1. What caused the big bang? or What external force was there that caused the big bang?
I'm sorry, what does this have to do with evolution versus intelligent design?
Though the big bang cosmology theory has nothing to do with biology, I would agree that Science in general probably doesn't at current have an answer to what caused the big bang. I've seen a few tentative attempts to answer that question, but I don't think there's a consensus. The thing is though, this doesn't exactly matter. We don't take the big bang seriously because we know or care where big bangs come from; we take it seriously because we observe it's what seems to have happened. Nobody particularly wants the big bang theory to be true. Nobody has a particularly vested philosophical interest in the universe being an explosion. We do, however, have rather a decent lot of evidence concerning the exact way that the universe formed, gathered from looking at the aftermath (i.e.: the universe). That evidence has come to suggest what is called the big bang theory. If this is messy, or strange, or we can't come up with a good explanation as to what caused the cause behind that big bang, there really isn't anything we can do about this. Unlike religion, science doesn't get to decide what happened. Science is forced to go whereever the facts the universe contains takes it. And whether we want them to or not, those facts point at this.
But of course our inability to explain the Big Bang is quite separate from the status of other theories-- for example, the theory of Evolution-- in which we understand not only what happened, but the mechanism, reasons, and context that brought the thing that happened about.
2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?
Oh, that's easy; there was food up there. Plants have been on land since at least 475 million years ago. Creatures have been permanently stationed up there since at least 425 million years ago. It's entirely unreasonable to say those millipedes "decided" to get up on land; this is undue anthropomorphization. The change to settle on land was made possible by mutation, which was a random act not guided by any conscious decision making process. It also seems unlikely to me that the first creatures to leave the ocean had any kind of purposeful goal, since I doubt they had enough sensory equipment to tell what the heck they were even doing.
More likely the very first time it happened, it went like this: something that could eat algae was crawling along a rock eating algae. This rock happened to be partially in, and partially out of, the ocean. The thing kept crawling along the rock, eating algae, and eventually it reached the interface between the ocean and the atmosphere, and it kept on crawling, and kept on eating algae. Why not? Of course, it may well have died very shortly after that, depending on whether and how long it could survive in the atmosphere. But: if there's all these algae and plants out in the dry world, and nobody's out there eating them or their dead, well heck, free food and no competition. This creates what we think of (it's a metaphor of sorts) as "evolutionary pressure", kind of like how, if we lived in a world where canned food was common but there weren't any can openers, the process of capitalism would create a tremendous metaphorical pressure for somebody to invent and start selling some.
Now let's say there's not just one thingy that eats algae and one rock where the algae is growing out in the atmosphere. Let's say there's lots and lots of thingies and lots and lots of rocks. The earth is pretty big. If, by coincidence, one of the thingies somewhere on the earth eventually winds up with some genes that, in its little gastropod nervous system, make it feel like it's a really good idea to
This was a predicted, sought find. This wasn't just like, some people found a fossil and was like "wow! this fills the gap in a missing link between reptiles and fish!". They set out to find something like this, targeted the most likely places in which to find it, and actually found what they were looking for. A quote of a Ahlberg and Clack article from the Pharyngula blog (lots of information there):
First, it demonstrates the predictive capacity of palaeontology. The Nunavut field project had the express aim of finding an intermediate between Panderichthys and tetrapods, by searching in sediments from the most probable environment (rivers) and time (early Late Devonian). Second, Tiktaalik adds enormously to our understanding of the fish-tetrapod transition because of its position on the tree and the combination of characters it displays.
Maybe it would make more sense for IBM to build an exchange replacement that is actually good, and then advertise the hell out of it? I think if they spend a lot of money on calling peoples' attention to Notes, it will just backfire.
TPM would be a fantastic hardware assistance in securing your environment further
No. TPM doesn't provide any advantages in security over traditional (and now-mature) encryption and operating system permissions technologies. All TPM does is create the opportunity to take all of your security needs and place them behind a single point of failure.
TPM exists to take control of what happens on your computer out of your hands and put it into the hands of hardware and software vendors. Anything else that is claimed about it is just marketing.
imagine a server only allowed to run one single service under one userid and nothing else
I can imagine this being managed perfectly well at the software level without any need for TPM.
90% of OSX Intel relies on having the TPM chip present and active, if you disable it you are going to have a very inoperative OS very quickly - unless you use one of the hacked versions.
I was thinking along the exact lines of running a hacked version, yes. However, if the OS can override the BIOS settings without user input (say, perhaps there's something the people writing the hacked version missed) and turn the disabled TPM back on, there wouldn't be much benefit from this.
