You can start them even younger with simulator-games.
My daughter, at one and a half, loves playing with the steering wheel of my car. She pretends to turn, to use the buttons, etc. I'm sure if she had a simple, children's oriented car-driving game she would have a lot of fun.
It wouldn't even have to be super-realistic NOR super-fun. Just being able to honk the horn, turn the car in circles, make it change music, etc. The same with Wii-Tennis, Wii-Bowling, etc. Things that are "hard" to do in real life, but "easier" in virtual games, just like Guitar Hero, Rock Band, etc.
There are so many different video games, how can you think you can generalize video games as not helping cognitive development?
Games are, simply put, simulations for reality. As such they can teach goal attainment, problem solving, manipulation, pattern recognition, skill improvement, and risk-reward skills.
Wii Tennis: Gross motor skills, coordination, eye-focus, timing, spatial recognition, simple strategy (just like tennis, but easier to learn) Super Mario Galaxy: Gross motor skills, coordination, timing, spatial recognition, problem solving, problem recognition, fine motor manipulation, data abstraction Tetris: Fine motor manipulation, spatial recognition, optimization, abstract thinking, planning
What if you are the expert? Why is it arbitrary if you make the decision without consulting experts? What expert would you recommend, by the way, since you believe there are experts out there better versed than a parent?
Taking responsibility means living with the consequences of those actions.
In this case, why is playing video games any worse than reading, watching TV, listening to music, or watching a movie? My daughter has been "playing" Wii Tennis since the age of one. For her it's another "thing" to interact with, much as a cell phone, MP3 player, blocks, block-mazes, toy cars and trains, spatulas, frying pans, and forks.
It isn't funny, at all. By not releasing an SDK for 6 months, Apple had a host of volunteer security testers search for every exploit, overflow, and vulnerability on the device (which they promptly fixed).
And of course, in the course of those six months, there are some people who have NOT patched their system against these vulnerabilities.
Apple doesn't seem to support crappy software. It's why, after all, they went with KHTML for Safari instead of Gecko. There are a few problems with OpenOffice that preclude Mac support (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/List_of_OpenOffice.org_Mac_OS_X_issues_and_problems)
In the end it was cheaper and faster for Apple to write their own apps from the ground up (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) than to rely on OpenOffice to even have a Mac port of an existing application.
If that is the case, it makes more sense to continue investing into iWork rather than into OpenOffice.
If the point is that traffic is moving at 65 and you leave a gap large enough for an idiot to speed up and eat that space... they are still moving at 65mph. If you need to slow down a little to maintain the gap... after coasting for a second, you are still moving at 65mph.
It's a good thing that Macs (in the US) are about 9% of the market and grow at about 30% a year; that means this time next year they will be about 12% of the market. I don't think Firewire is going away, any more than SCSI went away despite the success of ATA.
Blame Intel then. Firewire was developed in 1990, released into PCs
Here are the technical specs for Firewire from Wiki: FireWire can connect up to 63 peripherals in a tree topology (as opposed to Parallel SCSI's Electrical bus topology). It allows peer-to-peer device communication -- such as communication between a scanner and a printer -- to take place without using system memory or the CPU. FireWire also supports multiple hosts per bus. It is designed to support Plug-and-play and hot swapping. Its six-wire cable is more flexible than most Parallel SCSI cables and can supply up to 45 watts of power per port at up to 30 volts, allowing moderate-consumption devices to operate without a separate power supply. (As noted earlier, the Sony-branded i.LINK usually omits the power wiring of the cables and uses a 4-pin connector. Devices have to get their power by other means.)
FireWire devices implement the ISO/IEC 13213 "configuration ROM" model for device configuration and identification, to provide plug-and-play capability. All FireWire devices are identified by an IEEE EUI-64 unique identifier (an extension of the 48-bit Ethernet MAC address format) in addition to well-known codes indicating the type of device and the protocols it supports.
From the USB wiki: USB was originally seen as a complement to FireWire (IEEE 1394), which was designed as a high-speed serial bus which could efficiently interconnect peripherals such as hard disks, audio interfaces, and video equipment. USB originally operated at a far lower data rate and used much simpler hardware, and was suitable for small peripherals such as keyboards and mice.
