Console developers only know how to do two things in games: Objectify women, and... no wait, that's all.
If you want to get people interested in some sort of community, you need to stop selling soft porn and start selling a game that you play, not one that you watch.
Aside from that, console games are almost always linear, there's no replay value, no depth, it's just another "Super Mario" with T&A. Start making games like Morrowind on consoles and you'll get a community. Add flexibility, require the gamer to think, and stop insulting my intelligence.
From what I remember of physics in highschool, the production and transport of electricity is much more efficient when it is done in high volume with high voltages. In a small grid, you'd lose the benefits of that efficiency. It would also require separate maintenance crews, hardware, etc.
It would also raise concerns about standardization. Will the product I just purchased work on a grid down the street? Would you have to replace your appliances when you moved? The biggest benefit of consolitation is, imo, that you don't have to ask these questions. The systems are large enough to span areas well beyond the majority of general user's environments and thus there are few, if any compatability issues (i.e. Currently, if you leave the country, you might need to change your plug type / voltage, but anywhere in the country it should be the same).
Interruption also raises an issue. I'm inclined to think that a larger factility is easier to keep in operation because it's consolidated and more easily accessed by technicians / engineers / etc.
There are some benefits.
Solar power is made feasible, at least partially, in this case. I've always wondered why we don't all just have solar panels on our houses and batteries in the basements. I suppose that living in Southern California gives me a bit of a bias in terms of estimating the feasibility of such a system, but it certainly seems more reasonable than burning copious amounts of fossil fuels.
There are also other "alternative" power sources listed in the article, although it seems to me that large-scale, consolidated power production is still superior, given that the production facilities are clean.
Having grids separated increases security of those facilities in a disaster as there is no single facility whose compromise would cause a power loss to an entire large grid. With small grids, even if your grid goes down, surrounding grids should still be operational. That does, however, raise concerns about maintenance and repair--who's doing it and when?
Why not nuclear?
Nuclear energy is some of the cleanest and most efficient energy production available. Even with the waste being very toxic, its concentration levels are high. It is arguably easier to control the pollution from nuclear by-products than from a coal power plant. In a well-maintained and operated plant, there is virtually no risk of a meltdown, and I'm sure modern technology can be used to further increase the safety of nuclear power.
Chernobyl is the bloody poster-child of anti-nuclear groups, but that's certainly not par for the course in terms of nuclear power. San Onofre is down here in SoCal, and I dare say we have any mutated sea bass or deathclaw walking around.;)
My vote is for nuclear, hydroelectic, and other efficient, clean, large-scale power sources, or for solar panels on my roof. It'll be interesting to see how this issue plays out.
Are there any bots out there that are designed to shoot people? I'm constantly hearing about designs for them, but I've never heard of them being put to use.
Yes, yes there are. They're just looking for volunteers to test them.
The robot will be armed with various weapons and will operate both by remote control and its own artificial intelligence system.
Yes, this does raise some rather dire ethical concerns. Who's to be reponsible if one of these malfunctions and kills a bus full of school children? The programmer? The tech operating it? The government? The manufaturer? The military? Noone?
And now everyone will have to purchase a giant plastic suit to protect their privacy from the super-sniffer.
Alternatively, you could just smell really bad and overload the little bugger.
Take away the PC and replace it with (say) an iPod, a console-with-DVD-Player and a SunRay (The thin-client device that Sun is pushing.) Assume that the SunRay has some sort of reasonable connection (say, twice the speed of an ordinary DSL line) and that Google starts offering some sort of "GDesktop" web application service
It seems to me like most of this stuff will end up costing more than a PC. And that I would say, is what the business side of the deal would like. Not to mention that since they tag everything separately, they can add additional "upgrades" to each so that you actually get less bang for your buck overall.
As you mentioned,/.ers are not the targets. The old traditionalists are the targets. But how long are these people going to be around? Kids these days have grown up using PCs, digital cameras, etc., and most are probably more tech savvy than their parents. When the current CEO generation dies off, they'll be replaced by today's youth.
