I wasn't asserting the nature of reality; I was defining it as a term. "Let 'reality' mean 'the objective field of all experiences.'" There may or may not be a "reality" in this sense, but I think it's the best definition of the term. To use a looser definition of "reality" that doesn't incorporate objectivity as a defining property is, in my opinion, not as helpful, because the term "experience" can be used synonymously with this broader definition of "reality."
Reality is subjective, meatspace is just a part of it.
What you said is logically equivalent to "square are circular, area is just a part of it."
Reality = "that which is exists independent of the observer, that is to say exist objectively." (Of course, there may or may not be any such thing.)
subjective = "depending on the observer."
meatspace = "related to physical objects, people."
The terms you combined don't really make any sense together. What you're trying to say is, "Experience is subjective, and the physical world is only important as it impacts us subjectively, since objective reality either does exist or isn't important to human life."
I watched the stream live. After they showed the trailer, a Japanese game director or whatever came out and announced that all the press people would get a DS card with the trailer on it as a movie in their press kits. It's just a goodie for the press, that's all.
...are right on the money. I don't know how many times I've been reading David Pogue's technology column, when suddenly he'll launch into a 2 page diatribe about how the grinding gears of capitalism have produced another 6 megapixel camera only by exploiting the weak proletariat masses, but one day the oppressed will rise up and over throw the cultural hegemony of white male software.
Oh wait, I do know how many times I've read that: Zero.
Seriously though, I think all this crap about how "liberal" the Times is is basically meaningless. It's a big paper, and each writer and editor have their own view of the world. To take an example, before the Iraq War, Judith Miller kept "leaking" information about Saddam's enormous arsenal of WMD and the intricate ways in which the Pentagon was planning on destroying them. I know that Thomas Friedman and David Brooks gave tentative approval to Bush's decision to invade (don't remember about some of the other conservatives though). On the other hand, Bush was caught on the mic saying that reporter Adam Clymer is "an asshole" during the 2000 campaign.
Each reporter is a different person, and each story is a different story. By saying "the New York Times is liberal," you take something that's really complex and flatten it to a single dimension without gaining any insight into the real interworkings of it.
One thing that always bugged me on Star Trek was that if any alien started draining the power supply, life support system would always be the first things to go. The ISS is a tin can compared to the Enterprise, yet they somehow manage to have a 5 month supply of air just floating around. Meanwhile, the Enterprise still has more than enough power to run phasers (which must use unbelievable amounts of power to disintegrate stuff), shields (which must use as much power to absorb that energy), impulse engines, warp drive, etc.
I know, I know, "suspension of disbelief." It just seems like it would be more plausible if life support was always the LAST thing to start failing, instead of the first.
Alpha geeks are totally important. For example, imagine a product with no wireless and less space than a Nomad. I think if you asked alpha geeks, you'd get a clear answer about its prospects: "Lame."
That's the kind of marketing research Apple just can't buy but can only get from/..
When the user uses the font size up/down button, the layout automatically resizes to match it. (Example site.) Even better, a good PDA should know not to read.css files that are labeled media="screen", and only read the.css files that specify the media to include handhelds. Sadly, very few PDA browsers do this today, but I'm sure the situation will improve as more pages start using modern web design.
You're saying that vacuuming ghosts is innovative?
I haven't heard of any other games where you do that using two analog sticks, so yes, I think it counts as innovation.
Or jetpacks? Name an earlier 3-D platformer (not FPS) that uses jetpacks. (Bear in mind that Ratchet & Clank was released after Sunshine.)
Or cell shading? Or a nautical theme? Fair enough. That's not totally new, but it was departure from Zelda tradition. A departure that caused them a lot grief ("it's too kiddy!"), as it turns out, hence the plans to return to normal in the next Zelda.
Or commanding an army of 1" tall plant monster? How many times have I played that game!? Boooring.
OK, you didn't say that, but I think it's funny.
Also, I forgot to mention it before, but Mario Kart: Double Dash!! is another example of a game for the 'cube where they could have just phoned it and remade a 64 game with shiner graphics, but instead decided to try something new with the game play. To be honest, I prefer Mario Kart 64, but I really appreciate that they weren't willing to do the exact same thing, only prettier.
