Playstation might be successful now, but focusing the company by ditching everything else does not magically improve the chances of the next generation not failing. Selling divisions whenever they go through a weak phase means selling for a dime and since every part of the company will see such a phase of relative weakness at one point it is a reliable algorithm to end with an empty shell of a company.
I'd safely assume that the editors were just using the term "GPS" in the way that it is now commonly used by nontechnical people: as a general short for "technomagical gadget that tells cars'n'stuff where to go". They would probably call it a "GPS" even if it wasn't using satellite navigation at all (which it sure does, as the technoligy is just too useful to ignore)
First of all, in the US, anything that has enough money attached automatically becomes a "pork-barrel" project.
Do you really think there is something magic about being european that makes things tick any different here?
I agree with your fourth point though: stuff like that needs decades to learn, and people willing to think about how to improve things even if nobody will be able to recognize their work (any good engineer has to do exactly that, so it's not entirely unrealistic. in a way you need "good engineers of the social aspects")
Do not be so naive to think that the Theatrical Security Administration will not do to passenger rail service what they have done to passenger air service.
Making an airplane crash without getting aboard is several orders of magnitude more difficult than making a train crash without being there. Also, highjacking a train in an attempt to drive it somewhere it's not supposed to go isn't exactly an idea that would make many apprentice terrorists download a warez copy of MS Train Simulator.
Btw: airport security in Europe isn't much different than in the States, but even after the Madrid bombings nobody has ever seriously considered more security measures for high speed trains than you would see at a random subway station.
I do that wherever i go but sadly, the difference between using public transportation in a place you don't know and using it at home where you know all the lines is much bigger than the difference between driving at a place you don't know and driving at home.
It's not that hard, just put a prefab house on the rails.
(this was supposed to be merely a joke, but there is a certain truth in it: railway systems are so open for terrorist attacks from the outside that harrassing passengers could not make much of a difference)
It cerainly depends on the budget you are wanting to spend. Real beds (well, an approximation of a bed that you would still sue a hotel over, but still a million times better than reclining seats) are expensive in Europe as well.
But if you compare it with the price of a flight with a level of comfort well above the cheapest class, which is fair even if you wouldn't spend so many hours in the "cattle-flight", the difference is no worse than in any other plane/train comparison (yes, rail travel is expensive, but it will become more competetive with every increase in energy price, which, in the long term, is inevitable due to scarcity of resources).
Maybe the biggest difference between Europe and the USA is that the regional rail systems offer pretty good service, certainly better than airline service to the various mildly backwater places. If you travel by plane you will often switch to a regional train for the last 100 or so kilometers and many airports are very poorly connected to the railway system. The place where you get off the night train, by definition, is connected perfectly.
Alienware couldn't, but Dell could. And besides, they could do exactly the same thing with phones they do with cheap computer cases, china has plenty of noname gadgets makers that can supply "phone blanks". It still does not matter at all, because Alienware as a brand does not really exist outside of the basements of a few rich parents. In comparison to Alienware, Apple is mainstream. And in the market of mobile phones, even Apple is still midget, despite of the biggest hype ever made around a piece of electronics and even a few serious technical merits.
Heh, i've come to the same conclusion ("probably editor of one of those really, really bad magazines") just by reading the article. Being from Europe i don't even know that PCMag thing, but the symptoms were so obvious...
everything on the second page of the article ist complete bullshit. it's as simple as that. the guy who wrote migth probably be good at scheming and selling his ego as big, that explains why he became thisorthat editor of something that he perceives as important, but all his suggestions are clear proof of serious stupidity. yes, vista is lying on the floor and it has real problems as well as percepted problems, but he's the bully who is just happy to see an easy victim.
And don't underestimate the inherent "sexy" effect that the word "wireless" has on nontechnical people. Typical/. readers love wired connections for their technical elegance, reliability and totally natural user interface, but Joe Average (and even more so his wife Jane) will _always_ buy the "wireless" product if they have the choice between wired and wireless.
all those other perfectly valid points aside - setting up those systems costs 11 billion (projected). but what does it cost the other side to get past them? if "they" can get one SAM, "they" will also be able to get three, practically for free in comparison to the cost of the defense systems. and high power laser systems, in contrast to what scifi movies try to make us believe, are rarely able to engage multiple targets in short succession. it's also not that far fetched to imagine a quickly rigged prototype guidance system that would not be influenced by laser blinding, also for a fraction of the cost of those billions.
the good new is that according to the article the airline running those tests seems to be also very sceptical of those systems.
