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Comment Re:Makes you wonder... (Score 1) 187

I guess it targets the very specific group of people who'd burn a copy of the disk from a friend but wouldn't know how to download a torrent or use a crack.
Which is probably not very large these days.

And there's probably some sort of legal advantage to being able to claim they tried protecting it, DMCA and whatnot.

Comment Re:how about an objective view? (Score 2) 379

He can look at shaky videos some people shot on their phone of rocket flares in the distance and make all the assumptions he wants but if you look at the actual impacts, This is what an unintercepted impact looks like and This is what a piece of an intercepted rocket that landed a few hundred meters from my house looks like and the vast majority of impacts are of the latter variety.
Not that a hunk of metal falling on falling from the sky is nothing to sneeze at, but the shrapnel doesn't seem to have quite the penetrating power and if you're indoors you should be relatively safe.

Comment Yeah, well, that's just like, your opinion, man. (Score 2) 169

I'm not quite sure what the argument that's being made here is.
Games are an audio/visual medium that involves user interaction, there are many paths to take from that point and many of them may harken back to media that came before.
Some people may enjoy more the challenge of the mechanics, or the challenge of playing against other people, or art style, or the story, or the general ambiance.
So it seems to me that it's a rather limited way of thinking to try to make some sort of sweeping statement about what games should and shouldn't be.

Comment Asymmetry (Score 1) 393

I don't know why it's assumed that the universe started out with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, but assuming that it did, it still seems to have started out with some seed of asymmetry in the manner in which matter is distributed, as we see in the distribution of matter in the cosmos today.

So couldn't the asymmetry in amount of matter and antimatter arise from that?

For example, here's an idea I've had using my very limited understanding of such matters and I'd be happy if someone explained why I'm wrong.

I was wondering what would happen if a matter and an antimatter black holes collided, after reading a bit on the subject it seems that once the black hole is formed the information about what it was formed from is lost so they would be both just black holes and merge if they collided.

Now another aspect of black holes is Hawking Radiation which is supposed to produce radiation at the edge of the event horizon drawing on the mass of the black hole for energy.
So assuming the black hole doesn't retain the information about what formed it, the radiation would constitute photons and equal amounts of matter and antimatter by the random chance of which particle from the pair formed at the event horizon falls in and which escapes.

So then if a star formed from only matter or only antimatter (since a mix of both would fly apart) and collapsed into a black hole, and it was left to radiate Hawking radiation, wouldn't it essentially convert one type of matter into energy and equal amounts of matter and antimatter, violating the symmetry?

And if the universe happened to start out in such a distribution of matter and antimatter that there were slightly more denser regions of antimatter than matter, then a small violation of the symmetry would emerge, the rest of the matter and antimatter annihilate and there would remain a small remainder of matter.

Comment Re:WHY??? (Score 1) 73

I guess the developers on the Photoshop team are just running out of ideas for 2D image related features and management just lets them run with whatever silly ideas they come up with.

People sometimes want 3D text or preview the texture they're making for their model?
Sure, lets build 3D rendering engine into Photoshop and add support for 3D printing too!

People might want to make an animated gif?
Why don't we build a fucking audio/video timeline editor into it, even though we already have After Effects and Premiere.
I shit you not, I just played a couple of MP3s through Photoshop.

I'm pretty sure you can build a web browser into Photoshop panels.

I stopped using Winamp around the time they added the browser and then CD burning support.
And I stopped using Nero when they started bundling in all the shitty editors and video player and picture album and quick launch app and whatever.
And I'm sure the managers and marketing actually believe all those extra bullet points bring more value to the consumer or some shit.

Comment Re:Gather 'round children ... (Score 1) 804

That's an entertaining post and all but those arguments can be made about any other workstation computer, and better.

Now if you're a freelancer and you bring in clients who might be impressed with the new shiny black cylinder on your desk, and you can't afford paying for real enterprise level support or you're just used to OSX or you've specialized in the very small subset of platform specific software like Final Cut Pro then there might be a case for you getting this computer.

But if you actually need a workstation in an enterprise environment you get something like an HP Z series computer where you can get an onsite technician, or just keep a stock of spare parts like a PSU or GPU or RAM that the IT guy can slide out and replace using a conveniently placed color coded handle.
You don't bring it to the Genius Bar and maybe wait for them to ship it somewhere else because they can't deal with it there and leave sensitive data that you need to continue your work on some SDD that's incompatible with any computer your IT department has to transfer the data over.

And on the software side, Apple maybe have been a big name in publishing and video work in the past but nowadays no one cares.
They neglected their relationship with Adobe (who might, at some point make their software compatible with FireGL compute which you can get on any computer with CUDA on an nVidia card today).
I've never seen anyone do any actual 3D work on a Mac (Though maybe they do in CAD? I haven't had any experience with that segment).
But from my experience where I work, a post-production house, out of say 40-50 computers, we only have four apple desktops, two of which are rarely used and are used for work that could be done on a Windows machine, one that's a Mac historically for the job description and could also replaced and one that runs legacy software that's being phased out.

Apple don't do enterprise products, they do trendy prosumer products and services which is all well and good for their bottom line but this is not a push into that market, in fact it's a step backward compared to the previous iteration of the Mac Pro.

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