Uh...not so vastly lower? Unless my calculator is broken it seems to me the PSP's screen resolution is about 42% that of a typical console's 640x480 screen resolution. Because of the shape and size of our eyes even someone with excellent vision would have a tough time discerning two points an arcminute apart. On a 20" television our eyes are just barely able to discern individual pixels on the screen if we're sitting close. This means that every single pixel on the screen is conveying important information to our eyes and thus to us. On a television sitting at a reasonable distance the whole of the screen's surface area can give us visual information. On a small LCD screen at most a few inches across the pixels are so small and close together that unless the screen is rubbing the cornea of one's eye discerning individual pixels on the screen is quite a task. This means individual pixels begin to blur together and each pixel gives our eyes less information. We end up requiring a lot of pixels squished together to present our brains with something meaningful.
That all being said, a small LCD even with a resolution of 640x480 pixels means jack to our eyes. Depending on the pixel size and dot pitch of the screen, the effective resolution could be as little as a quarter of its true resolution. Rendering a high detail image at 480x272 on a screen a few inches across wouldn't be useful for anybody. A high resolution in-game shot on a console hooked to a TV is meaningful because we can get the full effect of the image being rendered. On a small handheld screen we'd be lucky to get a forth of the visual information that would end up rendered actually hitting our perception.
All the PSP's screen is going to do is waste a bunch of power driving pixels we can't resolve and make us squint trying. Unless the PSP's screen is the size of a Palm Pilot's screen there's little need for so many damn pixels on it.
What you're saying is a price/performance comparison is a measure of the unit's price vs. its SPEC benchmark scores. Performance is not measured in CPU processing power alone.
I'd put a Mac up against a Windows PC any day if you measure performance in terms of productivity. When orienting a new hire who may or may not know anything about computers, I've found Macs are FAR easier for them to learn to use than a Windows PC. Style and function guidelines are much more strictly followed as well as intelligent interface concepts. Shortcut keys are also used with much greater effectiveness. Getting a new user to use the Mac interface speedily is a relatively simple task.
If you're talking about interoperability as performance, OSX easily beats out Windows. Out of the box OSX supports NFS, CIFS/SMB, and AFS both as a client and server. You can stick an OSX system on a network with Windows, Linux, Solaris (or any other Unix), and Macintosh file servers and not need any third party software to browse or mount shares. On the file server end using OSX clients means no more third party software to provide a share protocol not natively supported by the file server's OS or vendor. Being able to interoperate with an existing infrastructure is a major advantage to using OSX.
If you measure performance in the form of longevity the Mac is a winner again. You may pay more up front for the Macintosh than you would an equivilent Windows PC but you end up with a much longer lasting machine. Ask anybody still doing serious work on their 8500s. Look to any school still doing quite well with Netscape 4.7 running on their Rev A iMacs.
If price is the lifetime price as opposed to the initial price a Mac is going to cost you a great deal less. Licensing Microsoft software for a large number of users is extremely expensive. A site running OSX over several years, and OS releases, is going to be paying far less than a Windows site. Because of the previously mentioned server compatibility the Mac site can replace their expensive proprietary servers with house supported open source server systems. Even if instead a site went with vendor supported server options they'd still be paying far less than the Windows site. A 10-user license for Windows Server 2003 Standard costs as a small cluster computers running open source programs providing the same functionality.
You may measure performance in terms of processor speed but when you run a business performance takes on many different meanings. Don't buy a Mac if you don't think the processor is fast enough. However don't be ignorant and make broad statements about price/performance comparisons if processor speed is the only metric you can think of.
1) Syncing is not required to copy files to the iPod. You can simply drag them to the iPod and they will be added to the iPod's library.
2) The iPod has fully support for normal and smart playlists. You can make a playlist on the iPod of files on the iPod and then play that playlist, either on the iPod itself or from iTunes. Smart playlist automagically generate given particular parameters. Any information about a song stored in the database (title, genre, now even BPM) can be used to make a smart playlist. I've got a list that plays 25 songs I haven't listened to in the past 30 days.
3) iTunes can be the untagged MP3 owner's dream. You can select a bunch of files, Get Info (via command+I, right clock, or the toolbar) and add all the information you want to a group of songs. Now you can even add a record's cover art to any group of songs. Adding tag information doesn't do a thing to the files' filenames, the iPod/iTunes doesn't even both with filename if an ID3 tag is present.
Well Apple said they're working on an iTunes for Windows. From there it would be up to the WINE folks to make that work on Linux. No reverse engineering involved.
Wow you found someone with the same stupid argument as you, do you want some kind of award? A biscuit perhaps?
Here's two situations
1. Apple switches to an entirely different processor architecture which forces them to leave behind all their old PowerPC software. The hope is some really fast processors will make people spend several thousands of dollars on new Macintoshes as well as the software to run on them.
2. Apple switches to a faster chip using the same instruction set as their current processors use. All of their old software runs without incident. Customers can buy new hardware as they see fit and upgrade the software when 64-bit clean versions are released. Existing software still works fine and runs better than it did on their old equipment.
Of those two situations which do you think is more likely? I'll give you a big hint, it isn't the first option. Drop this ridiculous Opteron crap. Apple is a co-developer of HyperTransport with AMD. An Opteron would make really fast Macintoshes that had no software to run really fast and would thus be useless until third party developers ported their software. It is much more likely Apple wants to use a faster PowerPC chip (like the 970) on top of a HyperTransport bus than switch to an entirely new processor. Porting Carbon and Cocoa to the new processor would be a hell of a lot less work than porting these frameworks to x86. You've made so many stupid conclusions it is downright painful to keep responding to them.
All Opteron switch proponents base their claims on the hope someone is going to perform a miracle and spit out a super fast PowerPC emulator. They don't seem to understand emulating PowerPC on an x86 is nothing at all like emulating a 68k. Hoping this is going to be magically possibly is futile. Thus basing hopes of Apple's with Opterons is just as futile. Faster processors is not the only aspect of a computer system that draws in customers no matter what slashdot weenies would like you to believe.
The article you point to is a guy making a bunch of assumptions based on VERY LITTLE real evidense. Half of his "evidense" is second or third hand rumors while the other half is entirely circumstantial. The conclusions he draws are based off of circumstantial situations relating to third hand rumors. I'm sorry but the Register and MOSR are not viable nor reliable sources of information.
I've read all of this crap before many times. You're not the first nor last person to think Apple will move to Opteron processors. MacOSX running on an x86 processor will not make people flock to the platform. Linux running on x86 likewise does not make people flock to the platform. The platform is not Windows it is not the "standard" and thus people are frightened of it. Whiney slashgeeks who proclaim "when OSX runs on Intel I'll buy Apple" are full of it. They will not buy a Macintosh, they never intend to.
An Opteron in Macs would not increase their sales enough to make up for the people ditching the platform because their mission critical software was not available any longer. It likewise wouldn't make up for the people abandoning the platform because any new hardware purchase would mean several thousands more in software purchases. OSX would have never made a mark on the world had it not been for the legacy compatibility it has maintained since day one. Carbon and Classic applications were all OSX had for a very long time. A new version without the ability to run old software would kill Macs and kill Apple. That is not a good business strategy.
This discussion has become absolutely absurd. Your entire argument is based on your personal opinions.
There's a lot of interest in PPC emulators but the proposition is not feasible! Go read up on PowerPC assembly for a little while, then take a look at some x86 assembly. It is not a simple task to emulate one on the other. Several groups have been trying for years to build a PPC emulator on the x86 architecture, it just isn't in the cards.
