The way you're talking, it's as if you walked into a restaurant, ate a nice meal, and then act surprised at the request that you pay up. I suppose if you had to sign a contract to eat it might be more obvious, but the bargain does exist.
Actually, it seems more like he's the restaurateur, but he's too bashful to demand payment from his patrons after they've already eaten the meal. The RIAA has fed off us for generations, but the downside is they've grown strong enough to refuse us our due.
Apple is basically saying: "All you other guys better support Safari, because it will rule mobile browsing.[....]"
Not to mention that the superb browser in Series 60 3rd edition is based on Webkit, too. I have been using it for almost a year on my E61, and I can tell you that if something runs on Safari, it almost certainly works identically on the Nokia browser. YMMV.
I think your understanding is a little naive... There *are* magic genes that do X. There are also pseudo-random sequences that we have found a use for, and there are, further, sequences we carry around that are malicious, or do exactly nothing. But we carry all these genes around anyway, because the cost of doing so is negligible, and the chance for quick modification is beneficial in a population crisis. To get an idea of the tasks geneticists face, familiarize yourself with the Brainfuck programming language (which is hilarious) and an uncommented sample program.
Now, imagine that -- over the course of MANY, MANY years -- we have evolved a usable Office Suite, circulating it on media with little or no error correction. There are no versions -- If yours doesn't do what you need, you toss it out and get a copy from somewhere else, or you try to randomly merge a friend's copy with your own using a little utility inside the software. The source code is over 8GB, and nobody knows what everything does. No individual programmer or team, at this point, can change much of anything because the chances of screwing up badly outweigh the benefits of any expected improvement -- but we are trying to gain the understanding to work with it. Exacerbating the problem, random copy errors exist, and have become functional and necessary, in every remaining copy of the program. People do research to try and find out how feature "X" works, but at some point, the code accepts a memory address from user input and jumps to it. Now, we have to find out where the input came from, and track down the code that created it.
Certainly, there will be parts of the program that do only one very specific thing, and there will be parts of the code that behave differently depending on state. There will be parts of the program that do nothing, and there will be parts that are seemingly random but just happen to contain instructions that do something useful under certain circumstances, or can serve as / generate useful input in others. There will be sequences with stable output, and those that vary wildly on input. Just because someone is looking for feature "X" doesn't mean that they will find it, or that it won't be an emergent property of the system -- some code written into memory by random-looking source scattered throughout the program. But it also doesn't mean there are no encapsulated features to be found.
At the stage we're in, we look for highly correlated output from the system, or at least easily-measured output, and try to track down any parts of the code that seem to affect it. Sometimes, there will be a clearly delineated subroutine, or portions of the output will occur literally in the code. Sometimes, the feature we seek will be a side effect of otherwise unrelated code, or the result of an error in code that originally did something else (and otherwise still would, except for the error). But you can't assert "There is no magic gene." any more than a geneticist can blindly assert that there is.
Wouldn't that be cool? Like, you know how when we're under stress, we feel *almost* sick -- totally drained and useless, but not in any way that would keep us from doing what we need to survive? What if our bodies are actively searching for genes to reactivate (somatically), and some of those changes can be made semi-permanent through changes in the balance or design of certain transcription factors, or even fully permanent by modifying the genes themselves in meiosis?
It would seem that this particular theory is relatively easily tested: If either of these are true, then there should be patterns of trait inheritance from parent organisms. Permanent genetic modifications would predominantly be inherited from the father (because the Mother's eggs are fixed at birth), and semipermanent ones would likely be inherited from the mother during gestation (since the mother's contribution of cellular material to the fetus dwarfs the father's).
The tech to test this is far from available, but if we studied people that were born to couples in very changed conditions (Chernobyl, for example, or a recently colonized island where massive dietary changes occurred), the pattern of inheritance for newly-expressed traits could be studied.
