Perhaps Teksavvy won't themselves, but knowing Bell, it would not surprise me to see them collecting data on their wholesale DSL lines that they lease to Teksavvy.
With all the BS they were pulling with capping the wholesale lines, it would actually be more of a surprise if they weren't... "Oh we had to install the monitoring appliances in our core. We just happen to monitor everyone now."
Breaking the manufacturing contract would probably cost Samsung a lot more than the $1 billion they lost here. Apparently Apple has already started moving away from Samsung's components in newer/upcoming devices. So, the writing was already on the wall for both parties.
Would this also possibly imply that a programmer needs to get a license to code in a specific language or to utilize a specific API? What is stopping Oracle from adding that to the JDK terms of use?
Many libraries do have ebook lending programs. They have a set number of licensed copies they can "lend". You must wait for people to "return" the ebook before you can get a copy. Yes... you have to wait. The main advantage I see is that I never have to pay overdue fees to the library since my book just expires when its "returned".
There is also the possibility that the flu will kill you. The chances of that happening vs. side effects killing you are probably greater, but that's just a guess.
Basing this solely on GDP is a bit presumptive. A good deal of income is Newfoundland is subsidized (both corporate and government) in order to give people incentives to come and work in high risk jobs (offshore oil, fishing). Think Alaska... same idea... high pay, high risk. Permanent population sticks around to service these guys, but when the resources bust or dry up, entire towns get deserted.
I cannot attest to the current quality of Sony products, as I have refused to even look at their products for 15 years (well before all this rootkit business).
I was bilked by their shoddy products many years ago, and discovered then that Sony has very distinct lines of products: 1) High end... which are probably worth it, but which I will not touch simply because I think other companies provide better products for the same price point and 2) everything else, which is at various price points. While the external style of these various products is quite good, I personally feel the internal electronics are no better than buying bargain electronics brands like Emerson, RCA, etc.
I suspect this method has a "bug" or its not working as expected in Chrome: 1) I am logged into Google apps, but it says I am not. 2) I do not have a twitter account, but it says I am logged in (and its blocked by Websense).
Any future society capable of devising the technology required to time travel into the past is not going to bother with anything as quaint as a cell phone. There are sufficiently capable in-ear devices in use even today that are capable of audio based communication and are much less conspicuous than holding a box to your head. Are we to think that we'll still be slugging around cell phones in our distant future, when sci-fi writers would have us believe that in-eye HUDs will be supplementing our realities? What is the point of toting around technology, when its built right into us?
Now, I know what you're thinking: BUT Doctor Who replaces the SIM card for each of his companions so they have a time-travelling cell phone. Yes, that's right, but its also because that's what that person's time is comfortable using. Heck, the form of the TARDIS itself is a throwback to this same idea. It was a comfortable icon at the time the series was actually created.
Now, yes, maybe this time traveler is "lost" and is improvising a makeshift communicator with readily available materials. I mean, that's what Data would do.
Mmm... you know, after browsing forums long enough, all the spammer has to do is add a caption at the beginning or end "Sorry my English is so bad, but... " and this might pass through quite a few more eyes before its caught. Kinda surprising they haven't caught on to that yet.
On the serious side, though: The way the US government is trending I think it's a really good idea to have a large number of weapons in the populace.
The general population may not figure into these comments, but there is some parallel thought among Americans. This is evident by the firearms shortage in the US. It started shortly after Obama was elected. This was primarily due to fears that the new administration would crack down with legislation on firearms, and to a lesser extent the extremists on right that believed that he was the anti-christ. In particular, ammo was in very short supply. It has abated to some extent in the last couple of years.
From what I understand, pure shortages are no longer much of an issue, but price of ammo in particular is considerably higher (basically doubled) than it was 2 years ago. This of course depends on the specific local market, etc, but on average the firearms market in the US is basically in a big... ummm... boom.
This isn't exactly a "prize". No one who submitted any of the ideas is the intended recipient of any of this money. Google's corporate board (re:advisory committee) will decide what to do with the money, and its going to places where the ideas can be implemented.
