Start with classroom work. Teaching should focus on the problem solving aspects of each discipline[1]. Math and science are learned best by doing, so make sure students are given an appropriate number and level of problems to work. Students often want to complete their work in the fastest way possible, so make sure that they have to learn the material in order to do so. Minimize the use of calculators[2] to prevent trial-and-error problem solving and cheating(not having fancy graphing calculators will help with cheating in other classes, too). A basic scientific calculator should be good up to university calculus, and a four function calculator should be good up to high school algebra and geometry. Science is tied to math, and should follow suit. Frequent in-class work will help keep students up to speed between homework assignments. One of my physics teachers in college gave us a very basic three question quiz every day on the material we were supposed to have read in the book. Something like this might be a good idea. Always respect the students, but understand that most of them will not be terribly motivated on their own.
On the curriculum level, treat math and science with more respect. Require four years of each from *every* student, as is already done with English and social studies. Don't let anyone fall behind -- provide remedial courses, if necessary. Make sure that the curriculum allows time for teachers to review material that might not have been learned in previous classes. Offer different course sequences for people who need to go faster or slower, but don't let "I'm just not a math person" be an option.
On the school/district level, make sure that math and science departments are adequately staffed and funded. Teachers need to receive appropriate respect, compensation, and benefits for their work. They(and administrators) need to be free from parental pressure to inflate grades and pass failing students for non-academic reasons(eg to meet no pass-no play standards).
On a large scale cultural level, the "Math and science are hard!" meme needs to go the way of the dodo. It is my opinion that no single factor damages math and science education more than the belief that it is acceptable to fail.
The above are not quick or easy things, and may not even be possible. At the very least, they give something to work towards. Since the Asker's organization is working on the classroom and curriculum levels, those are problem good places to start.
Less well-founded opinions:
Glamorization is not necessary(most fields aren't glamorized, and suffer no shortage of workers) and may even be harmful if reality doesn't match fantasy.
Gifted students need special attention, but should not be the sole focus of or reason for improvements. I realize this won't be quite as popular with the Slashdot crowd, but I believe that everyone needs education, regardless of how smart[3] they are.
Complete privatization of schools will not fix education, because it doesn't solve the cultural problems or the lack of qualified teachers.
[1] Memorization gets a bad rap, but sometimes you really do need it. You have to memorize Newton's laws to learn physics, you have to memorize that "==" is comparison in order to program in C, and you have to memorize algebraic operations in order to learn math. Things like memorizing multiplication tables are not so clear cut, but my personal belief that is being able to do basic math in your head is a far more useful skill than most people give it credit for, and more than outweighs a few hours of work. And really, how hard is it anyway? In the time you spent learning multiplication in elementary school, you probably memorized more than that by accident.
[2] I don't mean that technology should be completely removed from classrooms. Graphing calculators and computers are useful tools. But when the tool does the problem solving *for* you, you're not actually learning anything. Students need to learn how to thi
Re:Beware Emissions Inspection
on
Hack Your Ride
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· Score: 1
I too have a '98 Passat, and I've had the trunk and window problems. My passenger's side front door electric lock system is broken too.
There's a self sustaining culture of misery. People think the school is a crappy place to be, and make it happen. Bad weather, a high male/female ratio, clueless administration, ugly architecture, poor campus layout, and the fact that it's located in the far suburbs of a city without much to its credit don't help.
Amusingly enough, I saw an article in the Democrat and Chronicle(the same newspaper mentioned in the story) that said that the populace of Rochester feels much the same way about the city itself.
I personally think that RIT is something you really have to attend to understand. A lot of people enjoy the idea(and reality) of their own college so much that they can't believe that anyone could really feel otherwise.
I'm not going to tell you that you're an idiot, but I am going to tell you that using mplayer in SVGA mode from the console seems to give a better framerate than running in X. I have a 700MHz laptop with only 64 megs of RAM that can still play the latest divx movies without a hitch.
Be warned that the social life at RIT can be rather miserable, especially if you're not the outgoing type. If you go there, be prepared to miss out on some of the best parts of the college experience.
You _do_ have to deal with hardware upgrades (often ugly ones) and incompatibility. Talk to anyone who tried playing import games on their PlayStation. Doing so often requires chipping, a procedure which can be (though just like upgrading the hardware on a PC, doesn't have to be) very tricky to perform.
I wouldn't consider chipping to be a standard hardware upgrade. It's more like modifying the hardware itself(eg Athlon XP -> MP).
You also need to upgrade your hardware in the more traditional sense, because even consoles eventually get too old - ask any SNES owner.
Okay, I guess buying a new console technically counts as a hardware upgrade. But at the very least it's a benchmark-free upgrade.:)
Sure, you can keep the old console around (until it breaks - and when it does, you generally can't just swap out the faulty component like on a PC),
You can get a new system from even the previous generation for less than the cost of a minor PC component.
but then you either need some sort of switch or you need to poke the wires behind the TV every time you want to use the older one (if you don't have multiple sets).
Passthrough RF adaptors were common on consoles up until the time TVs with multiple inputs became common. You can still go out and buy them if it's that big of an issue.
My 2003 PC can still play games that were released in the early 90's for completely different hardware, and doing so requires no special reconfiguration between games.
Tried playing an old DOS game recently? Have fun getting sound.
Not being able to play old games on the same system is indeed a disadvantage of consoles, but it looks like backwards compatibility is starting to take hold. Here's hoping that it sticks around.
