The Japanese model is required by law to have a speed governor limiting it to 111mph* when used on the road, hence the fancy tech for turning it off automatically. It's separate to the performance mode setting, so iirc you can still use race mode on the streets with the limiter on**. I never said it covered the whole planet and don't get snarky with me because you didn't know a regional variation of a car had a pretty cool piece of tech on it;) I mentioned Targa Tasmania as an example because of the way it moves around different closed off streets on different days, so how they'd deal with an event like that would quite the technical challenge to get the automatic system to function properly given that it's database would need to be updated to cover it. Perhaps a nightly update via a built-in 3G device, or other over-the-air system. *shrugs* Thought exercise over, back to work...
The Nissan GT-R has a limiter that disengages when the GPS registers it's at a race track. How about the same technology controls whether or not the car can run only manufacturer-signed code?
Race tracks will need to be registered with the manufacturer, track location data will need to be distributed some how (and promptly updated when street tracks are in session, like Targa Tasmania etc.) but hey, that stuff is easy by comparison with convincing people user-adjustable cars are a safe idea (no matter how out-of-date this idea actually is).
Water causes injury or death when introduced into the body quickly enough, say through a fire hose or if frozen in a large mass and dropped into you from a reasonable height, say 50ft. Must be poisonous then *nods* uh-huh.
I like the idea of having a single background service that handles downloading, organizing and sharing of all media assets and apps. You then have a (comparatively) lightweight library program for syncing media to devices or playing it locally / via Airplay. The iTunes store becomes a purely web-based entity that kicks stubs over to the downloader app, Amazon MP3-stylee, rather than pulling everything in through the browser, or allows direct download to devices. Pretty much everything else can probably be handled best from the device itself.
Hardly trolling when it seems to be a major feature of some people's election campaigns. If someone over here was left to die in the street, people would end up in prison. Same thing happens over there, people end up in the White House?!
I never said anything about the quality of healthcare.
If you're insured, I'm sure your care is very good. But what if you aren't? What if you can't afford cover? Or have pre-existing conditions resulting in stratospheric premiums or getting flat turned down everywhere? How can someone like that afford outstanding treatment on their own, or god forbid an ER bill? Seems you have a lot of folk over there in that kind of position - had you not noticed the traveling doctor shows going around the USA, giving out as much charity treatment as they can to people who've been left behind, financially excluded by your "best health care system in the world?" (Try Googling "Who has the best health care system in the world?" - you'll quickly find your ill-informed opinion is the minority view by a very significant margin)
Oh, and last time I checked, pharmaceutical prices in the various markets take into account the globalized nature of the market - as though it could work any other way.
Funny how the same issues seem to come back over and over again, just like the Swearing Police. Under normal circumstances, school children stand far more chance of actually offending people when they swear at school than if they swear it tweets. Can someone please help me dig up George Carlin now? He's spinning in his grave so fast, we could use him as a form of renewable energy! Kan you see what I did there?;)
Played, and later worked (if you can call it that), at a LAN gaming centre for a good few years. I'm familiar with the mind-set of many gamers - that gameplay rules uber-alles. A lot of those guys tend towards disdain for anything that detracts from gameplay for even a millisecond, as well as anyone who tolerates those distractions.
There was one guy, a very unfortunate case, that I'll never forget. I was playing WoW a few weeks after it's release and he asked what class I was before. I blinked and asked "before what?". As our confused conversation continued, I realized he assumed I had previously been a Dark Age of Camelot player, the long-standing LAN centre favourite fantasy MMORPG. When I told him I'd never played it, he sneered at me and never shared a civil word with me again.
At first I chalked it up to the clannish divide that was growing in the place between hardcore DAoC players and cute WoW players. Later on he told me that the only games he would ever need for the rest of his life were DAoC and Counterstrike. I don't think his claim was hyperbole, he genuinely believed that at the time. I later realised his only source of pleasure was triumph over other players. I could understand the attraction - I was a competitive Counterstrike player, Planetside lover and I've recently started playing Navy Field (retro trip!), all of them pure PvP games with no plot to get in the way of the action. Thing was, this guy didn't seem to enjoy any other aspect of gaming. He'd never played Half-Life 2 and turned his nose up at Darwinia.
How anyone chooses to spend their time is entirely up to them, but an inability to appreciate a story line in a game coupled with an intolerance of other people's preferences in that department does seem... I don't know, childish? Emotionally stunted?
Upgrades that alter core architecture and/or performance should be steered clear of, extensions like Kinect and Move excepted. Developers like a nice level playing field, makes it easier to squeeze every last drop of performance from the hardware, which in turn lowers development costs and also makes the hardware last longer than equivalent PC gear.
