That doesn't mean the PC will die utterly. It just means a return to the days where you had to spend $15-20,000 to get that sort of a machine, because it will only be in demand from a niche [..] So don't worry, open computing platforms won't die. They will just fall back to their natural niche.
I don't know about you, but I *like* the fact that powerful computers are available for very little cost compared to the days when they cost "$15-20,000", and I certainly *would* consider it a "worry" if it meant returning to that situation.
And how would open computing retreating back into a niche- along with general-purpose computers- with the vast majority of computing devices out there being closed and shut off be nothing to worry about? It's only that if you didn't care about it all in the first place.
I can understand (though not agree with) the appeal of closed, walled-garden devices for the general public, but that doesn't mean it's something I have to be happy about.
Er, I've always known it to be spelled "Blue cheese", and apparently Wikipedia agrees. I've never seen it called "bleu(!) cheese" in my life.
Is this some weird pretentious Yank affectation, like the jarring way they don't pronounce the "h" in "herbs" for some reason?
At any rate, I know "bleu" is French for blue, but so what? If you want to use the French spelling, shouldn't you go the whole hog and call it "du fromage bleu"... well, that was my guess, but it turns out that the French don't even use that literal translation, and actually call it "Fromage à pâte persillée". So I'm not sure what the point of "bleu cheese" is at all, except some very silly half-baked and misguided attempt at cod-French sophistication.
The scheme was promising 7% return per week. Even among the gullible and greedy it takes a special breed of idiot to believe such guarentees can be anything but a scam.
Alternate possibility- Some or all of the investors knew damn well that it was likely to be a ponzi scheme, but thought that they could enjoy the benefits by pulling their investment (and any "profit" accrued) before it collapsed.
This assumes that the person running the ponzi scheme would give them their money back. Obviously this just wouldn't happen if everyone asked, but if only one out of a large number of investors did (and they were "entitled" to withdraw at that point), it would make more sense for the scammer to return that single investor's money and accept a proportionately small loss, rather than refuse, which would quickly result in unfavourable attention, panic and the collapse of the scheme sooner than otherwise would (inevitably) have happened.
Well, maybe that's what they were thinking. Maybe not, who knows...
You read more into my comment than was actually there. It wasn't a dismissal of the home-grown Chinese car industry- on the contrary, I'm not stupid. It's obvious that in the next decade it's likely to mature and present significant competition to the rest of the world.
But although it would impress many people (because it's never been done commercially in the West) having a remote controllable car *in itself* isn't anything that's technologically cutting edge. Remote control systems have been negligible-cost commodity items for years now, and (especially) with any car that's built around drive-by-wire, it should be trivial- in the scheme of things- to connect the two. If that was all there was to it, the traditional market leaders *could* have done it years ago. That's not Western arrogance, nor intended to demean the Chinese effort (I'm sure it was equally as easy for them to do this). It's merely an observation that raises the (more interesting) question as to *why* it hasn't been done commercially beforehand when it has likely been technologically possible for quite some time now.
Saloon is where you go to toss back a few after a hard day of work.
Seriously? If I told my friends we were going to the "saloon" for drinks they'd laugh and tell me to stop watching bad Italian westerns.
I live in a Wild West town in the 19th century, you insensitive clod!
Er, anyway, this "remote control car" idea isn't that big a deal in technological terms. I'm pretty sure that car manufacturers *could* technically have done this 20 years ago if it had been considered a good idea. I suspect it's more reflective of a cultural difference between China and other markets.
I must admit I was going to jokingly say "What could possibly go wrong?" due to theft and safety concerns, but the fact it's limited to 2 MPH(!) somewhat reduces these issues, particularly the latter.
If they can make the USB connector detachable from this keyboard, then we do not need to worry about wetting the USB connector and ruin the whole thing
Hey Slashdot? Can we please have a 'Stupid' option included in the moderator drop down list?
In this case I'm not sure whether we need a "Stupid" moderation for the OP's post, or a "Whoosh" moderation for yours...
grab an Amiga emulator, the roms for the three games I mentioned and play them (also include Shadow of the Beast 2 and 3). Come back and let us know if you still believe this.
