PV panels are so extremely inefficient it isn't funny. To make things worse their power ratings which people look up all the time are based on some ricidulous test conditions known as STC (standard test conditions). The STC that panels are rated under based on the amount of sunlight hitting the panel per square meter, the temperature of the panel itself, and the mass of the surrounding air. The STCs are 1000 watts/square meter, panel temp of 25C (77F), and an air mass of 1.5 (which is slightly above sea level). The ratings of panels based on the STC are measured in their output wattage. Amorphous silicon panels are the cheapest but least efficient with 4 to 6% efficiency. Under STC thats 40 to 60 watts per panel. Screen printed poly and mono crystaline panels are about 10 to 11% efficient and cost a bit more than amorphous panels. Laser grooved buried grid (LGBG) panels cost the most but have the highest efficiency of about 13% but in some cases as high as 15%.
While those efficiencies might not seem so bad recall the STC. Real world conditions are not nearly as pleasant. Typically due to dust and air pollution you're only seeing really 800 or so watts/square meter of sunshine unless you live in the mountains. Solar panels are also either dark blue or black so they retain a good deal of heat which affects their output voltage trmendously. Shadows and the angle of the Sun during the day are also going to cause output drops.
There's cases of using reflectors to increase the sunlight intensity on panels to increase their output. This causes you a lot of headaches however. Increased sunlight means a higher cell temperature which lowers your efficiency and output voltage. Adding active cooling just makes you entire system less efficient because power is being immediately used to cool the panels.
PV panels also require some nasty chemicals and most PV manufacturing plants are dirty monstrosities though many are getting better about the chemicals used. If you factor in all of the energy required to make a single solar panel though you're going to end up with a crappy cost/return ratio. Fossil fuels have good return ratios because biological and geological processes have been doing all the work of making the energy contained in the fossil fuels over millions of years. If you want to use the Sun to get power look into solar thermal rather than solar electric.
Thanks for the link but I've been to that site a number of times drooling. If i had an extra 1800$ to spend on one I'd get one. Right now however stuff like rent and car payments come first. I think it is high time I bring a frivolous lawsuit against cirgarette companies or McDonalds or some other national cash cow and get myself some spendin money!
There's a very interesting difference between gadget production in Japan and in the US. One important aspect besides pure technolust that drives the production of all forms of technological toys is the expected return. In Japan a tech product needs to only sell about 25,000 units in order for a company to see it as viable. In the US that prospect is ten times higher at 250,000 units. Ergo, Japan sees far more keen little toys because there's no impetus to sell hundreds of thousands of them which allows for a much larger number of what the US would see as production failures. The logic stems from the fact there is far more techno toy demand in Japan so a minimum demand product that just barely sells out its 25,000 unit inventory might be succeeded by a subsequent product that outsells production capability driving the price up through increased demand. There's also a ton of local intranational production facilities as well as a close proximity to Taiwan and Korea which vastly lowers the cost of all the microelectronic components because they don't need to be shipped across the Pacific. I know the pangs of technolust well, I want one of those Sony PCG-U1 in a way I'm not entirely comfortable with feeling about a computer. In short that is why Japan sees so many damn cool toys. The increased demand allows for smaller successful production runs and more product variety.
You ought to look into the C3 from Via. It only needs passive cooling and runs off of a stock Socket 370 motherboard which wouldn't be that hard to find with passive cooling of its own. A well mounted quiet hard drive and a good power supply and you'd be hard pressed to tell if the PC was even on.
The viability of an Apple in an office environment is entirely dependent on a fully featured version of Office or an equivilent. Much to a Linux user's chagrin MS Office has become a standard in business environments. Partly due to hard edged business tactics and partyle because Office does actually provide users with everything they need or want to be able to do. Office has some badass features you're not going to see in open source office suites for years to come. For home use most people can live pretty well with using just AppleWorks or one of the other limited feature office suites available for MacOS. I would use AppleWorks all the time if I didn't need seemless interoperability with Office 2000.
Office X is important to OS X because it shows that 1) a major company besides Apple is backing the OS and deciding to support it and 2) it means you can buy an iMac for your business and not lose out because you can't read Office 2k file formats correctly. You don't call up a client and ask them to resend you some paperwork in RTF rather than DOC because you only have [some other program]. MacOS needs an Office compatible suite of programs just like Linux does. Linux only has limited functionality in reading Office files and faces a lot of skepticism when its use is proposed. It's the same skepticism met when you suggest using a Mac in an office because the stigma still exists that they don't play nice with all the Microsoft software you've already got. These opinions come from experiences with MacOS 7.5 and Word 6 when you were damn lucky if you managed to get your Mac talking to anything.
I wouldn't say the free software movement is about inventing anything at all. Inventiveness is surely involved but many piece of free software are just free implimentations of a non-free product. The GNU manifesto is all about creating Free versions of closed source pieces of software. That is hardly inventing a product. This isn't to say the whole free software sharing is caring paradigm isn't an effective means of collaboration and an efficient way to share ideas. Many computer inventions have come out of well funded commercial or academic projects simply because someone working with these backings can sit around and think of ways to accomplish something. I think Alan Kay is more of an inventor than Linus Torvalds.
Not all were sleepers but not all were well known terrorists, I was just generalizing. I probably should have said many of the terrorists in September were sleepers. They had no records (at least in the US) to speak of. There was indeed a communication breakdown in the security structure, the INS should have been doing its job and so should the FBI. That is a case where some united database of offenders might someday when the technology is foolproof would catch someone. That day is long off however.
