The worst part about html is that it is open, and as such will be implemented independently by all the major browser makers...
This is in contrast to flash, where there is generally only one implementation, making scripts actually portable from device to device. This is made even worse by the fact that HTML implementations are being developed by a series of companies that all think they should be in charge of what HTML is, especially on non-windows platforms, resulting in incompatibilities that won't be fixed by the vendor and cannot be fixed by anyone else due to being closed source.
You forget why Flash took off- it was because it was the only thing that could actually reliably play video on multiple different OSes. Up until Flash it was a fucking nightmare of incompatible standards- anyone working in educational IT like I do remembers the horror that the simple sentence "I have a video I want to play in class" would cause.
I'd love for HTML5 to become a default standard that works on everything from my phone to my tablet to my desktop. But the folks actually making those devices have lots of incentives to break stuff, and very little to actually adhere closely to the standard. I'll believe that MS, Google, Apple, and the rest can all be one big happy family when [insert favorite very improbable event here]
The only proper way to prevent the spread of measles is to sacrifice a white goat to the great Jo'Bu under a full moon with a silver knife. Chiropractic, homeopathy and the like are just being pushed by big Alternative Medicine to distract you from the real truth.
I think a lot of the angst about iPads has a lot more to do with the philosophy of them- it's very antithetical to the hacker ethos that reigns supreme here.
I have an iPad. It's a nice toy. Some of the stuff makes it really very nice to carry around- the small size, the instant-on, the long battery life- these are the reasons I didn't ditch it the first week. But it lives in a walled box built by Apple, and nothing that doesn't pass through the Apple world will ever touch it. That's great for folks who want to use it for what Apple wants you to.
But a lot of folks like to take things apart and see how they work. They like to tinker and alter and kludge. You can't do that with the iPad- you can't even be sure if you can write software for it since Apple might decide at any time that they don't like your app and simply ban it. There are a lot of folks out there who don't like the thought of a company having that level of control over your devices. (And it's really clear that Apple sees this as the way of the future- MacOSX is starting to look more and more like iOS both in appearance and in the way you get stuff for it.)
It's not just Apple-/. groupthink is happy to bash any other company such as MS that's attempting to prevent access to the guts of your stuff.
Actually, the He situation is both serious and an example of government at it's worst
He is critical for a ton of stuff involving serious cooling. Ever had an MRI? Superconducting magnets, cooled by liquid He. It's not replaceable since nothing else liquifies at 4K
The government has run a stockpile for decades, since it's a byproduct of some natural gas wells. But we can't have the government running something successful, so they have to shut down the He reserve. To do this, they are dumping it on the open market at far less than cost, so we have really cheap He for a bit longer. After that, who knows? Maybe private industry will step in, assuming they can find a way to make enough money at it. Expect prices to skyrocket.
I didn't finish Mass Effect, despite having managed longer games (Morrowind, etc) in the past.
Why? Well, I'm the middle aged guy with kids they mention. While I have spare time, it's often rather broken up. I might get two hours one evening, but then it will be a couple of days before I can get it again. ME is a tough game to play that way- you have a dozen quests running, various people to see, multiple characters with different motivations and abilities to partner with, and to play efficiently without running around randomly you have to remember all of it. If you take a couple days off, it takes a while just to get back to where you were.
I can't remember the last time I played it. I know it was fun, but there's no way I could get back into it without practically starting over.
It's Apple, Amazon and Google doing it? Between the hipster morons, the basement dwelling tech geeks and Grandma who just need to get her shopping done they've managed to get a bigger user base than MS ever had...
Why? It's a solo game- there's nobody else that you're trumping by making yourself into a demigod. Part of the fun of these sorts of sandbox games is finding out ways to exploit stuff- Morrowind's main quest line was solvable in ~10 minutes if you knew the proper alchemy exploits.
If you want to solve a $60 game in under an hour, who does it hurt?
Just because your console is memory starved doesn't mean my PC is.
