potential reprocutions are huge...likely, murder would skyrocket at first. People would figure it out though.
"An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind."
History teaches us *repeatedly* that this doesn't work. It's the natural first idea that any civilization has when starting their society (including the US). People don't figure it out. At least, not the way you seem to think. What they end up doing is establishing a justice system to heavily regulate the usage of violence.
Societies that keeping this for long stretches end up degenerating over the course of a generation into anarchy (i.e., everyone fights for basic food/shelter/family, and no one has much of any of them) before moving into tribalism/clans where the regulation of violence by government begins again.
Do take a stroll by any of your local industrial plants -- doesn't matter what it is. Steel, say. Or a gas liquification plant. Now figure out how you're going to get all of that into space. Once you're in space, orbit around the sun is easy because there's no friction. Energy expenditures for going long distances aren't much - only what it takes to start and stop. Getting into space, though....
Now figure out how you're going to shield it from radiation Big chunks of metal (Faraday's cages) , and feed the hundreds of employees. Lets not bring people into this. People can't survive very long without gravity. Industrial robots will be doing this. Telerobots, for sure. People will probably be doing administration of them using radio signals. And keep in mind all of that capacity is to produce something for a regional demand, not a global demand The things will have to be bigger than aircraft carriers. They will likely cost trillions of dollars and use enough metals to rival the total yearly consumption of metal right now. Probably large portions will have to be made of glass based solely on the fact that we can't get enough metal to cover everything. Its trips will probably take decades, and it'll bring back hundreds of tons of new material.
Even when you've got it, now figure out how you're going to get it back down to the ground. Big ceramic boxes+gravity. Presumably the materials to make new big metal boxes will be mined.
Seems like the only really, really hard problems are how to be able to escape the earth's gravity whenever we want...and the logistical problem of getting every nation on the planet working together to produce this thing. Are these two issues insurmountable?
Of course, what's important in an MP3 player is the quality of the D/A decoder, not all the fancy gizmos. Whether you get a good one or not seems to be more luck than anything else. Good Player!=Good D/A converter.
CDs sound good. Mp3s sound boomy, I only use them for background music. I am not impressed.
Boomy=>lots of low end.
This has nothing to do with quality. It's the difference between two different A/D decoders. Slap an EQ on the front of your MP3 player and check again.
The question is what's missing, not what's present (except for noise...lowest noise also wins).
Say goodbye to the clean, crisp sound, of your CDs, Billy, and say hello to vinyl. Vinyl are kind of like CDs, only bigger, and with poorer quality. You're going to get to love those pops and cracks in the middle of your favorite songs....
"Okay, I see...the emo kids don't like studio-quality sound."
If you are above the age of 13 and you think this passes for humor, you're maladjusted and need to figure out how to live in the grownup world.
If you have a booth and this happens to you and you and you can't laugh and compliment the prankster, then you're maladjusted and need to figure out how to live in a world full of people who used to be children and would like to work with people who can remind them of that.
"Acting your age," and "acting like a grownup" are sure signs of lack of maturity. If you're picky about the humor you enjoy, then you're not going to get along with as many people as someone who isn't. You, for instance, wouldn't get along with the Gizmodo guys. Instead you're going to blow up when they do something you find not funny.:)
I would have thought this would be obvious. Are you one of those people who finds humor sinful? If your company can't handle having itself be the butt of a joke, then it can't handle business with my company. On the other hand, if it can, then we can probably work around whatever other communications problems exist.
Humor is, IMHO, the single most important facility in interpersonal relations. Its what lets unlike people work together without fighting. Laugh it off, and the problem doesn't seem so difficult to overcome, or so personal.
To go further, I've never met a talented programmer who didn't write well. I have a theory.
Programming languages are languages. If you understand them, and you're not just shoving out snippets, then a programmer is a linguist. So a programmer is a person that spends a very considerable portion of their day thinking of how to say things to a very, very stupid entity that doesn't understand his native language (a computer). So he has to have fantastic clarity of thought in the language translation department - especially if he's regularly using more than one programming language.
The only notable exception to this is low-level programming - assembly and pure C. That contains so little actual structure in and of itself that it more closely resembles a math construct than a language. So I think you can get pretty good at the low level stuff without affecting your writing capabilities.
