The study was poorly done anyway, not so much because of the methods as the measurement used: lifetime failure rates, which will over time hit 100% on any console it's applied to.
I mentioned this in another reply, but the time scale you'd need for a normal console to reach a 100% failure rate would be something like 100-200 years. Seriously. I mean, I have every single major game console of the last 30 years in my house right now, and every single one of them works. The only system that has ever failed on me is the Dreamcast. And yes, I still play them all. (Ok, not equally, but they all get some play.) And I know I'm not alone - there are still many tens of thousands of working Atari 2600's, Coleco Visions, Intellivisions, etc. out there - and the ones that no longer exist are gone not because they broke, but because they just ended up in a landfill somewhere due to perceived obsolescence.
Most game consoles are going to work until they literally begin turning back to dust. If your system is failing due to dry rot, I think you can be pretty sure it's not a design issue that's at fault.
For the Xbox 360 to reach 54% failure in the span of 3 years is pretty unbelievable. I can't think of another product in the history of, well, products to reach that high a percentage. Even when Nintendo did its massive recall of Japanese Famicoms due to a design flaw, the actual failure rate to that point was quite low - under 10%. In most industries, a 54% failure rate would lead to involuntary recall, much less voluntary action. (I'm sure that MS's warranty extension was a bid to head this off. It was done out of fear, not kindness.)
Yeah but the difference they noted between the PS3 and 360 for playability was 3%, while the difference in failure rate is about 40%. That's huge.
Actually, the difference between play time between 360 and PS3 is more like 8%, while the difference between failure rates is more like 500%. You don't just subtract when you're talking percentage difference. So there's way more of a differential than even you're saying. There's no way wear and tear even comes close to explaining these different failure rates. This is a design issue.
I posited after MS first started to come clean about their quality issues that, given the statements MS was making about why these failures were occuring, the 360 failure rate would eventually approach 100%. (Obviously this is true of anything given enough time, but I meant within the expected timeframe before obsolescence.) The original system suffered from a "series of flaws" (MS's words) in its design that led to various potential failures, not just one. Given that all 360's suffered from these same flaws, and that by MS's admission it did not matter what steps you took to "protect" your system, it did not seem logical to me that the failures would be confined to only a few systems.
Simply put, MS designed and sold a defective product that should not have been on the market. Even a 54% failure rate is completely unacceptable, but my bet is that this will continue to inch higher over the next few years as whatever initial-design systems remaining out there fail. I'm also not convinced that the new systems have solved every problem (remember, MS themselves said it was "a series of flaws"), although they may have solved a few so the failure rate of the new systems may be lower, though probably still pretty unacceptable by any reasonable standard.
I personally care about quality, and the lack of such is pretty much the only reason I haven't bought a 360 at this point, nor do I plan to. Even since the supposed internal redesign, there are still reports and surveys like this being released seemingly on a monthly basis. I keep waiting for the day when it seems like MS has this stuff finally solved, but that day just never seems to come.
As an airline passenger, this is not making me feel like this is a plane I can trust or should want to fly on. And yes I can choose to fly airlines that haven't ordered and won't use the 787. Pretty easy since it's not exactly selling like wild anyway.
Huh? Boeing has 800 orders for it before its launch. That is basically unheard-of in the industry. Name any successful airplane - none of them had that many orders prior to launch.
As for your "not gonna fly it because it's got pre-production problems" stance, I'd like to know what airliners you do feel comfortable on so I can list all the incidents and accidents they were involved in prior to launch, and see if you still feel as comfortable flying them afterwards.
The existing fuselage wrinkles might not compromise the flight safety of the 787s, but they will weigh and cost a lot more than planned because of the extra layers of carbon composite material. The added weight will reduce fuel efficiency for the entire lifetime of the airplane, which further increases the cost of use of these planes for the airlines that will be buying them.
And this kind of thing happens all the time with new airplanes, and the first few airplanes are then just given at a slight discount. It's no big deal to the airlines. These are carbon panels about 1/8 inch thick; they don't weigh a tremendous amount.
You can bet this means all future 787s will weigh more than Boeing told their investors they would, which means some companies who slightly prefered 787s over an alternative by, say, Airbus, might also cancel their orders and buy from the competition instead.
If you were talking tons of extra weight, yes. But the fix Boeing has come up with is literally a couple of extra kilograms. (I'm talking about the second issue now; the fixes for both issues are literally about 10kg total.) That's not going to drive anybody to a competitor's airplane, and the total weight penalty is going to be negligible. About the same as carrying an extra food cart on the plane on every trip.
That changed when the plane was landing. At first I thought people were applauding, which was a bit surprising, but then I realized that the sound was that of the entire roof shaking, you could actually see the roof plates moving against each other.
Are you talking about the cabin interior panels? That's not the "roof". Those are just panels hung from the frame around the fuselage. They're not designed to be entirely rigid. In fact, in most airliners you can see that the holes cut in the panels where the various framing parts are designed to fit in are not round, they're oval. That's so that the panels can move back and forth.
It used to freak me out too when I saw interior panels move, but then I looked more closely and read up on how these things are actually attached to the fuselage, and now I realize it's just normal. It happens on every plane too - if you look closely at the interior panels in any airplane, even an American-made one, you will see the panels flex and move on takeoff and landing, and during turbulence. Some of this is caused by the airplane itself flexing - airplanes are designed to flex - but most of it is just caused by the panels themselves not being 100% rigid in how they're attached. It's nothing to worry about.
Boeing pulled out the 787 after scrapping the Sonic Cruiser. It had nothing to do with the A380. Boeing had already been down the VLA route before Airbus had and decided there was no market.
You could say the A380 was a reaction to Boeing's "challenge" offered by the 747-700X, which was first offered in 1996. Boeing received no interest from airlines, leading them to explore smaller airplanes. The A380 had nothing to do with it.
