To be fair, a lot of people your fathers age and older, unless you're like 10 now, were likely to be conscripted into any conflict (they tend to be about one a generation or so), in that situation enlisting, for all of it's many faults may be a lesser evil than being forced to serve later. At least when you enlist you can choose which part of a service to go to.
volunteering to fight an illegal recolonization effort and you want respect? It's precisely that sort of thinking that has them wanting to kill you in the first place. Think long and hard about what you said. Seriously. There are countless british and french army types who volunteered to help 'civilize' various parts of the world (including Iraq), and countless colonial troops of various countries who wanted to variously bring religion to 'savages', wipe out the natives to make living space etc. Volunteering to help a colonial power expand it's ambitions is not worthy of respect. It is worthy of our disgust and disdain. If you idiots would stop volunteering they'd be forced to make truly difficult choices about what to do in Iraq. Is it worth conscription? Even after what happened in Vietnam? Right now they pile on the money and they get mercenaries, I'm sorry PMC's, and volunteers, none of whom are helping the situation. The reason, after you apparently 'liberated' them from Saddam Hussein they still want to kill you is that your still there, and still volunteering to go, (and when you are there tend to have a habit of killing innocent people, though that by definition is not intentional). It would be comically farcical if it wasn't so serious. Iraq, whether there are colonization forces there or not is a teetering mess, because it's the hub of the clash between saudi and iran for status as the dominant regional power, stabilization comes when those two stop funding a proxy war, at least temporarily.
One could reasonably argue that Afghanistan at least started out as a different situation. It certainly isn't now. But back in the 1990's and 2000's the driving forces behind the Anti-US movement were related to Israel, Egypt, and the US forces in Saudi, not all of which were particularly legitimate grievances (hence the terrorism for all its flair remained mostly rare, and of somewhat less dramatic support). Since the US recolonization effort in Iraq, you've put a giant beacon to the world saying 'hey look at us, all that crazy evil stuff OBL claimed we were doing but weren't, well, now we are!'
And no, a/. posting isn't likely to change your mind, or your income tax free + 225/mo imminent danger pay either. But your sob story of 'oh I'm in Abu Ghraib, I volunteered and they still want to kill me, you should respect me' isn't going to change my view. I'll presume you weren't involved in that previous business in abu ghraib with the torture etc. The people trying to kill you are all volunteers too, though they're more likely to be in it for an ideology (however crazy that may be) than the money. So ok I'll be at least sympathetic to you for that, at least you're probably in it for the money rather than for some misguided ideology about bringing some combination of Christianity or civilization to iraq. So no, you don't have my respect, you might have my sympathy, if you were so hard up for work and money to feed yourself this seemed like your last resort. At least if you learn arabic while you're there you can get a respectable job importing or exporting stuff with the middle east, just as a tip, don't tell them you were in Iraq, unless you want them to try and kill you during a meeting.
Most high end gpus ramp down a bit when they're getting too hot, and ramp up the fan. However, if you're overclocking, well, the fan doesn't go that high.
And ya, GPU's aren't designed to operate at 100% indefinitely. They seem like it, but since the load is never on every part of the card all at once you only rarely run the full card at max. When your GTX 480 is blowing at full speed in crysis it's probably not fully utilizing all of the shaders (some are waiting for others), some of the memory system (since it's all loaded already) that sort of thing. Hence I said there's stuff a programmer can do.
I suppose we can disagree on who the design issue falls with. I took the ops design issue as a system builder level issue. When building a system there's not much I can do about how the video card was designed, and when building a GPU, they don't actually physically build and test them much, if at all, before selling them. NVIDIA prides itself on their sales being 'first silicon' because they design all in software. Which sounds great until you get a GTX480.
Also your definition of appropriate margins of error, and mine are probably very different. Most modern top end GPU"s (480, 5970) require nearly 100% efficiency on the fan to match their TDP, and a layer of dusty gunk will kill them, at least first run parts. I'm not sure you'd find much agreement on how clean or not you can expect computers to be (or what PSU's they'll have), and there's going to be a lot of variability even in the high end part. A porche911 that never has it's oil changed just plain isn't being used as designed. That's not the designers fault, that's the owners.
Not so much design. A few other new games have had this issue (notably Star trek online).
TDP assumes, wrongly, that your card is perfectly clean, and that the fan controls are always correct, which might be the case on a reference designed card, but might not quite be the case on factory overclocked boards or if there have been aftermarket tweaks to the driver to adjust the fan speed (which is usually a noise problem).
You're also assuming the fan is still perfectly mounted (which it might not have been in the first place), and that sort of thing. The PSU needs to be able to feed enough juice to the card, the case needs to be properly ventilated (and ideally cleaned), and god knows what other bits you've got in this board. Lots of boards have a northbridge fan that sits directly above the (first) gpu nowdays.
As a developer there's a bit you can, and should be doing to prevent this sort of thing. This sort of problem happens a couple of ways. One is the 'draw a simple scene as fast as possible' scenario in SC so cap the framerate at something like 120. The other is basically constantly feed the card as much data as possible (some beta builds of STO and early release had this problem), that was basically a problem of not being able to fit a whole area/level in memory, or not wanting to cause a load screen, so you're maxing out your bandwidth to push data to the card, while at the same time letting the player fly around and shoot stuff (and said stuff shoot back). One of the things here is to do a better job of controlling what's being sent to the card in the first place (BSP trees for example). That's a problem that the card will render a scene to look correct even if you treat it badly, so you can sort of plod through development like that, but you shouldn't assume that the uncleaned 3 year old system one of your customers has will be as pristine as your development machines.
When driving a car you can 'floor it' for a few seconds, but if you left it that way your engine would eventually overheat, if you've ever gotten stuck in the snow or on ice you'll know what I'm talking about. GPU's are similar. When your comp starts or when you do specific things with an application they can run with all of it's parts at full power, but only for a little while. If you do that for too long eventually it will burn out.
And adding them in takes time to do right, and there is no point in doing it wrong, especially for older profs who won't have time to get it right.
Honestly, none of the 'tech' mentioned in article are broadly applicable. Interactive 'clickers' cost money, regularly don't work, are easily lost, and are a nightmare to manage, there's no easy way to detect mistake with them, and are only useful in large first year type classes. Not that they're really useful there, but they look like they'd be useful so profs try it, and then people like me have to figure out how to cope with them not working regularly. Oh and did I mention they cost money? Which we make students buy, who may not use the stupid thing ever again.
Group activities and so on are fine, if you have time. My undergrad (theoretical physics), most classes were 3 hours of lecture, 3 hours of lab per week (that's time with a TA/instructor), comp sci, where I am now as a PhD student, has 3 hours of lecture, 2 hours of lab in some first year courses and virtually no labs later. Group activities in class are slow as molasses, and waste time you could be well, covering content, which students are expected to know. As always in school, with a group activity it's usually one person or a small subset of a group that actually does the work. They're suitable for lab sessions, assuming you don't need 2 hours and 45 minutes of focus to take data (which happens occasionally but not usually).
Video conferencing is situational. Where it's useful, it's really useful, but normally it's of no value. I've taken courses while physical at one university from another (at University of guelph, course taught at waterloo), and at several places I've been they have 'distance' ed courses. But with enough students you don't want them, on an individual basis trying to conference call with you, you want them in class, focused on the class.
Lots of these 'technologies' you could try, I would call 'distractions', and think are better left out of classrooms. They're distractions in the real world too, but there it's up to your boss to worry about how much time you're actually working or not. In academia we don't want to facilitate the students distracting themselves, that seems counter productive. The technology I use when teaching is I give students powerpoint slides in advance, and then use a tablet to annotate the slides, and work problems etc, (and make corrections) in class, so the students are 'following along' with the notes, they have to at least read them a bit. It's not ideal but there's a lot of stuff in comp sci notes, especially when you're doing computer graphics that you can't reproduce in real time in front of them (actually correct code, diagrams that sort of thing).