Anything, of course, is possible -- until we can simulate the system and take an exact inventory of the code and everything it produces. If there actually are endogenous retroviruses integrated into our genome, then their being functional requires some type of promoter. They could even bring their own transcription factors along with them. You could imagine that, in order to get the "original" transcription factor produced it would have to bring it along from the original cell, or inherit it in breast milk from a child's mother. If you want to get really crazy, a particular disease may even have sequences that promote chromosome breakage during mitosis -- the cell that receives the broken DNA in the split might die, but at that point, the transcription factor has broken free and can go become active in other cells.
Possibilities abound. As soon as you figure it out, let me know. Obviously, it's a very interesting question.
I don't trust the parent and grandparents who are so righteously complaining about how customers have all "opted in" for their junk mail.
Your personal incredulity is not a rebuttal. I actually developed and run a site where each user pays us close to two thousand US dollars per year to receive our email updates, and some users on AOL still mark our messages as SPAM. About every six months or so, delivery to AOL email just gets blocked wholesale, and they aren't the friendliest people to deal with.
And we give the users many ways to opt in or out as they choose. They can even call or email customer service and we have a girl who will set up their account preferences for them -- so that each specific type of message, product category, or messages related to certain businesses, are excluded. And they still mark it as SPAM. I'm not sure if it's a penny-per-four emails problem, but it is certainly a problem.
Actually, the most selfish are those who insist on working directly with the charity -- even though an extra hour of work would provide them with the money to do far better good for the masses. Slate had an article on this late last year. Simply not donating would be rather neutral, because no party would benefit, and thus both would benefit equally. Check out the blockquote:
This isn't some silly tautology. If these do-gooders really were motivated by the desire to do good, they would be doing something different. It would almost always be more effective to volunteer less, work overtime, and give more. A Dutch banker can pay for a lot of soup-kitchen chefs and servers with a couple of hours' worth of his salary, but that wouldn't provide the same feel-good buzz as ladling out stew himself, would it?
And of course, for a lot of tasks it simply won't *matter* - anything with a live user sitting there, for example, only has to be fast enough that the person perceives it as being instantaneous. Any faster than that is essentially useless. So, for anything that has states requiring user input, there is a "fast enough" beyond which we need not bother optimizing unless we're just trying to speed up the system as a whole, and that sort of optimization is usually done at the compiler level.
I'll have to disagree a bit there. I think it's in everyone's best interest that computers use as little power and generate as little heat as possible. What used to take a roomful of vacuum tubes can now be done with a handheld unit powered by ambient indoor light through a 1x3cm solar collector.
Whether you believe current energy trends are sustainable or not, the world will be a better place for software that consumes less energy at runtime. If your PDA or cellphone can get enough power from kinetic or solar energy, you'll never have to plug the thing in. Whatever energy would have fueled the bloat in Windows Mobile 6, and that wall-wart that never gets unplugged, can now be used to grow food for someone in the 3rd world -- and their children can get an education instead of making up that shortfall in the fields.
I know this is quite melodromatic, but there are millions of devices out there, and it's kind of our job to make sure they're operating efficiently. We'll never (I hope) face a public outcry like the US automakers for their stubbornly low gas mileages, but that doesn't excuse inefficiency. Plugging a computer into the power grid doesn't excuse waste. Unless, that is, you think it's good for some multiple of all the saved programmer-hours to be made up in resource-hunting and agriculture instead.
Think a little bit about software efficiency as a measure of energy, like grams of coal per problem solved. It is pretty clear that even though it may not seem worthwhile to optimize now, that over time and with millions, nay billions, of computing devices online, that eventually it must. Even if you don't consider long-term energy cost, making a laptop run ten minutes longer with your application may just make someone's day.
I think this is also taking it a bit far. I shall rephrase the question:
With popular franchise games becoming more engrossing at each subsequent release, would game publishers be better able to serve their existing customers (or, alternatively, expand the market for a particular game) by making it less exciting and immersive?
The answer here seems to be "Games like that are for weenies. We don't want any, but hey - if the publishers want to bang their heads against the wall, more power to 'em." I, for one, would like to see *larger* RPG and adventure game worlds, with more casual gameplay that doesn't require me to perform upkeep on my in-game knowledge and dexterity. Principally, the skill curve and knowledge curve should be very shallow as the game progresses. That is, I should be able to pick up the game after a hiatus and enjoy it without being frustrated or studying a notebook or having to replay the lower levels. That kind of boring could appeal to me.
