"Why not use real numbers? Another post pointed to the a Wikipedia article on the economics for new nuclear power plants. [wikipedia.org]. " Well maybe because I didn't use any number for the cost of a nuclear plant. I just used my local power plant which happens to be nuclear for size. The question I was answering was how can wind cost more than natural gas. I just used a nuclear plant for the size because I have on in my town and it is a lot easier to find the power output of a plant when you know it's name. It was probably a mistake to say that it was a nuclear power plant since everyone is latching onto the N word. The point was wind may be free but wind power is still expensive.
And everything you are talking about is right from the pages of Popular Science. So me a full scale kit prototype? I can show you pictures from the 1970 of giant turbines that use the gulf stream and floating island OTECs. Until they are built they are just fantasy. We are talking what is available today.
It is funny because I was just trying to answer the augment as to how could wind cost more than natural gas since wind was free. I used a nuclear power plant for the simple reason that my local power plant is nuclear and I know it's name. It is a lot easer to find the power output of a power plant when you know it's name. The entire point that I was making was I have a friend in the wind industry. He works for a major power company and they are having a hard time with their wind program because Natural gas is cheaper and no one wants to pay for "carbon offsets" to use wind power right now. So they are loosing money on their wind program. There are just too many conspiracy nuts that are blaming the power companies when the problem is simple economics.
1. I was just using a nuclear plant for the size of a an average power plant. 2. Yes I was using the cost of one and multiplying but I was also using an average wind speed of 24 MPH. As one post said the average at most wind farms is closer to 12 MPH which will give you 1/4 the power. "If you double the wind speed the power is four times greater." I also left out the cost of towers, land, maintenance which for wind turbines is pretty high. Oh and the inverters to sync the power to line. As well as the backup power plants you need for when the wind isn't blowing. You must have enough standby generating capability to make up for when the wind isn't blowing. For every watt of wind right now you must have a watt of gas fired peak plant standing by. Those must also be maintained and waiting to make up for a calm day or a stormy day. Yes I said a stormy day. You see when the wind blows too hard they wind turbines must feather or stall the blades and make NO power because if they don't they will shred. But I was not comparing the cost of wind to nuclear but to natural gas. And natural gas doesn't have the problems you like to state about nuclear. I do feel as do many educated people including one of the founder of Greenpeace that you are over stating the risks of nuclear power. But the point was to answer the dumb question that "wind is free so how can it cost more than natural gas".
Okay then stop buying clothes and tools not made in the US as well as cars. It is easy to say that you will but it will take a HUGE amount of the US to go along with you to make a difference. Even then Wind isn't as good of a solution as Nuclear. It is just has better PR. PS I have already stopped buying tools made in China. Real Craftsman tools from Sears are made in the US and last a lot long than the Chinese tools I have bought other places. Well worth the money IMHO.
I would say if you spend $2000 on a gaming rig you are an enthusiast. Over that and your nuts. But then I am cheap.
Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni
on
Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
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· Score: 2, Informative
Wind is free but wind turbines cost money. http://www.northerntool.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_6970_200334247_200334247 In this case 9500 for 3 KW. But that 3 KW is in a 24 MPH wind. How often does the wind blow that fast? Your average nuclear power plant produces 2200 megawatts. So in theory using these off the shelf wind turbines it would take $6,966,666,666 to replace one nuclear power plant. Yes $7 billion dollars. Oh and if you only get half the rated power because the wind doesn't blow then the cost is almost 14 billion dollars. And that doesn't include the cost of the towers,,construction, running power lines or the land required. Of course power plants use bigger turbines but they are also custom made so the price for watt may not be much better. In this case I just found a well known off the shelf wind turbine and scaled. Then add in the requirement for a back up power system to make up for when the wind isn't blowing! Oh and wind turbines are big moving machines. They wear out and must be replaced over time or at least fixed. So as you can see wind power is far from free. It sounds like hokey if you are dealing with it at the fourth grade level. Once you get past that level you will see that it is not cheap or easy. Hey if a power company could get cheaper power and sell it at the same price as gas or coal produced power don't you think they would? More profit and more good PR for being green. It would be a no brainier. As I said this utility has spent A LOT of money on wind and solar and are now facing the fact that they will probably have to eat a lot of it. They have every reason to want wind to competitive with GAS since all they really care about is selling power for a profit.
