[QUOTE]I wonder if the reason for this is that the slow starters grow up thinking they are not that smart. [/QUOTE]
Has nothing to do with that:) You might want to read the article,
[QUOTE]The smartest 7-year-olds tended to start out with a relatively thinner cortex that thickened rapidly, peaking by age 11 or 12 before thinning. In their peers with average IQ, an initially thicker cortex peaked by age 8, with gradual thinning thereafter.[/QUOTE]
The 'slow start' is on the thickness of the cortex, they had higher IQs at the lower (age 7) age when they had the thinner cortex than the lower IQ children at the same age.
That only works if they can work with peoples existing music collections.
People have already bought a massive amount of music through itunes. Thus for those with an itunes locked in collection, it will need to be compatible with Apples DRM. So sony and motorola have to either partner with Apple, figure out a way to migrate Apples DRMed files to their service without an Apple partnership, or go after those individuals which have yet to purchase music through itunes, or who went with one of the competing services.
I download movies legally nearly daily, http://movielink.com/ is extremely convenient and for the movies I rent (the daily special usually or 50% discount) is as cheap or cheaper than blockbuster.
Download size is 1 GB typically, it takes between an hour and two hours to download. You can output to your TV if you so desire, and resolution looks good enough that it probably would look fine on most TVs.
[QUOTE]it's more that investors are not going to be pleased knowing that $1 billion/year is disappearing without any return on it. [/QUOTE]
The return is in that they can stunt competition - they desperately do not want competitors to be able to interoperate otherwise they risk losing their monopoly. If there were truly no return, then they would have made the change shortly after the initial request.
[QUOTE]Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?[/QUOTE]
The confusion is over the lay usage and the scientific usage of evolution. Lay usage usually implys an 'improvement' in the genome, whereas scientific usage is 'a change in allelle frequency over time' which can be due to 'selective pressure' resulting in differential reproductive success (and hence likely an 'improvement') or due to genetic drift, etc.. Selective pressures resulting in 'differential reproductive success' are not much of a factor for many modern humans. So if you are using evolution in the lay sense it has 'largely stopped' (though not completely see for instance what is likely to happen in Korea or China where the male to female ratio is hugely out of balance; or in Africa with HIV), even if it will inevitably continue to 'evolve' in the scientific sense.
[QUOTE]Within the world of electronic voting, though, eVACS (for "Electronic Voting and Counting System") has been a rare success story both for open source development methodology and for the benefits that electronic voting can offer. The first generation of eVACS (running on Debian Linux machines) was developed starting in March 2001 in response to a request for bids by the Australian Capitol Territory Electoral Commission (ACTEC), and it was done on a budget of only AUS$200,000.
(The Australian Capitol Territory includes Australia's capitol city, Canberra, as well as surrounding suburbs and Namadgi National Park.)
Besides a respectable list of features driven by ACTEC's initial requirements (like support for 12 voting languages, and audio support for blind voters), eVACS has an advantage not enjoyed by many electronic voting systems: it's been successfully, uneventfully used to gather votes in a national election. The election in which it played a part went smoothly, and the eVACS system itself functioned as hoped.[/QUOTE]
Isn't using the GIMP as an example a poor idea? No disrespect intended but I got the impression that they have had all sorts of issues with missing schedules, difficulties migrating to planned technologies, high overturn of individuals working on key technologies, etc.
antibiotics you attempt to mimimize usage and new antibiotics would be 'last resort' so the profitability of antibiotics is very low. The market incentives just don't exist for them like they do for mass market repeat customer products like viagra.
Antibiotics are more suited for government and non profit development.
[QUOTE]The line between hardcore developers and the average Joe will start to get very fuzzy[/QUOTE]
Not really - the hardore devs will be far more productive and be able to implement complex programs requiring algorithmic insight, the joes will be able to to implement stuff that requires simple logic and interfaces. Of course there will be lots of useful stuff that a joe could do, it just won't be the same kinds of stuff that the hardcore dev will be doing.
