For instance, you get co2 credit for planting new forests while chopping down old growth. Problem is that planting new forests releases TONS of CO2 that the trees planted will take hundreds of years to process. Couple that with the massive economic (1 Trillion or more) cost that could be spent on something like bringing potable water to everybody on earth, and it sounds like a losing deal.
My wife has in her repertoire of amazing skills the ability to play tekken as long as she wants for $0.50. We will go to an arcade like Dave and Busters where a line of 20 asian teenagers are playing, and she will sit there and destroy all comers. She only knows a couple of moves for maybe two characters, but I have seen her lose only once, when she lost a contact.
Quite eloquent, and 100% right. MMOGs have been constructed in a way that not only hardcore gamers are willing to pay for them, but that they are not fun unless you spend countless hours chopping up rats with a "+2 board with rusty nail" just to build up your stats.
The two hours/week that I get to play games are not going to be spent so that some 10 year old with nothing to do in the summer and a level 99 "ultimate fiery dragon shotgun of death" can mow me down when I walk out of the gate, board in hand.
The scientific consensus you refer to is that "the earth is getting warmer" not "man's actions are warming the earth." No scientist can say for 100% fact that man is warming the earth, but we seem a likely candidate. The problem is that controlled experiments are impossible in complex systems. (I'm a geographer) There is no smoking gun, no bloody glove, and there probably never will be. it sure seems like we're doing it, but it's far from a closed case.
The "debate" at this point is what to do about it. The Kyoto protocol is a well intentioned document that just missed the mark. For instance, countries can get additional CO2 credit for planting forests. The problem is that planting trees releases TONS of CO2. No protection is afforded for old-growth forests. (the big CO2 sinks) and the cost of implementation would be asolutely massive. Some estimates claim 750 billion, some double that. For that price you could get fresh running water to every man, woman, and child on earth. Where are your priorities?
Sure there is a lot of money being tossed around by big energy, but your misinformation is no better than theirs.
I can't think of the exact agreement, but nuclear material is not allowed in orbit because satellites must be deorbited and could cause massive contamination. More likely the secret espionage devices are about the size of a nickel and run for years.
Why is this funny? Why does a glorified text viewer have to become the subject of a holy war? The web is about the content, not how you view the content. Who the heck cares what browser you use so long as it does what it gets you to the content without a hassle.
Ok, stop laughing. The federal government is a very interesting (if sometimes frustrating) place to learn a LOT about computing in the "real world." I talk to all too many people that know how to do things in homogenous, clean environments, but that's not how enterprise systems are. You get to use interesting systems to do very interesting things.
Your average federal agency has a mish-mash of 30 year-old fortran, 20 year old COBOL, 10 year old C++, 5 year old Java, and at least a dozen system architectures from old VAX to WinXP or Solaris. You will be asked to do difficult things with insufficient resources. It forces you to either be creative and know what you're doing before you do it.
You will come out of a federal IT job as either 1) a master of the universe of technology 2)a burned out heap of cynicism.or 3)Retired with good benefits and reasonable pay.
Well, I searched #2 and found out what a blackberry is. Their brand has now grown by 0.000001%. I suppose the next step would be for me to actually see somebody using one.
Although now that I think of it I don't know if I've ever seen anybody use a mac either...:-)
Don't you? The biomass of a tomato is not made up of rocks and water. To create a tomato one needs organic material for the plant to extract and chemically recombine into a tomato. Even gravel and sand have organic materials in them, martian soil does not. Hydroponics still requires all the chemicals that the plant would normally get in the ground. Sure much of it can be recycled from waste, but there is always some loss in any system.
The algae I can see flourishing, as it is a far simpler organism that has proven that it can eat rocks. (it was the first lifeform on earth) Tomatoes are somewhat more picky.
To think that media handling capabilities are not a critical system function is ludicrious. How far do you want to take this? Should I not be able to view Jpegs or text without a third party application? Why are these any different than rendering HTML or watching video?
Sure, perhaps 5 years ago the arguement could have stood, but multimedia is right now an integral part of many applications. Millions of people like me quite literally NEED a media handling capability to do their jobs like other need notepad to do theirs. The world doesn't end at text, and neither should the an OS.
I have to agree with you to a point, but uninstalling system components is a slippery slope. Application developers need to rely 100% on certain components being available to them on all client platforms. Perhaps some of the higher level components could go, but a developers job is much easier when they know that EVERY user is going to be able to view XYZ object inside their application without having to write their own components that might conflict with something else.
