Right now the PS3 console is outselling the XBox360 console at about a 3:1 ratio in Japan. Gears of War is not something to extrapolate from. Right before it, I don't think there was a single XBox360 game in the top 30 in Japan.
Casio had some color screen models, but they were shit. It's always been HP or TI and the HP calculator division has been stagnant for a very long time. You're going to want a TI-89 or an actual computer running Mathematica. The last HP calculator I used was way behind the TI-92 many areas and I don't think there has been a new model since. If you have to graph a differential equation on an HP, be prepared to wait. The TI-89 has symbolic calculus, algebra, differential equations,... It can solve up to second order in algebra and diff eq. It can solve most anything that doesn't require special functions like Erf or Ei. It's programmable in TI-BASIC, C, and assembly.
Nobody in the US cares about 1080p HDMI, though, that's at most 2 percent of the actual market - few even have 720p HDTV nowadays, and most still have digital or analog 480i or 480p standard TV sets. Based on recent Wall Street Journal (expensive subscription required, I read my home print copy) articles.
Your statistics are considering the entire market. Sony has already polled their PS2 users and found the HD adoption rates to be significantly higher both presently and as far as future purchases in the next couple of years (something insane like 70%).
I'd consider getting a PS3 with Linux to play around with the Cell processor, but 3DO proved years ago that $600 is more than the market will bear for a game machine.
To be fair, the 3DO was a piece of crap and only looked good when compared to systems that were at least 3 years older than it.
I really really really wish people would stop using the HD-DVD attachment for the XBox 360 to make the PS3 price seem better. The add-on is completely optional. It's not part of the price you have to play to play games. And yeah, PS3 plays Blu-Ray movies, but I don't really care about that. The added value of that to me is $0. At least with the XBox Microsoft gives you a choice.
The BluRay drive is not something that gives no benefit to gaming. Xbox360 and PS3 games are going to slowly diverge in texture detail and/or game length as bigger and better HD games are developed. If you simply take a big last generation game like GTA:SD and replace all the textures with HD textures, it will no longer fit on a single DVD that the XBox360 can read. Perhaps this is a benefit that you personally don't feel is worth $200 dollars, but it is a true benefit.
You can't adjust the dimensionality of string theory to "make it work". The dimensionality of string theory is not an adjustable free parameter.
Then why don't they work in 3+1 dimensions? Because they have to work in 10+1 dimensions to get their theory to work, like I just said.
Furthermore, most major unified theories has included extra dimensions in one way or another.
So what. I'm sure there was a time when most theories of the solar system included epicycles. Extra dimensions has never worked. Never.
It appears important to have extra dimensions in order for unification to take place.
From another perspective, I could say that the original Kaluza Klein contained F_mu,nu in the conformally transformed Lagrangian because it's so easy to write such things down when I write down 5-vectors as 4-vectors plus a scalar, and symmetric 5-2-tensors as symmetric 4-2-tensors plus a scalar and a 4-vector. All of these things naturally come out as mathematical garbage. And then it becomes a matter of tinkering to try get it to look like reality. But there is always this excess mess that must be swept under the rug, like the scalar field and extra dimension of KK. One pushes the scalar field up to an extremely high energy by compactifying the extra dimension to be very small.
Don't get me wrong. I like playing with KK theory and extra dimensions. But I realize that I am just playing and I don't get my hopes up. It has never worked and I do not pretend it ever will.
If that's your goal, then you probably need extra dimensions, string theory or not.
There have been other ideas. I remember reading a paper by Ted Jacobson where he derived Einstein's equation from some thermodynamic principles and the existence of causal horizons. Then he speculated that gravity could be a thermodynamic limit of something and that there would not necessarily be a quantum theory of gravity. Even aside from this, there has long been some worry in the gravity community that the string/quantum theorists are trying to quantize the wrong theory. There is no reason to think that there really should be a graviton as there is a photon. Classical gravitons are perturbations on certain metrics. Classical photons are exact solutions for any system.
No, the reason is that the PC game is dwindling right now. I'd like to think that this comes from a general disgust of the industry that came out of the late 90s, which is when I ditched. Too many requirements, having to own just the right versions of software and hardware, or things wouldn't work. It became a full-time job just to do the research on what hardware and software you needed. Also, people enjoy being able to lounge back in their recliner or sofa and play games, and use an input device designed with gaming in mind.
Plus the fact, that when first released, the game should probably still be in beta. And when somebody complains about this, they just respond, well every other PC game is like this too, as if that makes it better.
Everything that Apple has written for Windows, from iTunes to the Quicktime player, is basically crap.
And everything that Microsoft has written for Windows is basically crap - so what's the difference?
At least Microsoft would have a little extra incentive to make their platform look good.