My point isn't that everything Nintendo does is gold ('cos it isn't) or that Microsoft hasn't added to the gaming world at all ('cos it has), just that Nintendo seems to have a greater emphasis on trying something new for the sake of trying something new than Microsoft, who tend to be more interested in having the best technical specs for everything.
While I agree that pro-Nintendo "OMG they are teh innovators!!1!" fanboy-ism is a little too strong, I still think its fair to say that Nintendo has been more concerned with thinking of something new than Microsoft has.
Think back to the launch of the XBox. What was the draw? The draw was, "hey, check it out; it's really easy to port DirectX PC games to this!" And, that's basically what has happened. Live is definitely an innovation in the console world, but to PCs, it's nothing new. In fact, I would argue that Live only exists because things like it already existed on the PC side. It's good that Nintendo has finally gotten online religion, but using the internet isn't really that innovative in a classical sense. Especially when you consider that most XBox hits are either FPS shooters (a graphically innovative, but gameplay stagnant genre) or sports games (an all together stagnant genre). There are some relatively innovative games, like the GTA series, but that's been bouncing around on the PS2 for a while anyway.
Nintendo on the other hand, tends to use established characters (the Italian plumber you disparaged) as a gateway to get people to buy games that try new things. For example, Luigi's Mansion. How many people would have bought a game about vacuuming ghosts if it didn't have a popular character in it? Look at the sales of "Grabbed by the Ghoulies" for your answer. Mario Sunshine also did something new, gave a jet pack to the star of a platformer. Zelda: Wind Waker used cell shading and an nautical theme. Pikmin speaks for itself. Likewise Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat.
OK, does Nintendo crank out some perfunctory titles? Hell yes, look at the Pokemon: Random Color series. On the other hand, just because they use established characters as a means of guaranteeing sales doesn't make their games any less innovative.
In Europe and Asia for centuries, the smartest men would voluntarily become monks or priests and thus severely limit the number of offspring they had. And yet those societies survived, and today those places are considered to be the areas from which the most technological innovation has sprung.
It's true that genes are important, but culture is also important. In this case, having a culture where certain men would devote their lives to study had a more important impact on the world than the fact these men eliminated themselves from the gene pool. I think our current society will probably end up the same way, if we can restore an emphasis on real learning, thinking, and accomplishment in school instead of just concentrating on self-esteem and following the rules.
Glasses are an interesting example of how genes aren't everything, and the interaction between genes and the environment is important.
In preliterate societies, most people don't need glasses, because they don't spend most of their life focusing on a book (or worse, computer screen) a few inches away from their face. So, it turns out that these people have the same defective eyeball gene as the rest of us, but in their society it was never weeded out by natural selection, because it never became a problem for them since it never becomes active. And of course, in our society it isn't weeded out, because we have the means to repair the problem with glasses, contact lenses, etc.
The upshot of all this is, even for things that are passed on directly by genes, like the gene for bad eyesight, there is still a large cultural effect that goes into determining whether and how that gene will be expressed in real life.
This information has been floating around the gaming sites for a few days now, but oh well. The really interesting stuff about what makes the Revolution a "revolution" has yet to be revealed however.
There's some interesting, but not ground breaking stuff that has been confirmed, like wireless controllers, DS connectivity, 802.11 internet connection, and free online gameplay, but the really interesting stuff is still just speculation. For what it's worth, my guess is that the "revolution" part of the console will be that the controllers have built in gyros. I've been playing WarioWare: Twisted since it hit the streets in Japan, and let me tell you what anyone who has played that title can tell confirm: twisting is the future. There's a great part of WW:T where you get to play the original Super Mario Brothers game by turning the Game Boy to the side to move forward while the world spins around under your feet. It's how the game was meant to be played!! I suppose the Nintendo critics will call a motion sensor a gimmick, but I really believe it has the ability to put some fire under the industry's feet.
Of course, there's a lot of other speculation that I'm not too sure about. Broken Saints claims that the Revolution will somehow display real 3-D on your TV screen, I guess using special glasses or something. That sounds unlikely to me. I've also heard that the Revolution will have a DS like touch screen controller or one that is somehow reprogrammable by the game, but I don't want to think about the ergonomics of that all. Pressure sensitive buttons does sound like a good idea, and I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear that.
