First off, there's the picture of a stereotypical "dirty hippie playing guitar" at the top. What does it have to do with the article? Absolutely nothing except to poke fun at Greenpeace. That'd be as though I was responding to the Anti-Defamation League and started out with a cartoon of a "dirty jew".
I guess you didn't notice, but that "dirty hippie" had been photoshopped with Steve Jobs' face, along with the words "It's not easy... being green...", and a green apple on the ground in front of him. The reference is Steve Jobs' "A Greener Apple" statement from some months back.
I won't deny, however, that Gizmondo has no love for Greenpeace, yet I do think in this case they have a point. Apple has stated that they will eliminate all PVCs and BFRs from their products sometime in 2008, which puts them above average among computer and mobile phone makers:
Dell: BFRs already eliminated, PVCs By 2009 Nokia: PVCs already eliminated, no date for complete elimination of BFRs Toshiba: By 2009 Lenovo: PVC By 2009, no date for complete elimination of BFRs Sony: Sometime in 2010 HP: No date for complete elimination of either Motorola: No date for complete elimination of either
So it seems ridiculous for Greenpeace to keep singling Apple out for PVC/BFR elimination instead of, say, HP or Motorola. Well, except for the fact that (a) any headline with "Apple" in it gets tons of media attention right now, and (b) there are so many pro- and anti-Apple fanboys that any new controversy will whip both sides into a frenzy.
Kudos to Greenpeace for social engineering, shame on them for demagoguery.
(Oh, and you can't argue that Greenpeace doesn't single out Apple. Try going to greenpeace.org/sony, greenpeace.org/hp or greenpeace.org/motorola. Didn't think so.)
The amount of power the PSU draws from the wall is equal to the power it outputs divided by the efficiency. However, not all PSUs are equally efficient, and the efficiency of a given PSU varies depending on the load.
Most PSUs have a "sweet spot" for efficiency somewhere in the middle of their output range, so - all else being equal - small PSUs will be more efficient with light loads but large PSUs will be more efficient for heavy loads.
For example: A Core 2 Duo system with 2 GB of ram and a high-end video card may only draw 100 watts at idle. This load is much better suited to a small power supply; a good 400W PSU may be able to supply 100 watts at 80% efficiency, which would mean 100/.8 = 125 watts from the wall. A 1000W PSU may only provide 65% efficiency for the same load, and draw over 150 watts from the wall. On the other hand, if you start playing a game and the load spikes to 300 watts, that 400W PSU might drop to 75% efficiency while the 1000W could climb to 80%. The 1000W PSU would now be using 25W less power than the 400W!
Of course, not all PSUs are created equal. Some models are dismally inefficient and never exceed 65% at any wattage. Others maintain a high efficiency all the way to their rated maximum output. But nearly all power supplies are inefficient at supplying loads less than 20% of their rated maximum, so it's best not to get a higher wattage PSU than necessary unless your computer spends most of its time at high load.
If you want more information on PSU efficiency, check out SilentPCReview's Power section. They have extremely thorough reviews of various PSUs and test their efficiency over a wide range of loads.
My post, like the article, was not about hardware or software but the size of a database field. Regardless of what a 64 bit architecture could do for the underlying hardware, operating system, or database engine, increasing a 32 bit database field to 64 bits will NOT improve the speed of transactions. My joke was meant to poke fun at the time when "64-bit" was a fad; anything "64-bit" was assumed to be better and the mere phrase caused a strange sense of euphoria like "dot com" had five years earlier. Despite its potential in speeding up certain operations and dramatically increasing addressing space, 64-bit architecture has, for the vast majority of users, thus far been a flash in the pan.
I completely agree re: the Palm V. I got one when it was first released and it felt absolutely perfect at the time. It and the iPod Nano are my only two gadgets of the last decade that I actually loved carrying around.
And speaking of the Newton, I certainly hope that Apple's iPhone SDK lives up to the hype. An iPhone with full PDA capabilities (and yes, someone's already made a stylus for it) might just be my third.
Okay, let's say the Apple I and II was just Jobs being in the right place at the right time. Let's say that Woz would have tried to turn his prototype into a consumer product without Jobs' prodding. Woz left the company in 1981.
Since then, Apple has created the Lisa, Macintosh, LaserWriter, iMac, OS X, iPod, and iPhone under Jobs' leadership. All revolutionary devices that changed their respective playing fields.
