1983 In Australia, how do I know, I was five when it came out.
The Atari 2600 sold 30 million units over it's entire life span throughout the entire world, so not that many people. For comparison, Nintendo sold that many Wii's in it's first year and the 2600 was sold from 1977 to 1992.
Further more, on release it cost US$199. Add to that the AUD fetched US$0.70 in 83, that's $260 for the console. That would be if things were actually priced according to the exchange rate. The real cost of an Atari 2600 in Australia was $400 in 1983 dollars (cant be arsed figuring out inflation). Now the average wage in 1983 was around the $350-380 mark.
So armed with those facts, I can say not that many people over 35 grew up with consoles.
Gaming really made it's mark in the 90's with the NES/SNES and their inferior Sega counterparts (punk kids, think their console war is a new thing).
The thing we're facing now, is that gaming has gone from being a new innovation to an accepted part of life and this shows a huge generation gap between the under 35's who grew up with gaming and the over 35's who didn't. There may be some over 35's who gamed but the overwhelming majority didn't.
So nice way to over-generalise and pull facts out of your arse (generalise and arse spelled correctly for a discussion about Australia, thank you). You dont even have decent supposition to support your argument and yes, I did register your sample of 1, you are the anomaly, not the norm.
Why is there still political uproar over games after all these years? It may have been understandable in the mid-1990s when Doom and Mortal Kombat were portraying a level of violence people hadn't seen in games before in such detail, but that time has passed without effect.
Because people over 35 haven't played games as a kid. Now the people over 35 are called "parents" and parents are worth 2 votes per policy.
Hand out a $20 note for a vote on election day and they call it corruption. Hand out $100 p/w for having a crotchspawn and they call it a policy.
Don't you ever leave 10 minutes early to ensure you make an appointment on time? Is that also considered a "game"?
This, I've noticed airlines padding time for a while now... I used to think it was for statistical reasons (I.E. Look, we're 100% on time) but then I took one of my regular flights against a headwind. It really did take 1/2 an hour longer (on a 2 hour flight). Airlines plan for the worst of conditions and it is a good thing.
It seems difficult to make the case that the best thing for the Australian Government to do would be to enter the patent into the public domain.
As far as return on investment (ie Australian taxpayers money) goes licencing the product to the world seems a far better idea than giving it away and hoping for some tangential return in Australian tax revenue.
CSIRO != the government.
The Australian government has no hand in what CSIRO does. The money from this patent will go to fund further research at CSIRO's discretion, which is what CSIRO has done with many other patents.
Also, CISRO != Government.
CISRO is a self governing public entity. That means it's not government controlled. NASA would be like CISRO if you removed the political interference.
Australia already does this -- you have to clear immigration to leave. They make you fill out a card specifying who you are, if you're coming back, when, where you're staying overseas and so forth.
Having emigrated here from Canada, this got my freedom-deluded ire up at first, but I've since become used to it. It also prevents criminals from fleeing the country, so once again it comes down to that whole liberty vs security equation.
In a way, though, the US already has 'emigration' clearance itself -- since all flight passenger manifests must be cleared by the TSA, they could keep you from leaving if they wanted to.
That;s a very different case.
Australia requires you to declare to Australian Customs your next point of departure and the country where you will spend the most time abroad on the departure card, the departure card does not ask the date of your return. The article is about UK customs giving this data (and more) to the US authorities even though the travellers are not going to the US.
Australia currently does not do this, but you can rest assured the US will shoehorn it in on some lopsided trade agreement.
Yes. And it costs $9508 for the 17.6 TB version, that seems to be the most bang for the buck.
Meanwhile, a 15 TB NAS-storage-solution with HDDs cost $759. That's more than an order of magnitude less.
LoL,
Where do you get a 15 TB NAS for $800.
You could barely by 7 x 2 TB drives for that. a cheap and nasty 8 bay NAS would cost another $800. With enterprise gear, you pay for guaranteed compatibility, I've got a client who went out and bought a el-cheapo WD NAS for storage against our advice and then wonder why it doesn't work with VMWare or Backup Exec
Welcome back to reality. You're comparing a cheap home made solution to an enterprise class solution. How do you propose to take backups off site? Keep archival copies for the legally required 7 years? You'll need a lot of hard drives. With backups, they should be on different media so you can recover from previous media if that media becomes broken or corrupted.
Secondly, try getting data of a physically broken HDD. With tape it's easy. Tape can be subjected to worse conditions than HDD and still be readable.
