Actually, I want Apple to offer the following on future iPods:
1. A user-replaceable battery. After all, if digital still camera manufacturers can offer user-replaceable NiMH and Li-Ion batteries....
2. A built-in tuner for local FM and AM stations. There are people out there that want to listen to local radio stations on long walks (like me every morning!) in addition to listening to music.
The Dragonslayer monster was really scary for the time (I was 12) whereas Dragonheart was kind of cartoonish.
Actually, the more I think about it a better example of what a flying dragon can look realistically as created by CGI are the Fell Beasts from The Lord of the Rings movies that were done by WETA Digital. They definitely look more realistic than the CGI creation in Dragonheart, which was done with less computing power than what was done in the LoTR movies.
The immediate future of television SciFi is niche channels. The staple of good SciFi is great special effects. Every year, it gets cheaper and cheaper to make effects that are better and better. The original BSG took the budget of a major network to put out. Now, a smallish cable channel can do a better job cheaper.
Back when the original BG series was in production in 1977-1978, it was exorbitantly expensive because you had to build models and use special motion cameras to film the models--a very time-consuming process. Given how good today's CGI technology has become with relatively cheap equipment, you can now do special effects vastly better than what was done with the original series at a tiny fraction of the cost.
I can cite another example: how to depict a mythological flying dragon on-screen. When Industrial Light & Magic did its work for Dragonslayer they built a "go-motion" model of a dragon and filmed it with special cameras, which required a long and time-consuming process to complete; 15 years later, Dragonheart did the same thing, but all completely done with CGI, probably at less expense per minute of film than the earlier movie.
I think the major reason why the new Battlestar Galactica series has done well is one Ronald D. Moore, who I believe developed the new series and is one of the Executive Producers.
Moore wrote and/or was involved in many of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; small wonder why the new BG series has been much better than many people anticipated. =)
It's too bad Ron Moore wasn't involved with Enterprise, because Moore could have turned Enterprise into a potentially great series.:-(
Especially coastline areas that tend to have an inordinate amount of shipwrecks historically.
For example, the Cape Haterras lighthouse in North Carolina definitely should stay, not only as a historical landmark but also as a warning for ships to be careful travelling near the lighthouse due to the many shipwrecks that have occurred off the coast of Cape Haterras.
I think while we all have to give a nod to the pioneers of electronic music, the album that made EVERYONE stand up and notice its potential was Switched-On Bach, an album by Walter (neé Wendy) Carlos and Benjamin Folkman that demonstrated how to truly make great music using electronic instruments, in this case the early Moog synthesizers. The Carlos/Folkman rendition of Bach's Brandenberg Concerto #3 in G major made me appreciate what a genius Bach was when it came to writing music.:-)
What will the tinfoil hat crowd like Richard C. Hoagland say about MARSIS radar images, especially when MARSIS does the radar imaging of the Cydonia region of Mars, probably late this year?
I have this feeling that Apple will announce that they will switch to the Cell CPU some time later this year, and the first machines to use the Cell CPU will be announced at MacWorld in January 2006 (probably both Power Macintosh and iMac models).
I think your experience with switching to an Antec power supply is good reason why if you're running a machine with a faster CPU and 1 GB of RAM you want to get at least a power supply of 350 W or higher made by Enermax, Antec or PC Power and Cooling. They're not cheap, but at least you're have the assurance that your machine will last a long time thanks to the power supply offering stable power to all your computer's components.
The nice thing is at least Microsoft is taking their security problems seriously nowadays and are making patches available on a regular basis.
Which does remind me: how does various commercial Linux distributions (Mandrake, SuSE, Linspire, etc.) provide patches for known code vulnerabilties? Do they use a system something akin to Windows Update?
