While it's rather basic in hindsight, to guess in advance places and people that might radicalize in response to policy. You don't have to spy on anyone or do anything illegal to guess who's going to be pissed by policy - you just have to have brains to guess well.
The religious right in the US is a good example. You don't need to spy on anyone, and I certainly can't, to guess that strongly religious groups, white supremacists and pro- gun groups could radicalize under obama. Knowing who those groups are is only marginally more involved than looking in a phone book.
With Iraq the UK police had to know anyone who saw the mess they (We) are causing in iraq and Afghanistan was likely to turn against us - then it's just a matter of figuring out who is seeing what we're up to, especially the bad stuff (NGOs, soldiers, Ministry of foreign affairs people, journalists, contractors, red cross), figuring out who from that lot is likely to turn - and the vast majority won't so it's a profiling exercise to some degree. Then providing a venue for people who aren't disillusioned to talk to police if anything untoward is happening. There isn't the manpower to follow everyone who went to Afghanistan - you need to have something to go with first or else you'll never find anyone. Not that the British have the best track record with catching terrorists lately, which might be a good indicator they haven't been gathering illegal or inadmissable evidence first - if they were you'd think the large number of guys they grabbed prior to these wouldn't have been let go - because they definitely aren't terrorists (not on lack of evidence of being terrorists).
gah missed a sentence in a last minute edit: "From the sounds of it, what did these guys in is that they started with an islamic charity organization that was trying to help people in afghanistan - and as time went on became progressively more radical, and disillusioned with what they saw via the charity" - and the UK police realized this could happen, were on the lookout for it, and started spying on people, with warrants, very quickly. Credit to them for anticipating the problem.
I think the distinction here is that they separately obtained the warrant (after trying to infiltrate the group the UK set up their own surveillance of these guys). If I send you an e-mail saying 'blow this up at..." and the NSA intercepts it, that's surveillance and inadmissible, if at the same time, or some point later, a court in Canada (where I am) or the US (where you presumably are) calls up yahoo with a warrant for said e-mail because they figure I might be sending such things that's fine. That it was intercepted in addition to being obtained via warrant shouldn't affect the validity of the warrant. And no, IANAL either.
From the sounds of it, what did these guys in is that they started with an islamic charity organization that was trying to help people in afghanistan - and as time went on became progressively more radical, and disillusioned with what they saw via the charity. The charity might well have been trying to do unbiased good, but seeing what the US and UK were up to in Afghanistan and especially by 2003 with Iraq took them from trying to help with aid to trying to help by killing the perceived source of the problems. I don't want to sound to sympathetic to a bunch of homicidal lunatics (and on every level fail to see the utility in blowing up civilian aircraft), but at some point sending food and clothing isn't going to help if their lack of food and clothing is because someone is stealing it (see somalia) - you need to go after the people doing the stealing (see somalia).
I honestly believe ISAF is trying, arguably doing a terrible job of it mind you, to help the afghans stand up on their own. That case is much like Somalia, too many warlords or 'Governors' who are basically looting any help we chose to provide, and because they're looting it, we're reluctant to supply it, because we're reluctant to supply it NGO's(charities) try and fill the gap - and in turn supply the warlords with loot to fuel their looting. All the while the population who needs help is getting none of it, and are pissed at us for bombing their country into the stone age so even if they wanted to try, they have no bootstraps to lift themselves up with.
Iraq is all around inherently much muddier. I freely admit my bias that I see the war in Iraq is illegal, unnecessary, and thinly veiled recolonization. You can't on one hand say that, and then get all high and mighty against people who want to do something against the people our governments effectively installed for not helping their own people. The current government in Iraq has been very crafty about asserting their independence (Iraq May Hold Vote on Early US Withdrawal - http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/168-general/48081-iraq-may-hold-vote-on-early-us-withdrawal.html) , credit where credit is due, but it has taken a long time to get there, and the situation on the ground there can hardly be considered good. More like less bad. In 2006 we were looking at a much bleaker outlook. It's not an easy problem - especially for frustrated youth. Sending money/stuff doesn't help, speaking out and protesting back home doesn't/didn't help. So what's the strategic play? The 'green revolution' Mousavi supporters in Iran, the pro democracy guys in Burma, the religious right in the US, the separatist movements all over seem to regularly grapple with this issue. If you are utterly convinced of the rightness of your position, but have no power what do you do about it? In Iran they're basically screwed. Protests haven't worked, so you're left with armed insurrection, or give up. Burma - they've all but given up. The religious right in the US transformed itself into a political movement and moved their votes to a political party in exchange for influence - but now that they've lost the influence they protest a lot - but what if the protesting doesn't work, and god forbid you get national healthcare, gun control, gay marriage and god back out of the pledge of allegiance? Independence movements, everywhere, grapple with
No contest. I wasn't suggesting using a Cell cluster is a particularly good idea, but that's the point of academia, try things out, see what happens, see what you can learn.
While I'm more a GPU computing guy, some people at the last place I worked were tinkering with a small PS3 cluster. Their biggest problem was overall system memory rather than 256k cache per SPE. Not like nvidia's 16k/stream processor (8 processors to a block) in a great deal better. The whole challenge is really changing how you think about working with your data and if you aren't working in a commercial production environment it doesn't make a huge difference since by the time you're ready to use it, odds are what you learned on is antiquated. There's certainly money to be made as a PS3 developer, so learning to do neat stuff with the PS3 is useful, as is learning to do neat stuff with a GPU. The PS3 has the 'virtue' of sticking around for a while, unlike a GPU which is lucky to have a shelf life of 18 months before some major hardware revision happens.
The problem is that PS3's are cheaper sources of Cell processors than anything IBM is selling. If you want to set up (at a university say) a research cluster of 4 or 8 Cell based computers for astrophysics, datamining, or the like, it was cheaper to buy PS3's than even consider the IBM bought Cell based servers. But then you weren't buying games, and Sony wasn't getting financial credit for subsidizing academic research (if they donated the equipment it would be a tax write off likely but if you buy it they get nothing, and since they're selling at a loss they only want you to buy if you'll buy games too).
Also, as amusingly geeky as this was, how many of their gaming customers actually bothered? This was never an actual selling feature of the system, they were trying to circumvent EU import tariffs on game consoles that aren't on computers. The EU didn't buy it with the PS2, I doubt they bought it with the PS3.
That was intended as tongue in cheek. I took as self evident the merits of ABS, air conditioning, air bags, and rear view mirrors.
The nano is in many ways marketed as 'good enough'. Certainly governments in richer countries would disagree - and rightfuly so. Maybe it's good enough for the indian market, my relatives there aren't thrilled about it, but they are far from average at this point.
If you never exceeded 10Km/h but needed to seat 4 there are probably a lot of things you could cut from typical car design and not compromise saftey. However if said vehicle will still go 80, and be regularly used at 80, even though it was never expected to much exceed 10 you have a problem.
note: Maybe they don't expect it to exceed 20, or 40 or whatever, the same principle applies, but at some point all of those fancy saftey features they make us buy in north america start to be useful.
that applies to cars too. The tata nano is essentailly that. No seat belts, most of the time people don't need those. Rear view mirrors, got by for 60 years without em. Airconditioning? Open a window. Air bags? If something goes wrong they can hurt you, even without an serious accident. Anti lock breaks, well with some practice a good driver can do better than ABS, and you aren't going fast most of the time anwyay. Radio, distracting. Cost: 2500 bucks US (or thereabouts).
The reason you can't sell them for that price in Europe/the US - the governments (including others such as Canada where I am), have decided if you want a car you must have all sorts of that stuff. Projected cost to bring them to 'western' markets ~10k. And even then they wouldn't go highway speeds.
