I'm not entirely sure that the "Sell Out" myth is really true. There's two easy ways to create a shortage of a product. One is to drastically underprice it. The other is to simply not make enough. But the ultimate goal here is to somehow wind up with more units in homes by not having enought than by making the proper amount. To do this, you'd have to make sure that those people who come into a store looking at the empty shelf space don't just walk over to another isle and buy something else, or put it off and wind up never buying your console. Not likely.
AFAIK, only microsoft is running for a 2005 release, given their block party MTV style this week. There was only one (okay, two but it was the sequal) stand out game to people who don't own an xbox. If MS doesn't drop out the third by Christmas for the 360, they'll be largely irrelevant. Perfect Dark wasn't a Goldeneye level seller on the n64, so even if they turn that wireframe demo into something polished, there can't be much expectation there.
The real challenge here is Sony. They gave Nintendo a run for their money the first time around and made some smart investments in pivotal software companies. The PS2 was built around some novel features (DVD players) and a strong set of franchise sequal expectations. It's probably better for Nintendo to focus this Christmas on their current offerings; the DS really hasn't seen many top quality games. This Christmas, a lot of games will be ready to go, and use some of that wireless connectivity. Personally, I'm looking forward to Advance Wars on Cube and DS.
SIGGRAPH has become a success for a damned good reason; it's a lot easier to understand and evaluate a two hour lecture than a paper. The paper still provides an important role in providing the mundane details, but all too often I find papers that are nearly wholly derivative and overstate their usefulness. From time to time, I find some interesting papers about stuff like recolouring a picture or video, but I don't go looking for it. The good ones come to me.
You know, I don't think I'd categorize them that way. I'd say instead that there's different groups of gamers, but it isn't about which console you buy. It's not like HALO is something that I can just pick up and understand; it represents another step forward in the 3rd person shooter design. And similarly, a lot of obscure titles are published on the PS2 (Rez, for example).
Instead, I'd say there's the mainstream game players, who populate Yahoo! games and enjoy a Mindsweeper or Hearts distraction from time. To these people games are a passtime during work or maybe a really boring business meeting. These games are successful because they're very already familiar to the player, not because they represent a new game to learn and conquer.
The next "level" of gaming really contains your entire thesis; console gamers. These games contain possibly the largest amount of diversity of the three. There's an amount of investment here in "game playing potential," as I call it. You spend 50 or 300 dollars to gain access to all these games. There is a history behind these sorts of games, but that doesn't stop studios from investigating and preparing
3D PC games are the top tier levels, and what Warren Specter is labelling as headed towards Hollywoodification. This is also the most expensive buy in, with a fairly strict upgrade cycle and an expensive one. You have to really want to play games to pick this stuff up, and have some time to spare. This group of games is slowly consolidating and congealing as developers realize that the X-Box is providing a far larger reward.
Recently, Microsoft's X-Box woke a lot of PC developers out there to console development. Microsoft has had a lot of success wooing American developers to the X-Box, perhaps realizing that most development teams don't have the skills to negotiate rights to make Playstation games. This has drained some of the PC innovators like Spector towards the XBox, because it represents a far larger market.
The PC market isn't dead, but it is heavily stagnant. In a way, it represents a R&D for applying new technology to games. Networking PC multiplayer has been a longstanding tradition and has gone through several iterations of design. HALO perhaps represents a cross polination between some of those ideas. What's needed is for developers to get out of the arms race of 3rd person shooters and explore some of the new PC technologies.
Really, it's a question of whether new technology is making artists more efficient, and if that tech is improving things fast enough. The answer appears to be negative, and the implication is either outsourcing significant parts of the game or smaller games.
Liscences require the state to recognize them as legally binding. Not everywhere has click through agreements, or even Uniform Commercial Codes to allow users to return software "because they don't agree to the liscence."
The most effective way for microsoft to stop markets from mingling is to control the language settings tightly. When you realize that people who prefer an english language setting have a hell of a lot more earning power on average than those who only read hindu or whatever it is (sanskrit?), you can segregate the market that way. It does become a logistical nightmare, unsolvable without computers though. I heard from an inside source, though, that microsoft has some experience with those things.
WRT 1) I've noticed a similar thing. It doesn't always happen but sometimes auto scrolling will nail the CPU, close to 100 percent in my case. I've got a 3000+ athlon64 running linux, and it totally trashes the CPU downclocking. My guess is that something is polling rather than setting up a timer or anything.
