Actually... I for one, welcome our new Zerg overlords;)
Well, now seriously, maybe it's just me, but I've had it up to here with all MMOs being medieval fantasy. Nothing wrong with fantasy as such, but a little variety is good, you know?
Well, that's maybe not technically true, so let me rephrase it a bit. There are a couple of SF MMOs, but so far they sucked hairy ass. Anarchy Online... well, read the Something Awful review, and know that SA is actually kind to them. It was actually even buggier and less fun than that. SWG... biggest franchise ever, and awaited by every SW nerd like the second coming of the messiah, but it started half-arsed (it was launched literally a SW game without Jedi or spaceships at all), and the various updates turned it into an even bigger joke. E.g., the NGE turned it into a FPS with a bad interface, bad design, and bad balance. Etc.
Just about the only decent non-fantasy MMO that comes to mind is City Of Heroes, and even that one gets boring due to sheer repetition after a while.
So I'd very much like a _good_ SF MMO for a change. Blizzard have already shown that they can make a good MMO, so here's to hope.
To repeat myself: so it's the same as before then?
Because comics too were accused of just that: causing juvenile delinquency. That little Johnny will read all that supposed "filth", then go mug, rape and kill as a result. The concern wasn't that little Johnny will just run around in a cape and spandex, but, yes, that a lot of people will be mugged or killed because little Johnny reads comics.
So was rock music. The accusation was outright that listening to all those violent lyrics, will cause kids to do all sorts of stupidly violent thing, ranging from "just" suicide to killing a few others.
Etc.
Basically, it's just a case of "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." It's repeating _verbatim_. The anti-games scare isn't original at all. It's a verbatim rehash of something that happened before. What ever you can think of as "yeah, but this time they're also saying X", chances are that a variant of X has been said in the previous scares too.
Even the "yeah, but this time the games are so realistic that people lose track of where game ends and reality starts"... funnily enough they said the same about comics, movies, rock music, D&D, etc. Little Johnny (is so stupid that he) will forget RL isn't a comic, and go do what he sees in those comics.
Seriously. Nothing is new. You may think that this is the bullshit war to end all bullshit wars, and the most important/insidious/brutal/etc bullshit war in history, just because you're dragged into it. Rest assured that it's just _a_ bullshit war, in a long line of nearly identical bullshit wars.
The USA has been there, done that. Don't think the "omg, think of the children!!!" bullshit started with video games. It was first comics ("omg, Batman and Robin are teaching children to be homosexual and antisocial"), and they got gutted into becoming a niche hobby, from something that outsold newspapers by a comfortable margin. Then it was music. Yeah, all those satanistic/violent/antisocial lyrics in rock music. Quite a stirr in the Congress and Senate and the media that was. Then a few other things before it got to video games.
So, well, sad to disappoint you there, but music has already been done to death already.
Mostly I'll aggree with you, but just to nitpick: but you seem to operate under the impression that the game is only buggy at launch, that it will be patched right, and that it's only remembered as having been once buggy.
My experience is quite the opposite: most games which were launched buggy (read: most games), their patches introduced at _least_ 1 new bug for every 2 fixed (though in some cases it was 2 introduced for 1 fixed), and the publisher gave up long before it was anywhere near good quality.
Basically: what makes anyone think that what wasn't fixed in 2-3 years of making the game, surely is trivial stuff that will get fixed in 1-2 weeks after launch? No, seriously. Debugging is stuff that takes 90% of the programming time, and is the hardest to get right. Writing code is _easy_. Debugging it to work _right_ is what's hard and time consuming. A game which got shoved out the door as soon as it compiled and showed the start menu (in some cases, literally) can be anywhere between 6 months away from being really ready, and essentially a failed project which will _never_ work right.
I remember fondly such cases as Ultima Online: 2 years after launch, Origin was still busy issuing half-arsed patches that did more damage than good... and then some of them had to be rolled back to contain the damage. Or "Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption" which only had 1 patch, and it introduced a couple of worse bugs than those it removed. Or Daggerfall, where after half a year trying to solve such problems as falling into the void as soon as you moved or bumped into a wall, Bethesda gave up and built in cheat codes so you could teleport yourself out of the void and to the start of the dungeon. Or Fallout 2. My favourite game, mind you, but also one of the buggiest games ever. Half the problems were never fixed. And just so people don't think only ancient examples are available: Gothic 3. It's still a buggy POS. 'Nuff said. Etc.
The thing is, even _if_ patching it later worked (and mostly it doesn't), I want to play the game _now_. The day I bought it, not 6 months in the future when it's finally patched. It's not just a matter of remembering a wrong first impression, it can be a matter of the _whole_ experience I've had with that game. And remembering it damn right, in all its buggy non-fun glory. I might play a game for as little as a day, or as much as 1-2 weeks. It doesn't matter if 2-6 months later a patch became available that fixed everything. (Mostly it doesn't.) Anyone who bought the game at launch, or preordered it, has _already_ played the buggy unpatched version.
And that's not including the inconveniences often visited upon the player if they _do_ stick around until some patches hit. Stuff like, "oops, my saved games don't work any more, I have to abandon all those tens of hours of playing and start all over again." (See: Fallout 2.) Or, "oops, the mechanics changed so much that my carefully built empire is going to pieces... and China is conquering the Byzantine empire." (See: most Paradox games, but as a concrete example, Europa Universalis 3.) Or, in at least one pathologic case, "oops, the game has been turned into a whole different _genre_ and my character, in which I 'invested' months, can't even play that class/skill-combination/role any more." (See: Star Wars Galaxies.)
And another thing that people miss when talking about patches is, basically: quality doesn't only mean "it doesn't crash to desktop". There are things like balance, game system, learning/difficulty curves, AI, story, which are damn hard and work-intensive things on their own. And are things which, when a game is shoved out the door untested, are also untested and unfinished. Most patches fix stuff like memory leaks or crashes to desktop, but stuff like balance or the game system rarely are touched at all by a patch. If they were shoved out the door unfinished, at the very least those aspects will tend to stay unfinished. For ever.
The latter was a major part of Blizzard's secret sauce, so to spe
Having the printing head on the printer has a down side - if it breaks its time to bin the printer - too expensive to replace/repair - the up side it they can use a better quality one than the disposable ones on the majority of cartridges
As opposed to HP where, at least for a couple of models, it's cheaper to buy a new printer than change the cartridge? Even though nothing is broken?
Not disaggreeing with you, just saying that if that's the only downside, I can live with that. Happily.
Also, by outlawing the recycling of paper, you'll reduce the number of trees that are still alive, and eventually wipe out all the trees in the world, and thus, contribute MORE to global warming than minimizing its effect on the planet.
You know, it's this kind of uninformed scares that give environmentalism a bad name.
Do you genuinely think that anyone goes and wipes out rain forests for _paper_? No, seriously. It's a crop, same as grain or cotton or whatever. Relatively fast growing trees are planted, left to grow, then cut down, and new trees are planted. Maybe generously spread some fertilizer too. Repeat ad infinitum. It's that simple.
It wouldn't even be economical to go around the world and wipe out woods for paper, since then you end up having to carry those trees over increasingly long distances to your factory. Plus, you have to keep buying new land or logging rights, and that's more money down the drain. It's a model akin to throwing money down a rat hole.
The plan to let trees fix it and then burry it, isn't too stupid either. Originally Earth had a helluva lot of carbon in the air, in the form of methane and CO2. Not unlike Venus before it lost its hydrogen to solar winds, really. Then plants fixated it, and now it's under the ground. There's a reason why we have an age called Carboniferous, for example. That's where a helluva lot of coal comes from. It was basically a helluva lot of tree-ferns that fixated a helluva lot of carbon, and got buried.
Mind you, it wouldn't make that big a difference, since we don't use as much paper as to come even close to the other carbon emissions. But, purely theoretically speaking, it's one way.
About making paper, there's nothing inherent in that process that releases more CO2 into the air than those trees got from the air. Maybe if you powered it all with a coal power plant, you'd get that effect, but using hydroelectric/solar/nuclear power gets you a net effect of removing carbon from the air via those trees.
Recycling... here also you seem to have some fantasy idea that it's absolutely free, and all that used paper you recycle somehow just miraculously ends up pristine again without any extra energy use. It's not. That used paper has to be cleaned with a lot of chemicals first, for a start. E.g., to get rid of the ink. Not only those aren't necessarily environment friendly, but some energy goes into producing them too. Then it's going to be converted to pulp again, just like wood would, which is only _marginally_ cheaper than starting from wood. And finally it's going to be bleached just like paper from wood would, because it ends up the same kind of naturally-yellow paper it was in the first place.
And that's not even taking into account the effort and energy used to sort it, transport it, etc.
It may surprise you, but a lot of recycling we do nowadays is... well, bluntly put: show business. We're not really saving the planet, we just let some ignorant sheeple feel good about themselves. Paper is one such example. Glass is another. Glass is made out of sand, and it's not any more economical to re-melt used glass than to just melt sand. Recycling whole bottles also doesn't get you much, since you end up washing them with strong chemicals, since you don't know what that guy stored in the bottle or how long a jar has been left to turn into a petri dish before being recycled. Plus, again, you spend a lot on sorting, transport, etc.