But the true sleepers involved in September's attacks as well as people we have no idea about are the sort that will pass through the cracks of any sort of database system. Joe Terrorist moves to the US or just gets a visa to live here and goes about his business and never gets so much as a speeding ticket. Then one day an e-mail turns up talking about enlarging his penis and has a particular picture on it and the appropriate code words. He then builds a bomb and blows somebody up. Other than a group of telepaths or time traveling cops how are you going to screen people coming into the US to see if they are a terrorist deep down? Facial recognition is just going to show that Joe Terrorist has no criminal record to speak of and pays his taxes. It isn't going to tell you his backpack has twenty pounds of home made explosives.
What is so retarded about these supposedly security engendering technologies is they can only catch someone (if they work at all) if they are in the database. This stops absolutely zero sleepers from commiting some act of terrorism which is exactly what the terrorists in September were. The only way they would have possibly been prevented from boarding those planes was if there was some ultralarge database that collected all the information from all possible channels and picked them out of the crowd for having expired student visas. Even then it isn't terribly likely they would have been prevented from boarding the planes, they're paying customers who will get something in the mail from the INS warning them their visas are expired.
This supports one of the major theories of Martian water and what the hell happened to it. On Earth there's a process the planet has to cycle carbon dioxide into and out of the atmosphere. This is entirely dependent plate tectonics however. The theory is that Mars was warm and wet a billion years before Earth was but because it cooled faster than Earth because it was smaller its plate tectonics ceased. When that happened the CO2 process couldn't continue and the oceans began to freeze into the ground. It would be really cool if this discovery promoted more exploration on Mars. Having an ice boring probe discover some form of life would be pretty interesting. I wouldn't expect anything to be alive currently because its been many billions of years since water was a liquid on Mars. Even the deepest ice on Antarctica isn't older than a few millions of years.
You stupid fuck. I said downloading a song you did not pay for is piracy. If you have a copy on one medium and then download it it is still considered fair use. I'm flabbergasted at your display of dumb fuckery with fair use. If you do not own a copy of that song of a medium you paid for and download that song it is not fair fucking use. I don't have to know if you own it or not and neither does the RIAA. Nobody needs to have knowlege that you own the song on some medium, the fact has to exist that you do own that song on some medium. Be careful stepping off the short bus.
What is most entertaining about the RIAA's continuing legal attacks is they are obviously attacking these companies with legal fees rather than substantitive claims and then turning around and flat out denying it. The problem legally with AG, Napster, and Kazaa is they have to maintain servers somewhere that not only distribute programs to share MP3s but also facilitate in their transfer. What none of these companies have managed to do is show a court that their software can be used for anything besides piracy* and in reality they can't be despite specious claims to the contrary. AG is going to fold under just like Kazaa did because there is no way their VC is going to hold out under the RIAA's assault, unless of course they have a retained attorney that works cheap.
It will be interesting to see what happens next after AG goes down, the biggest network left that I know of is Gnutella and with that the RIAA faces a pretty tough battle. The Gnutella network was not specifically designed for MP3 sharing and there is no single company responsible for its maintenance. If they did try to bring a suit against it it would be interesting how they could attack GPL'ed code.
* Yes trading MP3s or movies without paying for them is piracy. Unless you made it yourself or own the distribution rights to it, you giving it to other people isn't legal. The home recording act and time shifting statutes don't let you make recordings for distribution, only personal use. That is fair use. Kazaa, Napster, and AG aren't promoting fair use they ARE promoting piracy. It may seem unfair that you can't go download any song you want for free but those are the breaks. If you want cheap CDs buy them cheap either used or from swap meets. Mixing a CD for a friend can be fair use, a 70 gig MP3 collection downloaded entirely from some sharing service is not. Copying a CD you own to put in your car so your original doesn't get fucked up is fair use, downloading and watching AoTC instead of paying for it in some way is not.
A jamming decoy with a wood shack built around it would suggest to a flesh and blood pilot that it was a jamming system worthy of having munitions dumped on it. If you go to such effort to build a decoy it is probably going to fool some live pilots some of the time, the only view of the target they've got is a small TV monitor linked up to their weapon's guidance system.
I think you're also missing the point of these UCAV systems, they are meant to deal with people making decoy targets. Say you're in the desert looking for Scud missle trucks and there are a couple decoys all over the place. You're in an F-111F (which would now probably be an F/A-18 since the F-111 was retired) with a load of GBU-12s. Which Scud site do you take out? Taking out the wrong one means people on your side are going to end up dead. Now enter UCAVs which can be semi-autonomous, you can assign each one to a different potential target lowering the possibility of a miss and casulties on your side. Having several F/A-18s go up in a sortie means a greater chance of one of them getting shot down and not only do you lose the equipment but you've got a pilot either dead or captured. No one is going to be heart broken because a UCAV got shot down hitting a decoy. Someone is definitely going to care when a real pilot is shot down hitting a decoy though.
I really wish these titles would have been release titles, or maybe at the very least come out a little sooner than February. My GC doesn't have all that many worthwhile games out for it right now. Rogue Leader was fun for a bit, Luigi's Mansion got old fast, as did Crazi Taxi and Sonic. Super Smash Brothers is awesome and the best game I've played on the GC so far because Ihaven't gotten my hands on Monkey Ball yet and I hear it is just as addicting. The next title besides these I'm on the look out for is Clone Wars which looks like it will be pretty sweet to play.
Had Mario, Link, and Samus been in the initial wave of titles for the GC I think it probably would have sold even more units than it did. The classic Nintendo characters are franchises the XBox simply doesn't have and the playstation took several years to develop. I've played Metroid so many times I can hum the music to it on command. It disappointed me after getting my GC that some of the first games I had on my original Nintendo were going to take so long to get to it. The first Nintendo I got was the version with R.O.B and the light gun. From the get go I had Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt, and Gyroscope. Soon after I got Metroid and Kid Icarus which are two games I longed for on the N64 after I bought it off eBay. Zelda of course dominated a good deal of my time, I've got gold cartridge versions of both Zelda 1 and 2 lying around somewhere. I'm hoping these titles which have been in the works for a while turn out to be as entertaining as the originals. I thought Nintendo did a good job with Zelda 3 and Super Metroid on the SNES because for a while both games dominated my free time and cut into some of my sleep. While i would have hoped they came sooner I know three things I'm sticking on my wish list of nostalgic things.
