Actually I found the new format E3 way better (going as press). This was my first one since it shrunk and I found it much easier to check out games and get more time with developers. I've been thinking more and more in the last few years it should try and evolve with the times to become more of a press event and less of a consumer/developer event - GDC kicks its ass in terms of developer content anyway.
It was a little on the small side - there just weren't that many titles available (especially in PC games, which I thought was a little ironic given the massive spouting of "PC isn't dead" over the last few months).
I know one of the tenets of the legal system putting people in jail is so they can repay their debt to society. There's obviously a lot of debate about whether this happens, but maybe in this case a good option would be to give him a PC and let him spend the next 15 years writing open source software.
Arguably if he enjoys doing it it might not be the punishment everyone would hope he could get, but at least the rest of society might benefit from his work while he's in there - something that's quite a bit different from the normal number-plate-stamping idea of prison productivity.
Every time someone whines about the low limits I bring up the story of my grandfather, who - until about a year ago - was happily on a 300mb BigPond broadband cable plan for maybe 3-4 years.
He simple did not need any more data. He used his Internet for light usage - checking the weather, reading emails, etc.
I would constantly point out the dangers of going over quota and getting huge bills (a common problem for many people) and he would just tell me its not a problem and he checks his data usage.
Lots of people don't need to download hundreds of gigabytes a month. They just don't. Smaller bandwidth quotas on cheaper plans make sense. The only lame thing is the excess charges are really high when the connection should just get shaped.
(He's an amazing guy - got his first PC at age ~77 and of all the relatives I've ever had, he's the only one I've never had to provide tech support for, because he actually reads the manuals. )
I'm sorry, but if you've never tried to develop an XUL application, then you're not qualified to judge whether not the previous poster is a troll.
I'm not saying XUL is bug free or painless for developers. The post I was replying to was a clear attack on the end-usability of XUL applications. I merely pointed out that I use XUL applications on a daily basis and don't experience "major" bugs.
Your post appears to support the troll but like the troll, you haven't even included any even anecdotal evidence to support your case, so I have no way of changing my opinion!
I'm passing up the opportunity to moderate you as 'troll' despite your obvious troll post on the basis that maybe, just maybe, you have some evidence to back up those statements. I'm not sure what bugs you're talking about but I use Firefox all day long every single day and very rarely have any problems.
I also use an application (MediaCoder) that I believe uses the XUL parts of Firefox seemingly without any problems (other than annoying load times for what should really be a simple control panel thing).
It's the users who paid the ISP for the bandwidth they use.
That's who it SHOULD be - but because the ISPs have fucked up, they're footing the bill. They didn't cater for the fact that their users might suddenly band together and form a content distribution network.
There has never been proof by any ISP that P2P is harming their businesses. Without proof, what they wish to do is nothing less than criminal.
I'm curious as to what proof you would find acceptable.
Question: who do you think foots the bill when a content creator decides to use BitTorrent to distribute their bytes?
Answer: it's not the content creator. It's the ISPs (.. it should be the "peer", but broken ISP pricing models make it the ISPs).
BitTorrent (the entity) has always billed its software as a way to reduce your content distribution overheads.
These overheads don't magically disappear - the cost of moving those bytes around hasn't gone anywhere. It's just been shifted from you to the "p" in p2p - the peers.
Now, this is "harming" (open to interpetation) the ISPs in the sense that in the US (and sounds like Canada), ISPs have gone the "unlimited downloads" route and are now paying for that stupidity when people actually try to use their pipe in an unlimited capacity (the audacity!).
While I have zero sympathy for the ISPs - in fact it's pretty clear most of them are being complete and utter dicks about the whole thing - I have started to sympathise somewhat, because they're absorbing the costs of content distribution from people who have seen that BitTorrent removes the burden of cost from them and puts its "over there" (ie, anywhere that it doesn't appear on their bill.
