Steady decline in allocated resources in relation to the rest of the public. Is relativity such a difficult concept, or are you truly so foolish as to even entertain a possibility that people care for absolute level of life rather then relative to rest of population?
Hell, do you care that you live better then cavemen did? Or apes? Or do you care that your neighbour can afford his house, while you're getting evicted out of yours because you lost your job?
Here's another pearl of knowledge for you: During financial situation that led to WW2, level of life was significantly better among average population then it was amongst the richest of the rich just two hundred years before that. Didn't stop situation directly leading to the war that wiped out almost 100.000.000 people from the planet and got us a nuclear bomb.
So your argument is that we can safely ignore the steady decline because technological progress allows us to alleviate _some_ of the symptoms.
Question: what happens when _some_ of the symptoms become simply not enough, and system comes to a crashing halt, like banking sector did a couple of years ago?
Drawing the line between "proprietary storage format" and "preventing piracy" is one hell of a hyperbole. Especially in view of sony's history of pushing essentially mangled formats that only worked on their hardware to earn a little extra on peripheral sales, and then burying them in next generation (UMD games and movies would like a word with you, as would atrac ).
Thing is, music is a bad comparison, because it's found its way into media that youth of today uses constantly, i.e. movies, games and so on. The contact with music doesn't go away just because music stores do.
This isn't like that for books, and it is shown very well by declining numbers of young people visiting libraries.
Indeed. But let's face the facts, this is sony. As their otherOS fiasco showed, they care about locking their consoles down far more then about giving their users freedom to install another operating system.
Hell, it still has a proprietary non-volatile (storage) flash memory format, just so that they can cash in. Not (mini/micro)SD like most of the ultraportable hardware like mobile phones have.
Vita games will also be about as comparable to iphone games in the same way as sex compares to masturbating with sandpaper.
Seriously, there are maybe 10 games total worth playing on iphone, and that is a very optimistic view (+ badly working console emulators). Rest are designed for people with severe attention deficit disorder and are typically less interesting then old 8-bit nintendo games.
They certainly do work for the masses that never gamed before however, as well as people who only play on the road in sessions of a few minutes. I.e. they're very well suited for their audience, and that audience is not gamers.
Re:Fear Confirmed: non-replaceable battery
on
PS Vita Specs Announced
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· Score: 3, Informative
That's about phones, and in a country where essentially no one buys a phone without a contract. It's a cultural thing, folks in USA are used to paying a shitload of money in installments, but almost nothing in front. I believe it has to do with way finances are designed to work for individuals in USA, essentially slaving them to stable income, and encouraging debt that's just barely repayable.
Go to some EU countries, or even third world and you'll see the exact opposite. That's why nokia is still the king of phones across third world - it's phones are actually honest to god cheap rather then "costs you an arm and a leg, but will cut them off slowly over 2 years as you pay its actual price".
Has world really gotten to the point where "eventually" in context no longer means proper long term of half a century or more, but is instead "here and now!"?
The argument is that for every one of you, in ten years there will be ten youths that will have no contact with books, and won't buy any, because they never ran into a bookshop and browsed it in their lives. Not that it undercuts the number of the current clients.
This is pretty much the fear of most people I know who are into books and know about amazon. This effect will be slowed down by libraries, but it will likely push through regardless.
You do realise that when enough of book stores go down, demand for books will eventually follow? Bookstores create demand by letting people window shop, read, touch real books.
As amazon has proven, virtual shop will have something that is tailored for your preferences. Which for next generations means mostly games, videos and music. Creating supply creates demand in entertainment, and vice versa - reducing supply reduces demand as customers simply spend their entertainment budget elsewhere.
Now, publishers had this coming with extremely author-hostile policies they had for last couple of decades. But what the hell do independent book stores have to do with it?
Actually, they're not. Cable companies have reported extremely weak pay to view sales, low enough to impact their revenues in a very visible way last year. There was an article about it on slashdot, look it up.
TBH I have nothing against gestures. I find that "put finger down in upper middle or touchpad and drag left" for back function on browser or "put down two fingers and drag up or down for vertical page scrolling" to be very comfortable.
