In my experience, you have to just about double the processing power of a system before the difference becomes readily noticeable to the user. So if Wii is in fact 2 to 2.5 times as powerful as the GC, then it's fair to call Wii "only slightly better". Which means it's unlikely to WOW anybody.
But who cares? I love Nintendo's strategy with this system. An inexpensive console with fun and relatively simple games should do well. It's the same formula that propelled the NES.
Personally, I think too much graphic advancement may be making some games harder, or at least harder to get into. When you have too many objects on the screen, and those objects have more and more detail visible. . . It approaches sensory overload, and all the clutter becomes like camouflage. Older games had a very clean look because of their technical limitations, but that also made them easy for the player to deal with and get right to the gameplay mechanisms. Now you sometimes have to search through a graphical jungle to find the game.
The problem is, you can't really "broadcast" anything over the internet. It wasn't designed for that, it was designed for point-to-point transmission. You can try various ways to simulate a broadcast. . . You can send the same data multiple times, to multiple destinations, or you can even set up some peer-to-peer system like Bit Torrent. But in the end, it can't be as efficient as a true broadcast system where you send out ONE signal and it's picked up by thousands (or millions) of people.
Want to distribute HD video? We have a system already in place which can do that well, it's called Direct Broadcast Satellite.
The only problem with DBS is that, obviously, you are always sending the same signal to everybody. You can have lots of different channels, but still when you turn on the TV set you are still getting something that some broadcaster decided to put on at that time -- as opposed to something you asked for.
While a lot of smart people are trying to figure out how they can make the Internet more like a broadcast system, the DBS providers have been figuring out how to make their broadcasts more like the internet -- more personalized. Thus the ever-expanding number of channels. . . profusion of different subscription packages. . . pay-per-view events. . . all intended to disguise the fact that the same data stream is available to each DBS receiver. The expansion to multiple satellites and spot-beam transmission (for local channels) are also moves in this direction. And most of all, they've been putting DVRs into their receivers. This makes a huge difference to the user experience.
Just for the sake of debate, I'm going to disagree with everything. . .
There is a HUGE pent-up demand for Blu-Ray. The whole transition to HDTV has already been underway for years, large quantities of HD sets have been sold, and there's *still* no practical way to buy or rent movies for them. HDTV owners are crying for this, some of them would kill for it. The improvement in quality with Blu-Ray over DVD is *far* greater than the improvement of DVD over LaserDisc, which had already been around for many years -- and DVD crushed LD like crushing a bug.
Did 3DO really die out "pretty much completely due to price"? The first ones sold were too expensive, but the price rapidly plummeted to more sane levels -- and it still didn't become a success. Obviously there was something else besides price holding it back.
I'm not saying PS3 will be a raging success, I'm just saying I don't like simplistic arguments. There's always a way to spin them the other way.
You can certainly make a hybrid with a diesel engine. . . However, they don't gain as much efficiency. Gasoline engines perform best at a certain output level, and a hybrid system is able to balance the load on the engine. Diesel engines work well over a range of output levels, which is one reason they are more efficient to begin with, but also means you don't gain as much from hybridizing them.
AS for using the batteries in your electric or hybrid cars to balance the load on the electrical grid. . . I'm pretty skeptical of that idea, considering the energy conversion losses, and my general distrust of batteries with their witches brew of chemicals. If your hybrid car has supercapacitors or flywheels, then it might make more sense. (But why can't the power companies have their own load-balancing system?)
The UNH Biodiesel Group calculated that algae farms in the Mojave Desert alone could supply enough fuel to replace all the gasoline used in the USA. That was just an example to show the land-area requirements. In practice you would want algae cultivation spread out around the country. (The availability of waste feedstocks around the country is one reason.)
I like biodiesel as a long-term solution for several reasons. . .
Because an air-breathing engine draws much of its "fuel" mass from the air, it starts with a large advantage in energy density, and it will be hard for other energy sources -- batteries, supercapacitors, flywheels -- to ever compete.
Unlike hydrogen, we already have the infrastructure in place to handle, store and distribute biodiesel, and millions of vehicles that can already run off it, and the capacity to economically produce millions more of them.
Producing it from algae mimics the process by which petroleum originally formed, over the eons. It might seem unrealistic to produce enough biofuel on a year-by-year basis to replace the *millions* of years worth of petroleum that we routinely burn without thinking anything of it. . . But the natural processes that created petroleum were haphazard, and hardly what anyone would call efficient.