The 747-8 could be considered a reaction to the A380, although it is obviously smaller than both the A380 and the proposed 747-700X. But that was Boeing saying "ok, look, you guys said you didn't want this in 1996, but if you've all now changed your mind about wanting a bigger plane with a better cost per seat mile, here it is."
The article you linked says the A380 is "sold out until 2014", seems like a pretty good position to be in during a recession to me.
But they need to be sold out until something like 2030 before the airplane turns a profit. That's the problem. When you design a product in such a way that it's questionable whether you'll ever turn a profit even if you sell every single one you can make for the next 20 years, then something's wrong.
That tells me it's Boeing's fault that the problem exists, not the Italian manufacturers.
No, it's Alenia's.
There are two issues here. The first is that the wing body join failed earlier than it was supposed to - that's a design fault on Boeing's part. The second is that starting with the seventh frame, the fuselage skin was wrinkled. That's a production fault.
Alenia has since admitted that they changed production processes after the seventh frame, and something having to do with that change caused the faults. This issue has already been resolved. The information in this article is apparently a bit old, although the issues it brings up are still at least somewhat valid... though there is honestly no practical way of building an airliner these days without using offshore suppliers. But it highlights the dangers of lowest-bidder contracts.
My arguement in this case is that the machine would have to be smarter not than a single person, but than an entire group of people, all with different expertise and internal creative processes, combined, to result in an intilligence explosion. That's a very different conclusion.
But it's the wrong conclusion. This is a mistake (IMO) that I see a lot of people make when talking about machine intelligence in comparison to humans.
The thing is, these machines that are smarter than men are still machines. They are not humans. When you say a machine is "as smart as a human", people seem to automatically assume that means they're as fallible as humans too. That's not necessarily going to be the case and I would argue it likely will not be the case. It's not necessary, nor is it probably the easiest route, to reach a human level of intelligence by designing a machine brain exactly like a human's. More likely, we'll design it in some brute force digital way so that it is computationally as or more powerful than a human brain, but neither has some of our capacity for creative thought nor any of our problems with memory or senses or whatever. (The former is not guaranteed, though; creative thought and intelligence are linked, so a "smart" machine may be just as creative as we are, especially if pre-programmed with a set of overriding directives, as it no doubt would be because otherwise what's the point?)
So yes, a single machine "smarter" than a human could have its own designs in memory and could probably fairly easily teach itself how to build a copy of itself simply by studying how to do it. It would never forget anything until it ran out of memory, it would never be distracted by thoughts of love or sex or by being too tired or bored, it would presumably be built with the precision and dexterity of a robot, so that's not an issue. It wouldn't need to worry about experience, as a human does, because its limbs will just do whatever its "brain" tells them to - unlike a human. It could also pretty easily build machines smarter than itself, either by just adding more computing power or by linking itself to the copies it produces.
Humans are usually not limited in what they can do by their intelligence, but by all of their fallibilities, not to mention a desire for leisure time. We don't want to just be working all the time, and we want to do what we love to do, even if it means we can only build one part of a robot instead of the whole thing. If your field is welding, maybe you don't have any interest in learning how to design memory chips. A robot or android is not going to have that "problem"; it will learn to do whatever it needs to do in order to build whatever it needs to build to satisfy whatever directives it's programmed with. And it'll do it without any leisure time short of stopping to literally recharge its batteries.
*That* is what's really dangerous about all this, IMO. I don't even think robots need to be *as* smart as humans to cause us real problems. A robot with an IQ equivalent of about 50 (which is still far beyond where we are today) but a large amount of memory and good basic dexterity could probably replicate itself and then defend itself (with its buddies) if programmed with an innocuous directive like self-preservation. We are counting on the fact that our higher intelligence will protect us against dumber machines because we will be able to think more creatively and keep one step ahead, but all they really need to do is go to a library and get the right books to study, then hide out in the woods for a while building up a dumb but formidable army.
Even a single semi-intelligent machine programmed poorly could just waltz into a gun store, take a gun off the rack and start shooting people. And it'd probably require an RPG to take it down. We are already almost there - autonomous gun robots have already gone berzerk and killed people. Someday these things are gonna be
There is no test for sentience. Without such a test it would be impossible to kow if you have succeeded in accurately modeling it.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
At a certain point, it's all semantics. Is a machine that acts indistinguishably from a human and claims to be self-aware not sentient? You can say "we have no reliable test for it, so we can't say", but that hardly matters. Especially if you have built this machine with greater intelligence than a human, in which case you won't have much time to think about it anyway. Either that, or the machine itself will design such a test for you - not that you'll be able to understand it.
Except often they don't even say the word "twitter", they just steal people's quotes and don't credit them at all. When the Iranian election thing was front page news, they quoted "a source" or "a student inside Iran", which people easily figured out by searching on twitter for the quotes themselves were just twitterers. And of course, this is pretty annoying for a news site to do because you kind of expect them to do some actual work in reporting their stories, and if they don't, you would at least expect full disclosure. (No, it's not a lie to say "a source", but it is the omission of the full truth, e.g. "a source on microblogging site twitter who claims to be in Iran").
So it's front page news on CNN for twitter to be down, because that is apparently their source for all major news stories these days. Without twitter, what else are they going to report on?
Its site may be down, but few people use Twitter through its web site. The service itself has been running for me all day, except for one brief period around 10AM that lasted for about 10 minutes.
That's nice for Forza, but it is certainly not the first racing game to allow rollovers... the excellent Colin McRae Rally series has had them since day 1, IIRC. That game also has one of the most realistic damage models anywhere, as all the major parts of the car are individually modeled and any one or all of them can break. Nothing like trying to make it across the finish line with a busted windshield (which really affects visibility) and a blown engine...
