I was assuming that the doomsayers getting all up in arms are right, and that this technology can be adapted to give useful images... But you're right, there is absolutely nothing to worry about. Though... A webcam embedded behind the LCD would be very cool, and eliminate the current problem of "I'm talking to you but I'm not looking at you".
Yes, but how many of you already have webcams attached to your desktops/laptops? How is this technology any different? Hard-wire a "on" LED to the optical sensors and you've got a foolproof protection. Some hacker turns your "camera" on? No sweat, the power LED lights up like a Christmas tree. Almost all webcams have it, and my MacBook Pro does also.
In my limited engineering experience, solving a complicated problem by inserting even more complicated machinery is generally a bad idea. You want something that "just works", which in mechanical-speak means that you use as few servos as possible. Keep in mind that such motors require complex control systems (heat, power drain) or large motors, or perhaps both.
As an undergrad engineer, I can see a problem with this idea. Older and wiser engineers feel free to correct me:)
The problem is that the amount of heat transfer you get from an angled panel is significantly less than one that is pointed almost perfectly at the heat source (aka sun). This is especially true considering that the panels would need to be angled steeply enough for dust to come off when small vibrations are applied (which, realistically, is all a piezoelectric vibrating thingamabob could do). So while your panels stay squeaky clean, your power output suffers. I've not done the math but it may be as bad as simply having dirty panels!
As an Asian, I came from a heavily "tracked" system of education. Let me tell you the results of years of tracking. Where I come from, students go through grades 1 through 3 in a non-tracked system based on your area of residence. At grade 4 you are placed into a strong (enriched) or weak track based upon your existing performance - this is strictly informal and largely based on the whim of the school. At grade 7 official examinations occur and you are tracked into a LARGE number of schools, representing a wide range of student capabilities. At grade 10 you are further examined (standardized across the nation) and tracked into another high school via the same system. After graduation in grade 12 you are tested again for university entrance.
Here's what the system has created: an extreme amount of competition between anybody who wants their child to get the best education possible. This competition is so fierce that anyone who does not invest significant time and money outside of class receiving supplementary education ("cram schools"), will fall behind and, even if perfectly intelligent and capable, get tracked into a mediocre or poor school. It's created a system where students study from 7am onwards till 10pm, many not even having the time to eat a proper meal (nutrition is poor in that country amongst children despite the fact that most are well off financially). The poor are immediately screwed, as they have no money to send the kids to cram school, and thus no matter how smart the kids are, they will never score quite as high as the kind-of smart kids who've been put through the gauntlet of after-school classes.
Not only that, the system has created schools that have no resources. Obviously our brightest have to be educated properly, so a disproportionate amount of resources and teaching talent is shifted towards the top-tier schools, leaving kids who scored poorly (on a single exam!) in the dust, with schools that range from mediocre to terrible, where they are nothing but glorified day-care centers.
The worst part is that for uneducated parents, the cycle perpetuates. They are the most likely to be working menial hard labor jobs, and are the least likely to afford all of this extra "optional" education. They also have less time to devote to their children's educations, since they are likely to be dual working parents. The system has no place for these people - there is nobody to ensure that the bright kids with absentee parents succeeds, and there is certainly no system in place to fund bright kids through these "optional" cram schools.
Let me also tell you not only the experience, but also the results. Extreme competition has whittled the curriculum down to the most basics: math, sciences, languages. Every one of the top-tier kids can do calculus by grade 10, and sciences and the written arts is certainly within their repertoire. But with an aggressive schedule of 7 to 10, there is no room for anything else. You create millions of drones, mindless people who have facts in their mind but no art, no aesthetic, no creativity. You become a dead people, made up of millions of engineers (which, despite the Slashdot groupthink, really sucks) and scientists.
It's really quite jarring. When I go back, the most culturally rich areas are the less educated rural areas. The cities are bland, lifeless. People work, consume, and worry about putting their kids successfully through the same system that created them. The system has successfully stripped the word "fun" and "enjoyment" out of that entire society. There are art museums, but hardly anyone goes, since the appreciation has not been bred into them. The local cinema industry produces crappy, tasteless films made entirely of Family Guy-esque fart jokes, since the population doesn't have appreciation for any sort of humor or expression that doesn't slap 'em across the face.
The education system is what is destroying Asian culture above all else. It is also one of the major reasons my family got me out there while I was stil
The only part that bugged me was the journalist's asinine assertion that today's youth don't know about Tiananmen... that's absurd. You've got a Western camera pointed at them for something that will obviously be aired publicly somewhere, good luck having them say ANYTHING but the party line.
but their ideals are fairly noble, instead of just wanting to enrich themselves and screw over all their people in the process and send the country down the toilet.
I beg to differ. The Chinese leaders care about nothing other than power. It is only coincidental that an economically powerful China is advantageous to their power hungry quests. Such coincidence is never guaranteed to continue.
Not to mention that the prosperity of the China that most Westerners see (large cities like Beijing and Shanghai) are built on top of the increasing poverty of the rural areas. Poverty that is not being resolved, or leading to a resolution, at any point. This is something that the Chinese censorship has successfully blocked from general public perception the west, but the situation is much worse than they seem. Instead of the image of a prospering China built on rapid industrial growth, you actually have rampant poverty all over the place, little to no justice system in place, and worst of all, mini-revolutions happening every day all over the countryside. China projects an image of calming, dedicated industry steaming ahead at full steam, but in reality it's a runaway freight train that's in danger of exploding at any minute.