Re:It is not about how much rocket costs..
on
Hondas in Space
·
· Score: 1
However, you forget that the R-7 rocket that was developed during the 1950's had to be extremely reliable due to the fact it was designed as an ICBM and it needed to carry the quite heavy Soviet-designed nuclear warheads of that period. It took them years to get that rocket to work reliably, given the number of launch failures of R-7 rockets during late 1950's; the Russians really crossed their fingers launching the early Sputniks given the failure rate of the R-7 back then. By the middle 1960's the R-7 design was reliable enough that they were used to launch numerous "spy" satellites for the Russians, essentially highly-modified Vostok capsules loaded with cameras and film.
...if you buy a commercial machine with Windows XP installed you usually get at least an antivirus program loaded such as ViruScan or Norton Antivirus.
I wouldn't be surprised that by now for commercial machines they thrown in a full licensed install of McAfee's or Norton's full security suite (antivirus, bi-directional firewall and spyware detection/removal). Don't forget that Microsoft could offer such a thing pretty soon, given Microsoft's recent software company mergers.
Based on current exchange rates, it costs US$75.29 per month for that new UK broadband service. That is exorbitantly expensive compared to the current rate for Comcast High-Speed Internet here in the USA, which is US$42.95 per month for Comcast cable TV customers (at least here on the US West Coast).
Small wonder why the French service costing US$39.09 per month at current exchange rates is truly a steal, especially with the 20 mbps download speeds.
I think much of the people wanting to try Firefox is due to the fact that Firefox has a number of features that Internet Explorer lacks, especially tabbed browsing, RSS support, and pop-up ad blocking.
However, I have this suspicion that Microsoft maybe preparing a counterattack of sorts. If you've played with Maxthon, it's a pretty powerful shell program for Internet Explorer that essentially gives the browser a large fraction of the functionality of Firefox, plus Maxthon has number of interesting features of its own, such as its very nice ad blocking features. I would not be surprised that Microsoft might just buy the rights to Maxthon and incorporate it into IE itself some time later this year.
If Internet Explorer gets the functionality of Maxthon, the incentive to switch to Firefox will go down quite a bit, to say the least.
Remember, a DVD movie of about two hours will fit on a single-sided single-layer disc if you subtract out all the "extras" you find on DVD's nowadays, so true DVD quality is about 2.3 GB per hour of video.
But we don't really need that high quality video for my proposed "iVideo" store. Remember, DiVX at near-DVD quality video is about 350 MB per hour, and if you limit yourself to standard NTSC broadcast video resolution of 330 lines we could probably make a reasonable quality video fit in about 200 MB per hour.
1. Apple is the first company I know of that has really popularized legal downloads of multimedia on a truly large and profitable scale.
2. Steve Jobs is well-liked among people in the entertainment industry, so Jobs could convince the Hollywood movie/TV studios to create a system of legal video downloads.
3. Thanks to the increasing proliferation of broadband here in the USA, there are enough customers to justify such a service even though videos downloaded through the "iVideo" store would require about 100-200 MB of disk space per hour for good quality video.
4. Hard drives of high capacity (120 GB and above) are so cheap nowadays that customers could now store potentially hundreds of hours of videos with a decent compression codec.
5. Devices such as Sony's PlayStation Portable point the way of portable video playback devices viewing video programming downloaded legally from "iVideo." While the PSP is technologically not perfect (too small hard drive and too limited battery life), by this time next year the technology may be there for a PSP-sized device from Apple using a hard drive designed for the iPod of 120 GB capacity and with higher-capacity batteries. Such a device will likely connect with the computer where the videos are stored using IEEE-1394 or USB 2.0 connections.
One of my peeves about broadcasting over the net is that so many people want perfect signal, regardless of what they're using the broadcast for.
Unless you're streaming mostly music, you really don't need the highest quality data transmission rate for streaming audio over the Internet. Run Real or Windows Media audio streams at 16 kbps and the sound quality is more than acceptable enough to hear mostly speech broadcasts such as news, sporting events and talk radio clearly.
I think while these low bit rate transmissions might not be great for music, they do work pretty well for transmission of mostly speech broadcasts such as news, radio talk shows and sporting events.
I think because we're so used to talking over landline telephones with its relatively poor sound quality, Windows Media and Real audio streams transmitted at 16 kilobits per second and the audio stream mentioned in the article sounds reasonably well for mostly-speech programming.
