Gritty? Because they yell "FRACK!" all the time? Oooh! All that grit is sanding my face off! Save me!
No, seriously, watch Firefly, and then tell me that BSG made any headway with grit. And btw. watch the camera work in Firefly. BSG really is just star trek characters who act in a soap opera (in space) and emote the occasional "FRACK!"
Oh please, I saw that season finale episode. PUKE! Almost as bad as the rest of the season. I can't believe I watched the whole run, seriously. Of course, I'm someone who gave up on Enterprise at the end of the first season. I also don't expect to see another BSG episode. Just because it's in space doesn't make it anything better than a poorly written soap opera. If you think it invented or reinvented something, you haven't been paying attention to what's already around.
Any given 20 minutes of any Firefly episode had better/more original stuff than the best things that happened during the whole season of BSG. And Firefly was cancelled.
IBM/Sony shares with Apple the details of the cell processor, a modified Power5 with lots of extra vector units. Once these things get good, the start appearing in the mini iMacs with OSX support. We already had an article about how they will speed up ordinary computing a lot with the right software support. The only commercial OS widely in use that has any chance of running on them is OSX or OSXI. But if we're there, why couldn't a future iMac mini just play PS3 games? Well, Sony would need to cooperate, but why wouldn't they? They make little or no money on the conoles themselves, so if Apple is happy to build compatible consoles, why should Sony get upset? Apple has a lot of good vibe to it, and Sony could sell more games/PS3's if they can run the argument that the same disk will work in a Mac as well as the PS3. MS will not be able to duplicate anything like this, because everyone who runs windows has X86 chips and Xbox2 will have PowerPCs.
So with the help of Sony and IBM, Apple really could make a living room video game console. I wonder what they would want in return... maybe for Sony, a license to run a modified version of OSX? IBM would just have the satisfaction that another company that buys their processors is prospering, and at the same time is hindering MS/Intel's growth in the living room.
I don't know, did you read the Cringley about the mysterious appearance of Sony people at Jobs's keynote? These companies are ready to be seen together, and maybe even substantially work together.
I think cable companies are working hard on a solution for getting HD movies on demand into the living room. If Apple moves in and uses the cable company's very wires to undercut their buisiness plan, you might expect them to react! (One obvious way: don't increase download bandwidth.) Alternately, they might allow some sort of firmware solution in your cable modem that uncaps your d/l when the source is the cable company's own paid movie download site.
This makes me think that if Apple wants to get into this, they have to partner up with some important broadband ISPs. Then, though, the whole thing might rule.
What I want for a next video cable standard is the ability to run maybe 30 meters (100'), with KVMs. People are spending stupid amounts of money trying to make a quiet PC, but what I want is to have a loud, ugly PC that lives in the basement.
Then, one long cable carries the video signal plus USB3, so I could have my monitor, mouse and keyboard somewhere else in the house. Also, there should be a standard so that video signals can be made to be easily "networkable" so that I can switch any display device in the house to show any video source being produced in the house (and maybe control that source in some appropriate way).
Wow, I was thinking the very same thing. I'm sure there's an answer somewhere, but I don't know enough to give it, so I have the same question. I was thinking that a drive with 5 platters could have some hardware solution that if it's told to write "1,2,3,4" it will write the "1" on the first platter, the "2" in the same position but on the second, etc., and on the 5th, it will write "0" in that position, which is the last digit of the sum of what's on the first four platters. That way, if there is an error on any of the platters, it can figure out what was there by subtraction and recover the data. (Of course I know this would really be done in binary, the principle would be the same.)
They helped kill two of my favorite local bookstores, leaving exactly none. I said "helped" because Barnes and Noble are comparably evil... but you asked. Also, please don't ask me about Starbucks!
A good point! In general, trying to break up operations into multiple threads is a good idea, seeing that in a year or two, huge numbers of people will be running multicore processors.
About GRE as a service, at first I thought this was too "Microsofty" a solution, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. Also, with the service running, I can imagine a whole lot of third party apps that would take advantage of it.
Yes, yes and yes! You are right on with these, and say more useful stuff in your one post than what's in all the other posts combined. It's quite weird how I agree with absolutely every line, and at some point, I independently reached the same conclusions as you (except the Emacs - but it seems obvious when I see you mention it).
