"Android may be a bigger market, but the iPhone I'm targeting with my app resides in a deeper pocket, my friend."
O RLY? What exactly do you mean by a "deeper pocket"? There are certainly reports showing that Android users buy less apps, but app developers keep using a variety of excuses to explain why they don't port/create their apps for Android. So which apps is it that the Android users are supposed to be buying? Personally i'd snap up the Final Fantasy games or the Colbert "the Word" app if they ever made their way to Android. Or Plants vs Zombies, and probably lots of other cool apps that i'm not even aware of yet.
Of course just to make it even more of a vicious circle, those reports now provide the perfect self-reinforcing excuse to continue not making/porting apps for Android.
I'm not sure if your response is 50% failure to fully read what i wrote and 50% deliberate misconstruction, or just 100% failure to fully read.
"How can you bring up a 'geological timespan' when you only refer to data a few hundred years back and at choice 'interglacial periods'?"
I'm not sure where you got this. I said that in the past "It varied from around 200 ppm during ice ages to 300 ppm during interglacial periods." Those records span hundreds of thousands of years. Then i cited the value from the mid 19th century, which is the point at which the measured values started to rapidly diverge from the patterns they followed in the past.
"Your other points are just plain wrong.
No, the changes are not unprecedented. Earth has been hotter or colder than you have ever seen and more so than any model predicts. Life flourished."
That's clearly a failure to read. What i said was "First of all, it is mostly unprecedented if you take a look at the timespan over which it is occurring." I then went on to show how the values over the last 200 years have changed much more rapidly than they have in the past. To repeat, i never denied that it has been hotter and colder in the past than it is now, nor will i deny that life as a whole did fine during those periods. I'm just pointing out that conditions seem to be changing far faster now than they ever have in the past. It's not clear that most species can adapt to such a rapid change, and it's not clear that humans would be happy in the world that resulted from those rapid changes.
"Political action is not biological adaptation.
Economic action is not biological adaptation.
Life must adapt - not your lifestyle."
You never specified biological adaption. You just said "Life adapts or GTFOs." Why does the adaption have to be biological? Many species take actions to adapt the environment to themselves. They build nests, they build dams, they change the environment they find themselves in to make it more suited to themselves. Humans are certainly the most extreme example of this, but all the traits that allow us to organize ourselves, make plans and carry out actions using technology are all traits that arose through perfectly natural circumstances.
I think it behooves us to be one of the species that adapts our world in beneficial ways, rather than one of the species that pays no attention to the actions they take (figuratively speaking) and suffers from the consequences. (Although to be perfectly fair i presume all species are a mix of the two factors, but it's still better that we personally lean as far towards the beneficial side as possible.)
Would you argue that sewers and sewage treatment plants are somehow cheating because they're politically and economically motivated projects rather than just dealing with tons of sewage "naturally"? If we have a problem, something that adversely affects our lives, we should solve it in the most effective method possible, not stick to some arcane rules about what's "fair" or "natural" or not.
"the accuracy of ice core samples is terrible - and still global warming nutjobs have to obfuscate and cherry pick that data."
This would be a fair point, if it's true, in fact it's rather the key point. If ice cores are accurate then you can't deny anything i said about the rapidity of the changes. If the ice cores are entirely inaccurate then nothing i said about the speed of those changes holds up. I'm not sure how we could debate that particular issue since i presume neither one of us are experts in the field (at least i sure know i'm not.) I could ask my glaciologist friend if they know any details about the subject, but i'm not sure if it's something they've focused on.
"The legislation and fear mongering is completely COUNTER to the oil companies' current practices."
You were the one who said "As always, follow the money." originally. That sounded stupid to me because economically the ones with the biggest
The short answer is that we do have natural oil spills in the ocean. It's at a comparatively small amounts leaking through indirect cracks spread over wide areas and over long periods of time, so nature is able to adapt to it. That's as opposed to a giant hole drilled directly into the oil field allowing it to gush out at a rapid rate in a very small area. Believe it or not concentration and/or intensity of something often makes a big different on the effect it has. Take a look at little kids setting insects on fire with magnifying glasses. Sunlight is natural, so it can't be hurting the insects, right?
