Yikes, bad english, I should have hit the preview button. I also didn't add enough emphasis on the fact I was being sarcastic about the reactor exploding. I am well aware it is virtually impossible to cause a reactor core to explode in such a manner. My point was rather that the Chernobyl crew certainly tried their damnedest, and that the limited scale of the disaster in light of that fact should be seen as a testament to their inherent safety.
At the very least it should provide a recalibration for our understanding of "What's the WORST that could happen?"
What is even more frightening to me, at least in my capacity as student of medical ethics, is the practice of using the United States prison population for medical experimentation. No it isn't as bad as Aushwitz, but rewarding good behavior in the US prison system with infecting prisoners with diseases so the disease progression may be studied, or administering drugs of questionable safety for similar reasons even when participation is technically "voluntary" I consider to be extremely ethically questionable.
In my opinion, the risk involved in medical trials is not something that a prison inmate can be considered competant to consent to. The very nature imprisonment is such that inmates will assent to things that a person in their right mind would not ordinarily assent to. Consider "We'll give you a shot every day for five days, you'll have a rash, and there's 0.1% you will be permanently blinded, but at the end we'll give you enough money to buy a pack of cigarettes, will you agree?" Is that ethical? Is an experiment even vaguely like that ethical?
Chernobyl is in many ways a testament to safety of nuclear fission reactors. Considering the sheer scale of STUPID things the operators of the reactor did on the day of the disaster did, the fact that it didn't just explode in a 100 Megaton fissile explosion should be counted as a miracle.
As an aside to my sarcasm I would be very interested in knowing if anybody has done a realistic study about how long it will be until the area is safely habitable again. And I don't mean a study on the terms of "OMGZ! NUKEZ It'll be 100,000 YEARZ!" Because that's bullshit. A few times normal background radiation is fine. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are living cities for chissakes. I would assume the very worst case scenarios for a nuclear disaster of that sort would be a couple of hundred years, assuming that there was at least some responsible clean up and containment.
Problem: There is, comparativly no money in network game subscriptions. Even if they added Blizzard's WoW revenue, that might just offset what they're spending every month pimping the Xbox 360, and put MSFT Games Division barely into the black.
The Longest Journey is 6 years old. Its sequel has been converted into a Tomb raider clone. Syberia and Syberia II are likewise a few years old. Your argument doesn't ring very true when the only recent release you cite isn't even an adventure game. You could have mentioned Indigo Prophecy, of course it had the most horrific matrix rip-off plot of any game I've ever played.
Your argument is crap. A handful of releases in the past 5 years does not a live genre make. Especially not when you compare the current rate of release and perhaps more importantly the current style of releases to the immense number of classics of the preceeding decade (1991-2001) Just go ahead and try to present an argument that compared to that time period the present era is dead as far as adventure game releases are concerned.
Really? that makes me all the more intrigued about Guild Wars. Diablo was a far better game WoW ever thought about being. "Controls of an RTS" is exactly what I HATED most about WoW, that and the fact that all the professions were nerfed to uselessness.
Yes, but that's not the point. Oxygen would be produced as an industrial by-product from any number of activities on the moon, once you got it all started: Mining, both aluminum and Titanium would be both useful and profitable, as well as trace iron deposits. Silicon would probably be a fairly big deal, as growing absolutely pure silicon crystal wafers would be easier on the moon. And there are significant space industry uses for all that excess oxygen, particularly given that it is much easier to get freight off the moon than it is to get freight off earth (getting freight to earth being relatively simple and cheap by comparison). That oxygen could be used as a component in chemical rocket fuels, or as a reagent in any number of other processes. It wouldn't just be used for breathing.
If you think REALLY big, like using nuclear warheads to move medium sized metallic asteroids into earth orbit to provide construction bases for factories, and space stations uses should become even more clear.
No, you're exactly right. Much of the lunar dust is Si02, the same as sand or glass or quartz.
SiO2 + energy -> Si + O2
Is perfectly valid chemistry. In fact, if you go back to the hard sci-fi of the 50's and 60's this is the kind of shit they predicted we'd be doing RIGHT NOW. Building plants on the moon to convert lunar dust to oxygen (and high quality silicon for chip fabs) for both lunar bases and space stations.
uh yeah, because vacuum seals are 110% effective and never ever leak, and once you establish the base, you'd never want to EXPAND IT. And it not like it would be 100's of times cheaper to ship oxygen generated on the moon to a space station/other orbital facility than the earth, no siree.