This greatly depends on how you define quality regarding games. If you are talking bugs per line of code, yes, PC games may be buggier overall, but there are millions more PC games than there are console games for any single console. Because it's so easy to develop and release PC games, there are a lot of junk games out there. But on the PC, bugs can always be fixed post-release. On a console, they can't. This is clearly a huge advantage for PC's, and if it leads to (some) games being a bit buggier to start with, that's fine. Most if not all such games are eventually fixed and noone forces you to buy those games before they are. And on PC, you don't need to waste your money, there are always ways to try before you buy (not that console games aren't warezed, too).
I've played far more console games in the past few years that I'd be willing to spend $50 on than PC games. Maybe that's just an artifact of my choice of games, but it's also a general impression I get from reading reviews and such.
On the topic of bugginess, console games don't need patches because it is extremely rare to find any but the most minor bugs in a console game. It's amazing how sturdy code can get when you code for one platform and don't get any second chances.
Looking at aspects other than bugginess I'd argue that PC games are generally of a higher quality than console ones. PC games generally offer more ways to customize the game, support for more and different input devices (you can configure a keybd+mouse in many more ways than you can configure a simple joypad).
Okay, this is something important that I failed to mention. Thank you for pointing it out.
Oh, and not to forget, modifications to the games themselves - I don't think I need to tell you how PC's sweep the floor with consoles in that regard.
I wish PCs would sweet the floor *more* in that regard, seeing as how the most popular mod on the net is *still* fucking Counterstrike.
If you had RTFA'ed, you'd know that this console is in fact NOT impossible to upgrade. They even included an empty DIMM slot on the motherboard for pete's sake! And as far as limited funct
So my first thought was "Forget the hardware, where are the games?". Turns out the ApeXtreme is designed to run PC games via special "installer scripts". In other words, it's just like buying a PC to play games...only you don't get any of the benefits of actually owning a PC.
Riiiight.
The way the console world works is that you buy one piece of hardware and get 3-5 years of games out of it. If you keep the console around, you can still play those games many years later(raise your hand if you still have an NES/C64/etc). You never have to deal with patches, hardware upgrades, incompatibility, or any of the other woes of the PC. The downside is that you have a limited feature set and no option to upgrade the hardware and remain on the same platform. Since the hardware is fixed, the life and death of the various consoles are determined solely by the choice of games.
Anyone who tells you that hardware is anything more than a tertiary concern in the console market does not know what they are talking about
Consider, for instance, the success of the NES against the Sega Genesis, or the utter failure of the Atari Jaguar and countless others like it. Sony took control of the console market by being easier for third party licensees to work with than Nintendo or Sega.
Contrast this with the PC game market, in which the hardware is king. PC gaming web sites spend lots of time talking about hardware, and game developers write games so that future hardware will be able to take full advantage of them. Games themselves are generally of lower quality upon release than their console brethren, and it's not uncommon for it to take many patches to iron out all the problems. The upside of this is that patches will often improve the game as well as fix bugs.
Lower quality combined with the ever-increasing cost of hardware upgrades have caused the game industry to decline somewhat in the past few years. Successful PC games will likely have a console port, but the reverse is less often true.
Into this scenario comes VIA, proposing to combine the worst aspects of a console(non-upgradability, limited functionality) with the worst aspects of the PC game market(low quality, patches, quick obsolescence). Couple this with the fact that for the price of this console you can upgrade your CPU and video card anyway, and I can't see this as anything other than a disaster waiting to happen. There is absolutely no reason to buy this system.
[1] When I say "PC game market", I mean games like Warcraft and Half-Life, not Snood and its ilk.
WMP on Windows is hellishly fast. You're given a choice between the new interface(WMP9, fluffy) and the old one(WMP6, minimalist) on XP, and they're both equivalent in functionality due to the fact that they're actually just frontends for DirectShow. If you install a decent codec pack(I use Tsunami, but Nimo also seems to be popular), you'll never see another one of those update messages again. In my experience, ninety-nine out of a hundred problems people have with WMP are due to corrupt files and codec issues, not the player itself.
Contrast this with Real: annoying to install(in one window, options that are on by default are listed BELOW disabled options, hiding them from view; no install-time option to disable the system tray icon), slower, more crash-prone...
There's no reason to use Real over WMP on a Windows platform except to view Real content. Real content sucks anyway compared to DivX, XVid, QT, or MPG, but fortunately it has been on the decline for a long time. We can only hope that it disappears completely.
The above is less true for QT, but since WMP is at least as good(I like it better -- less fluff), there's no reason to use it either except to play QT content. If it weren't for Real/QT[1] codec issues I could ditch both of their players completely. Mplayer on Linux supports all of them out of the box, thanks to whoever wrote the ebuild.
Good points, but I was getting at something a little different.
It does happen, you're just apparently incapable of visualizing how it really happens.:) What he's referring to is the society-wide process of discussion, information dissemination, more discussion, controlled experimentation, etc. In other words, the general social development of an ethical system regarding the topic. Instead of coming up with a new technology, throwing it out into society and saying "let the chips fall where they may," instead we're saying something like, "Hey, this new technology could be incredibly dangerous if mishandled -- maybe we should take it slowly and try to avoid the worst of the problems that could come out of it."