You should really be comparing enterprise level tape drives to enterprise level disk storage solutions, an EMC AX4 costs around $20,000 for 4 TB. You could probably get DAS devices for less, a Dell server and 6 TB DAS would be about $10,000
Actually, most people who use tapes in an Enterprise environment use tape libraries that will shuffle the tapes around like a juke box.
This one holds 48 tapes. quote - "The TS3200, featuring Ultrium 5 tape drives, has a capacity of up to 72 TB native (144 TB with 2:1 compression)."
Tape libraries are great for backup, hard drives as good as they are, are still very fragile compared to tapes. You dont appreciate this until your boss runs over a backup tape taking them home, then you spool it onto a new cartridge and it still reads. As Murphy's law would have it, a user lost a file on the same day as the tape fell out of his bag:)
The big problem with tapes is that they are slower, so to get the 70 odd TB of data you need to back up in 24 hours or less you have to run a few tape drives.
That being said, I'd like an LTO tape drive for home backups but cant afford a drive.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press went this way last year. Unsurprisingly, participation in the comments has dropped to near zero.
I can see why companies do it - this saves them the trouble of moderation, as people moderate themselves when their real names are used and they conceivably could face real-life consequences for what they post. Is real-life intimidation really the best way to police comments? Certainly not if you want more participation...
I realistically cant see how this would work. It's not hard to create fake facebook accounts, say as Senior Alfred Kokonface to use for trolling.
I think the end result is as you said, comments will drop to zero which realistically will improve most Gawker blogs.
It's difficult to boycott Gawker. It's like boycotting punching yourself in the face. Sure, you can tell everyone loudly you're not going to do it, but on the other hand no one is likely to believe that it's a matter of principle.
How. I dont normally visit Gawker sites any more. I dropped off reading most Gawker sites after that horrific site redesign in Feb 11. Besides, you only need the login if you want to comment, so you can still read it and see content. Comments on most Gawker blogs are even worse then comments on Slashdot.
Since I don't own an iOS device (nor any other "mobile" device [since my laptop isn't mobile apparently]), can you or any other reader satisfy a curiosity of mine?
Obviously the jailbreaks use a number of vulnerable exploits to gain access; do they also board up the vulnerabilities when they're done? It seems to me that I would want to jailbreak on that basis alone if so, and refuse to use the platform if a known drive-by exploit is out in the wild otherwise.
I dont own any iDevices either, but I'd presume not. If anything they add new vulnerabilities such as an SSH server with a default password (Alpine2 IIRC)
There is no way to secure an OS from application exploits including of iOS style lockdown, which these very commenters would slag as "TAKING AWAY MY FREEEDOMZZZ". Sorry, but blaming Windows holes has become passe, especially after malware for OS X and Android(run on a Linux kernel which we are told is secure compared to Windows) has come out.
Fixed that for you.
Remember that IOS gets exploited regularly, including remote exploits like JailbreakMe.com.
The EB games at Broadway in Sydney actually had some real gamers on staff - at least for a while. I had a good chat with a guy there about where to buy retro games (PS1 and earlier stuff) and he seemed knowledgeable and interested.
Most stores just hire bog standard retail teens. They are more interested in getting the soccer mum through the door with her 6 whining kids.
BTW, when did the PS1 become retro? (blows into cartridge and shakes walking stick at youths)
Really, Between the hours of 3 PM and 11 PM the speed was unusable. That's if it would stay connected for more then 5 minutes. Telstra's Next G was reliable, faster and hand lower latency. I was glad when I moved and could get ADSL (11 months with Internode, not one problem).
I have several customers using Vivid as a last-line backup for their link
I have one customer using Vivid as a backup and what a nightmare that has been.
They push updates to the routers without telling anyone, the update breaks stuff. As I said above, it's unusable in the afternoon and frequently disconnects, Also, vivid has no support for IPSEC site-to-site VPN which has revealed just how useless the connection is. If a stores primary DSL link goes down, they have to stop doing business as they lose connection to the POS server over Vivid.
If any business is using Vivid, drop them like a brick.
Then again, Vivid take up in Perth is probably low
I live and work in Perth, if this is true I'd hate to see Vivid where take-up is high. Then again it was such a successful venture Channel 7 has sold it.
It may not be an issue for much longer, rumour has it Optus is going to shut down the WiMax network so they can use the 2.3 GHz freq for LTE.