Isn't the SFO runway configuration too small to handle the superjumbos?
If you're talking side-by-side takeoffs and landings, that's true. But given that Singapore Airlines will probably be the only airline to fly the A380-800 in and out of SFO at least till late 2007, the runway spacing should not be an issue.
But the big issue is taxiway spacing. SFO officials are mulling how to safely ground-taxi the A380-800 during the busy daytime hours, especially when Lufthansa starts flying the A380-800 on their route between Frankfurt-am-Main and San Francisco some time in 2008 (the current flight from Frankfurt arrives in the late morning and leaves San Francisco the middle of the afternoon).
All of these airports (At least Tokyo-narita's Terminal 2, Newark's gates C120-130, and Houston's E terminal) have a single wide entry door and a single aisleway, then as you get closer to the plane it splits into two narrower jetways, one leading to the first class cabin and the other leading to the main cabin.
Alas, that won't do for the A380-800 because you're still limited to ONE primary jet bridge connection from the terminal building to the plane. That's why each gate SFO's new International Terminal concourses have two primary jet bridge connections per gate, which speeds up passenger loading and unloading quite a bit. Because of the A380's interior design at the front of the plane, when you enter the plane through the front jet bridge you end up at the bottom of the wide stairway to access the upper deck, so all upper deck passengers will use one jet bridge and main deck passenger will use the other jet bridge.
There're only two gates at SFO that can handle the A380 (or the A340-600), and that's due to the extra length of the plane. The other Int'l gates are just long enough for the 747-400.
Actually, there are five gates--two on the Concourse A side and three on the Concourse G side--that have the 80 x 80 meter spacing to handle the A380-800 easily. You could actually park the A380-800 on the A and G gates that face San Francisco Bay, mostly because the spacing of the front two doors of the A380 for the dual jet bridges used by the A380 is almost the same as the 747-400; the only issue is that the wider wingspan of the A380 will interfere with adjecent gates, which means you can't park a 747-400 next to the A380-800 unless the A380-800 is parked at one of the gates with 80 x 80 meter spacing.
The problem with the A340-600 is that the spacing of the front two doors and the sheer length of the plane actually limits this Airbus plane to the gates at the end of Concourses A and G, which have the extra length jet bridges that can handle the A340-600 easily.
Frankly all of the dual aisle airliners 747,767, 777, MD-11 and some of the Airbuses would benefit from having an jetway on each side. I do not care how big the gate is, if you still have to push 800 people through one door it takes forever.
The gates at San Franciso International Airport's Concourses A and G (International Terminal) that opened at the end of 2000 all have dual jet bridges on the same level. For obvious reasons, when Singapore Airlines flies the A380-800 to SFO probably in the late summer of 2006, they will have to use both jet bridges to get 510 passengers (Singapore Airlines A380 seating configuration) on and off the plane in a reasonable time.
The A380 will be used mainly on the longhaul hub routes, such as LA to Hongkong, London to Hongkong, London to Sydney, London to New York, New York to Hongkong etc.
In fact, you might be able to see the A380-800 flying in and out of San Francisco (SFO) probably by the late summer of 2006, flying Singapore Airlines' most profitable route: Singapore to San Francisco via Hong Kong (SQ Flight 002 eastbound/Flight 001 westbound). Just the segment between San Francisco and Hong Kong would fill the 510-seat configuration used by Singapore Airlines for their A380-800's.
1. Have you ever flown on a 747? It takes forever to load and unload the people and the baggage. Unless they make new gates that use at least two doors the problem will be twice as bad on the new Airbus.
That may be true in the past but most of the busiest international airports have either upgraded or will so upgrade their facilities to handle the larger A380. That's why San Francisco (SFO) lucked out, because when they designed and built the current International Terminal during the latter half of the 1990's they closely followed the finalization of the A380 design and as such have 80 x 80 meter spacing gates and increased-capacity ground facilities to handle the plane.