Just a couple of notes from the FAQ:
How many ideas are you funding? We have committed $10 million to fund up to five ideas selected by our advisory board.
How will Google implement these ideas? Once we've announced up to five ideas for funding, we'll begin the process of identifying the organization(s) that are in the best position to help implement the selected ideas.
How involved will Google be in the implementation of the ideas? We didn't focus on ideas that Google would implement alone; instead, we looked for ideas whose implementation will required another organization's expertise or resources. These organizations will be the recipients of the funding grants.
Well, this is interesting since Rogers actually sub-contracted their Usenet to Giganews last year. That must have cost them quite a bit, and there will be no recompense back to users? Hrmm...
While Giganews was nice for grabbing alt.bin* type stuff (57 day binary retention), they nicely capped the connection to 2 connections at 256kbits each. Not exactly flying down the pipe if you're on the extreme 5000kbit end of their service offering.
I expect out of the article's reported 3% of users that did use Usenet, only 3% of those actually use it for non-binary/legitimate type discussions. The noise level these guys are making is not going to make a dent in Rogers' bottom line.
Ahh well, I've been using Usenet for quite sometime. I will probably miss it in a sentimental way, but I really don't find it as useful as mailing lists for the type of discussions it used to be famous/useful for.
Actually, several adult sites did just that, and specifically pursued lawsuits on anyone that posted their content on Usenet. I believe they still monitor common Usenet groups very closely.
For the most part though, Usenet is not very easy for a typical home-user to use. While some Usenet apps are getting better at filtering and organizing the posting information, users still aren't happy about having to browse through 40,000 groups to find their favorite "stuff". BT, eDonkey, etc all offer search capabilities which makes finding content very easy. Usenet is also very transient in nature. As posts expire, content lapses out of scope and is no longer available until its reposted. Most ISP level Usenet access these days is lucky to have more than a week of retention on binary groups, so the transient nature of the data is further amplified. If you want higher retention, you'll probably end up paying for a dedicated Usenet provider.
In general, I think Usenet stays under the radar because its just too hard for the average Joe to utilize.
GUBA has been around for a long time by internet standards (1998 according to the WHOIS record). It has also been a pay site for as long as I can remember. I think they popped up about the time independent providers charging for Usenet hosting also appeared.
Did they change their interface? Is it faster? Why is this new?
There are other sites for finding recent Usenet binary postings. However, they all link to some level of intrinsically non-public binary information (just like GUBA, or BT for that matter). One would be better off looking for them on their own, rather than resourcing Slashdot for that information.
It bothers me a bit that the reviewer considered the content intermediate to advanced, yet found the database design chapter most informative. Design in my opinion should be mostly irrelavent to the database its implemented on. Sure, you can optimize certain aspects of a design based on the features of the database server, but this should not define the design. Design should be a study in itself and not something thrown in for the sake of completeness.
However, considering the average DB design skillz of a commonplace/low-rent PHP developer (or at least the ones I have had to clean up after). I am hopeful that more developers using PHP/MySQL will actually take the time to look at the content in this or other definitive books on MySQL.
That seems quite a self-righteous statement. Did you even think a bit about what you were about to say?
Two things come to mind: The mental degeneration that Alzheimer's causes is terrible and irreversable. Having seen my grandmother go through that ordeal, I would have to think that 5 years prior to his death that he was still well along in the effects of the disease.
Coupled with the physical degeneration that Parkinson's causes, leads to one simple idea. Perhaps its not James Doohan you should blame for leaving a fatherless child, it is probably his wife who bore the child that is to "blame". Its a bit of a miracle of modern science that this child exists at all. Like it or not, this pretty much HAD to be planned.
I would also hardly think that a celebrity like Mr. Doohan was living in abject poverty. I am sure his child and his widow will live comfortably, and she is still young enough to find a suitable father figure to introduce to her still impressionable 5 year old.
