One problem is that there isn't enough education about the right way to dispose of CFs. I once attended a local environmental stage show for kids, where they gave out organic vegatables and CF lights. The guy running the show said "When these lights die, don't throw them in the garbage," but he didn't say the right way to dispose of them! The directions for proper disposal need to be as obvious and available as the stores that sell them.
I use a DVD recorder for a whole other use: Video game play recordings! I rent a lot of games through the mail via Gottaplay, and each one I rent I record about 30 minutes of myself playing the farthest part of the game I'm up to. I also use an audio mixer and mic to narrate as I record. I've actually been doing this since the late 80s with VHS, going back to early NES games, and I copied those 18 or so VHS tapes (all recorded in 6 hour mode, because I'm stingy) to DVD once I got the DVD recorder.
I suppose this is a different use for VHS and DVD than what most people do, but it's what I like to do and it's cheap.
When I was just six months old, my parents and I were vacationing in a beach town, and in a convenience store my dad held me in one hand and played a Pacman cabinet with the other. A year later we returned to that town, and when Dad walked me past the store again, I pointed to it and said "Bamans". He interpreted that to mean Pacman, and he was so impressed by my memory that when we got home two weeks later he wrote a whole game in BASIC on his C64 named "Bamans" for me! (Though he didn't make it exactly a Pacman clone.)
Though I was too young to remember the Pacman incident, he kept his Bamans disk for years (probably still has it), so I was old enough to remember that game.
This article focuses on the effect of Cell's SPEs (DSPs), but Cell also has a PowerPC CPU and a RAMBUS memory bus. So unless Toshiba's removed those parts from this version of Cell, this laptop, with its Intel CPU, has two complete, separate, incompatible CPUs, memory buses and memory banks. That'll make this laptop big, expensive, and power hungry.
Both Intel and AMD want to integrate more powerful DSPs onto the CPU in various ways, so unless Toshiba intends to eventually make an x86-compatible version of Cell, or make a PPC-based Cell laptop that doesn't run Windows, I'm afraid this thing's going to be a niche market.
If copyright duration does eventually decline, it'll probably come down the same way it went up, bit by bit. We should make it our ultimate goal to drop it from 120 down to 20 or so, but we'll never get it in one big chop. Too much shock to the system. Instead, we should campaign to reduce copyright duration in 20 year increments. Make Big Media think we only want to reduce it to 100. After we get that, wait a few years, then campaign to reduce it to 80. Repeat until ultimate victory.
Bill Griffith, the creator of Zippy the Pinhead, often complained that Hollywood wouldn't let him make a Zippy movie the way he wanted. But when I saw MST3K, especially the host segments, I thought cable TV would be the best place for Zippy because MST3K had a similar style of humor and was thriving in the cable world. Did Bill Griffith ever tell you what he thought of MST3K, or if he wanted Zippy to follow a similar model?
My dad played video games with me for quite a long time. I was 4 when Super Mario Bros. came out, and most evenings we'd take turns playing single player games like Mario and Zelda, or play together on multiplayer games like Contra and Mario Kart. We kept this going all the way up to Zelda: Ocarina of Time in early 1999, at which point he said new games were too complicated for him.
Our tastes differed a little. He especially liked gimicky stuff like Gyromite, Pilotwings and Myst, whereas I could handle RPGs like Final Fantasy that he called "too much like work" (he was a radar scientist/engineer who spent his week in front of spreadsheets).
Dad told me that one of my first memories was of a video game (though I've forgotten, ironically): When I was 6 months old and we were on vacation, he took me to a convenience store where he played a Pacman cabinet with one hand and held me up with the other. A year later we vacationed to that town again, and while he was rolling me past that store again in a stroller, I pointed to the building and said "Bamans", which he interpreted to mean Pacman. He was so impressed by this that when we got home he wrote a whole Pacman-ish game on his Commodore 64 that he named "Bamans" after my memory.
Today, dad has one of those miniature pirate 50-games-and-a-NES inside a controller, and just about every evening he plays a bit of Mario Bros, Contra and Tetris. Mom gets annoyed because its the same three damn games every night, but anything else would require too much research and/or learning curve on his part. However, I'm getting a Wii this Christmas, which he thinks is a neat concept for a console. We're getting together for the holidays, so maybe when he sees Wii Sports, Mario Galaxy and a few Virtual Console games, maybe he'll break and buy one for himself? One can only hope...
