I don't know if its feasible at this point. But it appears Sony might be better off just waiting another year or so. They could spend the extra time improving the controller to better compete with Wii, have a large game offering at launch, avoid the overt competition from Wii and have everyone chomping at the bit in anticipation, plus use the time to allow the cost to fall into a better range.
If Sony wants Blu-Ray to succeed, and hence PS3, the sure win is for Sony to get BD Recorders out to PC users ASAP. That, more than anything else will drive production and hence push price drops.
Huh. Well $60 is better than I thought possible. But I guess I should be more explicit. I'm essentially asking why we haven't made it to flying taxi servies yet?
See, I think we could have been there by now. But we are sooo economically wrong-headed these days, it's not even funny. Our present driving economic factors are the Peter principle and the Broken Windows theory (window maker pays people to break windows). Hence were caught in a deepening cycle of get less and less for each $1. The only thing saving our collective tush is the offsetting productivity gains of automation. Of course you can turn that around too. All the great automation is putting people out of work, so we have to geive them a whole lot of nothing to do to sustain the economy.
I'll only go seem then if Quentin Tarantino get to direct. George should have saved face and calle dhim in when ep.I got so much flack. George you got old man, face it!
4 hours is way too long for a day trip. That's 25% of the day... in a car! Yuk. I want to be able to zip over in about 30 or so. So I'd say 2 hours max.
I'm sorry. But doesn't it seem kind of lame to settle for less? The year is 2006!!! Haven't you noticed that in all but the field of Information Technology we have begun to drift backwards? We could drive from the Space Coast to Miami in a couple of hours half a century ago!
Oh joy. For a zillion dollars I'll soon be able to launch over to London in just a few hours. Oh I just can't wait! Please...
You know I realy would just like to hop over to Miami for the day from the Space Coast for a few Hamiltons. Why is that so hard? When is THAT technology going to get here? (Gee... maybe when the government gets its d*ck out of the corporate airline twat).
True. But I'm betting they can pull off at least 6 more years of this. Thats's all that's really needed. Beyond that it's just a matter of driving down cost.
Considering it takes around 10 years for optical media to make a 5-fold increase in capacity (CD 0.7GB 1983/91 -> DVD 4.7GB 1997 -> BD 25GB 2006) and Flash memory seems to be doubling every year (512Mb 2001 -> 16Gb 2006), the question is how long before Flash over-takes optical in capacity? Answer: about 5 years. Of course it will probably never beat optical discs for capacity/$, but at some point flash memory should be cheap enough that it doesn't rally matter a great deal. Flash memory is much more convenient to use. In other words, if the current trend continues, optical disks will be obsolete within 10 years. (Yes, that's right. 1TB flash cards anyone?)
I have been looking foward to the PS3 for years now. But given the delay's, all this DRM crap, and these costs (beside the fact they never responded to my compnaies request to become a developer), I'm starting to think, "to hell with em". Think I'll take a Nintendo Revolution, stick mith my current DVDs and invest the money I save into a spirited start-up working on Holographic disks. Thank you very much.
If they could get a few commonly used commercial application ported then they would have no problem becoming mainstream. For instance -- if Quicken ran on Linux I could have converted my sister's Doctor office. But alas she uses Quicken and even if there are Linux alternatives to it, she's used to using Quicken, so that makes all the difference.
Other key apps are QuickBooks and PhotoShop. I'm sure there are a number of others. Novell should really get after these companies to support them.
It doesn't even fit in a normal size mouth. "SUSE Linux Enterprise What"? I mean really, could the name be any more convoluted? From the other posts it is obvious there are plenty of Linux geeks supporting this, but to the lay user this is just garble. What is a SUSE, anyway? At least people KNOW the name Novell. Many have nostalgic feelings for those early network days. So what's wrong with "Novell Desktop" or if you insist on the lizard, "SUSE Desktop from Novell".
I have no respect for anyone who can't spel a word more than one way. Have less respect for those who point em out.
As for Sony. The answer is very very clear. They are ao big they think they can force the consumer to do things their way and act like the consumer has endless money to give to them for doing it. Unfortunately Apple is really Sony-lite. These companies a lock-in pushers. Ultimately it will be their undoing.
Give me any Cowon device over an iPod any day! And OMG how obvious can it be the CNet is getting paid off on their reviews: Cowon is "bad" b/c it has no DRM support? Give me a frack'n break!
