The DS Lite has already sold 2.34 million units in two months in Japan, with the newly redesigned version of the harder also appearing to stimulate sales in North America and Europe and continuing Nintendo's successful handheld spell.
So, no, it's a typo. Also, the DS Lite launched in March of this year in Japan, which by my reckoning is only 5 months ago.
Generally speaking, you need to interact with something to know anything about it. Interaction has a way of changing the thing that you were trying to observe in the first place. There are exceptions, but they aren't very common (at least at the level of photons). You might be able to fake it well enough to fool people, though (in principle, anyway; in practice, it probably wouldn't work). Sort of like the predator...
I never played Resident Evil anything, so I wouldn't know how nice it looks. I did think, however, that the graphical quality of Grim Fandango, Monkey Island 4, and Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon were sufficiently high that it was, in fact, already a non-issue. The Longest Journey had reasonable graphics, except that the 3D didn't blend well with the pre-rendered stuff (particularly since it was pre-antialiasing). I just didn't see any reason to bother mentioning Resident Evil (unless you're trying to point out the similarities between the "action-adventure" genre and the "adventure" genre, which seems like it ought to be a no-brainer given the similarities in the genre names).
Look at Resident Evil and Resident Evil Zero on the GameCube and tell me that their engine wouldn't be perfect for an adventure game. The backgrounds are 2D, but the 3D models blend into them perfectly, and the graphics are quite stunning.
As I recall, this is how (off the top of my head) Grim Fandango, Monkey Island 4, and Longest Journey worked. I never played Siberia, so I wouldn't know how they did it. Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon was full 3D, and it wasn't so bad, although I thought it was a PITA to use the "absolute" controls. (In Grim Fandango the controls were relative to the character, so pushing the "up" arrow key made the guy walk forward, not "up".) Basically, every "modern" adventure game does this (with varying degrees of success); I really don't think that graphics are what's holding the genre back. I don't know what is, but I think it has more to do with the success of RPGs as a genre than anything else.
Also, since when did anyone play adventure games on a console anyway? I thought this was pretty much a PC-only genre.
You're right, but it's important to understand that the problem has absolutely nothing to do with what happened to the test subjects and everything to do with them (evidently) not informing the subjects that this was a Phase I trial (and all that it entails). Every clinical trial has a chance of side-effects; we do trials to figure out what the side-effects are. Phase I trials exist to determine, essentially, whether or not a drug will kill humans. It is the first human test of a drug. It is utter lunacy for healthy humans to volunteer for a Phase I trial, especially if the PI (i.e. the head of the lab) is unwilling to take part in the trial. Requiring PIs to take part in Phase I trials has been suggested as a fix, though I'm not sure it's the best way.
Not that it's the same thing, but we do have absentee voting. It's close enough that everyone I talk to on a regular basis (and many with whom I do not) vote absentee so they don't have to wait in any lines. It's also nice in that it leaves a physical paper trail, which can come in handy on occasion.
I think that most of the Logitech laptop mice have little compartments within the mice to store the dongles. The ones that use "fast RF" (2.4 GHz) have a range comparable to Bluetooth (~30 feet, as I recall). I have a V500, and it works fine for me, unless I'm using Windows, since I can't figure out how to "emulate 3-button mouse" in Windows (and many of the programs I boot into Windows for actually use the middle click for important things).
I am willing to defer to your experience concerning the Asian fonts, but the other complaints do not match my own experiences. Specifically, installing mplayerplug-in fixes your media woes; xine-lib can handle DVD menus flawlessly (and is, in fact, my player of choice on my HTPC); my Canon scanner works flawlessly under linux. I'm rather suprised that Ubuntu doesn't include non-free sources, considering their target audience. One of the main reasons I switched to Gentoo when I did was because portage had more packages that I wanted to use (even when including non-free sources), despite having a vastly smaller package database. Of course, Gentoo is probably one of the last distros I'd hand to someone interested in "trying out" linux.