Some other places are reporting this as both saudi and the UAE (http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100801/world/ml_emirates_blackberry). Saudi being a somewhat bigger market.
except that it's what happens now. NHS trusts, insurance companies, national healthcare provides, even hospital administrators do that now. And in reality, it works out pretty well.
except that MS has been in the tablet business for years, and they envision the product differently. What software does the ipad need? A decent OS? An 'office' type app? Well ok, it needs a completely different OS, which MS isn't about to make, and I don't see them wanting to put office on the iPad, so what software should they make? MS doesn't really make software that belongs on another companies OS. Deployment software, development kits, I guess their customer relation software, but why would you want that to sync with a competitors device, that seems like a bad business plan. Their e-mail suite is unnecessary. In short, anything MS makes that the iPad needs they aren't about to make for a competitor, and anything else they make you wouldn't want on a slate anyway.
MS should take their years of experience with tablets, and their decent windows 7 that runs on antiquated hardware, and put windows 7... the actual OS, on a slate. Want to run office on your slate? Well... you can do that. Want to run, well, any of your windows apps that work on a system with these specs, go to it. Just like they already do, either use a pen or your finger to replace the mouse (there are a few options for single/double clicking), and some UI elements, but frankly I'm sick of carrying around a phone with a bunch of apps that won't run on my desktop, and having a bunch of apps on my desktop that won't run on my phone, and the ipad is basically just a bigger version of incompatible phone. That doesn't mean they shouldn't shake up the look and feel of the OS for a slate, but the core underlying functionality could be the same.
Oh, and since it's an open market, MS doesn't need to try and control the content you put on your slate. Imagine being able to put apps on that don't have to be approved my Steve Jobs & co (including custom apps for work that shouldn't need to be approved by anyone outside your company anyway).
This also leaves it up to vendors to set the tier. Willing to spend 7 grand on a slate, I bet I could make one with much better specs than the iPad. Want to spend 7k on an iPad... I can glue some diamonds on it for you I guess. Want a cheaper device, want one that meets specific durability/form factor/colour/logo requirements, no problem, the hundreds of hardware vendors out there can figure something out.
I don't suppose any of these decisions are easy, but how many people die every year due to a lack of an available organ? How many people do we keep alive for a few days, or a few hours just for the benefit of their families emotional state (which is a product of a culture we created), and in the process wreck their organs?
Having grown up in a rich country (canada), and spent a lot of time in poor ones, we in the rich world do a catastrophically bad job of making hard choices, myself included. We keep people alive, when they aren't able to live, and we treat the absolute maximum survivability of one individual as paramount over the reasonable survivability of many. It's an emotional allocation of resources, not an efficient one. Whether it's healthcare dollars or peoples organs, they are in truth, resources which can be, and are managed. The goal is to manage them efficiently. That needs to combine the people, and actual experts, who are removed from the emotional realities of the situation.
When a soldier sees a grenade land in the middle of his unit, and, in 3 seconds or less decides his life is worse less than his comrades jumps on the grenade and kills himself, whether he (and the rest his unit) could have all managed to get out of the way or not, we give them a posthumous medal, a flag, usually a promotion in rank so his family gets a better pension. But when a person spends years carefully assessing their role in the world, and the quality of life they have, vs what they can do we get all offended.
I think it's encouraging that we would start looking to preserve lives, rather than a life. When you stop throwing silly amounts of money at a problem you start thinking responsibly about what is important, and what can, and should be done. If you build a system that lets people be (emotionally) greedy, and stupid, they will be, because people are. If you build a system centred around helping not just your mental state, but the physical and mental state of people who you don't even know you're more likely to get a more efficient use of the resources available. This requires first and foremost that doctors be honest with patients, and each other, about what a prognosis is. Secondly it require a society that lets people be honest with themselves about what their prognosis is. As the original article states, this guy has had 2 years to come to grips with this, when the life expectancy for someone with ALS is about 4 years (20k people with ALS, 5k/year diagnosis). For every stephen hawking there are probably 4999 people who don't even make the 4 year mark, the quicker you can come to grips with the time you have, the more you can do with it, and the more you can value the time someone else might have too.
Um... FF7 was huge eye candy back in the day. It was one of the first 3d games for the PS1, back when that was a new thing, and was hugely expensive. It probably started as the first 3d game for the PS1, but given square enix and deadlines it wasn't the first to market.
Game quality and graphics aren't really mutually exclusive anymore. They are are different skillsets, with different people. The game designer has decided, rightly or wrongly, to allocate art time to a particular style of game, most of the levels people see in FF13 are linear (note that FF13 is perfectly linear for the main story only, it, oddly, opens up after that, that's purely a design decision, I'm not sure a good one, but a design decision and has nothing to do with graphics), FF7 is not linear, but that was a design decision, not a 'graphics vs gameplay' decision. With the same amount of money, and time you could have made a very different style of game than 13 with exactly the same game engine, and most of the same art assets.
20 years ago when a game development team was 10 guys (think indie games) some of whom know nothing about programming then yes, you were trading graphics for gameplay because your programmers who were also designers only had so much time. That definitely isn't the case now when development teams, if you include outsourcing can be hundreds of people.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that they aren't reusing existing technology, or why pushing the envelope is somehow a bad thing. Square enix licences the unreal engine, as do a mountain of other people, and there's lots of other technology out there. But what did you expect them to do, use the same engine they did for FF12 (on the PS2) for 13? Even within a hardware lifecycle there's a huge degree of difference in what you can do once you figure out how to use the hardware well. Compare resistance 1 to resistance 2, or the like, and if you aren't keeping your technology up to date, someone else is, and your product looks the worse for it. But you pick a target technology level, and work at that level, it's not like the night before the game ships they're trying to come up with some new BRDF to better model a characters hair, or some new parallelization system to squeeze slightly more performance out, those sorts of engine architecture decisions are made months, if not years before the game actually ships.
Ok TFA isn't bad, in that it makes clear professor Larsons analysis is basically crap. A former professor of spanish failing at stats doesn't warrant a slashdot posting. Overall rates of accidents involving pedestrians are down over the last 10 years, some car makers are working on making sure their vehicles will be audible, and proposed legislation is mostly crap. None of this is news.
no matter how hard you try some exhaust from a diesel engine gets into a submarine, and at the end of a deployment, well, everyone smells like diesel exhaust. It's not a good thing.
Though your view of reactors is US centric. The Soviets/Russians found uses for nuclear reactors in icebreakers and other generally big surface ships.
The French/UK future carrier is a good lesson in different perceptions of cost/value. Originally the two were going to use basically the same design, then it was the same design, but the french would use nuclear the british not, and then they split the project completely when it actually came to designing something. The british view, as being applies to their new carriers is that nuclear power basically isn't worth the expense, the french disagree, and would rather the initial investment. I have no idea if either party is 'right'.
a better analogy would probably have been to say you already have a hose, there's not shutoff valve, and you're trying to cap it with one of those spray nozzles. In that case, as I've done with some old hoses where I didn't ( was too lazy or forgot) to turn off the tap the hose eventually bursts, in several places. Where you go from a problem of one leak, in one (relatively) convenient shape, with a sort of hackable even temporary solution, to several cracks in several places.
Though I live in canada, pipes bursting inside the walls of the house can be a serious problem if you don't drain them properly when winter sets in.
