"they should be encouraged to release hand coded or special drivers to improve performance in specific games."
Games, sure - but it defeats the point of benchmarks by introducing a new useless variable: how optimized the driver is for that benchmark. I mean, why should 3dMarkVintage.exe be 30% slower than 3dMarkVantage.exe? How does this help anyone except Intel?
Also, don't forget that the XBox is considered income and will be taxed as such. It could cost you up to 100 dollars to keep it or sell it (assuming you do your taxes honestly - I believe here in the US the IRS has been known to go after people who don't declare their prizes). So, if you sell it you only get 100-150 dollars - not too much.
If you give it to charity it is no longer income, and won't be taxed. I think this is the best way to go - the IRS can't tax karma;)
If we assume that 15% of people have a mac and the other 85% have a windows (I know, a terribly insulting assumption on Slashdot!), and that everyone's computer choice is independent of the other computers in their household, then statistically a 2 computer household with 1 mac will have an 85% chance of having at least one windows computer. A 3 computer household - almost 98%. Likewise, a 2 computer household with 1 windows computer is only 15% likely to have at least one mac.
The one thing all this does not explain is why mac households have more computers than windows households. Maybe younger, more techy people own macs (college students and 20 something geeks) than windows (grandmothers).
I actually think the *way* MSFT killed Palm was the problem.
Palm provided exactly what a lot of people wanted 12 years ago: great battery life, an intuitive touch screen interface, and a closed but well-functioning set of standard programs.
Microsoft came in and made your PDA feel like a desktop. They increased Palm Pilot's CPU speed 10-fold, but replaced the lightweight OS with a monster so everything felt slower. Everything became less stable, and the battery life went down to less than a day. Still, people bought it because it felt more like a computer in your pocket.
I believe this has been the unfortunate path of mobile devices since, until Apple reverted everything. The iPhone was built on the same principles that made Palm great: a controlled environment, simple interface, and lightweight but functional built-in applications that are highly integrated with each other.
"I recall Street Fighter having some of the most insane markups. I think SFII topped out at $80 for the SNES."
This price point was an anomaly that signified the death of the arcade.
My friends and I used to play Street Fighter in the arcade all the time - at 50 cents a game (after the first game winner plays for free), we realized it made more sense to just buy the game for the SNES. Capcom realized that the SNES would cut into their lucrative arcade sales, and jacked the price up; it was still worth it for us to buy the game at 70/80 dollars (which I think is like 200,000 dollars in today's money).
Eventually, arcades starting going out of business, and the prices had to fall back into line with what people would pay. While I think 60 dollars is a bargain for an infinitely repayable game like SFII, I don't get why people pay that much for games that take 10 hours to beat.
Hah whoops, I guess that weakens my football analogy, but I stick to my point.
And it's not really about the money - a million dollars is nothing when you split it between the companies sponsoring the teams, but the right to say you won the contest means a lot. The 20 minutes realistically had nothing to do with winning or losing.
In football, I can see how a 20 second difference makes the difference between winning the superbowl. In a contest like this that took thousands of man hours of some brilliant people, calling Ensemble "second place" due to a 20 second difference is just wrong. I don't know if there was a better solution, but something just seems wrong about it all.
If it ran Windows do you think he would be showing off about that? Most people don't care what OS products like this use. The company probably wants to differentiate their product from a computer.
It says that space is ridiculously empty *on average*, so a molecule floating around in the middle of nowhere probably has virtually no energy (except the cosmic background radiation). This is why the average temperature of space is so low.
On the other hand, a molecule in our solar system gets hit by all sorts of radiation if it had direct line of sight with the sun, heating it to >40 kelvin.
A thousand million is probably the most correct term for international understanding.
There is no world standard term for one thousand million. In the US and most of the UK we call it a "billion", but in several countries a billion means a million million. In these countries, a thousand million is usually called "a thousand million" or a "milliard", but I've never seen "a million thousand".
Yes, the article goes into this on page 6. "There are at least two other possible explanations. One is "homophily," the tendency of people to gravitate toward others who are like them." They go on to explain that many scientists think the study did not properly account for this.
I agree with you; I generally do not hang out with fat people, people who smoke (other than socially), or people who are not generally happy. I remember in College I briefly tried hanging out with a group that was generally medicated (a lot of them were depressed), smoked a lot, and was largely overweight. They never understood me, and we eventually drifted apart. Meanwhile, my core friends, who I still associate myself with, are all similar to me.
I think this case is semi-interesting because it conveniently parallels the slow death of the media as we know it. The idea is that people used to look to newspapers like the New York Times for trustworthy news; now, these sources mislead (lie?) to their users and mess up their expensive computers in the process.
