I happen to be a member of the Yale Solar Car team - Team Lux. So needless to say I've studied solar cars quite a bit. So...
NO: Solar cars today are an experiment in engineering, not a solution to your everyday commuting needs. We can get relatively high speeds and drive all day, but the cars are very wide and long, flat, only hold one medium-to-small person (barely) and are limited by the environment.
YES: Any electric car could easily be supplemented by the addition of a high efficiency array. It wouldn't provide enough power to drive the car all day like we do with the current crop of cars, but since most people only drive their cars about 2-4 hours a day it could help a lot, and could be a real lifesaver if you ran out of power. OTOH, even a well designed commuter car is going to be much heavier than our solar cars and have much less array area. What would make the most sense is for all carports to have arrays on top that could store and transfer energy to the cars parked under them.
MAYBE: I don't know that electrical cars or fuel cells are the (near) future. Chemically propelled cars can potentially be much simpler and more efficient, since they aren't losing power through the extra electrical storage/transformation. And you can make fuel using solar power (you already were with the fuel cells). And until efficiency actually matters and the big-ass SUVs get off the road, it just won't be safe for extra-lightweight cars.
BTW, the plane thing has already been done with the Helios project. And you're right, it has a lot of potential.
No, except Tetris and maybe some Myst-type stuff
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 2
The problem with most games is that whatever art is within them is often overshadowed by other deficiencies within the game. The graphics within them often are quickly dated, there are very few notable storylines, and the coding elegance is frequently sub-par. And you didn't even address the artistry of gameplay.
If some game WERE to be artistic on ALL levels, then maybe I could consider it art. The only games that even come close to art are in my opinion Tetris, which when first written was an incredible example of code and gamplay elegance, and possibly Myst and it's imitators, which had very strong visuals and intrigueing storylines.
Re:You forgot the loss of 3rd-person perspective
on
First Review of Halo
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When it came out it was pretty much on-par with the games at the time. And as I said, the game physics were better, and the story/universe was WAY better than the plotless games on the PC side. I don't think there was a 1st person shooter with plot 'til Half-life for PCs. Since I usually play solo, such things make the game much more interesting to me.
In all fairness, designing non-humanoid aliens is a tricky business. Yes, the knees do resemble those of the protoss, but how many ways are you going to design legs besides those of humans? Protoss/Covenant knees resemble those of a number of different animals (albeit of the 4-legged variety). My point is, if you're going to design a realistic creature, there are significant limitations. It's debatable whether nature will even allow many bodyforms wholly different from those you already see in the natural world.
As for the rest of the body, they're not that similar, and although they're using an energy blade it's not like that of the Protoss.
You forgot the loss of 3rd-person perspective
on
First Review of Halo
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As a longtime mac user, I was (and still am to a lesser degree) a huge fan of Bungie. Starting with the original Marathon, they've always put a lot of love and technical detail into their games, and their storylines were some of the most complex and intriguing in the industry. Even now, the Marathon story is still a matter of discussion. Hopefully, all that and more carried over into Halo (which is a spin-off of the Marathon story). But considering what we've lost already - the game was originally to be played from a third-person perspective to enhance the storytelling - I'm a little doubtful it will live up to our original impression. Well, here's hoping the mac version will run on my new powerbook.
You forgot to add one thing - compared to the blazing speeds you can get for free if you work at a big company or school (I can get up to 1 megabyte/second), cable and DSL are downright pathetic and ridiculously overpriced. Trying to build modern connectivity speeds on such obsolete transmission lines is ridiculous. Hell, the lines are the cheapest part nowadays.
As one who has driven through New Jersey, let me say that I find it an INCREDIBLE pain to have to wait in my car for some slow-ass pump jockey to fill my tank and process my bill, and then have to wonder whether I'm supposed to tip or not. I'm perfectly capable of filling my tank myself, and faster too, thank you very much.
For all it's good points, people often gloss over the one big dealbreaker - hydrogen is a gas. And a very, very small gas as well, which has a tendency to work it's way even through metal containers, making them brittle in the process. In a nutshell, it's difficult to store. Even if you overcome that with tanks on cars or buildings, what are you going to do for smaller devices like lawnmowers or whatnot? If you run out of gas on the road, you won't be able to just walk to the nearest station to fill up a tank.
