How big is the market though, really? Macs hold about 13% of the market, total. And what, maybe 5-10% of those have high performance video cards that could handle a midrange VR game nicely? Remember, you need probably about 3-4x as much video card power for a good VR experience as for a comparable quality FPS gaming experience - you have to double both the frame rate and the number of geometry transforms - that's not cheap.
So, lets be generous and say good-VR-capable Macs are about 10% of the mac market - that makes them 1.3% of the total PC market. That's noise hardly worth considering. Especially when you consider that the overlap between Mac users and hard-core gamers is pretty small to begin with thanks to poor MAc gaming support. If you're a Mac user who's a hard-core gamer, then you're probably set up to dual-boot into Windows for gaming anyway - so a Windows-only VR headset is not a problem.
Not to mention - porting Windows games to Mac is far from trivial, and VR is already a challenging platform to develop for. Any porting is going to reduce the resources spent on the PC version, while the Mac version will still probably be decidedly sub-par in comparison, so everybody loses.
I would really like to know the reasoning behind that decision. It's not like a lens-adjustment mechanism is going to be break the bank, though I suppose it might cut into profits a bit to maintain that psychologically magical "less than $400" price tag.
I mean, you take a product that works perfectly for 90% of the population, and then make the next otherwise-upgraded version and make it only work properly for 1% of the population? While everybody else has to deal with degraded visual quality. That's pure stupidity, and Palmer speaking out would seem to suggest that it was a corporate decision that he strongly disagrees with as well.
Reminds me of ergonomic chairs on planes, buses, etc. Without the ability to adjust the settings you end up with a chair that's quite comfortable for the few percent of the population that happens to be almost average-sized, while being a torture device for anyone sized substantially differently. What was wrong with a boring, flat chair? It's not perfect for anybody, but it's a huge improvement over improperly-sized ergonomics for almost everyone.
>Do you think people achieve the full of their potential at any time in their lives? That they can achieve no more and have hit the limits of their brain's plasticity?
Not actually hit it - but it's not a limitless progression either. You converge on your maximum potential, so that further effort yields continuously diminishing returns. It perhaps takes as much effort to go from 80% to 85% of your maximum potential as it did to reach 80% in the first place. And of course you'e also fighting the natural degradation of skills with neglect - if you really strive to reach 100% of your potential, then eventually you'll reach the point where you have to strenuously practice and challenge yourself every waking moment just to maintain the skills you've already honed - at that point you've reached 100% of your potential. Of course nobody actually does that.
Also, deliberate practice is far older than Ericson, or even language. It's the way in which every predator learns to hunt for example. It's rote practice that's a modern anomaly, possibly a result of the modern education system having been originally invented for political indoctrination at least as as much as education.
If you're talking about "I'm no good at math" mental ability, then sure - you're no good at math because you haven't practiced enough. Some people are predisposed to thinking in the ways necessary, but it's something anyone do if they put their mind to it.
But if you're trying to scale that up to "anybody could be an Einstein" - I find that extremely unlikely. The further outside the normal range you get, the bigger the impact of genetic predisposition. The brain is not infinitely plastic - and like muscle, there's a limit to how far you can push it. If you come from a long line of scrawny weaklings, it's pretty much guaranteed that you'll never be able to become an Olympic-class weightlifter. You just don't have the hardware for it. Similarly, if you're born with an intelligence well below average (not damaged, just at the extreme low end of normal), no amount of practice is going to make you one of the most brilliant minds of the species.
>Look at poor rednecks: they're often genius automechanics, but we see them as stupid people. That's because stupid, as commonly used, has two different meanings - lacking in intelligence, and lacking in knowledge. Rednecks as a class fall into the second group. There's also the fact that, in your example, auto repair is an extremely limited problem domain, so most anyone who really dedicates themselves to it can master it and be a brilliant mechanic. Compare that to music, math, science, etc. where the scope is immense, and genius is only recognized in your ability to stand head-and-shoulders above the multitudes of experts. Had Einstein dedicated himself to auto repair instead of physics he would no doubt have been brilliant at it - but he wouldn't have been able to accomplish anything substantially more than any other run of the mill "genius" mechanic - the auto-repair domain is too small to allow for true brilliance to express itself.