If i put that "dreams as simulator exercise for threatening situations" theory together with your "adults have less threatening dreams" theory, i get an entirely different result than you: adults just know much more more refined and sublte threatening situation. A toddler might have some instinctive fear of big moving things with large teeth, but of little else, so if the brain sets up a "threatening situation simulation" it will inevitably include a decent number of man-eating monsters. An adult brain, on the other hand, knows many different threats, mostly well within the rules of a civilized society, so if an adult brain sets up a threatening situation for a dream it has a wide range of possibilities, of which most would not scare a child at all. Going naked to kindergarden? Fine, as long as mum doesn't notice.
I agree with your general points, but let me add this: history is full enough with concepts that failed repeatedly until at one point "the time was right" (who cares for real reasons anyway?) and a repeat of the concept was highly successful. So we can even learn the fact, that learning from history can sometimes be a bad idea, from -surprise- history.
and what i really wanted to say (sorry, got lost a bit) is that the physical format is the bigger problem: a makeshift film projector is easy to build compared to a makeshift DVD reader (but the makeshift film projector would certainly be more likely to destroy the archive copy, so it's still a very good idea to keep some kind of film projector industry alive at all times).
That's why it's so important to focus long term archiving efforts on the one point where digital is superior to analog and that is copying. even the most stable media won't be worth anything if you lack a working reader and the complexity of readers has long reached a point where recreation of the technology is more than unlikely and things will get worse with rising data density.
Having said that, it might still be a nice idea to have ultra-durable media as well (for those aliens-find-traces-of-civilisation-on-dead-planet scenarios), but not as a replacement for "active archives".
the software part (codec) of the formats should be easily solved as long as you can provide source code and the code does not do any fancy hardware related stuff. think along the lines of a reference implementation that values correctness and simplicity over performance. even if one day there won't be any compilers for that language it should be easy enough to build a proof-of-concept quality interpreter, or a translator, since the bit and maths operations that make up a basic media decoder don't need fancy library calls that might be difficult to recreate.
and languages going fully extinct seems to be less of a problem than it might seem, we still have infrastructure to run ancient algol code for example and even the plankalkül seems to have an implementation now, more than half a century after it was invented (but not implemented).
that's one thing that digital media has in advantage over those really old films, of which many are lost (and of which much more would be lost if those not-so-much-profit-oriented communists in moscow would not have decided to run a huge film archive): harddrives are less likely to be abused as fuel.
we don't know how digital long term archiving will turn out, but one thing we already know: the content lost will be lost for reasons quite different from the reasons for loss in the analog world. and the importance of people being aware of the problem can't be underestimated.
This little software feeds the TrackIR interface from a cheap webcam. Since it doesn't use a Wii it won't make you more attractive to the gender that you prefer being attractive to, but then you get full six degrees of freedom, which a Wii sensor bar can't do (it has only two points to track). Only trouble is the weak framerate most webcams have, and horrible webcam drivers that can suck away a considerable amount of CPU time.
...the beowulf cluster of ISSs that could be put in orbit with a single Ares V launch.
But yeah, manned spaceflight is not a matter of rationalism, so it's just consistent that a mars mission is easier to fund than anything "cheap" in LEO.
haven't been active there myself but i know a few of those d2 onliners, you know, those who played diablo 2 until wow came out. "does not really start before reaching level cap" was pretty much the impression i got from hearing them talk about d2 (like, whenever they were out in that cold, mean physical world).
If you want to fight for capitalism, you have to fight under the rules of capitalism. Defending humanity is only a random side effect of defending The System.
Or so you could read it;). In reality it's obviously just a weak attempt of distracting from the fact that the game is not counterstrike.
Slashdot Mirror
Playstation might be successful now, but focusing the company by ditching everything else does not magically improve the chances of the next generation not failing. Selling divisions whenever they go through a weak phase means selling for a dime and since every part of the company will see such a phase of relative weakness at one point it is a reliable algorithm to end with an empty shell of a company.
