Yeah, my PC speakers cost about $150. I listen to music on a set of Grado SR-80 cans that list at $90. If I need to travel, well I got as a gift a pair of Sennheiser PX-360s that run to slightly over a hundred bucks. I am an audiophile in the sense that I enjoy listening to music, and I listen to it on equipment that reproduces it to higher fidelity than the cheapest consumer stuff out there. Sure, I could spend more money, and get myself a proper DAC, a vacuum-tube headphone amp, some high-end headphones, and a totally sweet home theater, but as much as I would appreciate the results, that's not really an expense I can justify.
I can justify buying what I have, and most sensible audiophiles will see the logic in my choices.
Yet all my equipment together doesn't cost as much as a single "moderately-priced" Bose solution that puts out a horribly distorted sound. The reason why Bose's products are so successful is also why people who care about music dislike them: You hear the speakers, not the music. By punching up the bass and the highs, people hear things they don't normally hear in music, but what they hear sounds nothing like the original.
It's the audio equivalent of ketchup, only if ketchup cost four times the price of a decent cut of meat. Bose isn't the opposite of "Gold-plated Ethernet-cable Audiophiles", it's the gateway to that brand of Audiophilia. MIT's gonna make a lot of cash out of Amar's company. Good for them.
well, yeah, stupid teleological argument, but you ain't gonna but this one on the medieval universities. Arguing over the possible number of angels on the head of a pin is what academics should be doing. He's saying they should be busy figuring out how to apply the motion of the epicycle sphere of Mars to improving crop yields..
Those medieval University Professors were certainly debating each other, and did include topics such as whether two immaterial bodies (such as those of angels) could occupy the same space. They were also training students, and explaining their work to the rest of the world. In fact, one of the roles of the medieval university was to diffuse (sure, mostly religious) knowledge to all (believers).
But professors and students were engaged in a collaborative effort to describe in a unified manner the entirety of reality. Modern science has come a long way since then, but the institutions and even the notions that shaped science come from medieval universities.
The "angels dancing on a head of a pin" jab comes from the Reformation types who never saw the point in studying something not immediately applicable.
For the rest, yes, we need more education, more Ph.D.s, and the arguments to eliminate them come straight out of Brave New World: if people are ignorant of history, they'll buy the same stupid line, again and again.
... that last point is critical, and points at what I'm working towards: our Ph.D. system can't work if the only jobs Ph.D.s can get in their field are in the Universities. By having universities (often with public funds) put their resources to doing private industry research, we're not only subsidizing research, we're reducing the effective number of researchers in the field (does Bell Labs still exist?). And, yeah, at the same time our National Foundations and Endowments are turning the public route into one of paperwork and resource management.
So why give out Ph.D.s when the disagree effectively disqualifies the recipient for any job but the one held by the professor, which, by the way, has all the joys of a middle-management position except the salary, vacation time and short hours? Or, to put it another way, we should be investing our resources in a manner so that industry can complement academic research, not co-opt it.
The current focus on "relevant research" and turning university labs into money-making operations is part of the problem. While it's couched in terms of universities "Making Money" and "Doing something useful" (as the TFA appears to want), in practice, it means that university researchers pair up with private industry, doing only the things that private industry deems important (=incremental and rarely disruptive). Grant programs amplify this trend ("What are the industry applications of this research?", "Was your last research project a financial success?"). So, if the universities are paying researchers to do private-industry research, private industry has less incentive to fund its own research. As a result, we're moving from a system where we had academics engaged in fundamental research, with often disruptive results, and a thriving private industry research community, to one where a smaller pool of public-private academics do the bidding of private industry.
Too many Ph.D.s? You bet. In the name of "solving practical problems", we've moved industry research into the universities, and killed off fundamental research.
Sorry, that's wrong. TEPCO, like BP last year, has no interest in presenting an honest assessment of what's actually happening: the corporate barons got where they were by downplaying problems. The only difference between their actions as junior executives and as senior ones is that now the problems aren't human but environmental and factually verifiable. So, they've got no experience in the matter. The takeaway from this is not that we should kill nuclear power — good grief, did you see what BP did last year with oil, or Massey coal has done for generations? What we need is a procedure to deal with emergencies that removes them early on from the control of the captains of industry who got us in this mess to start with. Because yes, a magnitude 9 Earthquake and tsunami is more than any nuke plant designed in 1971 was built for, but we need people in charge of the emergency response who are willing to acknowledge this fact on day 1.