One interesting thing about Nintendo versus Microsoft is the different things that people focus on in their announcements. With the Xbox 360, everyone is talking about the 3.whatever GHz PPC chip. With the Revolution, everyone is talking about possible changes to the way games are traditionally played. It just goes to show the Microsoft is still more interested in the technology side of things, and Nintendo is more interested in the "innovation" (or, if you believe the detractors, "gimmickry") side.
I see evolution kicking in pretty soon on the birth control thing. Right now, most people are biologically predisposed to enjoy having sex and only think about having family after having sex results in children. Now that there's birth control of course, people can have a ton of sex and still never have kids. This of course makes them evolutionary dead ends. Eventually these people will all die off, and be replaced by people who may or may not enjoy sex, but definitely enjoy having children.
So, for example, right now in Europe and Japan and a lot of other places, the population is aging pretty rapidly, because young people have birth control and aren't really that interested in getting married and starting families. So, these countries are all about to enter an era of population decline. But it's pretty much inevitable that in a generation or two, only the descendants of those people who are interested in having families (whether for genetic reasons or cultural ones [read hardcore Catholics and others]) will still be around.
So, natural selection isn't quite gone just yet. But it definitely isn't choosing for the traits that we might want it to (like intelligence, disease resistance, or happiness). It's choosing for the traits that lead to more people (family attachment, cultural patterns that lead to reproduction, etc.).
The DS can't play Game Boy original-system games, which is a shame, since in my opinion the Game Boy version of Tetris is the best ever. I keep an SP around just to play it.
It's one of the lesser known side effects of Jobs' "Reality Distortion Field." Not only can he distort the *physical* universe, he can also distort the *logical* universe. Not only does it allow them to solve the Halting Problem, it also lets the company be both dying (BSD-style) and about to topple Microsoft, simultaneously.
I'd like to see an opera about the business relationship between IBM and Microsoft.
In the first act, IBM is big and indestructible, Big Blue in all its chess king stomping hubris.
In the second act, blinded by arrogance, IBM casually gives Microsoft the key to over throwing it, first with DOS and then with Windows (which was originally supposed to be a little sister product to OS/2).
In the third act, IBM goes almost to the edge of bankruptcy. Only at the last second does it pull itself back from the edge by focusing on servers and services.
In the fourth act, things go crazy! First, IBM (IBM of all companies!) throws its weight behind Linux, in a desperate bid to kill Microsoft. Then IBM teams with Apple to make chips for it (well, OK, this was foreshadowed before, but yeah). Now IBM is once again at the top of the heap, and what do they do?
Benevolently give Microsoft the chip it will need to take over the video game world!!
Unless of course they have more of the same production problems they had with the G5. In that case, they'll probably drag MS down with them as they choke each other to death...
Seriously, who can believe the crazy history these companies have?
This idea is so good that +5 insightful isn't enough.
Let's say it all together now, "The TV Networks don't get it."
For years, the reason that no one offered video-on-demand was that the bandwidth costs would eat anyone alive. This is still essentially the case, if you offer a direct download. However, bittorrent basically flatten the cost of distribution to almost nothing. The cost of distributing a torrent file to a million people is not that different from the cost of building and running an antenna that can broadcast to a million people.
If tomorrow, the networks would start distributing torrents with ads left in, then the current torrent sites would all but disappear overnight. Given the choice between downloading a show from a network with known bandwidth and compression quality, versus the hassle of finding a good torrent site with ads stripped, hopefully decent quality, and maybe enough peers to seed the file, the average consumer is just going to go with the known factor instead of searching for something else. Hell, with bittorrent, bandwidth costs are so low that the networks could probably make a profit on ad-stripped shows even if they only charged a dollar or so for them. Sprinkle on a dash of DRM to make it semi-difficult to strip the ads, and viola, they've got a way to stay competitive in the 21st century.
It's a shame they feel more like suing their customers than solving the problem...
