Remember, it took energy to make the machines that run the factory, the trucks that supply it with raw materials, the extraction and refinement of the raw materials, the energy consumed by the people running the plant, and so on.
I suspect that studies that say that solar cells are net positive in energy production are being less than honest about what they count as "solar cell manufacturing energy consumption". They may count basic manufacturing steps but leave out all the other costs unique to solar cell production, which leaves us with a less-than-honest break even perspective.
Very early porn had verisimilitude because there was no porn industry and the only people who could appear in it were amatuers or at best prostitutes. Even 1950s Playboys and stag stuff was more amateur than professional, and this was true up until the 1970s when plastic surgery and porno production improved and there was a desire to make the women (and the men) "more perfect".
This went on until the women ALL had "perfect" (if often cartoonish) breasts, all the men had huge cocks and could cum like a fire hose. After a while it just stops seeming real -- the people are too perfect and the action was so predictable and soullessly acted, leaving people to not believe these people are ACTUALLY having sex.
I think this is what largely drives amateur popularity.. It seems like they're really having sex not putting on a performance, and the people involved are like people you've had sex with or interact with, adding to the voyeurism. It's more real.
I also think the lack of verisimilitude in traditional modern porn had a lot to with the rise of "ultracore" stuff (fake rapes, S&M, etc) -- the soulless performances led people to want something that was more emotionally compelling, even if it was for the "wrong" reasons.
It's hard to see a single company's stock price validate a recovery of an entire economic sector; Google's a unique company and many people may see such a "brain trust" as valuable simply because there may be much that comes out of it.
As for iPods and Blackberry? iPods are consumer electronics and have little business relevance -- big-screen TVs have been doing well for over a year now (LCD RP, DLP, and more recently ED plasma) and no one thinks of that as an economic recovery checklist entry, just the portion of the economy that has done well buying toys (and perhaps those that haven't done well commiting credit suicide).
Blackberry isn't a terribly expensive complex technology to roll out until you get to multi-server enterprise levels and can be done with home ISPs. It's also a major upper management status toy, and since when has the technology downturn denied that particular economic segment anything?
I'll believe a technology turnaround when *hiring* becomes more common, *salaries* start to get a boost, and business start investing in large, long-term IT projects. Up 'till now it's been small projects and keep-your-head-above-water stuff to prevent total obsolecense, not big-spending projects.
Approximately 500,000 to 1,000,000 CD copies must be sold before these costs are covered
Isn't *anybody* asking why it "has" to cost $5-10 million dollars to record a pop record?
An artist that's rehearsed their material and knows what they're doing should be able to knock off an album's worth of material in two days; even if they're rough about what they're doing, we'll assume they're in the studio for two weeks. Even if you're recording lavishly, does it really need to cost $250K per day?
The problem with all aspects of the entertainment business is that there's just zero cost control. Outrageous spending, unbelievable salaries, and so on, and they expect to make it all up on the customer end.
Tivo has a head start on cable-based DVRs, but they've been slowly blowing that head start by not continuing to refine their software platform or their hardware platform. I have to admit an interest in Tivo2Go since it will support (albeit in a slightly crippled manner) DVD burning of shows, but overall their software strategy isn't focused on making the existing Tivo software do what it does smarter/better, but on a weaker strategy of broadening Tivo's use beyond its competency.
Tivo should also capitalize on the fact that user's own their hardware (and the liability of such relative to cable-rented boxen) and build in hardware expansion abilities, such as USB2/1394 HDD expansion and DVD burning add-ons. Instead we get sold the same sealed box that the cable company sells, albeit with better software.
At the very least CableCard-HD Tivos should have been announced last fall and available 2Q 2005 so that they could be as bug free as possible and in channel for the 2005 shopping season.
It would only really be marginally more expensive if based on existing multi-platter* drive designs due to a more sophisticated controller board.
I wouldn't think it would be used in place of traditional RAID, but used where the marginal increased reliability was worth more than the marginal increased costs associated with a failed device. The kind of thing that comes to mind to me is a logging/boot disk in remote monitoring equipment, where size/power might prohibit the use of traditional RAID, but where replacement is expensive due to location/travel.
