That would be the always on, online connection. Or similar. You're logged into steam, you can play anything on steam sort of thing (that's not how steam works, I'm just giving an example). I'm not a huge fan of that, but if you move your save games onto the cloud, and require an always on internet connection to play, with serial keys tied to an account it's a lot easier to deal with piracy. Then it's a matter of generating good keys, and regular ole network security. The key there will be to provide value to the customer. Onlive running the service for you is one option, but I think for everything onlive can do, there's always going to be a bit better something that can be done in your living room.
I'm guessing the online stuff will be achievements, in game chat linked across multiple games (imagine your WoW guild chat in world of goo, wow and minecraft, all at once), cloud based storage and re download of the games (for free), and maybe in game hints/tips/guides/manuals sort of stuff that's pulled from the web in a context sensitive way. Imagine you can't kill a particular boss, the game detects that, and then connects you with strategies from the developer, or other people who played and wrote up a blurb on how to do it. Think demon souls, with less misdirection.
I'd venture that if microsoft sold something that could be reasonably described as a PC they'd be in legal trouble, fast. PS3 was almost certainly intentionally engineered to be hard to code for. Sony assumed they would dominate again, and wanted to make it hard to port their code to other systems. IMO they could have accomplished that by putting 1 gig of ram in their machine for a lot less headache. But I've done enough with the Cell (astrophysics cluster at and I taught game engines last year) I can appreciate that it's good for certain things.
I don't think the console specific stuff is quite because they wrote for PPC's. Games (even PS3 games) are still largely made on windows, in visual studio. The issue is support 8000 different hardware configurations, and dealing with piracy/DRM (you don't have DRM, most publishers won't talk to you, but it does nothing but piss off your customers and drive them to piracy, a lose lose). Smaller publishers or niche publishers that will do without DRM can't fund the big projects that would be cross platform anyway. Most of the console games will run, with virtually no effort, on a a set of PC configurations, it's just a very small set. Too many GPU's sound cards and 3rd party programs for a lot of people.
Of course some of this is changing, without the PC gaming alliance, and because of Steam. Real time sales tracking is enormously valuable. I talked to one guy who was trying to get his game on shelves in the UK. They wanted about 40 copies. For the whole country. So he whipped out his steam page and said 'in the time it took to have this meeting, I've sold more than 40 copies already'. That, combined with better insight into the hardware gamers actually have (rather than could have) helps a lot. And lets face it, Nvidia and AMD do a much better job with their drivers today than they did 5 years ago, that helps a lot ( and directx/opengl are better too).
Well because it's opt in for non steam games you're skewing your data. Like I say, it's not perfect. That's not the same as useless, but it's not perfect. The handly little chart of how many people are logged in seems to peak around 3 million on steam. I'm sure there are a lot more PC gamers out there than 3 million, but that gives a pretty good average of what their computers are, how much they play etc.
My suspicion is that there's a lot of stuff on steam that's bought, and never played. I know I have a lot of that. Except I'm buying it on steam, in many cases because I intended to play it, and didn't get around to it, or I had it in another format years ago, and would like to come back to it (and have it work) at some point in the future, and saw it on sale. Not the most effective use of my money I'll grant you. Things like that probably really mess with statistics for some games statistics though.
the alliance doesn't seem to have done anything. Good idea, non-existant execution. The PC gaming alliance is called Steam, Gamersgate, Impulse, Direct2Drive, and for better or worse, The Pirate Bay.
Steam, with it's billion dollars a year in sales knows what's causing problems, what you're playing (and how much), what you're buying, and has a fairly good sense of what developers should be building for. That doesn't mean steams data is applicable to every single user, or every scenario, or even that it is necessarily the best service out there, especially without WoW or starcraft the data isn't perfect. But it's more likely to be successful to have people motivated by support costs and sales than a hodgepodge alliance of people who mean well, but have no real money or clear direction to back up their goals.
Oh I don't doubt that they're angry, probably justifiably so. I agree, it's probably a bad decision, (and is almost certainly a bad decision to the/. crowd) but if WP7 gets 20% of the market, RIM 10, and google/apple split the remainder that's still a lot of phones selling that could have an intel inside sticker on them. I'm not sure that much market fragmentation is good, but then I've grown up with MS 90%, apple 9%, Other 1%, so my expectations are probably biasing things badly.
I think for nokia they're going to need something to differentiate them from the competition, and fast. They're behind the curve here, by years. Even vs other WP7 developers (but at least WP7 is behind the curve as well, so they just need to keep up with the growth). Putting a dual core ARM9 of some sort into a nokia phone and selling it isn't going to keep their market share. Whether they can pull off something cool with software, or need a different hardware platform (intel, AMD, in house, or something), they need something or else HTC, samsung, Motorola et. al. are going to eat them alive.
They also shouldn't risk biting a major player in the market. WP7 has a lot of big corporate backers, now obviously including Nokia. Whether they will be successful or not depends on a lot of factors, but Intel should be aiming to sell chips to nokia, whether it's for MeeGo, Droid, WP7 or some other OS, not criticising their management choices publicly.
Like it or not, Nokia still sells a LOT of phones, meaning there's a lot of money to be made as a part supplier, and a good chance than the sheer mass of Nokia + WP7 will be able to sustain that ecosystem. I know a lot of people coming over from Europe (I live in canada) regularly laugh at how terrible a lot of our supposedly wonderful iPhones etc. are, when Nokia phones have had better call quality, voice dialling, very good integration with MS office (without extra fees), maps etc. long before Apple or Google started bringing that to market. They still have a lot of brand loyalty, and a strong brand if they call pull it together.
The problem with proven oil reserves is that they (by definition) include only economically recoverable oil at any given point in time, which is a stupid way to define things but that's beside the point. Saudi Light crude (which is the 15-20/barrel stuff, or less... a lot less), is not exactly going to last long, it's dead easy to get out of the ground and makes it hard to justify the effort in anything else for the saudis (as opposed to say canada, where we have relatively little of the cheap easy to get stuff). But the Saudi's have a lot of heavy oil that at 60 or 70 bucks a barrel wouldn't be economically viable, but at 100 bucks a barrel, with bangladeshi slave.. I'm sorry, foreign worker, labour becomes reasonably profitable. (In 20 years feel free to replace bangladesh with some random impoverished muslim nation in africa, I doubt the Saudi's care where the cheap labour comes from all that much).