You need to stop pulling things out of your ass and research them. Apple's AVERAGE margin on hardware is about 25%, read their quarterly statements for that. They make beaucoup cach off their hardware because they're the only ones that sell it and have tight control over their production process. Their high end equipment like PowerBooks have really nice margins reaching towards 30%.
Apple's third party hardware support is larger than most PC fanatics assume but is not nearly enough to license the OS to third parties. OSX would need to support everything Windows does to be a viable alternative to Windows. No 10% of Windows users are going to switch without more functionality than Windows provides. The SAME thing happened to BeOS and OS/2. Both were better operating systems than Windows but they lacked serious hardware support. Without it neither OS was a viable alternative to anyone. If Apple has to invest the time and money to increase hardware support their margins selling the OS disappears.
Did you eat paint chips when you were young or do you not understand the pond concept? Apple makes very good money selling products to a niche market. Success does not always necessarily equate to gigantic market share. Gigantic market share for some companies is a very bad thing. You can't seem to get your head around this concept. We'll contrast Apple's business plan to Dell's in hopes you can understand.
Dell competes directly with all of the other PC manufacturers because they make a product that are exactly like all of their competitor's products. Some of their products actually come from the same manufacturer that their competitors get their products from. In order to survive in that sort of market (big pond) Dell has to keep their prices competitive with other companies in the business. This most often means running razor thin margins in order to sell their hardware. Without selling services which they make good margins on Dell would go down the tubes.
Apple's business plan on the otherhand allows for making a real profit margin on their hardware sales. They forcus their sales at niche demographics and niche markets. Their business plan REQUIRES they sell to a niche audience (little pond). Because they sell to a niche market and are the only company providing that particular product, they can sell their products for a price that doesn't completely destroy their profit margin.
Dell buys their hardware from an ODM, the people who actually design and manufacturer most of their equipment. They give a piece of hardware to a marketeer and tell them to figure out who that product they've got is good to market to. If they have a cheapo laptop they can say its great for students, if they have a expensive PC they can say it is a workstation and market it to businesses.
Apple starts at the other end and designs a piece of hardware based on the target demographic. The iMac was designed for people who did not want the hassle of setting up a PC which in 1998 was a PITA for most people. It also catered to the needs of schools who needed easily maintained computers for labs and classrooms. The iBook was designed almost specifically for students with its rubber padding, ballistic plastic case, and handle.
Apple's is a big fish swiming around in a little pond. They cater to the people other computer companies either miss entirely with their marketing or ignore because they desire selling to a lower common denominator. Dell is a little fish in a very big pond. They have to fight all the other little fish, even the fish building PCs in their garages out of white box parts, to survive. If you dumped Apple into the big pond they would cease being a big fish and would also find they weren't equipped to survive in the big pond.
I present the fact there are currently no fast PowerPC emulators available on the x86 architecture as evidense the task is a hopeless one.
Simply mapping the eight GPRs of an x86 chip to the first eight GPRs of a PowerPC chip does not do you any good at all. Most PowerPC instructions accept at LEAST three registers for input, two input registers and an output variable. Typically x86 instructions (like add) take only two registers. In order to complete a single PowerPC add you'd need at least one x86 mov instruction to get a value into a GPR, the add instruction and then another mov to get that value into a GPR you've mapped to the first eight on the PowerPC.
In short you're fooling yourself thinking you can get any sort of decent performance out of an x86 emulating a PowerPC. The overhead for simple instructions is fairly hefty, more complex operations require the host processor to do even more work. An extremely well done emulator MIGHT get a tenth of the performance out of emulated code over native code. For a 3GHz P4 that is equivient to about say a 300MHz G3. Hey that looks familiar. I'm sorry but a 300MHz G3 isn't going to do anyone a lot of good unless they're content to run Safari and Mail exclusively. Even a fifth of the performance of native code is still only a 600MHz G3 equivilent. You're wagering Apple could easily pull off an ISA transition based on technologies that have no current implementation.
You're obviously misinformed about the Carbon API if you think it is portable to the x86 ISA. Carbon exists to allow developers to more easily transition their applications to OSX from ToolBox from classic MacOS. Carbon is the most used 80% or so of all the classic MacOS managers and libraries. It is written specifically to let PowerPC binaries run on both classic MacOS and OSX.
Even with the Opteron Apple would still have to sell their platform to people. They would still need to convince PHBs that their platform would be a good move for the company, they'd have to convince schools their products were worthwhile investments, they would have to still convince home users they would be happier using a Macintosh to browse the web and get their e-mail. No matter what processor Macs were powered by they would have to sell their platform. Their platform is what does or does not sell, not the processors.
What you really don't seem to pick up about Apple is they are a big fish in a little pond. In the world of Macintoshes they are the king and reigning champion. They have no competition with other people selling Macintoshes and can thus do more with their products. As soon as they enter the x86 realm they become a leeeeettle tiny fish in a great big pond. Apple would end up like VA Lin^H^H^H Software. They would be selling a non-Windows operating system on commodity hardware. That is not a business plan for success.
I would suspect your solution to that problem is license the OS out to people, that of course would increase adoption. Apple would have to sell ten times more copies of MacOS than they currently sell Macintoshes to make up for the difference in the margins. With sales numbering around a million machines a year they would need to increase that number by ten just to make as much money as they do now. In order to make the OS attractive to people they would need to support all or at least a signifigant portion of the hardware and hardware configurations that Windows does. As we know, hardware vendors are none too friendly in developing non-Windows drivers for their products. In the Linux world this slack is made up by developers in their free time. Apple to be competitive with Microsoft would need to do this work themselves. This would increase overhead and lower profits and require even MORE people to buy their OS to break even.
You might want to drop the Different part and just do more of the Think.
The reason I ask is there are absolutely no decent PowerPC emulators for the x86 architecture and figured since you thought it was so easy you might have one lying around. The primary reason for this is the absolute lack of GPRs on x86 and even x86-64 processors. The PowerPC ISA defines 32 32-bit GPRs, the x86 ISA defines 8, the x86-64 defines 16. In order to make up for the x86's lack of GPRs your emulator has to do a LOT of caching just to execute a single instruction. The x86 always ends up doing far more overhead work than actual execution work when emulating PowerPC code.
When going the other way around, emulating x86 or 68k code on the PowerPC the situation is very different. Because of the abundant GPRs, interpereted instructions aren't going to be writing to or reading from registers that have been cached out to the processor cache or main memory. The 68k emulator introduced with the PowerPC based PowerMacs was pretty much a direct map of instructions. For nearly every instruction on the 68k there was an equivilent PowerPC instruction and since the 68k only had 8 GPRs mapping them to registers on the PowerPC was very easy. The instruction ratio was something close to 2:1, for every clock it would take a 68k to execute an instruction a PPC would take 2. At 66MHz the 601 was already beating the pants off the fastest 68040s used in previous Macs.
Even the fastest Athlons and P4s out right now would have a hell of a time emulating so much as a 300MHz G3, not even bringing to question G4s and their vector units. An Opteron is not going to do a whole lot better despite its performance advantage over current x86 chips. Wow Apple could release x86 Macs that run their current software like a 300MHz G3 (ie. like crap) and then use a processor no native software would run on. That means a short while after they get their third party developers moving away from Classic and Carbon development they expect them to release their software compiled, bug tested, and supported for an x86 platform. Their third party developers would drop them like a bad habit. With no third party developers Apple would be little more than NeXT with a cooler logo. MacOS X would die from neglect just like OS/2 and BeOS did.
