Once you've had the experience of a system software upgrade rendering hardware unusable, and the manufacturer flat doesn't want to provide new drivers for old equipment, you will immediately see the value of open source drivers.
A working closed driver is nice when it supports your system. An open driver means that if more than four or five hardcore geeks out there run a similar system as you, you WILL have a driver.
So no, for day to day use on current consumer desktops that are free to update and reinstall whenever, closed drivers aren't a big deal. That isn't the only type of system out there.
So "truly see beyond our equations" "what it 'is' per se" "there is no picture"
that kind of language has nothing at all to do with science. the wave particle question has been answered as thoroughly as gravity. the fact that you have more trouble seeing wave/particle than you do seeing gravity isn't a terribly big philosophical problem for science.
you're asking for someone to come along and give you a better metaphor. it's not an invalid request. but for people who spend decades studying the stuff, the math is a much more accurate picture and mental model than any quasi-visual metaphor. just because it can't be pictured doesn't mean it isn't understood.
Many things tell very compelling and moving stories without being great works of art. The best examples I'd say are movies based on true events. It's the rare one that's actually a great film, but that doesn't mean you were some sort of philistine for being moved by the story. My point is that the core art of a game is not the narrative that strings along the interactive segments, it's the interactive segments. The actual *game* of Final Fantasy (a series I dearly love) is a bunch of menus simulating a Dungeons and Dragons style game. It is less interesting, in that respect, than its source material, not a good quality for art that is aiming at gallery level criticism. Not that it SHOULD aim for gallery level criticism. There's a million problem with gallery art, not the least of which is the horrid idea that it takes a specialized education and vocabulary to enjoy art.
Oh our tourist destinations and handful of multicultural cities are pretty fine. Foreigners have horror stories with dealing with the general public in, say, Atlanta (not picking, it's a non-cosmopolitan city with a huge international airport, that's all).
The man on the street isn't an evil person. But he's very unaccustomed to dealing with foreigners in his own country.
Finally, those claiming that grammar correction is "classist" should realize the irony of their statement. If I'm taking the time to tell you you're wrong and giving you an opportunity to learn the correct way then I'm hardly promoting some social hierarchy. Far from it. I'm trying to bring everyone up to the same level. If I sat here and silently judged your inability to differentiate "their" from "there" - THEN I would be "classist".
Oh man, I don't mean to pick, but there's a kind of amazing irony in what you're saying here. "I'm not being classist... I'm trying to bring everyone up to the same level." If you believe certain people are on a higher level than others to begin with, that's classism.
My problem with online games is not that they are, or that they are the way they are, it's that there's so little else getting the full attention of the industry at the moment. The jocks make the games unplayable for most. Remember 95% of the people out there (or however many, the overwhelming majority) never turn single player games onto hard mode. They sure as hell aren't going to find losing repeatedly to the best players in the world more amusing.
If you have little tolerance for people with partial English fluency, do yourself a favor and get out of tech.
Every site has to pick a primary language. Nowhere do I complain that Slashdot is English-only. I'm just saying individuals can stand to be less judgemental of each other.
Conservatives complain constantly (just turn on the radio and listen) but any complain they don't share is "whining." I suppose it's a human response, and liberals certainly ignore a lot of legitimate conservative complaints, but it doesn't particularly encourage me to take the rest of their opinions as anything other than total personal bias. I'm sure you're different though.
Many of Apple's lock-in strategies and their complete disregard for forward compatibility would be unacceptable if they had a larger deployed base.
But since Amiga isn't coming back any time soon, I'm glad there's a presence in the commercial computing world that tries to be innovative outside of office productivity (blech).
The peak of PC (& mac) gaming was the early 90s. Games like tetris, civilization, sim city, lemmings, kings quest, red baron, played fine on standard issue office computers, and the platform was targeted at adults rather than the under 25 crowd. At what point in the 80s did Apple IIs stop getting ports? Since grownups outside a dedicated fanbase generally do not care about the next iteration of graphics and twitch style play, this meant that games had to use either innovative gameplay, storyline, or compelling simulation to compete.
It was also wonderful that games had small enough budgets and man hours of development that games could be signed by individual creators. Virtually nothing made by committee is as interesting as the enthusiastic work of a dedicated artist.