* Are all drives single platters? It's been a while since I've opened one up, but the ones I have opened have had multiple platters.
At the very minimum it's probably due to the fact that it was the site of the most significant event in NYC since the Civil War draft riots and essentially the grave site of a couple of thousand people..
Sentimental reasons aside, IIRC the WTC was a huge city-backed redevelopment effort in the early 1970s. The land may actually belong to the city, and only the buildings were privately owned. No buildings left, so the property reverts to city control.
The WTC property has been the source of a major fight as to who gets to build what kind of building -- massive developer interest. I have no doubt that if really good, class A office property gets built on the site once the developer spats are finished that it will fill up in a heartbeat, particularly if its a unique design or gains any kind of "cool" cachet.
I don't know "why" drives fail, but I've often wondered if it wouldn't be possible in large, multi-platter drives to have some kind of RAID-5 redundancy inside the drive itself (perhaps as a configurable option?).
The loss of performance and capacity might be worth it in some situations if it mitigated some decent-sized portion of drive failures.
Another idea I had was the ability to daisy-chain drives directly together and have a "direct" RAID system without a seperate controller, using RAID logic integrated into one or more of the disk controllers themselves.
I don't know if its some kind of airport policy, an FAA thing, or something deliberate, but I've found available outlets mighty scarce at MSP, LGA, and SNA. If you can find them, they're often along walls of corridors where it's highly impractical to sit. If you *can* find seats near outlets, often the outlets are in use or the seats are taken by non-power consuming people (how *rude*!).
MSP has these "business centers" where you can (rent?) a cube-like space, but they're a million miles from the gate (at least *my* gate!).
I've largely given up on my AC adapter and just lug a couple of spare laptop batteries. 1 battery gets me through a DVD on the flight, one's enough for pre-flight wifi/itunes, and the third is power for wherever I end up. Sometimes the third ends up in checked luggage with the adapter if I know I won't need it.
The company I work for is in a large, multi-tenant office tower and I know for a fact we don't cut a check to the power company, our power costs are part of the rent, figured based on some wattage-per-square-foot formula.
When we put in new air conditioning for a data center, they made us put a meter on the feed to the air conditioning units, but I don't think it's resulted in any surcharges -- they just wanted to be able to see what kind of power these units actually consumed.
I bought an LCD rear projection for basically the same reasons. I thought the DLP looked superior on HD material ("sharper" somehow), but on SD and DVD material, the DLP looked over-processed and too artifacty.
The best way I could sum it up was that the LCD to DLP relationship was something like film to video. Good video images have a sharpness that film doesn't have, but good film images have a smoothness that video doesn't have. I choose smooth.
I can't have a dish where I am due to obstructions, so DTV HDTivo isn't an option -- even if it was, why not build a cablecard HD Tivo?
Free Replacement is easy -- Time Warner cable has a half-dozen storefronts. Just walk in with the box, walk out with a new one. I've done it more than once with SD boxes and when I wanted an HD box.
Pricing means something. I can get an HD DVR from Time-Warner for something like $10 a month -- HD, multiple-channel recording, total digital cable integration (no IR blaster hackery), and NO CASH INVESTMENT UP FRONT.
To many people this means something, and it should -- a Tivo + Lifetime will take YEARS to return its investment relative to the cable DVR, and that's IF it doesn't break. A cable DVR when it breaks or becomes out-dated goes back to the cable company for free replacement the same day. A Tivo box when it breaks goes back to god knows where for a $99 repair, for about two weeks.
To the vast majority of households the cable provided DVR is "perfect" -- easy to install, HD compatible if you want it, and not a financial commitment. They could give a shit about software and other Tivo advantages (what you've never had, you don't miss).
Speaking as a 2.5 year Series 2 Tivo owner, Tivo needs to get on the stick and KEEP their software AND hardware ahead of the game. CableCard (digital cable on private devices) has been out for months, where's the HD CableCard capable Tivo? Why does Tivo insist on wading into the PC space with HMO and Tivo2Go when there's a ton of features that would improve Tivo they're not adding? Where are other hardware advancements?
My overall concern is that Tivo is wasting too much effort trying to expand outside their area of expertise at the expense of improving it, while cable is quickly honing their products to match Tivo with the only "missing" element being the investment and lame "extras" like HMO.
