FTFA: "Over the minutes that followed, the software analysed every one of the car's digital systems in search of a problem. The culprit could have been any number of things -- the Bosch-supplied, Linux-based infotainment system, the Visteon-supplied virtual instrument display, a heat-ravaged processor, an errant mouse somewhere in one of the car's hundreds of miles of wiring, or the dodgy contents of a CNET UK memory key in one of the XJ's two USB ports."
Lots of systems running together, in a very rugged environment (for a computer, anyways)... I don't think it's terribly surprising that this could happen. In fact, the only surprising fact here is that it doesn't happen MORE often than it does.
I don't know if they're so much sweeping it under the rug so much as (very rightfully) fearing for their lives. NPR was recently running a string of stories about this with the related story found here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128929784 I can not blame the traditional media for avoiding a subject where they face more danger than most war zone correspondents do. The blog in question seems to have done something that traditional media can not: Avoided identifying itself in a way that allows the cartels to go after it with violence. I am personally happy to be living in an era where the dissemination of such dangerous information is possible. Maybe we wont get it how we want to, but the information is out there to be had. Especially in a country where Orwellian measures aren't being taken, important information has a way of finding its way past blocks that may have been 100% effective in stifling it in the past.
They're talking about using the 60GHz bands, which are heavily limited by line of sight, and have extremely poor to no penetration of physical objects. Those facts make it perfect for this kind of high bandwidth, short range application, without further cluttering the spectrum for those around you.
Standardized test scores are not, in and of themselves, evil. They are actually pretty useful tools for measuring the performance a student is capable of when used in moderation. It's the increasing focus put on standardized testing in the US that is creating the problem. When everything from school funding to teacher performance is dependent on these tests, it becomes more and more important for the SCHOOL how the kids do on the test. This leads to a huge increase in teaching specifically to the test, from what types of questions will be on it to testing techniques. There is also a lot of pressure on students to perform well. This leads to less general teaching, which would allow most students to pass the test just fine, and give better numbers, and more teaching to the test, which is good for the scores on one test, and good for the school, but terrible for the student.
Well, considering that these: http://www.siliconsolar.com/solar-garden-lights.html, have been around for many years, I think 'first' is a bit of a stretch. They may have made them CHEAPER, and longer lasting, or more useful, but certainly not FIRST.
Considering that the x86 platform is inherently insecure, I don't understand why this is surprising to people. Until we move away from the architecture, I don't think someone who says they takes PC's security seriously is being as serious as they could be. And yes, I do realize that a new architecture is a huge change, and one that's going to be a long time coming... But it's something that WILL happen. We will eventually need to overcome the shortcomings of x86, and it's at that point that we can really start to take proactive PC security more seriously.
I agree, this really strikes me as the same thing that happened with the memory controllers/FSB a few years ago. They move all of it on die, then claim it's this great huge thing... but in the end it really doesn't make all that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. Obviously its a good move, and one that Intel is going to want to make... EVENTUALLY. But what's the real world benefit of this over the Intel solution? IS there any benefit that the average user buying these chips is ever going to notice (These are integrated graphics... probably not many power-users rushing to get these)? I love real competition between AMD and Intel, as it's been shown many times over to be good for us, the consumer, so I too hope this may lead to better competition (early releases do tend to be good for that), but that's really the only bright spot that I can see in this release for AMD.
Agree 100%! I mean, the first transistor was invented in 1947, and the first integrated circuit wasn't introduced until 1959, and the integrated circuit took even more years to make it into computing devices... and then even more years to evolve to a complexity that allowed the creation of the PC. And the science and engineering involved in those was kid stuff in comparison to many of these inventions. We're not even to the point of the transistor in quantum computing... This is probably more closely related to the Babbage's analytical engine!
