In fact the only problem it has is making out the quality from the...not so quality
Which is not a problem we should dismiss out of hand. The exact same problem killed Atari (and the American video game market with it) back in the 80s. When the NES was introduced, Nintendo had some pretty strict quality/quantity control to prevent that from happening again, as well as its own magazine to inform gamers about what was available. Perhaps aggregate reviews on the internet will fulfill the same function today.
you do your thing, and i'll do mine ok? have some respect for people's desire to keep going and to encourage others to succeed.
I do not complain about other people's personal projects. But when you start asking for money, there's some responsibility that goes along with that. Part of it is being honest with others and yourself about who you are and how you operate. Part of it is responding to criticism. You can't expect the benefit of the doubt when you're selling something, especially when you barely understand your own project. You can't expect us to be trusting when we find out that nobody is working with you except the outside companies you're paying to do the design and prototyping. If your response to criticism of your credentials and your business model is to act persecuted and accuse others of bullying, how are you going to make it in the business world?
You want to make a funky SBC? Great! You had some working boards fabbed? Congrats! I am sincerely happy for you. You want to share the joy of your project with others? Go for it! (Maybe bring some technical people along, though.)
You want other people's money? Come back when you're actually shipping product.
got a problem with that? then FUCK OFF and stay out of my way. you do your thing, with your thoughts; i'll do mine.
Excuse me? You're the one who keeps bringing your pointless stories about meaningless "progress" on your pie in the sky project to Slashdot. Last time you were asking for ten million dollars for a hopeless SoC project that you yourself knew nothing about. Now you're back here, what, trolling for pre-orders and funding? What kind of con artist are you?
And let's be clear, this isn't even really *your* project. You're throwing money at companies in China to get them to do the work for you, and you can't even answer their questions. You're nothing but a sales guy with a vague idea and a big ego. Come back when you're selling in volume, until then please quit wasting our time.
The Raspberry Pi people made a toy for educational purposes. If you read the About page, you will see two key differences:
1. The Raspberry Pi people have extensive hardware experience, with key figures actually working in the industry. They do their own technical work. They can answer questions about their design. They are selling through reputable distributors. lkcl, on the other hand, is a front-man with no hardware background. He is apparently the sole advocate in the world for a China-based for-profit operation.
2. Raspberry Pi's ultimate goal is to make a small single-board computer to help kids learn programming. lkcl's goals are large and varied, but mostly involve upending industries he knows nothing about, and probably getting rich in the process.
As far as I can discern without reading TFA, this is just some new ARM system-on-a-chip
No, it's much sillier than that. This is the latest in a long-running series of Slashvertisements by the submitter, lkcl. They chronicle his journey towards creating an "industry standard" for swappable processors for tablets based on the PCMCIA form factor. Nobody asked for this, nobody wants it, and lkcl has next to no experience with hardware development, but he's convinced it's going to change the world! To help the world along, he's working on-- actually, it looks like various Chinese companies are doing all the work. Anyway, lkcl is the funding conduit for an example card based on an existing ARM SoC. Today's story is about getting the first samples of the "2nd revision" of this card. Future samples are approved for sale as a standalone product because "they boot", which obviously qualifies them to ship.
In our last episode, lkcl digressed from his main project to announce a funding drive for a totally unrealistic project to build a free software-friendly SoC with a custom CPU in six months without doing any "design" work. Except for speeding up the processor, adding a bunch of peripherals, and implementing it on a cutting-edge semiconductor process. And then getting to market by Christmas. Just a small side project, right?
lkcl is pretty prolific on his own stories, so I'm sure his dozens of comment responses will answer all of your questions.
Why isn't there a suite of command-line tools to handle video clips yet, such as cutting, merging, transitions, variable speeds, inserting still images for a certain length, etc.?
AviSynth is a scripting language/library that can do those things, but it's more useful as glue logic than a standalone editor. You really need to see what you're working on when editing video. Even simple effects can involve some manual tweaking to figure out what looks good, and having a real-time random access preview in a non-linear editor is ideal. Seeing audio waveforms is also helpful -- maybe you want to synchronize a video effect with the audio, for instance. I'm currently adding RiffTrax commentary tracks to movie audio/video to make custom Blu-rays, which is a lot easier if I can see how the waveforms line up at the synch points.
