The SteamMachine appears to be a weird hybrid between the two ends of the spectrum, and seems to be giving up the most significant advantages of both ends unless this starts to drive some major changes in game development.
It's not so weird. You're thinking about it wrong because you're thinking in terms of "companies" in the abstract. Think what Valve is trying to get out of it and then think whether this has any value to consumers.
Valve wants to get away Windows because it doesn't want competition from the Windows App Store and because it doesn't want to be dependant on Windows as a platform. By going their own way they have the chance to lock out the MS App store and to prodce a dedicated gaming OS that might bring about performance enhancements for users. It's also an opportunity to work their way into the living room and reach a new user base. They are doing this on the cheap by producing an open source OS and giving it away to hardware manufactures. This means they don't have to spend the big bucks the way MS did with the XBox. If they succeed they will hopefully bring more games into the fold, which expands their offerings on Steam and therefore increases revenues. All of these are advantages for Valve and that's why they're pushing this. They're looking to the future.
So what do consumers gain by following them? If your Windows box is only maintained for gaming then you can ditch Windows, which will save you money in upgrades and associated Windows BS. It also offers an easy way to take PC gaming into the living room, which might be nice for some people. The possibility of more games on Steam is also good, as it's a convenient platform with fairly sane policies regarding DRM. Hopefully Valve will put in place some recommendations regarding the specs of the machines, which might result in games that take better advantage of the available hardware. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to expect these boxes to have be upgradable components: users may be able to add more RAM or swap out the GFX card three years down the line. So your SteamBox will be looking good whilst the current PS/XBox generation starts showing its age.
For example, someone using default settings on a principal component analysis package not understanding that the package expects the user to have pre-processed the data; the output looks fine but it is wrong.
I'm a biologist who learned enough computational stats to get by and I do see what you mean. Initially I did do stuff like that, but over time I put in the effort to learn what's going on and now I hope I make these sorts of dumb mistakes a lot less often! However this is not so much a coding problem, but a stats problem. People in the "soft sciences" don't just have problems with more advanced stuff such as PCA, ICA, clustering, etc, but even simple stats. For example, it's very common to see ANOVA performed on data that would be much better suited to regression analysis. The concept of fitting a line or curve and extracting meaning from the coefficients is rather foreign to a lot of biologists, who are more comfortable with a table full of p-values. Indeed, there is a general fixation on p-values, despite the fact that these are not well understood. There is a tendency to hide raw data (since biological data are often noisy). There is also a tendency to use analyses such as PCA or hierarchical clustering simply to produce fancy plots to blind reviewers; these plots often add no insight (or the insight they might add is not explored).
The core of Ubuntu users are more typically ex-Windows users trying linux for the first time.
I keep reading this here. Perhaps it's true that first-time Linux users initially try Ubuntu, but there seems to be the notion on/. that once you've learned Ubuntu you "move on" to a more "hardcore" distro. But why should you? If Ubuntu works for you, then why move to something "harder"? If you're using Ubuntu for work or home surfing then there's no productivity gain by switching distros. The only reasons I can think for doing so are ideological, or because you want to explore and learn more about Linux. In terms of actually doing work: there's no point and messing around with difficult distros just sucks up time.
Personally, I moved from XP to SuSE back in 2001 or so because I wanted more flexibility, a CLI that works, etc. The only reason I switched to Ubuntu was because I got fed up trying to install new versions of software on SuSE. I don't know if it's got better, but back then I wasted a lot of time searching websites to find the right RPMs to resolve version conflicts. That's all gone with Ubuntu. So my reason for switching distros was purely productivity related. Other than that, SuSE was just as beginner friendly as Ubuntu was back then.
Hes doing his job, whether you like it or not. Dont blame the police for laws you dont like.
