Copyright really doesn't come into play here, at least not in favor of the contributors.
First, track information is basically factual data, so what protection there is will be pretty weak. (It is true that having no copyright due to a purely-factual nature is a pretty high bar in our legal system, but certainly one can't argue there's much creativity going into a CDDB description; and to the extent that creativity is involved and two people enter different information for the same CD that's probably a bug in the process.)
Second, to the extent that there is any protection on the song titles and track order, it would belong to the copyright holders, not the CDDB contributors. That is, if there is indeed any protection on this work, then the CDDB contributors are infringing. My personal call is that to the extent it is factual, it isn't infringing, as the average song title is too short to be considered "copyrighted" in the strict sense, and track order is almost certainly just factual information. But lawyers could profitably argue about this.
This isn't really about legal issues; none of the "State-run ways to try to protect content or ideas" apply to track listings entered into a database, and to the extent that they do, they don't apply to the contributors to CDDB. This is about community relations and ethics.
As the sibling to this post points out, Sir Ian McKellen can affort some more up-front costs than I can.
As I am in a rental house property my options on anything like solar are pretty limited, and even if I did something I need something that pays back in something like a year. I've been settling for purchasing efficient home appliances where I can, and concentrating on keeping this somewhat-old house's heat holes plugged, so I use less gas heat.
(Note that nobody has to guilt me into being more energy efficient, because I see the benefits on my energy bill. With less than $50 worth of stuff, we cut the heating bill on this house down by a third, although much of that was a poorly-hung door that was leaking like a sieve. This winter we're experimenting with these cheap kits to put plastic covers over our big windows, which so far seems to be working far better than it has any right to, although we don't know how this is going to be reflected on our bill yet; I'm in southern michigan and while the heater has started to run on some days, it's still not winter here yet.)
But the real reason I replied:
If you ask me, it's you brain making solar power hard, not the Universe.
The reason I say the Universe is making it hard is that it has not been an easy task to harness solar power in a cost-effective way. We may or may not just be getting to it here in the early 2000s, after the most fantastic century of progress in human history. By comparison, a cave man could usefully use coal and it doesn't take much more technology to pull at least some of it out of the ground. (Regretfully it took some significant technology to build an infrastructure that could do that without destroying people's lungs and the local ecology.)
The Universe is positively awash in energy of all kinds. However it's surprisingly difficult to use that energy to our advantage.
(In some sense that's not all bad. You think nuclear is bad, suppose it was easy to build a Total Conversion bomb on some significant amount of mass. Might not make up for easier power generation.)
Note I did notice them talking about working on the XBox 360 already and talking to Sony about the PS3; my point was that it's too late for the consoles to get full hardware support, not that procedural textures are impossible. It may be impractical to use procedural textures on current hardware with games that are more demanding than a standard FPS, which in computational terms is almost negligible in most cases; the average FPS is pretty much all graphics, if the textures end up eating a lot of the CPU due to lack of hardware support.
Then again, it may not be so bad. Hard to tell without knowing more.
Real-time procedural texturing is costly. So if the hardware isn't up to it, the advantages of the texturing will go unrealized. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the first generation merely generates static textures on load, then uses them as if they were bitmaps included with the game.
I would expect that if a company like this can find a powerful-enough mathematical abstraction for producing these textures, that nVidia and/or ATI would leap at the chance to put it in hardware, where it ought to speed up a lot. Maybe not up to "realtime", but probably to something a bit more useful, when combined with another couple of generations of generic advancement (as it's not going to be on the next set of cards) and some hardware-based lazy computation/caching. (For optimal performance, you may need to sometimes "predeclare" that a user is going to suddenly zoom in on a given texture; otherwise, with a hardware base you can allow "texture pop-in" to occur.)
If they come up with something both decent and useful, I suspect we can have something useful within a couple of years.
Bad news is that it may or may not be too late for the current consoles. The PS3 and XBox360 could certainly use something like this, not for graphical reasons, but to help with development costs.
I truly believe that the #1 reason why distributed power systems like solar, hydrogen, etc, are not taking off are because the big energy companies don't WANT decentralized energy systems - because they can't control the profits as easily.
Why hypothesize a gigantic multi-company conspiracy, apparently even extending into all the companies doing solar research (who evidently don't want to succeed), when It's been too expensive to be practical seems to cover the bases nicely?
The problem with all these "The Big Bad Industry doesn't want X to succeed!" is the absolutely staggering number of X's that have nonetheless succeeded. Who cares what my power company "wants"? If I could buy cost-effective solar, I would. I can't. (And given that I live in cloudy Michigan it's going to be even longer for me than for some of you, but that's just a detail.)
Good luck to any power company foolish enough to stand in the way of something with the PR power of solar power. Can you imagine the media bloodbath that would ensue if any power company executive even mumbled something about getting solar outlawed?
Seriously, less emotion, more brain. It's the Universe making solar power hard, not a conspiracy of apparently-omnipotent "evil executives".
He [steals X] and sell[s it] for a couple of bucks on markets to finance Al Quaida thermonuclear program, possible harm: millions of deaths + thousands of billions $ of damages.
That's a null argument; it holds equally for all X and is not special to downloaded music or other intellectual property.
Moreover, the law in this case is not specifically concerned with "damage to society", it is concerned with damage to the property holder. (There is a reason it's called "intellectual property"; that some people don't like the moniker, including me, doesn't make it any less true. The law treats it a lot like property, including some inappropriate ways.) Thus, the issues that arise from downloading come about from lost income, either real or potential*, from the downloading. The law cares little about the objective.
(The law is generally concerned with "damage to society", but that's a value that is generally impossible to work with.)
If they can establish that that the wholesale value of a song is three orders of magnitude less than the statutory damages, and demonstrate that for the essentially-victimless crime of downloading a couple-hundred CDs you face total economic ruination, they've probably got a good case here, at least in theory. As long as we're going to have these laws (and I personally still support some form of them, just of a different form), they need to be reasonable. Wholesale value per song + $10,000 I could see, but pretty much any per-song charge gets absurd very quickly. (Don't get too attached to the exact number; up, down, I don't care, my point is a constant punitive fee instead of a monstrous per-song one.)
*: The argument that someone who downloads something illegally probably wouldn't have bought it anyhow applies to analyzing the inflated damages claimed by the industry; the law says that if you can't afford something, you don't get to have it. For computing damages "potential" is fine.
I said that if you weren't going to vote anyhow, you should at least take the time to vote for a third party, to more precisely specify your "none-of-the-above" vote.
Whether or not there's a chance of winning is irrelevant to my point, because it starts on the presumption that you've already decided not to vote, and therefore have already completely punted on the "winning" issue. If you're going to vote for real than my argument has nothing to say to you.
