocol will also, as you note, probably be used to connect the DS to the Revolution.
However, when the DS needs to go onto the internet-- i.e. when you buy one of the online-enabled games such as Animal Crossing or Mario Kart coming later this year-- it switches to 802.11 TCP/IP.
I think we can completely assume that the Revolution will work the same way.
I'd kinda skimmed past that, it seems. That does look pretty useful, even if only to metaprogrammers.
- Some cases where you can type ; where previously {} was necessary, saving as many as two keystrokes.
- The lexer ambiguity where a<b<c>> and a<b<c> > meant entirely different things is fixed, saving as many as one keystroke.
- EVEN MORE "free" constructors which may or may not work quite the way you wanted them to in practice.
- More "fancy cast" operators, which sounds nice until you remember that if there's ever a time you find yourself using the C++ "fancy cast" operators, then there is a damn good chance that it's because you're doing something unwise enough it really would be a better idea to refactor the code to make the "fancy cast" unnecessary.
...in the meantime the fundamental issues with C++ remain not only unresolved, but unaddressed. The template system is still not a generics system, but an ugly cut & paste macro system which can incidentally be used for generics, with some caveats. The class system is still fundamentally brittle and unfriendly to simple things such as upgrading a DLL or determining at runtime if two objects are of the same type. The syntax is still a forest of features whose features interact in ways so crazy and unpredictable it approaches Perl in its chaos; references are still gimped; the distinctions in behavior and use between static and dynamic objects remain awkward and newbie-unfriendly. The features that people obviously desire to have in the language as demonstrated by their tendency to hack them in with third-party libraries (like BOOST) are-- they tell us-- a good thing, and they tell us we should continue to hack them in with libraries (like BOOST). That's nice. You know, that would be a lot easier though if we had a macro system** capable of anything smarter than blind code cut and paste-- or at least a macro system** fundamentally designed to be used for anything at all other than generics.Meanwhile, it appears if I'm reading this right that the most important differences in C++0x will be changes to the standard library. Great. The STL was defined how many years ago, and it's only just in the last few years that compliant implementations have become commonplace? How many decades will it be before the "C++0x" library changes have become common in a cross-platform compatible way?
C++ is an extremely useful language, and making an update to C++ which changes as little as possible so as to follow some kind of "if it aint broken don't fix it" principle is an idea which makes a whole lot of sense. However it seems likely to me from reading this that C++0x will offer so little significant difference from C++ as to make itself simply redundant.
* ("C++0x". Were they specifically trying to come up with a name less convenient than "C#"? Ah well, I guess we can call it "COX" or "cocks" for short.)
** "Template system"
And, um, let's see.
Exactly how much did the NASA budget for unmanned probes increase by after the columbia disaster?
Hmm.
Anyone remember those?
All I remember about CUSeeMe is a lot of nudity.
Man.... NASA sure has gotten a lot more conservative since then
Unfortunately Sun
- Charges about as much as a low-end PC for the SunRay thin client
- Charges about as much as a mid-range business PC for the SunRay thin client if you want little frills like, y'know, a monitor.
- More or less requires the use of Solaris to use Sunray, which makes quite a bit of sense when you consider SunRay necessarily requires a hugeass multiproc server stowed somewhere, but which, seriously, is not something many people would want to use as a desktop OS. You could maybe sell the end user on Linux, if you set it up quite specifically. Solaris, um, that's a lot harder. The upshot of this is that SunRay probably only appeals to that small number of companies where everyone is or can expected to be a UNIX user.
So between these things, the only places I've aware of in the entire world using SunRay in a way that demonstrates its potential are large universities with big Sun contracts, and, um, Sun itself. If there's another business using this system I don't know what it is.I think this is kind of representative of Sun as a whole right now. They've got a WHOLE bunch of promising ideas and services and products. But they're not quite where they can be useful in a real world situation-- there's just those two or three simple-but-difficult-to-solve issues that hold it back from people buying it. In every case Sun could probably address these issues if they thought really hard about exactly who they wanted to buy this and why-- that is, they've got the neat tech but they don't have a clear picture of exactly what (not "it could be used in a multimedia telecommunications infrastructure!", an actual exact product) this tech should be used for in the real world.