A synopsis of a very good Futurama episode: Fry and Leela reunite with Bender during the hunt in an abandoned robot porn shop, but he refuses their offer of rescue. Before Fry and Leela can leave, the other robots arrive and they are placed on trial for being human. After being sentenced to a life of tedious robot-type labor, they are dropped through a trap door, where they meet the five Robot Elders. The Robot Elders reveal that the trial was for entertainment, and command Bender to kill Fry and Leela, but he refuses. The Robot Elders reveal that humans are just being used as a scapegoat to distract the population from the actual problems, lug nut shortages and the incompetent corrupt government of Robot Elders, and that many of the supposed powers humans have that robots fear are in fact made up.
How do you know it's not the same thing in the Middle East? Find someone to hate so that the leaders can stay in power? If so, we can do little to change things except violence against said leaders. And even then, using violence to change the nature of a place is like paddling a canoe with a spoon. I don't know enough about this to be sure. Are you sure they hate the west solely because of our actions, and things will change if we do?
Standard compliance on an often used, though not dominant compiler tends to be a small deal because its coming late.
Fixed that for you. It's not the OS that's in question here. You don't even have to use the VC++ compiler in Visual Studio, much less is it the only choice for the OS.
Conservation of energy is a *VERY* well established scientific fact.
No. Conservation is a law - a postulate. Something that we're extremely certain that can't prove using other laws, but that has never, ever been wrong once. That is the fact. If we found something that violated this law, then it would no longer be considered a law. Personally, I don't consider overwhelming evidence that something has always happened a particular way within the observation of man proof that it always did or always will. Don't get me wrong: I'd never take a bet that a perpetual motion machine is going to work, but I'm not going to go around believing that reality is 100% certain to work the way that I think it does, either.
The system eventually reaches equilibrium, and the cycle stop
Apparently goes through about 10 cycles, according to Wikipedia.
Yeah! Only why stop there? You could make it output HDMI and be able to do DRM so that third world children would even have access to DRM protected content.
For that matter, make it so that it's got 6 channel surround sound for the third world children! And beer! And hookers!
In fact, forget the third world children!
Seriously, though...it's got a hand crank. If it's really going to be sold in places without electricity, there's *no way* TV will work. CRTs take far, far too much power.
Screw that! Lets just build ten mile wide/long automated tankards that go into space and collect chemical energy from the sun/solar winds/asteriods/???, and then bring it back to earth. When we get this working really well, the only waste will be heat - which we can actively concentrate and pump into space (with no net loss of mass for the process since we took on a lot from the tankards).
We can probably do a few dozen terajoules that way, and keep it up until the sun dies.
BugLabs has created an environment where you can jump immediately to building YOUR application after picking x, y, and z components. That's pretty neat - hot-plug, start up, stop, the general runtime has been completely written for you. All you need to do is write the application piece. Sounds like a pretty good description of the majority of the hobbyist market for Microchip PICs, Atmel, Lego Mindstorms, and even the OpenCores code repository. Anything you want to do you can get code to do for you, and you can just write your program.
They don't have anything crazy like "web services" though. They just use functions. You want to do something, call a function. No need to bring something as complicated as web into something so low level.
1. An ntpd not only syncs time, but adjusts the running speed of the kernel clock. Otherwise it would be nothing more than a ntpdate cronjob.
Which is precisely why I've ended up losing 10-20 seconds per minute in a VMWare ntp session. I think it's probably because realtime hardware clock isn't hardware or realtime, so the linear skew modeling of it doesn't work. NTP can sometimes make things worse, which may be a problem for the GP as it has been for me (before I replaced it with an ntpdate cronjob).
2. Under GNU/Linux, the local clock may be used to initialize the kernel clock, but those two run independently of each other until shutdown (or manual set). Only then the local clock is set to the kernel time, regardless of what the local clock was doing all the time.
It's not all software, though. It has to depend on some piece of underlying hardware to figure out fixed quanta of time - at worst, it has to use the system clock (the one that determines clock speed, not the one keeping track of the local time).
Assembly is necessary, to understand how a computer really works.
Microcode is necessary to understand how a computer sends its bits around, and a gate design class is necessary to understand how a basic computer functions. Assembly really only lets you know how a computer is operated at the lowest level of abstraction, not how it works.