All the "are video games art?" questions amuse me. Because the answer is: they used to be, now they're straight Hollywood, with opening weekends and everything, and if that qualifies as art or not really depends on individual taste. But they aren't terribly compelling art as storytelling mediums (Chrono Trigger is the only non-adventure story game I've ever played that might make a decent non-licensed-property paperback) and they don't match film for visual spectacle. Interactivity is the fundamental nature of the art. Tetris is ten times the work of art that Final Fantasy is.
While I'm complaining: what's with the totally jockish attitude toward games. I have so little interest in proving my skill against testosterone drive 15 year olds, I can't even begin to describe it. Competitive online content, which is seeing the most energy and creativity on both PCs AND consoles, is a turn-off to most people.
Rhythm games are interesting because much like adventure games, they have a basic interaction model that is dirt simple, but they appeal based on the surrounding context. If you'd told me at the time that Parappa the Rappa was one of the most important games ever made, possibly more so than Street Fighter II, I'd have thought you were nuts.
There's a lot of innovation on the PC these days though. It's all in Flash. If you haven't played Desktop Tower Defense, you're way missing out (say goodbye to your productive time and sleep schedule though, 100 level challenge is basically impossible but you just keep wanting to try). I'd relearn actionscript (haven't played with it since Flash 4) to make some games if I wasn't very well aware that any good game takes hundreds of hours to write and under the hood if you aren't using complicated physics or AI it isn't very interesting programming. I'd rather invent a language or fork Minix or something.
On the other hand, MMORPGs are very interesting. Though I worry that WoW defined the success model too well and experimentation is going to fall off (given the huge investment it takes to launch an MMORPG this isn't so much a worry as a certainty).
Back to the main topic: it's no accident at all that WoW runs playably well on 8 year old graphics cards. Games that require specced out systems have a bright neon sign that says "hobbyists only." If you want a game that crosses over, make it run on whatever piece of crap integrated graphics they put in $500 laptops these days. Hell make it run on OLPC. Graphics can scale down much farther than the currently do, and most people don't mind. Most games could be reduced to Halflife 1 level graphics and still convey the important ingame objects and map features. One thing that I'm constantly bewildered by is that designers use all these polygons not to populate worlds with more interactive objects, but to dress up the same low moving object count we've had since Quake 1. Halo would play perfectly well with 500 polygon characters.
Or maybe I'm just bitter because 1991 era action puzzle games were the last genre I was any good at. I beat Oh No More Lemmings! as a 10 year old, a fact that I'm still damn proud of.
But don't worry, PC gaming isn't anywhere near as dead as arcade games.
Many slashdot posters speak english as their second or third language. We should always remember that English is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn; it is an order of magnitude less regular and its working vocabulary is far larger than the Romance languages. All rules about spelling, punctuation, pluralization, etc. are wrong at least 1 or 2% of the time. There are over 30 vowel sounds represented by 5 1/2 letters. There is quite simply no logic to the use of prepositions in idiomatic phrases, and idiomatic phrases are all over the language, even in basic tourist / shopkeep speaking.
That said, "no" "hello" and "OK" are just about universal words at this point. If people are forward and the other party isn't made uncomfortable by foreign language speakers (Americans, for fairly obvious reasons I think -- isolation and power -- are the rudest first worlders about people who don't speak their native language. It isn't just waiters and store owners who are blatantly rude to non-English speakers, it's about everyone. A really high percentage of Americans will simply shrug or outright lie to someone requesting help to get them to shut up and go away.
Anyway, don't pick at peoples grammar. They're a stranger and you know nothing about them. Plus, given the way education generally works, it's classist as all hell.
Huh, and according to obvious things that don't surprise anyone who think about them for more than five minutes, most COBOL programmers are members of AARP.
Outside of the older, first world programming communities, there are far more young people to old people. Old programmers typically make their living by having a resume with years of experience in a technology or three that aren't going anywhere (you'll be able to keep a roof over your head for the next 50 years keeping Java business systems running.) How many guys out there are still using Fortran and Pascal professionally? Lots. Young guys don't feel like learning decades worth of back material to catch up with old hands. Far easier to jump on a new thing where you're not anywhere near as far behind as the rest of the world. Nobody has THAT much experience with Ajax, or.NET, or whatever.
