Tuor's story was never actually finished, which is a pity.
Actually, Tuor's story was the first to be written down by Tolkien (he did this right after the Battle of the Somme in 1916). Called The Fall of Gondolin, it actually had a fairly completed version done that was read to a bunch of Oxford students around 1919, just before Tolkien became a Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds.
I think what made The Silmarillion such tough going was the fact it read NOTHING like The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings--it glossed over a lot of old Middle-Earth history pretty quickly.
However, if you have ever read the old Norse sagas or the Finnish Kalevala in the original version, The Silmarillion made vastly more sense, given Tolkien's strong influence of these works.
I think sales of the Wii will be a lot higher than people think.
For one reason: innovative gameplay. That unusual controller used by the Wii allows for a level of realistic user interaction quite a bit higher than what you get with the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 with their more traditional controllers. For example, can you imagine the astonishing level of realistic action with a future version of something like Soul Calibur when you can move the Wii controller so it works almost exactly like you are wielding a real sword?
Then look at the popularity of LCD monitors. While say the color accuracy is worse, that doesnt' matter to most consumers. Meanwhile they're smaller, lighter, take less power, don't have flicker from refresh rates, etc...
LCD's have pretty much taken over from CRT's for two reasons: 1) they take up FAR less desktop space than regular monitors and 2) the power consumption of LCD panels is 1/3 that of a CRT monitor with the same display area. Also, LCD monitor picture quality has dramatically improved lately; if you've seen the NEC MultiSync 90GX2 you have to admire that LCD monitor's amazing sharpness and color clarity.
Electric cars have been 'practical' for a long time given the technology of 20 years ago. Don't believe GM.
If you're talking driving under 30 miles per day and willing to recharge the car for hours every night, that is. That was the downfall of the GM EV-1: it had way too short range and recharging the batteries took several hours for a full charge, not to mention the fact the battery pack took up a huge amount of space inside the car.
With these new battery technologies, we can finally drastically reduce the size of the battery pack; this means pax/cargo space comparable to a normal car and less "deadweight" to lug around, too. Also, because these new battery packs charge to full power in only a few minutes, this means service stations in the future can have both gasoline pumps and electric car recharging connectors on the same service "island."
Improvements in supercapacitor technology makes an all-electric car practical for these reasons:
1) You store quite a lot of electrical energy in a supercapacitor pack. This means potentially drastic reductions in the size of the battery pack on an all-electric car, reducing the "deadweight" of the car and providing cargo/passenger space comparable to a regular car now. You could sacrifice a little cargo/pax space for a larger supercapacitor battery pack and get driving ranges as much as 600 km (372 miles), very good by today's automotive standards.
2) Supercapacitor packs charge fully in few minutes, not several hours like you have with NiMH and Li-On battery packs. This means in the future service stations will have both gasoline fuel pumps and fast-charge electrical connectors on the same service "island," since the time to fill up a tank of fuel and the time to recharge a supercapacitor pack is almost the same.
I can understand your skepticism, but this breakthrough--along with MIT's research into using carbon nanotubes to build superior supercapacitor storage devices--could drastically change the world as we know it for two reasons:
1. It opens the door for a truly practical electric car, one that uses a far smaller battery pack (which means more passenger/cargo space and less battery "dead weight" to lug around) with very long range and recharge times about the same as one refilling the fuel tank in a passenger car.
2. It makes it possible for large-scale storage of electric power, meaning power generated by wind turbines and/or solar cell farms can be stored for future use when the wind speed is low and during the night.
I think this new battery probably has some relationship to the carbon nanotube supercapacitor electrical storage device that MIT is currently working on.
This is a potentially huge breakthrough, since unlike regular batteries this new power storage unit can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times and the recharge time is measured in minutes, not hours. That makes it possible for truly practical all-electric car and also as a truly practical means to store power generated by wind turbines and solar cell arrays for use later.
It is just reported more now -- for the ratings. And it's working.
And you wonder why--especially now in the modern telecommunications age--why people are increasingly skeptical of the mass media. The sensationalism of the mass media has essentially made parents increasingly less likely letting their children go out and play unsupervised even in a safe, familiar neighborhood.