I think I was bamboozled and run amuck. That was by far one of the stupidest articles I have ever read comparing any technologica ldevice to any other technological device. Even from a platform advocacy standpoint it was pretty fucking stupid. The author looked up prices on the vendors websites and made some dumbfuck guesses about the performance of the systems. BSD is dying trolls can fucking do that. Some points I found especially stupid:
- Rehashing the SCSI/ATA debate. Unless you're going to do a really in depth benchmark of SCSI and ATA drives it is fucking pointless to bring the subject up. Depending on the operating systems, host controller drivers, file system, main memory, DMA constroller, south bridge quality, time of day, and phase of the moon performance between SCSI and ATA drives varies widely. A 7200RPM ATA drive on a badass ATA controller can have better througput than a badass SCSI drive of the same speed. The ATA host controllers give ATA drives capabilities similar to that of SCSI drives if not superior ones at a lower cost per megabyte. A SCSI drive is just a dumb disk with a smart controller.
- Not including the price of software. Unless you're going to be sticking a Free as in beer or speech OS onto one of your x86 systems that don't have the OS pre-loaded you need to include that price. For Windows you're either buying a limited client license or an unlimited client license, that would set even the cheapest of those servers up a couple hundred dollars. The Xserve and Netra come with unlimited user license for the OS (AFAIK with the Netra) with the Xserve using Apache and the Netra having a single processor license for the Sun ONE webserver (iPlanet).
- Saying the G4 is better for multimedia. Fuck, by the multimedia definition used for the G4 you can say the Athlon is geared mainly as a multimedia processor because it has a strong FPU performance. What the fuck is wit hthat backwards logic. Serving up static web pages isn't very processor intensive, often times the overhead for the transaction is beefier than the transaction itself. The efficiency of the web server and if used the dynamic page generation code greatly affects performance. The processor can't be blamed when the OS can't handle the increasing transactions. Case in point were the Netcraft benchmarks showing that that particular kernel version couldn't build and tear down processes fast enough to keep up with IIS' worker thread model. The processor didn't have anything to do with that problem.
Uh...ever heard of dynamic memory allocation? You try writing a program that doesn't require more space in memory ro run than requires disk space to store. Even a Hellow World! is going to need more memory allocated to it than diskspace required to store it. Add in several orders of complexity including a graphical interface usinga private rendering engine and see how light you can get a program.
Not quite. In an electronic format I can grep information out as long as it is not encoded in some way be it intentional encryption or just the fact the file encodes characters and patterns to save space. An HTML format page can easily have the information grepped from it without ever seeing one ad. With a PDF or PS document I can do the same thing with a little more effort. This ability is bad for a publisher because the space to sell ads is practically non-existant. What good is an interactive ad that can easily be avoided? None. You for some reason seem to think that people are going to willingly view ads. The fact many slashdotters run ad busters viewing the internet ought to suggest to you that that is complete bullshit. You also miss the crucial aspect of CD magazines, you need some electronic device in order to read it. Besides your 19.95$ subscription to the magazine how much extra are you going to pay in batteries/electricity just to read a magazine article? If you take your Newton everywhere making your electronic magazine highly portable then good for you but not enough people are going to do that making the dead tree magazine a much better option.
Don't blame the editors for complying with the limitations of their publisher. Dead tree publications are durable and require scores less energy to read than an electronic medium like CD-ROMs would. Reading a magazine doesn't require flipping a power switch or plugging something in. This is entirely aside from the portability of dead tree media which is very popular among users. I can read a dead tree magazine on the pot, a train, on a park bench, in the middle of a desert, or wherever I end up at. CD-ROM copies of magazines would be nice for annual year-long wrap-up editions sort of like DDJ does but for a monthly run they are inconvienient. You also seem to ignore the fact that magazines make money from advertising and making the media electronic AND searchable means it is going to be relatively easy for people to get at articles without seeing your ads in there. For you that might seem great but for a magazine with a low circulation not being able to sell page space to advertisers and make money it is a bad thing.
The Linux kit is a fucking developer kit. It isn't a goddamn game system. There's no reason for some snot nosed kid to get a Linux kit for his or her PS2. What in the hell are you smoking?
The Cubes had a similar problem to this, for some reason the power switch circuitry was susceptible to RF noise generated by flourecent lights and other noisy electrical devices. Other G3 iMacs have also demonstrated their weirdness. It isn't static on the electrical wiring itself but RF noise being generated by the RF generated by the flourecent light. Call up Apple and ask them in there is a tech article about the power switch RF interference problem. It's a probablem that cropped up in a couple of different Mac models though not necessarily all of those models.
For geeks going to Mars is a technological achievement, a cool thing to do with no material benefit returned to the people (taxpayers) investing in it. Even the lowest estimates for a Mars mission run in the tens of billions for a single mission. Tens of billions of dollars to...plant a flag, take some measurements, and shoot some pictures? Apollo was a similar sort of mission though they actually had some nice returns on the investment because the technology to accomplish the mission didn't exist. The universities and contractors that designed and built equipment or just worked the numbers for the Gemini and Apollo missions gained immense amounts of knowlage about working in space. Had Apollo not needed small powerful computer systems which didn't exist at the time, slashdot probably would not exist and neither would your PC. The problem with a Mars mission is we have much of the technology needed to get there meaning putting an investment into the project isn't going to give you much of a return. It is inefficient and wasteful to mine Mars or even fabricate materials there for export. Say you had a Mars colony with a space launch infrastructure, it would cost them about as much to send something to Earth as it would cost us to send something to Mars. It is much more efficient to send a self sufficient manufacturing/refinment system to a much less massive body like an asteroid and have it send material back down to Earth. It's like mining the top of a mountain and rolling stuff downhill. As long as you've got a method to stop stuff it requires much less effort than trying to send your material up hill.