History shows that this is not true. They are perfectly happy for Windows to look like crap, as they have a monopoly. Since when did Microsoft care about the quality of Windows or the software that runs on it?
Windows Media Player doesn't stutter when my AVG is scanning my HD.
Everything that Apple has written for Windows, from iTunes to the Quicktime player, is basically crap. Apple is not good at developing software for the Windows platform, and it almost seems like they do not care to be. At least Microsoft would have a little extra incentive to make their platform look good.
If it would have put Microsoft developers on iTunes for Windows, then I would have been very thankful. iTunes 7 is sluggish as hell. It noticeably drags down the framerate of video games and stutters while doing it. And it's nonstandard interface doesn't play nicely with my dual-headed setup.
I assume this is the natural extension of the NWN premium modules. With the exception of Infinite Dungeons (my god was that horrible), they were a good deal at about $5 for a quality adventure. But the problem I found was that most of them opened up a great story and never finished it. Hopefully they won't repeat that aspect.
For NWN, this was a great way to make money that funded more development on NWN (the game has gotten over 60 patches). Which was great for NWN, with it's active user-developer community that's created many good adventures and persistent worlds. But for other games that don't come with a toolset, I don't think it's as good of an investment.
What ever they do, I hope Bioware soon replicates the NWN model. At the moment, I'm not so sure that Obsidian will be able to stay on the ball with NWN2.
Ignoring the fact that the base PS3 isn't crippled in the first place like the 360 core, you can use USB wireless networking devices and memory card readers and replace the included hard drive with any standard 2.5" notebook drive.
It's very simple what he meant by Unlike the PS3, you can actually upgrade the Core Pack to pretty much match the "full spec" of XBOX360. I shall explain it to you.
By that he meant Wa, wa, wa, I hate Sony, I love Microsoft.
Penn and Teller's show is very good when it comes to things that stage magicians are good at debunking, namely paranormal claims, mediums, psychics, spoon benders,... all the way into snake oil placebos and other bunkum that relies on psychology.
But where they fail is where their deep seated libertarian bias overwhelms their own better judgment, namely global warming, smoking, gun control,... (though it equally works in their favor too). For instance, in their episode of on gun control they admitted to the fact that a gun in the home was overwhelmingly more likely to shoot a relative or friend than an actual criminal. Then they resorted to fear tactics (something they've hounded others for doing) with a anonymous Mexican gangster talking about how he would kill people that couldn't defend themselves. And their last argument for free guns was to have the ability to overthrow the government, which I find to be incredibly quaint.
I also listened to Penn's radio show for a while. He's a nice guy, but he is anarcho-capitalist to the extreme. It just astounds me that so many seemingly reasonable libertarians are so against global warming without any good reason. I figure they are either cynics or subconsciously they know libertarianism won't work for the good in a world that allows things like global warming. Personally I find pure libertarianism to be as naive as pure socialism.
Sony may be preventing stores from listing PS3s on websites unless they are in bundles.
Sony has persuaded BestBuy to not sell me a PS3 console or bundle online and to lie to me and tell that they have no consoles or bundles at the physical store so that... I will be more likely to by a console or bundle at a store other than BestBuy? Uh, ok.
You continually misinterpret my comments. You know exactly what I mean if I say that String Theory hasn't predicted anything. You know that I mean that there has never been a prediction of a String Theory model, that was not also predicted by existing, simpler theories, that has been confirmed by experiment or observation. You must know this. You cannot be that stupid.
And yes it is exponentially more broad than QFT. You would have to know nothing of the actual mathematics of string theory to not know this. There is a fundamental increase of dimensionality from particle theories to string and brane theories. I take my words back, you are that stupid. You speak of infinities as if they are all the same size.
And to be pedantic about physics, as opposed to language as you have been, I do not believe that String Theory has been proven to be consistent with much more than the graviton... that you can write down diagrams with gravitons and not have the divergence problems of QFT. But gravitons are mere perturbations of certain metrics in classical gravity. They are not analogous to the photons of E&M. That is not the same thing as having full consistency with gravity as so many string theorists boast. I do not believe that has been proven. (Not to detract from the ability to make diagrams with gravitons, that is something to be proud of.)
No, "QFT" has not predicted anything. Specific models of particle physics have predicted things. You can embed those models in either QFT or string theory, as you prefer.
Let me rephrase for you. No string theory model has ever predicted anything that a QFT model couldn't. String theory is completely superfluous at this point.
If string theory had been around then, physicists could have proposed the Standard Model within the context of string theory instead of QFT if they had wanted.
You would have to be smoking reefer to think that human scientists would invent the edifice that is string theory to handle the mere standard model. Plus they already had their chance with the strong nuclear force.
