I'm mistaking artificial intelligence for Global Authentication Inc.? Government Affairs Institute? General Applet Interface?
Perhaps you meant AGI, but perhaps not, since your post shows you don't understand what it means.
What a compressor does could be considered "weak AI" but frankly, it's an absolutely idiotic classification, because just about any function a computer performs can be considered "weak AI".
A compression program does not come close to meeting the definition of strong AI, let alone AGI. What's more important in this case, however, is that the percentage of compression a program gets doesn't make it any smarter, in the AI sense. A program that can compress text even better, might have an advanced syntactical understanding of English, but that gives no insights into RESPONDING to a question, or anything of the sort.
A better compressor is a better compressor, is a better compressor, and the technology applies nowhere else.
bringing text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence.
I see no reason to believe AI and text compression are interchangeable.
I can think of a few methods that would allow a computer to guess a missing word better than humans (exceeding the AI limit), and that such methods would be useless for determining a response to a question, particularly in the real world, where things like punctuation, abbreviation, and capitalization would be highly suspect to begin with.
So I have to say the basis for this competition is flawed, and what's more, the results coming out of it are specific enough to just succeed in this competition, but be completely and utterly useless for any other (real) tasks.
Do a little investigation on setting up PostgreSQL with fault tolerance and replication and you'll quickly see why large corporations cough up money for Oracle.
No, you won't.
The free, BSD licensed PostgreSQL doesn't have much clustering capabilities (basically: read-only). There are, however commercial versions with full clustering support, that are a tiny fraction the cost of Oracle.
It is a fact that many large corporations with huge volumes of transactions use PostgreSQL instead of Oracle, their entire company dependent on it (a credit card company comes to mind).
Actually, I hurt my hand recently and was using my PC one-handed.
Win2K has the left and right-handed Dvork keyboard profiles built-in. Probably QWERTY profiles as well, but I haven't actually seen them.
It only takes a day of training to use it... Keys on that side of the keyboard are typed normally. Hold the space bar (IIRC) to change the keys to those on the other side of the keyboard. Really very fast, once muscle memory kicks in. Much faster than an on-screen keyboard, though xvkbd is nice.
Try creating Powerpoint slides without a mouse - or navigating the web - or playing games - or anything except for text-entry centric apps.
Navigating websites with your keyboard is GREAT. Unfortunately, only "links" has a good key scheme, and it's seriously lacking in features like javascript, CSS, etc. It's only because Firefox and Internet explorer were designed with such a crappy form of keyboard navigation that people don't appreciate how much faster, more comfortable, and more accurate it can be.
Powerpoint is really rather simple, and could easily be adapted to work with keyboard input. The problem, as with web browsers, is that it wasn't designed to do so. You can move images and other elements around the slide more quickly, easily and accurately with the keyboard than you can with a mouse, provided only that the app allows you to use the keyboard to begin with.
As for games, the mouse is a terrible input device. An (analog) controller is far better. And perhaps I'm a luddite, but I much prefer gaming with all keyboard controls, rather than using the mouse. It just makes sense, after all, movement in a game is a vector operation, which causes you to keep lifting your mouse or repositioning your hand on the trackball. If there was a small fixed distance you could move in either direction (such as being stuck in a box, or a 2 dimensional space), then a mouse might make sense.
China is, after all, the emerging superpower of the moment and history says that friction is sure to follow.
The economic development of China is significant, but still being VASTLY overblown. They are a major economic power, and they have a huge population, but I still see absolutely no reason to believe they will become a superpower. It's a lot of fear from westerners, and of course is being fueled by China at every opportunity.
Economically, they are still far, far behind Japan and Germany (which are both far behind the USA) and neither of them is considered a superpower. What's more, the economic development of China is highly dependent on the USA and other NATO nations, which will surely cut-off trade and other support should China start pushing for further military development.
Militarily, China lacks many of the necessary high-tech capabilities needed in the modern equipment and weaponry. They're developing low-tech manufacturing on a huge scale, but are seriously lacking in high-tech development. They make the occasional PR move to try and convince the world they are able to developed advanced technology on their own, but it's commonly based on stolen tech from the west, or extremely primitive by today's standards. They're struggling just to make fuel-efficient engines, and develop pollution controls (rather than having to buy them from western nations).
Now, it's quite possible (in the distant future) China will make that leap, but it seems rather unlikely, and anything-but a foregone conclusion. I'd give better odds on India making that jump, and before China if at all. Their proximity and totalitarian vs. democratic government makes that a very interesting prospect.
