I agree with you. But I also know there are people around who buy expensive sporty cars and drive aggressively, because it's fun. For example, I've already met several people who complain about how their traction control doesn't let them spin the rear wheels in hard cornering. And that's relatively primitive automation compared to what you describe.
The picture you sketch makes me see roads almost as a system of public transport. You punch in your destination, and with minimum input from you, you're driven to it (quickly, safely, smoothly and efficiently). Sounds great to me! But in a system like this, what's the use of having a sporty car that can pull serious g's when accelerating and cornering? Really, the weakest of economy cars could perform just as well as a sporty one in an automated system like the one you describe.
As for me, I think this is a very good thing: it would encourage responsible, economical cars. But I also know that the more nostalgia-prone drivers who prefer sporty cars would really hate this.
I don't imagine it will be long before we have digital maps with that level of accuracy. It wouldn't be so hard, I'm sure we already have all the satellite pictures we need to distinguish lanes. Though probably, they're classified by the military. If they could declassify the road info, that might be a great boon to the economy!
Of course, still more accurate road data could be added by road-based mapping cars, or they could install ground cameras on cars with inch-resolution GPS and use the data they collect to update their database automagically. The tricky part would involve things like lane closures, detours for construction, etc. My solution would be a traffic safety radio channel that sends data and dynamically updates a car's nav system about all the traffic conditions within the broadcast area.
Do you really think inch-resolution GPS will stay very expensive for long? Maybe after Gallileo is up, service will get even better and receivers will be cheaper.
If they were really interested in testing this, they would use run the very same setup and test a solution with normal hydrogen (which will 100% not fuse), then compare that to their results with deuterium. This would in one stroke settle the cosmic ray question, the "it's just energy you're putting in" question, and many others.
What makes me think this is a hoax is the fact that this obvious and cheap control was not done (or not reported - either way, a bad sign).
Any point to being an early adopter?
on
CNN On The $500 PS3
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If the initial price is $500, it's clear that discounts are not far behind. I mean, if they really want to get this into living rooms, $500 is just too much.
Compound this with the fact that the early games will be quick rewrites of last-gen titles... and remember: Netflix/Blockbuster will not be renting Blu-ray movies for a long while.
I have no doubt that in 2008, a sub-$300 PS3 will be an attractive purchase. By then, game coders will figure out how to program the Cell, and a decent catalog of Blu-ray movies will be available. Before then, though, buying a PS3 gets you bragging rights and little else.
As it happens, I'm planning a $500 investment in gaming hardware soon: a new mobo, CPU and graphics card. I'm confident that the results in 1600x1200 will look as nice as the PS3, and I won't be paying Sony to lock me out of using my hardware in the way that I see fit.
I think the laptop looks weak and conventional, and not like an Apple, because it's not on a white background. Really, what's the deal with that ugly "grey letters over black" theme they introduced? What a terrible idea! When the background was white, all of their gear really looked like works of art. Now even their fancy gear looks like ordinary warez.
What the proper poor person does is this: find AMD's best processor (now FX-60), see what core it uses, buy the cheapest chip with that core (Toledo, X2-4400 $500), huge heatsink, overclock past FX-60 levels.
If that's still too much, I'd recommend the X2 3800+ Manchester core, only $322 at newegg. People report getting these running cool and stable well past 2.6GHz with a good heatsink.
Your math is wrong but the main point is right. RAID disks are the no-brainer storage method for the home user. I recently picked up a 320GB drive for about $120 with shipping. That comes to $0.26 for 700MB, which makes it the same price as decent blank CDs. To me, it makes the decision easy. If only for reasons of compactness and ease of access, hard drives are far superior, but durability is another big advantage.
If you're really paranoid about your data, buy a big hard drive, copy the data to it, encrypt it in a hidden partition, and put it in your mom's computer (effective only if you don't live in her basement).
