Being an ATC is stressful, but there's nothing magical about it. You just have to direct planes such that they don't run into each other in a relatively fast changing and complex environment. This is exactly the sort of thing a computer should have no trouble with. It wouldn't even be an AI, just a program that calculates that models the path of all of the planes in the current airspace, updated from radar, ADS-B, etc... and insures that nothing intersects with anything else. Presumably this computer could even offer guidance to the on-board autopilots on airplanes automatically. Autopilots are already pretty advanced (they can take off/land on their own these days) so this isn't much of a streach.
The only tricky part is when something unexpected happens (engine falls off or something) and the pilot needs to talk to a person. Presumably there will always be a person keeping an eye on this system who could take over in situations like that.
What are you talking about? There are plenty of Light Guns for the consoles. Heck, the Wii has an official gun-like holder that Nintendo sells. While it's true that there are not a lot of games for them, it doesn't seem like it matters much given that they're all Area 51 clones anyway. That's my big complaint with gun games, they're all the same. A rails shooter where you point offscreen to reload and shoot at targets as they pop up.
First off, given the political nature of the FAA this system won't be live anytime during the next few decades, maybe not even during your lifetime. Secondly, ATCs are among the most stressful jobs you can actually do. The burnout rate on your average controller is insane, even with their extensive mandatory vacations and shift rotations. They're also getting harder and harder to replace and train as the number of airplanes in the sky increases with each year. It certainly won't be any less stressful once ADS-B is finally deployed and the inter-plane distances are decreased to increase the number of birds sharing the airspace.
One thing that's bothering me is that HardOCP said "Anandtech benchmarked this card vs. an 8800GTS and said it came out faster, then we benchmarked it against an 8800GTX and it game out faster, then people complained that our results didn't match". Isn't that expected? The GTX is a faster card than the GTS last time I looked. Why is it such a shock that the ATI card came in between them in performance?
It is a bit of a shock that ATI's latest and greatest can't seem to consistently beat nVidia's over a year old GTX cards I guess.
Hell, I found out a couple of years ago that I have a local Dave and Busters. I'd heard about them having some really awesome stuff like the old Battletech arcade game at one store. So I decided to check it out. I stood in the middle of the floor and took a look at what they actually have and said to myself "shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, driving, driving, driving, driving, driving, dancing, boxing". I'm not a big fan of driving or shooting games. I have DDR pads at home so I wasn't in a big hurry to plop down $2/song at the arcade, plus it was a Pump It Up machine which I don't like as much. I think they may have had one or two fighting games crammed in a corner and almost nothing new. I remember when I was a kid there were a lot of fighting game clones but there was also a good set of oddball games to keep you interested.
Well, a lot of the software patents are obvious because a lot of Slashdotters work with software and can tell on the face of something if its something you would have come up with in 5 minutes given the same problem. I doubt there are quite as many chip microcode developers on Slashdot.
That said, the description is kind of vague. Does it mean creating a table of opcodes and doing branch prediction based on the table? If so that would probably be patent troll area. My guess is that it's something far more clever though and stands a decent chance of being a good patent.
Uh, before Google agreed with the horrible Chinese policy they WERE blocked by the great firewall. Not consistently mind you, but enough that Chinese users flocked to the government run search engine instead. As far as I know, Google still has a minority share in China thanks to those shenanigans.
If you boycott the industry they'll just assume you're pirating and convince Congress to pass even more bad laws that let them snoop on you and control your life.
The article mentions the cost savings to Sony (maybe they'll be passed on to the consumer...two or three years from now), but the real kicker is at the bottom where IBM apparently had to maintain cycle compatibility with the old chip to make sure they don't break any games. They didn't use the die shrink to optimize or enhance any parts of the chip like you normally would. The supercomputer folks might end up losing out a bit in an effort to keep the game console folks happy.
Of course all of those checks are rendered useless on the same day the game is released by crack groups that put out the no-cd patch. Personally, I hate hunting down the disc when I want to play a game, especially on my laptop where I often want to play a game on the road (who wants to lug their CD library with them wherever they go?). The only people those checks do anything to are honest people with cheap burners that get messed up by SecurROM and its rootkit like properties.
