Wanna bet? A hardware/software platform that has no future support and no real development community is not worth buying into at any price. It's not even worth it if it's free. About the only offer I couldn't refuse is if they paid me to take one. Then it would be worth the time to drop it off at the recyclers. Or maybe sell it on Ebay to someone who wanted it for whatever reason.
RIM is one step above irrelevance. They're ripe for a takeover bid so one of the big players can scarf up all their patents. While technically accurate, there really are only 3 real players in the market
They want to sell me a TV that tracks what I do and gives that information to others who's only interest is selling me things based on my TV viewing habits?
Why on earth would anyone want a TV that targets spam at them? I suppose if someone were to get the TV for free, they would put up with the spam. But I can't see that as being a huge customer base. Then again, we're talking about the TV viewing public. I wouldn't have though there was much of a market for inane reality shows. I guess I'm just overestimating the intelligence of the TV viewing public.
Yeah, I figured I was already late to that party. I suppose that if people were smarter, one of those apps would have already caught on and replaced the expensive text messages.
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
It's amazing how people line up in droves to pay for a service that costs the person providing it basically nothing. Sure, the phone and data network cost to implement and maintain. But SMS messages use so little bandwidth, their incremental cost is basically zero. Yet people pay every month for the privilege of using that service. It's pure profit for the phone company.
Now, if the phone companies were to use the text message profits to offset the cost of the phone and data plans, making my service cheaper, I'd be happy to see them charge incredible amounts for the service. But they don't so I'm out of luck. But at least I don't have to pay extra for all of the text messages I don't send.
I think for my first Android software project I'm going to come up with a text message like program that uses your data plan. I could make a killing on something like that if it took off. Although I'll probably get my ass sued off by patent trolls so I may not bother.
Back in the day, you couldn't make good graphics, but that doesn't mean you always made a good game. There's really bad games on any system. But with the proliferation of graphics power, there are far more games where all of the attention has been put on the graphics and not so much on making a good story or good game play.
I certainly can't disagree. Different people like different types of games. And I do have to concede that graphics aren't entirely meaningless to me. There's a reason why I don't play Larn these days. As good as it was at the time, I appreciate a game that has better visual appeal than ASCII characters on an 80x25 screen. Though switching from monchrome to CGA color was a huge step up for that game. While games like Diablo aren't fundamentally different (town on top level, dungeons full of monsters you kill to level up, lots of goodies to pick up along the way, big bad guy on the bottom level), there are just some things you can't do on a text screen that you can do if you have full 3D graphics.
But your point is still valid. Things that make a game appealing to me aren't the same to others. I think it would be impossible to make one single game that appeals to everyone in the world. Sure, you can capture a significant audience by taking a game in a particular direction. But games that try to be everything to everyone end up being the worst games and no one wants to play them.
I am glad to see that game manufacturers are figuring out they don't need to spend time developing parts of a game that most people will never see. Hopefully they will split the extra time between bug fixes and releasing sooner.
It's been my experience that I'm much more likely to finish a game that has a decent story behind it. I don't mind a little senseless grinding if there's a worthwhile payoff in the end. But so many games these days have only the pretense of a story. There's just enough to loosely tie action sequences together but nothing to really compel you to continue with the game. It's like watching a modern action film. Cardboard cutout characters moving around with big explosions and lots of flashy effects gets boring fast.
I guess this is a "get off my lawn" rant but I think that flashy graphics have ruined games. Without fancy graphics, the game developers had no choice but to make the games interesting. The first time I saw a new console game system with 3D I was impressed by the graphics but the game the guy had was nothing more than just driving around the game world grinding away at some inane monotonous task that didn't seem to have any purpose.
I don't know how many times I spent grinding through Diablo to the end. The graphics were decent for the time but it was the game play that brought me back over and over. I wouldn't have cared if it was done in ASCII art, it was a fun game to play. I haven't broken out a copy of Larn in over a decade but it was one of those games I wasted hours upon hours playing over and over again because it was a fun game.
A couple years ago I was playing one of the GTA games on an XBox. I spent quite a bit of time playing it but realized that I just didn't care about the endless monotony. The story wasn't interesting. And as it turned out, it didn't matter what I actually did on the side, the game forced the story in one direction. And that just made the grind feel pointless. And after spending quite a bit of time on it, I found out I was less than half way through the story. So I stopped playing.
