Well the problem with the PS3 isn't the PPC part of the CPU it is the Cell. The Cell has a lot of potential I just fear that it is just too hard to write good code for. I Wish that there was a Linux kit for the 360 but that that isn't going to happen. I do understand that you can not just stick the standard cores on die. Caches and inter connects would be required but it could and will be done. Back to Linux on the ARM, busy box is usually chosen to save flash space and not for performance issues. But yes the PPC, Arm, Alpha, and Mips all had a lot of potential. I would love to have a small 1 Ghz Dual core ARM notebook. I really hopped that the hundred dollar notebook would going to ditch the X86. But it was not to be.
"If they did not buy the 767, it would almost certainly have been snapped by an airline, which would have used it far more often then then it is right now. Perhaps the most environmentally efficient way to prevent CO2 emissions is to buy Jumbo-Jets and under-utilize them." That has got to be the DUMBEST thing I have heard in a long time. First of all you have too assume that there is limit to the number of 767s available. There is but it is higher than the demand. I can promise you that no Airline is going "Well I guess those people can not fly because Larry Page bought our 767! Also a 767 is a very good people mover. You get better seat mileage out of a 767 than a Honda Civic. If you need to transport 250 to 300 people from NY to LA you are much better off with them in a 767 than even a Prius. Even a large SUV is a good people mover if you fill the seats. But in this case is a huge fuel drinking carbon fuel ego trip. But let's say that an Airline is going to have delay the purchase of a 767 because of this... They will in all likely hood then be flying an older and less fuel efficient plane in it's place! So the net carbon out but is EVEN higher. The let's talk about the aluminum and metals that are locked up in that plane being under used... Do you know how much power it takes to make aluminum?
All that aside my problem is with them trying to claim that they are working on being Green at the same time. It isn't that they own a private jet. It isn't that they own a private 767. It is that they are preaching alternative energy and conservation while owning a private 767.
Looks better is a real matter of opinon. Maybe the Sony only titles have better artists. Or artists that match your tastes better. Of the games I have seen for the PS3 I can honestly say that none of them blew me away. If COD looks better on the 360 than the PS3 Then I would have to say that the 360 is easier to program for and they did a better job with it. As too which is more powerful. I think the PS3 has more raw power than the 360 from what I have seen of the docks. The problem is that really doesn't matter. I have seen lots of really powerful systems over the years that are just too hard to program for. If the power is too hard to use then it will often not be used. So that is your answer. The PS3 is much harder to write code for. The 360 is much easer to write code for. Just about every multi platform game will look better on the 360 because for X effort they get better results. That means that the 360 is going to have more games that look good on it the the PS3 simply because it is easier to write games that look good on the 360. Unless things really turn around for the PS3 it will get less and less top games because it offers the worst return on developer investment. There are fewer consoles and harder to write good games for. So that is your answer. Multi platform games look worse on the PS3 because it is harder to make them look good than on the 360. I am a programmer but I don't own a 360 or a PS3.
But what you still don't seem to get is that the sail WILL NOT BE POINT AT THE SUN MOST OF THE TIME! In fact for most of the day it would be point at a very BAD direction unless the wind magically tracked the sun! And yes keep them clean would be an issue on deck. I am a fan of PVs but trying to put them on the sail would be the about the least practical use for them I can imagine short of putting them on submarine. If you really wanted to keep the ship as green as possible it would be a lot more logical to use a solar array on shore to product H2 and then to combine the H2 with atmospheric co2 to produce methane. Then to store the green methane on the ship and us it in a fuel cell, gas turbine, or sterling engine to produce electricity for the house keeping loads. There are no solar cells that are as flexible as the nylon sail material, the weight of the cable would make the sail less efficient at pulling the ship, they would be expensive, they would be point the wrong way most of the time, they would be dead weight for most of the time, since they would useless at twilight and at night. The ship is going to run it's main motor most of th time anyway since the sail will not provide 100% of the thrust needed to power the ship through the water. The housekeeping electric load is so small compared to the rest power required to push the ship through the water that it doesn't really matter. So over all it is just a really bad idea.