I suppose the better question now is... how do you sneak out of a secured building with a server? Stuff it down your pants? Or did they merely open the case and swipe the drive, in which case it's certainly do-able?
I don't know about Shenzhen or most of the rest of China, but where I came from in Asia the work day is 6 days a week, 8-10 hours a day. Overtime is paid at par (i.e. there is no bonus), but people love it anyway. Workers in these factory-cities don't have much of a life besides making money and sending most of it back home - so an opportunity to make even more cash with time they wouldn't spent doing diddly squat anyways seems appealing.
Some companies pay out mid-year bonuses based on company performance. This can sometimes be worth up to 4 months of normal wages. It's a cultural thing that simply doesn't exist in North America, and it's like a little Christmas in the middle of the fiscal year.
Hon Hai is known for paying above the regional average and maintaining safer than average working environments. A far cry from living in a comfortable bungalow in California, but it's certainly much better than the average treatment employees get in China.
EOL is inescapable. The problem with OSes is that it takes a fairly large amount of manpower to maintain it good working order. Between new applications tripping over unknown bugs, or simply fixing the massive list of known ones, it's a significant cost and resource expenditure for MS to continue supporting XP.
Almost all companies have EOL for their software. A company has a finite amount of resources, especially small ones, and after a few new versions you simply no longer have the manpower to maintain the oldest of releases. With most companies they just let it drop off the map, MS actually commits to a date (which in general is quite generous, compared to other companies' software).
I'm not criticising the US in any way, nor does the article. Should China be held accountable for the oppression of its people? By all means yes. It is a terrible tragedy what is happening to political and religious dissidents in that country, and as a Chinese I feel a great deal of empathy towards the people who endure that regime (which, thankfully, I'm out of).
So while criticism of China's policies should rightfully be directed at China, companies from any other country complicit in the government's crimes should also be held accountable for their actions. We need to send the message to corporations everywhere (USA or otherwise) that participating actively in an oppressive, totalitarian regime is unacceptable, and will result in real consequences from those countries that actually care about human rights.
If someone would compile a list of these companies, I will gladly stop using their products in boycott, but as this article reveals, some of these culprits are not who we would expect normally.
This has nothing to do with America, this has everything to do with businessmen who legimitize the oppression of 1.3 billion people to make a quick buck. They disgust me, and IMHO they should be punished for such an inhuman lack of morality.
The world is not like Jurassic Park, retard. A single DNA sample, or even a crate full of samples, will never give enough genetic diversity to successfully restore the species. And given that we can't keep these guys in captivity without them dying on us... what, pray tell, would be the point in preserving this species, when they absolutely cannot survive in the present condition of the wilderness? So we can clone a bunch of them, stick them in aquariums, subject them to cruelly short lifespans, just so we can feel a bit better about ourselves for preserving a species from extinction, even though no more can be found in the wild (which, IMHO, *is* extinction)?
It's not America's fault, it's the American company's fault. I think you're being a bit oversensitive - that sentence doesn't bash America, it raises alarm that our corporate community is knee-deep in China's systematic oppression of their people.
Yeah, the oppression will continue regardless of American companies' involvement, but that doesn't justify being involved.
There are similarities between China and America of the 50s, but they're not as analogous as you might think.
America in the 50s was in an economic boom like never seen before, but for the most part its population was already relatively prosperous. Education, shelter, food, and medicine were generally available, which is a far cry from China in the present (or worse, in the past).
China has a ludicrous number of people who still do not have access to food, medicine, and shelter. There are still villages starving to death left, right, and center. In this environment the impetus to improve economically (which really is the only way to more food, shelter, and medicine) is much stronger than merely to improve an already acceptable life.
I too question the usefulness of the Three Gorges Dam, and I also believe that not enough was done to minimize the environmental and archaeological impact of its construction. That being said, the dam notwithstanding, much of what China has done to destroy its environment was a toss-up between pulling villages out of starvation vs. preserving a forest. In those cases the choice is rather obvious.
Slightest of attention. Pray tell, Mr. Marine Biologist, what would it have honestly taken for the Chinese to preserve this species?
Obviously much effort was expended trying to breed the baiji in captivity, none of which to any success. So... Considering that the animals could not be bred in captivity and thus restored somewhat, the only way is to protect them in their environments. So... What does that mean? Denying (or at least greatly reducing) ship traffic along the Yangtze? Banning of all net fishing in the river?
In an ideal world it would have been possible to save the baiji at a minimal economic cost to the nation. But that is not the way it was.
My grandchildren will have a far lesser chance of dying at childbirth, far better health throughout their lifetimes, and they will not starve. Indeed, they will have opportunities to excel and make a better life for themselves and their grandchildren. They will live in warm houses, instead of freezing under a corrugated aluminum shack. My grandchildren will regret that certain issues had to be sidelined in the name of progress, but they will not question the value of this progress.
Hi. Chinese guy here. And yeah, you are being patronizing.
It's true that the baiji are somewhat significant in Chinese culture, but to the point you seem to think it is. Personally nobody I knew ever thought about them, or indeed were aware of them outside of field trips to some science museum. The whole "ancestors placed importance in baiji" and "Chinese venerate ancestors" is just one big non-sequitor I'm not even going to touch.
