That really glosses over the importance of the centrifuges. They are massive, expensive machines to replace, and they directly handle the material. If failure occurred during operation (which was exactly what Stuxnet was designed to do), then on top of losing the machines, the nuclear material itself would be lost. The centrifuges are a critical part of the entire program, and their loss set Iran back years. It's unlikely that "full nuclear catastrophe" was ever a plan, given Stuxnet's precise design. Iran under a nuclear fog makes for bad PR, after all.
Games generally need some kind of scoring mechanic to keep players playing.
I spend hours and hours on Minecraft because I like the earned satisfaction when I build something awesome without hacking my inventory.
Days were spent in the original Rainbow Six mission planner because it was more important that I have a flawlessly-executed mission than beat the game.
The fact that I never had a weapon for the longest time in Dark Corners of the Earth, or had to hide from monsters in Amnesia, never bothered me in the least.
Gamers will create their own "scores" if the game allows them. Here, it seems pretty obvious that the player has to choose between danger, and the possible shots that they can get. Add the tension of being a soft, meaty target that can't shoot back. Putting together an effectively-edited video at the end of any event, whether or not they share it with the community, will give a lot of people a sense of satisfaction in the work they did earlier in the game.
So what I'm saying is that it offers creative appeal akin to Minecraft (getting the footage), the planning appeal of Rainbow Six (editing the footage), and the tension of DCotE or Amnesia (staying alive for the sake of the footage). These are all successful games in their own right, and I can see a lot of players looking forward to this. I know I'll be buying it on release day (if I can't pre-order it).
I think it's foolish to dismiss the strength of good vertical integration on user experience. You're completely right that it depends on what Amazon does with it, but having it in the first place is vital to controlling the user experience, and thus being able to ensure that it's high-quality). Apple does it by controlling every facet of their iDevices. Amazon did it with the Kindles and, outside of the speed of eInk, they're very easy and pleasant to use (I own a Kindle 2). Microsoft does this with WP7 and its requirements for phone manufacturers. Of course, if Amazon messes it up it can't pin blame on anyone else.
I suspect most non-geeks class tablet app stores into "Apple" and "not Apple" anyway.
No doubt. Which is a huge uphill battle for Android tablets. Amazon has a better shot, because people understand "Kindle" as opposed to "iPad". This goes back to point #1, of course.
But what this certainly isn't, is an iPad challenger. Wrong size, wrong price, different market and totally different focus.
It's likely not fair to say that it's entirely a "different market" from the iPad, but I think you're right here. Amazon's tablet will (in theory) steal away some potential iPad buyers, but it's also likely to draw the attention of many others who weren't going to buy an iPad, for whatever reason. Amazon isn't trying to beat Apple at its own game, it's trying to squeeze in where there's room. I think that reasons #1-#4 will be instrumental in its success (or failure). So you're possibly right that it's not an iPad competitor, but if it's a viable tablet that sells well, then it'll be considered a wild success.
I don't see why pundits are suddenly predicting it'll disrupt the market.
1. "Amazon" and "Kindle" already have significant mindshare in the general public, while Android tablets had to start from scratch.
2. Pundits are expecting it to "just work" with the same sort of tight vertical integration that helped make the iPad such a success.
3. Yes, its specs are similar to the Nook, only it does more than a Nook without having to be rooted first.
4. The "heavily-skinned, older version of Android" is not the same. All UIs are not equal.
5. There's no "suddenly" in the pundits' predictions. People have been expecting the Amazon tablet to be the strongest iPad competitor when it was barely a rumour.
I'm looking forward to seeing what Amazon has to offer. I love my iPad 2, but I'm eager to see something that actually challenges it, too.
You're not going to find a game with depth on your iDevice or android that you will with a 3DS or a Vita.
Given that I have a fully-functional copy of Ascendancy running on my iPhone right now, and could in theory be running modern versions of SimCity, Civilization, Final Fantasy Tactics, or even Street Fighter, it's hard to argue that there's no "depth," unless you're deliberately confusing "depth" with "fancy graphics".
