Basically my point there was that the PSP Go should have been the PSP2. The PSP is now 5 years old, a decent life for any system, especially one that has been hampered by design flaws since almost day one. Assuming Sony actually cares about having launch games for the PSP2, they need somewhere between a year to a year and a half lead time between the announcement of such a device and it actually hitting store shelves. That puts an optimistic estimates for a PSP2 at Christmas 2010, by which time Apple and Nintendo will have taken any shred of the portable gaming market Sony has managed to cling to this long.
I'm glad to see that Sony's trying to court developers, but it just seems like too little too late for the PSP. The PSP is just too dated as a platform to hold much appeal to me at this point. The PSP Go managed to ditch some of the legacy problems of the PSP that were holding it back, but missed a lot of obvious updates the platform could have used (2nd analog stick, capacitive touchscreen, flash based physical media, longer battery life), and it came at the cost of a ridiculous price increase.
Sony could have the greatest gaming lineup ever, but I'm still not sure it would be enough to get me to shell out $250 for a portable device that's largely redundant with several devices I already own (and this is coming from a fairly hardcore gamer who didn't bat an eye at purchasing 3 home consoles and an HD4870).
This is the biggest problem that I see facing Microsoft. They've committed the cardinal sin of business, which was to produce a successful, long lasting product. As long as XP meets peoples' needs, especially when it comes to profit motivated businesses, they're going to have a very hard time convincing people to spend money on a new product, no matter how good it may be.
This brings up the point of how exactly does Google pay for this OS? I think a lot of people are assuming that since everything else from Google is free, so will this be. But shareholders may not be so keen on Google giving away something that consumes as much resources as an OS, and users aren't going to be eager to adopt an OS that's constantly pushing ads into their face. The easy way out would be to only distribute it to OEMs who aren't going to balk at paying for it.
The web is not the OS. The web is...the web. I do NOT want everything to be a goddamn web app. Web apps work very well for certain applications, and Google has shown that they can push the limits with dynamic content, but that does not mean the web application is an appropriate model for every damned application.
Good for you. I'm certain that Windows, OSX, or anyone of the dozens of Linux distros out there will serve you well for years to come. For the rest of us who already spend a good 3/4+ of our time using a browser, an announcement of an OS that might move beyond paradigms established well over 20 years ago, let alone from a company that actually has the resources to pull it off, is generally something to sit up and take note of.
I did read the summary. I merely looked at the wrong name while I was typing my comment (god forbid somebody make a mistake posting on an internet forum). And I was immediately aware of the mistake after I hit the submit button. Unfortunately/. does not allow editing of comments, so it will forever remain there waiting for self important people to come along and nit pick the one minor detail.
Hinton is saying that the only people who shouldn't be happy with his new business plan are the very people he needs to voluntarily pay for his service? Somebody didn't think this through.
The problem with your argument is that the incentive is not actually to extract as quickly as possible. Different oil reservoirs in different parts of the world have different costs of extraction. Many known oil reservoirs lie unexploited until the price of oil rises to a point where it can cover the cost of extraction.
So as prices rise, oil production increases. New equilibrium prices are established because these new reserves have hard limits on the lowest price they can be produced at, however the increased production keeps oil prices from rising too quickly.
The complaints against this bill have nothing to do with the spirit of it and everything to do with the structure of it. Taxes, any taxes, have distortionary economic effects. Some of these effects can be good, such as discouraging the use of carbon emitting fuels. Others are bad, such as making goods and services more expensive for consumers. Ideally, the government would enact a carbon tax and offset the tax by reducing personal income and corporate taxes proportionally. This leads to a marginal cost increase on burning fossil fuels without increasing the overall cost of goods and services to consumers and businesses.
But this is not what's happening. Instead of viewing this as an opportunity to enact beneficial legislation, our congressmen have instead opted to see it as an opportunity to increase government revenue. The pitfalls to the proposed system are numerous. As previously mentioned the first drawback is that consumers and businesses will immediately see prices on nearly all products go up. There has been discussion of granting permits to selected firms for free at the beginning. This is a fools bargain. See here for a detailed explanation why, but the net effect of such legislation is to essentially pass the proceeds from a carbon tax directly to the firms granted the permits. Not to mention that it opens up the entire system to immense potential for corruption, as permits will very likely be traded as political favors to campaign contributors, and it puts the government in the position of essentially selecting which companies to grant a massive competitive advantage to.
