Not to suggest that we shouldn't cure AIDS, but eliminating HIV as a threat might have some unintended consequences. Would infection rates for other STDs jump as people stopped worrying about condoms? I expect that any such cure will need to be accompanied by a major STD education campaign.
The talk that I've heard has all been about using 40-50GB optical discs to deliver compressed HDTV movies to consumers. That's what the whole HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray debate is all about. Both are about compressed high definition movies.
Frankly, I just don't see a market for uncompressed HDTV--the difference in quality is so minimal that very few consumers would notice the difference. And as we've seen with the popularity of compressed digital music, very few consumers really care about quality beyond a relatively low threshold.
And while it may be technologically possible to make 510GB optical discs, there's very little reason for the industry to invest in such a format. Sure, the writable verison might be popular, but there's not enough that it could provide that isn't already satisfied by HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. It might be nice to get a whole season or two of a TV show on one disc, but that's not a compelling reason.
Xbox 1 price history
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Xbox 2 for $400?
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· Score: 4, Informative
It's $100 more than the original Xbox was at introduction.
It was $299 on November 15, 2001. In 2002, it was $199. In 2003, it was $179. In 2004, it was $149.
So a price of $399 isn't that unreasonable, and we can expect similar price cuts over a three-year product lifespan.
Also, the prices being mentioned now may reflect what Microsoft would have to charge to sell the consoles without losing money on each sale. Depending on what the other console makers do, they may be forced into a lower price.
If you look very closely at some of the photos in Creative Computing or Compute! you'll see that the alleged 1450XLD had a nameplate on it calling it a 1250XLD. My guess is that there was another earlier project that was canceled, and since they didn't have any of the new ones ready, they used photos of the old one.
Apparently there were a few 1400XLs that got out, but there's as rare as an 815.
Yes, but unless you're doing video editing, you have no reason to ever deal with uncompressed HDTV. HDTV is broadcast in MPEG-2, so if you're going to record it, you just save the data as broadcast. Hence, less than 9GB/hour.
So outside of the TV industry, there is no uncompressed HDTV data to deal with. (Eventually we will see consumer HD camcorders, but they may well have hardware compression built-in.)
Write caching is perfectly acceptable in an environment where you trust the drive to eventually destage the write. In most cases, all this requires is a battery.
When you get a read hit, you get it at 3GB/s. And more importantly, when you queue a write to the drive, you do it at 3GB/s. With SATA, like SCSI or fibre, you can queue a bunch of writes and have the drive order them in a mechanically-optimal manner. Meanwhile, your computer can do other things, including issue reads.
If you are only losing money because of the development costs, then you can make it up on volume as you have more sales to amortize the development costs over. If you're still losing money even without your fixed costs, though, you're completely hosed.
Not to mention that it was designed to be used with helium, not hydrogen. However, the only source of helium was in the United States which had restricted exports to Germany in response to the rise of the Nazis.
This is presented as being for use with the HD-DVD standard. What about the competing Blu-Ray standard? Are they planning on using this, too, or do they have their own approach to the perceived problem?
Nope. I wouldn't expect this to be cracked using brute force.
More likely, someone will dissassemble a player and read the key out of an eprom. Most likely, once it's been done for one player, it will be relatively trivial to get a bunch of keys from different brands.
Personally, I won't be buying into this technology until I can play the discs with MythTV.
Obviously Spaceship One isn't an answer, as reaching space is much easier than acheiving orbit. Remember that orbit includes a huge horizontal velocity that Spaceship One wasn't even considering.
Of course, your point is still valid. It may well make more sense to use traditional rockets for lifting, and concentrate our manned efforts on a vehicle designed for human transport only. I'm not sure I agree with that approach, but it's certainly worth evaluating. Of course, we probably all agree that we need a shuttle replacement, just what we should develop is up for debate.
LEGOs have been changing for quite some time, but in many ways they're not much different. There were always specialty sets and special-purpose pieces. I remember the blue train tracks and ladders from the 70s, just as an example.
Certainly they have a lot more special pieces in current sets. Some of them are hard to use for a different purpose, but some of them are great for a wide variety of alternate uses.
Perhaps the biggest change of the last few years is the huge variety of colors available. There are multiple shades of most colors, including orange, purple, and many others. And they changed brown, grey, and dark grey to be slightly different colors.
But now you can go and buy a bucket of 1000 basic pieces for $20, so unlike twenty years ago, you're not limited to the sets.