Okay, the "correlation is not causation" loons have reached a new plateau of insanity. As far as i can tell there is neither correlation nor causation in the statistical sense involved here. There is an easily verified claim that the netbook market is currently larger than the iPad market, and there is an impossible to prove (except with the passage of time of course) but entirely reasonable belief that that will continue to be the case in the future. So where is the supposed correlation that is being incorrectly claimed to indicate a causation?
"'* (ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.'
Most of the increase, sure. But how much of the total percentage? The impact the rest of nature has astronomically outstrips the impact humans alone have."
False. The impact the rest of nature has is, or at least was, mostly balanced. It varied from around 200 ppm during ice ages to 300 ppm during interglacial periods. Ice cores indicate it was at about 260-280 ppm in the middle of the 19th century. It is now at 380-390 ppm and rising by 2 ppm per year, or a little over 0.5%. Over a geological timespan that is _huge_ and entirely swamps out all natural cycles we're aware of currently. (If it didn't, those natural cycles would have prevented it from rising much above 300 ppm.) I tried to do some math awhile ago given the amount of fossil fuels we burn every year and calculated that ought to equal an increase of a little over 3 ppm per year. Perhaps i didn't do the math exactly right, or perhaps not all the carbon is making it into the atmosphere, or maybe the biosphere is trying to compensate but not able to fully do so.
"These changes are only 'unprecedented' if you describe 'modern times' as spanning only the last few centuries. The planet has undergone more severe changes than any doomsayer has predicted - life, including human life, has done nothing but flourish. If species X suffers, so be it. If species X happens to be humans, then so be it. Life adapts or GTFOs."
First of all, it is mostly unprecedented if you take a look at the timespan over which it is occurring. The change from 200 ppm to 300 ppm usually takes place over tens of thousands of years. We've seen an increase approximately equal to that amount just over the last 200 years.
Second of all, "Life adapts or GTFOs." Exactly. What part of realizing your actions have negative consequences and adjusting your actions to avoid those consequences isn't "adapting"? Yet when some people say we ought to adapt you're apparently telling them to STFU and stick with the status quo. The universe certainly won't care if species X suffers, but i'm pretty interested in making sure my species isn't species X.
"As always, follow the money."
You mean like the oil corporations that make billions in profit per year, would suffer from a switch to other fuels, and fund studies and lobby groups to prove that global warming is false? (BP: $240 billion revenue, net $16 billion. ExxonMobil $310 B, net $19 B. Royal Dutch Shell $278 B revenue, $19 B net. Chevron $273 B, $23 B net.) Who do you propose is offering more money than they are to prove that global warming is true?
Hey kids, economics and facts can be fun! Try them! The price of something is heavily dependent on supply and demand. If the demand for oil goes down, say because solar power is ubiquitous as the grandparent poster theorized, but the supply remains the same, then the price will go down. If solar becomes cheap enough (definitely a big "if") then the price of pumping and shipping oil over from Saudi Arabia will be higher than just producing the energy locally. 260 billion barrels of oil at nothing per barrel is... let me do the math here. Nothing and nothing, carry the nothing... So how would time not be running out for them under that scenario?
I'm not a big fan of the theory that solar will actually get _that_ cheap, but let's not gloss over the glaring facts of what would happen if it did.
I haven't had much of a chance to play around with it, but it looks like it still suffers from all of the "problems" (ie things i don't like) that i've complained about before.
In particular, it's still lacking a lot of options that i think ought to be available, like making new tabs open at the end of the list, having a minimum size that tabs can shrink to and a scrollable tab bar, having a drop-down list of all open tabs, and the ability to move the tab bar below the rest of the toolbars. Which is mostly just a list of all the fixes that the Firefox browser has already introduced. There's no shame in benefiting from the experience of those who have come before if you're unable to think of a way to improve the interface yourself.
Obviously not everyone wants those features, which is why the should be options and not defaults, but i think enough people do that it _is_ worth making them options. Unfortunately Google's view towards user customability remains... unencouraging at best. (Or, IMHO, "stupidly wrong.") Luckily _some_ of those changes can be implemented by extensions, but not all of them.