You also have the question of how to handle (or rather, avoid) re-encoding. Does each tool output a huge raw temporary file? Do you use pipes to go from stdout->stdin through a mile-long command line? Do you have to run the tools in video-chronological order? How do you synchronize the audio with the video?
was Call of Duty banned there? I thought I recalled hearing about a mission where you assassinated Fidel Castro...
That was the first mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops. You play a special forces team sent in with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The goal of the mission is to kill Castro, but you only end up killing a body double. (It's based on a real historical event, so they couldn't actually have him get killed.)
Can someone explain to me what it is that gives such a small country that has comparably weak military... and pretty much zero chance of surviving a week in a real war the balls to be so dickish and war-hungry?
They have artillery lined up by the border. Within the first few hours of a war, they can devastate Seoul and probably other South Korean cities, killing millions. I think they also have rocket artillery that could hit Tokyo. North Korea would lose the war pretty quickly, but the civilian cost would be *very* high.
The New York Daily News' Mike Lupica reported last week that investigators of the Newtown case found a huge spreadsheet in the Lanza home where 20-year old Adam Lanza had methodically charted hundreds of past gun massacres, including the number of people killed and the make and model of weapons used. A Connecticut policeman told Lupica 'it sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research', and added, '[Mass killers such as Lanza] don't believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet. This was the work of a video gamer'.
Come on, a gamer wouldn't do that kind of research unless they were playing MMOs, or *maybe* a hardcore RPG. If he played shooters he would have just accused the other killers of hacking and tried to build an aimbot in retaliation.
If I read the article right, they're using a hypervisor (Xen) to directly run an Erlang interpreter (LING VM) that they wrote. The interpreter relies on Xen to provide some higher-level functionality. (Wikipedia says this is called paravirtualization.) So it's not quite a web server running on bare (virtual) metal, cool as that would be.
It looks like the significance of this is twofold. First, people are using VMs to create run-time environments that are less featureful than a standard OS but much faster to start up. Second, there's a working demo of a simple virtualized web server using this concept. I don't really follow virtualization tech, so maybe someone can clarify this? I'm not clear on exactly what the difference is between a hypervisor+para-API and a normal OS.
For some reason I decided to hunt through the Slashcode repository to see how moderation works, and I think you're right. To be on the list of eligible users, you have to have a certain minimum karma and a UID that's older than a certain limit. The list is then processed to select "good" moderators based on metamoderation and whether they actually use all their mod points. The good moderators are more likely to receive tokens, which eventually become mod points. I'm not clear on whether anything else can give tokens, since there are a lot of files and I'm manually reading through the repository. But it looks like you can get more mod points just by moderating fairly, which I guess was the whole point of metamod in the first place.
I didn't do anything like a full survey of the code base, so obviously take this with a grain of salt.
I'm not sure it's bias that's the root problem. There are many more other factors to consider:
1. Slashdot was born in a time when computer geeks were frequently abused and ostracized as teenagers. One of our defense mechanisms for this was to decide (often with adult encouragement) that we were smarter and better than everyone else. 2. Intelligent people with technical training (i.e. geeks) can easily come up with a plausible-sounding explanation for just about anything. You'll sometimes hear this called Engineer's Syndrome. 3. Moderation is focused on modding up entertaining writing and modding down flagrant spam. There's no separate mod option for rating actual subject matter expertise. 4. Getting modded +5 is rewarding (for your ego, at least). There's no reward for not commenting. 5. You have to be an active commenter to get mod points.
The upshot of all this is that users are motivated to comment regardless of what they add to the discussion. We underestimate how much we don't know, and thus overrate the comments of people like us. There's very little incentive for humility here.