If you replace haphazard processes with specially selected (maybe genetically engineered) strains of algae kept in controlled conditions, with concentrated feed of nutrients and sunlight, the production capacity could be immense. So yeah, I think it can be done.
We might not ever see dirt-cheap fuel again, but I'm optimistic that we can come up with petroleum alternatives at a level that allows our economy and industry to keep on functioning.
The problem with our current reactors is that they only "burn" a small fraction of their nuclear fuel and leave the rest as waste. With reprocessing and more advanced reactor designs, it's possible to extract far more energy and leave behind waste that's not dangerous for anywhere near as long.
The highly radioactive stuff we're struggling to "entomb forever" at Yucca Mountain is probably the same stuff we'll be scrambling to dig up and use as fuel 50 years from now.
I will try to explain the "obsession" with electric cars. . .
If the oil runs out, and we have to switch to alternate energy sources, most of those sources (i.e. wind, solar, nuclear) don't produce fuel that you can put in a gas tank. They produce electricity. Thus the need for electric cars.
Biofuels or hydrogen fuel cells would be the other options. And they also are interesting.
As for why we "can't" build nuclear plants, or wind farms, or solar farms, or hydroelectric dams, etc. . . I suspect that will change when the real crunch hits. The people who are now protesting and blocking every project will fade back into the woodwork after being hit with a few extended blackouts.
I think you've been drinking too much of Matt Savinar's kook-aid. The man is a huckster, the product he's selling is The End Of The World, and he'll apply whatever spin is necessary to make the sale.
Today's battery technology is the main obstacle to electric cars. There's no question that batteries will improve, the only questions are how much and how soon? And there are alternative technologies. . . Supercapacitors look promising. The newest ones, in the lab, are achieving energy density similar to batteries -- but they recharge much faster, never wear out, and don't contain a witches brew of chemicals. Another potential is flywheel energy storage. Flywheels aren't there yet, but they are gradually being improved.
I do think that biodiesel is most promising in the long run, especially if it can be produced from algae. Savinar is quick to dismiss that idea with a haughty laugh and a wave of his hand, because it "has yet to produce a single drop of commercially available fuel". Well of course not, when oil is still cheap and plentiful. There's no incentive. But the research has been done, and on paper it looks like this should work. When the real crunch hits, someone will surely give it a try.
From the brief comment in the article about Chariots of the Gods, I think they might actually base it a lot on The Day the Gods Died. It's an obscure book that I was lucky enough to stumble across about 20 years go; it was written by Walter Ernsting -- a German SF author who was a big follower of Von Daniken.
The Day the Gods Died was about Ernsting's supposed encounter with aliens during WW2, and his attempts to track them down again after the war (using correspondence with Van Daniken as a guide!). It's written from a non-fiction "I was there" point of view, with the quaint old excuse that "I had to submit this to the publisher as fiction because nobody is ready to believe these things are real".
At the same time, it's a great adventure story with everything but the kitchen sink: an alien base on a mountaintop in the Swiss Alps (guarded by a yeti, no less!), an alien laser pistol that somebody accidentally dropped down a well (putting it just out of reach from investigators), a time machine hidden in a Peruvian pyramid. . . which conveniently collapses in on itself just *after* the human adventurers return from a visit to the ancient alien base there. Fun stuff!
You might say Ernsting treated Von Daniken's theories with the seriousness they deserved.
I hope Sci-Fi Channel follow Ernsting's story (as far as they can get away with, anyhow), it could make a good, fun mini-series.
The current methods of doing a lot of things are unsustainable, but so what? We'll adapt. Today's farming techniques are adapted to use lots of gasoline, fertilizer and pesticides because those things have been cheap and readily available. When they aren't anymore, then farming will adapt again.
Another point, the crops that are currently used to produce vegetable oil (particularly soybeans in the USA) are not the most efficient for that. In the long run, algae seem promising. They can grow and produce oil much faster and more efficiently than any vascular plants. Plus, they don't require arable farmland that might otherwise be used for growing food.
