Take a 7200 rpm SCSI drive. Take a 7200 rpm IDE drive. Rip off the electronics.
You now have two identical drives.
That's how it's been for most vendors for years now. SCSI does offer higher speeds (10 and 15k RPM), and the various other benefits spoken of, but reliability is not one of them. The electronics rarely fail on HD's. Instead it's a failure of a mechanical device (the motor, the heads, etc).
SCSI really doesn't serve much purpose on desktop machines anymore. Three times the cost for little or no performance gain. The days of IDE being vastly slower (even on the desktop) are gone, as are the days of IDE CD-R/RW's spitting out coasters if you as much as moved the mouse. There are a few people who will go out and buy the fastest SCSI drives out there, toss them in a RAID array, and then play games on it (no, I'm not kidding... a friend of mine did), but the cost-benefit there is so small as to be ludicrous.
Agreed... what's humorous about the other thread is that while this one exec may be foaming at the mouth, a large amount of the industry has embraced TiVo and uses it, particularly the news people.
Why? Because in the broadcasting industry there may be shows on that are at inconvienent times for you to watch. If you have a 6 am TV show, you're up at around 2 am to get to work, get makeup, get briefed, etc. before going on air. That means you don't get to watch Nightline, or 60 minutes, or even the 11 o'clock news. And while some anchors are just talking heads, not all of them are. So they want to be able to watch other shows and form their own opinions.
I really suspect that Mr. Kellner accused over half of CNN's anchors of being thieves. Bet that'll go over nicely.
Even outside the news industry it's well liked... again, because the TV business (and entertainment in general) results in odd hours where you may not be available to watch whatever shows you like for weeks on end. TiVo/Replay can handle that. A VCR can't.
Did you even read the article? Ted Turner has nothing to do with this yammering. He's not the CEO of Turner networks, nor has he been for several years now.
No, government should not protect a broken business model. Heinlein is often quoted in regards to this. But it's long been true.
That said, there are some flaws in your particular statements...
100 years ago there were no commercial TV channels
100 years ago there were no TV channels, period. The first broadcast of any significant power was circa 1936 when Adolf Hitler opened the Olympics in Germany.
That said, yes, 50 years ago there were no commercial breaks on TV. They also didn't broadcast 24/7, and shows were sponsored. The commercials were put right in - often with the host blatantly pushing the product. You also had 2 or 3 stations to watch, not 3-400. But things changed, and the old model of a single company footing the bill for a show was no longer viable.
The current model is becoming unviable too... and, as you note, the current power structure is trying to fight change. They'll lose in the long run, but the problem is that they can win some short term battles that will eventually cause even more havoc as outdated laws get stomped on by technology. It just means stagnation while other industries and countries move onward. It's happened before in history, it'll happen again.
Best thing is 24 currently being shown on BBC2. Each show is supposed to show the passing of one hour of the day yeah? But each show is only 45 minutes long because we have no adverts.
Which is produced by Fox in the US. And without the commercial-bourne television in the US you wouldn't have 24. Or any of the other popular US television shows that get exported overseas. Funny that.
Ha Ha! we get 33% more drama for our money.
Hrm. Fox is a broadcast network in the US, which means it's totally supported by advertising. So I paid nothing (directly) for watching 24. Paying any amount of money for it can't gain you "more" than free.
Oh, and my wife and I watch it in about 45 minutes too. Thanks TiVo.
For reference, the US also has a network of free, totally commercial free, television and radio stations. PBS and NPR, respectively. They are funded through government grants as well as corporate and private donations. And some of the better programming has come from them as well (particularly children's TV such as Sesame Street, but also shows like Cosmos and Nova).
... what about the hordes of people who use Windows? And want to continue doing so?
I'm desperately looking for a new email client. I'm still using Eudora Lite 3.16 at home, simply because I haven't found anything to replace it with. The newer versions of Eudora are laden with spyware and ads. I looked at Pegasus and disliked it. Outlook and Outlook Express have nice ease of use, but we all know the utter lack of built-in security (this is Win98SE btw).
Yeah, I'm probably going to nuke one of my boxes and put Linux back on it soon, but I'll still have a Windows box around for playing games, and it's likely to be my main PC while Linux is my putter/hack TiVo box.
So, any suggestions on a decent Windows email client? I was really hoping Ximian was cross-compiled, but it doesn't appear so.
I used to work (more or less) for a credit card company. The fact is, once a cardholder goes bad there's a very high chance that that cardholder is going to become a writeoff.