Jobs also founded NeXT, and though (for the same reasons as the Lisa) it wasn't a commercial success, NeXTstep was years ahead of its time. If you're not familiar with the OS, Watch this and keep in mind that this was made more than a year before Windows 3.11 was released, and the demo was run on a 33MHz computer.
On the financial side of things, Apple was near bankruptcy in 1997 when Jobs was rehired. Jobs cleaned house immediately, bet everything on the iMac, and has since presided over an incredible comeback. Apple's stock has been soaring - their market cap now exceeds that of HP and is about to pass even IBM.
Some of that is luck, and some can be attributed to others. But you can't deny that while Jobs is no geek, he has a vision of an ideal computing experience, and many of the past three decades' computer revolutions, particularly in the domain of user-friendliness, can be directly traced to him.
The earth's gravity extends far beyond its atmosphere. Balloons won't get you to 40 kilometers, much less 40,000 kilometers.
Currently, microwave transmission is the most practical method in terms of efficiency and availability. Microwave beams have thus far transferred many tens of kilowatts over many kilometers at 80%+ efficiency and could be scaled up to meet any power need. There are some issues that still need to be resolved, and there are plenty of other technologies that show (possibly more) promise, but if a space elevator was built today it would probably be powered by microwaves.
The concepts for tethers usually involve them being thicker in the middle than at the ends, so as to reduce weight in areas that have less load (and don't need as much strength). A looping cable would make that impossible. What might work is a pair of cables that oscillate vertically, out of phase with each other, with a lifter that "walks" up or down by switching between cables as they change direction.
But whether that is more or less feasible than beaming power to the lifter, or collecting power from a conductive cable, is entirely dependent on the tether material, and the tether is a far more formidable engineering challenge. It's silly to design the lifter until we have a design for - or even a means of constructing - the tether itself.
Or just one cable, taking advantage of the fact that it runs all the way from the ground to the magnetosphere.
But designing a lifter now when we have no way of building the tether itself is like constructing a "Moone Carriage" in H.G. Wells's era. Once materials science reaches the point that we can build reliable hundred-thousand-kilometer nanotube (or another equivalently strong and light material) cables, we'll probably be able to build far better lifter than we can now. And we'll know the characteristics of the cable we're building it for, which won't hurt.
Actually, according to Wikipedia and other sources I could find, "Hail to the Thief" never went platinum (=1,000,000 sold) in the US. It went platinum in the UK, but the bar is lower (300,000). "In Rainbows" has now sold 1.2 million in a matter of days.
Compared to the first week of Thief, Rainbows sold at least four times as many copies, and each copy of Rainbows, on average, netted Radiohead more and cost customers less.
However you slice it, this release was an unmitigated success for Radiohead, not to mention their fans.
"Has become"? Steve Jobs was always the egomaniacal - but uncannily correct - leader, and Woz was always the brilliant tinkering geek who could pull off the engineering miracles Jobs's plans always required.
They're the Kirk and Scotty of the PC world. The Hannibal and B.A. Baracus.
But new bands, no matter how good, don't turn a profit easily - even with a record label. Most first contracts are absolutely horrible for the artist, and most artists - no matter how good - never get much attention from the label. Labels are like lotteries - great for a few lucky ones, a burden for the rest.
And popularity doesn't need a record label. I can name more artists (whose music I listen to) that I heard about through word of mouth than through labels' PR campaigns. Did Slashdot, YouTube, Pandora, Penny Arcade, or a thousand other sites need an advertising behemoth to make them popular? No, they just needed free content - some of which is good.
And, if it hadn't been proved already, Radiohead just showed that plenty of people will pay for content even if you let them have it for free.
I think that the one thing that would sink the labels would be an entire free music service similar in design to iTunes + the iTunes store. Have a huge online database of only indie artists. Let people rate music, and search by popularity, other user's ratings, genre, and a "people who like your song also liked..." system akin to Pandora. Don't put any DRM or other restrictions on the service - let users play whatever songs they want as often as they want, assemble their own libraries, download songs, burn CDs, sync with their iPods, set up their own internet radio channels and share them with friends.
But allow users to easily pay artists. Let users see at a glance which artists they rated the highest or listened to the most, and let them pay the artists by simply typing in an amount and clicking a button. Possibly even use a little shame, by using the faintest of red highlights on unpurchased songs in users' libraries, or by pointing out artists that are highly rated yet poorly compensated.
