I would say I'm even more impressed by this than by China's manned spaceflight.
This is something new and very interesting. It's relatively trivial for a nation of over a billion people and a strong centralized government to develop a space program. But a privately funded orbital rocket. That's a game changer.
Congratulations to China and especially congratulations to the groundbreaking team at SpaceX!
But how much do we legalize? I say legalize Pot. But what are the societal costs?
I don't think Pot usage would increase but I also don't think that Meth should be legalized and sold at Walgreens (which I guess it already sort of is through sudafed).
At least with Meth we can lock up users and stand a chance of forcing them into a rehabilitation program. Same with cocaine and heroin.
So we would still be having a War on Drugs and it would probably still cost a pretty penny. The question is whether or not it's cheaper than the alternative of increased health care costs.
How much is spent on police efforts to prevent the drug trade? How about the losses to the economy from drug-related crime? Both of those would drop dramatically if prohibition were to be abolished. Do those figures include that?
They include enforcement but I can't remember if they also included incarceration costs.
One problem is that we would still need drug enforcement to ensure that people purchase it from legally sanctioned businesses. It would take a long time to unravel the illicit-tax-exempt unlicensed dealer structure.
Also it doesn't include the costs of rehabilitation and abuse. Which would probably be lower than incarceration but still not free.
Xbox? You know the console which is selling more games, movies, controllers and expansion packs than practically all of its competitors combined? Sure it's not selling like the Wii which is pretty much a WiiSports Box but it's selling very very well. Yeah. Let's fire Balmer for releasing the most popular gaming machine amongst gamers and giving microsoft a reputation for releasing cutting edge home entertainment gear?
Zune? Have you used a Zune? Argueably better than the iPod although less popular. Yes let's fire Balmer for Zune... the only Microsoft product which has attractive, hip and desireable marketing. Yes let's kill the whole zune division because why would Microsoft want to get into the business of offering a pmp to stereo vertical integration of the entire media market when Xbox Live Marketplace and Zune marketplace finish their inevitable merging?
Microsoft has had the stated goal for decades that they want to be on your computer, TV, Car and in your hand. (Windows, Media Center, Car and then Sync and CE/Mobile/Zune). Eventually they'll succeed and it'll all work together. You'll buy a movie on your xbox and watch it on your zune. You'll buy a song on your zune and play it on your xbox. You'll have all your music on your laptop and your phone. Zune is just a windows CE device with the desktop hidden. I'm actually still very suprised nobody has hacked it onto another windows mobile system yet.
Xbox Live is universally loved by everyone who uses it. Zune is maturing and if not the best certainly the second best PMP system. Vista might be a black mark but personally I run it on two computers haven't had a single problem with it. Of course all my computers have 8GB of RAM so YMMV.
If anything the worst product that Microsoft has on the market today is Windows Mobile. And maybe... just maybe the reason they aren't releasing in 2009 is because they recognize that fact and want to actually take the time to do it right--for once. Microsoft's greatest failing is usually their rush to market.
Why do you think a server would be able to devote more resources to the game than a dedicated home system?
Photon/Ray-Tracing requires a LOT of horsepower. What makes you think that a server shared by thousands of people will be able to give you any more cycles than a dedicated high performance workstation?
Actually Catholics are worse than Atheists. Atheists are clear in their attacks on his almighty holiness. Catholics are the devil's vehicle to decieve the masses into thinking they're saved.
The pope will be the Antichrist. If you rearrange his official title in latin and add up all the roman numerals it equals 666. Amongst other reasoning.
As an ex-christian I'll help interpret for you. Since I understand both sides of the fence.
1) Your belief system is comforting. The more conservative I was the more certain I was and the more certain I was the happier and more comforted I felt. 2) Denying God is real means it's all in your head and you shouldn't actually be confident in what you 'know'. 3) If you can't be confident in what you know then you can't be certain and if you can't be certain then you aren't comforted. Your amazingly incredibly blissfully wonderfully happy land grows dark and is replaced with the cold uncaring uncertainty of doubt. 4) So when you attack a christian's faith what you're actually doing is robbing them of that beautiful all enveloping right-hemisphere of the brain oneness with God. Which is incredibly painful.
It's like stealing a junkie's needle. It's going to be very traumatic. Much more traumatic than if you for instance told them that ketchup sucks and it's silly that they like it. Unless they get some sort of bizzare high from ketchup.