The non dungeon areas are basically public spaces for meeting up with other people and getting quests. There is no player economy to speak of (and no easy mechanism for one), no housing, no exploration beyond exploring the quest instances themselves, no pvp, no crafting, no elder game, and no wookie table dancing. In short, it's a D&D quest and combat game. Some people have said it's not even a "real" mmorpg at all, just a public hub and instance system like Guild Wars...
So basically, it can't do anything new, anything Neverwinter Nights hasn't done for years. Plus, the review says combat rules are nothing like D&D and more like Diablo?!? Oh my, what a letdown. Wake me up when there is a persistent world that obeys D&D (or better: Hackmaster) rules.
Futurama was cancelled after it started sucking. Well, not sucking like the Simpsons now sucks, but it was certainly past its peak.
On the other hand, Firefly had an amazing half-season on Fox before it got cancelled. I personally think it was the best sci-fi show ever made, and I've seen many. So it's Firefly they should be talking about, not Futurama.
Thank you for an informative and reasonable answer. I'm especially happy to hear that you're considering a lightweight daemon that could be set to stay alive even after Firefox closes. I think it makes lots of sense to use FF as the interface to administer the (separately-running) client/server. But as you say, maybe I'll see it differently once I use it, and I'm looking forward to that day. Thanks!
One thing you can bet on is that 10.5 will be released simultaneously with their first Intel-based machine. You'd be crazy to bet that the latter can happen before the former. What would it run? There won't be a 10.4X86....
Just curious: This sounds like a neat app, but I'm curious why you chose to tie this to Firefox instead of making it a standalone. If I were going to p2p share photos with my family, I'd do it only with an app that's open 24/7, and for me, Firefox is not that app (memory bloat).
I do run Torrent 24/7, and if it had a system for distributing files among friends, I might use it. Right now, I do my friends/family sharing through my FTP server - also something that can run in the background without disturbing my games and other intensive computer use. But I would never dream of not closing Firefox before firing up a game, especially if it ran an extension that further increased its memory/CPU usage.
I think what I meant is that Einstein was making a theory for data that others collected, and that theory wouldn't have happened without that data which needed explaining. You can't do even theoretical physics in an intellectual vacuum. At the start of the 20th century there was an explosion of new observations about things large and small. That was also almost the end of the time when you can do most of the amazing and shocking research in a modestly-funded university lab.
Now you (usually) need huge accelerators and expensive satellites to collect fundamental data... and when those things produce readings, many people find out about them simultaneously, and the race is on. We just don't build many of these in a year, and we don't build the stuff that would really show us something exciting, since it would cost too much. So fundamental physicists may be somewhat starved for data, which is why they to off on adventures into this purely abstract mathematical string theory wonderland. Of course, they're a clever lot, and if we let them work on it longer, maybe the will find a way to test it.
Huh? The bar is being raised in music? Honestly, how many historical violinists can a normal person name (people who were famous just because they fiddled well)? I bet the median is zero. The people we remember are the composers, the "ideas" people, not the "fingers" people. And I don't think the bar on musical ideas is being raised at all - or if it is then I'm missing it.
Einstein too was an ideas person. Luckily, today's physics is much more fertile with new ideas than today's music!
I don't think you appreciate the genius of Einstein completely enough. Special relativity, which has E=mc^2 as a consequence, would have been proposed by somebody real soon after 1905, had Einstein chosen to be a bullfighter instead of a physicist. I mean, the Lorentz transform was already around; Einstein just said it wasn't a device for calculation but an actual description of reality. Good idea, but not one that we needed an Einstein for.
I think general relativity is a very different story. Without Einstein, it might have taken decades to work it out. I mean, really, it's just an amazing piece of work, and something that's hard to work up to incrementally.
So you're right about E=mc^2 being easy for people to remember, but in a way that's a shame, because it shouldn't be taken as anything like his greatest work.
