"Release their own player app"? I must be missing something here, but I feel compelled to point out that Apple unsurprisingly ships it with one that supports the same formats that their desktop player supports, basically the ones most commonly available and the ones they sell on iTunes. I don't think Apple has any interest in giving people the ability to play formats beyond those.
To put it another way, it'd be like the phone company trying to sell you a power service using the current supplied on the phone lines. The infrastructure just doesn't exist. The article doesn't seem to provide enough info to distinguish what exactly they intend to do, although it implies that they'd just use the powerline meters. It must just be bad reporting in this instance.
I don't think they mean that the smart meters themselves will be used for networking, I think they mean that the efforts to install proper powerline networking equipment at the electricity company's end can be shared with the efforts to install infrastructure to talk to the smart meters in the same locations.
It's rather like the growth of Steam on the PC. It didn't kill big-price retail titles, but it did make it a lot easier for people to sell little titles like Popcap's games.
Coordinating a binding mandate over a union of dozens of sovereign states, including one of the world's largest cellphone manufacturers, probably takes a bit longer than doing the same thing with one country with a notoriously closed cellphone market.
It doesn't provide a direct contractual way for them to say how the networks should/shouldn't be run, but it does give them the moral authority to step in and take action on anticompetitive or other grounds. If the government can give corporations a boost for the nation's best interests, it's entitled to give them a kick in the balls for the same reasons.
Actually the wonderful thing about Minecraft is that I was able to do all that with a pretty low time investment, maybe an average of 2-3 hours a week over the past few months, which leaves plenty of time for a normal human existence.
I think this (and the aforementioned absence of the Gawker breach) suggests they just kept a running list as the year went on, then wrote some copy for it when they were about to go on their holidays, and kicked it out the door.
It has in-game NOR gates. It is already known that you can build a turing-complete machine with NOR logic. Ergo, Minecraft is Turing complete. Kind of a cheat, really, it'd be interesting to know if you could do the same using just the physics.
The way he termed it was that it was a €20 game, but you got 50% off in Alpha and 25% off in Beta. So he's been upfront about the pricing from the outset. It's like a discounted pre-order that happens to come with work-in-progress versions of the game.
Nothing unique, just a different approach. You build things in Minecraft from the perspective of a small figure in the game world, and it's immediately graspable how you go about building something. It's less powerful, but the learning curve is more about the mechanics of getting into a position to place blocks than figuring out an interface. Throw in the resource-gathering and survival aspects of the game and you have quite a different play cycle. For example, if I decide to build a mine track in Minecraft, I have to consider how I'm going to gather the ores for the iron, which can be a challenge in itself, and then how to plot the track so I'm not having to carve up too many mountains, and where I'm going to take shelter at night while I do that work.
There's an obvious joke about Microsoft/Apple charging for the alpha version of an OS/gizmo here, and I'd just like to say that anyone who makes it should be ashamed of themselves.
From a first-person perspective you place and remove blocks, which have various properties, to build things. Some of those blocks can be combined and refined to make:
* New kinds of blocks, like glass or stairs * Tools, like pickaxes and torches * Interactable objects like doors, vehicles and refining furnaces * Sensors, switches, buttons and NOR gates, with which one can build everything from an automatic door to a turing-complete computer
The world you play in is procedurally generated from a seed and, depending on technical limitations, is several times the size of the surface of the earth, albeit only 128 metres deep. There is a day-night cycle, monsters can spawn wherever it is sufficiently dark (i.e. at night or in unlit caverns) and farm animals can spawn wherever it is sufficiently bright.
For example, I have built a monster-resistant house with a moat, and a system of water channels that funnels the creatures from the moat down to a contraption that kills them, at which point their loot is funnelled to a sensor that lights up a lamp upstairs to tell me to go fetch the goodies. I'm currently finishing off that system before I venture into a newly-discovered cave system to get some more iron ore with which to build some tracks for a railway system. On another part of the map, I am hollowing out a mountain to build a secure location in which to construct a portal to a parallel dimension of pure suffering.
It's not like Notch twisted anybody's arm. Several hundred thousand people, myself included, enjoy the game enough in its current form to be willing to pay for it. And if that means it's cheaper and we get all the add-ons for free, all the better.
Gravitational leakage is one idea - that gravity doesn't scale with distance the way we think it does, but appears to due to "leakage" of the force into higher dimensions. The dimensions may not be directly observable, but if you construct a model based on them that accurately fits the data and makes useful testable predictions, you've got yourself some science.
None of what you have said there is true. Firstly, QM and relativity conflict fundimentally. Physics is discontinuous with scale. We get around this because the corrections are generally negligable, much as QM and relativistic corrections were negligable to scientists in the 1800s. Experiments like the LHC are reaching energies at which the corrections become non-negligable. Secondly, this is not the only prediction that a string theory makes.
That's the scientific method at work. Bear in mind that string theory was constructed because quantum mechanics and relativity need some pretty serious adjustments of their own.
I'm sure the market's there, I'm just not sure that the people who would benefit from this device understand the cloud computing metaphor, and I worry that they won't be able to put a big enough price gap between ChromeOS and Windows 7 Starter netbooks.
Slashdot Mirror
"Release their own player app"? I must be missing something here, but I feel compelled to point out that Apple unsurprisingly ships it with one that supports the same formats that their desktop player supports, basically the ones most commonly available and the ones they sell on iTunes. I don't think Apple has any interest in giving people the ability to play formats beyond those.
