Do I have you mistaken for someone else or have you not been going on for some time with a meme about Google building some sort of super computer that is the Internet? Moreover, is it not established fact that none of these predictions have come true and Google has remained what it has always been, a search engine with text ads driving revenue and some interesting, but non-revolutionary and non-revenue producing side applications?
I'm calling you out. I ask that you fully disclose in a follow up article any stake-holdings you have in Google, its partners, or investors and, if existent, when you acquired those interests.
To the particulars of your argument, Google has a massively distributed database and a very high volume of queries. There need not be any conspiratorial or unusual reason for them to acquire lots of bandwidth and build distributed data centers aside from supporting their main functionality in a cost-efficient manner.
I do not think rampant speculation on the basis of scant fact, and repeated rampant speculation without any indication that past speculation has been borne out by actual facts, represents responsible journalism.
If I remember correctly, there is a cultural issue here in that Unicode is apparently considered with some disdain in Japan and local multi-byte encodings are used, one of which Ruby supports. If you do some searches, you can probably find the full background story.
I was going to post the same thing. "A matter of years" could mean 3, it could mean 100, it could mean 'til the end of Sol, etc. Instead of what? Decades? Centuries? Millennia?
"Most on the time while exploring the world, I galloped on an invisible, waterwalking horse..."
I never played the game, but what you describe actually seems complimentary of the game's flexibility. You essentially became a ghost, or more specifically a poltergeist since you could manipulate objects and cast spells while invisible, apparently.
Someone needs to come up with a checklist for why [someone's technical solution for avoiding traffic jams] is [impractical/unworkable/unacceptable] like I have seen here on Slashdot for spam. It seems we constantly hear about some new proposal for eliminating traffic jams, yet none of them ever come to fruition. I'll throw out some general reasons why:
1. The solution generally assumes that everyone opts-in. This is impossible. Not everyone is going to buy a new device to assist in traffic tracking. If an existing device, not everyone is going to have that device. 2. The tracking accuracy of the device or measurement system is poor. Look at this article. 330 feet? In places where traffic is congested, 330 feet can cover 6 streets. 3. Who is going to pay for this? Fine, you could technically get some traffic statistics if your device magically worked and everyone participated. Is it actually a sustainable business? Doubt it. 4. How much is it going to cost? We are talking a lot of bandwidth here to be getting enough data (and through low/expensive bandwidth mediums like cell networks, et cetera), and a lot of processing of that data against geographic databases to be able to do any meaningful data analysis. 5. So let's say you took care of the technical hurdles and had a lot of data and processed it and you had a great map of traffic in the local metro region. You are now parked on your ass in the operation center viewing your beautiful map, which is great and all, except you aren't driving and everyone who is driving has no idea how beautiful your map is. How are you going to get this information to people who are actually, you know, in traffic? 6. As a follow up of (5), let's say that you had a little printer in everyone's car and printed out your beautiful map right to their passenger seat. They pick it up, and while they are googling at its beauty and trying to locate where they are on the map, they plow right into the back of oil truck, explode, and die. Thanks, you just caused a huge backup, asshat. Assuming you get the information to the drivers, how are they going to be able to interpret the data with minimal attention while they are, you know, driving?
I would go on (and I hope someone else does), but these various traffic jam proposals that never work out are getting kind of silly. Everyone thinks they are a genius because they figured out that hey, if we got information on where are the cars are... and we put it on a map.. with like computers and stuff... we'd like... solve traffic! Except that getting from "genius idea" to "practical and effective traffic control" is non-trival.
"Nobody wants to say they've got counterfeit gear inside their enterprises that can all of a sudden stop working."
That sentence reads the same if you remove "counterfeit". Hardware and software that can all of a sudden stop working is a fact of life, regardless of manufacturer.
