in the same way textbooks written by university professors are the property of the university? Doesn't work like that. At all. If it did there wouldn't be any textbooks.
yes, the trick with the advance degree is that you learn in advance about them and when to know how to use them. It also depends very much on what you end up doing at the end of it all,if you end up in a job where traditional search and sorting are your bread and butter you'll pick that up quickly, but not all jobs are like that. Linked lists and sorting is a first and second year problem, Greedy algorithms, graph theory, (shortest path stuff), linear programming are 3rd year and so on.
I'm taking a grad course in machine learning, where we learn about the backpropogation algorithm (the first algorithm we talked about in class, in I think the first real lecture or maybe second). If in highschool someone had told me go look up and use the backpropogation algorithm for something I could have. But the guy with the degree is supposed to know which to use. Oh and you know all those big O notations... well we have a grad course in algorithms which is all about trying to calculate the numerical coefficients in front of the n^2 or whatever. In that case when they adverted the course to us, the prof gave this sample of two different implementations of the same O(n^2) sort, one had a coefficient of 1.7 the other was 2.something. Maybe important, maybe not. Maybe more education in this case is diminishing returns, but then you don't offer more education to that many people.
All things that of course you can learn on your own, if it's important, if you have time. The point of having the advanced degree person is they have taken the time, and may know other algorithms as well, and can direct the learning of the other people, who didn't have the time or if at the time it wasn't important. Just the same when you're actually at a company not everyone has time to read the literature, someone has to read, and understand a lot of literature and filter down to the important stuff which is then sent off the relevant people.
Google also values experience or demonstrable skills. Raw recruits they and microsoft take the bulk of private sector PhD grads in north america. (Last I checked, which admittedly was before I started my PhD which is not yet done, google and MS each took about 25% of the 900 or so north american PhD's in comp sci). Clearly both of them need a lot more than 250 ish new hires every year, so they have their pick of competent other people.
By that logic there is a great deal more than 3.2T trillion barrels of oil in the ground then (and actually that figure is only shale oil, since there's another 1.4 trillion or so conventional oil), since alberta(canada) venezuela, russia, iraq, iran, saudi all have very expensive to extract oil which basically sitting untouched, shale is also in china brazil, france germany and a few other places. Large untapped reserves aren't necessarily easy to extract from, and economically we're more concerned with the rate of extraction than how much we'll be able to get in total.
Estimates of how much oil there is in the ground depend very much on what you want to define as 'oil' and what you figure is going to be practical to extract. There's uranium all of the world in soil too, probably quite a lot of it, but it's not really reasonable to try get it out of random samples of ground. Usually you work with 'proven' reserves. The last I looked we should have run out of oil completely in the 1990's based on 'proven' oil reserve numbers from the 60's or early 70's. It's not that they're were wrong particularly, but digging 100 holes in the ground and saying we have a trillion barrels of oil is a far cry from actually trying to extract oil from that, and digging 10 000 holes in the ground.
Inaccessible is another matter. The government isn't going to let you go dig up half a state if they figure you're only going to get a million barrels of oil a day out of it. It doesn't matter if they're is 1 trillion or 10 trillion or 1 billion barrels of oil there, they know it's not going to be in the long run economically viable, and the last thing you need is to have a bunch of companies set up shop at 150 dollar a barrel oil, and then all go bankrupt and abandon a mess if the price drops to 70. This is kind of what happened in alberta in the last couple of years. Sure there's a vast reserve of tar sands oil, but half built projects aren't good for anyone; the government doesn't want to pick up the pieces after and there still wouldn't be any oil flowing. Oil from conventional sources in the middle east can still be 4 or 5 dollars a barrel, maybe a bit more now, to extract. Shale oil is going to start close to 100. That's living very close to the margins, since probably 60 or 70% of the worlds oil is produced for under 20 bucks a barrel (Saudi, Iraq, Iran, Russia for example) small drops in demand will plummet prices and if you're pushing 75 or 80 bucks a barrel in extraction costs you're very very close to a minor economic downturn or minor technological improvement in oil use efficiency putting you out of business. If most of the oil in the world was say 50 or 60 dollars to produce the government would likely be far more willing to consider opening up something at 70 or 80, since the price drops can't be so extreme, but I'd be very surprised if you could maintain 95% of todays production at 40 bucks a barrel. In short, shale oil isn't really a viable product right now. It may not ever be. Some economists can come up with a lot of numbers I'm sure but there's a point where it's just plain cheaper to use something else (electric cars, and electricity generation from non oil sources for example). The whole point is that the government is supposed to see, and plan for these sorts of things in advance, and prevent people throwing billions of dollars into projects destined to fail, which it then has to pay to clean up after. And Obama is right, the market doesn't always work, because it lives in the moment. Right at this moment shale oil might be almost possible to extract at a profit, and so people would love to charge out and start building, but if it's simply like oil at 150 bucks a barrel was, then it's bad for everyone. And again, it's the government that cleans up the mess of failed businesses (or worse entire industries).
Note: Right now the world consumes about 30 billion barrels of oil a year (80 million barrels/day). At that rate, conventional oil would be completely exhausted in 40 ish years, and shale oil another 120 or so given current estimates, which thusfar have proven wildly inaccurate. That assumes of course that one could maintain that rate of extraction (which seems equally unlikely).
um.. russia has a debt of 6.5% of gdp and in 2008 ran a 60 billion dollar (~20%) budget surplus. The US by contrast has a public debt of about 60% of gdp and in 2008 ran a budget deficit of 400 billion dollars (~20 of budget).
