It's pretty obvious who is and who is not reading the article here:
In short, there seems to be no evidence, at present, that the D-Wave machine is going to overtake simulated annealing for any instance size.
The author concedes that it is possible that this may happen, but:
Well, I concede that almost anything is possible in the future—but “these experiments, while not supporting D-Wave’s claims about the usefulness of its devices, also don’t conclusively disprove those claims” is a very different message than what’s currently making it into the press.
Additionally the author wants this to succeed because of possible results of its failure:
Academic QC programs will be decimated, despite the slow but genuine progress that they’d been making the entire time in a “parallel universe” from D-Wave. People’s contempt for academia is such that, while a D-Wave success would be trumpeted as its alone, a D-Wave failure would be blamed on the entire QC community.
The problem is that it's not faster, and while there's a study that concludes it is, the blog post specifically invalidates this:
Namely, the same USC paper that reported the quantum annealing behavior of the D-Wave One, also showed no speed advantage whatsoever for quantum annealing over classical simulated annealing. In more detail, Matthias Troyer’s group spent a few months carefully studying the D-Wave problem—after which, they were able to write optimized simulated annealing code that solves the D-Wave problem on a normal, off-the-shelf classical computer, about 15 times faster than the D-Wave machine itself solves the D-Wave problem! Of course, if you wanted even more classical speedup than that, then you could simply add more processors to your classical computer, for only a tiny fraction of the ~$10 million that a D-Wave One would set you back.
About the paper claiming it's faster:
As I said above, at the time McGeoch and Wang’s paper was released to the media (though maybe not at the time it was written?), the “highly tuned implementation” of simulated annealing that they ask for had already been written and tested, and the result was that it outperformed the D-Wave machine on all instance sizes tested. In other words, their comparison to CPLEX had already been superseded by a much more informative comparison—one that gave the “opposite” result—before it ever became public. For obvious reasons, most press reports have simply ignored this fact.
Same thing that happened with hotmail. They switch to Windows servers, it crashes and burns horribly, so they switch back. There's no quality control, no development, it goes to hell, and everyone switches to the far superior service Google offers (since they decided to grow their own and not acquire youtube).
Then they switch everyone over to zune.com or something to try capitalizing on their name.. or perhaps trying to gain a name, it's hard to tell really.. complete with commercials about people deleting hundreds of hours of video in a single click in the middle of other unrelated activities, because you know that's the feature we've all really been missing.
Yes, and that there is a "brick wall". First, the article may be wrong; exascale might hit by (or before) 2020. They've got 7 years. That's a long time in terms of technology; the first teraflops supercomputer was 1996, merely 17 years ago. Speed increase can't happen indefinitely, but we're not talking about indefinitely, just exaflops. Even if this is not achieved by 2020, they have not hit a "brick wall", because development will continue until it is achieved. There is nothing even slightly theoretical making exaflops unachievable.
In short, even if the article is right, it's wrong.
Sure but they're one of many. Even if one of the many don't accomplish this, surely another will. If not by (or before!) 2020, sometime later. People aren't just going to give up if it doesn't happen by some arbitrary date. This is my real point.
These days, how much is really revolutionary anyway? So many new supercomputing announcements are "we threw N parts at this, so it's Yflops".
We are so close to a Web-based operating system I can taste it.
Why yes, only a few simple modifications to the standard and soon we'll be writing kernel modules and drivers in HTML6. Joy!
Blech.
How can you go from "severe scope creep" to "hey let's add more scope!" with a straight face? Clearly, HTML is far beyond its original intent, and getting by on horrible hacks. Browsers can now do things on a shiny new 3.5GHz machine and $600 video card at nearly half the speed they could 14 years ago on a 200MHz P2 with a Voodoo2. Quake 3! Woo!
Let's start talking about how we can replace browsers and HTML.
College textbooks are largely irrelevant in the age of Internet. They only exist to keep publishers and bought teachers rich.
This is really not the case at all. Your class may "require" stupid irrelevant textbooks; I had many like this myself. However, textbooks, i.e., field-specific moderately expensive ($50-80+) texts are often the only useful place to find information. Yes, you can find probably all the information on Java you care about on the web. However, you will have a much harder time finding information on compiler optimization, writing garbage collectors, or other "real" CS topics on the web, beyond very rudimentary hand-wavy descriptions.
