This! It seems like game sales were a big missed opportunity with the original Wii. When you have an install base of 100M+ for the console, why in the world aren't you creating new versions of your flagship titles for years? Where was Super Mario Bros Wii 2 and 3 (like with the original NES), or Mario Kart 2? The answer of course is that they were trying to use those sequels to push hardware sales of the Wii U, with extremely limited success. There's a lot of hype now around the Switch; it will be interesting to see if this sales rate actually holds up. My guess is that it's not going to break out to the casual crowd like the Wii did and console sales will taper off much quicker.
There's a fascinating Planet Money story about this involving the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes, and the American representative Harry Dexter White (who apparently annoyed Keynes and was later accused of being a Soviet spy). Basically at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, the nations were discussing Keynes' proposal for an international currency to facilitate trade. The Americans wanted something similar but backed by gold (since they had most of it). It was suggested to just replace the theoretical currency in all the documents with something more tangible for clarity, so White, heading the technical committee, changed it to the dollar at the last minute. No one really understood the significance at the time; but apparently the idea stuck.. So now everyone holds US dollars to conduct trade.
I'm curious your thoughts on why Linux hasn't grabbed more laptop/desktop marketshare from Windows and MacOS over the years? It seems that with the privacy concerns around Windows 10 and Apple's lack of focus on MacOS there may be a huge opportunity in the near future. What things need to happen in the consumer marketplace and within the OSS community for it to really take off? Can 2017 be the year of the Linux desktop?
This! Nintendo's first party content is their largest untapped source of revenue because for some reason they keep trying to use it to push a new system. This is the problem with making a profit on console hardware: no extra incentive to develop games people want. Where was the follow-up to Super Mario Bros Wii or Mario Kart Wii? You have a huge market of Gen X'ers and Millenials with money burning holes in their pockets to relive the video game nostalgia of their youth. I likely would have bought every Mario sequel at $50-60 a pop. (What were the top 3 grossing NES games? Super Mario 1,2, and 3 of course... history says do this!) Heck, they could probably release them now and still make a killing. But asking us casual gamers to lay out $350 for a new system just to play the next Mario installment.... no thank you. Maybe when the WiiU drops to $99 in the bargain bin I'll take another look, but by then they'll have moved on. The marketshare of the Wii was amazing, and sure they made a lot of money, but not nearly what they could have with more first party sequels for their best selling system!
Agree about the issues with updating software and UI. However, UI isn't holding Linux back, or at least hasn't for a long time since the days before KDE and Gnome. What's holding back the popularity of Linux on the desktop is that even technical people get tired of dealing with the same problems that we've had for years. Hardware compatibility and ease of software installation/upgrades are easily the #1 and #2 reasons for the failure of Linux to reach even a fraction of desktop marketshare. Combine that with lack of general intuitiveness for solving problems (no standard control panel, dependencies, lack of documentation) and this is where it falls flat. Even technical people get tired, and just want something that works!
With the disaster Windows OS has become since Win7, Linux should have a shot, but until there is a serious effort to fix these issues (or even try to standardize across the most popular distros) this is a pipe dream. Standard hardware like the RasPI has helped in a few niche applications to solve the hardware issue, but something like this desperately needs to happen on the higher end. As for software, I'm not sure what can be done without a huge overhaul which will likely get bogged down for the same reasons you mention for UI changes! It's a mess all around, but maybe someone will figure it out...
Sure, there's a lot of science one can do even with a handful of pixels. The spectra tells us the atmospheric composition and the way the pixels change over time can tell us the size, orbit, rotations, perhaps even weather patterns or if the planet has any moons and the composition and size of those.
Without classics we wouldn't have architecture or democracy. Without philosophy we wouldn't have logic Without art we wouldn't have beauty or elegant design. Without religion we wouldn't have modern science or medicine...of course you wouldn't know about the Medieval monks or the Golden Age of Islam if you hadn't studied History, but I suppose that is another 'irrelevant' humanities study.
