For me it never froze (granted I didn't play it "all day long") but it took forever to load. I really wasn't interested in wasting my time standing at the machine waiting 5 minutes for a shitty demo to load.
Oh, that? Yeah, the long load times were intentional too. Just to let people's racing pulse and knotted muscles recover between each thrilling game of Destructoid(TM).
Huh? Do you have a link to back that up? I've gotten almost all my PS2 games used, so having that option taken away would be a showstopper for me buying a PS3, not just until they're easier to get, but ever.
I don't see how GPS would work even as well as the cellphone signal itself. GPS cannot blast through buildings like that cell tower 300m away can, so
it doesn't work indoors. It probably won't even work from inside your pocket. From my experience it won't work if the unit is turned upside-down. It also consumes fairly substantial power.
If you want reliability got to WalMart and get a Casio G-Shock.
To stand out from the crowds, you have to do something other people won't do, something dumb, like pierce your tongue or pay thousands for a hand-made wristwatch.
Is Linux really falling behind Windows in terms of VMWare support? The blurb only mentioned drag and drop. The things you mentioned:
IME changing resolutions on Linux is likely to crash or be unavailable even if you're NOT in a VM. It requires the RandR extention which is relatively recent and not widely well supported. Still I'm disappointed if the VMWare X driver doesn't do it.
Copy and paste between a Linux host and a Windows guest works for me. This of course with all the usual caveats for copy and paste on Linux - there's a mish-mash of ways to do it so many apps can't copy and paste to each other. Best bet is to copy from app A into an xterm then into app B. (And no I'm not saying having to do that is OK).
Linux doesn't have any widely accepted mechanism for drag and drop, so again the likely reason it doesn't work under virtualization is because it seldom works anyways.
Personally, I'd *much* rather listen to cellphone chatter than high-pitched informationless shrieking.
Your choice is not between either a crying baby or a cellphone. It's between a crying baby, or a crying baby and a dozen cellphone users shouting to be heard over the baby, the engines, and each other.
If you want a single package-management system... stick with one Linux distro.
This doesn't work because it moves the burden of packaging onto distro maintainers. This model has proven infeasible, since no distro in existence has even a significant fraction of all the linux software in it, not to mention reasonably up to date. If there were one de-facto standard package type, and vastly fewer inter-package dependencies, then developers could package their programs themselves.
Some people don't even want binary packages, so how can you expect there to be just one type?
So let's all do ebuilds. I've used them all and I don't care which wins.
Also, about the dependency system: how much wasted space will a Windows install contain when every little program has its own libraries? With this dependency system, every one can share the same library, rather than having two only a minor revision apart stored like in Windows.
It's a horrible tradeoff. Wasting hours of time trying to install a package because it's not in your distro, or using out-of-date software, or being unable to use a program alltogether, just to save a few megabytes. I don't care if it's a few hundred megabytes, it's not worth it.
In fact, if two programs use a library to communicate, they'll work better if they share the same version; just look at D-Bus.
There are a few such instances, but I think over 95% of package sharing is a huge waste of effort in return for a couple cents worth of disk space. The status quo simply doesn't work well enough.
You talk about having this "personal agent" doing comparison shopping for you, well Wal-mart themselves ALREADY DOES THAT--they have their own "business intelligence" software that takes data from ALL their suppliers, in a format mandated by wal-mart to their suppliers, and takes inventory data from ALL their stores and churns through it and finds out the lowest cost suppliers for each category, which stores move which merchandise the best, etc, etc. Wal-mart takes that data and uses it to it maximum potential--ruthlessly.
Does that sound like convergence, or more like an industry dominated by a single giant? Can competing retailers (including - or especially - small ones) tap into the same supplier information systems and make use of it to their best advantage? That is where we need to be.
I will tell you one reason to focus on B2C, because that is the true test of whether stovepiping has been cured. Consumers are the last to receive access, so if they can, everybody can. The greatest breakthrough of the Internet is not that the same establishments can communicate more efficiently, but that a much greater pool of suppliers now has access to markets. E.g. bloggers competing with newspapers, and companies with tiny marketing budgets making sales across the nation.
I realize some things are slowly opening up. I only hope you are right, and all the information fiefdoms are eventualy overthrown. The economy would be so much more efficient. But to me the progress seems frustratingly slow.
Debian is known to have an insane number of packages. Perhaps some culling is in order.
IMO, the value of a distribution is almost nothing but the number of supported packages, and how up-to-date they are. (Granted there is tension between these two). Even gentoo is struggling, as seemingly half the time, the package I want to install is masked.
Linux would be so much better if there were a single de-facto package management system, and vastly fewer dependencies between packages. The license is free! If you want to depend on something, just dump the code into your package. The few megabytes of drive space conserved isn't even nearly worth the hours of hunting for packages and resolving dependencies between them.
