I'm new to this idiocy you've churned up, but I can offer up a hearty rofl. This absurd waste of time is about as well considered and persuasive as bad vista, only it's chock full of 'more of the same'!
Vista is dominating just as we all new it would. Your lengthy and excited list of all the failures doesn't make a bit of difference, and the people screaming about you make even less difference. Independent developers and hardware are all flocking to it and discovering that most of your complaints are devious lies or founded on willful ignorance. This only makes FLOSSY look more like the bow backed nag she is.
to summarize, massive FAIL for everyone here 'cepts me and my vista machines. HAND
So, a thread where everyone gets to show how terribly sophisticated they are by turning their noses up at an action film? no way! I submit to you all that the vast majority of this trash talk is little more than fickle ignorance.
This film is certainly about visual appeal. But i can say that with just a teensy bit of knowledge in that domain, it is readily apparent to me that this is a spectacular triumph.
The film captures the recently popular technique called HDR or High Dynamic Range photography, but they manage to do it at 24 frames per second at IMAX resolutions and keep it going for 2 hours. All of the motion blur, lens flares and other camera artifacts are clearly intentional and separate from anything having to do with their cameras, most likely in order to emphasize a sense of scale or motion. Notice how the backgrounds are in focus, crisp and sharp along with the immediate foreground- this is surely the most essential element of creating the live action cartoon feel that the brief snippets of trailer are hinting at.
But the most important thing I'm able to extract from the limited glimpses I've had is that they employ all of this to convey the sense of big heavy cars racing at hundreds of miles per hour and flipping through the air as gracefully as a ballet troop in full deployment.
So what good does the optimistic assessment do me? For one thing, it gives me some joy in the anticipation. More importantly, I get the satisfaction of being truly sophisticated without sitting in a traffic jam down on Snark St.
Rowling is specifically "outraged" because she's been working on her own compendium. Should she just scrap one of the secondary projects for her Potter franchise so that shmucko McFanboi can publish his?
I've been following transmeta fairly close all this time, keeping up on the news clippings and press releases, anyway, and it seems to me that we went through this last year, and the year before was a buyout rumor.
My prediction: this year sees them consolidating the patent portfolio through acquisition, despite the money pit issues, in specific particular, they will gobble up rambus, inc before august '05. This is despite the rambus legal liabilities and with the intention of going MGLM (mean, green litigating machine).
The exit from manufacturing is a non-issue, really. the thing to watch is the IP warfare that's coming. also, the eventual sellout is nigh. expect AMD, samsung and hyundai to muscle in around early '06, if'n this press release isn't just grooming for the auction block now.
Take note of my username: Fudboy. I made this account in the midst of the heyday hype just prior to the first Transmeta product announcement, largely to combat said hype and interject a note of reason into the discussions here at slashdot. Many of the denizens here were overly excited about Transmeta, what with Linus on board and the appearance of their being David to Intel's Goliath...
It is a sad day coming for the chip industry, but not unexpected. Transmeta had some very sharp ideas, great talent, excellent marketting and the promise of revolutionary influence on the mobile computing market. But sadly, many forces conspired to undermine the great promise TMTA represented: most apparently the problems in logic design, lack of op/s power, expensive wholesale prices resulting from increasingly bizarre fabrication contractual arrangements with competitors, a weakening market made worse by tragedy... but I digress.
In a few years, there'll be another company attempting a Transmeta-style hype campaign, and I hope that when that day comes, we can all remember how this played out.
While it is sad to see a company die, let us not forget that this isn't entirely a tragedy- the venture capitalists won great riches, the principles of the company also surely won such riches if they were smart enough to sell liberally afetr the IPO, a handfull of speculators surely won such riches in the early heyday of trading the TMTA stock... But also let us mourn those who will find themselves unemployed, those whose brilliant work will be shelved or scraped and forgotten, those foolish enough to still hold the stock and scramble to cut their losses even at this late hour. Let us offer them our condolences.
Because the memory bus is a memory bus, and NOT a peripheral bus! Peripheral busses have things like interrupts, address space configuration, buffering, bridging, hot-plugging, and long-term stability that memory busses are simply not designed for.
