No, you're missing the point. The alternative to having companies keep secrets is for them to share all of their knowledge and techniques, cooperating with one another. This effectively scraps capitalism - if you think this is a good idea, I would direct you to Atlas Shrugged.
For some reason many people (on Slashdot and elsewhere) think that patents stifle competition and innovation, when in fact they are designed for the exact opposite purpose: to give companies an incentive to create new products. Obviously, just like any other law, this can have harmful effects if taken to extremes, since companies can try to claim an entire field as their own "innovation" and shut out others.
Exactly - just because something is easy to copy doesn't mean that it wasn't hard to develop. For example, I could spend a year developing a chocolate cake recipe (trying different combinations of ingredients, testing on different age groups, testing shelf life, etc.) but copying the recipe would take roughly 10 seconds. The only way someone will invest in your cake-making research is if they have some guarantee of exclusivity once it hits market. It's true that I'm inhibiting the world-wide cake-making establishment and possible preventing someone from creating an even more delicious cake by keeping my recipe secret, but that's the price you pay for competition.
I think that Jobs hopes to use EMI's music as an example to the other music execs. If he just removed the DRM from all the songs and then sales increased, a skeptic could say, "Well, the music market was just doing well." If he offers both options, however, and MORE people buy the DRM-free version even though it's a little more expensive, it will be sending a very strong message.
Note that all full albums will have DRM removed, so this only applies to singles anyway.
I think you're missing the point. While a single egg being penetrated by more than one sperm is rare for humans, it has been known to happen. The big deal here is that the two sperm (sperms?) came from DIFFERENT people. No, that's not what happened. The sperm are both from the same person, they are just different since every sperm contains a (different) random half of your genes. This is quite rare, as the parent post pointed out.
I think that it's a funny contrast with the rest of the article:
And just bring people the awesome, compelling experience, and hike up the quality of the gameplay, but not lose what's great about UT. In fact, I think we've brought back some of the things that people liked about the original UT--and toned down one or two of the things that people maybe didn't like about the last game in the series, and, again, just get it right.
So, there's all kinds of cool games being done with the technology, and I guess that's kind of our job over the next few years, is to just broaden people's imaginations and stop thinking about shooters.
We just need to help people broaden their imaginations. Despite all of this talk about how they're dedicated to innovation, his only comment about the PC version of Gears of War is that they want to "make it run well on enough PCs to be worth releasing." Notice in my post that I'm not angry about this (quite the contrary - I'm psyched for GOW on the PC) but I do think that it's quite funny - even Rein admits that GOW on the PC will at best be only as good as GOW on the 360, which by that point will be somewhat of an old game.
Rein doesn't sound very enthusiastic in TFA:
People ask me, "Are you going to do it on PC?" Yeah, eventually...I don't think that's any great secret that we would like to do it on PC, but for now it's a 360 game. Eventually we'll get around to a PC version. I just don't know when. Translation: When we feel like whoring out our franchise for a bunch of cash, we'll give you a PC version. Ah well, I'm still excited that I'll be able to get my hands on it eventually.
Astronauts' spacesuits may one day be covered in motion-sensitive proteins that could generate power from the astronauts' movement Hmm... but what if they are making vigorous movements outside of their spacesuits?
I wouldn't condemn Nantero to vaporware status just yet - it seems that they've been making progress. Here's a list of their press releases - notice that they successfully fabricated a switch in April and have made their processes compatible with current CMOS fab lines.
While IAOAPIT (I am only a physicist in training) and I'm not taking quantum mechanics until next semester, I don't believe that photon frequency can assume any value. The energy of a photon is quantized, so the frequency (related to energy by E=hf) should be also. Granted, this is quite a fine quantization (so fine that it took scientists a while to realize that it WAS quantized) but it can't encode an infinite amount of information.
Instead of an unwieldy name (Half-Life 2 : Episode Two and a bunch of other stuff) they've given the PC and console releases color-coded names More like: instead of a descriptive name, they've given the releases code names which are very easy to confuse. This article summary is exhibit A. In fact, this may be the most confusing naming convention of all time: the sequel to Half Life is called Half Life 2 (good so far), then the episodic sequel to THAT game is called Half Life 2: Episode 1 (starting to get confusing), then the episodic sequel to THAT episodic sequel is Half Life 2: Black (?!?). Or, on the alternate route, the sequel to Half Life that also contains 4 other games (2 of which are sequels to the sequel) is called Half Life 2: Orange.
I pity the poor soul who has to come up with a name for Episode 3 and its bundles.
I thought the same thing... poor little guy, trying to nuzzle under the lander like Simba in the Lion King. Now all we need is for Spirit and Opportunity to come over and sing "Hakuna Matata!"
Agreed (I'll excuse the grammar). If this were actually a problem, then by turning on my everyday hazard lights I might be sending the person behind me into seizures. Or, a policeman trying to pull over a vehicle by flashing all his lights could actually cause them to drive uncontrollably off the road. As far as I know, this condition does not exist, but if it does then I'm not sure if you be able to get a license under the current system anyway.
