Playing StarCraft with a wiimote instead of a mouse doesn't sound that much weird. (And the console has USB ports if you really need the real stuff).
Maybe because I'm looking at it from more of a hardcore standpoint, but it definitely does to me. I mean, my APM is pretty bad (only like 60-70) compared to people who play a lot, but I can't imagine getting anything close to that with a Wiimote.
As for the touch-screen type things like the DS: I've tried it on my convertible tablet, and while it's playable, you still can't get anything near playing seriously. Basically, if you don't have a bunch of hotkeys, the experience of playing SC changes substantially. That doesn't mean it can't be good (IIRC the Amazon reviews of the N64 Starcraft port are surprisingly good), but I definitely think that Blizzard wouldn't base decisions around making a console port easier unless it was almost a side product.
XBox 360 has an USB port, and apparently it's used for keyboard and mouse in FPS.
My impression was that you can only use the keyboard for text-entry fields, and that their SDK prohibited keyboard/mouse for games. (Same with Sony.) Is this not the case?
...making it more easy to port not only to Mac OS, but also to other consoles (anything else appart from the X-Box uses OpenGL for graphics).
The N64 version of Starcraft notwithstanding, I wouldn't hold your breath here. SC is not exactly a game that's amenable to the console, especially since none of them let you use mouse/keyboard in-game. I'd be quite surprised if we see console port of SC2.
Your other arguments are decent, but I don't think that one would have been much more than a "eh, it wouldn't hurt at least."
I thought Flash was some kind of perfect standard for video and it was already supported on every platform in existence. After all, that's why everyone is so pissed at Apple for failing to support Flash, right?
Just because Flash sucks doesn't mean that "I can't get the content I want" is better.
The only reason any device might not support Flash right now is if the manufacturer is evil?
That's a Red Herring. Adobe would love to provide Flash support for the iPhone, but Apple won't allow it. That's what matters, not whether Adobe was quick-on-the-draw to get support to Android.
It's not an environmental "negative". They plant three times as many trees as they harvest.
Do they undo the damage of the chemicals used in paper manufacturing? Do they put back into the ground all the oil that is used for shipping paper around? Do they go around and pull out all the paper that people throw away from the landfills?
The astronauts' responses were sent to the Moon which echoed them back to Earth based upon who was doing the talking (ie, when the CSM pilot spoke, it came from the CSM, when the moon-based astronauts spoke, it was sent to the LEM).
Well, not just to the moon per se, but to the actual (unmanned) Apollo craft they were sending to and from the moon at that time. And that stream would have to be undetectable. Regardless, it'd have had to be really well-done to fool the Soviets.
The idea would be that you have to fake out NASA as well. In this scenario, you basically have to have somebody "tap" the voice transmissions from NASA to the astronauts and telemetry data received by NASA at the source and resend it to the fake moon set. You wouldn't need high-ranking NASA people, just somebody to install the tap and make sure it kept working.
Incidentally, this is what I think is the most plausible way this conspiracy would have been accomplished: by keeping almost everyone in the dark. Satisfies that "deathbed confession" objection someone else had.
The best argument for the moon landing, in my opinion, is that we brought back lots of interesting stuff.
This is also a plenty good argument. (There's not exactly a dearth of good arguments here.) I just find it less compelling personally because I don't have a good answer to "the moon rocks are faked/from an asteroid/whatever".
This I always felt was the best proof that humans were on the moon, as opposed to say that the whole thing was faked in a movie studio.
Eh, personally, I think that's not a very good argument. This soviet thing is as much a counterargument as anything -- the Soviets have one on the moon, but they didn't send anyone. Probes can place reflectors.
The best argument for the moon landing IMO is the scrutiny the Soviets would have had to put into it. They would have been able to pick up telemetry and the transmissions from the craft (hell, amateurs were able to see the Apollo ships through telescopes) during the flight.
Long story short: we sent something of the right size to the moon, landed it there, and brought it back, and it was transmitting what we said it was transmitting. You can concoct some half-baked explanation of us sending up a recording or something like that (actually a recording wouldn't work as they transmitted time-sensitive information, so you'd have to say that NASA was transmitting a hidden stream to the craft what they would transmit back), but IMO by the time you get to this point it seems like the hard parts of Apollo were basically done.
And how are you going to read those CDs/DVDs/HDs in the computer systems of just a decade or so from now?
CD and DVD-Rs are not particularly stable, but if the discs are good, I guarantee that it'll be reasonably easy to find a drive in 10 years. I am reasonably confidant that SATA drives will be common in that time too.