And yeah, other countries have better math education and parallel programming actually involves some math. If you're bright enough to actually think about algorithms in abstract terms (can you work through S&IoCP and Knuth?) you're made in the shade no matter what is hot.
Does it suck to be an engineering student? Depends on what you want out of your program and whether it is a good fit to you.
Unless you're the author of this article and you don't like doing math. In which case: what the hell dude? Go get a humanities major and a minor in whatever technology you like to dabble in. You'll go to business school and be all the engineers' boss anyway.
Anyway, grades are bullshit. The fastest way to get rid of a pernicious social institution is to devalue it completely. Give everyone As. Hire / admit people on portfolio work and recommendations from professors in whatever their field is.
The factorization of large positive integers is currently faster-than-exponential and slower than polynomial. Quantum computers can *non-probabalistically* factor large integers in polynomial time (something roughly n^3 where n=number of binary digits if memory serves me) it is generally accepted, though not proven that integer factorization is not in the complexity classes of P or NP. Which isn't weird, nobody claims that every problem out there must be P or NP. There are algorithms out there for most numbers (basically everything not composed of a few large factors of close magnitude) that will factor them very fast. I could be wrong about a point or two here, it's been a long time since I've studied this stuff and I'm not bothering to hunt through all the crappy references on the web to "fact-check." There are good textbooks if you care.
A professor of mine used to say "you would rather use 1970s computers with 2000s algorithms for factoring than vice versa."
Did we learn nothing from the 80s and early 90s? If you write the standard first, you're going to get the kitchen sink. Engineer a good system, then standardize it. Nothing sands the sharp edges like the real world.
I don't know. I'll step up to the plate here and say that there's something about the botomlessness of the internet that can make it real hard to turn off even when you want to go to sleep.
I guess I've just haven't liked TV since they took all the cool reruns off of cable and replaced them with reality.
I've had far far far far FAR more "oh shit it's DAWN and I have to go to (class/work)" moments with wikipedia, WoW, forum arguments, Nethack, Civilization, etc. than I ever have with TV. The internet is basically a great big stack of awesome magazines. You can lose your attention but still immediately have something else to grab you. It works as both active and passive engagement. It's dangerous for people who are bad at saying "no."
And as for drugs? I don't know. Maybe a bunch of upright savanna apes are actually medically ill-equipped to live in this world we've built for ourselves, and only a small percentage of the population IS healthy by the standards we've created. We can either change our surroundings or drug ourselves into being OK with the surroundings we've built. Few people seem to be working very hard beyond mere complaining (guilty!) at the first option.
I don't know, though. I've struggled with very real been-in-the-hospital bipolar disorder with major depression and panic attacks. It's cost me jobs, education, and relationships. I resisted medication for a long time. While I don't doubt that psychoactives are way over perscribed (parents: hint: Adderol is meth. Don't be too shocked when your kids get hooked, and don't be too shocked at what happens when they lose their free pills at 22 or 23), my life is better since Lithium.
Assembly, contrary to popular belief, is not manual everything. Write an assembler to find out. Memory isn't a big continuous page, and hardware doesn't maintain a stack for you.
I know, I know I'm nitpicking, but it's important to remember this so we keep the right amount of respect for the men (and in those days, very frequently women - "calculator" and "computer" used to be jobs for unmarried women who was good at figures. WWII ballistics? Those huge old log tables? Women did it. This held into the early days of electronic computers) who wrestled ones and zeros out of machines when every cycle really REALLY counted.
No, Math is expensive too. People haven't done it for free since all mathematicians were wealthy and their names began with "Lord." Also, modern math uses supercomputers to guess at truth before it proves it. We're pretty certain that the R-Z hypotheses is true because it's been tested for trillions and trillions of solutions by pricey computers (and pricey mathematical computer scientists).
Someone with the chops to be a mathematician can in general do much more profitable things with their time. A high 5 / low 6 figure salary and a comfortable tenured position are pretty well needed to keep them from just going to investment banking and making easy(er than theoretical mathematics) millions.
So while no individual mathematician requires "millions," the university community collectively spends millions on keeping mathematicians employed. Also, most physics departments don't have a large hadron collider (funniest potential typo in science), most physicists are more or less mathematicians, just working with data gathered at a distant handful of very very expensive sites.