But that is the point. The 747 is a great plane for the price but it is very expensive as a way to fly 100 people $500 miles. Yes if you want a machine that fits in the segments that apple offers then they are priced about right. But they leave huge segments unaddressed. My desktop doesn't need wifi. I don't need a Xeon. So lets take a look at some configurations and see what Apple can offer. Here is a dell I built. Not perfect but an machine that will play a lot of games. Cost $816 http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=bv2hv9c2&c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&kc=desktop-vostro-220mt Yes a Mac Pro is much more powerful. An iMac is an all in one and takes up less room. A MacMini is smaller and cheaper. But this machine is a better game machine than the iMac or the MacMini and cheaper than the MacPro. Apple just doesn't offer anything in the middle of the road meat and potatoes desktop. They also fail to offer anything in the $600 range of notebooks. In many ways they remind me of Roll Royce or Ferrari. If you are going to buy a car in the class they make they are world beaters. But they don't make minivans for taking your kids to school or compact cars for commuters. There products are not over priced they just don't offer products in certain segments. If you are interested in that segment then you are out of luck.
Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni
on
Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Actually I know someone that works in the Wind Power part of a major utility company. He spelled out the problem with wind for me very clearly. "Companies don't care about carbon offsets because they don't believe that there will be a carbon tax". "Followed by "Natural gas is dirt cheap right now." Natural Gas is cheaper and more reliable than wind right now. Trust me this utility has spent a bundle on wind and my friend is on the road many days a month trying to set up wind power and make deals for people to buy the power. In this case I wouldn't blame the utilities. What it comes down to is dollars and cents. Gas is cheaper and works better than wind. Of course I love this comment. " Among the valid points raised by the carbon-based generators are concerns about how the cost of electricity transmission are allocated and how power quality can be improved (wind generation — from individual sites — is hopelessly variable). But there are fixes for all of the concerns raised by the carbon-based entities and in almost all cases they have been on the other side of the question in the past."" Notice how in the summary the poster says that they have some valid concerns and then says that there are fixes for them. Yea sure... But at what price? Read some of the "fixes" and then ask who is going to pay for them? Should the government keep subsidizing wind and the infrastructure. Don't bother saying that they can just take the money from the Military since we know that will not happen. Are you willing to pay more in taxes and pay more for goods produced in the US by US companies? China and India will not pass a dime of the costs on manufacturing so if you increase the cost to make goods in the US you will be pushing more manufacturing to China and India so in effect you will be shifting the carbon production from US plants burning natural gas to Chinese power plants burning Coal. Oh and Window power in China? Unless forced to that is just for export. They will produce a few token sites and then sell Windmills to western countries until it becomes economical to replace coal with wind. So the west will subsidize even more manufacturing jobs going overseas. I fear this isn't as simple as the summary or what most people on slashdot think it is.
What it all comes down to is that Natural gas is cheap, efficient, and thankfully pretty clean. While not carbon free it has the lowest carbon foot print of all the fossil fuels. It is MUCH lower in carbon output than coal so it isn't terrible that it is displacing wind. It could be worse, they could be building coal plants instead of wind.
"The cost issue has become pretty meaningless to anyone who is willing to compare oranges to oranges: the cost of a Mac laptop or desktop with X features is pretty comparable to a Windows laptop or desktop with the same feature set, " Only sort of. There are fewer options for the Mac so there are configurations available for PC that just don't exists in the Mac worlds. For instance a Core2Duo with a high end graphics card and no monitor. If you already have a perfectly good monitor why get an all in one or a new monitor. Yes if try and match the Apple configurations with a PC the price will be about the same. But you can not get the equivalent to a an Mac Mini with a high end video card and a 3 1/2" Hard drive and no wifi or Bluetooth.
Probably not a lot. Which Distro? What sound system? Lack of easy to install 3d drivers for nVidia and ATI. Actually the drivers for nVidia and ATI are pretty easy to install but probably beyond what some people will want to do. I would love to see it but Linux and OSX are not that alike. on OSX you just target quicktime for audio and video playback. No need to worry what "legal" codecs are available. Is Valve going to start targeting OpenGL? if so that part should be portable at least. But the real issue is lack of customers. I just don't see that many Linux users that don't dual boot into Windows for gaming. If you don't get new customers it doesn't pay off. OSX offers a bigger pay off and fewer development issues.
