So after keeping up with Sony news on Slashdot, I've learned that on launch they shipped around 150k PS3s and they sold out. I also learned that they lose something like $200-300 per console.
So I guess I figure that they lost around $37 million dollars on that day. So I would imagine that this will look pretty bad on their shareholder report card when their fourth quarter profits for 2006 come out.
Now, they'll make more than that in the future licensing the games. But I doubt they'll make that back before Christmas. So I would suggest holding off on PS4 speculation until the holiday season is over, all the facts are in and the shareholders tell the games division of Sony what to do. In the end, it's not Kaz Hirai or Yuta Sakurai that determine whether or not a PS4 happens, it's the reaction by Wallstreet and the people holding the shares.
As I've posted before, I think this is a good approach.
There are good sanctions & bad sanctions. An example of bad sanctions were the sanctions the UN imposed against Iraq that caused a lot of human suffering. Yes, it put pressure on the dictator but it was easy ammo to use against the United States. Essentially claiming that we were starving and murdering the civilians--and I knew people that were saying we were doing horrible things!
When we impose sanctions on a country to pressure the dictator, I think that things like food, water, clothing & medicine should be increased with pro-American propaganda along with it. What we should decrease is things like automobiles, electronics & other high standard of living commodities. Therefore we make it annoying for the people of North Korea to get by but it isn't possible to point to conditions of people dying due to our sanctions.
Their economy might stagnate and people might die as a result of that but it's not so easy to point the finger at the UN then. In my opinion, the blocking of these high commodities is precisely how sanctions should be done. If these have little or no effect (which they probably will) then you can always ramp it up to include other things. I think one of the harsher things you could do is just block all traffic two/from North Korea from the United States. I mean, they probably block most of it already so that might not matter but internet access would be another commodity that would certainly upset me if I didn't have access to it.
... that the process is so air tight that only 18 of 1 million pieces are considered defective...
Impressive but I wouldn't call it "air tight." Six Sigma is a defect rate that many employers (including my own) constantly strive to hit. While only 18 defects per million is still impressive, the Wikipedia entry will tell you what six sigma means:
The process was pioneered by Bill Smith at Motorola in 1986[2] and was originally defined[3] as a metric for measuring defects and improving quality, and a methodology to reduce defect levels below 3.4 Defects Per (one) Million Opportunities (DPMO), or put another way, a methodology of controlling a process to the point of plus or minus six sigma (standard deviations) from a centerline. Six Sigma has now grown beyond defect control.
It esentially means that if you model your product as a normal curve representing rate of failure, you need to aim for six standard deviations away from the mean failure rate. That figures out to be 3.4 per million which is a fraction of 18 per million. Believe it or not, there are many companies out there that consider their products to be six sigma.
"I'm sorry Senator, I cannot comment on the program due to an ongoing Justice Department investigation" - Alberto Gonzales, speaking to the new Democrat controlled congress sometime next year
Regardless if they're doing this to prevent a congressional hearing, I think all of Bush's cabinet are in up to their necks with this thing. They've promoted it, publicly praised it & even publicly defended it--I'm excited to see it publicly scrutinized & watch revisionist history write them all off as enemies of the constitution. I mean, my grandfather tells me about the horrible things the president authorized against Japanese-Americans during World War II & my father tells me the horrible things that Nixon did. I'm sure there will a time when I'm a haggled old coot that keeps telling my kids how lucky they are not to have a president that's pushing for government archival of their phone & internet records--and that's the only part I knew about which mean it must be twice as worse! So I put an onion in my pocket which was the style at the time...
Whatever the reason for the results, they will cheer defenders of Wikipedia's accuracy, though Chesney urges caution in extrapolating too generally from his study. For one thing, the sample size was small. For another, 13 percent of those in the "experts" group reported finding mistakes in their assigned articles.
If I may speculate why this happened, I often encounter non-experts having a higher opinion on a topic than an expert. Part of being an 'expert' (in my opinion) is the ability to see all major sides of an issue that they are experts on. Case in point, I've found while watching the History channel that I judge a historian's greatness on whether he tells me what to think about history or whether he tries to cover as many of the major angles as possible in as little time as possible. Example on Nazis:
Historian A: "The Nazis were horrible awful people who killed and murdered millions of people during World War II. They created nothing but pain and suffering while seeking out total fascist control of the entire world." Historian B: "Nazism is not a precise, theoretically grounded ideology. It consists of a loose collection of ideas and positions: extreme nationalism, racism, eugenics, totalitarianism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, and limits to freedom of religion."
Now the reason I put those two up there is because your average person (I'm American so I may be biased on 'average') would probably favor historian A's perspective as opposed to historian B. Historian B is actually an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry. It's more encyclopedic as it's not opinion oriented. I'm not saying Wikipedia is free of opinions but what I'm proposing is that non-experts have an opinion and often when they read something that doesn't align with that opinion, they consider it to be incorrect.
The (on average high) neutrality of Wikipedia is most likely what causes non-experts to rate it as more erroneous than experts. Since the sample set was so low (as the report notes) then it is perhaps more likely that this happened.
I think that this is what the "Everyone who disagrees with you is a moron" article is getting at. I'm guessing experts are training not to suffer from that disease.
I was watching the Colbert Report the other day and the CEO from Timberland was on there explaining his carbon neutral stance and he sounded quite avid about it. He was clearly agitated from Steven's persona of a right wing nut who couldn't understand. It was more awkward than funny.
But it caused me to wonder what would happen if I urged the big company I work for (and it is multi-national) to go carbon neutral. Well, on the surface, we don't burn anything. But I thought harder about the thousands of computers we must operate and the kilowatt upon kilowatt of power that is most likely used by each facility. Ok, so (since we can't assume the power company is adjusting for it) we offset the power consumption through planting some trees. Well, how many trees and how much land would this cost? And what about the thousands of computers we buy yearly from Dell or IBM? What about the plastics that go into the casings? And what about the companies that they buy the chips from and where do they buy the ore that's refined to make the silicon chips?
