I'm talking wealthly landlords and folks selling million-dollar homes. Who benefit not just from the fact that Craigslist is free, but the fact that the housing search software is well-designed.
It really isn't all that well-designed, though. It returns search results fast, sure, but if I'm looking to find a home, to make an investment that will account for a major portion of what I spend each month, I'd like a little more powerful search abilities than rudimentary price and region selection and keyword search against the body of the ad.
Then again, I've worked in online classifieds myself, in the past; even if craigslist offered a good structured search tool, it would be useless as long as advertisers fail to provide useful, fielded data. Many are still stuck in a newspaper-based, pay-by-the-word mentality.
Hear me out, landlords and brokers: I'm willing to do a lot of the gruntwork involved in searching for a home myself, if it means I can get what I'm looking for more quickly. If you put your information online, I can find it, and then we can work together and neither of us will waste time following up on leads that could have been identified as dead-ends weeks ago.
Where are your figures from? The surveys I've seen put HDTV penetration currently at somewhere between 10-15% of households, and even that I believe is higher than actual, due to consumer confusion about (among other things) the distinction between "digital TV" and "high definition TV".
They are hoping that eventually the technical problems with the other codecs and the format can be worked out, but for now if it's on Blu-ray, it will be MPEG-2.
Wouldn't this mean that when VC1-encoded Blu-ray discs do come out in a year or two, I won't be able to play them on my cutting-edge, bought-the-first-day-it-was-available, only-MPEG-1-passed-QA-testing $1000 Sony Blu-ray player?
Then he'll find that Microsoft has become so mired in its own muck that spurring the current crop of programmers who've been indoctrinated in the "Microsoft Way" will prove nigh impossible.
That doesn't sound like such an insurmountable obstacle to me. Microsoft can just do what they've done for the past 20 years -- wait for the current batch of "Microsoft Way" indoctrinees to burn out around age 30, and replace them with a bunch of workaholic recent grads willing to put in 70 hour weeks for the price of some free sodas and a complimentary mountain bike.
There's enough churn in the company that any issues with rank-and-file employee attitudes within the company can work themselves out within just a few years.
If you just want one bottle of detergent, you're out of luck. If you want to save on 6 bottles at a time, this is the place for you.
I think it's safe to say, then, that this new initiative of Amazon's does not put them so much in competition with your local supermarkets, but rather with the big-box shopping clubs -- Costco, Sam's Club, et al. For some people it makes sense to by their paper towels an entire pallette at a time, and here we see Amazon catering to those people by offering a better shopping experience than the clubs; they don't need to have a membership, they don't need to lug the stuff home themselves.
an 1000MW coal plant spews 6 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year. So, a 100MW coal plant would spew 600,000 tons of CO2 per year [544,310,844 kg]
I'm not sure that you can extrapolate linearly based on a single data point, but if you're just offering a rough estimate, that's probably close enough. Although if you are just estimating, you've got seven or eight extra digits of precision on your kilogram figure there.
Regardless, as big as those numbers are, they're still pretty meaningless without context. How many tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere in total? What is the optimal amount of CO2 in the air?
And yes, the money we spend paying for our PS2's to be in standby COULD have been used to build homes for the poor, but so could the energy you and I are "wasting" running our computers so we can post these comment right now. I don't know about you, but I don't feel guilty that I'm Slashdotting instead of helping people in the third world. It's not selfish to not give ALL your money away.
My point was that with the other two next gen consoles, you can play the current gen games fine through hardware, not software emulation.
As far as I know Sony has not made any official statement on how backwards compatibility will be implemented on the PS3. It seems likely to me, though, that they will do it by including a separate PS2 chipset, such as the one in the PS2 Slim model. Which isn't 100% compatible with all PSX or even all PS2 games.
Nintendo's new console will play Gamecube games in hardware, since the two consoles have a common architectural design. The "Virtual Console" retro games, though, will use software emulation (though The Big N is shying away from using that terminology, with its implications of ROM piracy).
The unfortunate truth is that I can't do it "for myself". I find myself bored with every project I start on my own.
Have you considered pursuing training in basic management skills, so that you will be able to follow your self-started projects to completion without losing focus, getting bored, and abandoning them? Now, you don't have to run out and enroll in business school or anything -- a weeklong Learning Tree seminar might do the trick, or a job skills class at a community college.
