If you look back at MS's history, they generally try to downplay any new innovation they aren't actively in the market with. Smartphones, music players, tablet PCs, etc.
They don't have a tablet (at least not for sale or for show) so they're going to call it a "fad" and hope that keeps buyers from getting one and getting branded on it.
In the meanwhile their R&D department will be mad busy with their photocopiers, trying to make an "improved variation" on whatever they're labeling as a fad. No one believes them, but they're convinced that by simply making the statement, that somehow everyone will believe them and not create a market for the product, giving them time to scramble and rush something out the door in time to catch the wave.
18 months later they will suddenly stop calling it a fad and announce their new product, with surprisingly familiar looking features, plus a ton of additional bloat. Many months later, after delays, price increases, even more bloat, and cutting of key features that were pushed hard in the initial announcement, product will hit the stores. MS will announces this new product will "revolutionize" the market.
Despite outrageous amounts of funding and marketing, it will still bomb because the market has already been captured several years ago by what they were unsuccessful at downplaying as a "fad", it doesn't work like consumers are now expecting it to (even if some features may even work better than their ancestor in the market), is clumsy to use, and few will buy it.
After losing their shirts in a spectacular show of bad retail, someone will then get a clue and less than 6 months after product launch, an announcement will be made that the product has been discontinued. No official numbers will be given as to how much the fiasco cost the company, but inside sources will whisper tales of massive financial loss.
That's unfortunate how the information is graphed. The MB/Sec scale on the left varies from graph to graph, between 80 and 150. Without any single chart at the end overlaying them to compare, it makes it difficult to see how they compare except in the shape of their curve. At a glance they all look very similar, but in reality they vary significantly.
I didn't want to post AC but I modded the hell outta some of the idjits in here.
I think you're missing the point of "you can't post and moderate in the same discussion". (and if a mod sees this post you may lose your mod pts for good, yes the admins can often internally identify AC posts)
I seem to recall if you were stupid enough to attack a villager in a town, you'd not see that once, but about six times over. (I don't recall which few virtues you didn't lose)
But EA probably is within their rights to do this. It does no good to get upset at them because they're playing by the rules. As we all know, it's the rules that are broken.
BUT, the reason the rules are broken are because companies (like EA) have brib...er lobbied congress critters to write those laws. But again, that's still them playing within the rules, and again leads back to the rules being broken. It's a problem that's two levels deep, and in both cases comes down to a defective legislative system. Defective, not malfunctioning. It's working as designed, it's just designed wrong. Unfortunately certain aspects of its design (such as lobbying) make it a problem that's self-perpetuating to a large degree.
When you start talking about that scale, even solar is no longer free. All that sun, hitting the land or the sea, you don't think that energy is otherwise "wasted" or destroyed? It goes to heat the earth. If you capture it with solar panels or other methods, that energy never gets where it was going.
I don't have any good idea what the impact of that is, but you can't just discount it as "free".
I use an old microsoft (gasp!) trackball that rolls off the tongue with a model number x05-87475. I use it because of the very high tracking speed on the trackball. Everything else I've bought since then would choke if I flitted the ball too fast. They either stop tracking at all until the ball slows down (or gets epilepsy) or they track backwards.
It's a big beaste too. But you have very little choice if you want a "right thumb" ball instead of a center ball. I'm amazed no one has made anything like it since then. While I've been looking, I keep running into gamers using this exact same model of trackball mouse for gaming, for exactly the same reason, all of them looking for anything like it. It's apparently the only high speed trackball to ever hit the market.
All these "laser mice" we read about, I tried one, and besides fleecing my wallet, it didn't help. I can't get used to moving the whole mouse, I'm used to just moving the ball. And I don't understand how you can do things like circlestraffe with a mouse since you quickly run out of desk space? I may yet get ambitious enough to take power tools to my pricey laser mouse gathering dust and see if I can turn it into a trackball.
what happens when a radio gets turned on/off in a room full of say, 50 people?
Cost increase to radio station: $0.00 Added listeners to commercials: 50 (translates to being able to ask more $$ from the advertisers for each spot)
Besides greed/doubledipping, there's absolutely no reason to charge for that. You're already getting more listeners which translates directly into additional ad revenue.
This is just the most popular Money Grab excuse out there "they have more money than our average customer, so we want to charge them more." (and without providing additional value)
we were just discussing how the USA could benefit from some of the design of canadian law, and it was decided that canada has safeties built into the system so that in the event that the government does something "batshit insane", that it can be dissolved almost instantly. And that's what has happened in Canada. Lie to parliament and refuse to disclose information, BAM you're outa here. Their parliament is a bit like our congress, but our congress neither has the balls nor the power to pull it off.
