>The goal? To increase food production by automating as much of it as possible.
They believe that automation is the key to increasing food production? Are they serious? The key to increasing food production is to either get more acreage in production, or to increase the amount of food produced per acre. Most types of farming (like corn & wheat) don't take huge amounts of labor. Even if they could automate something like picking vegetables that still wouldn't make it so there's more food, just, maybe, cheaper food.
You're right, the link is to a lame story. However, at the end of the story is the actual results: http://www.social-engineer.org/defcon21/DC21_SECTF_Final.pdf. That, on the other hand, is full of information and analysis, although they don't provide specific information that was harvested from the companies, only analysis of the methods employed and the success rates of those methods.
>Seagate has begun shipping hard drives based on a new technology dubbed Shingled Magnetic Recording....We should see the first examples of SMR next year, when Seagate intends to introduce a 5TB drive with 1.25TB per platter.
>One interesting strategy discussed is for the professor to make the final count for more of the final grade each time cheating is discovered.
I don't teach CS but I do teach college-level history, and I think that would cause some problems. For one thing (if I understand what they're saying), essentially everyone's grade changes whenever even a single student is caught cheating. If you aced the midterm that was 40% of the grade, well, sorry, now it's only 30% of the grade and you'll have to make it up on the final. While cheating is, obviously, a bad thing, I don't think the entire class should be made to suffer because of it.
>Why anyone think these abominations are progress is beyond me
I teach, too, and the word I was given was that blackboards generate lots of dust, and the dust gets into the computers/projectors/etc. I once taught in a room where the solution apparently was to put the projector facing one wall while the chalkboard was along another wall. It was completely useless for using the chalkboard while showing presentations.
There's something else going on as well. A few years ago I was looking at buying a particular product (I don't remember what now) so I Googled the product name to see what reviews I could find. There were a lot of reviews out there, but when I started looking at the specific reviews I realized that many of the reviews were just copied between reviewing websites. It wasn't just the positive reviews--the websites actually seemed to intentionally copy the reviews posted on each other's sites, most likely to pump up the number of reviews on their own sites. I ended up only being able to find maybe 10 reviews of the product, but they were copied over and over between sites. After that experience I don't trust the reviews on random websites nearly so much.
>people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them...
Exactly! Nothing they can do at all! They should just stop complaining about it and move on.
On a completely unrelated note, can someone please post instructions on how I can resell the games I've downloaded for my Wii and Xbox 360? Also, I've got some downloaded books for my Kindle that I'm tired of and want to sell. I know I can do these things because, like the summary says, there's nothing the publishers can do to stop it. Thanks in advance!
>... we don't think any party is seriously interested in throwing away these investments and starting over from scratch.
Man, wouldn't it be funny if Nintendo did a hardware refresh in a year or so and called it a next generation machine? They could make it backwards compatible to the Wii, have simultaneous releases for both systems, but distract Sony and MS to no end. But would it be the Wii2, or the WiiII (or Wiii)?
>In that case, why build a massive solar generator instead of fitting the rooftops with solar panels from the start? It would have the added advantage that one 'incident' at the generator site would nut shut down the whole city
I think a better question might be, "Why build a brand new city in a state with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the US? Do they really need more empty houses?"
>Should publishers get a cut of the money, at least as long as their book is being scanned?
Definitely. Especially if the book has been out of print for decades and the publisher has no plans, and no interest, in every publishing fresh copies. We need to keep the revenue going to the people it's always gone to!
Is this the new troll meme? I don't usually browse the lower-scored posts, so I haven't seen this one before, but it looks like a generic post--it certainly has nothing to do with MS opening new stores. It's kind of a bland post--my favorite from days of yore was the Mac troll complaining about how long it took to copy a small file at his "freelancing gig." Good times, good times.
>If you RTFA, you'll see that no one is losing access to their music, they just won't be able to transfer them to another computer without a workaround such as burning them to a CD. Annoying, yes, but not the end of the world.
What if their hard drive crashed and they're trying to load their backed-up songs onto a new computer? In that case they are screwed. Part of the issue here is that there's a problem but the users don't *realize* there's a problem until it's too late to do something. Yes, you realize DRM is a problem and take steps to work around it (burning a CD), but most users probably won't take steps to work around it until they can't figure out why their perfectly good song files won't work on their new computer.
>Since they will have to find somewhere to showcase their products if it does die, there will either be a new event created, or they will find some other way of achieving the same goal.
