I thought that Sony was using the PS3 as a Blu-ray Trojan horse too, until I read that they were releasing a $600 stand-alone player due out this summer. Really, I don't think we or anyone else really know the reasoning behind Sony's decisions, we can speculate but thats about it. After reading about this new player, I certainly no longer think I understand what Sony is trying to do, so I'm going to just sit back and wait to see what happens. Oh and enjoy my Wii in the meantime, too.
I don't have the link, but a recent video interview did mention they are excited about having multicore processing, so there's been no announcement that they have dropped working on that. However, they have repeatedly said that you don't really start to see benefits (on the developer's side) until you reach quad-core. The quad-core statement was said not too long ago in an article detailing how they were trying to implement multi-core processing in a scalable manner, which from the article sounded pretty tough. If I had to make two guesses what caused the delay, it be either their multicore implementation or the console work.
In addition, considering the XBox 360 supports directx 10 and both the xbox 360 and PS3 are some premutations of multicore processing, I suppose it makes sense to try an integrate any cross-platform available features into a single scalable Source solution. I could see how their decision to delay now to do such a thing would speed the console adaption of later games based in the Source engine. It's not only a smart buisness decision, but it will benefit customers as well; no one wants a game to be delayed just because the engine has splintered and bloated up so badly that it takes independent teams significant work to port. If a delay now save time later and maintains coherency, I say its a good thing and eagerly await the results.
Logically, yes. But ISPs are a finite group, and the smaller the group, the easier it is for them claim that the extortion is the best for their buisness. If enough ISPs take this route, customers begin to accept it as normal. Of course, the ISPs that would want to gain a larger share of the customers are the ones likely to not extort content providers, which usually means the smaller ISPs. Content providers will be slow to switch if they can make up the extortion in different way; none of them will want to switch until the smaller ISPs grow large enough to offset losses. In the mean time, however, we all suffer.
A company owns the copyright because they're the ones recording it. The government doesn't care about broadcasting proceedings and the only difference between C-SPAN and CNN is the news they cover (maybe a sense of style too.) If you don't like the idea of a company having a copyright on the material they recorded, then you can just record it yourself (after jumping through who knows how many hoops.)
Of course, you might want to form a company, since you yourself can't cover it all...
And you'll need some way to spread the costs of operating that company. Better find some sort of advertising setup since you don't want to sell what you recorded...
And since your recording government proceedings in a droll, yet mesmerizing way comparable to public broadcasting, you'll want to get your company's name out there to show advertisers your not a government office...
Well, your already giving away all kinds of content, maybe people who use it will be nice enough to acknowledge your effort to keep the ad money flowing...
And you'll need a catch name and motto. How about "Spanning the gap between citizens and the government"? Citizen-Span?
While my post was originally a joke (though it kind of tripped over the line between ludicrous and hilarious, falling flat on its face at mundane) I was thinking of the folds, creases, and crevasses the dust could get into. I decided that 'passive' methods like attractive forces of magnets, or methods involving ungainly giant lint rollers, wouldn't do. So I figured a hose vaccuum, kind of like what they use in the space shower, could be applied by the user to get into the pits of the suit. Or otherwise using air pressure to knock it off (afterwhich some collection method would be necessary.) Of course the suit itself would make it hard to manuever the hoses everywhere necessary. But the electrostatic idea is interesting. The only problem I could forsee would be making sure the outside of the suit charges properly, not sure what materials would work with it (I don't know a whole lot about the priciples behind electrostatic-y things.)
Re:I don't see the problem.
on
Lunar Dustbusters
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Lets say you spend hours/days in a tin can with very little room (and head-room) while your head is tethered to the wall and inside a fish bowl. Now lets try and not only sleep in that fish bowl, but carry out day-to-day activities. I think I do see a problem.
How about a FPS with no fecking guns in it, just once? I read this statement and almost immediatly thought "How lame would that be?" But after a second thought, I realized that is exactly what Portal will be: an FPS without guns. I am still very excited about Portal, but I didn't even place it in the same category as an FPS, more of an FPP (First Person Puzzler.) I think you're on to something. Innovation is a wonderful thing, and at its core, it is essentially about genre bending. HL1 was great because it brought intresting twists the the FPS genre.
Personally, I think the FPS genre is getting pretty huge and may be ready to split off into some real subgenres. The article describes something of an Action FPS, oriented around giving the player an experience concentrated in the action, but not mindless action. This is opposed to a sort of Adventure FPS, like HL2, which can get away with sacrificing some of the action in ways that promote the player's adventure through the storyline. Then there's Doom 3 and Quake 4... they're out there as FPS games, but not quite the same as modern FPS games; they reminded me more of the old Shoot-em-ups style arcade games, not necessarily as mindless but still lacking that strange quantifier that makes an gamer 'mindful' of the environment he's in. Of course we'll always want, and need, those genre bending games like Portal, or HL1, or Farcry.