How about hardware description languages? I'd through those ahead of functional ones if you're trying to get a breadth of knowledge. They're more different from everything else than functional languages are (if you're actually writing and running the code on hardware).
Then the student can realise that everythin after asm was a waste of time, and return to C.
Perhaps you should go play with microcode, read more about how transistors work and try a hardware description language. Then maybe you'd know how many layers of abstraction are really at work between you and the hardware (and that those layers are each consuming tons of resources of their own, but making it *much* faster to write code) and you wouldn't feel so bad about moving a few more rungs up the abstraction ladder for a lot of the time.
I don't know about that guy, but I went to high school in Florida, which is always ranked in the bottom ten states in academic performance. We covered bond shapes limited degree in our AP chem class junior year.
Perhaps you just weren't paying attention or didn't take the hardest classes you could?
There is no problem with paper and pen, and hand counting. It's fantastically expensive, and hard to back up.
It is completely verifiable, completely transparent, and with people watching the polling stations, ballot boxes, and counting, is actually quite hard to cheat the system.
There can only easily be one copy, so it isn't easily verifiable, transparent, or independently watchable. Only one group can be responsible for keeping track of the actual votes, and if they lose any, then they're gone. The difficulty in making copies adds a single point of failure.
actually quite hard to cheat the system. It's also very hard to do cheating en masse.
Be in charge of the "independent" agency responsible for doing all these (ridiculously expensive) hand counted polls by undercutting all of the competition on price. Do it for free, or pay for the privilege, even. Then be really good at not being caught taking bribes when you report the results, or at losing some of the ballots that you know are going to end up in favor of the guy you don't want to win.
It'd be a lot harder if the results coming out of each area were themselves a matter of public record. No losing them, then.
when it comes to voting machines the requirements should be that they are mathematically verifiable for correctness
And how will that keep the printer from malfunctioning, or the ram from spiking under a very specific, untestable state (include temperature and a particular set of bits that causes the CPU to malfunction?
Your solution sucks. The issues are not from mathematical failures, but from mechanical/electrical ones.
These machines should consist of a single MCU which is connected to pushbuttons and feeds to a dot-matrix printer and a EPROM (not EEPROM) via RS-485 or SPI (each of which is run by a single MCU that only does that).
Which pushbutton means which candidate is *printed* on a card and placed next to the buttons.
Cost to construct: $10 of hardware+outer casing (which is presumably hundreds of dollars). Chance of failure: extremely small.
Why this hasn't been done yet considering the amount of money poured into the process: because they like it to be the way that it is.
I should mention that the above procedure doesn't actually require an OS and can be easily represented by a finite state machine. In other words, this level of simplicity actually results in mathematically verifiable functionality automatically, while at the same time it actually solves the problem.
anything about TV that precludes it from having smart people watch it
Smart people can afford to (and will) either buy a Tivo, or set up a HTPC box and not watch commercials. Hence, TV stations are only interested in stupid people.
I can't help but feel that a lot has changed over that time to make that method of comparison completely irrelevant...
I can't help but feel that you've totally missed the point. The point is that the demand for Vista isn't as great as it was for XP. Obviously, there are lots of reasons for that which might not have a lot to do with the technical deficiencies of Vista, but I'm sure they don't help. Did you notice that the article actually pointed out the two things you mentioned as possible causes?
The cause part is speculation. The fact that Vista sales are weak compared to XP sales is not.
One thing they didn't mention is the size of the market, which is a lot bigger than it was when XP came out. You'd expect Vista to actually do better than XP if that was an important factor.
I've always wondered about that aspect of Zelda. Why'd they pick Rupees instead of some actually nonexistent currency? Did the designers really like (or hate) Indians or something?
If I ever make a game, the unit of money will be the "awesome." I don't think anybody is currently using that as their currency.
Recent best example was ASIO - and fact that only Windows does support it.
Interesting that you mention that one. The big deal about ASIO is that it's realtime - everything between the application and the card has predictable latency. While the necessity of doing it that way to get low latency is Windows-specific, having drivers with predictable latency isn't. Every OS should have something like that for realtime audio processing applications (such as audio recording).