This is true even of legitimate content (World of Warcraft patches, Age of Conan Early Access client, Linux ISOs, etc) in addition to the illicit stuff that people use torrents for.
ISPs need to fix it, fast. Blocking BitTorrent is such a stupid option all round that it actually hurts my brain.
Sane monthly download quotes followed by traffic shaping OR EXTRA COSTS for those that exceed those quotas just makes so much more sense for any business.
I guess it's just going to come down to what is going to cost them less - restructuring their plans like that, or getting sued for continuing to advertise "unlimited" plans whilst taking every opportunity to limit them.
I notice they are conspicuously absent in the comments. They tend to jump up and down in any other post about PHP and MySQL. This is such a great example of the scalability and performance of it WHEN USED CORRECTLY.
I assume GP is referring to Nokia in the US where - according to what I've read on Slashdot, anyway (I'm not in the US) - they don't have as big market share.
Wading through endless crappy RSS feeds is boring, especially given the number of repeat posts you tend to see on a hundred different blogs. Feedzero tries to tame the chaos by letting you decide from a few feeds what you're interested in, then it magically adapts to what you like after some training.
You can then subscribe to a heap more feeds and get a much nicer filtered list of content.
It's still only really "alpha" and there's a bunch of bugs, but we're hoping to get it finished up soon.
And there is always C & D. C: Robot lander lands on Mars and completes mission. D: Philip Fry completes mission, but the return module will not leave Mars. Will we ever try that again? While I agree with the main sentiment of your post - that robots are better to send in the short term than people - I'd like to think that even if the first manned Mars mission met with disaster, there'd still be brave people queuing up to try again a second time.
From where I stand capped pipes are the exception and I understand that you think it's normal but it doesn't have to be. I see four possibilities: 1. European (and Japanese) ISP's are altruists. 2. You're getting raped by your ISP's 3. Australia's international traffic is more expensive due to fewer interconnects 4. A combination of 2 and 3. You forgot:
5. One of the biggest markets in the world has been lying to their customers about the definition of "unlimited" and, in fact, does not want to sell them an unlimited service. It blows my mind noone in the US has taken them to court about this yet (maybe they have?) given the (in)famous litigiousness of Americans.
I just see it as a logical progression for all ISPs to offer limited-bandwidth plans. As you point out Australia is far away and thus bandwidth delivery is more expensive - that's why we have awesome mirrors for a lot of things at the ISP level. But as broadband picks up, fibre becomes more prolific, content becomes high def - the only reasonable way to charge for your Internet connection is going to be bandwidth-based.
So it just seems inevitable to me that this is how everyone will end up.
And it's definitely non-obvious here. If anything, I'd say it's obvious you love Apple (nothing wrong with that; certainly not calling you a fanboy or anything juvenile of the sort. I love Apple, in general, too.) and as a result of this love for Apple, will happily take it up the tailpipe from Apple when it comes to their connector (and as much as I love Apple - I do not love their connector.) I am not an Apple fanboy by any means. I just happen to have an iPod; it has a conveniently sized charger, and I realise that many many more people have iPod-charger-compatible devices (iPods, iPhones).
You are happy to let Apple rule the roost.. what roost is that? The 'mp3 player' roost? The 'smartphone' roost? The roost of creating a decent charging device that everyone would be more or less happy to use.
But while it isn't, and Apple is charging for licenses*, most manufacturers are not going to sell a universal power supply with an added Apple-licensed connector costing them $NNNNNNNNN when only a fraction of the users actually use the thing.
But then, who's going to pay $4 + S&H + a marginal profit for a little plug nub (shiny, white and "Made for iPod / compatible with iPhone"-logofied as it may be) when you can get a full-on charger elsewhere for $10, and can then charge your iPod / iPhone in parallel with whatever non-Apple device you've got hanging off of your universal power supply? as I said - I'd happily pay that (and more) if it meant I didn't have to carry around multiple chargers.
