I think the reason why Microsoft has US$40 billion on hand is the fact that it gives the company a huge financial cushion to weather financial downtowns and more importantly give time for Microsoft to properly develop its products.
For example, consider the Xbox gaming console. Microsoft can afford to lose money on this system because it has the cash reserves to nuture the system to success. This is where companies like Sony and Nintendo have potential major downsides--one misstep and either company will end up hurting financially BIG TIME. In fact, that's what did in Sega as a console manufacturer.
Also, Microsoft is able to afford to do serious research into computer interface design; after all, the polished feel of modern Microsoft products for the most part is due to the many thousands of hours spent in Usability Lab to develop the look and feel of the product. And you wonder why both Gnome and KDE borrows a lot of interface conventions from Windows....
While other high-tech companies have fallen flat on their faces since the spring of 2000, Microsoft continues to chug along well.
I think people forget that the trailer that featured the World Trade Center towers was never intended to be in the final movie. Very effective teaser trailer up till 9/11, though.
I think there are these factors that made the movie really good:
1. Director Sam Raimi is a diehard Spider-Man comics fanatic and you can tell from the movie he loved the subject matter.
2. Because people knew Raimi was a Spider-Man fan, Raimi had to do a movie that lived up to the expectations of the millions of Spider-Man comics readers over the years.
And it appears he has succeeded beyond even Sony Pictures' wildest dreams.
Give the idea to General Electric. Given their experience with lighting systems, they could probably make the new lightbulb design economically practical in a few years.
Imagine the efficiency of flourescent lightbulbs without the initial high cost--a lot of people would love to buy such a lightbulb.
I think they were never really deployed on a large scale because of the noise from the nose-mounted jet engines and the very high fuel burn rate.
However, if we apply modern Western jet engine and turboprop technology, we could probably build an ekranoplan that wouldn't be a fuel hog and is much less noisy, too.
I still think the ekranoplan is perfect for island hopping travel in the eastern Caribbean Sea islands.
The ekranoplan idea died not because of the fall of the Soviet Union, but because the designer was too friendly to Nikita Khrushchev. When Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964, most of the ekranoplan ideas were shelved for political reasons, though one smaller ekranoplan design did make to small scale production.
What's sad about the Soviet WIG program was the fact these vehicles were perfect for fast movements across the Baltic Sea to invade the Scandinavian Peninsula. Imagine moving an amphibious strike force at several times the speed of even hovercraft.
Unfortunately, the designers of the Ekranoplan were too closely tied to Khruschev (sp?), and when Brenzhnev took over, the Ekranoplan idea died a quick and untimely death.
With the application of modern technology, an ekranoplan could be perfect for island-hopping operations in the Less Antillies in the Caribbean Sea.
Certain forms of hydrogen are extremely dangerous to handle.
Especially liquid hydrogen--when LH2 burns it does it with an extremely explosive force indeed. That's why LH2 is used as rocket fuel. It's also the reason why when the external tank blew up on the Challenger launch in 1986 it did it with the force of a tactical nuclear warhead.
I'll say this though: if Disney had the money to install a digital projection system at the El Capitan theater they'll do it in a New York minute, to use to old saying.:)
You forget that virtually every animated feature Disney has released since The Rescuers Down Under are all actually "stored" on digital masters, thanks to the use of the Computer Aided Production System (CAPS). Gawd, can you imagine a true digital projection of Monsters, Inc. or Atlantis: The Lost Empire? It would be eye-opening clear, that's to be sure.:-)
Given the concept of how Linux is developed using the GNU Public License, the whole idea of piracy doesn't apply at all, especially when the software is encouraged to be freely copied and given away.
I mean, the US$30 or higher you pay for a retail copy essentially covers the cost of packaging and manuals, plus probably the development costs of the software distribution. People at Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Slackware, etc. in fact pass out Linux install disks like AOL passes out installation CD-ROM's for their access software.
However, the success of Linux will still be limited until they get Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) incorporated into the OS. (I believe the 2.6.x kernel will include ACPI support.) With ACPI, Linux upgrades becomes much, much easier, for starters.
As it currently stands (no pun intended, the Segway's weight of 65 pounds is just a bit too much for what it does. Also, the Segway can't be collapsed so it fits in smaller spaces.