If a draft happens, it will happen relatively soon. Otherwise, it becomes "someone else's problem". Whether that is a step in any direction, who knows, but I don't think it will be as devisive as those few people may think. As independent and self-absorbed as American are, we are all trained in conformity from birth. That's what the government is really for, isn't it? Or, is that the public school system?
On your other point: The people who believe that a modern conscript army will become a revolutionary force are clueless and haven't spent a day in real military training. Independent thinking isn't a primary learning point in even day-0 of basic boot camp. From the time you get off that bus, you are no longer Johnny P. Teenager, you're who they want you to become, and they will drill that into your head until you agree wholeheartedly. Those that do not prove themselves willing and eager to conform to the team standard are typically washed out sooner than later.
However, idealogically inspired (religious or otherwise) militias: that's another kettle of fish. Islamic (or otherwise) terrorists are bad enough, but there are plenty of born-and-bred US citizens that are trouncing through the outbacks of rural America that have their own militant agendas.
Now I have entered enough primary keywords in this post to ensure I find my name into a database of my own.
When it comes down to it, internet use is just a communication medium. Somehow, this seems to treat the Internet like something new and completely unmonitored.
Does this infer that:
Phone companies are recording all telephone calls? The postal service opens everyone's mail and scans it into a central database? The cable company tracks each channel you are watching?
It appears to me that this is more of a marketing research project than a programming/interface one. Perhaps this is just an attempt to create new buzzology. Semantics and the study thereof usually pertain to linguistics and the management of creating meaning between tokens of language. Whether this be words or symbols, semantics is how we gather meaning from language. I suppose this interface has tokens, but they are rather scattered about and don't derive meaning on their own. The user is responsible for generating the semantics/meaning on their own. This does not make the interface semantic. Searching on Google for classical music alone, I will be forced to derive meaning there as well. It might take longer than using this interface, but specific interfaces to subsets of data is not what Google is about. It bothers me that they somehow want to compare their interface to Google. They would do better to compare to allmusic.com.
This interface does not provide a true linguistic or semantic approach to finding meaning. It provides a hierarchal drill down of data... which is nice, but its not semantic. Semantic search should derive meaning from my intent, or my communication of intent to the interface. Google is actually more semantically oriented. I provide the tokens of language, the interface should parse those tokens and realize my meaning. It can then provide me information based on that intent. This "semantic" interface provides me general meaning first and I have to figure out how that matters to me. Based on the premise of this article, I was hoping the interface would be able to parse language for meaning (better than Google) and then zap out some adequate results. Maybe something like "how did people feel about Bach's music?" and it would tell me all about how he was viewed in popular culture. Instead, I have to first know that Bach was a Classisist and then I can find that information in his larger biography. Not semantic.
If a person has a good understanding of how to create meaning for Google, it can provide better semantic searching than this interface. This is not unlike how people communicate when language is uncommon between them. If we're both speaking the same language, we should understand each other's meaning easily. Deeper meanings can also be derived (sarcasm, emotional cues, etc). When language is a barrier, the relation of meaning breaks down into simpler forms. Many language nuances get lost in the translation. Likewise, search engines are not quite up to speed with things like abstract connections between concepts in language. They understand that language has tokens, but they don't always make meaningful relationships between them.
My cable provider started Docsis 2.0 and offers 5M down 800k up. However, their plant design could not accomidate the demand for the product and Docsis 2.0 actually ended up underperforming my old 1.1 setup. Eventually, it looks like they upgraded equipment and everything is working well again, but I had sub-standard service for over 3 weeks. Thankfully, my only additional cost is the Docsis 2 modem which I was required to purchase.
My cable provider has a bit of a history in doing this sort of thing by testing improper setups with its "cutting edge" clientele. Hopefully this is not an industry behavior.
