They're a company with more money than god, and some of the best programers in the world.. if they don't do something correctly the first time it's ALWAYS on purpose...
How silly. I'm sure it's been five years since a Windows OS release and they're having to scale back features to claw onto the tail end of 06 with Vista on purpose.
Money and a good workforce only take you so far if you don't have the proper management to direct them to their best ends. You don't have to quasi-deify the company to demonstrate their malintentions.
If only all advertising were so thoughtful. I feel obligated to point out, though, that a reasonable number of westerners do know how to be happy, though they likely still spend all their money.:)
"My issue with the article is that he says at the end, "I[n] some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux," but never says what those ways are."
Well, this article's name was "Review, Part 5: Where Vista Fails". I'm sure the other four parts have less emphasis on failure.
"If you say this about Apollo, what do you think about the pointless research on the even more expensive space station?"
It's a catastrophic waste of money. I'm glad we now have a NASA administrator who agrees.
Yes, there's been some science done on Apollo/ISS, but a ludicrously small amount in light of the cost of the operations. The ISS is estimated at circa $100b over its lifetime last I checked; in contrast, the Deep Impact probe cost $300m, 3% of the cost. Spirit and Opportunity cost under a billion. Hubble cost $14b inflation adjusted, and would've been less if it were serviced by anything but the Shuttle.
Perhaps you somehow fail to recognize that company policies are not retroactive. Of course the Gamecube isn't full of "revolutionary" games; the whole revolution direction PR didn't exist until a year or two ago, and games reflecting that new ideal do not pop out of thin air instantly. The strategy is just beginning to manifest itself with the likes of Nintendogs and the DS Kirby game. It's funny how you managed to avoid mentioning the DS at all, as it's the main currently available result of Nintendo's focus on innovation.
Claiming that it's an EyeToy ripoff (how are they even close?) underscores the simplicity of your grasp of the situation. Please try to be more open to thoughts which contradict your personal preferences.
"I suspect that this barebones configuration meets the need of most Americans, who are not tech savy."
Are you serious? Did you not see the article on Windows 'N' being a remarkable failure? People want their computers to be able to, shock of shocks, do things out of the box, especially those who aren't tech savvy.
But hey, who needs facts and reality when you have Slashdot dogma.
Does it really MATTER? There're enough geeky things to argue about that actually have a point instead of sniping at someone's syntax. You obviously understood what he meant, and he provided reasoning for it, so whether it's right or not, what's the point in debating it? If it's disprovable with internet sources, he can do it himself without your help. Trying to puff up your ego by "pwning" people with your amazing knowledge of technical terms? Please.
On the other hand, if you'd like to discuss, say, the social implications of the advancement of AI, I'm all game.
Your comments in this thread are so astoundingly shortsighted that I wonder if I'm just feeding trolls by replying. But in the event that I'm not...
Engineering problems are rarely a matter of simply finding a solution. There are always tradeoffs between costs, efficiencies, and results, and improvements to be made in each. The new locomotive method is vastly more energy efficient than the old, which in itself easily justifies keeping a test robot around.
And on the general topic of usefulness, even if their results lately had been lackluster, they don't justify sending the robot to be "productive" any more than physicists should be sent to do manual labor if they can't manage to crank a theory out. Their potential ultimate benefit to society is much greater in their ivory tower, even if they don't produce immediate results, because the rewards of a success are orders of magnitude larger.
Now then, if you can attempt to actually comprehend the general meaning of my post rather than choosing a sentence or two to snipe at as you seem to have done with the other posters, you might find yourself more enlightened.
One thing I have to agree with him upon: the demonization that he's fighting America because he dislikes freedom is absurd. The only spin on that argument that is remotely plausible is that he's fighting against secularization and disrespect for Islamic law, and in that case why wouldn't he just come out and say it rather than beat around the Bush with proclamations that they're supporting those bad guys who hurt some of our guys?
No, bin Laden truly believes that the US is meddling in affairs where it does not belong. The way he goes about acting upon his beliefs is somewhat less than proper, of course. But they are, at least in his twisted mind, well founded.