From what I've read here and elsewhere, the point is that E3 is dying because there are zillions of other places to hype a new game. E3 represents a significant expense for companies: they have to rent the booth space, fly people in, house them, etc., and they get zero dollars of productive time from their workers during E3. At the same time, they have to compete with every other company at E3 for space and peoples' attention.
Alternately, a company can throw a new preview vid up on the web for almost nothing, or they can interest a blogger or review site in interviewing one of their superstar programmers about their exciting new game, and they can do all of this at a time when they get all the attention themselves.
It sounds like the uber-hype event that was E3 was killed by the internet.
1. Promise the next version will be a geek's wet dream 2. Over the course of the several years of development, slowly step away from each and every major feature 3. Release the new version which is, at best, a minor upgrade from the previous version. 4. Profit!
Um, they've been around for five years, I don't think they're exactly a startup anymore. More like a regular company that's trying to attract some VC money and subscribers by trying to look all shiny and new.
It's kind of like your mom wearing low-riders and a tube top--at some point this sort of thing just needs to stop.
Mac Office 2008 has dropped VBA in favor of enhanced support for AppleScript...
So MS is ditching its homemade scripting language in favor of Apple's? MS, within the Mac platform at least, is moving towards openness? Is this a trick? Is this a new embrace and extend? This just sounds...bizarre.
By the way, has anyone got MacOffice 2008 yet? Is it very different from the previous version?
This link is a pretty good read for that information. Current price of uranium is nowhere near the historic inflation-adjusted high ($75/pound versus $145/pound). However, the author gives some very good information on why the price will be skyrocketing soon:
-there's a gap between production and consumption that's currently being closed by using stockpiles, i.e. old Russian nukes. Once those are used up, that gap opens up again. -there are many nuclear power plants coming online in the next decade or so. 28 are currently under construction, over 100 more in the next decade. -at current rates of demand, we'll need 900 new nuclear plants by 2050 to keep up.
In short, it's plentiful now, but it won't be soon.
I don't have any of the new round of consoles (too expensive so far) but I'm looking toward getting a Wii. I also love R&C. Anyone know if this is PS3 exclusive?
Though I do not underestimate the level of need in the so called "poor" world, I wonder why the OLPC folks think everyone in America can afford this PC.
Um, is there a statement from the OLPC people where they say that everyone in NA can afford one? It seems to me that they only said that individuals in NA can buy one, if they want. There is no comment about the "material prosperity" of everyone on this continent.
Now that I think about it, the title of your comment is "North America has poor folks too!" yet you only reference [the United States of] America. There are a couple of other countries on this continent, too, don't forget.
The Wii does something new and exciting, yes, but so do the PS3 and the 360...it's not just "shinier graphics", there are many things that game developers are able to do now that they were unable to do before
Maybe, except that the things you list are, essentially, "shinier graphics" sorts of things that you get through more horsepower in the console. Bigger levels, smarter AI, more online...these are pretty obvious things that *any* next generation platform could supply.
More powerful CPUs and GPUs don't just make things extra shiny...they make gameplay possible that was not possible before...just like a Wiimote.
But the experience with the PS3 and 360 is essentially the same as previous generations, there's just more of it. The experience of playing with the Wii is fundamentally different: a different control scheme lets you have a fundamentally different experience.
To put it another way, from what I've heard the Wii isn't all that much more powerful than the Gamecube, especially if you look at the PS2->PS3. But I haven't heard *anyone* bitching that the Wii is just the same as the GC, with a bit of flash thrown in. People are talking about the Wii as a legitimate contender in this generation against consoles that are (by everyone's admission) *much* more powerful. That's what the difference here is.
>it's hard not to think the whole thing is one big slam on the government.
It's been quite a while since I've read comics, but do comics today even mention Iraq? And what exactly is a "big slam on the government"? A vague commentary on the fact that (gasp!) people sometimes die, and the gov't should do something about it? Or is the death of Captain America a specific critique of Bush's policies in Iraq? Could someone who's followed the storyline enlighten me? Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
>The goal? To increase food production by automating as much of it as possible.
They believe that automation is the key to increasing food production? Are they serious? The key to increasing food production is to either get more acreage in production, or to increase the amount of food produced per acre. Most types of farming (like corn & wheat) don't take huge amounts of labor. Even if they could automate something like picking vegetables that still wouldn't make it so there's more food, just, maybe, cheaper food.
