I'm not talking overall latency - controller latency, video latency etc. is inherent in any system and I've assumed it equal in both cases because, well, they both have equal video latencies and controller latencies to deal with - this system doesn't say it runs on a "special low-latency monitor" or anything, so it's generic hardware that's cancelled out with either method. I'm talking about extra latency likely to be introduced OVER AND ABOVE the background latency of an existing system (which is 25ms for network vs Internet games for a basic online game to a GOOD server at low bandwidth over a good network link). In that case, they have *much* more latency than the basic online game, I would assume, and that's the only latency "variable" between the two really.
And this isn't really "running" anything... it's like watching an interactive Youtube video. Linux can run anything that publishers want to make for it, anyway. If they don't make games for it, that's the publishers problem and yours for not expressing your wishes.
I get 25ms latency in an ideal online gaming situation (i.e. it takes 25ms for my input to reach the server and the server information to reach me) with a good, nearby server (same country). That's at rates like 4-5 kbps using retranmission, UDP, etc. to keep losses to a minimum. I'm not affected by peak periods because I have a very good ISP.
How is anything which requires significantly more data going to work anywhere near those latencies? First, my router can kill a gaming session if someone opens a couple of webpages - people's connections will have to be *dead* to allow multi-Mbps connections anywhere near reliably. Then you have that data having to be received and processed at both ends - not a big task for the consumer but acting on Mbps takes much longer than acting on Kbps no matter what you do. Then you have the lack of ANY sort of "predictive" technology - even Doom, Quake etc. knew to do input smoothing and not send every input event and have the client/server compensate by basically guessing if the connection lagged for a few ms - that's not possible here.
Then you have that the BBC iPlayer streams can effectively kill a business-broadband connection on their own without proper QoS and they are talking significantly more bandwidth, and some of it in the other direction too. So even in the *ideal* situation, with an *ideal* ISP it'll be *worse* than an average game of Counterstrike to play. Translate that to what most people who would be interested in this service have (noisy wireless, crappy broadband, slow ISP connection, etc.) and it just makes for a disaster.
I'd love it to succeed. I'd also love it to have beta testing somewhere other than the US - but I have to admit my main factor in taking up the beta program would only be to see just how bad it is.
Unfortunately, one depends exclusively on the other in order to *be* rich. Whereas the other can make money just by slapping a few MP3's on a website and adding a Paypal donate button (there are some *BIG* name examples of this happening). One side also has knighted-persons who gained their knighthood through services to the music industry. One side also has the popular opinion and public vote. One side also will get on the news / Slashdot just by *saying* something like this and will encourage other people in their industry to follow suit.
There is only one winner - but it'll take *YEARS* to get there still. That winner *won't* be the consumer until the very last minute.
You can do some tricks with curved mirrors (like some arcade games from the 80's did with FMV) but in general, no. There's got to be something to "bounce" the light off to start it heading towards your eye. Possibly a light fog would make it "possible" but the practicalities behind getting a controlled, smooth fog to hover in mid-air aren't worth the effort.
You will always (at least with current tech) be required to sit in a certain viewing angle, to look at a certain device and for that device to be tailored to you (eye-distance, viewing-distance, flicker tolerance, etc.) to achieve perfectly convincing 3D. That's why it's never taken off despite being around for *decades*.
Because a printer costs almost nothing nowadays, certainly less than its component cost to a hobbyist when you can get Lexmark's etc. for about £20 brand new. Old printers are a great source of stepper motors because of this. The major problem is the ink, which is the hard bit to make effectively and cheaply on anything other than a mass scale - so actually with a £20 Lexmark printer and some "clone" ink refill, you've basically got something orders or magnitude more efficient than you could ever make yourself.
The tech being "open source" is a different matter, but we all *know* how printers work. An inkjet is no different to a dot matrix, except instead of hitting a physical pin into an inked ribbon, the carriage heats the ink through a very fine nozzle (probably out of the hobbyists reach without considerable skill/expense). The basic technology is a geared-down belt on a stepper motor. Try getting that working to within 300ths of an inch (300dpi) for less than £20. After that, the actual imprinting technology is either out of reach or difficult to manufacture / time accurately. Then you need control circuitry (WAY more than £20 worth of chip / effort / programming). Then you need the consumable in the first place, which doesn't clog, dry up, leak, etc. And laser printers? Don't even go there for hobbyist use.
Even back in the primarily-hobbyist days, "normal" types of printers around weren't in the hobbyist scene because you couldn't "make" them - the ZX printer on the Spectrum is one example - aluminium-coated paper which was printed on by an electrical "spark" because that's the only way it could be made affordable. Printers are one of those things that you can't make for anywhere near the price that 10 or 12 throwaway ones wouldn't cost. You don't gain anything at all. It's like saying, why doesn't someone make an "open-source" car? Because at the end of the day to make it would actually cost you more than just buying a new car anyway.
45/month? That's 1080 Euros in the same time period, which is 1,546.91 USD (according to XE.com today). So, actually, we're not paying that much less than the US. Admittedly that's "high-end" but the US is a helluva lot bigger than any particular EU country and we'd end up paying roaming on top of that if we change countries. Also, some of that $2000 is likely to be things like roaming charges etc. anyway.
So, ern... not that big a shock, really. Though why *anyone* would ever want to pay that amount of money for a damn phone, I have no idea.
Er, and that has to be one of the most ridiculous "solutions" ever to space debris, which is why nothing serious has been done about it. Firing a ground-based laser into space with the power to "obliterate" or affect even a small piece of space debris is incredibly stupid and then you have little matters like "aiming"... the size of the beam just outside the atmosphere would remove a lot of the power/accuracy to the point where it would be useless and/or affect other things NEAR it. Then you only have to make *one* tiny mistake and you take out birds, planes, helicopters, shuttles or satellites. That's not an insurmountable problem, we have good airspace control already, but the Outer Space Treaty is and no nation in the world will take kindly to any other nation "cleansing" the skies with a giant laser.
