They're really skating around the weakness of their evidence. They are bound to be given the cold shoulder from the scientific community. They may need to cool their heels for a bit.
Who in the world is this LaCie external drive made for? It has 2 500GB drives included, which can be run as RAID 0 or RAID 1. For the $600 price tag, I could purchase 5-6 external 1TB drives.
These things are most likely being used to store music and videos. I almost feel bad for all the people who buy one of these, set it to RAID 0, and then cry in a year or two when one of the drives die and they lose their data. If they had used the money to purchase backup drives instead, they would be fine.
The only possible advantage is speed, but the speed just isn't needed except for special applications, in which case it would be better to simply build a computer.
Here's the craziest thing about the $600 price tag - I could build an entire new computer running Linux, with a software RAID setup and twice the storage, for less money.
Exactly. Music sharing has NOTHING to do with universities except that it often happens there. At most, the schools might take steps to educate students and discourage this behavior. They don't owe the record companies a thing.
This is especially heinous because college is already so expensive. We need to be looking for ways to make it more affordable to those who are looking to learn. This would increase tuition and distract schools from their mission of education.
Sony is right - the PS3 doesn't compete directly with the Wii. However, in bang for the buck it surpasses the 360.
New PS3 80GB = $400. Wireless Networking = built in Network Gaming = free Blu-ray = included ---------------------- TOTAL = $400
Xbox 360 60GB = $300. Xbox Wireless Adapter = $87 Network gaming = $78 (covers your first 26 months only.) Cheapest Blu-ray player on Amazon = $175 ---------------------- TOTAL = $640
For an extra $240, you get a system with a smaller drive and an inferior Blu-ray player, and that Blu-ray player can't be utilized by games.
Or course, you can get a playable 360 system for much less, if you don't care about any of those features. But chances are you care about at least some of them.
The PS3 costs more because it comes with more. If Sony could sell the Blu-ray player and wireless card as add-ons, and if they charged for "gold" level online membership, their base console would be just as cheap. But the ps3 is a better console for having all that built in.
A key to his plan is using existing low-power lasers in quick pulses, much like the flashbulb on a camera. The laser would only singe the surface of an object in space, but that tiny burn could still help point it downward, Dr. Campbell says. Project Orion's low-budget approach hits at a conundrum of space debris.
To be clear, they are not talking about blowin' up space junk with lasers. The laser will instead slow down small pieces of space debris so that their orbits deteriorate. (Blowing things up is the domain of the otherProject Orion.)
This mechanism is called a laser broom, and there is a short entry about it on Wikipedia. I can't seem to find a more detailed, technical description of how this process works.
"The trade value of recorded music worldwide has fallen by more than a fifth in the past 10 years, despite more people than ever using and enjoying it."
He says that like it is a bad thing. We live in a world in which there is already more recorded music available than could be listened to in several lifetimes, with more being made every day. The costs of making it are continually dropping due to the abilities of PCs and home studios, and the cost of distribution is effectively zero thanks to the internet. The price should be dropping like a rock.
The cost of computing power has dropped immensely over the past couple of decades. It's not a tragedy that CPU producers can't make the same amount of money per unit of computing power as they did in 1988; in fact, it is an incredible boon to society.
I'll be impressed when you can just plug in any guitar, and the software can interpret what you're playing and if it's in sync. Games could have different rules - some would require strict following of written music, whereas others would allow room for interpretation and improvisation. The direct feedback from the software could really accelerate the process of learning to play.
Several third party Windows applications make use of common Microsoft APIs to display HTML content. Therefore, the HTML/Javascript/ActiveX/etc. code will always be on the system, along with the associated security problems.
The most that would ever be removed is the IE application, which just wraps a front end over the Windows libraries which do the heavy lifting. What is even gained by allowing this to be removed? Even those people who use other browsers exclusively will probably keep IE installed, just in case they need to use a site that is broken in their browser of choice.
It's not the privacy of one's buying history that is at issue. It's the privacy of a mom not sharing with the other parents just what she's reading while attending her daughter's soccer games.
The other mothers won't go stealing her credit card receipts from her mailbox, nor will they hack into her Amazon account. But they will try to catch a glimpse of a smutty book cover.
At least, that's the idea behind this article. I doubt that it is all that common of a concern.
Okay, genius, how are you going to separate out the invisible pink unicorns from the equally numerous invisible turquoise hippocampi? Hippocampi make grinding impossible, and every method we have devised for IPU/ITH separation requires ten times the energy we can extract from pink hydro.
Not only are the targets easy to pick out, they should be easy for a computer to pick out. A half way clever programmer will be able to create an automatically updating map of valuable targets.