So then we can ask a question. As the light, cheap, easy to get stuff dries up, and then there's inflation, economic growth etc. what will the price of oil be in 10 years, 15 years, 20 etc. The Saudi's and americans almost certainly disagree on what will be economically viable to extract, in the same way two experts on the price of oil aren't going to come to exactly the same number for 15 years from now. It's hard to see the future. There are different ways to count oil recoverability too, and that will depend a lot on well... price ( and technology).
Using some measures the US should run almost completely out of domestically produced oil in less than 8 years. Does anyone seriously think that's going to happen? That's supposedly been the case for at least a decade, and yet US oil production doesn't appear to exactly be in a massive imploding crisis of supply. In 2007 the US produced 8.5 million barrels/day (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_pro-energy-oil-production)... there's a long way from that to 0 in 11 years.
The geology question, of how much actual oil a country has, is mostly useless, since it only matters what you figure you can extract. But very reasonable people can have very reasonable disagreements on those numbers, with no one lying. Are the saudi's lying about their oil reserves? Probably not, at least, not significantly, at the current rate of production saudi arabia will run out of officially declared reserves... in 130 years (10 million barrels/day, 430 billion barrels of declared reserves). If they're lying by 40%, then they're lying about a problem that will manifest in the late 2070's or 2080's. That's a long time to hold onto a lie for relatively little gain, since shit will hit the fan either way. Can they disagree with the americans on what exactly the source of that will be? Certainly.
Essentially you could say the same thing about the US. If the figure the price of oil will be > 100 bucks a barrel (in todays dollars) then shale deposits suddenly become economically viable, given the US the largest reserves in the world, by a lot, if the price of oil is less than 70.. well then shale isn't viable to extract. Caveat: I'm not 100% sure on those numbers (100 and 70) but they're good enough to illustrate my point. Now anything in between and we have a fairly difficult calculation.
The Saudis could easily be lying about how long they can keep cheap production of 10 million barrels a day up. But I'm not sure how much of a problem that is, or how much difference it would make, since the price of oil is something like 4 or 5x the cost of most saudi oil, I'm sure for that much money they'll find something. It might be convenient to pay lip service to the americans and say 'oh yes Mr president we'll keep supplying cheap oil and keep the price down just give us more F15's' when they're still marking it up 300% (and that would still bring the cost down), but it's in their interest to convince the americans they're trying to keep oil cheap, when they probably can't do much about the price of oil anymore (by themselves), while at the same time
My linksys E3000, with whatever factory firmware it had from oct 2010 has IPV6 functionality. (Tested using http://v6.testmyipv6.com/ and http://test-ipv6.com/faq_opera.html, and I can see ipv6 cisco and google sites).
The e4200 might not, but that certainly doesn't mean none of them do.
with an iPad you could load up the play into a game (or at least a game engine), and have it actually show the play. Most of the NFL players have a strong background in games now, only makes sense to show it to them in 3D if you can.
I am neither ignoring nor disagreeing with that fact. My criticism isn't of Bill Gates, it's of the press he's getting on vaccines and autism (as compared to say, giving the headline to something actually about eradicating polio), and the way the (CNN in TFA) present it. If they want a headline about the (lack of a) link between autism and vaccines, have an interview with someone who actually did the research. If they want a headline about what the Gates foundation is doing to fight polio (or HIV, or family planning etc.)... interview Bill Gates.
They've intentionally presented it as though there is some valid point about vaccines and autism, and then throw him a softball question, which is fine... but then his answer to this softball question doesn't justify the press it's getting. Everything he says on the topic is perfectly correct, and I have the utmost respect for the fact that he is both employing and listening to experts in this field. But even the/. story is about "Bill Gates says anti vaccine effort kills children" presents it as though this is some revelation from Bill Gates, it is no more, or no less investigated by the journalists than the claims by Jenny McCarthy, which is my problem with it, credibility for celebrity doesn't make sense. The same principle applied to Steve Jobs is why Apple gets away with having a basically draconian app store policy, but Steve says it's good, so it must be good!
What Bill Gates says specifically on the issue "Well, Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn't have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts -- you know, they, they kill children. It's a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important."
He doesn't actually say it's hampering efforts against polio, in fact nothing in that blurb seems to be based on work his foundation actually does. Again, not that it isn't correct, Bill Gates is (for all of the MS related criticism of him) a smart guy who seems to actually listen to evidence. But he says some very interesting stuff about how health impacts security, about rich helping poor and how much time there is between vaccines for the rich and vaccines for the poor.
The part that offends me is the lead in question (from Dr Gupta) is intentionally soft, and the fact that this part gets a headline and not... you know, his solutions to problems he's actually trying to (and succeeding at) solving. "There has been a lot of scrutiny of vaccines recently -- specifically childhood vaccines. There has been a lot of news about is there a connection with autism, for example. What do you make of all that? Dr. [Andrew] Wakefield wrote a paper about this [in The Lancet in 1998] saying he thought there was a connection. And there were lower vaccination rates over a period of time as a result in Britain, then the United States. What are your thoughts?"
Importantly, cabinet cannot overrule the CRTC merely because it's cabinet. The CRTC is charged with ruling based on laws as written, but the government can always pass new laws.
Wind mobile is probably in serious trouble right now, because for the government (which is a minority party) to wrangle any of the other parties on board for this might be tough. Opposition to UBB has support from the liberals, the NDP and the conservatives (and I have no idea about the Bloc, and the greens have no seats so their opinion on the matter is irrelevant), so it might get turned into a law fairly quickly.
The problem is why does anyone care that Bill Gates says it? That's what got us into this mess in the first place, with soccer moms listening to jenny mccarthy, over, you know, actual experts. Sure, Bill Gates has apparently listened to experts, and is saying something sensible, but that's not a reason to give him a bunch of press over people who actually study and understand these things.
