No, I call the CSS and region locking features onerous (at least for what I would like to do). But for most users those aspects did not and do not matter.
I think you meant to say DVDs in your previous post where you said CDs? Then everything would make sense. Relatively few CDs have DRM, and of those that do a lot of them are well-known for causing problems with the basic stick in disc/play disc behavior that is all most people really want to work.
Anyway you have a point, though I also notice that the DRM of the next gen DVDs is more conspicuous than CSS. In particular the problems people have with HDMI/HDCP. Having to make sure everything in your output chain is compliant with the DRM standards is asking a lot more than was asked of DVD owners, who needed nothing but a licensed DVD player. Now you need to make sure that your TV, tuner, and amplifier all support the DRM. If we assume that anyone buying a new player is also buying these other pieces of equipment to upgrade their home to HD, then it will probably be moot. For anyone upgrading piecemeal, however, they may be surprised.
So, forgive me.. I could just be naive; but what does C or C++ calling semantics / methods have anything to do with calls into the OS?
No, you're right, it has nothing to do with C/C++. The GP was just another example on/. of "I'm going to seem smart by discrediting the article, and the easiest way to do so is make something up without reading the article".
This comparison is laughable. Do you think GPUs are Turing-complete like CPUs? The shaders in the Gamecube and Wii have a tiny instruction limit and no branching or loop support, among other problems. "Gamecube doesn't have full-fledged shaders" is perfectly accurate.
Back when no shader had branching or loop support, all had tiny instruction limits, we still called them "shaders", not "shaders which are not full fledged like the ones that will appear in the future".
Just like we called a 286 an "x86 processor" even though it lacks major features that we would consider critical today, like 32-bit mode. Turing completeness doesn't enter into it; a 286 can't run 32-bit code. Yet future features do not change the original definition.
I see the important distinction being made, but "full fledged" is hardly an accurate way to put it.
"full-fledged" does not mean "state of the art". The shaders in the 'Cube are "full fledged". Just like a Pentium 3 is a "full fledged" x86 microprocessor, even if it isn't as modern and powerful as Core 2 Duo.
"Gamecube doesn't have full-fledged shaders" is wrong. "Gamecube's shaders aren't as powerful as those of Xbox360" is correct, but also not as strong a statement, so I can see why the author chose the other.
My intent is a policy made by a few network engineers, as determined by their daily/weekly reports. Too slow to deal with an immediate network need (viral infections on the network), but certainly fast enough to respond to application lifecycles.
Okay, that sounds reasonable, if it works that way. I only criticize that methodology when it becomes political and money motivated, which is why the source-based descrimination is the big issue with 'network neutrality'. Yet there's still something that draws me towards an automated system.
If you have pointers to information about adaptive QoS (maybe using machine learning?), I'd love to see them. It would be great to be able to automate the human policy-decider's job (with the intent that those people would then manage and improve the automation).
Well I'm only familiar with the operating system thread scheduling concept of the multilevel feedback queue. You just have some queues, and each one has a limitation for how long you are allowed to use the CPU before giving it up, the shorter the limit the higher the priority. Threads that use less CPU time than the limit go to a higher priority queue, if they go over to lower priority. It's not exactly "machine learning", but it does result it responsiveness correlating with resource usage. You want an interactive application to use as little CPU as possible in order for it to be responsive to user input anyway, and the OS can give you appropriately fast access to the CPU. Uh, or here's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilevel_Feedback_Q ueue.
I assume it would work similar with a network router, in that it's also a throughput/latency tradeoff. Want a more responsive network app? Use less bandwidth, and then even if there's a ton of bittorrent is flying around, your packets will be serviced in a timely fashion. While this isn't always what you might exactly want -- you can imagine an important application that wants fairly high bandwidth and as low latency as possible -- it is certainly neutral and rewards efficient users of the network. Maybe. I'm not a network engineer.
I certainly wouldn't buy a $600 console knowing that the price could be $500 in a month or two.
Were you going to buy a $600 console anyway?
I think that's the position Sony is in right now. If you assume PS3 sales are approximately as bad as they seem after Christmas, then they aren't moving much product. So by saying that there is going to be a price drop, they are costing themselves much in the way of current sales, but can hopefully get people thinking of buying one of the other consoles to hold off.
I don't think this was necessarily a stupid move, it might be the only way to prevent their market share delta from increasing, but the situation still doesn't bode well for Sony.
In the short term, Sony have just ensured that no one (except the occasional fool) is going to want to part with their money.
Exactly. I said it in the article about Sony saying they wouldn't drop the price: Companies don't pre-announce price cuts because it hurts their own sales. When the price drop is close, they may announce it to try to interfere with their competitor's sales, especially if their own sales aren't expected to be great in that period anyway. Now Sony is saying they are thinking about a price drop, but with no specificity on the price or date, so it is probably not long off but not imminent either. This tells me that their sales are hurting, and they're more concerned with preventing people from buying xbox360 or wii than they are worried about tanking current sales.