Opera is the #1 mobile browser because the standard browser on WinMo and Blackberry suck. Firefox holds almost none of the mobile market right now. Opera will buy a license to H.264 and Firefox will get a plug in that uses what ever codecs that are installed. That will put the barrier of entry at zero for Firefox and low enough for Opera to deal with unless they just start using the included frameworks. It is still just convenience and not wanting to reinvest in a solution that they already have working. Totally self serving but not intentionally evil. I doubt that Apple cares a whole lot about Firefox or Opera except that they don't want Opera or Firefox on the iPhone.
After seeing the list of patent holders I have to ask if each line of code is covered by a different patent? Good grief we need to stop software patents.
I don't know if Apple wants it to raise the barrier of entry to the market as much as they want their cost to be low.
Honestly they already have hardware H.264 support in their devices. For them I would say it all about not having to spend money to support a format the doesn't perform as well as the format they are already using. Google already has H.264 support in Android and Microsoft already has H.264 support in Windows and WinMo7. Apple doesn't care about FOSS video players or browsers. I wouldn't attribute this to malice as much as supporting what they already have invested in. I would love to see a fully free video solution for HTML 5 but I don't expect to see it since it will not benefit Apple, Google, or Microsoft and in fact hurts them so it is illogical for them put any support into Theora as the only supported format. To expect any company to act any other way is just silly.
Does Apple hold any patents on H.264? So many people seem to hold patent on parts of H.264 that I am not sure who does and does not. There are a lot of other good reasons for Apple to support H.264 over Theora. 1. H.264 does produce better video. The best that you can say about Theora is that it is close to H.264 when dealing with YouTube quality video. 2. Huge amount of hardware support. A large number of mobile devices support H.264 decoding in hardware. That isn't the case with Theora. 3. Material is already available in that format. YouTube...
So H.264 is probably free for Apple to support, already has wide spread hardware support, offers better quality, and already has a good amount of support on the web. For apple to support H.264 really is a no brainer. The only benfit is that Theora is "free" but H.264 is probably free to Apple.
"GPGPU is useless except in scientific computing: we already have more x86 cores than the devs know how to use, let alone use a different computing paradigm" Well maybe for games but GPGPU will mean a lot for transcoding. Home HD video is going to be big soon and it takes forever to transcode. However you can do that with an ARM. The TegaII and the OMAP line have enough GPU power to use it for transcoding.
Well I think it has less to do with Apple standing up than it does with the fact that Flash didn't scale to mobile devices well. Before the iPhone mobile friendly sites where few and far between. Once the iPhone started selling great guns more and more people moved to have their sites be mobile friendly.
Of course Apple isn't going to support Thedora so with that desision they are pushing HTML5 to be more proprietary than it could have been. Of course Apple's choice is probably motivated by the fact that they already have hardware support for h.264 in their devices.
Except the same app works great on OSX, Linux, and Windows. And is used on all of them regularly. Cross platform at least for some apps does work today.
This could be done with just software right now and with some added features. 1. The car needs a module that has GPS, BT, maybe wifi and 3G as an option. 2. When after the cars stops the mobile device and the car us differential GPS to detect when the mobile device leaves the area. 2a. if no GPS signal the mobile device and car use the signal strength of the BT to determine range. 3. When approaching the car reverse the process. 4, Wifi and or 3g can be uses for longer range communication to allow the option of remote start and or car location.
No new hardware needed since a lot of cars already have GPS and BT and almost all smart phones have BT. You may want to create a new BT profile just for this function but again that should be software. You could just use a BT serial port to pass commands.
Of course you should also allow the car to use the the Mobile device for tethering to allow a connected GPS and streaming audio. This is now prior art and in the public domain.
You are right that people tend to cheap out on cases and power supplies. For a serious NAS I would like hot swapable redundant power supplies and to have a spare always on hand. Often we tend to go with a good big single PS for our servers. We are lucky that we have a Compusa that is only about an hour round trip. Being down for just an hour isn't a nightmare for us and if you buy good parts they don't fail very often. In this case it is risk management for us. I keep hoping we will see an OMAP 4 or Tegra 2 board aimed at the general purpose market. On of those with say six or eight sata 2 ports and DIMM slots for memory would make an ideal NAS IMHO. But thanks to you I think I will need to take a look at dropbox. Seems like a useful tool.
