This is the same exact article that's been coming out since well before the Wii was released. Underpowered systems are definitely doomed. Without an update they're screwed. The Wii has relegated to the scrap heap by articles like this for 4 years now, the author really, really wants graphic quality to be the main determinant of game console sales, and the article is another sad attempt to prove that personal belief but is contradicted by reality. Hardcore gamers might care a lot, but most people don't give a shit about HD. As long as it's fun, it could have the graphics quality of an Atari 2600. Graphics quality might be #1 on your list of requirements, but it's around #4 or #5 for most people.
Here's the sales from release to end of September, 2010 Wii - 75.9 million 360 - 44.6 million PS3 - 41.6 million
Until it gets passed up in sales, or at least these figures get kinda close, these articles are completely pointless. It's not dead, it's not close to being dead, and although the 360 is now selling faster than the Wii, at current rates it would take over 100 years to surpass the Wii. The Wii has outsold the original NES, and it's still flying off the shelves, not as fast as it once did, but still a lot faster than the PS3, and, unlike Sony & MS, Nintendo makes a profit on each one.
As a side note, i would think 360 sales figures are a somewhat bullshit way to estimate the number of users, since many of those are out-of-warranty red ring of death repurchases, garnering 2 or 3 sales for just one customer.
This makes perfect sense, and stands to be one of the largest mergers in history, as the only currency that can accurately measure these companies' value is Flooz. The combined company should be worth nearly $250 Trillion when adjusted to 1999 dollars.
While we're at it, I think Blizzard should concentrate on spreadsheet software, Autodesk should make video editing software, and Microsoft should really focus on beet farming. Those all make an equal amount of sense as the author's premise.
Firefox is still way ahead of every other browser. Safari is all-around crappy on Windows (this might have changed, I haven't tried it in about a year.) IE is, well, IE. I won't beat that dead horse here. Opera mini is great on the phones I've had, but the full Opera can't compete on price. And then there's Chrome.
Chrome might be slightly faster, but it is a nearly featureless, juvenile program with a horrible user interface. It has nowhere near the amount of extensions of Firefox. It has an error system that uses the jargon of a near-illiterate 13 year old. It has the worst bookmark system I've seen, it doesn't handle large numbers of tabs well and you can't really customize the UI much at all. I keep trying to use it, and it never lasts a full day before I uninstall it out of frustration. I'm far from the only one. I know someone who uninstalled as soon as the first error message showed up, saying "Neither me nor my computer is in middle school."
I love a lot of Google's software. But Chrome (and Picassa too) is an example of user interface design being given to the exactly wrong type of person.
We need a name for this process. I suggest "to Jar-Jar." Examples:
They Jar-Jared the cell phone and stapler off the desk. "Jar-jar the 3-D glasses off the chair." Al Pacino released the "Actor's cut" of Godfather 3 and Jar-jared himself out of the movie. I'd like to Jar-jar my ex-girlfriend from my brain. It was a guy! He Jar-jared his webcam!
. It does seem to be thwarted by reflections though; a cell phone removed from a bathroom counter is still visible in the mirror.
Ummmmm, no. The software reads an image with 2 objects, they only deleted one. Maybe the software can only delete one object at a time now. But that's not being "thwarted by reflections," the mirror has nothing to do with it. The software would behave the same if there actually were 2 objects on the screen.
Using the same password for most of the sites I visit isn't a security risk because those sites themselves aren't that important. If someone hacks my NY Times login, does it matter? What would they do with my message board accounts anyway? Post spam? Hasn't that already happened to a few people you know already? It's not a big deal.
Now if you use the same password for your bank, ebay, or paypal, it's a different story. But it's pointless to try to remember dozens of passwords for inconsequential sites.
Telling someone else your password is only a risk if they are untrustworthy. There are a few people who I trust with a lot more than my online information, these people can know my password. If they wanted to screw up my life that's the last thing they'd need or use.
The actual list, as voted on by a group of 5th grade boys: Volcano (Geology) Explosives test range (Chemistry) Jet Packs (Physics) A Shark tank with walkway and trap door(Marine Biology, Political Science) Space Shuttle (Astronomy) Remote control full size cars and ramps (Physics) 5-gigawatt lasers mounted on robot tanks (Recess)
You left off "for one whole hour" to the end of every sentence. Of those 1,000,000 phone calls, all the important ones would be made once the lines are back up. Ditto the research, the telecommuters, most purchases, email, etc. The tow trucks would get there. The markets wouldn't collapse if you couldn't trade for one hour, in fact, if no one could trade, there would be no change at all.
