Mod parent insightful - for those of you that don't know, yes politicians and lawyers do do this, in Congress for example. Congressman are allowed to take the floor and talk about wookies just to kill time and bore the other side to death so they give up on passing a bill and go home. It's not quite the same as what the parent posted, but it's another example of lawyers and politically minded officials stalling for time as a lame way to defeat the opposing party versus making an actual arguement...
Good that its being done now vs later
on
NASA Weighs Moon Plans
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Personally, its good that this is being done now than later, because otherwise I don't see it getting brought up again for like 10 or 20 years.
Set the groundwork, infrastructure, protocols, etc now, because I kinda wonder how much of the documentation on how to do some of this space flight stuff is on paper, and likely will be the one thing that won't be a digital document of some form, thus the odd chance of getting water damaged and lost forever.
Congress or any group of politicians won't see the "here and now" benefit of this type of investment, and so they'd rather put it towards something like replacing computers some department just bought a month or two ago (ya, sure they need thousand dollar each MacTel Core Duo Macbooks for basic word documents)...
so if I understand the summary right, they've basically done what the DNF dev team did - they want it to be the latest and greatest, so when they are just about done, they decide to upgrade the hardware or programming language, causing a need for the other to be upgraded (code a wont run on hardware y, or hardware x wont run code b) - therefor skyrocketing costs...
or just as well use artillery (howitzers, rockets (mlrs type rockets)) or aerial bombing, would I think at the very least be available options. an expendable person steps on a land-mine and blows up that one, but an artillery shell craters a swimming pool sized hole, thats even more mines gone. not to mention that people walking over anti-tank mines wont detonate the mine, but a big boom would, correct?
what the hell were those things, "Tickle me elmo" or something of the sort a few years ago I think? they were on the level of your average overpriced $30 USD little kids toys, and yet they went for how much on ebay?
in fact I just checked on wikipedia, with it saying:
In 1996, the Tickle Me Elmo was the "Must Have" toy. Many parents literally fought other parents in North American toy stores to purchase one of the toys for Christmas. The short supply of the toy, due to unexpected demand, meant that stores hiked the price on the dolls drastically. Newspaper classifieds even sold the plush toy for hundreds of US dollars. People reports that the $28.99USD toy fetched as much as $1500.
so the price jump is proportionally nothing for the PS3, which at the absolute least can be used to play movies, and install linux if you want and used as a desktop computer, etc - compared to crappy automation and playback of a soundfile in an elmo or furby, which after the month that it entertains the kid, is at best used for a "furbeowulf" parallel clustered computing...
maybe people could put up an arguement (for a while anyway) by using actual Unix systems (not unix-like) such as the BSD flavors and for example Sun's Solaris. I'm pretty doubtful that it would go much of anywhere, but the argument that Unix systems have been around since Bill Gates and company was still just a drop-out programmer (was he even that?)...
doesn't the PS3 use NVidia graphics? even if the hardware is drmed to hell with Sony spec, would NVidia really go so far away from the conventions of their regular graphics cards and chipsets that even if NVidia doesn't release drivers, SOMEBODY out there could take a modded kmod-nvidia package and adapt it to PS3 (potential) drm spec?
about the tv tuners - well, considering there are usb tuners (mostly hauppage from what I've seen), and being that bttv and ivtv drivers run pci tuners, I don't see any reason why it couldn't capture video/tv from a usb tuner...
exactly - the auto/AI npc feature is supposed to remove the annoyance of having to actually pay attention to who's turn it is when you run into, say, a level 5 wolf when you are at level 40 or 60. from what I understand, like you said, you can still micro-manage turns for those boss fights where you aren't exactly at such an insanely high level that you can just smack it a few times with even your weakest character and it's dead in 3 to 5 turns...
I'm not sure if you understood, but the gp meant sites that use the full 800x600 page width for flash content with no real html alternative. Whether he uses FlashBlock or not, he wouldnt have a very good experience on such sites. I love being able to use Flash, but for accessability to low-speed dialup, 64bit linux (I still havent heard of Flash player working in that), and screen-readers (for the blind, etc) you would have to practically redo the site in standard html and maybe even use javascript and possibly some php for the non-flash users. At that point, you're just as well off making just the html version...
No: Medal of Honor series (started the whole WW2 game being popular), FEAR, SOCOM, Ghost Recon series (cept for #2), Splinter Cell series, Max Payne(s), Half-life, countless others, etc???