As for nuclear power. . . I think nuclear plants will be critical for meeting our electricity needs. I'm a bit more skeptical about powering vehicles with them, we haven't yet seen which technology will be most practical for replacing gasoline engines. Maybe it will be electric cars powered from supercapacitors or flywheels. Maybe it will be hydrogen fuel cells. Maybe it will be biodiesel. There's lots of horses in that race. The big advantage of biodiesel is that millions of vehicles on the road today can run off it, and the whole distribution system we already have can be used.
That's exactly what I was thinking while I read the article. No way would I ever return to a music player that requires me to carry discs around, and shuffle through them looking for whatever I want to hear. The genius of the iPod is that you put all your music -- everything you own -- onto your computer, in your iTunes library. Everything is organized in the computer. Then the iPod updates every time you charge it. It's effortless. Or at any rate, it's a lot less effort than trying to manage a shelf (or three shelves plus overflow, in my case) of physical CDs.
It's sort of like the difference between tivo and a VCR. Since I got my satellite receiver/recorder unit [disclaimer: not an actual Tivo(R)(TM) brand tivo], I can hardly imagine going through the hassle of recording something on videotape.
I even read somewhere that films made before the 1970's used film stock that does not have enough resolution to make use of HD. I don't know if this is true but it is certainly possible.
Not true. I'm pretty sure film dating back to at least the 1930s has definition comparable to HDTV, and certainly higher than DVD. Of course the condition of the film matters. . . An old faded, scratched-up, multi-generational film transferred to HD video will still look faded, scratched-up and blurry. The old films that get properly restored will look great. The other day I saw a restored version of My Fair Lady (1964) on HDNet Movies, and it looked fabulous.
HD videodiscs will be the last new format to bring significant improvements to the whole back catalog of movies. Once you're able to present them in a form very close to the movie theater experience, there's nowhere else to go with them. Future formats beyond HD might have 3D effects or they might match IMAX, but they won't make My Fair Lady look any better.
It's subtle, but I can see the difference between film transfers and HD that was shot digitally. Film transfers look like. . . film. I can see hints of grain and a slight softness. Digital video often has a high-contrast, razor-sharp look. Film transfers on HD are like watching a movie in a really nice movie theater (clean and well-focused projector, etc.). Digital video on HD is like more like looking through a window. Both of them blow DVD out of the water.
However, if I may wax philosophical for a moment. . . It's fair to say, when watching a movie I can easily forget about the HD eye candy and get wrapped up in the story -- arguably, that's what should happen. And I sometimes find that the experience after it's said and done isn't that much different from watching a DVD. Where HD really shines is for shows like Sunrise Earth, where there is no story and immersiveness is the whole point of the exercise.
It won't be the massive shake-up that DVD was but it will eventually flow into the next generation pretty smoothly.
I've got to admit, I've never really understood why DVD produced such a massive shake-up. The video and audio quality is no better than LaserDisc, which was around for years and years prior to DVD. DVDs at first were perhaps a bit less expensive than LDs, but it wasn't a huge difference. People will point to the convenience of the smaller format. . . That's true, but I have a hard time seeing how that explains the massive, rapid success of DVD relative to LD. There weren't any portable DVD players in the beginning, so size shouldn't have mattered that much.
Higher resolution did immediately mean a very significant increase in quality, for me. Maybe not "massive", I'm not sure that's possible. After all, once you've presented the movie in a form very close to how it appeared in theaters, there's nowhere else to go with it. To me, that's what I find compelling about HD.
DVD is not already high quality. It's basically NTSC quality. It's NTSC pushed to the limits, but it's still based on specs that came out of the 1950s. And it's blurry. The human eye has amazing ability to distinguish fine detail, an ability wasted on DVD. We shouldn't be stuck with blurry video right through the 21st Century just because of a standard set in the 1950s.
As for the quality of TV sets. . . TVs have improved massively in my memory. In the 1980s VHS quality was about all the majority of TV sets could handle. (Which may be one reason why LaserDisc didn't make a big splash, not to mention S-VHS.) After 20 years of making computer monitors to ever higher resolutions, the industry is now easily turning out TV sets that can show off everything HD video has to offer. And big. . . 25 inches was as big as they came in the old days, but it's been years now since I've had one smaller than 32 inches, and they go way up from there, for those with the money and the room for it.
You do have to adjust them. For a long time TV makers have shipped sets with the contrast turned way up (torch mode), sharpness turned way up, and red color over-emphasized (red push) because that's how you make your set stand out in a showroom. I think some of them may start backing off that practice with their HD sets. I hope so anyhow.
