What really killed gaming complexity was 3D. We still haven't entirely recovered from the "need" to have everything in 3D.
Consider the set of verbs you might have in a late-generation 2D game, like Civilization or Starcraft. You might have tens, or hundreds depending on how you count. (Note modern Civs may use 3D hardware, but they are still fundamentally 2D games. The only effect is that I can't play Civ 4 because I have a laptop, whereas I could probably run tens of instances of the engine itself.)
Now, compare that to the set of verbs you have in Quake. The movement commands, jump, change weapon, and shoot. That's about it. That's about all you can afford in 3D, especially on a console because that set runs you right out of buttons.
3D made every feature immensely more complicated, both to create the assets and to implement user control, and as a natural result, we usually lost features in the jump to 3D. Result: Simpler games. Even now, the average blockbuster of today may be far prettier than a 1999 top-ten hit, but the 1999 top-ten hit will be much richer.
I think this is what actually killed the adventure game genre. Is it that nobody's interested in playing another Day of the Tentacle, or that there isn't a company out there that can afford all the requisite 3D animation work?
As my canonical example of how hard 3D is, imagine Nethack in 3D, with no compromises (except for anything that may be literally impossible due to being a play on words or something). Every monster, every polymorph, every item, every effect, everything in glorious 3D. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
I'm not saying all games are crap. They aren't. But we jumped to 3D before we were really ready technologically. Except for FPSs, I still don't think we are; it's all too expensive.
Dvorak for two years or so, I think. 5-10 minutes is the time it takes me to be cranking along at full speed in QWERTY; in 10 seconds I'm probably 80% there, but still making dumb mistakes. I don't do it very often, if I did it'd probably go faster. The only thing I do in QWERTY is my Angband playing, and that's because I don't think "'maa' to cast magic missle", but because that key combination is a built in shortcut in my head just like a copy keyboard shortcut, so there's no benefit in trying to stick with Dvorak there since it's not really "QWERTY" in my head, either.
Yes. Optimizing a device you spend tens of thousands of hours using is such a waste of time. Definitely only for status and stuff.
If you want to make a rationality-based argument, even "miniscule" benefits add up to a slam-dunk decision in a rationality computation across so much usage.
Most people aren't rational on this issue at all, neither switchers nor bitchers.
Well, in my sample size of one, 100% of users have switched. Therefore, clearly, there's nowhere to go but down.
Addressing some myths:
It's probably not any faster, but it is much more comfortable. There's no scientific evidence whatsoever about whether it affects carpal tunnel, neither for nor against, so you're on your own.
You don't need a special keyboard, just the willingness to actually learn to touchtype. Even if you don't switch to Dvorak, you really ought to learn to touchtype anyhow.
Code complaints vary from language to language. [] and/= may switch, but I actually took the time to do a character count in my Perl code (what I work in professionally) and it turned out they were as close to identical as to make no difference. You can make your own custom layout to move those back, but the further away from a standard layout you get, the more nervous I am. (I did end up remapping Caps Lock to Backspace, which has been nice, and that's not special to Dvorak. The key is to unmap the normal Backspace key; you'll learn in nothing flat.) Some languages may suffer more, some may even come out ahead.
You don't lose QWERTY per se, but I find there is a "reloading" period of five or ten minutes before I can really crank along again. If you're just using the keyboard briefly this can look like you'e lost QWERTY; I think this is the kernel of truth behind the myth.
Yes. The carnage since the Bush Administration began murdering all of its loudest critics has simply devastated the academic and journalistic communities. Why, there's hardly anybody left alive at NPR, and Berkeley is a ghost town! And San Francisco might as well have been hit by a nuke for all the depopulation that has occurred.
(Moral equivalence can be taken too far. Don't be so blinded by local demagogues that you allow them to mask true evil happening elsewhere. You end up making bad valuations.)
To not have any plans would be foolish, but to rush into a project like this would also be silly. So...I don't see the contradiction.
You beat me to it.
Let Nintendo work the whole motion sensing thing out, while the XBox360 plays to the strengths that the Wii can't match at the moment. I expect it'll be 2009 or 2010 before developers have really figured out the Wii. Then, let Microsoft embrace-and-extend with the XBox720, if the Wii is even still considered successful by then. (I expect it will, but I can't prove it.)
Consider watching SG-1, if you haven't tried that yet. The Gua'uld "arc" technically extends six or seven seasons, but that really consists of several sub-arcs, none of which are that long.
Also consider stopping at the big reset that occurs at the end of season eight or nine (not looking it up), where the current Ori arc starts up. I'm not ready to call the Ori arc "disastrous", but it certainly has been ill-conceived in dramatic terms.
