Since this outage wasn't T-Mo's fault, I would expect T-Mo to sue Microsoft for damages. I mean, why should T-Mo have to eat the huge financial losses? Unless T-Mo has idiots for lawyers, who entered into a business relationship of this sort with Danger/Microsoft with no language in the contract holding Microsoft liable for such losses.
One problem, potentially, if you 'adapt to players skill level' *too* well, is that as they get better (or as their character gets more powerful in an RPG type system), they might feel like they never get to enjoy the increase in either their skill, or power. It can feel like treading water, if as you get better, the game gets so much harder that you never get any feeling of accomplishment, no sense that you are any better or stronger than you started out, even though you *know* you've gotten better, or have more powerful abilities.
However, at some point, you do want more challenge. The trick will be, adapting to the players, while still giving them some opportunity to experience their increase in skill or strength.
This could be applied to almost any game genre, btw. I mean, consider an FPS. If you've gotten better at managing your economy, strategizing attack tactics, etc, but the computer remains in lockstep with your real skill increase as a player, then it can be very frustrating. At some point, you want the satisfaction of just slaughtering the AI player that used to beat you on the same 'skill level', because your skill has actually increased.
Why is Apple charging $10,000? Because they can (or at least, think they can). When they no longer can, they will reduce the price.
In the case of Apple, they are betting that the 'majors' are willing to pay $10,000 to have Apple setup "iTunes LPs" for them. The article asks why Apple "controls" iTunes LPs, when they are based on open standards. My guess is that the answer is that, sure, anyone could create an iTunes LP, but Apple controls iTunes, so you can't publish your third-party created LP on iTunes, right? Hey, thems the brakes. It's been said that "Freedom of the Press belongs to those who own one". Maybe the smaller labels just need to man up, and work together to establish a viable competitor.
I'm happy for Apple that they've been successful, but as for me, I like to see a competitive marketplace, so I try to throw some business to other comapanies, where I can find them. (Though I will occasionally buy one of the non-drm tracks from Apple).
I wonder if this superconductor is 'warm enough' that you could create practical underground/undersea conductors now? I mean, granted, it's not that cold underground, undersea, but this conductor is high-temperature enough that I suspect you could create a refrigerated 'housing' for the conductor, and manage to keep it cold enough underground or undersea. You wouldn't run the power the 'last mile' with such a superconductor, most likely, but perhaps refrigerated conductors would be suitable for connecting power plants to substations and other distant grids?
Now, why would you want such a superconductor? Because, wouldn't it be awesome, if you are an electric utility, to sell your 'off peak' electric capacity to another continent whose timezone puts them in 'peak demand' for that timezone, so that you get higher rate per hour than you do selling locally? (Granted, this doesn't help consumers any, but if you are a producer, this would sound like a no-brainer). If you could cost effectively connect all the continents with a superconductive grid, a producer in North America could sell power to Hawaii, Japan and SE Asia, Europe, former Soviet Republics, Africa, wherever, and vice versa.
I hear Iceland has more geothermal power than they could use. I bet they'd *love* to export power (maybe they already do?).
This might, possibly, make a decent Home Theater PC/media center type thing. It's got a relatively small form factor (although, of course, there *are* smaller PCs). It's got HDMI out (I didn't really check what kind of video chip this has installed, but if it's got HDMI out, one would hope that it has a video chip that can handle decoding 1080p video). The little screen means, that, potentially, a media center software vendor can have a User Interface which runs on the small screen, so that your TV just continues to show full-screen video while you do things like checking a program guide, or otherwise are doing 'control' tasks.
Still, I think you'd be better off with a very small HTPC with no built-in keyboard, and use a wireless (IR or BlueTooth, perhaps) keyboard externally. Just keep the wireless keyboard in a box or bin beside, behind, or underneath the couch/chair - grab it out to interact, and while your watching a movie or show, stow the keyboard back in the bin/box.
Yeah, that 'I found it objectionable' might work if you only worked for a company a year or two. If you try that and you worked for the company for 5 or 7 years, I'm gonna think your less than honest. Although, in the first place, I wouldn't have any problem with someone programming in the gambling industry. If anything, I know that gambling software must be *correct* because it is a highly regulated industry. Anyhow, it's a legal business, so why should it be a black mark?
However, some people will have a problem with it, but, I don't think *enough* people will consider it a black mark against you, to worry about (at least in the U.S., dunno about anywhere else). I figure, if someone has a problem with it, you probably are better off not working for them anyhow. I don't think it'd be a problem at any relatively large (or even medium size company), as those companies are generally so 'corporate' that it really won't matter. The only place it might matter is for a very small, entirely privately owned company where the owner has a rigid moral code.
You could always say that gambling is a core tenet of your religion, and sue them for religious discrimination. *grin*
Ok, I'll agree there's some truth to that. But there's also truth to the point that my laptop, with 1G of RAM, had on several games, worse performance under Vista, than later when I formatted and installed Windows XP on the same laptop. XP just seemed to give me better performance with only 1G of RAM, and my main point was, that at the time Vista launched, I believe there were a lot of machines that only had 512M - 1G of RAM, and that because of Microsoft's design, performance seemed, to a lot of people, to suffer on those machines when running Vista.
1) I disagree about UAC. I was only ever able to be happy with Vista after I turned UAC off. Effectively, it gives you a chance to say 'no' to something running, which isn't a bad thing, but for users who know what they are doing, generally they know what's installed on their systems, and what's running, already, and don't need an additional 'grant permission' window. For users who don't really understand much about computers, they have no real notion of whether something *should* be allowed or not, so they're either going to deny things they shouldn't (then wonder why something isn't working right), or allow everything, at which point UAC has given them extra prompts for no *actual* security benefit.
UAC also has the drawback of, potentially, extra user confusion in terms of where files are stored. What do I mean? There are a number of programs which, right or wrong (mostly wrong), store data files in their "Program Files" program directory (e.g. c:\Program Files\Publisher\ProgramName\Data). Now, with UAC turned on, when programs try to do that, the files will actually be saved into the user's profile directory (in a sort of 'mirror' of the program files directory structure). Now, on the surface, that seems like a great idea, BUT - if the user then goes to a manual or tech support page which says that the data files are located in c:\Program Files\Publisher\ProgramName\Data, they might not backup their data correctly (in an ideal world, every user's userprofile directory would also be backed up, but the world isn't always ideal).