Curiosity forces me to ask: If I'm looking into a series of cheap 80GB hard drives for $42, is it worth the extra ~$84 to go with a RAID 60, requiring 8 drives minimum, rather than the 6 drive RAID 50? I ask because in recent research, I noted that with RAID 50, if you suffer two HD failures in the same stripe, the entire array goes out, but with the RAID 60, you have to lose 4 HD (literally half the array) before the array is unrecoverable. Do you or anyone else have some preformance comparisons between RAID 50 and RAID 60? What sort of software and/or hardware options does one have with each type?
I am not sure how a UPS would know if you had a bad power supply... My mistake, I should have worded it better. What I ment was as far as I can tell from my APC unit, there is nothing wrong with my psu. By that I mean the apc battery backup works, as any other ups, as a hub for multiple electronics and the only noticable power interrupts that have occured to my system, occure to all other devices powered directly through the ups, in which case the battery backup kicks in and, if necessary, the ups manages a system shut down before the battery runs out.
Perhaps, however, I don't have the right idea of a bad power supply. If the symptoms of a bad psu can be solely that hds are dieing young but nothing else is effected, then I would agree with you. (That's a question: can that be the sole symptom? I don't know.)
I used to have a bad psu, I would start playing a graphics intensive game and the gpu would start drawing a lot of power, until the psu dipped out and the whole system reset. Eventually, that began happening outside of just games and I had the power supply replaced (about 4 years ago.) That's part of the reason I don't think it's a psu problem, the replacement was a good hefty 550watt and by no measure cheap. I can't recall the manufacturer or the price atm, but I do remember it's still under warrentee. A warrentee that would be broken if I simply opened the psu up.
Normally, I first notice a problem at boot up, it takes longer than normal and I hear a series clicking noises which usually prompts me to do an unscheduled backup. During the backup, I notice a few corrupted files. Not long after this starts, usually a week or two, a few corrupted files have become a lot more and eventually it refuses to boot the OS. Sometimes I can repair it from the boot CD, but it doesn't usually last long. I've stopped bringing them into the shop, I became tired of paying $15 to hear my data was unrecoverable, so I can't tell you for certain if the last couple had really died completly. From the volume of responses I've had here, it sounds like WD is still a good manufacturer, so either I've got bad luck or some other component is failing, though I can't recall anything else I've had problems with.
Thanks for the thoughts, but I do have a surge protector (as part of an APC 1250 NS back-up battery), my hard drives are consistently formated NTFS, my power supply is quite good (as far as my APC monitoring system tells me), and I don't have a RAID setup (yet...) Is there maybe something else that maybe the problem? I don't think cooling should be a problem, either. Maybe it's just the HD line I've chosen. Anyone have any comments on the WD1600JB or WD400JB series hard drives?
You mean to tell me these people have found hard drives that don't fail beyond repair by the end of the first year? I've never encountered a HD that has done this, much to the despare of my wallet. Now, I am serious, what is wrong with the harddrives I choose that kills them so quickly? Is Western Digital no longer a good manufacturer? Should I maybe not run a virus check nightly and a disk defrag weekly? Is 6.5GB of virtual memory too much to ask? Of course not, the manufacturers are just making crappier hds. This article has told me one thing: it's time to get a RAID setup. I've been looking at RAID 5, but two things still trouble me, the price and the performance hit. Does anyone have any information on just how much a performance hit I might experience if I have to access the HD a lot?
I'm curious as to what kind of ram the 4GB should be. I vaguely remember there being some point at which it was just silly to look at ram numbers, but I can't remember what they were for different applications. For instance, I remember that beyond DDR2 800, the manufacturers change the benchmark by which they number the ram (If I remember correctly, most modern motherboards go up to DDR 800, but there is ram marked beyond that that will work in them.) I guess what I'm wondering is: if I grabbed 4 sticks of cas 3 1GB DDR2 400 at $62 each ($248 total) would the benefit be about the same as 2 GB of cas 3 DDR2 800 ($200 or $400.) Of course, when DDR2 came about, just about everything I understood about cas latency flew out the window, so maybe it wouldn't matter if it was cas 3 or not. Perhaps someone can remind me.
Your article was very interesting, but it's wrong. I have a better idea. You see, the center of the earth is full of bees. They make the earth hum and the turtle stack keeps turning to find out what's buzzing. You see? Mine's a much better explaination: explains the humming and the rotation of the Earth!