It's not stupid to suggest that physics has elements of a zero sum game. There is something like a hard limit on our capacity to collect new data that's relevant to fundamental questions. Per unit time, there's only so much data (because of finite budgets) and then theoreticians share this data and race to interpret it correctly and brilliantly. So it makes sense that the more outstanding people take part in the races, the fewer "gold medals" any single individual will receive.
Another thing that works against the current generation of physicists is that Einstein and Heisenberg may really be more-or-less right, where as these old guys had the luxury of having predecessors that were wrong in a strikingly demonstrable way. That sort of revolution makes outsiders pay attention. But physicists can't just declare a revolution for its own sake, to make people notice them. Too many try to sound important (hello Drs. Greene, Davies, Penrose, Wolfram, et al) by breathless television appearances and glossy books, where they try to shock us by describing recent mathematical results by some crappy analogy. Of course, the new work is very interesting, but it doesn't subvert the old work, so we don't really care.
Anyway, here's how you beat Einstein: come up with a Theory of Everything (without strings/branes please!), make a prediction that violates general relativity, and have that prediction be confirmed and GR falsified in a big public spectacle of an experiment. Got it? OK, off you go!
I totally agree. I'd be more impressed if Firefox's download manager were to be beefed up and reborn as a separate process which allows download resuming and bittorrent downloads. As it is, bittorrent users should have their client running 24/7, which is not how I run Firefox.
There is finally an excellent Windows client for Windows, Torrent, and I have some ideas about how the interaction between Firefox and Torrent could improve. I think this is the most profitable way to think about helping bittorrent users who click on torrent files in Firefox.
A simple Firefox plugin that does Bittorrent will only encourage users to drop in to download and not do their uploading duties. Really, this whole plugin business just doesn't seem very well thought through.
I'm posting just to make sure you're not the last to say this. To be honest, the shaky cam doesn't bother me, but the bad acting, bad plot, and a completely unmaintainable suspension of disbelief... those things make it hard to have a good show.
I've seen every BSG episode, old and new, and I don't want the show to suck. I'm waiting for the day they fix the acting and writing. But I'll probably be waiting forever.
Just to put things in perspective: $3-4 Billion is what it costs to occupy Iraq for 20 days. Yes, this is another giant piece of government spending with money coercively collected taxpayers.
If you think of the pricetag of this awesome navigation system as being an Iraq occupation which is shorter by 20 days, it begins to sound like a very good deal!
When you say "given a run for its money" it suggests that the AMD chip's performance is about even with the EE Pentium. But this is wrong. The article itself concludes
"The Athon 64 X2 4800+ was the faster CPU in a majority of our real-world tests, and it consumed less power to boot."
But even that's a big understatement if you looked at the actual benchmark results. Neck and neck? Come on! Please, editors, accept submissions that aren't misleading.
I really don't think that can happen without being accompanied by something very dramatic. The end of the wage disparities is what enable outsourcing are the basis of our prosperity. I honestly find it unimaginable that in the future, things would be the same minus our prosperity. For sure, we will start wars to bring back some of the disparity between countries, but of course, this will also not go on forever. It really will be a fascinating how this plays out.
Sorry to remind you that this will at some point end because there are only so many people in the world, and the population is expected to stabilize soon. Once globalization is through with Africa, there will be no other place to go. And what comes after that? Dunno, maybe the People's Revolution? Big world war? But something is gonna happen. This sort of "water flowing downhill" approach (which is the basis of the global economy) can take you far, but not farther than the valley.
Look, this is the price you pay for having boardroom execs decide what bands make the hits. You get bands that are designed for the radio and MTV, not for concerts.
But I think it's worse than that. I think that young audiences just don't care about concerts like the last generation did. The list in the parent post is pretty telling: It's not young people who are lining up to see Neil Diamond and Elton John. It's old fogies who are well past their CD-experimenting prime (the time when you do the most CD buying).