You can find a lot of this information on the internet, usually in the form of papers behind a paywall (e.g., the ACM). However even then, it's usually not condensed into a useful form such that you can easily evaluate the pros and cons of various approaches. If you have to deal with these things, $100 for the textbook suddenly seems very reasonable.
Building your professional library as a student can be nice; however it would also be nice if professors focused on books that will have a long useful life.
Then take 20 seconds and search the web for real sources of information, not Slashdot or Random J Dude's blog about Java and how vaccines are giving us autism or whatever. Subscribe to the ACM or similar for your field and get access to great deals of actual research. Not cheap, but neither are print journals, and the coverage is far better.
Complaining about information not coming to you and that you have to discover it is pretty lazy in a very bad way. Assuming your slim selection of reading is actually giving you a broad picture of what's going on, especially if you're only reading a few sources, is only fooling yourself. However, the technology to actually collate information into an easy-to-read list obviously already exists.
Yes if only there were some sort of Rich Site Summary that could be published by websites that would allow a piece of software... let's call it an aggregator to be fancy, or maybe just a reader... to pull content for you, much like a mail delivery person. If you found a site you liked, you could just click on a link to subscribe, and your friends could share articles and feeds with you. Google should get on this!
There's a lot of awkward inconsistencies such as sometimes when you download a game from the store you get an unlock file, and others you get the full game, and other times you get random extra downloads on top, then it's non-obvious what files you can delete so you end up with these files that do nothing but you're unsure if it's safe to delete them.
This shows you have never actually used a PS3. After installation, there is just "the game". "Game data" and "Patch/DLC" may exist at some point, but only if you have run the game or downloaded them. These are all clearly labeled (assuming you know the definition of "DLC" or "Settings") and in a single location with the same game icon. There are no "files" that are "non-obvious".
For games where you download a demo and an unlock, these are merged into a single, unambiguous game. There is not even a separate "game data" at this point. From your description, it sounds like you saw someone download a demo, a game, and some DLC, and thought these were somehow all required to run the game.
While the demo+key solution may not seem like the most elegant, it's pretty nice when you try a game, decide you like it, and then don't have to spend another hour redownloading the full version.. you can just unlock it and continue playing in a minute or few total.
I do feel that objectively the 360 feels more polished, the controllers not only feel better to hold and use, but the PS3 buttons even just outright feel like they don't respond sometimes.
This is not "objective". Subjectively, to you, the 360 feels "more polished" and the controller "feels better to hold". I have the opposite experience; the 360's controller is OK, but I prefer the DualShock (and I have big hands). This is the first time I have ever heard of a non-broken PS3 controller feeling "like they don't respond sometimes".
Patching is horrendous, I had to download many 10s of gigabytes of patches for the handful of games I bought
OK at this point it's clear we're dealing with FUD. The biggest patch I've ever seen was around 200MB. The biggest downloadable full game I've ever seen is 14GB (though I typically buy discs.. infamous 2 was free for PS+). Never have these required "10s of gigabytes of patches".
The sign up process to Sony online was brutal, the site kept going down and I desperately tried to recover an SOE account from years ago but apparently that's a different Sony online thing to the Playstation one and that made it all a bit of a pain.
Er... so filling in a few blanks on the screen was "brutal"? I suppose if you're really a cluebie, you might confuse SOE and PSN, but nowhere is SOE or an SOE account mentioned in the signup process. Perhaps it would be nice if they merged these at some point, but that would get its own share of complaints. And let me tell you about the "recovery" process for XBOX/GFWL accounts...
In any case, this entire rant comes off either FUD, an incredibly inexperienced user, or someone who uses a 360 and watched their kids using a PS3.
Exactly why this is another troll piece. There is no evidence of "stigma"... Linux has never had stigma attached, except maybe in the minds of Microsoft management. When has "Linux" and been "a mark or token of infamy, disgrace, or reproach"?
As a counterexample, Steam just got released for Linux and they had a big fanfare and sale. Where's the stigma?
There is no grand conspiracy to hide the fact it's Linux; Linux is already everywhere and it doesn't need marketing. It's cool that way.
Now, a new vacuum cleaner comes out but it is required to always be plugged into the wall and it will only work if it is connected to a service that costs me a monthly payment.
