actually, releasing sterile insects to overwhelm a wild population of pests is done precisely to avoid damaging the food chain and ecosystem. presumably, no single animal or bird species will be totally dependent on the tse tse fly, so reducing tse tse fly numbers will have no effect on other species. plus, the tse tse fly population can be reduced without having to release toxins such as ddt or other pesticides into the environment that can affect other species.
the model 100 was just so right...
on
Tandys Never Die
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
i remember when the modell 100 came out, even then i thought, the machine was just so "right". think about how the machine could have been wrong.
if it came out with a one line display or, even more likley, a chicklet keyboard like the one used on the first version of the color computer, it would've been a curiosity, remembered like the sinclair zx computers are recalled today. but because the 100 had just the right combination of elements (real keyboard, a two dimensional display, a full set of I/O ports, and really useful applications) it's remebered as one of the most successful alternative computers at the dawn of the peecee era.
the model 100 had plenty of competition. luggable computers, pocket computers, etc. when i was in college, the school got a "great deal" on portable computers from texas instruments. one was issued to every incoming freshman that year. they were about the same size as the model 100, but only had a single line display and a chicklet keyboard. and they never went beyond being curiosities and playthings. the coolest thing about them was that with a simple command you could change their language from english to german.
the biggest roadblock to supporting the new format (indeed, any new audio or video format) will be retailer's willingness to stock it. right now, retailers stock regular vhs and dvd. they will likely not be willing to stock a third format of the same material, so if dvhs is successful, it will be at the expense of either dvd or regular vhs.
my guess is that they would not be willing to displace dvds with dvhs because dvhs tapes are bulkier than dvd. and why would they displace regular vhs, the most popular format with something that will take at least five years to mature?
i recall how the 12" videodiscs never really got a lot of shelf space and when dvd came out, the videodiscs were quickly dropped evne though, in some ways they were better quality than dvds (no digital compression artifacts) simply because dvds were smaller and had more extra features.
both tapes and discs have to be mastered and while disc masters probbaly are more expensive than tape masters (which in the case of tape can simply be files on a hard disc) discs are easier to duplicate in high volumes.
but you're probably right about low volume releases. for small quantities (1,000 pieces) tape may be cheaper.
i used to work for a company that made security and spy devices. one of their items was the "electric shock briefcase". this was a briefcase that included a electric shock device connected to the handle activated by a remote control.
never got around to it, but i always wanted to take one of these things to the port authority bus terminal, leave it in the middle of the concourse and, while standing off to the side, give shocks to people who just happened to pick the thing up.
fine. fire the guy. that's the right way to handle this. but you didn't call the attorney general and have the guy arrested, did you? that would be an overreaction.
now, if he installed a back door and used that to break into your system afterwards...
the whole idea of patents is really to "promote the useful arts". they do this by letting an inventor have exclusive use of his invention for a limited time in exchange for publishing the invention. you could say that the patent system is intended to let people give back to the world while still letting them protect their rights to profit from their inventiveness.
"good ideas are valuable. i like to be well fed" - hans bethe
so in your case, it would be great to have invented an engine that runs on toothpaste, but it doesn't do any good if you don't publish. the patent lets you publish your invention for the crest engine and profit from your inventiveness. if you're not interested in developing the invention then you could give people an open license or license the invention for a nominal fee.
there is nothing really wrong with patents per se. the opportunity to publish and enjoy an officially sanctioned monopoly encourages people to invent things and tell the world about their inventions. without patents, inventors would treat their inventions like trade secrets. other inventors would have to reinvent technology on their own in order to build on it.
the key is that patents are supposed to be "novel" and "non-obvious". you really shouldn't be able to come up with any old idea and patent it. the patent office needs to be more rigorous in its analysis of patents for these two requirements.
the problem is that the patent office has been willing to approve any old patent without rigorous analysis. the reasons for this is partly due to poor funding from the federal government and partly due to the patent ofice losing sight of its mission which has changed from "promoting the useful arts" to "helping companies make monopolis". the result is a lot of poor quality patents that end up stifling innovation by giving inventors monopolistic control over inventions that are either not new or are obvious or both.
i think you're selling new zealand short. weren't the xena and hercules series produced in new zealand? moving up to feature films sould seem to me to be a natural prograssion.
the record companies hate the used cd business. as far as they're concerned every used cd is sold because the original purchaser has made a copy and no longer needs the original.
