Battery technology has gotten much better, as well as tricks to lower power consumption. I wonder what sort of battery life you'd get if you took the same basic design, die-shrunk the chips to 32nm to lower the voltage, and used a large monolithic Lithium-Ion battery instead of a pack of AAs. Maybe add some dynamic frequency scaling, if that would get you anything.
I would not be surprised if you got a battery life measured in weeks.
He didn't say the 100 had the power of a modern computer, or could run anything approaching modern programs.
However, go find me a COMPUTER that has a battery life of half a work week, running off the kind of batteries I'd find at Wal-Mart or 7-11. It has to be a complete, self-reliant computer - I should be able to not just install any program I want, but *write* any program I can write, all without needing any other computer.
I did some looking. There's a few ebook readers with 20+ hour battery lives, but I couldn't find any proper computers, no matter what "horsepower".
The European discovery of Australia was in 1606 - this is about equivalent to "sending a small, Apollo-like exploration mission to Mars". More and more exploratory missions went on from various countries, but colonization was effectively unattempted until the late 1700s, nearly two centuries later (and driven, at least in part, by the American Revolution cutting off the outflow of "transported" criminals to America).
In short, sending a large number of unskilled and unmotivated colonists to a new land won't work until at least decades after initial, small-scale exploration is possible. You need at least hundreds (the first British Australian colony was over a thousand settlers) to have a sustainable colony - right now, we can't send tens, much less hundreds or thousands, of people to Mars, even one-way. Sending prisoners, half a dozen at a time, to Mars, at the cost of billions per trip, would get us nothing but a pile of skeletons on a distant planet and a national deficit that will require new fields of mathematics just to calculate.
The Moon might be a more plausible location (and by "more plausible" I mean "slightly closer to physically possible"). But even then, the metaphorical timescale doesn't look to good - we probably won't have a permanent Moon colony until 2150, by your analogy.
Guess it's time to start treating my Mac computers the same way I treat my Windows computers - in need of extra care and protection against external attacks.
And so I've just disabled my Java and Quicktime plugins. Java because that's where all the current attacks are focused (and I never use it anyways), Quicktime because I never use it, either, and a smaller attack area is always good. I still visit enough sites that I need Flash enabled, but that's currently my only plugin (and protected by some heavy blocking rules).
I'll also be much more strict about keeping everything up-to-date, and all the other basic security practices.
Next, guess I need a basic virus-scanner. The only GPL one I see is Clam, which, last time I used it, was completely ineffective at stopping viruses. The one I use on Windows, MSE, is naturally not available on the Mac. So, any suggestions?
First, infiltrate the NK working classes. Give them outside information - anything they want. Secret Agent Man sneaks in, finds a farmer family, gives them each a Big Mac meal - Super-Sized - and a rundown of our side of the story. Don't ask them to do anything except listen. Just try to convince them that we're not the mass-murdering monsters the NK propaganda claims. Above all, though, be honest - admit to the things we have done wrong, don't hide it. It's not the glamorous James Bond spy gig, but it will actually work. Repeat on a massive scale - the number of agents involved should reach the thousands. Masquerade it as a food benefit program, if necessary.
Second, start cutting off the rich kids' toys. We have sanctions on wheat and corn for the peasants, but the king still drinks $10,000-a-bottle champagne. Find a way to crack down on that sort of thing, and you'll either get them to seriously back down, or to go to even more extremes to maintain power.
If the leaders did back down, a relatively bloodless revolution will come about naturally, over the course of decades. Just like the Soviet Union - the leaders liberalized, the oppressed used their new freedoms to get rid of *all* the tyranny. Didn't work out perfectly, but still better than the alternative. No more work involved on our end.
If, however, Kim III clamps down tighter, get your "secret agents" to start a push for an armed revolution. Target especially the members of the army - when one in five North Korean combat-age men are in the army, you'll need to do something to shift those numbers. Promise the rebels full support - and GIVE it. They call for air strikes, give them. They ask for Stinger missiles, give them. The absolute worst thing you could do is fail to follow through at this point. This is arguably the only expensive part of the plan.
If the revolution succeeds, try to angle them towards reunification. It'll be tough on South Korea's economy for a bit, but they're in good enough shape to handle it. If they insist on independence for whatever reason, make sure no new dictators pop up, through assassinations if necessary.
Even if the revolution fails, the country will be in total ruins. Once the fighting stops, the generals will realize there's no food *at* *all*, and they'll either force the leadership out, or force them to accept any terms to get foreign food. You'll still have a dictator, but a pacified one, and one in a very, very tenuous situation.
The only complicating factor is China. China views NK as a necessary buffer state between it, and the South Korean and American armies below. They've been propping the country up for half a century. They'll need to be neutralized somehow before any of this can have a reasonable chance of success.
