1. Continue to push through new standards in the industry.
Unlike MS, who introduces new "standards" in software to twist old ones and keep things proprietary, Intel generally pushes through hardware standards that improve hardware in general.
Remember AGP, and everyone bitching at the time that it wasn't needed? I bet everyone's glad that their video cards today aren't running on the PCI bus. Speaking of PCI (which is getting old and crusty itself) Intel is leading the development of its replacement, in the same way that it led the development of PCI to replace ISA. ATA-100, and its future successor, Serial ATA, come to mind as well. Even RDRAM (may it RIP) was just bad execution of a good idea (more serialization, less traces on the memory bus).
2. Merced.
Whoa, before you flame this, think about it for a moment. This oft-delayed processor not only introduces a new computing paradigm (EPIC), it's also a processor that completes 8 instructions per clock cycle. Once the die shrink comes around, and clock speeds start coming up in McKinley, what exactly is going to compete with this 64-bit chip? Not Sledgehammer. Not a whole lot of RISC chips out there.
3. Willamette.
Merced, reversed. Instead of focusing on the number of instructions per clock cycle, it simply focuses on the number of clock cycles. While a lot of people have commented derisively about it, 2 years from now when the Willamette core has been refined and Intel is several GHz ahead of everyone else, I don't think near as many people are going to be laughing.
NASA decided last summer not to make the modifications necessary for the Shuttle fleet to be able to refuel the Propulsion Module in orbit, opting instead for a concept that would have the module brought back to Earth for refueling.
I was under the mistaken impression that, except for supplies, this was supposed to be a permanent outpost in space. It hardly makes sense to sell it to the public as such if a large chunk has to be brought down and replaced every few years. I don't have an idea on the cost savings involved, but I would imagine the Right Thing to do would be to modify the Space Shuttle so that it could function as a shuttle for fuel between the ISS and planetside.
"They have to keep using Carnivore because they paid for it."
They may very well try to use this argument, but it carries no weight. It's the fallacy of "sunk costs"--whether or not they use Carnivore they've already paid for it. Continuing to use an inferior product doesn't regain that value--might as well ditch it and use something better. Especially so if the "something better" has no associated cost.
I beg to differ - it carries plenty of weight. Rather than having to hire specialists to pore over the OS Carnivore alternative and fix any holes or weaknesses that they find, they can, at no cost, simply use the version that they paid for.
I also don't understand how an alternative that is different in only one respect (open sourced) and supposedly has the exact same functionality is superior to the closed source version. To me, a well-designed program is a well-designed program, whether it was designed in total secrecy or GPLed.
When did it become necessary for American government to legislate responsibility for the actions of the populace? I'm relatively young, a twenty-something, and even I remember a time when people took at least some responsibility for their own actions. The people didn't need a watchdog over them, nor did government care to create one.
I must be reading your comments wrong, because from what I'm reading you're saying there's no purpose to law enforcement. Here's two questions for you: do you believe corporations should have a watchdog to look over them? How about a watchdog for government?
The populace at large falls prey to the same moral and ethical failings as both corporations and government (probably because they're all made of the same ingredient: people). Just like every branch of the federal government has checks and balances to keep them in line, all aspects of society need to have at least some kind of restraint put on them.
As a resident of Norman, OK, about 15 minutes away from the remains of the Murrah federal building, I'd rather the government intercepted and stopped wackos before, rather than after the fact.
As for governmental agendas, in my experience the agendas of private citizens and corporations tend to be just as petty and just as dangerous.
As a fairly regular/. reader, I enjoy the issues brought up and the usually hotheaded discussions that ensue. However, the quality of editorial opinion IMHO has gone down since I first started reading a year and a half ago, and this is something I'm concerned with, since the editors of/. tend to have an overwhelming say in matters on this board.
For example, CmdrTaco recently aired his opinion that George W. Bush can, in not so many words, go suck his nuts. Since there was no evidence or even argument offered to support such an ad hominem attack, a large number of/. readers pointed out that if an editor moderation system was in place, his comments would easily have earned a large number of -1: Flamebait tags.
My concern with your comments appears in this sarcastic comment: "If you define your terms correctly, black is white and 2+2=5, too.". Now, there is no possible way no matter how you define the terms that 2+2=5, or that total visible light spectrum absorption (black) can be the same as total light reflection (white). But I don't really have a problem with factual errors, because I've grown accustomed to them in/. as well.
