We are all aware of the massive problem caused by excess carbon emissions resulting from mankind's inefficient use of energy, and you'd think that in the country which launched the Kyoto protocol companies would behave more responsibly. If the PS3 is as successful as its predecessor, that will equate to more than 100,000,000 consoles, and even if only 3% of those were in use at any one time, that's still over 1 Gigawatt per hour of power drained from the world's energy grids.
I remember reading an interview with Iwata of Nintendo, who said one of the focuses when developing the Wii was to make it smaller and more efficient. This is highly commendable, and perhaps has something to do with Nintendo being based in Kyoto. All I can say is that I have my Wii pre-order and have no intention of purchasing a PS3 until they release the slim-line power efficient version.
Everyone who has purchased a slimline PS2 is essentially a beta tester for Sony's efforts to reduce the entire PS2 hardware down to one chip that they will eventually be able to put into every PS3. The first few generations of slimline PS2s had major compatibility problems even with new PS2 games. These bugs are being fixed with each iteration and by the time the PS3 hardware makes its debut they should mostly be ironed out. Smart business practice!
Perhaps they mean there will only be 80 profitable console games or big budget titles per year, but there will be plenty of mobile phone and web-based games (even more than there are now) that are produced with meagre sums and turn a reasonable profit.
I guess in this sense, the gaming industry once again parallels the movie industry. You end up with a small pool of mega-studios producing the blockbusters each year while an ocean of indies, hobbyists, and wannabes fill the niche markets.
Speaking about patterns and earthquakes, it's an interesting coincidence that the Sumatra earthquake occured almost exactly one year and one hour apart from the last earthquake that involved major loss of life, at Bam (Iran) last boxing day.
The intention behind Kyoto is to get the rich developed countries into the agreement first, then when the next stage is negotiated in a few years time to begin introducing the developing world. The plan is for China, India and Brazil to sign into the agreement by 2112.
Getting rich countries started forces us to invest in the new energy efficient technology which will have matured and become cheap enough for developing countries to implement by the time they sign in. You can either look at Kyoto as a burden or an opportunity. Just as the space race gave the US the lead in computing and electronics which helped spur its current economic dominance, the early adopters of Kyoto will reap the long-term benefits of their investment in energy technology over the decades to come.
Actually, Clinton did sign the treaty despite the fact he knew it would be a battle to get through congress. Bush then *unsigned* it after coming into office.
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli television aired a videotape Saturday that for the first time shows the devastation caused when a Chinese rocket crashed into a village after a failed satellite launch. An Israeli engineer shot the footage during a business trip to China, Channel Two television said.
The rocket veered off course two seconds after take-off on Feb. 15 at the Xichang space center in remote southwestern Sichuan province, and landed nose-first nearby.
The launch was being aired live, but Chinese authorities cut video transmission just after the rocket started to plummet. Two weeks later, the Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that six people had been killed and 57 injured.
But the engineer, who asked not to be identified because he continues to do business in China, said the casualty toll appeared to be much higher.
The footage aired by Channel Two shows the remains of long white buildings inside the village and a nearby military base, some of them reduced to rubble, others left partially standing with bare window and doorway frames and broken facades.
Furniture, clothing and other belongings -- including a white teddy bear in pink overalls -- are strewn haphazardly amidst the blocks of concrete.
"The impact simply erased the (military) base, erased the village. Something unbelievable," the engineer said in a telephone interview with a local Israeli radio station the day after the accident.
"The impact could be heard at a distance as far as 60 miles from the site of the explosion," he said.
On the tape, shot a day after the crash and later smuggled out of the country, according to Channel Two, the amateur cameraman describes the scene in the unidentified village.
"Here is the hotel, the second floor," he says as the camera focuses on fallen beams and broken walls.
Then, panning over a large pile of stone and rubble, he adds: "A gift shop, flower shop, post office, where I used to buy all my postcards, souvenirs."
He also filmed Chinese soldiers posted along every building, guarding against entry, he said.
Xinhua reported on March 2 that the explosion was caused by a defective guidance system. The agency said 80 homes were damaged.
The Long March 3B rocket was carrying a communications satellite for Washington-based Intelsat, an international satellite conglomerate.
The rocket was being launched for the first time after three years of testing, and was the second Chinese rocket to explode in a year.