Of course, running such a service would cost money, primarily in bandwidth costs. But there are quite a few ways of paying that - one, with unobtrusive ads like most popular sites. Two, by letting users contribute bandwidth. Three, by putting a slight surcharge on payments. If sites like Slashdot and Pandora can stay afloat, there's no reason to believe a media portal like this couldn't either.
Not bad earnings, considering that this means (a) the album went platinum with no marketing help from a major label, and (b) even letting consumers name their own price (and pirate the album freely), Radiohead is making better royalties than they would through a label.
Destroys both of the arguments the labels make in their own defense. Other artists would be fools not to learn from Radiohead.
I was tempted, as 3.51 was the first NT I spent much time with. I guess I just missed 3.1 as I first got into real IT in '96 and don't remember seeing it in use (or maybe I just assumed it was 3.5)
Anyway, I didn't put 3.51 on the chart because if I had, I'd have felt obligated to list all the other "revision" point upgrades, like Windows 1.0x, 2.0x, Windows 3.11, and 98 SE. Not that they weren't important upgrades, I just wanted to keep the list simple by only listing major/minor version changes.
Sorry - I just did a bit of looking on Wikipedia and realized that 3.5 wasn't the first NT. There was apparently a short-lived Windows NT 3.1, though I've never personally seen it. The rest of what I said is correct, though.
Windows 1.0 Windows 2.0 Windows 3.0 Windows 3.1 Windows 95 (v. 4.0) Windows 98 (v. 4.1) Windows ME (v. 4.9) Line killed off.
Business line:
Windows NT 3.5 Windows NT 4.0 Windows 2000 (v. 5.0) Windows XP (v. 5.1) Windows Vista (v. 6) Windows "7"
There were no NT versions prior to 3.5 because the first NT was released after Windows 3.11, and Microsoft wanted their numbering to be consistent. NT 3.5 coexisted with Windows 3.x (and shared the same GUI design), NT 4.0 coexisted with Windows 4.x, and then MS killed off the "Consumer" Windows line, leaving the NT line to fill versions 5 and 6.
Slashdot Mirror
The identity thief sues you for endangering him when he sticks his hand into your shredder while trying to steal your mail.
But at least that only applies to the USA for the time being.
Yeah, keep on believing that.
Even if the current project is just a port, Psychonauts earning more well-deserved cash would definitely improve the likelihood of a sequel.
First off, there's the picture of a stereotypical "dirty hippie playing guitar" at the top. What does it have to do with the article? Absolutely nothing except to poke fun at Greenpeace. That'd be as though I was responding to the Anti-Defamation League and started out with a cartoon of a "dirty jew".
I guess you didn't notice, but that "dirty hippie" had been photoshopped with Steve Jobs' face, along with the words "It's not easy... being green...", and a green apple on the ground in front of him. The reference is Steve Jobs' "A Greener Apple" statement from some months back.
I won't deny, however, that Gizmondo has no love for Greenpeace, yet I do think in this case they have a point. Apple has stated that they will eliminate all PVCs and BFRs from their products sometime in 2008, which puts them above average among computer and mobile phone makers:
Dell: BFRs already eliminated, PVCs By 2009
Nokia: PVCs already eliminated, no date for complete elimination of BFRs
Toshiba: By 2009
Lenovo: PVC By 2009, no date for complete elimination of BFRs
Sony: Sometime in 2010
HP: No date for complete elimination of either
Motorola: No date for complete elimination of either
So it seems ridiculous for Greenpeace to keep singling Apple out for PVC/BFR elimination instead of, say, HP or Motorola. Well, except for the fact that (a) any headline with "Apple" in it gets tons of media attention right now, and (b) there are so many pro- and anti-Apple fanboys that any new controversy will whip both sides into a frenzy.
Kudos to Greenpeace for social engineering, shame on them for demagoguery.
(Oh, and you can't argue that Greenpeace doesn't single out Apple. Try going to greenpeace.org/sony, greenpeace.org/hp or greenpeace.org/motorola. Didn't think so.)
The amount of power the PSU draws from the wall is equal to the power it outputs divided by the efficiency. However, not all PSUs are equally efficient, and the efficiency of a given PSU varies depending on the load.
Most PSUs have a "sweet spot" for efficiency somewhere in the middle of their output range, so - all else being equal - small PSUs will be more efficient with light loads but large PSUs will be more efficient for heavy loads.