Band managers just don't put much effort into getting the kiddies to go to shows, and I wouldn't be surprised if their little manufactured primadonna acts don't really have much of a taste for the smelly grind on the road. It's much easier to buy off MTV/ClearChannel and brainwash the kids remotely, then hit em up at the record store. Those sorts of overheads are minimal.
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The picture you sketch makes me see roads almost as a system of public transport. You punch in your destination, and with minimum input from you, you're driven to it (quickly, safely, smoothly and efficiently). Sounds great to me! But in a system like this, what's the use of having a sporty car that can pull serious g's when accelerating and cornering? Really, the weakest of economy cars could perform just as well as a sporty one in an automated system like the one you describe.
As for me, I think this is a very good thing: it would encourage responsible, economical cars. But I also know that the more nostalgia-prone drivers who prefer sporty cars would really hate this.
Of course, still more accurate road data could be added by road-based mapping cars, or they could install ground cameras on cars with inch-resolution GPS and use the data they collect to update their database automagically. The tricky part would involve things like lane closures, detours for construction, etc. My solution would be a traffic safety radio channel that sends data and dynamically updates a car's nav system about all the traffic conditions within the broadcast area.
Do you really think inch-resolution GPS will stay very expensive for long? Maybe after Gallileo is up, service will get even better and receivers will be cheaper.
What makes me think this is a hoax is the fact that this obvious and cheap control was not done (or not reported - either way, a bad sign).
Compound this with the fact that the early games will be quick rewrites of last-gen titles... and remember: Netflix/Blockbuster will not be renting Blu-ray movies for a long while.
I have no doubt that in 2008, a sub-$300 PS3 will be an attractive purchase. By then, game coders will figure out how to program the Cell, and a decent catalog of Blu-ray movies will be available. Before then, though, buying a PS3 gets you bragging rights and little else.
As it happens, I'm planning a $500 investment in gaming hardware soon: a new mobo, CPU and graphics card. I'm confident that the results in 1600x1200 will look as nice as the PS3, and I won't be paying Sony to lock me out of using my hardware in the way that I see fit.
I think the laptop looks weak and conventional, and not like an Apple, because it's not on a white background. Really, what's the deal with that ugly "grey letters over black" theme they introduced? What a terrible idea! When the background was white, all of their gear really looked like works of art. Now even their fancy gear looks like ordinary warez.
If that's still too much, I'd recommend the X2 3800+ Manchester core, only $322 at newegg. People report getting these running cool and stable well past 2.6GHz with a good heatsink.
If you're really paranoid about your data, buy a big hard drive, copy the data to it, encrypt it in a hidden partition, and put it in your mom's computer (effective only if you don't live in her basement).
So basically, it can't do anything new, anything Neverwinter Nights hasn't done for years. Plus, the review says combat rules are nothing like D&D and more like Diablo?!? Oh my, what a letdown. Wake me up when there is a persistent world that obeys D&D (or better: Hackmaster) rules.
On the other hand, Firefly had an amazing half-season on Fox before it got cancelled. I personally think it was the best sci-fi show ever made, and I've seen many. So it's Firefly they should be talking about, not Futurama.
Thank you for an informative and reasonable answer. I'm especially happy to hear that you're considering a lightweight daemon that could be set to stay alive even after Firefox closes. I think it makes lots of sense to use FF as the interface to administer the (separately-running) client/server. But as you say, maybe I'll see it differently once I use it, and I'm looking forward to that day. Thanks!
One thing you can bet on is that 10.5 will be released simultaneously with their first Intel-based machine. You'd be crazy to bet that the latter can happen before the former. What would it run? There won't be a 10.4X86....
I do run Torrent 24/7, and if it had a system for distributing files among friends, I might use it. Right now, I do my friends/family sharing through my FTP server - also something that can run in the background without disturbing my games and other intensive computer use. But I would never dream of not closing Firefox before firing up a game, especially if it ran an extension that further increased its memory/CPU usage.