2) Part of the problem isn't just marketting - it's that Microsoft designed a system whose minimum requirements were far beyond what almost all but a small percentage of existing systems had, at the time. Most people expect that a year or two old system should reasonably be able to upgrade to the latest release. Heck, brand new systems should have no problem.
Now, I know this is anecdotal, and so is not scientific proof or anything, but I think it does illustrate the problem pretty well - I bought a brand new Dell laptop right after Vista was released, which came with Vista. At this time, most computers, except for high-end gaming rigs and workstations used by people doing pretty high-end computing tasks, had about 512M RAM.
I decided to buy the laptop with 1G of RAM (I think I could have bought it with 2G, but I would have had to pay like an extra $150 or something - Dell likes to advertise systems cheap, then have badly overpriced upgrades to increase their margins, it seems). I honestly thought 1G should be more than enough, even for a Vista system. Well, if all I was doing was web browsing, email, and word processing - and not having *too many* open processes/web pages, at the same time - that probably would have been about enough, I guess. But, I also like to play games on my computer, have 6 or 10 web pages open at a time, sometimes, watch full-screen video, etc.
1G of RAM just didn't cut for Vista. Vista used almost 700MB of RAM with nothing but a few system-tray apps, and normal system services, running. That is, boot up the laptop, and 700MB or RAM was already in use before opening a single application or game. When I did play games, the system usually had to start paging to disk, which of course kills performance.
I now have 4G of RAM, and Vista basically runs without any problems. But, considering the state of systems when Vista was released (very few people had 4G back then, though it's a bit more common now, but still probably less than 50% of computers have more than 1G).
So, Microsoft basically dropped the ball on providing an upgrade which could work well with smaller systems. They apparently thought it wasn't important, because Moore's Law would mean that within a couple years, everyone would have systems with more than enough memory. The problem is, the product has to work well *at release*, on existing systems, in order to get a good reputation, which Vista largely failed to do.
"If unlimited data is $30 but 1Gb/month is $15 then the average iPhone user is saving money, on the other hand if instead the pricing was $1/Mb obviously the users would be losing."
I see both sides of this. You're right that if the metered usage is *reasonably* priced, then it's usually a pretty good deal. Right now, I'm doing pay-as-you-go "metered" wireless from T-Mobile for my phone (it's only voice, btw, no data). Before discussing the T-Mobile pricing, let me mention that before that, I was on a month-to-month plan with Verizon. I was paying $45/mo (the price was nominally $40/mo, but there were various bs fees, plus if you used 411 they charged you like $1.75 or $2.00 - something outrageous (thank goodness for 1-800-goog-411). That package gave me 300 'anytime' minutes, plus the normal 'unlimited nights after 9pm, and weekends'.
Thing is, my usage is not 'normalized'. That is, I don't make the same amount of calls every day/week/month, or talk the same amount of time every call. So, one month I might use 100 minutes, and the next month closer to the 300. One month I went 100 minutes over - 400 minutes instead of 300. That month, my cell phone bill ended up being something like $120 instead of the normal $40 (the extra minutes after 300 were billed at something like 45c/minute).
With the T-mobile pay-as-you-go, if I buy $100 of credit on the phone, I get 1000 minutes (or 10c/minute). The minutes last for a year (but only when you buy at least one $100 credit per year; otherwise they will typically expire after a month or three months, depending on how much you bought) Now, if I was going to talk 1000 minutes or more, every month, I'd maybe do better with an all-you-can-eat plan. So, that is one lonely example of a relatively *good deal* with metered payment. I never pay outrageous overage fees when I talk more than 300 minutes a month, I don't 'waste' minutes months I talk less, and I'm paying a relatively affordable rate for phone service (in my case, with the pay as you go, I'm paying an average of about $30/mo).
BUT, here's the important point here - T-Mo not withstanding, the mobile phone industry has a horrible track record with most 'tiered pricing' schemes. For the most part, with the mobile carriers, customers who wish to talk less minutes per month get charged *a lot more per minute* than customers who are in the higher tiers (I mean, you expect there to be *some* price difference, but sometimes the difference is astounding). Applied to data, I'm afraid the mobile industry really tends to screw their customers.
Check out this ATT page for laptop-dongle 3G data plans.
Notice how for a 50% increase in monthly cost, they give you an allocation that is approx twenty five times more data (200MB vs 5 GB, at $40/mo vs $60/mo). About a year ago, when I checked that page, they used to have one *lower* tier which was like $30/mo for 20MB or something. My point is, that the mobile industry likes to force people to spend more by making the 'lower' cost packages so ridiculously overpriced on a per-unit cost basis, that it's impractical. I mean, it would be *very easy* to go over your 200MB/mo allotment on your data plan. So, let's say you accidentally use 400MB one month (maybe some program is using your bandwidth and you don't realize). At $10/100MB, that means you payed $60 that month - the same price as the person who gets 5GB, but you only used 400MB. God forbid you use a Gigabyte one month, and end up paying $40 + (about)$80 = (about) $120 for the 1000MB.
To most of us, when you talk about metered pricing with telecoms companies, that's what we think of - getting slammed with unexpected phone bills that are God-aweful overcharges.
People "like" the monthly plans because, even though they are expensive, EVERY MONTH, it means that they are not likely to get any month that is 2-3 times larger than a normal month's bill. They can basically fix, budget for, and know what they will be paying.
I could go for some limited product placement. . .
Like, say, in a car game like a GTA, having actual brands of cars, and having their physics more or less be accurate for the car model (so that the BMWs and Ferraris accelerate much more quickly than, say, the Smart Car, and being able to 'Test Drive' the car in-game by jacking it from a car lot. (Note, I've not yet played any of the Recent GTAs, so they may have even done this, by now, for all I know - the last GTA I played was Vice City, though I'm slowly catching up with the rest of the world).
