This is business as usual at the NRO. The NRO is the most pathetic of the US intelligence agencies, and is known for failing more often than not in just about all endeavors. For the NRO, a satellite making it into space at all is a big deal, because NRO projects have a history of dying in the design stage, and there have been other big failures such as a specialized launch vehicle blowing up on the launch pad, taking satellites with it.
If you're wondering why you've never heard of the NRO before, it's because the government does everything it can to keep the agency under wraps, mostly because it doesn't want the taxpayers to realize how many billions of dollars are flushed down this worthless toilet of a spy agency yearly.
No one will have "Won" or "Lost" until sometime in 2008 but (as far as I know) no company has recovered from a poor start when there was strong competition
What about the original Playstation? From what I remember, it had a slow start, in an environment where there were lots of competitors using CD media, but gradually won out. The original Playstation had a great start. Battle Arena Toshinden and Ridge Racer were both launch games, and no other system had anything that could compare with either one, particularly Toshinden which was the first 3D fighting game sold for consoles. These games made the console a huge hit with arcade fans who wanted to play Ridge Racer at home and fighting fans seeking a faster, easier game than Sega's Virtua Fighter arcade game.
Neither did Elephant, but it won a Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Or Zero Day, which also won several independant film awards.
If a movie touches a controversial subject, it's considered avant-guard and the director worthy of praise for daring to tackle such a "hard" issue. If a serious game that uses an interactive medium to try to do the same (SCMRPG is basically Zero Day in RPG form), it's not even worthy of consideration? If Elephant had been named "Super Columbine Massacre" most people would never have considered screening or viewing it. If the game developers really want to convince people that they've produced a game that assists people in thoughtfully examining the nature and causes of school shootings, they should try re-releasing the game with the respect, decency, and gravitas that anything dealing with those events deserves. I see know reason to sympathize with people who claim to be producing thoughtful content but treat it in a way that is inexcusably sophomoric.
We use x86 CPUs because they're cheap, versatile, and run all of our old software. All of the little things the OP complains about might matter to a seriously nerdy programmer, but to 99% of the people using computers, those words are just gibberish. Something else to keep in mind about non-x86 CPUs is that yes, they may be faster than x86 at task X or cheaper for task Z, but that's because most of them aren't really designed for general use; if they were used by everybody, the architectures would change to reflect that, and those chips would quickly become less nerd-friendly.
It's not that MS has the money to stay relevant. They have the market share to stay relevant. That may change in the future. The question is...how far in the future. What Microsoft has are products that are relevant to the masses. Mac OS is not relevant to the masses because not everyone wants, can afford, or is willing to pay for, an Apple desktop. Solaris is not relevant to the masses because it's not pretty and a bother for a non-sysadmin to configure and maintain. Linux is not relevant to the masses because F/OSS designers are nerds creating software that's relevant to them.
Microsoft gets away with being mediocre because they target the hordes of similarly mediocre individuals who make up the human population. If an above-average competitor comes along at this point and targets those same masses, upsetting Microsoft will be easy; but right now I see no evidence that such an event is likely. Google is too nerdy to do it, IBM doesn't care about desktops anymore, it could only happen at Apple with Jobs gone and with Jobs gone Apple would crumble, and Sun is just too much of a mess.
What I don't get is that Microsoft made Exchange clients for DOS, Win31, and Mac (There was even a rare Outlook 97 for Windows 3.1!) Why hasn't any of that been successfully reverse engineered and cloned? Because open-source programmers are often hobbyists who would rather cobble together one more mail client that will never have a measurable market share. One thing that the anti-Microsoft zealots need to realize is that the open-source crowd aren't in it to win, they're just in it for the code, and so relying on them to conquer the world is wrongheaded, if not downright stupid.
It makes the weathly have a better chance than the regular folks.
What's wrong with that? If the wealthy lived the same lives as the lower classes, what would incentvize the lower classes to be more productive? I don't have a Wii because some loser sat around Best Buy all night waiting to buy me one. I have a Wii because a hardworking attorney busted his butt to earn a salary that allowed him to spend less time buying one on eBay than it would have taken just to drive to the nearest Best Buy. Exceptional people deserve to be rewarded for their talent, intelligence, and efforts, not brought down to the level of people who toil at menial work and still expect easy access to everything they want.
XHTML is obtuse and annoying enough as it is, the last thing it needs is to start adding content-specific tags. Why not add tags, so that employers can customize browsers to keep employees from following email links to lame blog articles? Or maybe a tag, so that MBAs can be limited to only viewing stuff that's potentially work related?