Because "the net" is not always the inherently untrustworthy, malcious code-laden Internet, but is often an inherently trusted, managed and private *Intra*net. Making stuff on said Intranet easily and/or transparently usable/installable/upgradeable is an ease-of-use feature.
That is the near-verbatim MS response to this problem, as well as clearly demonstrating a lack of vision or understanding as to the value or purpose in a web browser or web at all. People have them to connect to the World Wide Web, not the "office-wide web", and there's just no granularity of control as to what gets run or what environment or priviledges it gets run as. It's the usual Microsoft "ship-it-as-fully-enabled" zero security BS that they've always had.
It's not MS fault that people DO install malicious Active X controls, it's MS fault that people CAN install malicious ActiveX controls because there's no good security for accepting Active X controls and no security at all as to what execution space they run in.
There are a couple of capture boards that will do hardware-assisted MPEG encoding without host CPU and "accelerate" (to a blazing 1x real time speed!) encoding from DV to MPEG (in the right applications).
But they're expensive (nearly $1K), especially for the fact that they only deliver 1x real time. I'd also guess that they're old designs and wouldn't have real great driver/application compatibility. Kind of for purpose-built workstations only.
Apparently the newest cards from NVidia have the ability to run transcode algorithms on their video cards, but that's a "Who writes the code and includes support?" problem, and will it be something that exists in the next rev of Nvidia silicon?
I'm also told that it's a harder problem to solve "in hardware" and that simple solutions (like DV to a single MPEG-2 format) are kind of limited, and the fact that AMD's new solution is essentially a specialized computer on a chip reinforces this.
Personally I'd still settle for something that did DV->MPEG2 for DVD at 4x real time. That'd rock, even if it did spend much of that time converting random formats to DV to take advantage of the MPEG2 acceleration.
The issue is bigger than that; it isn't that there's a specific bug or fault, its in the design and implementation of things like Active X.
Why should a browser EVER make it that easy to run arbitrary code off the net at the user's priviledge level in the native OS?
The only "valid" reason is that it was THE stick to beat Java over the head with and allow web-based applications to run as Windows applications, with all the easy advantages and UI widgets people expected. Java was stuck with it's horrid GUI, while ActiveX looked and felt like a Windows application.
And that reason was only "valid" if you were a Windows product strategist trying to keep the web and Java from eliminating the need for Windows and IE.
So now we have every third web site wanting to run Active X on our machines, often in the "helper" mode to add stuff to our machines so we can see their over-animated web sites that just HAD to be implemented with Flash or Shockwave or worse.
And you wonder how people reflexively hitting "OK" to Active X warnings get infested with spyware and insist it's not MS fault?
Hey, this might get me buying a new PC again. I've been wondering why we can't seem to get decent hardware transcoding boards, at any price. Going from DV to MPEG2 or any other standard is often a tedious hours long process with quality, or maybe 1.5x real-time with horrible quality loss.
Part of the reason this surprises me so much is that DVD recorders are often sub $300 these days, and each one has a hardware MPEG encoder and decoder in it. Why not slap one on a PC for at least "free" (no CPU) 1x encode?
And you ignore mine -- it's impossible to take his "points" seriously given that *French* foreign policy can be rated just as high on the stink scale as US foreign policy, if not worse if you factor in the fact that France is much smaller than the US and spent 5-10 years after WW II just trying to get back in the game.
Furthermore, even taking his "points" seriously means looking at a whole series of world events taken way out of context.
Heh, if you're doing new construction it should be everything. Any vault should be fire resistant from the start, but if you have the money and capability when doing new construction, why not make it a complete shelter with air filtration, water supply, and so on.
At that point it has to be strong enough to withstand a few dozen guys armed with RPGs, plastic explosives and a nearby nuke.
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Remember, it took energy to make the machines that run the factory, the trucks that supply it with raw materials, the extraction and refinement of the raw materials, the energy consumed by the people running the plant, and so on.
I suspect that studies that say that solar cells are net positive in energy production are being less than honest about what they count as "solar cell manufacturing energy consumption". They may count basic manufacturing steps but leave out all the other costs unique to solar cell production, which leaves us with a less-than-honest break even perspective.