String theory is not less predictive than QFT; it is a framework for model building (and in a broader and more consistent one than QFT).
That's just the problem. It's far too predictive and broad. It's exponentially predictive and broad. And every time an experimentalist looks for something stringy and finds nothing, the string theorists simply readjust their parameters and make sure they have escaped the clutches of known reality.
Even so, QM makes currently makes predictions correctly where classical mechanics does not. QM will still be useful when something more fundamental comes along and replaces it, just as classical mechanics is still useful even though we know it's wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now the PS3 console is outselling the XBox360 console at about a 3:1 ratio in Japan. Gears of War is not something to extrapolate from. Right before it, I don't think there was a single XBox360 game in the top 30 in Japan.
Casio had some color screen models, but they were shit. It's always been HP or TI and the HP calculator division has been stagnant for a very long time. You're going to want a TI-89 or an actual computer running Mathematica. The last HP calculator I used was way behind the TI-92 many areas and I don't think there has been a new model since. If you have to graph a differential equation on an HP, be prepared to wait. The TI-89 has symbolic calculus, algebra, differential equations, ... It can solve up to second order in algebra and diff eq. It can solve most anything that doesn't require special functions like Erf or Ei. It's programmable in TI-BASIC, C, and assembly.
Your statistics are considering the entire market. Sony has already polled their PS2 users and found the HD adoption rates to be significantly higher both presently and as far as future purchases in the next couple of years (something insane like 70%).
To be fair, the 3DO was a piece of crap and only looked good when compared to systems that were at least 3 years older than it.
The BluRay drive is not something that gives no benefit to gaming. Xbox360 and PS3 games are going to slowly diverge in texture detail and/or game length as bigger and better HD games are developed. If you simply take a big last generation game like GTA:SD and replace all the textures with HD textures, it will no longer fit on a single DVD that the XBox360 can read. Perhaps this is a benefit that you personally don't feel is worth $200 dollars, but it is a true benefit.
Then why don't they work in 3+1 dimensions? Because they have to work in 10+1 dimensions to get their theory to work, like I just said.
So what. I'm sure there was a time when most theories of the solar system included epicycles. Extra dimensions has never worked. Never.
From another perspective, I could say that the original Kaluza Klein contained F_mu,nu in the conformally transformed Lagrangian because it's so easy to write such things down when I write down 5-vectors as 4-vectors plus a scalar, and symmetric 5-2-tensors as symmetric 4-2-tensors plus a scalar and a 4-vector. All of these things naturally come out as mathematical garbage. And then it becomes a matter of tinkering to try get it to look like reality. But there is always this excess mess that must be swept under the rug, like the scalar field and extra dimension of KK. One pushes the scalar field up to an extremely high energy by compactifying the extra dimension to be very small.
Don't get me wrong. I like playing with KK theory and extra dimensions. But I realize that I am just playing and I don't get my hopes up. It has never worked and I do not pretend it ever will.
There have been other ideas. I remember reading a paper by Ted Jacobson where he derived Einstein's equation from some thermodynamic principles and the existence of causal horizons. Then he speculated that gravity could be a thermodynamic limit of something and that there would not necessarily be a quantum theory of gravity. Even aside from this, there has long been some worry in the gravity community that the string/quantum theorists are trying to quantize the wrong theory. There is no reason to think that there really should be a graviton as there is a photon. Classical gravitons are perturbations on certain metrics. Classical photons are exact solutions for any system.
It's the extra dimensions that are analogous the epicycles.
You keep adding more extra dimensions until you can get the theory to work.
Plus the fact, that when first released, the game should probably still be in beta. And when somebody complains about this, they just respond, well every other PC game is like this too, as if that makes it better.
And everything that Microsoft has written for Windows is basically crap - so what's the difference?
At least Microsoft would have a little extra incentive to make their platform look good.History shows that this is not true. They are perfectly happy for Windows to look like crap, as they have a monopoly. Since when did Microsoft care about the quality of Windows or the software that runs on it?
Windows Media Player doesn't stutter when my AVG is scanning my HD.Everything that Apple has written for Windows, from iTunes to the Quicktime player, is basically crap. Apple is not good at developing software for the Windows platform, and it almost seems like they do not care to be. At least Microsoft would have a little extra incentive to make their platform look good.
If it would have put Microsoft developers on iTunes for Windows, then I would have been very thankful. iTunes 7 is sluggish as hell. It noticeably drags down the framerate of video games and stutters while doing it. And it's nonstandard interface doesn't play nicely with my dual-headed setup.
I assume this is the natural extension of the NWN premium modules. With the exception of Infinite Dungeons (my god was that horrible), they were a good deal at about $5 for a quality adventure. But the problem I found was that most of them opened up a great story and never finished it. Hopefully they won't repeat that aspect.