I'd safely assume that the editors were just using the term "GPS" in the way that it is now commonly used by nontechnical people: as a general short for "technomagical gadget that tells cars'n'stuff where to go". They would probably call it a "GPS" even if it wasn't using satellite navigation at all (which it sure does, as the technoligy is just too useful to ignore)
There is no cultural difference that makes people only want physical printed books, unless you have some religious grounds to not use technology.
You fail to recognize a massive case of "not invented here" ;-)
I do agree with your other points though. People don't need ebooks, therefore they won't develop a desire to get them.
First of all, in the US, anything that has enough money attached automatically becomes a "pork-barrel" project.
Do you really think there is something magic about being european that makes things tick any different here?
I agree with your fourth point though: stuff like that needs decades to learn, and people willing to think about how to improve things even if nobody will be able to recognize their work (any good engineer has to do exactly that, so it's not entirely unrealistic. in a way you need "good engineers of the social aspects")
subsidies create false economies where inefficiencies are so buried in the noise that they are allowed to grow into depression-quality bubbles
couldn't have explained it better why we are all locked into an inefficient car-centric system.
Except that it already works in Europe.
It works nowhere in Europe. But it fails many orders of magnitude less hard than in the states! (and France is much better than all the others)
You are prefectly right with all the other points though.
Do not be so naive to think that the Theatrical Security Administration will not do to passenger rail service what they have done to passenger air service.
Making an airplane crash without getting aboard is several orders of magnitude more difficult than making a train crash without being there. Also, highjacking a train in an attempt to drive it somewhere it's not supposed to go isn't exactly an idea that would make many apprentice terrorists download a warez copy of MS Train Simulator.
Btw: airport security in Europe isn't much different than in the States, but even after the Madrid bombings nobody has ever seriously considered more security measures for high speed trains than you would see at a random subway station.
I do that wherever i go but sadly, the difference between using public transportation in a place you don't know and using it at home where you know all the lines is much bigger than the difference between driving at a place you don't know and driving at home.
It's not that hard, just put a prefab house on the rails.
(this was supposed to be merely a joke, but there is a certain truth in it: railway systems are so open for terrorist attacks from the outside that harrassing passengers could not make much of a difference)
It cerainly depends on the budget you are wanting to spend. Real beds (well, an approximation of a bed that you would still sue a hotel over, but still a million times better than reclining seats) are expensive in Europe as well.
But if you compare it with the price of a flight with a level of comfort well above the cheapest class, which is fair even if you wouldn't spend so many hours in the "cattle-flight", the difference is no worse than in any other plane/train comparison (yes, rail travel is expensive, but it will become more competetive with every increase in energy price, which, in the long term, is inevitable due to scarcity of resources).
Maybe the biggest difference between Europe and the USA is that the regional rail systems offer pretty good service, certainly better than airline service to the various mildly backwater places. If you travel by plane you will often switch to a regional train for the last 100 or so kilometers and many airports are very poorly connected to the railway system. The place where you get off the night train, by definition, is connected perfectly.
Alienware couldn't, but Dell could. And besides, they could do exactly the same thing with phones they do with cheap computer cases, china has plenty of noname gadgets makers that can supply "phone blanks". It still does not matter at all, because Alienware as a brand does not really exist outside of the basements of a few rich parents. In comparison to Alienware, Apple is mainstream. And in the market of mobile phones, even Apple is still midget, despite of the biggest hype ever made around a piece of electronics and even a few serious technical merits.
looks more like a GIF mockup drawn by an unsupervised intern than like a GIF mockup drawn by a staff artist.
Heh, i've come to the same conclusion ("probably editor of one of those really, really bad magazines") just by reading the article. Being from Europe i don't even know that PCMag thing, but the symptoms were so obvious...
everything on the second page of the article ist complete bullshit. it's as simple as that. the guy who wrote migth probably be good at scheming and selling his ego as big, that explains why he became thisorthat editor of something that he perceives as important, but all his suggestions are clear proof of serious stupidity. yes, vista is lying on the floor and it has real problems as well as percepted problems, but he's the bully who is just happy to see an easy victim.