I lucked out today and got to see AOTC at ten in the morning. The luck part was my friends and I bought our tickets on monday online. I was suprised by then the show wasn't sold out. When I saw TPM I had to wait in line for about four hours to get tickets and then another two hours waiting to get into the theater for the movie which filled the stadium. Today the stadium wasn't even close to full but I'd be curious to see how other theaters did. We picked the theater specifically because it has good quality screens but no oneever goes there because it is so out of the way.
I wasn't even positive last week that I would end up seeing the movie today because TPM disappointed me so damn much. The first time I saw it I was impressed mostly due to the anticipation of seeing it and the scale of the theater I saw it in. It was one of those ultra ginormous theaters with the sound cranked so high the speeder scenes caused your pants to massage your rectum. Subsequent viewings in other theaters and eventually getting the DVD spoiled the initial effect. TPM sucked ass. So in steps AOTC which had much less hype and I was less excited about. It turned out to impress me as much at it impressed Rob and many others here. It started off slow but it showed off lots of planets and lots of aliens and had plenty of Jedi action. All TPM had was abunch of pandering about mydoclorians by Qui fucking Gon and that damned pod race.
Things AOTC did right:
-Established Boba Fett, of all the characters from the original trilogy with possibly the exception of Han Solo he is the most interesting. Just by looking at him you can tell he has a past and has been there and done that. Han Solo was the same way, the Millennium Falcon had the same personal history effect as Boba's armor.
-Gives a reason why everyone goes on and on about Yoda being a badass Jedi master. Also gives Yoda a part in the movie that had some weight to it just like ESB had. Yoda's scenes were probably me favorite because I've always though he was a BMF.
-Goes back to Lucas' original desire to really show a full universe behind the story happening on screen. Originally he wanted to have the action take place indozens of different locals running a wide gamut of places in the galaxy. This is hard to do just using glass matte paintings and forced perspective shots. When the CG was used to really show off a big world that extended way past the reach of the camera it did its job well.
Things I didn't like so much:
-Poor use of CG characters in some scenes. Actually more like poor implimentation. Obi Wan's friend with the four arms just looked fake and stupid. If you want to use CG characters they need to look tangible. Some scenes felt like watching Roger Rabbit in space. When Yoda is seen floating by mace and Obi Wan he looks extra fake, in other scenes the CG shots are almost indistinguishable from puppet shots. Scenes with clone soldiers just look silly. In ANH and ROTJ the Death Star scenes with the stormtroopers in formation were done on glass mattes and look tons better than the CG clone soldiers.
-Crappy space scenes. While ESB didn't have a huge space battle or anything, it would have been nice for AOTC to have one or two. It did have the obligitory asteroid battle sequence but it was not nearly as tense as the one in ESB (baring the escape from the giant worm). Watching ESB for the first time it is a real possibility that Han and crew are going to end up staring at the walls of a Star Destroyer's brig. Star Destroyers were menacing and gave asense of forboding, the droid control ships just look comical and weak.
-Some shots like the view from Palpatine's office just look crappy. I applaud the effects guys for doing very good keying with all the CG augmented scenes. Characters don't have halos around them and it would be hard to tell that they were in front of ablue screen if it weren't for the fact the shots outside the windows looked way too weak sometimes. The twilight shots looked great and were massively detailed by the daytime shots didn't have nearly enough contrast. Something even old time directors have always done when using flat backdrops is add enough contrast to make it look like the backdrop is real. Too many soft shadows ruin the effect.
My gripes are just nitpicky visual details really because I really liked this movie. It was much better than TPM and gives me hope that Episode III willbe something really worth watching. Like Dante says, all Jedi had was a bunch of muppets. I'm looking forward to Episode III really jam packing in some action and maybe some real drama. I'm going to have to see it again on a digital screen just to compare and contrast the two formats. If you haven't seen it or are on the fence, go see it soon because Yoda's bad assery is worth sitting through the rest of the movie.
Do you understand the concepts console manufacturers produce their goods with? If they were losing X dollars per console (which I know is not going to be more than 100$ per console) at the initial release, for every four games per console sold recouped those losses nicely, anything beyond that recoup was profit. Which is exactly as I explained it in Sony's case, the losses incurred in the first run of consoles was recouped by any games that became even remotely popular. If Sony say sold four games for every PS2 sold initially they were not losing any money when you calculate net profits and losses. Microsoft dropping the price is hoping to sell more units to increase demand for the games which let them recoup the losses taken from production of the consoles. Dropping the price a hundred bucks doesn't mean they are taking an extra hundred dollar loss. If the initial run had losses of 50$ per console and they recouped that from sales of games the second production run is naturally going to be cheaper due to an increased availability of components which drops the unit price. If this drop in unit cost is below what they are selling the units on shelves for they can drop the price a hundred bucks and maintain their 50$/unit loss and recoup that by selling more games (because more units are in people's homes). The goal of a console maker following the licensing scheme first widely practiced by Nintendo with the NES (which is what we're talking about) aims to get consoles into as many living rooms as possible despite the cost to the company. Once these games are in homes the games which cost the company nothing to develope make them beaucoup cash to recoup their losses. Nintendo and Sony would not be in business if this model did not work out well.
Slashdot Mirror
Section 4B: Do not taunt ReplayTV 4500.
