I think the point of the article is that it's the larger, more distant explorations of science that are a matter of faith. I don't think you would find many people who disagree with the existence of gravity as a point of religion. The difference is they would probably tell that God created the laws of gravity and physics, as opposed to a theoretical physicist who said that the laws of physics are a result of X, Y, and Z occurrence at the creation of the Universe. Neither of those are provable in a way that you could understand. It's the way that the physicist (hopefully) reached his conclusion that makes it more believable to you or I. We may not understand more than a fraction of the mathematical proofs and models that are used to describe something like the creation of the universe, but we understand that all of that math is built upon core concepts we can prove to ourselves. That makes a lot more sense to me than accepting Jesus as the son of an omnipotent god that created the world in seven days six thousand years ago.
I would most definitely agree with that observation. A great deal of generally accepted science is difficult to understand for those not in the field. The common-knowledge simplified explanations for things like the creation of the universe aren't that much different from the basic concepts of various religions. If you think about it, the major difference between scientific fact and the teachings of most religions seems to be the role of consciousness in the natural laws of this world (universe, plane of existence, etc). Functionally, there's no real difference between the big bang and genesis. They both are said to have been the source of our current existence. The only difference of any importance is that genesis involves a conscious being and the big bang does not. According to christianity, god's will is impossible for people to comprehend. The creation of the universe, by it's very nature, is impossible to comprehend beyond abstractions that humans create (how can you comprehend something with laws that didn't exist at the time of what you are trying to understand). Science and religion are both attempts to explain as much of the natural world as possible, though they both have to falter at some point. The one fundamental difference between the scientific and the religious explanation for everything is the the religious explanation creates a purpose. God's plan is inconceivable, but he has a plan. There is a purpose to the universe, there is a purpose to this planet, and there is a purpose for your life of suffering. If you eliminate the conscious source of everything, than everything is just an accident.
Religion gives a sense of security and perhaps even self-importance. It's a safety blanket virtually necessitated by the emotional nature of human beings. In a perfect world, everyone would believe whatever they wanted and never tell anyone else about it.
Yeah, that's what I don't understand. Why does law enforcement need to ask the content host for your password when they can just tell the content host to use their super-duper admin powers to let them in the back door? I mean, your email provider may not have your password in clear (or other readable or modifiable form), but they sure as hell have access to the hard drives your account is stored on. Not that this isn't a stupid and terrible idea to begin with...
To be honest, yes I do expect at least some degree of compatibility flexibility. Hell, until last year we still used the long-deprecated AppleWorks 6 for our database management. That program is seven years old and wasn't the most stable piece of software even when it was new, but it worked just fine on everything from the iMac G3 running OS 9.0.4 all the way up to the Intel iMac running 10.6. I upgraded us to FileMaker (and converted the old databases) simply as a security against a future system upgrade breaking AppleWorks and catching me with my pants down. The fact that when Apple releases a major upgrade to Mac OS X, Adobe's response is not to patch the numerous inevitable bugs and incompatibilities that surface in their existing software, but to tell their entire userbase to wait months until they can purchase an entirely new version of their software that isn't backwards compatible with the last edition. I can certainly see and even sympathize with TFA and OP's view that it's ridiculous to have to pay many thousands of dollars (CS Design Standard is $1299 per license) every year just to keep doing the same thing. I can tell you with absolute certainty that my business does not do anything with Photoshop CS5 that we couldn't do with Photoshop 7. If it wasn't for compatibility issues with certain hardware and other graphics designers, I would love to set the office up with cheap late-generation G4s off eBay.
By the way, if Adobe was using Apple's APIs like they were supposed to, then I seriously doubt they would be having any significant compatibility issues between major OS versions or even architectures. I know I haven't written a Creative Suite, but I've done my fair share of Mac OS X and cross-platform development.
Argghhhh! Not only am I a pirate but I am expressing frustration with Adobe!
