Cool stuff this, but everyone seems to be caught up on the power density problems of batteries. Electric motors have efficiencies way beyond what ICE's (Internal Combustion Engines) can produce. The problem comes in feeding enough energy to the motor over a prolonged stretch of time.
This problem is pretty much moot if you consider fuel cells. Fuel cells come in a variety of types, but the most popular for vehicle applications run on Natural Gas or Methanol. Check out the efficiencies when compared to ICE's here.
These babies are the future. And if we go the methanol route, we can grow our own fuel stocks!
Education tuition is free. Although room and board and books are up to you.
Medical is not free except for children. Although it is very cheap. For example, I pay about $15.00 per doctors visit. Prescriptions are costly up to a cap of around $500. Hospital stays are very cheap - $10.00 a night or so. And operations are equally cheap. And, yes, if you can't afford it, you get it anyway.
Dental, on the other hand, is not free. In fact, there was a ridiculous proposal last year that homeless folks that can't afford fillings should just have their teeth pulled out! (It was defeated.)
I'm an American expatriate living in Sweden. This country has the highest tax burden of any country in Europe (and probably the world). Internet sales are not excepted! Sales tax (VAT): 25% Income tax: 30% (with exponential rise over $2700 per month income ) Payroll tax: 32% (also with exponential rise over $2700) Gas Tax: 300% Liquor, cigs: 400%+ The sum total is that your average Swede pays about 87% of personal income in taxes. To make it even tougher stock options received by employees as compensation are taxed as income at the above 62% base + exponential rise depending on the amount!
I'm an American expat living in Sweden. We have the highest tax burden of any country in Europe (and probably the world). Internet sales are not excepted! Taxes:
Firewire hasn't gotten the support it probably deserved on its technical merits. Apparently Apple, in its infinite wisdom (chuckle), tried to require licensing fees from every manufacturer and slowed its adoption. Then Intel dropped support for it in its 810, 820, 840 chipsets. But technically I think it's clearly superior to USB. I use firewire to talk to my Sony digital video camera and can count the problems I've had on one hand. I've tried to use USB, on the other hand, and finally gave up due to all the headaches to get it to work reliably (and this with just a couple simple devices like a mouse and keyboard).
FireWire has many advantages over other digital interfaces. It has already replaced SCSI on the new Apple iMacs G3s, and G4s, and FireWire is much more user-friendly for connecting devices than SCSI. Dell, Gateway, and Compaq have also released machines that rely on FireWire for attaching high-speed peripherals. Although USB is a great low-cost solution for connecting keyboards and other low-speed peripherals, it doesn't have the speed for multimedia uses. Maximum speed for USB is 12 megabits per second, compared to FireWire at 400 megabits per second. PCI is currently faster than FireWire, at 1 gigabit per second, but plans are already in the works for a FireWire that will be as fast and will of course have the ease of use and other advantages of the current FireWire. FireWire cables can be up to 15 feet long and they have either two 6-pin connectors, for data and power, or one 6-pin and one 4-pin connector for the data-only cables. Up to 63 devices can be connected to a FirePower network. Products currently using FireWire include video camcorders, digital cameras, digital video capturing and editing equipment, hard drives, DAT drives, CD drives, zip drives, ORB drives, MO (magneto optical) drives, and printers
I always liked the Firewire/IEEE1394 specs better.
If the USB group wants to play these games, switch to Firewire. It's much faster and supports far more devices on the same wire.
Unreal..female characters are harder to hit.
on
Men Playing as Women
·
· Score: 1
I don't know about the rest of the gameworld, but for us Unreal and UnrealTournament fanatics the reason is practical.
The Unreal female bodies are rendered smaller and thinner, thus are harder to hit. Playing as a female character gives the player an advantage in gameplay versus the thicker male characters' bodies.
Didn't Intel make a move to kill off VIA recently?
I don't remember the specifics, but the gist of it was a lawsuit Intel brought against VIA when they bought Cyrix for its x86 compatible chip designs. Ostensibly the lawsuit was over the old "microcode patent infringement" bruhaha, but a couple of articles in the press said the real motive was to scuttle the AMD chipsets that VIA is bringing to market.
Anyone with better knowledge of this care to comment?
..compared to VHS and CD/R. Especially if you consider only entertainment DVD players, not DVD/CD computer drives, since that is the market the DVD publishers are so jealously "protecting".