Open game worlds are overrated. There has been an ongoing trend towards every game moving from closed areas and scripted events toward wide-open spaces. "Open environment" is a feature added to any game in order to make it more modern and easy to sell. But adding that feature doesn't necessarily lead to a better game.
Open worlds were fascinating at first because they were new and full of possibilities. The game levels became vast playgrounds to explore. There was an undeniable appeal to running around in GTA III for the first time and just firing rockets in various directions to see what would happen.
However, the novelty of this is wearing off. There's only so much of interest to do in these open spaces. My real life town is a big open space, but that doesn't mean I wander around the various streets with my mouth agape. I'm finding that I spend too much time in these open world games getting to the interesting bits, rather than moving directly from one interesting challenge to the next.
I want scripted events. I want a game to be well written and entertaining, and for all the time I spend with it to feel satisfying. I'm hoping the pendulum will swing back towards careful design, even at the expense of openness.
I think it's funny that Adobe is taking so long to build this patch, since it seems like every freaking time I load up Adobe Reader, it wants to update itself.
Do I want to update Reader? Well, the current version reads PDFs, right? Why do I need a new version every week?
Baby, I feel so connected to you. Almost like we simultaneously (from the perspective of a fixed point midway between us) observed a set of photons with quantum properties amplified from the quantum properties of a single photon, that single photon being one of a pair of photons with linked quantum states, so that by observing the photons we caused their probabilities to collapse into a single observed state which was not predetermined but which was shared by both photons, a result which we later confirmed by comparing our observations using a conventional method of information sharing which propagated at less than the speed of light. Ya know, entangled. Don't you feel it?
There is actually a decent solution to all of this. Hulu needs to resell their streams.
Do the content providers care about a specific advertisement being shown with their shows? No. They care about getting 25 or 50 cents or however much money they receive each time someone watches their show.
They simply need to set up an API so that a trusted third party can instruct Hulu.com to play an episode for somebody. The third party is then billed an agreed amount, and it is up to the third party to recoup that expense. They might insert commercials between segments of the show, or charge the user for access. A German company could show Hulu content to people in Germany, interspersed with ads for German products, and Hulu wouldn't need to worry about all the details.
I'm also surprised that Hulu doesn't offer their own "Hulu premium" service which would allow people to choose to pay per stream rather than view ads. They could offer that globally to anyone with a valid credit card.
Slashdot Mirror
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it."
They're really skating around the weakness of their evidence. They are bound to be given the cold shoulder from the scientific community. They may need to cool their heels for a bit.
Who in the world is this LaCie external drive made for? It has 2 500GB drives included, which can be run as RAID 0 or RAID 1. For the $600 price tag, I could purchase 5-6 external 1TB drives.
These things are most likely being used to store music and videos. I almost feel bad for all the people who buy one of these, set it to RAID 0, and then cry in a year or two when one of the drives die and they lose their data. If they had used the money to purchase backup drives instead, they would be fine.
The only possible advantage is speed, but the speed just isn't needed except for special applications, in which case it would be better to simply build a computer.
Here's the craziest thing about the $600 price tag - I could build an entire new computer running Linux, with a software RAID setup and twice the storage, for less money.
Exactly. Music sharing has NOTHING to do with universities except that it often happens there. At most, the schools might take steps to educate students and discourage this behavior. They don't owe the record companies a thing.
This is especially heinous because college is already so expensive. We need to be looking for ways to make it more affordable to those who are looking to learn. This would increase tuition and distract schools from their mission of education.
Sony is right - the PS3 doesn't compete directly with the Wii. However, in bang for the buck it surpasses the 360.
New PS3 80GB = $400.
Wireless Networking = built in
Network Gaming = free
Blu-ray = included
----------------------
TOTAL = $400
Xbox 360 60GB = $300.
Xbox Wireless Adapter = $87
Network gaming = $78 (covers your first 26 months only.)
Cheapest Blu-ray player on Amazon = $175
----------------------
TOTAL = $640
For an extra $240, you get a system with a smaller drive and an inferior Blu-ray player, and that Blu-ray player can't be utilized by games.
Or course, you can get a playable 360 system for much less, if you don't care about any of those features. But chances are you care about at least some of them.
The PS3 costs more because it comes with more. If Sony could sell the Blu-ray player and wireless card as add-ons, and if they charged for "gold" level online membership, their base console would be just as cheap. But the ps3 is a better console for having all that built in.
Fascinating story. Can you tell us about other times that you put things into other things?
It's a LINUX system! I know this!
To be clear, they are not talking about blowin' up space junk with lasers. The laser will instead slow down small pieces of space debris so that their orbits deteriorate. (Blowing things up is the domain of the other Project Orion.)
This mechanism is called a laser broom, and there is a short entry about it on Wikipedia. I can't seem to find a more detailed, technical description of how this process works.