The trick here is that both blu-ray and hd-dvd have demonstrated technologies that allow for a disc to be a blu-ray disc AND a dvd disc, or an hd-dvd disc AND a normal dvd disc. The idea is that both formats are able to support the inclusion of a normal-DVD layer alongside the next-gen-dvd one, such that the next-gen-dvd player will see the next-gen layer and a normal dvd player just sees the normal-dvd layer and thinks it's playing a normal DVD.
This seems like the only hope either of these formats have, to me. It seems to me many retailers would be loath to give up shelf space, much less shelf space of the oh-so-profitable DVDs, for an unproven format-- much less two at once. But if retailers are faced with the proposition, "hey, if you buy these DVDs, you can sell them to your existing DVD customers, but they're also blu-rays or hd-dvds or whatnot", that would seem to be a lot more palatable. This means that retailers or consumers or whatnot don't have to accept the new format; they can just go on buying their normal DVDs while blu-ray or hd-dvd quietly takes over the world in the background.
I wonder which consortium (blu-ray or hd-dvd) will be the first to realize this. Last I heard, though the forward-compatible discs had been demonstrated for both formats, no one had announced plans to actually sell any forward-compatible discs for either format.
This is the thing fascinating me about this news: Even Wal-Mart, every time I've gone in there in the last year or so, is pushing UMD movies above the DS games. I've been to Wal-Marts in a few areas and all of them have had the UMD movies right up front and clearly visible in a big flashy display, while the DS games are just kind of unceremoniously stuffed at the back of the aisle.
This always disheartens me a little, and my response is usually just "Huh. Well, the PSP may be trailing the DS in total market share and trailing the GBA in day-to-day sales, and it may have a game library roughly as vibrant as the Jaguar, but I guess those UMD sales must be really popular. After all, if they weren't popular, why else would Wal-Mart be giving then so much well-placed shelf space?"
I'm still wondering this. Going from this big flashy UMD pushing I've seen recently to just nothing seems like a startling 180. If the article is right that they weren't selling well, why was Wal-Mart displaying such enthusiasm about UMDs up until the moment they dropped them? Were they displaying them thus because sales were sluggish, in hopes they could actually start to move units? Were they just not thinking about things very clearly? Is something going on behind the scenes here? What?
I'm sorry, what were you saying? I'm afraid I couldn't hear you over Matt Casamassina's incessant whining about the lack of HDTV support in the Revolution, lack of voice acting in Zelda, and lack of "production values" in everything in the world that isn't a Halo game.
Matt Casamassina hates Nintendo and takes every opportunity to talk about how weak and worthless their hardware is. Every three months for awhile now he's posted "leaked" specs about the Revolution. Every one of these "leak" stories takes care to talk about how much more powerful the XBox 1 is than the Revolution. In all cases the source is "sources".
Frankly I think it's most likely the Revolution will be the weakest of the three next gen consoles, but I'll believe this when I see , and after the rabid and rapidly decaying lack of journalistic integrity shown by Matt Casamassina in the last couple of years, I personally refuse to believe anything I read on revolution.ign.com at all.
You can feel free to believe what you want of course.
And it seems that besides there being more of them, the freebsd matches are more "real"-- if i look at the actual matches the FreeBSD ones consist to a great extent of matches in actual basic binaries and libraries, whereas the OpenBSD matches that aren't actually matching OpenSSH binaries seem to mostly be compatibility code in crossplatform UNIX apps-- "#ifdef openbsd" blocks in X11 headers for example (right before the #ifdef amiga ones), which clearly are not an indicator of OpenBSD crosspollination in OS X.
And then trying again, in the source for Apple's libc:
And even here again most of the occurances of OpenBSD maybe shouldn't count to the total, since they are, well, in some big directories named "FreeBSD/". It looks like a lot of those 63 matches were patches that were ported upstream to FreeBSD, then sucked into Darwin from there.
So these were just the first two things I thought to check, and in both cases FreeBSD strings show up more often than OpenBSD by a very significant majority. I can totally believe that Apple is making much more direct use of OpenBSD code than I was aware of, but if you do not mind me asking, exactly *where* in OS X am I supposed to be finding this effect you claim of "grep... you will find more occurrences of OpenBSD than NetBSD and FreeBSD"? Because so far I'm not seeing it at all.
If Apple doesn't already pay for NetBSD (which they use), then why on earth should they be expected to pay for OpenBSD (which they don't use)?
Because if they don't, then Theo de Raadt will shoot this adorable rabbit with "OpenSSH" written on it? Meh.