"Ferrari doesn't have a premium, they just sell more expensive cars. If you compare them to similarly spec'ed cars you'll find they're about the same price +/- $5000"
I build $800 blazing fast workstations: QuadCore, 8GB of Ram and just under top of the line video card along with a 500GB Raid 0 for storage.
You say "no premium" I say I can get a superb workstation for less money.
Since HD-DVD folded I've bought over 35 HD-DVDs. That is 2x the number of DVDs I owned before purchasing an HD-DVD player.
Why? $10 HD-DVDs for all new releases! It's like every day is labor day! And the picture is amazing! And the sound is fantastic!
Maybe when HD-DVD gets sufficiently abandoned and I want new movies in HD and can bring myself to pay $25-$30 for a movie I might consider picking up a Blu-Ray player. Until then. I'll stick to XBox Live and my handy dandy discount HD machine.
Blu-Ray needs to SLASH their prices if they want me to convert.
I think these stunts are very similar to the HP Bulletproof marketing where they would shoot a highpowered rifle through the motherboard during operation to demonstrate its redundancy.
You don't want to shoot your server but it demonstrates a worst case scenario to illustrate that it's a bit tougher than you might otherwise think.
Skip the middleman. The first four are the "new" screenshots... which look exactly like the old screenshots. Which is to say... nothing has changed
Really... a slashdot story on Blizzard releasing another 4 screenshots? Will we get a story for every new screenshot they release or only in intervals of 4 or greater?
Sorry wrong group of Watergate crooks. A little wikipedia search informs me they served about a year in prison. But were not charged with anything besides standard burglary charges.
If I remember my US History correctly all of the watergate burglars were charged with obstruction of justice, illegal campaign activities and purjury.
I don't remember any "burglary charges" being brought.
If this kid were an Obama staffer then he might face some sort of illegal campaign activity. But seeing as this was a simple account 'hack' it should be treated like my Steam Account being stolen.
Google and other can't even get address 100% much less road sign done to the point of where it will need to be and How big of a disk will you need to just fit each road in big city area?
Good questions. Now let's answer them.
Let's say there are 1,000,000 road sign varieties in North America of any consequence.
Let's be really generous and give each sign 1KB of information on average that's 10GB or so of data.
That can be organized into: Sign GUID: 32bit integer Sign Shape GUID: 8 bits Sign Color GUID: 32 bits Sign location: 2x 32bit signed floats Sign Content: ~1KB
And that's if we decide to be anal retentive about our signage. Let's limit ourselves to 256 different sign categories and a basic sign would only take up about 128 bits of information if we're incredibly generous. Sign Type: 8 bits Sign Location: 64 bits should be sufficient to designate the street/block you're on with close enough to 100% accuracy. Sign GUID: 32 bits that leaves another 24 bits for a pointer to speed information or more specific information.
You could fit 66,000,000 stop, yield or speed limit signs in one GB.
This is not going to be a storage problem.
Most people have ipods with at least 32GB of data that would be 2.1 billion stop or yield signs signs.
Hi reader, this is Microsoft. Thank you for liking Halo. We don't have a limit on production capacity. We have a bajillion dollars. The more dollars we have. The more games we can make. Making Halo derivatives which are surefire profits funds our other companies so that they can concentrate on making new and innovative games.
"I am not going to raise taxes--what I will do is spend billions on my groundbreaking educational reforms. I won't be satisfied until I see our children doing well. I am going to stop the decline in our school systems and I'm going to fix our curriculums" [Aka... I intend to tax you or take money from another program and put it into an ambiguous undefined plan.]
"Our children's education is more important than anything else to the nation. It will steer our children to either great success or second place mediocricy. That is why we must increase taxes to ensure our future and why in my first 100 days in office I will increase taxes and give the money to our schools to invest in afterschool programs so that kids of all backgrounds and incomes have access to an environment of success and learning. We need to move away from test scores and give our kids the inspiration and resources to explore on their own when the teacher leaves the classroom. You can't build something without money and that is why taxes on the riches 1% of the nation need to be increased. So that another generation of children have access to the same opportunties the most successful and wealthy were given." [Aka... I'm going to increase taxes and give it to the schools to do with as they see fit.]
I would say #1 is more baseless substanceless spin than #2 which uses I and My much less.
Or maybe you accountants just work with a completely different kind of data which actually does operate on a predictable expiration schedule. A lot of our data never expires.