[QUOTE]...considering Yahoo's music service uses a propretary media player (Yahoo's) with a propretary DRM implementation (Microsoft's) on the subscription model where your music is all deleted when you cancel your subscription... by DRM.[/QUOTE]
Not really when you translate what he says to [QUOTE]Our DRM is incompatible with the iPod which really sucks for us[/QUOTE], it makes perfect sense:)
[QUOTE]Electrical heating, electrical rail road engines, electrical cars would've made far more economic sense if electricity was as cheap and abundant as nuclear power can make it.[/QUOTE]
Even with the cheapest cents per watt hour, nuclear still isn't competitive with modern coal plants. You haven't offered anything that would suggest that we should be able to get cheap energy from nuclear (in the US).
[QUOTE]That's the point. Greenpeace's et al.'s passionate protests make the nuclear power's cost much higher financially. [/QUOTE]
While lawsuits from 'green' organizations make plant construction more costly (due to delays), I seriously doubt they are a significant factor.
[QUOTE]Even worse -- politically it was prohibitively expensive for decades.[/QUOTE]
They still recieved substantial government funding for research in reducing costs, etc. If it isn't economically cost effective, what does it matter the political costs?
[QUOTE]Now that Chinese (no more willing to depend on foreign fuel suppliers, than us) are about to build dozens of new nuclear plants (Toshiba's main motivation for this purchase), the world is suddenly reconsidering...[/QUOTE]
Chinas interest in nuclear is because for them coal has recently become increasingly more expensive and in short supply, whereas nuclear has had a steadily dropping price. If your coal is expensive then nuclear becomes much more attractive. If nuclear continues to drop in price it also becomes more attractive.
[QUOTE]I wonder, then, why do Chinese plan to build dozens of nuclear plants by 2020? Do they know something, you don't?[/QUOTE]
No, they know something that you don't - namely that they are having difficulty meeting demand for their coal production needs, (see above) which is causing a steady and strong increase in coal prices. Also that the cost of nuclear power has been steadily decreasing. Given the huge projected energy demand that China faces, and the serious liklihood of being unable to meet demand with coal (and already they are close to maximum energy available for hydroelectric) limits them to nuclear energy.
Also a large portion of the initial capital outlay for building a nuclear powerplant is the labor required. Chinas labor costs are quite a bit cheaper than those of the US. Also as a government it is able to commission a large number of plants simultaneously giving a great deal of economy of scale.
Thus for China to try and meet a larger percentage of its energy needs by 2020 makes quite a bit of sense.
Also since China is a large exporter of coal as well as consumer they're reduced export capacity due to local consumption also drives up foreign prices. Leading to a knock on impact on price for other countries and thus an increased interest in nuclear.
For other countries such as the US that have large coal reserves, the greatly improved nuclear power plant designs that have come out over the past three years finally bring down the capital costs to where they are more reasonable. Of course the US has large reserves of coal with no threat of shortages - however there are not good reserves of low sulfur coal which is desirable to reduce acid rain (and while regular sulphur content coal can be processed to low sulphur it does increase the cost...).
[QUOTE]If not for the hysterical campaigns against nuclear energy, we would not be having this awful dependency on oil and other grossly unhealthy fossil fuels...[/QUOTE]
Nuclear is currently used primarily for non transport energy so would have near zero impact on our oil dependency unless and until we switch to hyrogen for transport and use nuclear energy as the source to generate the hydrogen. Non transport energy sector is dominated by coal for electricty and natural gas.
The cost per kWh for nuclear is more expensive than coal for total costs. You need to include all costs for an accurate comparision, this site includes all costs (some are pretty far off - ie capital costs for coal are substantially cheaper than a nuclear) your typical pro nuclear site excludes many of the larger costs such as the cost of capital, and usually just include fuel + operation and maintenance costs.