I use a Gevalia cone filter coffee maker, and after reading some of the comments here, I decided to try something new -- pouring 4 oz of almost-boiling water in at the edges of the filter and letting it stand for 60 seconds before turning the machine on and adding the caraffe. It's definitely the best cup of coffee ever to come out of that machine. It's less bitter and less acidic, but at the same time considerably stronger. Perhaps stirring the grounds briefly (or swirling the basket) during the pre-brew would improve it even more.
I have a cheap burr mill grinder, a $30 Mr. Coffee brand machine, that is good enough for the day-to-day. I got it at a Target store last year, but I haven't seen it on the shelves recently. It never makes a mess, if you treat it right. There's a picture of it here, seemingly on the wrong product.
The trick is to find a grinder with a durable cup that has a lid with a small opening (this one is lexan, and the input opening is about 1cm x 2cm). Cover the opening with your thumb, shake the grounds around, and use a spoon to sharply strike the lid from the side, knocking all the grounds down into the body of the cup. Then, remove your thumb and the lid, pour the grounds into the filter (I use a cone filter), and strike the bottom corner of the container from the side with the spoon again. You should be left with virtually no coffee outside the filter, and a minimum of coffee powder stuck inside the cup. Obviously, YMMV.
the media in the US is like the media in most "Western" countries, it is capitalist.
That's fascist, or criminal, or immorally opportunistic. Capital has nothing to do with this -- the issue isn't economic interest, or else every news outlet in the world would be just as culpable. That is, are you guilty of a crime simply because you stand to benefit from it? I say you're guilty of the crime if you commit the act, and that having an economic interest in the crime is meaningless until and unless the act is actually committed. Stop trolling with your bullshit class-interest paranoia. State-owned and state-controlled media are hardly the solution to this, no matter what you've heard from the state-run news.
It's not the same. Good luck proving that they actually forgot to activate, once you've left the store with it. Especially if you've taken the product home.
After all, you might be trying to get stolen DVDs activated by using this ploy.
This is the same kind of hype that surrounded Java itself at its inception. We were all going to have Java Thin Clients, and Java programming would be so universal and so compatible, that it wouldn't matter what kind of computer you chose to run -- the free OS could run Java, too, so there would never be a need to pay for Windows just so you could run the same amazing Java Apps! Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison were each talking about how Java would change the distribution model of software, so that you never "installed" software again, you just had client libraries that were synced into a cache on disk when you first used a particular feature in some software you obtained, and as necessary thereafter.
Java is slow. Java has had over 10 years to become what it claimed to be. Unless this phone is running compiled Java, either performance or battery life are going to suffer. And if it *is* running on compiled Java, then I just have to ask how that's any better than the iPhone's objective-C, no matter how optimal Sun's compiler settings are?
I love how everything is an 'iPhone killer', too. As if Apple doesn't have skilled engineers and designers, the pundits think that every new product announced to compete with it is already better, while Apple (who have been working on the thing for 2 1/2 years!) aren't yet satisfied with the phone's quality. Everybody remember "The Mythical Man-Month"? Just because Sun, or Oracle, or Microsoft, or any company has 12,000% more developers than the competition, doesn't necessarily mean they can produce a better product. Actually, it's almost invariably the opposite. So calm down. The absolute first moment when there can be an 'iPhone killer' is when there is an iPhone in consumers' hands to be killed. Until then, it's only a battle of proposed specifications.
As one who is secular, the apparent biological advantage of the religious actually worries me
It worries me, too. As soon as you can help me convince my wife that I should be procreating with many young, intelligent, fertile, secular girls as often I can, we can begin to remedy this.
On a more serious note, I fully concur. We need to change our values, and start having more children.
Re:Obligatory Planet of the Apes
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No offense, but... Worry about the superspecies, not the subspecies. What happens when advantageous chimp genes are applied to a human? The chimps have had an extraordinary amount of selective pressure that our intellect has overcome; There's probably something very useful in that grab-bag.