It would cost money, but not anywhere near the ridiculous claim you made.. Destroying a city is permanent, you never get it back. The infrastructure alone would cost more than the internet going down for an hour, let alone all the buildings, vehicles, personal possessions, businesses and ecology.
That's just economic cost, the social cost claim is so far from rational the light leaving rational will not reach it for thousands of years. Hundreds of thousands dead is an insanely large social cost. They're gone, no way to get them back. Tens of millions would be affected by this, the effects would last years/decades.
From the small to the great the world is online now and even an hour's outage of the internet would be a disaster comparable in economic and social cost to the complete destruction of a small city somewhere in the world.
Ummmmm, no. Not at all. Not even close. Not even remotely comparable in any way. Not a comparison that survives even one second of rational thought. Not a sentence that I was able to finish without thinking the very phrase you started your post with.
All gun owners are NOT right-wing and/or cogs in the military-industrial complex. That's both insulting and idiotic. Analyze your own claims first.
If the UK government and military leaders took away the people's right to vote, what could the people actually do about it? Oh sure, they could strike or riot, but the strike would only last until their families got hungry, and mobs tend to run away once they start getting shot.
I can't find numbers that disagree with what you're saying, in fact, I did see an article about the UK murder rate being the lowest ever last year, but the site you linked also claims that drug offenses in the UK were 183,419 per 100,000 people, and Germany had 250,969 per 100,000 people. I didn't think those countries were so high that everyone got busted more than once last year.
They also list this as a crime statistic: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation > Broadcast details > Alternate title/Translation CSI - Tatort Las Vegas later CSI - Den Tätern auf der Spur ("CSI - hunting the offenders")
I mean, the shows suck, but I didn't think they were illegally bad.
If they make the first or second time you hit Tab take you to the first result, it might have made things faster, as you could start the page loading without having to transition your hand to your mouse (and back to the keyboard, if the next site has a logon.) As it is now, you have to hit Tab 16 times to highlight the first result, the now-unnecessary search button being one of them. The tab order includes the links to all of their other products before getting to the search results, as it is on their regular search, but at least the old one had the "I'm feeling Lucky" button for obvious searches (e.g. "Wiki" Tab Tab Enter takes you to Wikipedia.)
Article - A Pre-alpha release of the User Interface has security holes. For some reason this surprises people, and those who do know better are acting shocked, despite the fact that compiling "#include " by itself can be considered a pre-alpha release and that they have no idea about the project path.
Comments - Since I wouldn't have started with the user interface, this project is a failure. Stupid kids with no real-world large project experience can't do anything. The money they raised is completely wasted, even though we've no idea how much of that they've actually spent, with 4 programmers living in NYC working on this, they must have spent the $200,000 on gold plated Ferraris. They are not following my formula for creating large successful social networks (my current success rate: 0/0), therefore it is worthless. Trying is the first step towards failure.
Remind me never to show a work in progress on Slashdot.
Yeah, students with no real-world big project experience should all just get jobs with large companies and stop trying to be innovative until they've spent a few years updating comments and doing bugfixes in other people's code.
After all, no one has ever gotten ahead in computers by jumping into a huge project they had no experience in while they were young. They need to wait until they're in their 40's so they have enough experience and then start a small project.
Security problems in pre-Alpha code? The whole project is obviously a failure and should be abandoned. What idiots they are for trying!
Pretty much anyone who wants marijuana can get it anywhere in this country. This will not change the availability by much. This will be kinda like having ATM's at gas stations now instead of just at banks as it used to be. It's more convenient, but was by no means impossible before.
Prisons are overcrowded now, this will just bring them back to crowded.
Not all of them, but enough of them that it is now legal medicinally in many states and California has legalization for recreational use on the ballot this November. This represents a massive shift in views in the electorate and made it acceptable for politicians to advance these bills.
These things take time. 40 years of telling people that marijuana will make you jump out of a window after stabbing someone in your crazy drug-induced rage backfired when pretty much everyone has either been high or seen enough people high to know that's not what happens. It'll take a while, but a few decades of companies bitching that illegal downloading will cause people to stop making music or movies will eventually have the same effect. It'll be a lot tougher, since there's money behind the **AA lobbying groups, whereas legal marijuana doesn't directly effect any large legitimate financial group negatively.