How would you like it if you couldn't use the latest whizz bang 8.4GB/s memory technology because some peripheral you bought a year earlier needs to be on a 4.8GB/s memory interface?
it's all in the controller. Perhaps abandoning the other busses and rigging up the interrupts for a single bus would be best? Also, it seems that having several memory busses would solve the problems of speed dependencies. multiplexing the south bridge to 2 or 4 spereate channels should do it.
Anyway, PCI v2.2 (?) offers 512MB/s in 64 bit 66MHz mode. And then there's PCI-X...
And show me a game that is PCI/AGP bandwidth limited once textures are uploaded to the GXF card anyway. Memory is cheap, use it...
The slowdowns in heavy geometry transforms are still a bottleneck coming from the processor, even with h T&L. and who's to say game programming techniques wouldn't take off with so much more flexible pathways to design against?
Unfortunately, those pesky laws of physics (like the speed of light) come in and put paid to schemes like this. While it may be possible to get that bandwidth between machines, the latency becomes a problem. Certainly not feasable as a memory bus.
Speaking of the 'speed of light', you could use actual fiber optic network cables much nearer their capacity with a bus that fast dumping straight into the RAM, cutting out several steps (which is where the latency comes from in the first place) along the way. This would make clustered systems fly, and open up altogether new techniques as well.
My machine is a little slow, but I'm sure configs like this are still quite common in the real world. I have a pIII running @ 600mhz on an Asus p2b. This is more than sufficient for low-poly modelling and photoshopping, but the 10% really cuts into my work day. I often have to work in silence if I am in a hurry, and I know I have the hardware sitting here that would solve the problem. all in all, a bummer.
I have also wondered why more people aren't using the memory bus for peripherals. For instance, the VGA adaptor would greatly benefit from that interface (3d work, video games), also, using that bus as a network connection in a renderfarm would probably be nice too. Seriously, the PCI buss can only offer so much (132 MB/S) which is certainly going to be a problem with anything faster than gigabit ethernet... Meanwhile, modern memory busses are upwards of 4.8Gb/s. Imagine multiple machines strung together with that kind of bandwidth between them!
Another question I've had bouncing around in the back of my head is why no one uses MPEG decoder circuitry for MP3 playback? All the players I've tried, windows or linux, take 10-30% of the CPU for noraml playback operation. This is unacceptable when working in big apps like 3DStudio Max, make-ing a big app or running big scripts. I have an old MPEG decoder card from a Creative DVD, also I believe my G-Force has MPEG decoder acceleration... How much trouble would it be to write a driver for Winamp that uses preferred devices like that?
Having just spent the past year trying to build a videogame company and failing to get a project off the ground, I think I can safely comment on what steps are not sufficient for getting a game going.
We were actually in a good place as far as these things go, our team was top notch in the creative department, slightly lacking in the technical dept (though we felt we could pick up all the coders we'd need once a deal had been inked). Our worst weakness was in business issues. we didn't have an MBA on the team, so we hired a president and CFO through our lawyer, to legitimize the team. The roster was looking pretty good at that point, but it certainly occured to me that we were getting assed out of our own company before it even got off the ground with the inclusion of so many strangers in the top slots before we even started shopping for that VC money. but oh well, hopefully your internal structure will be solid enough to survive VC involvement.
As for getting a deal: well, we shopped and shopped among all the great publishers- from activision to warner brothers, infogrammes to EA. we produced nearly 50 kick ass design docs, many slick proposal packages, original concepts and custom art conceptuals all to no avail. The word was "this all looks great but let's see a demo".
Well, we tried to make demos. Problem was, most of us were working full time at other game companies. Those of us not working were incapable opr unwilling to create a demo from scratch. We tried mock-up stillshots and when that didn't get any bites we tried adapting the UT engine to look like a hand made demo (we were intending to use the UT engine for production at least, so that wasn't that bad an idea). But the resolve wasn't there and so the demos didn't scortch if they got made at all. This was very frustrating to say the least.