The problem with asking someone to do this is that if you weren't there at the time (as I assume the OP wasn't), you probably wouldn't get how technically impressive such games were. Even people like me who came to the Amiga later on were spoiled by the increase in standards that those earlier games forced. For example, I recently saw a video of Xenon 2, a game I remember hearing described as technically brilliant when I had my Amiga but never actually saw then. I really wasn't that impressed- the graphics were good for the time, but the music was no better than countless tracker modules and the chrome effect title page lettering? Meh.
I do remember seeing (and hearing!) an Amiga on TV circa 1986 and being blown away by its sampled sound, but most of my expectations were formed at a baseline circa 1991/92.
If you never even played an Amiga at the time it was current, let alone having played the games in question back then rather than 20 years on, it's going to be impossible to really *feel* how they would have blown people away at the time.
Also, I've never played Shadow of the Beast, but I've heard that it was notoriously difficult.
"Lemmings" seems appropriate when you think about Sony executives.
Ironically, Lemmings wasn't developed by Psygnosis themselves (they just published it). It was actually written by DMA Design, who later wrote the Grand Theft Auto series then became Rockstar North.
Still, it's worth remembering Psygnosis, who came to prominence in the early 16-bit era due to the high presentational standards of their games and went on to develop the Wipeout series before losing their name and (inevitably) some of their identity.
To be fair, I'm not a gamer anyway, but I never understood the appeal of "official" games review magazines.
There may be a case for official endorsement in other areas, but for magazines, there's no obvious benefit beyond (possibly) getting privileged access to (e.g.) Nintendo's news and announcements- when it suits *them*, that is. And that's the issue- isn't any official magazine always going to be compromised at some level, and isn't the reader going to be aware of that?
Even if it's not a blatant mouthpiece for the manufacturer's PR, one is always going to be wondering what level of interference and tolerance is permitted and how it affects (e.g.) reviews. It might be that (e.g.) reviewers are aware that they shouldn't rock the boat, and thus pull their punches even if the manufacturer isn't explicitly interfering.
Would Nintendo really be happy if their officially-endorsed mag published a blistering attack on the company, even if it was justified? Would they like it if the latest Newer New Super Mario 3D Bros 2 was given a stinking review for its production line nature?
That said, even non-official magazines probably aren't unbiased as they have to pander to the readers' fanboyish tendencies. Even publishing the aforementioned attack on Nintendo in a non-official Nintendo-specific mag would possibly be bad business practice for that reason. And, of course, the influence of pissed-off advertisers has been an issue for many years. (I remember reading an article in an Amiga magazine 20 years ago commenting that one advertiser threatened to pull their advertising because their game only got something like 85-89% ("good to very good"), short of the magic 90%. (Yes, rose-coloured-spectacle-wearers, even 20 to 25 years ago review ratings were skewed towards the top of the scale with many overhyped games getting silly ratings like 96%).
You probably also whined about the use of bits instead of bytes to denote ROM capacity in the old days, despite the fact that it's a perfectly accurate term, and in fact mirrors the way that EPROMs and RAM chips were measured and marketed as components.
I absolutely agree that in this case the OP is complaining about a non-issue, and I don't agree that it would automatically be assumed that "90% bigger" would be taken to refer to the diagonal.
However, the example you gave *was* (IMHO) an example of manufacturers being intentionally misleading. Virtually all consumer-oriented software back then was quoted in terms of its kilobyte or megabyte footprint (*). While the use of megabits may undeniably have been technically correct, its previously near-unknown use in a consumer end-product context like this was quite obviously chosen to mislead or obfuscate.
(*) No, no-one gave a toss about "mibibytes" and all that **** back then. Mibibytes.... pah. To paraphrase Paul Calf, I'm going to get a dog and train him to attack anyone who says "mibibyte";-)
OTOH one can argue that anything with GPL isn't either.
I realise that ideological bee in your bonnet is quite annoying and you're looking for any excuse to let it out and have some exercise. However, unless you've got something genuinely new to say that the rest of us haven't heard a thousand times before, please don't bother. Really.
This whole thing reminds me of the Hindi Ambassador. Basically it was an obsolete car design bought from the UK
I assume you meant the Hindustan Ambassador? According to the article, that was based on the *1956* Morris Oxford (which had already been *superseded* in Britain by the end of the 1950s, three years before the Beatles released "Love Me Do"!). The Hindustan version was released in 1958... and they're still making versions of it!.