Yes carbon emissions and dwindling fossil fuels are serious problems, and we as a nation need to take steps to mitigate their effects. But this bill is quite possibly the worst was to do so. It incorporates nearly every unnecessary drawback to such legislation. It's a poorly written bill from top to bottom that accomplishes as little as possible. And it will pass, because the average American is too blinded by the promise of such a law to notice how absolutely terrible the details of it are, and any congressman who wants to be reelected would be a fool to vote against it.
He sums the article up by claiming that his return will be sooner than 12 years based on changes in his electricity usage (like his daughter leaving for college). This is bad math. He would have changed his usage either way, so he can't really count those watts as impacted by his investment in the solar panels. Overall though it seems like he's getting a decent return on his investment.
That's not a subsidy. They can't sell digital copies for the same amount as hard copies because their customers know that it costs them significantly less money to produce. They're still selling both the hardware and content at a profit. A subsidy is when you use profits from one product to offset selling another product for a loss (eg Sony sells the PS3 at a loss but makes it up by charging a $10 royalty on every PS3 game made, even if they had no hand in the development/production/distribution of the game).
Digital content has no intrinsic cost, so it's not much of a subsidy on their behalf.
Digital content has no intrinsic cost to the publisher. To Amazon, who has to pay the publisher a royalty fee for every sale, digital content has a very real, per unit cost that they cannot go below. Just like the television and film industries learned very little about digital content from the music industry, so it would seem that the publishing industry has also chosen to ignore the lessons learned by those who have gone before them. The transition to digital print is going to be every bit as painful as it was for movies and music, and it's going to take several years of publishers taking their lumps before they finally come to grips with a pricing model that actually works for most of their customers.
Very true. The thing to keep in mind though, is that economic issues are more or less a proxy for where society needs resources and skills the most. There are a lot of people who would like to see private space flight succeed for no other reason than "because it's cool". But society doesn't really place much value on "because it's cool", at least not enough to send things like engineers who might otherwise have been working on projects like climate change or new energy sources to go work somewhere else.
The one real reason to be funding space exploration right now is mainly because there are a lot of potential benefits that we can;t really quantify yet. However, private enterprise is not very good at working towards potential breakthroughs in the distant future. Sure every once in a while a company takes a leap of faith on something big that pays off in the long run, but more often than not private investment is on a much shorter time frame than we're talking about here with much less risk. That doesn't mean that such research isn't worthwhile, just that most of the time it's more suitable for governments to undertake than the private sector.
Something tells me that if consumers aren't ready to fork over money for new hardware, console makers aren't ready to turn their backs on products that still haven't, or are just now starting to, turn a profit, and game developers aren't ready to start making games for hardware with even higher development costs, it's not going to happen. Anyone who jumps the gun here is going to see exactly what Sony did with the PS3, that is consumers and developers clinging to older hardware as long as they can while the newer, overpriced machines languish on shelves for a couple years until everyone is ready.
This is just one more example of how totally neglected our infrastructure is in this country. Net infrastructure spending today (that is accounting for depreciation) is about half of what it was during the 70's and 80's. But it goes beyond that. Our infrastructure doesn't just need to be maintained, it needs a complete overhaul. The US highway system has proven to be totally inadequate as a means of transportation for urban areas. Traffic and congestion gobble up billions of dollars worth of lost productivity, automobiles carrying single people to work spew tons of CO2 into the air, and traffic deaths claims tens of thousands of lives in the US every year.
And that's just our ground trasportation infrastructure. Consider also the situation with the Cable/Telco duopoly control of home Internet access, rail lines that have survived only on federal subsidies for years, Wireless carriers who actively interfere with advancements in cellular handset technology, and the pitiful state of air travel.
It seems so obvious it amazes me how many higher ups in these industries fail to recognize that they're not in the record business, or the video game business, or the film business. They're in the entertainment business. If you're going to make it a pain in the ass to purchase your music or to watch your movie, I'm just as happy to spend my time reading a book, or surfing the Internet, or playing a video game. 99% of the time I'm not even going to bother trying to hunt down a pirated copy, because quite frankly I'd rather just spend that time being entertained by one of the other numerous options I have available to me. You're not competing for my money, you're competing for my time, and you're competing against everything else I can possibly find to fill it with. The sooner these businesses learn this the easier they'll find it to get my money.
And this would be a bad thing why? At least 75% of cable programming is nothing but syndicated reruns and budget reality shows anyways. Cutting out some of the fat in the Cable lineup could consolidate viewership to fewer channels, and put more revenue in the hands of networks that could really distinguish themselves with quality programming, which in turn would go towards funding programming that doesn't have to be based on the "lowest cost reality show to fill airtime" structure.