But who is "we"? As I pointed out before, the overwhelming majority of "society" is not even informed about the realities of issues like these, much less qualified to make a decision. Furthermore, even among those who are experts in the field you have no guarantee of a consensus. I agree that biological research can have nasty consequences, but I don't think that any sort of non-obvious ethical guidelines are going to come out of waiting. Take, for instance, everyone's favorite example -- the atomic bomb. Aside from the obvious "hey, this can kill people" point, what new ethical principles would have come out of delaying atomic research?
Ethics basically boils down to one principle: hurt other people as little as possible. I'm at a loss to think how something like creating an artificial virus complicates that issue.
Good: Using virus research to help people Bad: Using virus research to hurt people
So what is helping and what is hurting? Some issues, like abortion, you're never going to get agreement on.
Don't forget that people also have an irrational fear of certain things that tends to cloud their judgement(see nuclear vs. coal power, for example).
The trick is in figuring out how much discussion you really need before you're just treading water and blocking progress to no good end.
This is what kills your idea dead in the water. There are *always* going to be large risks associated with powerful technology. Technology gives people power, and power is a double-edged sword. No amount of ethical discussion will remove the fundamental danger that knowledge presents.
If you want to reduce risk, it is often better to worry about social problems rather than technological problems. Which will create less risk of terrorism? Taking away the terrorist's weapons, or removing their desire to become terrorists?
People can worry all day about the danger's of technology, but some things are too useful to give up on.
Nothing personal in this, but you're really acting like someone who's never considered that maybe other people have thought about all this before.:)
Of course people have thought about it before. But I've never seen any substance come out of it. When has waiting prevented some sort of ethical catastrophe? Who can even agree on what an ethical catastrophe is? We're waiting on human cloning, but I haven't heard anything about any actual dangers associated with it. Stem cell reasearch was possibly one of the most useful things to come out of biology in recent history, and it's been flushed down the toiler for silly political reasons.
It seems to me that the people who want to decide whether or not something is ethically questionable have the least sense of all.
Until we have one unified set of ethics for everyone in the world that covers every possible act, there will be no societal discussion of anything.
I don't think anybody should be making any new life forms or modifying any existing life forms, at least until we've had a serious societal discussion regarding its possible role and impact on terrorism and biowarfare.
But the problem is that we're not *going* to have a serious societal discussion because that phrase means nothing. Who's talking with whom? Who makes decisions? Who gets input?
When I hear "societal discussion", I get an image in my head of the entire country sitting at a great big table having a little chat about what to do. But in real life, that sort of thing doesn't happen. You have kooks who think that anything that looks like "playing God" is evil, you have people who think that every new invention must immediately be used to aid/fight terrorism, you have people who don't even understand the basic science behind what's going on(like Slashdot...oops, did I say that out loud?). And in the end, after all of these people have "had their say"(who are they talking to?), who decides what will be done? You want the government to say "Sorry, no more research on microorganisms"? Because that's about all it could do. What right does "society" have to control science? Most people will tell you that they don't even understand what "science" is! Who is qualified to do cost/benefit analysis of this sort of thing? Does anybody even *care* about cost/benefit analysis?
I understand(and sympathize with) your concerns, but no amount of talking is going to do anything about this situation. We can't halt our understanding of the world where it is just because a few people might cause problems with it. Hell, if we had taken that attitude to begin with, we'd be lucky to have fire by now!
I've noticed a couple people questioning my choice of examples(Blowjob vs. WMD). My goal was not to say that the two examples have equal severity but rather to point out that, in each case, the president's own "side" chose to ignore the act of wrongdoing.
I really wish we could abolish "Left", "Right", "Liberal", and "Conservative" from political language. They've become no more than insults. The "Left" is in charge? Oh, then the "Right" is a bunch of evil zealots come to crush us under their heels! The "Right" is in charge? Now the "Left" is a bunch of evil terrorist sympathizers who want to bring about the downfall of America!
Stop it. Just stop it.
It disgusts me how easily people are blinded by their preferred camp. Both major parties(and their associated platforms) have major problems. Pretending otherwise is foolish, but it seems that that's just what people want to do. It's especially amusing when we have repeats of previous incidents that garner the same response from opposite sites. Clinton lies about blowjob? IMPEACH!(if "Right"), FORGIVE!(if "Left"). Bush lies about WMDs? CONDEMN!(if "Left"), IGNORE!(if "Right"). Sound similar? They are! What happened to lying itself being bad? Why won't people admit that their own side can fuck up too?
It doesn't matter which side you claim to be on. Evaluate people based on what they do, not what views they pay lip service to. If you do otherwise, you're just being a sheep.
And for the love of all that is good and right in the world, come up with some new insults while you're at it!
Let's look at some numbers from Japan, courtesy of The Magic Box.
Thus far in 2003, sales of the GameCube have lagged very far behind those of the PS2 and GBA(the XBox is not a contender in Japan). The PS2 has 2.2 million units sold and the combined GBA/GBASP has 2.8 million units sold. The GC has sold 590000 units. In 2002 the numbers are a little better(3.7/3.3/1.0 million), but Nintendo certainly isn't coming out on top.
Of course, as everyone (should) know, game sales are more important than hardware sales. Let's see what we find. Looking at the top 100 bestselling games for the first half of 2003 we see that the first GC games is at number 26(Zelda: Baton of Wind, 190000 sold in 2002, 660000 sold total). Note that this is actually a popular game from the previous year still clinging on. The next GC game, Kirby, is at number 36 with similar circumstances. The conclusion? That the GC hasn't had a major hit in Japan this year. The Wario game currently looks to be selling okay, and might get there. Resident Evil 4 probably will too. But compare to the other systems! In the top 20 there are 14 PS2 games and 6 GBA games.