My God, that is an *old* car design. I can only assume that they're still making it because they have the machinery and an established production facility that would cost money to replace.
Jesus Fuckin' Christ on motorcycle! I already see the iOS 6 trailer video: 2012. The revolution has begun in - customize your alarm music
I'm also pretty sure that waking up to "your favorite song" is a bad idea unless you want to end up associating that song with having your sleep disrupted early in the morning and having to drag yourself out of bed for work (when you probably don't want to)... and as a result, slowly coming to hate it.
For further terminology bending, the Daily Mail calls it a rock ice-shelf [dailymail.co.uk].
They then go on to blame it on illegal immigrants and ask if it is likely to affect house prices.
However, they haven't yet determined whether pumice is the latest miracle food or whether it's this week's innocuous substance that has been found to cause cancer in those gullible enough to believe scaremongering journalism.
Well, 44100 -> 96000 meets the nyquist condition, so...
I'm sorry, what do you mean it "meets the Nyquist condition"? The only thing Nyquist says is that (in theory) a signal containing frequencies no higher than n Hz can be perfectly reconstructed if sampled at 2n Hz or higher. That could apply to anything, I don't see what it has to do with going from 44.1 kHz to 96 kHz.
If you can tell me how to convert my CDs to 96 kHz, 24-bit FLACs, I'd be delighted!
You could use something like [..] You asked for it, it can be done.
Pedantically, yes, but not in the spirit of the OP's original comment.:-) I was expecting the OP himself to come up with that smartass reply (indeed he did) so I could deliver my equally smartass response. (^_^)
Sure! Just pad each sample with an extra byte of zeros, upsample, and encode! For instance, sox in.wav -b 24 out.flac -rate 96k does the trick!
Well then, you can convert a 64mbps MP3 to CD bitrate in a similar manner, can't you? Problem solved!;-P
(Actually, I'd been anticipating that smartass response to my question and already had that response in mind just in case. However, since you were being obviously tongue-in-cheek when you gave it, I'll let you off;-) )
you wouldn't be able to hear any improvement from 24/96 anyway
Yeah, I have heard this; I don't know if it was the linked story, but Slashdot referenced that- or a similar article- a while back. Quite possibly true...
It's sad to see clueless MBAs come into tech companies and try to cut their way to profitability. It never works, but they keep trying it again and again (cue famous quote about the definition of insanity...).
No, it does work- for them. The aim is to raise profits in the short term- which is also what the markets are concerned with- while they're still at the company and collecting large pay packets, bonuses, etc. etc.
The fact that this doesn't work over the long term is irrelevant, as they'll be long out of the company by that point.
Hopefully console manufacturers will shy away from overcomplicated designs as they have been quite costly for them in the current generation of consoles, but this is probably wishful thinking.
I don't remember how much it was supposed to have been that Sony spent developing the PS3 but it was something absolutely horrendous, and I suspect that whatever the benefits of its much hyped custom chips were, it probably didn't offset what they cost to develop or the benefit they provided. Even the cost of subsidising the early PS3s to get market share apparently cost Sony several billion (and they were still expensive).
Yeah, I know that the PS3 is doing better now, probably due to the cost being reduced, but are they still in the red on the project overall?
Anyway, bottom line is that- far moreso in the current economic climate than in 2006- Sony probably realise that they shouldn't- and couldn't- follow that path again, and will probably go for a (relatively) more off-the-shelf XBoxy approach.
Is it of any significance that the icon for this story appears to be SAL 9000, HAL 9000's earth-based, female-voiced twin?
And should we be worried if this "Nina" sounds like her?
To be fair, as far as I'm aware SAL never murdered anyone unlike her more famous sibling, but maybe that was only down to circumstances. Do we want to risk our smartphones murdering us while we sleep?
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't mean the PC will die utterly. It just means a return to the days where you had to spend $15-20,000 to get that sort of a machine, because it will only be in demand from a niche [..] So don't worry, open computing platforms won't die. They will just fall back to their natural niche.
I don't know about you, but I *like* the fact that powerful computers are available for very little cost compared to the days when they cost "$15-20,000", and I certainly *would* consider it a "worry" if it meant returning to that situation.