If he's giving money to eradicate polio then sure, he can have press over eradicating polio, and as part of that saying vaccines don't actually cause autism is fine. But the MSM jumping up and down like this is some great revelation because Bill Gates says it is the cause of all this in the first place. 'Your Kid has Autism so yu must be an expert on what causes autism! Your kid doesn't have autism and you gave them vaccines, vaccines must not cause autism!' The people who aren't taking polio vaccines (which is admittedly drops not injections but whatever), aren't doing it because they think vaccines cause autism; that group are yuppies in north America. The people not taking polio vaccines are doing it because they either think the government is out to sterilize them, are too poor to afford it, or believe the government has some other, random evil scheme to use vaccines against them.
Bill Gates is not an expert in vaccines. His correctly knowing that vaccines do not cause autism deserves no more press than my room-mate who makes 15k/year saying the same thing. The whole question asked by Gupta is a lead in for Bill Gates to make this statement, as though he is an authority on vaccines. . Except Dr. Gupta should be an expert, and should be behaving like one on medicine 'Mr Gates, we know that there was a discredited study linking autism to vaccines. How does that sort of fraud impact your work distributing polio vaccines' , not 'in 1998 they linked autism to vaccines, what do you make of it'.
Well if you didn't improve efficiency, and someone else did, eventually your costs would be so prohibitively high that you become uncompetitive.
That's what's happening now. Training offshore replacements is short term pain for long term gain. Yes, they're (at least theoretically) taking a potential job here, but right now there's not much of an IT market for us to sell to in india or pakistan etc.. If we want to sell them 500 dollar 'smart' phones they need to have skills and money to pay for them.
If you can do things better, the same task for less money or a better task for the same money then it's ultimately a good thing, assuming we have a robust enough education system that the people who made careers fixing buggy wheels can be converted into people who make car bumpers. To use the carburettor example, you increased the productivity per worker by a factor of 12 (not necessarily productivity per dollar since there is more equipment, which equally needs to be built by someone). That means they are worth more money, or you could supply 12x as many parts, or 6x as many parts and some other part. That seems like a good long term tradeoff to me.
The european industrial empires worked partially because they could make the same hand made goods for less money, and mass produce them. Rather than having 5 shirts you could own 10 for the same price sort of thing. The new products couldn't be produced enough to supply colonials even if they wanted to give them access to cars or subways or the like (at least initially). But now we can massively produce anything, even brand new stuff, that means we need to grow the whole market for everyone. It's going to be a painful process as we have india and china go from a per capital nominal GDP of 1100 dollars and 4200 towards the US or europe at around 45k, but once we get there there will many more products available for everyone.
Well for starters users opt in to the program that records the clicks. So Google, by opting in to MS, said go ahead and use this user data we generate (and that's what they did, generate user data). What we don't know is if the algorithm is engine agnostic, so could you produce the same effect with any of Bing, Ask, google, any other random search enigne. If it works for any engine (including Bing) then literally it's just using user data. They opt to send their search history to MS, MS can go ahead and use it.
Google is being inherently disingenuous by opting into basically every piece of MS tracking available, and then claiming plagiarism when MS turns around and uses that data, which will naturally be especially vulnerable to weird attacks like these. It would be interesting to know if they could so easily skew the results of a legitimate search, but nonsense searches aren't going to have much of any data to go on.
If you own a BMW, and Ford calls you up and says 'hey, can we put a bunch of cameras and sensors in your car to better understand how you use it' and then you say 'yes'.. well it's your car, bmw doesn't get a whole lot of say in the matter. If you opt in to MS's tracking service (which you probably shouldn't do, because god knows what's happening with that data, but that's beside the point), you are giving MS permission to follow your virtual self around and try and find out what you do.
If you want a better test of what bing is doing, have several search engines all put same random honey potted page, but then have all the results on the page be completely disconnected (so like RIM, BWM, Hong Kong Tourist Authority, Wiki page on something, a link to some random web forum etc), and then don't click on some of them (especially not the top ones), and see if their little learning algorithm still produces the same results as the other websites (even without clicking the links, implying some sort of scraping going on, which is probably a no-no) or if it is only reading 'searched for wlkerjlken means wiki page on Dalbury_Lees.
I'm willing to bet amazon does something similar in it's own searches, because they even tell you what percentage of people bought the item you're looking at vs something else.
Depends if they're necessarily grabbing the google result, or the fact that people searched for a term, and paired it with what they clicked on. To me that's a legitimate algorithm, (heck, it could be an exercise in machine learning).
Does the trick work with any search engine, or just google? For example if the engine was bing, but they honepotted something equally random, then trained it with a few dozen clicks then they're just learning based on what people click on, and that it happens to learn from google as well as anyone else isn't really a shock.
ya, and specifically, it's only *1* generation ahead of cell phones, and even then, it's not on store shelves yet. By the time it hits (close to xmas) we'll be seeing talk of 4 core ARM9 droid phones just as we were all wondering if the nexus S was going to be the first dual core Droid phone.
Which I think was the point of the rest of the announcement. The PSP2 *should* be a phone, but isn't, but they're at least going to make all that PSP/PSP2/PSone goodness available on other ARM9 devices soon enough via a software store. That might mean that the PSP2 gets one year as a sort of first adopter reference design marketing device, and then the second and 3rd year we start seeing either PSP2 phones or just PSP games on droid.
It creates an interesting 5 year strategy though. Year one, PSP2 reference device. Year 2 and 3, PSP2 phone or PSP2 slim (whichever of those is easier), year 4 PSP2 'superphone' which would be like a 6 or 8 core device but only 4 reserved for gaming. Year 5 is nothing new while they work on PSP3.
Wouldn't it be nice if htey could unify the architecture and have the PS4 and PSP2 both on ARM9 (or at least ARM something) chips so you could have synchronized gaming on the go, buy the game once an it always works and keeps progress between both.
On one hand, there's probably going to be improvement between the initial test variant and any production model. On the other hand, by the time they actually have a production model, NATO/the EU will probably be well on the way to the next generation.
So then you end up with one of those deeply troubling problems. Is an aircraft just a delivery platform for missiles, and if so, can the chinese build/steal missiles that are nearly as good as their NATO/EU variants, or will the plane itself make a huge difference? I have a lingering, and somewhat bad feeling that the ordinance and avionics are going to matter a lot more than the capabilities of the aircraft itself.