Last but not least, the publishers all showed a lot of interest in the development of pre-existing franchises that they have rights to.
So, my advice to you is:
Get a terrific team together
Arrange your business affairs to protect yourself thouroughly
Get enough seed money to allow the whole team to work full time until you strike a deal
electromagnets still work, and I think normal passive magnets have their own magnetic field (that react with/to the Earth's magnetosphere), so they should work as well.
I bet NASA rates a copy of the NT source code. no incident support required, the NASA techs would have to okay any changes anyway, they might as well ferret out the problem as well.
Ok, after reading the article and seeing that they ponderously crawl through the sewers to deploy robots to run fiber cables up through the bases of buildings, a somewhat obvious thought occured to me... Why don't they just flush the damn fibers down a toilet? figuratively speaking, of course, I mean why don't they just float the wire in the direction the pipes are running? They could set up at the sewer main for one of these buildings and deploy a rubber ball tied to an end of fiber. Then flood the system into the sewer. All they would need to do is retrieve the ball down in the larger sections of sewer, where one may walk upright at their leisure, in a hazmat suit. The only problem sounds like getting around a buildings slosh box, but I bet that task could be solved with a pump, a flashlight and a longish stick.
um, eyes are dilated, check. let more light in, check. eclipse conditions, check
oh, but wait- it's dark out during an eclipse!. I guess that's why your eyes dilate open so wide! so just what light is it that fries yer eyes during an eclipse again? please explain this to me.
right, your eyes are fully dilated for the lack of normal light, though roughly the same amount of UV is still shining. Your eye dilation is governed by the luminance in the standard spectrum. any sort of long term solar occlusion would screw with the biology of eyesight across nearly all phylum that have it. 'cepts for certain insects, possibly.
I would think that an asteroid would make a better shield than a tow-truck. with the proper topology and an orbit to match, an asteroid would deflect much of that direct radiation, leaving us quit comfortable with only the incidental radiation to worry over. of course this would have two side effects: one) a permanent eclipse-like effect would alter floral biology, and two, the eclipse would let a greater proportion of UV in as compared to the mix today. you know, when there is an eclipse you can look at it but still burn your eyes out. this would cause a shift in visual organs across the biosphere, either encouraging wide spread adaptation to UV or allowing creatures already comfy in the UV ranges to dominate.
Another idea might be to put up EM lenses at the Earth->Sun libration points, to refract the bulk of energy around the earth, and allow 'normal' sunlight levels to intersect.
Either way, this tow-truck plan would just about flip the crust right over with earthquakes. imagine the corialis forces at work in the mantle and core going out of wack!
Sega is proving to be very nimble lately, and it is my opinion that this is the true mark of good management. With the latest price drop on console, the rebate for their internet service(free dreamcast) and cool peripherals actually making it to market (ethernet adaptor), they really look to be the most competent out of the motley bunch of platform manufacturers. Those others are not showing themselves to be quite as capable, instead being mastered by entirely different principles. We've all seen how sony screwed the pooch in their arrogance and I expect to MS to perform about the same for too much ambition. Nintendo is going to pull through though, notice how they are laying low and waiting for the clouds to part... But this suggest a little too much caution, to the point of cowardice. Overall, I am convinced that Sega will weather this storm of console wars and pull through in the end.
But this box looks like a prototype for the Pace pitchsters, and they are merely playing the cut-throat salesman game with these press stunts. There is no telling what Sega is going to do next, based on these scanty pieces of speculatory journalism and dog-and-pony press events.
I hope Sega figures out something quick though. As for this hardware, it sounds sweet enough, and I'm sure it will play my current dreamcast disks (the article seemed to imply you could play dreamcasts games by downloading them, neglecting to mention backwards-compatability with the dreamcast media), but it stands the chance of falling into the same trap as the PSX2. The consoles are a loss leader, and adding a Tivo is only going to make the problem worse. I've read that PSX2 is killing Sony in Japan because folks are buying the set-top box and ignoring the games, instead just using the hardware as a DVD player. This sounds dreadful until you remember that Sony is selling a major percentage of the DVD's as well... Oh-boy, there's just too many variables at play here. I can't figure it out. But at least one thing is certain- Indrema won't factor into things at all. And that's the real pity.