I haven't even tried the numerous adventure games available for iOS.
That isn't to say that there's no place for dedicated consoles. I can't stand the lack of buttons on my iDevices, so I avoid arcade/platform games which just can't feel right. But when the controls are designed well, and suit touch, iOS sings as well as any other console.
In prior years, it would take you at LEAST a week to finish a campaign on any respectable video game. These days, you can finish a video game completely in two days.
I've watched people beat Super Mario Brothers in under ten minutes. I guess it's no longer respectable?
The time it takes to complete games hasn't changed. Action games (once platformers and top-down shooters, and now FPSes and 3rd person shooters) take a handful of hours to complete. RPGs take tens or hundreds of hours. Casual and arcade games take minutes to play and end up eating hours or even days of your life. I enjoy the Mass Effect series as much as I enjoy Super Mario World. I've also grown up and gained a great number of responsibilities and obligations that cut into the hours I used to spend playing video games.
Sure, it "only" took me six hours, over three nights, to play through Portal 2's single player once. I had fun, and didn't feel ripped off. And when I'm playing video games, that's all that matters to me.
That said I doubt Win7 will work on netbooks, so I won't be surprised that XP will be with us for a long long time to come.
Actually, there have been lots of Win7 installs on netbooks, and the general consensus is that it runs fine. Is it as quick as running XP? Well, no, but don't forget that XP is a seven-year-old operating system that required a Pentium II at release.
I've been running the Win7beta for a couple weeks now, and it's been a pretty nice experience. My machine's perfectly capable of running Vista, though, so I haven't noticed many speed gains. The UI touch-ups are nice, though.
I can't be the only one who wanted to read that to the tune of the Major-General's Song.
I am the widow of a wealthy Arizonan millionaire.
His will is complicated and I'm pulling out all of my hair.
Please meet me in the desert and help me sort out my affairs.
I promise not to kill you but instead will give you a nice share.
Etc., etc.
I'd be willing fall for scams that put the effort into being musicals.
While I'm not going to go through them all to find out which one's the right one, John Carmack, at last year's Quakecon said something along the lines of traditional 3d graphics not being remotely close to dead. So I imagine that most developers are thinking along those lines. The current model is comfortable, well-supported, and there are likely still plenty of tricks to be found. Whether the last part is a good thing (since another post mentioned engine complexity) will have to be seen.
I'm curious as to where the ray-traced proof-of-concept games are. The only one I recall seeing was the Ray-traced Quake 3, and that hasn't exactly made a lot of progress. Of course, I'm neither a developer nor an artist, so I'm not really helping out.
Well, yeah, you're right (and I knew this, growing up Catholic). The Church interprets the Bible as requiring faith and good works in order to achieve salvation. If you're not following the Church's interpretation and related doctrine, sorry, no salvation for you (although not necessarily an automatic ticket on the bullet-train to heck, either, unlike some flavours of Protestantism).
I'm curious as to what "most sacred texts" you think the Vatican is hiding.
The Vatican has secrets, yes (and its own top-secret archives, full of holy materials like financial records and correspondence), but salvation is only found in [the Church's interpretation of] the Bible. The end.
Yet oddly I can discuss organic chemistry while dismissing sub atomic particles. So as long as I take two steps I am fine, if i take only one, I am in trouble. Interesting. That's like saying you can work on your car's engine while ignoring the crankshaft, pistons, sparkplugs, et al. What do you do the moment someone asks you about how the atoms bond together? Last time I checked (and that was six years ago), why molecules don't fall apart was a big component of chemistry. Science marches on, but I doubt that's changed.
Now, while I'm hardly disagreeing with your main point, I did notice this:
Under the current regime any half baked psychiatrists can show pictures to 20 undergraduates, record a few squiggles on an MRI, run the numbers through R over and over until he gets what he wants, and proclaim to the world just about whatever he likes, and still be called a scientist! No wonder it's all too easy for the Intelligent Design movement to pose as "real science". Just look at how low the threshold for real science is.
