Sorry I have to disagree with Mr. Jaffe. A good game is like a good movie. You become immersed in it for hours. And it should always have an excellent single player version which, in my experience, on many top titles is severly lacking. Too much "Call of Duty" and "Battlefield" type play is out there and it's primarily geared towards selling copies for multiplayer. As someone who really treasures the immersion and cinematic flavor of a good single-player shooter, I refuse to invest my money into something we used to call a "twitch game." It becomes boring as all you do is run and try not to die. You don't get to really experience the game.
Look out Oracle. You wanted to pick a fight with an 800 lb gorilla, didn't you. You had to think with your wallet and not with your brain. Well, with this kind of ammunition I think Google is poised to really mess up your day.
Ah. A vacation that leaves you with a nice healthy glow! What could be better! But seriously, sign me up. The research possibilities are endless. All the sci-fi mutant stuff of "S.t.a.l.k.e.r" aside, seeing how life responds and adapts to that type of environment is fascinating.
We, in the electronics industry, solved the problem decades ago by two simple solutions. Color coding and making connectors unique so you cant plug the wrong plug into the wrong connector. You might have to stock more tubing and catheters - but when human life is involved the argument falls flat.
And yet, with human life on the line, the medical industry cant seem to grasp such a simple concept. Very sad, and it makes me worry as I have a daughter that is expecting soon.
Let's see. On another recent article it was stated that the average car has several million lines of code running in it. I haven't come across a sentient Prius yet.
And there's that pesky parallel processing the brain does. I don't think that a rack full of Nvidia Tesla cards can approach the average two year old's parallel processing capability.
I agree, Kurzweil is smoking something and not sharing.
On my Nexus One (or substitute your favorite Android phone running Froyo 2.2) and keep on surfing. Ho hum.
Personally, I don't abuse the privilege. I will take my notebook with me when I go to a Coffee Shop, buy coffee and a snack and enjoy reading Slashdot (and others) while I sip my cup. I suppose they could ban anyone bringing in a notebook computer, but then they would lose me as a customer.
As an engineer I work to make hardware robust and failure resistant. But to make hardware that actually will destroy itself is insane.
We all know software is never absolutely perfect. There are always bugs no matter how comprehensive the testing. Somewhere, sometime there's an application that does something to throw an exception. We've all seen kernels crash. It happens.
So Motorola has put into their device a mechanism that can at any time there is a crash kill the hardware permanently??? That can only lead to one result. A massive recall and/or class action suit to replace thousands of bricked phones.
I'll go one step further - they have planted the most perfect exploit ever. Just write an app that causes the fuse to trip. You cant, you say? It's too protected? Bull! Go ahead and live in la-la land where everything is perfect, software never fails, and no one writes malicious software.
Ok, how about the fact that Android is open source. As always, the open source community is willing and able to help with bugfixes, features, and patches to make what is a great mobile operating system even better. That is the point, Motorola! Get it through your tiny, pointy head! It's not *YOUR* O.S. And it's *MY* hardware. After I buy it, I can use it, smash it, drown it in water, and run over it with a truck. I paid for it, I didn't "rent" it, and I don't need your blessings to upgrade it.
I'll stick with my HTC. At least until they decide to follow suit...
I had a 1969 Chevy Nova that had this same kind of problem. The design of the accelerator was a set of rods that was hinged off the pedal, up the firewall to a pivot, and straight forward to the carburetor. All was well and good until an engine mount broke and it rocked a bit to one side. Engine mounts are intentionally captive, so it never breaks free, but suddenly there's a lot more transverse travel. Make a hard turn in traffic and the throttle gets pinned full open by that fixed linkage as the engine rocks to one side and stays there due to torque.
I was a scared 16 year old kid in a suddenly hurtling rocket. But even through that, I had the presence of mind to reach up and turn the key off.
So the question begs: Why didn't these people just switch off the engine when things went wrong?
Well, I recognize the setting in the screen shots as the French Quarter in New Orleans around Royal Street. Looks like a typical Mardi Gras to me. Especially the morning after.
-dh
It's about time this whole lamebrain flawed "technology" finally was put in the grave. There was a lot more than just Amateur Radio at stake. Military, Shipboard, and Aircraft use the 3-30 MHz band as well an I think they wouldn't have been as nice as the ARRL.
