Then complete silence until the 24-hour period ended, followed by a brief announcement that "hey, it works again!" and then completely ignoring that it ever happened. Instead they've posted several blog entries that conveniently knock the PSN outage way down the page.
A major bug knocks out significant functionality in a console with an installed base in the tens of millions. Remember, you're the CEO of Sony, and you have to protect the value of your company. It would be criminally irresponsible if you were to rush out an untested fix. If that broke anything you'd be subject to lawsuits. Firmware updates are risky at the best of times.
Meanwhile, your engineers are telling you, "We've got a problem with the date that's screwing up DRM. On our special development consoles, it looks like once the date rolls over in less than 24 hours, the problem will go away. We've tested it on a handful of our customer-style consoles, and from what we can see it appears to be the case there, too. But there are seven 'Fat' models out there and in these few hours we can't test 'em all. Even once that's fixed, we can't absolutely guarantee all will be working after that."
So, you're careful about what you say, and you proceed with deliberate speed. The problem hasn't even been resolved for 24 hours yet! I strongly suspect that they are working on adding a fix to the next firmware upgrade - but that means they'll need to delay the next upgrade, add new tests to the regression tests and QA process, evaluate the fix on all nine models of PS3 (plus the two new slim models in the pipe), and then finally roll it out.
I strongly suspect that Sony will release more information soon, and may offer a downloadable trinket as a further apology, too. But expecting a giant company to share technical information (that might be used in a lawsuit) in real-time is a bit much.
Sony decided to be paranoid about time because of pirates. If you can hack the PS3 and change the date, then you can avoid expiration times and so forth. So if the hardware clock and software clock get out of sync, their DRM and such stops working. Considering the PS3 is the only major console that has not been hacked to the point of widespread piracy, keeping to this level of paranoia seems to have paid off for Sony's purposes.
As to Sony's "piss-poor handling of the entire incident", I'd like to know what, exactly, you think they should have done about it?
Seriously, I've just appointed you, _xeno_, to be CEO of Sony, and you just got a phone call. "Oh, crap, it's midnight GMT on March 1st, 2010, and all the older PS3 consoles can't play downloaded content or games with trophies or sign into the PSN!". What are you going to do? What orders do you give?
"Quick! Find an excuse to issue a patch that disables OtherOS!"
No way. Apply Hanlon's Razor to the situation: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
If they wanted to disable OtherOS, they could do it easily enough by making the latest hot game need a firmware update that did it. That's what many companies have done, including Sony on the PSP. Annoying millions of their customers by making the games they've already paid for not work? Companies - even Sony - have done some stupid things out of greed, but that's a whole new level of moronic.
"[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
The GP was incomplete. The actual state of things is that "clergy may not talk about a political candidate from the puplit [sic]"and retain their tax-exempt status.
If you encounter a post that is factually wrong, the correct thing to do is to reply, quoting the relevant parts and presenting a well thought out refutation...
I agree... but apparently a fair number of people felt that the original post was so egregiously wrong that no individual capable of writing coherent English could have honestly held that position... and hence the poster was being deliberately wrong.
"Sony is considering adding a subscription-based version of the PlayStation Network, but the company denies that it will charge customers to play games online."
"Especially in the online area, we are studying the possibility of introducing a subscription model, offering premium content and services, in addition to the current free services." (Emphasis added.)
Don't buy a PS3 simply for the sake of installing Linux on it.
I would certainly agree with that. As you say, there are much better deals, price/performance-wise.
The PS3 only has 256MB of system RAM and Linux does not run well at all on it...
...but this is a little overstated. Clever people figured out how to use the video ram as ultra-fast swap, which brings the effective RAM up to around 512MB. Still not awesome, but it makes Linux quite a bit more usable on the PS3.
Then you would copy some data / ideas (in this case, games), which are NOT physical goods, from someone. Which is a normal thing that is a basis of human civilization.