I've also noticed on mac firefox that/. doesn't render italic text from article nubbins properly either, but that's something I'm willing to chalk up to mac oddness. No computer lab should be running 10.2.8, given that 10.4 is now available.
When I did my shopping, I didn't see any nForce boards with integrated video. Kinda doesn't make sense for nvidia to cut into its own market like that, and sort of a waste for consumers.
More like, there's a natural pyramid of energy in nature. Plants originate most all the energy available in an ecosystem, so they define the maximum amount out there. Consuming and converting plants to energy takes some effort, so its not 100 percent efficient. The same goes for animal meat, so each predatory level has less resources to prey on. It isn't that comsumption of meat is less efficient than plants, there's just less of it to go around as you go upwards.
I do recall being told in my biology class that one of the consequences of this is that pesticides kill bald eagles. Like you said, a top predator ends up eating a lot of plant; I guess the pesticide isn't able to leave the body appropriate and winds up concentrating upwards, making it far more dangerous to eagles than field mice.
Humans, incidentally, have been natural herbivores for hundreds of thousands of years
Ah yes, you bring to mind the ancient cave paintings of carrots, apples and bottled water. Your statement is further backed up by general recommendations that modern strict vegetarians take vitamin supplments to alleviate the deficiencies in Vitamins B12 and D.
I'm a Kansan, and graduate of a Kansan public school. I was a student when the first time this "Debate" flourished. The problem is that most people see the Board of Education as a political springboard into a more mainstream political body,such as Congress. There's no other reasons to hold a "hearing" when the members holding the hearing have all already made up their minds. What they typically don't realize is that making this into a national spectacle rouses the typical non-voters out of their complacency, who aren't quite that conservative. Notice, the average Kansan isn't very supportive of such things, but the average Kansan doesn't vote either.
The thing is, there is no controversy over evolution within biological sciences. Creationism (and that's what intelligent design is) was an okay starting point for scientific theories, but LeMarckian evolution has a far better scientific standing. Creationism doesn't publish in journals. It doesn't seek to examine how that intelligent designer worked. It simply exists to refute the evolutionary theory which generates so much ire in literal interpretations of the Bible.
The evidence for and against evolution are complex, and I pity the high schooler who may soon be forced to wade through it all. High school science is really just supposed to be a good approximation of the scientific theory. You don't solve waveform equations in chemistry, and the few students that choose to take physics rarely go through the calculatory rigor of special relativity. Even in college, it was mentioned that the formulas we were using for equalibrium calculations weren't exactly correct, that instead of concentration we should be using "activity" or something like that. I'm sure a slashdotter chemist can correct me on what I was told. Point is, Conservation of Mass is slightly flawed, but we don't go round telling our students that wine can transform into blood.
I welcome the next board of education elections, and I suspect that most of our citizens do as well.
Just thought I should mention that the WiFiMe does indeed require more hardware than just a DS and gba cart. You also need a wifi card that has a specific chipset. And it's not the popular atheros one. There's little hope of that particular project ever supporting another card, as the wifime replaces the driver with a different one to communicate with the DS.
I'm pretty sure the tsunami caused the destruction of natural resources (beaches) without deriving any economic benefit from it. I'm quite impressed by the argument going on here, even if it is just two guys hitting their heads against the walls.
What I sense is an engineer or physisict rationalizing about what is ultimately a human science. The first thing to realize is that by zero sum, I mean that by getting richer and more populus, China isn't hurting us through commodity consumption more than we're gaining in an upwardly mobile consumer market. Second, economic gain pretty much means money (or maybe "purchasing power"). You can question whether that's an appropriate measure, but you'd be venturing dangerously close to the useless pursuit of philosophy.
Your statement about economic benefit being at opposite ends with natural resources is misleading. Most people would agree that sunlight is a reasonably constant and infinite resource. Sure, in a few kajillion years, it will be a dying red sun or whatever, but for a fairly acceptable era, the sun will come out tomorrow. Agriculture is reliant upon sunlight, and nutrients in the soil. If natural resources are finite as you imagine, then some day we'll simply run out of food. Maybe once a critical amount of mass is dedicated to humans, but it's doubtful that this will happen anytime soon, and we'll probably be capable of mining asteroids asteriods by then. But is eating food a destruction of natural resources? Not really. It's just a very complex method of moving energy from sunlight to ATP in our cells. There's plenty of waste product for nature to reclaim in the process. Just like you aren't really "wasting" water by building a golf course in Phoenix. You're really wasting the purification process.
