Your kneejerk ill considered response thinking I was atacking hybrids is perplexing.
I said no such thing, and offered only a minor, polite correction. I did not in ANY way state that you were attacking hybrids. Perhaps you are referring to a different poster?
First I did mention you could turn off the engine if you were parked. however the idea you could turn it off when cuising is ass backward nonsense. When you are cruising, you MUST run the engine.
Actually, no. This depends on the particulars of the design. A first-gen civic hybrid is essentially a gas engine with a motor "booster," but even in this case the electric motor can indeed be off while the engine is running, effectively shutting off one of the two engines. A Prius or second-gen hybrid civic, on the other hand, can run both, electric-only, gas-only, or neither of the motors. *including* pure-electric cruising with no gas engine. I urge you to go test-drive one-- you can see this for yourself firsthand.
Right. So that means they get poorer efficiency that I described. if they ran at constant rates they could be tuned to get maximal efficiency.
No, it means that they chose a direct-drive design over one where power produced by the engine must go through conversion losses with the potential to go through a chemical conversion loss in the battery as well. Although a constant-rpm engine would be more efficient, it quickly loses its edge once it is used to drive a generator that goes through an inverter and a battery prior to arriving at the electric motor. Sure, it's an optimal RPM, but you've got three stages of conversion loss in your electrical system. When the engine drives the wheels, those conversion losses are eliminated.
So this is already included in everything I said.
What you said was, and I quote "Thus the sole benefit of hybrids is that it turns city driving inefficiency (stop and accelerate) into the equivalent of highway driving since the engine can run at a constant, efficeint, tuned point almost continuously."
Perhaps it was an honest mistake, but this sentence clearly states that you believe hybrid cars work by running the engine at a constant, tuned point during stop-and-go driving, and that this is their only benefit. I politely pointed out the actual benefits, and some gaps in your description of how they work.
What you are describing is in fact much closer to how a diesel-electric locomotive works, with the engine operating at a tuned RPM driving a generator to power a large electric drive motor.
I am not accusing you of not supporting hybrids, and only want to point out a few minor oversights.
Only 50mpg? Seriously? I guess I just always assumed bikes were getting something reasonable for their weight, considering plenty of cars have topped the 50mpg mark over the years.
I thought for sure you'd be seeing 100mpg or some such at a minimum! Some sort of real tradeoff for using your skin and bones as the crumple zones.
They are definitely roomier than you'd expect. I'm 6'2", and fit comfortably behind the driver even when the seat is all the way back AND partially reclined. I had more than 4" of knee clearance even with the drivers' seat tipped back like that.
It's significantly bigger than my Civic on the interior.
Thus the sole benefit of hybrids is that it turns city driving inefficiency (stop and accelerate) into the equivalent of highway driving since the engine can run at a constant, efficeint, tuned point almost continuously.
None of the currently available hybrids use a setup where the gas engine can run at constant RPM.
The benefits of the current drivetrain designs are as follows:
1. Your engine is the same total power, but now has two pieces. You can turn half of it off when both are not needed, such as when cruising.
2. In stop-and-go traffic, regenerative braking turns your kinetic energy back into stored power you can use to accelerate.
3. The large electric motor acts as an "instant starter" making it easy to shut down at stoplights and start up again seamlessly.
4. The high-torque electric motor lets the gas motor be run on the more efficient but less torquey atkinson cycle.
If you took something as innocuous as a Prius, and either bumped the size of the electric motor or added a second one (at the rear wheels, perhaps)-- you could build a hell of a fun car that was efficient, too.
As long as the electric motors could take a stupendous peak power for 20 seconds without melting, you could put down some truly stupendous torque and fly off the line. And the rest of the time you'd get 50mpg, since power like this is truly on-demand. There would be some slight additional weight to the car, but not enough to drastically change the fuel economy.
It is illegal to turn away people in "dire need" from emergency rooms in the US. It has been that way for some time, and the law is adhered to very strictly.
