The question is whether they remain driven by immediate profit over human rights or whether they're so ashamed of their past that they'll now do anything they can to distance themselves from such organizations.
You mean he sued Krispy Kreme for the way all those donuts endlessly tormented him?
I wouldn't normally make a cheap fat joke but something in the article got to me:
He said the situation left him feeling drained of energy, and that he let himself go and no longer lifted weights to keep fit.
Watch that video again sometime. Imagine how the ripplingly muscled greek adonis of that video must look now.
Oh, wait... He was a fat, dorky, clumsy idiot before the video ever got distributed. And distributing the video made him a fat, dorky, clumsy idiot?
I'm not saying it's cool that kids get bullied in highschool but one look at him tells you there's probably not a highschool on earth where he wouldn't have been the butt of endless jokes.
He was overweight, had a lousy haircut, was so mal-coordinated he couldn't stand upright when wiggling a broomstick, and was evidently an affirmed StarWars nerd. This is a kid who, whether bullying is acceptable or not, I think we can be pretty certain was bullied long before this video ever came out.
The one thing that changed was he got a degree of celebrity from this one which shifted it in to something OK to wallow in.
Most kids manage something utterly humiliating during their school lives. They wet themselves. They get dumped in public. They get their asses handed to them by a kid several years younger. Their yearbook picture catches them adjusting themselves. Their dad goes to jail. Whatever the case, they become the talk of the school for a couple of weeks. Their parents give them the tough but true advice, "Don't show that it bothers you and wait it out. In two or three weeks, someone else will have done something stupid."
In his case, the net gave him just enough celebrity to truly wallow. Instead of laughing and saying, "Yeah, it was pretty dorky, wasn't it." then leaving it two weeks to quieten down, he was pulled out of school. Instead of weathering it and waiting for it to die down, he gave interviews. Instead of being told, "Yeah, damn straight it sucks but it happens to everyone. You're just going to have to tough it out." this became "The Internet" and he was handed a great excuse to wallow. The really sad thing is, it's the wallowing that's likely done him the most harm.
Yeah, he'd have always got the odd joke about being the Star Wars kid but it would have died down. Instead, being allowed to wallow, he was able to completely sever all ties with normal teenage society. Instead of being allowed to cry at home every night for a week or two and then slowly face it, he was taken to a doctor and given meds, being told it was a reasonable response to be so upset. Instead of slowly accepting that, yeah, life does suck but you have to deal anyway, he was taught that his problems were someone else's fault and so he didn't have to take any responsibility in moving through them and coming out stronger on the far side.
I hate the bullying I faced as a kid. Some of it still hurts a huge amount. I'm also vastly more successful in life now because I had to come back from it and find a way through rather than was allowed to stay home, get home schooled, and wallow in how unfair everyone else was.
And so, when I hear how a fat kid who didn't exercise was so traumatized by his bullying that he "stopped pumping iron and really let [himself] go," I have to question how much of the problem was the same bullying that sucks utterly but toughens up most of us and how much was him getting a damned convenient excuse for many things that were already true.
How many guys out there "could have gone all the way" in their chosen sport before the got some terrible injury. And how many of them, if totally honest, never would have made it and the injury was a damned good excuse to stop trying and instead talk about what they could have been?
Is he any different other than that one video, that almost certainly wasn't the first time he was bullied, gave him a good excuse to stop trying in life and blame someone else for where he was, most likely, going to end up anyway?
And a cheap tea-light, perfect for shadow puppets, remains about $0.20 - a lot cheaper than a TV or movie tickets.
I'm imagining your kids don't like you much though.
That is, of course, assuming you don't whip out the free bible you got at a hotel for wild and crazy nights of bible reading.
All entertainment is not created equal. The cool thing about capitalism is that things generally cost what the market will bear. A games console costs around $500 (dropping to $200 a couple of years later) with games around $50-60 because enough people think that's a reasonable price to pay for what they get. A deck of cards costs around a dollar and change because that's what the market will bear for that rivetting form of entertainment. Bibles are free in hotel rooms because Gideons wants the market saturation they'd get with bibles if there's no cost for the market to bear. That, even despite their high costs, more people seem to play console games than play cards or read bibles could be taken as an indicator that, relatively, they're considered quite a bit more fun and thus worth the money.
(And, yes, I realise the first comment was likely a joke - the concept still holds true though)
Hey, leave the poor F-x50 driver alone. He's got bigger (OK, littler) problems to worry about. Is it me or is Ford's entire marketing scheme:
F-150: Compensates for an inch and a half under performance.
F-150 super cab: Compensates for an inch and a half and some girth.
F-250: Compensates for two and a half inches.
F-250 super cab: Compensates for two and a half inches and some girth.
F-350 super cab: Oh, your poor wife! Or was she Loretta Bobbit?
My personal favorite trucks are the ones with "Got Dirt" stickers littering them and then the chrome all around their raised underside is in perfect, unchipped by actual off-road conditions, shape.
Of course, none of them compare to just prior to the election when I saw an "Off-Roaders For W'04" sticker... On a Nissan Sentra. Being driven by a tiny woman in her seventies. My first thought was, "Wow, that's delusional!" until I asked myself how any Bush voter could possibly be considered that way.
causing you to pirate more material because you can't afford it
Back in the old days we had this other answer to that one. It was called, "You don't get to have it."
Fortunately, in this modern age, absolved of all personal responsibility, it's the content producers' fault for making such great content that we really have no choice but to pirate if we can't afford it. I mean, seriously, it's not like we can go without that extra Britney Spears CD - it's practically a right that we have it. If the founding fathers were around today, they'd almost certainly agree.
An accurate 3D model of a human face can be constructed in 40ms?
Excuse my whilst I almost jump up and down with glee. I mean it's not as if a typical high res photograph can be taken in 1/300th of a second (given decent light) and a bunch of them can't be taken simultaneously with a bank of cameras - leaving almost all of the remainder of 1/25th of a second to quickly calculate a 3D model using the same digital photogrametry that's been around for years on a powerful enough system.
To put it in context, there have been camera systems that can film an actor "in 3D" - and then use that co-ordinate data to manipulate a 3D character - for TV use for the last half decade or so. By definition, at 25 frames per second, it too builds a 3D model within 1/25 of a second (40ms). The only difference is higher accuracy.
So, OK, they've come up with a new technique for projecting a dot pattern that makes it even easier to record a set of points than the old annoying stick on black dots method. Even so, quickly capturing a 3D image isn't radically new - a bank of cameras can capture it in far less time than 40ms and you can do the processing in a staggering 2-3 whole seconds as the person steps away before the next person steps up.
The slow bit has always been comparing a complex 3D model against a huge database and identifying matches when people move their facial muscles between each image.