No, see, he's being very precise here. When he says "I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine", he means no less than once a month, and no more than once a month. Indeed, this is a great challenge.
No one should be deciding QoS policies based on assumptions. When there is a feedback loop between policy measurement and adjustment, that isn't a problem.
Well whenever you say "policy" I hear a decision made by a committee, not by a software algorithm, and hence something that is too slow to change if the measurements change. When you take a measurement, then assign a policy, then that policy is based on the assumption that the measurement continues to be valid. The problem is that they'll simply say "give VoIP app X priority", and it may turn out that voip app X has a badly behaved revision that suddenly starts eating bandwidth, invalidating their assumption. By the time the alter its priority, the problem may be solved, meaning the new assumption was once again proven false.
Not to mention every other voip or other app that jumps on the net. If they have to measure and make a policy decision about each application, it will simply be untenable.
This is why a scheduler that is based on real-time feedback of the connection's actual behavior is much better than any static per-app policy decision, even if that policy is based on measurement.
I think Web traffic is the closest example, because it is both sensitive to latency and bandwidth constraints.
Some parts are more sensitive to latency than others. The basic html is latency sensitive, large graphics or media files embedded in the html are less so. As the needs of even a particular web page change, a dynamic scheduler could adapt to give the appropriate priority. There is no way you could assign a static priority to web traffic that would be even close to optimal.
I mean apps VoIP, which requires moderate bandwidth but also low latency, for example, should get a higher priority than your bittorrent packet, which can build in in a queue before being unloaded to you after some VoIP is done.
One of the problems I have with this otherwise reasonable concept is I don't like the decision being made on an app by app basis. For one thing, who decides what app gets priority, the ISPs? Second, what if the assumed usage model doesn't match reality, and you have either high bandwidth but high priority apps chewing up all the bandwidth?
Your description though reminded me immediately of an app-neutral solution from another instance where we have to trade off between low latency and high throughput and deciding which app deserves what: operating system schedulers. A basic multi-level feedback queue, where connections that use little bandwidth are put into high priority queues, and as their bandwidth needs increase they are put into progressively lower priority queues -- maybe, like in OS schedulers, these lower level queues also get larger slices of the pipe at any point at which they get picked.
This solves both problems. No policy decision is needed to grant certain applications better performance, they are rewarded it naturally by being light on the system, and are stripped of it if they start suddenly demanding more resources. This solves the problem of bittorrent using up too much of the system, and of VoIP not being responsive enough.
I don't see any reason it wouldn't work, but my one networking class was a while ago.
This would totally change the world in the short term by finally providing a means to mass-produce holy water, and eventually even purifying the entire world of 'evil' particles (ie collect all the hateful particles together, send them up on the 'space elevator to heaven' and launch into the void).
Leading to the eventual clash between us and whatever planet our huge ball of quantum-mechanically perfect evil lands on.
You can change the nature of the game, the controls, or other things to approximate the experience, but unfortunately the disabled will never have the same experience.
Yes but video games, by their very nature an approximation and virtualization of some experience, lend themselves well to being made with the disabled in mind. For example the design of the controller is not a fundamental aspect that would change the balance of the game, so it makes perfect sense (even if there is no market for it) to have a game controller for people who can only use their feet, and that kid wouldn't have had as hard a time playing Nintendo. Now how that would work with the Wii is another story...
The most general form of what you are saying -- that there exist handicaps and games which are fundamentally incompatible -- is true, the video game industry has a unique opportunity to make games that are as accessible as possible in ways that meatspace gaming could never mimic.
If I recall correctly congress was going to pass a bill which would of required pharmaceutical companies to report the true percentage spent on marketing but due to lobbying it was shot down.
Which tells you one thing: If we knew exactly how much they spent on marketing, we would not think any more highly of them. If they prefer to have the ambiguity of not being able to clearly state that they spend 2x on marketing, it's because they do spend nearly that much more on marketing and obfuscating the fact only helps them.
The definition of being "conservative" is not wanting things to change.
Global warming, if true, forces us to face changing most of our current way of life.
Which, based on my own conservative leanings, means that we should do whatever we can to avoid exacerbating global warming. Whatever changes are required for us to reduce our CO2 and other pollution output has to be much, much less than the changes that would be wrought if global warming continues unabated.
It frusrates me when a conservative resists environmental conservation, under the idea that it means giving up our lifestyle. I understand they get that from the hippies, but it's not like the hippies get to actually implement anything anyway. Me, I want environmental conservation to preserve our lifestyle with minimal changes.
Meanwhile weather channel climatologist Heidi Cullen wants global warming skeptics who are meteorologists decertified.
Not global warming skeptics, meteorologists who were not educated in climate research, and who were presenting their uninformed opinions as the facts of a studied expert.
