I can recall a few companies making the "we're going to double the number of employees in the next year" kind of announcement over the last few decades, but I'm trying to remember one of them that was still in business (without having collapsed and been acquired, laid off more than they hired, etc.) five years later...
It has been suggested that this will be a limited-production chip/card.
They may have simply accumulated enough fermi chips with a particular defect profile that it made sense to introduce this "new" version which would let them clear out that accumulated inventory.
We used to just set off fission and fusion bombs in the air and on the ground, so I would kinda think the long term risk from a small amount of PU238 at the bottom of the ocean is not all that much in the grand scheme of things, especially since it may be completely contained.
Oh, and there may be a few people still walking around with similarly plutonium-powered pacemakers in their chests...
Amateur radio used to be popular because it let you do something awesome, communicate with people around the world in ways that nobody else could. Whether it was talking to someone on the other side of the country or the globe on HF, or chatting locally on a 2M repeater. It gave you power that ordinarily was reserved for governments or corporations, and as such was one of the coolest nerdy things you could do. It was the same kind of power that came with the early home computer movement.
But then we got computers, which siphoned off a fair amount of ham activity, though in most ways the two hobbies complemented each other very well.
And now there's the internet and cheap world-wide communication that's used by everyone, as well as mobile phones that eliminate the big thrill of local area communication.
So the hobby is doomed right? Well, in some sense that's true because the original thrill and justification really is mostly gone.
But now there's a whole new generation of people discovering Amateur Radio as this cool retro antique activity. Now people begin to do it not because it lets them do something they couldn't do otherwise, but because it's a *fun* and interesting/challenging way to communicate. The old-school hams would be annoyed by the internet and how it made them obsolete, but the new-school hams don't give it a thought because "of course I could just send an email, but this is so much more fun and I'm doing it myself!".
Real time rendering can only be a human animator pipeline productivity tool, not a production rendering technique. Otherwise your render farm is 100% idle unless someone is changing something, so you're wasting virtually all your time and rendering power that could be going towards better quality. Slow rendering gives the hardware something productive to do while the humans are thinking/sleeping.
I think Avatar claimed they spent something like 40 hours on each frame, so no way are we going from hours/frame to 1/24 of a second per frame, even for cheap low-quality throwaway TV production.
So Minecraft is transitioning from "Minecraft Beta 1.9" to "Minecraft 1.0".
If it were me, I would have called the milestone release version "Minecraft 2.0 (because our 1.0 is twice as good as your 1.0)".
I believe it's just a bad idea to have multiple overlapping version numbering sequences. It's fine if you want to do it (as Mojang have) with a developer philosophy justification, but the *practical* implication is that you're going to spend the rest of your life explaining to confused customers why Minecraft 1.0 > Minecraft Beta 1.9, and eventually why Minecraft 1.1 Beta > Minecraft Beta 1.9, etc.
People are going to google for your product, and they're going to find links to "Minecraft 1.0" and "Minecraft Beta 1.9", and which do you think they're going to follow? Chances are a substantial portion of your customer base will install version 1.0, and then find Beta 1.9 out there along with instructions for how to download and install it (which will work over the 1.0 version returning it back to a pre-1.0 beta).
There's a reason why large airports have a LOT of signs telling you exactly where to go. Remove even one and all the tourists are going to get just a little bit more confused and some will end up in the wrong place and clog up traffic and have to go around the airport loop again increasing traffic volume etc. When you have the sort of traffic a major airport does, then every little bit that you can reduce confusion will pay back appreciably.
Doing everything you can to avoid confusing customers for any product (especially one with millions of customers) is also worthwhile, even when it requires you to do things like spell out the blindingly obvious, because otherwise they're going to phone you, and email you, and tweet at you, and gripe about you on forums, and generally consume bandwidth that you would much rather put to other purposes.
Hence, while philosophically I understand "Minecraft 1.0" prefectly, from practical experience I think it's a bad idea.
This is a good reminder that earthquakes do eventually occur in many places that we like to think of as earthquake-proof, even if they're rare.
Having recently moved to the Chicago area from California, I find myself having to learn to live with the vague feeling of unease that's caused by the fact that the most popular building style here seems to be "big pile of bricks".
If an earthquake of substantial size ever does hit you in an area where they are rare enough that there's no pressure to make building codes stronger, then chances are your odds of dying will be a lot greater than if you lived in California where the new buildings are all very safe and the old buildings have at least been tested a few times.
