Pretty much this. NFC payment via phones has been one of the main reasons why western style smartphones like iphone have been a complete and utter failure in Japan. If you can't even do basic things like pay for your train ticket with a smartphone, then what good is the smart part?
Imagine an iphone that you couldn't send or receive text messages with. Would you buy it? NFC payments are so widespread there that it's in the same general category in Japan.
You're ignoring the point for the sake deluding yourself that once the cheaper actor with no R&D outcompetes on price point, they will somehow magically conjure the R&D and become that which they crushed.
We're seeing even now as many industries in the West are running to Asia, plant themselves there, and then note that their R&D hits the ground because it wasn't just a few key people that drove the innovation, but the entire support system and its own R&D.
This is damage because the system competing against capitalism is controlled by a small centralized community. It's capitalistic for as long as this community allows - and not a millimeter more. Unless of course you count a "hostile, pretentiously capitalist until opponent is defeated" system as something of an ally. In which case it's just plain self-delusion at work. You may also look up "dumping", as well as "protectionism" as terms, as well as study how West in general held China down for over a century.
This isn't anything new and original. US largely fought big European powers pre-WW1 to a standstill economically by essentially doing the same thing China is doing to West now. Buy tech, pirate tech, copy tech, compete making the same products but with no need to recoup massive research investments, outcompete on price point and win. This has already been done in many goods, such as electronics, and automotive industry is waking up to similar problem now.
The end result is that the system winning is currently the one strongly regulating its own form of capitalism, while the system losing ground so fast, it can't even understand what's going on is our largely unregulated one. And one of the main reasons why they caught up so fast, is because we did exactly what I described in the previous post. We sold things that took us decades to develop for a quick buck.
To quote Lenin again: A capitalist will sell you the rope you will hang him with if he can make profit on it. Chinese are offering companies a quick profit in exchange for information they can strangulate them with later on.
Except that it doesn't work that way for high tech. China now is an excellent example of this: They really, REALLY tried to make proper military making machine for several decades. Investments were close to trillion levels.
Results? To cover up the failures, they ended up essentially buying russian tech, modding it a bit, and showing it off as your own. The devepment costs needed to make a functional jetliner without the necessary know-how of the entire chain of suppliers is next to impossible, no matter how deep your pockets are. Look at russians themselves - after we raided their supply chain in 90s, essentially buying out and killing off many of their strategic know-how companies, they can't even make a current gen jumbo jet. This from country and bureaus that are known to produce civilian craft that has operated safely and consistently for decades in conditions boeing and airbus have problems making their military craft operate (TU-154 being the main supply workhorse for essentially entire Siberia, taking off and landing in what essentially amounted to nothing but a cleared out field with almost no accidents).
At they at least have a history and know how how to build a new jetliner. And they still can't. For China to do this without West helping is in a realm of impossiblity, unless we're talking 1st gen jetliners, which can't compete with any Airbus or Boeing variants on anything.
In this case, Lenin's quote is dead on. We are literally selling them the rope that they will hang us with. We're selling the supply chain and know how that took us DECADES to get, and would take them DECADES to acquire on their own. Rest is simply hardcore capitalistic bullshit about how we "have to participate now". Which is bullshit because if we don't participate now, they may have something among the lines of boeing 707, or more likely tu-104. Which is commercially pretty much dead on arrival considering the competition available - even russians, in spite of their problems could sell Chinese much better aircraft cheaper. Boeing and Airbus could even better then that.
Essentially this one of the biggest reasons why Marx predicted the fall of too capitalistic system - it is utterly unable to properly regulate itself not to damage itself, and at the same time it tends to try to destroy outside attempts to regulate it - which is what we're seeing with this now. Big companies simply buying out politicians to get permits to essentially sell decades worth of know-how for pennies compared to what it would cost to develop it in the first place.
Yes. The basis behind fingerprints is that as long as the regenerating tissue at the bottom of the skin layer remains alive, it will eventually regenerate same prints. However when damage extends to the deepest layers of the skin, the fingerprints are altered permanently. This is achievable via:
1. Physical trauma. When potential damage extends below the regenerative layer of the skin, your fingerprints end up altered. 2. Skin grafting: for example after heavy burns to your hands that require skin to be replaced fully. This will change your fingerprints.