Internet explorer is critical amongst these as it is the foundation of the MS help system. Media player is critical as consumers expect at least a basic capability to view media locally and online "out-of-the-box."
IANAFarmer, but food grows from nutrients and water. Assuming we can find or make water ther, we have to do one of two things to farm Mars
1)Take a lot of soil/hydroponic nutrients with us, or 2)Use martian "ingredients" to grow food in.
#1 would seem counterproductive as the mass of soil would be greater than the amount of food you could grow on it. That said, how do you grow anything in soil with no organic material as viking and spirit/opportunity have shown us?
No, they weren't (arent) doing "quite well" and the market forces have changed from the days when consumers were willing to be locked into a platform. Developing enterprise software is incredibly expensive, and re-writing it every few years because a new architecture is available is financial suicide.
HP didn't kill off PA-RISC because it was doing "quite well" they killed it off because they were hemmoraging money, and their customers were slowly miigrating off their proprietary solution to commodity boxes. So HP coproduces a generation of chips and make a bucket of money without having to reinvent the wheels that intel has already patented.
Ok, so it turned out to be a dud, but what killed it wasn't some fancy new shiny architecture, it was trusty ol' x86, with 20 years of platform consistency, and a clear roadmap into the future.
Ack, the flames, THEY BURN! But seriously, there are far too many architectures around to keep running. Fine, perhaps the elegant ones with technical superiority didn't triumph over the cruder general purpose, but I can't imagine being a developer still trying to support a dozen processors. There is market room for at least 3, and possibly 4 architectures out there, and the fewer there are, the more software choice there is for each as developers are forced to move to successful platforms.
that the majority of voice acting in games absolutely stinks! I mean, with some notable exceptions, (GTA Vice City, Half-life, etc) people mock voice acting, and nintendo thinks that it's so bad they don't even put it in ANY of their games!
CRTs are far from a dead business. CRT TVs still outsell all other technology TVs combined by about an order of magnitude. Computer users are still buying CRTs because 1) because they are dirt cheap with image quality far better than inexpensivve LCDs, or 2) because the image quality is FAR surpassing that of any other technology.
Thin panel CRTs have been promised for some time now, at about 5" thick with very high resolutons, and if they can do them cheap, expect CRTs to stick around for a while.
1) A flawed concept built by 2) a VERY flawed company on 3)an extremely flawed technology. This is government spending at it's best folks, and you can bet the farm that it won't work.
The part where you should be torn is that you are happy your tax dollars are being wasted.
I know someone is going to mark me as a troll, but it has to be said, Who REALLY thinks that tabbed browsing is the selling feature of FF?
I would suspect that the singular reason that anybody has every tried firefox (including myself) is the promise of security. As evidence, I point out that adoption significantly slowed, (some stats suggest reversed) since a series of security flaws required 4 releases past 1.0.
Besides, I've had tabs for 10 years, but mine can hold things other tan web pages. I call it a taskbar:-)
Going open source is a very personal decision, and forcing it down people's throat at the level of the retailer might not be a good idea, at least from the point of view of the merchant.
One possible avenue would be for him to sell something like firefox with norton suite as a security package, and make the limitations of firefox explicit to the customer. Charging a premium will buffer him from having customers think poorly of him when they realize that they can't see the dancing hamster, use their online bank, or whatever because it's not safe.
Firefox isn't going to hurt sales any, every copy of openoffice he distributes is taking food out of his kid's mouths, so don't even bother trying.
It sounds like a big number, but factor in that the average lifespan of a unit is about 2 years under average usage. If you leave it on all the time, drop that by a third. If the lifespan is supposed to be 5 years, you have 3 units per user, some will break more. I'm on my 3rd PS2, and I play MAYBE three hours/week. So if they can sell 333 million of them, and get people to replace them when they break, they can hit a billion.
It's easy to say things like this and wave the flag of digital convergence, but time has shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that (American) consumers prefer simple, function-specific devices to big clunky overcomplicated do-it-all boxes.
We like iPods, we like Cell phones, we like digital cameras, but we don't buy PDAs that do all three. Even camera-phones are tremendously underwhelming to all but tech-nerds and 14-year-old girls.
