As a Verizon customer I agree completely. What you mention at the end may be happening though. Most of the smaller companies don't block stuff like that intentionally, and I think Verizon is having to respond somewhat. I have a Blackberry Storm and the GPS is unlocked. I can also connect it directly to the computer to copy on and off files (or download from the internet) music, video, photos, I can even use the music as free ringtones, all of which Verizon has disallowed on some phones in the past. It doesn't have a slower processor, or less memory than other carriers' versions either, which they have also done. Several other recent phones are similarly unlimited as well.
They have relied on their network quality to get and maintain customers despite their inferior, often intentionally hobbled hardware and I hope they will be forced by the marketplace to change those practices.
This is not the case if those people have wisely continuously shifted their investments to less risky portfolio allocations as retirement approaches. You might still lose a significant chunk of money, as you probably aren't completely out of equities, but the majority that is invested conservatively will keep you going while the market recovers. If you retire at 60 and live until 85 you still have a very long time horizon to recover losses.
I don't think the article was concerned with detrimental effects caused by over or under praise, but with the what the type of praise they receive does to their perceptions of learning, and opinion of the amount of control they have over their intelligence.
Boiled down, they are saying don't say "Excellent job getting straight A's, you're very smart." Instead say something like "Excellent job getting straigh A's, you worked very hard." They aren't saying don't praise.
This isn't much of a problem with the latest graphics drivers. I have a native 1920x1080 display with some overscan. NVidia's drivers, and I believe ATI's too, although I have no experience there, allow you to specifiy a resolution within a resolution. So I set the screen resolution to be something like 1876x980 (just made up for an example) and it runs with the 1920x1080 timings so that I have 1 to 1 pixel mapping, with little or no overscan, at a slightly lower that 1920x1080 resolution. It works through the DVI to HDMI connector, since it's done manually, there is no communication necessary.
Actually, even when running as Administrator, it may not be possible. Since in Vista, even when you're Administrator, you're not really Administrator until you explicitly escalate priveleges for a process by acknowledging a dialog. The difference is that you don't have to authenticate if you are Adminstrator, just click ok. I'm not sure whether that would inhibit this hack or not though. At most, you would merely need to click kk on the dialog.
Your case doesn't explain how the service can change over time for the same person however. My incredibly small anecdotal sample of... wait for it... ONE, indicates that for a while after subscribing things went as expected. After several months of doing the copy and return thing, the throughput on movies is significantly reduced. I'm not sure whether they throttle, or something else is going on, but at least it's not explained by poor post office response.
"And applying that to my own name - Yes, someone apparently has gone through and registered virtually all US familial names, including my own. Not a problem. I didn't think of it first, nor do I really care if I have it, and if someone wants to pay $10 a year waiting for hell to freeze over before I offer to take it off their hands, well, their money to waste."
Would this still be the case if your friends and family regularly used this address for information on your life, and rather than finding info about you, instead they found a site selling porn, or slandering your family? What about if the person that ran the site offered to take it down if you paid him enough money? Obviously this wouldn't happen with an indvidual, your friends and family would quickly learn your real address, but corporations don't have this option. They will always have large numbers of people going to www.theirname.com.
I'm not saying the system isn't screwed up, but I'm not sure that forcing corporations to buy back their domain for huge money from somebody that doesn't even care about it is any better.
I understand your points, but I think you're being unfair to Bethesda in this case. I agree that at whatever point companies are releasing unfinished games to charge extra for stuff that should have been included, then they will deserve all the animosity they get. This is not that point. Oblivion has arguably more content then any game released for years. I knew the game I was buying when I got it, and it has been more worth the money than most games I have spent $50-$60 on recently. That doesn't change if I don't get the added content.
If Bethesda is releasing unimportant upgrades for too much money that's great, it means I don't have to spend the money on it, and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. If enough people agree with me they will have to make the added content better or reduce the price. If not I don't care, the game I got for my money is spectacular, horse armor or not.
