All the names listed above do the trick and a special note goes out to the cognitive scientists: Pinker, Dennett, Minsky, etc.
Carl Sagan was an even rarer breed though. More than just popularizing science: making it understandable and curious, he brought it to a deeper almost spiritual level and let you see both how your day to day life was a part of something so unimaginably huge and fantastic while simultaniously making a good case for our species to push the frontiers.
I don't think anyone can compare. If I had to try I'd pick Michio Kaku, he's a definitely more down to Earth than Sagan, but still great.
P.S. For a bit of history and sociology in the mix I really really suggest you pick up Connections (Season 1) and The Day the Universe Changed by James Burke. It stands beside Cosmos as my favorite TV series and will get your kids interested in economics, sociology and history on top of science.
I'm totally ignorant of the sun/enterprise space of computing hardware. What are these architectures good at that x64/GPGPU aren't going to cover? I've seen in my own career things like SGI Oynx and even high-end rendering cards go to the wayside in favor of standard COTS hardware that is more agile, refreshes more frequently and is blazing fast...
FFS $4400 on "Voltage stabalizer" and only $1600 on speakers!? FFS people if your gonna waste money don't do it on the boogie man. Spending almost 3 times as much on a power bar as you do on the A in the A/V...
[Penny-arcade comic about the power/voltage cooties would go here if their archives weren't down right now]
As someone who works in academia I really believe research is crying for something like this. You hear that anecdotal stat that the average published paper (conference or journal) is read ONCE. There is so much information out there that is going unused and with so much research going on getting out there in an easy to access and digestible format is key.
Any system that makes academic papers more digestible is a benefit for three reasons:
1) Researchers. Youtube like social networking amongst peers can boost awareness of research and give researchers a better sense of the "field" to dig into when doing background research allowing them to find relevant works quickly. It also does the opposite allowing them to spark others interest in their work so it doesn't get retired to the shelf. Even when reading papers in your own field understanding complex methods and results can sometimes be hard to digest if unclear writing is involved. A video (mainly of the researcher explaining things in their own spoken words) is worth a thousand words.
2) Business. Putting businesses in touch with research and programs relevant to them. This is a win/win. Companies get information that betters their products and services and hopefully in return they provide much needed research dollars to those doing the work.
3) The general public. Keeping the general public in the loop is important for countless reasons. Two of them being it lets them see where there tax research dollars are going and why they should support such funding and also because hopefully it will inspire people to take interest in the goings on of higher education and ward of general stupidity. It always brightens my day to see science videos of cool physics research or psychology tricks littered in with sports highlights and comedy clips. Even if it only raises peoples awareness slightly I think its worth it.
I agree and do it in H.264 HD while they are at it. After the shift to all HD equipment I don't want to back down to SD streaming. The Xbox market place stuff is a good start (though not in Canada yet), but it has the fatal flaw of being stored on the Xbox. If only you could download the same from windows marketplace, then store it on the PC with loads of disk space and then watch it on any copy of WMP or 360 MS would have a killer on their hands.
Seriously, wtf with the naming guys. You think someone surfing through a linux app menu would have any idea what tasks these apps perform? I sure don't...
Actually, what he really said is that the machine itself will not have any region restrictions, but it would be up to publishers whether they want to restrict their games to certain TV formats etc. Which they probably will for many major releases.
Still if a publisher, especially from Japan, knows they aren't going to publish a game in the US/Euro they can leave it region free and let importers have more fun. Still a good thing. Lets hope they get the system off the ground, so far my impression is one of a very expensive hype machine that has to play catch up to Xbox Live. Still, I'm all for having two (three??) great next-gen systems in my living room.