Now you (usually) need huge accelerators and expensive satellites to collect fundamental data... and when those things produce readings, many people find out about them simultaneously, and the race is on. We just don't build many of these in a year, and we don't build the stuff that would really show us something exciting, since it would cost too much. So fundamental physicists may be somewhat starved for data, which is why they to off on adventures into this purely abstract mathematical string theory wonderland. Of course, they're a clever lot, and if we let them work on it longer, maybe the will find a way to test it.
Einstein too was an ideas person. Luckily, today's physics is much more fertile with new ideas than today's music!
Great post, thanks for getting the facts right and also for mentioning Lev Landau, who really was amazing.
I think general relativity is a very different story. Without Einstein, it might have taken decades to work it out. I mean, really, it's just an amazing piece of work, and something that's hard to work up to incrementally.
So you're right about E=mc^2 being easy for people to remember, but in a way that's a shame, because it shouldn't be taken as anything like his greatest work.
Another thing that works against the current generation of physicists is that Einstein and Heisenberg may really be more-or-less right, where as these old guys had the luxury of having predecessors that were wrong in a strikingly demonstrable way. That sort of revolution makes outsiders pay attention. But physicists can't just declare a revolution for its own sake, to make people notice them. Too many try to sound important (hello Drs. Greene, Davies, Penrose, Wolfram, et al) by breathless television appearances and glossy books, where they try to shock us by describing recent mathematical results by some crappy analogy. Of course, the new work is very interesting, but it doesn't subvert the old work, so we don't really care.
Anyway, here's how you beat Einstein: come up with a Theory of Everything (without strings/branes please!), make a prediction that violates general relativity, and have that prediction be confirmed and GR falsified in a big public spectacle of an experiment. Got it? OK, off you go!
Exactly right, thank you!
There is finally an excellent Windows client for Windows, Torrent, and I have some ideas about how the interaction between Firefox and Torrent could improve. I think this is the most profitable way to think about helping bittorrent users who click on torrent files in Firefox.
A simple Firefox plugin that does Bittorrent will only encourage users to drop in to download and not do their uploading duties. Really, this whole plugin business just doesn't seem very well thought through.
I've seen every BSG episode, old and new, and I don't want the show to suck. I'm waiting for the day they fix the acting and writing. But I'll probably be waiting forever.
If you think of the pricetag of this awesome navigation system as being an Iraq occupation which is shorter by 20 days, it begins to sound like a very good deal!
But even that's a big understatement if you looked at the actual benchmark results. Neck and neck? Come on! Please, editors, accept submissions that aren't misleading.
I really don't think that can happen without being accompanied by something very dramatic. The end of the wage disparities is what enable outsourcing are the basis of our prosperity. I honestly find it unimaginable that in the future, things would be the same minus our prosperity. For sure, we will start wars to bring back some of the disparity between countries, but of course, this will also not go on forever. It really will be a fascinating how this plays out.
Sorry to remind you that this will at some point end because there are only so many people in the world, and the population is expected to stabilize soon. Once globalization is through with Africa, there will be no other place to go. And what comes after that? Dunno, maybe the People's Revolution? Big world war? But something is gonna happen. This sort of "water flowing downhill" approach (which is the basis of the global economy) can take you far, but not farther than the valley.
But I think it's worse than that. I think that young audiences just don't care about concerts like the last generation did. The list in the parent post is pretty telling: It's not young people who are lining up to see Neil Diamond and Elton John. It's old fogies who are well past their CD-experimenting prime (the time when you do the most CD buying).
Band managers just don't put much effort into getting the kiddies to go to shows, and I wouldn't be surprised if their little manufactured primadonna acts don't really have much of a taste for the smelly grind on the road. It's much easier to buy off MTV/ClearChannel and brainwash the kids remotely, then hit em up at the record store. Those sorts of overheads are minimal.