For NWN, this was a great way to make money that funded more development on NWN (the game has gotten over 60 patches). Which was great for NWN, with it's active user-developer community that's created many good adventures and persistent worlds. But for other games that don't come with a toolset, I don't think it's as good of an investment.
What ever they do, I hope Bioware soon replicates the NWN model. At the moment, I'm not so sure that Obsidian will be able to stay on the ball with NWN2.
It's very simple what he meant by Unlike the PS3, you can actually upgrade the Core Pack to pretty much match the "full spec" of XBOX360. I shall explain it to you.
By that he meant Wa, wa, wa, I hate Sony, I love Microsoft.
At least that's how I interpreted it.
Penn and Teller's show is very good when it comes to things that stage magicians are good at debunking, namely paranormal claims, mediums, psychics, spoon benders, ... all the way into snake oil placebos and other bunkum that relies on psychology.
... (though it equally works in their favor too). For instance, in their episode of on gun control they admitted to the fact that a gun in the home was overwhelmingly more likely to shoot a relative or friend than an actual criminal. Then they resorted to fear tactics (something they've hounded others for doing) with a anonymous Mexican gangster talking about how he would kill people that couldn't defend themselves. And their last argument for free guns was to have the ability to overthrow the government, which I find to be incredibly quaint.
But where they fail is where their deep seated libertarian bias overwhelms their own better judgment, namely global warming, smoking, gun control,
I also listened to Penn's radio show for a while. He's a nice guy, but he is anarcho-capitalist to the extreme. It just astounds me that so many seemingly reasonable libertarians are so against global warming without any good reason. I figure they are either cynics or subconsciously they know libertarianism won't work for the good in a world that allows things like global warming. Personally I find pure libertarianism to be as naive as pure socialism.
Sony has persuaded BestBuy to not sell me a PS3 console or bundle online and to lie to me and tell that they have no consoles or bundles at the physical store so that
Out of stock
Notify me when available
is all I get for the 10 Circuit City's near me.
20724 if you want to try
It does for BestBuy
Store Pickup: Not Available
I've bought stuff from them before, the website knows how much inventory each store has in stock.
On Best Buy I get
Shipping: Sold Out
Store Pickup: Not Available
for everything including the bundles
Amazon.com will only refer me some Amazon ebay shit, they don't actually have any themself.
Walmart only has 700-900 dollar bundles in stock and they are limited one per customer. Fuck that.
I don't have those other stores, so there's no point in me trying them.
By the time games and Bluray movies come out that I want, I'm sure I be able to get one somewhere. I'm a very patient person.
You continually misinterpret my comments. You know exactly what I mean if I say that String Theory hasn't predicted anything. You know that I mean that there has never been a prediction of a String Theory model, that was not also predicted by existing, simpler theories, that has been confirmed by experiment or observation. You must know this. You cannot be that stupid.
... that you can write down diagrams with gravitons and not have the divergence problems of QFT. But gravitons are mere perturbations of certain metrics in classical gravity. They are not analogous to the photons of E&M. That is not the same thing as having full consistency with gravity as so many string theorists boast. I do not believe that has been proven. (Not to detract from the ability to make diagrams with gravitons, that is something to be proud of.)
And yes it is exponentially more broad than QFT. You would have to know nothing of the actual mathematics of string theory to not know this. There is a fundamental increase of dimensionality from particle theories to string and brane theories. I take my words back, you are that stupid. You speak of infinities as if they are all the same size.
And to be pedantic about physics, as opposed to language as you have been, I do not believe that String Theory has been proven to be consistent with much more than the graviton
Let me rephrase for you. No string theory model has ever predicted anything that a QFT model couldn't. String theory is completely superfluous at this point.
You would have to be smoking reefer to think that human scientists would invent the edifice that is string theory to handle the mere standard model. Plus they already had their chance with the strong nuclear force.
That's just the problem. It's far too predictive and broad. It's exponentially predictive and broad. And every time an experimentalist looks for something stringy and finds nothing, the string theorists simply readjust their parameters and make sure they have escaped the clutches of known reality.
No you can't say the same thing about QFT. QFT has predicted things that lesser theories have not. String Theory has done no such thing.
Even so, QM makes currently makes predictions correctly where classical mechanics does not. QM will still be useful when something more fundamental comes along and replaces it, just as classical mechanics is still useful even though we know it's wrong.
String Theory currently has no utility.
It's not a correct thing either.
Even if Walmart doesn't give them all of their numbers, they will still track Walmart as well as all other over-the-counter sales through sampling.
s _16_43/ai_n6161035
Here is an example of NPD tracking Walmart purchases.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FNP/i
That's much cheaper than a hospital stay and months of rehabilitation.