I only watched mayday, and the thing that struck me was the impression I thought likely was that 'you better hope there's an apple genius around to help use your macbook, or else you will be screwed'. Historically, Apple focused on everyday people being self-sufficient without a lot of complexity, no 'genius' needed.
That and the tone of the ad just seemed so frantic and unsophisticated somehow.
The issue being if they did try to de-emphasize Jobs nominally in Apple, they would have been forfeiting opportunity. Jobs' leadership was a large marketable facet of Apple. If they made effort to push it aside, it probably wouldn't have worked. For all we know Jobs hasn't had such a siginficant role in decision-making for a while, but for the sake of marketing he continued to be the face of the decisions.
If without Jobs your company is going to decline, might as well delay the decline so long as possible rather than sacrifice what limited opportunity you have in a misguided effort to be more sustainable.
Console gaming is over. Gaming has moved onto mobile systems.
No, gaming has *expanded* onto mobile systems. Even taking your statement at face value, that IOS devices outnumber consoles, that doesn't mean much. Cell phones have long outnumbered consoles and could technically play little games. Console market is only marginally more threatened by ubiquitous cell phone gaming than makers of 60 inch televesions, and no one is claiming phones are going to displace that market. Now the DS and Vita type offerings are certainly at significant risk, but even they retain a sufficient market thanks to some distinct ergonomic advantages to not being a phone.
AppleTV outsells Xbox
Even if true, so have DVD players. Apple TV without jailbreak can't play games. This is comparing apples and oranges.
In a couple of years, iPad will have more GPU than the console games.
Probably not of the consoles that would be a contemporary of that iPad. Signs are pointing to 2013 refreshes of Sony and MS offerings. Historically, we are talking about systems that might be willing to draw ~250W at launch, far more than the iPad would ever be willing to do. I'm not even sure they could really match the GPU performance of the current PS3/xbox360 in the power envelope they'd want in that timeframe.
In short, big-screen, high-def, low latency network gaming I see as continuing to be a valid market. I just suspect/hope that Valve and Ouya platforms on top of linux will have a significant disruptive effect on the market for the better, and that MS is not going to be able to play.
If he had made the argument about Calculus, maybe, but Algebra is too frequently valuable. Even vague recollections of some pre-calculus lessons at least somewhat help people navigate the trappings of banking offerings.
The thing that strikes me:
To our nation’s shame, one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school.
The implication being that our nation, in comparison to others, has a lower rate of high school completion than other nations. His answer would be to lower the bar. While this very myopically could improve the very specific metric, we could acheive the same thing by giving out high school diplomas to any toddler that can reliably count to 10. Of course, the fact that the world rapidly adjusts to reflect the american high school diploma as less valuable is conveniently ignored.
The point was prior to xbox, many more companies were PC exclusive. With xbox, a lot of those companies took that as a cue to start doing console development in earnest.
I'd expect Ouya to move to JellyBean before launch, and likely embrace the facility to encrypt purchased apps and bring technical barriers to copyright infringment on par with iOS. Ouya may be able to do better than Apple, in Apple illegal copies can participate in the leaderboard facility with impunity. I could see Ouya linking things such that social gaming is precluded by server-side awareness of the actual purchase.
I think it's more fair to say that MBAs tend not to deliver mind-blowingly overwhelming sucess. MBAs are the vast majority of anomymous, boring leaders in the business world. On the whole they lead mostly obscure companies in relatively subtle and unexciting rate of growth, but still on the whole mostly growth.
Meanwhile, the Zuckerberg, Gates and Jobs of the worlds are effectively the lottery winners amongst non-MBAs playing corporate leadership game. Through a combination of persistent vision, acumen, and luck, they acheive overwhelming success that make them rock stars. Far more people could rattle off those names in relation to the companies they led than people can name the current leader of IBM, Food Lion, McDonald's, etc. However, for every Gates, there are probably a 1,000 people in the same position of leading a business out of an inherent interest in the product than boring MBA concerns that crash their endeavors spectacularly into the ground. Once you transition the reigns of such an overwhelming success to *anyone* else (MBA or not), that success will erode to a more rationally possible course over time. The issue being that looks *really* bad and people tend to extrapolate a negative trend as being inevitable all the way to the bottom and investors observing that make it a self-fulfilling prophecy by pulling funds from a seemingly sinking ship.
So in short, MBAs tend toward boring, uninspiring leadership that doesn't change the world but tend to do ok by the businesses they lead. A prominently resspected business leader will almost inevitably mean doom for the company when that leader goes away.