In 2002 the GC has three games in the top 20(Mario Party 4, Mario Sunshine, and the same Zelda game mentioned above). Again, better, but not by much.
Note that all of the above games are made by Nintendo themselves.
In America, the situation is better. The GC is in fourth place, but still has 4.7 million sales. There are three games in the top 20, two of which are made by third party licensees. However, it's still not much compared to the commanding lead held by the PS2(and ever-increasing competition from the XBox).
So given that the GC is basically on the bottom in the high-end console market, it's not surprising that Nintendo would try to get a new system out earlier. Given the extremely strong sales of the GBA, I don't think it's likely that their new system will be portable, either. If Nintendo gets their system out a year before anyone else, they'll have time to build up momentum and, more importantly, third party licensees. Nintendo's strength over the past couple generations has been in their in-house games, but those aren't enough to sustain the system. If they play their cards right, Nintendo might just pull a Sony and take the lead in the next generation.
The people who make comparisons to microwaves and cars are missing the point. A microwave is designed to do one thing and one thing only. A computer is designed to do, well, anything. The idea that the interface of a general purpose tool should be as simple as that of a more specialized tool is silly. The whole *point* of a computer is its complexity.
In this context, the article's assertion makes a bit more sense. People who use tools to solve problems need to understand the nature of those tools. Thus, people who use computers to solve new and interesting problems need to understand what a computer actually does before they even begin to work on a solution. Perhaps in fifty years time we will be using computers for much more interesting things in daily life than we do now. Given the existance of a near-natural language interface and voice recognition, tasks like word processing become trivial. The goal, then, is to be able to instruct the computer what to do in the most efficient way possible. Short of a strong AI, the only way to do that is to understand a bit about how a computer works.
When you look at things this way, the article doesn't seem quite so extreme. I don't know about "every secretary in the world", but I can see plenty of circumstances where complex instructions would need to be turned into "programming" to get anything out of them.
"With one new material -- known as a ``high k dielectric'' for its ability to hold a charge -- leakage is greatly reduced. In Intel's tests, the material -- whose composition the company would not reveal -- is thicker than silicon dioxide, but engineers say it will be shrunk."
The bottom panel on my KDE desktop is filled with icons for my 'daily use' applications. No matter how covered my screen is with applications windows (and it is almost always fully covered), I can click on a panel icon and open a new app. I haven't figured out how to put app icons on the Windows bottom panel. I don't even know if it can be done. Perhaps it can only be done by smart Windows geeks, but not by simple-minded Linux people like me.
Right-click on the taskbar and select "Show Quick Launch". There's even a preview windows where you can see the quick-launch buttons the moment you select the option!
Sounds like Rob was afraid to experiment with his setup.
This whole problem would have been solved already if the IEC had decided to give its new binary units reasonable names that people would actually use. "Kibibytes"? Come on. Someone needs to come up with a naming scheme that doesn't suck and promote it instead.
Gentoo makes the installation completely painless, although configuration can sometimes be a pain in the ass. I'm happier editing config files than dealing with make, though.
With all the complains about the GUI setup, you'd think there'd be more people using the completely painless command line version:
mplayer (file magically works perfectly)
I watch my videos in fullscreen anyway, so GUIs just get in the way. The only thing they seem to add is random seek, which is a useful feature, but not what people seem to be complaining about.
(not like they'll hurt any more than the ending will)
FFX was a pretty good game, with decent story and voice acting. The gameplay was far less annoying than FFIX(30 seconds to start a battle? Come on!), and even the puzzles were interesting. I thought it was the best FF game since VII.
The ending, however, was a horrible horrible mistake that never should have been allowed to happen. Rather than stick with the workable format of previous games(produce an enemy character that eventually becomes the last boss), the FFX team decided that their final enemy should be a monstrous, inhuman force of nature. All well and good so far, but the plot "twists" near the end transformed this enemy from something to be feared to something to be laughed at. The last boss is a floating cockroach, with no personality or motivation. Couple that with a five minute long ending, and the entire game is shot.
A sequel will give Square a chance to pull an otherwise interesting story out of its own ashes.
Given that every week brings news of real attacks on important freedoms, I fail to see why these RIAA lawsuits are garnering so much Slashdot press. The people being sued by the RIAA right now are criminals. Say that again with me: criminals. Distributing copyrighted works without(nay, against) the consent of the copyright holder is illegal. Scum or not, the RIAA owns those songs. If you don't like the rules, you have a computer and you have a congresscritter. Heck, you might even get out a real sheet of paper and an actual pen to voice your concerns. Believe it or not, money alone is not enough to elect a politician to office. They need votes too, and to get votes they have to care about what people think.
Some people have suggested that the EFF waste time and resources defending these people. I very much hope that the organization will spend its time on more important things than petty criminals, like:
DMCA UCITA Censorware
All of the above are far more important to the future of internet freedom than somebody's self-proclaimed "right" to give Britney Spears MP3s to their friends.
If we want to save P2P from the RIAA, then it's time to start emphasizing the legal uses and stop defending people who are too stupid to be worth our time.