You're right, the link is to a lame story. However, at the end of the story is the actual results: http://www.social-engineer.org/defcon21/DC21_SECTF_Final.pdf. That, on the other hand, is full of information and analysis, although they don't provide specific information that was harvested from the companies, only analysis of the methods employed and the success rates of those methods.
>Seagate has begun shipping hard drives based on a new technology dubbed Shingled Magnetic Recording....We should see the first examples of SMR next year, when Seagate intends to introduce a 5TB drive with 1.25TB per platter.
These two things don't match.
>One interesting strategy discussed is for the professor to make the final count for more of the final grade each time cheating is discovered.
I don't teach CS but I do teach college-level history, and I think that would cause some problems. For one thing (if I understand what they're saying), essentially everyone's grade changes whenever even a single student is caught cheating. If you aced the midterm that was 40% of the grade, well, sorry, now it's only 30% of the grade and you'll have to make it up on the final. While cheating is, obviously, a bad thing, I don't think the entire class should be made to suffer because of it.
>Why anyone think these abominations are progress is beyond me
I teach, too, and the word I was given was that blackboards generate lots of dust, and the dust gets into the computers/projectors/etc. I once taught in a room where the solution apparently was to put the projector facing one wall while the chalkboard was along another wall. It was completely useless for using the chalkboard while showing presentations.
There's something else going on as well. A few years ago I was looking at buying a particular product (I don't remember what now) so I Googled the product name to see what reviews I could find. There were a lot of reviews out there, but when I started looking at the specific reviews I realized that many of the reviews were just copied between reviewing websites. It wasn't just the positive reviews--the websites actually seemed to intentionally copy the reviews posted on each other's sites, most likely to pump up the number of reviews on their own sites. I ended up only being able to find maybe 10 reviews of the product, but they were copied over and over between sites. After that experience I don't trust the reviews on random websites nearly so much.
>people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them...
Exactly! Nothing they can do at all! They should just stop complaining about it and move on.
On a completely unrelated note, can someone please post instructions on how I can resell the games I've downloaded for my Wii and Xbox 360? Also, I've got some downloaded books for my Kindle that I'm tired of and want to sell. I know I can do these things because, like the summary says, there's nothing the publishers can do to stop it. Thanks in advance!
>... we don't think any party is seriously interested in throwing away these investments and starting over from scratch.
Man, wouldn't it be funny if Nintendo did a hardware refresh in a year or so and called it a next generation machine? They could make it backwards compatible to the Wii, have simultaneous releases for both systems, but distract Sony and MS to no end. But would it be the Wii2, or the WiiII (or Wiii)?
>A group of authors, including Philip K. Dick's estate...
In that single collection of words is everything that's wrong with our copyright system...
>In that case, why build a massive solar generator instead of fitting the rooftops with solar panels from the start? It would have the added advantage that one 'incident' at the generator site would nut shut down the whole city
I think a better question might be, "Why build a brand new city in a state with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the US? Do they really need more empty houses?"
>Should publishers get a cut of the money, at least as long as their book is being scanned?
Definitely. Especially if the book has been out of print for decades and the publisher has no plans, and no interest, in every publishing fresh copies. We need to keep the revenue going to the people it's always gone to!
Is this the new troll meme? I don't usually browse the lower-scored posts, so I haven't seen this one before, but it looks like a generic post--it certainly has nothing to do with MS opening new stores. It's kind of a bland post--my favorite from days of yore was the Mac troll complaining about how long it took to copy a small file at his "freelancing gig." Good times, good times.
>If you RTFA, you'll see that no one is losing access to their music, they just won't be able to transfer them to another computer without a workaround such as burning them to a CD. Annoying, yes, but not the end of the world.
What if their hard drive crashed and they're trying to load their backed-up songs onto a new computer? In that case they are screwed. Part of the issue here is that there's a problem but the users don't *realize* there's a problem until it's too late to do something. Yes, you realize DRM is a problem and take steps to work around it (burning a CD), but most users probably won't take steps to work around it until they can't figure out why their perfectly good song files won't work on their new computer.
>Since they will have to find somewhere to showcase their products if it does die, there will either be a new event created, or they will find some other way of achieving the same goal.
From what I've read here and elsewhere, the point is that E3 is dying because there are zillions of other places to hype a new game. E3 represents a significant expense for companies: they have to rent the booth space, fly people in, house them, etc., and they get zero dollars of productive time from their workers during E3. At the same time, they have to compete with every other company at E3 for space and peoples' attention.