I suspect that trauma that took your fingerprints off was a surface trauma of some sort, that only removed your prints temporarily, as regenerative layer of the skin remained alive.
It's fairly obvious that ANY internet connection is shared at some point. Hell, one of the main attractive points of using IP was how well it performed on shared connections.
Point was that, the point where you share your connection with other people on DSL is on DSLAM, which can both QoS people who such too much, as well as being connected with far more bandwith then last mile, typically making it impossible to congest by a single, or even several users. Essentially your copper pair going from DSLAM to your house is YOURS. No one is sharing it.
With cable, your last mile is shared, which means that your only means of not letting one or several users raping the line is to QoS the last mile, by slowing people down. The cable opening at your house is SHARED with other people.
This is a VERY significant difference. Obviously, as someone else already pointed out, there are places that use star topology for cable. Those are extremely rare however, because the amount of bandwith wasted is pretty epic in proportions to standard circle.
Now you can try to kill the point by pointing out the pointless "but it's shared on another level!". But you'll be missing the main point on purpose just to split hairs.
Not so much clueless as uncaring. The opinion they care is that of higher ups in certain countries. That's pretty much it.
And that's not that much different from US, or any modern Western nation really. We still rape and pillage many 3rd world countries without caring about their public opinions.
The main difference between DSL and DOCSIS cable is that DSL is your personal connection. No one is sharing it. DOCSIS cable line is shared between those on the same line, so if you have active warez people in your neighbourhood or someone hosting an active server of some kind, expect much lower speeds and higher latency then advertised.
Second difference, which has been largely negated lately is latency. DSL offers slightly lower latency by advantage of design.
Tradeoff is that DSL only uses one really shitty quality copper pair, that limits distance and maximum speed far more severely then cable's coaxial. This is exacerbated by the fact that many phone lines are from times before CAT3 home cabling, which is a realistic requirement to reach even ADSL2 level of speeds, causing end user speeds to be below 10mbps even over 24mbps ADSL2+ connection.
It's perfectly consistent once you stop being an ass and purposefully misunderstand the topic. Government and its way of using information is strictly regulated here - and by regulated I don't mean Bush-style "we do what we want and laws be damned" regulation, but a real working one. Problem is, facebook, google et al are largely NOT regulated. They can keep your information forever, even if you "delete" it from your account, and sell it to the highest bidder. This is the part where essentially all EU member states start to have problems - here culturally, privacy is taken far more seriously then in US. As a result, the legislation is aimed to bring the american privacy "you have none" culture that is currently used in most of these companies closer in line with the European values. Such as not being able to just mine data and then mass sell it, even after you expressed a wish for data to be deleted instead.
The data and voice service providers have to keep certain data because they are common carriers. They are not, for example, allowed to mine the data and sell it, and they are only allowed to pass the data on when courts or certain legally entitled entities request it. There is no inconsistency, we can have both. We just have to have laws that work, and government that obeys them.
And notably, this is one of the very few issues where you can safely call then "European values", and not look like a clueless idiot, because unlike most things on which we Europeans tend to differ in a major way across our countries' borders, privacy is something treated in a very similar way across borders on the continent.
If this shocks you as an american, that's okay. We're shocked that you view universal healthcare as something bad too. It's a cultural difference. Just because we have universal healthcare doesn't mean we should force it on you, and just because you have no right to privacy (from our point of view) doesn't mean that you should force similar regime on us.
It's funny how many are afraid to real name for the system that puts corporations in charge.
Reminder: it's called FASCISM. Not "corporatism". Fascism is a proper term to call the political system where corporations are the leading party in politics.
This is admitted by government and more wealthy families rather openly as a huge problem. Schools in South-Korea are essentially institutions that destroy creativity by design - they are designed to produce robotic-like work drones for huge South-Korean conglomerates. An average school day for young children in South-Korea is about 12-14 work hours. First at school, then at tutoring school, then at home. There was a great documentary about the issue on BBC about a year ago, where they showed that average day, and noted that even prime minister of the time spoke of this system as something bad, and something they want to change. Document noted that more wealthy families actively send their children out of the country specifically to avoid the system, and mentality that comes with it.
