Since you posted the Wikipedia link, I will assume you're aware that the slippery slope argument is fallacious when the inevitability of the ultimate condition is unproven. So why are you using it?
most of the data you find on P2P networks are recompressed, using lossy algorithm. You can mathematically prove in an indisputable way that this step degrades the data by introducing artefacts and approximations
But which is the more reasonable interpretation of "degraded": a mathematically demonstrable change in the data, or an audibly perceptible change?
If a typical listener cannot distinguish between a CD audio track and a 256kbps MP3 rip of the same track in a blindfold test, can the latter really be considered degraded?
You can still be promoted if no one knows how you do what you do because you'll still be around to handover and train your successor whereas the business is not going to have aas much success asking you to train your cheaper replacement.
You don't think this is a trivial issue for companies to circumvent?
1. Offer a promotion to critical, but undesired, employee 2. Have the employee hand over critical duties to more desirable successor 3. Lay off employee under pretense of bad fit for new duties 4. Profit!
The quality was kept reasonably high through careful controls on the number of games that could be produced by each licensee. (To prevent the "game dumping" problem that occurred in the Atari generation.)
I'm not sure if this was a good or bad thing, in retrospect. In practice it meant that leading publishers like Capcom and Konami had to abandon many of their (what we would now call) 'AAA' titles when choosing what to bring to the American market (though Konami found a workaround to the policy by establishing 'Ultra Games' as a puppet company, much like Atari did with Kee Games and later Tengen), while publishers like LJN that had more marketing talent than programming were encouraged to crap out their allotted 8 games a year, regardless of quality.
Second Reality is considered by many to be the Ur-Demo, and I'm not entirely sure why; it's not a revolutionary milestone in the evolution of demomaking, merely a refinement of a lot of effects and design choices which had existed previously (notably in Future Crew's own "Panic" demo, released a couple months earlier).
No less interesting than the original demo is the Commodore 64 port of it released in 1998, by Smash Designs and The Obsessed Maniacs. The same effects running on hardware 10 years older (and with far less power), and yet the graphics and sound are only marginally degraded from what was possible on a 486/VGA/SB PC. There's a vidcap of most of it on YouTube here.
If somebody has done some significant (yes even Indian students), then they will have sent it to a peer reviewed journal, and that journal will be indexed.
So it's significant because it's been published, and it's published because it's significant.
I'm going now to ask the reference librarian for "all the available information" on circular logic.
You're talking about "thin clients". But a really powerful computer will be the size of a thick piece of paper.
Yes, but requirements for computing power will have increased right along with them (insert joke about "Windows Vista 203X Cybernetic Edition" here). Your future paper computer will have power beyond anything available today, but it will still be a tiny fraction of the processing power of a pizza-box-sized computer mounted in a rack in a server room.
Is there much of a reason that we couldn't have single power+data connectors for internal HDD / DVD drives as well?
Nostalgia? The big ol' 4-pin Molex power connectors are practically the only thing inside a PC case that are still the same as they were when IBM first introduced them to the desktop twenty-seven years ago. If we get rid of those, we'll be severing the last remaining connection to the machine's origins.
The cable company will convert some of it back to analog, ship it plus scrambled digital to you, then charge you (again) for a digital converter box to descramble the digital portion of the cable signal so you can see it all on your TV.
Interesting. Why do you believe that the cable company would want to do a completely unnecessary digital->analog->digital conversion in the middle of the chain?
If there's a digital converter box on top of every set, there's no reason NOT to send everything to it as a digital signal.
All these things undermine your food security by replacing family farms (and local processors) with giant corporate systems that DO NOT have you or your community's best interests at heart.
Your faulty assumptions are: 1. Family farms DO have your best interests at heart. 2. Giant agribusinesses are somehow completely unaware of and unconcerned with the risks of genetic monocultures and chemical dependencies.
Make a clone of a cow, clone that, and then clone it again. Short of doing a hell of a lot of research, there is no evidence to support the claim this is safe. There is definitely evidence to suggest there is degradation in the genes of clones and the animals aren't as healthy.
Not as healthy for the cow, no. But how likely is it that genetic damage would manifest itself in a way that would be a health risk for someone that ate its flesh?
I care if the meat on my plate carries pathogens that could harm me. I don't really care if the animal, if allowed to live past slaughter age, would have died a year earlier due to bad genes.
And, of course, cloning is far from the only way that genetic damage can be introduced. Wouldn't the inherent uncertainness of traditional breeding programs actually present a greater risk than replicating known genes?
So, somebody's going to buy one, and when they foobar their OS and drop it off at the helpdesk, how do we fix it?
