Well, electricity was "invented" a lot earlier than the other things you mention, so it's a pretty different generation. Secondly, the P4 & iPod are indeed simply refinements of more recent inventions (i.e. the microprocessor, digital audio reproduction etc), but you're ignoring the original inventions themselves (even if you don't consider those two - and nuclear power, space travel etc - to be recent enough for our generation). Also, those are only just the last few years, not a full generation.
Consider such transforming technologies as the world wide web, the cell phone, quantum computing, genome sequencing etc. Remember also that many technologies are in their infancy today, and their full impact won't be felt for decades (e.g. nanotechnology).
Finally, I put it to you that if you're focussed on consumer items such as iPods and personal computers and are of the opinion that we "have enough", perhaps you should broaden your view a little. Over a fifth of the world's population does not "have enough" by any metric.
The original Xbox was late to the party, oversized, had weird controllers, was technically advanced, and cost way more to make than it sold for. The sleek PS2 wasn't, and didn't.
This time round, looks like it's Sony coming out second with the advanced yet fridge-sized beast & freakshow controllers, and it's going to really cost them a bundle, while the Xbox 360 seems to taking it more carefully...
I'm guessing that Nintendo will stay right where they were before though.
I'd say the ring could be placed at a moderate angle to the equator, so that it stays well within the tropics, blocks the sun briefly once a day for a given point & doesn't reduce sun to more temperate zones. Think of the savings on faded curtains!
OTOH, it'd completely destroy any hope of a space elevator. You'd have to place it right out beyond geosynchronous orbit, and that'd blow out the numbers fantastically.
It is still very expensive to launch and biuld space structures.
See Space Elevator (we have two of those, here in Fantasia). Lots of raw materials in the asteroids, no need to hoist megatonnes into orbit. Use a solar furnace for refining. Silicon crystals grow nicely in microgravity.
It could be beamed to earth and captured.
Nah, better to beam it to a receiving station on (or tethered to) the space elevator, then just run it down a superconducting wire to the planet. Less loss, less danger if you miss.
Ringworld is a totally different scale, and involves a lot of pseudo-science. This is all relatively straightforward engineering & financing challenges, no really new science needed.
Hm, if 90% is soaked up by the ring, that's 2.5 billion MW of heat energy we need to dissipate, or our ring's going to melt pretty quickly. Heatsinks aren't that efficient in a vacuum, plus they'd have to be on the dark side, radiating towards earth...
Maybe we better add some sort of superconducting thermal distributor, so we can radiate this excess heat into the earth's shadow. Shouldn't add much to the overall cost of lofting thousands of megatonnes into orbit:-)
(Mental note #2, asteroids are a better source of silicon for this than the earth's crust)
Lessee, the earth is about 15% Silicon, or nearly 896 billion megatonnes, particularly in the crust and bound up as quartz and other silicates. That's quite a lot of Si.
Now, let's orbit these solar cells at 500 km altitude, i.e. a diameter of 13,756.3 km or circumference of 43,217 km. The article doesn't say how wide the ring should be, but to block 1.6% of the sunlight to a circle 12,756.3 km in diameter would require a strip about 160 km wide. That's 6.9 million square kilometers of solar cells in the full ring.
Now the silicon wafer in a solar cell is really quite thin, typically around 300 microns thick, so that's only 2.074 cubic kilometers of silicon all up. Density is 2330 kg/m3, so that's 4,833 megatonnes of silicon required, or about 0.0000005% of the earth's resources. I think we have enough.
Of course, the energy required to manufacture that sort of area of solar cells would be pretty high, but think of the returns. The earth receives about 1370 W/m2 in orbit, so multiply that by the area of cells facing the sun (2.04 million square km), and you get about 2.8 billion MW of incident radiation:-) Let's say these cells aren't particularly efficient, maybe 10%, plus transmission losses of another 70%, and you still have 84 million MW of usable energy, all day, every day.
Now, in 1997 we used 380 quadrillion BTUs, globally, or about 111 quadrillion watt-hours. That's an average consumption of 12 million MW, comfortably within our budget for some time. An energy-producing system with a capacity of 7 times the entire global requirements is worth quite a bit.