Great pictures - I especially like the one with the hand holding the calculator. A cool extension of this would be to have the desktop display an x-ray image of what's behind it.
I'm impressed that less than 4 percent were dictionary words Considering only 10 percent of the words on myspace are dictionary words to begin with, this isn't very surprising.
Maybe the users just used their usernames as passwords - that would probably be the best way to generate a random sequence of characters.
Hmm... what's the relationship of that article to the original article and this one from a few days ago? What exactly are they recommending/rejecting?
Re:If it's not spatial it's not 4D
on
Google Earth In 4D
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
While I agree that 4D is being used more as a buzzword than anything else, time is in fact considered as a fourth dimension in physics. You can look at special relativity if you want to understand how time and the spatial dimensions can be "interchanged":
In the geometry of special relativity, a fourth dimension, time, is added, with units of c, so that the equation for the differential of distance becomes:
ds^2 = dx_1^2 + dx_2^2 + dx_3^2 - c^2 dt^2
If we wished to make the time coordinate look like the space coordinates, we could treat time as imaginary: x4 = ict . In this case the above equation becomes symmetric:
ds^2 = dx_1^2 + dx_2^2 + dx_3^2 + dx_4^2
Special relativity goes on to say that you can exchange time and spatial coordinates using the Lorentz transform, which preserves the length of the 4D position vector.
If the special relativity example seems too bizarre, just think in terms of locating an event. If I wanted you to come to my party, I would tell you 4 pieces of info - the x,y,z, and t coordinates of the party. Each of these degrees of freedom is a dimension.
What's much more annoying to me are the "4D" shows that are 3D plus some user interaction (getting water shot at you or something like this). That is a misuse of "4D".
I know that two must be a difficult number for you to count to, but it's around 7 orders of magnitude smaller than the number of things in Earth orbit. Around 10,000 of those are tracked continuously to prevent collisions.
Microsoft can always find ways to force people to upgrade - for example, locking DirectX 10 to Vista only. Want to use that shiny new video card? Pay up. It's unfortunate that the competitors lag so far behind that Microsoft is free to force upgrades - still, as you mentioned, OS's are nearly feature-complete, so it may be harder and harder to find features worth upgrading for.
That it's been successful is due primarily to marketing, and because Apple did bring iTunes to the PC.
That was the point of my post - Apple was able to take this to a completely unexpected level of popularity. I was just providing some evidence to support what the parent poster was saying - people are often too ready to draw conclusions about the marketability of a product ("I dare not imagine how badly they've ginnied up the volume control")
"Agree with the article poster - Lame. Not only is this a lackluster MP3 unit (which by virtue of being firewire will be limited to Apple Mac owners), but it has virtually no UI wizardry that might define it as an Apple product.
A total waste of time."
"Unfortunately, Apple's ultimate goal is to get people to buy more Apple hardware. So it's not likely that Apple will be developing a PC version of iTunes. They want to keep their so-called advantages to Mac-only. Maybe, in the future, they will get one program on Windows to definitely support the iPod and release an SDK for other Mac and Windows apps to optionally support it.
Remember, Apple makes more money on hardware sales, than on FireWire licenses. "
"The LCD display is too small, it remains to be seen what the power consumption or usability of the backlight is, the four buttons (five, actually, I suspect) are likely insufficient, and probably rather modal. I dare not imagine how badly they've ginnied up the volume control. Apple's support for ID3 is woefully insufficient on iTunes and on iPod."
"But it certainly isn't "groundbreaking" in any real sense.
Remember, due to the rumors people were expecting something more like an apple PDA/mp3 player.
Besides these devices will soon be illegal anyway with the SSSCA (or its offspring), and cds won't be rippable either. And we all know that therefore there will be no mp3s. Just look at how the RIAA managed to kill file-sharing by taking out Napster;)"
Exactly - "web-rage" sounds like a crime of passion caused by the internet, but this guy had plenty of time to think things through during his 70 mile drive.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're missing the point. The alternative to having companies keep secrets is for them to share all of their knowledge and techniques, cooperating with one another. This effectively scraps capitalism - if you think this is a good idea, I would direct you to Atlas Shrugged.
For some reason many people (on Slashdot and elsewhere) think that patents stifle competition and innovation, when in fact they are designed for the exact opposite purpose: to give companies an incentive to create new products. Obviously, just like any other law, this can have harmful effects if taken to extremes, since companies can try to claim an entire field as their own "innovation" and shut out others.
Exactly - just because something is easy to copy doesn't mean that it wasn't hard to develop. For example, I could spend a year developing a chocolate cake recipe (trying different combinations of ingredients, testing on different age groups, testing shelf life, etc.) but copying the recipe would take roughly 10 seconds. The only way someone will invest in your cake-making research is if they have some guarantee of exclusivity once it hits market. It's true that I'm inhibiting the world-wide cake-making establishment and possible preventing someone from creating an even more delicious cake by keeping my recipe secret, but that's the price you pay for competition.
I think that Jobs hopes to use EMI's music as an example to the other music execs. If he just removed the DRM from all the songs and then sales increased, a skeptic could say, "Well, the music market was just doing well." If he offers both options, however, and MORE people buy the DRM-free version even though it's a little more expensive, it will be sending a very strong message.