I'd argue that piracy is a big problem for the PC gaming industry, but these CD check things do nothing to prevent it. If anything, they drive people towards piracy because the pirated version is much less hassle. At least they don't make you look up words in the manual or spin the crazy decoder wheel or anything like that anymore.
The solution is simple: Just don't play ANYTHING unless it passes the DRM check. After all, if people are creating their own music they're just stealing from the music industry anyway. Easy fix. It's pretty much in line with the current industry thinking anyway.
Long passwords aren't so bad as long as you replicate them across your entire enterprise. Of course that is a security risk because once someone gets one password they have access to everything, but businesses where everybody has to have a different password for the 15 different systems they might access in a month, with the passwords changing every month is a recipe for having post-it notes full of passwords everywhere, and more often people just using the same password everywhere anyway (or a variant of it). Worse, they'll have old (expired) passwords on some systems that might be less secure than their current password due to leaks/reuse.
IMHO, sufficient password security is a checker when you create them that insures the password isn't based on a dictionary word (or a mutation of one) and has maybe a digit or some punctuation in it. Basically, a checker that makes sure a dictionary guesser won't get it. Then enforce password attempt timeouts (no more than 3 passwords per 30 seconds or something) on every system to prevent brute force attacks. Passwords should be changed every 6 months or so. Anything more gets well into the realm of diminishing returns IMHO.
On the other hand, you don't NEED to pull out your backups if you have an actual install disk. Just reinstall the os on top of the old one, patch it back up, then reinstall your apps to make sure they get their registry keys back. Your documents are still in perfect shape.
That's my biggest complaint with those recovery disks. They always want to blow away your machine first, even though that's gross overkill 95% of the time. Besides, these are home users, most of them don't have proper backups in the first place.
Um, what about the studies that try to pin down the causes of the Great Depression? Inflexible money supply after a period of wild speculation caused a deflation of the currency that sent the economy packing. I guess I was not verbose enough in my original post. The gold standard itself may be theoretically workable in a perfect system, but in real world practice (the 1930s for example) it has a lot of shortcomings that cause problems. It's like communism in a way, it works great on paper, but it makes assumptions that aren't true in the real world where real people are trying to game the system and where you have to interact with other (not gold-based) economies.
Oh geez, someone has been drinking the Gold Standard Kool-Aid. Do you know why we got away from the gold standard? Because it was one of the major causes of the Great Depression. It is also far less flexible than the monetary systems we use today such that an attempt to go back to it would cause a major deflation in the currency while skyrocketing the value of gold. Oh, and guess who has a lot of holding in gold? You guessed it, Ron Paul. The Wikipedia article alone has some rather compelling reasons why return to the Gold Standard is a bad idea.
He keeps saying he's for free trade, but whenever a vote comes up he votes protectionist.
States rights is a familiar dodge for people who rooted for the South in the Civil war but don't want to give the appearance of being pro-slavery. In here it appears to be a way to dodge for uncomfortable social issues that, while probably correct in the long term, are politically unpopular today.
Like most Libertarians, Ron Paul would much prefer getting rid of the socialized support systems we currently have, believing that people would be better off just saving on their own instead of having the government do it. In general, that is probably true, however if people were good at that we wouldn't have needed those systems in the first palace. Once he starts cutting the funds for those systems it is inevitable that more people will fall through the gaps. There is the promise that everybody currently on it will continue getting their support, but if the money is not there then there is no way to keep that promise.
For an extensive rundown of where Ron Paul stands on the issues, visit On The Issues. This is actually a good place to visit for all of the candidates.
What is the difference between the Vista and Longhorn kernels? What advantage would I see from this upgrade? Is it more stable? Are there features (scheduling features I'd guess, better realtime support maybe?) that Vista doesn't currently have? Other than the danger of introducing new and exciting bugs, why do I even care?
How about the "Ron Paul stands just about as much chance of being elected as you do" posts? It doesn't really matter if the person reading is 15, an atheist, Chinese, or a member of Al Qaeda; the statement is still accurate.
The best thing about Ron Paul this year is how he can be the ultimate form of humiliation. Pundits and pollsters were all over Rudy "9/11" Giuliani before the primaries started. Some of them were practically writing his victory speeches before the first vote had been cast. Then people started voting and he got less votes than even Ron Paul.