Some companies (EA I'm looking at you) will abuse the system, and charge for stuff that should have been included. Some companies will come up with great expansions and and extra levels for a reasonable price; providing continued support and add-ons that weren't previously possible with consoles. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Live marketplace has already provided lots of value by offering great, reasonably priced arcade games through a novel distribution mechanism that makes new types of console games possible. I don't think this is a case of abuse. They don't deserve the attacks directed their way.
Superficially it sounds like Sim Earth, but watch the video. It's not all macroscopic gameplay. When you start of as a tiny invertebrate, you are controlling one individual creature, not the environment. You are evolving that creature, not letting it evolve in response to your manipulations of the environment.
When it grows to sentience you are modifying it's immediate living conditions, it's village, town, city, etc... What you are controlling grows with the sphere of influence of the creature you create. Eventually when you are controlling things at a planetary, then inter-planetary level, you can seed other creature to other star systems and affect things much more macroscopically, but this is the end game, not the primary gameplay.
This isn't that hard to do. They sell systems like this at Home Depot. You install a little pump and a return pipe back to the water heater. My father installed one at his house. There is a little wireless doorbell-like button in the master bathroom and by the kitchen sink. Hit the button and it recirculates the water for 30 seconds or so, and then you have hot water with no waste other than the moderate cooling of having the cold water pumped back into the hot water tank. If the crawlspace or attic is not accesible for running the extra pipe though, obviously you're hooped.
Blu-Ray doesn't allow the same freedom as HD-DVD supposedly does. On Blu-Ray it is the content producers discretion as to whether or not to allow managed copy. On HD-DVD they are required to support at least one copy. Still, they are apparently allowed to charge for this, so in practice it may not end up in differently. Who knows what will actually ship at this point too.
As for the members, Apple has exactly as good a record at allowing interoperability of proprietary formats as Microsoft does, and Dell and HP are probably more concerned about PC media than movie content discs.
Honestly, I expect them both to be so DRMed up that it won't make much difference. It's like they are in a race to see who can make their format the least viable the fastest. Computers won't be able to play them on current monitors without HDCP protected DVI inputs anyway, all the players seem to require phoning home, it's just ridiculous. I'm not very optimistic either way.
Although certainly Microsoft hasn't proven themselves consumer friendly, you have to remember in this case Microsoft's interest is in making this format available for use and streaming by their Media Center PCs. They are doing it for their own reasons, not to protect consumers, but in this their goals are much more closely aligned with mine than Sony's. Sony has proven itself to be one of the most computer interoperability unfriendly companies in exsistence over and over again. They would be perfectly happy to never allow a Blu-Ray movie disc (not the PC blank media obviously) to ever play on a computer under any circumstances. Whether they can get away with that is another matter.
Certainly I would love DRM free next-gen dvds, but that's just not going to happen. Since I don't want to download movies, but I do want to archive them to my computer or at least use my computer as the player, and be able to stream to other locations, Microsoft's solution is better than nothing, and much better than what Sony would do unrestrained.
With photoshop at least, many of the operations you can perform have the same names, but unfortunately they don't usually seem to work as well as they did in the darkroom. By that I mean, while there is a tool for dodging and burning for example, the effect doesn't seem to match what you would expect in the darkroom. However, this isn't to say you can't get better results than you can in the darkroom, just that you need to use a workflow designed to accomplish the same effect, using the new tools the digital darkroom provides, rather than attempting to emulate how you would have done it in a wet darkroom. There is power and flexibility way beyond what you could have ever done in a wet darkroom, and it's much easier to experiment. Just don't expect to carry your workflow over unchanged, or even without a significant learning curve. Unfortunately the best tools in the digital workflow don't have analogues in the darkroom, so they have to use their own names and techniques.
I've seen your posts before and I've always wondered what your signature is from. It sounds cool, if it's book or something, it might be something I'd like to check out.
While I agree with most of the comment, a quick correction. AMD does not have the lead in performance per power unit. They only have that lead in current desktop cpus. If you assume Apple is interested in the Pentium M and later desktop versions of the same chip, AMD has nothing that can compete with that. It, unlike most of Intel's recent offerings, is an excellent chip with very good performance and incredibly low power requirements.