Taxes will continue to be required until someone finds a way to get everyone to consistently voluntarily contribute money to fund community and government services. They really only need to overcome one single obstacle... selfishness. (not happening)
I can see where anti-parallel may be arguable, (for event-driven OO languages for example) but anti-modular? I guess I'll have to rename all my modules after unicorns and other stuff that doesn't really exist?
The scary thing about this sort of decision is the people who are making it should know better. Or they don't belong in the position. Was there a hostile takeover led by a bunch of PHB in suits?
Daisy chaining costs performance though. Minimum 10% loss in speed each time you pass through a hub.
The big nit I have with USB is it wasn't designed from the start to be a large data transfer protocol, so it's not efficient at it, say compared to firewire. If you compare real world use, FW400 gets you about 39-40mb/sec. USB2 (@480) never gets above 38, and in most cases is more like 36. (or much much lower, many cheap bridge chips top out at 18) My averages showed USB2's 480mbps actually works out to around 380 if compared to FW400. FW800 simply creams USB2, averaging 79mb/sec for me.
So I've seen some people saying USB3 is triple 2, and some saying double. So I wonder, is it going to work out faster than FW800, or slower?
the time lag varies depending on the position of the planets, but I've heard 13-15 minutes is a common number for one way travel. So ya, that's a 30 minute ping time.
It's no wonder they're developing a network protocol for space.
The popular summary of that definition of "american arrest" is to simply ask the officer, "am I free to go?" If he says no, by definition you are under arrest, and confirming that should be your second question. If they then tell you that no, you're not under arrest, but no, you're not free to go, then you need to start digging into "can you please clarify my legal status right now if I'm not free to go but not under arrest?" They can't detain you against your will without arresting you. The legal status change to "arrested" suspends certain rights (privacy and fredom) and grants the officers additional rights over you, beyond what they have over the general public, rights they do NOT have until you are under arrest. So if they tell you you're not under arrest, they don't have the right to tell you that you are not free to leave, and you can start calling BS.
Right now they are authorized to take your fingerprints if you are arrested. This was the tradeoff made when the whole fingerprinting thing came up in the first place, "you've already been arrested, you temporarily certain rights of privacy when arrested, in the interest of safety of the officers" was the original reason they were allowed to search your person. (and later, your vehicle) Then that was expanded to fingerprinting for the purposes of recordkeeping, and later for lookup in the database to see if you had any outstanding warrants etc. But this was all based on your being arrested and having forfeit certain rights as a result.
So now we're going to continue with the invasion of privacy, but just drop the justification entirely? So a cop can see you walking down the street and looking funny and can pull you aside and print you? If that doesn't say "papers, please!" I don't know what does.
From what I've read nasa does some pretty thorough planning with their spacecraft software in terms of being able to recover from faults. (leave the units issues for another thread, eh?) I'm always impressed with how they have multiple fallback points that can usually dig them out of almost any hole bad programming, bad planning, or a stray cosmic ray can drop them into.
Look up the mars rovers, with their flash memory filling up, that in itself was amazing that they were able to recover from, given the crippling effect the programming oversight had on the system. (those iirc had to drop down three levels of safe before they were able to work with nasa) When you're millions of miles away you can't just send a tech out to press the Reset button.
And they have to not only get it back into a controllable state, but it has to be able to stay in that state for anywhere from minutes to days due to the time required for communication and analysis. If there's a fault in the solar panel positioning system your craft has to stay functional long enough to collect useful data, transmit it, wait for it to make it to earth, wait for it to be analyzed, and wait for a command to fix the problem, OR has to be able to at least patch it on its own before waiting for a proper fix. Amazing stuff really. It's not A.I. by any means, but it's definitely robust.
Please then forward to the appropriate department that it's not polite to take over an entire core of processing power just because it will insure smooth animation.
100% may have been a good idea if they're running a crappy slow old machine, but it doesn't do us any good here to see that animation in 300fps instead of 40.
Surely they have a way of checking their frame rate and doing some form of idle/yield in the loop if the animation is well-above goal framerate.
OK so I browse to the eye candy page showing downloads. Not much going on there. *shrug* Going to guess it only works on firefox or is tripping my annoying flash banner blocker.