1) Core based processors have more internal/embedded synchronization built in, especially related to on chip caching. SMP relies more heavily on the O/S for maintaining concurrency. 2) Connection between processors is shorter and theoretically faster. The big gain here is that the MB components for SMP are all integrated on the CPU, so everything is simplified and compressed. 3) Cache in SMP is separate to each processor, core-processors share the cache between the processors. SMP must maintain cache concurrency... this the basis of threading headaches and this takes process cycles to do so. However, sharing the cache in a core processor is often a problem (Intel) if the cache isn't big enough. AMD currently does this better. 4) SMP means higher license costs for multiple processors, core based processors are considered one processing unit (at least to MS).
That last one tends to be the most important to alot of people.
Don't worry too much. Oracle must leech from your company as many dollars as possible while also ensuring you become addicted to their products. I'm sure Oracle will do their best to ensure PeopleSoft 9 is a high performance, exhaustively featured and difficult to administer product as anything else they have developed. Heck, its their business model: expensive products, expensive licensing, expensive support.
However, while Oracle may be very pricy, it does what it does very well. You might argue that you're paying alot more than you get, but who's to say what the real price of quality, well supported products is in this day-and-age. I can remember when MicroSoft user support was still actually free. Now, that same level of support is a premium service. Many companies still seem to "put up" with the products that they deliver.
When Oracle says they're planning to give PS clients A-one support. I believe them. PeopleSoft as a product will not go away entirely. Expect PS 10 to be fully integrated with the Oracle application line (maybe around Oracle 12). Of course, by then you'll be paying fully exhorbitant Oracle licensing fees, not intermediate ones.
This book sounds alot like what the infamous Chris Crawford has been preaching for the last 8-10 years. I see alot of good things in this outlook: basically that interactivity should be the primary tenet of good game design. However, I don't really agree that the storytelling/"live your own movie" pragma is the best approach to garnering true interactivity. Its certainly a good platform for creating an interactive environment, but if interactivity and is the key, it must be the basis on which the design is built, not the stage on which it is played. Understanding drama concepts is crucial to creating believable and coherent storylines, but without believable actors, it pretty much falls apart.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps Teksavvy won't themselves, but knowing Bell, it would not surprise me to see them collecting data on their wholesale DSL lines that they lease to Teksavvy.
With all the BS they were pulling with capping the wholesale lines, it would actually be more of a surprise if they weren't... "Oh we had to install the monitoring appliances in our core. We just happen to monitor everyone now."
Bleh!
Breaking the manufacturing contract would probably cost Samsung a lot more than the $1 billion they lost here. Apparently Apple has already started moving away from Samsung's components in newer/upcoming devices. So, the writing was already on the wall for both parties.
Would this also possibly imply that a programmer needs to get a license to code in a specific language or to utilize a specific API? What is stopping Oracle from adding that to the JDK terms of use?
Many libraries do have ebook lending programs. They have a set number of licensed copies they can "lend". You must wait for people to "return" the ebook before you can get a copy. Yes... you have to wait. The main advantage I see is that I never have to pay overdue fees to the library since my book just expires when its "returned".
There is also the possibility that the flu will kill you. The chances of that happening vs. side effects killing you are probably greater, but that's just a guess.
Basing this solely on GDP is a bit presumptive. A good deal of income is Newfoundland is subsidized (both corporate and government) in order to give people incentives to come and work in high risk jobs (offshore oil, fishing). Think Alaska... same idea... high pay, high risk. Permanent population sticks around to service these guys, but when the resources bust or dry up, entire towns get deserted.
I cannot attest to the current quality of Sony products, as I have refused to even look at their products for 15 years (well before all this rootkit business).
I was bilked by their shoddy products many years ago, and discovered then that Sony has very distinct lines of products: 1) High end... which are probably worth it, but which I will not touch simply because I think other companies provide better products for the same price point and 2) everything else, which is at various price points. While the external style of these various products is quite good, I personally feel the internal electronics are no better than buying bargain electronics brands like Emerson, RCA, etc.
Just my opinion though.
I suspect this method has a "bug" or its not working as expected in Chrome:
1) I am logged into Google apps, but it says I am not.
2) I do not have a twitter account, but it says I am logged in (and its blocked by Websense).
Something odd is afoot.