So while living in the mid-west etc. greatly reduces your chance of experiencing a large earthquake, the reduction in risk for actually dying in an earthquake is probably not as large as people like to think.
Honestly Slide to Unlock is the most awful, horrible, annoying, misfeature in the entire iOS system.
Please for the love of god Apple, let me disable this horror.
There is a perfectly good physical switch on the phone which has never, ever, been pushed accidentally. I just want to be able to pick the damn phone up and push a button and have it ON and READY TO USE. I do not want to have to orient it using two hands and perform a careful gesture with no tactile feedback FOR NO EFFING GOOD REASON before I can do anything with the device.
They are welcome to this patent, as I can't imagine ever actually wanting this feature.
Based on how negative of an effect this feature has on iPhone use, I can only assume they have also filed for patents like the one in the subject line, as well as Hit-yourself-in-the-genitals-with-a-baseball-bat-to-unlock, Strangle-a-kitten-to-unlock, and Feed-a-baby-to-a-dingo-to-unlock, all of which could be only marginally worse than the current implementation.
If you have a fine detail that only covers a small portion of a pixel and is thus not resolvable, but you have multiple "frames" and you know exactly how the subject and the camera moved between frames (easier for a static object obviously) then you should be able to solve the system for much higher effective resolution. It has always been my assumption that this sort of thing would be used in spy satellites and other systems where you want to do much better than the diffraction limit.
At one point some years ago I started to try to work out if I could resolve the footsteps left in the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts, given a reasonably large earth-based telescope and enough multiple-frame high-resolution video passes over the target where the motion of the telescope and its optics system was known to a high enough degree of accuracy.
The Journalist observes and then writes words that try to communicate his/her understanding of the situation.
The Photojournalist observes and then takes pictures that try to capture the essence of the situation as he/she understands it.
If you don't want someone else interpreting and summarizing for you, then go there yourself.
We read and view the work of journalists because we want to understand but we don't want to do all the raw data collection and reduction ourselves. To the degree that journalists exhibit biases of one sort or another, we try to chose sources that exhibit similar biases to our own such that their interpretation and analysis will likely be the same (or at least similar) to our own. When the bias is for sensationalism, that's simply not journalism.
I never met him in person, but for a while my company leased space in an Apple-owned building on Valley Green Drive, and Steve would frequently walk past my window on the sidewalk on his way back and forth from HQ to various buildings on VGD (which tended to have all the windows covered up or painted black). He would just be walking alone without any entourage or anything, at a time when Carly was running HP and seemingly couldn't leave her office without press followers, support staff, security detail with automatic weapons, and a helicopter.
I can't imagine how much different (and for the worse) the history of the last thirty years of computing would have been without him.
He will be greatly missed by friends and foes alike.
Honestly when I read about this game it sounds like the developers have exactly the same mindset that Blizzard does, so apart from new scenery and stuff, SWTOR hardly sounds revolutionary in any way.
Quests, leveling, getting to max-level, raiding, limits on end-game content at launch, devs didn't want to allow talent respecs so that "player decisions will mean something" then later change their mind, attempts to encourage/force people to group up in order to do leveling content "because it's a social game and we think people should be social", battlegrounds, $15/month, etc.
The method's efficiency is only half the story, however. When the researchers tried to infect blood cells from the genetically modified kittens with FIV, the virus didn't replicate well. Poeschla and colleagues next plan to test whether the cats are resistant to FIV, or, if not, whether they are less likely to develop feline AIDS after infection.
"I think cats will become easier to utilize as a model organism now that you can manipulate the genome," VandeWoude says. "They're not going to replace mice, but it gives another tool to scientists."
It's the same as it has always been with commercial television, which most people don't understand either.
The vendor is the commercial broadcaster. The customer is the advertiser. The product is the viewer's soul which is sold to the advertiser in 30 second increments.
If you're not paying for something, take time to consider that maybe *you* are what's being sold.
Paying real money is very often the lowest cost way to get something.
"Hi, I'm your car. I have detected an anomaly in a fundamental system element. For liability reasons and to avoid upsetting you, I cannot provide further information at this time. For your safety and convenience, I recommend driving immediately to the nearest licensed manufacturer's repair facility which is three miles to the northwest. I have taken the liberty of programming your on-board navigation system with this destination. Please make a legal U-turn when able."
