Tell me this, what languages can you use to render content within a browser, on the client?
That I can think of off the top of my head? JavaScript, Flash, anything that compiles to Java bytecode (which is considerably more than "Java"), anything you can use to create Windows Forms controls (obviously, IE-only), and REBOL.
The author seems to equate dense with good, not an association I make
All other things being equal, I think dense -> good is pretty valid. The problem is that often, a programming language that allows a more dense expression does so at the expense of clarity, which becomes a problem for maintainability and debugging. (There may be other tradeoffs, as well.)
Sol is pretty small compared to the largest stars.
Yeah. But VV Cephei A that you point to, "one of the largest stars known", is either about 100 (by mass) or 1,600-1,900 (by diameter) times as big as the Sun. Given that, I think that reinforces the idea that stars 1,000 as big as the Sun are fairly described as "humungous".
Even if I believed that you actually had a friend who worked at EA Sports who actually told you that load of crap (as others have noted, it would be more convincing if your invented story actually referred to the right company as the source of the PS3 graphics card), I'd just assume they were just inventing excuses for the typically lame EA Sports launch titles, like the entire first year of PS2 titles they made.
Saying no one will ever use all the power it has doesn't mean that different games won't use all of its capacity in any single dimension, such that all of its capacities will be used, just not all of them simultaneously.
Of course, at launch, consoles are often rather underutilized (a lot of the earlier PS2 titles were generally worse in terms of gameplay than PS1 versions of the same titles, but took a little advantage of the PS2 to get better graphics—this was, as I recall, particularly true of the first year of EA Sports games.) And, over time, the console gets more fully utilized as developers get more experience with it.
(Which is one reason why being first to market is important in consoles that are similar technologically, because having developers more familiar with making games on your console gives you better games with less innate power: OTOH, its an edge that tends to fade fairly rapidly with time.)
Since when is a star of 1000 times the mass of the Sun a humungous star?
Since, well, forever.
The Sun is a pretty small star compared to others...
No, while its true that the sun is a main sequence or "dwarf" star, so are almost all stars (subgiants and bigger stars are extremely rare), and the Sun is bigger than the red dwarfs that are the vast majority of all stars; the sun is above average, not "pretty small".
If you look at the "known universe," it appears that we are in the exact middle, dead center, of the known universe.
Which is, in a closed universe model, simply because we are in the exact center of the universe, in that there is as much universe on any "side" of us as on the exact opposite "side"—not, it should be noted, that we are in any way special in that, the same thing holds at every point in the universe; for a very simple, one-dimensional analog, consider the space defined by the set of points on a circle, for any point you choose, the distance you travel before coming back to your starting point is the same in either direction, no matter what point you start at, so all points are the center. (Or, alternatively, as there are no edges, they is no "real" center.)
While that is good as it will bring OLPC users a browser, what good is it for Opera? It's not like OLPC is a potential market, or will become one in near future.
If they become ubiquitous, compatible but more powerful machines for business, government, and industry (as well as private purchase) will be a market in the countries in which they are ubiquitous, as will software for such machines.
For that matter, so will OLPC software; both governments and the individual owners (not every schoolchild in the developing world is poor) will be interested in software for the OLPC once they are in place.
If 200dpi is so good, how come regular LCD monitors are *not* 200 dpi, when a 100 USD *entire laptop* can have such a screen?
Because "regular LCD monitors" don't have a special, black-and-white, high-resolution mode designed for use as an e-book reader under a wide variety of conditions with a small screen, instead being optimized for bright, vivid color use, and dealing with readability by making bigger screens.
Yeah, but you can't dim compact fluorescent and they look awful.
The best looking light (in terms of the light it puts out) I've ever owned is a full-spectrum flourescent desk lamp I bought at a craft store, that has all the usual benefits (in terms of low power consumption : output, long tube life) of flourescent bulbs over incadescent bulbs. It was expensive, which is why most CFLs aren't the same, but IMO most CFLs are about as good as avage incadescents (halogens last longer and look better than normal incadescents without saving energy, and nice-looking incadescents are available at premium prices, but still are short-lived.)
I'd guess that dimmed incandescents use about the same energy as full powered fluorescents.