Writeoffs are sold to collection agencies for $.10 on the dollar. That's not just the interest you owed, but also the principal. So if the bank drops your interest rate to a fraction of what it was they'll still wind up getting more, as long as you continue making payments. It's pretty much a win-win situation, since this kind of thing doesn't show up on credit reports either.
Go bad on that debt though, and they will sell your life to a collection agency and trash your credit report at the same time (which is what they're supposed to do afterall).
If you cannot make ends meet, for whatever reason, pay your house, your car, and your utilities, in about that order. If you're renting, you may want to pay the car first. In most states eviction is a bitch for the apartment owner to go through. Foreclosure and repo is a lot easier.
Credit cards expect chargeoffs. I used to work (more or less) for a credit card company. It's not a good thing to do, since they will trash your credit history if you do it. But if it's between your house and your credit history, the house comes first.
The sad thing is, you would be better off being payed $57,501 to $59,999 than being payed $60k exactly. How silly.
BTW, anyone who is earning that kind of wage and still living from paycheck to paycheck is, well, a fscking idiot. There are families that earn $30k/year on a single salary with children and still save money. More to the point, if you're working in a high tech job right now and don't have an appreciable amount of cash in an "oh shit" fund, you're going to find out the hard way what a bad idea that is.
Having 3-6 months of living money (rent/mortgage, utilities, food, etc) in liquid savings (CDs are ok if done wisely, money market, savings acct, etc. but NOT stocks or mutual funds) is really something people should do. You can scoff, but when you suddenly find yourself unemployed, it's the people with these funds that are going to be fine and able to focus on finding a new job. The people without them will be visiting bankruptcy court.
We were going to use regex++, but large portions of boost don't play happy with AIX. AIX really does have a lousy compiler/linker. We've been struggling for days now to get compile/link times down to something reasonable, and hopefully reduce code bloat too. Doesn't help that shared libraries are a major PITA on AIX either.
The CRT used in front/rear projectors is different from the CRT you're thinking of as a monitor. CRT projectors use 3 7-9" tubes, one each for red, blue, and green, and then project the image onto a screen. The CRT monitor you're using has one huge freaking tube and you read directly off that tube. There are other differences as well, but suffice it to say that your monitor is not a projection system.
Similarly the LCD and other projection systems are not the same as an LCD monitor.
Go look into the technology before doubting.
And sure, contrast ratio may be the absolute difference between brightest and darkest, but it has absolutely no indication of what "darkest" is. Digital projectors simply don't have as low as a base level. CRT projectors simply don't have as high of a top end. But the latter can be fixed through modifying the environment (a dark room). The former cannot be fixed no matter what. (And, again, the difference in black levels is pretty minute nowadays, at least between the good projectors - unless you're a fanatic with way too much money digital is widely considered better. And you don't have to have a blacked out room to watch TV either).
No, black level has nothing to do with contrast ratio.
Contrast ratio compares the brightest white to the darkest black. Digital projectors (LCD, DLP, and D-ILA) tend to do well here (in roughly that order). CRTs, on the other hand, have really miserable contrast levels -- so bad that if you don't watch them in a totally dark room the picture will be badly washed out.
Black level is a measurement of how black your black is. All digital projects leak light, even into pixels where there's supposed to be none (black pixels). Because of this blacks on digital projectors tend to show up slightly gray. LCDs are the worst, DLPs are (currently) the best.
That said, you generally won't be able to notice the increased black level on a very good DLP or D-ILA projector unless you compare it to a CRT projector.
DLP rear projection systems are still on the expensive side compared to RP CRTs, as you noted. Meanwhile front projection DLP is considerably less expensive than front projection CRT. Why? Because most big screen TVs are rear projection CRT. Meanwhile CRT is essentially dead in the front projection (99% business) market, with only HT buffs still using it. The advantages of digital for business use (ease of setup, much brighter, reduced maintainance) vastly outweighed CRTs (oh, did I mention that a digital projector is far lighter than a CRT?). So it's all supply and demand right now. But odds are that DLP and D-ILA will replace CRTs in the rear projector market in the next few years as well.
The biggest downside of the STL is when it doesn't work.
Sure, the standard is >3 years old now, but a lot of compiler vendors are still working out bugs with either the STL, their compiler, or their linker still.
