I have had pleasant and unpleasant experiences with "Americans" but if I ever met with the original poster I believe I would have good moments of laughter and understanding. Seriously, your attitude and inability to understand/accept his humor just shows your own prejudice towards Americans.
This what you say is fact, when counting the density of the cities. I agree on that. Whether or not current situation in US can be traced back to policies, decisions, government actions, etc. is not certain. In any case this fact that you presented hinders US ability to compete on certain areas and makes it more expensive to roll out modern infrastructure.
Simple things like encouraging people to use public transport over private one (gas price, etc) have made the difference over long period of time in Europe. These policies have shaped many of the now advanced countries to be competitive in this environment. Whether that was intentional or not I don't know.
How does this compare to getting paid for your research? Common way to fund master or PhD studies in nordic countries is to work for the research team and then the professor of research team will get funding for the project. Normal researcher salaries are within same range as the 12-month stipend would be and the education is still free...
Anyway since this is government stipend the money will come from the tax payers pocket, no matter what. So the point that was made by some grandparent poster earlier is kind of nonsense. In other words US government funds the studies. The question is that why the funding is based on an application that is evaluated somewhere with very obscure mechanisms, why not give the stipend to everyone?
Now that I have bashed US stipends, I must say that the reason why students all over the world flock to US universities is that these universities are better. They can afford better professors, provide better resources and be more competitive than their counterparts in nordic countries. All because of the fact that students actually pay for their studies. Now it is up to everyone to figure out what implications does these two models have to the society... if there were a way to combine benefits from both then we would be close to perfect.
This "free" education is what I prefer, and happily pay part of my salary towards such cause. I see several benefits in reducing the upfront fees in life and collect the money away later in life. That's what it basically is. Main benefit being that interest and skill decides more about a persons future than money. (Yes, I know if you are exceptionally good or poor and good you get stipends, but in most of the time that is not the case)
Additionally free education has enabled students in nordic countries to pursue higher level of education than they would have had courage to do if they had to pay for it. Some of that money is wasted in over education, but most of it has resulted in higher quality workforce in many areas.
Btw. Since you say that large numbers of students get free education in US, where does that money come from? I bet you cannot give majority (if that is what large numbers means) free eduction without a cost, now can you? You must understand that.
Put some men on the moon and we'll let you sit at the big-boy table. Is this going to be a sandbox battle of "My ancestors have done greater things than your ancestors"? How about trying to colonize a small defenseless middle eastern country first, I'm sure we'll then let you play with some of our toy cars.
I think you captured the whole issue of Irak war as well. What are the standards of winning in Irak? Is it enough that there are no weapons of mass destruction? is it enough that Irak doesn't harbour terrorists? does it need to be stabilized? does it need to be democracy? does it need to be a democracy that supports US interests? does it need to be economically independent?
Where does the meaning of "winning" end? Obviously some of the goals have been already met, some haven't. All I hear is the rhetoric that says if we stay strong we will win, but there is no substance to the word win. No target no goal nothing.
I think you are close to the truth with this analogy. Conducting an orchestra isn't that hard when all musicians actually are professionals and thoroughly trained to work under your supervision. Big problem is that majority of the so called software industry participants are not skilled enough to actually perform the task they need to. I bet conducting an orchestra is difficult if the musicians play badly to begin with. Finding project full of skilled people is a major problem and there is no way you can see right away if someone is doing their job well.
On smaller projects my experience is that there are projects that I can count on going well, because I assign certain people to them. Other projects with double staffing does not do to job nearly as well, even when the task is half the size. This does not change (significantly) over time and is not related to education.
To answer the original question why software projects are so hard is that similarly to orchestra one bad player can ruin the show. Either that being the boss who has team meeting every hour, designer that doesn't know what is needed, customer that cannot give direction or software engineer that hides bugs in the code and causes several weeks of debugging for the team. Once the orchestra is filled with professionals I believe there is nothing inherently difficult with software engineering. Those projects happen, but it's rare.
Those Xboxes are most likely bought by some sorry developer who just hired 4 new people in their testing squad to test some latest import of some random game.