"Hi, it's me again. I cannot help noticing that you are continuing to travel in a direction away from my recommended repair facility. I am programmed to advise you that your comfort and safety may not be guaranteed if you continue to ignore my mandatory recommendations."
"GPS and navigation data suggest that you are pulling in to a non-factory-licensed automotive repair facility, 'Tom's Car Fixers'. I must tell you that such a facility may not be properly prepared to deal with the complex procedures required to maintain this vehicle, and that The Company cannot be held liable in the event that you suffer death or other inconvenience resulting from this decision."
Tom: "Yeah, we extracted the diagnostic codes from your car, and the fault decodes as MAJOR 11 MINOR 31 SUBCODE 4: ONE OR MORE BRAKE PADS LIFE NOW AT 33% REMAINING AND LOCAL DEALER MAINTENANCE SALES QUOTAS ARE UN-MET. DEALER REPLACEMENT OF ALL BRAKE PADS, ROTORS AND TIRES IS RECOMMENDED."
"Laura Pappano writes that the master's degree, once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D., or as a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, is now the fastest-growing degree[.]
Er, doesn't this sentence totally explain the current phenomenon, thus rendering the whole discussion rather, um, academic?
...WoW's users are building up a tolerance. Players are consuming new content at an ever increasing rate, and with the latest expansion Cataclysm, which took the better part of two years of development effort, many users have consumed the content and quit (again) after only six months or so.
An increasing number of people appear to be becoming tired of the same old recurring end-game structure of 10/25 player raids and working week after week on the next boss fight mechanics in order to slowly replace all of their equipment from the last tier of content with gear from the current content which will eventually get replaced again in the future.
The subscriber base has dropped significantly since it's peak shortly after the Cataclysm release, and Blizzard are now trying lots of things like giving away free copies of the original version of the game, allowing their "refer-a-friend" program to work up through level 80, and now the unlimited free trial period offer here.
Ultimately though the problem is that Blizzard has not been able to think outside the box enough to invent new and compelling *kinds* of content, and their players are increasingly unimpressed with the same cycle of leveling/raiding.
It is likely at this point that WoW has seen its peak in terms of subscriber base and relevance in the gaming world. I think they will always be able to maintain a subscriber base measured in millions, and may well run indefinitely, but if they want to grow again they need to get some fresh talent into their design group.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it Fred.
These days is anyone surprised that working for a games company is something that's best done by the young and unattached? And asshole bosses exist everywhere. Learn from the experience and move on. From all accounts I've seen, you guys produced a pretty darn awesome game.
Honestly there are lots of transactions in life where it's just not in anyone's interest to have the "juicy bits" up on YouTube. The only thing anyone will ever see from courtroom video will be the stuff that's "entertaining" and most likely taken out of context.
All these court proceedings are already public, so if you don't care enough about a trial to actually go there and observe it for yourself, then I don't think you need to have access to a full video record of the proceedings. Transcripts and eyewitness accounts should be plenty.
I am sick of seeing endless trial video filling up the news as it is already. Let us know what the verdict is at the end and skip all the gory details (and interminable tedium) of the process.
The only thing worse than releasing courtroom video is the practice of making 911 call recordings public. Ugh. I do not want to have to listen over and over to people in the middle of some domestic crisis.
It's also a matter of information overload. The amount of raw information collected and available continues to grow exponentially. We need to get better at summarizing data rather than just trying to deliver the raw data directly to everyone. For court proceedings, that's what the news reporter who sat through the trial used to do, and I would be quite happy to see that tradition continue.
So according to Robert Weinberg via the MIT 7.012 class from 2004 available via OpenCourseWare (and iTunes etc.), which is completely and utterly fascinating and I recommend it to any computer geek interested in Biology now that it has become an information science, the average number of cell divisions in a human being over the course of their lifetime is on the order of 10^11 divisions PER DAY. Most of this will be in your gut and bone marrow, etc. The human genome is about 750MB in size, so if you multiply that out then JUST the rate of DNA replication in your body is something like 500 TB/second.
And that impressive number is as *nothing* compared to the total number of other digital operations performed by all of your 10 trillion cells even when they seem to be idling along.
You are way more of a super-computer than you know:)
I too am concerned that people will be volunteering for this under the belief that the latency from radiation exposure to cancer will be longer than their expected life expectancy, when it might well be that their advanced age makes them much more susceptible to dangers induced by ionizing radiation.