Certainly there are plenty of classes out there with questionable value. It's a shame that you missed out on good ones. But by and large, humanities are the difference between learning a trade, and getting an education. These are the foundation for how our modern world and modern science came to exist through the thinkers of the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment. Some of the biggest scientific and technological breakthroughs come from those who are able to look outside their specific field of study for inspiration. That English lit you found such a waste of time...I suppose then Mary Shelley's Frankenstein wasn't worth writing? After all, who cares about one of the first Science Fiction books.. a genre that has inspired millions of STEM graduates to work on great things? Dismissing humanities as useless is a failure to understand where we came from and how we got here.
Exactly, there is no shortage of work to do, whether it's fixing crumbling infrastructure, doing maintenance or even just providing customer support. The problem is of course finding the money to do it. Even if the money is available, there's no incentive for a company to spend it. So what is the solution? I suppose you could try to pass a law about maintenance or quality of service, but the companies will fight it tooth and nail. And in the end, even if something like that got passed, it will cost more to the customer for the sake of maintaining a profit margin. Either way, the problem always comes down to money. As a society how do we provide an incentive to do things like this, without driving away business? I don't know that there's an easy answer
Exactly. There are plenty of solutions; the problem is there is currently too much momentum built up in the idea that we must work 40 hrs a week to have a relatively high paying job, with no significant gaps in employment. It's going to be difficult for society to accept anything different.
Taking your example, we could set the full time workweek at 20 hrs. In theory, businesses would have to hire twice the people to cover 40hrs worth of shifts. In fact, many large corporations are already starting to do this with job sharing... two people split a job, each works 2-3 days a week, with one day overlapping to get up to speed. It's very popular with working moms. But these are the exception rather than the norm.
The Planetary Society is doing an optical SETI search for laser signals. http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/seti/optical-seti.html/ Is it pointless? Well, you don't know until you look, and even then it could take a very very long time. Problem with a laser is you have to point it somewhere
It seems like if someone were to create a small 486 single board computer, similar to a Raspberry Pi, for under $60 or so, there would be an incredible market for it. For running everything from industrial equipment to a DOS/Windows retro gaming rig. Are there any cheap systems like this out there? I've seen lots of cheap ARM based boards but haven't come across any x86 ones.
As someone who was fortunate enough to see the northern lights in the lower 48 last year, this is good advice. Keep your eye on the forecast; unless you're far up north, good opportunities don't come along too often. Find a dark spot in the country with a good view, and be patient since they do ebb and flow. Although it can vary based on the space weather, your best chance is usually around midnight, and you can get frequent updates here http://helios.swpc.noaa.gov/ovation/
It took me a couple tries to finally see them the first time. And even that night, for the longest time, until my eyes adjusted, I thought I was just seeing hazy clouds. Every once in a while it would light up with color overhead, but sadly those only lasted a few minutes. Most of the time it was pretty faint, but still an amazing experience, and yes a long exposure is a must to get a decent photo!
That may be true, but think about the sheer number of hobbies devoted to building or fixing yesterday's technology that are neither practical or efficient...but still fun! The way I see it, if we get to that point technologically, people are going to create a planet just because they can. Who wouldn't want to design their own planet??
I'm the opposite; I would love to just browse around Best Buy like in years past but I can't do it any more due to the constant badgering by their employees. I ventured back there for the first time in probably a year, and it got to be so ridiculous I left without buying anything. I was asked about a dozen times in less than 5 minutes if I needed help with anything. Some people would love this constant attention; I'd prefer to be left in peace to actually browse on my own. I'd much rather read reviews online and then buy from a B&M store in case I needed to make a return. Even if I had to pay a reasonable premium. But the customer experience there is just so terrible due to the up-selling and constant badgering, I just can't do it.
Wish I had mod points, because I couldn't agree more. If you've been there that long, you might as well make the leap to management. Although it may not always seem like it, companies desperately need people in charge who know what they're doing. Demonstrate that you have the 'people' skills and know how to present to upper mgmt, and you're probably a shoe in.