Windows - for all of it's faults, does a lot of stuff you don't see, and don't know you use. So does linux of course. And both of them are deisgned for 'marginal' situations as well as main use ones. How many people plug in a monitor that's rotated 90 degrees or how often do you change the audio output/input device? Some of that is draconian, and some of it is good planning microsoft telling you things you should be able to do.
Ever see the Simpsons episode where Homer designs a car? He talks about 'rack and peanut stearing' - the average consumer doesn't know, doesn't want to know, and is possibly better off not knowing what their stuff does. If they think they know, and don't, they may try and fix it themselves and end up more in trouble. The standard of 'good enough' needs to be chosen by people with brains- unfortunately they tend to get overruled by management, but that's cost/benefit analysis for you.
Up until this summer my mother was using a computer with Windows 98. All she does is e-mail. Is that good enough? Well she thought so. But I couldn't find a free AV program that was up to date and didn't cripple her system. Firewall? Good luck. Need a USB device for anything, not going to happen. Once I moved far enough away I couldn't help her on a regular basis she started getting nasty e-mails from the cable company about how they detected 'virus like activity' from the network. She of course doesn't understand and ignored them. Good enough in the context of computer needs to be sustainable - which by definition a paid product won't be, since adding stuff costs money and they will eventually charge for added stuff. Linux can be, but when linux fails it doesn't tend to fail as gracefully, recovery as easily or get fixed as easily - which isn't a technical problem but a proliferation of skills issue, though my mother doesn't care why it can't get fixed, she cares that it won't.
I think you'd be suprised how useless a windows minimum with 10% of the functions 7/Vista would be. Lots of stuff 'under the hood' of vista is there for application developers to do stuff, and stripping out a lot of functionality would cripple hardware and severely limit what programs you can run. Granted there are computer systems out there with very software features (think ATMs), but really simple is almost a specialized market in itself.
Network access on the playstation isn't free. It's just a different model. The person providing the content pays for it essentially. So if you download a 'free' wallpaper from the PSN the guy who put it up there pays. If you buy FFVII from the PSN, Square Enix pays. I haven't looked at the PSN contract lately (not being in the PS3 dev business so much anymore), but I think it was a per gig rate too, so if you had something big, and free you could bankrupt yourself if it was sufficiently popular.
There's not fundamental reason why you can't do cross platform play. It's just developer convenience. You tie the online services of a game into the respective platform (or in the case of the PC you need your own platform, unless you lose your brain and use Games for Windows Live). If you want to write your own platform for the PC and on the server side figure out how to talk to the PSN and XBOX live stuff you probably can, but it wouldn't be trivial.
The MMO guys have a whole other ballgame with MMO's since patches normally go through Sony/MS quality control - a not so fast process. So either square enix has negotiated a special deal, or all of their patches for FFXIV will have to be approved by Sony first, and then pushed live. That creates a real mess if you're doing all 3, since the PC you could in principle sign off on it, and publish it immediately to your server, and then you have to wait until *both* MS and Sony sign off on a patch, and if you have to make changes for one you may have to resubmit for both etc. I wouldn't want the hassle. As I say, maybe you could get a special agreement with Sony/MS if you're big enough, but those system are in place for a reason; it's all to easy to screw something up.
So I use opera regularly, but I have chrome and firefox for certain things too. I know I know, godless heathen.
So I look at my drop down menu for the address bar. yahoo, google, google scholar, the uni I work at, a company I did a contract for, amazon. Rather dull. Oh, except for all of the things I typed wrong. Typed www.slahsdot.org - it's in there, might not be a huge problem since it is clearly spelled wrong. What about the more amiguous.net vs.com.ca, etc? Or my WoW guild when the website first went up the page was a/dkp/index.htm/dkp/ just gave an error and/dkp/index.html gave an error. Think I can remember which of those is correct? How about roger.com, rogers.com, rogers.ca? In this case IIRC they're all valid, but not necessarily the one I want.
Understandably people don't want their browsing history necessarily displayed when anyone goes to use their computer. But sometimes I don't want to see my own browsing history when it doesn't work.
Yes, the recently visited list is stored in a.xml file which I on occasion have to edit when I fail to type something in correclty.
Windows XP 64 has never been anything but terrible. Vista 64 and 7 64 are both pretty good. For the 0.1% of uber users who needed 64 bit and XP, they should have changed to something else, it would have been cheaper and less headache inducing. For everyone else Windows XP 64 is an example of a company demonstrating that something can be done, not that it should, or will be supported reasonably by anyone.
This would seem to pose a problem when there are conflicting viewpoints - esspecially among higher ups. Wikipedia has this problem too, but wikipedia articles on controversial topics aren't really actionable (and you can't plead your case that oh, you read this on wikipedia it must have been true! when something is wrong that you did act on wikipedia from). Army doctrine is.
If you take a look at the current US army and marine corps counterinsurgency field manual Chapter 2is titled "Unity of Effort: Integrating Civilian and Military Activities". I bet with 200k troops or so active at any given time on recolonization (I term I would prefer to counter insurgency), there are going to be at least a dozen different high level officers with different ideas on how to get things done, and some with contradictory ideas both seeing success (or failure). Figuring out which goes in the manual, which doesn't, and why is the sort of thing that requires people at the top to act as editors, pick sides and end up essentially censoring one group of people is likely to build dissent - and public dissent. It's different when they're silenced in a research lab, the only people who've know they've been shut up are immediate colleagues, but when you make opinions widely public (or in the case of an army wide wiki, mostly public), even wildly wrong ones, you're giving the people who dissent a voice to end up on faux news touting how their solution to 'counter insurgency' would have been to gas the lot of them! It even made it into the field manual before it was pulled! The government isn't supporting our commanders who want to use more/less/different whatever.
Certainly a military wiki has its place, but I'm betting there are going to be some kinks to be worked out yet. One of the virtues of the military structure is deffering responsibility for being wrong. If I'm colonel A and General B tells me to do something I know to be wildly misguided (but not illegal), I go and do it, and when questioned about it, can say with honesty, and possibly with written orders to squarely place the blame on General B. On the other hand with the wiki system if Generals C, D, E and F all say things on a topic, not all of which is consistent, and the one I happened to see was General E's opinion which happens to be wrong who's fault is it now? Colonel A for not researching enough Gen. E for being wrong, or the Lt who was moderating the discussion for not blocking the wrongness of E that was agreed upon by C, D and F.
This idea isn't new. CUDA allows you to execute your GPU code on the CPU. This is just AMD implenting OpenCl which afaik is sufficently new no one else has done this yet. I would have expected it to be another couple of months before we really saw NVIDIA and AMD start pushing OpenCL when they release new hardware. Obviously they're working on it already, it's just a matter of when anyone can do anything with it.
between 2000 and 2008 the population went up apparently 26.7% (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04000.html) and nationally inflation from 2000 - 2008 has been (http://www.westegg.com/inflation/) 23.8%. put together (multiplicitively) they add up to a 56% increase in cost to provide exactly the same services as in 2000 assuming everything increased in cost with inflation since then (which it might not). Since 2000 GSP has grown from 158 billion to 257 billion, and the budget went from 17% of gsp to 20%. (27 - 50 billion dollars). That doesn't seem significantly out of order to me. If you're ideologically pegged to the idea that state governments should never exceed 17% of gsp then I guess you're reallly angry, but a difference of 6 billion dollars (44 vs 50) without any indication what that money is going for is a bit unfair. I'm not from, nor have I ever been to arizona and I've spent about 2 minutes studying their budget, so I have no sense of what's new or different since 2000.
To actually balance the budget they could, by your reasoning only go back to last years budge, and be fine.
On 55 billion in spending to be 1.6 billion behind in these times doesn't seem a huge problem. They're concerned with a so called 'general fund' which is 10 billion dollars which they directly control and 1.6 billion out of that is inconvenient but again, doesn't strike me as as catastrophic as they seem to be presenting things. 1.6 billion dollars would equate to 0.6% tax on everything - or a 3% increase in taxation, however you want to look at it.