Case in point: The PS3 uses a cut-down nVidia 7900GT for it's graphics processor. That's silicon mapped out in 2006. Yet if you built a PC based around a 7900GT and using parts available at the time, I doubt the PC would get even half the frame rate the PS3 would in Battlefield 3 with a comparable detail, resolution and post-processing setup. Another test would be getting the same frame rate from the PC as from the PS3 and then doing image quality comparisons - no prizes for guessing who my money's on.
If a PC dev needs more GPU/CPU power, they change the requirements on the box. It's quicker and costs someone else money. Case in point: Crysis. Ick.
(NB: I'm not a PS3 fanboy, I just know off the top of my head it's a 7900GTish in there. I'm sure I could have Googled what the X360 has but IIRC it's rather more customized and tougher to nail down. [yeah, like "7900GTish" is "nailed down"] If the image quality shoot-outs on Digital Foundry are anything to go by, they're pretty much neck and neck)
"The 3DS did that last year and its initial sales were poor."
The 3DS may have had sales figures that weren't as good as they were expecting, but having sold 15million units quicker than either that Wii or the DS, I have to wonder just what those forecasters were smoking at the time. The attach rate of the console was pretty poor at first but that was mainly because the hardware launched without any first-party titles alongside it.
"What will the tablet actually add to the games?"
Rephrase that question to what will the Wii-U bring to tablet games, and keep in mind how popular the touch screen has become as a gaming interface in the mobile arena. I think that's a smart angle to go for. Nintendo promised the world with motion controls, disappointed everyone at first, but then lived up to that promise (for a price) with MotionPlus. Considering that Wii-U works with Wiimotes, MotionPlus might get a chance to shine and revitalize enthusiasm for motion control like Kinect did.
"I'm struggling to see what the pitch is with the Wii-U."
That's probably because they haven't pitched it to us yet.
My own personal alternative when there's no-one there worth voting for is to show up and spoil my ballot paper. If you stay at home and don't bother to show up, the statisticians who analyze the turn-out put you in the "disinterested" box and tell their bosses they can happily ignore your wishes. If you make the effort to find out about the candidates, get your registration sorted out, turn up and vote for no-one, that gets you in the "undecided" box and people start figuring out how to get you to vote for them. After all, if they don't pander to you and the other guy does...
You know when you go into a shop and buy something even vaguely electrical, the salesdroid always tries to push the extended warranty on you? I bet the US military declined that option, then Lockheed felt really smug about it because the terms were 12 months or 25,000 miles*.
(*which is a bit less than 1 orbit of the planet, but hey, it looked good to you on paper for a second there, huh?)
With BBC3 and BBC4, it's not like the amount of content has gone down, you just have more chance to watch it. Also, the BBC is still total bliss compared to ITV's current output. How many different vehicles can SiCo find for the same tired idea? How many "game shows" based purely on random chance and nothing else can you possible squeeze into Friday-night primetime?
Besides, just because *you* don't like cooking shows doesn't mean it's crap quality TV. You post on Slashdot ffs, I thought it would have been fairly obvious to you that your tastes are somewhat different to mainstream TV output expectations.
Last thing - BBC News vs Fox News. (I would put discuss here but I'll think I'll just sigh with relief and leave it at that.)
Using WDS to daisy-chain links between APs is a pretty bandwidth-hungry way of doing things, potentially tripling the on-the-spot bandwidth usage of a single client.
While working at a school, the wireless network scheme I came up with was to get dual-band APs that supported multiple SSIDs and encryption settings. By placing the end user SSIDs purely on the 2.4GHz band and the WDS link SSIDs alone on the 5GHz band, WDS wouldn't be retransmitting on the same frequency, easing network congestion. It would also leverage the superb range of the 5GHz band over a direct line of sight.
The AP I selected for this (a D-Link of some sort, can't remember) had quad antennae, two for each band. I would like to have tried refitting the omnidirectional antennae on APs in the middle of WDS daisy chains with directional 5GHz antennae, one pointing at the upstream AP and one at the downstream AP. Whether the increase in raw signal strength could make up for the loss of teaming, I don't know. I had to leave before the project got out of the planning stages.
Look up the MicroWulf project. Pretty much exactly the thing you want if you really really really do need to build it yourself.