you know that after the successes of Lord of the Rings and harry potter that we're going to be subjected to at least two years worth of really bad heroic fantasy movies.
hey, maybe we'll luck out and hollywood will decide to film "The Bromeliad".
your right, LoTR is not a trilogy. but it's not a 6 book story either. it is a single continuous narritive that was split into three volumes for practical reasons. tolkein's own separation of the story into six "books" was done along natural breaks in the narritive.
when The Two Towers comes out, i doubt that they'll split the movie into two separate stories told one after the other like Tolkein wrote them. more likley the film will cut between the high speed action of book three and the slower paced book four for some dramatic effect. i think that would work better as a movie.
when the dvds come out, i would love to see all the footage edited together as a single nine (or ten or eleven) hour long narrative. just the thing to watch on a snow day or over a long winter weekend.
does anyone know if tolkein's books, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Silmarillion, etc have had any of the difficulties with banning by christian fundamentalists that the Harry Potter books and c.s.lewis' Narnia books have had?
the resolution of film is related to its speed. faster films are grainier, that is, they have a lower resolution.
what is happening is that in order to make the film faster, the particles of silver halide have to be larger. larger particles capture more light and when the chemical reaction occurs, the whole particle darkens (or lightens since this is negative film). hence a faster exposure.
i'm not sure what professional astronomers use in terms of film, but it's probably some fancy fine grained high speed film that has the resolution and speed they need. probably expensive too. the alternative is to use a slower speed film but with a really long exposure. that means moving the telescope so that it points to the same object even as the earth turns. unfortunately, you wouldn't be able to use this technique to photograph meteors.
no, apple did not pay any cash to xerox for a tour of PARC. but apple did let xerox buy apple stock at a low price prior to going public. xerox made plenty of money from apple.
actually, judging from the replay 4000's capabilities, i'd say that pay per view video on demand is going to be one of the replay's business models. if the thing can transfer video over the internet, it won't be too difficult for sonic blue to develop a service where customers could order a video to be delivered over the internet for a fee. and it's a sure bet that these videos on demand won't be copyable.
sure. internet connectivity, tv display and crappy lossy compressed sound. sounds like a good trade off.
not that the $300 cd jukebox sounds all that good, but its going to be better than an mp3 palyer simply because it starts off with better quality source material.
the networks don't like the replay (and tivo) because they
1. let users strip out or otherwise skip commercials
and
2. baffle the network's attempts to create a brand.
think about it. each tv network wants to create a style so as to reach out to a certain type of viewer and get the advertising dollars focused on that viewer. that's why there are so many specialized cable channels. but one of the advertising points behind tv recorders is that they let you create your own channels. when we have this capability, all the efforts at branding and network style just fall apart.
but the networks can't sue the tv recorder manufacturers on this basis. otherwise, they would have sued tivo and replay years ago. the courts have made it clear that the networks can't sue a tv recorder manufacturer (any type of recorder) on the basis of forcing people to watch commercials and network branding.
so when replay cam up with a way to let recorder owners transfer copies of tv shows from one machine to another, it gave the networks an opportunity to do a lawsuit. oddly enough, the networks probably don't have a problem with people copying shows and sharing them with friends. although hard to quantify, program sharing improves the effectivness of the advertising and gives advertisers greater exposure.
so here is the networks' problem. they can't sue replay over the recorder's ability to blur the distinctiveness of a network and to zap commercials, features they don't like, but they can sue over program copying and sharing, which they probably have no problems with.
there are two ways to making it cheaper to get payloads into space. one is the tactic being worked on by a number of space entrpeneurs - make the launch vehicle smaller and more clever. the other is to go for economies of scale.
i'd like to see nasa work on the heavy lift vehicle - an unmanned launch vehicle designed for maximum payload. such a vehicle will be needed in the long run to support the space station and to create inventories of really useful stuff in space (like rocket fuel, spare sattelites, food, etc.) a heavy lift vehicle would be just the thing to lift low cost low value bulk into space. then the high value low bulk payloads (like astronauts) can be put into space on a smaller more efficient vehicle where all the safety technology would be correspondingly less expensive.
between the fbi and government trying to stomp on civil liberties and the RIAA and MPAA trying to stomp on free speech and civil liberites, and all the multitude of laws they're trying to pass, it's not surprising that they're starting to stumble into each other.
oem windows licenses are gradually turning into the computer equivalent of all those packets of duck sauce, soy sause and mustard that come packed with chinese take out. you buy them (indirectly) and they pile up on a counter or in a drawer somewhere because you never use them.