We actually have 6 file classifications.
1) Working (highspeed) 2) Permanant (Persistent data) 3) Tools and executables and 4) Archive (Where the highspeed data moves when it's no longer needed. Which has to be sorted by hand) 5) Temporary (Gets deleted instead of archived from the highspeed server) 6) Local instance (copy from highspeed to even higher speed local raids) of #1 using PowerToy
How are our applications supposed to know which is which? We often can't even tell.
Exactly. This isn't necessarily screwing the customer this is selling more of the same.
If I offered to sell you a game for $120 that had twice as many maps many people would say "thanks but no thanks, I'm not THAT into the game." On the other hand there are certainly players who can't get enough of it. Normally these came out in expansion packs. But Consoles don't get expansion packs... or at least they didn't use to. So you would have to wait for a complete new release. Now with DLC they are able to leverage an existing game engine and churn out content which is comparatively simple. You have all the dev tools. You have the pipeline. You just need to make more of the same. More of the same benefits from economies of scale and gives you a business incentive to have more artists working even after the game ships.
Normally a game ships and except for the bug team everybody either moves on to the next project after their well earned vacation or else if contract starts looking for a new project. Now companies can hire more artists (or even better, use the artists who might not be very busy during pre-production) in order to produce something which is marketable.
DLC is a chance for game companies to sell their waste. It's good for game companies because it increases the chances of profitability and by extension resources available to a project. It encourages companies to sell games that gamers want more of. And we get more stuff for games we like.
Who wouldn't kill for some more Fallout 2 Missions right about now? I know I would. And maybe black isle would still be around if they could exploit their existing assets to give me something I want for a nice healthy profit.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say I'm even more impressed by this than by China's manned spaceflight.
This is something new and very interesting. It's relatively trivial for a nation of over a billion people and a strong centralized government to develop a space program. But a privately funded orbital rocket. That's a game changer.
Congratulations to China and especially congratulations to the groundbreaking team at SpaceX!
But how much do we legalize? I say legalize Pot. But what are the societal costs?
I don't think Pot usage would increase but I also don't think that Meth should be legalized and sold at Walgreens (which I guess it already sort of is through sudafed).
At least with Meth we can lock up users and stand a chance of forcing them into a rehabilitation program. Same with cocaine and heroin.
So we would still be having a War on Drugs and it would probably still cost a pretty penny. The question is whether or not it's cheaper than the alternative of increased health care costs.
How much is spent on police efforts to prevent the drug trade? How about the losses to the economy from drug-related crime? Both of those would drop dramatically if prohibition were to be abolished. Do those figures include that?
They include enforcement but I can't remember if they also included incarceration costs.
One problem is that we would still need drug enforcement to ensure that people purchase it from legally sanctioned businesses. It would take a long time to unravel the illicit-tax-exempt unlicensed dealer structure.
Also it doesn't include the costs of rehabilitation and abuse. Which would probably be lower than incarceration but still not free.
Not really. The numbers I've seen from legalizing drugs would only boost US Revenue by about 20-30 billion per year.
That's 1/10th our peacetime defense budget. Not really a ton of money.
WOW: Don't play it.
Spore: Didn't buy it or play it.
Football Manager: Only ever heard of it 2 or 3 times.
Yep. It's got all my gaming covered!
WTF Mate?
Xbox? You know the console which is selling more games, movies, controllers and expansion packs than practically all of its competitors combined? Sure it's not selling like the Wii which is pretty much a WiiSports Box but it's selling very very well. Yeah. Let's fire Balmer for releasing the most popular gaming machine amongst gamers and giving microsoft a reputation for releasing cutting edge home entertainment gear?
Zune? Have you used a Zune? Argueably better than the iPod although less popular. Yes let's fire Balmer for Zune... the only Microsoft product which has attractive, hip and desireable marketing. Yes let's kill the whole zune division because why would Microsoft want to get into the business of offering a pmp to stereo vertical integration of the entire media market when Xbox Live Marketplace and Zune marketplace finish their inevitable merging?
Microsoft has had the stated goal for decades that they want to be on your computer, TV, Car and in your hand. (Windows, Media Center, Car and then Sync and CE/Mobile/Zune). Eventually they'll succeed and it'll all work together. You'll buy a movie on your xbox and watch it on your zune. You'll buy a song on your zune and play it on your xbox. You'll have all your music on your laptop and your phone. Zune is just a windows CE device with the desktop hidden. I'm actually still very suprised nobody has hacked it onto another windows mobile system yet.