Of note is the simple fact: This talks about how "fast" 3D imaging is now available (although it has been by years but we'll ignore that) which is a totally different concept to actually comparing that information against several million, if not hundreds of millions, of other entries.
OK, so fair enough, the article talks about comparing someone to a specific record to see if they're who they claim to be. Again, nothing that couldn't already be done with a bank of decent CMOS based cameras. They imply that this is "more" accurate (which I still dispute is any more accurate than a bank of 10MP CMOS cameras and traditional photogrametry) but make absolutely no reference to cracking the real problem of people's 3D facial structure changing as their muscles move, as they gain weight, etc.
So - they have a quick method of creating a 3D snapshot, which could be done already, and haven't solved any of the real problems that make a simple 3D snapshot useless (comparing against large numbers of possibilities, parameterizing 3D points that move as faces do). So absolutely nothing then? Sweet.
I wonder if I could come up with a new, different, but absolutely no better technology for something people also still can't do very well. If so, I wonder how much a breathy press release and vapid article would net me in grants for my research?
Here's a simple concept that he could have learned from playing The Sims for half an hour:
Your Sim is miserable in his apartment. He has a crappy TV that doesn't make him very happy. You are confident that a big plasma TV would make him much happier and thus he'd work harder, get promoted, and earn far more than the cost of the TV back.
Sensible person's approach: Earn what you can. Upgrade the TV for a slightly better one. Earn faster with the better TV. Upgrade once you can. Repeat until you have the plasma TV.
Idiot's approach: Sell the old TV. Afterall, it sucks. Go to buy a plasma. Discover you don't have the money to buy the plasma and now you can't even afford to buy back the crappy TV. Watch your Sim get depressed, skip work, and get demoted, earning less.
Yes, a wholly new website would be spiffy and, quite possibly, keen too. But there's not enough money for a wholly new website that proves the shining vision of the net as somewhere to invest.
A sensible manager - or a ten year old kid who's played The Sims - will thus not try and gut the whole damn thing. They'll take a week, a month, whatever period they figure they can handle and do the best job they can on one small part. They'll then use that success to argue for better resources to work on a bigger part next. In time they'll have proved repeatedly that money spent on them is a good investment, be doing large chunks at a time, with a well resourced team - and all those small parts will add up anyway.
If I walked up to my CEO and said, "I need 8 server side engineers, 4 html guys, 3 artists, 2 content writers, 2 sys admins, 3 db guys and two secretaries, can I have a $2.4m budget please?" I would damn well expect to get laughed out of his office.
On the other hand, if I took myself and the one other guy I had and proved a $100,000/year return on investment from our first $25,000 of work, I'd expect a much easier time of justifying an extra head count to hire on maybe an artist. The next project spends say $40,000 and makes $150,000 extra a year and I can likely get a dba. Repeat enough times, consistently giving the company more than it pays and I'll get my 24 person team. Ask for all 24 of them all at once and I should absolutely expect to get laughed out of the office and then fired for being an utterly clueless manager.
My wife and I have about 3,500 books. We can't find anything. All the books are in random order.
3,500 RFID tags, a scanner, and a pair of tin foil underpants?
If the books are out of order on shelves, all a db can do is tell you what books you happen to have - not where to find them. Even if you go to the insane task of cataloging your disordered filing, the moment you put one back in a different place, the db starts becoming useless.
The obvious solution is to sort them. By category and then by author is the obvious one but falls apart somewhat in personal collections where your interests mean you have huge amounts in certain sections and two books in others. The Hewey, Dewey, and Louie Decimal system gives you division and subdivision rules but takes a little more learning.
Once you have them sorted, barcode readers and dbs are fun projects for nerds but near meaningless for personal collections unless you want to loan books out or have nice sortable lists you can glow proudly over.
If you're totally unwilling to sort them - or know you'll never maintain the sort order - then you need to find some way of finding a specific object in a random collection. For that, much as it'll make the tinfoil brigade explode, a proximity triggered identifier and some kind of a scanner that bleeps when near whatever you're looking for as you swipe it over row after row of shelves sounds like your answer far more than a barcode reader (that's too slow even if you stuck barcodes on spines) and a db.
Shakespeare wasn't even close to the first twenty five years of plays as a medium. Given the obvious Illiad, he wasn't even in the first twenty five hundred years of plays.
To liken the incredibly young concept of computer games to the already tens of centuries old concept of plays in Shakespeare's time is a little unfair.
Imagine if we could go back to thirty years after the first guy came up with "drama". We'd likely find nothing more advanced than, "Ug kills a sabertooth." Not exactly a classic that's been enjoyed through the ages.
Look at the first thirty years of motion pictures. We had classics like: "Oooh look, a steamtrain", "Horse running", etc. Even attempts at taking the existing notions of drama and applying them to the new medium don't really exist except for film historians today - just as even the best attempts to apply plot and character to modern games likely won't exist for anyone except game historians in another hundred years.
On one level, this seems to support Ebert - Modern games are primative compared to established media and perhaps not a fully evolved art form.
Then again, Ebert wrote, "But for most games, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."...
True. And the same can be said of the first thirty years of his beloved medium of film. Fortunately for him, people didn't give up on film because the first thirty years wasn't yet a fully evolved art form - they kept with it and great pieces of art like Citizen Kane or The Godfather got to be made in time.
Should we have abandonned drama because "Ug kills a sabertooth" wasn't deeply evolved art? Should we have abandonned literature because the first scratches on clay weren't deeply literary? Should we have abandonned painting because the animals on cave walls weren't evocative enough? Should we have abandonned photography because stiff looking over posed people weren't art? Should we have abandonned film because it didn't achieve art in its first 30 years?
If the answer to all of those is an emphatic "no" - it strikes me as remarkably short sighted for Ebert to be glad people invested the time to evolve those mediums but regards computer games as nothing but a loss of precious hours that should be better spent elsewhere.
From throwing rocks at Ogg and Ug to Snakes and Ladders, there hasn't really been a "single player" game before.
Since the first cave teenager yelled, "Mom! Knock before coming in to my cave!" I think you'll find there has always been at least one "single player" game that's stayed remarkably popular.
And, cheap joke aside, to say there haven't been single player games ignores every kid that's kicked a ball against a wall, driven toy cars or flown toy planes around, flown a kite, used a hulahoop, jumped rope, played with a yo-yo, had a dolls tea party, built a cardboard and tinfoil spaceship for a trip to the moon, or kept a hoop rolling with a stick.
Two years later, we're quite confident that two million Xbox Live subscribers, more than five million World of Warcraft subscribers and, ironically, more than a million DS Wi-Fi Connection users would disagree with Iwata's statement.