And let me give you another example of something which isn't what many people assume: Tetra Pak style packaging. (E.g., milk cartons.) There seems to be a lot of mis-conception that its adoption had anything to do with being environmentally friendly. In practice it's just because it's cheaper than glass, weighs less, and it can be neatly packed in a truck without wasting much space. I.e., you can pack more of them in a truck.
Recycling them, again, actually is a bigger pain and uses more chemicals, than just making a new one. But, hey, you've been trained to sort your garbage like a good trained monkey and feel good about it. Carry on;)
More like: merely QOS isn't what they're asking for. A neutral implementation of QOS wouldn't care _whose_ packets it routes, merely whether it's high priority ones (e.g., tele-medicine to reuse that word), low priority (e.g., email), or something in between. They don't need to argue and lobby against net-neutrality to implement that.
What they _are_ proposing -- outright and explicitly, not just inferred or slippery-slope -- is the ability to discriminate based on _whose_ packets are they routing, and make people pay for it. E.g., there's a lot of sabre rattle as to how Google should pay a premium. That's quite different than QOS.
So why didn't soooo many people waste money on expensive cameras before modern digitals? Or do all-things-digital just have inherently higher "bling" value?
You'll notice that I gave examples of non-digital things in the "penis size" category, so I'm not sure what your point is. Yes, conspicuous consumption was very much alive and kicking since ancient times, long before digital cameras.
The Phoenicians made a fortune and built a trade empire with a super-expensive dye, for example. It didn't make clothes any better, it just allowed some nobles to wear something that just screamed "look what clothes I can afford". It's, if you will, one of the earliest recorded cases of Veblen goods: stuff which is desirable _because_ it's disproportionately expensive.
Is it really any surprise, then, that some optical cameras were sold as status symbols too?
Most tie-ins work both ways, so no big surprise there. So, yes, iTunes encourages people to get iPods, and iPods encourage people to sign up with iTunes, so their next player will be another iPod too.
In fact, I'll say that any working (near)monopoly implementation would have to work in as many directions as technically possible. If you can map a sort of a flow from a product that no other needs, to one which is only needed, it becomes easy to attack the whole from that end. So if you have products X, Y and Z and you want to go walled-garden about it, in the ideal case any one of them would need (or at least encourage one to buy) both the others. If you have 10 products, in an ideal world any 1 would need the other 9.
That's how MS pwned the software market, after all.
Because of simple maths. A 10 megapixels image... well, ok, they count the individual RGB components in that so it's really anywhere between 2.5 and 3.3 mega-pixels. At 4/3 aspect ratio, 2048x1536 gives you a bit over 3 megapixels. How many photos that size did you see online?
So you don't have to poll everyone on Earth, you just need to look at what pictures you see online. If you don't have to scroll up and down to view it even in 1600x1200, then it's probably not the raw output of a 10 megapixel camera. It's that simple. And you wouldn't need a 10 megapixel camera to take it.
What such logic omits, though, is (A) the ignorance factor, and (B) the penis size factor, a.k.a., conspicuous consumption. Respectively:
A) People don't understand those numbers and think that more megapixels is necessarily better. A 1024x768 picture _must_ be better if it was taken in 10 megapixels.
B) A lot of those things are bought not because the owners actually needed an expensive camera, but just to show that they can afford an expensive camera. Same as buying jewellery, fur coats, or cars with a big wing at mid-life crisis. Something with an objective that looks like it belongs in a James Bond movie, is soo much better for taking unzoomed photos of squirrels in the park. In reality, just because it shows everyone else in the park who can afford it.
And thanks to the emperor's new clothes syndrome, for a lot it won't ever matter what benchmarks and image analysis tools say. Once people got it into their head that a more expensive camera is better, they'll see differences even where there are none. Because they just have to confirm it to themselves that (1) buying that expensive camera was justified, and (2) they're such great artists that they can spot imperfections where unskilled plebs can't see anything wrong. Same, if you will, as wannabe "audiophiles" swearing that music sounds better when they use a 1000$ power cable for their stereo.
In a nutshell, very much so. I don't expect them to lay extra cable to shave a few milliseconds latency to, say, Google if it paid. Getting the result in 0.495s instead of 0.5s wouldn't even start to be an incentive to pay for the premium service. What is indeed more likely to happen is that the the answer time would jump from 0.5 to 2.5 for everyone who doesn't pay.
This article assumes that open source developers are aiming at becoming Microsoft like. Maybe they're just in it to make good software: not a profit, not make money for shareholders, or anything that that Microsoft is obviously aiming for. And the article is also using a very narrow definition of "win", one which I'm not sure is possible for OSS to attain.
And that is assuming that OSS developpers are a bunch of nerds in their free time, doing software just for fun. Sad to say, his assumption is closer to reality.
Oh, there are thousands of 1-2 man projects on sourceforge done by enthusiasts in their free time. Chances are you haven't even heard of most of them. They also tend to be small projects.
If you look at what's in your favourite Linux distribution, though, it's a different story. Look at the kernel credits some day. You'll see a lot of people from IBM, Red Hat, etc. Hate to break it to you, but they're doing a paid job there. Others may not be employees at such, but got paid/sponsored by a corporation to develop that stuff. E.g., ReiserFS was pretty much paid for by SuSE.
Other programs there? Mozilla? It even got started because Netscape wanted a browser that can stop MS's onslaught onto their business. Then it got bought by AOL, and nowadays it's Google footing the bill. Open Office? Got started as a proprietary project, then bought by Sun. Nowadays it's Sun doing pretty much the whole work, with people paid to code on OOo. It's costing Sun a lot of money. Etc.
See, the F/OSS that gets taken anywhere _near_ seriously these days is the work of corporations. Pretty much it's just a framework for a bunch of corporations to pool their resources into fighting MS. None of them has the resources to challenge the behemoth single-handedly, and some have already lost against the behemoth when trying to "solo" it. E.g., ask IBM what happened to their OS/2.
Where this long rant is going is: of _course_ those corporations are aiming at becoming the next MS. In fact, some of them were the original (near)monopoly long before MS. IBM used to be _the_ name in computing business, long before MS even existed. (And incidentally was just as underhanded as MS. The term "FUD" was first used to describe IBM's tactics, long before MS even existed.) Sun was _the_ name in professional micro-computers. Etc.
And some of them suffered quite humiliating defeats at the hands of the "beast". IBM created the PC, and everything had to be "IBM PC" compatible. Then MS helped shift that to "Intel x86 compatible". When IBM tried to introduce the micro-channel architecture, it discovered that it no longer is in control of the very architecture it created. The market just ignored IBM and took the PC in the direction other companies wanted. Then even Intel lost control. It became "Windows compatible." It may not have been immediately recognizable as a defeat, but it became blatantly so when Intel had to go ask for MS's permission to implement their own 64 bit extensions... and got told to use AMD's instead. Ouch.
In a sense, MS helped "create" Linux. At the anti-trust trial, MS used Linux as an example in their "we're not a monopoly, other people can still make good OS's" sophistry. It just told everyone what other OS they could use instead, if only it was more up to modern standards. And they just proceeded to help with bringing it there.
At any rate, the short story is: most of the successful F/OSS is the work of corporations, and _of_ _course_ they want to be the next MS. Or at least to take some market share from MS. And _of_ _course_ they'd like to make a profit (indirectly) out of it. That's the whole _point_ of bothering with it.
E.g., Sun isn't developping OOo because it just likes making cool software. It's because at some point people were saying, basically, "Yeah, well, but your workstations don't run MS Word." If the software they pay big bucks for doesn't address that problem, they might as well fire that team and move on.
It's sorta like this: it's not about what protocols you implement, but about who you allow on "your" network, and at what price or at what speed.
What protocols don't solve is being able to say, "ok, if you want high speed access on _my_ network, you have to pay extra." That's the problem. From just a neutral protocol's point of view, for example VOIP is VOIP is VOIP. A non-neutral approach could say, for example, "ok, you can use VOIP with our client and our paid service, but Skype users can eat shit and die... or at least get their pipe throttled until they have an incentive to switch to ours." Or, "you can play WoW on our network because Blizzard gave up and paid the tax, but you might notice a lot of latency and disconnects in SWG because Sony wanted to play hardball." Or viceversa, although it would probably count as a crime against humanity to make people play SWG;) Or "you can get high speed access to MSN Search, because Steve Balmer was more than happy to pay to 'fucking kill Google', but you might have problems using Google or getting your site indexed by Google."
It's all about walled gardens and monopolistic practices. You only make so much money with just one interchangeable product or service, so you'll want some kind of trade obstacles that give you some kind of a (semi)captive market. You'll want that people who want your product or service X, also have the incentive/FUD/lack-of-choice to also buy the less competitively priced Y and Z from you. That's where the money is.
If you look around you, that's how most people who make money, make it.