I would suggest that Nintendo is poised for a MAJOR comeback if they do the system right. They have said in no uncertain terms that the revolution is about games, not convergence. You heard it here first.
I subscribe to businessweek, and I was totally underwhelmed by the story. The entire thing centers around the breakup of the shadowcrew. No technical means were employed to do this. It happened because someone rolled on the organization. They used the informant to tell everyone to come online for a meeting and busted down their respective doors in traditional FBI style. How is this a group of elite FBI hackers? It's traditional law enforcement!
That's why they lost a couple of billion dollars. Sony deals in volume, so losing $100/unit on 50 million consoles ($5 billion) is not going to happen. No matter what you hear, nobody sells consoles for a loss (unless it's just a few cents from distribution) except MS. At $5/game royalty, that's REAL hard to make up. (MS lost $35 per unit initially, and they were not selling 7 games per system to make it up.
Not to be a troll, but why would MS care about opera? What uinque technology that enhances a user experience does it offer?
(say "security" and watch the firefox crowd blush) I hate to say it, but you have to be a real nerd to appreciate the miniscule differences between browers. All the new features do is detract from the web content. (after all, the web is about content, it's not a fashion show)
I will argue that content is king, and the ability to access that content without a hassle is the only selling point that matters. Look at google. It's a dirt simple interface, you type some keywords and you get what you want, no hassle.
From my preferred stat provider, IE is actually back UP in marketshare to 91%. I think that this reinforces my concept that amount of hassle, not # of features, is what sells.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, you get co2 credit for planting new forests while chopping down old growth. Problem is that planting new forests releases TONS of CO2 that the trees planted will take hundreds of years to process. Couple that with the massive economic (1 Trillion or more) cost that could be spent on something like bringing potable water to everybody on earth, and it sounds like a losing deal.
My wife has in her repertoire of amazing skills the ability to play tekken as long as she wants for $0.50. We will go to an arcade like Dave and Busters where a line of 20 asian teenagers are playing, and she will sit there and destroy all comers. She only knows a couple of moves for maybe two characters, but I have seen her lose only once, when she lost a contact.
The two hours/week that I get to play games are not going to be spent so that some 10 year old with nothing to do in the summer and a level 99 "ultimate fiery dragon shotgun of death" can mow me down when I walk out of the gate, board in hand.
I never claimed that they never HAD BEEN, but that they no longer do. That is of course subject to change.
The "debate" at this point is what to do about it. The Kyoto protocol is a well intentioned document that just missed the mark. For instance, countries can get additional CO2 credit for planting forests. The problem is that planting trees releases TONS of CO2. No protection is afforded for old-growth forests. (the big CO2 sinks) and the cost of implementation would be asolutely massive. Some estimates claim 750 billion, some double that. For that price you could get fresh running water to every man, woman, and child on earth. Where are your priorities?
Sure there is a lot of money being tossed around by big energy, but your misinformation is no better than theirs.
I can't think of the exact agreement, but nuclear material is not allowed in orbit because satellites must be deorbited and could cause massive contamination. More likely the secret espionage devices are about the size of a nickel and run for years.
Why is this funny? Why does a glorified text viewer have to become the subject of a holy war? The web is about the content, not how you view the content. Who the heck cares what browser you use so long as it does what it gets you to the content without a hassle.
Your average federal agency has a mish-mash of 30 year-old fortran, 20 year old COBOL, 10 year old C++, 5 year old Java, and at least a dozen system architectures from old VAX to WinXP or Solaris. You will be asked to do difficult things with insufficient resources. It forces you to either be creative and know what you're doing before you do it.
You will come out of a federal IT job as either
1) a master of the universe of technology
2)a burned out heap of cynicism.or
3)Retired with good benefits and reasonable pay.
Although now that I think of it I don't know if I've ever seen anybody use a mac either... :-)
The algae I can see flourishing, as it is a far simpler organism that has proven that it can eat rocks. (it was the first lifeform on earth) Tomatoes are somewhat more picky.
Sure, perhaps 5 years ago the arguement could have stood, but multimedia is right now an integral part of many applications. Millions of people like me quite literally NEED a media handling capability to do their jobs like other need notepad to do theirs. The world doesn't end at text, and neither should the an OS.
Internet explorer is critical amongst these as it is the foundation of the MS help system. Media player is critical as consumers expect at least a basic capability to view media locally and online "out-of-the-box."