>We don't think of politicians, bureaucrats, chefs, or performance artists as geniuses; Speak for yourself. I'll admit I can't think of any bureaucrats called geniuses - but I suspect that's because the domain is again too small, and the achievements of a brilliant bureaucrat mostly look just like the achievements of a larger number of mediocre ones. Genius is usually recognized in great achievements, not just numerous ones. The rest though - brilliance is celebrated in all of them.
It has often been considered, and will probably be attempted once we have the technology to effectively clone humans, assuming someone has a cache of intact DNA.
Only if you're especially incompetent. Or do you think in-vitro fertilization techniques for humans require killing the woman in order to harvest her eggs?
Typically you just administer a drug that causes rampant ovulation. Kill the donor and all you get are ovaries full of immature eggs, which will need special care to become viable (I don't know if we even have the technology to do that), since normally they mature during the days before ovulation.
Citation? Because all the research I've seen suggests that genetics do in fact have a powerful role to play - the tabla-rasa bullshit was put to bed decades ago.
What numb-nuts told you that? Decades of nature-versus-nurture studies have pretty firmly established that *both* aspects have very powerful influence on the individual.
Assuming you haven't been listening to baseless New-Age bullshit, what you probably heard was that there's no *racial* correlation of aptitudes (with a very few exceptions, like resisting skin cancer) - which is simply a reflection of the fact that racial classifications are based on obvious superficial phenotypes rather than genotypes,
That depends heavily on the cloning process used. It's also relatively straightforward to restore telomere length in an organism with the use of telomerase - a technique explored for rejuvenation therapies, before being dismissed as ineffective. Turns out that very few of the normal symptoms of aging are due to telomere shortening.
>The United States is not in control of Israel, or of those dictatorships, and should not act as the world's police, in order to project our values onto an unwilling audience.
That may be a good ideal - but the U.S. helped create the modern nation of Israel from the spoils of WWII, and we keep it afloat via ongoing funding and military support. That makes us personally responsible for their actions. If we don't like what they're doing, we should stop supporting them. But we like having a consistently loyal location for military bases in the middle of the Middle East, and indirect genocide and other dirty dealings of all kinds are our military's stock in trade, so nothing is likely to change so long as the oil deposits in the region remain valuable.
>This is effectively American foreign policy.
No, it really isn't. America's foreign policy has nothing to do with spreading our values, and everything to do with expanding our power and influence. We routinely aid in the overthrowing of uncooperative democracies in order to install totalitarian dictators that will further those goals, and look the other way as the governments we support engage in genocide and other atrocities (just look at what we allowed from Saddam Hussein after we installed him in power - it wasn't until he stopped cooperating that we finally replaced him.
>they are not ISPs. They are legacy providers of wireline telephony and wireline cable tv
Of course they are - they're the primary Providers of Internet Service in the U.S.
It's not their original business, and in the case of cable companies, perhaps still not their primary one. And their history gives them some substantial regulatory advantages over the competition, but to deny that they provide internet service is foolish.
Meanwhile, broad competition in physical infrastructure is a nightmare - both in terms of infrastructure complexity and financial cost.
Offhand, I only see one way that we could sustainably decouple the physical infrastructure from ISP services: Forbid the owners/maintainers of physical infrastructure from selling any services to the public. You have one or two physical infrastructure companies servicing a region, and the ISPs pay them reasonable and non-discriminatory rates for access to individual homes.
That at least ensures that the groups with a stranglehold on physical infrastructure are doing business with a number of large, competitive companies that are all trying to drive down the cost of access to attract customers, rather than basically powerless consumers. It's not perfect, but at least it consolidates consumer purchasing power enough to have negotiating clout. Comcast doesn't care much if you threaten to switch to the competition - maybe they'll offer you a fresh introductory-rate "discount" to stay on board, but either way it doesn't really effect their bottom line. But they would care immensely if SomeISP threatened to start moving their 100,000 customers to the competition.
Actually, I think the basic idea has a lot more potential than just ISPs - lets break up the power companies into grid and production - make sure the grid providers don't have a vested incentive in discouraging solar, etc. power, beyond the legitimate difficulties such sporadic power sources create.