Outlaw the transmission of emotions conveyed through copyrighted materials. Expressing any emotion, thought or idea that you have gained through experiencing copyrighted material is illegal to share with persons who have not paid the licensing fee.
You must have been developing PC games, because companies cannot get away with that shoddy practice when developing for consoles. All major console makers - Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft - have a LARGE amount of documentation about what is acceptable or not, then there's the company publishing your game (possibly EA, THQ, Activision) who have their own team of testers that will tear your game apart if your own team has not been debugging properly.
Until (patch happy) PC game companies are presented with this kind of accountability, consoles will continue to live on and flourish.
'Life is not all fun and games, though. It's all games -- with little time left for sleeping or eating, at least during the busy months before Christmas.
Don't you mean all -game- seeing as most QA jobs involve working on one game from start to finish? That means playing the same game every day all day. Sure it's fun for about two days, then it becomes mindbogglingly dull for the most part. And that goes double if the game is single player or just plain crap.
Your only respite is if the QA department is reasonably casual and contains a few comedians, which (fortunately for me) is the case.
..Of the hype a few years ago about slim PCs and 'dumb terminals' that have little power of their own and rely on a mainframe to handle most of the processing jobs?
It would make far more sense for IBM to put $10 billion aside to develop a p2p processor sharing application that works similar to SETI, then actually pay us netizens to install it, or offer other perks (and no bs advertising spyware crap). Paying $10 billion to double up on infrastructure that's already in place (hello, Internet) seems quite inefficient.
Doctor: Nurse, we have an ozone leak. Patient: Ozone, that's like laughing gas, right? Doctor: Not rea..
If you thought pen lasers were annoying...
on
Voices in Your Head
·
· Score: 1
Just wait until the kiddies get their hands on one of these.
Cinemas are going to need metal detectors to prevent the influx of highly irritating and disruptive gadgets - mobile phones, pen lasers, pen speakers - otherwise it's going to be their downfall.
Perhaps because competancy isn't always the deciding factor as to whether a person finds employment within the IT (or any) industry. Ask the multinationals why they are outsourcing their call centers to India for example. When it comes down to choosing between two equivilently skilled IT workers with one demanding 80k and the other asking for 30 - 60k, guess which one will be hired 90% of the time?
I'm an Australian multimedia professional. Here in Australia I can expect to be paid on average US$25k or less per year, or US$20-30 per hour when contracting. Would many of you work for that?
But it would be better if we could ditch the punitive mindset and try an incentive based one. If there is one overwhelming motivating force to coerce the people into public transport, it's money. London has too much traffic and an underused public transport system so why not subsidize busses and trains? or bicycles?
I'm guessing they have thought of this, but the real reason behind this plan is probably to raise revenue through indirect taxation. My state government (Queensland, Australia) does exactly the same thing with speeding/red-light cameras.
"Once more (infinitely recurring inside a timeloop) with feeling"
(sung to the tune of "going through the motions")
~/ Every moment is the same arrangement, I go back and forth in time. Still I always feel I'm missing something : nothing here is real (we bought it on a dime). I've been trading blows with salt-shaker foes, just hoping no one knows, that there's no money in the budget - spent it all on booze. A phone box versus Enterprise will lose!/~
I think that Microsoft has taken a look at the software industry, and seen who has the highest margins. Can anyone guess where they are? MMORPGs.
The monthly subscription fee gaming that was pulled off successfully Origin and the wildly popular Ultima Online, has since been emulated by other games like Everquest, Asheron's Call and Dark Age of Camelot.
Also, with the tech wreck and general economic instability, upgrade cycles in the corporate sector have slowed or been postphoned. Microsoft want a steady, predictable cashflow instead of having to do crazy things like innovate to entice people into upgrading their software. I predict people will get pissed off in the short term, but I can't imagine any dramatic defection away from MS.
Going by the market rates for cable Internet at Australia's largest ISP Telstra, if you choose the middle plan where you get 3 GB per month and excess MBs are charged at US 7 cents... http://www.bigpond.com/broadband/products/cable/ pr icing.asp ) -
13 people charged for a 1.2 Mbyte/second service. An hour at this rate would cost US$3931.20 A month at this rate would cost US$2,830,464 Five months of this nefarious action would cost US$14,152,320
If all of Telstra's broadband cable customers (about 80 thousand) had cottoned onto this scheme it would have cost them US$1,132,185,600,000!