"Maybe in a couple years when......Transmeta's stock crashes"
well, that's just the thing, isn't it? Transmeta could be in the position to crash at once. I personally feel transmeta will tank by summer. The hype they generated in the year+ prior to any actual product anouncements vastly inflated the float prices, co-mingled with the dearth of licensees and such hokey manufacturing arrangements all conspire to suggest immenent critical failure.
call it a hunch.
If I were uppr mgmt at transmeta, I would be looking to find a solution while the price is still high. Selling to AMD at a slight premium over market would be like striking gold. (Otherwise I would be cashing out what I could before Lerach & cronies could finish us off.)
I am gearing myself up to short them when the time is right. The indicator I'm watching for is the first wave of talent leaving. These will be the smart folk seeking security. I wonder if Linus will be in that wave? I even wonder if this is the week we see it beginning...
i think the 1000x's factor was just refering to HDTV resolution, persistant storage and memory. even a modest increase in the later two would result in 100's of times more versatility and functionality. and the increase from 300i to 1080p is a massive increase in video subsystem bandwidth.
well, I don't really agree with you about 'retaliation would be a given'comment. there is enough plausable deniability in the action that the soviets could simply say "don't be ridiculous!". and the few rabidly suspicious congressmen would grudgingly admit that when too little evidence was produced.
The reward would be a hobbling (or at least, some friction) for aerospace industry funding, via public resistance based on a lack of faith that the money would be or is being wisely spent. you know, as it actually happened. the Challenger disaster was a big fat delay in the official NASA roadmap.
I should like to point out that the cold war, and the eventual bankrupting of the soviet union was in effect played out in the race for aerospace dominance. the Challenger disaster is the biggest disaster in aerospace history. bigger than all of the sattelite failures and plane crashes in history, combined. Think about that for a minute, and you'll see why a shuttle launch was the perfect target for soviet saboteurs.
I am not directly accusing the USSR or the KGB in any of this, nor am I condoning such nefarious espionage, I am merely pointing out that if they had thought to do this, it would have been a wonderfully wicked coup de grace for them.
yes, but If the KGBs (or the CIA) were to attempt some sort of sabotage on this scale, wouldn't they attempt to work some plausable deniability into the equation? wouldn't they try to disguise their act as a natural disaster, albeit a particularly unfortunate one?
I should point out the there have been hundreds of O-rings to survive such conditions, if not thousands after the rigorous performance testing that is involved
between your sig here, the story & comments at hand and my crazy pre-workday grogginess, a wonderful notion has popped into my head- shooting the comet could be actual murder!
I've often suspected that the Oort cloud and the comets would be an ideal place for microbial life to develop. if you think about the materials involved and the history of the solar system, it isn't completely out of the question. picture an asteroid impact on earth during the 2 billion years of pre-cambrian-ness here on earth, causing a cloud of organics kicked up into orbit, which is subsquently passed through by a comet. the comet is 'moist' for its proximity to the sun (the outer shell is melting). perhaps inbound comets would simply shed the earth-dust as they approach the sun, but an outbound comet would keep whatever it picks up. this is how they grow.
After reading this article, I am convinced (not by anything directly mentioned- more by way of intuition) that a comet could in fact be some sort of higher order organism. after billions of years to evolve in a relatively stable envoronment. the entire comet could be an agglomeration of these rugged microbes, acting in unison much like a colony organism (jellyfish, sea anemone, fungusses) or even better, a multicelled creature like you or I. imagine for a moment that each comet is an entire creature, bobbing around in their oort cloud, communicating via vibratory radio fluctuations in their water/carbon/metal selves... mating == collision, and the sun's gravity well is the grim reaper. perhaps there are even predators/prey! we could 'domesticate' predatory comets for orbital protection from asteroids.
I am off to the stationary store to buy a new quill.
I do the same thing. I've even set my ol' celeron 400, and my machine at work too- but I am a sad-sack sci/sci-fi buff.
These things are expected of me.