You want to take another crack at explaining why you know what I think better than I do? Unless there's something you've been not telling me, you don't seem to live in my brain; only I do.
Out of curiosity, may I ask which county you are in?
I'm in Oakland county (which for non-michigan residents is just northwest of Detroit, containing many of the suburbs, many quite wealthy) and my experience corresponds to bfield's (sibling post) claim; I had a standardized-test-like ballot which could be rapidly counted by the machine but which would be easy to verify by hand if necessary. I was quite pleased after my concerns with electronic voting as this is one of my two "optimal" set ups (the other being a machine that takes your vote and prints off a ballot that looks like a standardized test, such that the voter can fully verify it before turning it in; this has potential accessibility and simplicity advantages over paper if implemented properly but paper does have a certain concreteness).
Given that Oakland county is pretty well off, I figured if anybody in the state used fancy machines, it'd be us.
If you want to vote a blank ballot, I'd suggest finding which third party most closely matches your beliefs and vote for them instead.
It is true that the third parties don't win, but this does two things:
If a third party starts getting enough votes, it will convince one of the mainstream parties to co-opt the issue giving them votes. This is a good thing. Third parties may not win but they force the main parties to stay in touch with the electorate. (As it happens we're a bit disconnected from that at the moment, and the third parties provide a Nuclear Option, which is that if one of the two main parties disconnect from voters and refuse to reconnect, a third party can supplant them. I still consider it a high probability that a third party will emerge sometime in the next decade.)
You are doing more than just saying "none of the above", you are saying what kind of "none of the above" you're voting. A Libertarian none-of-the-above is very different than a Green none-of-the-above. Also, since you basically know the candidate won't win, you don't really have to know anything about the candidate; it doesn't matter if the Libertarian candidate is the typical loon they seem to nominate, what matters is the fact that you voted Libertarian. (I use that party in this example because A: I trend that way and B: My goodness do they ever nominate loonies, which I can say since I trend that way.
By the way, I have practiced what I preached before. I also personally recommend that you only do this for races that you truly don't care about or where the conclusion is forgone, but you are of course free to vote any way you choose.
Pure mail-in systems also have the "voting receipt" problem, allowing a third party to affect/verify your vote with underhanded techniques.
I'm also concerned about losing ballots on a large scale.
Absentee ballots are better than losing that person's vote entirely, so we do have to allow at least some such ballots, but I don't see how we can build a secure voting system that isn't largely based on people physically going to a secure polling place.
I actually can't because I have only seen them in the stores.
And I have no problem admitting that to some degree my grading scale is relative. How the 360 gets graded will partially depend on how the other systems do.
Two can play at this game. My grades, briefly and biased-ly:
Playstation 2: A couple of points docked for some truly sub-par graphics decisions made to pump up the polygon count, but otherwise, this is pretty much the model console. A.
360, PS3, Wii: Way the fuck too early to grade. Everybody here knows where the pre-release hype stands.
DS: A+. You pretty much have to give out an A+ here because of the risk factor, and the fact that it paid off. The DS actually has fun games that can not be meaningfully ported to any other gaming platform. (Kirby's Canvas Curse is the canonical example, methinks; due to the way the game critically depends on the stylus even a mouse could not adequately emulate it.) Actually, A+ for the DS Lite; the DS is probably an A- for being a bit clunky, dim, and sorta ugly, but the Lite fixed all of that.
PSP: I have not used it, but certainly the followthrough execution has been lacking. I don't think a portable game player can afford optical disk technology yet. I'd cap the score at B- for technical issues, and for most people it's probably even worse due to lack of game selection. (It's not that there are no games, but I sure don't seem to hear about many of them.) The UMD movies were a sick joke and if you grade the device as a whole (not just as a games device) I'd knock it down to C- or even D+ for that; I do not appreciate having yet another proprietary movie medium foisted on me. (But as it is ignorable simply by not buying UMD movies, I'd consider the B- my "real" score.)
Gamecube: C for business reasons. The console is solid, the games are solid, the marketing apparently didn't execute, they were late to the party, and in general it just didn't make it. However, I note that one of the reasons I find myself interested in the Wii is knowing it opens the Gamecube library up to me; I could totally see buying a Wii, maybe Red Steele and Excite Truck (which would probably be my wife's favorite), then scrounging around in the Gamecube bargain bin/used pile for some of the many things I've missed there, cheap.
XBox: Sharply differs depending on whether you like the games the XBox had or you didn't. If you liked them, and liked playing them online, B+. If you couldn't care less, D+.
Dreamcast: B-. I actually liked the quality and the game selection was surprisingly good, especially if you still think it just sort of "died". In some ways it reminds me of the DS, with a high proportion of off-genre or niche games that turned out to be a lot of fun. Personally I find I like the controller better than the PS2, although I'm a big man. The memory cards were kooky and mostly useless. Note that this grade (and all others in this discussion) are "for the time"; obviously the Dreamcast released today would not beat the Gamecube.
But of course the reasons given are more interesting than the actual grades.
I happen to use Linux, OSX and Windows, and the number one annoyance for me is a lack of clear "native-looking" GUI or OpenGL toolkit offering that is reachable by scripting languages like Perl and Python.
What you're probably looking for there is wxWidgets, which is a sophisticated native wrapper around each of those and has binding for Python, Perl, and the usual motley crew, including.Net and to some extent Java (I think).
It has XRC files, which I think is how GUI designers tie into wxWidgets, covering that, too. I'm in the GUI builders are evil camp, so I don't know much more about that.
Tk sucks, but the general trend seems to have been away from shipping a standard GUI toolkit. There's just too many choices ranging from good to excellent to choose one. (And note this is not a problem specific to Python, it's true for all of the mainstream languages. How do you choose between GTK/QT/WinForms/Carbon/wxWidgets, plus a couple of other credible contenders, plus perhaps whatever your local GUI system is if you're on an exotic system, etc. They've all got obvious platform compatibility and licensing tradeoffs, and a whole slew of much more subtle quality and capability tradeoffs. It's really not possible at the current time to mandate one choice. I'd rather see Tk just come out than try to standardize on something els.)
it does? Where?! As far as science goes, science so far says life exists on Earth and nothing else, so far Earth is the only proven example (scientifcally) of where life exists. This means science says life only exists on earth.
No. Science as we currently know it says that life seems to arisen nearly the instant it was feasible, and even that it may well have arisen multiple times between catastrophes that wiped out all life early in the history of the plane. It also says that, broadly speaking, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly unique about Earth, and that there ought to be an incomprehensible number of planets out there.
Putting the two of those together, it seems like life is "easy", even if we can figure it out, and that there ought to be a lot of it.
Earth is the only planet with confirmed life. Science can neither confirm nor deny life anywhere else at this time. But mainstream-science says there ought to be more ought there.