Section 4C: If you hack ReplayTV 4500 and it begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
Geez, talking about infringement.
By telling me not to steal.
PV panels are so extremely inefficient it isn't funny. To make things worse their power ratings which people look up all the time are based on some ricidulous test conditions known as STC (standard test conditions). The STC that panels are rated under based on the amount of sunlight hitting the panel per square meter, the temperature of the panel itself, and the mass of the surrounding air. The STCs are 1000 watts/square meter, panel temp of 25C (77F), and an air mass of 1.5 (which is slightly above sea level). The ratings of panels based on the STC are measured in their output wattage. Amorphous silicon panels are the cheapest but least efficient with 4 to 6% efficiency. Under STC thats 40 to 60 watts per panel. Screen printed poly and mono crystaline panels are about 10 to 11% efficient and cost a bit more than amorphous panels. Laser grooved buried grid (LGBG) panels cost the most but have the highest efficiency of about 13% but in some cases as high as 15%.
While those efficiencies might not seem so bad recall the STC. Real world conditions are not nearly as pleasant. Typically due to dust and air pollution you're only seeing really 800 or so watts/square meter of sunshine unless you live in the mountains. Solar panels are also either dark blue or black so they retain a good deal of heat which affects their output voltage trmendously. Shadows and the angle of the Sun during the day are also going to cause output drops.
There's cases of using reflectors to increase the sunlight intensity on panels to increase their output. This causes you a lot of headaches however. Increased sunlight means a higher cell temperature which lowers your efficiency and output voltage. Adding active cooling just makes you entire system less efficient because power is being immediately used to cool the panels.
PV panels also require some nasty chemicals and most PV manufacturing plants are dirty monstrosities though many are getting better about the chemicals used. If you factor in all of the energy required to make a single solar panel though you're going to end up with a crappy cost/return ratio. Fossil fuels have good return ratios because biological and geological processes have been doing all the work of making the energy contained in the fossil fuels over millions of years. If you want to use the Sun to get power look into solar thermal rather than solar electric.
Thanks for the link but I've been to that site a number of times drooling. If i had an extra 1800$ to spend on one I'd get one. Right now however stuff like rent and car payments come first. I think it is high time I bring a frivolous lawsuit against cirgarette companies or McDonalds or some other national cash cow and get myself some spendin money!
There's a very interesting difference between gadget production in Japan and in the US. One important aspect besides pure technolust that drives the production of all forms of technological toys is the expected return. In Japan a tech product needs to only sell about 25,000 units in order for a company to see it as viable. In the US that prospect is ten times higher at 250,000 units. Ergo, Japan sees far more keen little toys because there's no impetus to sell hundreds of thousands of them which allows for a much larger number of what the US would see as production failures. The logic stems from the fact there is far more techno toy demand in Japan so a minimum demand product that just barely sells out its 25,000 unit inventory might be succeeded by a subsequent product that outsells production capability driving the price up through increased demand. There's also a ton of local intranational production facilities as well as a close proximity to Taiwan and Korea which vastly lowers the cost of all the microelectronic components because they don't need to be shipped across the Pacific. I know the pangs of technolust well, I want one of those Sony PCG-U1 in a way I'm not entirely comfortable with feeling about a computer. In short that is why Japan sees so many damn cool toys. The increased demand allows for smaller successful production runs and more product variety.
You ought to look into the C3 from Via. It only needs passive cooling and runs off of a stock Socket 370 motherboard which wouldn't be that hard to find with passive cooling of its own. A well mounted quiet hard drive and a good power supply and you'd be hard pressed to tell if the PC was even on.
The viability of an Apple in an office environment is entirely dependent on a fully featured version of Office or an equivilent. Much to a Linux user's chagrin MS Office has become a standard in business environments. Partly due to hard edged business tactics and partyle because Office does actually provide users with everything they need or want to be able to do. Office has some badass features you're not going to see in open source office suites for years to come. For home use most people can live pretty well with using just AppleWorks or one of the other limited feature office suites available for MacOS. I would use AppleWorks all the time if I didn't need seemless interoperability with Office 2000.
Office X is important to OS X because it shows that 1) a major company besides Apple is backing the OS and deciding to support it and 2) it means you can buy an iMac for your business and not lose out because you can't read Office 2k file formats correctly. You don't call up a client and ask them to resend you some paperwork in RTF rather than DOC because you only have [some other program]. MacOS needs an Office compatible suite of programs just like Linux does. Linux only has limited functionality in reading Office files and faces a lot of skepticism when its use is proposed. It's the same skepticism met when you suggest using a Mac in an office because the stigma still exists that they don't play nice with all the Microsoft software you've already got. These opinions come from experiences with MacOS 7.5 and Word 6 when you were damn lucky if you managed to get your Mac talking to anything.
I wouldn't say the free software movement is about inventing anything at all. Inventiveness is surely involved but many piece of free software are just free implimentations of a non-free product. The GNU manifesto is all about creating Free versions of closed source pieces of software. That is hardly inventing a product. This isn't to say the whole free software sharing is caring paradigm isn't an effective means of collaboration and an efficient way to share ideas. Many computer inventions have come out of well funded commercial or academic projects simply because someone working with these backings can sit around and think of ways to accomplish something. I think Alan Kay is more of an inventor than Linus Torvalds.
Not all were sleepers but not all were well known terrorists, I was just generalizing. I probably should have said many of the terrorists in September were sleepers. They had no records (at least in the US) to speak of. There was indeed a communication breakdown in the security structure, the INS should have been doing its job and so should the FBI. That is a case where some united database of offenders might someday when the technology is foolproof would catch someone. That day is long off however.