The use of logos to indicate that a piece of hardware is genuinely from another company when it is not is unethical and should be stopped, but this argument is simply a scare tactic attempting to disguise the real interest, which is that of the manufacturer whose logo is on the product and is angry they did not derive any revenue from the sale. Otherwise, they could care less. From a consumer standpoint, safety is found in redundancy and contingency planning, not trusting that the logo of any one manufacturer on an item means it will not suddenly stop working. I do not blame the manufacturer for wanting in on the sale, but tell it straight, don't childishly trot out the bogeyman to get sympathy,.
Explains everything observed by these sites. I predict that a lack of science and math education will continue to result in people fruitlessly attempting to use past performances in predicting chance-based events (either because of true randomness or sufficient complexity to thwart casual analysis) to denote exports that will at some point start getting it wrong.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Consider what happens to code development shipped offshore. It amuses me that businesses with strict non-open source code policies offshore code development because it's pretty much a de facto, if unofficial, grant of open source. It's even worse when people use offshore resources for "secret" prototype development and the such in an attempt to save money on project startup. I cannot think of a worse venue to put confidential new development into.
This problem is a compound problem. First you have low wage workers that are more likely to succumb to temptation of selling such secrets. Second, you have jurisdictional problems - technically you could make a legal claim through treaties and the like, but the hassles and delays would take years and years to resolve and probably give no real satisfaction (this is why I say de facto in the above, even if you disallow something, if there is no real useful legal remedial process behind it, whatever agreed is basically unenforcable). Third, there are cultural problems where intellectual property and consumer privacy are fairly artificial constructs of the legal systems of developed countries.
The bottom line is that this is only going to get worse and I imagine that Western companies will soon face legal liability for outsourcing in two ways:
1. To shareholders for assigning development to offshore resources that results in compromise of trade secrets or the like. 2. To consumers for breaches of privacy and resulting identify theft and the like.
The companies will argue that they entered into contractual agreements with third parties so it wasn't their fault, but I suspect that many of these cases could and will be successfully pressed on the basis of a lack of due diligence, especially against the backdrop of known incidents such as this.
If you ever actually see an albatross at sea, you will know this is complete bullocks. An albatross take off is a drawn out and complicated affair with much beating of wings and windwilling of the legs. There is absolutely no way an albatross sitting on the surface could react fast enough to a predator to make an escape by getting airborne.
So, if I pay $15 a month to subscribe to a massively multiplayher game where I get some amount of starter virtual currency, and the game has as a subset of functionality a mechanism through with I can gamble my virtual currency, and a mechanism exists to transfer that virtual currency into real currency through eBay sales or some process officially allowed or even serviced by the massively multiplayer game maker, is my subscription illegal?
In one of Jared Diamond's books, I think maybe the Third Chimpanzee, he makes an interesting point, after discussiong how human civilizations glady overwhelmed and exploited any other civilizations of which they became aware and had the capacity to do so, that sending out messages to alien civilizations (let's dodge the question of whether any actually exist since anyone sending a message implicitly assumes they probably do) represents pure folly given our lack of technological prowess.
Should people really broadcast these messages until we have at least mastered interplanetary war and perhaps colonized another solar system, by force if necessary? Given human history and assuming continued scientific progress two things are pretty apparent:
1. We'll eventually cross to new worlds and even solar systems. 2. We'll destroy anything that stands in our way.
Somehow I suspect that any sufficiently advanced technological civilization, human or otherwise, would have the same priorities. To be honest, I'm not too terribly concerned about this transmission reaching anything, but it's a valid question and shows a bit of hubris on the part of the broadcasters to the rest of humanity. It's in the best interest of any civlization to establish contact when and only when they have gained the upperhand technologically. The only thing humanity has as a signficant dissuading technology right now is the possibility of nuking itself, with no offensive capabilities whatsoever.
I think it has to do with wanting more and better stories about true technological and scientific advancements rather them some random guy's predictions for the future. If you are going to write about the future, the burden is on you to acknowledge it is fiction and make it entertaining, thus the profession of science fiction writer, for which I have great respect (especially those who really learn and use science as currently understood in their fiction). I don't like attempts to dress up divination and random opinion as a anything more than it is, especially when that takes coverage away from real advancements happening in the here and now.