I think a company like Dahon (who specializes in collapsible bicycles) should work with Dean Kamen to design a scooter with Segway technology that can be easily collapsed into a small carrying package and also weigh at most 28-30 pounds. Something like that would sell like ice cream in summer, in my opinion.
If the Communist Chinese think their cyberattack will cripple our military, I think they're going to find out that might not exactly work.
The reason is simple: US military systems are NOT connected to the commercial Internet. Given that we have devoted a lot of resources to monitor and safeguard our military communications, the Chinese won't dent much of our military communications unless they deliberately drop a nuclear bomb against our military command centers (and even that won't quite work because we have contingency plans thanks to Looking Glass and NEACAP planes).
Now, China deliberately interfering with the commercial Internet is something else, though. However, careful design of routers and careful firewall installation will likely limit any damage since the Internet doesn't really have any critical points that can bring down most of the Internet.
Are you sure about that? I believe CAPS was developed in the late 1980's, but I have not heard mention that Pixar provided the expertise to create that system.
I've heard that the first use of CAPS was the opening sequence from The Little Mermaid when you see the sailing ship come out of the fog. I believe that the first movie to use CAPS extensively was The Rescuers Down Under.
Here's an interesting question: does anyone know what kind of computer hardware is Disney using at their feature animation department in Burbank, CA nowadays? I believe that Disney's Computer Aided Production System (CAPS) for compositing digital and hand-drawn animation elements into a single film is based on SGI hardware, though I think if Disney could port the CAPS tools to Linux and run them on x86-based Athlon XP or Pentium 4 machines with one to two gigabytes of RAM per machine on a rendering farm level could save Disney a boatload of money.
I think the problem with IA-64 is the fact in order to take advantage of the CPU you have to essentially write every application program from scratch. That is quite expensive, given the costs of development hardware and programming time.
With x86-64, you can jump to 64-bit computing without having to dump your legacy code altogether. With some careful recompiling, just about all Microsoft apps today should run in 64-bit mode on the x86-64 platform fairly quickly.
Also, Linux support for x86-64 has been around for some time. I'm sure that it wouldn't take much to release an x86-64 compliant version of every major Linux commercial distribution within one year anyways.
Besides, the cost of IA-64 hardware is still somewhere in the stratosphere, to say the least.
More likely you have some weird BIOS issues or power problems... you should check those, too.
I think that could be part of the troubles.
I wonder does clearing the CMOS NVRAM and getting a decent 300 watt ATX power supply will help things along. Believe me, I've seen where clearing the CMOS NVRAM on the the motherboard fixes a LOT of Windows 9x/ME/2000/XP Plug and Play setup issues.
If it's an Abit, Asus, or other motherboard that allows you to seriously overclock, you might want to see if the motherboard will support a Socket 370 to Slot 1 adapter. That will allow you to run the Powerleap PL-370/T CPU upgrade (which should be released very soon); this will bump up the speed of your system from 450 MHz to 1,200 MHz!:-)
At 1,200 MHz CPU speed, even the Matrox G400-TV should be fast enough to run most modern games.
I expect GeForce4 Ti4200 to sell in large numbers
on
GeForce4 Ti 4200 Preview
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I think a decent graphics card that uses the GeForce4 Ti 4200 will end up being extremely successful in the marketplace.
There are two reasons for this:
1) It is less expensive to implement, so OEM's will be far more interested in installing this card instead of the much more expensive cards that use the Ti4400 or Ti4600 chipsets. Besides, the performance drop is not significant, so most users won't see any performance hits on even the latest games. This is why I expect many system builders to incorporate graphics cards that use the GeForce4 Ti4200 chipset onto new systems on a large scale by July 2002.
2) Because it is an NV25 chipset, it also means that the card will sport higher-level MPEG-2 decoding support. That means hardware assistance for playing back DVD discs as good as what ATI has done with their Rage 128 and Radeon chipset series.
I think you must like the Matrox G400/G450/G550 cards. Yes, they have excellent 2-D display, but the GeForce4 Ti4200 has vastly surpassed it in 3-D graphics and with the right manufacturer achieved almost as good 2-d quality display.