What I am concerned with, just as in the Bush example, is that such comments add nothing valuable to either my knowledge or to the discussion, i.e. is a waste of time. Instead of pointing out that there are systems that are primarily built for audio use (specialty audio systems used for recording, or even CD MP3 players) you instead make flippant remarks to simply try to point out how stupid the other side is. This is not news, and it is certainly not stuff that matters. Such comments can and do incite posters (as flamebait) that in fact hinder rational and constructive discussion, and I would ask you and the other/. editors to either take the time and effort to make constructive editorial comments, or to not make them at all. If that's too much to ask, then there are many, many others in the/. community who are willing to try.
...why don't you file a counterbrief with the court saying exactly that?
The main problem I have with a lot of Slashdot posters is that they like to bitch and moan about things to look wise and intelligent to the moderators, but they never do anything constructive about the issues brought up.
Actually, that chip (the 2 GHz Pentium 4) bears as much resemblance to the one you could see inside your desktop case, as, well, a hardcore overclocker's Pentium 4 system bears to an upcoming Pentium 4 system. YMMV, depending on how much you want to squeeze out of it. If you would get out of your AMD cheerleader's suit, maybe you could see past the FUD of both corporations.
So, Suck thinks Mozilla's going to die because of feature creep and an ever-lengthening development cycle. Let's apply a few arguments to another well-known project-that-sucks, the game Unreal:
Originally targeted as a Quake 1(!) killer, Tim Sweeney and Epic started this game during the times when 6 degrees of freedom was still cool. Do you want to talk about feature creep? How about 16 bpp textures, colored lighting, volumetric fog and halos? I seriously doubt any of those were even in design consideration in 1996. And didn't it set quite a few records in missed milestones? A four-year development cycle might as well be a few millenia for a game, I'm surprised (and glad) that they stuck it out.
According to Suck's logic, Unreal should have been dead, buried and dirt by the time it's release date finally came out. But instead, it just sold a couple of hundred thousand copies. Go figure.
Was Unreal buggy when released. Yes. Did multiplayer and non-Glide acceleration blow back then? Yes. Was Unreal continually worked on after release, as no doubt Mozilla will be? Hell yes. I use the Epic / Mozilla team analogy carefully, as both groups obviously love what they do, as opposed to just programming for a steady paycheck, and were/are underdogs in their respective market niches. Hopefully, Mozilla will turn out just as well.
The King Is Dead (Atlantis and Final Fantasy)
on
End Of Fox Animation
·
· Score: 2
...Long live the King.
2D animation will die about the same day newspapers, libraries, brick-and-mortar businesses, peer-reviewed journals, and all the rest of the currently-fashionable-predicting-their-death ways of providing services and content goes the way of the dodo.
I mean, hell, Katz has been predicting the death of everything not connected to the internet for how many years now? And when is he wrong...
Anyways, for a glimpse of the future of 2D animation, check out the newly released teaser trailer for Atlantis, Disney's newest and quite possibly best effort since the Little Mermaid.
For those who want something with an extra dimension, check out the also-newly released teaser for Final Fantasy the Movie.
Is it possible that near-universal Internet access might do more in the long run than plumbing and other infrastructure improvements to help raise people in developing nations out of poverty?
Not to snap a Slashdot editor out of his geek fantasies (*cough*Katz*cough*) but this is about as far as a Hi-I-was-raised-in-a-comfortable-suburban-setting type of ignorance can go. Yes, Roblimo, some people in the world actually have to wonder where their next meal is coming from. Some people have to actually wonder if they'll be alive tomorrow, if they live in places like Sudan, Zimbabwe or Chechnya.
Electricity, sanitation, water, food, and medical care are all necessities that we in the United States and the rest of the first world take for granted every single day that other not so fortunate nations do not have ready access to. I have yet to hear one subsistence farmer complain about his inability to gain wondrous knowledge from Internet sites such as Slashdot. I do hear about a lack of sanitary water to drink, much less to bathe, or food shortages due to corruption and infrastructural inefficiences causing famine. My parents grew up in 1940s Malaysia, and just thinking about the differences in our experiences makes me thank God that I was fortunate enough to be spared that.
Before you talk about the signs and wonders of the information revolution and how it's going to change the world, take a trip downtown and volunteer at the local John 3:16 to make a difference for someone today.
The sound quality, to human ears, of a well-encoded 256-320kbit/s is exactly the same as a CD. Go to Ars Technica's archives for a statistical comparison of unencoded and encoded waveforms - at higher bitrates, the only part of the waveform that is affected by the encoding process is well beyond the range of human hearing.
I'm not saying MP3s are good or bad from a philosophical standpoint, but I hate it when people use false arguments.
It's not really anybody's fault that girls tend not to pick technical fields - as my sociology professor put it, popular boys play with toys, and popular girls play with boys. Indirect pressure from media, culture and peers creates a push for girls and boys to play different roles. No one's forcing girls to play with Barbies, or boys to play with GI Joes, but girls and boys do look around to see what their friends are playing with.