Apple did that with the first round of clones and it went a long way towards killing them off. Apple makes anywhere between 20-30% in margins on every bit of hardware they sell depending on the particular product. For more expensive products like the super high end PowerMacs that is a fat wad of cash. They tend to make even more on their low end systems because they use much more commodity parts. If all the Macs sold in a year averaged $1800 a piece even a 20% margin would be a $360m profit on a million Macs sold.
Now let's say they make some sort of margin off licensing clones out. Say the margin is 20% but the average price of the clone systems is $1100, that is only $220m for a million Macs sold over a year. That is a 39% drop in margins. If the average price of clones is $800 that is a 56% drop in margins to $160m for a million Macs over a year. You'd have to pull a pretty fancy marketing campaign to sell 39% or 56% more Macs to make up for the reduced margins on the clones. Cheaper Macs might sell a little better than expensive Macs but there is STILL going to be the stupid "Macs don't have any software and can't be upgraded" stigmas attached which heavily influences sales.
Selling clones also kicks Apple in the ass in the fact a cheapo version of a PowerMac is going to outsell an Apple PowerMac simply because it is cheaper. So not only does Apple NOT get a sale of their high margin PowerMac they get a crap licensing return from the clone maker.
PowerComputing and UMAX put a serious dent in Apple's bottom line because the licensing fees didn't make up for the loss in Apple branded sales. If the Gap licenses out their logo to someone who sells the same exact clothes WITH the Gap logo for half the price how long do you think they'd stay in business? Letting a company outsell you with your own product is a dumb business move.
Safari is less about Apple trying to make their own end-all be-all browser and more Apple wanting to add a good HTML enginer to the Cocoa framework. Safari is as much of technology demonstration as it is an actual product. When WebCore becomes a system framework anyone will be able to implement their own browser on OSX with quite a bit of functionality at that. OmniGroup is planning to ditch their homebrew HTML engine for WebCore in the next OmniWeb release. They get all of the functionality and compatibility of WebCore and add their own interface and organization to the browser. It will still be OmniWeb but will just have WebCore doing the heavy lifting.
As for Camino, it is using the work of paid and unpaid developers on the Mozilla project to do the heavy lifting and merely adding an interface. If Safari beats it out in popularity it will be because Camino stopped adding features people wanted or needed. There's tons of Camino users that have stuck with it despite Safari's release specifically because it has more features than Safari does. Hence Camino for them is a better browser, if at some point Safari becomes "better" for them Camino will have to improve more to be even better. That sort of competition is a very good thing for end users because they end up with the best product.
I've wondered about this before as well, also having an SMP system running Linux. I'd like maybe a compile time option for threading (in the main code branch) so we could have threading while single processor users wouldn't be burdened by the context switch overhead. Thread safety now can also be useful down the line when Mplayer evolves a bit.
Compared to their Mac user base Emagic's PC user base is extraordinarily small. It is unfortunate for them to have to either switch platforms or audio programs but like the Mac community has known for years, you can't expect the low volume (thus low revenue) product to remain in production indefinitely. A large percentage of those PC users will likely switch to Macs which is what Apple would like while others will stick with what they have and then switch applications. In the end you'll likely see only about 15-20% of Logic's users switch to other applications.
Adobe would charge a lot more for Premiere if it didn't suck in its entirety. If you never had to meet a deadline or didn't mind your project getting trashed all the time Premiere would be a great application. Their Mac port of it is especially poor, as is their port of After Effects which is a sad excuse for a professional application all on its own.
As for shake needing 4 times the hardware, there is where Apple's sales department kicks in. You buy Shake 3 and say Maya and they'll gladly sell you a rack of the cluster specific XServes that you can run mental ray and QMaster network rendering clients on.
Re:DRM is not possible, period!
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Open Source DRM
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You've entirely missed the point of DRM. The point isn't to keep you from copying something which you will if so inclined, the point is to provide a legal defense against you if/when you do.
Think about it like this. You leave your über-hundred dollar stereo out on the sidewalk in front of your house for a couple days. Lo' and behold when you come out to look for it, it's been swiped. A couple days later you hear the riotous cacophony of the Pink Floyd CD you left in your stereo blasting down the block. You go down the street and look in the window and there on your trecherous neighbor's entertainment center is your stereo with your personalized nameplate on the front and everything. You call the flat foots down on the bloke without hesitance.
Later in court you tell your sob story about missing your most priced stereo. In the cross examination the defending attorney asks if your stereo was so prized why in the hell did you leave it on the sidewalk. Typically folks who prize something do not leave it out in the open waiting for someone to haul off with it. The judge then tell you that you're an idiot and drops the theft charges against the neighbor. It would be a bizzare twist of fate for your case to even get THAT FAR.
The judge tells you that you're an idiot because you have no reasonable expectation of security when you leave stuff on your sidewalk. Some people will pass the stuff by but there are plenty of people who see a stereo on the sidewalk as a gift from above. If the supposedly prized stereo was locked up in your house and it was stolen you'd actually have some ground to argue on.
DRM-free CDs and MP3s are the stereo on the sidewalk, it is obvious who it belongs to but it is sitting out on the sidewalk in the faint hope it will be there in the morning. DRM enabled media is the stereo under lock and key. Sure people can still break in and steal something but the fact there's a lock there changes the situation from a matter of conscience to a matter of law. It isn't illegal to pick stuff up off the sidewalk, it is however illegal to break into a dude's house and steal his stereo.
Copyrighting the stuff on the CDs is equivilent to the faint hope your stereo will be on the sidewalk where you left it. While it is plain the stereo belongs to you it is still out in the open. Putting DRM on the disc gives a property owner to actually pursue someone circumventing said protection. DRM is legal protection not practical protection.
I think municipal fiber or any other high capacity medium is a project everyone ought to be pressuring their city or town counsils for. There's currently two groups laying network cabling down, telephone companies and cable companies. Being commercial interest these groups will always do what is better or more beneficial to them than what is more beneficial or better for the communities they serve.
Being as their commercial interest is rarely in line with what is good for the people it should be the people putting up the lines and selling that space to people providing them service. I see it like this, if a town lays down some fiber they can put it just about anywhere without worrying about right of way issues or zoning restrictions. They are also laying out an infrastructure they are able to rent out to companies to offer services on. Renting out the infrastructure means they can issue bonds to pay for the line installation with a nice return. The line installation itself can be piggybacked on top of routine road, sewer, or power maintenance to keep man hour prices down.
Once the lines are in place and going out to homes it would be up to providers to rent space on the lines in a non-exclusive manner to sell services on. Without the overhead of upkeep a service provider can offer cheaper service than a provider paying the whole bill from head end to household. The rent goes to pay back the issued bond measures and commercial property and operating taxes go back into the municipal coffers.
By having really high bandwidth lines like fiber or high grade copper the municipality can offer bandwidth on a channel by channel basis. Want to offer internet access to the city? Rent out a couple data channels on the fiber lines and connect your head end to a top tier carrier. Want to have a public access television channel? Invest in some video equipment and rent a channel. All municipal services could have their own cheap and easy network access via such a set-up as well. Public and private schools could have dirt cheap network connectivity as could libraries and social services.
I think a lot of good could come from projects like this and with it being a local municipal issue a couple people writing letters and making phone calls might actually DO something other than give paper shredders a workout.