Not to mention that the Intuos3 series is capable of sensing pen rotation and x/y tilt. You need plugins and whatnot for some of these effects, and some features aren't present with the bundled stylus, but the feature-level on these tablets and accessories is absolutely astounding. Not to mention that each stylus, even among multiple of the same type, has its own unique ID, and can be associated with different tools. You can have an array of styluses, each with a different color, brush size/type, and opacity. I don't use mine as much as I'd like, but even for designing web graphics, it's invaluable.
You remember the movie "King Kong", where the villagers tied up the woman outside the village as a sacrifice, to keep the 8,000-lb gorilla from destroying them? Me neither...
Nintendo's usual strategy is to dribble out games slooooowly, so that there are never too many hits in the marketplace at one time...
I haven't seen a Wii on the shelf yet, so I'm just hoping that I can casually purchase one by the time these games come out. It may have nothing to do with titles competing with each other, but more to do with waiting until they've sold their current round of hardware and aren't engendering ill will by being unable to provide consoles. If I were the big N (aka, making a profit on console hardware), I'd want at least a million Wii's sitting on shelves and warehouse palletes before launching my sure-fire hits.
Basically, demand for consoles (in the absence of the hit games) should be satisified before the game increases console demand. Anything else would be lost sales. Claiming that the extra time is being used for debugging and quality assurance might just be PR smoke and mirrors.
I agree. I feel the same way about AT&T, after the wiretapping debacle. I can't have an iPhone, and will have to just do without -- or buy a shitty second-rate Chinese knockoff. See? It won't just hurt Verizon and AT&T; Hopefully, these shenanigans will hurt other businesses that choose to have contractual arrangements with them. I wonder if the company doing Verizon's FIOS phone is happy about their business practices. It can only accelerate their demise when they can't get exclusive rights to cool hardware on which to peddle their services.
For multi-threading, install a shared-memory cache, like apc, eAccelerator, or mmcache -- or use an in-memory table in your RDBMS. Now, you can spawn background tasks and monitor their progress or receive return values through the cache. You can even start a task as a server and keep it running indefinitely with set_time_limit(). I do plenty of unicode apps as UTF-8, and haven't had problems yet. If you're talking about UCS-2, then you have a good case. It's in development, but it's for PHP 6. Honestly, I'll probably switch languages before v6, based on all the other crap they're talking about throwing in. Version 5 is already getting pretty bloated, and it's only marginally faster than Java.
Here's the utility function I use to spawn background threads (like, sending a thousand customized newsletters or updating hundreds of thousands of database rows). The background process can either lock a file or create some shared-memory structure to indicate its progress, and you can return immediately and end the script before it's done running. The nice prefix is optional.
function fork($shellCmd) { exec("nice $shellCmd >/dev/null 2>&1 &"); }
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it seems more like he's the restaurateur, but he's too bashful to demand payment from his patrons after they've already eaten the meal. The RIAA has fed off us for generations, but the downside is they've grown strong enough to refuse us our due.
Not to mention that the superb browser in Series 60 3rd edition is based on Webkit, too. I have been using it for almost a year on my E61, and I can tell you that if something runs on Safari, it almost certainly works identically on the Nokia browser. YMMV.
So, maybe not a sword, then, and the axe seems relatively ineffective. How about a chainsaw?
I think your understanding is a little naive... There *are* magic genes that do X. There are also pseudo-random sequences that we have found a use for, and there are, further, sequences we carry around that are malicious, or do exactly nothing. But we carry all these genes around anyway, because the cost of doing so is negligible, and the chance for quick modification is beneficial in a population crisis. To get an idea of the tasks geneticists face, familiarize yourself with the Brainfuck programming language (which is hilarious) and an uncommented sample program.
Now, imagine that -- over the course of MANY, MANY years -- we have evolved a usable Office Suite, circulating it on media with little or no error correction. There are no versions -- If yours doesn't do what you need, you toss it out and get a copy from somewhere else, or you try to randomly merge a friend's copy with your own using a little utility inside the software. The source code is over 8GB, and nobody knows what everything does. No individual programmer or team, at this point, can change much of anything because the chances of screwing up badly outweigh the benefits of any expected improvement -- but we are trying to gain the understanding to work with it. Exacerbating the problem, random copy errors exist, and have become functional and necessary, in every remaining copy of the program. People do research to try and find out how feature "X" works, but at some point, the code accepts a memory address from user input and jumps to it. Now, we have to find out where the input came from, and track down the code that created it.