The fact is, for practical purposes, gases are difficult fuels, even relatively easy ones like LPNG. We need a liquid alternative that we can make in a renewable fashion, even if it doesn't trigger as many buzzwords. Methanol would be ideal for most purposes. Alternatively, rather than using hydrogen and oxygen we could use the easier-to-store sytem of ammonium and nitrous oxide. That produces water and nitrogen as a byproduct.
Lots of folks have made cars that run off vegetable oil. It's not too different from diesel fuel (hence the term "biodiesel"). It's not a very efficient method of energy production at all, though.
They frequently are opaque. And sometimes, quite gaudy. Ah Adult Swim, I love your shows, but I hate your logos (especially the rating that stays over Cowboy Bebop the whole time!)
This is certainly an admirable goal, but with conventional commercials quickly becoming totally ineffective (thanks to personal recorders with skipping features as well as more channels to flip to), I'd expect logos to be the least of our worries. From now on, you'll have to either deal with the morphing logos, advertising bars, virtual (and increasingly brazen) product placement, and other assorted in-show advertising, or actually start paying for your channels, HBO style. I don't really think that's such a bad thing... with increased demand for ad-free/light premium-style channels prices will drop, quality will go up, and you won't have to wade through crap. But, it'll cost you.
I heard of this a long time ago... the key thing about this design is that although it is very adaptable, easy to use, and stable, those same qualities come at a cost to performance. For speed, you gotta go with another design.
Change color and pattern to suit the environment you're in, automatically, whether it's snow, forest, rock, or city. Neat. If you do it right, you can do even trickier things, like blending into the background relative to a certain angle, or obscuring your movement.
If I'm not mistaken, the martians from Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" also used a base-three system of mathematics. Interesting. I wonder why he was so fond of it.
It's bad enough how commentary masquerades as news these days, but the biggest problem is the media quoting unreliable, heavily biased, or strictly speculative sources as fact. Just the other day I saw a segment on CNN on sites you might want to check out for more information, including Stratfor, an interesting but mostly speculative independent analysis group, and the perennial clinton-hating Drudge report.
More significantly, they also cited Debkafile, a right-wing Israeli affiliated rumor/news site with the bad habits of:
1) presenting "facts" that later prove to be false, and then not acknowledging them (i.e. they said terrorists shot down that russian plane, when it was later shown to be an errant ukranian missile - they changed the story but did not admit error)
2) basing their headlines and articles entirely on unnamed "Debkafile sources" which they make out to be deep within the upper eschelons of every government in the world (US and China included).
If you follow the TV news closely, you'll see how "news" is making if from web to TV in record time. This needs to stop.
It's not some arbitrary matter of size and weight. It's the difference between "portable" and "pocket-sized". The iPod is pocket-sized, and that means a lot when it comes to carrying something around with you. For instance, I was never tempted to get a cellphone because they were always too big and the antenna stuck out, until the day I was borrowing a friend's Nokia 8260 and realized I had forgotten the smooth little thing was in my pocket. I tell ya, if I could have found an acceptable calling plan to use it with I would have gotten one myself. As for space, 5gb is more than enough for most people (around 100 hours of music). A larger hard drive than that has a pretty limited value for just music storage.
It needs a way to hook into component stereo systems too.
I was thinking that if the iPod came with the iTunes software actually on it, then you wouldn't have to worry about whether it was installed on the Mac you hooked up to or not. Thus you could manage your iPod on any mac. And if it came bundled with Windows or Linux apps, (even stripped down compared to iTunes) you've got a great system for exchanging and managing music. Also, it would be great if you could hook two iPods together via firewire to exchange files... Firewire has peer-to-peer capability so it should be possible. The RIAA would hate that though.
Does anyone know what hardware/software system they use for playback? Can you load new codecs or system software or anything?
I submitted this story long before this one got posted, it was denied in about 5 seconds, what's up with that? The only difference was that I wasn't slamming the idea of a voluntary national ID card (because it doesn't bother me, since privacy is a myth). I was concerned about the fact that although Larry Ellison was offering Oracle software for free, the government would still have to pay for upgrades and maintenance. Quote "I don't think the government has any trouble paying for the labor associated with the software." Beware of geeks bearing gifts, as they say...