There's only one downside to this - if we divert all this energy down to earth & use it, it all ends up as heat in the end, which completely nullifies the original purpose of the ring (if you remember) of preventing global warming! D'oh!
What about that interlocking ring of spaceships being an interlocking ring of solar panels? Then that blocked energy can get diverted to earth in a more desirable form (via microwave beamed to a stable superconducting space elevator, something we particularly like the idea of here in my country).
That might even take the pressure off the environment, as you could probably shut down most of the world's coal-fired power stations.
More like, is it legal to display a noticeboard that has a bunch of notes added by the public that tells people where they can find all sorts of stuff for free, including possibly cocaine.
You don't have any cocaine near yourself, you don't personally know anyone with cocaine, you don't even know if cocaine is mentioned in the notes without checking the thousands of notes regularly. You only own the noticeboard, and are freely allowing people to post there whatever they have to offer.
Is that legal? I would think so, in itself. What if that noticeboard had a sign on top saying "Cocaine Community", would that change things?
Not just rendering
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· Score: 2, Insightful
3D rendering involves a LOT more than just output, as someone else pointed out. And digitally post-producing movies requires a LOT more than just 3D renders.
There's all the live footage elements to consider - potentially dozens of layers for every final frame - each of which must be stored, converted, colour-graded, maybe stabilised, grain-matched, composited and edited.
What's more, any CG in the movie would be rendered as multiple separate 3D layers, not just a single frame, and all those layers also have to be colour- and grain-matched, unstabilised and composited with the live elements.
I've worked on a scene that required over 40 live and 450 CG layers for each frame of the shot - and each of those layers ranged from 40-80 MB (the shot was around 300 frames). That's around 20 GB per frame of pixels alone, not counting textures, CG geometry etc. And this data was used and re-used repeatedly as the shot evolved over the course of months.
A 10 gbps pipe to each workstation would really have helped, believe me:-)
The Cell processor in the PS3 happens to be way faster than a $1000 desktop - at specific jobs. A wide range of general software is not what it's good at, but luckily, number-crunching is.
I don't know precisely what sort of algorithm SETI@Home uses, but the 7 SPE vector units in the Cell chip would be near-ideal for many types of signal processing (far far more so than the original Xbox), so I think it likely it'd work very well indeed.
If the owner could be bothered leaving it on all day - and if Sony actually sell an HDD/Linux option for enough to make an overall profit. Otherwise, there's no way in hell they'll subsidise your climb up the Folding@Home ladder.
While that's true, they'd likely get most of the buyers of the original series at least. Probably not as many as if it'd aired first, but the original series did quite well so I can't imagine them flopping.
Word of mouth still applies. The movie(s) would be a good hook for new buyers. And many reviewers do DVDs too.
Re:Is it YOUR own source code?
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Zeta Goes Gold
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· Score: 1
Heh, forgot to add "Now watch me get modded down for saying this on Slashdot", and look what happens:-)
Is it YOUR own source code?
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· Score: 0
While I agree with the bulk of your post, I would clarify the following distinction:
There are probably few cases around of anyone being prevented from editing & compiling their own source code, that they wrote or obtained the rights to or even licenced under permissive terms.
There are innumerous cases of people being prevented from editing & compiling the source code for software that belongs to someone else that they have not been granted such rights to, whether or not they have purchased the right to use that software.
Not all software is yours to do with as you please, of course. You can argue that the rights to use but not modify such software is not useful to you, but it is undeniably useful to many others. The fact that we are still able to choose what software we use and what software we purchase (Windows OEM bundling aside) means we are still, for the moment, free. At least in this respect.
Specifically the PS3. You will probably be able to configure it to run in 720P, 1080i or 1080P.
I'm guessing it'll behave more like the Xbox 1 did - the machine has a certain level of graphical power, and developers will tune their games so that they run well at a particular resolution. For the Xbox 1, this was 480p for the great majority of games, 720p for a handful of simpler games, and one or two (like Dragon's Lair) ran at 1080i.