Ping Internet For Time on Slashdot?
He says that like it is a bad thing. We live in a world in which there is already more recorded music available than could be listened to in several lifetimes, with more being made every day. The costs of making it are continually dropping due to the abilities of PCs and home studios, and the cost of distribution is effectively zero thanks to the internet. The price should be dropping like a rock.
The cost of computing power has dropped immensely over the past couple of decades. It's not a tragedy that CPU producers can't make the same amount of money per unit of computing power as they did in 1988; in fact, it is an incredible boon to society.
Who would've thought, it figures...
I'll be impressed when you can just plug in any guitar, and the software can interpret what you're playing and if it's in sync. Games could have different rules - some would require strict following of written music, whereas others would allow room for interpretation and improvisation. The direct feedback from the software could really accelerate the process of learning to play.
Several third party Windows applications make use of common Microsoft APIs to display HTML content. Therefore, the HTML/Javascript/ActiveX/etc. code will always be on the system, along with the associated security problems.
The most that would ever be removed is the IE application, which just wraps a front end over the Windows libraries which do the heavy lifting. What is even gained by allowing this to be removed? Even those people who use other browsers exclusively will probably keep IE installed, just in case they need to use a site that is broken in their browser of choice.
It's not the privacy of one's buying history that is at issue. It's the privacy of a mom not sharing with the other parents just what she's reading while attending her daughter's soccer games.
The other mothers won't go stealing her credit card receipts from her mailbox, nor will they hack into her Amazon account. But they will try to catch a glimpse of a smutty book cover.
At least, that's the idea behind this article. I doubt that it is all that common of a concern.
Okay, genius, how are you going to separate out the invisible pink unicorns from the equally numerous invisible turquoise hippocampi? Hippocampi make grinding impossible, and every method we have devised for IPU/ITH separation requires ten times the energy we can extract from pink hydro.
It's time to stop living in a fantasy world, pal.
Not only are the targets easy to pick out, they should be easy for a computer to pick out. A half way clever programmer will be able to create an automatically updating map of valuable targets.
Open game worlds are overrated. There has been an ongoing trend towards every game moving from closed areas and scripted events toward wide-open spaces. "Open environment" is a feature added to any game in order to make it more modern and easy to sell. But adding that feature doesn't necessarily lead to a better game.
Open worlds were fascinating at first because they were new and full of possibilities. The game levels became vast playgrounds to explore. There was an undeniable appeal to running around in GTA III for the first time and just firing rockets in various directions to see what would happen.
However, the novelty of this is wearing off. There's only so much of interest to do in these open spaces. My real life town is a big open space, but that doesn't mean I wander around the various streets with my mouth agape. I'm finding that I spend too much time in these open world games getting to the interesting bits, rather than moving directly from one interesting challenge to the next.
I want scripted events. I want a game to be well written and entertaining, and for all the time I spend with it to feel satisfying. I'm hoping the pendulum will swing back towards careful design, even at the expense of openness.
It must be dwarf cows! Herds of tiny bovines roam Pluto's surface. It takes seven of them to make the galaxy's most expensive burger.
And in case you hadn't noticed, Slashdot is now available online!
I thought it was an odd way of saying that it was 4th.
I think it's funny that Adobe is taking so long to build this patch, since it seems like every freaking time I load up Adobe Reader, it wants to update itself.
Do I want to update Reader? Well, the current version reads PDFs, right? Why do I need a new version every week?
Baby, I feel so connected to you. Almost like we simultaneously (from the perspective of a fixed point midway between us) observed a set of photons with quantum properties amplified from the quantum properties of a single photon, that single photon being one of a pair of photons with linked quantum states, so that by observing the photons we caused their probabilities to collapse into a single observed state which was not predetermined but which was shared by both photons, a result which we later confirmed by comparing our observations using a conventional method of information sharing which propagated at less than the speed of light. Ya know, entangled. Don't you feel it?
Actually, I've heard of worse pickup lines.
Amazingly, they chose the second option. Those of us who understand why this is important should be applauding right now.
There is actually a decent solution to all of this. Hulu needs to resell their streams.
Do the content providers care about a specific advertisement being shown with their shows? No. They care about getting 25 or 50 cents or however much money they receive each time someone watches their show.
They simply need to set up an API so that a trusted third party can instruct Hulu.com to play an episode for somebody. The third party is then billed an agreed amount, and it is up to the third party to recoup that expense. They might insert commercials between segments of the show, or charge the user for access. A German company could show Hulu content to people in Germany, interspersed with ads for German products, and Hulu wouldn't need to worry about all the details.
I'm also surprised that Hulu doesn't offer their own "Hulu premium" service which would allow people to choose to pay per stream rather than view ads. They could offer that globally to anyone with a valid credit card.