Any future society capable of devising the technology required to time travel into the past is not going to bother with anything as quaint as a cell phone. There are sufficiently capable in-ear devices in use even today that are capable of audio based communication and are much less conspicuous than holding a box to your head. Are we to think that we'll still be slugging around cell phones in our distant future, when sci-fi writers would have us believe that in-eye HUDs will be supplementing our realities? What is the point of toting around technology, when its built right into us?
Now, I know what you're thinking: BUT Doctor Who replaces the SIM card for each of his companions so they have a time-travelling cell phone. Yes, that's right, but its also because that's what that person's time is comfortable using. Heck, the form of the TARDIS itself is a throwback to this same idea. It was a comfortable icon at the time the series was actually created.
Now, yes, maybe this time traveler is "lost" and is improvising a makeshift communicator with readily available materials. I mean, that's what Data would do.
Mmm... you know, after browsing forums long enough, all the spammer has to do is add a caption at the beginning or end "Sorry my English is so bad, but... " and this might pass through quite a few more eyes before its caught. Kinda surprising they haven't caught on to that yet.
On the serious side, though: The way the US government is trending I think it's a really good idea to have a large number of weapons in the populace.
The general population may not figure into these comments, but there is some parallel thought among Americans. This is evident by the firearms shortage in the US. It started shortly after Obama was elected. This was primarily due to fears that the new administration would crack down with legislation on firearms, and to a lesser extent the extremists on right that believed that he was the anti-christ. In particular, ammo was in very short supply. It has abated to some extent in the last couple of years.
From what I understand, pure shortages are no longer much of an issue, but price of ammo in particular is considerably higher (basically doubled) than it was 2 years ago. This of course depends on the specific local market, etc, but on average the firearms market in the US is basically in a big... ummm... boom.
This isn't exactly a "prize". No one who submitted any of the ideas is the intended recipient of any of this money. Google's corporate board (re:advisory committee) will decide what to do with the money, and its going to places where the ideas can be implemented.
Just a couple of notes from the FAQ:
How many ideas are you funding?
We have committed $10 million to fund up to five ideas selected by our advisory board.
How will Google implement these ideas?
Once we've announced up to five ideas for funding, we'll begin the process of identifying the organization(s) that are in the best position to help implement the selected ideas.
How involved will Google be in the implementation of the ideas?
We didn't focus on ideas that Google would implement alone; instead, we looked for ideas whose implementation will required another organization's expertise or resources. These organizations will be the recipients of the funding grants.
Well, this is interesting since Rogers actually sub-contracted their Usenet to Giganews last year. That must have cost them quite a bit, and there will be no recompense back to users? Hrmm...
While Giganews was nice for grabbing alt.bin* type stuff (57 day binary retention), they nicely capped the connection to 2 connections at 256kbits each. Not exactly flying down the pipe if you're on the extreme 5000kbit end of their service offering.
I expect out of the article's reported 3% of users that did use Usenet, only 3% of those actually use it for non-binary/legitimate type discussions. The noise level these guys are making is not going to make a dent in Rogers' bottom line.
Ahh well, I've been using Usenet for quite sometime. I will probably miss it in a sentimental way, but I really don't find it as useful as mailing lists for the type of discussions it used to be famous/useful for.
Farewell my Usenet... I shall miss thee.
Actually, several adult sites did just that, and specifically pursued lawsuits on anyone that posted their content on Usenet. I believe they still monitor common Usenet groups very closely.
For the most part though, Usenet is not very easy for a typical home-user to use. While some Usenet apps are getting better at filtering and organizing the posting information, users still aren't happy about having to browse through 40,000 groups to find their favorite "stuff". BT, eDonkey, etc all offer search capabilities which makes finding content very easy. Usenet is also very transient in nature. As posts expire, content lapses out of scope and is no longer available until its reposted. Most ISP level Usenet access these days is lucky to have more than a week of retention on binary groups, so the transient nature of the data is further amplified. If you want higher retention, you'll probably end up paying for a dedicated Usenet provider.