Lately, ATI has been pushing non-graphical processing on the GPU (AKA GPGPU), and AMD is looking for ways to grow without imitating or directly competing against Intel. If GPGPU software design becomes mainstream, then much of the CPU may become redundant, such as SIMD and multiple cores. Maybe ATI and AMD will coordinate which functions go onto which chip. Intel has always disdained other companies' co-processors (and sells integrated graphics to reduce demand for them), so they're not likely to do this.
...much weakened by recommendation engines. With a recommendation engine in place, pricing really only fits a supply-demand curve, not some false psychology. If the record labels really wanted to promote something, iTunes could charge the labels big money for engine distortions, per title, per user, per week. Apple could raise the cost of advertizing enormously and earn a huge profit from it by using a recommendation engine as leverage against it.
"The entertainment industry has to maintain a straight face and tell you that Gigli or Battlefield Earth are every bit as valuable as Wedding Crashers or Star Wars or nobody will go see them."
Neither studios nor theaters actually like this situation; they simply can't do anything else. Theaters have no way to enforce variable pricing. Patrons can buy a ticket to one show then walk to another. It's too expensive to hire a guard for each room. But in retail, even bricks and mortar, it's easy to charge a different price for each item. This is part of why movie studios are putting more emphasis on DVDs and less on theatrical runs. They can charge whatever the market will bear.
It's possible there's a lot more music that might get made and sold online if it could be priced how the publisher wants. I personally don't have an iPod or buy from iTunes because they don't have nearly enough anime or video game music. Despite this, I respect Apple for being able to pressure the record labels this much. If Apple is smart and powerful enough to bend the entire RIAA cartel to its will, then the record labels doesn't deserve the benefits of variable pricing. It hurts consumers in the short run, but Apple deserves its lunch for as long as they can get it.
Hence why I posted this question in a forum available to everyone. I may not have worded the question diplomatically, but I knew I'd get responses from people around the world. If I didn't want to hear from people like you, I'd have tried to get this question posted on a one-way medium, like television or a magazine.
There's a lot of indications that governments want to split the internet into sections. China and the EU are balking at ICANN, and US politicians are getting more eager to control the flow of information at home. They can't get everything they want immediately, but they'll all keep chipping at it for as many years as it takes to get what they want. That's why we should now measure and appreciate the internet's ability to connect us with people beyond our borders, so we can know how much there is to lose, and how hard we should fight for it.
Metal Gear Solid series creator Hideo Kojima makes much use of iPods. In his blog, he mentioned that he uses an iPod to listen to music. And now he is making podcasts. He is supposed to be one of Sony's leading supporters, or at least one of PS3's leading supporters, but here is using Apple hardware and software whenever he likes.
There's a good reason why iTunes doesn't do rentals: Imagine downloading an 8 GB hi-def video file, or even a 700 MB file, over a 1 mbitps connection, only to have it vanish off your HD in a few days. You'd spend many times as long downloading as watching it. With bricks and mortar downloading, the transport-to-consumption time ratio would be more reasonable.
But I agree with another poster; this only requires a vending machine, not a whole store.
The GS (graphic synthesizer) got just 4mb of very fast ram.... That results in the PS2 having to spend a lot of time transfering textures between GS and regular RAM... you need to order your triangles in a way that minimizes the texture changes, which is a lot of trouble and hurts performance for sure.
Wouldn't this hurt Gamecube also? GC's graphics chip has only 3 MB of RAM. However, GC has other advantages, such as the fact that its GPU does texture decompression, that its CPU has 256K L2 cache and 64K L1 cache, that its main RAM has lower latency than PS2's main RAM...
Now that nVidia is selling Gelato, a GPU-accelerated renderer, shouldn't that reduce the need to outsource rendering? With Gelato, you could render maybe 3 or 4 times as much imagery with the same number of PCs in the same amount of time.
I read a claim that when it comes to navigation, men's minds are more spacially oriented while women's minds are more landmark oriented. Thus, maps work better for men than for women.