Another AC complains that the Fermi Paradox has a lot of problems, but that rather misses the point. Of course there's a problem with the Fermi Paradox; that is indeed the source of the paradox. Somewhere along the way there is an error. Perhaps life isn't that easy. Perhaps intelligent life isn't that easy. Perhaps the Rare Earth hypothesis hold (that is, the Earth has one or more specifically unique characteristics, perhaps even the Snowball Earth history to bring the topic back in.) Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. The problem is, we don't know what.
Nor is it an entirely intellectual enterprise. The Great Filter argument seems sound to me; if the thing preventing stable societies that can expand is in our past, perhaps the difficulty of life itself, perhaps the unlikeliness of intelligence, then perhaps we really can survive. If, on the other hand, the difficult part lies ahead of us, then we can assume unspeakably many societies may have advanced to our point, only to die anyhow. Perhaps we are screwed no matter what, but perhaps with logic and science we can identify the "great filter" before it filters us, and at least bend the odds in our favor. The answer to the Fermi Paradox may be very, very important. (Please do not argue with this poor summary, which is going off of my memory, I didn't even re-read the article. Please read the real article if you are interested enough to want to rebut this; rebutting this summary paragraph would just be rebutting a straw man.)
The Wikipedia article has some interesting connections to the Fermi Paradox, though the article doesn't call them out.
(If you don't know what the Fermi Paradox is, look, Wikipedia!)
One of the possible answers to the Fermi Paradox (which I note doesn't show up in the Wikipedia article) is that life is common in the universe, but the worlds are either hospitable towards the life, resulting in no selection pressure towards complexity, or so hostile that the life totally dies out too often to advance. The general image is of a universe full of oceans full of simple, utterly stable bacteria, which by most standards is still basically lifeless. (We're really interested in other intelligent life, not a universe of little germs.) It has been hypothesized that the best scenario for complex life is a recurring series of disasters that almost, but not quite, kills off life each time, resulting in a strong selection pressure for the requisite complexity to handle such environmental pressures.
The carbon dioxide levels necessary to unfreeze the Earth have been estimated as being 350 times what they are today, but would be able to accumulate due to the opposite of the effect mentioned earlier as a possible mechanism triggering the freeze in the first place; if the Earth was completely covered with ice, silicate rocks would not be exposed during erosion, and carbon dioxide would not then be removed from the atmosphere. Eventually enough CO2 would accumulate, perhaps after an era of increased volcanic activity (a prodigious producer of this greenhouse gas), that the oceans around the equator would finally melt, which would produce a band of open ice-free water, much darker than the highly reflective ice, which would absorb more energy from the sun. This would in turn heat the Earth more, melting more water to absorb more light, and so on. Concurrently, the abundance of CO2 would provide plenty of food to feed a cyanobacterial population explosion, resulting in a relatively rapid reoxygenation of the atmosphere to feed the following Cambrian Explosion with the new multicellular lifeforms. This positive feedback loop would melt the ice in geological short order, perhaps less than 1000 years; replenishment of atmospheric oxygen and depletion of the CO2 levels would take more thousands of years.
However, the carbon dioxide levels would still be two orders of magnitude higher than usual. Rain would wash CO2 out of the atmosphere as a weak solution of carbonic acid, which would turn exposed silicate rock to carbonate rock, which would then erode easily, wash into the ocean, and form deep layers of carbonate sedimentary rock. Thick layers of exactly this abiotic carbonate sediment can be found on top of the glacial till that first suggested the Snowball Earth.
Eventually the carbon dioxide level would get so low that the Earth would freeze over again. This cycle went on until Rodinia had dispersed so much that the Earth's land was no longer strung out along the equator and the primary cause of Snowball Earth would no longer operate.
The next section of the Wikipedia article mentions the effect this could have had on evolution.
(I find the Fermi Paradox interesting because I believe it is actually by far the biggest problem facing science as a whole; science says life should be plentiful and easy and populating the stars ought to be possible at significant fractions of the speed of light, so where is the life that is doing so? It's easy to become numbed to the problem because it seems somewhat abstract, but it's not. Something is fundamentally wrong with at least one of biology, astronomy, cosmology, sociology, and/or the intersections of those disciplines we don't have names for, and we don't know what.)
If there are signals travelling 80mph and signals travelling 4mph (and that's a good run/jog), then clearly the flow is at 80 mph.
If there are only signals travelling 4 mph, then clearly the traffic is stalled. Figuring out exactly which signal is which isn't important.
Pedestrians aren't the problem. The problem would be a parallel street within the error margin (common because highways are often basically run right over old popular routes, and sometimes the old popular routes are still there, so you can get multi-mile runs of a well-travelled road well within 300 feet). The highway can be completely clogged while traffic might still be flowing well on that side street. (I've seen this when the highway is unexpectedly clogged due to an accident and where there are no exits to move flow onto the side street for a ways.) However, even this situation could be ascertained with an extremely high degree of confidence with some rather simple statistics; a clogged highway in this situation would still show as hundreds of stalled signals, which could still be picked out as an abnormal situation, even if other signals are moving at 60mph.
It's a problem, yeah, and maybe you'd actually want to have someone with a real degree in computer science or statistics tackle it, rather than a "code monkey" (and note the scare quotes), but it wouldn't even rate what anybody would call "AI". Worst case scenario is a couple of isolated road segments that for special reasons are particularly hard to deal with, but even then you could probably solve the problem by considering a bit more data. (That is, if you can't figure out whether a particular half-mile segment of the highway is moving, for whatever reason, you can still get a good idea by looking at the segments on either side that you do know are the highway. Across the long term, traffic flow in must equal traffic flow out, so eventually if there is a slowdown in the particular mystery segment, you can infer that from other segments.)
Some context for people who didn't read the book... or didn't read it carefully enough.
First, Vernor Vinge has a PhD in Computer Science. This obviously doesn't guarantee he can't be wrong, but to those commenters who said something like "these ideas are idiotic"... you've got an uphill battle to convince me that you're that much smarter than Vernor Vinge, especially as most of you saying that don't show me you understood what he was saying in the first place.
Second, A Deepness In The Sky is set in his "zones of thought" universe. In this universe, the fundamental limits of computation vary depending on where you are physically in the galaxy. This is only faintly hinted at in A Deepness In The Sky, it is explicitly spelled out in A Fire Upon the Deep. This limit on computation may or may not be real. One of the effects of this limit on computation is that you can build a system larger than you can really handle, and eventually all such systems come apart in one way or another. This story is set thousands of years in the future and it is explicitly (albeit subtly) pointed out that the software running the ramscoop ships has direct continuity with modern software. (Qeng Ho computers use the UNIX epoch as the most fundamental form of timekeeping; apparently even the relativistic compensation is layered on top of that.) We are at the very, very beginning, where it is still feasible to burn an OS down entirely and start from scratch.... or is that really still feasible? (Perhaps Microsoft will soon find out.)