Self-building clusters needs some careful planning before you start:
1) Don't do it if it you don't have to. Lots of resources around that you can use, especially if you're in academia. 2) Find/read benchmarks for the key components to your research (CPU in this case) and then design your cluster modules around it. Keep in the mind your price/performance ratio for each entire module, not just the core component. Fewer faster modules is usually the best way to go. 3) Cut out as much hardware as you can but don't skimp on important specs. Integrated NICs on motherboards are good but check they're PCI-Ex connected instead of vanilla PCI if you want the best transfer rates with lowest latency. If you don't need lots of data lying around on each module, ditch local hard drives - dual purpose a module as a data server, maybe a Netboot server if you fancy it, or consider booting from cheap USB keys. 4) Don't forget to factor in the price of network switches, Cat-6, power leads, etc - it can mount up pretty quickly!
Did a few calculations myself for the UK. Based on some figures I pulled from a Bit-Tech review of the Core i7-990X CPU I figured the difference between CPU idle and CPU flat-out (running Prime95) was 122W. I then pulled up some electricity costs based on living in London using British Gas's standard rate tariff. I then figured out how much extra it would cost per hour and per year overall to run a CPU-hogging processing client against leaving the CPU idle during the day and during the night-time cheap electricity rate period:
Day-time rate = 26.353p per kWh (17 hours per 24h period)
hourly rate = 0.122kW * £0.26353 = £0.03215/hr
yearly rate = £0.03215 * 17 hours * 365 days = £199.49 / year Night-time rate = 12.167p per kWh (7 hours per 24h period)
hourly rate = 0.122kW * £0.12167 = £0.01484/hr
yearly rate = £0.01484 * 7 hours * 365 days = £37.93 / year
Total = £236.42 extra per year to run something like this or Folding@Home on a high-spec CPU.
Slashdot Mirror
The Japanese model is required by law to have a speed governor limiting it to 111mph* when used on the road, hence the fancy tech for turning it off automatically. It's separate to the performance mode setting, so iirc you can still use race mode on the streets with the limiter on**. I never said it covered the whole planet and don't get snarky with me because you didn't know a regional variation of a car had a pretty cool piece of tech on it ;) I mentioned Targa Tasmania as an example because of the way it moves around different closed off streets on different days, so how they'd deal with an event like that would quite the technical challenge to get the automatic system to function properly given that it's database would need to be updated to cover it. Perhaps a nightly update via a built-in 3G device, or other over-the-air system. *shrugs* Thought exercise over, back to work...
*I don't get it either.
**Errr....
The Nissan GT-R has a limiter that disengages when the GPS registers it's at a race track. How about the same technology controls whether or not the car can run only manufacturer-signed code?
Race tracks will need to be registered with the manufacturer, track location data will need to be distributed some how (and promptly updated when street tracks are in session, like Targa Tasmania etc.) but hey, that stuff is easy by comparison with convincing people user-adjustable cars are a safe idea (no matter how out-of-date this idea actually is).
Water causes injury or death when introduced into the body quickly enough, say through a fire hose or if frozen in a large mass and dropped into you from a reasonable height, say 50ft. Must be poisonous then *nods* uh-huh.
In fact, water is so poisonous, it was rebranded as a PR move after public safety groups began campaigning to ban it under it's original trade name: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/ban-dihydrogen-oxide.html
Gerard could've recorded that conversation then blackmailed Teller (back) into silence.
I like the idea of having a single background service that handles downloading, organizing and sharing of all media assets and apps. You then have a (comparatively) lightweight library program for syncing media to devices or playing it locally / via Airplay. The iTunes store becomes a purely web-based entity that kicks stubs over to the downloader app, Amazon MP3-stylee, rather than pulling everything in through the browser, or allows direct download to devices. Pretty much everything else can probably be handled best from the device itself.
So Microsoft have flavours and Apple have fragrances?
Who said anything about fiscal deficit? I was talking about moral deficiency and inhumanity toward fellow human beings:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irx_QXsJiao
Hardly trolling when it seems to be a major feature of some people's election campaigns. If someone over here was left to die in the street, people would end up in prison. Same thing happens over there, people end up in the White House?!
I never said anything about the quality of healthcare.
If you're insured, I'm sure your care is very good. But what if you aren't? What if you can't afford cover? Or have pre-existing conditions resulting in stratospheric premiums or getting flat turned down everywhere? How can someone like that afford outstanding treatment on their own, or god forbid an ER bill? Seems you have a lot of folk over there in that kind of position - had you not noticed the traveling doctor shows going around the USA, giving out as much charity treatment as they can to people who've been left behind, financially excluded by your "best health care system in the world?" (Try Googling "Who has the best health care system in the world?" - you'll quickly find your ill-informed opinion is the minority view by a very significant margin)
Oh, and last time I checked, pharmaceutical prices in the various markets take into account the globalized nature of the market - as though it could work any other way.
