We may THINK there's no reason for Google to have to keep logs for 18 months, but these days I wouldn't be surprised to find there's some hidden provision of the Patriot Act, or possibly some law we've never heard of, which it's illegal for us to hear of or read in the first place. So maybe there IS a law requiring them to keep it for 18 months, it's just not one the public is allowed to know of until it's used to prosecute them.
Or any of the other shenanigans ISPs are trying to pull over on people. Just block the entire ISP from Google.com. See how long it takes before the weight of support calls crushing them and customers leaving in droves makes it unprofitable to mess with traffic.
All that would really do is offer a sneak peak of the inevitable anyway if they keep on this track. Once P2P is locked down and all nice and cleanly precedented in court, what do you think they'll throttle next? Traffic to "non-partner" sites, and then come the DNS redirects. "Oh you meant google.com? Well we have a deal with MS so it goes to MSN.com first and then has a tiny flash overlay in the corner that prompts if you really meant google.com, which IE conveniently blocks as 'popup spam' by default now."
I've read the arguments on both sides of net neutrality, forcing this kind of thing stifles sandbox development of new tech. But the alternative would seem to be worse.
The scary thing is, the government is already taking a side, and if you want to know which, just watch for "think of the children" arguments.
I'm surprised nobody's written a doomsday scenario book about this with a silly title, like "P2P: An Inconvenient Packet. How ISPs and the Government are planning the death of the Internet as we know it."
All this really does is extend biological processes into the conscious space. Instead of just simple environmental pressures causing selection, more abstract concepts come into play.
As a species we have a very high reproduction and survival chance, and almost no predators or threats. So the gene pool is tending towards a neutral stance. This is normal, and most likely the ideal survival strategy, since when there's no selection pressure there's no telling what will be the next favorable/unfavorable trait, so you nedd to maximize variations. Selection isn't going anywhere fast for us as a species right now. Some things are still changing, like possibly peak intelligence backsliding in favor of multitasking capability, but overall we're not fighting for survival very hard as a species.
Now, I consider it part of my purpose to produce the best offspring I can. You may disagree, that's your problem. If I choose a mate based on specific characteristics rather than at random, I'm already performing a conscious selection of traits. I could take that one step further and choose an egg donor with the best traits and a different partner for the social raising who will contribute superior resources. This means my offspring would have both inherent and environmental advantages, which sounds pretty favorable to me.
Doing more advanced selection for embryos based on attributes is just yet another layer of extension. What if I want a male instead of a female because as a male myself I believe my probability of avoiding a dysfunctional child is better? What about if I want to split an embryo for identical twins because they tend to support each other and become more stable mentally and emotionally?
The point is the line is pretty fuzzy, and yes you can argue that people "will throw out the gay ones", or you could just as well argue that "gay people will only keep the gay ones". Being bi myself, I don't really consider that to be a likely factor in my decision, even if it were easily identifiable as a genetic trait (it's currently not).
But when it comes down to it, I'm going to go for every option that gives an advantage that I can get away with. Why? Because that's pretty much the mandate of reproduction. If other people don't, well then they risk having their genes bred out of the pool. Sucks for them, but that's kinda how life works. So I say give me everything you've got and if it's a country-specific issue just watch me pull up stakes and move wherever I can have the best kids. A tradition we've had for possibly millions of years (or we'd all still be hanging around central Africa).
This is anecdotal, so obviously have a side of salt with it.
I bought an 8GB Flash Voyager GT about a year ago. It died after about 5 weeks. Just *poof* light doesn't even blink, device not recognized. I spoke to Corsair about it and they said it's probably an isolated incident. I told them their feedback on Newegg was starting to show a few similar experiences. So they had me send in my drive for lab analysis to find out why it failed. They also gave me an 8GB Flash Survivor GT to replace it and said "Here, this one won't break." So far, it hasn't.
Been using a similar HSDPA system down here in Johannesburg for most of this year now (on it as I type this). Speeds are about 1.8mbps advertised, I get about 90% of it peak in real world. They're rolling out 3.6mbps but they want to charge an extra R49 (about $7) per month for it.
I use a prepaid SIM so the only cost is bandwidth, which comes in various packages. I pay R389 (about $50) for 2GB, which goes surprisingly far if you're not torrenting or a YouTube addict. Considering DSL also charges about half that for bandwidth here and piles on multiple monthly fees that make it cost less only if you use over 7GB or so (at like $150/month), and takes 10 months before they bother to hook you up, I'm happy with the cell connection.
Latency is about +100ms over DSL though, usable for games unless you're playing competitively.
That seems to be the way to get lots of funding these days. At least if we declared The War on Space we'd be sure to find weapons of mass destruction. There are nuclear fusion reactions all over the place in space, they don't even try to hide em!
Me, I'm to busy worrying about if I can find another job, if I can ever afford a place to live, if I'll ever have the "special" right to marry my husband like we did in his country, if riots will break out when gas hits $10/gal next year...