From the marketing folks at Dell, Intel, and others, I see their projected use of the PC as this:
You've bought 8 digital devices, now you need a way to connect them all. Use your home PC to do that!
Now a web-based system of communication between 8 different devices could work, but at this point it seems that it would be an excessively complicated infrastructure when compared to plug-n-play. Until you get a microchip implanted in your head that will link up with all of your accessories, I think you'll be needing your PC to do that instead.
If you simply use your PC to "do e-mail and the internet" then yes, I agree that the PC is rather ill-suited to the task. There's a vast amount of wasted capacity if you're only running an internet browser on your PC.
However, the PC is also a platform for a variety of other things:
Music
Movies
Games
Statistical Computation
Archiving
And more
For the sake of redundancy, I'll mention that the PC-less world relies much more heavily on bandwidth than the market currently provides at reasonable cost. PCs are primarily a storage device, and until you get another system with adequate cache to store all of the things that you want to keep after you download, you'll probably be stuck using a PC.
If you're an avid gamer, then you're definately putting a much larger portion of your PC to work than the "average" user described in the article. It does seem that consoles are becoming much more powerful in terms of delivering games than PCs are, but they are much less flexible at this point and don't support user-modded games, maps, addons, etc.
If you're a media fan, then the PC offers you speed, reliability, and flexibility that the internet world does not. Granted, you can get your music online, but I'm sure we all sleep much better at night when we know our favorite music is on our PC and not going anywhere, rather than being subjected to the whim of our ISP or whatever site we stream from.
The internet is a growing market for just about everything. Unfortunately, it also means that greedy people are starting to catch on, and there will be more and more pricetags for online services in the years to come. It doesn't cost me anything (aside from the electric bill of course) to play a song that's on my hard disk, but the internet is not so friendly (and I expect that it will become less-so as time goes by).
Streaming videos just don't rival the quality of a DVD at this stage. If you were able to compress a stream and still maintain quality at a reasonable rate, you'd still need a processor on the end-user side to decode the stream. There's also the issue of bandwidth and transportability of media. I can take a DVD with me to the room downstairs or even out of state on a plane and it never loses quality because the signal gets bad or my connection changes.
While the news, e-mail, forums, information, etc. may becoming increasingly internet-specific in terms of its execution, there's still a great deal of use for a PC. I'm certainly not going to give up my hard drives any time soon (xbox 360 can go to hell).
So what's the motivation for all of the internet stuffs, from an industry perspective? What you do online, they can see. What you do on your PC, they can't. Unless installing spyware becomes the new fad soon, that's not going to change. It makes much more sense from a business perspective to have all of your applications in the same place you have your data-collection--online.
Until the internet gets a Ctrl-S, I don't think I'll be giving up my PC. I can't count the times I've lost a lengthy post to the evil internet. And I like being able to keep my media out of the clutches of some greedy CEO as well.
The funds would be better vested in performing research on MODERN technology.
I think that's a flawed way of thinking under the circumstances. Russia has technology that works. Why not utilize that? Otherwise, you'll spend much, much more money on the R&D, testing, etc. in addition to not having an immediate fix to the problem. In terms of what is financially responsible/feasible in this case, I think NASA's making a good move.
Going into the nit-pickiness... how much more modern do you think you can get? Most of the time, "upgrades" to existing technology are nothing more than new, fancy packaging around the same old junk. So you have a car with a CD-player and a GPS system and powered windows, but it's still a car and it serves the same function as the one you would have used twenty years ago without the CD-player, GPS, and powered windows. It gets you where you need to be. The rest of the stuff is just icing on the cake.
Sometimes one is forced to choose between a shitty choice or death.
This choice only seems shitty if pride is your highest priority. In terms of practicality, it makes much more sense than what NASA's been doing for the past few years.
Now if only we could get the rest of the American government to follow suit and look to other countries for policy that works in practice, instead of only on the drawing board.;)
I remember one US plane that had to be transported from China in a Russian Antonov-124. The US did not have any aircraft that was up to the task! How long shall we have to rely on so called "third world economies" to achieve our goals?