I really don't understand your argument there. First you say the difference is "obvious" and then in the same sentence you say that ". ..movies won't look any better past added 'crispness'. .."
If by "crispness" you mean higher resolution, then yes. . . That is exactly what Blu-Ray is supposed to offer over DVD. If there's anything else, of any significance, I haven't heard about it yet. And yes, it is "obvious" to most people. Why you need some kind of demonstration to prove something you already admitted is obvious, I can't fathom.
The car is built up from a K1 Attack kit, which is a European competitor to the Lotus Elise. The Attack began as a kit car, and they've only recently started selling already-built cars in Europe. The only way to get them in the USA is in kit form. The most immediately noticeable difference between the Elise and the Attack is that the Attack has no roof (and I presume no heat or A/C) and is strictly a fair-weather car. The Attack is far from being able to pass US safety regulations (bumper, crash testing, etc), which is one reason why it's only available here as a kit. Even the more highly-developed Elise needs a regulatory exemption to be sold here. Starting in 2007 we're supposed to see a redesigned Elise that actually meets US standards.
If I'd built the thing, I would have bypassed all the hybrid technology (which is mostly hype, IMHO) and simply dropped a turbo-diesel engine into the Attack. I'm hoping that Lotus might someday build a diesel-powered Elise, that would be interesting (but I've seen no hint that they're interested in doing it). VW have shown something similar in principle, it was their Eco-Racer concept car. But there's no telling whether they will produce it.
As for bio-fuels, I have this to say: ALGAE
It's true that soybeans are not the most efficient crop for making bio-diesel fuel. It's true that growing conventional crops requires burning a lot of fuel (not to mention pesticides & fertilizer) that detracts from your energy yield. And of course they would compete against food crops for arable land. That doesn't mean you can write off biofuel. We've had articles in the past here on Slashdot about growing algae for biodiesel fuel, but everybody forgets so quickly. Tsk.
Second Life is like the anti-WoW. It's like a mirror image of WoW.
Success in SL comes primarily from creating things, which is a largely (though not exclusively) solitary pursuit. You're allowed and encouraged to sell items, and exchange game money for real-life currency. Skill counts more than time spent in the game. You are allowed and encouraged to join multiple groups. There's little censorship (large areas of SL are "adult" rated). For every bad lesson of WoW exposed in that article, SL appears to teach a corresponding good lesson.
One problem is, it's not always easy to figure out which hardware has DRM support built into it. Computer makers have been sneaky about this. I'm sure I'd like to get the latest and most advanced kit that came out before they started embedding Trusted Computing into it. But I don't even know if my current computer has it. I suspect it doesn't, but I don't know where to look for that information.
> What alternative do you propose? Panic, perhaps? Socialism?
You don't understand. . . The "alternative" being proposed by the worst of these doomsayers is that we all lay down and die. Our civilization crumbles and the scattered survivors live out the remainder of their days fighting for scraps in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of a Mad Max movie.
I would be far more interested in seeing how well WINE or something like iEmulator can work on it. Even if you got dual-booting to work, it's really a pain in the neck isn't it? I mean, who wants to restart their computer just to run a Windows app or two? That would be like a throwback to the early 1980s -- like my old Atari 800, where running a new program usually meant swapping disks and restarting the machine.
What chaps my hide the most is the loss of the Terrestrial Planet Finder. That's the one project with the biggest potential to change the whole way we look at the universe and our place in it. It could be the biggest thing since Galileo pointed his telescope at the planets and discovered they were worlds, they were places, not just specks of light.
Can you think of anything that would light up the public's imagination, and interest in space exploration, more than finding Earth-like planets? Even if we didn't have any clear idea how to reach them, just knowing they exist would be huge.
If I were calling the shots, we would fly one more mission with the existing shuttle -- to service Hubble -- and then pack the shuttles off to museums. This whole mad scramble to update the shuttle and make it safe to fly, just when we are on the verge of retiring it, is ridiculous.
As for ISS, I say let's put it in mothballs until the CEV is ready -- and then restart ISS only if we can figure out what we're really going to use it for. Yeah, I know we have international agreements involving the ISS. We can re-negotiate them. Our partners have to realize the old plan no longer makes sense, if it ever did.