When did taking drugs become a crime? Yes crimes are sometimes committed by people under the influence of drugs, or to support addictions.
But why should someone be treated as a criminal simply for ingesting a plant or chemical? Because they might commit a crime under the influence? Because they might become addicted and need medical or psychiatric help to quit but are instead thrown away by society?
Seems like we're punishing people for what crimes they might commit all the time. Somehow people decided that some plurality knows whats best or "moral", and that all should be punished to protect against the potential actions of the few.
If only there was some way to include the "trivial" information yet not see it unless specifically looking for it. Maybe if there was some sort of ranking system that could be used to filter what information was deemed trivial, like a score or rating system. Possibly even some kind of description tags to aid in this, like "insightful", "funny", "interesting", or "troll". Then those who were not interested in the trivial information could browse at a higher filter level, and those who were searching for it could still find it when desired.
Last time I checked the PS3 was still trailing. In terms of sales since launch it's been roughly on the same level as the 360, until recently when there was an upswing (coincidentally just when they finally realized nobody will pay $600 for the PS3 and cut it). Check vgchartz.com if you don't believe me.
Microsoft aimed at the gaming market. Sony aimed at the gaming and home theater market, which drove their price up. That's been hurting them enough to nullify a lot of their previous brand loyalty and install base advantages. They should be selling faster than the 360 but they're barely keeping pace if you line up the launch timelines. Funny you should mention Oblivion as being one of the good games for the 360, since the PS3 version is inferior due to memory constraints. I could cite many more examples of inferior graphical quality, framerate, or features in the PS3 version of a game vs the 360 version. Even when the game released later on PS3 (Skate anyone?).
Now let's move on to the "PS3 is better hardware". Yeah except for their GPU, which is a generation behind (see unified shaders). And their split memory architecture, which causes space headaches (See Oblivion). And Cell, which is a real bitch to write efficient code for (ask any developer). And their slow ass drive access times, which require 20 minute pre-installs that don't make the game load noticeably faster (Devil May Cry 4). And their badly designed rumble-less controllers (oh wait they've reversed their position and are now making one with the "obsolete" feature back again). Let's not even start on the 2nd generation Xbox Live vs the still closed beta Sony Home.
Nothing but the Wii has ever sold at Wii-like rates. Its sales are absolutely phenominal. It's selling roughly double the rate the PS2 did at the same time since launch. Also, anyone with half a brain can see that consoles normally sell less each successive year. It's called market saturation. Price drops and killer games can help but in general the machines sell less year on year. So saying "360 appears to have peaked back in 2006" is pretty worthless. Even the PS2 sold less year on year, doesn't that mean it "peaked" in 2000?
Yeah this is great, until you're in a part of the world where Internet access is sporadic, slow, and $10/GB. Then suddenly having to download a few hundred megs of non-differential patches per app and needing a connection to "verify" your software is a bit more than a minor inconvenience. It's extremely annoying when software that'd designed for completely non-networked functionality REQUIRES you to hook the machine it's installed (from CD!) on to prove you haven't pirated it. This just leads to people pirating it and distributing the copies to everyone else in the same situation.
While I would very much love to live in your future of free high speed connections that are always there, the future is looking like pay per gig to clamp down on bittorrent, recover costs for universal monitoring of traffic (without need for pesky warrants), and milk people for all they're worth. "Oh, too bad your line went down when the phone company screwed up and you didn't notice when your router swapped over to the 3G cellular backup, that'll be $54,000 this month."
Here's a tip: The US is not the entire world, and companies sell to the rest too. Try telling everyone here in Africa that "in 5-10 years it will be virtual [sic] impossible to go 'offline'", I'm sure it'll be good for a laugh.
Actually evolution's still working just fine, the problem is lack of selection pressure.
For a while, intelligence was favored as the smarter people had better health and survived longer and thus reproduced more, and more consistently. Now that more of the population is living "comfortably", there's no longer a favorable selection for that trait. This suggests the level of intelligence has been optimized for the current environment.
What's going on now is that since there is so little pressure (i.e. the environment isn't really harsh enough to consistently select for a specific favorable set of traits) the gene pool is moving back towards a more neutral stance. I.e. the gene pool is getting more diverse in this environment. This is normally a good thing. It means when the next environment change brings in a pressure that selects for a different favorable trait, more of the population will survive because of this diversity. If we kept evolving for intelligence and suddenly the environment changed to say, high UV radiation resistance as being the next favorable trait, those additional intelligence refinements would likely be fairly useless (neglecting the effect of technology that could be invented to artificially maintain a stable environment). So the current trend now is to randomize the genetics of the population so hopefully some part of it will be able to survive no matter what happens next. You'll still see more intelligent people pop up now and then, as part of the normal variance. But the mean value won't move until there's a reason that becomes an advantage to survival and/or reproduction, and yes it may in fact backslide a bit as it stabilizes.