Those of you posting that "we can always wrap it up in an API or whatever", I'd say two things: First, you get the Law of Leaky Abstractions working against you. The higher up the abstractions you go, the more problems you have. (Look it up if you don't know what that is.) The more sub-systems you make, the larger the state space of the total system becomes (exponentially), and the harder it is to know what's going on. It is entirely plausible that you eventually hit a wall beyond which you can't pass without being smarter, which, per the previous paragraph, you can't be.
In other places in the galaxy, you can be smarter, and Vernor Vinge postulates the existence of stable societies on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of years or beyond, where the society actually outlasts the component species, because the software base that makes up the species does not exceed the ability of the relevant intelligence to understand it.
Both cases (software might exceed intelligence, intelligence might grow with software) are extremely arguable, and I do not think he is advocating either one per se. (Leave that for his Singularity writings.) But you do him a disservice if you think he is not aware of the issues; he's extremely aware of the issues, to the point that he is the reason some of us are aware of the issues.
(Even this is a summary. In isolation, probably the best argument is that it is always possible to create a software system one can not understand or control, but one person can be wise enough to avoid that situation. However, in A Deepness in the Sky Vernor Vinge explicitly talks about how in a societal situation, one can be forced by competitive pressures to over-integrate your system and make it vulnerable. "OK, but the government can be smart enough to realize that's going to happen and step in to stop it." First... smart government? But even if you overcome that objection, now your society faces death-by-surveillance and other automated law enforcement mechanisms, which since they can't be human-intelligent will fail. If you avoid that (and it is a big temptation), then you face the problem of anarchy. And remember that "governance" is anything that governs; even if the "formal government" doesn't regulate you to soceital death, private corporations may do it. Anyhow, upshot, Vernor Vinge has done a lot of thinking on this topic, it shows in his books, it is not showing in the criticisms I've seen posted, and when it gets down to it he really has more questions than answers.)
I'd be a lot more (excited about the XBox360 or PS3)/(upset about the Wii design) if I believed power were the thing holding back games.
But I think to make that argument would take some serious rhetorical gymnastics. The problems with gaming clearly lie in the ideas, the general difficulty of executing complex ideas (programming complicated things, gaming or otherwise, is hard), the overemphasis on 3D graphics, and the stereotyping of controls.
All of these interrelate; in particular the emphasis on 3D graphics to the point that they are a requirement has resulted in the destruction of any number of good ideas from the old days, and who knows how many good ideas have been aborted because they wouldn't work in 3D? For an example of such an idea that luckily wasn't aborted, look at Viewtiful Joe. As graphics get harder, more of the projects programming superstars get dedicated to making them work, because it's hard. How many beautiful games have we seen with unbelievably bad pathfinding, a simple AI problem barely worthy of being called "AI"?
And of course there is the general monetary drain of good 3D graphics.
The DS has proven a safe haven for many of these older genres, and much new experimentation. Kirby: Canvas Curse is really fun, couldn't possibly work in 3D with a conventional controller (and it'd take some serious work with the Wii controller to make it work; I can envision one possibility but it'd still basically be a different game), and probably couldn't even work with a mouse interface. If you think good Sonic games died with the Genesis, the GBA and DS have had quite a few good old-school Sonic games. (I'm really enjoying Sonic Rush; using the stylus for the half-pipe Chaos Emerald stages is awesome, I wish there were twice as many. My favorite Sonic 2D ever, so far.) How many good ideas are never even thought of because console controllers can't support them?
A console with more RAM and more CPU, but the same graphics as the Gamecube and with an innovative new controller would still get my interest, because it attacks several of the real problems in gaming right now. (The rest of the problems will probably be solved the same way they are solved in all other programming domains, the slow but steady accumulation of ever-better libraries, and that's independent of console hardware.)
But I just don't see "power" as our big problem right now; we've got so much to spare that we can make grass wave realistically and make water sparkle and all kinds of other things that are nowhere near as important as the amount of development time they consume would seem to indicate.
Mario Brothers has a fun two-player mode. One player mode by modern standards is "meh", which actually still constitutes holding up pretty well as most games from that era are "crap", but still not something I'd go out of my way for.
The Nintendo's hardware is pretty simplistic and IMHO few games for it really hold up very well on nostalgia alone. However, when you add "playing against a human" back into the mix, that changes. Another example is Dr. Mario, which my wife enjoys because it's the only game she can consistently beat me with. Two player fun, one player boring.
Despite having played games since the Intellivision and having as much nostalgia for it as the next guy, I find the earliest console that has a number of games I actually want to play is the Super Nintendo, and to a lesser extent, the Genesis. Only one Intellivision game has held up for me ("Tron Deadly Discs", I have a weak spot for games that allow movement and firing in arbitrary directions, like Robotron 2084 or Smash TV), and only a handful of Nintendo-era games have held up for me, most of them decently remade on later consoles.
Four virtual desktops, set up in a square, with shortcuts to go up, down, left, and right, and no wrapping around. That just ends up being confusing. By setting it up this way, I can "go up, go right" to get to the top-right from any window. (Fitt's law, each virtual workspace is infinitely large this way.)
Upper left: Web, console, maybe music player. Actually, this and all further "consoles" are actually Konsole, which is the best console app I've had by far. (I was xterm for a long time, but the way KDE makes it easy for apps to have configurable keyboard shortcuts for so many things is awesome. Tab navigation is set up with the same keys as for Mozilla, and I've got one-keystroke SSH access to my work systems, along with custom icons to indicate that.)
Upper right: Communications. Email client, console, chat main window. (Chat windows sometimes wander.) Torrent client when torrenting.
Lower left: Two emacs windows at maximum height, side by side, for work. (When people say "large windows mean my code doesn't need to conform to the old 80-col limit", I show them this setup and about half the time they are Enlightened. More code = better for the forseeable future.) Console.
Lower right: Misc. Console. Any hobby projects often get sent there, as do certain documents I'm writing.
I use a laptop, but I usually suspend instead of rebooting so these configurations will often last a while.
ALT-SHIFT-arrow to change desktops. CTRL-ALT-SHIFT arrow to change desktops and move the highlighted window. Focus follows mouse, and that's about all the mouse gets used for (that and link clicking; I've tried the various "link enumerator" plugins for Firefox but they're too slow right now).
What's interesting is that I don't/didn't set up these distinctions on purpose, they've evolved and only later did I figure out what I was doing. Web browser got the upper left (start) window because that's the first thing I opened, usually.
Also, as anal as this sounds, I've been happy with several environments in the past that offered these features, plus keyboard shortcuts to start programs. (ALT-F1 for Mozilla, ALT-F2 for console, ALT-F3 to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY (for my wife when she wants to use the computer); I've had several things on ALT-F4 but none ever stuck, plus I feel I probably shouldn't get too used to hitting that key combo for when I do go back to windows.)