Re:Protection from Sabotage forgotten?
on
Floating Wind Turbines
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It is very difficult to protect it from intentional destruction.
No, it isn't.
Defense of power generation facilities is a low priority on land because your country's armed forces protect it and everything else that is within the borders.
Err... First, there have been numerous and vast efforts to protect nuclear power plants inside this country's borders.
And inside this country, basically every wind-farm is completely open... One large one, a few miles from my location, is completely unguarded by even the most basic of fences, practically abandoned, etc. You could drive a huge tanker truck between the turbines in the middle of the day, and nobody would even notice.
The thing about power generation is redundancy. Sure, if we have 50% of our generation capabilities out in the distant ocean, security might begin to be a problem... But with ~1% being provided by wind power, the price for a KWH of electricity wouldn't even rise a cent if somebody destroyed them all... Wind and solar power are inherently distributed electricity generation, which makes it, on the whole, more secure from attack than any single central facility could be, no matter where.
Granted the vast amount of ocean is going to mitigate the mischief, but it isn't going to stop submarine torpedos from psycho rogue governments or even agent-provocateurs from your 'friendly' neighbors. No, you have to get out there and patrol, patrol, patrol. Which costs a lot of money.
I don't think you understand much about the oceans. The US Navy is ALREADY patrolling all of the world's seas, and has been doing so for much of the last century. They are already meticulously tracking all the submarines, from every country, around the world's oceans.
That's not bull. We tried to partner up with Verizon to offer DSL in their territory 3 years ago, and they wanted $22/mo per line for the loop fee, PLUS you had to pay them damn near $1000/mo for the wholesale aggregate circuit. They were charging $19.95/mo direct.
Once again... you're using bullshit numbers. Verizon isn't offering DSL service for $19.95/mo even today, without a year-long contract. 3 years ago, the lowest promotional pricing for Verizon DSL was $30/mo, and that was ONLY with 12 month contract and for the first year you were signed-up. It's absolute and complete bullshit to claim their service is sold for less than the wholesale line fee... a bit like saying McDonalds is giving away their food for free, since you happen to have a coupon.
Verizon and AT&T are selling at a loss to get people to sign-up, and then keeping margins low to ensure a large number of customers. There's no reason a 3rd party can't do that.
we had to charge no less than $60 per customer
The fact that your company doesn't have the size, infrastructure, or customer base to make the economics work out, has nothing to do with the issue.
And I'm always suspicious of anyone who quotes a single figure when discussing a complex issue, where a vast number of qualitative decisions can vastly change things.
Cell phones and VoIP are making POTS a thing of the past.
How are you going to use VoIP? You can't use dial-up or DSL, since the line has been cut. You're stuck with the choice between the ridiculously high prices of the cable company, or the telephone company.
In both cases, they have extremely high fees that significantly penalize you if you don't want their crappy, overpriced TV and/or telephone service.
Verizon has been charging all other CLECs (read: competitors to Verizon DSL) for last-mile piggybacking (which they are required by law to offer) even more money than it costs a customer to get Verizon DSL,
That's complete bull.
Verizon DSL charges $14.99/month for their basic DSL package, Verizon charges some of its competitors $16/month for each DSL customer they have.
Verizon charges $15/month FOR THE FIRST YEAR ONLY. The lowest possible price is $20/month after that. No doubt Verizon loses money on the first year of service, and anyone who really wants to compete will have to do the same. You can charge a fee for anyone canceling early, and/or make-up the loss in the second year, that is assuming your service is good enough that people stay around.
Personally, if I could find somebody providing decent DSL service for $18/month, I'd sign-up immediately, and I bet many, many others would as well... (at least, as soon as their first year "trial" of Verizon DSL ends)
Unfortunately, there is no such competition around here. The only big competitor to Verizon and SBC/ATT seems to be Earthlink, which charges $40/month for DSL service that is worse than Verizon's at $15/20. Every other DSL company is just another small company reselling Verizon/ATT DSL at their normal price/rate, and trying very, very hard NOT to compete...
There's something about that size, the protective case, and even the colors that makes the form factor interesting. I'd love to be able to have a ~300GB Truecrypt container on a rewritable minidisc-type thing.
Very true, the size and protective caddy made minidiscs unbelievably easy to handle, and extremely reliable, completely unlike CDs.