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Actually, I want Apple to offer the following on future iPods:
1. A user-replaceable battery. After all, if digital still camera manufacturers can offer user-replaceable NiMH and Li-Ion batteries....
2. A built-in tuner for local FM and AM stations. There are people out there that want to listen to local radio stations on long walks (like me every morning!) in addition to listening to music.
The Dragonslayer monster was really scary for the time (I was 12) whereas Dragonheart was kind of cartoonish.
Actually, the more I think about it a better example of what a flying dragon can look realistically as created by CGI are the Fell Beasts from The Lord of the Rings movies that were done by WETA Digital. They definitely look more realistic than the CGI creation in Dragonheart, which was done with less computing power than what was done in the LoTR movies.
The immediate future of television SciFi is niche channels. The staple of good SciFi is great special effects. Every year, it gets cheaper and cheaper to make effects that are better and better. The original BSG took the budget of a major network to put out. Now, a smallish cable channel can do a better job cheaper.
Back when the original BG series was in production in 1977-1978, it was exorbitantly expensive because you had to build models and use special motion cameras to film the models--a very time-consuming process. Given how good today's CGI technology has become with relatively cheap equipment, you can now do special effects vastly better than what was done with the original series at a tiny fraction of the cost.
I can cite another example: how to depict a mythological flying dragon on-screen. When Industrial Light & Magic did its work for Dragonslayer they built a "go-motion" model of a dragon and filmed it with special cameras, which required a long and time-consuming process to complete; 15 years later, Dragonheart did the same thing, but all completely done with CGI, probably at less expense per minute of film than the earlier movie.
I think the major reason why the new Battlestar Galactica series has done well is one Ronald D. Moore, who I believe developed the new series and is one of the Executive Producers.
:-(
Moore wrote and/or was involved in many of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; small wonder why the new BG series has been much better than many people anticipated. =)
It's too bad Ron Moore wasn't involved with Enterprise, because Moore could have turned Enterprise into a potentially great series.
Especially coastline areas that tend to have an inordinate amount of shipwrecks historically.
For example, the Cape Haterras lighthouse in North Carolina definitely should stay, not only as a historical landmark but also as a warning for ships to be careful travelling near the lighthouse due to the many shipwrecks that have occurred off the coast of Cape Haterras.
I think while we all have to give a nod to the pioneers of electronic music, the album that made EVERYONE stand up and notice its potential was Switched-On Bach, an album by Walter (neé Wendy) Carlos and Benjamin Folkman that demonstrated how to truly make great music using electronic instruments, in this case the early Moog synthesizers. The Carlos/Folkman rendition of Bach's Brandenberg Concerto #3 in G major made me appreciate what a genius Bach was when it came to writing music. :-)
What will the tinfoil hat crowd like Richard C. Hoagland say about MARSIS radar images, especially when MARSIS does the radar imaging of the Cydonia region of Mars, probably late this year?
I have this feeling that Apple will announce that they will switch to the Cell CPU some time later this year, and the first machines to use the Cell CPU will be announced at MacWorld in January 2006 (probably both Power Macintosh and iMac models).
I think your experience with switching to an Antec power supply is good reason why if you're running a machine with a faster CPU and 1 GB of RAM you want to get at least a power supply of 350 W or higher made by Enermax, Antec or PC Power and Cooling. They're not cheap, but at least you're have the assurance that your machine will last a long time thanks to the power supply offering stable power to all your computer's components.
Thanks for the information! :-) I remember seeing YAST in SuSE when I played with SuSE Linux some time ago.
The nice thing is at least Microsoft is taking their security problems seriously nowadays and are making patches available on a regular basis.
Which does remind me: how does various commercial Linux distributions (Mandrake, SuSE, Linspire, etc.) provide patches for known code vulnerabilties? Do they use a system something akin to Windows Update?