I think that head mounted displays face something of a chicken vs. the egg situation. Simply put there just aren't currently any real applications for such a device. Traditional video obscures your vision. So, in order to watch it on one of these you must be standing (or sitting) still in one place. In which case traditional displays are simply a more economic way of showing the video anyways.
I suppose that the "killer app" for head mounted displays is augmented reality (or AR), in which you would overlay digital data on the real world. But such technology is very much still in the laboratory stage of development (although some of it is just starting to make its way onto smart phones).
I agree. It's excruciatingly difficult to measure student advancement as it is, let alone the teachers' impact on that advancement. However, identifying the obviously exceptional and obviously poor teachers (ie the top and bottom 10%) from the rest of the group is not so a difficult challenge that requires concrete metrics of performance. Merit pay doesn't have to be a sliding scale to be effective. Merely rewarding and punishing the extremes could result in the desired effect of improving the quality of education.
I see a lot of people here complaining about a non-issue. Google offers offline access for Gmail, Google Docs and several other services. Simple go to settings>labs>offline access in Gmail and enable. It's simple and free.
Quite the contrary. Being agnostic requires only avoiding stumbling into religion. Atheism requires a conscious choice on the believers part, that may or may not have a rational basis.
The problem is that many people believe that they know. Regardless of whatever irrational, unscientific base this belief is predicated on, the fact remains that a great percentage of the human population believe in a soul, and a great percentage of them believe that a soul is exclusive to humanity.
The problem lies in the fact that over the course of our history, we have used the argument that X group (eg blacks or animals) does not have a soul to justify gross atrocities.
Assuming machines eventually achieve consciousness this becomes a very serious problem, as people will assuredly use the same logic to justify atrocities against yet another group.
It's ignorant to lack belief if for no other reason than you're own personal biases. Adhering to atheism simply because one dislikes religion is no more rational or enlightened than adhering to any one religion. There are rational cases for atheism to be made, but a great many atheists have no knowledge or interest in these cases.
Simply because atheism may be rational does not make all atheists rational. Just like simply because certain religions teach values like peace and morals does not mean that all members of those religions are peaceful or moral.
Lumping these people together under one banner is the "simple" approach the GP spoke of that breeds prejudice and bias.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically my point there was that the PSP Go should have been the PSP2. The PSP is now 5 years old, a decent life for any system, especially one that has been hampered by design flaws since almost day one. Assuming Sony actually cares about having launch games for the PSP2, they need somewhere between a year to a year and a half lead time between the announcement of such a device and it actually hitting store shelves. That puts an optimistic estimates for a PSP2 at Christmas 2010, by which time Apple and Nintendo will have taken any shred of the portable gaming market Sony has managed to cling to this long.
I'm glad to see that Sony's trying to court developers, but it just seems like too little too late for the PSP. The PSP is just too dated as a platform to hold much appeal to me at this point. The PSP Go managed to ditch some of the legacy problems of the PSP that were holding it back, but missed a lot of obvious updates the platform could have used (2nd analog stick, capacitive touchscreen, flash based physical media, longer battery life), and it came at the cost of a ridiculous price increase.
Sony could have the greatest gaming lineup ever, but I'm still not sure it would be enough to get me to shell out $250 for a portable device that's largely redundant with several devices I already own (and this is coming from a fairly hardcore gamer who didn't bat an eye at purchasing 3 home consoles and an HD4870).
This is the biggest problem that I see facing Microsoft. They've committed the cardinal sin of business, which was to produce a successful, long lasting product. As long as XP meets peoples' needs, especially when it comes to profit motivated businesses, they're going to have a very hard time convincing people to spend money on a new product, no matter how good it may be.
This brings up the point of how exactly does Google pay for this OS? I think a lot of people are assuming that since everything else from Google is free, so will this be. But shareholders may not be so keen on Google giving away something that consumes as much resources as an OS, and users aren't going to be eager to adopt an OS that's constantly pushing ads into their face. The easy way out would be to only distribute it to OEMs who aren't going to balk at paying for it.
The web is not the OS. The web is...the web. I do NOT want everything to be a goddamn web app. Web apps work very well for certain applications, and Google has shown that they can push the limits with dynamic content, but that does not mean the web application is an appropriate model for every damned application.
Good for you. I'm certain that Windows, OSX, or anyone of the dozens of Linux distros out there will serve you well for years to come. For the rest of us who already spend a good 3/4+ of our time using a browser, an announcement of an OS that might move beyond paradigms established well over 20 years ago, let alone from a company that actually has the resources to pull it off, is generally something to sit up and take note of.