We all know that heat coagulates protein. Just boil an egg. 1/64" of an inch of intense heating is enough to cook your cornea. Instant cataract. Out of all this "testing" with screaming "volunteers" I haven't really seen any conclusive evidence come forth that this wont do eye injury to a person. And we all know how "non-letal" (read "less than lethal") weapons get overused.
At my last job, the boss allowed us to request a Logitech Marble Mouse instead of a regular soap-bar mouse. It took less than a minute to fall in love with the thing. Instead of cramped wrists shoving around a rectangular box, suddenly I was able to use my fingertips to use the CAD system. In a matter of days, all the problems I had suffered from due to years of CAD work disappeared.
I bought some extras to outfit the home systems.
Now that I've changed jobs, that marble mouse is still on my desk, working as well as the day I first got it, and I'll never look back.
And yes - gaming takes on a whole new dimension when you use a ball instead of a mouse. I'm a FPS addict and being able to quickly turn, look, and fire makes the game more fun. Plus I don't end up with cramps in my wrist after playing for an hour or so.
Well, I'm glad I didn't give up on engineering. After 20+ years in the field, working in analog, rf, and digital, I had almost given up and changed fields thinking that outsourcing plus imported workforces would finally kill my career off.
Hopefully the demand will keep wages where they should be. I'm tired of jerks with nothing more than a "C"-average MBA in spewing worthless marketspeak make twice my salary.
In order to attract good, skilled, qualified, dedicated people - you have to pay them. And add incentives, benefits, and merit raises to keep them. Not underpay them and have them sit under a dangling axe just waiting to be outsourced into oblivion.
What sensible person would put in 6+ years of engineering education plus student loans just to be underpaid and fear their job might go away at any moment.
Looks like the field might still have a chance of survival...for now.
You know, now that I think about it, there wasn't a lot of VHF/UHF gear for amateur radio back then during that huge solar max. Mostly old surplus, vibrator power supply, VHF trunk-mounted FM wideband business radios recrystalled for 2M. 70cm was largely unexplored territory. Forget everything above that, unless you happened to have a military surplus klystron laying around somewhere. 1296 MHz and above was hugely experimental and the average amateur couldn't touch the gear to play around with those bands..
So, this is really the first time we as amateurs get to explore ionospheric reflection propagation at those high frequencies. Exciting.
Only sour note is that a lot of birds out in space are going to have myriad problems. Surface charging, solar panel deterioriation, charged particles ripping through circuitry. Ugh. Only the RAD-hardened military stuff will get through relatively unscathed. We'll see, but I wouldn't want to be one of the operators of those birds.
73
Well, yes. Seems even the environmentalists are agreeing with that. I would say sequestering radioactive waste underground would be a lot better than releasing tons of carbon into the atmosphere. And the new reactor designs are meltdown resistant and far more safer than the old ones.
What ever happened to hydroelectric power? Geothermal?
Oh, yeah. It's cheaper to dig up the planet to burn coal than it is to fund some real research into bringing cheap energy to the masses. Maybe when some other country takes the initiative and produces something useful the U.S. will copy.
Problem with all this is that no one has addressed the very real possibility of eye damage. Seems that is an issue with laser weapons and is restraining their use as an antipersonnel device, but the possibility of generating cataracts in-masse or literally boiling the liquid inside the eye has not been addressed with this human-sized microwave oven. And if all the hyperbole is right about cell-phones causing cancer, what about being exposed to a EM field that is an incredible order of magnitude more than the puny few milliwatts a cell phone transmits.
Since this is a "non-lethal" weapon, wait for it to be deployed on every single excuse.
This is a bad idea no matter how you slice it. As an engineer with extensive RF experience, this really sickens me.
Good riddance. After having designed several embedded systems using MIPS processors with their boot vector in the middle of memory, the cached vs uncached memory linked to an address bit, the completely bizarre SYSAD bus interface instead of the normal/RD,/WR, Address and Data I'm personally glad to see it go. The only redeeming feature was it's RISC core.
Just try to create large contiguous memory with half of it as uncached, the other cached, and the boot at BFC00000. Ugh.
MIPS really smells like an academic exercise in RISC. Others like PowerPC are a dream to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry I have to disagree with Mr. Jaffe. A good game is like a good movie. You become immersed in it for hours. And it should always have an excellent single player version which, in my experience, on many top titles is severly lacking. Too much "Call of Duty" and "Battlefield" type play is out there and it's primarily geared towards selling copies for multiplayer. As someone who really treasures the immersion and cinematic flavor of a good single-player shooter, I refuse to invest my money into something we used to call a "twitch game." It becomes boring as all you do is run and try not to die. You don't get to really experience the game.