Most of the time, I want to kick my computer's ass. My laptop has been raised over my head for smashing many times, but fortunately for my wallet, I haven't followed through.
If it were a woman, it would've been dumped long ago. Probably on the first date.
If it doesn't involve typing, I actually prefer to use the internet on my phone over the computer. Way less frustrating.
C# is already.NET, there has never been any other version.
Which is why I said "or whatever they call the next one." VB 6 went to VB.NET, I am currently lacking the psychic abilities to tell you what MS will call the next version.
You need to learn new things when C++ evolves, but it would still compile your old code, unless they changed a specific function that you used. VB.NET will not run a VB6 version of "Hello world," let alone anything else.
It's always great to learn a language then have the company change it so drastically in the next version that all your knowledge of the language is useless. I don't believe it'll be the last time that happens either. I do know I will never bother to learn another MS programming language again.
Good luck to all you C# programmers when they switch to C#.NET, or whatever they call the next one. Hope you like reading!
Since Apple sold more iPad's in 80 days than all other manufacturers combined probably sold in a year, yeah, they're the gold standard.
I say probably because I couldn't find many tablet sales number past 2005. There were a total of 1 million tablets sold that year, Apple sold 3 million iPad in the first 80 days. I don't think the market got better for tablets after 2005.
I could be wrong, but I've wasted more time researching this than I wanted to.
I have no problem typing on my cell phone's 3 inch screen, I doubt people will have much problems with a 7" screen either. It's nowhere near as good as an actual keyboard, but this isn't a PC or laptop replacement we're talking about. The iPad isn't much better.
A cash payment from a new competitor for the data they need to be successful? This is like Google selling their search algorithms (not just the search results) to Microsoft. The price would need to be insanely high, or involve facebook getting or controlling Apple's data, too (which seems to me to likely be the onerous terms mentioned.)
Slashdot Mirror
This is the same exact article that's been coming out since well before the Wii was released. Underpowered systems are definitely doomed. Without an update they're screwed. The Wii has relegated to the scrap heap by articles like this for 4 years now, the author really, really wants graphic quality to be the main determinant of game console sales, and the article is another sad attempt to prove that personal belief but is contradicted by reality. Hardcore gamers might care a lot, but most people don't give a shit about HD. As long as it's fun, it could have the graphics quality of an Atari 2600. Graphics quality might be #1 on your list of requirements, but it's around #4 or #5 for most people.
Here's the sales from release to end of September, 2010
Wii - 75.9 million
360 - 44.6 million
PS3 - 41.6 million
Until it gets passed up in sales, or at least these figures get kinda close, these articles are completely pointless. It's not dead, it's not close to being dead, and although the 360 is now selling faster than the Wii, at current rates it would take over 100 years to surpass the Wii. The Wii has outsold the original NES, and it's still flying off the shelves, not as fast as it once did, but still a lot faster than the PS3, and, unlike Sony & MS, Nintendo makes a profit on each one.
As a side note, i would think 360 sales figures are a somewhat bullshit way to estimate the number of users, since many of those are out-of-warranty red ring of death repurchases, garnering 2 or 3 sales for just one customer.
The headline is completely accurate for large values of edge.
You mean the popular kids who talk to the most people have more sex than antisocial loners? Wow. Money well spent on research.
This makes perfect sense, and stands to be one of the largest mergers in history, as the only currency that can accurately measure these companies' value is Flooz. The combined company should be worth nearly $250 Trillion when adjusted to 1999 dollars.
While we're at it, I think Blizzard should concentrate on spreadsheet software, Autodesk should make video editing software, and Microsoft should really focus on beet farming. Those all make an equal amount of sense as the author's premise.
Firefox is still way ahead of every other browser. Safari is all-around crappy on Windows (this might have changed, I haven't tried it in about a year.) IE is, well, IE. I won't beat that dead horse here. Opera mini is great on the phones I've had, but the full Opera can't compete on price. And then there's Chrome.