Its like saying IBM did well selling a mainframe, sure once upon a time they did that and made huge fortunes, today, they don't.
Well, actually, IBM does make a large amount around new mainframe sells. While various pieces of enterprisey software are their meat and potatoes now, While System Z isn't particularly glamorous, it is *solid* and IBM doesn't screw with it. Would some things in a brand-new System Z configuration seem downright *archaic* by many technical people? Of course. Is IBM's dedication to the platform largely as-is incredibly valuable to the market they do retain? You better believe it. Contrast this treatment to MS. If run like MS, mainframe probably would have been changed to be more like competitors that were eating away market share rather than staying the course to retain a very profitable core market. Kind of like what Sun did with the Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 back in the day.
IBM is actually an interesting company in terms of financial success. They are rarely the leader of any particular wide market, yet so incredibly diverse that not a significant IT deal goes down without IBM getting something out of it. You buy HP blades but IBM might make money off their switch modules. You buy software from Oracle but oracle pays some licensing fee of some patents to IBM, and maybe some IBM hardware to run the software. IBM seems to always have *some* disappointing business units and some golden children in any given time period, but that changes over time. IBM used to have hardware as the golden child, software as nothing to write home about, and a fledgling service business. Times changed and suddenly their services business is the only one looking particularly good, software exceeding hardware to the point of the very immediate demise of mainframe a likely bet. Things change again and now software is the star, with Services and hardware both looking not particularly appealing, but within the hardware mainframe has actually made a comeback.
IBM is perhaps the most boring of the massively successful technology companies, but they don't seem to care that much given their understated, but very consistent positive financial results over time.
While xbox is a household name, profit wise it isn't stellar. It also has had an interesting effect of moving the attention of Windows game developers onto consoles. The problem being this actually seems to weaken MS lockin, migrating userbase from a mindset where microsoft unquestionably dominates the market to one where MS is just one of three big names. While this in the short term has boosted MS offering in the market, it also has made these studios get over their desktop fixation and get accustomed to supporting Sony and to some extent nintendo.
So far, not critical, but it does potentially pave the way for the big game companies to completely torpedo the desktop and xbox gaming market. At the same time as getting developers in the mindset of multi-platform support, it starts pushing it's first-party app store as well as a bizarre model for desktop usage. Between the improved view on multiplatform development and threatening digital distribution channels that particularly valve has become accustomed to it, they are paving the way for a company like Valve to completely undermine MS' desktop and console gaming market.
There are a large number of factors external to MS facilitating this scenario, but MS strategy has done it's part to explicitly fuel thisto some extent.
A very real scenario seems to be: MS effectively forfeits the desktop market due to lack of interest on their part. It's a boring market where they cannot grow and today's business philosophy seems to dismiss sustainability without exponential growth (growth is always indicated as a percentage, the raw dollar values are de-emphasized). Companies are still using XP by and large, which might have been ok except MS is simultaneously pushing the market to develop software that doesn't work with XP, so XP usage might be characeterized as 'limping along' with increased difficulty over time. Between OSX and Linux (though the 'front and center' Linux DEs have also lost their way), some enterprises are seeing viable MS alternatives. On the homefront, erosion comes more easily, mostly at the hands of IOS, Android, and to a lesser extent OSX and Linux, share-wise (consumer desktop/laptop market is increasingly driven by 'enthusiasts' as the casual user base moves on to tablets and phones).
Casual game development on Android paves the way to support Ouya on the low end (XBLA competitor) and on the high end, Valve makes a go of it with a game console, a stronger, diverse name in gaming and digital distribution of games than MS. I see this as highly disruptive to Sony, Nintendo, and MS, but I don't think Valve would've had such an easy time of it if MS hadn't paved the way with xBox.
Phone/tablet is easy enough to see. MS has no appreciable share. To those saying 'but WP7 users always rave about it', that would be a natural consequence of a small user base. The only people there are naturally going to be fanboys. Just like WebOS had exceedingly high satisfaction among its very small userbase (I liked WebOS, but it really lacked a lot). IOS and Android seem to be carving up the market handily.
Basically, MS is screwed. They are trying to compete with google using Bing to dubious result. They are pushing Azure to comete with EC2 and are diluting their vision because it just isn't working. They are throwing their desktop market (the only market they securely held) under the bus to try to prop up metro which has been a market failure on phones today.
However, x86-64 only use 40 bytes for addressing, which will handle 1 TB of RAM.
