Last I checked, I didn't breath in ordinary soil, and I had to have the decay products of that uranium in the soil (radon and radioactive lead) pumped out of the air in my house in order not to get lung cancer.
Not only that, but all the carbon that makes up the majority of the coal gets burnt off in the power plant, so the concentration of uranium is *much* higher in the soot.
Let's not all try and smear the boards with the anti-nuke lobby's propaganda, shall we?
That's silly Amazon crap. They have PC CD-ROM as the platform like where they'd put "PS2" or "GC" if it were for a console. That makes it so a game that comes out on DVD-ROM ends up having conflicting acronyms in the description. It looks right on the item page, but it always looks screwy in the e-mail if you have it set to 'plain text'.
This item is particularly bad because "(DVD)" is part of the name, so you get "(DVD)" (title) "[CD-ROM]" (platform), "[DVD-ROM]" (media).
It's just concerning when I read about Blu-Ray players debuting at $1,000 while HD-DVD players will [supposedly] be at $500
If you ignore licensing, the manufacturing costs of the two will be identical. The expensive component, the 405nm laser, is shared between the two formats, and the rest of the works are essentially the same as what's in a regular DVD drive. The difference between the two formats will end up being a firmware change in the second generation drives, and probably even in many first generation drives too.
February is a time period commonly reffered to as "Mid-Winter".
Late spring is 4 months from now. 16 weeks. Not 8. The first day of spring is March 21st. A full month from today.
That's 19 weeks. So, sometime in the next 19 weeks, we would expect to see:
1. A complete list of launch titles.
The complete list of Xbox 360 launch titles didn't exist until after the launch when we all saw what was on the shelf and what wasn't. Why should Sony rush?
7. A full marketing and advertising press, including print, television, and web advertising. This needs to happen MONTHS before launch so that people will know this important product is coming soon.
Clearly the existance of articles like this means the hype machine is.... off?
If Sony releases the PS3 for less than $500 and it includes fully functioning Blu-Ray movie playback, wouldn't that really piss off their hardware partners?
If the PS3 is a "fully functioning BluRay player" in the same way that the PS2 was a fully functioning DVD player, there won't be an issue. Also, if Blu-Ray starts to catch on, the prices won't stay in the $1000+ range for more than a few weeks before a price war kicks in. $99 DVD players were available before the PS2 launch even with all the talk about how the PS2 was going to undercut DVD player prices. Analysts, the ones you don't have to pay to get opinions from anyway, are usually full of shit.
What are the drawbacks, difficulties and limitations of MDA?
I wish I had a dollar for every time somebody in charge of "the model" (multiple people from different projects at different companies) told me that the requested change wasn't possible because the tool didn't support that, leading the feature to be devloped by a macro around the generated code, or in duplication of hand generated accessor transformation across a large code base, or worse.
If you have a cookie cutter project, it's great. If you don't your tool becomes the ball and chain. Make sure the tool you pick has the features you need, and make sure there isn't a zealot in charge of tool selection.
I'm 21, so I'm not caught in the middle of this situation anymore
Yes you are. The AO rating essentially amounts to censorship, since stores are unwilling to sell titles with such a rating. Games that might have interested you in that category are altered to be suitable to a 15 year old, or are never published. You may be 21, but because people have decided that it's not their job to raise their children themselves, you are essentially treated like a 15 year old when you go to purchase games.
There shouldn't be a number, or a letter, or any sort of catagorization on games/movies/whatever. The label should say what kind of content is in the game, and people should decide for themselves what is appropriate for them or their children to experience. Parenting isn't a governement entitlement program.
Make that HALO 2, DOA 3, DOAX, DOA Ultimate, Project Gotham Racing, Project Gotham Racing 2, Jade Empire, Jet Set Radio Future, Sega GT Online, and Rallisport Challenge 2 since we're talking about exclusives only here (he said "missed out because I don't have an XBox"
Presumably he only "missed" games that he actually wanted to play.
# 1 x NetApp 630 with 1.1TB of disk serving both NFS and CIFS
Why don't you sell that, replace it with $500 worth of stuff, and pay off your mortgage? Or at least your power bill?
And if you think that comes close to being a data center sized installation, clearly you don't know what a datacenter is. You're more like the server closet at a small business at this point.... And you're wasting a ton of energy.