Of course Drop box will work for some solutions. But this one is a graphics design house so I would say your looking at a lot of really big files. But the thing is that both think we agree that just using a spare box as a server in this case probably well short of the best solution. Of course my view is a little slanted. I work at a small developer where we have 3 programmers, a sysadmin, Webmaster, 20 software support techs, and an administrative staff of only 8. I have to admit those new AMD boards are really interesting. If I could get 10k RPM Sata drives that support 6Gb Sata I could make a really cheap really fast database server with that.
But macs are expensive. Too expensive to waste as a NAS I feel. If they already have an Airport then all they need to make a Mac friendly NAS is plug in a USB drive. It will probably save power and be simpler administer as well.
But everybody can afford a NAS today. http://www.amazon.com/D-Link-Network-Attached-Enclosure-DNS-323/dp/B000GK8LVE Here is one for only $175 from Amazon just add drives. If you are Mac shop just pick up an Airport and add a USB drive and you have a NAS. And if you do have a spare machine that can load up with drives you have the option of running say. FreeNAS or OpenFiler. Now that FreeNAS has ZFS support I have to say that I find it a very interesting option. If you need a Heavy duty NAS with LOTS of drive space this one could be very interesting. Combine this one of AMDs new 890GX based motherboards and then pick the CPU that has the power you need. For example this Motherboard http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128435 Has 6 6Gb Sata ports 2 3Gb sata ports and one ATA connector for you Optical drive if you need it. It also has two USB 3.0 port for external drives. A total of 3 firewire ports and 12 USB 2 ports as well. The mother board and CPU will run you less than $300. The most expensive part would be the power supply, case, and filling it with drives.
At this point in time I would say that everybody can afford a NAS of some kind. And frankly if you are willing to roll your own you can build some monsters for pretty cheap.
But the free version is limited to 2 GB and even the pro is only 50GB. But sure if they will go for it. The other problem I see is the slow speed of pushing big graphics files to and from DropBox over the internet vs having it on your Lan. But yea whatever will work.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why not use real numbers? Another post pointed to the a Wikipedia article on the economics for new nuclear power plants. [wikipedia.org]. "
Well maybe because I didn't use any number for the cost of a nuclear plant. I just used my local power plant which happens to be nuclear for size.
The question I was answering was how can wind cost more than natural gas. I just used a nuclear plant for the size because I have on in my town and it is a lot easier to find the power output of a plant when you know it's name.
It was probably a mistake to say that it was a nuclear power plant since everyone is latching onto the N word.
The point was wind may be free but wind power is still expensive.
And everything you are talking about is right from the pages of Popular Science. So me a full scale kit prototype?
I can show you pictures from the 1970 of giant turbines that use the gulf stream and floating island OTECs. Until they are built they are just fantasy. We are talking what is available today.
It is funny because I was just trying to answer the augment as to how could wind cost more than natural gas since wind was free.
I used a nuclear power plant for the simple reason that my local power plant is nuclear and I know it's name. It is a lot easer to find the power output of a power plant when you know it's name.
The entire point that I was making was I have a friend in the wind industry. He works for a major power company and they are having a hard time with their wind program because Natural gas is cheaper and no one wants to pay for "carbon offsets" to use wind power right now. So they are loosing money on their wind program.
There are just too many conspiracy nuts that are blaming the power companies when the problem is simple economics.
1. I was just using a nuclear plant for the size of a an average power plant.
2. Yes I was using the cost of one and multiplying but I was also using an average wind speed of 24 MPH. As one post said the average at most wind farms is closer to 12 MPH which will give you 1/4 the power. "If you double the wind speed the power is four times greater." I also left out the cost of towers, land, maintenance which for wind turbines is pretty high. Oh and the inverters to sync the power to line.
As well as the backup power plants you need for when the wind isn't blowing. You must have enough standby generating capability to make up for when the wind isn't blowing. For every watt of wind right now you must have a watt of gas fired peak plant standing by. Those must also be maintained and waiting to make up for a calm day or a stormy day.
Yes I said a stormy day. You see when the wind blows too hard they wind turbines must feather or stall the blades and make NO power because if they don't they will shred. But I was not comparing the cost of wind to nuclear but to natural gas. And natural gas doesn't have the problems you like to state about nuclear. I do feel as do many educated people including one of the founder of Greenpeace that you are over stating the risks of nuclear power.