Then you have the fact that the falling debris (if not obliterated) may well land somewhere unfortunate with your responsibility (say you alter the path of it and it hits the ISS at high speed... whoops!). And we're not talking tiny little particles here, we're talking mirror-sized objects large enough to be fired up there in volumes to make a difference. It's not even *feasible* an idea for random items of strictly monitored space junk, in close orbit, of certain size.
The reason it's so *incredibly* cheaper to schedule things and waste propellant (THE most precious commodity of space travel) is because it's so incredibly damn expensive to actually fix the problem - far more so than getting to the Moon or Mars (which we've done countless times since the 60's *despite* space junk being a humungous problem for us). Space junk is killing the ISS bit by bit, not least as being mentioned in the Wiki article you cited as one of the main benefactors of the "technology". Space junk hinders every mission from every country on the planet. Space junk makes us burn more fuel and reschedule entire missions. If there was *any* reasonable suggestion about how to fix it, it would have been done already - one mission's worth of clean-up would pay for itself in a matter of years (not decades) in tracking costs, risk assessment, extra fuel, lost mission time, etc. The fact is that it's an almost impossible task with the type, size, speed and number of debris up there - some of that stuff is moving so fast it blasts holes in satellites, comes out the other side and *still* keeps moving unaffected. And that satellite then becomes another, uncontrollable, bit of space junk that has to be cleared up.
Any suggestion that we're anywhere *near* being able to clear the skies is ludicrous. But the benefits would be phenomenal in running costs of existing satellites alone.
The millions of tons of entirely man-made space junk still orbiting Earth that we can't do anything about and thus "schedule" windows for rocket launches because otherwise we miss the tiny holes that *are* in it? We actually have to track and trace every part all around the world every day because we *can't* clear it up and it's cheaper to just wait another month for the right window to come around than it is to get up there and bin it.
We have no way to stop it, no way to collect it, no way to dispose of it and that's just mostly accidental stuff (satellites that turned off, bolts that came loose etc.). Putting TRILLIONS of mirrors into orbit will make it all but impossible to collect them back up again and they will become a SUBSTANTIAL hindrance in the future, even if carefully placed now - things don't stay in perfect orbits and the slightest rogue particule can give something small velocity enough to move out of position.
Yeah, but it wasn't stamped on a card that you had to carry around with you. Neither was it tied into something which required your fingerprints. Neither was it tied into something that *you* would have to be pay for. Neither was it required even if you'd never committed a crime in your life.
Nobody's saying that "identity" or "databases" don't exist, of course they do and damn well should do to make people pay their taxes and carry their history into the future. What the nay-sayers are saying is: Why the hell is it being shoved onto something that's "voluntary-mandatory", that we have to pay for, that *links* all this information together automatically (that's entirely new), that nobody wants, that is prompting changes in the law, that's been forced in via the backdoor at least twice and been thoroughly destroyed/removed (by places like the House of Lords, etc.) each time and that POST OFFICES and third-party companies will be able to "verify" your identity for. It provides no benefit. It provides no security. It actually *weakens* the primitive security in place now. We're constantly told it's voluntary but then it appears in new guises that always say "you must have it" bound upon certain conditions (airport workers, foreign immigrants and now school-workers). And we're expected to foot the (billions of pounds worth of) bill for it.
I work in education. I have *zero* criminal links (hell, I've spoken to three police officers in my entire life - once when I was asked to pull off CCTV from a school camera, once when I broke down by the side of the road and they escorted me off, and once when I was running a youth club at 10pm and a new officer "popped in" to familiarise themselves with the local community) - I don't want this card. I heartily sign some of the higher-level criminal record checks (those that check for cautions and expired convictions and even just general notes from the Police Commissioner) against my name at least twice a year. I don't *need* the card and I'm certainly not going to be mandated to carry it in order to get a job unless everyone in the country has to as well. But that bill already fell through at least twice. They picked the wrong industry too, because education has some extraordinarily powerful unions.
If it's a choice between working in an industry that already persecutes men for being "potential paedophiles" more than any other and who want to enforce me to make changes to my life in order to prove that I'm actually not, and one where I just work for a normal company and don't have the hassle, the decision is very easy. They are crying out for male teachers (partly because of the persecution they face by working in schools that teach girls and daring to be male), they are crying out for teachers in general (hence nationwide advertising campaigns for the last 5 years), they are crying out for people in certain subjects, they are crying out for IT staff, they are crying out for simplifying paperwork and putting less burden on the school and they are crying out for greater *accuracy* in such checks... this doesn't solve any of those problems either and actually makes all those problems worse.
A children's author was recently required to have background checks because he sits in a school hall in front of dozens of teachers and reads a book to the school and answers questions. He would need an ID card under this legislation and several authors have already categorically stated that it's ludicrous and they'll just give up lecturing to schools. Yet, strangely, when the Prime Minister visits a school under similar situations, he's "not required" to have even a check, let alone an ID card.
It's another backdoor-entrance to getting mandatory ID cards by making so many people have to have them voluntarily (Wanna work? You have to have an ID card... but it's *your* choice) that eventually it's mandatory-by-default. And *still* nobody wants these damn things because they provide zero benefit at enormous cost.
Do you call multiple refridgerators, "two fridge?" No. One refridgerator, two refridgerators. One fridge, two fridges. One mathematic, two mathematics. One math, two maths.
Aicraft: One aeroplane, two plane? No. Cars: One automobile, two auto? No.