You can do this pretty easily in any OS that has a sudo command. Create the new account, alias the command to use sudo instead of running the command directly, and you're off to the races. You don't "need" OS support on Linux (and I assume BSD).
In Windows it shouldn't be that hard to run IE as another user, but I don't know about Windows, nor do I know if that buys you much real protection.
The definition of a compiler seems to differ from person to person, but the best one is something that reads a stream of input, converts it into a richer internal representation (usually a tree but it doesn't have to be), and writes out a different stream based on this internal representation.
Even here in 2007, some people still seem to think the only thing that can be called a compiler is something that takes source code and emits binary code, but that's just one specific special case. The same basic principles that GCC uses will be used by PovRAY to compile its scene language into an image, ignoring the raytracing part. (That is, setting up the internal representation of the scene is just like a compiler.) Compiling C# into IL uses the same basic techniques. Defining anything that uses standard compiler techniques as a compiler is the motivation for my preferred definition.
Given the long history of compilers, and the sheer profusion of them, I really don't think that compilers ought to be patentable anymore. Compiling Java into Javascript isn't a novel idea, it's "just" some engineering by somebody who understands compilers. (Which the recent "Wasabi" uproar over Joel on Software's posting proved is not all that many people, but still, it's simple once you see the tricks.) The only even remotely tricky part of such a compilation is if there's no easy way to get the syntax tree directly from the language parser, and that's still just engineering. There's definitely plenty of copyrightable stuff in such a compiler, but it'd take something very, very novel for it to be patentable.
(Note I'm writing this message as if I weren't entirely against software patents, which I am, at length. This is written from the putative point of view of the patent system; even then, compilers generally aren't that novel an idea. Saying "with a compiler!" is up there with "on the internet!" for novelty.)
Progress Quest is even more successful at extracting the core essence of MMORPGs, and distilling them down to their bare essentials in a way that enhances the playability of the game to the ultimate degree. Well, measured along one dimension, at least.
(And it's not specifically an April Fools joke; download it and try it out, the executable is real. Windows app, generally runs absolutely perfectly in Wine.)
Buy yourself a used Pentium-M based laptop. If you don't need to actually use the computer directly, buy one with the screen broken, which tends to make for some darned cheap laptops. You can hook up a monitor to it, which is how you'll put your OS on it. (Remember, laptops have mouse ports, USB ports, and display, so you can use them as a conventional computer just fine, and most laptops have the graphics chips to drive a higher resolution that their native LCD resolution.) The money you save on buying a cheap laptop like that make up for a lot of power bill, especially with the broken screen bonus.
Get the model number of the laptop in advance, cross-reference that with the chip that it uses, then find the power consumption for that chip if you want to double check. I hear the later-model ones are (surprise surprise) more efficient, but they're all pretty good AFAIK.
As somebody else said, the built-in UPC isn't bad, and a Pentium M will have all the power you need for non-floating-point functions; any Pentium M can handle even a moderately-sized website if you wanted.
In general, beware this manipulation of a democratic process; it happens on national scales, too. Take a close vote and just keep voting on it until the resolution passes. Then, once it passes, generally you don't have to vote on it again.
Due to the nature of random processes, even the exact same population that has the exact same opinions will have different voting outcomes on each vote. Now, if you take just one vote on an issue, it works out in the end; some things get overvoted, some things get undervoted, some things are enacted that "shouldn't" be and some things aren't enacted that "should" be. (Also, it's really hard to know which is which, so resist the temptation to point to your favorite close election and hold it up as an example; you can't prove that the election was 51% instead of 49%, it may well have been 51% instead of 54%.)
By holding votes over and over again, and taking it if it passes even once, you secretly lower the pass threshold. Add in some simple, traditional games for keeping certain groups out (like polling times or other things) and you can muck with another couple of percentage points, and you can keep trying until you get it right.
Unfortunately, there's no real way to prevent this; people simply need to be aware on some level that this is cheating..XXX has lost. Put it away for a decent time period before trying to ram it through again.
I say it this way: Hollywood actually doesn't do a half-bad job with science fiction, provided they don't realize it's science fiction.
Space Opera is like a strange attractor; show even the slightest sign of it (space ships, heck, space at all, ray guns, most aliens), and you'll get sucked in by the time the story iterations are done. I can't speak for the Manchurian Candidate because I haven't seen it, but the others you mention survived by completely not looking like Hollywood's bastardized idea of sci-fi.
If it were an even distribution, then the moon wouldn't have any craters in its dust.
Take a pan of mud, say, one foot by one foot. Start with a flat surface.
Start throwing stones in it.
When you throw the stones in any way that results in a smooth surface, then I will listen to your stupid claims to understand science better than we do.
Your point is so stupid it boggles the mind. Try it. The craters will lay on top of each other, not cancel!