My understanding was that "Third World" originally referred to those countries that had neither aligned themselves with the Western nations (including Western Europe) nor with the Soviet Block. But maybe I'm just confused.
It sucks that you need such details to do something that you get just by pushing a button in every WYSIWIG word processor in the world. What we need, and what I haven't seen yet, is a WYSIWIG designer for CSS. I envision something equivalent to what Word and OpenOffice call "character styles", but frankly most people don't use them even when they're available.
As I understand it (and I could be wrong), the point of CSS (and this WYSIWYM paradigm) is that you separate the semantic information from the display information. Telling an editor what you want the output to be doesn't work in such a system, because there are a multitude of ways (semantically) to get the output to look a certain way, and the editor won't know which of them you mean. This is important if, at some later point, you want to change the layout but not the content.
It's also statistically unsound to indict the collective whole of professional players for the bad behavior of a select few.
But you know that that's what people do, and that's precisely why image matters. It doesn't matter what fraction of pro athletes are drunken bastards: that's the stereotype; what gets on the news is what people see and remember. It'd be nice if everyone was perfect, but failing that you either play the system or you don't; either way, you live with the consequences.
I thought I stated it was a first-order approximation. I am well aware of the limitations, but I don't want to get into a more lengthy discussion. In any case, you have still only addressed one sub-point. Your argument requires that the vast majority of employers be capable of moving their workforce overseas. This may, in fact, be the case, but when I look around there seems to be plenty of work to be done here. That's not to say that shipping work overseas isn't a problem, but it doesn't seem insurmountable-without-government-involvement (assuming both workers and consumers are responsible).
You seem to underestimate the power of the consumers (when they have a choice, and when they can actually agree on something) to get companies to do what they want. If we (as a country of consumers) didn't want companies to send work to other countries, it wouldn't be hard to force companies to keep their domestic factories. The bigger problem is apathy (and a love for "great prices"). This obviously breaks down if, for whatever reason (e.g. government supported monopoly) consumers are deprived of their choices. Then again, so long as it isn't something essential like oil or food one could either boycott or import from a better place.
Still, I agree that to be truly free, the barriers to physical relocation must be negligibly small.
Right, and they are compensated for it. What little economics I have taken would suggest that (at least to first order) employees are paid precisely what the market will bear (that is to say, the correct price). I know that "first order" is a gross simplification, and this is not to say that I think economic anarchy is necessarily the best way, but your arguments leave something to be desired.
There is a balance that must be met, via proper motivation. Wishing that people would be nicer to each other is not unlike wishing for an end to war. Nobody wants war any more than anyone wants mis-treated employees. "Honest work for honest pay" doesn't get you anywhere economically (since it's, by definition, break-even), so there isn't much motivation for such a model, particularly in a place like the US (rags to riches, baby!). To "fix" this problem in the current system, you either legislate a law that requires what you believe to be "treating employees well" (legal motivation), or you let the market decide what is right and what is wrong (fiscal motivation). Neither solution is ideal. On the one hand, you give the government the power to decide, in an absolute sense, what is "right" and what is "wrong"; on the other, you have a bunch of idiots deciding the future of the economy (read: Walmart's undeniable success).
And even if that problem is solved, we again run into the problem of distribution of profits. Sure, the employees did the work, but who would have paid them for that work without the investors? And as I've already stated, the employees ought to have been payed "enough", or they would have gone someplace else to work (in the capitalist model). Of course, you could pay in stock options, but... I don't really want to go there.
While I agree with your sentiments, isn't the maximization of profits the highest benefit of the shareholders, which I might add, were the ones that put up the money in the first place. I don't think you can change the goal without changing the rules of the game.
It really seems like the problem isn't so much "universities not producing competent teachers" as it is rather "universities not producing enthusiastic subject-matter experts, given a sizeable pool of people who wanted to study that subject matter in the first place".
The problem isn't that the teachers aren't enthusiastic about doing science; they wouldn't be professors (or even grad students) otherwise. There are many reasons why an ethusiastic subject-matter expert might not be enthusiastic about teaching. E.g., just because physics in general excites me doesn't mean I want to explain units to an uninterested audience. It's boring material. If you really are interested in a field, what's exciting is areas of active research, not issues of nomenclature.