He doesn't have to ticket them, though, cops use discretion. I often drive home late at night on a main road where the limit is 65 MPH but I do about 75 MPH. I'm >10% over the limit but on more than one occasion I've had a cop driving the same speed in the lane next to me. He knows what I'm doing but he doesn't care: it's late, the road's empty, nobody's in danger, and he too probably just wants to get home. Ticketing 800 people for texting at a red light or touching their phone in GPS mode is gratuitous. He's doing it because he can and because he wants to: because he gets off on being the top dog when it comes to issuing these sorts of tickets.
Not annualized profits, where years have been profitable. Division lifetime profit. like this
When I see graphs like that I always wonder exactly what goes into them. I'm sure the accounting is complicated and that it would be possible to produce all sorts of different figures depending on what you choose to include or exclude.
The fact that someone bought the game while accompanied by a child does not mean they're buying it for the child.
Not for sure, no, but it seems pretty likely. If you don't want your kid to play a game then it seems like a pretty dumb idea to take them to store, allow them to watch you buy it, and then tell them they can't play it. By far the best thing is to buy it on sly and never let them know you have it.
Haven't tried openbox, thanks for the tip. I've periodically gone back and looked at KDE, last time was earlier this year, but for some reason I just can't stomach it any more. Partly this is because it doesn't feel as snappy as XFCE, but partly it's because I find the UI elements oddly clunky in a way I find hard to explain: in other DEs different elements, such as buttons on windows, feel like distinct entities. Somehow in KDE 4 they feel as though they're simply different locations on a single large image. I know that sounds a bit stupid, but that's how it comes across to me. I use a few KDE applications, such as Konsole, within XFCE and that gets me by just fine at the moment.
I don't understand, how can it "confuse people"? If you know about it, then it's very easy to use. If you don't know about it, then either you'd never notice it OR you'd discover words appearing on middle-click and figure out what's going on pretty quickly. For the most part, Linux users are of above average tech savy and would likely understand without instruction. IF you were concerned about people getting confused then you could either: A. disable by default or B. bring up a "did you notice you just pasted some text?" info box the first time the user performs the action. This isn't hard. Why would the Gnome people think the correct solution is to remove the feature? Idiotic. I switched from KDE to Gnome when KDE 4 happened and then from Gnome to XFCE when Gnome 3 happened. I really hope XFCE stays sane or I'll be CLI only in ten years time.
These diagnostic patents are all held and defended by the American drug company cartels who hold the world ransom. Same thing applies to the detection of the breast cancer gene, that is why you only see the wealthy being tested for this indicator gene, then deciding to have their breasts removed if they inherited the gene. Nothing is holding back the rapid advancement of diagnostics more than the drug company cartels and they need to be broken up permanently the same way standard oil was dealt with!
Myriad no longer has a monopoly on the BRAC breast cancer markers: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/supreme-court-strikes-down-breast-cancer-gene-patent-175640515.html They may keep fighting this, but this patent is crumbling.
Where is your link for the HCV test? Physical image shape sounds like something you'd need EM to do. What's stopping people from tagging virus particle with fluorescent antibodies and then counting the green dots with a light microscope? No software patent needed to count dots.
Don't forget, this isn't talking about a standard "microscope" but rather a "fluorescence microscope", which is actually a fairly different thing.
No it isn't.
I disagree, it is a fairly different thing when you're talking about miniaturising it. I could stick a lens onto a phone cam and call it a microscope but it's not so trivial to turn a phone into a compact fluorescence microscope. You can't just whack in a Olympus filter cube, you need to think it through a little more. These guys have done a pretty good job of miniaturising the fluorescence microscope. As you say, the resolution is shitty (probably because objective NA is small). I can't see a use for the thing but I can appreciate it's geek cred. Some labelling is easy to do, though, it depends on the sample, so it might be possible for this thing to have field uses.
Have any of the people that push dream diaries, including this modern version, thought that perhaps there's an evolutionary reason that we don't often remember our dreams, and most of us, rarely in great detail?
Perhaps there's an evolutionary reason, perhaps not. But does it matter? With a little practice you can get pretty good at remembering your dreams. Keeping a diary helps a lot: I've tried it and definitely saw a difference in both volume and detail of recalled dreams. Pen and paper works just fine.