First, a cabled keyboard that weighs at least four pounds doesn't seem like the best TV remote out there. Second, what is this TV you speak of? Oh, you mean that tech from the twentieth century?
Seriously, a PC, and internet connection and a huge screen is becoming increasingly viable as a television replacement. Microsoft may have trouble putting Kinects on set-top boxes, but eventually, even the Cable companies and their vaunted "digital cable" will fall.
Academic IT departments are very different beasts. The bureaucracy to get things done can be much more complicated, the resources much scarcer, and the variety of tasks that people need to do/think they should have a right to do/assert that IT is born to do is vastly greater.
The more the IT people lock things down in an academic environment, the more rogue operations there are. If they go after the rogue operations, then the bureaucracy increases as the rogues fight to take the power away from centralized IT.
On the other side, if I want something done on an academic network, dealing with support in an IT department built to have work-study students explain to incompetent professors how to bring back a menu bar in Outlook (or Thunderbird, or whatever Macintoshes use, and, of course, professors will insist on the choice of which one) can be a nuisance. It'll waste a half-hour of my time (more in the phone queue), and a half-hour of thir time. On the other hand, if I screw up the MAC cloning on the rogue device I'm jacking in, or if I put it into an unauthorized drop, the competent person calls me, and we can sort the issue out. Nobody wastes any time. Of course, they'll also call me if I run an IRC client, and tell me that my PC is botted.
So, yeah, if they want a login on the box, good for them. They won't have the interest or money in administrating it. Naturally, they could be just collecting the data they need to bring a complaint.
PLATO was a pretty big and influential system. Education was its primary task, but the educational software paled compared to the games. I think Jetfight was Bruce Artwick's first flight sim (someone will wikicorrect me, no doubt), and it was multiplayer from the start. The first online, single-instance multiplayer graphical FRPG (Aka MMORPG, although probably would be more correctly called a protoroguelike) was Moria, and it featured the joys of permadeath.
The fact that it didn't really catch on as the answer to technology in education should tell us something about those who keep going back to this model for learning.
The vulnerability was fixed and they remain in contact with us, since they were interested in hiring us as security professionals in order to make an analysis of the plataforms.
Look, here's why companies pay bounties and don't hire "security researchers" on spec, and, vice versa, here's why "security researchers" need to be very careful about how they go about getting a real job:
Pointing out security vulnerabilities and asking for money IS extortion.
"Gee, nice construction site you've got here. Too bad you can't afford to work 24 hours a day. Shame if someone were to vandalize your hardware while you were asleep. You know, even I could do that, let me show you*. Buy the way, I'm looking for a job.
*=that's the step that's a problem; it's a double problem in the geek world, because the only accreditation that counts is being able to commit the crime that's a problem.
So, sure, sleazeballs all around. What'd you expect? It's an online dating site.
Huh? A rabbit is nothing more than it component material and perhaps an organizing principle. If that material is radioactive, the rabbit is radioactive. Taking 'radioactive' to mean "significantly above background levels", then that's one hot bunny.
By the way, did Oak Ridge ever solve their hot toad problem?
Yes, CS degrees appear more flexible, but there are huge advantages to a serious, top-tier game-program like DigiPen:
In addition to the courses you'd encounter in a standard CS program, the curriculum includes specific classes geared towards video game development. So, in terms of formation, a DigiPen RTIS B.S. does have a CS-level understanding of "alogrithms" and "data structures in depth"; but can also do the fun stuff.
The yearly project system ensures that each grad will come out with a portfolio (aka "solid demo projects), which demonstrate not only the grad's abilities, but also her or his competencies to work as part of a team.
Finally, I don't know about FS, but the last figure I saw for DigiPen was a 99% placement rate in the first year after degree. In other words: if you want to work in the videogames industry, and you are able to stick through four years of school, you will get a job.
Some hiring managers may not care where you went to school, but when on paper one person has what amounts to a CS degree and a mod project, and the other has a CS degree plus specialized training in the field, and a fat portfolio of games, the choice is easy.