Also, i'd like to point out that the Expert Reviews version used really poor examples for their #1 case that computers which are just left on will develop intelligence. V'ger didn't develop intelligence on its own, the original primitive computer was massively upgraded and reprogrammed by some aliens who found it, it wasn't just "left on." In Skynet's case the basic computer was powerful enough to develop sentience and did so almost immediately after being turned on, there was no "just leave it on long enough" involved. The WarGames example from the cracked article was better because it didn't show any signs of intelligence immediately after being turned on, and it involved completely understandable and by now quite outdated technology that clearly would have a hard time opening a modern webpage, much less developing intelligence.
Whether or not the price of my internet connection goes up or not if i subscribe to a cloud computing CPU service is entirely irrelevant to the independent price of said CPU service, which as far as i can tell what was originally being put forth as costing $100-$150 a month all by itself.
Furthermore the fact that you _can_ buy a cheap PC of your own to do your processing locally is exactly the reason why cloud computing couldn't get too expensive. If it couldn't compete with purchasing your own CPU no one would buy into it. The reason internet stays relatively expensive is because there _aren't_ any easy alternatives. However if you could buy a "reasonable" amount of cloud computing for $10 a month it would actually be competitive with having your own PC. Prices in the $10-50 range might be considered reasonable by some people because of the convenience of mobility. If there was actually a _reliable_ service that combined "unlimited" internet _and_ CPU for $100 a month i could see a lot of people going for that. A lot of people are already paying for close to that much when you consider both home and mobile internet. And a lot of those people would see the convenience of consolidating down to a single bill and a single mobile device that was just as powerful and versatile as a home PC to be well worth it.
I did a little quick math, and if the corporation running such an enterprise could buy powerful computers in bulk for $300 each, and if the average customer used 2 hour units of CPU power per day and each computer was able to provide 16 hour units per day (i'm assuming 8 hours of reduced non-peak usage) then the cost per person would be $37.50. If each server lasted an average of three years that would be a hardware cost of $12.50 per customer per year. Of course there would be other costs on top of the hardware, but i think it shows that the basic idea isn't entirely unfeasible.
I'm not saying this is how things will go, and i'm certainly not saying this is how i want things to go, but arguing that "of course" it would be insanely expensive because internet is somewhat expensive is just dumb.
I used a ridiculous counter-example as illustration because your original example was also ridiculous. I pay about $40 a month for my internet service so $100-$150/month is nowhere near the same thing.
Yep, that's going to work great. Instead of buying a white-box PC for $400-600 and using it for 3-5 years before upgrading, we'll just use cloud-based computing for $1.00-1.50 per month. So much more economical.
For an encore, i'll create a comment from 1970 "proving" that a theoretical home video industry is doomed, since tapes would clearly cost $50 each as compared to $3 for a movie ticket. You can prove anything you want with completely made up numbers.
What you're describing will end when/if we get the kind of technology described in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. I agree with you about the advantage of having a full-blown setup at home, but the value of that will diminish when you've got contacts (or glasses for the more squeamish amongst us i suppose) that can display as many screens as you want wherever you are.
And if cloud computing takes off (which is an even bigger "if" in my opinion) it won't matter where your "main" computer is, or perhaps not even if that computer is owned by you at all. If all your personal data is handled by your mobile devices and the heavy lifting if provided by the cloud, then desktops may get replaced by cheap, small margin, mass produced server farm CPUs which are bought by corporations which then rent out the computing power.
(Of course said corporations will then sell "unlimited use" monthly contracts but then throttle your connection if you go over 5 teraflops.)
It's kind of sad that apparently one of our more intelligent congresscritters, one who's willing to speak out for consumer rights at least (no matter how silly this case may actually be according to some people) "started out" as a comedian. But i guess if you're using lifetime politicians as a baseline...
Shadow of the Colossus, was also incredible but it did not have the emotional impact of ICO. However Shadow of the Colossus remains one of the most visually epic games to date, with a very insightful story... it misses the mark a bit but its there if you break it all down. Its an incredible game."