Exactly! I attended a speech here not to long ago by someone who had built their own earthship. Essentially the idea is to pack sand in tires for thick mass around 3 walls and then face the sun with a wall of windows and the house regulates its own temperatures. They built their home (somewhere in the 2000-3000 sqrft size range) for $40,000 CDN. The house regulates its own temperature from outdoor conditions of -40C to +30C here in Ontario. They use a composting toilet, well water with a waste water system using plants, woodstove and solar power (including computers). For $40k (they say they could do it for $30K knowing what they know now) they are completely off the grid and as a bonus financially independent other than property taxes. As an interesting aside in some municipalities your property taxes are based on the amount of greenspace your house takes up and since the roof of the house is actually earth and grass you loose no greenspace....
Anyway, this my new dream home. As it is completely self-sufficient, low cost, and there have been many projects to show that you don't have to sacrifice luxery (including running many computers and HDTVs and the like) when living in this sort of home. About the only trouble seems to be getting building permits (did I meantion they are certified earthquake safe in california?) Many of them are very gorgeous as well. I would recommend checking out earthship.org for examples.
Really it's unfortunate that real money can build an imbalance between players (say 14 year olds with no money vs. 9-5 salary earners), but its really the fault of some poor design. The WoW end game really sucks right now because it is a pure grind. To get an epic mount for 900g, with the exception of Pally's and Warlocks, there is no real challenge or goal other than a flat out repetitive kill-anything-that-drops-money grind. It took me 3 solid weeks of grinding/farming all kinds of mobs and doing instance runs for money (not for fun), lets say about 90hours of game time, to get 900g to buy a mount. I'd really rather have just laid down $70 for it and saved my precious time. There was no difficult challenge to overcome, no boss, backstory or interesting quest. Just a grind and a comitment to somewhat pointlessly sit at the computer mashing buttons like a zombie.
The same can be said of forty man raid content. I loved the 40 man stuff at first. The initial challenge of killing the boss and finding a strategy the first time is awesome and feeling of success is amazing. But after the first few kills it once again becomes this silly grind to hope the random drop gives you your items, and let me tell you spending four hours in MC for the 100th time because your guild has gone 6 weeks without your drop gets plenty dull.
Really up until 60 I saw no need to buy gold, the best items came from playing through instances with friends and completing some of the enjoyable quests. Surplus money would only serve to buy some over the top enchantments and load myself up on potions, neither of which is a necessity.
Blizzard seems to both be getting better in some respects (forcing smaller group sizes in instances, allowing upgradable to epic equipment for non-raid players in patch 1.10) while at the same time promoting more endless grinding (all that faction garbage for ZG/AQ). Players with lots of time on their hands will still get 'further' than anyone else in any game IMO, but that should be by virtue of having practiced more and being more skilled as a result, allowing them to take on challenges that less-experienced players can't handle yet. Instead WoW, as many suggest, is on easy mode at the moment giving out rewards simply based on your ability to show up the longest. About the only challenging thing at the moment is finding 39 other competent players to spend those endless hours in the raid dungeons with you. Most of the skilled, motivated, and socially enjoyable players that I have dealt with in WoW have all quit from burnout and bordem at the state of the endgame.
In china you actually pay by the hour from what I understand. 60 hrs of playtime at a time is the unit you pay for. Much much cheaper than here in north america, but finicially equivalent considering the salaries of people over there.
Maybe this means one of my nit picks about Apple hardware will be fixed. Although the PPC has been a great fast CPU the rest of the system (buses, memory types, etc) have always lagged behind the PC platform. Maybe the switch will allow apple to keep better in sync with these technologies as well as giving hardware companies (read Nvidia and ATI) quicker to the mac market time.
Blizzard has already stated that although they haven't gotten a mini in their lab yet, it is the same specs and gfx card as the iBook so with a new stick of ram the game should run acceptably.
I was really hoping that something like this would happen, especially since hearing that MS was opening it up to the standards organization.
HDTV content really does look and sound awesome and I itch to get my hands on HD movies. But if it would require a whole new format HD-DVD would fall flat on its face, not because of the need for new players as having to introduce another disc format in stores at a time when DVD has huge momentum. It would annoy customers and retailers.
