The price will need to come down quite a bit more before that will make sense. The current talk about space tourism is hovering around $200,000 per passenger, and that's just for a shot straight up and back down. Actually flying halfway around the world would likely bump that price up a bit.
Time is money, sure, but I don't think there's enough of a market of people who's time is worth that much.
I wouldn't want to be the person that died from a jettisoned booster landing on my house. I don't care how much money my family gets to sue for aftwerwards. I don't care if every person who even looked at the rocket goes bankrupt from the lawsuits. I'm still dead, and that sucks.
Yeah, any company doing this will try their best to make things safe, but it's easy to convince yourself that you're smarter than you are, or that your idea is better than it really is. Having a third party that is committed to protecting public safety seems pretty intelligent to me.
Didn't the 8-bit-nes of the NES limit it to 256 colors, while jumping to 16-bit bumped that limit up to like 65,000? That's a pretty big change.
It wasn't magic, it was mathmatics. Although your original point is a bit more accurate today, where hardware is so fast and powerful that you get diminishing returns, and it's much harder to make a serious leap in processing power.
A lot of people are very vocal online, and that actually makes it harder for the more hesitant people, because the loud ones tend to be such jackasses. Especially within a competitive game environment. I'm very comfortable chatting over AIM or IRC, to anyone, it's no big deal. But in an online game, I rarely say anything, because I don't want to inadvertantly get caught in some stupid and unamusing conversation.
Although there are some slower paced games where the communication really is essential to long term success in the game, and that as a result tends to spawn friendships and worthwhile conversations. Without that, the games aren't really social as much as they're multiplayer, which usually means somewhat smarter opponents, until they open their mouths.
Supposedly the DS is going to have a instant messaging system built into it. So maybe I can't find someone playing the same game that I've got loaded, but perhaps there's a way to notify them that there's someone online looking for a game, and play one of those games that allows multiplaying with just one game cart.
Have you done any serious traveling through the United States? Do you realize how big the country is? Getting public transportation out to everyone would be horrendously expensive. It's nowhere near economically viable . The scale of the problem is massive.
Agreed, Apple Computer broke this contract they made, and Apple Records is currently justified in calling them on it. That being said, I'm not sure that anything either of them has done really seems to warrant what is speculated to be one of the largest payouts ever. What is fair punishment for the computer company? Did their original contract specifiy what would happen? Can Apple Records prove that they've been damaged by itunes et all to such a degree that they deserve massive compensation? My mind just boggles at the amounts of money that corporations toy with.
Actually, I think most people will appreciate higher quality movies, and they also appreciate HDTV. It's just that most americans don't have the money to go out and buy those nice big HDTV plasma screens and whatnot, especially when our old tv's are still working just fine.
The next format of DVD's really shouldn't be too much more expensive, even at the beginning. And as long as I can also play my old DVD's on the player, it's not a bad deal. I'm going to be buying more movies in the future anyways, why not get the higher quality discs?
I'm a geek, I majored in Architecture, and I didn't play any organized sports for my university, but I sort of wish I had gone to a school with a bigger sports program. Despite the vocalness of many lazy, exercise hating slashdotters, sports are a whole lot of fun. Football games and the like are big social events, You can have a hell of a good time at them, alot of alumni love them, and it can be really cool. Sure it can get out of hand at times, but so can geeky tech stuff (i.e. free ipods).
If you're determined to get a decent education, you'll work hard, and you'll learn a fair amount regardless of where you go to school. Unless you're doing some really obscure line of study where only a couple schools are competitive, the academic resources aren't that big a deal. There are different tiers of schools, no doubt, but amongst it's peers, most universities are a lot the same in terms of learning.
So what you're really deciding is where you want to live for 4+ years of your life. And what kind of people you're going to get to know. That stuff should have a much bigger effect on your life than the upload speed you get from your dormroom ethernet.
One of the downsides to Apple's history of innovation is that people begin to expect unrealistic things from them. And all the rumor sites just making crap up doesn't help either. For a lot of people, when they see a picture of this new iMac, if it isn't something so entirely different from anything they've seen before, they're disappointed.
Apple's trying to walk a middle of the line approach here. Use lessons learned in past designs, both by them and by competitors, while also making something distinctly Apple. And a lot of people are upset because the computer on the back of the LCD has been tried before. Of course, a lot of other companies had mp3 players out before the iPod, and look how well that's worked out.