Women can make due with written directions, but what if there was a way to give directions by providing a photograph of every intersection from the 1st person, with the turns marked by arrows? Instead of memorizing street names or distances, you could just say "I'll turn when I see this, I'll turn when I see that..." You could be completely illiterate and still navigate. To make such a system possible, you'd have to photograph every intersection from every approach, at day and night, every season (which is frequent enough to account for new construction in most areas). It would be very labor intensive, but it would provide a very valuable service. Assuming illiterate, map-incompetent people have enough money to pay for it.
If you want to fight Bush by Boycotting Disney, that now means boycotting Miyazaki's movies, since Disney distributs his movies in North America. Is the Slashdot crowd up to the challenge? Can you endure anime withdrawl in order to save America from tyranny?
"Consider this: Older gamers have fond memories of games like "Tetris," "Space Invaders" and "Pong." But when Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine put them in the hands of a group of 10-13 year olds last year, the results weren't pretty. Rather than seeing the games' charms, the kids were bored - and mocked the titles mercilessly."
Kids naturally rejecting old things and lust after new things. Back when the above-mentioned games were new, kids were probably bored by pinball, air hocked and board games. To get a kid interested in something, you have to provide a hell of a lot of context, or they need a hell of a lot of imagination.
My dad told me how in Pittsburgh in the 50s, the high school's chemistry class did real chemistry with real reagents. My high school in FL (half an hour south of Kennedey Space Center) in the late 90s had at least four science labs, but never used them because school couldn't get insurance for accidents. The public schools in Brevard County don't let the students actually use chemicals until community college.
First, was the code on their hard drives destroyed, or merely copied? If it was destroyed, why can't they restore it from CD-R backups? They should've backed up all their code on CD-Rs weekly, if not daily. Why didn't they?
This could be reduced by making content-on-demand based on downloads rather than streaming, and artists can find creative ways of compressing their works more without reducing quality much. This assumes that the big media companies will embrace downloads over streaming.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem is that there isn't enough education about the right way to dispose of CFs. I once attended a local environmental stage show for kids, where they gave out organic vegatables and CF lights. The guy running the show said "When these lights die, don't throw them in the garbage," but he didn't say the right way to dispose of them! The directions for proper disposal need to be as obvious and available as the stores that sell them.
I use a DVD recorder for a whole other use: Video game play recordings! I rent a lot of games through the mail via Gottaplay, and each one I rent I record about 30 minutes of myself playing the farthest part of the game I'm up to. I also use an audio mixer and mic to narrate as I record. I've actually been doing this since the late 80s with VHS, going back to early NES games, and I copied those 18 or so VHS tapes (all recorded in 6 hour mode, because I'm stingy) to DVD once I got the DVD recorder.
I suppose this is a different use for VHS and DVD than what most people do, but it's what I like to do and it's cheap.
When I was just six months old, my parents and I were vacationing in a beach town, and in a convenience store my dad held me in one hand and played a Pacman cabinet with the other. A year later we returned to that town, and when Dad walked me past the store again, I pointed to it and said "Bamans". He interpreted that to mean Pacman, and he was so impressed by my memory that when we got home two weeks later he wrote a whole game in BASIC on his C64 named "Bamans" for me! (Though he didn't make it exactly a Pacman clone.)
Though I was too young to remember the Pacman incident, he kept his Bamans disk for years (probably still has it), so I was old enough to remember that game.
This article focuses on the effect of Cell's SPEs (DSPs), but Cell also has a PowerPC CPU and a RAMBUS memory bus. So unless Toshiba's removed those parts from this version of Cell, this laptop, with its Intel CPU, has two complete, separate, incompatible CPUs, memory buses and memory banks. That'll make this laptop big, expensive, and power hungry.
Both Intel and AMD want to integrate more powerful DSPs onto the CPU in various ways, so unless Toshiba intends to eventually make an x86-compatible version of Cell, or make a PPC-based Cell laptop that doesn't run Windows, I'm afraid this thing's going to be a niche market.
If copyright duration does eventually decline, it'll probably come down the same way it went up, bit by bit. We should make it our ultimate goal to drop it from 120 down to 20 or so, but we'll never get it in one big chop. Too much shock to the system. Instead, we should campaign to reduce copyright duration in 20 year increments. Make Big Media think we only want to reduce it to 100. After we get that, wait a few years, then campaign to reduce it to 80. Repeat until ultimate victory.