I mean, I'm sure that the loss of OpenBSD would be a sad thing for the open source community, but this entire fundraising drive just smells like the old Oral Roberts "if I don't raise 8.7 million dollars, God will call me home" thing. It seems rather unbecoming of a pillar of the open source community like OpenBSD to undermine the "the marketplace of ideas created by copylefted code means we can give our product away and still support ourselves" message of open source by floating this "WE CAN'T JUST GIVE OUR PRODUCT AWAY AND STILL SUPPORT OURSELVES!! YOU, GIVE ME MONEY!!" message on top of it.
I guess that sounds interesting, but... huh? It seems that this slashdot submission was generated by a computer (a markov chain babble bot?) as well...
Apple should just go ahead and buy Apple Records. It doesn't really matter how much it would cost, because they're just going to continue getting sued, endlessly, over and over, until they do so. Buying Apple Records would probably be the only surefire way to end this for good, plus whatever they spent would probably be eventually earned back in future revenues on Beatles albums, plus maybe they'd get to stick the Beatles on the iTMS.
There is no particular good reason for Apple Records to continue to exist at this point anyway. It only ever existed in the first place as a tax dodge, and none of the Beatles (especially not the dead ones) are really getting anything out of it anymore. It seems the only continuing purpose for the existence of the company is to repeatedly sue Apple Computer.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could all work together instead of wasting billions on competing?
Didn't we try that with the International Space Station? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that "all working together" only really worked until such time as the question of who was going to pay for all of this working together came up, at which point the Russians wound up sticking America with the bill for most of the Russian contribution, then started renting stays on the ISS to wealthy millionaires.
Now, the ESA and Japan and whatnot seem to be a lot more responsible about their portions of the project-- hell, maybe more responsible than NASA even-- but maybe we can say there's some downsides to collaboration when we're talking about multi-year public projects that cost many billions of dollars, downsides that don't exist when we're talking about I dunno world diplomacy. The heads of governments and even corporations change from time to time, and when (as with the ISS or a lunar base) the benefits of the project are indirect, every time this happens there is a risk of the new leadership going "wait... why are we paying for this again?". The more countries or entities you have involved, the more chances you wind up with for this risk to come to pass...
That said, if he hated his life enough to consider signing up for the Imperial military, why would it be of any interest at all to us?
The answer is obvious and, unfortunately, terrible. They're almost certainly going to pack luke's early life with exciting star-flung adventures, cameos of star wars characters, and a constant use of the force powers he supposedly didn't know he had. By the time the series ends, whatever suspension of disbelief the once-powerful opening scenes of A New Hope originally conjured will have been totally destroyed by the knowlege that Luke Skywalker is in fact just as experienced and battle-hardened as any character from Sailor Moon.
An alternate possibility is that when they say "the 20 years luke skywalker was growing up", they don't mean luke will be the focus of the series-- they just mean that is the period over which the series will take place. That is, perhaps the action will all follow Bail Organa, Mon Mothma et al, who have exciting and dangerous space adventures while Luke Skywalker is repainting the grain silo. This would make for an interesting and believable series-- and putting Leia through complex and traumatic adventures (while Luke sits at home and watches the news dispatches depicting the Empire's party line propaganda version of those same adventures) would be totally consistent with what we see in the movies. But I do not consider this likely to happen. Over 100 episodes, the temptation of somehow dragging Luke in every other plot will be too great to resist.
Oh-- and expect a long and drawn-out plot arc in which Obi-Wan takes increasingly dangerous journeys into the underworld in a desperate attempt to make the last three clumsy minutes of dialogue in Return of the Sith seem dramatic and important instead of just being a hastily composed plot band-aid. Expect Luke to feature in these semifrequently, although he supposedly had never met Old Ben before the beginning of A New Hope.
If Microsoft starts really hammering it in that the "next generation" is here, people will get sick of waiting for the PS3 and get a 360.
In order to do that, though, Microsoft will have to release some actual games that aren't just PC ports or short flash-game-on-steroids one-offs.
Moreover, these games will have to be more interesting and attention-grabbing than Kingdom Hearts 2 or Final Fantasy 12, which is what people who stick with their PS2 have to look forward to in the period between now and the PS3.
I mean, it's quite clear to me that the people who have bought the XBox 360 are quite happy with their decision. But I'm just thinking, when you look at the wider audience, it really looks like the largest problem the XBox 360 has is that it's doing a terrible job of convincing people "the next generation is here" in the first place.