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that Sony was using the PS3 as a Blu-ray Trojan horse too, until I read that they were releasing a $600 stand-alone player due out this summer. Really, I don't think we or anyone else really know the reasoning behind Sony's decisions, we can speculate but thats about it. After reading about this new player, I certainly no longer think I understand what Sony is trying to do, so I'm going to just sit back and wait to see what happens. Oh and enjoy my Wii in the meantime, too.
I don't have the link, but a recent video interview did mention they are excited about having multicore processing, so there's been no announcement that they have dropped working on that. However, they have repeatedly said that you don't really start to see benefits (on the developer's side) until you reach quad-core. The quad-core statement was said not too long ago in an article detailing how they were trying to implement multi-core processing in a scalable manner, which from the article sounded pretty tough. If I had to make two guesses what caused the delay, it be either their multicore implementation or the console work.
In addition, considering the XBox 360 supports directx 10 and both the xbox 360 and PS3 are some premutations of multicore processing, I suppose it makes sense to try an integrate any cross-platform available features into a single scalable Source solution. I could see how their decision to delay now to do such a thing would speed the console adaption of later games based in the Source engine. It's not only a smart buisness decision, but it will benefit customers as well; no one wants a game to be delayed just because the engine has splintered and bloated up so badly that it takes independent teams significant work to port. If a delay now save time later and maintains coherency, I say its a good thing and eagerly await the results.
Oh, btw, the mulitcore article and a good suppliment article With Videos! (on the 4th page. Woah, deja vu.)
Logically, yes. But ISPs are a finite group, and the smaller the group, the easier it is for them claim that the extortion is the best for their buisness. If enough ISPs take this route, customers begin to accept it as normal. Of course, the ISPs that would want to gain a larger share of the customers are the ones likely to not extort content providers, which usually means the smaller ISPs. Content providers will be slow to switch if they can make up the extortion in different way; none of them will want to switch until the smaller ISPs grow large enough to offset losses. In the mean time, however, we all suffer.
Time of Death: 2:30pm
Cause: Drug overdose
Location: A little bit over here,little bit over there, and significant portions missing.
A company owns the copyright because they're the ones recording it. The government doesn't care about broadcasting proceedings and the only difference between C-SPAN and CNN is the news they cover (maybe a sense of style too.) If you don't like the idea of a company having a copyright on the material they recorded, then you can just record it yourself (after jumping through who knows how many hoops.)
Of course, you might want to form a company, since you yourself can't cover it all...
And you'll need some way to spread the costs of operating that company. Better find some sort of advertising setup since you don't want to sell what you recorded...
And since your recording government proceedings in a droll, yet mesmerizing way comparable to public broadcasting, you'll want to get your company's name out there to show advertisers your not a government office...
Well, your already giving away all kinds of content, maybe people who use it will be nice enough to acknowledge your effort to keep the ad money flowing...
And you'll need a catch name and motto. How about "Spanning the gap between citizens and the government"? Citizen-Span?
While my post was originally a joke (though it kind of tripped over the line between ludicrous and hilarious, falling flat on its face at mundane) I was thinking of the folds, creases, and crevasses the dust could get into. I decided that 'passive' methods like attractive forces of magnets, or methods involving ungainly giant lint rollers, wouldn't do. So I figured a hose vaccuum, kind of like what they use in the space shower, could be applied by the user to get into the pits of the suit. Or otherwise using air pressure to knock it off (afterwhich some collection method would be necessary.) Of course the suit itself would make it hard to manuever the hoses everywhere necessary. But the electrostatic idea is interesting. The only problem I could forsee would be making sure the outside of the suit charges properly, not sure what materials would work with it (I don't know a whole lot about the priciples behind electrostatic-y things.)
Lets say you spend hours/days in a tin can with very little room (and head-room) while your head is tethered to the wall and inside a fish bowl. Now lets try and not only sleep in that fish bowl, but carry out day-to-day activities. I think I do see a problem.
I agree, a giant vaccuum hose, or a super powered compressed-air sprayer would be much more practical and easier to handle too.
Here's a real weird one: what killed searching for Soviet Russia in 2004?
Lacky: "Sir! Pirates in the nets, breakin' yur AACS!"
MPAA: "We must respond with out most powerful weapon: Ready the Lawyer Cannons."