The expanse of knowledge is neither cheap nor always profitable in the short term. But give it up and lets see where our society goes.
There are other applications that would want that level of service.
Primarily reselling or offering an additional service yourself.
Think of it this way, if you were running a MMORPG, the uptime on your datacenter's internet connections is the *hard limit* on your game's uptime. No matter how hard you work to make your servers robust and redundant, you can't stay online more than your connection.
There's lots of market for 99.999% uptime and guaranteed fat pipes, and all that, but you're not going to shop for that kind of thing unless your life or business is at stake.
We expect miraculous technology to be available at consumer prices. Compromises have to be made. Now, that doesn't mean there can't be space for improvement via regulation. The US has one of the least regulated, most expensive, and least reliable cell phone networks in the world. I know a family from *Uganda* who moved here a few years ago and are just shocked at how bad the cell phone plans are here compared to what they could get in Africa. And this isn't in some cornfield, it's the metro Atlanta area.
So yeah, things could be better, but they're not going to meet industrial standards.
Minidisc is still loved by field recorders, concert bootleggers, and for home recording. The format was meant to be a CD-quality cassette that could do both analogue and digital recording. It's an excellent format that the market just didn't demand.
I still have a 10 year old Sony MD player-recorder that is small, reliable, goes a long time on a charge, and has taken a real beating.
Oh and cassettes are still the best format for making a mix. With a cassette, your friend can move 3 times, drop the thing in the back of their closet, find it a decade later and re-discover your gift. CD-Rs die the moment you start to neglect them, and MP3s can be lost very easily if someone has a casual attitude toward their non-essential files.
You really should have just filed it, the patent clerks take one look at computer lingo they stamp "approved." It's up to the people you drag into court to find out if there's prior art or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Once you've had the experience of a system software upgrade rendering hardware unusable, and the manufacturer flat doesn't want to provide new drivers for old equipment, you will immediately see the value of open source drivers.
A working closed driver is nice when it supports your system. An open driver means that if more than four or five hardcore geeks out there run a similar system as you, you WILL have a driver.
So no, for day to day use on current consumer desktops that are free to update and reinstall whenever, closed drivers aren't a big deal. That isn't the only type of system out there.
So "truly see beyond our equations" "what it 'is' per se" "there is no picture"
that kind of language has nothing at all to do with science. the wave particle question has been answered as thoroughly as gravity. the fact that you have more trouble seeing wave/particle than you do seeing gravity isn't a terribly big philosophical problem for science.
you're asking for someone to come along and give you a better metaphor. it's not an invalid request. but for people who spend decades studying the stuff, the math is a much more accurate picture and mental model than any quasi-visual metaphor. just because it can't be pictured doesn't mean it isn't understood.
maybe you're a visual learner.
Give me a scientifically meaningful definition of "free will."
Something that could be tested as present or not in a defined experiment.
If such a definition cannot be found, then questions about "free will" are unscientific and better left to philosophy and religion.
The mystical associations people have regarding the very words surrounding the study of cognition is a great hindrance to meaningful research.
Marvin Minksy has a great deal to say about this.
Many things tell very compelling and moving stories without being great works of art. The best examples I'd say are movies based on true events. It's the rare one that's actually a great film, but that doesn't mean you were some sort of philistine for being moved by the story. My point is that the core art of a game is not the narrative that strings along the interactive segments, it's the interactive segments. The actual *game* of Final Fantasy (a series I dearly love) is a bunch of menus simulating a Dungeons and Dragons style game. It is less interesting, in that respect, than its source material, not a good quality for art that is aiming at gallery level criticism. Not that it SHOULD aim for gallery level criticism. There's a million problem with gallery art, not the least of which is the horrid idea that it takes a specialized education and vocabulary to enjoy art.
Oh our tourist destinations and handful of multicultural cities are pretty fine. Foreigners have horror stories with dealing with the general public in, say, Atlanta (not picking, it's a non-cosmopolitan city with a huge international airport, that's all).
The man on the street isn't an evil person. But he's very unaccustomed to dealing with foreigners in his own country.