How much will the service cost though? If I remember right, Blackberries use 3G right? Which happens to cost around $60 to $80 USD monthly, correct? So I would have to assume that this new "HSDPA" (advice to marketing: don't use confusing naming conventions, lest people be tongue-tied when they try to order it) would either cost over $80 USD monthly, or the current network would have to drop the price of the monthly bill - why pay for the old one if the new one is faster AND costs the same?
For office purposes, it would be great if OpenOffice could be configured to regularly (every 5 or 10 minutes) send the active document to your Google account to be used with Writely and whatever else GoogleDocs has, so that when people are away from their machine wanting to open an OOo odt in a Microsoft Office only shop, they could still have their documents (without having to worry about syncing the latest with a usb-drive).
I dunno, just thought maybe some people would have a use for that...
have they/you tried other distros (and live cd's if the distro has one)? I've seen machines not work with knoppix live-cd's, and then work fine (well, except for the keyboard) under ubuntu. perhaps a non-debian distro might work (if its base debian's hardware support that is the problem)?
Basically, the 360 has a 12x DVD drive that runs at 11mbps x 12 and PS3 has a 2X BD-ROM drive that runs at 36mbps x 2
Huh? I think you got the #x speed and #mbps mixed up. The #x speed is what data rate the first generation of that drive runs at, and the #mbps is how much data the drive is actually moving, so a 2x drive is 2x the original data rate, and 4x and etc - second off, to make sure of this, I just waded through the wikipedia article on bd-roms (couldn't find it looking through dvd), and your speed quote for BD-rom is wrong anyway:
Originally, Blu-ray Disc drives in production could only transfer approximately 36 Mbit/s (54 Mbit/s required for BD-ROM), but 2x speed drives with a 72 Mbit/s transfer rate are now available. Rates of 8x (288 Mbit/s) or more are planned for the future.
It applies from all the way back from the 90's when CD-roms were first coming to major use in PC's, to when DVD players first came out, to HD-DVD and BD-ROM... I'm not really trying to piss anybody off here (hopefully I'm not), just the facts you started with were wrong (mixup of mbps and 2x, and the actual mbps rate for BD-ROM)/p>
Except that this shuffles the entire library of songs on the device, not just the currently active playlist - I know, I've tried on mine. What the grand-parent was saying is how to shuffle the currently active playlist. For example, you might have a heavy metal or rock band or 2 on your favorite playlist, and then another playlist with trance/techno/house music for parties - do you really want to suddenly get Sandstorm mixed in with AC/DC?
I think its rather annoying too, because otherwise you've got to wait until the next time you sync with your box to shuffle playlist songs around. I also think that it (the iPod) should have actual playlist management on the device. It would mean that you could add/remove songs to certain playlists instead of just that "on the go" thing - it gets rather annoying to have to forward through the song or 2 that you hate and haven't had the chance or been too lazy to sync
Perhaps because Microsoft already decided to ditch their old drm plan which their music store partners such as Yahoo, Napster, etc had invested in (the crap where you buy music from one online store, it only works with compatible drm players), effectively screwing their partners. it doesn't help either that the only thing the built-in wifi works with on Zune is with other Zune devices (not even syncing with WMP via wireless instead of usb, no purchasing directly from the Microsoft music store (Urge), etc).
Don't worry though, Apple does the same thing with their iPod and iTunes (and probably a few other things)...
actually I've noticed in IE (6 I think on school lab computers), professional pages and ones by myself in Dreamweaver 8, using javascript to create things like draggable div's, IE often (re)renders the div's dog slow, when Firefox 1.5.x and Firefox 2 are perfectly fine
so in other words: it looks to basically be the same principal behind the click-wheel, which is a (or a set of) touch-pads setup in a circular manner - this design would just put the touch surfaces on the outside edge of the frame, and would be easier for them to manufacture s (I would think) since the touch surfaces needed could all be a set of 4 stripes, versus however they got the current click-wheel touch surface(s) setup.
on another note, something that came to mind when I was closing my click-wheel part of the post - perhaps Apple is going this route due to the patent crap with Creative, since the same company makes the touch surfaces for Apple iPods and I think the Zen line from Creative. This might get that pest of a legal matter off of Apple's backs, would it not?