As one of the greatest thinkers of all times said: "There are three different kind of knowns; known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns". Scientist usually work in the realm of known unknowns where they know they are close to the reality but there is always something unknown about the situation. Especially in such a complex phenomenon as global climate the scientists know they are unable to predict it accurately and won't be telling the press they are certain. Blaming the scientific community for not giving exact answers is in my opinion quite ridiculous, there is no absolute and exact proof on anything. On the other hand, scientists are presenting the public scenarios that they have studied and peer reviewed to present as accurate as possible prediction of the studied area. In these scenarios the scientists are taking into account vast amounts of data gathered throughout written human history. There is no way slashdot readers (unless they are part of the core scientific group doing peer reviews) can come up with any idea that they haven't already thought of. Moreover on the climate change there has been predictions and climate models dating from several decades back that have considered various aspects of the climate change and these predictions have somewhat followed on the change that is currently happening. Of course there has been significant improvement on the accuracy of the models and slight changes in predicted trends, but to really find out if they follow the actual trend yet remains to be seen.
What slashdot readers can do is to find alternative peer reviewed articles and studies to compare the results, please post any peer reviewed evidence you have to back up your claim. The article at hand discussed about the possibility of fabricated articles, which makes it especially important to check the references and credibility of any scientific study found. As a summary of the discussion on this topic it would be very interesting to collect links from all posts and verify them. This would help everyone of us to form an educated opinion about the situation.
To invalidate your claim on not being able to find error margins on 330pm, I can safely say that in science the significant numbers is the measure of accuracy. There is a scientific way to calculate the accuracy and give exactly correct number without explisitly stating the error margin. There is big difference between 300pm, 330pm, 330.pm and 330.0pm. Each of these give certain meaning on the accuracy of the number. Therefore when scientific paper states 330pm it means 330pm with an error margin assumed to this figure, not 330pm +/- 500pm.
Yep, I would think that doubleing the sales of Xbox360 is achievable goal. Unfortunately for Microsoft that would mean increase of weekly sales (first week of September) from 1250 to 2500 units. Trailing behind of 229k DS, 27k PSP and 22k PS2. Sad reality is that Xbox 360 sells in thousands when everythink else sells in tens or hundreds of thousands. In other words PS3 selling 100k in Japan means that there are about same amount of PS3 units in the market as there are Xbox360. And that is just the situation right after launch.
My point is that regardless of price the Xbox360 offering seems to be particularly uncool for Japan, shown by the figures above. I doubt that consumers will grab Xbox360 even if there is no way to get the next gen console. More likely event is that the consumer will get the PS2 instead, which sells 10x more than Xbox360 even now.
I think you have just proven the point why greenhouse gases are so powerful in warming up the earth. Indeed the sun can be regarded as the sole contributor of warmth on earth, which means that if human produced greenhouse gases trap even 0.1% more energy than before we will be in a big trouble. Naturally intensity of the suns radiation emphasises that effect, but the changes in the suns radiation are not big enough to explain global warming alone.
If some key personnel have left, does that mean it has a chance to be released? If these "key" persons have worked on the project for 10 years I think it's time to let them go and get some new people to actually finish it off.
I believe that disease resistance and variety should be valued much higher than small added growth. Banana has already been developed to a point where a single fungus threatens to wipe out most of the production around the world.
I believe none of the GE seed producers will take responsibility when a disease develops that threatens the crop. Even if the IPR issues are sorted out I would still feel uncomfortable to know that majority of the food production (or software) is single source and there is no backup.
Fact: Well observed fact is that mutations happen and organisms evolve into something new.
Theory: Theory is that it happens according to the model created by Charles Darwin. Theory may undergo a revolution or gradual improvement over the time, but it needs to explain observed facts. Theory is just the best currently available model for the fact.
Well I have first hand experience of an American couple having trouble in Tahiti for not accepting dollars. The man was after the incident frustrated and said to his wife, they don't want money, they want Francs, which in my opinion shows the whole attitude of some Americans. I had no troubles with the younger generation of American travellers, unfortunately most Americans tend to travel around after they retire. In my experience Europeans do travel a lot more and a lot younger.
Has it ever occurred to these researchers and analysts that there is only so much money people are willing to put on games and entertainment. All gaming areas seem to get similar market growths, which makes the overall spending on games to increase too much to be realistic. I think they might be right about quadrubling the consumption but I doubt that market will be that much. These numbers mean that 100 million people need to subscribe to 10/month service. Compare that to WOW, which has "only" 6 million subscribers.
Besides my own experiences with WOW makes me think twice before subscribing and getting involved with an online game. I'm sure there are others who are not willing to spend 100+ a year for one single game.
One alternative that has not been explored yet is that these laptops actually do have Blu-Ray drives but Sony staff didn't have Blu-Ray demo disk readily available and they had stock of DVD-Blu-Ray-demos from the time before the Blu-Ray drives were widely available.