Oh Hurray! the school board they'll save us! have you EVER been to a school board meeting? School Boards are the most utterly inneffectual, beaureaucratic autocracies on the face of the planet.
I'm not sure what the solution is to public education. I'm not about to defend Private schools, for exactly the reasons you cite, but the public school system in america is obscenely broken. In my opinion the public schools now are probably about as about as bad private schools would be, or at least they will be within a decade or two (as Brown v. Board gets reversed through a failure of enforcement, which will hurt minorities in america EVEN more.)
eh? what exactly? What competitors is Google putting out of business by delivering ultimatums to their customers of "if you use our competitors products it'll be curtains for you, see, Curtains!"
Lots of people are getting all "aww poor Microsoft, getting bullied just for a few dozen Sherman AntiTrust Violations! Is big bad Google/Apple trying to eat your pie?" What you're missing is that Microsoft is just as evil as ever (They NEVER stopped Antitrust violations!) And none of their competitors has ever even been close to weilding Microsoft's level of Influence.
(a)how much do the student's parents file on their 1040 and (b) how prominent are they in local politics (ie how aware are the school administration of (a)?)?
In all seriousness while you might want want to think that was entirely a grim joke. It makes a LOT of difference. This might be especially enlightening for those of you from outside the USA about just how stratefied US society really is. The higher income your family is in american school pre-college (and at college at some private esp. ivy league) the better you get treated by teachers and administrative staff, and the better grades you get.
American Primary and Secondary Education are the ugly fascist underbelly of american society designed to help the rich get richer and make the poor poorer.
Which, to complete your comment, is actually what Warren Spector generally writes about Indie development having to do now. Mr. Spector is not an idiot, nor is he an industry tool. The difficulties he notes are quite valid. The difficulties are ones of scale (i.e. you don't see a Morrowind or Oblivion coming out of the Indie camp), and liscensing issues, among others.
2) It is a figure consumers have been acclimated to in the past.
3) Microsoft is probably unlikely to drop the core system's price more than $50 to try and compete IMO, as such, $250 is not a safe price point as it could probably end up competing with the 360 Core System (Note that I don't think the Wii would be a better buy at $250 than the crippled XBOX 360, but I'm not the one Nintendo needs to convince, as I'm one of their avowed faithful)
4) $150, while exceptionally attractive, I don't think will be seen this early, that price is probably running dangerously close to Nintendo's Componenent Costs + Manufacturing + Shipping + Profit + Retailor Markup. I do definately think we'll see a $150 Wii within a 12-18 months however.
People don't want to pay for radio, and quite frankly it's too ad ridden for them to have to (even XM and Sirius). Besides, IMO, Podcasts are putting the squeeze on that market already in the same way open source is cramping shoddy closed source commercial development.
was done on TRS-80's on LOGO, and THAT had a system vaguely like an IDE, I'd say this entire discussion is rediculuous. Why don't you start doing entire four year degree's entirely on paper, no computers at all!
You know what? Crystal Meth use is also reaaallly common in those areas of the united states, and given that there is no adequate drug treatment in the states, "Meth Bugs" seems to be a very good explanation for this.
While I think that it is certainly likely that Nintendo is likely to go to lengths to prevent it, (Even though, paradoxically, it would be quite beneficial for them in many ways, since Nintendo is going to sell the Wii at a profit, as opposed to the Xbox) I think it is almost inevitable that the the Wii will be hacked, it's low price point will make it an especially attractive target. And, hell, if it requires *that* much work, I may just buy two of 'em, one for hacking and one to remain pristine. IMO, a Nintendo Wii running linux could, in some ways, start to compete with a mac mini as a media machine, and a much lower price. (Yes, i realize there is a fairly sizable gap between the two in terms of computing power)
Firstly, the PS2 was VERY difficult to develop for by comparison to the XBOX or the Gamecube, it had all the titles because everybody beleived all the hype about how the GraphicSynth would "change everything" and the "PS2 is a supercomputer," in much the same way people are talking about the cell now. Secondly, not only does the Wii have built in flash memory (512mb) and SD card slots (maximum supported capacity as yet unknown, many devices have software limitations of 1 or 2 GB, but again these are driver limitations and cards of up to at least 4GB are commonly available now) but the Wii has standard USB ports and will support user added external HDD on them. All the better to locally store nintendo complete back catalog of games.