Note that all full albums will have DRM removed, so this only applies to singles anyway.
Exactly - that's my real question. What's the maximum attachment size? If it's small enough, this whole discussion is moot.
Upcoming headline:
"IBM Many Eyes After Two Months"
Though I suppose it's better than the "Windows Vista: Has public opinion changed since yesterday?" articles that seem to make the rounds daily here.
Notice in my post that I'm not angry about this (quite the contrary - I'm psyched for GOW on the PC) but I do think that it's quite funny - even Rein admits that GOW on the PC will at best be only as good as GOW on the 360, which by that point will be somewhat of an old game.
Ah well, I'm still excited that I'll be able to get my hands on it eventually.
I wouldn't condemn Nantero to vaporware status just yet - it seems that they've been making progress. Here's a list of their press releases - notice that they successfully fabricated a switch in April and have made their processes compatible with current CMOS fab lines.
You think UAC is bad now? Just wait for Vista II: Hell on Earth
While IAOAPIT (I am only a physicist in training) and I'm not taking quantum mechanics until next semester, I don't believe that photon frequency can assume any value. The energy of a photon is quantized, so the frequency (related to energy by E=hf) should be also. Granted, this is quite a fine quantization (so fine that it took scientists a while to realize that it WAS quantized) but it can't encode an infinite amount of information.
In fact, this may be the most confusing naming convention of all time: the sequel to Half Life is called Half Life 2 (good so far), then the episodic sequel to THAT game is called Half Life 2: Episode 1 (starting to get confusing), then the episodic sequel to THAT episodic sequel is Half Life 2: Black (?!?). Or, on the alternate route, the sequel to Half Life that also contains 4 other games (2 of which are sequels to the sequel) is called Half Life 2: Orange.
I pity the poor soul who has to come up with a name for Episode 3 and its bundles.
I thought the same thing... poor little guy, trying to nuzzle under the lander like Simba in the Lion King. Now all we need is for Spirit and Opportunity to come over and sing "Hakuna Matata!"
Agreed (I'll excuse the grammar). If this were actually a problem, then by turning on my everyday hazard lights I might be sending the person behind me into seizures. Or, a policeman trying to pull over a vehicle by flashing all his lights could actually cause them to drive uncontrollably off the road. As far as I know, this condition does not exist, but if it does then I'm not sure if you be able to get a license under the current system anyway.
Great pictures - I especially like the one with the hand holding the calculator. A cool extension of this would be to have the desktop display an x-ray image of what's behind it.
Maybe the users just used their usernames as passwords - that would probably be the best way to generate a random sequence of characters.
Hmm... what's the relationship of that article to the original article and this one from a few days ago? What exactly are they recommending/rejecting?
If the special relativity example seems too bizarre, just think in terms of locating an event. If I wanted you to come to my party, I would tell you 4 pieces of info - the x,y,z, and t coordinates of the party. Each of these degrees of freedom is a dimension.
What's much more annoying to me are the "4D" shows that are 3D plus some user interaction (getting water shot at you or something like this). That is a misuse of "4D".
I know that two must be a difficult number for you to count to, but it's around 7 orders of magnitude smaller than the number of things in Earth orbit. Around 10,000 of those are tracked continuously to prevent collisions.
Microsoft can always find ways to force people to upgrade - for example, locking DirectX 10 to Vista only. Want to use that shiny new video card? Pay up.
It's unfortunate that the competitors lag so far behind that Microsoft is free to force upgrades - still, as you mentioned, OS's are nearly feature-complete, so it may be harder and harder to find features worth upgrading for.
Some of my favorite comments:
;)"
"Agree with the article poster - Lame. Not only is this a lackluster MP3 unit (which by virtue of being firewire will be limited to Apple Mac owners), but it has virtually no UI wizardry that might define it as an Apple product.
A total waste of time."
"Unfortunately, Apple's ultimate goal is to get people to buy more Apple hardware. So it's not likely that Apple will be developing a PC version of iTunes. They want to keep their so-called advantages to Mac-only. Maybe, in the future, they will get one program on Windows to definitely support the iPod and release an SDK for other Mac and Windows apps to optionally support it. Remember, Apple makes more money on hardware sales, than on FireWire licenses. "
"The LCD display is too small, it remains to be seen what the power consumption or usability of the backlight is, the four buttons (five, actually, I suspect) are likely insufficient, and probably rather modal. I dare not imagine how badly they've ginnied up the volume control. Apple's support for ID3 is woefully insufficient on iTunes and on iPod."
"But it certainly isn't "groundbreaking" in any real sense.
Remember, due to the rumors people were expecting something more like an apple PDA/mp3 player.
Besides these devices will soon be illegal anyway with the SSSCA (or its offspring), and cds won't be rippable either. And we all know that therefore there will be no mp3s. Just look at how the RIAA managed to kill file-sharing by taking out Napster
Exactly - "web-rage" sounds like a crime of passion caused by the internet, but this guy had plenty of time to think things through during his 70 mile drive.
Why is this modded "Insightful"?!?!