Under AIX, we've run into relatively few problems with the STL itself, but the linker is pretty bad. Between it and the compiler compiles take forever (which is why I've been surfing/. more recently), and the executables are freaking huge.
This is, obviously, an AIX-specific problem. And it's pretty much an old story - every vendor has their own quirks with the compiler and/or linker.
Beyond that -- I've found a few things missing in the STL that would be really nice to have.
First, the only smart pointer is std::auto_ptr. It's pretty useless, since you can't use it in a collection, and you can't have more than one thing pointing at an object/memory block at once. This can be worked around though, since there are libraries that have better smart pointers. Check out Loki or Boost for two.
Second, there's no way to automagically ignore case on a std::string, or to upper/lower case it easily. Yes, I know, you can muck around with traits, but that's a PITA and renders your string uncopyable to other strings easily. Yes, I also know that you can use a transform() to do it. But this still isn't as nice as myString.lower().
Third, there's no date or datetime classes. You have to fall back on C time functions for them. I haven't looked for a good C++ library to handle date/time, but I'm sure there's one out there.
Fourth, there's no regular expression matching on strings. We use PCRE with a C++ wrapper and it works fine for what we need though.
Both 2 and 3 are due largely to internationalization issues... in the case of 2 there's a lot of languages in which upper and lower case are non-sensical. And after having thought about the i18n issues regarding dates, I don't blame the standardization committee a bit for running away screaming from them (what date range? which calendar? how do you change between calendars? what about date weirdness with some calendars (like the missing days in the Gregorian calendar)? etc).
I used RogueWave prior to this job, so I tried to think of some of the things I was used to in RW and weren't in the STL. By and large I prefer the STL though. The container classes in particular are a lot more sane than RW's.
It's largely a function of having a big-ass new theater and someone who's willing to layout the cash for being on the bleeding edge.
Projection systems are not cheap. Digital projection systems make traditional systems look like chump change.
Of course, the maintainance on the digital system is a fraction of that of the traditional one. About all you have to do is replace the bulb every few thousand hours and replace the occasional dead drive.
The theaters that are digital right now are either sponsored by TI or another interested party or are due to some owner having a lot of balls.
As an aside, I believe any theater showing the Star Wars movies as a first run (e.g. - first 8 weeks of release) has to be THX certified.
Which, of course, pads Lucas's pocket a bit more (THX certification costs $$$), but also "ensures" that you get the movie experience that the film maker expected.
If, for instance, there's an issue with a THX certified movie in a THX certified theater, you can call 1-800-PHONE-THX to lodge a complaint. THX claims that they investigate every such complaint.
Yes, pixels still get stuck. Although at the moment I bet you can call TI, tell them you have a stuck pixel, and they'll send out a new DMD and someone to install it. Why? Because they want this to take off, and it's worth the short-period loss for the long-term gain.
But consider, you're talking about one stuck pixel out of 4 million. Compare that noise to the amount of hair, dust, etc. that's in an analog film reel everytime you watch a movie. And that's not even considering the eliptical "splotch" in the upper right corner that indicates a reel change. No more reels in digital - it's all fed directly off a HD array.
The other thing that's amusing about this is black level. Talk to a home theater buff about the importance of black level - it's one of the only reasons that CRT projectors are still popular in high end home theater. The black level of 35 mm film really deeply sucks. The black levels with a DMD projector are actually better than film (and DMD is significantly worse than CRT in home theater, although the gap is closing).
Either they don't, which means you do fly-bys of everything, or they slow down the same way they speed up. By using the solar wind.
I won't even begin to say I understand all the physics involved here, but apparantly you can essentially tack against the solar wind by using concentric circles and reflecting light from one circle to the other, thus giving the sail facing away from the star (or other power source) the "push".
Like I said, I don't really understand the physics.
It's discussed in Robert Forward's Indistinguisable from Magic science fact/fiction novel (discusses futuristic science from a factual standpoint, then has a related SF story after each chapter).
I suspect some sites on solar sails online would have info too.
Well, it's not so much that solar sails require zero fuel, it's just that the fuel they need isn't being provided by us.
And yes, that's a big advantage.
The big disadvantage, of course, is that solar sails are freaking slow. And freaking big. Freaking big means there's a lot more things to go wrong. Freaking slow means that you have to be able to wait a long, long time for any data from the sail. The other problem with freaking slow is that if it's too slow then it's likely to be passed in transit by some newer technology that isn't freaking slow.