Learning to manage yourself will provide benefits at your day job, too -- the more your boss can rely on you to work without constant supervision, the more advancement opportunities are likely to come your way.
He's got a lot to say on the subject of the future of MGS gaming.
He does, but how much of it will turn out to be accurate?
I tried to read the article all the way through, but kept getting distracted by something that was in the first couple pages. Matt Lee got his Masters degree in 2001, only five years ago. And he's already the go-to guy for pretty much the entire Microsoft gaming platform as far as graphics optimization goes, at least going by his description of his job duties.
Even if he is a technological genius, which I have no reason to doubt he is, should someone with such limited experience be in such a multiscient, guru-like role?
I dunno, if I was seeking advice on 3-D graphics, I'd prefer to talk to someone who was around in the days where it took an hour to render one frame of flat-shaded polygons. They're simply more likely to be familiar with more approaches to problem solving.
I think even MicroSoft BASIC was a more secure operating environment than Windows Vista is going to be. I mean, that shiz ran straight from a ROM chip, son. How you gonna hack that?
if I had a company full of workers whose pace was less than 20% of the national average, I'd be gravely concerned
If you measured your company's productivity in terms of high numbers of lines of code written, I'd be gravely concerned.
As any Perl hacker will tell you, the fewer lines of code, the better. Is not the goal of productivity to produce the greatest effect with the least amount of exertion?
but wait, we've all heard of Weird Al, so he doesn't need much marketing anymore.
Every time Al releases another new album, he needs marketing support. I don't know how large or rabid his fan base might be, but I don't think it's enough of either that everyone who might be interested in buying the album will hear about it via simple word-of-mouth.
Then again, I'm not so sure the majors are doing such a good job on providing marketing support for fringey artists like him anyway. Remember the big hit single from his latest album, Poodle Hat? No? Never heard of it?
Maybe its time musicians got together and set up an electronic coop to sell their music the way farmers sometimes set up "farmers markets". They could have more control over their prices, and how much of what consumers pay goes to them.
Shouldn't the internet be making it easier to cut out the middle man like this?
It makes the communications easier, but such a system would still require artists to turn themselves into businesspeople. As screwed as musicians get by major-label contracts, I'm sure that for a lot of them it's worth it not to worry about logistics themselves.
MS's tool doesn't show a list of all the WAPs in range; instead, it will just pick one for you.
a big popup comes up every couple fscking minutes alerting you that there's a WAP nearby, wouldn't you like to connect?
I've never experienced either of these behaviors with XP's built-in wireless networking, at least not in a manner which could not be configured to behave differently.
I don't mind that the story submission hasn't been revised to more clearly disclose the author's professional affiliations, because there's been at least a half dozen highly-moderated comments that do just that.
You went to a room filled with "climate change experts." By this very definition, you're talking about people who believe in global warming ("climate change").
You're fallaciously equating the terms "global warming" and "climate change" with each other.
The former is a subset of the latter. It's possible to believe in climate change (and the historical record supports the idea that the planet hasn't remained at a constant temperature over time) without believing that there is a human-caused trend towards making the planet warmer and warmer.
To borrow your church analogy, it's more like going to a gathering of Christians and finding that they all believe in God, but some are members of the Catholic Church, some are Protestants, some are Baptists, etc.
You said when you had an internal IRC channel set up, your users would avoid logging into it and were turned off by its complexity.
Regardless of what Instant Messaging solution you eventually decide on, will the situation be any different? If your users don't see the value of IM, it will be hard to convince them to make use of it, no matter how secure, convenient, or simple it is.
Sony won the last two rounds because it did better than what Nintendo did traditionally.
Namely, attract the best third-party game publishers in the world -- the Konamis, the Capcoms, the EAs, the Rares.
Regardless of how fun or innovative the Wii's control scheme is, if the only good titles available for it continue to be first-party, Nintendo will not emerge on top. At this point, it's still too early to say.
Before you say that JITs cannot hack this, remember that they use exactly the same technology as your 'standard' compilers.
Yes, but JIT compilers have the added requirement that whatever optimization they do, they have to get it done QUICKLY. A classical compiler can take hours to determine optimal output (if the user wishes), analyzing the code flow of the entire application, reordering instructions and unrolling loops until the cows come home. A JIT needs to start having machine code ready to execute within a few moments of being invoked.