The most significant technical differences between FireWire and USB include the following:
* USB networks use a tiered-star topology, while FireWire networks use a repeater-based topology.
* USB uses a "speak-when-spoken-to" protocol; peripherals cannot communicate with the host unless the host specifically requests communication. A FireWire device can communicate with any other node at any time, subject to network conditions.
* A USB network relies on a single host at the top of the tree to control the network. In a FireWire network, any capable node can control the network.
These and other differences reflect the differing design goals of the two buses: USB was designed for simplicity and low cost, while FireWire was designed for high performance, particularly in time-sensitive applications such as audio and video. Although similar in theoretical maximum transfer rate, in real-world use, especially for high-bandwidth use such as external hard-drives, FireWire 400 generally has a significantly higher throughput than USB 2.0 Hi-Speed.[13][14][15][16] The newer FireWire 800 standard is twice as fast as FireWire 400 and outperforms USB 2.0 Hi-Speed both theoretically and practically.[17]
There are technical reasons why USB 2.0 devices cannot efficiently utilize all the available bandwidth. USB communication is based on polling the devices; there is no pipelining of commands. After sending a command to a device, the USB host must wait for a reply to the command before a new command can be sent to the same device. The bandwidth of a USB bus is divided by all devices connected to the bus. The USB host cannot send commands to one device while waiting for reply from another device. Since all communication is initiated by a USB host, the host must periodically poll all those USB devices that can provide data at unexpected intervals, such as network cards and keyboards. This consumes unnecessary resources when the devices are idle. These issues are being addressed by the forthcoming USB 3.0 specification, although it is not clear whether USB 3.0 is going to match FireWire in bandwidth efficiency.
You have totally missed my point. The issue is of statistics. If 1/100m have a gene for AIDs resistance, and we only have 6.6b people on the earth, then that means only 66 people have that gene.
We don't know which people have that gene, however; it therefore benefits us to "save" as many people as we can until (1,000 years from now) everyone has that gene.
The whole point is to stack the odds in our favor. The more genetic diversity we have, the more possible genes we have available in the future. If we abort kids then we lose an untold (literally unknown) number of genes. Better to keep them for the future than to throw them away now, as long as we can afford to support them.
It is better to have resistance to HIV, period, and not be retarded. There is no reason for you to suppose or assume that HIV resistance is related to being retarded.
Getting rid of genes is stupid. It's like cutting off your toes to fit into your shoes on the assumption that "You only need 8 per foot anyway, the extra two are pointless". It's a stupid optimization. If you don't need those genes, or toes, but it doesn't cost you anything to keep them, then don't get rid of them.
If 1,000 years from now a single gene from a disabled person allows us to survive the next bird flu, then humanity will have been saved by our compassion and grace towards the disabled now.
So it is a definition of degrees. But the energy and skill we spend on severely disabled people helps us on the less severely but still useful people. The technology developed for Stephen Hawking, or the energy spent on implementing ramps and rails for handicapped people, benefit normal people who age, break a leg, or get a disease.
The tribe which consists of only fit humans has a disadvantage if the tribe with unfit humans happens to have a handful of people with 140+ IQs in their less fit genes. Those IQ points means more resourcefulness, and in the end, so much surplus that even with the unfit individuals they can afford to support both themselves AND the fit tribe.
You have evolution and survival of the fittest confused.
If you truly believe you have the best genes, then you should try to raise as many kids as possible.
Evolution, on the other hand, doesn't care who thinks what; all it manages is that the people who do survive, who do reproduce, and who do pass on their genes get to add their genetic strengths to the next generation and so on.
So from an evolutionary standpoint, as long as you survive and reproduce, you're fit and you've passed evolution's hurdles. That is all.
It IS evolutionary beneficial, however, if it means it broadens the diversity of our genepool.
What if the severely disabled (with the ability and the inclination to reproduce) have the genes for AIDs resistance? Bird-flu resistance?
You don't know a priori which genes are important until a selective pressure makes them important. Early optimization is a bad choice in that case. It is a question of degree; how disabled is too disabled?