Not disputing that china has the money, but the russians have money to spend. Where the US is struggling to balance the books, the books are a lot bigger admittedly, the red portion is correspondingly bigger. If anything the russians are in the sort of position to try stuff like this. They're trying to change from an economy that lives on oil back to an industrial and services economy, which gives the room to manouvre, the US is trying to cling to the industrial and services economy it has, which is much harder to transform to a different set of industries and services.
actually, that's exactly what you do. You physically base your business wherever you have the manpower/talent, and officially wherever is the cheapest you are legally allowed. Not all companies use Nevada because not all businesses have the same tax liabilities.
On one hand this is a strong argument for British style federalism from about 20 years ago(devoluting Scotland and wales in effect created states, which was dumb on a number of levels) that is to say no provinces (in your case organized as states). On the other it means all your devoluted entities (states) compete with each other, which hopefully makes them more efficient (at dealing with things that can move between states) than a single monolithic state. In practice the big monolithic state is bureaucratic and slow, and the devoluted states are on the dole of the bigger corporates who buy their way to favourable tax policy in the cheapest place possible.
Careful though, because saying they can't base in Nevada is a very slippery slope. Where, on a moral basis should a company base itself? Where it has the most revenue from? Where the most employees are? I bet india is going to have a strong case that the largest number of employees of big companies are in india soon, even if not how you count the point below Where you spend the most money on employees? Where you build your corporate HQ (and if so, how do you define corporate HQ)? Where you spend the most money (employees + subcontractors)? Where you were founded? Well what if where you were founded doesn't have any applicability to your current business? Where your product is actually produced (and if this is MS's product physical disks or the code they write or the service they provide?)
and for just about all of them If so, how do you compare the aforementioned british monolithic state to nevada. Just about everyone big international does more business in Britain or France than any single US state, but that's hardly a fair comparison.
One of these days the EU is going to jump up and say 'you have to pay taxes here if the majority of your revenue comes from here' (and then companies will have to pick an EU member state to base in), and then India will say you have to base where the largest number of customers or employees is. That doesn't work so well for china since a lot of the business in china is they build it at a chinese company for a foreign design firm. Very quickly trying to tell companies where they need to base could get very very complicated.
Quickly now. Where is the largest piece of MS's revenue from, the US or the EU? Which is growing fastest? What 'state' does MS have the most employees in, Washington or Andhra (Pradesh) or somewhere else? Intels big processor family was designed in Israel, yet they are incorporated in Delaware but based in California, which of those 3 should they be based in? Where the important work is, where the tax code is most favourable or where the corporate HQ happens to be? And how much would it cost to relocate the corporate HQ away if they start having tax issues.
This sort of article ran not too long ago, and it was dumb then, it's dumb now. Not liking MS doesn't mean they're doing anything different than anyone else. Except maybe general motors, and we know how well that worked for them.
Ya but for how many years? If you didn't want to buy a dvd drive for some moral reason you could keep playing CD released games for a while but you'd be hard pressed today. Besides, if they get nothing from you, but the price drop that right now is very extreme smooths out and they, the people who make the games, get a lot more per sale they are still better off. Like I say, you aren't the business they're looking for.
well that's part of the trick; to extend the tail on the price curve. A lot of old games have found life on good old games 'gog.com'. But those still are owned by someone and they're just extracting whatever value they can (or in the case of interplay games trying to make a lifeline to keep the company afloat).
I'm not sure bit torrent has anything to do with it. Nowdays the game to be played is to not do a demo until well after the initial sales spike is gone. How you distribute the demo is somewhat immaterial. There is a lot to be said for 'freeing' previous version of a series or old products, to build a base for the new one. But now that they see a revenue model they're probably not inclined to open them up too much.
Probably not true anymore in the 'west' that we give animals leftovers. Or at least not all of them. Though it might actually be better for them than what we actually feed them. The 'best' part of meat is hardly the most diverse, and packaged vegetables processed together aren't the greatest for all pets either. It may not be 'grade A' beef, but people, like one of the above posters who loves his dog more than most of humanity, will pay a premium to get fluffy and fido what marketing has told them is the best.
Leaks have a lot of different causes. They can be someone trying to get their 15 minutes of fame for the leak, or a disgruntled employee trying to make things look bad. They can be communication from the devs to management that things are not in a good state and the leak forces the issue. They can, as you describe, be intentionally done by marketting types (though it's unlikely MS would need or want to do this, since anyone really interested in MS products can get in on various builds that actually work). They can be from hackers trying to find a new malware vector, or just some hacker showing off where they got into. They can also, like closed beta's or the like (or any 'secret' information that say, everyone in the Army knows) be something sufficiently widely distributed it isn't public - but you know it's not perfectly final either.
And you may find yourself not playing many games in future. In fact your model is almost exactly the sort of thing that is going to drive a much faster shift to digital distribution. On a full price retail game (60 +10 for console tax) a developer+publisher combo gets maybe 30 bucks. Digital dstro it's closer to 50. Used games. They get nothing.
If you want new games to be made, the people making them need money. And they see, rightly or wrongly, used and bargain bin sales as bad for their bottom line. They're going to start doing everything they can to bind your game to your e-mail address. No resale, no piracy, less people playing but hopefully more revenue.
If you want to buy games the way you describe, they're aren't inclined to keep selling to you.
Supposedly windows 'upgrades' are basically an install of the new OS then it tries to copy over/grab all the stuff from the 'old' windows. It's an ugly process, and probably errors are caused by programs it doesn't know how to copy over. Stuff that embeds itself in the OS, itunes messes with USB, Google with search and god knows what, Anti virus with everything could work fundamentally differently on a new OS than an old and figuring out how, if at all, to copy that over is probably a difficult business. This might even be problems with specific versions of said programs rather than the application as a whole.
Uninstalling applications in an automated way is a bad idea. They may or may not remove *data* associated with the application that the user wants to keep, and may not know how to easily copy over. Believe it or not most people care more about their data, and access to it, more than the OS they use to launch the applications. It's probably better that people who know something about what a 'directory' is, and how to browse them, try to figure out how to copy data over than a lot of users for whom such a terrifying concept is completely foreign.