So download 4 and install. Browse there again. OK there it is. I'll admit it's sorta nifty Though we've all seen those fake counters on web pages before that have no base in reality so it makes me somewhat suspect how realistic it is. I'll give them benefit of the doubt though but it'd be nice if it said somewhere.
Why are my fans revving up? (looks at processor usage) OK wow. Open activity monitor. Imagine that, Firefox process is consuming 100% of one of my cores. Is that really necessary to draw some numbers and animate a few pips on a map? I'd need to be playing COD or something to get that out of an app usually. Let me guess, flash? And people can't understand why Apple wants it to go away.
But then again I'd bet it's more a problem of poor flash programming than anything else. Thanks Mozilla for making your new shiney look like a processor hog while you're trying to show it off.
The cost of the SSL certificate to make the HTTPS work has been the most common issue I've ran into. Penny-pinching administrators can't be convinced it's a justifiable expense. And they nickel and dime you for every service the certificate is "good for" such as email.
Static IP addresses aren't a problem, one IP can host a variety of completely different domain names, the server sorts out the requests based on the entire URL being requested, including the domain name. And there's nothing that says that you can only have one certificate bound to a specific IP address. (or group of them) Reverse mapping considers all possibilities, not just the first one it hits.
And if you want to get technical about things, ISPs almost never refuse to sell you a product like static IP addresses, you can have as many as you are willing to pay for, subject to availability. (which is kept inversely proportional, so as to make sure they never run out) They also don't have to be their own subnet either, it's common for an entire/26 to be split into 253 different static IP addresses, each sharing a network/router/broadcast run by their isp. That lets them sell 253 single addresses, rather than 64, on the same/26. Having your own segment for a small block is very inefficient use of available address space.
only problem is best place to lock down frequencies is in the baseband, and shortsighted fools that they are that's where they lock which carrier you can use. So to unlock the phone requires compromise of the baseband.
Tho there's very little point in modifying the frequency of your cell phone unless you're setting up your own pirate cell tower...
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If you look back at MS's history, they generally try to downplay any new innovation they aren't actively in the market with. Smartphones, music players, tablet PCs, etc.
They don't have a tablet (at least not for sale or for show) so they're going to call it a "fad" and hope that keeps buyers from getting one and getting branded on it.
In the meanwhile their R&D department will be mad busy with their photocopiers, trying to make an "improved variation" on whatever they're labeling as a fad. No one believes them, but they're convinced that by simply making the statement, that somehow everyone will believe them and not create a market for the product, giving them time to scramble and rush something out the door in time to catch the wave.
18 months later they will suddenly stop calling it a fad and announce their new product, with surprisingly familiar looking features, plus a ton of additional bloat. Many months later, after delays, price increases, even more bloat, and cutting of key features that were pushed hard in the initial announcement, product will hit the stores. MS will announces this new product will "revolutionize" the market.
Despite outrageous amounts of funding and marketing, it will still bomb because the market has already been captured several years ago by what they were unsuccessful at downplaying as a "fad", it doesn't work like consumers are now expecting it to (even if some features may even work better than their ancestor in the market), is clumsy to use, and few will buy it.
After losing their shirts in a spectacular show of bad retail, someone will then get a clue and less than 6 months after product launch, an announcement will be made that the product has been discontinued. No official numbers will be given as to how much the fiasco cost the company, but inside sources will whisper tales of massive financial loss.
That's unfortunate how the information is graphed. The MB/Sec scale on the left varies from graph to graph, between 80 and 150. Without any single chart at the end overlaying them to compare, it makes it difficult to see how they compare except in the shape of their curve. At a glance they all look very similar, but in reality they vary significantly.
I didn't want to post AC but I modded the hell outta
some of the idjits in here.
I think you're missing the point of "you can't post and moderate in the same discussion". (and if a mod sees this post you may lose your mod pts for good, yes the admins can often internally identify AC posts)
bet you'd have paid more attention if it said "thou hath lost a fifth"
That's like saying "AOL has no chance in surviving" now that dialup is a joke. But yet, they remain....
Most things that have gotten that big will die a very slow death.
I seem to recall if you were stupid enough to attack a villager in a town, you'd not see that once, but about six times over. (I don't recall which few virtues you didn't lose)
But EA probably is within their rights to do this. It does no good to get upset at them because they're playing by the rules. As we all know, it's the rules that are broken.
