1. Check your tire pressure at least once per week, preferably before you drive the car for the day. If the tires are properly inflated, you get lower rolling resistance, which can improve fuel efficiency as much as four percent.
2. Change the air filter once every three months. With a clean air filter, you get better engine breathing, which can improve fuel efficiency several precent.
3. Keep the fuel-delivery system clean. That means you should run something like Chevron's Techron additive to your fuel about three times per year to keep the fuel injectors clean. Also, consider having the fuel injectors removed and cleaned manually by a good auto repair shop every 36,000-40,000 miles or so. A dirty, potentially-clogging fuel injector can not only hurt fuel efficiency, it also hurts overall engine performance, too.
4. Replace the spark plugs at slightly shorter than manufacturer-recommended intervals. An improperly-working or worn spark plug can hurt fuel efficiency and overall engine performance quite a bit.
5. Don't drive too fast. Keeping the speed under 75 mph usually helps fuel efficiency since you're dealing with less air resistance when running at lower speeds.
6. Keep the windows closed on a sedan or coupe type vehicle if you're travelling above 40 mph. An open window causes considerable air resistance at higher speeds, so much so that you actually use less fuel with the windows closed and the air conditioner running than having the windows open when you're driving on the freeway.
I don't think we should even consider this movie a documentary.
It should be classed as a propaganda film, and even Michael Moore has admitted publicly this intention more or less.
A good comparison for what Moore did in Fahrenheit 9/11 is the infamous Nazi (yes, I know it'll end up invoking Godwin's Law =) ) propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), produced under close supervision of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and released in 1940 in German theaters. Der ewige Jude uses a lot of hot button images to manipulate the audience into support the Nazi progrom against the Jews, which of course led to six million Jews being killed in the Holocaust. You really have to wonder did Moore watch Der ewige Jude when he produced Fahrenheit 9/11.
You can see an excellent summary and still images of Der ewige Jude from this web page:
If Moore had stated right from the start this movie was intended as propaganda and not as a documentary, the movie wouldn't be so reviled by everyone outside of the hard Left-leaning political crowd.
1. The battery pack for a true-electric car takes up a massive amount of interior space. You ever seen how much interior space is taken up by the battery packs on the GM EV1?
2. The range is woefully too limited for general use. 60-70 mile range won't cut it for most users.
With today's hybrid vehicles, you get very low tailpipe emissions and amazing range on a tank of gasoline (if driven below 70 mph). And you're not tied up to an electric outlet waiting for hours to charge the battery up, unlike a few minutes' fillup time at a gas station with a hybrid car.
Actually, Las Vegas resorts dread COMDEX because the attendees tend to be cheapskates that leave very little money at the gambling tables.
The resorts actually make FAR more money from the National Finals Rodeo in December, where people attending this rodeo tend to be big spenders that do like to gamble.
I mean think about it: how many people who are running Windows XP right now running apps that are more than three years old? I think most users would be using current versions of most commercial software out there, if only because they've already been tested to run under Windows XP out of the box. I'm sure that the current versions of software from Adobe, Macromedia, etc. will likely run in Windows XP Service Pack 2 with no modifications. Given that Microsoft usually gives about a 30-45 day period between date of release to manufacturing and date of actual retail release, I'm sure that on the day that Windows XP SP2 comes out at the retail level you can go to the software manufacturer web site and download program code updates so your software safely works under WinXP SP2.
I seriously doubt that modern day M$ would fund something like this.
I respectfully disagree. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation could easily spare the US$30,000,000 it cost to design and build the White Knight/SpaceShipOne combination.
Indeed, if Burt Rutan wants to try to build a privately-finance spaceplane that could reach Low Earth Orbit (LEO), he may have to get funding from Bill Gates because the development cost of such a vehicle could reach a couple of billion US dollars.
I think once the X-Prize is won, I think somebody ought to seriously put up a even larger prize--like US$100 million--for the first competitor to build a small reusable space vehicle that could fly to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and even possibly rendezvous with the International Space Station. And have the same vehicle fly two such missions within 30 days.