Suprnova is now registration only.... and it looks like they are using exeem now too
"Download Torrents, Movies, Shows, Music, Full Albums and more!
Exeem Suprnova - register now and get all of these benefits and more"
Where did you read that? I just checked suprnova.org and there is no mention of registration or passwords or downloading anything. exeem. Then is says in big letters: "SuprNova.org Team is not working on any other projects then eXeem, do not be fooled by people who claim to be!" So... reconcile this!
The cell phone market is very sensitive to "cool" - Nokia really rode that wave for a while and it took them far.
The tech company most assossiated with style and hipness is Apple. If they made an iPod mini with a number pad, speaker and mic, which can be used to purchase whatever song you feel like hearing on your car trip or subway ride, there would be long lines of buyers - and a lot of spontaneous/impulse song purchases from iTunes (if the price was reasonable). There are lots of people with disposable income for whom this sort of instant gratification would quickly become irresistable.
Now sure, they could contract Motorolla to make a phone with similar specs, but the Apple logo itself would sell lots of units. Could this be their devious plan? Should it be?
I doubt the sincerity of that comment!
on
CNN Cancels Crossfire
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If the CEO of CNN really thought what he said he thought, CNN USA would look very different. I first thought their terrible and deliberately distorted news coverage had to do with their incompetence (or lack of resources). But this isn't true. I've spent a few days watching CNN Europe, and I have to tell you that it is a far better news channel. They actually do balanced and interesting stories, and are generally much less Tucker-Carlson-like. So the crap they're brodcasting into the USA is deliberately dumbed down. They actually have less-dumbed-down versions of all their big stories, but they just don't broadcast them in North America.
I saw Jon Stewart on Crossfire and from what I could gather from his rant, he objected to the institution of Republicans and Democrats yelling slogans from their talking points list, and pretending it's debate... and then pretending that reports like "Democrats claim X; Republicans claim Y" is news. So what if Crossfire is over. Everything that JS freaked out about is absolutely at the foundation of the way CNN reports. Crossfire is just reveals that formula in an especially naked way. So I don't understand how somebody could agree with JS and still be CEO of CNN-USA.
Why don't they just seal up the place with a whole bunch of stuff inside, and see what survives? That would be a pretty amazing experiement! Then, when we see something thriving, we introduce some interesting thing that feeds on it, and then see where the new equilibrium is. Maybe we'd eventually find something inside that humans can live on, and we could re-do the experiment and do it right.
Now that the thing is built and we have time, let's not micromanage the biosphere and just let it live. I think that studying how big but closed systems come to equilibrium would be more useful than the intitial experiment itself. The original idea was that this sort of thing might eventually be built on Mars, and we should first test in on Earth. Well, if we do that, here is how I think it should be done.
Not: Make guesses about how things will grow and interact, and engineer a system based on those guesses, hoping that it supports human habitation. (That's how the original failed experiment went.)
Instead: Send up a bunch of stuff that we're most confident about, some plants which are hardy and make a good base for a food chain. Have some unmanned "gardner" robots inside that do a bit of interfering, but mostly, let natural selection decide what does and doesn't grow. Once you see what grows best, introduce organisms that are progressively higher on the food chain. Only once we got stuff growing reliably should we send people there.
So you might be thinking that it will take a long time before a biosphere on Mars is ready for this... And I agree! That's why we should do some dry runs in Biosphere 2. It sucks that it gets so much hot sunlight, because on Mars, it will be a lot cooler and dimmer. Still, we'd learn some strategies, and a bunch of other stuff.
The point is that OLED's are not made of the same stuff that your normal "big" LEDs are made of. What they have in common is that they are diodes and emit light. Consider that the Panasonic screen has over 18 million of them packed in an area the size of my monitor. That's pretty impressive.
