I actually remember having to use a typewriter in middle school. There's no way you could drag me back to those days. They jam, run out of ink, are unforgiving, etc. Plus the obvious - once a letter is typed, it's typed.
I'm very sorry that you didn't get a chance to work with an IBM Selectric. It never jammed -- it was physically impossible. Sure it may run out of ink every now and then, but with an erase ink too, mistakes can be undone. Certainly an entire page is done, but that teaches one to write with distinct purpose. I love my computer, but I'm a little sorry my kids will never know the difference between a cheap $50 typewriter and a beautiful IBM Selectric. If anything teaches the value of an investment, that does.
I've used Hulu. Finding a single show is complicated, and tracking down the right episode is still more complicated than it needs to be. There's no tracking which shows I've watched. The interface does not port to a TV remote in the slightest, and the only way to watch Hulu on the TV is to have a TV out on the computer, or a DVI in on the TV.
Now, an episode of House, embedded with Chevy, Coke and Blue Cross / Blue Shield ads and then made available on a public, established Torrent interface -- that's success.
Heck, if iTunes could get the cost per episode down to the pennies per eyeball pair, plus the cost of bandwidth, that'd be far more reasonable than the $2 they charge today.
I wonder what bit rate we can push through the copper at most houses in rural America? My father-in-law's old house used to get very bad static on the line when it rained, but voice was still audible. Would this VOIP be capable of service, or does that house require new wiring? Anything requiring a lot of people to change the wires in their walls is going to face some serious problems. I bet new hardware in the field could get 64kbit or maybe 128kbit digital without much problem. If you're not worried about a computer talking on the line at the same time, that is way more than sufficient. Since the FCC solicitation seems to suggest they're using this as a way to force wider broadband deployment, 256kbit might be the minimum for a connection intended to share with a computer, although I'd hesitate to call that "broadband".
I bet we could help with the reliability of VOIP by putting cheap NiMH batteries in each VOIP device (one per house, at the pedestal? or each device needs its own?). Enough capacity to last a few hours on standby and maybe 15 or 20 minutes of talk time would cover emergencies.
I think it would be very interesting to be on a technical committee to write a new standard to cover bidirectional communication on low quality twisted pair. There would be interesting coupling challenges with using one wire for send and the other for receive, but using a current sense methodology on a differential signal has its own ugliness too. It would be cheating to take turns every 10-100ms using a training sequence, but there would be power and signal benefits to weigh against the increase in latency and cut in available bandwidth (and if each device gets its own CODEC, having more than 3 people on the phone may have ludicrous latencies).
It's interesting to me, the suite of hardware and software it takes to replace the functionality of an RSS feed on Vuse or uTorrent and a properly hacked XBox / AppleTV / PC with a decent remote with a few extra codecs.
Why doesn't NBC & Co. go out and get a pile of sponsors, embed ads in an avi and then release that torrent? Of course, it cuts out the local affiliates, but as I recall from reading the US Constitution (which is obsolete, I know), copyrights are there to progress the arts and science. Profits of local affiliates aren't in there.
Have you ever bought and ate a real steak. No... Not the kind you buy at Western Corral, but the NY cut or Filet mignon aged beef marinated over 24 hours cooked by a professional with the right blend of herbs spices that melts in your mouth usually costing you over 30-40 or even $100 per plate
Why would you have to marinate a good piece of steak? If it tasted good in the first place, you wouldn't have to add all that crap. Marinades are there for two reasons: 1) To homogenize a product, so every piece of meat from a restaurant (or chain) tastes the same, and 2) To compensate for sub-par product, by increasing the amount of flavor that comes from less variable sources.
Before you berate someone for not paying enough for their meat, I challenge you to get the same grade of beef and then NOT Starbuck-ize it. Grill it, or pan fry it or whatever. A good cut of beef tastes even better when you're not trying to flavor the fuck out of it with plants.
In general, I'd rather work with a person who has the knowledge but had to work it out for themselves than someone who memorized it in school... all else being equal, they will usually have a deeper understanding of the knowledge.
In the old days, this was called a "karma whore", and certainly to get modded up because it's a fundamental truth that nobody stops to think about. The difference between what you said and a useful comment is that there's a whole lot of spectrum between someone who "memorized it in school" and someone "who had to work it out". Of course, you don't want someone who thinks you go to college for the classes -- although most high school students would expect that to be the whole reason. College is for the people you meet, for the exchange of ideas and styles and for learning wholly new approaches to problems. I could take a correspondence course and learn a whole lot about computer engineering, but if I sit in a lab and have to compete with people for a grade, learn from my losses by observing how people work, I become a much better person. If you take the college experience and turn it into an opportunity to learn some book stuff while you teach yourself how to "run with the big dogs", then you're the best combination of book smarts and experience.