That might be on a case by case basis. If you can make it unique for each game it raises the barrier to entry for hacking. But all of the serial key generators out there have been cracked with some sort of keygen program by now. How well that will work on the PS3 is hard to say, but it seems likely to be only a temporary barrier to game pirates. Which is probably all they need, a day or two, or tying a serial key to your online account (for online play) would be sufficient to prevent most of the piracy they're worried about. Tying a serial key to an online account has the dual benefit of messing with used game sales. Essentially you can re-sell the single player version, but Sony (or the publishers in this case) would still sell access to the buyer of the used game the online portion of the game.
One of the things Blizzard, Bioware, Paradox, And sort of Steam do is they let you tie your serial keys to your account, (I mean seriously, I'm not going to resell my copy of Warcraft2 at this point), they can offer a service (free redownloading when logged in), save game syncs etc, but they also make it harder to resell/pirate (since your key is logged in your account if they can axe all the keys from a keygen then you either buy the game or don't get to play). I wouldn't be surprised if Sony is creeping towards a 'steam for a console' sort of setup, in a generation or two they can move to a full online model, they still can get value if you want to resell your game (and, to be fair, the online service costs them money, so if you aren't paying but one copy is bounced between 4 or 5 players in its used life that's a lot of cost for them which they aren't getting paid for right now). And it makes piracy harder, since you can know what keys you've given out, what keys you haven't (and what keys were physically stolen potentially). Oh, and you don't want to download the update that enables all of this? It's console, no update, no online connectivity, no new features, and eventually the firmware will be on a disk that you'll have to install for it to run. Overall it's not a bad plan, because it's a little bit less wild west on the console than the PC. You don't even need to make the serial keys something the user types in, it's just there, on the disk and read in automatically.
Oh, and if we find you with any pirated games, we ban your whole account. So if you bought 1000 games but pirate 1, we can lock you out of all of the stuff you *did* pay for. It's certainly more on the 'stick' side of the carrot-stick spectrum, but publicly banning a few thousand (even fictional) people for it might be a strong deterrent.
EA has come out and said a lot of the experience in their games is either online, or DLC, and there's probably more of that in future. As a developer (which I tangentially count myself as), if you don't want to use those account tie in facilities you don't have to, there's always DRM free PC games to make, but it's a strong showing that Sony is committed to making sure people are paying for the games they play on the playstation platform, and they *can* make it actually useful to players if they want too.
Linux is one of the potential components of your workflow as a computer scientist, and one of the major potential platforms for any work you may want to do. A mathematician who spends their life working in set theory still needs to know what differential equations are, and what they mean.
Software engineering is a critical component of computer science, because computer science isn't mathematics, they are deeply related and intertwined, but not exactly the same. Computer science is about what you can do with information, that includes how you organize it. Computer science is both more and less than pure math, and different schools emphasize comp sci very differently, some are right on the metal focusing on building from hardware up, others work from pure math down, (and if you're in the area, waterloo starts at pure math and works down, Laurier which is basically in the same place starts with hardware and works up). You cannot actually implement the vast majority of ideas in computer science without some basic skills in software engineering, nor can you communicate effectively with other computer scientists about what ideas they have, or what ideas you have. Computer scientists and physicists aren't engineers, (and I count myself as both a physicist by training and work and a computer scientist by training now), but you need to know some of their tools to do your job. True, a purely theoretical physicist doesn't use a whole lot of electrical engineering. But a experimental physicist uses a lot of engineering materials regularly. A purely theoretical computer scientist, may use relatively little software eng, but a experimental computer scientist may use quite a lot. In that sense computer science is as much math as physics is, but it's something else too, since experimental computer science is concerned very heavily with how you actually store the information everything that comes with that.
There's also a lot of very real research in software engineering processes as done by computer scientists, the big area at my school that I'm aware of (University of Western Ontario) is in automated software testing and performance analysis. Software engineering is a very real field, but until you try and build software involving dozens of people (not all of whom are programmers), and then try and keep it updated and maintained over many years, it's hard to appreciate how there's science there, but there can be quite a lot.
Computer scientists *can* be programmers, they *can* be system operators or administrators, or something else, and or all practical purposes they have to be minimally skilled in programming and system operation. Please don't confuse job training with academic training. We aim to empower students to learn effectively and give them the skills and knowledge they need to be prepared for a general area (computing), what they choose to do with that is up to them. Some, well, the vast majority, will end up programming or
Correct. You don't have to like linux, or want to use it as a computer scientist, but you should have some basic familiarity with what it is and how it works. I'm a PhD student in computer science and my actual work doesn't take me anywhere near linux, but I need to know what it *could* do for me (or more accurately for my workflow) in case that helps.
I admit, I fail at typing. I meant that climate science hasn't included any of those things in their climate models, but all of it impacts the climate. Significant economic contraction reduced greenhouse gas emissions, (not necessarily a lot, but some). Political instability in Tunisia if it spreads to other middle eastern states (admittedly unlikely), such as their old exporting neighbour Libya would drive up the price of oil, and down the use of oil (and therefore carbon emissions).
Well if climate change is real, and will devastate the US or chinese or Saudi or all the connected economies then they're banking on everyone else to fix the problem for them. Food riots, political instability in middle east or africa, or major political protests in china over the environment could very seriously damage US economic interests.
Of course climate change is real, the question of what that will do to economies is a whole other matter.
The other gamble is that major US trading partners won't start slapping trade/currency/etc restrictions on the US for not towing the line. That works both ways as being bad for them too, but a serious enough problem and I could certainly see a scenario where the Europeans or Japanese start saying they aren't going to buy aircraft or computers or cars or whatever from places that don't have decent environmental rules.
heh, I think republicans in the US are making a several trillion dollar gamble that everyone else will pick up the slack for them ignoring the problem.
It's more that the climate scientists shouldn't take a bet they hope to lose if people actually do what they say.
Much as I hate to admit it, betting that politicians will be idiots isn't a sure thing.
except you don't know what the programmes will be until they are decided on, and you still don't know what compliance will look like.
Laws passed in the US and Europe are much more likely to actually be in force than in china or india. But I live in canada, we signed the kyoto protocol, and then basically ignored it. It's hard to build a model that will account for that.