100 million+ PS2 sales. 30m? XBox1 sales. Several million XBox360 sales. Who knows how many tens of millions of PCs that games are played on.
Quoting eight million users against roughly 200 million gives maybe 4%.
That's the kind of figure people call statistical error when figuring out say how many people like or dislike a president.
Sure, there are plenty of other games with online components. But to quote 2m plus 5m plus an additional million and claim that makes a mockery of a quote regarding ~200m systems is kind of stretching things.
Even on the XBox - 2m Live subscribers across 30m? sales implies the statement is true: the majority of users do not want an online experience under the terms it's currently offered? 1 in 15? 6.7%? Curiously, 6.7% of the population is also the same percentage that has a sub 80 IQ which puts them in the Borderline Deficiency to Definite Feeble-Mindedness range.
Now I'm all for online gaming. I met my wife on a mud. But "the percentage of the population that are significantly mentally subnormal is also the same percentage as XBox owners who subscribe to XBox Live" is not really a compelling argument that "clearly customers want online gaming."
A survey last month of 300 Minnesota business officials found most thought a flu pandemic would significantly affect their business, but only 18% had preparedness plans in place.
I am pretty certain that a flock of winged monkeys, backed up by tap dancing midgets would significantly affect my business. We, sadly, don't have a plan for such an eventuality.
Just because the majority believe a pandemic would affect their business, that's not the same as saying they believe such a pandemic is likely to happen.
The last truly staggering flu pandemic was in 1919. Since then we've been about to get nuked, about to have planes flown in to us and about to all die of Sars, or possibly mad cow disease, or West Nile, or possibly flesh eating bacteria - oh, and our computers were all going to assplode on Y2K. It turns out there are lots of exciting panics the media likes to report and yet most of them are either over hyped of Jack Bauer manages to diffuse them before they become an issue for the masses.
Yes, a flu pandemic would be terrible. Yes, it's even possible - more possible, though less fun, than the winged monkeys. But it's not necessarily probable. Good risk management - as opposed to running around screaming at every perceived risk - involves calculating cost multiplied by probability and comparing options. It's possible most of those businesses, whether rightly or wrongly, just don't believe they need to panic about the latest shocking THREAT TO LIFE AS WE KNOW IT that is yet to do more in the west than make some German cats sick.
If units cost $29 and you can sell 1,000 at $40, or 10,000 at $30, which is the right choice?
Sell 10,000 at $30 with a $1 profit and you can make $10,000 and pat yourself on the back for selling more than your competitors.
Sell 1,000 at $40 with a $11 profit and you can make $11,000. Sure, you have less customers but you made more money.
My guess is Apple has such a massive market with the core iPods that they're happy to run the numbers that way - sell less overall but at an outrageous profit and they still make more money than if they simply sold more at a so-competitive-they-don't-make-much price.
I can't fault them as a business. They're doing great business.
But that does mean I'm going to be one of the 9,000 who don't buy their overpriced generic products and it also means I'm that much less likely to stay loyal should someone invent the iPod killer.
For what little it's worth, I'm that sucker. I feel dirty as hell for it but I'm also honest enough to admit it's true.
The iPod just [got] it right.
Having messed with various alternatives, I tried the old mono version. Rather than clunky jog switches and too many buttons, that touch wheel was the perfect way to navigate. Rather than present me with a million config options (and, I'll admit, I'm usually a total whore for them) it gave me a few way out of the way on the options menu then gave me nothing but my music - purity of function. Rather than looking like a clunky box or some overstyled piece of flimsy plastic, it was a pure, smooth, gently curved. That styling was so perfect it literally became something to be fetishized - it was so utterly right in every way that it climbed in to my lifestyle.
iTunes then did much the same and created a nice and easy interface to the PC part.
That's what Apple achieved. They stopped designing like tech companies. Most tech companies either create function over style *cough*early*cough*creative*cough*zens*cough* or try so hard to compensate that they end up creating style over function and you get a piece of plastic junk... that feels like plastic junk. Apple, by managing to perfectly merge style and function created something that just did everything exactly right. In doing so, they hooked their customers utterly.
Ironically, if anything, the new video iPods are a step in the wrong direction. They've missed the one thing it desperately needs (nested folders for playlists), they've implemented a few new functions badly (What on earth is up with the way you can list a video as a TV show but then it doesn't turn up?) and they've degraded a bunch of old features (The wheel is now too small for big fingers and way too easy to hit the wrong thing. The corners are now angular, losing that symbiotic feel it had when resting in your hand. They took off the top port for no better reason than it let them charge more for the proprietary dock - screwing their customers so they could chase bigger profits).
And the horrible thing? They've made such a junky of me I still stick with them. Even with their weird (mistaken/money grabbing?) choices of late, I'm still totally hooked.
Now the accessories... I haven't bought a single one for the new Video iPod. My old dock that I got for free with the old 40gb works well enough. I'd love a new one with a remote but $70 for a basic dock and remote - $100 if I want to power it - is daylight robbery and it's just too plain offensive to pay. I'd replace my old iTrip but I'm not in to paying $10 extra now Apple have forced the dock connector on them - a design that now stops me from charging it while I use it. About the only accessory I'll end up buying, given Apple's blatant gouging, are the TV out cable (that I'll buy for half the price elsewhere, knowing I can just swap two of the cables and have it work fine), a tape deck adaptor (which I can also buy as a third party add-on given Apple haven't yet removed the headphone jack in search of profits) and headphones (same reason).
So, you see, I'll suck up $100 extra for the unit because it's undeniably better than anyone else's. I'm not going to pay $10 extra per accessory (or $30 in many cases) because Apple wants to milk its customers at any chance it gets, even on generic accessories that are no better than you can get elsewhere.
In short: I'm not getting any better accessories from Apple as they price gouge so horrifically that I don't buy them anyway.
Sure, they charge extra for the basic unit but I'd prefer to pay $399 to do it absolutely right than $299 to not quite do so - $100 doesn't make up for a constant nagging sensation with something I have on me every day. But, if unit to unit was the same, Apple certainly wouldn't win me over just because they have more overpriced accessories that honestly aren't much (if any) more functional.
Balls? Worry about divots.
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Golf in Space
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· Score: 2, Funny
I'd worry less about the golf ball and more about the embarrassed cosmonaut who's trying to push the divot he just made back in to the ISS with the toe of his spacesuit before anyone notices.
These robots... have limited on-board intelligence and are wirelessly controlled by a central robot control system.
Forget about distributed denial of service attacks. Past studies show that all you need to take them down are a couple of jedi (which, if I recall, Europe's voter registration implies they have thousands of) and a really annoying little kid.
It works out even worse, when you think about the capacity of the devices they've given him:
10,102 (paying the 98c) songs ~= 40,408 GB of music.