What you may not appreciate, as an engineering graduate, is that a computer science degree is a science degree, not an engineering degree. 2-year technical diploma programs are sometimes closer to engineering degrees than computer science generally is.
I apologize if I gave that impression. In truth, I believe software engineering and computer science are two vastly different things, and are often used interchangably. Computer science, in the spirit of physics or chemistry, is more about algorithms and the purity of the computer. This is certainly needed, and I would argue this is more needed today than we actually see. Software engineering is a term vastly overused by people who have no idea what engineering is, and often computer scientists who aren't practicing science, but rather practical application. Engineering is about taking the science that others have made and making practical world tradeoffs to architect an entire solution. Too many people writing software these days should be called either "programmer" or even simply "hack". I have a world of respect for my compatriots in the software engineering field, and for their brethren in computer science.
An architect is not merely a guy who can hit a nail with a hammer. A software engineer is not merely someone who can write a program.
I'm a hardware engineer. You want a real engineer for some design and most analysis tasks. History and sociology don't play a part, but dedication to the profession and experience with the underlying principles behind observations are key. A two year grad, or technician, is typically very good for a subset of design, along with a whole bunch of data acquisition.
I imagine code to be the same. If you want high level stuff, architectures, in depth analysis, a full discussion of repercussions of coding choices, a 4 year computer scientist or software engineer is called for. If all that stuff is already laid out and you just need someone to type in a pile of code to do a well defined task, a 2 year would be great.
It's not necessarily the stuff learned in the extra 2 years, but the level of person it takes to invest in their future like that. The 4 year colleges provide a different group of people to "run with" and compete against. College is rarely about the classes, although they're necessary and grades are the common barometer, but it's about the friends made and the level of competition -- you need to compete with people to learn better practices.
Of course, there are prodigies who can do excellent work with self teaching, but separating them from the chaff (and overcoming their egos) is rarely worth the time in my experience.
Sure, you could try to teach the 50 year old dog new tricks, but you got here because [s]he didn't want to learn them in the first place.
Your choices:
Prevent any lasting changes. Live CD-ROM, USB key which is write protected, mounting read-only, etc. This prohibits bookmarking and the like. But if all they want is web, maybe it's not a problem. There are a few caging options that you can use too, that blow away the user id's changes on each log out / shutdown. As long as they don't need Administrator access, this may be a good option.
Streamline your install. Image the hard drive next time you "get it all just right". Except, repartition your hard drive so your "just right" fits in a second partition. Boot off a Linux CD, it doesn't really matter which one. Use dd to copy the raw partition to this new partition. Next time your family blasts it, boot off CD again, and use dd to copy the raw partition back. Fixes most problems. As extra credit, install a very basic (no gui) Linux on that other partition, and fix rc.3 or whatever so that as soon as it boots, it reinitializes the windows drive. Teach [Mom|Dad] to hit "2" whenever Windows is fucked up so it boots the non-default Linux install and wipes the drive and starts from scratch -- then you never have to be involved except to update the image.
When I first saw this "Natal" thing, I was confused, and I still am. Unlike the Playstation 3 controller announced around the same time which was a bulb on a stick that controls things on screen when you move it, I remain clueless about what Natal actually does.
Natal is a peripheral for your XBox 360 with gives it 3-D sight, particularly with respect to people. The concept is that a skeleton can be built in software to understand what motions you're making. Either through an API or through game code, the programmer can watch this skeleton and react differently based on how the user moves. There was a video on launch about playing breakout using your hands. It's conceivable that it could watch you do yoga, like Wii Fit, except actually correct your poses or represent you with an avatar in the pretty room. I don't know if it could see fingers or hands very well, but things like driving simulators and frisbee golf (I love my Wii Sports Resort) seem easy to envision. Of course, for most things, I'd rather have the resolution and tactile certainty of a controller I can hold.
I fell in love with my Wii when I realized I could lay down on my sofa, with my arms comfortable crossed over my chest while playing Lego Star Wars. The Wii controller is revolutionary, but not only because of the motion control. For me, it takes ergonomics to a new level.