Actually, while I agree with the majority of your post, I CAN think of one more place where speed limits are very useful, with the caveat that they're not useful all the time: I live in Denver, Colorado. We by far don't have the worst weather, I know, but our weather is variable enough, and can get bad enough, that road travel is seriously inhibited. Yet, if you must drive during these times, you'll find other people out on the highway doing 60 in the middle of a blizzard with a foot of snow on the road. I think that speed limits would be very useful on those roads DURING those times. They already have digital speed limit signs set up in places around Denver... what's to stop them from networking them and then slowing those limits for bad weather? Variable speed limits based on real time road information would be infinitely more helpful and safer than the set speed limits we have now, and I can't help feeling that if the speed limits were REALLY about safety, we'd be hearing more about ideas like this.
I play many games, and I finish almost none of them. Most games I don't play more than 4-5 hours before I'm done with them for awhile, just like the summary says. But I usually come back to them later, and play about the same amount a few months down the road, and then again a few months down the road. I don't buy a game expecting to finish it, I buy the game to have fun. And I probably WOULDN'T buy the game if all the extra game play wasn't in it. I LIKE huge long complex games. I like difficulty (to a certain extent of course:) ). I don't want games to lose that... even though I might not play it all the way through. And for the games that I DO play all the way through, it makes the sense of accomplishment all that much better. Knowing that I've got a stack of 10 or 15 games lying around that I can go and play through for that rush when I'm bored some day with nothing else to do is great! I can't believe I'm the only one that feels like this too.
"Recentering globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism" is a study by Koichi Iwabuchi published by Duke University Press that was done in the 90's and shows that the character Mario is more recognizable to American youth than Micky Mouse. If there's better support for your contention, I think you'd be hard pressed to find it:)
No, but it would be prefect cover for the REAL vast and vengeful consciousness of the murky deeps!
I fear, my brethren, that we have found the storied Leviathan. The end is nigh, for soon is will shed its covering layer, and destroy us all! Lament and weep, for the end of days has come!
(Well, not ME, actually, since it's aquatic, and I live in Colorado... but all the rest of you sea side slobs are doooooomed!)
Great story, and a perfect example of how established business has a very hard time expanding. They grow to fill their niche, and moving outside that niche is a huge risk. Most of these companies are publicly owned, and taking a risk that may fail, or not pay off for many years, could lose them their jobs very easily. Because of this, established companies almost never take real risks. It's left up to the small, crazy passionate garage shops to start the revolution. To be frank, I feel like this is good, since it leads to real innovation, that the big companies would be too scared to take on (although the argument could be made that most big companies would never start such a project in the first place, making it a non-issue). There ARE big companies that manage to innovate and spread into other fields... but they are few and far between. Hell, probably the greatest innovator of the century, Xerox, never actually spread beyond their core business, despite the potential for huge profits, because they felt it was too big a risk. What a lot of these companies and shareholders don't really understand is that the adage 'you have to spend money to make money' is 100% true. Sometimes you'll fail, but if you're smart about how you go about things, the payoff for those initial investments is incalculable.
It really makes sense that he would praise it, too. The strict control that Apple keeps over the app store is something that our good friend Rupert would love to see people get used to, since it falls right in line with his paywall schemes.
Besides being more responsible, it also has an effect on many negative numbers like teen pregnancy. For years, teen pregnancy dropped. With the advent of abstinence only sex ed being the only sex ed that the government would fund, teen pregnancy started to rise. Educating teens about the the risks of unprotected sex is a good idea. Telling teens just not to do it... not such a good idea. Personally, my kids will know almost anything they want to about sex as soon as they ask me, because I feel that being prepared, and knowing the risks involved is thousands of times better than just feeling it out yourself (which is what kids will do, no matter what we tell them). Teens CAN make good choices about things... IF they are educated about them. Remove the education, and those good choices go out the window also.
I've never understood how we can claim to be such a progressive, forward thinking country while having such a ridiculous number of blue laws (regarding laws that are meant to enforce certain 'moral' standards, not just the Sunday laws) on the books. In all honesty, it's time to get rid of these. Who cares when people sell things, or if people gamble with their own money, or who sleeps with whom (or whoms), or even if people want to parade around naked all day long? Hell, for a country that claims to have a separation of church and state, we sure have a lot of religious laws. (Okay, I kind of care if people want to parade around naked all day long, depending on the person, but that doesn't mean that we should have legislation in place banning something that doesn't have any victims other than our sense of taste!)