Did you just compare modern psychiatry to Intelligent Design? That's not merely outright wrong, that's downright Scientology-esque.
Because the only thing I have ever pirated does not appear to be available in the country in which I live. Is that a good reason? If they do not have a mechanism for me to pay them, they can hardly complain about not being paid.
Interesting how you're complaining about this on an internet message board.
Why not offer an opt-out option for the scan? The user calls (not emails, obviously) the ISP, explains/justifies their need to mass mail, and gets on a white list. Of course, I can see a couple pretty big flaws in my suggestion (before anyone posts that spam-fighter's checklist):
1. Joe Pwnedcomputer finds out about this feature, and bitches and moans until the ISP relents.
2. Bob Callcenter really doesn't care, and will whitelist any user who calls in.
3. Some third thing.
Tolkien's "main gig" was not editing the OED (hundreds of people edited OED2). It's just well-known because anyone who's dipped their toe into an English class greater than 101 is aware of what the OED is. I'm not disparaging his contributions, I'm just saying that give the man some credit: he was a professor of language and literature at Leeds and Oxford, and a writer to boot.
To make things/. compatible, I doubt people would want me typing "Torvalds is that guy who did some work on the Sinclair QL, right?" (I had to check Linus's Wikipedia bio to pull something like that up, FYI)
Normally I'm not one to post, and especially not in any way that would look like support for DeBeers, but natural flawless diamonds of appreciable size (read: the ones that are huge) are rare. But when you're down to the size of a ring, yeah, it doesn't make a difference.
I'm less interested in the artificial diamonds resembling the real, pricy diamonds of today and more interested in seeing what kind of inventiveness they can pull. Like the Rob Red, which fetched $880,000 at auction despite being 0.95 carats. The reason? It's a brilliant red diamond. Impurities (of the prettifying category) add character, and that's what I'd want if buying a stone.
However, OS X applications will run quite slow under Windows machines because they are optimized for PowerPC, not x86.
However, my boat will run quite slow on a highway because it is optimized for water, not ground.
Slashdot Mirror
That really glosses over the importance of the centrifuges. They are massive, expensive machines to replace, and they directly handle the material. If failure occurred during operation (which was exactly what Stuxnet was designed to do), then on top of losing the machines, the nuclear material itself would be lost. The centrifuges are a critical part of the entire program, and their loss set Iran back years. It's unlikely that "full nuclear catastrophe" was ever a plan, given Stuxnet's precise design. Iran under a nuclear fog makes for bad PR, after all.
For those of you who haven't read it, here's a great summary of the unravelling of Stuxnet, the key players, and conclusions made. Or you could listen to the US cyber analyst blame "them Ruskies".
Very Large Upgraded Array.
Games generally need some kind of scoring mechanic to keep players playing.
I spend hours and hours on Minecraft because I like the earned satisfaction when I build something awesome without hacking my inventory.
Days were spent in the original Rainbow Six mission planner because it was more important that I have a flawlessly-executed mission than beat the game.
The fact that I never had a weapon for the longest time in Dark Corners of the Earth, or had to hide from monsters in Amnesia, never bothered me in the least.
Gamers will create their own "scores" if the game allows them. Here, it seems pretty obvious that the player has to choose between danger, and the possible shots that they can get. Add the tension of being a soft, meaty target that can't shoot back. Putting together an effectively-edited video at the end of any event, whether or not they share it with the community, will give a lot of people a sense of satisfaction in the work they did earlier in the game.
So what I'm saying is that it offers creative appeal akin to Minecraft (getting the footage), the planning appeal of Rainbow Six (editing the footage), and the tension of DCotE or Amnesia (staying alive for the sake of the footage). These are all successful games in their own right, and I can see a lot of players looking forward to this. I know I'll be buying it on release day (if I can't pre-order it).
No cheaper, faster, better tablet will do.
Name me one cheaper, faster, better tablet.
Heck, name me that has two of those qualities.