Intelligent girls and boys who think for themselves can and will buck the cultural trend, if they so desire. There isn't any kind of real glass ceiling anymore (except the occasional old boys' network here and there), there just isn't a desire in boys and girls in general to break their respective social stereotypes. Heck, the article might as well have been about the repression of boys from joining the forces of happy homemakers cooking for the spouse and caring for the kids.
And as a side note, sex means the physical differences between men and women. Gender signifies the different social roles that men and women undertake. At least according to my psychology textbook.
Take a step back and look at your audience and your peer groups before using "everyone" this and "everyone" that.
Yes, that's right, 99% of Slashdot readers are male, computer literate, and young to early-middle-aged technophiles.
As a personal note, I went with a group of over a dozen friends to go see Episode I, twice. 8 guys, 4 girls, all college-age adults except for a younger brother (9 years old) present.
After the movie, it was pretty clear that different people liked (or disliked) specific things about the movie. The college guys hated or at least though Jar-Jar was annoying. On the other hand, they loved the extensive lightsaber duels, Darth Maul, and, of course, Queen Amidala.
The younger brother loved Jar-Jar. He thought he was funny, in a clownish way. He could have cared less about Queen Amidala, but he thought Darth Maul and all the fighting was cool.
The girls unanimously liked Jar-Jar. They thought he lightened the movie's mood, and was generally humorous in a "Dumb and Dumber" way. They generally didn't like Amidala too much (too uptight). Darth Maul was too icky for some of them, and they could care less about "laser sabers" (a direct quote!).
In other words, YMMV. But, try to keep in mind that you speak for probably 5-15% of the population before claiming to represent me, or any of my friends, in your personal views.
There's a difference between not liking a movie/series and undeservedly bashing on someone personally.
Strangely enough, my friends and I (mostly college students, except a younger brother) went to see Episode I and we liked it, overall. Not as good as V, but not as bad as IV either. Sounds like you're the one with penis envy...why don't you go make your own movie that is watchable for yourself?
Okay, instead of vague goals, let's talk about vague causalities.
How are "credit card debt, tracking information, prison histories, etc" leading to an oppressive order of technology and information? AFAICT, they're all avoidable. Don't use credit cards, turn off cookies and scripts, and don't go to prison.
I don't think you're getting the cost/benefit tradeoff inherent in all technology - most people accept the fact that if they don't pay their credit card bills, no one will lend them more money, to use your example. Communities (and the individuals that make up those communities) have a right to know if a convicted murderer is released in their area. If you don't like a technology, then simply don't get involved with it.
My previous posting was directed to the fact that your writings had a definite leaning towards putting goals over people. My "uninformed assumptions" is due to your lack of any kind of specific goal other than "societal progress", which has been used as an excuse to do harm more times than any other. Revolutions have a way of forgetting that people are an ends, and not a means - I think a good portion of history can support me here. And don't delude yourself; every revolution has a leader. The Czar of Russia wasn't overthrown without Lenin. India didn't win its independence without Ghandi. Iran didn't overthrow the Shah without the Ayatollah Khomeini. People have been predicting the rise of anarchism since the 1970s - and they had better arguments back then, too.
While I support technology, I have come to the conclusion that oppressive technology and information (credit card debt, tracking information, prison histories, etc) must be destroyed, blocked, or circumvented in order for any real social progress to occur.
O-kay. Not to dump on specifically you or anything, but anytime anyone starts talking about "bettering humanity", "making social progress", or "reviving the moral majority" or other vague garbage just gets my dander up.
Mao thought the Cultural Revolution was social progress; he'd definitely agree with your anti-technology stand.
Ted Kaczynski sound familiar to anyone? Please tell me you're not working on a Manifesto...
I could go on with other examples, but they all share a common trait: they all got to a self-righteous point where "progress" called for extreme measures.
Or as Kissinger succinctly put it, It's not the selfish people in the world that scare me, it's the righteous ones.
I mean, as a US citizen born in Texas, I know tHGttG and the Alamo pretty well...so ask yourselves something...
Why would you want to celebrate failure?
Do you feel that the protagonist deserves to fail? Do you think that his failings are intrinsically funny? Do you identify yourself with failure?
The answers to these questions go a long way in explaining the differences between US culture and other places, much more so than a shallow analysis about how young the US is.
Personally, I find nothing funny at all about Arthur Dent's situation - it's the satirizing of culture and "hipness" that makes tHGttG funny for me. Laughing at Arthur Dent would be like laughing at Maximus at the end of the movie Gladiator - both of them just want their own personal hell to stop.