I totally agree. I was expecting UMD drives for computers, but no show. Next gen Blue-laser UMD's could have had 15-30GB for HiDef content. And I like that the disks are protected from scrathes. I would have been happy to buy in. Very unfortunate.
It's not that she didn't eventually figure it out. She did. But she wasted more than a day making sense of it. Its not about what's possible. It's about improving the possiblites.
Do they mean that gasoline provides.74 over and above the 1 needed to get it out of the ground, refined and to the pump? That would make more sense, but that didn't seem to be case from what I read, although perhaps I missed read it. In either case oil has to provide more energy then it takes to aquire it, otherwise our high energy based economy would have been a non-starter --either that or we are actually well passed peak oil and they just haven;t bother to tell us.
As for the land, it takes something like 5000 ears of corn to make one gallon of E85. At that rate the land would be taken up right quick. So I wouldn't be too quick to dimiss the difficulty there. But it doesn't so much matter, as long aas we begin to focus on eletric as the primary instrument of energy supply, and hydrocarbons as supplimental, we'll be okay. We have the technology. We don't need anymore research. But if we don't do this, well then clearly we're in for a bad turn.
This is dangerous business. Those of you who favor the telcos position, allowing them to charge for prefered access to their network bandwidth should think very carefully about how this would effect the dyanmics of internet. First of all, everyone should understand that this has nothing to do with limits on bandwidth. There is plenty of available bandwidth, and technological advancements continue to expand bandwidth capabilities at a rapid pace. The telcos speak of QoS, but what they are really after is an artifically restricted supply market. If they get their way prices for content delivery will sky rocket, over time content will dry up, and in the end we will be left with nothing but large commercial websites controlled by mega corporations (just like cable TV).
Of course, we consumers could always move to Mesh networks, as has been suggested. But I suspect the hurdles involved with such a transition would make it pretty easy for the large corporations to keep them from gaining any traction.
It is worse then you might expect. We simply don't have enough farm land to both feed ourselves and fuel our cars, not to mention the water requirements. And don't forget all that Round-Up! Talk about an environmental disaster.
And you might be interested to know the President Bush's big plan and GM's big promotion, "Go Green, Buy Yellow" is a Big Oil shame (yes, once again). BioDiesel, ya the BioWillie stuff is vastly more efficient than ethonal. Ethonal hardly provides more energy than it requires to produce. Offical U.S. Govenment estimates that for every 1 unit of energy put in, at best 1.34 come out. Not much room to spare. Besides that, I don't put much faith in that since in the same report they said that gasoline itself only gives back 0.74 units of energy for every 1 put in. Obvioulsy that's a bunch of B.S. Nonetheless I've seen a few different reports that B100 does in fact return more than double the energy put in (the government report says 3.20!) See http://www.b100fuel.com/archives/2005/07/biodiesel _has_v.html.
The best current solution is plug-in biodisel hybirds. You could easily be getting 250 mpg right now! We should be demanding these and impeaching any government offical who does not support legislation to make the car manufactures build these. PERIOD!
FYI BioDiesel vehicles have been around since 1900.
FYI, The GUI interface of OpenOffice on Linux SUCKS. Plus the differnces between the K Desktop vs. Gnome software (not to mention the occasional other GUIs) doesn't help matters any.
So you want Desktop Linux uptake? Then it's time to figure out a new model. Only then will people switch.
Let me give you an example. My mother has a Mac. I wanted to recommend a PC with Linux, but couldn't b/c the truth is that Mac is easier to use and she needs easy. Nonetheless, when using iMovie and iDVD she could not understand that they were two different applications and she couldn't understand where her projects were being saved. She ended up saving one project a dozen times which ate up most of her harddisk space. You might say, 'well she's dumb', but that's not the case, and many many people are actually just like her, actually many people are worse. I'm an expert and I still feel like I spend too much time fussing with silly problems too.
So there's got to be innovation on the front-side of things. I think interface designers should envision more tactile interfaces --more like the real world. In the above case, for instance, when someone saves a project it should provide them with a very real-world-esque THING distinct for its type, name, content, etc. And it should have a very real-feeling PLACE in the virtual world. You should be able to see it and then move it to another place for safe-keeping. That way one whould know exactly where it is at.
