Nintendo has some up-front costs for setting up the service, and some minimal costs to keep it running. Basically, they're sending you free bits (for them) for your money. And you're glad to pay it.
Hell, yeah. I think the Wii's probably going to be the only game console that I'll actually buy new.
But what I'd really love to see is the ability to have the Wii run homebrew games under emulation. Consoles these days are so powerful that even the previous generation of console is powerful enough for most purposes. Remember the N64? Pretty sucky processing power by today's standards, but you got some damn good games for it.
By allowing people to upload and run their own game images on the Wii, for, say the SNES or the N64, they'll make the device an absolute dream come true to the (legitimate) emulation crowd. This would gain them huge mindshare with very little effort, while at the same time allowing them to keep control over the Wii running in native mode. It would be very easy to do; you'd need a system for loading in image from a USB device, and that's pretty much it. There would be a minor technical problem in making it so that people can't run copied commercial ROM images --- or they'll undermine their own retro game market --- but that's probably not hard (just rearrange th emulated hardware so the homebrew emulated machine wasn't compatible with the genuine original, for example).
(If they were willing to spend a bit more effort, they could come up with a sandboxed environment that allowed you to use a few more of the Wii's features; this would allow homebrew games similar to, say, the XBox Live range. But of course, that would involve significantly more work.)
So it should be legal for me to use a night-vision scope to look into my neighbor's bedroom window at night?
I'm not sure that's a valid analogy --- there is, after all, a big difference between passive scattered photons that have occurred simply because an object is in a particular space, and explicitly generating EM waves with the intent to communicate information.
Yes, you have the right to decode electromagnetic radiation. And yes, the callers have a right to privacy.
Why? And that's a serious question. Why do you consider there to be such rights?
Talking about 'rights' is dangerous, because using that word leads you to believe that they're automatic. They're not. They are granted to you by the social contract in return for certain services (the major one being that you, in turn, adhere to the social contract). The key issue is that you must pay for them, in one way or another --- these privileges are expensive.
In this situation: can the social contract really afford to decree that people may not listen in to other people's EM-broadcast conversations? I'd suggest not. After all, it's practically unenforcable; there's no way of catching such eavesdroppers, and the only alternative is to go after the equipment manufacturers. Not only is this incredibly hard these days --- as this device is showing --- but doing this is going to have a major chilling effect on all kinds of fields of endeavour, from electronics manufacture to hobbiest radio hams. I simply don't think it's worth it any more.
I'd rephrase as follows: you believe that the social contract grants you an expectation of privacy.
Will the goo harden in orbit, or does it need an oxidizing agent?
Vacuum has amazing evaporative power --- some substance with a volatile solvent in it should work fine. Exposed to vacuum, the solvent will evaporate off in practically no time. Plain PVA glue would most likely work, although you might need some thickener to reduce the flow rate.
I don't know what the Bigelow hab is using; from the very limited information available, I don't think they're going for this approach. I suspect they're just using an ordinary tough skin.
(The Apollo spacesuits had cooling systems that worked by evaporating water. The water evaporated so quickly that they had to keep the coolers turned all the way down, or the astronauts got far too cold...)
If you punch a hole in that, you just get a small hole, nothing more. If anything, inflatable space stations are easier to repair than other constructions.
Indeed --- they can even be made, quite simply, self-healing; make your station twin-walled, and fill the cavity with volatile goo. Anything punctures the outside, and the goo will ooze out, harden , and seal the hole. Very simple. (Any object big enough and moving fast enough to penetrate both layers is going to wipe out your habitat anyway and isn't worth worrying about.)
If you have enough of it, it even doubles as radiation shielding... Dr. Schlock, eat your heart out!
Has anyone got any idea what is going on here, or how that might affect their page ranking? Should I report them to google?
Without looking at the sites in question, it sounds like they're detecting the Google spider user-agent and feeding it false information --- which is strictly against the rules. I suppose you should report them, but I don't know if it'll do any good.