Oh, and a last comment on the cables issue. I've got one of the aluminum cinema displays, which is similar in a lot of ways. Same stand, same basic mount. It has two firewire and two usb ports on the back of it, and honestly, you can hardly even see the cables hanging down behind it. The bottom edge of the monitor is close enough to the desk that you don't really notice the wires that much. If you imagine cables being plugged in to Apple's promo-shots, the mental image is unattractive, because the machine is photographed on a plain white background. In real life, desks are full of stuff, people are used to cables everywhere, and you probably don't even notice them anymore.
I don't think the best part about all this will be big sites dedicated to providing links to lots of music. Sites like that already exist, and the good ones have made names for themselves.
What I find more interesting about this is that it can provide an easy way for people to provide useful music links on their personal websites. For example, I read a lot of different blogs every day, some written by people I know, some written by people I've never met. But most of those people think and write intelligently enough that I feel their opinions are worthwhile. And so if they recommend some music, I might just go check it out, because it might be something cool, something besides the normal radio play, and because doing it through itunes will be very easy.
I'll get a nice quick preview of the particular song, it'll be easy to find other songs by the artist if I like it, and if I choose to buy it, I can get it right then and there, and toss a little money back to the blog author as thanks.
One thing that always seemed to work well when I was in school (a whole two years ago), take the notes on paper during class; then when you're back home, copy all of the important stuff to your computer. This accomplishes a few things. First off, you end up with a nice, clean, and reproduceble form of your notes. Second, when you're transferring them over to the computer, you can filter out any extra stuff that you don't need while also noticing any holes in your notes. Better to notice it now than two weeks later when you're trying to study the night before a test. And third, going over your notes carefully enough to transcribe them creates another memory of all that knowledge in your brain. At least for me, the physical act of writing down(or typing) something helped me remember far better than just reading it over and over again.
Or maybe it would end up being forced concurrent. Meaning that if I'm working on SuperCool.ppt over this network app, and you decide to start working on it from your office at the same time, you load up the exact version that I'm working on, and see all of my changes in real time. So in an abstract sense, there's just one file, with the potential for a lot of people to be sitting at the keyboard in front of it.
SubEthaEdit is an excellent OSX text editor that works sort of like this. You see everyone else's changes (they're highlighted in different colors for each person), and it all happens real time. For more serious corporate work, there would definitely have to be some sort of versioning system, so you can always go back to older states, but it's not an impossible problem.
Exactly. We apple fanboys all love our happy geeky utopia that apple products try to project, and we'd like to see it maintained. And it's a common opinion that Real is in no way capable of being a positive contributer to that vision. Their history of shoddy, dishonest software goes totally against the mac experience. They're even hated in the windows world, which is overflowing with crap software.
While Apple is obviously being very careful with licensing in regards to itunes/ipods, they have not been entirely proprietary and lock-in oriented. So Real approached them and said they wanted in on this whole online music thing. Apple said, no thanks, we don't think you're the right people to help us. Real put out press releases declaring Apple to be some sort of anti-consumer juggernaut. Real is trying to force their way to a spot within Apple's grand scheme of things, and Apple doesn't like that. And neither do a lot of other people.
That line refers to problems they had back with some of the older school Rev. C imacs, when they had five different colors to choose from, but a couple colors sold much better than the rest. Apple wanted to sell the machines to retailers in groups of five, one of each color, but the retailers didn't want to be left over with colors that were harder to sell. Apple initially claimed that they wanted retailers to stock all the colors, because they wanted consumers to decide which ones would be the best sellers, not the store management. I don't know if they ever did end up selling them individually. If not, than that was dumb.
Because Apple has this habit of taking things that other companies have tried before and doing it better. A few recent examples being the ipod and their music store. It's a combination of design philosophy, attention to detail, and yes... generally higher price.
Yeah, a lot of companies sell tablet pc's. But why haven't they become the next big thing? Apple seems to be good at figuring that out. That's why people care.
I wouldn't tell them to go sit in the corner, but the rest sounds about right.
"No, son, you can't play with this, this is Daddy's table saw. No, you can't play with that either, that's the oven."
Setting limits for children, whether its for their own safety, or other reasons, is not a bad thing. If the only entertainment available for my children in the future ends up being gameboys, then I pity them too.
I wouldn't give a five year old something that expensive to play with anyways.
I think most of the concern about the PSP's screen is that it's generally unprotected by the design of the device. The clamshell on the GBA SP and DS makes both of them far more suitable for tossing into your bag, pulling them out for 10 minutes while on the subway, and then tossing it back in when you get to your stop.
Outside of Japan maybe, noone's going to wear their PSP around their neck like sony's be showing off. So you'll have to buy a bigass case for it (which will also have to protect disc media I guess), and that just adds a whole other step that makes it less convenient.