Worse than that, I don't even understand why. I mean, is it an ego thing? Really? Really truly? What would lead car company executives to be so full of themselves as to believe that their cars never, ever see so much as a scratch?
I think it's more that they don't want their cars damaged unrealistically, because that could hurt their brand image... especially if the game is otherwise very realistic (ie. Gran Turismo, which has never had damage).
I think I read somewhere that the developers of GT could have modeled damage, but always chose not to because it would have meant endless back and forth with the car manufacturers to tweak the damage models until the cars would get damaged realistically enough to the carmaker's satisfaction. It would have just added way too much to the development time, especially when you add it up over 500 cars or whatever.
There are games with real cars that model damage... Project Gotham Racing, for example. PGR gets around the "realistic damage" problem by just making all the cars a hell of a lot tougher than they ever would be in real life. You go straight into a wall at 200mph in PGR and you might scratch your bumper and dent your hood a little bit. That probably satisfies the carmakers, who now come out looking better than they would in real life, but a game like Gran Turismo, which has always claimed to be ultra-realistic, could never get away with that. PGR is more of an arcade style racing game, so it has more leeway and people don't expect it to have realistic damage models.
Point being, with games like GT that have no damage models, it's not that they couldn't, more a case of "if you can't do it right, don't do it at all".
The issue with the advertising in Wipeout HD is that it wasn't just incidental on the loading screen. You actually had to wait for the ad to run (and it's a regular video ad) before you could play the game. This is shown pretty clearly in this comparison video, with and without the ads: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX4f9zts6JM
It's no different than those unskippable ads on DVD's, or whatever. You bought the game, you should be able to play it whenever you want, without being forced to sit through an ad for no reason.
It depends on what type of shenanigans you're talking about. Some would argue that what they've done is worse than anything Sony or Microsoft has done, in that it not only has annoyed gamers, it has altered the entire video gaming industry to the detriment of gamers and their competition.
Nintendo's biggest sin is that they are notoriously lawsuit-happy. They started suing just after the NES was launched and have basically never stopped. Along the way, they helped put Atari out of the video game business (forcing them to recall "unauthorized" games made for their system), they created the idea of an "exclusivity" deal, and they got mod chips and bootloaders outlawed through their lawsuits and government lobbying.
I used to work as a game reviewer and I can tell you they have always been the most paranoid of all the gaming companies. And not the kind of funny stoner kind of paranoid, I'm talking CIA/NSA/TSA/DHS kind of paranoid. And with a similar level of power, at least within their industry. They are responsible for most of the lock-ins and legal restrictions that are now standard within the industry. If not for Nintendo, anybody could write and release a game for any video game system, and anybody could run whatever code they wanted on their home game consoles, be it "officially" released or not. Nintendo saw to it that you cannot.
The United States is the third-largest oil producing country in the world, far higher than Norway. The US is also sixth in the world in natural gas reserves; Norway is 16th.
If you think your people are being 100% utilized, either you're misinformed or nobody wants to work for you (or both). 3 minutes out of a day gets lost in the noise of the work day.
It's not about 100% efficiency, it's about trying to prevent annoying and unnecessary inefficiency "creep" in the workplace.
3 minutes here, 3 minutes there, eventually you've got people wasting literally hours out of every day just on trying to get stuff to work on borderline-compatible systems. I've seen it happen. I've seen people waste entire *days* trying to get documents open by downloading and installing various things, waiting for the IT dept. to clean out and edit their registries (to remove traces of old apps), etc.
Not being able to open a file because you're trying to open it on an app other than that which created it is just an unnecessary distraction that hurts both productivity *and* worker happiness. And I've had this experience myself with OO. When I first got my work Mac, it didn't have Word installed, so I tried installing OO myself and experienced literally nothing but frustration trying to get my Word 2004 docs to open. Granted, this was really my company's fault, but it was their fault for not installing Word, not any other reason. I wasted several days waiting to be able to open these docs, even though I had OO on my computer. (I did other work in the meantime, but it was still annoying.)
The bottom line is this: a worker should spend literally 0 seconds of every single day worrying about trying to get a document open properly. This is not my job, and I don't want to deal with it. I don't care about being 100% efficient, but there is just no reason why I should need to waste a single second of my time on this.
I'm not saying you never have to worry about compatibility with an all-MS setup either, I'm just saying your argument that a little frustration and inefficiency doesn't matter is wrong. It matters to me because the extra time that I have to waste on stuff like that ends up coming out of my time, not company time. Because the work has to get done regardless of whether or not I can open those files, so it's in my own interests to be able to open them immediately without fuss.
Radio Shack in Canada has pretty much always sucked. It's nothing like the American chain.
Your gripes are exactly my gripes about the American chain, so it's probably not much different. I have a RS within walking distance of my house, so I went to buy a four-pack of rechargeable AA batteries there a while ago - something that costs $9.99 at Target and pretty much anywhere else - and they wanted to charge me $21.99 for it. When I pointed out how ridiculous this price was, they looked shocked and asked me where I saw it for less. I said "everywhere" literally as I was walking out the door.
Radio Shack's problem for the last 15 years or so has been that they don't understand their place in the world. They have delusions of being the next Best Buy, but a) their prices suck, b) their stores are too small, c) their salespeople are even bigger idiots than BB's, and d) as Circuit City proved, we don't want another Best Buy.
I don't understand what the shame is in having a relatively small chain of stores that sells tools, supplies, wiring, antennas, etc. that we all need but don't really know where else to get. There are a lot of online stores these days that thrive selling nothing but things like LCD/plasma TV mounts and HDMI cables for reasonable prices. That could have been Radio Shack. But nobody thinks of them for that stuff anymore because they have decided their core business is instead things like poorly-made RC cars, game consoles and cell phones - all things that specialty retailers and discount chains do better and/or sell for lower prices. Meanwhile, the cables and whatnot that they *do* still have are all overpriced too, because they have decided to "gold plate" everything in an effort to make their stuff seem more "premium" than it is.
