It's interesting that if implemented properly, government infrastructure spending does work. Does anyone remember that the Tennessee Valley Authority projects starting from 1933? It was the TVA hydroelectric projects that single-handedly made possible the modern economy of much of the southeastern USA as we know it today by providing electric power and irrigation water to Tennessee and several surrounding states.
Given the enormous pressing need to upgrade the infrastructure of the USA nowadays, we could do things like:
1) Rebuild thousands of worn road bridges. 2) Upgrade passenger railroads to do real high-speed operations (Amtrak's very popular Northeast Corridor could use such an upgrade, especially between New York City and Washington, DC). 3) Upgrade transit systems to go to places where people really live (I for one would love to see Federal money pay for expanding the Sacramento Regional Transit light rail system to better accommodate suburban areas and to build a trolley system connecting downtown Sacramento with West Sacramento across the Sacramento River.) 4) Do large-scale environmental restoration projects like dismantling the obsolete hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in Oregon/California and removing O'Shaughnessy Dam inside Yosemite Park (with the replacement being a major upgrade to Don Pedro Dam downstream).
While download speeds isn't an issue, the issue I mentioned here is download capacity limits. Essentially, you're limited to 250 GB or less a month, which may put a kibosh on downloading HD movies given that one movie at 720p resolution will probably take about 12-15 GB of downloads.
ISP's are imposing download capacity limits not only because of fear of the current network infrastructure being overwhelmed, but also to discourage continuous downloading from torrent sites (torrent sites often carry illegally copied material).
That is, once this starts to go mainstream, when average home internet users can start using these devices, there'll be a lot more pressure for ISPs to NOT impose those bandwidth caps.
Actually, that's all the MORE reason for ISP's to put in download caps--with the current economic conditions, nobody is willing to put in the investment to tremendously expand the bandwidth necessary to accommodate large-scale video streaming.
Besides, with the prices of Blu-ray players and discs now dropping rapidly, why bother with a solution that could tie up your broadband connection for long periods of time and the picture quality still can't compare to a real 1080p-resolution Blu-ray disc?
While all of this seems to be great, there's one problem nobody really wants to talk about: the imposition of monthy download capacity limits by Internet Service Providers.
Indeed, even Comcast's 250 GB per month is woefully inadequate to accommodate streaming HD video over a device like Roku or Apple TV if you watch a lot of movies streamed to your device. And many ISP's are talking much smaller monthly download limits, too. The result: either you can't download as many movies and TV shows you really want, or, the media service providers will need to compromise picture quality for their HD downloads, which means the downloaded video won't be anywhere as good as what you get from a Blu-ray disc, and probably worse than the picture quality of an ATSC 720p/1080i broadcast.
Until the USA starts its conversion to IPv6 and tremendously increases its Internet bandwidth capacity (which will lift the limits imposed by ISP's), the very idea of downloaded HD movies will end up being a non-starter.
Actually, one potential problem with a true electric car is that their maximum torque comes when you first turn the motor. That could result in a pretty frightening initial acceleration, causing a lot of rear-end accidents for drivers not used to the strong initial torque of an electric motor. As such, you'll see sophisticated motor regulation systems to prevent over-acceleration from dead stop.
I have read that an all-electric dragster properly designed could out-accelerate conventional sports cars of the same weight and power because of this initial torque advantage. Indeed, I would not be surprised within 15 years the Pike's Peak hill climb record will be held by an electric car, since unlike conventional cars electric cars will have the same power at the top of Pike's Peak as at the bottom without all the complications of turbocharging conventional motors.
Actually not. I can imagine about 30 years from now out on the Interstate we'll have big service stations/restaurants/mini-shopping centers right next to a major Interstate highway intersection where drivers can park their cars into a parking space, plug in a commercial-quality charging cable to charge the battery, and after eating a meal or do a little shopping come back to a full-charged ultracapacitor battery pack in around 30 minutes.
For home applications, you'll plug into the same 220V connection used for electric dryers and electric ranges, and the charge takes only a few hours to complete.
I'm not surprised this is happening. If you look at a computer you buy at retail now, most of them are manufactured by ASUS, Intel, or the more viable manufacturers that use the latest Intel, nVidia or ATI chipsets and are highly integrated in function. My HP Pavilion a6400f uses the ASUS Benicia motherboard, which integrates everything I need (graphics, Ethernet, and REALtek sound control) all on the same motherboard.