And of course, Microsoft makes a "vacuum cleaners need plugged in" analogy while not realizing they are getting "unplugged", so to speak. With these fancy new vacuum cleaners, you only need to "download" the electricity when you're not using it! It's almost as if being plugged in all the time is highly inconvenient.
Sadly while T-Mobile has always had really good pricing in relation to AT&T and Verizon, they've always had really crappy coverage (though their service in covered areas always seemed decent). If you are someone who spends most of your time in a 4G-covered area, great. Otherwise, it's pretty much Verizon or bust (AT&T being pretty much the worst of both). Somehow T-Mobile always seems to get the best devices, though. I guess that and pricing set them apart.
If they can get their coverage up to rival Verizon, though, we can expect real competition... or increased prices.
Anybody who reads the news and is paying attention to what has been going on lately realizes that Google has changed. Are they completely "evil" now? No, but it's quite clear that openness is less important to them than in the past.
I don't think this is really that much different. Mostly in that Google was never particularly open. They just happen to have finally killed a service that people actually care about (vs like Wave or Buzz or even iGoogle) in their Ahab-like (or Quixotic, depending on your view) pursuit of G+.
They've all but declared war on RSS, they never implemented OpenSocial in Google+, G+ doesn't support any of a whole raft of standards that you'd use when building a social network if you cared about openness, Android has *never* really be developed in the open... it's "open source" but Google do everything and then throw code over the wall to the world.
They never cared about RSS and it's obvious Reader was never anything but a back-shelf product people happened to like, because, well, Google. None of their (major) products have been developed "in the open"; the fact you can even get the source to Android is quite something. Where's the open development (or source code) for Web Search, Gmail, G+, calendar, etc? Locked up tight. Don't idealize Google; they were never an "open source" company.
But the point is that there is a pattern present, where Google are showing less and less interest in Open Web principles.
Screw the web. If you want to beat Google, don't do it on their playground. It's not even a very good one.
Who owns Fogbeam Labs, anyway?
I do, along with my cofounders.
Then it's very disingenuous of you to post the article as if you were a third party when you are not.
Because this is a complete troll piece to begin with, and adding Microsoft to the list just makes it blatant. Nowhere is evidence given for Google "abdicating their position as such a champion," it's simply stated with the hope we accept it as a given. Then toss Microsoft into a list of "good guys".
Who owns Fogbeam Labs, anyway? They claim to be "Open Source 2.0" (what does that even mean?) and very new.
You mean when they made a search engine? Or a webmail client? Or online maps? Or office apps? Or an RSS reader? Or a calendar? Or a finance site? Or a chat program? Or a photo site? Or an online store? Or a social site? Or a phone OS?
None of these things are "innovations", none of them were particularly innovative, and they weren't doing any of them first (or even early), but in many cases they were better/easier/free-as-in-beer-er than the alternative. Which is fine. And they made money on it. Which is great. And when they stop working (like Reader), we'll find something else, or write something else. Since they make getting your data out pretty easy, that's not even hard.
And if you've become complacent where if Google doesn't offer it, you can't find it, that's not innovation... that's you being lazy. And it's not their fault, it's yours.
The game is partly calculated server-side. This is why you need a constant internet connection, because some of their servers are doing the work for you. This is almost certainly also why they've collapsed in a heap.
This is possibly BS, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. Either way, the server debacle shows how bad EA is. This is first and foremost a single-player game, and there should be no server requirement to play. Zero. Really, there should be no server-side requirement even for multiplayer: there is no reason two people can't play by connecting directly to each other, LAN or internet. A lobby server for random multiplayer is nice, but should never be required outside an MMO.
EA's true intent here is almost certainly to lock out user-based mods and content and eke every last dollar out of its userbase they can manage. They didn't quite get there with Sims 3, since it's still run on the user side and thus users can load stuff. I'm sure the primary motivation for always-on DRM in SC5 is to test completely locking out users and beginning the move to pure dollar-and-tenning everyone (have you seen the price of their DLC?).