When browsing through the lower rent neighbourhoods of the internet, it's sometimes interesting to set your browser's user-agent to report itself as the Google spider and see what happens.
I have to say that the runner-up is so much better it hurts. The problem with slashdot is all the noise. The collapseable sections would be a much welcome improvement. Don't see why they didn't go with the runner up.
Given that this is all done via CSS, which is seperate from the page content, why don't they go with all the leading entries and let the user choose which one they like best? (Look at View->Page Style in Firefox.)
There are a bunch of consumer level devices designed to have a USB hard drive plugged into them and export SMB shares from it. They are all around $80 or so. I have this one: http://www1.linksys.com/products/product.asp?prid= 640 but there are a bunch of ones by other companies.
*nods enthusiastically*
I've got one of these too --- it's awesome. It's my house server; it's got 250GB of disk, and it does firewall and routing services with two ethernet interfaces, it's my internal file server via NFS, my outward facing HTTP, IMAP and SMTP servers, and basically performs beyond the call of duty pretty much non-stop. It's also a box 10cm x 12cm x 2cm with no moving parts, and consumes a negligable amount of power. As I said, it's awesome.
The only problem with it is that 32MB of RAM is not, frankly, enough. Thanks to the magic of swap it copes fine, but if you try to make it do anything that involves allocating reasonable amounts of memory it starts to chug. aptitude, in particular, involves big datasets and is horribly slow --- it takes two minutes to start up (in non-GUI mode).
It is upgradable; but only if you're good at replacing surface-mount RAM chips. Which I'm not. At some point I'm going to try and get hold of a fattened one, but I'm definitely going to get someone else to do it for me.
SQLite is even starting to take over from MySQL for many smaller websites. The overhead (both in terms of system resources and administration) can't be justified when using a server-based system, especially when SQLite does the job just fine.
SQlite is so incredibly cool (for a database, of course; databases are intrinsically limited in coolness). It's tiny, it's easy to set up, it's portable, it's faster than MySQL for most operations, and it's not just open source, it's actually in the public domain. It doesn't do well if there are multiple processes trying to access the same database, and there's no network layer at all, but given that it stores the entire database in one file, it's the ideal choice for any application that needs to use complex state. I use it for keeping track of email addresses in an SMTP proxy --- it was so easy to use I was amazed.
I'd strongly, strongly recommend having a look if you're writing something that might want a database. Hell, given the command-line front end, you can even use it from shell scripts...
And if they do intend to engage in price discrimination, I hope they have found a way to prevent arbitrage, or else people may make businesses out of buying them at $100 and selling them at ~$200 in the countries where the negative price discrimination policy is in effect.
I'd heard that they were planning to make them in two colours; one colour for the donated machines, and another for the commercially sold ones. The idea was to make it very obvious that you were using a resold donated machine.
Society in general and the marketing departments of various household goods: all of the various soaps & cleansers which promise to kill bugs when you use them.
Soaps and such like are not antibiotics --- they do a completely different job. Antibiotics are fearsomely complex chemicals which specifical kill off one form of life (the bacteria) while leaving other forms of life untouched (the patient). Soaps and cleansers are much, much simpler chemicals that blitz everything... take bleach; it's mostly concentrated sodium hydroxide, and I don't believe there's any known form of life that can stand up to that stuff.
Basically, antiseptic cleansers don't compromise antibiotics because they're so extreme that practically nothing can survive them, and they're so simple and brute force that bacteria can't evolve to withstand them.
The truth is that the camera on the NASA MARS rover that has retured all of those great pictures of the red planet (or the studio mock-up of the red planet if you prefer) is 1.3 mega pixes, as was reported here previously on/.
You may be unaware that although those cameras do have really great optics, those startlingly good images are mostly made by taking lots and lots of 1.3 megapixel images and then painstakingly piecing them together (by hand) into a mosaic back here on Earth. There are a hell of a lot of pixels there.
One of the rovers is, I belive, doing a major pan right now. It's taking about two weeks to take all the pictures and transmit them back home.