40 *bytes* would be overkill and more than a TB, and 40 bits is outdated information:
"Current implementations of the AMD64 architecture (starting from AMD 10h microarchitecture) extend this to 48-bit physical addresses[9] and therefore can address up to 256 TB of RAM. The architecture permits extending this to 52 bits in the future"
So without a new architecture, can hit a petabyte of ram. There are systems with multiple terabytes of ram on a system already (see IBM x3850 x5 for example)
Of course that doesn't matter. Let's assume you are right and maybe the entire user base of Steam is 5% of the Windows market. Steam has no reason to care at all about the 95% that they don't care about. So if only 5% come over to Linux, then Steam's current business model is preserved.
If you think the MS app store will open up the 95% to gaming more that would compete with steam, that would be a silly proposition. Acquiring steam is so trivial, that I can't see that as a significant barrier to adoption. Maybe 95% will start throwing a buck here or a buck there on an angry birds type game, but that doesn't represent a threat to Steam's current business model, only a threat to Steam's expansion opportunities.
Yes Microsoft will have their own app store, but Steam has many people locked in right now...
Which is why they have to act as quickly as possible, while they still have an advantage. Both Apple and MS are emphasizing their first-party store experiences. Over time Steam risks becoming irrelevant. Steam needs to encourage more Linux adoption, as the last desktop platform with seemingly no interest in baked in commercial digital distribution mechanisms quite like Steam.
Additionally, steam stands to gain significant perceived value the more platforms they support. If hypothetically in the future a title purchased once for the user works for their Windows PC, their Linux SteamBox, and their Android tablet, that is significant value that MS nor Apple will ever provide, which helps to keep Windows platform users loyal in a world with more and more diverse OS platforms in their day to day life.
SSL certs conceptually contain SSH host keys as a strict subset of functionality. The strategy with respect to all-powerful CAs without limited authority domain is the big problem in x509 implementations. More sophisticated mechanisms to limit the scope of CAs and more carefully manage trust of CAs would go far to address the real-world problems of SSL.
I often find myself wishing ssh did have SSL mechanisms for user and client keys, but all ssh entities by default trust *no* CA and treat the keys like they treat ssh keypairs today, and normally speaking the admin would have to add one or two CAs pertinent to their organization if they wanted to take advantage of the extras of x509.
Shared secrets are not insecure. Applied incorrectly they are insecure.
When a given pairing is unique (i.e. the credential authenticates exactly one endpoint to exactly one other endpoint), then a breach of the level of acquiring the password data is likely going to yield nothing more than you already have: free reign over the system holding the data. In this case, the authenticator selected the characters randomly.
Shared secrets generally allow something that's impossible with one-way hashes: Being inherently impervious to MITM. The key would be that the secret must be set in a secure manner, but this is a straightforward and intuitive thing in general. For example, on some pieces of networking equipment, you must set initial SNMPv3 password using serial port before you can ever manage it. Intuitively, this makes sense to more people as they consider it 'initial setup' and over the network configuration is reasonably explained as chicken and egg. SNMPv3 uses the password as a shared secret, meaning a third party can't impersonate it, even though the admin took no effort to understand and implement something like a PKI.
In this situation, I presume the envisioned scenario is that the training would occur under a special circumstance (e.g. your super secret organization has you play this game in a secure office to train it where they control everything).
Or one could be rightfully skeptical that the recording images are because it was bumped rather than he likely has a 'store recent video' capability.
His explanation of the system seems suspect. He presents stills from at least a good 5-10 minute window. If all it was doing was augmented reality, then a 30 second old image has pretty much zero value and would not be retained by the system except to facilitate capture ability. Imagine yourself in the same position, with video footage naturally occuring. Would you not want to have video capture ability, just in case? Hell I know I would and i'd even have it uploading video content as quick as it can to some internet server in case anything happened to me that would leave any on-person storage not viable.
While all this makes him a bit more disingenious, I'm going to say whether you video it or not makes little difference. We wouldn't kick someone out of a store for having an eidetic memory, recording the data isn't that different. If you let someone see with their eyes, then implicitly you trust them enough to record.
Even if steam is allowed, it might be seen as superfluous. Particularly by other publishers. Why cut valve in on the action when MS and Apple have 100% attach rate for their own distribution channels and Steam can't guarantee such an attach rate. Valve needs to leverage their current status to bring users into platforms without the aspirations of Apple and Microsoft driving.
All of that and factor in the rumored aspirations of a "Steam Box" where Steam would need some OS. They know OSX is impossible, and with Windows they'd have to pay a significant fee and/or incorporate Windows branding, which would dilute the branding message Valve would want most.