So far, Sony has done nothing to deny the Merryl Lynch report...
Merryl Lynch has been predicting random doom for the PS3 for at least nine months that I've been paying attention. As far as I'm aware Sony's not yet responded to a single one of them for any reason.
Which isn't very surprising. If Sony bothered to confirm or deny everything Merryl Lynch said, this would probably constitute the majority of their news releases.
Personally I think they'd be better served by concentrating on improving their security, rather than concentrating on improving their security-related PR.
Analysts and bloggers crowing endlessly about "Apple/Linux/Firefox/whatever don't have better security, they're just smaller" gets attention for a little while, but just let time pass. Eventually people realize they're being cried wolf to. After a few years people will have forgotten the bloggers, but will remember whatever the next major Windows worm incident that gets on the nightly news turns out to be.
Unfortunately, this only works if you really do have better security. And while this article is just talking about media events like the mac mini challenge as if they're all that matters, Apple has had real security problems of late. Whether or not the mac mini challenge was important for real security there are apparently some os x privilidge escalation exploits floating around, and there was that incredibly embarrassing bug awhile back where Safari could be tricked into launching a shell script as if it were a.jpg. Exploits based on getting the operating system confused about filetype mismatches are really the kind of thing we should not be seeing in 2006, especially since (1) OS X has had security issues of this exact same type before and (2) this is the exact kind of exploit which is the basis for many Windows e-mail worms. Apple needs to take this seriously.
Taking this seriously does not mean-- as the article suggests-- appointing someone to talk to the press about how great Apple's security is. It means actually fixing the problems, and making some effort to see what other problems might be out there. PR is temporary, and if you do too much of it it can backfire (as people start to assume anything positive they read about your platform is just a result of PR). Real security problems like the filetype bug I mention can impact your reputation for years, no matter how much you try to spin them.
Speaking of which, there was a new security update on Apple Software Update this week. Anyone know what exactly that covered? Is the jpg/sh MIME or whatever problem fixed yet?
Yeah they did, at E3 last May. Moreover, they just re-confirmed the Spring launch last month.
I don't think any such statement was made at E3, and your own link "re-confirm"ing the launch says:
A Sony public relations representative didn't specifically deny the report, stating to Reuters, "We cannot comment on analyst reports. At the present, we're aiming for a spring 2006 launch, just as planned." Reuters points out that Sony's comments did not specify a territory.
Here is an article titled U.S. November Game Sales Decrease Confirmed. So, no they won't. The industry is in transition. Transition won't end until PS3 ships. Please, god, let it be soon.
The article in no way demonstrates the lack of sales were because of "transitions". In fact, the article says quite the opposite, blaming the drop in sales specifically on:
the lack of major releases
Sales last november were poor because the game selection was poor; it wasn't consumers were unwilling to buy PS2 games, it was that there were no PS2 games worth buying in that period.
As far as I am aware Sony never actually announced a spring release for America. They've been talking about a spring launch quite a lot, but I've never seen them do so without the "...in Japan" qualifier. My assumption all along has been that we'll be getting a mid-late Spring launch in Japan*, with a four or five month gap before the American launch, just like with the PSP, and the "PS3 release in Spring!" thing is as far as America's concerned just internet rumors blown out of proportion.
Now, maybe Sony claimed something specific about American release dates that I didn't see at some point. But that brings me to my point: Practically nobody knows they were supposed to be expecting a ps3 spring launch in the first place unless they follow websites and magazines like this one religiously! Sony's been so tight-lipped in the general american press about the PS3 it's crazy. A lot of people don't really know anything at all about the PS3 except that it's someday coming-- which is something they probably knew two years go, too. The uncertainty about the release date is a big deal on internet message boards, but internet message boards are not the market.
How can delays in the PS3 possibly hurt PS2 game sales when practically nobody knows a delay is happening in the first place? Especially considering
The PS3 is backward compatible with the PS2, so PS2 games can be played on and bought for the PS3.
The major blockbuster games still yet to come for the PS2 have been in development for years-- they couldn't be switched to PS3 titles even if the publisher wanted, and most of the minor titles between now and the "real" PS3 launch probably couldn't either. If there's a next-gen sales cooling effect coming, it will happen to those games whether the PS3 is delayed or not.
It just seems kinda silly to me. PS2 hardware sales are probably going to drop off as people increasingly wait for the PS3-- I know I personally would have probably bought a ps2 several months ago if I weren't waiting for the PS3-- but the PS2 sales base is already ginormous, and they're talking about game sales in this article. PS2 games absolutely can and will continue to sell briskly right up to the PS3 release, even if there is a "next gen" system already available; look at Final Fantasy 9, a PS1 game which came out shortly after the PS2 launch and after the Dreamcast had been out a year. It was a top seller at release despite being widely viewed as the worst game in the series**.