But the point is that for medium-term storage, how available 20-year-old storage media is doesn't matter so much. There's never any point at which you don't have access to both the old and the new. Hard drives are big enough that too that there's almost no way you won't be able to fit all your photos on one. So it's just a matter of transferring your photos from one hard drive to the next one when you get a new one. That takes all of 30 seconds of your actions to do, and a few minutes of waiting.
The GP is absolutely right that digital requires constant vigilance and effort.
You and I have a different definition of "constant." I wouldn't consider having to worry about something every 5 or 10 years "constant."
And both of you are ignoring the internet. Individual companies may come and go (Flickr and DeviantArt may not be around in 15 years for instance), but the nice thing about those sites is that they're browseable, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone is crawling large parts of it even now.
The thing is, when new storage technologies arise, you already are going to move your data across.
I'm not claiming that digital archiving is free -- by contrast, lots of people are working very hard at it. That said, for every box of 4x5 negatives that look great, how many photos are faded? How many are covered in mildew?
I will acknowledge that the tradeoff between print and digital is much less clear in the long term. I was mostly thinking in the medium term (say 10-50 years; basically, as long as you are alive, since, presumably, you will care and will continue to keep your data alive.
(That said, I suspect preserving digital history of your ancestors will become a part of popular culture before not too too long, and the balance will shift more in digital's favor.)
LOL, you think those CDs are archival? You think magnetic hard drives aren't vulnerable to data loss/corruption? You think flash memory can't go bad?
Of course you can lose data on a computer. BUT, it's way easier to back up a computer file than it is a film negative. I can copy it to a second USB hard drive and leave it at a friend's house. I can upload photos to Mozy. I can rent a server somewhere and upload my data to that.
Way easier than arranging some way to copy all my film negatives, figuring out somewhere to store it in a proper environment, etc., and even then it wouldn't be lossless like backing up data is.
In the "which is easiest to prevent data loss" wars, digital wins hands down.
Loss-less would be ideal but would run even modern data cards down to nothing in meantime.
Just for curiosity's sake, the review says RAW results are about 50 MB/shot. I expected the back to come with a hard drive to be honest, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
That said, do you really think someone who pays $14,000 for a digital back for their 'blad is really going to shoot lossy? Because I certainly don't. (Especially because of all the postprocessing flexibility you get with RAW images you don't with others. Forget about just the lossy/nonlossy bit.)
No kidding. It's threads like this (where I think the question is entirely reasonable and a good thing to support) that really sour my opinion of Linux. There are a few other things -- better file-system-supported metadata, transactional filesystems, etc. -- that have come up in the past too where it seems I just flat out disagree with most hardcore Linux users.
(Don't worry, I hate Windows too, but for mostly different reasons. I don't use OS X very often and don't have an opinion on it, but I'd probably hate it too.)
So yes, it'll help (a bit) but it's really expensive given what will happen to the SSD. Better is add RAM, so the system won't need to swap (with enough RAM you don't need swap at all).
A RAM buffer cache and SSD cache address far different issues. The buffer cache is far faster when it hits, but the SSD cache is far larger. It's pretty easy to find workloads where getting enough RAM so that your working set will fit into your buffer cache (alongside the memory use of whatever you're doing) would be more expensive than getting at least a cheap, small SSD. (You can get a cheap 30 GB OCZ drive for about the price of 4 GB of RAM.) Your buffer cache can't survive between boots, while an SSD cache would (though an SSD swap partition wouldn't; not really).
Finally, SSD wear is, I think, overstated. Even with quite heavy write activity, current SSDs will last years, and I suspect adding a 30 GB SSD cache would be a bigger help in 5 years than adding 4 GB of RAM now would, at least in many cases.
Saying "better is to add RAM" is way too simplistic an answer.
Sure it's caching. You're storing frequently-used data on a faster medium.
You're also storing a lot of infrequently-used data on a faster medium, and a lot of frequently-used data on the slower medium. How is that better than using the faster medium only for frequently used data?
As it happens, for many of my workloads anyway, I'd expect to see bigger benefits by storing some of my data directories on SSDs than storing/usr. Which directories? Well, they're sort of scattered all around. Why should I have to go through and figure out what things I use all the time? How can I even determine that (I don't know what files programs are opening behind my back). Figuring out that sort of thing is exactly what computers are good at.
I's actually better than caching, because in this case you don't have to write back the data to the spinning-disk drive when there are changes...
That's not a problem. Writes are already delayed because they can be buffered; if you cache in a SSD, they can be delayed even further before you write them back to the magnetic drive.