Of course, I agree with you that it is misleading to accuse just the NYT - 1000s of sites run these misleading ads, and many probably don't mean to (including the NYT, I'm sure). I would call this a non-story - the obvious reaction from the NYT will be "we did not mean to run these ads, it's the online ad providers' fault, and we have made sure the ads won't be run again." And then no one will care anymore. Yawn.
Interesting how in the before/after diagram, they zoomed out the old item page to make it look less clear. Also, they chose a crappier picture (and an entirely different product).
This is the kind of sloppiness/deviousness I expect fat-burning pill advertisements, not a big corporation like eBay. They should have shown the same product at the same resolution so people could objectively see the differences.
But I dislike how this guy tries to shift the blame throughout the interview - the Dreamcast was a lot like the PS3 of this generation - too ahead of its time. It's not that it was overpriced like the PS3 was, but developing for it was a big pain in the ass (although there were some great games because of its powerful hardware). When the PS2 came out soon after, it had a DVD player and truly felt next-gen. The modem this guy pushed for was a pretty crappy feature compared to a fully-featured DVD player.
I agree with you, but keep in mind that it hasn't been cheap. A lot of liberterian types probably don't like the Hubble's cost.
The Hubble has cost at least 5-7 billion dollars now (http://www.spacetelescope.org/about/faq.html). It has directly led to 4,000+ papers (source: Wikipedia), and a lot of new discoveries. It is hard to quantify the value of the Hubble, but one way of putting it is the mean cost per academic paper is about 1.5 million dollars. Of course this is a terrible way of putting it, because the Hubble produces some awesome images. Also, many of those papers have had a big impact on several academic fields, and are highly cited.
The answer is some images are close to true, while others are totally different from what our eyes would see. Every Hubble photograph we see is actually a composite of 3 gray-scale images with different filters attached. In general, they color the image with the highest wavelength filter red, the lowest blue, and the middle green.
This page (http://www.hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of_color/eso.php) gives a pretty good illustration. You can click on several images and see a map from where the three filters exist (on a wavelength axis). Some images, like the Galaxy ESO 510-G13 I linked you to, are close to true color. The image of Saturn (http://www.hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of_color/saturn.php) is stretched from a pure infrared to RGB.
I think an 8 billion dollar aircraft carrier off the coast of North Korea probably convinces them of whatever we want a lot faster than a space station.
I feel like there is an implicit assumption on Slashdot that government agents don't know how to do their jobs properly, even though we know very little about what they do.
And then we complain when lay people assume tech/IT people don't know how to do their jobs correctly.
Amazon presumably pays Sprint for the service connection too. My guess is Amazon pays per byte, because they charge to wirelessly transmit books to the kindle (unless you buy the book from Amazon, in which case that's baked into the price).
If my guess is true, using it purely as a browser could cost Amazon a decent amount. Fortunately for them, the browser is terrible and the screen is too slow to browse quickly.
As it is, at least at my company, if I apply for a patent my name is on it. This obviously furthers my career - I don't care about the 500 dollars, but having a useful patent in my name is great for the resume.
But I wouldn't expect ownership for several reasons. First, the company puts about 10,000 dollars worth of a lawyer's time into each patent. I'm guessing they would expect me to pay for that myself if I were to own it. Second, my company would probably fire me if I spent dozens of work hours applying for a patent that they couldn't own or use for free. Third, it would create a huge conflict of interest if I start licensing the patent out to my company's competitors for personal profit.
There's just too much wrong with not allowing a company to profit off its own investments.
I was with you until that last one. That idea is just stupid.
Company patents are developed on their time and resources. They are often built off of dozens of peoples' efforts. This is one of the benefits of companies - they allow people to collaborate and then share profits (either through part ownership or salaries).
How much are the unlimited plans, and for what speeds?
I personally have no complaints where I live in the US. I spend 30 dollars (21 Euros) a month (requires TV service at this rate) for an unlimited cable connection. I consistently get 8 Mbps down (1000 kB/sec) and ~800 kbps up (100 kB/sec). This is enough for any sort of VOIP or online video. My pings to major servers are always under 30 ms.
The upload is a bit slow, but I'm fine with that. 800 kbps is enough to send out a decent streaming video, and that's all I need upload for.
Slashdot Mirror
Action shot!
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&layer=c&cbll=32.77388,-117.069558&panoid=ruB3X_JC-_5xfysQwTxhSA&cbp=12,98.79,,2,10.95&ll=32.773798,-117.069561&spn=0,359.98071&z=16
Whatever, Batman has been doing it for years.