I suspect rebranding as "The Shack" is an attempt to put them further down that road that they shouldn't be on, and going the wrong way.
With Verizon it probably helped. Anyone happy with the Bell Atlantic/NYNEX/GTE was already a customer, and wasn't going to switch just because of a name change. Changing their name gave them a chance to trick some of their unhappy former customers into trying them out again.
The Verizon rebrand happened when they still had a monopoly on northeast area local call service, and that was their only real business. There wasn't any choice of switching or not. You can rebrand as many times as you want when customers have no other company to go to. (A lot of utilities rebrand pretty frequently for that reason - my gas company just rebranded themselves as "National Grid" a little while ago, even though they only serve the Northeast. But I have no other choice of where to get my gas, so who cares?) I suspect my gas company rebranded themselves the way they did for the same reason as Verizon - they did not want to continue to be pigeonholed by their name into one region of the country. (Ditto for Cingular, now AT&T, which is an apt case of "back to the future".) In those cases, the rebranding allowed a local company to go national.
I would love to see Verizon try to rebrand themselves again now, in the middle of a major battle with Cablevision for TV and phone service, and an ongoing battle with the three other major cell phone carriers for cell phone service. It would be a disaster.
Any company that has major competition and is not region-bound by their name had better think long and hard about rebranding itself. You have to make the determination that your current brand is actually hurting you more than the confusion caused by rebranding would. I can't see how that's the case with Radio Shack. In fact, most companies interested in re-branding would be better served by going back to their roots and seeing what made them successful in the first place, not throwing it all away and trying to start from zero. (See aforementioned AT&T - how many telegraphs will you use today?)
I do not believe that the I-tunes UELA says that I have to have an Apple device to use the software.
No, but it does say that you have no right to expect iTunes to work at all. It is a free piece of software offered with no warranty whatsoever. You are not even protected if you have an Apple product, much less another company's product. At least as far as the EULA goes, Apple is free to lock out whoever they want.
Did I mention I received an iPod as part of my brother's estate after he passed away, and that I hate the iTunes interface? I've never put any music on it because every program I've found to put music on the iPod (iTunes, Winamp, etc...) makes me put it in some asinine Music Library rather than using this filing system I call a Hierarchical Directory Structure that my 17,050 music files (60.8GB) are already in?
Apparently you are not aware that iTunes is perfectly happy to let you have your music anywhere you want it. Even on a network drive. And it has been that way since day one.
I always wonder about these posts from people who claim to hate various pieces of hardware and software for some arbitrary reason that doesn't actually exist. Really makes me wonder if you've actually tried it as you claim to have done. You may as well say "I hate Sony televisions because they explode whenever you turn them on!" If that were true, do you think anybody would actually put up with it? Sony TV owners are not all complete morons and neither are iTunes users.
The "iTunes makes you move all your music!" thing is a rumor probably started by MS fanboys based on the fact that iTunes can copy all your music, if you tell it to, into a music folder that it organizes. It does not delete or move anything. And if you don't tell it to organize your music for you, it will just keep everything exactly as it is and let you deal with keeping some semblance of organization.
Apple is being petty and obnoxious to their own PAYING CUSTOMERS simply because some people made the cardinal sin of buying a semi-related product they didn't make. I can only imagine what the people honestly trying to defend that would say if Microsoft did this instead of Apple, or even if Google did this instead of Apple.
a) Can you connect an iPod and sync it with Zune software? I was not aware of this functionality. If not, it seems to me that your argument doesn't really work.
b) Who is paying Apple when they buy a Palm Pre? You buy a Palm Pre, you download iTunes for free. What is Apple getting from this transaction? At no time do you need to pay Apple anything.
If you're talking about buying music from iTMS, you can still do that and sync it with another app. Just like I could still buy music from the Zune Marketplace and sync it with my iPod via iTunes. Woops, no I couldn't, because Zune Marketplace songs are all DRM'd.
Wait, who's the villain in your argument again?
Maybe if Google comes out with an mp3 player and an app to sync with it, then we can talk about how they're bigger dicks than Microsoft. But at this point, if you're talking the lesser of two evils, Microsoft ain't it.
My stats only count desktop browsers and I am at 52.4% for all versions of IE. And I don't run a tech-heavy site or anything, I run a site selling Japanese clothes. (http://www.tokyorebel.com)
Firefox 3.0 is at 35.6%, 3.5 is at a surprising 0.6%, but then it's new. (And thank God, because some of my CSS is totally messed up in 3.5.)
Actually now that I'm looking, I do have a stat that says "iPhone" which is at 0.2%.
Doesn't matter if he _could_ work on the plane. Many union rules forbid unscheduled activity. In effect, this guy took away 8 hours of pay from his union brother.
His "union brother" works a standard work week regardless. He'll just be working on a different plane. There is no shortage of work for airline engineers.
And the repair took 35 minutes, not 8 hours. The 8 hours was presumably to fly an engineer in. He likely would not have been paid for all that time (he would have been paid for "flight time" but not his full transit time, which is what the 8 hours refers to).
What if he got hurt while working on the plane?
Covered in the maintenance agreement.
I would like to point out that various airlines have maintenance sharing agreements in the United States as well. The industry wouldn't work otherwise. Imagine an airline that flies just one or two flights into an airport per day - as many do to many airports - but having to have a full maintenance contingent at every one of those airports. Talk about inefficiency...
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The study was poorly done anyway, not so much because of the methods as the measurement used: lifetime failure rates, which will over time hit 100% on any console it's applied to.