I've got a case for my GBA SP, I use it to organize my stuff when I'm going on long trips. But for day to day usage, the thing just sits around, floating from between my nightstand, my desk, and my living room. The casing shows some evidence of all that movement. The screen, fortunately, does not.
So why didn't Apple give Real a license? They've been working with Audible, HP, and now Motorola on iTunes/iPod projects, why did Real get so quickly and entirely dismissed? Maybe because Real's history is full of entirely crappy products that would add absolutely nothing positive to the iPod or Apple brand name.
It'd be Real's responsibility to maintain the compatibilty, sure, but that wouldn't keep the average guy from calling up Apple when a bunch of songs stopped playing on his iPod because Real doesn't have their act together.
When that need occurs, then people will be more willing to spend money on it. If some farsighted investor wants to get the jump on that need, they can take a long term approach and hope to make it big later. And maybe some research money can come from the government, but not industry-wide commercial welfare to try and keep all these companies afloat until the next supercomputer killer-app comes along.
maybe I'm just not hip, but I don't see what's so attractive about the PSP. It looks like an old sega game gear with more rounded edges and some shiny parts. It's way too big to fit in any pockets; if I throw it into a bag, the screen looks like it'll get scratched to hell; and if I wear it around my neck from a string like they're showing, it'll get scratched to hell and I'll probably get mugged.
The specs are impressive, but if they battery life isn't up to snuff, it's dead in the water.
They use a cold laser, but when I was getting it done, I could definitely smell something. The whole thing was a pretty interesting experience though. Definitely glad I got it.
How can science really yet show that the evolution of humanity is a statistical fluke? Are you talking about the development of intelligence? I don't think science has anywhere near a good enough understanding of how intelligence actually works to declare that it's practically a statistical impossibility. Not to mention that you're talking about a universe of immense size, and processes that occur over millions and even billions of years. I don't think anyone has come up with any sort of experiment that can come close to touching those parameters, so it's hard to test. Anything else is just a fairly wild speculation.
Now the chances of finding intelligent life around a star close enough to have meaningful communication, astronomers can probably give more accurate predictions about that, and the numbers don't seem to be good.
Slashdot Mirror
The price will need to come down quite a bit more before that will make sense. The current talk about space tourism is hovering around $200,000 per passenger, and that's just for a shot straight up and back down. Actually flying halfway around the world would likely bump that price up a bit.
Time is money, sure, but I don't think there's enough of a market of people who's time is worth that much.
I wouldn't want to be the person that died from a jettisoned booster landing on my house. I don't care how much money my family gets to sue for aftwerwards. I don't care if every person who even looked at the rocket goes bankrupt from the lawsuits. I'm still dead, and that sucks.
Yeah, any company doing this will try their best to make things safe, but it's easy to convince yourself that you're smarter than you are, or that your idea is better than it really is. Having a third party that is committed to protecting public safety seems pretty intelligent to me.
Didn't the 8-bit-nes of the NES limit it to 256 colors, while jumping to 16-bit bumped that limit up to like 65,000? That's a pretty big change.
It wasn't magic, it was mathmatics. Although your original point is a bit more accurate today, where hardware is so fast and powerful that you get diminishing returns, and it's much harder to make a serious leap in processing power.
A lot of people are very vocal online, and that actually makes it harder for the more hesitant people, because the loud ones tend to be such jackasses. Especially within a competitive game environment. I'm very comfortable chatting over AIM or IRC, to anyone, it's no big deal. But in an online game, I rarely say anything, because I don't want to inadvertantly get caught in some stupid and unamusing conversation.
Although there are some slower paced games where the communication really is essential to long term success in the game, and that as a result tends to spawn friendships and worthwhile conversations. Without that, the games aren't really social as much as they're multiplayer, which usually means somewhat smarter opponents, until they open their mouths.
Supposedly the DS is going to have a instant messaging system built into it. So maybe I can't find someone playing the same game that I've got loaded, but perhaps there's a way to notify them that there's someone online looking for a game, and play one of those games that allows multiplaying with just one game cart.
Obviously, he was talking about a jumbo jet crashing into a football stadium during a game. Where's the imagination?
Have you done any serious traveling through the United States? Do you realize how big the country is? Getting public transportation out to everyone would be horrendously expensive. It's nowhere near economically viable . The scale of the problem is massive.