My family art business has to do a lot of Photoshop work on photographs and uses InDesign for promo material. We also put out a book recently that was almost completely laid out with InDesign. As the IT guy of the business it is my job to make sure that all the hardware and software used for these tasks is functioning. Over the years, we've purchased Photoshop 3, 5, 7 and more recently Adobe CS Design Suite 1 and 2. The purchase of 7 actually necessitated me upgrading an iBook and a Power Mac G4 to Mac OS X because although it did "support" OS 9 it was horribly buggy and slow. Then I had to buy CS1 because 7 didn't like the iMac G5 on 10.3. Eventually the Power Mac was replaced with a Mac Mini G4 and I had to buy CS2 because CS1 crashed a lot in the 10.4 it came with. Next came a MacBook Pro running 10.5. Go figure, CS2 is not supported on Intel Macs (and has been known to actually break their OS). Considering how recently CS2 had been purchased, I was given the green light for an illegal copy of CS3. Of course, for the other machines to be able to open CS3 files I had to install it on everything. Then I discover that CS3 really really hates PPC Macs. After months of trying to live with the issues, I'm forced to replace the Mac Mini with an Intel iMac. Fortunately the iMac G5 is no longer needed, we couldn't have afforded two new Macs. The new iMac comes with 10.6, yay! Except that CS3 has fatal bugs in Snow Leopard. No worries, download CS4 and install. In the process working on another book, we sent a number of CS4 InDesign documents to a graphic designer, who modified them in CS5 and sent them back. *sigh* Off to download CS5 and upgrade again just so we can open a couple layout files... While I was working on the MacBook Pro, I noticed that it now has four different versions of Adobe CS installed on it - CS2, CS3, CS4, and CS5. I tried running the uninstaller for CS2 but it wouldn't launch, just bounced the dock icon for several minutes before disappearing. Good god I hate Adobe software...
It's unbelievable. I go to a well-respected technology institute and the school all but required us to purchase a ThinkPad T410 from them. The hardware wasn't the best, but it was decent. I was surprised to find that my three-year-old C2D MacBook Pro ran Win7 better than this i5 machine. Then I looked under the hood. These laptops come imaged with all sorts of craptastic crapware and really necessary shit. They came with this incredibly annoying background thing called Intel Active Management Technology. I had never heard of it, but according to wikipedia this software that routinely ate about %15 CPU time does absolutely nothing I or nearly any other student would ever have any use for.
My girlfriend here isn't doing much in the technical field so she didn't have any use for any of the preinstalled CAD or embedded control software. I stopped by the campus help desk and purchased a student-discounted windows 7 upgrade disk for $20. I loaded some XP I had lying around and then the Win7 upgrade. Then I only installed the essential drivers from the Lenovo website. She and I were both amazing by how snappy her machine is now. It also stopped randomly shutting down, which she and many other students had often complained to me about. Yeesh. You think they could make a good computer decision at a tech school.
Lawyers and judges. I think it's notable that it seems only those with skill in manipulating others are exhibiting upward mobility. What about the poor texas kid who's got a great mind for algorithms and math but can't go to college because of . In some parts of the country there is decent public education and a whole slew of leg-ups (scholarships, competitions, etc) for students to make their way forward, but it is still really hard to achieve more than the "average" quality of life through application of math, science, and technology skills. The applied "public relations" field of employment (lawyers and politicians) seems to have a disproportionately greater share (as compared to technology workers) of the wealth distribution. It should be obvious: people's who's job is to manipulate the decisions of other people come out way ahead of people who's job is to improve society. Oh and because we're all greedy bastard humans, it's no surprise that those manipulative people on top using their own strong powers of influence to make sure they stay on top.
Mmm. Very true on some points. However it also comes to mind that China is often noted for ignoring things like licensing requirements for foreign-produced software. The chinese business or lab or whatever that isn't paying $X for all their copies of Microsoft Office can put that $X into R&D, advertising, whatever they want.
The big sensationalist media (and unbiased ones too), aka the most followed ones in the US are giving the nuclear danger side of this incredible disaster in Japan a much larger focus than the humanitarian concern. Right now, there are a lot of people dead as a direct result of the tsunami. Many many more are injured and possibly dying, not to mention homeless and displaced. While I appreciate that nuke stories have high "cool factor", it's upsetting to me that whenever I talk to people about this disaster, everyone seems to forget that there are things and people in Japan other than reactors and reactor workers.
Indeed. This is the issue with society/humanity in general though. The ideal situation for software licensing (and pretty much all contract and law) would to have absolutely no software licenses simply because everyone inherently doesn't do anything that anyone else disagrees with. Alas, that's an incredibly unlikely situation to occur in the near future (barring there being a worldwide nuclear holocaust with only one survivor). Thus we must stoop to the next best thing: there are laws, contracts, and licenses in place to ensure that at all times, the largest possible group of people is pleased. That's the theory behind democratic government and such. Of course, that's not even close to reality either. I think that time will tell with this current software predicament.
To my knowledge, a number of critical projects have held off switching to GPLv3. Also, this loophole fix in GPLv3 makes it less likely that certain bodies (commercial ones, of course) will use GPL software, as they may have only been willing to comply under the previous terms. On the other hand, the "spirit" of the license has not changed, so I do not see any reason why developers who had chosen not to adopt it before would do so now.