There are a LOT of questions to be answered both from the technology side and the business logistics side before you are going to see these in production for consumers.
Not really; all the questions you asked have simple, obvious answers. To refill, you just take the lid off, pour in some more fuel (it's a convenient liquid), and put the lid back on again. If you want to prevent accidental exposure, just package the fuel in little cartridges like the ones that fountain pens have been using for decades. No need to throw away the fuel cell itself... as for safety, the stuff's considerably safer than, say, lighter fluid, which you're allowed to take on a plane today. And as for heat... this is a device designed to be left in your pocket for long periods of time. I seriously doubt excess heat will be a problem.
This leads me to believe that without the card installed, those games will use a software physics engine written by Ageia, which is likely to be unoptimized in an attempt to encourage users to buy the accelerator card.
I find myself a bit puzzled by what this thing's actually supposed to do for me. Given that there are currently no applications that require it (because since it's not actually shipping yet, it would be the kiss of death), then supporting the PbysX can make no difference to the actual gameplay --- because any games need to be able to run on machines without it. This means all it'll be good for is eye candy. Is it really worth spending money on the PhysX so you can get slightly prettier explosions, when instead you can spend the same amount of money on a better GPU or CPU so you'll get prettier everything?
I'd also rather like to know what it actually is. There's practically no technical details out there. Obviously it's basically a DSP-ish processor on a card, with its own RAM, etc, but is it their own DSP or an off-the-shelf core?
Because if it is a reasonably normal vector processor, then it'll be a shit hot one, and I'd love to see what else people can do with it. Screw games --- can it encode video? Process audio? Could you use it as the decoder for a software radio? What about speeding up statistical analysis for, say, really high-grade text searching or spam filtering? Is it suitable for simulating really big neural networks at a reasonable speed? What interesting applications could you come it with for a really high end vector processor attached to a high end PC, that people haven't already come up with?
Orlovski? Isn't he the guy that also hates Wikipedia, with his sneering remarks about wiki-fiddlers and barely restraining himself from referring to them as Wikipedophiles?
Yes, that's him. I didn't mention it because I couldn't remember off-hand what his other phobia was (it's late in my time zone).
He's okay when he's not doing opinion pieces, though.
Andrew Orlowski seems to have this weird grudge against Google --- he's been posting reams of violently anti-Google stories for, well, years now. It's reached the stage where if the subject line has 'Google' in it, and Orlowski's byline is attached, I just skip over; even if there's actual information there, it's going to be so wrapped up in snide misreporting as to be useless.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the WD-40 company's product line is sizeable (and growing)
Yeah, and look when they started producing product #2 compared to product #1...
It's a fundamental of business -- change is fact: you can either be part of it or watch it happen.
Not necessarily; for 37 years, the WD40 company produced exactly one product (I'll leave figuring out what they make as an exercise to the reader).
There's a difference between change necessary to adapt to a changing marketplace, and change simply for the sake of change.
Nintendo has some up-front costs for setting up the service, and some minimal costs to keep it running. Basically, they're sending you free bits (for them) for your money. And you're glad to pay it.
Hell, yeah. I think the Wii's probably going to be the only game console that I'll actually buy new.
But what I'd really love to see is the ability to have the Wii run homebrew games under emulation. Consoles these days are so powerful that even the previous generation of console is powerful enough for most purposes. Remember the N64? Pretty sucky processing power by today's standards, but you got some damn good games for it.
By allowing people to upload and run their own game images on the Wii, for, say the SNES or the N64, they'll make the device an absolute dream come true to the (legitimate) emulation crowd. This would gain them huge mindshare with very little effort, while at the same time allowing them to keep control over the Wii running in native mode. It would be very easy to do; you'd need a system for loading in image from a USB device, and that's pretty much it. There would be a minor technical problem in making it so that people can't run copied commercial ROM images --- or they'll undermine their own retro game market --- but that's probably not hard (just rearrange th emulated hardware so the homebrew emulated machine wasn't compatible with the genuine original, for example).