And don't say it's as easy as yum/apt-get/emerge xxx. Sometimes it is, but only in the best case. Just as often there is no package for the software you want, or it's hopelessly outdated, or it uses a different version of libC from the other 4999 packages installed. All of these problems are caused or aggravated by the hunge number of inter-package dependencies.
Is it legal for them to read snail mail at the post office?
Are you joking? I've woken up in the Soviet Union. No, the police cannot steam open your mail without a warrant. No, they cannot tap your phone without a warrant. (Until recently of course). Why we have given up on these principles and accepted universal wiretapping for newer technologies, I cannot imagine.
In my career I've seen companies spend a GREAT DEAL of time and money trying to "make their data and services available to one another". They don't do this because it is a fad--they do it because they HAVE to to stay competitive and there is a very convincing cost-benefit-analysis argument to do so. There is a VERY large industry in systems integration and EDI (electronic data interchange). Companies have spent millions on systems based upon SAP and IBM WebSphere and the like to do EXACTLY what you day companies don't want to do!
You're missing the point. Of course companies exchange data electronically, and pay good money to set up specific interchanges of information. But the vision of the semantic web and web services is quite different: that information and services will be widely available, in widely adopted formats, so that they can be harnessed together in unforeseen ways to create new applications almost in near-real time. The fact that companies still pay millions to SAP and IBM for system integration on a case-by-case basis is a strong counter argument to your assertion that this vision is already realized. If it were, I could sit at home and have my personal software agent fulfill my shopping list by querying the inventories and prices of local retailers and Internet merchants. For budget reporting I could accrue a detailed itemized list of every single item I buy at the grocery store, Target, or through online payment, grouped into categories like "food" and sub-categories like "junkfood." All this information is already recorded, but only in disparate systems and formats. Wal-Mart (for instance) tracks this sort of information closely, yet you'll be kicked out of their store if you so much as go into a store and write down the prices of goods on the shelves. The airline industry is constantly bucking legislation requiring them to state upfront the simple total price of a ticket. Same for cell phone companies. The fact is, there is strong resistance to eliminating many sources of market friction.
This isn't about deprecating SOAP in favor of something simpler, is it? Sounds to me like google wants people to visit their website to use their services. Which, once again, proves why the semantic web and web services will never fly. Companies don't want to make their data and services available to each other.
Now that I have a cell phone with a good phonebook, I no longer memorize phone numbers. (I remember phone numbers I called 10 years ago, but I don't remember phone numbers I now call all the time. There's no need.)
Here's the difference, though: even though the GPS tells you what to do, you still have to do it yourself. You still have to make each turn and experience the trip, same as before. It's not like mental vs. calculator arithmetic where you can bypass the whole experience. I'm not saying what you're predicting won't happen, but I think it warrants investigation.
I'm surprised they even bothered if it's not a longitudinal study. "This just in, basketball makes you taller. Those who give up on basketball don't develop legs as long as those who stay with it throughout professional basketball careers."
The ultimate would be to compare the same population of cabbies vs. bus drivers (control group) through their entire careers. Obviously that'd be a long-term study, and it will become impossible when "the Knowledge" is obsoleted by GPS mapping software.
I wouldn't assume GPS will have any effect. Who knows, maybe people will learn the city faster and more thoroughly by repeatedly seeing themselves move through a computer-generated map.
There seems to be an assumption that people won't learn what they don't "have to" learn (I've heard this argument against PDAs too). But maybe people just learn what they're repeatedly exposed to, or things with emotional connections. Technology may or may not interfere with that. It's not a question I would guess at the answer without some evidence either way.
Unfortunately for Garry Kasparov, dealing with Vladimir Putin differs sharply from simply playing a chess game. In chess, there is a set of rules respected by both players. The rules dictate the means of determining a winner.
Kasparov will not be using his chess skills, but rather trading on the notoriety as a chess grandmaster. In a democracy, perhaps the best cure for the KGB authoritarian-style ruler is Russia's version of Arnold Schwarzenegger - a dilettante cashing in on fame and fortune.
I believe that Morse Code is still good to learn, much like ocean-goers could benefit from learning celestial navigation techniques even though GPS has all but obliterated the need.
I can imagine situations where celestial navigation would work even if GPS would not (though I suspect the reverse is more often the case, due to clouds, mist, and daylight), but it's harder for me to see the value of morse code radio. It's not a different medium, just a different encoding of our alphabet.
Besides, the fact that something can help terrorists should NOT prevent it, unless the benefit to them outweighs the benefit to the rest of us. Roads, electricity, phones, Internet, cars... all are crucial terrorist tools, so what?