For what it's worth, I'm more of a supporter of the BSD concept, although I do see the need for both. While I do support free software pretty strongly, I don't see commercial software going away any time soon and I think the open source community should seek allies within the realm of proprietary usage. I don't hate iPhones because I believe the user should be able to decide that they don't care if they are locked into a walled garden. Of course it would make me happier if there was a "jailbreak" button that informed users of the consequences of root access, but the fact that there isn't doesn't make me want to boycott Apple. Everyone on all sides of the issue needs to realize that this is not a perfect world and we can't all be happy and in agreement. Compromise is the only way for everyone to move forward.
I second this. iTunes takes the ID3 tags concept and wraps it around movies, audiobooks, etc. As you can sort and categorize your music with various metadata properties, movies can be organized likewise. I don't do too much movie/tv show viewing in iTunes, as I either use just plain old Quicktime or my iPad. Unfortunately it's pretty much MPEG4 (h.264 optional) or bust. Even with Perian or other codecs installed, no go for alternative formats.
As far as I've seen, game developers working on their game engines re-implement everything themselves. The Source engine is written in C++, but makes virtually no usage of any STL. They wrote their own container implementations, etc. The why would you want to probably stems from the desire to have full control over the implementation of all of their "under the hood" stuff. I can certainly think of a few situations when I wish I could make some change to the STL map class or somesuch. Not to mention in large development project you probably want to avoid dependance on external libraries wherever possible.
Someone with a deep understanding or perhaps even a conception of the inner workings of said robot may understand that, but the layman may not. The appearance and presentation of a particular robot would probably play a big role in the face-value interpretation of it's "intentions." What I mean is that an individual interacting with an obviously mechanical construct covered with sharp corners, hard lines, and protruding wires is undoubtedly going to make the connection: "machine - artificial construct - no soul." While being presented with a smooth-featured, soft-colored, and possibly vaguely humanoid model may make it easier for the individual's mind to relax and subconsciously process it as another emotionally-driven being. However, I would point out that interacting with an android that's created with the intent of being as close to human in appearance, but still somewhat obviously artificial would probably have more of a creepiness factor than a more purpose-suited robot.
Ever see the movie Short Circuit?:P
I remember reading a review by an owner of the 360 version about how at least one DLC item that was mastered on the disk required purchase and download of an activation key. Regardless, what I'm saying applies to the concept of launch DLC in general. It's a publisher's way of inflating the price of the game beyond the $50 (or these days $60) standard. Sure you *could* just pay for the "standard" edition but all those people who dropped extra cash are getting quests, items, whatever that were developed alongside the base game. It's worse in some multiplayer games where on day one, if you didn't pay for *extra item pack X* then you're immediately at a disadvantage to all the players who did.
These days the only Bioware games that haven't been shit are the ones that weren't massively hyped. Mass Effect and SW:KOTOR were great. ME2 and DA:O are terrible and I regret purchasing them.
Totally. I loved the BG and IWD series games so much (still play them occasionally) that when I heard that DA:O was a spiritual successor to them I picked it up for $50 without even trying it first, something I usually never do. I have to say that is one of the very few game purchases I regret. For $50 I got an incomplete game with crappy visuals, a thin plot, and NPCs asking for my credit card left and right. "Help! Help, my castle is on fire! Help me please!" "Ok, I'd be happy to help. Where is it?" "Oh thank you thank you! Now I just need you to give me 1200 Bioware Points and then we can be on our way:)"
I mean come on... Worse yet, turns out that all those DLC quests and such you're bugged about throughout the game are actually already on the XBOX 360 game disk. When you purchase them it just downloads a tiny activation file to allow you access to content that was created and mastered along with the base game...
Take a look at the Mass Effect games. The first one wasn't a very big project compared to the second one. ME2 was an immensely hyped sequel due to the surprise popularity of the first one. They both had sexual aspects, but the second was definitely much more of a teenage-boy-pleasing game. The three female squad members in ME1 wear armor on combat missions. Makes sense considering they're usually getting shot at, dodging bone-breaking biotics, and possibly performing EVA in a vacuum. Mass Effect 2, however, has the majority of the female characters prancing around in either skin-tight body suits, epic v-necks, or next to nothing. Yeah I had a good laugh when you're wearing full armor complete with oxygen helmet and Miranda's out of proportion body is still squeezing into that flimsy spandex with a little rebreather mask. I mean come on, you could at least be a little discrete with the fan-service.