I'm going to go a little off topic here, but this is my personal analysis of why we are seeing so many large companies like WorldCom collapsing in on their own corruption.
We all know that power and money doesn't circulate within a vacuum. Everything in the world is tied together, so that when one force of influence diminishes another will rise to take its place. The five main players I see in the modern world economy are - The governments, big business, small business, unions, and workers/individual consumers. The dynamics and fairness/wealth distribution of an economy are highest when there is a balance of influence between each of those forces. Historically, they are rarely balanced (and in some countries they are completely imbalanced), but I think the opportunities to correct it are greater than ever now.
As you may guess, I believe that the weight of influence in the American economy (in a concerted push since the early 80's) has tipped to predominantly favour big business and big government/military. Since America's economy is twice the size of number 2 - Japan - it controls global economic policy and as such is creating mirror economies to its own around the world. This imbalance is spreading like an epidemic around the world, seriously affecting other countries who model themselves off America - like my own country Australia.
So, what can be done about it? It seems a rebalancing isn't going to happen on its own, or at least not until the current situation degenerates to a point where violent revolution is needed to fix the problem. I guess there's several paths that could be chosen but here are two off the top of my head. One - allow the current consolidation of small and medium sized business into large/uber businesses to continue but restore power to the unions. Two - shift all laws that favour big business to favour small business instead.
Personally, I favour the latter. A society run by small business is far less likely to have organised and entrenched corruption - eg Would Dick Cheney have been swayed by the CEO of a company that controlled only one or two power stations? What benefit would a government get by helping out small companies that can't contribute many campaign funds and have little influence around the nation?
Anyhow, I think I'll cut the sermon off here. I think +5 troll and +5 offtopic is a good enough effort for today!
Slashdot Mirror
We are all aware of the massive problem caused by excess carbon emissions resulting from mankind's inefficient use of energy, and you'd think that in the country which launched the Kyoto protocol companies would behave more responsibly. If the PS3 is as successful as its predecessor, that will equate to more than 100,000,000 consoles, and even if only 3% of those were in use at any one time, that's still over 1 Gigawatt per hour of power drained from the world's energy grids.
I remember reading an interview with Iwata of Nintendo, who said one of the focuses when developing the Wii was to make it smaller and more efficient. This is highly commendable, and perhaps has something to do with Nintendo being based in Kyoto. All I can say is that I have my Wii pre-order and have no intention of purchasing a PS3 until they release the slim-line power efficient version.
Everyone who has purchased a slimline PS2 is essentially a beta tester for Sony's efforts to reduce the entire PS2 hardware down to one chip that they will eventually be able to put into every PS3. The first few generations of slimline PS2s had major compatibility problems even with new PS2 games. These bugs are being fixed with each iteration and by the time the PS3 hardware makes its debut they should mostly be ironed out. Smart business practice!
Perhaps they mean there will only be 80 profitable console games or big budget titles per year, but there will be plenty of mobile phone and web-based games (even more than there are now) that are produced with meagre sums and turn a reasonable profit.
I guess in this sense, the gaming industry once again parallels the movie industry. You end up with a small pool of mega-studios producing the blockbusters each year while an ocean of indies, hobbyists, and wannabes fill the niche markets.
It even developed its own sustainable nuclear fission reactor 2 billion years ago according to Discover magazine.
c lear-reactor0204/
http://www.discover.com/web-exclusives/natures-nu
Timing the double click while keeping the mouse positioned over the icon however...
Sumatra:v /
12,000+ deaths (and rising).
Sunday, December 26, 2004 at 00:58:50 (UTC) - Coordinated Universal Time
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqinthenews/2004/ussla
Bam:/
Approx 31,000 deaths.
Friday, December 26, 2003 at 01:56:52 (UTC) - Coordinated Universal Time
http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/eq_depot/2003/eq_031226
of it hitting the moon? And would it cause a major crater?
For those of you without the equipment to make your own, you can buy them quite cheaply from a Hong Kong importer called Lik Sang. http://www.lik-sang.com/info.php?category=278&prod ucts_id=2994&
The intention behind Kyoto is to get the rich developed countries into the agreement first, then when the next stage is negotiated in a few years time to begin introducing the developing world. The plan is for China, India and Brazil to sign into the agreement by 2112.