No. Americans get this wrong and all UK speakers say Maths -- with the s.... Which is why I had the (hastily typed and thus typo'ed) disclaimer there.
makes $35 on a $60 video game needs to sell 1.1 million copes to break even new games have just six weeks to sell.
So you make $38.5m in order to break even for ONE game, and you do that in six weeks. But marketing costs "up to three times more than the development" so that would mean that, say, development *definitely* costs less than $9.6m and marketing, say, $28.8m roughly (if you were to assume they were the only expenses).
So after investing let's say $5m over several years in development, you make $38.5m with that in SIX WEEKS and you think that's *all* to do with the marketing (especially as it DIES within six weeks - good marketing would stop the game dying I would think, not provide a one-off boost purchase)? I would think it was more to do with being a good game. Can't remember the last time I picked up a game because of a review in a magazine or online. I play demos (no demo? Aw, shame... not buying it then), I view videos on Youtube, I buy things because they appear as a new item on Steam, or I spot them in the shops.
Gaming is a demand industry, hence the only one that really solved the "on-demand buying/playing" with things like Steam, etc., hence the high piracy, pre-release leaks, etc. People want the new games. I don't think the marketing has anything to do with this because games that don't even get advertised get leaked/stolen before the marketing really drives up. How much is valve spending on HL2:Ep3 marketing? It'll spend next to nothing, I'm sure.
If you were to scrap that $20m-ish on marketing and just, say, make it equal to game development, you could instantaneously half the price of the game. That would BE your marketing right there - you'd barely need to do anything else, you'd be cheaper than all your rivals but the same quality. Or, say, just scrap the marketing entirely, release it on Steam (so it gets a lot of exposure on pre-release download, demo, release, etc. with little-to-no effort. Then you'd be raking in a slightly reduced amount much much quicker and over a much longer term and probably still at a much-reduced price.
The indie-games are going to win over the big titles sooner or later because this is exactly how they work. If I do have £50 I want to spend on games, then I'd much rather get 500 hours of gameplay for the same price than 20. I can even get a mix of genres, a mix of play-types (long, high-investment, or short, casual games), a mix that ensures I get at least one good game, etc.
The sums don't add up - imaging convincing an investor: we want $38.5m, we intend to spend three-quarters of that on the marketing for a six-week window in which we'll claw back the $38.5 if it takes off, and then the game is dead after that. We'll be spending a tiny proportion on development of the game.
If it tells you nothing else, it tells you that games are ALL hype these days. Give me Crayon Physics any day - saw it on a Youtube vid (not even an official one), wanted it, played demo, wanted it more, bought it, played it, still replay it. Not once did I see any marketing for it except it's official website. Did the same for Left4Dead, believe it or not - played a free weekend on Steam having only ever heard the name and never seen it played - ended up playing it to death and buying it. Where did the marketing work there?
Stop faffing about, making FIVE blockbuster games for the same money by just paying the development side, release them on something like Steam whenever you feel they are ready, when you make you development budget back, start another game project. I bet you'd make a lot more, and a steadier and sustainable, income.
Well, think what was around 16 years ago (1993) and project forward:
The compact disc had been invented for a little over 13 years and was still going strong (and would do until five-ten years after that).
Thinkpads were available with CD etc. (although we're talking 486's here because the Pentium was JUST coming out)
So if you dug up an old 486 with some CD's now, how hard would it be to get running? How hard if your particular units didn't work? Not very.
Now project 16 years into the future - buy yourself some *new* reliable technology (CD was in its infancy as a computer format in 1993). Make it as standard and popular as possible. Throw in a device that's still likely to be passed around on second-hand websites like eBay just in case. Hell, I can still buy ZX Spectrums for little more than a few dollars, and that was 25 years ago. Hedge your bets... use a Blu-Ray AND DVD for everything you want to put in there. Throw in some Windows / Linux / Open Source / freeware to read the data (don't do a BBC Domesday project and have to decode the software as well as find the hardware).
If you wanna be ultra-sure... throw in a Gumstix or something small and capable of playing the media (you could use USB memory in this case, or CompactFlash or similar). Hardware easily survives 16 years if you look after it or don't touch it. The data media may not (especially writable media) so project it forward with each transition of your own personal data.
And most importantly - backup, backup, backup. Include *two* of each device, and two copies of the data in two different media, on two seperate discs/flashs and keep a copy on your home machine to "upgrade" to the next new format.
Because you gain nothing for extraordinarily large amounts of work?
You don't get speed boosts, you have to write an OS (or borrow one) anyway, you have to write/maintain drivers for every piece of hardware under the sun (which almost certainly means licensing binary blobs from their manufacturers), cope with all their fancy BIOS-bugs and workarounds that even modern PC's still suffer from (read the Linux source code for these sorts of things - there are "QUIRK" entries everywhere) and for this you gain... What? Not a lot. You have a "unified" platform that nobody writes for so you're stuck with maintaining it. Every time machines are updated, you get complaints from customers that the software won't run, you don't get *any* performance benefits at all and it takes the customer 10 minutes (and probably several tries) to boot into the software... that's if they can manage it AT ALL... I don't know any "ordinary" user that has ever booted from CD/USB deliberately.
You basically take on Microsoft / Linux's job of building an operating system and don't get any benefit for you / the consumer.
Back in the days of standardised buses, soundcards, VESA VGA, 2Mb RAM etc. - possibly. Nowadays, not a chance in hell. It's a ridiculous suggestion on modern hardware.
Does it really matter? If they have access to your PC, why on Earth is this an issue anyway? Two-factor authentication or not, they have *ACCESS* to your Visa numbers, Amazon account, bank details (if you pay some bills online by direct transfer etc.). What the things *do* once they are on your machine is irrelevant. How they got there and finding them is infinitely more important.