But I guess if you aren't a knee-jerk libertarian on the right stories you don't get posted. It's hardly news to say it, but slashdot is definitely biased. It ain't just the stories, it's the stories you choose to run...
Matthew Broderick is laughing all the way to the bank, seeing as how he's starring in the biggest, most popular, record-award winning Broadway play in years - Mel Brook's "The Producers", as Leo Bloom.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot... I want it to be big enough and visible enough so it can be seen from the earth, so that every time anyone that despises the United States and the rest of the free world looks up at the moon, they know just how far they are below us.
Plus we'd have a mass driver for launching items into space from the moon (it's easy in 1/6th-g and no atmosphere, and we'd need it for it to be a useful colony) which would probably be great for dropping rocks anywhere on earth, if we felt like it... ahahha
I would send people back to the moon... but this time, to set up a permanent base using technology developed for the long mars trip. Instead of research being the primary goal, they would be focused on the practical arts, so that unlike most every other mission they could pay, at least in part, for the expense of being there. They would be manufacturing heavy items - structural members, fuel, etc. - so that we don't have to ship them up from earth at high cost. They would develop new technologies for living and travelling in space. They would manufacture items that could only be fashioned in low/zero-g, and shoot them to earth. They would become a base for lunar/asteroid mining for rare elements.
Why put all that money and risk on a mission to mars first? Why not try it out in our own backyard, where we can support them if need be?
I'd rather have a cellphone with built-in 640x480 or better resolution camera, so I can take pictures, view them on the display, and save or send them immediately to my personal computer or virtual drive via a packet-switched phone network and the internet. Voila - essentially infinite image storage. Throw in a GPS system that automatically tags the images with coordinates and direction and you have an amazing tool for instantaneous documentation.
Quicktime is the first, the oldest, the most developed, and by far the best video architecture around (although the default codecs aren't the best, and the software implementations of the standard sometimes have bugs). Its ability to handle many different types of data is unparalelled - it's almost an operating system unto its own. That's why they picked it as the basis of the MPEG 4 standard. Now if only they'd come out with a linux version.
Slashdot Mirror
I happen to be a member of the Yale Solar Car team - Team Lux. So needless to say I've studied solar cars quite a bit. So...
NO: Solar cars today are an experiment in engineering, not a solution to your everyday commuting needs. We can get relatively high speeds and drive all day, but the cars are very wide and long, flat, only hold one medium-to-small person (barely) and are limited by the environment.
YES: Any electric car could easily be supplemented by the addition of a high efficiency array. It wouldn't provide enough power to drive the car all day like we do with the current crop of cars, but since most people only drive their cars about 2-4 hours a day it could help a lot, and could be a real lifesaver if you ran out of power. OTOH, even a well designed commuter car is going to be much heavier than our solar cars and have much less array area. What would make the most sense is for all carports to have arrays on top that could store and transfer energy to the cars parked under them.
MAYBE: I don't know that electrical cars or fuel cells are the (near) future. Chemically propelled cars can potentially be much simpler and more efficient, since they aren't losing power through the extra electrical storage/transformation. And you can make fuel using solar power (you already were with the fuel cells). And until efficiency actually matters and the big-ass SUVs get off the road, it just won't be safe for extra-lightweight cars.
BTW, the plane thing has already been done with the Helios project. And you're right, it has a lot of potential.
The problem with most games is that whatever art is within them is often overshadowed by other deficiencies within the game. The graphics within them often are quickly dated, there are very few notable storylines, and the coding elegance is frequently sub-par. And you didn't even address the artistry of gameplay.
If some game WERE to be artistic on ALL levels, then maybe I could consider it art. The only games that even come close to art are in my opinion Tetris, which when first written was an incredible example of code and gamplay elegance, and possibly Myst and it's imitators, which had very strong visuals and intrigueing storylines.
When it came out it was pretty much on-par with the games at the time. And as I said, the game physics were better, and the story/universe was WAY better than the plotless games on the PC side. I don't think there was a 1st person shooter with plot 'til Half-life for PCs. Since I usually play solo, such things make the game much more interesting to me.