People keep assuming that being more intelligent is consistently an advantage. It may be from a societal view of how we define "success", or maybe "potential", or even "progress". But from natural selection's point of view, it isn't. Bigger brains require more resources in terms of food, complicate births, take longer to mature to adult level, etc. The system is designed to quit once "good enough" has been reached, so it doesn't waste resources on overkill.
Yup! Though previously when I've mentioned this to./ before figuring it out, it was ignored by askslashdot and help emails, or I was told I have no idea what I'm talking about by people who "obviously know more about SA's networks" than I do.
IPv6 as mentioned by the poster up top won't solve issues like this. Paying $10/GB of traffic per month is the problem, not address space. Oh and despite what Telkom tells you, it's not that there's too much traffic for their poor transoceanic cables. Currently, just 25 percent of the SAT-3/WASC/SAFE capacity is being used. This is due to incompetence in negotiating reasonable peering agreements. Oh and I've priced the cost to lay a new line from the west coast of SA to say, Florida with AT&T laying the cable. It's about R4bn. Telkom makes more than that in profit per year, they could afford more capacity (and more is coming to the continent anyway), but since that's not the problem it won't solve anything. They just keep using it as an excuse to charge the 2nd highest rate for broadband in the world and pretend they're not still a government-owned monopoly.
While Eskom has built a second fiberoptic net (which has been lying idle a couple years now, thanks ICASA!) to service the local infrastructure, I think they'll still run into the same issues at the international gateways.
Your Firefox ASKS? Mine just says "Hey I've downloaded a new update without bothering to ask, and it'll be installed as soon as you restart the browser! Bend over now? Or later?" It did this just today in fact, on both my machines. It never gives the option to NOT install the update, and it never asks to waste bandwidth downloading it (which may be a consideration here where it costs $10/GB).
Gee mine's been up a few hours and has 3 tabs open, which are slashdot stories. Guess what the memory use is? 572MB. Oh and 34% CPU use on a 1.7Ghz Pentium M just sitting here staring at the page. But hey, don't let my "anecdotal evidence" get in the way of blind zealotry.
Of course here comes the "It's windows fault!" crowd, along with the people who go "Oh but it's a setting you can fix only buried in some obscure config that we're too lazy to make a proper GUI for!" If everything can be fixed by config changes to cater to the user who knows what they're doing, where's the config option to let me open an EXE? Oh yeah, well it's only about empowring the user until they want to do something the developer's idealism doesn't agree with.
This IP address or network has been used to abuse the system and logins from it have been disabled. If you feel that this is unwarranted, feel free to include your IP address (198.54.202.114) in the subject of an email to banned@slashdot.org, and we will examine why there is a ban.
198.54.202.114 resolves to rba-cache3-vif1.saix.net
Yes, read my article that I'm sure is laughable and went completely unread in South Africa Computer Magazine. I mean obviously everyone must agree with you so this must be entirely fake in my inbox:
I found your "Open Source Man" article very informative, especially as we in Government is struggling convincing decision makers that they need to take on their OS initiatives more carefully and especially not force them down on us but rather base it on research etc. I am looking for the original "Open Source Man" article (or articles) and will appreciate it if you can make it available to me.
Regards
Tjaart Richards - Systems Specialist
Department of Developmental Local Government & Housing
North West Provincial Government
Of course there were also negative responses, but not a single one could be professional enough to refrain from using "M$" in their reply.
....like say anyone who uses South Africa's sole monopoly telecom provider, Telkom.
Why has this happened? Oh well you see Telkom likes to save bandwidth because they're cheap. So they force every international connection through a cache server. Slashdot has deemed the cache server an "abusive" IP, so it's banned from posting on the site. But you can't NOT submit from that IP, because it's forced by the only internet provider in the country. So basically 45 million people can't post thanks to lazy site administrators.
Have I submitted this to the appropriate channels? Of course, countless times, and never recieve any reply. I've even submitted it as news. I've asked about it as an ask slashdot.(both rejected of course). Nobody seems to care.
After all, I'm sure it's just so easy for everyone to VNC into a machine in the US like I'm doing so they can struggle with laggy shaped international connections just to submit text to a website. It's our fault for living in a third world country with a government that artificially maintains a monopoly now that it's no longer "official" since half of the government still has stock in it, right?
Go ahead, mod me offtopic or troll or whatever. I don't give a damn. If you people bothered to read your own damn mail and fix the site I wouldn't have had to spend a year trying to find a solution only to wind up bitching about it in posts!
What if, the capattery itself was sealed watertight, so just the wires came out... then somewhere in the phone we could put some... thing. And this thing could kind of make some sort of break in the circuit when too much current went through it... some sort of "circuit breaker" if you will.... And after you get the phone out, well you could dry it off and then reset this thing so that the circuit was restored. Nah, if such an easy solution for dealing with high current discharges was so easy, someone would already have thought of it and it'd be in every home and office by now. Forget I mentioned it. Crazy idea.