And don't underestimate the inherent "sexy" effect that the word "wireless" has on nontechnical people. Typical /. readers love wired connections for their technical elegance, reliability and totally natural user interface, but Joe Average (and even more so his wife Jane) will _always_ buy the "wireless" product if they have the choice between wired and wireless.
all those other perfectly valid points aside - setting up those systems costs 11 billion (projected). but what does it cost the other side to get past them? if "they" can get one SAM, "they" will also be able to get three, practically for free in comparison to the cost of the defense systems. and high power laser systems, in contrast to what scifi movies try to make us believe, are rarely able to engage multiple targets in short succession. it's also not that far fetched to imagine a quickly rigged prototype guidance system that would not be influenced by laser blinding, also for a fraction of the cost of those billions.
the good new is that according to the article the airline running those tests seems to be also very sceptical of those systems.
If i put that "dreams as simulator exercise for threatening situations" theory together with your "adults have less threatening dreams" theory, i get an entirely different result than you: adults just know much more more refined and sublte threatening situation. A toddler might have some instinctive fear of big moving things with large teeth, but of little else, so if the brain sets up a "threatening situation simulation" it will inevitably include a decent number of man-eating monsters. An adult brain, on the other hand, knows many different threats, mostly well within the rules of a civilized society, so if an adult brain sets up a threatening situation for a dream it has a wide range of possibilities, of which most would not scare a child at all. Going naked to kindergarden? Fine, as long as mum doesn't notice.
I agree with your general points, but let me add this: history is full enough with concepts that failed repeatedly until at one point "the time was right" (who cares for real reasons anyway?) and a repeat of the concept was highly successful. So we can even learn the fact, that learning from history can sometimes be a bad idea, from -surprise- history.
and what i really wanted to say (sorry, got lost a bit) is that the physical format is the bigger problem: a makeshift film projector is easy to build compared to a makeshift DVD reader (but the makeshift film projector would certainly be more likely to destroy the archive copy, so it's still a very good idea to keep some kind of film projector industry alive at all times).
That's why it's so important to focus long term archiving efforts on the one point where digital is superior to analog and that is copying. even the most stable media won't be worth anything if you lack a working reader and the complexity of readers has long reached a point where recreation of the technology is more than unlikely and things will get worse with rising data density.
Having said that, it might still be a nice idea to have ultra-durable media as well (for those aliens-find-traces-of-civilisation-on-dead-planet scenarios), but not as a replacement for "active archives".
the software part (codec) of the formats should be easily solved as long as you can provide source code and the code does not do any fancy hardware related stuff. think along the lines of a reference implementation that values correctness and simplicity over performance. even if one day there won't be any compilers for that language it should be easy enough to build a proof-of-concept quality interpreter, or a translator, since the bit and maths operations that make up a basic media decoder don't need fancy library calls that might be difficult to recreate.
and languages going fully extinct seems to be less of a problem than it might seem, we still have infrastructure to run ancient algol code for example and even the plankalkül seems to have an implementation now, more than half a century after it was invented (but not implemented).
"and was highly flammable."
that's one thing that digital media has in advantage over those really old films, of which many are lost (and of which much more would be lost if those not-so-much-profit-oriented communists in moscow would not have decided to run a huge film archive): harddrives are less likely to be abused as fuel.
we don't know how digital long term archiving will turn out, but one thing we already know: the content lost will be lost for reasons quite different from the reasons for loss in the analog world. and the importance of people being aware of the problem can't be underestimated.
Just take a look at http://free-track.net./
This little software feeds the TrackIR interface from a cheap webcam. Since it doesn't use a Wii it won't make you more attractive to the gender that you prefer being attractive to, but then you get full six degrees of freedom, which a Wii sensor bar can't do (it has only two points to track). Only trouble is the weak framerate most webcams have, and horrible webcam drivers that can suck away a considerable amount of CPU time.
...the beowulf cluster of ISSs that could be put in orbit with a single Ares V launch.
But yeah, manned spaceflight is not a matter of rationalism, so it's just consistent that a mars mission is easier to fund than anything "cheap" in LEO.
I was talking specifically about diablo 2 online.
haven't been active there myself but i know a few of those d2 onliners, you know, those who played diablo 2 until wow came out. "does not really start before reaching level cap" was pretty much the impression i got from hearing them talk about d2 (like, whenever they were out in that cold, mean physical world).
If you want to fight for capitalism, you have to fight under the rules of capitalism. Defending humanity is only a random side effect of defending The System.
;). In reality it's obviously just a weak attempt of distracting from the fact that the game is not counterstrike.
Or so you could read it