If I were Bill Gates, I would be seriously considering just scrapping the entire Windows codebase and picking up some little known OS to use for a bottom up rewrite. Sounds crazy? Consider this-- WINE has proven that you don't need Windows to run Windows apps on x86. If anyone could make a turbo-charged version of WINE for a new, non-free OS, it's Microsoft. Meanwhile, Apple has gone from nothing (1998) to top of the heap in terms of UI, features, usability, etc. all in less than 7 years. With Microsoft's larger cash reserves, they could do the same thing faster (but not too fast!) and serve up some real competition.
And any time there's competition, the real winner is the consumer. On the other hand, if MS does nothing, people will wake up to the fact when you barely know how to use a computer at all, there's no difference between the little bit you know about using Windows and how things are done in Linux and Mac OS...
I dunno, I guess you're just being glib, but to take it overly seriously for a moment, in such cases, there's still a risk in dating someone too far below your league-- if by some random chance someone else above their league falls for them, they'll gladly trade you to move up the ladder. The problem is that in a lot of cases, a less attractive person will end up falling in love with the idea of you instead of the actuality of you. The thought is, "Oh wow, I can't believe someone like that could love me," instead of, "Oh wow, I love these things about him/her." Thus, when some new, more handsome and sexy person comes along, there's nothing tying them to you and specifically you alone except for that fact that prior to now they were unable to date anyone at your level of attractiveness...
Love is a tricky problem, and I've experienced both sides of the attractiveness imbalance. It's never healthy. It might be nice if people could just ignore physical attractiveness in all cases, but don't kid yourself, most of the time the people who say, "looks don't matter" are non-lookers who are upset about being unable to bag more attractive partners.
The problem is that if you make a new Carbon app, it defaults to "click to raise" in the IDE, but if you make a new Cocoa app, it defaults to "click-through: OK." I really wish Apple would clean this up, and make everything "click to raise" by default. Only a few things (like the play/pause button in iTunes) should be click-through. Everything else should be click to raise, because of Fitt's Law.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't asserting the nature of reality; I was defining it as a term. "Let 'reality' mean 'the objective field of all experiences.'" There may or may not be a "reality" in this sense, but I think it's the best definition of the term. To use a looser definition of "reality" that doesn't incorporate objectivity as a defining property is, in my opinion, not as helpful, because the term "experience" can be used synonymously with this broader definition of "reality."
What you said is logically equivalent to "square are circular, area is just a part of it."
Reality = "that which is exists independent of the observer, that is to say exist objectively." (Of course, there may or may not be any such thing.)
subjective = "depending on the observer."
meatspace = "related to physical objects, people."
The terms you combined don't really make any sense together. What you're trying to say is, "Experience is subjective, and the physical world is only important as it impacts us subjectively, since objective reality either does exist or isn't important to human life."
Ah, philosophy nerd urged satisfied.
Heh, why do you think the backstory of Babylon 5 is that San Francisco was nuked sometime in the undefined past?
I watched the stream live. After they showed the trailer, a Japanese game director or whatever came out and announced that all the press people would get a DS card with the trailer on it as a movie in their press kits. It's just a goodie for the press, that's all.
...are right on the money. I don't know how many times I've been reading David Pogue's technology column, when suddenly he'll launch into a 2 page diatribe about how the grinding gears of capitalism have produced another 6 megapixel camera only by exploiting the weak proletariat masses, but one day the oppressed will rise up and over throw the cultural hegemony of white male software.
Oh wait, I do know how many times I've read that: Zero.
Seriously though, I think all this crap about how "liberal" the Times is is basically meaningless. It's a big paper, and each writer and editor have their own view of the world. To take an example, before the Iraq War, Judith Miller kept "leaking" information about Saddam's enormous arsenal of WMD and the intricate ways in which the Pentagon was planning on destroying them. I know that Thomas Friedman and David Brooks gave tentative approval to Bush's decision to invade (don't remember about some of the other conservatives though). On the other hand, Bush was caught on the mic saying that reporter Adam Clymer is "an asshole" during the 2000 campaign.
Each reporter is a different person, and each story is a different story. By saying "the New York Times is liberal," you take something that's really complex and flatten it to a single dimension without gaining any insight into the real interworkings of it.
One thing that always bugged me on Star Trek was that if any alien started draining the power supply, life support system would always be the first things to go. The ISS is a tin can compared to the Enterprise, yet they somehow manage to have a 5 month supply of air just floating around. Meanwhile, the Enterprise still has more than enough power to run phasers (which must use unbelievable amounts of power to disintegrate stuff), shields (which must use as much power to absorb that energy), impulse engines, warp drive, etc.