This sounds familliar. I've had an "unknown" skin condition on both arms since I was 14 that looks similar to bad acne and it itches and hurts, particularly when I get stressed. I've had people claim it's everything from psychological to sensitivity to detergents to an STD(unlikely considering when it started). I know I've got sensitive skin that reacts to certain soaps etc, but that always manifests as a different type of rash.
I saw a whole bunch of dermatologists several years ago. They gave me everything from clindamycin to erethromycin to minicyclin. None of which was as effective as a sunburn or salt water, and just as temporary. I had biopsies and cultures done, and they could never get the damn thing to culture. They couldn't even tell me if it was viral or bacterial, as it has symptoms of both.
So I kinda gave up on it and just tried to live with it. Then a bit earlier this year when I was seeing a new doctor (non-dermatologist) he asked if any of them ever prescribed accutane. I said no, it wasn't that commonly known last time I was looked at but I figured if none of the other "strong" antibiotics had worked, it wouldn't either. But I figured what the hell I'll try it anyway.
So I got put on 20mg/day of Accutane. The "normal adult dose" is supposedly more like 125mg/day, but it has bad side effects so I figured I'd start low and see. Within about 48 hours I noticed an improvement in the skin. I stayed on it for about a month, and no new ones have formed, and the older ones are healing well. The worst side effect I got was chapped lips, which sounds like nothing but when it's severe enough that you can't eat anything without pain it's another story. So I'm going off the accutane for a while to let that heal and see if the improvement in my condition is stable. If it is, I'll probably try 40mg/day for 2-4 weeks and hopefully that will get rid of it or at least reduce it to the point where it's no more than a minor nuisance.
IANAD (doctor), and I don't own any stock in drug companies (I was getting generics anyway), so I can't say this will work for everyone else. But if you have something that seems bacterial or similar to acne, I suggest giving the low dosage a shot to see if it does anything for you.
I don't really see myself using either format. Why? Because discs aren't how I consume media anymore. I download everything. I'm just waiting for them to come out with pay services with better quality, and then I'll be buying everything instead of pirating it. But either way, I'm not buying discs anymore. Why would I when they're DRMed to hell and want to bully me into purchacing "compliant" hardware? I'd rather just download the illegal unrestricted content. I do it for DVD-quality now, I'll do it for HD-quality later. Do I care if the pirate versions are recompressed slightly worse? Not really if I don't have to go hunting through a stack of easily scratchable or lost media that I can't transfer to other machines and devices.
If I had to pick one, I'd say HD-DVD. Why? 1. It's out now. 2. Mandatory managed copy vs voluntary managed copy. 3. More advanced codecs than mpeg-2. 4. Lack of regions? Not sure on this last one, but the 360 games have no regions, and I've heard Toshiba is pushing hard to remove the region system from HD-DVD.
Well you're assuming we'd keep the design of the gasoline engine similar. If we start using the idea of electricity as a virtual transmission then it's possible to make gains.
Consider a redesign of the combustion engine that has just cylinders that use 2 a modified 2 stroke compression cycle on each end, and just move the cylinder in a tube that has an electric coil. Put a magnet in the middle and you can transmit power without needing to connect the cylinder to any mechanical transfer system. It'll produce a pretty standard AC sine-wave, and because there's no direct mechanical coupling it can run at optimal efficiency or power rates instead of having to deal with constant acceleration/deceleration. You could even shut down and power up individual cylinders on demand, and since there's no mechanical connections, using say, dozens or hundreds of smaller cylinders for better efficiency and more flexible power would be possible.
On the electric side, motors have far better low end torque, and less moving parts overall. If you did the design right you might even be able to eliminate the mechanical transmission for different gears completely. Not having mechanical transfer means you can easily do things like 1 motor per wheel directly coupled. This would again provide more robust redundancy, better efficiency, scalability (only run 2 motors when needed i.e. highway driving), better driving properties (full time all-wheel drive), etc.
Granted you're still going gas->motion->electricity->motion, but you're not replacing just gas->motion. You're replacing gas->several thousand moving parts with friction losses and failure rates->motion with gas->electricity->maybe a couple dozen parts->motion. The removal of the complex mechanical transfer system is where you'll get the efficiency AND reliability boost. But that would make cars last for 20 years, and nobody wants that, right?
Slashdot Mirror
We may THINK there's no reason for Google to have to keep logs for 18 months, but these days I wouldn't be surprised to find there's some hidden provision of the Patriot Act, or possibly some law we've never heard of, which it's illegal for us to hear of or read in the first place. So maybe there IS a law requiring them to keep it for 18 months, it's just not one the public is allowed to know of until it's used to prosecute them.