Perhaps that was the case for you, but it wasn't the case for everyone. (Which is one of the interesting things about art, not every piece moves everyone the same way.) I personally know one person (and have heard of other cases,) where they were emotionally unable to finish the game because they felt so sorry for the Colossi(?) they were killing.
EA _used_ to be evil. They've actually reformed a lot, partially through lawsuits (the EA Spouse thing) and partly through the actions of their new CEO John Riccitiello. He instituted a lot of changes when he took over, including a focus on developing new games rather than just making sequel after sequel after sequel. Unfortunately the game buying public has responded by... not buying the new games they've always said they wanted, which has driven down EA stock prices and puts Riccitiello at serious risk of being ousted and EA at potential risk of being acquired by someone who would probably be more willing to exploit their existing library rather than developing new ideas.
Plus, you've got to love their response to this current situation, which was reported in 1UP's and Gamasutra's articles. Since EA was supposedly part of the reason West and Zampella got fired, reporters contacted EA's "director of corporate communications" Jeff Brown, who said "We don't have the time to comment on the many lawsuits Activision files against its employees and creative partners."
And for my own thoughts, as i said in response to an earlier Slashdot article, if the Justice Department doesn't think a company refusing to hire someone who previously worked at a competitor is legal, my gut feeling is that they won't look too kindly on a company firing someone for talking to a competitor about a possible job either. Of course i am not a lawyer, so we'll have to wait to see if Activision is actually as screwed as i think they probably are.
Yeah, that's very true. But i suspect that if they made that the official reason for the firing, and the employee was willing to go through the legal system (often a big "if" there) then the Justice Department would not look kindly upon such a tactic. I am obviously not a lawyer though. Of course that seems to be exactly what Activision has done, and clearly the people in question have already proved they're willing to go through the legal system, so we should find out what lawyers (and judges, and possibly juries) actually think about it pretty soon now.
Their supposed crime? Interviewing with EA for a job.
The "supposed" part should be doubly emphasized. First of all, because so far at least Activision hasn't actually provided any proof that the studio heads were actually doing that. Second of all, because if the Justice Department thinks refusing to hire people because the worked for a competitor is illegal, how are they going to respond to a policy of firing any employees that are suspected of talking to a competitor about a job? Presuming no actual trade secrets were being shared Activision my be setting _themselves_ up for further lawsuits or investigations. Everyone knows that if your current company finds out that you're shopping around for a new job that there might be consequences, but most companies aren't stupid enough to announce in a legal document that it was a direct response intended as a punishment for "misbehaving" employees.
I thought that everyone started out with pretty much zero gut bacteria and acquire them based on what they eat. (And sometimes people lose all their gut bacteria from various medical treatments and have to work to restore them.)
So the japanese end up with the bacteria/enzymes do digest sushi because... they eat a lot of sushi. Presumably anyone else could develop a colony of such bacteria/enzymes by also eating a lot of sushi?
That would mean the division isn't whether you're Japanese or American or something else. It's just whether or not you eat a lot of sushi.
Officially?
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists."
Since we're talking about competing philosophies rather than the destruction of the entire company, and further given that there's been no press releases declaring the death of Woz's ideals, i'm not sure that word means what you think it means.
Love that one, her first novel I ever read. Apparently its part of a planned trilogy, don't think she's written the third one yet."
Apparently the "third one" has become "the third one and the fourth one." "Blackout" just came out in February, "All-Clear" will supposedly be out in few more months.
For those who haven't looked into the series at all, the first book, "The Doomsday Book" is squarely in the tragedy category, while the second book, "To Say Nothing of the Dog" is one of the funniest books i've ever read. (Other contenders, James Alan Gardner's "League of Peoples" series and John Scalzi's "The Android's Dream.")
It's not clear yet whether "Blackout" is more of a tragedy or a comedy. (At least it's not clear to me, i don't like hardback books so i'll be waiting for the paperback version before i read it.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Android may be a bigger market, but the iPhone I'm targeting with my app resides in a deeper pocket, my friend."
O RLY? What exactly do you mean by a "deeper pocket"? There are certainly reports showing that Android users buy less apps, but app developers keep using a variety of excuses to explain why they don't port/create their apps for Android. So which apps is it that the Android users are supposed to be buying? Personally i'd snap up the Final Fantasy games or the Colbert "the Word" app if they ever made their way to Android. Or Plants vs Zombies, and probably lots of other cool apps that i'm not even aware of yet.