microsoft wants eveyone to somehow buy a windows license whether they need one or not. they try to block the sale of peecees without a license, they try to block the sale of dual boot machines, and they try to prevent the recycling of old licenses.
in this case, the most hard hit victims are businesses who end up buying two windows licenses for every computer, the site license and the license that unavoidably comes with each computer.
come on people. i get sick and tired of reading these debates on the sound quality of mp3s, oggs and the sound that comes out of a computer. fact is, unless you put together a pro music system (and sometimes not even then) you're not going to get anything other than low fidelity sound out of a computer.
think about it. get a sound card for $100 and it will have some $20 worth of components on it. analog digital converters - $1 each. ten cent op amps. cheap resistors. little or no power output (hey, even line level preamplifiers have to have headroom even if it is only about a tenth of a watt). your average boom box has better sound than the audio section of a computer.
usb speakers displace the burden of generating good sound from the computer to the usb speakers. but if you expect to get good sound out of such a system, expect them to cost about $1,000 (couple a hundred each for the analog digital converter and analog amplifier stages and the rest for the speaker drivers. and that still assumes the computer is going to feed them with clean error free digital feed.
bottom line is that you can have a digital source file equal to, say 96 kilohertz pulse code modulation or 20 megahertz delta modulation or whatever, and no computer will be able to make it sound better than a bad boom box or clock radio. they just don't have the analog audio hardware to do it. even the portable players can't do it. the digital electronics are too expensive. by the time you factor in the cost of the digital electronics stage (memory and cpu), there isn't enough money to make a decent analog section without making the device too expensive for the market.
add to that mp3s and oggs are lossy digital formats and you know you're not going to get anything other than tinny lo fidelity sound.
which leaves me constantly wondering. what is the purpose of these sound quality debates? mp3 or ogg, wmv or realaudio, they all sound like crap. you might as well use the same criteria as you use to pick out a boom box - just get the heaviest system. and base your decisions on the only reason why you use mp3s in the first place. which is cheapest and has the most convenience features.
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actually, releasing sterile insects to overwhelm a wild population of pests is done precisely to avoid damaging the food chain and ecosystem. presumably, no single animal or bird species will be totally dependent on the tse tse fly, so reducing tse tse fly numbers will have no effect on other species. plus, the tse tse fly population can be reduced without having to release toxins such as ddt or other pesticides into the environment that can affect other species.
i remember when the modell 100 came out, even then i thought, the machine was just so "right". think about how the machine could have been wrong.
if it came out with a one line display or, even more likley, a chicklet keyboard like the one used on the first version of the color computer, it would've been a curiosity, remembered like the sinclair zx computers are recalled today. but because the 100 had just the right combination of elements (real keyboard, a two dimensional display, a full set of I/O ports, and really useful applications) it's remebered as one of the most successful alternative computers at the dawn of the peecee era.
the model 100 had plenty of competition. luggable computers, pocket computers, etc. when i was in college, the school got a "great deal" on portable computers from texas instruments. one was issued to every incoming freshman that year. they were about the same size as the model 100, but only had a single line display and a chicklet keyboard. and they never went beyond being curiosities and playthings. the coolest thing about them was that with a simple command you could change their language from english to german.
i remember how frequently people (classmates, my brother) would ask "what would happen if i pressed this orange button?"
answer: "your arm would break."
the biggest roadblock to supporting the new format (indeed, any new audio or video format) will be retailer's willingness to stock it. right now, retailers stock regular vhs and dvd. they will likely not be willing to stock a third format of the same material, so if dvhs is successful, it will be at the expense of either dvd or regular vhs.
my guess is that they would not be willing to displace dvds with dvhs because dvhs tapes are bulkier than dvd. and why would they displace regular vhs, the most popular format with something that will take at least five years to mature?
i recall how the 12" videodiscs never really got a lot of shelf space and when dvd came out, the videodiscs were quickly dropped evne though, in some ways they were better quality than dvds (no digital compression artifacts) simply because dvds were smaller and had more extra features.
both tapes and discs have to be mastered and while disc masters probbaly are more expensive than tape masters (which in the case of tape can simply be files on a hard disc) discs are easier to duplicate in high volumes.
but you're probably right about low volume releases. for small quantities (1,000 pieces) tape may be cheaper.
i used to work for a company that made security and spy devices. one of their items was the "electric shock briefcase". this was a briefcase that included a electric shock device connected to the handle activated by a remote control.