The reasons are the same - developers have a choice of high resolution, or fancier effects (longer shaders, depth complexity, AA/AF etc). They'll go with the eye candy first, and whatever resolution that the machine can support without losing too much framerate - rarely will the user be able to tradeoff effects for more resolution, as it is this sort of tweaking that takes so much of the time required to develop PC games, and that consoles avoid.
I'm expecting only a handful of PS3 games to output full 1080p (less for dual-monitors), for much the same reasons that Xbox 1 only saw a few developers opt for 720p support, even though the hardware was capable - too many tradeoffs, and not enough of a market. As with the Xbox 1, most of these will be released in the latter half of the console's life, and it'll be a nice feature for those games but ultimately make little difference overall.
And how many thousands of dollars have you spent on all this equipment?
Well, the laptop cost a bit (AUD$1500), but the 24" monitor was AUD$425 and the 19" monitors (which can squeak up to 2Kx1536, if not clearly) can be had for AUD$200 or less). The gfx cards weren't particularly high-end, AUD$200 or so. The PCs I already had, maybe $1200-1400 in parts at the most.
1080p-capable TVs are what, US$4000? $5000? Not available over here yet, at any sane price anyway.
Even bleeding-edge GPUs still struggle at 1920x1200 for any recent game, and 1920x1200-capable screens are also priced at a premium.
Current gfx cards will happily do 1920x1200 for many recent games, depending on how much eye candy you have enabled (like AA/AF, texture resolution etc), and what frame rate you find acceptable for that game. 1600x1200 is not at all uncommon, and that has more pixels than 1080p. And 19" monitors can be had for US$120 or so.
My point was just that 1080p gaming is quite possible on PCs today, and for somewhat less money than a PS3 + 1080p TV - it's not that new a deal.
Sony has stated quite explicitly that 1080p will the standard internal resolution for all PS3 games.
Oh? I must have missed that. Can you point me to that statement? I've only been able to find them declaring that the PS3 hardware will support 1080p "as standard", out-of-the-box. Nothing about requiring all games to render at that resolution as a minimum (which requires 2.25x more fillrate & framebuffer bandwidth than 720p). Seems a big performance hit to force on games for the exclusive benefit of people with a 1080p-capable TV.
Carmack explored threading the Quake3 engine pretty thoroughly - and concluded that it really didn't help much, due to the nature of the problem - high-bandwidth communication between threads.
Some types of computing problems (e.g the compositing app I work on) multithread very well, and some just don't.
It's possible Q3A might thread better on a Cell, due to high bandwidth between SPEs - but then again, he was using a the second thread for vertex processing, which is done by the GPU these days anyway.
I figured it was pretty easy to explain. The engines are in the back so that is where the anti gravity field that was keeping the up is the last to go. So as the antigravity field goes, the artificial gravity goes, and the planet's normal gravity asserts itself.
If there's no anti-gravity, and the ship's engines aren't on, then the ship is in free-fall and so are the occupants. Everyone's weightless, and that's that.
Besides, why was R2D2 sliding helplessly down a steep slope anyway? I thought he/she/it could fly these days.
1. CPU speed.
Well, maybe compared to the days when the CPU was also rendering the gfx, but modern games are becoming more dependant on the CPU, not less - better AI, more realistic physics, more complex animation techniques etc. Hence why the next-gen consoles have not just faster CPUs, but multiple cores - looks like they'll hold their own against PCs for a while.
2. Screen resolution/Graphics card
That's a large part of what's been driving the gfx market - improved display resolution. And now that we're finally abandoning crappy 480i TVs, consoles can make a jump too.
Heck in some cases these new consoles will actually beat computers for the first time in history. 1900X1000 is definately cool for a video resolution!
I have a laptop and 3 monitors that are comfortably capable of at least 1920 x 1200, and I can (& occasionally do) play games at that resolution. Do you have a 1080p-capable TV? Can you afford one? (they cost more than a full-on PC) Can you even *buy* one? I can't, not yet.
Don't expect many console games to actually support 1080 (i or p), however. The simpler ones might, but most will be tuned to run best at the more common (and easier) resolution of 720p.