I think it's foolish to dismiss the strength of good vertical integration on user experience. You're completely right that it depends on what Amazon does with it, but having it in the first place is vital to controlling the user experience, and thus being able to ensure that it's high-quality). Apple does it by controlling every facet of their iDevices. Amazon did it with the Kindles and, outside of the speed of eInk, they're very easy and pleasant to use (I own a Kindle 2). Microsoft does this with WP7 and its requirements for phone manufacturers. Of course, if Amazon messes it up it can't pin blame on anyone else.
I suspect most non-geeks class tablet app stores into "Apple" and "not Apple" anyway.
No doubt. Which is a huge uphill battle for Android tablets. Amazon has a better shot, because people understand "Kindle" as opposed to "iPad". This goes back to point #1, of course.
But what this certainly isn't, is an iPad challenger. Wrong size, wrong price, different market and totally different focus.
It's likely not fair to say that it's entirely a "different market" from the iPad, but I think you're right here. Amazon's tablet will (in theory) steal away some potential iPad buyers, but it's also likely to draw the attention of many others who weren't going to buy an iPad, for whatever reason. Amazon isn't trying to beat Apple at its own game, it's trying to squeeze in where there's room. I think that reasons #1-#4 will be instrumental in its success (or failure). So you're possibly right that it's not an iPad competitor, but if it's a viable tablet that sells well, then it'll be considered a wild success.
I don't see why pundits are suddenly predicting it'll disrupt the market.
1. "Amazon" and "Kindle" already have significant mindshare in the general public, while Android tablets had to start from scratch.
2. Pundits are expecting it to "just work" with the same sort of tight vertical integration that helped make the iPad such a success.
3. Yes, its specs are similar to the Nook, only it does more than a Nook without having to be rooted first.
4. The "heavily-skinned, older version of Android" is not the same. All UIs are not equal.
5. There's no "suddenly" in the pundits' predictions. People have been expecting the Amazon tablet to be the strongest iPad competitor when it was barely a rumour.
I'm looking forward to seeing what Amazon has to offer. I love my iPad 2, but I'm eager to see something that actually challenges it, too.
You're not going to find a game with depth on your iDevice or android that you will with a 3DS or a Vita.
Given that I have a fully-functional copy of Ascendancy running on my iPhone right now, and could in theory be running modern versions of SimCity, Civilization, Final Fantasy Tactics, or even Street Fighter, it's hard to argue that there's no "depth," unless you're deliberately confusing "depth" with "fancy graphics".
I haven't even tried the numerous adventure games available for iOS.
That isn't to say that there's no place for dedicated consoles. I can't stand the lack of buttons on my iDevices, so I avoid arcade/platform games which just can't feel right. But when the controls are designed well, and suit touch, iOS sings as well as any other console.
I may be way off-beam here but I think Android is open source and IE isn't.
You think very wrong.
In prior years, it would take you at LEAST a week to finish a campaign on any respectable video game. These days, you can finish a video game completely in two days.
I've watched people beat Super Mario Brothers in under ten minutes. I guess it's no longer respectable? The time it takes to complete games hasn't changed. Action games (once platformers and top-down shooters, and now FPSes and 3rd person shooters) take a handful of hours to complete. RPGs take tens or hundreds of hours. Casual and arcade games take minutes to play and end up eating hours or even days of your life. I enjoy the Mass Effect series as much as I enjoy Super Mario World. I've also grown up and gained a great number of responsibilities and obligations that cut into the hours I used to spend playing video games. Sure, it "only" took me six hours, over three nights, to play through Portal 2's single player once. I had fun, and didn't feel ripped off. And when I'm playing video games, that's all that matters to me.
That said I doubt Win7 will work on netbooks, so I won't be surprised that XP will be with us for a long long time to come.
Actually, there have been lots of Win7 installs on netbooks, and the general consensus is that it runs fine. Is it as quick as running XP? Well, no, but don't forget that XP is a seven-year-old operating system that required a Pentium II at release.
I've been running the Win7beta for a couple weeks now, and it's been a pretty nice experience. My machine's perfectly capable of running Vista, though, so I haven't noticed many speed gains. The UI touch-ups are nice, though.