(All this is based on my observations from reading and commenting in the past ~15 years. Am I a psychologist? No. Have I done any kind of rigorous study of this? No. Am I doing the thing I complained about in #2 above? Quite possibly! See how easy it is to fall into this trap?;-) )
Treating gays and lesbians as second-class citizens does them actual harm for literally no rational, empirical reason. This is a very straightforward issue, lacking even the economic arguments associated with slavery, women's lib, etc. It's been obvious for many years how the gay rights struggle is going to go and how it's going to look to future generations. Can you really blame DC et al for not wanting to funnel money to someone on the wrong side? Another few years and they might as well be soliciting comics from the Klan.
There's a paragraph near the end that suggests retaliation through widespread kidnapping:
I think these measures are capable, with God’s help, of disabling the new strategy of the American army at the medium or long-range levels. This is not all we have. There is the golden solution that shortens the long distances and through which we can bring back the pressure of the American public opinion in a more active way depending on the strategy of kidnapping in exchange for the drone strategy and we should not stop until they stop their strategy which will enable all the supporter of jihad to take part in defeating Petraeus and his new strategy. We start kidnapping Western citizens in any spot in the world, whether in the Islamic Maghreb, Egypt, Iraq or any other easy kidnapping places and the only demand is the halt of attacks on civilians in Yemen which is a just and humanitarian demand that will create world support and a public opinion pressure in America as they are being hurt again. We, therefore, aim at the core of the nation’s strategy which if failed, America, will accordingly collapse. We also are taking part in laying a block in the promising Islamic State in the Arab peninsula.
Seems like that's important, but the AP didn't pay any attention to it...
part time and casual workers do have jobs but people need full time jobs to make a decent living and pay a mortgage (american dream and all) so lets not kid ourselves into thinking a heap of people with part time or casial jobs is a good thing.
Part-time jobs can be fine for people who don't live by themselves. See above re: stay-at-home parents, full-time students, etc. Houses are designed for multiple people to live in. (So are a lot of apartments.) The pay rate matters too. Full-time at minimum wage is the same amount of money as part-time at $15/hour.
if you're not working full time in the private sector you are either underemployed... or your mooching off the government.
You're equating performing a service for a fee with "mooching". Do you think that schoolteachers, fire fighters, and police officers are moochers? What about the people at the BLS who compiled that statistic you mentioned?
The idea that there's a huge and growing group of people who sit around collecting "handouts" and pushing for "socialism" is pure fantasy. It's right-wing propaganda designed to make you angry and scared enough to vote for their political candidates. Contrary to what you seem to think, poor people don't like being poor, and unemployment (with or without benefits) does not make people happy.
94,750,000 jobs / (102,665,043 + 103,129,321) = 94,750,000 / 205,794,364 = 0.46 = 46%, which means 54% of the total US working age population is either unemployed or employed by government
depressing huh
Not really.
First off, you're leaving out part-time workers (many millions of them), which gets you up over 50%.
Secondly, you're making the assumption that a person without a full-time job is just leeching off of the rest of society. This ignores stay-at-home parents and full-time students, for examples.
Thirdly, the assumption that a government job is equivalent to unemployment is silly. Government employees perform a service and we pay them for it. That the money flows through the IRS instead of some corporation's accounts receivable is irrelevant.
Well, 8 gigs of RAM is nice, I guess. The headset jack in the controller is a neat idea. Improving controller latency is wonderful -- I'm glad people are finally taking this seriously. But everything else just seems... irrelevant, somehow. Particularly the controller, which, like the Wii U, apparently wants me to look away from the game while I'm playing. It's got more motion controls -- yawn. And a "share" button? Give me a break. The constant spamming of "trophy" messages and the occasional DLC ads are distracting enough; now you want me to perform for a camera while my friends watch in real-time?
Then there's this bizarre emphasis on streaming games. Because when I spend $600 on a game console, what I'm really looking for is compressed video and more lag. It sounds like a joke, but then they talk about a client/server model where I can stream the game to a Vita or smart phone.
Maybe we're at the point where there's not much room for substantial improvement, or maybe I'm just getting old. But between DLC, day 1 patches, long installation times, and low frame rates, I find myself wishing consoles could take a step backwards. Remember when you could buy a game with virtually no major bugs because there was real quality control? Remember when the game you bought was the whole game, and not missing another $30 of optional bolted-on content? Remember when you turned on the console and the game started up in less than 15 seconds?