Performance might sometimes be a concern, depending on the nature of the app. Probably a bigger problem with any interpreted language is security. Maybe, just maybe, I don't want everybody out there picking over my source code and making changes to the program. I don't know if Ruby or Python have any way to tokenize or obfuscate source code -- but with a compiled language, it's clearly not something I need to worry about.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, you have to just about double the processing power of a system before the difference becomes readily noticeable to the user. So if Wii is in fact 2 to 2.5 times as powerful as the GC, then it's fair to call Wii "only slightly better". Which means it's unlikely to WOW anybody.
But who cares? I love Nintendo's strategy with this system. An inexpensive console with fun and relatively simple games should do well. It's the same formula that propelled the NES.
Personally, I think too much graphic advancement may be making some games harder, or at least harder to get into. When you have too many objects on the screen, and those objects have more and more detail visible. . . It approaches sensory overload, and all the clutter becomes like camouflage. Older games had a very clean look because of their technical limitations, but that also made them easy for the player to deal with and get right to the gameplay mechanisms. Now you sometimes have to search through a graphical jungle to find the game.
The problem is, you can't really "broadcast" anything over the internet. It wasn't designed for that, it was designed for point-to-point transmission. You can try various ways to simulate a broadcast. . . You can send the same data multiple times, to multiple destinations, or you can even set up some peer-to-peer system like Bit Torrent. But in the end, it can't be as efficient as a true broadcast system where you send out ONE signal and it's picked up by thousands (or millions) of people.
Want to distribute HD video? We have a system already in place which can do that well, it's called Direct Broadcast Satellite.
The only problem with DBS is that, obviously, you are always sending the same signal to everybody. You can have lots of different channels, but still when you turn on the TV set you are still getting something that some broadcaster decided to put on at that time -- as opposed to something you asked for.
While a lot of smart people are trying to figure out how they can make the Internet more like a broadcast system, the DBS providers have been figuring out how to make their broadcasts more like the internet -- more personalized. Thus the ever-expanding number of channels. . . profusion of different subscription packages. . . pay-per-view events. . . all intended to disguise the fact that the same data stream is available to each DBS receiver. The expansion to multiple satellites and spot-beam transmission (for local channels) are also moves in this direction. And most of all, they've been putting DVRs into their receivers. This makes a huge difference to the user experience.
Just for the sake of debate, I'm going to disagree with everything. . .
There is a HUGE pent-up demand for Blu-Ray. The whole transition to HDTV has already been underway for years, large quantities of HD sets have been sold, and there's *still* no practical way to buy or rent movies for them. HDTV owners are crying for this, some of them would kill for it. The improvement in quality with Blu-Ray over DVD is *far* greater than the improvement of DVD over LaserDisc, which had already been around for many years -- and DVD crushed LD like crushing a bug.
Did 3DO really die out "pretty much completely due to price"? The first ones sold were too expensive, but the price rapidly plummeted to more sane levels -- and it still didn't become a success. Obviously there was something else besides price holding it back.
I'm not saying PS3 will be a raging success, I'm just saying I don't like simplistic arguments. There's always a way to spin them the other way.
You can certainly make a hybrid with a diesel engine. . . However, they don't gain as much efficiency. Gasoline engines perform best at a certain output level, and a hybrid system is able to balance the load on the engine. Diesel engines work well over a range of output levels, which is one reason they are more efficient to begin with, but also means you don't gain as much from hybridizing them.
AS for using the batteries in your electric or hybrid cars to balance the load on the electrical grid. . . I'm pretty skeptical of that idea, considering the energy conversion losses, and my general distrust of batteries with their witches brew of chemicals. If your hybrid car has supercapacitors or flywheels, then it might make more sense. (But why can't the power companies have their own load-balancing system?)
The UNH Biodiesel Group calculated that algae farms in the Mojave Desert alone could supply enough fuel to replace all the gasoline used in the USA. That was just an example to show the land-area requirements. In practice you would want algae cultivation spread out around the country. (The availability of waste feedstocks around the country is one reason.)
I like biodiesel as a long-term solution for several reasons. . .
Because an air-breathing engine draws much of its "fuel" mass from the air, it starts with a large advantage in energy density, and it will be hard for other energy sources -- batteries, supercapacitors, flywheels -- to ever compete.
Unlike hydrogen, we already have the infrastructure in place to handle, store and distribute biodiesel, and millions of vehicles that can already run off it, and the capacity to economically produce millions more of them.