Anyways, China has been growing rapidly lately (10 percent in 2004), which is why its becoming a focus in the news outlets. But that growth should wind up causing more domestic demand and raising prices. What we're seeing is a government regulation of the yuan to keep manufacturing attractive compared to the costs of say, East Timor. This policy is hurting the chinese, whose money is worth less than it should be, and the US, who can't compete with such cheap manufactured goods. The only benefactor of the policy is the Federal Reserve, who's bonds are being bought up ad nausem to keep the dollar from becoming cheaper.
Generally, the economic argument is that as the supply dwindles, new technology will reduce consumption, promote substitutes and improve extraction. This means we'll need less per unit, get more out of the ground than we currently estimate and reduce dependence on a particular good. It's not like alternatives don't exists; they just can't compete on price. It's not a bad theory, overall. It's just that they neglect to tell you that this will likely happen in lumps rather than a smooth transition. Like the Oil Embargo, which crushed American manufacturers, who were slow to respond to the drastic pricing increase (adjusted for inflation, the price of gas was close to 4.50 at the worst of it).
Certainly, there are some strange theories out there. The discussions this spawned are very relevant to your argument, and I think you should consider it carefully. And just to spoil thing for ya, the economist won handily. Even without adjusting for inflation, the price of raw commodities fell.
When (if) China becomes a economic supercenter, it won't be at the direct expense of the American lifestyle. Economics isn't a zero sum game, after all.
Your video card doesn't help much in pushing photoshop effects. The reason is that the 3d cards are dedicated to performing matrix multiplcation and fast texture lookups. Photoshop involves a lot more complex calculations that typically can't be performed with simple vector math. Its possible that a 3rd party filter or plugin might use 3d accelleration, but I've never seen a guide to Photoshop performance that discussed the video card at all.
Basically, this card is worthless until developers make a game that actually needs a half gigabyte to generate less than 15 frames. Above that, even AGP is fast enough that it can deliver RAM appropriately. Realistically though, developers aren't good at utilizing the whole pipe, especially given that they have to work with as many cards as possible, so that might be closer to 20 or 30 frames, a whole half a second at a decent framerate.
I think that Super Mario Brothers represents the perfect example of this, and that it suggests where within that range you should aim for. SMB consists of levels that should be beatable within five minutes, tops. The game save is what places Super Mario World at the top of its peers. The original ties your investment in time to the immediate future. Beat level 6-4 and you'll have to play 7-1 immediately, or leave and start back at the very beginning. SMW lets you digest the game in chewable chunks, five minutes at a time. Board? Play as many levels as you like, they're all fun. In this case, the long term fun relies on a series of short instances of fun.
In contrast, most RPGs are pretty damn boring when broken down like this. Minor battles suck, because the strategy behind them is brain dead, but you can't avoid every monster or the boss will kick your ass. The cutscenes vary from boring and excessive to a welcome respite from actually playing the game. Boss battles can be fun, though they do reinforce the notion that all conflict can be resolved by beating people with sticks until they either die or conceed the point. The plot itself is usually cliched and poorly written, by any standard other than The Video Game Standard. The modern RPG represents an Exercise in Tedium offset by a Reward of Mediocrity.
Some day I'll just have to get off my ass and show them how its done...
Personally, I thank God they just didn't come up with some sort of addictive five minute version of Zelda. The national GDP would probably have fallen. If nintendo had spent the past five years perfecting such a beast, I would've been found dead of starvation or something a week after purchase, controller still in hand.
Fortunately, Nintendo has found it thus far difficult to automate the construction of new and innovative puzzles. Four Swords represents a step in that direction, but they had the foresight to cripple its success by requiring a gameboy cable and gba. I suspect their half hearted approach stems from cutting off their own future game sales, and the immense difficulty in preparing a "Strategy Guide" for a quality random dungeon generator. In fact, I'm pretty sure the two ideas are in direct opposition of one another.
Seriously, if someone combines nethack and a good zelda style we're probably all doomed.
I'd just have to mention that I've seen people on Yahoo who have played like thousands of games of Spades. Even if they were the best players ever they'd still be clocking more than five minutes a game.
How does a "mostly usable system that automated systems can feed into testing" help development? I recall some time ago that Debian held unstable hostage until a new stable was released, because developers were simply ignoring RC bugs. Unstable should not be considered a mostly stable system.