Using solar sails for in-system transit would take years to go places (which may be ok for unmanned ships). Using them for interstellar voyages without some kind of powered assist (e.g. - space based microwave power station) makes it so slow that you'll either get passed or whatever agenda sent you is long gone by the time you get to your objective.
Solar sails are definitely neat, but they aren't a panacea to space travel problems.
WHY: To conduct the first solar sail flight and demonstrate the technique for traveling between planets -- and someday, to the stars.
The purpose is proof-of-concept. Which is a fairly standard thing to do. NASA has done some proof-of-concept on space tethers in the past few years, but I'm not aware of any solar sail testing (but I also don't read the various space websites religiously).
Note that this seems like a really small sail (30m diameter) for such a heavy payload (40 kg). But it is, after all, just proof-of-concept.
Get a sufficiently light sail with a large enough coverage area and you can get to a reasonable percentage of C in a pretty short time. It works better if you have a space-based microwave power station that you test by launching this super-light sail (this is proposed/popularized by Robert Forward in a number of different science fiction/fact books).
The issue with any space exploration is cost. To do exploration in a reasonable amount of time (100 years) you have to go a significant percentage of C. That's a LOT of speed and costs a LOT of money. You have to bankroll the project somehow, and in this case compound interest is working against you. If you can somehow bankroll a space-based power station (and it's the most cost-effective space construction I've heard of yet, but still requires something on the order of $1 TRILLION to build initially), then the cost of a super-light probe is pretty minor. Especially since you can start recouping costs immediately.
And so when the reaction comes out that the character wasn't as appealing to myself or someone else is really irrelevant, because we're not the audience, and we shouldn't be the critiques of that.
Ok, yes, I know the concept of demographic groups and marketing to them. And, apparantly, Jar Jar was supposed to appeal to 13 year old girls.
Thing is though, you can't target market like that when you're also marketing to a broader market. Why? Because when you target that intensely you're going to inherently turn off the rest of your audience. Which is exactly what happened.
Target marketing works fine for commercials and advertisements. It even works fine in TV shows and some movies which are supposed to have a limited appeal. But this was a movie (allegedly) designed for broad appeal to most of the Western world. What on earth were they thinking?
Kurzweil repeatedly refers to "The Singularity", which is (as he defines it), "a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself."
For reference, this is very similar to something that Vernor Vinge has espoused in several novels, chiefly Marooned in Realtime. Basically that technological progress is logarithmic in scale, not linear, and that at some point any intelligent, technological race will reach an apex, or singularity, beyond which it's essentially unrecognizable to anything prior to it (in the book humanity simply disappears from the solar system with no evidence of what occurred). Consider it Clarke's old adage "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" taken to the extreme.
The question that's really posed, and which will be vehemenantly opposed by some groups (and almost certainly most religious groups), is "is this good for us?". After all, when it comes down to it individuals still tend to be rather petty and bicker over the least slights. We tend to be very devisive over things - witness the Middle East, which has been undergoing strife for thousands of years.
The flipside, of course, is exactly how are you going to stop technological progress? Every society that attempts to do so simply becomes outpaced and outmoded by its neighbors. Complacancy seems to be a formula for catastrophe. If we don't develop advanced biological and technological enhancements, they will (insert values for we and they that make you happy... or that make you concerned). Societal mores are not universal, and just because one group of people feel that something is immoral, unethical, or beyond human capability to be responsible, doesn't mean another group does.
Ok, so now that I've spouted that, what's my take? I'm hoping to ride the wave... I know I won't be the first (and wouldn't want to be) to take any advanced treatments, but I hope they become available before the end of my life. Barring that, that they are available to my (future) child(ren). I know that in such a society I wouldn't want to be one of the people on the "have-not" side. And this being/., I suspect the sentiment will largely run to that side.
No. 1998. The inception of the HDTV quest has nothing to do with this. Once the Grand Alliance had finally set the standard someone over at the FCC realized that there was absolutely no buy-in from the cable companies, which is how 60% of the US receives TV now.
So in 1998, after a couple years of the cable companies doing jack about HD, the FCC finally threatened to impose a standard if the cable companies didn't choose a standardized HD interface. The cable companies swore that they'd get right to it.
Four years later, we have an alleged standard, but nobody's decided on licensing royalties yet. That usually takes another 2-5 years to figure out. Until then, nobody can realistically use it because they'll get gouged by one or more of the patent holders.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, that's not true.
Take a 7200 rpm SCSI drive. Take a 7200 rpm IDE drive. Rip off the electronics.