Obviously what Apple is actually going to use is speculation at this point, but at least it's plausible that they could have been interested in something AMD couldn't offer. Not to mention Intel's ability to provide an entire platform, not just a processor.
Well, mostly it was just a joke, but the original poster did mention the booster failure, not a solar sail failure, so we weren't talking about just the solar sail.
Ripped from the post above: "The world's first solar sail spacecraft (search) crashed back to Earth when its booster rocket failed less than two minutes after Tuesday's takeoff, Russian space officials said Wednesday.
In 1999, Russia launched a similar experiment with a sun-reflecting device from its Mir space station, but the deployment mechanism jammed and the device burned up in the atmosphere.
In 2001, Russia again attempted a similar experiment, but the device failed to separate from the booster and burned in the atmosphere."
Maybe, after the third solor sail experiment failure in as many attempts, it's time to do some of that studying and a little less blindly launching failure after failure. But what do I know.
I think the idea is that in future generations of games, worlds will be so complex and large that it's simply not possible to hand optimize the required number of models. Additionally, even assuming you had infinite artists, the memory and bandwidth requirements for storing and transferring that number of models to the graphics card are prohibitive. Therefore you must either have many duplicated models to reduce the total number necessary, or they must reduce the memory and bandwidth footprints of dealing with that many discreet models.
I'm not commenting on the validaty of this thesis, I don't really know, but I believe this is why the article feels it may be more attractive than in the past.
What I don't understand is why not hybrid diesels? If you can get 50 mpg out of a hybrid now, imagine what it would be like if you could use a diesel engine that already gets 45 mpg to replace the gas engine. Diesels and hybrids are not mutually exclusive. Plus you can still use your alternate sources of diesel.
Ah, but you see the US has already figured out a solution to this problem. Instead of the power resting in the hands of the people, where they can foolishly vote themselves a larger and larger slice of the pie, instead it now rests with corporations and special interests. They provide the money which increasingly allows the elected officials to buy the votes of the population through misleading advertising and other means. This means they no longer actually having to provide beneficial (or otherwise) programs to the public to buy votes, they just trick people into voting for them.
The genius of this plan is that we now only have to trust the corporations to do what is best for the long term benefit of society, and the people can no longer mess it up.
All but one of the technologies would be abandoned assuming there was only one market segment, and only one set of requirements. You are forgetting how many different markets and needs there are.
As long as there is not one single display that leads in all relevant metrics, there is room in the market for more than one technology. For example, It is entirely plausible that mobile applications will use OLED due to power and size requirements, while large screen displays will use SED due to superior picture quality.
If they don't solve lifetime issues completely it is even possible that LCD may survive as a computer display, as any kind of uneven wear, or aging effects can be a big problem for displaying a majority of static content.
I'm not saying this is where these technologies will shake out, just giving an example of possible market segments, based on hypothetical strengths and weaknesses that may or may not show up in final products.
I agree that this is an extremely interesting time, as there is much more differentiation than normal. In the past manufactureres were forced to compete on electronics quality and implemantation details using basically identical technologies. This results in subtle picture quality differences and more often than not they end up competing on price and marketing features of dubious benefit, which doesn't help knowledgable people primarily concerned with picture quality.
Yeah, and no goods you use ever travel long distances on those roads your tax dollars subsidize. You'll subsidize it either way. Taxes, or product and shipping costs (assuming the toll roads were so numerous or convenient as to be unavoidable).