Essentially it's a mix of local culture and the desire of major conglomerates to have cheap and robotic, yet educated workforce.
This is actually a physical impossiblity. The nerve signal conduction velocity is between 3 and 120 m/s for myelinated nerve cells, usually averaging around 20-30 for motor control cells (iirc, quick wikipedia search suggests same numbers).
This means that at around 1 meter length from brain to fingers, you get about 1/30 sec lag on finger response after signal being sent by the brain.
As a result, anything lower then this would likely be impossible to really affect due to biological limitations. You're most likely thinking of input LAG, where our actions come on screen delayed, in other words there are several frames that show action as if we didn't already start doing something differently. This indeed causes discrepancy as brain's logic is used to real world being immediately affected by our actions, and having artificial world in the game "life out" a period after we have visibly affected it breaks this effect.
For difference between 30 and 60 fps to really affect our perception of input lag is, imho out of realm of physical possibility due to above reasons.
Well, numerically many if not most of these phones are nokia n8. These have a proper GPU, proper swapping and proper multitasking, and therefore aren't subjects to limitations discussed in the article.
Same goes for high end android in many cases as well.
To break down the question: Why do we need this much fps in a game on a ~4 inch screen?
To understand the importance of the question, we need to understand how human eye works, and how it processes images. Essentially, we have two kinds of cells in our eye capable of sensing light. One is capable of sensing shades of gray, and other senses a certain color (there are three different cells in this category, sensing different light wavelengths). Notably, cells sensing shades of gray can track many more image changes/second then those sensing colors due to their original purpose - tracking movement (for hunter-prey scenarios). Another thing to note is that while focus of our vision, the area that covers a very small center zone of our field of view houses vast majority of the cells that can sense colors, most of the gray-sensing cells are housed outside focus, in area of peripheral vision.
As a result, when you play a game on a large screen at home, a large portion of the screen's image is sensed by the area out of focus, and when your frame per second counter is below 60ish, the out-of-focus area begins to see separate images, while your focus still sees the flowing animation. This is what causes the uncomfortable discrepancy during high motion scenes when viewer still sees the fluid animation in his focus, but his peripheral vision doesn't, making the image look "choppy".
Now, enter mobile phones. The screen is actually small enough to mostly, if not entirely fit into our focus. This drastically cuts the need for high fps.
So why is Carmack talking about 60 fps on a graphics engine designed for phones? Is he actually clueless about the issue, is it marketing speak, or does he simply want to advertise to developers who may not be as familiar with the issue as he himself is?
I mean, that's the normal argument for why CEOs make so much money, right? That they have far more riding on their shoulders? Why don't we make that argument true in fact, instead of just true in theory?
That reason is given as obfuscation to avoid unpleasant revolution-like movement when the masses figure out that the only reason most CEOs get the job is because they have the proper social contacts with those who are hiring.
Practical management skills are of really, REALLY low importance on the hiring requirement for top management. Pedigree, studying in the right university, having the right people you know and going to the right golf club on the other hand is very high. Essentially they are the new aristocracy, and often are just as clueless at practical management as aristocrats were.
He omits important caveat. LARGE companies pay almost no to no taxes. Small companies pay a lot.
Because large companies have the lobbying power to make sure they don't have to pay taxes. As a certain infamous billionaire said, "taxes are for the poor".
Notably in early beta, no addons were allowed. At all.
And personally I found that with some minor tweaking, default blizzard raid frames were superior, and vastly more stable then both addons you mentioned.
You can. It was comprehensively proven when 4.0 came out breaking all major unit/raid frame addons for almost a week. Additional proof can be found on beta, where people raided some really hard stuff with no addons allowed at the beginning.
It's not that it's impossible. It's just that it's harder.
Or the machines will simply be put under even stronger firewall rules. It's not like you need a "secure OS" when pretty much all vectors of infection are sealed shut by 3rd party software with no way for user to reverse it, as most businesses already do.
I did the same thing, and my old, machine running xp with zero updates (that is ZERO, the out of the box version only) sat on the net as the usable machine until I retired the hardware a couple of years ago. How? Firewall, Anti-Virus, draconian rules in both. Auto-updaters for used 3rd party software such as flash player, browser, email client making sure these aren't vulnerable. Result: Zero problems with the machine outside the massively annoying lack of USB2.0 support. It cruised uninfected though the worst worm and virus issues of the decade in spite of several rather clueless users on it.
