Back in my days writing Windows drivers for add-on boards we ended up detecting VIA chipsets and turning off all features other than basic PCI, because anything complex like AGP never worked right; after that it was stable, just substantially slower than it should have been.
private industry may be reluctant to pay for technologies that might become profitable 20 years down the road.
If it's not going to be profitable for twenty years, why not wait twenty years and develop it then?
Imagine trying to build an iPhone in 1990. Sure, the first clunky models would be kind of cool even though they required you to drag a half-ton trailer around with you, but would also be utterly pointless until technology had improved enough in other areas to eliminate that half-ton truck.
Regulations are primarily used to keep new, cheaper, more innovative competitors out of the market.
Do you really think that planes would be falling out of the sky every day if the FAA stopped regulating? Airlines whose planes crash regularly tend not to last long.
As the USA transitioned from a largely agricultural economy to an industrial one, these same issues were raised: we lost the "farming class." We never really "lost" the skills and tech though: we just commoditized them.
We could rebuild a manufacturing empire (with $20K/year jobs,) but a $30K/year dog-walker is just a better job given that almost anyone in the world can solder while my dog-walker needs to live nearby.
In ten years your dog-walker will be a robot driven by someone earning $2 an hour in Butfukistan.
"Most Americans are basically the 99.9% - the non-innovators. The 1% comes from all over the world."
Does not compute.
This is innovative foreign percentages; they go up to 100.9%.
It's true in a way, though; America reached the peak of its power because it encouraged the 'best and brightest' from all over the world to move there by providing them with the best environment to bring their ideas to fruition. That's no longer the case, so we shouldn't be surprised that America is in decline now it's become a nation of rent-seekers.
Nearly anyone can learn how to work on a fishing boat in less than a week. Learning to pilot a spacecraft is a lot more complicated and few people would take the time and put forth the effort required to develop the necessary skills.
Nearly anyone can learn how to work on a space shuttle in less than a week. Here's how the toilet works, here's how you get out after a pad abort, don't get in the way of the flight crew.
And as for the flight crew, most of the time they're pressing a few buttons and watching cockpit displays; NASA gets thousands and thousands of perfectly qualified applicants for those jobs every time they look for new astronauts.
Too bad there's still no destination for people, eh?
Bigelow is supposed to be launching his first hotel soon. So the fat-cats will be able to take their mistresses on a vacation where they can be pretty sure their wife won't find them.
I believe SpaceX have been waiting for NASA to give them the go-ahead to fly the first Dragon flight to ISS, so complaining that SpaceX are slow is amusing.
Interestingly enough, all of those complaints have since been remedied.
Surely the one thing MMOG developers should have learned by now is that you don't get a second chance to launch. We've seen so many games start out with big player bases which soon abandoned them because the game was buggy and half-finished that any company should know that you can't get those players back once they've decided your game sucks and told all their friends.
Unless you do lots of, um, downloading "Linux ISOs" off Bittorrent or something, or for professional reasons, most people don't need faster.
One of the new games I looked at on Steam recently was 30GB. Several of the games I already own are 10-25GB.
Admittedly downloading a new game isn't something I do often, but when I do it would be nice if I didn't have to wait a day for it to complete. Just not enough to be worth paying 3x as much every month.
The problem is that there are now roughly 300,000,000 different MMOGs on the market, and few people want to pay a monthly fee to each of them. If a game can keep a reasonable number of dedicated players but also bring in a lot of casual players who pay $20 every now and again then that's better than just giving up because you can't attract enough dedicated players.
The hard part is finding the right compromise between making money and pissing off the free players with nickel and diming.
First of all, I'm not an Apple fan boy. But I went to look at a Kindle the other day and I can't figure out why I'd even pay 10 bucks for one.
You clearly don't read a lot. I bought a Kindle recently and the e-ink screen is vastly better for reading than an LCD and I can use it for days without charging.
However, I have had to reboot it about half a dozen times; it seems to have a bunch of bugs that cause it to lock up or lose the wireless connection and not reconnect.
Amazon produces a Kindle app for almost every platform, which ensures that the Kindle eBook marketplace is dominant. But buying an actual Kindle device limits you to the Kindle eBook marketplace.