The point is that they hate it because they have been feed lies. And frankly I don't think as many people hate is as you think. I live near a nuclear power plant. I am just fine with it. I know of only one person that is worried about it. She also stockpiled grain and heirloom seeds for Y2K.
"Surely what they do with their own money is their own business. " In that case you can have no problem with every SUV owner on the planet. Or people that don't car pool. Or people that shop at Walmart. It is their own money and their own business. I on the other hand find it more than a little hypocritical for Larry Page to own a private 767 and talk about the importance of alternative clean energy.
As I said I have no problem with them having a private jet. Just with a private 767. There are many very nice private jets that burn a lot less fuel but can fly just about as far and even faster.
"About the ARM core: Keep in mind, that programs written for ARM tend to be written in low-level languages, to squeeze that last bit of power out of that poor CPU." No they are not. They are written in C or C++... I know I write for one and it runs Linux. WindowsMobile runs on the ARM as well and the vast majority of those applications are written in C++ and maybe a little C. All current Palms run on a ARM and they emulate a 68K dragonball! They tend to also be written in C. The Arm isn't a poor CPU. It is a pretty dang good CPU. "I don't think all my 3 Firefox windows, my Outlook and my Word/Excel need their own CPU to run effectively." A modern OS tends to have MANY threads all running at the same time. Lets take your example to show how multiable cores could be helpful. If each windows had it's own core than each core could independently scale it's clock speed and power use based on the need it the specific task. A Firefox window in the background could be almost at idle while your Outlook task is running at full speed and probably using 8 cores all by it's self. "The latest version of outlook gets ugly when your mailbox gets big". If you had a 32 core CPU each core could run just fast enough for the current task. That might save alot of power. Even without putting as many cores as possible on a die a quad core XScale would be much smaller than any of the current quad core CPUs and use less power. It would also be more than fast enough for most users. Then you have the PowerPC. Funny how Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all are using a PPC for their consoles. So yes I feel that the X86 is holding us back and that is because of the need to run Microsoft code. It is a pig. It just happens to be a really fast and cheap pig.
Unix... Well as I said I use it and actually like it. I just have to think that we could have a better OS. Unix is a case of good enough.
Yep but they are the founders and the Chief operating officers. I would have have less of a problem is Google owned it. It wouldn't be so bad if they used it to fly say a team of 100 tech from site to site in an emergency. Yes it is bought with the money the founders of Google made from Google stock. Google it's self has a fleet of biz jets for the other execs.
No. But can I share a DRMed book with ANYONE? Can I sell it to a used book store? Can I be sure that if I really like it I can read it again in 20 years if I just stick in on a shelf? Since you have to hide and us insults I will try to use little words. I don't pirate as I said in my first post. DRM to be acceptable must in no way prevent me from using the material in any lawful way that I can use none DRM material. I must have the right to transfer ownership at anytime. I must have the right to loan it to some at anytime. I must have a perpetual guarantee that I will have access to the media forever and that right can be passed on forever. Media production houses don't have the right to take away my rights because other people are pirating their material. DRM doesn't work. It only punishes the legitimate users. So I suggest you pull clean up that oral diarrhea you seem to have and get a clue.
Two bad the spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a private 767. I am not even and extremist when it comes to things like that. Hey if they wanted a private jet a Gulfstream IV is very nice as is the Citation X. A converted airliner that could carry well over 200 people for your private toy. Well it makes Hummer owners look down right green. I guess the non billionaires need to save energy.
You don't store plutonium as waste. You put it in a reactor and use it as fuel. I worry less about proliferation if plutonium is burned in a reactor than if it just "stored". Chernobyl was the the Yugo of reactor designs. It would never have been built in the US. Chernobyl used a graphite moderator. Modern western power plants us water. Graphite is carbon... Get it hot and it burns. Chernobyl lacked a containment building. Using Chernobyl to prove that a modern nuclear power plant is unsafe is like using the Comet to show that air travel isn't safe.
"By which you mean the vast majority of people outside Slashdot, who don't like nuclear power?" You mean the same people that drive big honking SUVs and read their horoscope? Yep thanks to a really bad movie coming out at the same time and the fear mongering a large majority of people fear nuclear power for no good reason.