Chrome might be slightly faster, but it is a nearly featureless, juvenile program with a horrible user interface. It has nowhere near the amount of extensions of Firefox. It has an error system that uses the jargon of a near-illiterate 13 year old. It has the worst bookmark system I've seen, it doesn't handle large numbers of tabs well and you can't really customize the UI much at all. I keep trying to use it, and it never lasts a full day before I uninstall it out of frustration. I'm far from the only one. I know someone who uninstalled as soon as the first error message showed up, saying "Neither me nor my computer is in middle school."
I love a lot of Google's software. But Chrome (and Picassa too) is an example of user interface design being given to the exactly wrong type of person.
We need a name for this process. I suggest "to Jar-Jar." Examples:
They Jar-Jared the cell phone and stapler off the desk.
"Jar-jar the 3-D glasses off the chair."
Al Pacino released the "Actor's cut" of Godfather 3 and Jar-jared himself out of the movie.
I'd like to Jar-jar my ex-girlfriend from my brain.
It was a guy! He Jar-jared his webcam!
FTA:
Ummmmm, no. The software reads an image with 2 objects, they only deleted one. Maybe the software can only delete one object at a time now. But that's not being "thwarted by reflections," the mirror has nothing to do with it. The software would behave the same if there actually were 2 objects on the screen.
Using the same password for most of the sites I visit isn't a security risk because those sites themselves aren't that important. If someone hacks my NY Times login, does it matter? What would they do with my message board accounts anyway? Post spam? Hasn't that already happened to a few people you know already? It's not a big deal.
Now if you use the same password for your bank, ebay, or paypal, it's a different story. But it's pointless to try to remember dozens of passwords for inconsequential sites.
Telling someone else your password is only a risk if they are untrustworthy. There are a few people who I trust with a lot more than my online information, these people can know my password. If they wanted to screw up my life that's the last thing they'd need or use.
The actual list, as voted on by a group of 5th grade boys:
Volcano (Geology)
Explosives test range (Chemistry)
Jet Packs (Physics)
A Shark tank with walkway and trap door(Marine Biology, Political Science)
Space Shuttle (Astronomy)
Remote control full size cars and ramps (Physics)
5-gigawatt lasers mounted on robot tanks (Recess)
You left off "for one whole hour" to the end of every sentence. Of those 1,000,000 phone calls, all the important ones would be made once the lines are back up. Ditto the research, the telecommuters, most purchases, email, etc. The tow trucks would get there. The markets wouldn't collapse if you couldn't trade for one hour, in fact, if no one could trade, there would be no change at all.
It would cost money, but not anywhere near the ridiculous claim you made.. Destroying a city is permanent, you never get it back. The infrastructure alone would cost more than the internet going down for an hour, let alone all the buildings, vehicles, personal possessions, businesses and ecology.
That's just economic cost, the social cost claim is so far from rational the light leaving rational will not reach it for thousands of years. Hundreds of thousands dead is an insanely large social cost. They're gone, no way to get them back. Tens of millions would be affected by this, the effects would last years/decades.
Ummmmm, no. Not at all. Not even close. Not even remotely comparable in any way. Not a comparison that survives even one second of rational thought. Not a sentence that I was able to finish without thinking the very phrase you started your post with.
Nice to know you live in a place that has no possible violent crime at all. How do you get oxygen, food and water on the moon anyway?
It's human nature. I'm sure there's already been a fight on the ISS over the last tube of steak paste. The bigger guy won.
Insightful my ass.
All gun owners are NOT right-wing and/or cogs in the military-industrial complex. That's both insulting and idiotic. Analyze your own claims first.
If the UK government and military leaders took away the people's right to vote, what could the people actually do about it? Oh sure, they could strike or riot, but the strike would only last until their families got hungry, and mobs tend to run away once they start getting shot.
I can't find numbers that disagree with what you're saying, in fact, I did see an article about the UK murder rate being the lowest ever last year, but the site you linked also claims that drug offenses in the UK were 183,419 per 100,000 people, and Germany had 250,969 per 100,000 people. I didn't think those countries were so high that everyone got busted more than once last year.
They also list this as a crime statistic:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation > Broadcast details > Alternate title/Translation
CSI - Tatort Las Vegas
later CSI - Den Tätern auf der Spur
("CSI - hunting the offenders")
I mean, the shows suck, but I didn't think they were illegally bad.