Of course, the unasked question is: Do you really want to write games? Before anyone enrolls in a games program, she or he should try something: modding, building 3D models, little games, whatever. Because making games is a hell of a lot different than playing them.
Liberal Arts = the things that are worthy pursuits for Free Citizens*.
*Only slaves learn "useful" trades.
Oh yeah, and don't forget the class system. $100k/year and being branded "working class" doesn't go further than $60k a year and "elite".
Still, if it's earning power you're interested in, don't go to school. Make a ton of cash. Robertson's right insofar as if you spend a ton of money on an education only to become a wage slave, you screwed yourself.
Still, some of us have fond memories of college. Would you rather retire at 57 and possibly enjoy 8 additional years of screwing around, or take four at age 18?
Hell, I'll take those four years in the reminiscence bump, thank you very much.
The subject may not change, but the terms of the scholarly debate do. If an idea is "outdated", then there will be research on the history of the idea.
More precisely, philosophy establishes the bounds of reality. Neuroscience does a great job of explaining how brains work, but a crappy job of explaining how humans can discuss neuroscience: it's the triple question mark between underpants and profit.
FWIW, I use and cite SEP articles. I do occasionally check through Wikipedia, but they're working to a different audience, and the quality of their articles on second-tier philosophy subjects is pretty damn low. They are very different beasts. Wikipedia is very fast, and for subjects that are high-velocity, it's unbeatable.
On the other hand, Wikipedia can't get to the same level of detail as the SEP because of Wikipedia's model of editing-by-committee and governance-by-wikielite (aka the people who put in the time and effort to be able to throw down TLAs and related wikijargon in the discussion threads). Simply put, the advantage of having one person be an authority on an article lies in that person being able to assure the meaning of every sentence. A simple "stylistic rewrite" can kill the sense of the passage (see above, where people have trouble making sense of a logical argument).
Also, SEP comes with a built-in system for citation to static versions, along with the requirement that authors keep their articles up-to-date by revising them at least every five years.
What's impressive is that it's fast rendering obsolete print dictionaries of philosophy. Yes, they still exist; but people are starting to ask why.
First, I don't recall ever thinking HD was stupid, nor do I recall a huge Slashdot backlash against HD. And as someone who's been playing PC games for a very long time, I can say that HD gaming is very important; however, five years ago I did think that developing a videogame console to connect to televisions and produce HD content was economically questionable.
Five years later, with the HDTV penetration of US households creeping up from 1/3, and Nintendo the hands-down winner of the last console wars, it turns out that, indeed, "Not enough people cared about HD gaming" to justify the added hardware costs. Now, of course it's a different story.
Second, will people stop calling Avatar "First-generation 3D Technology?" It's absolutely idiotic, akin to calling the 787 "First-generation Jet Transport Technology", only stereoscopic viewing technology has been around for longer than airplanes have; stereoscopic movies have been around in different iterations for at least sixty years (and some would say over eighty). Avatar uses some of the better theater technology available and is very well shot and rendered, but it is not a "new" technology; just a vastly better implementation than before.
Third, the fact that it's been around so long and still has huge problems should be a warning sign: there's some basic physics and cognitive science that is standing in the way of 3D television being comfortable or viable in the long term. Let's take the Avatar standard: the dream of 3DTV makers is to produce an Avatar-like experience in the home. Something on the order of 10% of the population is unable to watch Avatar in 3D because of nausea, and at least 5% has conditions that make them unable to see the effect. The rest of us emerged from the theater groggy.
It's a huge exercise on the brain, and people don't watch TV to exercise their brains.
So no, 3DTV needs some major technological breakthrough in order to work.
It's more complex than that:
1. Games are getting simpler because the hardware is no longer hi-spec.
___A. Hardware development is not only related to PCs, and it follows market demand. If only a few games exist that require high-end cards, why make an even more powerful one.
___B. the most recent console on the market (the PS3) dates from 2006. That is, we are at the cosmic minimum in the console dev cycle: no replacement has been announced, and so big developers are producing games for the 4-year-old graphics cards.