Of course just to make it even more of a vicious circle, those reports now provide the perfect self-reinforcing excuse to continue not making/porting apps for Android.
Well fine! I'm gonna go build my own galaxy! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the galaxy!
I'm not sure if your response is 50% failure to fully read what i wrote and 50% deliberate misconstruction, or just 100% failure to fully read.
"How can you bring up a 'geological timespan' when you only refer to data a few hundred years back and at choice 'interglacial periods'?"
I'm not sure where you got this. I said that in the past "It varied from around 200 ppm during ice ages to 300 ppm during interglacial periods." Those records span hundreds of thousands of years. Then i cited the value from the mid 19th century, which is the point at which the measured values started to rapidly diverge from the patterns they followed in the past.
"Your other points are just plain wrong. No, the changes are not unprecedented. Earth has been hotter or colder than you have ever seen and more so than any model predicts. Life flourished."
That's clearly a failure to read. What i said was "First of all, it is mostly unprecedented if you take a look at the timespan over which it is occurring." I then went on to show how the values over the last 200 years have changed much more rapidly than they have in the past. To repeat, i never denied that it has been hotter and colder in the past than it is now, nor will i deny that life as a whole did fine during those periods. I'm just pointing out that conditions seem to be changing far faster now than they ever have in the past. It's not clear that most species can adapt to such a rapid change, and it's not clear that humans would be happy in the world that resulted from those rapid changes.
"Political action is not biological adaptation. Economic action is not biological adaptation. Life must adapt - not your lifestyle."
You never specified biological adaption. You just said "Life adapts or GTFOs." Why does the adaption have to be biological? Many species take actions to adapt the environment to themselves. They build nests, they build dams, they change the environment they find themselves in to make it more suited to themselves. Humans are certainly the most extreme example of this, but all the traits that allow us to organize ourselves, make plans and carry out actions using technology are all traits that arose through perfectly natural circumstances.
I think it behooves us to be one of the species that adapts our world in beneficial ways, rather than one of the species that pays no attention to the actions they take (figuratively speaking) and suffers from the consequences. (Although to be perfectly fair i presume all species are a mix of the two factors, but it's still better that we personally lean as far towards the beneficial side as possible.)
Would you argue that sewers and sewage treatment plants are somehow cheating because they're politically and economically motivated projects rather than just dealing with tons of sewage "naturally"? If we have a problem, something that adversely affects our lives, we should solve it in the most effective method possible, not stick to some arcane rules about what's "fair" or "natural" or not.
"the accuracy of ice core samples is terrible - and still global warming nutjobs have to obfuscate and cherry pick that data."
This would be a fair point, if it's true, in fact it's rather the key point. If ice cores are accurate then you can't deny anything i said about the rapidity of the changes. If the ice cores are entirely inaccurate then nothing i said about the speed of those changes holds up. I'm not sure how we could debate that particular issue since i presume neither one of us are experts in the field (at least i sure know i'm not.) I could ask my glaciologist friend if they know any details about the subject, but i'm not sure if it's something they've focused on.
"The legislation and fear mongering is completely COUNTER to the oil companies' current practices."
You were the one who said "As always, follow the money." originally. That sounded stupid to me because economically the ones with the biggest
The short answer is that we do have natural oil spills in the ocean. It's at a comparatively small amounts leaking through indirect cracks spread over wide areas and over long periods of time, so nature is able to adapt to it. That's as opposed to a giant hole drilled directly into the oil field allowing it to gush out at a rapid rate in a very small area. Believe it or not concentration and/or intensity of something often makes a big different on the effect it has. Take a look at little kids setting insects on fire with magnifying glasses. Sunlight is natural, so it can't be hurting the insects, right?
Okay, the "correlation is not causation" loons have reached a new plateau of insanity. As far as i can tell there is neither correlation nor causation in the statistical sense involved here. There is an easily verified claim that the netbook market is currently larger than the iPad market, and there is an impossible to prove (except with the passage of time of course) but entirely reasonable belief that that will continue to be the case in the future. So where is the supposed correlation that is being incorrectly claimed to indicate a causation?