Please stop posting predictions of "futurologists". They are the modern era's form of witch doctors, shamans, medicine men, and other self-proclaimed prognosticators. Since BT apparently actually employs one, I am reminded of another article I read a long time ago which proposed today's corporations and brands as substitutes for an innate desire for membership in parallel to the tribes and clans of yore, replete with those who attempt to hold positions of power by their somehow unique predictions of the future that have no more or less probability of coming true than any random statement of anyone in the group, but dress it up in some sort of mysticism, whether spiritual, or false intellectualism, to make it sound divinely guided or erudite.
I predict that in 2015, this guy will still be making predictions. His track record will be no better than random probability would have resolved. The time you have spent reading his predictions and even this response is time out of your life that you will never recover, and reading it will not put you to any better advantage than if you had not.
Instead of cryogenics, stasis fields called 'bobbles' allow 'flickering' into the future. Vinge develops this idea to the extreme and the whole story spans 50 million years. Cryogenics could serve as equivalent, with the drawbacks of maintenance of the frozen body for long periods of time.
The article dismisses reputation systems early on and instead focuses on age of information as a n indicator of credibility. I find it ironic that:
1) The poster didn't read the article. 2) The editor didn't read the article. 3) Most of the people posting here didn't read the article.
Yet people here discuss the article on the basis of the the incorrect title and summary as if the article were about reputation systems, when it is not. Go figure.
Perhaps the first challenge is to make sure the information in the resource is credible. But perhaps the greatest challenge is insuring that the people who make decisions based on the information... actually read the information.
From the article, highlighted in the introduction:
"my laptop is noticeably warmer than when I use Mac OS X. I've also noticed that battery life is substantially reduced."
Come on, that's not even the center point of the article, nor is that anything but subjective, anecdotal observation. Of one. As someone else has said here in the past, even the plural of anecdote is not data. Get a surface temperature thermometer, get some real data. Who knows? Does this guy sense a 3 degree difference as a lot or a 20 degree difference as a lot? Would either of those differences even matter? Did he run Mac OS X under the same conditions as Vista - was the room temperature the same? How about the apps he was running? I could care less about Vista, but, really, folks, how is this newsworthy that some one guy thinks his one laptop runs hotter running Vista the one time he tried it?
And please stop with the Vista posts. We don't need daily updates, thanks though.
I guess I'm just going to have to keep saying it until it stops:
When it is released and available for purchase, have someone review it like any other product, make one post, and be done with it. We don't need to hear about or debate every single time a developer in the Windows group sneezes or a random blogger decides to write their personal conclusions on a product that isn't even released
When it is released and avaiable for purchase, have someone review it like any other product, make one post, and be done with it. We don't need to hear about or debate everytime a developer in the Windows group sneezes or a random blogger decides to write their personal conclusions on a product that isn't even released
My subject says nothing. That's because "context" these days has become a catch-all buzzword for people in the technology industry and academic circles to try to abstract a very complex entity away to focus on some specific detail. Although this sometimes works, it only works when you the specific detail or thing you want to discuss, observe, or code can realistically be isolated from all those complexities you just swept away by calling them 'context'.
The trouble is, when you say you want something to be 'context-aware' you are saying you want it to be aware of all the complexity. Software cannot do this. You want to create something can run on your computer that is more aware than a human is and not just aware in the data sense of facts and trivia, nor simply in the analytical sense of adding facts to facts and substracting trivia. What you want is intuitive awareness and this is the one thing you cannot have in software and systems of the complexity available today (it remains to be seen if it can ever be gained through deterministic computation - the rote addings and subtractings of on and off states or, if it can be found, if it will collapse what was previously thought of as intuition into merely imperfect analysis that would only be acceptable for a human to conclude).