E.g., take iTunes. Not the worst case of shearing penned sheep, to be sure, but nevertheless an example of how it works. ITunes itself doesn't make Apple much money, and it actually caused the music companies to make a lot less money than with a CD. The companies wanted to kill the single, but iTunes made them kill the album. Previously they'd sell you a whole CD, now you just buy 1-2 tracks at 1$ each, and they don't even get the whole dollar. ITunes is basically priced not to make Apple or the music companies a profit, but to keep any possible competitor unable to make a profit.
However, iTunes just happens to have this proprietary DRM that works only on an iPod. (Yes, as Steve Jobs is quite happy to tell you, the DRM is there because the RIAA wanted DRM. But, no, they didn't ask for a DRM that works only on his players. The lock in is _not_ RIAA's demand.) The iPod is quite a bit overpriced. If you want to use iTunes, you pretty much need an iPod. And IIRC, Apple sells around 1 iPod for every 10 songs sold on iTunes. So iTunes doesn't make Apple much money, in fact, it barely makes enough to keep the servers running, but makes you buy another product from them.
The key to making money there is the whole not being neutral.
The big ISP's now would like to get in the same kind of position. They have a service which doesn't make a fortune, and as long as they stay neutral, they have no way to coax/coerce you into buying an overpriced product to go with it. They'd like to be able to do something like that, because that's where the money is.
Interesting theory, but let me ask you this: If the universe itself has limited floating-point accuracy, how is it possible for an entity within that universe to make a more precise floating-point calculation? To me that would be like trying to stuff an 8-byte float into a 4-byte float...
It's not hard, actually. What you're saying there is basically akin to that you couldn't run something that calculates 64 bit arithmetic on a 32 bit machine. Yet Java or your favourite C compiler do that all the time. In fact, they can calculate a 1000 digit binary coded decimal just fine too. Thankfully, we can do arithmetic in slices, much like you operate on the individual digits instead of the whole number when you do arithmetic by hand.
If it weren't possible, well, let's just say that computers wouldn't have been too useful until very recently. We've had 8 bit computers, 12 bit computers (Unix was written on one), even a 4 bit CPU, and other such. If it weren't possible to calculate at least 32 bit floats on them, any kind of computer aided engineering would have been dead in the water for a long time.
Also, to answer your problem, let me give you some examples from that universe:
1. A photon has, so to speak, 2 states. Either it's there or it isn't there. It's not even a float, it's 1 bit. You know, 0 decimal points. Yet you can assign decimal values to how bright a monitor is. Or you can have grey shades on your monitor, basically, float values between 0.0 and 1.0. If you want to set that pixel to 0.12345 brightness, at least theoretically (given enough bits per pixel), you can.
Why? Because we do a neat fixed point arithmetic trick there. We basically define "1.0" to mean a gazillion bajillion photons per second, so 0.25 brightness is really a quarter of a gazillion bajillion.
2. You either have an extra helium atom in a balloon, or tank, or you don't. When you count in atoms, there are no decimals there. You can't have half an atom of helium. (Well, not while still being helium. Half of it is deuterium;) Yet you can talk about having 12.73 litres of helium in a baloon, if you want to. Why? Because again 1 litre means a helluva lot of those atoms, so you can have quite a bit of accuracy when measuring in litres.
And so on and so forth. We do that kind of trick all over the place.
Yes, well, you'll have to understand that this is second hand, what some prophet understood from God's dumbed down explanation to someone who doesn't even have the concepts to understand it all.
Think explaining Linux or the Internet to my old grandma (otherwise a smart woman, but doesn't even have a computer) and see if you don't end up dumbing it down to "it's like some tubes" oversimplification to get it over with. Now think she goes forth and writes a book about it. Ouch. It's not going to be very accurate, to say the least.
I mean, I can just think God explaining a player wipe to Moses:
God: "So we just reformatted the hard drive and re-installed from backups." Moses: "Uh, what's a hard drive, Lord?" God: "Well, it's this thing, like a magnetic disc, where everything is stored. All you see around you is on it." Moses: "So, like a flat platter lord? And it carries the whole world?" God: "Ah, wth, yeah, the world is on a plate. Whatever. So, anyways, we reformatted it..." Moses: "My Lord, what's a reformat?" God: "We wiped it clean, really?" Moses: "Wiped the whole world, Lord? How is that even possible?" God: "(Gah, I'll never get to the bottom of it.) You know, rewrite it all... if you will, cover it all with the same value." Moses: "With a value?" God: "You know what? With water." Moses: "Like a flood, Lord?" God: "Yeah, I flooded the damned thing. Everything was cross-linked and corrupted anyway." Moses: . o O (Damned? Corrupted? So the world must have been sinful and angered the Lord.) God: "So, anyway, then we reinstalled the prototype files for everything from the backup and respaned them everywhere..." Moses: "Curse this feeble mortal mind, Lord, you've lost me." God: "You know, prototypes? Like a definition of each animal? A master copy of each animal, one per sex? Male lion, female lion, male zebra, female zebra..." Moses: "So you had one male and one female of each species stowed away somewhere safe?" God: "Yep." Moses: "On a... what was the word, Lord? Backup?" God: "Uh, a big boat. Really big boat. I told this guy Noah to put one of each there."
Well, yes and no. Mostly no. And I was indeed joking, and pretty heavy-handedly at that.
Floating point errors tend to be more chaotic and unpredictable. QM is actually quite predictable and you can calculate useful stuff with it. E.g., it's not just that an electron in a potential well sometimes "tunnels through" (or rather, due to uncertainty principle constraints, it might have enough energy to jump or it might already be on the other side.) You can actually calculate how many will tunnel, and under which conditions, and build for example a Zenner diode. Mere floating point errors don't act that predictably, or not in the same way.
The thing about QM is... well, that QM doesn't actually have a problem. You can calculate stuff with any degree of accuracy, and, assuming you can actually design an experiment to simulate an measure it that accurately, chances are you'll get the expected results. The QM has been better validated than pretty much anything else.
Most of the conceptual problems you read about it are, basically, not problems of QM itself, but problems of the human imagination. The only problem is trying to imagine it, with a mind and in terms/concepts that were not made for that kind of problems. It's like trying to imagine a Beethoven symphony in terms of shapes and colours. That big a problem.
The human mind and your everyday experiences are based on macroscopic, Newtonian experiences. That is really why you find Newtonian mechanics simple. Your intuition helps you there. If I say "imagine a billiard ball hitting another" or "picture a ball rolling down a slope", you can conjure that mental image right away. You have tens of years of experience with that domain, and a brain which evolved to deal with that kind of problems.
When you move to Quantum Mechanics domain, your imagination and intuition fail you. (And me too, so don't take it as being snotty or anything.) You can imagine a particle, like a billiard ball. You can imagine a wave. (E.g., think: raindrops on a lake.) You _can't_ imagine something which acts fundamentally and thoroughly as _both_ at the same time. You can work abstractly with the concept, because you're undoubtedly a smart guy, but if you actually tried to really _imagine_ it, you'd probably just get a headache.
The "problem" is that people instinctively try to reduce it to one or the other, but each has its own problems:
- Thinking of, say, an electron as purely a particle, just like a small newtonian billiard ball, gets out of hand very fast. It does all these things, like mysteriously appearing on the other side of a potential barrier, which just aren't very newtonian.
- Thinking of it as purely wave, popular as it may be, is almost as big a mistake. Whenever you actually measure a state, you get a particle, not a wave front. E.g., if you put a phosphorescent coated screen (like that of a CRT) in the path of the electron, you get a single blip of light, not a fuzzy cloud over the whole screen. It only hits exactly one atom or mollecule of that phosphorescent coating, not all of them.
At any rate, that is the only problem: trying to imagine it all in a way that makes any sense to your macroscopic intuition. Even smart people who know QM well have a problem there. When you apply your intuition to it, it just doesn't make any sense. So all sorts of funny metaphors are invented to try to describe it... in words and concepts that just weren't made for that, and to a mind that wasn't supposed to imagine something like that.
Well, and then there are the people who _don't_ understand QM. Again, not meant snottily, it's a very hard and abstract domain. If it gives experts mind-cramps trying to wrap some intuitive sense around it, you can imagine how hard it confuses everyone else. So a thousand times more bad metaphors and mis-understandings get born that way.
Well, it all makes sense, if you think of it. Whoever is running this MMO we call RL, can't possibly have the resources to simulate every single particle all the time. So until someone actually goes and observes the damn thing, there's no need to actually spawn/instantiate it.
Think of going farming for copper and tin ore in, say, the Gold Coast Quary in WoW. A particular ore spawn point might have been spawned as tin (most often), or as silver (rarely) or not at all. Would it already be spawned and in memory, if noone was there to see it? Or would it exist only as a probability until someone actually gets in range?
Or say you're hacking away at a copper ore vein with your trusty cold iron pickaxe, like a good dwarf. Sometimes you get just a piece of copper ore, sometimes you also get 1-2 pieces of stone, sometimes you get a Shadowgem, or a Tigerseye or Malachite. Were they already there before you started to hack at the ore vein? Or did they exist only as a probability until someone actually gets that loot window?