This is not a good thing, for two reasons.
1. There is no accompanying law to pick up the tab for the poor who use this service, and no collection agency can collect when there is no money to start with. It is NOT an equivalent to the UK system-- it is in fact forcing a private industry to subsidize public healthcare.
2. There is no nationwide system (private or otherwise) to give the poor general care. Without family doctors, guess where they take their sniffles, scrapes, and headaches? Sometimes, they even call an ambulance for these trifles because they don't have their own transportation.
The way our system is set up forces ERs to operate at a loss, drives the poor and uninsured to waste ER time. Sure, they're getting treated, but at dramatic cost to the efficacy of our emergency rooms for treating actual emergencies, including those of both the wealthy AND the poor.
It would cost us less to pay for their checkups than it does to pay for similar services rendered by an ER, and it would free the ER to treat genuine emergencies.
I'm responding to the grandparent post that has been modded into oblivion, not yours. The one where some fool said:
I know you'll shake your head at it like everybody does, but the typical vegetarian gets no cancer, never gets influenza (yes your flu last year could be avoided if you dumped meat) and will never have the depression, bowel disease, heart problems and overweight that inflict meat eaters!
I would like to point out that I was vegan for three years and vegetarian for ten, and that I enjoyed the flu a half-dozen times in that stretch. People making claims like this are idiots.
I eat a little fish now, on advice from several doctors who were kind enough to point to well-done studies that argued for the health benefits. There is no reason that eating some meat is bad for you. There are, however, problems with getting an excess of iron (in men), too much fat from the wrong meats in excess, and so forth-- but the same downsides are true of anything with a lot of bioavailable iron or fat.
Whether or not it's workable in the GPU depends on the bandwidth available. I'll admit I don't know what kind of utilization PCI Express busses are seeing with graphics accelerators these days, but for "interactive" physics calculations, the data will need a ton o' bandwidth to feed back into the game engine.
"Incidental" physics, like dust spray or blood spatter that don't affect the game at all except as eyecandy, can be done as a last step by the GPU with no feedback to the game whatsoever. Obstructions, objects large enough to cause damage, etc... will all have to be done in a manner where the results are calculated and both displayed *and* routed back to the engine so that the affect on gameplay can be assessed.
If there's room on the bus, you could do both. I honestly have no idea.
At orders of the fiancee, no less. Any way to reduce the number of electronic boxes cluttering up the living room is fine by her.
So, pending me finishing the basement, I use a console to play DVDs.
I'd be happy to pay extra, but I don't see why there needs to be a goofy hardware add-on. Can't I just pay Nintendo $5 to cover the CSS license and download the tiny software to the flash memory?
Heh-- we could build a border fence that would actually be useful! If we're gonna waste our time putting up a 1,000-mile wall everybody can climb over, we might as well put solar panels on it. Hell, you could even monitor panel output to see where somebody was climbing during the day.
Republicans: Yay! A border fence! Democrats: Yay! Solar power! Immigrants: This fence is MUCH easier on my hands than the old wire one!
A PV panel isn't like copper-- it can't be "melted down" and sold. You'd have to sell the actual panel, and it doesn't seem like it would be hard to watermark the silicon to close any black market that might arise-- think VIN numbers etched like the circuits in a microchip. The panels are, after all, big chunks of the same silicon. Hiding a few million ID numbers per panel ought to be easy, and you're not gonna file them off without destroying the panel.
If we cover everybody's rooftops in the first place, where are they gonna put the ones they steal? The hoarders should be easy to spot.:)
Vandalism, on the other hand, is a likely problem. I don't think it's one that makes the whole idea invalid-- it will lower the overall net efficiency, but I doubt even the most diligent vandals could paint over more than a tiny fraction of a nation-sized solar infrastructure, particularly when much of it is on the rooftops of individual homes. We don't have much of a problem with rooftop vandalism here, but I can't speak for the whole country. Perhaps there are roving gangs of shingle-taggers in suburban Nebraska I am unaware of.
