Now that you have a few months with PS3s in the hands of consumers and plenty of reviews to pour over, what mistakes did Sony make in the design of the system?
In the archaeological world Clovis population theories have been dead or dying for at least 5 years. Isotopic dating of human dwellings in the Americas throughout the 90s as well as single parent DNA research have been available for years that show human populations were present and separated from Asian populations thousands of years before the glacial corridor was a possibility. This doesn't even mention that Clovis technology likely didn't even come from Asia.
The only thing that Clovis had going for it is that the theory neatly solved several issues. Since archaeology at that time was not as sophisticated with its techniques and the lack of a good selection of sites, the people digging stuff up just noticed that after about 13,000 years ago they stopped finding these spear points when they found a large mammal skeleton. Also, within a short period after this tool showed up, the large mammal population of the Americas seemed to have died out. In addition, climatologists at the time came out with a breakthrough theory that massive glaciation had lowered sea levels significantly allowing for the Bering Straight land bridge. This convergence of new information seemed like the perfect way to integrate the known information at the time. Unfortunately, except for the coincidence, they didn't have a shred of evidence it actually happened that way.
So, like so much "news", this is just an old hat. Carry on.
These report cards that measure the quality of legislators based on their floor votes really don't give the big picture and don't really mean much.
First, it assumes that each bill can be rated as either 'good' or 'bad' in some key respect. This is an extremely subjective position and with the low number of tech bills that regularly go through the congress it is hard to say.
Second, it assumes that the legislation is single-issue. The legislative process is one of compromise. Something which may be a fantastic idea to one person may be horribly flawed due to some political reason, such as objection to a sunset clause or a rider which is not acceptable.
The very 'best' score was an 80% with a major clumping in the 50% range? This seems that most of the representatives weren't unfriendly to tech interests, but they were voting based on unrelated criteria. This isn't a measure of tech friendliness, but a measure of tech indifference.
I can personally attest to the problems of buried electrical cable. I am a dispatcher for a local power company. About 3/4 of our grid is above ground with the rest earth buried (not tunnel buried as in some cities). Buried cables account for fully half of our line failures. The most common issues are the result of earth shifting and water seepage. Repair of underground cable requires extra equipment and manpower to locate and excavate to fix problems. Also, there is a danger of damaging underground cables and pipes maintained by other utilities. Utilities spend a lot of money locating their underground infrastructure for each other.
It's a disaster for modern science that so many great minds have spent so much time working on something so very fruitless. Regardless of the actual merits of string theory, if they had worked on other things they likely would have been much more productive at creating predictive theory.
It isn't so obvious that he was commiting theft, thus the story.
This is a coffee shop which provides free wireless access to draw in customers. People are encouraged to access this hotspot. When the coffee shop employees that some guy was always outside the shop with his laptop, they said that if he wasn't going to purchase something he couldn't use their wireless signal, eventually calling the police to shoo him away. He later returned and parked in the private parking lot for which he is probably guilty of tresspassing, but is he guilty of theft for doing what other people do for free?
This is the big difference between theft and tresspass law is that theft deprives the victim by the loss of something. The coffee shop could be argued to have lost some bandwidth, but it could be compared to something that has been likely been seen by the courts. If you are told not to return to a store that offers free samples to shoppers every weekend and you return and have some free samples can you be changed with theft of those samples? You didn't eat an unusually large number of samples compared to other non-prohibited customers, but the store is out that stuff that they freely gave to you.
I'm of the opinion that this is a single count of tresspass. The guy went into a private area which he had been asked by agents of the owners of said area as well as police officials to vacate and not return to. He returned to that private area and used their services without causing undue harm to them.
Bob Carter and Richard Morgan are both among the "hundreds of scientists" who naysay climate change to varying degrees. The fact that these two are being interviewed is not a change in the scientific community, it is not the scientific community in general talking back on this. These are the cries of the same anti-climate change folks as always.
The fact of the matter is tens of thousands of scientists worldwide agree that there is marked climate change, the trends of this change corrolate very well with increased concentrations of certain gasses in the atmosphere, and that these gasses can quite plausibly trap heat. Those who doubt this science have not been able to provide any arguments which reasonably dispute these three important points about the theory of climate change.
This post and the dozens below it are arguing the difference between Linux the open source kernel project and Linux the brand.
When most normal non-dev people talk about Linux they aren't talking about a kernel, seperate from the development projects which rely on it; they are talking about Linux the operating system alternative. Linux is actually a really good brand and those of you who try to box it into just the kernel are missing the point of this and many other articles like it.