There might be other things. . . like maybe having some virtual mannequins in store windows dressed up in styles some department store or designer is trying to promote in real life, or maybe having some of the npc 'citizens' which are walking around the streets wearing such fashions. It would get very annoying, though, if those same npc citizen's are spamming the local chat with exclamations like, "I *love* these new $designerName slacks I got at $vendorName". Maybe if I was actually interested in what he/she was wearing, I could go talk to them individually and find out more info in a private 'conversation'. I think I could tolerate that.
The virtual billboards/signs thing, though, I'm less inclined to want. I've always found it much more entertaining to have funny *parodies* of real ads in a game, than actual ads. For example, in the game City of Heroes/City of Villains, they had some very funny and clever fake ads, like a defense lawyer who had a billboard about getting villains back on the streets of Paragon City.
CoH even had some quests/storylines which were based around some of the fake products you would see advertised in the city (like a Cola which was, I dunno, poisoning the population, or mutating them, or something, by the local MegaCorp). How can you have things like that if you are using real advertisers? I doubt Coke Zero will appreciate it very much if you have a plot based around their beverage doing bad things to kids (although, maybe Coke would pay to have Pepsi be the culprit *grin*).
"agree to your general's request for 40,000 aditional peacekeepers."
There, I fixed it for you. Now, I don't mean peacekeepers in the sense of, necessarily, UN Peacekeepers, but more in the sense of troops whose mission in Afghanistan is to keep the peace. Sometimes, the world needs strong men and women who are capable soldiers, in order to prevent *worse* violence and bloodshed. Our forces aren't over there gratuitously slaughtering Afghani's. The fighting they do is in response to agents of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda who are attacking them, attacking the Afghani government, and attacking civilians.
Would the U.S.A. have accomplished *more* for peace by staying out of WW1 and WW2 than they did by entering into it? It's hard to say for sure, but I think that Hitler and Mussolini would have probably finished conquering Western Europe and the U.K., and once they were fighting a one-front War against the U.S.S.R, they would have used the resources of Europe to make the war against the U.S.S.R drag on for a lot longer, costing many more lives. Who would be victorious in the long-run is unknowable, and not important in this case. The point is, U.S. intervention in World War 2 helped to end it sooner, and establish a world order which, while not perfect, quite probably was far more peaceful for the last 60+ years than the alternative (of course, we'll never know for sure).
Sometimes, the greatest benefactors of Peace are those who are willing to make War.
On a more personal level, is someone who steps in to prevent, say, domestic violence against a woman by her boyfriend or husband, a violent person? A perpetrator of violence? Of if they end up having to fight with the violant spouse/boyfriend to protect that woman and/or her children, are they *peacemakers*?
I've noticed for the past few years that the Nobel Peace Prize committee seems to definitely be moving in a direction not of honoring people for recognized achievements, but instead using the prize, seemingly, to try to promote an agenda. The parent's point is a good one - Obama hasn't really done that *much* yet, to promote peace - though I'm sure he has nobel, err, noble intentions, the actual results don't seem to be in yet.
Ok, maybe I'm jumping the gun on this one, but in a recent/. article about phones not having enough battery life, I sort of tongue-in-cheek proposed atomic batteries for powering the phones. Maybe I'm not so far off the mark?
I'm not sure though - these batteries might not provide sufficiently high wattage to power the phones? Still, maybe you could have self-recharging cell phones? Couple one or two of these small atomic batteries with something more conventional, like Li-ions, (or, in the future, perhaps high-temperature superconductive storage rings) and you'd not have to worry about plugging your phone in at night. Maybe while one of these batteries couldn't provide enough power, if you created arrays of 6 or 8 of them, all packaged into the phone housing, maybe they could?
I guess now we know how Gordon Freeman's HEV suit recharges the flashlight.
What's one computer? That's hardly convincing. By your own admission, 5000 servers in a datacenter run by the likes of Google or Microsoft could consume 2^64 Bytes in a year (or a few years, more realistically). See, your mistake is that you are thinking in terms of one computer, but some of the very high end systems in the world are clusters of *thousands* of computers. Granted, other than the virtual filesystem they share on some sort of SAN, which really could arguably need to be 128 bits, I suppose mostly those thousand+ computer clusters are running 64-bit OS's and they each have a relatively small 'chunk' of the data to work with.
But, maybe someone wants to come up with an operating system that shares a single address space among thousands of computers?
I'm a little bit confused. What monopoly does IBM have? Aren't there 'mainframes' available from the likes of HP, Fujitsu, Sun, Siemens, and other companies? I suppose that might depend on the definition of 'mainframe'. I know there are certainly supercomputers, and "Enterprise Servers", and "High Performance Clusters", and such available from multiple vendors. Seems to me that the existence of other alternatives, even if they aren't defined as 'mainframes', suggests that all potential customers aren't locked into a single solution from a single vendor (if you've been *using* IBM already, you might be locked in by technical 'vendor lock-in' issues, but that does not a monopoly make).
"They let this go on, because they think the cost of ruining a few lives is ok, as long as in the end they make their bust and all is ok in coptown."
How are they *supposed* to stop it if they don't know everyone involved? Busting one punk out of a group of 100+ conspirators won't even put a dent in the fraud. The only *way* to stop the fraud is for them to take the time to trace out the whole network.
"when they have the power to stop it in its tracks."
That's a bold statement. How do they stop it in it's tracks if they don't fully understand who all is involved in the fraud and how it's being comitted? If you mean shutting down an individual phishing website, if you haven't caught the criminals behind them, you're just playing whack-a-mole: another 5 phishing sites will be created on another 5 hosts within minutes of you shutting down the old one. That's not to say they shouldn't shut down the phishing sites as they are found - I'm pretty sure they *do*, but shutting down any given phishing site doesn't qualify as 'stopping it in it's tracks'.
Plus, it may be possible to recover some (most?) of those stolen funds, if they haven't been converted yet (i.e. spent on goods and services, or converted to other valuables like cash, bonds, metals, oil, gemstones, etc). In the case of conversion to other valuables, they still might be able to recover the cash, bonds, gems, etc, and convert most of the money back to cash and return it to the banks.
In any case, I disagree with your general premise - you can't jump the gun on the investigation and expect to actually result in *fewer* people screwed for less money. Also, once you start taking any action, the birds are gonna take flight, you know? So, you have to wait till you are ready to throw the net over the whole flock.