I think OP was onto something when he defined an impulse buy as "in the area of $20.00 or less", and I don't disagree. The whole point being that £50, regardless of how you convert currencies, isn't an impulse thing. Admittedly, after looking at what MS charges for other XBox 360 accessories, anything short of $100 is a bargain.
And how cheap is this ex-Soviet fuel, while it lasts? Shouldn't we count the cost to get them, which includes $TRILLIONS on the Cold War?
In economic terms, that's a sunk or opportunity cost. Those trillions have been paid. Whether we decide to use the material or knowledge or not doesn't change the amount of money put in, and the incremental cost of actually using that is all that we should continue to worry about.
If we can take all those trillions and turn them into something good, why not do it? Ignoring the inherent benefit of breeder reactor, or fuel recycling, what do you think should be done with all that material? Bury it in the ground because it's bad? Or maybe spend it and offset the amount of radiation we're introducing into the atmosphere (from coal)?
I want to see every coal plant in the world shut down and recycled. I think a combination of nuclear, solar (photovoltaic and thermal) and wind can do the job just as well, while costing the same or even less.
And how much will it cost when ALL their water needs for lawns and parks and such need to be piped in? Not to mention that many plants need some of the water to fall on the leaves not just the roots.
Well, this is a town of 7000 people in Vermont. If they don't have their own wells, the central utility does. Water is generally not a big deal there. I imagine the people would start to need sprinklers.
What about insects and pollinators? Birds that fly south?
Well, the birds aren't going south very far, but there are probably going to be insects who live inside the dome. There will probably be an equilibrium of insects who pollinate.
Air quality will probably be solved with some air exchangers. Part of what makes this idea so interesting is learning how much air needs to be exchanged. What kinds of air locks, if any, are necessary for people to come and go would be a very interesting problem.
As much of a tourist destination Vermont is for its small towns, fall foliage, cool summers and winter snow, there are probably a lot of Vermont residents who would love to spend a week somewhere they'd consider the weather sane -- and a dome just might provide that respite. I think it would be a fantastic engineering and science learning experience to try it out.
Maybe you're very young, but I seem to recall that Microsoft was at one time held as a sort of liberator from IBM's hegemony. I guess it's all a matter of perspective...
Maybe I am very young, but I seem to recall Gary Kildall having a few words to say about both Microsoft and IBM in this era of liberation you speak of. Something about Microsoft stealing CP/M through a thinly veiled Seattle Computer Products?
'Isaac Asimov died forty years after they were first written. If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have.
A few select pieces of timeline:
_I, Robot_, 1950.
_Foundation_, 1951.
_Foundation's Edge_, 1982.
_Robots and Empire_, 1985.
_Foundation and Earth_, 1986.
Author's death, 1992.
It seems obvious he felt it entirely possible to follow up with a book 30 years after beginning, and it is certainly true that he didn't feel Robots were finished off as a body of story 35-36 years after beginning (Foundation and Earth is arguably a Robots novel). If he had lived another 40 years beyond 1986 and not touched the universe, then I think we could have argued about original intentions. Passing a mere 6 years after the last entries, however, tells us nothing about his true intent, or how it would change after decades of pondering his creations.
Of course, being revisionist in assessing his intent is a bit clever, isn't it? Seeing as how many times he revised his own plans, thoughts and plot/ story/ time lines.
I loved Asimov for the reason I love Lucas. He can tell a great story. It's not particularly great writing, not very deep stuff (although there are quite a few good reflections on human nature), but it's an entire universe in a book (or five).
If you're enough of an Asimov aficionado to get excited about this, I sure hope you're still angry at him for adding to the Foundation "Trilogy", what with the prequel and sequels written long after the Trilogy wrapped up. Hopefully you're angry with him for writing Foundation and Earth, the last I, Robot novel (not a Foundation book, some assert). Foundation's Edge certainly didn't follow the same writing style or story telling style of the first three (as written, not chronologically).
If you love the stories, I bet you'll love the next few. If you're some pure Asimov fan, you have quite a few inconsistencies built-in already, so maybe you'll love these too.
There are Winchester drives and 1x cdroms that still work fine today. I doubt that in 25 years ANY of the SSDs built today will work.