Technical specs don't mean much in the end. The real value of a console is its games. As always, the fate of the next generation is in the hands of developers. Let's hope they've learned some lessons.
What I'm going to do about it, though, is hack that damn console and pirate each and every game. I'm done paying before I can evaluate the quality.
You could always just wait. After a year or so the prices come down, the bugs are as fixed as they're gonna get, and word of mouth will tell you whether the game is worth the time. There's nothing that says you *have* to play the latest and greatest games the moment they come out.
There have been a few stories in the last year or two with analyses of stolen password databases. The overwhelming majority of the passwords were based around a few simple schemes like abc123, ABC123, 123456, etc. Wouldn't it be possible to simply not let users choose those passwords? If you know what the 10,000 most common passwords are, you can hook the list into your account creation routine and reject them. Seems like an big improvement for very little effort on the user or server end.
It probably doesn't hurt that North Korea is right on their border. I'm sure they'd rather have their own client state there than an extension of U.S.-backed South Korea.
You're one of the few enemies we can still put into our video games without any real backlash.
Modern warfare games tend to use Russians and Middle Easterners as villains. I can't think of a game in the last five years that had China as the main villain. Sometimes North Korea is used as a euphemism. I had assumed this was because game publishers wanted to sell to China's growing middle class, but if game consoles are banned that clearly doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Having to stay at work till six and then the commute means you won't be home close to 8.
A two hour commute one way? If you're spending four hours a day commuting you're living in the wrong place.
In fact the only problem it has is making out the quality from the...not so quality
Which is not a problem we should dismiss out of hand. The exact same problem killed Atari (and the American video game market with it) back in the 80s. When the NES was introduced, Nintendo had some pretty strict quality/quantity control to prevent that from happening again, as well as its own magazine to inform gamers about what was available. Perhaps aggregate reviews on the internet will fulfill the same function today.
you do your thing, and i'll do mine ok? have some respect for people's desire to keep going and to encourage others to succeed.
I do not complain about other people's personal projects. But when you start asking for money, there's some responsibility that goes along with that. Part of it is being honest with others and yourself about who you are and how you operate. Part of it is responding to criticism. You can't expect the benefit of the doubt when you're selling something, especially when you barely understand your own project. You can't expect us to be trusting when we find out that nobody is working with you except the outside companies you're paying to do the design and prototyping. If your response to criticism of your credentials and your business model is to act persecuted and accuse others of bullying, how are you going to make it in the business world?
You want to make a funky SBC? Great! You had some working boards fabbed? Congrats! I am sincerely happy for you. You want to share the joy of your project with others? Go for it! (Maybe bring some technical people along, though.)
You want other people's money? Come back when you're actually shipping product.
got a problem with that? then FUCK OFF and stay out of my way. you do your thing, with your thoughts; i'll do mine.
Excuse me? You're the one who keeps bringing your pointless stories about meaningless "progress" on your pie in the sky project to Slashdot. Last time you were asking for ten million dollars for a hopeless SoC project that you yourself knew nothing about. Now you're back here, what, trolling for pre-orders and funding? What kind of con artist are you?
And let's be clear, this isn't even really *your* project. You're throwing money at companies in China to get them to do the work for you, and you can't even answer their questions. You're nothing but a sales guy with a vague idea and a big ego. Come back when you're selling in volume, until then please quit wasting our time.
The Raspberry Pi people made a toy for educational purposes. If you read the About page, you will see two key differences:
1. The Raspberry Pi people have extensive hardware experience, with key figures actually working in the industry. They do their own technical work. They can answer questions about their design. They are selling through reputable distributors. lkcl, on the other hand, is a front-man with no hardware background. He is apparently the sole advocate in the world for a China-based for-profit operation.
2. Raspberry Pi's ultimate goal is to make a small single-board computer to help kids learn programming. lkcl's goals are large and varied, but mostly involve upending industries he knows nothing about, and probably getting rich in the process.
