EXECUTIVE
Oh, God, yes. We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.
MEYER
Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important? Not that I'm accusing you of anything like that. I'm fired, aren't I?
Finally, if you think that the Sony-Disney-MS deal is important, you better quiet Steve down
Danger Will Robinson, Danger!!! That's a scary idea, what would you call a company that is MS, Sony, and Disney? Disonysoft? Microney? AOL Time Warner?
I completely agree with you that from a Chinese perspective its a good thing, but the IP problems are horrendous. I'm a car guy and I follow developments in that area, and I think every major manufacturer has at least one lawsuit (if not more) open right now in China because the vehicle they're building is being ripped off by another Chinese company. So, Honda sells a vehicle for X, and included in X is the cost of R&D. Company A rips off (and by rips off I mean literally steals the plans) and begins to build an identical vehicle only they sell it at Y, which is substantially cheaper than X, because there was no R&D expenditure. If this is the norm, then the only way to overcome the loss is to pump money from your other business units to bolster this business unit. That's bad business. The hypothetical company does damage on more fronts than one too. Usually the product is sub-par and is traded on Honda's good name. Plus, every sale of "other" product means a sale that Honda didn't get (well, there's probably not a direct correlation, but I'm sure there's some loss of sales). So, its a double whammy against Honda.
If you really want to get away from video games you should also check out GPGPU. Its a site dedicated to general processing on GPUs. There is also a lot of research done in this area, such as a DB run on a graphics card as well as a lot computational geometry problems. Also, Stanford has developed a more straightforward C-like language to do GPGPU. Pretty cool stuff.
I doubt BMW really learned much from Land Rover. The engine in the Range Rover is still a BMW derivative. BMW got something very good out of the very bad Rover deal: Mini.
You make a good point about it being market driven, but the way China currently treats IP, Western corporations won't be around long after Chinese knock offs have driven them out of the market.
Also, don't forget that China is expected to be the largest economy in the world soon, so everyone's bending over backwards (or just simply bending over) to get a piece of the action. Take car manufacturers for instance. They cannot sell cars without first teaming up with a Chinese corporation. And what does teaming up entail? Well, pretty much giving up all your R&D on whatever model you want to sell in China. So the hundreds of millions of dollars that a company spends to develop a car is handed over to a Chinese corporation. Could you imagine another country doing that? It'd be like BMW wanting to sell in the US and the US government telling them "Sure, but you have to team up with Ford and give Ford all the proprietary information on the vehicles you want to introduce in the US." So, China does this type of stuff to us all the time, but we bend over and take it just to get our foot in the door.
I'm not MySQL fan boy, I'm genuinely curious about the technical differences between the two DBs. The only reason I'm using MySQL as a comparison is because I did a comparison between regular MySQL and MySQL Cluster beforehand and noticed no difference in performance. Maybe you just need to simma down now!
I wonder how this is different from MySQL Cluster an in memory only DB. From my own comparisons of regular MySQL versus MySQL Cluster, I didn't see much of a performance increase. But, I guess it wasn't "streaming" either. I didn't really see too many technical specs for their new DB, but I didn't really look either. I wonder how they handle saving stuff to disk? Or do they not even bother and hope that the generator holds out until the power is restored?
I can agree with the author on just about every criticism he makes, but some of the things he wishes were better are huge hurdles. For instance its trivial to say "We should have better AI in games!" but, in reality its damn hard to try to make AI better. Most current AI (the AI the author was talking about) is scripted and is therefore limited by the programmer's ability to think outside the box. Yeah, when you're in a game and the enemy does something weird we automatically think "Duh! Its obvious that this is stupid!" But when you're designing and writing the game, its not always obvious. The designer has to think ahead "Well, what would happen in this situation?" and then program that particular situation in.
Or take voice recognition AI. It would be great in KOTOR if I could simply tell a companion to go attack the guy on the left and then I attack the guy on the right. Again, this is not a trivial hack or by any means some hidden conspiracy to prevent ease of use. The AI would have to understand the idea of left, right, and attack along with actually understanding when I state into a microphone "Attack the guy on the left." Yeah, we could script this, but see previous problem.
I realize the author is critiquing games to make them better, which is good, but failing to understand how some problems are very difficult can sometimes aggravate more than motivate. Nothing aggravates me more than a fanboy who simply states "How hard could it be to do X?"