Best option? Trade. China is the world's #1 exporter, but also the world's #2 importer. Unlike North Korea, they *depend* on the rest of the world.
The best place to squeeze them is on manufacturing technology. They import almost all their manufacturing machinery from either the US or Japan, both of whom have a vested interest in neutralizing North Korea. Getting Russia to join in by cutting off the flow of oil and power from the North would also help, but might be optional.
Obviously, selling the American public on accepting a huge spike in consumer good prices "for liberating North Korea" will never work. However, doing so "for FREEDOM" might. There's been a huge amount of anti-Chinese rhetoric in American politics lately - between latent Sinophobia (racism against Chinese is probably one of the more tolerated bigotries in the US), and the whole "China buying up America" debt scare, you could probably sell America on accepting a spike in prices at least long enough to execute the NK plan.
OK, fine, so it's not *easy*, but it is *possible*. And if there's ever a revolution in China that leads to them abandoning NK, it *does* become easy.
But, as better men than I have said, "doing what is right is not always easy, and doing what is easy is not always right".
I was with you (the iMac definitely proved the viability of the legacy-free PC) up until you said "the PC world will follow".
The PC world doesn't follow Apple. Never really did.
Remember how long it took Apple to even support multi-button mice, let alone make one? Yeah, how'd that work out?
Remember FireWire? I have never seen a non-Apple computer have a single Firewire port, except via an add-on card. The only Firewire devices I've ever seen were external hard drives used by a Mac-exclusive print shop, and a pro-grade video camera. It may not be a dead tech, but it's dead on the desktop.
Remember GeoPort? AAUI? Yeah, neither does anyone else.
Remember PowerPC? How that was supposedly "so much better" than x86, both faster and less power-hungry? Yeah, about that...
The list of technologies Apple introduced that became ubiquitous in the PC world is small - and most of them weren't even invented by Apple. EFI? Invented by Intel for their Itanium servers.
Apple doesn't lead the way in introducing new technologies - it leads the way in killing old technologies. And it can do that because half its customers are blind zealots like yourself.
You make a somewhat valid point, but think about it from the vendor's point of view:
You need to have computers support TB before you can really sell devices using TB. People don't buy a hard drive or monitor, and then find a computer that will use it; they find a computer they want and then buy a hard drive or monitor that will work with *that*, simply because it's cheaper to buy a new monitor than it is to buy a new computer.
The laptop I have on preorder has a TB port. I don't particularly care about that either way - it seems to have displaced the eSATA port, and the only eSATA device I have works as USB just as well. But, when I'm out shopping for [device] in a year from now, TB will be an option, and possibly the best option.
Vendors know, through long experience, to build up the supporting devices (ones that support the new standard as well as old ones) well before making devices that primarily or exclusively use the new standard. Even a decade after USB 1.1, computers had legacy PS/2 ports for keyboards and mice. Even years after DVI was itself made technically obsolete, computers were coming with VGA ports.
Remember when USB first came out? At first, nothing really used it. You'd see printers support it as an option, right next to the old parallel port; you'd see a few USB mice and keyboards, often packaged with a PS/2USB converter. But now, you have to look long and hard to find a computer *without* USB, and finding legacy PS/2 keyboards or parallel cables is rather difficult.
Thunderbolt isn't guaranteed to take off the same way (remember FireWire? Or the countless mini-DVI ports? Or any other failed standard?), but it *could*. And so device manufacturers throw it in, especially since Intel's chipsets support it *anyways*. It's another bullet point to put on the marketing, but it could be that small little edge against [competitor], right?
Or, more recently, Intel's many-core prototypes used this. At the very least, the "Single-Chip Cloud Computer" used a mesh network, and I think Larrabee had such a thing as well...
Oh yes, you have to *type in a password* to use the Wifi. How ever will ordinary people learn how to do something as complicated and technical as that?
For a rather weird video game I'm making (will post it on/. as soon as it's ready), I compiled a list of literally thousands of processors. As of now, I believe I have every x86 processor (Intel, AMD, Via, Centaur, NSC, etc., from the 8086 to Ivy Bridge), every Itanium, quite a few POWER and SPARC chips and a handful of MIPS.
I'd like to contribute it - it has some factual errors, such as where I couldn't find actual prices and had to guess, and it has some less relevant stuff, like what integrated GPU, if any, it has. But hey, it's already several thousand processors, that's got to be a good start.
And, if this CPU database starts growing, I'm excited because it will make adding the *rest* of the processors easier. ARM in particular is hard to find full, definite lists of, because it's a licensed architecture instead of fabricated.