Given Burt Rutan's innovative knowledge of aerospace technology, I wouldn't bet against him for winning this proposed prize, too.:-)
....The Mars Exploration Rovers named Spirit and Opportunity that have tremendously expanded our knowledge of the Martian soil since their missions began at the beginning of 2004. The spectacular pictures from two MER's have opened up the very distinct possibility that life once existed on Mars extensively, and some primitive forms of life may still exist there even now.
I think that Mikhail Kalashnikov--the designer of the AK-47--really lucked out when he designed that famous assault rifle.
Despite his denials, I still believe that Kalashnikov may have seen captured examples of the Sturmgewehr 43 and 44 weapons that the Germans used during World War II and applied some of the German weapon concepts into the AK-47. But the AK-47 incorporated one thing that made it famous: its firing chamber mechanism was designed to be extremely reliable even in the worst conditions of mud, snow and high humidity. The result was a superb weapon, one that was much-lauded for its extreme reliability and reasonable accuracy in the long-barrel versions.
Meanwhile, the M16 was designed to such tight tolerances that it made the weapon quite susceptible to firing chamber jamming in poor operating conditions, as the Americans found out much to their chagrin in the mud and high humidity of Vietnam. That's why the M16 evolved into the much more reliable M16A1, which had a number of design changes to improve its reliability under poor conditions.
By the way, the appearance of the M16 made to Soviets want to develop an assault rifle that used smaller caliber ammunition; the result was the AK-74, another outstanding weapon, though one that was developed surprisingly with some opposition from Mr. Kalashikov, who thought going to the 5.45 mm calibre cartridge wasn't such a good idea.
Unless you need to print really big prints all the time, another good choice is the Canon PowerShot S1 IS.
Despite the fact it's limited to 3.2 megapixels in resolution (which means you can still print 8" x 10" pretty clearly with a good-quality printer), the PowerShot S1 IS has one thing that many people ignore: a decent lens system. With its true 10x optical zoom, this camera can zoom the lens at very high levels with very little optical distortion caused by the lens.
I think people are forgetting the nice things about the update Yahoo! Mail:
1. 100 MB is more than enough if you do mostly text messages. After all, most text messages are about 2-5 KB in size, a tiny fraction of the 100 MB capacity.
2. Yahoo! Mail has excellent controls for spam filtering, and all the spam email is routed to a Bulk folder that does not count towards your normal email quota.:-)
3. Yahoo! Mail has automatic virus checking, so it's very unlikely you'll download attachments that are viruses.
Especially now with new home stereo receivers incorporating digital audio connection cable connections.
What's nice about both Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio is that they eliminate the biggest complaint about Compact Discs, namely the harsh-sounding treble frequency sounds due to the relatively low 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Under DVD-A and SACD, the high notes on a piano, violins and cymbals sound pretty much exactly the way you hear it in a live performance. Indeed, that's why many people who've heard DVD-A and SACD note how much warmer sounding these new formats are compared to Compact Discs, mostly due to the dramatic reduction in treble frequency distortion.
I say within the next 18 months we'll see software that will allow computer users to create their own SACD and/or DVD-A discs using DVD burners and/or we'll see new DVD recorder drives that can create DVD-A or SACD discs.
I think the Intel 80486 CPU will be considered a great CPU, though it pales in comparison to the more significant importance of the 80386, Pentium, Pentium II, and Pentium 4 CPU's.
The 80386 is definitely important because 1) it introduced the 32-bit flat memory model, something that subsequent Intel CPU's incorporated, and 2) it could virtualize 8086 sessions, which made it possible to run multiple programs safely (remember what a breakthrough QEMM-386 plus DESQview was?).
The improvements that the 80486 brought was essentially a built-in FPU unit and faster clock speeds.
I remember reading a very recent Wired magazine article where advances in technology has made it possible to create in the open domain what we should call genetically improved crops, essentially genetic cross-breeding without creating a whole new genome from scratch for the crop at vastly faster rates than normal.