never got around to it, but i always wanted to take one of these things to the port authority bus terminal, leave it in the middle of the concourse and, while standing off to the side, give shocks to people who just happened to pick the thing up.
fine. fire the guy. that's the right way to handle this. but you didn't call the attorney general and have the guy arrested, did you? that would be an overreaction.
now, if he installed a back door and used that to break into your system afterwards...
the whole idea of patents is really to "promote the useful arts". they do this by letting an inventor have exclusive use of his invention for a limited time in exchange for publishing the invention. you could say that the patent system is intended to let people give back to the world while still letting them protect their rights to profit from their inventiveness.
"good ideas are valuable. i like to be well fed" - hans bethe
so in your case, it would be great to have invented an engine that runs on toothpaste, but it doesn't do any good if you don't publish. the patent lets you publish your invention for the crest engine and profit from your inventiveness. if you're not interested in developing the invention then you could give people an open license or license the invention for a nominal fee.
there is nothing really wrong with patents per se. the opportunity to publish and enjoy an officially sanctioned monopoly encourages people to invent things and tell the world about their inventions. without patents, inventors would treat their inventions like trade secrets. other inventors would have to reinvent technology on their own in order to build on it.
the key is that patents are supposed to be "novel" and "non-obvious". you really shouldn't be able to come up with any old idea and patent it. the patent office needs to be more rigorous in its analysis of patents for these two requirements.
the problem is that the patent office has been willing to approve any old patent without rigorous analysis. the reasons for this is partly due to poor funding from the federal government and partly due to the patent ofice losing sight of its mission which has changed from "promoting the useful arts" to "helping companies make monopolis". the result is a lot of poor quality patents that end up stifling innovation by giving inventors monopolistic control over inventions that are either not new or are obvious or both.
i think you're selling new zealand short. weren't the xena and hercules series produced in new zealand? moving up to feature films sould seem to me to be a natural prograssion.
the record companies hate the used cd business. as far as they're concerned every used cd is sold because the original purchaser has made a copy and no longer needs the original.
look carefully. the staff Gandalf is using later in the film is different from the one he had at the beginning.
you know that after the successes of Lord of the Rings and harry potter that we're going to be subjected to at least two years worth of really bad heroic fantasy movies.
hey, maybe we'll luck out and hollywood will decide to film "The Bromeliad".
your right, LoTR is not a trilogy. but it's not a 6 book story either. it is a single continuous narritive that was split into three volumes for practical reasons. tolkein's own separation of the story into six "books" was done along natural breaks in the narritive.
when The Two Towers comes out, i doubt that they'll split the movie into two separate stories told one after the other like Tolkein wrote them. more likley the film will cut between the high speed action of book three and the slower paced book four for some dramatic effect. i think that would work better as a movie.
when the dvds come out, i would love to see all the footage edited together as a single nine (or ten or eleven) hour long narrative. just the thing to watch on a snow day or over a long winter weekend.
does anyone know if tolkein's books, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Silmarillion, etc have had any of the difficulties with banning by christian fundamentalists that the Harry Potter books and c.s.lewis' Narnia books have had?
the resolution of film is related to its speed. faster films are grainier, that is, they have a lower resolution.
what is happening is that in order to make the film faster, the particles of silver halide have to be larger. larger particles capture more light and when the chemical reaction occurs, the whole particle darkens (or lightens since this is negative film). hence a faster exposure.
i'm not sure what professional astronomers use in terms of film, but it's probably some fancy fine grained high speed film that has the resolution and speed they need. probably expensive too. the alternative is to use a slower speed film but with a really long exposure. that means moving the telescope so that it points to the same object even as the earth turns. unfortunately, you wouldn't be able to use this technique to photograph meteors.
no, apple did not pay any cash to xerox for a tour of PARC. but apple did let xerox buy apple stock at a low price prior to going public. xerox made plenty of money from apple.
actually, judging from the replay 4000's capabilities, i'd say that pay per view video on demand is going to be one of the replay's business models. if the thing can transfer video over the internet, it won't be too difficult for sonic blue to develop a service where customers could order a video to be delivered over the internet for a fee. and it's a sure bet that these videos on demand won't be copyable.
sure. internet connectivity, tv display and crappy lossy compressed sound. sounds like a good trade off.
not that the $300 cd jukebox sounds all that good, but its going to be better than an mp3 palyer simply because it starts off with better quality source material.