The limit of what you can do easily is not give them money. There are plenty more things you could be doing, depending on how much you really care:
1. Encourage others to not give them money.
2. Start a campaign to spread awareness about how their (and any other similar) games harm everyone.
3. Start a campaign to boycott any games similar to this. A nice fancy website listing these games would be a start.
4. Bring this up as a consumer rights issue, start a lobby.
If you get enough people wound up about something, you can get the backing and momentum to really have an effect. Unfortunately few people actually care enough to do more than complain on slashdot as they're downloading the thing they claim to hate so much. There is much that could be done, but few people willing to do it.
So if you have a physical mail, and someone gets to read it and insert ads with it (without knowing who you are - say they aren't allowed to see the address), it would be fine?
Straw man. Despite MS's claims, "someone" at Google is not reading your email. If you had said: "So, if you have a physical mail, and an algorithm generates ads from the content to help support the Post Office, and it's completely anonymous to the advertisers, it would be fine?", you might have a valid argument.
And I disagree with other posters that email doesn't have an expectation of privacy, though that doesn't mean it is private, unless you have strong end-to-end encryption.
76.3 million worldwide as of last March. Maybe you consider selling 76 million units "a failure" but you're the only one. Do I smell some fanboyism here? Sure, this is about half of Nintendo's 153 million DS units as of Dec 31, 2012, but considering this is Sony's first handheld and Nintendo has had a dominating stranglehold on the market since 1989 with the Game Boy, that's a pretty good first attempt
The fact you don't know what the Vita looks like simply means you don't pay attention to the news, or the news you do pay attention to is simply focused on Nintendo-only products.
Re:Nintendo needs to rethink its place in the worl
on
Is the Wii U Already Dead?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
has "gimmicks" (can we lay that one to rest BTW? Innovation isn't gimmickry, the DS killed the PSP, and the introduction of the Wii basically forced Microsoft to go in a new direction)
No, because it's still Nintendo's primary problem. The DS didn't kill the PSP. The PSP was the first successful non-Nintendo gaming handheld, and by "successful" I mean "sold substantially in the popular market", "had a lot of games", and "has a successor". That's pretty successful. The PSP may not have beat the DS in sales figures, but that's still a pretty huge win given the wasteland of other failed non-Nintendo handhelds.
Innovation isn't gimmickry, but the Wii was gimmickry. It did most certainly not force Microsoft to do anything. Sure, they came out with the Kinect. The number of good games using it? Zero. Sure, it's found a lot of non-gaming use, but that's irrelevant. It's irrelevant to gaming. Nintendo only finally at the end of the Wii's lifecycle managed to show motion controls could work... but only as well as a regular controller at best. (Worse, Zelda Skyward Sword triggers my RSI too fast to be playable.)
Sony and Microsoft need to take note, because realistically, unless their next game consoles are significantly different from the box-with-controllers-and-some-way-to-insert-a-game-and-a-TV-out model, they'll flop too.
For the casual market, maybe something like Ouya is sufficient. Even my Roku XS plays Angry Birds. But this is buying the Nintendo Lie: that everyone is a casual gamer. If anything, fewer people are becoming casual gamers, since so many people are growing up with video games. It's no longer just for nerds.
In the end, Microsoft and Sony only need to do one thing: make sure their consoles have games that Nintendo doesn't, or even just that they play games better than Nintendo. Given the last three generations of Nintendo consoles (Wii, Cube, N64), this is hardly a stretch.
Many of you accuse Microsoft of understocking, and yet when it doesn't continue to sell a whole lot of units, you laugh at their sales?
You seem to think this is some form of contradiction or hypocrisy. Yet it is not: the reason they're accused of understocking is because they're being accused of creating the illusion of demand; when they are laughed at for low sales, it is because this false demand is exposed.
No, but oddly, it has a PrtSc key between the right Ctrl and Alt. I have not verified if this acts as a SysRq key that Linux recognizes (PrtSc/SysRq are usually the same key), but if so this is arguably a lot more useful. Pause/Break is usually just the same as Ctrl+S.
There are also Home/End/Insert/Delete keys up above the backspace key, but I don't find them useful. Presumably you could remap any of these to keys you do find useful. Fn-modified keys (except maybe spacebar) are recognized as keysyms in X.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty obvious who is and who is not reading the article here:
The author concedes that it is possible that this may happen, but:
Additionally the author wants this to succeed because of possible results of its failure:
Seriously, read the whole damn article.