Really radical stuff should be tested before its even uploaded to experimental. Seriously, I think developers should be running testing. Every developer running unstable should be considered a vote to drop support for a stable branch. Experimental is a hack that recognizes a severe schism within Debian that has yet to be resolved.
Cars might be simpler than modern computers, but they're also very low fault tolerant. The state of car technology today is about equivlant to the general purpose computing of 1988; it exists, but networking is expensive and nonstandard. CAN is the defacto standard for transmitting data to the distributed sensors and processors in a car, but even CAN is under strong scrutiny for not being good enough in the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is a lot of what drives automotive engineering improvements. Unless you feel like totally wrecking a prototype, test driving will NOT provide code coverage to the programs. The basic code is simple, but the bulk of the code is dedicated to errant conditions and failsafe modes.
And yes, I've had console games lock up on me. Metroid Prime did so once, and Turok 2 loved to do so. I think Baten Kaitos locked up on me once, and I just got it for Christmas. But the two domains are totally different. A console is basically a single processor, non-networked device under soft-real time constraints. That is, when a game fails to render a frame in time, no big deal head on to the next one and hope for the best. In a fully electronically controlled car, you miss processing the input on time, it could be a stalled engine, it could be a delay in applying the brakes (which is why a lot of stuff still relies on mechanical systems). If you've got a lot of traffic going over the CAN, then you have to worry about accidentally starving a sensor of communication time. Hell, you could have very little usage and still screw over a real time constraint.
The bigger question is, how does microsoft plan to approach this? Their stock kernels (NT, CE) are generally reguarded as not up to the task of driving critical components. When they made the X-Box, MS again fell for its own marketing before it realized that developers didn't want 90 percent of the kernel they were offering. MS already has inroads in the dashboard, but basically the dashboard isn't a concern to safety engineers. If your CD player doesn't work or resets BFD. Your gear shifter refusing to downshift, on the other hand, has dangerous consequences. They could theoretically write yet another OS, but it seems like such a waste. They'd be better off spending some of that billion a month income and buying Wind River (market cap: 1 billion). Actually, I'm not very enthusiastic about Wind River right now; they're trading at 145 price to earnings. That's rididuclusly high. So maybe they should pick up QNX. Point is, it will take ten years minimum for them to get a new OS to the point where the auto industry might accecpt it.
I don't think that camping is part of the Scout Law either, but the merit badge does exist. And I fail to see how stamp collecting keeps one morally straight, mentally awake or physically fit.
The trick is to build up a queue, so that you've got something in the wait. My old roommate made out ok treating amazon like a library. Buy a book, sell it back, maybe even make a profit. He usually had two or three books just sitting on his desk and by his bed, so there was no immediate need to get his books ASAP. If you really want something ASAP, brick and morter stores specialize in having stuff on shelves in physical places.
Another interesting and good trick of his was to simply shop six months or more behind the times. Buy games on eBay or whatnot that are more than six months old, and sell them on amazon (apparently stuff sells for more on amazon). Your discount off of retail is gigantic; for example, Deus Ex 2 sold for 50 bucks new at retail, and ebstore right NOW sells it for 5. It was released over a year ago, but its not signficantly less fun today than now.
I'm pretty sure a MAP constitutes a fair and free trade rule of law. In fact, I seem to recall a price fixing lawsuit wherein the record industry was setting an advertised price floor, which was enforced by tying the rule to an advertising fee which offsets the retailer costs of printing circulars. In the end, the industry settled, promised not to do so again, and admitted no wrongdoing. In other words, the DA got a win, some buerocrat gets a job distributing the wealth to libraries (and subsequently get in trouble for refusing to distribute copkiller albums), the record company has to find a new way to accomplish the same goal, while the average consumer gets MAYBE a five dollar coupon off their next purchase.
A Minimum Advertised Price is stupid, anticompetitive and hurts both the retailers selling products and the consumers buying them.
You're assuming that the actions of Adam and Eve are not somehow random, but rather a fixed and determinate function of time. We generally believe that humans are unpredictable, and fiendishly clever.
Besides, if God is omniscient, then by definition he knows what we're thinking, and the outcome of any situation. So he put the tree there KNOWING that they'd take the bait, and that the snake would talk em into it. But yea, I don't think anybody wants to mix transfinite mathematics with creation stories; its like mixing salmon and ice cream.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not entirely sure that the "Sell Out" myth is really true. There's two easy ways to create a shortage of a product. One is to drastically underprice it. The other is to simply not make enough. But the ultimate goal here is to somehow wind up with more units in homes by not having enought than by making the proper amount. To do this, you'd have to make sure that those people who come into a store looking at the empty shelf space don't just walk over to another isle and buy something else, or put it off and wind up never buying your console. Not likely.