Before now I was holding a shred of hope that perhaps I was looking at the PSP's issues too negatively, that Sony would find a way to compensate for them, that they were just getting their feet wet and might improve now that they have some feedback. That hope is now gone.
Time and again he makes comments that indicate they just don't understand the portable market. Users won't be satisfied with sub-PS2 graphics? I realize Sony aims for an older audience, but between the small (though comparatively large for a handheld) screen and, well, the fact that it's a *portable* and not meant for hardcore gaming sessions, is it really worth having beefier specs at the expense of battery life and price? And on the same tack, what older gamer would want PS2 graphics on a tiny screen (and where) when he has his PS3 at home? It doesn't make sense. And, of course, the futility of making a powerful system and then telling the developers to limit how they use it. I'll give them partial credit for making the batteries swappable, but until they reveal if/how you can keep the game going I'm not convinced.
Then there's the proprietary and expensive DVD/MP3 media, but that's old news. What really knocked my socks off is that they don't think leaving the disc exposed is a problem! It makes no sense. Being Sony I'm sure they'll avoid being complete retards and have some sort of case, but why? What's the point of giving the UMDs their own little caddy if it doesn't even cover it?
Okay, perhaps I STILL have a shred of hope, that they'll have some brilliant marketing package with pack-in extra batteries and memory sticks, but for them to do that and maintain a competitive price would hemorrhage money like no other. Outlook not so good.
Um, I'm not even entirely sure what you're getting at... but the point is, two photons are entangled, you move one far away, then mess with the first one and the second one instantly changes in the same way. The photons don't teleport, but their information does.
Yeah, except not.;D Nobody cares enough to register two new accounts just to post (in the same style, I might add) on your behalf except you.;)
"I wish he didn't have to follow me every-freakin'-where."
Don't flatter yourself. Reading Slashdot and stalking you are two very different things.;P
With something that close to a PC, I'd rather be using Windows anyway. There's no point in creating compatibility issues for myself just to be able to say I screwed Microsoft. With cell phones syncing isn't an issue, so go ahead and have that market.
They represent not just a new console, but a new way of doing games; nobody else is transferring whole games across the Net. They seem to be leveraging their system as more interoperable with what's already out there (you thought XBOX seemed like a PC?). I think the best mix will come in the generation of consoles after the Phantom, with a convergence of both retail and downloadable media. A lot of people don't want the hassle of waiting while downloading new games, but there's a lot of reasons why buying a game and then updating it over the Net would be a good thing - say if some horrendous exploit or bug was discovered after launch (cough FZero cough).
And then there's the possibility of hooking up the old SNES controller... hey, I can dream, right?;)
Inept. I can't believe we've wasted so many tens of billions on it when they could be going towards something truly beneficial, like the SSC. We all hear about the potential for science, etc etc, yet when's the last time that anyone read a paper which mentions the ISS in any way? And the truth is that a better understanding of the fundamental physics behind it would do more to advance space travel than another new series of rockets and stations designed on essentially the same principles we've been using for decades.
Re:This is not "Grid Computing"
on
Grid Processing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
They do work on the same principle though. It's just that grid computing on a network involves processors that are vastly separated and consume different resources, whereas the "new" grid computing involves tightly bound, hardwired processors that share resources. It's not like you have to be an engineer to figure out the difference... and if you don't read about it and you get confused, that's your own fault.;)
"A better analogy would be if the highway dept made a bunch of roads that they didn't want the public to use but didn't bother to put gates on them or even a sign that says 'no trespassing'."
Just because it is connected to a public network doesn't mean it is public property - quite to the contrary. It's more akin to a house. There's a sidewalk leading straight to my front door, and if you knock you'll probably get some interaction, but crawl through my window and I'll call the cops and come after you with a knife. Even if it was unlocked! I guess I'm just harsh that way...
Insurers aren't concerned with the cause of the damage if it was external, because from their standpoint it doesn't really matter - they're not there to punish, just to repay you. On the other hand, if you share blame for it due to passivity, then you should be compensated less. That doesn't make the perpetrator any less culpable.
"Most, if not all of them, left gaping holes that amounted to revolving doors at the front end of their networks."