I totally agree with you that we as a society live the high life where obesity is our #1 killer:O As for your ad hominem attack on who you *suspect* I think I am, well your wrong.
I never said that someone should be punished for something they "might" say. Of course its all context: if I yell fire in a movie theatre and I'm not taken serious there are no repercussions, but causing a stampede is obviously harmful. I was simply pointing out to the GP that freedom of speech does not constitute a carte blanche to simply say anything you want.
As for an "objective reason for drawing a line there," all of our laws are social constructs. Why is murder illegal? Because we as a society find it reprehensible to take a human life and we've agreed that its within our best interest to try to prevent it whenever possible. What is the objective reason to outlaw murder?
Well, the next time I scream out "Fire!" in a movie theatre, I'll remember to mention this to the arresting police officer.
There are exceptions to the First Amendment and yelling fire in a crowded theatre is one of those exceptions. Likewise, obscenity (by its lawful definition) is not protected by the First Amendment.
How is this different from any other school? At Wisconsin undergrads rarely if ever saw the clusters they had, and these weren't particular prestigious either. For instance, I never saw the WAIL lab, and I didn't know anyone else who had either. So, I don't know why you would expect to be able to view VTech's cluster.
Its better than trying to hide their mistakes. No matter what a company does today, they're going to get crap for it. So, let's say they don't they blame it on some obscure thing, or the DMCA or something equally idiotic. Then, all our friends here on/. jump up and say "That's so stoopid! My buddy and I could do a better job with a beowulf cluster!" But, when the company is transparent, as we like them to be, then we rail on them again for not being as cool as we thought they were.
I think you could find each of these ten things somewhere in some country. Each point on the list highlights something cool, somewhere. Transit debit cards in Shanghai, Beijing has adult outdoor playgrounds, etc, etc. So, besides the informative stoplights, which I know would confuse the hell out of my mom, you could find just about all those things somewhere in your country, except the cell phone coverage in the US (but Verizon is pretty close for me)
Geez, I wish cars were like they were 80 years ago. I mean, nobody understands how their car works anymore! I'd give anything to prime the cylinders in my car, and crank the engine over by hand! I mean, real men know exactly what their cars do, and don't leave it up to computers and such things! I mean, today's cars with their fancy keys and electric starters and brakes that actually work abstract the essence of the car away from the driver! The driver should know how their car works and why!
Bollux to all you people who keep saying "Man, I miss the old days!" I sure as heck don't miss the old DOS days of trying to get around the 640K limit or IRQ nightmares. Now, I plug and play. Or with the C64 and its terrific graphics! Yah 320x240 screen with pixels so large that people don't have discernible faces.
In Virginia, where several of the 9/11 hijackers obtained driver's licenses, state legislators Wednesday will hear testimony about how radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags may prevent identity fraud and help thwart terrorists using falsified documents to move about the country. It doesn't really spell out in the article why RFID tags would improve security. In fact, it only mentions ease of use "The RFID tags would make the licenses a "contact-less" technology, verifying IDs more efficiently, and making lines at security checkpoints move quicker." The "security" comes from the biometric data imbedded in the card.
So, if I'm understanding this correctly, they'll increase security through biometrics, but then make it easier to use with RFID. And thanks to RFID, the card itself will become less secure because now I don't have to physically touch the card that I'm stealing from.
This is such a sham. Who is coming up with these half-assed ideas and passing them along to legislators?/sarcasm Improve security through the technological breakthrough of RFID tags! That's right folks! Prevent terrorism today by adopting this fantastic technology! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
What about FutureTruck? Or the GM HyWire? How is it a conflict of interest for auto manufacturers to build fuel cell/diesel/hybrid vehicles?
Yes, their project was built for I think this is a step forward but to sit there and claim that there's some kind of conspiracy is laughable. To produce a viable alternative to the combustion engine takes time. It took us over 100 years to get engines that last 100K miles, while at the same time get 30 miles to the gallon, and go 0-60 in around 7 seconds (2004 Honda Accord V6) while at the same time have enough space to seat 5, and put all their stuff in the trunk. And that's what people expect; go around 300 miles before fillups, be able to carry all their stuff and not worry about their engine breaking down on them. That's why we're seeing hybrid technology first so we can build on top of proven technology.
From the article:
Reform legislation, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), may actually facilitate Republican intimidation of minority voters and reduce Democratic turnout.