My point is I find it unfortunate that such a popular game and sequel to a great game could be so misogynist. It really degraded my game experience.
$5 a month? AT&T (my carrier) charges $20 a month on top of existing plans.
Source: http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/services/serviceDetails.jsp?LOSGId=&skuId=sku1160055&catId=cat1470003 (may have to enter a zip code)
Why exactly do you think sending messages over the MAP signaling channel would be so expensive or resource-intensive? We're talking about a sub-protocol of GSM that was already in existence and in use for carrier-related messaging. We're also talking about max of approx. 1 KB per message. The message goes from your phone to a relatively simple routing node. It's best effort, so there's really not much overhead or verification. Not to mention if this routing infrastructure is really as expensive as you think, there's really no reason why they can't move it to the IP layer. That's how 3G and other non-GSM devices function, they wrap the SMS in their native data format. I've got a 3-year-old GSM phone with data capabilities.
I don't think there's a single teenager, especially first-borns, that gets a cell phone and then doesn't go over the texting limit in the first month. Back in high school I remember people getting chewed out all the time for racking up something like $200 worth of overages. Honestly, we'd be better off without the telcos as they are. Remember this? http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html
Cell phone networks use digital voice protocols, of course. Essentially, your audio is being streamed as a (compressed) data file over a data network. The GSM-EFR audio codec has a bitrate of 12.2 kbps. Obviously more modern phones probably use a higher-bitrate codec. That means for one minute of audio 60 * 12.2 kb or approx. 750000 bits of data is sent. One AT&T text message costs $0.20. The maximum size of an SMS message is 1120 bits (140 characters). That means in the data space of one minute of voice you could send 700 messages. At 20 cents each that's $140. Now I'm pretty sure that there aren't any cell phone plans (excluding sat phones) that cost $140 per minute of speech.
I've been to Mexico many times over the past 10 years, my family has many friends that alternate between living in the US and Mexico. Last time I was there I was visiting friends that live in a small silver-mining town in the mountains around Guanajuato, one of the largest cities in Mexico. On the car ride from the airport we passed lots of cars that stretched for miles upon miles. Along the highway were storage lots for a US-based auto manufacturer, filled with uncountable numbers of SUVs and minivans. While we were passing through the outskirts of Guanajuato my friend pointed out a shopping complex that was under construction. We went back later to purchase something. This mall-thing was half-finished, but open to the public. In it there was a video store selling movies for upwards of 200 pesos (that's quite a bit of money for the average family living there), a sushi bar selling the less-extravagant types of sushi, and a large walmart-type store that sold just about anything. Seeing this complex really baffled me, as it was in one of the poorer areas of the city and literally surrounded by shacks. My friend (who is in the Mexican equivalent of upper middle class), told me about how when they first opened it the locals flocked to buy junk and things they could not afford. Such is the world...
I'd say that 7200 RPMs won't be affected nearly as much as the 10000+ RPMs. I use a quad of WD Caviar Black 750GB 7200s in my audio workstation. The higher spin rate is hugely noticeable in audio sample latency. The 800GB 5400 Caviar Green that I use for the boot drive couldn't come close to keeping up with the immense disk reads mandated by many large sampled instruments streaming at the same time. On the other hand, an SSD or ever one of those 10000 RPM disks would probably be overkill. I've balanced out different samplers and libraries across the four disks so that there typically won't be too much load on any one disk. Perhaps one or two faster drives could eliminate the need for that consideration, my method is cheaper and with the added bonus of greatly increased storage space. So yeah, the typical prosumer can probably leverage existing storage solutions for their purposes. Not to mention I doubt a recording studio with 2TB+ of samples and loops is going to want to drop $8500 on an SDD array (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227516) when they can get a handful of 600GB VelociRaptors (10000RPM) for less than $300 each (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136803).
If you've ever used a Palm device, you'd know that cruddy single-touch digitizers are capable of just as many gestures as any modern multitouch screens. Every touch-screen palm device I know of used a number of glyph gestures called graffiti for handwriting interpretation. In that sense, multitouch would have been completely useless since you had to write with a stylus.
It's not actually Apple's fault. In my research for building hackintoshes I learned that the reason you can't use an off-the-shelf GTX 285 in a Mac Pro is the card's firmware isn't capable of interfacing with the EFI (BIOS) in a Mac. The Mac version of the 285 actually has different firmware than the PC card. If you wanted to risk bricking a $400 card you could try flashing a PC card with EFI-compatible firmware.