I'm sure much more innovation can be had if things were thought through along these lines.
Well, sort of. Many companies were involved in that. Looks like Philps was the primary driver for consumer products, then Sony came in.
1978 Philips releases the video disc player Sony sells the PCM-1600 and PCM-1 (digital audio processors) "Digital Audio Disc Convention" Held in Tokyo, Japan with 35 different manufacturers. Philips proposes that a worldwide standard be set. Polygram (division of Philips) determined that polycarbonate would be the best material for the CD. Decision made for data on a CD to start on the inside and spiral towards the outer edge. Disc diameter originally set at 115mm. Type of laser selected for CD Players.
1979 Prototype CD System demonstrated in Europe and Japan. Sony agrees to join in collaboration. Sony & Philips compromise on the standard sampling rate of a CD -- 44.1 kHz (44,100 samples per second) Philips accepts Sony's proposal for 16-bit audio. Reed-Solomon code adopted after Sony's suggestion. Maximum playing time decided to be slighty more that 74 minutes. Disc diameter changed to 120mm to allow for 74 minutes of 16-bit stereo sound with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz
Interestingly the first time I ever saw a CD was on Star Trek (Original) and that was a repeat aired in the early 70s.
I use MP3 because it's what my MP3 player supports
Exactly my point. If all you're equipment supported ogg then you could use ogg. But they don't. And they don't b/c Apple and MS won't allow them to do so. Specifically they don't allow them to support their DRM formats if they also support open formats. Becuase MP3 is propreitory, it can be controlled. In time they will phase out MP3s and the your MP3 library will be useless on new equipment.
All because you wouldn't stand up and demand open formats.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if its feasible at this point. But it appears Sony might be better off just waiting another year or so. They could spend the extra time improving the controller to better compete with Wii, have a large game offering at launch, avoid the overt competition from Wii and have everyone chomping at the bit in anticipation, plus use the time to allow the cost to fall into a better range.
If Sony wants Blu-Ray to succeed, and hence PS3, the sure win is for Sony to get BD Recorders out to PC users ASAP. That, more than anything else will drive production and hence push price drops.
T.
Wireless mesh would really be the the communication dream come true. If we could just get an inexpensive highspeed 10km non-line-of-sight nodes....
The 1.3x figure comes from government study.
See http://www.mda.state.mn.us/ethanol/balance.html
Huh. Well $60 is better than I thought possible. But I guess I should be more explicit. I'm essentially asking why we haven't made it to flying taxi servies yet?
;-)
See, I think we could have been there by now. But we are sooo economically wrong-headed these days, it's not even funny. Our present driving economic factors are the Peter principle and the Broken Windows theory (window maker pays people to break windows). Hence were caught in a deepening cycle of get less and less for each $1. The only thing saving our collective tush is the offsetting productivity gains of automation. Of course you can turn that around too. All the great automation is putting people out of work, so we have to geive them a whole lot of nothing to do to sustain the economy.
Wonderful ain't it?
I'll only go seem then if Quentin Tarantino get to direct. George should have saved face and calle dhim in when ep.I got so much flack. George you got old man, face it!
4 hours is way too long for a day trip. That's 25% of the day... in a car! Yuk. I want to be able to zip over in about 30 or so. So I'd say 2 hours max.
I'm sorry. But doesn't it seem kind of lame to settle for less? The year is 2006!!! Haven't you noticed that in all but the field of Information Technology we have begun to drift backwards? We could drive from the Space Coast to Miami in a couple of hours half a century ago!
For $30 you can travel to California from VA and back? Which airline is that? No I think you must be confusin Hamilton with Franklin.
The Space Coast is Cape Canaveral --where they lauch the shuttle.
Oh joy. For a zillion dollars I'll soon be able to launch over to London in just a few hours. Oh I just can't wait! Please...
You know I realy would just like to hop over to Miami for the day from the Space Coast for a few Hamiltons. Why is that so hard? When is THAT technology going to get here? (Gee... maybe when the government gets its d*ck out of the corporate airline twat).
True. But I'm betting they can pull off at least 6 more years of this. Thats's all that's really needed. Beyond that it's just a matter of driving down cost.