DIVX was the same thing to video and is dead. DVD's adoption has been very slow due to all the restrictions. And SDMI doesn't have a chance against the momentum MP3 has gained.
People buy things that give them value and convenience. I have no problem with industry safeguarding their rights to media (film, music, print), but in going to such great lengths to prevent copying, they lose billions more in lost sales than they gain from the reduction in small-scale "pirating".
Most of this stuff has a time value anyway. Hit songs and movies are only hot for a few weeks or months. This is plenty of time for the legit distributors to make a bundle. And they will make FAR more on an open (or more open) medium than on a closed (or even semi-closed) one.
All this money and effort would be better spent lobbying governments of pirate havens to crack down on the big offenders (who are only slightly inconvenienced by these copy protection schemes), instead of killing sales through this kind of copy protection mania.
Any RIAA types out there listening to this? Please get a clue...
First of all, my condolences on your arrest and treatment at the behest of my former homeland's authorities. Many people outside of the U.S. don't realize just how important money is there and what lengths the authorities will go to to protect profits. For what it's worth, your pain will serve as a wake up call to many.
On another topic, I have only seen an object code release of DeCSS. In 20-20 hindsight, had you ever thought about releasing the source? A source release of DeCSS would have likely splintered into a couple of hundred ports and versions rendering moot any prosecution of a single individual.
The problem with the current streaming media standards, as I see it, is that they are purely binary standards.
Has anyone made any moves toward an open streaming media markup language (SMML) and browser/player? If it were based on XML and had markup for specs like required codecs, binary media format, etc., it would be possible to create SM using the HTML/browser model that has already proved so successful on the web.
Microsoft et al. would be left in the dust if they stuck with a proprietary binary standard to compete with this model.
"providing in the computer system an interpreter for the specific user interface toolbox and controller"
Yeah, sure. This describes a browser to the T. Mosaic was first created in the early 1990's. Text examples of this "patent" technique date back to the mid or early 1980's.
There is so much prior art that I predict this will be demolished by the first company to take it to court.
Also, note that Geoworks claims a U.S. and a Japanese patent but no European patents. According to the Paris Convention governing patents, patent holders in the U.S. have one year from the patent issue date to seek a patent in Europe. Geoworks does not seem to have done this and, thus, cannot seek claims in Europe.
Say that my intent in releasing package A is that all derived packages are under the same license that I released it under. This is essentially the same intent as that of the GPL "virus". The crux is that I release it with *my* license superceding all others, instead of the GPL's superceding mine.
Are Open Source licenses like the GPL defendable in court?
There is a lot of controversy surrounding the chained effects of GPL code - often referred to as the "GPL virus" - and I don't think this kind of licensing would hold up well in a court of law.
I don't stand strongly for or against the GPL to any great degree. But a license is a contract. My limited understanding of contract law (note: I am *not* a lawyer) that subsumes all subsequent or previous contracts to its own conditions and extends itself to cover objects (i.e. code) that were not written or released specifically under its own terms, probably violates a few basic contractual laws.
As I understand the GPL, if I write something and release it under a BSD or Artistic license, and someone comes along and includes my code in a GPL package, all subsequent derived works become automagically GPL'd. This may not have been my original intent. I may _want_ my code (and any derived code) to always be available for commercial, closed, shareware, etc. as well as GPL and other more open projects. But inclusion of my code in a GPL project by someone else has just ended my license (and intent) and subsumed it with the GPL.
As I see it, the GPL and RMS have provided all of us with lots of benefits, but I find there are areas where it seems to go a little too far, and I think a court would probably rule likewise.
This was before Hollenshead became the big cheese at id.
Check out the email trail of his threats to sue the bejesus out of some hacker porting the old Wolfenstein3D to the Unreal engine at http://unrealnation.com/wolf3d/news/CEO-email.html . Jeesh!
That plus the constant Romero bashing from Hollenshead makes me think that Id's gone mainstream corporate. Their new slogan seems to be "show me the money".
Slashdot Mirror
Cool stuff this, but everyone seems to be caught up on the power density problems of batteries. Electric motors have efficiencies way beyond what ICE's (Internal Combustion Engines) can produce. The problem comes in feeding enough energy to the motor over a prolonged stretch of time.
This problem is pretty much moot if you consider fuel cells. Fuel cells come in a variety of types, but the most popular for vehicle applications run on Natural Gas or Methanol. Check out the efficiencies when compared to ICE's here.
These babies are the future. And if we go the methanol route, we can grow our own fuel stocks!