Of course, once you got a certain set of ore, stone and/or gems, closing the window and hacking at it again, won't change it. It stays the same set of, say, 1 ore, 2 stone, 1 gem until you actually loot them.
I can tell you, the best gnomish engineers and mages have worked hard for an answer to those questions, but everyone came up empty. We just can't figure out a way to see what's there without seeing what's there. Even warlocks sending their Eye Of Killrog into the mine didn't manage to fool the system. That and the eye got killed by the bandits in the mine. The best priests whined... err... prayed piously to the great gods of Blizzard, and got no answer. Etc.
Excuse me? Since when is it "hate speech" to even mention what a country did wrong? It's just history, lemming.
I'm sorry if history makes you personally uncomfortable, but, tough shit, it can't just be erased. And at the very least, knowing what happened back then, provides an answer to all the "oh, woe is us, I wonder why those mean Iranians are no longer our friends" laments. Now you know exactly why.
Doubly so when that lament is laced with the outright accusation that they are all irrational and you can't even have a rational discussion with them. Because that's the underlying message of moaning for the good old days when you had the Soviets as enemies, and you could at least talk rationally to them.
No, it's not just the arabs who are irrational and not listening there. The USA and we the western world as a whole aren't listening either. We're stuffing our fingers in the ears and pretending that we don't even hear anything uncomfortable coming from that part of the world. Whenever they try to say exactly what _is_ their problem, the western media and politicians manage to twist it back to, "dunno what they want. They're probably babbling some terrorist nonsense about their false god." That's not a rational talk either, sorry.
_Neither_ side is listening. _That_ is the whole middle-east problem in a nutshell.
Or to put it otherwise: noone's proposing to make you individually responsible for it all, _but_ I've also had it up to here with the bullshit "we were just their friends and then suddenly, unexplainably they turned against us. Guess we just chose our friends wrong" revisionism. Because that's the kind of message I was answering to. No, the USA was not friends with Iran, by any sane definition of the word "friend." And they didn't ask for that kind of friendship in the first place. It's not them who tricked the USA into thinking they're friends, it's the USA who basically went there and kicked them in the nuts to protect big oil interests.
Basically, let's all just stop the whole us-vs-them bullshit, where "us" == all saintly and friendly, and "them" == some evil two-faced bastards who turned against us only for some evil religious reasons. The world isn't that simple. That's all.
You know, much as I can enjoy a piece of revisionist bullshit, I just have to rain on your parrade there. There are a ton of countries, Iran included, where the USA didn't just happen to have a friend, but actually installed a puppet dictator. The Shah was only your friend because a bloody CIA coup deposed the democratically elected government and installed him. _Again_. That's all.
And understanding that, also gives you the key as to why those people hate you now. It's not just some people that inexplicably forgot their old friendships, it's some people who hate you for what you did to them. That pseudo-friendship only lasted as long as the USA-installed puppet lasted. The dictator might have been your faithful puppet friend, but the people ended up hating not only him, but also the foreign power that installed and kept him in power. Gee, big surprise there. And as soon as they managed to free them of him, by brutal revolt, gee, who would have guessed that they're no longer your friends? Completely unexpected surprise that;)
And, generally, if we're talking about that period, the USA was bloody active installing and backing dictators left and right. That's champions of democracy at work for ya. Sure preferred a brutal tyrant to an elected government. _Especially_ if that government happened to be left wing or get in the way of western colonial interests.
It started right after WWII, e.g.,
- South Korea: got saddled with an inept totalitarian regime, where the "president" hadn't even lived in Korea before. Just because, god forbid, you can't let them maybe vote for a left-wing government. (The current favourite was actually left wing.) Got to give them our version of "democracy" instead.
- Vietnam: the USA actually prevented them from holding democratic elections and backed an inept dictator instead. Again, out of fear that the left might win.
And it continued throughout the 20'th century, with some of the most brutal third world dictators installed or helped by the USA. If you happen to be on our side, here, let us teach you how to torture and terrorize dissidents. And god forbid if you happen to _not_ be on our side. Then we'll stage a coup and replace you with some puppet that's on our side. And teach _him_ how to torture and terrorize disidents.
Gee, I wonder why a lot of people ended up hating the USA. You'd think they'd appreciate the support and training it gave to their dictator's secret police more.
The goal of the military-industrial(-congressional) complex is simply to get bigger. What better excuse than "we need more resources to reduce the number of false positives"?
Unfortunately, that's pretty much equivalent to saying "we need more resources, because we've been arresting innocent people left and right, searching for something that's next to non-existent". It's not going to make you very popular. It also just asks for the question, "then why are you _wasting_ manpower looking for something virtually nonexistant?"
You'll want to put it more like, "good Lord, look at all these junkies everywhere! We've been arresting them left and right, and we're still not getting to the bottom of it! Plus, our labs are so crappy, they let all those dangerous drug dealers go right after we've arrested them! We need better labs! We need more manpower! We need to get rid of the search and seizure limits! We need to be allowed to torture them into confessing! We need to get rid of lawyers! These fucking lawyers come get them out as fast as we catch them, on some 'it was just soap' bullshit! Yeah, right, soap my ass..."
It serves the same goal of getting bigger, but in a more productive way.
Actually, it helps if you don't even think of it as some sentient hive that tries to get bigger. It's just police officer X who thinks he'd get a promotion if he had more junkies busted and/or more subordinates to manage, marketroid Y who'd get a bonus if he sells more snake oil, etc. The effect is the same globally, it wants to grow, but it affects the behaviour quite a bit. You don't want to look like the guy who arrested innocents left and right, but as the guy who worked hard to make the community a better place and was just thwarted by those evil lawyers and those dumb limits on police power.
In the end, it's only natural. If someone's job performance and security is measured in problems to solve and in actually solving them, they'll try to maximize that. I see it daily in other domains too. So some will do just that. Others have just grown old and bitter and filter it all through the goggles of the worst people they dealt with: surely everyone else is a hardened criminal. Others are simply sociopaths and love abusing their power over others, stopping just short of the line where it would terminally bite them in the ass. Or not even there. Etc.
And it's damn tempting to see all those safeguards and presumptions of innocents, as just a bunch of crap that gets in the way of your getting the job done and getting a promotion.
In the end, that's why those safeguards are needed. Without them, the incentive is there to abuse the system, and there's no shortage of people who'll take that incentive.
See the Soviet police for example. They had very few unsolved cases. They'd just arrest the first suspect, or in some cases an innocent, and beat him up until he confessed. There you go, another case solved.
And yes, some are good cops anyway. Unfortunately there again, we need the safeguards to even be able to tell who is one and who isn't. Otherwise, in a parody of that economic wisdom, the bad cops push the good cops off the market. The bad ones are those who get all those cases solved fast, the good ones are those without half as many results. Unless the bad cops are stopped from faking it, they _will_ push the good cops out.
Sadly, it's not even something new. I've been under a distinct impression lately that there are a lot more Slashdot articles which are blatant heavy-handed PR, than anything even remotely resembling news. This one only stands out by not even trying to disguise the blatant conflict of interest, but otherwise is no different from any other of the "news" directly telling you "X is wrong. X is doing evil stuff. Your very rights/future/whatever depend on joining in the anti-X crusade _now_."
Now I'm not necessarily saying it's an actual corporate PR department. Those tend to be more subtle than that. Maybe it's just individuals with some axe to grind, or persecution syndrome, or whatever. But nevertheless, regularly something just has to come up that's so one-sided and distorted, and stops just short of saying "join in shouting slogans against X _now_ or you're a loser", that it's not even funny any more.
Or maybe it is corporate and political PR after all. These guys are expert at masquerading and astroturfing as whatever they want to, from scientist to high school kid. I don't see why they couldn't sound like a dysfunctional geek on a crusade, if they wanted to.
At any rate, it's getting tiresome. I'm all for being informed about news or dangerous precedents, but being outright told what to think and in whose crusade to join, is just leaving a bad taste.
You have to understand, however, that this kind of image manipulation is used as a casual gamer's makeshift game, not as professionals having a clear idea what they're doing and to what end. The _purpose_ there is ultimately to spend some hours at the computer playing with image filters. It's a high tech toy for people who aren't complete nerds.
It's not even the only thing that gets used as a toy. E.g., to use the example given by Will Wright as to why some people bought The Sims: people buy all sorts of furniture planning software, garden planning software, etc, to use equally as a toy. They're not planning to actually buy new furniture or a new house, it's just an outlet to be creative and play with visual layouts.
It's not even that different from what nerds do. You might exercise your creativity on coding cool algorithms, they exercise it in designing a cool looking house, photo, or whatever else.
At any rate, it's a game, and interactivity is more important than you seem to realize. Turning it into a background batch job is akin to playing Oblivion or WoW by mail. (Send a "fly my character to Ironforge" email, get a "ok, your character is at the Ironforge FP now" several hours later.) It's just not the same thing. As the fun factor and immersion go, seeing and adjusting ther results continuously beats batch jobs any day.