Agreed, Apple Computer broke this contract they made, and Apple Records is currently justified in calling them on it. That being said, I'm not sure that anything either of them has done really seems to warrant what is speculated to be one of the largest payouts ever. What is fair punishment for the computer company? Did their original contract specifiy what would happen? Can Apple Records prove that they've been damaged by itunes et all to such a degree that they deserve massive compensation? My mind just boggles at the amounts of money that corporations toy with.
Actually, I think most people will appreciate higher quality movies, and they also appreciate HDTV. It's just that most americans don't have the money to go out and buy those nice big HDTV plasma screens and whatnot, especially when our old tv's are still working just fine.
The next format of DVD's really shouldn't be too much more expensive, even at the beginning. And as long as I can also play my old DVD's on the player, it's not a bad deal. I'm going to be buying more movies in the future anyways, why not get the higher quality discs?
I'm a geek, I majored in Architecture, and I didn't play any organized sports for my university, but I sort of wish I had gone to a school with a bigger sports program. Despite the vocalness of many lazy, exercise hating slashdotters, sports are a whole lot of fun. Football games and the like are big social events, You can have a hell of a good time at them, alot of alumni love them, and it can be really cool. Sure it can get out of hand at times, but so can geeky tech stuff (i.e. free ipods).
If you're determined to get a decent education, you'll work hard, and you'll learn a fair amount regardless of where you go to school. Unless you're doing some really obscure line of study where only a couple schools are competitive, the academic resources aren't that big a deal. There are different tiers of schools, no doubt, but amongst it's peers, most universities are a lot the same in terms of learning.
So what you're really deciding is where you want to live for 4+ years of your life. And what kind of people you're going to get to know. That stuff should have a much bigger effect on your life than the upload speed you get from your dormroom ethernet.
One of the downsides to Apple's history of innovation is that people begin to expect unrealistic things from them. And all the rumor sites just making crap up doesn't help either. For a lot of people, when they see a picture of this new iMac, if it isn't something so entirely different from anything they've seen before, they're disappointed.
Apple's trying to walk a middle of the line approach here. Use lessons learned in past designs, both by them and by competitors, while also making something distinctly Apple. And a lot of people are upset because the computer on the back of the LCD has been tried before. Of course, a lot of other companies had mp3 players out before the iPod, and look how well that's worked out.
Oh, and a last comment on the cables issue. I've got one of the aluminum cinema displays, which is similar in a lot of ways. Same stand, same basic mount. It has two firewire and two usb ports on the back of it, and honestly, you can hardly even see the cables hanging down behind it. The bottom edge of the monitor is close enough to the desk that you don't really notice the wires that much. If you imagine cables being plugged in to Apple's promo-shots, the mental image is unattractive, because the machine is photographed on a plain white background. In real life, desks are full of stuff, people are used to cables everywhere, and you probably don't even notice them anymore.
I don't think the best part about all this will be big sites dedicated to providing links to lots of music. Sites like that already exist, and the good ones have made names for themselves.
What I find more interesting about this is that it can provide an easy way for people to provide useful music links on their personal websites. For example, I read a lot of different blogs every day, some written by people I know, some written by people I've never met. But most of those people think and write intelligently enough that I feel their opinions are worthwhile. And so if they recommend some music, I might just go check it out, because it might be something cool, something besides the normal radio play, and because doing it through itunes will be very easy.
I'll get a nice quick preview of the particular song, it'll be easy to find other songs by the artist if I like it, and if I choose to buy it, I can get it right then and there, and toss a little money back to the blog author as thanks.
One thing that always seemed to work well when I was in school (a whole two years ago), take the notes on paper during class; then when you're back home, copy all of the important stuff to your computer. This accomplishes a few things. First off, you end up with a nice, clean, and reproduceble form of your notes. Second, when you're transferring them over to the computer, you can filter out any extra stuff that you don't need while also noticing any holes in your notes. Better to notice it now than two weeks later when you're trying to study the night before a test. And third, going over your notes carefully enough to transcribe them creates another memory of all that knowledge in your brain. At least for me, the physical act of writing down(or typing) something helped me remember far better than just reading it over and over again.
Or maybe it would end up being forced concurrent. Meaning that if I'm working on SuperCool.ppt over this network app, and you decide to start working on it from your office at the same time, you load up the exact version that I'm working on, and see all of my changes in real time. So in an abstract sense, there's just one file, with the potential for a lot of people to be sitting at the keyboard in front of it.
SubEthaEdit is an excellent OSX text editor that works sort of like this. You see everyone else's changes (they're highlighted in different colors for each person), and it all happens real time. For more serious corporate work, there would definitely have to be some sort of versioning system, so you can always go back to older states, but it's not an impossible problem.