AFAIK, only microsoft is running for a 2005 release, given their block party MTV style this week. There was only one (okay, two but it was the sequal) stand out game to people who don't own an xbox. If MS doesn't drop out the third by Christmas for the 360, they'll be largely irrelevant. Perfect Dark wasn't a Goldeneye level seller on the n64, so even if they turn that wireframe demo into something polished, there can't be much expectation there.
The real challenge here is Sony. They gave Nintendo a run for their money the first time around and made some smart investments in pivotal software companies. The PS2 was built around some novel features (DVD players) and a strong set of franchise sequal expectations. It's probably better for Nintendo to focus this Christmas on their current offerings; the DS really hasn't seen many top quality games. This Christmas, a lot of games will be ready to go, and use some of that wireless connectivity. Personally, I'm looking forward to Advance Wars on Cube and DS.
SIGGRAPH has become a success for a damned good reason; it's a lot easier to understand and evaluate a two hour lecture than a paper. The paper still provides an important role in providing the mundane details, but all too often I find papers that are nearly wholly derivative and overstate their usefulness. From time to time, I find some interesting papers about stuff like recolouring a picture or video, but I don't go looking for it. The good ones come to me.
You know, I don't think I'd categorize them that way. I'd say instead that there's different groups of gamers, but it isn't about which console you buy. It's not like HALO is something that I can just pick up and understand; it represents another step forward in the 3rd person shooter design. And similarly, a lot of obscure titles are published on the PS2 (Rez, for example).
Instead, I'd say there's the mainstream game players, who populate Yahoo! games and enjoy a Mindsweeper or Hearts distraction from time. To these people games are a passtime during work or maybe a really boring business meeting. These games are successful because they're very already familiar to the player, not because they represent a new game to learn and conquer.
The next "level" of gaming really contains your entire thesis; console gamers. These games contain possibly the largest amount of diversity of the three. There's an amount of investment here in "game playing potential," as I call it. You spend 50 or 300 dollars to gain access to all these games. There is a history behind these sorts of games, but that doesn't stop studios from investigating and preparing
3D PC games are the top tier levels, and what Warren Specter is labelling as headed towards Hollywoodification. This is also the most expensive buy in, with a fairly strict upgrade cycle and an expensive one. You have to really want to play games to pick this stuff up, and have some time to spare. This group of games is slowly consolidating and congealing as developers realize that the X-Box is providing a far larger reward.
Recently, Microsoft's X-Box woke a lot of PC developers out there to console development. Microsoft has had a lot of success wooing American developers to the X-Box, perhaps realizing that most development teams don't have the skills to negotiate rights to make Playstation games. This has drained some of the PC innovators like Spector towards the XBox, because it represents a far larger market.
The PC market isn't dead, but it is heavily stagnant. In a way, it represents a R&D for applying new technology to games. Networking PC multiplayer has been a longstanding tradition and has gone through several iterations of design. HALO perhaps represents a cross polination between some of those ideas. What's needed is for developers to get out of the arms race of 3rd person shooters and explore some of the new PC technologies.
Really, it's a question of whether new technology is making artists more efficient, and if that tech is improving things fast enough. The answer appears to be negative, and the implication is either outsourcing significant parts of the game or smaller games.
Liscences require the state to recognize them as legally binding. Not everywhere has click through agreements, or even Uniform Commercial Codes to allow users to return software "because they don't agree to the liscence."
The most effective way for microsoft to stop markets from mingling is to control the language settings tightly. When you realize that people who prefer an english language setting have a hell of a lot more earning power on average than those who only read hindu or whatever it is (sanskrit?), you can segregate the market that way. It does become a logistical nightmare, unsolvable without computers though. I heard from an inside source, though, that microsoft has some experience with those things.
WRT 1) I've noticed a similar thing. It doesn't always happen but sometimes auto scrolling will nail the CPU, close to 100 percent in my case. I've got a 3000+ athlon64 running linux, and it totally trashes the CPU downclocking. My guess is that something is polling rather than setting up a timer or anything.
/. doesn't render italic text from article nubbins properly either, but that's something I'm willing to chalk up to mac oddness. No computer lab should be running 10.2.8, given that 10.4 is now available.