I definitely want to see final cost numbers. Their target price is such a bargain that if they hit it, it would be cost effective compared to normal panels even if they're only a third as efficient. At half the performance, but a third the price-- these are still the dollar-per-watt winner.
But we all know that predicted prices and not-in-production experimental products have a way of not turning out like the rosy predictions their inventors make.
The biggest deal with this is that there is currently a supply bottleneck in getting enough good silicon to meet panel production demand, since it requires so much of it and they must compete with the chip industry. If they can suddenly use 1/10 the silicon, they can stretch their limited silicon supply into ten times the panel production. I hope this pans out, and that the patent holders license it to everyone they can find.
While panels may not be economically reasonable in most areas (they are cheaper to use than the grid in locations like Hawaii already), they are certainly net-positive on their production energy.
Depending on the type of panel you're talking about, the break-even time is 3-5 years, for panels that will last several decades. Show me another way to invest 3 watt-hours and get 20 watt-hours in return, and I'll be a wholehearted supporter of that, too. They are indeed energy-intensive to manufacture-- but they are also capable of producing energy above that many times over.
The particular design this article discusses would improve that payoff time by roughly 10x, as well-- going from five years to six months, since they're using a tenth of the silicon.
I agree with all of that. Parking lots could start small-- there is often an in-place array of streetlights, which could support a few square yards of panels each.
Roads would require the same sort of support structure a parking lot would, but you could start with interstate medians, where the panels could practically be laid on the ground. With four lanes on either side, the odds of the median being shaded are tiny. Additionally, one could attach panels to guardrails. They do not necessarily need to cover the road, but a one-foot-wide strip above the guardrails would be quite a piece of area once you installed it the entire length of a 1200-mile road.
"The net result being an overall photosynthetic efficiency of between 3 and 6% of total solar radiation."
"Typical solar panels have an average efficiency of 12%, with the best commercialy available panels at 20%, and recent prototype panels at around 30%."
My only argument is with your original post's generalization. I don't think anyone is arguing that the particular computer you bought didn't have a socketed CPU, and I certainly am not.
My apologies for jumping down your throat-- you didn't deserve my work-induced crankiness. I should have just politely pointed out that while your computer may not have been soldered together, such abominations have been around for years and persist to this day.
I believe you probably meant this, but your wording is a bit misleading.
You still need the same number of *panels* with this new technology. They are not more efficient per area than normal panels built with the same type of silicon, and probably slightly less due to loss in the diffraction.
But you need less silicon per panel, since most of the panel is just a cheap holographic diffraction grating that directs light towards the small strips of silicon.
You'll still need your whole roof, or whatever-- but it will cost less.
Sure, it would take an area the size of Maine, but how much land is already covered by one of the following?
1. Rooftops 2. Parking lots 3. Paved roads
I'd wager it's close to the area you need, and covering any of the above with solar panels would have little to no effect on anything, since the roads/roofs/lots are already nicely free of plant life that might want to use the sun.
No reason not to stick a little 400w wind turbine on every other streetlight pole, either.
The big limit is financial, and this solar development helps in a big way.
While not all cheap computers are like that, I've seen soldered-on CPU/Motherboard combos as recently as the Athlon 2000+ generation. Don't know if anybody's making one now, but even places like newegg used to carry them. I very nearly bought one for an HTPC, because they were unbeatably cheap.
Best Buy employees would benefit from the same advice as you-- just admit you don't know something, and nobody gets misinformed.
Good point, I forgot about that one. It's not an issue on the DirecTV Tivo units, since we don't have a quality setting.
I remember recordings at anything below "high" looking like crapola on my series 1, though-- has it improved? I didn't think they could tweak the codecs, since they're in hardware.
The DirecTV tivos, at least, have a power button. Why, I don't know-- since turning it off makes it not record anything. The power button just confuses things.