I know, I know, "suspension of disbelief." It just seems like it would be more plausible if life support was always the LAST thing to start failing, instead of the first.
I'm a week late, but oh well:
/..
Alpha geeks are totally important. For example, imagine a product with no wireless and less space than a Nomad. I think if you asked alpha geeks, you'd get a clear answer about its prospects: "Lame."
That's the kind of marketing research Apple just can't buy but can only get from
CSS is our king.
.css files that are labeled media="screen", and only read the .css files that specify the media to include handhelds. Sadly, very few PDA browsers do this today, but I'm sure the situation will improve as more pages start using modern web design.
div#content { width: 35em; margin-left: 2em; }
When the user uses the font size up/down button, the layout automatically resizes to match it. (Example site.) Even better, a good PDA should know not to read
You're saying that vacuuming ghosts is innovative?
I haven't heard of any other games where you do that using two analog sticks, so yes, I think it counts as innovation.
Or jetpacks?
Name an earlier 3-D platformer (not FPS) that uses jetpacks. (Bear in mind that Ratchet & Clank was released after Sunshine.)
Or cell shading? Or a nautical theme?
Fair enough. That's not totally new, but it was departure from Zelda tradition. A departure that caused them a lot grief ("it's too kiddy!"), as it turns out, hence the plans to return to normal in the next Zelda.
Or commanding an army of 1" tall plant monster? How many times have I played that game!? Boooring.
OK, you didn't say that, but I think it's funny.
Also, I forgot to mention it before, but Mario Kart: Double Dash!! is another example of a game for the 'cube where they could have just phoned it and remade a 64 game with shiner graphics, but instead decided to try something new with the game play. To be honest, I prefer Mario Kart 64, but I really appreciate that they weren't willing to do the exact same thing, only prettier.
My point isn't that everything Nintendo does is gold ('cos it isn't) or that Microsoft hasn't added to the gaming world at all ('cos it has), just that Nintendo seems to have a greater emphasis on trying something new for the sake of trying something new than Microsoft, who tend to be more interested in having the best technical specs for everything.
That's why I wouldn't be surprised by them.
While I agree that pro-Nintendo "OMG they are teh innovators!!1!" fanboy-ism is a little too strong, I still think its fair to say that Nintendo has been more concerned with thinking of something new than Microsoft has.
Think back to the launch of the XBox. What was the draw? The draw was, "hey, check it out; it's really easy to port DirectX PC games to this!" And, that's basically what has happened. Live is definitely an innovation in the console world, but to PCs, it's nothing new. In fact, I would argue that Live only exists because things like it already existed on the PC side. It's good that Nintendo has finally gotten online religion, but using the internet isn't really that innovative in a classical sense. Especially when you consider that most XBox hits are either FPS shooters (a graphically innovative, but gameplay stagnant genre) or sports games (an all together stagnant genre). There are some relatively innovative games, like the GTA series, but that's been bouncing around on the PS2 for a while anyway.
Nintendo on the other hand, tends to use established characters (the Italian plumber you disparaged) as a gateway to get people to buy games that try new things. For example, Luigi's Mansion. How many people would have bought a game about vacuuming ghosts if it didn't have a popular character in it? Look at the sales of "Grabbed by the Ghoulies" for your answer. Mario Sunshine also did something new, gave a jet pack to the star of a platformer. Zelda: Wind Waker used cell shading and an nautical theme. Pikmin speaks for itself. Likewise Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat.
OK, does Nintendo crank out some perfunctory titles? Hell yes, look at the Pokemon: Random Color series. On the other hand, just because they use established characters as a means of guaranteeing sales doesn't make their games any less innovative.
In Europe and Asia for centuries, the smartest men would voluntarily become monks or priests and thus severely limit the number of offspring they had. And yet those societies survived, and today those places are considered to be the areas from which the most technological innovation has sprung.
It's true that genes are important, but culture is also important. In this case, having a culture where certain men would devote their lives to study had a more important impact on the world than the fact these men eliminated themselves from the gene pool. I think our current society will probably end up the same way, if we can restore an emphasis on real learning, thinking, and accomplishment in school instead of just concentrating on self-esteem and following the rules.