If each tab got its own window, I'd have tons of windows. Thank goodness for tabs.
It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be better (in most ways) than upsampling from NTSC/PAL resolutions. Future games would be tested with it. It would be reasonably analogous to the PS1/PS2 situation, although obviously not perfect.
Plus, Nintendo may be able to do some careful work to avoid this problem, since they presumably wouldn't be just sticking any ol' updated graphics card in, but a card custom designed for this purpose.
I think it's a distinct possibility, if Nintendo percieves that lack of HD is hurting them, or will be hurting them.
It's not trivial, but it's not impossible, either.
They're really missing an opportunity with their commercials.
To get the best sense of the graphical prowess of the modern consoles, you need an effectively-uncompressed video feed. The gameplay videos you can download, by and large, don't cut it; they can show gameplay but they can't show the graphics. They are compressed far more than a TV feed and typically shrunk to less than NTSC resolution, let alone HDTV resolution.
TV is the best place to be putting out some game clips that really show the PS3 kicking ass graphically. Instead we get a doll, being spooky for no reason I've been able to figure out.
I don't have an HDTV, but even TV resolution would be a step up. And for those who do have an HDTV, it would probably be awesome.
So, what you're saying is, if I have a medical condition correctly diagnosed, and five different doctors recommend five different treatments for that condition, that medicine is bullshit?
Depends on the treatment. Few ailments have that many accepted treatments, and I'd raise my eyebrows. But there are a few exceptions; five doctors might prescribe five different antibiotics. (But they're still all antibiotics, not antibiotics from one, exercise from another, and magnet therapy from a third.)
Better analogy, though I hate getting into analogy wars, is five doctors, five diagnoses. At that point, yes, at least four of those diagnoses are bullshit, and good odds the fifth one is wrong too. This happens; see the Discovery Health Channel's "Mystery Diagnosis" show for many examples.
The difference is that this is an unusual occurance, the kind of thing that can get you on a TV show when it happens. Five Feng Shui advocates producing five completely different diagnoses is the common case in Feng Shui.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright really doesn't come into play here, at least not in favor of the contributors.
First, track information is basically factual data, so what protection there is will be pretty weak. (It is true that having no copyright due to a purely-factual nature is a pretty high bar in our legal system, but certainly one can't argue there's much creativity going into a CDDB description; and to the extent that creativity is involved and two people enter different information for the same CD that's probably a bug in the process.)
Second, to the extent that there is any protection on the song titles and track order, it would belong to the copyright holders, not the CDDB contributors. That is, if there is indeed any protection on this work, then the CDDB contributors are infringing. My personal call is that to the extent it is factual, it isn't infringing, as the average song title is too short to be considered "copyrighted" in the strict sense, and track order is almost certainly just factual information. But lawyers could profitably argue about this.
This isn't really about legal issues; none of the "State-run ways to try to protect content or ideas" apply to track listings entered into a database, and to the extent that they do, they don't apply to the contributors to CDDB. This is about community relations and ethics.
Because the VGCats comic is inevitable, might as well come from someone with maxed-out Karma.
(It is pretty good though. I love the auction in the background of the second-to-last panel.)
As I am in a rental house property my options on anything like solar are pretty limited, and even if I did something I need something that pays back in something like a year. I've been settling for purchasing efficient home appliances where I can, and concentrating on keeping this somewhat-old house's heat holes plugged, so I use less gas heat.
(Note that nobody has to guilt me into being more energy efficient, because I see the benefits on my energy bill. With less than $50 worth of stuff, we cut the heating bill on this house down by a third, although much of that was a poorly-hung door that was leaking like a sieve. This winter we're experimenting with these cheap kits to put plastic covers over our big windows, which so far seems to be working far better than it has any right to, although we don't know how this is going to be reflected on our bill yet; I'm in southern michigan and while the heater has started to run on some days, it's still not winter here yet.)
But the real reason I replied:The reason I say the Universe is making it hard is that it has not been an easy task to harness solar power in a cost-effective way. We may or may not just be getting to it here in the early 2000s, after the most fantastic century of progress in human history. By comparison, a cave man could usefully use coal and it doesn't take much more technology to pull at least some of it out of the ground. (Regretfully it took some significant technology to build an infrastructure that could do that without destroying people's lungs and the local ecology.)
The Universe is positively awash in energy of all kinds. However it's surprisingly difficult to use that energy to our advantage.
(In some sense that's not all bad. You think nuclear is bad, suppose it was easy to build a Total Conversion bomb on some significant amount of mass. Might not make up for easier power generation.)
Note I did notice them talking about working on the XBox 360 already and talking to Sony about the PS3; my point was that it's too late for the consoles to get full hardware support, not that procedural textures are impossible. It may be impractical to use procedural textures on current hardware with games that are more demanding than a standard FPS, which in computational terms is almost negligible in most cases; the average FPS is pretty much all graphics, if the textures end up eating a lot of the CPU due to lack of hardware support.
Then again, it may not be so bad. Hard to tell without knowing more.
If they come up with something both decent and useful, I suspect we can have something useful within a couple of years.
Bad news is that it may or may not be too late for the current consoles. The PS3 and XBox360 could certainly use something like this, not for graphical reasons, but to help with development costs.
The problem with all these "The Big Bad Industry doesn't want X to succeed!" is the absolutely staggering number of X's that have nonetheless succeeded. Who cares what my power company "wants"? If I could buy cost-effective solar, I would. I can't. (And given that I live in cloudy Michigan it's going to be even longer for me than for some of you, but that's just a detail.)
Good luck to any power company foolish enough to stand in the way of something with the PR power of solar power. Can you imagine the media bloodbath that would ensue if any power company executive even mumbled something about getting solar outlawed?
Seriously, less emotion, more brain. It's the Universe making solar power hard, not a conspiracy of apparently-omnipotent "evil executives".
Moreover, the law in this case is not specifically concerned with "damage to society", it is concerned with damage to the property holder. (There is a reason it's called "intellectual property"; that some people don't like the moniker, including me, doesn't make it any less true. The law treats it a lot like property, including some inappropriate ways.) Thus, the issues that arise from downloading come about from lost income, either real or potential*, from the downloading. The law cares little about the objective.
(The law is generally concerned with "damage to society", but that's a value that is generally impossible to work with.)
If they can establish that that the wholesale value of a song is three orders of magnitude less than the statutory damages, and demonstrate that for the essentially-victimless crime of downloading a couple-hundred CDs you face total economic ruination, they've probably got a good case here, at least in theory. As long as we're going to have these laws (and I personally still support some form of them, just of a different form), they need to be reasonable. Wholesale value per song + $10,000 I could see, but pretty much any per-song charge gets absurd very quickly. (Don't get too attached to the exact number; up, down, I don't care, my point is a constant punitive fee instead of a monstrous per-song one.)