Considering it takes around 10 years for optical media to make a 5-fold increase in capacity (CD 0.7GB 1983/91 -> DVD 4.7GB 1997 -> BD 25GB 2006) and Flash memory seems to be doubling every year (512Mb 2001 -> 16Gb 2006), the question is how long before Flash over-takes optical in capacity? Answer: about 5 years. Of course it will probably never beat optical discs for capacity/$, but at some point flash memory should be cheap enough that it doesn't rally matter a great deal. Flash memory is much more convenient to use. In other words, if the current trend continues, optical disks will be obsolete within 10 years. (Yes, that's right. 1TB flash cards anyone?)
I have been looking foward to the PS3 for years now. But given the delay's, all this DRM crap, and these costs (beside the fact they never responded to my compnaies request to become a developer), I'm starting to think, "to hell with em". Think I'll take a Nintendo Revolution, stick mith my current DVDs and invest the money I save into a spirited start-up working on Holographic disks. Thank you very much.
Sony's going down!
If they could get a few commonly used commercial application ported then they would have no problem becoming mainstream. For instance -- if Quicken ran on Linux I could have converted my sister's Doctor office. But alas she uses Quicken and even if there are Linux alternatives to it, she's used to using Quicken, so that makes all the difference.
Other key apps are QuickBooks and PhotoShop. I'm sure there are a number of others. Novell should really get after these companies to support them.
NO!!!
It's the paper scanner one's that are the problem!!! Doesn't anyone in the government ever frig'n read?
I guess they're ALL in on it.
Good-bye.
It doesn't even fit in a normal size mouth. "SUSE Linux Enterprise What"? I mean really, could the name be any more convoluted? From the other posts it is obvious there are plenty of Linux geeks supporting this, but to the lay user this is just garble. What is a SUSE, anyway? At least people KNOW the name Novell. Many have nostalgic feelings for those early network days. So what's wrong with "Novell Desktop" or if you insist on the lizard, "SUSE Desktop from Novell".
K.I.S.S.
Yes! Score 0! Downgraded. That means I must be right. Truth hurts ;)
Let me see, $250 billion and counting (not to mention interest on the debt to pay for it) Hmmm...
Yes, I'd say some of us could have been throwing back celibratory cosmos at a lunar night club any day now. What a shame.
I have no respect for anyone who can't spel a word more than one way. Have less respect for those who point em out.
As for Sony. The answer is very very clear. They are ao big they think they can force the consumer to do things their way and act like the consumer has endless money to give to them for doing it. Unfortunately Apple is really Sony-lite. These companies a lock-in pushers. Ultimately it will be their undoing.
Give me any Cowon device over an iPod any day! And OMG how obvious can it be the CNet is getting paid off on their reviews: Cowon is "bad" b/c it has no DRM support? Give me a frack'n break!
I totally agree. I was expecting UMD drives for computers, but no show. Next gen Blue-laser UMD's could have had 15-30GB for HiDef content. And I like that the disks are protected from scrathes. I would have been happy to buy in. Very unfortunate.
It's not that she didn't eventually figure it out. She did. But she wasted more than a day making sense of it. Its not about what's possible. It's about improving the possiblites.
Do they mean that gasoline provides .74 over and above the 1 needed to get it out of the ground, refined and to the pump? That would make more sense, but that didn't seem to be case from what I read, although perhaps I missed read it. In either case oil has to provide more energy then it takes to aquire it, otherwise our high energy based economy would have been a non-starter --either that or we are actually well passed peak oil and they just haven;t bother to tell us.
As for the land, it takes something like 5000 ears of corn to make one gallon of E85. At that rate the land would be taken up right quick. So I wouldn't be too quick to dimiss the difficulty there. But it doesn't so much matter, as long aas we begin to focus on eletric as the primary instrument of energy supply, and hydrocarbons as supplimental, we'll be okay. We have the technology. We don't need anymore research. But if we don't do this, well then clearly we're in for a bad turn.
This is dangerous business. Those of you who favor the telcos position, allowing them to charge for prefered access to their network bandwidth should think very carefully about how this would effect the dyanmics of internet. First of all, everyone should understand that this has nothing to do with limits on bandwidth. There is plenty of available bandwidth, and technological advancements continue to expand bandwidth capabilities at a rapid pace. The telcos speak of QoS, but what they are really after is an artifically restricted supply market. If they get their way prices for content delivery will sky rocket, over time content will dry up, and in the end we will be left with nothing but large commercial websites controlled by mega corporations (just like cable TV).