Keep in mind that the significance of the river dolphins was limited to an isolated geographical region, where the vast majority of Chinese did *not* reside. Maybe there are people living on the banks of the yangtze mourning their loss, but for the other 99.99% of Chinese people out there, things haven't changed a bit.
Now... Regarding your previous comment. While it's certainly unfortunate and sad that the baiji have been killed off due to human actions, in the end who is responsible? Want to dig Mao out of the ground and put him on trial for instituting the Great Leap Forward that encouraged such reckless killings? Good luck with that. In the end, commercial fisheries, massively increased boat traffic, and the construction of the Three Gorges Dam were primary contributors to the extinction of these dolphins. IMHO all of these have been critical to raising the standard of living and quality of life for the Chinese people. I wish we could have both (human prosperity and ecological conservation), and perhaps we could have under more effective leadership or more resources, but those were the cards we were dealt.
What would a serious conservation effort require to preserve these creatures? Stop using the Yangtze as an industry shipping lane? Spew even more toxic gases into the atmosphere by constructing the huge number of fuel-burning power plants that the Three Gorges Dam could replace? Stop fishing the Yangtze and deny a critical food source for the local population? I hate to be so human-ist about everything, but between the survival of humans the the survival of a bunch of dolphins, it's pretty clear which I pick.
So now the baiji are (probably) all dead. What did we receive out of that deal? Millions of Chinese are now far more prosperous than they were before. Remote regions are no longer starving, and many now have access to proper food, shelter, and medicine. The situation in China, especially the rural areas, is not pretty, but for the most part it's a lot better than it was before.
Good sir, I'm afraid they already have. I'm currently enrolled in an engineering program at Canada's most prestigious engineering school. Of the 43 courses required for graduation, 41 of them are engineering courses. I have only 2 non-engineering electives. We take absolutely no English, nor history, nor art. I have taken interesting courses on my own time, on top of my already heavy load, and I've paid the price in terms of a lowered average (good thing I don't plan on going to grad school).
I find this to be a sad situation. I feel like in order to become an engineer I've been asked to sacrifice my humanity. What is even sadder is how many of my peers have made the trade and never looked back. The majority of my peers have, over the years of being in this degree program, been reduced to mere shells of people. The only thing that many of them live for is the holy grail of huge engineering paycheques. I'm not sure what they would do when they find out that it doesn't exist for that many people.
There's a reason engineers around America (and possibly abroad also) are known for hard partying and hard drinking - it's the only thing left for them. By the end of their degrees they're lucky to know basic world events, much less discuss philosophical and artistic topics in any real seriousness. Some of our country's most talented, capable people graduate from universities, and are probably the worst rounded people in the country.
Now that made your whole stupid little fanboy tantrum worth my day. Can't wait for the certain someone who is, ahem, intimately involved with KZ dev to read that bit o tech insight!
There are very few real differences left between engines, graphically speaking. In the end you've got endless oodles of parallax maps, specular maps, diffuse maps, and all that nonsense. These tools are available to anyone, and they are everywhere. In the end the deciding factor between a game looking damned sexy vs. load of crap comes down to target hardware and artistic talent.
There are some interesting and exciting ideas floating about, but as far as I know none of the truly impressive ones have made it into a production game that's been announced yet. In the end the line drawn between different engines are almost entirely dependent on lighting technique, and the vast majority of games simply use the standard set by Doom 3 (aka parallax/normal maps, direct lighting, with hacky ways to predict an ambient value which Doom 3 sorely lacked). GOW (and by extension UE3) uses a very interesting hybrid precomputed radiosity + dynamic lighting solution that is akin to the method used in HL2, though avoids some of the larger mistakes Valve made with their implementation. It looks great, and it is probably the state of the art for lighting technology at this point.
The next step in the holy grail of graphics will be real-time radiosity and global illumination. We're not there yet. I've seen some interesting papers on the subject, but AFAIK neither Heavenly Sword nor Killzone 2 are going to be using that kind of tech. I don't know of any production game that has that type of tech rolled in. Indeed, I don't know of any hardware that is capable of running that type of simulation at playable framerates!
In a roundabout way, what I'm saying is that in this shader age, the "graphical capabilities" of an engine are really measured with the shaders, and in that arena there are very few techniques being employed. Some devs make optimizations and changes that make their results look marginally better, but often times this is not a one-size-fits-all solution and will only look good with whatever it is they're working with, content-wise. This is the source of my "all engines are created equal" comment. The true difference between engines now come down to data organization - how large you can balloon your maps while remaining manageable, how good your netcode is (this varies greatly between engines, truly). As you can imagine, a lot of what sets each engine apart from another is incredibly niche, and that is also why I object to any labeling of any engine as inferior or superior. Those two terms are simply not valid for describing game engines. Depending on the effects you want to achieve, there are different engines that suit your needs. To evaluate engines graphically, however, is foolish. Often times my non-graphics-coding buddies would comment between two screenshots, claiming that one looks far better than another. In 99% of these cases what they're noticing is the quality of the art, not the capabilities of the code running underneath. I've taken incredibly "poor" looking engines and made them look on par with Quake 4 (which granted is no longer truly state of the art) within hours. Any engine that supports HLSL/GLSL in the end can look just like any other, and even fancy shadowing techniques are very homogeneous across the industry.