The article mentioned how rice crops in India thanks to computerized genetic analysis for cross-breeding resulted in a rice crop that had 20-30% higher yields and vastly improved resistance to insect, parasite and fungal pests.
The DSL and cable Internet providers will have to provide lower prices soon.
The reason is simple: the deployment of successors to WiFi technology over the next 3-4 years. Imagine by 2007 you can get true wireless broadband Internet access that works smoothly even in a moving vehicle (I believe that's what the 802.20 wireless networking standard will do). I think the companies that provide cellphone service now could be on the vanguard of offering such services, and once that happens Comcast better offer better pricing before they suddenly realize a lot of users will be disconnecting cable and switching to wireless antennas for broadband Internet access.
Disk i/o seems to be handled a bit more gracefully under winxp.
I'm not surprised you said that. Unlike Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home/Professional is designed for today's multimedia hardware, so that's why they seem to work better with CD and DVD recorder drivers.
The more I think about it, the more I think Plato based his story of Atlantis on the destruction of Thera (neé Santorini).
Let's consider the following:
1. Thera in its heyday had a very advanced civilization by ancient standards with things like surprisingly modern plumbing systems!
2. The island of Crete--90 miles south of Thera--had more or less the same type of civilization on Thera.
3. When Thera's volcano did that catastrophic eruption, not only did most of the island sink into the sea from the eruption but it also created a massive tsunami wave that wiped out most of the smaller and larger human settlements on the north coast of Crete 90 miles south. That explains why there was considerable water and mud damage to Knossos.
4. If Solon had properly translated what he heard from the Egyptians in the 7th Century BC, he would have placed the destruction of Atlantis at 900 years, not 9,000 years before his time. 900 years would almost match perfectly the time Thera did its final eruption from Solon's contemporary perspective.
Frankly, any machine that uses a motherboard that supports the Intel 440BX chipset is ready to run Windows 2000 Professional.
Win2K Pro--once you install Service Pack 4 and all current security patches--is actually a very nice operating system for business applications and Internet access. I myself run Win2K Pro (SP4) on a home-built system that uses the Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with a Celeron "A" 500 MHz CPU with 384 MB of RAM and all programs run decently fast.
Another big advantage of Win2K Pro is the fact that software driver support for PC hardware is nothing short of superb. On a fast enough system with USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394 external connections (which are supported in Win2K since there is plentiful third-party driver support for these connections), Win2K is actually a pretty good platform for editing files downloaded from digital still cameras and MiniDV/MicroDV digital camcorders.
It's no wonder why Win2K Pro is still much-liked in the corporate world.
Actually, right now the USA standard for high definition projection is 1080-line interlaced or 720-line non-interlaced, which is pretty much equal in picture quality to most human eyes on today's rear-projection TV sets.
The next leap forward is 1080-line non-interlaced display, which may become available to consumers by 2010. 1080-line non-interlaced is extremely sharp, something like 25 to 50 percent clearer than the current USA standards. Such displays will happen when we get DLP and LCOS rear projection TV sets with two million elements on the DLP/LCOS device, compared to the 1.3 million elements on current DLP/LCOS devices.
I remember seeing Douglas Trumbull's Showscan system at Expo '85 in Japan--it was breathtakingly clear because the frame rate of the projector was 60 frames per second. The only problem is that the film usage rate borders on hideous because you're running the projector at 2.5 times the normal 24 frames per second rate used by movie projectors.
There has been a serious attempt improve film movie projection using the MaxiVision format (which runs at 48 frames per second), but between the necessity of needing movie cameeras and projectors with much higher mechanical tolerences and much higher film usage (you need 1.5 to 2 times the amount of film as normal 24 frames per second projection), no wonder the idea hasn't taken off.
In the end, with the price of digital projectors coming down, a more likely scenario for movie theaters is 1080-line progressive scan projection at 96 fields per second (48 fps), which probably will become reality by 2010.