___C. The visual quality (in terms of number and sophistication of art assets) of games used to be limited by the quality of hardware. Now it's also limited by the projected sales. That is, if you plot the size of development teams for AAA titles against the hardware available, you'd see a pretty stable relationship until recently, when the market no longer increases to cover additional costs. That's also why the current generation of consoles isn't going anywhere.
__2. The XP Ghetto. I quite disagree. While I still run XP, Windows 7 has done good things for gaming. Since the first DOS machines in the early eighties, there's been a split between general computing machines and PCs that can do games. At some points, the gap between an office computer and a gaming PC has been wider than others: in 1992, for example, there was little difference between a 486x33 with a fancy VGA card and Gravis Ultrasound and a 486x25 with a normal VGA card and a Soundblaster compatible; in 1998, on the other hand, a 500-MHz PII (or even a legendary 300->450 OC'd Celery) with a TNT 3D card and 16-bit audio would blow the doors off of a stock processor and a VGA card. Now, with Windows 7, there's finally the requirement that cards actually be capable of doing 3D operations. And that means that a bunch of Windows-7-ready machines can play some games, even if their owners put XP on them.
3. Mass Migrations to Linux and old games. I don't know about any of that. Online sales, however, are not always driven by the latest games, and, where retail shelf-space is expensive, online sales can make cheaper products (casual games, old games that are still extremely engaging) a worthwhile proposition. Also, when they say 36% of the revenue comes from online sales, retail revenue has much higher overhead, in terms of what the retailer and even the distributor get, with respect to the developer.
4. PCs: the configuration nightmare vs. Consoles. Well, yes and know. Yes, PCs with all their flexibility, are a challenge for developers. On the other hand, developers don't have to resolve every single difficulty in releasing a title. Development for Consoles require an expensive and time-consuming process of validation and verification by the console maker. Spending the time and money to go through these products makes a far superior product, but for PCs, it's an option, not an obligation.
5. WoW is still one of the hugest sources of online sales: WoW and Blizzard are listed separately, and both factor into the top five online distributors.
As a matter of fact, Oprah has Rugbrød flown in straight from Denmark for her breakfast (google Oprah, Rugbrød, and check the Danish-press articles. I couldn't find a decent English one).
The point of such behavior: what we eat is the primary social differentiators. It's more indicative even than what we wear and what we drink. In non-industrialized cultures, wealth is tied to eating lots of meat. In many parts of the world today, a socially important person is also obese. Food is power.
In the West, we're rich enough that everyone can afford meat, and our poor can also be morbidly obese. But, in addition to quantity, quality has always been a determining factor. And one of the easiest ways to indicate quality is by eating really expensive food, hence the taste for the exotic. So, yes, I think sushi is quite tasty. But the ability to serve sushi, and to eat it, indicates belonging to a social group of wealthy, educated elites.
That's also why in the US, they make sickly sweet "blush" wines and overoaked chardonnays: Americans associated drinking wine with bourgeois status, but many don't like the taste.
I get paid to (among other things) transcribe medieval manuscripts. It's a data storage technology. In this case, the medium is really expensive (parchment or old-skool paper), and the compression used (contextual abbreviation) often exceeds the capacity of the agent (scribe). The result is text that, if expanded according to ever-changing rules (and remember, we're talking about a couple millennia of shifting conventions), would render nonsense at critical junctures. But, in the hands of someone with reasonable experience and understanding, the same text can achieve a reasonably high level of fidelity to be understood. Now, to be understood in every detail requires two more levels of refinement, and even more cash. But computers can't even get close to the first level at the moment. So DjVu is not what you need. What you need are really nice color photographs and a storage format that will last. And, yes, you need to make it free too. There's nothing new or artistic about these reproductions.
...then I hope to God it's not cosmic rays. Here's what you're missing: TFconspiracy-theory email argue not cosmic rays, but cosmic rays + fault intolerant software. My point was bad RAM is far more common, and far more likely than bit flips from cosmic radiation. That does not exclude the possibility of more likely causes (badly managed PR over existing problems coupled with media-induced hysteria is my personal favorite), but arguing as you are that there cannot be a problem in one system because the others are fault tolerant doesn't make sense.
Still, nobody's produced convincing evidence that a problem exists or of its magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was "Do it right or wrong, but do it on time."
Any idea how much more Hydroelectric can Switzerland squeeze out?