I'd probably do a better job, considering I've caught them doing benchmarks wrong before.
But hey, why be right when you can generate a controversy that attracts millions of hits instead?
Or any of the other shenanigans ISPs are trying to pull over on people. Just block the entire ISP from Google.com. See how long it takes before the weight of support calls crushing them and customers leaving in droves makes it unprofitable to mess with traffic.
All that would really do is offer a sneak peak of the inevitable anyway if they keep on this track. Once P2P is locked down and all nice and cleanly precedented in court, what do you think they'll throttle next? Traffic to "non-partner" sites, and then come the DNS redirects. "Oh you meant google.com? Well we have a deal with MS so it goes to MSN.com first and then has a tiny flash overlay in the corner that prompts if you really meant google.com, which IE conveniently blocks as 'popup spam' by default now."
I've read the arguments on both sides of net neutrality, forcing this kind of thing stifles sandbox development of new tech. But the alternative would seem to be worse.
The scary thing is, the government is already taking a side, and if you want to know which, just watch for "think of the children" arguments.
I'm surprised nobody's written a doomsday scenario book about this with a silly title, like "P2P: An Inconvenient Packet. How ISPs and the Government are planning the death of the Internet as we know it."
All this really does is extend biological processes into the conscious space. Instead of just simple environmental pressures causing selection, more abstract concepts come into play.
As a species we have a very high reproduction and survival chance, and almost no predators or threats. So the gene pool is tending towards a neutral stance. This is normal, and most likely the ideal survival strategy, since when there's no selection pressure there's no telling what will be the next favorable/unfavorable trait, so you nedd to maximize variations. Selection isn't going anywhere fast for us as a species right now. Some things are still changing, like possibly peak intelligence backsliding in favor of multitasking capability, but overall we're not fighting for survival very hard as a species.
Now, I consider it part of my purpose to produce the best offspring I can. You may disagree, that's your problem. If I choose a mate based on specific characteristics rather than at random, I'm already performing a conscious selection of traits. I could take that one step further and choose an egg donor with the best traits and a different partner for the social raising who will contribute superior resources. This means my offspring would have both inherent and environmental advantages, which sounds pretty favorable to me.
Doing more advanced selection for embryos based on attributes is just yet another layer of extension. What if I want a male instead of a female because as a male myself I believe my probability of avoiding a dysfunctional child is better? What about if I want to split an embryo for identical twins because they tend to support each other and become more stable mentally and emotionally?
The point is the line is pretty fuzzy, and yes you can argue that people "will throw out the gay ones", or you could just as well argue that "gay people will only keep the gay ones". Being bi myself, I don't really consider that to be a likely factor in my decision, even if it were easily identifiable as a genetic trait (it's currently not).
But when it comes down to it, I'm going to go for every option that gives an advantage that I can get away with. Why? Because that's pretty much the mandate of reproduction. If other people don't, well then they risk having their genes bred out of the pool. Sucks for them, but that's kinda how life works. So I say give me everything you've got and if it's a country-specific issue just watch me pull up stakes and move wherever I can have the best kids. A tradition we've had for possibly millions of years (or we'd all still be hanging around central Africa).
This is anecdotal, so obviously have a side of salt with it.
I bought an 8GB Flash Voyager GT about a year ago. It died after about 5 weeks. Just *poof* light doesn't even blink, device not recognized. I spoke to Corsair about it and they said it's probably an isolated incident. I told them their feedback on Newegg was starting to show a few similar experiences. So they had me send in my drive for lab analysis to find out why it failed. They also gave me an 8GB Flash Survivor GT to replace it and said "Here, this one won't break." So far, it hasn't.
Then it's a CHEAT since it's designed to have a nice big number for marketing to slap on the box/website to convince someone it's worth buying.
Been using a similar HSDPA system down here in Johannesburg for most of this year now (on it as I type this). Speeds are about 1.8mbps advertised, I get about 90% of it peak in real world. They're rolling out 3.6mbps but they want to charge an extra R49 (about $7) per month for it.
I use a prepaid SIM so the only cost is bandwidth, which comes in various packages. I pay R389 (about $50) for 2GB, which goes surprisingly far if you're not torrenting or a YouTube addict. Considering DSL also charges about half that for bandwidth here and piles on multiple monthly fees that make it cost less only if you use over 7GB or so (at like $150/month), and takes 10 months before they bother to hook you up, I'm happy with the cell connection.
Latency is about +100ms over DSL though, usable for games unless you're playing competitively.
That seems to be the way to get lots of funding these days. At least if we declared The War on Space we'd be sure to find weapons of mass destruction. There are nuclear fusion reactions all over the place in space, they don't even try to hide em!
Me, I'm to busy worrying about if I can find another job, if I can ever afford a place to live, if I'll ever have the "special" right to marry my husband like we did in his country, if riots will break out when gas hits $10/gal next year...