As far as the "nut" complaint, just Google "Gold Standard". He's also protectionist as hell. He also stands behind a lot of things that Slashdotters find acceptable that are political suicide in America today (legalize drugs, gay marrage is ok, privatize Social Security). It's one thing to be against "wasteful government spending", but when it ends up involving people dying on the street (social programs), it's a lot harder to stomach. From a purely economic point of view it is probably better to let the mentally ill and unemployable just die on the street instead of subsidizing them for the rest of their life, but that's not what most people consider acceptable for the first world.
The invisible plane was always an odd accessory IMHO. It's stealthier than a regular plane, but you still have the fully visible squatting woman zipping through the air. Plus, it's gotta be harder to fly when you can't see the controls (or readouts!). And lord help you if you forget where you parked it. Plus, it's a public nuisance to park it anywhere there might be people. The last thing WW needs is some jogger getting a concussion from running smack into her invisible jet head first.
More importantly, the Spectrum is a limited resource. Even if you can't capitalize on it, you can be sure that someone in the future will want to use it, especially these bands with favorable RF propagation.
The problem with 3G isn't the band it is in, it's the fact that the hardware is still expensive and power hungry, which makes it less than ideal for the intended purpose of being used in smartphones. Give it a few years and you'll likely see considerable growth on that chunk of the spectrum as the chipsets improve and people grow more data hungry (and they always grow more data hungry).
How many of those girls are "approachable" though? Would you want to hold a conversation with them? Like many Mythbusters commentators you have failed to fully grasp the premise before criticizing the work, which makes you a tool.
Oh, and if you want to see the dumbest people online (even dumber than Youtube commentators), then look no further than the Mythbusters fansite. People are looking so hard for something "they screwed up" that most of the time they don't even seem to know what exactly the Mythbusters are testing.
Slashdot Mirror
Being an ATC is stressful, but there's nothing magical about it. You just have to direct planes such that they don't run into each other in a relatively fast changing and complex environment. This is exactly the sort of thing a computer should have no trouble with. It wouldn't even be an AI, just a program that calculates that models the path of all of the planes in the current airspace, updated from radar, ADS-B, etc... and insures that nothing intersects with anything else. Presumably this computer could even offer guidance to the on-board autopilots on airplanes automatically. Autopilots are already pretty advanced (they can take off/land on their own these days) so this isn't much of a streach.
The only tricky part is when something unexpected happens (engine falls off or something) and the pilot needs to talk to a person. Presumably there will always be a person keeping an eye on this system who could take over in situations like that.
What are you talking about? There are plenty of Light Guns for the consoles. Heck, the Wii has an official gun-like holder that Nintendo sells. While it's true that there are not a lot of games for them, it doesn't seem like it matters much given that they're all Area 51 clones anyway. That's my big complaint with gun games, they're all the same. A rails shooter where you point offscreen to reload and shoot at targets as they pop up.
First off, given the political nature of the FAA this system won't be live anytime during the next few decades, maybe not even during your lifetime. Secondly, ATCs are among the most stressful jobs you can actually do. The burnout rate on your average controller is insane, even with their extensive mandatory vacations and shift rotations. They're also getting harder and harder to replace and train as the number of airplanes in the sky increases with each year. It certainly won't be any less stressful once ADS-B is finally deployed and the inter-plane distances are decreased to increase the number of birds sharing the airspace.
One thing that's bothering me is that HardOCP said "Anandtech benchmarked this card vs. an 8800GTS and said it came out faster, then we benchmarked it against an 8800GTX and it game out faster, then people complained that our results didn't match". Isn't that expected? The GTX is a faster card than the GTS last time I looked. Why is it such a shock that the ATI card came in between them in performance?
It is a bit of a shock that ATI's latest and greatest can't seem to consistently beat nVidia's over a year old GTX cards I guess.