Slashdot Mirror
Some opinions:
Start with classroom work. Teaching should focus on the problem solving aspects of each discipline[1]. Math and science are learned best by doing, so make sure students are given an appropriate number and level of problems to work. Students often want to complete their work in the fastest way possible, so make sure that they have to learn the material in order to do so. Minimize the use of calculators[2] to prevent trial-and-error problem solving and cheating(not having fancy graphing calculators will help with cheating in other classes, too). A basic scientific calculator should be good up to university calculus, and a four function calculator should be good up to high school algebra and geometry. Science is tied to math, and should follow suit. Frequent in-class work will help keep students up to speed between homework assignments. One of my physics teachers in college gave us a very basic three question quiz every day on the material we were supposed to have read in the book. Something like this might be a good idea. Always respect the students, but understand that most of them will not be terribly motivated on their own.
On the curriculum level, treat math and science with more respect. Require four years of each from *every* student, as is already done with English and social studies. Don't let anyone fall behind -- provide remedial courses, if necessary. Make sure that the curriculum allows time for teachers to review material that might not have been learned in previous classes. Offer different course sequences for people who need to go faster or slower, but don't let "I'm just not a math person" be an option.
On the school/district level, make sure that math and science departments are adequately staffed and funded. Teachers need to receive appropriate respect, compensation, and benefits for their work. They(and administrators) need to be free from parental pressure to inflate grades and pass failing students for non-academic reasons(eg to meet no pass-no play standards).
On a large scale cultural level, the "Math and science are hard!" meme needs to go the way of the dodo. It is my opinion that no single factor damages math and science education more than the belief that it is acceptable to fail.
The above are not quick or easy things, and may not even be possible. At the very least, they give something to work towards. Since the Asker's organization is working on the classroom and curriculum levels, those are problem good places to start.
Less well-founded opinions:
Glamorization is not necessary(most fields aren't glamorized, and suffer no shortage of workers) and may even be harmful if reality doesn't match fantasy.
Gifted students need special attention, but should not be the sole focus of or reason for improvements. I realize this won't be quite as popular with the Slashdot crowd, but I believe that everyone needs education, regardless of how smart[3] they are.
Complete privatization of schools will not fix education, because it doesn't solve the cultural problems or the lack of qualified teachers.
[1] Memorization gets a bad rap, but sometimes you really do need it. You have to memorize Newton's laws to learn physics, you have to memorize that "==" is comparison in order to program in C, and you have to memorize algebraic operations in order to learn math. Things like memorizing multiplication tables are not so clear cut, but my personal belief that is being able to do basic math in your head is a far more useful skill than most people give it credit for, and more than outweighs a few hours of work. And really, how hard is it anyway? In the time you spent learning multiplication in elementary school, you probably memorized more than that by accident.
[2] I don't mean that technology should be completely removed from classrooms. Graphing calculators and computers are useful tools. But when the tool does the problem solving *for* you, you're not actually learning anything. Students need to learn how to thi
I too have a '98 Passat, and I've had the trunk and window problems. My passenger's side front door electric lock system is broken too.
There's a self sustaining culture of misery. People think the school is a crappy place to be, and make it happen. Bad weather, a high male/female ratio, clueless administration, ugly architecture, poor campus layout, and the fact that it's located in the far suburbs of a city without much to its credit don't help.
Amusingly enough, I saw an article in the Democrat and Chronicle(the same newspaper mentioned in the story) that said that the populace of Rochester feels much the same way about the city itself.
I personally think that RIT is something you really have to attend to understand. A lot of people enjoy the idea(and reality) of their own college so much that they can't believe that anyone could really feel otherwise.
311 is the non-emergency number for police/fire/medical services in some areas.
I'm not going to tell you that you're an idiot, but I am going to tell you that using mplayer in SVGA mode from the console seems to give a better framerate than running in X. I have a 700MHz laptop with only 64 megs of RAM that can still play the latest divx movies without a hitch.
Hey Ryan, long time no see! I'm off on co-op in the backwoods of New York State. Are you still at, er, UT?
Be warned that the social life at RIT can be rather miserable, especially if you're not the outgoing type. If you go there, be prepared to miss out on some of the best parts of the college experience.
You _do_ have to deal with hardware upgrades (often ugly ones) and incompatibility. Talk to anyone who tried playing import games on their PlayStation. Doing so often requires chipping, a procedure which can be (though just like upgrading the hardware on a PC, doesn't have to be) very tricky to perform.
:)
I wouldn't consider chipping to be a standard hardware upgrade. It's more like modifying the hardware itself(eg Athlon XP -> MP).
You also need to upgrade your hardware in the more traditional sense, because even consoles eventually get too old - ask any SNES owner.
Okay, I guess buying a new console technically counts as a hardware upgrade. But at the very least it's a benchmark-free upgrade.
Sure, you can keep the old console around (until it breaks - and when it does, you generally can't just swap out the faulty component like on a PC),
You can get a new system from even the previous generation for less than the cost of a minor PC component.
but then you either need some sort of switch or you need to poke the wires behind the TV every time you want to use the older one (if you don't have multiple sets).
Passthrough RF adaptors were common on consoles up until the time TVs with multiple inputs became common. You can still go out and buy them if it's that big of an issue.
My 2003 PC can still play games that were released in the early 90's for completely different hardware, and doing so requires no special reconfiguration between games.
Tried playing an old DOS game recently? Have fun getting sound.
Not being able to play old games on the same system is indeed a disadvantage of consoles, but it looks like backwards compatibility is starting to take hold. Here's hoping that it sticks around.