They, however, have given him 10 x 60GB players. That great gift card won't even fill one of them. He'll have to drop another five grand of his own money at the rate the iTunes music store charges just to fill one of them.
Then, with another $15,000 / player for the other 9 players... Apple have given him the gift that keeps on giving [back to them], needing a total investment of $140,000 in addition to their "generous" prize if he wants to fully use it.
Wouldn't it make you feel all fuzzy to hear "Congratulations on winning our prize. Now give us $140,000 to use it fully."
On the other hand, you could just sell those other 9 on EBay and easily buy a thousand nice un-DRM'd albums to fill up the remaining 10,000 songs.
Re:JavaScript standards???
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DOM Scripting
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· Score: 4, Insightful
JavaScript has a long ways to go and no book is going to erase these vast differences no matter how well written it is.
I disagree.
You cannot support everything, that is true.
You can do the following:
1) Identify a basic starting point (say where browsers had reached n years ago, accepting a high enough percentage of users fit that criteria).
2) Identify which features are commonly supported across those browsers (or commonly enough) and deem them "safe" to use.
3) Identify which other features are inconsistent but can gain a consistent interface through your coding. innerText may not be supported but that doesn't mean it's impossible to write consistent setInnerText/getInnerText functions that calls it directly for IE and then does more work to get the same result for other browsers.
4) Identify which other features are so inconsistent that there is no way you can write your own library to unify them (or add them).
5) Identify what fail-gracefully methods can be used for older browsers than your cut-off criteria.
With such an approach, you don't get all features of all implementations of JavaScript and DOM. You do however get a unified interface that allows you to use the majority of features on the majority of browsers and know that, even in the edge cases, the majority of those edge cases will fail gracefully.
Does it erase all of the differences? Absolutely not. But it does erase enough of them that the barrier for entry for many people now disappears.
Most people are concerned that they have to learn everything about all inconsistencies before they can code anything. They are concerned that, without that knowledge, even supporting the core browsers becomes impossible and they'll have a massive development cost testing for things they have no idea to look for.
A solution like the one above lets them have a list of things they can do, things they can't do, and a library of methods to unify the stuff in between. They know that, with that, they're pretty safe.
And that, as far as most users are concerned, is the unification they need - not absolute unification of every last detail.
I bet if IBM and Sony had decided to go with six SPEs per Cell rather than eight, and cut the die down in size, they wouldn't be having these problems.
They are actually only using 7 of the 8 SPEs per chip to add greater fault tolerance.
I'm guessing that the yields work out dramatically better this way than with simply 6 SPEs per chip. If you think about it - say half the silicon is used by the main processor and parts other than the SPEs and then the other half is used to make up the 8 SPEs... 6SPEs means you drop total die size by 12.5%. Assuming an average chip has one flaw, some have none, some have two - the chips with two flaws almost certainly still have issues and the ones with one flaw only change by a few percent. On the other hand, build in the ability to accept a flaw on half the silicon, you're looking at dropping your failure rate by nigh on 50%.
So, in short, the very parallel design of the CELL opens up opportunities that the much less parallel design of say a Pentium can't use. With a Pentium, if there's a flaw anywhere, you ditch the whole chip. With a cell, if there's a single flaw, so long as it's in the SPE area, oh well. It's only when a second one turns up that it's an issue.
Even better would be if they could switch those blocks of local memory around. That way you could have SPE 4 and memory 6 both have errors and still get a perfectly servicable chip by routing SPE 6 to use memory 4.
Nice little trick for totally rewriting the rules on yield issues.
Next Gen Ideals vs. Reality
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What is Next-Gen?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"NextGen" sadly - whatever we might hope - doesn't mean anything other than a quantum step in graphics power.
The author identifies three categories: 1) Gameplay. 2) Scope. 3) Graphics.
I'll use a simple question: If you added the feature to a game from say the early 90s, would you suddenly call it NextGen?
Gameplay So we're playing Doom on the SNES. The author claims a great control scheme is what makes it work. Would adding Halo's controls to SNES Doom make it NextGen? I'm guessing most people would laugh at the idea.
Scope The author says NextGen games should be bigger. Anyone remember Ultima 7? That thing was freaking huge. Morrowind was also huge. Both are from previous generations. Both are bigger than anything seen on future consoles, even in previews, with the exception of Oblivion. Take a small Ultima type game. Give it a massive game world with lots of cool things to do, you don't get NextGen Ultima, you get Ultima 7.
Graphics Take a fairly typical console racer. Give it 720p graphics and nothing much else. That gets called NextGen pretty quickly. Take a basic beat-em-up and add 720p graphics, again, NextGen.
We may want Next Gen to mean quantum increases across the board. We may feel a true "Next Gen" game should step up its game in every field not just shiny stuff. They're a whole bunch of nice ideals but the sad truth is, we're judged by our actions and our actions have us simply calling a quantum increase in graphics "NextGen" because it's the only thing that really needs the next generation of systems to be possible.
Better music, better gameplay, bigger worlds, longer playtimes, [basic] physics systems, improved AI, better control schemes... These are all great things but none of them require the next generation of system - most of them can be done on the system before last (PS1) or even earlier.
About the only thing that requires the next generation of systems are prettier visuals. It may feel empty, it may not suit our ideals, but, truth is, that's all NextGen really is.
The only reason people question the "NextGen"ishness of some 360 launch titles is because, as with any new system, many of the launch titles are so inefficient they really aren't that quantum step up from the old one.
a photocapacitor or some other light sensitive electronics wouldn't suffice?
Simple:
"Robot controlled by light sensitive electronics seeks corner" gets a quick nod before someone realises eight year olds have been doing it with the basic Lego Mindstorms kit for years.
"Slime mold remotely controls six legged robot" gets the quirky and weird headlines. Quirky and weird headlines can be claimed as public interest. Public interest can be parlayed in to additional funding for your otherwise unfundable project.
So, whilst it's not really any more exciting, it does get the trivia audience - which gets the funding. Thus, for PhDs who can't get Google to hire them, it's essential to use a cockroach or slime mold or something similarly quirky to keep you in tweed jackets and leather elbow patches.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that charming comparison:
Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the main division of the Nazi SS translates out as Reich (Homeland) Sicherheit (Security) Huptampt (Department).
And IBM does have a history with those fine people.
The question is whether they remain driven by immediate profit over human rights or whether they're so ashamed of their past that they'll now do anything they can to distance themselves from such organizations.
Star Wars Kid Cuts a Deal With His Tormentors
You mean he sued Krispy Kreme for the way all those donuts endlessly tormented him?
I wouldn't normally make a cheap fat joke but something in the article got to me:
He said the situation left him feeling drained of energy, and that he let himself go and no longer lifted weights to keep fit.