If I left the door to my apartment open and someone randomly walked in, I wouldn't be asking him if he wanted something to drink. No one said it had to be hard to be illegal.
You get burned. Anyone who breaks the law and flaunts it is going to get caught, regardless of how honorable his intentions. Laws do not only exist to punish "bad guys;" they exist to make society an orderly place, and people who run around hacking others' servers willy-nilly are going to be causing chaos (ie the costs of the IT department figuring out wtf's going on with their network, as someone else mentioned). Awhile back the DoD conducted an authorized hacking of their system (with unpleasant conclusions). That is what needs to happen, because when dealing with gray areas there're shades of black. Remember the "good" anti-Blaster patching worm, and how it shut down systems in Canada because of its overly eager replication? It's foolish to presume that we should trust in the skills of a lone ranger. Get off yer high horse, cowboy.
"Along about the Canary Islands [Columbus] sinks the first ship, just throws it away, deliberately. [Etc etc.]"
That's abusing the analogy. Space flight is not seafaring, and to treat it as such is naive. Columbus had the benefit of free propulsion in the form of wind; rockets do not, and so they have to worry about their weight. I could construct an equally valid opposing argument about, say, whether a 300lb man or a 150lb man would be more likely to finish a marathon. Proof by analogy means nothing.
After thinking about the idea more, it seems that this is only a resting point on the path to better energy. We have these organisms which happen to manufacture proteins (I assume that's what does the work) that metabolize sugar into electricity. They also happen to manufacture hundreds or thousands of other proteins, many of which are quite helpful in spreading progeny but superfluous in their electrical purpose. Once we have a better understanding of how they work and how to imitate them - and I'm sure the 20 or 30 year target zone the article cites is ample for that - why not strip away all the excess baggage and make a lean, mean electric machine?
Though bacteria possess great advantages over the machines of today with such things as replication, there're a lot of things biological systems are vastly inferior at, like energy efficiency. In the long run in which this technology will be relevant, there's nothing fundamental to keep us from improving on nature's design by leaps and bounds. Ooh... it sends shivers down my spine.;)
Slashdot Mirror
They're a company with more money than god, and some of the best programers in the world.. if they don't do something correctly the first time it's ALWAYS on purpose...
How silly. I'm sure it's been five years since a Windows OS release and they're having to scale back features to claw onto the tail end of 06 with Vista on purpose.
Money and a good workforce only take you so far if you don't have the proper management to direct them to their best ends. You don't have to quasi-deify the company to demonstrate their malintentions.
If only all advertising were so thoughtful. I feel obligated to point out, though, that a reasonable number of westerners do know how to be happy, though they likely still spend all their money. :)
Kinda makes you wonder if fighting terrorism is the real goal....
'Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.'
"My issue with the article is that he says at the end, "I[n] some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux," but never says what those ways are."
Well, this article's name was "Review, Part 5: Where Vista Fails". I'm sure the other four parts have less emphasis on failure.
"If you say this about Apollo, what do you think about the pointless research on the even more expensive space station?"
It's a catastrophic waste of money. I'm glad we now have a NASA administrator who agrees.
Yes, there's been some science done on Apollo/ISS, but a ludicrously small amount in light of the cost of the operations. The ISS is estimated at circa $100b over its lifetime last I checked; in contrast, the Deep Impact probe cost $300m, 3% of the cost. Spirit and Opportunity cost under a billion. Hubble cost $14b inflation adjusted, and would've been less if it were serviced by anything but the Shuttle.
I'd take those over the ISS any day.
Perhaps you somehow fail to recognize that company policies are not retroactive. Of course the Gamecube isn't full of "revolutionary" games; the whole revolution direction PR didn't exist until a year or two ago, and games reflecting that new ideal do not pop out of thin air instantly. The strategy is just beginning to manifest itself with the likes of Nintendogs and the DS Kirby game. It's funny how you managed to avoid mentioning the DS at all, as it's the main currently available result of Nintendo's focus on innovation.
Claiming that it's an EyeToy ripoff (how are they even close?) underscores the simplicity of your grasp of the situation. Please try to be more open to thoughts which contradict your personal preferences.
"I suspect that this barebones configuration meets the need of most Americans, who are not tech savy."