Doesn't seem to be the only one - who the hell is modding that demogogue up?!
Oh, I'd say the US has a pretty massive deficiency compared to the Europe - we have socialized healthcare, they have inhumanity.
If not, background radiation would be lethal and we'd all be in a jam. Lord preserve us!
Funny how the same issues seem to come back over and over again, just like the Swearing Police. ;)
Under normal circumstances, school children stand far more chance of actually offending people when they swear at school than if they swear it tweets.
Can someone please help me dig up George Carlin now? He's spinning in his grave so fast, we could use him as a form of renewable energy!
Kan you see what I did there?
The second half of that wish has already been fulfilled: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/remote/id284417350?mt=8
Now we're just waiting for the Apps. Not like I can't Airplay from Plex on my iPod, but native Plex on my Apple TV would be nice too.
I even warned the guy sitting at the desk behind me not to do it. Some people just don't know what's good for them when it smacks them in the head.
Played, and later worked (if you can call it that), at a LAN gaming centre for a good few years. I'm familiar with the mind-set of many gamers - that gameplay rules uber-alles. A lot of those guys tend towards disdain for anything that detracts from gameplay for even a millisecond, as well as anyone who tolerates those distractions.
There was one guy, a very unfortunate case, that I'll never forget. I was playing WoW a few weeks after it's release and he asked what class I was before. I blinked and asked "before what?". As our confused conversation continued, I realized he assumed I had previously been a Dark Age of Camelot player, the long-standing LAN centre favourite fantasy MMORPG. When I told him I'd never played it, he sneered at me and never shared a civil word with me again.
At first I chalked it up to the clannish divide that was growing in the place between hardcore DAoC players and cute WoW players. Later on he told me that the only games he would ever need for the rest of his life were DAoC and Counterstrike. I don't think his claim was hyperbole, he genuinely believed that at the time. I later realised his only source of pleasure was triumph over other players. I could understand the attraction - I was a competitive Counterstrike player, Planetside lover and I've recently started playing Navy Field (retro trip!), all of them pure PvP games with no plot to get in the way of the action. Thing was, this guy didn't seem to enjoy any other aspect of gaming. He'd never played Half-Life 2 and turned his nose up at Darwinia.
How anyone chooses to spend their time is entirely up to them, but an inability to appreciate a story line in a game coupled with an intolerance of other people's preferences in that department does seem... I don't know, childish? Emotionally stunted?
Upgrades that alter core architecture and/or performance should be steered clear of, extensions like Kinect and Move excepted. Developers like a nice level playing field, makes it easier to squeeze every last drop of performance from the hardware, which in turn lowers development costs and also makes the hardware last longer than equivalent PC gear.
Case in point: The PS3 uses a cut-down nVidia 7900GT for it's graphics processor. That's silicon mapped out in 2006. Yet if you built a PC based around a 7900GT and using parts available at the time, I doubt the PC would get even half the frame rate the PS3 would in Battlefield 3 with a comparable detail, resolution and post-processing setup. Another test would be getting the same frame rate from the PC as from the PS3 and then doing image quality comparisons - no prizes for guessing who my money's on.
If a PC dev needs more GPU/CPU power, they change the requirements on the box. It's quicker and costs someone else money. Case in point: Crysis. Ick.
(NB: I'm not a PS3 fanboy, I just know off the top of my head it's a 7900GTish in there. I'm sure I could have Googled what the X360 has but IIRC it's rather more customized and tougher to nail down. [yeah, like "7900GTish" is "nailed down"] If the image quality shoot-outs on Digital Foundry are anything to go by, they're pretty much neck and neck)
"The 3DS did that last year and its initial sales were poor."
The 3DS may have had sales figures that weren't as good as they were expecting, but having sold 15million units quicker than either that Wii or the DS, I have to wonder just what those forecasters were smoking at the time. The attach rate of the console was pretty poor at first but that was mainly because the hardware launched without any first-party titles alongside it.
"What will the tablet actually add to the games?"
Rephrase that question to what will the Wii-U bring to tablet games, and keep in mind how popular the touch screen has become as a gaming interface in the mobile arena. I think that's a smart angle to go for. Nintendo promised the world with motion controls, disappointed everyone at first, but then lived up to that promise (for a price) with MotionPlus. Considering that Wii-U works with Wiimotes, MotionPlus might get a chance to shine and revitalize enthusiasm for motion control like Kinect did.