This greatly depends on how you define quality regarding games. If you are talking bugs per line of code, yes, PC games may be buggier overall, but there are millions more PC games than there are console games for any single console. Because it's so easy to develop and release PC games, there are a lot of junk games out there. But on the PC, bugs can always be fixed post-release. On a console, they can't. This is clearly a huge advantage for PC's, and if it leads to (some) games being a bit buggier to start with, that's fine. Most if not all such games are eventually fixed and noone forces you to buy those games before they are. And on PC, you don't need to waste your money, there are always ways to try before you buy (not that console games aren't warezed, too).
I've played far more console games in the past few years that I'd be willing to spend $50 on than PC games. Maybe that's just an artifact of my choice of games, but it's also a general impression I get from reading reviews and such.
On the topic of bugginess, console games don't need patches because it is extremely rare to find any but the most minor bugs in a console game. It's amazing how sturdy code can get when you code for one platform and don't get any second chances.
Looking at aspects other than bugginess I'd argue that PC games are generally of a higher quality than console ones. PC games generally offer more ways to customize the game, support for more and different input devices (you can configure a keybd+mouse in many more ways than you can configure a simple joypad).
Okay, this is something important that I failed to mention. Thank you for pointing it out.
Oh, and not to forget, modifications to the games themselves - I don't think I need to tell you how PC's sweep the floor with consoles in that regard.
I wish PCs would sweet the floor *more* in that regard, seeing as how the most popular mod on the net is *still* fucking Counterstrike.
If you had RTFA'ed, you'd know that this console is in fact NOT impossible to upgrade. They even included an empty DIMM slot on the motherboard for pete's sake! And as far as limited funct
So my first thought was "Forget the hardware, where are the games?". Turns out the ApeXtreme is designed to run PC games via special "installer scripts". In other words, it's just like buying a PC to play games...only you don't get any of the benefits of actually owning a PC.
Riiiight.
The way the console world works is that you buy one piece of hardware and get 3-5 years of games out of it. If you keep the console around, you can still play those games many years later(raise your hand if you still have an NES/C64/etc). You never have to deal with patches, hardware upgrades, incompatibility, or any of the other woes of the PC. The downside is that you have a limited feature set and no option to upgrade the hardware and remain on the same platform. Since the hardware is fixed, the life and death of the various consoles are determined solely by the choice of games.
Anyone who tells you that hardware is anything more than a tertiary concern in the console market does not know what they are talking about
Consider, for instance, the success of the NES against the Sega Genesis, or the utter failure of the Atari Jaguar and countless others like it. Sony took control of the console market by being easier for third party licensees to work with than Nintendo or Sega.
Contrast this with the PC game market, in which the hardware is king. PC gaming web sites spend lots of time talking about hardware, and game developers write games so that future hardware will be able to take full advantage of them. Games themselves are generally of lower quality upon release than their console brethren, and it's not uncommon for it to take many patches to iron out all the problems. The upside of this is that patches will often improve the game as well as fix bugs.
Lower quality combined with the ever-increasing cost of hardware upgrades have caused the game industry to decline somewhat in the past few years. Successful PC games will likely have a console port, but the reverse is less often true.
Into this scenario comes VIA, proposing to combine the worst aspects of a console(non-upgradability, limited functionality) with the worst aspects of the PC game market(low quality, patches, quick obsolescence). Couple this with the fact that for the price of this console you can upgrade your CPU and video card anyway, and I can't see this as anything other than a disaster waiting to happen. There is absolutely no reason to buy this system.
[1] When I say "PC game market", I mean games like Warcraft and Half-Life, not Snood and its ilk.
WMP on Windows is hellishly fast. You're given a choice between the new interface(WMP9, fluffy) and the old one(WMP6, minimalist) on XP, and they're both equivalent in functionality due to the fact that they're actually just frontends for DirectShow. If you install a decent codec pack(I use Tsunami, but Nimo also seems to be popular), you'll never see another one of those update messages again. In my experience, ninety-nine out of a hundred problems people have with WMP are due to corrupt files and codec issues, not the player itself.
Contrast this with Real: annoying to install(in one window, options that are on by default are listed BELOW disabled options, hiding them from view; no install-time option to disable the system tray icon), slower, more crash-prone...
There's no reason to use Real over WMP on a Windows platform except to view Real content. Real content sucks anyway compared to DivX, XVid, QT, or MPG, but fortunately it has been on the decline for a long time. We can only hope that it disappears completely.
The above is less true for QT, but since WMP is at least as good(I like it better -- less fluff), there's no reason to use it either except to play QT content. If it weren't for Real/QT[1] codec issues I could ditch both of their players completely. Mplayer on Linux supports all of them out of the box, thanks to whoever wrote the ebuild.
Good points, but I was getting at something a little different.
:) What he's referring to is the society-wide process of discussion, information dissemination, more discussion, controlled experimentation, etc. In other words, the general social development of an ethical system regarding the topic. Instead of coming up with a new technology, throwing it out into society and saying "let the chips fall where they may," instead we're saying something like, "Hey, this new technology could be incredibly dangerous if mishandled -- maybe we should take it slowly and try to avoid the worst of the problems that could come out of it."
:)
It does happen, you're just apparently incapable of visualizing how it really happens.
But who is "we"? As I pointed out before, the overwhelming majority of "society" is not even informed about the realities of issues like these, much less qualified to make a decision. Furthermore, even among those who are experts in the field you have no guarantee of a consensus. I agree that biological research can have nasty consequences, but I don't think that any sort of non-obvious ethical guidelines are going to come out of waiting. Take, for instance, everyone's favorite example -- the atomic bomb. Aside from the obvious "hey, this can kill people" point, what new ethical principles would have come out of delaying atomic research?