There's a significant difference. Someone who is skeptical of global warming, and has read the research and can make his case with facts and reason, is not a problem. Someone who is skeptical of global warming and has not read the research, they just feel that there is something wrong, that climatologists have "something to hide", and hey maybe it's the sun, has anyone thought about the sun? Those are problems, because uninformed unscientific opinions are not helpful in science. When that person is a meteorologist, whom people would assume has an informed scientific opinion and who presents their opinion as though it comes from their expertise, that is damaging.
What exactly do the ecofundamentalists have to hide? It seems to me that one side is saying 'We are skeptical of what you are saying for the following reasons" and the other side is threating trials and decertifications.
No, one side is saying "We are skeptical of what you are saying for the following reasons."
And the other side is saying "Those reasons are bunk, the research has shown this, here's a cite, please read up on the current state of climatology before claiming you have a rational basis for your skepticism."
And then the first one goes "No, really, I don't believe you, and here's why."
And the other goes "Those are the same reasons as before, and I told you, that was covered here. Did you read it? Oh, I guess not. Well would you please shut up until you educate yourself on the topic so we can have a productive conversation?"
And the first responds "Ha! Ha! See that, he's censoring me! You don't dare face my truth! I knew global warming was bunk!"
But of course it's the climatologists who are being emotional and unscientific.
There's nothing to hide. The research is all there, in the open. The fact that there are few people who are both well-versed in this research and what you would call a "global warming skeptic" should tell you something. No, it's not a conspiracy. The conspiracy is what we are seeing in this Congressional hearing, with scientists pressured to change their statements to match an agenda of the administration. I find it really ridiculous that you would sit here and claim it's the ones who accept the conclusions of climate change research who are the ones trying to silence people, in an article presenting evidence of exactly the opposite.
There are scientists -- including those who find fault with existing research and actually try to enhance the state of knowledge -- and there are the "skeptics", who aren't actually skeptical so much as flat-out disbelieving and willing to grab at any evidence that serves their purpose without doing any further research to see if that evidence stands up to scientific inquiry. They are the ones with a pre-conceived conclusion and are "skeptical" of anything that shows otherwise while completely accepting of anything that does -- again, completely bereft of scientific merit. That's really the key here. Everyone's emotions aside, there are people doing real climatology science, and there are people who are not. The correlation between these two groups and the groups who you would call "believers" and "skeptics" tells you something.
Meanwhile weather channel climatologist Heidi Cullen wants global warming skeptics who are meteorologists decertified.
Not global warming skeptics, meteorologists who were not educated in climate research, and who were presenting their uninformed opinions as the facts of a studied expert.
There's a significant difference. Someone who is skeptical of global warming, and has read the research and can make his case with facts and reason, is not a problem. Someone who is skeptical of global warming and has not read the research, they just feel that there is something wrong, that climatologists have "something to hide", and hey maybe it's the sun, has anyone thought about the sun? Those are problems, because uninformed unscientific opinions are not helpful in science. When that person is a meteorologist, whom people would assume has an informed scientific opinion and who presents their opinion as though it comes from their expertise, that is damaging.
What exactly do the ecofundamentalists have to hide? It seems to me that one side is saying 'We are skeptical of what you are saying for the following reasons" and the other side is threating trials and decertifications.
No, one side is saying "We are skeptical of what you are saying for the following reasons."
And the other side is saying "Those reasons are bunk, the research has shown this, here's a cite, please read up on the current state of climatology before claiming you have a rational basis for your skepticism."
There's nothing to hide. The research is all there, in the open. The fact that there are few people who are both well-versed in this research and what you would call a "global warming skeptic" should tell you something. No, it's not a conspiracy.
"According to these FDA regulations, advertisers who name a prescription drug, and state its purpose and benefits, must also include full disclosure of its side effects, contraindications, and must follow specific labeling guidelines."
By stating the purpose of the drug, that "extra 5 seconds" suddenly turns into a full minute or two of small print being read to you. Not exactly what the advertisers want to be doing with their time/money.
Well the ad would be completely useless if they didn't name the drug, or give an at least vague indication of its purpose, and all the prescription medication ads I've seen do have that 20 second low-volume recitation of all the side effects, usually while showing a happy couple on a swingset or kayaking.
Which personally I love. The first such ad I recall was for Propecia, the hair growth pill, which contained the line "women who are pregnant or wish to become pregnent should not handle broken propecia tablets as serious birth defects may result". Whoa, that's nasty shit, I thought. I also like a lot of the anti-depression med ads, where they show some guy whose happy and enjoying life, while saying "may cause certain sexual side effects" -- meaning you become impotent, basically replacing your chemical-imbalance-induced depression with a real reason to be depressed.
"I love my Xbox, Halo is sweet!" "Cool. What other fun games are there?" "Halo is totally awesome!"