So what most likely happened is that they played DVD disk containing Blu-Ray clip on a Blu-Ray drive. It might not be what expected by general public but for me that is good enough.
There is one unexplored way to go around this problem. The companies and organizations involved in the issue should/could allow this particular piece of work. That would save them from the uncertain future of not reacting and also let the gy off the hook and issue specific guidelines how to behave with the content he used. IP owners don't need to be always suing.
Once you invalidate these fees on online music, why not go after other formats as well? I believe there hasn't been these breakage costs around since vinyl records. That would make it more significant deal for all record companies around.
I kind of agree with Nintendo, although most of those things mentioned would be on my wish list. Wii is really the first major plunder in the whole console.
1. Lack of HD, official reason was to keep loading times reasonable. I kind of believe that, although I haven't seen XBOX360 working to see how long it actually takes to load those games or levels. This is questionable decisision anyway and I would like to see HD support.
2. Underpower really doesn't mean that much for porting. In current games most of the power is used for shading, effects, etc that are relatively easy to remove. Besides there is still few "old" consoles out there that need game support and all the games are ported for those no matter what.
3. Lack of DVD mentioned in other posts is not really an issue. If there is no DVD player around then most likely Wii won't be finding its way to that home either.
I guess you don't believe on the theory of gravity either, there are several hollywood productions that defy the consensus of how the gravity works. I agree that not all about gravity has been proven or understood, but basic knowledge of how gravity works is there. It may change in the future, but until it does we are stuck with current theory.
Is it really your opinion that UN statistics division produces same level of information as fiction writer? Please let me know what would be a "credible" source of information, since I cannot really think of any significantly more credible source. Obiviously NASA is not a credible source, since we are debating about the validity of their research as well.
Being sceptical is acceptable, but you are now being ignorant.
I have understood that there are several companies that have done that, but eventually they have become liable to the things they knowingly hide from the customers/public. Unfortunately agencies or government does not have such liability towards tax payers, which is very disturbing. Since there is no real liability for ones actions any and all scientific findings agencies or government produce should be public, publicly debated and peer reviewed.
Slashdot Mirror
I have had pleasant and unpleasant experiences with "Americans" but if I ever met with the original poster I believe I would have good moments of laughter and understanding. Seriously, your attitude and inability to understand/accept his humor just shows your own prejudice towards Americans.
This what you say is fact, when counting the density of the cities. I agree on that. Whether or not current situation in US can be traced back to policies, decisions, government actions, etc. is not certain. In any case this fact that you presented hinders US ability to compete on certain areas and makes it more expensive to roll out modern infrastructure.
Simple things like encouraging people to use public transport over private one (gas price, etc) have made the difference over long period of time in Europe. These policies have shaped many of the now advanced countries to be competitive in this environment. Whether that was intentional or not I don't know.
How does this compare to getting paid for your research? Common way to fund master or PhD studies in nordic countries is to work for the research team and then the professor of research team will get funding for the project. Normal researcher salaries are within same range as the 12-month stipend would be and the education is still free...
Anyway since this is government stipend the money will come from the tax payers pocket, no matter what. So the point that was made by some grandparent poster earlier is kind of nonsense. In other words US government funds the studies. The question is that why the funding is based on an application that is evaluated somewhere with very obscure mechanisms, why not give the stipend to everyone?
Now that I have bashed US stipends, I must say that the reason why students all over the world flock to US universities is that these universities are better. They can afford better professors, provide better resources and be more competitive than their counterparts in nordic countries. All because of the fact that students actually pay for their studies. Now it is up to everyone to figure out what implications does these two models have to the society... if there were a way to combine benefits from both then we would be close to perfect.
This "free" education is what I prefer, and happily pay part of my salary towards such cause. I see several benefits in reducing the upfront fees in life and collect the money away later in life. That's what it basically is. Main benefit being that interest and skill decides more about a persons future than money. (Yes, I know if you are exceptionally good or poor and good you get stipends, but in most of the time that is not the case)
Additionally free education has enabled students in nordic countries to pursue higher level of education than they would have had courage to do if they had to pay for it. Some of that money is wasted in over education, but most of it has resulted in higher quality workforce in many areas.
Btw. Since you say that large numbers of students get free education in US, where does that money come from? I bet you cannot give majority (if that is what large numbers means) free eduction without a cost, now can you? You must understand that.