*: The argument that someone who downloads something illegally probably wouldn't have bought it anyhow applies to analyzing the inflated damages claimed by the industry; the law says that if you can't afford something, you don't get to have it. For computing damages "potential" is fine.
I said that if you weren't going to vote anyhow, you should at least take the time to vote for a third party, to more precisely specify your "none-of-the-above" vote.
Whether or not there's a chance of winning is irrelevant to my point, because it starts on the presumption that you've already decided not to vote, and therefore have already completely punted on the "winning" issue. If you're going to vote for real than my argument has nothing to say to you.
You want to take another crack at explaining why you know what I think better than I do? Unless there's something you've been not telling me, you don't seem to live in my brain; only I do.
You completely missed my point. Try reading it again.
Hint: I have no intention of actually electing a Libertarian, or at least not any candidate of theirs I've ever examined.
Out of curiosity, may I ask which county you are in?
I'm in Oakland county (which for non-michigan residents is just northwest of Detroit, containing many of the suburbs, many quite wealthy) and my experience corresponds to bfield's (sibling post) claim; I had a standardized-test-like ballot which could be rapidly counted by the machine but which would be easy to verify by hand if necessary. I was quite pleased after my concerns with electronic voting as this is one of my two "optimal" set ups (the other being a machine that takes your vote and prints off a ballot that looks like a standardized test, such that the voter can fully verify it before turning it in; this has potential accessibility and simplicity advantages over paper if implemented properly but paper does have a certain concreteness).
Given that Oakland county is pretty well off, I figured if anybody in the state used fancy machines, it'd be us.
It is true that the third parties don't win, but this does two things:
- If a third party starts getting enough votes, it will convince one of the mainstream parties to co-opt the issue giving them votes. This is a good thing. Third parties may not win but they force the main parties to stay in touch with the electorate. (As it happens we're a bit disconnected from that at the moment, and the third parties provide a Nuclear Option, which is that if one of the two main parties disconnect from voters and refuse to reconnect, a third party can supplant them. I still consider it a high probability that a third party will emerge sometime in the next decade.)
- You are doing more than just saying "none of the above", you are saying what kind of "none of the above" you're voting. A Libertarian none-of-the-above is very different than a Green none-of-the-above. Also, since you basically know the candidate won't win, you don't really have to know anything about the candidate; it doesn't matter if the Libertarian candidate is the typical loon they seem to nominate, what matters is the fact that you voted Libertarian. (I use that party in this example because A: I trend that way and B: My goodness do they ever nominate loonies, which I can say since I trend that way.
By the way, I have practiced what I preached before. I also personally recommend that you only do this for races that you truly don't care about or where the conclusion is forgone, but you are of course free to vote any way you choose.Pure mail-in systems also have the "voting receipt" problem, allowing a third party to affect/verify your vote with underhanded techniques.
I'm also concerned about losing ballots on a large scale.
Absentee ballots are better than losing that person's vote entirely, so we do have to allow at least some such ballots, but I don't see how we can build a secure voting system that isn't largely based on people physically going to a secure polling place.
You have a point.
I actually can't because I have only seen them in the stores.
And I have no problem admitting that to some degree my grading scale is relative. How the 360 gets graded will partially depend on how the other systems do.
- Playstation 2: A couple of points docked for some truly sub-par graphics decisions made to pump up the polygon count, but otherwise, this is pretty much the model console. A.
- 360, PS3, Wii: Way the fuck too early to grade. Everybody here knows where the pre-release hype stands.
- DS: A+. You pretty much have to give out an A+ here because of the risk factor, and the fact that it paid off. The DS actually has fun games that can not be meaningfully ported to any other gaming platform. (Kirby's Canvas Curse is the canonical example, methinks; due to the way the game critically depends on the stylus even a mouse could not adequately emulate it.) Actually, A+ for the DS Lite; the DS is probably an A- for being a bit clunky, dim, and sorta ugly, but the Lite fixed all of that.
- PSP: I have not used it, but certainly the followthrough execution has been lacking. I don't think a portable game player can afford optical disk technology yet. I'd cap the score at B- for technical issues, and for most people it's probably even worse due to lack of game selection. (It's not that there are no games, but I sure don't seem to hear about many of them.) The UMD movies were a sick joke and if you grade the device as a whole (not just as a games device) I'd knock it down to C- or even D+ for that; I do not appreciate having yet another proprietary movie medium foisted on me. (But as it is ignorable simply by not buying UMD movies, I'd consider the B- my "real" score.)
- Gamecube: C for business reasons. The console is solid, the games are solid, the marketing apparently didn't execute, they were late to the party, and in general it just didn't make it. However, I note that one of the reasons I find myself interested in the Wii is knowing it opens the Gamecube library up to me; I could totally see buying a Wii, maybe Red Steele and Excite Truck (which would probably be my wife's favorite), then scrounging around in the Gamecube bargain bin/used pile for some of the many things I've missed there, cheap.
- XBox: Sharply differs depending on whether you like the games the XBox had or you didn't. If you liked them, and liked playing them online, B+. If you couldn't care less, D+.
- Dreamcast: B-. I actually liked the quality and the game selection was surprisingly good, especially if you still think it just sort of "died". In some ways it reminds me of the DS, with a high proportion of off-genre or niche games that turned out to be a lot of fun. Personally I find I like the controller better than the PS2, although I'm a big man. The memory cards were kooky and mostly useless. Note that this grade (and all others in this discussion) are "for the time"; obviously the Dreamcast released today would not beat the Gamecube.
But of course the reasons given are more interesting than the actual grades.It has XRC files, which I think is how GUI designers tie into wxWidgets, covering that, too. I'm in the GUI builders are evil camp, so I don't know much more about that.
Tk sucks, but the general trend seems to have been away from shipping a standard GUI toolkit. There's just too many choices ranging from good to excellent to choose one. (And note this is not a problem specific to Python, it's true for all of the mainstream languages. How do you choose between GTK/QT/WinForms/Carbon/wxWidgets, plus a couple of other credible contenders, plus perhaps whatever your local GUI system is if you're on an exotic system, etc. They've all got obvious platform compatibility and licensing tradeoffs, and a whole slew of much more subtle quality and capability tradeoffs. It's really not possible at the current time to mandate one choice. I'd rather see Tk just come out than try to standardize on something els.)
Putting the two of those together, it seems like life is "easy", even if we can figure it out, and that there ought to be a lot of it.
Earth is the only planet with confirmed life. Science can neither confirm nor deny life anywhere else at this time. But mainstream-science says there ought to be more ought there.