In general, I think Usenet stays under the radar because its just too hard for the average Joe to utilize.
GUBA has been around for a long time by internet standards (1998 according to the WHOIS record). It has also been a pay site for as long as I can remember. I think they popped up about the time independent providers charging for Usenet hosting also appeared.
Did they change their interface? Is it faster? Why is this new?
There are other sites for finding recent Usenet binary postings. However, they all link to some level of intrinsically non-public binary information (just like GUBA, or BT for that matter). One would be better off looking for them on their own, rather than resourcing Slashdot for that information.
It bothers me a bit that the reviewer considered the content intermediate to advanced, yet found the database design chapter most informative. Design in my opinion should be mostly irrelavent to the database its implemented on. Sure, you can optimize certain aspects of a design based on the features of the database server, but this should not define the design. Design should be a study in itself and not something thrown in for the sake of completeness.
However, considering the average DB design skillz of a commonplace/low-rent PHP developer (or at least the ones I have had to clean up after). I am hopeful that more developers using PHP/MySQL will actually take the time to look at the content in this or other definitive books on MySQL.
Okay, I'll bite.. what goes in that box?
That seems quite a self-righteous statement. Did you even think a bit about what you were about to say?
Two things come to mind: The mental degeneration that Alzheimer's causes is terrible and irreversable. Having seen my grandmother go through that ordeal, I would have to think that 5 years prior to his death that he was still well along in the effects of the disease.
Coupled with the physical degeneration that Parkinson's causes, leads to one simple idea. Perhaps its not James Doohan you should blame for leaving a fatherless child, it is probably his wife who bore the child that is to "blame". Its a bit of a miracle of modern science that this child exists at all. Like it or not, this pretty much HAD to be planned.
I would also hardly think that a celebrity like Mr. Doohan was living in abject poverty. I am sure his child and his widow will live comfortably, and she is still young enough to find a suitable father figure to introduce to her still impressionable 5 year old.
If a draft happens, it will happen relatively soon. Otherwise, it becomes "someone else's problem". Whether that is a step in any direction, who knows, but I don't think it will be as devisive as those few people may think. As independent and self-absorbed as American are, we are all trained in conformity from birth. That's what the government is really for, isn't it? Or, is that the public school system?
On your other point: The people who believe that a modern conscript army will become a revolutionary force are clueless and haven't spent a day in real military training. Independent thinking isn't a primary learning point in even day-0 of basic boot camp. From the time you get off that bus, you are no longer Johnny P. Teenager, you're who they want you to become, and they will drill that into your head until you agree wholeheartedly. Those that do not prove themselves willing and eager to conform to the team standard are typically washed out sooner than later.
However, idealogically inspired (religious or otherwise) militias: that's another kettle of fish. Islamic (or otherwise) terrorists are bad enough, but there are plenty of born-and-bred US citizens that are trouncing through the outbacks of rural America that have their own militant agendas.
Now I have entered enough primary keywords in this post to ensure I find my name into a database of my own.
Cheers,
When it comes down to it, internet use is just a communication medium. Somehow, this seems to treat the Internet like something new and completely unmonitored.
Does this infer that:
Phone companies are recording all telephone calls?
The postal service opens everyone's mail and scans it into a central database?
The cable company tracks each channel you are watching?
Maybe it does...
I'll have 1 tin hat please, size 7-3/8's.
It appears to me that this is more of a marketing research project than a programming/interface one. Perhaps this is just an attempt to create new buzzology. Semantics and the study thereof usually pertain to linguistics and the management of creating meaning between tokens of language. Whether this be words or symbols, semantics is how we gather meaning from language. I suppose this interface has tokens, but they are rather scattered about and don't derive meaning on their own. The user is responsible for generating the semantics/meaning on their own. This does not make the interface semantic. Searching on Google for classical music alone, I will be forced to derive meaning there as well. It might take longer than using this interface, but specific interfaces to subsets of data is not what Google is about. It bothers me that they somehow want to compare their interface to Google. They would do better to compare to allmusic.com.