This whole thing just sounds to me like gibberish from analysts trying to rewrite reality to be more dramatic.
* Though if they don't announce a release date at GDC on March 20, I will take that as a sign the Japan launch date has slipped as well. You do not go from media blackout to release in under three months unless you are Sega and you have a death wish. ** Mystic Quest doesn't count.
Slashdot Mirror
1. What caused the big bang? or What external force was there that caused the big bang?
I'm sorry, what does this have to do with evolution versus intelligent design?
Though the big bang cosmology theory has nothing to do with biology, I would agree that Science in general probably doesn't at current have an answer to what caused the big bang. I've seen a few tentative attempts to answer that question, but I don't think there's a consensus. The thing is though, this doesn't exactly matter. We don't take the big bang seriously because we know or care where big bangs come from; we take it seriously because we observe it's what seems to have happened. Nobody particularly wants the big bang theory to be true. Nobody has a particularly vested philosophical interest in the universe being an explosion. We do, however, have rather a decent lot of evidence concerning the exact way that the universe formed, gathered from looking at the aftermath (i.e.: the universe). That evidence has come to suggest what is called the big bang theory. If this is messy, or strange, or we can't come up with a good explanation as to what caused the cause behind that big bang, there really isn't anything we can do about this. Unlike religion, science doesn't get to decide what happened. Science is forced to go whereever the facts the universe contains takes it. And whether we want them to or not, those facts point at this.
But of course our inability to explain the Big Bang is quite separate from the status of other theories-- for example, the theory of Evolution-- in which we understand not only what happened, but the mechanism, reasons, and context that brought the thing that happened about.
2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?
Oh, that's easy; there was food up there. Plants have been on land since at least 475 million years ago. Creatures have been permanently stationed up there since at least 425 million years ago. It's entirely unreasonable to say those millipedes "decided" to get up on land; this is undue anthropomorphization. The change to settle on land was made possible by mutation, which was a random act not guided by any conscious decision making process. It also seems unlikely to me that the first creatures to leave the ocean had any kind of purposeful goal, since I doubt they had enough sensory equipment to tell what the heck they were even doing.
More likely the very first time it happened, it went like this: something that could eat algae was crawling along a rock eating algae. This rock happened to be partially in, and partially out of, the ocean. The thing kept crawling along the rock, eating algae, and eventually it reached the interface between the ocean and the atmosphere, and it kept on crawling, and kept on eating algae. Why not? Of course, it may well have died very shortly after that, depending on whether and how long it could survive in the atmosphere. But: if there's all these algae and plants out in the dry world, and nobody's out there eating them or their dead, well heck, free food and no competition. This creates what we think of (it's a metaphor of sorts) as "evolutionary pressure", kind of like how, if we lived in a world where canned food was common but there weren't any can openers, the process of capitalism would create a tremendous metaphorical pressure for somebody to invent and start selling some.
Now let's say there's not just one thingy that eats algae and one rock where the algae is growing out in the atmosphere. Let's say there's lots and lots of thingies and lots and lots of rocks. The earth is pretty big. If, by coincidence, one of the thingies somewhere on the earth eventually winds up with some genes that, in its little gastropod nervous system, make it feel like it's a really good idea to
Maybe it would make more sense for IBM to build an exchange replacement that is actually good, and then advertise the hell out of it? I think if they spend a lot of money on calling peoples' attention to Notes, it will just backfire.
So you dont think a hardware MMU gave any benefits to computing today
We are not talking about hardware MMUs.
TPM would be a fantastic hardware assistance in securing your environment further
No. TPM doesn't provide any advantages in security over traditional (and now-mature) encryption and operating system permissions technologies. All TPM does is create the opportunity to take all of your security needs and place them behind a single point of failure.
TPM exists to take control of what happens on your computer out of your hands and put it into the hands of hardware and software vendors. Anything else that is claimed about it is just marketing.
imagine a server only allowed to run one single service under one userid and nothing else
I can imagine this being managed perfectly well at the software level without any need for TPM.
90% of OSX Intel relies on having the TPM chip present and active, if you disable it you are going to have a very inoperative OS very quickly - unless you use one of the hacked versions.
I was thinking along the exact lines of running a hacked version, yes. However, if the OS can override the BIOS settings without user input (say, perhaps there's something the people writing the hacked version missed) and turn the disabled TPM back on, there wouldn't be much benefit from this.