And while JITs have the added benefit of being able to analyze actual behavior of the program, rather than just predicting expected behavior, having the analyzer constantly running also takes away resources that could otherwise be used by the program. It's a tradeoff.
It may be that something like 10 bits per channel would more closely match the eye's sensitivity, but it's rather more convenient to encode on byte-boundaries.
MARGINALLY more convenient, perhaps.
Before the days of 24-bit color, we encoded RGB colorspace across byte boundaries and we liked it, by gum! 16 = 5+6+5, and you never heard anyone complaining!
It's really only performing color arithmetic in the ALU that would benefit from having byte-aligned color values -- one less shift instruction to execute per calculation. (Of course, since most CPUs read the values as 32-bit words these days, there will be shifts anyway to extract specific color fields.)
The GPU and output DAC can be designed to extract values from the bitfield in any combination necessary, so it's not an issue there.
The commdore 64 was originally designed as a video game machine, even the production model came with a cartridge slot
Practically every 8-bit home computer of the era came with a cartridge slot. It was really nothing more than an easy and modular way to add storage (or memory-mapped I/O) to the system. Not a determining factor of console-iness.
The console market of the early 1980's basically killed itself, and the C64 was simply well positioned to attract the attention from consumers who had been stranded by the demise of the consoliers. I wouldn't attribute any special genius to Commodore because of it--especially considering the relative failure of the C128 and Amiga models that followed good ol' Compy 64.
Fortunately for Rockstar, they got the slap on the wrist this go because the law/court ruling didn't exist up until now.
The law STILL doesn't exist. Unless you're arguing that Sarbanes-Oxley applies to game publishers, or that the voluntary ESRB rating system carries force of law.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm talking wealthly landlords and folks selling million-dollar homes. Who benefit not just from the fact that Craigslist is free, but the fact that the housing search software is well-designed.
It really isn't all that well-designed, though. It returns search results fast, sure, but if I'm looking to find a home, to make an investment that will account for a major portion of what I spend each month, I'd like a little more powerful search abilities than rudimentary price and region selection and keyword search against the body of the ad.
Then again, I've worked in online classifieds myself, in the past; even if craigslist offered a good structured search tool, it would be useless as long as advertisers fail to provide useful, fielded data. Many are still stuck in a newspaper-based, pay-by-the-word mentality.
Hear me out, landlords and brokers: I'm willing to do a lot of the gruntwork involved in searching for a home myself, if it means I can get what I'm looking for more quickly. If you put your information online, I can find it, and then we can work together and neither of us will waste time following up on leads that could have been identified as dead-ends weeks ago.
here in the US, 1 out of 5 people have HDTVs
Where are your figures from? The surveys I've seen put HDTV penetration currently at somewhere between 10-15% of households, and even that I believe is higher than actual, due to consumer confusion about (among other things) the distinction between "digital TV" and "high definition TV".
They are hoping that eventually the technical problems with the other codecs and the format can be worked out, but for now if it's on Blu-ray, it will be MPEG-2.
Wouldn't this mean that when VC1-encoded Blu-ray discs do come out in a year or two, I won't be able to play them on my cutting-edge, bought-the-first-day-it-was-available, only-MPEG-1-passed-QA-testing $1000 Sony Blu-ray player?
Then he'll find that Microsoft has become so mired in its own muck that spurring the current crop of programmers who've been indoctrinated in the "Microsoft Way" will prove nigh impossible.
That doesn't sound like such an insurmountable obstacle to me. Microsoft can just do what they've done for the past 20 years -- wait for the current batch of "Microsoft Way" indoctrinees to burn out around age 30, and replace them with a bunch of workaholic recent grads willing to put in 70 hour weeks for the price of some free sodas and a complimentary mountain bike.
There's enough churn in the company that any issues with rank-and-file employee attitudes within the company can work themselves out within just a few years.
But with Windows being bloated and out of control, you just can't clean it up and make it more simple... can you?
They used to say the same things about Mac OS 9 and Netscape Navigator 4...
If you just want one bottle of detergent, you're out of luck. If you want to save on 6 bottles at a time, this is the place for you.