The US is ideally an egalitarian meritocracy - a culture driven on personal success. Success in business, success in social circles, success in education; you name the situation, and there are success stories that people in the US want to emulate. That's why there's a multibillion dollar market in self-help books. Finding failure funny requires a darker sense of humor than we in the eternally optimistic US, land of the American Dream, usually have.
The Alamo is celebrated, as a valiant struggle in the name of a just and ultimately successful cause. I won't get into the ethics of the Texas Independence War, but suffice it to say that if the Texans had lost against the Mexicans, the Alamo would be regarded as a tragedy today. I would also argue that Britons feel the same way. There would have been nothing heroic about Dunkirk or Gallipoli if the US and the UK had lost either WWI or WWII. Along the same lines, there would be nothing heroic about the famous torpedo bomber squadron during the Battle of Midway (they gave their lives as a distraction for the incoming dive bombers far above) if the US Navy had lost the Battle of Midway.
Places such as Serbia, where the entire national consciousness is rooted in the idea of heroic sacrifice, don't find abject failure heroic either. If you've ever read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (one of the seminal books on the Balkans) than you know what I'm talking about. They regard every one of their physical failures, from their loss at Kosovo Polje in the 14th century to the Ottoman Turks to NATO forcing governance of Kosovo from them as a spiritual victory - a kind of affirmation of the Serbian spirit.
There is nothing funny or heroic about failure. The only stories of true failure that are funny are those of characters that the audience doesn't identify with - the comic foil.
[snip] Now for the really OT bit. Can someone well-versed in the arcane ways of advanced HTML please tell me how ZD has bolloxed up their web page, so that I can't even scroll without a huge (1/2 second) lag between typing and response. (or mouse control, same problem) This is on any computer I've used, and through any bandwidth I've had access to. Why do they suck so much???
After a brief inspection of ZDNet's source, I can say definitely that there is nothing there that could be called "bolloxed up". Clean, no; but not screwed up, either. I can suggest several remedies if it's really bothering you:
Turn off AutoComplete. If you have lag between typing and response, it sounds like AutoComplete. (If it walks like a duck...)
Turn off pictures. More than likely the scrolling delay is due to your web browser having to reparse the multiple images within the nested tables. Turning off the pictures might help, but what really would help is...
TIME TO UPGRADE. If you're having this many problems with a fairly standard website, I hate to break it to you, but it's probably time to get something better than that Cyrix or Pentium processor you have. Or maybe you're just oversensitive to I/O latency. In which case upgrading would help anyways...
Do you seriously think, that in the midst of Intel and AMDs' competition to best each other by 0.001% with their latest products, that they would actually care about how much noise the cooling fans will make? I can just hear it now:
AMD EE: "Well, we're running at 30 volts now with our latest Thunderbird IV core, but we're behind the equivalent Pentium VIII by 3 fps in Tom's latest Quake X benchmarks."
AMD Management: "Can you increase the voltage and boost the clock frequency?"
AMD EE: "Sure, but it'll increase the heat produced and add to the cooling burden which..."
AMD Management:hits engineer over head with profit chart, "JUST MAKE IT BEAT INTEL!"
I mean, geez, if you're not already recording in an acoustically-isolated room, I don't know why you bother to bitch about the noise the computer makes. A much better method of reducing ambient noise if you're using a computer for digital mixing and effects is to make sure you have a soundcard with SPDIF jacks, and go digital, which will reduce it by a factor of 5 or more over analog.
And just as a personal anecdote, I have a 7,200 RPM SCSI HD that sounds like a jet engine, and I don't pick up anything on my Shure mics from 20 ft away. I don't understand what your problem is with your cooling fans.
For any gaming console to succeed, it needs a Killer App. What am I talking about? Legend of Zelda for the NES, Super Mario World and Final Fantasy 2(4) for the SNES, Resident Evil and FF7 for the Playstation is what I'm talking about. Games that draw consumers by the hundreds, make Quake 3 sales look like a drop in a bucket, and are reason enough to buy the console itself.
In order to get a Killer App, you need clear incentives for the top-class game designers to want to work with your platform. "Open Source design" just doesn't cut it - they need incentives, whether its financial, or better yet, technological, to develop on a Linux console rather than Sony's, Nintendo's, or Sega's. Convincing the designers that an unproven console is worthy of their limited resources will be the biggest hurdle by far.
[snip] they will look at you with a blank moronic stare before resuming their game of frogger (or whatever, so I can't think of any cool console games:-)
*choke*
Legend of Zelda (all 5 so far), Metroid (all 3), Phantasy Star series, not to mention the ever-present Final Fantasy series, Contra (the original mindless console shoot-em-up), Sonic the Hedgehog series, the Super Mario Brothers series, just to name a few.
Ring any bells? And what geek planet did you grow up in? =o
When you start up Napster, does it ask which mp3s to share and which not to share? No. Does it even ask if you want to share or not? No. Kind of strange for a program that claims to just connect users.