1. Patents only last a very limited time. in 40 or 50 years, when people may start seriously looking at this option, the patent on his CO2 scrubber will be long gone.
2. Its been known for a long time that in places where Oxygen is not naturally found, you're going to have to pay for it somehow. Under water and in space, oxygen is not a guarantee, and work must be done to produce breathable atmosphere. Why do you think that work should be done for free? It will either be done by some entrepreneur, who's going to be in it for money, or by the government of the habitat, using your taxes. Only on a planet with its enormous biosphere of oxygen producing plants and huge reserves of land on which to grow them could you have any hope of NOT paying for your breathable atmosphere.
Actually, this behavior can cause you to gain weight instead of losing it. When you eat one meal a day (or less), your kicks into a kind of 'starvation' mode, and ends up storing more of that food as fat than it would if you at 3+ smaller meals a day. Your metabolic rate also will decrease in an attempt to conserve more calories for potentially harsher times. This is why many health experts recommend that you eat 6 or so small meals a day, or that you consume small healthy snacks throughout the day.
I'm not so sure it was all about a PR stunt. The original thread had quite a few response pointing out the defamation laws that could have been used against them if they had moved too quickly to out a supplier. I'm sure the legal team had a few days of hard work making sure they were (reasonably) safe from a suit before they allowed any statement out that named names.
If the store has to write off too many returns, then they will be much warier about how they stock that publisher's games in the future. Even just not stocking as many per store could have a huge hit on the numbers that publishers see.
If I were a developer, I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole. Paypal wants to pull more shit with people's accounts? Well, just declare that the app is a 'rogue app' or something. Then they get to play their little games, and THEY probably don't get the bad PR for it.
Slashdot Mirror
FTFA: "Over the minutes that followed, the software analysed every one of the car's digital systems in search of a problem. The culprit could have been any number of things -- the Bosch-supplied, Linux-based infotainment system, the Visteon-supplied virtual instrument display, a heat-ravaged processor, an errant mouse somewhere in one of the car's hundreds of miles of wiring, or the dodgy contents of a CNET UK memory key in one of the XJ's two USB ports."
Lots of systems running together, in a very rugged environment (for a computer, anyways)... I don't think it's terribly surprising that this could happen. In fact, the only surprising fact here is that it doesn't happen MORE often than it does.
I don't know if they're so much sweeping it under the rug so much as (very rightfully) fearing for their lives. NPR was recently running a string of stories about this with the related story found here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128929784 I can not blame the traditional media for avoiding a subject where they face more danger than most war zone correspondents do. The blog in question seems to have done something that traditional media can not: Avoided identifying itself in a way that allows the cartels to go after it with violence. I am personally happy to be living in an era where the dissemination of such dangerous information is possible. Maybe we wont get it how we want to, but the information is out there to be had. Especially in a country where Orwellian measures aren't being taken, important information has a way of finding its way past blocks that may have been 100% effective in stifling it in the past.
They're talking about using the 60GHz bands, which are heavily limited by line of sight, and have extremely poor to no penetration of physical objects. Those facts make it perfect for this kind of high bandwidth, short range application, without further cluttering the spectrum for those around you.
Standardized test scores are not, in and of themselves, evil. They are actually pretty useful tools for measuring the performance a student is capable of when used in moderation. It's the increasing focus put on standardized testing in the US that is creating the problem. When everything from school funding to teacher performance is dependent on these tests, it becomes more and more important for the SCHOOL how the kids do on the test. This leads to a huge increase in teaching specifically to the test, from what types of questions will be on it to testing techniques. There is also a lot of pressure on students to perform well. This leads to less general teaching, which would allow most students to pass the test just fine, and give better numbers, and more teaching to the test, which is good for the scores on one test, and good for the school, but terrible for the student.