That said, Linux builds such a system by combining realtime driver scheduling with the existing soundcard drivers, which is a way more awesome way to get that.
Not sure my post was modded troll; I'd really like to know the answer to this question. Blu-ray comes with a virtual machine to do DRM - with all that this entails. It has to have its own address space, interpreter, and microprocessor if it's going to fully support the blu-ray spec.
Does such a requirement ramp up the size or power requirements of these devices?
Could it be the embedded computer that's built-in to the devices in order to do DRM? That seems like it'd take quite a lot of work to get working on small devices.
At an American company, and the ideas spawned from an American University.
Nokia is European....but nearly everything they design is engineered from American-designed specs and algorithms.
Television was invented here.
Electronic reproduction of sound, moving pictures, and color photography all came from the US. The European invention was just making an electronic version. I'd say that's a rather obvious step by comparison.
The Compact disc was invented here. Digital recording was invented in Japan. Then a Dutch physicist had the idea to put it on optical media instead of a tape. Much earlier, (and without consultation of the other two), an American also developed compact discs, but he didn't sell the idea. I'd say the lion's share of that invention belongs to Japan.
The automobile, albeit slightly longer than your arbitrary 100 years. You got one! Germany certainly deserves the credit for this idea.
Digital computing.
This is definitely not clear cut. What's first? Newton's algebra? Zuse's Z2? Babbage's calculator? ENIAC? And that's just talking about the first computing - not even mentioning the huge amount of work that came after it that one might consider essential. There's too much credit to go around to attribute it to one place. Europe or the US, probably, but it's hard to be sure which.
This game isn't worth playing. There's very little that one region can really take full credit for. Besides, what good is it saying that a countryman made something? It's not like you did. The Wright brothers may have been American, but so what? It's not like that means I have anything to do with planes. Besides, we very seldom get a guy who comes up with something out of the blue that's not a very small increment of something that already exists. Almost always, if it hadn't been one smart guy from one country, it wouldn't have been someone from another, so what does it matter who did it?
Slashdot Mirror
potential reprocutions are huge...likely, murder would skyrocket at first. People would figure it out though.
"An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind."
History teaches us *repeatedly* that this doesn't work. It's the natural first idea that any civilization has when starting their society (including the US). People don't figure it out. At least, not the way you seem to think. What they end up doing is establishing a justice system to heavily regulate the usage of violence.
Societies that keeping this for long stretches end up degenerating over the course of a generation into anarchy (i.e., everyone fights for basic food/shelter/family, and no one has much of any of them) before moving into tribalism/clans where the regulation of violence by government begins again.
Do take a stroll by any of your local industrial plants -- doesn't matter what it is. Steel, say. Or a gas liquification plant. Now figure out how you're going to get all of that into space.
Once you're in space, orbit around the sun is easy because there's no friction. Energy expenditures for going long distances aren't much - only what it takes to start and stop. Getting into space, though....
Now figure out how you're going to shield it from radiation
Big chunks of metal (Faraday's cages)
, and feed the hundreds of employees.
Lets not bring people into this. People can't survive very long without gravity. Industrial robots will be doing this. Telerobots, for sure. People will probably be doing administration of them using radio signals.
And keep in mind all of that capacity is to produce something for a regional demand, not a global demand
The things will have to be bigger than aircraft carriers. They will likely cost trillions of dollars and use enough metals to rival the total yearly consumption of metal right now. Probably large portions will have to be made of glass based solely on the fact that we can't get enough metal to cover everything. Its trips will probably take decades, and it'll bring back hundreds of tons of new material.
Even when you've got it, now figure out how you're going to get it back down to the ground.
Big ceramic boxes+gravity. Presumably the materials to make new big metal boxes will be mined.
Seems like the only really, really hard problems are how to be able to escape the earth's gravity whenever we want...and the logistical problem of getting every nation on the planet working together to produce this thing. Are these two issues insurmountable?
and higher audio quality mp3 player.
Of course, what's important in an MP3 player is the quality of the D/A decoder, not all the fancy gizmos. Whether you get a good one or not seems to be more luck than anything else. Good Player!=Good D/A converter.
CDs sound good. Mp3s sound boomy, I only use them for background music. I am not impressed.
Boomy=>lots of low end.