Alternately, a company can throw a new preview vid up on the web for almost nothing, or they can interest a blogger or review site in interviewing one of their superstar programmers about their exciting new game, and they can do all of this at a time when they get all the attention themselves.
It sounds like the uber-hype event that was E3 was killed by the internet.
The Microsoft OS development model:
1. Promise the next version will be a geek's wet dream
2. Over the course of the several years of development, slowly step away from each and every major feature
3. Release the new version which is, at best, a minor upgrade from the previous version.
4. Profit!
We are currently at step 2.
>You guys if we all say things like "Wow I wonder how John Carmack would respond to abc and xyz" then he is sure to appear and then we can love him...
John Romero? Is that you?
QTrax, a 5-year-old startup
Um, they've been around for five years, I don't think they're exactly a startup anymore. More like a regular company that's trying to attract some VC money and subscribers by trying to look all shiny and new.
It's kind of like your mom wearing low-riders and a tube top--at some point this sort of thing just needs to stop.
Mac Office 2008 has dropped VBA in favor of enhanced support for AppleScript...
So MS is ditching its homemade scripting language in favor of Apple's? MS, within the Mac platform at least, is moving towards openness? Is this a trick? Is this a new embrace and extend? This just sounds...bizarre.
By the way, has anyone got MacOffice 2008 yet? Is it very different from the previous version?
July 24th: Activision Becomes Industry Sales Leader
November 13th: Atari Exits Production Business
While I do know these aren't the same companies as they used to be, it would be highly amusing if Activision finally bought out Atari.
Revenge of the third parties!
From TFA:
Sony asserts that the surge in sales is largely due to the price cut...
Price cut? But that's why I got my second job!
How plentiful is Uranium for nuclear power?
This link is a pretty good read for that information. Current price of uranium is nowhere near the historic inflation-adjusted high ($75/pound versus $145/pound). However, the author gives some very good information on why the price will be skyrocketing soon:
-there's a gap between production and consumption that's currently being closed by using stockpiles, i.e. old Russian nukes. Once those are used up, that gap opens up again.
-there are many nuclear power plants coming online in the next decade or so. 28 are currently under construction, over 100 more in the next decade.
-at current rates of demand, we'll need 900 new nuclear plants by 2050 to keep up.
In short, it's plentiful now, but it won't be soon.
I don't have any of the new round of consoles (too expensive so far) but I'm looking toward getting a Wii. I also love R&C. Anyone know if this is PS3 exclusive?
Though I do not underestimate the level of need in the so called "poor" world, I wonder why the OLPC folks think everyone in America can afford this PC.
Um, is there a statement from the OLPC people where they say that everyone in NA can afford one? It seems to me that they only said that individuals in NA can buy one, if they want. There is no comment about the "material prosperity" of everyone on this continent.
Now that I think about it, the title of your comment is "North America has poor folks too!" yet you only reference [the United States of] America. There are a couple of other countries on this continent, too, don't forget.
The Wii does something new and exciting, yes, but so do the PS3 and the 360...it's not just "shinier graphics", there are many things that game developers are able to do now that they were unable to do before
Maybe, except that the things you list are, essentially, "shinier graphics" sorts of things that you get through more horsepower in the console. Bigger levels, smarter AI, more online...these are pretty obvious things that *any* next generation platform could supply.
More powerful CPUs and GPUs don't just make things extra shiny...they make gameplay possible that was not possible before...just like a Wiimote.
But the experience with the PS3 and 360 is essentially the same as previous generations, there's just more of it. The experience of playing with the Wii is fundamentally different: a different control scheme lets you have a fundamentally different experience.
To put it another way, from what I've heard the Wii isn't all that much more powerful than the Gamecube, especially if you look at the PS2->PS3. But I haven't heard *anyone* bitching that the Wii is just the same as the GC, with a bit of flash thrown in. People are talking about the Wii as a legitimate contender in this generation against consoles that are (by everyone's admission) *much* more powerful. That's what the difference here is.
>it's hard not to think the whole thing is one big slam on the government.
It's been quite a while since I've read comics, but do comics today even mention Iraq? And what exactly is a "big slam on the government"? A vague commentary on the fact that (gasp!) people sometimes die, and the gov't should do something about it? Or is the death of Captain America a specific critique of Bush's policies in Iraq? Could someone who's followed the storyline enlighten me? Thanks.