Very early porn had verisimilitude because there was no porn industry and the only people who could appear in it were amatuers or at best prostitutes. Even 1950s Playboys and stag stuff was more amateur than professional, and this was true up until the 1970s when plastic surgery and porno production improved and there was a desire to make the women (and the men) "more perfect".
This went on until the women ALL had "perfect" (if often cartoonish) breasts, all the men had huge cocks and could cum like a fire hose. After a while it just stops seeming real -- the people are too perfect and the action was so predictable and soullessly acted, leaving people to not believe these people are ACTUALLY having sex.
I think this is what largely drives amateur popularity.. It seems like they're really having sex not putting on a performance, and the people involved are like people you've had sex with or interact with, adding to the voyeurism. It's more real.
I also think the lack of verisimilitude in traditional modern porn had a lot to with the rise of "ultracore" stuff (fake rapes, S&M, etc) -- the soulless performances led people to want something that was more emotionally compelling, even if it was for the "wrong" reasons.
It's hard to see a single company's stock price validate a recovery of an entire economic sector; Google's a unique company and many people may see such a "brain trust" as valuable simply because there may be much that comes out of it.
As for iPods and Blackberry? iPods are consumer electronics and have little business relevance -- big-screen TVs have been doing well for over a year now (LCD RP, DLP, and more recently ED plasma) and no one thinks of that as an economic recovery checklist entry, just the portion of the economy that has done well buying toys (and perhaps those that haven't done well commiting credit suicide).
Blackberry isn't a terribly expensive complex technology to roll out until you get to multi-server enterprise levels and can be done with home ISPs. It's also a major upper management status toy, and since when has the technology downturn denied that particular economic segment anything?
I'll believe a technology turnaround when *hiring* becomes more common, *salaries* start to get a boost, and business start investing in large, long-term IT projects. Up 'till now it's been small projects and keep-your-head-above-water stuff to prevent total obsolecense, not big-spending projects.
Approximately 500,000 to 1,000,000 CD copies must be sold before these costs are covered
Isn't *anybody* asking why it "has" to cost $5-10 million dollars to record a pop record?
An artist that's rehearsed their material and knows what they're doing should be able to knock off an album's worth of material in two days; even if they're rough about what they're doing, we'll assume they're in the studio for two weeks. Even if you're recording lavishly, does it really need to cost $250K per day?
The problem with all aspects of the entertainment business is that there's just zero cost control. Outrageous spending, unbelievable salaries, and so on, and they expect to make it all up on the customer end.
Tivo has a head start on cable-based DVRs, but they've been slowly blowing that head start by not continuing to refine their software platform or their hardware platform. I have to admit an interest in Tivo2Go since it will support (albeit in a slightly crippled manner) DVD burning of shows, but overall their software strategy isn't focused on making the existing Tivo software do what it does smarter/better, but on a weaker strategy of broadening Tivo's use beyond its competency.
Tivo should also capitalize on the fact that user's own their hardware (and the liability of such relative to cable-rented boxen) and build in hardware expansion abilities, such as USB2/1394 HDD expansion and DVD burning add-ons. Instead we get sold the same sealed box that the cable company sells, albeit with better software.
At the very least CableCard-HD Tivos should have been announced last fall and available 2Q 2005 so that they could be as bug free as possible and in channel for the 2005 shopping season.
It would only really be marginally more expensive if based on existing multi-platter* drive designs due to a more sophisticated controller board.
I wouldn't think it would be used in place of traditional RAID, but used where the marginal increased reliability was worth more than the marginal increased costs associated with a failed device. The kind of thing that comes to mind to me is a logging/boot disk in remote monitoring equipment, where size/power might prohibit the use of traditional RAID, but where replacement is expensive due to location/travel.
* Are all drives single platters? It's been a while since I've opened one up, but the ones I have opened have had multiple platters.
At the very minimum it's probably due to the fact that it was the site of the most significant event in NYC since the Civil War draft riots and essentially the grave site of a couple of thousand people..
Sentimental reasons aside, IIRC the WTC was a huge city-backed redevelopment effort in the early 1970s. The land may actually belong to the city, and only the buildings were privately owned. No buildings left, so the property reverts to city control.