Uh..we can do that already. Instead of pure hydrogen we get a much more useful substance called methanol. We can take a huge portion of our current organic wastes and turn it into methanol. This is doubly useful because in the here and now it can be used in normal internal combustion engines with a little tuning and tweaking. These are called Flexible Fuel Vehicles (FFV) and were first introduced by Ford in the mid 80s. These can run on just about any combination of gasoline and alcohol. In the long run methanol is also useful because you can feed it into a fuel cell with a catalytic converter to crack it. It is going to spit out CO2 but that CO2 is the same stuff the plant you made the methanol from sucked out of the atmosphere. If methanol production can be made into a relatively closed loop process there'd be very little net increase in atmosphic CO2 due to its production and use.
You can't have a net gain of energy production. Energy is never made, it can only be moved. The only renewable sources or power we have are solar, geothermal, or kinetic in nature. None of these renewable sources are very efficient or convenient. Solar power only works when you've got a lot of sunshine, hot rock geothermal needs hot rock which isn't exactly simple to access everywhere, tidal and wind power is extremely limited by region, as is hydroelectric. Hydrogen does not exist in an unbonbded state on Earth, if it did it would float away nary to be seen again. The only natural places to get at it are places it is chemically bonded to other elements like carbon or oxygen. Electrolosis is very wasteful and fossil fuels are limited and don't solve your emissions problem. The last place to get it is from organics processing, this isn't ideal either because in order to grow crops you can turn into methanol for use in fuel cells you need to spent a bit of energy and use very wasteful technologies. None of these are on their way to getting any greener either.
I've been trying to say, fuel cells are a nice idea for tomorrow but they don't solve any problems today. It'd be cool to have a methanol using fuel cell in my house that I could dump fermented woodchips in and power my gadgets, get fresh water out of, and heat my shower. This is still a long ways off and is nowhere near being affordable for middle class Americans, let alone folks in third world economies with a GNP smaller than my bank account.
If you look at the numbers they are really familiar, they're pretty similar to the deal you'd get with a colocation account in a carrier hotel. Their local network might be 100mbps but your connection to the outside world is going to be limited by whatever connection the head end has. Cable and DSL providers do this as well, they sell you a 512kbps or whatever line but that speed is really just dependent on how saturated their head end line is. I think more important than the internet speed is the fact this is fiber to the door and not merely fiber to a DLC.
Fuel cells powered by pure hydrogen beat chemical batteries in what way? Capacity? Think again. Per mass hydrogen stores a lot of energy, per volume is does not store nearly as much. Portability is primarily influenced by mass and volume.
Take an EV1 with its lead-acid battery pack weighing 1310 pounds. If you wanted to revamp that car to use a fuel cell rather than a battery the weight and volume of the fuel cell itself, the storage tank and associated pumping and refridgeration mechanics would take up so much space and weight the space left for the actual hydrogen fuel would let you carry just about enough to equal the amount of power in the lead-acid battery you're replacing.
You can't just put hydrogen in a bottle, it will evaporate right through whatever material you stick it in. The only way to keep it from escaping into space is to cryogenically cool it. Even then you have evaporation. If you leave your hydrogen car in the garage with half a tank of hydrogen for a week the tank will be just about empty when to get in at the end of that week.
Please don't suck down the hydrogen hippie rhetoric so blindly. A number of the people clamoring for a hydrogen economy are not engineers or really people of great mechanical ability. They are liberal arts and communications majors who got the idea in their head hydrogen is the magic bullet to cure all the world's problems. Hydrogen sucks as an energy transport mechanism when you count in real world problems with its storage and transportation.
Recycling old ideas is a great way to save brain energy. Thus I quote myself:
If you can maintain an air of hype-proofness it is fairly easy to see how stupid the "Hydrogen Economy" ideas are in both the short term and long term. Hydrogen is merely an energy carrier a finicky one at that. Many of its proponents only see the end result, a car that spits out warm wet air, without fully realizing the infrastructure that warm wet air is generated with.
Diesel, especially biodiesel has a much better cost/benefit analysis but isn't as sexy as technology as hydrogen. Even the word Diesel fares ill in comparison to the dynamicism of hydrogen's syllibles. It also seems to me that the American public, three quarters of which live in urban areas, connotate Diesel with dirty and noisy MAC trucks and pubtrans buses. If they're a little more technical they probably instantly think of Diesel cars like the TDI Golf and Jetta with their 90hp-I-think-I-can-make-it-up-to-passing-speed engines.
What Diesel hybrid proponents ought to do is start up a massive test drive program. Give a couple people the keys to a Diesel hybrid for a week with a full tank. If more people see they can actually use freeway on-ramps effectively AND have most of the tank of gas left by the end of the week they'd see Diesel hybrids and hopefully Diesel engines in a much different light. Electric assist makes a huge difference in the car's feel, especially for those who shun anything that won't pop off a light like a Roman candle.
The Honda Dualnote concept car is an excellent example of this idea, the combustion engine charges an ultracapacitor while idling or braking. Said capacitor gives an extra umph (100hp worth) when accelerating. If you were to stick such a system on a high efficiency yet power deprived car like the TDI Lupo it'd make for a fair bit of go juice without expending a ton of gas juice. Citroën and Audi have shown that it is possible to make exceptionally clean burning Diesels which is promising for the Diesel-smells-like-poo opponents. Nissan's Gloria is making some great advancements using toroidal CVTs instead of conventional gearboxs.
These sorts of advances lend well to designing a really badass Diesel hybrid. From conception to fruition Diesels are going to be far cheaper than any hydrogen powered car for the next several decades. Diesel fuel is much easier to store and transport than pure hydrogen, it is more robust than methanol, and with biodiesel is renewable and is only pumping the CO2 back into the environment that was used to grow it.
Hype about hydrogen based utopian societies are the same sort of pie in the sky crap that has been fed to people about fusion power. It's payoff point is always somewhere out in the distant future where we all use transporters to get to work. Hydrogen COULD be viable as could nuclear fusion. They could be viable technologies at a point in the future but not now and not any time soon. Hyping these technologies up does little to fix any problems anyone has in the here and now which is where we live.
Hydrogen will be a good idea some day but unfortunately not today. Until then we ought to work towards improving what we have available to its most efficient state while working on the technology of next year. I personally think Diesel's time is due but clean and efficient gasoline engines would work just as well for me. I just want more cars on the road with that get 40+ miles per gallon. I'd really love to see 90+ miles to the gallon. The more fuel efficient our cars get the less dependent we are on the gas pump to lead functional lives. Three times the gas milage means a third of your current fuel expenses. I'm sure everyone in meat space can find a use for a couple hundred extra dollars left at the end of the year, for some a few thousand.
Oil is a different matter than hydrogen because the energy in oil has been put there by millions of years of chemical and biological reactions. Oil is transporting millions of years of biological energy to use for immediate use. Making our own hydrogen is just moving energy we're getting from thermal and kinetic processes in central locations to remote locations. There's more immediate energy in oil reserves than in our current solar, geothermal, and hydrokinetic power production facilities. Ergo oil is a cheaper energy source than hydrogen and will be for many years to come.
Do you lack the ability to reason? Hydrogen is a storage medium for energy, it can only contain the amount of energy to put into it. If it takes 1kW to crack the H2O to get hydrogen, a 100% efficient process could only extract 1kW back out of that hydrogen. Hydrogen merely moves energy from place to place. Being as it isn't very dense and requires a metric assload of infrastructure merely to be stored, pure hydrogen is a horrible energy mover. Superconducting power lines are a far more efficient process than transporting massive amounts of hydrogen all over the planet. Having pigeons carry alkaline batteries to remote locations is only slightly less efficient than moving hydrogen from place to place.