I sometimes wonder will the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences finally recognize Buffy: The Vampire Slayer with multiple nominations? Or is the TV show not to the Emmy voters' taste?
Methinks at the rate things are going Joss Whedon won't get his Emmy for the work on this show until they give it to him as a Lifetime Achievement Award.
You are correct about more RAM being a better solution.
For example, my system at home (a home-built system) uses an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with a Celeron A 466 MHz CPU, a four-year old CPU design. Yet, performance is still pretty reasonable thanks to the fact I'm running 256 MB of RAM and a 10 GB ATA-33 hard drive.
In short, for many computer users a major RAM upgrade and a switch to a faster hard drive could increase performance of the computer by as much as 50% or more regardless of operating system, since the computer doesn't need to spend so much time doing virtual memory swaps to and from the hard drive.
However, what's interesting is that here in the San Francisco Bay Area, it's actually pretty hard to find a system builder that offers Duron-based systems.
Many of the lower-cost systems built by computer builders in the Bay Area use the lower-end Athlon CPU's--besides, with the price of Athlon XP CPU's being so reasonable nowadays there's no real incentive to get a system with a Duron CPU.
I think the primary reason why AMD is phasing out the Duron is the fact that outside of the do-it-yourself crowd, there was almost NO demand for the Duron CPU here in the USA, despite its technical merits.
Besides, for low-end computing Intel's Celeron had such a hammerlock on the market that there was no real incentive to use an alternative. Note that most of the major computer manufacturers still offer machines that use the Tualatin Celerons (1,100 to 1,300 MHz speeds). Indeed, the 1,300 MHz Celeron is actually a pretty nice CPU, especially with 256 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die.
I remember 17 years ago when a Seagate 20 MB hard drive went for US$500. Those were also the days when Maxtor introduced their 650 MB 5.25" full-height SCSI hard drive, which cost US$6,000 back then. (eek!)
Nowadays, that same US$500 buys you 320 gigabytes of storage on two 160 GB ATA-100 3.5" 1/3 height hard drives. (thud)
Slashdot Mirror
I think the reason why Microsoft has US$40 billion on hand is the fact that it gives the company a huge financial cushion to weather financial downtowns and more importantly give time for Microsoft to properly develop its products.
For example, consider the Xbox gaming console. Microsoft can afford to lose money on this system because it has the cash reserves to nuture the system to success. This is where companies like Sony and Nintendo have potential major downsides--one misstep and either company will end up hurting financially BIG TIME. In fact, that's what did in Sega as a console manufacturer.
Also, Microsoft is able to afford to do serious research into computer interface design; after all, the polished feel of modern Microsoft products for the most part is due to the many thousands of hours spent in Usability Lab to develop the look and feel of the product. And you wonder why both Gnome and KDE borrows a lot of interface conventions from Windows....
While other high-tech companies have fallen flat on their faces since the spring of 2000, Microsoft continues to chug along well.
I think people forget that the trailer that featured the World Trade Center towers was never intended to be in the final movie. Very effective teaser trailer up till 9/11, though.
I think there are these factors that made the movie really good:
1. Director Sam Raimi is a diehard Spider-Man comics fanatic and you can tell from the movie he loved the subject matter.
2. Because people knew Raimi was a Spider-Man fan, Raimi had to do a movie that lived up to the expectations of the millions of Spider-Man comics readers over the years.
And it appears he has succeeded beyond even Sony Pictures' wildest dreams.
Give the idea to General Electric. Given their experience with lighting systems, they could probably make the new lightbulb design economically practical in a few years.
Imagine the efficiency of flourescent lightbulbs without the initial high cost--a lot of people would love to buy such a lightbulb.
I think they were never really deployed on a large scale because of the noise from the nose-mounted jet engines and the very high fuel burn rate.
However, if we apply modern Western jet engine and turboprop technology, we could probably build an ekranoplan that wouldn't be a fuel hog and is much less noisy, too.
I still think the ekranoplan is perfect for island hopping travel in the eastern Caribbean Sea islands.
The ekranoplan idea died not because of the fall of the Soviet Union, but because the designer was too friendly to Nikita Khrushchev. When Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964, most of the ekranoplan ideas were shelved for political reasons, though one smaller ekranoplan design did make to small scale production.