Does Washington state enforce non-compete agreements? What's it like at Microsoft and Amazon compared to Silicon Valley?
Bill Griffith, the creator of Zippy the Pinhead, often complained that Hollywood wouldn't let him make a Zippy movie the way he wanted. But when I saw MST3K, especially the host segments, I thought cable TV would be the best place for Zippy because MST3K had a similar style of humor and was thriving in the cable world. Did Bill Griffith ever tell you what he thought of MST3K, or if he wanted Zippy to follow a similar model?
My dad played video games with me for quite a long time. I was 4 when Super Mario Bros. came out, and most evenings we'd take turns playing single player games like Mario and Zelda, or play together on multiplayer games like Contra and Mario Kart. We kept this going all the way up to Zelda: Ocarina of Time in early 1999, at which point he said new games were too complicated for him.
Our tastes differed a little. He especially liked gimicky stuff like Gyromite, Pilotwings and Myst, whereas I could handle RPGs like Final Fantasy that he called "too much like work" (he was a radar scientist/engineer who spent his week in front of spreadsheets).
Dad told me that one of my first memories was of a video game (though I've forgotten, ironically): When I was 6 months old and we were on vacation, he took me to a convenience store where he played a Pacman cabinet with one hand and held me up with the other. A year later we vacationed to that town again, and while he was rolling me past that store again in a stroller, I pointed to the building and said "Bamans", which he interpreted to mean Pacman. He was so impressed by this that when we got home he wrote a whole Pacman-ish game on his Commodore 64 that he named "Bamans" after my memory.
Today, dad has one of those miniature pirate 50-games-and-a-NES inside a controller, and just about every evening he plays a bit of Mario Bros, Contra and Tetris. Mom gets annoyed because its the same three damn games every night, but anything else would require too much research and/or learning curve on his part. However, I'm getting a Wii this Christmas, which he thinks is a neat concept for a console. We're getting together for the holidays, so maybe when he sees Wii Sports, Mario Galaxy and a few Virtual Console games, maybe he'll break and buy one for himself? One can only hope...
Would it help if the iPhone had a Dvorak layout option?
Lately, ATI has been pushing non-graphical processing on the GPU (AKA GPGPU), and AMD is looking for ways to grow without imitating or directly competing against Intel. If GPGPU software design becomes mainstream, then much of the CPU may become redundant, such as SIMD and multiple cores. Maybe ATI and AMD will coordinate which functions go onto which chip. Intel has always disdained other companies' co-processors (and sells integrated graphics to reduce demand for them), so they're not likely to do this.
Coca-cola is named after a drug, and look how that did.
...much weakened by recommendation engines. With a recommendation engine in place, pricing really only fits a supply-demand curve, not some false psychology. If the record labels really wanted to promote something, iTunes could charge the labels big money for engine distortions, per title, per user, per week. Apple could raise the cost of advertizing enormously and earn a huge profit from it by using a recommendation engine as leverage against it.
"The entertainment industry has to maintain a straight face and tell you that Gigli or Battlefield Earth are every bit as valuable as Wedding Crashers or Star Wars or nobody will go see them."
Neither studios nor theaters actually like this situation; they simply can't do anything else. Theaters have no way to enforce variable pricing. Patrons can buy a ticket to one show then walk to another. It's too expensive to hire a guard for each room. But in retail, even bricks and mortar, it's easy to charge a different price for each item. This is part of why movie studios are putting more emphasis on DVDs and less on theatrical runs. They can charge whatever the market will bear.
It's possible there's a lot more music that might get made and sold online if it could be priced how the publisher wants. I personally don't have an iPod or buy from iTunes because they don't have nearly enough anime or video game music. Despite this, I respect Apple for being able to pressure the record labels this much. If Apple is smart and powerful enough to bend the entire RIAA cartel to its will, then the record labels doesn't deserve the benefits of variable pricing. It hurts consumers in the short run, but Apple deserves its lunch for as long as they can get it.
Hence why I posted this question in a forum available to everyone. I may not have worded the question diplomatically, but I knew I'd get responses from people around the world. If I didn't want to hear from people like you, I'd have tried to get this question posted on a one-way medium, like television or a magazine.