Which benchmark are you talking about? It looks to me like the 8 core Xeon slaughtered everything. It even won for least power to complete a job, while doing it in half the time. The Opteron only gained the upper hand in the "power at idle" test.
This is an idea whose implementation I've been waiting on for a long time.
I would love to have a closet in my house with a computer 'core'. Something that can be large enough to have enough cpus and hard drives to serve a family with thin clients.
What's stopping that now? IMHO it's lack of demand. For the home especially, thin clients just don't have enough to put them above a few laptops plus LaCie drive for backups.
As far as broadcasts over the Internet done in a technically sensible way, old-timers may remember the MBONE initiative. This would have distributed broadcast video via IP Multicast.
Who's talking about broadcasts over the Internet? That's only useful for live events. The Internet is all about on-demand. If you want to broadcast the Super Bowl, use a satellite.
"Somebody?" I pay every month, don't you? Or were you hoping Comcast would stop charging you after a couple years when they've recouped their investment in your share of the infrastructure?
Banwdith gets cheaper and cheaper. Unless ISPs are planning on radically dropping their prices, they'd better be planning on continued bandwidth upgrades.
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Huh? Do you have a link to back that up? I've gotten almost all my PS2 games used, so having that option taken away would be a showstopper for me buying a PS3, not just until they're easier to get, but ever.
I don't see how GPS would work even as well as the cellphone signal itself. GPS cannot blast through buildings like that cell tower 300m away can, so it doesn't work indoors. It probably won't even work from inside your pocket. From my experience it won't work if the unit is turned upside-down. It also consumes fairly substantial power.
To stand out from the crowds, you have to do something other people won't do, something dumb, like pierce your tongue or pay thousands for a hand-made wristwatch.
IME changing resolutions on Linux is likely to crash or be unavailable even if you're NOT in a VM. It requires the RandR extention which is relatively recent and not widely well supported. Still I'm disappointed if the VMWare X driver doesn't do it.
Copy and paste between a Linux host and a Windows guest works for me. This of course with all the usual caveats for copy and paste on Linux - there's a mish-mash of ways to do it so many apps can't copy and paste to each other. Best bet is to copy from app A into an xterm then into app B. (And no I'm not saying having to do that is OK).
Linux doesn't have any widely accepted mechanism for drag and drop, so again the likely reason it doesn't work under virtualization is because it seldom works anyways.
I will tell you one reason to focus on B2C, because that is the true test of whether stovepiping has been cured. Consumers are the last to receive access, so if they can, everybody can. The greatest breakthrough of the Internet is not that the same establishments can communicate more efficiently, but that a much greater pool of suppliers now has access to markets. E.g. bloggers competing with newspapers, and companies with tiny marketing budgets making sales across the nation.
I realize some things are slowly opening up. I only hope you are right, and all the information fiefdoms are eventualy overthrown. The economy would be so much more efficient. But to me the progress seems frustratingly slow.
Linux would be so much better if there were a single de-facto package management system, and vastly fewer dependencies between packages. The license is free! If you want to depend on something, just dump the code into your package. The few megabytes of drive space conserved isn't even nearly worth the hours of hunting for packages and resolving dependencies between them.
And don't say it's as easy as yum/apt-get/emerge xxx. Sometimes it is, but only in the best case. Just as often there is no package for the software you want, or it's hopelessly outdated, or it uses a different version of libC from the other 4999 packages installed. All of these problems are caused or aggravated by the hunge number of inter-package dependencies.
This isn't about deprecating SOAP in favor of something simpler, is it? Sounds to me like google wants people to visit their website to use their services. Which, once again, proves why the semantic web and web services will never fly. Companies don't want to make their data and services available to each other.
I'm surprised they even bothered if it's not a longitudinal study. "This just in, basketball makes you taller. Those who give up on basketball don't develop legs as long as those who stay with it throughout professional basketball careers."
There seems to be an assumption that people won't learn what they don't "have to" learn (I've heard this argument against PDAs too). But maybe people just learn what they're repeatedly exposed to, or things with emotional connections. Technology may or may not interfere with that. It's not a question I would guess at the answer without some evidence either way.
The Executive branch has forgotten it can't make laws.
Besides, the fact that something can help terrorists should NOT prevent it, unless the benefit to them outweighs the benefit to the rest of us. Roads, electricity, phones, Internet, cars... all are crucial terrorist tools, so what?
Which benchmark are you talking about? It looks to me like the 8 core Xeon slaughtered everything. It even won for least power to complete a job, while doing it in half the time. The Opteron only gained the upper hand in the "power at idle" test.
Banwdith gets cheaper and cheaper. Unless ISPs are planning on radically dropping their prices, they'd better be planning on continued bandwidth upgrades.