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That would be the always on, online connection. Or similar. You're logged into steam, you can play anything on steam sort of thing (that's not how steam works, I'm just giving an example). I'm not a huge fan of that, but if you move your save games onto the cloud, and require an always on internet connection to play, with serial keys tied to an account it's a lot easier to deal with piracy. Then it's a matter of generating good keys, and regular ole network security. The key there will be to provide value to the customer. Onlive running the service for you is one option, but I think for everything onlive can do, there's always going to be a bit better something that can be done in your living room.
I'm guessing the online stuff will be achievements, in game chat linked across multiple games (imagine your WoW guild chat in world of goo, wow and minecraft, all at once), cloud based storage and re download of the games (for free), and maybe in game hints/tips/guides/manuals sort of stuff that's pulled from the web in a context sensitive way. Imagine you can't kill a particular boss, the game detects that, and then connects you with strategies from the developer, or other people who played and wrote up a blurb on how to do it. Think demon souls, with less misdirection.
I'd venture that if microsoft sold something that could be reasonably described as a PC they'd be in legal trouble, fast. PS3 was almost certainly intentionally engineered to be hard to code for. Sony assumed they would dominate again, and wanted to make it hard to port their code to other systems. IMO they could have accomplished that by putting 1 gig of ram in their machine for a lot less headache. But I've done enough with the Cell (astrophysics cluster at and I taught game engines last year) I can appreciate that it's good for certain things.
I don't think the console specific stuff is quite because they wrote for PPC's. Games (even PS3 games) are still largely made on windows, in visual studio. The issue is support 8000 different hardware configurations, and dealing with piracy/DRM (you don't have DRM, most publishers won't talk to you, but it does nothing but piss off your customers and drive them to piracy, a lose lose). Smaller publishers or niche publishers that will do without DRM can't fund the big projects that would be cross platform anyway. Most of the console games will run, with virtually no effort, on a a set of PC configurations, it's just a very small set. Too many GPU's sound cards and 3rd party programs for a lot of people.
Of course some of this is changing, without the PC gaming alliance, and because of Steam. Real time sales tracking is enormously valuable. I talked to one guy who was trying to get his game on shelves in the UK. They wanted about 40 copies. For the whole country. So he whipped out his steam page and said 'in the time it took to have this meeting, I've sold more than 40 copies already'. That, combined with better insight into the hardware gamers actually have (rather than could have) helps a lot. And lets face it, Nvidia and AMD do a much better job with their drivers today than they did 5 years ago, that helps a lot ( and directx/opengl are better too).
Well because it's opt in for non steam games you're skewing your data. Like I say, it's not perfect. That's not the same as useless, but it's not perfect. The handly little chart of how many people are logged in seems to peak around 3 million on steam. I'm sure there are a lot more PC gamers out there than 3 million, but that gives a pretty good average of what their computers are, how much they play etc.
My suspicion is that there's a lot of stuff on steam that's bought, and never played. I know I have a lot of that. Except I'm buying it on steam, in many cases because I intended to play it, and didn't get around to it, or I had it in another format years ago, and would like to come back to it (and have it work) at some point in the future, and saw it on sale. Not the most effective use of my money I'll grant you. Things like that probably really mess with statistics for some games statistics though.
the alliance doesn't seem to have done anything. Good idea, non-existant execution. The PC gaming alliance is called Steam, Gamersgate, Impulse, Direct2Drive, and for better or worse, The Pirate Bay.
Steam, with it's billion dollars a year in sales knows what's causing problems, what you're playing (and how much), what you're buying, and has a fairly good sense of what developers should be building for. That doesn't mean steams data is applicable to every single user, or every scenario, or even that it is necessarily the best service out there, especially without WoW or starcraft the data isn't perfect. But it's more likely to be successful to have people motivated by support costs and sales than a hodgepodge alliance of people who mean well, but have no real money or clear direction to back up their goals.
Oh I don't doubt that they're angry, probably justifiably so. I agree, it's probably a bad decision, (and is almost certainly a bad decision to the /. crowd) but if WP7 gets 20% of the market, RIM 10, and google/apple split the remainder that's still a lot of phones selling that could have an intel inside sticker on them. I'm not sure that much market fragmentation is good, but then I've grown up with MS 90%, apple 9%, Other 1%, so my expectations are probably biasing things badly.
I think for nokia they're going to need something to differentiate them from the competition, and fast. They're behind the curve here, by years. Even vs other WP7 developers (but at least WP7 is behind the curve as well, so they just need to keep up with the growth). Putting a dual core ARM9 of some sort into a nokia phone and selling it isn't going to keep their market share. Whether they can pull off something cool with software, or need a different hardware platform (intel, AMD, in house, or something), they need something or else HTC, samsung, Motorola et. al. are going to eat them alive.
They also shouldn't risk biting a major player in the market. WP7 has a lot of big corporate backers, now obviously including Nokia. Whether they will be successful or not depends on a lot of factors, but Intel should be aiming to sell chips to nokia, whether it's for MeeGo, Droid, WP7 or some other OS, not criticising their management choices publicly.
Like it or not, Nokia still sells a LOT of phones, meaning there's a lot of money to be made as a part supplier, and a good chance than the sheer mass of Nokia + WP7 will be able to sustain that ecosystem. I know a lot of people coming over from Europe (I live in canada) regularly laugh at how terrible a lot of our supposedly wonderful iPhones etc. are, when Nokia phones have had better call quality, voice dialling, very good integration with MS office (without extra fees), maps etc. long before Apple or Google started bringing that to market. They still have a lot of brand loyalty, and a strong brand if they call pull it together.
Of all the video game music that could possibly qualify, this one is definitely deserving.
It's just the Lord's Prayer in Swahili, but exceptionally well done.
The problem with proven oil reserves is that they (by definition) include only economically recoverable oil at any given point in time, which is a stupid way to define things but that's beside the point. Saudi Light crude (which is the 15-20/barrel stuff, or less... a lot less), is not exactly going to last long, it's dead easy to get out of the ground and makes it hard to justify the effort in anything else for the saudis (as opposed to say canada, where we have relatively little of the cheap easy to get stuff). But the Saudi's have a lot of heavy oil that at 60 or 70 bucks a barrel wouldn't be economically viable, but at 100 bucks a barrel, with bangladeshi slave.. I'm sorry, foreign worker, labour becomes reasonably profitable. (In 20 years feel free to replace bangladesh with some random impoverished muslim nation in africa, I doubt the Saudi's care where the cheap labour comes from all that much).