I could live without the dancing tivo guy, for sure.
What I *do* wish the tivo had is a wake-on-schedule setup for recordings. Why does the thing need to be "on" all the time? I have a cheapass HTPC that can hibernate itself and power up at a scheduled time to start a recording-- surely Tivo can do likewise. I could live without the unnecessary power usage and the (admittedly mild) fan noise.
I don't think you've tried enough DVRs. Tivo's buffer may be a measly 30 minutes, but if you hit "record," it copies everything in the buffer back in time to the beginning of the show you are watching.
There are still some gripes with the Tivo buffering system, but this isn't one of them. Gripes:
1. It's only 30 minutes 2. If you wait too long to hit record (ie, into the start of another show) you'll only get the airing show, not the buffered one. It should ask which one you want. 3. It clears the buffer on every channel change. (Annoying to some, beneficial to others-- perhaps a setting we could switch depending on preference?)
Oblivion has several attack moves, depending on your level of skill with a particular weapon.
Doesn't mean the physics don't bug me-- we had far better object behavior two years ago in HL2 on much slower hardware, but in Oblivion you have to watch your step or you might accidentally kick a 40-lb. warhammer 30 ft. away and off the edge of a cliff while you're trying to pick it up.
That's my only gripe. It *has* a rudimentary physics engine, but it treats everything like it weighs the same. Wads of paper can send suits of armor flying. An inadvertant step can fling the heaviest of objects well out of your reach.
It's a great game, but the physics needs a touchup. The worst wonkiness seems like it ought to be easily fixable.
Perhaps my post didn't come off the way I intended, but I agree with you. Nintendo's move is smart business-- if they can launch cheap enough, the strength of their first-party titles will drop them into a ton of homes.
I'm just a bit sad to see no HD this time around. I'm a minority, but I would have paid the markup for it.
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Your kneejerk ill considered response thinking I was atacking hybrids is perplexing.
I said no such thing, and offered only a minor, polite correction. I did not in ANY way state that you were attacking hybrids. Perhaps you are referring to a different poster?
First I did mention you could turn off the engine if you were parked. however the idea you could turn it off when cuising is ass backward nonsense. When you are cruising, you MUST run the engine.
Actually, no. This depends on the particulars of the design. A first-gen civic hybrid is essentially a gas engine with a motor "booster," but even in this case the electric motor can indeed be off while the engine is running, effectively shutting off one of the two engines. A Prius or second-gen hybrid civic, on the other hand, can run both, electric-only, gas-only, or neither of the motors. *including* pure-electric cruising with no gas engine. I urge you to go test-drive one-- you can see this for yourself firsthand.
Right. So that means they get poorer efficiency that I described. if they ran at constant rates they could be tuned to get maximal efficiency.
No, it means that they chose a direct-drive design over one where power produced by the engine must go through conversion losses with the potential to go through a chemical conversion loss in the battery as well. Although a constant-rpm engine would be more efficient, it quickly loses its edge once it is used to drive a generator that goes through an inverter and a battery prior to arriving at the electric motor. Sure, it's an optimal RPM, but you've got three stages of conversion loss in your electrical system. When the engine drives the wheels, those conversion losses are eliminated.
So this is already included in everything I said.
What you said was, and I quote "Thus the sole benefit of hybrids is that it turns city driving inefficiency (stop and accelerate) into the equivalent of highway driving since the engine can run at a constant, efficeint, tuned point almost continuously."
Perhaps it was an honest mistake, but this sentence clearly states that you believe hybrid cars work by running the engine at a constant, tuned point during stop-and-go driving, and that this is their only benefit. I politely pointed out the actual benefits, and some gaps in your description of how they work.
What you are describing is in fact much closer to how a diesel-electric locomotive works, with the engine operating at a tuned RPM driving a generator to power a large electric drive motor.
I am not accusing you of not supporting hybrids, and only want to point out a few minor oversights.