This interface does not provide a true linguistic or semantic approach to finding meaning. It provides a hierarchal drill down of data... which is nice, but its not semantic. Semantic search should derive meaning from my intent, or my communication of intent to the interface. Google is actually more semantically oriented. I provide the tokens of language, the interface should parse those tokens and realize my meaning. It can then provide me information based on that intent. This "semantic" interface provides me general meaning first and I have to figure out how that matters to me. Based on the premise of this article, I was hoping the interface would be able to parse language for meaning (better than Google) and then zap out some adequate results. Maybe something like "how did people feel about Bach's music?" and it would tell me all about how he was viewed in popular culture. Instead, I have to first know that Bach was a Classisist and then I can find that information in his larger biography. Not semantic.
If a person has a good understanding of how to create meaning for Google, it can provide better semantic searching than this interface. This is not unlike how people communicate when language is uncommon between them. If we're both speaking the same language, we should understand each other's meaning easily. Deeper meanings can also be derived (sarcasm, emotional cues, etc). When language is a barrier, the relation of meaning breaks down into simpler forms. Many language nuances get lost in the translation. Likewise, search engines are not quite up to speed with things like abstract connections between concepts in language. They understand that language has tokens, but they don't always make meaningful relationships between them.
Buyer beware:
My cable provider started Docsis 2.0 and offers 5M down 800k up. However, their plant design could not accomidate the demand for the product and Docsis 2.0 actually ended up underperforming my old 1.1 setup. Eventually, it looks like they upgraded equipment and everything is working well again, but I had sub-standard service for over 3 weeks. Thankfully, my only additional cost is the Docsis 2 modem which I was required to purchase.
My cable provider has a bit of a history in doing this sort of thing by testing improper setups with its "cutting edge" clientele. Hopefully this is not an industry behavior.
Memory as in on-die cache... yes, RAM... no:
1) Core based processors have more internal/embedded synchronization built in, especially related to on chip caching. SMP relies more heavily on the O/S for maintaining concurrency.
2) Connection between processors is shorter and theoretically faster. The big gain here is that the MB components for SMP are all integrated on the CPU, so everything is simplified and compressed.
3) Cache in SMP is separate to each processor, core-processors share the cache between the processors. SMP must maintain cache concurrency... this the basis of threading headaches and this takes process cycles to do so. However, sharing the cache in a core processor is often a problem (Intel) if the cache isn't big enough. AMD currently does this better.
4) SMP means higher license costs for multiple processors, core based processors are considered one processing unit (at least to MS).
That last one tends to be the most important to alot of people.
Don't worry too much. Oracle must leech from your company as many dollars as possible while also ensuring you become addicted to their products. I'm sure Oracle will do their best to ensure PeopleSoft 9 is a high performance, exhaustively featured and difficult to administer product as anything else they have developed. Heck, its their business model: expensive products, expensive licensing, expensive support.
However, while Oracle may be very pricy, it does what it does very well. You might argue that you're paying alot more than you get, but who's to say what the real price of quality, well supported products is in this day-and-age. I can remember when MicroSoft user support was still actually free. Now, that same level of support is a premium service. Many companies still seem to "put up" with the products that they deliver.
When Oracle says they're planning to give PS clients A-one support. I believe them. PeopleSoft as a product will not go away entirely. Expect PS 10 to be fully integrated with the Oracle application line (maybe around Oracle 12). Of course, by then you'll be paying fully exhorbitant Oracle licensing fees, not intermediate ones.
This book sounds alot like what the infamous Chris Crawford has been preaching for the last 8-10 years. I see alot of good things in this outlook: basically that interactivity should be the primary tenet of good game design. However, I don't really agree that the storytelling/"live your own movie" pragma is the best approach to garnering true interactivity. Its certainly a good platform for creating an interactive environment, but if interactivity and is the key, it must be the basis on which the design is built, not the stage on which it is played. Understanding drama concepts is crucial to creating believable and coherent storylines, but without believable actors, it pretty much falls apart.