Yes, email spam is dropping. But is it truly because we're winning, or is it because we're not keeping up with the times?
I read maybe 20 emails a week. None of them are spam. But I spend far, far more times on forums, or in comment sections on various blogs or news sites. Spam levels there seem to be rising. And I imagine spammers are finding ways to exploit Facebook and Twitter, as well.
Perhaps spammers have just realized that you get better results spamming Web 2.0 than spamming Web 1.0.
*I doubt terrorists will waste their time attacking airplanes with bombs. They'll go after soft targets like your home or factory. The best way to deal with them is to keep them OUT of the country in the first place (yes that means walls on both borders; enemies shouldn't be able to just walk in).
No, planes are still big, juicy targets. The problem is that the TSA is assuming *all* terrorists are suicidal. And I have to say, "assuming all your enemies' plans involve killing themselves" is pretty fucking stupid.
What if one of them has a Stinger launcher left over from when we gave them to the then-"freedom-fighter" Taliban to fight the then-"evil-communists"? Or a cheap Chinese knockoff of one? Boom. There's easily several hundred people dead (the Airbus A380's certified for 850 people), plus whatever poor bastards happen to be where the wreckage lands. Hit it on approach for landing, with luck (good or bad, depending on your character alignment) and it hits the airport terminal...
Or use a powerful laser (I've seen several on this very site) to blind the pilots during landing. With luck, bam, crash. Or use a sniper rifle to damage the jet turbines - catastrophic engine failure would easily cost millions to repair, even if it doesn't kill too many people.
Or, if you're still feeling suicidal, rent a small aircraft, a single-engine Cessna or something. Hijack *that*, kamikaze aforementioned Airbus.
That's all off the top of my head, from a guy who hasn't ever thought about "how to take down a jet fighter" before now. Imagine what actual terrorists could do, with actual planning and actual experience.
I'm honestly surprised it hasn't already happened.
Overboard shipping containers. Search-and-rescue (aka find the bodies). Security (if it can spot debris, it can spot actual ships). Oil slicks, possibly.
Also, if there's something *continually* spitting out debris or something similar, tracking it down to stop it would be important.
Agreed. I'm an *American*, and I listen to the BBC far more than any of my own news services. *Especially* for American politics - they don't seem to have an agenda they're pushing, unlike Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and whichever other ones I forgot.
The only downside is a constant slightly-condescending tone. You could probably end each report on the US elections with "Silly Americans, thinking they know how to form a system of government." and it would fit perfectly.
Curiously, Xinhua, the government-sponsored Chinese news service, does basic factual reporting better than most of the American news sources (coughcoughfoxcough). They're absolutely, completely untrustworthy when it comes to what happens in, to, with, nearby or within earshot of *China*, but if you need basic "On March 1, politician X was caught doing Y with an underage herring" or "the Elbonian town of Kerlyaglyagle has been occupied by anarcho-syndicalist separatists", they give you that. I think it's a combination of "only intended for Chinese consumption", and "not having good enough translators to put spin on anything".
And Arabic is not the Esperanto of the Islamic world - unless Arabic is the idealistic but extremely rare constructed language intended for auxiliary use but ultimately relegated to a small hopeful minority. Arabic is more the Latin of the Islamic world - the Holy Book is written* in it, so many people know it, even in areas where nobody speaks it historically.
* Yes, I know the Bible was not originally in Latin, but the most common version, especially in the Middle Ages, was.
Weird, could have sworn Farsi (aka Persian) is the main language of Afghanistan.
And Wikipedia seems to back me up: "Dari... or Farsi-ye Dari...As defined in the Constitution of Afghanistan, it is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan; the other is Pashto. Dari is the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan and the mother-tongue of approximately 50% of the population, serving as the country's lingua franca."
There's actually a few questions I'd like to ask them myself (won't bother, since I assume they only take questions in Farsi, or maybe Arabic as well, neither of which I speak). I can probably guess their answers, but hearing it straight from them, instead of indirectly through our own "expert analysis", would be... well, more scientific, I suppose. Direct observations are almost always more accurate and reliable than indirect observations.
First, I'd ask "if you had the ability to eliminate every 'infidel' from the planet, would you?". Second, "if the invaders were to leave, completely, on the sole condition that Afghanistan become a non-Islamic, but non anti-Islamic, state, would that be preferable to continued occupation?"
The first is sort of a "can we co-exist with these people? can they be reasonable?" If we were to leave them completely alone, would they keep to themselves, or would they remain a threat to our security? A classical Islamic state would tolerate 'infidels' even in their own country - during the Middle Ages, all you had to do was pay an extra tax, and *that* was mainly to get out of the military draft. It was illegal to *leave* the state religion (on pain of death, often), but for the most part, if you stayed quiet and obeyed the secular laws, the religious laws left you alone. However, a modern fundamentalist Islamic state probably would not be so... tolerant.