Of course, we consumers could always move to Mesh networks, as has been suggested. But I suspect the hurdles involved with such a transition would make it pretty easy for the large corporations to keep them from gaining any traction.
It is worse then you might expect. We simply don't have enough farm land to both feed ourselves and fuel our cars, not to mention the water requirements. And don't forget all that Round-Up! Talk about an environmental disaster.
l _has_v.html.
And you might be interested to know the President Bush's big plan and GM's big promotion, "Go Green, Buy Yellow" is a Big Oil shame (yes, once again). BioDiesel, ya the BioWillie stuff is vastly more efficient than ethonal. Ethonal hardly provides more energy than it requires to produce. Offical U.S. Govenment estimates that for every 1 unit of energy put in, at best 1.34 come out. Not much room to spare. Besides that, I don't put much faith in that since in the same report they said that gasoline itself only gives back 0.74 units of energy for every 1 put in. Obvioulsy that's a bunch of B.S. Nonetheless I've seen a few different reports that B100 does in fact return more than double the energy put in (the government report says 3.20!) See http://www.b100fuel.com/archives/2005/07/biodiese
The best current solution is plug-in biodisel hybirds. You could easily be getting 250 mpg right now! We should be demanding these and impeaching any government offical who does not support legislation to make the car manufactures build these. PERIOD!
FYI BioDiesel vehicles have been around since 1900.
FYI, The GUI interface of OpenOffice on Linux SUCKS. Plus the differnces between the K Desktop vs. Gnome software (not to mention the occasional other GUIs) doesn't help matters any.
So you want Desktop Linux uptake? Then it's time to figure out a new model. Only then will people switch.
Let me give you an example. My mother has a Mac. I wanted to recommend a PC with Linux, but couldn't b/c the truth is that Mac is easier to use and she needs easy. Nonetheless, when using iMovie and iDVD she could not understand that they were two different applications and she couldn't understand where her projects were being saved. She ended up saving one project a dozen times which ate up most of her harddisk space. You might say, 'well she's dumb', but that's not the case, and many many people are actually just like her, actually many people are worse. I'm an expert and I still feel like I spend too much time fussing with silly problems too.
So there's got to be innovation on the front-side of things. I think interface designers should envision more tactile interfaces --more like the real world. In the above case, for instance, when someone saves a project it should provide them with a very real-world-esque THING distinct for its type, name, content, etc. And it should have a very real-feeling PLACE in the virtual world. You should be able to see it and then move it to another place for safe-keeping. That way one whould know exactly where it is at.
I'm sure much more innovation can be had if things were thought through along these lines.
HTH.
Well, sort of. Many companies were involved in that. Looks like Philps was the primary driver for consumer products, then Sony came in.
1978 Philips releases the video disc player
Sony sells the PCM-1600 and PCM-1 (digital audio processors)
"Digital Audio Disc Convention" Held in Tokyo, Japan with 35 different manufacturers.
Philips proposes that a worldwide standard be set.
Polygram (division of Philips) determined that polycarbonate would be the best material for the CD.
Decision made for data on a CD to start on the inside and spiral towards the outer edge.
Disc diameter originally set at 115mm.
Type of laser selected for CD Players.
1979 Prototype CD System demonstrated in Europe and Japan.
Sony agrees to join in collaboration.
Sony & Philips compromise on the standard sampling rate of a CD -- 44.1 kHz (44,100 samples per second)
Philips accepts Sony's proposal for 16-bit audio.
Reed-Solomon code adopted after Sony's suggestion.
Maximum playing time decided to be slighty more that 74 minutes.
Disc diameter changed to 120mm to allow for 74 minutes of 16-bit stereo sound with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz
Interestingly the first time I ever saw a CD was on Star Trek (Original) and that was a repeat aired in the early 70s.
I use MP3 because it's what my MP3 player supports
Exactly my point. If all you're equipment supported ogg then you could use ogg. But they don't. And they don't b/c Apple and MS won't allow them to do so. Specifically they don't allow them to support their DRM formats if they also support open formats. Becuase MP3 is propreitory, it can be controlled. In time they will phase out MP3s and the your MP3 library will be useless on new equipment.
All because you wouldn't stand up and demand open formats.
T.