Certainly, there will be parts of the program that do only one very specific thing, and there will be parts of the code that behave differently depending on state. There will be parts of the program that do nothing, and there will be parts that are seemingly random but just happen to contain instructions that do something useful under certain circumstances, or can serve as / generate useful input in others. There will be sequences with stable output, and those that vary wildly on input. Just because someone is looking for feature "X" doesn't mean that they will find it, or that it won't be an emergent property of the system -- some code written into memory by random-looking source scattered throughout the program. But it also doesn't mean there are no encapsulated features to be found.
At the stage we're in, we look for highly correlated output from the system, or at least easily-measured output, and try to track down any parts of the code that seem to affect it. Sometimes, there will be a clearly delineated subroutine, or portions of the output will occur literally in the code. Sometimes, the feature we seek will be a side effect of otherwise unrelated code, or the result of an error in code that originally did something else (and otherwise still would, except for the error). But you can't assert "There is no magic gene." any more than a geneticist can blindly assert that there is.
Wouldn't that be cool? Like, you know how when we're under stress, we feel *almost* sick -- totally drained and useless, but not in any way that would keep us from doing what we need to survive? What if our bodies are actively searching for genes to reactivate (somatically), and some of those changes can be made semi-permanent through changes in the balance or design of certain transcription factors, or even fully permanent by modifying the genes themselves in meiosis?
It would seem that this particular theory is relatively easily tested: If either of these are true, then there should be patterns of trait inheritance from parent organisms. Permanent genetic modifications would predominantly be inherited from the father (because the Mother's eggs are fixed at birth), and semipermanent ones would likely be inherited from the mother during gestation (since the mother's contribution of cellular material to the fetus dwarfs the father's).
The tech to test this is far from available, but if we studied people that were born to couples in very changed conditions (Chernobyl, for example, or a recently colonized island where massive dietary changes occurred), the pattern of inheritance for newly-expressed traits could be studied.
Anything, of course, is possible -- until we can simulate the system and take an exact inventory of the code and everything it produces. If there actually are endogenous retroviruses integrated into our genome, then their being functional requires some type of promoter. They could even bring their own transcription factors along with them. You could imagine that, in order to get the "original" transcription factor produced it would have to bring it along from the original cell, or inherit it in breast milk from a child's mother. If you want to get really crazy, a particular disease may even have sequences that promote chromosome breakage during mitosis -- the cell that receives the broken DNA in the split might die, but at that point, the transcription factor has broken free and can go become active in other cells.
Possibilities abound. As soon as you figure it out, let me know. Obviously, it's a very interesting question.
Exotic car dealers. They are who they are. ;)
Your personal incredulity is not a rebuttal. I actually developed and run a site where each user pays us close to two thousand US dollars per year to receive our email updates, and some users on AOL still mark our messages as SPAM. About every six months or so, delivery to AOL email just gets blocked wholesale, and they aren't the friendliest people to deal with.
And we give the users many ways to opt in or out as they choose. They can even call or email customer service and we have a girl who will set up their account preferences for them -- so that each specific type of message, product category, or messages related to certain businesses, are excluded. And they still mark it as SPAM. I'm not sure if it's a penny-per-four emails problem, but it is certainly a problem.
Actually, the most selfish are those who insist on working directly with the charity -- even though an extra hour of work would provide them with the money to do far better good for the masses. Slate had an article on this late last year. Simply not donating would be rather neutral, because no party would benefit, and thus both would benefit equally. Check out the blockquote:
I'll have to disagree a bit there. I think it's in everyone's best interest that computers use as little power and generate as little heat as possible. What used to take a roomful of vacuum tubes can now be done with a handheld unit powered by ambient indoor light through a 1x3cm solar collector.