Political theatre doesn't necessarily equate to any fundamentally serious problem, other than general incompetence on the part of politicians and their unwillingness to make minor changes.... which isn't exactly news.
California's situation, which is a 100 billion budget and 60 billion in revenue is somewhat more serious, by just about any measure. I live in Ontario (Canada), we have a budget of about 100 billion canadian dollars with a projected revenue of about 95 billion, so the situation here isn't particularly dire.
seems like a lot of it is a fairly straightforward decision tree.
There are things someone requires (gender, age bracket, willingness to relocate either for the relationship or for work etc), and an individual may have their own quirks/fetishes. Then you have things which are preferred but not necessarily required, height, haircolour, food preferences and so on. And then you're matching based on answers to other questions with a personality profile (which is largely psychologist nonsense but not entirely. if you ask 200 questions, even stupid questions each with a scale out of 5, you have 1000 possible points, you can do a fairly straightforward matching (0.5% each, want to assume some distribution etc.) then by virtue of the large sample size a close % match probably means something. Not necessarily a lot, but it does tell you something about how they answer questions at least.
I suppose the big advantage to online dating is if you know there is something you specifically do, or do not want that is not always immediately obvious when meeting somene (smoke, drink, shave, like harry potter, likes to travel whatever) you can immediately cull that lot from your target selection pool. People who would fall into an exclusionary category that isn't obvious can consume time otherwise spent looking for people who wouldn't be excluded. Esspeecially if they are mutually exclusive, I like to travel, she doesn't well neither party will be happy in the long run, it might be more efficient (albeit less fun) to simply skip each other and move on. You have to know what you want (which is a decidedly iterative process), and then be honest about it, one can see the advantages.
I think most of us, even if we don't regularly buy things on steam are agreeable to binding a purchase to an account. I wish microsoft would adopt this logic so I could easily manage and transfer my licences between machines and so on.
From there publishers need to dramatically drop (or even zero) the price of older titles as they move on to sequels (or new IP). There's really not much point in charging 20 or 30 bucks for assassins creed or bioshock now. If the put them on games for windows live, steam, impulse, direct2drive gamersgate etc for 5 or 10 bucks, or even 0 and just said go torrent it they would have more people lined up for the sequels and ready to pay full price. The only people who pay full price for anything are the impatient ones, myself included, they need to grow that market, they're not likely to get much from anyone else no matter what.
the same way programs require you have service pack 1, or service pack 2 etc. The course material was built around a particular version.
If the student needs to buy a book, there's no reason to not recommend the newest version. New versions exist for a reason, error correction, new information, change in focus etc. all go into making new editions.
Other reasons: The professor only has the new version. Profs get textbooks for free, usually many more than they will actually use, but publishers only send along the newest versions. (Sometimes they send these to departments rather than individual profs but the effect is the same). I'm now 7 years from finishing my undergrad. If I were to teach a course my choices are: my textbook from 7-11 years ago, which in engineering or the sciences could be irrelevant, or it could make the books antiquated garbage, or I grab the latest edition supplied by the publisher. I'm certainly not going to construct course material (which I hope to reuse next year) based on a 2 or 3 year old book when there's a new one out. That's like those people who are still clinging to office 2003 and complaining about installing office 2007 at universities... the world has moved on (for better or worse), and students don't want to go back and learn office 2003 when they have 2007 on their fancy new laptops.
Using multiple versions takes longer. Section 3.3 in 4th edition may not have been copied verbatim from any section in 3rd edition, and even if it was you have to find it. If it wasn't you need to tell students where equivalent information can be found, assuming it can be, and make sure you aren't using anything from the 4th edition that isn't in the 3rd.
We don't expect you to resell most of your books. Gasp. Looked into a professors office? Most of them are full of textbooks. If we picked it for you we probably figure its useful and you should keep it: Only applies to some courses (usually the more senior ones)
How long do you support an old edition? How long is the new edition going to last. I know when you're a student it feels like there's a new edition of every book every year, but there isn't. Most books last for quite a few years before they put out new versions. So how long do I want to support the old version? It's like software, once gears of war 2 comes out how much support does gears 1 get? If the average life of an edition of a book is 5 or 6 years I could be trying to run two versions in parallel for half the life of the first one, assuming I stay on th course.
From experience with old editions (in general). I TA'd for a guy who used to find stuff in the bargain bin at the bookstore and use that as a textbook. He wanted to keep things cheap for students. Except that a class of 200 people all trying to find the same out of print book becomes a problem, fast. If 3 or 4 weeks into the course students can't get the text you have a serious problem. The last thing you want is to say 'we recommend this $160 textbook, but the $80 prior edition will still work' only to find out 3 weeks in that the class is waiting to get the previous edition.
Lastly, and to be kind of a dick about it, generally universities don't care. You're spending ~7K in tuition (in canada) + ~12K living expenses for the 8 months you're with us at school. Wasting time fussing over differents versions of textbooks which only barely flutter in top 2 or 3% of that doesnt' register on anyones radar. It should, but it doesn't. That's all out of hte disposable income, which is a tight resource, but we don't want to let you disadvantage yourself by pleading poverty. If everyone else is using the 9th edition and you're on the 8th you're probably making life harder for yourself, and for us, and we don't care that much. Maybe universities should, but they're more worried about making sure tuition doesn't end up like it does in the US, and making sure there is someone to teach your class and that they're getting research done, and money brought in so they can pay grad students who will TA your course.
I think this is mainly for university students. The system in canada is the similar to the one in France, until you're finished high school you don't have to buy text books normally.
that's because people in north america and europe grew up with computers and love what they do, people in those countries who grew up with computers in the 80's and 90's are all spoiled rich kids. Well mostly.
My dad did a MSc in electrical engineering in india before comming to canada in the 60's, having enrolled in his Bachelors in engineering before he'd lived anywhere that had electricity. When GE started laying off EE staff in his group he was the last one there so presumably they thought he was useful for something. So I'm guessing at some point he learned something useful about electricity, but the passion which I have for experimenting with science and technology, because I've had all of those toys as I was growing up wasn't available to him. I wouldn't be suprised if most people from india and china are the same way still. The generation comming up now, who were born in the 1990's, and probably late 90's, just like we have in north america all have access to computers and they'll be able to make much more meaninful contributions on the creative side than the previous lot.
I remember a couple of years ago a friend of mine interviewed for a position as an Apple genius in Canada. About half of the questions were about the iPhone, which was, at that point, not available in canada (and still pretty new in the US). No matter how well trained or educated he was in being a computer tech he knew bugger all about how to fix an iPhone, having never seen one let alone tried to use it.
That said, my experience as a grad student with students from Canada, the US, India, China the middle east etc is that the ones who will actually learn how to do stuff properly (to whatever guidelines you lay out, sometimes intentionally crazy guideliness just to see what they do with them), are the foreigners, not the domestic students. The foreigners are obviously the best and brightest from wherever they are, or they wouldn't be 10 time zones from home, but they are not burdened with antiquated notions of how to do things because that worked for them 5 years ago. I was trying to convey this point to the prof of one of the relevant courses, there were a couple of hard core geek types from Canada who could write code for small programs, but not software, and they didn't grasp the merits of object oriented thinking (let alone design), nor were they particularly inclined to consider it. They'd been coding for 10 years this way, and it worked so why change? I was sort of fortunate that when I was 13 or so and starting to program I'd learned to use quick basic, turing and then Fortran (which serves me well 17 years later oddly), where the first of those two were dead out the door. I had to learn C, and then having tried to make real software that you know, people will pay for, using any of C, C++ or Fortran (and HTML/PHP/ASP/Javascript crap), whereas these guys have been using C since high school, which means at least 3 or 4 years of it by the time they get to 3rd year, and they might have picked up some basic java, but their java code is organized like a C program.