It's also not the metal in the oven that's bad for it, it's any configuration where the microwave energy is not absorbed. Metal can absorb (well, couple to, or "receive") microwave energy just fine if it's the right length (this is why the sliced grape plasma thing works too). You can solder a couple short wires onto the end of an incandescent lightbulb, making a little 1/4 wave dipole antenna at 2.45GHz, and the bulb will light up in the oven.
Traditionally the *worst* configuration for damaging the oven is to run it EMPTY (or at least with nothing in it that can absorb the energy). This results in a nearly infinite SWR, with almost all the 600-1200W of energy getting "reflected" back at the transmitter, and it will heat up and die (or melt something important nearby) within maybe 10-30 minutes or so.
Same thing will happen to most transmitters if you disconnect the antenna creating a huge impedance mismatch that literally reflects the energy back to the transmitter. And it's the same reason all high speed communication links (Coax Ethernet, SCSI, etc.) have "terminators" to sink the energy at the end of the transmission line so it doesn't bounce off the end of the cable and echo back down the line.
Metal in the oven is *usually* not a problem the way people think it is. But it will block and reflect (in a more traditional sense) the energy around so that you can't cook a potato wrapped in foil.
Modernist Cuisine has this to say: "Myth: You can't put metal in a Microwave. Fact: Microwaves already have plenty of metal in them: the walls of the oven, the fan [that distributes the microwaves], and so on are all metal! What you need to be careful of is metal that has sharp points or edges. Those features concentrate the electrical field in the oven and cause arcing. Arcing in and of itself isn't too dangerous, but it can ignite dry flammables in the oven. The reason to not use metal cookware is that microwaves cannot penetrate the metal, so your food will not cook."
Well duh, Time Machine already does this for local or NAS storage, so any extension of this into the "cloud" would obviously include the same functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
I can recall a few companies making the "we're going to double the number of employees in the next year" kind of announcement over the last few decades, but I'm trying to remember one of them that was still in business (without having collapsed and been acquired, laid off more than they hired, etc.) five years later...
G.
It has been suggested that this will be a limited-production chip/card.
They may have simply accumulated enough fermi chips with a particular defect profile that it made sense to introduce this "new" version which would let them clear out that accumulated inventory.
G.
We used to just set off fission and fusion bombs in the air and on the ground, so I would kinda think the long term risk from a small amount of PU238 at the bottom of the ocean is not all that much in the grand scheme of things, especially since it may be completely contained.
Oh, and there may be a few people still walking around with similarly plutonium-powered pacemakers in their chests...
http://www.theodoregray.com/periodictable/Samples/094.3/index.s12.html
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/miscellaneous/pacemaker.htm
G.
Amateur radio used to be popular because it let you do something awesome, communicate with people around the world in ways that nobody else could. Whether it was talking to someone on the other side of the country or the globe on HF, or chatting locally on a 2M repeater. It gave you power that ordinarily was reserved for governments or corporations, and as such was one of the coolest nerdy things you could do. It was the same kind of power that came with the early home computer movement.
But then we got computers, which siphoned off a fair amount of ham activity, though in most ways the two hobbies complemented each other very well.
And now there's the internet and cheap world-wide communication that's used by everyone, as well as mobile phones that eliminate the big thrill of local area communication.
So the hobby is doomed right? Well, in some sense that's true because the original thrill and justification really is mostly gone.
But now there's a whole new generation of people discovering Amateur Radio as this cool retro antique activity. Now people begin to do it not because it lets them do something they couldn't do otherwise, but because it's a *fun* and interesting/challenging way to communicate. The old-school hams would be annoyed by the internet and how it made them obsolete, but the new-school hams don't give it a thought because "of course I could just send an email, but this is so much more fun and I'm doing it myself!".
G.
Real time rendering can only be a human animator pipeline productivity tool, not a production rendering technique. Otherwise your render farm is 100% idle unless someone is changing something, so you're wasting virtually all your time and rendering power that could be going towards better quality. Slow rendering gives the hardware something productive to do while the humans are thinking/sleeping.
I think Avatar claimed they spent something like 40 hours on each frame, so no way are we going from hours/frame to 1/24 of a second per frame, even for cheap low-quality throwaway TV production.
Nothing to see here I suspect.
G.
So Minecraft is transitioning from "Minecraft Beta 1.9" to "Minecraft 1.0".