>Why not change a bit and do things less shady things?
Because that would harm profit margins, while a name change only requires changing the stationary.
Besides, in this case it's a name very few people know - would you have recognized what NCTA was without the long name?
But spell it out? People hear about the latest action by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, they know right away they're getting screwed harder. The Internet & Television Association though? Now, that could be anybody, right?
Depends - are you optimizing the code, or are you optimizing the algorithm?
Code is usually small gains, and modern compilers can claim most of the low-hanging fruit themselves.
Data structures can be much bigger gains in some contexts, as using hardware cache inefficiently for frequent operations can cost you an order of magnitude of performance.
The algorithm though - that can easily often make several orders of magnitude difference. That's where optimization and elegance can often really come together. Sometimes simplicity has to be sacrificed - but if you start thinking that way it's usually a warning sign that you need to revisit your assumptions.
Same thing with architecture in many ways - though with a bad architecture it's the programmers' time you're wasting rather than CPU time. And that's generally even worse.
Truly? I suspect that varies a bit from person to person, but you say no problems?
That bore investigation, and you might be interested that one of the things I came across was a comment about high-capacity replacement batteries that extend the life to 4-5 hours
It really does demand two extra QC 3.0 batteries if you're going to use it for any extended period. It draws 18 watts (12v @ 1.5 amps), which means a 20k mAh / 72 kWh battery lasts about 4-5 hours. The included battery's life is too short to be usable
That's all the info they offered, but it sounds like it might be worth investigating.
The Odyssey is actually lower resolution than most MS MR headsets, with the same "2880x1600" OLED resolution as the Occulus Quest, so it will also have a lower quality than the Rift S. In order of decreasing number of subpixels: From what I can find:
MS MR Acer, LCD: 2880x1440x3 = 12.4 million Rift Quest LCD: 2,560 × 1,440 x 3 = 11.06 million Rift S, Vive PRO, Odyssey, OLED: 2x2880x1600 = 9.22 million Original Rift and VIVE, pentile OLED, so 2160x1200x2 = 5.2 million
And of course there's lots of variation in comfort and adjustability, "halo" versus straps, lens quality, and the fact that some of them lack a mechanical interpupillary distance adjustment, when means the optics will mis-aligned for virtually everyone, and there's only so much you can compensate for that with rendering tricks. And of course the LCD-vs-OLED comparison should also consider LCDs general inability to display anything close to true black.
As for why anybody is bothering with Occulus - I've only used the VIVE, but from most everything I've heard the rift is delivering the more polished and pleasant to use product. Not the most technically capable perhaps - but like a keyboard, the ergonomics and feel of anything you physically interact with are some of the most important aspects.
I think as soon as you throw compression into the mix you introduce huge latency issues.
The sad fact seems to be that we just don't yet have the wireless bandwidth to stream a premium VR experience.
Unless perhaps you can operate multiple WiGig channels simultaneously without interference - 4 channels delivering a combined 20+Gbps could do the job nicely.
Or, a personal favorite - what if you took something like the Quest, and wirelessly fed it pre-transformed and optimized geometry so that it only had to perform the final-stage pixel rendering?
640k *was* enough for anyone, at the time the arbitrary limit was created. The problem was that that it was a difficult-to-circumvent limitation in an an operating system that migrated across various platforms for almost two decades, and couldn't be removed without breaking backwards compatibility. And Moore's law had already been in full force for more than a decade when the first version of DOS was released, so there was little excuse for such an assumption. And while there's very little evidence that Gates ever made such a statement, the fact that Windows XP was similarly handicapped at the ~3.5GB boundary suggests a recurring theme of disregard for the rate of hardware advancement.
Meanwhile, 256GB in an iMac is just that. It's something you're paying for *today*, to what end? There are projects that need that sort of memory, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that very few (if any) such projects are going to be running on a grossly overpriced all-in-one iMac. Which leaves, what? Artists that want to be able to hold 10minutes of uncompressed 4k UHD content in RAM all at once?
I don't think that's a problem with access culture itself. Access culture can be implemented almost as robustly distributed as in ownership culture, and even more so in some respects (e.g. having your car break down is far less of a personal problem if you borrowed it from the neighborhood motorpool)
The real problem is monoculture - when one problem can cripple all access sources to an important resource, you have a much bigger problem. Far more so if the monoculture is centralized so that problems can propagate faster than you can hope to quarantine them.