3. Controllers
Agree, different controllers for different games. However, you can use a mouse/keyboard on current & future consoles, you can use some console controllers on PCs, and this will get a lot more common (according to MS).
4. Configuration.
True, but some people miss that:-) I modded my Xbox because it was cool to tweak it to do more than it could.
5. Living space.
Uh uh. While your point is valid, you could have a second console & 20" TV for a lot less than a PC - and many games are so much better on a large-screen TV (or projector) and full-size 6-channel surround system! My entertainment system is better at entertainment than my PC, so I prefer to use it for games where I can.
I have a 7 disc DVD changer, so no console is going to replace that.
Strange that you should say that. My modded Xbox running XBMC full of ripped movies on a 200 GB drive (and networked to my PCs) actually replaces my DVD player rather well, and has way more than 7 movies on hand. Music too. More convenient than a PC, and my precious originals are safe from my kids. Hey, it even plays games too!
It's great you're buying a Revolution & all, best way to play Nintendo games, but some people like to buy hardware that is useful for more than just one thing, not to replace but to supplement. Seems like better value to me, but YMMV of course.
Slashdot Mirror
C'mon, somebody make with the neat imagery already...
Consider such transforming technologies as the world wide web, the cell phone, quantum computing, genome sequencing etc. Remember also that many technologies are in their infancy today, and their full impact won't be felt for decades (e.g. nanotechnology).
Finally, I put it to you that if you're focussed on consumer items such as iPods and personal computers and are of the opinion that we "have enough", perhaps you should broaden your view a little. Over a fifth of the world's population does not "have enough" by any metric.
This time round, looks like it's Sony coming out second with the advanced yet fridge-sized beast & freakshow controllers, and it's going to really cost them a bundle, while the Xbox 360 seems to taking it more carefully...
I'm guessing that Nintendo will stay right where they were before though.
OTOH, it'd completely destroy any hope of a space elevator. You'd have to place it right out beyond geosynchronous orbit, and that'd blow out the numbers fantastically.
See Space Elevator (we have two of those, here in Fantasia). Lots of raw materials in the asteroids, no need to hoist megatonnes into orbit. Use a solar furnace for refining. Silicon crystals grow nicely in microgravity.
It could be beamed to earth and captured.
Nah, better to beam it to a receiving station on (or tethered to) the space elevator, then just run it down a superconducting wire to the planet. Less loss, less danger if you miss.
Ringworld is a totally different scale, and involves a lot of pseudo-science. This is all relatively straightforward engineering & financing challenges, no really new science needed.
Hm, if 90% is soaked up by the ring, that's 2.5 billion MW of heat energy we need to dissipate, or our ring's going to melt pretty quickly. Heatsinks aren't that efficient in a vacuum, plus they'd have to be on the dark side, radiating towards earth...
Maybe we better add some sort of superconducting thermal distributor, so we can radiate this excess heat into the earth's shadow. Shouldn't add much to the overall cost of lofting thousands of megatonnes into orbit :-)
(Mental note #2, asteroids are a better source of silicon for this than the earth's crust)
Now, let's orbit these solar cells at 500 km altitude, i.e. a diameter of 13,756.3 km or circumference of 43,217 km. The article doesn't say how wide the ring should be, but to block 1.6% of the sunlight to a circle 12,756.3 km in diameter would require a strip about 160 km wide. That's 6.9 million square kilometers of solar cells in the full ring.
Now the silicon wafer in a solar cell is really quite thin, typically around 300 microns thick, so that's only 2.074 cubic kilometers of silicon all up. Density is 2330 kg/m3, so that's 4,833 megatonnes of silicon required, or about 0.0000005% of the earth's resources. I think we have enough.
Of course, the energy required to manufacture that sort of area of solar cells would be pretty high, but think of the returns. The earth receives about 1370 W/m2 in orbit, so multiply that by the area of cells facing the sun (2.04 million square km), and you get about 2.8 billion MW of incident radiation :-) Let's say these cells aren't particularly efficient, maybe 10%, plus transmission losses of another 70%, and you still have 84 million MW of usable energy, all day, every day.