For example: A Core 2 Duo system with 2 GB of ram and a high-end video card may only draw 100 watts at idle. This load is much better suited to a small power supply; a good 400W PSU may be able to supply 100 watts at 80% efficiency, which would mean 100/.8 = 125 watts from the wall. A 1000W PSU may only provide 65% efficiency for the same load, and draw over 150 watts from the wall. On the other hand, if you start playing a game and the load spikes to 300 watts, that 400W PSU might drop to 75% efficiency while the 1000W could climb to 80%. The 1000W PSU would now be using 25W less power than the 400W!
Of course, not all PSUs are created equal. Some models are dismally inefficient and never exceed 65% at any wattage. Others maintain a high efficiency all the way to their rated maximum output. But nearly all power supplies are inefficient at supplying loads less than 20% of their rated maximum, so it's best not to get a higher wattage PSU than necessary unless your computer spends most of its time at high load.
If you want more information on PSU efficiency, check out SilentPCReview's Power section. They have extremely thorough reviews of various PSUs and test their efficiency over a wide range of loads.
My post, like the article, was not about hardware or software but the size of a database field. Regardless of what a 64 bit architecture could do for the underlying hardware, operating system, or database engine, increasing a 32 bit database field to 64 bits will NOT improve the speed of transactions. My joke was meant to poke fun at the time when "64-bit" was a fad; anything "64-bit" was assumed to be better and the mere phrase caused a strange sense of euphoria like "dot com" had five years earlier. Despite its potential in speeding up certain operations and dramatically increasing addressing space, 64-bit architecture has, for the vast majority of users, thus far been a flash in the pan.
I completely agree re: the Palm V. I got one when it was first released and it felt absolutely perfect at the time. It and the iPod Nano are my only two gadgets of the last decade that I actually loved carrying around.
And speaking of the Newton, I certainly hope that Apple's iPhone SDK lives up to the hype. An iPhone with full PDA capabilities (and yes, someone's already made a stylus for it) might just be my third.
Okay, let's say the Apple I and II was just Jobs being in the right place at the right time. Let's say that Woz would have tried to turn his prototype into a consumer product without Jobs' prodding. Woz left the company in 1981.
Since then, Apple has created the Lisa, Macintosh, LaserWriter, iMac, OS X, iPod, and iPhone under Jobs' leadership. All revolutionary devices that changed their respective playing fields.
Jobs also founded NeXT, and though (for the same reasons as the Lisa) it wasn't a commercial success, NeXTstep was years ahead of its time. If you're not familiar with the OS, Watch this and keep in mind that this was made more than a year before Windows 3.11 was released, and the demo was run on a 33MHz computer.
On the financial side of things, Apple was near bankruptcy in 1997 when Jobs was rehired. Jobs cleaned house immediately, bet everything on the iMac, and has since presided over an incredible comeback. Apple's stock has been soaring - their market cap now exceeds that of HP and is about to pass even IBM.
Some of that is luck, and some can be attributed to others. But you can't deny that while Jobs is no geek, he has a vision of an ideal computing experience, and many of the past three decades' computer revolutions, particularly in the domain of user-friendliness, can be directly traced to him.
64 bits are WAY FASTER than 32 bits!
The earth's gravity extends far beyond its atmosphere. Balloons won't get you to 40 kilometers, much less 40,000 kilometers.
Currently, microwave transmission is the most practical method in terms of efficiency and availability. Microwave beams have thus far transferred many tens of kilowatts over many kilometers at 80%+ efficiency and could be scaled up to meet any power need. There are some issues that still need to be resolved, and there are plenty of other technologies that show (possibly more) promise, but if a space elevator was built today it would probably be powered by microwaves.
The concepts for tethers usually involve them being thicker in the middle than at the ends, so as to reduce weight in areas that have less load (and don't need as much strength). A looping cable would make that impossible. What might work is a pair of cables that oscillate vertically, out of phase with each other, with a lifter that "walks" up or down by switching between cables as they change direction.
But whether that is more or less feasible than beaming power to the lifter, or collecting power from a conductive cable, is entirely dependent on the tether material, and the tether is a far more formidable engineering challenge. It's silly to design the lifter until we have a design for - or even a means of constructing - the tether itself.
Or just one cable, taking advantage of the fact that it runs all the way from the ground to the magnetosphere.
But designing a lifter now when we have no way of building the tether itself is like constructing a "Moone Carriage" in H.G. Wells's era. Once materials science reaches the point that we can build reliable hundred-thousand-kilometer nanotube (or another equivalently strong and light material) cables, we'll probably be able to build far better lifter than we can now. And we'll know the characteristics of the cable we're building it for, which won't hurt.