I did read the summary. I merely looked at the wrong name while I was typing my comment (god forbid somebody make a mistake posting on an internet forum). And I was immediately aware of the mistake after I hit the submit button. Unfortunately /. does not allow editing of comments, so it will forever remain there waiting for self important people to come along and nit pick the one minor detail.
Hinton is saying that the only people who shouldn't be happy with his new business plan are the very people he needs to voluntarily pay for his service? Somebody didn't think this through.
The problem with your argument is that the incentive is not actually to extract as quickly as possible. Different oil reservoirs in different parts of the world have different costs of extraction. Many known oil reservoirs lie unexploited until the price of oil rises to a point where it can cover the cost of extraction.
So as prices rise, oil production increases. New equilibrium prices are established because these new reserves have hard limits on the lowest price they can be produced at, however the increased production keeps oil prices from rising too quickly.
The complaints against this bill have nothing to do with the spirit of it and everything to do with the structure of it. Taxes, any taxes, have distortionary economic effects. Some of these effects can be good, such as discouraging the use of carbon emitting fuels. Others are bad, such as making goods and services more expensive for consumers. Ideally, the government would enact a carbon tax and offset the tax by reducing personal income and corporate taxes proportionally. This leads to a marginal cost increase on burning fossil fuels without increasing the overall cost of goods and services to consumers and businesses.
But this is not what's happening. Instead of viewing this as an opportunity to enact beneficial legislation, our congressmen have instead opted to see it as an opportunity to increase government revenue. The pitfalls to the proposed system are numerous. As previously mentioned the first drawback is that consumers and businesses will immediately see prices on nearly all products go up. There has been discussion of granting permits to selected firms for free at the beginning. This is a fools bargain. See here for a detailed explanation why, but the net effect of such legislation is to essentially pass the proceeds from a carbon tax directly to the firms granted the permits. Not to mention that it opens up the entire system to immense potential for corruption, as permits will very likely be traded as political favors to campaign contributors, and it puts the government in the position of essentially selecting which companies to grant a massive competitive advantage to.
Yes carbon emissions and dwindling fossil fuels are serious problems, and we as a nation need to take steps to mitigate their effects. But this bill is quite possibly the worst was to do so. It incorporates nearly every unnecessary drawback to such legislation. It's a poorly written bill from top to bottom that accomplishes as little as possible. And it will pass, because the average American is too blinded by the promise of such a law to notice how absolutely terrible the details of it are, and any congressman who wants to be reelected would be a fool to vote against it.
He sums the article up by claiming that his return will be sooner than 12 years based on changes in his electricity usage (like his daughter leaving for college). This is bad math. He would have changed his usage either way, so he can't really count those watts as impacted by his investment in the solar panels. Overall though it seems like he's getting a decent return on his investment.
That's not a subsidy. They can't sell digital copies for the same amount as hard copies because their customers know that it costs them significantly less money to produce. They're still selling both the hardware and content at a profit. A subsidy is when you use profits from one product to offset selling another product for a loss (eg Sony sells the PS3 at a loss but makes it up by charging a $10 royalty on every PS3 game made, even if they had no hand in the development/production/distribution of the game).
Digital content has no intrinsic cost, so it's not much of a subsidy on their behalf.
Digital content has no intrinsic cost to the publisher. To Amazon, who has to pay the publisher a royalty fee for every sale, digital content has a very real, per unit cost that they cannot go below. Just like the television and film industries learned very little about digital content from the music industry, so it would seem that the publishing industry has also chosen to ignore the lessons learned by those who have gone before them. The transition to digital print is going to be every bit as painful as it was for movies and music, and it's going to take several years of publishers taking their lumps before they finally come to grips with a pricing model that actually works for most of their customers.
Very true. The thing to keep in mind though, is that economic issues are more or less a proxy for where society needs resources and skills the most. There are a lot of people who would like to see private space flight succeed for no other reason than "because it's cool". But society doesn't really place much value on "because it's cool", at least not enough to send things like engineers who might otherwise have been working on projects like climate change or new energy sources to go work somewhere else.
The one real reason to be funding space exploration right now is mainly because there are a lot of potential benefits that we can;t really quantify yet. However, private enterprise is not very good at working towards potential breakthroughs in the distant future. Sure every once in a while a company takes a leap of faith on something big that pays off in the long run, but more often than not private investment is on a much shorter time frame than we're talking about here with much less risk. That doesn't mean that such research isn't worthwhile, just that most of the time it's more suitable for governments to undertake than the private sector.