And most of all when the access sources are online - because unlike physical infrastructure, online infrastructure is always exposed to attack from anyone, anywhere, at very little expense or risk of being caught. And there's just no realistic way to completely defend against that.
Firstly, if you're 2x more productive, and need to make 2.5x as much product, then you only need to work 25% more, not 50% (2.5/2 = 1.25)
Meanwhile, if you have 2.5x the population your production is providing, you should also have 2.5x as many people available to hire to produce it. Do so, and each person only has to work (1.25x the work / 2.5x the workers) = 50% as much, while producing the same amount of value per-capita.
>After going to the trouble to make tunnels, why not be smart and put a train in them, that's much more efficient than storing electric power in batteries for use later!
There's also another compelling alternative, if you want the responsiveness of pods/minibusses, without the cost of batteries to power them: streetcars. Run power lines along the ceiling to power the pods, and install (retractable) power brushes in the cars. Then you don't have to build infrastructure capable of handling the massive weight of a train, and don't need batteries in your cars, though small batteries to allow them to operate independently at the stations might be both safer and more cost effective.
One of the nice things about autonomous pods is that it's relatively trivial to assemble them into trains on the fly. Either via actual hitches, or just operating them bumper-to-bumper to maintain a continuous slipstream. Much of the "science fiction" promise of how autonomous vehicles will vastly improve traffic flow and efficiency can actually be delivered in a system where one operator gets to set the rules for all the cars.
We're talking about Loop, not Hyperloop. Too completely different projects (though no doubt the tunneling technology will overlap if Hyperloop ever becomes real.)
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How big is the market though, really? Macs hold about 13% of the market, total. And what, maybe 5-10% of those have high performance video cards that could handle a midrange VR game nicely? Remember, you need probably about 3-4x as much video card power for a good VR experience as for a comparable quality FPS gaming experience - you have to double both the frame rate and the number of geometry transforms - that's not cheap.
So, lets be generous and say good-VR-capable Macs are about 10% of the mac market - that makes them 1.3% of the total PC market. That's noise hardly worth considering. Especially when you consider that the overlap between Mac users and hard-core gamers is pretty small to begin with thanks to poor MAc gaming support. If you're a Mac user who's a hard-core gamer, then you're probably set up to dual-boot into Windows for gaming anyway - so a Windows-only VR headset is not a problem.
Not to mention - porting Windows games to Mac is far from trivial, and VR is already a challenging platform to develop for. Any porting is going to reduce the resources spent on the PC version, while the Mac version will still probably be decidedly sub-par in comparison, so everybody loses.
I would really like to know the reasoning behind that decision. It's not like a lens-adjustment mechanism is going to be break the bank, though I suppose it might cut into profits a bit to maintain that psychologically magical "less than $400" price tag.
I mean, you take a product that works perfectly for 90% of the population, and then make the next otherwise-upgraded version and make it only work properly for 1% of the population? While everybody else has to deal with degraded visual quality. That's pure stupidity, and Palmer speaking out would seem to suggest that it was a corporate decision that he strongly disagrees with as well.
Reminds me of ergonomic chairs on planes, buses, etc. Without the ability to adjust the settings you end up with a chair that's quite comfortable for the few percent of the population that happens to be almost average-sized, while being a torture device for anyone sized substantially differently. What was wrong with a boring, flat chair? It's not perfect for anybody, but it's a huge improvement over improperly-sized ergonomics for almost everyone.
>Do you think people achieve the full of their potential at any time in their lives? That they can achieve no more and have hit the limits of their brain's plasticity?
Not actually hit it - but it's not a limitless progression either. You converge on your maximum potential, so that further effort yields continuously diminishing returns. It perhaps takes as much effort to go from 80% to 85% of your maximum potential as it did to reach 80% in the first place. And of course you'e also fighting the natural degradation of skills with neglect - if you really strive to reach 100% of your potential, then eventually you'll reach the point where you have to strenuously practice and challenge yourself every waking moment just to maintain the skills you've already honed - at that point you've reached 100% of your potential. Of course nobody actually does that.