The issue is that there's only so many of these simple, fast gestures available before you go into drawing circles and such, and lose the entire point of such shortcuts. Not so with keyboard that has a very large amount of shortcuts due to having a lot of keys near ctrl and alt buttons.
You're wrong on failures part. Modern hard drives have far more logic system (controller) failures then mechanical ones when properly installed, especially on desktop where they're not stressed nearly as much as on servers.
On the other hand, SSDs have significantly worse failure rate on logic part, as their controllers have to be extremely complex in comparison with HDD ones. This problem will likely be ironed out with age, as they get better but at the moment, there are actual serious bugs found in controllers on drives in retail in addition to increased failure rate.
That said, on desktop the failure rate is probably not meaningful, as drives generally tend to die slower then desktops get updated.
Absolutely no argument on speed though, SSDs beat HDDs hands down in that department. In the end, it's price and slightly better reliability vs speed.
And of course, make it a PERFECT circle. Because everyone is Picasso.
Seriously, the entire point of shortcuts is to make things faster. Drawing three circles, hell, one circle takes a whole lot longer then hitting a keyboard combo. In most cases, it would be about as fast as clicking an icon with a mouse. Just try it.
(I had a circle gesture on touchpad of my laptop for a reload function of web page for a while. Ugh).
Reality is, galactic development measures in millions and billions of years. We had a massive technological breakthrough from not knowing what space is to having manned flight to the moon in less then 500 years, and we're on exponential acceleration when it comes to technology development. If I were a strategic thinker for a race whose goal was to protect galaxy, I would put a very high threat assessment on humanity, both because of its potential to develop relatively fast technologically, and because of it's complete inability to develop genetically at the same speed. I'd be potentially looking at an equivalent of a galactic virus should humanity be allowed to develop, where they would swarm a planet, take it, strip it of resources and move on to the next one using resources gained on the planet to multiply.
In a nutshell, essentially everything in and out of PC is standardized, and when it's not, drivers usually provide abstraction to some standardized layer to ensure compatibility. This is true, and is probably the point you're trying to make. But it ended up coming pretty badly mangled. In fact the sheer size of falsehood in your claim is astonishing. The entire point of PC platform is that it supports a massive amount of different hardware configurations that all work with the same x86 (amd64) code.
Networking hardware vendors are dime a dozen. There are hundreds of them. All of them work in the OS on their own x86/(amd64) drivers. Graphics market has shrunk somewhat, but just a few years ago there was about 20 vendors. All of whom worked. Most still do. Mice, and controller device numbers, as well as their unique solutions are insane - we have keyboards, mice, special keyboards, special mice, wheels, pedals, joysticks, various control interfaces for variously impaired people, various touch screens... The list is almost endless.
How you could claim that things have "filtered down to a few typical devices of each type" on PC and get +5 informative is beyond me. Most PCs certainly have the usual peripherals, but amount of specialized, WORKING components and peripherals in PC world that can just be hooked in, have drivers installed and work in whatever exotic combination you want outnumber any platform by far. That's one of the most important attractions of the platform, as well as one of its harshest features to program and test for.
That's the difference: with ARM, if you design software, you need to know the hardware you're designing it for. With a PC, you just design x86/amd64 software mostly caring about OS platform, and you start caring about hardware only when you optimize. Hell, in many cases you can even make it work under all popular OS's, porting your software to windows, mac os and linux with minimal hassle. Not so with ARM.
WoW PvP: Sandbox (instanced) PvP, minimal negative consequences on loss, very polished in terms of balance, focuses on teamwork. EvE PvP: World PvP, extreme negative consequences on loss, so-so balance, focuses on organisation skills.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me help you. It's called water closet, or WC for short. The short name is universal across most languages.
Steady decline in allocated resources in relation to the rest of the public. Is relativity such a difficult concept, or are you truly so foolish as to even entertain a possibility that people care for absolute level of life rather then relative to rest of population?