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Uh...not so vastly lower? Unless my calculator is broken it seems to me the PSP's screen resolution is about 42% that of a typical console's 640x480 screen resolution. Because of the shape and size of our eyes even someone with excellent vision would have a tough time discerning two points an arcminute apart. On a 20" television our eyes are just barely able to discern individual pixels on the screen if we're sitting close. This means that every single pixel on the screen is conveying important information to our eyes and thus to us. On a television sitting at a reasonable distance the whole of the screen's surface area can give us visual information. On a small LCD screen at most a few inches across the pixels are so small and close together that unless the screen is rubbing the cornea of one's eye discerning individual pixels on the screen is quite a task. This means individual pixels begin to blur together and each pixel gives our eyes less information. We end up requiring a lot of pixels squished together to present our brains with something meaningful.
That all being said, a small LCD even with a resolution of 640x480 pixels means jack to our eyes. Depending on the pixel size and dot pitch of the screen, the effective resolution could be as little as a quarter of its true resolution. Rendering a high detail image at 480x272 on a screen a few inches across wouldn't be useful for anybody. A high resolution in-game shot on a console hooked to a TV is meaningful because we can get the full effect of the image being rendered. On a small handheld screen we'd be lucky to get a forth of the visual information that would end up rendered actually hitting our perception.
All the PSP's screen is going to do is waste a bunch of power driving pixels we can't resolve and make us squint trying. Unless the PSP's screen is the size of a Palm Pilot's screen there's little need for so many damn pixels on it.
Just about everything you said, save for the CD-Rs being single layer, is entirely false.
What you're saying is a price/performance comparison is a measure of the unit's price vs. its SPEC benchmark scores. Performance is not measured in CPU processing power alone.
I'd put a Mac up against a Windows PC any day if you measure performance in terms of productivity. When orienting a new hire who may or may not know anything about computers, I've found Macs are FAR easier for them to learn to use than a Windows PC. Style and function guidelines are much more strictly followed as well as intelligent interface concepts. Shortcut keys are also used with much greater effectiveness. Getting a new user to use the Mac interface speedily is a relatively simple task.
If you're talking about interoperability as performance, OSX easily beats out Windows. Out of the box OSX supports NFS, CIFS/SMB, and AFS both as a client and server. You can stick an OSX system on a network with Windows, Linux, Solaris (or any other Unix), and Macintosh file servers and not need any third party software to browse or mount shares. On the file server end using OSX clients means no more third party software to provide a share protocol not natively supported by the file server's OS or vendor. Being able to interoperate with an existing infrastructure is a major advantage to using OSX.
If you measure performance in the form of longevity the Mac is a winner again. You may pay more up front for the Macintosh than you would an equivilent Windows PC but you end up with a much longer lasting machine. Ask anybody still doing serious work on their 8500s. Look to any school still doing quite well with Netscape 4.7 running on their Rev A iMacs.
If price is the lifetime price as opposed to the initial price a Mac is going to cost you a great deal less. Licensing Microsoft software for a large number of users is extremely expensive. A site running OSX over several years, and OS releases, is going to be paying far less than a Windows site. Because of the previously mentioned server compatibility the Mac site can replace their expensive proprietary servers with house supported open source server systems. Even if instead a site went with vendor supported server options they'd still be paying far less than the Windows site. A 10-user license for Windows Server 2003 Standard costs as a small cluster computers running open source programs providing the same functionality.
You may measure performance in terms of processor speed but when you run a business performance takes on many different meanings. Don't buy a Mac if you don't think the processor is fast enough. However don't be ignorant and make broad statements about price/performance comparisons if processor speed is the only metric you can think of.
1) Syncing is not required to copy files to the iPod. You can simply drag them to the iPod and they will be added to the iPod's library.
2) The iPod has fully support for normal and smart playlists. You can make a playlist on the iPod of files on the iPod and then play that playlist, either on the iPod itself or from iTunes. Smart playlist automagically generate given particular parameters. Any information about a song stored in the database (title, genre, now even BPM) can be used to make a smart playlist. I've got a list that plays 25 songs I haven't listened to in the past 30 days.
3) iTunes can be the untagged MP3 owner's dream. You can select a bunch of files, Get Info (via command+I, right clock, or the toolbar) and add all the information you want to a group of songs. Now you can even add a record's cover art to any group of songs. Adding tag information doesn't do a thing to the files' filenames, the iPod/iTunes doesn't even both with filename if an ID3 tag is present.
Well Apple said they're working on an iTunes for Windows. From there it would be up to the WINE folks to make that work on Linux. No reverse engineering involved.
Wow you found someone with the same stupid argument as you, do you want some kind of award? A biscuit perhaps?
Here's two situations
1. Apple switches to an entirely different processor architecture which forces them to leave behind all their old PowerPC software. The hope is some really fast processors will make people spend several thousands of dollars on new Macintoshes as well as the software to run on them.
2. Apple switches to a faster chip using the same instruction set as their current processors use. All of their old software runs without incident. Customers can buy new hardware as they see fit and upgrade the software when 64-bit clean versions are released. Existing software still works fine and runs better than it did on their old equipment.
Of those two situations which do you think is more likely? I'll give you a big hint, it isn't the first option. Drop this ridiculous Opteron crap. Apple is a co-developer of HyperTransport with AMD. An Opteron would make really fast Macintoshes that had no software to run really fast and would thus be useless until third party developers ported their software. It is much more likely Apple wants to use a faster PowerPC chip (like the 970) on top of a HyperTransport bus than switch to an entirely new processor. Porting Carbon and Cocoa to the new processor would be a hell of a lot less work than porting these frameworks to x86. You've made so many stupid conclusions it is downright painful to keep responding to them.
All Opteron switch proponents base their claims on the hope someone is going to perform a miracle and spit out a super fast PowerPC emulator. They don't seem to understand emulating PowerPC on an x86 is nothing at all like emulating a 68k. Hoping this is going to be magically possibly is futile. Thus basing hopes of Apple's with Opterons is just as futile. Faster processors is not the only aspect of a computer system that draws in customers no matter what slashdot weenies would like you to believe.
The article you point to is a guy making a bunch of assumptions based on VERY LITTLE real evidense. Half of his "evidense" is second or third hand rumors while the other half is entirely circumstantial. The conclusions he draws are based off of circumstantial situations relating to third hand rumors. I'm sorry but the Register and MOSR are not viable nor reliable sources of information.
I've read all of this crap before many times. You're not the first nor last person to think Apple will move to Opteron processors. MacOSX running on an x86 processor will not make people flock to the platform. Linux running on x86 likewise does not make people flock to the platform. The platform is not Windows it is not the "standard" and thus people are frightened of it. Whiney slashgeeks who proclaim "when OSX runs on Intel I'll buy Apple" are full of it. They will not buy a Macintosh, they never intend to.
An Opteron in Macs would not increase their sales enough to make up for the people ditching the platform because their mission critical software was not available any longer. It likewise wouldn't make up for the people abandoning the platform because any new hardware purchase would mean several thousands more in software purchases. OSX would have never made a mark on the world had it not been for the legacy compatibility it has maintained since day one. Carbon and Classic applications were all OSX had for a very long time. A new version without the ability to run old software would kill Macs and kill Apple. That is not a good business strategy.
This discussion has become absolutely absurd. Your entire argument is based on your personal opinions.
There's a lot of interest in PPC emulators but the proposition is not feasible! Go read up on PowerPC assembly for a little while, then take a look at some x86 assembly. It is not a simple task to emulate one on the other. Several groups have been trying for years to build a PPC emulator on the x86 architecture, it just isn't in the cards.