LOL! It's been seven fucking years and the stupid little fanboys are still trying to get the world to believe that bullshit.
Last I checked, the PS3 came out in 2006, and the existence of Cell in the machine was only known, what, a year before that? Unless you're a time traveler from the year 2012, check those numbers.
Not to mention that there is still no threading support in the PS3 SDK. All those SPUs are not much good on their own, and Sony's massively advertised throughput for the processor assumes peak efficiency in all SP
IMHO that's just wishful thinking. How strong are Chinese students in math? I'm one, and I consider myself quite strong mathematically, though most of my Asian peers are even more insane. Of course, I am probably *the* only critical thinker out of the bunch. It's entirely possible to create a bunch of math geniuses without risking exposure to democratic ideas.
Slightly off topic, but what I find most interesting about my Chinese peers is that they haven't been indoctrinated to worship Mao, or any such nonsense. Rather, they've been indoctrinated not to care. Most have a very mild contempt for Mao, and aren't writing rave reviews about their government, but at the same time they fail to see what the fuss is about with democracy, freedom of the press/religion, etc, having been totally trained to believe that politics simply aren't important in a proper person's life. I find it altogether much scarier than a bunch of Mao worshippers, and infinitely more depressing.
they would get laughed at if anyone was insane enough to try when games like Killzone 2, Heavenly Sword, Ratchet and Clank, and so on are there to have to compete with
And why is that? Because Unreal Engine 3 runs inferior technology compared to those games? Go get a clue, or better yet, go get a job working with graphics engines all day and you will realize that *all* of the above games use practically the same technology, with only slight variations. Everyone's got parallax mapping and cubic shadowmapping, etc etc. Some have slightly smarter implementations, but overall UE3 has it nailed down pretty well. There's really nothing that's seen in the Killzone trailer that can't be realistically done on UE3.
nightmare of doing 360 development
Yes, because strong support, an extremely complete documentation set, the availability of an industry-standard API (DirectX), as well as the availability of a common OS API (Windows) is such a nightmare? If anything I've heard that PS3 development is a nightmare. The Cell is a beast that requires a ludicrous level of low-level assembly just to get working, much less high level code for you to run your game.
Of all the things to complain about Halo... the controls? Halo was the first console shooter to implement anything even close to the oh-so-sweet WADS+mouse interface used in PC shooters. PC gamers complain about the lack of precision aiming, which is true, though saying that Goldeneye is better is just a plain lie. The "aim mode" in Goldeneye required the user to stop moving, be a sitting duck, while the ever-finicky N64 analog stick chased a moving target around the screen. Not much better, really.
As for controls being confusing... How? Left stick to move (WADS), right stick to look (mouse), pull the trigger to shoot (mouse click), pull the other one to toss grenade (right click)... A one-size-fits-all X button for actions in the game world... It's still in fact the standard control layout for console shooters!
I am in no way attempting to say that America is as bad as many other countries in their worst human rights violations. That is simply not true. What I am trying to say is that all of the issues you've described have cultural origins, and are being perpetuated for political and cultural reasons, and religion is merely a scapegoat. All of the above occur in secular nations, as well as religious ones.
In a nutshell, while I agree that many Muslim states suffer from your mentioned problems, I disagree fundamentally in your attempt to blame it on sharia or Islam as a religion. Blame the power-hungry and corrupt clerics who have perpetuated this false and violent version of Islam, don't blame the religion itself.
I encourage you to speak with members of your local mosque, serious Muslims who make it part of their lives. I did, and the version of Islam that I got is a far cry from the hardcore fundamentalist trash that's being paraded about on US television as examples of "Islam". After you do this you will realize that the most egregious violations of human rights occur for power, or money, or both, not because the violator actually believes in it.
While some (read: a couple) of the things you've listed are problems that the Muslim community faces, let's take this in perspective:
Freedom of Speech: China has an even worse problem with it, and they are decided a non-religious country. Heck, by definition through Marxism they are all atheists!
Homophobia: And this isn't a huge issue in America? I'm not sure what's worse, the systematic oppression of gay people through religious laws, or the American way: calling everyone a faggot and enforcing the image that "gay = bad". One has a bunch of kooky religious leaders oppressing the people, the other has the people themselves oppressing each other. Hmm.
Religious Law: Yes... and gay marriage is banned in almost all the US states because of UNreligious law? Give me a break.
Repressed View of Sexuality: Yes... Because we know secular, democratic governments are so good at encouraging a balanced view of sexuality. After all, NOBODY here overreacted to Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, and the Hot Coffee issue was SO maturely handled...
When are people going to realize that religion is not the source of the problem, but rather the excuse? Honor killings occur in many places with secular governments, genital mutilation (wait, circumcision?) tends to be a cultural meme that some use religion to justify, and there are many places in the world that lack women's rights that are not Muslim. These are cultural and political issues, religion has always simply been an excuse for those in power to justify what they do, or what others do, and you've bought into hook line and sinker.
Stop getting your world view from CNN, and go out to your local mosque. I'm not Muslim, I talked to local Muslims and their religious leaders, and in the end my impression is that they are not so unlike Christianity. The hardcore ramble on about following the Bible to the T, justifying hate crimes with Bible verses, etc etc. Most Christians are not so extreme, and neither are most Muslims.