Watch that video again sometime. Imagine how the ripplingly muscled greek adonis of that video must look now.
Oh, wait... He was a fat, dorky, clumsy idiot before the video ever got distributed. And distributing the video made him a fat, dorky, clumsy idiot?
I'm not saying it's cool that kids get bullied in highschool but one look at him tells you there's probably not a highschool on earth where he wouldn't have been the butt of endless jokes.
He was overweight, had a lousy haircut, was so mal-coordinated he couldn't stand upright when wiggling a broomstick, and was evidently an affirmed StarWars nerd. This is a kid who, whether bullying is acceptable or not, I think we can be pretty certain was bullied long before this video ever came out.
The one thing that changed was he got a degree of celebrity from this one which shifted it in to something OK to wallow in.
Most kids manage something utterly humiliating during their school lives. They wet themselves. They get dumped in public. They get their asses handed to them by a kid several years younger. Their yearbook picture catches them adjusting themselves. Their dad goes to jail. Whatever the case, they become the talk of the school for a couple of weeks. Their parents give them the tough but true advice, "Don't show that it bothers you and wait it out. In two or three weeks, someone else will have done something stupid."
In his case, the net gave him just enough celebrity to truly wallow. Instead of laughing and saying, "Yeah, it was pretty dorky, wasn't it." then leaving it two weeks to quieten down, he was pulled out of school. Instead of weathering it and waiting for it to die down, he gave interviews. Instead of being told, "Yeah, damn straight it sucks but it happens to everyone. You're just going to have to tough it out." this became "The Internet" and he was handed a great excuse to wallow. The really sad thing is, it's the wallowing that's likely done him the most harm.
Yeah, he'd have always got the odd joke about being the Star Wars kid but it would have died down. Instead, being allowed to wallow, he was able to completely sever all ties with normal teenage society. Instead of being allowed to cry at home every night for a week or two and then slowly face it, he was taken to a doctor and given meds, being told it was a reasonable response to be so upset. Instead of slowly accepting that, yeah, life does suck but you have to deal anyway, he was taught that his problems were someone else's fault and so he didn't have to take any responsibility in moving through them and coming out stronger on the far side.
I hate the bullying I faced as a kid. Some of it still hurts a huge amount. I'm also vastly more successful in life now because I had to come back from it and find a way through rather than was allowed to stay home, get home schooled, and wallow in how unfair everyone else was.
And so, when I hear how a fat kid who didn't exercise was so traumatized by his bullying that he "stopped pumping iron and really let [himself] go," I have to question how much of the problem was the same bullying that sucks utterly but toughens up most of us and how much was him getting a damned convenient excuse for many things that were already true.
How many guys out there "could have gone all the way" in their chosen sport before the got some terrible injury. And how many of them, if totally honest, never would have made it and the injury was a damned good excuse to stop trying and instead talk about what they could have been?
Is he any different other than that one video, that almost certainly wasn't the first time he was bullied, gave him a good excuse to stop trying in life and blame someone else for where he was, most likely, going to end up anyway?
And a cheap tea-light, perfect for shadow puppets, remains about $0.20 - a lot cheaper than a TV or movie tickets.
I'm imagining your kids don't like you much though.
That is, of course, assuming you don't whip out the free bible you got at a hotel for wild and crazy nights of bible reading.
All entertainment is not created equal. The cool thing about capitalism is that things generally cost what the market will bear. A games console costs around $500 (dropping to $200 a couple of years later) with games around $50-60 because enough people think that's a reasonable price to pay for what they get. A deck of cards costs around a dollar and change because that's what the market will bear for that rivetting form of entertainment. Bibles are free in hotel rooms because Gideons wants the market saturation they'd get with bibles if there's no cost for the market to bear. That, even despite their high costs, more people seem to play console games than play cards or read bibles could be taken as an indicator that, relatively, they're considered quite a bit more fun and thus worth the money.
(And, yes, I realise the first comment was likely a joke - the concept still holds true though)
Hey, leave the poor F-x50 driver alone. He's got bigger (OK, littler) problems to worry about. Is it me or is Ford's entire marketing scheme:
F-150: Compensates for an inch and a half under performance.
F-150 super cab: Compensates for an inch and a half and some girth.
F-250: Compensates for two and a half inches.
F-250 super cab: Compensates for two and a half inches and some girth.
F-350 super cab: Oh, your poor wife! Or was she Loretta Bobbit?
My personal favorite trucks are the ones with "Got Dirt" stickers littering them and then the chrome all around their raised underside is in perfect, unchipped by actual off-road conditions, shape.
Of course, none of them compare to just prior to the election when I saw an "Off-Roaders For W'04" sticker... On a Nissan Sentra. Being driven by a tiny woman in her seventies. My first thought was, "Wow, that's delusional!" until I asked myself how any Bush voter could possibly be considered that way.
causing you to pirate more material because you can't afford it
Back in the old days we had this other answer to that one. It was called, "You don't get to have it."
Fortunately, in this modern age, absolved of all personal responsibility, it's the content producers' fault for making such great content that we really have no choice but to pirate if we can't afford it. I mean, seriously, it's not like we can go without that extra Britney Spears CD - it's practically a right that we have it. If the founding fathers were around today, they'd almost certainly agree.
From one click purchasing to one dick blogging, is there anything Amazon doesn't have patents on?
An accurate 3D model of a human face can be constructed in 40ms?
Excuse my whilst I almost jump up and down with glee. I mean it's not as if a typical high res photograph can be taken in 1/300th of a second (given decent light) and a bunch of them can't be taken simultaneously with a bank of cameras - leaving almost all of the remainder of 1/25th of a second to quickly calculate a 3D model using the same digital photogrametry that's been around for years on a powerful enough system.
To put it in context, there have been camera systems that can film an actor "in 3D" - and then use that co-ordinate data to manipulate a 3D character - for TV use for the last half decade or so. By definition, at 25 frames per second, it too builds a 3D model within 1/25 of a second (40ms). The only difference is higher accuracy.
So, OK, they've come up with a new technique for projecting a dot pattern that makes it even easier to record a set of points than the old annoying stick on black dots method. Even so, quickly capturing a 3D image isn't radically new - a bank of cameras can capture it in far less time than 40ms and you can do the processing in a staggering 2-3 whole seconds as the person steps away before the next person steps up.
The slow bit has always been comparing a complex 3D model against a huge database and identifying matches when people move their facial muscles between each image.
Of note is the simple fact: This talks about how "fast" 3D imaging is now available (although it has been by years but we'll ignore that) which is a totally different concept to actually comparing that information against several million, if not hundreds of millions, of other entries.