The second is a "what do they care more about: being left alone, or being fundamentalist Muslims?" Because, undoubtedly, a fundamentalist state of any religion is generally bad. Even a fundamentalist atheist state would be oppressive and essentially *wrong*. So it is in the best interests of justice, of humanity, that Afghanistan not revert to a fundamentalist Islamic state, as the Taliban desires. However, I suspect that much of their popular support comes not from people wanting to be ruled by some theocrat, but by people who want the invaders out of their homeland. I can sympathize - I want our "invaders" out of their homeland and back in ours, as well. The question is, would their leadership accept not ruling Afghanistan themselves if it meant a free Afghanistan? It's not likely, given the past decade, but it's possible. And any possibility for a peaceful but beneficial resolution to war is worth entertaining.
The difference here is mainly that their primary retail distributors often make most of their profit off used, not new, products.
I go to a Honda dealer, they may sell used cars, maybe even a *lot* of new cars, but their highest profit margins and overall highest profits are on new.
I go to NewEgg, they may sell some refurbished kit, but most of their income comes from new products.
I go to GameStop, I see racks upon racks of used games, often labeled near-identically to the new games, and am constantly nagged about buying used instead of new.
And the one time I *did* sell them my old games, I got about $3 per game, which they turned around and sold for up to $30. I've never since been interested in selling off old games, because it's just not worth it, particularly since I actually like going back and playing old games.
So think about how that skews the developer's profits. Their primary retailer has a vested interest in screwing them out of as many new sales as possible.
Developers don't want to kill used games because of gamers. Most probably wouldn't care if you sold their game on Ebay, or sold it to a friend - that's a small channel that's not even really competing with retail. They want to kill used games because they want to kill GameStop's used section.
Crippling games so they can't be on-sold, the essence of a free market, just makes people angry and turns people off their products.
Which is why most companies prefer to combat the problem by making gamers not *want* to resell it - by tacking on a multiplayer component, or releasing new content, or selling a lot of DLC (which is inherently tied to one account).
You'll note that the companies most likely to artificially make games tied to one account (several games already do this) are also the ones that decide massively invasive DRM is the best way to fight piracy.
Not quite, if you look at Sony's audience as game *developers* instead of game *players*.
Game developers hate hate *HATE* used games. They try hard to make gamers *not* sell their games - focusing on multiplayer instead of story, or continually adding DLC, even free DLC, for months after release. Making it impossible to play used games is the rare extreme case, because most developers know that it pisses off their players more than it's worth. But I have yet to see a developer come out in favor of used games. It's relatively common, even, to see a developer state in an interview that used games are doing more to kill the industry than piracy.
And when you look at it, that's kind of true. Used games give zero profit to the developers, and often actually *cost* the developer money (storing two player's data on their servers instead of just one). While the same is true of piracy, if I pirate GameX, I still have money to spend on GameY. If I buy GameX used, that's 30-55 bucks I no longer have to spend on new games.
Used games do help the platform, *if* the platform is limited to physical distribution - giving a mandatory discount on old games lowers the barrier of entry, makes it easier to get the console. But once you get digital distribution going on, used games don't even do that. That's why the PC isn't really suffering from not having used games - you can find the old games rather easily, in general, and and the cheap games role is still filled by old, or bad, releases - many games now drop $10-$20 within a month or two, if they aren't good enough to sell well at $50-$60.
The 360 isn't fairly open. You have to pay for everything and despite the fact MS is the only company that has real experience in browser development it's the only system without a browser in order to stop people from gaining access to something outside of their paywall.
Look at who else there is: Nintendo, whose development kit costs more than my car, and Sony, who's fucking Sony. Compared to that, a $100 XNA license is as open as it gets, especially since it doubles as a WP7 license, where it's on par with Apple (nobody really *wants* to write for WP7, but it's a decent gesture.
Oh, and Nintendo originally charged for the web browser.
Regarding indie development, they treat that like a disease these days and hope it goes away. But in the early days that was a bonus for the PC gamers that they converted to xbox. But now they brag about how much time is spent *not* playing games on the 360 as they try to out "causal" Nintendo.
The XBox actually has the best indie support of any console. They're still terrible compared to Steam, but you judge evil based on its competitors - there's a really good WW2 analogy I want to use, but like hell I'm going to give Godwin an opening here.
Slashdot Mirror
Battery technology has gotten much better, as well as tricks to lower power consumption. I wonder what sort of battery life you'd get if you took the same basic design, die-shrunk the chips to 32nm to lower the voltage, and used a large monolithic Lithium-Ion battery instead of a pack of AAs. Maybe add some dynamic frequency scaling, if that would get you anything.