You now have two identical drives.
That's how it's been for most vendors for years now. SCSI does offer higher speeds (10 and 15k RPM), and the various other benefits spoken of, but reliability is not one of them. The electronics rarely fail on HD's. Instead it's a failure of a mechanical device (the motor, the heads, etc).
SCSI really doesn't serve much purpose on desktop machines anymore. Three times the cost for little or no performance gain. The days of IDE being vastly slower (even on the desktop) are gone, as are the days of IDE CD-R/RW's spitting out coasters if you as much as moved the mouse. There are a few people who will go out and buy the fastest SCSI drives out there, toss them in a RAID array, and then play games on it (no, I'm not kidding... a friend of mine did), but the cost-benefit there is so small as to be ludicrous.
Agreed... what's humorous about the other thread is that while this one exec may be foaming at the mouth, a large amount of the industry has embraced TiVo and uses it, particularly the news people.
Why? Because in the broadcasting industry there may be shows on that are at inconvienent times for you to watch. If you have a 6 am TV show, you're up at around 2 am to get to work, get makeup, get briefed, etc. before going on air. That means you don't get to watch Nightline, or 60 minutes, or even the 11 o'clock news. And while some anchors are just talking heads, not all of them are. So they want to be able to watch other shows and form their own opinions.
I really suspect that Mr. Kellner accused over half of CNN's anchors of being thieves. Bet that'll go over nicely.
Even outside the news industry it's well liked... again, because the TV business (and entertainment in general) results in odd hours where you may not be available to watch whatever shows you like for weeks on end. TiVo/Replay can handle that. A VCR can't.
Did you even read the article? Ted Turner has nothing to do with this yammering. He's not the CEO of Turner networks, nor has he been for several years now.
No, government should not protect a broken business model. Heinlein is often quoted in regards to this. But it's long been true.
That said, there are some flaws in your particular statements...
100 years ago there were no commercial TV channels
100 years ago there were no TV channels, period. The first broadcast of any significant power was circa 1936 when Adolf Hitler opened the Olympics in Germany.
That said, yes, 50 years ago there were no commercial breaks on TV. They also didn't broadcast 24/7, and shows were sponsored. The commercials were put right in - often with the host blatantly pushing the product. You also had 2 or 3 stations to watch, not 3-400. But things changed, and the old model of a single company footing the bill for a show was no longer viable.
The current model is becoming unviable too... and, as you note, the current power structure is trying to fight change. They'll lose in the long run, but the problem is that they can win some short term battles that will eventually cause even more havoc as outdated laws get stomped on by technology. It just means stagnation while other industries and countries move onward. It's happened before in history, it'll happen again.
Best thing is 24 currently being shown on BBC2. Each show is supposed to show the passing of one hour of the day yeah? But each show is only 45 minutes long because we have no adverts.
Which is produced by Fox in the US. And without the commercial-bourne television in the US you wouldn't have 24. Or any of the other popular US television shows that get exported overseas. Funny that.
Ha Ha! we get 33% more drama for our money.
Hrm. Fox is a broadcast network in the US, which means it's totally supported by advertising. So I paid nothing (directly) for watching 24. Paying any amount of money for it can't gain you "more" than free.
Oh, and my wife and I watch it in about 45 minutes too. Thanks TiVo.
For reference, the US also has a network of free, totally commercial free, television and radio stations. PBS and NPR, respectively. They are funded through government grants as well as corporate and private donations. And some of the better programming has come from them as well (particularly children's TV such as Sesame Street, but also shows like Cosmos and Nova).
... what about the hordes of people who use Windows? And want to continue doing so?
I'm desperately looking for a new email client. I'm still using Eudora Lite 3.16 at home, simply because I haven't found anything to replace it with. The newer versions of Eudora are laden with spyware and ads. I looked at Pegasus and disliked it. Outlook and Outlook Express have nice ease of use, but we all know the utter lack of built-in security (this is Win98SE btw).
Yeah, I'm probably going to nuke one of my boxes and put Linux back on it soon, but I'll still have a Windows box around for playing games, and it's likely to be my main PC while Linux is my putter/hack TiVo box.
So, any suggestions on a decent Windows email client? I was really hoping Ximian was cross-compiled, but it doesn't appear so.
What others said is very true - just ask.
I used to work (more or less) for a credit card company. The fact is, once a cardholder goes bad there's a very high chance that that cardholder is going to become a writeoff.