WM9 can fit a feature length film at 720p with decent 5.1 sound in 3-5 GB. With so many DVDs now coming as a 2-Disc set anyway it doesn't seem like much effort to throw in a HD WM9 version along side the standard DVD version and some movies (e.g. Terminator 2) have already done this. No need for a new production processes, wacky labeling at retail outlets, etc. This way those of us wanting HD content won't get snubbed while waiting for a more lossless based (MPEG2) HD-DVD format to get settled and at the same time it won't upset the currently booming DVD market.
The only annoying thing about movies like this at the moment is they usually require that the player bundled with the movie is used to aquire the license instead of just the standard media player. Most of those bundled players are annoying and mess up far more often. It will be nice when the internet authentication based DRM gets removed so I can just watch things on my netless media PC.
You can view clips of WM9-HD stuff on the MS website, but honestly their samples are a little disappointing and the two feature length films I watched in the format looked WAY better. It takes quite a bit of horsepower to play the 1080p clips, but the 720p ones aren't so bad. I for one hope to see WM9-HD to pick up ASAP.
I watch no TV at all, but the purchase was really worth it simply for the DVD movies. If you have an HDTV you MUST use a progressive scanning DVD player using component video. The difference is like day an night, especially on widescreen.
The Xbox also looks magnificent, although im sure it would look even better if some of the games had anti-aliasing turned on.
On a similar topic, I know many GeForce2(3?) cards have component video out? Has anyone tried running their computer in widescreen over component? What res do you get? Is it worthwhile, etc.
I die for this in general. Everytime I open some pro IDE for coding I despirately wish it had a VIM mode. (I hear emacs + JDE in VIper mode is good so im going to give it a try).
It's a bitch to learn, but once you do you never go back.
There are many more little slogans throughout the movie and if you look on the second disc there is a gallery of propaganda: "Don't Suspect a Friend, Report Him" "Happiness! Were all in it together" (Located in the slums by the Buttle/Tuttle's
Slashdot Mirror
All the names listed above do the trick and a special note goes out to the cognitive scientists: Pinker, Dennett, Minsky, etc.
Carl Sagan was an even rarer breed though. More than just popularizing science: making it understandable and curious, he brought it to a deeper almost spiritual level and let you see both how your day to day life was a part of something so unimaginably huge and fantastic while simultaniously making a good case for our species to push the frontiers.
I don't think anyone can compare. If I had to try I'd pick Michio Kaku, he's a definitely more down to Earth than Sagan, but still great.
P.S. For a bit of history and sociology in the mix I really really suggest you pick up Connections (Season 1) and The Day the Universe Changed by James Burke. It stands beside Cosmos as my favorite TV series and will get your kids interested in economics, sociology and history on top of science.
I'm totally ignorant of the sun/enterprise space of computing hardware. What are these architectures good at that x64/GPGPU aren't going to cover? I've seen in my own career things like SGI Oynx and even high-end rendering cards go to the wayside in favor of standard COTS hardware that is more agile, refreshes more frequently and is blazing fast...
What keeps this SPARC space alive?
FFS $4400 on "Voltage stabalizer" and only $1600 on speakers!? FFS people if your gonna waste money don't do it on the boogie man. Spending almost 3 times as much on a power bar as you do on the A in the A/V...
[Penny-arcade comic about the power/voltage cooties would go here if their archives weren't down right now]
You forgot James Burke!
As someone who works in academia I really believe research is crying for something like this. You hear that anecdotal stat that the average published paper (conference or journal) is read ONCE. There is so much information out there that is going unused and with so much research going on getting out there in an easy to access and digestible format is key.
Any system that makes academic papers more digestible is a benefit for three reasons:
1) Researchers. Youtube like social networking amongst peers can boost awareness of research and give researchers a better sense of the "field" to dig into when doing background research allowing them to find relevant works quickly. It also does the opposite allowing them to spark others interest in their work so it doesn't get retired to the shelf. Even when reading papers in your own field understanding complex methods and results can sometimes be hard to digest if unclear writing is involved. A video (mainly of the researcher explaining things in their own spoken words) is worth a thousand words.