The more I taxed my brain with this possible carbon neutral proposition, the more it looked like this was going to require a lot of resources. Resources being money. And while we're doing this, some other IT company isn't and we're competing with them to do business with our customers. So my proposition might be passed around at the office as a joke until the CTO got ahold of it and thought about the shareholder and rejected it.
So before any of you say a carbon tax is stupid because consumers will start to buy the most environmentally friendly products, you're simply wrong. The only way they'll buy it is if the environment is having direct negative impacts on their business. And the irony is that if it does negatively affect their business that means lost profits. And lost profits means they'll have less money to spend on their solutions. So our environmentally friendly services with a carbon neutral company will probably be out of the question if they're more expensive. Tell me, when you buy your computer or your Xbox360/PS3/Wii or your new processor, does carbon neutrality figure into your pricing at all? I'll bet it doesn't.
And at the end of the day, my coworkers will tell me that there's X number of companies that are worse than us so I shouldn't even worry about it. Or that we don't even need to worry about that because it's the people who make our tools that should be conscious. But we do need to at least think about it. We might even need to worry about it more than others because we're the least obvious target yet the largest base of carbon output. Take Wal-Mart for example. Just look at the trucks they use for their distribution centers. 500 distribution centers across the states with probably thousands of stores--all of those places being supplied regularly from the coasts and producers by truck. Such an easy thing to overlook--especially if they contract those truckers because then it's not their fault, it's not their conscious and they can have articles hailing them as the greenest distribute in the world while the contractor doesn't care because they're doing business with the largest distributor in the world.
I'm not going to tell you whether or not a carbon tax is a good idea. I'm just going to ask you to tell me what scenario would have to go down for an entire industry to collectively switch to being carbon neutral. And I mean that everybody has to be on board because it will affect price. And when that price goes up, if it doesn't go up across the board, consumers will on average opt for the cheaper product. What would have to be happening to make that consumer stay away from non-carbon neutral compa
Whoever wrote this article lives in a fantasy land full of gum drop trees and puppy dog kisses.
Not only are these points weak, they're a stretch. And number four is laughable,
(4) The agreement and accompanying threats are serving as additional bad publicity in the free software community for an increasingly troubled Microsoft, and the effect will be to further motivate developers and users of free software. People do not like to be threatened or bullied, and they can react strongly to it.
That's right, folks, this agreement will make developers so angry that they'll triumph in the face of Microsoft telling them they're all patent infringers. Yep, sound argument to me. Let's see here... SAMBA developers very happy & OpenSUSE devs happy. In case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic.
And also, some of the footnotes are pure comedic genius,
Benefitting Microsoft could be a good thing, even in the eyes of many advocates of free software, if it helps that company to reallocate its massive resources to emphasize developing truly innovative and quality products instead of attempting (increasingly in vain) to protect a doomed monopoly. These resources include its large number of very talented employees, some of whom are our friends and neighbors.
It's so funny because the way I see it, this was the perfect way to hobble Linux & threaten all the application development on it so that the competition for Windows dwindles & therefore they can produce pure crap and we'll have to use it. Please explain yourself, Linux Information Project.
I'm not saying that the Zune is good by any means nor have I had a chance to play around with one. Which is why I read this review--I was hoping for a good review on this new MP3 player.
But I found this to be a particularly bad review. Perhaps I don't read a lot of reviews but I prefer them to be thorough. One thing that stuck out about this review is that it didn't even have room for something nice to say about the Zune. Not one thing. I'm sure a high school student could write me a review with a PROS/CONS table that would be more informative than this. I find it very hard to believe that this reviewer managed to not find anything good about the Zune.
Here's a simple question I didn't see answered anywhere, "Did it work?" If it did what was its sound quality like? Is it durable? How heavy/large is it? Every point of this article a mark against the Zune. I think that a 'review' entitles you to be subjective & look at it from all angles then weigh in at the end about whether or not you would recommend it. Instead this review starts off with the quote, "Yes, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face. 'Avoid,' is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity." Why should I even finish reading your review if that's the first thing you say?
And then Apple enters your review. I can understand a comparison to other competitive MP3 players but you just start using the brand name Apple. Why? Why not give me a rundown of this versus iRiver or Creative's MP3 players? So the Toshiba MP3 player is $40 cheaper, doesn't tell me much if it sucks even more. Are they also compatible with podcasts and WMA codecs?
Reading this review causes me to question Andy Ihnatko's motive. Is he reviewing the Zune, grinding an ax or trying to get me to buy an iPod? I know the thing sucks but at least be fair if you're going to write a review for the masses.
"It seems Firefox has lost its way somewhere along the passage to fame."
I think "lost its way" is too strong of a phrase. Sure, some of these points are negative but I haven't really experienced that much of a negative experience. It's good to criticize this project (with constructive criticism) so that it stays as great as it is. But to say that it's lost its way I think is going too far.
The complaints raised here are trivial features. Not the performance or stability problems I had with 1.5 but instead things like RSS & aesthetics which to me aren't too important when it comes to a browser. I'm sure for some other people RSS or theme might make a world of difference but I'm not that person and I don't wager there are many people like that.
The concern that it makes itself the default browser is valid but using the word 'hijacking' is a bit strong. Honestly, I didn't even notice this but I was going from 1.5 to 2.0 on most of my computers so that might explain why this was a non-issue for me. Perhaps they assumed if you were going to 2.0, you were coming from 1.5? Either, I agree with this qualm though I find it to be the most serious offense listed in the article.