I was thinking more of my co-worker dullards, always fickle and finicky for the latest eye candy. those bastards.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm new to this idiocy you've churned up, but I can offer up a hearty rofl. This absurd waste of time is about as well considered and persuasive as bad vista, only it's chock full of 'more of the same'!
Vista is dominating just as we all new it would. Your lengthy and excited list of all the failures doesn't make a bit of difference, and the people screaming about you make even less difference. Independent developers and hardware are all flocking to it and discovering that most of your complaints are devious lies or founded on willful ignorance. This only makes FLOSSY look more like the bow backed nag she is.
to summarize, massive FAIL for everyone here 'cepts me and my vista machines. HAND
So, a thread where everyone gets to show how terribly sophisticated they are by turning their noses up at an action film? no way! I submit to you all that the vast majority of this trash talk is little more than fickle ignorance.
This film is certainly about visual appeal. But i can say that with just a teensy bit of knowledge in that domain, it is readily apparent to me that this is a spectacular triumph.
The film captures the recently popular technique called HDR or High Dynamic Range photography, but they manage to do it at 24 frames per second at IMAX resolutions and keep it going for 2 hours. All of the motion blur, lens flares and other camera artifacts are clearly intentional and separate from anything having to do with their cameras, most likely in order to emphasize a sense of scale or motion. Notice how the backgrounds are in focus, crisp and sharp along with the immediate foreground- this is surely the most essential element of creating the live action cartoon feel that the brief snippets of trailer are hinting at.
But the most important thing I'm able to extract from the limited glimpses I've had is that they employ all of this to convey the sense of big heavy cars racing at hundreds of miles per hour and flipping through the air as gracefully as a ballet troop in full deployment.
So what good does the optimistic assessment do me? For one thing, it gives me some joy in the anticipation. More importantly, I get the satisfaction of being truly sophisticated without sitting in a traffic jam down on Snark St.
awww. it's so depressing to have to explain the obvious. the franchise is HER PROPERTY.
You like, can't _own_ property, man
I can you filthy hippy!
Rowling is specifically "outraged" because she's been working on her own compendium. Should she just scrap one of the secondary projects for her Potter franchise so that shmucko McFanboi can publish his?
Card, you card.
deja vu.
don't count your monkeys before they crap.
I've been following transmeta fairly close all this time, keeping up on the news clippings and press releases, anyway, and it seems to me that we went through this last year, and the year before was a buyout rumor.
My prediction: this year sees them consolidating the patent portfolio through acquisition, despite the money pit issues, in specific particular, they will gobble up rambus, inc before august '05. This is despite the rambus legal liabilities and with the intention of going MGLM (mean, green litigating machine).
The exit from manufacturing is a non-issue, really. the thing to watch is the IP warfare that's coming. also, the eventual sellout is nigh. expect AMD, samsung and hyundai to muscle in around early '06, if'n this press release isn't just grooming for the auction block now.
Take note of my username: Fudboy. I made this account in the midst of the heyday hype just prior to the first Transmeta product announcement, largely to combat said hype and interject a note of reason into the discussions here at slashdot. Many of the denizens here were overly excited about Transmeta, what with Linus on board and the appearance of their being David to Intel's Goliath...
It is a sad day coming for the chip industry, but not unexpected. Transmeta had some very sharp ideas, great talent, excellent marketting and the promise of revolutionary influence on the mobile computing market. But sadly, many forces conspired to undermine the great promise TMTA represented: most apparently the problems in logic design, lack of op/s power, expensive wholesale prices resulting from increasingly bizarre fabrication contractual arrangements with competitors, a weakening market made worse by tragedy... but I digress.
In a few years, there'll be another company attempting a Transmeta-style hype campaign, and I hope that when that day comes, we can all remember how this played out.
While it is sad to see a company die, let us not forget that this isn't entirely a tragedy- the venture capitalists won great riches, the principles of the company also surely won such riches if they were smart enough to sell liberally afetr the IPO, a handfull of speculators surely won such riches in the early heyday of trading the TMTA stock... But also let us mourn those who will find themselves unemployed, those whose brilliant work will be shelved or scraped and forgotten, those foolish enough to still hold the stock and scramble to cut their losses even at this late hour. Let us offer them our condolences.