The fact that Toshiba is now shipping a 512 GB SSD tells me that Apple may be now working on a replacement for the iPod classic (current "6.5G" version with 120 GB hard disk) in two versions, both with larger displays and a 128 GB SSD: one with full iPod touch functionality at US$350 and one with less functionality (more aimed for music lovers) at US$250.
That would be true if your friends are technically savvy, but the vast majority of portable music player users are NOT in that category, which means if you start encoding music in.OGG format those users are sadly out of luck. In short, if you want music that everybody can put on their portable music players you have to go with either MP3 or WMA format, and to a slightly lesser extent AAC format.
Actually, wind turbines are not as viable as people think for a couple of reasons:
1) The best places for wind power are generally far away from the largest human settlements (e.g., the upper Great Plains in the USA), which means you need a really expensive power grid to get the power to the population centers.
2) There is still much controversy about large-scale bird kills with a large number wind turbines in the area. This is a major problem in the Altamont Pass area of California, where many birds are killed flying into a running wind turbine unit.
Anyway, thanks to breakthroughs to nanotechnology, solar power has finally become a viable option. A solar panel array that used to cost US$30,000 to power a single house will soon cost US$5,000 or less, which means new individual homes can get solar power even in today's depressed housing economy.
...The teacher was more or less right to be suspicious in seeing those Linux disks.
The reason is simple: who's to say those disks could be unknowingly carrying malware that could cause serious problems down the road? While Linux by definition is less susceptible to malware, malware running under Linux do exist and even one of them suddenly running "in the wild" could cause untold damage to other computers.
That's why corporations and government organizations have STRICT policies against third-party software running on computers in the office. Introducing anything third-party could cause problems and enormous productivity loss.
I noticed that, too. On my HP Pavilion a6400f PC, I was able to run the jsballs fight timedemo test in 22.5 seconds in Chrome 1.0, 44.5 seconds in Safari 3.2, 79 seconds in Internet Explorer 7.0, and 88 seconds in Firefox 3.0.3.
Google must have really tweaked the rendering engine for some really fast performance indeed.
Problem is, to encode music in.OGG format requires a third party program, which means you have to download and install a new program just for this purpose. And you still have the issue of many of your friends being unable to play back the files on their player, too.
At least with.WMA format most non-Apple portable music players support this format, and AAC files are supported by almost every iPod out there (and increasingly more non-Apple portable music players, too).
The only problem with FLAC and Ogg Vorbis is that they're formats that only advanced computer users are familiar with, and are NOT supported by the most popular brands of portable music players from Apple, Creative and Microsoft without a potentially dangerous firmware upgrade. It's small wonder why MP3 format is still around, since practically every player out there can read MP3 files.
At least for a "commercial" format, AAC could become more popular as a lot of newer non-Apple portable musics players now support AAC "out of the box."
Yes, but try to find a Cowon player in a "brick and mortar" retail store--not so easy!:-( Meanwhile, you can find Apple, Creative, Samsung, Sandisk and Sony players almost everywhere.
I play Ogg Vorbis on my Samsung all the time thanks to RockBox [rockbox.org].
While that sounds like a good idea I'm not sure if most end users want to upgrade their firmware to do this--it's potentially dangerous and could result in a non-functional player if you don't upgrade properly.:-(
Remember, we want to keep things as simple as possible, and doing third-party upgrades can sometimes cause more problems than necessary.
The problem with FLAC conversion is that most computer users don't want to waste the time download the appropriate program and then configure the program to do a proper conversion. They like to do things as simple as possible, not go through the whole rigmarole of the conversion process.
While FLAC is a true lossless format, I kind of don't like the idea of doing a transcode to another compression format because of the potential of substantial sound quality loss if the transcoding isn't done properly.:-( The transcoding process is one that the vast majority of computer users out there aren't going to do, either.
While FLAC sounds like a good idea there's one big problem: only a very small number of portable music players out there support the FLAC format, and converting FLAC format files to another format could result in substantial sound quality loss.
Given Apple's commanding market share for portable music players, I'm surprised there hasn't been more music released in the Apple Lossless format.