But the point was to answer the dumb question that "wind is free so how can it cost more than natural gas".
Okay then stop buying clothes and tools not made in the US as well as cars. It is easy to say that you will but it will take a HUGE amount of the US to go along with you to make a difference.
Even then Wind isn't as good of a solution as Nuclear. It is just has better PR.
PS I have already stopped buying tools made in China.
Real Craftsman tools from Sears are made in the US and last a lot long than the Chinese tools I have bought other places.
Well worth the money IMHO.
I would say if you spend $2000 on a gaming rig you are an enthusiast.
Over that and your nuts.
But then I am cheap.
Wind is free but wind turbines cost money. ,construction, running power lines or the land required.
http://www.northerntool.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_6970_200334247_200334247
In this case 9500 for 3 KW.
But that 3 KW is in a 24 MPH wind. How often does the wind blow that fast?
Your average nuclear power plant produces 2200 megawatts.
So in theory using these off the shelf wind turbines it would take $6,966,666,666 to replace one nuclear power plant.
Yes $7 billion dollars. Oh and if you only get half the rated power because the wind doesn't blow then the cost is almost 14 billion dollars.
And that doesn't include the cost of the towers,
Of course power plants use bigger turbines but they are also custom made so the price for watt may not be much better. In this case I just found a well known off the shelf wind turbine and scaled.
Then add in the requirement for a back up power system to make up for when the wind isn't blowing!
Oh and wind turbines are big moving machines. They wear out and must be replaced over time or at least fixed.
So as you can see wind power is far from free.
It sounds like hokey if you are dealing with it at the fourth grade level. Once you get past that level you will see that it is not cheap or easy.
Hey if a power company could get cheaper power and sell it at the same price as gas or coal produced power don't you think they would?
More profit and more good PR for being green.
It would be a no brainier.
As I said this utility has spent A LOT of money on wind and solar and are now facing the fact that they will probably have to eat a lot of it.
They have every reason to want wind to competitive with GAS since all they really care about is selling power for a profit.
But that is the point.
The 747 is a great plane for the price but it is very expensive as a way to fly 100 people $500 miles.
Yes if you want a machine that fits in the segments that apple offers then they are priced about right.
But they leave huge segments unaddressed.
My desktop doesn't need wifi.
I don't need a Xeon.
So lets take a look at some configurations and see what Apple can offer.
Here is a dell I built. Not perfect but an machine that will play a lot of games.
Cost $816 http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=bv2hv9c2&c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&kc=desktop-vostro-220mt
Yes a Mac Pro is much more powerful.
An iMac is an all in one and takes up less room.
A MacMini is smaller and cheaper.
But this machine is a better game machine than the iMac or the MacMini and cheaper than the MacPro.
Apple just doesn't offer anything in the middle of the road meat and potatoes desktop.
They also fail to offer anything in the $600 range of notebooks.
In many ways they remind me of Roll Royce or Ferrari. If you are going to buy a car in the class they make they are world beaters.
But they don't make minivans for taking your kids to school or compact cars for commuters.
There products are not over priced they just don't offer products in certain segments. If you are interested in that segment then you are out of luck.
Actually I know someone that works in the Wind Power part of a major utility company.
He spelled out the problem with wind for me very clearly.
"Companies don't care about carbon offsets because they don't believe that there will be a carbon tax".
"Followed by "Natural gas is dirt cheap right now."
Natural Gas is cheaper and more reliable than wind right now.
Trust me this utility has spent a bundle on wind and my friend is on the road many days a month trying to set up wind power and make deals for people to buy the power. In this case I wouldn't blame the utilities.
What it comes down to is dollars and cents. Gas is cheaper and works better than wind.
Of course I love this comment.
" Among the valid points raised by the carbon-based generators are concerns about how the cost of electricity transmission are allocated and how power quality can be improved (wind generation — from individual sites — is hopelessly variable). But there are fixes for all of the concerns raised by the carbon-based entities and in almost all cases they have been on the other side of the question in the past.""
Notice how in the summary the poster says that they have some valid concerns and then says that there are fixes for them.
Yea sure... But at what price? Read some of the "fixes" and then ask who is going to pay for them? Should the government keep subsidizing wind and the infrastructure.