How would you like it if you couldn't use the latest whizz bang 8.4GB/s memory technology because some peripheral you bought a year earlier needs to be on a 4.8GB/s memory interface?
it's all in the controller. Perhaps abandoning the other busses and rigging up the interrupts for a single bus would be best? Also, it seems that having several memory busses would solve the problems of speed dependencies. multiplexing the south bridge to 2 or 4 spereate channels should do it.
And show me a game that is PCI/AGP bandwidth limited once textures are uploaded to the GXF card anyway. Memory is cheap, use it...
The slowdowns in heavy geometry transforms are still a bottleneck coming from the processor, even with h T&L. and who's to say game programming techniques wouldn't take off with so much more flexible pathways to design against?
Speaking of the 'speed of light', you could use actual fiber optic network cables much nearer their capacity with a bus that fast dumping straight into the RAM, cutting out several steps (which is where the latency comes from in the first place) along the way. This would make clustered systems fly, and open up altogether new techniques as well.
My machine is a little slow, but I'm sure configs like this are still quite common in the real world. I have a pIII running @ 600mhz on an Asus p2b. This is more than sufficient for low-poly modelling and photoshopping, but the 10% really cuts into my work day. I often have to work in silence if I am in a hurry, and I know I have the hardware sitting here that would solve the problem. all in all, a bummer.
I have also wondered why more people aren't using the memory bus for peripherals. For instance, the VGA adaptor would greatly benefit from that interface (3d work, video games), also, using that bus as a network connection in a renderfarm would probably be nice too. Seriously, the PCI buss can only offer so much (132 MB/S) which is certainly going to be a problem with anything faster than gigabit ethernet... Meanwhile, modern memory busses are upwards of 4.8Gb/s. Imagine multiple machines strung together with that kind of bandwidth between them!
Another question I've had bouncing around in the back of my head is why no one uses MPEG decoder circuitry for MP3 playback? All the players I've tried, windows or linux, take 10-30% of the CPU for noraml playback operation. This is unacceptable when working in big apps like 3DStudio Max, make-ing a big app or running big scripts. I have an old MPEG decoder card from a Creative DVD, also I believe my G-Force has MPEG decoder acceleration... How much trouble would it be to write a driver for Winamp that uses preferred devices like that?
We were actually in a good place as far as these things go, our team was top notch in the creative department, slightly lacking in the technical dept (though we felt we could pick up all the coders we'd need once a deal had been inked). Our worst weakness was in business issues. we didn't have an MBA on the team, so we hired a president and CFO through our lawyer, to legitimize the team. The roster was looking pretty good at that point, but it certainly occured to me that we were getting assed out of our own company before it even got off the ground with the inclusion of so many strangers in the top slots before we even started shopping for that VC money. but oh well, hopefully your internal structure will be solid enough to survive VC involvement.
As for getting a deal: well, we shopped and shopped among all the great publishers- from activision to warner brothers, infogrammes to EA. we produced nearly 50 kick ass design docs, many slick proposal packages, original concepts and custom art conceptuals all to no avail. The word was "this all looks great but let's see a demo".
Well, we tried to make demos. Problem was, most of us were working full time at other game companies. Those of us not working were incapable opr unwilling to create a demo from scratch. We tried mock-up stillshots and when that didn't get any bites we tried adapting the UT engine to look like a hand made demo (we were intending to use the UT engine for production at least, so that wasn't that bad an idea). But the resolve wasn't there and so the demos didn't scortch if they got made at all. This was very frustrating to say the least.
Last but not least, the publishers all showed a lot of interest in the development of pre-existing franchises that they have rights to.
So, my advice to you is:
:)Fudboy
electromagnets still work, and I think normal passive magnets have their own magnetic field (that react with/to the Earth's magnetosphere), so they should work as well.
:)Fudboy
I bet NASA rates a copy of the NT source code. no incident support required, the NASA techs would have to okay any changes anyway, they might as well ferret out the problem as well.