Whether you believe current energy trends are sustainable or not, the world will be a better place for software that consumes less energy at runtime. If your PDA or cellphone can get enough power from kinetic or solar energy, you'll never have to plug the thing in. Whatever energy would have fueled the bloat in Windows Mobile 6, and that wall-wart that never gets unplugged, can now be used to grow food for someone in the 3rd world -- and their children can get an education instead of making up that shortfall in the fields.
I know this is quite melodromatic, but there are millions of devices out there, and it's kind of our job to make sure they're operating efficiently. We'll never (I hope) face a public outcry like the US automakers for their stubbornly low gas mileages, but that doesn't excuse inefficiency. Plugging a computer into the power grid doesn't excuse waste. Unless, that is, you think it's good for some multiple of all the saved programmer-hours to be made up in resource-hunting and agriculture instead.
Think a little bit about software efficiency as a measure of energy, like grams of coal per problem solved. It is pretty clear that even though it may not seem worthwhile to optimize now, that over time and with millions, nay billions, of computing devices online, that eventually it must. Even if you don't consider long-term energy cost, making a laptop run ten minutes longer with your application may just make someone's day.
I think this is also taking it a bit far. I shall rephrase the question:
With popular franchise games becoming more engrossing at each subsequent release, would game publishers be better able to serve their existing customers (or, alternatively, expand the market for a particular game) by making it less exciting and immersive?
The answer here seems to be "Games like that are for weenies. We don't want any, but hey - if the publishers want to bang their heads against the wall, more power to 'em." I, for one, would like to see *larger* RPG and adventure game worlds, with more casual gameplay that doesn't require me to perform upkeep on my in-game knowledge and dexterity. Principally, the skill curve and knowledge curve should be very shallow as the game progresses. That is, I should be able to pick up the game after a hiatus and enjoy it without being frustrated or studying a notebook or having to replay the lower levels. That kind of boring could appeal to me.
I use a Gevalia cone filter coffee maker, and after reading some of the comments here, I decided to try something new -- pouring 4 oz of almost-boiling water in at the edges of the filter and letting it stand for 60 seconds before turning the machine on and adding the caraffe. It's definitely the best cup of coffee ever to come out of that machine. It's less bitter and less acidic, but at the same time considerably stronger. Perhaps stirring the grounds briefly (or swirling the basket) during the pre-brew would improve it even more.
I have a cheap burr mill grinder, a $30 Mr. Coffee brand machine, that is good enough for the day-to-day. I got it at a Target store last year, but I haven't seen it on the shelves recently. It never makes a mess, if you treat it right. There's a picture of it here, seemingly on the wrong product.
The trick is to find a grinder with a durable cup that has a lid with a small opening (this one is lexan, and the input opening is about 1cm x 2cm). Cover the opening with your thumb, shake the grounds around, and use a spoon to sharply strike the lid from the side, knocking all the grounds down into the body of the cup. Then, remove your thumb and the lid, pour the grounds into the filter (I use a cone filter), and strike the bottom corner of the container from the side with the spoon again. You should be left with virtually no coffee outside the filter, and a minimum of coffee powder stuck inside the cup. Obviously, YMMV.
That's fascist, or criminal, or immorally opportunistic. Capital has nothing to do with this -- the issue isn't economic interest, or else every news outlet in the world would be just as culpable. That is, are you guilty of a crime simply because you stand to benefit from it? I say you're guilty of the crime if you commit the act, and that having an economic interest in the crime is meaningless until and unless the act is actually committed. Stop trolling with your bullshit class-interest paranoia. State-owned and state-controlled media are hardly the solution to this, no matter what you've heard from the state-run news.
It's not the same. Good luck proving that they actually forgot to activate, once you've left the store with it. Especially if you've taken the product home.
After all, you might be trying to get stolen DVDs activated by using this ploy.
This is the same kind of hype that surrounded Java itself at its inception. We were all going to have Java Thin Clients, and Java programming would be so universal and so compatible, that it wouldn't matter what kind of computer you chose to run -- the free OS could run Java, too, so there would never be a need to pay for Windows just so you could run the same amazing Java Apps! Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison were each talking about how Java would change the distribution model of software, so that you never "installed" software again, you just had client libraries that were synced into a cache on disk when you first used a particular feature in some software you obtained, and as necessary thereafter.