But minidiscs have other advantages people don't seem to realize. Sony based minidiscs on their professional magneto optical technology, the MO discs corporations pay vast sums of money for use the same tech as your $1 recordable minidisc. That's why they were able to claim 1 million erase/rewrite cycles, compared to perhaps 1,000 for CD-RWs if you're really lucky. That's also why the portable recorder units could record, reliably, even with repeated shocks, such as running. Not only could MDs have replaced floppies, they could well have replaced compact flash, and could have been used as hard drives in small portable computers and MP3 players. At a time when unreliable 1X CD-R Drive were selling for $1,000, Standalone MD recorders were $100, and the MD devices back then were far more reliable than even CD/DVD Burners are today.
(Besides licensing) The one big problem with it was that Sony made audio MDs and data MDs different, so that you couldn't use one for the other. So while audio MDs were $2 for 140MBs back when CD-Burners were a pipe dream and 100MB Zip disks were $20+, unfortunately you had to use the $20, hard to find "data" MDs in your ridiculously over-priced SCSI MD drive... That prevented nearly anyone from buying-in to MDs for data storage, and the lowering prices of CD burners doomed them.
Do they have Crystal Pepsi? How much caffeine is in that? Does it age like a fine wine?
After Crystal Pepsi went out of production, I bought the last 6-pack on the supermarket shelves... (I wasn't much of a fan, but it wasn't bad)
I can assure you, 6 months after the expiration date, Crystal Pepsi tastes like dirt in water... Not a slight hint of dirt, mind you, but a slight hint of only Crystal Pepsi in your can of dirt-water...
But given that AMD is lagging far behind Intel in this field, they probably needed access to some good design cheap and quick to avoid losing focus on Barca.
AMD doesn't NEED much of anything in this space. Their mobile chips are quite good... Better than Intel at present.
You on the other hand seem to think that AMD did not need to buy Transmeta and are challenging the company's decision
There can be millions of reasons AMD would buy Transmeta. You act as if the obvious reason you can think of is the one and only... That's just ridiculous speculation on your part, and is in direct conflict with reality.
The fact that your specific reasoning doesn't match the facts, does not mean there weren't many other possible reasons for AMD to buy Transmeta. I am not going speculate on what those reasons may be. It could well be several things that aren't even available in the public record.
Intel's overwhelming mobile computing dominance probably left AMD with no alternative but to buy their way back into competition.
Wow, that's an incredibly stupid thing to say.
AMD doesn't have the fastest chips anymore, but that's never of interest in the mobile space anyhow. AMD still have the lowest-power mobile chips, which is huge... In fact, that's exactly why Intel has been so dominate there for so long, despite far higher prices, and relatively low performance.
Intel has a bigger share of the laptop market than AMD, but that's been true forever, and more importantly, AMD holds a bigger share of it now than they ever have before.
As another person has already posted, there is equipment that can record and reproduce it.
There is equipment that can record a dog whistle, but CDs aren't among them. CDs reach just barely beyond the edge of human hearing. They do not sample fast enough to reproduce a 22khz dog whistle without severe distortion.
There is equipment that can reproduce it as well, but nothing consumer-level, and very little of the pro-level equipment qualifies as well. The vast majority of pros aren't stupid enough to buy it, anyhow.
Difference tones are a psychoacoustic phenomenon. They are not actually present in the air in such a way that they could be recorded.
Wow, you just keep digging your hole deeper...
Yes, two tones, in the air, do interact with each other, and affect each other. It's called interference. No doubt you've heard that word before. It happens with sound, radio, light, etc. Basically any waves that overlap.
having a dog whistle blown at the same time as a tone is produced by one of the traditional orchestral instruments. The sound on its own would be beyond human ears, but the combination of the two sounds is audible. [...] If you listen to a low bitrate lossy file that has the high ends thrown out, you miss the mix of sounds
That's one of the stupidest things I've heard in a while.
First, even uncompressed/lossless CDs can't record a dog whistle, neither can even the highest-end amplifiers and speakers reproduce it. So, what the lossless copy has is the already-mixed sound.
Second, lossy compression absolutely shouldn't throw away this mixture of sounds you are talking about. Combinations of sounds are certainly preserved. You're probably thinking of the fact that quieter sounds (hidden by louder sounds) are commonly discarded with lossy compression.
Third, there are well over a dozen entirely separate/unique lossy formats out there, each having it's own completely independent rules as to which sounds are discarded, and which are not. It's ridiculous to claim they ALL have the same limitations, when they each vary so widely from one another.