I would not be surprised if you got a battery life measured in weeks.
You missed the point.
He didn't say the 100 had the power of a modern computer, or could run anything approaching modern programs.
However, go find me a COMPUTER that has a battery life of half a work week, running off the kind of batteries I'd find at Wal-Mart or 7-11. It has to be a complete, self-reliant computer - I should be able to not just install any program I want, but *write* any program I can write, all without needing any other computer.
I did some looking. There's a few ebook readers with 20+ hour battery lives, but I couldn't find any proper computers, no matter what "horsepower".
And you know Slashdot thinks you're dumb because you just used the wrong "your".
There's a flaw in your metaphor: timeline.
The European discovery of Australia was in 1606 - this is about equivalent to "sending a small, Apollo-like exploration mission to Mars". More and more exploratory missions went on from various countries, but colonization was effectively unattempted until the late 1700s, nearly two centuries later (and driven, at least in part, by the American Revolution cutting off the outflow of "transported" criminals to America).
In short, sending a large number of unskilled and unmotivated colonists to a new land won't work until at least decades after initial, small-scale exploration is possible. You need at least hundreds (the first British Australian colony was over a thousand settlers) to have a sustainable colony - right now, we can't send tens, much less hundreds or thousands, of people to Mars, even one-way. Sending prisoners, half a dozen at a time, to Mars, at the cost of billions per trip, would get us nothing but a pile of skeletons on a distant planet and a national deficit that will require new fields of mathematics just to calculate.
The Moon might be a more plausible location (and by "more plausible" I mean "slightly closer to physically possible"). But even then, the metaphorical timescale doesn't look to good - we probably won't have a permanent Moon colony until 2150, by your analogy.
Guess it's time to start treating my Mac computers the same way I treat my Windows computers - in need of extra care and protection against external attacks.
And so I've just disabled my Java and Quicktime plugins. Java because that's where all the current attacks are focused (and I never use it anyways), Quicktime because I never use it, either, and a smaller attack area is always good. I still visit enough sites that I need Flash enabled, but that's currently my only plugin (and protected by some heavy blocking rules).
I'll also be much more strict about keeping everything up-to-date, and all the other basic security practices.
Next, guess I need a basic virus-scanner. The only GPL one I see is Clam, which, last time I used it, was completely ineffective at stopping viruses. The one I use on Windows, MSE, is naturally not available on the Mac. So, any suggestions?
Well, he didn't say he wasn't...
Sure there is.
First, infiltrate the NK working classes. Give them outside information - anything they want. Secret Agent Man sneaks in, finds a farmer family, gives them each a Big Mac meal - Super-Sized - and a rundown of our side of the story. Don't ask them to do anything except listen. Just try to convince them that we're not the mass-murdering monsters the NK propaganda claims. Above all, though, be honest - admit to the things we have done wrong, don't hide it. It's not the glamorous James Bond spy gig, but it will actually work. Repeat on a massive scale - the number of agents involved should reach the thousands. Masquerade it as a food benefit program, if necessary.
Second, start cutting off the rich kids' toys. We have sanctions on wheat and corn for the peasants, but the king still drinks $10,000-a-bottle champagne. Find a way to crack down on that sort of thing, and you'll either get them to seriously back down, or to go to even more extremes to maintain power.
If the leaders did back down, a relatively bloodless revolution will come about naturally, over the course of decades. Just like the Soviet Union - the leaders liberalized, the oppressed used their new freedoms to get rid of *all* the tyranny. Didn't work out perfectly, but still better than the alternative. No more work involved on our end.
If, however, Kim III clamps down tighter, get your "secret agents" to start a push for an armed revolution. Target especially the members of the army - when one in five North Korean combat-age men are in the army, you'll need to do something to shift those numbers. Promise the rebels full support - and GIVE it. They call for air strikes, give them. They ask for Stinger missiles, give them. The absolute worst thing you could do is fail to follow through at this point. This is arguably the only expensive part of the plan.
If the revolution succeeds, try to angle them towards reunification. It'll be tough on South Korea's economy for a bit, but they're in good enough shape to handle it. If they insist on independence for whatever reason, make sure no new dictators pop up, through assassinations if necessary.
Even if the revolution fails, the country will be in total ruins. Once the fighting stops, the generals will realize there's no food *at* *all*, and they'll either force the leadership out, or force them to accept any terms to get foreign food. You'll still have a dictator, but a pacified one, and one in a very, very tenuous situation.
The only complicating factor is China. China views NK as a necessary buffer state between it, and the South Korean and American armies below. They've been propping the country up for half a century. They'll need to be neutralized somehow before any of this can have a reasonable chance of success.
