What happens to the kite when it's not windy? Someone would have to drive up to the plant and relaunch the kite. :/ My guess is that at the altitudes they're talking about, it's always windy enough to keep a kite aloft. An appropriately designed kite can stay up in very little -- or no -- wind. Search youtube for "indoor kite" for demonstrations.
I find it hard to see how this "kite" technology works. At such a height, any movement from the air foil would be diminished to a few degrees or less at the generator on the ground. Check this paper (PDF) about neural net / genetic algorithms for steering power kites.
"The common element between current proposed traction kites applications is that the aerodynamic forces developed by the kite are transferred via the lines to perform work at near-ground level. This could be either the direct acceleration of large masses such as cargo ships, or the turning of a dynamo as the taut lines slowly spool out from a reel."
For the reel dynamo, you'd have a power generating reeling out phase, and a power draining reeling in phase -- but for the latter phase you can depower the kite so you make an energy profit overall.
I find the idea of massive cargo ships towed by arrays of huge power kites much more thrilling, however.
In my case, I've looked at a couple of iPod competitors, all of which had terrible UIs. I didn't have the energy to keep looking and settled on the iPod, which has a "good enough" UI.
Once you've bought one, you're locked in by the accessory ecosystem. If I replace my old iPod with a non-iPod, I have to replace my spare charger, my car connector etc.
The one thing I reckon Apple's myriad MP3 competitors should do is form a coalition and define some hardware and software interface standards. Then you can benefit from a shared accessory ecosystem that could grow big enough to compete with Apple's.
Not even everyone with a TV in the UK pays a TV tax.
The letter of the law used to be that if your household contains any device that is CAPABLE of receiving terrestrial analogue or digital broadcasts, you were obliged to have a license. That is, even if you have an unplugged VCR in your loft, you should be paying (realistically, I'm sure any enforcer would turn a blind eye to this).
Another test, I *think* is when the music's loud, the room isn't acousically ideal, and there's background noise.
I've been to pubs where they're pumping out loud music that's competing with chatting/shouting punters. Often I can tell what song it is, but can't place the pitch -- which is really very frustrating -- and I suspect it's because they're playing MP3s from which important pitch cues have been compressed away.
From the article's summing up: And here's the really crazy part of the hardware issue: Apple designed the hardware and the software, and still, somehow, the Mac Mini was a mess. If the company has sole province over how the OS should run on a limited set of hardware, you'd think that it would know when 512MB of RAM isn't enough.
This is exactly true. I bought an original Mac mini with the base amount of RAM. This is sold as a "plug it in and go" computer; almost an appliance. It was basically unusable. The GUI would freeze up for ten seconds at a time. Fortunately, I'd ordered a 1GB stick from Crucial the same day I ordered the Mac -- I was just saving a few pounds by not paying Apple's RAM prices. The extra RAM fixed it, but I don't think it would have been unreasonable to send the machine back as unfit for its purpose.
The Mac Mini was also marketed as an iLife machine -- the implication being that you get iLife, and a machine designed to run it. Yet GarageBand can't manage to record more than a few bars of live input before bailing out in a very inelegant manner. iPhoto slows to a crawl with just a couple of thousand photos.
It's a nice machine if you stay within its capabilities (I now use mine as a Web browsing machine, a Bittorrent client, an iTunes library and a media server). But its marketing certainly implied it was suitable for jobs that it just isn't up to.
The newer ones may very well be more powerful. But has the software's demands increased to fill the gap? I don't want to pay to find out.
However I don't think porting it is a good idea, it simply isn't that special, the reason it is good is becasue it runs on the xbox, not anything else I disagree. In combination with the Xbox remote, XBMC is hands down the best media player I've used on any platform. It has a better UI than TiVo! Thanks to XBMC I was able to retire my CD player and my DVD player. Most of my TV watching is now AVIs streaming off the net.
XBMC is the most reliable video player I have -- it plays pretty much anything, including stuff that Windows Media Player and Quicktime (both on Mac and PC) choke on. Obviously, I could run MPlayer on my PC, but with XBMC I get Mplayer ready built with every codec and extension under the sun.