Hell, do you care that you live better then cavemen did? Or apes? Or do you care that your neighbour can afford his house, while you're getting evicted out of yours because you lost your job?
Here's another pearl of knowledge for you: During financial situation that led to WW2, level of life was significantly better among average population then it was amongst the richest of the rich just two hundred years before that. Didn't stop situation directly leading to the war that wiped out almost 100.000.000 people from the planet and got us a nuclear bomb.
So your argument is that we can safely ignore the steady decline because technological progress allows us to alleviate _some_ of the symptoms.
Question: what happens when _some_ of the symptoms become simply not enough, and system comes to a crashing halt, like banking sector did a couple of years ago?
Drawing the line between "proprietary storage format" and "preventing piracy" is one hell of a hyperbole. Especially in view of sony's history of pushing essentially mangled formats that only worked on their hardware to earn a little extra on peripheral sales, and then burying them in next generation (UMD games and movies would like a word with you, as would atrac ).
Thing is, music is a bad comparison, because it's found its way into media that youth of today uses constantly, i.e. movies, games and so on. The contact with music doesn't go away just because music stores do.
This isn't like that for books, and it is shown very well by declining numbers of young people visiting libraries.
Indeed. But let's face the facts, this is sony. As their otherOS fiasco showed, they care about locking their consoles down far more then about giving their users freedom to install another operating system.
Hell, it still has a proprietary non-volatile (storage) flash memory format, just so that they can cash in. Not (mini/micro)SD like most of the ultraportable hardware like mobile phones have.
Vita games will also be about as comparable to iphone games in the same way as sex compares to masturbating with sandpaper.
Seriously, there are maybe 10 games total worth playing on iphone, and that is a very optimistic view (+ badly working console emulators). Rest are designed for people with severe attention deficit disorder and are typically less interesting then old 8-bit nintendo games.
They certainly do work for the masses that never gamed before however, as well as people who only play on the road in sessions of a few minutes. I.e. they're very well suited for their audience, and that audience is not gamers.
That's about phones, and in a country where essentially no one buys a phone without a contract. It's a cultural thing, folks in USA are used to paying a shitload of money in installments, but almost nothing in front. I believe it has to do with way finances are designed to work for individuals in USA, essentially slaving them to stable income, and encouraging debt that's just barely repayable.
Go to some EU countries, or even third world and you'll see the exact opposite. That's why nokia is still the king of phones across third world - it's phones are actually honest to god cheap rather then "costs you an arm and a leg, but will cut them off slowly over 2 years as you pay its actual price".
Never attribute to malice, what you can attribute to stupidity.
Someone must've honestly thought that one IP = one site. One can only wonder how someone that stupid can work on ISP networking.
Has world really gotten to the point where "eventually" in context no longer means proper long term of half a century or more, but is instead "here and now!"?
Possible, but then again amazon has business presence in pretty much all major countries.
That would be because it pays VAT in UK, and under EU rules that is the tax that needs to be paid for sales inside EU.
The argument is that for every one of you, in ten years there will be ten youths that will have no contact with books, and won't buy any, because they never ran into a bookshop and browsed it in their lives. Not that it undercuts the number of the current clients.
FYI: they pay taxes to other countries they ship to. If they didn't their goods would simply get impounded in customs.
This is pretty much the fear of most people I know who are into books and know about amazon. This effect will be slowed down by libraries, but it will likely push through regardless.
You do realise that when enough of book stores go down, demand for books will eventually follow? Bookstores create demand by letting people window shop, read, touch real books.
As amazon has proven, virtual shop will have something that is tailored for your preferences. Which for next generations means mostly games, videos and music. Creating supply creates demand in entertainment, and vice versa - reducing supply reduces demand as customers simply spend their entertainment budget elsewhere.
Now, publishers had this coming with extremely author-hostile policies they had for last couple of decades. But what the hell do independent book stores have to do with it?
Actually, they're not. Cable companies have reported extremely weak pay to view sales, low enough to impact their revenues in a very visible way last year. There was an article about it on slashdot, look it up.