Imagine a china with 1.5 billion people pissed at you for holding them back for the last 200 years, and still trying to hold them back.
They will pass the US - with 4x the population that is inevitable. It's a matter of precisely when, and how gracefully you step aside. The british thanks to the league of nations and some good sense stepped aside quietly for the the US in the 20's. At this point the chinese already have a larger industrial base the rest is how willing you are to accept reality, and how quickly they can build the rest of their society around that industrial base.
completely untrue. At least in canada. Roughly every 6 or 7 foreign students subsidizes a professor (well maybe 10 or 11 depends on how you count the flow of money and if you include grad students etc). They pay about 20k in tuition and the average prof gets probably a bit less than 100k. Lots of courses are taught by people making a lot less than that too. On top of that they bring into this country about 15k/year in living expenses which is spent, unsurprisingly, on local things like rent, food etc. Though one should see the irony of a student from china spending extra money in canada on goods made in china with much lower point of sale costs there.
There is not a limit on the number of students we can teach - there is a limit on how fast we can grow, but not how big we can get. In fact quite the contrary - the more students we have the more we can teach, because the more graduate students we can fund, and thus the processes is a positive feedback system. Engineering, medicine and the like; programs which control enrollment do so artificially to keep the value of their degrees up, if demand gets too high (we cannot attract enough engineers/doctors) politicians either force rule changes or the price goes up and more of the smartest people from other countries stay here, and don't go home.
Don't kid yourself for a moment - we aren't 'passing over' domestic students for foreign ones. We get the best and brightest from those countries; you don't move 10 time zones across and ocean to a place where you don't know anyone and barely speak the language because you're mediocre. They make our 'average' students look bad sure, but we have lots of room for domestic students, for good or bad we can train far more domestic students than want to apply to our programs. And we still, including here on/. bemoan the falling quality of computer science graduates because we're dumbing down the programs. I'll let you in on a secret: we're not dumbing the program down for the guys from india china or the middle east.
Right now I'm in a PhD programme in comp sci. We could probably double our undergraduate enrollment (2nd 3rd and 4th year courses probably have 400 ish students combined now) with all domestic students right now, and not skip a beat.
Imagine I was at a business. Lets call it the computer science corporation of London ontario. (Fake). And we do 70% of our business with india the middle east and china. Our real dollar business with the local market (canada) has basically grown with inflation for 10 years, but we've more than doubled in size by exporting our product to those markets and we see continued expansion in those areas. Is that really bad, shareholders would be thrilled? Car companies have basically reached one car per person in north america, the market is pretty obviously saturated at that point, so to grow your business you go elsewhere. Education has the same problem. Frankly we have more PhD's than the private market really wants, and more people who would rather the ~25% pay cut but academic freedom and the ability to teach rather than work for the man (IBM, MS, Google). Think of foreign students as sales to a foreign country - and lets face it, we're running out of other things the chinese are willing to pay money for that we have.
You want to pick on someone pick on programmes that aren't the aforementioned "management, technology and science". Want to know why we're managing such poor enrollment? Because students have been given the woefully misguided impression that 80K later any degree will be just as good as spending 80k on one in management, technology or science, and that working hard and learning to do math is bad. Admittedly I'm in Canada, and we have oil, and oil makes you as a society stupid because any high profit margin product that can be mass produced reduces demand for education or efficiency gains through education. It's not that I object to psychology, or history or anything else, but if the market wants 100 grads and you
retail on games is more like 20% than 50, source http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2006/12/8479.ars (and that's markup, not profit, profit is probably about half of that, the last EB manager I was friends with said they averaged about 7% profit on the price of games over a particular period, which I think was summer but not sure). There's a lot less overhead when you don't have to manufacture a box, manual or DVDs, after all you have to pay for all the stuff even if it doesn't sell.
Either way, I'm partial to gamersgate more than steam or the others. No client, but you're encumbered with DRM, in many cases DRM that is designed as though there was a disk.
It's cyclical. When the consoles first come out they look good. But for how long? At some point PC tools and PC hardware make consoles look antiquated. This new hardware is 4 generations later than console hardware, but some of those generations were more die shrinks than anything consumers care about. For the moment we're fluttering around equal quality between PC and consoles, the race to the bottom in PC prices and hardware has meant that trying to make a decent PC only game which both takes advantage of really good hardware, and runs on the walmart trash people actually have is nearly impossible. So you pick your market. If you're developing all your art assets to be fully cross platform you aren't going to invest a whole lot in the PC model. Until someone else does. Once someone (think farcry, Doom, etc) starts doing spectacular things on the PC which simply cannot be done on consoles the two groups diverge again for a while. And then a new generation of consoles comes out and they converge again. I would think the console makers will want either this gen or next gen hardware in their consoles (Xbox 3 and PS4), but time will tell.
Though the big difference between PC's and consoles is probably more about memory than GPU architecture. 3-4GiGs of ram on PC is becoming common, compared to 512 on the consoles, there's too much you can do with that much memory that you just can't do on a console, and that will probably drive divergence more than hardware tesselation or directx computing.
I have to amend this. I hadn't looked at http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5870-review-test/ reviews, which seem to have a different selection of games and paint the 5870 in a better light than the pc perspective article. The PCper article I got the impression teh GTX285 was in some cases faster and only 10-15% slower than the 5870 in most cases, the GURU3D test has a more noticeable 25% or thereabout performance boost for the 5870. Better, but not stunning. I would have still expected a 50% or so performance jump going from generation to generation, but ATI is aiming for the affordable market, not just the 600 dollar market, and who knows, maybe with Dx11 you'd see that. Still, I think it's hard to justify running out today and buying one when there's not much that can take advantage of Dx11, and by then NVIDIA will have launched a competing product to compare to.