I've also noticed on mac firefox that
Use a real router, you cheap bastard.
When I did my shopping, I didn't see any nForce boards with integrated video. Kinda doesn't make sense for nvidia to cut into its own market like that, and sort of a waste for consumers.
More like, there's a natural pyramid of energy in nature. Plants originate most all the energy available in an ecosystem, so they define the maximum amount out there. Consuming and converting plants to energy takes some effort, so its not 100 percent efficient. The same goes for animal meat, so each predatory level has less resources to prey on. It isn't that comsumption of meat is less efficient than plants, there's just less of it to go around as you go upwards.
I do recall being told in my biology class that one of the consequences of this is that pesticides kill bald eagles. Like you said, a top predator ends up eating a lot of plant; I guess the pesticide isn't able to leave the body appropriate and winds up concentrating upwards, making it far more dangerous to eagles than field mice.
Humans, incidentally, have been natural herbivores for hundreds of thousands of years
Ah yes, you bring to mind the ancient cave paintings of carrots, apples and bottled water. Your statement is further backed up by general recommendations that modern strict vegetarians take vitamin supplments to alleviate the deficiencies in Vitamins B12 and D.
I'm a Kansan, and graduate of a Kansan public school. I was a student when the first time this "Debate" flourished. The problem is that most people see the Board of Education as a political springboard into a more mainstream political body,such as Congress. There's no other reasons to hold a "hearing" when the members holding the hearing have all already made up their minds. What they typically don't realize is that making this into a national spectacle rouses the typical non-voters out of their complacency, who aren't quite that conservative. Notice, the average Kansan isn't very supportive of such things, but the average Kansan doesn't vote either.
The thing is, there is no controversy over evolution within biological sciences. Creationism (and that's what intelligent design is) was an okay starting point for scientific theories, but LeMarckian evolution has a far better scientific standing. Creationism doesn't publish in journals. It doesn't seek to examine how that intelligent designer worked. It simply exists to refute the evolutionary theory which generates so much ire in literal interpretations of the Bible.
The evidence for and against evolution are complex, and I pity the high schooler who may soon be forced to wade through it all. High school science is really just supposed to be a good approximation of the scientific theory. You don't solve waveform equations in chemistry, and the few students that choose to take physics rarely go through the calculatory rigor of special relativity. Even in college, it was mentioned that the formulas we were using for equalibrium calculations weren't exactly correct, that instead of concentration we should be using "activity" or something like that. I'm sure a slashdotter chemist can correct me on what I was told. Point is, Conservation of Mass is slightly flawed, but we don't go round telling our students that wine can transform into blood.
I welcome the next board of education elections, and I suspect that most of our citizens do as well.
Just thought I should mention that the WiFiMe does indeed require more hardware than just a DS and gba cart. You also need a wifi card that has a specific chipset. And it's not the popular atheros one. There's little hope of that particular project ever supporting another card, as the wifime replaces the driver with a different one to communicate with the DS.
I'm pretty sure the tsunami caused the destruction of natural resources (beaches) without deriving any economic benefit from it. I'm quite impressed by the argument going on here, even if it is just two guys hitting their heads against the walls.
What I sense is an engineer or physisict rationalizing about what is ultimately a human science. The first thing to realize is that by zero sum, I mean that by getting richer and more populus, China isn't hurting us through commodity consumption more than we're gaining in an upwardly mobile consumer market. Second, economic gain pretty much means money (or maybe "purchasing power"). You can question whether that's an appropriate measure, but you'd be venturing dangerously close to the useless pursuit of philosophy.
Your statement about economic benefit being at opposite ends with natural resources is misleading. Most people would agree that sunlight is a reasonably constant and infinite resource. Sure, in a few kajillion years, it will be a dying red sun or whatever, but for a fairly acceptable era, the sun will come out tomorrow. Agriculture is reliant upon sunlight, and nutrients in the soil. If natural resources are finite as you imagine, then some day we'll simply run out of food. Maybe once a critical amount of mass is dedicated to humans, but it's doubtful that this will happen anytime soon, and we'll probably be capable of mining asteroids asteriods by then. But is eating food a destruction of natural resources? Not really. It's just a very complex method of moving energy from sunlight to ATP in our cells. There's plenty of waste product for nature to reclaim in the process. Just like you aren't really "wasting" water by building a golf course in Phoenix. You're really wasting the purification process.