2) Business. Putting businesses in touch with research and programs relevant to them. This is a win/win. Companies get information that betters their products and services and hopefully in return they provide much needed research dollars to those doing the work.
3) The general public. Keeping the general public in the loop is important for countless reasons. Two of them being it lets them see where there tax research dollars are going and why they should support such funding and also because hopefully it will inspire people to take interest in the goings on of higher education and ward of general stupidity. It always brightens my day to see science videos of cool physics research or psychology tricks littered in with sports highlights and comedy clips. Even if it only raises peoples awareness slightly I think its worth it.
The specs have both 16 and 32-bit per channel ranges. 128-bit floating point colour is pretty high dynamic range I'd say.
I agree and do it in H.264 HD while they are at it. After the shift to all HD equipment I don't want to back down to SD streaming. The Xbox market place stuff is a good start (though not in Canada yet), but it has the fatal flaw of being stored on the Xbox. If only you could download the same from windows marketplace, then store it on the PC with loads of disk space and then watch it on any copy of WMP or 360 MS would have a killer on their hands.
Seriously, wtf with the naming guys. You think someone surfing through a linux app menu would have any idea what tasks these apps perform? I sure don't...
Actually, what he really said is that the machine itself will not have any region restrictions, but it would be up to publishers whether they want to restrict their games to certain TV formats etc. Which they probably will for many major releases.
Still if a publisher, especially from Japan, knows they aren't going to publish a game in the US/Euro they can leave it region free and let importers have more fun. Still a good thing. Lets hope they get the system off the ground, so far my impression is one of a very expensive hype machine that has to play catch up to Xbox Live. Still, I'm all for having two (three??) great next-gen systems in my living room.
Exactly! I attended a speech here not to long ago by someone who had built their own earthship. Essentially the idea is to pack sand in tires for thick mass around 3 walls and then face the sun with a wall of windows and the house regulates its own temperatures. They built their home (somewhere in the 2000-3000 sqrft size range) for $40,000 CDN. The house regulates its own temperature from outdoor conditions of -40C to +30C here in Ontario. They use a composting toilet, well water with a waste water system using plants, woodstove and solar power (including computers). For $40k (they say they could do it for $30K knowing what they know now) they are completely off the grid and as a bonus financially independent other than property taxes. As an interesting aside in some municipalities your property taxes are based on the amount of greenspace your house takes up and since the roof of the house is actually earth and grass you loose no greenspace....
Anyway, this my new dream home. As it is completely self-sufficient, low cost, and there have been many projects to show that you don't have to sacrifice luxery (including running many computers and HDTVs and the like) when living in this sort of home. About the only trouble seems to be getting building permits (did I meantion they are certified earthquake safe in california?) Many of them are very gorgeous as well. I would recommend checking out earthship.org for examples.
Really it's unfortunate that real money can build an imbalance between players (say 14 year olds with no money vs. 9-5 salary earners), but its really the fault of some poor design. The WoW end game really sucks right now because it is a pure grind. To get an epic mount for 900g, with the exception of Pally's and Warlocks, there is no real challenge or goal other than a flat out repetitive kill-anything-that-drops-money grind. It took me 3 solid weeks of grinding/farming all kinds of mobs and doing instance runs for money (not for fun), lets say about 90hours of game time, to get 900g to buy a mount. I'd really rather have just laid down $70 for it and saved my precious time. There was no difficult challenge to overcome, no boss, backstory or interesting quest. Just a grind and a comitment to somewhat pointlessly sit at the computer mashing buttons like a zombie.
The same can be said of forty man raid content. I loved the 40 man stuff at first. The initial challenge of killing the boss and finding a strategy the first time is awesome and feeling of success is amazing. But after the first few kills it once again becomes this silly grind to hope the random drop gives you your items, and let me tell you spending four hours in MC for the 100th time because your guild has gone 6 weeks without your drop gets plenty dull.