If it were me, I would have called the milestone release version "Minecraft 2.0 (because our 1.0 is twice as good as your 1.0)".
I believe it's just a bad idea to have multiple overlapping version numbering sequences. It's fine if you want to do it (as Mojang have) with a developer philosophy justification, but the *practical* implication is that you're going to spend the rest of your life explaining to confused customers why Minecraft 1.0 > Minecraft Beta 1.9, and eventually why Minecraft 1.1 Beta > Minecraft Beta 1.9, etc.
People are going to google for your product, and they're going to find links to "Minecraft 1.0" and "Minecraft Beta 1.9", and which do you think they're going to follow? Chances are a substantial portion of your customer base will install version 1.0, and then find Beta 1.9 out there along with instructions for how to download and install it (which will work over the 1.0 version returning it back to a pre-1.0 beta).
There's a reason why large airports have a LOT of signs telling you exactly where to go. Remove even one and all the tourists are going to get just a little bit more confused and some will end up in the wrong place and clog up traffic and have to go around the airport loop again increasing traffic volume etc. When you have the sort of traffic a major airport does, then every little bit that you can reduce confusion will pay back appreciably.
Doing everything you can to avoid confusing customers for any product (especially one with millions of customers) is also worthwhile, even when it requires you to do things like spell out the blindingly obvious, because otherwise they're going to phone you, and email you, and tweet at you, and gripe about you on forums, and generally consume bandwidth that you would much rather put to other purposes.
Hence, while philosophically I understand "Minecraft 1.0" prefectly, from practical experience I think it's a bad idea.
G.
This is a good reminder that earthquakes do eventually occur in many places that we like to think of as earthquake-proof, even if they're rare.
Having recently moved to the Chicago area from California, I find myself having to learn to live with the vague feeling of unease that's caused by the fact that the most popular building style here seems to be "big pile of bricks".
If an earthquake of substantial size ever does hit you in an area where they are rare enough that there's no pressure to make building codes stronger, then chances are your odds of dying will be a lot greater than if you lived in California where the new buildings are all very safe and the old buildings have at least been tested a few times.
So while living in the mid-west etc. greatly reduces your chance of experiencing a large earthquake, the reduction in risk for actually dying in an earthquake is probably not as large as people like to think.
G.
Honestly Slide to Unlock is the most awful, horrible, annoying, misfeature in the entire iOS system.
Please for the love of god Apple, let me disable this horror.
There is a perfectly good physical switch on the phone which has never, ever, been pushed accidentally. I just want to be able to pick the damn phone up and push a button and have it ON and READY TO USE. I do not want to have to orient it using two hands and perform a careful gesture with no tactile feedback FOR NO EFFING GOOD REASON before I can do anything with the device.
They are welcome to this patent, as I can't imagine ever actually wanting this feature.
Based on how negative of an effect this feature has on iPhone use, I can only assume they have also filed for patents like the one in the subject line, as well as Hit-yourself-in-the-genitals-with-a-baseball-bat-to-unlock, Strangle-a-kitten-to-unlock, and Feed-a-baby-to-a-dingo-to-unlock, all of which could be only marginally worse than the current implementation.
G.
Pretty sure this has to be the IMDb page in question...
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000659/
G.
If you have a fine detail that only covers a small portion of a pixel and is thus not resolvable, but you have multiple "frames" and you know exactly how the subject and the camera moved between frames (easier for a static object obviously) then you should be able to solve the system for much higher effective resolution. It has always been my assumption that this sort of thing would be used in spy satellites and other systems where you want to do much better than the diffraction limit.
At one point some years ago I started to try to work out if I could resolve the footsteps left in the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts, given a reasonably large earth-based telescope and enough multiple-frame high-resolution video passes over the target where the motion of the telescope and its optics system was known to a high enough degree of accuracy.
G.
The Journalist observes and then writes words that try to communicate his/her understanding of the situation.
The Photojournalist observes and then takes pictures that try to capture the essence of the situation as he/she understands it.
If you don't want someone else interpreting and summarizing for you, then go there yourself.
We read and view the work of journalists because we want to understand but we don't want to do all the raw data collection and reduction ourselves. To the degree that journalists exhibit biases of one sort or another, we try to chose sources that exhibit similar biases to our own such that their interpretation and analysis will likely be the same (or at least similar) to our own. When the bias is for sensationalism, that's simply not journalism.
G.