:)Fudboy
Ok, after reading the article and seeing that they ponderously crawl through the sewers to deploy robots to run fiber cables up through the bases of buildings, a somewhat obvious thought occured to me... Why don't they just flush the damn fibers down a toilet? figuratively speaking, of course, I mean why don't they just float the wire in the direction the pipes are running? They could set up at the sewer main for one of these buildings and deploy a rubber ball tied to an end of fiber. Then flood the system into the sewer. All they would need to do is retrieve the ball down in the larger sections of sewer, where one may walk upright at their leisure, in a hazmat suit. The only problem sounds like getting around a buildings slosh box, but I bet that task could be solved with a pump, a flashlight and a longish stick.
:)Fudboy
um, eyes are dilated, check. let more light in, check. eclipse conditions, check
oh, but wait- it's dark out during an eclipse!. I guess that's why your eyes dilate open so wide! so just what light is it that fries yer eyes during an eclipse again? please explain this to me.
:)Fudboy
right, your eyes are fully dilated for the lack of normal light, though roughly the same amount of UV is still shining. Your eye dilation is governed by the luminance in the standard spectrum. any sort of long term solar occlusion would screw with the biology of eyesight across nearly all phylum that have it. 'cepts for certain insects, possibly.
:)Fudboy
The details they are testing for have been supplatanted with remembering vi commands.
no big deal. I can use vi to do anything, right?
:)Fudboy
I would think that an asteroid would make a better shield than a tow-truck. with the proper topology and an orbit to match, an asteroid would deflect much of that direct radiation, leaving us quit comfortable with only the incidental radiation to worry over. of course this would have two side effects: one) a permanent eclipse-like effect would alter floral biology, and two, the eclipse would let a greater proportion of UV in as compared to the mix today. you know, when there is an eclipse you can look at it but still burn your eyes out. this would cause a shift in visual organs across the biosphere, either encouraging wide spread adaptation to UV or allowing creatures already comfy in the UV ranges to dominate.
Another idea might be to put up EM lenses at the Earth->Sun libration points, to refract the bulk of energy around the earth, and allow 'normal' sunlight levels to intersect.
Either way, this tow-truck plan would just about flip the crust right over with earthquakes. imagine the corialis forces at work in the mantle and core going out of wack!
:)Fudboy
Sega is proving to be very nimble lately, and it is my opinion that this is the true mark of good management. With the latest price drop on console, the rebate for their internet service(free dreamcast) and cool peripherals actually making it to market (ethernet adaptor), they really look to be the most competent out of the motley bunch of platform manufacturers. Those others are not showing themselves to be quite as capable, instead being mastered by entirely different principles. We've all seen how sony screwed the pooch in their arrogance and I expect to MS to perform about the same for too much ambition. Nintendo is going to pull through though, notice how they are laying low and waiting for the clouds to part... But this suggest a little too much caution, to the point of cowardice. Overall, I am convinced that Sega will weather this storm of console wars and pull through in the end.
But this box looks like a prototype for the Pace pitchsters, and they are merely playing the cut-throat salesman game with these press stunts. There is no telling what Sega is going to do next, based on these scanty pieces of speculatory journalism and dog-and-pony press events.
I hope Sega figures out something quick though. As for this hardware, it sounds sweet enough, and I'm sure it will play my current dreamcast disks (the article seemed to imply you could play dreamcasts games by downloading them, neglecting to mention backwards-compatability with the dreamcast media), but it stands the chance of falling into the same trap as the PSX2. The consoles are a loss leader, and adding a Tivo is only going to make the problem worse. I've read that PSX2 is killing Sony in Japan because folks are buying the set-top box and ignoring the games, instead just using the hardware as a DVD player. This sounds dreadful until you remember that Sony is selling a major percentage of the DVD's as well... Oh-boy, there's just too many variables at play here. I can't figure it out. But at least one thing is certain- Indrema won't factor into things at all. And that's the real pity.