I don't mind grind in a game if the grind has a real purpose. Grind for the sake of grind just isn't interesting. So I guess I'm glad game designers are taking it out and making the games shorter. But it won't compel me to buy and play the new games. They're still not interesting. And even though the cost to me is trivial, they're still not worth it.
I see your point. When I refer to it appearing more natural, I assume that I'm referring to a movie or TV show set here on earth in modern times. For example, a good crime drama doesn't need the distraction of made up brands catching your eye. When the cops kick down the door of a criminal's hideout and you see empty Bud Light bottles strewn about, you get an idea of what kind of place it is right away.
Certainly shows like The Simpsons having Krusty branded items is more appropriate than real products. But it goes along with the theme of the show.
I certainly agree that movies set outside of our time period and especially in entirely made up worlds would look silly with product placements from here and now. But having branded products in the scene would certainly make the scene appear more "realistic", in my (not so) humble opinion. For historic settings, period logos and items would look best (assuming it's not so far back that branded items didn't yet exist). For extra terrestrial and future settings, made up brands and logos would probably work best.
Did you only read the headline? You don't even have to read the article, just the summary at the top of the page. This is about Europe where restrictions have been in place are being relaxed. Transformers was produced in the USA where there has never been any kind of restriction.
Natural placement of branded items isn't always a bad thing. It can make the story that much more believable. I find that the products with labels that are deliberately nothing like anything in the real world can actually be distracting. With the dialog, it's far more natural for an actor to ask for a Coke or Pepsi than to say "I'd like a cola."
But the best product placement in a movie had to be "Wayne's World". They did an entire scene about how they didn't want to sell out to advertisers. Of course, the scene was shot with as many product placements as possible while they were talking about selling out to advertisers. They even mimicked the commercials of some of the products. Garth dressed head to toe in Reebok gear saying "It's like people only do these things because they can get paid. And that's just really sad." had to be the funniest part of that scene.
I know there's little to no chance that my Yahoo accounts will know about my other accounts. I haven't updated any of my personal information (such as where I live) in either of them. One has a location from 3 moves ago, the other from 4 moves. There's little to no chance of the accounts syncing with each other, much less with anything I might have on a social networking site.
The key is that all of these social networking sites and email providers only have the information you give them. They can guess at a few things but really, they won't have the information if it's not provided to them in the first place.
The stealth coatings are old news. The original development of the F117 was started in the 70's and revealed in the 80's. Given the knowledge that the coatings exist for the last 30 years means any half-competent research team at a second rate college could have figured out several good radar absorbing coatings on their own by now. China should have had no problem figuring it out by now, even without stealing secrets from us.
The shapes they needed to use for the aircraft likewise are no great mystery. Again, given a picture of the F117 and 30 years, any research team could pretty much have come up with a decent shape for an aircraft, including helicopter rotors, on their own. Like you say, the materials aren't important at this stage.
Computers have been able to make unstable shapes fly well since the late 70's/early 80's. The F16 used 8 bit microprocessors to provide 100% fly by wire from the beginning. They've upgraded a couple of times as the computers wear out and they just can't get parts to replace them. But pretty much every new military plane since then has been computer controlled. At this point, most of the new civilian planes (at least passenger/cargo planes) are computer controlled as well. So at this point getting a weird shape to fly well isn't even an issue.
And that's why I say that leaving behind the tail rotor isn't as big a deal as some people think. And it's why I suggest they just left it, focusing instead on destroying other components. The huge secrets aren't in the physical design of the craft. It's probably not even in the flight controls. The big secrets are in the sensors, the weapons, the electronics, the countermeasures.
The fancy new gizmos that can do who-knows-what are the real secrets that need to be protected. Whatever it is that we put on our aircraft to make them more effective at what they do are more important secrets. And it's not the gizmos themselves. It's the fact that they exist and they make a difference that is the secret. If no one else knows that we have some capability, they don't know to start defending against it. If they don't know of a particular vulnerability, they don't know to start attacking it. That's the kind of secret stuff the SEALs probably destroyed before leaving. If they only see a pod hanging off the side of the plane, they have no way of knowing what it's for, if they even notice it there in the first place. If they were able to crack one open and get a look inside, they'd have a much better idea of what's going on. That why the SEALs destroy bits like those and leave the tail rotor alone.