Problem is, Ogg Vorbis is not a format you can play on the familiar brands of portable music players out there (Apple, Creative, Microsoft, Samsung and Sony). You could modify a player to do it, but that's something the vast majority of users are not wanting to do.
I do think we will start seeing a movement towards more AAC-encoded files, given 1) Apple owns the majority share of portable music player usage and sales and 2) most of the newer non-Apple players are now starting to support non-DRM'd AAC-encoded files.
My major gripe with FLAC is that iPods don't support this format (without major firmware modifications to the player). Given the huge marketshare of the portable music player market that Apple enjoys, I'm surprised there hasn't been a movement to start selling digital music files encoded in the Apple Lossless format or more higher bit rate AAC-encoded format files for legal download outside of Apple's iTunes Plus store.
I think with the wide proliferation of portable music players since 2001, there's a big market for portable music files anyway. I think every musician is starting to realize that if they want to capture this market they have to find a way to make it easier to copy music to these portable music players.
Mind you, I'd like to see everyone on the commercial side gravitate towards using AAC-encoded files, since they tend to sound better than MP3-encoded files and the fact that most generation Apple iPods support this format along with most higher-end portable music players.
I've been a fan of Logitech mouse pointers--they're generally well-made, and the current models are actually quite good.
I currently use the MX500 wired mouse pointer, a superb device with the right "hefty" feel and comfortable fit in your right hand. Pity that Logitech has not seen it fit to update their SetPoint software to accommodate this pointer uhder Windows Vista, because I like to be able to use Logitech's own software controls to reprogram the buttons on the MX500 and to adjust the mouse movement speed.
However, on more recent machines that use dual-core or quad-core AMD or Intel CPU's, Windows Vista is actually a far better choice than Windows XP.
With Service Pack 1 eliminating a lot of the performance issues, Vista today is actually a pretty good operating system. The best thing about Vista is the fact it offers vastly improved recovery from a crashed program, something that XP does relatively poorly.
Better yet, scrap our current income tax system and start over again with either a low-percentage flat tax or a consumption tax like FairTax.
Have you seen how completely unwieldy the Federal tax code is now? It's around 60,000 pages long and even IRS agents can't understand the terms of all these pages of tax code. There's got to be something much better than this.
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It's interesting that if implemented properly, government infrastructure spending does work. Does anyone remember that the Tennessee Valley Authority projects starting from 1933? It was the TVA hydroelectric projects that single-handedly made possible the modern economy of much of the southeastern USA as we know it today by providing electric power and irrigation water to Tennessee and several surrounding states.
Given the enormous pressing need to upgrade the infrastructure of the USA nowadays, we could do things like:
1) Rebuild thousands of worn road bridges.
2) Upgrade passenger railroads to do real high-speed operations (Amtrak's very popular Northeast Corridor could use such an upgrade, especially between New York City and Washington, DC).
3) Upgrade transit systems to go to places where people really live (I for one would love to see Federal money pay for expanding the Sacramento Regional Transit light rail system to better accommodate suburban areas and to build a trolley system connecting downtown Sacramento with West Sacramento across the Sacramento River.)
4) Do large-scale environmental restoration projects like dismantling the obsolete hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in Oregon/California and removing O'Shaughnessy Dam inside Yosemite Park (with the replacement being a major upgrade to Don Pedro Dam downstream).
While download speeds isn't an issue, the issue I mentioned here is download capacity limits. Essentially, you're limited to 250 GB or less a month, which may put a kibosh on downloading HD movies given that one movie at 720p resolution will probably take about 12-15 GB of downloads.
ISP's are imposing download capacity limits not only because of fear of the current network infrastructure being overwhelmed, but also to discourage continuous downloading from torrent sites (torrent sites often carry illegally copied material).
That is, once this starts to go mainstream, when average home internet users can start using these devices, there'll be a lot more pressure for ISPs to NOT impose those bandwidth caps.
Actually, that's all the MORE reason for ISP's to put in download caps--with the current economic conditions, nobody is willing to put in the investment to tremendously expand the bandwidth necessary to accommodate large-scale video streaming.
Besides, with the prices of Blu-ray players and discs now dropping rapidly, why bother with a solution that could tie up your broadband connection for long periods of time and the picture quality still can't compare to a real 1080p-resolution Blu-ray disc?
While all of this seems to be great, there's one problem nobody really wants to talk about: the imposition of monthy download capacity limits by Internet Service Providers.