An added benefit of that is that there's no need to keep the SSD-stored directories on the spinning media, freeing up more space there.
Whoopde do. Even if you got a 100 GB SSD, duplicating that space on, say, a 1 TB hard drive would cost under $10. Considering that the SSD would be in the vicinity of $400, that extra $10 in lost space isn't exactly something to cry about.
The last time I bought a game, it came on a plastic disc in a plastic case, surrounded by cardboard padding, packed into a laminated cardboard box, and then covered in a plastic wrapper. They've got a long way to go before that's 'green'.
To be fair, a LOT of games (I'd say most games) are distributed in something like a DVD case now. Gets rid of most of that extraneous packaging.
I also love how news stories leave out the important details like the system itself was vulnerable to compromise by a simple CTRL-C at the logon prompt that dropped the "hacker" off at the root console.
This case is different because it was a small kid, but in general I don't see much of a difference there.
If doing something malicious is easy to do, it doesn't make it any more malicious. Changing other people's passwords, course materials, and course enrollment certainly qualifies as malicious IMO.
...the likes of dealing with Xeons, Pentium Pros, Core architecture, Itanium
Not just those... at one time or another, Windows NT has run on IA-32, amd64, Itanium, PowerPC, DEC Alpha, and MIPS; there was also an unreleased port to the Clipper architecture. That's between 6 and 8 different architectures, depending on how you count.
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Playing StarCraft with a wiimote instead of a mouse doesn't sound that much weird. (And the console has USB ports if you really need the real stuff).
Maybe because I'm looking at it from more of a hardcore standpoint, but it definitely does to me. I mean, my APM is pretty bad (only like 60-70) compared to people who play a lot, but I can't imagine getting anything close to that with a Wiimote.
As for the touch-screen type things like the DS: I've tried it on my convertible tablet, and while it's playable, you still can't get anything near playing seriously. Basically, if you don't have a bunch of hotkeys, the experience of playing SC changes substantially. That doesn't mean it can't be good (IIRC the Amazon reviews of the N64 Starcraft port are surprisingly good), but I definitely think that Blizzard wouldn't base decisions around making a console port easier unless it was almost a side product.
XBox 360 has an USB port, and apparently it's used for keyboard and mouse in FPS.
My impression was that you can only use the keyboard for text-entry fields, and that their SDK prohibited keyboard/mouse for games. (Same with Sony.) Is this not the case?
...making it more easy to port not only to Mac OS, but also to other consoles (anything else appart from the X-Box uses OpenGL for graphics).
The N64 version of Starcraft notwithstanding, I wouldn't hold your breath here. SC is not exactly a game that's amenable to the console, especially since none of them let you use mouse/keyboard in-game. I'd be quite surprised if we see console port of SC2.
Your other arguments are decent, but I don't think that one would have been much more than a "eh, it wouldn't hurt at least."
I thought Flash was some kind of perfect standard for video and it was already supported on every platform in existence. After all, that's why everyone is so pissed at Apple for failing to support Flash, right?
Just because Flash sucks doesn't mean that "I can't get the content I want" is better.
The only reason any device might not support Flash right now is if the manufacturer is evil?
That's a Red Herring. Adobe would love to provide Flash support for the iPhone, but Apple won't allow it. That's what matters, not whether Adobe was quick-on-the-draw to get support to Android.
Your comment is so close to How To Irritate People, but far enough away I can't tell if it's a deliberate reference or not. ;-)
"I spy with my little eye, something beginning with 's'." ... I spy with my little eye, something beginning with 'c'."
"Sky.
"Clouds."
"Yep."
It's not an environmental "negative". They plant three times as many trees as they harvest.
Do they undo the damage of the chemicals used in paper manufacturing? Do they put back into the ground all the oil that is used for shipping paper around? Do they go around and pull out all the paper that people throw away from the landfills?
The astronauts' responses were sent to the Moon which echoed them back to Earth based upon who was doing the talking (ie, when the CSM pilot spoke, it came from the CSM, when the moon-based astronauts spoke, it was sent to the LEM).
Well, not just to the moon per se, but to the actual (unmanned) Apollo craft they were sending to and from the moon at that time. And that stream would have to be undetectable. Regardless, it'd have had to be really well-done to fool the Soviets.
The idea would be that you have to fake out NASA as well. In this scenario, you basically have to have somebody "tap" the voice transmissions from NASA to the astronauts and telemetry data received by NASA at the source and resend it to the fake moon set. You wouldn't need high-ranking NASA people, just somebody to install the tap and make sure it kept working.