I think it's safe to say, then, that this new initiative of Amazon's does not put them so much in competition with your local supermarkets, but rather with the big-box shopping clubs -- Costco, Sam's Club, et al. For some people it makes sense to by their paper towels an entire pallette at a time, and here we see Amazon catering to those people by offering a better shopping experience than the clubs; they don't need to have a membership, they don't need to lug the stuff home themselves.
an 1000MW coal plant spews 6 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year. So, a 100MW coal plant would spew 600,000 tons of CO2 per year [544,310,844 kg]
I'm not sure that you can extrapolate linearly based on a single data point, but if you're just offering a rough estimate, that's probably close enough. Although if you are just estimating, you've got seven or eight extra digits of precision on your kilogram figure there.
Regardless, as big as those numbers are, they're still pretty meaningless without context. How many tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere in total? What is the optimal amount of CO2 in the air?
And yes, the money we spend paying for our PS2's to be in standby COULD have been used to build homes for the poor, but so could the energy you and I are "wasting" running our computers so we can post these comment right now. I don't know about you, but I don't feel guilty that I'm Slashdotting instead of helping people in the third world. It's not selfish to not give ALL your money away.
My point was that with the other two next gen consoles, you can play the current gen games fine through hardware, not software emulation.
As far as I know Sony has not made any official statement on how backwards compatibility will be implemented on the PS3. It seems likely to me, though, that they will do it by including a separate PS2 chipset, such as the one in the PS2 Slim model. Which isn't 100% compatible with all PSX or even all PS2 games.
Nintendo's new console will play Gamecube games in hardware, since the two consoles have a common architectural design. The "Virtual Console" retro games, though, will use software emulation (though The Big N is shying away from using that terminology, with its implications of ROM piracy).
The unfortunate truth is that I can't do it "for myself". I find myself bored with every project I start on my own.
Have you considered pursuing training in basic management skills, so that you will be able to follow your self-started projects to completion without losing focus, getting bored, and abandoning them? Now, you don't have to run out and enroll in business school or anything -- a weeklong Learning Tree seminar might do the trick, or a job skills class at a community college.
Learning to manage yourself will provide benefits at your day job, too -- the more your boss can rely on you to work without constant supervision, the more advancement opportunities are likely to come your way.
He's got a lot to say on the subject of the future of MGS gaming.
He does, but how much of it will turn out to be accurate?
I tried to read the article all the way through, but kept getting distracted by something that was in the first couple pages. Matt Lee got his Masters degree in 2001, only five years ago. And he's already the go-to guy for pretty much the entire Microsoft gaming platform as far as graphics optimization goes, at least going by his description of his job duties.
Even if he is a technological genius, which I have no reason to doubt he is, should someone with such limited experience be in such a multiscient, guru-like role?
I dunno, if I was seeking advice on 3-D graphics, I'd prefer to talk to someone who was around in the days where it took an hour to render one frame of flat-shaded polygons. They're simply more likely to be familiar with more approaches to problem solving.
I think even MicroSoft BASIC was a more secure operating environment than Windows Vista is going to be. I mean, that shiz ran straight from a ROM chip, son. How you gonna hack that?
SDL - Security Development Lifecycle
Relatively inconspicuous. Simple DirectMedia Layer has nothing to fear from this in terms of mindshare.
What is Simple DirectMedia Layer?
But then again, they knew that SDL was in use. Why not show a bit of cooperation?
There are only 26^3 possible TLA's in capital Latin alphabet namespace. I think it's safe to say that they're ALL already in use.
if I had a company full of workers whose pace was less than 20% of the national average, I'd be gravely concerned
If you measured your company's productivity in terms of high numbers of lines of code written, I'd be gravely concerned.
As any Perl hacker will tell you, the fewer lines of code, the better. Is not the goal of productivity to produce the greatest effect with the least amount of exertion?
but wait, we've all heard of Weird Al, so he doesn't need much marketing anymore.
Every time Al releases another new album, he needs marketing support. I don't know how large or rabid his fan base might be, but I don't think it's enough of either that everyone who might be interested in buying the album will hear about it via simple word-of-mouth.
Then again, I'm not so sure the majors are doing such a good job on providing marketing support for fringey artists like him anyway. Remember the big hit single from his latest album, Poodle Hat? No? Never heard of it?