And yes, I do realize that I can turn off the mp3 directory sharing, but the mere fact that it does share mp3s by default builds a legal argument against it.
And no, designing it outside the US would not have changed the legality of Napster within US borders one whit. You're confusing encryption technology for file distribution technology. And even your encryption info is out-of-date, as the US government has significantly laxed its export laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel has done, lately:
1. Continue to push through new standards in the industry.
Unlike MS, who introduces new "standards" in software to twist old ones and keep things proprietary, Intel generally pushes through hardware standards that improve hardware in general.
Remember AGP, and everyone bitching at the time that it wasn't needed? I bet everyone's glad that their video cards today aren't running on the PCI bus. Speaking of PCI (which is getting old and crusty itself) Intel is leading the development of its replacement, in the same way that it led the development of PCI to replace ISA. ATA-100, and its future successor, Serial ATA, come to mind as well. Even RDRAM (may it RIP) was just bad execution of a good idea (more serialization, less traces on the memory bus).
2. Merced.
Whoa, before you flame this, think about it for a moment. This oft-delayed processor not only introduces a new computing paradigm (EPIC), it's also a processor that completes 8 instructions per clock cycle. Once the die shrink comes around, and clock speeds start coming up in McKinley, what exactly is going to compete with this 64-bit chip? Not Sledgehammer. Not a whole lot of RISC chips out there.
3. Willamette.
Merced, reversed. Instead of focusing on the number of instructions per clock cycle, it simply focuses on the number of clock cycles. While a lot of people have commented derisively about it, 2 years from now when the Willamette core has been refined and Intel is several GHz ahead of everyone else, I don't think near as many people are going to be laughing.
Wow, a voice of skeptical reason among all the 10 year-olds (mental age) posting on /. What was that pink blob that just whizzed by my window...?
NASA decided last summer not to make the modifications necessary for the Shuttle fleet to be able to refuel the Propulsion Module in orbit, opting instead for a concept that would have the module brought back to Earth for refueling.
I was under the mistaken impression that, except for supplies, this was supposed to be a permanent outpost in space. It hardly makes sense to sell it to the public as such if a large chunk has to be brought down and replaced every few years. I don't have an idea on the cost savings involved, but I would imagine the Right Thing to do would be to modify the Space Shuttle so that it could function as a shuttle for fuel between the ISS and planetside.
"They have to keep using Carnivore because they paid for it."
They may very well try to use this argument, but it carries no weight. It's the fallacy of "sunk costs"--whether or not they use Carnivore they've already paid for it. Continuing to use an inferior product doesn't regain that value--might as well ditch it and use something better. Especially so if the "something better" has no associated cost. I beg to differ - it carries plenty of weight. Rather than having to hire specialists to pore over the OS Carnivore alternative and fix any holes or weaknesses that they find, they can, at no cost, simply use the version that they paid for.
I also don't understand how an alternative that is different in only one respect (open sourced) and supposedly has the exact same functionality is superior to the closed source version. To me, a well-designed program is a well-designed program, whether it was designed in total secrecy or GPLed.
When did it become necessary for American government to legislate responsibility for the actions of the populace? I'm relatively young, a twenty-something, and even I remember a time when people took at least some responsibility for their own actions. The people didn't need a watchdog over them, nor did government care to create one.
I must be reading your comments wrong, because from what I'm reading you're saying there's no purpose to law enforcement. Here's two questions for you: do you believe corporations should have a watchdog to look over them? How about a watchdog for government?
The populace at large falls prey to the same moral and ethical failings as both corporations and government (probably because they're all made of the same ingredient: people). Just like every branch of the federal government has checks and balances to keep them in line, all aspects of society need to have at least some kind of restraint put on them.
As a resident of Norman, OK, about 15 minutes away from the remains of the Murrah federal building, I'd rather the government intercepted and stopped wackos before, rather than after the fact.
As for governmental agendas, in my experience the agendas of private citizens and corporations tend to be just as petty and just as dangerous.
As a fairly regular /. reader, I enjoy the issues brought up and the usually hotheaded discussions that ensue. However, the quality of editorial opinion IMHO has gone down since I first started reading a year and a half ago, and this is something I'm concerned with, since the editors of /. tend to have an overwhelming say in matters on this board.
/. readers pointed out that if an editor moderation system was in place, his comments would easily have earned a large number of -1: Flamebait tags.
/. as well.
/. editors to either take the time and effort to make constructive editorial comments, or to not make them at all. If that's too much to ask, then there are many, many others in the /. community who are willing to try.