Sure the nerd hacker types have a much better sense of what software can do for you, and by extension are somewhat better at hacking together a solution to a problem, but if you, as an employer, want people to do things a particular way, in my experience at least, you don't generally want people from north america. When you hire people who come from the Canada/US high school system (who have along with their foreign counterparts graduated a US or canadian university), you tend to get a rather bipolar lot, on one extreme, and they represent 80% of the group, are people who don't really know anything about computers, through some miracle ( administrations not wanting to fail everyone) passed computer science or engineering and can only write token crap to solve simple problems (they will immediately be promoted to management however because they speak english clearly and understand something about what computers can do), or the hardcore hacker typ
yep. If you have employees in india they had to pay bribes probably to get on the train to to work, to buy a radio, get government ID, buy a Television.
Everyone knows this law really means "don't bribe anyone in a country that would be outraged if you were caught, or don't get caught".
Maybe if Sun had been able to pay better bribes, to more relevant people they would have gotten better contracts and wouldn't be in the mess they are now. That is the sad reality of doing business in most of the world.
I would say almost the exact opposite of everything you are suggesting is what the US military needs.
Does it need to stave of North korean missiles? No. South korea outnumber the north koreans 2:1 and a vastly larger and more sophisticated economy. Keeping US forces there is a waste of money, and serves no purpose than antagonizing the DPRK. Oh and there's japan next door too, and they outnumber the DPRK by about 4:1. They don't need your help with that either. You can sell them weapons, but htey don't need US military bases.
Afghanistan is, at best a minimal commitment for a country of 300 million people. 20k troops at a time, add in some support personel etc, you'll looking at a total involvement of at most a couple of hundred thousand troops a year, on a standing military of over a million. Iraq, entirely unnecessary and illegal, if you'd had a smaller army in the first place it would have been much harder to persuade people of the virtues of massively expanding the armed forces to go in. Chalk one of up for pro shrinking the US military.
Stop pirates etc... You don't need multibillion dollar aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles to go after pirates. Very different goals, very different economies of scale, and frankly other countries are willing to contribute more since it so obviously is the right thing to do.
Monitor the chinese? You mean monitor the chinese monitoring you. They outnumber you 4:1. They will win. Let it go gracefully. You cannot keep up with them. Don't try. You'll end up broke and they'll laugh at you for years. The british very nearly made that mistake in the 20's trying to outpace the americans. A combination of good sense and the league of nations put a stop to that. Follow their good example, and pass the torch to india and china with dignity and without the bankruptcy.
I'll take your mission to mars quip as hyperbole. People have spent far longer on ships (wisely or not) than any modern navy, and certainly long enough to go to and from mars. However they had the benefit of gravity, and the problem that a large percentage died when anything went wrong.
State owned shipyards are sort of the wrong direction. True, building cruise ships and warships are different things, but they're still ships. The principles of buoyancy don't change, much of the equipment doesn't change, the size of the dock etc. Principles of efficient management of shipyard workers, are the same. Competition between suppliers in the long run gets you better products, and for less money. Granted not everything learned building a cruise ship applies to building an aircraft carrier, but some of it does (whether thats modularization, or a new way of transporting steel). The private company is more inclined towards efficiency than the public. The Navy, any Navy, wants ships that work. The public sector is inherently slower, less efficient, but more likely to produce a consistent product with a paper trail of accountability.
Again, I would argue the best thing for the US navy, would be to immediately halve it size. Maybe even mothball 2/3rds of the fleet. Focus on quality over quantity as always, and the smaller the force, the less likely it will be sent on unreasonable assignments. The harder it is to do a mission, the more thought people will put in to doing it. The bigger it is, the easier it is to get sent off on some half baked plan. Right now no navy in the world can match even one US fleet carrier, if you only had 6 it wouldn't really change the deterrent effect, and when the chinese start to outpace you, they will leap past you either way. Trying to outspend them is begging to go broke.
Not to mention the practical problems of having a large number of ships, which may be obsoleted by some new technology (or old technology if there was something fundamentally flawed with teh design). This happened a couple of times in the last two centuries. There's no point in spending billions of dollars on a ship, only to find out some French guy is sel
Basic ides: If the PS3 is sufficently unique it won't be worth the effort to port it to other consoles. A future looking architecture is a many core system, and we can continue, with the PS4 to use a better version of said new architecture.
Bad assumption: All of the PS2 devs who were exclusive would stay that way.
Bad business: Not paying for exclusives. If sony had opened up the wallet and left the 360 with Halo as it's only real platform exclusive the PS3 would be doing much better. Losing FF13 and GTA (as exclusives) was a really bad move on their part, there are other titles too.
Bad technology: The PS3 is marginally more powerful than the 360, but in the wrong area. nVIDIA is mostly right on this, any half decent CPU is fast enough for whatever you want to do. The Cell is an expensive CPU design, which even fully utilized doesn't add a whole lot to the gameplay experience. The conole also launched a year after the 360, it should have been significantly more powerful. Sony would have made their lives much easier if they had put 2GiB of memory in the system and a variant on the 8800 rather than 7800, then a game written for the PS3 would in some respects be clearly better than its 360 counterpart. Developers would be able to easily exploit some of that power (notably RAM), and customers would see a real tangible benefit.
Other bad technical: The hard drive used is a notebook drive. This adds no functionality, but increases cost. One can argue blu-ray until you're blu in the face, it at least adds functionality, and IMO is a big contributor to why blu ray won the format war. But the hard drive...just wtf? Stripping BC from later consoles was really bad too. I just got Killzone2, in anticipation I went and played through Killzone 1 again, to get a feel for the world again. Try doing that on a new PS3
Where to go in future: Sony needs to launch a PS4 the moment dx11 is finalized, and hope MS isn't doing the same. A PS4 with 28 cell processor, 4 GiB of ram and a directx11 compatible video card. It would be fully BC with the current PS3, relatively easy to develop for when going from the PS3 development, and be so clearly better than the Xbox360. MS has a problem, their architecture died and became the Cell. They could go back to intel/AMD (like the xbox) but that pretty much tosses BC. They have the clear advantage in dev tools and being behind a lot of DX11. But then is the Xbox3 going to be "Now with the cell and blu ray"? That's not going to make for good marketting. If they go the "Now with an intel CPU" route they're back to competing with themselves on the PC. MS also has a harder time justifying a new console, they're sort of winning, but not making much money. Making another huge investment in console R&D in that position would be unpopular. Sony is losing, they want to stop losing, that justifies more money.
So right now, they hold and auction, big companies with deep pockets buy up everything they can, and then leave a huge chunk of it poorly utilized. They drive the price up because they have money to burn, but then keep the price high because they have no inclination to let anyone else in. It's a self perpetuating system which limits access to the few companies that have cash to buy in in the first place.
If you add a cost you drive them to be more efficient about what spectrum they do use, and lower the costs of entry for the 'little guy'. It's not in AT&Ts interest to buy 5 billion dollars in spectrum, and then spend 500 million a year on space they only really need 10% of. That drives down demand for spectrum space amongst rich companies, since they need way less and have no incentive to buy more than they need, and opens it up to smaller players to buy small pieces.
More efficient spectrum utilization is nothing but good. It's one of the few resources there is no possible way to get more of, no recycling as such etc. All you can do is increase the usable spectrum by high and low bandwidth research and fancy encoding schemes at a particular frequency. Forcing companies to pay for what they have will make them much more efficient about using it.
Yes, they will pass on costs to consumers, but if they're buying less spectrum, and only using exactly what they need then the cost is only going to be for the spectrum they need to provide you service, and not for spectrum they're holding for the sake of holding.
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While it's rather basic in hindsight, to guess in advance places and people that might radicalize in response to policy. You don't have to spy on anyone or do anything illegal to guess who's going to be pissed by policy - you just have to have brains to guess well.