Yeah, my PC speakers cost about $150. I listen to music on a set of Grado SR-80 cans that list at $90. If I need to travel, well I got as a gift a pair of Sennheiser PX-360s that run to slightly over a hundred bucks. I am an audiophile in the sense that I enjoy listening to music, and I listen to it on equipment that reproduces it to higher fidelity than the cheapest consumer stuff out there. Sure, I could spend more money, and get myself a proper DAC, a vacuum-tube headphone amp, some high-end headphones, and a totally sweet home theater, but as much as I would appreciate the results, that's not really an expense I can justify.
I can justify buying what I have, and most sensible audiophiles will see the logic in my choices.
Yet all my equipment together doesn't cost as much as a single "moderately-priced" Bose solution that puts out a horribly distorted sound. The reason why Bose's products are so successful is also why people who care about music dislike them: You hear the speakers, not the music. By punching up the bass and the highs, people hear things they don't normally hear in music, but what they hear sounds nothing like the original.
It's the audio equivalent of ketchup, only if ketchup cost four times the price of a decent cut of meat. Bose isn't the opposite of "Gold-plated Ethernet-cable Audiophiles", it's the gateway to that brand of Audiophilia. MIT's gonna make a lot of cash out of Amar's company. Good for them.
well, yeah, stupid teleological argument, but you ain't gonna but this one on the medieval universities. Arguing over the possible number of angels on the head of a pin is what academics should be doing. He's saying they should be busy figuring out how to apply the motion of the epicycle sphere of Mars to improving crop yields..
Those medieval University Professors were certainly debating each other, and did include topics such as whether two immaterial bodies (such as those of angels) could occupy the same space. They were also training students, and explaining their work to the rest of the world. In fact, one of the roles of the medieval university was to diffuse (sure, mostly religious) knowledge to all (believers).
But professors and students were engaged in a collaborative effort to describe in a unified manner the entirety of reality. Modern science has come a long way since then, but the institutions and even the notions that shaped science come from medieval universities.
The "angels dancing on a head of a pin" jab comes from the Reformation types who never saw the point in studying something not immediately applicable.
For the rest, yes, we need more education, more Ph.D.s, and the arguments to eliminate them come straight out of Brave New World: if people are ignorant of history, they'll buy the same stupid line, again and again.
... that last point is critical, and points at what I'm working towards: our Ph.D. system can't work if the only jobs Ph.D.s can get in their field are in the Universities. By having universities (often with public funds) put their resources to doing private industry research, we're not only subsidizing research, we're reducing the effective number of researchers in the field (does Bell Labs still exist?). And, yeah, at the same time our National Foundations and Endowments are turning the public route into one of paperwork and resource management.
So why give out Ph.D.s when the disagree effectively disqualifies the recipient for any job but the one held by the professor, which, by the way, has all the joys of a middle-management position except the salary, vacation time and short hours? Or, to put it another way, we should be investing our resources in a manner so that industry can complement academic research, not co-opt it.
The current focus on "relevant research" and turning university labs into money-making operations is part of the problem. While it's couched in terms of universities "Making Money" and "Doing something useful" (as the TFA appears to want), in practice, it means that university researchers pair up with private industry, doing only the things that private industry deems important (=incremental and rarely disruptive). Grant programs amplify this trend ("What are the industry applications of this research?", "Was your last research project a financial success?"). So, if the universities are paying researchers to do private-industry research, private industry has less incentive to fund its own research. As a result, we're moving from a system where we had academics engaged in fundamental research, with often disruptive results, and a thriving private industry research community, to one where a smaller pool of public-private academics do the bidding of private industry.
Too many Ph.D.s? You bet. In the name of "solving practical problems", we've moved industry research into the universities, and killed off fundamental research.
Sorry, that's wrong. TEPCO, like BP last year, has no interest in presenting an honest assessment of what's actually happening: the corporate barons got where they were by downplaying problems. The only difference between their actions as junior executives and as senior ones is that now the problems aren't human but environmental and factually verifiable. So, they've got no experience in the matter.
The takeaway from this is not that we should kill nuclear power — good grief, did you see what BP did last year with oil, or Massey coal has done for generations? What we need is a procedure to deal with emergencies that removes them early on from the control of the captains of industry who got us in this mess to start with. Because yes, a magnitude 9 Earthquake and tsunami is more than any nuke plant designed in 1971 was built for, but we need people in charge of the emergency response who are willing to acknowledge this fact on day 1.