Writeoffs are sold to collection agencies for $.10 on the dollar. That's not just the interest you owed, but also the principal. So if the bank drops your interest rate to a fraction of what it was they'll still wind up getting more, as long as you continue making payments. It's pretty much a win-win situation, since this kind of thing doesn't show up on credit reports either.
Go bad on that debt though, and they will sell your life to a collection agency and trash your credit report at the same time (which is what they're supposed to do afterall).
That said, you're right.
If you cannot make ends meet, for whatever reason, pay your house, your car, and your utilities, in about that order. If you're renting, you may want to pay the car first. In most states eviction is a bitch for the apartment owner to go through. Foreclosure and repo is a lot easier.
Credit cards expect chargeoffs. I used to work (more or less) for a credit card company. It's not a good thing to do, since they will trash your credit history if you do it. But if it's between your house and your credit history, the house comes first.
The sad thing is, you would be better off being payed $57,501 to $59,999 than being payed $60k exactly. How silly.
BTW, anyone who is earning that kind of wage and still living from paycheck to paycheck is, well, a fscking idiot. There are families that earn $30k/year on a single salary with children and still save money. More to the point, if you're working in a high tech job right now and don't have an appreciable amount of cash in an "oh shit" fund, you're going to find out the hard way what a bad idea that is.
Having 3-6 months of living money (rent/mortgage, utilities, food, etc) in liquid savings (CDs are ok if done wisely, money market, savings acct, etc. but NOT stocks or mutual funds) is really something people should do. You can scoff, but when you suddenly find yourself unemployed, it's the people with these funds that are going to be fine and able to focus on finding a new job. The people without them will be visiting bankruptcy court.
We were going to use regex++, but large portions of boost don't play happy with AIX. AIX really does have a lousy compiler/linker. We've been struggling for days now to get compile/link times down to something reasonable, and hopefully reduce code bloat too. Doesn't help that shared libraries are a major PITA on AIX either.
No, I'm not kidding.
The CRT used in front/rear projectors is different from the CRT you're thinking of as a monitor. CRT projectors use 3 7-9" tubes, one each for red, blue, and green, and then project the image onto a screen. The CRT monitor you're using has one huge freaking tube and you read directly off that tube. There are other differences as well, but suffice it to say that your monitor is not a projection system.
Similarly the LCD and other projection systems are not the same as an LCD monitor.
Go look into the technology before doubting.
And sure, contrast ratio may be the absolute difference between brightest and darkest, but it has absolutely no indication of what "darkest" is. Digital projectors simply don't have as low as a base level. CRT projectors simply don't have as high of a top end. But the latter can be fixed through modifying the environment (a dark room). The former cannot be fixed no matter what. (And, again, the difference in black levels is pretty minute nowadays, at least between the good projectors - unless you're a fanatic with way too much money digital is widely considered better. And you don't have to have a blacked out room to watch TV either).
struct tm.tm_isdst
If it's set, it's DST, if not, it's not.
No, black level has nothing to do with contrast ratio.
Contrast ratio compares the brightest white to the darkest black. Digital projectors (LCD, DLP, and D-ILA) tend to do well here (in roughly that order). CRTs, on the other hand, have really miserable contrast levels -- so bad that if you don't watch them in a totally dark room the picture will be badly washed out.
Black level is a measurement of how black your black is. All digital projects leak light, even into pixels where there's supposed to be none (black pixels). Because of this blacks on digital projectors tend to show up slightly gray. LCDs are the worst, DLPs are (currently) the best.
That said, you generally won't be able to notice the increased black level on a very good DLP or D-ILA projector unless you compare it to a CRT projector.
DLP rear projection systems are still on the expensive side compared to RP CRTs, as you noted. Meanwhile front projection DLP is considerably less expensive than front projection CRT. Why? Because most big screen TVs are rear projection CRT. Meanwhile CRT is essentially dead in the front projection (99% business) market, with only HT buffs still using it. The advantages of digital for business use (ease of setup, much brighter, reduced maintainance) vastly outweighed CRTs (oh, did I mention that a digital projector is far lighter than a CRT?). So it's all supply and demand right now. But odds are that DLP and D-ILA will replace CRTs in the rear projector market in the next few years as well.
The biggest downside of the STL is when it doesn't work.
/. more recently), and the executables are freaking huge.
Sure, the standard is >3 years old now, but a lot of compiler vendors are still working out bugs with either the STL, their compiler, or their linker still.