In WWII many US citizens donated their dogs to the war effort. Some of them wore suicide vests (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/480/animal-sacrifice). In comparison to that, the robot thing is surely not a big deal.
Natural selection is a mechanism brought about by mass death, without mass death you do not have natural selection, because there is no selection. Without it you simply have unguided evolution, the buildup of random mutation. A varied and intense climate is one very good way to bring complexity into an environment and encourage intelligence and adaptability, that said, normally it is the cold that normally inspires intelligence.
Natural selection does not require "mass death." I don't know where you hear that, but it's wrong. Natural selection can work quite subtly. Without natural selection you have no evolution. Also, you have no "buildup" of random mutation. Most mutations are counter-productive and get selected out. Complexity is not related to climatic intensity. A lot of the tropics have very steady weather yet they contain the rainforests, which are the most complex habitats on Earth. I don't think it's known what encourages intelligence, but I don't know why the cold would do it.
to improve over time, after the short term mass death.
Species do not "improve" over time; evolution doesn't work like that. Natural selection simply leads to organisms being better suited to their environments. This is happening constantly, even in the absence of major climatic pressures. On other the hand, some species such as crocodiles and alligators have stayed largely the same for millions of years. This doesn't imply that they have "stagnated", it implies that they have found a stable environmental niche, which they fill very effectively. That makes them a successful organism.
Whilst it's true that there are crazy comments here on this story, it's also true the the copyright laws are counter-intuitive in places. My favourite is borrowing DVDs from the library. Public libraries buy DVDs at the same price as we do (i.e. they don't pay the rental price because they're not renting and therefore making money). I often watch TV shows by waiting until they appear in the library and then borrowing the disks. If I do this, it's not "theft" as defined by the MPAA, even though they may have lost a sale. If, however, the DVD is out and I choose to download from TPB instead of waiting in line at the library, then it is theft. Similarly, if I take out a box set, don't get to watch it in time, then clone it (with a view to deleting once watched) and return the disks then that's theft too.
I can't though, because like any responsible human being, I block Facebook at the DNS level. FFS people, if you make Facebook the new web, I give up all faith I had left in humanity.
Exactly. Facebook is like an evil, privately-controlled, sub-internet.
They'll get this ruling in their favour eventually. Remember 4 years ago when they blocked the whole of usenet in order to Save The Children from kiddie porn? That was basically the same stunt.
They'd be nuts to accept such exposure. As long as we can ensure that they do not receive an exemption from current law, net neutrality should be safe.
Oh, and my _phone_ has the same resolution as these 50" panels. Why the fuck he's talking about "image quality"? Until we get 4k displays the quality differences are non-existent.
Because the pixel density alone (what you're talking about) isn't what matters, it's the angle subtended by a pixel at the viewer's eye that matters. You view your phone about a foot from your eye. You likely view your TV from several feet away. My LCD TV isn't huge (30") and I watch it from a distance of about 12 feet. I've noticed that I see *way* more detail in from a BluRay recording if I sit on the floor about 5 feet from it. So if I bought a larger screen and kept resolution the same, I would see more from my sofa.
TFA really should be required reading for anyone developing a significant open source project. An area which seems particularly in need of help is OS projects in the sciences. Some are very good, but others (sometimes important ones) fail most of the items on the list. They end up being developed by one or two people, no mailing list, minimal docs, no issue tracker, and erratic to zero response from the developer(s). The result is that others download the code, fix the obvious bugs or implement improvements, but these fixes never get incorporated back into the original project because there's no mechanism for doing it. Everyone's reinventing the wheel.
Slashdot Mirror
There's obviously something wrong with this metric since Python has twice the whatTheFuckability as Perl: http://www.itworld.com/sites/default/files/WTF_programming_languages-600x450.jpg
The SteamMachine appears to be a weird hybrid between the two ends of the spectrum, and seems to be giving up the most significant advantages of both ends unless this starts to drive some major changes in game development.