If you want dim lighting you can just use lower-output or fewer flourescents; whatever illumination level you want, flourescents will provide at lower power use than incadescents, and last longer doing it.
Of course MS wants to emphasize gaming on their OS. Many people, myself included, would never touch Windows again if it weren't for the games... But I find this stupid: "To earn the GFW brand, a title must comply with certain Microsoft-tested specifications, including... compatibility with the Xbox 360 controller."
Um, why? That's just plain stupid. While, certainly, console-style controllers including the (IMO, poor among the console options) Xbox 360 controller, are perhaps good for some kinds of games, there are plenty of games that they are anywhere from less than ideal to downright bad for.
Not necessarily. Stores are also a business, and if the minority product's vendor can subsidize its losses in one division with excessive profits in another, the store might be persueded to add extra emphesis to a non-leading product that its vendor hopes will one day become one.
Sure, if the vendor gives them the choice of carrying both or neither. Of course, in many cases that could violate the law, particularly if the "leading" product was a monopoly product.
But without that kind of condition, they'll just sell the profitable product and not sell the space-wasting one, and make more money than if they looked at the lemon as "subsidized" by the star product just because they came from the same vendor.
What I don't get about that feature is, why is DRM even being included in the first place?
Probably because the content providers demanded it, so that the iTMS wouldn't be an easier way for people to "steal" content than buying CDs.
The resulting CD has no DRM and may be ripped, encoded and be file shared like any other CD.
Making it no worse for the content owner than having sold a CD, which is the main way they would sell the content if it wasn't being sold through iTMS.
Oh, right, that's what killed off the old Soviet union. They ignored the theories of a long dead naturalist about the origin of life. Wow, to think that the rest of us have always incorrectly thought that it was the failure of a broken political system and the constant military pressure of the US that brought down the Soviets.
Er, the "failure of the broken political system" was a direct result of the fact that the political system was based on and promoted adherence to acceptable ideological dogma as the bases of policy, even where that dogma concerned matters of empirically verifiable fact and was contradicted by systematic investigation of fact.
Lysenkoism and the associated marginalization of Darwinism was a symptom of that problem.
Understanding what was broken about the system is important.
However, if you believe that the entire universe is only a few thousand years old, as many extreme Christians do, then you could make the case that biological evolutionary common descent implies that God didn't create the planet and the universe (although, in truth, the same could be said about pretty much any branch of natural science).
Er, no, you couldn't.
You could claim that evolutionary common descent implies that God didn't create the planet and universe in the manner you believe he did. Which isn't the same thing.
No, as a Christian, you believe that God created man. There is a difference.
Belief does not imply knowledge (read up on discourses on epistemology etc).
If you read up on discourses on epistemology, you will find a lack of consensus, because there is ongoing dispute about what it means to "know" something and what it means to have a belief that is "justified" (and, additionally, whether the two mean the same thing, whether one requires the other, etc.)
Most will agree that belief does not imply knowledge, but that doesn't negate the claim to knowledge you reject. What you really are saying, it seems to me, is that you don't believe the thing he claims to know is a belief that is justified or justifiable under your personal set of beliefs about epistemology.
Faith and intelligence are in no way mutually exclusive.
That is arguable. Faith and facts, however, are mutually exclusive, unless substantiated with reproducible, empirical, scientific evidence.
You are confusing "facts" with "empiricism", here, it seems to me, and even there I'd disagree.
Faith is, in simplest form, the belief that a belief may be justified other either empiricially or by pure logic. It is not inconsitent with intelligence, nor is it inconsistent with "facts", nor is it inconsistent with empiricism except with the further and unnecessary belief that the kinds of beliefs that can be justified through faith overlap with the subjects that can be investigated empirically, and further the belief that in that case justification of belief through faith trumps empirical justification.
Only then is there a conflict with empiricism. Even then, its not a conflict with intelligence
I may believe in a purple dragon, however that does not imply that a purple dragon exists.
True, so far as it goes.
And moreover, as an intelligent man, it is my opinion that because of the lack of any reproducible, empirical, scientific evidence, the probability of the exitence of a purple dragon is minimal.