So what am I saying? I'm saying that "context awareness" is just a buzzword for a de facto implausibility. I point you to this quote from the article: "While people clearly do these things today without additional help from context-aware services, the goals of such services are to allow people to make better communication choices, engage in a richer and more valuable interaction, and waste less time in accomplishing their interactions, while providing significant cost savings to the enterprise."
This is contextual statement. It sweeps all the true complexity away in exchange for semantic complexity. It really says nothing and simply uses 30 or so words where two would do: work better.
Why am I going on about this? Becuase it is intellecutally dishonest to pretend that you can brush away the complexity of the world by calling it context. It leads to pointless research projects where aggregations are made, imperfectly, from imperfect information when it could already be obviously judged from the outset that they would ultimately not scale to complexity at hand. It results in 'Xanadu' projects that will forever be stuck in a state of being 'so close' to being useful, but never actually becoming so. There are more concrete things we can attack, things were we can make actual statements rather than vague and amorphous statements about what a system might theoretically do. It's just a matter of rolling up the sleeves and doing some work instead of engaging in intellectual laziness and then wasting other people's time with our frivolities.
Which is all to say that I found the article and information contained therein not worth the time of reading.:)
That's rampant speculation. The blog does not 'suggest the real reason' - it restates a speculative guess. If you look at the blog, a comment on it points out the obvious logical inconsistency that the risk occurs when you use the computer, not when you shut it off or put it into sleep mode.
This occurs regularly in Eve, this just happens to be the latest incarnation (the title of "rocks" is way overblown, 99.9% of players in Eve won't even know or care). The basic "problem" in Eve is that there are no enforced laws on corporate behavior. No SEC or FTC. Therefore, it's almost a certainty that any venture that requires joint ownership and capital will ultimately end up in fraud. It's a great study for both libertarian and regulatory economists alike. Although some people may relish the prospect of no government regulation, the problem is that no grand projects of joint capital are possible (they do happen, but they are always under a cloud of suspicion and will ultimately fall to greed in most cases). This means there are no truly reliable avenues of investment (there is also no FDIC for joint ventures). For those who are going to point out that you can buy shares in X venture currently in game, wait awhile.
Also, imagine the work it takes for one person to run a scheme of this size, dealing constantly with investments, withdrawals, and dividends. Sure, it racks up a lot of cash, but the perpetrator probably had to "play" 23/7 for six months to pull it off, constantly dealing with minutiae. So, yes, well done in terms of a scam, but it takes a hell of a lot of work. Is 700 billion units of virtual cash worth it? Maybe, when you consider how much it could be transferred into real currency if he bought time cards with ISK and sold them.
However, here another economic curiosity comes into play - the number of people selling time cards is a limited number (you cannot buy time cards from CCP with ISK, someone has to pay CCP real money and then put them up for sale in ISK). Cashing out would spike the sell price of time cards in *ISK* through the roof. He would have to deal both the minutiae of buying and with selling hundreds if not thousands of time cards, which would also drive the cost of time cards down *in real currency*.
Basically, when you figure it all out and divide the final take in real currency by time spent to do the scam and then transfer it all, I doubt the hourly pay is impressive. So, sorry folks, no get rich quick scheme here.
Please, Eve takes the cake on this one. Let's say you want to take down an enemy starbase. Here's how you do it:
1. Identify the supporting player operated structures (think 'starbase camps') in the same system. 2. Bring a huge fleet and force them into 'reinforced mode' one by one. 3. Wait however many hours it takes for their shield reinforcement fuel to run out (12, 24, 36 hours, who knows) while preventing them from refueling it 23/7. 4. Now attack the starbase - I don't even know how long that takes.
So, time to take any enemy system putting up resistance... probably around a week or so. Maybe two. Oh, yeah, and it will take a fleet worth about $30,000 U.S. to do it and you'll probably suffer $10,000 U.S. in losses if the enemy is putting up resistance.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Cringely
Do I have you mistaken for someone else or have you not been going on for some time with a meme about Google building some sort of super computer that is the Internet? Moreover, is it not established fact that none of these predictions have come true and Google has remained what it has always been, a search engine with text ads driving revenue and some interesting, but non-revolutionary and non-revenue producing side applications?