When backyard science can contradict your claims, you should tone way down on the lectures. Why, one might think you had to resort to flames because you had nothing else to reach for...
Of all the crazy reasons I've heard not to colonize the moon, this is the second silliest.
The information you're talking about is basically holographic. "Destroying" (a loaded term; "perturbing" would be a lot closer) even 1% of the Moon's surface couldn't even be said to destroy 1% of the useful data, because we just won't need it.
Moreover, the Moon is not the only body in the Solar System that will have such a record.
And this all assumes that information will ever actually be extractable and useful for any purpose, which is really a bit of a longshot anyhow.
(What's the silliest reason? Disturbing the Moon's ecological balance, which manifests in any number of concerns about "despoiling" the Moon or any number of other loaded words that only have real content in the presence of life, which the Moon does not have.)
Have we 'cried wolf' too many times with global warming?
We've cried wolf too many times, period.
We've lived under the constant spectre of doom and gloom for a long time. Everything is bad, bad for us, and going to cause the death of civilization as we know it. Even just enumerating the big bad ones would take me a while; I caught the tail end of nuclear doom, just in time for a segue into environmental doom. I remember the tail end of "Communism is going to crush us". I remember numerous predictions that basically had us all dead by now. I know we were supposed to run out of oil in the mid-90s. I remember when the Japanese were going to crush us with their mighty economy. I remember how our school system was going to doom us. (That story hasn't changed much in 20 years, really.) I remember how Reagan's policies were going to cause certain world war. We've been on the verge of major plague now for years and years, bird flu is merely the latest virus du jour. I remember just this last year stories about the interest rates going up and how that was bad and going to hurt the economy, followed a few short weeks later by stories about how the interest rates going down was bad and was going to hurt the economy. So help me, I've seen stories about the low unemployment rate being proof our economy was doomed!
I remember more doom than I can even enumerate in a single paragraph.
I also think it's important to point out the ever-increasing sophistication of marketing techniques, especially as they increasingly feed back into politics and these claims of doom. Regardless of the truth of global warming, many people are selling global warming doom. Why are they selling it? Because it's being bought. The news sells doom, because bad news brings more eyeballs. Doom, doom, doom everywhere.
And only a vanishing fraction of what we're being sold, be it doom, consumer product claims, or politicians is true. After a while, we can't help but notice this, and I think the general public is becoming increasingly suspicious of this sort of selling, on all levels. What's so special about today's predictions of doom? Why should I trust that this shampoo will make me sexy? I think this skepticism is all of a kind.
I don't know how this is going to turn out in the end, but at least for the topic at hand, I think you can expect a growing AGW backlash over the next few months. For some reason, in these past few months AGW-advocates turned up the volume to eleven and starting selling like never before, and I think they've seriously overplayed their hand by selling it too hard. Anybody who can survive economically in the US in this environment is becoming increasingly cynical about "selling" of all kinds.
(I say the US specifically because we seem to be farthest along the advertising/selling curve; even my English acquaintances who have lived here tell me we seem to be deluged in ads by comparison to them. If you don't become cynical about people selling you things, you will go bankrupt in the US; even as we have become immensely more wealthy, the number of things available for purchase has gone up even faster. Who in 1960 could bankrupt themselves on buying DVDs? Even if you say "but they had albums", well, so do we, only even more so.)
Of course, there will be two natural responses: The AGW advocates will try to make their presentations that much more slick, while the AGW-skeptics will become increasingly organized and therefore creating slick sales pitches too. Very few people have been seriously fighting AGW in a large-scale, organized way. (Not zero, but very few.) I expect that will change. It's going to be a warzone out there, with the biggest casualty being the truth.
(All-in-all, I expect the AGW people who seem to have cranked the volume up would have been better off leaving well enough alone.)
This is all independent of the truth or falseness of the AGW claims.
Increasingly, the market for doom is just getting tapped out. There's only such much worry available, even if you stoke it, and there's just too damned many people trying to tap it.
I will admit I'm not in the market per se, but I like to browse through the electronics section of stores Just In Case, and since the Wii's release, I've added checking to see if they have a Wii to the sweep for bargain games.
I have still never seen a Wii. From Best Buy to Wal-Mart, its local competition, K-Mart, and several other places I've been to in passing, I have never yet seen a Wii.
Everybody has PS3s now.
Anecdotal evidence? Sure, but wow, and this is across many stores in many samples.
I could probably get one if I were trying, but you still have to be trying.
Nexgenwars and VGCharts have the Wii's penetration at around 50% of the XBox 360's, in four months. At any time supply could finally catch up to demand, but until then, the limiting factor on the Wii's sales has been manufacturing rate for four months now.
Only problem on the ride home I would be knackered, an early meeting would leave me useless for the rest of the day.