Getting rich countries started forces us to invest in the new energy efficient technology which will have matured and become cheap enough for developing countries to implement by the time they sign in. You can either look at Kyoto as a burden or an opportunity. Just as the space race gave the US the lead in computing and electronics which helped spur its current economic dominance, the early adopters of Kyoto will reap the long-term benefits of their investment in energy technology over the decades to come.
Actually, Clinton did sign the treaty despite the fact he knew it would be a battle to get through congress. Bush then *unsigned* it after coming into office.
Yeah... Just like the Chinese rocket disaster caused them to halt their space program.
e s/ 1996/032396b.htm
http://www.floridatoday.com/space/explore/stori
(The year is 1996)
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli television aired a videotape Saturday that for the first time shows the devastation caused when a Chinese rocket crashed into a village after a failed satellite launch.
An Israeli engineer shot the footage during a business trip to China, Channel Two television said.
The rocket veered off course two seconds after take-off on Feb. 15 at the Xichang space center in remote southwestern Sichuan province, and landed nose-first nearby.
The launch was being aired live, but Chinese authorities cut video transmission just after the rocket started to plummet. Two weeks later, the Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that six people had been killed and 57 injured.
But the engineer, who asked not to be identified because he continues to do business in China, said the casualty toll appeared to be much higher.
The footage aired by Channel Two shows the remains of long white buildings inside the village and a nearby military base, some of them reduced to rubble, others left partially standing with bare window and doorway frames and broken facades.
Furniture, clothing and other belongings -- including a white teddy bear in pink overalls -- are strewn haphazardly amidst the blocks of concrete.
"The impact simply erased the (military) base, erased the village. Something unbelievable," the engineer said in a telephone interview with a local Israeli radio station the day after the accident.
"The impact could be heard at a distance as far as 60 miles from the site of the explosion," he said.
On the tape, shot a day after the crash and later smuggled out of the country, according to Channel Two, the amateur cameraman describes the scene in the unidentified village.
"Here is the hotel, the second floor," he says as the camera focuses on fallen beams and broken walls.
Then, panning over a large pile of stone and rubble, he adds: "A gift shop, flower shop, post office, where I used to buy all my postcards, souvenirs."
He also filmed Chinese soldiers posted along every building, guarding against entry, he said.
Xinhua reported on March 2 that the explosion was caused by a defective guidance system. The agency said 80 homes were damaged.
The Long March 3B rocket was carrying a communications satellite for Washington-based Intelsat, an international satellite conglomerate.
The rocket was being launched for the first time after three years of testing, and was the second Chinese rocket to explode in a year.
Outlaw the transmission of emotions conveyed through copyrighted materials. Expressing any emotion, thought or idea that you have gained through experiencing copyrighted material is illegal to share with persons who have not paid the licensing fee.
For the most irritating, whiny male actor of all time to play Shinji Ikari!
There really is a universe where Homer is real, obscenely wealthy, AND it rains donuts!?!
You must have been developing PC games, because companies cannot get away with that shoddy practice when developing for consoles. All major console makers - Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft - have a LARGE amount of documentation about what is acceptable or not, then there's the company publishing your game (possibly EA, THQ, Activision) who have their own team of testers that will tear your game apart if your own team has not been debugging properly.
Until (patch happy) PC game companies are presented with this kind of accountability, consoles will continue to live on and flourish.
Don't you mean all -game- seeing as most QA jobs involve working on one game from start to finish? That means playing the same game every day all day. Sure it's fun for about two days, then it becomes mindbogglingly dull for the most part. And that goes double if the game is single player or just plain crap.
Your only respite is if the QA department is reasonably casual and contains a few comedians, which (fortunately for me) is the case.
..Of the hype a few years ago about slim PCs and 'dumb terminals' that have little power of their own and rely on a mainframe to handle most of the processing jobs?
It would make far more sense for IBM to put $10 billion aside to develop a p2p processor sharing application that works similar to SETI, then actually pay us netizens to install it, or offer other perks (and no bs advertising spyware crap). Paying $10 billion to double up on infrastructure that's already in place (hello, Internet) seems quite inefficient.
Doctor: Nurse, we have an ozone leak.
Patient: Ozone, that's like laughing gas, right?
Doctor: Not rea..
Just wait until the kiddies get their hands on one of these.