High margins on accessories - batteries, cables, adapters
Just a little too high, or they might not be in trouble...
I don't mind paying a little extra to get an adaptor/cable/tool/power supply/etc... at a convienient location up the street. The key word there is "little". Radio Shack has passed the pricepoint where it's worth driving the extra distance to a larger discount store to get what I need instead of shelling out the few extra bucks to get it near by.
When it's $45 for a 6' firewire cable that I need *right now*, for example, at Radio Shack, I'm inclined to drive to Framingham (20 Miles) to get the cable at CompUSA and use the $40 I have left over to go out to dinner. Somewhere between the 100% markup and the 1000% markup is where they lost me.
"We refuse to allow you to access our content unless you do X and Y", then you either do X and Y, or break the DMCA and end up in jail."
There are several other options. They are painfully obvious unless you've bought into the lies of the content distribution cartels.
You don't do X and Y and you don't get access to the content, but your don't cripple your cash-cow product either. You don't do X and Y and the distributors realize that they're not making any money so you get access to the content anyway in the long run. You propose Z and negotiate terms that don't screw over your customers. You start distributing content yourself and bypass the cartels entirely.
Come up with a valid counter-point or I refuse to reply to your comments.
But this really is a hit-driven industry, and so far Microsoft's only homer is Xbox Live.
If it's a "homer", then why isn't it very popular?
The concept of online gaming just doen't appeal to, well, most people, and the types of people who do play online right now in the types of game available on a console don't really provide an experience that makes pepole come around. Combine that with parents who don't want their kids gaming online due to language, etc... and you'll see that relying on Live too much is going to be a problem. Subscriptions to Live were a tiny fraction of Xbox owners, who were a tiny fraction of the console gaming market. The numbers seem higher for the 360 right now, but you have to remember that only the hardcore Xbox fans have a 360 right now, and that percentage will probably come down a bit as your average gamers pick up a 360.
"Online" doesn't make a game good. The game has to be good to begin with, and good games sell consoles, not the connectivity.
I know all about what you're talking about, and you mis-understand what I'm saying.
There is no reason you can't be a sucessful inventor, and become wealthy as an inventor with a series of quality inventions that the market is ready for. I don't deny that Kamen has those skills, and that he has been wildly successful. Edison, however, had the skill of being able to take something that the market wasn't ready for, solve all the problems around it as well as making the initial discovery, and build an industry that made even the some of the worst of his inventions a success. That's before you even get into how some of his inventions have been the most influential forces in modern technology (like the vacuum tube), unlike what Kamen has done. Edison's inventions have an effect on everybody alive today, where Kaman's inventions are specialized devices that probably won't be used by the vast majority of people.
Anyway, there is no modern single person that is the equivalent of Edison, because what we think of as Edison wasn't one man anyway. A large amount of what we consider to be Edison's inventions were actually creations of his company, and the inventors in his employ. If you were looking for a candidate, though, I would have put forward names like Robert Noyce, or Jack Kilby instead... Except instead of thinking of him when we use his inventions, we think of Intel and Texas Instruments. That, and they're not alive anymore... Details.
the closest thing we have to a Thomas Edison in our generation.
Edison's skill was not just the creation of novel devices, but the creation of the infrsastructure and market manipulation that went along with making the novel part of his invention a success. In that respect Kamen, smart as he is, is as far from Thomas Edison as you can get.
You have to be able to do more than invent to be in the same league as Edison.
So unfortunately MS and the rest of the PC industry has had to bend to their will or not allow HD content to be recorded or time-shifted on your PC.
No they don't. The consumer electronics and computer indyustries are bigger than the media distribution companies. Not only that, but it's the media companies that will suffer if Microsoft doesn't support this shit, not Microsoft.
they have been fighting the good fight in this case, trying to protect consumers rights to record and time-shift media on multiple PCs
That's total crap. They've given in to the will of the content companies because they're sympathetic due to their own piracy issues, and because they need to play nice with the media companies for now if they want to embrace and extend them out of existance in the future. They care about everybody *but* the consumer.
I think the complaints about piracy are actually developers being optimistic that there is actually somebody out there running their buggy pieces of trash.