Hell, I found out a couple of years ago that I have a local Dave and Busters. I'd heard about them having some really awesome stuff like the old Battletech arcade game at one store. So I decided to check it out. I stood in the middle of the floor and took a look at what they actually have and said to myself "shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, driving, driving, driving, driving, driving, dancing, boxing". I'm not a big fan of driving or shooting games. I have DDR pads at home so I wasn't in a big hurry to plop down $2/song at the arcade, plus it was a Pump It Up machine which I don't like as much. I think they may have had one or two fighting games crammed in a corner and almost nothing new. I remember when I was a kid there were a lot of fighting game clones but there was also a good set of oddball games to keep you interested.
It's hard to gain marketshare when your users are being tossed in jail for circumventing the government's censorship.
Well, a lot of the software patents are obvious because a lot of Slashdotters work with software and can tell on the face of something if its something you would have come up with in 5 minutes given the same problem. I doubt there are quite as many chip microcode developers on Slashdot.
That said, the description is kind of vague. Does it mean creating a table of opcodes and doing branch prediction based on the table? If so that would probably be patent troll area. My guess is that it's something far more clever though and stands a decent chance of being a good patent.
Uh, before Google agreed with the horrible Chinese policy they WERE blocked by the great firewall. Not consistently mind you, but enough that Chinese users flocked to the government run search engine instead. As far as I know, Google still has a minority share in China thanks to those shenanigans.
Depends if the writers are going to get new media royalties I guess. That could be a pyhrric victory for the writers.
If you boycott the industry they'll just assume you're pirating and convince Congress to pass even more bad laws that let them snoop on you and control your life.
The article mentions the cost savings to Sony (maybe they'll be passed on to the consumer...two or three years from now), but the real kicker is at the bottom where IBM apparently had to maintain cycle compatibility with the old chip to make sure they don't break any games. They didn't use the die shrink to optimize or enhance any parts of the chip like you normally would. The supercomputer folks might end up losing out a bit in an effort to keep the game console folks happy.
Of course all of those checks are rendered useless on the same day the game is released by crack groups that put out the no-cd patch. Personally, I hate hunting down the disc when I want to play a game, especially on my laptop where I often want to play a game on the road (who wants to lug their CD library with them wherever they go?). The only people those checks do anything to are honest people with cheap burners that get messed up by SecurROM and its rootkit like properties.
I'd argue that piracy is a big problem for the PC gaming industry, but these CD check things do nothing to prevent it. If anything, they drive people towards piracy because the pirated version is much less hassle. At least they don't make you look up words in the manual or spin the crazy decoder wheel or anything like that anymore.
The solution is simple: Just don't play ANYTHING unless it passes the DRM check. After all, if people are creating their own music they're just stealing from the music industry anyway. Easy fix. It's pretty much in line with the current industry thinking anyway.
Long passwords aren't so bad as long as you replicate them across your entire enterprise. Of course that is a security risk because once someone gets one password they have access to everything, but businesses where everybody has to have a different password for the 15 different systems they might access in a month, with the passwords changing every month is a recipe for having post-it notes full of passwords everywhere, and more often people just using the same password everywhere anyway (or a variant of it). Worse, they'll have old (expired) passwords on some systems that might be less secure than their current password due to leaks/reuse.
IMHO, sufficient password security is a checker when you create them that insures the password isn't based on a dictionary word (or a mutation of one) and has maybe a digit or some punctuation in it. Basically, a checker that makes sure a dictionary guesser won't get it. Then enforce password attempt timeouts (no more than 3 passwords per 30 seconds or something) on every system to prevent brute force attacks. Passwords should be changed every 6 months or so. Anything more gets well into the realm of diminishing returns IMHO.
How else could they be Holier than Thou?
On the other hand, you don't NEED to pull out your backups if you have an actual install disk. Just reinstall the os on top of the old one, patch it back up, then reinstall your apps to make sure they get their registry keys back. Your documents are still in perfect shape.
That's my biggest complaint with those recovery disks. They always want to blow away your machine first, even though that's gross overkill 95% of the time. Besides, these are home users, most of them don't have proper backups in the first place.
Um, what about the studies that try to pin down the causes of the Great Depression? Inflexible money supply after a period of wild speculation caused a deflation of the currency that sent the economy packing. I guess I was not verbose enough in my original post. The gold standard itself may be theoretically workable in a perfect system, but in real world practice (the 1930s for example) it has a lot of shortcomings that cause problems. It's like communism in a way, it works great on paper, but it makes assumptions that aren't true in the real world where real people are trying to game the system and where you have to interact with other (not gold-based) economies.