How do you know that cancer genes don't do something beneficial before you get cancer? In which case, you have to balance the benefit and cost of the genes.
What is the benefit to our species as a whole to create genetically wrong humans?
Excuse me?
How about the geniuses with perfectly sound minds but unsound bodies? Like Stephen Hawking?
Are you saying the only value humans have is their ability to survive independently of each other? That children who cannot hunt down a buffalo without the help of a parent, or even a peer, is useless? Yet what is cooperation to achieve things greater than an individual (the space shuttle, the pyramids, the aqueducts of Rome, raising a single child) except "depending on society for the rest of their life"?
Perfectly FIT people depend on society their whole lives! Can you generate your own electricity, recycle your own trash, smelt your own steel, craft your own furniture, etc?
So even genetically wrong people can offer things, such as their minds, their voices, their arts, etc, to humanity. On top of that, their survival broadens our genepool; what if the AIDs resistance virus lies in a mildly autistic child? Or the resistance to the next bird flu pandemic lies in a mildly retarded child?
Ah, you mean like how the iPod is desperately losing market share to cooler... oh no, it's not.
The Wii and iPod aren't fads; the Wii introduced the future of gaming with their remote; much like the original mouse changed computing in 1984, and propelled Apple and eventually Microsoft to their current status, the Wii-mote firmly sets the Wii as a contender in the next generation of games.
Why don't you care about consoles? There's good money in hunks of silicon and plastic. Apple and Nintendo both profit handsomely from them.
The market for games will ebb and flow as free time ebbs and flow. The attach rate for games is like the sell rate of CDs. Do you think the sales of music is more important than the sales of iPods?
Slashdot Mirror
You can start them even younger with simulator-games.
My daughter, at one and a half, loves playing with the steering wheel of my car. She pretends to turn, to use the buttons, etc. I'm sure if she had a simple, children's oriented car-driving game she would have a lot of fun.
It wouldn't even have to be super-realistic NOR super-fun. Just being able to honk the horn, turn the car in circles, make it change music, etc. The same with Wii-Tennis, Wii-Bowling, etc. Things that are "hard" to do in real life, but "easier" in virtual games, just like Guitar Hero, Rock Band, etc.
There are so many different video games, how can you think you can generalize video games as not helping cognitive development?
Games are, simply put, simulations for reality. As such they can teach goal attainment, problem solving, manipulation, pattern recognition, skill improvement, and risk-reward skills.
Wii Tennis: Gross motor skills, coordination, eye-focus, timing, spatial recognition, simple strategy (just like tennis, but easier to learn)
Super Mario Galaxy: Gross motor skills, coordination, timing, spatial recognition, problem solving, problem recognition, fine motor manipulation, data abstraction
Tetris: Fine motor manipulation, spatial recognition, optimization, abstract thinking, planning
What if you are the expert?
Why is it arbitrary if you make the decision without consulting experts?
What expert would you recommend, by the way, since you believe there are experts out there better versed than a parent?
Taking responsibility means living with the consequences of those actions.
In this case, why is playing video games any worse than reading, watching TV, listening to music, or watching a movie? My daughter has been "playing" Wii Tennis since the age of one. For her it's another "thing" to interact with, much as a cell phone, MP3 player, blocks, block-mazes, toy cars and trains, spatulas, frying pans, and forks.
A MacBook starts at $1,100.
What laptop are you looking at that starts at $2000?
It isn't funny, at all. By not releasing an SDK for 6 months, Apple had a host of volunteer security testers search for every exploit, overflow, and vulnerability on the device (which they promptly fixed).
And of course, in the course of those six months, there are some people who have NOT patched their system against these vulnerabilities.
Apple doesn't seem to support crappy software. It's why, after all, they went with KHTML for Safari instead of Gecko. There are a few problems with OpenOffice that preclude Mac support (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/List_of_OpenOffice.org_Mac_OS_X_issues_and_problems)
In the end it was cheaper and faster for Apple to write their own apps from the ground up (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) than to rely on OpenOffice to even have a Mac port of an existing application.
If that is the case, it makes more sense to continue investing into iWork rather than into OpenOffice.
So why are you bagging on this "Genius" for being honest about store policy?