The religious right in the US is a good example. You don't need to spy on anyone, and I certainly can't, to guess that strongly religious groups, white supremacists and pro- gun groups could radicalize under obama. Knowing who those groups are is only marginally more involved than looking in a phone book.
With Iraq the UK police had to know anyone who saw the mess they (We) are causing in iraq and Afghanistan was likely to turn against us - then it's just a matter of figuring out who is seeing what we're up to, especially the bad stuff (NGOs, soldiers, Ministry of foreign affairs people, journalists, contractors, red cross), figuring out who from that lot is likely to turn - and the vast majority won't so it's a profiling exercise to some degree. Then providing a venue for people who aren't disillusioned to talk to police if anything untoward is happening. There isn't the manpower to follow everyone who went to Afghanistan - you need to have something to go with first or else you'll never find anyone. Not that the British have the best track record with catching terrorists lately, which might be a good indicator they haven't been gathering illegal or inadmissable evidence first - if they were you'd think the large number of guys they grabbed prior to these wouldn't have been let go - because they definitely aren't terrorists (not on lack of evidence of being terrorists).
gah missed a sentence in a last minute edit: "From the sounds of it, what did these guys in is that they started with an islamic charity organization that was trying to help people in afghanistan - and as time went on became progressively more radical, and disillusioned with what they saw via the charity" - and the UK police realized this could happen, were on the lookout for it, and started spying on people, with warrants, very quickly. Credit to them for anticipating the problem.
I think the distinction here is that they separately obtained the warrant (after trying to infiltrate the group the UK set up their own surveillance of these guys). If I send you an e-mail saying 'blow this up at ..." and the NSA intercepts it, that's surveillance and inadmissible, if at the same time, or some point later, a court in Canada (where I am) or the US (where you presumably are) calls up yahoo with a warrant for said e-mail because they figure I might be sending such things that's fine. That it was intercepted in addition to being obtained via warrant shouldn't affect the validity of the warrant. And no, IANAL either.
From the sounds of it, what did these guys in is that they started with an islamic charity organization that was trying to help people in afghanistan - and as time went on became progressively more radical, and disillusioned with what they saw via the charity. The charity might well have been trying to do unbiased good, but seeing what the US and UK were up to in Afghanistan and especially by 2003 with Iraq took them from trying to help with aid to trying to help by killing the perceived source of the problems. I don't want to sound to sympathetic to a bunch of homicidal lunatics (and on every level fail to see the utility in blowing up civilian aircraft), but at some point sending food and clothing isn't going to help if their lack of food and clothing is because someone is stealing it (see somalia) - you need to go after the people doing the stealing (see somalia).
I honestly believe ISAF is trying, arguably doing a terrible job of it mind you, to help the afghans stand up on their own. That case is much like Somalia, too many warlords or 'Governors' who are basically looting any help we chose to provide, and because they're looting it, we're reluctant to supply it, because we're reluctant to supply it NGO's(charities) try and fill the gap - and in turn supply the warlords with loot to fuel their looting. All the while the population who needs help is getting none of it, and are pissed at us for bombing their country into the stone age so even if they wanted to try, they have no bootstraps to lift themselves up with.
Iraq is all around inherently much muddier. I freely admit my bias that I see the war in Iraq is illegal, unnecessary, and thinly veiled recolonization. You can't on one hand say that, and then get all high and mighty against people who want to do something against the people our governments effectively installed for not helping their own people. The current government in Iraq has been very crafty about asserting their independence (Iraq May Hold Vote on Early US Withdrawal - http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/168-general/48081-iraq-may-hold-vote-on-early-us-withdrawal.html) , credit where credit is due, but it has taken a long time to get there, and the situation on the ground there can hardly be considered good. More like less bad. In 2006 we were looking at a much bleaker outlook. It's not an easy problem - especially for frustrated youth. Sending money/stuff doesn't help, speaking out and protesting back home doesn't/didn't help. So what's the strategic play? The 'green revolution' Mousavi supporters in Iran, the pro democracy guys in Burma, the religious right in the US, the separatist movements all over seem to regularly grapple with this issue. If you are utterly convinced of the rightness of your position, but have no power what do you do about it? In Iran they're basically screwed. Protests haven't worked, so you're left with armed insurrection, or give up. Burma - they've all but given up. The religious right in the US transformed itself into a political movement and moved their votes to a political party in exchange for influence - but now that they've lost the influence they protest a lot - but what if the protesting doesn't work, and god forbid you get national healthcare, gun control, gay marriage and god back out of the pledge of allegiance? Independence movements, everywhere, grapple with
No contest. I wasn't suggesting using a Cell cluster is a particularly good idea, but that's the point of academia, try things out, see what happens, see what you can learn.
While I'm more a GPU computing guy, some people at the last place I worked were tinkering with a small PS3 cluster. Their biggest problem was overall system memory rather than 256k cache per SPE. Not like nvidia's 16k/stream processor (8 processors to a block) in a great deal better. The whole challenge is really changing how you think about working with your data and if you aren't working in a commercial production environment it doesn't make a huge difference since by the time you're ready to use it, odds are what you learned on is antiquated. There's certainly money to be made as a PS3 developer, so learning to do neat stuff with the PS3 is useful, as is learning to do neat stuff with a GPU. The PS3 has the 'virtue' of sticking around for a while, unlike a GPU which is lucky to have a shelf life of 18 months before some major hardware revision happens.
The problem is that PS3's are cheaper sources of Cell processors than anything IBM is selling. If you want to set up (at a university say) a research cluster of 4 or 8 Cell based computers for astrophysics, datamining, or the like, it was cheaper to buy PS3's than even consider the IBM bought Cell based servers. But then you weren't buying games, and Sony wasn't getting financial credit for subsidizing academic research (if they donated the equipment it would be a tax write off likely but if you buy it they get nothing, and since they're selling at a loss they only want you to buy if you'll buy games too).
Also, as amusingly geeky as this was, how many of their gaming customers actually bothered? This was never an actual selling feature of the system, they were trying to circumvent EU import tariffs on game consoles that aren't on computers. The EU didn't buy it with the PS2, I doubt they bought it with the PS3.
That was intended as tongue in cheek. I took as self evident the merits of ABS, air conditioning, air bags, and rear view mirrors.
The nano is in many ways marketed as 'good enough'. Certainly governments in richer countries would disagree - and rightfuly so. Maybe it's good enough for the indian market, my relatives there aren't thrilled about it, but they are far from average at this point.
If you never exceeded 10Km/h but needed to seat 4 there are probably a lot of things you could cut from typical car design and not compromise saftey. However if said vehicle will still go 80, and be regularly used at 80, even though it was never expected to much exceed 10 you have a problem.
note: Maybe they don't expect it to exceed 20, or 40 or whatever, the same principle applies, but at some point all of those fancy saftey features they make us buy in north america start to be useful.
that applies to cars too. The tata nano is essentailly that. No seat belts, most of the time people don't need those. Rear view mirrors, got by for 60 years without em. Airconditioning? Open a window. Air bags? If something goes wrong they can hurt you, even without an serious accident. Anti lock breaks, well with some practice a good driver can do better than ABS, and you aren't going fast most of the time anwyay. Radio, distracting. Cost: 2500 bucks US (or thereabouts).
The reason you can't sell them for that price in Europe/the US - the governments (including others such as Canada where I am), have decided if you want a car you must have all sorts of that stuff. Projected cost to bring them to 'western' markets ~10k. And even then they wouldn't go highway speeds.
Windows - for all of it's faults, does a lot of stuff you don't see, and don't know you use. So does linux of course. And both of them are deisgned for 'marginal' situations as well as main use ones. How many people plug in a monitor that's rotated 90 degrees or how often do you change the audio output/input device? Some of that is draconian, and some of it is good planning microsoft telling you things you should be able to do.