[QUOTE]It seriously set the nuclear power industry back, which is a shame. Old plants continue to operate, but new ones are very slow to appear. Safe and non-polluting technologies were available for decades and we are wising up to using them only now.[/QUOTE]
Capital costs are the major setback for nuclear, new designs have lowered the capital costs, that is the real reason for nuclears return to being considered. It has historically had a huge up front cost which has been heavily subsidized by most countries.
I think that Blender www.blender.org will become a major player in this niche. A completely free tool that any game maker can bundle with their game, that can do modeling, texturing (procedural, image or paint based), and rigging and animation.
I wonder what sort of case a developer of keyboards or mice, or controllers could make that the OS monopoly is being leveraged to limit competitors with their hardware.
[QUOTE]That's entirely untrue. You can easily spot the difference in smoothness between video captured in 24FPS and video captured in 60iFPS.
Try playing a video game at 25FPS, and then at 60FPS. Can't tell the difference? If you can't, you've got to be full of it.[/QUOTE]
You have confused video and video game - videos will tend to have good (or real) motion blur and hence can be percieved as smooth even at lower frame rates. Games tend to have poor if any motion blur, and thus need a much higher frame rate to appear smooth.
What is interesting is that the 'or later' clause of GPL 2 - I would think means that GPL software used for previous DMCA encryption would be subject to GPL 3 disclaimer...
[QUOTE]I've always been under the impression that it would be fine to perform this live and play it for an audience but once you try to sell it as a record, you're going to face some serious liabilities. I've been in bands that have covered Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beatles, Beck, The Pixies, etc. and we've never got in trouble for playing them live at crowded bars. In fact, when you start out, it's advised to include about 50% originals and 50% covers so that the music is accessible to anyone who might be there just for a drink.[/QUOTE]
In the US the bar/restraunt/etc. is supposed to pay an annual licensing fee based on seating etc. to ASCAP. Your performace rights are being paid by someone else (and if they are not licensed they can and will likely be sued for it...).
[QUOTE]They are not creating cold fusion, nor feeding the hungry. They index lots of stuff and release free cool software. That's all![/QUOTE]
They actually are probably a huge contributor to the rate of research since they have enable researchers to more quickly find information. We are talking many millions of research ours saved.
Better search tools are extremely important to nearly every research project.
[QUOTE]I am probably not the smartest person in the world, and I have no programming experience what so ever. What I am looking for, is some easy language to either script or program. Would python provide a good starting environment? Have any of you been at my level, then learned python?[/QUOTE]
For Blender, Python is our embeded scripting language. We have had a number of artists who came from knowing nothing about programming to writing some useful tools and scripts. It is very easy for non programmers to pick up. Also for experienced programmers, it makes things easy to do 'the right way' ie using the intuitive and correct data structure.
Apparently Blender is indeed included as well as other 3D software, my confusion occured due to the layout of the website
under the link software where the website claims to list all included software, a number of software items are missing. So either the section is incomplete or out of date, or perhaps a mistranslation or other meaning.
In your description you state "for 2D, 3D, Audio and Video pre and post production.", yet I don't see any 3d software listed under your software listings, in particular I don't see Blender which is by far the most robust 3D content creation application available as free software on Linux. It also has a significant role in 2D illustration work (ie creating complex textures and shading for 3d text, or creating a rough overview of shading and texturing for a scene via a 3d rendering and then filling in details in your 2d tool). Also it has video editing and compositing features.
Slashdot Mirror
[QUOTE]You don't have to be faster than the killer robot.
:)
You just need to be faster than that any other humans you happen to be with.[/QUOTE]
That only works if the killer robot can't catch up with you after killing the other humans
LetterRip
[QUOTE]I wonder if the reason for this is that the slow starters grow up thinking they are not that smart. [/QUOTE]
:) You might want to read the article,
Has nothing to do with that
[QUOTE]The smartest 7-year-olds tended to start out with a relatively thinner cortex that thickened rapidly, peaking by age 11 or 12 before thinning. In their peers with average IQ, an initially thicker cortex peaked by age 8, with gradual thinning thereafter.[/QUOTE]
The 'slow start' is on the thickness of the cortex, they had higher IQs at the lower (age 7) age when they had the thinner cortex than the lower IQ children at the same age.