Send out a spam like this: [snip]
I can't be the only one who wanted to read that to the tune of the Major-General's Song.
I am the widow of a wealthy Arizonan millionaire.
His will is complicated and I'm pulling out all of my hair.
Please meet me in the desert and help me sort out my affairs.
I promise not to kill you but instead will give you a nice share.
Etc., etc.
I'd be willing fall for scams that put the effort into being musicals.
While I'm not going to go through them all to find out which one's the right one, John Carmack, at last year's Quakecon said something along the lines of traditional 3d graphics not being remotely close to dead. So I imagine that most developers are thinking along those lines. The current model is comfortable, well-supported, and there are likely still plenty of tricks to be found. Whether the last part is a good thing (since another post mentioned engine complexity) will have to be seen.
I'm curious as to where the ray-traced proof-of-concept games are. The only one I recall seeing was the Ray-traced Quake 3, and that hasn't exactly made a lot of progress. Of course, I'm neither a developer nor an artist, so I'm not really helping out.
Well, yeah, you're right (and I knew this, growing up Catholic). The Church interprets the Bible as requiring faith and good works in order to achieve salvation. If you're not following the Church's interpretation and related doctrine, sorry, no salvation for you (although not necessarily an automatic ticket on the bullet-train to heck, either, unlike some flavours of Protestantism).
I'm curious as to what "most sacred texts" you think the Vatican is hiding.
The Vatican has secrets, yes (and its own top-secret archives, full of holy materials like financial records and correspondence), but salvation is only found in [the Church's interpretation of] the Bible. The end.
Now, while I'm hardly disagreeing with your main point, I did notice this:
Under the current regime any half baked psychiatrists can show pictures to 20 undergraduates, record a few squiggles on an MRI, run the numbers through R over and over until he gets what he wants, and proclaim to the world just about whatever he likes, and still be called a scientist! No wonder it's all too easy for the Intelligent Design movement to pose as "real science". Just look at how low the threshold for real science is.
Did you just compare modern psychiatry to Intelligent Design? That's not merely outright wrong, that's downright Scientology-esque.
Because the only thing I have ever pirated does not appear to be available in the country in which I live. Is that a good reason? If they do not have a mechanism for me to pay them, they can hardly complain about not being paid.
Interesting how you're complaining about this on an internet message board.
Why not offer an opt-out option for the scan? The user calls (not emails, obviously) the ISP, explains/justifies their need to mass mail, and gets on a white list. Of course, I can see a couple pretty big flaws in my suggestion (before anyone posts that spam-fighter's checklist):
1. Joe Pwnedcomputer finds out about this feature, and bitches and moans until the ISP relents.
2. Bob Callcenter really doesn't care, and will whitelist any user who calls in.
3. Some third thing.
And the thought sent a chill through my blood. Oh no.
Tolkien's "main gig" was not editing the OED (hundreds of people edited OED2). It's just well-known because anyone who's dipped their toe into an English class greater than 101 is aware of what the OED is. I'm not disparaging his contributions, I'm just saying that give the man some credit: he was a professor of language and literature at Leeds and Oxford, and a writer to boot. To make things /. compatible, I doubt people would want me typing "Torvalds is that guy who did some work on the Sinclair QL, right?" (I had to check Linus's Wikipedia bio to pull something like that up, FYI)
Normally I'm not one to post, and especially not in any way that would look like support for DeBeers, but natural flawless diamonds of appreciable size (read: the ones that are huge) are rare. But when you're down to the size of a ring, yeah, it doesn't make a difference. I'm less interested in the artificial diamonds resembling the real, pricy diamonds of today and more interested in seeing what kind of inventiveness they can pull. Like the Rob Red, which fetched $880,000 at auction despite being 0.95 carats. The reason? It's a brilliant red diamond. Impurities (of the prettifying category) add character, and that's what I'd want if buying a stone.
However, OS X applications will run quite slow under Windows machines because they are optimized for PowerPC, not x86. However, my boat will run quite slow on a highway because it is optimized for water, not ground.