Oh, yeah, one more thing. Let's quote someone who made this point far more articulately, Thomas Jefferson:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Of course, he went on to say: Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility...
No copyright/patents/trademarks at all is a pretty bad state. Draconian DRM and unending copyright isn't productive, either. Fortunately, we can try to find a balance between them. Pretending the choice is only one or the other is ridiculous.
You bought a computer in form of a game console, but then noticed that the designer employed some tricks to keep you from doing certain things whit it, despite you having payed and owning the device.
Um... no. If you didn't "notice" that up front, then you were either exceptionally dim (my condolences) or were paying a dangerously low amount of attention (in which case, I fear for you crossing the street). Console makers don't exactly hide the restrictions they place on what they permit to run.
I got a PS3 knowing that it had built-in limitations on what I could do with it. I decided that those limitations were worth the value I got out of the things it does do. (You are entirely free to judge me a moron for thinking that. I'll try not to let your opinion ruin my day.)
Now, if this hack actually pans out, I may well use it to play around with the PS3 more. After all, I let my son get an R4 for his DS, and he enjoys being able to pack all his games and some movies on one card he doesn't have to swap out. (Yes, his games. I don't steal games, nor do I let him do so.) But even if you think that console makers shouldn't put DRM on their consoles, you can't claim that they aren't up front about doing so.
But so did I: I said "some physical tasks", and you immediately started talking about mental tasks: "Completing a task, for example, of moving an object from one location to another, involves mental capacity." But when you use the word "physical", Humpty, it doesn't mean "physical and mental". Got it.
In your original post, you immediately brought up mental tasks, anyway: "men have a greater affinity for science/math, and women more for culture/literature". But it would be entirely unfair of me to respond talking about mental differences. Got it.
Actually, "superior at some physical tasks" would be sexist. Completing a task, for example, of moving an object from one location to another, involves mental capacity. How do we move those? Do we push, pull, use a pully, etc. It leaves too much for interpretation. My comments, more accurately, are - given a specific set of criteria involving a physical "task" men will do better.
Okay, so "physically, men are superior to women" does not leave "too much for interpretation"?
When I say "physical task", I actually mean "physical and mental tasks"... but when you say "physically superior", for you that automatically includes the connotation of "a specific set of criteria involving a physical 'task'"? Wow, you're truly a master communicator. I wish everyone could be that specific!
I said the strongest man is stronger then the strongest woman. I said the average man is stronger then the average woman.
To reiterate: and then you said "That physically, men were superior to women."
That's what's wrong, in two different ways. First off, the word 'superior' is unqualified - if you'd said something like, "superior at some physical tasks", Sockatume's objection would not apply. Secondly, the use of "men" and "women" was unqualified. If you'd said something like, "at a given strength level on the upper end, you will find more men than women," you would have actually been correct and your statement would be unobjectionable.
i said on average men are stronger. That is not a failure of knowledge that is a statement of fact. Average of these two means there will be women who are stronger then men, but on AVERAGE men will be stronger then women.
And I said that doesn't mean what you think it means. You said that meant "That physically, men were superior to women."
Sockatume pointed out one problem with that too: "Equating mechanical strength to physical superiority is specious." Especially in a species with as many different strategic options as humans do, a difference in any one dimension isn't particularly relevant.
My point was that, even for tasks that require a specific faculty like upper-body strength, you'll still find women who can do the job just fine. The "average differences", while interesting, are useless in practice. You still need to focus on the only relevant criteria: can they do the job?
Smart men are smarter than smart women, on average. (Stupid men are also retards compared to stupid women due to a male intellectual bell curve with significantly more outliers). Women are much more normalized, intellectually.
That's not nearly as well-established as you seem to think it is. As an example, from here:
Far more men play chess than women and based on that simple fact, you could actually predict the differences we see in chess ability at the highest level. It's a simple statistical fact that the best performers from a large group are probably going to be better than the best performers from a small one. Even if two groups have the same average skill and, importantly, the same range in skill, the most capable individuals will probably come from the larger group.