LetterRip
That only works if they can work with peoples existing music collections.
People have already bought a massive amount of music through itunes. Thus for those with an itunes locked in collection, it will need to be compatible with Apples DRM. So sony and motorola have to either partner with Apple, figure out a way to migrate Apples DRMed files to their service without an Apple partnership, or go after those individuals which have yet to purchase music through itunes, or who went with one of the competing services.
LetterRip
I download movies legally nearly daily, http://movielink.com/ is extremely convenient and for the movies I rent (the daily special usually or 50% discount) is as cheap or cheaper than blockbuster.
Download size is 1 GB typically, it takes between an hour and two hours to download. You can output to your TV if you so desire, and resolution looks good enough that it probably would look fine on most TVs.
LetterRip
[QUOTE]it's more that investors are not going to be pleased knowing that $1 billion/year is disappearing without any return on it. [/QUOTE]
The return is in that they can stunt competition - they desperately do not want competitors to be able to interoperate otherwise they risk losing their monopoly. If there were truly no return, then they would have made the change shortly after the initial request.
LetterRip
[QUOTE]Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?[/QUOTE]
The confusion is over the lay usage and the scientific usage of evolution. Lay usage usually implys an 'improvement' in the genome, whereas scientific usage is 'a change in allelle frequency over time' which can be due to 'selective pressure' resulting in differential reproductive success (and hence likely an 'improvement') or due to genetic drift, etc.. Selective pressures resulting in 'differential reproductive success' are not much of a factor for many modern humans. So if you are using evolution in the lay sense it has 'largely stopped' (though not completely see for instance what is likely to happen in Korea or China where the male to female ratio is hugely out of balance; or in Africa with HIV), even if it will inevitably continue to 'evolve' in the scientific sense.
LetterRip
and from a previous slashdot article,
9 51202&mode=nocomment
[QUOTE]Within the world of electronic voting, though, eVACS (for "Electronic Voting and Counting System") has been a rare success story both for open source development methodology and for the benefits that electronic voting can offer. The first generation of eVACS (running on Debian Linux machines) was developed starting in March 2001 in response to a request for bids by the Australian Capitol Territory Electoral Commission (ACTEC), and it was done on a budget of only AUS$200,000.
(The Australian Capitol Territory includes Australia's capitol city, Canberra, as well as surrounding suburbs and Namadgi National Park.)
Besides a respectable list of features driven by ACTEC's initial requirements (like support for 12 voting languages, and audio support for blind voters), eVACS has an advantage not enjoyed by many electronic voting systems: it's been successfully, uneventfully used to gather votes in a national election. The election in which it played a part went smoothly, and the eVACS system itself functioned as hoped.[/QUOTE]
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/04/1
EVACS started open source under the GPL - but closed the source at a later point.
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/EVACS.html
It is made in Australia, and I was of the impression has been used in elections already.
LetterRip
Isn't using the GIMP as an example a poor idea? No disrespect intended but I got the impression that they have had all sorts of issues with missing schedules, difficulties migrating to planned technologies, high overturn of individuals working on key technologies, etc.
LetterRip
antibiotics you attempt to mimimize usage and new antibiotics would be 'last resort' so the profitability of antibiotics is very low. The market incentives just don't exist for them like they do for mass market repeat customer products like viagra.
Antibiotics are more suited for government and non profit development.
LetterRip
[QUOTE]The line between hardcore developers and the average Joe will start to get very fuzzy[/QUOTE]
Not really - the hardore devs will be far more productive and be able to implement complex programs requiring algorithmic insight, the joes will be able to to implement stuff that requires simple logic and interfaces. Of course there will be lots of useful stuff that a joe could do, it just won't be the same kinds of stuff that the hardcore dev will be doing.