Tangentially, has anybody thought about how hackable this is likely to make the Wii? I can see the Wii being a VERY nice Linux media box, I mean, USB ports, SD cards, how hard can it be to get linux booting on this thing, and from there, you get a wirelessly controlled machine that should have no problem playing back MP3's, FLAC's, MPEG-4's and surfing the web (although it will apparently do that already).
You need to read the articles on the Power Processing Elements at Ars technica. "PPE" being the name IBM is marketing the Power component in the Cell, and the Xenon CPU.
The PPE is an extremely stripped down POWER design with significantly fewer resources than the G3 in the Revolution.
Higher resolutions tend to mask jaggies somewhat, except they also cause them to pop out and crawl much worse during movement. Additionally FSAA is easier at lower resolutions, obviously.
And the 1/6 processing power estimation assumes that that all three cores are at 100% utilization, which is a pretty bad assumption.
And your kind of experience is a significant component in the slowness of HDTV adoption, consumers are, rightfully, afraid of getting screwed over by an HDTV purchase.
1. Texture memory - Yes, the Revolution has less memory overall, (estimates about final numbers are between 96-128MB. HOWEVER (!) this memory is all 1T SRAM, i.e. it's really fucking fast, and the system is using a UMA, plus each of the individual components have reasonably big on-die caches, so the Revolution has a very decent, SPEEDY (Faster than DDR2, and RAMBUS), memory sub-system.
2. Information indicates that the revolution's main CPU is a faster clocked version of the chip in the Gamecube, which is a slightly customized POWERPC G3 chip. On the other hand, the cores of the Cell, and the Xbox 360 are known to be the same design and are in many ways extremely cut down, to such an extent they they are less capable than the initial 1993 PowerPC cores. The Revolution's G3 has a MUCH higher IPC than the CPUs in the competition. As a result a more accurate comparison would be to say that it probably around 1/2 as powerful as one such core.
3. Given the Gamecube GPU's proven graphical prowess, and that it is known that the Revolution's GPU is a faster version of that chip, YES, there will be power to spare on AA, especially at 480p. Also, you seem to be confused, Jaggies get worse as you INCREASE resolution. So all things being equal, at 720p a scene will look more jaggy than at 480p.
That lower resolution also means that requirements are lower across the board. One can simply look at GC titles like "Resident Evil 4" and the release screen for Twilight Princess, plus the knowledge that the Revolution has headroom to improve on that, and rest confidently that the revolution will look just fine
I would argue with this: "Nintendo used a format that was not in the best interest of the market (cartridges)." I think you're dead wrong. I think Nintendo stayed with the right media. Remember load times on the PSX? With that blazing fast 1x (or 2x?) CD-ROM drive? Remember the access times? I think the 3rd parties swarmed to CD because it was cheaper, and because it increased THEIR margins, and sony gave very generous liscensing terms in that generation. On the other side Nintendo stayed with the format that gave the far superior user experience. Just do a comparison today side by side (if you can find a working PSX, luckily N64's are rock solid so they're not a problem) which one is more pleasant to use?
Sony won that round by allowing hordes of cheap shovelware on their system, and the many many new gamers of that era went with the PSX because it could advertise "100x the games on the N64" nevermind that 95% of them were absolute garbage. And really, of that era the only games that have stood the Test of TIme are probably FFVII, on the PSX side; and Nintendo's exclusives on the other. Mario 64 is still awesome, as are the N64 zelda's, Smash Brothers and Nintendo's other titles, most of the 3rd party stuff was honestly pretty crap. The 3D revolution was a disaster.
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At the very least it should provide a recalibration for our understanding of "What's the WORST that could happen?"
In my opinion, the risk involved in medical trials is not something that a prison inmate can be considered competant to consent to. The very nature imprisonment is such that inmates will assent to things that a person in their right mind would not ordinarily assent to. Consider "We'll give you a shot every day for five days, you'll have a rash, and there's 0.1% you will be permanently blinded, but at the end we'll give you enough money to buy a pack of cigarettes, will you agree?" Is that ethical? Is an experiment even vaguely like that ethical?