the networks don't like the replay (and tivo) because they
1. let users strip out or otherwise skip commercials
and
2. baffle the network's attempts to create a brand.
think about it. each tv network wants to create a style so as to reach out to a certain type of viewer and get the advertising dollars focused on that viewer. that's why there are so many specialized cable channels. but one of the advertising points behind tv recorders is that they let you create your own channels. when we have this capability, all the efforts at branding and network style just fall apart.
but the networks can't sue the tv recorder manufacturers on this basis. otherwise, they would have sued tivo and replay years ago. the courts have made it clear that the networks can't sue a tv recorder manufacturer (any type of recorder) on the basis of forcing people to watch commercials and network branding.
so when replay cam up with a way to let recorder owners transfer copies of tv shows from one machine to another, it gave the networks an opportunity to do a lawsuit. oddly enough, the networks probably don't have a problem with people copying shows and sharing them with friends. although hard to quantify, program sharing improves the effectivness of the advertising and gives advertisers greater exposure.
so here is the networks' problem. they can't sue replay over the recorder's ability to blur the distinctiveness of a network and to zap commercials, features they don't like, but they can sue over program copying and sharing, which they probably have no problems with.
there are two ways to making it cheaper to get payloads into space. one is the tactic being worked on by a number of space entrpeneurs - make the launch vehicle smaller and more clever. the other is to go for economies of scale.
i'd like to see nasa work on the heavy lift vehicle - an unmanned launch vehicle designed for maximum payload. such a vehicle will be needed in the long run to support the space station and to create inventories of really useful stuff in space (like rocket fuel, spare sattelites, food, etc.) a heavy lift vehicle would be just the thing to lift low cost low value bulk into space. then the high value low bulk payloads (like astronauts) can be put into space on a smaller more efficient vehicle where all the safety technology would be correspondingly less expensive.
call me when they develop a saroyama style robot girl.
between the fbi and government trying to stomp on civil liberties and the RIAA and MPAA trying to stomp on free speech and civil liberites, and all the multitude of laws they're trying to pass, it's not surprising that they're starting to stumble into each other.
oem windows licenses are gradually turning into the computer equivalent of all those packets of duck sauce, soy sause and mustard that come packed with chinese take out. you buy them (indirectly) and they pile up on a counter or in a drawer somewhere because you never use them.
microsoft wants eveyone to somehow buy a windows license whether they need one or not. they try to block the sale of peecees without a license, they try to block the sale of dual boot machines, and they try to prevent the recycling of old licenses.
in this case, the most hard hit victims are businesses who end up buying two windows licenses for every computer, the site license and the license that unavoidably comes with each computer.
come on people. i get sick and tired of reading these debates on the sound quality of mp3s, oggs and the sound that comes out of a computer. fact is, unless you put together a pro music system (and sometimes not even then) you're not going to get anything other than low fidelity sound out of a computer.
think about it. get a sound card for $100 and it will have some $20 worth of components on it. analog digital converters - $1 each. ten cent op amps. cheap resistors. little or no power output (hey, even line level preamplifiers have to have headroom even if it is only about a tenth of a watt). your average boom box has better sound than the audio section of a computer.
usb speakers displace the burden of generating good sound from the computer to the usb speakers. but if you expect to get good sound out of such a system, expect them to cost about $1,000 (couple a hundred each for the analog digital converter and analog amplifier stages and the rest for the speaker drivers. and that still assumes the computer is going to feed them with clean error free digital feed.
bottom line is that you can have a digital source file equal to, say 96 kilohertz pulse code modulation or 20 megahertz delta modulation or whatever, and no computer will be able to make it sound better than a bad boom box or clock radio. they just don't have the analog audio hardware to do it. even the portable players can't do it. the digital electronics are too expensive. by the time you factor in the cost of the digital electronics stage (memory and cpu), there isn't enough money to make a decent analog section without making the device too expensive for the market.
add to that mp3s and oggs are lossy digital formats and you know you're not going to get anything other than tinny lo fidelity sound.
which leaves me constantly wondering. what is the purpose of these sound quality debates? mp3 or ogg, wmv or realaudio, they all sound like crap. you might as well use the same criteria as you use to pick out a boom box - just get the heaviest system. and base your decisions on the only reason why you use mp3s in the first place. which is cheapest and has the most convenience features.
ummm, why were you operating a television set submerged in distilled water? and was the tv set submerged in water or were you submerged in water?