Education tuition is free. Although room and board and books are up to you.
Medical is not free except for children. Although it is very cheap. For example, I pay about $15.00 per doctors visit. Prescriptions are costly up to a cap of around $500. Hospital stays are very cheap - $10.00 a night or so. And operations are equally cheap. And, yes, if you can't afford it, you get it anyway.
Dental, on the other hand, is not free. In fact, there was a ridiculous proposal last year that homeless folks that can't afford fillings should just have their teeth pulled out! (It was defeated.)
I'm an American expatriate living in Sweden. This country has the highest tax burden of any country in Europe (and probably the world). Internet sales are not excepted! Sales tax (VAT): 25% Income tax: 30% (with exponential rise over $2700 per month income ) Payroll tax: 32% (also with exponential rise over $2700) Gas Tax: 300% Liquor, cigs: 400%+ The sum total is that your average Swede pays about 87% of personal income in taxes. To make it even tougher stock options received by employees as compensation are taxed as income at the above 62% base + exponential rise depending on the amount!
I'm an American expat living in Sweden. We have the highest tax burden of any country in Europe (and probably the world). Internet sales are not excepted! Taxes:
Firewire hasn't gotten the support it probably deserved on its technical merits. Apparently Apple, in its infinite wisdom (chuckle), tried to require licensing fees from every manufacturer and slowed its adoption. Then Intel dropped support for it in its 810, 820, 840 chipsets. But technically I think it's clearly superior to USB. I use firewire to talk to my Sony digital video camera and can count the problems I've had on one hand. I've tried to use USB, on the other hand, and finally gave up due to all the headaches to get it to work reliably (and this with just a couple simple devices like a mouse and keyboard).
Here is a quick USB - Firewire comparison:
FireWire has many advantages over other digital interfaces. It has already replaced SCSI on the new Apple iMacs G3s, and G4s, and FireWire is much more user-friendly for connecting devices than SCSI. Dell, Gateway, and Compaq have also released machines that rely on FireWire for attaching high-speed peripherals. Although USB is a great low-cost solution for connecting keyboards and other low-speed peripherals, it doesn't have the speed for multimedia uses. Maximum speed for USB is 12 megabits per second, compared to FireWire at 400 megabits per second. PCI is currently faster than FireWire, at 1 gigabit per second, but plans are already in the works for a FireWire that will be as fast and will of course have the ease of use and other advantages of the current FireWire. FireWire cables can be up to 15 feet long and they have either two 6-pin connectors, for data and power, or one 6-pin and one 4-pin connector for the data-only cables. Up to 63 devices can be connected to a FirePower network. Products currently using FireWire include video camcorders, digital cameras, digital video capturing and editing equipment, hard drives, DAT drives, CD drives, zip drives, ORB drives, MO (magneto optical) drives, and printers
I always liked the Firewire/IEEE1394 specs better.
If the USB group wants to play these games, switch to Firewire. It's much faster and supports far more devices on the same wire.
I don't know about the rest of the gameworld, but for us Unreal and UnrealTournament fanatics the reason is practical.
The Unreal female bodies are rendered smaller and thinner, thus are harder to hit. Playing as a female character gives the player an advantage in gameplay versus the thicker male characters' bodies.
I used these guys on a "try 30 days free" offer during a trip to the states.
They promptly put a $150.00 charge on my credit card. I contacted them both by email and by phone (from Europe) to get the charge removed to no avail.
To add insult to injury, their lines are limited to the west coast and were often busy and/or toll calls from many areas.
Caveat emptor.
Didn't Intel make a move to kill off VIA recently?
I don't remember the specifics, but the gist of it was a lawsuit Intel brought against VIA when they bought Cyrix for its x86 compatible chip designs. Ostensibly the lawsuit was over the old "microcode patent infringement" bruhaha, but a couple of articles in the press said the real motive was to scuttle the AMD chipsets that VIA is bringing to market.
Anyone with better knowledge of this care to comment?
..compared to VHS and CD/R. Especially if you consider only entertainment DVD
m l98/dvdd_110198.html
0 22
players, not DVD/CD computer drives, since that is the market the DVD
publishers are so jealously "protecting".
http://205.177.58.134/tdb/tdb_may99/vhs.htm
http://www.seattle-times.com/news/technology/ht
http://techmall.com/techdocs/TS980407-8.html
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19981001S0
Where did you get your info?
When will these guys learn?
...