Only 50mpg? Seriously? I guess I just always assumed bikes were getting something reasonable for their weight, considering plenty of cars have topped the 50mpg mark over the years.
I thought for sure you'd be seeing 100mpg or some such at a minimum! Some sort of real tradeoff for using your skin and bones as the crumple zones.
They are definitely roomier than you'd expect. I'm 6'2", and fit comfortably behind the driver even when the seat is all the way back AND partially reclined. I had more than 4" of knee clearance even with the drivers' seat tipped back like that.
It's significantly bigger than my Civic on the interior.
Thus the sole benefit of hybrids is that it turns city driving inefficiency (stop and accelerate) into the equivalent of highway driving since the engine can run at a constant, efficeint, tuned point almost continuously.
None of the currently available hybrids use a setup where the gas engine can run at constant RPM.
The benefits of the current drivetrain designs are as follows:
1. Your engine is the same total power, but now has two pieces. You can turn half of it off when both are not needed, such as when cruising.
2. In stop-and-go traffic, regenerative braking turns your kinetic energy back into stored power you can use to accelerate.
3. The large electric motor acts as an "instant starter" making it easy to shut down at stoplights and start up again seamlessly.
4. The high-torque electric motor lets the gas motor be run on the more efficient but less torquey atkinson cycle.
If you took something as innocuous as a Prius, and either bumped the size of the electric motor or added a second one (at the rear wheels, perhaps)-- you could build a hell of a fun car that was efficient, too.
As long as the electric motors could take a stupendous peak power for 20 seconds without melting, you could put down some truly stupendous torque and fly off the line. And the rest of the time you'd get 50mpg, since power like this is truly on-demand. There would be some slight additional weight to the car, but not enough to drastically change the fuel economy.
It is illegal to turn away people in "dire need" from emergency rooms in the US. It has been that way for some time, and the law is adhered to very strictly.
This is not a good thing, for two reasons.
1. There is no accompanying law to pick up the tab for the poor who use this service, and no collection agency can collect when there is no money to start with. It is NOT an equivalent to the UK system-- it is in fact forcing a private industry to subsidize public healthcare.
2. There is no nationwide system (private or otherwise) to give the poor general care. Without family doctors, guess where they take their sniffles, scrapes, and headaches? Sometimes, they even call an ambulance for these trifles because they don't have their own transportation.
The way our system is set up forces ERs to operate at a loss, drives the poor and uninsured to waste ER time. Sure, they're getting treated, but at dramatic cost to the efficacy of our emergency rooms for treating actual emergencies, including those of both the wealthy AND the poor.
It would cost us less to pay for their checkups than it does to pay for similar services rendered by an ER, and it would free the ER to treat genuine emergencies.
I'm responding to the grandparent post that has been modded into oblivion, not yours. The one where some fool said:
I know you'll shake your head at it like everybody does, but the typical vegetarian gets no cancer, never gets influenza (yes your flu last year could be avoided if you dumped meat) and will never have the depression, bowel disease, heart problems and overweight that inflict meat eaters!
I would like to point out that I was vegan for three years and vegetarian for ten, and that I enjoyed the flu a half-dozen times in that stretch. People making claims like this are idiots.
I eat a little fish now, on advice from several doctors who were kind enough to point to well-done studies that argued for the health benefits. There is no reason that eating some meat is bad for you. There are, however, problems with getting an excess of iron (in men), too much fat from the wrong meats in excess, and so forth-- but the same downsides are true of anything with a lot of bioavailable iron or fat.
Meat does not magically cause the flu.
Whether or not it's workable in the GPU depends on the bandwidth available. I'll admit I don't know what kind of utilization PCI Express busses are seeing with graphics accelerators these days, but for "interactive" physics calculations, the data will need a ton o' bandwidth to feed back into the game engine.