Also, deliberate practice is far older than Ericson, or even language. It's the way in which every predator learns to hunt for example. It's rote practice that's a modern anomaly, possibly a result of the modern education system having been originally invented for political indoctrination at least as as much as education.
If you're talking about "I'm no good at math" mental ability, then sure - you're no good at math because you haven't practiced enough. Some people are predisposed to thinking in the ways necessary, but it's something anyone do if they put their mind to it.
But if you're trying to scale that up to "anybody could be an Einstein" - I find that extremely unlikely. The further outside the normal range you get, the bigger the impact of genetic predisposition. The brain is not infinitely plastic - and like muscle, there's a limit to how far you can push it. If you come from a long line of scrawny weaklings, it's pretty much guaranteed that you'll never be able to become an Olympic-class weightlifter. You just don't have the hardware for it. Similarly, if you're born with an intelligence well below average (not damaged, just at the extreme low end of normal), no amount of practice is going to make you one of the most brilliant minds of the species.
>Look at poor rednecks: they're often genius automechanics, but we see them as stupid people.
That's because stupid, as commonly used, has two different meanings - lacking in intelligence, and lacking in knowledge. Rednecks as a class fall into the second group. There's also the fact that, in your example, auto repair is an extremely limited problem domain, so most anyone who really dedicates themselves to it can master it and be a brilliant mechanic. Compare that to music, math, science, etc. where the scope is immense, and genius is only recognized in your ability to stand head-and-shoulders above the multitudes of experts. Had Einstein dedicated himself to auto repair instead of physics he would no doubt have been brilliant at it - but he wouldn't have been able to accomplish anything substantially more than any other run of the mill "genius" mechanic - the auto-repair domain is too small to allow for true brilliance to express itself.
>We don't think of politicians, bureaucrats, chefs, or performance artists as geniuses;
Speak for yourself. I'll admit I can't think of any bureaucrats called geniuses - but I suspect that's because the domain is again too small, and the achievements of a brilliant bureaucrat mostly look just like the achievements of a larger number of mediocre ones. Genius is usually recognized in great achievements, not just numerous ones. The rest though - brilliance is celebrated in all of them.
Tell you what, let me know when we finally get around to doing the right thing - I haven't seen it yet.
It has often been considered, and will probably be attempted once we have the technology to effectively clone humans, assuming someone has a cache of intact DNA.
Only if you're especially incompetent. Or do you think in-vitro fertilization techniques for humans require killing the woman in order to harvest her eggs?
Typically you just administer a drug that causes rampant ovulation. Kill the donor and all you get are ovaries full of immature eggs, which will need special care to become viable (I don't know if we even have the technology to do that), since normally they mature during the days before ovulation.
Citation? Because all the research I've seen suggests that genetics do in fact have a powerful role to play - the tabla-rasa bullshit was put to bed decades ago.
What numb-nuts told you that? Decades of nature-versus-nurture studies have pretty firmly established that *both* aspects have very powerful influence on the individual.
Assuming you haven't been listening to baseless New-Age bullshit, what you probably heard was that there's no *racial* correlation of aptitudes (with a very few exceptions, like resisting skin cancer) - which is simply a reflection of the fact that racial classifications are based on obvious superficial phenotypes rather than genotypes,
That depends heavily on the cloning process used. It's also relatively straightforward to restore telomere length in an organism with the use of telomerase - a technique explored for rejuvenation therapies, before being dismissed as ineffective. Turns out that very few of the normal symptoms of aging are due to telomere shortening.
It'd still need to be a ghola rather than a simple clone.
>The United States is not in control of Israel, or of those dictatorships, and should not act as the world's police, in order to project our values onto an unwilling audience.
That may be a good ideal - but the U.S. helped create the modern nation of Israel from the spoils of WWII, and we keep it afloat via ongoing funding and military support. That makes us personally responsible for their actions. If we don't like what they're doing, we should stop supporting them. But we like having a consistently loyal location for military bases in the middle of the Middle East, and indirect genocide and other dirty dealings of all kinds are our military's stock in trade, so nothing is likely to change so long as the oil deposits in the region remain valuable.
>This is effectively American foreign policy.