The 'extraction' is more that it's easier to funnel some of the leak somewhere, and it has to go somewhere, than it is to actually stop the leak (which IMO isn't a bad plan really). AFAIK basically they've always needed relief wells or nuclear weapons or a working blowout preventer to get stuff to stop. Imagine an outside tap on your house that won't close, sticking something on there which will actually plug the leak, while under pressure is pretty hard. Screwing on a hose is messy, but once it's on at least you're funnelling the (in this case) water wherever you want it, it'll be leaky, but a lot better than nothing. Fitting on a new tap while there is flow is pretty tough, not impossible though, and if you stick a cap on it, and the cap bursts you're probably further behind than if you'd just left the partially connected hose.
The whole thing has been to some degree theatre. Dumping dispersant on light oil is dramatically worse than just letting it get to the surface and evaporate, but they had to be seen to be doing something. Building a cap to hold it in was always, at best a temporary solution, and everything they do risks making the problem worse. Funnelling as best they could until relief wells could be made was probably the only viable choice, at this point whether they can cap the leak for a week or two isn't going to make meaningful impact on the overall size of the spill, a useful learning exercise for the next time something like this happens, but not all that useful now.
The question will be what to do if the relief wells fail in some way, because then the number of options is pretty low.
I doubt the amount of oil they could get hardly justifies worrying about. Even if they're getting 20K barrels of actual oil a day that they can sell at say 80 bucks a barrel, that's only about 1.6 million bucks a day, for a business that's doing ~690 million USD in revenue a day, and spending probably 20 or 30 billion dollars on this, a few hundred million here or there is unlikely to even make notice on a balance sheet, and risk extremely bad press for very little gain.
It's a bit different because every game will have it's own DLC system. Right now there are only a handful of drm systems, (perhaps with several versions), used across multiple titles, compromise said DRM once, and you've compromised all of the games that use it. DLC is a whole other ballgame. Want to install it? (Or activate it for that matter), you need to be logged into your account with the publisher, want to use it, you need to log in, or maybe it installs from within the game, or glues into the game in a particular way. If each game installs, and or activates its own DLC in a different way then ya, sure, the big titles will probably still get cracked, but no one will want invest the effort in the smaller titles. Just the same as no one is going to spend dozens or hundreds of man hours figuring out how to rip a CD made by my highschool band, but they will for the latest taylor swift album (she was best seller in 2009 after all), and if you run the same program to rip both disks, well, you get the idea.
Believe it or not, it's not really Halo they're trying to save here, although COD, and the Sims get the big numbers for piracy it probably isn't going to kill those franchises, the smaller titles, alpha protocol, metro 2033 the guild, hearts of iron, conflict reign of nations, sword of the stars etc.. guys were 10 or 15% lost sales (which I distinguish from number of copies pirates) can be the difference between profitability or not.
So ya, on one hand you're moving the problem of where the DRM is, but if each game is different then it's raising the barrier to entry for hacking quite a lot. Not that it will do much good, but they might be able to generate more revenue, sell a 'game' for 10 bucks, sell 4 more chunks of it for 10 bucks each and you'll might get less pirates, some converts who pay for the first part, decide they don't like it and don't buy the rest, than the current crop of 'I'll buy it if I like it after I've 'demoed' it crowd', at which point you definitely get nothing.
It has the dual benefit of going after used game sales at the throat. Since your DLC will be tied to your account you cannot 'resell it', and they can can still sell DLC to the next guy who buys your boxed copy, so long as they bother making boxed copies.
Having used as my primary laptop a windows tablet for years, with several different tablets (not slates, like the iPad), having pen input, from it's own digital ink pen is super handy. Touchscreen, hell I have a crappy 10 inch HP from a couple years ago that does that, but it's a feature you wish it didn't have. It works fine (your finger replaces the mouse, simple, intuitive, easy to use, easy to understand), but you don't want to be handling your screen when you're using a pen. MS has all the technology there, and it works, it's a matter of putting in the right places to meet market demands, which, to be fair, isn't really MS's thing. They make stuff for companies to buy, and then companies package it up and resell. Apple's model works in certain spaces because they manage the whole process, and have coherent vision between the UI designers and the hardware guys, it also significantly limits the innovative designs one could have for specialty markets
However, having used a (convertible) tablet for years. They are super useful. Smartpens are awesome, but because most of them record audio you can't use them in big business. But a tablet you can write, or type notes and diagrams during meetings (even technical meetings) and archive them for later, and send them around. Being able to annotate power point presentations, in real time, with a pen, that can map to what other people are scrawling on their notes is super useful as well. Do companies need it? Well, companies existed long before computers, so I don't think they 'need' anything, but it can be worth the investment. If the cost is low enough it's worth the money. For a converStible tablet the base hardware cost only goes up by 50 or 60 bucks on a thousand dollar purchase, it's definitely worth that, but it's probably not worth 1000 bucks on it's own.
Slates are another animal entirely though. Without pen input (either a regular pen, or some sort of special one) they're pretty limited in use. You can only type on a touchscreen keyboard that's the wrong size so fast. That makes slates OK for data output, but not so much data input. But I think MS has an opportunity here because all these specialist machines businesses (barcode scanners, notetaking etc), they can let windows 7 support all of that, while at the same time not force any of those things on you if you don't need it. Apple gives you one product, that meets one (granted one big) market segment, but MS can, with its hardware partners hit a lot more market segments and drive a lot more integration with windows 7 desktops, if they can organize the vision.
Flawless, no. But it's a reasonable expectation that your phone should have a failure rate comparable to other phones on the market. It's also reasonable that if a problem exists that puts the failure rate of your device well outside industry norms (think xbox360) the device will be repaired or fixed both for free and in a reasonable timeframe.
In canada for example we have laws that require cell phones, even ones not attached to a plan, and with no carrier, can connect to 911. It's a nightmare for 911 if they call and cannot give a location, but if I buy a cellphone in canada I can expect that it will connect to 911. I don't know if we have rules about downtime, dropped calls or silent calls, but I'm sure there are large tomes of requirements that all the companies have to comply to for all sorts of stuff. I can expect that those will be followed, or the CRTC/FCC will send in the lawyers.
Cars get recalled for defects/repairs, so do drinking glasses from MacDonalds and children's toys, my cell phone falls somewhere between those points on a spectrum of cost and utility, and yes, your life can depend on it, just because we 'got by' with landline phones doesn't mean they didn't cost lives, there just wasn't anything you could do about it.
I took my battle.net authenticator off my iPhone and got a physical one precisely because as you say, smartphones fail a lot, I've had to reinstall the OS 3 or 4 times so far (iPhone 3g) and it spent 14 hours updating to iOS4. Not exactly my idea of a reliable device. But my GF has a nokia dumbphone, which has never had an OS update, and never needed a reboot, so maybe since my phone cost 10x as much as hers, (+ data plan) I can expect better reliability, and won't be looking to apple to replace my smartphone. People don't buy a Lexus rather than a regular old toyota for the fun of it, premium markets (which I count smart phones as part of) do still have problems, but you're paying for more functionality, not less, and a phone that can't make calls is by definition less functional.
Well this basic problem applies to a lot of games that don't get sequels or the like. Did alpha protocol fail because of piracy or bad reviews? Or maybe a bit of both. Well maybe alpha protocol itself didn't fail, it just wasn't profitable enough, (especially given the TV ad budget) and so 'beta protocol' or alpha protocol 2 or whatever they would have made failed before it got out the sparkle in a devs eye phase.
I'm not sure the original question is a sensible one. It's asking for a fairly elaborate study, to try and correlate lost sales to piracy directly, which is hard (but probably not impossible) to decouple from things like reviews, bad press and so on. I think if a game needs to sell a million copies to be successful, but only sells 900k, but has your aforementioned 3:1 piracy rate then ya, maybe we can say piracy caused it to fail. But of course other things could cause it to fail too. It's not like there's an example of two identically desirable games, where one has zero piracy, and the other has some 'average' amount of it to make the analysis easy.