I like the new iPod nano better because it essentially duplicates on a smaller scale the old iPod mini design, which I thought was the best-designed of the iPod units.
-also, as we over protect our children, we seperate ourselves more and more from the rest of the community. This splits our kids away from the available social networks and playmates - encouraging further isolation.
When you have the mass media constantly scaring people about sexual predators that prey on children, is it small wonder why parents nowadays are absolutely scared about letting their children go out and play in the neighborhood? Small wonder why the only time you see children at a playground nowadays is with very strict parental supervision....
Actually, one of the things iTunes 7.0 may allow is paid subscription-based podcast downloads. The Rush Limbaugh radio show web sites allows this, and an integrated version will allow podcast downloads from the likes of ESPN Insider podcast archive.
The new high-definition formats won't be successful until the price of displays (rear-projection TV, LCD panels and plasma panels) that display 1080-line progressive scan video become far less expensive that it is now.
Creative has decent low cost players but seriously, the biggest competitor against Apple could end up being Sandisk. If you're seen the Sansa e200 series players, these players are among the first portable music players that can compare successfully against the iPod Nano series.
What is interesting is that increasingly, the biggest competitor to the iPod could come from Sandisk, one of the world's largest maker of flash memory modules for digital still cameras. If you've seen the Sansa e200 series player, Sandisk has come up with an excellent portable music player, one that has good sound quality and is easy to navigate around and copy files to the player.
I expect the iPod Nano replacement to have flash memory storage about the same as the Sansa e200 series--8 GB, 6 GB and 4 GB in capacity, and probably price about the same as the Sandisk units (US$250 for the 8 GB, US$200 for the 6 GB and US$150 for the 4 GB units).
Honestly, all doom-and-gloom iPod discussion in this article is going to look silly after this Tuesday's media event by Apple, which is rumored to be offering new metal-enclosed nanos in multiple colors, new iPods, a cell phone, a video streaming device, and movie downloads from Disney (which also means studios like Miramax).
The (likely) announcement of the replacement of the iPod Nano with a new small iPod model that sports 8 GB, 6 GB and possibly 4 GB of flash memory will likely spur sales for many months to come. Apple will likely use a much-improved (and definitely scratchproof!) case and display (rumor has it that it looks like a reduced-size version of the old iPod Mini player), and don't be surprised that the display is larger, too. I also think Apple will upgrade iTunes with a new version that is easier to configure and use, too.
1. It will use a new case design derived from the old iPod Mini case but in a smaller form factor, with scratchproof materials for the case and display. It will be about the size of the Sandisk Sansa e200 series portable music player.
2. The display will be larger than the current Nano display, which will allow the playback of short 4:3 aspect ratio video clips.
3. Flash memory storage will be 8 GB, 6 GB and possibly 4 GB.
4. Apple may offer an AC adapter standard so the new iPod model can be charged without using USB port power to recharge the battery.
5. Apple may offer a protective carrying case as standard.
Don't expect the true video iPod (aka. vPod) to arrive until MacWorld Expo in January 2007.
Just as long as I can get the 17" iMac with at 1 GB of RAM, I'll take it!:) Apple has finally gotten very nice machines that no longer burn a hole in your wallet.
However, I expect Dell to be huge in the server market using Intel's new dual-core Xeon 5000 and 7000 series CPU's. Based on the same CPU core that made the Core Duo 2 CPU such a great CPU, the new Xeons will likely fight back successfully against AMD's Opteron CPU's.
I think one thing that could unnerve the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps is the fact thanks to dramatic reductions in the cost of the technology, the so-called Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) that can store 500 to 1,000 gigabytes on a single disc could make both current high-definition disc formats obselete before their time.
At that level of storage capacity, imagine fitting the ENTIRE Extended Editions of the three Lord of the Rings movies in H.264-compressed 1080p format--including all the supplemental discs!--onto a single 1,000 GB HVD disc. Or imagine all ten seasons of Friends in ten or less HVD discs.
We'll probably not see HVD's reach the market until the latter half of 2007 or early 2008 for consumer use, but once it reaches the market the advantages of 10 to 16.7 times the storage capacity of HD-DVD/Blu-Ray even in 500 GB form will be quite obvious.