Just lock the damn thing down hard enough, and you could probably use a win2k with no problems as a business desktop machine.
Allow me to help you connect the dots you missed completely. The reason it's so damn expensive to mine it here is not because of the costs - look at the thriving coal mining industry.
The reason is that extraction of rare earths requires some of the most toxic and polluting substances on the planet in large amounts when you extract them from the ore. Environmental laws FORCE you to clean the waste born from this in the West, and that's what's driving the costs through the roof.
It we could extract them under the same "don't bother cleaning anything" rules as they do in China, costs would be roughly the same, as most of the mining costs tend to be in equipment needed, and dependent on extraction methods. Wage costs have a minimal impact - which is why coal is still being actively and profitably mined in many western countries with very high wages, such as US and Germany.
The main reason production of many rare earths exists mainly in China and moved out of North America and Europe is the extremely polluting and toxic process of extraction.
Theirs isn't really that much worse then what ours was back when we were extracting rare earths.
Essentially what they are doing is what we we (as in West) have been doing to China and still doing to many other developing countries for about a century. We're still doing it in most agricultural products, dumping so that local farmers in Africa can't really compete unless they play ball.
The issue isn't protectionism. It's that this is really the first time that West actually got the taste of same medicine, and same arguments to back the medicine, as it was giving to developing countries for centuries. Chinese have watched what we did, learned, and simply copied our actions. And now, we're finding that in the raw, brutal, jungle-law "only strongest and most ruthless survives" style of globalisation we created, we may not be the only top dogs. And that realisation is so shocking to many of the elite, they're clearly in denial. Mostly because they simply believe in the system they created on religious level, and when the system is turned against them, they are unable to see the bigger picture. So we get the "oh noes, China is being protectionist" tears from top leaders. Never mind that we did the same thing for centuries, when China does it, it's deeply wrong. Not because system is deeply flawed, but because it's not the West that is the party in control.
It's not even that it's somehow irreplaceable. There is a centuries-worth of rare earths across both Northern American and Europe. It's just that we're so used to being the ones using globalisation as a hammer to beat the nail of competition into the ground, we are simply stumped as to what we are supposed to do when we become the nail that is getting hammered instead. A hundred years of being the hammer makes us a pretty bad nail.
Understand that this isn't formerly colonial countries with their unavoidable ethnic and cultural mish-mash. Nordic countries are very ethnically and religiously solid entities with long and rich history spanning thousands of years. As a result, traditions and faith are on a completely different level here - something that is quite hard if not impossible for someone born and raised in a former colony to understand.
So no, that's not messed up. Over 90% of people in Finland still belong to the state church. Reasons are many, but first and foremost it's because it's the TRADITION. You have the traditional confirmation camp, baptising, godparents, etc. When 90% of population does this, it's a norm. We even have secular "confirmation style" camps to replace actual confirmation camps because people want to celebrate the "mental/spiritual coming of age" with their children. Because it's traditionally proper to do so, because you did it, your parents did it, and so on.
China has not moved to take over Taiwan because, having missed their opportunity shortly after the civil war, the modern era's situation is that entire planet has too much to lose over such an unimaginably, disastrously irresponsible thing.
I completely agree with you on this, as well as your entire post. However it is largely moot, because it relies on China being the escalator.
If Taiwan is the one to attempt escalation by a change of status quo by breaching non-profiliteration agreements, it will become the aggressor. At this point, very few in ASEAN will be willing to stand up for it if China was to go in, and in asian cultures in general, such a move would be viewed as a challenge which when gone unanswered would cause chinese to lose face. No one in the region would blame chinese for acting in such situation. There would be public political posturing and possibly some form of UN resolution + sanctions. But no one would stand for Taiwan if it tried to get nukes.
Which is why arming Taiwan with strategic or tactical nuclear weapons will never happen. Because LOCALS will not stand for it, as they understand the consequences. They have far more to lose then people of US from such a stupid move.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much this. NFC payment via phones has been one of the main reasons why western style smartphones like iphone have been a complete and utter failure in Japan. If you can't even do basic things like pay for your train ticket with a smartphone, then what good is the smart part?