Java is slow. Java has had over 10 years to become what it claimed to be. Unless this phone is running compiled Java, either performance or battery life are going to suffer. And if it *is* running on compiled Java, then I just have to ask how that's any better than the iPhone's objective-C, no matter how optimal Sun's compiler settings are?
I love how everything is an 'iPhone killer', too. As if Apple doesn't have skilled engineers and designers, the pundits think that every new product announced to compete with it is already better, while Apple (who have been working on the thing for 2 1/2 years!) aren't yet satisfied with the phone's quality. Everybody remember "The Mythical Man-Month"? Just because Sun, or Oracle, or Microsoft, or any company has 12,000% more developers than the competition, doesn't necessarily mean they can produce a better product. Actually, it's almost invariably the opposite. So calm down. The absolute first moment when there can be an 'iPhone killer' is when there is an iPhone in consumers' hands to be killed. Until then, it's only a battle of proposed specifications.
It worries me, too. As soon as you can help me convince my wife that I should be procreating with many young, intelligent, fertile, secular girls as often I can, we can begin to remedy this.
On a more serious note, I fully concur. We need to change our values, and start having more children.
No offense, but ... Worry about the superspecies, not the subspecies. What happens when advantageous chimp genes are applied to a human? The chimps have had an extraordinary amount of selective pressure that our intellect has overcome; There's probably something very useful in that grab-bag.
You forgot the requisite link. :)
Not to mention that the Intuos3 series is capable of sensing pen rotation and x/y tilt. You need plugins and whatnot for some of these effects, and some features aren't present with the bundled stylus, but the feature-level on these tablets and accessories is absolutely astounding. Not to mention that each stylus, even among multiple of the same type, has its own unique ID, and can be associated with different tools. You can have an array of styluses, each with a different color, brush size/type, and opacity. I don't use mine as much as I'd like, but even for designing web graphics, it's invaluable.
You remember the movie "King Kong", where the villagers tied up the woman outside the village as a sacrifice, to keep the 8,000-lb gorilla from destroying them? Me neither...
I haven't seen a Wii on the shelf yet, so I'm just hoping that I can casually purchase one by the time these games come out. It may have nothing to do with titles competing with each other, but more to do with waiting until they've sold their current round of hardware and aren't engendering ill will by being unable to provide consoles. If I were the big N (aka, making a profit on console hardware), I'd want at least a million Wii's sitting on shelves and warehouse palletes before launching my sure-fire hits.
Basically, demand for consoles (in the absence of the hit games) should be satisified before the game increases console demand. Anything else would be lost sales. Claiming that the extra time is being used for debugging and quality assurance might just be PR smoke and mirrors.
Umm, those are working?
I agree. I feel the same way about AT&T, after the wiretapping debacle. I can't have an iPhone, and will have to just do without -- or buy a shitty second-rate Chinese knockoff. See? It won't just hurt Verizon and AT&T; Hopefully, these shenanigans will hurt other businesses that choose to have contractual arrangements with them. I wonder if the company doing Verizon's FIOS phone is happy about their business practices. It can only accelerate their demise when they can't get exclusive rights to cool hardware on which to peddle their services.
For multi-threading, install a shared-memory cache, like apc, eAccelerator, or mmcache -- or use an in-memory table in your RDBMS. Now, you can spawn background tasks and monitor their progress or receive return values through the cache. You can even start a task as a server and keep it running indefinitely with set_time_limit(). I do plenty of unicode apps as UTF-8, and haven't had problems yet. If you're talking about UCS-2, then you have a good case. It's in development, but it's for PHP 6. Honestly, I'll probably switch languages before v6, based on all the other crap they're talking about throwing in. Version 5 is already getting pretty bloated, and it's only marginally faster than Java.
Here's the utility function I use to spawn background threads (like, sending a thousand customized newsletters or updating hundreds of thousands of database rows). The background process can either lock a file or create some shared-memory structure to indicate its progress, and you can return immediately and end the script before it's done running. The nice prefix is optional.