Ever see the Simpsons episode where Homer designs a car? He talks about 'rack and peanut stearing' - the average consumer doesn't know, doesn't want to know, and is possibly better off not knowing what their stuff does. If they think they know, and don't, they may try and fix it themselves and end up more in trouble. The standard of 'good enough' needs to be chosen by people with brains- unfortunately they tend to get overruled by management, but that's cost/benefit analysis for you.
Up until this summer my mother was using a computer with Windows 98. All she does is e-mail. Is that good enough? Well she thought so. But I couldn't find a free AV program that was up to date and didn't cripple her system. Firewall? Good luck. Need a USB device for anything, not going to happen. Once I moved far enough away I couldn't help her on a regular basis she started getting nasty e-mails from the cable company about how they detected 'virus like activity' from the network. She of course doesn't understand and ignored them. Good enough in the context of computer needs to be sustainable - which by definition a paid product won't be, since adding stuff costs money and they will eventually charge for added stuff. Linux can be, but when linux fails it doesn't tend to fail as gracefully, recovery as easily or get fixed as easily - which isn't a technical problem but a proliferation of skills issue, though my mother doesn't care why it can't get fixed, she cares that it won't.
I think you'd be suprised how useless a windows minimum with 10% of the functions 7/Vista would be. Lots of stuff 'under the hood' of vista is there for application developers to do stuff, and stripping out a lot of functionality would cripple hardware and severely limit what programs you can run. Granted there are computer systems out there with very software features (think ATMs), but really simple is almost a specialized market in itself.
Network access on the playstation isn't free. It's just a different model. The person providing the content pays for it essentially. So if you download a 'free' wallpaper from the PSN the guy who put it up there pays. If you buy FFVII from the PSN, Square Enix pays. I haven't looked at the PSN contract lately (not being in the PS3 dev business so much anymore), but I think it was a per gig rate too, so if you had something big, and free you could bankrupt yourself if it was sufficiently popular.
There's not fundamental reason why you can't do cross platform play. It's just developer convenience. You tie the online services of a game into the respective platform (or in the case of the PC you need your own platform, unless you lose your brain and use Games for Windows Live). If you want to write your own platform for the PC and on the server side figure out how to talk to the PSN and XBOX live stuff you probably can, but it wouldn't be trivial.
The MMO guys have a whole other ballgame with MMO's since patches normally go through Sony/MS quality control - a not so fast process. So either square enix has negotiated a special deal, or all of their patches for FFXIV will have to be approved by Sony first, and then pushed live. That creates a real mess if you're doing all 3, since the PC you could in principle sign off on it, and publish it immediately to your server, and then you have to wait until *both* MS and Sony sign off on a patch, and if you have to make changes for one you may have to resubmit for both etc. I wouldn't want the hassle. As I say, maybe you could get a special agreement with Sony/MS if you're big enough, but those system are in place for a reason; it's all to easy to screw something up.
So I use opera regularly, but I have chrome and firefox for certain things too. I know I know, godless heathen.
So I look at my drop down menu for the address bar. yahoo, google, google scholar, the uni I work at, a company I did a contract for, amazon. Rather dull. Oh, except for all of the things I typed wrong. Typed www.slahsdot.org - it's in there, might not be a huge problem since it is clearly spelled wrong. What about the more amiguous .net vs .com .ca, etc? Or my WoW guild when the website first went up the page was a /dkp/index.htm /dkp/ just gave an error and /dkp/index.html gave an error. Think I can remember which of those is correct? How about roger.com, rogers.com, rogers.ca? In this case IIRC they're all valid, but not necessarily the one I want.
Understandably people don't want their browsing history necessarily displayed when anyone goes to use their computer. But sometimes I don't want to see my own browsing history when it doesn't work.
Yes, the recently visited list is stored in a .xml file which I on occasion have to edit when I fail to type something in correclty.
Windows XP 64 has never been anything but terrible. Vista 64 and 7 64 are both pretty good. For the 0.1% of uber users who needed 64 bit and XP, they should have changed to something else, it would have been cheaper and less headache inducing. For everyone else Windows XP 64 is an example of a company demonstrating that something can be done, not that it should, or will be supported reasonably by anyone.
This would seem to pose a problem when there are conflicting viewpoints - esspecially among higher ups. Wikipedia has this problem too, but wikipedia articles on controversial topics aren't really actionable (and you can't plead your case that oh, you read this on wikipedia it must have been true! when something is wrong that you did act on wikipedia from). Army doctrine is.
If you take a look at the current US army and marine corps counterinsurgency field manual Chapter 2is titled "Unity of Effort: Integrating Civilian and Military Activities". I bet with 200k troops or so active at any given time on recolonization (I term I would prefer to counter insurgency), there are going to be at least a dozen different high level officers with different ideas on how to get things done, and some with contradictory ideas both seeing success (or failure). Figuring out which goes in the manual, which doesn't, and why is the sort of thing that requires people at the top to act as editors, pick sides and end up essentially censoring one group of people is likely to build dissent - and public dissent. It's different when they're silenced in a research lab, the only people who've know they've been shut up are immediate colleagues, but when you make opinions widely public (or in the case of an army wide wiki, mostly public), even wildly wrong ones, you're giving the people who dissent a voice to end up on faux news touting how their solution to 'counter insurgency' would have been to gas the lot of them! It even made it into the field manual before it was pulled! The government isn't supporting our commanders who want to use more/less/different whatever.
Certainly a military wiki has its place, but I'm betting there are going to be some kinks to be worked out yet. One of the virtues of the military structure is deffering responsibility for being wrong. If I'm colonel A and General B tells me to do something I know to be wildly misguided (but not illegal), I go and do it, and when questioned about it, can say with honesty, and possibly with written orders to squarely place the blame on General B. On the other hand with the wiki system if Generals C, D, E and F all say things on a topic, not all of which is consistent, and the one I happened to see was General E's opinion which happens to be wrong who's fault is it now? Colonel A for not researching enough Gen. E for being wrong, or the Lt who was moderating the discussion for not blocking the wrongness of E that was agreed upon by C, D and F.
This idea isn't new. CUDA allows you to execute your GPU code on the CPU. This is just AMD implenting OpenCl which afaik is sufficently new no one else has done this yet. I would have expected it to be another couple of months before we really saw NVIDIA and AMD start pushing OpenCL when they release new hardware. Obviously they're working on it already, it's just a matter of when anyone can do anything with it.
this article didn't deserve to be run on arstechnica, it certainly doesn't deserve to be pointed to by /.
between 2000 and 2008 the population went up apparently 26.7% (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04000.html) and nationally inflation from 2000 - 2008 has been (http://www.westegg.com/inflation/) 23.8%. put together (multiplicitively) they add up to a 56% increase in cost to provide exactly the same services as in 2000 assuming everything increased in cost with inflation since then (which it might not). Since 2000 GSP has grown from 158 billion to 257 billion, and the budget went from 17% of gsp to 20%. (27 - 50 billion dollars). That doesn't seem significantly out of order to me. If you're ideologically pegged to the idea that state governments should never exceed 17% of gsp then I guess you're reallly angry, but a difference of 6 billion dollars (44 vs 50) without any indication what that money is going for is a bit unfair. I'm not from, nor have I ever been to arizona and I've spent about 2 minutes studying their budget, so I have no sense of what's new or different since 2000.
To actually balance the budget they could, by your reasoning only go back to last years budge, and be fine.
On 55 billion in spending to be 1.6 billion behind in these times doesn't seem a huge problem. They're concerned with a so called 'general fund' which is 10 billion dollars which they directly control and 1.6 billion out of that is inconvenient but again, doesn't strike me as as catastrophic as they seem to be presenting things. 1.6 billion dollars would equate to 0.6% tax on everything - or a 3% increase in taxation, however you want to look at it.