"they should be encouraged to release hand coded or special drivers to improve performance in specific games."
Games, sure - but it defeats the point of benchmarks by introducing a new useless variable: how optimized the driver is for that benchmark. I mean, why should 3dMarkVintage.exe be 30% slower than 3dMarkVantage.exe? How does this help anyone except Intel?
Also, don't forget that the XBox is considered income and will be taxed as such. It could cost you up to 100 dollars to keep it or sell it (assuming you do your taxes honestly - I believe here in the US the IRS has been known to go after people who don't declare their prizes). So, if you sell it you only get 100-150 dollars - not too much.
If you give it to charity it is no longer income, and won't be taxed. I think this is the best way to go - the IRS can't tax karma ;)
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
If we assume that 15% of people have a mac and the other 85% have a windows (I know, a terribly insulting assumption on Slashdot!), and that everyone's computer choice is independent of the other computers in their household, then statistically a 2 computer household with 1 mac will have an 85% chance of having at least one windows computer. A 3 computer household - almost 98%. Likewise, a 2 computer household with 1 windows computer is only 15% likely to have at least one mac.
The one thing all this does not explain is why mac households have more computers than windows households. Maybe younger, more techy people own macs (college students and 20 something geeks) than windows (grandmothers).
I actually think the *way* MSFT killed Palm was the problem.
Palm provided exactly what a lot of people wanted 12 years ago: great battery life, an intuitive touch screen interface, and a closed but well-functioning set of standard programs.
Microsoft came in and made your PDA feel like a desktop. They increased Palm Pilot's CPU speed 10-fold, but replaced the lightweight OS with a monster so everything felt slower. Everything became less stable, and the battery life went down to less than a day. Still, people bought it because it felt more like a computer in your pocket.
I believe this has been the unfortunate path of mobile devices since, until Apple reverted everything. The iPhone was built on the same principles that made Palm great: a controlled environment, simple interface, and lightweight but functional built-in applications that are highly integrated with each other.
"I recall Street Fighter having some of the most insane markups. I think SFII topped out at $80 for the SNES."
This price point was an anomaly that signified the death of the arcade.
My friends and I used to play Street Fighter in the arcade all the time - at 50 cents a game (after the first game winner plays for free), we realized it made more sense to just buy the game for the SNES. Capcom realized that the SNES would cut into their lucrative arcade sales, and jacked the price up; it was still worth it for us to buy the game at 70/80 dollars (which I think is like 200,000 dollars in today's money).
Eventually, arcades starting going out of business, and the prices had to fall back into line with what people would pay. While I think 60 dollars is a bargain for an infinitely repayable game like SFII, I don't get why people pay that much for games that take 10 hours to beat.
Hah whoops, I guess that weakens my football analogy, but I stick to my point.
And it's not really about the money - a million dollars is nothing when you split it between the companies sponsoring the teams, but the right to say you won the contest means a lot. The 20 minutes realistically had nothing to do with winning or losing.
It was a tie...
In football, I can see how a 20 second difference makes the difference between winning the superbowl. In a contest like this that took thousands of man hours of some brilliant people, calling Ensemble "second place" due to a 20 second difference is just wrong. I don't know if there was a better solution, but something just seems wrong about it all.
If it ran Windows do you think he would be showing off about that? Most people don't care what OS products like this use. The company probably wants to differentiate their product from a computer.
See http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-temperature-in-space.htm
It says that space is ridiculously empty *on average*, so a molecule floating around in the middle of nowhere probably has virtually no energy (except the cosmic background radiation). This is why the average temperature of space is so low.
On the other hand, a molecule in our solar system gets hit by all sorts of radiation if it had direct line of sight with the sun, heating it to >40 kelvin.
A thousand million is probably the most correct term for international understanding.
There is no world standard term for one thousand million. In the US and most of the UK we call it a "billion", but in several countries a billion means a million million. In these countries, a thousand million is usually called "a thousand million" or a "milliard", but I've never seen "a million thousand".
Yes, the article goes into this on page 6. "There are at least two other possible explanations. One is "homophily," the tendency of people to gravitate toward others who are like them." They go on to explain that many scientists think the study did not properly account for this.
I agree with you; I generally do not hang out with fat people, people who smoke (other than socially), or people who are not generally happy. I remember in College I briefly tried hanging out with a group that was generally medicated (a lot of them were depressed), smoked a lot, and was largely overweight. They never understood me, and we eventually drifted apart. Meanwhile, my core friends, who I still associate myself with, are all similar to me.
I think this case is semi-interesting because it conveniently parallels the slow death of the media as we know it. The idea is that people used to look to newspapers like the New York Times for trustworthy news; now, these sources mislead (lie?) to their users and mess up their expensive computers in the process.