GAME are also in Australia. They want A$80-100 per game (GBP 60-70 ish) I can order the same games from Zavvi for GBP 30. Same with EB games. A lot of Australian gamers have taken to importing games and I dont think it will be long before retailers like JBHiFi test the waters of direct import on games and movies (they already do it on cameras). But GAME and EB wont bother, they're locked into the old way of doing things with local distributors charging inflated prices and as a result are dying slowly.
GAME and EB Games will join the other retail dinosaurs like Harvey Norman in retail extinction.
So what was their solution? Become as souless and supermarket-like as possible. Cram in as many shelves as possible, with no aisle space, no demo machines, no nice displays
And staff it with people who know nothing about games.
EB games Australia have gone one step further and play annoying techno way too loud. If I do buy a game locally (I.E. I want it today and am willing to pay the premium) I'll generally walk down the street to the nearest JB, no music, easy to find stuff and slightly cheaper.
If I had a company that made the relevant toys, could I advertise them as "5G", or even "6G"?
Who decides what qualifies?
The ITU (International Telecommunications Union), but telco's have co-opted this to the point that the ITU has said, there will be no 5G.
The original ITU 4G specification was 100 Mbps fixed and 40 Mbps mobile, not even LTE can guarantee this, LTE Enhanced (Advanced, cant remember which) would have been the first but US telco's wanted to brand HSPA+ as 4G and the ITU capitulated.
Uh, it's US which runs on different bands to the rest of the world.
Europe and Asia are using Australia's bands.
While Telstra is the only one with a 4G network right now, Optus is launching one in a month and Vodafone is soon to follow.
Vivid Wireless has run a WiMax network in Australia for over a year. But realistically it's a joke. You get better speeds using Telstra's HSPA+ network.
This is true for the same reasons that a decade ago Mac OSX was considered more secure than Windows. Its a function of install base. As soon as Windows Phone has 100's of million of users exploits will be published.
You mean Linux itself isn't better security wise either, it's just that the (desktop) market share is so low?
You might have a point if Linux didn't have such a huge share of the Server market.
Slashdot Mirror
1983 In Australia, how do I know, I was five when it came out. The Atari 2600 sold 30 million units over it's entire life span throughout the entire world, so not that many people. For comparison, Nintendo sold that many Wii's in it's first year and the 2600 was sold from 1977 to 1992.
Further more, on release it cost US$199. Add to that the AUD fetched US$0.70 in 83, that's $260 for the console. That would be if things were actually priced according to the exchange rate. The real cost of an Atari 2600 in Australia was $400 in 1983 dollars (cant be arsed figuring out inflation). Now the average wage in 1983 was around the $350-380 mark.
So armed with those facts, I can say not that many people over 35 grew up with consoles.
Gaming really made it's mark in the 90's with the NES/SNES and their inferior Sega counterparts (punk kids, think their console war is a new thing).
The thing we're facing now, is that gaming has gone from being a new innovation to an accepted part of life and this shows a huge generation gap between the under 35's who grew up with gaming and the over 35's who didn't. There may be some over 35's who gamed but the overwhelming majority didn't. So nice way to over-generalise and pull facts out of your arse (generalise and arse spelled correctly for a discussion about Australia, thank you). You dont even have decent supposition to support your argument and yes, I did register your sample of 1, you are the anomaly, not the norm.
Glad you were able to figure that out.
And I'm not on your lawn, you're on my lawn you senile twat, now get off it.
Why is there still political uproar over games after all these years? It may have been understandable in the mid-1990s when Doom and Mortal Kombat were portraying a level of violence people hadn't seen in games before in such detail, but that time has passed without effect.
Because people over 35 haven't played games as a kid. Now the people over 35 are called "parents" and parents are worth 2 votes per policy.
Hand out a $20 note for a vote on election day and they call it corruption. Hand out $100 p/w for having a crotchspawn and they call it a policy.
Not exactly. It isn't known if any particular "girl" puts out. It IS know that your mom does.
Also, there is a very strong chance your dad is a mother fucker.
How's that a "game"? Sounds like good planning.
Don't you ever leave 10 minutes early to ensure you make an appointment on time? Is that also considered a "game"?
This, I've noticed airlines padding time for a while now... I used to think it was for statistical reasons (I.E. Look, we're 100% on time) but then I took one of my regular flights against a headwind. It really did take 1/2 an hour longer (on a 2 hour flight). Airlines plan for the worst of conditions and it is a good thing.
of April?
This may be true...