As far as I can discern without reading TFA, this is just some new ARM system-on-a-chip
No, it's much sillier than that. This is the latest in a long-running series of Slashvertisements by the submitter, lkcl. They chronicle his journey towards creating an "industry standard" for swappable processors for tablets based on the PCMCIA form factor. Nobody asked for this, nobody wants it, and lkcl has next to no experience with hardware development, but he's convinced it's going to change the world! To help the world along, he's working on-- actually, it looks like various Chinese companies are doing all the work. Anyway, lkcl is the funding conduit for an example card based on an existing ARM SoC. Today's story is about getting the first samples of the "2nd revision" of this card. Future samples are approved for sale as a standalone product because "they boot", which obviously qualifies them to ship.
In our last episode, lkcl digressed from his main project to announce a funding drive for a totally unrealistic project to build a free software-friendly SoC with a custom CPU in six months without doing any "design" work. Except for speeding up the processor, adding a bunch of peripherals, and implementing it on a cutting-edge semiconductor process. And then getting to market by Christmas. Just a small side project, right?
lkcl is pretty prolific on his own stories, so I'm sure his dozens of comment responses will answer all of your questions.
Previous episodes:
Live Interview: Luke Leighton of Rhombus Tech Dec 11, 2012: Live interview that nobody saw. There doesn't seem to be a transcript.
Rhombus Tech A10 EOMA-68 CPU Card Schematics Completed Sept 7, 2012: PCB schematics (for the first revision -- prototype?) completed.
PCMCIA Computer Project Aims Even Higher (and Cheaper) Than Raspberry Pi Dec 17, 2011: Project announced? This is as far back as the Rhombus Tech news page goes.
Why isn't there a suite of command-line tools to handle video clips yet, such as cutting, merging, transitions, variable speeds, inserting still images for a certain length, etc.?
AviSynth is a scripting language/library that can do those things, but it's more useful as glue logic than a standalone editor. You really need to see what you're working on when editing video. Even simple effects can involve some manual tweaking to figure out what looks good, and having a real-time random access preview in a non-linear editor is ideal. Seeing audio waveforms is also helpful -- maybe you want to synchronize a video effect with the audio, for instance. I'm currently adding RiffTrax commentary tracks to movie audio/video to make custom Blu-rays, which is a lot easier if I can see how the waveforms line up at the synch points.
You also have the question of how to handle (or rather, avoid) re-encoding. Does each tool output a huge raw temporary file? Do you use pipes to go from stdout->stdin through a mile-long command line? Do you have to run the tools in video-chronological order? How do you synchronize the audio with the video?
was Call of Duty banned there? I thought I recalled hearing about a mission where you assassinated Fidel Castro...
That was the first mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops. You play a special forces team sent in with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The goal of the mission is to kill Castro, but you only end up killing a body double. (It's based on a real historical event, so they couldn't actually have him get killed.)
Can someone explain to me what it is that gives such a small country that has comparably weak military ... and pretty much zero chance of surviving a week in a real war the balls to be so dickish and war-hungry?
They have artillery lined up by the border. Within the first few hours of a war, they can devastate Seoul and probably other South Korean cities, killing millions. I think they also have rocket artillery that could hit Tokyo. North Korea would lose the war pretty quickly, but the civilian cost would be *very* high.
The New York Daily News' Mike Lupica reported last week that investigators of the Newtown case found a huge spreadsheet in the Lanza home where 20-year old Adam Lanza had methodically charted hundreds of past gun massacres, including the number of people killed and the make and model of weapons used. A Connecticut policeman told Lupica 'it sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research', and added, '[Mass killers such as Lanza] don't believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet. This was the work of a video gamer'.
Come on, a gamer wouldn't do that kind of research unless they were playing MMOs, or *maybe* a hardcore RPG. If he played shooters he would have just accused the other killers of hacking and tried to build an aimbot in retaliation.
(I am a bad person.)
Thanks! That was exactly the sort of answer I was looking for.
The broken link should probably point here.