Reading the PC perspective reviews and a couple of others the 5870 seems to be a bit faster than the GTX285 but not by much, and certainly not by a margin one would expect from a new generation of parts vs old.
Admittedly this is all DX9/10 stuff, and there's probably a lot of the transistor budget allocated to new DX11 features but I would have expected ATI's latest offering to have utterly destroyed NVIDIA's last gen part. The GTX 295 is really 2 gpus so it's not really a fair comparison.
It will be interesting to see what NVIDIA offers on the Dx11 front in the next few months. Until then I'm kinda waffling about the 5800's, it's hard to justify an upgrade to just support DX11 when it's not significantly better than what I have, which is sort of the same problem I have with the Corei7's vs Core2's. I suppose a 'killer app' for Dx11 might move people in that direction, but if we're not seeing many of those until Q1 2010 that gives NVIDIA a while to play catch up and release their hardware.
As though all of their competitors aren't essentially doing that already. Even MS has development in India now (and other countries, not all of which count as third world). We (on slashot) got all up in arms over IBM offering employees the chance to keep their jobs by moving to india, the main architecture for intel desktop CPU's was developed in Israel. Sure, moving out of the US would get them bad press in one place, but it would get them really good press elsewhere. Everywhere outside the US assumes the US is using MS to spy on them (which it probably is) and the US assumes everyone else is trying to inject people into big companies to spy on them (they are).
The nature of the modern world is that at least half of anything worth having is made somewhere other than where you are. Want to buy fighter jets? Good luck getting electronic control systems and displays that aren't made in east asia. Want to buy software? There are developers contributing code from all over the world.
As it is RIM (blackberrry) is a foreign company selling critical systems infrastructure in the US. And the US has a plethora of free trade agreements, MS could very smartly move its official HQ to somewhere cheap (Switzerland), with free trade to the US and watch the government cringe as it has to fight through years of losing court cases on whether imposing tariffs are legal.
As the guy above says, they could just move to a more tax advantageous state too rather than jump ship entirely.
and there still might be - therein lies the problem. Nuclear weapons maybe have delayed WW3, or prevented the US- USSR war of 1965, but the league of nations prevented the ango-american war of 1920's, that did bugger all about WW2.
Nuclear weapons solved two problems: 1, when overwhelming force could compel a state which would otherwise not consider surrender to acknowledge defeat, and 2: to keep somewhat sane states from obliterating each other. It does nothing to help if one party is facing destruction and has no civilians it is trying to protect.
Seriously, I don't see it as much other than a museum piece. Odds are if it still works, it won't for very much longer, leaving it a glorified vase, with toxic metals in it.
Galaxies is hardly the first MMO to shut down/merge servers and keep in business. Others have done it more gradually perhaps, but they went from 200k subscribers to probably 100k and didn't close half the servers for a long time, and as anticipation builds for Star Wars TOR they're going to have a churn of people - but they're probably seeing the eventual need to be down around 50 or 60k subscribers, if not outright close. Whatever one may think of the NGE (cough disaster cough), their technology was never great to start with, and looks dated, and they've changed the design from what the people who were paying wanted to keep paying for, which isn't going to inspire confidence for the future. That's the natural progress of an MMO, just because WoW hasn't got there yet doesn't mean others haven't.
So if you go to the middle east there are regularly news reports about how the west (possibly with some specifics), are dumping toxic/radioactive waste off the coast of Somalia/Egypt/Iraq/Pakistan/other muslim country with a coast. And we - in the west- tend to regard these as nonsense. But now we're finding out that we are getting toxic waste dumped off the coast of western countries - that seems like it might be tip of the iceberg. Somalia isn't nearly as likely as italy to catch these things (albeit rather slowly), who knows what we could find in the deep waters off countries that don't have the ability to patrol their own coasts.
There is. 15 bucks a month. They offered early 6 month and lifetime (bill roper) subscriptions as well.
Character customization: incredible. Getting to see all the crazy costumes other people have is really need. Oh an you can both buy more costumes and change your own (and you use basically the same creator for your nemesis, unfortunately I cannot figure out how to alter my nemesis, who I accidentally made as a big hulking demon, the size of a gnome).
Soloing: fun - but only if you picked half decent powers. Having played a character similar to my current on in beta I knew what skills to get and what to avoid. This is somewhat problematic. Grouping: remarkably more difficult than you'd expect while leveling (I'm only 30), since people don't have clearly defined rolls cooperating is a bit harder. You do have 'builds' which are kinda like stances you can set yourself to defence - offence - support styles, which help, but if you've taken all healy skills and go defence build you're screwed.
Quests/leveling. Mostly fun, but somewhat repetitive. Granted there's no easy way around that. There are only so many types of bad guys, and you basically kill one group in one place, go somewhere else, kill another group there. Unfortunately there aren't quite enough quests, and you can end up having to grind to level up a bit. I hit this a couple of times already, most recently about half way through 29 I ran out of soloable quests I could do, and had to grind until I got a nemesis mission.
Server: Single server architecture is wonderful. None of this 'which sever are you on, oh you aren't on my sever' crap when you meet people also playing. I don't mean to criticize people who use a sharded system (basically everything but Eve and champions), but being able to connect with everyone is really nice, it does mean there are 100 copies of popular zones though.
Bugs and missing features. There are a lot of little things. The retcon thing seems like the cost is just not scaling as you level up (so the price you see are about what you should be seeing at level 40, even though you're level 1). Searching and sorting the AH isn't great, and the UI scaling is kinda broken. Compared to something like Aion the graphics don't look stunning, but they are pretty good. It's fun, and worth playing overall.