I have a friend that was in the same situation a while back. They had been an expert for years with new managers rotating in every 12 months or so. Being new, the managers were terrible at understanding what was going on, and even more terrible at explaining to upper mgmt, which only served to make the rest of the group look bad. Finally after 3-4 years of this they just told their director they were considering their career options but what they were really interested in was being a manager as soon as a position opened up. The implied threat of course, is that they were willing to leave. This is the kind of thing that gets things moving. They were promoted within the month. So if I were you, I'd give it a shot, but take a look around and see what else is out there. If nothing else, maybe you'll get a raise or some perks while you're looking at other options.
Why are we still working more than 3 days a week? All this technology we have is being wasted on stupid crap like this... monitoring employees is not progress.
My problem with the whole situation is that as a society, we are rewarding the wrong kind of risk taking. We should be rewarding risk taking that is actually an investment in our future... things like developing technology like a fusion reactor or a high capacity batteries. Not betting whether the derivatives market will rise or fall. These banks are simply gambling on the price of stocks and other securities at a given point of time. Fundamentally it's nothing different than going to the casino, and that should never be supported with taxpayer money. One simple thing to do is say no more bailouts, ever, for what is essentially gambling.
That's also my main complaint with broadcast TV... it suffers from the same problem of being either perfect, choppy and generally awful, or "no signal" Are there any digital codecs out there which have graceful degradation of quality for either video or audio?
I just saw a Nova special about this exact topic called Dogs Decoded. He wasn't one of the researchers listed but I'm sure there are many out there. It's on instant watch if you are Netflix customer
I could be way off base here but my understanding is that for a display with that pixel density the light coming from the different areas of the screen is sufficiently dense to cause interference at the focal point before reaching the eye (with a ton of very specialized calculations in the background). So yeah in essence, it's displaying the fringes on the display rather than the image. If you do a search for "computer generated holography", CGH there's some interesting links to papers and current methods of doing this.
Here's a great reason to keep going smaller: once you get down to the 10k or so pixels per inch level, you've got the main ingredient for a holographic computer display. As in the pixels are dense enough that you can display the holographic fringes necessary to show a true 3 dimensional image without any glasses/lenticular lenses, or any of the other tricks used today.
Slashdot Mirror
This! It seems like game sales were a big missed opportunity with the original Wii. When you have an install base of 100M+ for the console, why in the world aren't you creating new versions of your flagship titles for years? Where was Super Mario Bros Wii 2 and 3 (like with the original NES), or Mario Kart 2? The answer of course is that they were trying to use those sequels to push hardware sales of the Wii U, with extremely limited success. There's a lot of hype now around the Switch; it will be interesting to see if this sales rate actually holds up. My guess is that it's not going to break out to the casual crowd like the Wii did and console sales will taper off much quicker.
Read or listen here: https://www.npr.org/templates/...
I'm curious your thoughts on why Linux hasn't grabbed more laptop/desktop marketshare from Windows and MacOS over the years? It seems that with the privacy concerns around Windows 10 and Apple's lack of focus on MacOS there may be a huge opportunity in the near future. What things need to happen in the consumer marketplace and within the OSS community for it to really take off? Can 2017 be the year of the Linux desktop?
This! Nintendo's first party content is their largest untapped source of revenue because for some reason they keep trying to use it to push a new system. This is the problem with making a profit on console hardware: no extra incentive to develop games people want. Where was the follow-up to Super Mario Bros Wii or Mario Kart Wii? You have a huge market of Gen X'ers and Millenials with money burning holes in their pockets to relive the video game nostalgia of their youth. I likely would have bought every Mario sequel at $50-60 a pop. (What were the top 3 grossing NES games? Super Mario 1,2, and 3 of course... history says do this!) Heck, they could probably release them now and still make a killing. But asking us casual gamers to lay out $350 for a new system just to play the next Mario installment.... no thank you. Maybe when the WiiU drops to $99 in the bargain bin I'll take another look, but by then they'll have moved on. The marketshare of the Wii was amazing, and sure they made a lot of money, but not nearly what they could have with more first party sequels for their best selling system!