So you may ask if Firefox has lost its way but I counter that there have merely been a few miss-steps along the way. I'm keeping an eye on IE 7 & so far it hasn't lured me away from Firefox 2.0 so I guess that's a good sign as I consider my standards to be pretty high.
The Rainbow technology is feasible because printed text, readable by the human eye is a very wasteful use of the potential capacity of paper to store data.
And I'm sure this "Rainbow Technology" is also very wasteful if you would devise a way to encode data on electrons & lay them on the sheet of paper and then read them. The obvious problem being that just exposing the paper to the natural elements would probably render some of the data useless. Now I know that compact disc drives in computers use a form of error correcting codes (I can't recall if it's cyclic redundancy checks or some other form of parity) and I assume that the scheme of this paper technology uses the same (most likely at the cost of a fraction of space). Judging by the word 'rainbow' I'm guessing it uses colorized shapes to encode the data which is a novel idea but what quality must the paper & ink be? Can the paper in my printer be used to encode this data?
My question would be how much wear & tear can a sample of this medium stand before it is rendered unreadable? I would highly doubt one would be able to fold it--however it would be interesting to see whether creating a diagonal read/write scheme would protect from vertical & horizontal folds with the proper ECC. I think the plastic sheets could potentially be as robust as discs but would you be able to bend them? I doubt it though if they allowed it, it'd probably end up being more expensive than a disc.
Interesting technology but I'd sure like to hear a lot more of the details of how it works & how it performs before I make a solid judgment on its feasibility.
Alright so I could flip through some old memories and recommend you an obscure title and tell you to go play it. But I've come to a realization about a lot of those games. General Chaos for the Sega Genesis was a great game. Until I got a hold of it a few years ago. I had this memory of me and several of my friends taking turn on the multi player campaigns. Great memories. But when I started playing it solo, it lost a lot. Still a fun game but lost a lot.
I also remember Golden Eye to be a great game but--well, it really lacks a lot of features that FPS's of today have. But in high school, I played that non-stop with all my friends. It was the time spent with them that give me an over-evaluation of the game.
Now, I'm not saying the arguments of one game being better than the other aren't warranted. In fact, I still find A Link to the Past just as fun as I did when I played it many many years ago (I recommend the DS Lite version for portability). The funny thing about my childhood is that I was always at a friend's house watching them play their system. Back then I cursed this as I could never play at my house. But in retrospect, it turned what would be single player RPGs into fun play along and plan together social games & every chance to play was well savored. Maybe I have some sacred view of console games that others lack because they were a haven from working the fields. But I digress...
So this is the part of the post where I get all wishy washy and I don't suggest a game. I suggest you think back to all the games you played with people. And you take the time to dig these games up and play them with those people for the last time. I'm sure they wouldn't mind a few hours just for old times sake. A lot of my friends are spread across the globe and I don't have enough money right now... but when we retire, I may do the same thing for nostalgia's sake.
As for the new games that are out there? Play them with your kids & family (if you have them), enjoy them with the people of your life right now. Enjoy them and be done with them for the sake of your health. Learn to enjoy other things in life--watching movies, reading books, bird watching--whatever you could enjoy.
Now, I'm only 24 so there's a lot I could be missing. Considering what I've been brainwashed to believe about older people, it is I who should be asking you what I should be playing right now...
Since I submitted the story yesterday, I found a good Ars Technica article that explains how the internet has been a sexual revolution for the Chinese and the government's negative attitude towards it. It's funny to me because not too long ago, China underwent huge birth control programs instituted on all levels. I would think that internet porn for everyone would prevent a little extra hanky panky but I supposed that's another debate as to whether or not it inhibits it or enforces it.
From that website (dated December of 2005):
According to a Chinese government official, 221 people have been arrested, and almost 600 web sites have been shut down since March in a crackdown on "obscene" Internet content.
I'm certainly not intimately familiar with these cases but I do hope that they are jailing the correct people and that these people deserve it. A life sentence is nothing to sneeze at, especially in China.
I guess I'm not on the same page as this guy. When I read about the Microsoft allegations, they're not against just Linux. They're also against Open Source projects. Either way they a lot of OSS projects rely on Linux as a platform and development environment. One of the potential issues I see if Linux goes down as "Microsoft Intellectual Property" is that these projects will dry up as no one likes to face litigation from Microsoft. Like when the SAMBA team cried out against Novell and I'm sure the Open Office folks wouldn't be too happy about this.
So you might be able to argue that Linux will still remain free to us somehow but I think it would be severely detrimental if not fatal to the applications that run on top of it.
I'm not a lawyer but I think that if the Linux kernel fell then a lot of the applications that make Linux great would be in immediate danger. I mean, this guy kind of scoffs at Microsoft claiming patent infringement but has he thought what would happen to projects like KDE & Gnome? I wouldn't be afraid of losing Linux but I would be afraid of losing the great applications that either stress interoperability with Windows or mimic functionality of a Windows environment.
Comparing this to the RIAA cases? Give me a break. That's like comparing a rapist with someone taking a second glance at someone they find attractive.
I'm glad you personally watched all of these 129 cases go down and that you found all of them to be genuine phishers. How many teenagers are capable of setting up phishing scams?
You know, we were told that these people are phishers, if you can provide some first party accounts of every case, I'll gladly consider myself a dumbass for using that comparison in the submission.
It's the 'settling out of court' that sounds suspicious to me. Why wouldn't Microsoft drive them into the ground like you suggest? Why not bankrupt them and jail them?
I apologize for not blindly accepting this story as complete 100% truth. Forgive my skepticism.
Well, that's what we hope they're guilty of doing. How many teenagers do you know that set up and run phishing sites by themselves? Sounds like these are kids taking the fall for other people.