In the meantime, the energy that could be used on figuring out how to leverage or market the things that Sun offers but no one else does (SunRay-ish stuff) is all being diverted into fighting uphill battles, mostly trying to keep a market presence for Sun's not-so-unique products-- for example, the Solaris vs. Linux fight-- which are still the cornerstone of Sun's business, but aren't necessarily the company's strength anymore now that similar or interchangeable products have become more commonplace.
I'm sure they're trying to figure this out also, and I'm sure there's some way Sun can change this situation, but I don't know when or if it will happen.
Ah. I did not realize that.
I am reasonably certain you can already do this in with Acrobat with the addition of a small cgi script. Look here, scroll down to where it talks about the "FDF toolkit" API.
In order to do this of course you must write your own cgi frontend, so you could say this isn't as much as Office would hypothetically give you. However all Office would be hypothetically giving you here is a prepared drop-in CGI script, and I'm relatively certain were there need for such a thing there would be several free prepared drop-in CGI scripts for doing this with Acrobat already; and certainly it would likely be quicker and cheaper for any organization with access to at least one programmer to write such a thing internally than to wait for, then upgrade to, a new version of MS-Office.
I would imagine however that no one would ever really bother with such a thing, however, since, well, pretty much everyone in the world except Microsoft considers a PDF viewer a necessary part of a modern desktop system and web browser, so few people would particularly think of "requires PDF support" as "requiring plugin"...
One could say there is significant conceptual and practical difference between editing a simple configuration file in a text editor, and having to actually insert or extract blocks of hex within game binary files to insert code paths or extract images.
Thanks for the recommendation.
If you have to actually mod the game to "unlock" this then I don't see why this is the ESRB's business. The game Rockstar shipped deserved the rating it received. The game with the porn in it is a result of modification by the end user and therefore a different game from the ESRB's perspective. You could easily mod quake 3 so that, I don't know, all the textures are hardcore pornography, but that doesn't earn quake 3 an "adult" rating.
But, of course-- and this incident just goes to show this-- the ESRB isn't actually about allowing gamers to be informed about their purchases, or about allowing parents to responsibly monitor and regulate the video game usage of their children. Those things are just halfhearted side effects. The ESRB is about feeding and indulging hysteria and media hype concerning video games. With this goal in mind, of course, the ability to mod a game to unlock or insert porn becomes very much the ESRB's business.
What drives me nuts about most sci fi, and one of the big reasons I stopped reading sci fi for a long time, is how they absolutely insist on putting little "look, it's future technology, see" signifiers on absolutely everything. Characters in sci fi novels never just take a piece of toast out of the toaster which, the writing somehow casually reveals, is for some dumb reason based on nanotechnology. No, they take a piece of toast out of the NanoToast.
It's like all the authors seem to be trying really hard to outline differences between the present and future in a casual and subtle way, so as to make the future seem simultaneously alien but immediate and real... but then they do it so bluntly and unsubtly it's just painful, jarring, and entirely anathemic to the idea of suspension of disbelief. And then they make this even worse by slapping stupid brand names on everything, brand names that would never catch on in real life. Like, "Phoenix handheld". Or "holographic touch screen". In a future where PDAs had holographic touch screens, nobody would ever, ever call them this except the manuals for the actual PDAs. We'd just call them screens.
Nobody in normal fiction insists on mentioning the brand name of every single product that passes before the reader, or adding adjectives to every object to make to note some specific new technology of the last ten years which they utilize. Why must science fiction? It's like trying to watch a movie where all the characters are walking around with NASCAR-style logos plastered all over their clothing.
It looks like if they'll be doing this, they'll just be piggybacking on Sprint or CDMA or whatever those wacky kids are using these days. The acronym "MVNO" was used.
So if you were hoping for someone to finally break down and start providing 802.16, or make steps toward some other real city-scale wireless internet access protocol becoming a consumer reality, looks like you'll still be waiting awhile.
And from my limited knowlege of the subject, it seems like someone sitting in that MVNO seat rather than taking the step forward into something WiMax-like would be okay with periodic for-pay one-shot downloads like downloading an MP3, but not so okay with allowing some kind of continuous data stream operation (like internet radio would represent) without charging a relatively hefty fee...