But the true sleepers involved in September's attacks as well as people we have no idea about are the sort that will pass through the cracks of any sort of database system. Joe Terrorist moves to the US or just gets a visa to live here and goes about his business and never gets so much as a speeding ticket. Then one day an e-mail turns up talking about enlarging his penis and has a particular picture on it and the appropriate code words. He then builds a bomb and blows somebody up. Other than a group of telepaths or time traveling cops how are you going to screen people coming into the US to see if they are a terrorist deep down? Facial recognition is just going to show that Joe Terrorist has no criminal record to speak of and pays his taxes. It isn't going to tell you his backpack has twenty pounds of home made explosives.
What is so retarded about these supposedly security engendering technologies is they can only catch someone (if they work at all) if they are in the database. This stops absolutely zero sleepers from commiting some act of terrorism which is exactly what the terrorists in September were. The only way they would have possibly been prevented from boarding those planes was if there was some ultralarge database that collected all the information from all possible channels and picked them out of the crowd for having expired student visas. Even then it isn't terribly likely they would have been prevented from boarding the planes, they're paying customers who will get something in the mail from the INS warning them their visas are expired.
This supports one of the major theories of Martian water and what the hell happened to it. On Earth there's a process the planet has to cycle carbon dioxide into and out of the atmosphere. This is entirely dependent plate tectonics however. The theory is that Mars was warm and wet a billion years before Earth was but because it cooled faster than Earth because it was smaller its plate tectonics ceased. When that happened the CO2 process couldn't continue and the oceans began to freeze into the ground. It would be really cool if this discovery promoted more exploration on Mars. Having an ice boring probe discover some form of life would be pretty interesting. I wouldn't expect anything to be alive currently because its been many billions of years since water was a liquid on Mars. Even the deepest ice on Antarctica isn't older than a few millions of years.
You stupid fuck. I said downloading a song you did not pay for is piracy. If you have a copy on one medium and then download it it is still considered fair use. I'm flabbergasted at your display of dumb fuckery with fair use. If you do not own a copy of that song of a medium you paid for and download that song it is not fair fucking use. I don't have to know if you own it or not and neither does the RIAA. Nobody needs to have knowlege that you own the song on some medium, the fact has to exist that you do own that song on some medium. Be careful stepping off the short bus.
What is most entertaining about the RIAA's continuing legal attacks is they are obviously attacking these companies with legal fees rather than substantitive claims and then turning around and flat out denying it. The problem legally with AG, Napster, and Kazaa is they have to maintain servers somewhere that not only distribute programs to share MP3s but also facilitate in their transfer. What none of these companies have managed to do is show a court that their software can be used for anything besides piracy* and in reality they can't be despite specious claims to the contrary. AG is going to fold under just like Kazaa did because there is no way their VC is going to hold out under the RIAA's assault, unless of course they have a retained attorney that works cheap.
It will be interesting to see what happens next after AG goes down, the biggest network left that I know of is Gnutella and with that the RIAA faces a pretty tough battle. The Gnutella network was not specifically designed for MP3 sharing and there is no single company responsible for its maintenance. If they did try to bring a suit against it it would be interesting how they could attack GPL'ed code.
* Yes trading MP3s or movies without paying for them is piracy. Unless you made it yourself or own the distribution rights to it, you giving it to other people isn't legal. The home recording act and time shifting statutes don't let you make recordings for distribution, only personal use. That is fair use. Kazaa, Napster, and AG aren't promoting fair use they ARE promoting piracy. It may seem unfair that you can't go download any song you want for free but those are the breaks. If you want cheap CDs buy them cheap either used or from swap meets. Mixing a CD for a friend can be fair use, a 70 gig MP3 collection downloaded entirely from some sharing service is not. Copying a CD you own to put in your car so your original doesn't get fucked up is fair use, downloading and watching AoTC instead of paying for it in some way is not.
Awww poor Iraq, what did they ever do to anybody?
A jamming decoy with a wood shack built around it would suggest to a flesh and blood pilot that it was a jamming system worthy of having munitions dumped on it. If you go to such effort to build a decoy it is probably going to fool some live pilots some of the time, the only view of the target they've got is a small TV monitor linked up to their weapon's guidance system.
I think you're also missing the point of these UCAV systems, they are meant to deal with people making decoy targets. Say you're in the desert looking for Scud missle trucks and there are a couple decoys all over the place. You're in an F-111F (which would now probably be an F/A-18 since the F-111 was retired) with a load of GBU-12s. Which Scud site do you take out? Taking out the wrong one means people on your side are going to end up dead. Now enter UCAVs which can be semi-autonomous, you can assign each one to a different potential target lowering the possibility of a miss and casulties on your side. Having several F/A-18s go up in a sortie means a greater chance of one of them getting shot down and not only do you lose the equipment but you've got a pilot either dead or captured. No one is going to be heart broken because a UCAV got shot down hitting a decoy. Someone is definitely going to care when a real pilot is shot down hitting a decoy though.
I really wish these titles would have been release titles, or maybe at the very least come out a little sooner than February. My GC doesn't have all that many worthwhile games out for it right now. Rogue Leader was fun for a bit, Luigi's Mansion got old fast, as did Crazi Taxi and Sonic. Super Smash Brothers is awesome and the best game I've played on the GC so far because Ihaven't gotten my hands on Monkey Ball yet and I hear it is just as addicting. The next title besides these I'm on the look out for is Clone Wars which looks like it will be pretty sweet to play.