Biggest offender: Thief 3. Thief 1 and 2 had *huge* levels. The one where you sneak around half the city on rooftops before entering the fortress is a great example- it really feels like you have the run of the city (although it is a bit linear)
Thief 3? You can barely move across a room without seeing fog and a loading screen. You can't move around the city at all without endless jumps between areas. It totally kills the immersion, and even if 1+2 have poorer graphics they are far, far better games.
IIRC, the Nook doesn't run Honeycomb. My bet is that the vast majority of Android tablets now out there are Nooks, of which only a few have been hacked to be stock Android tablets. The most recent sales figures I can find for the nook imply that 3M were sold as of last March, so the sales of that one tablet dwarf the numbers estimated above
I'll be impressed if they manage to figure out how to do string detection. Given that on a guitar you can play the same note as an open high E on... well, every string... it's not that simple. There are a plethora of notes you can play on pretty much every string of a guitar and only I think about 9 that are actually unique? (4 semitones on the lowest string, 3 on the highest - at least in standard EADGBE tuning).
Why should it matter? It's an E. You can play it anywhere you want. For that matter, score any E chord the same. I'm a crappy guitarist but I routinely change fingerings and chords off of tab if they're easier to play in some other form.
That said, having played around with some of the "real" guitar games, they all seem to fail pretty hard on chord recognition. Individual notes are ok, but as soon as there are multiple notes it just craps out at random points even when you play correctly. My favorite was a company (I'll keep them unnamed) at CES selling a guitar trainer who admitted to me that they couldn't grade the songs correctly- they would give you a score at the end but couldn't point out where you made a mistake, and even if you played perfectly you wouldn't get a 100% except by luck.
Also I love how the promo video talks about effects and amps being expensive. I suppose that's true... but at the same time, that's part of the joy of playing an instrument... saving up to get that one distortion pedal from the 70s that really wails, or finally buying a gong, or getting that vocal mic that perfectly suits your voice... and virtual effects and amps are of course limited by the output device you have... home theatre systems tend to make pretty crappy guitar amps....
The interesting thing is how cheap all this stuff has gotten if you skip the boutique guitars and analog pedals. I have $200 guitar I play through a $150 (used) floorboard that emulates ~60 amps, ~30 cabinets and close to 100 different pedals, and also doubles as a USB recording interface. That's less than some of the Rock Band games. Yeah, it's not perfect, but I'm not any good anyway.
I ask because that is the one technology that nobody ever seemed to have predicted, and of course one of the biggest in terms of changing how things are done. While people certainly predicted wider networking of computers it was always in the context of systems you'd connect to. I have never seen an author that predicted a global network that everything could connect to, through which any and all information could flow.
Just wondering since you are right that he tended to be more on target with things than most people. He seemed to grasp that while technology changes, humans by and large don't.
John Brunner, 1975, The Shockwave Rider. A lot of the way things work he missed (access via a telephone using a special code) but he pretty much got the rest of it, down to the idea you could cripple the government through cyberwarfare
Fact is he got reelected, so he "passed". If Obama doesn't get reelected then Obama fails.
I know you're pointing out political calculus, but this is the entire reason that the US political system is so badly fucked right now. Nothing matters other than getting elected.
I'd *love* to see a politician get up and start actually telling the truth to America
Taxes are going to have to go up
Benefits are going to have to come down
You're going to have to save more and party less.
$25+/hour unskilled labor jobs are gone forever. Manufacturing still exists, but you're going to actually need that math you hate to study even for a basic blue collar career.
Ditto English skills. I don't care what your degree is in: if you can't write a coherent sentence you're useless.
No CEO is worth what they are paid today. None.
90% of all MBAs are worthless.
Ditto law school degrees
Infrastructure is crumbling. It's essential, and it's going to cost $$$ to fix.
Get used to living and working with folks that are different than you: black, white, Hispanic, Muslim, Hindu, gay, whatever.
Evolution is true. Everyone other country the US is competing with for biotech jobs understands this.
I could keep going, but no politician who actually said half those things would have any future at all, no matter how true they are and how much we need to come to grips with them. It's all about getting reelected.