Slashdot Mirror
I was assuming that the doomsayers getting all up in arms are right, and that this technology can be adapted to give useful images... But you're right, there is absolutely nothing to worry about. Though... A webcam embedded behind the LCD would be very cool, and eliminate the current problem of "I'm talking to you but I'm not looking at you".
Yes, but how many of you already have webcams attached to your desktops/laptops? How is this technology any different? Hard-wire a "on" LED to the optical sensors and you've got a foolproof protection. Some hacker turns your "camera" on? No sweat, the power LED lights up like a Christmas tree. Almost all webcams have it, and my MacBook Pro does also.
In my limited engineering experience, solving a complicated problem by inserting even more complicated machinery is generally a bad idea. You want something that "just works", which in mechanical-speak means that you use as few servos as possible. Keep in mind that such motors require complex control systems (heat, power drain) or large motors, or perhaps both.
As an undergrad engineer, I can see a problem with this idea. Older and wiser engineers feel free to correct me :)
The problem is that the amount of heat transfer you get from an angled panel is significantly less than one that is pointed almost perfectly at the heat source (aka sun). This is especially true considering that the panels would need to be angled steeply enough for dust to come off when small vibrations are applied (which, realistically, is all a piezoelectric vibrating thingamabob could do). So while your panels stay squeaky clean, your power output suffers. I've not done the math but it may be as bad as simply having dirty panels!
As an Asian, I came from a heavily "tracked" system of education. Let me tell you the results of years of tracking. Where I come from, students go through grades 1 through 3 in a non-tracked system based on your area of residence. At grade 4 you are placed into a strong (enriched) or weak track based upon your existing performance - this is strictly informal and largely based on the whim of the school. At grade 7 official examinations occur and you are tracked into a LARGE number of schools, representing a wide range of student capabilities. At grade 10 you are further examined (standardized across the nation) and tracked into another high school via the same system. After graduation in grade 12 you are tested again for university entrance.
Here's what the system has created: an extreme amount of competition between anybody who wants their child to get the best education possible. This competition is so fierce that anyone who does not invest significant time and money outside of class receiving supplementary education ("cram schools"), will fall behind and, even if perfectly intelligent and capable, get tracked into a mediocre or poor school. It's created a system where students study from 7am onwards till 10pm, many not even having the time to eat a proper meal (nutrition is poor in that country amongst children despite the fact that most are well off financially). The poor are immediately screwed, as they have no money to send the kids to cram school, and thus no matter how smart the kids are, they will never score quite as high as the kind-of smart kids who've been put through the gauntlet of after-school classes.
Not only that, the system has created schools that have no resources. Obviously our brightest have to be educated properly, so a disproportionate amount of resources and teaching talent is shifted towards the top-tier schools, leaving kids who scored poorly (on a single exam!) in the dust, with schools that range from mediocre to terrible, where they are nothing but glorified day-care centers.
The worst part is that for uneducated parents, the cycle perpetuates. They are the most likely to be working menial hard labor jobs, and are the least likely to afford all of this extra "optional" education. They also have less time to devote to their children's educations, since they are likely to be dual working parents. The system has no place for these people - there is nobody to ensure that the bright kids with absentee parents succeeds, and there is certainly no system in place to fund bright kids through these "optional" cram schools.
Let me also tell you not only the experience, but also the results. Extreme competition has whittled the curriculum down to the most basics: math, sciences, languages. Every one of the top-tier kids can do calculus by grade 10, and sciences and the written arts is certainly within their repertoire. But with an aggressive schedule of 7 to 10, there is no room for anything else. You create millions of drones, mindless people who have facts in their mind but no art, no aesthetic, no creativity. You become a dead people, made up of millions of engineers (which, despite the Slashdot groupthink, really sucks) and scientists.
It's really quite jarring. When I go back, the most culturally rich areas are the less educated rural areas. The cities are bland, lifeless. People work, consume, and worry about putting their kids successfully through the same system that created them. The system has successfully stripped the word "fun" and "enjoyment" out of that entire society. There are art museums, but hardly anyone goes, since the appreciation has not been bred into them. The local cinema industry produces crappy, tasteless films made entirely of Family Guy-esque fart jokes, since the population doesn't have appreciation for any sort of humor or expression that doesn't slap 'em across the face.
The education system is what is destroying Asian culture above all else. It is also one of the major reasons my family got me out there while I was stil
I found this to be a good documentary on the subject overall:
Here
The only part that bugged me was the journalist's asinine assertion that today's youth don't know about Tiananmen... that's absurd. You've got a Western camera pointed at them for something that will obviously be aired publicly somewhere, good luck having them say ANYTHING but the party line.
I beg to differ. The Chinese leaders care about nothing other than power. It is only coincidental that an economically powerful China is advantageous to their power hungry quests. Such coincidence is never guaranteed to continue.
Not to mention that the prosperity of the China that most Westerners see (large cities like Beijing and Shanghai) are built on top of the increasing poverty of the rural areas. Poverty that is not being resolved, or leading to a resolution, at any point. This is something that the Chinese censorship has successfully blocked from general public perception the west, but the situation is much worse than they seem. Instead of the image of a prospering China built on rapid industrial growth, you actually have rampant poverty all over the place, little to no justice system in place, and worst of all, mini-revolutions happening every day all over the countryside. China projects an image of calming, dedicated industry steaming ahead at full steam, but in reality it's a runaway freight train that's in danger of exploding at any minute.