For example, CmdrTaco recently aired his opinion that George W. Bush can, in not so many words, go suck his nuts. Since there was no evidence or even argument offered to support such an ad hominem attack, a large number of
My concern with your comments appears in this sarcastic comment: "If you define your terms correctly, black is white and 2+2=5, too.". Now, there is no possible way no matter how you define the terms that 2+2=5, or that total visible light spectrum absorption (black) can be the same as total light reflection (white). But I don't really have a problem with factual errors, because I've grown accustomed to them in
What I am concerned with, just as in the Bush example, is that such comments add nothing valuable to either my knowledge or to the discussion, i.e. is a waste of time. Instead of pointing out that there are systems that are primarily built for audio use (specialty audio systems used for recording, or even CD MP3 players) you instead make flippant remarks to simply try to point out how stupid the other side is. This is not news, and it is certainly not stuff that matters. Such comments can and do incite posters (as flamebait) that in fact hinder rational and constructive discussion, and I would ask you and the other
one of my pc's is JUST for audio use
...why don't you file a counterbrief with the court saying exactly that?
The main problem I have with a lot of Slashdot posters is that they like to bitch and moan about things to look wise and intelligent to the moderators, but they never do anything constructive about the issues brought up.
Actually, that chip (the 2 GHz Pentium 4) bears as much resemblance to the one you could see inside your desktop case, as, well, a hardcore overclocker's Pentium 4 system bears to an upcoming Pentium 4 system. YMMV, depending on how much you want to squeeze out of it. If you would get out of your AMD cheerleader's suit, maybe you could see past the FUD of both corporations.
So, Suck thinks Mozilla's going to die because of feature creep and an ever-lengthening development cycle. Let's apply a few arguments to another well-known project-that-sucks, the game Unreal:
Originally targeted as a Quake 1(!) killer, Tim Sweeney and Epic started this game during the times when 6 degrees of freedom was still cool. Do you want to talk about feature creep? How about 16 bpp textures, colored lighting, volumetric fog and halos? I seriously doubt any of those were even in design consideration in 1996. And didn't it set quite a few records in missed milestones? A four-year development cycle might as well be a few millenia for a game, I'm surprised (and glad) that they stuck it out.
According to Suck's logic, Unreal should have been dead, buried and dirt by the time it's release date finally came out. But instead, it just sold a couple of hundred thousand copies. Go figure.
Was Unreal buggy when released. Yes. Did multiplayer and non-Glide acceleration blow back then? Yes. Was Unreal continually worked on after release, as no doubt Mozilla will be? Hell yes. I use the Epic / Mozilla team analogy carefully, as both groups obviously love what they do, as opposed to just programming for a steady paycheck, and were/are underdogs in their respective market niches. Hopefully, Mozilla will turn out just as well.
...Long live the King.
2D animation will die about the same day newspapers, libraries, brick-and-mortar businesses, peer-reviewed journals, and all the rest of the currently-fashionable-predicting-their-death ways of providing services and content goes the way of the dodo.
I mean, hell, Katz has been predicting the death of everything not connected to the internet for how many years now? And when is he wrong...
Anyways, for a glimpse of the future of 2D animation, check out the newly released teaser trailer for Atlantis, Disney's newest and quite possibly best effort since the Little Mermaid.
For those who want something with an extra dimension, check out the also-newly released teaser for Final Fantasy the Movie.
Electricity, sanitation, water, food, and medical care are all necessities that we in the United States and the rest of the first world take for granted every single day that other not so fortunate nations do not have ready access to. I have yet to hear one subsistence farmer complain about his inability to gain wondrous knowledge from Internet sites such as Slashdot. I do hear about a lack of sanitary water to drink, much less to bathe, or food shortages due to corruption and infrastructural inefficiences causing famine. My parents grew up in 1940s Malaysia, and just thinking about the differences in our experiences makes me thank God that I was fortunate enough to be spared that.
Before you talk about the signs and wonders of the information revolution and how it's going to change the world, take a trip downtown and volunteer at the local John 3:16 to make a difference for someone today.
The sound quality, to human ears, of a well-encoded 256-320kbit/s is exactly the same as a CD. Go to Ars Technica's archives for a statistical comparison of unencoded and encoded waveforms - at higher bitrates, the only part of the waveform that is affected by the encoding process is well beyond the range of human hearing.
I'm not saying MP3s are good or bad from a philosophical standpoint, but I hate it when people use false arguments.
It's not really anybody's fault that girls tend not to pick technical fields - as my sociology professor put it, popular boys play with toys, and popular girls play with boys. Indirect pressure from media, culture and peers creates a push for girls and boys to play different roles. No one's forcing girls to play with Barbies, or boys to play with GI Joes, but girls and boys do look around to see what their friends are playing with.