Anyways, China has been growing rapidly lately (10 percent in 2004), which is why its becoming a focus in the news outlets. But that growth should wind up causing more domestic demand and raising prices. What we're seeing is a government regulation of the yuan to keep manufacturing attractive compared to the costs of say, East Timor. This policy is hurting the chinese, whose money is worth less than it should be, and the US, who can't compete with such cheap manufactured goods. The only benefactor of the policy is the Federal Reserve, who's bonds are being bought up ad nausem to keep the dollar from becoming cheaper.
Generally, the economic argument is that as the supply dwindles, new technology will reduce consumption, promote substitutes and improve extraction. This means we'll need less per unit, get more out of the ground than we currently estimate and reduce dependence on a particular good. It's not like alternatives don't exists; they just can't compete on price. It's not a bad theory, overall. It's just that they neglect to tell you that this will likely happen in lumps rather than a smooth transition. Like the Oil Embargo, which crushed American manufacturers, who were slow to respond to the drastic pricing increase (adjusted for inflation, the price of gas was close to 4.50 at the worst of it).
Certainly, there are some strange theories out there. The discussions this spawned are very relevant to your argument, and I think you should consider it carefully. And just to spoil thing for ya, the economist won handily. Even without adjusting for inflation, the price of raw commodities fell.
When (if) China becomes a economic supercenter, it won't be at the direct expense of the American lifestyle. Economics isn't a zero sum game, after all.
Your video card doesn't help much in pushing photoshop effects. The reason is that the 3d cards are dedicated to performing matrix multiplcation and fast texture lookups. Photoshop involves a lot more complex calculations that typically can't be performed with simple vector math. Its possible that a 3rd party filter or plugin might use 3d accelleration, but I've never seen a guide to Photoshop performance that discussed the video card at all.
Basically, this card is worthless until developers make a game that actually needs a half gigabyte to generate less than 15 frames. Above that, even AGP is fast enough that it can deliver RAM appropriately. Realistically though, developers aren't good at utilizing the whole pipe, especially given that they have to work with as many cards as possible, so that might be closer to 20 or 30 frames, a whole half a second at a decent framerate.
I think that Super Mario Brothers represents the perfect example of this, and that it suggests where within that range you should aim for. SMB consists of levels that should be beatable within five minutes, tops. The game save is what places Super Mario World at the top of its peers. The original ties your investment in time to the immediate future. Beat level 6-4 and you'll have to play 7-1 immediately, or leave and start back at the very beginning. SMW lets you digest the game in chewable chunks, five minutes at a time. Board? Play as many levels as you like, they're all fun. In this case, the long term fun relies on a series of short instances of fun.
In contrast, most RPGs are pretty damn boring when broken down like this. Minor battles suck, because the strategy behind them is brain dead, but you can't avoid every monster or the boss will kick your ass. The cutscenes vary from boring and excessive to a welcome respite from actually playing the game. Boss battles can be fun, though they do reinforce the notion that all conflict can be resolved by beating people with sticks until they either die or conceed the point. The plot itself is usually cliched and poorly written, by any standard other than The Video Game Standard. The modern RPG represents an Exercise in Tedium offset by a Reward of Mediocrity.
Some day I'll just have to get off my ass and show them how its done...
Personally, I thank God they just didn't come up with some sort of addictive five minute version of Zelda. The national GDP would probably have fallen. If nintendo had spent the past five years perfecting such a beast, I would've been found dead of starvation or something a week after purchase, controller still in hand.
Fortunately, Nintendo has found it thus far difficult to automate the construction of new and innovative puzzles. Four Swords represents a step in that direction, but they had the foresight to cripple its success by requiring a gameboy cable and gba. I suspect their half hearted approach stems from cutting off their own future game sales, and the immense difficulty in preparing a "Strategy Guide" for a quality random dungeon generator. In fact, I'm pretty sure the two ideas are in direct opposition of one another.
Seriously, if someone combines nethack and a good zelda style we're probably all doomed.
Few people look back at 40 hours of DDR (or Counter-Strike, Warcraft, etc.) with the kind of emotional attachment that a good RPG can bring.
Ah, so good games are the kind that generate action figures! No wonder my Pac-Man figures didn't fly off the shelves...
I'd just have to mention that I've seen people on Yahoo who have played like thousands of games of Spades. Even if they were the best players ever they'd still be clocking more than five minutes a game.
How does a "mostly usable system that automated systems can feed into testing" help development? I recall some time ago that Debian held unstable hostage until a new stable was released, because developers were simply ignoring RC bugs. Unstable should not be considered a mostly stable system.