I suppose the better question now is... how do you sneak out of a secured building with a server? Stuff it down your pants? Or did they merely open the case and swipe the drive, in which case it's certainly do-able?
I don't know about Shenzhen or most of the rest of China, but where I came from in Asia the work day is 6 days a week, 8-10 hours a day. Overtime is paid at par (i.e. there is no bonus), but people love it anyway. Workers in these factory-cities don't have much of a life besides making money and sending most of it back home - so an opportunity to make even more cash with time they wouldn't spent doing diddly squat anyways seems appealing.
Some companies pay out mid-year bonuses based on company performance. This can sometimes be worth up to 4 months of normal wages. It's a cultural thing that simply doesn't exist in North America, and it's like a little Christmas in the middle of the fiscal year.
Hon Hai is known for paying above the regional average and maintaining safer than average working environments. A far cry from living in a comfortable bungalow in California, but it's certainly much better than the average treatment employees get in China.
EOL is inescapable. The problem with OSes is that it takes a fairly large amount of manpower to maintain it good working order. Between new applications tripping over unknown bugs, or simply fixing the massive list of known ones, it's a significant cost and resource expenditure for MS to continue supporting XP.
Almost all companies have EOL for their software. A company has a finite amount of resources, especially small ones, and after a few new versions you simply no longer have the manpower to maintain the oldest of releases. With most companies they just let it drop off the map, MS actually commits to a date (which in general is quite generous, compared to other companies' software).
I'm not criticising the US in any way, nor does the article. Should China be held accountable for the oppression of its people? By all means yes. It is a terrible tragedy what is happening to political and religious dissidents in that country, and as a Chinese I feel a great deal of empathy towards the people who endure that regime (which, thankfully, I'm out of).
So while criticism of China's policies should rightfully be directed at China, companies from any other country complicit in the government's crimes should also be held accountable for their actions. We need to send the message to corporations everywhere (USA or otherwise) that participating actively in an oppressive, totalitarian regime is unacceptable, and will result in real consequences from those countries that actually care about human rights.
If someone would compile a list of these companies, I will gladly stop using their products in boycott, but as this article reveals, some of these culprits are not who we would expect normally.
This has nothing to do with America, this has everything to do with businessmen who legimitize the oppression of 1.3 billion people to make a quick buck. They disgust me, and IMHO they should be punished for such an inhuman lack of morality.
The world is not like Jurassic Park, retard. A single DNA sample, or even a crate full of samples, will never give enough genetic diversity to successfully restore the species. And given that we can't keep these guys in captivity without them dying on us... what, pray tell, would be the point in preserving this species, when they absolutely cannot survive in the present condition of the wilderness? So we can clone a bunch of them, stick them in aquariums, subject them to cruelly short lifespans, just so we can feel a bit better about ourselves for preserving a species from extinction, even though no more can be found in the wild (which, IMHO, *is* extinction)?
It's not America's fault, it's the American company's fault. I think you're being a bit oversensitive - that sentence doesn't bash America, it raises alarm that our corporate community is knee-deep in China's systematic oppression of their people.
Yeah, the oppression will continue regardless of American companies' involvement, but that doesn't justify being involved.
There are similarities between China and America of the 50s, but they're not as analogous as you might think.
America in the 50s was in an economic boom like never seen before, but for the most part its population was already relatively prosperous. Education, shelter, food, and medicine were generally available, which is a far cry from China in the present (or worse, in the past).
China has a ludicrous number of people who still do not have access to food, medicine, and shelter. There are still villages starving to death left, right, and center. In this environment the impetus to improve economically (which really is the only way to more food, shelter, and medicine) is much stronger than merely to improve an already acceptable life.
I too question the usefulness of the Three Gorges Dam, and I also believe that not enough was done to minimize the environmental and archaeological impact of its construction. That being said, the dam notwithstanding, much of what China has done to destroy its environment was a toss-up between pulling villages out of starvation vs. preserving a forest. In those cases the choice is rather obvious.
Slightest of attention. Pray tell, Mr. Marine Biologist, what would it have honestly taken for the Chinese to preserve this species?
Obviously much effort was expended trying to breed the baiji in captivity, none of which to any success. So... Considering that the animals could not be bred in captivity and thus restored somewhat, the only way is to protect them in their environments. So... What does that mean? Denying (or at least greatly reducing) ship traffic along the Yangtze? Banning of all net fishing in the river?
In an ideal world it would have been possible to save the baiji at a minimal economic cost to the nation. But that is not the way it was.
My grandchildren will have a far lesser chance of dying at childbirth, far better health throughout their lifetimes, and they will not starve. Indeed, they will have opportunities to excel and make a better life for themselves and their grandchildren. They will live in warm houses, instead of freezing under a corrugated aluminum shack. My grandchildren will regret that certain issues had to be sidelined in the name of progress, but they will not question the value of this progress.
Hi. Chinese guy here. And yeah, you are being patronizing.
It's true that the baiji are somewhat significant in Chinese culture, but to the point you seem to think it is. Personally nobody I knew ever thought about them, or indeed were aware of them outside of field trips to some science museum. The whole "ancestors placed importance in baiji" and "Chinese venerate ancestors" is just one big non-sequitor I'm not even going to touch.