The support of HDCP is not an optional thing -- the content will not be available without it
You think that without the requested protections, the content industry would pack up and go home? Nope. They'd keep doing their thing, and just bitch a lot.
If the HDCP protected formats fail, the content will become available on the non protected formats.
Since most, if not all, computer monitors do not support HDCP right now, that'll be the place there will be issues. But none of them will cause HDCP to fail.
If there is sufficient uproar amongst consumers that adoption of HDCP compliant equipment doesn't occur than HDCP will fail, or the content distribution industry will go out of business.
People's computers will either work with it, or they'll have to buy new ones.
Two days after HDCP gets in the way of a savvy user, a firmware hack for video cards will be out that tells the OS that HDCP has been enabled even when it hasn't.
If sufficient chaos ensues, perhaps this can be the issue that pulls HDCP requirements out of Windows. Without support from Microsoft (who has no real financial interest in HDCP), HDCP will probably fail in the marketplace.
Hopefully this little 'mishap' will be the thing that makes it such that all our new LCD monitors aren't obsolete after all.
I know some people (even musicians!) who are just fine with listening to 64kbps mp3s, and can tell the difference between that and 192kbps
Some people listen for the music, not the sound quality.
That's why there are people who are content to listen to a recording of a great artist on a scratchy old 78. They can hear the quality of the art even if it's not being faithfully reproduced by the equipment or media.
Similarly, there are people who obscess over the technical abilities of their equipment so much that the either never get around to enjoying some music/video on it, or are so trained to notice the technical flaws that it distracts them from the art beyond the point of enjoyment.
There are plenty of people that aren't one extreme or the other too. I like to call those people 'sane'.
ar from it. All of the components of a space elevator will be revolutionary, not just the ribbon. The climber's mechanical parts have to work flawlessly for about 100,000 km.
That's all well and true, but none of this is all that impressive on the tiny scale they're currently working at. Cables longer than this hold up bridges all over the world (before you get some bridge lengths to dispute, remember that the cables are much longer than the bridges), and the mechanical climbers that install those cable strand by strand have climbed much higher than a few hundred feet to pull it off decades ago. When they get the climber up a a few miles on a cable that's light and thin enough to not break under it's own weight, then I'll be impressed with their cable and their climber technology. Until then, this is a much more interesting and technologically advanced project, and it's cables will be more than twice the length this elevator test is using.
What these will really be used for is actually more similar to what laser pointers are used for.
Now when you go to a concert, instead of seeing the laser dots of childish pranksters on various surfaces, you'll be treated to the Goatse pic, and your favorite rockstar getting boned by an enormous laser penis.
That makes sense to me if there are 2048x1280 laser sources, i.e., one for each pixel.
No need. Think about how a CRT works. You aim the laser at each of those pixels for a fraction of a second, scanning the entire surface, and repeat fast enough for it to look to your eye like all the pixels are lit at once. In theory... But then there's more to it, which brings us to:
how do you get around the diffraction problem where the light from one pixel gets spread out over the other pixels?
From their release, it sounds like they have some dynamic "holographic" film that allows the beam, which is larger than a single pixel, to be filtered such that it displays multiple pixels within the beam, all while remaining cohesive. Think like the little lenses that they have to cover the ends of cheapy laser pointers, but can be changed on the fly with electronics.
Even a nice, collimated laser beam gives you a narrow waist only in a certain region, then spreads out from there.
That's why you have to put "infinite" in quotes. It would be infinite in a vacuum, in real life in an atmosphere it will actually only be in focus from zero to the point where diffusion due to the medium the beam is passing through becomes too great. It's still infinite in that there are an infinite number of distances within the finite range, but it's not infinite in that it'll still be in focus some rediculous distance away from the projector.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I checked, I didn't breath in ordinary soil, and I had to have the decay products of that uranium in the soil (radon and radioactive lead) pumped out of the air in my house in order not to get lung cancer.
Not only that, but all the carbon that makes up the majority of the coal gets burnt off in the power plant, so the concentration of uranium is *much* higher in the soot.
Let's not all try and smear the boards with the anti-nuke lobby's propaganda, shall we?