And how would open computing retreating back into a niche- along with general-purpose computers- with the vast majority of computing devices out there being closed and shut off be nothing to worry about? It's only that if you didn't care about it all in the first place.
I can understand (though not agree with) the appeal of closed, walled-garden devices for the general public, but that doesn't mean it's something I have to be happy about.
Remember, kids!
Bluetooth
BluRay
Bleu Cheese
Er, I've always known it to be spelled "Blue cheese", and apparently Wikipedia agrees. I've never seen it called "bleu(!) cheese" in my life.
Is this some weird pretentious Yank affectation, like the jarring way they don't pronounce the "h" in "herbs" for some reason?
At any rate, I know "bleu" is French for blue, but so what? If you want to use the French spelling, shouldn't you go the whole hog and call it "du fromage bleu"... well, that was my guess, but it turns out that the French don't even use that literal translation, and actually call it "Fromage à pâte persillée". So I'm not sure what the point of "bleu cheese" is at all, except some very silly half-baked and misguided attempt at cod-French sophistication.
The scheme was promising 7% return per week. Even among the gullible and greedy it takes a special breed of idiot to believe such guarentees can be anything but a scam.
Alternate possibility- Some or all of the investors knew damn well that it was likely to be a ponzi scheme, but thought that they could enjoy the benefits by pulling their investment (and any "profit" accrued) before it collapsed.
This assumes that the person running the ponzi scheme would give them their money back. Obviously this just wouldn't happen if everyone asked, but if only one out of a large number of investors did (and they were "entitled" to withdraw at that point), it would make more sense for the scammer to return that single investor's money and accept a proportionately small loss, rather than refuse, which would quickly result in unfavourable attention, panic and the collapse of the scheme sooner than otherwise would (inevitably) have happened.
Well, maybe that's what they were thinking. Maybe not, who knows...
You read more into my comment than was actually there. It wasn't a dismissal of the home-grown Chinese car industry- on the contrary, I'm not stupid. It's obvious that in the next decade it's likely to mature and present significant competition to the rest of the world.
But although it would impress many people (because it's never been done commercially in the West) having a remote controllable car *in itself* isn't anything that's technologically cutting edge. Remote control systems have been negligible-cost commodity items for years now, and (especially) with any car that's built around drive-by-wire, it should be trivial- in the scheme of things- to connect the two. If that was all there was to it, the traditional market leaders *could* have done it years ago. That's not Western arrogance, nor intended to demean the Chinese effort (I'm sure it was equally as easy for them to do this). It's merely an observation that raises the (more interesting) question as to *why* it hasn't been done commercially beforehand when it has likely been technologically possible for quite some time now.
Saloon is where you go to toss back a few after a hard day of work.
Seriously? If I told my friends we were going to the "saloon" for drinks they'd laugh and tell me to stop watching bad Italian westerns.
I live in a Wild West town in the 19th century, you insensitive clod!
Er, anyway, this "remote control car" idea isn't that big a deal in technological terms. I'm pretty sure that car manufacturers *could* technically have done this 20 years ago if it had been considered a good idea. I suspect it's more reflective of a cultural difference between China and other markets.
I must admit I was going to jokingly say "What could possibly go wrong?" due to theft and safety concerns, but the fact it's limited to 2 MPH(!) somewhat reduces these issues, particularly the latter.
Why bother with that effort? I have cleaned keyboards in a dishwasher. Just leave them for a few days before attempting to use.
I even had an O'Reilly *book* about ten years back that explained how to clean your keyboard in the dishwasher
If they can make the USB connector detachable from this keyboard, then we do not need to worry about wetting the USB connector and ruin the whole thing
Hey Slashdot? Can we please have a 'Stupid' option included in the moderator drop down list?
In this case I'm not sure whether we need a "Stupid" moderation for the OP's post, or a "Whoosh" moderation for yours...
grab an Amiga emulator, the roms for the three games I mentioned and play them (also include Shadow of the Beast 2 and 3). Come back and let us know if you still believe this.
The problem with asking someone to do this is that if you weren't there at the time (as I assume the OP wasn't), you probably wouldn't get how technically impressive such games were. Even people like me who came to the Amiga later on were spoiled by the increase in standards that those earlier games forced. For example, I recently saw a video of Xenon 2, a game I remember hearing described as technically brilliant when I had my Amiga but never actually saw then. I really wasn't that impressed- the graphics were good for the time, but the music was no better than countless tracker modules and the chrome effect title page lettering? Meh.