It's not so weird. You're thinking about it wrong because you're thinking in terms of "companies" in the abstract. Think what Valve is trying to get out of it and then think whether this has any value to consumers.
Valve wants to get away Windows because it doesn't want competition from the Windows App Store and because it doesn't want to be dependant on Windows as a platform. By going their own way they have the chance to lock out the MS App store and to prodce a dedicated gaming OS that might bring about performance enhancements for users. It's also an opportunity to work their way into the living room and reach a new user base. They are doing this on the cheap by producing an open source OS and giving it away to hardware manufactures. This means they don't have to spend the big bucks the way MS did with the XBox. If they succeed they will hopefully bring more games into the fold, which expands their offerings on Steam and therefore increases revenues. All of these are advantages for Valve and that's why they're pushing this. They're looking to the future.
So what do consumers gain by following them? If your Windows box is only maintained for gaming then you can ditch Windows, which will save you money in upgrades and associated Windows BS. It also offers an easy way to take PC gaming into the living room, which might be nice for some people. The possibility of more games on Steam is also good, as it's a convenient platform with fairly sane policies regarding DRM. Hopefully Valve will put in place some recommendations regarding the specs of the machines, which might result in games that take better advantage of the available hardware. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to expect these boxes to have be upgradable components: users may be able to add more RAM or swap out the GFX card three years down the line. So your SteamBox will be looking good whilst the current PS/XBox generation starts showing its age.
For example, someone using default settings on a principal component analysis package not understanding that the package expects the user to have pre-processed the data; the output looks fine but it is wrong.
I'm a biologist who learned enough computational stats to get by and I do see what you mean. Initially I did do stuff like that, but over time I put in the effort to learn what's going on and now I hope I make these sorts of dumb mistakes a lot less often! However this is not so much a coding problem, but a stats problem. People in the "soft sciences" don't just have problems with more advanced stuff such as PCA, ICA, clustering, etc, but even simple stats. For example, it's very common to see ANOVA performed on data that would be much better suited to regression analysis. The concept of fitting a line or curve and extracting meaning from the coefficients is rather foreign to a lot of biologists, who are more comfortable with a table full of p-values. Indeed, there is a general fixation on p-values, despite the fact that these are not well understood. There is a tendency to hide raw data (since biological data are often noisy). There is also a tendency to use analyses such as PCA or hierarchical clustering simply to produce fancy plots to blind reviewers; these plots often add no insight (or the insight they might add is not explored).
The core of Ubuntu users are more typically ex-Windows users trying linux for the first time.
I keep reading this here. Perhaps it's true that first-time Linux users initially try Ubuntu, but there seems to be the notion on /. that once you've learned Ubuntu you "move on" to a more "hardcore" distro. But why should you? If Ubuntu works for you, then why move to something "harder"? If you're using Ubuntu for work or home surfing then there's no productivity gain by switching distros. The only reasons I can think for doing so are ideological, or because you want to explore and learn more about Linux. In terms of actually doing work: there's no point and messing around with difficult distros just sucks up time.
Personally, I moved from XP to SuSE back in 2001 or so because I wanted more flexibility, a CLI that works, etc. The only reason I switched to Ubuntu was because I got fed up trying to install new versions of software on SuSE. I don't know if it's got better, but back then I wasted a lot of time searching websites to find the right RPMs to resolve version conflicts. That's all gone with Ubuntu. So my reason for switching distros was purely productivity related. Other than that, SuSE was just as beginner friendly as Ubuntu was back then.
Hes doing his job, whether you like it or not. Dont blame the police for laws you dont like.
He doesn't have to ticket them, though, cops use discretion. I often drive home late at night on a main road where the limit is 65 MPH but I do about 75 MPH. I'm >10% over the limit but on more than one occasion I've had a cop driving the same speed in the lane next to me. He knows what I'm doing but he doesn't care: it's late, the road's empty, nobody's in danger, and he too probably just wants to get home. Ticketing 800 people for texting at a red light or touching their phone in GPS mode is gratuitous. He's doing it because he can and because he wants to: because he gets off on being the top dog when it comes to issuing these sorts of tickets.