Not only that -- plugins and scripts -- in XBMC, I can use a script to access BBC "listen again" audio, or live streaming radio, or YouTube.
Here's something that blew my mind: I'd been irritated for a while that sometimes after downloading a torrent, I'd have to unRAR it. Then one day, I noticed that XBMC would let me browse into the RAR, and play directly from there, unpacking on the fly. Brilliant.
And the point is - one day my Xbox hardware will fail. I'll want to keep using XBMC. Instead of buying a new Xbox 1, I'll be able to buy something more powerful. Maybe a quiet PC, maybe a 360, maybe a PS3, maybe something else. I'd expect to gain enough power to decode HD content. Maybe in future it will accept a DTV card and replace the TiVo. Sure, there are alternatives out there -- Freevo, MythTV, but staying with the same UI will keep me and my girlfriend in a comfort zone. This is nothing but good news.
...can make up for the overwhelming load of crap that are the other tracks. I guess it's not inherently the game's fault though, the 80s wasn't a very good decade overall, popular music just happened to suffer the most. The 80s were a golden age for the sort of widdly hair metal that works well in Guitar Hero. I hope they're saving the best for later announcements though: some Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Europe...
"the program can "(partially) decode the image back to the DCT coefficients and recompress them with a much better algorithm then default Huffman coding." Whew, that makes me feel a bit dirty: detecting a file format an applying special rules. It's a bit like firewalls stepping out of their network-layer remit to mess about with application-layer protocols (e.g. to make FTP work over NAT).
Still, in both cases, it works; who can argue with that.
Repeated play degrades a record, while it doesn't really degrade a CD. True. But I read somewhere that regular play actually maintains vinyl records. In typical storage conditions (i.e. not a climate controlled archive), mould will grow in the groove. Playing the record every so often actually scrapes the mould out before it gets too deep.
Let's assume this is a "because it's there" hack, because as others have pointed out, if all you want is a large video screen, you'd be better off spending the time doing a McJob and spending the proceeds on a projector.
So, you're doing it because it would be kinda cool. Have a play with GGI. It's a portable graphics layer with various targets implemented. e.g. there are kernel targets for various graphics cards, a Windows target, a VNC target, etc.
What'll interest you is the display-tile target, which is a proxy target that splits its input into tiles and forwards them to a set of other targets.
So:
- find the most efficient way you can to display video on a GGI target. Mplayer can do it. here is a screenshot of mplayer tiled across a load of X windows via display-tile.
- Set up each of your displays to be a GGI target that your central box can display to (be it VNC, X, or something more original)
- configure display-tile to forward the right tiles to the right targets
- point mplayer at display-tile
- profit!
The tiles don't have to be a regular size. I'd quite like to see a video wall made up of various sized screens - a 32" TV here, a 17" monitor there, a PSP there, etc... maybe a vt100 in there displaying the aalib target...
Um, have you missed the single most important aspect of the game?
That is, people can collaboratively build levels, publish them online, play each other's levels co-operatively online, rate them, comment them, copy and change them...
Sony's idea is for this to become a Youtube-for-games sandbox.
And I think that's pretty cool. I think it's pretty cool in concept.
But YouTube videos can be endlessly different. Whereas a platformer level is just variations on a theme of moving from point A to point B by running and jumping.
I wish them the best of luck, and will watch with interest... we'll see.
Maybe I've missed something important, but I'm not sure I see how Little Big Planet is going to succeed.
Sure, all those high-def textures are very pretty. And the physics stuff is very clever. But watching the gameplay video, it's just a 2.5D platformer, and I'm not sure how the super-duper physics simulation is any more fun than the more basic mechanisms used in the previous generation of platformers.... which leaves us with the community aspect -- which I understand to mean that you can design your own levels and upload them so that other people can play them. It sounds appealing at first, but I started to think about how it would actually play out.
Sonic 2 is an excellent platformer. Let's hypothesise that someone hacked up a level design tool that outputs playable Sonic levels, and set up a web site so you could share the levels you designed. How soon am I going to get bored of playing new Sonic levels, most of which were designed by people who are/not/ expert level designers? I reckon, very soon.