"'* (ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.'
Most of the increase, sure. But how much of the total percentage? The impact the rest of nature has astronomically outstrips the impact humans alone have."
False. The impact the rest of nature has is, or at least was, mostly balanced. It varied from around 200 ppm during ice ages to 300 ppm during interglacial periods. Ice cores indicate it was at about 260-280 ppm in the middle of the 19th century. It is now at 380-390 ppm and rising by 2 ppm per year, or a little over 0.5%. Over a geological timespan that is _huge_ and entirely swamps out all natural cycles we're aware of currently. (If it didn't, those natural cycles would have prevented it from rising much above 300 ppm.) I tried to do some math awhile ago given the amount of fossil fuels we burn every year and calculated that ought to equal an increase of a little over 3 ppm per year. Perhaps i didn't do the math exactly right, or perhaps not all the carbon is making it into the atmosphere, or maybe the biosphere is trying to compensate but not able to fully do so.
"These changes are only 'unprecedented' if you describe 'modern times' as spanning only the last few centuries. The planet has undergone more severe changes than any doomsayer has predicted - life, including human life, has done nothing but flourish. If species X suffers, so be it. If species X happens to be humans, then so be it. Life adapts or GTFOs."
First of all, it is mostly unprecedented if you take a look at the timespan over which it is occurring. The change from 200 ppm to 300 ppm usually takes place over tens of thousands of years. We've seen an increase approximately equal to that amount just over the last 200 years.
Second of all, "Life adapts or GTFOs." Exactly. What part of realizing your actions have negative consequences and adjusting your actions to avoid those consequences isn't "adapting"? Yet when some people say we ought to adapt you're apparently telling them to STFU and stick with the status quo. The universe certainly won't care if species X suffers, but i'm pretty interested in making sure my species isn't species X.
"As always, follow the money."
You mean like the oil corporations that make billions in profit per year, would suffer from a switch to other fuels, and fund studies and lobby groups to prove that global warming is false? (BP: $240 billion revenue, net $16 billion. ExxonMobil $310 B, net $19 B. Royal Dutch Shell $278 B revenue, $19 B net. Chevron $273 B, $23 B net.) Who do you propose is offering more money than they are to prove that global warming is true?
I tried that one out for awhile, but the interface seemed way too cluttered. Luckily someone else above pointed out the Tab Menu extension, which seems like exactly what i want in that regard.
Ahh! That extension didn't exist the last time i searched for solutions, thank you!
Hey kids, economics and facts can be fun! Try them! The price of something is heavily dependent on supply and demand. If the demand for oil goes down, say because solar power is ubiquitous as the grandparent poster theorized, but the supply remains the same, then the price will go down. If solar becomes cheap enough (definitely a big "if") then the price of pumping and shipping oil over from Saudi Arabia will be higher than just producing the energy locally. 260 billion barrels of oil at nothing per barrel is... let me do the math here. Nothing and nothing, carry the nothing... So how would time not be running out for them under that scenario?
I'm not a big fan of the theory that solar will actually get _that_ cheap, but let's not gloss over the glaring facts of what would happen if it did.
I haven't had much of a chance to play around with it, but it looks like it still suffers from all of the "problems" (ie things i don't like) that i've complained about before.
In particular, it's still lacking a lot of options that i think ought to be available, like making new tabs open at the end of the list, having a minimum size that tabs can shrink to and a scrollable tab bar, having a drop-down list of all open tabs, and the ability to move the tab bar below the rest of the toolbars. Which is mostly just a list of all the fixes that the Firefox browser has already introduced. There's no shame in benefiting from the experience of those who have come before if you're unable to think of a way to improve the interface yourself.
Obviously not everyone wants those features, which is why the should be options and not defaults, but i think enough people do that it _is_ worth making them options. Unfortunately Google's view towards user customability remains... unencouraging at best. (Or, IMHO, "stupidly wrong.") Luckily _some_ of those changes can be implemented by extensions, but not all of them.
Believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date. Some day very soon, life's little Twinkie gauge is gonna go... empty.