It is of course still ballsy, as with Linux the library will be largely limited to first-party titles and indie content and they'd forfeit a lot of other major publisher content. On the *other* hand, one wonders how much value Valve will continue to extract from those other publishers as they get more ambitious with their own Steam competitors. For example. EA is rolling their own and witholding content from Steam, Square Enix seems to be doing the same.
Considering Android's stack is entirely distinct from the typical Linux desktop stack, that would be a big no. WebOS was about as close as a even remotely serious contender got (SDL graphics access, pulseaudio sound) to matching desktop linux, and even that was very very different.
But it isn't 'just' an abstraction layer. It is an abstraction layer that *usually* isn't tested by the programs that run on it, that don't implement a consistent look and feel with other applications, sometimes require odd window and display management circumstances, and one where the filesystem is traversed in a way that is fundamentally distinct from the rest of applications in the environment. An app running under wine sticks out like crazy in an otherwise normal Linux desktop.
The wine project deserves much praise for what they do, but to be complacent and say "wine is good enough" really undervalues the merits of an app that is clearly actually targetting the operating system.
I think the parent understood energy/power (else he couldn't do the math to express duration). I think he phrased the last part poorly, but trying to convey that TFA is exploting a general misunderstanding of the nature of power to create a very different conceptual picture in the minds of the reader. If you took average US power consumption over a whole second during one firing of these lasers and a second where the lasers weren't fired, you wouldn't be able to make out the difference that one might intuitively expect given the headline. For simplicity, ignoring the situation suggests that the energy for the system was likely charged over at least the course of a few seconds and not instantly drawn from the grid).
Of course, struggling to express the magnitude of this acheivement in an intuitive way is a losing proposition.
Have you never been involved a project that past the go/no go point they decided to bring on additional talent, either because a solid opportunity presents itself (e.g. learning a coveted developer is leaving a position or is otherwise more willing to work for your effort than you imagined) or because they realized resources on hand were insufficient in some way or another? Valve has already been reporting significant issues with the layers they are targeting in linux. It would not be surprising that they made use of SDL, determined in QA significant problems in SDL or their use of SDL and they were not getting the attention on problems they needed without paying, and hired the lead of the project to improve attention to their usage of SDL.
Based on the progress demonstrated, they've pretty far along, farther along than I would expect a company to be if they had not yet decided for sure to make a go for it. Or if they haven't decided for sure to make a go for it, they have been risking devolpment resources speculating that they would make a go for it, so the runway is potentially shorter than an organization where no one does *anything* until the business is 100% percent certain.
Remember on the OSX launch, native linux reference could be found by digging. They've been toying with this at least so long that they were doing some build activity back in 1H 2010. All the steam box rumors seem to center around Linux on AMD x86 platform, which isn't so exotic that Valve would face an overwhelming challenge compared with what they already support between Windows and OSX today.
Actually, the likelihood would be that Valve would do an x86 based solution with a higher end graphics solution. It will cost more, but it will accomodate the market segment of high end games from big name studios and such that Tegra won't compete with (due to power envelope).
Ouya would aim for cheap and high commonality with tablets and cell phones, which have much tighter power and cost constraints. You'll likely see more interesting independent works on Ouya.
Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo may be in for an interesting landscape in 2013.
It's reasonable to assume Valve isn't doing this for the Linux desktop (though they may be doing things in such a way that Linux desktop is covered 'for free'), but likely related to the other rumors of a Steam branded game console.
If Steam gives a console-equivalent experience in a manner similar to their PC platform, it's likely to be as capable as Sony and MS platforms but a lot more approachable. The 'big studios' are likely to be very enthusiastic about it. So the 'AAA' games will likely hit a Valve platform and probably with a bit more aggressive pricing (at first) compared to Sony and MS.
On the low end, Ouya may stir things up significantly.
*Anything* that becomes the most popular 'brand' will become distorted to the point it's hard to say precisely how meaningful the application of the name in a given circumstance is. Agile and Cloud are the two terms in the computing industry the most afflicted by this phenomenon.
In fact, I would say an organization getting very picky about using every little piece of 'Agile' terminology is more likely than not in a scenario where they really aren't doing 'Agile'. Many just rename their 'product requirements' to 'user stories', 'milestones' to 'sprints', and 'status meetings' to 'scrum' without actually changing anything about the way they do things other than renaming (well, and putting the exact same project management data they had before into new software tools that advertise 'Agile').
It's just like how anything that has network connectivity now is advertised as 'cloud enabled', without regard for anything but the ability to transmit and receive IP as a qualifiaction for 'cloud'.