OK, so fair enough, the article talks about comparing someone to a specific record to see if they're who they claim to be. Again, nothing that couldn't already be done with a bank of decent CMOS based cameras. They imply that this is "more" accurate (which I still dispute is any more accurate than a bank of 10MP CMOS cameras and traditional photogrametry) but make absolutely no reference to cracking the real problem of people's 3D facial structure changing as their muscles move, as they gain weight, etc.
So - they have a quick method of creating a 3D snapshot, which could be done already, and haven't solved any of the real problems that make a simple 3D snapshot useless (comparing against large numbers of possibilities, parameterizing 3D points that move as faces do). So absolutely nothing then? Sweet.
I wonder if I could come up with a new, different, but absolutely no better technology for something people also still can't do very well. If so, I wonder how much a breathy press release and vapid article would net me in grants for my research?
Here's a simple concept that he could have learned from playing The Sims for half an hour:
Your Sim is miserable in his apartment. He has a crappy TV that doesn't make him very happy. You are confident that a big plasma TV would make him much happier and thus he'd work harder, get promoted, and earn far more than the cost of the TV back.
Sensible person's approach: Earn what you can. Upgrade the TV for a slightly better one. Earn faster with the better TV. Upgrade once you can. Repeat until you have the plasma TV.
Idiot's approach: Sell the old TV. Afterall, it sucks. Go to buy a plasma. Discover you don't have the money to buy the plasma and now you can't even afford to buy back the crappy TV. Watch your Sim get depressed, skip work, and get demoted, earning less.
Yes, a wholly new website would be spiffy and, quite possibly, keen too. But there's not enough money for a wholly new website that proves the shining vision of the net as somewhere to invest.
A sensible manager - or a ten year old kid who's played The Sims - will thus not try and gut the whole damn thing. They'll take a week, a month, whatever period they figure they can handle and do the best job they can on one small part. They'll then use that success to argue for better resources to work on a bigger part next. In time they'll have proved repeatedly that money spent on them is a good investment, be doing large chunks at a time, with a well resourced team - and all those small parts will add up anyway.
If I walked up to my CEO and said, "I need 8 server side engineers, 4 html guys, 3 artists, 2 content writers, 2 sys admins, 3 db guys and two secretaries, can I have a $2.4m budget please?" I would damn well expect to get laughed out of his office.
On the other hand, if I took myself and the one other guy I had and proved a $100,000/year return on investment from our first $25,000 of work, I'd expect a much easier time of justifying an extra head count to hire on maybe an artist. The next project spends say $40,000 and makes $150,000 extra a year and I can likely get a dba. Repeat enough times, consistently giving the company more than it pays and I'll get my 24 person team. Ask for all 24 of them all at once and I should absolutely expect to get laughed out of the office and then fired for being an utterly clueless manager.
My wife and I have about 3,500 books. We can't find anything. All the books are in random order.
3,500 RFID tags, a scanner, and a pair of tin foil underpants?
If the books are out of order on shelves, all a db can do is tell you what books you happen to have - not where to find them. Even if you go to the insane task of cataloging your disordered filing, the moment you put one back in a different place, the db starts becoming useless.
The obvious solution is to sort them. By category and then by author is the obvious one but falls apart somewhat in personal collections where your interests mean you have huge amounts in certain sections and two books in others. The Hewey, Dewey, and Louie Decimal system gives you division and subdivision rules but takes a little more learning.
Once you have them sorted, barcode readers and dbs are fun projects for nerds but near meaningless for personal collections unless you want to loan books out or have nice sortable lists you can glow proudly over.
If you're totally unwilling to sort them - or know you'll never maintain the sort order - then you need to find some way of finding a specific object in a random collection. For that, much as it'll make the tinfoil brigade explode, a proximity triggered identifier and some kind of a scanner that bleeps when near whatever you're looking for as you swipe it over row after row of shelves sounds like your answer far more than a barcode reader (that's too slow even if you stuck barcodes on spines) and a db.
The windshield mentioned, for example -- how quickly would heat build to the point of damaging the IC?
I wasn't speeding officer. I was "air cooling" my windshield IC.
Of course the far more l33t Brits and folks from the state of Washington would all have watercooled versions but we can't all be that l33t.
Even if technology wasn't an issue...
Shakespeare wasn't even close to the first twenty five years of plays as a medium. Given the obvious Illiad, he wasn't even in the first twenty five hundred years of plays.
To liken the incredibly young concept of computer games to the already tens of centuries old concept of plays in Shakespeare's time is a little unfair.
Imagine if we could go back to thirty years after the first guy came up with "drama". We'd likely find nothing more advanced than, "Ug kills a sabertooth." Not exactly a classic that's been enjoyed through the ages.
Look at the first thirty years of motion pictures. We had classics like: "Oooh look, a steamtrain", "Horse running", etc. Even attempts at taking the existing notions of drama and applying them to the new medium don't really exist except for film historians today - just as even the best attempts to apply plot and character to modern games likely won't exist for anyone except game historians in another hundred years.
On one level, this seems to support Ebert - Modern games are primative compared to established media and perhaps not a fully evolved art form.
Then again, Ebert wrote, "But for most games, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."...
True. And the same can be said of the first thirty years of his beloved medium of film. Fortunately for him, people didn't give up on film because the first thirty years wasn't yet a fully evolved art form - they kept with it and great pieces of art like Citizen Kane or The Godfather got to be made in time.
Should we have abandonned drama because "Ug kills a sabertooth" wasn't deeply evolved art? Should we have abandonned literature because the first scratches on clay weren't deeply literary? Should we have abandonned painting because the animals on cave walls weren't evocative enough? Should we have abandonned photography because stiff looking over posed people weren't art? Should we have abandonned film because it didn't achieve art in its first 30 years?
If the answer to all of those is an emphatic "no" - it strikes me as remarkably short sighted for Ebert to be glad people invested the time to evolve those mediums but regards computer games as nothing but a loss of precious hours that should be better spent elsewhere.
From throwing rocks at Ogg and Ug to Snakes and Ladders, there hasn't really been a "single player" game before.
Since the first cave teenager yelled, "Mom! Knock before coming in to my cave!" I think you'll find there has always been at least one "single player" game that's stayed remarkably popular.
And, cheap joke aside, to say there haven't been single player games ignores every kid that's kicked a ball against a wall, driven toy cars or flown toy planes around, flown a kite, used a hulahoop, jumped rope, played with a yo-yo, had a dolls tea party, built a cardboard and tinfoil spaceship for a trip to the moon, or kept a hoop rolling with a stick.
Two years later, we're quite confident that two million Xbox Live subscribers, more than five million World of Warcraft subscribers and, ironically, more than a million DS Wi-Fi Connection users would disagree with Iwata's statement.