Producing it from algae mimics the process by which petroleum originally formed, over the eons. It might seem unrealistic to produce enough biofuel on a year-by-year basis to replace the *millions* of years worth of petroleum that we routinely burn without thinking anything of it. . . But the natural processes that created petroleum were haphazard, and hardly what anyone would call efficient.
If you replace haphazard processes with specially selected (maybe genetically engineered) strains of algae kept in controlled conditions, with concentrated feed of nutrients and sunlight, the production capacity could be immense. So yeah, I think it can be done.
We might not ever see dirt-cheap fuel again, but I'm optimistic that we can come up with petroleum alternatives at a level that allows our economy and industry to keep on functioning.
The problem with our current reactors is that they only "burn" a small fraction of their nuclear fuel and leave the rest as waste. With reprocessing and more advanced reactor designs, it's possible to extract far more energy and leave behind waste that's not dangerous for anywhere near as long.
The highly radioactive stuff we're struggling to "entomb forever" at Yucca Mountain is probably the same stuff we'll be scrambling to dig up and use as fuel 50 years from now.
I will try to explain the "obsession" with electric cars. . .
If the oil runs out, and we have to switch to alternate energy sources, most of those sources (i.e. wind, solar, nuclear) don't produce fuel that you can put in a gas tank. They produce electricity. Thus the need for electric cars.
Biofuels or hydrogen fuel cells would be the other options. And they also are interesting.
As for why we "can't" build nuclear plants, or wind farms, or solar farms, or hydroelectric dams, etc. . . I suspect that will change when the real crunch hits. The people who are now protesting and blocking every project will fade back into the woodwork after being hit with a few extended blackouts.
I think you've been drinking too much of Matt Savinar's kook-aid. The man is a huckster, the product he's selling is The End Of The World, and he'll apply whatever spin is necessary to make the sale.
Today's battery technology is the main obstacle to electric cars. There's no question that batteries will improve, the only questions are how much and how soon? And there are alternative technologies. . . Supercapacitors look promising. The newest ones, in the lab, are achieving energy density similar to batteries -- but they recharge much faster, never wear out, and don't contain a witches brew of chemicals. Another potential is flywheel energy storage. Flywheels aren't there yet, but they are gradually being improved.
I do think that biodiesel is most promising in the long run, especially if it can be produced from algae. Savinar is quick to dismiss that idea with a haughty laugh and a wave of his hand, because it "has yet to produce a single drop of commercially available fuel". Well of course not, when oil is still cheap and plentiful. There's no incentive. But the research has been done, and on paper it looks like this should work. When the real crunch hits, someone will surely give it a try.
From the brief comment in the article about Chariots of the Gods, I think they might actually base it a lot on The Day the Gods Died. It's an obscure book that I was lucky enough to stumble across about 20 years go; it was written by Walter Ernsting -- a German SF author who was a big follower of Von Daniken.
The Day the Gods Died was about Ernsting's supposed encounter with aliens during WW2, and his attempts to track them down again after the war (using correspondence with Van Daniken as a guide!). It's written from a non-fiction "I was there" point of view, with the quaint old excuse that "I had to submit this to the publisher as fiction because nobody is ready to believe these things are real".
At the same time, it's a great adventure story with everything but the kitchen sink: an alien base on a mountaintop in the Swiss Alps (guarded by a yeti, no less!), an alien laser pistol that somebody accidentally dropped down a well (putting it just out of reach from investigators), a time machine hidden in a Peruvian pyramid. . . which conveniently collapses in on itself just *after* the human adventurers return from a visit to the ancient alien base there. Fun stuff!
You might say Ernsting treated Von Daniken's theories with the seriousness they deserved.
I hope Sci-Fi Channel follow Ernsting's story (as far as they can get away with, anyhow), it could make a good, fun mini-series.
The current methods of doing a lot of things are unsustainable, but so what? We'll adapt. Today's farming techniques are adapted to use lots of gasoline, fertilizer and pesticides because those things have been cheap and readily available. When they aren't anymore, then farming will adapt again.
Another point, the crops that are currently used to produce vegetable oil (particularly soybeans in the USA) are not the most efficient for that. In the long run, algae seem promising. They can grow and produce oil much faster and more efficiently than any vascular plants. Plus, they don't require arable farmland that might otherwise be used for growing food.