Are you serious? Did you not see the article on Windows 'N' being a remarkable failure? People want their computers to be able to, shock of shocks, do things out of the box, especially those who aren't tech savvy.
But hey, who needs facts and reality when you have Slashdot dogma.
Does it really MATTER? There're enough geeky things to argue about that actually have a point instead of sniping at someone's syntax. You obviously understood what he meant, and he provided reasoning for it, so whether it's right or not, what's the point in debating it? If it's disprovable with internet sources, he can do it himself without your help. Trying to puff up your ego by "pwning" people with your amazing knowledge of technical terms? Please.
On the other hand, if you'd like to discuss, say, the social implications of the advancement of AI, I'm all game.
Your comments in this thread are so astoundingly shortsighted that I wonder if I'm just feeding trolls by replying. But in the event that I'm not...
Engineering problems are rarely a matter of simply finding a solution. There are always tradeoffs between costs, efficiencies, and results, and improvements to be made in each. The new locomotive method is vastly more energy efficient than the old, which in itself easily justifies keeping a test robot around.
And on the general topic of usefulness, even if their results lately had been lackluster, they don't justify sending the robot to be "productive" any more than physicists should be sent to do manual labor if they can't manage to crank a theory out. Their potential ultimate benefit to society is much greater in their ivory tower, even if they don't produce immediate results, because the rewards of a success are orders of magnitude larger.
Now then, if you can attempt to actually comprehend the general meaning of my post rather than choosing a sentence or two to snipe at as you seem to have done with the other posters, you might find yourself more enlightened.
One thing I have to agree with him upon: the demonization that he's fighting America because he dislikes freedom is absurd. The only spin on that argument that is remotely plausible is that he's fighting against secularization and disrespect for Islamic law, and in that case why wouldn't he just come out and say it rather than beat around the Bush with proclamations that they're supporting those bad guys who hurt some of our guys?
No, bin Laden truly believes that the US is meddling in affairs where it does not belong. The way he goes about acting upon his beliefs is somewhat less than proper, of course. But they are, at least in his twisted mind, well founded.
Before now I was holding a shred of hope that perhaps I was looking at the PSP's issues too negatively, that Sony would find a way to compensate for them, that they were just getting their feet wet and might improve now that they have some feedback. That hope is now gone. Time and again he makes comments that indicate they just don't understand the portable market. Users won't be satisfied with sub-PS2 graphics? I realize Sony aims for an older audience, but between the small (though comparatively large for a handheld) screen and, well, the fact that it's a *portable* and not meant for hardcore gaming sessions, is it really worth having beefier specs at the expense of battery life and price? And on the same tack, what older gamer would want PS2 graphics on a tiny screen (and where) when he has his PS3 at home? It doesn't make sense. And, of course, the futility of making a powerful system and then telling the developers to limit how they use it. I'll give them partial credit for making the batteries swappable, but until they reveal if/how you can keep the game going I'm not convinced. Then there's the proprietary and expensive DVD/MP3 media, but that's old news. What really knocked my socks off is that they don't think leaving the disc exposed is a problem! It makes no sense. Being Sony I'm sure they'll avoid being complete retards and have some sort of case, but why? What's the point of giving the UMDs their own little caddy if it doesn't even cover it? Okay, perhaps I STILL have a shred of hope, that they'll have some brilliant marketing package with pack-in extra batteries and memory sticks, but for them to do that and maintain a competitive price would hemorrhage money like no other. Outlook not so good.
Um, I'm not even entirely sure what you're getting at... but the point is, two photons are entangled, you move one far away, then mess with the first one and the second one instantly changes in the same way. The photons don't teleport, but their information does.
It was the PROPERTIES of the particles that were teleported. Not the actual photons. You lose.
Yeah, except not. ;D Nobody cares enough to register two new accounts just to post (in the same style, I might add) on your behalf except you. ;)
"I wish he didn't have to follow me every-freakin'-where."
Don't flatter yourself. Reading Slashdot and stalking you are two very different things. ;P
You can find most good soundtracks on the Internet anyway. If they don't want to get paid for it, then they won't.