I don't know anything about these particular examples, but maybe, just maybe, the reason you hear about all kinds of crap that will change the world, but never materializes is because it's mostly massively overhyped garbage from marketing depertments attempting to secure funding for ideas that are poorly thought out, and ignore many very large very real hurdles. *cough* Muller Sky Car *cough*
Slashdot Mirror
As a Verizon customer I agree completely. What you mention at the end may be happening though. Most of the smaller companies don't block stuff like that intentionally, and I think Verizon is having to respond somewhat. I have a Blackberry Storm and the GPS is unlocked. I can also connect it directly to the computer to copy on and off files (or download from the internet) music, video, photos, I can even use the music as free ringtones, all of which Verizon has disallowed on some phones in the past. It doesn't have a slower processor, or less memory than other carriers' versions either, which they have also done. Several other recent phones are similarly unlimited as well. They have relied on their network quality to get and maintain customers despite their inferior, often intentionally hobbled hardware and I hope they will be forced by the marketplace to change those practices.
This is not the case if those people have wisely continuously shifted their investments to less risky portfolio allocations as retirement approaches. You might still lose a significant chunk of money, as you probably aren't completely out of equities, but the majority that is invested conservatively will keep you going while the market recovers. If you retire at 60 and live until 85 you still have a very long time horizon to recover losses.
I don't think the article was concerned with detrimental effects caused by over or under praise, but with the what the type of praise they receive does to their perceptions of learning, and opinion of the amount of control they have over their intelligence.
Boiled down, they are saying don't say "Excellent job getting straight A's, you're very smart." Instead say something like "Excellent job getting straigh A's, you worked very hard." They aren't saying don't praise.
This isn't much of a problem with the latest graphics drivers. I have a native 1920x1080 display with some overscan. NVidia's drivers, and I believe ATI's too, although I have no experience there, allow you to specifiy a resolution within a resolution. So I set the screen resolution to be something like 1876x980 (just made up for an example) and it runs with the 1920x1080 timings so that I have 1 to 1 pixel mapping, with little or no overscan, at a slightly lower that 1920x1080 resolution. It works through the DVI to HDMI connector, since it's done manually, there is no communication necessary.
Actually, even when running as Administrator, it may not be possible. Since in Vista, even when you're Administrator, you're not really Administrator until you explicitly escalate priveleges for a process by acknowledging a dialog. The difference is that you don't have to authenticate if you are Adminstrator, just click ok. I'm not sure whether that would inhibit this hack or not though. At most, you would merely need to click kk on the dialog.
Your case doesn't explain how the service can change over time for the same person however. My incredibly small anecdotal sample of... wait for it... ONE, indicates that for a while after subscribing things went as expected. After several months of doing the copy and return thing, the throughput on movies is significantly reduced. I'm not sure whether they throttle, or something else is going on, but at least it's not explained by poor post office response.
"And applying that to my own name - Yes, someone apparently has gone through and registered virtually all US familial names, including my own. Not a problem. I didn't think of it first, nor do I really care if I have it, and if someone wants to pay $10 a year waiting for hell to freeze over before I offer to take it off their hands, well, their money to waste."
Would this still be the case if your friends and family regularly used this address for information on your life, and rather than finding info about you, instead they found a site selling porn, or slandering your family? What about if the person that ran the site offered to take it down if you paid him enough money? Obviously this wouldn't happen with an indvidual, your friends and family would quickly learn your real address, but corporations don't have this option. They will always have large numbers of people going to www.theirname.com.
I'm not saying the system isn't screwed up, but I'm not sure that forcing corporations to buy back their domain for huge money from somebody that doesn't even care about it is any better.
I understand your points, but I think you're being unfair to Bethesda in this case. I agree that at whatever point companies are releasing unfinished games to charge extra for stuff that should have been included, then they will deserve all the animosity they get. This is not that point. Oblivion has arguably more content then any game released for years. I knew the game I was buying when I got it, and it has been more worth the money than most games I have spent $50-$60 on recently. That doesn't change if I don't get the added content.
If Bethesda is releasing unimportant upgrades for too much money that's great, it means I don't have to spend the money on it, and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. If enough people agree with me they will have to make the added content better or reduce the price. If not I don't care, the game I got for my money is spectacular, horse armor or not.