(If they were willing to spend a bit more effort, they could come up with a sandboxed environment that allowed you to use a few more of the Wii's features; this would allow homebrew games similar to, say, the XBox Live range. But of course, that would involve significantly more work.)
Just to point out that that last sentence shouldn't be there.
(mutters) friggin' textarea boxes...
So it should be legal for me to use a night-vision scope to look into my neighbor's bedroom window at night?
I'm not sure that's a valid analogy --- there is, after all, a big difference between passive scattered photons that have occurred simply because an object is in a particular space, and explicitly generating EM waves with the intent to communicate information.
Yes, you have the right to decode electromagnetic radiation. And yes, the callers have a right to privacy.
Why? And that's a serious question. Why do you consider there to be such rights?
Talking about 'rights' is dangerous, because using that word leads you to believe that they're automatic. They're not. They are granted to you by the social contract in return for certain services (the major one being that you, in turn, adhere to the social contract). The key issue is that you must pay for them, in one way or another --- these privileges are expensive.
In this situation: can the social contract really afford to decree that people may not listen in to other people's EM-broadcast conversations? I'd suggest not. After all, it's practically unenforcable; there's no way of catching such eavesdroppers, and the only alternative is to go after the equipment manufacturers. Not only is this incredibly hard these days --- as this device is showing --- but doing this is going to have a major chilling effect on all kinds of fields of endeavour, from electronics manufacture to hobbiest radio hams. I simply don't think it's worth it any more. I'd rephrase as follows: you believe that the social contract grants you an expectation of privacy.
Will the goo harden in orbit, or does it need an oxidizing agent?
Vacuum has amazing evaporative power --- some substance with a volatile solvent in it should work fine. Exposed to vacuum, the solvent will evaporate off in practically no time. Plain PVA glue would most likely work, although you might need some thickener to reduce the flow rate.
I don't know what the Bigelow hab is using; from the very limited information available, I don't think they're going for this approach. I suspect they're just using an ordinary tough skin.
(The Apollo spacesuits had cooling systems that worked by evaporating water. The water evaporated so quickly that they had to keep the coolers turned all the way down, or the astronauts got far too cold...)
If you punch a hole in that, you just get a small hole, nothing more. If anything, inflatable space stations are easier to repair than other constructions.
Indeed --- they can even be made, quite simply, self-healing; make your station twin-walled, and fill the cavity with volatile goo. Anything punctures the outside, and the goo will ooze out, harden , and seal the hole. Very simple. (Any object big enough and moving fast enough to penetrate both layers is going to wipe out your habitat anyway and isn't worth worrying about.)
If you have enough of it, it even doubles as radiation shielding... Dr. Schlock, eat your heart out!
A topologist is someone who doesn't know whether to dip their doughnut into their coffee mug, or vice versa...
Now, that would be cool.
Without looking at the sites in question, it sounds like they're detecting the Google spider user-agent and feeding it false information --- which is strictly against the rules. I suppose you should report them, but I don't know if it'll do any good.
When browsing through the lower rent neighbourhoods of the internet, it's sometimes interesting to set your browser's user-agent to report itself as the Google spider and see what happens.
Yup --- an RTL8150 widget. It Just Worked, too.
Given that this is all done via CSS, which is seperate from the page content, why don't they go with all the leading entries and let the user choose which one they like best? (Look at View->Page Style in Firefox.)
*nods enthusiastically*
I've got one of these too --- it's awesome. It's my house server; it's got 250GB of disk, and it does firewall and routing services with two ethernet interfaces, it's my internal file server via NFS, my outward facing HTTP, IMAP and SMTP servers, and basically performs beyond the call of duty pretty much non-stop. It's also a box 10cm x 12cm x 2cm with no moving parts, and consumes a negligable amount of power. As I said, it's awesome.
The only problem with it is that 32MB of RAM is not, frankly, enough. Thanks to the magic of swap it copes fine, but if you try to make it do anything that involves allocating reasonable amounts of memory it starts to chug. aptitude, in particular, involves big datasets and is horribly slow --- it takes two minutes to start up (in non-GUI mode).