Had Mario, Link, and Samus been in the initial wave of titles for the GC I think it probably would have sold even more units than it did. The classic Nintendo characters are franchises the XBox simply doesn't have and the playstation took several years to develop. I've played Metroid so many times I can hum the music to it on command. It disappointed me after getting my GC that some of the first games I had on my original Nintendo were going to take so long to get to it. The first Nintendo I got was the version with R.O.B and the light gun. From the get go I had Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt, and Gyroscope. Soon after I got Metroid and Kid Icarus which are two games I longed for on the N64 after I bought it off eBay. Zelda of course dominated a good deal of my time, I've got gold cartridge versions of both Zelda 1 and 2 lying around somewhere. I'm hoping these titles which have been in the works for a while turn out to be as entertaining as the originals. I thought Nintendo did a good job with Zelda 3 and Super Metroid on the SNES because for a while both games dominated my free time and cut into some of my sleep. While i would have hoped they came sooner I know three things I'm sticking on my wish list of nostalgic things.
I think I was bamboozled and run amuck. That was by far one of the stupidest articles I have ever read comparing any technologica ldevice to any other technological device. Even from a platform advocacy standpoint it was pretty fucking stupid. The author looked up prices on the vendors websites and made some dumbfuck guesses about the performance of the systems. BSD is dying trolls can fucking do that. Some points I found especially stupid:
- Rehashing the SCSI/ATA debate. Unless you're going to do a really in depth benchmark of SCSI and ATA drives it is fucking pointless to bring the subject up. Depending on the operating systems, host controller drivers, file system, main memory, DMA constroller, south bridge quality, time of day, and phase of the moon performance between SCSI and ATA drives varies widely. A 7200RPM ATA drive on a badass ATA controller can have better througput than a badass SCSI drive of the same speed. The ATA host controllers give ATA drives capabilities similar to that of SCSI drives if not superior ones at a lower cost per megabyte. A SCSI drive is just a dumb disk with a smart controller.
- Not including the price of software. Unless you're going to be sticking a Free as in beer or speech OS onto one of your x86 systems that don't have the OS pre-loaded you need to include that price. For Windows you're either buying a limited client license or an unlimited client license, that would set even the cheapest of those servers up a couple hundred dollars. The Xserve and Netra come with unlimited user license for the OS (AFAIK with the Netra) with the Xserve using Apache and the Netra having a single processor license for the Sun ONE webserver (iPlanet).
- Saying the G4 is better for multimedia. Fuck, by the multimedia definition used for the G4 you can say the Athlon is geared mainly as a multimedia processor because it has a strong FPU performance. What the fuck is wit hthat backwards logic. Serving up static web pages isn't very processor intensive, often times the overhead for the transaction is beefier than the transaction itself. The efficiency of the web server and if used the dynamic page generation code greatly affects performance. The processor can't be blamed when the OS can't handle the increasing transactions. Case in point were the Netcraft benchmarks showing that that particular kernel version couldn't build and tear down processes fast enough to keep up with IIS' worker thread model. The processor didn't have anything to do with that problem.
Uh...ever heard of dynamic memory allocation? You try writing a program that doesn't require more space in memory ro run than requires disk space to store. Even a Hellow World! is going to need more memory allocated to it than diskspace required to store it. Add in several orders of complexity including a graphical interface usinga private rendering engine and see how light you can get a program.
Not quite. In an electronic format I can grep information out as long as it is not encoded in some way be it intentional encryption or just the fact the file encodes characters and patterns to save space. An HTML format page can easily have the information grepped from it without ever seeing one ad. With a PDF or PS document I can do the same thing with a little more effort. This ability is bad for a publisher because the space to sell ads is practically non-existant. What good is an interactive ad that can easily be avoided? None. You for some reason seem to think that people are going to willingly view ads. The fact many slashdotters run ad busters viewing the internet ought to suggest to you that that is complete bullshit. You also miss the crucial aspect of CD magazines, you need some electronic device in order to read it. Besides your 19.95$ subscription to the magazine how much extra are you going to pay in batteries/electricity just to read a magazine article? If you take your Newton everywhere making your electronic magazine highly portable then good for you but not enough people are going to do that making the dead tree magazine a much better option.
Don't blame the editors for complying with the limitations of their publisher. Dead tree publications are durable and require scores less energy to read than an electronic medium like CD-ROMs would. Reading a magazine doesn't require flipping a power switch or plugging something in. This is entirely aside from the portability of dead tree media which is very popular among users. I can read a dead tree magazine on the pot, a train, on a park bench, in the middle of a desert, or wherever I end up at. CD-ROM copies of magazines would be nice for annual year-long wrap-up editions sort of like DDJ does but for a monthly run they are inconvienient. You also seem to ignore the fact that magazines make money from advertising and making the media electronic AND searchable means it is going to be relatively easy for people to get at articles without seeing your ads in there. For you that might seem great but for a magazine with a low circulation not being able to sell page space to advertisers and make money it is a bad thing.
The Linux kit is a fucking developer kit. It isn't a goddamn game system. There's no reason for some snot nosed kid to get a Linux kit for his or her PS2. What in the hell are you smoking?
The Cubes had a similar problem to this, for some reason the power switch circuitry was susceptible to RF noise generated by flourecent lights and other noisy electrical devices. Other G3 iMacs have also demonstrated their weirdness. It isn't static on the electrical wiring itself but RF noise being generated by the RF generated by the flourecent light. Call up Apple and ask them in there is a tech article about the power switch RF interference problem. It's a probablem that cropped up in a couple of different Mac models though not necessarily all of those models.
For geeks going to Mars is a technological achievement, a cool thing to do with no material benefit returned to the people (taxpayers) investing in it. Even the lowest estimates for a Mars mission run in the tens of billions for a single mission. Tens of billions of dollars to...plant a flag, take some measurements, and shoot some pictures? Apollo was a similar sort of mission though they actually had some nice returns on the investment because the technology to accomplish the mission didn't exist. The universities and contractors that designed and built equipment or just worked the numbers for the Gemini and Apollo missions gained immense amounts of knowlage about working in space. Had Apollo not needed small powerful computer systems which didn't exist at the time, slashdot probably would not exist and neither would your PC. The problem with a Mars mission is we have much of the technology needed to get there meaning putting an investment into the project isn't going to give you much of a return. It is inefficient and wasteful to mine Mars or even fabricate materials there for export. Say you had a Mars colony with a space launch infrastructure, it would cost them about as much to send something to Earth as it would cost us to send something to Mars. It is much more efficient to send a self sufficient manufacturing/refinment system to a much less massive body like an asteroid and have it send material back down to Earth. It's like mining the top of a mountain and rolling stuff downhill. As long as you've got a method to stop stuff it requires much less effort than trying to send your material up hill.