No, it really isn't. America's foreign policy has nothing to do with spreading our values, and everything to do with expanding our power and influence. We routinely aid in the overthrowing of uncooperative democracies in order to install totalitarian dictators that will further those goals, and look the other way as the governments we support engage in genocide and other atrocities (just look at what we allowed from Saddam Hussein after we installed him in power - it wasn't until he stopped cooperating that we finally replaced him.
>they are not ISPs. They are legacy providers of wireline telephony and wireline cable tv
Of course they are - they're the primary Providers of Internet Service in the U.S.
It's not their original business, and in the case of cable companies, perhaps still not their primary one. And their history gives them some substantial regulatory advantages over the competition, but to deny that they provide internet service is foolish.
Meanwhile, broad competition in physical infrastructure is a nightmare - both in terms of infrastructure complexity and financial cost.
Offhand, I only see one way that we could sustainably decouple the physical infrastructure from ISP services: Forbid the owners/maintainers of physical infrastructure from selling any services to the public. You have one or two physical infrastructure companies servicing a region, and the ISPs pay them reasonable and non-discriminatory rates for access to individual homes.
That at least ensures that the groups with a stranglehold on physical infrastructure are doing business with a number of large, competitive companies that are all trying to drive down the cost of access to attract customers, rather than basically powerless consumers. It's not perfect, but at least it consolidates consumer purchasing power enough to have negotiating clout. Comcast doesn't care much if you threaten to switch to the competition - maybe they'll offer you a fresh introductory-rate "discount" to stay on board, but either way it doesn't really effect their bottom line. But they would care immensely if SomeISP threatened to start moving their 100,000 customers to the competition.
Actually, I think the basic idea has a lot more potential than just ISPs - lets break up the power companies into grid and production - make sure the grid providers don't have a vested incentive in discouraging solar, etc. power, beyond the legitimate difficulties such sporadic power sources create.
>Why not change a bit and do things less shady things?
Because that would harm profit margins, while a name change only requires changing the stationary.
Besides, in this case it's a name very few people know - would you have recognized what NCTA was without the long name?
But spell it out? People hear about the latest action by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, they know right away they're getting screwed harder. The Internet & Television Association though? Now, that could be anybody, right?
Depends - are you optimizing the code, or are you optimizing the algorithm?
Code is usually small gains, and modern compilers can claim most of the low-hanging fruit themselves.
Data structures can be much bigger gains in some contexts, as using hardware cache inefficiently for frequent operations can cost you an order of magnitude of performance.
The algorithm though - that can easily often make several orders of magnitude difference. That's where optimization and elegance can often really come together. Sometimes simplicity has to be sacrificed - but if you start thinking that way it's usually a warning sign that you need to revisit your assumptions.
Same thing with architecture in many ways - though with a bad architecture it's the programmers' time you're wasting rather than CPU time. And that's generally even worse.
Truly? I suspect that varies a bit from person to person, but you say no problems?
That bore investigation, and you might be interested that one of the things I came across was a comment about high-capacity replacement batteries that extend the life to 4-5 hours
It really does demand two extra QC 3.0 batteries if you're going to use it for any extended period. It draws 18 watts (12v @ 1.5 amps), which means a 20k mAh / 72 kWh battery lasts about 4-5 hours. The included battery's life is too short to be usable
That's all the info they offered, but it sounds like it might be worth investigating.
The Odyssey is actually lower resolution than most MS MR headsets, with the same "2880x1600" OLED resolution as the Occulus Quest, so it will also have a lower quality than the Rift S. In order of decreasing number of subpixels:
From what I can find:
MS MR Acer, LCD: 2880x1440x3 = 12.4 million
Rift Quest LCD: 2,560 × 1,440 x 3 = 11.06 million
Rift S, Vive PRO, Odyssey, OLED: 2x2880x1600 = 9.22 million
Original Rift and VIVE, pentile OLED, so 2160x1200x2 = 5.2 million
And of course there's lots of variation in comfort and adjustability, "halo" versus straps, lens quality, and the fact that some of them lack a mechanical interpupillary distance adjustment, when means the optics will mis-aligned for virtually everyone, and there's only so much you can compensate for that with rendering tricks. And of course the LCD-vs-OLED comparison should also consider LCDs general inability to display anything close to true black.