With this statistical effect in mind, Bilalic wanted to see if the actual sex difference that we see among chess players is any greater than the difference you would rationally expect. Fortunately, there are easy ways of finding out the answer for chess, as opposed to many other intellectual disciplines like science and engineering where success is nigh-impossible to measure objectively.
Every serious player has an objective rating - the Elo rating - that measures their skill based on their results against other players. Bilalic looked at a set of data encompassing all known German players - over 120,000 individuals, of whom 113,000 are men. He directly compared the top 100 players of either gender and used a mathematical model to work out the expected difference in their Elo ratings, given the size of the groups they belong to.
The model revealed that the greater proportion of male chess players accounts for a whopping 96% of the difference in ability between the two genders at the highest level of play. If more women took up chess, you'd see that difference close substantially.
...Of course, sceptics could argue that low participation rate is itself caused by the fact that women simply give up chess in greater numbers than men based on some innate disadvantage. As Bilalic says, the argument is "reasonable" but there is no evidence that the drop-out rate is higher in women than men.
In fact, Christopher Chablis and Mark Glickman recently found equal drop-out rates for boys and girls among 600 budding chess players of comparable age, skill and interest. Their study also found that both sexes improve at an matching pace, and they concluded that the success of men at chess's highest tiers is fuelled by the overwhelming majority of boys who enter the game at its lowest levels.
So why are there so few female chess grandmasters? Because fewer women play chess. It's that simple. This overlooked fact accounts for so much of the observable differences that other possible explanations, be they biological, cultural or environmental, are just fighting for scraps at the table.
Yes... and no. The "differences" you mention are not hard, sharp divisions. They are bell curves with peaks in different places, but there is lots of overlap. Even in the realm of sheer upper-body strength, I guarantee that (unless you happen to be a champion powerlifter) there are are women who can outbench you.
It's not that differences don't exist. (They do, and vive la difference.) It's just they they are of a different kind, and a different size, and a different range, than you seem to understand.
But the Na'vi don't have fur. I don't understand why people keep saying they do.
Because they are clearly shown to in the movie? Anyway, I looked up the "canon", and Word of God says they have hair, "although Na'vi cranial hair raises another question, as no other Pandoran animal observed to date possess hair".
Like humans, they only have patches of fur, but they do have fur. So there.:->
The hominid model seemed to work fairly well here, I see no reason why it should not work equally well elsewhere.
Even the monkeys shown in the movie had six arms. Almost all the animals had four eyes, and I didn't see any with hair. Yet the Na'vi are fur-bearing, binocular tetrapods.
Sure, weird outliers exist even on Earth; like the monotremes, the egg-laying mammals. But such a coincidence of body plans would be considered strong evidence of intelligent intervention (like panspermia) if we found it in real life. Even in fiction, it's clear that there was 'intelligent design' - they went for easy-to-relate-to aliens rather than off-putting ones.
...if you made a movie for pedantic nerds how much do you think it'd earn?
Pretty well. Look at, say, 2001 and The Abyss. Sure, both of them have aliens doing impossible stuff, but they're supposed to be more advanced than us. All the stuff the humans do in those movies were either possible at the time or plausible extrapolations from existing tech. (Yes, even the 'breathable fluid' suit - the rat in the movie really did breathe liquid. It turned out - later - that we couldn't come up with a light enough fluid to scale up to adult human lungs, but it's used for premature babies today.)
Oddly enough, the movies that put enough thought in to get the science right tend to do well.
Slashdot Mirror
...my fingers don't even have to be cold and dead to pry my DNA out of them.
A major bug knocks out significant functionality in a console with an installed base in the tens of millions. Remember, you're the CEO of Sony, and you have to protect the value of your company. It would be criminally irresponsible if you were to rush out an untested fix. If that broke anything you'd be subject to lawsuits. Firmware updates are risky at the best of times.