Intelligent girls and boys who think for themselves can and will buck the cultural trend, if they so desire. There isn't any kind of real glass ceiling anymore (except the occasional old boys' network here and there), there just isn't a desire in boys and girls in general to break their respective social stereotypes. Heck, the article might as well have been about the repression of boys from joining the forces of happy homemakers cooking for the spouse and caring for the kids.
And as a side note, sex means the physical differences between men and women. Gender signifies the different social roles that men and women undertake. At least according to my psychology textbook.
Exactly how did his ISP suffer? Emotional damages? Those big, bad packets scare customers away?
Take a step back and look at your audience and your peer groups before using "everyone" this and "everyone" that.
Yes, that's right, 99% of Slashdot readers are male, computer literate, and young to early-middle-aged technophiles.
As a personal note, I went with a group of over a dozen friends to go see Episode I, twice. 8 guys, 4 girls, all college-age adults except for a younger brother (9 years old) present.
After the movie, it was pretty clear that different people liked (or disliked) specific things about the movie. The college guys hated or at least though Jar-Jar was annoying. On the other hand, they loved the extensive lightsaber duels, Darth Maul, and, of course, Queen Amidala.
The younger brother loved Jar-Jar. He thought he was funny, in a clownish way. He could have cared less about Queen Amidala, but he thought Darth Maul and all the fighting was cool.
The girls unanimously liked Jar-Jar. They thought he lightened the movie's mood, and was generally humorous in a "Dumb and Dumber" way. They generally didn't like Amidala too much (too uptight). Darth Maul was too icky for some of them, and they could care less about "laser sabers" (a direct quote!).
In other words, YMMV. But, try to keep in mind that you speak for probably 5-15% of the population before claiming to represent me, or any of my friends, in your personal views.
...moderate this down.
There's a difference between not liking a movie/series and undeservedly bashing on someone personally.
Strangely enough, my friends and I (mostly college students, except a younger brother) went to see Episode I and we liked it, overall. Not as good as V, but not as bad as IV either. Sounds like you're the one with penis envy...why don't you go make your own movie that is watchable for yourself?
Okay, instead of vague goals, let's talk about vague causalities.
How are "credit card debt, tracking information, prison histories, etc" leading to an oppressive order of technology and information? AFAICT, they're all avoidable. Don't use credit cards, turn off cookies and scripts, and don't go to prison.
I don't think you're getting the cost/benefit tradeoff inherent in all technology - most people accept the fact that if they don't pay their credit card bills, no one will lend them more money, to use your example. Communities (and the individuals that make up those communities) have a right to know if a convicted murderer is released in their area. If you don't like a technology, then simply don't get involved with it.
My previous posting was directed to the fact that your writings had a definite leaning towards putting goals over people. My "uninformed assumptions" is due to your lack of any kind of specific goal other than "societal progress", which has been used as an excuse to do harm more times than any other. Revolutions have a way of forgetting that people are an ends, and not a means - I think a good portion of history can support me here. And don't delude yourself; every revolution has a leader. The Czar of Russia wasn't overthrown without Lenin. India didn't win its independence without Ghandi. Iran didn't overthrow the Shah without the Ayatollah Khomeini. People have been predicting the rise of anarchism since the 1970s - and they had better arguments back then, too.
While I support technology, I have come to the conclusion that oppressive technology and information (credit card debt, tracking information, prison histories, etc) must be destroyed, blocked, or circumvented in order for any real social progress to occur.
O-kay. Not to dump on specifically you or anything, but anytime anyone starts talking about "bettering humanity", "making social progress", or "reviving the moral majority" or other vague garbage just gets my dander up.
Mao thought the Cultural Revolution was social progress; he'd definitely agree with your anti-technology stand.
Ted Kaczynski sound familiar to anyone? Please tell me you're not working on a Manifesto...
I could go on with other examples, but they all share a common trait: they all got to a self-righteous point where "progress" called for extreme measures.
Or as Kissinger succinctly put it, It's not the selfish people in the world that scare me, it's the righteous ones.
I mean, as a US citizen born in Texas, I know tHGttG and the Alamo pretty well...so ask yourselves something...
Why would you want to celebrate failure?
Do you feel that the protagonist deserves to fail?
Do you think that his failings are intrinsically funny?
Do you identify yourself with failure?
The answers to these questions go a long way in explaining the differences between US culture and other places, much more so than a shallow analysis about how young the US is.
Personally, I find nothing funny at all about Arthur Dent's situation - it's the satirizing of culture and "hipness" that makes tHGttG funny for me. Laughing at Arthur Dent would be like laughing at Maximus at the end of the movie Gladiator - both of them just want their own personal hell to stop.