I suspect that if this technology was so uber-secret, we would have saturated the place with enough ordinance to blow it into dust. So either it's not so terribly secret (the SEALs destroying what needed to be destroyed) or there was a plan to leave it behind specifically to mislead. Either way, I'd suggest this is a tempest in a teacup.
Sure, a lot of people have no idea what the contract really means. Then again, so many of the unwashed masses have no idea if the internet connection is "fast" or not. They just want to plug in and play farmville and stream their brain dead reality shows. So long as they get a response from the server before their gnat like attention span runs out, they're content to keep tapping the button to get their rewards. And for most people, they can get that satisfaction from a connection far below advertised speeds.
I see your point. There should be some differentiation between a 5 and 1.5 mbps connection. And if there isn't, then you might have grounds for a suit.
However, one of the reasons ISPs put in the "up to" clause in their speed rating is that they are not in 100% control of your entire internet experience. They do supply the connection to your house and then on to "the internet". Once your connection goes out of their zone of influence, they have no control over it. Your traffic can be slowed through choke points completely out of the control of your ISP, not to mention trying to download from an overloaded server. (Slashdot effect anyone?) Even if the third party server is on their own network, it can still be overloaded. The connection to the server can be just fine but if the server is slow, there's nothing they can do about it. You can have a 1.5mbps connection or an eleventy gazillion mbps connection but if the server is only dishing out data at 56kbps, that's all you're going to get.
I'm not trying to defend ISPs but there has to be some reason applied to the standards to which they are held. I don't think expecting them to always meet their "up to" speeds all the time for everyone is a reasonable standard. Though meeting 80% of advertised speed for the network is probably not a terrible starting point for the standard. And that should include the ISP's upstream connection. If they have oversold their upstream connection and it is the source of the restriction, they should be held to task for removing that bottleneck. But the one gaping hole in the standard is that no ISP can guarantee that any one particular connection to any one particular server will result in the desired speed. They just can't provide that kind of guarantee because it's ultimately something they just don't have control over.
I have an "Up To 12 Mb" connection through my local cable company. I get exactly that. Somewhere between nothing and 12 Mb. I certainly never get more than that. But given that they advertise it as a "you might get as much as X bandwidth", I don't see how you can say they aren't giving me what they promised.
I'm pretty sure that there is not as much variation in the speed of processors coming out of a fab plant as there is in the size of eggs that hens lay.
Having worked for a major chip company, I can tell you that your assumption here is incorrect. There really is that much variation in chips coming off the assembly line. In fact, I'd wager that the variation in chips coming off the fab is more varied than the size of chicken eggs.
It's the side effect of pushing higher and higher density within the chip. Modern equipment could probably push out extremely consistent 90nm designs. But 90nm chips were out of date 5 years ago. In order to be competitive, you have to push the most density out of the equipment you have. And that means that you get significant variation in your product, even within one wafer. The companies build in flexibility to the chip to allow for this variation. There are "fuses" built in to each chip specifically to disable the broken parts of the chip. If the L3 cache on a processor is totally hosed, they will blow the fuses for it and completely turn it off. But since the rest of the chip is fine they can still sell it, albeit at a discount. Even the maximum speed can be fused into the chip. The testing procedures ramp up voltage and clock frequency until the chip starts failing. Then they step it down a notch or two and fuse it there.
AMD has never produced a 45nm dual or triple core design. I'm not sure they even made one in 65nm. The x2 and x3 processors are just x4 (or x6?) chips with one or more dead cores and maybe less cache, depending on the specific chip. Intel does the exact same thing with their core series processors. That's just the way processor companies do business. It's been that way for decades.
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Our zero tolerance policy will save the children!
(aside)Now where did I go an hide that sarcasm tag?
Wanna bet? A hardware/software platform that has no future support and no real development community is not worth buying into at any price. It's not even worth it if it's free. About the only offer I couldn't refuse is if they paid me to take one. Then it would be worth the time to drop it off at the recyclers. Or maybe sell it on Ebay to someone who wanted it for whatever reason.