Some companies (EA I'm looking at you) will abuse the system, and charge for stuff that should have been included. Some companies will come up with great expansions and and extra levels for a reasonable price; providing continued support and add-ons that weren't previously possible with consoles. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Live marketplace has already provided lots of value by offering great, reasonably priced arcade games through a novel distribution mechanism that makes new types of console games possible. I don't think this is a case of abuse. They don't deserve the attacks directed their way.
Superficially it sounds like Sim Earth, but watch the video. It's not all macroscopic gameplay. When you start of as a tiny invertebrate, you are controlling one individual creature, not the environment. You are evolving that creature, not letting it evolve in response to your manipulations of the environment.
When it grows to sentience you are modifying it's immediate living conditions, it's village, town, city, etc... What you are controlling grows with the sphere of influence of the creature you create. Eventually when you are controlling things at a planetary, then inter-planetary level, you can seed other creature to other star systems and affect things much more macroscopically, but this is the end game, not the primary gameplay.
This isn't that hard to do. They sell systems like this at Home Depot. You install a little pump and a return pipe back to the water heater. My father installed one at his house. There is a little wireless doorbell-like button in the master bathroom and by the kitchen sink. Hit the button and it recirculates the water for 30 seconds or so, and then you have hot water with no waste other than the moderate cooling of having the cold water pumped back into the hot water tank. If the crawlspace or attic is not accesible for running the extra pipe though, obviously you're hooped.
Blu-Ray doesn't allow the same freedom as HD-DVD supposedly does. On Blu-Ray it is the content producers discretion as to whether or not to allow managed copy. On HD-DVD they are required to support at least one copy. Still, they are apparently allowed to charge for this, so in practice it may not end up in differently. Who knows what will actually ship at this point too.
As for the members, Apple has exactly as good a record at allowing interoperability of proprietary formats as Microsoft does, and Dell and HP are probably more concerned about PC media than movie content discs.
Honestly, I expect them both to be so DRMed up that it won't make much difference. It's like they are in a race to see who can make their format the least viable the fastest. Computers won't be able to play them on current monitors without HDCP protected DVI inputs anyway, all the players seem to require phoning home, it's just ridiculous. I'm not very optimistic either way.
Although certainly Microsoft hasn't proven themselves consumer friendly, you have to remember in this case Microsoft's interest is in making this format available for use and streaming by their Media Center PCs. They are doing it for their own reasons, not to protect consumers, but in this their goals are much more closely aligned with mine than Sony's. Sony has proven itself to be one of the most computer interoperability unfriendly companies in exsistence over and over again. They would be perfectly happy to never allow a Blu-Ray movie disc (not the PC blank media obviously) to ever play on a computer under any circumstances. Whether they can get away with that is another matter.
Certainly I would love DRM free next-gen dvds, but that's just not going to happen. Since I don't want to download movies, but I do want to archive them to my computer or at least use my computer as the player, and be able to stream to other locations, Microsoft's solution is better than nothing, and much better than what Sony would do unrestrained.
Incidentally, I don't think the BMW is a fuel cell vehicle. I believe it's hydrogen fueled internal combustion.
With photoshop at least, many of the operations you can perform have the same names, but unfortunately they don't usually seem to work as well as they did in the darkroom. By that I mean, while there is a tool for dodging and burning for example, the effect doesn't seem to match what you would expect in the darkroom. However, this isn't to say you can't get better results than you can in the darkroom, just that you need to use a workflow designed to accomplish the same effect, using the new tools the digital darkroom provides, rather than attempting to emulate how you would have done it in a wet darkroom. There is power and flexibility way beyond what you could have ever done in a wet darkroom, and it's much easier to experiment. Just don't expect to carry your workflow over unchanged, or even without a significant learning curve. Unfortunately the best tools in the digital workflow don't have analogues in the darkroom, so they have to use their own names and techniques.
I've seen your posts before and I've always wondered what your signature is from. It sounds cool, if it's book or something, it might be something I'd like to check out.
While I agree with most of the comment, a quick correction. AMD does not have the lead in performance per power unit. They only have that lead in current desktop cpus. If you assume Apple is interested in the Pentium M and later desktop versions of the same chip, AMD has nothing that can compete with that. It, unlike most of Intel's recent offerings, is an excellent chip with very good performance and incredibly low power requirements.