You seem to be rabidly anti-Apple; I'm not pro-Apple in any way - I just realise that they have a big market share and am prepared to accept that, along with the fact that I think it makes sense for people to sell devices that can charge off something that so many millions of people have.
I think that is a much more likely outcome than everyone magically switching to just using generic USB for charging or something - again, there's more money for them not to.
I'd love to, and would if I could. But (afaik) my phone (some nokia thing) can't charge from USB without a special connector. My iPaq is old and has some dumb charger that I can buy which was like $60 (newer iPaqs can charge direct from USB, I'm thinking about upgrading for that almost alone). My cameras, etc, can't charge without other special adapters. So I'm sort of boned, either way - I have to cart around a stack of power cables or invest quite a bit in buying bullshit proprietary cables/connectors or risk buying cheap knockoffs.
When I was in Scotland last year, a tour guide told me about Scotland's "Freedom to Roam" - he basically said there's no trespassing laws (or words to that effect) so you can wander around the whole country.
A quick Google seems to show that this might not be the case anymore but I remember that as I thought it sounded awesome.
Meanwhile 'regular' people will be complaining because they don't understand their up/down ratios, why bandwidth costs more going in one direction than the other, why they had to pay $5 extra one month when they didn't do anything out of the ordinary.... except update windows to sp3... and according to the MS page, thats only a 97kb download. as pointed out in another comment, this is how we already roll in Australia. It took a while, but most people understand now that bandwidth is a limited resource and "unlimited" is not something that exists.
The crux of the problem is that US ISPs are advertising unlimited and don't want to deliver it. We in Australia went through that already, the ISPs got told to stop being jerks, and now they can't do that anymore.
The sooner the US ISPs start doing that the better - there's an adjustment period as people realise Internet connectivity needs to be treated like electricty - the more you use, the more it costs.
I'd happily pay an extra $5 or $10 for a device if it had an iPod charge connector.
I travel a bit and it is a royal pain in the ass to have to have to carry multiple chargers. I'm up to 5 now - laptop, phone, ipod, ipaq, and camera chargers (yes, I could scale back what I take, but I don't want to; I use all those devices a lot on the move).
It is probably one of the most common electronic devices so I'm really surprised there's not more out there. I know Apple wants a cut, but I can't imagine its more than a couple of dollars per device and I'd HAPPILY pay the extra for it. In addition to the above 5 devices I have a billion more at home that I don't want either.
While I'd obviously much rather see some generic standard take hold, I can't see that happening because these add-on peripheral things are clearly such an awesome cashcow for consumer electronics makers. In the meantime, I'm happy to let Apple rule the roost.
But just because you can play Guitar Hero and have a blast of a time doing so, it doesn't necessarily mean you can play the guitar. What if you can fly a plane in a flight simulator?!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I found the new format E3 way better (going as press). This was my first one since it shrunk and I found it much easier to check out games and get more time with developers. I've been thinking more and more in the last few years it should try and evolve with the times to become more of a press event and less of a consumer/developer event - GDC kicks its ass in terms of developer content anyway.
It was a little on the small side - there just weren't that many titles available (especially in PC games, which I thought was a little ironic given the massive spouting of "PC isn't dead" over the last few months).
I know one of the tenets of the legal system putting people in jail is so they can repay their debt to society. There's obviously a lot of debate about whether this happens, but maybe in this case a good option would be to give him a PC and let him spend the next 15 years writing open source software.
Arguably if he enjoys doing it it might not be the punishment everyone would hope he could get, but at least the rest of society might benefit from his work while he's in there - something that's quite a bit different from the normal number-plate-stamping idea of prison productivity.
Every time someone whines about the low limits I bring up the story of my grandfather, who - until about a year ago - was happily on a 300mb BigPond broadband cable plan for maybe 3-4 years.
He simple did not need any more data. He used his Internet for light usage - checking the weather, reading emails, etc.