This has nothing to do with quality. It's the difference between two different A/D decoders. Slap an EQ on the front of your MP3 player and check again.
The question is what's missing, not what's present (except for noise...lowest noise also wins).
I think this explains it pretty well:
Say goodbye to the clean, crisp sound, of your CDs, Billy, and say hello to vinyl. Vinyl are kind of like CDs, only bigger, and with poorer quality. You're going to get to love those pops and cracks in the middle of your favorite songs....
"Okay, I see...the emo kids don't like studio-quality sound."
That's right, Billy.
If you are above the age of 13 and you think this passes for humor, you're maladjusted and need to figure out how to live in the grownup world.
:)
If you have a booth and this happens to you and you and you can't laugh and compliment the prankster, then you're maladjusted and need to figure out how to live in a world full of people who used to be children and would like to work with people who can remind them of that.
"Acting your age," and "acting like a grownup" are sure signs of lack of maturity. If you're picky about the humor you enjoy, then you're not going to get along with as many people as someone who isn't. You, for instance, wouldn't get along with the Gizmodo guys. Instead you're going to blow up when they do something you find not funny.
ut I really would love to hear a justification of this device that does not amount to a fascist imposition of one person's will upon others.
This is not normally associated with fascism.
I would have thought this would be obvious. Are you one of those people who finds humor sinful? If your company can't handle having itself be the butt of a joke, then it can't handle business with my company. On the other hand, if it can, then we can probably work around whatever other communications problems exist.
Humor is, IMHO, the single most important facility in interpersonal relations.
Its what lets unlike people work together without fighting. Laugh it off, and the problem doesn't seem so difficult to overcome, or so personal.
To go further, I've never met a talented programmer who didn't write well. I have a theory.
Programming languages are languages. If you understand them, and you're not just shoving out snippets, then a programmer is a linguist.
So a programmer is a person that spends a very considerable portion of their day thinking of how to say things to a very, very stupid entity that doesn't understand his native language (a computer). So he has to have fantastic clarity of thought in the language translation department - especially if he's regularly using more than one programming language.
The only notable exception to this is low-level programming - assembly and pure C. That contains so little actual structure in and of itself that it more closely resembles a math construct than a language. So I think you can get pretty good at the low level stuff without affecting your writing capabilities.
A synopsis of a very good Futurama episode:
Fry and Leela reunite with Bender during the hunt in an abandoned robot porn shop, but he refuses their offer of rescue. Before Fry and Leela can leave, the other robots arrive and they are placed on trial for being human. After being sentenced to a life of tedious robot-type labor, they are dropped through a trap door, where they meet the five Robot Elders. The Robot Elders reveal that the trial was for entertainment, and command Bender to kill Fry and Leela, but he refuses. The Robot Elders reveal that humans are just being used as a scapegoat to distract the population from the actual problems, lug nut shortages and the incompetent corrupt government of Robot Elders, and that many of the supposed powers humans have that robots fear are in fact made up.
How do you know it's not the same thing in the Middle East? Find someone to hate so that the leaders can stay in power? If so, we can do little to change things except violence against said leaders. And even then, using violence to change the nature of a place is like paddling a canoe with a spoon. I don't know enough about this to be sure. Are you sure they hate the west solely because of our actions, and things will change if we do?
Standard compliance on an often used, though not dominant compiler tends to be a small deal because its coming late.
Fixed that for you. It's not the OS that's in question here. You don't even have to use the VC++ compiler in Visual Studio, much less is it the only choice for the OS.
Conservation of energy is a *VERY* well established scientific fact.
No. Conservation is a law - a postulate. Something that we're extremely certain that can't prove using other laws, but that has never, ever been wrong once. That is the fact. If we found something that violated this law, then it would no longer be considered a law. Personally, I don't consider overwhelming evidence that something has always happened a particular way within the observation of man proof that it always did or always will. Don't get me wrong: I'd never take a bet that a perpetual motion machine is going to work, but I'm not going to go around believing that reality is 100% certain to work the way that I think it does, either.
The system eventually reaches equilibrium, and the cycle stop
Apparently goes through about 10 cycles, according to Wikipedia.
Yeah! Only why stop there? You could make it output HDMI and be able to do DRM so that third world children would even have access to DRM protected content.