Xbox Live is universally loved by everyone who uses it. Zune is maturing and if not the best certainly the second best PMP system. Vista might be a black mark but personally I run it on two computers haven't had a single problem with it. Of course all my computers have 8GB of RAM so YMMV.
If anything the worst product that Microsoft has on the market today is Windows Mobile. And maybe... just maybe the reason they aren't releasing in 2009 is because they recognize that fact and want to actually take the time to do it right--for once. Microsoft's greatest failing is usually their rush to market.
Why do you think a server would be able to devote more resources to the game than a dedicated home system?
Photon/Ray-Tracing requires a LOT of horsepower. What makes you think that a server shared by thousands of people will be able to give you any more cycles than a dedicated high performance workstation?
I think I speak for everyone else when I say F*** you Japan! We never liked you anyway!
Actually Catholics are worse than Atheists. Atheists are clear in their attacks on his almighty holiness. Catholics are the devil's vehicle to decieve the masses into thinking they're saved.
The pope will be the Antichrist. If you rearrange his official title in latin and add up all the roman numerals it equals 666. Amongst other reasoning.
*Ex-Christian. I know all the secrets.*
As an ex-christian I'll help interpret for you. Since I understand both sides of the fence.
1) Your belief system is comforting. The more conservative I was the more certain I was and the more certain I was the happier and more comforted I felt.
2) Denying God is real means it's all in your head and you shouldn't actually be confident in what you 'know'.
3) If you can't be confident in what you know then you can't be certain and if you can't be certain then you aren't comforted. Your amazingly incredibly blissfully wonderfully happy land grows dark and is replaced with the cold uncaring uncertainty of doubt.
4) So when you attack a christian's faith what you're actually doing is robbing them of that beautiful all enveloping right-hemisphere of the brain oneness with God. Which is incredibly painful.
It's like stealing a junkie's needle. It's going to be very traumatic. Much more traumatic than if you for instance told them that ketchup sucks and it's silly that they like it. Unless they get some sort of bizzare high from ketchup.
Which is a premium.
"Ferrari doesn't have a premium, they just sell more expensive cars. If you compare them to similarly spec'ed cars you'll find they're about the same price +/- $5000"
I build $800 blazing fast workstations: QuadCore, 8GB of Ram and just under top of the line video card along with a 500GB Raid 0 for storage.
You say "no premium" I say I can get a superb workstation for less money.
True. And if anything it should be the K2 of computing.
The real problem is once you've overcome the highest peak does that mean all computing is down hill! Hurray for bad analogies!
Since HD-DVD folded I've bought over 35 HD-DVDs. That is 2x the number of DVDs I owned before purchasing an HD-DVD player.
Why? $10 HD-DVDs for all new releases! It's like every day is labor day! And the picture is amazing! And the sound is fantastic!
Maybe when HD-DVD gets sufficiently abandoned and I want new movies in HD and can bring myself to pay $25-$30 for a movie I might consider picking up a Blu-Ray player. Until then. I'll stick to XBox Live and my handy dandy discount HD machine.
Blu-Ray needs to SLASH their prices if they want me to convert.
I think these stunts are very similar to the HP Bulletproof marketing where they would shoot a highpowered rifle through the motherboard during operation to demonstrate its redundancy.
You don't want to shoot your server but it demonstrates a worst case scenario to illustrate that it's a bit tougher than you might otherwise think.
Here Here. How about a Mod redirect the link to a functioning server that's not just reposting official materials.
This is nothing more than an extremely thinly vailed attempt at getting some ad hits.
http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/media/screenshots.xml
Skip the middleman. The first four are the "new" screenshots... which look exactly like the old screenshots. Which is to say... nothing has changed
Really... a slashdot story on Blizzard releasing another 4 screenshots? Will we get a story for every new screenshot they release or only in intervals of 4 or greater?
Any mirrors? It seems to have gone down the second it went up. Or perhaps even prior to being posted.
Sorry wrong group of Watergate crooks. A little wikipedia search informs me they served about a year in prison. But were not charged with anything besides standard burglary charges.
If I remember my US History correctly all of the watergate burglars were charged with obstruction of justice, illegal campaign activities and purjury.
I don't remember any "burglary charges" being brought.