When you look at, for example, some iphone games that claim piracy rates of 90% or more (http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/the-little-tank-that-could-for-iphone-was-pirated-96-percent-of-the-time-20090729/ for example), and that's on products that cost 2 bucks, you've gotta figure some of them 'fail' because of piracy, but the market is so small that you may not normally hear of it. If your 'success' is to sell 10k copies of your game, for $15k in 'revenue' (some loss to app store, tax man, price drops eventually etc.), but in the end you only sell 500, well, ok so you're out $14K, but for most of us (in the western world at least), we decide the whole thing was a failed experiment and move on. It's an expensive resume pad, but for most of us $14k in lost sales, which may or may not translate to actual debts isn't going to send us spiralling into bankruptcy all over the front page of CNN.
And of course, we're sort of guessing at definitions of success here. I worked (briefly) at a fairly large company where 'failure' was anything less than 20% ROI every year, which they almost never achieved, yet have been in business for decades. Any unit that didn't make 20% ROI was on the verge of being axed or sold. So my definition of 'success' was making money, their definition of success was making enough money to justify share price, and their management style dictated one target for success on an individual unit basis, and another measure of success for the shareholders (whom, continue to buy shares of said company), after all you might say to an internal unit that only made 11% ROI that they're miserable failures and they don't deserve any more funding, but in your shareholder meeting you sing the praises of your average 10% ROI.
If you know what companies are 'worth' why aren't you out making a pile of money either shorting them if they're too high or buying if they're too low? What exactly justifies your price of 5000? Really, what defines the worth of a company? A company's worth isn't some discretely tangible thing, as much as we'd all like that. You buy or sell stocks based on what you think the price and dividends are going to be at some point in the future. Which can suddenly change if you know... there's a major oil spill in the gulf of mexico. The DOW average is just a collection of some companies, which can then wildly distort the picture. Last year (roughly) GM was on the DOW but they went bankrupt, so just a guess, but that might have dragged the market down a bit. On June 8th of 2009, so my 'roughly' one year ago, citi and GM got tossed off the DOW. So maybe the new DOW really is worth a lot more, or at least is projected to be worth a lot more.
As to your assertion that it's being propped up by funny money. Well not exactly. I'll grant that the US dollar is a bit screwy, but since the DOW is in US dollars the the dollar could change down -50%, DOW could change +100%, and the total value if you were to consider it in Euro's would be unchanged. Of course the US dollar factors into things because people are more confident in the US managing its debts than say, botswana or nigeria, or the PIIGS. Of course in that situation, in the the last year, money will have been taken out of those foreign accounts and dumped into US dollar businesses, which in turn inflated both the dollar and the DOW, and reflects a real shift in money from one region to another.
ya if anything this was a strong supporter of high frequency trading. The market corrected before the vast majority of people were even aware there was a stock market dip. What caused the initial dip is well outside my area of expertise (since I don't follow the second to second activities of traders), but after it did happen, that it went back to be in line with it's roughly steady state seems like the system is work.
High frequency trading allows rapid price normalization between exchanges, which is good, and while the rate of the fluctuations is faster, that doesn't necessarily change the average value over time.
not all autism is crippling. It can have a fairly broad spectrum, and the argument the OP seems to be trying to make is that quite a lot of the geeks and nerds in the world are a high functioning form of autism. I wouldn't guess as to percentage, but having worked in a disabilities service office at a university for 4 years, the sciences have a disproportionate share of the autism types, whereas the arts tend to cope better with ADHD types and so on.
Granted, a lot of this is self fulfilling. People with aspergers get into positions in universities and schools and build a nurturing environment for other people with aspergers. I live in ontario, and we are in the process of implementing new laws called the Accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities acts (AODA). At my particular institution the arts have been all over trying to get compliance, and be more accessible, whereas the science departments figure they've been accessible enough (and to a large degree are correct), and that the training is a waste of time. The implicit undercurrent is that the science departments already are accessible, because otherwise there wouldn't be any domestic scientists.
There is a lot to be said for treating even the mild cases though. Anger management is a major issue for a lot of people with autism, and they risk taking it out on subordinates in a fashion that to the rest of us is utterly irrational, equally a lack of social skills can limit their access to useful employment, and while they tend to need a different sort of office from the more socially amenable types, they can be remarkably productive, if they can get a job. It's also useful to know in advance the sorts of things you need to watch out for as a parent or in my case as a guy who fixed printers in an office full of students with some sorts of disability - people with autism will have odd movement behaviours which can be both distracting and disruptive, as well as have anger outburts if the printer doesn't work right away. In my experience they aren't good at personal responsibility either(you pushed the wrong button, it doesn't matter what you think the button should have done, that's not what it does, and getting mad at me over it doesn't teach you how to push the correct one next time type problems), but that is not part of any official diagnosis.
According to foxconns official website they have production facilities at two sites in the PRC, one in ROC (taiwan), europe, the US etc.
http://www.foxconn.com/NWInG/about/global.asp
The parent company Hon Hai precision industry (They way I understand this is they are essentially the same company with an English façade and a Chinese one) has 900k employees with something like 300-400k of them at the one facility in question. Mostly from other websites.
And a number of sources including a (admittedly somewhat biased) reuters article seem to imply this is the go to place for apples production stuff. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61G3XA20100217
If you meant in reference to trying to skirt around building the it's own high tech sweatshop, that's the point of outsourcing. You don't pay Western (EU/NAFTA/JAPAN) wages, you don't have to follow their environmental and labour laws, including hours worked. When you have one major supplier for all your stuff and suddenly it turns out they do something that would not be tolerated in your main place of business you feign ignorance, feign outrage and hope no one notices that not a lot changes. This is most definitely not unique to Apple.
This is the same problem passwords have. And the (first) part of the solution seems to be don't store the password, store the result of a one way function on the password (think hashes or md5's). Ideally these one way functions, even if they use the same algorithm could use different seed values on different databases. Now the trick here of course is that the one way function really really really needs to be only one way, and the places where the data is grabbed (biometric devices themselves) need to be difficult to compromise.
The problem with passwords is largely that there are these large databases of passwords that people compare to. If the database of pwds didn't exist, if it was just a db of hashes on pwd's if it's compromised odds are whomever copied it couldn't just go and try those username/pwd pairs a dozen other places.
No matter what though, there's nothing you can do that on the one hand specifically identifies you and at the same time not be duplicable somewhere else for enough effort.
To give a simple example of a one way function (that isn't unique) is say count the consonants in a word. So if the password is word, then the 1-way function is 3. There's no unique way to go from 3 back to word, so the pwd itself is secured, but then your function so weak that it would accept a lot of other stuff as well, obviously there are a lot of PhD's in math earned concocting more useful 1-way functions than that.
I dunno. If I have a factory, or in this case a small city, that makes products for one company, to that companies designs and that companies security compliance rules how separate is it really? Sure Foxconn sells to anybody who pays, but the facility in question seems to be primarily an apple factory that allows apple to skirt around running it's own high tech sweatshop. Granted that's sort of the point of doing business in the PRC in the first place.
part of the problem here seems to be that this factory has 400k employees. I live in London ontario and we have 400k people, and this is, by canadian standards a decent sized place. The sheer scale of this sort of operation is mind boggling to most westerners. How does the suicide rate for their 400k employees compare to walmart, or GE or the like?
