It matters because the total sales of this generation of consoles are used by game companies to project the sales of the next generation. That means that the generation that does the best will be best supported with launch titles.
Er, sure, but I'm not sure if a 10% lead is enough to make software developers comfortable enough to risk abandoning the other platform, especially given the shakeup that a generation switch will entail.
I kind of like the them neck-and-neck; it basically means that most software gets ported to both, so users win whichever they buy, and can just choose whichever unit matches their living-room decor, or whose controller fits their hands best, or whose maker they deem to be slightly less evil...
Hmm. So they still use nvidia gpus in the newer models?
The air is a sexy beast, and looking at laptops the other day in a store, I noticed that the low-end macbook air was actually very cheap -- cheaper than many roughly equivalent (but far more plasticy) models from other manuf.s.
BTW, do they give you a DVD with the OS on it or something? I don't really want to run macosx as the base OS, but it would be nice to have it running in a VM occasionally for testing etc...
I'm sure this will start an arms race with the malware writers, but I still wouldn't bet against Google.
Indeed. Spam filtering of course started a similar arms race, but gmail spam filtering has become so good that spam long ago ceased to be an issue for me -- it's been months since I've seen a false negative or false positive (yes I do still check the spam folder sometimes, out of lingering habit), and my email address is all over the place.
Malware is probably a stickier issue of course, but as you say, it's always risky to bet against Google...
It can take time for some people to get used to git ("wait the commands aren't exactly the same as CVS!? noooooooooo...").
But once it clicks, you'll never want to go back.
There's a good reason git is by far the most popular "new generation" source-control system (and no, it's not "because Linus is popular"). It's simply more powerful, more facile, more nimble than the competition.
Looking at slashdot headlines in my rss reader, at first I mixed up several different headlines and read this one as "Google Launching First Space Station Module In September."
... and it didn't really seem particularly surprising...
Our constitution is partially based on the US one but it only protects "political" speech, so we have always followed the British model of comprehensive censorship of non-political subjects.
Sooooo... all one needs to do to get one's pr0n extravaganza past the filter is to liberally throw in jabs at the prime minister...?
"I'm gonna beep you like prime minister has beeeeped this country... beep, beeep, oh, censor me, censor me....!1!...BEEEEP..."
When I fly out of Narita, they seem to do the baggage exam before checkin, which seems a much better system.
Baggage is x-rayed upon entering the checkin area, and if they're suspicious, they pull you aside to a table and have you open the suitcase and go through it. The examiner just watches, giving directions as needed (indeed, it's very clear they're under orders not to touch anything), and asks you to explain anything unusual. It works very well, and gives real peace of mind.
Why are they interviewing Gates about energy? I mean, yeah, he's rich and all, but is there any reason to think he has any particular insight on the subject?
It has to do with people who very clearly make a living reviewing products where they are directly payed for providing solid reviews. You can spot these people easily. They're the ones who have given 4 and 5 star reviews to an average of ten novels every single day for ten straight years. You click their name and in about give seconds of looking at their profile, it becomes obvious what's going on.
Indeed, and in many cases it's dead simple to spot bogus reviews simply by reading them -- it's not actually all that easy to write a fake review that sounds real without spending a fair bit of effort at it, and many of these bogus reviewers clearly lack either the time, the motivation, or the brains to do a good job.
I'm frankly astounded anyone would consider Facebook or any similar sites for primary storage. Hello, I wouldn't even trust Flickr. If you have important data, look after it yourself. Sure, use online as part of the solution but not the primary store.
It would be really neat to have some application that allows easy automatic syncing between multiple photo sites... flickr->picasa, picasa->flickr, etc. Then one could easily upload wherever is most convenient, and replicate for safety (sure one can upload multiple times, but... this way would seem to make the bookkeeping eaiser, and often there is metadata etc one adds online that it would be nice to have preserved). It's slightly risky to trust flikr/etc completely, but flickr+picasa seems much less worrying...