Looks like a variation on the "5 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do" article from cracked.com.
Also, i'd like to point out that the Expert Reviews version used really poor examples for their #1 case that computers which are just left on will develop intelligence. V'ger didn't develop intelligence on its own, the original primitive computer was massively upgraded and reprogrammed by some aliens who found it, it wasn't just "left on." In Skynet's case the basic computer was powerful enough to develop sentience and did so almost immediately after being turned on, there was no "just leave it on long enough" involved. The WarGames example from the cracked article was better because it didn't show any signs of intelligence immediately after being turned on, and it involved completely understandable and by now quite outdated technology that clearly would have a hard time opening a modern webpage, much less developing intelligence.
Whether or not the price of my internet connection goes up or not if i subscribe to a cloud computing CPU service is entirely irrelevant to the independent price of said CPU service, which as far as i can tell what was originally being put forth as costing $100-$150 a month all by itself.
Furthermore the fact that you _can_ buy a cheap PC of your own to do your processing locally is exactly the reason why cloud computing couldn't get too expensive. If it couldn't compete with purchasing your own CPU no one would buy into it. The reason internet stays relatively expensive is because there _aren't_ any easy alternatives. However if you could buy a "reasonable" amount of cloud computing for $10 a month it would actually be competitive with having your own PC. Prices in the $10-50 range might be considered reasonable by some people because of the convenience of mobility. If there was actually a _reliable_ service that combined "unlimited" internet _and_ CPU for $100 a month i could see a lot of people going for that. A lot of people are already paying for close to that much when you consider both home and mobile internet. And a lot of those people would see the convenience of consolidating down to a single bill and a single mobile device that was just as powerful and versatile as a home PC to be well worth it.
I did a little quick math, and if the corporation running such an enterprise could buy powerful computers in bulk for $300 each, and if the average customer used 2 hour units of CPU power per day and each computer was able to provide 16 hour units per day (i'm assuming 8 hours of reduced non-peak usage) then the cost per person would be $37.50. If each server lasted an average of three years that would be a hardware cost of $12.50 per customer per year. Of course there would be other costs on top of the hardware, but i think it shows that the basic idea isn't entirely unfeasible.
I'm not saying this is how things will go, and i'm certainly not saying this is how i want things to go, but arguing that "of course" it would be insanely expensive because internet is somewhat expensive is just dumb.
I used a ridiculous counter-example as illustration because your original example was also ridiculous. I pay about $40 a month for my internet service so $100-$150/month is nowhere near the same thing.
Yep, that's going to work great. Instead of buying a white-box PC for $400-600 and using it for 3-5 years before upgrading, we'll just use cloud-based computing for $1.00-1.50 per month. So much more economical.
For an encore, i'll create a comment from 1970 "proving" that a theoretical home video industry is doomed, since tapes would clearly cost $50 each as compared to $3 for a movie ticket. You can prove anything you want with completely made up numbers.
What you're describing will end when/if we get the kind of technology described in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. I agree with you about the advantage of having a full-blown setup at home, but the value of that will diminish when you've got contacts (or glasses for the more squeamish amongst us i suppose) that can display as many screens as you want wherever you are.
And if cloud computing takes off (which is an even bigger "if" in my opinion) it won't matter where your "main" computer is, or perhaps not even if that computer is owned by you at all. If all your personal data is handled by your mobile devices and the heavy lifting if provided by the cloud, then desktops may get replaced by cheap, small margin, mass produced server farm CPUs which are bought by corporations which then rent out the computing power.
(Of course said corporations will then sell "unlimited use" monthly contracts but then throttle your connection if you go over 5 teraflops.)
It's kind of sad that apparently one of our more intelligent congresscritters, one who's willing to speak out for consumer rights at least (no matter how silly this case may actually be according to some people) "started out" as a comedian. But i guess if you're using lifetime politicians as a baseline...
"ICO is art.
Shadow of the Colossus, was also incredible but it did not have the emotional impact of ICO. However Shadow of the Colossus remains one of the most visually epic games to date, with a very insightful story... it misses the mark a bit but its there if you break it all down. Its an incredible game."