Possible. I'm running on a Mac in 64 bit mode so >2GB is no issue, but I seem to remember my work PC holding memory usage down below that, although that was also 3.6. (I'm on 4.0 on the Mac right now) I'm not running a huge number of extensions either- AdBlock, GreaseMonkey, Webdeveloper, Treetab and Mouse Gestures.
Using it. Right now I'm running pretty light- I only have 6 tabs open, but when I'm doing serious debugging it can easily be 20+. Some of them have video in them, others have google docs, etc. Right now it's "only" using 900MB, but it's not at all uncommon for FF to take up 2+ GB.
It's not obvious to a lot of people- folks think objects have value. Listen to any gold bug discuss the intrinsic value of gold, as if it has some inherent value beyond what people will pay you for it. Or, if you'd prefer, all the people who can't sell their house because they can't get what they paid for it and it's "Worth more"
Lots of people assume that various objects (including paper or virtual money) have value outside of what you can get in exchange.
It's been a while since I gamed a lot, but there were a few PC games I had that didn't allow this. This one is so hardwired into my hands that any game without it is totally unplayable for me.
Aren't they aware that quite a few of their members might not appreciate being advertised as members?
A better question is why should they care? The worst-case scenario where subscribers go away is solved by selling the domain, buying a new one and putting the same content back up with a minor re-design of the pages.
Actually, the worst case scenario is taking the entire tarball of content on the site and uploading it to one of the free porn sites or as a torrent. I'm guessing that if the site is hacked badly enough to get the password list that it's pretty much open season
Actually, you'd be surprised how little crime actually pays. (Unless you work for a Wall Street firm)
Check out some of Sudhir Venkatesh's stuff. He's done some close sociological work with gangs, and the results are quite surprising. The rank and file drug dealers on street corners would be better off at McDonalds: the pay is about the same, and you have a lot less chance of being shot. It's only a few of the serious kingpins who bring in a good income, and at that point you're working so hard keeping all the balls in the air you'd again be better off trying to go legit- anyone who can manage that many people in a high-risk environment could probably do very well in management.
Actually, as with any large state school (indeed, any college) they are exactly as good as you want them to be.
The professors there are at the top of their fields. Yes, even at a state U in a less academic climate. They probably get 300-600 applications for every tenure track slot, so competition is utterly brutal. (The school I work at does) If you want to get an education, seek them out. Work with them. Even at Enormous Factory U you'll find undergrad research programs- if you're not in one then you're not trying hard enough.
You have an academic library available, with everything free. This is not your local community library- it's a completely different animal. What's on the internet is a *tiny* fraction of what humans know. That library has access to all the other stuff. You even get access to reference librarians. Talk to them too.
Oh, and out of the 30k students at EFU there will be hundreds of very serious, driven students. Find them and hang out with them too.
Sure, you can spend the entire four years with all the drunk frat boys at a string of keggers. But in the end it's your responsibility to learn.
Slashdot Mirror
This is in contrast to flash, where there is generally only one implementation, making scripts actually portable from device to device. This is made even worse by the fact that HTML implementations are being developed by a series of companies that all think they should be in charge of what HTML is, especially on non-windows platforms, resulting in incompatibilities that won't be fixed by the vendor and cannot be fixed by anyone else due to being closed source.
You forget why Flash took off- it was because it was the only thing that could actually reliably play video on multiple different OSes. Up until Flash it was a fucking nightmare of incompatible standards- anyone working in educational IT like I do remembers the horror that the simple sentence "I have a video I want to play in class" would cause.
I'd love for HTML5 to become a default standard that works on everything from my phone to my tablet to my desktop. But the folks actually making those devices have lots of incentives to break stuff, and very little to actually adhere closely to the standard. I'll believe that MS, Google, Apple, and the rest can all be one big happy family when [insert favorite very improbable event here]
The only proper way to prevent the spread of measles is to sacrifice a white goat to the great Jo'Bu under a full moon with a silver knife. Chiropractic, homeopathy and the like are just being pushed by big Alternative Medicine to distract you from the real truth.
Yeah, it's an unfair comparison. Made in Mexico (MIM) Fenders have far better quality control than current USA Gibsons.