The problem is that it's not faster, and while there's a study that concludes it is, the blog post specifically invalidates this:
About the paper claiming it's faster:
Same thing that happened with hotmail. They switch to Windows servers, it crashes and burns horribly, so they switch back. There's no quality control, no development, it goes to hell, and everyone switches to the far superior service Google offers (since they decided to grow their own and not acquire youtube).
Then they switch everyone over to zune.com or something to try capitalizing on their name .. or perhaps trying to gain a name, it's hard to tell really .. complete with commercials about people deleting hundreds of hours of video in a single click in the middle of other unrelated activities, because you know that's the feature we've all really been missing.
Yes, and that there is a "brick wall". First, the article may be wrong; exascale might hit by (or before) 2020. They've got 7 years. That's a long time in terms of technology; the first teraflops supercomputer was 1996, merely 17 years ago. Speed increase can't happen indefinitely, but we're not talking about indefinitely, just exaflops. Even if this is not achieved by 2020, they have not hit a "brick wall", because development will continue until it is achieved. There is nothing even slightly theoretical making exaflops unachievable.
In short, even if the article is right, it's wrong.
Sure but they're one of many. Even if one of the many don't accomplish this, surely another will. If not by (or before!) 2020, sometime later. People aren't just going to give up if it doesn't happen by some arbitrary date. This is my real point.
These days, how much is really revolutionary anyway? So many new supercomputing announcements are "we threw N parts at this, so it's Yflops".
"Japan to develop new exaflop computer by 2020" ... why not? And if it's even a few microseconds into 2021 I suppose that supercomputing has failed, will pack up, and go home.
Why yes, only a few simple modifications to the standard and soon we'll be writing kernel modules and drivers in HTML6. Joy!
Blech.
How can you go from "severe scope creep" to "hey let's add more scope!" with a straight face? Clearly, HTML is far beyond its original intent, and getting by on horrible hacks. Browsers can now do things on a shiny new 3.5GHz machine and $600 video card at nearly half the speed they could 14 years ago on a 200MHz P2 with a Voodoo2. Quake 3! Woo!
Let's start talking about how we can replace browsers and HTML.
This is really not the case at all. Your class may "require" stupid irrelevant textbooks; I had many like this myself. However, textbooks, i.e., field-specific moderately expensive ($50-80+) texts are often the only useful place to find information. Yes, you can find probably all the information on Java you care about on the web. However, you will have a much harder time finding information on compiler optimization, writing garbage collectors, or other "real" CS topics on the web, beyond very rudimentary hand-wavy descriptions.
You can find a lot of this information on the internet, usually in the form of papers behind a paywall (e.g., the ACM). However even then, it's usually not condensed into a useful form such that you can easily evaluate the pros and cons of various approaches. If you have to deal with these things, $100 for the textbook suddenly seems very reasonable.
Building your professional library as a student can be nice; however it would also be nice if professors focused on books that will have a long useful life.
Then take 20 seconds and search the web for real sources of information, not Slashdot or Random J Dude's blog about Java and how vaccines are giving us autism or whatever. Subscribe to the ACM or similar for your field and get access to great deals of actual research. Not cheap, but neither are print journals, and the coverage is far better.
Complaining about information not coming to you and that you have to discover it is pretty lazy in a very bad way. Assuming your slim selection of reading is actually giving you a broad picture of what's going on, especially if you're only reading a few sources, is only fooling yourself. However, the technology to actually collate information into an easy-to-read list obviously already exists.
Yes if only there were some sort of Rich Site Summary that could be published by websites that would allow a piece of software ... let's call it an aggregator to be fancy, or maybe just a reader... to pull content for you, much like a mail delivery person. If you found a site you liked, you could just click on a link to subscribe, and your friends could share articles and feeds with you. Google should get on this!
This shows you have never actually used a PS3. After installation, there is just "the game". "Game data" and "Patch/DLC" may exist at some point, but only if you have run the game or downloaded them. These are all clearly labeled (assuming you know the definition of "DLC" or "Settings") and in a single location with the same game icon. There are no "files" that are "non-obvious".
For games where you download a demo and an unlock, these are merged into a single, unambiguous game. There is not even a separate "game data" at this point. From your description, it sounds like you saw someone download a demo, a game, and some DLC, and thought these were somehow all required to run the game.