However, you forget that the R-7 rocket that was developed during the 1950's had to be extremely reliable due to the fact it was designed as an ICBM and it needed to carry the quite heavy Soviet-designed nuclear warheads of that period. It took them years to get that rocket to work reliably, given the number of launch failures of R-7 rockets during late 1950's; the Russians really crossed their fingers launching the early Sputniks given the failure rate of the R-7 back then. By the middle 1960's the R-7 design was reliable enough that they were used to launch numerous "spy" satellites for the Russians, essentially highly-modified Vostok capsules loaded with cameras and film.
...if you buy a commercial machine with Windows XP installed you usually get at least an antivirus program loaded such as ViruScan or Norton Antivirus.
I wouldn't be surprised that by now for commercial machines they thrown in a full licensed install of McAfee's or Norton's full security suite (antivirus, bi-directional firewall and spyware detection/removal). Don't forget that Microsoft could offer such a thing pretty soon, given Microsoft's recent software company mergers.
Based on current exchange rates, it costs US$75.29 per month for that new UK broadband service. That is exorbitantly expensive compared to the current rate for Comcast High-Speed Internet here in the USA, which is US$42.95 per month for Comcast cable TV customers (at least here on the US West Coast).
Small wonder why the French service costing US$39.09 per month at current exchange rates is truly a steal, especially with the 20 mbps download speeds.
I think much of the people wanting to try Firefox is due to the fact that Firefox has a number of features that Internet Explorer lacks, especially tabbed browsing, RSS support, and pop-up ad blocking.
However, I have this suspicion that Microsoft maybe preparing a counterattack of sorts. If you've played with Maxthon, it's a pretty powerful shell program for Internet Explorer that essentially gives the browser a large fraction of the functionality of Firefox, plus Maxthon has number of interesting features of its own, such as its very nice ad blocking features. I would not be surprised that Microsoft might just buy the rights to Maxthon and incorporate it into IE itself some time later this year.
If Internet Explorer gets the functionality of Maxthon, the incentive to switch to Firefox will go down quite a bit, to say the least.
Remember, a DVD movie of about two hours will fit on a single-sided single-layer disc if you subtract out all the "extras" you find on DVD's nowadays, so true DVD quality is about 2.3 GB per hour of video.
But we don't really need that high quality video for my proposed "iVideo" store. Remember, DiVX at near-DVD quality video is about 350 MB per hour, and if you limit yourself to standard NTSC broadcast video resolution of 330 lines we could probably make a reasonable quality video fit in about 200 MB per hour.
For a number of reasons:
1. Apple is the first company I know of that has really popularized legal downloads of multimedia on a truly large and profitable scale.
2. Steve Jobs is well-liked among people in the entertainment industry, so Jobs could convince the Hollywood movie/TV studios to create a system of legal video downloads.
3. Thanks to the increasing proliferation of broadband here in the USA, there are enough customers to justify such a service even though videos downloaded through the "iVideo" store would require about 100-200 MB of disk space per hour for good quality video.
4. Hard drives of high capacity (120 GB and above) are so cheap nowadays that customers could now store potentially hundreds of hours of videos with a decent compression codec.
5. Devices such as Sony's PlayStation Portable point the way of portable video playback devices viewing video programming downloaded legally from "iVideo." While the PSP is technologically not perfect (too small hard drive and too limited battery life), by this time next year the technology may be there for a PSP-sized device from Apple using a hard drive designed for the iPod of 120 GB capacity and with higher-capacity batteries. Such a device will likely connect with the computer where the videos are stored using IEEE-1394 or USB 2.0 connections.
One of my peeves about broadcasting over the net is that so many people want perfect signal, regardless of what they're using the broadcast for.
Unless you're streaming mostly music, you really don't need the highest quality data transmission rate for streaming audio over the Internet. Run Real or Windows Media audio streams at 16 kbps and the sound quality is more than acceptable enough to hear mostly speech broadcasts such as news, sporting events and talk radio clearly.
I think while these low bit rate transmissions might not be great for music, they do work pretty well for transmission of mostly speech broadcasts such as news, radio talk shows and sporting events.