Someone else posted a link to an ArsTechnica article about this. They had more info from the LinkedIn post, which indicated that the work was being done to target the IA-128 instruction set (which is currently only available as a simulator, no actual silicon, *yet*). But, since Intel hasn't abandoned Itanium yet, and they are targetting it at Enterprise and High Performance Computing, I could totally see Intel evolving the Itanium architecture from 64-bits to 128-bits. After all, there are a few servers in the world that handle truly epic amounts of data, and really might be able to use more than 64-bits.
It's probably that they are laying the groundwork now, for release 5 or 10 years down the road.
Oh, you beat me to it. I posted nearly the same point, but apparently you were posting at the same time. Your write up is better, anyhow. Great wiki link, thanks.
I was reading some science fiction once (I'm thinking maybe it was Larry Niven? Don't remember for sure). Anyhow, the author described a ship which used some sort of large electromagnetic 'scoop' to gather hydrogen gas from space (remember, space isn't a complete vacuum, and, the Interstellar Gas is believed to be about 89% hydrogen), to use as fuel (basically, the scoop in this theoretical ship narrowed down to a cone, and at the extreme minimal point of the cone, achieved compression necessary to cause fusion of the Hydrogen). It was sort of an interstellar fusion ramjet
Because of the problem you've mentioned, I've always thought that, somehow, this has to be the answer to the long-distance fuel problem - gather your fuel as you go, don't 'pack it all' at the beginning of the voyage.
Also, because fusion releases so much energy, it has a much better 'energy density' than current, conventional fuels. So, you can get more acceleration from smaller amounts of fuel mass.
I think the acceleration they refer to is for a) decoding streaming video/audio data (something that's been done on PCs for a long time, to free up the cpu for other tasks, and usually uses less power than the CPU would to decode it, too), and maybe b) for accellerating vector graphics primitives (drawing lines, circles, polygons, arcs, etc), something which *also* has been done in silicon for a long time (I think back in the days of Windows 3.1 they were already starting to come out with cards which could accelerate some vector operations). I don't think they are going to hardware accelerate the whole language runtime?
Or, we could just mine all the naqadah out of it and use it to power generators. . . something the SGC completely failed to capitalize on. It seems like they are always looking for a source of naqadah, than when Apophis delivers it their doorstep, they just let it fly off into deep space. . .
What I find comical is that AT&T recently was reported to be having bandwidth limit issues due to the popularity of the iPhone, and yet they don't *encourage more texting* by either making all texts free, without an expensive all-you-can-eat package. What better way to save bandwidth, than to have as many people as possible using texting? I mean, granted, that will only go so far, as things like youtube and hulu will be soaking up lots of bandwidth, still. But, if you can encourage people to replace a few million phone calls with a few million text messages, won't that cut the bandwidth usage from voice calls by like 95% ? (Err, well, not a *total* bandwidth reduction of 95%; that is, the text messages which *otherwise* would have been phone calls, would account for something like 95% less bandwidth than the calls would have taken, see what I mean?)
That's not to say that 90-95% of phone calls will suddenly become text messages - I doubt that, but maybe something like 10-20% of phone calls might become text messages, if they were free for everyone, all the time. I have a very simple mobile phone, with just voice and text capabilities. I'd use text a lot more if my carrier didn't charge me for it, but since I'm already paying for voice, I might as well use it instead of the text, most of the time, to not avoid paying additional fees. So, the phone companies have given me an economic incentive to use more bandwidth. Seems like a pretty silly way to run a business where the resource (bandwidth, in this casee) is limited, and there is more demand than supply for the resource.
I thought Star Trek shields had a concept of "modulation", which is how they are able to shoot phasers out through the shield - and that if an enemy knows your modulation sequence, they can penetrate the shield with their own energy weapons by matching the sequence? Shouldn't you be able to send your own transporter beam out through your own shield because you know your own shield modulation? I guess, perhaps, that works with phasers but not transporter beams, being two slightly different things.
What it really comes down to is market demand vs supply. Let's not frame the discussion about whether or not XYZ is an "asshole" because they don't offer customers what they want. Let's not ask whether the government should mandate such things. Not all problems can be answered by the "Free Market", but this is one problem which *can be*. At some point, whether it's Google or someone else, someone will see a market opportunity - a way to make customers happier, and hopefully more loyal, by giving them something people seem to want - the security of knowing they are not "locked in" to your service.
Once a critical-mass of web services *offer* their customers that 'feature', it is likely that their competitors will need to follow suit in order to not lose too many prospective new customers. If I'm already locked in to your service, it might be hard for me to move, but if I know that another, comparable service exists, which I know makes it easier for me to make local backups, and to move my data to other providers, I as a consumer have at least some motivation to go with the provider who isn't trying to lock me in. That is to say, if I'm looking for *new* service, and am not already locked in, if I think I can avoid lockin with one of your competitors, that will at least be one factor in my decisions (even if it's not to begin with, the marketing department of the competitor can bring it to my attention and try to sell me on that idea).
"As for the characters, the acting was quite good, i can see some of them growin"
At the risk of speaking heresy on/., I'd like to point out that it's hard to judge a show by the first episode, sometimes, or even the first season of a show. I recently started watching SG1 on Hulu, and I gotta say, I almost didn't make it through the first season. The first season was, really, not that interesting to me. But, the show kept growing, and somewhere in the 2nd Season, started to seem a lot more interesting. The characters got more interesting, the acting and effects got better, and most importantly, the story lines started getting more entertaining.
Heck, I've been watching some early Episodes of Star Trek: TNG lately (via Netflix DVDs), and I gotta say, the show seems pretty hit-or-miss in the first season. The pilot episode seemed very lame and contrived to me. Too much 'preaching' by Jean-Luc (of course, the contrivance of the "Q" character forced this). I don't remember disliking the Deanna Troy character this much (although, when original ST:TNG was on air, I didn't really start watching until later seasons, so, quite possibly, the character improved in that time). I've since heard other people say they disliked the first couple seasons of TNG, so I'm not alone.
Let's hope that, maybe, SG:U lasts long enough to grow into a great Sci Fi show.