It's the 2nd of April here in Oz and it's been reported on ABC news
I dont think that even Ashton Kutcher is a big enough douchebag to do proper homage to Jobs.
It seems difficult to make the case that the best thing for the Australian Government to do would be to enter the patent into the public domain. As far as return on investment (ie Australian taxpayers money) goes licencing the product to the world seems a far better idea than giving it away and hoping for some tangential return in Australian tax revenue.
CSIRO != the government.
The Australian government has no hand in what CSIRO does. The money from this patent will go to fund further research at CSIRO's discretion, which is what CSIRO has done with many other patents.
Australia != US.
Also, CISRO != Government. CISRO is a self governing public entity. That means it's not government controlled. NASA would be like CISRO if you removed the political interference.
The people with the British accents are the bad guys.
Only because Hollywood keeps casting British actors as Germans.
Air travel is safe because of tremendous efforts exerted towards making the process safe.
That's really funny. Sad, but funny.
He mentioned the tremendous efforts, which isn't funny nor sad. What he didn't say was the American TSA was part of that effort.
Australia already does this -- you have to clear immigration to leave. They make you fill out a card specifying who you are, if you're coming back, when, where you're staying overseas and so forth.
Having emigrated here from Canada, this got my freedom-deluded ire up at first, but I've since become used to it. It also prevents criminals from fleeing the country, so once again it comes down to that whole liberty vs security equation.
In a way, though, the US already has 'emigration' clearance itself -- since all flight passenger manifests must be cleared by the TSA, they could keep you from leaving if they wanted to.
That;s a very different case.
Australia requires you to declare to Australian Customs your next point of departure and the country where you will spend the most time abroad on the departure card, the departure card does not ask the date of your return. The article is about UK customs giving this data (and more) to the US authorities even though the travellers are not going to the US.
Australia currently does not do this, but you can rest assured the US will shoehorn it in on some lopsided trade agreement.
Yes. And it costs $9508 for the 17.6 TB version, that seems to be the most bang for the buck.
Meanwhile, a 15 TB NAS-storage-solution with HDDs cost $759. That's more than an order of magnitude less.
LoL,
Where do you get a 15 TB NAS for $800.
You could barely by 7 x 2 TB drives for that. a cheap and nasty 8 bay NAS would cost another $800. With enterprise gear, you pay for guaranteed compatibility, I've got a client who went out and bought a el-cheapo WD NAS for storage against our advice and then wonder why it doesn't work with VMWare or Backup Exec
Welcome back to reality. You're comparing a cheap home made solution to an enterprise class solution. How do you propose to take backups off site? Keep archival copies for the legally required 7 years? You'll need a lot of hard drives. With backups, they should be on different media so you can recover from previous media if that media becomes broken or corrupted.
Secondly, try getting data of a physically broken HDD. With tape it's easy. Tape can be subjected to worse conditions than HDD and still be readable.
You should really be comparing enterprise level tape drives to enterprise level disk storage solutions, an EMC AX4 costs around $20,000 for 4 TB. You could probably get DAS devices for less, a Dell server and 6 TB DAS would be about $10,000
Actually, most people who use tapes in an Enterprise environment use tape libraries that will shuffle the tapes around like a juke box.
This one holds 48 tapes. quote - "The TS3200, featuring Ultrium 5 tape drives, has a capacity of up to 72 TB native (144 TB with 2:1 compression)."
Tape libraries are great for backup, hard drives as good as they are, are still very fragile compared to tapes. You dont appreciate this until your boss runs over a backup tape taking them home, then you spool it onto a new cartridge and it still reads. As Murphy's law would have it, a user lost a file on the same day as the tape fell out of his bag :)
The big problem with tapes is that they are slower, so to get the 70 odd TB of data you need to back up in 24 hours or less you have to run a few tape drives.
That being said, I'd like an LTO tape drive for home backups but cant afford a drive.
Yes. It's a kind of bread you can smoke.
I thought it was Italian-American for when you cant remember something.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press went this way last year. Unsurprisingly, participation in the comments has dropped to near zero.
I can see why companies do it - this saves them the trouble of moderation, as people moderate themselves when their real names are used and they conceivably could face real-life consequences for what they post. Is real-life intimidation really the best way to police comments? Certainly not if you want more participation...
I realistically cant see how this would work. It's not hard to create fake facebook accounts, say as Senior Alfred Kokonface to use for trolling.
I think the end result is as you said, comments will drop to zero which realistically will improve most Gawker blogs.