I mentioned this in another reply, but the time scale you'd need for a normal console to reach a 100% failure rate would be something like 100-200 years. Seriously. I mean, I have every single major game console of the last 30 years in my house right now, and every single one of them works. The only system that has ever failed on me is the Dreamcast. And yes, I still play them all. (Ok, not equally, but they all get some play.) And I know I'm not alone - there are still many tens of thousands of working Atari 2600's, Coleco Visions, Intellivisions, etc. out there - and the ones that no longer exist are gone not because they broke, but because they just ended up in a landfill somewhere due to perceived obsolescence.
Most game consoles are going to work until they literally begin turning back to dust. If your system is failing due to dry rot, I think you can be pretty sure it's not a design issue that's at fault.
For the Xbox 360 to reach 54% failure in the span of 3 years is pretty unbelievable. I can't think of another product in the history of, well, products to reach that high a percentage. Even when Nintendo did its massive recall of Japanese Famicoms due to a design flaw, the actual failure rate to that point was quite low - under 10%. In most industries, a 54% failure rate would lead to involuntary recall, much less voluntary action. (I'm sure that MS's warranty extension was a bid to head this off. It was done out of fear, not kindness.)
Yeah but the difference they noted between the PS3 and 360 for playability was 3%, while the difference in failure rate is about 40%. That's huge.
Actually, the difference between play time between 360 and PS3 is more like 8%, while the difference between failure rates is more like 500%. You don't just subtract when you're talking percentage difference. So there's way more of a differential than even you're saying. There's no way wear and tear even comes close to explaining these different failure rates. This is a design issue.
I posited after MS first started to come clean about their quality issues that, given the statements MS was making about why these failures were occuring, the 360 failure rate would eventually approach 100%. (Obviously this is true of anything given enough time, but I meant within the expected timeframe before obsolescence.) The original system suffered from a "series of flaws" (MS's words) in its design that led to various potential failures, not just one. Given that all 360's suffered from these same flaws, and that by MS's admission it did not matter what steps you took to "protect" your system, it did not seem logical to me that the failures would be confined to only a few systems.
Simply put, MS designed and sold a defective product that should not have been on the market. Even a 54% failure rate is completely unacceptable, but my bet is that this will continue to inch higher over the next few years as whatever initial-design systems remaining out there fail. I'm also not convinced that the new systems have solved every problem (remember, MS themselves said it was "a series of flaws"), although they may have solved a few so the failure rate of the new systems may be lower, though probably still pretty unacceptable by any reasonable standard.
I personally care about quality, and the lack of such is pretty much the only reason I haven't bought a 360 at this point, nor do I plan to. Even since the supposed internal redesign, there are still reports and surveys like this being released seemingly on a monthly basis. I keep waiting for the day when it seems like MS has this stuff finally solved, but that day just never seems to come.
As an airline passenger, this is not making me feel like this is a plane I can trust or should want to fly on. And yes I can choose to fly airlines that haven't ordered and won't use the 787. Pretty easy since it's not exactly selling like wild anyway.
Huh? Boeing has 800 orders for it before its launch. That is basically unheard-of in the industry. Name any successful airplane - none of them had that many orders prior to launch.
As for your "not gonna fly it because it's got pre-production problems" stance, I'd like to know what airliners you do feel comfortable on so I can list all the incidents and accidents they were involved in prior to launch, and see if you still feel as comfortable flying them afterwards.
The existing fuselage wrinkles might not compromise the flight safety of the 787s, but they will weigh and cost a lot more than planned because of the extra layers of carbon composite material. The added weight will reduce fuel efficiency for the entire lifetime of the airplane, which further increases the cost of use of these planes for the airlines that will be buying them.
And this kind of thing happens all the time with new airplanes, and the first few airplanes are then just given at a slight discount. It's no big deal to the airlines. These are carbon panels about 1/8 inch thick; they don't weigh a tremendous amount.
You can bet this means all future 787s will weigh more than Boeing told their investors they would, which means some companies who slightly prefered 787s over an alternative by, say, Airbus, might also cancel their orders and buy from the competition instead.
If you were talking tons of extra weight, yes. But the fix Boeing has come up with is literally a couple of extra kilograms. (I'm talking about the second issue now; the fixes for both issues are literally about 10kg total.) That's not going to drive anybody to a competitor's airplane, and the total weight penalty is going to be negligible. About the same as carrying an extra food cart on the plane on every trip.
That changed when the plane was landing. At first I thought people were applauding, which was a bit surprising, but then I realized that the sound was that of the entire roof shaking, you could actually see the roof plates moving against each other.
Are you talking about the cabin interior panels? That's not the "roof". Those are just panels hung from the frame around the fuselage. They're not designed to be entirely rigid. In fact, in most airliners you can see that the holes cut in the panels where the various framing parts are designed to fit in are not round, they're oval. That's so that the panels can move back and forth.
It used to freak me out too when I saw interior panels move, but then I looked more closely and read up on how these things are actually attached to the fuselage, and now I realize it's just normal. It happens on every plane too - if you look closely at the interior panels in any airplane, even an American-made one, you will see the panels flex and move on takeoff and landing, and during turbulence. Some of this is caused by the airplane itself flexing - airplanes are designed to flex - but most of it is just caused by the panels themselves not being 100% rigid in how they're attached. It's nothing to worry about.
Boeing pulled out the 787 after scrapping the Sonic Cruiser. It had nothing to do with the A380. Boeing had already been down the VLA route before Airbus had and decided there was no market.
You could say the A380 was a reaction to Boeing's "challenge" offered by the 747-700X, which was first offered in 1996. Boeing received no interest from airlines, leading them to explore smaller airplanes. The A380 had nothing to do with it.