To put it another way, it'd be like the phone company trying to sell you a power service using the current supplied on the phone lines. The infrastructure just doesn't exist. The article doesn't seem to provide enough info to distinguish what exactly they intend to do, although it implies that they'd just use the powerline meters. It must just be bad reporting in this instance.
I don't think they mean that the smart meters themselves will be used for networking, I think they mean that the efforts to install proper powerline networking equipment at the electricity company's end can be shared with the efforts to install infrastructure to talk to the smart meters in the same locations.
It's rather like the growth of Steam on the PC. It didn't kill big-price retail titles, but it did make it a lot easier for people to sell little titles like Popcap's games.
In a lot of cities in the UK, the road signs directing people to the main car parks have vacancy numbers. It helps a lot.
Coordinating a binding mandate over a union of dozens of sovereign states, including one of the world's largest cellphone manufacturers, probably takes a bit longer than doing the same thing with one country with a notoriously closed cellphone market.
Nobody asked whether it impressed you.
It doesn't provide a direct contractual way for them to say how the networks should/shouldn't be run, but it does give them the moral authority to step in and take action on anticompetitive or other grounds. If the government can give corporations a boost for the nation's best interests, it's entitled to give them a kick in the balls for the same reasons.
Actually the wonderful thing about Minecraft is that I was able to do all that with a pretty low time investment, maybe an average of 2-3 hours a week over the past few months, which leaves plenty of time for a normal human existence.
I think this (and the aforementioned absence of the Gawker breach) suggests they just kept a running list as the year went on, then wrote some copy for it when they were about to go on their holidays, and kicked it out the door.
It has in-game NOR gates. It is already known that you can build a turing-complete machine with NOR logic. Ergo, Minecraft is Turing complete. Kind of a cheat, really, it'd be interesting to know if you could do the same using just the physics.
Ah yes, Geek-Sheik, the famous fashion movement characterised by pocket protectors and an impressive scholarship of Islam.
The way he termed it was that it was a €20 game, but you got 50% off in Alpha and 25% off in Beta. So he's been upfront about the pricing from the outset. It's like a discounted pre-order that happens to come with work-in-progress versions of the game.
Nothing unique, just a different approach. You build things in Minecraft from the perspective of a small figure in the game world, and it's immediately graspable how you go about building something. It's less powerful, but the learning curve is more about the mechanics of getting into a position to place blocks than figuring out an interface. Throw in the resource-gathering and survival aspects of the game and you have quite a different play cycle. For example, if I decide to build a mine track in Minecraft, I have to consider how I'm going to gather the ores for the iron, which can be a challenge in itself, and then how to plot the track so I'm not having to carve up too many mountains, and where I'm going to take shelter at night while I do that work.
There's an obvious joke about Microsoft/Apple charging for the alpha version of an OS/gizmo here, and I'd just like to say that anyone who makes it should be ashamed of themselves.
From a first-person perspective you place and remove blocks, which have various properties, to build things. Some of those blocks can be combined and refined to make:
* New kinds of blocks, like glass or stairs
* Tools, like pickaxes and torches
* Interactable objects like doors, vehicles and refining furnaces
* Sensors, switches, buttons and NOR gates, with which one can build everything from an automatic door to a turing-complete computer
The world you play in is procedurally generated from a seed and, depending on technical limitations, is several times the size of the surface of the earth, albeit only 128 metres deep. There is a day-night cycle, monsters can spawn wherever it is sufficiently dark (i.e. at night or in unlit caverns) and farm animals can spawn wherever it is sufficiently bright.
For example, I have built a monster-resistant house with a moat, and a system of water channels that funnels the creatures from the moat down to a contraption that kills them, at which point their loot is funnelled to a sensor that lights up a lamp upstairs to tell me to go fetch the goodies. I'm currently finishing off that system before I venture into a newly-discovered cave system to get some more iron ore with which to build some tracks for a railway system. On another part of the map, I am hollowing out a mountain to build a secure location in which to construct a portal to a parallel dimension of pure suffering.
It's not like Notch twisted anybody's arm. Several hundred thousand people, myself included, enjoy the game enough in its current form to be willing to pay for it. And if that means it's cheaper and we get all the add-ons for free, all the better.
You are all -1 off topic for this thread. >:|
You know what, actually, after writing the title, I can't bring myself to do this. You all deserve better.
Gravitational leakage is one idea - that gravity doesn't scale with distance the way we think it does, but appears to due to "leakage" of the force into higher dimensions. The dimensions may not be directly observable, but if you construct a model based on them that accurately fits the data and makes useful testable predictions, you've got yourself some science.
I suspect a carat or other symbol was dropped by the slashcode, and it used to read "TeV (10 *to the* 12 electron volts)".
You're commenting on an article about string theory failing a test, saying how string theory cannot be tested.
None of what you have said there is true. Firstly, QM and relativity conflict fundimentally. Physics is discontinuous with scale. We get around this because the corrections are generally negligable, much as QM and relativistic corrections were negligable to scientists in the 1800s. Experiments like the LHC are reaching energies at which the corrections become non-negligable. Secondly, this is not the only prediction that a string theory makes.
That's the scientific method at work. Bear in mind that string theory was constructed because quantum mechanics and relativity need some pretty serious adjustments of their own.
I'm sure the market's there, I'm just not sure that the people who would benefit from this device understand the cloud computing metaphor, and I worry that they won't be able to put a big enough price gap between ChromeOS and Windows 7 Starter netbooks.