This is nothing at all like the MPAA/RIAA using extortionary tactics to go after low level copyright infringement.
It's the phrase "teenagers settling out of court" that worries me. It's not necessarily that their motives are impure just that their tactics are kind of dirty. As in, we-probably-can't-pin-this-on-you-so-we'll-force-y ou-to-settle-out-of-court. I really don't like that, if you bring a suit against someone in the name of the public, I'd like it to be seen through to the end even if the person doesn't have the money for the lawyers (another possible problem with this prosecution).
I'm really personally torn on this. I mean, on one hand, I hate spam and I hate all kinds of computer related scams. I feel that a lot of good ideas (like e-mail) risk death at the hands of these attacks. That said, I welcome all efforts to take care of this.
However, I would be a lot happier if the law took care of this. You know, if Microsoft would give every police district across the world free software, tools and maybe even hardware to catch these guys, that would be the safest route--leave it to the law to take care of these matters. But what I fear is that local police just don't have the time and resources to track these guys down. And, on top of that, law enforcement here in the states might find an illegal or rogue server in another country and have no way within their jurisdiction to follow the case across the boarders. That and in some locations, cops are crooked or they don't see the problem of phishing to have any tangible victims.
So while there's a lot of good reasons for Microsoft to do this, I still feel a tiny bit afraid that an already very powerful company is becoming a lot more powerful by gaining international recognition as a crime buster.
So, if you'll entertain me and let my tin-foil hat imagination run wild for a second, say that BitTorrent becomes illegal to use under some country X's laws. Now, I live in country Y (across the world) and I use BitTorrent to retrieve Linux DVD distro images. Microsoft somehow monitors this through my operating system and brings a trial against me in country X. I don't even live there but now I have to go there and defend a lawsuit in that country? That would be a horrible outcome.
Another fear of mine has already occurred... that Microsoft offers out of court settlements from these individuals & personally profits from them. I would assume that amount is trivial to Microsoft & I would want Microsoft to punish these people to the extent of the law where they live. It would also be nice to see Microsoft turn around and donate any money earned towards anti-phishing and anti-spam initiatives.
In the end, I really don't think this is the answer to the problem of spam & phishing. I submitted this story in hopes that there'd be some good debate about where the responsibilities of stopping phishing attacks should lie.
Now the question is who's leaving them behind. Let's take, for instance, the SAMBA team that urged Novell to reconsider. Why was it the SAMBA team? Well, probably because people on both sides saw this deal as an tacit acknowledgement that several open source projects infringe on Microsoft intellectual property. SAMBA would be a pretty easy target for Microsoft, in my opinion and that's why they voiced their concerns so quickly--I'm sure more will follow once the realization hits the entire community when the precise details of the deal are released. I've seen figures anywhere from $100-450 million USD to be accepted by Novell from Microsoft. Why? Hopefully we'll find out.
Interestingly enough, the finest details I can find on this deal come from Novell's Website with the thought provoking title, "NOVELL & MICROSOFT COLLABORATE--CUSTOMERS WIN." Once these details surface, after the FSF's lawyer is done picking them over with a fine toothed comb, then I think we'll know who's still with Novell and who's 'left them behind.'
I'm going to say right now that--pending the GPLv2 allowing this deal--projects feel genuinely threatened by Microsoft lawsuits will alter their licenses to exclude potential deals regarding their software like the one Novell made. If this deal goes through, what we'll most likely see is SuSE being pretty much the basic Linux kernel and not a whole lot more except (as the summary states) the frozen old releases of software. Ironically, the eventual evolution of the Linux kernel will probably render these releases unusable which will mean at some point Novell will have to stick with an old edition of Linux or make the upgrades and patches itself to the rest of the software. I would bet that Open Office and a lot of the Windows-y environments (like KDE & Gnome) might adjust to this and move away from SuSE just to be safe. After all, these agreements that give you protection against Microsoft litigation based on intellectual property is the first step in Microsoft's eventual licensing of the software you've written.
If this deal hasn't been signed in blood, then I would urge every project that would jump ship to publicly notify Novell they will (the only one I know of is SAMBA--there must be more). But if the ink has dried on the contract and they're checking it against the GPLv2, I fear the damage is already done. Look to the future and hope the GPLv3 that's eventually ratified stops things like this from happening.
Even if this fails under the GPLv2 and the deal never goes down, will you ever be able to look at Novell the same way again? I'm not sure I will.
The software giant has declared that home versions of their upcoming OS may not be run virtually, because 'virtualization is not mature enough for broad adoption.
Wake up from your tryptophan tryp, man! It's not that early!:-)
Here's a picture of the process that Yuefeng Xie set up at PSU.
Note that on his homepage under news he has "A patent "Method of Using Waste Tires As A Filter Media" was issued to me on November 29, 2005. With 40% of royalties to the inventor (other 60% goes to Penn State), I am going to be a rich professor very soon."
A lot of the material I can find online makes it look as though he's been working on this for six years, he was just waiting for the patent to to be granted. It seems now they just have to verify tha the water that is processed doesn't leach out any harmful toxins or heavy metals (as the article states). A side note is that he only has one other patent aside from this one.
Despite his plans to become rich over this, I hope he is very successful as a lot of countries (both 3rd and 1st world) could stand to benefit from this greatly.
So... people should be given a choice when it comes to the question of how much choice they should get.
If your brain hurts after thinking about that, software developer might not be the best profession for you.
One of the most successful pieces of software (in my opinion) out there is the Eclipse project. It's all about "meta" choices--that is, the choice to have more choices. Out of the box Eclipse is great for your average Java developer. I recommend it to novice freshman developers. Now, if you want it to do more or integrate it with a server, that requires a plug-in. In fact, you can make it work for any language with the right plug-in. You don't get that functionality right off the bat but if you know what you're doing, you can plug it in. The problem is that a lot of development must be done to satisfy the unique choices your end user might have--that is, it requires a lot of support unless you let your community do it for you like Eclipse has.