Finally, those claiming that grammar correction is "classist" should realize the irony of their statement. If I'm taking the time to tell you you're wrong and giving you an opportunity to learn the correct way then I'm hardly promoting some social hierarchy. Far from it. I'm trying to bring everyone up to the same level. If I sat here and silently judged your inability to differentiate "their" from "there" - THEN I would be "classist".
Oh man, I don't mean to pick, but there's a kind of amazing irony in what you're saying here. "I'm not being classist... I'm trying to bring everyone up to the same level." If you believe certain people are on a higher level than others to begin with, that's classism.
My problem with online games is not that they are, or that they are the way they are, it's that there's so little else getting the full attention of the industry at the moment. The jocks make the games unplayable for most. Remember 95% of the people out there (or however many, the overwhelming majority) never turn single player games onto hard mode. They sure as hell aren't going to find losing repeatedly to the best players in the world more amusing.
If you have little tolerance for people with partial English fluency, do yourself a favor and get out of tech.
Every site has to pick a primary language. Nowhere do I complain that Slashdot is English-only. I'm just saying individuals can stand to be less judgemental of each other.
Conservatives complain constantly (just turn on the radio and listen) but any complain they don't share is "whining." I suppose it's a human response, and liberals certainly ignore a lot of legitimate conservative complaints, but it doesn't particularly encourage me to take the rest of their opinions as anything other than total personal bias. I'm sure you're different though.
why? it's a reply to a grammar correction that's multiple paragraphs long. how in the hell could it be anything other than a rant?
Many of Apple's lock-in strategies and their complete disregard for forward compatibility would be unacceptable if they had a larger deployed base.
But since Amiga isn't coming back any time soon, I'm glad there's a presence in the commercial computing world that tries to be innovative outside of office productivity (blech).
The peak of PC (& mac) gaming was the early 90s. Games like tetris, civilization, sim city, lemmings, kings quest, red baron, played fine on standard issue office computers, and the platform was targeted at adults rather than the under 25 crowd. At what point in the 80s did Apple IIs stop getting ports? Since grownups outside a dedicated fanbase generally do not care about the next iteration of graphics and twitch style play, this meant that games had to use either innovative gameplay, storyline, or compelling simulation to compete.
It was also wonderful that games had small enough budgets and man hours of development that games could be signed by individual creators. Virtually nothing made by committee is as interesting as the enthusiastic work of a dedicated artist.
All the "are video games art?" questions amuse me. Because the answer is: they used to be, now they're straight Hollywood, with opening weekends and everything, and if that qualifies as art or not really depends on individual taste. But they aren't terribly compelling art as storytelling mediums (Chrono Trigger is the only non-adventure story game I've ever played that might make a decent non-licensed-property paperback) and they don't match film for visual spectacle. Interactivity is the fundamental nature of the art. Tetris is ten times the work of art that Final Fantasy is.
While I'm complaining: what's with the totally jockish attitude toward games. I have so little interest in proving my skill against testosterone drive 15 year olds, I can't even begin to describe it. Competitive online content, which is seeing the most energy and creativity on both PCs AND consoles, is a turn-off to most people.
Rhythm games are interesting because much like adventure games, they have a basic interaction model that is dirt simple, but they appeal based on the surrounding context. If you'd told me at the time that Parappa the Rappa was one of the most important games ever made, possibly more so than Street Fighter II, I'd have thought you were nuts.
There's a lot of innovation on the PC these days though. It's all in Flash. If you haven't played Desktop Tower Defense, you're way missing out (say goodbye to your productive time and sleep schedule though, 100 level challenge is basically impossible but you just keep wanting to try). I'd relearn actionscript (haven't played with it since Flash 4) to make some games if I wasn't very well aware that any good game takes hundreds of hours to write and under the hood if you aren't using complicated physics or AI it isn't very interesting programming. I'd rather invent a language or fork Minix or something.
On the other hand, MMORPGs are very interesting. Though I worry that WoW defined the success model too well and experimentation is going to fall off (given the huge investment it takes to launch an MMORPG this isn't so much a worry as a certainty).