I like to think of the United States being the world's R&D department. We come up with the ideas, bungle them, and then someone else picks it up and does it properly.
There's the occasional successful project in the US, such as FedEx, the iPod, etc. I suppose those are the ideas that don't need to be refined too much, or are designed specifically with American culture in mind.
At least by purchasing this former Soviet equipment they can blame the Russians for any problems.
Seems to me like we'd have been better off with Soviet hardware from the beginning. Sure, our stuff looks sexy on the drawing board, but their stuff works.
Slashdot Mirror
Console developers only know how to do two things in games: Objectify women, and ... no wait, that's all.
If you want to get people interested in some sort of community, you need to stop selling soft porn and start selling a game that you play, not one that you watch.
Aside from that, console games are almost always linear, there's no replay value, no depth, it's just another "Super Mario" with T&A. Start making games like Morrowind on consoles and you'll get a community. Add flexibility, require the gamer to think, and stop insulting my intelligence.
I think you keeled it.
Captain Ahab, is that you?
This seems somewhat far-fetched to me.
From what I remember of physics in highschool, the production and transport of electricity is much more efficient when it is done in high volume with high voltages. In a small grid, you'd lose the benefits of that efficiency. It would also require separate maintenance crews, hardware, etc.
It would also raise concerns about standardization. Will the product I just purchased work on a grid down the street? Would you have to replace your appliances when you moved? The biggest benefit of consolitation is, imo, that you don't have to ask these questions. The systems are large enough to span areas well beyond the majority of general user's environments and thus there are few, if any compatability issues (i.e. Currently, if you leave the country, you might need to change your plug type / voltage, but anywhere in the country it should be the same).
Interruption also raises an issue. I'm inclined to think that a larger factility is easier to keep in operation because it's consolidated and more easily accessed by technicians / engineers / etc.
There are some benefits.
Solar power is made feasible, at least partially, in this case. I've always wondered why we don't all just have solar panels on our houses and batteries in the basements. I suppose that living in Southern California gives me a bit of a bias in terms of estimating the feasibility of such a system, but it certainly seems more reasonable than burning copious amounts of fossil fuels.
There are also other "alternative" power sources listed in the article, although it seems to me that large-scale, consolidated power production is still superior, given that the production facilities are clean.
Having grids separated increases security of those facilities in a disaster as there is no single facility whose compromise would cause a power loss to an entire large grid. With small grids, even if your grid goes down, surrounding grids should still be operational. That does, however, raise concerns about maintenance and repair--who's doing it and when?
Why not nuclear?
Nuclear energy is some of the cleanest and most efficient energy production available. Even with the waste being very toxic, its concentration levels are high. It is arguably easier to control the pollution from nuclear by-products than from a coal power plant. In a well-maintained and operated plant, there is virtually no risk of a meltdown, and I'm sure modern technology can be used to further increase the safety of nuclear power.
Chernobyl is the bloody poster-child of anti-nuclear groups, but that's certainly not par for the course in terms of nuclear power. San Onofre is down here in SoCal, and I dare say we have any mutated sea bass or deathclaw walking around. ;)
My vote is for nuclear, hydroelectic, and other efficient, clean, large-scale power sources, or for solar panels on my roof. It'll be interesting to see how this issue plays out.
Yes, yes there are. They're just looking for volunteers to test them.
Yes, this does raise some rather dire ethical concerns. Who's to be reponsible if one of these malfunctions and kills a bus full of school children? The programmer? The tech operating it? The government? The manufaturer? The military? Noone?
And now everyone will have to purchase a giant plastic suit to protect their privacy from the super-sniffer. Alternatively, you could just smell really bad and overload the little bugger.
Take away the PC and replace it with (say) an iPod, a console-with-DVD-Player and a SunRay (The thin-client device that Sun is pushing.) Assume that the SunRay has some sort of reasonable connection (say, twice the speed of an ordinary DSL line) and that Google starts offering some sort of "GDesktop" web application service
It seems to me like most of this stuff will end up costing more than a PC. And that I would say, is what the business side of the deal would like. Not to mention that since they tag everything separately, they can add additional "upgrades" to each so that you actually get less bang for your buck overall.