Slashdot Mirror
I only watched mayday, and the thing that struck me was the impression I thought likely was that 'you better hope there's an apple genius around to help use your macbook, or else you will be screwed'. Historically, Apple focused on everyday people being self-sufficient without a lot of complexity, no 'genius' needed.
That and the tone of the ad just seemed so frantic and unsophisticated somehow.
The issue being if they did try to de-emphasize Jobs nominally in Apple, they would have been forfeiting opportunity. Jobs' leadership was a large marketable facet of Apple. If they made effort to push it aside, it probably wouldn't have worked.
For all we know Jobs hasn't had such a siginficant role in decision-making for a while, but for the sake of marketing he continued to be the face of the decisions.
If without Jobs your company is going to decline, might as well delay the decline so long as possible rather than sacrifice what limited opportunity you have in a misguided effort to be more sustainable.
Console gaming is over. Gaming has moved onto mobile systems.
No, gaming has *expanded* onto mobile systems. Even taking your statement at face value, that IOS devices outnumber consoles, that doesn't mean much. Cell phones have long outnumbered consoles and could technically play little games. Console market is only marginally more threatened by ubiquitous cell phone gaming than makers of 60 inch televesions, and no one is claiming phones are going to displace that market. Now the DS and Vita type offerings are certainly at significant risk, but even they retain a sufficient market thanks to some distinct ergonomic advantages to not being a phone.
AppleTV outsells Xbox
Even if true, so have DVD players. Apple TV without jailbreak can't play games. This is comparing apples and oranges.
In a couple of years, iPad will have more GPU than the console games.
Probably not of the consoles that would be a contemporary of that iPad. Signs are pointing to 2013 refreshes of Sony and MS offerings. Historically, we are talking about systems that might be willing to draw ~250W at launch, far more than the iPad would ever be willing to do. I'm not even sure they could really match the GPU performance of the current PS3/xbox360 in the power envelope they'd want in that timeframe.
In short, big-screen, high-def, low latency network gaming I see as continuing to be a valid market. I just suspect/hope that Valve and Ouya platforms on top of linux will have a significant disruptive effect on the market for the better, and that MS is not going to be able to play.
If he had made the argument about Calculus, maybe, but Algebra is too frequently valuable. Even vague recollections of some pre-calculus lessons at least somewhat help people navigate the trappings of banking offerings.
The thing that strikes me:
To our nation’s shame, one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school.
The implication being that our nation, in comparison to others, has a lower rate of high school completion than other nations. His answer would be to lower the bar. While this very myopically could improve the very specific metric, we could acheive the same thing by giving out high school diplomas to any toddler that can reliably count to 10. Of course, the fact that the world rapidly adjusts to reflect the american high school diploma as less valuable is conveniently ignored.
The point was prior to xbox, many more companies were PC exclusive. With xbox, a lot of those companies took that as a cue to start doing console development in earnest.
I'd expect Ouya to move to JellyBean before launch, and likely embrace the facility to encrypt purchased apps and bring technical barriers to copyright infringment on par with iOS. Ouya may be able to do better than Apple, in Apple illegal copies can participate in the leaderboard facility with impunity. I could see Ouya linking things such that social gaming is precluded by server-side awareness of the actual purchase.
I think it's more fair to say that MBAs tend not to deliver mind-blowingly overwhelming sucess. MBAs are the vast majority of anomymous, boring leaders in the business world. On the whole they lead mostly obscure companies in relatively subtle and unexciting rate of growth, but still on the whole mostly growth.
Meanwhile, the Zuckerberg, Gates and Jobs of the worlds are effectively the lottery winners amongst non-MBAs playing corporate leadership game. Through a combination of persistent vision, acumen, and luck, they acheive overwhelming success that make them rock stars. Far more people could rattle off those names in relation to the companies they led than people can name the current leader of IBM, Food Lion, McDonald's, etc. However, for every Gates, there are probably a 1,000 people in the same position of leading a business out of an inherent interest in the product than boring MBA concerns that crash their endeavors spectacularly into the ground. Once you transition the reigns of such an overwhelming success to *anyone* else (MBA or not), that success will erode to a more rationally possible course over time. The issue being that looks *really* bad and people tend to extrapolate a negative trend as being inevitable all the way to the bottom and investors observing that make it a self-fulfilling prophecy by pulling funds from a seemingly sinking ship.
So in short, MBAs tend toward boring, uninspiring leadership that doesn't change the world but tend to do ok by the businesses they lead. A prominently resspected business leader will almost inevitably mean doom for the company when that leader goes away.