Furthermore, the distinction between an interested and a disinterested one is vitally important. I don't know a single professor that wouldn't jump at the chance to talk about their research to an interested party. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that the vast majority of teaching (at least in physics) involves first-year, pre-med/engineering type stuff. So you have a teacher that is totally bored with the material, and students interested in it simply because they need to maintain that magic 4.0 for med/grad school. I don't know about you, but I don't think (especially at that level) it's the teacher's responsibility to make their students interested in the material.
Lastly, I find that it is typically those most expert in a field that either cannot remember what was difficult about learning material for the first time, or are simply so "brilliant" that the way they think about things (paradigms, if you will) is not understable by lesser beings (i.e. undergraduates).
You don't have to rush the production of teachers. Opening more schools makes the "pipes" wider, not shorter. And as was alluded to, this is a positive feedback system, so I don't see how you could possibly have a long-term shortage of professors. The issue is one of pacing, since you don't want to open up more schools than you can manage at ay given time.
Perhaps I'm using the phrase "runaway greenhouse effect" wrong. The only example of a runaway greenhouse that I am aware of is Venus (which I would like to note is not in any shape to harbor life as we know it). I'd be surprised if anything on Earth, including humans, could adapt to live in such an environment. I agree that in all likelihood life won't have to "start from scratch", and I'm sorry if I caused any confusion.
So you're trying to tell me that because our CO2 levels are no where near prehistoric C02 levels, that we are going to have a runaway greenhouse effect? Or perhaps you simply enjoy taking statements out of context?
I agree completely withy you WRT photographic resolution. I don't think your second comparison is very good, however. iPods are the modern equivalent of boom boxes. Except that they have far better fidelity and dynamic range (for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the simple fact that AM is mono and iPods can output in stereo). Also, since you are always free to provide your own speakers, I don't see why the speakers are necessarily 100 times smaller (not that being small even implies crappiness in and of itself).
Going into more detail about why the analogy doesn't work, note that electronics has come a long way, whereas other areas have not seen the same kind of progress. It follows that the device that is "more" electronic will benefit the most. A digital camera needs optics (which hasn't really changed much in the last 50 years), and a transducer (CCD). These both impose very harsh limitations in the quality of output of digital cameras. Compare with the iPod, which is electronic from start to finish (digital, in fact, until it hits the DAC). Couple this with the fact that it's also removed the biggest source of noise in car radios (analog wireless transmission), and I hope you'll realise that iPods can't help but be infinitely superior to FM car radios.
The "mob rule" is the group of thousands applying their own brand of justice, using neither trial, jury, nor judge. I don't know about you, but when I hear "mob rule", I think torches and pitchforks, which is essentially what happened.
It's not even like adultery is even a crime (or is it... ). Sure, he might be a jerk for cuckolding someone (and notice that even the alleged cuckold has rescinded his accusations), but does the punishment here really fit the crime? I don't think it does in this case, and furthermore, I think this penchant for taking things too far is a hallmark of "mob rule" (as is the lack of due process, which perhaps you don't think is important?).
If the Japanese difference in price is as you say it is, it's probably would pay to just get a R1 DVD player in Japan, that would be the price of 2-5 DVDs, depending on which model. Again, the guy who bends the rules is happy and the average consumer is forced to pay/inconvenience unnecesarrily.
It's not uncommon for them to do just that.
Also, are these prices for brand new DVDs just released in Japan? Because I shop japanese manga, and the shipping is the most expensive cost, and the manga themselves are usually cheaper than the US counterparts.
I may be wrong (haven't been to Japan since I was a little kid), but my understanding was that manga is extraordinarily cheap in Japan, since the kind of speculative accumulation that drives prices up doesn't occur there. Much of the manga printed in Japan isn't meant to make it out of the train station.