Meanwhile, your engineers are telling you, "We've got a problem with the date that's screwing up DRM. On our special development consoles, it looks like once the date rolls over in less than 24 hours, the problem will go away. We've tested it on a handful of our customer-style consoles, and from what we can see it appears to be the case there, too. But there are seven 'Fat' models out there and in these few hours we can't test 'em all. Even once that's fixed, we can't absolutely guarantee all will be working after that."
So, you're careful about what you say, and you proceed with deliberate speed. The problem hasn't even been resolved for 24 hours yet! I strongly suspect that they are working on adding a fix to the next firmware upgrade - but that means they'll need to delay the next upgrade, add new tests to the regression tests and QA process, evaluate the fix on all nine models of PS3 (plus the two new slim models in the pipe), and then finally roll it out.
Every company with a substantial codebase and millions of customers is this slow, by necessity. It took Microsoft a week to get the Live network stable after the flood of new users back in December, 2008. A week later (i.e. seven times 24 hours), they gave away a free downloadable game as a further apology. And they still got sued over it.
I strongly suspect that Sony will release more information soon, and may offer a downloadable trinket as a further apology, too. But expecting a giant company to share technical information (that might be used in a lawsuit) in real-time is a bit much.
Well, apparently, it wasn't a Sony bug per se, it was a bug in one of the support chips.
Sony decided to be paranoid about time because of pirates. If you can hack the PS3 and change the date, then you can avoid expiration times and so forth. So if the hardware clock and software clock get out of sync, their DRM and such stops working. Considering the PS3 is the only major console that has not been hacked to the point of widespread piracy, keeping to this level of paranoia seems to have paid off for Sony's purposes.
As to Sony's "piss-poor handling of the entire incident", I'd like to know what, exactly, you think they should have done about it?
Seriously, I've just appointed you, _xeno_, to be CEO of Sony, and you just got a phone call. "Oh, crap, it's midnight GMT on March 1st, 2010, and all the older PS3 consoles can't play downloaded content or games with trophies or sign into the PSN!". What are you going to do? What orders do you give?
Frankly, it's not that useful on the PS3. Even when web browsing, I mostly use the analog sticks to move things around. But it's cute for a while.
No way. Apply Hanlon's Razor to the situation: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
If they wanted to disable OtherOS, they could do it easily enough by making the latest hot game need a firmware update that did it. That's what many companies have done, including Sony on the PSP. Annoying millions of their customers by making the games they've already paid for not work? Companies - even Sony - have done some stupid things out of greed, but that's a whole new level of moronic.
Well, actually...
The GP was incomplete. The actual state of things is that "clergy may not talk about a political candidate from the puplit [sic]" and retain their tax-exempt status.
I agree... but apparently a fair number of people felt that the original post was so egregiously wrong that no individual capable of writing coherent English could have honestly held that position... and hence the poster was being deliberately wrong.
In a way, it's a backhanded compliment. :->
http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/213014/premium-psn-service-planned-wont-affect-online-gaming/
"Sony is considering adding a subscription-based version of the PlayStation Network, but the company denies that it will charge customers to play games online."
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/sony-may-introduce-psn-subscription-model
"Especially in the online area, we are studying the possibility of introducing a subscription model, offering premium content and services, in addition to the current free services." (Emphasis added.)
Because it's wrong:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/03/the_hannah_poling_case_and_the_rebrandin.php
I would certainly agree with that. As you say, there are much better deals, price/performance-wise.
Oh, yeah, one more thing. Let's quote someone who made this point far more articulately, Thomas Jefferson: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Of course, he went on to say: Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility...
No copyright/patents/trademarks at all is a pretty bad state. Draconian DRM and unending copyright isn't productive, either. Fortunately, we can try to find a balance between them. Pretending the choice is only one or the other is ridiculous.