I guess the sites would hate it though (and facebook would probably delete all your pictures...).
To be honest, I think the article is 90%+ sleaze. They're insinuating that Google (the organization) is anti-competitive because they defaulted to promoting their own service, as part of a user-customizable feature, and one (let's not forget) that's actually very simple to correct.
Hmm, it appears that MS has budgeted some astroturfing to along with their anti-Google lobbying push...
Protective measures failed and a lot of radiation was released in Japan. Nobody is dead. From what I've gathered, nobody is likely to die as a direct result of what happened at the reactor. Risk exists, shit happens, and it was sure as hell a lot less severe than a range of other man-precipitated disasters, nuclear, fossil or otherwise. Man up and move on, there's no such thing as guarateed safety in anything.
The phrase "direct result" is key of course; direct results are much easier to measure, but indirect results can be much, much, worse. It's going to be a long time before people can just "move on" in Fukushima.
Sure, the necessity to keep kids from playing outside due to radioactive dirt sucks, but maybe even worse is the impact of the Fukushima nuclear disaster on the economy of the Tohoku region -- in a time when they really need people to buy their stuff to recover from the Tsunami damage, people are scared to buy agricultural products from the region, and it's a largely agricultural area.
If there's any justice, all profit TEPCO makes in the foreseeable future will go directly to help repay the massive amount of damage due to their negligence.
Er, sure, but be much, much, more leery of Google's enemies -- you know, the ones that are lobbying for investigations like this.
Because the alternative to Google isn't (in the short term) some scrappy and lovable FOSS underdogs, it's vast evil entities like Microsoft and Facebook.
I don't know know enough about the technical details to give a good answer, but there are some things that come to mind.
It seems that compared to a cellphone, an eye-display would require optics (can't just hang a display in front of your eye), which would add weight/bulk/opacity. Moreover, for casual use, it would have to be even lighter than a cell phone (you can't have a heavy weight precariously perched over you eye, and bulky head gear isn't acceptable for a consumer product), and even with the battery and electronics shunted off into a separate unit (but with the optics added), that's not trivial at a reasonable cost. All of this may be solvable, but... for a consumer product it also has to have a pretty low cost!
Another thing is that I think generally people probably won't accept a single-eye display that blocks that eye's view entirely -- something that overlays a display onto normal vision would be far more attractive, but of course that increases the required complexity/precision even more...
Funnily enough, I've been looking at this recently. I still don't get quite there don't seem to be many low-cost monocular wearable displays out there, even if tethered to a desktop.
It's not good enough to be low cost, they'd also have to not suck.
Judging from the "eye displays" I've tried, even the basic tech is still pretty shaky, and trying to make a product that seamlessly integrates with the outside environment is appreciably harder.
A product that distracts people visually while promoting use "on the move" would also be an interesting public safety problem. Think zoned-out pedestrians listening to their ipod, or drivers yacking on their cellphone, but worse. [Whatever warning labels are on the box, you know Americans would start using them while driving... "oh, but it only blocks one eye, I felt I could handle it... I didn't mean to kill all those orphans..."]
So... yeah, it's a really cool idea in SF and maybe for specialized applications in reality (special forces), but, for general usage... I dunno...
A good faith reaction would be to work with others to fix the security issues.
The problem is, a lot of the security problems with WebGL need fixing in silicon. With most GPUs currently out there, a small bug anywhere in the OpenGL stack - a huge chunk of code that was designed to run trusted code and so optimised heavily for speed, and not really designed with security in mind - can let shader code completely compromise the system, or at least let malicious code perform a DoS attack....
Then require shaders to be signed (with some system of delegating trust), or only allow webgl programs to reference standard named shaders, or... etc
Anyway the point is that even if webGL needs to be substantially altered / gimped / whatever, ultimately, it's not an unsolvable problem. Maybe it should be replaced entirely (e.g. by a scene-graph oriented system), though of course "good faith" effort would make the smallest change that reasonably solves the problem.