I was reading the article and I came across this. Searching for it leads to here and here amongst the millions google returns. I don't understand how Republicans can use this to intimidate minorities. I could see point #3 from the second link "Develop a statewide, centralized, electronic list of all eligible voters" could be viewed upon as an attempt to exclude but then the next bullet point states "Ensure that ID requirements are fair and nondiscriminatory."
I know nothing about HAVA. Could someone comment on this?
Sounds familiar...
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I knew this sounded familiar. Its even at New Scientist.
Its kinda like 3g cell technology. The US lags behind the stalwarts (Korea, Japan) when it comes to deploying 3G cell technology. We come up with things like "Well, no one can cover the whole US!" or "If we were more densely populated it would be different!" Then why, when I read howardforums, are people so pissed about coverage/dropped calls in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, DC, LA, New York, Phillie or San Fran some of our largest cities? If its because most of the US live in the suburbs then why aren't we seeing penetration of either higher speed internet access to the home or excellent 3G coverage in our most densely populated areas (the five burroughs in NY for instance). These excuses hardly seem to apply then.
You're obviously tech-savvy, which is good. =D But, what about people who aren't? They don't know the difference between CF and SD/MD. Or that only Sony products use Memory Sticks. We know it because its interesting to us, but alot of people couldn't care less. And its these people who walk into Best Buy and ask the nice person in the blue shirt what they need to buy. Its the same thing with cars. There are people out there who know the difference between DOHC, SOHC, OHV, as well as VTEC and VVTi, and they are very specific when they shop. Other people know general stuff like airbags (good!) ABS (good!), nice stereo with CD player and leather seats, yah! And you have one on the lot that's blue? I'm so there. =D
AS for selection, yeah, for most computer stuff it sucks, especially compared to online stores who have warehouses. Could you imagine trying to stock Best Buy with 50 different kinds of card readers? All 750 of them? What a bloody nightmare! And whose gonna buy them? Most people who walk into Best Buy want CDs, TVs, games, computers and DVD players. They're not looking for very specific things like you or I.
Slashdot Mirror
EXECUTIVE
Oh, God, yes. We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.
MEYER
Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important? Not that I'm accusing you of anything like that. I'm fired, aren't I?
--The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show script
Finally, if you think that the Sony-Disney-MS deal is important, you better quiet Steve down
Danger Will Robinson, Danger!!! That's a scary idea, what would you call a company that is MS, Sony, and Disney? Disonysoft? Microney? AOL Time Warner?
You and I have very different opinions on what constitutes "soon."
I completely agree with you that from a Chinese perspective its a good thing, but the IP problems are horrendous. I'm a car guy and I follow developments in that area, and I think every major manufacturer has at least one lawsuit (if not more) open right now in China because the vehicle they're building is being ripped off by another Chinese company. So, Honda sells a vehicle for X, and included in X is the cost of R&D. Company A rips off (and by rips off I mean literally steals the plans) and begins to build an identical vehicle only they sell it at Y, which is substantially cheaper than X, because there was no R&D expenditure. If this is the norm, then the only way to overcome the loss is to pump money from your other business units to bolster this business unit. That's bad business. The hypothetical company does damage on more fronts than one too. Usually the product is sub-par and is traded on Honda's good name. Plus, every sale of "other" product means a sale that Honda didn't get (well, there's probably not a direct correlation, but I'm sure there's some loss of sales). So, its a double whammy against Honda.
If you really want to get away from video games you should also check out GPGPU. Its a site dedicated to general processing on GPUs. There is also a lot of research done in this area, such as a DB run on a graphics card as well as a lot computational geometry problems. Also, Stanford has developed a more straightforward C-like language to do GPGPU. Pretty cool stuff.
I doubt BMW really learned much from Land Rover. The engine in the Range Rover is still a BMW derivative. BMW got something very good out of the very bad Rover deal: Mini.
You make a good point about it being market driven, but the way China currently treats IP, Western corporations won't be around long after Chinese knock offs have driven them out of the market.
Also, don't forget that China is expected to be the largest economy in the world soon, so everyone's bending over backwards (or just simply bending over) to get a piece of the action. Take car manufacturers for instance. They cannot sell cars without first teaming up with a Chinese corporation. And what does teaming up entail? Well, pretty much giving up all your R&D on whatever model you want to sell in China. So the hundreds of millions of dollars that a company spends to develop a car is handed over to a Chinese corporation. Could you imagine another country doing that? It'd be like BMW wanting to sell in the US and the US government telling them "Sure, but you have to team up with Ford and give Ford all the proprietary information on the vehicles you want to introduce in the US." So, China does this type of stuff to us all the time, but we bend over and take it just to get our foot in the door.