Best option? Trade. China is the world's #1 exporter, but also the world's #2 importer. Unlike North Korea, they *depend* on the rest of the world.
The best place to squeeze them is on manufacturing technology. They import almost all their manufacturing machinery from either the US or Japan, both of whom have a vested interest in neutralizing North Korea. Getting Russia to join in by cutting off the flow of oil and power from the North would also help, but might be optional.
Obviously, selling the American public on accepting a huge spike in consumer good prices "for liberating North Korea" will never work. However, doing so "for FREEDOM" might. There's been a huge amount of anti-Chinese rhetoric in American politics lately - between latent Sinophobia (racism against Chinese is probably one of the more tolerated bigotries in the US), and the whole "China buying up America" debt scare, you could probably sell America on accepting a spike in prices at least long enough to execute the NK plan.
OK, fine, so it's not *easy*, but it is *possible*. And if there's ever a revolution in China that leads to them abandoning NK, it *does* become easy.
But, as better men than I have said, "doing what is right is not always easy, and doing what is easy is not always right".
I was with you (the iMac definitely proved the viability of the legacy-free PC) up until you said "the PC world will follow".
The PC world doesn't follow Apple. Never really did.
Remember how long it took Apple to even support multi-button mice, let alone make one? Yeah, how'd that work out?
Remember FireWire? I have never seen a non-Apple computer have a single Firewire port, except via an add-on card. The only Firewire devices I've ever seen were external hard drives used by a Mac-exclusive print shop, and a pro-grade video camera. It may not be a dead tech, but it's dead on the desktop.
Remember GeoPort? AAUI? Yeah, neither does anyone else.
Remember PowerPC? How that was supposedly "so much better" than x86, both faster and less power-hungry? Yeah, about that...
The list of technologies Apple introduced that became ubiquitous in the PC world is small - and most of them weren't even invented by Apple. EFI? Invented by Intel for their Itanium servers.
Apple doesn't lead the way in introducing new technologies - it leads the way in killing old technologies. And it can do that because half its customers are blind zealots like yourself.
Posted from my Mac Pro.
You make a somewhat valid point, but think about it from the vendor's point of view:
You need to have computers support TB before you can really sell devices using TB. People don't buy a hard drive or monitor, and then find a computer that will use it; they find a computer they want and then buy a hard drive or monitor that will work with *that*, simply because it's cheaper to buy a new monitor than it is to buy a new computer.
The laptop I have on preorder has a TB port. I don't particularly care about that either way - it seems to have displaced the eSATA port, and the only eSATA device I have works as USB just as well. But, when I'm out shopping for [device] in a year from now, TB will be an option, and possibly the best option.
Vendors know, through long experience, to build up the supporting devices (ones that support the new standard as well as old ones) well before making devices that primarily or exclusively use the new standard. Even a decade after USB 1.1, computers had legacy PS/2 ports for keyboards and mice. Even years after DVI was itself made technically obsolete, computers were coming with VGA ports.
Remember when USB first came out? At first, nothing really used it. You'd see printers support it as an option, right next to the old parallel port; you'd see a few USB mice and keyboards, often packaged with a PS/2USB converter. But now, you have to look long and hard to find a computer *without* USB, and finding legacy PS/2 keyboards or parallel cables is rather difficult.
Thunderbolt isn't guaranteed to take off the same way (remember FireWire? Or the countless mini-DVI ports? Or any other failed standard?), but it *could*. And so device manufacturers throw it in, especially since Intel's chipsets support it *anyways*. It's another bullet point to put on the marketing, but it could be that small little edge against [competitor], right?
Or, more recently, Intel's many-core prototypes used this. At the very least, the "Single-Chip Cloud Computer" used a mesh network, and I think Larrabee had such a thing as well...
Oh yes, you have to *type in a password* to use the Wifi. How ever will ordinary people learn how to do something as complicated and technical as that?
For a rather weird video game I'm making (will post it on /. as soon as it's ready), I compiled a list of literally thousands of processors. As of now, I believe I have every x86 processor (Intel, AMD, Via, Centaur, NSC, etc., from the 8086 to Ivy Bridge), every Itanium, quite a few POWER and SPARC chips and a handful of MIPS.
I'd like to contribute it - it has some factual errors, such as where I couldn't find actual prices and had to guess, and it has some less relevant stuff, like what integrated GPU, if any, it has. But hey, it's already several thousand processors, that's got to be a good start.
And, if this CPU database starts growing, I'm excited because it will make adding the *rest* of the processors easier. ARM in particular is hard to find full, definite lists of, because it's a licensed architecture instead of fabricated.
Yes, email spam is dropping. But is it truly because we're winning, or is it because we're not keeping up with the times?