For this reason: in all the panic over the Sasser virus, I'm sure most Windows 2000 and Windows XP users upgraded with the patch mentioned in Microsoft's KB835732 advisory. Given that Korgo is essentially a Sasser variant, this virus will probably peter out in less than a week.:-)
In fact, the days of hand-painted cels are pretty much over anyway.
In Japan, much anime nowadays are done using computers to achieve a 2-D look, something that can actually be done today on a high-end PC running a faster Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 FX CPU's. They started to switch because Fujifilm (the company that made the clear plastic sheets used in hand-drawn animation) was phasing out production of those sheets in the late 1990's.
By the way, Disney is one of the companies that have been heavily investing in computers to create 2-D animation that are rendered on computers. If you've seen the recent The Lion King 1-1/2 DVD release (which is surprisingly quite good, by the way), most of the animation work was done on computer workstations. Indeed, animation companies in Europe are also doing the same: SIP Animation in France is also a heavy user of computer workstations to create 2-D animation.
However, because Windows 2000 Professional uses more or less the same memory management model as Windows XP, I wouldn't be surprised that the next beta drop does include Win2K Pro support.
I've actually played around with Windows Media Player 9.0 on a relative's machine that has broadband Internet access. One thing I've noticed is that it runs very well in broadband, with very smooth streaming audio and video, even at near full-screen sizes.
I wonder is WMP 10 designed for Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP users only.
If there is ANYONE that could build the world's first privately funded reusable spacecraft that can achieve low Earth orbit (LEO), it's Burt Rutan's company.
Scaled Composites could work with Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works division and come up with a low cost vehicle that could be launched on top of a modified 747-200 to carry up to six astronauts and/or its equivalent in cargo to LEO. Unlike the unfortunate X-33 project, this project is probably going to be much cheaper to pull off since the vehicle that actually flies into space will not need to carry so much fuel during its boost phase.
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1. Check your tire pressure at least once per week, preferably before you drive the car for the day. If the tires are properly inflated, you get lower rolling resistance, which can improve fuel efficiency as much as four percent.
2. Change the air filter once every three months. With a clean air filter, you get better engine breathing, which can improve fuel efficiency several precent.
3. Keep the fuel-delivery system clean. That means you should run something like Chevron's Techron additive to your fuel about three times per year to keep the fuel injectors clean. Also, consider having the fuel injectors removed and cleaned manually by a good auto repair shop every 36,000-40,000 miles or so. A dirty, potentially-clogging fuel injector can not only hurt fuel efficiency, it also hurts overall engine performance, too.
4. Replace the spark plugs at slightly shorter than manufacturer-recommended intervals. An improperly-working or worn spark plug can hurt fuel efficiency and overall engine performance quite a bit.
5. Don't drive too fast. Keeping the speed under 75 mph usually helps fuel efficiency since you're dealing with less air resistance when running at lower speeds.
6. Keep the windows closed on a sedan or coupe type vehicle if you're travelling above 40 mph. An open window causes considerable air resistance at higher speeds, so much so that you actually use less fuel with the windows closed and the air conditioner running than having the windows open when you're driving on the freeway.
I don't think we should even consider this movie a documentary.
t ills.shtml
It should be classed as a propaganda film, and even Michael Moore has admitted publicly this intention more or less.
A good comparison for what Moore did in Fahrenheit 9/11 is the infamous Nazi (yes, I know it'll end up invoking Godwin's Law =) ) propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), produced under close supervision of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and released in 1940 in German theaters. Der ewige Jude uses a lot of hot button images to manipulate the audience into support the Nazi progrom against the Jews, which of course led to six million Jews being killed in the Holocaust. You really have to wonder did Moore watch Der ewige Jude when he produced Fahrenheit 9/11.
You can see an excellent summary and still images of Der ewige Jude from this web page:
http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/s
If Moore had stated right from the start this movie was intended as propaganda and not as a documentary, the movie wouldn't be so reviled by everyone outside of the hard Left-leaning political crowd.