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I think the point of the article is that it's the larger, more distant explorations of science that are a matter of faith. I don't think you would find many people who disagree with the existence of gravity as a point of religion. The difference is they would probably tell that God created the laws of gravity and physics, as opposed to a theoretical physicist who said that the laws of physics are a result of X, Y, and Z occurrence at the creation of the Universe. Neither of those are provable in a way that you could understand. It's the way that the physicist (hopefully) reached his conclusion that makes it more believable to you or I. We may not understand more than a fraction of the mathematical proofs and models that are used to describe something like the creation of the universe, but we understand that all of that math is built upon core concepts we can prove to ourselves. That makes a lot more sense to me than accepting Jesus as the son of an omnipotent god that created the world in seven days six thousand years ago.
I would most definitely agree with that observation. A great deal of generally accepted science is difficult to understand for those not in the field. The common-knowledge simplified explanations for things like the creation of the universe aren't that much different from the basic concepts of various religions. If you think about it, the major difference between scientific fact and the teachings of most religions seems to be the role of consciousness in the natural laws of this world (universe, plane of existence, etc). Functionally, there's no real difference between the big bang and genesis. They both are said to have been the source of our current existence. The only difference of any importance is that genesis involves a conscious being and the big bang does not. According to christianity, god's will is impossible for people to comprehend. The creation of the universe, by it's very nature, is impossible to comprehend beyond abstractions that humans create (how can you comprehend something with laws that didn't exist at the time of what you are trying to understand). Science and religion are both attempts to explain as much of the natural world as possible, though they both have to falter at some point. The one fundamental difference between the scientific and the religious explanation for everything is the the religious explanation creates a purpose. God's plan is inconceivable, but he has a plan. There is a purpose to the universe, there is a purpose to this planet, and there is a purpose for your life of suffering. If you eliminate the conscious source of everything, than everything is just an accident. Religion gives a sense of security and perhaps even self-importance. It's a safety blanket virtually necessitated by the emotional nature of human beings. In a perfect world, everyone would believe whatever they wanted and never tell anyone else about it.
Yeah, that's what I don't understand. Why does law enforcement need to ask the content host for your password when they can just tell the content host to use their super-duper admin powers to let them in the back door? I mean, your email provider may not have your password in clear (or other readable or modifiable form), but they sure as hell have access to the hard drives your account is stored on. Not that this isn't a stupid and terrible idea to begin with...
The worst part of that is that by nature of the problem, it means that some developer(s) was/were lazy when they hardcoded some filenames somewhere.
To be honest, yes I do expect at least some degree of compatibility flexibility. Hell, until last year we still used the long-deprecated AppleWorks 6 for our database management. That program is seven years old and wasn't the most stable piece of software even when it was new, but it worked just fine on everything from the iMac G3 running OS 9.0.4 all the way up to the Intel iMac running 10.6. I upgraded us to FileMaker (and converted the old databases) simply as a security against a future system upgrade breaking AppleWorks and catching me with my pants down. The fact that when Apple releases a major upgrade to Mac OS X, Adobe's response is not to patch the numerous inevitable bugs and incompatibilities that surface in their existing software, but to tell their entire userbase to wait months until they can purchase an entirely new version of their software that isn't backwards compatible with the last edition. I can certainly see and even sympathize with TFA and OP's view that it's ridiculous to have to pay many thousands of dollars (CS Design Standard is $1299 per license) every year just to keep doing the same thing. I can tell you with absolute certainty that my business does not do anything with Photoshop CS5 that we couldn't do with Photoshop 7. If it wasn't for compatibility issues with certain hardware and other graphics designers, I would love to set the office up with cheap late-generation G4s off eBay.
By the way, if Adobe was using Apple's APIs like they were supposed to, then I seriously doubt they would be having any significant compatibility issues between major OS versions or even architectures. I know I haven't written a Creative Suite, but I've done my fair share of Mac OS X and cross-platform development.
Argghhhh! Not only am I a pirate but I am expressing frustration with Adobe!