Exactly. We apple fanboys all love our happy geeky utopia that apple products try to project, and we'd like to see it maintained. And it's a common opinion that Real is in no way capable of being a positive contributer to that vision. Their history of shoddy, dishonest software goes totally against the mac experience. They're even hated in the windows world, which is overflowing with crap software.
While Apple is obviously being very careful with licensing in regards to itunes/ipods, they have not been entirely proprietary and lock-in oriented. So Real approached them and said they wanted in on this whole online music thing. Apple said, no thanks, we don't think you're the right people to help us. Real put out press releases declaring Apple to be some sort of anti-consumer juggernaut. Real is trying to force their way to a spot within Apple's grand scheme of things, and Apple doesn't like that. And neither do a lot of other people.
That line refers to problems they had back with some of the older school Rev. C imacs, when they had five different colors to choose from, but a couple colors sold much better than the rest. Apple wanted to sell the machines to retailers in groups of five, one of each color, but the retailers didn't want to be left over with colors that were harder to sell. Apple initially claimed that they wanted retailers to stock all the colors, because they wanted consumers to decide which ones would be the best sellers, not the store management. I don't know if they ever did end up selling them individually. If not, than that was dumb.
Because Apple has this habit of taking things that other companies have tried before and doing it better. A few recent examples being the ipod and their music store. It's a combination of design philosophy, attention to detail, and yes... generally higher price.
Yeah, a lot of companies sell tablet pc's. But why haven't they become the next big thing? Apple seems to be good at figuring that out. That's why people care.
I wouldn't tell them to go sit in the corner, but the rest sounds about right.
"No, son, you can't play with this, this is Daddy's table saw. No, you can't play with that either, that's the oven."
Setting limits for children, whether its for their own safety, or other reasons, is not a bad thing. If the only entertainment available for my children in the future ends up being gameboys, then I pity them too.
I wouldn't give a five year old something that expensive to play with anyways.
I think most of the concern about the PSP's screen is that it's generally unprotected by the design of the device. The clamshell on the GBA SP and DS makes both of them far more suitable for tossing into your bag, pulling them out for 10 minutes while on the subway, and then tossing it back in when you get to your stop.
Outside of Japan maybe, noone's going to wear their PSP around their neck like sony's be showing off. So you'll have to buy a bigass case for it (which will also have to protect disc media I guess), and that just adds a whole other step that makes it less convenient.
I've got a case for my GBA SP, I use it to organize my stuff when I'm going on long trips. But for day to day usage, the thing just sits around, floating from between my nightstand, my desk, and my living room. The casing shows some evidence of all that movement. The screen, fortunately, does not.
So why didn't Apple give Real a license? They've been working with Audible, HP, and now Motorola on iTunes/iPod projects, why did Real get so quickly and entirely dismissed? Maybe because Real's history is full of entirely crappy products that would add absolutely nothing positive to the iPod or Apple brand name.
It'd be Real's responsibility to maintain the compatibilty, sure, but that wouldn't keep the average guy from calling up Apple when a bunch of songs stopped playing on his iPod because Real doesn't have their act together.
When that need occurs, then people will be more willing to spend money on it. If some farsighted investor wants to get the jump on that need, they can take a long term approach and hope to make it big later. And maybe some research money can come from the government, but not industry-wide commercial welfare to try and keep all these companies afloat until the next supercomputer killer-app comes along.
maybe I'm just not hip, but I don't see what's so attractive about the PSP. It looks like an old sega game gear with more rounded edges and some shiny parts. It's way too big to fit in any pockets; if I throw it into a bag, the screen looks like it'll get scratched to hell; and if I wear it around my neck from a string like they're showing, it'll get scratched to hell and I'll probably get mugged.
The specs are impressive, but if they battery life isn't up to snuff, it's dead in the water.
BFP 9000
They use a cold laser, but when I was getting it done, I could definitely smell something. The whole thing was a pretty interesting experience though. Definitely glad I got it.
How can science really yet show that the evolution of humanity is a statistical fluke? Are you talking about the development of intelligence? I don't think science has anywhere near a good enough understanding of how intelligence actually works to declare that it's practically a statistical impossibility. Not to mention that you're talking about a universe of immense size, and processes that occur over millions and even billions of years. I don't think anyone has come up with any sort of experiment that can come close to touching those parameters, so it's hard to test. Anything else is just a fairly wild speculation.
Now the chances of finding intelligent life around a star close enough to have meaningful communication, astronomers can probably give more accurate predictions about that, and the numbers don't seem to be good.