While the demo+key solution may not seem like the most elegant, it's pretty nice when you try a game, decide you like it, and then don't have to spend another hour redownloading the full version .. you can just unlock it and continue playing in a minute or few total.
This is not "objective". Subjectively, to you, the 360 feels "more polished" and the controller "feels better to hold". I have the opposite experience; the 360's controller is OK, but I prefer the DualShock (and I have big hands). This is the first time I have ever heard of a non-broken PS3 controller feeling "like they don't respond sometimes".
OK at this point it's clear we're dealing with FUD. The biggest patch I've ever seen was around 200MB. The biggest downloadable full game I've ever seen is 14GB (though I typically buy discs .. infamous 2 was free for PS+). Never have these required "10s of gigabytes of patches".
Er... so filling in a few blanks on the screen was "brutal"? I suppose if you're really a cluebie, you might confuse SOE and PSN, but nowhere is SOE or an SOE account mentioned in the signup process. Perhaps it would be nice if they merged these at some point, but that would get its own share of complaints. And let me tell you about the "recovery" process for XBOX/GFWL accounts...
In any case, this entire rant comes off either FUD, an incredibly inexperienced user, or someone who uses a 360 and watched their kids using a PS3.
Exactly why this is another troll piece. There is no evidence of "stigma" ... Linux has never had stigma attached, except maybe in the minds of Microsoft management. When has "Linux" and been "a mark or token of infamy, disgrace, or reproach"?
As a counterexample, Steam just got released for Linux and they had a big fanfare and sale. Where's the stigma?
There is no grand conspiracy to hide the fact it's Linux; Linux is already everywhere and it doesn't need marketing. It's cool that way.
And of course, Microsoft makes a "vacuum cleaners need plugged in" analogy while not realizing they are getting "unplugged", so to speak. With these fancy new vacuum cleaners, you only need to "download" the electricity when you're not using it! It's almost as if being plugged in all the time is highly inconvenient.
Sadly while T-Mobile has always had really good pricing in relation to AT&T and Verizon, they've always had really crappy coverage (though their service in covered areas always seemed decent). If you are someone who spends most of your time in a 4G-covered area, great. Otherwise, it's pretty much Verizon or bust (AT&T being pretty much the worst of both). Somehow T-Mobile always seems to get the best devices, though. I guess that and pricing set them apart.
If they can get their coverage up to rival Verizon, though, we can expect real competition... or increased prices.
I don't think this is really that much different. Mostly in that Google was never particularly open. They just happen to have finally killed a service that people actually care about (vs like Wave or Buzz or even iGoogle) in their Ahab-like (or Quixotic, depending on your view) pursuit of G+.
They never cared about RSS and it's obvious Reader was never anything but a back-shelf product people happened to like, because, well, Google. None of their (major) products have been developed "in the open"; the fact you can even get the source to Android is quite something. Where's the open development (or source code) for Web Search, Gmail, G+, calendar, etc? Locked up tight. Don't idealize Google; they were never an "open source" company.
Screw the web. If you want to beat Google, don't do it on their playground. It's not even a very good one.
Then it's very disingenuous of you to post the article as if you were a third party when you are not.
Because this is a complete troll piece to begin with, and adding Microsoft to the list just makes it blatant. Nowhere is evidence given for Google "abdicating their position as such a champion," it's simply stated with the hope we accept it as a given. Then toss Microsoft into a list of "good guys".
Who owns Fogbeam Labs, anyway? They claim to be "Open Source 2.0" (what does that even mean?) and very new.
You mean when they made a search engine? Or a webmail client? Or online maps? Or office apps? Or an RSS reader? Or a calendar? Or a finance site? Or a chat program? Or a photo site? Or an online store? Or a social site? Or a phone OS?
None of these things are "innovations", none of them were particularly innovative, and they weren't doing any of them first (or even early), but in many cases they were better/easier/free-as-in-beer-er than the alternative. Which is fine. And they made money on it. Which is great. And when they stop working (like Reader), we'll find something else, or write something else. Since they make getting your data out pretty easy, that's not even hard.
And if you've become complacent where if Google doesn't offer it, you can't find it, that's not innovation... that's you being lazy. And it's not their fault, it's yours.
This sentiment is so wrong on so many levels. Stuff should not be "locked" in the first place.