First, a cabled keyboard that weighs at least four pounds doesn't seem like the best TV remote out there.
Second, what is this TV you speak of? Oh, you mean that tech from the twentieth century?
Seriously, a PC, and internet connection and a huge screen is becoming increasingly viable as a television replacement. Microsoft may have trouble putting Kinects on set-top boxes, but eventually, even the Cable companies and their vaunted "digital cable" will fall.
Academic IT departments are very different beasts. The bureaucracy to get things done can be much more complicated, the resources much scarcer, and the variety of tasks that people need to do/think they should have a right to do/assert that IT is born to do is vastly greater.
The more the IT people lock things down in an academic environment, the more rogue operations there are. If they go after the rogue operations, then the bureaucracy increases as the rogues fight to take the power away from centralized IT.
On the other side, if I want something done on an academic network, dealing with support in an IT department built to have work-study students explain to incompetent professors how to bring back a menu bar in Outlook (or Thunderbird, or whatever Macintoshes use, and, of course, professors will insist on the choice of which one) can be a nuisance. It'll waste a half-hour of my time (more in the phone queue), and a half-hour of thir time. On the other hand, if I screw up the MAC cloning on the rogue device I'm jacking in, or if I put it into an unauthorized drop, the competent person calls me, and we can sort the issue out. Nobody wastes any time. Of course, they'll also call me if I run an IRC client, and tell me that my PC is botted.
So, yeah, if they want a login on the box, good for them. They won't have the interest or money in administrating it. Naturally, they could be just collecting the data they need to bring a complaint.
PLATO was a pretty big and influential system. Education was its primary task, but the educational software paled compared to the games. I think Jetfight was Bruce Artwick's first flight sim (someone will wikicorrect me, no doubt), and it was multiplayer from the start. The first online, single-instance multiplayer graphical FRPG (Aka MMORPG, although probably would be more correctly called a protoroguelike) was Moria, and it featured the joys of permadeath.
The fact that it didn't really catch on as the answer to technology in education should tell us something about those who keep going back to this model for learning.
Look, here's why companies pay bounties and don't hire "security researchers" on spec, and, vice versa, here's why "security researchers" need to be very careful about how they go about getting a real job: Pointing out security vulnerabilities and asking for money IS extortion. "Gee, nice construction site you've got here. Too bad you can't afford to work 24 hours a day. Shame if someone were to vandalize your hardware while you were asleep. You know, even I could do that, let me show you*. Buy the way, I'm looking for a job. *=that's the step that's a problem; it's a double problem in the geek world, because the only accreditation that counts is being able to commit the crime that's a problem. So, sure, sleazeballs all around. What'd you expect? It's an online dating site.
Huh? A rabbit is nothing more than it component material and perhaps an organizing principle. If that material is radioactive, the rabbit is radioactive. Taking 'radioactive' to mean "significantly above background levels", then that's one hot bunny.
By the way, did Oak Ridge ever solve their hot toad problem?
But the judiciary has a rule: Even-numbered Star Trek movies have greater legal authority than odd-numbed ones.
Yes, CS degrees appear more flexible, but there are huge advantages to a serious, top-tier game-program like DigiPen:
In addition to the courses you'd encounter in a standard CS program, the curriculum includes specific classes geared towards video game development. So, in terms of formation, a DigiPen RTIS B.S. does have a CS-level understanding of "alogrithms" and "data structures in depth"; but can also do the fun stuff.
The yearly project system ensures that each grad will come out with a portfolio (aka "solid demo projects), which demonstrate not only the grad's abilities, but also her or his competencies to work as part of a team.
Finally, I don't know about FS, but the last figure I saw for DigiPen was a 99% placement rate in the first year after degree. In other words: if you want to work in the videogames industry, and you are able to stick through four years of school, you will get a job.
Some hiring managers may not care where you went to school, but when on paper one person has what amounts to a CS degree and a mod project, and the other has a CS degree plus specialized training in the field, and a fat portfolio of games, the choice is easy.