You need to stop pulling things out of your ass and research them. Apple's AVERAGE margin on hardware is about 25%, read their quarterly statements for that. They make beaucoup cach off their hardware because they're the only ones that sell it and have tight control over their production process. Their high end equipment like PowerBooks have really nice margins reaching towards 30%.
Apple's third party hardware support is larger than most PC fanatics assume but is not nearly enough to license the OS to third parties. OSX would need to support everything Windows does to be a viable alternative to Windows. No 10% of Windows users are going to switch without more functionality than Windows provides. The SAME thing happened to BeOS and OS/2. Both were better operating systems than Windows but they lacked serious hardware support. Without it neither OS was a viable alternative to anyone. If Apple has to invest the time and money to increase hardware support their margins selling the OS disappears.
Did you eat paint chips when you were young or do you not understand the pond concept? Apple makes very good money selling products to a niche market. Success does not always necessarily equate to gigantic market share. Gigantic market share for some companies is a very bad thing. You can't seem to get your head around this concept. We'll contrast Apple's business plan to Dell's in hopes you can understand.
Dell competes directly with all of the other PC manufacturers because they make a product that are exactly like all of their competitor's products. Some of their products actually come from the same manufacturer that their competitors get their products from. In order to survive in that sort of market (big pond) Dell has to keep their prices competitive with other companies in the business. This most often means running razor thin margins in order to sell their hardware. Without selling services which they make good margins on Dell would go down the tubes.
Apple's business plan on the otherhand allows for making a real profit margin on their hardware sales. They forcus their sales at niche demographics and niche markets. Their business plan REQUIRES they sell to a niche audience (little pond). Because they sell to a niche market and are the only company providing that particular product, they can sell their products for a price that doesn't completely destroy their profit margin.
Dell buys their hardware from an ODM, the people who actually design and manufacturer most of their equipment. They give a piece of hardware to a marketeer and tell them to figure out who that product they've got is good to market to. If they have a cheapo laptop they can say its great for students, if they have a expensive PC they can say it is a workstation and market it to businesses.
Apple starts at the other end and designs a piece of hardware based on the target demographic. The iMac was designed for people who did not want the hassle of setting up a PC which in 1998 was a PITA for most people. It also catered to the needs of schools who needed easily maintained computers for labs and classrooms. The iBook was designed almost specifically for students with its rubber padding, ballistic plastic case, and handle.
Apple's is a big fish swiming around in a little pond. They cater to the people other computer companies either miss entirely with their marketing or ignore because they desire selling to a lower common denominator. Dell is a little fish in a very big pond. They have to fight all the other little fish, even the fish building PCs in their garages out of white box parts, to survive. If you dumped Apple into the big pond they would cease being a big fish and would also find they weren't equipped to survive in the big pond.
I present the fact there are currently no fast PowerPC emulators available on the x86 architecture as evidense the task is a hopeless one.
Simply mapping the eight GPRs of an x86 chip to the first eight GPRs of a PowerPC chip does not do you any good at all. Most PowerPC instructions accept at LEAST three registers for input, two input registers and an output variable. Typically x86 instructions (like add) take only two registers. In order to complete a single PowerPC add you'd need at least one x86 mov instruction to get a value into a GPR, the add instruction and then another mov to get that value into a GPR you've mapped to the first eight on the PowerPC.
In short you're fooling yourself thinking you can get any sort of decent performance out of an x86 emulating a PowerPC. The overhead for simple instructions is fairly hefty, more complex operations require the host processor to do even more work. An extremely well done emulator MIGHT get a tenth of the performance out of emulated code over native code. For a 3GHz P4 that is equivient to about say a 300MHz G3. Hey that looks familiar. I'm sorry but a 300MHz G3 isn't going to do anyone a lot of good unless they're content to run Safari and Mail exclusively. Even a fifth of the performance of native code is still only a 600MHz G3 equivilent. You're wagering Apple could easily pull off an ISA transition based on technologies that have no current implementation.
You're obviously misinformed about the Carbon API if you think it is portable to the x86 ISA. Carbon exists to allow developers to more easily transition their applications to OSX from ToolBox from classic MacOS. Carbon is the most used 80% or so of all the classic MacOS managers and libraries. It is written specifically to let PowerPC binaries run on both classic MacOS and OSX.
Even with the Opteron Apple would still have to sell their platform to people. They would still need to convince PHBs that their platform would be a good move for the company, they'd have to convince schools their products were worthwhile investments, they would have to still convince home users they would be happier using a Macintosh to browse the web and get their e-mail. No matter what processor Macs were powered by they would have to sell their platform. Their platform is what does or does not sell, not the processors.
What you really don't seem to pick up about Apple is they are a big fish in a little pond. In the world of Macintoshes they are the king and reigning champion. They have no competition with other people selling Macintoshes and can thus do more with their products. As soon as they enter the x86 realm they become a leeeeettle tiny fish in a great big pond. Apple would end up like VA Lin^H^H^H Software. They would be selling a non-Windows operating system on commodity hardware. That is not a business plan for success.
I would suspect your solution to that problem is license the OS out to people, that of course would increase adoption. Apple would have to sell ten times more copies of MacOS than they currently sell Macintoshes to make up for the difference in the margins. With sales numbering around a million machines a year they would need to increase that number by ten just to make as much money as they do now. In order to make the OS attractive to people they would need to support all or at least a signifigant portion of the hardware and hardware configurations that Windows does. As we know, hardware vendors are none too friendly in developing non-Windows drivers for their products. In the Linux world this slack is made up by developers in their free time. Apple to be competitive with Microsoft would need to do this work themselves. This would increase overhead and lower profits and require even MORE people to buy their OS to break even.
You might want to drop the Different part and just do more of the Think.
The reason I ask is there are absolutely no decent PowerPC emulators for the x86 architecture and figured since you thought it was so easy you might have one lying around. The primary reason for this is the absolute lack of GPRs on x86 and even x86-64 processors. The PowerPC ISA defines 32 32-bit GPRs, the x86 ISA defines 8, the x86-64 defines 16. In order to make up for the x86's lack of GPRs your emulator has to do a LOT of caching just to execute a single instruction. The x86 always ends up doing far more overhead work than actual execution work when emulating PowerPC code.
When going the other way around, emulating x86 or 68k code on the PowerPC the situation is very different. Because of the abundant GPRs, interpereted instructions aren't going to be writing to or reading from registers that have been cached out to the processor cache or main memory. The 68k emulator introduced with the PowerPC based PowerMacs was pretty much a direct map of instructions. For nearly every instruction on the 68k there was an equivilent PowerPC instruction and since the 68k only had 8 GPRs mapping them to registers on the PowerPC was very easy. The instruction ratio was something close to 2:1, for every clock it would take a 68k to execute an instruction a PPC would take 2. At 66MHz the 601 was already beating the pants off the fastest 68040s used in previous Macs.
Even the fastest Athlons and P4s out right now would have a hell of a time emulating so much as a 300MHz G3, not even bringing to question G4s and their vector units. An Opteron is not going to do a whole lot better despite its performance advantage over current x86 chips. Wow Apple could release x86 Macs that run their current software like a 300MHz G3 (ie. like crap) and then use a processor no native software would run on. That means a short while after they get their third party developers moving away from Classic and Carbon development they expect them to release their software compiled, bug tested, and supported for an x86 platform. Their third party developers would drop them like a bad habit. With no third party developers Apple would be little more than NeXT with a cooler logo. MacOS X would die from neglect just like OS/2 and BeOS did.
How do you propose anyone make a G4 emulator "scream" on a processor architecture with only 16 GPRs?