Look out Oracle. You wanted to pick a fight with an 800 lb gorilla, didn't you. You had to think with your wallet and not with your brain. Well, with this kind of ammunition I think Google is poised to really mess up your day.
Ah. A vacation that leaves you with a nice healthy glow! What could be better!
But seriously, sign me up. The research possibilities are endless. All the sci-fi mutant stuff of "S.t.a.l.k.e.r" aside, seeing how life responds and adapts to that type of environment is fascinating.
We, in the electronics industry, solved the problem decades ago by two simple solutions. Color coding and making connectors unique so you cant plug the wrong plug into the wrong connector. You might have to stock more tubing and catheters - but when human life is involved the argument falls flat.
And yet, with human life on the line, the medical industry cant seem to grasp such a simple concept. Very sad, and it makes me worry as I have a daughter that is expecting soon.
Let's see. On another recent article it was stated that the average car has several million lines of code running in it. I haven't come across a sentient Prius yet.
And there's that pesky parallel processing the brain does. I don't think that a rack full of Nvidia Tesla cards can approach the average two year old's parallel processing capability.
I agree, Kurzweil is smoking something and not sharing.
On my Nexus One (or substitute your favorite Android phone running Froyo 2.2) and keep on surfing. Ho hum.
Personally, I don't abuse the privilege. I will take my notebook with me when I go to a Coffee Shop, buy coffee and a snack and enjoy reading Slashdot (and others) while I sip my cup. I suppose they could ban anyone bringing in a notebook computer, but then they would lose me as a customer.
As an engineer I work to make hardware robust and failure resistant. But to make hardware that actually will destroy itself is insane.
We all know software is never absolutely perfect. There are always bugs no matter how comprehensive the testing. Somewhere, sometime there's an application that does something to throw an exception. We've all seen kernels crash. It happens.
So Motorola has put into their device a mechanism that can at any time there is a crash kill the hardware permanently??? That can only lead to one result. A massive recall and/or class action suit to replace thousands of bricked phones.
I'll go one step further - they have planted the most perfect exploit ever. Just write an app that causes the fuse to trip. You cant, you say? It's too protected? Bull! Go ahead and live in la-la land where everything is perfect, software never fails, and no one writes malicious software.
Ok, how about the fact that Android is open source. As always, the open source community is willing and able to help with bugfixes, features, and patches to make what is a great mobile operating system even better. That is the point, Motorola! Get it through your tiny, pointy head! It's not *YOUR* O.S. And it's *MY* hardware. After I buy it, I can use it, smash it, drown it in water, and run over it with a truck. I paid for it, I didn't "rent" it, and I don't need your blessings to upgrade it.
I'll stick with my HTC. At least until they decide to follow suit...
I had a 1969 Chevy Nova that had this same kind of problem. The design of the accelerator was a set of rods that was hinged off the pedal, up the firewall to a pivot, and straight forward to the carburetor. All was well and good until an engine mount broke and it rocked a bit to one side. Engine mounts are intentionally captive, so it never breaks free, but suddenly there's a lot more transverse travel. Make a hard turn in traffic and the throttle gets pinned full open by that fixed linkage as the engine rocks to one side and stays there due to torque. I was a scared 16 year old kid in a suddenly hurtling rocket. But even through that, I had the presence of mind to reach up and turn the key off. So the question begs: Why didn't these people just switch off the engine when things went wrong?
Well, I recognize the setting in the screen shots as the French Quarter in New Orleans around Royal Street. Looks like a typical Mardi Gras to me. Especially the morning after. -dh
It's about time this whole lamebrain flawed "technology" finally was put in the grave. There was a lot more than just Amateur Radio at stake. Military, Shipboard, and Aircraft use the 3-30 MHz band as well an I think they wouldn't have been as nice as the ARRL.
We all know that heat coagulates protein. Just boil an egg. 1/64" of an inch of intense heating is enough to cook your cornea. Instant cataract. Out of all this "testing" with screaming "volunteers" I haven't really seen any conclusive evidence come forth that this wont do eye injury to a person. And we all know how "non-letal" (read "less than lethal") weapons get overused.
-dh
So Mitsubishi goes the way of the once-great Bell Labs. Sad.