I know its just personal preference, but I always had the "Tabs Mix Plus" extension installed in the 1.5.x branch, mostly to add the close tab buttons (it also had a "save session" feature, me-thinks they incorporated that extension into the 2.0 main code. My reason that its better to have close-tab buttons on each tab is that in the old 1.5.x system with the one close button on the side, you would have to select the tab you wanted, then move your mouse across back across the screen to hit close (and it got even more annoying with like 5 tabs open)...
wouldn't that "no activation, etc" be because of the hardware drm (tpm if I remember right?) that keeps you from running OS-X on non-apple hardware. thus if you are running OS-X it's because you had to pay for the hardware, with which the os is bundled.
"At least not until the hardware itself is able to recognize Windows and refuse to run everything else"
wouldn't that be an attempt at monopoly though on the part of the hardware vendor(s) AND/OR Microsoft because you wouldn't be able to use the hardware with Linux or Mac for example if it was cross-platform before the hardware-drm. Thankfully I'm not a lawyer, this crap can get kinda confusing...
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Mod parent insightful - for those of you that don't know, yes politicians and lawyers do do this, in Congress for example. Congressman are allowed to take the floor and talk about wookies just to kill time and bore the other side to death so they give up on passing a bill and go home. It's not quite the same as what the parent posted, but it's another example of lawyers and politically minded officials stalling for time as a lame way to defeat the opposing party versus making an actual arguement...
Sorry, but isn't this old news - like 2004 or 2005 old news around when the Cell was first announced as a Sony/IBM/Whoever else partnership?
so if I understand the summary right, they've basically done what the DNF dev team did - they want it to be the latest and greatest, so when they are just about done, they decide to upgrade the hardware or programming language, causing a need for the other to be upgraded (code a wont run on hardware y, or hardware x wont run code b) - therefor skyrocketing costs...
or just as well use artillery (howitzers, rockets (mlrs type rockets)) or aerial bombing, would I think at the very least be available options. an expendable person steps on a land-mine and blows up that one, but an artillery shell craters a swimming pool sized hole, thats even more mines gone. not to mention that people walking over anti-tank mines wont detonate the mine, but a big boom would, correct?
in fact I just checked on wikipedia, with it saying: so the price jump is proportionally nothing for the PS3, which at the absolute least can be used to play movies, and install linux if you want and used as a desktop computer, etc - compared to crappy automation and playback of a soundfile in an elmo or furby, which after the month that it entertains the kid, is at best used for a "furbeowulf" parallel clustered computing...
maybe people could put up an arguement (for a while anyway) by using actual Unix systems (not unix-like) such as the BSD flavors and for example Sun's Solaris. I'm pretty doubtful that it would go much of anywhere, but the argument that Unix systems have been around since Bill Gates and company was still just a drop-out programmer (was he even that?)...
thank you - this I did not know... now I won't have to sync every time I get bored with the order of songs...
doesn't the PS3 use NVidia graphics? even if the hardware is drmed to hell with Sony spec, would NVidia really go so far away from the conventions of their regular graphics cards and chipsets that even if NVidia doesn't release drivers, SOMEBODY out there could take a modded kmod-nvidia package and adapt it to PS3 (potential) drm spec?
about the tv tuners - well, considering there are usb tuners (mostly hauppage from what I've seen), and being that bttv and ivtv drivers run pci tuners, I don't see any reason why it couldn't capture video/tv from a usb tuner...
exactly - the auto/AI npc feature is supposed to remove the annoyance of having to actually pay attention to who's turn it is when you run into, say, a level 5 wolf when you are at level 40 or 60. from what I understand, like you said, you can still micro-manage turns for those boss fights where you aren't exactly at such an insanely high level that you can just smack it a few times with even your weakest character and it's dead in 3 to 5 turns...
I'm not sure if you understood, but the gp meant sites that use the full 800x600 page width for flash content with no real html alternative. Whether he uses FlashBlock or not, he wouldnt have a very good experience on such sites. I love being able to use Flash, but for accessability to low-speed dialup, 64bit linux (I still havent heard of Flash player working in that), and screen-readers (for the blind, etc) you would have to practically redo the site in standard html and maybe even use javascript and possibly some php for the non-flash users. At that point, you're just as well off making just the html version...
Halo is the best he could come up with?
No: Medal of Honor series (started the whole WW2 game being popular), FEAR, SOCOM, Ghost Recon series (cept for #2), Splinter Cell series, Max Payne(s), Half-life, countless others, etc???