For that matter, make it so that it's got 6 channel surround sound for the third world children! And beer! And hookers!
In fact, forget the third world children!
Seriously, though...it's got a hand crank. If it's really going to be sold in places without electricity, there's *no way* TV will work. CRTs take far, far too much power.
and the world's going to have to accept that
Screw that! Lets just build ten mile wide/long automated tankards that go into space and collect chemical energy from the sun/solar winds/asteriods/???, and then bring it back to earth. When we get this working really well, the only waste will be heat - which we can actively concentrate and pump into space (with no net loss of mass for the process since we took on a lot from the tankards).
We can probably do a few dozen terajoules that way, and keep it up until the sun dies.
BugLabs has created an environment where you can jump immediately to building YOUR application after picking x, y, and z components. That's pretty neat - hot-plug, start up, stop, the general runtime has been completely written for you. All you need to do is write the application piece.
Sounds like a pretty good description of the majority of the hobbyist market for Microchip PICs, Atmel, Lego Mindstorms, and even the OpenCores code repository. Anything you want to do you can get code to do for you, and you can just write your program.
They don't have anything crazy like "web services" though. They just use functions. You want to do something, call a function. No need to bring something as complicated as web into something so low level.
1. An ntpd not only syncs time, but adjusts the running speed of the kernel clock. Otherwise it would be nothing more than a ntpdate cronjob.
Which is precisely why I've ended up losing 10-20 seconds per minute in a VMWare ntp session. I think it's probably because realtime hardware clock isn't hardware or realtime, so the linear skew modeling of it doesn't work. NTP can sometimes make things worse, which may be a problem for the GP as it has been for me (before I replaced it with an ntpdate cronjob).
2. Under GNU/Linux, the local clock may be used to initialize the kernel clock, but those two run independently of each other until shutdown (or manual set). Only then the local clock is set to the kernel time, regardless of what the local clock was doing all the time.
It's not all software, though. It has to depend on some piece of underlying hardware to figure out fixed quanta of time - at worst, it has to use the system clock (the one that determines clock speed, not the one keeping track of the local time).
Assembly is necessary, to understand how a computer really works.
Microcode is necessary to understand how a computer sends its bits around, and a gate design class is necessary to understand how a basic computer functions. Assembly really only lets you know how a computer is operated at the lowest level of abstraction, not how it works.
How about hardware description languages? I'd through those ahead of functional ones if you're trying to get a breadth of knowledge. They're more different from everything else than functional languages are (if you're actually writing and running the code on hardware).
Then the student can realise that everythin after asm was a waste of time, and return to C.
Perhaps you should go play with microcode, read more about how transistors work and try a hardware description language. Then maybe you'd know how many layers of abstraction are really at work between you and the hardware (and that those layers are each consuming tons of resources of their own, but making it *much* faster to write code) and you wouldn't feel so bad about moving a few more rungs up the abstraction ladder for a lot of the time.
I don't know about that guy, but I went to high school in Florida, which is always ranked in the bottom ten states in academic performance.
We covered bond shapes limited degree in our AP chem class junior year.
Perhaps you just weren't paying attention or didn't take the hardest classes you could?
There is no problem with paper and pen, and hand counting.
It's fantastically expensive, and hard to back up.
It is completely verifiable, completely transparent, and with people watching the polling stations, ballot boxes, and counting, is actually quite hard to cheat the system.
There can only easily be one copy, so it isn't easily verifiable, transparent, or independently watchable. Only one group can be responsible for keeping track of the actual votes, and if they lose any, then they're gone. The difficulty in making copies adds a single point of failure.
actually quite hard to cheat the system. It's also very hard to do cheating en masse.
Be in charge of the "independent" agency responsible for doing all these (ridiculously expensive) hand counted polls by undercutting all of the competition on price. Do it for free, or pay for the privilege, even. Then be really good at not being caught taking bribes when you report the results, or at losing some of the ballots that you know are going to end up in favor of the guy you don't want to win.
It'd be a lot harder if the results coming out of each area were themselves a matter of public record. No losing them, then.
when it comes to voting machines the requirements should be that they are mathematically verifiable for correctness
And how will that keep the printer from malfunctioning, or the ram from spiking under a very specific, untestable state (include temperature and a particular set of bits that causes the CPU to malfunction?