If we think of Linux as simply a base part of the larger GNU community, then the Linux brand that means an alternate OS to Windows for the large majority of PC users will fail because of increased costs to commercial developers because each 'flavor' of Linux has such a small userbase.
While I'm not an expert by any means about the various standards projects, we need the community to be open to the idea of them if Linux the brand is to be realized.
Naw. Football players actually have relatively good academic records. This is mostly due to requirements that competing athletes maintain good grades.
The big trends that are causing student disengagement in high school are more likely these culprits:
1. A decline in the number of hours per day that children are supervised by adults during non-school hours.
2. A decrease in the number of well educated role-models for children in the popular media.
3. Very large student:teacher ratios make meaningful personal relationships less numerous.
4. Teacher shortages have led to hiring many teachers with either poor credentials in their subject or poor teaching credentials.
There are other important factors, sure, but these are the biggies and they relate to more than just the subjects mentioned. This is part of the decay of our secondary education system.
How about education and municipal plans to regarding epidemics? Anti-virals might be the best chance of treating those who have bird flu, but the best practice is to contain the virus early and give the medical community time to develop a real vaccine defense.
1) Complexity of use is definitely complexity here. Like good programmers, a lot of the people working on FOSS are trying to build in flexibility. This means a boatload of options, most of which are cryptic techno-speak for interoperability. Instead of tucking all of the options out of the way of people who won't understand them, much FOSS even requires that you deal with these settings before the software will even work. The author is using complexity from a user perspective, which is a more specific gripe than just complaining about usability, which is broader.
2) I agree that it is a problem with software in general, but FOSS is particularly bad in this regard. Paid software companies that want to have a popular product will hire people who might not be coding experts, but understand usability for their target audience to come in and help create the result. They also end up hiring people who can translate between these folks and the devs so they don't kill each other. One outstanding criticism of FOSS is that most projects exclude those without a coding skillset even if they can bring other skillsets to the table that would improve the project. This means that people who have insights regarding usability often get excluded from influencing development.
I do want to point out that a vast majority of FOSS is just fine because the target audience is very technology savvy folks. The problem here is when FOSS evangalists run around asking why people are still installing Windows when this great other OS is available for free. Even if FOSS were to bridge that last usability gap to the non-technical user, there are other obstacles which bar the way, but this last gap is a requirement for use by the general public.
This is the case in most of the world and one of the few reasons I am proud to be an American where the burden of proof is on the plaintiff in such a case. This barrier makes it very difficult and expensive for citizens and reporters in other countries to report on anything. The rule outside the U.S. is, if you can't prove it in court, don't say it. In the U.S. we expect that people will say anything on their minds and as long as nobody can prove that you are lying to deceive then you are usually in the clear.
Is there anything you can't do with carbon nanotubes?
So far I have heard that they will be the next steel, the next silicon, the next communication line, the next display medium, the next fabric, the next medicinal treatment. I just want to know is will this change the world in the same fundamental way that mineral oil did in the 20th?
There is a big difference between 'subscribers' and 'purchacers'. Subscribers can decrease as people stop paying money for them. Guild Wars doesn't have that problem so that when somebody stops playing the game their account stays active.
There is one caveat: Symantec counts only those security flaws that have been confirmed by the vendor. According to security monitoring company Secunia, there are 19 security issues that Microsoft still has to deal with for Internet Explorer, while there are only three for Firefox.
All these people miss the big drawback of this controller. For it to work you have to swing around your fist clenched around a dense piece of plastic and battery. Susie is going to knock Jimmy's clock off and big N will have to go to the courthouse.
Other than that, good show, these guys spell out exactly why I'm buying one; particularly if the price point is below $200.
What is the purpose of education in general?
Is there a single purpose or does it need to provide different services for different people?
Our Universities used to be places for research and the training of researchers. They currently are providing a basic vocational role for high-skilled labor from computer design to health-care.
If we are going to meet the labor requirements of an advanced service economy we need to evaluate the entire education system from cradle to grave. Everybody needs to have life-long learning skills and post-secondary school is not the place to be trying to teach people this.
The learning requirements of the future are going to require that we look at school systematically instead of divided into several distinct parts. Degrees are an antiquated concept which doesn't reflect the high degree of specialization required in the workforce.
Is higher-ed about becoming a specialist or a generalist or a specialist with a degree of generalization? Yes. Students coming to higher education will each be better at some balance of generalization and specialization and the workforce needs people of great variety in this respect. Our institutions of learning need to be able to do all of this, but the question is are they doing a good job of it now?