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, a lot of people your fathers age and older, unless you're like 10 now, were likely to be conscripted into any conflict (they tend to be about one a generation or so), in that situation enlisting, for all of it's many faults may be a lesser evil than being forced to serve later. At least when you enlist you can choose which part of a service to go to.
volunteering to fight an illegal recolonization effort and you want respect? It's precisely that sort of thinking that has them wanting to kill you in the first place. Think long and hard about what you said. Seriously. There are countless british and french army types who volunteered to help 'civilize' various parts of the world (including Iraq), and countless colonial troops of various countries who wanted to variously bring religion to 'savages', wipe out the natives to make living space etc. Volunteering to help a colonial power expand it's ambitions is not worthy of respect. It is worthy of our disgust and disdain. If you idiots would stop volunteering they'd be forced to make truly difficult choices about what to do in Iraq. Is it worth conscription? Even after what happened in Vietnam? Right now they pile on the money and they get mercenaries, I'm sorry PMC's, and volunteers, none of whom are helping the situation. The reason, after you apparently 'liberated' them from Saddam Hussein they still want to kill you is that your still there, and still volunteering to go, (and when you are there tend to have a habit of killing innocent people, though that by definition is not intentional). It would be comically farcical if it wasn't so serious. Iraq, whether there are colonization forces there or not is a teetering mess, because it's the hub of the clash between saudi and iran for status as the dominant regional power, stabilization comes when those two stop funding a proxy war, at least temporarily.
One could reasonably argue that Afghanistan at least started out as a different situation. It certainly isn't now. But back in the 1990's and 2000's the driving forces behind the Anti-US movement were related to Israel, Egypt, and the US forces in Saudi, not all of which were particularly legitimate grievances (hence the terrorism for all its flair remained mostly rare, and of somewhat less dramatic support). Since the US recolonization effort in Iraq, you've put a giant beacon to the world saying 'hey look at us, all that crazy evil stuff OBL claimed we were doing but weren't, well, now we are!'
And no, a /. posting isn't likely to change your mind, or your income tax free + 225/mo imminent danger pay either. But your sob story of 'oh I'm in Abu Ghraib, I volunteered and they still want to kill me, you should respect me' isn't going to change my view. I'll presume you weren't involved in that previous business in abu ghraib with the torture etc. The people trying to kill you are all volunteers too, though they're more likely to be in it for an ideology (however crazy that may be) than the money. So ok I'll be at least sympathetic to you for that, at least you're probably in it for the money rather than for some misguided ideology about bringing some combination of Christianity or civilization to iraq. So no, you don't have my respect, you might have my sympathy, if you were so hard up for work and money to feed yourself this seemed like your last resort. At least if you learn arabic while you're there you can get a respectable job importing or exporting stuff with the middle east, just as a tip, don't tell them you were in Iraq, unless you want them to try and kill you during a meeting.
Most high end gpus ramp down a bit when they're getting too hot, and ramp up the fan. However, if you're overclocking, well, the fan doesn't go that high.
And ya, GPU's aren't designed to operate at 100% indefinitely. They seem like it, but since the load is never on every part of the card all at once you only rarely run the full card at max. When your GTX 480 is blowing at full speed in crysis it's probably not fully utilizing all of the shaders (some are waiting for others), some of the memory system (since it's all loaded already) that sort of thing. Hence I said there's stuff a programmer can do.
I suppose we can disagree on who the design issue falls with. I took the ops design issue as a system builder level issue. When building a system there's not much I can do about how the video card was designed, and when building a GPU, they don't actually physically build and test them much, if at all, before selling them. NVIDIA prides itself on their sales being 'first silicon' because they design all in software. Which sounds great until you get a GTX480.
Also your definition of appropriate margins of error, and mine are probably very different. Most modern top end GPU"s (480, 5970) require nearly 100% efficiency on the fan to match their TDP, and a layer of dusty gunk will kill them, at least first run parts. I'm not sure you'd find much agreement on how clean or not you can expect computers to be (or what PSU's they'll have), and there's going to be a lot of variability even in the high end part. A porche911 that never has it's oil changed just plain isn't being used as designed. That's not the designers fault, that's the owners.
Not so much design. A few other new games have had this issue (notably Star trek online).
TDP assumes, wrongly, that your card is perfectly clean, and that the fan controls are always correct, which might be the case on a reference designed card, but might not quite be the case on factory overclocked boards or if there have been aftermarket tweaks to the driver to adjust the fan speed (which is usually a noise problem).
You're also assuming the fan is still perfectly mounted (which it might not have been in the first place), and that sort of thing. The PSU needs to be able to feed enough juice to the card, the case needs to be properly ventilated (and ideally cleaned), and god knows what other bits you've got in this board. Lots of boards have a northbridge fan that sits directly above the (first) gpu nowdays.
As a developer there's a bit you can, and should be doing to prevent this sort of thing. This sort of problem happens a couple of ways. One is the 'draw a simple scene as fast as possible' scenario in SC so cap the framerate at something like 120. The other is basically constantly feed the card as much data as possible (some beta builds of STO and early release had this problem), that was basically a problem of not being able to fit a whole area/level in memory, or not wanting to cause a load screen, so you're maxing out your bandwidth to push data to the card, while at the same time letting the player fly around and shoot stuff (and said stuff shoot back). One of the things here is to do a better job of controlling what's being sent to the card in the first place (BSP trees for example). That's a problem that the card will render a scene to look correct even if you treat it badly, so you can sort of plod through development like that, but you shouldn't assume that the uncleaned 3 year old system one of your customers has will be as pristine as your development machines.
When driving a car you can 'floor it' for a few seconds, but if you left it that way your engine would eventually overheat, if you've ever gotten stuck in the snow or on ice you'll know what I'm talking about. GPU's are similar. When your comp starts or when you do specific things with an application they can run with all of it's parts at full power, but only for a little while. If you do that for too long eventually it will burn out.
And adding them in takes time to do right, and there is no point in doing it wrong, especially for older profs who won't have time to get it right.
Honestly, none of the 'tech' mentioned in article are broadly applicable. Interactive 'clickers' cost money, regularly don't work, are easily lost, and are a nightmare to manage, there's no easy way to detect mistake with them, and are only useful in large first year type classes. Not that they're really useful there, but they look like they'd be useful so profs try it, and then people like me have to figure out how to cope with them not working regularly. Oh and did I mention they cost money? Which we make students buy, who may not use the stupid thing ever again.
Group activities and so on are fine, if you have time. My undergrad (theoretical physics), most classes were 3 hours of lecture, 3 hours of lab per week (that's time with a TA/instructor), comp sci, where I am now as a PhD student, has 3 hours of lecture, 2 hours of lab in some first year courses and virtually no labs later. Group activities in class are slow as molasses, and waste time you could be well, covering content, which students are expected to know. As always in school, with a group activity it's usually one person or a small subset of a group that actually does the work. They're suitable for lab sessions, assuming you don't need 2 hours and 45 minutes of focus to take data (which happens occasionally but not usually).
Video conferencing is situational. Where it's useful, it's really useful, but normally it's of no value. I've taken courses while physical at one university from another (at University of guelph, course taught at waterloo), and at several places I've been they have 'distance' ed courses. But with enough students you don't want them, on an individual basis trying to conference call with you, you want them in class, focused on the class.
Lots of these 'technologies' you could try, I would call 'distractions', and think are better left out of classrooms. They're distractions in the real world too, but there it's up to your boss to worry about how much time you're actually working or not. In academia we don't want to facilitate the students distracting themselves, that seems counter productive. The technology I use when teaching is I give students powerpoint slides in advance, and then use a tablet to annotate the slides, and work problems etc, (and make corrections) in class, so the students are 'following along' with the notes, they have to at least read them a bit. It's not ideal but there's a lot of stuff in comp sci notes, especially when you're doing computer graphics that you can't reproduce in real time in front of them (actually correct code, diagrams that sort of thing).
