Its substantial savings, but its not like we're going to be able to start planning our houses with titanium frames in a few years or anything.
Weight isn't a very big concern for your house. Not too many people take their house out for a flight.
Personally, I think this will be most directly competing with high-tech composite materials that are currently in (limited) use, as well as aluminum. I'd certainly love to see commercial jets getting lighter (saving on fuel, reducing takeoff/landing distances, etc) while becoming significantly stronger in the process.
And that's assuming that demand doesn't keep skyrocketing above supply...
TFA does mention that part of the reason for limited supply is the very dangerous and toxic method currently used to produce it. If this is anywhere near as environmentally friendly as they claim, it will allow a tremendous number of plants to be created, significantly increasing supplies.
I guess I'm enough of an optimist to think that the keyboard/mouse combo isn't the zenith of input devices.
I don't entirely disagree with you. However, since I can type fairly accurately at well over 100 WPM (Dvorak layout on a TypeMatrix keyboard BTW), it would take a hell of an input device to surpass the standard old keyboard.
and somehow someone managed to come up with a few.
Well, that is an entirely different thing. That's the progress of a new field of technology, as opposed to fundamentially different ways of input, which is a field understood and studied for hundreds of years.
As for the mouse, however, trackballs beat the hell out of them. Use one for a couple weeks, and you won't be able to go back.
Well, if a company is scamming their customers in the free market, they won't last long.
It sounds good in theory, but just try to apply it to reality...
How long are people going to be paying the scam companies, before they realize the scam? How long are they going to turn a profit? How much profit is that going to take away from the legitimate companies?
Saying that "they won't last long" implies some kind of widespread consumer telepathy which simply doesn't exist. The first 1,000 customers don't have any way to notify 6 billion people that dating website XYZ is a scam. Word of mouth works for a few things, like movies and music, but not much, and certainly not EVERYTHING, in the real world.
The dimension of the entire device is about 4"x3" and yet somehow people manage to get a lot done with them.
No, people certainly don't do "a lot" with blackberries. Sending a few e-mails around is fine, but hardly doing a lot. You really need a much larger keyboard to do things with reasonable speed.
And my vx9800 phone seems to be extremely useful with a full qwerty keyboard under 4" x 1.5" and a 2" x 1.5" screen
Typing with two fingers won't get you very far, and having to squint to try and read the screen (or zooming in and having to scroll constantly) isn't productive at all.
A properply adjusted and focused glasses display will cause no more eyesight problems than staring at a 15" LCD in a dark room furtively posting on slashdot at 4 in the morning.;P
Not true. It's all about depth of focus. Your eyes have no problem focusing on a screen 2 feet in front of you. Trying to focus on a screen less than an inch in-front of you eyes to read it, however, is impossible for your eyes. Never-the-less, they will try, and after long-term use, you'll see serious problems.
Check out laser projected keyboard out, how's that for space saving?
That's not space-saving at all. First off, because the main unit is nearly as large as a (folded?) keyboard to begin with. Second, because you really have to carry a DESK with you to use it... You can't count on there being a chest-high table wherever you may be when you want to use it (roll-up keyboards have the same limitation).
How come the many connector/formfactor flavors of Flash don't include native IDE?
A few certainly do. I have a cheap 44pin (laptop pin-out) 32MB Flash device I was using in my firewall for a long time. However, since CF to IDE adapters are so simple, and so cheap, it's not worth the cost of another form factor, especially since that limits your flexibility as well.
I did this in order to reduce the amount of access to the hard disk so the hard disk could remain off more often with a little bit of power savings and hopefully a little less wear on the disk itself.
Having to spin up/down often will result in far more wear-and-tear on your hard drive, and shorten the lifespan.
It's quite nice not having to listen to the hard drive hums and clicks while reading data and makes a silent computer possible.
Any reasonably new hard drive has a very quiet fluid bearing motor, practically eliminating the hard drive whine, and dramatically reducing noise. As for the clicks, you just need to use hdparm to set the accoustic noise management to the quietest possible setting, and you won't hear it ever again.
Though my DVR has (slow) fans and a hard drive, it's still damn-near silent. I just wish I could find a silent, slot-loading, DVD-ROM, though the Pioneer drive is acceptable if you force it to stay at 3X with the Windows software.
The rest of you can continue to enjoy your breadbox-sized pcs and your feelings of self-righteousness.
The input/output of high-tech gadgets is, by far, the limiting factor with current technology.
Shrink a PC/PDA all you want, but I still need to carry around a 5"x3" keyboard and perhaps an 8" screen ( AT MINIMUM ) to be able to DO ANYTHING useful with it. Hence the short-lived hype of PDAs.