I think Intel has finally got their act together with the Conroe-core Core Duo 2/Extreme CPU's, the first truly "designed from scratch" x86-class CPU's from Intel in quite a while. Intel lost its lead because AMD's advanced Athlon-core CPU's could process far more CPU instructions per clock cycle than the equivalent Intel CPU for a long, long time.
Don't don't think AMD will take this lying down--I'm sure by early spring 2007 they'll have next-generation CPU's that will equal the Conroe-core CPU's but with lower power consumption.
I remember when compact flourescents first became widely available in the middle 1990's.
Back then, they had these disadvantages: 1) such bulbs were very expensive (a CFL bulb equivalent of a 60-watt incandescent bulb cost around US$10 per bulb!), 2) they often caused RF interference and 3) they were slow to "warm up" to proper levels of brightness.
However, thanks to improvements in technology since then, 1) you can get 13-watt CFL bulbs for under US$1 per bulb (especially with rebates from local utility companies), 2) they don't cause so much RF interference and 3) most of them "war up" to proper brightness levels in 10-15 seconds at most.
The next major breakthrough in lighting will be LED bulbs, which are still fairly expensive but with improvements in technology and more production costs have rapidly fallen lately. LED's potentially use even less power than CFL bulbs and unlike most CFL bulbs, LED bulbs are full compatible with light dimmer controls.
Another big problem with regular incandescent light bulbs besides its high power use is that they also generate quite a lot of heat, which can sometimes shorten the life of light fixtures. Since a CFL with the equivalent light output of a standard 60-watt bulb only uses 13 watts of power, it also means dramatically lower heat generation.
Yes, there is the issue of recycling CFL's with their mercury content, but fortunately most municipalities have facilities to recycle CFL's.
I think you have to be careful about defining the iPod as a true Windows-based portable music player. For one thing, you need Apple's iTunes software to copy and organize files on an iPod.
In contrast, the players from Sandisk, Samsung, iRiver and Creative Labs work in accordance to the Windows Media Play for Sure specs, and music/podcast files can be copied to the player using Windows Media Player 10 or even Windows Explorer.
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Tuor's story was never actually finished, which is a pity.
Actually, Tuor's story was the first to be written down by Tolkien (he did this right after the Battle of the Somme in 1916). Called The Fall of Gondolin, it actually had a fairly completed version done that was read to a bunch of Oxford students around 1919, just before Tolkien became a Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds.
I think what made The Silmarillion such tough going was the fact it read NOTHING like The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings--it glossed over a lot of old Middle-Earth history pretty quickly.
However, if you have ever read the old Norse sagas or the Finnish Kalevala in the original version, The Silmarillion made vastly more sense, given Tolkien's strong influence of these works.
I think sales of the Wii will be a lot higher than people think.
For one reason: innovative gameplay. That unusual controller used by the Wii allows for a level of realistic user interaction quite a bit higher than what you get with the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 with their more traditional controllers. For example, can you imagine the astonishing level of realistic action with a future version of something like Soul Calibur when you can move the Wii controller so it works almost exactly like you are wielding a real sword?
Then look at the popularity of LCD monitors. While say the color accuracy is worse, that doesnt' matter to most consumers. Meanwhile they're smaller, lighter, take less power, don't have flicker from refresh rates, etc...
LCD's have pretty much taken over from CRT's for two reasons: 1) they take up FAR less desktop space than regular monitors and 2) the power consumption of LCD panels is 1/3 that of a CRT monitor with the same display area. Also, LCD monitor picture quality has dramatically improved lately; if you've seen the NEC MultiSync 90GX2 you have to admire that LCD monitor's amazing sharpness and color clarity.
Electric cars have been 'practical' for a long time given the technology of 20 years ago. Don't believe GM.
If you're talking driving under 30 miles per day and willing to recharge the car for hours every night, that is. That was the downfall of the GM EV-1: it had way too short range and recharging the batteries took several hours for a full charge, not to mention the fact the battery pack took up a huge amount of space inside the car.
With these new battery technologies, we can finally drastically reduce the size of the battery pack; this means pax/cargo space comparable to a normal car and less "deadweight" to lug around, too. Also, because these new battery packs charge to full power in only a few minutes, this means service stations in the future can have both gasoline pumps and electric car recharging connectors on the same service "island."