Some other places are reporting this as both saudi and the UAE (http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100801/world/ml_emirates_blackberry). Saudi being a somewhat bigger market.
except that it's what happens now. NHS trusts, insurance companies, national healthcare provides, even hospital administrators do that now. And in reality, it works out pretty well.
except that MS has been in the tablet business for years, and they envision the product differently. What software does the ipad need? A decent OS? An 'office' type app? Well ok, it needs a completely different OS, which MS isn't about to make, and I don't see them wanting to put office on the iPad, so what software should they make? MS doesn't really make software that belongs on another companies OS. Deployment software, development kits, I guess their customer relation software, but why would you want that to sync with a competitors device, that seems like a bad business plan. Their e-mail suite is unnecessary. In short, anything MS makes that the iPad needs they aren't about to make for a competitor, and anything else they make you wouldn't want on a slate anyway.
MS should take their years of experience with tablets, and their decent windows 7 that runs on antiquated hardware, and put windows 7... the actual OS, on a slate. Want to run office on your slate? Well... you can do that. Want to run, well, any of your windows apps that work on a system with these specs, go to it. Just like they already do, either use a pen or your finger to replace the mouse (there are a few options for single/double clicking), and some UI elements, but frankly I'm sick of carrying around a phone with a bunch of apps that won't run on my desktop, and having a bunch of apps on my desktop that won't run on my phone, and the ipad is basically just a bigger version of incompatible phone. That doesn't mean they shouldn't shake up the look and feel of the OS for a slate, but the core underlying functionality could be the same.
Oh, and since it's an open market, MS doesn't need to try and control the content you put on your slate. Imagine being able to put apps on that don't have to be approved my Steve Jobs & co (including custom apps for work that shouldn't need to be approved by anyone outside your company anyway).
This also leaves it up to vendors to set the tier. Willing to spend 7 grand on a slate, I bet I could make one with much better specs than the iPad. Want to spend 7k on an iPad... I can glue some diamonds on it for you I guess. Want a cheaper device, want one that meets specific durability/form factor/colour/logo requirements, no problem, the hundreds of hardware vendors out there can figure something out.
preserving one life, or preserving several.
I don't suppose any of these decisions are easy, but how many people die every year due to a lack of an available organ? How many people do we keep alive for a few days, or a few hours just for the benefit of their families emotional state (which is a product of a culture we created), and in the process wreck their organs?
Having grown up in a rich country (canada), and spent a lot of time in poor ones, we in the rich world do a catastrophically bad job of making hard choices, myself included. We keep people alive, when they aren't able to live, and we treat the absolute maximum survivability of one individual as paramount over the reasonable survivability of many. It's an emotional allocation of resources, not an efficient one. Whether it's healthcare dollars or peoples organs, they are in truth, resources which can be, and are managed. The goal is to manage them efficiently. That needs to combine the people, and actual experts, who are removed from the emotional realities of the situation.
When a soldier sees a grenade land in the middle of his unit, and, in 3 seconds or less decides his life is worse less than his comrades jumps on the grenade and kills himself, whether he (and the rest his unit) could have all managed to get out of the way or not, we give them a posthumous medal, a flag, usually a promotion in rank so his family gets a better pension. But when a person spends years carefully assessing their role in the world, and the quality of life they have, vs what they can do we get all offended.
I think it's encouraging that we would start looking to preserve lives, rather than a life. When you stop throwing silly amounts of money at a problem you start thinking responsibly about what is important, and what can, and should be done. If you build a system that lets people be (emotionally) greedy, and stupid, they will be, because people are. If you build a system centred around helping not just your mental state, but the physical and mental state of people who you don't even know you're more likely to get a more efficient use of the resources available. This requires first and foremost that doctors be honest with patients, and each other, about what a prognosis is. Secondly it require a society that lets people be honest with themselves about what their prognosis is. As the original article states, this guy has had 2 years to come to grips with this, when the life expectancy for someone with ALS is about 4 years (20k people with ALS, 5k/year diagnosis). For every stephen hawking there are probably 4999 people who don't even make the 4 year mark, the quicker you can come to grips with the time you have, the more you can do with it, and the more you can value the time someone else might have too.
Um... FF7 was huge eye candy back in the day. It was one of the first 3d games for the PS1, back when that was a new thing, and was hugely expensive. It probably started as the first 3d game for the PS1, but given square enix and deadlines it wasn't the first to market.
Game quality and graphics aren't really mutually exclusive anymore. They are are different skillsets, with different people. The game designer has decided, rightly or wrongly, to allocate art time to a particular style of game, most of the levels people see in FF13 are linear (note that FF13 is perfectly linear for the main story only, it, oddly, opens up after that, that's purely a design decision, I'm not sure a good one, but a design decision and has nothing to do with graphics), FF7 is not linear, but that was a design decision, not a 'graphics vs gameplay' decision. With the same amount of money, and time you could have made a very different style of game than 13 with exactly the same game engine, and most of the same art assets.
20 years ago when a game development team was 10 guys (think indie games) some of whom know nothing about programming then yes, you were trading graphics for gameplay because your programmers who were also designers only had so much time. That definitely isn't the case now when development teams, if you include outsourcing can be hundreds of people.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that they aren't reusing existing technology, or why pushing the envelope is somehow a bad thing. Square enix licences the unreal engine, as do a mountain of other people, and there's lots of other technology out there. But what did you expect them to do, use the same engine they did for FF12 (on the PS2) for 13? Even within a hardware lifecycle there's a huge degree of difference in what you can do once you figure out how to use the hardware well. Compare resistance 1 to resistance 2, or the like, and if you aren't keeping your technology up to date, someone else is, and your product looks the worse for it. But you pick a target technology level, and work at that level, it's not like the night before the game ships they're trying to come up with some new BRDF to better model a characters hair, or some new parallelization system to squeeze slightly more performance out, those sorts of engine architecture decisions are made months, if not years before the game actually ships.
Ok TFA isn't bad, in that it makes clear professor Larsons analysis is basically crap. A former professor of spanish failing at stats doesn't warrant a slashdot posting. Overall rates of accidents involving pedestrians are down over the last 10 years, some car makers are working on making sure their vehicles will be audible, and proposed legislation is mostly crap. None of this is news.
no matter how hard you try some exhaust from a diesel engine gets into a submarine, and at the end of a deployment, well, everyone smells like diesel exhaust. It's not a good thing.
Though your view of reactors is US centric. The Soviets/Russians found uses for nuclear reactors in icebreakers and other generally big surface ships.
The French/UK future carrier is a good lesson in different perceptions of cost/value. Originally the two were going to use basically the same design, then it was the same design, but the french would use nuclear the british not, and then they split the project completely when it actually came to designing something. The british view, as being applies to their new carriers is that nuclear power basically isn't worth the expense, the french disagree, and would rather the initial investment. I have no idea if either party is 'right'.
a better analogy would probably have been to say you already have a hose, there's not shutoff valve, and you're trying to cap it with one of those spray nozzles. In that case, as I've done with some old hoses where I didn't ( was too lazy or forgot) to turn off the tap the hose eventually bursts, in several places. Where you go from a problem of one leak, in one (relatively) convenient shape, with a sort of hackable even temporary solution, to several cracks in several places.
Though I live in canada, pipes bursting inside the walls of the house can be a serious problem if you don't drain them properly when winter sets in.