What XHTML needs it to be made less obtuse and more friendly for new designers. If the W3C is foolish enough to clutter it's standards by adding tags like , it will only encourage design firms to standardize their web design on Flash.
I think that younger people, myself included, would be a lot more excited by space travel if it seemed like there was some sensible, practical business thought behind it. The Mars landers of the last decade have fired up a lot of young people because the men and women behind those missions made their work very public, so we've known what they were looking for, what they actually looked at, and what they've been learning from it all. But those missions are standouts in space exploration, not the norm. Nobody seems to have a good reason for going to the Moon, other than it's a great source of pride for nationalists in the governments and media of the two interested nations, China and the United States. The same goes for Mars--we don't here scientists talking about it much, just politicians and pundits.
It doesn't help that some of us have grown up to regard NASA as a bloated bureaucratic nightmare that's either being hobbled by politicians using it for personal gain or being reigned in by politicians trying to kill off NASA's wasteful spending habits. Was the decision to sort-of-save the Hubble telescope genius or folly? Why should I waste my time sorting through the BS? The political theater that surrounded the safety investigations of the Space Shuttle program in recent years was similarly annoying, but NASA probably deserves more of the blame than the sleazy congresscritters who were making annoying speeches about it.
To make space exploration palatable the governments need to get out and let big business take over. It might take longer, but it will also cost less and provide a lot more good PR and heroes than the national space programs are now. Burt Rutan and Richard Branson have done more to excite me about space travel than anyone at NASA or any other space agency has in my entire lifetime. If the people of the United States want to see a new age of exploration, lets give massive tax breaks to companies that want to do the work and then get the politics the hell out of the way.
Will enough people really want to spend $100K or so to travel halfway around the world in 2 hours vs. 20? After the novelty of going into space wears off for the rich, I see this as being about as exciting (and economically feasible) as the Concorde. The Concorde was economically feasible; after raising prices in the mid-to-late-1980s British Airways turned some hefty profits from their Concordes. Air France probably could have done the same if it had been owned by rational people at the time, but French socialists aren't especially good at business. But subsonic air travel is much more profitable, so grounding the planes made a lot of sense once BA had privatized; had there actually been any competition in the market BA would probably have lost many of those customers and killing the Concorde would have made less sense. Virgin negotiated to buy the BA Concordes and keep them in service but gave up when Airbus decided to end support for the Concorde altogether.
I do it with bigger ammount of cash, too, since new US banknotes can be detected from distance. If I'm about to carry few hundreds of $ in my pocket, I don't want to advertise it. Anyone with the money, time, and ability to set up an electronic system to identify potential targets for a mugging probably has better things to do than mug people. Like just robbing you at an ATM.
Ease of installation....if you make Linux as easy to use as Windows, then you need to discard the root/user distinction, and that would make Linux as bad as Windows... Apple has all the security of *NIX, is easier to install and configure--both in terms of the OS and software--than either Linux or Windows, and is certainly not as bad as Windows in terms of security.
The real solution to make Linux more mainstream is to make users more computer litterate. That's a terrible solution. Most people don't WANT to be more computer literate; their time is worth enough to justify paying for proprietary software as opposed to learning to deal with all of the BS that goes along with maintaining a Linux install.
I seriously think MS should support more than 1 filesystem (FAT32 is dieing). I'm not sure if you're a troll or a moron, but...
First of all, Windows supports more than one filesystem from Microsoft alone, those being FAT and NTFS. Second, adding support for other filesystems isn't hard; just like Linux all one has to do is install the software.
I'm guessing it will involve a bunch of Air Force nerds who travel through a magic gate to other planets which all oddly resemble either California or British Coloumbia, and once there, do whatever the Star Trek crew did in whatever episode of Star Trek the script for this particular episode of the new Stargate was lifted from. And they'll throw in a popular nerd or two from some other nerdy show to ensure that nerds bother to watch.
I hate Microsoft because I find it insulting that they expect damn near everyone to buy into their scam: release problem software, get you hooked, and then charge you for "fixes" which just create more problems that lead to more updates.
When I move to a new version of Mac OS, it's for cool new features I actually want. When I move to a new version of Windows, it's because of some lame issue with the previous version that Microsoft never fixed. This is why I haven't dumped any more money into PC hardware in two years, and boot my PC about once a month, and in a good month, not at all.