...A winch attached to a solar panel.
Not so long. As another poster mentioned, most planetary missions are spectacular either in success or failure.
Actually, according to Wikipedia and other sources I could find, "Hail to the Thief" never went platinum (=1,000,000 sold) in the US. It went platinum in the UK, but the bar is lower (300,000). "In Rainbows" has now sold 1.2 million in a matter of days.
Compared to the first week of Thief, Rainbows sold at least four times as many copies, and each copy of Rainbows, on average, netted Radiohead more and cost customers less.
However you slice it, this release was an unmitigated success for Radiohead, not to mention their fans.
"Has become"? Steve Jobs was always the egomaniacal - but uncannily correct - leader, and Woz was always the brilliant tinkering geek who could pull off the engineering miracles Jobs's plans always required.
They're the Kirk and Scotty of the PC world. The Hannibal and B.A. Baracus.
But new bands, no matter how good, don't turn a profit easily - even with a record label. Most first contracts are absolutely horrible for the artist, and most artists - no matter how good - never get much attention from the label. Labels are like lotteries - great for a few lucky ones, a burden for the rest.
And popularity doesn't need a record label. I can name more artists (whose music I listen to) that I heard about through word of mouth than through labels' PR campaigns. Did Slashdot, YouTube, Pandora, Penny Arcade, or a thousand other sites need an advertising behemoth to make them popular? No, they just needed free content - some of which is good.
And, if it hadn't been proved already, Radiohead just showed that plenty of people will pay for content even if you let them have it for free.
I think that the one thing that would sink the labels would be an entire free music service similar in design to iTunes + the iTunes store. Have a huge online database of only indie artists. Let people rate music, and search by popularity, other user's ratings, genre, and a "people who like your song also liked..." system akin to Pandora. Don't put any DRM or other restrictions on the service - let users play whatever songs they want as often as they want, assemble their own libraries, download songs, burn CDs, sync with their iPods, set up their own internet radio channels and share them with friends.
But allow users to easily pay artists. Let users see at a glance which artists they rated the highest or listened to the most, and let them pay the artists by simply typing in an amount and clicking a button. Possibly even use a little shame, by using the faintest of red highlights on unpurchased songs in users' libraries, or by pointing out artists that are highly rated yet poorly compensated.
Of course, running such a service would cost money, primarily in bandwidth costs. But there are quite a few ways of paying that - one, with unobtrusive ads like most popular sites. Two, by letting users contribute bandwidth. Three, by putting a slight surcharge on payments. If sites like Slashdot and Pandora can stay afloat, there's no reason to believe a media portal like this couldn't either.
Not bad earnings, considering that this means (a) the album went platinum with no marketing help from a major label, and (b) even letting consumers name their own price (and pirate the album freely), Radiohead is making better royalties than they would through a label.
Destroys both of the arguments the labels make in their own defense. Other artists would be fools not to learn from Radiohead.
I was tempted, as 3.51 was the first NT I spent much time with. I guess I just missed 3.1 as I first got into real IT in '96 and don't remember seeing it in use (or maybe I just assumed it was 3.5)
Anyway, I didn't put 3.51 on the chart because if I had, I'd have felt obligated to list all the other "revision" point upgrades, like Windows 1.0x, 2.0x, Windows 3.11, and 98 SE. Not that they weren't important upgrades, I just wanted to keep the list simple by only listing major/minor version changes.
Their commercials make sense on a whole new level now.
Strange, I thought that was a Cingular/AT&T feature.
Sorry - I just did a bit of looking on Wikipedia and realized that 3.5 wasn't the first NT. There was apparently a short-lived Windows NT 3.1, though I've never personally seen it. The rest of what I said is correct, though.
Sorry for any confusion.
Consumer line:
Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.1
Windows 95 (v. 4.0)
Windows 98 (v. 4.1)
Windows ME (v. 4.9)
Line killed off.
Business line:
Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000 (v. 5.0)
Windows XP (v. 5.1)
Windows Vista (v. 6)
Windows "7"
There were no NT versions prior to 3.5 because the first NT was released after Windows 3.11, and Microsoft wanted their numbering to be consistent. NT 3.5 coexisted with Windows 3.x (and shared the same GUI design), NT 4.0 coexisted with Windows 4.x, and then MS killed off the "Consumer" Windows line, leaving the NT line to fill versions 5 and 6.
Sorry, you've violated my patent for one-click lighting.
Speak for yourself. I want to oboe with it.
For great justice.