A "glasses" display will only make you sick, possibly giving you eyesight problems, serious headaches, etc. And since there's currently no good replacements for keyboards, hasn't saved space anyhow.
I don't think anyone here is a luddite, I just think many people are tired of worthless and useless "gadgets", while you aren't.
Uh...The "new" format I'm talking about is of the storage medium itself. Not the video or audio output. This seems to be changing every few years.
No, it doesn't change very often, and after the upgrade to HD, I can't see it being changed again for a VERY long time.
These new formats will give the maximum resolution any displays will be capable of (unlike VHS). After everyone has their highdef discs, NOTHING will be able to get them to upgrade in the forseeable future.
And when they stop making players for the old format, you will upgrade when your player becomes unrepairable.
As much as people like to believe in the big corporation that can do anything they want to, this kind of thing will NEVER happen. They've phased out VHS tapes because DVDs got popular. If DVDs hadn't caught-on, there's no way they would have even started phasing them out. They absolutely CAN'T force people to upgrade, it takes the cooperation of 90%+ of the market to do that.
As much as they'd love to force more DRM down your throat, they didn't discontinue DVDs 5+ years ago when the DRM was broken, nor will they when the DRM on HD-DVD/Blu-ray discs is cracked.
And on that other part, not all digital audio is DRM'd, so, I wouldn't suggest that you toss that out.
That was actually supposed to read "digital audio recorders". I understand the confusion.
Let's stop buying DRM...starting now. Not after the next Star Wars, not after Beverly Hills Cop XIV...NOW! This minute.
I for one did not buy a DVD-burner until DeCSS was out
Well, either:
1) That's a (repeated) typo, and you meant "ROM" rather than burner. 2) You're confused about the timeline, since DeCSS was released in 1999. 3) You were a SERIOUS early adopter, getting a commercial DVD writer years before the first consumer-level burners were sold.
While I can't speak for all assembled, personally that was the crux-point in my decision to purchase a DVD burner.
The ability to break the CSS encryption was completely irrelevant to the DVD boycott.
Incidentally, my UID on/. may be fairly new, but I'm not.
I didn't say anything about your age, only that it appears you haven't been reading/. for very long, and missed out on this little bit of history you're now trying to repeat.
The first regular TV program, for example, started in Berlin in March 1935.
The key there just being "regular". In fact, that broadcast was done using RCA/Farnsworth (American) equipment.
AC power networks developped more or less parallel in the US and Europe, and I'm not aware that there existed a definite standard for quite some years, concerning voltage and frequency.
No, not at all really. Tesla (in the US) pretty well came up with AC and the first practical generators himself, which were almost immediately pressed into service by Westinghouse.
The US system (ATSC) and European DVB were developed in parallel and went commercial basically at the same time
Not true. The ATSC standard was developing long before DVB (and IIRC, it was ratified before DVB as well) although obviously ATSC adoption has been slower than DVB-T/C for numerous reasons.
Analog radio was also not only developed in the US, but simultaneously it various other places in world.
The long list of significant inventors of radio are almost exclusively Americans. Though you hear names like "Marconi", he didn't invent much of anything, merely being a good show man.
The first radio program was broadcast from Massachusetts.
The world's first commercial radio station (and the first radio station broadcasting on a regular schedule) was located in Pennsylvania.
Why would you want to bother archiving every movie though?
Because most of us watch more than just the current Hollywood blockbuster remake crapfest.
then I'd probably just delete them after I'd seen them and re-download them from whichever movie rental service I'd subscribed to if I felt the need to re-watch them.
I wouldn't count on unlimited download subscriptions. The bandwidth costs are going to be far too high to support that, unlike music.
Oh, and as for MP3 being a fringe thing when everyone was on dial-up? I take it you don't remember Napster...
Yes, that was at the very end of the dial-up era. Many people were getting broadband connections at that time. Those on dial-up were only downloading a few tracks here and there, and they were only able to find them because of the people with high-speed pipes able to upload to several of them at once. It was mainly students using their university's connection for sharing and swaping large MP3 collections at the time.
MP3s weren't even REMOTELY as popular as they are now.
Regulation and legislation usually stifles competition and innovation.
No, it USUALLY doesn't.
If people can't get good service at one place, they will go to somewhere else that meets their needs.
The real question here, which you are conveniently ignoring like oh-so-many Republican politicians, is HOW LONG will this "one place" be able to scam their customers, fooling them into believing they ARE getting "good service" before they figure out it's all a big scam/hoax?
How long will it be before the next "new" format comes out?