As for nuclear power. . . I think nuclear plants will be critical for meeting our electricity needs. I'm a bit more skeptical about powering vehicles with them, we haven't yet seen which technology will be most practical for replacing gasoline engines. Maybe it will be electric cars powered from supercapacitors or flywheels. Maybe it will be hydrogen fuel cells. Maybe it will be biodiesel. There's lots of horses in that race. The big advantage of biodiesel is that millions of vehicles on the road today can run off it, and the whole distribution system we already have can be used.
Before we get worked up into a frenzy over the impending doom from global warming, let's consider the other side of the issue. . .
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http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2005-03-06-
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220
That's exactly what I was thinking while I read the article. No way would I ever return to a music player that requires me to carry discs around, and shuffle through them looking for whatever I want to hear. The genius of the iPod is that you put all your music -- everything you own -- onto your computer, in your iTunes library. Everything is organized in the computer. Then the iPod updates every time you charge it. It's effortless. Or at any rate, it's a lot less effort than trying to manage a shelf (or three shelves plus overflow, in my case) of physical CDs.
It's sort of like the difference between tivo and a VCR. Since I got my satellite receiver/recorder unit [disclaimer: not an actual Tivo(R)(TM) brand tivo], I can hardly imagine going through the hassle of recording something on videotape.
Not true. I'm pretty sure film dating back to at least the 1930s has definition comparable to HDTV, and certainly higher than DVD. Of course the condition of the film matters. . . An old faded, scratched-up, multi-generational film transferred to HD video will still look faded, scratched-up and blurry. The old films that get properly restored will look great. The other day I saw a restored version of My Fair Lady (1964) on HDNet Movies, and it looked fabulous.
HD videodiscs will be the last new format to bring significant improvements to the whole back catalog of movies. Once you're able to present them in a form very close to the movie theater experience, there's nowhere else to go with them. Future formats beyond HD might have 3D effects or they might match IMAX, but they won't make My Fair Lady look any better.
It's subtle, but I can see the difference between film transfers and HD that was shot digitally. Film transfers look like. . . film. I can see hints of grain and a slight softness. Digital video often has a high-contrast, razor-sharp look. Film transfers on HD are like watching a movie in a really nice movie theater (clean and well-focused projector, etc.). Digital video on HD is like more like looking through a window. Both of them blow DVD out of the water.
However, if I may wax philosophical for a moment. . . It's fair to say, when watching a movie I can easily forget about the HD eye candy and get wrapped up in the story -- arguably, that's what should happen. And I sometimes find that the experience after it's said and done isn't that much different from watching a DVD. Where HD really shines is for shows like Sunrise Earth, where there is no story and immersiveness is the whole point of the exercise.
I've got to admit, I've never really understood why DVD produced such a massive shake-up. The video and audio quality is no better than LaserDisc, which was around for years and years prior to DVD. DVDs at first were perhaps a bit less expensive than LDs, but it wasn't a huge difference. People will point to the convenience of the smaller format. . . That's true, but I have a hard time seeing how that explains the massive, rapid success of DVD relative to LD. There weren't any portable DVD players in the beginning, so size shouldn't have mattered that much.
Higher resolution did immediately mean a very significant increase in quality, for me. Maybe not "massive", I'm not sure that's possible. After all, once you've presented the movie in a form very close to how it appeared in theaters, there's nowhere else to go with it. To me, that's what I find compelling about HD.
DVD is not already high quality. It's basically NTSC quality. It's NTSC pushed to the limits, but it's still based on specs that came out of the 1950s. And it's blurry. The human eye has amazing ability to distinguish fine detail, an ability wasted on DVD. We shouldn't be stuck with blurry video right through the 21st Century just because of a standard set in the 1950s.
As for the quality of TV sets. . . TVs have improved massively in my memory. In the 1980s VHS quality was about all the majority of TV sets could handle. (Which may be one reason why LaserDisc didn't make a big splash, not to mention S-VHS.) After 20 years of making computer monitors to ever higher resolutions, the industry is now easily turning out TV sets that can show off everything HD video has to offer. And big. . . 25 inches was as big as they came in the old days, but it's been years now since I've had one smaller than 32 inches, and they go way up from there, for those with the money and the room for it.
You do have to adjust them. For a long time TV makers have shipped sets with the contrast turned way up (torch mode), sharpness turned way up, and red color over-emphasized (red push) because that's how you make your set stand out in a showroom. I think some of them may start backing off that practice with their HD sets. I hope so anyhow.