With software steadily becoming more sophisticated, are more choices really necessarily better?
This shouldn't be an "Ask Slashdot," this should be an "Ask Your Customer" question. Because, like a lot of things, it depends. I'd imagine your average Slashdot user would love more choices, which is why the Slashdot interface is slowly expanding for subscribers--and also why Linux is so popular on this site. Seriously, name me one software project with more options than Linux. Hell, the number of distros alone should tip you off.
That said, let's take the average American. Their head would explode if you started explaining all they could do with Linux. They'd probably rather be trapped in the movie Deliverance than be faced with building and configuring Linux from scratch.
So don't ask me if more options are better because it depends on the case. I don't want my text editor to have all the bells and whistles known to man although I expect my process management suite that I use at my company to be able to interface with web services. Even though I prefer Emacs over MS Word, the next person my prefer them flipped.
To recap, ask your customer. Ask your end user. Ask your mother if she'd be able to user your software (provided it's meant for the general public). But the last people you should be asking are members of the Slashdot community.
Of course, news of a dip-stick test was released two days ago. I imagine cops might be given authority to draw blood at the scene of a crime and use standard testing kits installed in their cars. Scary? Yeah, kind of--although I think probably cause would have to be very very high for this kind of invasion of privacy. Any lawyers out there know what the law (local or federal) says about forced blood & UA analysis?
Plus there's that "Sleepless" episode of the X-Files from Season Two where soldiers were given medication and treatment during Vietnam so that they'd never sleep... I won't give away any spoilers as it's quite the enjoyable episode.
Doctor: Now, what seems to be the problem? Patient: I got it bad, doc, I barely get any sleep... I need some modafinil--or my life will fall apart! Doctor: Now hold on there, I don't go around giving prescriptions of that to just anyone! You're young, you look like you're in good shape, why don't you get any sleep? Patient: Well, it's just that... I'm a... software developer. Doctor: My GOD! Why didn't you say anything? *yells out the door* Nurse! I'm going to need a lifetime's supply of modafinil--stat! Patient: Oh thank you, doc, thank you so much! Doctor: Everything's going to be alright, plus it seems your company's health care is willing to provide 100% of the funding for this with no deductable, can't say I've seen that before. Now you say that you're married as well? Then I'm going to recommend you take two of these every day with fifth of bourbon...
The original article is from The Astrophysical Journal and I'm not sure if you can read this but I'll link it here. I have an account so that may be unreachable, if it is try the PDF of it or the abstract. I often enjoy reading the original article no matter how large and complex it is. If anything, it causes me to look up more terms so that I feel like I'm learning something.
Slashdot Mirror
So after keeping up with Sony news on Slashdot, I've learned that on launch they shipped around 150k PS3s and they sold out. I also learned that they lose something like $200-300 per console.
So I guess I figure that they lost around $37 million dollars on that day. So I would imagine that this will look pretty bad on their shareholder report card when their fourth quarter profits for 2006 come out.
Now, they'll make more than that in the future licensing the games. But I doubt they'll make that back before Christmas. So I would suggest holding off on PS4 speculation until the holiday season is over, all the facts are in and the shareholders tell the games division of Sony what to do. In the end, it's not Kaz Hirai or Yuta Sakurai that determine whether or not a PS4 happens, it's the reaction by Wallstreet and the people holding the shares.
As I've posted before, I think this is a good approach.
There are good sanctions & bad sanctions. An example of bad sanctions were the sanctions the UN imposed against Iraq that caused a lot of human suffering. Yes, it put pressure on the dictator but it was easy ammo to use against the United States. Essentially claiming that we were starving and murdering the civilians--and I knew people that were saying we were doing horrible things!
When we impose sanctions on a country to pressure the dictator, I think that things like food, water, clothing & medicine should be increased with pro-American propaganda along with it. What we should decrease is things like automobiles, electronics & other high standard of living commodities. Therefore we make it annoying for the people of North Korea to get by but it isn't possible to point to conditions of people dying due to our sanctions.
Their economy might stagnate and people might die as a result of that but it's not so easy to point the finger at the UN then. In my opinion, the blocking of these high commodities is precisely how sanctions should be done. If these have little or no effect (which they probably will) then you can always ramp it up to include other things. I think one of the harsher things you could do is just block all traffic two/from North Korea from the United States. I mean, they probably block most of it already so that might not matter but internet access would be another commodity that would certainly upset me if I didn't have access to it.
Regardless if they're doing this to prevent a congressional hearing, I think all of Bush's cabinet are in up to their necks with this thing. They've promoted it, publicly praised it & even publicly defended it--I'm excited to see it publicly scrutinized & watch revisionist history write them all off as enemies of the constitution. I mean, my grandfather tells me about the horrible things the president authorized against Japanese-Americans during World War II & my father tells me the horrible things that Nixon did. I'm sure there will a time when I'm a haggled old coot that keeps telling my kids how lucky they are not to have a president that's pushing for government archival of their phone & internet records--and that's the only part I knew about which mean it must be twice as worse! So I put an onion in my pocket which was the style at the time
Historian A: "The Nazis were horrible awful people who killed and murdered millions of people during World War II. They created nothing but pain and suffering while seeking out total fascist control of the entire world."
Historian B: "Nazism is not a precise, theoretically grounded ideology. It consists of a loose collection of ideas and positions: extreme nationalism, racism, eugenics, totalitarianism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, and limits to freedom of religion."