I do remember seeing (and hearing!) an Amiga on TV circa 1986 and being blown away by its sampled sound, but most of my expectations were formed at a baseline circa 1991/92.
If you never even played an Amiga at the time it was current, let alone having played the games in question back then rather than 20 years on, it's going to be impossible to really *feel* how they would have blown people away at the time.
Also, I've never played Shadow of the Beast, but I've heard that it was notoriously difficult.
"Lemmings" seems appropriate when you think about Sony executives.
Ironically, Lemmings wasn't developed by Psygnosis themselves (they just published it). It was actually written by DMA Design, who later wrote the Grand Theft Auto series then became Rockstar North.
Still, it's worth remembering Psygnosis, who came to prominence in the early 16-bit era due to the high presentational standards of their games and went on to develop the Wipeout series before losing their name and (inevitably) some of their identity.
Now where will I get my biased game reviews from?
To be fair, I'm not a gamer anyway, but I never understood the appeal of "official" games review magazines.
There may be a case for official endorsement in other areas, but for magazines, there's no obvious benefit beyond (possibly) getting privileged access to (e.g.) Nintendo's news and announcements- when it suits *them*, that is. And that's the issue- isn't any official magazine always going to be compromised at some level, and isn't the reader going to be aware of that?
Even if it's not a blatant mouthpiece for the manufacturer's PR, one is always going to be wondering what level of interference and tolerance is permitted and how it affects (e.g.) reviews. It might be that (e.g.) reviewers are aware that they shouldn't rock the boat, and thus pull their punches even if the manufacturer isn't explicitly interfering.
Would Nintendo really be happy if their officially-endorsed mag published a blistering attack on the company, even if it was justified? Would they like it if the latest Newer New Super Mario 3D Bros 2 was given a stinking review for its production line nature?
That said, even non-official magazines probably aren't unbiased as they have to pander to the readers' fanboyish tendencies. Even publishing the aforementioned attack on Nintendo in a non-official Nintendo-specific mag would possibly be bad business practice for that reason. And, of course, the influence of pissed-off advertisers has been an issue for many years. (I remember reading an article in an Amiga magazine 20 years ago commenting that one advertiser threatened to pull their advertising because their game only got something like 85-89% ("good to very good"), short of the magic 90%. (Yes, rose-coloured-spectacle-wearers, even 20 to 25 years ago review ratings were skewed towards the top of the scale with many overhyped games getting silly ratings like 96%).
Nintendo has finally fully embraced digital distribution.
Thank god for that, I'm sick of playing those crappy old analogue cartridges!
You probably also whined about the use of bits instead of bytes to denote ROM capacity in the old days, despite the fact that it's a perfectly accurate term, and in fact mirrors the way that EPROMs and RAM chips were measured and marketed as components.
I absolutely agree that in this case the OP is complaining about a non-issue, and I don't agree that it would automatically be assumed that "90% bigger" would be taken to refer to the diagonal.
;-)
However, the example you gave *was* (IMHO) an example of manufacturers being intentionally misleading. Virtually all consumer-oriented software back then was quoted in terms of its kilobyte or megabyte footprint (*). While the use of megabits may undeniably have been technically correct, its previously near-unknown use in a consumer end-product context like this was quite obviously chosen to mislead or obfuscate.
(*) No, no-one gave a toss about "mibibytes" and all that **** back then. Mibibytes.... pah. To paraphrase Paul Calf, I'm going to get a dog and train him to attack anyone who says "mibibyte"
Java is NOT free as in Libre.
OTOH one can argue that anything with GPL isn't either.
I realise that ideological bee in your bonnet is quite annoying and you're looking for any excuse to let it out and have some exercise. However, unless you've got something genuinely new to say that the rest of us haven't heard a thousand times before, please don't bother. Really.
This whole thing reminds me of the Hindi Ambassador. Basically it was an obsolete car design bought from the UK
I assume you meant the Hindustan Ambassador? According to the article, that was based on the *1956* Morris Oxford (which had already been *superseded* in Britain by the end of the 1950s, three years before the Beatles released "Love Me Do"!). The Hindustan version was released in 1958... and they're still making versions of it!.