(getting off soapbox)
There are two big problems with electric cars:
1. The battery pack for a true-electric car takes up a massive amount of interior space. You ever seen how much interior space is taken up by the battery packs on the GM EV1?
2. The range is woefully too limited for general use. 60-70 mile range won't cut it for most users.
With today's hybrid vehicles, you get very low tailpipe emissions and amazing range on a tank of gasoline (if driven below 70 mph). And you're not tied up to an electric outlet waiting for hours to charge the battery up, unlike a few minutes' fillup time at a gas station with a hybrid car.
Not really.
Actually, Las Vegas resorts dread COMDEX because the attendees tend to be cheapskates that leave very little money at the gambling tables.
The resorts actually make FAR more money from the National Finals Rodeo in December, where people attending this rodeo tend to be big spenders that do like to gamble.
Amen to your comment! :-)
I mean think about it: how many people who are running Windows XP right now running apps that are more than three years old? I think most users would be using current versions of most commercial software out there, if only because they've already been tested to run under Windows XP out of the box. I'm sure that the current versions of software from Adobe, Macromedia, etc. will likely run in Windows XP Service Pack 2 with no modifications. Given that Microsoft usually gives about a 30-45 day period between date of release to manufacturing and date of actual retail release, I'm sure that on the day that Windows XP SP2 comes out at the retail level you can go to the software manufacturer web site and download program code updates so your software safely works under WinXP SP2.
I seriously doubt that modern day M$ would fund something like this.
I respectfully disagree. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation could easily spare the US$30,000,000 it cost to design and build the White Knight/SpaceShipOne combination.
Indeed, if Burt Rutan wants to try to build a privately-finance spaceplane that could reach Low Earth Orbit (LEO), he may have to get funding from Bill Gates because the development cost of such a vehicle could reach a couple of billion US dollars.
I think once the X-Prize is won, I think somebody ought to seriously put up a even larger prize--like US$100 million--for the first competitor to build a small reusable space vehicle that could fly to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and even possibly rendezvous with the International Space Station. And have the same vehicle fly two such missions within 30 days.
:-)
Given Burt Rutan's innovative knowledge of aerospace technology, I wouldn't bet against him for winning this proposed prize, too.
....The Mars Exploration Rovers named Spirit and Opportunity that have tremendously expanded our knowledge of the Martian soil since their missions began at the beginning of 2004. The spectacular pictures from two MER's have opened up the very distinct possibility that life once existed on Mars extensively, and some primitive forms of life may still exist there even now.
I think that Mikhail Kalashnikov--the designer of the AK-47--really lucked out when he designed that famous assault rifle.
Despite his denials, I still believe that Kalashnikov may have seen captured examples of the Sturmgewehr 43 and 44 weapons that the Germans used during World War II and applied some of the German weapon concepts into the AK-47. But the AK-47 incorporated one thing that made it famous: its firing chamber mechanism was designed to be extremely reliable even in the worst conditions of mud, snow and high humidity. The result was a superb weapon, one that was much-lauded for its extreme reliability and reasonable accuracy in the long-barrel versions.
Meanwhile, the M16 was designed to such tight tolerances that it made the weapon quite susceptible to firing chamber jamming in poor operating conditions, as the Americans found out much to their chagrin in the mud and high humidity of Vietnam. That's why the M16 evolved into the much more reliable M16A1, which had a number of design changes to improve its reliability under poor conditions.
By the way, the appearance of the M16 made to Soviets want to develop an assault rifle that used smaller caliber ammunition; the result was the AK-74, another outstanding weapon, though one that was developed surprisingly with some opposition from Mr. Kalashikov, who thought going to the 5.45 mm calibre cartridge wasn't such a good idea.
Unless you need to print really big prints all the time, another good choice is the Canon PowerShot S1 IS.