Really up until 60 I saw no need to buy gold, the best items came from playing through instances with friends and completing some of the enjoyable quests. Surplus money would only serve to buy some over the top enchantments and load myself up on potions, neither of which is a necessity.
Blizzard seems to both be getting better in some respects (forcing smaller group sizes in instances, allowing upgradable to epic equipment for non-raid players in patch 1.10) while at the same time promoting more endless grinding (all that faction garbage for ZG/AQ). Players with lots of time on their hands will still get 'further' than anyone else in any game IMO, but that should be by virtue of having practiced more and being more skilled as a result, allowing them to take on challenges that less-experienced players can't handle yet. Instead WoW, as many suggest, is on easy mode at the moment giving out rewards simply based on your ability to show up the longest. About the only challenging thing at the moment is finding 39 other competent players to spend those endless hours in the raid dungeons with you. Most of the skilled, motivated, and socially enjoyable players that I have dealt with in WoW have all quit from burnout and bordem at the state of the endgame.
In china you actually pay by the hour from what I understand. 60 hrs of playtime at a time is the unit you pay for. Much much cheaper than here in north america, but finicially equivalent considering the salaries of people over there.
Maybe this means one of my nit picks about Apple hardware will be fixed. Although the PPC has been a great fast CPU the rest of the system (buses, memory types, etc) have always lagged behind the PC platform. Maybe the switch will allow apple to keep better in sync with these technologies as well as giving hardware companies (read Nvidia and ATI) quicker to the mac market time.
Blizzard has already stated that although they haven't gotten a mini in their lab yet, it is the same specs and gfx card as the iBook so with a new stick of ram the game should run acceptably.
I was really hoping that something like this would happen, especially since hearing that MS was opening it up to the standards organization.
HDTV content really does look and sound awesome and I itch to get my hands on HD movies. But if it would require a whole new format HD-DVD would fall flat on its face, not because of the need for new players as having to introduce another disc format in stores at a time when DVD has huge momentum. It would annoy customers and retailers.
WM9 can fit a feature length film at 720p with decent 5.1 sound in 3-5 GB. With so many DVDs now coming as a 2-Disc set anyway it doesn't seem like much effort to throw in a HD WM9 version along side the standard DVD version and some movies (e.g. Terminator 2) have already done this. No need for a new production processes, wacky labeling at retail outlets, etc. This way those of us wanting HD content won't get snubbed while waiting for a more lossless based (MPEG2) HD-DVD format to get settled and at the same time it won't upset the currently booming DVD market.
The only annoying thing about movies like this at the moment is they usually require that the player bundled with the movie is used to aquire the license instead of just the standard media player. Most of those bundled players are annoying and mess up far more often. It will be nice when the internet authentication based DRM gets removed so I can just watch things on my netless media PC.
You can view clips of WM9-HD stuff on the MS website, but honestly their samples are a little disappointing and the two feature length films I watched in the format looked WAY better. It takes quite a bit of horsepower to play the 1080p clips, but the 720p ones aren't so bad. I for one hope to see WM9-HD to pick up ASAP.
I have a Panisonic 16:9 HDTV.
I watch no TV at all, but the purchase was really worth it simply for the DVD movies. If you have an HDTV you MUST use a progressive scanning DVD player using component video. The difference is like day an night, especially on widescreen.
The Xbox also looks magnificent, although im sure it would look even better if some of the games had anti-aliasing turned on.
On a similar topic, I know many GeForce2(3?) cards have component video out? Has anyone tried running their computer in widescreen over component? What res do you get? Is it worthwhile, etc.
I die for this in general. Everytime I open some pro IDE for coding I despirately wish it had a VIM mode. (I hear emacs + JDE in VIper mode is good so im going to give it a try).
It's a bitch to learn, but once you do you never go back.
There are many more little slogans throughout the movie and if you look on the second disc there is a gallery of propaganda: "Don't Suspect a Friend, Report Him" "Happiness! Were all in it together" (Located in the slums by the Buttle/Tuttle's