As an aside to my sarcasm I would be very interested in knowing if anybody has done a realistic study about how long it will be until the area is safely habitable again. And I don't mean a study on the terms of "OMGZ! NUKEZ It'll be 100,000 YEARZ!" Because that's bullshit. A few times normal background radiation is fine. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are living cities for chissakes. I would assume the very worst case scenarios for a nuclear disaster of that sort would be a couple of hundred years, assuming that there was at least some responsible clean up and containment.
Problem: There is, comparativly no money in network game subscriptions. Even if they added Blizzard's WoW revenue, that might just offset what they're spending every month pimping the Xbox 360, and put MSFT Games Division barely into the black.
The Longest Journey is 6 years old. Its sequel has been converted into a Tomb raider clone. Syberia and Syberia II are likewise a few years old. Your argument doesn't ring very true when the only recent release you cite isn't even an adventure game. You could have mentioned Indigo Prophecy, of course it had the most horrific matrix rip-off plot of any game I've ever played. Your argument is crap. A handful of releases in the past 5 years does not a live genre make. Especially not when you compare the current rate of release and perhaps more importantly the current style of releases to the immense number of classics of the preceeding decade (1991-2001) Just go ahead and try to present an argument that compared to that time period the present era is dead as far as adventure game releases are concerned.
Really? that makes me all the more intrigued about Guild Wars. Diablo was a far better game WoW ever thought about being. "Controls of an RTS" is exactly what I HATED most about WoW, that and the fact that all the professions were nerfed to uselessness.
If you think REALLY big, like using nuclear warheads to move medium sized metallic asteroids into earth orbit to provide construction bases for factories, and space stations uses should become even more clear.
and Social Security, and Public education, and well, just about everything.
SiO2 + energy -> Si + O2
Is perfectly valid chemistry. In fact, if you go back to the hard sci-fi of the 50's and 60's this is the kind of shit they predicted we'd be doing RIGHT NOW. Building plants on the moon to convert lunar dust to oxygen (and high quality silicon for chip fabs) for both lunar bases and space stations.
uh yeah, because vacuum seals are 110% effective and never ever leak, and once you establish the base, you'd never want to EXPAND IT. And it not like it would be 100's of times cheaper to ship oxygen generated on the moon to a space station/other orbital facility than the earth, no siree.
I'm not sure what the solution is to public education. I'm not about to defend Private schools, for exactly the reasons you cite, but the public school system in america is obscenely broken. In my opinion the public schools now are probably about as about as bad private schools would be, or at least they will be within a decade or two (as Brown v. Board gets reversed through a failure of enforcement, which will hurt minorities in america EVEN more.)
Lots of people are getting all "aww poor Microsoft, getting bullied just for a few dozen Sherman AntiTrust Violations! Is big bad Google/Apple trying to eat your pie?" What you're missing is that Microsoft is just as evil as ever (They NEVER stopped Antitrust violations!) And none of their competitors has ever even been close to weilding Microsoft's level of Influence.
In all seriousness while you might want want to think that was entirely a grim joke. It makes a LOT of difference. This might be especially enlightening for those of you from outside the USA about just how stratefied US society really is. The higher income your family is in american school pre-college (and at college at some private esp. ivy league) the better you get treated by teachers and administrative staff, and the better grades you get.
American Primary and Secondary Education are the ugly fascist underbelly of american society designed to help the rich get richer and make the poor poorer.
Which, to complete your comment, is actually what Warren Spector generally writes about Indie development having to do now. Mr. Spector is not an idiot, nor is he an industry tool. The difficulties he notes are quite valid. The difficulties are ones of scale (i.e. you don't see a Morrowind or Oblivion coming out of the Indie camp), and liscensing issues, among others.
No a $50K/year job doesn't cut it anymore. Not if you want to have some kind of life. Welcome to Bush's America. Have a nice day.
1) It is much lower than the competition.
2) It is a figure consumers have been acclimated to in the past.
3) Microsoft is probably unlikely to drop the core system's price more than $50 to try and compete IMO, as such, $250 is not a safe price point as it could probably end up competing with the 360 Core System (Note that I don't think the Wii would be a better buy at $250 than the crippled XBOX 360, but I'm not the one Nintendo needs to convince, as I'm one of their avowed faithful)
4) $150, while exceptionally attractive, I don't think will be seen this early, that price is probably running dangerously close to Nintendo's Componenent Costs + Manufacturing + Shipping + Profit + Retailor Markup. I do definately think we'll see a $150 Wii within a 12-18 months however.