Keep in mind that the significance of the river dolphins was limited to an isolated geographical region, where the vast majority of Chinese did *not* reside. Maybe there are people living on the banks of the yangtze mourning their loss, but for the other 99.99% of Chinese people out there, things haven't changed a bit.
Now... Regarding your previous comment. While it's certainly unfortunate and sad that the baiji have been killed off due to human actions, in the end who is responsible? Want to dig Mao out of the ground and put him on trial for instituting the Great Leap Forward that encouraged such reckless killings? Good luck with that. In the end, commercial fisheries, massively increased boat traffic, and the construction of the Three Gorges Dam were primary contributors to the extinction of these dolphins. IMHO all of these have been critical to raising the standard of living and quality of life for the Chinese people. I wish we could have both (human prosperity and ecological conservation), and perhaps we could have under more effective leadership or more resources, but those were the cards we were dealt.
What would a serious conservation effort require to preserve these creatures? Stop using the Yangtze as an industry shipping lane? Spew even more toxic gases into the atmosphere by constructing the huge number of fuel-burning power plants that the Three Gorges Dam could replace? Stop fishing the Yangtze and deny a critical food source for the local population? I hate to be so human-ist about everything, but between the survival of humans the the survival of a bunch of dolphins, it's pretty clear which I pick.
So now the baiji are (probably) all dead. What did we receive out of that deal? Millions of Chinese are now far more prosperous than they were before. Remote regions are no longer starving, and many now have access to proper food, shelter, and medicine. The situation in China, especially the rural areas, is not pretty, but for the most part it's a lot better than it was before.
Good sir, I'm afraid they already have. I'm currently enrolled in an engineering program at Canada's most prestigious engineering school. Of the 43 courses required for graduation, 41 of them are engineering courses. I have only 2 non-engineering electives. We take absolutely no English, nor history, nor art. I have taken interesting courses on my own time, on top of my already heavy load, and I've paid the price in terms of a lowered average (good thing I don't plan on going to grad school).
I find this to be a sad situation. I feel like in order to become an engineer I've been asked to sacrifice my humanity. What is even sadder is how many of my peers have made the trade and never looked back. The majority of my peers have, over the years of being in this degree program, been reduced to mere shells of people. The only thing that many of them live for is the holy grail of huge engineering paycheques. I'm not sure what they would do when they find out that it doesn't exist for that many people.
There's a reason engineers around America (and possibly abroad also) are known for hard partying and hard drinking - it's the only thing left for them. By the end of their degrees they're lucky to know basic world events, much less discuss philosophical and artistic topics in any real seriousness. Some of our country's most talented, capable people graduate from universities, and are probably the worst rounded people in the country.
Now that made your whole stupid little fanboy tantrum worth my day. Can't wait for the certain someone who is, ahem, intimately involved with KZ dev to read that bit o tech insight!
There are very few real differences left between engines, graphically speaking. In the end you've got endless oodles of parallax maps, specular maps, diffuse maps, and all that nonsense. These tools are available to anyone, and they are everywhere. In the end the deciding factor between a game looking damned sexy vs. load of crap comes down to target hardware and artistic talent.
There are some interesting and exciting ideas floating about, but as far as I know none of the truly impressive ones have made it into a production game that's been announced yet. In the end the line drawn between different engines are almost entirely dependent on lighting technique, and the vast majority of games simply use the standard set by Doom 3 (aka parallax/normal maps, direct lighting, with hacky ways to predict an ambient value which Doom 3 sorely lacked). GOW (and by extension UE3) uses a very interesting hybrid precomputed radiosity + dynamic lighting solution that is akin to the method used in HL2, though avoids some of the larger mistakes Valve made with their implementation. It looks great, and it is probably the state of the art for lighting technology at this point.
The next step in the holy grail of graphics will be real-time radiosity and global illumination. We're not there yet. I've seen some interesting papers on the subject, but AFAIK neither Heavenly Sword nor Killzone 2 are going to be using that kind of tech. I don't know of any production game that has that type of tech rolled in. Indeed, I don't know of any hardware that is capable of running that type of simulation at playable framerates!
In a roundabout way, what I'm saying is that in this shader age, the "graphical capabilities" of an engine are really measured with the shaders, and in that arena there are very few techniques being employed. Some devs make optimizations and changes that make their results look marginally better, but often times this is not a one-size-fits-all solution and will only look good with whatever it is they're working with, content-wise. This is the source of my "all engines are created equal" comment. The true difference between engines now come down to data organization - how large you can balloon your maps while remaining manageable, how good your netcode is (this varies greatly between engines, truly). As you can imagine, a lot of what sets each engine apart from another is incredibly niche, and that is also why I object to any labeling of any engine as inferior or superior. Those two terms are simply not valid for describing game engines. Depending on the effects you want to achieve, there are different engines that suit your needs. To evaluate engines graphically, however, is foolish. Often times my non-graphics-coding buddies would comment between two screenshots, claiming that one looks far better than another. In 99% of these cases what they're noticing is the quality of the art, not the capabilities of the code running underneath. I've taken incredibly "poor" looking engines and made them look on par with Quake 4 (which granted is no longer truly state of the art) within hours. Any engine that supports HLSL/GLSL in the end can look just like any other, and even fancy shadowing techniques are very homogeneous across the industry.