Really? I don't blame the book publishers too much for DRM. The music and video companies I do blame. Ever since they tried to sue the VCR out of existence. I don't pirate but bloody heck I am sick of being treated like a criminal instead of a customer. Ever since they locked out my ability to fast forward over the ads in DVDs and added region coding to DVDs I blame them. DRM doesn't stop pirates all it does is punish honest people. PS. I share my books wildly with people. When I read a good book I often lend it to a friend.
Flicker, YouTube, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo briefcase.... The public has show that it loves putting its data on the internet. Hack I use gmail/yahoo mail for backups. I just email files that I want to backup from my gmail account to my yahoo account. Instant redundant off site backups.
Well permafrost doesn't mix well with anything. Ideally the reactor would have some kind of thermal fuse. If it reaches X then it scrams. Once shut down it would cool to ambiant temperatures.
Yes the X86 is fast and cheap but we have it only because it ran MS-DOS and then Windows. I have to wonder just how good an ARM core made with the latest process would be? How cheap would it be at a tiny fraction of the die size of an X86. How little power would it take? How many of them could you put on a die the size of the latest from Intel or AMD CPU? Maybe 16 or 32? It will not run Windows thought... Take a look at the T2 from Sun. And then we get to Unix. Yes I use Linux everyday. I love it and I want to keep it. The problem is that I think we could do better. Linux and the other Unix and Unix like OS are eating up a huge amount of development resources.
Except that it will be very rare that the sail is pointing at the sun. So yea it would still be better to put them on the ship than the sail. Over all I think it would be a waste of money. The sail will provide so much more power than the solar would for a tiny fraction of the cost and with a lot less maintenance. Large areas of solar cells getting hit with saltwater all the time just isn't a lot of fun.
"However, don't you think renewables are better than both fossil fuels AND nuclear power?" No. They are not. The problem with almost all renewables is lack of throttling. About the only renewable that works as well as fossil fuels and or nuclear power is Hydro. The problem is that is very limted. Did you know that electric and gas cars from the very beginning. Why did gas win? It wasn't any conspiracy of the oil company. Gas won because it was the better technical solution. Even with todays best tech can you make a battery pack that will propel a small car 300 miles on a charge, weighs under 100 lbs, and can be recharged in less than 10 minutes, costs under $1000 and will last for ten years? It doesn't exist. To be honest I don't know if it is even possible. Diesels didn't become popular for cars until Europe changed the tax laws to make it cheaper and there where major improvments in material science. Light, durable, and inexpensive. When it came to diesels you could pick one. Things are better now.
So do I think that we should drop renewable? No I don't I think we should use them more. I live in south Florida. I think every house built should have at least a pv panel on the roof. Heck even if they just started out with 100 watt panels and increased it year by year. Here when the sun is out the AC is running. The same is true over a large area of the south. I am not convinced that wind power is a great way to go. But in some areas it seems to be a good addition to the power mix. I do count nuclear as a renewable. Even if you don't want a plutonium economy you can use slow breeder reactors and Thorium for fuel. Combined with fuel reprocessing nuclear will last a VERY long time. Heck even coal has a future. Maybe not as a fuel but as a feedstock for plastic and fertilizer production to replace oil. For some things like aviation I doubt that we will ever get away from hydrocarbon based fuels. The good news is that with heat and electricity it is possible to make hydrocarbon fuels from water and air.
I guess you didn't see where I said why not put them on the ship instead of the sail. Plus all the other reasons I gave why it is illogical to mount it on the sail.
Why put them on the sail. What are the odds that the sail will be pointing at the sun... Why put them on the sail/kite at all instead of the ship? Why risk them getting lost if the sail goes into the water or the cable fails? Why try to make the as flexable as the sail so it is easy to store in case of storm or headwinds? The electrical load of a freighter is actually pretty small compaired to the propulsion load. So are you going to carry a big honking electric motor to use make in to an hybrid? If so why care the extra weight and drag on the screw shaft for something you could only use for a few hours each day?
Why not? Because it wouldn't really help in any way and would cost a lot of money.