I think because we're so used to talking over landline telephones with its relatively poor sound quality, Windows Media and Real audio streams transmitted at 16 kilobits per second and the audio stream mentioned in the article sounds reasonably well for mostly-speech programming.
Isn't the SFO runway configuration too small to handle the superjumbos?
If you're talking side-by-side takeoffs and landings, that's true. But given that Singapore Airlines will probably be the only airline to fly the A380-800 in and out of SFO at least till late 2007, the runway spacing should not be an issue.
But the big issue is taxiway spacing. SFO officials are mulling how to safely ground-taxi the A380-800 during the busy daytime hours, especially when Lufthansa starts flying the A380-800 on their route between Frankfurt-am-Main and San Francisco some time in 2008 (the current flight from Frankfurt arrives in the late morning and leaves San Francisco the middle of the afternoon).
All of these airports (At least Tokyo-narita's Terminal 2, Newark's gates C120-130, and Houston's E terminal) have a single wide entry door and a single aisleway, then as you get closer to the plane it splits into two narrower jetways, one leading to the first class cabin and the other leading to the main cabin.
Alas, that won't do for the A380-800 because you're still limited to ONE primary jet bridge connection from the terminal building to the plane. That's why each gate SFO's new International Terminal concourses have two primary jet bridge connections per gate, which speeds up passenger loading and unloading quite a bit. Because of the A380's interior design at the front of the plane, when you enter the plane through the front jet bridge you end up at the bottom of the wide stairway to access the upper deck, so all upper deck passengers will use one jet bridge and main deck passenger will use the other jet bridge.
There're only two gates at SFO that can handle the A380 (or the A340-600), and that's due to the extra length of the plane. The other Int'l gates are just long enough for the 747-400.
Actually, there are five gates--two on the Concourse A side and three on the Concourse G side--that have the 80 x 80 meter spacing to handle the A380-800 easily. You could actually park the A380-800 on the A and G gates that face San Francisco Bay, mostly because the spacing of the front two doors of the A380 for the dual jet bridges used by the A380 is almost the same as the 747-400; the only issue is that the wider wingspan of the A380 will interfere with adjecent gates, which means you can't park a 747-400 next to the A380-800 unless the A380-800 is parked at one of the gates with 80 x 80 meter spacing.
The problem with the A340-600 is that the spacing of the front two doors and the sheer length of the plane actually limits this Airbus plane to the gates at the end of Concourses A and G, which have the extra length jet bridges that can handle the A340-600 easily.
Frankly all of the dual aisle airliners 747,767, 777, MD-11 and some of the Airbuses would benefit from having an jetway on each side. I do not care how big the gate is, if you still have to push 800 people through one door it takes forever.
The gates at San Franciso International Airport's Concourses A and G (International Terminal) that opened at the end of 2000 all have dual jet bridges on the same level. For obvious reasons, when Singapore Airlines flies the A380-800 to SFO probably in the late summer of 2006, they will have to use both jet bridges to get 510 passengers (Singapore Airlines A380 seating configuration) on and off the plane in a reasonable time.
The A380 will be used mainly on the longhaul hub routes, such as LA to Hongkong, London to Hongkong, London to Sydney, London to New York, New York to Hongkong etc.
In fact, you might be able to see the A380-800 flying in and out of San Francisco (SFO) probably by the late summer of 2006, flying Singapore Airlines' most profitable route: Singapore to San Francisco via Hong Kong (SQ Flight 002 eastbound/Flight 001 westbound). Just the segment between San Francisco and Hong Kong would fill the 510-seat configuration used by Singapore Airlines for their A380-800's.
1. Have you ever flown on a 747? It takes forever to load and unload the people and the baggage. Unless they make new gates that use at least two doors the problem will be twice as bad on the new Airbus.
That may be true in the past but most of the busiest international airports have either upgraded or will so upgrade their facilities to handle the larger A380. That's why San Francisco (SFO) lucked out, because when they designed and built the current International Terminal during the latter half of the 1990's they closely followed the finalization of the A380 design and as such have 80 x 80 meter spacing gates and increased-capacity ground facilities to handle the plane.