With something that close to a PC, I'd rather be using Windows anyway. There's no point in creating compatibility issues for myself just to be able to say I screwed Microsoft. With cell phones syncing isn't an issue, so go ahead and have that market.
They represent not just a new console, but a new way of doing games; nobody else is transferring whole games across the Net. They seem to be leveraging their system as more interoperable with what's already out there (you thought XBOX seemed like a PC?). I think the best mix will come in the generation of consoles after the Phantom, with a convergence of both retail and downloadable media. A lot of people don't want the hassle of waiting while downloading new games, but there's a lot of reasons why buying a game and then updating it over the Net would be a good thing - say if some horrendous exploit or bug was discovered after launch (cough FZero cough). And then there's the possibility of hooking up the old SNES controller... hey, I can dream, right? ;)
Inept. I can't believe we've wasted so many tens of billions on it when they could be going towards something truly beneficial, like the SSC. We all hear about the potential for science, etc etc, yet when's the last time that anyone read a paper which mentions the ISS in any way? And the truth is that a better understanding of the fundamental physics behind it would do more to advance space travel than another new series of rockets and stations designed on essentially the same principles we've been using for decades.
They do work on the same principle though. It's just that grid computing on a network involves processors that are vastly separated and consume different resources, whereas the "new" grid computing involves tightly bound, hardwired processors that share resources. It's not like you have to be an engineer to figure out the difference... and if you don't read about it and you get confused, that's your own fault. ;)
Just because it is connected to a public network doesn't mean it is public property - quite to the contrary. It's more akin to a house. There's a sidewalk leading straight to my front door, and if you knock you'll probably get some interaction, but crawl through my window and I'll call the cops and come after you with a knife. Even if it was unlocked! I guess I'm just harsh that way...
Insurers aren't concerned with the cause of the damage if it was external, because from their standpoint it doesn't really matter - they're not there to punish, just to repay you. On the other hand, if you share blame for it due to passivity, then you should be compensated less. That doesn't make the perpetrator any less culpable.
"Most, if not all of them, left gaping holes that amounted to revolving doors at the front end of their networks." If I left the door to my apartment open and someone randomly walked in, I wouldn't be asking him if he wanted something to drink. No one said it had to be hard to be illegal.
You get burned. Anyone who breaks the law and flaunts it is going to get caught, regardless of how honorable his intentions. Laws do not only exist to punish "bad guys;" they exist to make society an orderly place, and people who run around hacking others' servers willy-nilly are going to be causing chaos (ie the costs of the IT department figuring out wtf's going on with their network, as someone else mentioned). Awhile back the DoD conducted an authorized hacking of their system (with unpleasant conclusions). That is what needs to happen, because when dealing with gray areas there're shades of black. Remember the "good" anti-Blaster patching worm, and how it shut down systems in Canada because of its overly eager replication? It's foolish to presume that we should trust in the skills of a lone ranger. Get off yer high horse, cowboy.
"Along about the Canary Islands [Columbus] sinks the first ship, just throws it away, deliberately. [Etc etc.]"
That's abusing the analogy. Space flight is not seafaring, and to treat it as such is naive. Columbus had the benefit of free propulsion in the form of wind; rockets do not, and so they have to worry about their weight. I could construct an equally valid opposing argument about, say, whether a 300lb man or a 150lb man would be more likely to finish a marathon. Proof by analogy means nothing.
After thinking about the idea more, it seems that this is only a resting point on the path to better energy. We have these organisms which happen to manufacture proteins (I assume that's what does the work) that metabolize sugar into electricity. They also happen to manufacture hundreds or thousands of other proteins, many of which are quite helpful in spreading progeny but superfluous in their electrical purpose. Once we have a better understanding of how they work and how to imitate them - and I'm sure the 20 or 30 year target zone the article cites is ample for that - why not strip away all the excess baggage and make a lean, mean electric machine? Though bacteria possess great advantages over the machines of today with such things as replication, there're a lot of things biological systems are vastly inferior at, like energy efficiency. In the long run in which this technology will be relevant, there's nothing fundamental to keep us from improving on nature's design by leaps and bounds. Ooh... it sends shivers down my spine. ;)