Last I heard, flash manufacturers were shooting for "5 9s at 10 years", which is to say that they were going to retain 99.999% of cell data after 10 years. Flash is made of very low leakage capacitors, and every capacitor leaks. If your device never refreshes a cell in 25 years, I'd expect more than one failure. I don't know what the distribution looks like, nor what their ECC / hamming distance look like, but after 25 years of off-time, my expectations would be fairly low. If you were using this device in a mostly read fashion, or writing with most of the drive empty (for wear levelling purposes), or if you powered it up every 5 years and re-imaged it (is there a tool to read every block and re-write it to force a cell refresh?), I would fully expect SSDs to fail at a lower rate than any spinning or mechanical device beyond 30 years.
If you care that the Winchester still works, you really should be looking at tape. I don't care if your 1x CDROM works, you could use a 52x for pretty cheap. SSDs are strong for a lot of reasons, but few customers could care less about long term storage.
As an aside, we seem to be stuck around 50-70x for optical drives, instead relying on lower wavelength lasers to drive up linear bit density. Has anybody considered a multi-armed read device? If you had a pair of laser arms parked at 1/3 and 2/3, random access should cut in half. A second device in a single arm fixed a single sector away would allow a track to be read and the next one speculatively buffered. Of course, such a business case seems to resemble failure.
Young man, you will bite your tongue after speaking of Firefly with such disrespect!
Compare the technobabble of TNG to Firefly. How many times did the tachyon thing have to get reversed, repolarized, resynchronized or whatever in order to solve some time spacial anomaly?
Firefly ep Out of Gas:
Kaylee: Catalyzer on the port compression coil blew. It's where the trouble started.
Mal: Okay, I need that in captain dummy-talk, Kaylee.
Kaylee: We're dead in the water.
And that's about as "technobabble to assist the plot" as Firefly got.
I thought most energy losses in chips were in the actual transistors rather than in the wires? Now, if they find a way to make this stuff switch very quickly between "superconducting" and "very good insulator"...
You're mostly right, gp is way off. Between the DC currents of modern short channel FETs and the AC currents of any high performance CMOS chip, the transistors are the biggest contributor.
On the second order, if you could reduce all your RC wires to just C wires by using those superconductors, then you could turn the voltage down for equivalent performance -- the transistors would "see" the full power supply voltage. Depending on the power distribution network, the transistors could be seeing 5-15% less voltage (or worse) than the power supply puts out. We mitigate this by devoting large wires to power distribution and putting decaps on the package and in silicon, but there's only so much you can do with aluminum or copper wires. I'm sure you can see the advantage for both the DC and AC power components if the power supply can be 5-15% lower because we're not having to argue with wire resistance.
I don't know how novel it is. Pick a character, based on their strengths and optionally weigh that against your opponents' weaknesses. You're on a team of 5 or less, against another team of 5 or less. The objective is to destroy the other team's primary building, but to do so you have to get through a number of defensive buildings, hostile "creeps" and of course, the other team. In order to do so, you must gain experience and "level up" by killing aforementioned creeps and opponents as well as NPCs. With gold from said killings and from periodic salary, you invest in a number of weapons, spells and armor, some of which combine to reduce the number of slots taken (from 6 available) or to yield special abilities. There are additional nuances of etiquette (some of which are patches to exploits) and of course strategy.
In summary, I think the only thing that makes it novel is that it takes familiar ideas from a number of old games and combines them in a way nobody else has. The concepts, while high in number, are easily learned for someone who has played several games before, allowing the focus of the game to fall to strategy.
I get on binges where I play it every night for a month once or twice a year since I found it in 2003/2004.
While the Mac may be a predictable answer, it doesn't answer the challenge of a port replicator or a hot swappable drive bay.
While I have to disclose that I'm typing this on a 24" iMac Merom, and that i own 100 shares of Apple, the MacBook Pro comes closes to the challenge, given the hefty built-in battery and optical drive (and no need to choose between them), but only barely meets the price. You won't find a MacBook Pro docking station either. The processor will be a noticable upgrade, and a few vitrual machines will please you with convenience for the other OSes (but you'll want to cough up 50-100 for more RAM before too long if you go this route I think).
Given the poster's happiness with the previous machine, I'd suggest repair or finding a used machine of the same model. All the legacy hardware will still work. If you're really interested in a little better performance, make sure you have maxed out the RAM (can make a very big difference) and take a good hard look at SSDs that may fit your budget. A good SSD will completely change how you use your machine, and you'll quickly find that lower latency mass storage will greatly impact a variety of tasks you thought had already hit their peak (I recommend this article.