Anyone who is old enough to remember when Commodore was a decent gaming platform has probably grown into the type of person who builds his own machines. Many will have got bored of tweaking and now be happy to buy a prebuilt machine -- sacrificing power and flexibility for convenience.
You only need to be 30 to remember Commodore with fondness. Whether that fondness will be enough for the brand to sell fairly ordinary PCs is another matter.
I certainly don't have time to listen to 100 bad tunes to find one good one.
I need filtering, or i'm just going to keep on listening to Zeppelin. Don't we all, don't we all.
But some people do have time: proper, music oriented, DJs. I'm talking about people like the late lamented John Peel, his BBC semi-replacement Huw Stephens, and many of the good people at Seatte's wonderful KEXP.
Now, Peel was broadcasting bands' self-issued vinyl releases back when that was the most open way of distributing your own music -- he'd read out the addresses of the homes where people had stacks of 7" singles waiting to ship out by mail order. This was stuff you couldn't hope to discover without him, and of course he must have listened to hours of crap in order to play us the gems.
The same kind of DJ is now gradually starting to dip into the world of internet-released content. Without people like them, most of us, as you rightly say, will never have the time or the energy to do our own filtering.
A subsidy? What ever happened "Let the market decide?", or are we learning to be like the communists now? There's a clear profit motive to this particular subsidy.
When you turn off analogue broadcasting, you suddenly get a great big frequency band that you can sell. Problem is, when you turn off analogue broadcasting, you are effectively taking something away from people. To mitigate this, you have to subsidise the replacement -- just to avoid being sued. But the resource you're freeing makes it more than worthwhile.
I've always liked Penrose tilings - and this reminded me. There's a small patch under my washbasin that would benefit from some decorative tiling. Does anywhere sell sets of Penrose tiles, ready to lay?
Otherwise I can tell I'm going to need to fire some myself, dammit!
In fact, the echos are bordering on being uncanny. I guess it all boils down to the question of whether somebody can just be "born bad".
The evidence both from this case (if the account here is to be believed) and my own experiences is "yes, they can". I'm not sure anybody in the political or academic estabishments really want to face up to the implications of this, though. My personal view on nature vs nurture is that it's probably a little bit of both.
There seems to be a lot of polarised "Was the kid just born that way" versus "The parents mould the kid" (putting "videogames" to one side for the moment). Freakonomics has an interesting view on this. I don't have the book in front of me, so I must paraphrase from memory, but it said that empirical evidence suggests that by a certain mid-teens kind of age, parents have very little influence on their kids compared to other factors -- peers, media, school etc. And, I have to say, that makes sense to me. By the time you're 6 years old, you're spending as much or more contact time with your peers than you are with your parents -- unless you're homeschooled of course.
Slashdot Mirror
(Sorry -- won't happen again).
"The common element between current proposed traction kites applications is that
the aerodynamic forces developed by the kite are transferred via the lines to perform
work at near-ground level. This could be either the direct acceleration of large masses
such as cargo ships, or the turning of a dynamo as the taut lines slowly spool out
from a reel."
For the reel dynamo, you'd have a power generating reeling out phase, and a power draining reeling in phase -- but for the latter phase you can depower the kite so you make an energy profit overall.
I find the idea of massive cargo ships towed by arrays of huge power kites much more thrilling, however.
Now put yourself in the position of The Edge's guitar tech, who has to restring and tune something like 20 guitars every gig.
Apple product costs more in UK than in US: news at 11.
As long as we keep buying, they'll keep the price where it is. Instead of whining, simply spend your money elsewhere. That's capitalism.
In my case, I've looked at a couple of iPod competitors, all of which had terrible UIs. I didn't have the energy to keep looking and settled on the iPod, which has a "good enough" UI.
Once you've bought one, you're locked in by the accessory ecosystem. If I replace my old iPod with a non-iPod, I have to replace my spare charger, my car connector etc.
The one thing I reckon Apple's myriad MP3 competitors should do is form a coalition and define some hardware and software interface standards. Then you can benefit from a shared accessory ecosystem that could grow big enough to compete with Apple's.
I imagine it has something of a carbon footprint. (But seriously, it only says it's environmentally friendly in comparisom to a nuke)
Not even everyone with a TV in the UK pays a TV tax.
k 1 says that you can notify the licensing authority in writing, if your TV is not used for watching TV...