100 million+ PS2 sales.
30m? XBox1 sales.
Several million XBox360 sales.
Who knows how many tens of millions of PCs that games are played on.
Quoting eight million users against roughly 200 million gives maybe 4%.
That's the kind of figure people call statistical error when figuring out say how many people like or dislike a president.
Sure, there are plenty of other games with online components. But to quote 2m plus 5m plus an additional million and claim that makes a mockery of a quote regarding ~200m systems is kind of stretching things.
Even on the XBox - 2m Live subscribers across 30m? sales implies the statement is true: the majority of users do not want an online experience under the terms it's currently offered? 1 in 15? 6.7%? Curiously, 6.7% of the population is also the same percentage that has a sub 80 IQ which puts them in the Borderline Deficiency to Definite Feeble-Mindedness range.
Now I'm all for online gaming. I met my wife on a mud. But "the percentage of the population that are significantly mentally subnormal is also the same percentage as XBox owners who subscribe to XBox Live" is not really a compelling argument that "clearly customers want online gaming."
A week ago, scientists created the hottest temperature ever seen on earth but had no idea how they did it.
This week, following NVidia's earlier announcement of 2 GPUs per card in a tie-in with Dell, Gigabyte anounces a 4xPCIe motherboard.
Millions of nerds, picturing 8 high end GPUs in one small box, sagely nod their heads and say, "Ah!"
A survey last month of 300 Minnesota business officials found most thought a flu pandemic would significantly affect their business, but only 18% had preparedness plans in place.
I am pretty certain that a flock of winged monkeys, backed up by tap dancing midgets would significantly affect my business. We, sadly, don't have a plan for such an eventuality.
Just because the majority believe a pandemic would affect their business, that's not the same as saying they believe such a pandemic is likely to happen.
The last truly staggering flu pandemic was in 1919. Since then we've been about to get nuked, about to have planes flown in to us and about to all die of Sars, or possibly mad cow disease, or West Nile, or possibly flesh eating bacteria - oh, and our computers were all going to assplode on Y2K. It turns out there are lots of exciting panics the media likes to report and yet most of them are either over hyped of Jack Bauer manages to diffuse them before they become an issue for the masses.
Yes, a flu pandemic would be terrible. Yes, it's even possible - more possible, though less fun, than the winged monkeys. But it's not necessarily probable. Good risk management - as opposed to running around screaming at every perceived risk - involves calculating cost multiplied by probability and comparing options. It's possible most of those businesses, whether rightly or wrongly, just don't believe they need to panic about the latest shocking THREAT TO LIFE AS WE KNOW IT that is yet to do more in the west than make some German cats sick.
That law says whoever "knowingly causes damage without authorization" to a networked computer can be held civilly and criminally liable.
Here's a simple defense then:
"I had unplugged the network cable at the time I deleted the files."
You can't claim damage to a networked computer if the computer wasn't networked.
If units cost $29 and you can sell 1,000 at $40, or 10,000 at $30, which is the right choice?
Sell 10,000 at $30 with a $1 profit and you can make $10,000 and pat yourself on the back for selling more than your competitors.
Sell 1,000 at $40 with a $11 profit and you can make $11,000. Sure, you have less customers but you made more money.
My guess is Apple has such a massive market with the core iPods that they're happy to run the numbers that way - sell less overall but at an outrageous profit and they still make more money than if they simply sold more at a so-competitive-they-don't-make-much price.
I can't fault them as a business. They're doing great business.
But that does mean I'm going to be one of the 9,000 who don't buy their overpriced generic products and it also means I'm that much less likely to stay loyal should someone invent the iPod killer.
Their business, their choice, I guess.
Do you have any basis for this statement at all?
For what little it's worth, I'm that sucker. I feel dirty as hell for it but I'm also honest enough to admit it's true.
The iPod just [got] it right.
Having messed with various alternatives, I tried the old mono version. Rather than clunky jog switches and too many buttons, that touch wheel was the perfect way to navigate. Rather than present me with a million config options (and, I'll admit, I'm usually a total whore for them) it gave me a few way out of the way on the options menu then gave me nothing but my music - purity of function. Rather than looking like a clunky box or some overstyled piece of flimsy plastic, it was a pure, smooth, gently curved. That styling was so perfect it literally became something to be fetishized - it was so utterly right in every way that it climbed in to my lifestyle.
iTunes then did much the same and created a nice and easy interface to the PC part.
That's what Apple achieved. They stopped designing like tech companies. Most tech companies either create function over style *cough*early*cough*creative*cough*zens*cough* or try so hard to compensate that they end up creating style over function and you get a piece of plastic junk... that feels like plastic junk. Apple, by managing to perfectly merge style and function created something that just did everything exactly right. In doing so, they hooked their customers utterly.
Ironically, if anything, the new video iPods are a step in the wrong direction. They've missed the one thing it desperately needs (nested folders for playlists), they've implemented a few new functions badly (What on earth is up with the way you can list a video as a TV show but then it doesn't turn up?) and they've degraded a bunch of old features (The wheel is now too small for big fingers and way too easy to hit the wrong thing. The corners are now angular, losing that symbiotic feel it had when resting in your hand. They took off the top port for no better reason than it let them charge more for the proprietary dock - screwing their customers so they could chase bigger profits).
And the horrible thing? They've made such a junky of me I still stick with them. Even with their weird (mistaken/money grabbing?) choices of late, I'm still totally hooked.
Now the accessories... I haven't bought a single one for the new Video iPod. My old dock that I got for free with the old 40gb works well enough. I'd love a new one with a remote but $70 for a basic dock and remote - $100 if I want to power it - is daylight robbery and it's just too plain offensive to pay. I'd replace my old iTrip but I'm not in to paying $10 extra now Apple have forced the dock connector on them - a design that now stops me from charging it while I use it. About the only accessory I'll end up buying, given Apple's blatant gouging, are the TV out cable (that I'll buy for half the price elsewhere, knowing I can just swap two of the cables and have it work fine), a tape deck adaptor (which I can also buy as a third party add-on given Apple haven't yet removed the headphone jack in search of profits) and headphones (same reason).
So, you see, I'll suck up $100 extra for the unit because it's undeniably better than anyone else's. I'm not going to pay $10 extra per accessory (or $30 in many cases) because Apple wants to milk its customers at any chance it gets, even on generic accessories that are no better than you can get elsewhere.
In short: I'm not getting any better accessories from Apple as they price gouge so horrifically that I don't buy them anyway.
Sure, they charge extra for the basic unit but I'd prefer to pay $399 to do it absolutely right than $299 to not quite do so - $100 doesn't make up for a constant nagging sensation with something I have on me every day. But, if unit to unit was the same, Apple certainly wouldn't win me over just because they have more overpriced accessories that honestly aren't much (if any) more functional.