Umm... Maybe another 100 years, when the broadcast standard is rewritten again for a higher resolution. These formats deliver the maximum HDTVs can display, and that's unlikely to change for a long time.
The only possible forseeable event that might obsolete highdef video discs is cheap holographic displays, and I'm not holding my breath for that one.
And even if not for the threat of progress, we shouldn't buy DRM'd hardware, no matter what.
Right! Throw away your DVD player, any digital audio records you might have, your digital cable/satellite box, etc.
Direct-download of H.264 video would have the same advantages as MP3, as well as (potentially) better quality than DVDs.
No. Internet connections are currently fast enough to download MP3s without much hassle. Back when everyone was on dial-up, MP3 was a fringe thing.
Unfortunately, we're almost all on dial-up, relative to highdef video. Not to mention that the cost of hard drive space, or multiple DVD-Rs, surpasses the cost of a pressed HD-DVD/Blu-ray disc.
If someone decided to offer 720p H.264 downloads, I can see this eclipsing both formats.
Maybe in 10 years, and the demand for HD isn't just going to stay pent-up until then. It seems pretty obvious one of these two is going to win.
Work together people - let's vote with our wallets, the way free enterprise is supposed to work!
Since your UID is in the 800,000s, I presume you weren't here when DVDs were comming out, a couple years before DeCSS was created, and when people were posting comments very similar to yours about DVDs.
The "boycott" on DVDs was a long-running joke that would pop-up whenever anyone mentioned owning a DVD.
I'd like to know when we decided it was acceptable for the Government to make a standard out of some company's proprietary format.
Probably around 1776 or so... Or perhaps when they established the patent office for just this kind of purpose.
This has been happening from the beginning. Provided that the licensing fees aren't prohibitive, it IS better to chose the propritary solution, and save more on spectrum allocation, hardware costs, etc.
The real world doesn't work like the computer world. Get over it. If you think you're right, start-up a company using unpatented techniques (hint, hint, DRM may be an open standard, but isn't patent-free either, so it's just as "owned" as IBOC).
Why the US has to be different once again I haven't figured out.
First off, the technical reasons are in TFA, which you didn't bother to read before spouting off.
Second, it's (almost) NEVER the USA being different, but Europe going out of their way to be different...
From AC voltages, to analog radio, to analog TV, to digital TV, etc. It's the US that has developed it first, and set the standard. It's the European countries who go out of their way to develope and choose something different and incompatible, rather than the US standard.
3) On the left side write down all countries which have nukes. 4) On the right side write down all the countries that have used nukes in war.
5) Compare with the list of countries which had nukes at a time of full-scale war with an evenly-matched adversary. 6) Also note how conventional warheads have improved over the years to provide a large fraction of the same power as those early nukes at much lower cost. 7) See how newer technologies have made the old carpet-bombing methods of warfare (which nukes excell at) obsolute.
If anything MAD will keep the peace between israel and iran (two religous states)
Israel hasn't ever expressed any interest in attacking or destroying another country. Iran, however, has expressed deep interest in eliminating Israel.
MAD works only when the leaders are rational. The leaders of Iran have shown themselves not to be.
we talked about Rodi and you mentioned that you see IP address of the remote server
Sorry about that. Your username sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it.
goMyPlace is a remote access software with a couple of interesting twists.
Though it sounds like a very interesting project, none of those features particularly appeals to me to be honest. Rodi was something I had a particular use for, and I was particularly interested in the technical aspects of the anonymous networking.
goMyPlace appears to be just an HTTP server running through a 3rd party proxy (Bouncer if you like).
i use gomyplace to move files in my own LAN. in many cases this is simpler than struggling with samba and openning NETBios.
I always use SSH for that purpose, which allows secure access, the ability to penetrate NATs/Firewalls rather easily, forwarding of arbitary ports and X11. etc. Client software is available for just about any networked machine ever made, no matter how dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
Weight isn't a very big concern for your house. Not too many people take their house out for a flight.
Personally, I think this will be most directly competing with high-tech composite materials that are currently in (limited) use, as well as aluminum. I'd certainly love to see commercial jets getting lighter (saving on fuel, reducing takeoff/landing distances, etc) while becoming significantly stronger in the process.
TFA does mention that part of the reason for limited supply is the very dangerous and toxic method currently used to produce it. If this is anywhere near as environmentally friendly as they claim, it will allow a tremendous number of plants to be created, significantly increasing supplies.
I don't entirely disagree with you. However, since I can type fairly accurately at well over 100 WPM (Dvorak layout on a TypeMatrix keyboard BTW), it would take a hell of an input device to surpass the standard old keyboard.