RIM is one step above irrelevance. They're ripe for a takeover bid so one of the big players can scarf up all their patents. While technically accurate, there really are only 3 real players in the market
You're forgetting about Microsoft employees who won't have a choice.
They want to sell me a TV that tracks what I do and gives that information to others who's only interest is selling me things based on my TV viewing habits?
Why on earth would anyone want a TV that targets spam at them? I suppose if someone were to get the TV for free, they would put up with the spam. But I can't see that as being a huge customer base. Then again, we're talking about the TV viewing public. I wouldn't have though there was much of a market for inane reality shows. I guess I'm just overestimating the intelligence of the TV viewing public.
Yeah, I figured I was already late to that party. I suppose that if people were smarter, one of those apps would have already caught on and replaced the expensive text messages.
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
It's amazing how people line up in droves to pay for a service that costs the person providing it basically nothing. Sure, the phone and data network cost to implement and maintain. But SMS messages use so little bandwidth, their incremental cost is basically zero. Yet people pay every month for the privilege of using that service. It's pure profit for the phone company.
Now, if the phone companies were to use the text message profits to offset the cost of the phone and data plans, making my service cheaper, I'd be happy to see them charge incredible amounts for the service. But they don't so I'm out of luck. But at least I don't have to pay extra for all of the text messages I don't send.
I think for my first Android software project I'm going to come up with a text message like program that uses your data plan. I could make a killing on something like that if it took off. Although I'll probably get my ass sued off by patent trolls so I may not bother.
Back in the day, you couldn't make good graphics, but that doesn't mean you always made a good game. There's really bad games on any system. But with the proliferation of graphics power, there are far more games where all of the attention has been put on the graphics and not so much on making a good story or good game play.
I certainly can't disagree. Different people like different types of games. And I do have to concede that graphics aren't entirely meaningless to me. There's a reason why I don't play Larn these days. As good as it was at the time, I appreciate a game that has better visual appeal than ASCII characters on an 80x25 screen. Though switching from monchrome to CGA color was a huge step up for that game. While games like Diablo aren't fundamentally different (town on top level, dungeons full of monsters you kill to level up, lots of goodies to pick up along the way, big bad guy on the bottom level), there are just some things you can't do on a text screen that you can do if you have full 3D graphics.
But your point is still valid. Things that make a game appealing to me aren't the same to others. I think it would be impossible to make one single game that appeals to everyone in the world. Sure, you can capture a significant audience by taking a game in a particular direction. But games that try to be everything to everyone end up being the worst games and no one wants to play them.
I am glad to see that game manufacturers are figuring out they don't need to spend time developing parts of a game that most people will never see. Hopefully they will split the extra time between bug fixes and releasing sooner.
It's been my experience that I'm much more likely to finish a game that has a decent story behind it. I don't mind a little senseless grinding if there's a worthwhile payoff in the end. But so many games these days have only the pretense of a story. There's just enough to loosely tie action sequences together but nothing to really compel you to continue with the game. It's like watching a modern action film. Cardboard cutout characters moving around with big explosions and lots of flashy effects gets boring fast.
I guess this is a "get off my lawn" rant but I think that flashy graphics have ruined games. Without fancy graphics, the game developers had no choice but to make the games interesting. The first time I saw a new console game system with 3D I was impressed by the graphics but the game the guy had was nothing more than just driving around the game world grinding away at some inane monotonous task that didn't seem to have any purpose.
I don't know how many times I spent grinding through Diablo to the end. The graphics were decent for the time but it was the game play that brought me back over and over. I wouldn't have cared if it was done in ASCII art, it was a fun game to play. I haven't broken out a copy of Larn in over a decade but it was one of those games I wasted hours upon hours playing over and over again because it was a fun game.
A couple years ago I was playing one of the GTA games on an XBox. I spent quite a bit of time playing it but realized that I just didn't care about the endless monotony. The story wasn't interesting. And as it turned out, it didn't matter what I actually did on the side, the game forced the story in one direction. And that just made the grind feel pointless. And after spending quite a bit of time on it, I found out I was less than half way through the story. So I stopped playing.
I don't mind grind in a game if the grind has a real purpose. Grind for the sake of grind just isn't interesting. So I guess I'm glad game designers are taking it out and making the games shorter. But it won't compel me to buy and play the new games. They're still not interesting. And even though the cost to me is trivial, they're still not worth it.