I read maybe 20 emails a week. None of them are spam. But I spend far, far more times on forums, or in comment sections on various blogs or news sites. Spam levels there seem to be rising. And I imagine spammers are finding ways to exploit Facebook and Twitter, as well.
Perhaps spammers have just realized that you get better results spamming Web 2.0 than spamming Web 1.0.
*I doubt terrorists will waste their time attacking airplanes with bombs. They'll go after soft targets like your home or factory. The best way to deal with them is to keep them OUT of the country in the first place (yes that means walls on both borders; enemies shouldn't be able to just walk in).
No, planes are still big, juicy targets. The problem is that the TSA is assuming *all* terrorists are suicidal. And I have to say, "assuming all your enemies' plans involve killing themselves" is pretty fucking stupid.
What if one of them has a Stinger launcher left over from when we gave them to the then-"freedom-fighter" Taliban to fight the then-"evil-communists"? Or a cheap Chinese knockoff of one? Boom. There's easily several hundred people dead (the Airbus A380's certified for 850 people), plus whatever poor bastards happen to be where the wreckage lands. Hit it on approach for landing, with luck (good or bad, depending on your character alignment) and it hits the airport terminal...
Or use a powerful laser (I've seen several on this very site) to blind the pilots during landing. With luck, bam, crash. Or use a sniper rifle to damage the jet turbines - catastrophic engine failure would easily cost millions to repair, even if it doesn't kill too many people.
Or, if you're still feeling suicidal, rent a small aircraft, a single-engine Cessna or something. Hijack *that*, kamikaze aforementioned Airbus.
That's all off the top of my head, from a guy who hasn't ever thought about "how to take down a jet fighter" before now. Imagine what actual terrorists could do, with actual planning and actual experience.
I'm honestly surprised it hasn't already happened.
HEY! That's an unfair generalization.
Women can pollute as well.
Overboard shipping containers. Search-and-rescue (aka find the bodies). Security (if it can spot debris, it can spot actual ships). Oil slicks, possibly.
Also, if there's something *continually* spitting out debris or something similar, tracking it down to stop it would be important.
Agreed. I'm an *American*, and I listen to the BBC far more than any of my own news services. *Especially* for American politics - they don't seem to have an agenda they're pushing, unlike Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and whichever other ones I forgot.
The only downside is a constant slightly-condescending tone. You could probably end each report on the US elections with "Silly Americans, thinking they know how to form a system of government." and it would fit perfectly.
Curiously, Xinhua, the government-sponsored Chinese news service, does basic factual reporting better than most of the American news sources (coughcoughfoxcough). They're absolutely, completely untrustworthy when it comes to what happens in, to, with, nearby or within earshot of *China*, but if you need basic "On March 1, politician X was caught doing Y with an underage herring" or "the Elbonian town of Kerlyaglyagle has been occupied by anarcho-syndicalist separatists", they give you that. I think it's a combination of "only intended for Chinese consumption", and "not having good enough translators to put spin on anything".
Farsi is French for Persian.
No, Farsi is the Persian word for Persian. The French for Persian is apparently "persan".
Citation
And Arabic is not the Esperanto of the Islamic world - unless Arabic is the idealistic but extremely rare constructed language intended for auxiliary use but ultimately relegated to a small hopeful minority. Arabic is more the Latin of the Islamic world - the Holy Book is written* in it, so many people know it, even in areas where nobody speaks it historically.
* Yes, I know the Bible was not originally in Latin, but the most common version, especially in the Middle Ages, was.
Weird, could have sworn Farsi (aka Persian) is the main language of Afghanistan.
And Wikipedia seems to back me up: "Dari... or Farsi-ye Dari...As defined in the Constitution of Afghanistan, it is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan; the other is Pashto. Dari is the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan and the mother-tongue of approximately 50% of the population, serving as the country's lingua franca."
In any case, I don't speak it.
There's actually a few questions I'd like to ask them myself (won't bother, since I assume they only take questions in Farsi, or maybe Arabic as well, neither of which I speak). I can probably guess their answers, but hearing it straight from them, instead of indirectly through our own "expert analysis", would be... well, more scientific, I suppose. Direct observations are almost always more accurate and reliable than indirect observations.
First, I'd ask "if you had the ability to eliminate every 'infidel' from the planet, would you?". Second, "if the invaders were to leave, completely, on the sole condition that Afghanistan become a non-Islamic, but non anti-Islamic, state, would that be preferable to continued occupation?"