Well, that is an entirely different thing. That's the progress of a new field of technology, as opposed to fundamentially different ways of input, which is a field understood and studied for hundreds of years.
As for the mouse, however, trackballs beat the hell out of them. Use one for a couple weeks, and you won't be able to go back.
It sounds good in theory, but just try to apply it to reality...
How long are people going to be paying the scam companies, before they realize the scam? How long are they going to turn a profit? How much profit is that going to take away from the legitimate companies?
Saying that "they won't last long" implies some kind of widespread consumer telepathy which simply doesn't exist. The first 1,000 customers don't have any way to notify 6 billion people that dating website XYZ is a scam. Word of mouth works for a few things, like movies and music, but not much, and certainly not EVERYTHING, in the real world.
No, people certainly don't do "a lot" with blackberries. Sending a few e-mails around is fine, but hardly doing a lot. You really need a much larger keyboard to do things with reasonable speed.
Typing with two fingers won't get you very far, and having to squint to try and read the screen (or zooming in and having to scroll constantly) isn't productive at all.
Not true. It's all about depth of focus. Your eyes have no problem focusing on a screen 2 feet in front of you. Trying to focus on a screen less than an inch in-front of you eyes to read it, however, is impossible for your eyes. Never-the-less, they will try, and after long-term use, you'll see serious problems.
That's not space-saving at all. First off, because the main unit is nearly as large as a (folded?) keyboard to begin with. Second, because you really have to carry a DESK with you to use it... You can't count on there being a chest-high table wherever you may be when you want to use it (roll-up keyboards have the same limitation).
A few certainly do. I have a cheap 44pin (laptop pin-out) 32MB Flash device I was using in my firewall for a long time. However, since CF to IDE adapters are so simple, and so cheap, it's not worth the cost of another form factor, especially since that limits your flexibility as well.
Having to spin up/down often will result in far more wear-and-tear on your hard drive, and shorten the lifespan.
Any reasonably new hard drive has a very quiet fluid bearing motor, practically eliminating the hard drive whine, and dramatically reducing noise. As for the clicks, you just need to use hdparm to set the accoustic noise management to the quietest possible setting, and you won't hear it ever again.
Though my DVR has (slow) fans and a hard drive, it's still damn-near silent. I just wish I could find a silent, slot-loading, DVD-ROM, though the Pioneer drive is acceptable if you force it to stay at 3X with the Windows software.
It's a technical discussion of flaws in the system. Not sympathy.
When
Dammit! The first rule is that you say everything in code!
Unleash the angry marmoset...
The input/output of high-tech gadgets is, by far, the limiting factor with current technology.
Shrink a PC/PDA all you want, but I still need to carry around a 5"x3" keyboard and perhaps an 8" screen ( AT MINIMUM ) to be able to DO ANYTHING useful with it. Hence the short-lived hype of PDAs.
A "glasses" display will only make you sick, possibly giving you eyesight problems, serious headaches, etc. And since there's currently no good replacements for keyboards, hasn't saved space anyhow.
I don't think anyone here is a luddite, I just think many people are tired of worthless and useless "gadgets", while you aren't.
No, it doesn't change very often, and after the upgrade to HD, I can't see it being changed again for a VERY long time.
These new formats will give the maximum resolution any displays will be capable of (unlike VHS). After everyone has their highdef discs, NOTHING will be able to get them to upgrade in the forseeable future.
As much as people like to believe in the big corporation that can do anything they want to, this kind of thing will NEVER happen. They've phased out VHS tapes because DVDs got popular. If DVDs hadn't caught-on, there's no way they would have even started phasing them out. They absolutely CAN'T force people to upgrade, it takes the cooperation of 90%+ of the market to do that.
As much as they'd love to force more DRM down your throat, they didn't discontinue DVDs 5+ years ago when the DRM was broken, nor will they when the DRM on HD-DVD/Blu-ray discs is cracked.
That was actually supposed to read "digital audio recorders". I understand the confusion.
Rather than repeating myself, see this thread on the subject: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=187663&cid=15
Well, either:
1) That's a (repeated) typo, and you meant "ROM" rather than burner.
2) You're confused about the timeline, since DeCSS was released in 1999.
3) You were a SERIOUS early adopter, getting a commercial DVD writer years before the first consumer-level burners were sold.
The ability to break the CSS encryption was completely irrelevant to the DVD boycott.
I didn't say anything about your age, only that it appears you haven't been reading
The key there just being "regular". In fact, that broadcast was done using RCA/Farnsworth (American) equipment.
No, not at all really. Tesla (in the US) pretty well came up with AC and the first practical generators himself, which were almost immediately pressed into service by Westinghouse.