Imagine an iphone that you couldn't send or receive text messages with. Would you buy it? NFC payments are so widespread there that it's in the same general category in Japan.
With stakes involved, they'll be elbowing their neighbours to get through the class door first. Do not underestimate the value of fear.
I'm the one who posted the grand parent, and frankly, this post said it better then I did.
You're ignoring the point for the sake deluding yourself that once the cheaper actor with no R&D outcompetes on price point, they will somehow magically conjure the R&D and become that which they crushed.
We're seeing even now as many industries in the West are running to Asia, plant themselves there, and then note that their R&D hits the ground because it wasn't just a few key people that drove the innovation, but the entire support system and its own R&D.
This is damage because the system competing against capitalism is controlled by a small centralized community. It's capitalistic for as long as this community allows - and not a millimeter more.
Unless of course you count a "hostile, pretentiously capitalist until opponent is defeated" system as something of an ally. In which case it's just plain self-delusion at work.
You may also look up "dumping", as well as "protectionism" as terms, as well as study how West in general held China down for over a century.
This isn't anything new and original. US largely fought big European powers pre-WW1 to a standstill economically by essentially doing the same thing China is doing to West now. Buy tech, pirate tech, copy tech, compete making the same products but with no need to recoup massive research investments, outcompete on price point and win. This has already been done in many goods, such as electronics, and automotive industry is waking up to similar problem now.
The end result is that the system winning is currently the one strongly regulating its own form of capitalism, while the system losing ground so fast, it can't even understand what's going on is our largely unregulated one. And one of the main reasons why they caught up so fast, is because we did exactly what I described in the previous post. We sold things that took us decades to develop for a quick buck.
To quote Lenin again: A capitalist will sell you the rope you will hang him with if he can make profit on it. Chinese are offering companies a quick profit in exchange for information they can strangulate them with later on.
Except that it doesn't work that way for high tech. China now is an excellent example of this: They really, REALLY tried to make proper military making machine for several decades. Investments were close to trillion levels.
Results? To cover up the failures, they ended up essentially buying russian tech, modding it a bit, and showing it off as your own. The devepment costs needed to make a functional jetliner without the necessary know-how of the entire chain of suppliers is next to impossible, no matter how deep your pockets are. Look at russians themselves - after we raided their supply chain in 90s, essentially buying out and killing off many of their strategic know-how companies, they can't even make a current gen jumbo jet. This from country and bureaus that are known to produce civilian craft that has operated safely and consistently for decades in conditions boeing and airbus have problems making their military craft operate (TU-154 being the main supply workhorse for essentially entire Siberia, taking off and landing in what essentially amounted to nothing but a cleared out field with almost no accidents).
At they at least have a history and know how how to build a new jetliner. And they still can't. For China to do this without West helping is in a realm of impossiblity, unless we're talking 1st gen jetliners, which can't compete with any Airbus or Boeing variants on anything.
In this case, Lenin's quote is dead on. We are literally selling them the rope that they will hang us with. We're selling the supply chain and know how that took us DECADES to get, and would take them DECADES to acquire on their own. Rest is simply hardcore capitalistic bullshit about how we "have to participate now". Which is bullshit because if we don't participate now, they may have something among the lines of boeing 707, or more likely tu-104. Which is commercially pretty much dead on arrival considering the competition available - even russians, in spite of their problems could sell Chinese much better aircraft cheaper. Boeing and Airbus could even better then that.
Essentially this one of the biggest reasons why Marx predicted the fall of too capitalistic system - it is utterly unable to properly regulate itself not to damage itself, and at the same time it tends to try to destroy outside attempts to regulate it - which is what we're seeing with this now. Big companies simply buying out politicians to get permits to essentially sell decades worth of know-how for pennies compared to what it would cost to develop it in the first place.
Yes. The basis behind fingerprints is that as long as the regenerating tissue at the bottom of the skin layer remains alive, it will eventually regenerate same prints. However when damage extends to the deepest layers of the skin, the fingerprints are altered permanently. This is achievable via:
1. Physical trauma. When potential damage extends below the regenerative layer of the skin, your fingerprints end up altered.