He returned stock and had nothing to sell you. He was telling you the truth.
It was stated last year that each store pulls in about 24m a year.
http://www.ifoapplestore.com/stores/thinkequity_2006_rj.html
Since the Mac is growing at about 5% a year in the US, that means the military will be secure for another 10 years then.
Both Mac OS and Mac OS X were the children of Steve Jobs, even if he never touched the code.
So even as a descendent of NeXTStep, Mac OS X is still descended in spirit from the original Mac OS.
So? Who cares? Let them!
If the point is that traffic is moving at 65 and you leave a gap large enough for an idiot to speed up and eat that space... they are still moving at 65mph. If you need to slow down a little to maintain the gap... after coasting for a second, you are still moving at 65mph.
No loss.
It's a good thing that Macs (in the US) are about 9% of the market and grow at about 30% a year; that means this time next year they will be about 12% of the market. I don't think Firewire is going away, any more than SCSI went away despite the success of ATA.
Different devices can get different amounts of bandwidth on a Firewire tree.
Each device on a USB bus have to get equal bandwidth slices.
Blame Intel then. Firewire was developed in 1990, released into PCs
Here are the technical specs for Firewire from Wiki:
FireWire can connect up to 63 peripherals in a tree topology (as opposed to Parallel SCSI's Electrical bus topology). It allows peer-to-peer device communication -- such as communication between a scanner and a printer -- to take place without using system memory or the CPU. FireWire also supports multiple hosts per bus. It is designed to support Plug-and-play and hot swapping. Its six-wire cable is more flexible than most Parallel SCSI cables and can supply up to 45 watts of power per port at up to 30 volts, allowing moderate-consumption devices to operate without a separate power supply. (As noted earlier, the Sony-branded i.LINK usually omits the power wiring of the cables and uses a 4-pin connector. Devices have to get their power by other means.)
FireWire devices implement the ISO/IEC 13213 "configuration ROM" model for device configuration and identification, to provide plug-and-play capability. All FireWire devices are identified by an IEEE EUI-64 unique identifier (an extension of the 48-bit Ethernet MAC address format) in addition to well-known codes indicating the type of device and the protocols it supports.
From the USB wiki:
USB was originally seen as a complement to FireWire (IEEE 1394), which was designed as a high-speed serial bus which could efficiently interconnect peripherals such as hard disks, audio interfaces, and video equipment. USB originally operated at a far lower data rate and used much simpler hardware, and was suitable for small peripherals such as keyboards and mice.
The most significant technical differences between FireWire and USB include the following:
* USB networks use a tiered-star topology, while FireWire networks use a repeater-based topology.
* USB uses a "speak-when-spoken-to" protocol; peripherals cannot communicate with the host unless the host specifically requests communication. A FireWire device can communicate with any other node at any time, subject to network conditions.
* A USB network relies on a single host at the top of the tree to control the network. In a FireWire network, any capable node can control the network.
These and other differences reflect the differing design goals of the two buses: USB was designed for simplicity and low cost, while FireWire was designed for high performance, particularly in time-sensitive applications such as audio and video. Although similar in theoretical maximum transfer rate, in real-world use, especially for high-bandwidth use such as external hard-drives, FireWire 400 generally has a significantly higher throughput than USB 2.0 Hi-Speed.[13][14][15][16] The newer FireWire 800 standard is twice as fast as FireWire 400 and outperforms USB 2.0 Hi-Speed both theoretically and practically.[17]
There are technical reasons why USB 2.0 devices cannot efficiently utilize all the available bandwidth. USB communication is based on polling the devices; there is no pipelining of commands. After sending a command to a device, the USB host must wait for a reply to the command before a new command can be sent to the same device. The bandwidth of a USB bus is divided by all devices connected to the bus. The USB host cannot send commands to one device while waiting for reply from another device. Since all communication is initiated by a USB host, the host must periodically poll all those USB devices that can provide data at unexpected intervals, such as network cards and keyboards. This consumes unnecessary resources when the devices are idle. These issues are being addressed by the forthcoming USB 3.0 specification, although it is not clear whether USB 3.0 is going to match FireWire in bandwidth efficiency.