I'm not MySQL fan boy, I'm genuinely curious about the technical differences between the two DBs. The only reason I'm using MySQL as a comparison is because I did a comparison between regular MySQL and MySQL Cluster beforehand and noticed no difference in performance. Maybe you just need to simma down now!
I wonder how this is different from MySQL Cluster an in memory only DB. From my own comparisons of regular MySQL versus MySQL Cluster, I didn't see much of a performance increase. But, I guess it wasn't "streaming" either. I didn't really see too many technical specs for their new DB, but I didn't really look either. I wonder how they handle saving stuff to disk? Or do they not even bother and hope that the generator holds out until the power is restored?
I can agree with the author on just about every criticism he makes, but some of the things he wishes were better are huge hurdles. For instance its trivial to say "We should have better AI in games!" but, in reality its damn hard to try to make AI better. Most current AI (the AI the author was talking about) is scripted and is therefore limited by the programmer's ability to think outside the box. Yeah, when you're in a game and the enemy does something weird we automatically think "Duh! Its obvious that this is stupid!" But when you're designing and writing the game, its not always obvious. The designer has to think ahead "Well, what would happen in this situation?" and then program that particular situation in.
Or take voice recognition AI. It would be great in KOTOR if I could simply tell a companion to go attack the guy on the left and then I attack the guy on the right. Again, this is not a trivial hack or by any means some hidden conspiracy to prevent ease of use. The AI would have to understand the idea of left, right, and attack along with actually understanding when I state into a microphone "Attack the guy on the left." Yeah, we could script this, but see previous problem.
I realize the author is critiquing games to make them better, which is good, but failing to understand how some problems are very difficult can sometimes aggravate more than motivate. Nothing aggravates me more than a fanboy who simply states "How hard could it be to do X?"
I totally agree with you that we as a society live the high life where obesity is our #1 killer :O As for your ad hominem attack on who you *suspect* I think I am, well your wrong.
I never said that someone should be punished for something they "might" say. Of course its all context: if I yell fire in a movie theatre and I'm not taken serious there are no repercussions, but causing a stampede is obviously harmful. I was simply pointing out to the GP that freedom of speech does not constitute a carte blanche to simply say anything you want.
As for an "objective reason for drawing a line there," all of our laws are social constructs. Why is murder illegal? Because we as a society find it reprehensible to take a human life and we've agreed that its within our best interest to try to prevent it whenever possible. What is the objective reason to outlaw murder?
Well, the next time I scream out "Fire!" in a movie theatre, I'll remember to mention this to the arresting police officer.
There are exceptions to the First Amendment and yelling fire in a crowded theatre is one of those exceptions. Likewise, obscenity (by its lawful definition) is not protected by the First Amendment.
cuz it was posted on /. almost a year ago today!
Human Pacman
How is this different from any other school? At Wisconsin undergrads rarely if ever saw the clusters they had, and these weren't particular prestigious either. For instance, I never saw the WAIL lab, and I didn't know anyone else who had either. So, I don't know why you would expect to be able to view VTech's cluster.
Its better than trying to hide their mistakes. No matter what a company does today, they're going to get crap for it. So, let's say they don't they blame it on some obscure thing, or the DMCA or something equally idiotic. Then, all our friends here on /. jump up and say "That's so stoopid! My buddy and I could do a better job with a beowulf cluster!" But, when the company is transparent, as we like them to be, then we rail on them again for not being as cool as we thought they were.
I think you could find each of these ten things somewhere in some country. Each point on the list highlights something cool, somewhere. Transit debit cards in Shanghai, Beijing has adult outdoor playgrounds, etc, etc. So, besides the informative stoplights, which I know would confuse the hell out of my mom, you could find just about all those things somewhere in your country, except the cell phone coverage in the US (but Verizon is pretty close for me)
Geez, I wish cars were like they were 80 years ago. I mean, nobody understands how their car works anymore! I'd give anything to prime the cylinders in my car, and crank the engine over by hand! I mean, real men know exactly what their cars do, and don't leave it up to computers and such things! I mean, today's cars with their fancy keys and electric starters and brakes that actually work abstract the essence of the car away from the driver! The driver should know how their car works and why!