That's silly Amazon crap. They have PC CD-ROM as the platform like where they'd put "PS2" or "GC" if it were for a console. That makes it so a game that comes out on DVD-ROM ends up having conflicting acronyms in the description. It looks right on the item page, but it always looks screwy in the e-mail if you have it set to 'plain text'.
This item is particularly bad because "(DVD)" is part of the name, so you get "(DVD)" (title) "[CD-ROM]" (platform), "[DVD-ROM]" (media).
Oblivion, Bethesda's upcoming RPG, doesn't quite have a release date yet.
I recently recieved the following E-mail from Amazon:
We are pleased to report that the following item will ship
sooner than expected:
"Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Collector's Edition (DVD) [CD-ROM]"
[DVD-ROM]
The new date listed in the order details is 3/20/2006.
Perhaps it's only the 360 version that doesn't have a date yet...
It's just concerning when I read about Blu-Ray players debuting at $1,000 while HD-DVD players will [supposedly] be at $500
If you ignore licensing, the manufacturing costs of the two will be identical. The expensive component, the 405nm laser, is shared between the two formats, and the rest of the works are essentially the same as what's in a regular DVD drive. The difference between the two formats will end up being a firmware change in the second generation drives, and probably even in many first generation drives too.
It's late February NOW. "Spring" probably means
February is a time period commonly reffered to as "Mid-Winter".
Late spring is 4 months from now. 16 weeks. Not 8. The first day of spring is March 21st. A full month from today.
That's 19 weeks. So, sometime in the next 19 weeks, we would expect to see:
1. A complete list of launch titles.
The complete list of Xbox 360 launch titles didn't exist until after the launch when we all saw what was on the shelf and what wasn't. Why should Sony rush?
7. A full marketing and advertising press, including print, television, and web advertising. This needs to happen MONTHS before launch so that people will know this important product is coming soon.
Clearly the existance of articles like this means the hype machine is.... off?
9. Preorders offered at major game retailers.
Hell, you could do that *months* ago.
If Sony releases the PS3 for less than $500 and it includes fully functioning Blu-Ray movie playback, wouldn't that really piss off their hardware partners?
If the PS3 is a "fully functioning BluRay player" in the same way that the PS2 was a fully functioning DVD player, there won't be an issue. Also, if Blu-Ray starts to catch on, the prices won't stay in the $1000+ range for more than a few weeks before a price war kicks in. $99 DVD players were available before the PS2 launch even with all the talk about how the PS2 was going to undercut DVD player prices. Analysts, the ones you don't have to pay to get opinions from anyway, are usually full of shit.
What are the drawbacks, difficulties and limitations of MDA?
I wish I had a dollar for every time somebody in charge of "the model" (multiple people from different projects at different companies) told me that the requested change wasn't possible because the tool didn't support that, leading the feature to be devloped by a macro around the generated code, or in duplication of hand generated accessor transformation across a large code base, or worse.
If you have a cookie cutter project, it's great. If you don't your tool becomes the ball and chain. Make sure the tool you pick has the features you need, and make sure there isn't a zealot in charge of tool selection.
I'm 21, so I'm not caught in the middle of this situation anymore
Yes you are. The AO rating essentially amounts to censorship, since stores are unwilling to sell titles with such a rating. Games that might have interested you in that category are altered to be suitable to a 15 year old, or are never published. You may be 21, but because people have decided that it's not their job to raise their children themselves, you are essentially treated like a 15 year old when you go to purchase games.
There shouldn't be a number, or a letter, or any sort of catagorization on games/movies/whatever. The label should say what kind of content is in the game, and people should decide for themselves what is appropriate for them or their children to experience. Parenting isn't a governement entitlement program.
Make that HALO 2, DOA 3, DOAX, DOA Ultimate, Project Gotham Racing, Project Gotham Racing 2, Jade Empire, Jet Set Radio Future, Sega GT Online, and Rallisport Challenge 2 since we're talking about exclusives only here (he said "missed out because I don't have an XBox"
Presumably he only "missed" games that he actually wanted to play.
# 1 x NetApp 630 with 1.1TB of disk serving both NFS and CIFS
Why don't you sell that, replace it with $500 worth of stuff, and pay off your mortgage? Or at least your power bill?
And if you think that comes close to being a data center sized installation, clearly you don't know what a datacenter is. You're more like the server closet at a small business at this point.... And you're wasting a ton of energy.