Improvements in supercapacitor technology makes an all-electric car practical for these reasons:
1) You store quite a lot of electrical energy in a supercapacitor pack. This means potentially drastic reductions in the size of the battery pack on an all-electric car, reducing the "deadweight" of the car and providing cargo/passenger space comparable to a regular car now. You could sacrifice a little cargo/pax space for a larger supercapacitor battery pack and get driving ranges as much as 600 km (372 miles), very good by today's automotive standards.
2) Supercapacitor packs charge fully in few minutes, not several hours like you have with NiMH and Li-On battery packs. This means in the future service stations will have both gasoline fuel pumps and fast-charge electrical connectors on the same service "island," since the time to fill up a tank of fuel and the time to recharge a supercapacitor pack is almost the same.
I can understand your skepticism, but this breakthrough--along with MIT's research into using carbon nanotubes to build superior supercapacitor storage devices--could drastically change the world as we know it for two reasons:
1. It opens the door for a truly practical electric car, one that uses a far smaller battery pack (which means more passenger/cargo space and less battery "dead weight" to lug around) with very long range and recharge times about the same as one refilling the fuel tank in a passenger car.
2. It makes it possible for large-scale storage of electric power, meaning power generated by wind turbines and/or solar cell farms can be stored for future use when the wind speed is low and during the night.
I think this new battery probably has some relationship to the carbon nanotube supercapacitor electrical storage device that MIT is currently working on.
This is a potentially huge breakthrough, since unlike regular batteries this new power storage unit can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times and the recharge time is measured in minutes, not hours. That makes it possible for truly practical all-electric car and also as a truly practical means to store power generated by wind turbines and solar cell arrays for use later.
It is just reported more now -- for the ratings. And it's working.
And you wonder why--especially now in the modern telecommunications age--why people are increasingly skeptical of the mass media. The sensationalism of the mass media has essentially made parents increasingly less likely letting their children go out and play unsupervised even in a safe, familiar neighborhood.
I like the new iPod nano better because it essentially duplicates on a smaller scale the old iPod mini design, which I thought was the best-designed of the iPod units.
-also, as we over protect our children, we seperate ourselves more and more from the rest of the community. This splits our kids away from the available social networks and playmates - encouraging further isolation.
When you have the mass media constantly scaring people about sexual predators that prey on children, is it small wonder why parents nowadays are absolutely scared about letting their children go out and play in the neighborhood? Small wonder why the only time you see children at a playground nowadays is with very strict parental supervision....
Actually, one of the things iTunes 7.0 may allow is paid subscription-based podcast downloads. The Rush Limbaugh radio show web sites allows this, and an integrated version will allow podcast downloads from the likes of ESPN Insider podcast archive.
The new high-definition formats won't be successful until the price of displays (rear-projection TV, LCD panels and plasma panels) that display 1080-line progressive scan video become far less expensive that it is now.
I think we'll see two changes with iTunes 7.0:
1. It will be easier to configure and use.
2. It will be designed to work with Apple's true video iPod player (aka vPod), as some have suggested for its name).
Creative has decent low cost players but seriously, the biggest competitor against Apple could end up being Sandisk. If you're seen the Sansa e200 series players, these players are among the first portable music players that can compare successfully against the iPod Nano series.
What is interesting is that increasingly, the biggest competitor to the iPod could come from Sandisk, one of the world's largest maker of flash memory modules for digital still cameras. If you've seen the Sansa e200 series player, Sandisk has come up with an excellent portable music player, one that has good sound quality and is easy to navigate around and copy files to the player.
I expect the iPod Nano replacement to have flash memory storage about the same as the Sansa e200 series--8 GB, 6 GB and 4 GB in capacity, and probably price about the same as the Sandisk units (US$250 for the 8 GB, US$200 for the 6 GB and US$150 for the 4 GB units).
Honestly, all doom-and-gloom iPod discussion in this article is going to look silly after this Tuesday's media event by Apple, which is rumored to be offering new metal-enclosed nanos in multiple colors, new iPods, a cell phone, a video streaming device, and movie downloads from Disney (which also means studios like Miramax).