Heh, so yeah, I'll grant that Halo saved the xbox *but* the main difference here is that there were other games that interest a north american audience, and certainly no lack of faith that more FPS would be coming out for Xbox. If Halo was truly the only game on the system for U.S. audiences, I'd say they'd have "succeeded" in the U.S. just as much as they have in Japan based solely on Blue Dragon.
Yes, a high-quality exclusive game that appeals to the Japanese market was what they needed, and desperately.
Was Blue Dragon sufficient?
No, obviously not. One game is never going to turn a console from an abject failure into a success all by itself. Few people will buy a console when only one game out of the entire library interests them, and so it is with the 360.
Blue dragon is what MS needed, past tense, to show they had a chance at all in Japan. What they need, present tense, is another Blue Dragon, and another, so that people will have multiple reasons to want one, and to hope that more games they'll like will come out. Even still MS being successfull in Japan is very iffy, but without this, failure is guaranteed. Sort of like when a paramedic needs a defribulator, even though it may not save the patient -- their other option is to sit by and note the time of death.
Yes, we will replace them with Compact Flaming Politicians (CFPs). Any existing politician who wishes to remain in office must volunteer to be Compacted, and must also comply with the Flaming clause. I wonder how many would pick the definition of flaming that isn't slang...
World of Warcraft, for example. I mean they had to write it for OpenAL to get the Mac and Linux versions working and they released the Mac version at the same time as the Windows version.
Blizzard hasn't done jack for Linux, at least as far as development goes. They have worked with Transgaming to help Transgaming fix some issues with Cedega, and to restore accounts of Linux users that were erroneously flagged as bot-users. There is no "linux version" of the game, though. Cedega runs the Windows version of wow, and uses whatever audio driver the windows version uses.
They did implement both directX and OpenGL, and both can be used under Windows, so maybe it similarly has an OpenAL path on Windows.
No, there's a fourth option: They didn't know what BlueJ was, not because of incompetence but because they deliberately didn't seek it out under the express instructions of the company patent lawyer.
Since knowingly infringing a patent is treble damages, it's SOP for companies to tell their engineers not to do patent searches or other prior art searches before submitting patents or using ideas. The other half of this strategy is to patent as many things as possible. This way when you violate someone else's patent you can sit at the negotiating table and point all the patents of yours that they are also violating, the goal being to settle with a cross-licensing agreement that is more favorable to the party with the bigger pile of patents and with more key patents.
That exact mechanism of treble damages may not apply in this particular case, but I still wouldn't be surprised if it was corporate policy to not try too hard to discover prior art.
That a letter was found indicates that someone at MS did know about BlueJ, though, is probably what is actually getting them in trouble and causing them to drop the patent. Which just means they're going to enforce the policy of deliberate ignorance even more in the future.
I could've told you this was coming back when the invasion was first announced. Why? I'm Bengali.
Well not to pat myself on the back but I knew it was coming too, and that's with my piss-poor American public school education.;) Quick, list of countries whose people were grateful to be invaded and occupied by a foreign power! Hmm...
"What every terrorist fears most is human freedom -- societies where men and women make their own choices, answer to their own conscience, and live by their hopes instead of their resentments. Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies -- and most will choose a better way when they are given a chance."
Haha! I didn't watch the speech, because I can't stand to hear the man speak, and I didn't read about it either since I knew what he was going to say.
That's just a twist on a clasic Bush line. He used to give a much more direct and even more ludicrous statement when he was explaining why terrorists would want to attack the United States: "They hate us for our freedom." Oh man, that one had me rolling in the isles. Also crying, because a person who believes that (not that Bush necessarily does, but many believe it because he said it), then they have absolutely zero chance of ever understanding terrorism.
My personal favorite example of how ludicrous this whole line of thinking that Democracy will make everything okay is when the Palestinians voted in Hamas. The West's reaction was basically: Oh shit, you weren't supposed to be that free!
Ultimately, it's not democracy that makes Westerners, well, Westernized. It's a couple of thousand years of shared culture, history, and civilization. Democracy is an expression of the underlying mindset of the West, not the underpinnings of that mindset. It took the West a long time to get its societies to the point where they could support democracy. It took France a 150 years to build a supportable Republic, and France had one of the longest traditions of liberal Enlightenment thinking in Europe! How could anybody be stupid enough to think that we could have pushed Iraq to do it in a few years, much less a few decades?
Yeah, my history education was shitty and Euro-centric, but damn do I find it amazing that so few of my fellow Americans seem to remember this simple fact. Just like so many don't seem to appreciate how great our debt to France is. Is it any surprise that they also thought that getting rid of Saddam Hussein would turn Iraq into Oklahoma overnight?
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No, I call the CSS and region locking features onerous (at least for what I would like to do). But for most users those aspects did not and do not matter.