Now, in 1997 we used 380 quadrillion BTUs, globally, or about 111 quadrillion watt-hours. That's an average consumption of 12 million MW, comfortably within our budget for some time. An energy-producing system with a capacity of 7 times the entire global requirements is worth quite a bit.
There's only one downside to this - if we divert all this energy down to earth & use it, it all ends up as heat in the end, which completely nullifies the original purpose of the ring (if you remember) of preventing global warming! D'oh!
That might even take the pressure off the environment, as you could probably shut down most of the world's coal-fired power stations.
You don't have any cocaine near yourself, you don't personally know anyone with cocaine, you don't even know if cocaine is mentioned in the notes without checking the thousands of notes regularly. You only own the noticeboard, and are freely allowing people to post there whatever they have to offer.
Is that legal? I would think so, in itself. What if that noticeboard had a sign on top saying "Cocaine Community", would that change things?
There's all the live footage elements to consider - potentially dozens of layers for every final frame - each of which must be stored, converted, colour-graded, maybe stabilised, grain-matched, composited and edited.
What's more, any CG in the movie would be rendered as multiple separate 3D layers, not just a single frame, and all those layers also have to be colour- and grain-matched, unstabilised and composited with the live elements.
I've worked on a scene that required over 40 live and 450 CG layers for each frame of the shot - and each of those layers ranged from 40-80 MB (the shot was around 300 frames). That's around 20 GB per frame of pixels alone, not counting textures, CG geometry etc. And this data was used and re-used repeatedly as the shot evolved over the course of months.
A 10 gbps pipe to each workstation would really have helped, believe me :-)
I don't know precisely what sort of algorithm SETI@Home uses, but the 7 SPE vector units in the Cell chip would be near-ideal for many types of signal processing (far far more so than the original Xbox), so I think it likely it'd work very well indeed.
If the owner could be bothered leaving it on all day - and if Sony actually sell an HDD/Linux option for enough to make an overall profit. Otherwise, there's no way in hell they'll subsidise your climb up the Folding@Home ladder.
Word of mouth still applies. The movie(s) would be a good hook for new buyers. And many reviewers do DVDs too.
I've wondered this in the past myself.
Heh, forgot to add "Now watch me get modded down for saying this on Slashdot", and look what happens :-)
There are probably few cases around of anyone being prevented from editing & compiling their own source code, that they wrote or obtained the rights to or even licenced under permissive terms.
There are innumerous cases of people being prevented from editing & compiling the source code for software that belongs to someone else that they have not been granted such rights to, whether or not they have purchased the right to use that software.
Not all software is yours to do with as you please, of course. You can argue that the rights to use but not modify such software is not useful to you, but it is undeniably useful to many others. The fact that we are still able to choose what software we use and what software we purchase (Windows OEM bundling aside) means we are still, for the moment, free. At least in this respect.
Step backwards? or irrelevant? You decide...
(I always call them that)
I'm guessing it'll behave more like the Xbox 1 did - the machine has a certain level of graphical power, and developers will tune their games so that they run well at a particular resolution. For the Xbox 1, this was 480p for the great majority of games, 720p for a handful of simpler games, and one or two (like Dragon's Lair) ran at 1080i.
The reasons are the same - developers have a choice of high resolution, or fancier effects (longer shaders, depth complexity, AA/AF etc). They'll go with the eye candy first, and whatever resolution that the machine can support without losing too much framerate - rarely will the user be able to tradeoff effects for more resolution, as it is this sort of tweaking that takes so much of the time required to develop PC games, and that consoles avoid.
I'm expecting only a handful of PS3 games to output full 1080p (less for dual-monitors), for much the same reasons that Xbox 1 only saw a few developers opt for 720p support, even though the hardware was capable - too many tradeoffs, and not enough of a market. As with the Xbox 1, most of these will be released in the latter half of the console's life, and it'll be a nice feature for those games but ultimately make little difference overall.