DIVX was the same thing to video and is dead. DVD's adoption has been very slow due to all the restrictions. And SDMI doesn't have a chance against the momentum MP3 has gained.
People buy things that give them value and convenience. I have no problem with industry safeguarding their rights to media (film, music, print), but in going to such great lengths to prevent copying, they lose billions more in lost sales than they gain from the reduction in small-scale "pirating".
Most of this stuff has a time value anyway. Hit songs and movies are only hot for a few weeks or months. This is plenty of time for the legit distributors to make a bundle. And they will make FAR more on an open (or more open) medium than on a closed (or even semi-closed) one.
All this money and effort would be better spent lobbying governments of pirate havens to crack down on the big offenders (who are only slightly inconvenienced by these copy protection schemes), instead of killing sales through this kind of copy protection mania.
Any RIAA types out there listening to this? Please get a clue
First of all, my condolences on your arrest and treatment at the behest of my former homeland's authorities. Many people outside of the U.S. don't realize just how important money is there and what lengths the authorities will go to to protect profits. For what it's worth, your pain will serve as a wake up call to many.
On another topic, I have only seen an object code release of DeCSS. In 20-20 hindsight, had you ever thought about releasing the source? A source release of DeCSS would have likely splintered into a couple of hundred ports and versions rendering moot any prosecution of a single individual.
The problem with the current streaming media standards, as I see it, is that they are purely binary standards.
Has anyone made any moves toward an open streaming media markup language (SMML) and browser/player? If it were based on XML and had markup for specs like required codecs, binary media format, etc., it would be possible to create SM using the HTML/browser model that has already proved so successful on the web.
Microsoft et al. would be left in the dust if they stuck with a proprietary binary standard to compete with this model.
"providing in the computer system an interpreter for the specific user interface toolbox and controller"
Yeah, sure. This describes a browser to the T. Mosaic was first created in the early 1990's. Text examples of this "patent" technique date back to the mid or early 1980's.
There is so much prior art that I predict this will be demolished by the first company to take it to court.
Also, note that Geoworks claims a U.S. and a Japanese patent but no European patents. According to the Paris Convention governing patents, patent holders in the U.S. have one year from the patent issue date to seek a patent in Europe. Geoworks does not seem to have done this and, thus, cannot seek claims in Europe.
The solution to this is obvious I think.
Modify the standard and exclude the GeoDorks stuff (and any other propietary crap).
I wonder if GeoSucks realizes the bad press they have generated over this? Reminds me of UniPiss and the GIF patents fiasco...(thank-you PNG)!
"It's the culture of diversity.."
The U.S. has a monopoly on diversity? I think not.
Your "diversity" = "crime".
This is the problem I'm pointing out.
Say that my intent in releasing package A is that all derived packages are under the same license that I released it under. This is essentially the same intent as that of the GPL "virus". The crux is that I release it with *my* license superceding all others, instead of the GPL's superceding mine.
Are Open Source licenses like the GPL defendable in court?
There is a lot of controversy surrounding the chained effects of GPL code - often referred to as the "GPL virus" - and I don't think this kind of licensing would hold up well in a court of law.
I don't stand strongly for or against the GPL to any great degree. But a license is a contract. My limited understanding of contract law (note: I am *not* a lawyer) that subsumes all subsequent or previous contracts to its own conditions and extends itself to cover objects (i.e. code) that were not written or released specifically under its own terms, probably violates a few basic contractual laws.
As I understand the GPL, if I write something and release it under a BSD or Artistic license, and someone comes along and includes my code in a GPL package, all subsequent derived works become automagically GPL'd. This may not have been my original intent. I may _want_ my code (and any derived code) to always be available for commercial, closed, shareware, etc. as well as GPL and other more open projects. But inclusion of my code in a GPL project by someone else has just ended my license (and intent) and subsumed it with the GPL.
As I see it, the GPL and RMS have provided all of us with lots of benefits, but I find there are areas where it seems to go a little too far, and I think a court would probably rule likewise.
This was before Hollenshead became the big cheese at id.
l . Jeesh!
Check out the email trail of his threats to sue the bejesus out of some hacker porting the old Wolfenstein3D to the Unreal engine at http://unrealnation.com/wolf3d/news/CEO-email.htm
That plus the constant Romero bashing from Hollenshead makes me think that Id's gone mainstream corporate. Their new slogan seems to be "show me the money".
Pleas say it ain't so John (Carmack)!