Indeed, even Comcast's 250 GB per month is woefully inadequate to accommodate streaming HD video over a device like Roku or Apple TV if you watch a lot of movies streamed to your device. And many ISP's are talking much smaller monthly download limits, too. The result: either you can't download as many movies and TV shows you really want, or, the media service providers will need to compromise picture quality for their HD downloads, which means the downloaded video won't be anywhere as good as what you get from a Blu-ray disc, and probably worse than the picture quality of an ATSC 720p/1080i broadcast.
Until the USA starts its conversion to IPv6 and tremendously increases its Internet bandwidth capacity (which will lift the limits imposed by ISP's), the very idea of downloaded HD movies will end up being a non-starter.
Actually, one potential problem with a true electric car is that their maximum torque comes when you first turn the motor. That could result in a pretty frightening initial acceleration, causing a lot of rear-end accidents for drivers not used to the strong initial torque of an electric motor. As such, you'll see sophisticated motor regulation systems to prevent over-acceleration from dead stop.
I have read that an all-electric dragster properly designed could out-accelerate conventional sports cars of the same weight and power because of this initial torque advantage. Indeed, I would not be surprised within 15 years the Pike's Peak hill climb record will be held by an electric car, since unlike conventional cars electric cars will have the same power at the top of Pike's Peak as at the bottom without all the complications of turbocharging conventional motors.
Actually not. I can imagine about 30 years from now out on the Interstate we'll have big service stations/restaurants/mini-shopping centers right next to a major Interstate highway intersection where drivers can park their cars into a parking space, plug in a commercial-quality charging cable to charge the battery, and after eating a meal or do a little shopping come back to a full-charged ultracapacitor battery pack in around 30 minutes.
For home applications, you'll plug into the same 220V connection used for electric dryers and electric ranges, and the charge takes only a few hours to complete.
I'm not surprised this is happening. If you look at a computer you buy at retail now, most of them are manufactured by ASUS, Intel, or the more viable manufacturers that use the latest Intel, nVidia or ATI chipsets and are highly integrated in function. My HP Pavilion a6400f uses the ASUS Benicia motherboard, which integrates everything I need (graphics, Ethernet, and REALtek sound control) all on the same motherboard.
The fact that Toshiba is now shipping a 512 GB SSD tells me that Apple may be now working on a replacement for the iPod classic (current "6.5G" version with 120 GB hard disk) in two versions, both with larger displays and a 128 GB SSD: one with full iPod touch functionality at US$350 and one with less functionality (more aimed for music lovers) at US$250.
That would be true if your friends are technically savvy, but the vast majority of portable music player users are NOT in that category, which means if you start encoding music in .OGG format those users are sadly out of luck. In short, if you want music that everybody can put on their portable music players you have to go with either MP3 or WMA format, and to a slightly lesser extent AAC format.
Actually, wind turbines are not as viable as people think for a couple of reasons:
1) The best places for wind power are generally far away from the largest human settlements (e.g., the upper Great Plains in the USA), which means you need a really expensive power grid to get the power to the population centers.
2) There is still much controversy about large-scale bird kills with a large number wind turbines in the area. This is a major problem in the Altamont Pass area of California, where many birds are killed flying into a running wind turbine unit.
Anyway, thanks to breakthroughs to nanotechnology, solar power has finally become a viable option. A solar panel array that used to cost US$30,000 to power a single house will soon cost US$5,000 or less, which means new individual homes can get solar power even in today's depressed housing economy.
...The teacher was more or less right to be suspicious in seeing those Linux disks.
The reason is simple: who's to say those disks could be unknowingly carrying malware that could cause serious problems down the road? While Linux by definition is less susceptible to malware, malware running under Linux do exist and even one of them suddenly running "in the wild" could cause untold damage to other computers.
That's why corporations and government organizations have STRICT policies against third-party software running on computers in the office. Introducing anything third-party could cause problems and enormous productivity loss.
I noticed that, too. On my HP Pavilion a6400f PC, I was able to run the jsballs fight timedemo test in 22.5 seconds in Chrome 1.0, 44.5 seconds in Safari 3.2, 79 seconds in Internet Explorer 7.0, and 88 seconds in Firefox 3.0.3.
Google must have really tweaked the rendering engine for some really fast performance indeed.