TPM has some great potential uses
I disagree entirely.
Firstly you can disable the chip from BIOS or driver software
1. Is this even the case with the new Intel macs?
2. If you disable the chip from bios, can the OS re-enable it without your consent?
The trick here is that both blu-ray and hd-dvd have demonstrated technologies that allow for a disc to be a blu-ray disc AND a dvd disc, or an hd-dvd disc AND a normal dvd disc. The idea is that both formats are able to support the inclusion of a normal-DVD layer alongside the next-gen-dvd one, such that the next-gen-dvd player will see the next-gen layer and a normal dvd player just sees the normal-dvd layer and thinks it's playing a normal DVD.
This seems like the only hope either of these formats have, to me. It seems to me many retailers would be loath to give up shelf space, much less shelf space of the oh-so-profitable DVDs, for an unproven format-- much less two at once. But if retailers are faced with the proposition, "hey, if you buy these DVDs, you can sell them to your existing DVD customers, but they're also blu-rays or hd-dvds or whatnot", that would seem to be a lot more palatable. This means that retailers or consumers or whatnot don't have to accept the new format; they can just go on buying their normal DVDs while blu-ray or hd-dvd quietly takes over the world in the background.
I wonder which consortium (blu-ray or hd-dvd) will be the first to realize this. Last I heard, though the forward-compatible discs had been demonstrated for both formats, no one had announced plans to actually sell any forward-compatible discs for either format.
This is the thing fascinating me about this news: Even Wal-Mart, every time I've gone in there in the last year or so, is pushing UMD movies above the DS games. I've been to Wal-Marts in a few areas and all of them have had the UMD movies right up front and clearly visible in a big flashy display, while the DS games are just kind of unceremoniously stuffed at the back of the aisle.
This always disheartens me a little, and my response is usually just "Huh. Well, the PSP may be trailing the DS in total market share and trailing the GBA in day-to-day sales, and it may have a game library roughly as vibrant as the Jaguar, but I guess those UMD sales must be really popular. After all, if they weren't popular, why else would Wal-Mart be giving then so much well-placed shelf space?"
I'm still wondering this. Going from this big flashy UMD pushing I've seen recently to just nothing seems like a startling 180. If the article is right that they weren't selling well, why was Wal-Mart displaying such enthusiasm about UMDs up until the moment they dropped them? Were they displaying them thus because sales were sluggish, in hopes they could actually start to move units? Were they just not thinking about things very clearly? Is something going on behind the scenes here? What?
I'm sorry, what were you saying? I'm afraid I couldn't hear you over Matt Casamassina's incessant whining about the lack of HDTV support in the Revolution, lack of voice acting in Zelda, and lack of "production values" in everything in the world that isn't a Halo game.
Matt Casamassina hates Nintendo and takes every opportunity to talk about how weak and worthless their hardware is. Every three months for awhile now he's posted "leaked" specs about the Revolution. Every one of these "leak" stories takes care to talk about how much more powerful the XBox 1 is than the Revolution. In all cases the source is "sources".
Frankly I think it's most likely the Revolution will be the weakest of the three next gen consoles, but I'll believe this when I see , and after the rabid and rapidly decaying lack of journalistic integrity shown by Matt Casamassina in the last couple of years, I personally refuse to believe anything I read on revolution.ign.com at all.
You can feel free to believe what you want of course.
"I don't see these measures as an infringement on personal freedom, because the measures will target people I don't like."
However, I do notice that when I actually test on my Mac OS X machine here:And it seems that besides there being more of them, the freebsd matches are more "real"-- if i look at the actual matches the FreeBSD ones consist to a great extent of matches in actual basic binaries and libraries, whereas the OpenBSD matches that aren't actually matching OpenSSH binaries seem to mostly be compatibility code in crossplatform UNIX apps-- "#ifdef openbsd" blocks in X11 headers for example (right before the #ifdef amiga ones), which clearly are not an indicator of OpenBSD crosspollination in OS X.
And then trying again, in the source for Apple's libc:
And even here again most of the occurances of OpenBSD maybe shouldn't count to the total, since they are, well, in some big directories named "FreeBSD/". It looks like a lot of those 63 matches were patches that were ported upstream to FreeBSD, then sucked into Darwin from there.
So these were just the first two things I thought to check, and in both cases FreeBSD strings show up more often than OpenBSD by a very significant majority. I can totally believe that Apple is making much more direct use of OpenBSD code than I was aware of, but if you do not mind me asking, exactly *where* in OS X am I supposed to be finding this effect you claim of "grep... you will find more occurrences of OpenBSD than NetBSD and FreeBSD"? Because so far I'm not seeing it at all.