I personally can't stand MP3 (lame) even at extremely high bit rates and quality settings, but MP2 (toolame/twolame) at 192kbps psy=1, and Musepack at standard (avg. ~150kbps VBR) sounds great. One of the great things about MP2 is that you can just rename the files to mp3, and any software/hardware that handles MP3s will play MP2 files perfectly.
(Side note: Vorbis is pretty good 99% of the time, but on just the occasional (1%) strange sounds, it distorts like a tin can... I've never been able to encode an entire movie's sound track with Vorbis and not hear some blatant distortions that stand out.)
Not enough time to watch? Get a DVR. Intros, credits, and (mainly) commercials make up 33% the length of any TV shows.
Plus, you waste less of your time, due to repeats. Remember, it's standard for series to produce a total of about 15 episodes annually... while there are 52 weeks in a year. So if you're a time-slot watcher, you're just wasting most of your time.
As to the subject at hand, I'd like to see it go the other way. Give me a few short hours of quality shows each week, and I'd be happy. Shortening it would be counter productive, if there's any actual content to them.
Well, first off, I don't see why/what you think you're arguing with. I never even said anything positive about cellulosic ethanol to begin with.
And second, what you said is really not true in the slightest. We know it's trivially easy to grow cellulose very cheaply and in quite large quantities. We know with what processes it can be converted into ethanol. The only problem is that the processes are energy intensive, and so, too expensive to be practical.
With algae, we can't grow it inexpensively, we can't grow it in any reasonable quantities at all, it's no cheaper to process it into fuel, etc. We can't do much of anything at all with algae.
Hydrogen fueled cars are simply not reality either. They won't be in the foreseeable future.
Hydrogen fuel cells have existed for a very long time. Car companies have already built a few prototypes.
Who will make them if you can't buy any hydrogen? Who will set up a hydrogen distribution system if no one's buying the fuel?
You can't seriously be that stupid. There is plenty of government funding for hydrogen right now. There are already a handful of hydrogen refueling stations, despite the lack of vehicles. And it's not hard to imagine oil companies putting up hydrogen stations in major cities, to get their foot in the door, possibly even working with car companies to split costs and profits.
I expect you'll first start seeing fleet vehicles hydrogen-powered, since they commonly set-up their own private refueling stations. The equipment to create hydrogen (fuel) really isn't very expensive.
Plug-in electric cars are limited to a few hundred km before needing a lengthy recharge.
Range continues to increase. 99.999%+ of the time, people aren't going to exceed the range of an electric vehicle, and will simply plug it in at home and let it charge overnight.
For longer trips, recharging really does not need to be lengthy. With NiCD, NiMH, and LiIon batteries, it's entirely possible to recharge a vehicle worth of batteries in around 15 minutes. The problem right now is that there are no standards for electric vehicles, so a recharging station can't yet invest in a few huge transformers that will be able to plug-in to any electric vehicle and quick charge it.. Instead, everyone goes for the lowest common denominator, using each vehicles' wimpy built-in inverters/chargers, and common house current. When the price of LiIon comes down, or if perhaps the capacity of NiMH or NiCad goes way up, expect to see that happen.
And that's only assuming the most basic of existing technology. Flywheels just need a few improvements to make them practical in moving vehicles, but then have the potential to give electric vehicles incredible range, in a small space, and add very little weight.
I just don't see how electric cars and hydrogen are viable long term solutions where biodiesel is a pipe dream.
Are you intentionally being cynical?
Biodiesel is fine as a short-term measure, as is ethanol. It won't work in the long-term, however, as neither can be produced in large quantities with any existing methods, and there's absolutely nothing on the horizon.
It's fuel from algae that is the pipe dream... Nobody has ever gotten algae to work outside the lab, on a reasonable scale, at a reasonable cost, etc. I expect to see flying cars become common before algae-produced biofuels.
Both hydrogen and electricity can be created from just about any power source, whereas ethanol/biodiesel are seriously limited.
Farmed algae biodiesel doesn't suddenly expire a few years down the road.
I'm talking about reality. You're talking about pipe dreams.
Algae biodiesel doesn't exist, nor does any other algae fuel, despite decades and billions of dollars invested in repeatedly trying to harness the potential of algae. There's no reason to believe algae will become viable in the foreseeable future, let alone in the short term.