Well, considering that these: http://www.siliconsolar.com/solar-garden-lights.html, have been around for many years, I think 'first' is a bit of a stretch. They may have made them CHEAPER, and longer lasting, or more useful, but certainly not FIRST.
Considering that the x86 platform is inherently insecure, I don't understand why this is surprising to people. Until we move away from the architecture, I don't think someone who says they takes PC's security seriously is being as serious as they could be. And yes, I do realize that a new architecture is a huge change, and one that's going to be a long time coming... But it's something that WILL happen. We will eventually need to overcome the shortcomings of x86, and it's at that point that we can really start to take proactive PC security more seriously.
I agree, this really strikes me as the same thing that happened with the memory controllers/FSB a few years ago. They move all of it on die, then claim it's this great huge thing... but in the end it really doesn't make all that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. Obviously its a good move, and one that Intel is going to want to make... EVENTUALLY. But what's the real world benefit of this over the Intel solution? IS there any benefit that the average user buying these chips is ever going to notice (These are integrated graphics... probably not many power-users rushing to get these)? I love real competition between AMD and Intel, as it's been shown many times over to be good for us, the consumer, so I too hope this may lead to better competition (early releases do tend to be good for that), but that's really the only bright spot that I can see in this release for AMD.
Agree 100%! I mean, the first transistor was invented in 1947, and the first integrated circuit wasn't introduced until 1959, and the integrated circuit took even more years to make it into computing devices... and then even more years to evolve to a complexity that allowed the creation of the PC. And the science and engineering involved in those was kid stuff in comparison to many of these inventions. We're not even to the point of the transistor in quantum computing... This is probably more closely related to the Babbage's analytical engine!
Actually, while I agree with the majority of your post, I CAN think of one more place where speed limits are very useful, with the caveat that they're not useful all the time: I live in Denver, Colorado. We by far don't have the worst weather, I know, but our weather is variable enough, and can get bad enough, that road travel is seriously inhibited. Yet, if you must drive during these times, you'll find other people out on the highway doing 60 in the middle of a blizzard with a foot of snow on the road. I think that speed limits would be very useful on those roads DURING those times. They already have digital speed limit signs set up in places around Denver... what's to stop them from networking them and then slowing those limits for bad weather? Variable speed limits based on real time road information would be infinitely more helpful and safer than the set speed limits we have now, and I can't help feeling that if the speed limits were REALLY about safety, we'd be hearing more about ideas like this.
I play many games, and I finish almost none of them. Most games I don't play more than 4-5 hours before I'm done with them for awhile, just like the summary says. But I usually come back to them later, and play about the same amount a few months down the road, and then again a few months down the road. I don't buy a game expecting to finish it, I buy the game to have fun. And I probably WOULDN'T buy the game if all the extra game play wasn't in it. I LIKE huge long complex games. I like difficulty (to a certain extent of course :) ). I don't want games to lose that... even though I might not play it all the way through. And for the games that I DO play all the way through, it makes the sense of accomplishment all that much better. Knowing that I've got a stack of 10 or 15 games lying around that I can go and play through for that rush when I'm bored some day with nothing else to do is great! I can't believe I'm the only one that feels like this too.
"Recentering globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism" is a study by Koichi Iwabuchi published by Duke University Press that was done in the 90's and shows that the character Mario is more recognizable to American youth than Micky Mouse. If there's better support for your contention, I think you'd be hard pressed to find it :)
Apparently San Francisco doesn't.
No, but it would be prefect cover for the REAL vast and vengeful consciousness of the murky deeps! I fear, my brethren, that we have found the storied Leviathan. The end is nigh, for soon is will shed its covering layer, and destroy us all! Lament and weep, for the end of days has come! (Well, not ME, actually, since it's aquatic, and I live in Colorado... but all the rest of you sea side slobs are doooooomed!)