If Apple doesn't already pay for NetBSD (which they use), then why on earth should they be expected to pay for OpenBSD (which they don't use)?
Because if they don't, then Theo de Raadt will shoot this adorable rabbit with "OpenSSH" written on it? Meh.
I mean, I'm sure that the loss of OpenBSD would be a sad thing for the open source community, but this entire fundraising drive just smells like the old Oral Roberts "if I don't raise 8.7 million dollars, God will call me home" thing. It seems rather unbecoming of a pillar of the open source community like OpenBSD to undermine the "the marketplace of ideas created by copylefted code means we can give our product away and still support ourselves" message of open source by floating this "WE CAN'T JUST GIVE OUR PRODUCT AWAY AND STILL SUPPORT OURSELVES!! YOU, GIVE ME MONEY!!" message on top of it.
I guess that sounds interesting, but... huh? It seems that this slashdot submission was generated by a computer (a markov chain babble bot?) as well...
Apple should just go ahead and buy Apple Records. It doesn't really matter how much it would cost, because they're just going to continue getting sued, endlessly, over and over, until they do so. Buying Apple Records would probably be the only surefire way to end this for good, plus whatever they spent would probably be eventually earned back in future revenues on Beatles albums, plus maybe they'd get to stick the Beatles on the iTMS.
There is no particular good reason for Apple Records to continue to exist at this point anyway. It only ever existed in the first place as a tax dodge, and none of the Beatles (especially not the dead ones) are really getting anything out of it anymore. It seems the only continuing purpose for the existence of the company is to repeatedly sue Apple Computer.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could all work together instead of wasting billions on competing?
Didn't we try that with the International Space Station? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that "all working together" only really worked until such time as the question of who was going to pay for all of this working together came up, at which point the Russians wound up sticking America with the bill for most of the Russian contribution, then started renting stays on the ISS to wealthy millionaires.
Now, the ESA and Japan and whatnot seem to be a lot more responsible about their portions of the project-- hell, maybe more responsible than NASA even-- but maybe we can say there's some downsides to collaboration when we're talking about multi-year public projects that cost many billions of dollars, downsides that don't exist when we're talking about I dunno world diplomacy. The heads of governments and even corporations change from time to time, and when (as with the ISS or a lunar base) the benefits of the project are indirect, every time this happens there is a risk of the new leadership going "wait... why are we paying for this again?". The more countries or entities you have involved, the more chances you wind up with for this risk to come to pass...
I can't wait until the day when I get punched in the face, and suddenly I can't use ATMs anymore.
That said, if he hated his life enough to consider signing up for the Imperial military, why would it be of any interest at all to us?
The answer is obvious and, unfortunately, terrible. They're almost certainly going to pack luke's early life with exciting star-flung adventures, cameos of star wars characters, and a constant use of the force powers he supposedly didn't know he had. By the time the series ends, whatever suspension of disbelief the once-powerful opening scenes of A New Hope originally conjured will have been totally destroyed by the knowlege that Luke Skywalker is in fact just as experienced and battle-hardened as any character from Sailor Moon.
An alternate possibility is that when they say "the 20 years luke skywalker was growing up", they don't mean luke will be the focus of the series-- they just mean that is the period over which the series will take place. That is, perhaps the action will all follow Bail Organa, Mon Mothma et al, who have exciting and dangerous space adventures while Luke Skywalker is repainting the grain silo. This would make for an interesting and believable series-- and putting Leia through complex and traumatic adventures (while Luke sits at home and watches the news dispatches depicting the Empire's party line propaganda version of those same adventures) would be totally consistent with what we see in the movies. But I do not consider this likely to happen. Over 100 episodes, the temptation of somehow dragging Luke in every other plot will be too great to resist.
Oh-- and expect a long and drawn-out plot arc in which Obi-Wan takes increasingly dangerous journeys into the underworld in a desperate attempt to make the last three clumsy minutes of dialogue in Return of the Sith seem dramatic and important instead of just being a hastily composed plot band-aid. Expect Luke to feature in these semifrequently, although he supposedly had never met Old Ben before the beginning of A New Hope.
If Microsoft starts really hammering it in that the "next generation" is here, people will get sick of waiting for the PS3 and get a 360.
In order to do that, though, Microsoft will have to release some actual games that aren't just PC ports or short flash-game-on-steroids one-offs.
