A PC using that board would be able to reduce the download time of a typical high-definition feature-length movie from 30 minutes to one second, the company said.
That's nice, but I don't know of anyone able to provide me with that movie in one second, much less anyone with the bandwidth to receive it (or write it to disk) that quickly. The bottleneck in my downloading experience sure as hell doesn't exist within my beige box.
Will this actually be useful for anything in 2010?
I don't doubt you for a moment, but I can imagine this being a fantastically brilliant concept. While I did well at school, as I imagine most people here did, we can doubtless all remember a large segment of students who simply weren't into traditional learning in any of its forms.
Now contrast that will some sort of game in the style of Typing of the Dead - a simple, cheaply-implemented game which turned learning to type into something entertaining. I see no reason why a clever development team couldn't concentrate the same sort of adrenaline and advancement motivation into spelling or arithmetic games. Off the top of my head: imagine a sort of tetris game where number descend and have to be placed in rows to achieve a pre-determined multiple of x. Or even a direct rip-off of TotD where numbers have to be calculated in order to 'shoot' zombies.
Perhaps these would be entirely useless. But I think it's worth a shot - we're looking at what may be the first generation to have a practical opportunity of learning via gaming. It may turn out to be worse than traditional textbook learning; it may slash the number of illiterate and innumerate adults in our society. Given the scope of the problem and the possibilities of a solution it surely merits further study.
Even with a less horrifying model we're still left with the reality of a woman covered in rancid scum. Not my bag, though perhaps the "anything with an orifice" crowd wouldn't object.
Perhaps they're aiming it at the same group who somehow find value in myspace. It smacks of the skin-deep, frothy 'self-expression' that's supposedly facilitated by designer mobile phone covers.
It sounds entirely meaningless to me, but presumably a fat, curmudgeonly old fucker isn't part of Sony's target demographic. Anecdotal evidence suggests that every generation finds its successors superficial, easily distracted by shiny claptrap and utterly lacking in discernment. As I get older I not only turn into my father; I become increasingly aware that he was right.
It's an interesting marketing strategy, isn't it? Late, worse and more expensive. I'm starting to wonder why any Europeans will actually bother to buy the thing.
You can reply by hitting the link underneath the new-fangled threshold selection bar on the left-hand side. They've done a great job of hiding it, I have to say.
Who gives a damn what something is 'for'? So bingo is for geriatrics and Harry Potter's for kids; doesn't stop me enjoying either of them.
If you enjoyed Viva Piñata before Gates opened his mouth you have no reason to enjoy it any less afterwards. If you let marketing demographics dictate how you spend your leisure time you deserve to be miserable.
Genuine question. As far as I'm aware, in order to take someone to court you need to claim that they've broken one or more laws. So does anyone know what Myspace has allegedly done, or not done, which is supposed to have broken the law? All the articles mutter things about negligence, but that surely requires an unfulfilled legal requirement of the service provider.
This case is clearly wrong on every level, but I'm curious to know what grounds these people think that they have for lodging a case. Or is it a straightforward greedy lawyer thing?
Given a sufficiently large group of people, some of them will be wankers.
Wah! Some IT people are nasty! Yeah, isn't humanity a horrible thing? Ever met an unpleasant doctor, lawyer, bus driver, teacher, plumber? But let's forget about reality and hurl some ill-considered generalisations instead.
Or better yet, let's not. I've worked in IT for ten years or so and the vast majority of my colleagues have been professionals who behave...well, professionally. Some users are easier to interact with than others; a particularly incalcitrant customer will provoke the odd grumble back in the IT office. A member of staff who publically insults/intmidates/ridicules/humiliates a user should, and usually will, get a smack from the management stick.
Of course attitude problems will sometimes arise and fail to be corrected, and the appropriate manager should be bludgeoned with the aforementioned stick. More often, IT staff will work with their user base to achieve a mutually satisfactory goal. Painting the entire industry as a bunch of ill-bred sociopaths is wrong, stupid and insulting.