Apple did that with the first round of clones and it went a long way towards killing them off. Apple makes anywhere between 20-30% in margins on every bit of hardware they sell depending on the particular product. For more expensive products like the super high end PowerMacs that is a fat wad of cash. They tend to make even more on their low end systems because they use much more commodity parts. If all the Macs sold in a year averaged $1800 a piece even a 20% margin would be a $360m profit on a million Macs sold.
Now let's say they make some sort of margin off licensing clones out. Say the margin is 20% but the average price of the clone systems is $1100, that is only $220m for a million Macs sold over a year. That is a 39% drop in margins. If the average price of clones is $800 that is a 56% drop in margins to $160m for a million Macs over a year. You'd have to pull a pretty fancy marketing campaign to sell 39% or 56% more Macs to make up for the reduced margins on the clones. Cheaper Macs might sell a little better than expensive Macs but there is STILL going to be the stupid "Macs don't have any software and can't be upgraded" stigmas attached which heavily influences sales.
Selling clones also kicks Apple in the ass in the fact a cheapo version of a PowerMac is going to outsell an Apple PowerMac simply because it is cheaper. So not only does Apple NOT get a sale of their high margin PowerMac they get a crap licensing return from the clone maker.
PowerComputing and UMAX put a serious dent in Apple's bottom line because the licensing fees didn't make up for the loss in Apple branded sales. If the Gap licenses out their logo to someone who sells the same exact clothes WITH the Gap logo for half the price how long do you think they'd stay in business? Letting a company outsell you with your own product is a dumb business move.
Safari is less about Apple trying to make their own end-all be-all browser and more Apple wanting to add a good HTML enginer to the Cocoa framework. Safari is as much of technology demonstration as it is an actual product. When WebCore becomes a system framework anyone will be able to implement their own browser on OSX with quite a bit of functionality at that. OmniGroup is planning to ditch their homebrew HTML engine for WebCore in the next OmniWeb release. They get all of the functionality and compatibility of WebCore and add their own interface and organization to the browser. It will still be OmniWeb but will just have WebCore doing the heavy lifting.
As for Camino, it is using the work of paid and unpaid developers on the Mozilla project to do the heavy lifting and merely adding an interface. If Safari beats it out in popularity it will be because Camino stopped adding features people wanted or needed. There's tons of Camino users that have stuck with it despite Safari's release specifically because it has more features than Safari does. Hence Camino for them is a better browser, if at some point Safari becomes "better" for them Camino will have to improve more to be even better. That sort of competition is a very good thing for end users because they end up with the best product.
I've wondered about this before as well, also having an SMP system running Linux. I'd like maybe a compile time option for threading (in the main code branch) so we could have threading while single processor users wouldn't be burdened by the context switch overhead. Thread safety now can also be useful down the line when Mplayer evolves a bit.
Compared to their Mac user base Emagic's PC user base is extraordinarily small. It is unfortunate for them to have to either switch platforms or audio programs but like the Mac community has known for years, you can't expect the low volume (thus low revenue) product to remain in production indefinitely. A large percentage of those PC users will likely switch to Macs which is what Apple would like while others will stick with what they have and then switch applications. In the end you'll likely see only about 15-20% of Logic's users switch to other applications.
Adobe would charge a lot more for Premiere if it didn't suck in its entirety. If you never had to meet a deadline or didn't mind your project getting trashed all the time Premiere would be a great application. Their Mac port of it is especially poor, as is their port of After Effects which is a sad excuse for a professional application all on its own.
As for shake needing 4 times the hardware, there is where Apple's sales department kicks in. You buy Shake 3 and say Maya and they'll gladly sell you a rack of the cluster specific XServes that you can run mental ray and QMaster network rendering clients on.
You've entirely missed the point of DRM. The point isn't to keep you from copying something which you will if so inclined, the point is to provide a legal defense against you if/when you do.
Think about it like this. You leave your über-hundred dollar stereo out on the sidewalk in front of your house for a couple days. Lo' and behold when you come out to look for it, it's been swiped. A couple days later you hear the riotous cacophony of the Pink Floyd CD you left in your stereo blasting down the block. You go down the street and look in the window and there on your trecherous neighbor's entertainment center is your stereo with your personalized nameplate on the front and everything. You call the flat foots down on the bloke without hesitance.
Later in court you tell your sob story about missing your most priced stereo. In the cross examination the defending attorney asks if your stereo was so prized why in the hell did you leave it on the sidewalk. Typically folks who prize something do not leave it out in the open waiting for someone to haul off with it. The judge then tell you that you're an idiot and drops the theft charges against the neighbor. It would be a bizzare twist of fate for your case to even get THAT FAR.
The judge tells you that you're an idiot because you have no reasonable expectation of security when you leave stuff on your sidewalk. Some people will pass the stuff by but there are plenty of people who see a stereo on the sidewalk as a gift from above. If the supposedly prized stereo was locked up in your house and it was stolen you'd actually have some ground to argue on.
DRM-free CDs and MP3s are the stereo on the sidewalk, it is obvious who it belongs to but it is sitting out on the sidewalk in the faint hope it will be there in the morning. DRM enabled media is the stereo under lock and key. Sure people can still break in and steal something but the fact there's a lock there changes the situation from a matter of conscience to a matter of law. It isn't illegal to pick stuff up off the sidewalk, it is however illegal to break into a dude's house and steal his stereo.
Copyrighting the stuff on the CDs is equivilent to the faint hope your stereo will be on the sidewalk where you left it. While it is plain the stereo belongs to you it is still out in the open. Putting DRM on the disc gives a property owner to actually pursue someone circumventing said protection. DRM is legal protection not practical protection.
I think municipal fiber or any other high capacity medium is a project everyone ought to be pressuring their city or town counsils for. There's currently two groups laying network cabling down, telephone companies and cable companies. Being commercial interest these groups will always do what is better or more beneficial to them than what is more beneficial or better for the communities they serve.
Being as their commercial interest is rarely in line with what is good for the people it should be the people putting up the lines and selling that space to people providing them service. I see it like this, if a town lays down some fiber they can put it just about anywhere without worrying about right of way issues or zoning restrictions. They are also laying out an infrastructure they are able to rent out to companies to offer services on. Renting out the infrastructure means they can issue bonds to pay for the line installation with a nice return. The line installation itself can be piggybacked on top of routine road, sewer, or power maintenance to keep man hour prices down.
Once the lines are in place and going out to homes it would be up to providers to rent space on the lines in a non-exclusive manner to sell services on. Without the overhead of upkeep a service provider can offer cheaper service than a provider paying the whole bill from head end to household. The rent goes to pay back the issued bond measures and commercial property and operating taxes go back into the municipal coffers.
By having really high bandwidth lines like fiber or high grade copper the municipality can offer bandwidth on a channel by channel basis. Want to offer internet access to the city? Rent out a couple data channels on the fiber lines and connect your head end to a top tier carrier. Want to have a public access television channel? Invest in some video equipment and rent a channel. All municipal services could have their own cheap and easy network access via such a set-up as well. Public and private schools could have dirt cheap network connectivity as could libraries and social services.
I think a lot of good could come from projects like this and with it being a local municipal issue a couple people writing letters and making phone calls might actually DO something other than give paper shredders a workout.
A troll is a troll but W's last name couldn't get him into Harvard. It did get him into Yale however.