Its like saying IBM did well selling a mainframe, sure once upon a time they did that and made huge fortunes, today, they don't.
Well, actually, IBM does make a large amount around new mainframe sells. While various pieces of enterprisey software are their meat and potatoes now, While System Z isn't particularly glamorous, it is *solid* and IBM doesn't screw with it. Would some things in a brand-new System Z configuration seem downright *archaic* by many technical people? Of course. Is IBM's dedication to the platform largely as-is incredibly valuable to the market they do retain? You better believe it. Contrast this treatment to MS. If run like MS, mainframe probably would have been changed to be more like competitors that were eating away market share rather than staying the course to retain a very profitable core market. Kind of like what Sun did with the Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 back in the day.
IBM is actually an interesting company in terms of financial success. They are rarely the leader of any particular wide market, yet so incredibly diverse that not a significant IT deal goes down without IBM getting something out of it. You buy HP blades but IBM might make money off their switch modules. You buy software from Oracle but oracle pays some licensing fee of some patents to IBM, and maybe some IBM hardware to run the software. IBM seems to always have *some* disappointing business units and some golden children in any given time period, but that changes over time. IBM used to have hardware as the golden child, software as nothing to write home about, and a fledgling service business. Times changed and suddenly their services business is the only one looking particularly good, software exceeding hardware to the point of the very immediate demise of mainframe a likely bet. Things change again and now software is the star, with Services and hardware both looking not particularly appealing, but within the hardware mainframe has actually made a comeback.
IBM is perhaps the most boring of the massively successful technology companies, but they don't seem to care that much given their understated, but very consistent positive financial results over time.
While xbox is a household name, profit wise it isn't stellar. It also has had an interesting effect of moving the attention of Windows game developers onto consoles. The problem being this actually seems to weaken MS lockin, migrating userbase from a mindset where microsoft unquestionably dominates the market to one where MS is just one of three big names. While this in the short term has boosted MS offering in the market, it also has made these studios get over their desktop fixation and get accustomed to supporting Sony and to some extent nintendo.
So far, not critical, but it does potentially pave the way for the big game companies to completely torpedo the desktop and xbox gaming market. At the same time as getting developers in the mindset of multi-platform support, it starts pushing it's first-party app store as well as a bizarre model for desktop usage. Between the improved view on multiplatform development and threatening digital distribution channels that particularly valve has become accustomed to it, they are paving the way for a company like Valve to completely undermine MS' desktop and console gaming market.
There are a large number of factors external to MS facilitating this scenario, but MS strategy has done it's part to explicitly fuel thisto some extent.
A very real scenario seems to be:
MS effectively forfeits the desktop market due to lack of interest on their part. It's a boring market where they cannot grow and today's business philosophy seems to dismiss sustainability without exponential growth (growth is always indicated as a percentage, the raw dollar values are de-emphasized). Companies are still using XP by and large, which might have been ok except MS is simultaneously pushing the market to develop software that doesn't work with XP, so XP usage might be characeterized as 'limping along' with increased difficulty over time. Between OSX and Linux (though the 'front and center' Linux DEs have also lost their way), some enterprises are seeing viable MS alternatives. On the homefront, erosion comes more easily, mostly at the hands of IOS, Android, and to a lesser extent OSX and Linux, share-wise (consumer desktop/laptop market is increasingly driven by 'enthusiasts' as the casual user base moves on to tablets and phones).
Casual game development on Android paves the way to support Ouya on the low end (XBLA competitor) and on the high end, Valve makes a go of it with a game console, a stronger, diverse name in gaming and digital distribution of games than MS. I see this as highly disruptive to Sony, Nintendo, and MS, but I don't think Valve would've had such an easy time of it if MS hadn't paved the way with xBox.
Phone/tablet is easy enough to see. MS has no appreciable share. To those saying 'but WP7 users always rave about it', that would be a natural consequence of a small user base. The only people there are naturally going to be fanboys. Just like WebOS had exceedingly high satisfaction among its very small userbase (I liked WebOS, but it really lacked a lot). IOS and Android seem to be carving up the market handily.
Basically, MS is screwed. They are trying to compete with google using Bing to dubious result. They are pushing Azure to comete with EC2 and are diluting their vision because it just isn't working. They are throwing their desktop market (the only market they securely held) under the bus to try to prop up metro which has been a market failure on phones today.
However, x86-64 only use 40 bytes for addressing, which will handle 1 TB of RAM.