Besides, even if they had a vague general idea of what they have to do in mind, remember that these are not professionals. The keywords are: vague general idea. They'll click lots and use lots of random filters until it looks kinda like what they meant. Seeing the results on your clip immediately is a major advantage there. If for every brute force attempt they had to wait a couple of hours until the batch job finishes, they'd never get any results, and it wouldn't be much fun.
Is it going to "kill the world"? Nope. Is there an advantage to having a more powerful computer? Yes. That's all.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... true, I should try that one too. Didn't sound like quite my thing at the time, but I guess it ought to beat running around with an axe again.
Actually... I for one, welcome our new Zerg overlords ;)
Well, now seriously, maybe it's just me, but I've had it up to here with all MMOs being medieval fantasy. Nothing wrong with fantasy as such, but a little variety is good, you know?
Well, that's maybe not technically true, so let me rephrase it a bit. There are a couple of SF MMOs, but so far they sucked hairy ass. Anarchy Online... well, read the Something Awful review, and know that SA is actually kind to them. It was actually even buggier and less fun than that. SWG... biggest franchise ever, and awaited by every SW nerd like the second coming of the messiah, but it started half-arsed (it was launched literally a SW game without Jedi or spaceships at all), and the various updates turned it into an even bigger joke. E.g., the NGE turned it into a FPS with a bad interface, bad design, and bad balance. Etc.
Just about the only decent non-fantasy MMO that comes to mind is City Of Heroes, and even that one gets boring due to sheer repetition after a while.
So I'd very much like a _good_ SF MMO for a change. Blizzard have already shown that they can make a good MMO, so here's to hope.
To repeat myself: so it's the same as before then?
Because comics too were accused of just that: causing juvenile delinquency. That little Johnny will read all that supposed "filth", then go mug, rape and kill as a result. The concern wasn't that little Johnny will just run around in a cape and spandex, but, yes, that a lot of people will be mugged or killed because little Johnny reads comics.
So was rock music. The accusation was outright that listening to all those violent lyrics, will cause kids to do all sorts of stupidly violent thing, ranging from "just" suicide to killing a few others.
Etc.
Basically, it's just a case of "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." It's repeating _verbatim_. The anti-games scare isn't original at all. It's a verbatim rehash of something that happened before. What ever you can think of as "yeah, but this time they're also saying X", chances are that a variant of X has been said in the previous scares too.
Even the "yeah, but this time the games are so realistic that people lose track of where game ends and reality starts"... funnily enough they said the same about comics, movies, rock music, D&D, etc. Little Johnny (is so stupid that he) will forget RL isn't a comic, and go do what he sees in those comics.
Seriously. Nothing is new. You may think that this is the bullshit war to end all bullshit wars, and the most important/insidious/brutal/etc bullshit war in history, just because you're dragged into it. Rest assured that it's just _a_ bullshit war, in a long line of nearly identical bullshit wars.
The USA has been there, done that. Don't think the "omg, think of the children!!!" bullshit started with video games. It was first comics ("omg, Batman and Robin are teaching children to be homosexual and antisocial"), and they got gutted into becoming a niche hobby, from something that outsold newspapers by a comfortable margin. Then it was music. Yeah, all those satanistic/violent/antisocial lyrics in rock music. Quite a stirr in the Congress and Senate and the media that was. Then a few other things before it got to video games.
So, well, sad to disappoint you there, but music has already been done to death already.
Mostly I'll aggree with you, but just to nitpick: but you seem to operate under the impression that the game is only buggy at launch, that it will be patched right, and that it's only remembered as having been once buggy.
My experience is quite the opposite: most games which were launched buggy (read: most games), their patches introduced at _least_ 1 new bug for every 2 fixed (though in some cases it was 2 introduced for 1 fixed), and the publisher gave up long before it was anywhere near good quality.
Basically: what makes anyone think that what wasn't fixed in 2-3 years of making the game, surely is trivial stuff that will get fixed in 1-2 weeks after launch? No, seriously. Debugging is stuff that takes 90% of the programming time, and is the hardest to get right. Writing code is _easy_. Debugging it to work _right_ is what's hard and time consuming. A game which got shoved out the door as soon as it compiled and showed the start menu (in some cases, literally) can be anywhere between 6 months away from being really ready, and essentially a failed project which will _never_ work right.
I remember fondly such cases as Ultima Online: 2 years after launch, Origin was still busy issuing half-arsed patches that did more damage than good... and then some of them had to be rolled back to contain the damage. Or "Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption" which only had 1 patch, and it introduced a couple of worse bugs than those it removed. Or Daggerfall, where after half a year trying to solve such problems as falling into the void as soon as you moved or bumped into a wall, Bethesda gave up and built in cheat codes so you could teleport yourself out of the void and to the start of the dungeon. Or Fallout 2. My favourite game, mind you, but also one of the buggiest games ever. Half the problems were never fixed. And just so people don't think only ancient examples are available: Gothic 3. It's still a buggy POS. 'Nuff said. Etc.
The thing is, even _if_ patching it later worked (and mostly it doesn't), I want to play the game _now_. The day I bought it, not 6 months in the future when it's finally patched. It's not just a matter of remembering a wrong first impression, it can be a matter of the _whole_ experience I've had with that game. And remembering it damn right, in all its buggy non-fun glory. I might play a game for as little as a day, or as much as 1-2 weeks. It doesn't matter if 2-6 months later a patch became available that fixed everything. (Mostly it doesn't.) Anyone who bought the game at launch, or preordered it, has _already_ played the buggy unpatched version.
And that's not including the inconveniences often visited upon the player if they _do_ stick around until some patches hit. Stuff like, "oops, my saved games don't work any more, I have to abandon all those tens of hours of playing and start all over again." (See: Fallout 2.) Or, "oops, the mechanics changed so much that my carefully built empire is going to pieces... and China is conquering the Byzantine empire." (See: most Paradox games, but as a concrete example, Europa Universalis 3.) Or, in at least one pathologic case, "oops, the game has been turned into a whole different _genre_ and my character, in which I 'invested' months, can't even play that class/skill-combination/role any more." (See: Star Wars Galaxies.)
And another thing that people miss when talking about patches is, basically: quality doesn't only mean "it doesn't crash to desktop". There are things like balance, game system, learning/difficulty curves, AI, story, which are damn hard and work-intensive things on their own. And are things which, when a game is shoved out the door untested, are also untested and unfinished. Most patches fix stuff like memory leaks or crashes to desktop, but stuff like balance or the game system rarely are touched at all by a patch. If they were shoved out the door unfinished, at the very least those aspects will tend to stay unfinished. For ever.
The latter was a major part of Blizzard's secret sauce, so to spe
As opposed to HP where, at least for a couple of models, it's cheaper to buy a new printer than change the cartridge? Even though nothing is broken?
Not disaggreeing with you, just saying that if that's the only downside, I can live with that. Happily.
You know, it's this kind of uninformed scares that give environmentalism a bad name.
Do you genuinely think that anyone goes and wipes out rain forests for _paper_? No, seriously. It's a crop, same as grain or cotton or whatever. Relatively fast growing trees are planted, left to grow, then cut down, and new trees are planted. Maybe generously spread some fertilizer too. Repeat ad infinitum. It's that simple.
It wouldn't even be economical to go around the world and wipe out woods for paper, since then you end up having to carry those trees over increasingly long distances to your factory. Plus, you have to keep buying new land or logging rights, and that's more money down the drain. It's a model akin to throwing money down a rat hole.
The plan to let trees fix it and then burry it, isn't too stupid either. Originally Earth had a helluva lot of carbon in the air, in the form of methane and CO2. Not unlike Venus before it lost its hydrogen to solar winds, really. Then plants fixated it, and now it's under the ground. There's a reason why we have an age called Carboniferous, for example. That's where a helluva lot of coal comes from. It was basically a helluva lot of tree-ferns that fixated a helluva lot of carbon, and got buried.
Mind you, it wouldn't make that big a difference, since we don't use as much paper as to come even close to the other carbon emissions. But, purely theoretically speaking, it's one way.
About making paper, there's nothing inherent in that process that releases more CO2 into the air than those trees got from the air. Maybe if you powered it all with a coal power plant, you'd get that effect, but using hydroelectric/solar/nuclear power gets you a net effect of removing carbon from the air via those trees.
Recycling... here also you seem to have some fantasy idea that it's absolutely free, and all that used paper you recycle somehow just miraculously ends up pristine again without any extra energy use. It's not. That used paper has to be cleaned with a lot of chemicals first, for a start. E.g., to get rid of the ink. Not only those aren't necessarily environment friendly, but some energy goes into producing them too. Then it's going to be converted to pulp again, just like wood would, which is only _marginally_ cheaper than starting from wood. And finally it's going to be bleached just like paper from wood would, because it ends up the same kind of naturally-yellow paper it was in the first place.
And that's not even taking into account the effort and energy used to sort it, transport it, etc.