Moreover, these games will have to be more interesting and attention-grabbing than Kingdom Hearts 2 or Final Fantasy 12, which is what people who stick with their PS2 have to look forward to in the period between now and the PS3.
I mean, it's quite clear to me that the people who have bought the XBox 360 are quite happy with their decision. But I'm just thinking, when you look at the wider audience, it really looks like the largest problem the XBox 360 has is that it's doing a terrible job of convincing people "the next generation is here" in the first place.
So far, Sony has done nothing to deny the Merryl Lynch report...
Merryl Lynch has been predicting random doom for the PS3 for at least nine months that I've been paying attention. As far as I'm aware Sony's not yet responded to a single one of them for any reason.
Which isn't very surprising. If Sony bothered to confirm or deny everything Merryl Lynch said, this would probably constitute the majority of their news releases.
Personally I think they'd be better served by concentrating on improving their security, rather than concentrating on improving their security-related PR.
.jpg. Exploits based on getting the operating system confused about filetype mismatches are really the kind of thing we should not be seeing in 2006, especially since (1) OS X has had security issues of this exact same type before and (2) this is the exact kind of exploit which is the basis for many Windows e-mail worms. Apple needs to take this seriously.
Analysts and bloggers crowing endlessly about "Apple/Linux/Firefox/whatever don't have better security, they're just smaller" gets attention for a little while, but just let time pass. Eventually people realize they're being cried wolf to. After a few years people will have forgotten the bloggers, but will remember whatever the next major Windows worm incident that gets on the nightly news turns out to be.
Unfortunately, this only works if you really do have better security. And while this article is just talking about media events like the mac mini challenge as if they're all that matters, Apple has had real security problems of late. Whether or not the mac mini challenge was important for real security there are apparently some os x privilidge escalation exploits floating around, and there was that incredibly embarrassing bug awhile back where Safari could be tricked into launching a shell script as if it were a
Taking this seriously does not mean-- as the article suggests-- appointing someone to talk to the press about how great Apple's security is. It means actually fixing the problems, and making some effort to see what other problems might be out there. PR is temporary, and if you do too much of it it can backfire (as people start to assume anything positive they read about your platform is just a result of PR). Real security problems like the filetype bug I mention can impact your reputation for years, no matter how much you try to spin them.
Speaking of which, there was a new security update on Apple Software Update this week. Anyone know what exactly that covered? Is the jpg/sh MIME or whatever problem fixed yet?
I don't think any such statement was made at E3, and your own link "re-confirm"ing the launch says:
Here is an article titled U.S. November Game Sales Decrease Confirmed. So, no they won't. The industry is in transition. Transition won't end until PS3 ships. Please, god, let it be soon.
The article in no way demonstrates the lack of sales were because of "transitions". In fact, the article says quite the opposite, blaming the drop in sales specifically on:Sales last november were poor because the game selection was poor; it wasn't consumers were unwilling to buy PS2 games, it was that there were no PS2 games worth buying in that period.
Now, maybe Sony claimed something specific about American release dates that I didn't see at some point. But that brings me to my point: Practically nobody knows they were supposed to be expecting a ps3 spring launch in the first place unless they follow websites and magazines like this one religiously! Sony's been so tight-lipped in the general american press about the PS3 it's crazy. A lot of people don't really know anything at all about the PS3 except that it's someday coming-- which is something they probably knew two years go, too. The uncertainty about the release date is a big deal on internet message boards, but internet message boards are not the market.
How can delays in the PS3 possibly hurt PS2 game sales when practically nobody knows a delay is happening in the first place? Especially considering
It just seems kinda silly to me. PS2 hardware sales are probably going to drop off as people increasingly wait for the PS3-- I know I personally would have probably bought a ps2 several months ago if I weren't waiting for the PS3-- but the PS2 sales base is already ginormous, and they're talking about game sales in this article. PS2 games absolutely can and will continue to sell briskly right up to the PS3 release, even if there is a "next gen" system already available; look at Final Fantasy 9, a PS1 game which came out shortly after the PS2 launch and after the Dreamcast had been out a year. It was a top seller at release despite being widely viewed as the worst game in the series**.
This whole thing just sounds to me like gibberish from analysts trying to rewrite reality to be more dramatic.
* Though if they don't announce a release date at GDC on March 20, I will take that as a sign the Japan launch date has slipped as well. You do not go from media blackout to release in under three months unless you are Sega and you have a death wish.
** Mystic Quest doesn't count.
The only thing worse would be to have the UAE issue a similar report. :-)
:O
Oh no too late