I'm not sure what intelligence has to do with your belief here, except perhaps to contradict it. I would suggest that an intelligent person would say that, judging from empirical facts alone, there is insufficient data to reach a conclusion on the probability of the existence of purple dragons somewhere in the universe.
Therefore, without sufficient evidence (despite the appearance of dragons in several pieces of literature), I would have to say that I do not particularly believe in a purple dragon, or more precisely that the existence of such a creature is highly improbable.
Again, I don't see any justification for any conclusion on probability; certainly, the assumption under empiricism would be, as purple dragons are unnecessary to explain any existing observations, that one presume they do not exist, but that does not mean it is highly improbable that they do exist, only that it is unnecessary to explain the observed universe so far.
You don't see people complaining that the laws of gravity are taught as fact at school.
Despite the fact that Newtonian gravitation, often taught as a fact particularly at lower grade levels, is not merely a "theory" but an outdated theory that has since been disproven but just happens to remain a useful close approximation of the modern theory under common conditions.
And to add the usual point...even if the GPL were somehow found invalid, it means you have NO license to distribute the software, and thus have not helped your case any!
You seem to think that a license can only be found completely valid or completely invalid by a court.
Technically, there is no such thing as a "subgenre."
Perhaps, but the rest of your post doesn't support that:
According to Carolyn Miller, one of the most influential founders of the North American school of genre theory, "genre" is defined as a patterned set of responses to a recurrent rhetorical situation ("Genre as Social Action" Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1984).
And...so? Leaving aside whether that's the best definition of genre to apply in this discussion, how does that rule out the existence of "subgenre"?
I've been hearing a lot about XNA lately, but I'm curious if the licensing only allows you to share your creations with other XNA developers.
I believe the licensing for the free version prohibits you from distributing Xbox-targetted binary code at all, you can only distribute source; therefore, the user must also use XNA.
PS3 Linux is aimed at competing with XNA as a game development system. PS3 Linux opens up the PS3 as a general-purpose computer. Saying that XNA is a better game development system than PS3 Linux is true, but kind of weird; like saying that PS3 Linux is a better choice than XNA if you want to use your console as a general purpose computer, or like saying that my Sony VAIO laptop is a better computer than my Chevy Aveo.
I suppose if PS3 Linux ever gets full hardware support, there might be an XNA-like toolkit delivered on top of PS3 Linux for game development that it makes sense to compare to XNA, but really it seems like MS, here, is just pulling an unrelated product with an entirely different purpose to compare.
Its about on the level of saying "Microsoft Excel better for making spreadsheets than Java is."
how are ISP's going to take to users maxing out their upload bandwidth 24/7 running commercial p2p clients?
Charge more of a premium for higher upload bandwidths, or cap total "free" upstream transfers with additional charges for usage beyond that.
Its hardly as if ISPs (many of which are also hosting providers) haven't already had to deal with the "some people use too much bandwidth if there are no consequences" problem already and solved it in other contexts where the solutions can be directly applied to this particular manifestation of the problem.
It needs to be remembered that government isn't the only, or the most flagrant, abuser of scientific research. Commercial firms are, if anything, worse (on the average).
Commercial exist to serve the financial interests of their owners; governments exist to serve the common interests of their people. There is, therefore, a substantial different between commercial firms misleading the public to promote some narrow private interest at the expense of the truth, and governments misleading the public to promote some narrow private interest at the expense of the truth.
No, what I'm pointing out is that the UCS tries to paint itself as simply that, a "union" of "concerned" scientists, when in fact they've had a Liberal Agenda since their very founding (in opposition to Ronald Reagan, and his Star Wars SDI proposals).
Plenty of non-liberal scientists were opposed to SDI because it was simply unworkable (Edward Teller, of course, being a notable exception.)
For them now, nearly 30 years later, to still be claiming any sort of objectivity is laughable.
UCS doesn't claim to be neutral and objective, they are overtly an advocacy group concerned about a particular range of issues that they identify up front.
OTOH, no one is offering UCS hostile characterization of the political leanings of another group as if they were fact.