Not true. The ATSC standard was developing long before DVB (and IIRC, it was ratified before DVB as well) although obviously ATSC adoption has been slower than DVB-T/C for numerous reasons.
The long list of significant inventors of radio are almost exclusively Americans. Though you hear names like "Marconi", he didn't invent much of anything, merely being a good show man.
The first radio program was broadcast from Massachusetts.
The world's first commercial radio station (and the first radio station broadcasting on a regular schedule) was located in Pennsylvania.
etc.
Sources? I'd certainly like to read where Israel has said any of those countries should not be recognized, and be wiped-off the map.
Because most of us watch more than just the current Hollywood blockbuster remake crapfest.
I wouldn't count on unlimited download subscriptions. The bandwidth costs are going to be far too high to support that, unlike music.
Yes, that was at the very end of the dial-up era. Many people were getting broadband connections at that time. Those on dial-up were only downloading a few tracks here and there, and they were only able to find them because of the people with high-speed pipes able to upload to several of them at once. It was mainly students using their university's connection for sharing and swaping large MP3 collections at the time.
MP3s weren't even REMOTELY as popular as they are now.
No, it USUALLY doesn't.
The real question here, which you are conveniently ignoring like oh-so-many Republican politicians, is HOW LONG will this "one place" be able to scam their customers, fooling them into believing they ARE getting "good service" before they figure out it's all a big scam/hoax?
i386-compatible code.
Legacy (DOS) BIOS functions.
That's a tougher one. But the large majority of cards are either NE2000, Tulip, SIS, or RTL compatible.
VESA or SVGA instructions.
Umm... Maybe another 100 years, when the broadcast standard is rewritten again for a higher resolution. These formats deliver the maximum HDTVs can display, and that's unlikely to change for a long time.
The only possible forseeable event that might obsolete highdef video discs is cheap holographic displays, and I'm not holding my breath for that one.
Right! Throw away your DVD player, any digital audio records you might have, your digital cable/satellite box, etc.
No. Internet connections are currently fast enough to download MP3s without much hassle. Back when everyone was on dial-up, MP3 was a fringe thing.
Unfortunately, we're almost all on dial-up, relative to highdef video. Not to mention that the cost of hard drive space, or multiple DVD-Rs, surpasses the cost of a pressed HD-DVD/Blu-ray disc.
Maybe in 10 years, and the demand for HD isn't just going to stay pent-up until then. It seems pretty obvious one of these two is going to win.
Since your UID is in the 800,000s, I presume you weren't here when DVDs were comming out, a couple years before DeCSS was created, and when people were posting comments very similar to yours about DVDs.
The "boycott" on DVDs was a long-running joke that would pop-up whenever anyone mentioned owning a DVD.
Probably around 1776 or so... Or perhaps when they established the patent office for just this kind of purpose.
This has been happening from the beginning. Provided that the licensing fees aren't prohibitive, it IS better to chose the propritary solution, and save more on spectrum allocation, hardware costs, etc.
The real world doesn't work like the computer world. Get over it. If you think you're right, start-up a company using unpatented techniques (hint, hint, DRM may be an open standard, but isn't patent-free either, so it's just as "owned" as IBOC).
First off, the technical reasons are in TFA, which you didn't bother to read before spouting off.
Second, it's (almost) NEVER the USA being different, but Europe going out of their way to be different...
From AC voltages, to analog radio, to analog TV, to digital TV, etc. It's the US that has developed it first, and set the standard. It's the European countries who go out of their way to develope and choose something different and incompatible, rather than the US standard.
5) Compare with the list of countries which had nukes at a time of full-scale war with an evenly-matched adversary.
6) Also note how conventional warheads have improved over the years to provide a large fraction of the same power as those early nukes at much lower cost.
7) See how newer technologies have made the old carpet-bombing methods of warfare (which nukes excell at) obsolute.
Israel hasn't ever expressed any interest in attacking or destroying another country. Iran, however, has expressed deep interest in eliminating Israel.
MAD works only when the leaders are rational. The leaders of Iran have shown themselves not to be.
Sorry about that. Your username sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it.
Though it sounds like a very interesting project, none of those features particularly appeals to me to be honest. Rodi was something I had a particular use for, and I was particularly interested in the technical aspects of the anonymous networking.
goMyPlace appears to be just an HTTP server running through a 3rd party proxy (Bouncer if you like).
I always use SSH for that purpose, which allows secure access, the ability to penetrate NATs/Firewalls rather easily, forwarding of arbitary ports and X11. etc. Client software is available for just about any networked machine ever made, no matter how dumb.
I assume you posted this to the wrong thread...