Back to the main topic: it's no accident at all that WoW runs playably well on 8 year old graphics cards. Games that require specced out systems have a bright neon sign that says "hobbyists only." If you want a game that crosses over, make it run on whatever piece of crap integrated graphics they put in $500 laptops these days. Hell make it run on OLPC. Graphics can scale down much farther than the currently do, and most people don't mind. Most games could be reduced to Halflife 1 level graphics and still convey the important ingame objects and map features. One thing that I'm constantly bewildered by is that designers use all these polygons not to populate worlds with more interactive objects, but to dress up the same low moving object count we've had since Quake 1. Halo would play perfectly well with 500 polygon characters.
Or maybe I'm just bitter because 1991 era action puzzle games were the last genre I was any good at. I beat Oh No More Lemmings! as a 10 year old, a fact that I'm still damn proud of.
But don't worry, PC gaming isn't anywhere near as dead as arcade games.
Many slashdot posters speak english as their second or third language. We should always remember that English is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn; it is an order of magnitude less regular and its working vocabulary is far larger than the Romance languages. All rules about spelling, punctuation, pluralization, etc. are wrong at least 1 or 2% of the time. There are over 30 vowel sounds represented by 5 1/2 letters. There is quite simply no logic to the use of prepositions in idiomatic phrases, and idiomatic phrases are all over the language, even in basic tourist / shopkeep speaking.
That said, "no" "hello" and "OK" are just about universal words at this point. If people are forward and the other party isn't made uncomfortable by foreign language speakers (Americans, for fairly obvious reasons I think -- isolation and power -- are the rudest first worlders about people who don't speak their native language. It isn't just waiters and store owners who are blatantly rude to non-English speakers, it's about everyone. A really high percentage of Americans will simply shrug or outright lie to someone requesting help to get them to shut up and go away.
Anyway, don't pick at peoples grammar. They're a stranger and you know nothing about them. Plus, given the way education generally works, it's classist as all hell.
Huh, and according to obvious things that don't surprise anyone who think about them for more than five minutes, most COBOL programmers are members of AARP.
.NET, or whatever.
Outside of the older, first world programming communities, there are far more young people to old people. Old programmers typically make their living by having a resume with years of experience in a technology or three that aren't going anywhere (you'll be able to keep a roof over your head for the next 50 years keeping Java business systems running.) How many guys out there are still using Fortran and Pascal professionally? Lots. Young guys don't feel like learning decades worth of back material to catch up with old hands. Far easier to jump on a new thing where you're not anywhere near as far behind as the rest of the world. Nobody has THAT much experience with Ajax, or
And yeah, other countries have better math education and parallel programming actually involves some math. If you're bright enough to actually think about algorithms in abstract terms (can you work through S&IoCP and Knuth?) you're made in the shade no matter what is hot.
Does it suck to be an engineering student? Depends on what you want out of your program and whether it is a good fit to you.
Unless you're the author of this article and you don't like doing math. In which case: what the hell dude? Go get a humanities major and a minor in whatever technology you like to dabble in. You'll go to business school and be all the engineers' boss anyway.
That would lower the school's law school yield.
Anyway, grades are bullshit. The fastest way to get rid of a pernicious social institution is to devalue it completely. Give everyone As. Hire / admit people on portfolio work and recommendations from professors in whatever their field is.
The factorization of large positive integers is currently faster-than-exponential and slower than polynomial. Quantum computers can *non-probabalistically* factor large integers in polynomial time (something roughly n^3 where n=number of binary digits if memory serves me) it is generally accepted, though not proven that integer factorization is not in the complexity classes of P or NP. Which isn't weird, nobody claims that every problem out there must be P or NP. There are algorithms out there for most numbers (basically everything not composed of a few large factors of close magnitude) that will factor them very fast. I could be wrong about a point or two here, it's been a long time since I've studied this stuff and I'm not bothering to hunt through all the crappy references on the web to "fact-check." There are good textbooks if you care.
A professor of mine used to say "you would rather use 1970s computers with 2000s algorithms for factoring than vice versa."
Did we learn nothing from the 80s and early 90s? If you write the standard first, you're going to get the kitchen sink. Engineer a good system, then standardize it. Nothing sands the sharp edges like the real world.
I don't know. I'll step up to the plate here and say that there's something about the botomlessness of the internet that can make it real hard to turn off even when you want to go to sleep.
I guess I've just haven't liked TV since they took all the cool reruns off of cable and replaced them with reality.