The best definition of "introvert" and "extrovert" I have seen is than an extrovert is someone who is energized by interacting with people, and an introvert is someone who is drained by interacting with people. This definition especially holds true for large groups of people, but what qualifies as "large" varies from person to person.
(Your post hinted at this, I wanted to highlight it explicitly.)
Deep down, we all believe everybody is "exactly like me", but I'm pretty sure they are both kinds of people in the world.
The nice thing about this definition is that it is fairly value-neutral, and it accounts for reality better than most definitions. An introvert is certainly statistically more likely than an extrovert to be socially inept, but it's not an intrinsic failing, it's simply that the extrovert is likely to have more practice, because they enjoy social interaction more. Nothing stops an introvert from becoming socially capable, and I find definitions that try to work social skills into them fail to model, well, most of the programmers I know, who are mostly introverts, but none of them are totally socially inept, really.
By this definition, yes, an introvert should absolutely not go into sales. Extroverts will likely have a harder time as a programmer than an introvert, because programming has significant bits where it's just you and the computer. However, that's not the whole job and an extrovert can survive on the collaboration parts; I've seen it. But since sales is pretty much 100% dealing with people, introverts should follow some of the most ancient advice, "Know Thyself", and stay away.
Oh, and this is of course a continuum, not a binary distinction.
"OS" is a term that passed into meaninglessness for the IBM world when Windows was released, and somewhat earlier for Big Iron.
When you have a DOS machine (or even a Commodore 64), there was a clear distinction between the OS (what was resident in memory before the program you really want to use was even loaded), and everything else.
As you start layering things on top of that, and also building programs that critically depend on those higher layers, it becomes impossible to draw a binary line between "OS" and "Not OS".
Is KDE my OS? By almost any standard definition, no. On the other hand, the services provided by KDE look an awful lot like OS services to KDE-based programs, like knotify and the unification of remote and local file access that the program doesn't have to implement.
You can't even get away with claiming everything in the kernel is an "OS". There's a webserver that goes in the Linux kernel itself. Some versions of Windows had a disturbing amount of graphics handling in the inner kernel running in the most privileged processor mode (another possible OS definition which doesn't really work out).
There's almost, but not quite, no meaningful line to be drawn between "OS" and "programming framework" anymore. Probably the best definition of "OS" is "the set of frameworks that you can not bypass for some task", which in passing encompasses everything traditionally considered an OS. If you want to write a Windows program, you pretty much have to use the Windows Messaging framework. If you want to write a Linux program that uses the network as a normal user, you'll be using the socket framework the kernel provides. You can layer things on top of that, but you can't bypass it, and often there's no way around fundamental limitations in the OS.
(Note that Linux the OS is therefore much smaller than Windows the OS, because many more pieces of the Linux stack can be ripped out and replaced, like the Windowing system, than you can in Windows.)
The advantage of this definition is that it's actually somewhat usable and concrete. The disadvantage is, I don't know of anyone else who uses it; most people are still trying to jam the 1970s definition somehow onto our 2007 stack of technology.
And the real moral of your post is... Stop guessing!
I've said several times, I'd love to call myself an "environmentalist" but it involves too much sanctimonious guessing about what's green and what's not.
This is a place for science, not doing things because they feel good. Things you think are green may be a net negative (much recycling, some poor alternate energy ideas); things that you may think are horrible may be a great idea (certain replacement schemes as hankwang shows, other alternate energies like nuclear).
If you're not doing math you're not helping the environment, and you may be hurting it when you mean to help it. Good intentions are a good start, but nothing more; alone, they count for nothing.
The one way that DRM can work is replacing the "personal computer" in home environments with a dedicated entertainment appliance.
We have that. We call it a "gaming console", as it also plays games.
You may well have had that in mind when you wrote it; I'm not claiming this is news to you. I bring this up because I want to say that while it wouldn't make me ecstatic, I would be satisfied with the compromise of not being able to play DRM'ed content at all on my "general purpose" computer, and confining DRM'ed content to my "gaming console". (Possibly made cheaper by removing the gaming stuff, although as I'd still want download support and a hard drive on this device that doesn't quite take us down to "(HD-)DVD player".)
In theory, I'm against DRM. In practice, I can deal with it to some degree, on the condition market forces are allowed full play. But "a monopolistic operating system provider mandating the extensive crippling of my computer so it can 'safely' play DRM'ed content" is not acceptable to me. I think that as we get more and more "dedicated entertainment devices", the logic of crippling the general-purpose computer so it can be graciously allowed some small chance to play "premium" content is a bad trade for customers and society at large.