High margins on accessories - batteries, cables, adapters
Just a little too high, or they might not be in trouble...
I don't mind paying a little extra to get an adaptor/cable/tool/power supply/etc... at a convienient location up the street. The key word there is "little". Radio Shack has passed the pricepoint where it's worth driving the extra distance to a larger discount store to get what I need instead of shelling out the few extra bucks to get it near by.
When it's $45 for a 6' firewire cable that I need *right now*, for example, at Radio Shack, I'm inclined to drive to Framingham (20 Miles) to get the cable at CompUSA and use the $40 I have left over to go out to dinner. Somewhere between the 100% markup and the 1000% markup is where they lost me.
"We refuse to allow you to access our content unless you do X and Y", then you either do X and Y, or break the DMCA and end up in jail."
There are several other options. They are painfully obvious unless you've bought into the lies of the content distribution cartels.
You don't do X and Y and you don't get access to the content, but your don't cripple your cash-cow product either.
You don't do X and Y and the distributors realize that they're not making any money so you get access to the content anyway in the long run.
You propose Z and negotiate terms that don't screw over your customers.
You start distributing content yourself and bypass the cartels entirely.
Come up with a valid counter-point or I refuse to reply to your comments.
You're doing really well with that.
But this really is a hit-driven industry, and so far Microsoft's only homer is Xbox Live.
If it's a "homer", then why isn't it very popular?
The concept of online gaming just doen't appeal to, well, most people, and the types of people who do play online right now in the types of game available on a console don't really provide an experience that makes pepole come around. Combine that with parents who don't want their kids gaming online due to language, etc... and you'll see that relying on Live too much is going to be a problem. Subscriptions to Live were a tiny fraction of Xbox owners, who were a tiny fraction of the console gaming market. The numbers seem higher for the 360 right now, but you have to remember that only the hardcore Xbox fans have a 360 right now, and that percentage will probably come down a bit as your average gamers pick up a 360.
"Online" doesn't make a game good. The game has to be good to begin with, and good games sell consoles, not the connectivity.
"We refuse to allow you to access our content unless you do X and Y", then you either do X and Y, or break the DMCA and end up in jail."
Are you really that small minded?
Think real hard and perhaps you'll see the other options.
I know all about what you're talking about, and you mis-understand what I'm saying.
There is no reason you can't be a sucessful inventor, and become wealthy as an inventor with a series of quality inventions that the market is ready for. I don't deny that Kamen has those skills, and that he has been wildly successful. Edison, however, had the skill of being able to take something that the market wasn't ready for, solve all the problems around it as well as making the initial discovery, and build an industry that made even the some of the worst of his inventions a success. That's before you even get into how some of his inventions have been the most influential forces in modern technology (like the vacuum tube), unlike what Kamen has done. Edison's inventions have an effect on everybody alive today, where Kaman's inventions are specialized devices that probably won't be used by the vast majority of people.
Anyway, there is no modern single person that is the equivalent of Edison, because what we think of as Edison wasn't one man anyway. A large amount of what we consider to be Edison's inventions were actually creations of his company, and the inventors in his employ. If you were looking for a candidate, though, I would have put forward names like Robert Noyce, or Jack Kilby instead... Except instead of thinking of him when we use his inventions, we think of Intel and Texas Instruments. That, and they're not alive anymore... Details.
the closest thing we have to a Thomas Edison in our generation.
Edison's skill was not just the creation of novel devices, but the creation of the infrsastructure and market manipulation that went along with making the novel part of his invention a success. In that respect Kamen, smart as he is, is as far from Thomas Edison as you can get.
You have to be able to do more than invent to be in the same league as Edison.
So unfortunately MS and the rest of the PC industry has had to bend to their will or not allow HD content to be recorded or time-shifted on your PC.
No they don't. The consumer electronics and computer indyustries are bigger than the media distribution companies. Not only that, but it's the media companies that will suffer if Microsoft doesn't support this shit, not Microsoft.
they have been fighting the good fight in this case, trying to protect consumers rights to record and time-shift media on multiple PCs
That's total crap. They've given in to the will of the content companies because they're sympathetic due to their own piracy issues, and because they need to play nice with the media companies for now if they want to embrace and extend them out of existance in the future. They care about everybody *but* the consumer.