But however it's addressed, the crucial issue is whether the process is open and broadly based, and result an open widely adopted standard that's equally accessible to all parties -- as webGL is, whatever its flaws -- or something that's proprietary and/or under the control of one party, as MS would no doubt highly prefer (as long as that one party is them).
MS has a lot of really smart and experienced people, so in an ideal world they could play an important part of such an effort -- but unfortunately in this world, their dysfunctional corporate culture and history of backstabbing make it very hard to trust them.
No, you can't "just take a look at Amtrack," because it's a very different system -- slow, unreliable, poorly maintained, hobbled by ill-considered government regulation. HSR should be none of those things, and that directly affects how attractive it is to passengers.
The important thing is not that they've pointed out some security problems, but how they're going to proceed from there.
A good faith reaction would be to work with others to fix the security issues.
But of course, they're not going to do that, because security is really just a smokescreen -- their real concern is that WebGL is a portable standard that they have no control over, gives no advantage to Microsoft, and which already works well on competitors' systems.
Guaranteed they subsequently announce they're instead supporting a competing web-3d standard that "leverages Microsoft technologies"...
No mention was made of the "states" in this subthread, but even in the U.S., you can't simply make statements like "they'd be empty" as if the entire country were one homogenous mass.
HSR in the U.S. will first be implemented in corridors where there is sufficient ridership for traditional trains. Maybe in the future, there will be room for exploring alternate models to bring rail transit to random sparsely populated areas of flyover country in the U.S. -- that'd be very cool, and of course single-car DMUs are already widely used on rural lines in sparsely populated areas of other countries -- but that simply isn't the subject being discussed here.
Slashdot Mirror
It matters because the total sales of this generation of consoles are used by game companies to project the sales of the next generation. That means that the generation that does the best will be best supported with launch titles.
Er, sure, but I'm not sure if a 10% lead is enough to make software developers comfortable enough to risk abandoning the other platform, especially given the shakeup that a generation switch will entail.
I kind of like the them neck-and-neck; it basically means that most software gets ported to both, so users win whichever they buy, and can just choose whichever unit matches their living-room decor, or whose controller fits their hands best, or whose maker they deem to be slightly less evil...
For those of us who have never used twitter, is there an edited, "best of" to convince us to use it?
Twitter has almost no functionality, and thus is very simple to use.
Also it's got Fail Whale.
Corporate Death Penalty and Billion Dollars in Penalties, arresting all senior officers and the Board of Directors. The Buck stops THERE.
But, but, but... shareholders!
Ok, arrest them too.
Hmm. So they still use nvidia gpus in the newer models?
The air is a sexy beast, and looking at laptops the other day in a store, I noticed that the low-end macbook air was actually very cheap -- cheaper than many roughly equivalent (but far more plasticy) models from other manuf.s.
BTW, do they give you a DVD with the OS on it or something? I don't really want to run macosx as the base OS, but it would be nice to have it running in a VM occasionally for testing etc...
So... how well do they (the air) run debian?
I'm sure this will start an arms race with the malware writers, but I still wouldn't bet against Google.
Indeed. Spam filtering of course started a similar arms race, but gmail spam filtering has become so good that spam long ago ceased to be an issue for me -- it's been months since I've seen a false negative or false positive (yes I do still check the spam folder sometimes, out of lingering habit), and my email address is all over the place.
Malware is probably a stickier issue of course, but as you say, it's always risky to bet against Google...
... and in the case of COD4, I hope they were targetting multiplayer, because the single-player campaign takes about 15 minutes to complete...
It can take time for some people to get used to git ("wait the commands aren't exactly the same as CVS!? noooooooooo...").
But once it clicks, you'll never want to go back.
There's a good reason git is by far the most popular "new generation" source-control system (and no, it's not "because Linus is popular"). It's simply more powerful, more facile, more nimble than the competition.
Was BSD relevant at some point?
It was super influential in the early '80s.