I think you meant to say DVDs in your previous post where you said CDs? Then everything would make sense. Relatively few CDs have DRM, and of those that do a lot of them are well-known for causing problems with the basic stick in disc/play disc behavior that is all most people really want to work.
Anyway you have a point, though I also notice that the DRM of the next gen DVDs is more conspicuous than CSS. In particular the problems people have with HDMI/HDCP. Having to make sure everything in your output chain is compliant with the DRM standards is asking a lot more than was asked of DVD owners, who needed nothing but a licensed DVD player. Now you need to make sure that your TV, tuner, and amplifier all support the DRM. If we assume that anyone buying a new player is also buying these other pieces of equipment to upgrade their home to HD, then it will probably be moot. For anyone upgrading piecemeal, however, they may be surprised.
So, forgive me.. I could just be naive; but what does C or C++ calling semantics / methods have anything to do with calls into the OS?
/. of "I'm going to seem smart by discrediting the article, and the easiest way to do so is make something up without reading the article".
No, you're right, it has nothing to do with C/C++. The GP was just another example on
This comparison is laughable. Do you think GPUs are Turing-complete like CPUs? The shaders in the Gamecube and Wii have a tiny instruction limit and no branching or loop support, among other problems. "Gamecube doesn't have full-fledged shaders" is perfectly accurate.
Back when no shader had branching or loop support, all had tiny instruction limits, we still called them "shaders", not "shaders which are not full fledged like the ones that will appear in the future".
Just like we called a 286 an "x86 processor" even though it lacks major features that we would consider critical today, like 32-bit mode. Turing completeness doesn't enter into it; a 286 can't run 32-bit code. Yet future features do not change the original definition.
I see the important distinction being made, but "full fledged" is hardly an accurate way to put it.
"full-fledged" does not mean "state of the art". The shaders in the 'Cube are "full fledged". Just like a Pentium 3 is a "full fledged" x86 microprocessor, even if it isn't as modern and powerful as Core 2 Duo.
"Gamecube doesn't have full-fledged shaders" is wrong. "Gamecube's shaders aren't as powerful as those of Xbox360" is correct, but also not as strong a statement, so I can see why the author chose the other.
My intent is a policy made by a few network engineers, as determined by their daily/weekly reports. Too slow to deal with an immediate network need (viral infections on the network), but certainly fast enough to respond to application lifecycles.
Q ueue.
Okay, that sounds reasonable, if it works that way. I only criticize that methodology when it becomes political and money motivated, which is why the source-based descrimination is the big issue with 'network neutrality'. Yet there's still something that draws me towards an automated system.
If you have pointers to information about adaptive QoS (maybe using machine learning?), I'd love to see them. It would be great to be able to automate the human policy-decider's job (with the intent that those people would then manage and improve the automation).
Well I'm only familiar with the operating system thread scheduling concept of the multilevel feedback queue. You just have some queues, and each one has a limitation for how long you are allowed to use the CPU before giving it up, the shorter the limit the higher the priority. Threads that use less CPU time than the limit go to a higher priority queue, if they go over to lower priority. It's not exactly "machine learning", but it does result it responsiveness correlating with resource usage. You want an interactive application to use as little CPU as possible in order for it to be responsive to user input anyway, and the OS can give you appropriately fast access to the CPU. Uh, or here's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilevel_Feedback_
I assume it would work similar with a network router, in that it's also a throughput/latency tradeoff. Want a more responsive network app? Use less bandwidth, and then even if there's a ton of bittorrent is flying around, your packets will be serviced in a timely fashion. While this isn't always what you might exactly want -- you can imagine an important application that wants fairly high bandwidth and as low latency as possible -- it is certainly neutral and rewards efficient users of the network. Maybe. I'm not a network engineer.
I certainly wouldn't buy a $600 console knowing that the price could be $500 in a month or two.
Were you going to buy a $600 console anyway?
I think that's the position Sony is in right now. If you assume PS3 sales are approximately as bad as they seem after Christmas, then they aren't moving much product. So by saying that there is going to be a price drop, they are costing themselves much in the way of current sales, but can hopefully get people thinking of buying one of the other consoles to hold off.
I don't think this was necessarily a stupid move, it might be the only way to prevent their market share delta from increasing, but the situation still doesn't bode well for Sony.
In the short term, Sony have just ensured that no one (except the occasional fool) is going to want to part with their money.
Exactly. I said it in the article about Sony saying they wouldn't drop the price: Companies don't pre-announce price cuts because it hurts their own sales. When the price drop is close, they may announce it to try to interfere with their competitor's sales, especially if their own sales aren't expected to be great in that period anyway. Now Sony is saying they are thinking about a price drop, but with no specificity on the price or date, so it is probably not long off but not imminent either. This tells me that their sales are hurting, and they're more concerned with preventing people from buying xbox360 or wii than they are worried about tanking current sales.
No, see, he's being very precise here. When he says "I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine", he means no less than once a month, and no more than once a month. Indeed, this is a great challenge.