The 'extraction' is more that it's easier to funnel some of the leak somewhere, and it has to go somewhere, than it is to actually stop the leak (which IMO isn't a bad plan really). AFAIK basically they've always needed relief wells or nuclear weapons or a working blowout preventer to get stuff to stop. Imagine an outside tap on your house that won't close, sticking something on there which will actually plug the leak, while under pressure is pretty hard. Screwing on a hose is messy, but once it's on at least you're funnelling the (in this case) water wherever you want it, it'll be leaky, but a lot better than nothing. Fitting on a new tap while there is flow is pretty tough, not impossible though, and if you stick a cap on it, and the cap bursts you're probably further behind than if you'd just left the partially connected hose.
The whole thing has been to some degree theatre. Dumping dispersant on light oil is dramatically worse than just letting it get to the surface and evaporate, but they had to be seen to be doing something. Building a cap to hold it in was always, at best a temporary solution, and everything they do risks making the problem worse. Funnelling as best they could until relief wells could be made was probably the only viable choice, at this point whether they can cap the leak for a week or two isn't going to make meaningful impact on the overall size of the spill, a useful learning exercise for the next time something like this happens, but not all that useful now.
The question will be what to do if the relief wells fail in some way, because then the number of options is pretty low.
I doubt the amount of oil they could get hardly justifies worrying about. Even if they're getting 20K barrels of actual oil a day that they can sell at say 80 bucks a barrel, that's only about 1.6 million bucks a day, for a business that's doing ~690 million USD in revenue a day, and spending probably 20 or 30 billion dollars on this, a few hundred million here or there is unlikely to even make notice on a balance sheet, and risk extremely bad press for very little gain.
It's a bit different because every game will have it's own DLC system. Right now there are only a handful of drm systems, (perhaps with several versions), used across multiple titles, compromise said DRM once, and you've compromised all of the games that use it. DLC is a whole other ballgame. Want to install it? (Or activate it for that matter), you need to be logged into your account with the publisher, want to use it, you need to log in, or maybe it installs from within the game, or glues into the game in a particular way. If each game installs, and or activates its own DLC in a different way then ya, sure, the big titles will probably still get cracked, but no one will want invest the effort in the smaller titles. Just the same as no one is going to spend dozens or hundreds of man hours figuring out how to rip a CD made by my highschool band, but they will for the latest taylor swift album (she was best seller in 2009 after all), and if you run the same program to rip both disks, well, you get the idea.
Believe it or not, it's not really Halo they're trying to save here, although COD, and the Sims get the big numbers for piracy it probably isn't going to kill those franchises, the smaller titles, alpha protocol, metro 2033 the guild, hearts of iron, conflict reign of nations, sword of the stars etc.. guys were 10 or 15% lost sales (which I distinguish from number of copies pirates) can be the difference between profitability or not.
So ya, on one hand you're moving the problem of where the DRM is, but if each game is different then it's raising the barrier to entry for hacking quite a lot. Not that it will do much good, but they might be able to generate more revenue, sell a 'game' for 10 bucks, sell 4 more chunks of it for 10 bucks each and you'll might get less pirates, some converts who pay for the first part, decide they don't like it and don't buy the rest, than the current crop of 'I'll buy it if I like it after I've 'demoed' it crowd', at which point you definitely get nothing.
It has the dual benefit of going after used game sales at the throat. Since your DLC will be tied to your account you cannot 'resell it', and they can can still sell DLC to the next guy who buys your boxed copy, so long as they bother making boxed copies.
Having used as my primary laptop a windows tablet for years, with several different tablets (not slates, like the iPad), having pen input, from it's own digital ink pen is super handy. Touchscreen, hell I have a crappy 10 inch HP from a couple years ago that does that, but it's a feature you wish it didn't have. It works fine (your finger replaces the mouse, simple, intuitive, easy to use, easy to understand), but you don't want to be handling your screen when you're using a pen. MS has all the technology there, and it works, it's a matter of putting in the right places to meet market demands, which, to be fair, isn't really MS's thing. They make stuff for companies to buy, and then companies package it up and resell. Apple's model works in certain spaces because they manage the whole process, and have coherent vision between the UI designers and the hardware guys, it also significantly limits the innovative designs one could have for specialty markets
However, having used a (convertible) tablet for years. They are super useful. Smartpens are awesome, but because most of them record audio you can't use them in big business. But a tablet you can write, or type notes and diagrams during meetings (even technical meetings) and archive them for later, and send them around. Being able to annotate power point presentations, in real time, with a pen, that can map to what other people are scrawling on their notes is super useful as well. Do companies need it? Well, companies existed long before computers, so I don't think they 'need' anything, but it can be worth the investment. If the cost is low enough it's worth the money. For a converStible tablet the base hardware cost only goes up by 50 or 60 bucks on a thousand dollar purchase, it's definitely worth that, but it's probably not worth 1000 bucks on it's own.
Slates are another animal entirely though. Without pen input (either a regular pen, or some sort of special one) they're pretty limited in use. You can only type on a touchscreen keyboard that's the wrong size so fast. That makes slates OK for data output, but not so much data input. But I think MS has an opportunity here because all these specialist machines businesses (barcode scanners, notetaking etc), they can let windows 7 support all of that, while at the same time not force any of those things on you if you don't need it. Apple gives you one product, that meets one (granted one big) market segment, but MS can, with its hardware partners hit a lot more market segments and drive a lot more integration with windows 7 desktops, if they can organize the vision.
Flawless, no. But it's a reasonable expectation that your phone should have a failure rate comparable to other phones on the market. It's also reasonable that if a problem exists that puts the failure rate of your device well outside industry norms (think xbox360) the device will be repaired or fixed both for free and in a reasonable timeframe.
In canada for example we have laws that require cell phones, even ones not attached to a plan, and with no carrier, can connect to 911. It's a nightmare for 911 if they call and cannot give a location, but if I buy a cellphone in canada I can expect that it will connect to 911. I don't know if we have rules about downtime, dropped calls or silent calls, but I'm sure there are large tomes of requirements that all the companies have to comply to for all sorts of stuff. I can expect that those will be followed, or the CRTC/FCC will send in the lawyers.
Cars get recalled for defects/repairs, so do drinking glasses from MacDonalds and children's toys, my cell phone falls somewhere between those points on a spectrum of cost and utility, and yes, your life can depend on it, just because we 'got by' with landline phones doesn't mean they didn't cost lives, there just wasn't anything you could do about it.
I took my battle.net authenticator off my iPhone and got a physical one precisely because as you say, smartphones fail a lot, I've had to reinstall the OS 3 or 4 times so far (iPhone 3g) and it spent 14 hours updating to iOS4. Not exactly my idea of a reliable device. But my GF has a nokia dumbphone, which has never had an OS update, and never needed a reboot, so maybe since my phone cost 10x as much as hers, (+ data plan) I can expect better reliability, and won't be looking to apple to replace my smartphone. People don't buy a Lexus rather than a regular old toyota for the fun of it, premium markets (which I count smart phones as part of) do still have problems, but you're paying for more functionality, not less, and a phone that can't make calls is by definition less functional.
Well this basic problem applies to a lot of games that don't get sequels or the like. Did alpha protocol fail because of piracy or bad reviews? Or maybe a bit of both. Well maybe alpha protocol itself didn't fail, it just wasn't profitable enough, (especially given the TV ad budget) and so 'beta protocol' or alpha protocol 2 or whatever they would have made failed before it got out the sparkle in a devs eye phase.
I'm not sure the original question is a sensible one. It's asking for a fairly elaborate study, to try and correlate lost sales to piracy directly, which is hard (but probably not impossible) to decouple from things like reviews, bad press and so on. I think if a game needs to sell a million copies to be successful, but only sells 900k, but has your aforementioned 3:1 piracy rate then ya, maybe we can say piracy caused it to fail. But of course other things could cause it to fail too. It's not like there's an example of two identically desirable games, where one has zero piracy, and the other has some 'average' amount of it to make the analysis easy.