I would constantly point out the dangers of going over quota and getting huge bills (a common problem for many people) and he would just tell me its not a problem and he checks his data usage.
Lots of people don't need to download hundreds of gigabytes a month. They just don't. Smaller bandwidth quotas on cheaper plans make sense. The only lame thing is the excess charges are really high when the connection should just get shaped.
(He's an amazing guy - got his first PC at age ~77 and of all the relatives I've ever had, he's the only one I've never had to provide tech support for, because he actually reads the manuals. )
Does it pass the originating site along with it as a referrer or something?
I'm sorry, but if you've never tried to develop an XUL application, then you're not qualified to judge whether not the previous poster is a troll.
I'm not saying XUL is bug free or painless for developers. The post I was replying to was a clear attack on the end-usability of XUL applications. I merely pointed out that I use XUL applications on a daily basis and don't experience "major" bugs.
Your post appears to support the troll but like the troll, you haven't even included any even anecdotal evidence to support your case, so I have no way of changing my opinion!
I'm passing up the opportunity to moderate you as 'troll' despite your obvious troll post on the basis that maybe, just maybe, you have some evidence to back up those statements. I'm not sure what bugs you're talking about but I use Firefox all day long every single day and very rarely have any problems.
I also use an application (MediaCoder) that I believe uses the XUL parts of Firefox seemingly without any problems (other than annoying load times for what should really be a simple control panel thing).
It's the users who paid the ISP for the bandwidth they use.
That's who it SHOULD be - but because the ISPs have fucked up, they're footing the bill. They didn't cater for the fact that their users might suddenly band together and form a content distribution network.
There has never been proof by any ISP that P2P is harming their businesses. Without proof, what they wish to do is nothing less than criminal.
I'm curious as to what proof you would find acceptable.
Question: who do you think foots the bill when a content creator decides to use BitTorrent to distribute their bytes?
Answer: it's not the content creator. It's the ISPs (.. it should be the "peer", but broken ISP pricing models make it the ISPs).
BitTorrent (the entity) has always billed its software as a way to reduce your content distribution overheads.
These overheads don't magically disappear - the cost of moving those bytes around hasn't gone anywhere. It's just been shifted from you to the "p" in p2p - the peers.
Now, this is "harming" (open to interpetation) the ISPs in the sense that in the US (and sounds like Canada), ISPs have gone the "unlimited downloads" route and are now paying for that stupidity when people actually try to use their pipe in an unlimited capacity (the audacity!).
While I have zero sympathy for the ISPs - in fact it's pretty clear most of them are being complete and utter dicks about the whole thing - I have started to sympathise somewhat, because they're absorbing the costs of content distribution from people who have seen that BitTorrent removes the burden of cost from them and puts its "over there" (ie, anywhere that it doesn't appear on their bill.
This is true even of legitimate content (World of Warcraft patches, Age of Conan Early Access client, Linux ISOs, etc) in addition to the illicit stuff that people use torrents for.
ISPs need to fix it, fast. Blocking BitTorrent is such a stupid option all round that it actually hurts my brain.
Sane monthly download quotes followed by traffic shaping OR EXTRA COSTS for those that exceed those quotas just makes so much more sense for any business.
I guess it's just going to come down to what is going to cost them less - restructuring their plans like that, or getting sued for continuing to advertise "unlimited" plans whilst taking every opportunity to limit them.
heh true dat, but the same can be said of just about anything
I notice they are conspicuously absent in the comments. They tend to jump up and down in any other post about PHP and MySQL. This is such a great example of the scalability and performance of it WHEN USED CORRECTLY.
I assume GP is referring to Nokia in the US where - according to what I've read on Slashdot, anyway (I'm not in the US) - they don't have as big market share.
[plug]
This is basically the exact reason we built Feedzero - http://www.feedzero.com./
Wading through endless crappy RSS feeds is boring, especially given the number of repeat posts you tend to see on a hundred different blogs. Feedzero tries to tame the chaos by letting you decide from a few feeds what you're interested in, then it magically adapts to what you like after some training.