Now the reason I put those two up there is because your average person (I'm American so I may be biased on 'average') would probably favor historian A's perspective as opposed to historian B. Historian B is actually an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry. It's more encyclopedic as it's not opinion oriented. I'm not saying Wikipedia is free of opinions but what I'm proposing is that non-experts have an opinion and often when they read something that doesn't align with that opinion, they consider it to be incorrect.
The (on average high) neutrality of Wikipedia is most likely what causes non-experts to rate it as more erroneous than experts. Since the sample set was so low (as the report notes) then it is perhaps more likely that this happened.
I think that this is what the "Everyone who disagrees with you is a moron" article is getting at. I'm guessing experts are training not to suffer from that disease.
I was watching the Colbert Report the other day and the CEO from Timberland was on there explaining his carbon neutral stance and he sounded quite avid about it. He was clearly agitated from Steven's persona of a right wing nut who couldn't understand. It was more awkward than funny.
But it caused me to wonder what would happen if I urged the big company I work for (and it is multi-national) to go carbon neutral. Well, on the surface, we don't burn anything. But I thought harder about the thousands of computers we must operate and the kilowatt upon kilowatt of power that is most likely used by each facility. Ok, so (since we can't assume the power company is adjusting for it) we offset the power consumption through planting some trees. Well, how many trees and how much land would this cost? And what about the thousands of computers we buy yearly from Dell or IBM? What about the plastics that go into the casings? And what about the companies that they buy the chips from and where do they buy the ore that's refined to make the silicon chips?
The more I taxed my brain with this possible carbon neutral proposition, the more it looked like this was going to require a lot of resources. Resources being money. And while we're doing this, some other IT company isn't and we're competing with them to do business with our customers. So my proposition might be passed around at the office as a joke until the CTO got ahold of it and thought about the shareholder and rejected it.
So before any of you say a carbon tax is stupid because consumers will start to buy the most environmentally friendly products, you're simply wrong. The only way they'll buy it is if the environment is having direct negative impacts on their business. And the irony is that if it does negatively affect their business that means lost profits. And lost profits means they'll have less money to spend on their solutions. So our environmentally friendly services with a carbon neutral company will probably be out of the question if they're more expensive. Tell me, when you buy your computer or your Xbox360/PS3/Wii or your new processor, does carbon neutrality figure into your pricing at all? I'll bet it doesn't.
And at the end of the day, my coworkers will tell me that there's X number of companies that are worse than us so I shouldn't even worry about it. Or that we don't even need to worry about that because it's the people who make our tools that should be conscious. But we do need to at least think about it. We might even need to worry about it more than others because we're the least obvious target yet the largest base of carbon output. Take Wal-Mart for example. Just look at the trucks they use for their distribution centers. 500 distribution centers across the states with probably thousands of stores--all of those places being supplied regularly from the coasts and producers by truck. Such an easy thing to overlook--especially if they contract those truckers because then it's not their fault, it's not their conscious and they can have articles hailing them as the greenest distribute in the world while the contractor doesn't care because they're doing business with the largest distributor in the world.
I'm not going to tell you whether or not a carbon tax is a good idea. I'm just going to ask you to tell me what scenario would have to go down for an entire industry to collectively switch to being carbon neutral. And I mean that everybody has to be on board because it will affect price. And when that price goes up, if it doesn't go up across the board, consumers will on average opt for the cheaper product. What would have to be happening to make that consumer stay away from non-carbon neutral compa
Not only are these points weak, they're a stretch. And number four is laughable, That's right, folks, this agreement will make developers so angry that they'll triumph in the face of Microsoft telling them they're all patent infringers. Yep, sound argument to me. Let's see here
And also, some of the footnotes are pure comedic genius, It's so funny because the way I see it, this was the perfect way to hobble Linux & threaten all the application development on it so that the competition for Windows dwindles & therefore they can produce pure crap and we'll have to use it. Please explain yourself, Linux Information Project.
I'm not saying that the Zune is good by any means nor have I had a chance to play around with one. Which is why I read this review--I was hoping for a good review on this new MP3 player.
But I found this to be a particularly bad review. Perhaps I don't read a lot of reviews but I prefer them to be thorough. One thing that stuck out about this review is that it didn't even have room for something nice to say about the Zune. Not one thing. I'm sure a high school student could write me a review with a PROS/CONS table that would be more informative than this. I find it very hard to believe that this reviewer managed to not find anything good about the Zune.
Here's a simple question I didn't see answered anywhere, "Did it work?" If it did what was its sound quality like? Is it durable? How heavy/large is it? Every point of this article a mark against the Zune. I think that a 'review' entitles you to be subjective & look at it from all angles then weigh in at the end about whether or not you would recommend it. Instead this review starts off with the quote, "Yes, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face. 'Avoid,' is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity." Why should I even finish reading your review if that's the first thing you say?
And then Apple enters your review. I can understand a comparison to other competitive MP3 players but you just start using the brand name Apple. Why? Why not give me a rundown of this versus iRiver or Creative's MP3 players? So the Toshiba MP3 player is $40 cheaper, doesn't tell me much if it sucks even more. Are they also compatible with podcasts and WMA codecs?
Reading this review causes me to question Andy Ihnatko's motive. Is he reviewing the Zune, grinding an ax or trying to get me to buy an iPod? I know the thing sucks but at least be fair if you're going to write a review for the masses.
The complaints raised here are trivial features. Not the performance or stability problems I had with 1.5 but instead things like RSS & aesthetics which to me aren't too important when it comes to a browser. I'm sure for some other people RSS or theme might make a world of difference but I'm not that person and I don't wager there are many people like that.
The concern that it makes itself the default browser is valid but using the word 'hijacking' is a bit strong. Honestly, I didn't even notice this but I was going from 1.5 to 2.0 on most of my computers so that might explain why this was a non-issue for me. Perhaps they assumed if you were going to 2.0, you were coming from 1.5? Either, I agree with this qualm though I find it to be the most serious offense listed in the article.