JAJC is already taken as the name of a jabber client.
The whole idea of embracing an open protocol is that anybody can easily make a client for it. So far Jabber clients aren't all that hot in many respects but until it becomes way popular we aren't going to see the kind of choice that we will if Google Chat becomes big and stays open, which this article does a good job of expressing my concern in this regard.
As for Gaim, I personally don't like it for some of the same reasons, it is just feels like too much duct tape is holding it together most days and it doesn't play well with other aps on my comp, namely my OS.
They also forgot legacy business software. You know that hack job Jimmy made back in '97 that runs everything in the company, everybody hates to use, but you can't live without? My company runs Linux on most of its boxes, but we have to rdesktop into a Windows machine to get anything done.
You can't really make any money in a decentralized system
But that isn't the point. Google makes money where it can, but where it can't make money directly it can still earn something that is hard to just buy: Namespace. Even if Google doesn't make a dime on their IM, they are going to migrate people off of MSN, AIM, and Yahoo! messengers and replace those terms with Google.
Now the problem comes for Google if they alienate all those people who think that Google is leading a revolution to an open future with green pastures and the like. By not connecting to other Jabber servers they are going to turn off a lot of influential techies and it will hurt their name.
Google should just settle with getting people off of clients that burn competetors names into the brains of people and bask in the warm glow from the techie community for embracing an open standard because this closed network thing just isn't going to fly with a major Google market segment. I think that is going to hurt them more than if they chose to lose out on the opportunity to put the words "Google Talk" on everybody's desktop.
The trick is creating a clear and nagivable path for people new to the system to learn it. I work with professional graphic designers who are married not only to specific programs but older versions of those programs because learning the new interface would just cause too much headache and hurt their livlihoods.
If GIMP and other mass user Linux products (read, X) want to get users to convert they need to make the transition much easier than it is now otherwise the less savvy professionals in less technical areas will keep using what they are comfortable with.
What is the accuracy and reliability of any of these market share tests? Perhaps a previous poll gave a result in the high end of the margin of error and this one gave on the low end. You can't follow these polls as if they were actually accurate. Any one poll is unreliable, it is a series of polls which can show a trend.
This is just a bunch of thoughts about things and is really just feelings devs got after the EQ age. It fails to even address the important issues that the current round of games are trying to address with various levels of failure. Let's throw out the soundbyte length 'laws' and bring around a discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that you have a few months with PS3s in the hands of consumers and plenty of reviews to pour over, what mistakes did Sony make in the design of the system?
In the archaeological world Clovis population theories have been dead or dying for at least 5 years. Isotopic dating of human dwellings in the Americas throughout the 90s as well as single parent DNA research have been available for years that show human populations were present and separated from Asian populations thousands of years before the glacial corridor was a possibility. This doesn't even mention that Clovis technology likely didn't even come from Asia.
The only thing that Clovis had going for it is that the theory neatly solved several issues. Since archaeology at that time was not as sophisticated with its techniques and the lack of a good selection of sites, the people digging stuff up just noticed that after about 13,000 years ago they stopped finding these spear points when they found a large mammal skeleton. Also, within a short period after this tool showed up, the large mammal population of the Americas seemed to have died out. In addition, climatologists at the time came out with a breakthrough theory that massive glaciation had lowered sea levels significantly allowing for the Bering Straight land bridge. This convergence of new information seemed like the perfect way to integrate the known information at the time. Unfortunately, except for the coincidence, they didn't have a shred of evidence it actually happened that way.
So, like so much "news", this is just an old hat. Carry on.
These report cards that measure the quality of legislators based on their floor votes really don't give the big picture and don't really mean much.
First, it assumes that each bill can be rated as either 'good' or 'bad' in some key respect. This is an extremely subjective position and with the low number of tech bills that regularly go through the congress it is hard to say.
Second, it assumes that the legislation is single-issue. The legislative process is one of compromise. Something which may be a fantastic idea to one person may be horribly flawed due to some political reason, such as objection to a sunset clause or a rider which is not acceptable.
The very 'best' score was an 80% with a major clumping in the 50% range? This seems that most of the representatives weren't unfriendly to tech interests, but they were voting based on unrelated criteria. This isn't a measure of tech friendliness, but a measure of tech indifference.