This is possibly BS, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. Either way, the server debacle shows how bad EA is. This is first and foremost a single-player game, and there should be no server requirement to play. Zero. Really, there should be no server-side requirement even for multiplayer: there is no reason two people can't play by connecting directly to each other, LAN or internet. A lobby server for random multiplayer is nice, but should never be required outside an MMO.
EA's true intent here is almost certainly to lock out user-based mods and content and eke every last dollar out of its userbase they can manage. They didn't quite get there with Sims 3, since it's still run on the user side and thus users can load stuff. I'm sure the primary motivation for always-on DRM in SC5 is to test completely locking out users and beginning the move to pure dollar-and-tenning everyone (have you seen the price of their DLC?).
The limit of what you can do easily is not give them money. There are plenty more things you could be doing, depending on how much you really care:
1. Encourage others to not give them money.
2. Start a campaign to spread awareness about how their (and any other similar) games harm everyone.
3. Start a campaign to boycott any games similar to this. A nice fancy website listing these games would be a start.
4. Bring this up as a consumer rights issue, start a lobby.
If you get enough people wound up about something, you can get the backing and momentum to really have an effect. Unfortunately few people actually care enough to do more than complain on slashdot as they're downloading the thing they claim to hate so much. There is much that could be done, but few people willing to do it.
Straw man. Despite MS's claims, "someone" at Google is not reading your email. If you had said: "So, if you have a physical mail, and an algorithm generates ads from the content to help support the Post Office, and it's completely anonymous to the advertisers, it would be fine?", you might have a valid argument.
And I disagree with other posters that email doesn't have an expectation of privacy, though that doesn't mean it is private, unless you have strong end-to-end encryption.
76.3 million worldwide as of last March. Maybe you consider selling 76 million units "a failure" but you're the only one. Do I smell some fanboyism here? Sure, this is about half of Nintendo's 153 million DS units as of Dec 31, 2012, but considering this is Sony's first handheld and Nintendo has had a dominating stranglehold on the market since 1989 with the Game Boy, that's a pretty good first attempt
The fact you don't know what the Vita looks like simply means you don't pay attention to the news, or the news you do pay attention to is simply focused on Nintendo-only products.
No, because it's still Nintendo's primary problem. The DS didn't kill the PSP. The PSP was the first successful non-Nintendo gaming handheld, and by "successful" I mean "sold substantially in the popular market", "had a lot of games", and "has a successor". That's pretty successful. The PSP may not have beat the DS in sales figures, but that's still a pretty huge win given the wasteland of other failed non-Nintendo handhelds.
Innovation isn't gimmickry, but the Wii was gimmickry. It did most certainly not force Microsoft to do anything. Sure, they came out with the Kinect. The number of good games using it? Zero. Sure, it's found a lot of non-gaming use, but that's irrelevant. It's irrelevant to gaming. Nintendo only finally at the end of the Wii's lifecycle managed to show motion controls could work ... but only as well as a regular controller at best. (Worse, Zelda Skyward Sword triggers my RSI too fast to be playable.)
For the casual market, maybe something like Ouya is sufficient. Even my Roku XS plays Angry Birds. But this is buying the Nintendo Lie: that everyone is a casual gamer. If anything, fewer people are becoming casual gamers, since so many people are growing up with video games. It's no longer just for nerds.
In the end, Microsoft and Sony only need to do one thing: make sure their consoles have games that Nintendo doesn't, or even just that they play games better than Nintendo. Given the last three generations of Nintendo consoles (Wii, Cube, N64), this is hardly a stretch.
You seem to think this is some form of contradiction or hypocrisy. Yet it is not: the reason they're accused of understocking is because they're being accused of creating the illusion of demand; when they are laughed at for low sales, it is because this false demand is exposed.
No, but oddly, it has a PrtSc key between the right Ctrl and Alt. I have not verified if this acts as a SysRq key that Linux recognizes (PrtSc/SysRq are usually the same key), but if so this is arguably a lot more useful. Pause/Break is usually just the same as Ctrl+S.
There are also Home/End/Insert/Delete keys up above the backspace key, but I don't find them useful. Presumably you could remap any of these to keys you do find useful. Fn-modified keys (except maybe spacebar) are recognized as keysyms in X.