On the other hand, when I was trying to get a copy of Mononoke Hime before it was brought over by Buena Vista, I was looking at a pretty hefty price tag (which I can't quite remember); and that was just for the movie (no duties or shipping anything like that), since I knew a fella that was willing to bring me a copy on his next trip to America.
And since he was talking about consumer adoption, current practices are irrelevant. What is important is the dramatic differences between VHS and DVD when DVD was fighting for adoption. I can remember when DVDs were starting to become popular; I had a computer but no TV, so the choice was a no-brainer.
Actually, the signal is very, very different from, say, light. Electromagnetic waves (i.e. radiation) can propagate through a vacuum; electronic signals are waves propagating through a medium (i.e. a sea/gas of electrons). People used to think that a wave needed something to propagate through (be it water or electrons), which is not true in the case of light (one recalls Michelson-Morley interferometers).
Electronic signals travel extremely fast through wires because the restoring force (the tension, if you want to make an analogy to waves on a string) is very strong compared to mechanical analogs.
If they're too busy baking and they need their fish yesterday, then they ought to go find a fishmonger and buy some fish. Seriously, who gives fish away to strangers for free? Oh right, Jesus does. Well let's go and ask him for some free tech support then.
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From the article:
So, no, it's a typo. Also, the DS Lite launched in March of this year in Japan, which by my reckoning is only 5 months ago.
Generally speaking, you need to interact with something to know anything about it. Interaction has a way of changing the thing that you were trying to observe in the first place. There are exceptions, but they aren't very common (at least at the level of photons). You might be able to fake it well enough to fool people, though (in principle, anyway; in practice, it probably wouldn't work). Sort of like the predator ...
I never played Resident Evil anything, so I wouldn't know how nice it looks. I did think, however, that the graphical quality of Grim Fandango, Monkey Island 4, and Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon were sufficiently high that it was, in fact, already a non-issue. The Longest Journey had reasonable graphics, except that the 3D didn't blend well with the pre-rendered stuff (particularly since it was pre-antialiasing). I just didn't see any reason to bother mentioning Resident Evil (unless you're trying to point out the similarities between the "action-adventure" genre and the "adventure" genre, which seems like it ought to be a no-brainer given the similarities in the genre names).
As I recall, this is how (off the top of my head) Grim Fandango, Monkey Island 4, and Longest Journey worked. I never played Siberia, so I wouldn't know how they did it. Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon was full 3D, and it wasn't so bad, although I thought it was a PITA to use the "absolute" controls. (In Grim Fandango the controls were relative to the character, so pushing the "up" arrow key made the guy walk forward, not "up".) Basically, every "modern" adventure game does this (with varying degrees of success); I really don't think that graphics are what's holding the genre back. I don't know what is, but I think it has more to do with the success of RPGs as a genre than anything else.
Also, since when did anyone play adventure games on a console anyway? I thought this was pretty much a PC-only genre.
You're right, but it's important to understand that the problem has absolutely nothing to do with what happened to the test subjects and everything to do with them (evidently) not informing the subjects that this was a Phase I trial (and all that it entails). Every clinical trial has a chance of side-effects; we do trials to figure out what the side-effects are. Phase I trials exist to determine, essentially, whether or not a drug will kill humans. It is the first human test of a drug. It is utter lunacy for healthy humans to volunteer for a Phase I trial, especially if the PI (i.e. the head of the lab) is unwilling to take part in the trial. Requiring PIs to take part in Phase I trials has been suggested as a fix, though I'm not sure it's the best way.
Not that it's the same thing, but we do have absentee voting. It's close enough that everyone I talk to on a regular basis (and many with whom I do not) vote absentee so they don't have to wait in any lines. It's also nice in that it leaves a physical paper trail, which can come in handy on occasion.
I think that most of the Logitech laptop mice have little compartments within the mice to store the dongles. The ones that use "fast RF" (2.4 GHz) have a range comparable to Bluetooth (~30 feet, as I recall). I have a V500, and it works fine for me, unless I'm using Windows, since I can't figure out how to "emulate 3-button mouse" in Windows (and many of the programs I boot into Windows for actually use the middle click for important things).