Obviously what Apple is actually going to use is speculation at this point, but at least it's plausible that they could have been interested in something AMD couldn't offer. Not to mention Intel's ability to provide an entire platform, not just a processor.
Duh! The PS3 isn't out yet. Don't worry it will be there next year. Up near the top!
Well, mostly it was just a joke, but the original poster did mention the booster failure, not a solar sail failure, so we weren't talking about just the solar sail.
Ripped from the post above:
"The world's first solar sail spacecraft (search) crashed back to Earth when its booster rocket failed less than two minutes after Tuesday's takeoff, Russian space officials said Wednesday.
In 1999, Russia launched a similar experiment with a sun-reflecting device from its Mir space station, but the deployment mechanism jammed and the device burned up in the atmosphere.
In 2001, Russia again attempted a similar experiment, but the device failed to separate from the booster and burned in the atmosphere."
Maybe, after the third solor sail experiment failure in as many attempts, it's time to do some of that studying and a little less blindly launching failure after failure. But what do I know.
I think the idea is that in future generations of games, worlds will be so complex and large that it's simply not possible to hand optimize the required number of models. Additionally, even assuming you had infinite artists, the memory and bandwidth requirements for storing and transferring that number of models to the graphics card are prohibitive. Therefore you must either have many duplicated models to reduce the total number necessary, or they must reduce the memory and bandwidth footprints of dealing with that many discreet models.
I'm not commenting on the validaty of this thesis, I don't really know, but I believe this is why the article feels it may be more attractive than in the past.
What I don't understand is why not hybrid diesels? If you can get 50 mpg out of a hybrid now, imagine what it would be like if you could use a diesel engine that already gets 45 mpg to replace the gas engine. Diesels and hybrids are not mutually exclusive. Plus you can still use your alternate sources of diesel.
Ah, but you see the US has already figured out a solution to this problem. Instead of the power resting in the hands of the people, where they can foolishly vote themselves a larger and larger slice of the pie, instead it now rests with corporations and special interests. They provide the money which increasingly allows the elected officials to buy the votes of the population through misleading advertising and other means. This means they no longer actually having to provide beneficial (or otherwise) programs to the public to buy votes, they just trick people into voting for them.
The genius of this plan is that we now only have to trust the corporations to do what is best for the long term benefit of society, and the people can no longer mess it up.
Sorry, I might be a little cynical.
All but one of the technologies would be abandoned assuming there was only one market segment, and only one set of requirements. You are forgetting how many different markets and needs there are.
As long as there is not one single display that leads in all relevant metrics, there is room in the market for more than one technology. For example, It is entirely plausible that mobile applications will use OLED due to power and size requirements, while large screen displays will use SED due to superior picture quality.
If they don't solve lifetime issues completely it is even possible that LCD may survive as a computer display, as any kind of uneven wear, or aging effects can be a big problem for displaying a majority of static content.
I'm not saying this is where these technologies will shake out, just giving an example of possible market segments, based on hypothetical strengths and weaknesses that may or may not show up in final products.
I agree that this is an extremely interesting time, as there is much more differentiation than normal. In the past manufactureres were forced to compete on electronics quality and implemantation details using basically identical technologies. This results in subtle picture quality differences and more often than not they end up competing on price and marketing features of dubious benefit, which doesn't help knowledgable people primarily concerned with picture quality.
David
Yeah, and no goods you use ever travel long distances on those roads your tax dollars subsidize. You'll subsidize it either way. Taxes, or product and shipping costs (assuming the toll roads were so numerous or convenient as to be unavoidable).
I don't know anything about these particular examples, but maybe, just maybe, the reason you hear about all kinds of crap that will change the world, but never materializes is because it's mostly massively overhyped garbage from marketing depertments attempting to secure funding for ideas that are poorly thought out, and ignore many very large very real hurdles. *cough* Muller Sky Car *cough*