No one should be deciding QoS policies based on assumptions. When there is a feedback loop between policy measurement and adjustment, that isn't a problem.
Well whenever you say "policy" I hear a decision made by a committee, not by a software algorithm, and hence something that is too slow to change if the measurements change. When you take a measurement, then assign a policy, then that policy is based on the assumption that the measurement continues to be valid. The problem is that they'll simply say "give VoIP app X priority", and it may turn out that voip app X has a badly behaved revision that suddenly starts eating bandwidth, invalidating their assumption. By the time the alter its priority, the problem may be solved, meaning the new assumption was once again proven false.
Not to mention every other voip or other app that jumps on the net. If they have to measure and make a policy decision about each application, it will simply be untenable.
This is why a scheduler that is based on real-time feedback of the connection's actual behavior is much better than any static per-app policy decision, even if that policy is based on measurement.
I think Web traffic is the closest example, because it is both sensitive to latency and bandwidth constraints.
Some parts are more sensitive to latency than others. The basic html is latency sensitive, large graphics or media files embedded in the html are less so. As the needs of even a particular web page change, a dynamic scheduler could adapt to give the appropriate priority. There is no way you could assign a static priority to web traffic that would be even close to optimal.
I mean apps VoIP, which requires moderate bandwidth but also low latency, for example, should get a higher priority than your bittorrent packet, which can build in in a queue before being unloaded to you after some VoIP is done.
One of the problems I have with this otherwise reasonable concept is I don't like the decision being made on an app by app basis. For one thing, who decides what app gets priority, the ISPs? Second, what if the assumed usage model doesn't match reality, and you have either high bandwidth but high priority apps chewing up all the bandwidth?
Your description though reminded me immediately of an app-neutral solution from another instance where we have to trade off between low latency and high throughput and deciding which app deserves what: operating system schedulers. A basic multi-level feedback queue, where connections that use little bandwidth are put into high priority queues, and as their bandwidth needs increase they are put into progressively lower priority queues -- maybe, like in OS schedulers, these lower level queues also get larger slices of the pipe at any point at which they get picked.
This solves both problems. No policy decision is needed to grant certain applications better performance, they are rewarded it naturally by being light on the system, and are stripped of it if they start suddenly demanding more resources. This solves the problem of bittorrent using up too much of the system, and of VoIP not being responsive enough.
I don't see any reason it wouldn't work, but my one networking class was a while ago.
This would totally change the world in the short term by finally providing a means to mass-produce holy water, and eventually even purifying the entire world of 'evil' particles (ie collect all the hateful particles together, send them up on the 'space elevator to heaven' and launch into the void).
Leading to the eventual clash between us and whatever planet our huge ball of quantum-mechanically perfect evil lands on.
Which would be sweet. This is the best plan ever.
You can change the nature of the game, the controls, or other things to approximate the experience, but unfortunately the disabled will never have the same experience.
Yes but video games, by their very nature an approximation and virtualization of some experience, lend themselves well to being made with the disabled in mind. For example the design of the controller is not a fundamental aspect that would change the balance of the game, so it makes perfect sense (even if there is no market for it) to have a game controller for people who can only use their feet, and that kid wouldn't have had as hard a time playing Nintendo. Now how that would work with the Wii is another story...
The most general form of what you are saying -- that there exist handicaps and games which are fundamentally incompatible -- is true, the video game industry has a unique opportunity to make games that are as accessible as possible in ways that meatspace gaming could never mimic.
If I recall correctly congress was going to pass a bill which would of required pharmaceutical companies to report the true percentage spent on marketing but due to lobbying it was shot down.
Which tells you one thing: If we knew exactly how much they spent on marketing, we would not think any more highly of them. If they prefer to have the ambiguity of not being able to clearly state that they spend 2x on marketing, it's because they do spend nearly that much more on marketing and obfuscating the fact only helps them.
The definition of being "conservative" is not wanting things to change.
Global warming, if true, forces us to face changing most of our current way of life.
Which, based on my own conservative leanings, means that we should do whatever we can to avoid exacerbating global warming. Whatever changes are required for us to reduce our CO2 and other pollution output has to be much, much less than the changes that would be wrought if global warming continues unabated.
It frusrates me when a conservative resists environmental conservation, under the idea that it means giving up our lifestyle. I understand they get that from the hippies, but it's not like the hippies get to actually implement anything anyway. Me, I want environmental conservation to preserve our lifestyle with minimal changes.
Meanwhile weather channel climatologist Heidi Cullen wants global warming skeptics who are meteorologists decertified.
Not global warming skeptics, meteorologists who were not educated in climate research, and who were presenting their uninformed opinions as the facts of a studied expert.