I think you captured the whole issue of Irak war as well. What are the standards of winning in Irak? Is it enough that there are no weapons of mass destruction? is it enough that Irak doesn't harbour terrorists? does it need to be stabilized? does it need to be democracy? does it need to be a democracy that supports US interests? does it need to be economically independent?
Where does the meaning of "winning" end? Obviously some of the goals have been already met, some haven't. All I hear is the rhetoric that says if we stay strong we will win, but there is no substance to the word win. No target no goal nothing.
I think you are close to the truth with this analogy. Conducting an orchestra isn't that hard when all musicians actually are professionals and thoroughly trained to work under your supervision. Big problem is that majority of the so called software industry participants are not skilled enough to actually perform the task they need to. I bet conducting an orchestra is difficult if the musicians play badly to begin with. Finding project full of skilled people is a major problem and there is no way you can see right away if someone is doing their job well.
On smaller projects my experience is that there are projects that I can count on going well, because I assign certain people to them. Other projects with double staffing does not do to job nearly as well, even when the task is half the size. This does not change (significantly) over time and is not related to education.
To answer the original question why software projects are so hard is that similarly to orchestra one bad player can ruin the show. Either that being the boss who has team meeting every hour, designer that doesn't know what is needed, customer that cannot give direction or software engineer that hides bugs in the code and causes several weeks of debugging for the team. Once the orchestra is filled with professionals I believe there is nothing inherently difficult with software engineering. Those projects happen, but it's rare.
Those Xboxes are most likely bought by some sorry developer who just hired 4 new people in their testing squad to test some latest import of some random game.
As one of the greatest thinkers of all times said: "There are three different kind of knowns; known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns". Scientist usually work in the realm of known unknowns where they know they are close to the reality but there is always something unknown about the situation. Especially in such a complex phenomenon as global climate the scientists know they are unable to predict it accurately and won't be telling the press they are certain. Blaming the scientific community for not giving exact answers is in my opinion quite ridiculous, there is no absolute and exact proof on anything. On the other hand, scientists are presenting the public scenarios that they have studied and peer reviewed to present as accurate as possible prediction of the studied area. In these scenarios the scientists are taking into account vast amounts of data gathered throughout written human history. There is no way slashdot readers (unless they are part of the core scientific group doing peer reviews) can come up with any idea that they haven't already thought of. Moreover on the climate change there has been predictions and climate models dating from several decades back that have considered various aspects of the climate change and these predictions have somewhat followed on the change that is currently happening. Of course there has been significant improvement on the accuracy of the models and slight changes in predicted trends, but to really find out if they follow the actual trend yet remains to be seen.
What slashdot readers can do is to find alternative peer reviewed articles and studies to compare the results, please post any peer reviewed evidence you have to back up your claim. The article at hand discussed about the possibility of fabricated articles, which makes it especially important to check the references and credibility of any scientific study found. As a summary of the discussion on this topic it would be very interesting to collect links from all posts and verify them. This would help everyone of us to form an educated opinion about the situation.
To invalidate your claim on not being able to find error margins on 330pm, I can safely say that in science the significant numbers is the measure of accuracy. There is a scientific way to calculate the accuracy and give exactly correct number without explisitly stating the error margin. There is big difference between 300pm, 330pm, 330.pm and 330.0pm. Each of these give certain meaning on the accuracy of the number. Therefore when scientific paper states 330pm it means 330pm with an error margin assumed to this figure, not 330pm +/- 500pm.
If not then I might go on with my life and not to bother with this.
If he is worried then I guess I should stop saving for my retirement fund.
Yep, I would think that doubleing the sales of Xbox360 is achievable goal. Unfortunately for Microsoft that would mean increase of weekly sales (first week of September) from 1250 to 2500 units. Trailing behind of 229k DS, 27k PSP and 22k PS2. Sad reality is that Xbox 360 sells in thousands when everythink else sells in tens or hundreds of thousands. In other words PS3 selling 100k in Japan means that there are about same amount of PS3 units in the market as there are Xbox360. And that is just the situation right after launch.
t ory=10796/
My point is that regardless of price the Xbox360 offering seems to be particularly uncool for Japan, shown by the figures above. I doubt that consumers will grab Xbox360 even if there is no way to get the next gen console. More likely event is that the consumer will get the PS2 instead, which sells 10x more than Xbox360 even now.