It may surprise you, but a lot of recycling we do nowadays is... well, bluntly put: show business. We're not really saving the planet, we just let some ignorant sheeple feel good about themselves. Paper is one such example. Glass is another. Glass is made out of sand, and it's not any more economical to re-melt used glass than to just melt sand. Recycling whole bottles also doesn't get you much, since you end up washing them with strong chemicals, since you don't know what that guy stored in the bottle or how long a jar has been left to turn into a petri dish before being recycled. Plus, again, you spend a lot on sorting, transport, etc.
And let me give you another example of something which isn't what many people assume: Tetra Pak style packaging. (E.g., milk cartons.) There seems to be a lot of mis-conception that its adoption had anything to do with being environmentally friendly. In practice it's just because it's cheaper than glass, weighs less, and it can be neatly packed in a truck without wasting much space. I.e., you can pack more of them in a truck.
Recycling them, again, actually is a bigger pain and uses more chemicals, than just making a new one. But, hey, you've been trained to sort your garbage like a good trained monkey and feel good about it. Carry on
More like: merely QOS isn't what they're asking for. A neutral implementation of QOS wouldn't care _whose_ packets it routes, merely whether it's high priority ones (e.g., tele-medicine to reuse that word), low priority (e.g., email), or something in between. They don't need to argue and lobby against net-neutrality to implement that.
What they _are_ proposing -- outright and explicitly, not just inferred or slippery-slope -- is the ability to discriminate based on _whose_ packets are they routing, and make people pay for it. E.g., there's a lot of sabre rattle as to how Google should pay a premium. That's quite different than QOS.
You'll notice that I gave examples of non-digital things in the "penis size" category, so I'm not sure what your point is. Yes, conspicuous consumption was very much alive and kicking since ancient times, long before digital cameras.
The Phoenicians made a fortune and built a trade empire with a super-expensive dye, for example. It didn't make clothes any better, it just allowed some nobles to wear something that just screamed "look what clothes I can afford". It's, if you will, one of the earliest recorded cases of Veblen goods: stuff which is desirable _because_ it's disproportionately expensive.
Is it really any surprise, then, that some optical cameras were sold as status symbols too?
Most tie-ins work both ways, so no big surprise there. So, yes, iTunes encourages people to get iPods, and iPods encourage people to sign up with iTunes, so their next player will be another iPod too.
In fact, I'll say that any working (near)monopoly implementation would have to work in as many directions as technically possible. If you can map a sort of a flow from a product that no other needs, to one which is only needed, it becomes easy to attack the whole from that end. So if you have products X, Y and Z and you want to go walled-garden about it, in the ideal case any one of them would need (or at least encourage one to buy) both the others. If you have 10 products, in an ideal world any 1 would need the other 9.
That's how MS pwned the software market, after all.
Because of simple maths. A 10 megapixels image... well, ok, they count the individual RGB components in that so it's really anywhere between 2.5 and 3.3 mega-pixels. At 4/3 aspect ratio, 2048x1536 gives you a bit over 3 megapixels. How many photos that size did you see online?
So you don't have to poll everyone on Earth, you just need to look at what pictures you see online. If you don't have to scroll up and down to view it even in 1600x1200, then it's probably not the raw output of a 10 megapixel camera. It's that simple. And you wouldn't need a 10 megapixel camera to take it.
What such logic omits, though, is (A) the ignorance factor, and (B) the penis size factor, a.k.a., conspicuous consumption. Respectively:
A) People don't understand those numbers and think that more megapixels is necessarily better. A 1024x768 picture _must_ be better if it was taken in 10 megapixels.
B) A lot of those things are bought not because the owners actually needed an expensive camera, but just to show that they can afford an expensive camera. Same as buying jewellery, fur coats, or cars with a big wing at mid-life crisis. Something with an objective that looks like it belongs in a James Bond movie, is soo much better for taking unzoomed photos of squirrels in the park. In reality, just because it shows everyone else in the park who can afford it.
And thanks to the emperor's new clothes syndrome, for a lot it won't ever matter what benchmarks and image analysis tools say. Once people got it into their head that a more expensive camera is better, they'll see differences even where there are none. Because they just have to confirm it to themselves that (1) buying that expensive camera was justified, and (2) they're such great artists that they can spot imperfections where unskilled plebs can't see anything wrong. Same, if you will, as wannabe "audiophiles" swearing that music sounds better when they use a 1000$ power cable for their stereo.
In a nutshell, very much so. I don't expect them to lay extra cable to shave a few milliseconds latency to, say, Google if it paid. Getting the result in 0.495s instead of 0.5s wouldn't even start to be an incentive to pay for the premium service. What is indeed more likely to happen is that the the answer time would jump from 0.5 to 2.5 for everyone who doesn't pay.
And that is assuming that OSS developpers are a bunch of nerds in their free time, doing software just for fun. Sad to say, his assumption is closer to reality.
Oh, there are thousands of 1-2 man projects on sourceforge done by enthusiasts in their free time. Chances are you haven't even heard of most of them. They also tend to be small projects.
If you look at what's in your favourite Linux distribution, though, it's a different story. Look at the kernel credits some day. You'll see a lot of people from IBM, Red Hat, etc. Hate to break it to you, but they're doing a paid job there. Others may not be employees at such, but got paid/sponsored by a corporation to develop that stuff. E.g., ReiserFS was pretty much paid for by SuSE.
Other programs there? Mozilla? It even got started because Netscape wanted a browser that can stop MS's onslaught onto their business. Then it got bought by AOL, and nowadays it's Google footing the bill. Open Office? Got started as a proprietary project, then bought by Sun. Nowadays it's Sun doing pretty much the whole work, with people paid to code on OOo. It's costing Sun a lot of money. Etc.
See, the F/OSS that gets taken anywhere _near_ seriously these days is the work of corporations. Pretty much it's just a framework for a bunch of corporations to pool their resources into fighting MS. None of them has the resources to challenge the behemoth single-handedly, and some have already lost against the behemoth when trying to "solo" it. E.g., ask IBM what happened to their OS/2.
Where this long rant is going is: of _course_ those corporations are aiming at becoming the next MS. In fact, some of them were the original (near)monopoly long before MS. IBM used to be _the_ name in computing business, long before MS even existed. (And incidentally was just as underhanded as MS. The term "FUD" was first used to describe IBM's tactics, long before MS even existed.) Sun was _the_ name in professional micro-computers. Etc.
And some of them suffered quite humiliating defeats at the hands of the "beast". IBM created the PC, and everything had to be "IBM PC" compatible. Then MS helped shift that to "Intel x86 compatible". When IBM tried to introduce the micro-channel architecture, it discovered that it no longer is in control of the very architecture it created. The market just ignored IBM and took the PC in the direction other companies wanted. Then even Intel lost control. It became "Windows compatible." It may not have been immediately recognizable as a defeat, but it became blatantly so when Intel had to go ask for MS's permission to implement their own 64 bit extensions... and got told to use AMD's instead. Ouch.
In a sense, MS helped "create" Linux. At the anti-trust trial, MS used Linux as an example in their "we're not a monopoly, other people can still make good OS's" sophistry. It just told everyone what other OS they could use instead, if only it was more up to modern standards. And they just proceeded to help with bringing it there.
At any rate, the short story is: most of the successful F/OSS is the work of corporations, and _of_ _course_ they want to be the next MS. Or at least to take some market share from MS. And _of_ _course_ they'd like to make a profit (indirectly) out of it. That's the whole _point_ of bothering with it.
E.g., Sun isn't developping OOo because it just likes making cool software. It's because at some point people were saying, basically, "Yeah, well, but your workstations don't run MS Word." If the software they pay big bucks for doesn't address that problem, they might as well fire that team and move on.
E
It's sorta like this: it's not about what protocols you implement, but about who you allow on "your" network, and at what price or at what speed.
;) Or "you can get high speed access to MSN Search, because Steve Balmer was more than happy to pay to 'fucking kill Google', but you might have problems using Google or getting your site indexed by Google."
What protocols don't solve is being able to say, "ok, if you want high speed access on _my_ network, you have to pay extra." That's the problem. From just a neutral protocol's point of view, for example VOIP is VOIP is VOIP. A non-neutral approach could say, for example, "ok, you can use VOIP with our client and our paid service, but Skype users can eat shit and die... or at least get their pipe throttled until they have an incentive to switch to ours." Or, "you can play WoW on our network because Blizzard gave up and paid the tax, but you might notice a lot of latency and disconnects in SWG because Sony wanted to play hardball." Or viceversa, although it would probably count as a crime against humanity to make people play SWG
It's all about walled gardens and monopolistic practices. You only make so much money with just one interchangeable product or service, so you'll want some kind of trade obstacles that give you some kind of a (semi)captive market. You'll want that people who want your product or service X, also have the incentive/FUD/lack-of-choice to also buy the less competitively priced Y and Z from you. That's where the money is.
If you look around you, that's how most people who make money, make it.
E.g., take iTunes. Not the worst case of shearing penned sheep, to be sure, but nevertheless an example of how it works. ITunes itself doesn't make Apple much money, and it actually caused the music companies to make a lot less money than with a CD. The companies wanted to kill the single, but iTunes made them kill the album. Previously they'd sell you a whole CD, now you just buy 1-2 tracks at 1$ each, and they don't even get the whole dollar. ITunes is basically priced not to make Apple or the music companies a profit, but to keep any possible competitor unable to make a profit.