Incidentally, this is what I think is the most plausible way this conspiracy would have been accomplished: by keeping almost everyone in the dark. Satisfies that "deathbed confession" objection someone else had.
The best argument for the moon landing, in my opinion, is that we brought back lots of interesting stuff.
This is also a plenty good argument. (There's not exactly a dearth of good arguments here.) I just find it less compelling personally because I don't have a good answer to "the moon rocks are faked/from an asteroid/whatever".
This I always felt was the best proof that humans were on the moon, as opposed to say that the whole thing was faked in a movie studio.
Eh, personally, I think that's not a very good argument. This soviet thing is as much a counterargument as anything -- the Soviets have one on the moon, but they didn't send anyone. Probes can place reflectors.
The best argument for the moon landing IMO is the scrutiny the Soviets would have had to put into it. They would have been able to pick up telemetry and the transmissions from the craft (hell, amateurs were able to see the Apollo ships through telescopes) during the flight.
Long story short: we sent something of the right size to the moon, landed it there, and brought it back, and it was transmitting what we said it was transmitting. You can concoct some half-baked explanation of us sending up a recording or something like that (actually a recording wouldn't work as they transmitted time-sensitive information, so you'd have to say that NASA was transmitting a hidden stream to the craft what they would transmit back), but IMO by the time you get to this point it seems like the hard parts of Apollo were basically done.
...why "Republicans" are against this?? Aren't they supposed to be in favor of small goverment and fewer regulations?
Only if you believe the crap they've been spewing out. The GOP is as much big-government as Democrats are, just in slightly different ways.
And how are you going to read those CDs/DVDs/HDs in the computer systems of just a decade or so from now?
CD and DVD-Rs are not particularly stable, but if the discs are good, I guarantee that it'll be reasonably easy to find a drive in 10 years. I am reasonably confidant that SATA drives will be common in that time too.
But the point is that for medium-term storage, how available 20-year-old storage media is doesn't matter so much. There's never any point at which you don't have access to both the old and the new. Hard drives are big enough that too that there's almost no way you won't be able to fit all your photos on one. So it's just a matter of transferring your photos from one hard drive to the next one when you get a new one. That takes all of 30 seconds of your actions to do, and a few minutes of waiting.
The GP is absolutely right that digital requires constant vigilance and effort.
You and I have a different definition of "constant." I wouldn't consider having to worry about something every 5 or 10 years "constant."
And both of you are ignoring the internet. Individual companies may come and go (Flickr and DeviantArt may not be around in 15 years for instance), but the nice thing about those sites is that they're browseable, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone is crawling large parts of it even now.
The thing is, when new storage technologies arise, you already are going to move your data across.
I'm not claiming that digital archiving is free -- by contrast, lots of people are working very hard at it. That said, for every box of 4x5 negatives that look great, how many photos are faded? How many are covered in mildew?
I will acknowledge that the tradeoff between print and digital is much less clear in the long term. I was mostly thinking in the medium term (say 10-50 years; basically, as long as you are alive, since, presumably, you will care and will continue to keep your data alive.
(That said, I suspect preserving digital history of your ancestors will become a part of popular culture before not too too long, and the balance will shift more in digital's favor.)
All you need to do with film to keep it safe for a couple hundred years is stick it in a box.
And hope you don't have a house fire. And make sure it doesn't get mildewy.
And if you want to actually retain the original quality, you need to make sure that it doesn't sit out of temperature and humidity ranges.
Digital requires constant attention as storage mediums change, or else you end up with tens of thousands of pictures trapped in a forgotten format.
IDE has been around quite a long time now, and it's still plenty accessible. At most you'd need to give it some attention every few years.
Once you are gone, is anyone going to give a shit about your photos to bother with the trouble of preserving them digitally?
OTOH, if no one does, how much does it really matter?
Besides, it's not like you can't make hard-copy printouts from digital, and there are some photo inks that "should" last comparably to film.
LOL, you think those CDs are archival? You think magnetic hard drives aren't vulnerable to data loss/corruption? You think flash memory can't go bad?
Of course you can lose data on a computer. BUT, it's way easier to back up a computer file than it is a film negative. I can copy it to a second USB hard drive and leave it at a friend's house. I can upload photos to Mozy. I can rent a server somewhere and upload my data to that.
Way easier than arranging some way to copy all my film negatives, figuring out somewhere to store it in a proper environment, etc., and even then it wouldn't be lossless like backing up data is.
In the "which is easiest to prevent data loss" wars, digital wins hands down.
Loss-less would be ideal but would run even modern data cards down to nothing in meantime.