Some more info: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?s
I think you have just proven the point why greenhouse gases are so powerful in warming up the earth. Indeed the sun can be regarded as the sole contributor of warmth on earth, which means that if human produced greenhouse gases trap even 0.1% more energy than before we will be in a big trouble. Naturally intensity of the suns radiation emphasises that effect, but the changes in the suns radiation are not big enough to explain global warming alone.
If some key personnel have left, does that mean it has a chance to be released? If these "key" persons have worked on the project for 10 years I think it's time to let them go and get some new people to actually finish it off.
I believe that disease resistance and variety should be valued much higher than small added growth. Banana has already been developed to a point where a single fungus threatens to wipe out most of the production around the world.
Here is a link to the fungus : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusarium_wilt/
I believe none of the GE seed producers will take responsibility when a disease develops that threatens the crop. Even if the IPR issues are sorted out I would still feel uncomfortable to know that majority of the food production (or software) is single source and there is no backup.
You are deliberately confusing things.
Fact: Well observed fact is that mutations happen and organisms evolve into something new.
Theory: Theory is that it happens according to the model created by Charles Darwin. Theory may undergo a revolution or gradual improvement over the time, but it needs to explain observed facts. Theory is just the best currently available model for the fact.
Well I have first hand experience of an American couple having trouble in Tahiti for not accepting dollars. The man was after the incident frustrated and said to his wife, they don't want money, they want Francs, which in my opinion shows the whole attitude of some Americans. I had no troubles with the younger generation of American travellers, unfortunately most Americans tend to travel around after they retire. In my experience Europeans do travel a lot more and a lot younger.
Has it ever occurred to these researchers and analysts that there is only so much money people are willing to put on games and entertainment. All gaming areas seem to get similar market growths, which makes the overall spending on games to increase too much to be realistic. I think they might be right about quadrubling the consumption but I doubt that market will be that much. These numbers mean that 100 million people need to subscribe to 10/month service. Compare that to WOW, which has "only" 6 million subscribers.
Besides my own experiences with WOW makes me think twice before subscribing and getting involved with an online game. I'm sure there are others who are not willing to spend 100+ a year for one single game.
This is too confusing to me, is Sony evil or not?
One alternative that has not been explored yet is that these laptops actually do have Blu-Ray drives but Sony staff didn't have Blu-Ray demo disk readily available and they had stock of DVD-Blu-Ray-demos from the time before the Blu-Ray drives were widely available.
So what most likely happened is that they played DVD disk containing Blu-Ray clip on a Blu-Ray drive. It might not be what expected by general public but for me that is good enough.
There is one unexplored way to go around this problem. The companies and organizations involved in the issue should/could allow this particular piece of work. That would save them from the uncertain future of not reacting and also let the gy off the hook and issue specific guidelines how to behave with the content he used. IP owners don't need to be always suing.
Once you invalidate these fees on online music, why not go after other formats as well? I believe there hasn't been these breakage costs around since vinyl records. That would make it more significant deal for all record companies around.
I kind of agree with Nintendo, although most of those things mentioned would be on my wish list. Wii is really the first major plunder in the whole console.
1. Lack of HD, official reason was to keep loading times reasonable. I kind of believe that, although I haven't seen XBOX360 working to see how long it actually takes to load those games or levels. This is questionable decisision anyway and I would like to see HD support.
2. Underpower really doesn't mean that much for porting. In current games most of the power is used for shading, effects, etc that are relatively easy to remove. Besides there is still few "old" consoles out there that need game support and all the games are ported for those no matter what.
3. Lack of DVD mentioned in other posts is not really an issue. If there is no DVD player around then most likely Wii won't be finding its way to that home either.
I guess you don't believe on the theory of gravity either, there are several hollywood productions that defy the consensus of how the gravity works. I agree that not all about gravity has been proven or understood, but basic knowledge of how gravity works is there. It may change in the future, but until it does we are stuck with current theory.
Is it really your opinion that UN statistics division produces same level of information as fiction writer? Please let me know what would be a "credible" source of information, since I cannot really think of any significantly more credible source. Obiviously NASA is not a credible source, since we are debating about the validity of their research as well.
Being sceptical is acceptable, but you are now being ignorant.
Should be fine as long as you don't make/produce backup of your harddrive.
In one other comment a person claiming to be closer to the case said that the man actually produced CDs for sale.
I have understood that there are several companies that have done that, but eventually they have become liable to the things they knowingly hide from the customers/public. Unfortunately agencies or government does not have such liability towards tax payers, which is very disturbing. Since there is no real liability for ones actions any and all scientific findings agencies or government produce should be public, publicly debated and peer reviewed.