Opera 9.54 rendered it in no time at all (nowhere near the download time, for instance), allows you to zoom in/out, pan, etc. immediately once it's loaded. SVG is obviously dependent on the number of objects and size of the rendered image, whereas bitmaps are pretty much only reliant on the size of the rendered image, so complex scenes *will* take longer to draw. But with decent code, it shouldn't be a problem at all and vector-based-desktops are the up-and-coming thing.
And I'd worry about a SSD that needs upgrades to ensure data retention (and, additionallly, some SSDs have had firmwares issued that the manufacturer then warns "Don't upgrade the firmware again... we broke the update / storage mechanism and you'll lose data until we sort out a NEW new firmware"). SSD's have one job - store data. That part should NEVER need updating. Performance, possibly, longevity and data retention - holy shit.
It's like saying that occasionally your fuel tank needs updating to improve it's fire-prevention, stop leakage etc. Maybe it does, but hell, I'd want a DIFFERENT fuel tank if that was the case, not one that "gets updated"... fix it in the design, not the firmware.
This is the problem - 20 years ago you DIDN'T need a driver for your monitor, or a flashing utility for your hard drive, or any of the other ridiculous things caused by not sticking to standards and/or designing the hardware badly. Today even the bloody photo-keyring I bought for someone had a firmware update issued for it.
More like a cycle... observe, theorise, observe to check results, refine theory.
In this case, this is exactly what's happened - the observations looks like they may not fit the theory perfectly - hence, once that's been double-checked, go back and revise the theory and try to find out why.
If you don't test the theory, it's worthless. And if you posit a theory, only observation will definitively "prove" it. Science is about positing theories, observing results, and if they fit the theory - WONDERFUL... you just "predicted" part of the universe that nobody has before.
Can't find the button that you have to hold for five seconds. Besides... would you want to press it? I can't guarantee that my laptop will turn on again next time, let alone the Universe.
It's called evolution. We developed a tool to save time, can mass-produce that tool in a standardised format and find it infinitely preferable to older alternatives. I can type over 100WPM. I can write *legibly* about 15-20, faster if only I have to read it. That's about as much as could ever be said for my handwriting, anyway: legible.
My mother once complained to my primary school (aged about 8) that the teachers were saying my handwriting wasn't good enough. Her rule was, if it was good enough for the teacher to tell if the answer was right or wrong, then it wasn't a problem. The teachers disagreed until she visited, but soon relented. I think that's saved me a lot of unnecessary hassle over the years. I think it's also entirely correct. If I'm not writing it for other people, it doesn't matter. If I'm writing it for other people, it matters that they can read it. If I'm writing for *display*, that's another matter entirely. I can't remember the last time that was necessary.
I communicate. How I do it is to use the most convenient medium. In the same way that people decried the demise of the quill, or stone-engraving, so people are getting rid of the pen except for quick notes. How long do you think it will *genuinely* last once we have some sort of electronic paper? My guess is months, not decades.
When was the last time you employed someone whose CV was hand-written?:-)
If you're THAT reliant on a single *application*, you have bigger problems anyway. What if the application breaks, or its creator goes out of business, or become vulnerable to a serious security flaw that doesn't get updated for years, etc.?
If your data is THAT important, you'd at least secure something - whether that be the application (e.g. by bringing it in-house and doing it yourself) or the data (by using more standardised formats, etc.)
"Switching applications", "Switching OS", etc. should be TRANSPARENT to any business that relies on its data that badly. Otherwise the disappearance or modification of those things will break the business, not just the computer system, and permanently, not just for a day or two.
You know MS make more money out of Europe than they do out of the US? I say Windows should default to damn UK English on UK keyboards, but it ain't gonna happen. And the reason "nobody buys it" is circular with the reason it's been removed in the first place - nobody buys things like Windows "N" because, basically, you can't from any of the retailers that sell OS pre-installed computers, because Microsoft basically make it prohibitive on a business basis. It's virtually impossible to find - I don't know of a single retailer (even Dell, etc.) that offer it. And because of that, that's why they are under investigation STILL for monopolistic practices.
First, you have some serious issues about cleanliness if "just a bath" or "just a shower" is insufficient for you. If you think that you somehow magically gain "hygiene" by washing your bum or nadgers in a seperate appliance, then feel free. But the world has done without bidets for much of its life, and for the majority of its citizens in first-world countries. If you think it makes a difference to your overall cleanliness, I believe you're mistaken. I think you just have a complex about certain parts of your body being "dirty". What would you do on a hiking trip where you're lucky to get water that's sanitary?
Hot tap. Cold tap. Marked appropriately, because one is heated, the other unheated. The world seems to have grasped and adopted this principle with ease. Either... SHOCK, HORROR, run them both to create warm water (WOW!), buy a mixer tap (which does the same thing but "easier" for the dumb-of-hand) or install a temperature-controlled water system to your house (something which I've never seen installed anywhere because, you know, people cope quite easily with this). I've never found anyone else who's ever had a problem with this. And if your hot water is THAT hot, you must have a very old boiler that isn't temperature controlled seperately from the heating, or you're pissing away energy all the time for water that's too hot for you anyway. Or maybe that's a hygiene thing again, that you think that "hot water is better" somehow (not really, not in those temperature ranges)?
Number 3, I have to agree with, though. And number 4 to an extent, but being subject to abuse doesn't mean it fails to serve those in need too. It does an amazingly good job at that, I feel... in fact... TOO good.