Political theatre doesn't necessarily equate to any fundamentally serious problem, other than general incompetence on the part of politicians and their unwillingness to make minor changes.... which isn't exactly news.
California's situation, which is a 100 billion budget and 60 billion in revenue is somewhat more serious, by just about any measure. I live in Ontario (Canada), we have a budget of about 100 billion canadian dollars with a projected revenue of about 95 billion, so the situation here isn't particularly dire.
seems like a lot of it is a fairly straightforward decision tree.
There are things someone requires (gender, age bracket, willingness to relocate either for the relationship or for work etc), and an individual may have their own quirks/fetishes. Then you have things which are preferred but not necessarily required, height, haircolour, food preferences and so on. And then you're matching based on answers to other questions with a personality profile (which is largely psychologist nonsense but not entirely. if you ask 200 questions, even stupid questions each with a scale out of 5, you have 1000 possible points, you can do a fairly straightforward matching (0.5% each, want to assume some distribution etc.) then by virtue of the large sample size a close % match probably means something. Not necessarily a lot, but it does tell you something about how they answer questions at least.
I suppose the big advantage to online dating is if you know there is something you specifically do, or do not want that is not always immediately obvious when meeting somene (smoke, drink, shave, like harry potter, likes to travel whatever) you can immediately cull that lot from your target selection pool. People who would fall into an exclusionary category that isn't obvious can consume time otherwise spent looking for people who wouldn't be excluded. Esspeecially if they are mutually exclusive, I like to travel, she doesn't well neither party will be happy in the long run, it might be more efficient (albeit less fun) to simply skip each other and move on. You have to know what you want (which is a decidedly iterative process), and then be honest about it, one can see the advantages.
I think most of us, even if we don't regularly buy things on steam are agreeable to binding a purchase to an account. I wish microsoft would adopt this logic so I could easily manage and transfer my licences between machines and so on.
From there publishers need to dramatically drop (or even zero) the price of older titles as they move on to sequels (or new IP). There's really not much point in charging 20 or 30 bucks for assassins creed or bioshock now. If the put them on games for windows live, steam, impulse, direct2drive gamersgate etc for 5 or 10 bucks, or even 0 and just said go torrent it they would have more people lined up for the sequels and ready to pay full price. The only people who pay full price for anything are the impatient ones, myself included, they need to grow that market, they're not likely to get much from anyone else no matter what.
the same way programs require you have service pack 1, or service pack 2 etc. The course material was built around a particular version.
If the student needs to buy a book, there's no reason to not recommend the newest version. New versions exist for a reason, error correction, new information, change in focus etc. all go into making new editions.
Other reasons:
The professor only has the new version. Profs get textbooks for free, usually many more than they will actually use, but publishers only send along the newest versions. (Sometimes they send these to departments rather than individual profs but the effect is the same). I'm now 7 years from finishing my undergrad. If I were to teach a course my choices are: my textbook from 7-11 years ago, which in engineering or the sciences could be irrelevant, or it could make the books antiquated garbage, or I grab the latest edition supplied by the publisher. I'm certainly not going to construct course material (which I hope to reuse next year) based on a 2 or 3 year old book when there's a new one out. That's like those people who are still clinging to office 2003 and complaining about installing office 2007 at universities... the world has moved on (for better or worse), and students don't want to go back and learn office 2003 when they have 2007 on their fancy new laptops.
Using multiple versions takes longer. Section 3.3 in 4th edition may not have been copied verbatim from any section in 3rd edition, and even if it was you have to find it. If it wasn't you need to tell students where equivalent information can be found, assuming it can be, and make sure you aren't using anything from the 4th edition that isn't in the 3rd.
We don't expect you to resell most of your books. Gasp. Looked into a professors office? Most of them are full of textbooks. If we picked it for you we probably figure its useful and you should keep it: Only applies to some courses (usually the more senior ones)
How long do you support an old edition? How long is the new edition going to last. I know when you're a student it feels like there's a new edition of every book every year, but there isn't. Most books last for quite a few years before they put out new versions. So how long do I want to support the old version? It's like software, once gears of war 2 comes out how much support does gears 1 get? If the average life of an edition of a book is 5 or 6 years I could be trying to run two versions in parallel for half the life of the first one, assuming I stay on th course.
From experience with old editions (in general). I TA'd for a guy who used to find stuff in the bargain bin at the bookstore and use that as a textbook. He wanted to keep things cheap for students. Except that a class of 200 people all trying to find the same out of print book becomes a problem, fast. If 3 or 4 weeks into the course students can't get the text you have a serious problem. The last thing you want is to say 'we recommend this $160 textbook, but the $80 prior edition will still work' only to find out 3 weeks in that the class is waiting to get the previous edition.
Lastly, and to be kind of a dick about it, generally universities don't care. You're spending ~7K in tuition (in canada) + ~12K living expenses for the 8 months you're with us at school. Wasting time fussing over differents versions of textbooks which only barely flutter in top 2 or 3% of that doesnt' register on anyones radar. It should, but it doesn't. That's all out of hte disposable income, which is a tight resource, but we don't want to let you disadvantage yourself by pleading poverty. If everyone else is using the 9th edition and you're on the 8th you're probably making life harder for yourself, and for us, and we don't care that much. Maybe universities should, but they're more worried about making sure tuition doesn't end up like it does in the US, and making sure there is someone to teach your class and that they're getting research done, and money brought in so they can pay grad students who will TA your course.
I think this is mainly for university students. The system in canada is the similar to the one in France, until you're finished high school you don't have to buy text books normally.
that's because people in north america and europe grew up with computers and love what they do, people in those countries who grew up with computers in the 80's and 90's are all spoiled rich kids. Well mostly.
My dad did a MSc in electrical engineering in india before comming to canada in the 60's, having enrolled in his Bachelors in engineering before he'd lived anywhere that had electricity. When GE started laying off EE staff in his group he was the last one there so presumably they thought he was useful for something. So I'm guessing at some point he learned something useful about electricity, but the passion which I have for experimenting with science and technology, because I've had all of those toys as I was growing up wasn't available to him. I wouldn't be suprised if most people from india and china are the same way still. The generation comming up now, who were born in the 1990's, and probably late 90's, just like we have in north america all have access to computers and they'll be able to make much more meaninful contributions on the creative side than the previous lot.
I remember a couple of years ago a friend of mine interviewed for a position as an Apple genius in Canada. About half of the questions were about the iPhone, which was, at that point, not available in canada (and still pretty new in the US). No matter how well trained or educated he was in being a computer tech he knew bugger all about how to fix an iPhone, having never seen one let alone tried to use it.
That said, my experience as a grad student with students from Canada, the US, India, China the middle east etc is that the ones who will actually learn how to do stuff properly (to whatever guidelines you lay out, sometimes intentionally crazy guideliness just to see what they do with them), are the foreigners, not the domestic students. The foreigners are obviously the best and brightest from wherever they are, or they wouldn't be 10 time zones from home, but they are not burdened with antiquated notions of how to do things because that worked for them 5 years ago. I was trying to convey this point to the prof of one of the relevant courses, there were a couple of hard core geek types from Canada who could write code for small programs, but not software, and they didn't grasp the merits of object oriented thinking (let alone design), nor were they particularly inclined to consider it. They'd been coding for 10 years this way, and it worked so why change? I was sort of fortunate that when I was 13 or so and starting to program I'd learned to use quick basic, turing and then Fortran (which serves me well 17 years later oddly), where the first of those two were dead out the door. I had to learn C, and then having tried to make real software that you know, people will pay for, using any of C, C++ or Fortran (and HTML/PHP/ASP/Javascript crap), whereas these guys have been using C since high school, which means at least 3 or 4 years of it by the time they get to 3rd year, and they might have picked up some basic java, but their java code is organized like a C program.