Developing a nice-looking, hi-res raster 2D game isn't likely to be any cheaper than 3D. There's still a tremendous amount of content that has to be drawn and tweaked, frame by frame. At HD resolutions, it needs a hell of a lot more detail to look good--maybe not so much for kids games, but adults likely won't be happy with a bland, flat 2D game--than it ever did at 320x240, which adds up to a lot of time spent detailing sprites.
A vector based 2D game could be done at a lower cost than traditional sprites, giving a look similar to most of the cartoons on Adult Swim, but to make it run well it would probably just end up being a 3D game with a lot of textures slapped onto planes.
Early on, I thought that the iTunes store was great. But that was several years ago, and Apple's failure to enhance it with anything other than more content and higher but still crappy video resolution is pretty pathetic. There are still glaring bugs in the Fairplay DRM system, both in iTunes and on the iPod, that have not been fixed. Audio quality is still horrible, which is a shame given that iTunes and the iPod both support lossless AAC. And it doesn't help Apple that CD prices, at least in my area, have come down some; many CDs that were $17.99 two years ago have come to ~$13.
iTunes needs a serious code overhaul, Apple needs to address the bugs in Fairplay and the iPod, and most of all, needs to at least double the bitrate of music being sold before I'll go back. And I imagine that its safe to assume a lot of other Apple customers feel the same.
I'm just stopping by to point out that the new FFMPEG codecs included with VLC are dreamy. Fullscreen video looks twice as good as it used to. And having Apple remote support in fullscreen mode is fab. Truly an excellent release.
Assuming the idiot kid with a Desert Eagle already owns and is using the weapon illegally, what difference did the prohibition on guns make for the community's safety to begin with except to prevent a homeowner from protecting himself when the kid decides to run into one of the surrounding homes for cover?
None whatsoever. But on the occasions where the idiots kids with guns are busted for something else before shooting anyone, the police are able to get at least some guns off of the street and prevent some shootouts. And in a city where people can be detained, searched, and even arrested for riding an unlicensed bicycle, it's not hard for the cops to find reasons to stop and search gangbangers.
... therefore the opposite of what you suggest should decrease crime: more socialism.
That theory only works if one ignores an obvious flaw; socialism is criminal behavior. Socialism is nothing more than theft: the proletariat gang up and coerce the wealthy into giving up their property so that it can be redistributed to the proletariat.
Gun control laws have consistently had as their targeted enforcement population the blacks of this country. Except nowadays, such laws are even endorsed by the NAACP and people historically targeted. That's what I find interesting.
That may be true in some cases, but in the case of DC, the connection to race is circumstantial. DC's criminal population may have been largely black at the time--as it has long been in much of the nation--but in this case the law was not passed by people looking to repress blacks. It was passed by black people, who, having watched much of their city destroyed by riots and arson in 1968, their middle and upper-class of all races flee, and insurers and lenders--what few had ever been willing to work with urban minorities--abandon them, were desperate to try and bring order to their city. Had it not have been for the crack epidemic and influx of latin gangs in the decades the followed, the ban might actually have even had some effect.
It was over 10 years after the passage of this law that DC became the murder capital of the nation.
That doesn't mean that the city was safe when the law was passed. Crime in DC started getting really bad after the 1968 riots and kept getting worse for a long time.
Guns aren't just for the military, cops, and gang-bangers -- we have 'em to make sure that our government doesn't herd us into cattle-cars, and send us off to the thermal depolymerizor en masse.
That's a great idea, and the last six years make me appreciate my rural gun-toting bretheren, but here in DC we're a little more concerned with doing whatever it takes to prevent gang shootouts that have residents of some neighborhoods taking cover in their bathtubs on Friday nights lest some idiot kid with a Desert Eagle put a bullet through a window/wall/whatever and hit someone inside. This is why I identify with Howard Dean on gun control--he understands that there are places where few restrictions on guns are needed, and others where allowing the general populace to remain armed is, quite simply, insane.
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This is business as usual at the NRO. The NRO is the most pathetic of the US intelligence agencies, and is known for failing more often than not in just about all endeavors. For the NRO, a satellite making it into space at all is a big deal, because NRO projects have a history of dying in the design stage, and there have been other big failures such as a specialized launch vehicle blowing up on the launch pad, taking satellites with it.
If you're wondering why you've never heard of the NRO before, it's because the government does everything it can to keep the agency under wraps, mostly because it doesn't want the taxpayers to realize how many billions of dollars are flushed down this worthless toilet of a spy agency yearly.