Of course, the unasked question is: Do you really want to write games? Before anyone enrolls in a games program, she or he should try something: modding, building 3D models, little games, whatever. Because making games is a hell of a lot different than playing them.
Liberal Arts = the things that are worthy pursuits for Free Citizens*. *Only slaves learn "useful" trades. Oh yeah, and don't forget the class system. $100k/year and being branded "working class" doesn't go further than $60k a year and "elite". Still, if it's earning power you're interested in, don't go to school. Make a ton of cash. Robertson's right insofar as if you spend a ton of money on an education only to become a wage slave, you screwed yourself. Still, some of us have fond memories of college. Would you rather retire at 57 and possibly enjoy 8 additional years of screwing around, or take four at age 18? Hell, I'll take those four years in the reminiscence bump, thank you very much.
The subject may not change, but the terms of the scholarly debate do. If an idea is "outdated", then there will be research on the history of the idea.
More precisely, philosophy establishes the bounds of reality. Neuroscience does a great job of explaining how brains work, but a crappy job of explaining how humans can discuss neuroscience: it's the triple question mark between underpants and profit.
If there's been absolutely no research on the topic in five years, it has no business in a 1200-entry academic encyclopedia.
Aye, bad use of headlines.
FWIW, I use and cite SEP articles. I do occasionally check through Wikipedia, but they're working to a different audience, and the quality of their articles on second-tier philosophy subjects is pretty damn low. They are very different beasts. Wikipedia is very fast, and for subjects that are high-velocity, it's unbeatable.
On the other hand, Wikipedia can't get to the same level of detail as the SEP because of Wikipedia's model of editing-by-committee and governance-by-wikielite (aka the people who put in the time and effort to be able to throw down TLAs and related wikijargon in the discussion threads). Simply put, the advantage of having one person be an authority on an article lies in that person being able to assure the meaning of every sentence. A simple "stylistic rewrite" can kill the sense of the passage (see above, where people have trouble making sense of a logical argument).
Also, SEP comes with a built-in system for citation to static versions, along with the requirement that authors keep their articles up-to-date by revising them at least every five years.
What's impressive is that it's fast rendering obsolete print dictionaries of philosophy. Yes, they still exist; but people are starting to ask why.
If you're publishing a grant application, you're doing it wrong, dude.
First, I don't recall ever thinking HD was stupid, nor do I recall a huge Slashdot backlash against HD. And as someone who's been playing PC games for a very long time, I can say that HD gaming is very important; however, five years ago I did think that developing a videogame console to connect to televisions and produce HD content was economically questionable.
Five years later, with the HDTV penetration of US households creeping up from 1/3, and Nintendo the hands-down winner of the last console wars, it turns out that, indeed, "Not enough people cared about HD gaming" to justify the added hardware costs. Now, of course it's a different story.
Second, will people stop calling Avatar "First-generation 3D Technology?" It's absolutely idiotic, akin to calling the 787 "First-generation Jet Transport Technology", only stereoscopic viewing technology has been around for longer than airplanes have; stereoscopic movies have been around in different iterations for at least sixty years (and some would say over eighty). Avatar uses some of the better theater technology available and is very well shot and rendered, but it is not a "new" technology; just a vastly better implementation than before.
Third, the fact that it's been around so long and still has huge problems should be a warning sign: there's some basic physics and cognitive science that is standing in the way of 3D television being comfortable or viable in the long term. Let's take the Avatar standard: the dream of 3DTV makers is to produce an Avatar-like experience in the home. Something on the order of 10% of the population is unable to watch Avatar in 3D because of nausea, and at least 5% has conditions that make them unable to see the effect. The rest of us emerged from the theater groggy.
It's a huge exercise on the brain, and people don't watch TV to exercise their brains.
So no, 3DTV needs some major technological breakthrough in order to work.
It's more complex than that:
1. Games are getting simpler because the hardware is no longer hi-spec.
___A. Hardware development is not only related to PCs, and it follows market demand. If only a few games exist that require high-end cards, why make an even more powerful one.
___B. the most recent console on the market (the PS3) dates from 2006. That is, we are at the cosmic minimum in the console dev cycle: no replacement has been announced, and so big developers are producing games for the 4-year-old graphics cards.