Looking at slashdot headlines in my rss reader, at first I mixed up several different headlines and read this one as "Google Launching First Space Station Module In September."
... and it didn't really seem particularly surprising...
Our constitution is partially based on the US one but it only protects "political" speech, so we have always followed the British model of comprehensive censorship of non-political subjects.
Sooooo... all one needs to do to get one's pr0n extravaganza past the filter is to liberally throw in jabs at the prime minister...?
"I'm gonna beep you like prime minister has beeeeped this country... beep, beeep, oh, censor me, censor me....!1! ...BEEEEP..."
When I fly out of Narita, they seem to do the baggage exam before checkin, which seems a much better system.
Baggage is x-rayed upon entering the checkin area, and if they're suspicious, they pull you aside to a table and have you open the suitcase and go through it. The examiner just watches, giving directions as needed (indeed, it's very clear they're under orders not to touch anything), and asks you to explain anything unusual. It works very well, and gives real peace of mind.
Why are they interviewing Gates about energy? I mean, yeah, he's rich and all, but is there any reason to think he has any particular insight on the subject?
It has to do with people who very clearly make a living reviewing products where they are directly payed for providing solid reviews. You can spot these people easily. They're the ones who have given 4 and 5 star reviews to an average of ten novels every single day for ten straight years. You click their name and in about give seconds of looking at their profile, it becomes obvious what's going on.
Indeed, and in many cases it's dead simple to spot bogus reviews simply by reading them -- it's not actually all that easy to write a fake review that sounds real without spending a fair bit of effort at it, and many of these bogus reviewers clearly lack either the time, the motivation, or the brains to do a good job.
I'm frankly astounded anyone would consider Facebook or any similar sites for primary storage. Hello, I wouldn't even trust Flickr. If you have important data, look after it yourself. Sure, use online as part of the solution but not the primary store.
It would be really neat to have some application that allows easy automatic syncing between multiple photo sites... flickr->picasa, picasa->flickr, etc. Then one could easily upload wherever is most convenient, and replicate for safety (sure one can upload multiple times, but ... this way would seem to make the bookkeeping eaiser, and often there is metadata etc one adds online that it would be nice to have preserved). It's slightly risky to trust flikr/etc completely, but flickr+picasa seems much less worrying...
I guess the sites would hate it though (and facebook would probably delete all your pictures...).
To be honest, I think the article is 90%+ sleaze. They're insinuating that Google (the organization) is anti-competitive because they defaulted to promoting their own service, as part of a user-customizable feature, and one (let's not forget) that's actually very simple to correct.
Hmm, it appears that MS has budgeted some astroturfing to along with their anti-Google lobbying push...
Protective measures failed and a lot of radiation was released in Japan. Nobody is dead. From what I've gathered, nobody is likely to die as a direct result of what happened at the reactor. Risk exists, shit happens, and it was sure as hell a lot less severe than a range of other man-precipitated disasters, nuclear, fossil or otherwise. Man up and move on, there's no such thing as guarateed safety in anything.
The phrase "direct result" is key of course; direct results are much easier to measure, but indirect results can be much, much, worse. It's going to be a long time before people can just "move on" in Fukushima.
Sure, the necessity to keep kids from playing outside due to radioactive dirt sucks, but maybe even worse is the impact of the Fukushima nuclear disaster on the economy of the Tohoku region -- in a time when they really need people to buy their stuff to recover from the Tsunami damage, people are scared to buy agricultural products from the region, and it's a largely agricultural area.
If there's any justice, all profit TEPCO makes in the foreseeable future will go directly to help repay the massive amount of damage due to their negligence.
Er, sure, but be much, much, more leery of Google's enemies -- you know, the ones that are lobbying for investigations like this.
Because the alternative to Google isn't (in the short term) some scrappy and lovable FOSS underdogs, it's vast evil entities like Microsoft and Facebook.
Addendum: Be very scared.
I don't know know enough about the technical details to give a good answer, but there are some things that come to mind.