BUT, the reason the rules are broken are because companies (like EA) have brib...er lobbied congress critters to write those laws. But again, that's still them playing within the rules, and again leads back to the rules being broken. It's a problem that's two levels deep, and in both cases comes down to a defective legislative system. Defective, not malfunctioning. It's working as designed, it's just designed wrong. Unfortunately certain aspects of its design (such as lobbying) make it a problem that's self-perpetuating to a large degree.
When you start talking about that scale, even solar is no longer free. All that sun, hitting the land or the sea, you don't think that energy is otherwise "wasted" or destroyed? It goes to heat the earth. If you capture it with solar panels or other methods, that energy never gets where it was going.
I don't have any good idea what the impact of that is, but you can't just discount it as "free".
instead of insta-caving to abuse of law? wow. never saw that coming, certainly not from Twitter.
Twitter respect: level UP
they already went crazy with einstein's brain and didn't learn much.
I use an old microsoft (gasp!) trackball that rolls off the tongue with a model number x05-87475. I use it because of the very high tracking speed on the trackball. Everything else I've bought since then would choke if I flitted the ball too fast. They either stop tracking at all until the ball slows down (or gets epilepsy) or they track backwards.
It's a big beaste too. But you have very little choice if you want a "right thumb" ball instead of a center ball. I'm amazed no one has made anything like it since then. While I've been looking, I keep running into gamers using this exact same model of trackball mouse for gaming, for exactly the same reason, all of them looking for anything like it. It's apparently the only high speed trackball to ever hit the market.
All these "laser mice" we read about, I tried one, and besides fleecing my wallet, it didn't help. I can't get used to moving the whole mouse, I'm used to just moving the ball. And I don't understand how you can do things like circlestraffe with a mouse since you quickly run out of desk space? I may yet get ambitious enough to take power tools to my pricey laser mouse gathering dust and see if I can turn it into a trackball.
what happens when a radio gets turned on/off in a room full of say, 50 people?
Cost increase to radio station: $0.00
Added listeners to commercials: 50
(translates to being able to ask more $$ from the advertisers for each spot)
Besides greed/doubledipping, there's absolutely no reason to charge for that. You're already getting more listeners which translates directly into additional ad revenue.
This is just the most popular Money Grab excuse out there "they have more money than our average customer, so we want to charge them more." (and without providing additional value)
Bogus. Totally bogus.
we were just discussing how the USA could benefit from some of the design of canadian law, and it was decided that canada has safeties built into the system so that in the event that the government does something "batshit insane", that it can be dissolved almost instantly. And that's what has happened in Canada. Lie to parliament and refuse to disclose information, BAM you're outa here. Their parliament is a bit like our congress, but our congress neither has the balls nor the power to pull it off.
Taxes will continue to be required until someone finds a way to get everyone to consistently voluntarily contribute money to fund community and government services. They really only need to overcome one single obstacle... selfishness. (not happening)
I can see where anti-parallel may be arguable, (for event-driven OO languages for example) but anti-modular? I guess I'll have to rename all my modules after unicorns and other stuff that doesn't really exist?
The scary thing about this sort of decision is the people who are making it should know better. Or they don't belong in the position. Was there a hostile takeover led by a bunch of PHB in suits?
Daisy chaining costs performance though. Minimum 10% loss in speed each time you pass through a hub.
The big nit I have with USB is it wasn't designed from the start to be a large data transfer protocol, so it's not efficient at it, say compared to firewire. If you compare real world use, FW400 gets you about 39-40mb/sec. USB2 (@480) never gets above 38, and in most cases is more like 36. (or much much lower, many cheap bridge chips top out at 18) My averages showed USB2's 480mbps actually works out to around 380 if compared to FW400. FW800 simply creams USB2, averaging 79mb/sec for me.
So I've seen some people saying USB3 is triple 2, and some saying double. So I wonder, is it going to work out faster than FW800, or slower?
They mention what improvement it can do but I wasn't able to find any examples. Anyone at least have that space shuttle example they mentioned?
the time lag varies depending on the position of the planets, but I've heard 13-15 minutes is a common number for one way travel. So ya, that's a 30 minute ping time.
It's no wonder they're developing a network protocol for space.
The popular summary of that definition of "american arrest" is to simply ask the officer, "am I free to go?" If he says no, by definition you are under arrest, and confirming that should be your second question. If they then tell you that no, you're not under arrest, but no, you're not free to go, then you need to start digging into "can you please clarify my legal status right now if I'm not free to go but not under arrest?" They can't detain you against your will without arresting you. The legal status change to "arrested" suspends certain rights (privacy and fredom) and grants the officers additional rights over you, beyond what they have over the general public, rights they do NOT have until you are under arrest. So if they tell you you're not under arrest, they don't have the right to tell you that you are not free to leave, and you can start calling BS.