Signed,
A Kokonface.
It's difficult to boycott Gawker. It's like boycotting punching yourself in the face. Sure, you can tell everyone loudly you're not going to do it, but on the other hand no one is likely to believe that it's a matter of principle.
How. I dont normally visit Gawker sites any more. I dropped off reading most Gawker sites after that horrific site redesign in Feb 11. Besides, you only need the login if you want to comment, so you can still read it and see content. Comments on most Gawker blogs are even worse then comments on Slashdot.
Since I don't own an iOS device (nor any other "mobile" device [since my laptop isn't mobile apparently]), can you or any other reader satisfy a curiosity of mine?
Obviously the jailbreaks use a number of vulnerable exploits to gain access; do they also board up the vulnerabilities when they're done? It seems to me that I would want to jailbreak on that basis alone if so, and refuse to use the platform if a known drive-by exploit is out in the wild otherwise.
I dont own any iDevices either, but I'd presume not. If anything they add new vulnerabilities such as an SSH server with a default password (Alpine2 IIRC)
Scientists have also discovered these planets are cold outside and have no kind of atmosphere.
There is no way to secure an OS from application exploits including of iOS style lockdown, which these very commenters would slag as "TAKING AWAY MY FREEEDOMZZZ". Sorry, but blaming Windows holes has become passe, especially after malware for OS X and Android(run on a Linux kernel which we are told is secure compared to Windows) has come out.
Fixed that for you.
Remember that IOS gets exploited regularly, including remote exploits like JailbreakMe.com.
The EB games at Broadway in Sydney actually had some real gamers on staff - at least for a while. I had a good chat with a guy there about where to buy retro games (PS1 and earlier stuff) and he seemed knowledgeable and interested.
Most stores just hire bog standard retail teens. They are more interested in getting the soccer mum through the door with her 6 whining kids.
BTW, when did the PS1 become retro? (blows into cartridge and shakes walking stick at youths)
Really, Between the hours of 3 PM and 11 PM the speed was unusable. That's if it would stay connected for more then 5 minutes. Telstra's Next G was reliable, faster and hand lower latency. I was glad when I moved and could get ADSL (11 months with Internode, not one problem).
I have one customer using Vivid as a backup and what a nightmare that has been. They push updates to the routers without telling anyone, the update breaks stuff. As I said above, it's unusable in the afternoon and frequently disconnects, Also, vivid has no support for IPSEC site-to-site VPN which has revealed just how useless the connection is. If a stores primary DSL link goes down, they have to stop doing business as they lose connection to the POS server over Vivid.
If any business is using Vivid, drop them like a brick.
I live and work in Perth, if this is true I'd hate to see Vivid where take-up is high. Then again it was such a successful venture Channel 7 has sold it.
It may not be an issue for much longer, rumour has it Optus is going to shut down the WiMax network so they can use the 2.3 GHz freq for LTE.
GAME and EB Games will join the other retail dinosaurs like Harvey Norman in retail extinction.
And staff it with people who know nothing about games.
EB games Australia have gone one step further and play annoying techno way too loud. If I do buy a game locally (I.E. I want it today and am willing to pay the premium) I'll generally walk down the street to the nearest JB, no music, easy to find stuff and slightly cheaper.
If I had a company that made the relevant toys, could I advertise them as "5G", or even "6G"?
Who decides what qualifies?
The ITU (International Telecommunications Union), but telco's have co-opted this to the point that the ITU has said, there will be no 5G.
The original ITU 4G specification was 100 Mbps fixed and 40 Mbps mobile, not even LTE can guarantee this, LTE Enhanced (Advanced, cant remember which) would have been the first but US telco's wanted to brand HSPA+ as 4G and the ITU capitulated.
BTW, Ipads and Iphone dont even support HSPA+
Uh, it's US which runs on different bands to the rest of the world.
Europe and Asia are using Australia's bands.
While Telstra is the only one with a 4G network right now, Optus is launching one in a month and Vodafone is soon to follow.
Vivid Wireless has run a WiMax network in Australia for over a year. But realistically it's a joke. You get better speeds using Telstra's HSPA+ network.
This is true for the same reasons that a decade ago Mac OSX was considered more secure than Windows. Its a function of install base. As soon as Windows Phone has 100's of million of users exploits will be published.
You mean Linux itself isn't better security wise either, it's just that the (desktop) market share is so low?
You might have a point if Linux didn't have such a huge share of the Server market.
Back under your bridge.