In all fairness, designing non-humanoid aliens is a tricky business. Yes, the knees do resemble those of the protoss, but how many ways are you going to design legs besides those of humans? Protoss/Covenant knees resemble those of a number of different animals (albeit of the 4-legged variety). My point is, if you're going to design a realistic creature, there are significant limitations. It's debatable whether nature will even allow many bodyforms wholly different from those you already see in the natural world.
As for the rest of the body, they're not that similar, and although they're using an energy blade it's not like that of the Protoss.
As a longtime mac user, I was (and still am to a lesser degree) a huge fan of Bungie. Starting with the original Marathon, they've always put a lot of love and technical detail into their games, and their storylines were some of the most complex and intriguing in the industry. Even now, the Marathon story is still a matter of discussion. Hopefully, all that and more carried over into Halo (which is a spin-off of the Marathon story). But considering what we've lost already - the game was originally to be played from a third-person perspective to enhance the storytelling - I'm a little doubtful it will live up to our original impression. Well, here's hoping the mac version will run on my new powerbook.
You forgot to add one thing - compared to the blazing speeds you can get for free if you work at a big company or school (I can get up to 1 megabyte/second), cable and DSL are downright pathetic and ridiculously overpriced. Trying to build modern connectivity speeds on such obsolete transmission lines is ridiculous. Hell, the lines are the cheapest part nowadays.
Go last mile ethernet! Go neighborhood wireless!
As one who has driven through New Jersey, let me say that I find it an INCREDIBLE pain to have to wait in my car for some slow-ass pump jockey to fill my tank and process my bill, and then have to wonder whether I'm supposed to tip or not. I'm perfectly capable of filling my tank myself, and faster too, thank you very much.
For all it's good points, people often gloss over the one big dealbreaker - hydrogen is a gas. And a very, very small gas as well, which has a tendency to work it's way even through metal containers, making them brittle in the process. In a nutshell, it's difficult to store. Even if you overcome that with tanks on cars or buildings, what are you going to do for smaller devices like lawnmowers or whatnot? If you run out of gas on the road, you won't be able to just walk to the nearest station to fill up a tank.
The fact is, for practical purposes, gases are difficult fuels, even relatively easy ones like LPNG. We need a liquid alternative that we can make in a renewable fashion, even if it doesn't trigger as many buzzwords. Methanol would be ideal for most purposes. Alternatively, rather than using hydrogen and oxygen we could use the easier-to-store sytem of ammonium and nitrous oxide. That produces water and nitrogen as a byproduct.
Lots of folks have made cars that run off vegetable oil. It's not too different from diesel fuel (hence the term "biodiesel"). It's not a very efficient method of energy production at all, though.
They frequently are opaque. And sometimes, quite gaudy. Ah Adult Swim, I love your shows, but I hate your logos (especially the rating that stays over Cowboy Bebop the whole time!)
This is certainly an admirable goal, but with conventional commercials quickly becoming totally ineffective (thanks to personal recorders with skipping features as well as more channels to flip to), I'd expect logos to be the least of our worries. From now on, you'll have to either deal with the morphing logos, advertising bars, virtual (and increasingly brazen) product placement, and other assorted in-show advertising, or actually start paying for your channels, HBO style. I don't really think that's such a bad thing... with increased demand for ad-free/light premium-style channels prices will drop, quality will go up, and you won't have to wade through crap. But, it'll cost you.
I heard of this a long time ago... the key thing about this design is that although it is very adaptable, easy to use, and stable, those same qualities come at a cost to performance. For speed, you gotta go with another design.
Change color and pattern to suit the environment you're in, automatically, whether it's snow, forest, rock, or city. Neat. If you do it right, you can do even trickier things, like blending into the background relative to a certain angle, or obscuring your movement.
If I'm not mistaken, the martians from Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" also used a base-three system of mathematics. Interesting. I wonder why he was so fond of it.
It's bad enough how commentary masquerades as news these days, but the biggest problem is the media quoting unreliable, heavily biased, or strictly speculative sources as fact. Just the other day I saw a segment on CNN on sites you might want to check out for more information, including Stratfor, an interesting but mostly speculative independent analysis group, and the perennial clinton-hating Drudge report.