So you may ask if Firefox has lost its way but I counter that there have merely been a few miss-steps along the way. I'm keeping an eye on IE 7 & so far it hasn't lured me away from Firefox 2.0 so I guess that's a good sign as I consider my standards to be pretty high.
My question would be how much wear & tear can a sample of this medium stand before it is rendered unreadable? I would highly doubt one would be able to fold it--however it would be interesting to see whether creating a diagonal read/write scheme would protect from vertical & horizontal folds with the proper ECC. I think the plastic sheets could potentially be as robust as discs but would you be able to bend them? I doubt it though if they allowed it, it'd probably end up being more expensive than a disc.
Interesting technology but I'd sure like to hear a lot more of the details of how it works & how it performs before I make a solid judgment on its feasibility.
Alright so I could flip through some old memories and recommend you an obscure title and tell you to go play it. But I've come to a realization about a lot of those games. General Chaos for the Sega Genesis was a great game. Until I got a hold of it a few years ago. I had this memory of me and several of my friends taking turn on the multi player campaigns. Great memories. But when I started playing it solo, it lost a lot. Still a fun game but lost a lot.
...
... but when we retire, I may do the same thing for nostalgia's sake.
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I also remember Golden Eye to be a great game but--well, it really lacks a lot of features that FPS's of today have. But in high school, I played that non-stop with all my friends. It was the time spent with them that give me an over-evaluation of the game.
Now, I'm not saying the arguments of one game being better than the other aren't warranted. In fact, I still find A Link to the Past just as fun as I did when I played it many many years ago (I recommend the DS Lite version for portability). The funny thing about my childhood is that I was always at a friend's house watching them play their system. Back then I cursed this as I could never play at my house. But in retrospect, it turned what would be single player RPGs into fun play along and plan together social games & every chance to play was well savored. Maybe I have some sacred view of console games that others lack because they were a haven from working the fields. But I digress
So this is the part of the post where I get all wishy washy and I don't suggest a game. I suggest you think back to all the games you played with people. And you take the time to dig these games up and play them with those people for the last time. I'm sure they wouldn't mind a few hours just for old times sake. A lot of my friends are spread across the globe and I don't have enough money right now
As for the new games that are out there? Play them with your kids & family (if you have them), enjoy them with the people of your life right now. Enjoy them and be done with them for the sake of your health. Learn to enjoy other things in life--watching movies, reading books, bird watching--whatever you could enjoy.
Now, I'm only 24 so there's a lot I could be missing. Considering what I've been brainwashed to believe about older people, it is I who should be asking you what I should be playing right now
From that website (dated December of 2005): I'm certainly not intimately familiar with these cases but I do hope that they are jailing the correct people and that these people deserve it. A life sentence is nothing to sneeze at, especially in China.
I guess I'm not on the same page as this guy. When I read about the Microsoft allegations, they're not against just Linux. They're also against Open Source projects. Either way they a lot of OSS projects rely on Linux as a platform and development environment. One of the potential issues I see if Linux goes down as "Microsoft Intellectual Property" is that these projects will dry up as no one likes to face litigation from Microsoft. Like when the SAMBA team cried out against Novell and I'm sure the Open Office folks wouldn't be too happy about this.
So you might be able to argue that Linux will still remain free to us somehow but I think it would be severely detrimental if not fatal to the applications that run on top of it.
I'm not a lawyer but I think that if the Linux kernel fell then a lot of the applications that make Linux great would be in immediate danger. I mean, this guy kind of scoffs at Microsoft claiming patent infringement but has he thought what would happen to projects like KDE & Gnome? I wouldn't be afraid of losing Linux but I would be afraid of losing the great applications that either stress interoperability with Windows or mimic functionality of a Windows environment.
You know, we were told that these people are phishers, if you can provide some first party accounts of every case, I'll gladly consider myself a dumbass for using that comparison in the submission.
It's the 'settling out of court' that sounds suspicious to me. Why wouldn't Microsoft drive them into the ground like you suggest? Why not bankrupt them and jail them?
I apologize for not blindly accepting this story as complete 100% truth. Forgive my skepticism.
It's the phrase "teenagers settling out of court" that worries me. It's not necessarily that their motives are impure just that their tactics are kind of dirty. As in, we-probably-can't-pin-this-on-you-so-we'll-force-
I'm really personally torn on this. I mean, on one hand, I hate spam and I hate all kinds of computer related scams. I feel that a lot of good ideas (like e-mail) risk death at the hands of these attacks. That said, I welcome all efforts to take care of this.
... that Microsoft offers out of court settlements from these individuals & personally profits from them. I would assume that amount is trivial to Microsoft & I would want Microsoft to punish these people to the extent of the law where they live. It would also be nice to see Microsoft turn around and donate any money earned towards anti-phishing and anti-spam initiatives.
However, I would be a lot happier if the law took care of this. You know, if Microsoft would give every police district across the world free software, tools and maybe even hardware to catch these guys, that would be the safest route--leave it to the law to take care of these matters. But what I fear is that local police just don't have the time and resources to track these guys down. And, on top of that, law enforcement here in the states might find an illegal or rogue server in another country and have no way within their jurisdiction to follow the case across the boarders. That and in some locations, cops are crooked or they don't see the problem of phishing to have any tangible victims.
So while there's a lot of good reasons for Microsoft to do this, I still feel a tiny bit afraid that an already very powerful company is becoming a lot more powerful by gaining international recognition as a crime buster.