If this kid were an Obama staffer then he might face some sort of illegal campaign activity. But seeing as this was a simple account 'hack' it should be treated like my Steam Account being stolen.
That's probably the only payphone in 30 miles. She probably hiked for 2 days to reach the promised land of instant voice communication.
Google and other can't even get address 100% much less road sign done to the point of where it will need to be and How big of a disk will you need to just fit each road in big city area?
Good questions. Now let's answer them.
Let's say there are 1,000,000 road sign varieties in North America of any consequence.
Let's be really generous and give each sign 1KB of information on average that's 10GB or so of data.
That can be organized into:
Sign GUID: 32bit integer
Sign Shape GUID: 8 bits
Sign Color GUID: 32 bits
Sign location: 2x 32bit signed floats
Sign Content: ~1KB
And that's if we decide to be anal retentive about our signage. Let's limit ourselves to 256 different sign categories and a basic sign would only take up about 128 bits of information if we're incredibly generous.
Sign Type: 8 bits
Sign Location: 64 bits should be sufficient to designate the street/block you're on with close enough to 100% accuracy.
Sign GUID: 32 bits
that leaves another 24 bits for a pointer to speed information or more specific information.
You could fit 66,000,000 stop, yield or speed limit signs in one GB.
This is not going to be a storage problem.
Most people have ipods with at least 32GB of data that would be 2.1 billion stop or yield signs signs.
Hi reader, this is Microsoft. Thank you for liking Halo. We don't have a limit on production capacity. We have a bajillion dollars. The more dollars we have. The more games we can make. Making Halo derivatives which are surefire profits funds our other companies so that they can concentrate on making new and innovative games.
- Microsoft
"I am not going to raise taxes--what I will do is spend billions on my groundbreaking educational reforms. I won't be satisfied until I see our children doing well. I am going to stop the decline in our school systems and I'm going to fix our curriculums"
[Aka... I intend to tax you or take money from another program and put it into an ambiguous undefined plan.]
"Our children's education is more important than anything else to the nation. It will steer our children to either great success or second place mediocricy. That is why we must increase taxes to ensure our future and why in my first 100 days in office I will increase taxes and give the money to our schools to invest in afterschool programs so that kids of all backgrounds and incomes have access to an environment of success and learning. We need to move away from test scores and give our kids the inspiration and resources to explore on their own when the teacher leaves the classroom. You can't build something without money and that is why taxes on the riches 1% of the nation need to be increased. So that another generation of children have access to the same opportunties the most successful and wealthy were given."
[Aka... I'm going to increase taxes and give it to the schools to do with as they see fit.]
I would say #1 is more baseless substanceless spin than #2 which uses I and My much less.
Or maybe you accountants just work with a completely different kind of data which actually does operate on a predictable expiration schedule. A lot of our data never expires.
We actually have 6 file classifications.
1) Working (highspeed)
2) Permanant (Persistent data)
3) Tools and executables
and
4) Archive (Where the highspeed data moves when it's no longer needed. Which has to be sorted by hand)
5) Temporary (Gets deleted instead of archived from the highspeed server)
6) Local instance (copy from highspeed to even higher speed local raids) of #1 using PowerToy
How are our applications supposed to know which is which? We often can't even tell.
Exactly. This isn't necessarily screwing the customer this is selling more of the same.
If I offered to sell you a game for $120 that had twice as many maps many people would say "thanks but no thanks, I'm not THAT into the game." On the other hand there are certainly players who can't get enough of it. Normally these came out in expansion packs. But Consoles don't get expansion packs... or at least they didn't use to. So you would have to wait for a complete new release. Now with DLC they are able to leverage an existing game engine and churn out content which is comparatively simple. You have all the dev tools. You have the pipeline. You just need to make more of the same. More of the same benefits from economies of scale and gives you a business incentive to have more artists working even after the game ships.
Normally a game ships and except for the bug team everybody either moves on to the next project after their well earned vacation or else if contract starts looking for a new project. Now companies can hire more artists (or even better, use the artists who might not be very busy during pre-production) in order to produce something which is marketable.
DLC is a chance for game companies to sell their waste. It's good for game companies because it increases the chances of profitability and by extension resources available to a project. It encourages companies to sell games that gamers want more of. And we get more stuff for games we like.
Who wouldn't kill for some more Fallout 2 Missions right about now? I know I would. And maybe black isle would still be around if they could exploit their existing assets to give me something I want for a nice healthy profit.