I never met him in person, but for a while my company leased space in an Apple-owned building on Valley Green Drive, and Steve would frequently walk past my window on the sidewalk on his way back and forth from HQ to various buildings on VGD (which tended to have all the windows covered up or painted black). He would just be walking alone without any entourage or anything, at a time when Carly was running HP and seemingly couldn't leave her office without press followers, support staff, security detail with automatic weapons, and a helicopter.
I can't imagine how much different (and for the worse) the history of the last thirty years of computing would have been without him.
He will be greatly missed by friends and foes alike.
G.
Honestly when I read about this game it sounds like the developers have exactly the same mindset that Blizzard does, so apart from new scenery and stuff, SWTOR hardly sounds revolutionary in any way.
Quests, leveling, getting to max-level, raiding, limits on end-game content at launch, devs didn't want to allow talent respecs so that "player decisions will mean something" then later change their mind, attempts to encourage/force people to group up in order to do leveling content "because it's a social game and we think people should be social", battlegrounds, $15/month, etc.
G.
From TFA:
The method's efficiency is only half the story, however. When the researchers tried to infect blood cells from the genetically modified kittens with FIV, the virus didn't replicate well. Poeschla and colleagues next plan to test whether the cats are resistant to FIV, or, if not, whether they are less likely to develop feline AIDS after infection.
"I think cats will become easier to utilize as a model organism now that you can manipulate the genome," VandeWoude says. "They're not going to replace mice, but it gives another tool to scientists."
G.
It's the same as it has always been with commercial television, which most people don't understand either.
The vendor is the commercial broadcaster.
The customer is the advertiser.
The product is the viewer's soul which is sold to the advertiser in 30 second increments.
If you're not paying for something, take time to consider that maybe *you* are what's being sold.
Paying real money is very often the lowest cost way to get something.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
G.
"Hi, I'm your car. I have detected an anomaly in a fundamental system element. For liability reasons and to avoid upsetting you, I cannot provide further information at this time. For your safety and convenience, I recommend driving immediately to the nearest licensed manufacturer's repair facility which is three miles to the northwest. I have taken the liberty of programming your on-board navigation system with this destination. Please make a legal U-turn when able."
"Hi, it's me again. I cannot help noticing that you are continuing to travel in a direction away from my recommended repair facility. I am programmed to advise you that your comfort and safety may not be guaranteed if you continue to ignore my mandatory recommendations."
"GPS and navigation data suggest that you are pulling in to a non-factory-licensed automotive repair facility, 'Tom's Car Fixers'. I must tell you that such a facility may not be properly prepared to deal with the complex procedures required to maintain this vehicle, and that The Company cannot be held liable in the event that you suffer death or other inconvenience resulting from this decision."
Tom: "Yeah, we extracted the diagnostic codes from your car, and the fault decodes as MAJOR 11 MINOR 31 SUBCODE 4: ONE OR MORE BRAKE PADS LIFE NOW AT 33% REMAINING AND LOCAL DEALER MAINTENANCE SALES QUOTAS ARE UN-MET. DEALER REPLACEMENT OF ALL BRAKE PADS, ROTORS AND TIRES IS RECOMMENDED."
G.
So how is "nanodiamond" material different from graphine?
G.
"Laura Pappano writes that the master's degree, once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D., or as a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, is now the fastest-growing degree[.]
Er, doesn't this sentence totally explain the current phenomenon, thus rendering the whole discussion rather, um, academic?
G.
...WoW's users are building up a tolerance. Players are consuming new content at an ever increasing rate, and with the latest expansion Cataclysm, which took the better part of two years of development effort, many users have consumed the content and quit (again) after only six months or so.
An increasing number of people appear to be becoming tired of the same old recurring end-game structure of 10/25 player raids and working week after week on the next boss fight mechanics in order to slowly replace all of their equipment from the last tier of content with gear from the current content which will eventually get replaced again in the future.
The subscriber base has dropped significantly since it's peak shortly after the Cataclysm release, and Blizzard are now trying lots of things like giving away free copies of the original version of the game, allowing their "refer-a-friend" program to work up through level 80, and now the unlimited free trial period offer here.
Ultimately though the problem is that Blizzard has not been able to think outside the box enough to invent new and compelling *kinds* of content, and their players are increasingly unimpressed with the same cycle of leveling/raiding.