Agree about the issues with updating software and UI. However, UI isn't holding Linux back, or at least hasn't for a long time since the days before KDE and Gnome. What's holding back the popularity of Linux on the desktop is that even technical people get tired of dealing with the same problems that we've had for years. Hardware compatibility and ease of software installation/upgrades are easily the #1 and #2 reasons for the failure of Linux to reach even a fraction of desktop marketshare. Combine that with lack of general intuitiveness for solving problems (no standard control panel, dependencies, lack of documentation) and this is where it falls flat. Even technical people get tired, and just want something that works!
With the disaster Windows OS has become since Win7, Linux should have a shot, but until there is a serious effort to fix these issues (or even try to standardize across the most popular distros) this is a pipe dream. Standard hardware like the RasPI has helped in a few niche applications to solve the hardware issue, but something like this desperately needs to happen on the higher end. As for software, I'm not sure what can be done without a huge overhaul which will likely get bogged down for the same reasons you mention for UI changes! It's a mess all around, but maybe someone will figure it out...
Sure, there's a lot of science one can do even with a handful of pixels. The spectra tells us the atmospheric composition and the way the pixels change over time can tell us the size, orbit, rotations, perhaps even weather patterns or if the planet has any moons and the composition and size of those.
...Sigh
Without classics we wouldn't have architecture or democracy.
Without philosophy we wouldn't have logic
Without art we wouldn't have beauty or elegant design.
Without religion we wouldn't have modern science or medicine...of course you wouldn't know about the Medieval monks or the Golden Age of Islam if you hadn't studied History, but I suppose that is another 'irrelevant' humanities study.
Certainly there are plenty of classes out there with questionable value. It's a shame that you missed out on good ones. But by and large, humanities are the difference between learning a trade, and getting an education. These are the foundation for how our modern world and modern science came to exist through the thinkers of the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment. Some of the biggest scientific and technological breakthroughs come from those who are able to look outside their specific field of study for inspiration. That English lit you found such a waste of time...I suppose then Mary Shelley's Frankenstein wasn't worth writing? After all, who cares about one of the first Science Fiction books .. a genre that has inspired millions of STEM graduates to work on great things? Dismissing humanities as useless is a failure to understand where we came from and how we got here.
Prett sure it shows cached images. One or the news sites in mine shows headlines over a day old
The biggest thing I'm going to miss is the community here. Where else is there to go? Reddit?
Exactly, there is no shortage of work to do, whether it's fixing crumbling infrastructure, doing maintenance or even just providing customer support. The problem is of course finding the money to do it. Even if the money is available, there's no incentive for a company to spend it. So what is the solution? I suppose you could try to pass a law about maintenance or quality of service, but the companies will fight it tooth and nail. And in the end, even if something like that got passed, it will cost more to the customer for the sake of maintaining a profit margin. Either way, the problem always comes down to money. As a society how do we provide an incentive to do things like this, without driving away business? I don't know that there's an easy answer
Exactly. There are plenty of solutions; the problem is there is currently too much momentum built up in the idea that we must work 40 hrs a week to have a relatively high paying job, with no significant gaps in employment. It's going to be difficult for society to accept anything different.
Taking your example, we could set the full time workweek at 20 hrs. In theory, businesses would have to hire twice the people to cover 40hrs worth of shifts. In fact, many large corporations are already starting to do this with job sharing... two people split a job, each works 2-3 days a week, with one day overlapping to get up to speed. It's very popular with working moms. But these are the exception rather than the norm.
The Planetary Society is doing an optical SETI search for laser signals. http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/seti/optical-seti.html/ Is it pointless? Well, you don't know until you look, and even then it could take a very very long time. Problem with a laser is you have to point it somewhere
Since this is a Slashdot video, what would be really nice is if we could have some screen captures interspersed throughout the transcript.
It seems like if someone were to create a small 486 single board computer, similar to a Raspberry Pi, for under $60 or so, there would be an incredible market for it. For running everything from industrial equipment to a DOS/Windows retro gaming rig. Are there any cheap systems like this out there? I've seen lots of cheap ARM based boards but haven't come across any x86 ones.