My Google skills have obviously been waning. I did some searching for a way to play Wii games without the discs and never came up with anything. Is Hack Mii the best way to do this? I honestly don't care about homebrew, but my kids destroy optical discs. Heck, last week, my son tried to put Lego Batman in the drive while Wii Fitness Resort was in and now the optical drive itself is dead (go AmEx extended warranty!). Will Hack Mii allow me to take titles I bought (I own over 20) and drop at least a few commonly used ones to a USB drive, preferably flash?
I looked around Hack Mii, and there's a certain vocabulary that's already assumed. I think I'm most interested in WiiTools / Wiiso, but WiiUpdateManager seems relevant too. Can anybody tell me if there's a simple app I can run (after installing Hack Mii) to image off a disc to a USB stick or an SD card?
There's a difference between "options" and "we removed features to charge more". That's what you're missing. With cable, you choose what tv stations you want and then you get those channels.
Sweet. Then I'll go order HBO, SciFi and History. By the time they finish taking off FX, Spike, Lifetime, 20 channels of shopping, ESPN, Disney, Nickelodeon and BET, those three channels shouldn't be very expensive at all. I bet I'll save money!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm very sorry that you didn't get a chance to work with an IBM Selectric. It never jammed -- it was physically impossible. Sure it may run out of ink every now and then, but with an erase ink too, mistakes can be undone. Certainly an entire page is done, but that teaches one to write with distinct purpose. I love my computer, but I'm a little sorry my kids will never know the difference between a cheap $50 typewriter and a beautiful IBM Selectric. If anything teaches the value of an investment, that does.
I've used Hulu. Finding a single show is complicated, and tracking down the right episode is still more complicated than it needs to be. There's no tracking which shows I've watched. The interface does not port to a TV remote in the slightest, and the only way to watch Hulu on the TV is to have a TV out on the computer, or a DVI in on the TV. Now, an episode of House, embedded with Chevy, Coke and Blue Cross / Blue Shield ads and then made available on a public, established Torrent interface -- that's success. Heck, if iTunes could get the cost per episode down to the pennies per eyeball pair, plus the cost of bandwidth, that'd be far more reasonable than the $2 they charge today.
I wonder what bit rate we can push through the copper at most houses in rural America? My father-in-law's old house used to get very bad static on the line when it rained, but voice was still audible. Would this VOIP be capable of service, or does that house require new wiring? Anything requiring a lot of people to change the wires in their walls is going to face some serious problems. I bet new hardware in the field could get 64kbit or maybe 128kbit digital without much problem. If you're not worried about a computer talking on the line at the same time, that is way more than sufficient. Since the FCC solicitation seems to suggest they're using this as a way to force wider broadband deployment, 256kbit might be the minimum for a connection intended to share with a computer, although I'd hesitate to call that "broadband".
I bet we could help with the reliability of VOIP by putting cheap NiMH batteries in each VOIP device (one per house, at the pedestal? or each device needs its own?). Enough capacity to last a few hours on standby and maybe 15 or 20 minutes of talk time would cover emergencies.
I think it would be very interesting to be on a technical committee to write a new standard to cover bidirectional communication on low quality twisted pair. There would be interesting coupling challenges with using one wire for send and the other for receive, but using a current sense methodology on a differential signal has its own ugliness too. It would be cheating to take turns every 10-100ms using a training sequence, but there would be power and signal benefits to weigh against the increase in latency and cut in available bandwidth (and if each device gets its own CODEC, having more than 3 people on the phone may have ludicrous latencies).
It's interesting to me, the suite of hardware and software it takes to replace the functionality of an RSS feed on Vuse or uTorrent and a properly hacked XBox / AppleTV / PC with a decent remote with a few extra codecs.
Why doesn't NBC & Co. go out and get a pile of sponsors, embed ads in an avi and then release that torrent? Of course, it cuts out the local affiliates, but as I recall from reading the US Constitution (which is obsolete, I know), copyrights are there to progress the arts and science. Profits of local affiliates aren't in there.
Why would you have to marinate a good piece of steak? If it tasted good in the first place, you wouldn't have to add all that crap. Marinades are there for two reasons: 1) To homogenize a product, so every piece of meat from a restaurant (or chain) tastes the same, and 2) To compensate for sub-par product, by increasing the amount of flavor that comes from less variable sources.
Before you berate someone for not paying enough for their meat, I challenge you to get the same grade of beef and then NOT Starbuck-ize it. Grill it, or pan fry it or whatever. A good cut of beef tastes even better when you're not trying to flavor the fuck out of it with plants.