They complete rewrote the module but kept the name. Maybe it doesn't contain any GPL code? I don't know if it does or not but it would see that there is a lot of I don't know going on here.
Game developers have X amount of resources. I suspect that the Wii is the number one target for a lot of them. A lot of game houses bet that Wii wouldn't be a hit and now they are in are scramble mode. You statement about the PS3 not being hard to write code for just doesn't hold much water. The Orange Box is a big deal and has a lot of resources backing it. It seems that it sucks on the PS3. The fact that Infinity Ward has managed to write a good quality game for the PS3 doesn't prove that it isn't hard to write code for. It as best shows that it isn't impossible. The PS3 is short of system ram and the cell has a strange asymmetrical architecture. I have written a lot of multi-threaded code. In fact I actually like writing multi-threaded code. However asymmetrical multi-threaded code is a lot harder to write than your typical multi-threaded code.
"On the other hand, porting from the PS3 to the 360 has had some success to my knowledge. Maybe that's the way these developers should go?" Only if they have a desire for the PS3 to be a hit. From what I have seen the PS3 is really hard to develop for. The programing model is very difficult to get good performance out of. The reason that you can port from P3 to the 360 is that the 360 is easy to program for. I do agree that the difficulty in programing will hurt the PS3. Maybe they can fix the Orange Box. What is really scary is that the Orange Box runs just fine on most medium powered PCs. You don't need a top of the line Box to run it well. I just don't see companies wanting to spend the resources to make a game work well on the PS3 first and then port to the 360. Well out side of Sony and the Japanese game houses. At least in Japan the PS3 has more market share than the 360.
I think that is changing. My wife is into "Digital" scrap booking. Everything she does involves images that are a minimum of 300 dpi and 12"x12" in size. She uses Gimp as do a good number of people on the message boards she goes to. Then you have digital video. More and more people are getting digital camcorders and they will want to edit and author their videos. So yes CPU power needs are going up even for your average users.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the problem with the PS3 isn't the PPC part of the CPU it is the Cell. The Cell has a lot of potential I just fear that it is just too hard to write good code for. I Wish that there was a Linux kit for the 360 but that that isn't going to happen.
I do understand that you can not just stick the standard cores on die. Caches and inter connects would be required but it could and will be done. Back to Linux on the ARM, busy box is usually chosen to save flash space and not for performance issues. But yes the PPC, Arm, Alpha, and Mips all had a lot of potential.
I would love to have a small 1 Ghz Dual core ARM notebook. I really hopped that the hundred dollar notebook would going to ditch the X86. But it was not to be.
"If they did not buy the 767, it would almost certainly have been snapped by an airline, which would have used it far more often then then it is right now. Perhaps the most environmentally efficient way to prevent CO2 emissions is to buy Jumbo-Jets and under-utilize them."
That has got to be the DUMBEST thing I have heard in a long time.
First of all you have too assume that there is limit to the number of 767s available. There is but it is higher than the demand. I can promise you that no Airline is going "Well I guess those people can not fly because Larry Page bought our 767! Also a 767 is a very good people mover. You get better seat mileage out of a 767 than a Honda Civic. If you need to transport 250 to 300 people from NY to LA you are much better off with them in a 767 than even a Prius. Even a large SUV is a good people mover if you fill the seats. But in this case is a huge fuel drinking carbon fuel ego trip.
But let's say that an Airline is going to have delay the purchase of a 767 because of this... They will in all likely hood then be flying an older and less fuel efficient plane in it's place! So the net carbon out but is EVEN higher. The let's talk about the aluminum and metals that are locked up in that plane being under used... Do you know how much power it takes to make aluminum?
All that aside my problem is with them trying to claim that they are working on being Green at the same time. It isn't that they own a private jet. It isn't that they own a private 767. It is that they are preaching alternative energy and conservation while owning a private 767.
Looks better is a real matter of opinon. Maybe the Sony only titles have better artists. Or artists that match your tastes better.
Of the games I have seen for the PS3 I can honestly say that none of them blew me away.
If COD looks better on the 360 than the PS3 Then I would have to say that the 360 is easier to program for and they did a better job with it.
As too which is more powerful. I think the PS3 has more raw power than the 360 from what I have seen of the docks.