Your solution sucks. The issues are not from mathematical failures, but from mechanical/electrical ones.
These machines should consist of a single MCU which is connected to pushbuttons and feeds to a dot-matrix printer and a EPROM (not EEPROM) via RS-485 or SPI (each of which is run by a single MCU that only does that).
Which pushbutton means which candidate is *printed* on a card and placed next to the buttons.
Cost to construct: $10 of hardware+outer casing (which is presumably hundreds of dollars).
Chance of failure: extremely small.
Why this hasn't been done yet considering the amount of money poured into the process: because they like it to be the way that it is.
I should mention that the above procedure doesn't actually require an OS and can be easily represented by a finite state machine. In other words, this level of simplicity actually results in mathematically verifiable functionality automatically, while at the same time it actually solves the problem.
anything about TV that precludes it from having smart people watch it
Smart people can afford to (and will) either buy a Tivo, or set up a HTPC box and not watch commercials. Hence, TV stations are only interested in stupid people.
I can't help but feel that a lot has changed over that time to make that method of comparison completely irrelevant...
I can't help but feel that you've totally missed the point. The point is that the demand for Vista isn't as great as it was for XP. Obviously, there are lots of reasons for that which might not have a lot to do with the technical deficiencies of Vista, but I'm sure they don't help. Did you notice that the article actually pointed out the two things you mentioned as possible causes?
The cause part is speculation. The fact that Vista sales are weak compared to XP sales is not.
One thing they didn't mention is the size of the market, which is a lot bigger than it was when XP came out. You'd expect Vista to actually do better than XP if that was an important factor.
I've always wondered about that aspect of Zelda. Why'd they pick Rupees instead of some actually nonexistent currency? Did the designers really like (or hate) Indians or something?
If I ever make a game, the unit of money will be the "awesome." I don't think anybody is currently using that as their currency.
Recent best example was ASIO - and fact that only Windows does support it.
Interesting that you mention that one. The big deal about ASIO is that it's realtime - everything between the application and the card has predictable latency. While the necessity of doing it that way to get low latency is Windows-specific, having drivers with predictable latency isn't. Every OS should have something like that for realtime audio processing applications (such as audio recording).
That said, Linux builds such a system by combining realtime driver scheduling with the existing soundcard drivers, which is a way more awesome way to get that.
Not sure my post was modded troll; I'd really like to know the answer to this question. Blu-ray comes with a virtual machine to do DRM - with all that this entails. It has to have its own address space, interpreter, and microprocessor if it's going to fully support the blu-ray spec.
Does such a requirement ramp up the size or power requirements of these devices?
Could it be the embedded computer that's built-in to the devices in order to do DRM? That seems like it'd take quite a lot of work to get working on small devices.
Google was started by a 50% European team.
...but nearly everything they design is engineered from American-designed specs and algorithms.
At an American company, and the ideas spawned from an American University.
Nokia is European.
Television was invented here.
Electronic reproduction of sound, moving pictures, and color photography all came from the US.
The European invention was just making an electronic version. I'd say that's a rather obvious step by comparison.
The Compact disc was invented here.
Digital recording was invented in Japan. Then a Dutch physicist had the idea to put it on optical media instead of a tape. Much earlier, (and without consultation of the other two), an American also developed compact discs, but he didn't sell the idea. I'd say the lion's share of that invention belongs to Japan.
The automobile, albeit slightly longer than your arbitrary 100 years.
You got one! Germany certainly deserves the credit for this idea.
Digital computing.
This is definitely not clear cut. What's first? Newton's algebra? Zuse's Z2? Babbage's calculator? ENIAC? And that's just talking about the first computing - not even mentioning the huge amount of work that came after it that one might consider essential. There's too much credit to go around to attribute it to one place. Europe or the US, probably, but it's hard to be sure which.
This game isn't worth playing. There's very little that one region can really take full credit for. Besides, what good is it saying that a countryman made something? It's not like you did. The Wright brothers may have been American, but so what? It's not like that means I have anything to do with planes. Besides, we very seldom get a guy who comes up with something out of the blue that's not a very small increment of something that already exists. Almost always, if it hadn't been one smart guy from one country, it wouldn't have been someone from another, so what does it matter who did it?