If they make the first or second time you hit Tab take you to the first result, it might have made things faster, as you could start the page loading without having to transition your hand to your mouse (and back to the keyboard, if the next site has a logon.) As it is now, you have to hit Tab 16 times to highlight the first result, the now-unnecessary search button being one of them. The tab order includes the links to all of their other products before getting to the search results, as it is on their regular search, but at least the old one had the "I'm feeling Lucky" button for obvious searches (e.g. "Wiki" Tab Tab Enter takes you to Wikipedia.)
Article - A Pre-alpha release of the User Interface has security holes. For some reason this surprises people, and those who do know better are acting shocked, despite the fact that compiling "#include " by itself can be considered a pre-alpha release and that they have no idea about the project path.
Comments - Since I wouldn't have started with the user interface, this project is a failure. Stupid kids with no real-world large project experience can't do anything. The money they raised is completely wasted, even though we've no idea how much of that they've actually spent, with 4 programmers living in NYC working on this, they must have spent the $200,000 on gold plated Ferraris. They are not following my formula for creating large successful social networks (my current success rate: 0/0), therefore it is worthless. Trying is the first step towards failure.
Remind me never to show a work in progress on Slashdot.
Yeah, students with no real-world big project experience should all just get jobs with large companies and stop trying to be innovative until they've spent a few years updating comments and doing bugfixes in other people's code.
After all, no one has ever gotten ahead in computers by jumping into a huge project they had no experience in while they were young. They need to wait until they're in their 40's so they have enough experience and then start a small project.
Security problems in pre-Alpha code? The whole project is obviously a failure and should be abandoned. What idiots they are for trying!
Pretty much anyone who wants marijuana can get it anywhere in this country. This will not change the availability by much. This will be kinda like having ATM's at gas stations now instead of just at banks as it used to be. It's more convenient, but was by no means impossible before.
Prisons are overcrowded now, this will just bring them back to crowded.
Not all of them, but enough of them that it is now legal medicinally in many states and California has legalization for recreational use on the ballot this November. This represents a massive shift in views in the electorate and made it acceptable for politicians to advance these bills.
These things take time. 40 years of telling people that marijuana will make you jump out of a window after stabbing someone in your crazy drug-induced rage backfired when pretty much everyone has either been high or seen enough people high to know that's not what happens. It'll take a while, but a few decades of companies bitching that illegal downloading will cause people to stop making music or movies will eventually have the same effect. It'll be a lot tougher, since there's money behind the **AA lobbying groups, whereas legal marijuana doesn't directly effect any large legitimate financial group negatively.
Most of the time, I want to kick my computer's ass. My laptop has been raised over my head for smashing many times, but fortunately for my wallet, I haven't followed through.
If it were a woman, it would've been dumped long ago. Probably on the first date.
If it doesn't involve typing, I actually prefer to use the internet on my phone over the computer. Way less frustrating.
Which is why I said "or whatever they call the next one." VB 6 went to VB.NET, I am currently lacking the psychic abilities to tell you what MS will call the next version.
You need to learn new things when C++ evolves, but it would still compile your old code, unless they changed a specific function that you used. VB.NET will not run a VB6 version of "Hello world," let alone anything else.
Visual Basic - Don't. Just don't.
It's always great to learn a language then have the company change it so drastically in the next version that all your knowledge of the language is useless. I don't believe it'll be the last time that happens either. I do know I will never bother to learn another MS programming language again.
Good luck to all you C# programmers when they switch to C#.NET, or whatever they call the next one. Hope you like reading!
Since Apple sold more iPad's in 80 days than all other manufacturers combined probably sold in a year, yeah, they're the gold standard.
I say probably because I couldn't find many tablet sales number past 2005. There were a total of 1 million tablets sold that year, Apple sold 3 million iPad in the first 80 days. I don't think the market got better for tablets after 2005.
I could be wrong, but I've wasted more time researching this than I wanted to.
I have no problem typing on my cell phone's 3 inch screen, I doubt people will have much problems with a 7" screen either. It's nowhere near as good as an actual keyboard, but this isn't a PC or laptop replacement we're talking about. The iPad isn't much better.
A cash payment from a new competitor for the data they need to be successful? This is like Google selling their search algorithms (not just the search results) to Microsoft. The price would need to be insanely high, or involve facebook getting or controlling Apple's data, too (which seems to me to likely be the onerous terms mentioned.)