___C. The visual quality (in terms of number and sophistication of art assets) of games used to be limited by the quality of hardware. Now it's also limited by the projected sales. That is, if you plot the size of development teams for AAA titles against the hardware available, you'd see a pretty stable relationship until recently, when the market no longer increases to cover additional costs. That's also why the current generation of consoles isn't going anywhere.
__2. The XP Ghetto. I quite disagree. While I still run XP, Windows 7 has done good things for gaming. Since the first DOS machines in the early eighties, there's been a split between general computing machines and PCs that can do games. At some points, the gap between an office computer and a gaming PC has been wider than others: in 1992, for example, there was little difference between a 486x33 with a fancy VGA card and Gravis Ultrasound and a 486x25 with a normal VGA card and a Soundblaster compatible; in 1998, on the other hand, a 500-MHz PII (or even a legendary 300->450 OC'd Celery) with a TNT 3D card and 16-bit audio would blow the doors off of a stock processor and a VGA card. Now, with Windows 7, there's finally the requirement that cards actually be capable of doing 3D operations. And that means that a bunch of Windows-7-ready machines can play some games, even if their owners put XP on them.
3. Mass Migrations to Linux and old games. I don't know about any of that. Online sales, however, are not always driven by the latest games, and, where retail shelf-space is expensive, online sales can make cheaper products (casual games, old games that are still extremely engaging) a worthwhile proposition. Also, when they say 36% of the revenue comes from online sales, retail revenue has much higher overhead, in terms of what the retailer and even the distributor get, with respect to the developer.
4. PCs: the configuration nightmare vs. Consoles. Well, yes and know. Yes, PCs with all their flexibility, are a challenge for developers. On the other hand, developers don't have to resolve every single difficulty in releasing a title. Development for Consoles require an expensive and time-consuming process of validation and verification by the console maker. Spending the time and money to go through these products makes a far superior product, but for PCs, it's an option, not an obligation.
5. WoW is still one of the hugest sources of online sales: WoW and Blizzard are listed separately, and both factor into the top five online distributors.
As a matter of fact, Oprah has Rugbrød flown in straight from Denmark for her breakfast (google Oprah, Rugbrød, and check the Danish-press articles. I couldn't find a decent English one).
The point of such behavior: what we eat is the primary social differentiators. It's more indicative even than what we wear and what we drink. In non-industrialized cultures, wealth is tied to eating lots of meat. In many parts of the world today, a socially important person is also obese. Food is power.
In the West, we're rich enough that everyone can afford meat, and our poor can also be morbidly obese. But, in addition to quantity, quality has always been a determining factor. And one of the easiest ways to indicate quality is by eating really expensive food, hence the taste for the exotic. So, yes, I think sushi is quite tasty. But the ability to serve sushi, and to eat it, indicates belonging to a social group of wealthy, educated elites.
That's also why in the US, they make sickly sweet "blush" wines and overoaked chardonnays: Americans associated drinking wine with bourgeois status, but many don't like the taste.
I get paid to (among other things) transcribe medieval manuscripts. It's a data storage technology. In this case, the medium is really expensive (parchment or old-skool paper), and the compression used (contextual abbreviation) often exceeds the capacity of the agent (scribe). The result is text that, if expanded according to ever-changing rules (and remember, we're talking about a couple millennia of shifting conventions), would render nonsense at critical junctures. But, in the hands of someone with reasonable experience and understanding, the same text can achieve a reasonably high level of fidelity to be understood. Now, to be understood in every detail requires two more levels of refinement, and even more cash. But computers can't even get close to the first level at the moment.
So DjVu is not what you need. What you need are really nice color photographs and a storage format that will last. And, yes, you need to make it free too. There's nothing new or artistic about these reproductions.
...then I hope to God it's not cosmic rays.
Here's what you're missing: TFconspiracy-theory email argue not cosmic rays, but cosmic rays + fault intolerant software. My point was bad RAM is far more common, and far more likely than bit flips from cosmic radiation. That does not exclude the possibility of more likely causes (badly managed PR over existing problems coupled with media-induced hysteria is my personal favorite), but arguing as you are that there cannot be a problem in one system because the others are fault tolerant doesn't make sense.
Still, nobody's produced convincing evidence that a problem exists or of its magnitude.