Another AC complains that the Fermi Paradox has a lot of problems, but that rather misses the point. Of course there's a problem with the Fermi Paradox; that is indeed the source of the paradox. Somewhere along the way there is an error. Perhaps life isn't that easy. Perhaps intelligent life isn't that easy. Perhaps the Rare Earth hypothesis hold (that is, the Earth has one or more specifically unique characteristics, perhaps even the Snowball Earth history to bring the topic back in.) Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. The problem is, we don't know what.
Nor is it an entirely intellectual enterprise. The Great Filter argument seems sound to me; if the thing preventing stable societies that can expand is in our past, perhaps the difficulty of life itself, perhaps the unlikeliness of intelligence, then perhaps we really can survive. If, on the other hand, the difficult part lies ahead of us, then we can assume unspeakably many societies may have advanced to our point, only to die anyhow. Perhaps we are screwed no matter what, but perhaps with logic and science we can identify the "great filter" before it filters us, and at least bend the odds in our favor. The answer to the Fermi Paradox may be very, very important. (Please do not argue with this poor summary, which is going off of my memory, I didn't even re-read the article. Please read the real article if you are interested enough to want to rebut this; rebutting this summary paragraph would just be rebutting a straw man.)
(If you don't know what the Fermi Paradox is, look, Wikipedia!)
One of the possible answers to the Fermi Paradox (which I note doesn't show up in the Wikipedia article) is that life is common in the universe, but the worlds are either hospitable towards the life, resulting in no selection pressure towards complexity, or so hostile that the life totally dies out too often to advance. The general image is of a universe full of oceans full of simple, utterly stable bacteria, which by most standards is still basically lifeless. (We're really interested in other intelligent life, not a universe of little germs.) It has been hypothesized that the best scenario for complex life is a recurring series of disasters that almost, but not quite, kills off life each time, resulting in a strong selection pressure for the requisite complexity to handle such environmental pressures.
Connect that idea with:
The next section of the Wikipedia article mentions the effect this could have had on evolution.
(I find the Fermi Paradox interesting because I believe it is actually by far the biggest problem facing science as a whole; science says life should be plentiful and easy and populating the stars ought to be possible at significant fractions of the speed of light, so where is the life that is doing so? It's easy to become numbed to the problem because it seems somewhat abstract, but it's not. Something is fundamentally wrong with at least one of biology, astronomy, cosmology, sociology, and/or the intersections of those disciplines we don't have names for, and we don't know what.)
If there are signals travelling 80mph and signals travelling 4mph (and that's a good run/jog), then clearly the flow is at 80 mph.
If there are only signals travelling 4 mph, then clearly the traffic is stalled. Figuring out exactly which signal is which isn't important.
Pedestrians aren't the problem. The problem would be a parallel street within the error margin (common because highways are often basically run right over old popular routes, and sometimes the old popular routes are still there, so you can get multi-mile runs of a well-travelled road well within 300 feet). The highway can be completely clogged while traffic might still be flowing well on that side street. (I've seen this when the highway is unexpectedly clogged due to an accident and where there are no exits to move flow onto the side street for a ways.) However, even this situation could be ascertained with an extremely high degree of confidence with some rather simple statistics; a clogged highway in this situation would still show as hundreds of stalled signals, which could still be picked out as an abnormal situation, even if other signals are moving at 60mph.
It's a problem, yeah, and maybe you'd actually want to have someone with a real degree in computer science or statistics tackle it, rather than a "code monkey" (and note the scare quotes), but it wouldn't even rate what anybody would call "AI". Worst case scenario is a couple of isolated road segments that for special reasons are particularly hard to deal with, but even then you could probably solve the problem by considering a bit more data. (That is, if you can't figure out whether a particular half-mile segment of the highway is moving, for whatever reason, you can still get a good idea by looking at the segments on either side that you do know are the highway. Across the long term, traffic flow in must equal traffic flow out, so eventually if there is a slowdown in the particular mystery segment, you can infer that from other segments.)
Some context for people who didn't read the book... or didn't read it carefully enough.
First, Vernor Vinge has a PhD in Computer Science. This obviously doesn't guarantee he can't be wrong, but to those commenters who said something like "these ideas are idiotic"... you've got an uphill battle to convince me that you're that much smarter than Vernor Vinge, especially as most of you saying that don't show me you understood what he was saying in the first place.
Second, A Deepness In The Sky is set in his "zones of thought" universe. In this universe, the fundamental limits of computation vary depending on where you are physically in the galaxy. This is only faintly hinted at in A Deepness In The Sky, it is explicitly spelled out in A Fire Upon the Deep. This limit on computation may or may not be real. One of the effects of this limit on computation is that you can build a system larger than you can really handle, and eventually all such systems come apart in one way or another. This story is set thousands of years in the future and it is explicitly (albeit subtly) pointed out that the software running the ramscoop ships has direct continuity with modern software. (Qeng Ho computers use the UNIX epoch as the most fundamental form of timekeeping; apparently even the relativistic compensation is layered on top of that.) We are at the very, very beginning, where it is still feasible to burn an OS down entirely and start from scratch.... or is that really still feasible? (Perhaps Microsoft will soon find out.)
Those of you posting that "we can always wrap it up in an API or whatever", I'd say two things: First, you get the Law of Leaky Abstractions working against you. The higher up the abstractions you go, the more problems you have. (Look it up if you don't know what that is.) The more sub-systems you make, the larger the state space of the total system becomes (exponentially), and the harder it is to know what's going on. It is entirely plausible that you eventually hit a wall beyond which you can't pass without being smarter, which, per the previous paragraph, you can't be.
In other places in the galaxy, you can be smarter, and Vernor Vinge postulates the existence of stable societies on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of years or beyond, where the society actually outlasts the component species, because the software base that makes up the species does not exceed the ability of the relevant intelligence to understand it.
Both cases (software might exceed intelligence, intelligence might grow with software) are extremely arguable, and I do not think he is advocating either one per se. (Leave that for his Singularity writings.) But you do him a disservice if you think he is not aware of the issues; he's extremely aware of the issues, to the point that he is the reason some of us are aware of the issues.
(Even this is a summary. In isolation, probably the best argument is that it is always possible to create a software system one can not understand or control, but one person can be wise enough to avoid that situation. However, in A Deepness in the Sky Vernor Vinge explicitly talks about how in a societal situation, one can be forced by competitive pressures to over-integrate your system and make it vulnerable. "OK, but the government can be smart enough to realize that's going to happen and step in to stop it." First... smart government? But even if you overcome that objection, now your society faces death-by-surveillance and other automated law enforcement mechanisms, which since they can't be human-intelligent will fail. If you avoid that (and it is a big temptation), then you face the problem of anarchy. And remember that "governance" is anything that governs; even if the "formal government" doesn't regulate you to soceital death, private corporations may do it. Anyhow, upshot, Vernor Vinge has done a lot of thinking on this topic, it shows in his books, it is not showing in the criticisms I've seen posted, and when it gets down to it he really has more questions than answers.)