What about the original Playstation? From what I remember, it had a slow start, in an environment where there were lots of competitors using CD media, but gradually won out. The original Playstation had a great start. Battle Arena Toshinden and Ridge Racer were both launch games, and no other system had anything that could compare with either one, particularly Toshinden which was the first 3D fighting game sold for consoles. These games made the console a huge hit with arcade fans who wanted to play Ridge Racer at home and fighting fans seeking a faster, easier game than Sega's Virtua Fighter arcade game.
Neither did Elephant, but it won a Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Or Zero Day, which also won several independant film awards.
If a movie touches a controversial subject, it's considered avant-guard and the director worthy of praise for daring to tackle such a "hard" issue. If a serious game that uses an interactive medium to try to do the same (SCMRPG is basically Zero Day in RPG form), it's not even worthy of consideration? If Elephant had been named "Super Columbine Massacre" most people would never have considered screening or viewing it. If the game developers really want to convince people that they've produced a game that assists people in thoughtfully examining the nature and causes of school shootings, they should try re-releasing the game with the respect, decency, and gravitas that anything dealing with those events deserves. I see know reason to sympathize with people who claim to be producing thoughtful content but treat it in a way that is inexcusably sophomoric.
We use x86 CPUs because they're cheap, versatile, and run all of our old software. All of the little things the OP complains about might matter to a seriously nerdy programmer, but to 99% of the people using computers, those words are just gibberish. Something else to keep in mind about non-x86 CPUs is that yes, they may be faster than x86 at task X or cheaper for task Z, but that's because most of them aren't really designed for general use; if they were used by everybody, the architectures would change to reflect that, and those chips would quickly become less nerd-friendly.
Microsoft gets away with being mediocre because they target the hordes of similarly mediocre individuals who make up the human population. If an above-average competitor comes along at this point and targets those same masses, upsetting Microsoft will be easy; but right now I see no evidence that such an event is likely. Google is too nerdy to do it, IBM doesn't care about desktops anymore, it could only happen at Apple with Jobs gone and with Jobs gone Apple would crumble, and Sun is just too much of a mess.
It makes the weathly have a better chance than the regular folks.
What's wrong with that? If the wealthy lived the same lives as the lower classes, what would incentvize the lower classes to be more productive? I don't have a Wii because some loser sat around Best Buy all night waiting to buy me one. I have a Wii because a hardworking attorney busted his butt to earn a salary that allowed him to spend less time buying one on eBay than it would have taken just to drive to the nearest Best Buy. Exceptional people deserve to be rewarded for their talent, intelligence, and efforts, not brought down to the level of people who toil at menial work and still expect easy access to everything they want.
XHTML is obtuse and annoying enough as it is, the last thing it needs is to start adding content-specific tags. Why not add tags, so that employers can customize browsers to keep employees from following email links to lame blog articles? Or maybe a tag, so that MBAs can be limited to only viewing stuff that's potentially work related?
What XHTML needs it to be made less obtuse and more friendly for new designers. If the W3C is foolish enough to clutter it's standards by adding tags like , it will only encourage design firms to standardize their web design on Flash.
I think that younger people, myself included, would be a lot more excited by space travel if it seemed like there was some sensible, practical business thought behind it. The Mars landers of the last decade have fired up a lot of young people because the men and women behind those missions made their work very public, so we've known what they were looking for, what they actually looked at, and what they've been learning from it all. But those missions are standouts in space exploration, not the norm. Nobody seems to have a good reason for going to the Moon, other than it's a great source of pride for nationalists in the governments and media of the two interested nations, China and the United States. The same goes for Mars--we don't here scientists talking about it much, just politicians and pundits.
It doesn't help that some of us have grown up to regard NASA as a bloated bureaucratic nightmare that's either being hobbled by politicians using it for personal gain or being reigned in by politicians trying to kill off NASA's wasteful spending habits. Was the decision to sort-of-save the Hubble telescope genius or folly? Why should I waste my time sorting through the BS? The political theater that surrounded the safety investigations of the Space Shuttle program in recent years was similarly annoying, but NASA probably deserves more of the blame than the sleazy congresscritters who were making annoying speeches about it.
To make space exploration palatable the governments need to get out and let big business take over. It might take longer, but it will also cost less and provide a lot more good PR and heroes than the national space programs are now. Burt Rutan and Richard Branson have done more to excite me about space travel than anyone at NASA or any other space agency has in my entire lifetime. If the people of the United States want to see a new age of exploration, lets give massive tax breaks to companies that want to do the work and then get the politics the hell out of the way.