I see your point. When I refer to it appearing more natural, I assume that I'm referring to a movie or TV show set here on earth in modern times. For example, a good crime drama doesn't need the distraction of made up brands catching your eye. When the cops kick down the door of a criminal's hideout and you see empty Bud Light bottles strewn about, you get an idea of what kind of place it is right away.
Certainly shows like The Simpsons having Krusty branded items is more appropriate than real products. But it goes along with the theme of the show.
I certainly agree that movies set outside of our time period and especially in entirely made up worlds would look silly with product placements from here and now. But having branded products in the scene would certainly make the scene appear more "realistic", in my (not so) humble opinion. For historic settings, period logos and items would look best (assuming it's not so far back that branded items didn't yet exist). For extra terrestrial and future settings, made up brands and logos would probably work best.
True. I found that out when I moved to Texas and ordered a Coke. I was bewildered when they asked me what kind.
The reason you don't hear Pepsi very often is because The Coca-Cola company invests a lot of advertising dollars in movie and TV production.
Weird. Every time I watch a BBC show these days -- which isn't often since I left the UK -- it just seems like laughable politically correct pap.
You obviously haven't seen Top Gear then.
That's almost as bad as a NASCAR driver plugging all his sponsors when talking about the car.
Did you only read the headline? You don't even have to read the article, just the summary at the top of the page. This is about Europe where restrictions have been in place are being relaxed. Transformers was produced in the USA where there has never been any kind of restriction.
Natural placement of branded items isn't always a bad thing. It can make the story that much more believable. I find that the products with labels that are deliberately nothing like anything in the real world can actually be distracting. With the dialog, it's far more natural for an actor to ask for a Coke or Pepsi than to say "I'd like a cola."
But the best product placement in a movie had to be "Wayne's World". They did an entire scene about how they didn't want to sell out to advertisers. Of course, the scene was shot with as many product placements as possible while they were talking about selling out to advertisers. They even mimicked the commercials of some of the products. Garth dressed head to toe in Reebok gear saying "It's like people only do these things because they can get paid. And that's just really sad." had to be the funniest part of that scene.
Yep. Even this site uses google-analytics. It's scary how much information is picked up from your surfing habits almost anywhere on the web.
I know there's little to no chance that my Yahoo accounts will know about my other accounts. I haven't updated any of my personal information (such as where I live) in either of them. One has a location from 3 moves ago, the other from 4 moves. There's little to no chance of the accounts syncing with each other, much less with anything I might have on a social networking site.
The key is that all of these social networking sites and email providers only have the information you give them. They can guess at a few things but really, they won't have the information if it's not provided to them in the first place.
The stealth coatings are old news. The original development of the F117 was started in the 70's and revealed in the 80's. Given the knowledge that the coatings exist for the last 30 years means any half-competent research team at a second rate college could have figured out several good radar absorbing coatings on their own by now. China should have had no problem figuring it out by now, even without stealing secrets from us.
The shapes they needed to use for the aircraft likewise are no great mystery. Again, given a picture of the F117 and 30 years, any research team could pretty much have come up with a decent shape for an aircraft, including helicopter rotors, on their own. Like you say, the materials aren't important at this stage.
Computers have been able to make unstable shapes fly well since the late 70's/early 80's. The F16 used 8 bit microprocessors to provide 100% fly by wire from the beginning. They've upgraded a couple of times as the computers wear out and they just can't get parts to replace them. But pretty much every new military plane since then has been computer controlled. At this point, most of the new civilian planes (at least passenger/cargo planes) are computer controlled as well. So at this point getting a weird shape to fly well isn't even an issue.
And that's why I say that leaving behind the tail rotor isn't as big a deal as some people think. And it's why I suggest they just left it, focusing instead on destroying other components. The huge secrets aren't in the physical design of the craft. It's probably not even in the flight controls. The big secrets are in the sensors, the weapons, the electronics, the countermeasures.