In the old days, this was called a "karma whore", and certainly to get modded up because it's a fundamental truth that nobody stops to think about. The difference between what you said and a useful comment is that there's a whole lot of spectrum between someone who "memorized it in school" and someone "who had to work it out". Of course, you don't want someone who thinks you go to college for the classes -- although most high school students would expect that to be the whole reason. College is for the people you meet, for the exchange of ideas and styles and for learning wholly new approaches to problems. I could take a correspondence course and learn a whole lot about computer engineering, but if I sit in a lab and have to compete with people for a grade, learn from my losses by observing how people work, I become a much better person. If you take the college experience and turn it into an opportunity to learn some book stuff while you teach yourself how to "run with the big dogs", then you're the best combination of book smarts and experience.
I apologize if I gave that impression. In truth, I believe software engineering and computer science are two vastly different things, and are often used interchangably. Computer science, in the spirit of physics or chemistry, is more about algorithms and the purity of the computer. This is certainly needed, and I would argue this is more needed today than we actually see. Software engineering is a term vastly overused by people who have no idea what engineering is, and often computer scientists who aren't practicing science, but rather practical application. Engineering is about taking the science that others have made and making practical world tradeoffs to architect an entire solution. Too many people writing software these days should be called either "programmer" or even simply "hack". I have a world of respect for my compatriots in the software engineering field, and for their brethren in computer science.
An architect is not merely a guy who can hit a nail with a hammer. A software engineer is not merely someone who can write a program.
I'm a hardware engineer. You want a real engineer for some design and most analysis tasks. History and sociology don't play a part, but dedication to the profession and experience with the underlying principles behind observations are key. A two year grad, or technician, is typically very good for a subset of design, along with a whole bunch of data acquisition.
I imagine code to be the same. If you want high level stuff, architectures, in depth analysis, a full discussion of repercussions of coding choices, a 4 year computer scientist or software engineer is called for. If all that stuff is already laid out and you just need someone to type in a pile of code to do a well defined task, a 2 year would be great.
It's not necessarily the stuff learned in the extra 2 years, but the level of person it takes to invest in their future like that. The 4 year colleges provide a different group of people to "run with" and compete against. College is rarely about the classes, although they're necessary and grades are the common barometer, but it's about the friends made and the level of competition -- you need to compete with people to learn better practices.
Of course, there are prodigies who can do excellent work with self teaching, but separating them from the chaff (and overcoming their egos) is rarely worth the time in my experience.
Sure, you could try to teach the 50 year old dog new tricks, but you got here because [s]he didn't want to learn them in the first place.
Your choices:
Prevent any lasting changes. Live CD-ROM, USB key which is write protected, mounting read-only, etc. This prohibits bookmarking and the like. But if all they want is web, maybe it's not a problem. There are a few caging options that you can use too, that blow away the user id's changes on each log out / shutdown. As long as they don't need Administrator access, this may be a good option.
Streamline your install. Image the hard drive next time you "get it all just right". Except, repartition your hard drive so your "just right" fits in a second partition. Boot off a Linux CD, it doesn't really matter which one. Use dd to copy the raw partition to this new partition. Next time your family blasts it, boot off CD again, and use dd to copy the raw partition back. Fixes most problems. As extra credit, install a very basic (no gui) Linux on that other partition, and fix rc.3 or whatever so that as soon as it boots, it reinitializes the windows drive. Teach [Mom|Dad] to hit "2" whenever Windows is fucked up so it boots the non-default Linux install and wipes the drive and starts from scratch -- then you never have to be involved except to update the image.
Natal is a peripheral for your XBox 360 with gives it 3-D sight, particularly with respect to people. The concept is that a skeleton can be built in software to understand what motions you're making. Either through an API or through game code, the programmer can watch this skeleton and react differently based on how the user moves. There was a video on launch about playing breakout using your hands. It's conceivable that it could watch you do yoga, like Wii Fit, except actually correct your poses or represent you with an avatar in the pretty room. I don't know if it could see fingers or hands very well, but things like driving simulators and frisbee golf (I love my Wii Sports Resort) seem easy to envision. Of course, for most things, I'd rather have the resolution and tactile certainty of a controller I can hold.
I fell in love with my Wii when I realized I could lay down on my sofa, with my arms comfortable crossed over my chest while playing Lego Star Wars. The Wii controller is revolutionary, but not only because of the motion control. For me, it takes ergonomics to a new level.