Yes they do. The subject at hand has nothing to do with the rest of the world. The US isn't going to grow crops for biodiesel then export them to the rest of the world.
We're talking changeover times measured in decades
I have ethanol in my car's tank right now. Prices for corn are extremely high because so much of it is being used for ethanol production. There is no switchover time, just ever-increasing ratios of ethanol to gasoline at the pumps.
It is not as if ethanol is magically "compatible" with the majority of cars already on the road.
There's nothing magical about it. Cars produced in the past 15 years or so have been required by law to be able to run on a mixture of 30% ethanol.
My car won't take E10 let alone something with a significant ethanol component.
First of all, how did you determine this? Second of all, what the hell kind of a screwed up vehicle have you got?
Basically everyone in the state of California is buying gasoline commonly with 20% ethanol, and cars aren't falling apart on the side of the road. My old 1970's Chrysler didn't hasn't displayed any problems at all with the fuel... I have to raise this point because there's a lot of people who have seriously crazy ideas about ethanol.
you deride the grandparent for proposing biodiesel as being "incompatible", which will run in hundreds of commonly available vehicles
Biodiesel is incompatible with gasoline/ethanol. The parent didn't suggest ALSO producing biodiesel for OTHER vehicles, he suggested developing/producing biodiesel INSTEAD of Ethanol.
Then you suggest "hydrogen...fully electric
What part of "short term" and "long term" confuses you?
There are stories like that practically every day. Mostly just laboratory research projects from Universities. Lab conditions don't directly translate into full-scale, real world production. All that have tried with various such projects have failed. Despite all the claims, they never work-out in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm mistaking artificial intelligence for Global Authentication Inc.? Government Affairs Institute? General Applet Interface?
Perhaps you meant AGI, but perhaps not, since your post shows you don't understand what it means.
What a compressor does could be considered "weak AI" but frankly, it's an absolutely idiotic classification, because just about any function a computer performs can be considered "weak AI".
A compression program does not come close to meeting the definition of strong AI, let alone AGI. What's more important in this case, however, is that the percentage of compression a program gets doesn't make it any smarter, in the AI sense. A program that can compress text even better, might have an advanced syntactical understanding of English, but that gives no insights into RESPONDING to a question, or anything of the sort.
A better compressor is a better compressor, is a better compressor, and the technology applies nowhere else.
I see no reason to believe AI and text compression are interchangeable.
I can think of a few methods that would allow a computer to guess a missing word better than humans (exceeding the AI limit), and that such methods would be useless for determining a response to a question, particularly in the real world, where things like punctuation, abbreviation, and capitalization would be highly suspect to begin with.
So I have to say the basis for this competition is flawed, and what's more, the results coming out of it are specific enough to just succeed in this competition, but be completely and utterly useless for any other (real) tasks.
No, you won't.
The free, BSD licensed PostgreSQL doesn't have much clustering capabilities (basically: read-only). There are, however commercial versions with full clustering support, that are a tiny fraction the cost of Oracle.
It is a fact that many large corporations with huge volumes of transactions use PostgreSQL instead of Oracle, their entire company dependent on it (a credit card company comes to mind).
Win2K has the left and right-handed Dvork keyboard profiles built-in. Probably QWERTY profiles as well, but I haven't actually seen them.
It only takes a day of training to use it... Keys on that side of the keyboard are typed normally. Hold the space bar (IIRC) to change the keys to those on the other side of the keyboard. Really very fast, once muscle memory kicks in. Much faster than an on-screen keyboard, though xvkbd is nice.
Navigating websites with your keyboard is GREAT. Unfortunately, only "links" has a good key scheme, and it's seriously lacking in features like javascript, CSS, etc. It's only because Firefox and Internet explorer were designed with such a crappy form of keyboard navigation that people don't appreciate how much faster, more comfortable, and more accurate it can be.
Powerpoint is really rather simple, and could easily be adapted to work with keyboard input. The problem, as with web browsers, is that it wasn't designed to do so. You can move images and other elements around the slide more quickly, easily and accurately with the keyboard than you can with a mouse, provided only that the app allows you to use the keyboard to begin with.
As for games, the mouse is a terrible input device. An (analog) controller is far better. And perhaps I'm a luddite, but I much prefer gaming with all keyboard controls, rather than using the mouse. It just makes sense, after all, movement in a game is a vector operation, which causes you to keep lifting your mouse or repositioning your hand on the trackball. If there was a small fixed distance you could move in either direction (such as being stuck in a box, or a 2 dimensional space), then a mouse might make sense.