As someone who was fortunate enough to see the northern lights in the lower 48 last year, this is good advice. Keep your eye on the forecast; unless you're far up north, good opportunities don't come along too often. Find a dark spot in the country with a good view, and be patient since they do ebb and flow. Although it can vary based on the space weather, your best chance is usually around midnight, and you can get frequent updates here http://helios.swpc.noaa.gov/ovation/
It took me a couple tries to finally see them the first time. And even that night, for the longest time, until my eyes adjusted, I thought I was just seeing hazy clouds. Every once in a while it would light up with color overhead, but sadly those only lasted a few minutes. Most of the time it was pretty faint, but still an amazing experience, and yes a long exposure is a must to get a decent photo!
That may be true, but think about the sheer number of hobbies devoted to building or fixing yesterday's technology that are neither practical or efficient...but still fun! The way I see it, if we get to that point technologically, people are going to create a planet just because they can. Who wouldn't want to design their own planet??
I'm the opposite; I would love to just browse around Best Buy like in years past but I can't do it any more due to the constant badgering by their employees. I ventured back there for the first time in probably a year, and it got to be so ridiculous I left without buying anything. I was asked about a dozen times in less than 5 minutes if I needed help with anything. Some people would love this constant attention; I'd prefer to be left in peace to actually browse on my own. I'd much rather read reviews online and then buy from a B&M store in case I needed to make a return. Even if I had to pay a reasonable premium. But the customer experience there is just so terrible due to the up-selling and constant badgering, I just can't do it.
Wish I had mod points, because I couldn't agree more. If you've been there that long, you might as well make the leap to management. Although it may not always seem like it, companies desperately need people in charge who know what they're doing. Demonstrate that you have the 'people' skills and know how to present to upper mgmt, and you're probably a shoe in.
I have a friend that was in the same situation a while back. They had been an expert for years with new managers rotating in every 12 months or so. Being new, the managers were terrible at understanding what was going on, and even more terrible at explaining to upper mgmt, which only served to make the rest of the group look bad. Finally after 3-4 years of this they just told their director they were considering their career options but what they were really interested in was being a manager as soon as a position opened up. The implied threat of course, is that they were willing to leave. This is the kind of thing that gets things moving. They were promoted within the month. So if I were you, I'd give it a shot, but take a look around and see what else is out there. If nothing else, maybe you'll get a raise or some perks while you're looking at other options.
Why are we still working more than 3 days a week? All this technology we have is being wasted on stupid crap like this... monitoring employees is not progress.
My problem with the whole situation is that as a society, we are rewarding the wrong kind of risk taking. We should be rewarding risk taking that is actually an investment in our future... things like developing technology like a fusion reactor or a high capacity batteries. Not betting whether the derivatives market will rise or fall. These banks are simply gambling on the price of stocks and other securities at a given point of time. Fundamentally it's nothing different than going to the casino, and that should never be supported with taxpayer money. One simple thing to do is say no more bailouts, ever, for what is essentially gambling.
Yeah, that was a catchy TV theme. Golden Girls in space... who knew?
That's also my main complaint with broadcast TV... it suffers from the same problem of being either perfect, choppy and generally awful, or "no signal" Are there any digital codecs out there which have graceful degradation of quality for either video or audio?
I just saw a Nova special about this exact topic called Dogs Decoded. He wasn't one of the researchers listed but I'm sure there are many out there. It's on instant watch if you are Netflix customer
I could be way off base here but my understanding is that for a display with that pixel density the light coming from the different areas of the screen is sufficiently dense to cause interference at the focal point before reaching the eye (with a ton of very specialized calculations in the background). So yeah in essence, it's displaying the fringes on the display rather than the image. If you do a search for "computer generated holography", CGH there's some interesting links to papers and current methods of doing this.
Here's a great reason to keep going smaller: once you get down to the 10k or so pixels per inch level, you've got the main ingredient for a holographic computer display. As in the pixels are dense enough that you can display the holographic fringes necessary to show a true 3 dimensional image without any glasses/lenticular lenses, or any of the other tricks used today.