If I'm about to carry few hundreds of $ in my pocket, I don't want to advertise it. Anyone with the money, time, and ability to set up an electronic system to identify potential targets for a mugging probably has better things to do than mug people. Like just robbing you at an ATM.
First of all, Windows supports more than one filesystem from Microsoft alone, those being FAT and NTFS. Second, adding support for other filesystems isn't hard; just like Linux all one has to do is install the software.
...and what the concept behind the show will be?
I'm guessing it will involve a bunch of Air Force nerds who travel through a magic gate to other planets which all oddly resemble either California or British Coloumbia, and once there, do whatever the Star Trek crew did in whatever episode of Star Trek the script for this particular episode of the new Stargate was lifted from. And they'll throw in a popular nerd or two from some other nerdy show to ensure that nerds bother to watch.
I hate Microsoft because I find it insulting that they expect damn near everyone to buy into their scam: release problem software, get you hooked, and then charge you for "fixes" which just create more problems that lead to more updates.
When I move to a new version of Mac OS, it's for cool new features I actually want. When I move to a new version of Windows, it's because of some lame issue with the previous version that Microsoft never fixed. This is why I haven't dumped any more money into PC hardware in two years, and boot my PC about once a month, and in a good month, not at all.
Developing a nice-looking, hi-res raster 2D game isn't likely to be any cheaper than 3D. There's still a tremendous amount of content that has to be drawn and tweaked, frame by frame. At HD resolutions, it needs a hell of a lot more detail to look good--maybe not so much for kids games, but adults likely won't be happy with a bland, flat 2D game--than it ever did at 320x240, which adds up to a lot of time spent detailing sprites.
A vector based 2D game could be done at a lower cost than traditional sprites, giving a look similar to most of the cartoons on Adult Swim, but to make it run well it would probably just end up being a 3D game with a lot of textures slapped onto planes.
Early on, I thought that the iTunes store was great. But that was several years ago, and Apple's failure to enhance it with anything other than more content and higher but still crappy video resolution is pretty pathetic. There are still glaring bugs in the Fairplay DRM system, both in iTunes and on the iPod, that have not been fixed. Audio quality is still horrible, which is a shame given that iTunes and the iPod both support lossless AAC. And it doesn't help Apple that CD prices, at least in my area, have come down some; many CDs that were $17.99 two years ago have come to ~$13.
iTunes needs a serious code overhaul, Apple needs to address the bugs in Fairplay and the iPod, and most of all, needs to at least double the bitrate of music being sold before I'll go back. And I imagine that its safe to assume a lot of other Apple customers feel the same.
Perhaps. I'll probably spend some more time comparing with old versions and windows stuff and see what I get.
I'm just stopping by to point out that the new FFMPEG codecs included with VLC are dreamy. Fullscreen video looks twice as good as it used to. And having Apple remote support in fullscreen mode is fab. Truly an excellent release.
In general, nothing good.
None whatsoever. But on the occasions where the idiots kids with guns are busted for something else before shooting anyone, the police are able to get at least some guns off of the street and prevent some shootouts. And in a city where people can be detained, searched, and even arrested for riding an unlicensed bicycle, it's not hard for the cops to find reasons to stop and search gangbangers.
That theory only works if one ignores an obvious flaw; socialism is criminal behavior. Socialism is nothing more than theft: the proletariat gang up and coerce the wealthy into giving up their property so that it can be redistributed to the proletariat.
That may be true in some cases, but in the case of DC, the connection to race is circumstantial. DC's criminal population may have been largely black at the time--as it has long been in much of the nation--but in this case the law was not passed by people looking to repress blacks. It was passed by black people, who, having watched much of their city destroyed by riots and arson in 1968, their middle and upper-class of all races flee, and insurers and lenders--what few had ever been willing to work with urban minorities--abandon them, were desperate to try and bring order to their city. Had it not have been for the crack epidemic and influx of latin gangs in the decades the followed, the ban might actually have even had some effect.
That doesn't mean that the city was safe when the law was passed. Crime in DC started getting really bad after the 1968 riots and kept getting worse for a long time.
That's a great idea, and the last six years make me appreciate my rural gun-toting bretheren, but here in DC we're a little more concerned with doing whatever it takes to prevent gang shootouts that have residents of some neighborhoods taking cover in their bathtubs on Friday nights lest some idiot kid with a Desert Eagle put a bullet through a window/wall/whatever and hit someone inside. This is why I identify with Howard Dean on gun control--he understands that there are places where few restrictions on guns are needed, and others where allowing the general populace to remain armed is, quite simply, insane.