"Incidental" physics, like dust spray or blood spatter that don't affect the game at all except as eyecandy, can be done as a last step by the GPU with no feedback to the game whatsoever. Obstructions, objects large enough to cause damage, etc... will all have to be done in a manner where the results are calculated and both displayed *and* routed back to the engine so that the affect on gameplay can be assessed.
If there's room on the bus, you could do both. I honestly have no idea.
At orders of the fiancee, no less. Any way to reduce the number of electronic boxes cluttering up the living room is fine by her.
So, pending me finishing the basement, I use a console to play DVDs.
I'd be happy to pay extra, but I don't see why there needs to be a goofy hardware add-on. Can't I just pay Nintendo $5 to cover the CSS license and download the tiny software to the flash memory?
I went to high school with that guy. Poor Richard.
Heh-- we could build a border fence that would actually be useful! If we're gonna waste our time putting up a 1,000-mile wall everybody can climb over, we might as well put solar panels on it. Hell, you could even monitor panel output to see where somebody was climbing during the day.
Republicans: Yay! A border fence!
Democrats: Yay! Solar power!
Immigrants: This fence is MUCH easier on my hands than the old wire one!
A PV panel isn't like copper-- it can't be "melted down" and sold. You'd have to sell the actual panel, and it doesn't seem like it would be hard to watermark the silicon to close any black market that might arise-- think VIN numbers etched like the circuits in a microchip. The panels are, after all, big chunks of the same silicon. Hiding a few million ID numbers per panel ought to be easy, and you're not gonna file them off without destroying the panel.
:)
If we cover everybody's rooftops in the first place, where are they gonna put the ones they steal? The hoarders should be easy to spot.
Vandalism, on the other hand, is a likely problem. I don't think it's one that makes the whole idea invalid-- it will lower the overall net efficiency, but I doubt even the most diligent vandals could paint over more than a tiny fraction of a nation-sized solar infrastructure, particularly when much of it is on the rooftops of individual homes. We don't have much of a problem with rooftop vandalism here, but I can't speak for the whole country. Perhaps there are roving gangs of shingle-taggers in suburban Nebraska I am unaware of.
I definitely want to see final cost numbers. Their target price is such a bargain that if they hit it, it would be cost effective compared to normal panels even if they're only a third as efficient. At half the performance, but a third the price-- these are still the dollar-per-watt winner.
But we all know that predicted prices and not-in-production experimental products have a way of not turning out like the rosy predictions their inventors make.
The biggest deal with this is that there is currently a supply bottleneck in getting enough good silicon to meet panel production demand, since it requires so much of it and they must compete with the chip industry. If they can suddenly use 1/10 the silicon, they can stretch their limited silicon supply into ten times the panel production. I hope this pans out, and that the patent holders license it to everyone they can find.
But I'm not holding my breath.
While panels may not be economically reasonable in most areas (they are cheaper to use than the grid in locations like Hawaii already), they are certainly net-positive on their production energy.
Depending on the type of panel you're talking about, the break-even time is 3-5 years, for panels that will last several decades. Show me another way to invest 3 watt-hours and get 20 watt-hours in return, and I'll be a wholehearted supporter of that, too. They are indeed energy-intensive to manufacture-- but they are also capable of producing energy above that many times over.
The particular design this article discusses would improve that payoff time by roughly 10x, as well-- going from five years to six months, since they're using a tenth of the silicon.
I agree with all of that. Parking lots could start small-- there is often an in-place array of streetlights, which could support a few square yards of panels each.
Roads would require the same sort of support structure a parking lot would, but you could start with interstate medians, where the panels could practically be laid on the ground. With four lanes on either side, the odds of the median being shaded are tiny. Additionally, one could attach panels to guardrails. They do not necessarily need to cover the road, but a one-foot-wide strip above the guardrails would be quite a piece of area once you installed it the entire length of a 1200-mile road.
Photosynthesis is well below the efficiency of commercially available solar panels.