That's news to me. About half the books on my Kindle came from Smashwords, Gutenburg and archive.org; I always buy ebooks from Smashwords where possible, because they're guaranteed DRM-free.
You seemed to have answered you own question. Unless you think nuclear war somehow doesn't affect the entire country.
You think a massive nuclear war (with whom?) is just suddenly going to happen without any prior warning? About the only possibility I could see would be some kind of computer failure that launched all Russia's remaining nukes, then you'll see it on TV just in time to realise that you're going to die.
The culture shift from desktop computing to mobile is happening in part because mobiles are becoming powerful enough to do most of the tasks that desktops used to do.
No, they're not. They're becoming powerful enough to check your email and play Farmville, which is all that many people used to do with their PCs; they're not much good for actual productive work.
Meanwhile PC gaming has stagnated due to Microsoft concentrating on pushing console games, so there's little reason for the average home user to upgrade. Word won't let you write stuff ten times faster just because you switched from a Pentium-4 to an i7, and when games are limited by being designed for an Xbox and them ported over, your super-fast GPU will be sitting idle much of the time waiting for something to do.
Because we are getting to the point in technology that us humans won't be able to perceive the difference in graphics.
Hollywood is getting close, but they have huge render farms, terabytes of source data and can spend hours rendering a single frame. GPUs are still a long way from producing photo-realistic output.
so they rebuilt 1960's technology and it worked...so lets find those old engineers who designed stuff that actually worked and pat them on the back.
If I remember correctly, the J-2X is a substantially improved version of the engine with a few hundred changes over the original J-2, but, yeah, this story would be more interesting if SLS was ever going to fly.
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Back in my days writing Windows drivers for add-on boards we ended up detecting VIA chipsets and turning off all features other than basic PCI, because anything complex like AGP never worked right; after that it was stable, just substantially slower than it should have been.
Actually I have one. It's a good at what it does.
Then you should be used to 'unresponsive screens, buttons, and general lag'.
Suggesting that users won't notice unresponsive screens, buttons, an general lag is just burying your head in the sand.
Have you ever used a Kindle?
Given that an 8-core Bulldozer already needs its own power station to operate, I can't imagine Intel could have a worse TDP than a 16-core.
Windows 8 is not going app store only and but even then MS is more open to in app user maps and addons.
I thought Metrosexual apps were going to be app-store only?
It's going to be hard for any OS developer to turn down the idea of getting 30% of every piece of software installed on a sysem.
private industry may be reluctant to pay for technologies that might become profitable 20 years down the road.
If it's not going to be profitable for twenty years, why not wait twenty years and develop it then?
Imagine trying to build an iPhone in 1990. Sure, the first clunky models would be kind of cool even though they required you to drag a half-ton trailer around with you, but would also be utterly pointless until technology had improved enough in other areas to eliminate that half-ton truck.
Regulations are primarily used to keep new, cheaper, more innovative competitors out of the market.
Do you really think that planes would be falling out of the sky every day if the FAA stopped regulating? Airlines whose planes crash regularly tend not to last long.
As the USA transitioned from a largely agricultural economy to an industrial one, these same issues were raised: we lost the "farming class." We never really "lost" the skills and tech though: we just commoditized them.
We could rebuild a manufacturing empire (with $20K/year jobs,) but a $30K/year dog-walker is just a better job given that almost anyone in the world can solder while my dog-walker needs to live nearby.
In ten years your dog-walker will be a robot driven by someone earning $2 an hour in Butfukistan.
If your idea can quickly be copied then it's clearly not innovative enough to deserve a patent.
"Most Americans are basically the 99.9% - the non-innovators. The 1% comes from all over the world."
Does not compute.
This is innovative foreign percentages; they go up to 100.9%.
It's true in a way, though; America reached the peak of its power because it encouraged the 'best and brightest' from all over the world to move there by providing them with the best environment to bring their ideas to fruition. That's no longer the case, so we shouldn't be surprised that America is in decline now it's become a nation of rent-seekers.
Nearly anyone can learn how to work on a fishing boat in less than a week. Learning to pilot a spacecraft is a lot more complicated and few people would take the time and put forth the effort required to develop the necessary skills.
Nearly anyone can learn how to work on a space shuttle in less than a week. Here's how the toilet works, here's how you get out after a pad abort, don't get in the way of the flight crew.