2. Skin grafting: for example after heavy burns to your hands that require skin to be replaced fully. This will change your fingerprints.
I suspect that trauma that took your fingerprints off was a surface trauma of some sort, that only removed your prints temporarily, as regenerative layer of the skin remained alive.
It's fairly obvious that ANY internet connection is shared at some point. Hell, one of the main attractive points of using IP was how well it performed on shared connections.
Point was that, the point where you share your connection with other people on DSL is on DSLAM, which can both QoS people who such too much, as well as being connected with far more bandwith then last mile, typically making it impossible to congest by a single, or even several users. Essentially your copper pair going from DSLAM to your house is YOURS. No one is sharing it.
With cable, your last mile is shared, which means that your only means of not letting one or several users raping the line is to QoS the last mile, by slowing people down. The cable opening at your house is SHARED with other people.
This is a VERY significant difference. Obviously, as someone else already pointed out, there are places that use star topology for cable. Those are extremely rare however, because the amount of bandwith wasted is pretty epic in proportions to standard circle.
Now you can try to kill the point by pointing out the pointless "but it's shared on another level!". But you'll be missing the main point on purpose just to split hairs.
Not so much clueless as uncaring. The opinion they care is that of higher ups in certain countries. That's pretty much it.
And that's not that much different from US, or any modern Western nation really. We still rape and pillage many 3rd world countries without caring about their public opinions.
The main difference between DSL and DOCSIS cable is that DSL is your personal connection. No one is sharing it. DOCSIS cable line is shared between those on the same line, so if you have active warez people in your neighbourhood or someone hosting an active server of some kind, expect much lower speeds and higher latency then advertised.
Second difference, which has been largely negated lately is latency. DSL offers slightly lower latency by advantage of design.
Tradeoff is that DSL only uses one really shitty quality copper pair, that limits distance and maximum speed far more severely then cable's coaxial. This is exacerbated by the fact that many phone lines are from times before CAT3 home cabling, which is a realistic requirement to reach even ADSL2 level of speeds, causing end user speeds to be below 10mbps even over 24mbps ADSL2+ connection.
It's perfectly consistent once you stop being an ass and purposefully misunderstand the topic. Government and its way of using information is strictly regulated here - and by regulated I don't mean Bush-style "we do what we want and laws be damned" regulation, but a real working one.
Problem is, facebook, google et al are largely NOT regulated. They can keep your information forever, even if you "delete" it from your account, and sell it to the highest bidder. This is the part where essentially all EU member states start to have problems - here culturally, privacy is taken far more seriously then in US. As a result, the legislation is aimed to bring the american privacy "you have none" culture that is currently used in most of these companies closer in line with the European values. Such as not being able to just mine data and then mass sell it, even after you expressed a wish for data to be deleted instead.
The data and voice service providers have to keep certain data because they are common carriers. They are not, for example, allowed to mine the data and sell it, and they are only allowed to pass the data on when courts or certain legally entitled entities request it. There is no inconsistency, we can have both. We just have to have laws that work, and government that obeys them.
And notably, this is one of the very few issues where you can safely call then "European values", and not look like a clueless idiot, because unlike most things on which we Europeans tend to differ in a major way across our countries' borders, privacy is something treated in a very similar way across borders on the continent.
If this shocks you as an american, that's okay. We're shocked that you view universal healthcare as something bad too. It's a cultural difference. Just because we have universal healthcare doesn't mean we should force it on you, and just because you have no right to privacy (from our point of view) doesn't mean that you should force similar regime on us.
It's funny how many are afraid to real name for the system that puts corporations in charge.
Reminder: it's called FASCISM. Not "corporatism". Fascism is a proper term to call the political system where corporations are the leading party in politics.
This is admitted by government and more wealthy families rather openly as a huge problem. Schools in South-Korea are essentially institutions that destroy creativity by design - they are designed to produce robotic-like work drones for huge South-Korean conglomerates.
An average school day for young children in South-Korea is about 12-14 work hours. First at school, then at tutoring school, then at home. There was a great documentary about the issue on BBC about a year ago, where they showed that average day, and noted that even prime minister of the time spoke of this system as something bad, and something they want to change. Document noted that more wealthy families actively send their children out of the country specifically to avoid the system, and mentality that comes with it.