One thing that would have been interesting is if they listed the year that the toy first came out, the year it was last produced (some are still sold today, like the Rubik's Cube), and the year that had the top sales (i.e., when it was "in" for Christmas).
Unfortunately, with the site down, I can't even see what their criteria was.
You're thinking of "Brigands" which is an infrequently used word that referrs to a bandit.
Yup, that was a fun game. Unfortunately, it would ruin the game if it ran low on batteries. (A low battery warning at the start of a game would have really helped.)
At least with ATA drives, you can usually use smartd to monitor your drives. This includes temperature and various failure indicators. Usually when a drive fails, there is plenty of warning from small failures that the drive recovers from. When you run smartd, you can receive these warnings.
Services should be started at boot time, but the list of what has to be started before you get a login prompt is much shorter than the full list of what you want running. Why should cron or apache need to start before you log in?
The way to handle this is to take something like the dependencies in the init files that Gentoo has and extend it to specify whether the service should be started before command-line prompts (and separately X-login prompts) should be started. File systems must be mounted first, syslog needs to be up, and if you're running NFS or NIS, those services need to start.
The key is to figure out the dependencies and find a good way to express them in the init scripts.
For me, the user-space initialization is relatively fast. What is a pain is the kernel init time as it waits to hear what SCSI devices exist (including the boot drive). And this is after the BIOS has done the exact same thing.
I suppose I should figure out where the timeout value for that is in the kernel and cut it short. (Doesn't Solaris handle that by saving the data unless you tell it that it needs to rescan?)
If you don't mind a little soldering, make yourself a JP1 cable, and buy a cheap remote that you can program from your computer. If you're not familiar with the JP1 interface, it's a little connector that you hook up to the parallel port on your PC. You can then create and upload new code sets for devices that it doesn't already know. With my cheap Radio Shack remote, I now have almost complete control of every button, so it works exactly the way I want it to.
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Not to suggest that we shouldn't cure AIDS, but eliminating HIV as a threat might have some unintended consequences. Would infection rates for other STDs jump as people stopped worrying about condoms? I expect that any such cure will need to be accompanied by a major STD education campaign.
The talk that I've heard has all been about using 40-50GB optical discs to deliver compressed HDTV movies to consumers. That's what the whole HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray debate is all about. Both are about compressed high definition movies.
Frankly, I just don't see a market for uncompressed HDTV--the difference in quality is so minimal that very few consumers would notice the difference. And as we've seen with the popularity of compressed digital music, very few consumers really care about quality beyond a relatively low threshold.
And while it may be technologically possible to make 510GB optical discs, there's very little reason for the industry to invest in such a format. Sure, the writable verison might be popular, but there's not enough that it could provide that isn't already satisfied by HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. It might be nice to get a whole season or two of a TV show on one disc, but that's not a compelling reason.
It's $100 more than the original Xbox was at introduction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox
It was $299 on November 15, 2001.
In 2002, it was $199.
In 2003, it was $179.
In 2004, it was $149.
So a price of $399 isn't that unreasonable, and we can expect similar price cuts over a three-year product lifespan.
Also, the prices being mentioned now may reflect what Microsoft would have to charge to sell the consoles without losing money on each sale. Depending on what the other console makers do, they may be forced into a lower price.
Oh, boy, did I ever want one of those.
If you look very closely at some of the photos in Creative Computing or Compute! you'll see that the alleged 1450XLD had a nameplate on it calling it a 1250XLD. My guess is that there was another earlier project that was canceled, and since they didn't have any of the new ones ready, they used photos of the old one.
Apparently there were a few 1400XLs that got out, but there's as rare as an 815.
Yes, but unless you're doing video editing, you have no reason to ever deal with uncompressed HDTV. HDTV is broadcast in MPEG-2, so if you're going to record it, you just save the data as broadcast. Hence, less than 9GB/hour.
So outside of the TV industry, there is no uncompressed HDTV data to deal with. (Eventually we will see consumer HD camcorders, but they may well have hardware compression built-in.)
Write caching is perfectly acceptable in an environment where you trust the drive to eventually destage the write. In most cases, all this requires is a battery.
Two uses:
MythTV, especially with HDTV recording at eight to nine gigs per hour.
Video editing. When editing video, you typically want to work with raw uncompressed video that takes vast amounts of space.
Actually, it's more like 60 hours. The HDTV that I've been recording is around 8.3GB/hour.
There is a point: cache.