The fancy new gizmos that can do who-knows-what are the real secrets that need to be protected. Whatever it is that we put on our aircraft to make them more effective at what they do are more important secrets. And it's not the gizmos themselves. It's the fact that they exist and they make a difference that is the secret. If no one else knows that we have some capability, they don't know to start defending against it. If they don't know of a particular vulnerability, they don't know to start attacking it. That's the kind of secret stuff the SEALs probably destroyed before leaving. If they only see a pod hanging off the side of the plane, they have no way of knowing what it's for, if they even notice it there in the first place. If they were able to crack one open and get a look inside, they'd have a much better idea of what's going on. That why the SEALs destroy bits like those and leave the tail rotor alone.
I'm sure the SEALs destroyed the stuff that really matters. Stealth technology is not new. China has already started testing their own prototype of a stealth plane. Will the Chinese learn something from what was left behind? Maybe. Maybe not.
I suspect that if this technology was so uber-secret, we would have saturated the place with enough ordinance to blow it into dust. So either it's not so terribly secret (the SEALs destroying what needed to be destroyed) or there was a plan to leave it behind specifically to mislead. Either way, I'd suggest this is a tempest in a teacup.
Sure, a lot of people have no idea what the contract really means. Then again, so many of the unwashed masses have no idea if the internet connection is "fast" or not. They just want to plug in and play farmville and stream their brain dead reality shows. So long as they get a response from the server before their gnat like attention span runs out, they're content to keep tapping the button to get their rewards. And for most people, they can get that satisfaction from a connection far below advertised speeds.
I see your point. There should be some differentiation between a 5 and 1.5 mbps connection. And if there isn't, then you might have grounds for a suit.
However, one of the reasons ISPs put in the "up to" clause in their speed rating is that they are not in 100% control of your entire internet experience. They do supply the connection to your house and then on to "the internet". Once your connection goes out of their zone of influence, they have no control over it. Your traffic can be slowed through choke points completely out of the control of your ISP, not to mention trying to download from an overloaded server. (Slashdot effect anyone?) Even if the third party server is on their own network, it can still be overloaded. The connection to the server can be just fine but if the server is slow, there's nothing they can do about it. You can have a 1.5mbps connection or an eleventy gazillion mbps connection but if the server is only dishing out data at 56kbps, that's all you're going to get.
I'm not trying to defend ISPs but there has to be some reason applied to the standards to which they are held. I don't think expecting them to always meet their "up to" speeds all the time for everyone is a reasonable standard. Though meeting 80% of advertised speed for the network is probably not a terrible starting point for the standard. And that should include the ISP's upstream connection. If they have oversold their upstream connection and it is the source of the restriction, they should be held to task for removing that bottleneck. But the one gaping hole in the standard is that no ISP can guarantee that any one particular connection to any one particular server will result in the desired speed. They just can't provide that kind of guarantee because it's ultimately something they just don't have control over.
I have an "Up To 12 Mb" connection through my local cable company. I get exactly that. Somewhere between nothing and 12 Mb. I certainly never get more than that. But given that they advertise it as a "you might get as much as X bandwidth", I don't see how you can say they aren't giving me what they promised.
I'm pretty sure that there is not as much variation in the speed of processors coming out of a fab plant as there is in the size of eggs that hens lay.
Having worked for a major chip company, I can tell you that your assumption here is incorrect. There really is that much variation in chips coming off the assembly line. In fact, I'd wager that the variation in chips coming off the fab is more varied than the size of chicken eggs.
It's the side effect of pushing higher and higher density within the chip. Modern equipment could probably push out extremely consistent 90nm designs. But 90nm chips were out of date 5 years ago. In order to be competitive, you have to push the most density out of the equipment you have. And that means that you get significant variation in your product, even within one wafer. The companies build in flexibility to the chip to allow for this variation. There are "fuses" built in to each chip specifically to disable the broken parts of the chip. If the L3 cache on a processor is totally hosed, they will blow the fuses for it and completely turn it off. But since the rest of the chip is fine they can still sell it, albeit at a discount. Even the maximum speed can be fused into the chip. The testing procedures ramp up voltage and clock frequency until the chip starts failing. Then they step it down a notch or two and fuse it there.
AMD has never produced a 45nm dual or triple core design. I'm not sure they even made one in 65nm. The x2 and x3 processors are just x4 (or x6?) chips with one or more dead cores and maybe less cache, depending on the specific chip. Intel does the exact same thing with their core series processors. That's just the way processor companies do business. It's been that way for decades.