The US is ideally an egalitarian meritocracy - a culture driven on personal success. Success in business, success in social circles, success in education; you name the situation, and there are success stories that people in the US want to emulate. That's why there's a multibillion dollar market in self-help books. Finding failure funny requires a darker sense of humor than we in the eternally optimistic US, land of the American Dream, usually have.
The Alamo is celebrated, as a valiant struggle in the name of a just and ultimately successful cause. I won't get into the ethics of the Texas Independence War, but suffice it to say that if the Texans had lost against the Mexicans, the Alamo would be regarded as a tragedy today. I would also argue that Britons feel the same way. There would have been nothing heroic about Dunkirk or Gallipoli if the US and the UK had lost either WWI or WWII. Along the same lines, there would be nothing heroic about the famous torpedo bomber squadron during the Battle of Midway (they gave their lives as a distraction for the incoming dive bombers far above) if the US Navy had lost the Battle of Midway.
Places such as Serbia, where the entire national consciousness is rooted in the idea of heroic sacrifice, don't find abject failure heroic either. If you've ever read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (one of the seminal books on the Balkans) than you know what I'm talking about. They regard every one of their physical failures, from their loss at Kosovo Polje in the 14th century to the Ottoman Turks to NATO forcing governance of Kosovo from them as a spiritual victory - a kind of affirmation of the Serbian spirit.
There is nothing funny or heroic about failure. The only stories of true failure that are funny are those of characters that the audience doesn't identify with - the comic foil.
[snip]
Now for the really OT bit. Can someone well-versed in the arcane ways of advanced HTML please tell me how ZD has bolloxed up their web page, so that I can't even scroll without a huge (1/2 second) lag between typing and response. (or mouse control, same problem) This is on any computer I've used, and through any bandwidth I've had access to. Why do they suck so much???
After a brief inspection of ZDNet's source, I can say definitely that there is nothing there that could be called "bolloxed up". Clean, no; but not screwed up, either. I can suggest several remedies if it's really bothering you:
HTH
Do you seriously think, that in the midst of Intel and AMDs' competition to best each other by 0.001% with their latest products, that they would actually care about how much noise the cooling fans will make? I can just hear it now:
AMD EE: "Well, we're running at 30 volts now with our latest Thunderbird IV core, but we're behind the equivalent Pentium VIII by 3 fps in Tom's latest Quake X benchmarks."
AMD Management: "Can you increase the voltage and boost the clock frequency?"
AMD EE: "Sure, but it'll increase the heat produced and add to the cooling burden which..."
AMD Management: hits engineer over head with profit chart, "JUST MAKE IT BEAT INTEL!"
I mean, geez, if you're not already recording in an acoustically-isolated room, I don't know why you bother to bitch about the noise the computer makes. A much better method of reducing ambient noise if you're using a computer for digital mixing and effects is to make sure you have a soundcard with SPDIF jacks, and go digital, which will reduce it by a factor of 5 or more over analog.
And just as a personal anecdote, I have a 7,200 RPM SCSI HD that sounds like a jet engine, and I don't pick up anything on my Shure mics from 20 ft away. I don't understand what your problem is with your cooling fans.
For any gaming console to succeed, it needs a Killer App. What am I talking about? Legend of Zelda for the NES, Super Mario World and Final Fantasy 2(4) for the SNES, Resident Evil and FF7 for the Playstation is what I'm talking about. Games that draw consumers by the hundreds, make Quake 3 sales look like a drop in a bucket, and are reason enough to buy the console itself.
In order to get a Killer App, you need clear incentives for the top-class game designers to want to work with your platform. "Open Source design" just doesn't cut it - they need incentives, whether its financial, or better yet, technological, to develop on a Linux console rather than Sony's, Nintendo's, or Sega's. Convincing the designers that an unproven console is worthy of their limited resources will be the biggest hurdle by far.
[snip] they will look at you with a blank moronic stare before resuming their game of frogger (or whatever, so I can't think of any cool console games
*choke*
Legend of Zelda (all 5 so far), Metroid (all 3), Phantasy Star series, not to mention the ever-present Final Fantasy series, Contra (the original mindless console shoot-em-up), Sonic the Hedgehog series, the Super Mario Brothers series, just to name a few.
Ring any bells? And what geek planet did you grow up in? =o
When you start up Napster, does it ask which mp3s to share and which not to share? No. Does it even ask if you want to share or not? No. Kind of strange for a program that claims to just connect users.
And yes, I do realize that I can turn off the mp3 directory sharing, but the mere fact that it does share mp3s by default builds a legal argument against it.
And no, designing it outside the US would not have changed the legality of Napster within US borders one whit. You're confusing encryption technology for file distribution technology. And even your encryption info is out-of-date, as the US government has significantly laxed its export laws.