I am willing to defer to your experience concerning the Asian fonts, but the other complaints do not match my own experiences. Specifically, installing mplayerplug-in fixes your media woes; xine-lib can handle DVD menus flawlessly (and is, in fact, my player of choice on my HTPC); my Canon scanner works flawlessly under linux. I'm rather suprised that Ubuntu doesn't include non-free sources, considering their target audience. One of the main reasons I switched to Gentoo when I did was because portage had more packages that I wanted to use (even when including non-free sources), despite having a vastly smaller package database. Of course, Gentoo is probably one of the last distros I'd hand to someone interested in "trying out" linux.
My understanding was that "Third World" originally referred to those countries that had neither aligned themselves with the Western nations (including Western Europe) nor with the Soviet Block. But maybe I'm just confused.
As I understand it (and I could be wrong), the point of CSS (and this WYSIWYM paradigm) is that you separate the semantic information from the display information. Telling an editor what you want the output to be doesn't work in such a system, because there are a multitude of ways (semantically) to get the output to look a certain way, and the editor won't know which of them you mean. This is important if, at some later point, you want to change the layout but not the content.
You seem to underestimate the power of the consumers (when they have a choice, and when they can actually agree on something) to get companies to do what they want. If we (as a country of consumers) didn't want companies to send work to other countries, it wouldn't be hard to force companies to keep their domestic factories. The bigger problem is apathy (and a love for "great prices"). This obviously breaks down if, for whatever reason (e.g. government supported monopoly) consumers are deprived of their choices. Then again, so long as it isn't something essential like oil or food one could either boycott or import from a better place.
Still, I agree that to be truly free, the barriers to physical relocation must be negligibly small.
There is a balance that must be met, via proper motivation. Wishing that people would be nicer to each other is not unlike wishing for an end to war. Nobody wants war any more than anyone wants mis-treated employees. "Honest work for honest pay" doesn't get you anywhere economically (since it's, by definition, break-even), so there isn't much motivation for such a model, particularly in a place like the US (rags to riches, baby!). To "fix" this problem in the current system, you either legislate a law that requires what you believe to be "treating employees well" (legal motivation), or you let the market decide what is right and what is wrong (fiscal motivation). Neither solution is ideal. On the one hand, you give the government the power to decide, in an absolute sense, what is "right" and what is "wrong"; on the other, you have a bunch of idiots deciding the future of the economy (read: Walmart's undeniable success).
And even if that problem is solved, we again run into the problem of distribution of profits. Sure, the employees did the work, but who would have paid them for that work without the investors? And as I've already stated, the employees ought to have been payed "enough", or they would have gone someplace else to work (in the capitalist model). Of course, you could pay in stock options, but ... I don't really want to go there.
While I agree with your sentiments, isn't the maximization of profits the highest benefit of the shareholders, which I might add, were the ones that put up the money in the first place. I don't think you can change the goal without changing the rules of the game.
The problem isn't that the teachers aren't enthusiastic about doing science; they wouldn't be professors (or even grad students) otherwise. There are many reasons why an ethusiastic subject-matter expert might not be enthusiastic about teaching. E.g., just because physics in general excites me doesn't mean I want to explain units to an uninterested audience. It's boring material. If you really are interested in a field, what's exciting is areas of active research, not issues of nomenclature.
Furthermore, the distinction between an interested and a disinterested one is vitally important. I don't know a single professor that wouldn't jump at the chance to talk about their research to an interested party. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that the vast majority of teaching (at least in physics) involves first-year, pre-med/engineering type stuff. So you have a teacher that is totally bored with the material, and students interested in it simply because they need to maintain that magic 4.0 for med/grad school. I don't know about you, but I don't think (especially at that level) it's the teacher's responsibility to make their students interested in the material.
Lastly, I find that it is typically those most expert in a field that either cannot remember what was difficult about learning material for the first time, or are simply so "brilliant" that the way they think about things (paradigms, if you will) is not understable by lesser beings (i.e. undergraduates).