How much will the service cost though? If I remember right, Blackberries use 3G right? Which happens to cost around $60 to $80 USD monthly, correct? So I would have to assume that this new "HSDPA" (advice to marketing: don't use confusing naming conventions, lest people be tongue-tied when they try to order it) would either cost over $80 USD monthly, or the current network would have to drop the price of the monthly bill - why pay for the old one if the new one is faster AND costs the same?
For office purposes, it would be great if OpenOffice could be configured to regularly (every 5 or 10 minutes) send the active document to your Google account to be used with Writely and whatever else GoogleDocs has, so that when people are away from their machine wanting to open an OOo odt in a Microsoft Office only shop, they could still have their documents (without having to worry about syncing the latest with a usb-drive).
I dunno, just thought maybe some people would have a use for that...
have they/you tried other distros (and live cd's if the distro has one)? I've seen machines not work with knoppix live-cd's, and then work fine (well, except for the keyboard) under ubuntu. perhaps a non-debian distro might work (if its base debian's hardware support that is the problem)?
Huh? I think you got the #x speed and #mbps mixed up. The #x speed is what data rate the first generation of that drive runs at, and the #mbps is how much data the drive is actually moving, so a 2x drive is 2x the original data rate, and 4x and etc - second off, to make sure of this, I just waded through the wikipedia article on bd-roms (couldn't find it looking through dvd), and your speed quote for BD-rom is wrong anyway:
It applies from all the way back from the 90's when CD-roms were first coming to major use in PC's, to when DVD players first came out, to HD-DVD and BD-ROM... I'm not really trying to piss anybody off here (hopefully I'm not), just the facts you started with were wrong (mixup of mbps and 2x, and the actual mbps rate for BD-ROM)/p>
Except that this shuffles the entire library of songs on the device, not just the currently active playlist - I know, I've tried on mine. What the grand-parent was saying is how to shuffle the currently active playlist. For example, you might have a heavy metal or rock band or 2 on your favorite playlist, and then another playlist with trance/techno/house music for parties - do you really want to suddenly get Sandstorm mixed in with AC/DC?
I think its rather annoying too, because otherwise you've got to wait until the next time you sync with your box to shuffle playlist songs around. I also think that it (the iPod) should have actual playlist management on the device. It would mean that you could add/remove songs to certain playlists instead of just that "on the go" thing - it gets rather annoying to have to forward through the song or 2 that you hate and haven't had the chance or been too lazy to sync
Perhaps because Microsoft already decided to ditch their old drm plan which their music store partners such as Yahoo, Napster, etc had invested in (the crap where you buy music from one online store, it only works with compatible drm players), effectively screwing their partners. it doesn't help either that the only thing the built-in wifi works with on Zune is with other Zune devices (not even syncing with WMP via wireless instead of usb, no purchasing directly from the Microsoft music store (Urge), etc).
Don't worry though, Apple does the same thing with their iPod and iTunes (and probably a few other things)...
actually I've noticed in IE (6 I think on school lab computers), professional pages and ones by myself in Dreamweaver 8, using javascript to create things like draggable div's, IE often (re)renders the div's dog slow, when Firefox 1.5.x and Firefox 2 are perfectly fine
so in other words: it looks to basically be the same principal behind the click-wheel, which is a (or a set of) touch-pads setup in a circular manner - this design would just put the touch surfaces on the outside edge of the frame, and would be easier for them to manufacture s (I would think) since the touch surfaces needed could all be a set of 4 stripes, versus however they got the current click-wheel touch surface(s) setup.
on another note, something that came to mind when I was closing my click-wheel part of the post - perhaps Apple is going this route due to the patent crap with Creative, since the same company makes the touch surfaces for Apple iPods and I think the Zen line from Creative. This might get that pest of a legal matter off of Apple's backs, would it not?
I know its just personal preference, but I always had the "Tabs Mix Plus" extension installed in the 1.5.x branch, mostly to add the close tab buttons (it also had a "save session" feature, me-thinks they incorporated that extension into the 2.0 main code. My reason that its better to have close-tab buttons on each tab is that in the old 1.5.x system with the one close button on the side, you would have to select the tab you wanted, then move your mouse across back across the screen to hit close (and it got even more annoying with like 5 tabs open)...
wouldn't that "no activation, etc" be because of the hardware drm (tpm if I remember right?) that keeps you from running OS-X on non-apple hardware. thus if you are running OS-X it's because you had to pay for the hardware, with which the os is bundled.
I suppose its cuz I dont feel like hopping over to wikipedia - but I thought thats what the new (relatively) Mactel (intel mac) systems are: x86?