So then we can ask a question. As the light, cheap, easy to get stuff dries up, and then there's inflation, economic growth etc. what will the price of oil be in 10 years, 15 years, 20 etc. The Saudi's and americans almost certainly disagree on what will be economically viable to extract, in the same way two experts on the price of oil aren't going to come to exactly the same number for 15 years from now. It's hard to see the future. There are different ways to count oil recoverability too, and that will depend a lot on well... price ( and technology).
Using some measures the US should run almost completely out of domestically produced oil in less than 8 years. Does anyone seriously think that's going to happen? That's supposedly been the case for at least a decade, and yet US oil production doesn't appear to exactly be in a massive imploding crisis of supply. In 2007 the US produced 8.5 million barrels/day (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_pro-energy-oil-production)... there's a long way from that to 0 in 11 years.
The geology question, of how much actual oil a country has, is mostly useless, since it only matters what you figure you can extract. But very reasonable people can have very reasonable disagreements on those numbers, with no one lying. Are the saudi's lying about their oil reserves? Probably not, at least, not significantly, at the current rate of production saudi arabia will run out of officially declared reserves... in 130 years (10 million barrels/day, 430 billion barrels of declared reserves). If they're lying by 40%, then they're lying about a problem that will manifest in the late 2070's or 2080's. That's a long time to hold onto a lie for relatively little gain, since shit will hit the fan either way. Can they disagree with the americans on what exactly the source of that will be? Certainly.
Essentially you could say the same thing about the US. If the figure the price of oil will be > 100 bucks a barrel (in todays dollars) then shale deposits suddenly become economically viable, given the US the largest reserves in the world, by a lot, if the price of oil is less than 70.. well then shale isn't viable to extract. Caveat: I'm not 100% sure on those numbers (100 and 70) but they're good enough to illustrate my point. Now anything in between and we have a fairly difficult calculation.
The Saudis could easily be lying about how long they can keep cheap production of 10 million barrels a day up. But I'm not sure how much of a problem that is, or how much difference it would make, since the price of oil is something like 4 or 5x the cost of most saudi oil, I'm sure for that much money they'll find something. It might be convenient to pay lip service to the americans and say 'oh yes Mr president we'll keep supplying cheap oil and keep the price down just give us more F15's' when they're still marking it up 300% (and that would still bring the cost down), but it's in their interest to convince the americans they're trying to keep oil cheap, when they probably can't do much about the price of oil anymore (by themselves), while at the same time
My linksys E3000, with whatever factory firmware it had from oct 2010 has IPV6 functionality. (Tested using http://v6.testmyipv6.com/ and http://test-ipv6.com/faq_opera.html, and I can see ipv6 cisco and google sites).
The e4200 might not, but that certainly doesn't mean none of them do.
with an iPad you could load up the play into a game (or at least a game engine), and have it actually show the play. Most of the NFL players have a strong background in games now, only makes sense to show it to them in 3D if you can.
I am neither ignoring nor disagreeing with that fact. My criticism isn't of Bill Gates, it's of the press he's getting on vaccines and autism (as compared to say, giving the headline to something actually about eradicating polio), and the way the (CNN in TFA) present it. If they want a headline about the (lack of a) link between autism and vaccines, have an interview with someone who actually did the research. If they want a headline about what the Gates foundation is doing to fight polio (or HIV, or family planning etc.)... interview Bill Gates.
They've intentionally presented it as though there is some valid point about vaccines and autism, and then throw him a softball question, which is fine... but then his answer to this softball question doesn't justify the press it's getting. Everything he says on the topic is perfectly correct, and I have the utmost respect for the fact that he is both employing and listening to experts in this field. But even the /. story is about "Bill Gates says anti vaccine effort kills children" presents it as though this is some revelation from Bill Gates, it is no more, or no less investigated by the journalists than the claims by Jenny McCarthy, which is my problem with it, credibility for celebrity doesn't make sense. The same principle applied to Steve Jobs is why Apple gets away with having a basically draconian app store policy, but Steve says it's good, so it must be good!
What Bill Gates says specifically on the issue
"Well, Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn't have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts -- you know, they, they kill children. It's a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important."
He doesn't actually say it's hampering efforts against polio, in fact nothing in that blurb seems to be based on work his foundation actually does. Again, not that it isn't correct, Bill Gates is (for all of the MS related criticism of him) a smart guy who seems to actually listen to evidence. But he says some very interesting stuff about how health impacts security, about rich helping poor and how much time there is between vaccines for the rich and vaccines for the poor.
The part that offends me is the lead in question (from Dr Gupta) is intentionally soft, and the fact that this part gets a headline and not... you know, his solutions to problems he's actually trying to (and succeeding at) solving.
"There has been a lot of scrutiny of vaccines recently -- specifically childhood vaccines. There has been a lot of news about is there a connection with autism, for example. What do you make of all that? Dr. [Andrew] Wakefield wrote a paper about this [in The Lancet in 1998] saying he thought there was a connection. And there were lower vaccination rates over a period of time as a result in Britain, then the United States. What are your thoughts?"
Importantly, cabinet cannot overrule the CRTC merely because it's cabinet. The CRTC is charged with ruling based on laws as written, but the government can always pass new laws.
Wind mobile is probably in serious trouble right now, because for the government (which is a minority party) to wrangle any of the other parties on board for this might be tough. Opposition to UBB has support from the liberals, the NDP and the conservatives (and I have no idea about the Bloc, and the greens have no seats so their opinion on the matter is irrelevant), so it might get turned into a law fairly quickly.
The problem is why does anyone care that Bill Gates says it? That's what got us into this mess in the first place, with soccer moms listening to jenny mccarthy, over, you know, actual experts. Sure, Bill Gates has apparently listened to experts, and is saying something sensible, but that's not a reason to give him a bunch of press over people who actually study and understand these things.