1. Amend the support policies to make it clear that due to hardware issues, MacBook Airs are not supported by the helpdesk and should not be used onsite or attached to the local network. 2. Request an increase to the helpdesk budget for additional equipment and training that would allow you to support these computers 3. Give yourselves raises from whatever's left over after you've read the Air manual and spent $200 for a couple of USB DVD drives.
Are they serious? No way to swap out a battery halfway through a 10 hour flight? No way to take it out at security check points (or if it catches fire)?
iPods also have an integrated battery pack. Have any of the things you mentioned ever been an issue with iPods?
The incentive for using the self-checkout lanes is that you won't have to wait in line behind all the other schlubs who refuse to use the self-checkout lanes.
Now, if they could only develop a self-checkout station that didn't require a manager to come and override a problem twice in every order, because it mis-registered the weight of the bag of sandwich rolls, or the UPC code was smudged and got scanned incorrectly...
I spend a lot of time involved in groceries, because I care a lot about what I put into my body. And while most people I know who do use delivery services (like FreshDirect here in New York City) are generally pleased with the quality of produce and perishables they receive, I'd still rather decide myself which tomatoes to buy than leave the decision in the hands of some faceless warehouse drone.
While this is probably only available in big cities like the bay area, Portland, Denver and others, this is something that should be both available *and* used everywhere by almost every one.
No, it's something that only COULD work in big cities and denser suburbs.
A huge percentage of the United States is comprised of rural areas, where a resident has to drive an hour or more to get to the nearest supermarket.
Where a delivery driver in a densely packed urban area might be able make eight deliveries per hour, the driver on a rural route might only make eight deliveries per DAY. And unless the minimum order quantity is set at something like $200, that's just not going to be a profitable service to provide. Gas is expensive, and refrigerated trucks need a lot of the stuff.
You don't go out and pick your own oranges.
Not every time I want an orange, no, but if you've never been to a pick-your-own orchard I recommend it. It's FUN to pick your food right off the plant, and I find it almost as fun to pick it off the shelf. I ENJOY food shopping at a supermarket, despite the presence of other people.
If you don't, that's fine. You have a system that works for you, and I have one that works for me.
I thought the same thing about savings cards. YOU SAVED $18.43 MISTER LIVESTOCK! Surely people can not be this dumb, and this idea will fail... but no.
What's dumb about savings cards?
Yes, of course, the supermarket gets to have my address on file, and collects information about my purchasing habits. But how is that supposed to represent a risk to me? My address is in the phone book, and the only reasonable outcomes from marketers finding out that I prefer Coke to Pepsi are (1) Coke will give me coupons for being a loyal customer, or (2) Pepsi will give me coupons to try to change my mind. Either way, I benefit.
The information I would be keeping secret by not participating in a "rewards card" program is worth much less that $18.43 to me.
This page suggests that the memory devices they are creating have a small display to show the free space on the chip. Wouldn't this suggest that they are making these chips filesystem aware and able to read free space?
Nah, they just treat every memory cell storing a 1 as "used", and every cell storing a 0 as "free".
That calculation's much easier to do with the modest computing power of a USB stick than actual filesystem awareness would be.
the key to the diagram states that part 2 (as indicated several times on the diagram) is an 'optical lens' when it is quite clearly the end (and third contact) of a 3.5mm audio jack
Perhaps the ring and sleeve portions of the connector are based on the 3.5mm audio connector, but the copper 'tip' has been replaced with a TOSlink-type fiber optic coupler?
Yeah, it's ALL shady vaporware garbage, but I'm not so sure they've been caught in a blatant and intentional lie there.
How many other keyboards in the list are no longer available?
Given that the "Wearable Keyboard" looks as though it's a cross between the NES Power Glove (1989) and the original Commodore PET keyboard (1977), I would HOPE that it's not being sold as a contemporary device in 2008...
considering the fact that the before last year there were no displays available on the market that could do what they wanted for the optimus.
Maybe that's because they wanted too much. The concept of tiny displays on each key is a brilliant and fairly obvious application, but did they NEED to use 48x48 RGB OLEDs for the first pass? A bunch of 8x8 monochrome LCDs could more easily have been used to demonstrate the keyboard's potential, and with far lower development and materials costs.
But then, Art Lebedev & co. are a design studio, not a hardware manufacturer. It's not in their nature to seek compromise instead of shooting for the moon.
"But surely it can't be any good if they're just giving it away. After all, you don't get something for nothing."
Therefore you give them the software and let them enjoy it, and then only once they've recognized the actual value of the product do you inform them that the cost is $0.00.
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The problem is that it is a "slippery slope" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope )
Since you posted the Wikipedia link, I will assume you're aware that the slippery slope argument is fallacious when the inevitability of the ultimate condition is unproven. So why are you using it?
most of the data you find on P2P networks are recompressed, using lossy algorithm. You can mathematically prove in an indisputable way that this step degrades the data by introducing artefacts and approximations
But which is the more reasonable interpretation of "degraded": a mathematically demonstrable change in the data, or an audibly perceptible change?