"I'm struggling to see what the pitch is with the Wii-U."
That's probably because they haven't pitched it to us yet.
We'll end up with TV shows like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO6rqAJ3mGc
My own personal alternative when there's no-one there worth voting for is to show up and spoil my ballot paper. If you stay at home and don't bother to show up, the statisticians who analyze the turn-out put you in the "disinterested" box and tell their bosses they can happily ignore your wishes. If you make the effort to find out about the candidates, get your registration sorted out, turn up and vote for no-one, that gets you in the "undecided" box and people start figuring out how to get you to vote for them. After all, if they don't pander to you and the other guy does...
You know when you go into a shop and buy something even vaguely electrical, the salesdroid always tries to push the extended warranty on you? I bet the US military declined that option, then Lockheed felt really smug about it because the terms were 12 months or 25,000 miles*.
(*which is a bit less than 1 orbit of the planet, but hey, it looked good to you on paper for a second there, huh?)
With BBC3 and BBC4, it's not like the amount of content has gone down, you just have more chance to watch it. Also, the BBC is still total bliss compared to ITV's current output. How many different vehicles can SiCo find for the same tired idea? How many "game shows" based purely on random chance and nothing else can you possible squeeze into Friday-night primetime?
Besides, just because *you* don't like cooking shows doesn't mean it's crap quality TV. You post on Slashdot ffs, I thought it would have been fairly obvious to you that your tastes are somewhat different to mainstream TV output expectations.
Last thing - BBC News vs Fox News. (I would put discuss here but I'll think I'll just sigh with relief and leave it at that.)
Using WDS to daisy-chain links between APs is a pretty bandwidth-hungry way of doing things, potentially tripling the on-the-spot bandwidth usage of a single client.
While working at a school, the wireless network scheme I came up with was to get dual-band APs that supported multiple SSIDs and encryption settings. By placing the end user SSIDs purely on the 2.4GHz band and the WDS link SSIDs alone on the 5GHz band, WDS wouldn't be retransmitting on the same frequency, easing network congestion. It would also leverage the superb range of the 5GHz band over a direct line of sight.
The AP I selected for this (a D-Link of some sort, can't remember) had quad antennae, two for each band. I would like to have tried refitting the omnidirectional antennae on APs in the middle of WDS daisy chains with directional 5GHz antennae, one pointing at the upstream AP and one at the downstream AP. Whether the increase in raw signal strength could make up for the loss of teaming, I don't know. I had to leave before the project got out of the planning stages.
"...young people who have been weaned on electronic devices will not tune in without them."
Does anyone else find that to be a disturbing idea?
Look up the MicroWulf project. Pretty much exactly the thing you want if you really really really do need to build it yourself.
Self-building clusters needs some careful planning before you start:
1) Don't do it if it you don't have to. Lots of resources around that you can use, especially if you're in academia.
2) Find/read benchmarks for the key components to your research (CPU in this case) and then design your cluster modules around it. Keep in the mind your price/performance ratio for each entire module, not just the core component. Fewer faster modules is usually the best way to go.
3) Cut out as much hardware as you can but don't skimp on important specs. Integrated NICs on motherboards are good but check they're PCI-Ex connected instead of vanilla PCI if you want the best transfer rates with lowest latency. If you don't need lots of data lying around on each module, ditch local hard drives - dual purpose a module as a data server, maybe a Netboot server if you fancy it, or consider booting from cheap USB keys.
4) Don't forget to factor in the price of network switches, Cat-6, power leads, etc - it can mount up pretty quickly!
Did a few calculations myself for the UK. Based on some figures I pulled from a Bit-Tech review of the Core i7-990X CPU I figured the difference between CPU idle and CPU flat-out (running Prime95) was 122W. I then pulled up some electricity costs based on living in London using British Gas's standard rate tariff. I then figured out how much extra it would cost per hour and per year overall to run a CPU-hogging processing client against leaving the CPU idle during the day and during the night-time cheap electricity rate period:
Day-time rate = 26.353p per kWh (17 hours per 24h period)
hourly rate = 0.122kW * £0.26353 = £0.03215/hr
yearly rate = £0.03215 * 17 hours * 365 days = £199.49 / year
Night-time rate = 12.167p per kWh (7 hours per 24h period)
hourly rate = 0.122kW * £0.12167 = £0.01484/hr
yearly rate = £0.01484 * 7 hours * 365 days = £37.93 / year
Total = £236.42 extra per year to run something like this or Folding@Home on a high-spec CPU.