The 747-8 could be considered a reaction to the A380, although it is obviously smaller than both the A380 and the proposed 747-700X. But that was Boeing saying "ok, look, you guys said you didn't want this in 1996, but if you've all now changed your mind about wanting a bigger plane with a better cost per seat mile, here it is."
The article you linked says the A380 is "sold out until 2014", seems like a pretty good position to be in during a recession to me.
But they need to be sold out until something like 2030 before the airplane turns a profit. That's the problem. When you design a product in such a way that it's questionable whether you'll ever turn a profit even if you sell every single one you can make for the next 20 years, then something's wrong.
That tells me it's Boeing's fault that the problem exists, not the Italian manufacturers.
No, it's Alenia's.
There are two issues here. The first is that the wing body join failed earlier than it was supposed to - that's a design fault on Boeing's part. The second is that starting with the seventh frame, the fuselage skin was wrinkled. That's a production fault.
Alenia has since admitted that they changed production processes after the seventh frame, and something having to do with that change caused the faults. This issue has already been resolved. The information in this article is apparently a bit old, although the issues it brings up are still at least somewhat valid... though there is honestly no practical way of building an airliner these days without using offshore suppliers. But it highlights the dangers of lowest-bidder contracts.
My arguement in this case is that the machine would have to be smarter not than a single person, but than an entire group of people, all with different expertise and internal creative processes, combined, to result in an intilligence explosion. That's a very different conclusion.
But it's the wrong conclusion. This is a mistake (IMO) that I see a lot of people make when talking about machine intelligence in comparison to humans.
The thing is, these machines that are smarter than men are still machines. They are not humans. When you say a machine is "as smart as a human", people seem to automatically assume that means they're as fallible as humans too. That's not necessarily going to be the case and I would argue it likely will not be the case. It's not necessary, nor is it probably the easiest route, to reach a human level of intelligence by designing a machine brain exactly like a human's. More likely, we'll design it in some brute force digital way so that it is computationally as or more powerful than a human brain, but neither has some of our capacity for creative thought nor any of our problems with memory or senses or whatever. (The former is not guaranteed, though; creative thought and intelligence are linked, so a "smart" machine may be just as creative as we are, especially if pre-programmed with a set of overriding directives, as it no doubt would be because otherwise what's the point?)
So yes, a single machine "smarter" than a human could have its own designs in memory and could probably fairly easily teach itself how to build a copy of itself simply by studying how to do it. It would never forget anything until it ran out of memory, it would never be distracted by thoughts of love or sex or by being too tired or bored, it would presumably be built with the precision and dexterity of a robot, so that's not an issue. It wouldn't need to worry about experience, as a human does, because its limbs will just do whatever its "brain" tells them to - unlike a human. It could also pretty easily build machines smarter than itself, either by just adding more computing power or by linking itself to the copies it produces.
Humans are usually not limited in what they can do by their intelligence, but by all of their fallibilities, not to mention a desire for leisure time. We don't want to just be working all the time, and we want to do what we love to do, even if it means we can only build one part of a robot instead of the whole thing. If your field is welding, maybe you don't have any interest in learning how to design memory chips. A robot or android is not going to have that "problem"; it will learn to do whatever it needs to do in order to build whatever it needs to build to satisfy whatever directives it's programmed with. And it'll do it without any leisure time short of stopping to literally recharge its batteries.
*That* is what's really dangerous about all this, IMO. I don't even think robots need to be *as* smart as humans to cause us real problems. A robot with an IQ equivalent of about 50 (which is still far beyond where we are today) but a large amount of memory and good basic dexterity could probably replicate itself and then defend itself (with its buddies) if programmed with an innocuous directive like self-preservation. We are counting on the fact that our higher intelligence will protect us against dumber machines because we will be able to think more creatively and keep one step ahead, but all they really need to do is go to a library and get the right books to study, then hide out in the woods for a while building up a dumb but formidable army.
Even a single semi-intelligent machine programmed poorly could just waltz into a gun store, take a gun off the rack and start shooting people. And it'd probably require an RPG to take it down. We are already almost there - autonomous gun robots have already gone berzerk and killed people. Someday these things are gonna be
There is no test for sentience. Without such a test it would be impossible to kow if you have succeeded in accurately modeling it.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
At a certain point, it's all semantics. Is a machine that acts indistinguishably from a human and claims to be self-aware not sentient? You can say "we have no reliable test for it, so we can't say", but that hardly matters. Especially if you have built this machine with greater intelligence than a human, in which case you won't have much time to think about it anyway. Either that, or the machine itself will design such a test for you - not that you'll be able to understand it.
Except often they don't even say the word "twitter", they just steal people's quotes and don't credit them at all. When the Iranian election thing was front page news, they quoted "a source" or "a student inside Iran", which people easily figured out by searching on twitter for the quotes themselves were just twitterers. And of course, this is pretty annoying for a news site to do because you kind of expect them to do some actual work in reporting their stories, and if they don't, you would at least expect full disclosure. (No, it's not a lie to say "a source", but it is the omission of the full truth, e.g. "a source on microblogging site twitter who claims to be in Iran").
So it's front page news on CNN for twitter to be down, because that is apparently their source for all major news stories these days. Without twitter, what else are they going to report on?
Its site may be down, but few people use Twitter through its web site. The service itself has been running for me all day, except for one brief period around 10AM that lasted for about 10 minutes.
I use Twitterific on my Mac.
That's nice for Forza, but it is certainly not the first racing game to allow rollovers... the excellent Colin McRae Rally series has had them since day 1, IIRC. That game also has one of the most realistic damage models anywhere, as all the major parts of the car are individually modeled and any one or all of them can break. Nothing like trying to make it across the finish line with a busted windshield (which really affects visibility) and a blown engine...