40 *bytes* would be overkill and more than a TB, and 40 bits is outdated information:
"Current implementations of the AMD64 architecture (starting from AMD 10h microarchitecture) extend this to 48-bit physical addresses[9] and therefore can address up to 256 TB of RAM. The architecture permits extending this to 52 bits in the future"
So without a new architecture, can hit a petabyte of ram. There are systems with multiple terabytes of ram on a system already (see IBM x3850 x5 for example)
Of course that doesn't matter. Let's assume you are right and maybe the entire user base of Steam is 5% of the Windows market. Steam has no reason to care at all about the 95% that they don't care about. So if only 5% come over to Linux, then Steam's current business model is preserved.
If you think the MS app store will open up the 95% to gaming more that would compete with steam, that would be a silly proposition. Acquiring steam is so trivial, that I can't see that as a significant barrier to adoption. Maybe 95% will start throwing a buck here or a buck there on an angry birds type game, but that doesn't represent a threat to Steam's current business model, only a threat to Steam's expansion opportunities.
Yes Microsoft will have their own app store, but Steam has many people locked in right now...
Which is why they have to act as quickly as possible, while they still have an advantage. Both Apple and MS are emphasizing their first-party store experiences. Over time Steam risks becoming irrelevant. Steam needs to encourage more Linux adoption, as the last desktop platform with seemingly no interest in baked in commercial digital distribution mechanisms quite like Steam.
Additionally, steam stands to gain significant perceived value the more platforms they support. If hypothetically in the future a title purchased once for the user works for their Windows PC, their Linux SteamBox, and their Android tablet, that is significant value that MS nor Apple will ever provide, which helps to keep Windows platform users loyal in a world with more and more diverse OS platforms in their day to day life.
You mean wine?
SSL certs conceptually contain SSH host keys as a strict subset of functionality. The strategy with respect to all-powerful CAs without limited authority domain is the big problem in x509 implementations. More sophisticated mechanisms to limit the scope of CAs and more carefully manage trust of CAs would go far to address the real-world problems of SSL.
I often find myself wishing ssh did have SSL mechanisms for user and client keys, but all ssh entities by default trust *no* CA and treat the keys like they treat ssh keypairs today, and normally speaking the admin would have to add one or two CAs pertinent to their organization if they wanted to take advantage of the extras of x509.
Shared secrets are not insecure. Applied incorrectly they are insecure.
When a given pairing is unique (i.e. the credential authenticates exactly one endpoint to exactly one other endpoint), then a breach of the level of acquiring the password data is likely going to yield nothing more than you already have: free reign over the system holding the data. In this case, the authenticator selected the characters randomly.
Shared secrets generally allow something that's impossible with one-way hashes: Being inherently impervious to MITM. The key would be that the secret must be set in a secure manner, but this is a straightforward and intuitive thing in general. For example, on some pieces of networking equipment, you must set initial SNMPv3 password using serial port before you can ever manage it. Intuitively, this makes sense to more people as they consider it 'initial setup' and over the network configuration is reasonably explained as chicken and egg. SNMPv3 uses the password as a shared secret, meaning a third party can't impersonate it, even though the admin took no effort to understand and implement something like a PKI.
In this situation, I presume the envisioned scenario is that the training would occur under a special circumstance (e.g. your super secret organization has you play this game in a secure office to train it where they control everything).
Or one could be rightfully skeptical that the recording images are because it was bumped rather than he likely has a 'store recent video' capability.
His explanation of the system seems suspect. He presents stills from at least a good 5-10 minute window. If all it was doing was augmented reality, then a 30 second old image has pretty much zero value and would not be retained by the system except to facilitate capture ability. Imagine yourself in the same position, with video footage naturally occuring. Would you not want to have video capture ability, just in case? Hell I know I would and i'd even have it uploading video content as quick as it can to some internet server in case anything happened to me that would leave any on-person storage not viable.
While all this makes him a bit more disingenious, I'm going to say whether you video it or not makes little difference. We wouldn't kick someone out of a store for having an eidetic memory, recording the data isn't that different. If you let someone see with their eyes, then implicitly you trust them enough to record.
Even if steam is allowed, it might be seen as superfluous. Particularly by other publishers. Why cut valve in on the action when MS and Apple have 100% attach rate for their own distribution channels and Steam can't guarantee such an attach rate. Valve needs to leverage their current status to bring users into platforms without the aspirations of Apple and Microsoft driving.
All of that and factor in the rumored aspirations of a "Steam Box" where Steam would need some OS. They know OSX is impossible, and with Windows they'd have to pay a significant fee and/or incorporate Windows branding, which would dilute the branding message Valve would want most.