(If Microsoft is ultimately successful at getting the entire industry to make Vista-only hardware, "somebody" needs to re-open monopoly proceedings against Microsoft; I can hardly imagine a clearer demonstration of monopoly power than a software company fully making all hardware companies its bitch, even if some of them go into it willingly.)
Before you go ballistic, bear in mind that unless you've got data sources beyond those cited in the Slashdot blurb, the most technical details come from CNN, which is about one step from priding itself on its ignorance of military matters, and has a less-than-distinguished history on the technical details front as well. Put the two together and the odds are low that you've got anything like an accurate view, let alone a complete one.
You can trust the what and the when; I wouldn't trust their how or why any further than I could spit.
(This isn't anti-CNN; this is anti-almost-everything news media. Journalists aren't required to learn squat about science or technology for their degree and it tends to show up in every last article they write with even a passing connection to science or technology. Any even cursory overview of stories on any technical subject you know about will reveal this. Remember that "multi-gear rocket" atrocity from a day or two ago?)
Slashdot Mirror
What really killed gaming complexity was 3D. We still haven't entirely recovered from the "need" to have everything in 3D.
Consider the set of verbs you might have in a late-generation 2D game, like Civilization or Starcraft. You might have tens, or hundreds depending on how you count. (Note modern Civs may use 3D hardware, but they are still fundamentally 2D games. The only effect is that I can't play Civ 4 because I have a laptop, whereas I could probably run tens of instances of the engine itself.)
Now, compare that to the set of verbs you have in Quake. The movement commands, jump, change weapon, and shoot. That's about it. That's about all you can afford in 3D, especially on a console because that set runs you right out of buttons.
3D made every feature immensely more complicated, both to create the assets and to implement user control, and as a natural result, we usually lost features in the jump to 3D. Result: Simpler games. Even now, the average blockbuster of today may be far prettier than a 1999 top-ten hit, but the 1999 top-ten hit will be much richer.
I think this is what actually killed the adventure game genre. Is it that nobody's interested in playing another Day of the Tentacle, or that there isn't a company out there that can afford all the requisite 3D animation work?
As my canonical example of how hard 3D is, imagine Nethack in 3D, with no compromises (except for anything that may be literally impossible due to being a play on words or something). Every monster, every polymorph, every item, every effect, everything in glorious 3D. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
I'm not saying all games are crap. They aren't. But we jumped to 3D before we were really ready technologically. Except for FPSs, I still don't think we are; it's all too expensive.
Dvorak for two years or so, I think. 5-10 minutes is the time it takes me to be cranking along at full speed in QWERTY; in 10 seconds I'm probably 80% there, but still making dumb mistakes. I don't do it very often, if I did it'd probably go faster. The only thing I do in QWERTY is my Angband playing, and that's because I don't think "'maa' to cast magic missle", but because that key combination is a built in shortcut in my head just like a copy keyboard shortcut, so there's no benefit in trying to stick with Dvorak there since it's not really "QWERTY" in my head, either.
Yes. Optimizing a device you spend tens of thousands of hours using is such a waste of time. Definitely only for status and stuff.
If you want to make a rationality-based argument, even "miniscule" benefits add up to a slam-dunk decision in a rationality computation across so much usage.
Most people aren't rational on this issue at all, neither switchers nor bitchers.
Addressing some myths:
Yes. The carnage since the Bush Administration began murdering all of its loudest critics has simply devastated the academic and journalistic communities. Why, there's hardly anybody left alive at NPR, and Berkeley is a ghost town! And San Francisco might as well have been hit by a nuke for all the depopulation that has occurred.
(Moral equivalence can be taken too far. Don't be so blinded by local demagogues that you allow them to mask true evil happening elsewhere. You end up making bad valuations.)
Let Nintendo work the whole motion sensing thing out, while the XBox360 plays to the strengths that the Wii can't match at the moment. I expect it'll be 2009 or 2010 before developers have really figured out the Wii. Then, let Microsoft embrace-and-extend with the XBox720, if the Wii is even still considered successful by then. (I expect it will, but I can't prove it.)
Consider watching SG-1, if you haven't tried that yet. The Gua'uld "arc" technically extends six or seven seasons, but that really consists of several sub-arcs, none of which are that long.
Also consider stopping at the big reset that occurs at the end of season eight or nine (not looking it up), where the current Ori arc starts up. I'm not ready to call the Ori arc "disastrous", but it certainly has been ill-conceived in dramatic terms.
You can do this pretty easily in any OS that has a sudo command. Create the new account, alias the command to use sudo instead of running the command directly, and you're off to the races. You don't "need" OS support on Linux (and I assume BSD).
In Windows it shouldn't be that hard to run IE as another user, but I don't know about Windows, nor do I know if that buys you much real protection.
The definition of a compiler seems to differ from person to person, but the best one is something that reads a stream of input, converts it into a richer internal representation (usually a tree but it doesn't have to be), and writes out a different stream based on this internal representation.