Plus, it IS New York City...
The WTC property has been the source of a major fight as to who gets to build what kind of building -- massive developer interest. I have no doubt that if really good, class A office property gets built on the site once the developer spats are finished that it will fill up in a heartbeat, particularly if its a unique design or gains any kind of "cool" cachet.
I don't know "why" drives fail, but I've often wondered if it wouldn't be possible in large, multi-platter drives to have some kind of RAID-5 redundancy inside the drive itself (perhaps as a configurable option?).
The loss of performance and capacity might be worth it in some situations if it mitigated some decent-sized portion of drive failures.
Another idea I had was the ability to daisy-chain drives directly together and have a "direct" RAID system without a seperate controller, using RAID logic integrated into one or more of the disk controllers themselves.
"No highs, no lows, must be Bose."
"Bose: Better sound through bigger magnets." (A reference to the 1980s college student's Holy Grail, the 901 speaker).
Nowadays I just try to spend around $800 and match my wife's furniture.
As a libertarian athiest gun-loving American, I am insulted.
I don't know if its some kind of airport policy, an FAA thing, or something deliberate, but I've found available outlets mighty scarce at MSP, LGA, and SNA. If you can find them, they're often along walls of corridors where it's highly impractical to sit. If you *can* find seats near outlets, often the outlets are in use or the seats are taken by non-power consuming people (how *rude*!).
MSP has these "business centers" where you can (rent?) a cube-like space, but they're a million miles from the gate (at least *my* gate!).
I've largely given up on my AC adapter and just lug a couple of spare laptop batteries. 1 battery gets me through a DVD on the flight, one's enough for pre-flight wifi/itunes, and the third is power for wherever I end up. Sometimes the third ends up in checked luggage with the adapter if I know I won't need it.
The company I work for is in a large, multi-tenant office tower and I know for a fact we don't cut a check to the power company, our power costs are part of the rent, figured based on some wattage-per-square-foot formula.
When we put in new air conditioning for a data center, they made us put a meter on the feed to the air conditioning units, but I don't think it's resulted in any surcharges -- they just wanted to be able to see what kind of power these units actually consumed.
Even worse, he lied to the gubmint when they first asked, saying "my daughter did it."
He should have owned up to it in a shocked way and said "get out -- you can't even see this thing 3500 feet away!"
Q: Why do women fake their orgasms?
A: Because they think men care.
I bought an LCD rear projection for basically the same reasons. I thought the DLP looked superior on HD material ("sharper" somehow), but on SD and DVD material, the DLP looked over-processed and too artifacty.
The best way I could sum it up was that the LCD to DLP relationship was something like film to video. Good video images have a sharpness that film doesn't have, but good film images have a smoothness that video doesn't have. I choose smooth.
Someone in the Navy told me they used to look for high pressure steam leaks with a 2x4, as the steam was so hot that it would ignite the 2x4.
I can't have a dish where I am due to obstructions, so DTV HDTivo isn't an option -- even if it was, why not build a cablecard HD Tivo?
Free Replacement is easy -- Time Warner cable has a half-dozen storefronts. Just walk in with the box, walk out with a new one. I've done it more than once with SD boxes and when I wanted an HD box.
Pricing means something. I can get an HD DVR from Time-Warner for something like $10 a month -- HD, multiple-channel recording, total digital cable integration (no IR blaster hackery), and NO CASH INVESTMENT UP FRONT.
To many people this means something, and it should -- a Tivo + Lifetime will take YEARS to return its investment relative to the cable DVR, and that's IF it doesn't break. A cable DVR when it breaks or becomes out-dated goes back to the cable company for free replacement the same day. A Tivo box when it breaks goes back to god knows where for a $99 repair, for about two weeks.
To the vast majority of households the cable provided DVR is "perfect" -- easy to install, HD compatible if you want it, and not a financial commitment. They could give a shit about software and other Tivo advantages (what you've never had, you don't miss).