It is of course still ballsy, as with Linux the library will be largely limited to first-party titles and indie content and they'd forfeit a lot of other major publisher content. On the *other* hand, one wonders how much value Valve will continue to extract from those other publishers as they get more ambitious with their own Steam competitors. For example. EA is rolling their own and witholding content from Steam, Square Enix seems to be doing the same.
Considering Android's stack is entirely distinct from the typical Linux desktop stack, that would be a big no. WebOS was about as close as a even remotely serious contender got (SDL graphics access, pulseaudio sound) to matching desktop linux, and even that was very very different.
But it isn't 'just' an abstraction layer. It is an abstraction layer that *usually* isn't tested by the programs that run on it, that don't implement a consistent look and feel with other applications, sometimes require odd window and display management circumstances, and one where the filesystem is traversed in a way that is fundamentally distinct from the rest of applications in the environment. An app running under wine sticks out like crazy in an otherwise normal Linux desktop.
The wine project deserves much praise for what they do, but to be complacent and say "wine is good enough" really undervalues the merits of an app that is clearly actually targetting the operating system.
I think the parent understood energy/power (else he couldn't do the math to express duration). I think he phrased the last part poorly, but trying to convey that TFA is exploting a general misunderstanding of the nature of power to create a very different conceptual picture in the minds of the reader. If you took average US power consumption over a whole second during one firing of these lasers and a second where the lasers weren't fired, you wouldn't be able to make out the difference that one might intuitively expect given the headline. For simplicity, ignoring the situation suggests that the energy for the system was likely charged over at least the course of a few seconds and not instantly drawn from the grid).
Of course, struggling to express the magnitude of this acheivement in an intuitive way is a losing proposition.
Have you never been involved a project that past the go/no go point they decided to bring on additional talent, either because a solid opportunity presents itself (e.g. learning a coveted developer is leaving a position or is otherwise more willing to work for your effort than you imagined) or because they realized resources on hand were insufficient in some way or another? Valve has already been reporting significant issues with the layers they are targeting in linux. It would not be surprising that they made use of SDL, determined in QA significant problems in SDL or their use of SDL and they were not getting the attention on problems they needed without paying, and hired the lead of the project to improve attention to their usage of SDL.
Based on the progress demonstrated, they've pretty far along, farther along than I would expect a company to be if they had not yet decided for sure to make a go for it. Or if they haven't decided for sure to make a go for it, they have been risking devolpment resources speculating that they would make a go for it, so the runway is potentially shorter than an organization where no one does *anything* until the business is 100% percent certain.
Remember on the OSX launch, native linux reference could be found by digging. They've been toying with this at least so long that they were doing some build activity back in 1H 2010. All the steam box rumors seem to center around Linux on AMD x86 platform, which isn't so exotic that Valve would face an overwhelming challenge compared with what they already support between Windows and OSX today.
Actually, the likelihood would be that Valve would do an x86 based solution with a higher end graphics solution. It will cost more, but it will accomodate the market segment of high end games from big name studios and such that Tegra won't compete with (due to power envelope).
Ouya would aim for cheap and high commonality with tablets and cell phones, which have much tighter power and cost constraints. You'll likely see more interesting independent works on Ouya.
Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo may be in for an interesting landscape in 2013.
It's reasonable to assume Valve isn't doing this for the Linux desktop (though they may be doing things in such a way that Linux desktop is covered 'for free'), but likely related to the other rumors of a Steam branded game console.
If Steam gives a console-equivalent experience in a manner similar to their PC platform, it's likely to be as capable as Sony and MS platforms but a lot more approachable. The 'big studios' are likely to be very enthusiastic about it. So the 'AAA' games will likely hit a Valve platform and probably with a bit more aggressive pricing (at first) compared to Sony and MS.
On the low end, Ouya may stir things up significantly.
*Anything* that becomes the most popular 'brand' will become distorted to the point it's hard to say precisely how meaningful the application of the name in a given circumstance is. Agile and Cloud are the two terms in the computing industry the most afflicted by this phenomenon.
In fact, I would say an organization getting very picky about using every little piece of 'Agile' terminology is more likely than not in a scenario where they really aren't doing 'Agile'. Many just rename their 'product requirements' to 'user stories', 'milestones' to 'sprints', and 'status meetings' to 'scrum' without actually changing anything about the way they do things other than renaming (well, and putting the exact same project management data they had before into new software tools that advertise 'Agile').
It's just like how anything that has network connectivity now is advertised as 'cloud enabled', without regard for anything but the ability to transmit and receive IP as a qualifiaction for 'cloud'.