If you honestly think that the only reason Apple controls every single aspect of the iPad is to keep viruses off I feel truly sorry for you.
I have an iPad. It's a nice toy. Some of the stuff makes it really very nice to carry around- the small size, the instant-on, the long battery life- these are the reasons I didn't ditch it the first week. But it lives in a walled box built by Apple, and nothing that doesn't pass through the Apple world will ever touch it. That's great for folks who want to use it for what Apple wants you to.
But a lot of folks like to take things apart and see how they work. They like to tinker and alter and kludge. You can't do that with the iPad- you can't even be sure if you can write software for it since Apple might decide at any time that they don't like your app and simply ban it. There are a lot of folks out there who don't like the thought of a company having that level of control over your devices. (And it's really clear that Apple sees this as the way of the future- MacOSX is starting to look more and more like iOS both in appearance and in the way you get stuff for it.)
It's not just Apple- /. groupthink is happy to bash any other company such as MS that's attempting to prevent access to the guts of your stuff.
But reality is far, far too weird for you to spoof.
Checkmate.
He is critical for a ton of stuff involving serious cooling. Ever had an MRI? Superconducting magnets, cooled by liquid He. It's not replaceable since nothing else liquifies at 4K
The government has run a stockpile for decades, since it's a byproduct of some natural gas wells. But we can't have the government running something successful, so they have to shut down the He reserve. To do this, they are dumping it on the open market at far less than cost, so we have really cheap He for a bit longer. After that, who knows? Maybe private industry will step in, assuming they can find a way to make enough money at it. Expect prices to skyrocket.
Why? Well, I'm the middle aged guy with kids they mention. While I have spare time, it's often rather broken up. I might get two hours one evening, but then it will be a couple of days before I can get it again. ME is a tough game to play that way- you have a dozen quests running, various people to see, multiple characters with different motivations and abilities to partner with, and to play efficiently without running around randomly you have to remember all of it. If you take a couple days off, it takes a while just to get back to where you were.
I can't remember the last time I played it. I know it was fun, but there's no way I could get back into it without practically starting over.
It's Apple, Amazon and Google doing it? Between the hipster morons, the basement dwelling tech geeks and Grandma who just need to get her shopping done they've managed to get a bigger user base than MS ever had...
If you want to solve a $60 game in under an hour, who does it hurt?
(Can't say too much bad about Lego right now- having too much fun with my son's new Mindstorms kit.)
Ironically, Juno is slated to burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere at the end of the mission to avoid contaminating any of the moons with Earth Goo...
Biggest offender: Thief 3. Thief 1 and 2 had *huge* levels. The one where you sneak around half the city on rooftops before entering the fortress is a great example- it really feels like you have the run of the city (although it is a bit linear)
Thief 3? You can barely move across a room without seeing fog and a loading screen. You can't move around the city at all without endless jumps between areas. It totally kills the immersion, and even if 1+2 have poorer graphics they are far, far better games.
IIRC, the Nook doesn't run Honeycomb. My bet is that the vast majority of Android tablets now out there are Nooks, of which only a few have been hacked to be stock Android tablets. The most recent sales figures I can find for the nook imply that 3M were sold as of last March, so the sales of that one tablet dwarf the numbers estimated above
I'll be impressed if they manage to figure out how to do string detection. Given that on a guitar you can play the same note as an open high E on... well, every string... it's not that simple. There are a plethora of notes you can play on pretty much every string of a guitar and only I think about 9 that are actually unique? (4 semitones on the lowest string, 3 on the highest - at least in standard EADGBE tuning).
Why should it matter? It's an E. You can play it anywhere you want. For that matter, score any E chord the same. I'm a crappy guitarist but I routinely change fingerings and chords off of tab if they're easier to play in some other form.
That said, having played around with some of the "real" guitar games, they all seem to fail pretty hard on chord recognition. Individual notes are ok, but as soon as there are multiple notes it just craps out at random points even when you play correctly. My favorite was a company (I'll keep them unnamed) at CES selling a guitar trainer who admitted to me that they couldn't grade the songs correctly- they would give you a score at the end but couldn't point out where you made a mistake, and even if you played perfectly you wouldn't get a 100% except by luck.