Personally, I think the FPS genre is getting pretty huge and may be ready to split off into some real subgenres. The article describes something of an Action FPS, oriented around giving the player an experience concentrated in the action, but not mindless action. This is opposed to a sort of Adventure FPS, like HL2, which can get away with sacrificing some of the action in ways that promote the player's adventure through the storyline. Then there's Doom 3 and Quake 4... they're out there as FPS games, but not quite the same as modern FPS games; they reminded me more of the old Shoot-em-ups style arcade games, not necessarily as mindless but still lacking that strange quantifier that makes an gamer 'mindful' of the environment he's in. Of course we'll always want, and need, those genre bending games like Portal, or HL1, or Farcry.
Between the title and the mock-theta-soup department, I though the late, great creator of Ramen noodles had left us a noodle scratcher!
I think I need to get to bed...
Curiosity forces me to ask: If I'm looking into a series of cheap 80GB hard drives for $42, is it worth the extra ~$84 to go with a RAID 60, requiring 8 drives minimum, rather than the 6 drive RAID 50? I ask because in recent research, I noted that with RAID 50, if you suffer two HD failures in the same stripe, the entire array goes out, but with the RAID 60, you have to lose 4 HD (literally half the array) before the array is unrecoverable. Do you or anyone else have some preformance comparisons between RAID 50 and RAID 60? What sort of software and/or hardware options does one have with each type?
In Soviet Russia, Beowulf Cluster explains you!
Dang it! We need to switch delivery companies! First they sent chainsaws to Mars, now chisels to the ISS.
Normally, I first notice a problem at boot up, it takes longer than normal and I hear a series clicking noises which usually prompts me to do an unscheduled backup. During the backup, I notice a few corrupted files. Not long after this starts, usually a week or two, a few corrupted files have become a lot more and eventually it refuses to boot the OS. Sometimes I can repair it from the boot CD, but it doesn't usually last long. I've stopped bringing them into the shop, I became tired of paying $15 to hear my data was unrecoverable, so I can't tell you for certain if the last couple had really died completly. From the volume of responses I've had here, it sounds like WD is still a good manufacturer, so either I've got bad luck or some other component is failing, though I can't recall anything else I've had problems with.
Thanks for the thoughts, but I do have a surge protector (as part of an APC 1250 NS back-up battery), my hard drives are consistently formated NTFS, my power supply is quite good (as far as my APC monitoring system tells me), and I don't have a RAID setup (yet...) Is there maybe something else that maybe the problem? I don't think cooling should be a problem, either. Maybe it's just the HD line I've chosen. Anyone have any comments on the WD1600JB or WD400JB series hard drives?
You mean to tell me these people have found hard drives that don't fail beyond repair by the end of the first year? I've never encountered a HD that has done this, much to the despare of my wallet. Now, I am serious, what is wrong with the harddrives I choose that kills them so quickly? Is Western Digital no longer a good manufacturer? Should I maybe not run a virus check nightly and a disk defrag weekly? Is 6.5GB of virtual memory too much to ask? Of course not, the manufacturers are just making crappier hds. This article has told me one thing: it's time to get a RAID setup. I've been looking at RAID 5, but two things still trouble me, the price and the performance hit. Does anyone have any information on just how much a performance hit I might experience if I have to access the HD a lot?
I'm curious as to what kind of ram the 4GB should be. I vaguely remember there being some point at which it was just silly to look at ram numbers, but I can't remember what they were for different applications. For instance, I remember that beyond DDR2 800, the manufacturers change the benchmark by which they number the ram (If I remember correctly, most modern motherboards go up to DDR 800, but there is ram marked beyond that that will work in them.) I guess what I'm wondering is: if I grabbed 4 sticks of cas 3 1GB DDR2 400 at $62 each ($248 total) would the benefit be about the same as 2 GB of cas 3 DDR2 800 ($200 or $400.) Of course, when DDR2 came about, just about everything I understood about cas latency flew out the window, so maybe it wouldn't matter if it was cas 3 or not. Perhaps someone can remind me.
This is not a typo, the police were merely trying out the latest in mobile office technology
I disagree. That would be like saying "In Soviet Russia, the party finds you!" isn't funny because the Soviet Union no lon... Oh, wait.
Your article was very interesting, but it's wrong. I have a better idea. You see, the center of the earth is full of bees. They make the earth hum and the turtle stack keeps turning to find out what's buzzing. You see? Mine's a much better explaination: explains the humming and the rotation of the Earth!
I guess that means I should cut back, then.
...Nah! Gotta get my cache stashed for the bandwidth apocalypse...
Hey! Maybe
Server Response: "Lameness filter encountered. Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."
I guess that would mean I'd have to stop my shoddy-attempt-at-a-web-spider from crawling through the Slashdot links, too.
Whoops, no need. It just crashed again...