I think OP was onto something when he defined an impulse buy as "in the area of $20.00 or less", and I don't disagree. The whole point being that £50, regardless of how you convert currencies, isn't an impulse thing. Admittedly, after looking at what MS charges for other XBox 360 accessories, anything short of $100 is a bargain.
In economic terms, that's a sunk or opportunity cost. Those trillions have been paid. Whether we decide to use the material or knowledge or not doesn't change the amount of money put in, and the incremental cost of actually using that is all that we should continue to worry about.
If we can take all those trillions and turn them into something good, why not do it? Ignoring the inherent benefit of breeder reactor, or fuel recycling, what do you think should be done with all that material? Bury it in the ground because it's bad? Or maybe spend it and offset the amount of radiation we're introducing into the atmosphere (from coal)?
I want to see every coal plant in the world shut down and recycled. I think a combination of nuclear, solar (photovoltaic and thermal) and wind can do the job just as well, while costing the same or even less.
Well, this is a town of 7000 people in Vermont. If they don't have their own wells, the central utility does. Water is generally not a big deal there. I imagine the people would start to need sprinklers.
Well, the birds aren't going south very far, but there are probably going to be insects who live inside the dome. There will probably be an equilibrium of insects who pollinate.
Air quality will probably be solved with some air exchangers. Part of what makes this idea so interesting is learning how much air needs to be exchanged. What kinds of air locks, if any, are necessary for people to come and go would be a very interesting problem.
As much of a tourist destination Vermont is for its small towns, fall foliage, cool summers and winter snow, there are probably a lot of Vermont residents who would love to spend a week somewhere they'd consider the weather sane -- and a dome just might provide that respite. I think it would be a fantastic engineering and science learning experience to try it out.
Maybe I am very young, but I seem to recall Gary Kildall having a few words to say about both Microsoft and IBM in this era of liberation you speak of. Something about Microsoft stealing CP/M through a thinly veiled Seattle Computer Products?
A few select pieces of timeline:
_I, Robot_, 1950.
_Foundation_, 1951.
_Foundation's Edge_, 1982.
_Robots and Empire_, 1985.
_Foundation and Earth_, 1986.
Author's death, 1992.
It seems obvious he felt it entirely possible to follow up with a book 30 years after beginning, and it is certainly true that he didn't feel Robots were finished off as a body of story 35-36 years after beginning (Foundation and Earth is arguably a Robots novel). If he had lived another 40 years beyond 1986 and not touched the universe, then I think we could have argued about original intentions. Passing a mere 6 years after the last entries, however, tells us nothing about his true intent, or how it would change after decades of pondering his creations.
Of course, being revisionist in assessing his intent is a bit clever, isn't it? Seeing as how many times he revised his own plans, thoughts and plot/ story/ time lines.
I loved Asimov for the reason I love Lucas. He can tell a great story. It's not particularly great writing, not very deep stuff (although there are quite a few good reflections on human nature), but it's an entire universe in a book (or five).
If you're enough of an Asimov aficionado to get excited about this, I sure hope you're still angry at him for adding to the Foundation "Trilogy", what with the prequel and sequels written long after the Trilogy wrapped up. Hopefully you're angry with him for writing Foundation and Earth, the last I, Robot novel (not a Foundation book, some assert). Foundation's Edge certainly didn't follow the same writing style or story telling style of the first three (as written, not chronologically).
If you love the stories, I bet you'll love the next few. If you're some pure Asimov fan, you have quite a few inconsistencies built-in already, so maybe you'll love these too.
Last I heard, flash manufacturers were shooting for "5 9s at 10 years", which is to say that they were going to retain 99.999% of cell data after 10 years. Flash is made of very low leakage capacitors, and every capacitor leaks. If your device never refreshes a cell in 25 years, I'd expect more than one failure. I don't know what the distribution looks like, nor what their ECC / hamming distance look like, but after 25 years of off-time, my expectations would be fairly low. If you were using this device in a mostly read fashion, or writing with most of the drive empty (for wear levelling purposes), or if you powered it up every 5 years and re-imaged it (is there a tool to read every block and re-write it to force a cell refresh?), I would fully expect SSDs to fail at a lower rate than any spinning or mechanical device beyond 30 years.
If you care that the Winchester still works, you really should be looking at tape. I don't care if your 1x CDROM works, you could use a 52x for pretty cheap. SSDs are strong for a lot of reasons, but few customers could care less about long term storage.