When did taking drugs become a crime? Yes crimes are sometimes committed by people under the influence of drugs, or to support addictions.
But why should someone be treated as a criminal simply for ingesting a plant or chemical? Because they might commit a crime under the influence? Because they might become addicted and need medical or psychiatric help to quit but are instead thrown away by society?
Seems like we're punishing people for what crimes they might commit all the time. Somehow people decided that some plurality knows whats best or "moral", and that all should be punished to protect against the potential actions of the few.
If only there was some way to include the "trivial" information yet not see it unless specifically looking for it. Maybe if there was some sort of ranking system that could be used to filter what information was deemed trivial, like a score or rating system. Possibly even some kind of description tags to aid in this, like "insightful", "funny", "interesting", or "troll". Then those who were not interested in the trivial information could browse at a higher filter level, and those who were searching for it could still find it when desired.
Nah that would never work.
Sony is winning what now? Since when?
Last time I checked the PS3 was still trailing. In terms of sales since launch it's been roughly on the same level as the 360, until recently when there was an upswing (coincidentally just when they finally realized nobody will pay $600 for the PS3 and cut it). Check vgchartz.com if you don't believe me.
Microsoft aimed at the gaming market. Sony aimed at the gaming and home theater market, which drove their price up. That's been hurting them enough to nullify a lot of their previous brand loyalty and install base advantages. They should be selling faster than the 360 but they're barely keeping pace if you line up the launch timelines. Funny you should mention Oblivion as being one of the good games for the 360, since the PS3 version is inferior due to memory constraints. I could cite many more examples of inferior graphical quality, framerate, or features in the PS3 version of a game vs the 360 version. Even when the game released later on PS3 (Skate anyone?).
Now let's move on to the "PS3 is better hardware". Yeah except for their GPU, which is a generation behind (see unified shaders). And their split memory architecture, which causes space headaches (See Oblivion). And Cell, which is a real bitch to write efficient code for (ask any developer). And their slow ass drive access times, which require 20 minute pre-installs that don't make the game load noticeably faster (Devil May Cry 4). And their badly designed rumble-less controllers (oh wait they've reversed their position and are now making one with the "obsolete" feature back again). Let's not even start on the 2nd generation Xbox Live vs the still closed beta Sony Home.
Nothing but the Wii has ever sold at Wii-like rates. Its sales are absolutely phenominal. It's selling roughly double the rate the PS2 did at the same time since launch. Also, anyone with half a brain can see that consoles normally sell less each successive year. It's called market saturation. Price drops and killer games can help but in general the machines sell less year on year. So saying "360 appears to have peaked back in 2006" is pretty worthless. Even the PS2 sold less year on year, doesn't that mean it "peaked" in 2000?
Yeah this is great, until you're in a part of the world where Internet access is sporadic, slow, and $10/GB. Then suddenly having to download a few hundred megs of non-differential patches per app and needing a connection to "verify" your software is a bit more than a minor inconvenience. It's extremely annoying when software that'd designed for completely non-networked functionality REQUIRES you to hook the machine it's installed (from CD!) on to prove you haven't pirated it. This just leads to people pirating it and distributing the copies to everyone else in the same situation.
While I would very much love to live in your future of free high speed connections that are always there, the future is looking like pay per gig to clamp down on bittorrent, recover costs for universal monitoring of traffic (without need for pesky warrants), and milk people for all they're worth. "Oh, too bad your line went down when the phone company screwed up and you didn't notice when your router swapped over to the 3G cellular backup, that'll be $54,000 this month."
Here's a tip: The US is not the entire world, and companies sell to the rest too. Try telling everyone here in Africa that "in 5-10 years it will be virtual [sic] impossible to go 'offline'", I'm sure it'll be good for a laugh.
Actually evolution's still working just fine, the problem is lack of selection pressure.
For a while, intelligence was favored as the smarter people had better health and survived longer and thus reproduced more, and more consistently. Now that more of the population is living "comfortably", there's no longer a favorable selection for that trait. This suggests the level of intelligence has been optimized for the current environment.
What's going on now is that since there is so little pressure (i.e. the environment isn't really harsh enough to consistently select for a specific favorable set of traits) the gene pool is moving back towards a more neutral stance. I.e. the gene pool is getting more diverse in this environment. This is normally a good thing. It means when the next environment change brings in a pressure that selects for a different favorable trait, more of the population will survive because of this diversity. If we kept evolving for intelligence and suddenly the environment changed to say, high UV radiation resistance as being the next favorable trait, those additional intelligence refinements would likely be fairly useless (neglecting the effect of technology that could be invented to artificially maintain a stable environment). So the current trend now is to randomize the genetics of the population so hopefully some part of it will be able to survive no matter what happens next. You'll still see more intelligent people pop up now and then, as part of the normal variance. But the mean value won't move until there's a reason that becomes an advantage to survival and/or reproduction, and yes it may in fact backslide a bit as it stabilizes.