Even here in 2007, some people still seem to think the only thing that can be called a compiler is something that takes source code and emits binary code, but that's just one specific special case. The same basic principles that GCC uses will be used by PovRAY to compile its scene language into an image, ignoring the raytracing part. (That is, setting up the internal representation of the scene is just like a compiler.) Compiling C# into IL uses the same basic techniques. Defining anything that uses standard compiler techniques as a compiler is the motivation for my preferred definition.
Given the long history of compilers, and the sheer profusion of them, I really don't think that compilers ought to be patentable anymore. Compiling Java into Javascript isn't a novel idea, it's "just" some engineering by somebody who understands compilers. (Which the recent "Wasabi" uproar over Joel on Software's posting proved is not all that many people, but still, it's simple once you see the tricks.) The only even remotely tricky part of such a compilation is if there's no easy way to get the syntax tree directly from the language parser, and that's still just engineering. There's definitely plenty of copyrightable stuff in such a compiler, but it'd take something very, very novel for it to be patentable.
(Note I'm writing this message as if I weren't entirely against software patents, which I am, at length. This is written from the putative point of view of the patent system; even then, compilers generally aren't that novel an idea. Saying "with a compiler!" is up there with "on the internet!" for novelty.)
Progress Quest is even more successful at extracting the core essence of MMORPGs, and distilling them down to their bare essentials in a way that enhances the playability of the game to the ultimate degree. Well, measured along one dimension, at least.
(And it's not specifically an April Fools joke; download it and try it out, the executable is real. Windows app, generally runs absolutely perfectly in Wine.)
I salute you, sir!
Buy yourself a used Pentium-M based laptop. If you don't need to actually use the computer directly, buy one with the screen broken, which tends to make for some darned cheap laptops. You can hook up a monitor to it, which is how you'll put your OS on it. (Remember, laptops have mouse ports, USB ports, and display, so you can use them as a conventional computer just fine, and most laptops have the graphics chips to drive a higher resolution that their native LCD resolution.) The money you save on buying a cheap laptop like that make up for a lot of power bill, especially with the broken screen bonus.
Get the model number of the laptop in advance, cross-reference that with the chip that it uses, then find the power consumption for that chip if you want to double check. I hear the later-model ones are (surprise surprise) more efficient, but they're all pretty good AFAIK.
As somebody else said, the built-in UPC isn't bad, and a Pentium M will have all the power you need for non-floating-point functions; any Pentium M can handle even a moderately-sized website if you wanted.
In general, beware this manipulation of a democratic process; it happens on national scales, too. Take a close vote and just keep voting on it until the resolution passes. Then, once it passes, generally you don't have to vote on it again.
.XXX has lost. Put it away for a decent time period before trying to ram it through again.
Due to the nature of random processes, even the exact same population that has the exact same opinions will have different voting outcomes on each vote. Now, if you take just one vote on an issue, it works out in the end; some things get overvoted, some things get undervoted, some things are enacted that "shouldn't" be and some things aren't enacted that "should" be. (Also, it's really hard to know which is which, so resist the temptation to point to your favorite close election and hold it up as an example; you can't prove that the election was 51% instead of 49%, it may well have been 51% instead of 54%.)
By holding votes over and over again, and taking it if it passes even once, you secretly lower the pass threshold. Add in some simple, traditional games for keeping certain groups out (like polling times or other things) and you can muck with another couple of percentage points, and you can keep trying until you get it right.
Unfortunately, there's no real way to prevent this; people simply need to be aware on some level that this is cheating.
No, the anonymous D&D quest is much lower in quality than the actual LotR.
I say it this way: Hollywood actually doesn't do a half-bad job with science fiction, provided they don't realize it's science fiction.
Space Opera is like a strange attractor; show even the slightest sign of it (space ships, heck, space at all, ray guns, most aliens), and you'll get sucked in by the time the story iterations are done. I can't speak for the Manchurian Candidate because I haven't seen it, but the others you mention survived by completely not looking like Hollywood's bastardized idea of sci-fi.
- Take a pan of mud, say, one foot by one foot. Start with a flat surface.
- Start throwing stones in it.
- When you throw the stones in any way that results in a smooth surface, then I will listen to your stupid claims to understand science better than we do.
Your point is so stupid it boggles the mind. Try it. The craters will lay on top of each other, not cancel!When backyard science can contradict your claims, you should tone way down on the lectures. Why, one might think you had to resort to flames because you had nothing else to reach for...
Of all the crazy reasons I've heard not to colonize the moon, this is the second silliest.
The information you're talking about is basically holographic. "Destroying" (a loaded term; "perturbing" would be a lot closer) even 1% of the Moon's surface couldn't even be said to destroy 1% of the useful data, because we just won't need it.