You're anticipating 500,000 requests a day, so let's bump it up to a million to give you a bit of wiggle-room. Assuming a worst-case scenario of those queries being shoe-horned into a typical 8-hour working day, that equates to an average of 35 queries a second, multiplied by some factor to account for peak usage. I have no experience of MySQL specifically but that doesn't sound like an unreasonable ball-park to me - with a decent server, proper indexing and well-written queries I don't see why you should struggle.
(This is obviously subject to the size and structure of your database, but I'm guessing that you don't want to join dozens of tables all containing millions of records).
Before you run out and buy an Oracle licence I would attempt to run some tests on your current set-up. Presumably you have, or can acquire, an idea of the ultimate database structure and data volumes? You may find that you just need to optimise your database and spend a few grand on a better server. As for the reporting question: if you don't need to report on real-time data you can perhaps perform a daily load to your reporting server in the middle of the night when usage is low.
And in any case, your application will hopefully be portable between different database systems without massive effort, so you may be able to defer a final decision until you've got a better idea of what your database needs to be able to do.
You can forget the objects and anything else about the thread, and feel free to mod as off-topic as you wish, but read The Dark is Rising anyway. Fantastic stuff, especially this close to Christmas.
You may notice by my username that I anticipated this threat years in advance. I have intended all along to make my fortune by providing wombat-neutralisation services to the fledgling WiMAX industry.
Except that if it works and gives us an alternative source of power generation it will have proven to be a trivially small amount of money. In my view it's money well spent, with the risk/reward balance way over in the project's favour.
Why did he need the NYT to provide a wake-up call? He's a senior VP, he's been there for three years and, by his own cheerful admission, his company's strategy and organisational structure are screwed. Shoddy leadership, no accountability, no direction, massive redundancy, and a mass exodus of the valuable staff.
Who's fucking fault is that? What's he been doing for the last three years? Why has he allowed Yahoo!!! to get into its current state?
The implicit admission being that he is one of the people he describes as "phoning it in", I assume that he will be including himself in the 15-20% redundancy.
The vast majority of heterosexual males are disgusted with homosexuality. This isn't something that liberals want to hear, but it's true. This is about forcing something on the consumer that they don't want. The standard reaction of the consumer is not to buy it.
My counter-suggestion, similarly based on wild conjecture, is that most people care much less than you do. For reference: well, anything popular that has homosexuality in it somewhere. Take your pick.
I think that the arena of armchair hypothesis favours my speculation over yours, in this instance.
Or any games at all, for that matter. Given their previous history, perhaps they could generate enough marketing spin to sell it as a 'content delivery platform for enriched surfing and targeted purchasing opportunities'.
They wouldn't even need to develop anything; just strike a branding deal with Claria (or whatever they're called these days).
That's not a rhetorical question. I have no idea how easy it is to make a game compatible with both Windows and Linux but I assume that it's a bit more complicated than changing backslashes to forward slashes. I also don't know how big the market is for Linux games but I doubt it's huge. If it takes an extra, say, 20% longer to make a game Linux-compatible I'm not surprised that it doesn't happen more often.
On the other hand perhaps it's just lazy design. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who doesn't share my ignorance.
The article suggests not that it's doing anything better, but that since it has only 0.8% of the market the malware authors don't bother to work around it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sorry, can't stop - have to take my seven octillion Libraries of Congress for a walk".
A PC using that board would be able to reduce the download time of a typical high-definition feature-length movie from 30 minutes to one second, the company said.
That's nice, but I don't know of anyone able to provide me with that movie in one second, much less anyone with the bandwidth to receive it (or write it to disk) that quickly. The bottleneck in my downloading experience sure as hell doesn't exist within my beige box.
Will this actually be useful for anything in 2010?