My God, that is an *old* car design. I can only assume that they're still making it because they have the machinery and an established production facility that would cost money to replace.
Jesus Fuckin' Christ on motorcycle! I already see the iOS 6 trailer video: 2012. The revolution has begun in - customize your alarm music
I'm also pretty sure that waking up to "your favorite song" is a bad idea unless you want to end up associating that song with having your sleep disrupted early in the morning and having to drag yourself out of bed for work (when you probably don't want to)... and as a result, slowly coming to hate it.
For further terminology bending, the Daily Mail calls it a rock ice-shelf [dailymail.co.uk].
They then go on to blame it on illegal immigrants and ask if it is likely to affect house prices.
However, they haven't yet determined whether pumice is the latest miracle food or whether it's this week's innocuous substance that has been found to cause cancer in those gullible enough to believe scaremongering journalism.
Hang on, never mind- I assume you were implying the same thing as the OP said directly in his reply.
Well, 44100 -> 96000 meets the nyquist condition, so...
I'm sorry, what do you mean it "meets the Nyquist condition"? The only thing Nyquist says is that (in theory) a signal containing frequencies no higher than n Hz can be perfectly reconstructed if sampled at 2n Hz or higher. That could apply to anything, I don't see what it has to do with going from 44.1 kHz to 96 kHz.
If you can tell me how to convert my CDs to 96 kHz, 24-bit FLACs, I'd be delighted!
You could use something like [..] You asked for it, it can be done.
Pedantically, yes, but not in the spirit of the OP's original comment. :-) I was expecting the OP himself to come up with that smartass reply (indeed he did) so I could deliver my equally smartass response. (^_^)
Sure! Just pad each sample with an extra byte of zeros, upsample, and encode! For instance, sox in.wav -b 24 out.flac -rate 96k does the trick!
Well then, you can convert a 64mbps MP3 to CD bitrate in a similar manner, can't you? Problem solved! ;-P
(Actually, I'd been anticipating that smartass response to my question and already had that response in mind just in case. However, since you were being obviously tongue-in-cheek when you gave it, I'll let you off ;-) )
you wouldn't be able to hear any improvement from 24/96 anyway
Yeah, I have heard this; I don't know if it was the linked story, but Slashdot referenced that- or a similar article- a while back. Quite possibly true...
If in the States
Here's a weird little fact. Many people don't live in the USA.
That'll have been why the paragraph included the qualifier "if in the States", then.
With a CD I can make whatever format and/or bitrate I want
If you can tell me how to convert my CDs to 96 kHz, 24-bit FLACs, I'd be delighted!
It's sad to see clueless MBAs come into tech companies and try to cut their way to profitability. It never works, but they keep trying it again and again (cue famous quote about the definition of insanity...).
No, it does work- for them. The aim is to raise profits in the short term- which is also what the markets are concerned with- while they're still at the company and collecting large pay packets, bonuses, etc. etc.
The fact that this doesn't work over the long term is irrelevant, as they'll be long out of the company by that point.
Hopefully console manufacturers will shy away from overcomplicated designs as they have been quite costly for them in the current generation of consoles, but this is probably wishful thinking.
Well, it was said a while back that Sony aren't planning on investing as much in the PS4 as they did on the PS3.
I don't remember how much it was supposed to have been that Sony spent developing the PS3 but it was something absolutely horrendous, and I suspect that whatever the benefits of its much hyped custom chips were, it probably didn't offset what they cost to develop or the benefit they provided. Even the cost of subsidising the early PS3s to get market share apparently cost Sony several billion (and they were still expensive).
Yeah, I know that the PS3 is doing better now, probably due to the cost being reduced, but are they still in the red on the project overall?
Anyway, bottom line is that- far moreso in the current economic climate than in 2006- Sony probably realise that they shouldn't- and couldn't- follow that path again, and will probably go for a (relatively) more off-the-shelf XBoxy approach.
Is it of any significance that the icon for this story appears to be SAL 9000, HAL 9000's earth-based, female-voiced twin?
And should we be worried if this "Nina" sounds like her?
To be fair, as far as I'm aware SAL never murdered anyone unlike her more famous sibling, but maybe that was only down to circumstances. Do we want to risk our smartphones murdering us while we sleep?