If I read the article right, they're using a hypervisor (Xen) to directly run an Erlang interpreter (LING VM) that they wrote. The interpreter relies on Xen to provide some higher-level functionality. (Wikipedia says this is called paravirtualization.) So it's not quite a web server running on bare (virtual) metal, cool as that would be.
It looks like the significance of this is twofold. First, people are using VMs to create run-time environments that are less featureful than a standard OS but much faster to start up. Second, there's a working demo of a simple virtualized web server using this concept. I don't really follow virtualization tech, so maybe someone can clarify this? I'm not clear on exactly what the difference is between a hypervisor+para-API and a normal OS.
For some reason I decided to hunt through the Slashcode repository to see how moderation works, and I think you're right. To be on the list of eligible users, you have to have a certain minimum karma and a UID that's older than a certain limit. The list is then processed to select "good" moderators based on metamoderation and whether they actually use all their mod points. The good moderators are more likely to receive tokens, which eventually become mod points. I'm not clear on whether anything else can give tokens, since there are a lot of files and I'm manually reading through the repository. But it looks like you can get more mod points just by moderating fairly, which I guess was the whole point of metamod in the first place.
I didn't do anything like a full survey of the code base, so obviously take this with a grain of salt.
I'm not sure it's bias that's the root problem. There are many more other factors to consider:
1. Slashdot was born in a time when computer geeks were frequently abused and ostracized as teenagers. One of our defense mechanisms for this was to decide (often with adult encouragement) that we were smarter and better than everyone else.
2. Intelligent people with technical training (i.e. geeks) can easily come up with a plausible-sounding explanation for just about anything. You'll sometimes hear this called Engineer's Syndrome.
3. Moderation is focused on modding up entertaining writing and modding down flagrant spam. There's no separate mod option for rating actual subject matter expertise.
4. Getting modded +5 is rewarding (for your ego, at least). There's no reward for not commenting.
5. You have to be an active commenter to get mod points.
The upshot of all this is that users are motivated to comment regardless of what they add to the discussion. We underestimate how much we don't know, and thus overrate the comments of people like us. There's very little incentive for humility here.
(All this is based on my observations from reading and commenting in the past ~15 years. Am I a psychologist? No. Have I done any kind of rigorous study of this? No. Am I doing the thing I complained about in #2 above? Quite possibly! See how easy it is to fall into this trap? ;-) )
Meanwhile, the Slashdot headline adds an apostrophe to "Higgs". :-(
Also, Card is right about gay rights being in opposition to democracy...
Not anymore: http://www.pollingreport.com/civil.htm
And even if opinions weren't rapidly shifting, there would still be the demographic factor to consider: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/11/05/support-for-same-sex-marriage-by-age-and-state/
Treating gays and lesbians as second-class citizens does them actual harm for literally no rational, empirical reason. This is a very straightforward issue, lacking even the economic arguments associated with slavery, women's lib, etc. It's been obvious for many years how the gay rights struggle is going to go and how it's going to look to future generations. Can you really blame DC et al for not wanting to funnel money to someone on the wrong side? Another few years and they might as well be soliciting comics from the Klan.
There's a paragraph near the end that suggests retaliation through widespread kidnapping:
I think these measures are capable, with God’s help, of disabling the new strategy of the American army at the medium or long-range levels. This is not all we have. There is the golden solution that shortens the long distances and through which we can bring back the pressure of the American public opinion in a more active way depending on the strategy of kidnapping in exchange for the drone strategy and we should not stop until they stop their strategy which will enable all the supporter of jihad to take part in defeating Petraeus and his new strategy. We start kidnapping Western citizens in any spot in the world, whether in the Islamic Maghreb, Egypt, Iraq or any other easy kidnapping places and the only demand is the halt of attacks on civilians in Yemen which is a just and humanitarian demand that will create world support and a public opinion pressure in America as they are being hurt again. We, therefore, aim at the core of the nation’s strategy which if failed, America, will accordingly collapse. We also are taking part in laying a block in the promising Islamic State in the Arab peninsula.
Seems like that's important, but the AP didn't pay any attention to it...
part time and casual workers do have jobs but people need full time jobs to make a decent living and pay a mortgage (american dream and all) so lets not kid ourselves into thinking a heap of people with part time or casial jobs is a good thing.