Essentially it's a mix of local culture and the desire of major conglomerates to have cheap and robotic, yet educated workforce.
This is actually a physical impossiblity. The nerve signal conduction velocity is between 3 and 120 m/s for myelinated nerve cells, usually averaging around 20-30 for motor control cells (iirc, quick wikipedia search suggests same numbers).
This means that at around 1 meter length from brain to fingers, you get about 1/30 sec lag on finger response after signal being sent by the brain.
As a result, anything lower then this would likely be impossible to really affect due to biological limitations. You're most likely thinking of input LAG, where our actions come on screen delayed, in other words there are several frames that show action as if we didn't already start doing something differently. This indeed causes discrepancy as brain's logic is used to real world being immediately affected by our actions, and having artificial world in the game "life out" a period after we have visibly affected it breaks this effect.
For difference between 30 and 60 fps to really affect our perception of input lag is, imho out of realm of physical possibility due to above reasons.
Well, numerically many if not most of these phones are nokia n8. These have a proper GPU, proper swapping and proper multitasking, and therefore aren't subjects to limitations discussed in the article.
Same goes for high end android in many cases as well.
To break down the question: Why do we need this much fps in a game on a ~4 inch screen?
To understand the importance of the question, we need to understand how human eye works, and how it processes images.
Essentially, we have two kinds of cells in our eye capable of sensing light. One is capable of sensing shades of gray, and other senses a certain color (there are three different cells in this category, sensing different light wavelengths). Notably, cells sensing shades of gray can track many more image changes/second then those sensing colors due to their original purpose - tracking movement (for hunter-prey scenarios). Another thing to note is that while focus of our vision, the area that covers a very small center zone of our field of view houses vast majority of the cells that can sense colors, most of the gray-sensing cells are housed outside focus, in area of peripheral vision.
As a result, when you play a game on a large screen at home, a large portion of the screen's image is sensed by the area out of focus, and when your frame per second counter is below 60ish, the out-of-focus area begins to see separate images, while your focus still sees the flowing animation. This is what causes the uncomfortable discrepancy during high motion scenes when viewer still sees the fluid animation in his focus, but his peripheral vision doesn't, making the image look "choppy".
Now, enter mobile phones. The screen is actually small enough to mostly, if not entirely fit into our focus. This drastically cuts the need for high fps.
So why is Carmack talking about 60 fps on a graphics engine designed for phones? Is he actually clueless about the issue, is it marketing speak, or does he simply want to advertise to developers who may not be as familiar with the issue as he himself is?
I mean, that's the normal argument for why CEOs make so much money, right? That they have far more riding on their shoulders? Why don't we make that argument true in fact, instead of just true in theory?
That reason is given as obfuscation to avoid unpleasant revolution-like movement when the masses figure out that the only reason most CEOs get the job is because they have the proper social contacts with those who are hiring.
Practical management skills are of really, REALLY low importance on the hiring requirement for top management. Pedigree, studying in the right university, having the right people you know and going to the right golf club on the other hand is very high. Essentially they are the new aristocracy, and often are just as clueless at practical management as aristocrats were.
He omits important caveat. LARGE companies pay almost no to no taxes. Small companies pay a lot.
Because large companies have the lobbying power to make sure they don't have to pay taxes. As a certain infamous billionaire said, "taxes are for the poor".
Notably in early beta, no addons were allowed. At all.
And personally I found that with some minor tweaking, default blizzard raid frames were superior, and vastly more stable then both addons you mentioned.
You can. It was comprehensively proven when 4.0 came out breaking all major unit/raid frame addons for almost a week.
Additional proof can be found on beta, where people raided some really hard stuff with no addons allowed at the beginning.
It's not that it's impossible. It's just that it's harder.
Or the machines will simply be put under even stronger firewall rules. It's not like you need a "secure OS" when pretty much all vectors of infection are sealed shut by 3rd party software with no way for user to reverse it, as most businesses already do.