If a typical listener cannot distinguish between a CD audio track and a 256kbps MP3 rip of the same track in a blindfold test, can the latter really be considered degraded?
You can still be promoted if no one knows how you do what you do because you'll still be around to handover and train your successor whereas the business is not going to have aas much success asking you to train your cheaper replacement.
You don't think this is a trivial issue for companies to circumvent?
1. Offer a promotion to critical, but undesired, employee
2. Have the employee hand over critical duties to more desirable successor
3. Lay off employee under pretense of bad fit for new duties
4. Profit!
Note there is no '???' step.
The quality was kept reasonably high through careful controls on the number of games that could be produced by each licensee. (To prevent the "game dumping" problem that occurred in the Atari generation.)
I'm not sure if this was a good or bad thing, in retrospect. In practice it meant that leading publishers like Capcom and Konami had to abandon many of their (what we would now call) 'AAA' titles when choosing what to bring to the American market (though Konami found a workaround to the policy by establishing 'Ultra Games' as a puppet company, much like Atari did with Kee Games and later Tengen), while publishers like LJN that had more marketing talent than programming were encouraged to crap out their allotted 8 games a year, regardless of quality.
Second Reality is considered by many to be the Ur-Demo, and I'm not entirely sure why; it's not a revolutionary milestone in the evolution of demomaking, merely a refinement of a lot of effects and design choices which had existed previously (notably in Future Crew's own "Panic" demo, released a couple months earlier).
No less interesting than the original demo is the Commodore 64 port of it released in 1998, by Smash Designs and The Obsessed Maniacs. The same effects running on hardware 10 years older (and with far less power), and yet the graphics and sound are only marginally degraded from what was possible on a 486/VGA/SB PC. There's a vidcap of most of it on YouTube here.
If somebody has done some significant (yes even Indian students), then they will have sent it to a peer reviewed journal, and that journal will be indexed.
So it's significant because it's been published, and it's published because it's significant.
I'm going now to ask the reference librarian for "all the available information" on circular logic.
You're talking about "thin clients". But a really powerful computer will be the size of a thick piece of paper.
Yes, but requirements for computing power will have increased right along with them (insert joke about "Windows Vista 203X Cybernetic Edition" here). Your future paper computer will have power beyond anything available today, but it will still be a tiny fraction of the processing power of a pizza-box-sized computer mounted in a rack in a server room.
Is there much of a reason that we couldn't have single power+data connectors for internal HDD / DVD drives as well?
Nostalgia? The big ol' 4-pin Molex power connectors are practically the only thing inside a PC case that are still the same as they were when IBM first introduced them to the desktop twenty-seven years ago. If we get rid of those, we'll be severing the last remaining connection to the machine's origins.
The cable company will convert some of it back to analog, ship it plus scrambled digital to you, then charge you (again) for a digital converter box to descramble the digital portion of the cable signal so you can see it all on your TV.
Interesting. Why do you believe that the cable company would want to do a completely unnecessary digital->analog->digital conversion in the middle of the chain?
If there's a digital converter box on top of every set, there's no reason NOT to send everything to it as a digital signal.
If they lack the infrastructure to support what they claim, then they should get better lines.
Okay, where does one purchase a network line with unlimited capacity? It's not possible for them to do what you wish of them.
Since software is not binary portable on these systems, if he hads not preserved the sources, it will not run in modern systems in the first place
Unless the modern system is emulating a legacy system, and the binary-only software works fine within the legacy emulation.
All these things undermine your food security by replacing family farms (and local processors) with giant corporate systems that DO NOT have you or your community's best interests at heart.
Your faulty assumptions are:
1. Family farms DO have your best interests at heart.
2. Giant agribusinesses are somehow completely unaware of and unconcerned with the risks of genetic monocultures and chemical dependencies.
Make a clone of a cow, clone that, and then clone it again. Short of doing a hell of a lot of research, there is no evidence to support the claim this is safe. There is definitely evidence to suggest there is degradation in the genes of clones and the animals aren't as healthy.
Not as healthy for the cow, no. But how likely is it that genetic damage would manifest itself in a way that would be a health risk for someone that ate its flesh?
I care if the meat on my plate carries pathogens that could harm me. I don't really care if the animal, if allowed to live past slaughter age, would have died a year earlier due to bad genes.
And, of course, cloning is far from the only way that genetic damage can be introduced. Wouldn't the inherent uncertainness of traditional breeding programs actually present a greater risk than replicating known genes?
So, somebody's going to buy one, and when they foobar their OS and drop it off at the helpdesk, how do we fix it?