Don't bother saying that they can just take the money from the Military since we know that will not happen. Are you willing to pay more in taxes and pay more for goods produced in the US by US companies? China and India will not pass a dime of the costs on manufacturing so if you increase the cost to make goods in the US you will be pushing more manufacturing to China and India so in effect you will be shifting the carbon production from US plants burning natural gas to Chinese power plants burning Coal.
Oh and Window power in China? Unless forced to that is just for export. They will produce a few token sites and then sell Windmills to western countries until it becomes economical to replace coal with wind.
So the west will subsidize even more manufacturing jobs going overseas.
I fear this isn't as simple as the summary or what most people on slashdot think it is.
What it all comes down to is that Natural gas is cheap, efficient, and thankfully pretty clean.
While not carbon free it has the lowest carbon foot print of all the fossil fuels. It is MUCH lower in carbon output than coal so it isn't terrible that it is displacing wind. It could be worse, they could be building coal plants instead of wind.
"The cost issue has become pretty meaningless to anyone who is willing to compare oranges to oranges: the cost of a Mac laptop or desktop with X features is pretty comparable to a Windows laptop or desktop with the same feature set, "
Only sort of.
There are fewer options for the Mac so there are configurations available for PC that just don't exists in the Mac worlds.
For instance a Core2Duo with a high end graphics card and no monitor.
If you already have a perfectly good monitor why get an all in one or a new monitor.
Yes if try and match the Apple configurations with a PC the price will be about the same.
But you can not get the equivalent to a an Mac Mini with a high end video card and a 3 1/2" Hard drive and no wifi or Bluetooth.
Probably not a lot.
Which Distro? What sound system? Lack of easy to install 3d drivers for nVidia and ATI. Actually the drivers for nVidia and ATI are pretty easy to install but probably beyond what some people will want to do.
I would love to see it but Linux and OSX are not that alike. on OSX you just target quicktime for audio and video playback. No need to worry what "legal" codecs are available.
Is Valve going to start targeting OpenGL? if so that part should be portable at least.
But the real issue is lack of customers. I just don't see that many Linux users that don't dual boot into Windows for gaming.
If you don't get new customers it doesn't pay off.
OSX offers a bigger pay off and fewer development issues.
Opera is the #1 mobile browser because the standard browser on WinMo and Blackberry suck.
Firefox holds almost none of the mobile market right now.
Opera will buy a license to H.264 and Firefox will get a plug in that uses what ever codecs that are installed.
That will put the barrier of entry at zero for Firefox and low enough for Opera to deal with unless they just start using the included frameworks.
It is still just convenience and not wanting to reinvest in a solution that they already have working.
Totally self serving but not intentionally evil. I doubt that Apple cares a whole lot about Firefox or Opera except that they don't want Opera or Firefox on the iPhone.
After seeing the list of patent holders I have to ask if each line of code is covered by a different patent?
Good grief we need to stop software patents.
I don't know if Apple wants it to raise the barrier of entry to the market as much as they want their cost to be low.
Honestly they already have hardware H.264 support in their devices. For them I would say it all about not having to spend money to support a format the doesn't perform as well as the format they are already using.
Google already has H.264 support in Android and Microsoft already has H.264 support in Windows and WinMo7. Apple doesn't care about FOSS video players or browsers.
I wouldn't attribute this to malice as much as supporting what they already have invested in.
I would love to see a fully free video solution for HTML 5 but I don't expect to see it since it will not benefit Apple, Google, or Microsoft and in fact hurts them so it is illogical for them put any support into Theora as the only supported format.
To expect any company to act any other way is just silly.
Does Apple hold any patents on H.264? So many people seem to hold patent on parts of H.264 that I am not sure who does and does not.
There are a lot of other good reasons for Apple to support H.264 over Theora.
1. H.264 does produce better video. The best that you can say about Theora is that it is close to H.264 when dealing with YouTube quality video.
2. Huge amount of hardware support. A large number of mobile devices support H.264 decoding in hardware. That isn't the case with Theora.
3. Material is already available in that format. YouTube...
So H.264 is probably free for Apple to support, already has wide spread hardware support, offers better quality, and already has a good amount of support on the web.
For apple to support H.264 really is a no brainer. The only benfit is that Theora is "free" but H.264 is probably free to Apple.
"GPGPU is useless except in scientific computing: we already have more x86 cores than the devs know how to use, let alone use a different computing paradigm"
Well maybe for games but GPGPU will mean a lot for transcoding.