"The net result being an overall photosynthetic efficiency of between 3 and 6% of total solar radiation."
"Typical solar panels have an average efficiency of 12%, with the best commercialy available panels at 20%, and recent prototype panels at around 30%."
My only argument is with your original post's generalization. I don't think anyone is arguing that the particular computer you bought didn't have a socketed CPU, and I certainly am not.
My apologies for jumping down your throat-- you didn't deserve my work-induced crankiness. I should have just politely pointed out that while your computer may not have been soldered together, such abominations have been around for years and persist to this day.
I believe you probably meant this, but your wording is a bit misleading.
You still need the same number of *panels* with this new technology. They are not more efficient per area than normal panels built with the same type of silicon, and probably slightly less due to loss in the diffraction.
But you need less silicon per panel, since most of the panel is just a cheap holographic diffraction grating that directs light towards the small strips of silicon.
You'll still need your whole roof, or whatever-- but it will cost less.
Sure, it would take an area the size of Maine, but how much land is already covered by one of the following?
1. Rooftops
2. Parking lots
3. Paved roads
I'd wager it's close to the area you need, and covering any of the above with solar panels would have little to no effect on anything, since the roads/roofs/lots are already nicely free of plant life that might want to use the sun.
No reason not to stick a little 400w wind turbine on every other streetlight pole, either.
The big limit is financial, and this solar development helps in a big way.
While not all cheap computers are like that, I've seen soldered-on CPU/Motherboard combos as recently as the Athlon 2000+ generation. Don't know if anybody's making one now, but even places like newegg used to carry them. I very nearly bought one for an HTPC, because they were unbeatably cheap.
Best Buy employees would benefit from the same advice as you-- just admit you don't know something, and nobody gets misinformed.
Good point, I forgot about that one. It's not an issue on the DirecTV Tivo units, since we don't have a quality setting.
I remember recordings at anything below "high" looking like crapola on my series 1, though-- has it improved? I didn't think they could tweak the codecs, since they're in hardware.
The DirecTV tivos, at least, have a power button. Why, I don't know-- since turning it off makes it not record anything. The power button just confuses things.
I could live without the dancing tivo guy, for sure.
What I *do* wish the tivo had is a wake-on-schedule setup for recordings. Why does the thing need to be "on" all the time? I have a cheapass HTPC that can hibernate itself and power up at a scheduled time to start a recording-- surely Tivo can do likewise. I could live without the unnecessary power usage and the (admittedly mild) fan noise.
I don't think you've tried enough DVRs. Tivo's buffer may be a measly 30 minutes, but if you hit "record," it copies everything in the buffer back in time to the beginning of the show you are watching.
There are still some gripes with the Tivo buffering system, but this isn't one of them. Gripes:
1. It's only 30 minutes
2. If you wait too long to hit record (ie, into the start of another show) you'll only get the airing show, not the buffered one. It should ask which one you want.
3. It clears the buffer on every channel change. (Annoying to some, beneficial to others-- perhaps a setting we could switch depending on preference?)
Oblivion has several attack moves, depending on your level of skill with a particular weapon.
Doesn't mean the physics don't bug me-- we had far better object behavior two years ago in HL2 on much slower hardware, but in Oblivion you have to watch your step or you might accidentally kick a 40-lb. warhammer 30 ft. away and off the edge of a cliff while you're trying to pick it up.
That's my only gripe. It *has* a rudimentary physics engine, but it treats everything like it weighs the same. Wads of paper can send suits of armor flying. An inadvertant step can fling the heaviest of objects well out of your reach.
It's a great game, but the physics needs a touchup. The worst wonkiness seems like it ought to be easily fixable.
Perhaps my post didn't come off the way I intended, but I agree with you. Nintendo's move is smart business-- if they can launch cheap enough, the strength of their first-party titles will drop them into a ton of homes.
I'm just a bit sad to see no HD this time around. I'm a minority, but I would have paid the markup for it.