There's a significant difference. Someone who is skeptical of global warming, and has read the research and can make his case with facts and reason, is not a problem. Someone who is skeptical of global warming and has not read the research, they just feel that there is something wrong, that climatologists have "something to hide", and hey maybe it's the sun, has anyone thought about the sun? Those are problems, because uninformed unscientific opinions are not helpful in science. When that person is a meteorologist, whom people would assume has an informed scientific opinion and who presents their opinion as though it comes from their expertise, that is damaging.
What exactly do the ecofundamentalists have to hide? It seems to me that one side is saying 'We are skeptical of what you are saying for the following reasons" and the other side is threating trials and decertifications.
No, one side is saying "We are skeptical of what you are saying for the following reasons."
And the other side is saying "Those reasons are bunk, the research has shown this, here's a cite, please read up on the current state of climatology before claiming you have a rational basis for your skepticism."
And then the first one goes "No, really, I don't believe you, and here's why."
And the other goes "Those are the same reasons as before, and I told you, that was covered here. Did you read it? Oh, I guess not. Well would you please shut up until you educate yourself on the topic so we can have a productive conversation?"
And the first responds "Ha! Ha! See that, he's censoring me! You don't dare face my truth! I knew global warming was bunk!"
But of course it's the climatologists who are being emotional and unscientific.
There's nothing to hide. The research is all there, in the open. The fact that there are few people who are both well-versed in this research and what you would call a "global warming skeptic" should tell you something. No, it's not a conspiracy. The conspiracy is what we are seeing in this Congressional hearing, with scientists pressured to change their statements to match an agenda of the administration. I find it really ridiculous that you would sit here and claim it's the ones who accept the conclusions of climate change research who are the ones trying to silence people, in an article presenting evidence of exactly the opposite.
There are scientists -- including those who find fault with existing research and actually try to enhance the state of knowledge -- and there are the "skeptics", who aren't actually skeptical so much as flat-out disbelieving and willing to grab at any evidence that serves their purpose without doing any further research to see if that evidence stands up to scientific inquiry. They are the ones with a pre-conceived conclusion and are "skeptical" of anything that shows otherwise while completely accepting of anything that does -- again, completely bereft of scientific merit. That's really the key here. Everyone's emotions aside, there are people doing real climatology science, and there are people who are not. The correlation between these two groups and the groups who you would call "believers" and "skeptics" tells you something.
Meanwhile weather channel climatologist Heidi Cullen wants global warming skeptics who are meteorologists decertified.
Not global warming skeptics, meteorologists who were not educated in climate research, and who were presenting their uninformed opinions as the facts of a studied expert.
There's a significant difference. Someone who is skeptical of global warming, and has read the research and can make his case with facts and reason, is not a problem. Someone who is skeptical of global warming and has not read the research, they just feel that there is something wrong, that climatologists have "something to hide", and hey maybe it's the sun, has anyone thought about the sun? Those are problems, because uninformed unscientific opinions are not helpful in science. When that person is a meteorologist, whom people would assume has an informed scientific opinion and who presents their opinion as though it comes from their expertise, that is damaging.
What exactly do the ecofundamentalists have to hide? It seems to me that one side is saying 'We are skeptical of what you are saying for the following reasons" and the other side is threating trials and decertifications.
No, one side is saying "We are skeptical of what you are saying for the following reasons."
And the other side is saying "Those reasons are bunk, the research has shown this, here's a cite, please read up on the current state of climatology before claiming you have a rational basis for your skepticism."
There's nothing to hide. The research is all there, in the open. The fact that there are few people who are both well-versed in this research and what you would call a "global warming skeptic" should tell you something. No, it's not a conspiracy.
"According to these FDA regulations, advertisers who name a prescription drug, and state its purpose and benefits, must also include full disclosure of its side effects, contraindications, and must follow specific labeling guidelines."
By stating the purpose of the drug, that "extra 5 seconds" suddenly turns into a full minute or two of small print being read to you. Not exactly what the advertisers want to be doing with their time/money.
Well the ad would be completely useless if they didn't name the drug, or give an at least vague indication of its purpose, and all the prescription medication ads I've seen do have that 20 second low-volume recitation of all the side effects, usually while showing a happy couple on a swingset or kayaking.
Which personally I love. The first such ad I recall was for Propecia, the hair growth pill, which contained the line "women who are pregnant or wish to become pregnent should not handle broken propecia tablets as serious birth defects may result". Whoa, that's nasty shit, I thought. I also like a lot of the anti-depression med ads, where they show some guy whose happy and enjoying life, while saying "may cause certain sexual side effects" -- meaning you become impotent, basically replacing your chemical-imbalance-induced depression with a real reason to be depressed.
"I love my Xbox, Halo is sweet!"
"Cool. What other fun games are there?"
"Halo is totally awesome!"