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in the same way textbooks written by university professors are the property of the university? Doesn't work like that. At all. If it did there wouldn't be any textbooks.
yes, the trick with the advance degree is that you learn in advance about them and when to know how to use them. It also depends very much on what you end up doing at the end of it all,if you end up in a job where traditional search and sorting are your bread and butter you'll pick that up quickly, but not all jobs are like that. Linked lists and sorting is a first and second year problem, Greedy algorithms, graph theory, (shortest path stuff), linear programming are 3rd year and so on.
I'm taking a grad course in machine learning, where we learn about the backpropogation algorithm (the first algorithm we talked about in class, in I think the first real lecture or maybe second). If in highschool someone had told me go look up and use the backpropogation algorithm for something I could have. But the guy with the degree is supposed to know which to use. Oh and you know all those big O notations... well we have a grad course in algorithms which is all about trying to calculate the numerical coefficients in front of the n^2 or whatever. In that case when they adverted the course to us, the prof gave this sample of two different implementations of the same O(n^2) sort, one had a coefficient of 1.7 the other was 2.something. Maybe important, maybe not. Maybe more education in this case is diminishing returns, but then you don't offer more education to that many people.
All things that of course you can learn on your own, if it's important, if you have time. The point of having the advanced degree person is they have taken the time, and may know other algorithms as well, and can direct the learning of the other people, who didn't have the time or if at the time it wasn't important. Just the same when you're actually at a company not everyone has time to read the literature, someone has to read, and understand a lot of literature and filter down to the important stuff which is then sent off the relevant people.
Google also values experience or demonstrable skills. Raw recruits they and microsoft take the bulk of private sector PhD grads in north america. (Last I checked, which admittedly was before I started my PhD which is not yet done, google and MS each took about 25% of the 900 or so north american PhD's in comp sci). Clearly both of them need a lot more than 250 ish new hires every year, so they have their pick of competent other people.
By that logic there is a great deal more than 3.2T trillion barrels of oil in the ground then (and actually that figure is only shale oil, since there's another 1.4 trillion or so conventional oil), since alberta(canada) venezuela, russia, iraq, iran, saudi all have very expensive to extract oil which basically sitting untouched, shale is also in china brazil, france germany and a few other places. Large untapped reserves aren't necessarily easy to extract from, and economically we're more concerned with the rate of extraction than how much we'll be able to get in total.
Estimates of how much oil there is in the ground depend very much on what you want to define as 'oil' and what you figure is going to be practical to extract. There's uranium all of the world in soil too, probably quite a lot of it, but it's not really reasonable to try get it out of random samples of ground. Usually you work with 'proven' reserves. The last I looked we should have run out of oil completely in the 1990's based on 'proven' oil reserve numbers from the 60's or early 70's. It's not that they're were wrong particularly, but digging 100 holes in the ground and saying we have a trillion barrels of oil is a far cry from actually trying to extract oil from that, and digging 10 000 holes in the ground.
Inaccessible is another matter. The government isn't going to let you go dig up half a state if they figure you're only going to get a million barrels of oil a day out of it. It doesn't matter if they're is 1 trillion or 10 trillion or 1 billion barrels of oil there, they know it's not going to be in the long run economically viable, and the last thing you need is to have a bunch of companies set up shop at 150 dollar a barrel oil, and then all go bankrupt and abandon a mess if the price drops to 70. This is kind of what happened in alberta in the last couple of years. Sure there's a vast reserve of tar sands oil, but half built projects aren't good for anyone; the government doesn't want to pick up the pieces after and there still wouldn't be any oil flowing. Oil from conventional sources in the middle east can still be 4 or 5 dollars a barrel, maybe a bit more now, to extract. Shale oil is going to start close to 100. That's living very close to the margins, since probably 60 or 70% of the worlds oil is produced for under 20 bucks a barrel (Saudi, Iraq, Iran, Russia for example) small drops in demand will plummet prices and if you're pushing 75 or 80 bucks a barrel in extraction costs you're very very close to a minor economic downturn or minor technological improvement in oil use efficiency putting you out of business. If most of the oil in the world was say 50 or 60 dollars to produce the government would likely be far more willing to consider opening up something at 70 or 80, since the price drops can't be so extreme, but I'd be very surprised if you could maintain 95% of todays production at 40 bucks a barrel. In short, shale oil isn't really a viable product right now. It may not ever be. Some economists can come up with a lot of numbers I'm sure but there's a point where it's just plain cheaper to use something else (electric cars, and electricity generation from non oil sources for example). The whole point is that the government is supposed to see, and plan for these sorts of things in advance, and prevent people throwing billions of dollars into projects destined to fail, which it then has to pay to clean up after. And Obama is right, the market doesn't always work, because it lives in the moment. Right at this moment shale oil might be almost possible to extract at a profit, and so people would love to charge out and start building, but if it's simply like oil at 150 bucks a barrel was, then it's bad for everyone. And again, it's the government that cleans up the mess of failed businesses (or worse entire industries).
Note: Right now the world consumes about 30 billion barrels of oil a year (80 million barrels/day). At that rate, conventional oil would be completely exhausted in 40 ish years, and shale oil another 120 or so given current estimates, which thusfar have proven wildly inaccurate. That assumes of course that one could maintain that rate of extraction (which seems equally unlikely).
um.. russia has a debt of 6.5% of gdp and in 2008 ran a 60 billion dollar (~20%) budget surplus.
The US by contrast has a public debt of about 60% of gdp and in 2008 ran a budget deficit of 400 billion dollars (~20 of budget).