Under AIX, we've run into relatively few problems with the STL itself, but the linker is pretty bad. Between it and the compiler compiles take forever (which is why I've been surfing
This is, obviously, an AIX-specific problem. And it's pretty much an old story - every vendor has their own quirks with the compiler and/or linker.
Beyond that -- I've found a few things missing in the STL that would be really nice to have.
First, the only smart pointer is std::auto_ptr. It's pretty useless, since you can't use it in a collection, and you can't have more than one thing pointing at an object/memory block at once. This can be worked around though, since there are libraries that have better smart pointers. Check out Loki or Boost for two.
Second, there's no way to automagically ignore case on a std::string, or to upper/lower case it easily. Yes, I know, you can muck around with traits, but that's a PITA and renders your string uncopyable to other strings easily. Yes, I also know that you can use a transform() to do it. But this still isn't as nice as myString.lower().
Third, there's no date or datetime classes. You have to fall back on C time functions for them. I haven't looked for a good C++ library to handle date/time, but I'm sure there's one out there.
Fourth, there's no regular expression matching on strings. We use PCRE with a C++ wrapper and it works fine for what we need though.
Both 2 and 3 are due largely to internationalization issues... in the case of 2 there's a lot of languages in which upper and lower case are non-sensical. And after having thought about the i18n issues regarding dates, I don't blame the standardization committee a bit for running away screaming from them (what date range? which calendar? how do you change between calendars? what about date weirdness with some calendars (like the missing days in the Gregorian calendar)? etc).
I used RogueWave prior to this job, so I tried to think of some of the things I was used to in RW and weren't in the STL. By and large I prefer the STL though. The container classes in particular are a lot more sane than RW's.
It's largely a function of having a big-ass new theater and someone who's willing to layout the cash for being on the bleeding edge.
Projection systems are not cheap. Digital projection systems make traditional systems look like chump change.
Of course, the maintainance on the digital system is a fraction of that of the traditional one. About all you have to do is replace the bulb every few thousand hours and replace the occasional dead drive.
The theaters that are digital right now are either sponsored by TI or another interested party or are due to some owner having a lot of balls.
As an aside, I believe any theater showing the Star Wars movies as a first run (e.g. - first 8 weeks of release) has to be THX certified.
Which, of course, pads Lucas's pocket a bit more (THX certification costs $$$), but also "ensures" that you get the movie experience that the film maker expected.
If, for instance, there's an issue with a THX certified movie in a THX certified theater, you can call 1-800-PHONE-THX to lodge a complaint. THX claims that they investigate every such complaint.
Yes, pixels still get stuck. Although at the moment I bet you can call TI, tell them you have a stuck pixel, and they'll send out a new DMD and someone to install it. Why? Because they want this to take off, and it's worth the short-period loss for the long-term gain.
But consider, you're talking about one stuck pixel out of 4 million. Compare that noise to the amount of hair, dust, etc. that's in an analog film reel everytime you watch a movie. And that's not even considering the eliptical "splotch" in the upper right corner that indicates a reel change. No more reels in digital - it's all fed directly off a HD array.
The other thing that's amusing about this is black level. Talk to a home theater buff about the importance of black level - it's one of the only reasons that CRT projectors are still popular in high end home theater. The black level of 35 mm film really deeply sucks. The black levels with a DMD projector are actually better than film (and DMD is significantly worse than CRT in home theater, although the gap is closing).
I wonder how they slow down
Either they don't, which means you do fly-bys of everything, or they slow down the same way they speed up. By using the solar wind.
I won't even begin to say I understand all the physics involved here, but apparantly you can essentially tack against the solar wind by using concentric circles and reflecting light from one circle to the other, thus giving the sail facing away from the star (or other power source) the "push".
Like I said, I don't really understand the physics.
It's discussed in Robert Forward's Indistinguisable from Magic science fact/fiction novel (discusses futuristic science from a factual standpoint, then has a related SF story after each chapter).
I suspect some sites on solar sails online would have info too.
Well, it's not so much that solar sails require zero fuel, it's just that the fuel they need isn't being provided by us.
And yes, that's a big advantage.
The big disadvantage, of course, is that solar sails are freaking slow. And freaking big. Freaking big means there's a lot more things to go wrong. Freaking slow means that you have to be able to wait a long, long time for any data from the sail. The other problem with freaking slow is that if it's too slow then it's likely to be passed in transit by some newer technology that isn't freaking slow.