I'm calling you out. I ask that you fully disclose in a follow up article any stake-holdings you have in Google, its partners, or investors and, if existent, when you acquired those interests.
To the particulars of your argument, Google has a massively distributed database and a very high volume of queries. There need not be any conspiratorial or unusual reason for them to acquire lots of bandwidth and build distributed data centers aside from supporting their main functionality in a cost-efficient manner.
I do not think rampant speculation on the basis of scant fact, and repeated rampant speculation without any indication that past speculation has been borne out by actual facts, represents responsible journalism.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Slashdot Member
If I remember correctly, there is a cultural issue here in that Unicode is apparently considered with some disdain in Japan and local multi-byte encodings are used, one of which Ruby supports. If you do some searches, you can probably find the full background story.
I was going to post the same thing. "A matter of years" could mean 3, it could mean 100, it could mean 'til the end of Sol, etc. Instead of what? Decades? Centuries? Millennia?
"Most on the time while exploring the world, I galloped on an invisible, waterwalking horse..."
I never played the game, but what you describe actually seems complimentary of the game's flexibility. You essentially became a ghost, or more specifically a poltergeist since you could manipulate objects and cast spells while invisible, apparently.
" Don't bother posting in the Introversion DEFCON forums, though, it's run by a small clique of anti-social types."
Well, you can't claim false advertising.
Someone needs to come up with a checklist for why [someone's technical solution for avoiding traffic jams] is [impractical/unworkable/unacceptable] like I have seen here on Slashdot for spam. It seems we constantly hear about some new proposal for eliminating traffic jams, yet none of them ever come to fruition. I'll throw out some general reasons why:
1. The solution generally assumes that everyone opts-in. This is impossible. Not everyone is going to buy a new device to assist in traffic tracking. If an existing device, not everyone is going to have that device.
2. The tracking accuracy of the device or measurement system is poor. Look at this article. 330 feet? In places where traffic is congested, 330 feet can cover 6 streets.
3. Who is going to pay for this? Fine, you could technically get some traffic statistics if your device magically worked and everyone participated. Is it actually a sustainable business? Doubt it.
4. How much is it going to cost? We are talking a lot of bandwidth here to be getting enough data (and through low/expensive bandwidth mediums like cell networks, et cetera), and a lot of processing of that data against geographic databases to be able to do any meaningful data analysis.
5. So let's say you took care of the technical hurdles and had a lot of data and processed it and you had a great map of traffic in the local metro region. You are now parked on your ass in the operation center viewing your beautiful map, which is great and all, except you aren't driving and everyone who is driving has no idea how beautiful your map is. How are you going to get this information to people who are actually, you know, in traffic?
6. As a follow up of (5), let's say that you had a little printer in everyone's car and printed out your beautiful map right to their passenger seat. They pick it up, and while they are googling at its beauty and trying to locate where they are on the map, they plow right into the back of oil truck, explode, and die. Thanks, you just caused a huge backup, asshat. Assuming you get the information to the drivers, how are they going to be able to interpret the data with minimal attention while they are, you know, driving?
I would go on (and I hope someone else does), but these various traffic jam proposals that never work out are getting kind of silly. Everyone thinks they are a genius because they figured out that hey, if we got information on where are the cars are... and we put it on a map.. with like computers and stuff... we'd like... solve traffic! Except that getting from "genius idea" to "practical and effective traffic control" is non-trival.
"Nobody wants to say they've got counterfeit gear inside their enterprises that can all of a sudden stop working."
That sentence reads the same if you remove "counterfeit". Hardware and software that can all of a sudden stop working is a fact of life, regardless of manufacturer.