The economic development of China is significant, but still being VASTLY overblown. They are a major economic power, and they have a huge population, but I still see absolutely no reason to believe they will become a superpower. It's a lot of fear from westerners, and of course is being fueled by China at every opportunity.
Economically, they are still far, far behind Japan and Germany (which are both far behind the USA) and neither of them is considered a superpower. What's more, the economic development of China is highly dependent on the USA and other NATO nations, which will surely cut-off trade and other support should China start pushing for further military development.
Militarily, China lacks many of the necessary high-tech capabilities needed in the modern equipment and weaponry. They're developing low-tech manufacturing on a huge scale, but are seriously lacking in high-tech development. They make the occasional PR move to try and convince the world they are able to developed advanced technology on their own, but it's commonly based on stolen tech from the west, or extremely primitive by today's standards. They're struggling just to make fuel-efficient engines, and develop pollution controls (rather than having to buy them from western nations).
Now, it's quite possible (in the distant future) China will make that leap, but it seems rather unlikely, and anything-but a foregone conclusion. I'd give better odds on India making that jump, and before China if at all. Their proximity and totalitarian vs. democratic government makes that a very interesting prospect.
No, it isn't.
Err... First, there have been numerous and vast efforts to protect nuclear power plants inside this country's borders.
And inside this country, basically every wind-farm is completely open... One large one, a few miles from my location, is completely unguarded by even the most basic of fences, practically abandoned, etc. You could drive a huge tanker truck between the turbines in the middle of the day, and nobody would even notice.
The thing about power generation is redundancy. Sure, if we have 50% of our generation capabilities out in the distant ocean, security might begin to be a problem... But with ~1% being provided by wind power, the price for a KWH of electricity wouldn't even rise a cent if somebody destroyed them all... Wind and solar power are inherently distributed electricity generation, which makes it, on the whole, more secure from attack than any single central facility could be, no matter where.
I don't think you understand much about the oceans. The US Navy is ALREADY patrolling all of the world's seas, and has been doing so for much of the last century. They are already meticulously tracking all the submarines, from every country, around the world's oceans.
Once again... you're using bullshit numbers. Verizon isn't offering DSL service for $19.95/mo even today, without a year-long contract. 3 years ago, the lowest promotional pricing for Verizon DSL was $30/mo, and that was ONLY with 12 month contract and for the first year you were signed-up. It's absolute and complete bullshit to claim their service is sold for less than the wholesale line fee... a bit like saying McDonalds is giving away their food for free, since you happen to have a coupon.
Verizon and AT&T are selling at a loss to get people to sign-up, and then keeping margins low to ensure a large number of customers. There's no reason a 3rd party can't do that.
The fact that your company doesn't have the size, infrastructure, or customer base to make the economics work out, has nothing to do with the issue.
And I'm always suspicious of anyone who quotes a single figure when discussing a complex issue, where a vast number of qualitative decisions can vastly change things.
How are you going to use VoIP? You can't use dial-up or DSL, since the line has been cut. You're stuck with the choice between the ridiculously high prices of the cable company, or the telephone company.
In both cases, they have extremely high fees that significantly penalize you if you don't want their crappy, overpriced TV and/or telephone service.
That's complete bull.
Verizon charges $15/month FOR THE FIRST YEAR ONLY. The lowest possible price is $20/month after that. No doubt Verizon loses money on the first year of service, and anyone who really wants to compete will have to do the same. You can charge a fee for anyone canceling early, and/or make-up the loss in the second year, that is assuming your service is good enough that people stay around.
Personally, if I could find somebody providing decent DSL service for $18/month, I'd sign-up immediately, and I bet many, many others would as well... (at least, as soon as their first year "trial" of Verizon DSL ends)
Unfortunately, there is no such competition around here. The only big competitor to Verizon and SBC/ATT seems to be Earthlink, which charges $40/month for DSL service that is worse than Verizon's at $15/20. Every other DSL company is just another small company reselling Verizon/ATT DSL at their normal price/rate, and trying very, very hard NOT to compete...
Very true, the size and protective caddy made minidiscs unbelievably easy to handle, and extremely reliable, completely unlike CDs.