Sure the nerd hacker types have a much better sense of what software can do for you, and by extension are somewhat better at hacking together a solution to a problem, but if you, as an employer, want people to do things a particular way, in my experience at least, you don't generally want people from north america. When you hire people who come from the Canada/US high school system (who have along with their foreign counterparts graduated a US or canadian university), you tend to get a rather bipolar lot, on one extreme, and they represent 80% of the group, are people who don't really know anything about computers, through some miracle ( administrations not wanting to fail everyone) passed computer science or engineering and can only write token crap to solve simple problems (they will immediately be promoted to management however because they speak english clearly and understand something about what computers can do), or the hardcore hacker typ
yep. If you have employees in india they had to pay bribes probably to get on the train to to work, to buy a radio, get government ID, buy a Television.
Everyone knows this law really means "don't bribe anyone in a country that would be outraged if you were caught, or don't get caught".
Maybe if Sun had been able to pay better bribes, to more relevant people they would have gotten better contracts and wouldn't be in the mess they are now. That is the sad reality of doing business in most of the world.
it's already undone outside the US. See the article on arstechnica etc.
There was no sex in Ireland before television.-Irish MP Oliver J. Flanagan
Apparently there wasn't any before the internet, and they must put a stop to this before it catches on.
I would say almost the exact opposite of everything you are suggesting is what the US military needs.
Does it need to stave of North korean missiles? No. South korea outnumber the north koreans 2:1 and a vastly larger and more sophisticated economy. Keeping US forces there is a waste of money, and serves no purpose than antagonizing the DPRK. Oh and there's japan next door too, and they outnumber the DPRK by about 4:1. They don't need your help with that either. You can sell them weapons, but htey don't need US military bases.
Afghanistan is, at best a minimal commitment for a country of 300 million people. 20k troops at a time, add in some support personel etc, you'll looking at a total involvement of at most a couple of hundred thousand troops a year, on a standing military of over a million. Iraq, entirely unnecessary and illegal, if you'd had a smaller army in the first place it would have been much harder to persuade people of the virtues of massively expanding the armed forces to go in. Chalk one of up for pro shrinking the US military.
Stop pirates etc... You don't need multibillion dollar aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles to go after pirates. Very different goals, very different economies of scale, and frankly other countries are willing to contribute more since it so obviously is the right thing to do.
Monitor the chinese? You mean monitor the chinese monitoring you. They outnumber you 4:1. They will win. Let it go gracefully. You cannot keep up with them. Don't try. You'll end up broke and they'll laugh at you for years. The british very nearly made that mistake in the 20's trying to outpace the americans. A combination of good sense and the league of nations put a stop to that. Follow their good example, and pass the torch to india and china with dignity and without the bankruptcy.
I'll take your mission to mars quip as hyperbole. People have spent far longer on ships (wisely or not) than any modern navy, and certainly long enough to go to and from mars. However they had the benefit of gravity, and the problem that a large percentage died when anything went wrong.
State owned shipyards are sort of the wrong direction. True, building cruise ships and warships are different things, but they're still ships. The principles of buoyancy don't change, much of the equipment doesn't change, the size of the dock etc. Principles of efficient management of shipyard workers, are the same. Competition between suppliers in the long run gets you better products, and for less money. Granted not everything learned building a cruise ship applies to building an aircraft carrier, but some of it does (whether thats modularization, or a new way of transporting steel). The private company is more inclined towards efficiency than the public. The Navy, any Navy, wants ships that work. The public sector is inherently slower, less efficient, but more likely to produce a consistent product with a paper trail of accountability.
Again, I would argue the best thing for the US navy, would be to immediately halve it size. Maybe even mothball 2/3rds of the fleet. Focus on quality over quantity as always, and the smaller the force, the less likely it will be sent on unreasonable assignments. The harder it is to do a mission, the more thought people will put in to doing it. The bigger it is, the easier it is to get sent off on some half baked plan. Right now no navy in the world can match even one US fleet carrier, if you only had 6 it wouldn't really change the deterrent effect, and when the chinese start to outpace you, they will leap past you either way. Trying to outspend them is begging to go broke.
Not to mention the practical problems of having a large number of ships, which may be obsoleted by some new technology (or old technology if there was something fundamentally flawed with teh design). This happened a couple of times in the last two centuries. There's no point in spending billions of dollars on a ship, only to find out some French guy is sel
Basic ides: If the PS3 is sufficently unique it won't be worth the effort to port it to other consoles. A future looking architecture is a many core system, and we can continue, with the PS4 to use a better version of said new architecture.
Bad assumption: All of the PS2 devs who were exclusive would stay that way.
Bad business: Not paying for exclusives. If sony had opened up the wallet and left the 360 with Halo as it's only real platform exclusive the PS3 would be doing much better. Losing FF13 and GTA (as exclusives) was a really bad move on their part, there are other titles too.
Bad technology: The PS3 is marginally more powerful than the 360, but in the wrong area. nVIDIA is mostly right on this, any half decent CPU is fast enough for whatever you want to do. The Cell is an expensive CPU design, which even fully utilized doesn't add a whole lot to the gameplay experience. The conole also launched a year after the 360, it should have been significantly more powerful. Sony would have made their lives much easier if they had put 2GiB of memory in the system and a variant on the 8800 rather than 7800, then a game written for the PS3 would in some respects be clearly better than its 360 counterpart. Developers would be able to easily exploit some of that power (notably RAM), and customers would see a real tangible benefit.
Other bad technical: The hard drive used is a notebook drive. This adds no functionality, but increases cost. One can argue blu-ray until you're blu in the face, it at least adds functionality, and IMO is a big contributor to why blu ray won the format war. But the hard drive...just wtf? Stripping BC from later consoles was really bad too. I just got Killzone2, in anticipation I went and played through Killzone 1 again, to get a feel for the world again. Try doing that on a new PS3
Where to go in future: Sony needs to launch a PS4 the moment dx11 is finalized, and hope MS isn't doing the same. A PS4 with 28 cell processor, 4 GiB of ram and a directx11 compatible video card. It would be fully BC with the current PS3, relatively easy to develop for when going from the PS3 development, and be so clearly better than the Xbox360. MS has a problem, their architecture died and became the Cell. They could go back to intel/AMD (like the xbox) but that pretty much tosses BC. They have the clear advantage in dev tools and being behind a lot of DX11. But then is the Xbox3 going to be "Now with the cell and blu ray"? That's not going to make for good marketting. If they go the "Now with an intel CPU" route they're back to competing with themselves on the PC. MS also has a harder time justifying a new console, they're sort of winning, but not making much money. Making another huge investment in console R&D in that position would be unpopular. Sony is losing, they want to stop losing, that justifies more money.
So right now, they hold and auction, big companies with deep pockets buy up everything they can, and then leave a huge chunk of it poorly utilized. They drive the price up because they have money to burn, but then keep the price high because they have no inclination to let anyone else in. It's a self perpetuating system which limits access to the few companies that have cash to buy in in the first place.
If you add a cost you drive them to be more efficient about what spectrum they do use, and lower the costs of entry for the 'little guy'. It's not in AT&Ts interest to buy 5 billion dollars in spectrum, and then spend 500 million a year on space they only really need 10% of. That drives down demand for spectrum space amongst rich companies, since they need way less and have no incentive to buy more than they need, and opens it up to smaller players to buy small pieces.
More efficient spectrum utilization is nothing but good. It's one of the few resources there is no possible way to get more of, no recycling as such etc. All you can do is increase the usable spectrum by high and low bandwidth research and fancy encoding schemes at a particular frequency. Forcing companies to pay for what they have will make them much more efficient about using it.
Yes, they will pass on costs to consumers, but if they're buying less spectrum, and only using exactly what they need then the cost is only going to be for the spectrum they need to provide you service, and not for spectrum they're holding for the sake of holding.