The first is sort of a "can we co-exist with these people? can they be reasonable?" If we were to leave them completely alone, would they keep to themselves, or would they remain a threat to our security? A classical Islamic state would tolerate 'infidels' even in their own country - during the Middle Ages, all you had to do was pay an extra tax, and *that* was mainly to get out of the military draft. It was illegal to *leave* the state religion (on pain of death, often), but for the most part, if you stayed quiet and obeyed the secular laws, the religious laws left you alone. However, a modern fundamentalist Islamic state probably would not be so... tolerant.
The second is a "what do they care more about: being left alone, or being fundamentalist Muslims?" Because, undoubtedly, a fundamentalist state of any religion is generally bad. Even a fundamentalist atheist state would be oppressive and essentially *wrong*. So it is in the best interests of justice, of humanity, that Afghanistan not revert to a fundamentalist Islamic state, as the Taliban desires. However, I suspect that much of their popular support comes not from people wanting to be ruled by some theocrat, but by people who want the invaders out of their homeland. I can sympathize - I want our "invaders" out of their homeland and back in ours, as well. The question is, would their leadership accept not ruling Afghanistan themselves if it meant a free Afghanistan? It's not likely, given the past decade, but it's possible. And any possibility for a peaceful but beneficial resolution to war is worth entertaining.
While the game may be real, I highly doubt the title and logo are.
The difference here is mainly that their primary retail distributors often make most of their profit off used, not new, products.
I go to a Honda dealer, they may sell used cars, maybe even a *lot* of new cars, but their highest profit margins and overall highest profits are on new.
I go to NewEgg, they may sell some refurbished kit, but most of their income comes from new products.
I go to GameStop, I see racks upon racks of used games, often labeled near-identically to the new games, and am constantly nagged about buying used instead of new.
And the one time I *did* sell them my old games, I got about $3 per game, which they turned around and sold for up to $30. I've never since been interested in selling off old games, because it's just not worth it, particularly since I actually like going back and playing old games.
So think about how that skews the developer's profits. Their primary retailer has a vested interest in screwing them out of as many new sales as possible.
Developers don't want to kill used games because of gamers. Most probably wouldn't care if you sold their game on Ebay, or sold it to a friend - that's a small channel that's not even really competing with retail. They want to kill used games because they want to kill GameStop's used section.
Crippling games so they can't be on-sold, the essence of a free market, just makes people angry and turns people off their products.
Which is why most companies prefer to combat the problem by making gamers not *want* to resell it - by tacking on a multiplayer component, or releasing new content, or selling a lot of DLC (which is inherently tied to one account).
You'll note that the companies most likely to artificially make games tied to one account (several games already do this) are also the ones that decide massively invasive DRM is the best way to fight piracy.
Not quite, if you look at Sony's audience as game *developers* instead of game *players*.
Game developers hate hate *HATE* used games. They try hard to make gamers *not* sell their games - focusing on multiplayer instead of story, or continually adding DLC, even free DLC, for months after release. Making it impossible to play used games is the rare extreme case, because most developers know that it pisses off their players more than it's worth. But I have yet to see a developer come out in favor of used games. It's relatively common, even, to see a developer state in an interview that used games are doing more to kill the industry than piracy.
And when you look at it, that's kind of true. Used games give zero profit to the developers, and often actually *cost* the developer money (storing two player's data on their servers instead of just one). While the same is true of piracy, if I pirate GameX, I still have money to spend on GameY. If I buy GameX used, that's 30-55 bucks I no longer have to spend on new games.
Used games do help the platform, *if* the platform is limited to physical distribution - giving a mandatory discount on old games lowers the barrier of entry, makes it easier to get the console. But once you get digital distribution going on, used games don't even do that. That's why the PC isn't really suffering from not having used games - you can find the old games rather easily, in general, and and the cheap games role is still filled by old, or bad, releases - many games now drop $10-$20 within a month or two, if they aren't good enough to sell well at $50-$60.
The 360 isn't fairly open. You have to pay for everything and despite the fact MS is the only company that has real experience in browser development it's the only system without a browser in order to stop people from gaining access to something outside of their paywall.
Look at who else there is: Nintendo, whose development kit costs more than my car, and Sony, who's fucking Sony. Compared to that, a $100 XNA license is as open as it gets, especially since it doubles as a WP7 license, where it's on par with Apple (nobody really *wants* to write for WP7, but it's a decent gesture.
Oh, and Nintendo originally charged for the web browser.
Regarding indie development, they treat that like a disease these days and hope it goes away. But in the early days that was a bonus for the PC gamers that they converted to xbox. But now they brag about how much time is spent *not* playing games on the 360 as they try to out "causal" Nintendo.
The XBox actually has the best indie support of any console. They're still terrible compared to Steam, but you judge evil based on its competitors - there's a really good WW2 analogy I want to use, but like hell I'm going to give Godwin an opening here.