If he's giving money to eradicate polio then sure, he can have press over eradicating polio, and as part of that saying vaccines don't actually cause autism is fine. But the MSM jumping up and down like this is some great revelation because Bill Gates says it is the cause of all this in the first place. 'Your Kid has Autism so yu must be an expert on what causes autism! Your kid doesn't have autism and you gave them vaccines, vaccines must not cause autism!' The people who aren't taking polio vaccines (which is admittedly drops not injections but whatever), aren't doing it because they think vaccines cause autism; that group are yuppies in north America. The people not taking polio vaccines are doing it because they either think the government is out to sterilize them, are too poor to afford it, or believe the government has some other, random evil scheme to use vaccines against them.
Bill Gates is not an expert in vaccines. His correctly knowing that vaccines do not cause autism deserves no more press than my room-mate who makes 15k/year saying the same thing. The whole question asked by Gupta is a lead in for Bill Gates to make this statement, as though he is an authority on vaccines. . Except Dr. Gupta should be an expert, and should be behaving like one on medicine 'Mr Gates, we know that there was a discredited study linking autism to vaccines. How does that sort of fraud impact your work distributing polio vaccines' , not 'in 1998 they linked autism to vaccines, what do you make of it'.
Well if you didn't improve efficiency, and someone else did, eventually your costs would be so prohibitively high that you become uncompetitive.
That's what's happening now. Training offshore replacements is short term pain for long term gain. Yes, they're (at least theoretically) taking a potential job here, but right now there's not much of an IT market for us to sell to in india or pakistan etc.. If we want to sell them 500 dollar 'smart' phones they need to have skills and money to pay for them.
If you can do things better, the same task for less money or a better task for the same money then it's ultimately a good thing, assuming we have a robust enough education system that the people who made careers fixing buggy wheels can be converted into people who make car bumpers. To use the carburettor example, you increased the productivity per worker by a factor of 12 (not necessarily productivity per dollar since there is more equipment, which equally needs to be built by someone). That means they are worth more money, or you could supply 12x as many parts, or 6x as many parts and some other part. That seems like a good long term tradeoff to me.
The european industrial empires worked partially because they could make the same hand made goods for less money, and mass produce them. Rather than having 5 shirts you could own 10 for the same price sort of thing. The new products couldn't be produced enough to supply colonials even if they wanted to give them access to cars or subways or the like (at least initially). But now we can massively produce anything, even brand new stuff, that means we need to grow the whole market for everyone. It's going to be a painful process as we have india and china go from a per capital nominal GDP of 1100 dollars and 4200 towards the US or europe at around 45k, but once we get there there will many more products available for everyone.
Well for starters users opt in to the program that records the clicks. So Google, by opting in to MS, said go ahead and use this user data we generate (and that's what they did, generate user data). What we don't know is if the algorithm is engine agnostic, so could you produce the same effect with any of Bing, Ask, google, any other random search enigne. If it works for any engine (including Bing) then literally it's just using user data. They opt to send their search history to MS, MS can go ahead and use it.
Google is being inherently disingenuous by opting into basically every piece of MS tracking available, and then claiming plagiarism when MS turns around and uses that data, which will naturally be especially vulnerable to weird attacks like these. It would be interesting to know if they could so easily skew the results of a legitimate search, but nonsense searches aren't going to have much of any data to go on.
If you own a BMW, and Ford calls you up and says 'hey, can we put a bunch of cameras and sensors in your car to better understand how you use it' and then you say 'yes'.. well it's your car, bmw doesn't get a whole lot of say in the matter. If you opt in to MS's tracking service (which you probably shouldn't do, because god knows what's happening with that data, but that's beside the point), you are giving MS permission to follow your virtual self around and try and find out what you do.
If you want a better test of what bing is doing, have several search engines all put same random honey potted page, but then have all the results on the page be completely disconnected (so like RIM, BWM, Hong Kong Tourist Authority, Wiki page on something, a link to some random web forum etc), and then don't click on some of them (especially not the top ones), and see if their little learning algorithm still produces the same results as the other websites (even without clicking the links, implying some sort of scraping going on, which is probably a no-no) or if it is only reading 'searched for wlkerjlken means wiki page on Dalbury_Lees.
I'm willing to bet amazon does something similar in it's own searches, because they even tell you what percentage of people bought the item you're looking at vs something else.
Depends if they're necessarily grabbing the google result, or the fact that people searched for a term, and paired it with what they clicked on. To me that's a legitimate algorithm, (heck, it could be an exercise in machine learning).
Does the trick work with any search engine, or just google? For example if the engine was bing, but they honepotted something equally random, then trained it with a few dozen clicks then they're just learning based on what people click on, and that it happens to learn from google as well as anyone else isn't really a shock.
ya, and specifically, it's only *1* generation ahead of cell phones, and even then, it's not on store shelves yet. By the time it hits (close to xmas) we'll be seeing talk of 4 core ARM9 droid phones just as we were all wondering if the nexus S was going to be the first dual core Droid phone.
Which I think was the point of the rest of the announcement. The PSP2 *should* be a phone, but isn't, but they're at least going to make all that PSP/PSP2/PSone goodness available on other ARM9 devices soon enough via a software store. That might mean that the PSP2 gets one year as a sort of first adopter reference design marketing device, and then the second and 3rd year we start seeing either PSP2 phones or just PSP games on droid.
It creates an interesting 5 year strategy though. Year one, PSP2 reference device. Year 2 and 3, PSP2 phone or PSP2 slim (whichever of those is easier), year 4 PSP2 'superphone' which would be like a 6 or 8 core device but only 4 reserved for gaming. Year 5 is nothing new while they work on PSP3.
Wouldn't it be nice if htey could unify the architecture and have the PS4 and PSP2 both on ARM9 (or at least ARM something) chips so you could have synchronized gaming on the go, buy the game once an it always works and keeps progress between both.
On one hand, there's probably going to be improvement between the initial test variant and any production model. On the other hand, by the time they actually have a production model, NATO/the EU will probably be well on the way to the next generation.
So then you end up with one of those deeply troubling problems. Is an aircraft just a delivery platform for missiles, and if so, can the chinese build/steal missiles that are nearly as good as their NATO/EU variants, or will the plane itself make a huge difference? I have a lingering, and somewhat bad feeling that the ordinance and avionics are going to matter a lot more than the capabilities of the aircraft itself.