Despite those problems, I agree with your sentiments on copyright. And it's hard to offend a British person. We just denigrate you for being different and then ignore you, mostly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not talking overall latency - controller latency, video latency etc. is inherent in any system and I've assumed it equal in both cases because, well, they both have equal video latencies and controller latencies to deal with - this system doesn't say it runs on a "special low-latency monitor" or anything, so it's generic hardware that's cancelled out with either method. I'm talking about extra latency likely to be introduced OVER AND ABOVE the background latency of an existing system (which is 25ms for network vs Internet games for a basic online game to a GOOD server at low bandwidth over a good network link). In that case, they have *much* more latency than the basic online game, I would assume, and that's the only latency "variable" between the two really.
And this isn't really "running" anything... it's like watching an interactive Youtube video. Linux can run anything that publishers want to make for it, anyway. If they don't make games for it, that's the publishers problem and yours for not expressing your wishes.
I get 25ms latency in an ideal online gaming situation (i.e. it takes 25ms for my input to reach the server and the server information to reach me) with a good, nearby server (same country). That's at rates like 4-5 kbps using retranmission, UDP, etc. to keep losses to a minimum. I'm not affected by peak periods because I have a very good ISP.
How is anything which requires significantly more data going to work anywhere near those latencies? First, my router can kill a gaming session if someone opens a couple of webpages - people's connections will have to be *dead* to allow multi-Mbps connections anywhere near reliably. Then you have that data having to be received and processed at both ends - not a big task for the consumer but acting on Mbps takes much longer than acting on Kbps no matter what you do. Then you have the lack of ANY sort of "predictive" technology - even Doom, Quake etc. knew to do input smoothing and not send every input event and have the client/server compensate by basically guessing if the connection lagged for a few ms - that's not possible here.
Then you have that the BBC iPlayer streams can effectively kill a business-broadband connection on their own without proper QoS and they are talking significantly more bandwidth, and some of it in the other direction too. So even in the *ideal* situation, with an *ideal* ISP it'll be *worse* than an average game of Counterstrike to play. Translate that to what most people who would be interested in this service have (noisy wireless, crappy broadband, slow ISP connection, etc.) and it just makes for a disaster.
I'd love it to succeed. I'd also love it to have beta testing somewhere other than the US - but I have to admit my main factor in taking up the beta program would only be to see just how bad it is.
Unfortunately, one depends exclusively on the other in order to *be* rich. Whereas the other can make money just by slapping a few MP3's on a website and adding a Paypal donate button (there are some *BIG* name examples of this happening). One side also has knighted-persons who gained their knighthood through services to the music industry. One side also has the popular opinion and public vote. One side also will get on the news / Slashdot just by *saying* something like this and will encourage other people in their industry to follow suit.
There is only one winner - but it'll take *YEARS* to get there still. That winner *won't* be the consumer until the very last minute.
You can do some tricks with curved mirrors (like some arcade games from the 80's did with FMV) but in general, no. There's got to be something to "bounce" the light off to start it heading towards your eye. Possibly a light fog would make it "possible" but the practicalities behind getting a controlled, smooth fog to hover in mid-air aren't worth the effort.
You will always (at least with current tech) be required to sit in a certain viewing angle, to look at a certain device and for that device to be tailored to you (eye-distance, viewing-distance, flicker tolerance, etc.) to achieve perfectly convincing 3D. That's why it's never taken off despite being around for *decades*.
Because a printer costs almost nothing nowadays, certainly less than its component cost to a hobbyist when you can get Lexmark's etc. for about £20 brand new. Old printers are a great source of stepper motors because of this. The major problem is the ink, which is the hard bit to make effectively and cheaply on anything other than a mass scale - so actually with a £20 Lexmark printer and some "clone" ink refill, you've basically got something orders or magnitude more efficient than you could ever make yourself.
The tech being "open source" is a different matter, but we all *know* how printers work. An inkjet is no different to a dot matrix, except instead of hitting a physical pin into an inked ribbon, the carriage heats the ink through a very fine nozzle (probably out of the hobbyists reach without considerable skill/expense). The basic technology is a geared-down belt on a stepper motor. Try getting that working to within 300ths of an inch (300dpi) for less than £20. After that, the actual imprinting technology is either out of reach or difficult to manufacture / time accurately. Then you need control circuitry (WAY more than £20 worth of chip / effort / programming). Then you need the consumable in the first place, which doesn't clog, dry up, leak, etc. And laser printers? Don't even go there for hobbyist use.
Even back in the primarily-hobbyist days, "normal" types of printers around weren't in the hobbyist scene because you couldn't "make" them - the ZX printer on the Spectrum is one example - aluminium-coated paper which was printed on by an electrical "spark" because that's the only way it could be made affordable. Printers are one of those things that you can't make for anywhere near the price that 10 or 12 throwaway ones wouldn't cost. You don't gain anything at all. It's like saying, why doesn't someone make an "open-source" car? Because at the end of the day to make it would actually cost you more than just buying a new car anyway.
No, but it would account for quite a bit of the difference.
45/month? That's 1080 Euros in the same time period, which is 1,546.91 USD (according to XE.com today). So, actually, we're not paying that much less than the US. Admittedly that's "high-end" but the US is a helluva lot bigger than any particular EU country and we'd end up paying roaming on top of that if we change countries. Also, some of that $2000 is likely to be things like roaming charges etc. anyway.
So, ern... not that big a shock, really. Though why *anyone* would ever want to pay that amount of money for a damn phone, I have no idea.
Er, and that has to be one of the most ridiculous "solutions" ever to space debris, which is why nothing serious has been done about it. Firing a ground-based laser into space with the power to "obliterate" or affect even a small piece of space debris is incredibly stupid and then you have little matters like "aiming"... the size of the beam just outside the atmosphere would remove a lot of the power/accuracy to the point where it would be useless and/or affect other things NEAR it. Then you only have to make *one* tiny mistake and you take out birds, planes, helicopters, shuttles or satellites. That's not an insurmountable problem, we have good airspace control already, but the Outer Space Treaty is and no nation in the world will take kindly to any other nation "cleansing" the skies with a giant laser.