Bollux to all you people who keep saying "Man, I miss the old days!" I sure as heck don't miss the old DOS days of trying to get around the 640K limit or IRQ nightmares. Now, I plug and play. Or with the C64 and its terrific graphics! Yah 320x240 screen with pixels so large that people don't have discernible faces.
In Virginia, where several of the 9/11 hijackers obtained driver's licenses, state legislators Wednesday will hear testimony about how radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags may prevent identity fraud and help thwart terrorists using falsified documents to move about the country. /sarcasm Improve security through the technological breakthrough of RFID tags! That's right folks! Prevent terrorism today by adopting this fantastic technology! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
It doesn't really spell out in the article why RFID tags would improve security. In fact, it only mentions ease of use "The RFID tags would make the licenses a "contact-less" technology, verifying IDs more efficiently, and making lines at security checkpoints move quicker." The "security" comes from the biometric data imbedded in the card.
So, if I'm understanding this correctly, they'll increase security through biometrics, but then make it easier to use with RFID. And thanks to RFID, the card itself will become less secure because now I don't have to physically touch the card that I'm stealing from.
This is such a sham. Who is coming up with these half-assed ideas and passing them along to legislators?
What about FutureTruck? Or the GM HyWire? How is it a conflict of interest for auto manufacturers to build fuel cell/diesel/hybrid vehicles?
Yes, their project was built for I think this is a step forward but to sit there and claim that there's some kind of conspiracy is laughable. To produce a viable alternative to the combustion engine takes time. It took us over 100 years to get engines that last 100K miles, while at the same time get 30 miles to the gallon, and go 0-60 in around 7 seconds (2004 Honda Accord V6) while at the same time have enough space to seat 5, and put all their stuff in the trunk. And that's what people expect; go around 300 miles before fillups, be able to carry all their stuff and not worry about their engine breaking down on them. That's why we're seeing hybrid technology first so we can build on top of proven technology.
Thanks! This is the kind of information I was looking for.
From the article: Reform legislation, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), may actually facilitate Republican intimidation of minority voters and reduce Democratic turnout.
I was reading the article and I came across this. Searching for it leads to here and here amongst the millions google returns. I don't understand how Republicans can use this to intimidate minorities. I could see point #3 from the second link "Develop a statewide, centralized, electronic list of all eligible voters" could be viewed upon as an attempt to exclude but then the next bullet point states "Ensure that ID requirements are fair and nondiscriminatory."
I know nothing about HAVA. Could someone comment on this?
I knew this sounded familiar. Its even at New Scientist.
Mini nuclear reactor could power apartment blocks
With that said, I don't know how similar these two technologies are. But, smaller reactors seem to be an active area of research.
Its kinda like 3g cell technology. The US lags behind the stalwarts (Korea, Japan) when it comes to deploying 3G cell technology. We come up with things like "Well, no one can cover the whole US!" or "If we were more densely populated it would be different!" Then why, when I read howardforums, are people so pissed about coverage/dropped calls in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, DC, LA, New York, Phillie or San Fran some of our largest cities? If its because most of the US live in the suburbs then why aren't we seeing penetration of either higher speed internet access to the home or excellent 3G coverage in our most densely populated areas (the five burroughs in NY for instance). These excuses hardly seem to apply then.
You're obviously tech-savvy, which is good. =D But, what about people who aren't? They don't know the difference between CF and SD/MD. Or that only Sony products use Memory Sticks. We know it because its interesting to us, but alot of people couldn't care less. And its these people who walk into Best Buy and ask the nice person in the blue shirt what they need to buy. Its the same thing with cars. There are people out there who know the difference between DOHC, SOHC, OHV, as well as VTEC and VVTi, and they are very specific when they shop. Other people know general stuff like airbags (good!) ABS (good!), nice stereo with CD player and leather seats, yah! And you have one on the lot that's blue? I'm so there. =D
AS for selection, yeah, for most computer stuff it sucks, especially compared to online stores who have warehouses. Could you imagine trying to stock Best Buy with 50 different kinds of card readers? All 750 of them? What a bloody nightmare! And whose gonna buy them? Most people who walk into Best Buy want CDs, TVs, games, computers and DVD players. They're not looking for very specific things like you or I.