It is upgradable; but only if you're good at replacing surface-mount RAM chips. Which I'm not. At some point I'm going to try and get hold of a fattened one, but I'm definitely going to get someone else to do it for me.
The undying enmity of half the population of the planet?
SQlite is so incredibly cool (for a database, of course; databases are intrinsically limited in coolness). It's tiny, it's easy to set up, it's portable, it's faster than MySQL for most operations, and it's not just open source, it's actually in the public domain. It doesn't do well if there are multiple processes trying to access the same database, and there's no network layer at all, but given that it stores the entire database in one file, it's the ideal choice for any application that needs to use complex state. I use it for keeping track of email addresses in an SMTP proxy --- it was so easy to use I was amazed.
I'd strongly, strongly recommend having a look if you're writing something that might want a database. Hell, given the command-line front end, you can even use it from shell scripts...
I'd heard that they were planning to make them in two colours; one colour for the donated machines, and another for the commercially sold ones. The idea was to make it very obvious that you were using a resold donated machine.
Unfortunately, I have no references for this.
With what net connection?
Soaps and such like are not antibiotics --- they do a completely different job. Antibiotics are fearsomely complex chemicals which specifical kill off one form of life (the bacteria) while leaving other forms of life untouched (the patient). Soaps and cleansers are much, much simpler chemicals that blitz everything... take bleach; it's mostly concentrated sodium hydroxide, and I don't believe there's any known form of life that can stand up to that stuff.
Basically, antiseptic cleansers don't compromise antibiotics because they're so extreme that practically nothing can survive them, and they're so simple and brute force that bacteria can't evolve to withstand them.
Certainly; but before I can design your product, you're going to have to tell me your project requirements.
You may be unaware that although those cameras do have really great optics, those startlingly good images are mostly made by taking lots and lots of 1.3 megapixel images and then painstakingly piecing them together (by hand) into a mosaic back here on Earth. There are a hell of a lot of pixels there.
One of the rovers is, I belive, doing a major pan right now. It's taking about two weeks to take all the pictures and transmit them back home.
Not really; all the questions you asked have simple, obvious answers. To refill, you just take the lid off, pour in some more fuel (it's a convenient liquid), and put the lid back on again. If you want to prevent accidental exposure, just package the fuel in little cartridges like the ones that fountain pens have been using for decades. No need to throw away the fuel cell itself... as for safety, the stuff's considerably safer than, say, lighter fluid, which you're allowed to take on a plane today. And as for heat... this is a device designed to be left in your pocket for long periods of time. I seriously doubt excess heat will be a problem.
I find myself a bit puzzled by what this thing's actually supposed to do for me. Given that there are currently no applications that require it (because since it's not actually shipping yet, it would be the kiss of death), then supporting the PbysX can make no difference to the actual gameplay --- because any games need to be able to run on machines without it. This means all it'll be good for is eye candy. Is it really worth spending money on the PhysX so you can get slightly prettier explosions, when instead you can spend the same amount of money on a better GPU or CPU so you'll get prettier everything?
I'd also rather like to know what it actually is. There's practically no technical details out there. Obviously it's basically a DSP-ish processor on a card, with its own RAM, etc, but is it their own DSP or an off-the-shelf core?
Because if it is a reasonably normal vector processor, then it'll be a shit hot one, and I'd love to see what else people can do with it. Screw games --- can it encode video? Process audio? Could you use it as the decoder for a software radio? What about speeding up statistical analysis for, say, really high-grade text searching or spam filtering? Is it suitable for simulating really big neural networks at a reasonable speed? What interesting applications could you come it with for a really high end vector processor attached to a high end PC, that people haven't already come up with?
"Hey, Bob, chuck me the controller, I want a go!" "Sure, here..." "Gottit... uh, Bob, how do I get Link's head out of his ass?"
Yes, that's him. I didn't mention it because I couldn't remember off-hand what his other phobia was (it's late in my time zone).
He's okay when he's not doing opinion pieces, though.
Be warned.