Despite the fact it's limited to 3.2 megapixels in resolution (which means you can still print 8" x 10" pretty clearly with a good-quality printer), the PowerShot S1 IS has one thing that many people ignore: a decent lens system. With its true 10x optical zoom, this camera can zoom the lens at very high levels with very little optical distortion caused by the lens.
I think people are forgetting the nice things about the update Yahoo! Mail:
:-)
1. 100 MB is more than enough if you do mostly text messages. After all, most text messages are about 2-5 KB in size, a tiny fraction of the 100 MB capacity.
2. Yahoo! Mail has excellent controls for spam filtering, and all the spam email is routed to a Bulk folder that does not count towards your normal email quota.
3. Yahoo! Mail has automatic virus checking, so it's very unlikely you'll download attachments that are viruses.
Especially now with new home stereo receivers incorporating digital audio connection cable connections.
What's nice about both Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio is that they eliminate the biggest complaint about Compact Discs, namely the harsh-sounding treble frequency sounds due to the relatively low 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Under DVD-A and SACD, the high notes on a piano, violins and cymbals sound pretty much exactly the way you hear it in a live performance. Indeed, that's why many people who've heard DVD-A and SACD note how much warmer sounding these new formats are compared to Compact Discs, mostly due to the dramatic reduction in treble frequency distortion.
I say within the next 18 months we'll see software that will allow computer users to create their own SACD and/or DVD-A discs using DVD burners and/or we'll see new DVD recorder drives that can create DVD-A or SACD discs.
I think the Intel 80486 CPU will be considered a great CPU, though it pales in comparison to the more significant importance of the 80386, Pentium, Pentium II, and Pentium 4 CPU's.
The 80386 is definitely important because 1) it introduced the 32-bit flat memory model, something that subsequent Intel CPU's incorporated, and 2) it could virtualize 8086 sessions, which made it possible to run multiple programs safely (remember what a breakthrough QEMM-386 plus DESQview was?).
The improvements that the 80486 brought was essentially a built-in FPU unit and faster clock speeds.
I remember reading a very recent Wired magazine article where advances in technology has made it possible to create in the open domain what we should call genetically improved crops, essentially genetic cross-breeding without creating a whole new genome from scratch for the crop at vastly faster rates than normal.
The article mentioned how rice crops in India thanks to computerized genetic analysis for cross-breeding resulted in a rice crop that had 20-30% higher yields and vastly improved resistance to insect, parasite and fungal pests.
The DSL and cable Internet providers will have to provide lower prices soon.
The reason is simple: the deployment of successors to WiFi technology over the next 3-4 years. Imagine by 2007 you can get true wireless broadband Internet access that works smoothly even in a moving vehicle (I believe that's what the 802.20 wireless networking standard will do). I think the companies that provide cellphone service now could be on the vanguard of offering such services, and once that happens Comcast better offer better pricing before they suddenly realize a lot of users will be disconnecting cable and switching to wireless antennas for broadband Internet access.
Disk i/o seems to be handled a bit more gracefully under winxp.
I'm not surprised you said that. Unlike Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home/Professional is designed for today's multimedia hardware, so that's why they seem to work better with CD and DVD recorder drivers.
The more I think about it, the more I think Plato based his story of Atlantis on the destruction of Thera (neé Santorini).
Let's consider the following:
1. Thera in its heyday had a very advanced civilization by ancient standards with things like surprisingly modern plumbing systems!
2. The island of Crete--90 miles south of Thera--had more or less the same type of civilization on Thera.
3. When Thera's volcano did that catastrophic eruption, not only did most of the island sink into the sea from the eruption but it also created a massive tsunami wave that wiped out most of the smaller and larger human settlements on the north coast of Crete 90 miles south. That explains why there was considerable water and mud damage to Knossos.
4. If Solon had properly translated what he heard from the Egyptians in the 7th Century BC, he would have placed the destruction of Atlantis at 900 years, not 9,000 years before his time. 900 years would almost match perfectly the time Thera did its final eruption from Solon's contemporary perspective.