The (likely) announcement of the replacement of the iPod Nano with a new small iPod model that sports 8 GB, 6 GB and possibly 4 GB of flash memory will likely spur sales for many months to come. Apple will likely use a much-improved (and definitely scratchproof!) case and display (rumor has it that it looks like a reduced-size version of the old iPod Mini player), and don't be surprised that the display is larger, too. I also think Apple will upgrade iTunes with a new version that is easier to configure and use, too.
1. It will use a new case design derived from the old iPod Mini case but in a smaller form factor, with scratchproof materials for the case and display. It will be about the size of the Sandisk Sansa e200 series portable music player.
2. The display will be larger than the current Nano display, which will allow the playback of short 4:3 aspect ratio video clips.
3. Flash memory storage will be 8 GB, 6 GB and possibly 4 GB.
4. Apple may offer an AC adapter standard so the new iPod model can be charged without using USB port power to recharge the battery.
5. Apple may offer a protective carrying case as standard.
Don't expect the true video iPod (aka. vPod) to arrive until MacWorld Expo in January 2007.
Just as long as I can get the 17" iMac with at 1 GB of RAM, I'll take it! :) Apple has finally gotten very nice machines that no longer burn a hole in your wallet.
However, I expect Dell to be huge in the server market using Intel's new dual-core Xeon 5000 and 7000 series CPU's. Based on the same CPU core that made the Core Duo 2 CPU such a great CPU, the new Xeons will likely fight back successfully against AMD's Opteron CPU's.
I think one thing that could unnerve the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps is the fact thanks to dramatic reductions in the cost of the technology, the so-called Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) that can store 500 to 1,000 gigabytes on a single disc could make both current high-definition disc formats obselete before their time.
At that level of storage capacity, imagine fitting the ENTIRE Extended Editions of the three Lord of the Rings movies in H.264-compressed 1080p format--including all the supplemental discs!--onto a single 1,000 GB HVD disc. Or imagine all ten seasons of Friends in ten or less HVD discs.
We'll probably not see HVD's reach the market until the latter half of 2007 or early 2008 for consumer use, but once it reaches the market the advantages of 10 to 16.7 times the storage capacity of HD-DVD/Blu-Ray even in 500 GB form will be quite obvious.
I think Intel has finally got their act together with the Conroe-core Core Duo 2/Extreme CPU's, the first truly "designed from scratch" x86-class CPU's from Intel in quite a while. Intel lost its lead because AMD's advanced Athlon-core CPU's could process far more CPU instructions per clock cycle than the equivalent Intel CPU for a long, long time.
Don't don't think AMD will take this lying down--I'm sure by early spring 2007 they'll have next-generation CPU's that will equal the Conroe-core CPU's but with lower power consumption.
I remember when compact flourescents first became widely available in the middle 1990's.
Back then, they had these disadvantages: 1) such bulbs were very expensive (a CFL bulb equivalent of a 60-watt incandescent bulb cost around US$10 per bulb!), 2) they often caused RF interference and 3) they were slow to "warm up" to proper levels of brightness.
However, thanks to improvements in technology since then, 1) you can get 13-watt CFL bulbs for under US$1 per bulb (especially with rebates from local utility companies), 2) they don't cause so much RF interference and 3) most of them "war up" to proper brightness levels in 10-15 seconds at most.
The next major breakthrough in lighting will be LED bulbs, which are still fairly expensive but with improvements in technology and more production costs have rapidly fallen lately. LED's potentially use even less power than CFL bulbs and unlike most CFL bulbs, LED bulbs are full compatible with light dimmer controls.
Another big problem with regular incandescent light bulbs besides its high power use is that they also generate quite a lot of heat, which can sometimes shorten the life of light fixtures. Since a CFL with the equivalent light output of a standard 60-watt bulb only uses 13 watts of power, it also means dramatically lower heat generation.
Yes, there is the issue of recycling CFL's with their mercury content, but fortunately most municipalities have facilities to recycle CFL's.
I think you have to be careful about defining the iPod as a true Windows-based portable music player. For one thing, you need Apple's iTunes software to copy and organize files on an iPod.
In contrast, the players from Sandisk, Samsung, iRiver and Creative Labs work in accordance to the Windows Media Play for Sure specs, and music/podcast files can be copied to the player using Windows Media Player 10 or even Windows Explorer.