Also I love how the promo video talks about effects and amps being expensive. I suppose that's true... but at the same time, that's part of the joy of playing an instrument... saving up to get that one distortion pedal from the 70s that really wails, or finally buying a gong, or getting that vocal mic that perfectly suits your voice... and virtual effects and amps are of course limited by the output device you have... home theatre systems tend to make pretty crappy guitar amps....
The interesting thing is how cheap all this stuff has gotten if you skip the boutique guitars and analog pedals. I have $200 guitar I play through a $150 (used) floorboard that emulates ~60 amps, ~30 cabinets and close to 100 different pedals, and also doubles as a USB recording interface. That's less than some of the Rock Band games. Yeah, it's not perfect, but I'm not any good anyway.
I ask because that is the one technology that nobody ever seemed to have predicted, and of course one of the biggest in terms of changing how things are done. While people certainly predicted wider networking of computers it was always in the context of systems you'd connect to. I have never seen an author that predicted a global network that everything could connect to, through which any and all information could flow.
Just wondering since you are right that he tended to be more on target with things than most people. He seemed to grasp that while technology changes, humans by and large don't.
John Brunner, 1975, The Shockwave Rider. A lot of the way things work he missed (access via a telephone using a special code) but he pretty much got the rest of it, down to the idea you could cripple the government through cyberwarfare
Fact is he got reelected, so he "passed". If Obama doesn't get reelected then Obama fails.
I know you're pointing out political calculus, but this is the entire reason that the US political system is so badly fucked right now. Nothing matters other than getting elected.
I'd *love* to see a politician get up and start actually telling the truth to America
I could keep going, but no politician who actually said half those things would have any future at all, no matter how true they are and how much we need to come to grips with them. It's all about getting reelected.
Possible. I'm running on a Mac in 64 bit mode so >2GB is no issue, but I seem to remember my work PC holding memory usage down below that, although that was also 3.6. (I'm on 4.0 on the Mac right now) I'm not running a huge number of extensions either- AdBlock, GreaseMonkey, Webdeveloper, Treetab and Mouse Gestures.
Using it. Right now I'm running pretty light- I only have 6 tabs open, but when I'm doing serious debugging it can easily be 20+. Some of them have video in them, others have google docs, etc. Right now it's "only" using 900MB, but it's not at all uncommon for FF to take up 2+ GB.
Lots of people assume that various objects (including paper or virtual money) have value outside of what you can get in exchange.
It's been a while since I gamed a lot, but there were a few PC games I had that didn't allow this. This one is so hardwired into my hands that any game without it is totally unplayable for me.
Actually, the worst case scenario is taking the entire tarball of content on the site and uploading it to one of the free porn sites or as a torrent. I'm guessing that if the site is hacked badly enough to get the password list that it's pretty much open season
Check out some of Sudhir Venkatesh's stuff. He's done some close sociological work with gangs, and the results are quite surprising. The rank and file drug dealers on street corners would be better off at McDonalds: the pay is about the same, and you have a lot less chance of being shot. It's only a few of the serious kingpins who bring in a good income, and at that point you're working so hard keeping all the balls in the air you'd again be better off trying to go legit- anyone who can manage that many people in a high-risk environment could probably do very well in management.
Gingrich. Pro: Took on Bill Clinton. Con: Lost
The professors there are at the top of their fields. Yes, even at a state U in a less academic climate. They probably get 300-600 applications for every tenure track slot, so competition is utterly brutal. (The school I work at does) If you want to get an education, seek them out. Work with them. Even at Enormous Factory U you'll find undergrad research programs- if you're not in one then you're not trying hard enough.
You have an academic library available, with everything free. This is not your local community library- it's a completely different animal. What's on the internet is a *tiny* fraction of what humans know. That library has access to all the other stuff. You even get access to reference librarians. Talk to them too.
Oh, and out of the 30k students at EFU there will be hundreds of very serious, driven students. Find them and hang out with them too.
Sure, you can spend the entire four years with all the drunk frat boys at a string of keggers. But in the end it's your responsibility to learn.