Not annualized profits, where years have been profitable. Division lifetime profit. like this
When I see graphs like that I always wonder exactly what goes into them. I'm sure the accounting is complicated and that it would be possible to produce all sorts of different figures depending on what you choose to include or exclude.
The fact that someone bought the game while accompanied by a child does not mean they're buying it for the child.
Not for sure, no, but it seems pretty likely. If you don't want your kid to play a game then it seems like a pretty dumb idea to take them to store, allow them to watch you buy it, and then tell them they can't play it. By far the best thing is to buy it on sly and never let them know you have it.
Haven't tried openbox, thanks for the tip. I've periodically gone back and looked at KDE, last time was earlier this year, but for some reason I just can't stomach it any more. Partly this is because it doesn't feel as snappy as XFCE, but partly it's because I find the UI elements oddly clunky in a way I find hard to explain: in other DEs different elements, such as buttons on windows, feel like distinct entities. Somehow in KDE 4 they feel as though they're simply different locations on a single large image. I know that sounds a bit stupid, but that's how it comes across to me. I use a few KDE applications, such as Konsole, within XFCE and that gets me by just fine at the moment.
I don't understand, how can it "confuse people"? If you know about it, then it's very easy to use. If you don't know about it, then either you'd never notice it OR you'd discover words appearing on middle-click and figure out what's going on pretty quickly. For the most part, Linux users are of above average tech savy and would likely understand without instruction. IF you were concerned about people getting confused then you could either: A. disable by default or B. bring up a "did you notice you just pasted some text?" info box the first time the user performs the action. This isn't hard. Why would the Gnome people think the correct solution is to remove the feature? Idiotic. I switched from KDE to Gnome when KDE 4 happened and then from Gnome to XFCE when Gnome 3 happened. I really hope XFCE stays sane or I'll be CLI only in ten years time.
These diagnostic patents are all held and defended by the American drug company cartels who hold the world ransom. Same thing applies to the detection of the breast cancer gene, that is why you only see the wealthy being tested for this indicator gene, then deciding to have their breasts removed if they inherited the gene. Nothing is holding back the rapid advancement of diagnostics more than the drug company cartels and they need to be broken up permanently the same way standard oil was dealt with!
Myriad no longer has a monopoly on the BRAC breast cancer markers: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/supreme-court-strikes-down-breast-cancer-gene-patent-175640515.html They may keep fighting this, but this patent is crumbling. Where is your link for the HCV test? Physical image shape sounds like something you'd need EM to do. What's stopping people from tagging virus particle with fluorescent antibodies and then counting the green dots with a light microscope? No software patent needed to count dots.
Building a fluorescence microscope is easy. It's day two or any three of a beginners imaging course.
Don't forget, this isn't talking about a standard "microscope" but rather a "fluorescence microscope", which is actually a fairly different thing.
No it isn't.
I disagree, it is a fairly different thing when you're talking about miniaturising it. I could stick a lens onto a phone cam and call it a microscope but it's not so trivial to turn a phone into a compact fluorescence microscope. You can't just whack in a Olympus filter cube, you need to think it through a little more. These guys have done a pretty good job of miniaturising the fluorescence microscope. As you say, the resolution is shitty (probably because objective NA is small). I can't see a use for the thing but I can appreciate it's geek cred. Some labelling is easy to do, though, it depends on the sample, so it might be possible for this thing to have field uses.
Have any of the people that push dream diaries, including this modern version, thought that perhaps there's an evolutionary reason that we don't often remember our dreams, and most of us, rarely in great detail?
Perhaps there's an evolutionary reason, perhaps not. But does it matter? With a little practice you can get pretty good at remembering your dreams. Keeping a diary helps a lot: I've tried it and definitely saw a difference in both volume and detail of recalled dreams. Pen and paper works just fine.