And as for the flight crew, most of the time they're pressing a few buttons and watching cockpit displays; NASA gets thousands and thousands of perfectly qualified applicants for those jobs every time they look for new astronauts.
Too bad there's still no destination for people, eh?
Bigelow is supposed to be launching his first hotel soon. So the fat-cats will be able to take their mistresses on a vacation where they can be pretty sure their wife won't find them.
2011 is passing and SpaceX hasn't launched jack. I thought these jokers were supposed to be fast. Definitely the 'spirit of Solyndra'.
Uh, dude: http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php
I believe SpaceX have been waiting for NASA to give them the go-ahead to fly the first Dragon flight to ISS, so complaining that SpaceX are slow is amusing.
Interestingly enough, all of those complaints have since been remedied.
Surely the one thing MMOG developers should have learned by now is that you don't get a second chance to launch. We've seen so many games start out with big player bases which soon abandoned them because the game was buggy and half-finished that any company should know that you can't get those players back once they've decided your game sucks and told all their friends.
Unless you make it free, anyway.
Unless you do lots of, um, downloading "Linux ISOs" off Bittorrent or something, or for professional reasons, most people don't need faster.
One of the new games I looked at on Steam recently was 30GB. Several of the games I already own are 10-25GB.
Admittedly downloading a new game isn't something I do often, but when I do it would be nice if I didn't have to wait a day for it to complete. Just not enough to be worth paying 3x as much every month.
The problem is that there are now roughly 300,000,000 different MMOGs on the market, and few people want to pay a monthly fee to each of them. If a game can keep a reasonable number of dedicated players but also bring in a lot of casual players who pay $20 every now and again then that's better than just giving up because you can't attract enough dedicated players.
The hard part is finding the right compromise between making money and pissing off the free players with nickel and diming.
Yeah, I've been playing it too and it's pretty fun. No idea whether they're making enough money to justify keeping it going though.
Plus Steve Jobs is pining for the fjords.
First of all, I'm not an Apple fan boy. But I went to look at a Kindle the other day and I can't figure out why I'd even pay 10 bucks for one.
You clearly don't read a lot. I bought a Kindle recently and the e-ink screen is vastly better for reading than an LCD and I can use it for days without charging.
However, I have had to reboot it about half a dozen times; it seems to have a bunch of bugs that cause it to lock up or lose the wireless connection and not reconnect.
Amazon produces a Kindle app for almost every platform, which ensures that the Kindle eBook marketplace is dominant. But buying an actual Kindle device limits you to the Kindle eBook marketplace.
That's news to me. About half the books on my Kindle came from Smashwords, Gutenburg and archive.org; I always buy ebooks from Smashwords where possible, because they're guaranteed DRM-free.
You seemed to have answered you own question. Unless you think nuclear war somehow doesn't affect the entire country.
You think a massive nuclear war (with whom?) is just suddenly going to happen without any prior warning? About the only possibility I could see would be some kind of computer failure that launched all Russia's remaining nukes, then you'll see it on TV just in time to realise that you're going to die.
The culture shift from desktop computing to mobile is happening in part because mobiles are becoming powerful enough to do most of the tasks that desktops used to do.
No, they're not. They're becoming powerful enough to check your email and play Farmville, which is all that many people used to do with their PCs; they're not much good for actual productive work.
Meanwhile PC gaming has stagnated due to Microsoft concentrating on pushing console games, so there's little reason for the average home user to upgrade. Word won't let you write stuff ten times faster just because you switched from a Pentium-4 to an i7, and when games are limited by being designed for an Xbox and them ported over, your super-fast GPU will be sitting idle much of the time waiting for something to do.
Because we are getting to the point in technology that us humans won't be able to perceive the difference in graphics.
Hollywood is getting close, but they have huge render farms, terabytes of source data and can spend hours rendering a single frame. GPUs are still a long way from producing photo-realistic output.
Ah, looks like I was thinking of the J-2S, which was apparently also called J-2X early in its development.
so they rebuilt 1960's technology and it worked...so lets find those old engineers who designed stuff that actually worked and pat them on the back.
If I remember correctly, the J-2X is a substantially improved version of the engine with a few hundred changes over the original J-2, but, yeah, this story would be more interesting if SLS was ever going to fly.