What's sad about the Soviet WIG program was the fact these vehicles were perfect for fast movements across the Baltic Sea to invade the Scandinavian Peninsula. Imagine moving an amphibious strike force at several times the speed of even hovercraft.
Unfortunately, the designers of the Ekranoplan were too closely tied to Khruschev (sp?), and when Brenzhnev took over, the Ekranoplan idea died a quick and untimely death.
With the application of modern technology, an ekranoplan could be perfect for island-hopping operations in the Less Antillies in the Caribbean Sea.
I think Ellison's pandering to the Democratic Party is coming home to roost, to use the old cliché.
You wonder just how much under the table money did Ellison pay to the Clinton Administration to expedite the US v. Microsoft case, too.
Certain forms of hydrogen are extremely dangerous to handle.
Especially liquid hydrogen--when LH2 burns it does it with an extremely explosive force indeed. That's why LH2 is used as rocket fuel. It's also the reason why when the external tank blew up on the Challenger launch in 1986 it did it with the force of a tactical nuclear warhead.
Whoops!!
:-/
I should have read the Wired magazine article first. I didn't know Disney already installed a digital projection system there.
I'll say this though: if Disney had the money to install a digital projection system at the El Capitan theater they'll do it in a New York minute, to use to old saying. :)
:-)
You forget that virtually every animated feature Disney has released since The Rescuers Down Under are all actually "stored" on digital masters, thanks to the use of the Computer Aided Production System (CAPS). Gawd, can you imagine a true digital projection of Monsters, Inc. or Atlantis: The Lost Empire? It would be eye-opening clear, that's to be sure.
Given the concept of how Linux is developed using the GNU Public License, the whole idea of piracy doesn't apply at all, especially when the software is encouraged to be freely copied and given away.
I mean, the US$30 or higher you pay for a retail copy essentially covers the cost of packaging and manuals, plus probably the development costs of the software distribution. People at Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Slackware, etc. in fact pass out Linux install disks like AOL passes out installation CD-ROM's for their access software.
However, the success of Linux will still be limited until they get Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) incorporated into the OS. (I believe the 2.6.x kernel will include ACPI support.) With ACPI, Linux upgrades becomes much, much easier, for starters.
As it currently stands (no pun intended, the Segway's weight of 65 pounds is just a bit too much for what it does. Also, the Segway can't be collapsed so it fits in smaller spaces.
I think a company like Dahon (who specializes in collapsible bicycles) should work with Dean Kamen to design a scooter with Segway technology that can be easily collapsed into a small carrying package and also weigh at most 28-30 pounds. Something like that would sell like ice cream in summer, in my opinion.
If the Communist Chinese think their cyberattack will cripple our military, I think they're going to find out that might not exactly work.
The reason is simple: US military systems are NOT connected to the commercial Internet. Given that we have devoted a lot of resources to monitor and safeguard our military communications, the Chinese won't dent much of our military communications unless they deliberately drop a nuclear bomb against our military command centers (and even that won't quite work because we have contingency plans thanks to Looking Glass and NEACAP planes).
Now, China deliberately interfering with the commercial Internet is something else, though. However, careful design of routers and careful firewall installation will likely limit any damage since the Internet doesn't really have any critical points that can bring down most of the Internet.
Are you sure about that? I believe CAPS was developed in the late 1980's, but I have not heard mention that Pixar provided the expertise to create that system.
I've heard that the first use of CAPS was the opening sequence from The Little Mermaid when you see the sailing ship come out of the fog. I believe that the first movie to use CAPS extensively was The Rescuers Down Under.
Here's an interesting question: does anyone know what kind of computer hardware is Disney using at their feature animation department in Burbank, CA nowadays? I believe that Disney's Computer Aided Production System (CAPS) for compositing digital and hand-drawn animation elements into a single film is based on SGI hardware, though I think if Disney could port the CAPS tools to Linux and run them on x86-based Athlon XP or Pentium 4 machines with one to two gigabytes of RAM per machine on a rendering farm level could save Disney a boatload of money.
I think the problem with IA-64 is the fact in order to take advantage of the CPU you have to essentially write every application program from scratch. That is quite expensive, given the costs of development hardware and programming time.