This video has no sound, but it's a pretty cool crash with a rollover: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRbwy3vGbMQ
Worse than that, I don't even understand why. I mean, is it an ego thing? Really? Really truly? What would lead car company executives to be so full of themselves as to believe that their cars never, ever see so much as a scratch?
I think it's more that they don't want their cars damaged unrealistically, because that could hurt their brand image... especially if the game is otherwise very realistic (ie. Gran Turismo, which has never had damage).
I think I read somewhere that the developers of GT could have modeled damage, but always chose not to because it would have meant endless back and forth with the car manufacturers to tweak the damage models until the cars would get damaged realistically enough to the carmaker's satisfaction. It would have just added way too much to the development time, especially when you add it up over 500 cars or whatever.
There are games with real cars that model damage... Project Gotham Racing, for example. PGR gets around the "realistic damage" problem by just making all the cars a hell of a lot tougher than they ever would be in real life. You go straight into a wall at 200mph in PGR and you might scratch your bumper and dent your hood a little bit. That probably satisfies the carmakers, who now come out looking better than they would in real life, but a game like Gran Turismo, which has always claimed to be ultra-realistic, could never get away with that. PGR is more of an arcade style racing game, so it has more leeway and people don't expect it to have realistic damage models.
Point being, with games like GT that have no damage models, it's not that they couldn't, more a case of "if you can't do it right, don't do it at all".
The issue with the advertising in Wipeout HD is that it wasn't just incidental on the loading screen. You actually had to wait for the ad to run (and it's a regular video ad) before you could play the game. This is shown pretty clearly in this comparison video, with and without the ads: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX4f9zts6JM
It's no different than those unskippable ads on DVD's, or whatever. You bought the game, you should be able to play it whenever you want, without being forced to sit through an ad for no reason.
It depends on what type of shenanigans you're talking about. Some would argue that what they've done is worse than anything Sony or Microsoft has done, in that it not only has annoyed gamers, it has altered the entire video gaming industry to the detriment of gamers and their competition.
Nintendo's biggest sin is that they are notoriously lawsuit-happy. They started suing just after the NES was launched and have basically never stopped. Along the way, they helped put Atari out of the video game business (forcing them to recall "unauthorized" games made for their system), they created the idea of an "exclusivity" deal, and they got mod chips and bootloaders outlawed through their lawsuits and government lobbying.
I used to work as a game reviewer and I can tell you they have always been the most paranoid of all the gaming companies. And not the kind of funny stoner kind of paranoid, I'm talking CIA/NSA/TSA/DHS kind of paranoid. And with a similar level of power, at least within their industry. They are responsible for most of the lock-ins and legal restrictions that are now standard within the industry. If not for Nintendo, anybody could write and release a game for any video game system, and anybody could run whatever code they wanted on their home game consoles, be it "officially" released or not. Nintendo saw to it that you cannot.
Does the US have the same oil and natural gas resources as Norway? No.
What?!
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_pro-energy-oil-production
The United States is the third-largest oil producing country in the world, far higher than Norway. The US is also sixth in the world in natural gas reserves; Norway is 16th.
If you think your people are being 100% utilized, either you're misinformed or nobody wants to work for you (or both). 3 minutes out of a day gets lost in the noise of the work day.
It's not about 100% efficiency, it's about trying to prevent annoying and unnecessary inefficiency "creep" in the workplace.
3 minutes here, 3 minutes there, eventually you've got people wasting literally hours out of every day just on trying to get stuff to work on borderline-compatible systems. I've seen it happen. I've seen people waste entire *days* trying to get documents open by downloading and installing various things, waiting for the IT dept. to clean out and edit their registries (to remove traces of old apps), etc.
Not being able to open a file because you're trying to open it on an app other than that which created it is just an unnecessary distraction that hurts both productivity *and* worker happiness. And I've had this experience myself with OO. When I first got my work Mac, it didn't have Word installed, so I tried installing OO myself and experienced literally nothing but frustration trying to get my Word 2004 docs to open. Granted, this was really my company's fault, but it was their fault for not installing Word, not any other reason. I wasted several days waiting to be able to open these docs, even though I had OO on my computer. (I did other work in the meantime, but it was still annoying.)
The bottom line is this: a worker should spend literally 0 seconds of every single day worrying about trying to get a document open properly. This is not my job, and I don't want to deal with it. I don't care about being 100% efficient, but there is just no reason why I should need to waste a single second of my time on this.
I'm not saying you never have to worry about compatibility with an all-MS setup either, I'm just saying your argument that a little frustration and inefficiency doesn't matter is wrong. It matters to me because the extra time that I have to waste on stuff like that ends up coming out of my time, not company time. Because the work has to get done regardless of whether or not I can open those files, so it's in my own interests to be able to open them immediately without fuss.
Radio Shack in Canada has pretty much always sucked. It's nothing like the American chain.
Your gripes are exactly my gripes about the American chain, so it's probably not much different. I have a RS within walking distance of my house, so I went to buy a four-pack of rechargeable AA batteries there a while ago - something that costs $9.99 at Target and pretty much anywhere else - and they wanted to charge me $21.99 for it. When I pointed out how ridiculous this price was, they looked shocked and asked me where I saw it for less. I said "everywhere" literally as I was walking out the door.
Radio Shack's problem for the last 15 years or so has been that they don't understand their place in the world. They have delusions of being the next Best Buy, but a) their prices suck, b) their stores are too small, c) their salespeople are even bigger idiots than BB's, and d) as Circuit City proved, we don't want another Best Buy.