Of course, I agree with you that it is misleading to accuse just the NYT - 1000s of sites run these misleading ads, and many probably don't mean to (including the NYT, I'm sure). I would call this a non-story - the obvious reaction from the NYT will be "we did not mean to run these ads, it's the online ad providers' fault, and we have made sure the ads won't be run again." And then no one will care anymore. Yawn.
Interesting how in the before/after diagram, they zoomed out the old item page to make it look less clear. Also, they chose a crappier picture (and an entirely different product).
This is the kind of sloppiness/deviousness I expect fat-burning pill advertisements, not a big corporation like eBay. They should have shown the same product at the same resolution so people could objectively see the differences.
I had one, and it was a great system, RIP.
But I dislike how this guy tries to shift the blame throughout the interview - the Dreamcast was a lot like the PS3 of this generation - too ahead of its time. It's not that it was overpriced like the PS3 was, but developing for it was a big pain in the ass (although there were some great games because of its powerful hardware). When the PS2 came out soon after, it had a DVD player and truly felt next-gen. The modem this guy pushed for was a pretty crappy feature compared to a fully-featured DVD player.
I agree with you, but keep in mind that it hasn't been cheap. A lot of liberterian types probably don't like the Hubble's cost.
The Hubble has cost at least 5-7 billion dollars now (http://www.spacetelescope.org/about/faq.html). It has directly led to 4,000+ papers (source: Wikipedia), and a lot of new discoveries. It is hard to quantify the value of the Hubble, but one way of putting it is the mean cost per academic paper is about 1.5 million dollars. Of course this is a terrible way of putting it, because the Hubble produces some awesome images. Also, many of those papers have had a big impact on several academic fields, and are highly cited.
The answer is some images are close to true, while others are totally different from what our eyes would see. Every Hubble photograph we see is actually a composite of 3 gray-scale images with different filters attached. In general, they color the image with the highest wavelength filter red, the lowest blue, and the middle green.
This page (http://www.hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of_color/eso.php) gives a pretty good illustration. You can click on several images and see a map from where the three filters exist (on a wavelength axis). Some images, like the Galaxy ESO 510-G13 I linked you to, are close to true color. The image of Saturn (http://www.hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of_color/saturn.php) is stretched from a pure infrared to RGB.
I think an 8 billion dollar aircraft carrier off the coast of North Korea probably convinces them of whatever we want a lot faster than a space station.
Why not, if it helps them do their job?
I feel like there is an implicit assumption on Slashdot that government agents don't know how to do their jobs properly, even though we know very little about what they do.
And then we complain when lay people assume tech/IT people don't know how to do their jobs correctly.
Amazon presumably pays Sprint for the service connection too. My guess is Amazon pays per byte, because they charge to wirelessly transmit books to the kindle (unless you buy the book from Amazon, in which case that's baked into the price).
If my guess is true, using it purely as a browser could cost Amazon a decent amount. Fortunately for them, the browser is terrible and the screen is too slow to browse quickly.
As it is, at least at my company, if I apply for a patent my name is on it. This obviously furthers my career - I don't care about the 500 dollars, but having a useful patent in my name is great for the resume.
But I wouldn't expect ownership for several reasons. First, the company puts about 10,000 dollars worth of a lawyer's time into each patent. I'm guessing they would expect me to pay for that myself if I were to own it. Second, my company would probably fire me if I spent dozens of work hours applying for a patent that they couldn't own or use for free. Third, it would create a huge conflict of interest if I start licensing the patent out to my company's competitors for personal profit.
There's just too much wrong with not allowing a company to profit off its own investments.
In all fairness 30 dollars/month is subsidized by an overpriced TV connection. Without TV I would be paying closer to 40-50/month.
I am fortunate to live in an urban area with a lot of competition.
I was with you until that last one. That idea is just stupid.
Company patents are developed on their time and resources. They are often built off of dozens of peoples' efforts. This is one of the benefits of companies - they allow people to collaborate and then share profits (either through part ownership or salaries).
Your idea would set back innovation quite a bit.
How much are the unlimited plans, and for what speeds?
I personally have no complaints where I live in the US. I spend 30 dollars (21 Euros) a month (requires TV service at this rate) for an unlimited cable connection. I consistently get 8 Mbps down (1000 kB/sec) and ~800 kbps up (100 kB/sec). This is enough for any sort of VOIP or online video. My pings to major servers are always under 30 ms.
The upload is a bit slow, but I'm fine with that. 800 kbps is enough to send out a decent streaming video, and that's all I need upload for.