With x86-64, you can jump to 64-bit computing without having to dump your legacy code altogether. With some careful recompiling, just about all Microsoft apps today should run in 64-bit mode on the x86-64 platform fairly quickly.
Also, Linux support for x86-64 has been around for some time. I'm sure that it wouldn't take much to release an x86-64 compliant version of every major Linux commercial distribution within one year anyways.
Besides, the cost of IA-64 hardware is still somewhere in the stratosphere, to say the least.
More likely you have some weird BIOS issues or power problems... you should check those, too.
I think that could be part of the troubles.
I wonder does clearing the CMOS NVRAM and getting a decent 300 watt ATX power supply will help things along. Believe me, I've seen where clearing the CMOS NVRAM on the the motherboard fixes a LOT of Windows 9x/ME/2000/XP Plug and Play setup issues.
Question: what model motherboard are you running?
:-)
If it's an Abit, Asus, or other motherboard that allows you to seriously overclock, you might want to see if the motherboard will support a Socket 370 to Slot 1 adapter. That will allow you to run the Powerleap PL-370/T CPU upgrade (which should be released very soon); this will bump up the speed of your system from 450 MHz to 1,200 MHz!
At 1,200 MHz CPU speed, even the Matrox G400-TV should be fast enough to run most modern games.
I think a decent graphics card that uses the GeForce4 Ti 4200 will end up being extremely successful in the marketplace.
There are two reasons for this:
1) It is less expensive to implement, so OEM's will be far more interested in installing this card instead of the much more expensive cards that use the Ti4400 or Ti4600 chipsets. Besides, the performance drop is not significant, so most users won't see any performance hits on even the latest games. This is why I expect many system builders to incorporate graphics cards that use the GeForce4 Ti4200 chipset onto new systems on a large scale by July 2002.
2) Because it is an NV25 chipset, it also means that the card will sport higher-level MPEG-2 decoding support. That means hardware assistance for playing back DVD discs as good as what ATI has done with their Rage 128 and Radeon chipset series.
I think you must like the Matrox G400/G450/G550 cards. Yes, they have excellent 2-D display, but the GeForce4 Ti4200 has vastly surpassed it in 3-D graphics and with the right manufacturer achieved almost as good 2-d quality display.
I sometimes wonder will the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences finally recognize Buffy: The Vampire Slayer with multiple nominations? Or is the TV show not to the Emmy voters' taste?
Methinks at the rate things are going Joss Whedon won't get his Emmy for the work on this show until they give it to him as a Lifetime Achievement Award.
You are correct about more RAM being a better solution.
For example, my system at home (a home-built system) uses an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with a Celeron A 466 MHz CPU, a four-year old CPU design. Yet, performance is still pretty reasonable thanks to the fact I'm running 256 MB of RAM and a 10 GB ATA-33 hard drive.
In short, for many computer users a major RAM upgrade and a switch to a faster hard drive could increase performance of the computer by as much as 50% or more regardless of operating system, since the computer doesn't need to spend so much time doing virtual memory swaps to and from the hard drive.
However, what's interesting is that here in the San Francisco Bay Area, it's actually pretty hard to find a system builder that offers Duron-based systems.
Many of the lower-cost systems built by computer builders in the Bay Area use the lower-end Athlon CPU's--besides, with the price of Athlon XP CPU's being so reasonable nowadays there's no real incentive to get a system with a Duron CPU.
I think the primary reason why AMD is phasing out the Duron is the fact that outside of the do-it-yourself crowd, there was almost NO demand for the Duron CPU here in the USA, despite its technical merits.
Besides, for low-end computing Intel's Celeron had such a hammerlock on the market that there was no real incentive to use an alternative. Note that most of the major computer manufacturers still offer machines that use the Tualatin Celerons (1,100 to 1,300 MHz speeds). Indeed, the 1,300 MHz Celeron is actually a pretty nice CPU, especially with 256 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die.
I remember 17 years ago when a Seagate 20 MB hard drive went for US$500. Those were also the days when Maxtor introduced their 650 MB 5.25" full-height SCSI hard drive, which cost US$6,000 back then. (eek!)
Nowadays, that same US$500 buys you 320 gigabytes of storage on two 160 GB ATA-100 3.5" 1/3 height hard drives. (thud)