What's not impressive is that they tend to grow fainter with time. The article says 10,000 hours before they lose half their brightness... that's not very long, and I'm sure you'd notice the effect well before the 10,000-hour point. Elsewhere I read that this dimming is not even across the color range, and that the images get progressively more red. LCD displays are supposed to lose half their brightness in 30,000 hours, which is not that much better imo. That makes me wonder about CRTs. My Sony 500PS is pushing 7 years and still looks beautiful. The only difference I notice is that it takes a bit longer to warm up than when it was new. Ah, trusty old CRT! As long as I keep my big desk, I probably won't even be thinking about a new monitor before 2008. I know that "degradation with time" probably makes the salespeople happy, but I know that when I'm looking to replace my monitor, I'll be looking for something that doesn't have an obsolescense plan.
This is a very good point. If the telcos set up an easy interface to buy songs with the phone, and a reasonable price, it would be absolutely huge. People who get nostalgic for an old song they left at home might re-purchase that song while on their car trip... If it's just $1/song or something reasonable, I bet a lot of people would buy (and re-buy) songs all the time.
This makes so much sense that I'm now wondering whether the next iPod feature will be a phone - plus some license deal with a major wireless firm to have iTunes over the air. I think there are a lot of young people who carry both an iPod and a phone everywhere, and wouldn't mind simplifying. Just an idea...
I can tell you that even if people would decide to change to a network computer, the stuff they will want to do with it will be include: Using Word, Excell and PowerPoint. And they won't be happy to hear about "almost perfect substitutes" - if they were prepared to accept those, Windows would soon teeter anyway.
If anything I think MS is hoping for this sort model. What they're scared of is unauthorized hardware, and if you don't have hardware, that makes their job a whole lot easier. You can bet that they will be the first to release the OS and interface system to run such network computers, should they every come. In fact, I think they may throw around a whole lot of money initially to make sure that all service providers use Windows on their "mainframes" and no sane ISPs will dare pull an unrequested switcharoo on their paying customers.
This leaves us in the situation where all Linux machines are house-bound, and if normal computer users really do migrate to offsite computers, people who use different OS's will really be seen as nothing more that nostalgic freaks.
The whole argument about how this will supplant Windows is just ill-conceived.
The question is, did they pay the money after Carmack announced that the code will be GPL before 2005? Because if they did, they'd have no right to complain if he did what he said he'd do. I have a feeling he's not telling us everything, and that there were some clauses in the contract, in exchange for some extra money maybe.
You're right that we should be happy with whatever we get, but as an excuse, this seems pretty weak. It sounds like "oh, I thought that code was worthless, and only if it is will I release it (in - perhaps - a publicity stunt for mindshare and good will); so long as people are willing to pay for it, OSS people don't get it. They only get our trash" This is a pretty mercenary attitude. Not dumb, maybe even shrewd, but also not OSS-altruistic like some may have thought.
Oh, so you, on your system, have replicated every major bug in all the software you use? Wow!
Let me guess, you've done a lot of drunk driving and never had a problem, so all that FUD about it from all those insidious mothers is totally baseless.
I think the blurb on the front page was quite misleading. I was pretty blown away by the performance data of the Pentium M. It was on a crappy board with prehistoric features, and it was still kicking ass. It overclocked perfectly to 2.1 Ghz and beat a standard-clocked A64 3500+ on almost every benchmark, and never broke 40C with a tiny little heatsink and a tiny little fan.
If Intel were serious, they could be making these right now at 2.4 GHz (I'm sure they'd run fine, and still quite cool) at which point it would be beating every desktop processor in the world. I say that's a hell of a start for an Intel processor line. The most important thing is that with such a low heat output, Intel can eventually clock these things pretty high. The Athlon64 seems to have less headroom.
One clear lesson is that the Pentium4 and everything based on it is done. The P4 gets creamed by the M, it's quite embarassing. I think Intel will just ride out the P4 advertising investment, but we know that their next big thing involves the M cores. And they will be quite fearsome once they start putting multiple M cores into desktop chips, and putting their marketing muscle behind the result.
I'm a huge AMD fan and will remain loyal, but... I think AMD is in a good place now only because they've consistently out-engineered Intel since the first Athlon. Now I'm scared that they won't pull it off in the next generation. Intel seems to have a really promising starting point.
I'm sorry, but I read the whole thing and I thought that overall, those 11-year-olds had more articulate observations to make than most of the stuff posted on Slashdot, including the parent post.