My family art business has to do a lot of Photoshop work on photographs and uses InDesign for promo material. We also put out a book recently that was almost completely laid out with InDesign. As the IT guy of the business it is my job to make sure that all the hardware and software used for these tasks is functioning. Over the years, we've purchased Photoshop 3, 5, 7 and more recently Adobe CS Design Suite 1 and 2. The purchase of 7 actually necessitated me upgrading an iBook and a Power Mac G4 to Mac OS X because although it did "support" OS 9 it was horribly buggy and slow. Then I had to buy CS1 because 7 didn't like the iMac G5 on 10.3. Eventually the Power Mac was replaced with a Mac Mini G4 and I had to buy CS2 because CS1 crashed a lot in the 10.4 it came with. Next came a MacBook Pro running 10.5. Go figure, CS2 is not supported on Intel Macs (and has been known to actually break their OS). Considering how recently CS2 had been purchased, I was given the green light for an illegal copy of CS3. Of course, for the other machines to be able to open CS3 files I had to install it on everything. Then I discover that CS3 really really hates PPC Macs. After months of trying to live with the issues, I'm forced to replace the Mac Mini with an Intel iMac. Fortunately the iMac G5 is no longer needed, we couldn't have afforded two new Macs. The new iMac comes with 10.6, yay! Except that CS3 has fatal bugs in Snow Leopard. No worries, download CS4 and install. In the process working on another book, we sent a number of CS4 InDesign documents to a graphic designer, who modified them in CS5 and sent them back. *sigh* Off to download CS5 and upgrade again just so we can open a couple layout files... While I was working on the MacBook Pro, I noticed that it now has four different versions of Adobe CS installed on it - CS2, CS3, CS4, and CS5. I tried running the uninstaller for CS2 but it wouldn't launch, just bounced the dock icon for several minutes before disappearing. Good god I hate Adobe software...
It's unbelievable. I go to a well-respected technology institute and the school all but required us to purchase a ThinkPad T410 from them. The hardware wasn't the best, but it was decent. I was surprised to find that my three-year-old C2D MacBook Pro ran Win7 better than this i5 machine. Then I looked under the hood. These laptops come imaged with all sorts of craptastic crapware and really necessary shit. They came with this incredibly annoying background thing called Intel Active Management Technology. I had never heard of it, but according to wikipedia this software that routinely ate about %15 CPU time does absolutely nothing I or nearly any other student would ever have any use for.
My girlfriend here isn't doing much in the technical field so she didn't have any use for any of the preinstalled CAD or embedded control software. I stopped by the campus help desk and purchased a student-discounted windows 7 upgrade disk for $20. I loaded some XP I had lying around and then the Win7 upgrade. Then I only installed the essential drivers from the Lenovo website. She and I were both amazing by how snappy her machine is now. It also stopped randomly shutting down, which she and many other students had often complained to me about. Yeesh. You think they could make a good computer decision at a tech school.
Lawyers and judges. I think it's notable that it seems only those with skill in manipulating others are exhibiting upward mobility. What about the poor texas kid who's got a great mind for algorithms and math but can't go to college because of . In some parts of the country there is decent public education and a whole slew of leg-ups (scholarships, competitions, etc) for students to make their way forward, but it is still really hard to achieve more than the "average" quality of life through application of math, science, and technology skills. The applied "public relations" field of employment (lawyers and politicians) seems to have a disproportionately greater share (as compared to technology workers) of the wealth distribution. It should be obvious: people's who's job is to manipulate the decisions of other people come out way ahead of people who's job is to improve society. Oh and because we're all greedy bastard humans, it's no surprise that those manipulative people on top using their own strong powers of influence to make sure they stay on top.
Electrical Engineer Average Salary
Software Engineer Average Salary
Average Lobbyist Salary
Mmm. Very true on some points. However it also comes to mind that China is often noted for ignoring things like licensing requirements for foreign-produced software. The chinese business or lab or whatever that isn't paying $X for all their copies of Microsoft Office can put that $X into R&D, advertising, whatever they want.
It may not be the way the world ought to work, but it is how it does work.
And I reserve the right to be upset by that fact.
The big sensationalist media (and unbiased ones too), aka the most followed ones in the US are giving the nuclear danger side of this incredible disaster in Japan a much larger focus than the humanitarian concern. Right now, there are a lot of people dead as a direct result of the tsunami. Many many more are injured and possibly dying, not to mention homeless and displaced. While I appreciate that nuke stories have high "cool factor", it's upsetting to me that whenever I talk to people about this disaster, everyone seems to forget that there are things and people in Japan other than reactors and reactor workers.
Indeed. This is the issue with society/humanity in general though. The ideal situation for software licensing (and pretty much all contract and law) would to have absolutely no software licenses simply because everyone inherently doesn't do anything that anyone else disagrees with. Alas, that's an incredibly unlikely situation to occur in the near future (barring there being a worldwide nuclear holocaust with only one survivor). Thus we must stoop to the next best thing: there are laws, contracts, and licenses in place to ensure that at all times, the largest possible group of people is pleased. That's the theory behind democratic government and such. Of course, that's not even close to reality either. I think that time will tell with this current software predicament.