I think the complaints about piracy are actually developers being optimistic that there is actually somebody out there running their buggy pieces of trash.
The support of HDCP is not an optional thing -- the content will not be available without it
You think that without the requested protections, the content industry would pack up and go home? Nope. They'd keep doing their thing, and just bitch a lot.
If the HDCP protected formats fail, the content will become available on the non protected formats.
Since most, if not all, computer monitors do not support HDCP right now, that'll be the place there will be issues. But none of them will cause HDCP to fail.
If there is sufficient uproar amongst consumers that adoption of HDCP compliant equipment doesn't occur than HDCP will fail, or the content distribution industry will go out of business.
People's computers will either work with it, or they'll have to buy new ones.
Two days after HDCP gets in the way of a savvy user, a firmware hack for video cards will be out that tells the OS that HDCP has been enabled even when it hasn't.
If sufficient chaos ensues, perhaps this can be the issue that pulls HDCP requirements out of Windows. Without support from Microsoft (who has no real financial interest in HDCP), HDCP will probably fail in the marketplace.
Hopefully this little 'mishap' will be the thing that makes it such that all our new LCD monitors aren't obsolete after all.
I know some people (even musicians!) who are just fine with listening to 64kbps mp3s, and can tell the difference between that and 192kbps
Some people listen for the music, not the sound quality.
That's why there are people who are content to listen to a recording of a great artist on a scratchy old 78. They can hear the quality of the art even if it's not being faithfully reproduced by the equipment or media.
Similarly, there are people who obscess over the technical abilities of their equipment so much that the either never get around to enjoying some music/video on it, or are so trained to notice the technical flaws that it distracts them from the art beyond the point of enjoyment.
There are plenty of people that aren't one extreme or the other too. I like to call those people 'sane'.
You can build up the reliability of a climber on any scale. Just have it go up and down a bazillion times.
and
Very, very different engineering concerns (and "1500 feet" is not "a few hundred", unless your definition of "a few" is somehow "15").
Which is it?
You're also not testing the climber very well if you're not testing it on a representative cable.
ar from it. All of the components of a space elevator will be revolutionary, not just the ribbon. The climber's mechanical parts have to work flawlessly for about 100,000 km.
That's all well and true, but none of this is all that impressive on the tiny scale they're currently working at. Cables longer than this hold up bridges all over the world (before you get some bridge lengths to dispute, remember that the cables are much longer than the bridges), and the mechanical climbers that install those cable strand by strand have climbed much higher than a few hundred feet to pull it off decades ago. When they get the climber up a a few miles on a cable that's light and thin enough to not break under it's own weight, then I'll be impressed with their cable and their climber technology. Until then, this is a much more interesting and technologically advanced project, and it's cables will be more than twice the length this elevator test is using.
Hmm good clean fun....
What these will really be used for is actually more similar to what laser pointers are used for.
Now when you go to a concert, instead of seeing the laser dots of childish pranksters on various surfaces, you'll be treated to the Goatse pic, and your favorite rockstar getting boned by an enormous laser penis.
Yay technology!
That makes sense to me if there are 2048x1280 laser sources, i.e., one for each pixel.
No need. Think about how a CRT works. You aim the laser at each of those pixels for a fraction of a second, scanning the entire surface, and repeat fast enough for it to look to your eye like all the pixels are lit at once. In theory... But then there's more to it, which brings us to:
how do you get around the diffraction problem where the light from one pixel gets spread out over the other pixels?
From their release, it sounds like they have some dynamic "holographic" film that allows the beam, which is larger than a single pixel, to be filtered such that it displays multiple pixels within the beam, all while remaining cohesive. Think like the little lenses that they have to cover the ends of cheapy laser pointers, but can be changed on the fly with electronics.
Even a nice, collimated laser beam gives you a narrow waist only in a certain region, then spreads out from there.
That's why you have to put "infinite" in quotes. It would be infinite in a vacuum, in real life in an atmosphere it will actually only be in focus from zero to the point where diffusion due to the medium the beam is passing through becomes too great. It's still infinite in that there are an infinite number of distances within the finite range, but it's not infinite in that it'll still be in focus some rediculous distance away from the projector.