People keep assuming that being more intelligent is consistently an advantage. It may be from a societal view of how we define "success", or maybe "potential", or even "progress". But from natural selection's point of view, it isn't. Bigger brains require more resources in terms of food, complicate births, take longer to mature to adult level, etc. The system is designed to quit once "good enough" has been reached, so it doesn't waste resources on overkill.
Yup! Though previously when I've mentioned this to ./ before figuring it out, it was ignored by askslashdot and help emails, or I was told I have no idea what I'm talking about by people who "obviously know more about SA's networks" than I do.
IPv6 as mentioned by the poster up top won't solve issues like this. Paying $10/GB of traffic per month is the problem, not address space. Oh and despite what Telkom tells you, it's not that there's too much traffic for their poor transoceanic cables. Currently, just 25 percent of the SAT-3/WASC/SAFE capacity is being used. This is due to incompetence in negotiating reasonable peering agreements. Oh and I've priced the cost to lay a new line from the west coast of SA to say, Florida with AT&T laying the cable. It's about R4bn. Telkom makes more than that in profit per year, they could afford more capacity (and more is coming to the continent anyway), but since that's not the problem it won't solve anything. They just keep using it as an excuse to charge the 2nd highest rate for broadband in the world and pretend they're not still a government-owned monopoly.
While Eskom has built a second fiberoptic net (which has been lying idle a couple years now, thanks ICASA!) to service the local infrastructure, I think they'll still run into the same issues at the international gateways.
Your Firefox ASKS? Mine just says "Hey I've downloaded a new update without bothering to ask, and it'll be installed as soon as you restart the browser! Bend over now? Or later?" It did this just today in fact, on both my machines. It never gives the option to NOT install the update, and it never asks to waste bandwidth downloading it (which may be a consideration here where it costs $10/GB).
Gee mine's been up a few hours and has 3 tabs open, which are slashdot stories. Guess what the memory use is? 572MB. Oh and 34% CPU use on a 1.7Ghz Pentium M just sitting here staring at the page. But hey, don't let my "anecdotal evidence" get in the way of blind zealotry.
Of course here comes the "It's windows fault!" crowd, along with the people who go "Oh but it's a setting you can fix only buried in some obscure config that we're too lazy to make a proper GUI for!" If everything can be fixed by config changes to cater to the user who knows what they're doing, where's the config option to let me open an EXE? Oh yeah, well it's only about empowring the user until they want to do something the developer's idealism doesn't agree with.
Oh? Explain this to me then!
This IP address or network has been used to abuse the system and logins from it have been disabled. If you feel that this is unwarranted, feel free to include your IP address (198.54.202.114) in the subject of an email to banned@slashdot.org, and we will examine why there is a ban.
198.54.202.114 resolves to rba-cache3-vif1.saix.net
Yes, read my article that I'm sure is laughable and went completely unread in South Africa Computer Magazine. I mean obviously everyone must agree with you so this must be entirely fake in my inbox:
I found your "Open Source Man" article very informative, especially as we in Government is struggling convincing decision makers that they need to take on their OS initiatives more carefully and especially not force them down on us but rather base it on research etc. I am looking for the original "Open Source Man" article (or articles) and will appreciate it if you can make it available to me.
Regards
Tjaart Richards - Systems Specialist
Department of Developmental Local Government & Housing
North West Provincial Government
Of course there were also negative responses, but not a single one could be professional enough to refrain from using "M$" in their reply.
....like say anyone who uses South Africa's sole monopoly telecom provider, Telkom.
Why has this happened? Oh well you see Telkom likes to save bandwidth because they're cheap. So they force every international connection through a cache server. Slashdot has deemed the cache server an "abusive" IP, so it's banned from posting on the site. But you can't NOT submit from that IP, because it's forced by the only internet provider in the country. So basically 45 million people can't post thanks to lazy site administrators.
Have I submitted this to the appropriate channels? Of course, countless times, and never recieve any reply. I've even submitted it as news. I've asked about it as an ask slashdot.(both rejected of course). Nobody seems to care.
After all, I'm sure it's just so easy for everyone to VNC into a machine in the US like I'm doing so they can struggle with laggy shaped international connections just to submit text to a website. It's our fault for living in a third world country with a government that artificially maintains a monopoly now that it's no longer "official" since half of the government still has stock in it, right?
Go ahead, mod me offtopic or troll or whatever. I don't give a damn. If you people bothered to read your own damn mail and fix the site I wouldn't have had to spend a year trying to find a solution only to wind up bitching about it in posts!
What if, the capattery itself was sealed watertight, so just the wires came out... then somewhere in the phone we could put some... thing. And this thing could kind of make some sort of break in the circuit when too much current went through it... some sort of "circuit breaker" if you will.... And after you get the phone out, well you could dry it off and then reset this thing so that the circuit was restored. Nah, if such an easy solution for dealing with high current discharges was so easy, someone would already have thought of it and it'd be in every home and office by now. Forget I mentioned it. Crazy idea.