When you get a read hit, you get it at 3GB/s. And more importantly, when you queue a write to the drive, you do it at 3GB/s. With SATA, like SCSI or fibre, you can queue a bunch of writes and have the drive order them in a mechanically-optimal manner. Meanwhile, your computer can do other things, including issue reads.
That can actually work.
If you are only losing money because of the development costs, then you can make it up on volume as you have more sales to amortize the development costs over. If you're still losing money even without your fixed costs, though, you're completely hosed.
I thought they did that from the start.
The problem is that they don't have the sales volume to amortize the development costs such that they can make a profit.
Of course, you hear about yield problems, but I'm not sure that's really anything that Transmeta has any control over.
Not to mention that it was designed to be used with helium, not hydrogen. However, the only source of helium was in the United States which had restricted exports to Germany in response to the rise of the Nazis.
This is presented as being for use with the HD-DVD standard. What about the competing Blu-Ray standard? Are they planning on using this, too, or do they have their own approach to the perceived problem?
Nope. I wouldn't expect this to be cracked using brute force.
More likely, someone will dissassemble a player and read the key out of an eprom. Most likely, once it's been done for one player, it will be relatively trivial to get a bunch of keys from different brands.
Personally, I won't be buying into this technology until I can play the discs with MythTV.
Obviously Spaceship One isn't an answer, as reaching space is much easier than acheiving orbit. Remember that orbit includes a huge horizontal velocity that Spaceship One wasn't even considering.
Of course, your point is still valid. It may well make more sense to use traditional rockets for lifting, and concentrate our manned efforts on a vehicle designed for human transport only. I'm not sure I agree with that approach, but it's certainly worth evaluating. Of course, we probably all agree that we need a shuttle replacement, just what we should develop is up for debate.
LEGOs have been changing for quite some time, but in many ways they're not much different. There were always specialty sets and special-purpose pieces. I remember the blue train tracks and ladders from the 70s, just as an example.
Certainly they have a lot more special pieces in current sets. Some of them are hard to use for a different purpose, but some of them are great for a wide variety of alternate uses.
Perhaps the biggest change of the last few years is the huge variety of colors available. There are multiple shades of most colors, including orange, purple, and many others. And they changed brown, grey, and dark grey to be slightly different colors.
But now you can go and buy a bucket of 1000 basic pieces for $20, so unlike twenty years ago, you're not limited to the sets.
One thing that would have been interesting is if they listed the year that the toy first came out, the year it was last produced (some are still sold today, like the Rubik's Cube), and the year that had the top sales (i.e., when it was "in" for Christmas).
Unfortunately, with the site down, I can't even see what their criteria was.
You're thinking of "Brigands" which is an infrequently used word that referrs to a bandit.
Yup, that was a fun game. Unfortunately, it would ruin the game if it ran low on batteries. (A low battery warning at the start of a game would have really helped.)
Unfortunately, they split it up to 10 toys per page, and that one only lists numbers 100 through 91.
At least with ATA drives, you can usually use smartd to monitor your drives. This includes temperature and various failure indicators. Usually when a drive fails, there is plenty of warning from small failures that the drive recovers from. When you run smartd, you can receive these warnings.
I completely agree.
Services should be started at boot time, but the list of what has to be started before you get a login prompt is much shorter than the full list of what you want running. Why should cron or apache need to start before you log in?
The way to handle this is to take something like the dependencies in the init files that Gentoo has and extend it to specify whether the service should be started before command-line prompts (and separately X-login prompts) should be started. File systems must be mounted first, syslog needs to be up, and if you're running NFS or NIS, those services need to start.
The key is to figure out the dependencies and find a good way to express them in the init scripts.
For me, the user-space initialization is relatively fast. What is a pain is the kernel init time as it waits to hear what SCSI devices exist (including the boot drive). And this is after the BIOS has done the exact same thing.
I suppose I should figure out where the timeout value for that is in the kernel and cut it short. (Doesn't Solaris handle that by saving the data unless you tell it that it needs to rescan?)
Yup. There aren't any smoking sections in Massachusetts, either. And I heard something about eliminating them in Ireland recently.
But it is just an analogy.
Just don't try doing 'find /afs' and forget about it for a few weeks...
If you don't mind a little soldering, make yourself a JP1 cable, and buy a cheap remote that you can program from your computer. If you're not familiar with the JP1 interface, it's a little connector that you hook up to the parallel port on your PC. You can then create and upload new code sets for devices that it doesn't already know. With my cheap Radio Shack remote, I now have almost complete control of every button, so it works exactly the way I want it to.