I can personally attest to the problems of buried electrical cable. I am a dispatcher for a local power company. About 3/4 of our grid is above ground with the rest earth buried (not tunnel buried as in some cities). Buried cables account for fully half of our line failures. The most common issues are the result of earth shifting and water seepage. Repair of underground cable requires extra equipment and manpower to locate and excavate to fix problems. Also, there is a danger of damaging underground cables and pipes maintained by other utilities. Utilities spend a lot of money locating their underground infrastructure for each other.
It's a disaster for modern science that so many great minds have spent so much time working on something so very fruitless. Regardless of the actual merits of string theory, if they had worked on other things they likely would have been much more productive at creating predictive theory.
It isn't so obvious that he was commiting theft, thus the story.
This is a coffee shop which provides free wireless access to draw in customers. People are encouraged to access this hotspot. When the coffee shop employees that some guy was always outside the shop with his laptop, they said that if he wasn't going to purchase something he couldn't use their wireless signal, eventually calling the police to shoo him away. He later returned and parked in the private parking lot for which he is probably guilty of tresspassing, but is he guilty of theft for doing what other people do for free?
This is the big difference between theft and tresspass law is that theft deprives the victim by the loss of something. The coffee shop could be argued to have lost some bandwidth, but it could be compared to something that has been likely been seen by the courts. If you are told not to return to a store that offers free samples to shoppers every weekend and you return and have some free samples can you be changed with theft of those samples? You didn't eat an unusually large number of samples compared to other non-prohibited customers, but the store is out that stuff that they freely gave to you.
I'm of the opinion that this is a single count of tresspass. The guy went into a private area which he had been asked by agents of the owners of said area as well as police officials to vacate and not return to. He returned to that private area and used their services without causing undue harm to them.
Bob Carter and Richard Morgan are both among the "hundreds of scientists" who naysay climate change to varying degrees. The fact that these two are being interviewed is not a change in the scientific community, it is not the scientific community in general talking back on this. These are the cries of the same anti-climate change folks as always.
The fact of the matter is tens of thousands of scientists worldwide agree that there is marked climate change, the trends of this change corrolate very well with increased concentrations of certain gasses in the atmosphere, and that these gasses can quite plausibly trap heat. Those who doubt this science have not been able to provide any arguments which reasonably dispute these three important points about the theory of climate change.
This post and the dozens below it are arguing the difference between Linux the open source kernel project and Linux the brand.
When most normal non-dev people talk about Linux they aren't talking about a kernel, seperate from the development projects which rely on it; they are talking about Linux the operating system alternative. Linux is actually a really good brand and those of you who try to box it into just the kernel are missing the point of this and many other articles like it.
If we think of Linux as simply a base part of the larger GNU community, then the Linux brand that means an alternate OS to Windows for the large majority of PC users will fail because of increased costs to commercial developers because each 'flavor' of Linux has such a small userbase.
While I'm not an expert by any means about the various standards projects, we need the community to be open to the idea of them if Linux the brand is to be realized.
Naw. Football players actually have relatively good academic records. This is mostly due to requirements that competing athletes maintain good grades.
The big trends that are causing student disengagement in high school are more likely these culprits:
1. A decline in the number of hours per day that children are supervised by adults during non-school hours.
2. A decrease in the number of well educated role-models for children in the popular media.
3. Very large student:teacher ratios make meaningful personal relationships less numerous.
4. Teacher shortages have led to hiring many teachers with either poor credentials in their subject or poor teaching credentials.
There are other important factors, sure, but these are the biggies and they relate to more than just the subjects mentioned. This is part of the decay of our secondary education system.
How about education and municipal plans to regarding epidemics? Anti-virals might be the best chance of treating those who have bird flu, but the best practice is to contain the virus early and give the medical community time to develop a real vaccine defense.
1) Complexity of use is definitely complexity here. Like good programmers, a lot of the people working on FOSS are trying to build in flexibility. This means a boatload of options, most of which are cryptic techno-speak for interoperability. Instead of tucking all of the options out of the way of people who won't understand them, much FOSS even requires that you deal with these settings before the software will even work. The author is using complexity from a user perspective, which is a more specific gripe than just complaining about usability, which is broader.
2) I agree that it is a problem with software in general, but FOSS is particularly bad in this regard. Paid software companies that want to have a popular product will hire people who might not be coding experts, but understand usability for their target audience to come in and help create the result. They also end up hiring people who can translate between these folks and the devs so they don't kill each other. One outstanding criticism of FOSS is that most projects exclude those without a coding skillset even if they can bring other skillsets to the table that would improve the project. This means that people who have insights regarding usability often get excluded from influencing development.