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Since this outage wasn't T-Mo's fault, I would expect T-Mo to sue Microsoft for damages. I mean, why should T-Mo have to eat the huge financial losses? Unless T-Mo has idiots for lawyers, who entered into a business relationship of this sort with Danger/Microsoft with no language in the contract holding Microsoft liable for such losses.
One problem, potentially, if you 'adapt to players skill level' *too* well, is that as they get better (or as their character gets more powerful in an RPG type system), they might feel like they never get to enjoy the increase in either their skill, or power. It can feel like treading water, if as you get better, the game gets so much harder that you never get any feeling of accomplishment, no sense that you are any better or stronger than you started out, even though you *know* you've gotten better, or have more powerful abilities.
However, at some point, you do want more challenge. The trick will be, adapting to the players, while still giving them some opportunity to experience their increase in skill or strength.
This could be applied to almost any game genre, btw. I mean, consider an FPS. If you've gotten better at managing your economy, strategizing attack tactics, etc, but the computer remains in lockstep with your real skill increase as a player, then it can be very frustrating. At some point, you want the satisfaction of just slaughtering the AI player that used to beat you on the same 'skill level', because your skill has actually increased.
Why is Apple charging $10,000? Because they can (or at least, think they can). When they no longer can, they will reduce the price.
In the case of Apple, they are betting that the 'majors' are willing to pay $10,000 to have Apple setup "iTunes LPs" for them. The article asks why Apple "controls" iTunes LPs, when they are based on open standards. My guess is that the answer is that, sure, anyone could create an iTunes LP, but Apple controls iTunes, so you can't publish your third-party created LP on iTunes, right? Hey, thems the brakes. It's been said that "Freedom of the Press belongs to those who own one". Maybe the smaller labels just need to man up, and work together to establish a viable competitor.
I'm happy for Apple that they've been successful, but as for me, I like to see a competitive marketplace, so I try to throw some business to other comapanies, where I can find them. (Though I will occasionally buy one of the non-drm tracks from Apple).
I wonder if this superconductor is 'warm enough' that you could create practical underground/undersea conductors now? I mean, granted, it's not that cold underground, undersea, but this conductor is high-temperature enough that I suspect you could create a refrigerated 'housing' for the conductor, and manage to keep it cold enough underground or undersea. You wouldn't run the power the 'last mile' with such a superconductor, most likely, but perhaps refrigerated conductors would be suitable for connecting power plants to substations and other distant grids?
Now, why would you want such a superconductor? Because, wouldn't it be awesome, if you are an electric utility, to sell your 'off peak' electric capacity to another continent whose timezone puts them in 'peak demand' for that timezone, so that you get higher rate per hour than you do selling locally? (Granted, this doesn't help consumers any, but if you are a producer, this would sound like a no-brainer). If you could cost effectively connect all the continents with a superconductive grid, a producer in North America could sell power to Hawaii, Japan and SE Asia, Europe, former Soviet Republics, Africa, wherever, and vice versa.
I hear Iceland has more geothermal power than they could use. I bet they'd *love* to export power (maybe they already do?).
This might, possibly, make a decent Home Theater PC/media center type thing. It's got a relatively small form factor (although, of course, there *are* smaller PCs). It's got HDMI out (I didn't really check what kind of video chip this has installed, but if it's got HDMI out, one would hope that it has a video chip that can handle decoding 1080p video). The little screen means, that, potentially, a media center software vendor can have a User Interface which runs on the small screen, so that your TV just continues to show full-screen video while you do things like checking a program guide, or otherwise are doing 'control' tasks.
Still, I think you'd be better off with a very small HTPC with no built-in keyboard, and use a wireless (IR or BlueTooth, perhaps) keyboard externally. Just keep the wireless keyboard in a box or bin beside, behind, or underneath the couch/chair - grab it out to interact, and while your watching a movie or show, stow the keyboard back in the bin/box.
Yeah, that 'I found it objectionable' might work if you only worked for a company a year or two. If you try that and you worked for the company for 5 or 7 years, I'm gonna think your less than honest. Although, in the first place, I wouldn't have any problem with someone programming in the gambling industry. If anything, I know that gambling software must be *correct* because it is a highly regulated industry. Anyhow, it's a legal business, so why should it be a black mark?
However, some people will have a problem with it, but, I don't think *enough* people will consider it a black mark against you, to worry about (at least in the U.S., dunno about anywhere else). I figure, if someone has a problem with it, you probably are better off not working for them anyhow. I don't think it'd be a problem at any relatively large (or even medium size company), as those companies are generally so 'corporate' that it really won't matter. The only place it might matter is for a very small, entirely privately owned company where the owner has a rigid moral code.
You could always say that gambling is a core tenet of your religion, and sue them for religious discrimination. *grin*
Ok, I'll agree there's some truth to that. But there's also truth to the point that my laptop, with 1G of RAM, had on several games, worse performance under Vista, than later when I formatted and installed Windows XP on the same laptop. XP just seemed to give me better performance with only 1G of RAM, and my main point was, that at the time Vista launched, I believe there were a lot of machines that only had 512M - 1G of RAM, and that because of Microsoft's design, performance seemed, to a lot of people, to suffer on those machines when running Vista.
I think you're *almost* right.
1) I disagree about UAC. I was only ever able to be happy with Vista after I turned UAC off. Effectively, it gives you a chance to say 'no' to something running, which isn't a bad thing, but for users who know what they are doing, generally they know what's installed on their systems, and what's running, already, and don't need an additional 'grant permission' window. For users who don't really understand much about computers, they have no real notion of whether something *should* be allowed or not, so they're either going to deny things they shouldn't (then wonder why something isn't working right), or allow everything, at which point UAC has given them extra prompts for no *actual* security benefit.
UAC also has the drawback of, potentially, extra user confusion in terms of where files are stored. What do I mean? There are a number of programs which, right or wrong (mostly wrong), store data files in their "Program Files" program directory (e.g. c:\Program Files\Publisher\ProgramName\Data). Now, with UAC turned on, when programs try to do that, the files will actually be saved into the user's profile directory (in a sort of 'mirror' of the program files directory structure). Now, on the surface, that seems like a great idea, BUT - if the user then goes to a manual or tech support page which says that the data files are located in c:\Program Files\Publisher\ProgramName\Data, they might not backup their data correctly (in an ideal world, every user's userprofile directory would also be backed up, but the world isn't always ideal).