Right now they are authorized to take your fingerprints if you are arrested. This was the tradeoff made when the whole fingerprinting thing came up in the first place, "you've already been arrested, you temporarily certain rights of privacy when arrested, in the interest of safety of the officers" was the original reason they were allowed to search your person. (and later, your vehicle) Then that was expanded to fingerprinting for the purposes of recordkeeping, and later for lookup in the database to see if you had any outstanding warrants etc. But this was all based on your being arrested and having forfeit certain rights as a result.
So now we're going to continue with the invasion of privacy, but just drop the justification entirely? So a cop can see you walking down the street and looking funny and can pull you aside and print you? If that doesn't say "papers, please!" I don't know what does.
Collage appears to be automated stenography
I don't think that really fits here?
From what I've read nasa does some pretty thorough planning with their spacecraft software in terms of being able to recover from faults. (leave the units issues for another thread, eh?) I'm always impressed with how they have multiple fallback points that can usually dig them out of almost any hole bad programming, bad planning, or a stray cosmic ray can drop them into.
Look up the mars rovers, with their flash memory filling up, that in itself was amazing that they were able to recover from, given the crippling effect the programming oversight had on the system. (those iirc had to drop down three levels of safe before they were able to work with nasa) When you're millions of miles away you can't just send a tech out to press the Reset button.
And they have to not only get it back into a controllable state, but it has to be able to stay in that state for anywhere from minutes to days due to the time required for communication and analysis. If there's a fault in the solar panel positioning system your craft has to stay functional long enough to collect useful data, transmit it, wait for it to make it to earth, wait for it to be analyzed, and wait for a command to fix the problem, OR has to be able to at least patch it on its own before waiting for a proper fix. Amazing stuff really. It's not A.I. by any means, but it's definitely robust.
Please then forward to the appropriate department that it's not polite to take over an entire core of processing power just because it will insure smooth animation.
100% may have been a good idea if they're running a crappy slow old machine, but it doesn't do us any good here to see that animation in 300fps instead of 40.
Surely they have a way of checking their frame rate and doing some form of idle/yield in the loop if the animation is well-above goal framerate.
OK so I browse to the eye candy page showing downloads. Not much going on there. *shrug* Going to guess it only works on firefox or is tripping my annoying flash banner blocker.
So download 4 and install. Browse there again. OK there it is. I'll admit it's sorta nifty Though we've all seen those fake counters on web pages before that have no base in reality so it makes me somewhat suspect how realistic it is. I'll give them benefit of the doubt though but it'd be nice if it said somewhere.
Why are my fans revving up? (looks at processor usage) OK wow. Open activity monitor. Imagine that, Firefox process is consuming 100% of one of my cores. Is that really necessary to draw some numbers and animate a few pips on a map? I'd need to be playing COD or something to get that out of an app usually. Let me guess, flash? And people can't understand why Apple wants it to go away.
But then again I'd bet it's more a problem of poor flash programming than anything else. Thanks Mozilla for making your new shiney look like a processor hog while you're trying to show it off.
The cost of the SSL certificate to make the HTTPS work has been the most common issue I've ran into. Penny-pinching administrators can't be convinced it's a justifiable expense. And they nickel and dime you for every service the certificate is "good for" such as email.
Static IP addresses aren't a problem, one IP can host a variety of completely different domain names, the server sorts out the requests based on the entire URL being requested, including the domain name. And there's nothing that says that you can only have one certificate bound to a specific IP address. (or group of them) Reverse mapping considers all possibilities, not just the first one it hits.
And if you want to get technical about things, ISPs almost never refuse to sell you a product like static IP addresses, you can have as many as you are willing to pay for, subject to availability. (which is kept inversely proportional, so as to make sure they never run out) They also don't have to be their own subnet either, it's common for an entire /26 to be split into 253 different static IP addresses, each sharing a network/router/broadcast run by their isp. That lets them sell 253 single addresses, rather than 64, on the same /26. Having your own segment for a small block is very inefficient use of available address space.
only problem is best place to lock down frequencies is in the baseband, and shortsighted fools that they are that's where they lock which carrier you can use. So to unlock the phone requires compromise of the baseband.
Tho there's very little point in modifying the frequency of your cell phone unless you're setting up your own pirate cell tower...