And, anyhow, weren't the last, er, however many (as I stopped watching regularly, and soon after stopped watching at all, shortly after this occurred) seasons of Enterprise rather "post-9/11", with a big scary terror attack and Earth and aliens that were going to destroy Earth entirely with some real big Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Enterprise loaded up with special forces troops and set to go wipe out the terrorists, some torture thrown in, etc., etc.
Slashdot Mirror
That I can think of off the top of my head? JavaScript, Flash, anything that compiles to Java bytecode (which is considerably more than "Java"), anything you can use to create Windows Forms controls (obviously, IE-only), and REBOL.
I'm sure I'm missing a few.
All other things being equal, I think dense -> good is pretty valid. The problem is that often, a programming language that allows a more dense expression does so at the expense of clarity, which becomes a problem for maintainability and debugging. (There may be other tradeoffs, as well.)
Yeah. But VV Cephei A that you point to, "one of the largest stars known", is either about 100 (by mass) or 1,600-1,900 (by diameter) times as big as the Sun. Given that, I think that reinforces the idea that stars 1,000 as big as the Sun are fairly described as "humungous".
Even if I believed that you actually had a friend who worked at EA Sports who actually told you that load of crap (as others have noted, it would be more convincing if your invented story actually referred to the right company as the source of the PS3 graphics card), I'd just assume they were just inventing excuses for the typically lame EA Sports launch titles, like the entire first year of PS2 titles they made.
Saying no one will ever use all the power it has doesn't mean that different games won't use all of its capacity in any single dimension, such that all of its capacities will be used, just not all of them simultaneously.
Of course, at launch, consoles are often rather underutilized (a lot of the earlier PS2 titles were generally worse in terms of gameplay than PS1 versions of the same titles, but took a little advantage of the PS2 to get better graphics—this was, as I recall, particularly true of the first year of EA Sports games.) And, over time, the console gets more fully utilized as developers get more experience with it.
(Which is one reason why being first to market is important in consoles that are similar technologically, because having developers more familiar with making games on your console gives you better games with less innate power: OTOH, its an edge that tends to fade fairly rapidly with time.)
Since, well, forever.
No, while its true that the sun is a main sequence or "dwarf" star, so are almost all stars (subgiants and bigger stars are extremely rare), and the Sun is bigger than the red dwarfs that are the vast majority of all stars; the sun is above average, not "pretty small".
Which is, in a closed universe model, simply because we are in the exact center of the universe, in that there is as much universe on any "side" of us as on the exact opposite "side"—not, it should be noted, that we are in any way special in that, the same thing holds at every point in the universe; for a very simple, one-dimensional analog, consider the space defined by the set of points on a circle, for any point you choose, the distance you travel before coming back to your starting point is the same in either direction, no matter what point you start at, so all points are the center. (Or, alternatively, as there are no edges, they is no "real" center.)
If they become ubiquitous, compatible but more powerful machines for business, government, and industry (as well as private purchase) will be a market in the countries in which they are ubiquitous, as will software for such machines.
For that matter, so will OLPC software; both governments and the individual owners (not every schoolchild in the developing world is poor) will be interested in software for the OLPC once they are in place.
Because "regular LCD monitors" don't have a special, black-and-white, high-resolution mode designed for use as an e-book reader under a wide variety of conditions with a small screen, instead being optimized for bright, vivid color use, and dealing with readability by making bigger screens.
The best looking light (in terms of the light it puts out) I've ever owned is a full-spectrum flourescent desk lamp I bought at a craft store, that has all the usual benefits (in terms of low power consumption : output, long tube life) of flourescent bulbs over incadescent bulbs. It was expensive, which is why most CFLs aren't the same, but IMO most CFLs are about as good as avage incadescents (halogens last longer and look better than normal incadescents without saving energy, and nice-looking incadescents are available at premium prices, but still are short-lived.)
If you want dim lighting you can just use lower-output or fewer flourescents; whatever illumination level you want, flourescents will provide at lower power use than incadescents, and last longer doing it.
Um, why? That's just plain stupid. While, certainly, console-style controllers including the (IMO, poor among the console options) Xbox 360 controller, are perhaps good for some kinds of games, there are plenty of games that they are anywhere from less than ideal to downright bad for.