Oh geez, someone has been drinking the Gold Standard Kool-Aid. Do you know why we got away from the gold standard? Because it was one of the major causes of the Great Depression. It is also far less flexible than the monetary systems we use today such that an attempt to go back to it would cause a major deflation in the currency while skyrocketing the value of gold. Oh, and guess who has a lot of holding in gold? You guessed it, Ron Paul. The Wikipedia article alone has some rather compelling reasons why return to the Gold Standard is a bad idea.
He keeps saying he's for free trade, but whenever a vote comes up he votes protectionist.
States rights is a familiar dodge for people who rooted for the South in the Civil war but don't want to give the appearance of being pro-slavery. In here it appears to be a way to dodge for uncomfortable social issues that, while probably correct in the long term, are politically unpopular today.
Like most Libertarians, Ron Paul would much prefer getting rid of the socialized support systems we currently have, believing that people would be better off just saving on their own instead of having the government do it. In general, that is probably true, however if people were good at that we wouldn't have needed those systems in the first palace. Once he starts cutting the funds for those systems it is inevitable that more people will fall through the gaps. There is the promise that everybody currently on it will continue getting their support, but if the money is not there then there is no way to keep that promise.
For an extensive rundown of where Ron Paul stands on the issues, visit On The Issues. This is actually a good place to visit for all of the candidates.
What is the difference between the Vista and Longhorn kernels? What advantage would I see from this upgrade? Is it more stable? Are there features (scheduling features I'd guess, better realtime support maybe?) that Vista doesn't currently have? Other than the danger of introducing new and exciting bugs, why do I even care?
How about the "Ron Paul stands just about as much chance of being elected as you do" posts? It doesn't really matter if the person reading is 15, an atheist, Chinese, or a member of Al Qaeda; the statement is still accurate.
The best thing about Ron Paul this year is how he can be the ultimate form of humiliation. Pundits and pollsters were all over Rudy "9/11" Giuliani before the primaries started. Some of them were practically writing his victory speeches before the first vote had been cast. Then people started voting and he got less votes than even Ron Paul.
As far as the "nut" complaint, just Google "Gold Standard". He's also protectionist as hell. He also stands behind a lot of things that Slashdotters find acceptable that are political suicide in America today (legalize drugs, gay marrage is ok, privatize Social Security). It's one thing to be against "wasteful government spending", but when it ends up involving people dying on the street (social programs), it's a lot harder to stomach. From a purely economic point of view it is probably better to let the mentally ill and unemployable just die on the street instead of subsidizing them for the rest of their life, but that's not what most people consider acceptable for the first world.
Large corporations exploit tax loopholes? Who would have thought?
- and a bunch of motherboards with various features.
The invisible plane was always an odd accessory IMHO. It's stealthier than a regular plane, but you still have the fully visible squatting woman zipping through the air. Plus, it's gotta be harder to fly when you can't see the controls (or readouts!). And lord help you if you forget where you parked it. Plus, it's a public nuisance to park it anywhere there might be people. The last thing WW needs is some jogger getting a concussion from running smack into her invisible jet head first.
More importantly, the Spectrum is a limited resource. Even if you can't capitalize on it, you can be sure that someone in the future will want to use it, especially these bands with favorable RF propagation.
The problem with 3G isn't the band it is in, it's the fact that the hardware is still expensive and power hungry, which makes it less than ideal for the intended purpose of being used in smartphones. Give it a few years and you'll likely see considerable growth on that chunk of the spectrum as the chipsets improve and people grow more data hungry (and they always grow more data hungry).
How many of those girls are "approachable" though? Would you want to hold a conversation with them? Like many Mythbusters commentators you have failed to fully grasp the premise before criticizing the work, which makes you a tool.
Oh, and if you want to see the dumbest people online (even dumber than Youtube commentators), then look no further than the Mythbusters fansite. People are looking so hard for something "they screwed up" that most of the time they don't even seem to know what exactly the Mythbusters are testing.