In WWII many US citizens donated their dogs to the war effort. Some of them wore suicide vests (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/480/animal-sacrifice). In comparison to that, the robot thing is surely not a big deal.
Natural selection is a mechanism brought about by mass death, without mass death you do not have natural selection, because there is no selection. Without it you simply have unguided evolution, the buildup of random mutation. A varied and intense climate is one very good way to bring complexity into an environment and encourage intelligence and adaptability, that said, normally it is the cold that normally inspires intelligence.
Natural selection does not require "mass death." I don't know where you hear that, but it's wrong. Natural selection can work quite subtly. Without natural selection you have no evolution. Also, you have no "buildup" of random mutation. Most mutations are counter-productive and get selected out. Complexity is not related to climatic intensity. A lot of the tropics have very steady weather yet they contain the rainforests, which are the most complex habitats on Earth. I don't think it's known what encourages intelligence, but I don't know why the cold would do it.
Lying always works. You say it often enough and it becomes true.
to improve over time, after the short term mass death.
Species do not "improve" over time; evolution doesn't work like that. Natural selection simply leads to organisms being better suited to their environments. This is happening constantly, even in the absence of major climatic pressures. On other the hand, some species such as crocodiles and alligators have stayed largely the same for millions of years. This doesn't imply that they have "stagnated", it implies that they have found a stable environmental niche, which they fill very effectively. That makes them a successful organism.
ditto. amazing how little they've progressed.
Whilst it's true that there are crazy comments here on this story, it's also true the the copyright laws are counter-intuitive in places. My favourite is borrowing DVDs from the library. Public libraries buy DVDs at the same price as we do (i.e. they don't pay the rental price because they're not renting and therefore making money). I often watch TV shows by waiting until they appear in the library and then borrowing the disks. If I do this, it's not "theft" as defined by the MPAA, even though they may have lost a sale. If, however, the DVD is out and I choose to download from TPB instead of waiting in line at the library, then it is theft. Similarly, if I take out a box set, don't get to watch it in time, then clone it (with a view to deleting once watched) and return the disks then that's theft too.
I can't though, because like any responsible human being, I block Facebook at the DNS level. FFS people, if you make Facebook the new web, I give up all faith I had left in humanity.
Exactly. Facebook is like an evil, privately-controlled, sub-internet.
They'll get this ruling in their favour eventually. Remember 4 years ago when they blocked the whole of usenet in order to Save The Children from kiddie porn? That was basically the same stunt.
They'd be nuts to accept such exposure. As long as we can ensure that they do not receive an exemption from current law, net neutrality should be safe.
Unfortunately, it would appear they are nuts: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/10/net-neutrality-is-on-trial-in-washington-heres-what-you-need-to-know/ From that page: "Verizon contends that the FCC overstepped its authority by imposing what amount to common carrier regulations on broadband providers. The FCC disagrees.
Oh, and my _phone_ has the same resolution as these 50" panels. Why the fuck he's talking about "image quality"? Until we get 4k displays the quality differences are non-existent.
Because the pixel density alone (what you're talking about) isn't what matters, it's the angle subtended by a pixel at the viewer's eye that matters. You view your phone about a foot from your eye. You likely view your TV from several feet away. My LCD TV isn't huge (30") and I watch it from a distance of about 12 feet. I've noticed that I see *way* more detail in from a BluRay recording if I sit on the floor about 5 feet from it. So if I bought a larger screen and kept resolution the same, I would see more from my sofa.
TFA really should be required reading for anyone developing a significant open source project. An area which seems particularly in need of help is OS projects in the sciences. Some are very good, but others (sometimes important ones) fail most of the items on the list. They end up being developed by one or two people, no mailing list, minimal docs, no issue tracker, and erratic to zero response from the developer(s). The result is that others download the code, fix the obvious bugs or implement improvements, but these fixes never get incorporated back into the original project because there's no mechanism for doing it. Everyone's reinventing the wheel.
(Score:4, Funny)