The problem is that really doesn't matter. I have seen lots of really powerful systems over the years that are just too hard to program for. If the power is too hard to use then it will often not be used.
So that is your answer. The PS3 is much harder to write code for. The 360 is much easer to write code for. Just about every multi platform game will look better on the 360 because for X effort they get better results. That means that the 360 is going to have more games that look good on it the the PS3 simply because it is easier to write games that look good on the 360. Unless things really turn around for the PS3 it will get less and less top games because it offers the worst return on developer investment. There are fewer consoles and harder to write good games for.
So that is your answer. Multi platform games look worse on the PS3 because it is harder to make them look good than on the 360.
I am a programmer but I don't own a 360 or a PS3.
But what you still don't seem to get is that the sail WILL NOT BE POINT AT THE SUN MOST OF THE TIME!
In fact for most of the day it would be point at a very BAD direction unless the wind magically tracked the sun!
And yes keep them clean would be an issue on deck. I am a fan of PVs but trying to put them on the sail would be the about the least practical use for them I can imagine short of putting them on submarine. If you really wanted to keep the ship as green as possible it would be a lot more logical to use a solar array on shore to product H2 and then to combine the H2 with atmospheric co2 to produce methane. Then to store the green methane on the ship and us it in a fuel cell, gas turbine, or sterling engine to produce electricity for the house keeping loads.
There are no solar cells that are as flexible as the nylon sail material, the weight of the cable would make the sail less efficient at pulling the ship, they would be expensive, they would be point the wrong way most of the time, they would be dead weight for most of the time, since they would useless at twilight and at night. The ship is going to run it's main motor most of th time anyway since the sail will not provide 100% of the thrust needed to power the ship through the water. The housekeeping electric load is so small compared to the rest power required to push the ship through the water that it doesn't really matter.
So over all it is just a really bad idea.
The point is that they hate it because they have been feed lies. And frankly I don't think as many people hate is as you think. I live near a nuclear power plant. I am just fine with it. I know of only one person that is worried about it. She also stockpiled grain and heirloom seeds for Y2K.
"Surely what they do with their own money is their own business. "
In that case you can have no problem with every SUV owner on the planet. Or people that don't car pool. Or people that shop at Walmart.
It is their own money and their own business.
I on the other hand find it more than a little hypocritical for Larry Page to own a private 767 and talk about the importance of alternative clean energy.
As I said I have no problem with them having a private jet. Just with a private 767. There are many very nice private jets that burn a lot less fuel but can fly just about as far and even faster.
"About the ARM core:
Keep in mind, that programs written for ARM tend to be written in low-level languages, to squeeze that last bit of power out of that poor CPU."
No they are not. They are written in C or C++... I know I write for one and it runs Linux. WindowsMobile runs on the ARM as well and the vast majority of those applications are written in C++ and maybe a little C.
All current Palms run on a ARM and they emulate a 68K dragonball! They tend to also be written in C.
The Arm isn't a poor CPU. It is a pretty dang good CPU.
"I don't think all my 3 Firefox windows, my Outlook and my Word/Excel need their own CPU to run effectively."
A modern OS tends to have MANY threads all running at the same time. Lets take your example to show how multiable cores could be helpful.
If each windows had it's own core than each core could independently scale it's clock speed and power use based on the need it the specific task. A Firefox window in the background could be almost at idle while your Outlook task is running at full speed and probably using 8 cores all by it's self. "The latest version of outlook gets ugly when your mailbox gets big".
If you had a 32 core CPU each core could run just fast enough for the current task. That might save alot of power.
Even without putting as many cores as possible on a die a quad core XScale would be much smaller than any of the current quad core CPUs and use less power. It would also be more than fast enough for most users.
Then you have the PowerPC. Funny how Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all are using a PPC for their consoles.
So yes I feel that the X86 is holding us back and that is because of the need to run Microsoft code. It is a pig. It just happens to be a really fast and cheap pig.
Unix... Well as I said I use it and actually like it. I just have to think that we could have a better OS. Unix is a case of good enough.