I think you're quite right. If they could make players that don't cost too much more to manufacture, and disks that are maybe $1 costlier than red laser DVDs, they just might have a winner. Blu-ray has a bunch of studios already signed up, and if they just declared that all their disks will be Blu-ray and included some visible reminders of this in their pamphlet, like "you're not seeing the full quality of this disk unless you have a Blu-ray player", they might very well sell lots of players... after which the people would realize that it really makes no difference unless they own a high definition television, and that's where SONY will really make their money!
Yeah, but I think it's already settled in the Blu-ray specification that the encoding will be MPEG2. I agree with you. We have much better, proven compression methods, and we should be using them. I bet we'll be kicking ourselves later... or not; maybe it will be like with CD's, where only certain annoying "fidelity freaks" will complain about the various observable artifacts of compression. Or, maybe the big media companies are waiting to see whether some Norwegian kid figures out how to decrypt these things again. If so, maybe they will introduce a "new, better" standard with MPEG4 and maybe 60GB/disk.
Unlike the poster I actually read the article. The blue layer only stores 25GB, not 33.
I imagine that the extras and interviews wouldn't have to be duplicated in the HD layer, so that's decent amount of space. Still from 9GB to 25GB seems like a pretty small jump. Notice that the jump from CD (700MB) to DVD (9GB)is more than an order of magnitude, which makes sense. Compared to that jump, an improvement from 9 to 25GB is a bit underwhelming. I think it would have been better to wait for a denser format, since there are so few playback devices out there which can display in true HD anyway.
Who would play back the recordings? Me? Ooh, here is some fancy footage: It's me, watching old video of myself, in which I watch still older video of myself.
Although, as somebody mentioned, I'd love to have a record of all the fights I've had with my last gf. It's pretty impressive how many fights we had about exactly what happened in previous fights. It got to the point where we almost started a "fight blog" to keep records.
Slashdot Mirror
No, seriously, watch Firefly, and then tell me that BSG made any headway with grit. And btw. watch the camera work in Firefly. BSG really is just star trek characters who act in a soap opera (in space) and emote the occasional "FRACK!"
Any given 20 minutes of any Firefly episode had better/more original stuff than the best things that happened during the whole season of BSG. And Firefly was cancelled.
IBM/Sony shares with Apple the details of the cell processor, a modified Power5 with lots of extra vector units. Once these things get good, the start appearing in the mini iMacs with OSX support. We already had an article about how they will speed up ordinary computing a lot with the right software support. The only commercial OS widely in use that has any chance of running on them is OSX or OSXI. But if we're there, why couldn't a future iMac mini just play PS3 games? Well, Sony would need to cooperate, but why wouldn't they? They make little or no money on the conoles themselves, so if Apple is happy to build compatible consoles, why should Sony get upset? Apple has a lot of good vibe to it, and Sony could sell more games/PS3's if they can run the argument that the same disk will work in a Mac as well as the PS3. MS will not be able to duplicate anything like this, because everyone who runs windows has X86 chips and Xbox2 will have PowerPCs.
So with the help of Sony and IBM, Apple really could make a living room video game console. I wonder what they would want in return... maybe for Sony, a license to run a modified version of OSX? IBM would just have the satisfaction that another company that buys their processors is prospering, and at the same time is hindering MS/Intel's growth in the living room.
I don't know, did you read the Cringley about the mysterious appearance of Sony people at Jobs's keynote? These companies are ready to be seen together, and maybe even substantially work together.
This makes me think that if Apple wants to get into this, they have to partner up with some important broadband ISPs. Then, though, the whole thing might rule.
Then, one long cable carries the video signal plus USB3, so I could have my monitor, mouse and keyboard somewhere else in the house. Also, there should be a standard so that video signals can be made to be easily "networkable" so that I can switch any display device in the house to show any video source being produced in the house (and maybe control that source in some appropriate way).