1. Amend the support policies to make it clear that due to hardware issues, MacBook Airs are not supported by the helpdesk and should not be used onsite or attached to the local network.
2. Request an increase to the helpdesk budget for additional equipment and training that would allow you to support these computers
3. Give yourselves raises from whatever's left over after you've read the Air manual and spent $200 for a couple of USB DVD drives.
Are they serious? No way to swap out a battery halfway through a 10 hour flight? No way to take it out at security check points (or if it catches fire)?
iPods also have an integrated battery pack. Have any of the things you mentioned ever been an issue with iPods?
In any case, fixing the basis library and recompileing is enough for properly implemented software.
Whew! It's a good thing most software is properly implemented, then.
The incentive for using the self-checkout lanes is that you won't have to wait in line behind all the other schlubs who refuse to use the self-checkout lanes.
Now, if they could only develop a self-checkout station that didn't require a manager to come and override a problem twice in every order, because it mis-registered the weight of the bag of sandwich rolls, or the UPC code was smudged and got scanned incorrectly...
I spend almost zero time involved in groceries.
I spend a lot of time involved in groceries, because I care a lot about what I put into my body. And while most people I know who do use delivery services (like FreshDirect here in New York City) are generally pleased with the quality of produce and perishables they receive, I'd still rather decide myself which tomatoes to buy than leave the decision in the hands of some faceless warehouse drone.
While this is probably only available in big cities like the bay area, Portland, Denver and others, this is something that should be both available *and* used everywhere by almost every one.
No, it's something that only COULD work in big cities and denser suburbs.
A huge percentage of the United States is comprised of rural areas, where a resident has to drive an hour or more to get to the nearest supermarket.
Where a delivery driver in a densely packed urban area might be able make eight deliveries per hour, the driver on a rural route might only make eight deliveries per DAY. And unless the minimum order quantity is set at something like $200, that's just not going to be a profitable service to provide. Gas is expensive, and refrigerated trucks need a lot of the stuff.
You don't go out and pick your own oranges.
Not every time I want an orange, no, but if you've never been to a pick-your-own orchard I recommend it. It's FUN to pick your food right off the plant, and I find it almost as fun to pick it off the shelf. I ENJOY food shopping at a supermarket, despite the presence of other people.
If you don't, that's fine. You have a system that works for you, and I have one that works for me.
I thought the same thing about savings cards. YOU SAVED $18.43 MISTER LIVESTOCK! Surely people can not be this dumb, and this idea will fail... but no.
What's dumb about savings cards?
Yes, of course, the supermarket gets to have my address on file, and collects information about my purchasing habits. But how is that supposed to represent a risk to me? My address is in the phone book, and the only reasonable outcomes from marketers finding out that I prefer Coke to Pepsi are (1) Coke will give me coupons for being a loyal customer, or (2) Pepsi will give me coupons to try to change my mind. Either way, I benefit.
The information I would be keeping secret by not participating in a "rewards card" program is worth much less that $18.43 to me.
This page suggests that the memory devices they are creating have a small display to show the free space on the chip. Wouldn't this suggest that they are making these chips filesystem aware and able to read free space?
Nah, they just treat every memory cell storing a 1 as "used", and every cell storing a 0 as "free".
That calculation's much easier to do with the modest computing power of a USB stick than actual filesystem awareness would be.
the key to the diagram states that part 2 (as indicated several times on the diagram) is an 'optical lens' when it is quite clearly the end (and third contact) of a 3.5mm audio jack
Perhaps the ring and sleeve portions of the connector are based on the 3.5mm audio connector, but the copper 'tip' has been replaced with a TOSlink-type fiber optic coupler?
Yeah, it's ALL shady vaporware garbage, but I'm not so sure they've been caught in a blatant and intentional lie there.
How many other keyboards in the list are no longer available?
Given that the "Wearable Keyboard" looks as though it's a cross between the NES Power Glove (1989) and the original Commodore PET keyboard (1977), I would HOPE that it's not being sold as a contemporary device in 2008...
considering the fact that the before last year there were no displays available on the market that could do what they wanted for the optimus.
Maybe that's because they wanted too much. The concept of tiny displays on each key is a brilliant and fairly obvious application, but did they NEED to use 48x48 RGB OLEDs for the first pass? A bunch of 8x8 monochrome LCDs could more easily have been used to demonstrate the keyboard's potential, and with far lower development and materials costs.
But then, Art Lebedev & co. are a design studio, not a hardware manufacturer. It's not in their nature to seek compromise instead of shooting for the moon.
"But surely it can't be any good if they're just giving it away. After all, you don't get something for nothing."
Therefore you give them the software and let them enjoy it, and then only once they've recognized the actual value of the product do you inform them that the cost is $0.00.
There was a time when most of the most skilled workers in the world were American.
Who told you that incredible factoid...?