But minidiscs have other advantages people don't seem to realize. Sony based minidiscs on their professional magneto optical technology, the MO discs corporations pay vast sums of money for use the same tech as your $1 recordable minidisc. That's why they were able to claim 1 million erase/rewrite cycles, compared to perhaps 1,000 for CD-RWs if you're really lucky. That's also why the portable recorder units could record, reliably, even with repeated shocks, such as running. Not only could MDs have replaced floppies, they could well have replaced compact flash, and could have been used as hard drives in small portable computers and MP3 players. At a time when unreliable 1X CD-R Drive were selling for $1,000, Standalone MD recorders were $100, and the MD devices back then were far more reliable than even CD/DVD Burners are today.
(Besides licensing) The one big problem with it was that Sony made audio MDs and data MDs different, so that you couldn't use one for the other. So while audio MDs were $2 for 140MBs back when CD-Burners were a pipe dream and 100MB Zip disks were $20+, unfortunately you had to use the $20, hard to find "data" MDs in your ridiculously over-priced SCSI MD drive... That prevented nearly anyone from buying-in to MDs for data storage, and the lowering prices of CD burners doomed them.
After Crystal Pepsi went out of production, I bought the last 6-pack on the supermarket shelves... (I wasn't much of a fan, but it wasn't bad)
I can assure you, 6 months after the expiration date, Crystal Pepsi tastes like dirt in water... Not a slight hint of dirt, mind you, but a slight hint of only Crystal Pepsi in your can of dirt-water...
AMD doesn't NEED much of anything in this space. Their mobile chips are quite good... Better than Intel at present.
There can be millions of reasons AMD would buy Transmeta. You act as if the obvious reason you can think of is the one and only... That's just ridiculous speculation on your part, and is in direct conflict with reality.
The fact that your specific reasoning doesn't match the facts, does not mean there weren't many other possible reasons for AMD to buy Transmeta. I am not going speculate on what those reasons may be. It could well be several things that aren't even available in the public record.
Wow, that's an incredibly stupid thing to say.
AMD doesn't have the fastest chips anymore, but that's never of interest in the mobile space anyhow. AMD still have the lowest-power mobile chips, which is huge... In fact, that's exactly why Intel has been so dominate there for so long, despite far higher prices, and relatively low performance.
Intel has a bigger share of the laptop market than AMD, but that's been true forever, and more importantly, AMD holds a bigger share of it now than they ever have before.
CPUs are not homogeneous products. One is not just the same as the other.
AMD has better 64-bit support, lower power consumption, and far less likelihood of major microcode bugs.
Intel... happens to have slightly faster CPUs at the moment, and is hemorrhaging money to maintain prices competitive with AMD.
There is equipment that can record a dog whistle, but CDs aren't among them. CDs reach just barely beyond the edge of human hearing. They do not sample fast enough to reproduce a 22khz dog whistle without severe distortion.
There is equipment that can reproduce it as well, but nothing consumer-level, and very little of the pro-level equipment qualifies as well. The vast majority of pros aren't stupid enough to buy it, anyhow.
Wow, you just keep digging your hole deeper...
Yes, two tones, in the air, do interact with each other, and affect each other. It's called interference. No doubt you've heard that word before. It happens with sound, radio, light, etc. Basically any waves that overlap.
That's one of the stupidest things I've heard in a while.
First, even uncompressed/lossless CDs can't record a dog whistle, neither can even the highest-end amplifiers and speakers reproduce it. So, what the lossless copy has is the already-mixed sound.
Second, lossy compression absolutely shouldn't throw away this mixture of sounds you are talking about. Combinations of sounds are certainly preserved. You're probably thinking of the fact that quieter sounds (hidden by louder sounds) are commonly discarded with lossy compression.
Third, there are well over a dozen entirely separate/unique lossy formats out there, each having it's own completely independent rules as to which sounds are discarded, and which are not. It's ridiculous to claim they ALL have the same limitations, when they each vary so widely from one another.
I personally can't stand MP3 (lame) even at extremely high bit rates and quality settings, but MP2 (toolame/twolame) at 192kbps psy=1, and Musepack at standard (avg. ~150kbps VBR) sounds great. One of the great things about MP2 is that you can just rename the files to mp3, and any software/hardware that handles MP3s will play MP2 files perfectly.
(Side note: Vorbis is pretty good 99% of the time, but on just the occasional (1%) strange sounds, it distorts like a tin can... I've never been able to encode an entire movie's sound track with Vorbis and not hear some blatant distortions that stand out.)
Not enough time to watch? Get a DVR. Intros, credits, and (mainly) commercials make up 33% the length of any TV shows.