I'd worry less about the golf ball and more about the embarrassed cosmonaut who's trying to push the divot he just made back in to the ISS with the toe of his spacesuit before anyone notices.
These robots ... have limited on-board intelligence and are wirelessly controlled by a central robot control system.
Forget about distributed denial of service attacks. Past studies show that all you need to take them down are a couple of jedi (which, if I recall, Europe's voter registration implies they have thousands of) and a really annoying little kid.
It works out even worse, when you think about the capacity of the devices they've given him:
10,102 (paying the 98c) songs ~= 40,408 GB of music.
They, however, have given him 10 x 60GB players. That great gift card won't even fill one of them. He'll have to drop another five grand of his own money at the rate the iTunes music store charges just to fill one of them.
Then, with another $15,000 / player for the other 9 players... Apple have given him the gift that keeps on giving [back to them], needing a total investment of $140,000 in addition to their "generous" prize if he wants to fully use it.
Wouldn't it make you feel all fuzzy to hear "Congratulations on winning our prize. Now give us $140,000 to use it fully."
On the other hand, you could just sell those other 9 on EBay and easily buy a thousand nice un-DRM'd albums to fill up the remaining 10,000 songs.
JavaScript has a long ways to go and no book is going to erase these vast differences no matter how well written it is.
I disagree.
You cannot support everything, that is true.
You can do the following:
1) Identify a basic starting point (say where browsers had reached n years ago, accepting a high enough percentage of users fit that criteria).
2) Identify which features are commonly supported across those browsers (or commonly enough) and deem them "safe" to use.
3) Identify which other features are inconsistent but can gain a consistent interface through your coding. innerText may not be supported but that doesn't mean it's impossible to write consistent setInnerText/getInnerText functions that calls it directly for IE and then does more work to get the same result for other browsers.
4) Identify which other features are so inconsistent that there is no way you can write your own library to unify them (or add them).
5) Identify what fail-gracefully methods can be used for older browsers than your cut-off criteria.
With such an approach, you don't get all features of all implementations of JavaScript and DOM. You do however get a unified interface that allows you to use the majority of features on the majority of browsers and know that, even in the edge cases, the majority of those edge cases will fail gracefully.
Does it erase all of the differences? Absolutely not. But it does erase enough of them that the barrier for entry for many people now disappears.
Most people are concerned that they have to learn everything about all inconsistencies before they can code anything. They are concerned that, without that knowledge, even supporting the core browsers becomes impossible and they'll have a massive development cost testing for things they have no idea to look for.
A solution like the one above lets them have a list of things they can do, things they can't do, and a library of methods to unify the stuff in between. They know that, with that, they're pretty safe.
And that, as far as most users are concerned, is the unification they need - not absolute unification of every last detail.
I bet if IBM and Sony had decided to go with six SPEs per Cell rather than eight, and cut the die down in size, they wouldn't be having these problems.
Speaking purely from public knowledge...
They are actually only using 7 of the 8 SPEs per chip to add greater fault tolerance.
I'm guessing that the yields work out dramatically better this way than with simply 6 SPEs per chip. If you think about it - say half the silicon is used by the main processor and parts other than the SPEs and then the other half is used to make up the 8 SPEs... 6SPEs means you drop total die size by 12.5%. Assuming an average chip has one flaw, some have none, some have two - the chips with two flaws almost certainly still have issues and the ones with one flaw only change by a few percent. On the other hand, build in the ability to accept a flaw on half the silicon, you're looking at dropping your failure rate by nigh on 50%.
So, in short, the very parallel design of the CELL opens up opportunities that the much less parallel design of say a Pentium can't use. With a Pentium, if there's a flaw anywhere, you ditch the whole chip. With a cell, if there's a single flaw, so long as it's in the SPE area, oh well. It's only when a second one turns up that it's an issue.
Even better would be if they could switch those blocks of local memory around. That way you could have SPE 4 and memory 6 both have errors and still get a perfectly servicable chip by routing SPE 6 to use memory 4.
Nice little trick for totally rewriting the rules on yield issues.
"NextGen" sadly - whatever we might hope - doesn't mean anything other than a quantum step in graphics power.
The author identifies three categories:
1) Gameplay.
2) Scope.
3) Graphics.
I'll use a simple question: If you added the feature to a game from say the early 90s, would you suddenly call it NextGen?
Gameplay
So we're playing Doom on the SNES. The author claims a great control scheme is what makes it work. Would adding Halo's controls to SNES Doom make it NextGen? I'm guessing most people would laugh at the idea.
Scope
The author says NextGen games should be bigger. Anyone remember Ultima 7? That thing was freaking huge. Morrowind was also huge. Both are from previous generations. Both are bigger than anything seen on future consoles, even in previews, with the exception of Oblivion. Take a small Ultima type game. Give it a massive game world with lots of cool things to do, you don't get NextGen Ultima, you get Ultima 7.
Graphics
Take a fairly typical console racer. Give it 720p graphics and nothing much else. That gets called NextGen pretty quickly. Take a basic beat-em-up and add 720p graphics, again, NextGen.
We may want Next Gen to mean quantum increases across the board. We may feel a true "Next Gen" game should step up its game in every field not just shiny stuff. They're a whole bunch of nice ideals but the sad truth is, we're judged by our actions and our actions have us simply calling a quantum increase in graphics "NextGen" because it's the only thing that really needs the next generation of systems to be possible.
Better music, better gameplay, bigger worlds, longer playtimes, [basic] physics systems, improved AI, better control schemes... These are all great things but none of them require the next generation of system - most of them can be done on the system before last (PS1) or even earlier.
About the only thing that requires the next generation of systems are prettier visuals. It may feel empty, it may not suit our ideals, but, truth is, that's all NextGen really is.
The only reason people question the "NextGen"ishness of some 360 launch titles is because, as with any new system, many of the launch titles are so inefficient they really aren't that quantum step up from the old one.
a photocapacitor or some other light sensitive electronics wouldn't suffice?
Simple:
"Robot controlled by light sensitive electronics seeks corner" gets a quick nod before someone realises eight year olds have been doing it with the basic Lego Mindstorms kit for years.
"Slime mold remotely controls six legged robot" gets the quirky and weird headlines. Quirky and weird headlines can be claimed as public interest. Public interest can be parlayed in to additional funding for your otherwise unfundable project.
So, whilst it's not really any more exciting, it does get the trivia audience - which gets the funding. Thus, for PhDs who can't get Google to hire them, it's essential to use a cockroach or slime mold or something similarly quirky to keep you in tweed jackets and leather elbow patches.