Ethics basically boils down to one principle: hurt other people as little as possible. I'm at a loss to think how something like creating an artificial virus complicates that issue.
Good: Using virus research to help people
Bad: Using virus research to hurt people
So what is helping and what is hurting? Some issues, like abortion, you're never going to get agreement on.
Don't forget that people also have an irrational fear of certain things that tends to cloud their judgement(see nuclear vs. coal power, for example).
The trick is in figuring out how much discussion you really need before you're just treading water and blocking progress to no good end.
This is what kills your idea dead in the water. There are *always* going to be large risks associated with powerful technology. Technology gives people power, and power is a double-edged sword. No amount of ethical discussion will remove the fundamental danger that knowledge presents.
If you want to reduce risk, it is often better to worry about social problems rather than technological problems. Which will create less risk of terrorism? Taking away the terrorist's weapons, or removing their desire to become terrorists?
People can worry all day about the danger's of technology, but some things are too useful to give up on.
Nothing personal in this, but you're really acting like someone who's never considered that maybe other people have thought about all this before.
Of course people have thought about it before. But I've never seen any substance come out of it. When has waiting prevented some sort of ethical catastrophe? Who can even agree on what an ethical catastrophe is? We're waiting on human cloning, but I haven't heard anything about any actual dangers associated with it. Stem cell reasearch was possibly one of the most useful things to come out of biology in recent history, and it's been flushed down the toiler for silly political reasons.
It seems to me that the people who want to decide whether or not something is ethically questionable have the least sense of all.
Until we have one unified set of ethics for everyone in the world that covers every possible act, there will be no societal discussion of anything.
I don't think anybody should be making any new life forms or modifying any existing life forms, at least until we've had a serious societal discussion regarding its possible role and impact on terrorism and biowarfare.
But the problem is that we're not *going* to have a serious societal discussion because that phrase means nothing. Who's talking with whom? Who makes decisions? Who gets input?
When I hear "societal discussion", I get an image in my head of the entire country sitting at a great big table having a little chat about what to do. But in real life, that sort of thing doesn't happen. You have kooks who think that anything that looks like "playing God" is evil, you have people who think that every new invention must immediately be used to aid/fight terrorism, you have people who don't even understand the basic science behind what's going on(like Slashdot...oops, did I say that out loud?). And in the end, after all of these people have "had their say"(who are they talking to?), who decides what will be done? You want the government to say "Sorry, no more research on microorganisms"? Because that's about all it could do. What right does "society" have to control science? Most people will tell you that they don't even understand what "science" is! Who is qualified to do cost/benefit analysis of this sort of thing? Does anybody even *care* about cost/benefit analysis?
I understand(and sympathize with) your concerns, but no amount of talking is going to do anything about this situation. We can't halt our understanding of the world where it is just because a few people might cause problems with it. Hell, if we had taken that attitude to begin with, we'd be lucky to have fire by now!
I've noticed a couple people questioning my choice of examples(Blowjob vs. WMD). My goal was not to say that the two examples have equal severity but rather to point out that, in each case, the president's own "side" chose to ignore the act of wrongdoing.
I really wish we could abolish "Left", "Right", "Liberal", and "Conservative" from political language. They've become no more than insults. The "Left" is in charge? Oh, then the "Right" is a bunch of evil zealots come to crush us under their heels! The "Right" is in charge? Now the "Left" is a bunch of evil terrorist sympathizers who want to bring about the downfall of America!
Stop it. Just stop it.
It disgusts me how easily people are blinded by their preferred camp. Both major parties(and their associated platforms) have major problems. Pretending otherwise is foolish, but it seems that that's just what people want to do. It's especially amusing when we have repeats of previous incidents that garner the same response from opposite sites. Clinton lies about blowjob? IMPEACH!(if "Right"), FORGIVE!(if "Left"). Bush lies about WMDs? CONDEMN!(if "Left"), IGNORE!(if "Right"). Sound similar? They are! What happened to lying itself being bad? Why won't people admit that their own side can fuck up too?
It doesn't matter which side you claim to be on. Evaluate people based on what they do, not what views they pay lip service to. If you do otherwise, you're just being a sheep.
And for the love of all that is good and right in the world, come up with some new insults while you're at it!
Let's look at some numbers from Japan, courtesy of The Magic Box.
Thus far in 2003, sales of the GameCube have lagged very far behind those of the PS2 and GBA(the XBox is not a contender in Japan). The PS2 has 2.2 million units sold and the combined GBA/GBASP has 2.8 million units sold. The GC has sold 590000 units. In 2002 the numbers are a little better(3.7/3.3/1.0 million), but Nintendo certainly isn't coming out on top.
Of course, as everyone (should) know, game sales are more important than hardware sales. Let's see what we find. Looking at the top 100 bestselling games for the first half of 2003 we see that the first GC games is at number 26(Zelda: Baton of Wind, 190000 sold in 2002, 660000 sold total). Note that this is actually a popular game from the previous year still clinging on. The next GC game, Kirby, is at number 36 with similar circumstances. The conclusion? That the GC hasn't had a major hit in Japan this year. The Wario game currently looks to be selling okay, and might get there. Resident Evil 4 probably will too. But compare to the other systems! In the top 20 there are 14 PS2 games and 6 GBA games.
In 2002 the GC has three games in the top 20(Mario Party 4, Mario Sunshine, and the same Zelda game mentioned above). Again, better, but not by much.