I've had far far far far FAR more "oh shit it's DAWN and I have to go to (class/work)" moments with wikipedia, WoW, forum arguments, Nethack, Civilization, etc. than I ever have with TV. The internet is basically a great big stack of awesome magazines. You can lose your attention but still immediately have something else to grab you. It works as both active and passive engagement. It's dangerous for people who are bad at saying "no."
And as for drugs? I don't know. Maybe a bunch of upright savanna apes are actually medically ill-equipped to live in this world we've built for ourselves, and only a small percentage of the population IS healthy by the standards we've created. We can either change our surroundings or drug ourselves into being OK with the surroundings we've built. Few people seem to be working very hard beyond mere complaining (guilty!) at the first option.
I don't know, though. I've struggled with very real been-in-the-hospital bipolar disorder with major depression and panic attacks. It's cost me jobs, education, and relationships. I resisted medication for a long time. While I don't doubt that psychoactives are way over perscribed (parents: hint: Adderol is meth. Don't be too shocked when your kids get hooked, and don't be too shocked at what happens when they lose their free pills at 22 or 23), my life is better since Lithium.
Assembly, contrary to popular belief, is not manual everything. Write an assembler to find out. Memory isn't a big continuous page, and hardware doesn't maintain a stack for you.
I know, I know I'm nitpicking, but it's important to remember this so we keep the right amount of respect for the men (and in those days, very frequently women - "calculator" and "computer" used to be jobs for unmarried women who was good at figures. WWII ballistics? Those huge old log tables? Women did it. This held into the early days of electronic computers) who wrestled ones and zeros out of machines when every cycle really REALLY counted.
No, Math is expensive too. People haven't done it for free since all mathematicians were wealthy and their names began with "Lord." Also, modern math uses supercomputers to guess at truth before it proves it. We're pretty certain that the R-Z hypotheses is true because it's been tested for trillions and trillions of solutions by pricey computers (and pricey mathematical computer scientists).
Someone with the chops to be a mathematician can in general do much more profitable things with their time. A high 5 / low 6 figure salary and a comfortable tenured position are pretty well needed to keep them from just going to investment banking and making easy(er than theoretical mathematics) millions.
So while no individual mathematician requires "millions," the university community collectively spends millions on keeping mathematicians employed. Also, most physics departments don't have a large hadron collider (funniest potential typo in science), most physicists are more or less mathematicians, just working with data gathered at a distant handful of very very expensive sites.
The expanse of knowledge is neither cheap nor always profitable in the short term. But give it up and lets see where our society goes.
Sure, but I bet it's not the fault of the guys providing their line to the internet.
There are other applications that would want that level of service.
Primarily reselling or offering an additional service yourself.
Think of it this way, if you were running a MMORPG, the uptime on your datacenter's internet connections is the *hard limit* on your game's uptime. No matter how hard you work to make your servers robust and redundant, you can't stay online more than your connection.
There's lots of market for 99.999% uptime and guaranteed fat pipes, and all that, but you're not going to shop for that kind of thing unless your life or business is at stake.
We expect miraculous technology to be available at consumer prices. Compromises have to be made. Now, that doesn't mean there can't be space for improvement via regulation. The US has one of the least regulated, most expensive, and least reliable cell phone networks in the world. I know a family from *Uganda* who moved here a few years ago and are just shocked at how bad the cell phone plans are here compared to what they could get in Africa. And this isn't in some cornfield, it's the metro Atlanta area.
So yeah, things could be better, but they're not going to meet industrial standards.
Minidisc is still loved by field recorders, concert bootleggers, and for home recording. The format was meant to be a CD-quality cassette that could do both analogue and digital recording. It's an excellent format that the market just didn't demand.
I still have a 10 year old Sony MD player-recorder that is small, reliable, goes a long time on a charge, and has taken a real beating.
Oh and cassettes are still the best format for making a mix. With a cassette, your friend can move 3 times, drop the thing in the back of their closet, find it a decade later and re-discover your gift. CD-Rs die the moment you start to neglect them, and MP3s can be lost very easily if someone has a casual attitude toward their non-essential files.
I propose that the RIAA and MPAA and the BSA file the ridiculous figures they've been claiming all these years.
You really should have just filed it, the patent clerks take one look at computer lingo they stamp "approved." It's up to the people you drag into court to find out if there's prior art or not.