I don't understand what the shame is in having a relatively small chain of stores that sells tools, supplies, wiring, antennas, etc. that we all need but don't really know where else to get. There are a lot of online stores these days that thrive selling nothing but things like LCD/plasma TV mounts and HDMI cables for reasonable prices. That could have been Radio Shack. But nobody thinks of them for that stuff anymore because they have decided their core business is instead things like poorly-made RC cars, game consoles and cell phones - all things that specialty retailers and discount chains do better and/or sell for lower prices. Meanwhile, the cables and whatnot that they *do* still have are all overpriced too, because they have decided to "gold plate" everything in an effort to make their stuff seem more "premium" than it is.
I suspect rebranding as "The Shack" is an attempt to put them further down that road that they shouldn't be on, and going the wrong way.
With Verizon it probably helped. Anyone happy with the Bell Atlantic/NYNEX/GTE was already a customer, and wasn't going to switch just because of a name change. Changing their name gave them a chance to trick some of their unhappy former customers into trying them out again.
The Verizon rebrand happened when they still had a monopoly on northeast area local call service, and that was their only real business. There wasn't any choice of switching or not. You can rebrand as many times as you want when customers have no other company to go to. (A lot of utilities rebrand pretty frequently for that reason - my gas company just rebranded themselves as "National Grid" a little while ago, even though they only serve the Northeast. But I have no other choice of where to get my gas, so who cares?) I suspect my gas company rebranded themselves the way they did for the same reason as Verizon - they did not want to continue to be pigeonholed by their name into one region of the country. (Ditto for Cingular, now AT&T, which is an apt case of "back to the future".) In those cases, the rebranding allowed a local company to go national.
I would love to see Verizon try to rebrand themselves again now, in the middle of a major battle with Cablevision for TV and phone service, and an ongoing battle with the three other major cell phone carriers for cell phone service. It would be a disaster.
Any company that has major competition and is not region-bound by their name had better think long and hard about rebranding itself. You have to make the determination that your current brand is actually hurting you more than the confusion caused by rebranding would. I can't see how that's the case with Radio Shack. In fact, most companies interested in re-branding would be better served by going back to their roots and seeing what made them successful in the first place, not throwing it all away and trying to start from zero. (See aforementioned AT&T - how many telegraphs will you use today?)
I do not believe that the I-tunes UELA says that I have to have an Apple device to use the software.
No, but it does say that you have no right to expect iTunes to work at all. It is a free piece of software offered with no warranty whatsoever. You are not even protected if you have an Apple product, much less another company's product. At least as far as the EULA goes, Apple is free to lock out whoever they want.
Did I mention I received an iPod as part of my brother's estate after he passed away, and that I hate the iTunes interface? I've never put any music on it because every program I've found to put music on the iPod (iTunes, Winamp, etc...) makes me put it in some asinine Music Library rather than using this filing system I call a Hierarchical Directory Structure that my 17,050 music files (60.8GB) are already in?
Apparently you are not aware that iTunes is perfectly happy to let you have your music anywhere you want it. Even on a network drive. And it has been that way since day one.
I always wonder about these posts from people who claim to hate various pieces of hardware and software for some arbitrary reason that doesn't actually exist. Really makes me wonder if you've actually tried it as you claim to have done. You may as well say "I hate Sony televisions because they explode whenever you turn them on!" If that were true, do you think anybody would actually put up with it? Sony TV owners are not all complete morons and neither are iTunes users.
The "iTunes makes you move all your music!" thing is a rumor probably started by MS fanboys based on the fact that iTunes can copy all your music, if you tell it to, into a music folder that it organizes. It does not delete or move anything. And if you don't tell it to organize your music for you, it will just keep everything exactly as it is and let you deal with keeping some semblance of organization.
Apple is being petty and obnoxious to their own PAYING CUSTOMERS simply because some people made the cardinal sin of buying a semi-related product they didn't make. I can only imagine what the people honestly trying to defend that would say if Microsoft did this instead of Apple, or even if Google did this instead of Apple.
a) Can you connect an iPod and sync it with Zune software? I was not aware of this functionality. If not, it seems to me that your argument doesn't really work.
b) Who is paying Apple when they buy a Palm Pre? You buy a Palm Pre, you download iTunes for free. What is Apple getting from this transaction? At no time do you need to pay Apple anything.
If you're talking about buying music from iTMS, you can still do that and sync it with another app. Just like I could still buy music from the Zune Marketplace and sync it with my iPod via iTunes. Woops, no I couldn't, because Zune Marketplace songs are all DRM'd.
Wait, who's the villain in your argument again?
Maybe if Google comes out with an mp3 player and an app to sync with it, then we can talk about how they're bigger dicks than Microsoft. But at this point, if you're talking the lesser of two evils, Microsoft ain't it.
My stats only count desktop browsers and I am at 52.4% for all versions of IE. And I don't run a tech-heavy site or anything, I run a site selling Japanese clothes. (http://www.tokyorebel.com)
Firefox 3.0 is at 35.6%, 3.5 is at a surprising 0.6%, but then it's new. (And thank God, because some of my CSS is totally messed up in 3.5.)
Actually now that I'm looking, I do have a stat that says "iPhone" which is at 0.2%.
Doesn't matter if he _could_ work on the plane. Many union rules forbid unscheduled activity. In effect, this guy took away 8 hours of pay from his union brother.
His "union brother" works a standard work week regardless. He'll just be working on a different plane. There is no shortage of work for airline engineers.
And the repair took 35 minutes, not 8 hours. The 8 hours was presumably to fly an engineer in. He likely would not have been paid for all that time (he would have been paid for "flight time" but not his full transit time, which is what the 8 hours refers to).
What if he got hurt while working on the plane?
Covered in the maintenance agreement.
I would like to point out that various airlines have maintenance sharing agreements in the United States as well. The industry wouldn't work otherwise. Imagine an airline that flies just one or two flights into an airport per day - as many do to many airports - but having to have a full maintenance contingent at every one of those airports. Talk about inefficiency...