Cinemas are going to need metal detectors to prevent the influx of highly irritating and disruptive gadgets - mobile phones, pen lasers, pen speakers - otherwise it's going to be their downfall.
Perhaps because competancy isn't always the deciding factor as to whether a person finds employment within the IT (or any) industry. Ask the multinationals why they are outsourcing their call centers to India for example. When it comes down to choosing between two equivilently skilled IT workers with one demanding 80k and the other asking for 30 - 60k, guess which one will be hired 90% of the time?
I'm an Australian multimedia professional. Here in Australia I can expect to be paid on average US$25k or less per year, or US$20-30 per hour when contracting. Would many of you work for that?
But it would be better if we could ditch the punitive mindset and try an incentive based one. If there is one overwhelming motivating force to coerce the people into public transport, it's money. London has too much traffic and an underused public transport system so why not subsidize busses and trains? or bicycles?
I'm guessing they have thought of this, but the real reason behind this plan is probably to raise revenue through indirect taxation. My state government (Queensland, Australia) does exactly the same thing with speeding/red-light cameras.
Will we be seeing any musical Dr Who episodes?
/~
"Once more (infinitely recurring inside a timeloop) with feeling"
(sung to the tune of "going through the motions")
~/ Every moment is the same arrangement, I go back and forth in time. Still I always feel I'm missing something : nothing here is real (we bought it on a dime). I've been trading blows with salt-shaker foes, just hoping no one knows, that there's no money in the budget - spent it all on booze. A phone box versus Enterprise will lose!
I think that Microsoft has taken a look at the software industry, and seen who has the highest margins. Can anyone guess where they are? MMORPGs.
The monthly subscription fee gaming that was pulled off successfully Origin and the wildly popular Ultima Online, has since been emulated by other games like Everquest, Asheron's Call and Dark Age of Camelot.
Also, with the tech wreck and general economic instability, upgrade cycles in the corporate sector have slowed or been postphoned. Microsoft want a steady, predictable cashflow instead of having to do crazy things like innovate to entice people into upgrading their software. I predict people will get pissed off in the short term, but I can't imagine any dramatic defection away from MS.
Going by the market rates for cable Internet at Australia's largest ISP Telstra, if you choose the middle plan where you get 3 GB per month and excess MBs are charged at US 7 cents.../ pr icing.asp ) -
http://www.bigpond.com/broadband/products/cable
13 people charged for a 1.2 Mbyte/second service. An hour at this rate would cost US$3931.20
A month at this rate would cost US$2,830,464
Five months of this nefarious action would cost US$14,152,320
If all of Telstra's broadband cable customers (about 80 thousand) had cottoned onto this scheme it would have cost them US$1,132,185,600,000!
I'm going to go a little off topic here, but this is my personal analysis of why we are seeing so many large companies like WorldCom collapsing in on their own corruption.
We all know that power and money doesn't circulate within a vacuum. Everything in the world is tied together, so that when one force of influence diminishes another will rise to take its place. The five main players I see in the modern world economy are - The governments, big business, small business, unions, and workers/individual consumers. The dynamics and fairness/wealth distribution of an economy are highest when there is a balance of influence between each of those forces. Historically, they are rarely balanced (and in some countries they are completely imbalanced), but I think the opportunities to correct it are greater than ever now.
As you may guess, I believe that the weight of influence in the American economy (in a concerted push since the early 80's) has tipped to predominantly favour big business and big government/military. Since America's economy is twice the size of number 2 - Japan - it controls global economic policy and as such is creating mirror economies to its own around the world. This imbalance is spreading like an epidemic around the world, seriously affecting other countries who model themselves off America - like my own country Australia.
So, what can be done about it? It seems a rebalancing isn't going to happen on its own, or at least not until the current situation degenerates to a point where violent revolution is needed to fix the problem. I guess there's several paths that could be chosen but here are two off the top of my head. One - allow the current consolidation of small and medium sized business into large/uber businesses to continue but restore power to the unions. Two - shift all laws that favour big business to favour small business instead.
Personally, I favour the latter. A society run by small business is far less likely to have organised and entrenched corruption - eg Would Dick Cheney have been swayed by the CEO of a company that controlled only one or two power stations? What benefit would a government get by helping out small companies that can't contribute many campaign funds and have little influence around the nation?
Anyhow, I think I'll cut the sermon off here. I think +5 troll and +5 offtopic is a good enough effort for today!