I do want to point out that a vast majority of FOSS is just fine because the target audience is very technology savvy folks. The problem here is when FOSS evangalists run around asking why people are still installing Windows when this great other OS is available for free. Even if FOSS were to bridge that last usability gap to the non-technical user, there are other obstacles which bar the way, but this last gap is a requirement for use by the general public.
Capitalism isn't a political system. It is an economic system.
This is the case in most of the world and one of the few reasons I am proud to be an American where the burden of proof is on the plaintiff in such a case. This barrier makes it very difficult and expensive for citizens and reporters in other countries to report on anything. The rule outside the U.S. is, if you can't prove it in court, don't say it. In the U.S. we expect that people will say anything on their minds and as long as nobody can prove that you are lying to deceive then you are usually in the clear.
Is there anything you can't do with carbon nanotubes?
So far I have heard that they will be the next steel, the next silicon, the next communication line, the next display medium, the next fabric, the next medicinal treatment. I just want to know is will this change the world in the same fundamental way that mineral oil did in the 20th?
Why don't we leave the definition of words like 'planet' to the English majors and just dig into the real science of the discovery?
There is a big difference between 'subscribers' and 'purchacers'. Subscribers can decrease as people stop paying money for them. Guild Wars doesn't have that problem so that when somebody stops playing the game their account stays active.
apples != oranges
Law
Suit
All these people miss the big drawback of this controller. For it to work you have to swing around your fist clenched around a dense piece of plastic and battery. Susie is going to knock Jimmy's clock off and big N will have to go to the courthouse.
Other than that, good show, these guys spell out exactly why I'm buying one; particularly if the price point is below $200.
Is there a single purpose or does it need to provide different services for different people?
Our Universities used to be places for research and the training of researchers. They currently are providing a basic vocational role for high-skilled labor from computer design to health-care.
If we are going to meet the labor requirements of an advanced service economy we need to evaluate the entire education system from cradle to grave. Everybody needs to have life-long learning skills and post-secondary school is not the place to be trying to teach people this.
The learning requirements of the future are going to require that we look at school systematically instead of divided into several distinct parts. Degrees are an antiquated concept which doesn't reflect the high degree of specialization required in the workforce.
Is higher-ed about becoming a specialist or a generalist or a specialist with a degree of generalization? Yes. Students coming to higher education will each be better at some balance of generalization and specialization and the workforce needs people of great variety in this respect. Our institutions of learning need to be able to do all of this, but the question is are they doing a good job of it now?
The whole idea of embracing an open protocol is that anybody can easily make a client for it. So far Jabber clients aren't all that hot in many respects but until it becomes way popular we aren't going to see the kind of choice that we will if Google Chat becomes big and stays open, which this article does a good job of expressing my concern in this regard.
As for Gaim, I personally don't like it for some of the same reasons, it is just feels like too much duct tape is holding it together most days and it doesn't play well with other aps on my comp, namely my OS.
They also forgot legacy business software. You know that hack job Jimmy made back in '97 that runs everything in the company, everybody hates to use, but you can't live without? My company runs Linux on most of its boxes, but we have to rdesktop into a Windows machine to get anything done.
But that isn't the point. Google makes money where it can, but where it can't make money directly it can still earn something that is hard to just buy: Namespace. Even if Google doesn't make a dime on their IM, they are going to migrate people off of MSN, AIM, and Yahoo! messengers and replace those terms with Google.
Now the problem comes for Google if they alienate all those people who think that Google is leading a revolution to an open future with green pastures and the like. By not connecting to other Jabber servers they are going to turn off a lot of influential techies and it will hurt their name.
Google should just settle with getting people off of clients that burn competetors names into the brains of people and bask in the warm glow from the techie community for embracing an open standard because this closed network thing just isn't going to fly with a major Google market segment. I think that is going to hurt them more than if they chose to lose out on the opportunity to put the words "Google Talk" on everybody's desktop.
If GIMP and other mass user Linux products (read, X) want to get users to convert they need to make the transition much easier than it is now otherwise the less savvy professionals in less technical areas will keep using what they are comfortable with.
What is the accuracy and reliability of any of these market share tests? Perhaps a previous poll gave a result in the high end of the margin of error and this one gave on the low end. You can't follow these polls as if they were actually accurate. Any one poll is unreliable, it is a series of polls which can show a trend.
This is just a bunch of thoughts about things and is really just feelings devs got after the EQ age. It fails to even address the important issues that the current round of games are trying to address with various levels of failure. Let's throw out the soundbyte length 'laws' and bring around a discussion.