To my knowledge, a number of critical projects have held off switching to GPLv3. Also, this loophole fix in GPLv3 makes it less likely that certain bodies (commercial ones, of course) will use GPL software, as they may have only been willing to comply under the previous terms. On the other hand, the "spirit" of the license has not changed, so I do not see any reason why developers who had chosen not to adopt it before would do so now.
For what it's worth, I'm more of a supporter of the BSD concept, although I do see the need for both. While I do support free software pretty strongly, I don't see commercial software going away any time soon and I think the open source community should seek allies within the realm of proprietary usage. I don't hate iPhones because I believe the user should be able to decide that they don't care if they are locked into a walled garden. Of course it would make me happier if there was a "jailbreak" button that informed users of the consequences of root access, but the fact that there isn't doesn't make me want to boycott Apple. Everyone on all sides of the issue needs to realize that this is not a perfect world and we can't all be happy and in agreement. Compromise is the only way for everyone to move forward.
I second this. iTunes takes the ID3 tags concept and wraps it around movies, audiobooks, etc. As you can sort and categorize your music with various metadata properties, movies can be organized likewise. I don't do too much movie/tv show viewing in iTunes, as I either use just plain old Quicktime or my iPad. Unfortunately it's pretty much MPEG4 (h.264 optional) or bust. Even with Perian or other codecs installed, no go for alternative formats.
As far as I've seen, game developers working on their game engines re-implement everything themselves. The Source engine is written in C++, but makes virtually no usage of any STL. They wrote their own container implementations, etc. The why would you want to probably stems from the desire to have full control over the implementation of all of their "under the hood" stuff. I can certainly think of a few situations when I wish I could make some change to the STL map class or somesuch. Not to mention in large development project you probably want to avoid dependance on external libraries wherever possible.
Someone with a deep understanding or perhaps even a conception of the inner workings of said robot may understand that, but the layman may not. The appearance and presentation of a particular robot would probably play a big role in the face-value interpretation of it's "intentions." What I mean is that an individual interacting with an obviously mechanical construct covered with sharp corners, hard lines, and protruding wires is undoubtedly going to make the connection: "machine - artificial construct - no soul." While being presented with a smooth-featured, soft-colored, and possibly vaguely humanoid model may make it easier for the individual's mind to relax and subconsciously process it as another emotionally-driven being. However, I would point out that interacting with an android that's created with the intent of being as close to human in appearance, but still somewhat obviously artificial would probably have more of a creepiness factor than a more purpose-suited robot. Ever see the movie Short Circuit? :P
I remember reading a review by an owner of the 360 version about how at least one DLC item that was mastered on the disk required purchase and download of an activation key. Regardless, what I'm saying applies to the concept of launch DLC in general. It's a publisher's way of inflating the price of the game beyond the $50 (or these days $60) standard. Sure you *could* just pay for the "standard" edition but all those people who dropped extra cash are getting quests, items, whatever that were developed alongside the base game. It's worse in some multiplayer games where on day one, if you didn't pay for *extra item pack X* then you're immediately at a disadvantage to all the players who did.
These days the only Bioware games that haven't been shit are the ones that weren't massively hyped. Mass Effect and SW:KOTOR were great. ME2 and DA:O are terrible and I regret purchasing them.
Totally. I loved the BG and IWD series games so much (still play them occasionally) that when I heard that DA:O was a spiritual successor to them I picked it up for $50 without even trying it first, something I usually never do. I have to say that is one of the very few game purchases I regret. For $50 I got an incomplete game with crappy visuals, a thin plot, and NPCs asking for my credit card left and right. "Help! Help, my castle is on fire! Help me please!" "Ok, I'd be happy to help. Where is it?" "Oh thank you thank you! Now I just need you to give me 1200 Bioware Points and then we can be on our way :)"
I mean come on... Worse yet, turns out that all those DLC quests and such you're bugged about throughout the game are actually already on the XBOX 360 game disk. When you purchase them it just downloads a tiny activation file to allow you access to content that was created and mastered along with the base game...
Take a look at the Mass Effect games. The first one wasn't a very big project compared to the second one. ME2 was an immensely hyped sequel due to the surprise popularity of the first one. They both had sexual aspects, but the second was definitely much more of a teenage-boy-pleasing game. The three female squad members in ME1 wear armor on combat missions. Makes sense considering they're usually getting shot at, dodging bone-breaking biotics, and possibly performing EVA in a vacuum. Mass Effect 2, however, has the majority of the female characters prancing around in either skin-tight body suits, epic v-necks, or next to nothing. Yeah I had a good laugh when you're wearing full armor complete with oxygen helmet and Miranda's out of proportion body is still squeezing into that flimsy spandex with a little rebreather mask. I mean come on, you could at least be a little discrete with the fan-service. My point is I find it unfortunate that such a popular game and sequel to a great game could be so misogynist. It really degraded my game experience.