You don't have to rush the production of teachers. Opening more schools makes the "pipes" wider, not shorter. And as was alluded to, this is a positive feedback system, so I don't see how you could possibly have a long-term shortage of professors. The issue is one of pacing, since you don't want to open up more schools than you can manage at ay given time.
Perhaps I'm using the phrase "runaway greenhouse effect" wrong. The only example of a runaway greenhouse that I am aware of is Venus (which I would like to note is not in any shape to harbor life as we know it). I'd be surprised if anything on Earth, including humans, could adapt to live in such an environment. I agree that in all likelihood life won't have to "start from scratch", and I'm sorry if I caused any confusion.
So you're trying to tell me that because our CO2 levels are no where near prehistoric C02 levels, that we are going to have a runaway greenhouse effect? Or perhaps you simply enjoy taking statements out of context?
Not that it'll happen, but I'm not really looking forward to a runaway greenhouse effect; I'm fairly certain that nothing would survive that.
I agree completely withy you WRT photographic resolution. I don't think your second comparison is very good, however. iPods are the modern equivalent of boom boxes. Except that they have far better fidelity and dynamic range (for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the simple fact that AM is mono and iPods can output in stereo). Also, since you are always free to provide your own speakers, I don't see why the speakers are necessarily 100 times smaller (not that being small even implies crappiness in and of itself). Going into more detail about why the analogy doesn't work, note that electronics has come a long way, whereas other areas have not seen the same kind of progress. It follows that the device that is "more" electronic will benefit the most. A digital camera needs optics (which hasn't really changed much in the last 50 years), and a transducer (CCD). These both impose very harsh limitations in the quality of output of digital cameras. Compare with the iPod, which is electronic from start to finish (digital, in fact, until it hits the DAC). Couple this with the fact that it's also removed the biggest source of noise in car radios (analog wireless transmission), and I hope you'll realise that iPods can't help but be infinitely superior to FM car radios.
The "mob rule" is the group of thousands applying their own brand of justice, using neither trial, jury, nor judge. I don't know about you, but when I hear "mob rule", I think torches and pitchforks, which is essentially what happened.
It's not even like adultery is even a crime (or is it ... ). Sure, he might be a jerk for cuckolding someone (and notice that even the alleged cuckold has rescinded his accusations), but does the punishment here really fit the crime? I don't think it does in this case, and furthermore, I think this penchant for taking things too far is a hallmark of "mob rule" (as is the lack of due process, which perhaps you don't think is important?).
It's not uncommon for them to do just that.
I may be wrong (haven't been to Japan since I was a little kid), but my understanding was that manga is extraordinarily cheap in Japan, since the kind of speculative accumulation that drives prices up doesn't occur there. Much of the manga printed in Japan isn't meant to make it out of the train station.
On the other hand, when I was trying to get a copy of Mononoke Hime before it was brought over by Buena Vista, I was looking at a pretty hefty price tag (which I can't quite remember); and that was just for the movie (no duties or shipping anything like that), since I knew a fella that was willing to bring me a copy on his next trip to America.
And since he was talking about consumer adoption, current practices are irrelevant. What is important is the dramatic differences between VHS and DVD when DVD was fighting for adoption. I can remember when DVDs were starting to become popular; I had a computer but no TV, so the choice was a no-brainer.
Actually, the signal is very, very different from, say, light. Electromagnetic waves (i.e. radiation) can propagate through a vacuum; electronic signals are waves propagating through a medium (i.e. a sea/gas of electrons). People used to think that a wave needed something to propagate through (be it water or electrons), which is not true in the case of light (one recalls Michelson-Morley interferometers). Electronic signals travel extremely fast through wires because the restoring force (the tension, if you want to make an analogy to waves on a string) is very strong compared to mechanical analogs.
If they're too busy baking and they need their fish yesterday, then they ought to go find a fishmonger and buy some fish. Seriously, who gives fish away to strangers for free? Oh right, Jesus does. Well let's go and ask him for some free tech support then.