:)Fudboy
"Maybe in a couple years when... ...Transmeta's stock crashes"
well, that's just the thing, isn't it? Transmeta could be in the position to crash at once. I personally feel transmeta will tank by summer. The hype they generated in the year+ prior to any actual product anouncements vastly inflated the float prices, co-mingled with the dearth of licensees and such hokey manufacturing arrangements all conspire to suggest immenent critical failure.
call it a hunch.
If I were uppr mgmt at transmeta, I would be looking to find a solution while the price is still high. Selling to AMD at a slight premium over market would be like striking gold. (Otherwise I would be cashing out what I could before Lerach & cronies could finish us off.)
I am gearing myself up to short them when the time is right. The indicator I'm watching for is the first wave of talent leaving. These will be the smart folk seeking security. I wonder if Linus will be in that wave? I even wonder if this is the week we see it beginning...
:)Fudboy
From the article:
...No one is going to confuse protocol testing with cookies... "
"
umm, what if the protocol testing is regarding the cookies in yer browser? I'm already confused.
:)Fudboy
i think the 1000x's factor was just refering to HDTV resolution, persistant storage and memory. even a modest increase in the later two would result in 100's of times more versatility and functionality. and the increase from 300i to 1080p is a massive increase in video subsystem bandwidth.
:)Fudboy
well, I don't really agree with you about 'retaliation would be a given'comment. there is enough plausable deniability in the action that the soviets could simply say "don't be ridiculous!". and the few rabidly suspicious congressmen would grudgingly admit that when too little evidence was produced.
The reward would be a hobbling (or at least, some friction) for aerospace industry funding, via public resistance based on a lack of faith that the money would be or is being wisely spent. you know, as it actually happened. the Challenger disaster was a big fat delay in the official NASA roadmap.
I should like to point out that the cold war, and the eventual bankrupting of the soviet union was in effect played out in the race for aerospace dominance. the Challenger disaster is the biggest disaster in aerospace history. bigger than all of the sattelite failures and plane crashes in history, combined. Think about that for a minute, and you'll see why a shuttle launch was the perfect target for soviet saboteurs.
I am not directly accusing the USSR or the KGB in any of this, nor am I condoning such nefarious espionage, I am merely pointing out that if they had thought to do this, it would have been a wonderfully wicked coup de grace for them.
:)Fudboy
I should point out the there have been hundreds of O-rings to survive such conditions, if not thousands after the rigorous performance testing that is involved
:)Fudboy
"IANASBLF (silicon based lifeform).."
between your sig here, the story & comments at hand and my crazy pre-workday grogginess, a wonderful notion has popped into my head- shooting the comet could be actual murder!
I've often suspected that the Oort cloud and the comets would be an ideal place for microbial life to develop. if you think about the materials involved and the history of the solar system, it isn't completely out of the question. picture an asteroid impact on earth during the 2 billion years of pre-cambrian-ness here on earth, causing a cloud of organics kicked up into orbit, which is subsquently passed through by a comet. the comet is 'moist' for its proximity to the sun (the outer shell is melting). perhaps inbound comets would simply shed the earth-dust as they approach the sun, but an outbound comet would keep whatever it picks up. this is how they grow.
After reading this article, I am convinced (not by anything directly mentioned- more by way of intuition) that a comet could in fact be some sort of higher order organism. after billions of years to evolve in a relatively stable envoronment. the entire comet could be an agglomeration of these rugged microbes, acting in unison much like a colony organism (jellyfish, sea anemone, fungusses) or even better, a multicelled creature like you or I. imagine for a moment that each comet is an entire creature, bobbing around in their oort cloud, communicating via vibratory radio fluctuations in their water/carbon/metal selves... mating == collision, and the sun's gravity well is the grim reaper. perhaps there are even predators/prey! we could 'domesticate' predatory comets for orbital protection from asteroids.
I am off to the stationary store to buy a new quill.
:)Fudboy
I do the same thing. I've even set my ol' celeron 400, and my machine at work too- but I am a sad-sack sci/sci-fi buff.
These things are expected of me.
I was thinking more of my co-worker dullards, always fickle and finicky for the latest eye candy. those bastards.
:)Fudboy