Moreover, the Moon is not the only body in the Solar System that will have such a record.
And this all assumes that information will ever actually be extractable and useful for any purpose, which is really a bit of a longshot anyhow.
(What's the silliest reason? Disturbing the Moon's ecological balance, which manifests in any number of concerns about "despoiling" the Moon or any number of other loaded words that only have real content in the presence of life, which the Moon does not have.)
We've lived under the constant spectre of doom and gloom for a long time. Everything is bad, bad for us, and going to cause the death of civilization as we know it. Even just enumerating the big bad ones would take me a while; I caught the tail end of nuclear doom, just in time for a segue into environmental doom. I remember the tail end of "Communism is going to crush us". I remember numerous predictions that basically had us all dead by now. I know we were supposed to run out of oil in the mid-90s. I remember when the Japanese were going to crush us with their mighty economy. I remember how our school system was going to doom us. (That story hasn't changed much in 20 years, really.) I remember how Reagan's policies were going to cause certain world war. We've been on the verge of major plague now for years and years, bird flu is merely the latest virus du jour. I remember just this last year stories about the interest rates going up and how that was bad and going to hurt the economy, followed a few short weeks later by stories about how the interest rates going down was bad and was going to hurt the economy. So help me, I've seen stories about the low unemployment rate being proof our economy was doomed!
I remember more doom than I can even enumerate in a single paragraph.
I also think it's important to point out the ever-increasing sophistication of marketing techniques, especially as they increasingly feed back into politics and these claims of doom. Regardless of the truth of global warming, many people are selling global warming doom. Why are they selling it? Because it's being bought. The news sells doom, because bad news brings more eyeballs. Doom, doom, doom everywhere.
And only a vanishing fraction of what we're being sold, be it doom, consumer product claims, or politicians is true. After a while, we can't help but notice this, and I think the general public is becoming increasingly suspicious of this sort of selling, on all levels. What's so special about today's predictions of doom? Why should I trust that this shampoo will make me sexy? I think this skepticism is all of a kind.
I don't know how this is going to turn out in the end, but at least for the topic at hand, I think you can expect a growing AGW backlash over the next few months. For some reason, in these past few months AGW-advocates turned up the volume to eleven and starting selling like never before, and I think they've seriously overplayed their hand by selling it too hard. Anybody who can survive economically in the US in this environment is becoming increasingly cynical about "selling" of all kinds.
(I say the US specifically because we seem to be farthest along the advertising/selling curve; even my English acquaintances who have lived here tell me we seem to be deluged in ads by comparison to them. If you don't become cynical about people selling you things, you will go bankrupt in the US; even as we have become immensely more wealthy, the number of things available for purchase has gone up even faster. Who in 1960 could bankrupt themselves on buying DVDs? Even if you say "but they had albums", well, so do we, only even more so.)
Of course, there will be two natural responses: The AGW advocates will try to make their presentations that much more slick, while the AGW-skeptics will become increasingly organized and therefore creating slick sales pitches too. Very few people have been seriously fighting AGW in a large-scale, organized way. (Not zero, but very few.) I expect that will change. It's going to be a warzone out there, with the biggest casualty being the truth.
(All-in-all, I expect the AGW people who seem to have cranked the volume up would have been better off leaving well enough alone.)
This is all independent of the truth or falseness of the AGW claims.
Increasingly, the market for doom is just getting tapped out. There's only such much worry available, even if you stoke it, and there's just too damned many people trying to tap it.
I will admit I'm not in the market per se, but I like to browse through the electronics section of stores Just In Case, and since the Wii's release, I've added checking to see if they have a Wii to the sweep for bargain games.
I have still never seen a Wii. From Best Buy to Wal-Mart, its local competition, K-Mart, and several other places I've been to in passing, I have never yet seen a Wii.
Everybody has PS3s now.
Anecdotal evidence? Sure, but wow, and this is across many stores in many samples.
I could probably get one if I were trying, but you still have to be trying.
Nexgenwars and VGCharts have the Wii's penetration at around 50% of the XBox 360's, in four months. At any time supply could finally catch up to demand, but until then, the limiting factor on the Wii's sales has been manufacturing rate for four months now.
Apparently.
(Your post hinted at this, I wanted to highlight it explicitly.)
Deep down, we all believe everybody is "exactly like me", but I'm pretty sure they are both kinds of people in the world.
The nice thing about this definition is that it is fairly value-neutral, and it accounts for reality better than most definitions. An introvert is certainly statistically more likely than an extrovert to be socially inept, but it's not an intrinsic failing, it's simply that the extrovert is likely to have more practice, because they enjoy social interaction more. Nothing stops an introvert from becoming socially capable, and I find definitions that try to work social skills into them fail to model, well, most of the programmers I know, who are mostly introverts, but none of them are totally socially inept, really.