I don't doubt you for a moment, but I can imagine this being a fantastically brilliant concept. While I did well at school, as I imagine most people here did, we can doubtless all remember a large segment of students who simply weren't into traditional learning in any of its forms.
Now contrast that will some sort of game in the style of Typing of the Dead - a simple, cheaply-implemented game which turned learning to type into something entertaining. I see no reason why a clever development team couldn't concentrate the same sort of adrenaline and advancement motivation into spelling or arithmetic games. Off the top of my head: imagine a sort of tetris game where number descend and have to be placed in rows to achieve a pre-determined multiple of x. Or even a direct rip-off of TotD where numbers have to be calculated in order to 'shoot' zombies.
Perhaps these would be entirely useless. But I think it's worth a shot - we're looking at what may be the first generation to have a practical opportunity of learning via gaming. It may turn out to be worse than traditional textbook learning; it may slash the number of illiterate and innumerate adults in our society. Given the scope of the problem and the possibilities of a solution it surely merits further study.
Q: Why was the Egyptian boy confused? ...fine, I'll get my coat.
A: Because his daddy was a mummy.
Wikipedia has a list of minerals, some of which have excellent names. My current favourite is Hexatestibiopanickelite.
"Aargh! This mineral has given me six testicles!"
Even with a less horrifying model we're still left with the reality of a woman covered in rancid scum. Not my bag, though perhaps the "anything with an orifice" crowd wouldn't object.
Perhaps they're aiming it at the same group who somehow find value in myspace. It smacks of the skin-deep, frothy 'self-expression' that's supposedly facilitated by designer mobile phone covers.
It sounds entirely meaningless to me, but presumably a fat, curmudgeonly old fucker isn't part of Sony's target demographic. Anecdotal evidence suggests that every generation finds its successors superficial, easily distracted by shiny claptrap and utterly lacking in discernment. As I get older I not only turn into my father; I become increasingly aware that he was right.
Bah.
It's an interesting marketing strategy, isn't it? Late, worse and more expensive. I'm starting to wonder why any Europeans will actually bother to buy the thing.
Let's hope that they don't.
You can reply by hitting the link underneath the new-fangled threshold selection bar on the left-hand side. They've done a great job of hiding it, I have to say.
DRM hinders piracy and increases sales. This generates more money for new content and therefore more consumer value.
That's probably their pitch. I think it's largely a crock of shit but, then again, Macrovision probably privately thinks so too.
Ah, that makes sense - thank you for the excellent explanation!
Just out of interest: if we don't know whether or not it's going to hit, how do we know that if it does it will land in the Pacific?
Who gives a damn what something is 'for'? So bingo is for geriatrics and Harry Potter's for kids; doesn't stop me enjoying either of them.
If you enjoyed Viva Piñata before Gates opened his mouth you have no reason to enjoy it any less afterwards. If you let marketing demographics dictate how you spend your leisure time you deserve to be miserable.
Genuine question. As far as I'm aware, in order to take someone to court you need to claim that they've broken one or more laws. So does anyone know what Myspace has allegedly done, or not done, which is supposed to have broken the law? All the articles mutter things about negligence, but that surely requires an unfulfilled legal requirement of the service provider.
This case is clearly wrong on every level, but I'm curious to know what grounds these people think that they have for lodging a case. Or is it a straightforward greedy lawyer thing?
Given a sufficiently large group of people, some of them will be wankers.
Wah! Some IT people are nasty! Yeah, isn't humanity a horrible thing? Ever met an unpleasant doctor, lawyer, bus driver, teacher, plumber? But let's forget about reality and hurl some ill-considered generalisations instead.
Or better yet, let's not. I've worked in IT for ten years or so and the vast majority of my colleagues have been professionals who behave...well, professionally. Some users are easier to interact with than others; a particularly incalcitrant customer will provoke the odd grumble back in the IT office. A member of staff who publically insults/intmidates/ridicules/humiliates a user should, and usually will, get a smack from the management stick.