It is likely at this point that WoW has seen its peak in terms of subscriber base and relevance in the gaming world. I think they will always be able to maintain a subscriber base measured in millions, and may well run indefinitely, but if they want to grow again they need to get some fresh talent into their design group.
G.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it Fred.
These days is anyone surprised that working for a games company is something that's best done by the young and unattached? And asshole bosses exist everywhere. Learn from the experience and move on. From all accounts I've seen, you guys produced a pretty darn awesome game.
G.
Honestly there are lots of transactions in life where it's just not in anyone's interest to have the "juicy bits" up on YouTube. The only thing anyone will ever see from courtroom video will be the stuff that's "entertaining" and most likely taken out of context.
All these court proceedings are already public, so if you don't care enough about a trial to actually go there and observe it for yourself, then I don't think you need to have access to a full video record of the proceedings. Transcripts and eyewitness accounts should be plenty.
I am sick of seeing endless trial video filling up the news as it is already. Let us know what the verdict is at the end and skip all the gory details (and interminable tedium) of the process.
The only thing worse than releasing courtroom video is the practice of making 911 call recordings public. Ugh. I do not want to have to listen over and over to people in the middle of some domestic crisis.
It's also a matter of information overload. The amount of raw information collected and available continues to grow exponentially. We need to get better at summarizing data rather than just trying to deliver the raw data directly to everyone. For court proceedings, that's what the news reporter who sat through the trial used to do, and I would be quite happy to see that tradition continue.
G.
So according to Robert Weinberg via the MIT 7.012 class from 2004 available via OpenCourseWare (and iTunes etc.), which is completely and utterly fascinating and I recommend it to any computer geek interested in Biology now that it has become an information science, the average number of cell divisions in a human being over the course of their lifetime is on the order of 10^11 divisions PER DAY. Most of this will be in your gut and bone marrow, etc. The human genome is about 750MB in size, so if you multiply that out then JUST the rate of DNA replication in your body is something like 500 TB/second.
And that impressive number is as *nothing* compared to the total number of other digital operations performed by all of your 10 trillion cells even when they seem to be idling along.
You are way more of a super-computer than you know :)
I too am concerned that people will be volunteering for this under the belief that the latency from radiation exposure to cancer will be longer than their expected life expectancy, when it might well be that their advanced age makes them much more susceptible to dangers induced by ionizing radiation.
G.
I watched a couple videos of this game. Honestly it's going to fail for one reason:
Lightsabers don't actually cut through stuff.
Who wants to play a game where you have to beat someone about the head a dozen times with your lightsaber before they die of a concussion?
G.
Mod parent up.
It's also not the metal in the oven that's bad for it, it's any configuration where the microwave energy is not absorbed. Metal can absorb (well, couple to, or "receive") microwave energy just fine if it's the right length (this is why the sliced grape plasma thing works too). You can solder a couple short wires onto the end of an incandescent lightbulb, making a little 1/4 wave dipole antenna at 2.45GHz, and the bulb will light up in the oven.
Traditionally the *worst* configuration for damaging the oven is to run it EMPTY (or at least with nothing in it that can absorb the energy). This results in a nearly infinite SWR, with almost all the 600-1200W of energy getting "reflected" back at the transmitter, and it will heat up and die (or melt something important nearby) within maybe 10-30 minutes or so.
Same thing will happen to most transmitters if you disconnect the antenna creating a huge impedance mismatch that literally reflects the energy back to the transmitter. And it's the same reason all high speed communication links (Coax Ethernet, SCSI, etc.) have "terminators" to sink the energy at the end of the transmission line so it doesn't bounce off the end of the cable and echo back down the line.
Metal in the oven is *usually* not a problem the way people think it is. But it will block and reflect (in a more traditional sense) the energy around so that you can't cook a potato wrapped in foil.
Modernist Cuisine has this to say: "Myth: You can't put metal in a Microwave. Fact: Microwaves already have plenty of metal in them: the walls of the oven, the fan [that distributes the microwaves], and so on are all metal! What you need to be careful of is metal that has sharp points or edges. Those features concentrate the electrical field in the oven and cause arcing. Arcing in and of itself isn't too dangerous, but it can ignite dry flammables in the oven. The reason to not use metal cookware is that microwaves cannot penetrate the metal, so your food will not cook."
G.
Well duh, Time Machine already does this for local or NAS storage, so any extension of this into the "cloud" would obviously include the same functionality.
Inflammatory summary is inflammatory.
G.