Great story, and a perfect example of how established business has a very hard time expanding. They grow to fill their niche, and moving outside that niche is a huge risk. Most of these companies are publicly owned, and taking a risk that may fail, or not pay off for many years, could lose them their jobs very easily. Because of this, established companies almost never take real risks. It's left up to the small, crazy passionate garage shops to start the revolution. To be frank, I feel like this is good, since it leads to real innovation, that the big companies would be too scared to take on (although the argument could be made that most big companies would never start such a project in the first place, making it a non-issue). There ARE big companies that manage to innovate and spread into other fields... but they are few and far between. Hell, probably the greatest innovator of the century, Xerox, never actually spread beyond their core business, despite the potential for huge profits, because they felt it was too big a risk. What a lot of these companies and shareholders don't really understand is that the adage 'you have to spend money to make money' is 100% true. Sometimes you'll fail, but if you're smart about how you go about things, the payoff for those initial investments is incalculable.
It really makes sense that he would praise it, too. The strict control that Apple keeps over the app store is something that our good friend Rupert would love to see people get used to, since it falls right in line with his paywall schemes.
Besides being more responsible, it also has an effect on many negative numbers like teen pregnancy. For years, teen pregnancy dropped. With the advent of abstinence only sex ed being the only sex ed that the government would fund, teen pregnancy started to rise. Educating teens about the the risks of unprotected sex is a good idea. Telling teens just not to do it... not such a good idea. Personally, my kids will know almost anything they want to about sex as soon as they ask me, because I feel that being prepared, and knowing the risks involved is thousands of times better than just feeling it out yourself (which is what kids will do, no matter what we tell them). Teens CAN make good choices about things... IF they are educated about them. Remove the education, and those good choices go out the window also.
This is one case where credit not being passed on might not be such a bad thing...
I've never understood how we can claim to be such a progressive, forward thinking country while having such a ridiculous number of blue laws (regarding laws that are meant to enforce certain 'moral' standards, not just the Sunday laws) on the books. In all honesty, it's time to get rid of these. Who cares when people sell things, or if people gamble with their own money, or who sleeps with whom (or whoms), or even if people want to parade around naked all day long? Hell, for a country that claims to have a separation of church and state, we sure have a lot of religious laws. (Okay, I kind of care if people want to parade around naked all day long, depending on the person, but that doesn't mean that we should have legislation in place banning something that doesn't have any victims other than our sense of taste!)
Since Rocketfish belongs to Best Buy, you're blaming the same company either way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Buy#Best_Buy_exclusive_brands
1. Patents only last a very limited time. in 40 or 50 years, when people may start seriously looking at this option, the patent on his CO2 scrubber will be long gone. 2. Its been known for a long time that in places where Oxygen is not naturally found, you're going to have to pay for it somehow. Under water and in space, oxygen is not a guarantee, and work must be done to produce breathable atmosphere. Why do you think that work should be done for free? It will either be done by some entrepreneur, who's going to be in it for money, or by the government of the habitat, using your taxes. Only on a planet with its enormous biosphere of oxygen producing plants and huge reserves of land on which to grow them could you have any hope of NOT paying for your breathable atmosphere.
Actually, this behavior can cause you to gain weight instead of losing it. When you eat one meal a day (or less), your kicks into a kind of 'starvation' mode, and ends up storing more of that food as fat than it would if you at 3+ smaller meals a day. Your metabolic rate also will decrease in an attempt to conserve more calories for potentially harsher times. This is why many health experts recommend that you eat 6 or so small meals a day, or that you consume small healthy snacks throughout the day.
I'm not so sure it was all about a PR stunt. The original thread had quite a few response pointing out the defamation laws that could have been used against them if they had moved too quickly to out a supplier. I'm sure the legal team had a few days of hard work making sure they were (reasonably) safe from a suit before they allowed any statement out that named names.
If the store has to write off too many returns, then they will be much warier about how they stock that publisher's games in the future. Even just not stocking as many per store could have a huge hit on the numbers that publishers see.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who had this thought.
If I were a developer, I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole. Paypal wants to pull more shit with people's accounts? Well, just declare that the app is a 'rogue app' or something. Then they get to play their little games, and THEY probably don't get the bad PR for it.