Really radical stuff should be tested before its even uploaded to experimental. Seriously, I think developers should be running testing. Every developer running unstable should be considered a vote to drop support for a stable branch. Experimental is a hack that recognizes a severe schism within Debian that has yet to be resolved.
Cars might be simpler than modern computers, but they're also very low fault tolerant. The state of car technology today is about equivlant to the general purpose computing of 1988; it exists, but networking is expensive and nonstandard. CAN is the defacto standard for transmitting data to the distributed sensors and processors in a car, but even CAN is under strong scrutiny for not being good enough in the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is a lot of what drives automotive engineering improvements. Unless you feel like totally wrecking a prototype, test driving will NOT provide code coverage to the programs. The basic code is simple, but the bulk of the code is dedicated to errant conditions and failsafe modes.
And yes, I've had console games lock up on me. Metroid Prime did so once, and Turok 2 loved to do so. I think Baten Kaitos locked up on me once, and I just got it for Christmas. But the two domains are totally different. A console is basically a single processor, non-networked device under soft-real time constraints. That is, when a game fails to render a frame in time, no big deal head on to the next one and hope for the best. In a fully electronically controlled car, you miss processing the input on time, it could be a stalled engine, it could be a delay in applying the brakes (which is why a lot of stuff still relies on mechanical systems). If you've got a lot of traffic going over the CAN, then you have to worry about accidentally starving a sensor of communication time. Hell, you could have very little usage and still screw over a real time constraint.
The bigger question is, how does microsoft plan to approach this? Their stock kernels (NT, CE) are generally reguarded as not up to the task of driving critical components. When they made the X-Box, MS again fell for its own marketing before it realized that developers didn't want 90 percent of the kernel they were offering. MS already has inroads in the dashboard, but basically the dashboard isn't a concern to safety engineers. If your CD player doesn't work or resets BFD. Your gear shifter refusing to downshift, on the other hand, has dangerous consequences. They could theoretically write yet another OS, but it seems like such a waste. They'd be better off spending some of that billion a month income and buying Wind River (market cap: 1 billion). Actually, I'm not very enthusiastic about Wind River right now; they're trading at 145 price to earnings. That's rididuclusly high. So maybe they should pick up QNX. Point is, it will take ten years minimum for them to get a new OS to the point where the auto industry might accecpt it.
I don't think that camping is part of the Scout Law either, but the merit badge does exist. And I fail to see how stamp collecting keeps one morally straight, mentally awake or physically fit.
The trick is to build up a queue, so that you've got something in the wait. My old roommate made out ok treating amazon like a library. Buy a book, sell it back, maybe even make a profit. He usually had two or three books just sitting on his desk and by his bed, so there was no immediate need to get his books ASAP. If you really want something ASAP, brick and morter stores specialize in having stuff on shelves in physical places.
Another interesting and good trick of his was to simply shop six months or more behind the times. Buy games on eBay or whatnot that are more than six months old, and sell them on amazon (apparently stuff sells for more on amazon). Your discount off of retail is gigantic; for example, Deus Ex 2 sold for 50 bucks new at retail, and ebstore right NOW sells it for 5. It was released over a year ago, but its not signficantly less fun today than now.
I'm pretty sure a MAP constitutes a fair and free trade rule of law. In fact, I seem to recall a price fixing lawsuit wherein the record industry was setting an advertised price floor, which was enforced by tying the rule to an advertising fee which offsets the retailer costs of printing circulars. In the end, the industry settled, promised not to do so again, and admitted no wrongdoing. In other words, the DA got a win, some buerocrat gets a job distributing the wealth to libraries (and subsequently get in trouble for refusing to distribute copkiller albums), the record company has to find a new way to accomplish the same goal, while the average consumer gets MAYBE a five dollar coupon off their next purchase.
A Minimum Advertised Price is stupid, anticompetitive and hurts both the retailers selling products and the consumers buying them.
You're assuming that the actions of Adam and Eve are not somehow random, but rather a fixed and determinate function of time. We generally believe that humans are unpredictable, and fiendishly clever.
Besides, if God is omniscient, then by definition he knows what we're thinking, and the outcome of any situation. So he put the tree there KNOWING that they'd take the bait, and that the snake would talk em into it. But yea, I don't think anybody wants to mix transfinite mathematics with creation stories; its like mixing salmon and ice cream.