Using solar sails for in-system transit would take years to go places (which may be ok for unmanned ships). Using them for interstellar voyages without some kind of powered assist (e.g. - space based microwave power station) makes it so slow that you'll either get passed or whatever agenda sent you is long gone by the time you get to your objective.
Solar sails are definitely neat, but they aren't a panacea to space travel problems.
DS1 is the name of the ion-drive probe that was launched in 1999 (I think). It's real and is now the fastest moving man-made object in space.
It's only science fiction to you due to ignorance.
The purpose is proof-of-concept. Which is a fairly standard thing to do. NASA has done some proof-of-concept on space tethers in the past few years, but I'm not aware of any solar sail testing (but I also don't read the various space websites religiously).
Note that this seems like a really small sail (30m diameter) for such a heavy payload (40 kg). But it is, after all, just proof-of-concept.
Get a sufficiently light sail with a large enough coverage area and you can get to a reasonable percentage of C in a pretty short time. It works better if you have a space-based microwave power station that you test by launching this super-light sail (this is proposed/popularized by Robert Forward in a number of different science fiction/fact books).
The issue with any space exploration is cost. To do exploration in a reasonable amount of time (100 years) you have to go a significant percentage of C. That's a LOT of speed and costs a LOT of money. You have to bankroll the project somehow, and in this case compound interest is working against you. If you can somehow bankroll a space-based power station (and it's the most cost-effective space construction I've heard of yet, but still requires something on the order of $1 TRILLION to build initially), then the cost of a super-light probe is pretty minor. Especially since you can start recouping costs immediately.
Ok, yes, I know the concept of demographic groups and marketing to them. And, apparantly, Jar Jar was supposed to appeal to 13 year old girls.
Thing is though, you can't target market like that when you're also marketing to a broader market. Why? Because when you target that intensely you're going to inherently turn off the rest of your audience. Which is exactly what happened.
Target marketing works fine for commercials and advertisements. It even works fine in TV shows and some movies which are supposed to have a limited appeal. But this was a movie (allegedly) designed for broad appeal to most of the Western world. What on earth were they thinking?
Er... right.... oops.
Kurzweil repeatedly refers to "The Singularity", which is (as he defines it), "a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself."
/., I suspect the sentiment will largely run to that side.
For reference, this is very similar to something that Vernor Vinge has espoused in several novels, chiefly Marooned in Realtime. Basically that technological progress is logarithmic in scale, not linear, and that at some point any intelligent, technological race will reach an apex, or singularity, beyond which it's essentially unrecognizable to anything prior to it (in the book humanity simply disappears from the solar system with no evidence of what occurred). Consider it Clarke's old adage "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" taken to the extreme.
The question that's really posed, and which will be vehemenantly opposed by some groups (and almost certainly most religious groups), is "is this good for us?". After all, when it comes down to it individuals still tend to be rather petty and bicker over the least slights. We tend to be very devisive over things - witness the Middle East, which has been undergoing strife for thousands of years.
The flipside, of course, is exactly how are you going to stop technological progress? Every society that attempts to do so simply becomes outpaced and outmoded by its neighbors. Complacancy seems to be a formula for catastrophe. If we don't develop advanced biological and technological enhancements, they will (insert values for we and they that make you happy... or that make you concerned). Societal mores are not universal, and just because one group of people feel that something is immoral, unethical, or beyond human capability to be responsible, doesn't mean another group does.
Ok, so now that I've spouted that, what's my take? I'm hoping to ride the wave... I know I won't be the first (and wouldn't want to be) to take any advanced treatments, but I hope they become available before the end of my life. Barring that, that they are available to my (future) child(ren). I know that in such a society I wouldn't want to be one of the people on the "have-not" side. And this being
Interesting times, indeed.
No. 1998. The inception of the HDTV quest has nothing to do with this. Once the Grand Alliance had finally set the standard someone over at the FCC realized that there was absolutely no buy-in from the cable companies, which is how 60% of the US receives TV now.
So in 1998, after a couple years of the cable companies doing jack about HD, the FCC finally threatened to impose a standard if the cable companies didn't choose a standardized HD interface. The cable companies swore that they'd get right to it.
Four years later, we have an alleged standard, but nobody's decided on licensing royalties yet. That usually takes another 2-5 years to figure out. Until then, nobody can realistically use it because they'll get gouged by one or more of the patent holders.