LetterRip
Even if I never use 'all the features' there is a good chance a client, business partner, or coworker does.
So some way to make use of that feature may be a business requirement whether I plan on using it or not.
LetterRip
[QUOTE]...considering Yahoo's music service uses a propretary media player (Yahoo's) with a propretary DRM implementation (Microsoft's) on the subscription model where your music is all deleted when you cancel your subscription... by DRM.[/QUOTE]
:)
Not really when you translate what he says to [QUOTE]Our DRM is incompatible with the iPod which really sucks for us[/QUOTE], it makes perfect sense
[QUOTE]Electrical heating, electrical rail road engines, electrical cars would've made far more economic sense if electricity was as cheap and abundant as nuclear power can make it.[/QUOTE]
w orld_stories.shtml
Even with the cheapest cents per watt hour, nuclear still isn't competitive with modern coal plants. You haven't offered anything that would suggest that we should be able to get cheap energy from nuclear (in the US).
[QUOTE]That's the point. Greenpeace's et al.'s passionate protests make the nuclear power's cost much higher financially. [/QUOTE]
While lawsuits from 'green' organizations make plant construction more costly (due to delays), I seriously doubt they are a significant factor.
[QUOTE]Even worse -- politically it was prohibitively expensive for decades.[/QUOTE]
They still recieved substantial government funding for research in reducing costs, etc. If it isn't economically cost effective, what does it matter the political costs?
[QUOTE]Now that Chinese (no more willing to depend on foreign fuel suppliers, than us) are about to build dozens of new nuclear plants (Toshiba's main motivation for this purchase), the world is suddenly reconsidering...[/QUOTE]
Chinas interest in nuclear is because for them coal has recently become increasingly more expensive and in short supply, whereas nuclear has had a steadily dropping price. If your coal is expensive then nuclear becomes much more attractive. If nuclear continues to drop in price it also becomes more attractive.
http://www.china.org.cn/english/BAT/124955.htm
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/030205_
[QUOTE]I wonder, then, why do Chinese plan to build dozens of nuclear plants by 2020? Do they know something, you don't?[/QUOTE]
No, they know something that you don't - namely that they are having difficulty meeting demand for their coal production needs, (see above) which is causing a steady and strong increase in coal prices. Also that the cost of nuclear power has been steadily decreasing. Given the huge projected energy demand that China faces, and the serious liklihood of being unable to meet demand with coal (and already they are close to maximum energy available for hydroelectric) limits them to nuclear energy.
Also a large portion of the initial capital outlay for building a nuclear powerplant is the labor required. Chinas labor costs are quite a bit cheaper than those of the US. Also as a government it is able to commission a large number of plants simultaneously giving a great deal of economy of scale.
Thus for China to try and meet a larger percentage of its energy needs by 2020 makes quite a bit of sense.
Also since China is a large exporter of coal as well as consumer they're reduced export capacity due to local consumption also drives up foreign prices. Leading to a knock on impact on price for other countries and thus an increased interest in nuclear.
For other countries such as the US that have large coal reserves, the greatly improved nuclear power plant designs that have come out over the past three years finally bring down the capital costs to where they are more reasonable. Of course the US has large reserves of coal with no threat of shortages - however there are not good reserves of low sulfur coal which is desirable to reduce acid rain (and while regular sulphur content coal can be processed to low sulphur it does increase the cost...).
LetterRip
[QUOTE]If not for the hysterical campaigns against nuclear energy, we would not be having this awful dependency on oil and other grossly unhealthy fossil fuels...[/QUOTE]
Nuclear is currently used primarily for non transport energy so would have near zero impact on our oil dependency unless and until we switch to hyrogen for transport and use nuclear energy as the source to generate the hydrogen. Non transport energy sector is dominated by coal for electricty and natural gas.