The letter of the law used to be that if your household contains any device that is CAPABLE of receiving terrestrial analogue or digital broadcasts, you were obliged to have a license. That is, even if you have an unplugged VCR in your loft, you should be paying (realistically, I'm sure any enforcer would turn a blind eye to this).
There does seem to have been a change however -- http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/gethelp/faqs.jsp#lin
Another test, I *think* is when the music's loud, the room isn't acousically ideal, and there's background noise.
I've been to pubs where they're pumping out loud music that's competing with chatting/shouting punters. Often I can tell what song it is, but can't place the pitch -- which is really very frustrating -- and I suspect it's because they're playing MP3s from which important pitch cues have been compressed away.
... £1.40 plus the moral sting of buying the Mail on Sunday.
I think I'd rather pay full price.
From the article's summing up:
And here's the really crazy part of the hardware issue: Apple designed the hardware and the software, and still, somehow, the Mac Mini was a mess. If the company has sole province over how the OS should run on a limited set of hardware, you'd think that it would know when 512MB of RAM isn't enough.
This is exactly true. I bought an original Mac mini with the base amount of RAM. This is sold as a "plug it in and go" computer; almost an appliance. It was basically unusable. The GUI would freeze up for ten seconds at a time. Fortunately, I'd ordered a 1GB stick from Crucial the same day I ordered the Mac -- I was just saving a few pounds by not paying Apple's RAM prices. The extra RAM fixed it, but I don't think it would have been unreasonable to send the machine back as unfit for its purpose.
The Mac Mini was also marketed as an iLife machine -- the implication being that you get iLife, and a machine designed to run it. Yet GarageBand can't manage to record more than a few bars of live input before bailing out in a very inelegant manner. iPhoto slows to a crawl with just a couple of thousand photos.
It's a nice machine if you stay within its capabilities (I now use mine as a Web browsing machine, a Bittorrent client, an iTunes library and a media server). But its marketing certainly implied it was suitable for jobs that it just isn't up to.
The newer ones may very well be more powerful. But has the software's demands increased to fill the gap? I don't want to pay to find out.
XBMC is the most reliable video player I have -- it plays pretty much anything, including stuff that Windows Media Player and Quicktime (both on Mac and PC) choke on. Obviously, I could run MPlayer on my PC, but with XBMC I get Mplayer ready built with every codec and extension under the sun.
Not only that -- plugins and scripts -- in XBMC, I can use a script to access BBC "listen again" audio, or live streaming radio, or YouTube.
Here's something that blew my mind: I'd been irritated for a while that sometimes after downloading a torrent, I'd have to unRAR it. Then one day, I noticed that XBMC would let me browse into the RAR, and play directly from there, unpacking on the fly. Brilliant.
And the point is - one day my Xbox hardware will fail. I'll want to keep using XBMC. Instead of buying a new Xbox 1, I'll be able to buy something more powerful. Maybe a quiet PC, maybe a 360, maybe a PS3, maybe something else. I'd expect to gain enough power to decode HD content. Maybe in future it will accept a DTV card and replace the TiVo. Sure, there are alternatives out there -- Freevo, MythTV, but staying with the same UI will keep me and my girlfriend in a comfort zone. This is nothing but good news.
...can make up for the overwhelming load of crap that are the other tracks. I guess it's not inherently the game's fault though, the 80s wasn't a very good decade overall, popular music just happened to suffer the most. The 80s were a golden age for the sort of widdly hair metal that works well in Guitar Hero. I hope they're saving the best for later announcements though: some Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Europe...Still, in both cases, it works; who can argue with that.
Ah, technology I can actually understand
Let's assume this is a "because it's there" hack, because as others have pointed out, if all you want is a large video screen, you'd be better off spending the time doing a McJob and spending the proceeds on a projector.
So, you're doing it because it would be kinda cool. Have a play with GGI. It's a portable graphics layer with various targets implemented. e.g. there are kernel targets for various graphics cards, a Windows target, a VNC target, etc.
What'll interest you is the display-tile target, which is a proxy target that splits its input into tiles and forwards them to a set of other targets.