The use of logos to indicate that a piece of hardware is genuinely from another company when it is not is unethical and should be stopped, but this argument is simply a scare tactic attempting to disguise the real interest, which is that of the manufacturer whose logo is on the product and is angry they did not derive any revenue from the sale. Otherwise, they could care less. From a consumer standpoint, safety is found in redundancy and contingency planning, not trusting that the logo of any one manufacturer on an item means it will not suddenly stop working. I do not blame the manufacturer for wanting in on the sale, but tell it straight, don't childishly trot out the bogeyman to get sympathy,.
Explains everything observed by these sites. I predict that a lack of science and math education will continue to result in people fruitlessly attempting to use past performances in predicting chance-based events (either because of true randomness or sufficient complexity to thwart casual analysis) to denote exports that will at some point start getting it wrong.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Consider what happens to code development shipped offshore. It amuses me that businesses with strict non-open source code policies offshore code development because it's pretty much a de facto, if unofficial, grant of open source. It's even worse when people use offshore resources for "secret" prototype development and the such in an attempt to save money on project startup. I cannot think of a worse venue to put confidential new development into.
This problem is a compound problem. First you have low wage workers that are more likely to succumb to temptation of selling such secrets. Second, you have jurisdictional problems - technically you could make a legal claim through treaties and the like, but the hassles and delays would take years and years to resolve and probably give no real satisfaction (this is why I say de facto in the above, even if you disallow something, if there is no real useful legal remedial process behind it, whatever agreed is basically unenforcable). Third, there are cultural problems where intellectual property and consumer privacy are fairly artificial constructs of the legal systems of developed countries.
The bottom line is that this is only going to get worse and I imagine that Western companies will soon face legal liability for outsourcing in two ways:
1. To shareholders for assigning development to offshore resources that results in compromise of trade secrets or the like.
2. To consumers for breaches of privacy and resulting identify theft and the like.
The companies will argue that they entered into contractual agreements with third parties so it wasn't their fault, but I suspect that many of these cases could and will be successfully pressed on the basis of a lack of due diligence, especially against the backdrop of known incidents such as this.
If you ever actually see an albatross at sea, you will know this is complete bullocks. An albatross take off is a drawn out and complicated affair with much beating of wings and windwilling of the legs. There is absolutely no way an albatross sitting on the surface could react fast enough to a predator to make an escape by getting airborne.
So, if I pay $15 a month to subscribe to a massively multiplayher game where I get some amount of starter virtual currency, and the game has as a subset of functionality a mechanism through with I can gamble my virtual currency, and a mechanism exists to transfer that virtual currency into real currency through eBay sales or some process officially allowed or even serviced by the massively multiplayer game maker, is my subscription illegal?
In one of Jared Diamond's books, I think maybe the Third Chimpanzee, he makes an interesting point, after discussiong how human civilizations glady overwhelmed and exploited any other civilizations of which they became aware and had the capacity to do so, that sending out messages to alien civilizations (let's dodge the question of whether any actually exist since anyone sending a message implicitly assumes they probably do) represents pure folly given our lack of technological prowess.
Should people really broadcast these messages until we have at least mastered interplanetary war and perhaps colonized another solar system, by force if necessary? Given human history and assuming continued scientific progress two things are pretty apparent:
1. We'll eventually cross to new worlds and even solar systems.
2. We'll destroy anything that stands in our way.
Somehow I suspect that any sufficiently advanced technological civilization, human or otherwise, would have the same priorities. To be honest, I'm not too terribly concerned about this transmission reaching anything, but it's a valid question and shows a bit of hubris on the part of the broadcasters to the rest of humanity. It's in the best interest of any civlization to establish contact when and only when they have gained the upperhand technologically. The only thing humanity has as a signficant dissuading technology right now is the possibility of nuking itself, with no offensive capabilities whatsoever.
Is anyone in a position to compare this book to the folowing?
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
That is a good question.
I think it has to do with wanting more and better stories about true technological and scientific advancements rather them some random guy's predictions for the future. If you are going to write about the future, the burden is on you to acknowledge it is fiction and make it entertaining, thus the profession of science fiction writer, for which I have great respect (especially those who really learn and use science as currently understood in their fiction). I don't like attempts to dress up divination and random opinion as a anything more than it is, especially when that takes coverage away from real advancements happening in the here and now.