Part-time jobs can be fine for people who don't live by themselves. See above re: stay-at-home parents, full-time students, etc. Houses are designed for multiple people to live in. (So are a lot of apartments.) The pay rate matters too. Full-time at minimum wage is the same amount of money as part-time at $15/hour.
if you're not working full time in the private sector you are either underemployed ... or your mooching off the government.
You're equating performing a service for a fee with "mooching". Do you think that schoolteachers, fire fighters, and police officers are moochers? What about the people at the BLS who compiled that statistic you mentioned?
The idea that there's a huge and growing group of people who sit around collecting "handouts" and pushing for "socialism" is pure fantasy. It's right-wing propaganda designed to make you angry and scared enough to vote for their political candidates. Contrary to what you seem to think, poor people don't like being poor, and unemployment (with or without benefits) does not make people happy.
94,750,000 jobs / (102,665,043 + 103,129,321) = 94,750,000 / 205,794,364 = 0.46 = 46%, which means 54% of the total US working age population is either unemployed or employed by government
depressing huh
Not really.
First off, you're leaving out part-time workers (many millions of them), which gets you up over 50%.
Secondly, you're making the assumption that a person without a full-time job is just leeching off of the rest of society. This ignores stay-at-home parents and full-time students, for examples.
Thirdly, the assumption that a government job is equivalent to unemployment is silly. Government employees perform a service and we pay them for it. That the money flows through the IRS instead of some corporation's accounts receivable is irrelevant.
Well, 8 gigs of RAM is nice, I guess. The headset jack in the controller is a neat idea. Improving controller latency is wonderful -- I'm glad people are finally taking this seriously. But everything else just seems... irrelevant, somehow. Particularly the controller, which, like the Wii U, apparently wants me to look away from the game while I'm playing. It's got more motion controls -- yawn. And a "share" button? Give me a break. The constant spamming of "trophy" messages and the occasional DLC ads are distracting enough; now you want me to perform for a camera while my friends watch in real-time?
Then there's this bizarre emphasis on streaming games. Because when I spend $600 on a game console, what I'm really looking for is compressed video and more lag. It sounds like a joke, but then they talk about a client/server model where I can stream the game to a Vita or smart phone.
Maybe we're at the point where there's not much room for substantial improvement, or maybe I'm just getting old. But between DLC, day 1 patches, long installation times, and low frame rates, I find myself wishing consoles could take a step backwards. Remember when you could buy a game with virtually no major bugs because there was real quality control? Remember when the game you bought was the whole game, and not missing another $30 of optional bolted-on content? Remember when you turned on the console and the game started up in less than 15 seconds?
Technical specs don't mean much in the end. The real value of a console is its games. As always, the fate of the next generation is in the hands of developers. Let's hope they've learned some lessons.
What I'm going to do about it, though, is hack that damn console and pirate each and every game. I'm done paying before I can evaluate the quality.
You could always just wait. After a year or so the prices come down, the bugs are as fixed as they're gonna get, and word of mouth will tell you whether the game is worth the time. There's nothing that says you *have* to play the latest and greatest games the moment they come out.
There have been a few stories in the last year or two with analyses of stolen password databases. The overwhelming majority of the passwords were based around a few simple schemes like abc123, ABC123, 123456, etc. Wouldn't it be possible to simply not let users choose those passwords? If you know what the 10,000 most common passwords are, you can hook the list into your account creation routine and reject them. Seems like an big improvement for very little effort on the user or server end.
I thought Scientology was a joke on current religions when I first heard about it.
No, that's Discordianism.
It probably doesn't hurt that North Korea is right on their border. I'm sure they'd rather have their own client state there than an extension of U.S.-backed South Korea.
You're one of the few enemies we can still put into our video games without any real backlash.
Modern warfare games tend to use Russians and Middle Easterners as villains. I can't think of a game in the last five years that had China as the main villain. Sometimes North Korea is used as a euphemism. I had assumed this was because game publishers wanted to sell to China's growing middle class, but if game consoles are banned that clearly doesn't work.