There's a lot of indications that governments want to split the internet into sections. China and the EU are balking at ICANN, and US politicians are getting more eager to control the flow of information at home. They can't get everything they want immediately, but they'll all keep chipping at it for as many years as it takes to get what they want. That's why we should now measure and appreciate the internet's ability to connect us with people beyond our borders, so we can know how much there is to lose, and how hard we should fight for it.
Metal Gear Solid series creator Hideo Kojima makes much use of iPods. In his blog, he mentioned that he uses an iPod to listen to music. And now he is making podcasts. He is supposed to be one of Sony's leading supporters, or at least one of PS3's leading supporters, but here is using Apple hardware and software whenever he likes.
There's a good reason why iTunes doesn't do rentals: Imagine downloading an 8 GB hi-def video file, or even a 700 MB file, over a 1 mbitps connection, only to have it vanish off your HD in a few days. You'd spend many times as long downloading as watching it. With bricks and mortar downloading, the transport-to-consumption time ratio would be more reasonable.
But I agree with another poster; this only requires a vending machine, not a whole store.
The GS (graphic synthesizer) got just 4mb of very fast ram.... That results in the PS2 having to spend a lot of time transfering textures between GS and regular RAM... you need to order your triangles in a way that minimizes the texture changes, which is a lot of trouble and hurts performance for sure.
Wouldn't this hurt Gamecube also? GC's graphics chip has only 3 MB of RAM. However, GC has other advantages, such as the fact that its GPU does texture decompression, that its CPU has 256K L2 cache and 64K L1 cache, that its main RAM has lower latency than PS2's main RAM...
Now that nVidia is selling Gelato, a GPU-accelerated renderer, shouldn't that reduce the need to outsource rendering? With Gelato, you could render maybe 3 or 4 times as much imagery with the same number of PCs in the same amount of time.
I read a claim that when it comes to navigation, men's minds are more spacially oriented while women's minds are more landmark oriented. Thus, maps work better for men than for women.
Women can make due with written directions, but what if there was a way to give directions by providing a photograph of every intersection from the 1st person, with the turns marked by arrows? Instead of memorizing street names or distances, you could just say "I'll turn when I see this, I'll turn when I see that..." You could be completely illiterate and still navigate. To make such a system possible, you'd have to photograph every intersection from every approach, at day and night, every season (which is frequent enough to account for new construction in most areas). It would be very labor intensive, but it would provide a very valuable service. Assuming illiterate, map-incompetent people have enough money to pay for it.
If you want to fight Bush by Boycotting Disney, that now means boycotting Miyazaki's movies, since Disney distributs his movies in North America. Is the Slashdot crowd up to the challenge? Can you endure anime withdrawl in order to save America from tyranny?
"Consider this: Older gamers have fond memories of games like "Tetris," "Space Invaders" and "Pong." But when Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine put them in the hands of a group of 10-13 year olds last year, the results weren't pretty. Rather than seeing the games' charms, the kids were bored - and mocked the titles mercilessly."
Kids naturally rejecting old things and lust after new things.
Back when the above-mentioned games were new, kids were probably bored by pinball, air hocked and board games. To get a kid interested in something, you have to provide a hell of a lot of context, or they need a hell of a lot of imagination.
My dad told me how in Pittsburgh in the 50s, the high school's chemistry class did real chemistry with real reagents. My high school in FL (half an hour south of Kennedey Space Center) in the late 90s had at least four science labs, but never used them because school couldn't get insurance for accidents. The public schools in Brevard County don't let the students actually use chemicals until community college.
"How soon before robotic limbs become so efficient that people are voluntarily amputating their legs for the better robotic counterparts?"
It won't become mainstream until they offer a sense of touch. But people who want to run and jump far would be the early adopters.
First, was the code on their hard drives destroyed, or merely copied? If it was destroyed, why can't they restore it from CD-R backups? They should've backed up all their code on CD-Rs weekly, if not daily. Why didn't they?
This could be reduced by making content-on-demand based on downloads rather than streaming, and artists can find creative ways of compressing their works more without reducing quality much. This assumes that the big media companies will embrace downloads over streaming.