Heh, so yeah, I'll grant that Halo saved the xbox *but* the main difference here is that there were other games that interest a north american audience, and certainly no lack of faith that more FPS would be coming out for Xbox. If Halo was truly the only game on the system for U.S. audiences, I'd say they'd have "succeeded" in the U.S. just as much as they have in Japan based solely on Blue Dragon.
Yes, a high-quality exclusive game that appeals to the Japanese market was what they needed, and desperately.
Was Blue Dragon sufficient?
No, obviously not. One game is never going to turn a console from an abject failure into a success all by itself. Few people will buy a console when only one game out of the entire library interests them, and so it is with the 360.
Blue dragon is what MS needed, past tense, to show they had a chance at all in Japan. What they need, present tense, is another Blue Dragon, and another, so that people will have multiple reasons to want one, and to hope that more games they'll like will come out. Even still MS being successfull in Japan is very iffy, but without this, failure is guaranteed. Sort of like when a paramedic needs a defribulator, even though it may not save the patient -- their other option is to sit by and note the time of death.
Yes, we will replace them with Compact Flaming Politicians (CFPs). Any existing politician who wishes to remain in office must volunteer to be Compacted, and must also comply with the Flaming clause. I wonder how many would pick the definition of flaming that isn't slang...
World of Warcraft, for example. I mean they had to write it for OpenAL to get the Mac and Linux versions working and they released the Mac version at the same time as the Windows version.
Blizzard hasn't done jack for Linux, at least as far as development goes. They have worked with Transgaming to help Transgaming fix some issues with Cedega, and to restore accounts of Linux users that were erroneously flagged as bot-users. There is no "linux version" of the game, though. Cedega runs the Windows version of wow, and uses whatever audio driver the windows version uses.
They did implement both directX and OpenGL, and both can be used under Windows, so maybe it similarly has an OpenAL path on Windows.
when I say: Fuck fuck fuckity-fuck fuck ass-raping horse fuck shit balls cock fuck fuck fuckity-fushizle-fuck!
No, there's a fourth option: They didn't know what BlueJ was, not because of incompetence but because they deliberately didn't seek it out under the express instructions of the company patent lawyer.
Since knowingly infringing a patent is treble damages, it's SOP for companies to tell their engineers not to do patent searches or other prior art searches before submitting patents or using ideas. The other half of this strategy is to patent as many things as possible. This way when you violate someone else's patent you can sit at the negotiating table and point all the patents of yours that they are also violating, the goal being to settle with a cross-licensing agreement that is more favorable to the party with the bigger pile of patents and with more key patents.
That exact mechanism of treble damages may not apply in this particular case, but I still wouldn't be surprised if it was corporate policy to not try too hard to discover prior art.
That a letter was found indicates that someone at MS did know about BlueJ, though, is probably what is actually getting them in trouble and causing them to drop the patent. Which just means they're going to enforce the policy of deliberate ignorance even more in the future.
News/weather channels? 480p is all you get!
Yeah, because I really need HD to get my weather forcast. "Damnit, I can't tell if that Partly Cloudy icon is a cumulus or stratus cloud!"
I could've told you this was coming back when the invasion was first announced. Why? I'm Bengali.
;) Quick, list of countries whose people were grateful to be invaded and occupied by a foreign power! Hmm...
Well not to pat myself on the back but I knew it was coming too, and that's with my piss-poor American public school education.
"What every terrorist fears most is human freedom -- societies where men and women make their own choices, answer to their own conscience, and live by their hopes instead of their resentments. Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies -- and most will choose a better way when they are given a chance."
Haha! I didn't watch the speech, because I can't stand to hear the man speak, and I didn't read about it either since I knew what he was going to say.
That's just a twist on a clasic Bush line. He used to give a much more direct and even more ludicrous statement when he was explaining why terrorists would want to attack the United States: "They hate us for our freedom." Oh man, that one had me rolling in the isles. Also crying, because a person who believes that (not that Bush necessarily does, but many believe it because he said it), then they have absolutely zero chance of ever understanding terrorism.
My personal favorite example of how ludicrous this whole line of thinking that Democracy will make everything okay is when the Palestinians voted in Hamas. The West's reaction was basically: Oh shit, you weren't supposed to be that free!
Ultimately, it's not democracy that makes Westerners, well, Westernized. It's a couple of thousand years of shared culture, history, and civilization. Democracy is an expression of the underlying mindset of the West, not the underpinnings of that mindset. It took the West a long time to get its societies to the point where they could support democracy. It took France a 150 years to build a supportable Republic, and France had one of the longest traditions of liberal Enlightenment thinking in Europe! How could anybody be stupid enough to think that we could have pushed Iraq to do it in a few years, much less a few decades?
Yeah, my history education was shitty and Euro-centric, but damn do I find it amazing that so few of my fellow Americans seem to remember this simple fact. Just like so many don't seem to appreciate how great our debt to France is. Is it any surprise that they also thought that getting rid of Saddam Hussein would turn Iraq into Oklahoma overnight?