Please stop posting predictions of "futurologists". They are the modern era's form of witch doctors, shamans, medicine men, and other self-proclaimed prognosticators. Since BT apparently actually employs one, I am reminded of another article I read a long time ago which proposed today's corporations and brands as substitutes for an innate desire for membership in parallel to the tribes and clans of yore, replete with those who attempt to hold positions of power by their somehow unique predictions of the future that have no more or less probability of coming true than any random statement of anyone in the group, but dress it up in some sort of mysticism, whether spiritual, or false intellectualism, to make it sound divinely guided or erudite.
I predict that in 2015, this guy will still be making predictions. His track record will be no better than random probability would have resolved. The time you have spent reading his predictions and even this response is time out of your life that you will never recover, and reading it will not put you to any better advantage than if you had not.
Nice use of a digest to verify a piece of information known by an unknown party on a public forum without revealing the actual information!
Please reference Vernor Vinge's books:
The Peace War
Marooned In Realtime
Also available in single book entitled:
Across Realtime
Instead of cryogenics, stasis fields called 'bobbles' allow 'flickering' into the future. Vinge develops this idea to the extreme and the whole story spans 50 million years. Cryogenics could serve as equivalent, with the drawbacks of maintenance of the frozen body for long periods of time.
The article dismisses reputation systems early on and instead focuses on age of information as a n indicator of credibility. I find it ironic that:
1) The poster didn't read the article.
2) The editor didn't read the article.
3) Most of the people posting here didn't read the article.
Yet people here discuss the article on the basis of the the incorrect title and summary as if the article were about reputation systems, when it is not. Go figure.
Perhaps the first challenge is to make sure the information in the resource is credible. But perhaps the greatest challenge is insuring that the people who make decisions based on the information... actually read the information.
From the article, highlighted in the introduction:
"my laptop is noticeably warmer than when I use Mac OS X. I've also noticed that battery life is substantially reduced."
Come on, that's not even the center point of the article, nor is that anything but subjective, anecdotal observation. Of one. As someone else has said here in the past, even the plural of anecdote is not data. Get a surface temperature thermometer, get some real data. Who knows? Does this guy sense a 3 degree difference as a lot or a 20 degree difference as a lot? Would either of those differences even matter? Did he run Mac OS X under the same conditions as Vista - was the room temperature the same? How about the apps he was running? I could care less about Vista, but, really, folks, how is this newsworthy that some one guy thinks his one laptop runs hotter running Vista the one time he tried it?
And please stop with the Vista posts. We don't need daily updates, thanks though.
I guess I'm just going to have to keep saying it until it stops:
When it is released and available for purchase, have someone review it like any other product, make one post, and be done with it. We don't need to hear about or debate every single time a developer in the Windows group sneezes or a random blogger decides to write their personal conclusions on a product that isn't even released
When it is released and avaiable for purchase, have someone review it like any other product, make one post, and be done with it. We don't need to hear about or debate everytime a developer in the Windows group sneezes or a random blogger decides to write their personal conclusions on a product that isn't even released
My subject says nothing. That's because "context" these days has become a catch-all buzzword for people in the technology industry and academic circles to try to abstract a very complex entity away to focus on some specific detail. Although this sometimes works, it only works when you the specific detail or thing you want to discuss, observe, or code can realistically be isolated from all those complexities you just swept away by calling them 'context'.
:)
The trouble is, when you say you want something to be 'context-aware' you are saying you want it to be aware of all the complexity. Software cannot do this. You want to create something can run on your computer that is more aware than a human is and not just aware in the data sense of facts and trivia, nor simply in the analytical sense of adding facts to facts and substracting trivia. What you want is intuitive awareness and this is the one thing you cannot have in software and systems of the complexity available today (it remains to be seen if it can ever be gained through deterministic computation - the rote addings and subtractings of on and off states or, if it can be found, if it will collapse what was previously thought of as intuition into merely imperfect analysis that would only be acceptable for a human to conclude).