We'll see how it works out, I guess.
Glasses are an interesting example of how genes aren't everything, and the interaction between genes and the environment is important.
In preliterate societies, most people don't need glasses, because they don't spend most of their life focusing on a book (or worse, computer screen) a few inches away from their face. So, it turns out that these people have the same defective eyeball gene as the rest of us, but in their society it was never weeded out by natural selection, because it never became a problem for them since it never becomes active. And of course, in our society it isn't weeded out, because we have the means to repair the problem with glasses, contact lenses, etc.
The upshot of all this is, even for things that are passed on directly by genes, like the gene for bad eyesight, there is still a large cultural effect that goes into determining whether and how that gene will be expressed in real life.
This information has been floating around the gaming sites for a few days now, but oh well. The really interesting stuff about what makes the Revolution a "revolution" has yet to be revealed however.
There's some interesting, but not ground breaking stuff that has been confirmed, like wireless controllers, DS connectivity, 802.11 internet connection, and free online gameplay, but the really interesting stuff is still just speculation. For what it's worth, my guess is that the "revolution" part of the console will be that the controllers have built in gyros. I've been playing WarioWare: Twisted since it hit the streets in Japan, and let me tell you what anyone who has played that title can tell confirm: twisting is the future. There's a great part of WW:T where you get to play the original Super Mario Brothers game by turning the Game Boy to the side to move forward while the world spins around under your feet. It's how the game was meant to be played!! I suppose the Nintendo critics will call a motion sensor a gimmick, but I really believe it has the ability to put some fire under the industry's feet.
Of course, there's a lot of other speculation that I'm not too sure about. Broken Saints claims that the Revolution will somehow display real 3-D on your TV screen, I guess using special glasses or something. That sounds unlikely to me. I've also heard that the Revolution will have a DS like touch screen controller or one that is somehow reprogrammable by the game, but I don't want to think about the ergonomics of that all. Pressure sensitive buttons does sound like a good idea, and I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear that.
One interesting thing about Nintendo versus Microsoft is the different things that people focus on in their announcements. With the Xbox 360, everyone is talking about the 3.whatever GHz PPC chip. With the Revolution, everyone is talking about possible changes to the way games are traditionally played. It just goes to show the Microsoft is still more interested in the technology side of things, and Nintendo is more interested in the "innovation" (or, if you believe the detractors, "gimmickry") side.
I see evolution kicking in pretty soon on the birth control thing. Right now, most people are biologically predisposed to enjoy having sex and only think about having family after having sex results in children. Now that there's birth control of course, people can have a ton of sex and still never have kids. This of course makes them evolutionary dead ends. Eventually these people will all die off, and be replaced by people who may or may not enjoy sex, but definitely enjoy having children.
So, for example, right now in Europe and Japan and a lot of other places, the population is aging pretty rapidly, because young people have birth control and aren't really that interested in getting married and starting families. So, these countries are all about to enter an era of population decline. But it's pretty much inevitable that in a generation or two, only the descendants of those people who are interested in having families (whether for genetic reasons or cultural ones [read hardcore Catholics and others]) will still be around.
So, natural selection isn't quite gone just yet. But it definitely isn't choosing for the traits that we might want it to (like intelligence, disease resistance, or happiness). It's choosing for the traits that lead to more people (family attachment, cultural patterns that lead to reproduction, etc.).
The DS can't play Game Boy original-system games, which is a shame, since in my opinion the Game Boy version of Tetris is the best ever. I keep an SP around just to play it.
It's one of the lesser known side effects of Jobs' "Reality Distortion Field." Not only can he distort the *physical* universe, he can also distort the *logical* universe. Not only does it allow them to solve the Halting Problem, it also lets the company be both dying (BSD-style) and about to topple Microsoft, simultaneously.
I'd like to see an opera about the business relationship between IBM and Microsoft.
In the first act, IBM is big and indestructible, Big Blue in all its chess king stomping hubris.
In the second act, blinded by arrogance, IBM casually gives Microsoft the key to over throwing it, first with DOS and then with Windows (which was originally supposed to be a little sister product to OS/2).