Yep but they are the founders and the Chief operating officers. I would have have less of a problem is Google owned it. It wouldn't be so bad if they used it to fly say a team of 100 tech from site to site in an emergency. Yes it is bought with the money the founders of Google made from Google stock.
Google it's self has a fleet of biz jets for the other execs.
No. But can I share a DRMed book with ANYONE? Can I sell it to a used book store? Can I be sure that if I really like it I can read it again in 20 years if I just stick in on a shelf?
Since you have to hide and us insults I will try to use little words. I don't pirate as I said in my first post.
DRM to be acceptable must in no way prevent me from using the material in any lawful way that I can use none DRM material.
I must have the right to transfer ownership at anytime. I must have the right to loan it to some at anytime. I must have a perpetual guarantee that I will have access to the media forever and that right can be passed on forever. Media production houses don't have the right to take away my rights because other people are pirating their material.
DRM doesn't work. It only punishes the legitimate users.
So I suggest you pull clean up that oral diarrhea you seem to have and get a clue.
Two bad the spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a private 767. I am not even and extremist when it comes to things like that. Hey if they wanted a private jet a Gulfstream IV is very nice as is the Citation X. A converted airliner that could carry well over 200 people for your private toy.
Well it makes Hummer owners look down right green.
I guess the non billionaires need to save energy.
You don't store plutonium as waste. You put it in a reactor and use it as fuel.
I worry less about proliferation if plutonium is burned in a reactor than if it just "stored".
Chernobyl was the the Yugo of reactor designs. It would never have been built in the US.
Chernobyl used a graphite moderator. Modern western power plants us water. Graphite is carbon... Get it hot and it burns.
Chernobyl lacked a containment building.
Using Chernobyl to prove that a modern nuclear power plant is unsafe is like using the Comet to show that air travel isn't safe.
"By which you mean the vast majority of people outside Slashdot, who don't like nuclear power?"
You mean the same people that drive big honking SUVs and read their horoscope?
Yep thanks to a really bad movie coming out at the same time and the fear mongering a large majority of people fear nuclear power for no good reason.
Really? I don't blame the book publishers too much for DRM. The music and video companies I do blame.
Ever since they tried to sue the VCR out of existence.
I don't pirate but bloody heck I am sick of being treated like a criminal instead of a customer. Ever since they locked out my ability to fast forward over the ads in DVDs and added region coding to DVDs I blame them.
DRM doesn't stop pirates all it does is punish honest people.
PS.
I share my books wildly with people. When I read a good book I often lend it to a friend.
Flicker, YouTube, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo briefcase....
The public has show that it loves putting its data on the internet.
Hack I use gmail/yahoo mail for backups. I just email files that I want to backup from my gmail account to my yahoo account. Instant redundant off site backups.
Well permafrost doesn't mix well with anything.
Ideally the reactor would have some kind of thermal fuse. If it reaches X then it scrams. Once shut down it would cool to ambiant temperatures.
The X86, MS-DOS/Widows, and Unix/Posix.
Yes the X86 is fast and cheap but we have it only because it ran MS-DOS and then Windows. I have to wonder just how good an ARM core made with the latest process would be? How cheap would it be at a tiny fraction of the die size of an X86. How little power would it take?
How many of them could you put on a die the size of the latest from Intel or AMD CPU? Maybe 16 or 32?
It will not run Windows thought...
Take a look at the T2 from Sun.
And then we get to Unix. Yes I use Linux everyday. I love it and I want to keep it. The problem is that I think we could do better. Linux and the other Unix and Unix like OS are eating up a huge amount of development resources.
Except that it will be very rare that the sail is pointing at the sun. So yea it would still be better to put them on the ship than the sail. Over all I think it would be a waste of money. The sail will provide so much more power than the solar would for a tiny fraction of the cost and with a lot less maintenance.
Large areas of solar cells getting hit with saltwater all the time just isn't a lot of fun.
"However, don't you think renewables are better than both fossil fuels AND nuclear power?"
No. They are not.
The problem with almost all renewables is lack of throttling. About the only renewable that works as well as fossil fuels and or nuclear power is Hydro. The problem is that is very limted.