It seems that compared to a cellphone, an eye-display would require optics (can't just hang a display in front of your eye), which would add weight/bulk/opacity. Moreover, for casual use, it would have to be even lighter than a cell phone (you can't have a heavy weight precariously perched over you eye, and bulky head gear isn't acceptable for a consumer product), and even with the battery and electronics shunted off into a separate unit (but with the optics added), that's not trivial at a reasonable cost. All of this may be solvable, but ... for a consumer product it also has to have a pretty low cost!
Another thing is that I think generally people probably won't accept a single-eye display that blocks that eye's view entirely -- something that overlays a display onto normal vision would be far more attractive, but of course that increases the required complexity/precision even more...
Funnily enough, I've been looking at this recently. I still don't get quite there don't seem to be many low-cost monocular wearable displays out there, even if tethered to a desktop.
It's not good enough to be low cost, they'd also have to not suck.
Judging from the "eye displays" I've tried, even the basic tech is still pretty shaky, and trying to make a product that seamlessly integrates with the outside environment is appreciably harder.
A product that distracts people visually while promoting use "on the move" would also be an interesting public safety problem. Think zoned-out pedestrians listening to their ipod, or drivers yacking on their cellphone, but worse. [Whatever warning labels are on the box, you know Americans would start using them while driving... "oh, but it only blocks one eye, I felt I could handle it ... I didn't mean to kill all those orphans..."]
So ... yeah, it's a really cool idea in SF and maybe for specialized applications in reality (special forces), but, for general usage... I dunno...
Better: Year of the Linux HalterTop
Worse: ... for guys
A good faith reaction would be to work with others to fix the security issues.
The problem is, a lot of the security problems with WebGL need fixing in silicon. With most GPUs currently out there, a small bug anywhere in the OpenGL stack - a huge chunk of code that was designed to run trusted code and so optimised heavily for speed, and not really designed with security in mind - can let shader code completely compromise the system, or at least let malicious code perform a DoS attack....
Then require shaders to be signed (with some system of delegating trust), or only allow webgl programs to reference standard named shaders, or ... etc
Anyway the point is that even if webGL needs to be substantially altered / gimped / whatever, ultimately, it's not an unsolvable problem. Maybe it should be replaced entirely (e.g. by a scene-graph oriented system), though of course "good faith" effort would make the smallest change that reasonably solves the problem.
But however it's addressed, the crucial issue is whether the process is open and broadly based, and result an open widely adopted standard that's equally accessible to all parties -- as webGL is, whatever its flaws -- or something that's proprietary and/or under the control of one party, as MS would no doubt highly prefer (as long as that one party is them).
MS has a lot of really smart and experienced people, so in an ideal world they could play an important part of such an effort -- but unfortunately in this world, their dysfunctional corporate culture and history of backstabbing make it very hard to trust them.
No, you can't "just take a look at Amtrack," because it's a very different system -- slow, unreliable, poorly maintained, hobbled by ill-considered government regulation. HSR should be none of those things, and that directly affects how attractive it is to passengers.
Yup.
The important thing is not that they've pointed out some security problems, but how they're going to proceed from there.
A good faith reaction would be to work with others to fix the security issues.
But of course, they're not going to do that, because security is really just a smokescreen -- their real concern is that WebGL is a portable standard that they have no control over, gives no advantage to Microsoft, and which already works well on competitors' systems.
Guaranteed they subsequently announce they're instead supporting a competing web-3d standard that "leverages Microsoft technologies"...
No mention was made of the "states" in this subthread, but even in the U.S., you can't simply make statements like "they'd be empty" as if the entire country were one homogenous mass.
HSR in the U.S. will first be implemented in corridors where there is sufficient ridership for traditional trains. Maybe in the future, there will be room for exploring alternate models to bring rail transit to random sparsely populated areas of flyover country in the U.S. -- that'd be very cool, and of course single-car DMUs are already widely used on rural lines in sparsely populated areas of other countries -- but that simply isn't the subject being discussed here.