Well, the laptop cost a bit (AUD$1500), but the 24" monitor was AUD$425 and the 19" monitors (which can squeak up to 2Kx1536, if not clearly) can be had for AUD$200 or less). The gfx cards weren't particularly high-end, AUD$200 or so. The PCs I already had, maybe $1200-1400 in parts at the most.
1080p-capable TVs are what, US$4000? $5000? Not available over here yet, at any sane price anyway.
Even bleeding-edge GPUs still struggle at 1920x1200 for any recent game, and 1920x1200-capable screens are also priced at a premium.
Current gfx cards will happily do 1920x1200 for many recent games, depending on how much eye candy you have enabled (like AA/AF, texture resolution etc), and what frame rate you find acceptable for that game. 1600x1200 is not at all uncommon, and that has more pixels than 1080p. And 19" monitors can be had for US$120 or so.
My point was just that 1080p gaming is quite possible on PCs today, and for somewhat less money than a PS3 + 1080p TV - it's not that new a deal.
Sony has stated quite explicitly that 1080p will the standard internal resolution for all PS3 games.
Oh? I must have missed that. Can you point me to that statement? I've only been able to find them declaring that the PS3 hardware will support 1080p "as standard", out-of-the-box. Nothing about requiring all games to render at that resolution as a minimum (which requires 2.25x more fillrate & framebuffer bandwidth than 720p). Seems a big performance hit to force on games for the exclusive benefit of people with a 1080p-capable TV.
Some types of computing problems (e.g the compositing app I work on) multithread very well, and some just don't.
It's possible Q3A might thread better on a Cell, due to high bandwidth between SPEs - but then again, he was using a the second thread for vertex processing, which is done by the GPU these days anyway.
"Broadband Engine"? Which marketing dept came up with that one?
If there's no anti-gravity, and the ship's engines aren't on, then the ship is in free-fall and so are the occupants. Everyone's weightless, and that's that.
Besides, why was R2D2 sliding helplessly down a steep slope anyway? I thought he/she/it could fly these days.
Well, maybe compared to the days when the CPU was also rendering the gfx, but modern games are becoming more dependant on the CPU, not less - better AI, more realistic physics, more complex animation techniques etc. Hence why the next-gen consoles have not just faster CPUs, but multiple cores - looks like they'll hold their own against PCs for a while.
2. Screen resolution/Graphics card
That's a large part of what's been driving the gfx market - improved display resolution. And now that we're finally abandoning crappy 480i TVs, consoles can make a jump too.
Heck in some cases these new consoles will actually beat computers for the first time in history. 1900X1000 is definately cool for a video resolution!
I have a laptop and 3 monitors that are comfortably capable of at least 1920 x 1200, and I can (& occasionally do) play games at that resolution. Do you have a 1080p-capable TV? Can you afford one? (they cost more than a full-on PC) Can you even *buy* one? I can't, not yet.
Don't expect many console games to actually support 1080 (i or p), however. The simpler ones might, but most will be tuned to run best at the more common (and easier) resolution of 720p.
3. Controllers
Agree, different controllers for different games. However, you can use a mouse/keyboard on current & future consoles, you can use some console controllers on PCs, and this will get a lot more common (according to MS).
4. Configuration. :-) I modded my Xbox because it was cool to tweak it to do more than it could.
True, but some people miss that
5. Living space.
Uh uh. While your point is valid, you could have a second console & 20" TV for a lot less than a PC - and many games are so much better on a large-screen TV (or projector) and full-size 6-channel surround system! My entertainment system is better at entertainment than my PC, so I prefer to use it for games where I can.
Right, and the Sinclair ZX80 could use its 1 KB of RAM to control a nuclear power station.
Strange that you should say that. My modded Xbox running XBMC full of ripped movies on a 200 GB drive (and networked to my PCs) actually replaces my DVD player rather well, and has way more than 7 movies on hand. Music too. More convenient than a PC, and my precious originals are safe from my kids. Hey, it even plays games too!
It's great you're buying a Revolution & all, best way to play Nintendo games, but some people like to buy hardware that is useful for more than just one thing, not to replace but to supplement. Seems like better value to me, but YMMV of course.