Wow, I was thinking the very same thing. I'm sure there's an answer somewhere, but I don't know enough to give it, so I have the same question. I was thinking that a drive with 5 platters could have some hardware solution that if it's told to write "1,2,3,4" it will write the "1" on the first platter, the "2" in the same position but on the second, etc., and on the 5th, it will write "0" in that position, which is the last digit of the sum of what's on the first four platters. That way, if there is an error on any of the platters, it can figure out what was there by subtraction and recover the data. (Of course I know this would really be done in binary, the principle would be the same.)
They helped kill two of my favorite local bookstores, leaving exactly none. I said "helped" because Barnes and Noble are comparably evil... but you asked. Also, please don't ask me about Starbucks!
About GRE as a service, at first I thought this was too "Microsofty" a solution, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. Also, with the service running, I can imagine a whole lot of third party apps that would take advantage of it.
Yes, yes and yes! You are right on with these, and say more useful stuff in your one post than what's in all the other posts combined. It's quite weird how I agree with absolutely every line, and at some point, I independently reached the same conclusions as you (except the Emacs - but it seems obvious when I see you mention it).
Yeah, I can imagine that if I ever got resurrected I'd wake up with serious munchies for colored eggs and chocolate bunnies. Mmmm, bunnies!
Where did you read that? I just checked suprnova.org and there is no mention of registration or passwords or downloading anything. exeem. Then is says in big letters: "SuprNova.org Team is not working on any other projects then eXeem, do not be fooled by people who claim to be!" So... reconcile this!
The tech company most assossiated with style and hipness is Apple. If they made an iPod mini with a number pad, speaker and mic, which can be used to purchase whatever song you feel like hearing on your car trip or subway ride, there would be long lines of buyers - and a lot of spontaneous/impulse song purchases from iTunes (if the price was reasonable). There are lots of people with disposable income for whom this sort of instant gratification would quickly become irresistable.
Now sure, they could contract Motorolla to make a phone with similar specs, but the Apple logo itself would sell lots of units. Could this be their devious plan? Should it be?
I saw Jon Stewart on Crossfire and from what I could gather from his rant, he objected to the institution of Republicans and Democrats yelling slogans from their talking points list, and pretending it's debate... and then pretending that reports like "Democrats claim X; Republicans claim Y" is news. So what if Crossfire is over. Everything that JS freaked out about is absolutely at the foundation of the way CNN reports. Crossfire is just reveals that formula in an especially naked way. So I don't understand how somebody could agree with JS and still be CEO of CNN-USA.
Now that the thing is built and we have time, let's not micromanage the biosphere and just let it live. I think that studying how big but closed systems come to equilibrium would be more useful than the intitial experiment itself. The original idea was that this sort of thing might eventually be built on Mars, and we should first test in on Earth. Well, if we do that, here is how I think it should be done.
Not: Make guesses about how things will grow and interact, and engineer a system based on those guesses, hoping that it supports human habitation. (That's how the original failed experiment went.)
Instead: Send up a bunch of stuff that we're most confident about, some plants which are hardy and make a good base for a food chain. Have some unmanned "gardner" robots inside that do a bit of interfering, but mostly, let natural selection decide what does and doesn't grow. Once you see what grows best, introduce organisms that are progressively higher on the food chain. Only once we got stuff growing reliably should we send people there.
So you might be thinking that it will take a long time before a biosphere on Mars is ready for this... And I agree! That's why we should do some dry runs in Biosphere 2. It sucks that it gets so much hot sunlight, because on Mars, it will be a lot cooler and dimmer. Still, we'd learn some strategies, and a bunch of other stuff.
What's not impressive is that they tend to grow fainter with time. The article says 10,000 hours before they lose half their brightness... that's not very long, and I'm sure you'd notice the effect well before the 10,000-hour point. Elsewhere I read that this dimming is not even across the color range, and that the images get progressively more red. LCD displays are supposed to lose half their brightness in 30,000 hours, which is not that much better imo. That makes me wonder about CRTs. My Sony 500PS is pushing 7 years and still looks beautiful. The only difference I notice is that it takes a bit longer to warm up than when it was new. Ah, trusty old CRT! As long as I keep my big desk, I probably won't even be thinking about a new monitor before 2008. I know that "degradation with time" probably makes the salespeople happy, but I know that when I'm looking to replace my monitor, I'll be looking for something that doesn't have an obsolescense plan.