Does that now make Apple a SCO litigation target??
At my last job, the boss allowed us to request a Logitech Marble Mouse instead of a regular soap-bar mouse. It took less than a minute to fall in love with the thing. Instead of cramped wrists shoving around a rectangular box, suddenly I was able to use my fingertips to use the CAD system. In a matter of days, all the problems I had suffered from due to years of CAD work disappeared.
I bought some extras to outfit the home systems.
Now that I've changed jobs, that marble mouse is still on my desk, working as well as the day I first got it, and I'll never look back.
And yes - gaming takes on a whole new dimension when you use a ball instead of a mouse. I'm a FPS addict and being able to quickly turn, look, and fire makes the game more fun. Plus I don't end up with cramps in my wrist after playing for an hour or so.
So, yes. I recommend them highly.
Well, I'm glad I didn't give up on engineering. After 20+ years in the field, working in analog, rf, and digital, I had almost given up and changed fields thinking that outsourcing plus imported workforces would finally kill my career off.
Hopefully the demand will keep wages where they should be. I'm tired of jerks with nothing more than a "C"-average MBA in spewing worthless marketspeak make twice my salary.
In order to attract good, skilled, qualified, dedicated people - you have to pay them. And add incentives, benefits, and merit raises to keep them. Not underpay them and have them sit under a dangling axe just waiting to be outsourced into oblivion.
What sensible person would put in 6+ years of engineering education plus student loans just to be underpaid and fear their job might go away at any moment.
Looks like the field might still have a chance of survival...for now.
-dh
Actually I think we should upgrade all the shuttle's computers to Vista just before launch. That should make BillyG feel right at home! :)
You know, now that I think about it, there wasn't a lot of VHF/UHF gear for amateur radio back then during that huge solar max. Mostly old surplus, vibrator power supply, VHF trunk-mounted FM wideband business radios recrystalled for 2M. 70cm was largely unexplored territory. Forget everything above that, unless you happened to have a military surplus klystron laying around somewhere. 1296 MHz and above was hugely experimental and the average amateur couldn't touch the gear to play around with those bands.. So, this is really the first time we as amateurs get to explore ionospheric reflection propagation at those high frequencies. Exciting. Only sour note is that a lot of birds out in space are going to have myriad problems. Surface charging, solar panel deterioriation, charged particles ripping through circuitry. Ugh. Only the RAD-hardened military stuff will get through relatively unscathed. We'll see, but I wouldn't want to be one of the operators of those birds. 73
Wonder how high the maximum usable frequency will rise to? Worldwide QRP on 6 meters? 2 meters? Can't wait.
Well, yes. Seems even the environmentalists are agreeing with that. I would say sequestering radioactive waste underground would be a lot better than releasing tons of carbon into the atmosphere. And the new reactor designs are meltdown resistant and far more safer than the old ones.
What ever happened to hydroelectric power? Geothermal?
Oh, yeah. It's cheaper to dig up the planet to burn coal than it is to fund some real research into bringing cheap energy to the masses. Maybe when some other country takes the initiative and produces something useful the U.S. will copy.
Or does WGA fail 22% of the time? Hmmm?
Ok, I'm taking bets... 10 to 1 Google buys it.
-dh
No you're not doing it right. UNWRAP the battery first - then chew on it. Sheesh.
..amen!
Problem with all this is that no one has addressed the very real possibility of eye damage. Seems that is an issue with laser weapons and is restraining their use as an antipersonnel device, but the possibility of generating cataracts in-masse or literally boiling the liquid inside the eye has not been addressed with this human-sized microwave oven. And if all the hyperbole is right about cell-phones causing cancer, what about being exposed to a EM field that is an incredible order of magnitude more than the puny few milliwatts a cell phone transmits.
Since this is a "non-lethal" weapon, wait for it to be deployed on every single excuse.
This is a bad idea no matter how you slice it. As an engineer with extensive RF experience, this really sickens me.
Good riddance. After having designed several embedded systems using MIPS processors with their boot vector in the middle of memory, the cached vs uncached memory linked to an address bit, the completely bizarre SYSAD bus interface instead of the normal /RD, /WR, Address and Data I'm personally glad to see it go. The only redeeming feature was it's RISC core.
Just try to create large contiguous memory with half of it as uncached, the other cached, and the boot at BFC00000. Ugh.
MIPS really smells like an academic exercise in RISC. Others like PowerPC are a dream to work with.