2) Part of the problem isn't just marketting - it's that Microsoft designed a system whose minimum requirements were far beyond what almost all but a small percentage of existing systems had, at the time. Most people expect that a year or two old system should reasonably be able to upgrade to the latest release. Heck, brand new systems should have no problem.
Now, I know this is anecdotal, and so is not scientific proof or anything, but I think it does illustrate the problem pretty well - I bought a brand new Dell laptop right after Vista was released, which came with Vista. At this time, most computers, except for high-end gaming rigs and workstations used by people doing pretty high-end computing tasks, had about 512M RAM.
I decided to buy the laptop with 1G of RAM (I think I could have bought it with 2G, but I would have had to pay like an extra $150 or something - Dell likes to advertise systems cheap, then have badly overpriced upgrades to increase their margins, it seems). I honestly thought 1G should be more than enough, even for a Vista system. Well, if all I was doing was web browsing, email, and word processing - and not having *too many* open processes/web pages, at the same time - that probably would have been about enough, I guess. But, I also like to play games on my computer, have 6 or 10 web pages open at a time, sometimes, watch full-screen video, etc.
1G of RAM just didn't cut for Vista. Vista used almost 700MB of RAM with nothing but a few system-tray apps, and normal system services, running. That is, boot up the laptop, and 700MB or RAM was already in use before opening a single application or game. When I did play games, the system usually had to start paging to disk, which of course kills performance.
I now have 4G of RAM, and Vista basically runs without any problems. But, considering the state of systems when Vista was released (very few people had 4G back then, though it's a bit more common now, but still probably less than 50% of computers have more than 1G).
So, Microsoft basically dropped the ball on providing an upgrade which could work well with smaller systems. They apparently thought it wasn't important, because Moore's Law would mean that within a couple years, everyone would have systems with more than enough memory. The problem is, the product has to work well *at release*, on existing systems, in order to get a good reputation, which Vista largely failed to do.
"If unlimited data is $30 but 1Gb/month is $15 then the average iPhone user is saving money, on the other hand if instead the pricing was $1/Mb obviously the users would be losing."
I see both sides of this. You're right that if the metered usage is *reasonably* priced, then it's usually a pretty good deal. Right now, I'm doing pay-as-you-go "metered" wireless from T-Mobile for my phone (it's only voice, btw, no data). Before discussing the T-Mobile pricing, let me mention that before that, I was on a month-to-month plan with Verizon. I was paying $45/mo (the price was nominally $40/mo, but there were various bs fees, plus if you used 411 they charged you like $1.75 or $2.00 - something outrageous (thank goodness for 1-800-goog-411). That package gave me 300 'anytime' minutes, plus the normal 'unlimited nights after 9pm, and weekends'.
Thing is, my usage is not 'normalized'. That is, I don't make the same amount of calls every day/week/month, or talk the same amount of time every call. So, one month I might use 100 minutes, and the next month closer to the 300. One month I went 100 minutes over - 400 minutes instead of 300. That month, my cell phone bill ended up being something like $120 instead of the normal $40 (the extra minutes after 300 were billed at something like 45c/minute).
With the T-mobile pay-as-you-go, if I buy $100 of credit on the phone, I get 1000 minutes (or 10c/minute). The minutes last for a year (but only when you buy at least one $100 credit per year; otherwise they will typically expire after a month or three months, depending on how much you bought) Now, if I was going to talk 1000 minutes or more, every month, I'd maybe do better with an all-you-can-eat plan. So, that is one lonely example of a relatively *good deal* with metered payment. I never pay outrageous overage fees when I talk more than 300 minutes a month, I don't 'waste' minutes months I talk less, and I'm paying a relatively affordable rate for phone service (in my case, with the pay as you go, I'm paying an average of about $30/mo).
BUT, here's the important point here - T-Mo not withstanding, the mobile phone industry has a horrible track record with most 'tiered pricing' schemes. For the most part, with the mobile carriers, customers who wish to talk less minutes per month get charged *a lot more per minute* than customers who are in the higher tiers (I mean, you expect there to be *some* price difference, but sometimes the difference is astounding). Applied to data, I'm afraid the mobile industry really tends to screw their customers.
Check out this ATT page for laptop-dongle 3G data plans.
Notice how for a 50% increase in monthly cost, they give you an allocation that is approx twenty five times more data (200MB vs 5 GB, at $40/mo vs $60/mo). About a year ago, when I checked that page, they used to have one *lower* tier which was like $30/mo for 20MB or something. My point is, that the mobile industry likes to force people to spend more by making the 'lower' cost packages so ridiculously overpriced on a per-unit cost basis, that it's impractical. I mean, it would be *very easy* to go over your 200MB/mo allotment on your data plan. So, let's say you accidentally use 400MB one month (maybe some program is using your bandwidth and you don't realize). At $10/100MB, that means you payed $60 that month - the same price as the person who gets 5GB, but you only used 400MB. God forbid you use a Gigabyte one month, and end up paying $40 + (about)$80 = (about) $120 for the 1000MB.
To most of us, when you talk about metered pricing with telecoms companies, that's what we think of - getting slammed with unexpected phone bills that are God-aweful overcharges.
People "like" the monthly plans because, even though they are expensive, EVERY MONTH, it means that they are not likely to get any month that is 2-3 times larger than a normal month's bill. They can basically fix, budget for, and know what they will be paying.
I could go for some limited product placement. . .
Like, say, in a car game like a GTA, having actual brands of cars, and having their physics more or less be accurate for the car model (so that the BMWs and Ferraris accelerate much more quickly than, say, the Smart Car, and being able to 'Test Drive' the car in-game by jacking it from a car lot. (Note, I've not yet played any of the Recent GTAs, so they may have even done this, by now, for all I know - the last GTA I played was Vice City, though I'm slowly catching up with the rest of the world).