Then you have the fact that the falling debris (if not obliterated) may well land somewhere unfortunate with your responsibility (say you alter the path of it and it hits the ISS at high speed... whoops!). And we're not talking tiny little particles here, we're talking mirror-sized objects large enough to be fired up there in volumes to make a difference. It's not even *feasible* an idea for random items of strictly monitored space junk, in close orbit, of certain size.
The reason it's so *incredibly* cheaper to schedule things and waste propellant (THE most precious commodity of space travel) is because it's so incredibly damn expensive to actually fix the problem - far more so than getting to the Moon or Mars (which we've done countless times since the 60's *despite* space junk being a humungous problem for us). Space junk is killing the ISS bit by bit, not least as being mentioned in the Wiki article you cited as one of the main benefactors of the "technology". Space junk hinders every mission from every country on the planet. Space junk makes us burn more fuel and reschedule entire missions. If there was *any* reasonable suggestion about how to fix it, it would have been done already - one mission's worth of clean-up would pay for itself in a matter of years (not decades) in tracking costs, risk assessment, extra fuel, lost mission time, etc. The fact is that it's an almost impossible task with the type, size, speed and number of debris up there - some of that stuff is moving so fast it blasts holes in satellites, comes out the other side and *still* keeps moving unaffected. And that satellite then becomes another, uncontrollable, bit of space junk that has to be cleared up.
Any suggestion that we're anywhere *near* being able to clear the skies is ludicrous. But the benefits would be phenomenal in running costs of existing satellites alone.
The millions of tons of entirely man-made space junk still orbiting Earth that we can't do anything about and thus "schedule" windows for rocket launches because otherwise we miss the tiny holes that *are* in it? We actually have to track and trace every part all around the world every day because we *can't* clear it up and it's cheaper to just wait another month for the right window to come around than it is to get up there and bin it.
We have no way to stop it, no way to collect it, no way to dispose of it and that's just mostly accidental stuff (satellites that turned off, bolts that came loose etc.). Putting TRILLIONS of mirrors into orbit will make it all but impossible to collect them back up again and they will become a SUBSTANTIAL hindrance in the future, even if carefully placed now - things don't stay in perfect orbits and the slightest rogue particule can give something small velocity enough to move out of position.
Yeah, but it wasn't stamped on a card that you had to carry around with you. Neither was it tied into something which required your fingerprints. Neither was it tied into something that *you* would have to be pay for. Neither was it required even if you'd never committed a crime in your life.
Nobody's saying that "identity" or "databases" don't exist, of course they do and damn well should do to make people pay their taxes and carry their history into the future. What the nay-sayers are saying is: Why the hell is it being shoved onto something that's "voluntary-mandatory", that we have to pay for, that *links* all this information together automatically (that's entirely new), that nobody wants, that is prompting changes in the law, that's been forced in via the backdoor at least twice and been thoroughly destroyed/removed (by places like the House of Lords, etc.) each time and that POST OFFICES and third-party companies will be able to "verify" your identity for. It provides no benefit. It provides no security. It actually *weakens* the primitive security in place now. We're constantly told it's voluntary but then it appears in new guises that always say "you must have it" bound upon certain conditions (airport workers, foreign immigrants and now school-workers). And we're expected to foot the (billions of pounds worth of) bill for it.
I work in education. I have *zero* criminal links (hell, I've spoken to three police officers in my entire life - once when I was asked to pull off CCTV from a school camera, once when I broke down by the side of the road and they escorted me off, and once when I was running a youth club at 10pm and a new officer "popped in" to familiarise themselves with the local community) - I don't want this card. I heartily sign some of the higher-level criminal record checks (those that check for cautions and expired convictions and even just general notes from the Police Commissioner) against my name at least twice a year. I don't *need* the card and I'm certainly not going to be mandated to carry it in order to get a job unless everyone in the country has to as well. But that bill already fell through at least twice. They picked the wrong industry too, because education has some extraordinarily powerful unions.
If it's a choice between working in an industry that already persecutes men for being "potential paedophiles" more than any other and who want to enforce me to make changes to my life in order to prove that I'm actually not, and one where I just work for a normal company and don't have the hassle, the decision is very easy. They are crying out for male teachers (partly because of the persecution they face by working in schools that teach girls and daring to be male), they are crying out for teachers in general (hence nationwide advertising campaigns for the last 5 years), they are crying out for people in certain subjects, they are crying out for IT staff, they are crying out for simplifying paperwork and putting less burden on the school and they are crying out for greater *accuracy* in such checks... this doesn't solve any of those problems either and actually makes all those problems worse.
A children's author was recently required to have background checks because he sits in a school hall in front of dozens of teachers and reads a book to the school and answers questions. He would need an ID card under this legislation and several authors have already categorically stated that it's ludicrous and they'll just give up lecturing to schools. Yet, strangely, when the Prime Minister visits a school under similar situations, he's "not required" to have even a check, let alone an ID card.
It's another backdoor-entrance to getting mandatory ID cards by making so many people have to have them voluntarily (Wanna work? You have to have an ID card... but it's *your* choice) that eventually it's mandatory-by-default. And *still* nobody wants these damn things because they provide zero benefit at enormous cost.
I will leave my industry if they m
Do you call multiple refridgerators, "two fridge?" No. One refridgerator, two refridgerators. One fridge, two fridges. One mathematic, two mathematics. One math, two maths.
Aicraft: One aeroplane, two plane? No.
Cars: One automobile, two auto? No.
No. Americans get this wrong and all UK speakers say Maths -- with the s.... Which is why I had the (hastily typed and thus typo'ed) disclaimer there.