When you look at, for example, some iphone games that claim piracy rates of 90% or more (http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/the-little-tank-that-could-for-iphone-was-pirated-96-percent-of-the-time-20090729/ for example), and that's on products that cost 2 bucks, you've gotta figure some of them 'fail' because of piracy, but the market is so small that you may not normally hear of it. If your 'success' is to sell 10k copies of your game, for $15k in 'revenue' (some loss to app store, tax man, price drops eventually etc.), but in the end you only sell 500, well, ok so you're out $14K, but for most of us (in the western world at least), we decide the whole thing was a failed experiment and move on. It's an expensive resume pad, but for most of us $14k in lost sales, which may or may not translate to actual debts isn't going to send us spiralling into bankruptcy all over the front page of CNN.
And of course, we're sort of guessing at definitions of success here. I worked (briefly) at a fairly large company where 'failure' was anything less than 20% ROI every year, which they almost never achieved, yet have been in business for decades. Any unit that didn't make 20% ROI was on the verge of being axed or sold. So my definition of 'success' was making money, their definition of success was making enough money to justify share price, and their management style dictated one target for success on an individual unit basis, and another measure of success for the shareholders (whom, continue to buy shares of said company), after all you might say to an internal unit that only made 11% ROI that they're miserable failures and they don't deserve any more funding, but in your shareholder meeting you sing the praises of your average 10% ROI.
Yes because we all know that when warning labels are on everything, and it's the same warning label, that they're taken seriously.... not even close.
Unless the effect is immediate (even mild) I cannot imagine a problem like this turning out well.
If you know what companies are 'worth' why aren't you out making a pile of money either shorting them if they're too high or buying if they're too low? What exactly justifies your price of 5000? Really, what defines the worth of a company? A company's worth isn't some discretely tangible thing, as much as we'd all like that. You buy or sell stocks based on what you think the price and dividends are going to be at some point in the future. Which can suddenly change if you know... there's a major oil spill in the gulf of mexico. The DOW average is just a collection of some companies, which can then wildly distort the picture. Last year (roughly) GM was on the DOW but they went bankrupt, so just a guess, but that might have dragged the market down a bit. On June 8th of 2009, so my 'roughly' one year ago, citi and GM got tossed off the DOW. So maybe the new DOW really is worth a lot more, or at least is projected to be worth a lot more.
As to your assertion that it's being propped up by funny money. Well not exactly. I'll grant that the US dollar is a bit screwy, but since the DOW is in US dollars the the dollar could change down -50%, DOW could change +100%, and the total value if you were to consider it in Euro's would be unchanged. Of course the US dollar factors into things because people are more confident in the US managing its debts than say, botswana or nigeria, or the PIIGS. Of course in that situation, in the the last year, money will have been taken out of those foreign accounts and dumped into US dollar businesses, which in turn inflated both the dollar and the DOW, and reflects a real shift in money from one region to another.
ya if anything this was a strong supporter of high frequency trading. The market corrected before the vast majority of people were even aware there was a stock market dip. What caused the initial dip is well outside my area of expertise (since I don't follow the second to second activities of traders), but after it did happen, that it went back to be in line with it's roughly steady state seems like the system is work.
High frequency trading allows rapid price normalization between exchanges, which is good, and while the rate of the fluctuations is faster, that doesn't necessarily change the average value over time.
not all autism is crippling. It can have a fairly broad spectrum, and the argument the OP seems to be trying to make is that quite a lot of the geeks and nerds in the world are a high functioning form of autism. I wouldn't guess as to percentage, but having worked in a disabilities service office at a university for 4 years, the sciences have a disproportionate share of the autism types, whereas the arts tend to cope better with ADHD types and so on.
Granted, a lot of this is self fulfilling. People with aspergers get into positions in universities and schools and build a nurturing environment for other people with aspergers. I live in ontario, and we are in the process of implementing new laws called the Accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities acts (AODA). At my particular institution the arts have been all over trying to get compliance, and be more accessible, whereas the science departments figure they've been accessible enough (and to a large degree are correct), and that the training is a waste of time. The implicit undercurrent is that the science departments already are accessible, because otherwise there wouldn't be any domestic scientists.
There is a lot to be said for treating even the mild cases though. Anger management is a major issue for a lot of people with autism, and they risk taking it out on subordinates in a fashion that to the rest of us is utterly irrational, equally a lack of social skills can limit their access to useful employment, and while they tend to need a different sort of office from the more socially amenable types, they can be remarkably productive, if they can get a job. It's also useful to know in advance the sorts of things you need to watch out for as a parent or in my case as a guy who fixed printers in an office full of students with some sorts of disability - people with autism will have odd movement behaviours which can be both distracting and disruptive, as well as have anger outburts if the printer doesn't work right away. In my experience they aren't good at personal responsibility either(you pushed the wrong button, it doesn't matter what you think the button should have done, that's not what it does, and getting mad at me over it doesn't teach you how to push the correct one next time type problems), but that is not part of any official diagnosis.
According to foxconns official website they have production facilities at two sites in the PRC, one in ROC (taiwan), europe, the US etc.
http://www.foxconn.com/NWInG/about/global.asp
The parent company Hon Hai precision industry (They way I understand this is they are essentially the same company with an English façade and a Chinese one) has 900k employees with something like 300-400k of them at the one facility in question. Mostly from other websites.
And a number of sources including a (admittedly somewhat biased) reuters article seem to imply this is the go to place for apples production stuff. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61G3XA20100217
If you meant in reference to trying to skirt around building the it's own high tech sweatshop, that's the point of outsourcing. You don't pay Western (EU/NAFTA/JAPAN) wages, you don't have to follow their environmental and labour laws, including hours worked. When you have one major supplier for all your stuff and suddenly it turns out they do something that would not be tolerated in your main place of business you feign ignorance, feign outrage and hope no one notices that not a lot changes. This is most definitely not unique to Apple.
This is the same problem passwords have. And the (first) part of the solution seems to be don't store the password, store the result of a one way function on the password (think hashes or md5's). Ideally these one way functions, even if they use the same algorithm could use different seed values on different databases. Now the trick here of course is that the one way function really really really needs to be only one way, and the places where the data is grabbed (biometric devices themselves) need to be difficult to compromise.
The problem with passwords is largely that there are these large databases of passwords that people compare to. If the database of pwds didn't exist, if it was just a db of hashes on pwd's if it's compromised odds are whomever copied it couldn't just go and try those username/pwd pairs a dozen other places.
No matter what though, there's nothing you can do that on the one hand specifically identifies you and at the same time not be duplicable somewhere else for enough effort.
To give a simple example of a one way function (that isn't unique) is say count the consonants in a word. So if the password is word, then the 1-way function is 3. There's no unique way to go from 3 back to word, so the pwd itself is secured, but then your function so weak that it would accept a lot of other stuff as well, obviously there are a lot of PhD's in math earned concocting more useful 1-way functions than that.
I dunno. If I have a factory, or in this case a small city, that makes products for one company, to that companies designs and that companies security compliance rules how separate is it really? Sure Foxconn sells to anybody who pays, but the facility in question seems to be primarily an apple factory that allows apple to skirt around running it's own high tech sweatshop. Granted that's sort of the point of doing business in the PRC in the first place.
part of the problem here seems to be that this factory has 400k employees. I live in London ontario and we have 400k people, and this is, by canadian standards a decent sized place. The sheer scale of this sort of operation is mind boggling to most westerners. How does the suicide rate for their 400k employees compare to walmart, or GE or the like?