Just for curiosity's sake, the review says RAW results are about 50 MB/shot. I expected the back to come with a hard drive to be honest, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
That said, do you really think someone who pays $14,000 for a digital back for their 'blad is really going to shoot lossy? Because I certainly don't. (Especially because of all the postprocessing flexibility you get with RAW images you don't with others. Forget about just the lossy/nonlossy bit.)
You mean Slashdot posted an incorrect and sensationalist summary? Say it ain't so!
You can back up your keys, you know.
No kidding. It's threads like this (where I think the question is entirely reasonable and a good thing to support) that really sour my opinion of Linux. There are a few other things -- better file-system-supported metadata, transactional filesystems, etc. -- that have come up in the past too where it seems I just flat out disagree with most hardcore Linux users.
(Don't worry, I hate Windows too, but for mostly different reasons. I don't use OS X very often and don't have an opinion on it, but I'd probably hate it too.)
but not quite as good as using a metric fuck-ton of RAM and memcached
Of course, an SSD will cost less than your metric fuck-ton of RAM, and has the benefit of lasting through boots.
So yes, it'll help (a bit) but it's really expensive given what will happen to the SSD. Better is add RAM, so the system won't need to swap (with enough RAM you don't need swap at all).
A RAM buffer cache and SSD cache address far different issues. The buffer cache is far faster when it hits, but the SSD cache is far larger. It's pretty easy to find workloads where getting enough RAM so that your working set will fit into your buffer cache (alongside the memory use of whatever you're doing) would be more expensive than getting at least a cheap, small SSD. (You can get a cheap 30 GB OCZ drive for about the price of 4 GB of RAM.) Your buffer cache can't survive between boots, while an SSD cache would (though an SSD swap partition wouldn't; not really).
Finally, SSD wear is, I think, overstated. Even with quite heavy write activity, current SSDs will last years, and I suspect adding a 30 GB SSD cache would be a bigger help in 5 years than adding 4 GB of RAM now would, at least in many cases.
Saying "better is to add RAM" is way too simplistic an answer.
Sure it's caching. You're storing frequently-used data on a faster medium.
You're also storing a lot of infrequently-used data on a faster medium, and a lot of frequently-used data on the slower medium. How is that better than using the faster medium only for frequently used data?
As it happens, for many of my workloads anyway, I'd expect to see bigger benefits by storing some of my data directories on SSDs than storing /usr. Which directories? Well, they're sort of scattered all around. Why should I have to go through and figure out what things I use all the time? How can I even determine that (I don't know what files programs are opening behind my back). Figuring out that sort of thing is exactly what computers are good at.
I's actually better than caching, because in this case you don't have to write back the data to the spinning-disk drive when there are changes...
That's not a problem. Writes are already delayed because they can be buffered; if you cache in a SSD, they can be delayed even further before you write them back to the magnetic drive.
An added benefit of that is that there's no need to keep the SSD-stored directories on the spinning media, freeing up more space there.
Whoopde do. Even if you got a 100 GB SSD, duplicating that space on, say, a 1 TB hard drive would cost under $10. Considering that the SSD would be in the vicinity of $400, that extra $10 in lost space isn't exactly something to cry about.
The last time I bought a game, it came on a plastic disc in a plastic case, surrounded by cardboard padding, packed into a laminated cardboard box, and then covered in a plastic wrapper. They've got a long way to go before that's 'green'.
To be fair, a LOT of games (I'd say most games) are distributed in something like a DVD case now. Gets rid of most of that extraneous packaging.
My hat is off to you, sir.
Careful; removing the tin foil is dangerous after all.
It's a real problem -- Android is easily the most hackable phone out there.
I'm not so sure... I think the Nokia N900 has got it beat.
I also love how news stories leave out the important details like the system itself was vulnerable to compromise by a simple CTRL-C at the logon prompt that dropped the "hacker" off at the root console.
This case is different because it was a small kid, but in general I don't see much of a difference there.
If doing something malicious is easy to do, it doesn't make it any more malicious. Changing other people's passwords, course materials, and course enrollment certainly qualifies as malicious IMO.
Actually if your debit card has a Visa or Mastercard logo on it, it has the exact same protections on it as a credit card.
Only if it's run as if it were credit and not a PIN transaction.
...the likes of dealing with Xeons, Pentium Pros, Core architecture, Itanium
Not just those... at one time or another, Windows NT has run on IA-32, amd64, Itanium, PowerPC, DEC Alpha, and MIPS; there was also an unreleased port to the Clipper architecture. That's between 6 and 8 different architectures, depending on how you count.