You may be aiding in copyright infringement! (dramatic chord)
/sarcasm on Slashdot?
If you think you're safe because you only showed people where to find it and don't actually have it yourself, don't come crying to me when 50 cops break down your door and steal your computers!
Do I really need a
This sounds familliar. I've had an "unknown" skin condition on both arms since I was 14 that looks similar to bad acne and it itches and hurts, particularly when I get stressed. I've had people claim it's everything from psychological to sensitivity to detergents to an STD(unlikely considering when it started). I know I've got sensitive skin that reacts to certain soaps etc, but that always manifests as a different type of rash.
I saw a whole bunch of dermatologists several years ago. They gave me everything from clindamycin to erethromycin to minicyclin. None of which was as effective as a sunburn or salt water, and just as temporary. I had biopsies and cultures done, and they could never get the damn thing to culture. They couldn't even tell me if it was viral or bacterial, as it has symptoms of both.
So I kinda gave up on it and just tried to live with it. Then a bit earlier this year when I was seeing a new doctor (non-dermatologist) he asked if any of them ever prescribed accutane. I said no, it wasn't that commonly known last time I was looked at but I figured if none of the other "strong" antibiotics had worked, it wouldn't either. But I figured what the hell I'll try it anyway.
So I got put on 20mg/day of Accutane. The "normal adult dose" is supposedly more like 125mg/day, but it has bad side effects so I figured I'd start low and see. Within about 48 hours I noticed an improvement in the skin. I stayed on it for about a month, and no new ones have formed, and the older ones are healing well. The worst side effect I got was chapped lips, which sounds like nothing but when it's severe enough that you can't eat anything without pain it's another story. So I'm going off the accutane for a while to let that heal and see if the improvement in my condition is stable. If it is, I'll probably try 40mg/day for 2-4 weeks and hopefully that will get rid of it or at least reduce it to the point where it's no more than a minor nuisance.
IANAD (doctor), and I don't own any stock in drug companies (I was getting generics anyway), so I can't say this will work for everyone else. But if you have something that seems bacterial or similar to acne, I suggest giving the low dosage a shot to see if it does anything for you.
I don't really see myself using either format. Why? Because discs aren't how I consume media anymore. I download everything. I'm just waiting for them to come out with pay services with better quality, and then I'll be buying everything instead of pirating it. But either way, I'm not buying discs anymore. Why would I when they're DRMed to hell and want to bully me into purchacing "compliant" hardware? I'd rather just download the illegal unrestricted content. I do it for DVD-quality now, I'll do it for HD-quality later. Do I care if the pirate versions are recompressed slightly worse? Not really if I don't have to go hunting through a stack of easily scratchable or lost media that I can't transfer to other machines and devices.
If I had to pick one, I'd say HD-DVD. Why? 1. It's out now. 2. Mandatory managed copy vs voluntary managed copy. 3. More advanced codecs than mpeg-2. 4. Lack of regions? Not sure on this last one, but the 360 games have no regions, and I've heard Toshiba is pushing hard to remove the region system from HD-DVD.
It was in the August issue of South Africa Computer Magazine. I put some scans of it up on my blog a few months later, I think they're still up there.
Well you're assuming we'd keep the design of the gasoline engine similar. If we start using the idea of electricity as a virtual transmission then it's possible to make gains.
Consider a redesign of the combustion engine that has just cylinders that use 2 a modified 2 stroke compression cycle on each end, and just move the cylinder in a tube that has an electric coil. Put a magnet in the middle and you can transmit power without needing to connect the cylinder to any mechanical transfer system. It'll produce a pretty standard AC sine-wave, and because there's no direct mechanical coupling it can run at optimal efficiency or power rates instead of having to deal with constant acceleration/deceleration. You could even shut down and power up individual cylinders on demand, and since there's no mechanical connections, using say, dozens or hundreds of smaller cylinders for better efficiency and more flexible power would be possible.
On the electric side, motors have far better low end torque, and less moving parts overall. If you did the design right you might even be able to eliminate the mechanical transmission for different gears completely. Not having mechanical transfer means you can easily do things like 1 motor per wheel directly coupled. This would again provide more robust redundancy, better efficiency, scalability (only run 2 motors when needed i.e. highway driving), better driving properties (full time all-wheel drive), etc.
Granted you're still going gas->motion->electricity->motion, but you're not replacing just gas->motion. You're replacing gas->several thousand moving parts with friction losses and failure rates->motion with gas->electricity->maybe a couple dozen parts->motion. The removal of the complex mechanical transfer system is where you'll get the efficiency AND reliability boost. But that would make cars last for 20 years, and nobody wants that, right?