Plus, you waste less of your time, due to repeats. Remember, it's standard for series to produce a total of about 15 episodes annually... while there are 52 weeks in a year. So if you're a time-slot watcher, you're just wasting most of your time.
As to the subject at hand, I'd like to see it go the other way. Give me a few short hours of quality shows each week, and I'd be happy. Shortening it would be counter productive, if there's any actual content to them.
Well, first off, I don't see why/what you think you're arguing with. I never even said anything positive about cellulosic ethanol to begin with.
And second, what you said is really not true in the slightest. We know it's trivially easy to grow cellulose very cheaply and in quite large quantities. We know with what processes it can be converted into ethanol. The only problem is that the processes are energy intensive, and so, too expensive to be practical.
With algae, we can't grow it inexpensively, we can't grow it in any reasonable quantities at all, it's no cheaper to process it into fuel, etc. We can't do much of anything at all with algae.
Hydrogen fuel cells have existed for a very long time. Car companies have already built a few prototypes.
You can't seriously be that stupid. There is plenty of government funding for hydrogen right now. There are already a handful of hydrogen refueling stations, despite the lack of vehicles. And it's not hard to imagine oil companies putting up hydrogen stations in major cities, to get their foot in the door, possibly even working with car companies to split costs and profits.
I expect you'll first start seeing fleet vehicles hydrogen-powered, since they commonly set-up their own private refueling stations. The equipment to create hydrogen (fuel) really isn't very expensive.
Range continues to increase. 99.999%+ of the time, people aren't going to exceed the range of an electric vehicle, and will simply plug it in at home and let it charge overnight.
For longer trips, recharging really does not need to be lengthy. With NiCD, NiMH, and LiIon batteries, it's entirely possible to recharge a vehicle worth of batteries in around 15 minutes. The problem right now is that there are no standards for electric vehicles, so a recharging station can't yet invest in a few huge transformers that will be able to plug-in to any electric vehicle and quick charge it.. Instead, everyone goes for the lowest common denominator, using each vehicles' wimpy built-in inverters/chargers, and common house current. When the price of LiIon comes down, or if perhaps the capacity of NiMH or NiCad goes way up, expect to see that happen.
And that's only assuming the most basic of existing technology. Flywheels just need a few improvements to make them practical in moving vehicles, but then have the potential to give electric vehicles incredible range, in a small space, and add very little weight.
Are you intentionally being cynical?
Biodiesel is fine as a short-term measure, as is ethanol. It won't work in the long-term, however, as neither can be produced in large quantities with any existing methods, and there's absolutely nothing on the horizon.
It's fuel from algae that is the pipe dream... Nobody has ever gotten algae to work outside the lab, on a reasonable scale, at a reasonable cost, etc. I expect to see flying cars become common before algae-produced biofuels.
Both hydrogen and electricity can be created from just about any power source, whereas ethanol/biodiesel are seriously limited.
I'm talking about reality. You're talking about pipe dreams.
Algae biodiesel doesn't exist, nor does any other algae fuel, despite decades and billions of dollars invested in repeatedly trying to harness the potential of algae. There's no reason to believe algae will become viable in the foreseeable future, let alone in the short term.
Yes they do. The subject at hand has nothing to do with the rest of the world. The US isn't going to grow crops for biodiesel then export them to the rest of the world.
I have ethanol in my car's tank right now. Prices for corn are extremely high because so much of it is being used for ethanol production. There is no switchover time, just ever-increasing ratios of ethanol to gasoline at the pumps.
There's nothing magical about it. Cars produced in the past 15 years or so have been required by law to be able to run on a mixture of 30% ethanol.
First of all, how did you determine this? Second of all, what the hell kind of a screwed up vehicle have you got?
Basically everyone in the state of California is buying gasoline commonly with 20% ethanol, and cars aren't falling apart on the side of the road. My old 1970's Chrysler didn't hasn't displayed any problems at all with the fuel... I have to raise this point because there's a lot of people who have seriously crazy ideas about ethanol.
Biodiesel is incompatible with gasoline/ethanol. The parent didn't suggest ALSO producing biodiesel for OTHER vehicles, he suggested developing/producing biodiesel INSTEAD of Ethanol.
What part of "short term" and "long term" confuses you?
There are stories like that practically every day. Mostly just laboratory research projects from Universities. Lab conditions don't directly translate into full-scale, real world production. All that have tried with various such projects have failed. Despite all the claims, they never work-out in the real world.