Let's do the maths (Yes, there's IS an 's' in it)
makes $35 on a $60 video game
needs to sell 1.1 million copes to break even
new games have just six weeks to sell.
So you make $38.5m in order to break even for ONE game, and you do that in six weeks. But marketing costs "up to three times more than the development" so that would mean that, say, development *definitely* costs less than $9.6m and marketing, say, $28.8m roughly (if you were to assume they were the only expenses).
So after investing let's say $5m over several years in development, you make $38.5m with that in SIX WEEKS and you think that's *all* to do with the marketing (especially as it DIES within six weeks - good marketing would stop the game dying I would think, not provide a one-off boost purchase)? I would think it was more to do with being a good game. Can't remember the last time I picked up a game because of a review in a magazine or online. I play demos (no demo? Aw, shame... not buying it then), I view videos on Youtube, I buy things because they appear as a new item on Steam, or I spot them in the shops.
Gaming is a demand industry, hence the only one that really solved the "on-demand buying/playing" with things like Steam, etc., hence the high piracy, pre-release leaks, etc. People want the new games. I don't think the marketing has anything to do with this because games that don't even get advertised get leaked/stolen before the marketing really drives up. How much is valve spending on HL2:Ep3 marketing? It'll spend next to nothing, I'm sure.
If you were to scrap that $20m-ish on marketing and just, say, make it equal to game development, you could instantaneously half the price of the game. That would BE your marketing right there - you'd barely need to do anything else, you'd be cheaper than all your rivals but the same quality. Or, say, just scrap the marketing entirely, release it on Steam (so it gets a lot of exposure on pre-release download, demo, release, etc. with little-to-no effort. Then you'd be raking in a slightly reduced amount much much quicker and over a much longer term and probably still at a much-reduced price.
The indie-games are going to win over the big titles sooner or later because this is exactly how they work. If I do have £50 I want to spend on games, then I'd much rather get 500 hours of gameplay for the same price than 20. I can even get a mix of genres, a mix of play-types (long, high-investment, or short, casual games), a mix that ensures I get at least one good game, etc.
The sums don't add up - imaging convincing an investor: we want $38.5m, we intend to spend three-quarters of that on the marketing for a six-week window in which we'll claw back the $38.5 if it takes off, and then the game is dead after that. We'll be spending a tiny proportion on development of the game.
If it tells you nothing else, it tells you that games are ALL hype these days. Give me Crayon Physics any day - saw it on a Youtube vid (not even an official one), wanted it, played demo, wanted it more, bought it, played it, still replay it. Not once did I see any marketing for it except it's official website. Did the same for Left4Dead, believe it or not - played a free weekend on Steam having only ever heard the name and never seen it played - ended up playing it to death and buying it. Where did the marketing work there?
Stop faffing about, making FIVE blockbuster games for the same money by just paying the development side, release them on something like Steam whenever you feel they are ready, when you make you development budget back, start another game project. I bet you'd make a lot more, and a steadier and sustainable, income.
I say we nuke the entire site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure.
Well, think what was around 16 years ago (1993) and project forward:
The compact disc had been invented for a little over 13 years and was still going strong (and would do until five-ten years after that).
Thinkpads were available with CD etc. (although we're talking 486's here because the Pentium was JUST coming out)
So if you dug up an old 486 with some CD's now, how hard would it be to get running? How hard if your particular units didn't work? Not very.
Now project 16 years into the future - buy yourself some *new* reliable technology (CD was in its infancy as a computer format in 1993). Make it as standard and popular as possible. Throw in a device that's still likely to be passed around on second-hand websites like eBay just in case. Hell, I can still buy ZX Spectrums for little more than a few dollars, and that was 25 years ago. Hedge your bets... use a Blu-Ray AND DVD for everything you want to put in there. Throw in some Windows / Linux / Open Source / freeware to read the data (don't do a BBC Domesday project and have to decode the software as well as find the hardware).
If you wanna be ultra-sure... throw in a Gumstix or something small and capable of playing the media (you could use USB memory in this case, or CompactFlash or similar). Hardware easily survives 16 years if you look after it or don't touch it. The data media may not (especially writable media) so project it forward with each transition of your own personal data.
And most importantly - backup, backup, backup. Include *two* of each device, and two copies of the data in two different media, on two seperate discs/flashs and keep a copy on your home machine to "upgrade" to the next new format.
Because you gain nothing for extraordinarily large amounts of work?
You don't get speed boosts, you have to write an OS (or borrow one) anyway, you have to write/maintain drivers for every piece of hardware under the sun (which almost certainly means licensing binary blobs from their manufacturers), cope with all their fancy BIOS-bugs and workarounds that even modern PC's still suffer from (read the Linux source code for these sorts of things - there are "QUIRK" entries everywhere) and for this you gain... What? Not a lot. You have a "unified" platform that nobody writes for so you're stuck with maintaining it. Every time machines are updated, you get complaints from customers that the software won't run, you don't get *any* performance benefits at all and it takes the customer 10 minutes (and probably several tries) to boot into the software... that's if they can manage it AT ALL... I don't know any "ordinary" user that has ever booted from CD/USB deliberately.
You basically take on Microsoft / Linux's job of building an operating system and don't get any benefit for you / the consumer.
Back in the days of standardised buses, soundcards, VESA VGA, 2Mb RAM etc. - possibly. Nowadays, not a chance in hell. It's a ridiculous suggestion on modern hardware.
Does it really matter? If they have access to your PC, why on Earth is this an issue anyway? Two-factor authentication or not, they have *ACCESS* to your Visa numbers, Amazon account, bank details (if you pay some bills online by direct transfer etc.). What the things *do* once they are on your machine is irrelevant. How they got there and finding them is infinitely more important.