I did the same thing, and my old, machine running xp with zero updates (that is ZERO, the out of the box version only) sat on the net as the usable machine until I retired the hardware a couple of years ago. How? Firewall, Anti-Virus, draconian rules in both. Auto-updaters for used 3rd party software such as flash player, browser, email client making sure these aren't vulnerable. Result: Zero problems with the machine outside the massively annoying lack of USB2.0 support. It cruised uninfected though the worst worm and virus issues of the decade in spite of several rather clueless users on it.
Just lock the damn thing down hard enough, and you could probably use a win2k with no problems as a business desktop machine.
Allow me to help you connect the dots you missed completely. The reason it's so damn expensive to mine it here is not because of the costs - look at the thriving coal mining industry.
The reason is that extraction of rare earths requires some of the most toxic and polluting substances on the planet in large amounts when you extract them from the ore. Environmental laws FORCE you to clean the waste born from this in the West, and that's what's driving the costs through the roof.
It we could extract them under the same "don't bother cleaning anything" rules as they do in China, costs would be roughly the same, as most of the mining costs tend to be in equipment needed, and dependent on extraction methods. Wage costs have a minimal impact - which is why coal is still being actively and profitably mined in many western countries with very high wages, such as US and Germany.
The main reason production of many rare earths exists mainly in China and moved out of North America and Europe is the extremely polluting and toxic process of extraction.
Theirs isn't really that much worse then what ours was back when we were extracting rare earths.
Essentially what they are doing is what we we (as in West) have been doing to China and still doing to many other developing countries for about a century. We're still doing it in most agricultural products, dumping so that local farmers in Africa can't really compete unless they play ball.
The issue isn't protectionism. It's that this is really the first time that West actually got the taste of same medicine, and same arguments to back the medicine, as it was giving to developing countries for centuries. Chinese have watched what we did, learned, and simply copied our actions. And now, we're finding that in the raw, brutal, jungle-law "only strongest and most ruthless survives" style of globalisation we created, we may not be the only top dogs. And that realisation is so shocking to many of the elite, they're clearly in denial. Mostly because they simply believe in the system they created on religious level, and when the system is turned against them, they are unable to see the bigger picture. So we get the "oh noes, China is being protectionist" tears from top leaders. Never mind that we did the same thing for centuries, when China does it, it's deeply wrong. Not because system is deeply flawed, but because it's not the West that is the party in control.
It's not even that it's somehow irreplaceable. There is a centuries-worth of rare earths across both Northern American and Europe. It's just that we're so used to being the ones using globalisation as a hammer to beat the nail of competition into the ground, we are simply stumped as to what we are supposed to do when we become the nail that is getting hammered instead. A hundred years of being the hammer makes us a pretty bad nail.
Understand that this isn't formerly colonial countries with their unavoidable ethnic and cultural mish-mash. Nordic countries are very ethnically and religiously solid entities with long and rich history spanning thousands of years. As a result, traditions and faith are on a completely different level here - something that is quite hard if not impossible for someone born and raised in a former colony to understand.
So no, that's not messed up. Over 90% of people in Finland still belong to the state church. Reasons are many, but first and foremost it's because it's the TRADITION. You have the traditional confirmation camp, baptising, godparents, etc. When 90% of population does this, it's a norm. We even have secular "confirmation style" camps to replace actual confirmation camps because people want to celebrate the "mental/spiritual coming of age" with their children.
Because it's traditionally proper to do so, because you did it, your parents did it, and so on.
China has not moved to take over Taiwan because, having missed their opportunity shortly after the civil war, the modern era's situation is that entire planet has too much to lose over such an unimaginably, disastrously irresponsible thing.
I completely agree with you on this, as well as your entire post. However it is largely moot, because it relies on China being the escalator.
If Taiwan is the one to attempt escalation by a change of status quo by breaching non-profiliteration agreements, it will become the aggressor. At this point, very few in ASEAN will be willing to stand up for it if China was to go in, and in asian cultures in general, such a move would be viewed as a challenge which when gone unanswered would cause chinese to lose face.
No one in the region would blame chinese for acting in such situation. There would be public political posturing and possibly some form of UN resolution + sanctions. But no one would stand for Taiwan if it tried to get nukes.
Which is why arming Taiwan with strategic or tactical nuclear weapons will never happen. Because LOCALS will not stand for it, as they understand the consequences. They have far more to lose then people of US from such a stupid move.
Which was the original claim I answered to.