However, iTunes just happens to have this proprietary DRM that works only on an iPod. (Yes, as Steve Jobs is quite happy to tell you, the DRM is there because the RIAA wanted DRM. But, no, they didn't ask for a DRM that works only on his players. The lock in is _not_ RIAA's demand.) The iPod is quite a bit overpriced. If you want to use iTunes, you pretty much need an iPod. And IIRC, Apple sells around 1 iPod for every 10 songs sold on iTunes. So iTunes doesn't make Apple much money, in fact, it barely makes enough to keep the servers running, but makes you buy another product from them.
The key to making money there is the whole not being neutral.
The big ISP's now would like to get in the same kind of position. They have a service which doesn't make a fortune, and as long as they stay neutral, they have no way to coax/coerce you into buying an overpriced product to go with it. They'd like to be able to do something like that, because that's where the money is.
It's not hard, actually. What you're saying there is basically akin to that you couldn't run something that calculates 64 bit arithmetic on a 32 bit machine. Yet Java or your favourite C compiler do that all the time. In fact, they can calculate a 1000 digit binary coded decimal just fine too. Thankfully, we can do arithmetic in slices, much like you operate on the individual digits instead of the whole number when you do arithmetic by hand.
If it weren't possible, well, let's just say that computers wouldn't have been too useful until very recently. We've had 8 bit computers, 12 bit computers (Unix was written on one), even a 4 bit CPU, and other such. If it weren't possible to calculate at least 32 bit floats on them, any kind of computer aided engineering would have been dead in the water for a long time.
Also, to answer your problem, let me give you some examples from that universe:
1. A photon has, so to speak, 2 states. Either it's there or it isn't there. It's not even a float, it's 1 bit. You know, 0 decimal points. Yet you can assign decimal values to how bright a monitor is. Or you can have grey shades on your monitor, basically, float values between 0.0 and 1.0. If you want to set that pixel to 0.12345 brightness, at least theoretically (given enough bits per pixel), you can.
Why? Because we do a neat fixed point arithmetic trick there. We basically define "1.0" to mean a gazillion bajillion photons per second, so 0.25 brightness is really a quarter of a gazillion bajillion.
2. You either have an extra helium atom in a balloon, or tank, or you don't. When you count in atoms, there are no decimals there. You can't have half an atom of helium. (Well, not while still being helium. Half of it is deuterium;) Yet you can talk about having 12.73 litres of helium in a baloon, if you want to. Why? Because again 1 litre means a helluva lot of those atoms, so you can have quite a bit of accuracy when measuring in litres.
And so on and so forth. We do that kind of trick all over the place.
Yes, well, you'll have to understand that this is second hand, what some prophet understood from God's dumbed down explanation to someone who doesn't even have the concepts to understand it all.
:P
Think explaining Linux or the Internet to my old grandma (otherwise a smart woman, but doesn't even have a computer) and see if you don't end up dumbing it down to "it's like some tubes" oversimplification to get it over with. Now think she goes forth and writes a book about it. Ouch. It's not going to be very accurate, to say the least.
I mean, I can just think God explaining a player wipe to Moses:
God: "So we just reformatted the hard drive and re-installed from backups."
Moses: "Uh, what's a hard drive, Lord?"
God: "Well, it's this thing, like a magnetic disc, where everything is stored. All you see around you is on it."
Moses: "So, like a flat platter lord? And it carries the whole world?"
God: "Ah, wth, yeah, the world is on a plate. Whatever. So, anyways, we reformatted it..."
Moses: "My Lord, what's a reformat?"
God: "We wiped it clean, really?"
Moses: "Wiped the whole world, Lord? How is that even possible?"
God: "(Gah, I'll never get to the bottom of it.) You know, rewrite it all... if you will, cover it all with the same value."
Moses: "With a value?"
God: "You know what? With water."
Moses: "Like a flood, Lord?"
God: "Yeah, I flooded the damned thing. Everything was cross-linked and corrupted anyway."
Moses: . o O (Damned? Corrupted? So the world must have been sinful and angered the Lord.)
God: "So, anyway, then we reinstalled the prototype files for everything from the backup and respaned them everywhere..."
Moses: "Curse this feeble mortal mind, Lord, you've lost me."
God: "You know, prototypes? Like a definition of each animal? A master copy of each animal, one per sex? Male lion, female lion, male zebra, female zebra..."
Moses: "So you had one male and one female of each species stowed away somewhere safe?"
God: "Yep."
Moses: "On a... what was the word, Lord? Backup?"
God: "Uh, a big boat. Really big boat. I told this guy Noah to put one of each there."
You can see where it's going
Well, yes and no. Mostly no. And I was indeed joking, and pretty heavy-handedly at that.
Floating point errors tend to be more chaotic and unpredictable. QM is actually quite predictable and you can calculate useful stuff with it. E.g., it's not just that an electron in a potential well sometimes "tunnels through" (or rather, due to uncertainty principle constraints, it might have enough energy to jump or it might already be on the other side.) You can actually calculate how many will tunnel, and under which conditions, and build for example a Zenner diode. Mere floating point errors don't act that predictably, or not in the same way.
The thing about QM is... well, that QM doesn't actually have a problem. You can calculate stuff with any degree of accuracy, and, assuming you can actually design an experiment to simulate an measure it that accurately, chances are you'll get the expected results. The QM has been better validated than pretty much anything else.
Most of the conceptual problems you read about it are, basically, not problems of QM itself, but problems of the human imagination. The only problem is trying to imagine it, with a mind and in terms/concepts that were not made for that kind of problems. It's like trying to imagine a Beethoven symphony in terms of shapes and colours. That big a problem.
The human mind and your everyday experiences are based on macroscopic, Newtonian experiences. That is really why you find Newtonian mechanics simple. Your intuition helps you there. If I say "imagine a billiard ball hitting another" or "picture a ball rolling down a slope", you can conjure that mental image right away. You have tens of years of experience with that domain, and a brain which evolved to deal with that kind of problems.
When you move to Quantum Mechanics domain, your imagination and intuition fail you. (And me too, so don't take it as being snotty or anything.) You can imagine a particle, like a billiard ball. You can imagine a wave. (E.g., think: raindrops on a lake.) You _can't_ imagine something which acts fundamentally and thoroughly as _both_ at the same time. You can work abstractly with the concept, because you're undoubtedly a smart guy, but if you actually tried to really _imagine_ it, you'd probably just get a headache.
The "problem" is that people instinctively try to reduce it to one or the other, but each has its own problems:
- Thinking of, say, an electron as purely a particle, just like a small newtonian billiard ball, gets out of hand very fast. It does all these things, like mysteriously appearing on the other side of a potential barrier, which just aren't very newtonian.
- Thinking of it as purely wave, popular as it may be, is almost as big a mistake. Whenever you actually measure a state, you get a particle, not a wave front. E.g., if you put a phosphorescent coated screen (like that of a CRT) in the path of the electron, you get a single blip of light, not a fuzzy cloud over the whole screen. It only hits exactly one atom or mollecule of that phosphorescent coating, not all of them.
At any rate, that is the only problem: trying to imagine it all in a way that makes any sense to your macroscopic intuition. Even smart people who know QM well have a problem there. When you apply your intuition to it, it just doesn't make any sense. So all sorts of funny metaphors are invented to try to describe it... in words and concepts that just weren't made for that, and to a mind that wasn't supposed to imagine something like that.
Well, and then there are the people who _don't_ understand QM. Again, not meant snottily, it's a very hard and abstract domain. If it gives experts mind-cramps trying to wrap some intuitive sense around it, you can imagine how hard it confuses everyone else. So a thousand times more bad metaphors and mis-understandings get born that way.
Actually, as the Fortran wisecrack went, "God is real, unless declared an integer." ;)
Well, same here, then. We could probably get all the answers and then some, if we could talk to one of the guys who programmed RL ;)
Well, it all makes sense, if you think of it. Whoever is running this MMO we call RL, can't possibly have the resources to simulate every single particle all the time. So until someone actually goes and observes the damn thing, there's no need to actually spawn/instantiate it.
Think of going farming for copper and tin ore in, say, the Gold Coast Quary in WoW. A particular ore spawn point might have been spawned as tin (most often), or as silver (rarely) or not at all. Would it already be spawned and in memory, if noone was there to see it? Or would it exist only as a probability until someone actually gets in range?
Or say you're hacking away at a copper ore vein with your trusty cold iron pickaxe, like a good dwarf. Sometimes you get just a piece of copper ore, sometimes you also get 1-2 pieces of stone, sometimes you get a Shadowgem, or a Tigerseye or Malachite. Were they already there before you started to hack at the ore vein? Or did they exist only as a probability until someone actually gets that loot window?
Of course, once you got a certain set of ore, stone and/or gems, closing the window and hacking at it again, won't change it. It stays the same set of, say, 1 ore, 2 stone, 1 gem until you actually loot them.