Sure, if the vendor gives them the choice of carrying both or neither. Of course, in many cases that could violate the law, particularly if the "leading" product was a monopoly product.
But without that kind of condition, they'll just sell the profitable product and not sell the space-wasting one, and make more money than if they looked at the lemon as "subsidized" by the star product just because they came from the same vendor.
Probably because the content providers demanded it, so that the iTMS wouldn't be an easier way for people to "steal" content than buying CDs.
Making it no worse for the content owner than having sold a CD, which is the main way they would sell the content if it wasn't being sold through iTMS.
Er, the "failure of the broken political system" was a direct result of the fact that the political system was based on and promoted adherence to acceptable ideological dogma as the bases of policy, even where that dogma concerned matters of empirically verifiable fact and was contradicted by systematic investigation of fact.
Lysenkoism and the associated marginalization of Darwinism was a symptom of that problem.
Understanding what was broken about the system is important.
Er, no, you couldn't.
You could claim that evolutionary common descent implies that God didn't create the planet and universe in the manner you believe he did. Which isn't the same thing.
If you read up on discourses on epistemology, you will find a lack of consensus, because there is ongoing dispute about what it means to "know" something and what it means to have a belief that is "justified" (and, additionally, whether the two mean the same thing, whether one requires the other, etc.)
Most will agree that belief does not imply knowledge, but that doesn't negate the claim to knowledge you reject. What you really are saying, it seems to me, is that you don't believe the thing he claims to know is a belief that is justified or justifiable under your personal set of beliefs about epistemology.
Despite the fact that Newtonian gravitation, often taught as a fact particularly at lower grade levels, is not merely a "theory" but an outdated theory that has since been disproven but just happens to remain a useful close approximation of the modern theory under common conditions.
You seem to think that a license can only be found completely valid or completely invalid by a court.
That is not the case.
Perhaps, but the rest of your post doesn't support that:
And...so? Leaving aside whether that's the best definition of genre to apply in this discussion, how does that rule out the existence of "subgenre"?
I believe the licensing for the free version prohibits you from distributing Xbox-targetted binary code at all, you can only distribute source; therefore, the user must also use XNA.
PS3 Linux is aimed at competing with XNA as a game development system. PS3 Linux opens up the PS3 as a general-purpose computer. Saying that XNA is a better game development system than PS3 Linux is true, but kind of weird; like saying that PS3 Linux is a better choice than XNA if you want to use your console as a general purpose computer, or like saying that my Sony VAIO laptop is a better computer than my Chevy Aveo.
I suppose if PS3 Linux ever gets full hardware support, there might be an XNA-like toolkit delivered on top of PS3 Linux for game development that it makes sense to compare to XNA, but really it seems like MS, here, is just pulling an unrelated product with an entirely different purpose to compare.
Its about on the level of saying "Microsoft Excel better for making spreadsheets than Java is."
Charge more of a premium for higher upload bandwidths, or cap total "free" upstream transfers with additional charges for usage beyond that.
Its hardly as if ISPs (many of which are also hosting providers) haven't already had to deal with the "some people use too much bandwidth if there are no consequences" problem already and solved it in other contexts where the solutions can be directly applied to this particular manifestation of the problem.
Commercial exist to serve the financial interests of their owners; governments exist to serve the common interests of their people. There is, therefore, a substantial different between commercial firms misleading the public to promote some narrow private interest at the expense of the truth, and governments misleading the public to promote some narrow private interest at the expense of the truth.
Plenty of non-liberal scientists were opposed to SDI because it was simply unworkable (Edward Teller, of course, being a notable exception.)
UCS doesn't claim to be neutral and objective, they are overtly an advocacy group concerned about a particular range of issues that they identify up front.
OTOH, no one is offering UCS hostile characterization of the political leanings of another group as if they were fact.
And, anyhow, weren't the last, er, however many (as I stopped watching regularly, and soon after stopped watching at all, shortly after this occurred) seasons of Enterprise rather "post-9/11", with a big scary terror attack and Earth and aliens that were going to destroy Earth entirely with some real big Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Enterprise loaded up with special forces troops and set to go wipe out the terrorists, some torture thrown in, etc., etc.
That sure seemed to work out well...