Not disputing that china has the money, but the russians have money to spend. Where the US is struggling to balance the books, the books are a lot bigger admittedly, the red portion is correspondingly bigger. If anything the russians are in the sort of position to try stuff like this. They're trying to change from an economy that lives on oil back to an industrial and services economy, which gives the room to manouvre, the US is trying to cling to the industrial and services economy it has, which is much harder to transform to a different set of industries and services.
actually, that's exactly what you do. You physically base your business wherever you have the manpower/talent, and officially wherever is the cheapest you are legally allowed. Not all companies use Nevada because not all businesses have the same tax liabilities.
On one hand this is a strong argument for British style federalism from about 20 years ago(devoluting Scotland and wales in effect created states, which was dumb on a number of levels) that is to say no provinces (in your case organized as states). On the other it means all your devoluted entities (states) compete with each other, which hopefully makes them more efficient (at dealing with things that can move between states) than a single monolithic state. In practice the big monolithic state is bureaucratic and slow, and the devoluted states are on the dole of the bigger corporates who buy their way to favourable tax policy in the cheapest place possible.
Careful though, because saying they can't base in Nevada is a very slippery slope. Where, on a moral basis should a company base itself?
Where it has the most revenue from?
Where the most employees are? I bet india is going to have a strong case that the largest number of employees of big companies are in india soon, even if not how you count the point below
Where you spend the most money on employees?
Where you build your corporate HQ (and if so, how do you define corporate HQ)?
Where you spend the most money (employees + subcontractors)?
Where you were founded? Well what if where you were founded doesn't have any applicability to your current business?
Where your product is actually produced (and if this is MS's product physical disks or the code they write or the service they provide?)
and for just about all of them If so, how do you compare the aforementioned british monolithic state to nevada. Just about everyone big international does more business in Britain or France than any single US state, but that's hardly a fair comparison.
One of these days the EU is going to jump up and say 'you have to pay taxes here if the majority of your revenue comes from here' (and then companies will have to pick an EU member state to base in), and then India will say you have to base where the largest number of customers or employees is. That doesn't work so well for china since a lot of the business in china is they build it at a chinese company for a foreign design firm. Very quickly trying to tell companies where they need to base could get very very complicated.
Quickly now. Where is the largest piece of MS's revenue from, the US or the EU? Which is growing fastest? What 'state' does MS have the most employees in, Washington or Andhra (Pradesh) or somewhere else? Intels big processor family was designed in Israel, yet they are incorporated in Delaware but based in California, which of those 3 should they be based in? Where the important work is, where the tax code is most favourable or where the corporate HQ happens to be? And how much would it cost to relocate the corporate HQ away if they start having tax issues.
This sort of article ran not too long ago, and it was dumb then, it's dumb now. Not liking MS doesn't mean they're doing anything different than anyone else. Except maybe general motors, and we know how well that worked for them.
true enough
Ya but for how many years? If you didn't want to buy a dvd drive for some moral reason you could keep playing CD released games for a while but you'd be hard pressed today. Besides, if they get nothing from you, but the price drop that right now is very extreme smooths out and they, the people who make the games, get a lot more per sale they are still better off. Like I say, you aren't the business they're looking for.
well that's part of the trick; to extend the tail on the price curve. A lot of old games have found life on good old games 'gog.com'. But those still are owned by someone and they're just extracting whatever value they can (or in the case of interplay games trying to make a lifeline to keep the company afloat).
I'm not sure bit torrent has anything to do with it. Nowdays the game to be played is to not do a demo until well after the initial sales spike is gone. How you distribute the demo is somewhat immaterial. There is a lot to be said for 'freeing' previous version of a series or old products, to build a base for the new one. But now that they see a revenue model they're probably not inclined to open them up too much.
Probably not true anymore in the 'west' that we give animals leftovers. Or at least not all of them. Though it might actually be better for them than what we actually feed them. The 'best' part of meat is hardly the most diverse, and packaged vegetables processed together aren't the greatest for all pets either. It may not be 'grade A' beef, but people, like one of the above posters who loves his dog more than most of humanity, will pay a premium to get fluffy and fido what marketing has told them is the best.
Leaks have a lot of different causes. They can be someone trying to get their 15 minutes of fame for the leak, or a disgruntled employee trying to make things look bad. They can be communication from the devs to management that things are not in a good state and the leak forces the issue. They can, as you describe, be intentionally done by marketting types (though it's unlikely MS would need or want to do this, since anyone really interested in MS products can get in on various builds that actually work). They can be from hackers trying to find a new malware vector, or just some hacker showing off where they got into. They can also, like closed beta's or the like (or any 'secret' information that say, everyone in the Army knows) be something sufficiently widely distributed it isn't public - but you know it's not perfectly final either.
And you may find yourself not playing many games in future. In fact your model is almost exactly the sort of thing that is going to drive a much faster shift to digital distribution. On a full price retail game (60 +10 for console tax) a developer+publisher combo gets maybe 30 bucks. Digital dstro it's closer to 50. Used games. They get nothing.
If you want new games to be made, the people making them need money. And they see, rightly or wrongly, used and bargain bin sales as bad for their bottom line. They're going to start doing everything they can to bind your game to your e-mail address. No resale, no piracy, less people playing but hopefully more revenue.
If you want to buy games the way you describe, they're aren't inclined to keep selling to you.
Supposedly windows 'upgrades' are basically an install of the new OS then it tries to copy over/grab all the stuff from the 'old' windows. It's an ugly process, and probably errors are caused by programs it doesn't know how to copy over. Stuff that embeds itself in the OS, itunes messes with USB, Google with search and god knows what, Anti virus with everything could work fundamentally differently on a new OS than an old and figuring out how, if at all, to copy that over is probably a difficult business. This might even be problems with specific versions of said programs rather than the application as a whole.
Uninstalling applications in an automated way is a bad idea. They may or may not remove *data* associated with the application that the user wants to keep, and may not know how to easily copy over. Believe it or not most people care more about their data, and access to it, more than the OS they use to launch the applications. It's probably better that people who know something about what a 'directory' is, and how to browse them, try to figure out how to copy data over than a lot of users for whom such a terrifying concept is completely foreign.