As an aside, we seem to be stuck around 50-70x for optical drives, instead relying on lower wavelength lasers to drive up linear bit density. Has anybody considered a multi-armed read device? If you had a pair of laser arms parked at 1/3 and 2/3, random access should cut in half. A second device in a single arm fixed a single sector away would allow a track to be read and the next one speculatively buffered. Of course, such a business case seems to resemble failure.
Young man, you will bite your tongue after speaking of Firefly with such disrespect!
Compare the technobabble of TNG to Firefly. How many times did the tachyon thing have to get reversed, repolarized, resynchronized or whatever in order to solve some time spacial anomaly?
Firefly ep Out of Gas:
And that's about as "technobabble to assist the plot" as Firefly got.
You're mostly right, gp is way off. Between the DC currents of modern short channel FETs and the AC currents of any high performance CMOS chip, the transistors are the biggest contributor.
On the second order, if you could reduce all your RC wires to just C wires by using those superconductors, then you could turn the voltage down for equivalent performance -- the transistors would "see" the full power supply voltage. Depending on the power distribution network, the transistors could be seeing 5-15% less voltage (or worse) than the power supply puts out. We mitigate this by devoting large wires to power distribution and putting decaps on the package and in silicon, but there's only so much you can do with aluminum or copper wires. I'm sure you can see the advantage for both the DC and AC power components if the power supply can be 5-15% lower because we're not having to argue with wire resistance.
Maggie? Gross. I mean, she's at least 19 now, maybe 20, so even if it's legal, it's not something I want to think about.
I don't know how novel it is. Pick a character, based on their strengths and optionally weigh that against your opponents' weaknesses. You're on a team of 5 or less, against another team of 5 or less. The objective is to destroy the other team's primary building, but to do so you have to get through a number of defensive buildings, hostile "creeps" and of course, the other team. In order to do so, you must gain experience and "level up" by killing aforementioned creeps and opponents as well as NPCs. With gold from said killings and from periodic salary, you invest in a number of weapons, spells and armor, some of which combine to reduce the number of slots taken (from 6 available) or to yield special abilities. There are additional nuances of etiquette (some of which are patches to exploits) and of course strategy.
In summary, I think the only thing that makes it novel is that it takes familiar ideas from a number of old games and combines them in a way nobody else has. The concepts, while high in number, are easily learned for someone who has played several games before, allowing the focus of the game to fall to strategy.
I get on binges where I play it every night for a month once or twice a year since I found it in 2003/2004.
While the Mac may be a predictable answer, it doesn't answer the challenge of a port replicator or a hot swappable drive bay.
While I have to disclose that I'm typing this on a 24" iMac Merom, and that i own 100 shares of Apple, the MacBook Pro comes closes to the challenge, given the hefty built-in battery and optical drive (and no need to choose between them), but only barely meets the price. You won't find a MacBook Pro docking station either. The processor will be a noticable upgrade, and a few vitrual machines will please you with convenience for the other OSes (but you'll want to cough up 50-100 for more RAM before too long if you go this route I think).
Given the poster's happiness with the previous machine, I'd suggest repair or finding a used machine of the same model. All the legacy hardware will still work. If you're really interested in a little better performance, make sure you have maxed out the RAM (can make a very big difference) and take a good hard look at SSDs that may fit your budget. A good SSD will completely change how you use your machine, and you'll quickly find that lower latency mass storage will greatly impact a variety of tasks you thought had already hit their peak (I recommend this article.
Frustrating answer, but thanks for the googlebait quotes.
My Google skills have obviously been waning. I did some searching for a way to play Wii games without the discs and never came up with anything. Is Hack Mii the best way to do this? I honestly don't care about homebrew, but my kids destroy optical discs. Heck, last week, my son tried to put Lego Batman in the drive while Wii Fitness Resort was in and now the optical drive itself is dead (go AmEx extended warranty!). Will Hack Mii allow me to take titles I bought (I own over 20) and drop at least a few commonly used ones to a USB drive, preferably flash?
I looked around Hack Mii, and there's a certain vocabulary that's already assumed. I think I'm most interested in WiiTools / Wiiso, but WiiUpdateManager seems relevant too. Can anybody tell me if there's a simple app I can run (after installing Hack Mii) to image off a disc to a USB stick or an SD card?
Sweet. Then I'll go order HBO, SciFi and History. By the time they finish taking off FX, Spike, Lifetime, 20 channels of shopping, ESPN, Disney, Nickelodeon and BET, those three channels shouldn't be very expensive at all. I bet I'll save money!