Uh..we can do that already. Instead of pure hydrogen we get a much more useful substance called methanol. We can take a huge portion of our current organic wastes and turn it into methanol. This is doubly useful because in the here and now it can be used in normal internal combustion engines with a little tuning and tweaking. These are called Flexible Fuel Vehicles (FFV) and were first introduced by Ford in the mid 80s. These can run on just about any combination of gasoline and alcohol. In the long run methanol is also useful because you can feed it into a fuel cell with a catalytic converter to crack it. It is going to spit out CO2 but that CO2 is the same stuff the plant you made the methanol from sucked out of the atmosphere. If methanol production can be made into a relatively closed loop process there'd be very little net increase in atmosphic CO2 due to its production and use.
You can't have a net gain of energy production. Energy is never made, it can only be moved. The only renewable sources or power we have are solar, geothermal, or kinetic in nature. None of these renewable sources are very efficient or convenient. Solar power only works when you've got a lot of sunshine, hot rock geothermal needs hot rock which isn't exactly simple to access everywhere, tidal and wind power is extremely limited by region, as is hydroelectric. Hydrogen does not exist in an unbonbded state on Earth, if it did it would float away nary to be seen again. The only natural places to get at it are places it is chemically bonded to other elements like carbon or oxygen. Electrolosis is very wasteful and fossil fuels are limited and don't solve your emissions problem. The last place to get it is from organics processing, this isn't ideal either because in order to grow crops you can turn into methanol for use in fuel cells you need to spent a bit of energy and use very wasteful technologies. None of these are on their way to getting any greener either.
I've been trying to say, fuel cells are a nice idea for tomorrow but they don't solve any problems today. It'd be cool to have a methanol using fuel cell in my house that I could dump fermented woodchips in and power my gadgets, get fresh water out of, and heat my shower. This is still a long ways off and is nowhere near being affordable for middle class Americans, let alone folks in third world economies with a GNP smaller than my bank account.
If you look at the numbers they are really familiar, they're pretty similar to the deal you'd get with a colocation account in a carrier hotel. Their local network might be 100mbps but your connection to the outside world is going to be limited by whatever connection the head end has. Cable and DSL providers do this as well, they sell you a 512kbps or whatever line but that speed is really just dependent on how saturated their head end line is. I think more important than the internet speed is the fact this is fiber to the door and not merely fiber to a DLC.
Fuel cells powered by pure hydrogen beat chemical batteries in what way? Capacity? Think again. Per mass hydrogen stores a lot of energy, per volume is does not store nearly as much. Portability is primarily influenced by mass and volume.
Take an EV1 with its lead-acid battery pack weighing 1310 pounds. If you wanted to revamp that car to use a fuel cell rather than a battery the weight and volume of the fuel cell itself, the storage tank and associated pumping and refridgeration mechanics would take up so much space and weight the space left for the actual hydrogen fuel would let you carry just about enough to equal the amount of power in the lead-acid battery you're replacing.
You can't just put hydrogen in a bottle, it will evaporate right through whatever material you stick it in. The only way to keep it from escaping into space is to cryogenically cool it. Even then you have evaporation. If you leave your hydrogen car in the garage with half a tank of hydrogen for a week the tank will be just about empty when to get in at the end of that week.
Please don't suck down the hydrogen hippie rhetoric so blindly. A number of the people clamoring for a hydrogen economy are not engineers or really people of great mechanical ability. They are liberal arts and communications majors who got the idea in their head hydrogen is the magic bullet to cure all the world's problems. Hydrogen sucks as an energy transport mechanism when you count in real world problems with its storage and transportation.
Recycling old ideas is a great way to save brain energy. Thus I quote myself:
If you can maintain an air of hype-proofness it is fairly easy to see how stupid the "Hydrogen Economy" ideas are in both the short term and long term. Hydrogen is merely an energy carrier a finicky one at that. Many of its proponents only see the end result, a car that spits out warm wet air, without fully realizing the infrastructure that warm wet air is generated with.
Diesel, especially biodiesel has a much better cost/benefit analysis but isn't as sexy as technology as hydrogen. Even the word Diesel fares ill in comparison to the dynamicism of hydrogen's syllibles. It also seems to me that the American public, three quarters of which live in urban areas, connotate Diesel with dirty and noisy MAC trucks and pubtrans buses. If they're a little more technical they probably instantly think of Diesel cars like the TDI Golf and Jetta with their 90hp-I-think-I-can-make-it-up-to-passing-speed engines.
What Diesel hybrid proponents ought to do is start up a massive test drive program. Give a couple people the keys to a Diesel hybrid for a week with a full tank. If more people see they can actually use freeway on-ramps effectively AND have most of the tank of gas left by the end of the week they'd see Diesel hybrids and hopefully Diesel engines in a much different light. Electric assist makes a huge difference in the car's feel, especially for those who shun anything that won't pop off a light like a Roman candle.
The Honda Dualnote concept car is an excellent example of this idea, the combustion engine charges an ultracapacitor while idling or braking. Said capacitor gives an extra umph (100hp worth) when accelerating. If you were to stick such a system on a high efficiency yet power deprived car like the TDI Lupo it'd make for a fair bit of go juice without expending a ton of gas juice. Citroën and Audi have shown that it is possible to make exceptionally clean burning Diesels which is promising for the Diesel-smells-like-poo opponents. Nissan's Gloria is making some great advancements using toroidal CVTs instead of conventional gearboxs.
These sorts of advances lend well to designing a really badass Diesel hybrid. From conception to fruition Diesels are going to be far cheaper than any hydrogen powered car for the next several decades. Diesel fuel is much easier to store and transport than pure hydrogen, it is more robust than methanol, and with biodiesel is renewable and is only pumping the CO2 back into the environment that was used to grow it.
Hype about hydrogen based utopian societies are the same sort of pie in the sky crap that has been fed to people about fusion power. It's payoff point is always somewhere out in the distant future where we all use transporters to get to work. Hydrogen COULD be viable as could nuclear fusion. They could be viable technologies at a point in the future but not now and not any time soon. Hyping these technologies up does little to fix any problems anyone has in the here and now which is where we live.
Hydrogen will be a good idea some day but unfortunately not today. Until then we ought to work towards improving what we have available to its most efficient state while working on the technology of next year. I personally think Diesel's time is due but clean and efficient gasoline engines would work just as well for me. I just want more cars on the road with that get 40+ miles per gallon. I'd really love to see 90+ miles to the gallon. The more fuel efficient our cars get the less dependent we are on the gas pump to lead functional lives. Three times the gas milage means a third of your current fuel expenses. I'm sure everyone in meat space can find a use for a couple hundred extra dollars left at the end of the year, for some a few thousand.
Oil is a different matter than hydrogen because the energy in oil has been put there by millions of years of chemical and biological reactions. Oil is transporting millions of years of biological energy to use for immediate use. Making our own hydrogen is just moving energy we're getting from thermal and kinetic processes in central locations to remote locations. There's more immediate energy in oil reserves than in our current solar, geothermal, and hydrokinetic power production facilities. Ergo oil is a cheaper energy source than hydrogen and will be for many years to come.
Do you lack the ability to reason? Hydrogen is a storage medium for energy, it can only contain the amount of energy to put into it. If it takes 1kW to crack the H2O to get hydrogen, a 100% efficient process could only extract 1kW back out of that hydrogen. Hydrogen merely moves energy from place to place. Being as it isn't very dense and requires a metric assload of infrastructure merely to be stored, pure hydrogen is a horrible energy mover. Superconducting power lines are a far more efficient process than transporting massive amounts of hydrogen all over the planet. Having pigeons carry alkaline batteries to remote locations is only slightly less efficient than moving hydrogen from place to place.