You have totally missed my point. The issue is of statistics. If 1/100m have a gene for AIDs resistance, and we only have 6.6b people on the earth, then that means only 66 people have that gene.
We don't know which people have that gene, however; it therefore benefits us to "save" as many people as we can until (1,000 years from now) everyone has that gene.
The whole point is to stack the odds in our favor. The more genetic diversity we have, the more possible genes we have available in the future. If we abort kids then we lose an untold (literally unknown) number of genes. Better to keep them for the future than to throw them away now, as long as we can afford to support them.
You present a false dichotomy.
It is better to have resistance to HIV, period, and not be retarded. There is no reason for you to suppose or assume that HIV resistance is related to being retarded.
Getting rid of genes is stupid. It's like cutting off your toes to fit into your shoes on the assumption that "You only need 8 per foot anyway, the extra two are pointless". It's a stupid optimization. If you don't need those genes, or toes, but it doesn't cost you anything to keep them, then don't get rid of them.
If 1,000 years from now a single gene from a disabled person allows us to survive the next bird flu, then humanity will have been saved by our compassion and grace towards the disabled now.
So it is a definition of degrees. But the energy and skill we spend on severely disabled people helps us on the less severely but still useful people. The technology developed for Stephen Hawking, or the energy spent on implementing ramps and rails for handicapped people, benefit normal people who age, break a leg, or get a disease.
The tribe which consists of only fit humans has a disadvantage if the tribe with unfit humans happens to have a handful of people with 140+ IQs in their less fit genes. Those IQ points means more resourcefulness, and in the end, so much surplus that even with the unfit individuals they can afford to support both themselves AND the fit tribe.
That is, after all, the story of civilization.
You have evolution and survival of the fittest confused.
If you truly believe you have the best genes, then you should try to raise as many kids as possible.
Evolution, on the other hand, doesn't care who thinks what; all it manages is that the people who do survive, who do reproduce, and who do pass on their genes get to add their genetic strengths to the next generation and so on.
So from an evolutionary standpoint, as long as you survive and reproduce, you're fit and you've passed evolution's hurdles. That is all.
It IS evolutionary beneficial, however, if it means it broadens the diversity of our genepool.
What if the severely disabled (with the ability and the inclination to reproduce) have the genes for AIDs resistance? Bird-flu resistance?
You don't know a priori which genes are important until a selective pressure makes them important. Early optimization is a bad choice in that case. It is a question of degree; how disabled is too disabled?
How do you know that cancer genes don't do something beneficial before you get cancer? In which case, you have to balance the benefit and cost of the genes.
What is the benefit to our species as a whole to create genetically wrong humans?
Excuse me?
How about the geniuses with perfectly sound minds but unsound bodies? Like Stephen Hawking?
Are you saying the only value humans have is their ability to survive independently of each other? That children who cannot hunt down a buffalo without the help of a parent, or even a peer, is useless? Yet what is cooperation to achieve things greater than an individual (the space shuttle, the pyramids, the aqueducts of Rome, raising a single child) except "depending on society for the rest of their life"?
Perfectly FIT people depend on society their whole lives! Can you generate your own electricity, recycle your own trash, smelt your own steel, craft your own furniture, etc?
So even genetically wrong people can offer things, such as their minds, their voices, their arts, etc, to humanity. On top of that, their survival broadens our genepool; what if the AIDs resistance virus lies in a mildly autistic child? Or the resistance to the next bird flu pandemic lies in a mildly retarded child?
Ah, you mean like how the iPod is desperately losing market share to cooler... oh no, it's not.
The Wii and iPod aren't fads; the Wii introduced the future of gaming with their remote; much like the original mouse changed computing in 1984, and propelled Apple and eventually Microsoft to their current status, the Wii-mote firmly sets the Wii as a contender in the next generation of games.
Why don't you care about consoles? There's good money in hunks of silicon and plastic. Apple and Nintendo both profit handsomely from them.
The market for games will ebb and flow as free time ebbs and flow. The attach rate for games is like the sell rate of CDs. Do you think the sales of music is more important than the sales of iPods?
Both are relevant to different markets.
You misspelled majority.
It's much cheaper to live in a moderate fidelity world, thank you very much!