People don't want to pay for radio, and quite frankly it's too ad ridden for them to have to (even XM and Sirius). Besides, IMO, Podcasts are putting the squeeze on that market already in the same way open source is cramping shoddy closed source commercial development.
was done on TRS-80's on LOGO, and THAT had a system vaguely like an IDE, I'd say this entire discussion is rediculuous. Why don't you start doing entire four year degree's entirely on paper, no computers at all!
You know what? Crystal Meth use is also reaaallly common in those areas of the united states, and given that there is no adequate drug treatment in the states, "Meth Bugs" seems to be a very good explanation for this.
While I think that it is certainly likely that Nintendo is likely to go to lengths to prevent it, (Even though, paradoxically, it would be quite beneficial for them in many ways, since Nintendo is going to sell the Wii at a profit, as opposed to the Xbox) I think it is almost inevitable that the the Wii will be hacked, it's low price point will make it an especially attractive target. And, hell, if it requires *that* much work, I may just buy two of 'em, one for hacking and one to remain pristine. IMO, a Nintendo Wii running linux could, in some ways, start to compete with a mac mini as a media machine, and a much lower price. (Yes, i realize there is a fairly sizable gap between the two in terms of computing power)
Tangentially, has anybody thought about how hackable this is likely to make the Wii? I can see the Wii being a VERY nice Linux media box, I mean, USB ports, SD cards, how hard can it be to get linux booting on this thing, and from there, you get a wirelessly controlled machine that should have no problem playing back MP3's, FLAC's, MPEG-4's and surfing the web (although it will apparently do that already).
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360 -2.ars
The PPE is an extremely stripped down POWER design with significantly fewer resources than the G3 in the Revolution.
Higher resolutions tend to mask jaggies somewhat, except they also cause them to pop out and crawl much worse during movement. Additionally FSAA is easier at lower resolutions, obviously.
And the 1/6 processing power estimation assumes that that all three cores are at 100% utilization, which is a pretty bad assumption.
And your kind of experience is a significant component in the slowness of HDTV adoption, consumers are, rightfully, afraid of getting screwed over by an HDTV purchase.
1. Texture memory - Yes, the Revolution has less memory overall, (estimates about final numbers are between 96-128MB. HOWEVER (!) this memory is all 1T SRAM, i.e. it's really fucking fast, and the system is using a UMA, plus each of the individual components have reasonably big on-die caches, so the Revolution has a very decent, SPEEDY (Faster than DDR2, and RAMBUS), memory sub-system.
2. Information indicates that the revolution's main CPU is a faster clocked version of the chip in the Gamecube, which is a slightly customized POWERPC G3 chip. On the other hand, the cores of the Cell, and the Xbox 360 are known to be the same design and are in many ways extremely cut down, to such an extent they they are less capable than the initial 1993 PowerPC cores. The Revolution's G3 has a MUCH higher IPC than the CPUs in the competition. As a result a more accurate comparison would be to say that it probably around 1/2 as powerful as one such core.
3. Given the Gamecube GPU's proven graphical prowess, and that it is known that the Revolution's GPU is a faster version of that chip, YES, there will be power to spare on AA, especially at 480p. Also, you seem to be confused, Jaggies get worse as you INCREASE resolution. So all things being equal, at 720p a scene will look more jaggy than at 480p.
That lower resolution also means that requirements are lower across the board. One can simply look at GC titles like "Resident Evil 4" and the release screen for Twilight Princess, plus the knowledge that the Revolution has headroom to improve on that, and rest confidently that the revolution will look just fine
Sony won that round by allowing hordes of cheap shovelware on their system, and the many many new gamers of that era went with the PSX because it could advertise "100x the games on the N64" nevermind that 95% of them were absolute garbage. And really, of that era the only games that have stood the Test of TIme are probably FFVII, on the PSX side; and Nintendo's exclusives on the other. Mario 64 is still awesome, as are the N64 zelda's, Smash Brothers and Nintendo's other titles, most of the 3rd party stuff was honestly pretty crap. The 3D revolution was a disaster.