LOL! It's been seven fucking years and the stupid little fanboys are still trying to get the world to believe that bullshit.
Last I checked, the PS3 came out in 2006, and the existence of Cell in the machine was only known, what, a year before that? Unless you're a time traveler from the year 2012, check those numbers.
Not to mention that there is still no threading support in the PS3 SDK. All those SPUs are not much good on their own, and Sony's massively advertised throughput for the processor assumes peak efficiency in all SP
IMHO that's just wishful thinking. How strong are Chinese students in math? I'm one, and I consider myself quite strong mathematically, though most of my Asian peers are even more insane. Of course, I am probably *the* only critical thinker out of the bunch. It's entirely possible to create a bunch of math geniuses without risking exposure to democratic ideas.
Slightly off topic, but what I find most interesting about my Chinese peers is that they haven't been indoctrinated to worship Mao, or any such nonsense. Rather, they've been indoctrinated not to care. Most have a very mild contempt for Mao, and aren't writing rave reviews about their government, but at the same time they fail to see what the fuss is about with democracy, freedom of the press/religion, etc, having been totally trained to believe that politics simply aren't important in a proper person's life. I find it altogether much scarier than a bunch of Mao worshippers, and infinitely more depressing.
Unreal Tournament 3
they would get laughed at if anyone was insane enough to try when games like Killzone 2, Heavenly Sword, Ratchet and Clank, and so on are there to have to compete withAnd why is that? Because Unreal Engine 3 runs inferior technology compared to those games? Go get a clue, or better yet, go get a job working with graphics engines all day and you will realize that *all* of the above games use practically the same technology, with only slight variations. Everyone's got parallax mapping and cubic shadowmapping, etc etc. Some have slightly smarter implementations, but overall UE3 has it nailed down pretty well. There's really nothing that's seen in the Killzone trailer that can't be realistically done on UE3.
nightmare of doing 360 developmentYes, because strong support, an extremely complete documentation set, the availability of an industry-standard API (DirectX), as well as the availability of a common OS API (Windows) is such a nightmare? If anything I've heard that PS3 development is a nightmare. The Cell is a beast that requires a ludicrous level of low-level assembly just to get working, much less high level code for you to run your game.
Of all the things to complain about Halo... the controls? Halo was the first console shooter to implement anything even close to the oh-so-sweet WADS+mouse interface used in PC shooters. PC gamers complain about the lack of precision aiming, which is true, though saying that Goldeneye is better is just a plain lie. The "aim mode" in Goldeneye required the user to stop moving, be a sitting duck, while the ever-finicky N64 analog stick chased a moving target around the screen. Not much better, really.
As for controls being confusing... How? Left stick to move (WADS), right stick to look (mouse), pull the trigger to shoot (mouse click), pull the other one to toss grenade (right click)... A one-size-fits-all X button for actions in the game world... It's still in fact the standard control layout for console shooters!
I am in no way attempting to say that America is as bad as many other countries in their worst human rights violations. That is simply not true. What I am trying to say is that all of the issues you've described have cultural origins, and are being perpetuated for political and cultural reasons, and religion is merely a scapegoat. All of the above occur in secular nations, as well as religious ones.
In a nutshell, while I agree that many Muslim states suffer from your mentioned problems, I disagree fundamentally in your attempt to blame it on sharia or Islam as a religion. Blame the power-hungry and corrupt clerics who have perpetuated this false and violent version of Islam, don't blame the religion itself.
I encourage you to speak with members of your local mosque, serious Muslims who make it part of their lives. I did, and the version of Islam that I got is a far cry from the hardcore fundamentalist trash that's being paraded about on US television as examples of "Islam". After you do this you will realize that the most egregious violations of human rights occur for power, or money, or both, not because the violator actually believes in it.
Damn, the first thing I thought when I read the title was "Does it come with SuperJesus?"
While some (read: a couple) of the things you've listed are problems that the Muslim community faces, let's take this in perspective:
Freedom of Speech: China has an even worse problem with it, and they are decided a non-religious country. Heck, by definition through Marxism they are all atheists!
Homophobia: And this isn't a huge issue in America? I'm not sure what's worse, the systematic oppression of gay people through religious laws, or the American way: calling everyone a faggot and enforcing the image that "gay = bad". One has a bunch of kooky religious leaders oppressing the people, the other has the people themselves oppressing each other. Hmm.
Religious Law: Yes... and gay marriage is banned in almost all the US states because of UNreligious law? Give me a break.
Repressed View of Sexuality: Yes... Because we know secular, democratic governments are so good at encouraging a balanced view of sexuality. After all, NOBODY here overreacted to Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, and the Hot Coffee issue was SO maturely handled...
When are people going to realize that religion is not the source of the problem, but rather the excuse? Honor killings occur in many places with secular governments, genital mutilation (wait, circumcision?) tends to be a cultural meme that some use religion to justify, and there are many places in the world that lack women's rights that are not Muslim. These are cultural and political issues, religion has always simply been an excuse for those in power to justify what they do, or what others do, and you've bought into hook line and sinker.
Stop getting your world view from CNN, and go out to your local mosque. I'm not Muslim, I talked to local Muslims and their religious leaders, and in the end my impression is that they are not so unlike Christianity. The hardcore ramble on about following the Bible to the T, justifying hate crimes with Bible verses, etc etc. Most Christians are not so extreme, and neither are most Muslims.