Maybe its time musicians got together and set up an electronic coop to sell their music the way farmers sometimes set up "farmers markets". They could have more control over their prices, and how much of what consumers pay goes to them.
Shouldn't the internet be making it easier to cut out the middle man like this?
It makes the communications easier, but such a system would still require artists to turn themselves into businesspeople. As screwed as musicians get by major-label contracts, I'm sure that for a lot of them it's worth it not to worry about logistics themselves.
MS's tool doesn't show a list of all the WAPs in range; instead, it will just pick one for you.
a big popup comes up every couple fscking minutes alerting you that there's a WAP nearby, wouldn't you like to connect?
I've never experienced either of these behaviors with XP's built-in wireless networking, at least not in a manner which could not be configured to behave differently.
On Slashdot, WE are the editors.
I don't mind that the story submission hasn't been revised to more clearly disclose the author's professional affiliations, because there's been at least a half dozen highly-moderated comments that do just that.
You went to a room filled with "climate change experts." By this very definition, you're talking about people who believe in global warming ("climate change").
You're fallaciously equating the terms "global warming" and "climate change" with each other.
The former is a subset of the latter. It's possible to believe in climate change (and the historical record supports the idea that the planet hasn't remained at a constant temperature over time) without believing that there is a human-caused trend towards making the planet warmer and warmer.
To borrow your church analogy, it's more like going to a gathering of Christians and finding that they all believe in God, but some are members of the Catholic Church, some are Protestants, some are Baptists, etc.
What happened to the previous Sky Press(es)?
You said when you had an internal IRC channel set up, your users would avoid logging into it and were turned off by its complexity.
Regardless of what Instant Messaging solution you eventually decide on, will the situation be any different? If your users don't see the value of IM, it will be hard to convince them to make use of it, no matter how secure, convenient, or simple it is.
Sony won the last two rounds because it did better than what Nintendo did traditionally.
Namely, attract the best third-party game publishers in the world -- the Konamis, the Capcoms, the EAs, the Rares.
Regardless of how fun or innovative the Wii's control scheme is, if the only good titles available for it continue to be first-party, Nintendo will not emerge on top. At this point, it's still too early to say.
Before you say that JITs cannot hack this, remember that they use exactly the same technology as your 'standard' compilers.
Yes, but JIT compilers have the added requirement that whatever optimization they do, they have to get it done QUICKLY. A classical compiler can take hours to determine optimal output (if the user wishes), analyzing the code flow of the entire application, reordering instructions and unrolling loops until the cows come home. A JIT needs to start having machine code ready to execute within a few moments of being invoked.
And while JITs have the added benefit of being able to analyze actual behavior of the program, rather than just predicting expected behavior, having the analyzer constantly running also takes away resources that could otherwise be used by the program. It's a tradeoff.
It may be that something like 10 bits per channel would more closely match the eye's sensitivity, but it's rather more convenient to encode on byte-boundaries.
MARGINALLY more convenient, perhaps.
Before the days of 24-bit color, we encoded RGB colorspace across byte boundaries and we liked it, by gum! 16 = 5+6+5, and you never heard anyone complaining!
It's really only performing color arithmetic in the ALU that would benefit from having byte-aligned color values -- one less shift instruction to execute per calculation. (Of course, since most CPUs read the values as 32-bit words these days, there will be shifts anyway to extract specific color fields.)
The GPU and output DAC can be designed to extract values from the bitfield in any combination necessary, so it's not an issue there.
The commdore 64 was originally designed as a video game
machine, even the production model came with a cartridge slot
Practically every 8-bit home computer of the era came with a cartridge slot. It was really nothing more than an easy and modular way to add storage (or memory-mapped I/O) to the system. Not a determining factor of console-iness.
The console market of the early 1980's basically killed itself, and the C64 was simply well positioned to attract the attention from consumers who had been stranded by the demise of the consoliers. I wouldn't attribute any special genius to Commodore because of it--especially considering the relative failure of the C128 and Amiga models that followed good ol' Compy 64.
Fortunately for Rockstar, they got the slap on the wrist this go because the law/court ruling didn't exist up until now.
The law STILL doesn't exist. Unless you're arguing that Sarbanes-Oxley applies to game publishers, or that the voluntary ESRB rating system carries force of law.