So what am I saying? I'm saying that "context awareness" is just a buzzword for a de facto implausibility. I point you to this quote from the article: "While people clearly do these things today without additional help from context-aware services, the goals of such services are to allow people to make better communication choices, engage in a richer and more valuable interaction, and waste less time in accomplishing their interactions, while providing significant cost savings to the enterprise."
This is contextual statement. It sweeps all the true complexity away in exchange for semantic complexity. It really says nothing and simply uses 30 or so words where two would do: work better.
Why am I going on about this? Becuase it is intellecutally dishonest to pretend that you can brush away the complexity of the world by calling it context. It leads to pointless research projects where aggregations are made, imperfectly, from imperfect information when it could already be obviously judged from the outset that they would ultimately not scale to complexity at hand. It results in 'Xanadu' projects that will forever be stuck in a state of being 'so close' to being useful, but never actually becoming so. There are more concrete things we can attack, things were we can make actual statements rather than vague and amorphous statements about what a system might theoretically do. It's just a matter of rolling up the sleeves and doing some work instead of engaging in intellectual laziness and then wasting other people's time with our frivolities.
Which is all to say that I found the article and information contained therein not worth the time of reading.
That's rampant speculation. The blog does not 'suggest the real reason' - it restates a speculative guess. If you look at the blog, a comment on it points out the obvious logical inconsistency that the risk occurs when you use the computer, not when you shut it off or put it into sleep mode.
This occurs regularly in Eve, this just happens to be the latest incarnation (the title of "rocks" is way overblown, 99.9% of players in Eve won't even know or care). The basic "problem" in Eve is that there are no enforced laws on corporate behavior. No SEC or FTC. Therefore, it's almost a certainty that any venture that requires joint ownership and capital will ultimately end up in fraud. It's a great study for both libertarian and regulatory economists alike. Although some people may relish the prospect of no government regulation, the problem is that no grand projects of joint capital are possible (they do happen, but they are always under a cloud of suspicion and will ultimately fall to greed in most cases). This means there are no truly reliable avenues of investment (there is also no FDIC for joint ventures). For those who are going to point out that you can buy shares in X venture currently in game, wait awhile.
Also, imagine the work it takes for one person to run a scheme of this size, dealing constantly with investments, withdrawals, and dividends. Sure, it racks up a lot of cash, but the perpetrator probably had to "play" 23/7 for six months to pull it off, constantly dealing with minutiae. So, yes, well done in terms of a scam, but it takes a hell of a lot of work. Is 700 billion units of virtual cash worth it? Maybe, when you consider how much it could be transferred into real currency if he bought time cards with ISK and sold them.
However, here another economic curiosity comes into play - the number of people selling time cards is a limited number (you cannot buy time cards from CCP with ISK, someone has to pay CCP real money and then put them up for sale in ISK). Cashing out would spike the sell price of time cards in *ISK* through the roof. He would have to deal both the minutiae of buying and with selling hundreds if not thousands of time cards, which would also drive the cost of time cards down *in real currency*.
Basically, when you figure it all out and divide the final take in real currency by time spent to do the scam and then transfer it all, I doubt the hourly pay is impressive. So, sorry folks, no get rich quick scheme here.
Please, Eve takes the cake on this one. Let's say you want to take down an enemy starbase. Here's how you do it:
1. Identify the supporting player operated structures (think 'starbase camps') in the same system.
2. Bring a huge fleet and force them into 'reinforced mode' one by one.
3. Wait however many hours it takes for their shield reinforcement fuel to run out (12, 24, 36 hours, who knows) while preventing them from refueling it 23/7.
4. Now attack the starbase - I don't even know how long that takes.
So, time to take any enemy system putting up resistance... probably around a week or so. Maybe two. Oh, yeah, and it will take a fleet worth about $30,000 U.S. to do it and you'll probably suffer $10,000 U.S. in losses if the enemy is putting up resistance.