There might be other things. . . like maybe having some virtual mannequins in store windows dressed up in styles some department store or designer is trying to promote in real life, or maybe having some of the npc 'citizens' which are walking around the streets wearing such fashions. It would get very annoying, though, if those same npc citizen's are spamming the local chat with exclamations like, "I *love* these new $designerName slacks I got at $vendorName". Maybe if I was actually interested in what he/she was wearing, I could go talk to them individually and find out more info in a private 'conversation'. I think I could tolerate that.
The virtual billboards/signs thing, though, I'm less inclined to want. I've always found it much more entertaining to have funny *parodies* of real ads in a game, than actual ads. For example, in the game City of Heroes/City of Villains, they had some very funny and clever fake ads, like a defense lawyer who had a billboard about getting villains back on the streets of Paragon City.
CoH even had some quests/storylines which were based around some of the fake products you would see advertised in the city (like a Cola which was, I dunno, poisoning the population, or mutating them, or something, by the local MegaCorp). How can you have things like that if you are using real advertisers? I doubt Coke Zero will appreciate it very much if you have a plot based around their beverage doing bad things to kids (although, maybe Coke would pay to have Pepsi be the culprit *grin*).
"agree to your general's request for 40,000 aditional peacekeepers."
There, I fixed it for you. Now, I don't mean peacekeepers in the sense of, necessarily, UN Peacekeepers, but more in the sense of troops whose mission in Afghanistan is to keep the peace. Sometimes, the world needs strong men and women who are capable soldiers, in order to prevent *worse* violence and bloodshed. Our forces aren't over there gratuitously slaughtering Afghani's. The fighting they do is in response to agents of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda who are attacking them, attacking the Afghani government, and attacking civilians.
Would the U.S.A. have accomplished *more* for peace by staying out of WW1 and WW2 than they did by entering into it? It's hard to say for sure, but I think that Hitler and Mussolini would have probably finished conquering Western Europe and the U.K., and once they were fighting a one-front War against the U.S.S.R, they would have used the resources of Europe to make the war against the U.S.S.R drag on for a lot longer, costing many more lives. Who would be victorious in the long-run is unknowable, and not important in this case. The point is, U.S. intervention in World War 2 helped to end it sooner, and establish a world order which, while not perfect, quite probably was far more peaceful for the last 60+ years than the alternative (of course, we'll never know for sure).
Sometimes, the greatest benefactors of Peace are those who are willing to make War.
On a more personal level, is someone who steps in to prevent, say, domestic violence against a woman by her boyfriend or husband, a violent person? A perpetrator of violence? Of if they end up having to fight with the violant spouse/boyfriend to protect that woman and/or her children, are they *peacemakers*?
I've noticed for the past few years that the Nobel Peace Prize committee seems to definitely be moving in a direction not of honoring people for recognized achievements, but instead using the prize, seemingly, to try to promote an agenda. The parent's point is a good one - Obama hasn't really done that *much* yet, to promote peace - though I'm sure he has nobel, err, noble intentions, the actual results don't seem to be in yet.
Ok, maybe I'm jumping the gun on this one, but in a recent /. article about phones not having enough battery life, I sort of tongue-in-cheek proposed atomic batteries for powering the phones. Maybe I'm not so far off the mark?
I'm not sure though - these batteries might not provide sufficiently high wattage to power the phones? Still, maybe you could have self-recharging cell phones? Couple one or two of these small atomic batteries with something more conventional, like Li-ions, (or, in the future, perhaps high-temperature superconductive storage rings) and you'd not have to worry about plugging your phone in at night. Maybe while one of these batteries couldn't provide enough power, if you created arrays of 6 or 8 of them, all packaged into the phone housing, maybe they could?
I guess now we know how Gordon Freeman's HEV suit recharges the flashlight.
What's one computer? That's hardly convincing. By your own admission, 5000 servers in a datacenter run by the likes of Google or Microsoft could consume 2^64 Bytes in a year (or a few years, more realistically). See, your mistake is that you are thinking in terms of one computer, but some of the very high end systems in the world are clusters of *thousands* of computers. Granted, other than the virtual filesystem they share on some sort of SAN, which really could arguably need to be 128 bits, I suppose mostly those thousand+ computer clusters are running 64-bit OS's and they each have a relatively small 'chunk' of the data to work with.
But, maybe someone wants to come up with an operating system that shares a single address space among thousands of computers?
I'm a little bit confused. What monopoly does IBM have? Aren't there 'mainframes' available from the likes of HP, Fujitsu, Sun, Siemens, and other companies? I suppose that might depend on the definition of 'mainframe'. I know there are certainly supercomputers, and "Enterprise Servers", and "High Performance Clusters", and such available from multiple vendors. Seems to me that the existence of other alternatives, even if they aren't defined as 'mainframes', suggests that all potential customers aren't locked into a single solution from a single vendor (if you've been *using* IBM already, you might be locked in by technical 'vendor lock-in' issues, but that does not a monopoly make).
"They let this go on, because they think the cost of ruining a few lives is ok, as long as in the end they make their bust and all is ok in coptown."
How are they *supposed* to stop it if they don't know everyone involved? Busting one punk out of a group of 100+ conspirators won't even put a dent in the fraud. The only *way* to stop the fraud is for them to take the time to trace out the whole network.
"when they have the power to stop it in its tracks."
That's a bold statement. How do they stop it in it's tracks if they don't fully understand who all is involved in the fraud and how it's being comitted? If you mean shutting down an individual phishing website, if you haven't caught the criminals behind them, you're just playing whack-a-mole: another 5 phishing sites will be created on another 5 hosts within minutes of you shutting down the old one. That's not to say they shouldn't shut down the phishing sites as they are found - I'm pretty sure they *do*, but shutting down any given phishing site doesn't qualify as 'stopping it in it's tracks'.
Plus, it may be possible to recover some (most?) of those stolen funds, if they haven't been converted yet (i.e. spent on goods and services, or converted to other valuables like cash, bonds, metals, oil, gemstones, etc). In the case of conversion to other valuables, they still might be able to recover the cash, bonds, gems, etc, and convert most of the money back to cash and return it to the banks.
In any case, I disagree with your general premise - you can't jump the gun on the investigation and expect to actually result in *fewer* people screwed for less money. Also, once you start taking any action, the birds are gonna take flight, you know? So, you have to wait till you are ready to throw the net over the whole flock.