I'd be a lot more (excited about the XBox360 or PS3)/(upset about the Wii design) if I believed power were the thing holding back games.
But I think to make that argument would take some serious rhetorical gymnastics. The problems with gaming clearly lie in the ideas, the general difficulty of executing complex ideas (programming complicated things, gaming or otherwise, is hard), the overemphasis on 3D graphics, and the stereotyping of controls.
All of these interrelate; in particular the emphasis on 3D graphics to the point that they are a requirement has resulted in the destruction of any number of good ideas from the old days, and who knows how many good ideas have been aborted because they wouldn't work in 3D? For an example of such an idea that luckily wasn't aborted, look at Viewtiful Joe. As graphics get harder, more of the projects programming superstars get dedicated to making them work, because it's hard. How many beautiful games have we seen with unbelievably bad pathfinding, a simple AI problem barely worthy of being called "AI"?
And of course there is the general monetary drain of good 3D graphics.
The DS has proven a safe haven for many of these older genres, and much new experimentation. Kirby: Canvas Curse is really fun, couldn't possibly work in 3D with a conventional controller (and it'd take some serious work with the Wii controller to make it work; I can envision one possibility but it'd still basically be a different game), and probably couldn't even work with a mouse interface. If you think good Sonic games died with the Genesis, the GBA and DS have had quite a few good old-school Sonic games. (I'm really enjoying Sonic Rush; using the stylus for the half-pipe Chaos Emerald stages is awesome, I wish there were twice as many. My favorite Sonic 2D ever, so far.) How many good ideas are never even thought of because console controllers can't support them?
A console with more RAM and more CPU, but the same graphics as the Gamecube and with an innovative new controller would still get my interest, because it attacks several of the real problems in gaming right now. (The rest of the problems will probably be solved the same way they are solved in all other programming domains, the slow but steady accumulation of ever-better libraries, and that's independent of console hardware.)
But I just don't see "power" as our big problem right now; we've got so much to spare that we can make grass wave realistically and make water sparkle and all kinds of other things that are nowhere near as important as the amount of development time they consume would seem to indicate.
Mario Brothers has a fun two-player mode. One player mode by modern standards is "meh", which actually still constitutes holding up pretty well as most games from that era are "crap", but still not something I'd go out of my way for.
The Nintendo's hardware is pretty simplistic and IMHO few games for it really hold up very well on nostalgia alone. However, when you add "playing against a human" back into the mix, that changes. Another example is Dr. Mario, which my wife enjoys because it's the only game she can consistently beat me with. Two player fun, one player boring.
Despite having played games since the Intellivision and having as much nostalgia for it as the next guy, I find the earliest console that has a number of games I actually want to play is the Super Nintendo, and to a lesser extent, the Genesis. Only one Intellivision game has held up for me ("Tron Deadly Discs", I have a weak spot for games that allow movement and firing in arbitrary directions, like Robotron 2084 or Smash TV), and only a handful of Nintendo-era games have held up for me, most of them decently remade on later consoles.
Four virtual desktops, set up in a square, with shortcuts to go up, down, left, and right, and no wrapping around. That just ends up being confusing. By setting it up this way, I can "go up, go right" to get to the top-right from any window. (Fitt's law, each virtual workspace is infinitely large this way.)
Upper left: Web, console, maybe music player. Actually, this and all further "consoles" are actually Konsole, which is the best console app I've had by far. (I was xterm for a long time, but the way KDE makes it easy for apps to have configurable keyboard shortcuts for so many things is awesome. Tab navigation is set up with the same keys as for Mozilla, and I've got one-keystroke SSH access to my work systems, along with custom icons to indicate that.)
Upper right: Communications. Email client, console, chat main window. (Chat windows sometimes wander.) Torrent client when torrenting.
Lower left: Two emacs windows at maximum height, side by side, for work. (When people say "large windows mean my code doesn't need to conform to the old 80-col limit", I show them this setup and about half the time they are Enlightened. More code = better for the forseeable future.) Console.
Lower right: Misc. Console. Any hobby projects often get sent there, as do certain documents I'm writing.
I use a laptop, but I usually suspend instead of rebooting so these configurations will often last a while.
ALT-SHIFT-arrow to change desktops. CTRL-ALT-SHIFT arrow to change desktops and move the highlighted window. Focus follows mouse, and that's about all the mouse gets used for (that and link clicking; I've tried the various "link enumerator" plugins for Firefox but they're too slow right now).
What's interesting is that I don't/didn't set up these distinctions on purpose, they've evolved and only later did I figure out what I was doing. Web browser got the upper left (start) window because that's the first thing I opened, usually.
Also, as anal as this sounds, I've been happy with several environments in the past that offered these features, plus keyboard shortcuts to start programs. (ALT-F1 for Mozilla, ALT-F2 for console, ALT-F3 to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY (for my wife when she wants to use the computer); I've had several things on ALT-F4 but none ever stuck, plus I feel I probably shouldn't get too used to hitting that key combo for when I do go back to windows.)
If each tab got its own window, I'd have tons of windows. Thank goodness for tabs.
It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be better (in most ways) than upsampling from NTSC/PAL resolutions. Future games would be tested with it. It would be reasonably analogous to the PS1/PS2 situation, although obviously not perfect.
Plus, Nintendo may be able to do some careful work to avoid this problem, since they presumably wouldn't be just sticking any ol' updated graphics card in, but a card custom designed for this purpose.
I think it's a distinct possibility, if Nintendo percieves that lack of HD is hurting them, or will be hurting them.
It's not trivial, but it's not impossible, either.
They're really missing an opportunity with their commercials.
To get the best sense of the graphical prowess of the modern consoles, you need an effectively-uncompressed video feed. The gameplay videos you can download, by and large, don't cut it; they can show gameplay but they can't show the graphics. They are compressed far more than a TV feed and typically shrunk to less than NTSC resolution, let alone HDTV resolution.
TV is the best place to be putting out some game clips that really show the PS3 kicking ass graphically. Instead we get a doll, being spooky for no reason I've been able to figure out.
I don't have an HDTV, but even TV resolution would be a step up. And for those who do have an HDTV, it would probably be awesome.
"Where's the beef", Sony?
Better analogy, though I hate getting into analogy wars, is five doctors, five diagnoses. At that point, yes, at least four of those diagnoses are bullshit, and good odds the fifth one is wrong too. This happens; see the Discovery Health Channel's "Mystery Diagnosis" show for many examples.
The difference is that this is an unusual occurance, the kind of thing that can get you on a TV show when it happens. Five Feng Shui advocates producing five completely different diagnoses is the common case in Feng Shui.