TBH I have nothing against gestures. I find that "put finger down in upper middle or touchpad and drag left" for back function on browser or "put down two fingers and drag up or down for vertical page scrolling" to be very comfortable.
The issue is that there's only so many of these simple, fast gestures available before you go into drawing circles and such, and lose the entire point of such shortcuts. Not so with keyboard that has a very large amount of shortcuts due to having a lot of keys near ctrl and alt buttons.
You're wrong on failures part. Modern hard drives have far more logic system (controller) failures then mechanical ones when properly installed, especially on desktop where they're not stressed nearly as much as on servers.
On the other hand, SSDs have significantly worse failure rate on logic part, as their controllers have to be extremely complex in comparison with HDD ones. This problem will likely be ironed out with age, as they get better but at the moment, there are actual serious bugs found in controllers on drives in retail in addition to increased failure rate.
That said, on desktop the failure rate is probably not meaningful, as drives generally tend to die slower then desktops get updated.
Absolutely no argument on speed though, SSDs beat HDDs hands down in that department. In the end, it's price and slightly better reliability vs speed.
And of course, make it a PERFECT circle. Because everyone is Picasso.
Seriously, the entire point of shortcuts is to make things faster. Drawing three circles, hell, one circle takes a whole lot longer then hitting a keyboard combo. In most cases, it would be about as fast as clicking an icon with a mouse. Just try it.
(I had a circle gesture on touchpad of my laptop for a reload function of web page for a while. Ugh).
It's worth noting that if everyone liked exploring, nothing would ever get done. So there's a downside to everything.
Is there someone insane enough to challenge this notion? I don't think even the most hardcore linux/apple fans ever went that far.
At our CURRENT technological level...
Reality is, galactic development measures in millions and billions of years. We had a massive technological breakthrough from not knowing what space is to having manned flight to the moon in less then 500 years, and we're on exponential acceleration when it comes to technology development. If I were a strategic thinker for a race whose goal was to protect galaxy, I would put a very high threat assessment on humanity, both because of its potential to develop relatively fast technologically, and because of it's complete inability to develop genetically at the same speed. I'd be potentially looking at an equivalent of a galactic virus should humanity be allowed to develop, where they would swarm a planet, take it, strip it of resources and move on to the next one using resources gained on the planet to multiply.
In a nutshell, essentially everything in and out of PC is standardized, and when it's not, drivers usually provide abstraction to some standardized layer to ensure compatibility. This is true, and is probably the point you're trying to make. But it ended up coming pretty badly mangled.
In fact the sheer size of falsehood in your claim is astonishing. The entire point of PC platform is that it supports a massive amount of different hardware configurations that all work with the same x86 (amd64) code.
Networking hardware vendors are dime a dozen. There are hundreds of them. All of them work in the OS on their own x86/(amd64) drivers. Graphics market has shrunk somewhat, but just a few years ago there was about 20 vendors. All of whom worked. Most still do. Mice, and controller device numbers, as well as their unique solutions are insane - we have keyboards, mice, special keyboards, special mice, wheels, pedals, joysticks, various control interfaces for variously impaired people, various touch screens... The list is almost endless.
How you could claim that things have "filtered down to a few typical devices of each type" on PC and get +5 informative is beyond me. Most PCs certainly have the usual peripherals, but amount of specialized, WORKING components and peripherals in PC world that can just be hooked in, have drivers installed and work in whatever exotic combination you want outnumber any platform by far. That's one of the most important attractions of the platform, as well as one of its harshest features to program and test for.
That's the difference: with ARM, if you design software, you need to know the hardware you're designing it for. With a PC, you just design x86/amd64 software mostly caring about OS platform, and you start caring about hardware only when you optimize. Hell, in many cases you can even make it work under all popular OS's, porting your software to windows, mac os and linux with minimal hassle. Not so with ARM.
To sum the argument:
WoW PvP: Sandbox (instanced) PvP, minimal negative consequences on loss, very polished in terms of balance, focuses on teamwork.
EvE PvP: World PvP, extreme negative consequences on loss, so-so balance, focuses on organisation skills.