You want to use a better browser.
Opera 9.54 rendered it in no time at all (nowhere near the download time, for instance), allows you to zoom in /out, pan, etc. immediately once it's loaded. SVG is obviously dependent on the number of objects and size of the rendered image, whereas bitmaps are pretty much only reliant on the size of the rendered image, so complex scenes *will* take longer to draw. But with decent code, it shouldn't be a problem at all and vector-based-desktops are the up-and-coming thing.
Surely that's three reasons.
And I'd worry about a SSD that needs upgrades to ensure data retention (and, additionallly, some SSDs have had firmwares issued that the manufacturer then warns "Don't upgrade the firmware again... we broke the update / storage mechanism and you'll lose data until we sort out a NEW new firmware"). SSD's have one job - store data. That part should NEVER need updating. Performance, possibly, longevity and data retention - holy shit.
It's like saying that occasionally your fuel tank needs updating to improve it's fire-prevention, stop leakage etc. Maybe it does, but hell, I'd want a DIFFERENT fuel tank if that was the case, not one that "gets updated"... fix it in the design, not the firmware.
This is the problem - 20 years ago you DIDN'T need a driver for your monitor, or a flashing utility for your hard drive, or any of the other ridiculous things caused by not sticking to standards and/or designing the hardware badly. Today even the bloody photo-keyring I bought for someone had a firmware update issued for it.
More like a cycle... observe, theorise, observe to check results, refine theory.
In this case, this is exactly what's happened - the observations looks like they may not fit the theory perfectly - hence, once that's been double-checked, go back and revise the theory and try to find out why.
If you don't test the theory, it's worthless. And if you posit a theory, only observation will definitively "prove" it. Science is about positing theories, observing results, and if they fit the theory - WONDERFUL... you just "predicted" part of the universe that nobody has before.
Can't find the button that you have to hold for five seconds. Besides... would you want to press it? I can't guarantee that my laptop will turn on again next time, let alone the Universe.
It's called evolution. We developed a tool to save time, can mass-produce that tool in a standardised format and find it infinitely preferable to older alternatives. I can type over 100WPM. I can write *legibly* about 15-20, faster if only I have to read it. That's about as much as could ever be said for my handwriting, anyway: legible.
My mother once complained to my primary school (aged about 8) that the teachers were saying my handwriting wasn't good enough. Her rule was, if it was good enough for the teacher to tell if the answer was right or wrong, then it wasn't a problem. The teachers disagreed until she visited, but soon relented. I think that's saved me a lot of unnecessary hassle over the years. I think it's also entirely correct. If I'm not writing it for other people, it doesn't matter. If I'm writing it for other people, it matters that they can read it. If I'm writing for *display*, that's another matter entirely. I can't remember the last time that was necessary.
I communicate. How I do it is to use the most convenient medium. In the same way that people decried the demise of the quill, or stone-engraving, so people are getting rid of the pen except for quick notes. How long do you think it will *genuinely* last once we have some sort of electronic paper? My guess is months, not decades.
When was the last time you employed someone whose CV was hand-written? :-)
If you're THAT reliant on a single *application*, you have bigger problems anyway. What if the application breaks, or its creator goes out of business, or become vulnerable to a serious security flaw that doesn't get updated for years, etc.?
If your data is THAT important, you'd at least secure something - whether that be the application (e.g. by bringing it in-house and doing it yourself) or the data (by using more standardised formats, etc.)
"Switching applications", "Switching OS", etc. should be TRANSPARENT to any business that relies on its data that badly. Otherwise the disappearance or modification of those things will break the business, not just the computer system, and permanently, not just for a day or two.
You know MS make more money out of Europe than they do out of the US? I say Windows should default to damn UK English on UK keyboards, but it ain't gonna happen. And the reason "nobody buys it" is circular with the reason it's been removed in the first place - nobody buys things like Windows "N" because, basically, you can't from any of the retailers that sell OS pre-installed computers, because Microsoft basically make it prohibitive on a business basis. It's virtually impossible to find - I don't know of a single retailer (even Dell, etc.) that offer it. And because of that, that's why they are under investigation STILL for monopolistic practices.
Troll much?
First, you have some serious issues about cleanliness if "just a bath" or "just a shower" is insufficient for you. If you think that you somehow magically gain "hygiene" by washing your bum or nadgers in a seperate appliance, then feel free. But the world has done without bidets for much of its life, and for the majority of its citizens in first-world countries. If you think it makes a difference to your overall cleanliness, I believe you're mistaken. I think you just have a complex about certain parts of your body being "dirty". What would you do on a hiking trip where you're lucky to get water that's sanitary?
Hot tap. Cold tap. Marked appropriately, because one is heated, the other unheated. The world seems to have grasped and adopted this principle with ease. Either... SHOCK, HORROR, run them both to create warm water (WOW!), buy a mixer tap (which does the same thing but "easier" for the dumb-of-hand) or install a temperature-controlled water system to your house (something which I've never seen installed anywhere because, you know, people cope quite easily with this). I've never found anyone else who's ever had a problem with this. And if your hot water is THAT hot, you must have a very old boiler that isn't temperature controlled seperately from the heating, or you're pissing away energy all the time for water that's too hot for you anyway. Or maybe that's a hygiene thing again, that you think that "hot water is better" somehow (not really, not in those temperature ranges)?
Number 3, I have to agree with, though. And number 4 to an extent, but being subject to abuse doesn't mean it fails to serve those in need too. It does an amazingly good job at that, I feel... in fact... TOO good.
Despite those problems, I agree with your sentiments on copyright. And it's hard to offend a British person. We just denigrate you for being different and then ignore you, mostly.