In the third act, IBM goes almost to the edge of bankruptcy. Only at the last second does it pull itself back from the edge by focusing on servers and services.
In the fourth act, things go crazy! First, IBM (IBM of all companies!) throws its weight behind Linux, in a desperate bid to kill Microsoft. Then IBM teams with Apple to make chips for it (well, OK, this was foreshadowed before, but yeah). Now IBM is once again at the top of the heap, and what do they do?
Benevolently give Microsoft the chip it will need to take over the video game world!!
Unless of course they have more of the same production problems they had with the G5. In that case, they'll probably drag MS down with them as they choke each other to death...
Seriously, who can believe the crazy history these companies have?
This idea is so good that +5 insightful isn't enough.
Let's say it all together now, "The TV Networks don't get it."
For years, the reason that no one offered video-on-demand was that the bandwidth costs would eat anyone alive. This is still essentially the case, if you offer a direct download. However, bittorrent basically flatten the cost of distribution to almost nothing. The cost of distributing a torrent file to a million people is not that different from the cost of building and running an antenna that can broadcast to a million people.
If tomorrow, the networks would start distributing torrents with ads left in, then the current torrent sites would all but disappear overnight. Given the choice between downloading a show from a network with known bandwidth and compression quality, versus the hassle of finding a good torrent site with ads stripped, hopefully decent quality, and maybe enough peers to seed the file, the average consumer is just going to go with the known factor instead of searching for something else. Hell, with bittorrent, bandwidth costs are so low that the networks could probably make a profit on ad-stripped shows even if they only charged a dollar or so for them. Sprinkle on a dash of DRM to make it semi-difficult to strip the ads, and viola, they've got a way to stay competitive in the 21st century.
It's a shame they feel more like suing their customers than solving the problem...
Installation process for Linux?
:(
Insert Knoppix LiveCD. Hold down power button 5 seconds. Press power button once more.
The sad thing is that yeah, that does sound too complicated for the average user.
...and at this rate, I'll say it again in two years:
Longhorn is the new Copland.
If I were Bill Gates, I would be seriously considering just scrapping the entire Windows codebase and picking up some little known OS to use for a bottom up rewrite. Sounds crazy? Consider this-- WINE has proven that you don't need Windows to run Windows apps on x86. If anyone could make a turbo-charged version of WINE for a new, non-free OS, it's Microsoft. Meanwhile, Apple has gone from nothing (1998) to top of the heap in terms of UI, features, usability, etc. all in less than 7 years. With Microsoft's larger cash reserves, they could do the same thing faster (but not too fast!) and serve up some real competition.
And any time there's competition, the real winner is the consumer. On the other hand, if MS does nothing, people will wake up to the fact when you barely know how to use a computer at all, there's no difference between the little bit you know about using Windows and how things are done in Linux and Mac OS...
I dunno, I guess you're just being glib, but to take it overly seriously for a moment, in such cases, there's still a risk in dating someone too far below your league-- if by some random chance someone else above their league falls for them, they'll gladly trade you to move up the ladder. The problem is that in a lot of cases, a less attractive person will end up falling in love with the idea of you instead of the actuality of you. The thought is, "Oh wow, I can't believe someone like that could love me," instead of, "Oh wow, I love these things about him/her." Thus, when some new, more handsome and sexy person comes along, there's nothing tying them to you and specifically you alone except for that fact that prior to now they were unable to date anyone at your level of attractiveness...
Love is a tricky problem, and I've experienced both sides of the attractiveness imbalance. It's never healthy. It might be nice if people could just ignore physical attractiveness in all cases, but don't kid yourself, most of the time the people who say, "looks don't matter" are non-lookers who are upset about being unable to bag more attractive partners.
Americans say "autumn" too. We just say both.
I for one welcome our new ABBA overlords...
And dammit, now I have "Dancing Queen" in my head.
The problem is that if you make a new Carbon app, it defaults to "click to raise" in the IDE, but if you make a new Cocoa app, it defaults to "click-through: OK." I really wish Apple would clean this up, and make everything "click to raise" by default. Only a few things (like the play/pause button in iTunes) should be click-through. Everything else should be click to raise, because of Fitt's Law.