As for why anybody is bothering with Occulus - I've only used the VIVE, but from most everything I've heard the rift is delivering the more polished and pleasant to use product. Not the most technically capable perhaps - but like a keyboard, the ergonomics and feel of anything you physically interact with are some of the most important aspects.
Keep in mind that OLED usually has a pentile sub-pixel layout that only includes two "color dots" per pixel instead of LCDs 3.
The actual number of individually subpixel elements is then:
LCD: 2,560 × 1,440 x 3 = 11.06 million
OLED: 2,880 × 1,600 x 2 = 9.22 million
Despite the apparently lower resolution, the LCD actually has 20% more "color dot" subpixels, and will thus deliver an overall sharper image.
I think as soon as you throw compression into the mix you introduce huge latency issues.
The sad fact seems to be that we just don't yet have the wireless bandwidth to stream a premium VR experience.
Unless perhaps you can operate multiple WiGig channels simultaneously without interference - 4 channels delivering a combined 20+Gbps could do the job nicely.
Or, a personal favorite - what if you took something like the Quest, and wirelessly fed it pre-transformed and optimized geometry so that it only had to perform the final-stage pixel rendering?
640k *was* enough for anyone, at the time the arbitrary limit was created. The problem was that that it was a difficult-to-circumvent limitation in an an operating system that migrated across various platforms for almost two decades, and couldn't be removed without breaking backwards compatibility. And Moore's law had already been in full force for more than a decade when the first version of DOS was released, so there was little excuse for such an assumption. And while there's very little evidence that Gates ever made such a statement, the fact that Windows XP was similarly handicapped at the ~3.5GB boundary suggests a recurring theme of disregard for the rate of hardware advancement.
Meanwhile, 256GB in an iMac is just that. It's something you're paying for *today*, to what end? There are projects that need that sort of memory, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that very few (if any) such projects are going to be running on a grossly overpriced all-in-one iMac. Which leaves, what? Artists that want to be able to hold 10minutes of uncompressed 4k UHD content in RAM all at once?
I don't think that's a problem with access culture itself. Access culture can be implemented almost as robustly distributed as in ownership culture, and even more so in some respects (e.g. having your car break down is far less of a personal problem if you borrowed it from the neighborhood motorpool)
The real problem is monoculture - when one problem can cripple all access sources to an important resource, you have a much bigger problem. Far more so if the monoculture is centralized so that problems can propagate faster than you can hope to quarantine them.
And most of all when the access sources are online - because unlike physical infrastructure, online infrastructure is always exposed to attack from anyone, anywhere, at very little expense or risk of being caught. And there's just no realistic way to completely defend against that.
More like "I built my business on a castle of other people's code, and now somebody else is doing the same thing to me!"
Why?
Firstly, if you're 2x more productive, and need to make 2.5x as much product, then you only need to work 25% more, not 50% (2.5/2 = 1.25)
Meanwhile, if you have 2.5x the population your production is providing, you should also have 2.5x as many people available to hire to produce it. Do so, and each person only has to work (1.25x the work / 2.5x the workers) = 50% as much, while producing the same amount of value per-capita.
>After going to the trouble to make tunnels, why not be smart and put a train in them, that's much more efficient than storing electric power in batteries for use later!
There's also another compelling alternative, if you want the responsiveness of pods/minibusses, without the cost of batteries to power them: streetcars. Run power lines along the ceiling to power the pods, and install (retractable) power brushes in the cars. Then you don't have to build infrastructure capable of handling the massive weight of a train, and don't need batteries in your cars, though small batteries to allow them to operate independently at the stations might be both safer and more cost effective.
One of the nice things about autonomous pods is that it's relatively trivial to assemble them into trains on the fly. Either via actual hitches, or just operating them bumper-to-bumper to maintain a continuous slipstream. Much of the "science fiction" promise of how autonomous vehicles will vastly improve traffic flow and efficiency can actually be delivered in a system where one operator gets to set the rules for all the cars.
We're talking about Loop, not Hyperloop. Too completely different projects (though no doubt the tunneling technology will overlap if Hyperloop ever becomes real.)