Frankly, any machine that uses a motherboard that supports the Intel 440BX chipset is ready to run Windows 2000 Professional.
Win2K Pro--once you install Service Pack 4 and all current security patches--is actually a very nice operating system for business applications and Internet access. I myself run Win2K Pro (SP4) on a home-built system that uses the Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with a Celeron "A" 500 MHz CPU with 384 MB of RAM and all programs run decently fast.
Another big advantage of Win2K Pro is the fact that software driver support for PC hardware is nothing short of superb. On a fast enough system with USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394 external connections (which are supported in Win2K since there is plentiful third-party driver support for these connections), Win2K is actually a pretty good platform for editing files downloaded from digital still cameras and MiniDV/MicroDV digital camcorders.
It's no wonder why Win2K Pro is still much-liked in the corporate world.
Actually, right now the USA standard for high definition projection is 1080-line interlaced or 720-line non-interlaced, which is pretty much equal in picture quality to most human eyes on today's rear-projection TV sets.
The next leap forward is 1080-line non-interlaced display, which may become available to consumers by 2010. 1080-line non-interlaced is extremely sharp, something like 25 to 50 percent clearer than the current USA standards. Such displays will happen when we get DLP and LCOS rear projection TV sets with two million elements on the DLP/LCOS device, compared to the 1.3 million elements on current DLP/LCOS devices.
I remember seeing Douglas Trumbull's Showscan system at Expo '85 in Japan--it was breathtakingly clear because the frame rate of the projector was 60 frames per second. The only problem is that the film usage rate borders on hideous because you're running the projector at 2.5 times the normal 24 frames per second rate used by movie projectors.
There has been a serious attempt improve film movie projection using the MaxiVision format (which runs at 48 frames per second), but between the necessity of needing movie cameeras and projectors with much higher mechanical tolerences and much higher film usage (you need 1.5 to 2 times the amount of film as normal 24 frames per second projection), no wonder the idea hasn't taken off.
In the end, with the price of digital projectors coming down, a more likely scenario for movie theaters is 1080-line progressive scan projection at 96 fields per second (48 fps), which probably will become reality by 2010.
For this reason: in all the panic over the Sasser virus, I'm sure most Windows 2000 and Windows XP users upgraded with the patch mentioned in Microsoft's KB835732 advisory. Given that Korgo is essentially a Sasser variant, this virus will probably peter out in less than a week. :-)
In fact, the days of hand-painted cels are pretty much over anyway.
In Japan, much anime nowadays are done using computers to achieve a 2-D look, something that can actually be done today on a high-end PC running a faster Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 FX CPU's. They started to switch because Fujifilm (the company that made the clear plastic sheets used in hand-drawn animation) was phasing out production of those sheets in the late 1990's.
By the way, Disney is one of the companies that have been heavily investing in computers to create 2-D animation that are rendered on computers. If you've seen the recent The Lion King 1-1/2 DVD release (which is surprisingly quite good, by the way), most of the animation work was done on computer workstations. Indeed, animation companies in Europe are also doing the same: SIP Animation in France is also a heavy user of computer workstations to create 2-D animation.
I saw that too.
However, because Windows 2000 Professional uses more or less the same memory management model as Windows XP, I wouldn't be surprised that the next beta drop does include Win2K Pro support.
I've actually played around with Windows Media Player 9.0 on a relative's machine that has broadband Internet access. One thing I've noticed is that it runs very well in broadband, with very smooth streaming audio and video, even at near full-screen sizes.
I wonder is WMP 10 designed for Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP users only.
If there is ANYONE that could build the world's first privately funded reusable spacecraft that can achieve low Earth orbit (LEO), it's Burt Rutan's company.
Scaled Composites could work with Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works division and come up with a low cost vehicle that could be launched on top of a modified 747-200 to carry up to six astronauts and/or its equivalent in cargo to LEO. Unlike the unfortunate X-33 project, this project is probably going to be much cheaper to pull off since the vehicle that actually flies into space will not need to carry so much fuel during its boost phase.