1)Take a lot of soil/hydroponic nutrients with us, or
2)Use martian "ingredients" to grow food in.
#1 would seem counterproductive as the mass of soil would be greater than the amount of food you could grow on it. That said, how do you grow anything in soil with no organic material as viking and spirit/opportunity have shown us?
HP didn't kill off PA-RISC because it was doing "quite well" they killed it off because they were hemmoraging money, and their customers were slowly miigrating off their proprietary solution to commodity boxes. So HP coproduces a generation of chips and make a bucket of money without having to reinvent the wheels that intel has already patented.
Ok, so it turned out to be a dud, but what killed it wasn't some fancy new shiny architecture, it was trusty ol' x86, with 20 years of platform consistency, and a clear roadmap into the future.
Ack, the flames, THEY BURN!
But seriously, there are far too many architectures around to keep running. Fine, perhaps the elegant ones with technical superiority didn't triumph over the cruder general purpose, but I can't imagine being a developer still trying to support a dozen processors. There is market room for at least 3, and possibly 4 architectures out there, and the fewer there are, the more software choice there is for each as developers are forced to move to successful platforms.
that the majority of voice acting in games absolutely stinks! I mean, with some notable exceptions, (GTA Vice City, Half-life, etc) people mock voice acting, and nintendo thinks that it's so bad they don't even put it in ANY of their games!
1) because they are dirt cheap with image quality far better than inexpensivve LCDs, or
2) because the image quality is FAR surpassing that of any other technology.
Thin panel CRTs have been promised for some time now, at about 5" thick with very high resolutons, and if they can do them cheap, expect CRTs to stick around for a while.
The part where you should be torn is that you are happy your tax dollars are being wasted.
I would suspect that the singular reason that anybody has every tried firefox (including myself) is the promise of security. As evidence, I point out that adoption significantly slowed, (some stats suggest reversed) since a series of security flaws required 4 releases past 1.0.
Besides, I've had tabs for 10 years, but mine can hold things other tan web pages. I call it a taskbar :-)
One possible avenue would be for him to sell something like firefox with norton suite as a security package, and make the limitations of firefox explicit to the customer. Charging a premium will buffer him from having customers think poorly of him when they realize that they can't see the dancing hamster, use their online bank, or whatever because it's not safe.
Firefox isn't going to hurt sales any, every copy of openoffice he distributes is taking food out of his kid's mouths, so don't even bother trying.
It sounds like a big number, but factor in that the average lifespan of a unit is about 2 years under average usage. If you leave it on all the time, drop that by a third. If the lifespan is supposed to be 5 years, you have 3 units per user, some will break more. I'm on my 3rd PS2, and I play MAYBE three hours/week. So if they can sell 333 million of them, and get people to replace them when they break, they can hit a billion.
We like iPods, we like Cell phones, we like digital cameras, but we don't buy PDAs that do all three. Even camera-phones are tremendously underwhelming to all but tech-nerds and 14-year-old girls.
I would suggest that Nintendo is poised for a MAJOR comeback if they do the system right. They have said in no uncertain terms that the revolution is about games, not convergence. You heard it here first.
I subscribe to businessweek, and I was totally underwhelmed by the story. The entire thing centers around the breakup of the shadowcrew. No technical means were employed to do this. It happened because someone rolled on the organization. They used the informant to tell everyone to come online for a meeting and busted down their respective doors in traditional FBI style. How is this a group of elite FBI hackers? It's traditional law enforcement!
That's why they lost a couple of billion dollars. Sony deals in volume, so losing $100/unit on 50 million consoles ($5 billion) is not going to happen. No matter what you hear, nobody sells consoles for a loss (unless it's just a few cents from distribution) except MS. At $5/game royalty, that's REAL hard to make up. (MS lost $35 per unit initially, and they were not selling 7 games per system to make it up.
(say "security" and watch the firefox crowd blush) I hate to say it, but you have to be a real nerd to appreciate the miniscule differences between browers. All the new features do is detract from the web content. (after all, the web is about content, it's not a fashion show)
I will argue that content is king, and the ability to access that content without a hassle is the only selling point that matters. Look at google. It's a dirt simple interface, you type some keywords and you get what you want, no hassle.
From my preferred stat provider, IE is actually back UP in marketshare to 91%. I think that this reinforces my concept that amount of hassle, not # of features, is what sells.