The cost per kWh for nuclear is more expensive than coal for total costs. You need to include all costs for an accurate comparision, this site includes all costs (some are pretty far off - ie capital costs for coal are substantially cheaper than a nuclear) your typical pro nuclear site excludes many of the larger costs such as the cost of capital, and usually just include fuel + operation and maintenance costs.
http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/costs.htm
[QUOTE]It seriously set the nuclear power industry back, which is a shame. Old plants continue to operate, but new ones are very slow to appear. Safe and non-polluting technologies were available for decades and we are wising up to using them only now.[/QUOTE]
Capital costs are the major setback for nuclear, new designs have lowered the capital costs, that is the real reason for nuclears return to being considered. It has historically had a huge up front cost which has been heavily subsidized by most countries.
LetterRip
I think that Blender www.blender.org will become a major player in this niche. A completely free tool that any game maker can bundle with their game, that can do modeling, texturing (procedural, image or paint based), and rigging and animation.
LetterRip
I wonder what sort of case a developer of keyboards or mice, or controllers could make that the OS monopoly is being leveraged to limit competitors with their hardware.
LetterRip
[QUOTE]That's entirely untrue. You can easily spot the difference in smoothness between video captured in 24FPS and video captured in 60iFPS.
Try playing a video game at 25FPS, and then at 60FPS. Can't tell the difference? If you can't, you've got to be full of it.[/QUOTE]
You have confused video and video game - videos will tend to have good (or real) motion blur and hence can be percieved as smooth even at lower frame rates. Games tend to have poor if any motion blur, and thus need a much higher frame rate to appear smooth.
LetterRip
That is a really excellent layman summary of the licenses,
thanks,
LetterRip
What is interesting is that the 'or later' clause of GPL 2 - I would think means that GPL software used for previous DMCA encryption would be subject to GPL 3 disclaimer...
LetterRip
[QUOTE]I've always been under the impression that it would be fine to perform this live and play it for an audience but once you try to sell it as a record, you're going to face some serious liabilities. I've been in bands that have covered Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beatles, Beck, The Pixies, etc. and we've never got in trouble for playing them live at crowded bars. In fact, when you start out, it's advised to include about 50% originals and 50% covers so that the music is accessible to anyone who might be there just for a drink.[/QUOTE]
In the US the bar/restraunt/etc. is supposed to pay an annual licensing fee based on seating etc. to ASCAP. Your performace rights are being paid by someone else (and if they are not licensed they can and will likely be sued for it...).
LetterRip
[QUOTE]They are not creating cold fusion, nor feeding the hungry. They index lots of stuff and release free cool software. That's all![/QUOTE]
They actually are probably a huge contributor to the rate of research since they have enable researchers to more quickly find information. We are talking many millions of research ours saved.
Better search tools are extremely important to nearly every research project.
LetterRip
[QUOTE]I am probably not the smartest person in the world, and I have no programming experience what so ever. What I am looking for, is some easy language to either script or program. Would python provide a good starting environment? Have any of you been at my level, then learned python?[/QUOTE]
For Blender, Python is our embeded scripting language. We have had a number of artists who came from knowing nothing about programming to writing some useful tools and scripts. It is very easy for non programmers to pick up. Also for experienced programmers, it makes things easy to do 'the right way' ie using the intuitive and correct data structure.
LetterRip
Apparently Blender is indeed included as well as other 3D software, my confusion occured due to the layout of the website
under the link software where the website claims to list all included software, a number of software items are missing. So either the section is incomplete or out of date, or perhaps a mistranslation or other meaning.
My apologies for the confusion.
In your description you state "for 2D, 3D, Audio and Video pre and post production.", yet I don't see any 3d software listed under your software listings, in particular I don't see Blender which is by far the most robust 3D content creation application available as free software on Linux. It also has a significant role in 2D illustration work (ie creating complex textures and shading for 3d text, or creating a rough overview of shading and texturing for a scene via a 3d rendering and then filling in details in your 2d tool). Also it has video editing and compositing features.