Imagine a china with 1.5 billion people pissed at you for holding them back for the last 200 years, and still trying to hold them back.
They will pass the US - with 4x the population that is inevitable. It's a matter of precisely when, and how gracefully you step aside. The british thanks to the league of nations and some good sense stepped aside quietly for the the US in the 20's. At this point the chinese already have a larger industrial base the rest is how willing you are to accept reality, and how quickly they can build the rest of their society around that industrial base.
completely untrue. At least in canada. Roughly every 6 or 7 foreign students subsidizes a professor (well maybe 10 or 11 depends on how you count the flow of money and if you include grad students etc). They pay about 20k in tuition and the average prof gets probably a bit less than 100k. Lots of courses are taught by people making a lot less than that too. On top of that they bring into this country about 15k/year in living expenses which is spent, unsurprisingly, on local things like rent, food etc. Though one should see the irony of a student from china spending extra money in canada on goods made in china with much lower point of sale costs there.
There is not a limit on the number of students we can teach - there is a limit on how fast we can grow, but not how big we can get. In fact quite the contrary - the more students we have the more we can teach, because the more graduate students we can fund, and thus the processes is a positive feedback system. Engineering, medicine and the like; programs which control enrollment do so artificially to keep the value of their degrees up, if demand gets too high (we cannot attract enough engineers/doctors) politicians either force rule changes or the price goes up and more of the smartest people from other countries stay here, and don't go home.
Don't kid yourself for a moment - we aren't 'passing over' domestic students for foreign ones. We get the best and brightest from those countries; you don't move 10 time zones across and ocean to a place where you don't know anyone and barely speak the language because you're mediocre. They make our 'average' students look bad sure, but we have lots of room for domestic students, for good or bad we can train far more domestic students than want to apply to our programs. And we still, including here on /. bemoan the falling quality of computer science graduates because we're dumbing down the programs. I'll let you in on a secret: we're not dumbing the program down for the guys from india china or the middle east.
Right now I'm in a PhD programme in comp sci. We could probably double our undergraduate enrollment (2nd 3rd and 4th year courses probably have 400 ish students combined now) with all domestic students right now, and not skip a beat.
Imagine I was at a business. Lets call it the computer science corporation of London ontario. (Fake). And we do 70% of our business with india the middle east and china. Our real dollar business with the local market (canada) has basically grown with inflation for 10 years, but we've more than doubled in size by exporting our product to those markets and we see continued expansion in those areas. Is that really bad, shareholders would be thrilled? Car companies have basically reached one car per person in north america, the market is pretty obviously saturated at that point, so to grow your business you go elsewhere. Education has the same problem. Frankly we have more PhD's than the private market really wants, and more people who would rather the ~25% pay cut but academic freedom and the ability to teach rather than work for the man (IBM, MS, Google). Think of foreign students as sales to a foreign country - and lets face it, we're running out of other things the chinese are willing to pay money for that we have.
You want to pick on someone pick on programmes that aren't the aforementioned "management, technology and science". Want to know why we're managing such poor enrollment? Because students have been given the woefully misguided impression that 80K later any degree will be just as good as spending 80k on one in management, technology or science, and that working hard and learning to do math is bad. Admittedly I'm in Canada, and we have oil, and oil makes you as a society stupid because any high profit margin product that can be mass produced reduces demand for education or efficiency gains through education. It's not that I object to psychology, or history or anything else, but if the market wants 100 grads and you
retail on games is more like 20% than 50, source http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2006/12/8479.ars (and that's markup, not profit, profit is probably about half of that, the last EB manager I was friends with said they averaged about 7% profit on the price of games over a particular period, which I think was summer but not sure). There's a lot less overhead when you don't have to manufacture a box, manual or DVDs, after all you have to pay for all the stuff even if it doesn't sell.
Either way, I'm partial to gamersgate more than steam or the others. No client, but you're encumbered with DRM, in many cases DRM that is designed as though there was a disk.
It's cyclical. When the consoles first come out they look good. But for how long? At some point PC tools and PC hardware make consoles look antiquated. This new hardware is 4 generations later than console hardware, but some of those generations were more die shrinks than anything consumers care about. For the moment we're fluttering around equal quality between PC and consoles, the race to the bottom in PC prices and hardware has meant that trying to make a decent PC only game which both takes advantage of really good hardware, and runs on the walmart trash people actually have is nearly impossible. So you pick your market. If you're developing all your art assets to be fully cross platform you aren't going to invest a whole lot in the PC model. Until someone else does. Once someone (think farcry, Doom, etc) starts doing spectacular things on the PC which simply cannot be done on consoles the two groups diverge again for a while. And then a new generation of consoles comes out and they converge again. I would think the console makers will want either this gen or next gen hardware in their consoles (Xbox 3 and PS4), but time will tell.
Though the big difference between PC's and consoles is probably more about memory than GPU architecture. 3-4GiGs of ram on PC is becoming common, compared to 512 on the consoles, there's too much you can do with that much memory that you just can't do on a console, and that will probably drive divergence more than hardware tesselation or directx computing.
I have to amend this. I hadn't looked at http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5870-review-test/ reviews, which seem to have a different selection of games and paint the 5870 in a better light than the pc perspective article. The PCper article I got the impression teh GTX285 was in some cases faster and only 10-15% slower than the 5870 in most cases, the GURU3D test has a more noticeable 25% or thereabout performance boost for the 5870. Better, but not stunning. I would have still expected a 50% or so performance jump going from generation to generation, but ATI is aiming for the affordable market, not just the 600 dollar market, and who knows, maybe with Dx11 you'd see that. Still, I think it's hard to justify running out today and buying one when there's not much that can take advantage of Dx11, and by then NVIDIA will have launched a competing product to compare to.