As you mentioned, /.ers are not the targets. The old traditionalists are the targets. But how long are these people going to be around? Kids these days have grown up using PCs, digital cameras, etc., and most are probably more tech savvy than their parents. When the current CEO generation dies off, they'll be replaced by today's youth.
From the marketing folks at Dell, Intel, and others, I see their projected use of the PC as this:
You've bought 8 digital devices, now you need a way to connect them all. Use your home PC to do that!
Now a web-based system of communication between 8 different devices could work, but at this point it seems that it would be an excessively complicated infrastructure when compared to plug-n-play. Until you get a microchip implanted in your head that will link up with all of your accessories, I think you'll be needing your PC to do that instead.
If you simply use your PC to "do e-mail and the internet" then yes, I agree that the PC is rather ill-suited to the task. There's a vast amount of wasted capacity if you're only running an internet browser on your PC.
However, the PC is also a platform for a variety of other things:
For the sake of redundancy, I'll mention that the PC-less world relies much more heavily on bandwidth than the market currently provides at reasonable cost. PCs are primarily a storage device, and until you get another system with adequate cache to store all of the things that you want to keep after you download, you'll probably be stuck using a PC.
If you're an avid gamer, then you're definately putting a much larger portion of your PC to work than the "average" user described in the article. It does seem that consoles are becoming much more powerful in terms of delivering games than PCs are, but they are much less flexible at this point and don't support user-modded games, maps, addons, etc.
If you're a media fan, then the PC offers you speed, reliability, and flexibility that the internet world does not. Granted, you can get your music online, but I'm sure we all sleep much better at night when we know our favorite music is on our PC and not going anywhere, rather than being subjected to the whim of our ISP or whatever site we stream from.
The internet is a growing market for just about everything. Unfortunately, it also means that greedy people are starting to catch on, and there will be more and more pricetags for online services in the years to come. It doesn't cost me anything (aside from the electric bill of course) to play a song that's on my hard disk, but the internet is not so friendly (and I expect that it will become less-so as time goes by).
Streaming videos just don't rival the quality of a DVD at this stage. If you were able to compress a stream and still maintain quality at a reasonable rate, you'd still need a processor on the end-user side to decode the stream. There's also the issue of bandwidth and transportability of media. I can take a DVD with me to the room downstairs or even out of state on a plane and it never loses quality because the signal gets bad or my connection changes.
While the news, e-mail, forums, information, etc. may becoming increasingly internet-specific in terms of its execution, there's still a great deal of use for a PC. I'm certainly not going to give up my hard drives any time soon (xbox 360 can go to hell).
So what's the motivation for all of the internet stuffs, from an industry perspective? What you do online, they can see. What you do on your PC, they can't. Unless installing spyware becomes the new fad soon, that's not going to change. It makes much more sense from a business perspective to have all of your applications in the same place you have your data-collection--online.
Until the internet gets a Ctrl-S, I don't think I'll be giving up my PC. I can't count the times I've lost a lengthy post to the evil internet. And I like being able to keep my media out of the clutches of some greedy CEO as well.
IT is outsourced to India I thought Tech Support was outsourced to India.
I think that's a flawed way of thinking under the circumstances. Russia has technology that works. Why not utilize that? Otherwise, you'll spend much, much more money on the R&D, testing, etc. in addition to not having an immediate fix to the problem. In terms of what is financially responsible/feasible in this case, I think NASA's making a good move.
Going into the nit-pickiness... how much more modern do you think you can get? Most of the time, "upgrades" to existing technology are nothing more than new, fancy packaging around the same old junk. So you have a car with a CD-player and a GPS system and powered windows, but it's still a car and it serves the same function as the one you would have used twenty years ago without the CD-player, GPS, and powered windows. It gets you where you need to be. The rest of the stuff is just icing on the cake.
Now if only we could get the rest of the American government to follow suit and look to other countries for policy that works in practice, instead of only on the drawing board. ;)
I think that alone says something.
As for the rest of the article, allow me to translate:
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.