Speaking as a 2.5 year Series 2 Tivo owner, Tivo needs to get on the stick and KEEP their software AND hardware ahead of the game. CableCard (digital cable on private devices) has been out for months, where's the HD CableCard capable Tivo? Why does Tivo insist on wading into the PC space with HMO and Tivo2Go when there's a ton of features that would improve Tivo they're not adding? Where are other hardware advancements?
My overall concern is that Tivo is wasting too much effort trying to expand outside their area of expertise at the expense of improving it, while cable is quickly honing their products to match Tivo with the only "missing" element being the investment and lame "extras" like HMO.
Because "the net" is not always the inherently untrustworthy, malcious code-laden Internet, but is often an inherently trusted, managed and private *Intra*net. Making stuff on said Intranet easily and/or transparently usable/installable/upgradeable is an ease-of-use feature.
That is the near-verbatim MS response to this problem, as well as clearly demonstrating a lack of vision or understanding as to the value or purpose in a web browser or web at all. People have them to connect to the World Wide Web, not the "office-wide web", and there's just no granularity of control as to what gets run or what environment or priviledges it gets run as. It's the usual Microsoft "ship-it-as-fully-enabled" zero security BS that they've always had.
It's not MS fault that people DO install malicious Active X controls, it's MS fault that people CAN install malicious ActiveX controls because there's no good security for accepting Active X controls and no security at all as to what execution space they run in.
There are a couple of capture boards that will do hardware-assisted MPEG encoding without host CPU and "accelerate" (to a blazing 1x real time speed!) encoding from DV to MPEG (in the right applications).
But they're expensive (nearly $1K), especially for the fact that they only deliver 1x real time. I'd also guess that they're old designs and wouldn't have real great driver/application compatibility. Kind of for purpose-built workstations only.
Apparently the newest cards from NVidia have the ability to run transcode algorithms on their video cards, but that's a "Who writes the code and includes support?" problem, and will it be something that exists in the next rev of Nvidia silicon?
I'm also told that it's a harder problem to solve "in hardware" and that simple solutions (like DV to a single MPEG-2 format) are kind of limited, and the fact that AMD's new solution is essentially a specialized computer on a chip reinforces this.
Personally I'd still settle for something that did DV->MPEG2 for DVD at 4x real time. That'd rock, even if it did spend much of that time converting random formats to DV to take advantage of the MPEG2 acceleration.
The issue is bigger than that; it isn't that there's a specific bug or fault, its in the design and implementation of things like Active X.
Why should a browser EVER make it that easy to run arbitrary code off the net at the user's priviledge level in the native OS?
The only "valid" reason is that it was THE stick to beat Java over the head with and allow web-based applications to run as Windows applications, with all the easy advantages and UI widgets people expected. Java was stuck with it's horrid GUI, while ActiveX looked and felt like a Windows application.
And that reason was only "valid" if you were a Windows product strategist trying to keep the web and Java from eliminating the need for Windows and IE.
So now we have every third web site wanting to run Active X on our machines, often in the "helper" mode to add stuff to our machines so we can see their over-animated web sites that just HAD to be implemented with Flash or Shockwave or worse.
And you wonder how people reflexively hitting "OK" to Active X warnings get infested with spyware and insist it's not MS fault?
Hey, this might get me buying a new PC again. I've been wondering why we can't seem to get decent hardware transcoding boards, at any price. Going from DV to MPEG2 or any other standard is often a tedious hours long process with quality, or maybe 1.5x real-time with horrible quality loss.
Part of the reason this surprises me so much is that DVD recorders are often sub $300 these days, and each one has a hardware MPEG encoder and decoder in it. Why not slap one on a PC for at least "free" (no CPU) 1x encode?
And you ignore mine -- it's impossible to take his "points" seriously given that *French* foreign policy can be rated just as high on the stink scale as US foreign policy, if not worse if you factor in the fact that France is much smaller than the US and spent 5-10 years after WW II just trying to get back in the game.
Furthermore, even taking his "points" seriously means looking at a whole series of world events taken way out of context.
Heh, if you're doing new construction it should be everything. Any vault should be fire resistant from the start, but if you have the money and capability when doing new construction, why not make it a complete shelter with air filtration, water supply, and so on.
At that point it has to be strong enough to withstand a few dozen guys armed with RPGs, plastic explosives and a nearby nuke.