So, if you'll entertain me and let my tin-foil hat imagination run wild for a second, say that BitTorrent becomes illegal to use under some country X's laws. Now, I live in country Y (across the world) and I use BitTorrent to retrieve Linux DVD distro images. Microsoft somehow monitors this through my operating system and brings a trial against me in country X. I don't even live there but now I have to go there and defend a lawsuit in that country? That would be a horrible outcome.
Another fear of mine has already occurred
In the end, I really don't think this is the answer to the problem of spam & phishing. I submitted this story in hopes that there'd be some good debate about where the responsibilities of stopping phishing attacks should lie.
Novell is left behind.
Now the question is who's leaving them behind. Let's take, for instance, the SAMBA team that urged Novell to reconsider. Why was it the SAMBA team? Well, probably because people on both sides saw this deal as an tacit acknowledgement that several open source projects infringe on Microsoft intellectual property. SAMBA would be a pretty easy target for Microsoft, in my opinion and that's why they voiced their concerns so quickly--I'm sure more will follow once the realization hits the entire community when the precise details of the deal are released. I've seen figures anywhere from $100-450 million USD to be accepted by Novell from Microsoft. Why? Hopefully we'll find out.
Interestingly enough, the finest details I can find on this deal come from Novell's Website with the thought provoking title, "NOVELL & MICROSOFT COLLABORATE--CUSTOMERS WIN." Once these details surface, after the FSF's lawyer is done picking them over with a fine toothed comb, then I think we'll know who's still with Novell and who's 'left them behind.'
I'm going to say right now that--pending the GPLv2 allowing this deal--projects feel genuinely threatened by Microsoft lawsuits will alter their licenses to exclude potential deals regarding their software like the one Novell made. If this deal goes through, what we'll most likely see is SuSE being pretty much the basic Linux kernel and not a whole lot more except (as the summary states) the frozen old releases of software. Ironically, the eventual evolution of the Linux kernel will probably render these releases unusable which will mean at some point Novell will have to stick with an old edition of Linux or make the upgrades and patches itself to the rest of the software. I would bet that Open Office and a lot of the Windows-y environments (like KDE & Gnome) might adjust to this and move away from SuSE just to be safe. After all, these agreements that give you protection against Microsoft litigation based on intellectual property is the first step in Microsoft's eventual licensing of the software you've written.
If this deal hasn't been signed in blood, then I would urge every project that would jump ship to publicly notify Novell they will (the only one I know of is SAMBA--there must be more). But if the ink has dried on the contract and they're checking it against the GPLv2, I fear the damage is already done. Look to the future and hope the GPLv3 that's eventually ratified stops things like this from happening.
Even if this fails under the GPLv2 and the deal never goes down, will you ever be able to look at Novell the same way again? I'm not sure I will.
Here's a picture of the process that Yuefeng Xie set up at PSU.
Note that on his homepage under news he has "A patent "Method of Using Waste Tires As A Filter Media" was issued to me on November 29, 2005. With 40% of royalties to the inventor (other 60% goes to Penn State), I am going to be a rich professor very soon."
Which reveals he applied for this patent on Aug. 26, 1999.
A lot of the material I can find online makes it look as though he's been working on this for six years, he was just waiting for the patent to to be granted. It seems now they just have to verify tha the water that is processed doesn't leach out any harmful toxins or heavy metals (as the article states). A side note is that he only has one other patent aside from this one.
Despite his plans to become rich over this, I hope he is very successful as a lot of countries (both 3rd and 1st world) could stand to benefit from this greatly.
One of the most successful pieces of software (in my opinion) out there is the Eclipse project. It's all about "meta" choices--that is, the choice to have more choices. Out of the box Eclipse is great for your average Java developer. I recommend it to novice freshman developers. Now, if you want it to do more or integrate it with a server, that requires a plug-in. In fact, you can make it work for any language with the right plug-in. You don't get that functionality right off the bat but if you know what you're doing, you can plug it in. The problem is that a lot of development must be done to satisfy the unique choices your end user might have--that is, it requires a lot of support unless you let your community do it for you like Eclipse has.
That said, let's take the average American. Their head would explode if you started explaining all they could do with Linux. They'd probably rather be trapped in the movie Deliverance than be faced with building and configuring Linux from scratch.
So don't ask me if more options are better because it depends on the case. I don't want my text editor to have all the bells and whistles known to man although I expect my process management suite that I use at my company to be able to interface with web services. Even though I prefer Emacs over MS Word, the next person my prefer them flipped.
To recap, ask your customer. Ask your end user. Ask your mother if she'd be able to user your software (provided it's meant for the general public). But the last people you should be asking are members of the Slashdot community.
Plus there's that "Sleepless" episode of the X-Files from Season Two where soldiers were given medication and treatment during Vietnam so that they'd never sleep ... I won't give away any spoilers as it's quite the enjoyable episode.
Doctor: Now, what seems to be the problem? ... I need some modafinil--or my life will fall apart! ... I'm a ... software developer. ...
Patient: I got it bad, doc, I barely get any sleep
Doctor: Now hold on there, I don't go around giving prescriptions of that to just anyone! You're young, you look like you're in good shape, why don't you get any sleep?
Patient: Well, it's just that
Doctor: My GOD! Why didn't you say anything? *yells out the door* Nurse! I'm going to need a lifetime's supply of modafinil--stat!
Patient: Oh thank you, doc, thank you so much!
Doctor: Everything's going to be alright, plus it seems your company's health care is willing to provide 100% of the funding for this with no deductable, can't say I've seen that before. Now you say that you're married as well? Then I'm going to recommend you take two of these every day with fifth of bourbon
The original article is from The Astrophysical Journal and I'm not sure if you can read this but I'll link it here. I have an account so that may be unreachable, if it is try the PDF of it or the abstract. I often enjoy reading the original article no matter how large and complex it is. If anything, it causes me to look up more terms so that I feel like I'm learning something.