You can then subscribe to a heap more feeds and get a much nicer filtered list of content.
It's still only really "alpha" and there's a bunch of bugs, but we're hoping to get it finished up soon.
Sounds like the story of the Mission to Mars movie :)
See: Apollo 1.
1. European (and Japanese) ISP's are altruists.
2. You're getting raped by your ISP's
3. Australia's international traffic is more expensive due to fewer interconnects
4. A combination of 2 and 3. You forgot:
5. One of the biggest markets in the world has been lying to their customers about the definition of "unlimited" and, in fact, does not want to sell them an unlimited service. It blows my mind noone in the US has taken them to court about this yet (maybe they have?) given the (in)famous litigiousness of Americans.
I just see it as a logical progression for all ISPs to offer limited-bandwidth plans. As you point out Australia is far away and thus bandwidth delivery is more expensive - that's why we have awesome mirrors for a lot of things at the ISP level. But as broadband picks up, fibre becomes more prolific, content becomes high def - the only reasonable way to charge for your Internet connection is going to be bandwidth-based.
So it just seems inevitable to me that this is how everyone will end up.
You seem to be rabidly anti-Apple; I'm not pro-Apple in any way - I just realise that they have a big market share and am prepared to accept that, along with the fact that I think it makes sense for people to sell devices that can charge off something that so many millions of people have.
I think that is a much more likely outcome than everyone magically switching to just using generic USB for charging or something - again, there's more money for them not to.
I'd love to, and would if I could. But (afaik) my phone (some nokia thing) can't charge from USB without a special connector. My iPaq is old and has some dumb charger that I can buy which was like $60 (newer iPaqs can charge direct from USB, I'm thinking about upgrading for that almost alone). My cameras, etc, can't charge without other special adapters. So I'm sort of boned, either way - I have to cart around a stack of power cables or invest quite a bit in buying bullshit proprietary cables/connectors or risk buying cheap knockoffs.
When I was in Scotland last year, a tour guide told me about Scotland's "Freedom to Roam" - he basically said there's no trespassing laws (or words to that effect) so you can wander around the whole country.
A quick Google seems to show that this might not be the case anymore but I remember that as I thought it sounded awesome.
The crux of the problem is that US ISPs are advertising unlimited and don't want to deliver it. We in Australia went through that already, the ISPs got told to stop being jerks, and now they can't do that anymore.
The sooner the US ISPs start doing that the better - there's an adjustment period as people realise Internet connectivity needs to be treated like electricty - the more you use, the more it costs.
I'd happily pay an extra $5 or $10 for a device if it had an iPod charge connector.
I travel a bit and it is a royal pain in the ass to have to have to carry multiple chargers. I'm up to 5 now - laptop, phone, ipod, ipaq, and camera chargers (yes, I could scale back what I take, but I don't want to; I use all those devices a lot on the move).
It is probably one of the most common electronic devices so I'm really surprised there's not more out there. I know Apple wants a cut, but I can't imagine its more than a couple of dollars per device and I'd HAPPILY pay the extra for it. In addition to the above 5 devices I have a billion more at home that I don't want either.
While I'd obviously much rather see some generic standard take hold, I can't see that happening because these add-on peripheral things are clearly such an awesome cashcow for consumer electronics makers. In the meantime, I'm happy to let Apple rule the roost.
According to their website, AISO is 100% solar powered: bink. Not sure how big they are, but it's a start :)
Yep. Perhaps though it was there because he liked whacking off to it. And that should be fine too!
... and that alcohol and tobacco isn't alongside them.
(not saying they should be illegal, just pointing it out)
Am I blind, or is this not mentioned on CNN at all? It's not linked on their Bush topics page anywhere I can see, and search doesn't find it.
This seems like huge news, so it seems odd that CNN wouldn't be all over it?