Problem is, to encode music in .OGG format requires a third party program, which means you have to download and install a new program just for this purpose. And you still have the issue of many of your friends being unable to play back the files on their player, too.
At least with .WMA format most non-Apple portable music players support this format, and AAC files are supported by almost every iPod out there (and increasingly more non-Apple portable music players, too).
The only problem with FLAC and Ogg Vorbis is that they're formats that only advanced computer users are familiar with, and are NOT supported by the most popular brands of portable music players from Apple, Creative and Microsoft without a potentially dangerous firmware upgrade. It's small wonder why MP3 format is still around, since practically every player out there can read MP3 files.
At least for a "commercial" format, AAC could become more popular as a lot of newer non-Apple portable musics players now support AAC "out of the box."
Yes, but try to find a Cowon player in a "brick and mortar" retail store--not so easy! :-( Meanwhile, you can find Apple, Creative, Samsung, Sandisk and Sony players almost everywhere.
I play Ogg Vorbis on my Samsung all the time thanks to RockBox [rockbox.org].
While that sounds like a good idea I'm not sure if most end users want to upgrade their firmware to do this--it's potentially dangerous and could result in a non-functional player if you don't upgrade properly. :-(
Remember, we want to keep things as simple as possible, and doing third-party upgrades can sometimes cause more problems than necessary.
The problem with FLAC conversion is that most computer users don't want to waste the time download the appropriate program and then configure the program to do a proper conversion. They like to do things as simple as possible, not go through the whole rigmarole of the conversion process.
While FLAC is a true lossless format, I kind of don't like the idea of doing a transcode to another compression format because of the potential of substantial sound quality loss if the transcoding isn't done properly. :-( The transcoding process is one that the vast majority of computer users out there aren't going to do, either.
While FLAC sounds like a good idea there's one big problem: only a very small number of portable music players out there support the FLAC format, and converting FLAC format files to another format could result in substantial sound quality loss.
Given Apple's commanding market share for portable music players, I'm surprised there hasn't been more music released in the Apple Lossless format.
Problem is, Ogg Vorbis is not a format you can play on the familiar brands of portable music players out there (Apple, Creative, Microsoft, Samsung and Sony). You could modify a player to do it, but that's something the vast majority of users are not wanting to do.
I do think we will start seeing a movement towards more AAC-encoded files, given 1) Apple owns the majority share of portable music player usage and sales and 2) most of the newer non-Apple players are now starting to support non-DRM'd AAC-encoded files.
My major gripe with FLAC is that iPods don't support this format (without major firmware modifications to the player). Given the huge marketshare of the portable music player market that Apple enjoys, I'm surprised there hasn't been a movement to start selling digital music files encoded in the Apple Lossless format or more higher bit rate AAC-encoded format files for legal download outside of Apple's iTunes Plus store.
I think with the wide proliferation of portable music players since 2001, there's a big market for portable music files anyway. I think every musician is starting to realize that if they want to capture this market they have to find a way to make it easier to copy music to these portable music players.
Mind you, I'd like to see everyone on the commercial side gravitate towards using AAC-encoded files, since they tend to sound better than MP3-encoded files and the fact that most generation Apple iPods support this format along with most higher-end portable music players.
I've been a fan of Logitech mouse pointers--they're generally well-made, and the current models are actually quite good.
I currently use the MX500 wired mouse pointer, a superb device with the right "hefty" feel and comfortable fit in your right hand. Pity that Logitech has not seen it fit to update their SetPoint software to accommodate this pointer uhder Windows Vista, because I like to be able to use Logitech's own software controls to reprogram the buttons on the MX500 and to adjust the mouse movement speed.
However, on more recent machines that use dual-core or quad-core AMD or Intel CPU's, Windows Vista is actually a far better choice than Windows XP.
With Service Pack 1 eliminating a lot of the performance issues, Vista today is actually a pretty good operating system. The best thing about Vista is the fact it offers vastly improved recovery from a crashed program, something that XP does relatively poorly.
Better yet, scrap our current income tax system and start over again with either a low-percentage flat tax or a consumption tax like FairTax.
Have you seen how completely unwieldy the Federal tax code is now? It's around 60,000 pages long and even IRS agents can't understand the terms of all these pages of tax code. There's got to be something much better than this.