By this definition, yes, an introvert should absolutely not go into sales. Extroverts will likely have a harder time as a programmer than an introvert, because programming has significant bits where it's just you and the computer. However, that's not the whole job and an extrovert can survive on the collaboration parts; I've seen it. But since sales is pretty much 100% dealing with people, introverts should follow some of the most ancient advice, "Know Thyself", and stay away.
Oh, and this is of course a continuum, not a binary distinction.
"OS" is a term that passed into meaninglessness for the IBM world when Windows was released, and somewhat earlier for Big Iron.
When you have a DOS machine (or even a Commodore 64), there was a clear distinction between the OS (what was resident in memory before the program you really want to use was even loaded), and everything else.
As you start layering things on top of that, and also building programs that critically depend on those higher layers, it becomes impossible to draw a binary line between "OS" and "Not OS".
Is KDE my OS? By almost any standard definition, no. On the other hand, the services provided by KDE look an awful lot like OS services to KDE-based programs, like knotify and the unification of remote and local file access that the program doesn't have to implement.
You can't even get away with claiming everything in the kernel is an "OS". There's a webserver that goes in the Linux kernel itself. Some versions of Windows had a disturbing amount of graphics handling in the inner kernel running in the most privileged processor mode (another possible OS definition which doesn't really work out).
There's almost, but not quite, no meaningful line to be drawn between "OS" and "programming framework" anymore. Probably the best definition of "OS" is "the set of frameworks that you can not bypass for some task", which in passing encompasses everything traditionally considered an OS. If you want to write a Windows program, you pretty much have to use the Windows Messaging framework. If you want to write a Linux program that uses the network as a normal user, you'll be using the socket framework the kernel provides. You can layer things on top of that, but you can't bypass it, and often there's no way around fundamental limitations in the OS.
(Note that Linux the OS is therefore much smaller than Windows the OS, because many more pieces of the Linux stack can be ripped out and replaced, like the Windowing system, than you can in Windows.)
The advantage of this definition is that it's actually somewhat usable and concrete. The disadvantage is, I don't know of anyone else who uses it; most people are still trying to jam the 1970s definition somehow onto our 2007 stack of technology.
And the real moral of your post is... Stop guessing!
I've said several times, I'd love to call myself an "environmentalist" but it involves too much sanctimonious guessing about what's green and what's not.
This is a place for science, not doing things because they feel good. Things you think are green may be a net negative (much recycling, some poor alternate energy ideas); things that you may think are horrible may be a great idea (certain replacement schemes as hankwang shows, other alternate energies like nuclear).
If you're not doing math you're not helping the environment, and you may be hurting it when you mean to help it. Good intentions are a good start, but nothing more; alone, they count for nothing.
You may well have had that in mind when you wrote it; I'm not claiming this is news to you. I bring this up because I want to say that while it wouldn't make me ecstatic, I would be satisfied with the compromise of not being able to play DRM'ed content at all on my "general purpose" computer, and confining DRM'ed content to my "gaming console". (Possibly made cheaper by removing the gaming stuff, although as I'd still want download support and a hard drive on this device that doesn't quite take us down to "(HD-)DVD player".)
In theory, I'm against DRM. In practice, I can deal with it to some degree, on the condition market forces are allowed full play. But "a monopolistic operating system provider mandating the extensive crippling of my computer so it can 'safely' play DRM'ed content" is not acceptable to me. I think that as we get more and more "dedicated entertainment devices", the logic of crippling the general-purpose computer so it can be graciously allowed some small chance to play "premium" content is a bad trade for customers and society at large.
(If Microsoft is ultimately successful at getting the entire industry to make Vista-only hardware, "somebody" needs to re-open monopoly proceedings against Microsoft; I can hardly imagine a clearer demonstration of monopoly power than a software company fully making all hardware companies its bitch, even if some of them go into it willingly.)
Before you go ballistic, bear in mind that unless you've got data sources beyond those cited in the Slashdot blurb, the most technical details come from CNN, which is about one step from priding itself on its ignorance of military matters, and has a less-than-distinguished history on the technical details front as well. Put the two together and the odds are low that you've got anything like an accurate view, let alone a complete one.
You can trust the what and the when; I wouldn't trust their how or why any further than I could spit.
(This isn't anti-CNN; this is anti-almost-everything news media. Journalists aren't required to learn squat about science or technology for their degree and it tends to show up in every last article they write with even a passing connection to science or technology. Any even cursory overview of stories on any technical subject you know about will reveal this. Remember that "multi-gear rocket" atrocity from a day or two ago?)