Something tells me that if consumers aren't ready to fork over money for new hardware, console makers aren't ready to turn their backs on products that still haven't, or are just now starting to, turn a profit, and game developers aren't ready to start making games for hardware with even higher development costs, it's not going to happen. Anyone who jumps the gun here is going to see exactly what Sony did with the PS3, that is consumers and developers clinging to older hardware as long as they can while the newer, overpriced machines languish on shelves for a couple years until everyone is ready.
This is just one more example of how totally neglected our infrastructure is in this country. Net infrastructure spending today (that is accounting for depreciation) is about half of what it was during the 70's and 80's. But it goes beyond that. Our infrastructure doesn't just need to be maintained, it needs a complete overhaul. The US highway system has proven to be totally inadequate as a means of transportation for urban areas. Traffic and congestion gobble up billions of dollars worth of lost productivity, automobiles carrying single people to work spew tons of CO2 into the air, and traffic deaths claims tens of thousands of lives in the US every year.
And that's just our ground trasportation infrastructure. Consider also the situation with the Cable/Telco duopoly control of home Internet access, rail lines that have survived only on federal subsidies for years, Wireless carriers who actively interfere with advancements in cellular handset technology, and the pitiful state of air travel.
It seems so obvious it amazes me how many higher ups in these industries fail to recognize that they're not in the record business, or the video game business, or the film business. They're in the entertainment business. If you're going to make it a pain in the ass to purchase your music or to watch your movie, I'm just as happy to spend my time reading a book, or surfing the Internet, or playing a video game. 99% of the time I'm not even going to bother trying to hunt down a pirated copy, because quite frankly I'd rather just spend that time being entertained by one of the other numerous options I have available to me. You're not competing for my money, you're competing for my time, and you're competing against everything else I can possibly find to fill it with. The sooner these businesses learn this the easier they'll find it to get my money.
And this would be a bad thing why? At least 75% of cable programming is nothing but syndicated reruns and budget reality shows anyways. Cutting out some of the fat in the Cable lineup could consolidate viewership to fewer channels, and put more revenue in the hands of networks that could really distinguish themselves with quality programming, which in turn would go towards funding programming that doesn't have to be based on the "lowest cost reality show to fill airtime" structure.
I think that head mounted displays face something of a chicken vs. the egg situation. Simply put there just aren't currently any real applications for such a device. Traditional video obscures your vision. So, in order to watch it on one of these you must be standing (or sitting) still in one place. In which case traditional displays are simply a more economic way of showing the video anyways.
I suppose that the "killer app" for head mounted displays is augmented reality (or AR), in which you would overlay digital data on the real world. But such technology is very much still in the laboratory stage of development (although some of it is just starting to make its way onto smart phones).
I agree. It's excruciatingly difficult to measure student advancement as it is, let alone the teachers' impact on that advancement. However, identifying the obviously exceptional and obviously poor teachers (ie the top and bottom 10%) from the rest of the group is not so a difficult challenge that requires concrete metrics of performance. Merit pay doesn't have to be a sliding scale to be effective. Merely rewarding and punishing the extremes could result in the desired effect of improving the quality of education.
I see a lot of people here complaining about a non-issue. Google offers offline access for Gmail, Google Docs and several other services. Simple go to settings>labs>offline access in Gmail and enable. It's simple and free.
I second that. Mod parent up.
Quite the contrary. Being agnostic requires only avoiding stumbling into religion. Atheism requires a conscious choice on the believers part, that may or may not have a rational basis.
The problem is that many people believe that they know. Regardless of whatever irrational, unscientific base this belief is predicated on, the fact remains that a great percentage of the human population believe in a soul, and a great percentage of them believe that a soul is exclusive to humanity.
The problem lies in the fact that over the course of our history, we have used the argument that X group (eg blacks or animals) does not have a soul to justify gross atrocities.
Assuming machines eventually achieve consciousness this becomes a very serious problem, as people will assuredly use the same logic to justify atrocities against yet another group.
It's ignorant to lack belief if for no other reason than you're own personal biases. Adhering to atheism simply because one dislikes religion is no more rational or enlightened than adhering to any one religion. There are rational cases for atheism to be made, but a great many atheists have no knowledge or interest in these cases.
Simply because atheism may be rational does not make all atheists rational. Just like simply because certain religions teach values like peace and morals does not mean that all members of those religions are peaceful or moral.
Lumping these people together under one banner is the "simple" approach the GP spoke of that breeds prejudice and bias.
Like I said, the statement can be read two ways:
1) The largest human outpost in space (currently)
2) The largest human outpost in space (ever)
The latter interpretation would be inclusive of MIR and Skylab.