That might be on a case by case basis. If you can make it unique for each game it raises the barrier to entry for hacking. But all of the serial key generators out there have been cracked with some sort of keygen program by now. How well that will work on the PS3 is hard to say, but it seems likely to be only a temporary barrier to game pirates. Which is probably all they need, a day or two, or tying a serial key to your online account (for online play) would be sufficient to prevent most of the piracy they're worried about. Tying a serial key to an online account has the dual benefit of messing with used game sales. Essentially you can re-sell the single player version, but Sony (or the publishers in this case) would still sell access to the buyer of the used game the online portion of the game.
One of the things Blizzard, Bioware, Paradox, And sort of Steam do is they let you tie your serial keys to your account, (I mean seriously, I'm not going to resell my copy of Warcraft2 at this point), they can offer a service (free redownloading when logged in), save game syncs etc, but they also make it harder to resell/pirate (since your key is logged in your account if they can axe all the keys from a keygen then you either buy the game or don't get to play). I wouldn't be surprised if Sony is creeping towards a 'steam for a console' sort of setup, in a generation or two they can move to a full online model, they still can get value if you want to resell your game (and, to be fair, the online service costs them money, so if you aren't paying but one copy is bounced between 4 or 5 players in its used life that's a lot of cost for them which they aren't getting paid for right now). And it makes piracy harder, since you can know what keys you've given out, what keys you haven't (and what keys were physically stolen potentially). Oh, and you don't want to download the update that enables all of this? It's console, no update, no online connectivity, no new features, and eventually the firmware will be on a disk that you'll have to install for it to run. Overall it's not a bad plan, because it's a little bit less wild west on the console than the PC. You don't even need to make the serial keys something the user types in, it's just there, on the disk and read in automatically.
Oh, and if we find you with any pirated games, we ban your whole account. So if you bought 1000 games but pirate 1, we can lock you out of all of the stuff you *did* pay for. It's certainly more on the 'stick' side of the carrot-stick spectrum, but publicly banning a few thousand (even fictional) people for it might be a strong deterrent.
EA has come out and said a lot of the experience in their games is either online, or DLC, and there's probably more of that in future. As a developer (which I tangentially count myself as), if you don't want to use those account tie in facilities you don't have to, there's always DRM free PC games to make, but it's a strong showing that Sony is committed to making sure people are paying for the games they play on the playstation platform, and they *can* make it actually useful to players if they want too.
Linux is one of the potential components of your workflow as a computer scientist, and one of the major potential platforms for any work you may want to do. A mathematician who spends their life working in set theory still needs to know what differential equations are, and what they mean.
Software engineering is a critical component of computer science, because computer science isn't mathematics, they are deeply related and intertwined, but not exactly the same. Computer science is about what you can do with information, that includes how you organize it. Computer science is both more and less than pure math, and different schools emphasize comp sci very differently, some are right on the metal focusing on building from hardware up, others work from pure math down, (and if you're in the area, waterloo starts at pure math and works down, Laurier which is basically in the same place starts with hardware and works up). You cannot actually implement the vast majority of ideas in computer science without some basic skills in software engineering, nor can you communicate effectively with other computer scientists about what ideas they have, or what ideas you have. Computer scientists and physicists aren't engineers, (and I count myself as both a physicist by training and work and a computer scientist by training now), but you need to know some of their tools to do your job. True, a purely theoretical physicist doesn't use a whole lot of electrical engineering. But a experimental physicist uses a lot of engineering materials regularly. A purely theoretical computer scientist, may use relatively little software eng, but a experimental computer scientist may use quite a lot. In that sense computer science is as much math as physics is, but it's something else too, since experimental computer science is concerned very heavily with how you actually store the information everything that comes with that.
There's also a lot of very real research in software engineering processes as done by computer scientists, the big area at my school that I'm aware of (University of Western Ontario) is in automated software testing and performance analysis. Software engineering is a very real field, but until you try and build software involving dozens of people (not all of whom are programmers), and then try and keep it updated and maintained over many years, it's hard to appreciate how there's science there, but there can be quite a lot.
Computer scientists *can* be programmers, they *can* be system operators or administrators, or something else, and or all practical purposes they have to be minimally skilled in programming and system operation. Please don't confuse job training with academic training. We aim to empower students to learn effectively and give them the skills and knowledge they need to be prepared for a general area (computing), what they choose to do with that is up to them. Some, well, the vast majority, will end up programming or
Correct. You don't have to like linux, or want to use it as a computer scientist, but you should have some basic familiarity with what it is and how it works. I'm a PhD student in computer science and my actual work doesn't take me anywhere near linux, but I need to know what it *could* do for me (or more accurately for my workflow) in case that helps.
I admit, I fail at typing. I meant that climate science hasn't included any of those things in their climate models, but all of it impacts the climate. Significant economic contraction reduced greenhouse gas emissions, (not necessarily a lot, but some). Political instability in Tunisia if it spreads to other middle eastern states (admittedly unlikely), such as their old exporting neighbour Libya would drive up the price of oil, and down the use of oil (and therefore carbon emissions).
Well if climate change is real, and will devastate the US or chinese or Saudi or all the connected economies then they're banking on everyone else to fix the problem for them. Food riots, political instability in middle east or africa, or major political protests in china over the environment could very seriously damage US economic interests.
Of course climate change is real, the question of what that will do to economies is a whole other matter.
The other gamble is that major US trading partners won't start slapping trade/currency/etc restrictions on the US for not towing the line. That works both ways as being bad for them too, but a serious enough problem and I could certainly see a scenario where the Europeans or Japanese start saying they aren't going to buy aircraft or computers or cars or whatever from places that don't have decent environmental rules.
heh, I think republicans in the US are making a several trillion dollar gamble that everyone else will pick up the slack for them ignoring the problem.
It's more that the climate scientists shouldn't take a bet they hope to lose if people actually do what they say.
Much as I hate to admit it, betting that politicians will be idiots isn't a sure thing.
except you don't know what the programmes will be until they are decided on, and you still don't know what compliance will look like.
Laws passed in the US and Europe are much more likely to actually be in force than in china or india. But I live in canada, we signed the kyoto protocol, and then basically ignored it. It's hard to build a model that will account for that.