Reading the PC perspective reviews and a couple of others the 5870 seems to be a bit faster than the GTX285 but not by much, and certainly not by a margin one would expect from a new generation of parts vs old.
Admittedly this is all DX9/10 stuff, and there's probably a lot of the transistor budget allocated to new DX11 features but I would have expected ATI's latest offering to have utterly destroyed NVIDIA's last gen part. The GTX 295 is really 2 gpus so it's not really a fair comparison.
It will be interesting to see what NVIDIA offers on the Dx11 front in the next few months. Until then I'm kinda waffling about the 5800's, it's hard to justify an upgrade to just support DX11 when it's not significantly better than what I have, which is sort of the same problem I have with the Corei7's vs Core2's. I suppose a 'killer app' for Dx11 might move people in that direction, but if we're not seeing many of those until Q1 2010 that gives NVIDIA a while to play catch up and release their hardware.
As though all of their competitors aren't essentially doing that already. Even MS has development in India now (and other countries, not all of which count as third world). We (on slashot) got all up in arms over IBM offering employees the chance to keep their jobs by moving to india, the main architecture for intel desktop CPU's was developed in Israel. Sure, moving out of the US would get them bad press in one place, but it would get them really good press elsewhere. Everywhere outside the US assumes the US is using MS to spy on them (which it probably is) and the US assumes everyone else is trying to inject people into big companies to spy on them (they are).
The nature of the modern world is that at least half of anything worth having is made somewhere other than where you are. Want to buy fighter jets? Good luck getting electronic control systems and displays that aren't made in east asia. Want to buy software? There are developers contributing code from all over the world.
As it is RIM (blackberrry) is a foreign company selling critical systems infrastructure in the US. And the US has a plethora of free trade agreements, MS could very smartly move its official HQ to somewhere cheap (Switzerland), with free trade to the US and watch the government cringe as it has to fight through years of losing court cases on whether imposing tariffs are legal.
As the guy above says, they could just move to a more tax advantageous state too rather than jump ship entirely.
and there still might be - therein lies the problem. Nuclear weapons maybe have delayed WW3, or prevented the US- USSR war of 1965, but the league of nations prevented the ango-american war of 1920's, that did bugger all about WW2.
Nuclear weapons solved two problems: 1, when overwhelming force could compel a state which would otherwise not consider surrender to acknowledge defeat, and 2: to keep somewhat sane states from obliterating each other. It does nothing to help if one party is facing destruction and has no civilians it is trying to protect.
3 bars of gold pressed latinum.
Seriously, I don't see it as much other than a museum piece. Odds are if it still works, it won't for very much longer, leaving it a glorified vase, with toxic metals in it.
Galaxies is hardly the first MMO to shut down/merge servers and keep in business. Others have done it more gradually perhaps, but they went from 200k subscribers to probably 100k and didn't close half the servers for a long time, and as anticipation builds for Star Wars TOR they're going to have a churn of people - but they're probably seeing the eventual need to be down around 50 or 60k subscribers, if not outright close. Whatever one may think of the NGE (cough disaster cough), their technology was never great to start with, and looks dated, and they've changed the design from what the people who were paying wanted to keep paying for, which isn't going to inspire confidence for the future. That's the natural progress of an MMO, just because WoW hasn't got there yet doesn't mean others haven't.
So if you go to the middle east there are regularly news reports about how the west (possibly with some specifics), are dumping toxic/radioactive waste off the coast of Somalia/Egypt/Iraq/Pakistan/other muslim country with a coast. And we - in the west- tend to regard these as nonsense. But now we're finding out that we are getting toxic waste dumped off the coast of western countries - that seems like it might be tip of the iceberg. Somalia isn't nearly as likely as italy to catch these things (albeit rather slowly), who knows what we could find in the deep waters off countries that don't have the ability to patrol their own coasts.
There is. 15 bucks a month. They offered early 6 month and lifetime (bill roper) subscriptions as well.
Character customization: incredible. Getting to see all the crazy costumes other people have is really need. Oh an you can both buy more costumes and change your own (and you use basically the same creator for your nemesis, unfortunately I cannot figure out how to alter my nemesis, who I accidentally made as a big hulking demon, the size of a gnome).
Soloing: fun - but only if you picked half decent powers. Having played a character similar to my current on in beta I knew what skills to get and what to avoid. This is somewhat problematic.
Grouping: remarkably more difficult than you'd expect while leveling (I'm only 30), since people don't have clearly defined rolls cooperating is a bit harder. You do have 'builds' which are kinda like stances you can set yourself to defence - offence - support styles, which help, but if you've taken all healy skills and go defence build you're screwed.
Quests/leveling. Mostly fun, but somewhat repetitive. Granted there's no easy way around that. There are only so many types of bad guys, and you basically kill one group in one place, go somewhere else, kill another group there. Unfortunately there aren't quite enough quests, and you can end up having to grind to level up a bit. I hit this a couple of times already, most recently about half way through 29 I ran out of soloable quests I could do, and had to grind until I got a nemesis mission.
Server: Single server architecture is wonderful. None of this 'which sever are you on, oh you aren't on my sever' crap when you meet people also playing. I don't mean to criticize people who use a sharded system (basically everything but Eve and champions), but being able to connect with everyone is really nice, it does mean there are 100 copies of popular zones though.
Bugs and missing features. There are a lot of little things. The retcon thing seems like the cost is just not scaling as you level up (so the price you see are about what you should be seeing at level 40, even though you're level 1). Searching and sorting the AH isn't great, and the UI scaling is kinda broken. Compared to something like Aion the graphics don't look stunning, but they are pretty good. It's fun, and worth playing overall.