Home HD video is going to be big soon and it takes forever to transcode. However you can do that with an ARM. The TegaII and the OMAP line have enough GPU power to use it for transcoding.
Well I think it has less to do with Apple standing up than it does with the fact that Flash didn't scale to mobile devices well.
Before the iPhone mobile friendly sites where few and far between. Once the iPhone started selling great guns more and more people moved to have their sites be mobile friendly.
Of course Apple isn't going to support Thedora so with that desision they are pushing HTML5 to be more proprietary than it could have been.
Of course Apple's choice is probably motivated by the fact that they already have hardware support for h.264 in their devices.
Except the same app works great on OSX, Linux, and Windows.
And is used on all of them regularly.
Cross platform at least for some apps does work today.
This could be done with just software right now and with some added features.
1. The car needs a module that has GPS, BT, maybe wifi and 3G as an option.
2. When after the cars stops the mobile device and the car us differential GPS to detect when the mobile device leaves the area.
2a. if no GPS signal the mobile device and car use the signal strength of the BT to determine range.
3. When approaching the car reverse the process.
4, Wifi and or 3g can be uses for longer range communication to allow the option of remote start and or car location.
No new hardware needed since a lot of cars already have GPS and BT and almost all smart phones have BT. You may want to create a new BT profile just for this function but again that should be software. You could just use a BT serial port to pass commands.
Of course you should also allow the car to use the the Mobile device for tethering to allow a connected GPS and streaming audio.
This is now prior art and in the public domain.
You are right that people tend to cheap out on cases and power supplies. For a serious NAS I would like hot swapable redundant power supplies and to have a spare always on hand.
Often we tend to go with a good big single PS for our servers. We are lucky that we have a Compusa that is only about an hour round trip. Being down for just an hour isn't a nightmare for us and if you buy good parts they don't fail very often. In this case it is risk management for us.
I keep hoping we will see an OMAP 4 or Tegra 2 board aimed at the general purpose market.
On of those with say six or eight sata 2 ports and DIMM slots for memory would make an ideal NAS IMHO.
But thanks to you I think I will need to take a look at dropbox.
Seems like a useful tool.
Of course Drop box will work for some solutions. But this one is a graphics design house so I would say your looking at a lot of really big files.
But the thing is that both think we agree that just using a spare box as a server in this case probably well short of the best solution.
Of course my view is a little slanted. I work at a small developer where we have 3 programmers, a sysadmin, Webmaster, 20 software support techs, and an administrative staff of only 8.
I have to admit those new AMD boards are really interesting. If I could get 10k RPM Sata drives that support 6Gb Sata I could make a really cheap really fast database server with that.
But macs are expensive. Too expensive to waste as a NAS I feel.
If they already have an Airport then all they need to make a Mac friendly NAS is plug in a USB drive.
It will probably save power and be simpler administer as well.
But everybody can afford a NAS today.
http://www.amazon.com/D-Link-Network-Attached-Enclosure-DNS-323/dp/B000GK8LVE
Here is one for only $175 from Amazon just add drives.
If you are Mac shop just pick up an Airport and add a USB drive and you have a NAS.
And if you do have a spare machine that can load up with drives you have the option of running say.
FreeNAS or OpenFiler. Now that FreeNAS has ZFS support I have to say that I find it a very interesting option. If you need a Heavy duty NAS with LOTS of drive space this one could be very interesting.
Combine this one of AMDs new 890GX based motherboards and then pick the CPU that has the power you need.
For example this Motherboard http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128435
Has 6 6Gb Sata ports 2 3Gb sata ports and one ATA connector for you Optical drive if you need it.
It also has two USB 3.0 port for external drives.
A total of 3 firewire ports and 12 USB 2 ports as well.
The mother board and CPU will run you less than $300. The most expensive part would be the power supply, case, and filling it with drives.
At this point in time I would say that everybody can afford a NAS of some kind. And frankly if you are willing to roll your own you can build some monsters for pretty cheap.
most but not all. Still the very idea that you can just take all your java apps and run it on Android is just wrong
But the free version is limited to 2 GB and even the pro is only 50GB.
But sure if they will go for it. The other problem I see is the slow speed of pushing big graphics files to and from DropBox over the internet vs having it on your Lan.
But yea whatever will work.