This makes so much sense that I'm now wondering whether the next iPod feature will be a phone - plus some license deal with a major wireless firm to have iTunes over the air. I think there are a lot of young people who carry both an iPod and a phone everywhere, and wouldn't mind simplifying. Just an idea...
If anything I think MS is hoping for this sort model. What they're scared of is unauthorized hardware, and if you don't have hardware, that makes their job a whole lot easier. You can bet that they will be the first to release the OS and interface system to run such network computers, should they every come. In fact, I think they may throw around a whole lot of money initially to make sure that all service providers use Windows on their "mainframes" and no sane ISPs will dare pull an unrequested switcharoo on their paying customers.
This leaves us in the situation where all Linux machines are house-bound, and if normal computer users really do migrate to offsite computers, people who use different OS's will really be seen as nothing more that nostalgic freaks.
The whole argument about how this will supplant Windows is just ill-conceived.
You're right that we should be happy with whatever we get, but as an excuse, this seems pretty weak. It sounds like "oh, I thought that code was worthless, and only if it is will I release it (in - perhaps - a publicity stunt for mindshare and good will); so long as people are willing to pay for it, OSS people don't get it. They only get our trash" This is a pretty mercenary attitude. Not dumb, maybe even shrewd, but also not OSS-altruistic like some may have thought.
Let me guess, you've done a lot of drunk driving and never had a problem, so all that FUD about it from all those insidious mothers is totally baseless.
If Intel were serious, they could be making these right now at 2.4 GHz (I'm sure they'd run fine, and still quite cool) at which point it would be beating every desktop processor in the world. I say that's a hell of a start for an Intel processor line. The most important thing is that with such a low heat output, Intel can eventually clock these things pretty high. The Athlon64 seems to have less headroom.
One clear lesson is that the Pentium4 and everything based on it is done. The P4 gets creamed by the M, it's quite embarassing. I think Intel will just ride out the P4 advertising investment, but we know that their next big thing involves the M cores. And they will be quite fearsome once they start putting multiple M cores into desktop chips, and putting their marketing muscle behind the result.
I'm a huge AMD fan and will remain loyal, but... I think AMD is in a good place now only because they've consistently out-engineered Intel since the first Athlon. Now I'm scared that they won't pull it off in the next generation. Intel seems to have a really promising starting point.
I'm sorry, but I read the whole thing and I thought that overall, those 11-year-olds had more articulate observations to make than most of the stuff posted on Slashdot, including the parent post.
I think you're quite right. If they could make players that don't cost too much more to manufacture, and disks that are maybe $1 costlier than red laser DVDs, they just might have a winner. Blu-ray has a bunch of studios already signed up, and if they just declared that all their disks will be Blu-ray and included some visible reminders of this in their pamphlet, like "you're not seeing the full quality of this disk unless you have a Blu-ray player", they might very well sell lots of players... after which the people would realize that it really makes no difference unless they own a high definition television, and that's where SONY will really make their money!
Yeah, but I think it's already settled in the Blu-ray specification that the encoding will be MPEG2. I agree with you. We have much better, proven compression methods, and we should be using them. I bet we'll be kicking ourselves later... or not; maybe it will be like with CD's, where only certain annoying "fidelity freaks" will complain about the various observable artifacts of compression. Or, maybe the big media companies are waiting to see whether some Norwegian kid figures out how to decrypt these things again. If so, maybe they will introduce a "new, better" standard with MPEG4 and maybe 60GB/disk.
I imagine that the extras and interviews wouldn't have to be duplicated in the HD layer, so that's decent amount of space. Still from 9GB to 25GB seems like a pretty small jump. Notice that the jump from CD (700MB) to DVD (9GB)is more than an order of magnitude, which makes sense. Compared to that jump, an improvement from 9 to 25GB is a bit underwhelming. I think it would have been better to wait for a denser format, since there are so few playback devices out there which can display in true HD anyway.
Although, as somebody mentioned, I'd love to have a record of all the fights I've had with my last gf. It's pretty impressive how many fights we had about exactly what happened in previous fights. It got to the point where we almost started a "fight blog" to keep records.