Of course attitude problems will sometimes arise and fail to be corrected, and the appropriate manager should be bludgeoned with the aforementioned stick. More often, IT staff will work with their user base to achieve a mutually satisfactory goal. Painting the entire industry as a bunch of ill-bred sociopaths is wrong, stupid and insulting.
Typical fucking user.
Just because you can whip out a microscope and examine every inch of her body (every pimple, every blemish, every hair), doesn't mean you do.
Can you? I think that attempting to examine my wife's pimples with a microscope would most likely earn me a swift punch to the neck.
You're anticipating 500,000 requests a day, so let's bump it up to a million to give you a bit of wiggle-room. Assuming a worst-case scenario of those queries being shoe-horned into a typical 8-hour working day, that equates to an average of 35 queries a second, multiplied by some factor to account for peak usage. I have no experience of MySQL specifically but that doesn't sound like an unreasonable ball-park to me - with a decent server, proper indexing and well-written queries I don't see why you should struggle.
(This is obviously subject to the size and structure of your database, but I'm guessing that you don't want to join dozens of tables all containing millions of records).
Before you run out and buy an Oracle licence I would attempt to run some tests on your current set-up. Presumably you have, or can acquire, an idea of the ultimate database structure and data volumes? You may find that you just need to optimise your database and spend a few grand on a better server. As for the reporting question: if you don't need to report on real-time data you can perhaps perform a daily load to your reporting server in the middle of the night when usage is low.
And in any case, your application will hopefully be portable between different database systems without massive effort, so you may be able to defer a final decision until you've got a better idea of what your database needs to be able to do.
You can forget the objects and anything else about the thread, and feel free to mod as off-topic as you wish, but read The Dark is Rising anyway. Fantastic stuff, especially this close to Christmas.
You may notice by my username that I anticipated this threat years in advance. I have intended all along to make my fortune by providing wombat-neutralisation services to the fledgling WiMAX industry.
Except that if it works and gives us an alternative source of power generation it will have proven to be a trivially small amount of money. In my view it's money well spent, with the risk/reward balance way over in the project's favour.
Why did he need the NYT to provide a wake-up call? He's a senior VP, he's been there for three years and, by his own cheerful admission, his company's strategy and organisational structure are screwed. Shoddy leadership, no accountability, no direction, massive redundancy, and a mass exodus of the valuable staff.
Who's fucking fault is that? What's he been doing for the last three years? Why has he allowed Yahoo!!! to get into its current state?
The implicit admission being that he is one of the people he describes as "phoning it in", I assume that he will be including himself in the 15-20% redundancy.
Yeah.
The vast majority of heterosexual males are disgusted with homosexuality. This isn't something that liberals want to hear, but it's true. This is about forcing something on the consumer that they don't want. The standard reaction of the consumer is not to buy it.
My counter-suggestion, similarly based on wild conjecture, is that most people care much less than you do. For reference: well, anything popular that has homosexuality in it somewhere. Take your pick.
I think that the arena of armchair hypothesis favours my speculation over yours, in this instance.
Or any games at all, for that matter. Given their previous history, perhaps they could generate enough marketing spin to sell it as a 'content delivery platform for enriched surfing and targeted purchasing opportunities'.
They wouldn't even need to develop anything; just strike a branding deal with Claria (or whatever they're called these days).
Or rather, a viable one?
That's not a rhetorical question. I have no idea how easy it is to make a game compatible with both Windows and Linux but I assume that it's a bit more complicated than changing backslashes to forward slashes. I also don't know how big the market is for Linux games but I doubt it's huge. If it takes an extra, say, 20% longer to make a game Linux-compatible I'm not surprised that it doesn't happen more often.
On the other hand perhaps it's just lazy design. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who doesn't share my ignorance.
The article suggests not that it's doing anything better, but that since it has only 0.8% of the market the malware authors don't bother to work around it.