I can tell you, the best gnomish engineers and mages have worked hard for an answer to those questions, but everyone came up empty. We just can't figure out a way to see what's there without seeing what's there. Even warlocks sending their Eye Of Killrog into the mine didn't manage to fool the system. That and the eye got killed by the bandits in the mine. The best priests whined... err... prayed piously to the great gods of Blizzard, and got no answer. Etc.
Excuse me? Since when is it "hate speech" to even mention what a country did wrong? It's just history, lemming.
I'm sorry if history makes you personally uncomfortable, but, tough shit, it can't just be erased. And at the very least, knowing what happened back then, provides an answer to all the "oh, woe is us, I wonder why those mean Iranians are no longer our friends" laments. Now you know exactly why.
Doubly so when that lament is laced with the outright accusation that they are all irrational and you can't even have a rational discussion with them. Because that's the underlying message of moaning for the good old days when you had the Soviets as enemies, and you could at least talk rationally to them.
No, it's not just the arabs who are irrational and not listening there. The USA and we the western world as a whole aren't listening either. We're stuffing our fingers in the ears and pretending that we don't even hear anything uncomfortable coming from that part of the world. Whenever they try to say exactly what _is_ their problem, the western media and politicians manage to twist it back to, "dunno what they want. They're probably babbling some terrorist nonsense about their false god." That's not a rational talk either, sorry.
_Neither_ side is listening. _That_ is the whole middle-east problem in a nutshell.
Or to put it otherwise: noone's proposing to make you individually responsible for it all, _but_ I've also had it up to here with the bullshit "we were just their friends and then suddenly, unexplainably they turned against us. Guess we just chose our friends wrong" revisionism. Because that's the kind of message I was answering to. No, the USA was not friends with Iran, by any sane definition of the word "friend." And they didn't ask for that kind of friendship in the first place. It's not them who tricked the USA into thinking they're friends, it's the USA who basically went there and kicked them in the nuts to protect big oil interests.
Basically, let's all just stop the whole us-vs-them bullshit, where "us" == all saintly and friendly, and "them" == some evil two-faced bastards who turned against us only for some evil religious reasons. The world isn't that simple. That's all.
You know, much as I can enjoy a piece of revisionist bullshit, I just have to rain on your parrade there. There are a ton of countries, Iran included, where the USA didn't just happen to have a friend, but actually installed a puppet dictator. The Shah was only your friend because a bloody CIA coup deposed the democratically elected government and installed him. _Again_. That's all.
;)
And understanding that, also gives you the key as to why those people hate you now. It's not just some people that inexplicably forgot their old friendships, it's some people who hate you for what you did to them. That pseudo-friendship only lasted as long as the USA-installed puppet lasted. The dictator might have been your faithful puppet friend, but the people ended up hating not only him, but also the foreign power that installed and kept him in power. Gee, big surprise there. And as soon as they managed to free them of him, by brutal revolt, gee, who would have guessed that they're no longer your friends? Completely unexpected surprise that
And, generally, if we're talking about that period, the USA was bloody active installing and backing dictators left and right. That's champions of democracy at work for ya. Sure preferred a brutal tyrant to an elected government. _Especially_ if that government happened to be left wing or get in the way of western colonial interests.
It started right after WWII, e.g.,
- South Korea: got saddled with an inept totalitarian regime, where the "president" hadn't even lived in Korea before. Just because, god forbid, you can't let them maybe vote for a left-wing government. (The current favourite was actually left wing.) Got to give them our version of "democracy" instead.
- Vietnam: the USA actually prevented them from holding democratic elections and backed an inept dictator instead. Again, out of fear that the left might win.
And it continued throughout the 20'th century, with some of the most brutal third world dictators installed or helped by the USA. If you happen to be on our side, here, let us teach you how to torture and terrorize dissidents. And god forbid if you happen to _not_ be on our side. Then we'll stage a coup and replace you with some puppet that's on our side. And teach _him_ how to torture and terrorize disidents.
Gee, I wonder why a lot of people ended up hating the USA. You'd think they'd appreciate the support and training it gave to their dictator's secret police more.
Unfortunately, that's pretty much equivalent to saying "we need more resources, because we've been arresting innocent people left and right, searching for something that's next to non-existent". It's not going to make you very popular. It also just asks for the question, "then why are you _wasting_ manpower looking for something virtually nonexistant?"
You'll want to put it more like, "good Lord, look at all these junkies everywhere! We've been arresting them left and right, and we're still not getting to the bottom of it! Plus, our labs are so crappy, they let all those dangerous drug dealers go right after we've arrested them! We need better labs! We need more manpower! We need to get rid of the search and seizure limits! We need to be allowed to torture them into confessing! We need to get rid of lawyers! These fucking lawyers come get them out as fast as we catch them, on some 'it was just soap' bullshit! Yeah, right, soap my ass..."
It serves the same goal of getting bigger, but in a more productive way.
Actually, it helps if you don't even think of it as some sentient hive that tries to get bigger. It's just police officer X who thinks he'd get a promotion if he had more junkies busted and/or more subordinates to manage, marketroid Y who'd get a bonus if he sells more snake oil, etc. The effect is the same globally, it wants to grow, but it affects the behaviour quite a bit. You don't want to look like the guy who arrested innocents left and right, but as the guy who worked hard to make the community a better place and was just thwarted by those evil lawyers and those dumb limits on police power.
In the end, it's only natural. If someone's job performance and security is measured in problems to solve and in actually solving them, they'll try to maximize that. I see it daily in other domains too. So some will do just that. Others have just grown old and bitter and filter it all through the goggles of the worst people they dealt with: surely everyone else is a hardened criminal. Others are simply sociopaths and love abusing their power over others, stopping just short of the line where it would terminally bite them in the ass. Or not even there. Etc.
And it's damn tempting to see all those safeguards and presumptions of innocents, as just a bunch of crap that gets in the way of your getting the job done and getting a promotion.
In the end, that's why those safeguards are needed. Without them, the incentive is there to abuse the system, and there's no shortage of people who'll take that incentive.
See the Soviet police for example. They had very few unsolved cases. They'd just arrest the first suspect, or in some cases an innocent, and beat him up until he confessed. There you go, another case solved.
And yes, some are good cops anyway. Unfortunately there again, we need the safeguards to even be able to tell who is one and who isn't. Otherwise, in a parody of that economic wisdom, the bad cops push the good cops off the market. The bad ones are those who get all those cases solved fast, the good ones are those without half as many results. Unless the bad cops are stopped from faking it, they _will_ push the good cops out.
Sadly, it's not even something new. I've been under a distinct impression lately that there are a lot more Slashdot articles which are blatant heavy-handed PR, than anything even remotely resembling news. This one only stands out by not even trying to disguise the blatant conflict of interest, but otherwise is no different from any other of the "news" directly telling you "X is wrong. X is doing evil stuff. Your very rights/future/whatever depend on joining in the anti-X crusade _now_."
Now I'm not necessarily saying it's an actual corporate PR department. Those tend to be more subtle than that. Maybe it's just individuals with some axe to grind, or persecution syndrome, or whatever. But nevertheless, regularly something just has to come up that's so one-sided and distorted, and stops just short of saying "join in shouting slogans against X _now_ or you're a loser", that it's not even funny any more.
Or maybe it is corporate and political PR after all. These guys are expert at masquerading and astroturfing as whatever they want to, from scientist to high school kid. I don't see why they couldn't sound like a dysfunctional geek on a crusade, if they wanted to.
At any rate, it's getting tiresome. I'm all for being informed about news or dangerous precedents, but being outright told what to think and in whose crusade to join, is just leaving a bad taste.
You have to understand, however, that this kind of image manipulation is used as a casual gamer's makeshift game, not as professionals having a clear idea what they're doing and to what end. The _purpose_ there is ultimately to spend some hours at the computer playing with image filters. It's a high tech toy for people who aren't complete nerds.
It's not even the only thing that gets used as a toy. E.g., to use the example given by Will Wright as to why some people bought The Sims: people buy all sorts of furniture planning software, garden planning software, etc, to use equally as a toy. They're not planning to actually buy new furniture or a new house, it's just an outlet to be creative and play with visual layouts.
It's not even that different from what nerds do. You might exercise your creativity on coding cool algorithms, they exercise it in designing a cool looking house, photo, or whatever else.
At any rate, it's a game, and interactivity is more important than you seem to realize. Turning it into a background batch job is akin to playing Oblivion or WoW by mail. (Send a "fly my character to Ironforge" email, get a "ok, your character is at the Ironforge FP now" several hours later.) It's just not the same thing. As the fun factor and immersion go, seeing and adjusting ther results continuously beats batch jobs any day.
Besides, even if they had a vague general idea of what they have to do in mind, remember that these are not professionals. The keywords are: vague general idea. They'll click lots and use lots of random filters until it looks kinda like what they meant. Seeing the results on your clip immediately is a major advantage there. If for every brute force attempt they had to wait a couple of hours until the batch job finishes, they'd never get any results, and it wouldn't be much fun.
Is it going to "kill the world"? Nope. Is there an advantage to having a more powerful computer? Yes. That's all.