More significantly, they also cited Debkafile, a right-wing Israeli affiliated rumor/news site with the bad habits of:
1) presenting "facts" that later prove to be false, and then not acknowledging them (i.e. they said terrorists shot down that russian plane, when it was later shown to be an errant ukranian missile - they changed the story but did not admit error)
2) basing their headlines and articles entirely on unnamed "Debkafile sources" which they make out to be deep within the upper eschelons of every government in the world (US and China included).
If you follow the TV news closely, you'll see how "news" is making if from web to TV in record time. This needs to stop.
It's not some arbitrary matter of size and weight. It's the difference between "portable" and "pocket-sized". The iPod is pocket-sized, and that means a lot when it comes to carrying something around with you. For instance, I was never tempted to get a cellphone because they were always too big and the antenna stuck out, until the day I was borrowing a friend's Nokia 8260 and realized I had forgotten the smooth little thing was in my pocket. I tell ya, if I could have found an acceptable calling plan to use it with I would have gotten one myself. As for space, 5gb is more than enough for most people (around 100 hours of music). A larger hard drive than that has a pretty limited value for just music storage.
You don't need os X to use this. 9.2.1 also works.
It needs a way to hook into component stereo systems too.
I was thinking that if the iPod came with the iTunes software actually on it, then you wouldn't have to worry about whether it was installed on the Mac you hooked up to or not. Thus you could manage your iPod on any mac. And if it came bundled with Windows or Linux apps, (even stripped down compared to iTunes) you've got a great system for exchanging and managing music. Also, it would be great if you could hook two iPods together via firewire to exchange files... Firewire has peer-to-peer capability so it should be possible. The RIAA would hate that though.
Does anyone know what hardware/software system they use for playback? Can you load new codecs or system software or anything?
It damn well better come out for the mac sometime in the near future...
I submitted this story long before this one got posted, it was denied in about 5 seconds, what's up with that? The only difference was that I wasn't slamming the idea of a voluntary national ID card (because it doesn't bother me, since privacy is a myth). I was concerned about the fact that although Larry Ellison was offering Oracle software for free, the government would still have to pay for upgrades and maintenance. Quote "I don't think the government has any trouble paying for the labor associated with the software." Beware of geeks bearing gifts, as they say...
But I guess if you aren't a knee-jerk libertarian on the right stories you don't get posted. It's hardly news to say it, but slashdot is definitely biased. It ain't just the stories, it's the stories you choose to run...
Matthew Broderick is laughing all the way to the bank, seeing as how he's starring in the biggest, most popular, record-award winning Broadway play in years - Mel Brook's "The Producers", as Leo Bloom.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot... I want it to be big enough and visible enough so it can be seen from the earth, so that every time anyone that despises the United States and the rest of the free world looks up at the moon, they know just how far they are below us.
Plus we'd have a mass driver for launching items into space from the moon (it's easy in 1/6th-g and no atmosphere, and we'd need it for it to be a useful colony) which would probably be great for dropping rocks anywhere on earth, if we felt like it... ahahha
I would send people back to the moon... but this time, to set up a permanent base using technology developed for the long mars trip. Instead of research being the primary goal, they would be focused on the practical arts, so that unlike most every other mission they could pay, at least in part, for the expense of being there. They would be manufacturing heavy items - structural members, fuel, etc. - so that we don't have to ship them up from earth at high cost. They would develop new technologies for living and travelling in space. They would manufacture items that could only be fashioned in low/zero-g, and shoot them to earth. They would become a base for lunar/asteroid mining for rare elements.
Why put all that money and risk on a mission to mars first? Why not try it out in our own backyard, where we can support them if need be?
80 postage stamp sized pictures... whoopee.
I'd rather have a cellphone with built-in 640x480 or better resolution camera, so I can take pictures, view them on the display, and save or send them immediately to my personal computer or virtual drive via a packet-switched phone network and the internet. Voila - essentially infinite image storage. Throw in a GPS system that automatically tags the images with coordinates and direction and you have an amazing tool for instantaneous documentation.
Quicktime is the first, the oldest, the most developed, and by far the best video architecture around (although the default codecs aren't the best, and the software implementations of the standard sometimes have bugs). Its ability to handle many different types of data is unparalelled - it's almost an operating system unto its own. That's why they picked it as the basis of the MPEG 4 standard. Now if only they'd come out with a linux version.