Perhaps that was the case for you, but it wasn't the case for everyone. (Which is one of the interesting things about art, not every piece moves everyone the same way.) I personally know one person (and have heard of other cases,) where they were emotionally unable to finish the game because they felt so sorry for the Colossi(?) they were killing.
EA _used_ to be evil. They've actually reformed a lot, partially through lawsuits (the EA Spouse thing) and partly through the actions of their new CEO John Riccitiello. He instituted a lot of changes when he took over, including a focus on developing new games rather than just making sequel after sequel after sequel. Unfortunately the game buying public has responded by... not buying the new games they've always said they wanted, which has driven down EA stock prices and puts Riccitiello at serious risk of being ousted and EA at potential risk of being acquired by someone who would probably be more willing to exploit their existing library rather than developing new ideas.
Plus, you've got to love their response to this current situation, which was reported in 1UP's and Gamasutra's articles. Since EA was supposedly part of the reason West and Zampella got fired, reporters contacted EA's "director of corporate communications" Jeff Brown, who said "We don't have the time to comment on the many lawsuits Activision files against its employees and creative partners."
And for my own thoughts, as i said in response to an earlier Slashdot article, if the Justice Department doesn't think a company refusing to hire someone who previously worked at a competitor is legal, my gut feeling is that they won't look too kindly on a company firing someone for talking to a competitor about a possible job either. Of course i am not a lawyer, so we'll have to wait to see if Activision is actually as screwed as i think they probably are.
Yeah, that's very true. But i suspect that if they made that the official reason for the firing, and the employee was willing to go through the legal system (often a big "if" there) then the Justice Department would not look kindly upon such a tactic. I am obviously not a lawyer though. Of course that seems to be exactly what Activision has done, and clearly the people in question have already proved they're willing to go through the legal system, so we should find out what lawyers (and judges, and possibly juries) actually think about it pretty soon now.
This does not bode well for Activision, who are counter-suing the former executives of Infinity Ward for being "insubordinate [...] self-serving schemers."
Their supposed crime? Interviewing with EA for a job.
The "supposed" part should be doubly emphasized. First of all, because so far at least Activision hasn't actually provided any proof that the studio heads were actually doing that. Second of all, because if the Justice Department thinks refusing to hire people because the worked for a competitor is illegal, how are they going to respond to a policy of firing any employees that are suspected of talking to a competitor about a job? Presuming no actual trade secrets were being shared Activision my be setting _themselves_ up for further lawsuits or investigations. Everyone knows that if your current company finds out that you're shopping around for a new job that there might be consequences, but most companies aren't stupid enough to announce in a legal document that it was a direct response intended as a punishment for "misbehaving" employees.
Well as long as we're mutilating old adages, Hindsight is 100/50: You always think you've learned something, but half the time you're wrong.
I thought that everyone started out with pretty much zero gut bacteria and acquire them based on what they eat. (And sometimes people lose all their gut bacteria from various medical treatments and have to work to restore them.)
So the japanese end up with the bacteria/enzymes do digest sushi because... they eat a lot of sushi. Presumably anyone else could develop a colony of such bacteria/enzymes by also eating a lot of sushi?
That would mean the division isn't whether you're Japanese or American or something else. It's just whether or not you eat a lot of sushi.
"The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists."
Since we're talking about competing philosophies rather than the destruction of the entire company, and further given that there's been no press releases declaring the death of Woz's ideals, i'm not sure that word means what you think it means.
"'To Say Nothing Of The Dog'
Love that one, her first novel I ever read. Apparently its part of a planned trilogy, don't think she's written the third one yet."
Apparently the "third one" has become "the third one and the fourth one." "Blackout" just came out in February, "All-Clear" will supposedly be out in few more months.
For those who haven't looked into the series at all, the first book, "The Doomsday Book" is squarely in the tragedy category, while the second book, "To Say Nothing of the Dog" is one of the funniest books i've ever read. (Other contenders, James Alan Gardner's "League of Peoples" series and John Scalzi's "The Android's Dream.")
It's not clear yet whether "Blackout" is more of a tragedy or a comedy. (At least it's not clear to me, i don't like hardback books so i'll be waiting for the paperback version before i read it.)