I lucked out today and got to see AOTC at ten in the morning. The luck part was my friends and I bought our tickets on monday online. I was suprised by then the show wasn't sold out. When I saw TPM I had to wait in line for about four hours to get tickets and then another two hours waiting to get into the theater for the movie which filled the stadium. Today the stadium wasn't even close to full but I'd be curious to see how other theaters did. We picked the theater specifically because it has good quality screens but no oneever goes there because it is so out of the way.
I wasn't even positive last week that I would end up seeing the movie today because TPM disappointed me so damn much. The first time I saw it I was impressed mostly due to the anticipation of seeing it and the scale of the theater I saw it in. It was one of those ultra ginormous theaters with the sound cranked so high the speeder scenes caused your pants to massage your rectum. Subsequent viewings in other theaters and eventually getting the DVD spoiled the initial effect. TPM sucked ass. So in steps AOTC which had much less hype and I was less excited about. It turned out to impress me as much at it impressed Rob and many others here. It started off slow but it showed off lots of planets and lots of aliens and had plenty of Jedi action. All TPM had was abunch of pandering about mydoclorians by Qui fucking Gon and that damned pod race.
Things AOTC did right:
-Established Boba Fett, of all the characters from the original trilogy with possibly the exception of Han Solo he is the most interesting. Just by looking at him you can tell he has a past and has been there and done that. Han Solo was the same way, the Millennium Falcon had the same personal history effect as Boba's armor.
-Gives a reason why everyone goes on and on about Yoda being a badass Jedi master. Also gives Yoda a part in the movie that had some weight to it just like ESB had. Yoda's scenes were probably me favorite because I've always though he was a BMF.
-Goes back to Lucas' original desire to really show a full universe behind the story happening on screen. Originally he wanted to have the action take place indozens of different locals running a wide gamut of places in the galaxy. This is hard to do just using glass matte paintings and forced perspective shots. When the CG was used to really show off a big world that extended way past the reach of the camera it did its job well.
Things I didn't like so much:
-Poor use of CG characters in some scenes. Actually more like poor implimentation. Obi Wan's friend with the four arms just looked fake and stupid. If you want to use CG characters they need to look tangible. Some scenes felt like watching Roger Rabbit in space. When Yoda is seen floating by mace and Obi Wan he looks extra fake, in other scenes the CG shots are almost indistinguishable from puppet shots. Scenes with clone soldiers just look silly. In ANH and ROTJ the Death Star scenes with the stormtroopers in formation were done on glass mattes and look tons better than the CG clone soldiers.
-Crappy space scenes. While ESB didn't have a huge space battle or anything, it would have been nice for AOTC to have one or two. It did have the obligitory asteroid battle sequence but it was not nearly as tense as the one in ESB (baring the escape from the giant worm). Watching ESB for the first time it is a real possibility that Han and crew are going to end up staring at the walls of a Star Destroyer's brig. Star Destroyers were menacing and gave asense of forboding, the droid control ships just look comical and weak.
-Some shots like the view from Palpatine's office just look crappy. I applaud the effects guys for doing very good keying with all the CG augmented scenes. Characters don't have halos around them and it would be hard to tell that they were in front of ablue screen if it weren't for the fact the shots outside the windows looked way too weak sometimes. The twilight shots looked great and were massively detailed by the daytime shots didn't have nearly enough contrast. Something even old time directors have always done when using flat backdrops is add enough contrast to make it look like the backdrop is real. Too many soft shadows ruin the effect.
My gripes are just nitpicky visual details really because I really liked this movie. It was much better than TPM and gives me hope that Episode III willbe something really worth watching. Like Dante says, all Jedi had was a bunch of muppets. I'm looking forward to Episode III really jam packing in some action and maybe some real drama. I'm going to have to see it again on a digital screen just to compare and contrast the two formats. If you haven't seen it or are on the fence, go see it soon because Yoda's bad assery is worth sitting through the rest of the movie.
Do you understand the concepts console manufacturers produce their goods with? If they were losing X dollars per console (which I know is not going to be more than 100$ per console) at the initial release, for every four games per console sold recouped those losses nicely, anything beyond that recoup was profit. Which is exactly as I explained it in Sony's case, the losses incurred in the first run of consoles was recouped by any games that became even remotely popular. If Sony say sold four games for every PS2 sold initially they were not losing any money when you calculate net profits and losses. Microsoft dropping the price is hoping to sell more units to increase demand for the games which let them recoup the losses taken from production of the consoles. Dropping the price a hundred bucks doesn't mean they are taking an extra hundred dollar loss. If the initial run had losses of 50$ per console and they recouped that from sales of games the second production run is naturally going to be cheaper due to an increased availability of components which drops the unit price. If this drop in unit cost is below what they are selling the units on shelves for they can drop the price a hundred bucks and maintain their 50$/unit loss and recoup that by selling more games (because more units are in people's homes). The goal of a console maker following the licensing scheme first widely practiced by Nintendo with the NES (which is what we're talking about) aims to get consoles into as many living rooms as possible despite the cost to the company. Once these games are in homes the games which cost the company nothing to develope make them beaucoup cash to recoup their losses. Nintendo and Sony would not be in business if this model did not work out well.