Did you know that electric and gas cars from the very beginning. Why did gas win? It wasn't any conspiracy of the oil company. Gas won because it was the better technical solution. Even with todays best tech can you make a battery pack that will propel a small car 300 miles on a charge, weighs under 100 lbs, and can be recharged in less than 10 minutes, costs under $1000 and will last for ten years? It doesn't exist. To be honest I don't know if it is even possible. Diesels didn't become popular for cars until Europe changed the tax laws to make it cheaper and there where major improvments in material science. Light, durable, and inexpensive. When it came to diesels you could pick one. Things are better now.
So do I think that we should drop renewable? No I don't I think we should use them more. I live in south Florida. I think every house built should have at least a pv panel on the roof. Heck even if they just started out with 100 watt panels and increased it year by year. Here when the sun is out the AC is running. The same is true over a large area of the south.
I am not convinced that wind power is a great way to go. But in some areas it seems to be a good addition to the power mix.
I do count nuclear as a renewable. Even if you don't want a plutonium economy you can use slow breeder reactors and Thorium for fuel. Combined with fuel reprocessing nuclear will last a VERY long time.
Heck even coal has a future. Maybe not as a fuel but as a feedstock for plastic and fertilizer production to replace oil.
For some things like aviation I doubt that we will ever get away from hydrocarbon based fuels. The good news is that with heat and electricity it is possible to make hydrocarbon fuels from water and air.
I guess you didn't see where I said why not put them on the ship instead of the sail. Plus all the other reasons I gave why it is illogical to mount it on the sail.
The reactor probably would reach an equilibrium temperature pretty quickly. The idea is that as the temperature goes up the reactions slows.
Why put them on the sail. What are the odds that the sail will be pointing at the sun... Why put them on the sail/kite at all instead of the ship? Why risk them getting lost if the sail goes into the water or the cable fails? Why try to make the as flexable as the sail so it is easy to store in case of storm or headwinds? The electrical load of a freighter is actually pretty small compaired to the propulsion load. So are you going to carry a big honking electric motor to use make in to an hybrid? If so why care the extra weight and drag on the screw shaft for something you could only use for a few hours each day?
Why not? Because it wouldn't really help in any way and would cost a lot of money.
They complete rewrote the module but kept the name. Maybe it doesn't contain any GPL code?
I don't know if it does or not but it would see that there is a lot of I don't know going on here.
Game developers have X amount of resources. I suspect that the Wii is the number one target for a lot of them. A lot of game houses bet that Wii wouldn't be a hit and now they are in are scramble mode.
You statement about the PS3 not being hard to write code for just doesn't hold much water. The Orange Box is a big deal and has a lot of resources backing it. It seems that it sucks on the PS3. The fact that Infinity Ward has managed to write a good quality game for the PS3 doesn't prove that it isn't hard to write code for. It as best shows that it isn't impossible.
The PS3 is short of system ram and the cell has a strange asymmetrical architecture. I have written a lot of multi-threaded code. In fact I actually like writing multi-threaded code. However asymmetrical multi-threaded code is a lot harder to write than your typical multi-threaded code.
"On the other hand, porting from the PS3 to the 360 has had some success to my knowledge. Maybe that's the way these developers should go?"
Only if they have a desire for the PS3 to be a hit.
From what I have seen the PS3 is really hard to develop for. The programing model is very difficult to get good performance out of.
The reason that you can port from P3 to the 360 is that the 360 is easy to program for.
I do agree that the difficulty in programing will hurt the PS3. Maybe they can fix the Orange Box.
What is really scary is that the Orange Box runs just fine on most medium powered PCs. You don't need a top of the line Box to run it well.
I just don't see companies wanting to spend the resources to make a game work well on the PS3 first and then port to the 360. Well out side of Sony and the Japanese game houses. At least in Japan the PS3 has more market share than the 360.
I think that is changing.
My wife is into "Digital" scrap booking. Everything she does involves images that are a minimum of 300 dpi and 12"x12" in size.
She uses Gimp as do a good number of people on the message boards she goes to.
Then you have digital video. More and more people are getting digital camcorders and they will want to edit and author their videos.
So yes CPU power needs are going up even for your average users.