Someone else posted a link to an ArsTechnica article about this. They had more info from the LinkedIn post, which indicated that the work was being done to target the IA-128 instruction set (which is currently only available as a simulator, no actual silicon, *yet*). But, since Intel hasn't abandoned Itanium yet, and they are targetting it at Enterprise and High Performance Computing, I could totally see Intel evolving the Itanium architecture from 64-bits to 128-bits. After all, there are a few servers in the world that handle truly epic amounts of data, and really might be able to use more than 64-bits.
It's probably that they are laying the groundwork now, for release 5 or 10 years down the road.
Oh, you beat me to it. I posted nearly the same point, but apparently you were posting at the same time. Your write up is better, anyhow. Great wiki link, thanks.
I was reading some science fiction once (I'm thinking maybe it was Larry Niven? Don't remember for sure). Anyhow, the author described a ship which used some sort of large electromagnetic 'scoop' to gather hydrogen gas from space (remember, space isn't a complete vacuum, and, the Interstellar Gas is believed to be about 89% hydrogen), to use as fuel (basically, the scoop in this theoretical ship narrowed down to a cone, and at the extreme minimal point of the cone, achieved compression necessary to cause fusion of the Hydrogen). It was sort of an interstellar fusion ramjet
Because of the problem you've mentioned, I've always thought that, somehow, this has to be the answer to the long-distance fuel problem - gather your fuel as you go, don't 'pack it all' at the beginning of the voyage.
Also, because fusion releases so much energy, it has a much better 'energy density' than current, conventional fuels. So, you can get more acceleration from smaller amounts of fuel mass.
I think the acceleration they refer to is for a) decoding streaming video/audio data (something that's been done on PCs for a long time, to free up the cpu for other tasks, and usually uses less power than the CPU would to decode it, too), and maybe b) for accellerating vector graphics primitives (drawing lines, circles, polygons, arcs, etc), something which *also* has been done in silicon for a long time (I think back in the days of Windows 3.1 they were already starting to come out with cards which could accelerate some vector operations). I don't think they are going to hardware accelerate the whole language runtime?
Or, we could just mine all the naqadah out of it and use it to power generators. . . something the SGC completely failed to capitalize on. It seems like they are always looking for a source of naqadah, than when Apophis delivers it their doorstep, they just let it fly off into deep space. . .
What I find comical is that AT&T recently was reported to be having bandwidth limit issues due to the popularity of the iPhone, and yet they don't *encourage more texting* by either making all texts free, without an expensive all-you-can-eat package. What better way to save bandwidth, than to have as many people as possible using texting? I mean, granted, that will only go so far, as things like youtube and hulu will be soaking up lots of bandwidth, still. But, if you can encourage people to replace a few million phone calls with a few million text messages, won't that cut the bandwidth usage from voice calls by like 95% ? (Err, well, not a *total* bandwidth reduction of 95%; that is, the text messages which *otherwise* would have been phone calls, would account for something like 95% less bandwidth than the calls would have taken, see what I mean?)
That's not to say that 90-95% of phone calls will suddenly become text messages - I doubt that, but maybe something like 10-20% of phone calls might become text messages, if they were free for everyone, all the time. I have a very simple mobile phone, with just voice and text capabilities. I'd use text a lot more if my carrier didn't charge me for it, but since I'm already paying for voice, I might as well use it instead of the text, most of the time, to not avoid paying additional fees. So, the phone companies have given me an economic incentive to use more bandwidth. Seems like a pretty silly way to run a business where the resource (bandwidth, in this casee) is limited, and there is more demand than supply for the resource.
I thought Star Trek shields had a concept of "modulation", which is how they are able to shoot phasers out through the shield - and that if an enemy knows your modulation sequence, they can penetrate the shield with their own energy weapons by matching the sequence? Shouldn't you be able to send your own transporter beam out through your own shield because you know your own shield modulation? I guess, perhaps, that works with phasers but not transporter beams, being two slightly different things.
What it really comes down to is market demand vs supply. Let's not frame the discussion about whether or not XYZ is an "asshole" because they don't offer customers what they want. Let's not ask whether the government should mandate such things. Not all problems can be answered by the "Free Market", but this is one problem which *can be*. At some point, whether it's Google or someone else, someone will see a market opportunity - a way to make customers happier, and hopefully more loyal, by giving them something people seem to want - the security of knowing they are not "locked in" to your service.
Once a critical-mass of web services *offer* their customers that 'feature', it is likely that their competitors will need to follow suit in order to not lose too many prospective new customers. If I'm already locked in to your service, it might be hard for me to move, but if I know that another, comparable service exists, which I know makes it easier for me to make local backups, and to move my data to other providers, I as a consumer have at least some motivation to go with the provider who isn't trying to lock me in. That is to say, if I'm looking for *new* service, and am not already locked in, if I think I can avoid lockin with one of your competitors, that will at least be one factor in my decisions (even if it's not to begin with, the marketing department of the competitor can bring it to my attention and try to sell me on that idea).
"As for the characters, the acting was quite good, i can see some of them growin"
At the risk of speaking heresy on /., I'd like to point out that it's hard to judge a show by the first episode, sometimes, or even the first season of a show. I recently started watching SG1 on Hulu, and I gotta say, I almost didn't make it through the first season. The first season was, really, not that interesting to me. But, the show kept growing, and somewhere in the 2nd Season, started to seem a lot more interesting. The characters got more interesting, the acting and effects got better, and most importantly, the story lines started getting more entertaining.
Heck, I've been watching some early Episodes of Star Trek: TNG lately (via Netflix DVDs), and I gotta say, the show seems pretty hit-or-miss in the first season. The pilot episode seemed very lame and contrived to me. Too much 'preaching' by Jean-Luc (of course, the contrivance of the "Q" character forced this). I don't remember disliking the Deanna Troy character this much (although, when original ST:TNG was on air, I didn't really start watching until later seasons, so, quite possibly, the character improved in that time). I've since heard other people say they disliked the first couple seasons of TNG, so I'm not alone.
Let's hope that, maybe, SG:U lasts long enough to grow into a great Sci Fi show.