$5 a month? AT&T (my carrier) charges $20 a month on top of existing plans. Source: http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/services/serviceDetails.jsp?LOSGId=&skuId=sku1160055&catId=cat1470003 (may have to enter a zip code) Why exactly do you think sending messages over the MAP signaling channel would be so expensive or resource-intensive? We're talking about a sub-protocol of GSM that was already in existence and in use for carrier-related messaging. We're also talking about max of approx. 1 KB per message. The message goes from your phone to a relatively simple routing node. It's best effort, so there's really not much overhead or verification. Not to mention if this routing infrastructure is really as expensive as you think, there's really no reason why they can't move it to the IP layer. That's how 3G and other non-GSM devices function, they wrap the SMS in their native data format. I've got a 3-year-old GSM phone with data capabilities. I don't think there's a single teenager, especially first-borns, that gets a cell phone and then doesn't go over the texting limit in the first month. Back in high school I remember people getting chewed out all the time for racking up something like $200 worth of overages. Honestly, we'd be better off without the telcos as they are. Remember this? http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html
Cell phone networks use digital voice protocols, of course. Essentially, your audio is being streamed as a (compressed) data file over a data network. The GSM-EFR audio codec has a bitrate of 12.2 kbps. Obviously more modern phones probably use a higher-bitrate codec. That means for one minute of audio 60 * 12.2 kb or approx. 750000 bits of data is sent. One AT&T text message costs $0.20. The maximum size of an SMS message is 1120 bits (140 characters). That means in the data space of one minute of voice you could send 700 messages. At 20 cents each that's $140. Now I'm pretty sure that there aren't any cell phone plans (excluding sat phones) that cost $140 per minute of speech.
I've been to Mexico many times over the past 10 years, my family has many friends that alternate between living in the US and Mexico. Last time I was there I was visiting friends that live in a small silver-mining town in the mountains around Guanajuato, one of the largest cities in Mexico. On the car ride from the airport we passed lots of cars that stretched for miles upon miles. Along the highway were storage lots for a US-based auto manufacturer, filled with uncountable numbers of SUVs and minivans. While we were passing through the outskirts of Guanajuato my friend pointed out a shopping complex that was under construction. We went back later to purchase something. This mall-thing was half-finished, but open to the public. In it there was a video store selling movies for upwards of 200 pesos (that's quite a bit of money for the average family living there), a sushi bar selling the less-extravagant types of sushi, and a large walmart-type store that sold just about anything. Seeing this complex really baffled me, as it was in one of the poorer areas of the city and literally surrounded by shacks. My friend (who is in the Mexican equivalent of upper middle class), told me about how when they first opened it the locals flocked to buy junk and things they could not afford. Such is the world...
I'd say that 7200 RPMs won't be affected nearly as much as the 10000+ RPMs. I use a quad of WD Caviar Black 750GB 7200s in my audio workstation. The higher spin rate is hugely noticeable in audio sample latency. The 800GB 5400 Caviar Green that I use for the boot drive couldn't come close to keeping up with the immense disk reads mandated by many large sampled instruments streaming at the same time. On the other hand, an SSD or ever one of those 10000 RPM disks would probably be overkill. I've balanced out different samplers and libraries across the four disks so that there typically won't be too much load on any one disk. Perhaps one or two faster drives could eliminate the need for that consideration, my method is cheaper and with the added bonus of greatly increased storage space. So yeah, the typical prosumer can probably leverage existing storage solutions for their purposes. Not to mention I doubt a recording studio with 2TB+ of samples and loops is going to want to drop $8500 on an SDD array (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227516) when they can get a handful of 600GB VelociRaptors (10000RPM) for less than $300 each (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136803).
If you've ever used a Palm device, you'd know that cruddy single-touch digitizers are capable of just as many gestures as any modern multitouch screens. Every touch-screen palm device I know of used a number of glyph gestures called graffiti for handwriting interpretation. In that sense, multitouch would have been completely useless since you had to write with a stylus.
It's not actually Apple's fault. In my research for building hackintoshes I learned that the reason you can't use an off-the-shelf GTX 285 in a Mac Pro is the card's firmware isn't capable of interfacing with the EFI (BIOS) in a Mac. The Mac version of the 285 actually has different firmware than the PC card. If you wanted to risk bricking a $400 card you could try flashing a PC card with EFI-compatible firmware.