Note that all of the above games are made by Nintendo themselves.
In America, the situation is better. The GC is in fourth place, but still has 4.7 million sales. There are three games in the top 20, two of which are made by third party licensees. However, it's still not much compared to the commanding lead held by the PS2(and ever-increasing competition from the XBox).
So given that the GC is basically on the bottom in the high-end console market, it's not surprising that Nintendo would try to get a new system out earlier. Given the extremely strong sales of the GBA, I don't think it's likely that their new system will be portable, either. If Nintendo gets their system out a year before anyone else, they'll have time to build up momentum and, more importantly, third party licensees. Nintendo's strength over the past couple generations has been in their in-house games, but those aren't enough to sustain the system. If they play their cards right, Nintendo might just pull a Sony and take the lead in the next generation.
The people who make comparisons to microwaves and cars are missing the point. A microwave is designed to do one thing and one thing only. A computer is designed to do, well, anything. The idea that the interface of a general purpose tool should be as simple as that of a more specialized tool is silly. The whole *point* of a computer is its complexity.
In this context, the article's assertion makes a bit more sense. People who use tools to solve problems need to understand the nature of those tools. Thus, people who use computers to solve new and interesting problems need to understand what a computer actually does before they even begin to work on a solution. Perhaps in fifty years time we will be using computers for much more interesting things in daily life than we do now. Given the existance of a near-natural language interface and voice recognition, tasks like word processing become trivial. The goal, then, is to be able to instruct the computer what to do in the most efficient way possible. Short of a strong AI, the only way to do that is to understand a bit about how a computer works.
When you look at things this way, the article doesn't seem quite so extreme. I don't know about "every secretary in the world", but I can see plenty of circumstances where complex instructions would need to be turned into "programming" to get anything out of them.
"With one new material -- known as a ``high k dielectric'' for its ability to hold a charge -- leakage is greatly reduced. In Intel's tests, the material -- whose composition the company would not reveal -- is thicker than silicon dioxide, but engineers say it will be shrunk."
The dielectric isn't metal, it's something else.
2.6 already supports the Athlon-64, and GCC has architecture optimizations for it as well.
How did this get modded up?
Got another one for you:
The bottom panel on my KDE desktop is filled with icons for my 'daily use' applications. No matter how covered my screen is with applications windows (and it is almost always fully covered), I can click on a panel icon and open a new app. I haven't figured out how to put app icons on the Windows bottom panel. I don't even know if it can be done. Perhaps it can only be done by smart Windows geeks, but not by simple-minded Linux people like me.
Right-click on the taskbar and select "Show Quick Launch". There's even a preview windows where you can see the quick-launch buttons the moment you select the option!
Sounds like Rob was afraid to experiment with his setup.
This whole problem would have been solved already if the IEC had decided to give its new binary units reasonable names that people would actually use. "Kibibytes"? Come on. Someone needs to come up with a naming scheme that doesn't suck and promote it instead.
Gentoo makes the installation completely painless, although configuration can sometimes be a pain in the ass. I'm happier editing config files than dealing with make, though.
With all the complains about the GUI setup, you'd think there'd be more people using the completely painless command line version:
mplayer
(file magically works perfectly)
I watch my videos in fullscreen anyway, so GUIs just get in the way. The only thing they seem to add is random seek, which is a useful feature, but not what people seem to be complaining about.
SPOILERS
:)
(not like they'll hurt any more than the ending will)
FFX was a pretty good game, with decent story and voice acting. The gameplay was far less annoying than FFIX(30 seconds to start a battle? Come on!), and even the puzzles were interesting. I thought it was the best FF game since VII.
The ending, however, was a horrible horrible mistake that never should have been allowed to happen. Rather than stick with the workable format of previous games(produce an enemy character that eventually becomes the last boss), the FFX team decided that their final enemy should be a monstrous, inhuman force of nature. All well and good so far, but the plot "twists" near the end transformed this enemy from something to be feared to something to be laughed at. The last boss is a floating cockroach, with no personality or motivation. Couple that with a five minute long ending, and the entire game is shot.
A sequel will give Square a chance to pull an otherwise interesting story out of its own ashes.
Oh yeah, and fanservice. Some of that, too.
"After pressing the button, the printer proceeds."
Which is a nice try, except now it sounds like the printer is doing the pressing!
Given that every week brings news of real attacks on important freedoms, I fail to see why these RIAA lawsuits are garnering so much Slashdot press. The people being sued by the RIAA right now are criminals. Say that again with me: criminals. Distributing copyrighted works without(nay, against) the consent of the copyright holder is illegal. Scum or not, the RIAA owns those songs. If you don't like the rules, you have a computer and you have a congresscritter. Heck, you might even get out a real sheet of paper and an actual pen to voice your concerns. Believe it or not, money alone is not enough to elect a politician to office. They need votes too, and to get votes they have to care about what people think.
Some people have suggested that the EFF waste time and resources defending these people. I very much hope that the organization will spend its time on more important things than petty criminals, like:
DMCA
UCITA
Censorware
All of the above are far more important to the future of internet freedom than somebody's self-proclaimed "right" to give Britney Spears MP3s to their friends.
If we want to save P2P from the RIAA, then it's time to start emphasizing the legal uses and stop defending people who are too stupid to be worth our time.
Have your mail server relay all its outgoing mail through your ISP's mail server. Inbound mail should still make it to you in one piece.