So:
- find the most efficient way you can to display video on a GGI target. Mplayer can do it. here is a screenshot of mplayer tiled across a load of X windows via display-tile.
- Set up each of your displays to be a GGI target that your central box can display to (be it VNC, X, or something more original)
- configure display-tile to forward the right tiles to the right targets
- point mplayer at display-tile
- profit!
The tiles don't have to be a regular size. I'd quite like to see a video wall made up of various sized screens - a 32" TV here, a 17" monitor there, a PSP there, etc... maybe a vt100 in there displaying the aalib target...
Fun!
That is, people can collaboratively build levels, publish them online, play each other's levels co-operatively online, rate them, comment them, copy and change them...
Sony's idea is for this to become a Youtube-for-games sandbox.
And I think that's pretty cool. I think it's pretty cool in concept.
But YouTube videos can be endlessly different. Whereas a platformer level is just variations on a theme of moving from point A to point B by running and jumping.
I wish them the best of luck, and will watch with interest... we'll see.
Maybe I've missed something important, but I'm not sure I see how Little Big Planet is going to succeed.
... which leaves us with the community aspect -- which I understand to mean that you can design your own levels and upload them so that other people can play them. It sounds appealing at first, but I started to think about how it would actually play out.
/not/ expert level designers? I reckon, very soon.
Sure, all those high-def textures are very pretty. And the physics stuff is very clever. But watching the gameplay video, it's just a 2.5D platformer, and I'm not sure how the super-duper physics simulation is any more fun than the more basic mechanisms used in the previous generation of platformers.
Sonic 2 is an excellent platformer. Let's hypothesise that someone hacked up a level design tool that outputs playable Sonic levels, and set up a web site so you could share the levels you designed. How soon am I going to get bored of playing new Sonic levels, most of which were designed by people who are
-- Bala Keilman, CEO for Commodore Gaming.
Best selling, fool!There's a CEO with vision for you. Best PC of the late 20th century.
You only need to be 30 to remember Commodore with fondness. Whether that fondness will be enough for the brand to sell fairly ordinary PCs is another matter.
I need filtering, or i'm just going to keep on listening to Zeppelin. Don't we all, don't we all.
But some people do have time: proper, music oriented, DJs.
I'm talking about people like the late lamented John Peel, his BBC semi-replacement Huw Stephens, and many of the good people at Seatte's wonderful KEXP.
Now, Peel was broadcasting bands' self-issued vinyl releases back when that was the most open way of distributing your own music -- he'd read out the addresses of the homes where people had stacks of 7" singles waiting to ship out by mail order. This was stuff you couldn't hope to discover without him, and of course he must have listened to hours of crap in order to play us the gems.
The same kind of DJ is now gradually starting to dip into the world of internet-released content. Without people like them, most of us, as you rightly say, will never have the time or the energy to do our own filtering.
... better block Slashdot while you're at it.
When you turn off analogue broadcasting, you suddenly get a great big frequency band that you can sell. Problem is, when you turn off analogue broadcasting, you are effectively taking something away from people. To mitigate this, you have to subsidise the replacement -- just to avoid being sued. But the resource you're freeing makes it more than worthwhile.
I've always liked Penrose tilings - and this reminded me. There's a small patch under my washbasin that would benefit from some decorative tiling. Does anywhere sell sets of Penrose tiles, ready to lay?
Otherwise I can tell I'm going to need to fire some myself, dammit!
The evidence both from this case (if the account here is to be believed) and my own experiences is "yes, they can". I'm not sure anybody in the political or academic estabishments really want to face up to the implications of this, though. My personal view on nature vs nurture is that it's probably a little bit of both.
There seems to be a lot of polarised "Was the kid just born that way" versus "The parents mould the kid" (putting "videogames" to one side for the moment). Freakonomics has an interesting view on this. I don't have the book in front of me, so I must paraphrase from memory, but it said that empirical evidence suggests that by a certain mid-teens kind of age, parents have very little influence on their kids compared to other factors -- peers, media, school etc. And, I have to say, that makes sense to me. By the time you're 6 years old, you're spending as much or more contact time with your peers than you are with your parents -- unless you're homeschooled of course.