Um... no. If you didn't "notice" that up front, then you were either exceptionally dim (my condolences) or were paying a dangerously low amount of attention (in which case, I fear for you crossing the street). Console makers don't exactly hide the restrictions they place on what they permit to run.
I got a PS3 knowing that it had built-in limitations on what I could do with it. I decided that those limitations were worth the value I got out of the things it does do. (You are entirely free to judge me a moron for thinking that. I'll try not to let your opinion ruin my day.)
Now, if this hack actually pans out, I may well use it to play around with the PS3 more. After all, I let my son get an R4 for his DS, and he enjoys being able to pack all his games and some movies on one card he doesn't have to swap out. (Yes, his games. I don't steal games, nor do I let him do so.) But even if you think that console makers shouldn't put DRM on their consoles, you can't claim that they aren't up front about doing so.
Well, have fun, see you around.
Okay, so "physically, men are superior to women" does not leave "too much for interpretation"?
When I say "physical task", I actually mean "physical and mental tasks"... but when you say "physically superior", for you that automatically includes the connotation of "a specific set of criteria involving a physical 'task'"? Wow, you're truly a master communicator. I wish everyone could be that specific!
To reiterate: and then you said "That physically, men were superior to women."
That's what's wrong, in two different ways. First off, the word 'superior' is unqualified - if you'd said something like, "superior at some physical tasks", Sockatume's objection would not apply. Secondly, the use of "men" and "women" was unqualified. If you'd said something like, "at a given strength level on the upper end, you will find more men than women," you would have actually been correct and your statement would be unobjectionable.
And I said that doesn't mean what you think it means. You said that meant "That physically, men were superior to women."
Sockatume pointed out one problem with that too: "Equating mechanical strength to physical superiority is specious." Especially in a species with as many different strategic options as humans do, a difference in any one dimension isn't particularly relevant.
My point was that, even for tasks that require a specific faculty like upper-body strength, you'll still find women who can do the job just fine. The "average differences", while interesting, are useless in practice. You still need to focus on the only relevant criteria: can they do the job?
That's not nearly as well-established as you seem to think it is. As an example, from here:
You haven't seen "The Full Monty", have you? :->
Yes... and no. The "differences" you mention are not hard, sharp divisions. They are bell curves with peaks in different places, but there is lots of overlap. Even in the realm of sheer upper-body strength, I guarantee that (unless you happen to be a champion powerlifter) there are are women who can outbench you.
It's not that differences don't exist. (They do, and vive la difference.) It's just they they are of a different kind, and a different size, and a different range, than you seem to understand.
The Titanides from the Titan series by Varley are the perfect application for the motion-capture and facial animation technology developed for Avatar.
Because they are clearly shown to in the movie? Anyway, I looked up the "canon", and Word of God says they have hair, "although Na'vi cranial hair raises another question, as no other Pandoran animal observed to date possess hair".
Like humans, they only have patches of fur, but they do have fur. So there. :->
Even the monkeys shown in the movie had six arms. Almost all the animals had four eyes, and I didn't see any with hair. Yet the Na'vi are fur-bearing, binocular tetrapods.
Sure, weird outliers exist even on Earth; like the monotremes, the egg-laying mammals. But such a coincidence of body plans would be considered strong evidence of intelligent intervention (like panspermia) if we found it in real life. Even in fiction, it's clear that there was 'intelligent design' - they went for easy-to-relate-to aliens rather than off-putting ones.
Pretty well. Look at, say, 2001 and The Abyss. Sure, both of them have aliens doing impossible stuff, but they're supposed to be more advanced than us. All the stuff the humans do in those movies were either possible at the time or plausible extrapolations from existing tech. (Yes, even the 'breathable fluid' suit - the rat in the movie really did breathe liquid. It turned out - later - that we couldn't come up with a light enough fluid to scale up to adult human lungs, but it's used for premature babies today.)
Oddly enough, the movies that put enough thought in to get the science right tend to do well.