I really don't understand your argument there. First you say the difference is "obvious" and then in the same sentence you say that ". . .movies won't look any better past added 'crispness'. . ."
If by "crispness" you mean higher resolution, then yes. . . That is exactly what Blu-Ray is supposed to offer over DVD. If there's anything else, of any significance, I haven't heard about it yet. And yes, it is "obvious" to most people. Why you need some kind of demonstration to prove something you already admitted is obvious, I can't fathom.
Do most people you know suffer from severe cataracts?
The difference between DVD and HD quality is quite distinct to me.
The car is built up from a K1 Attack kit, which is a European competitor to the Lotus Elise. The Attack began as a kit car, and they've only recently started selling already-built cars in Europe. The only way to get them in the USA is in kit form. The most immediately noticeable difference between the Elise and the Attack is that the Attack has no roof (and I presume no heat or A/C) and is strictly a fair-weather car. The Attack is far from being able to pass US safety regulations (bumper, crash testing, etc), which is one reason why it's only available here as a kit. Even the more highly-developed Elise needs a regulatory exemption to be sold here. Starting in 2007 we're supposed to see a redesigned Elise that actually meets US standards.
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If I'd built the thing, I would have bypassed all the hybrid technology (which is mostly hype, IMHO) and simply dropped a turbo-diesel engine into the Attack. I'm hoping that Lotus might someday build a diesel-powered Elise, that would be interesting (but I've seen no hint that they're interested in doing it). VW have shown something similar in principle, it was their Eco-Racer concept car. But there's no telling whether they will produce it.
As for bio-fuels, I have this to say: ALGAE
It's true that soybeans are not the most efficient crop for making bio-diesel fuel. It's true that growing conventional crops requires burning a lot of fuel (not to mention pesticides & fertilizer) that detracts from your energy yield. And of course they would compete against food crops for arable land. That doesn't mean you can write off biofuel. We've had articles in the past here on Slashdot about growing algae for biodiesel fuel, but everybody forgets so quickly. Tsk.
Biodiesel from algae:
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
http://www.greenfuelonline.com/
VW Ecoracer:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/12/vw_ecorac
Second Life is like the anti-WoW. It's like a mirror image of WoW.
Success in SL comes primarily from creating things, which is a largely (though not exclusively) solitary pursuit. You're allowed and encouraged to sell items, and exchange game money for real-life currency. Skill counts more than time spent in the game. You are allowed and encouraged to join multiple groups. There's little censorship (large areas of SL are "adult" rated). For every bad lesson of WoW exposed in that article, SL appears to teach a corresponding good lesson.
One problem is, it's not always easy to figure out which hardware has DRM support built into it. Computer makers have been sneaky about this. I'm sure I'd like to get the latest and most advanced kit that came out before they started embedding Trusted Computing into it. But I don't even know if my current computer has it. I suspect it doesn't, but I don't know where to look for that information.
> What alternative do you propose? Panic, perhaps? Socialism?
You don't understand. . . The "alternative" being proposed by the worst of these doomsayers is that we all lay down and die. Our civilization crumbles and the scattered survivors live out the remainder of their days fighting for scraps in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of a Mad Max movie.
I would be far more interested in seeing how well WINE or something like iEmulator can work on it. Even if you got dual-booting to work, it's really a pain in the neck isn't it? I mean, who wants to restart their computer just to run a Windows app or two? That would be like a throwback to the early 1980s -- like my old Atari 800, where running a new program usually meant swapping disks and restarting the machine.
> As far as I can tell, the MacBook lacks any kind of feature that sets it apart, other than running MacOS X.
Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?
What chaps my hide the most is the loss of the Terrestrial Planet Finder. That's the one project with the biggest potential to change the whole way we look at the universe and our place in it. It could be the biggest thing since Galileo pointed his telescope at the planets and discovered they were worlds, they were places, not just specks of light.
Can you think of anything that would light up the public's imagination, and interest in space exploration, more than finding Earth-like planets? Even if we didn't have any clear idea how to reach them, just knowing they exist would be huge.
If I were calling the shots, we would fly one more mission with the existing shuttle -- to service Hubble -- and then pack the shuttles off to museums. This whole mad scramble to update the shuttle and make it safe to fly, just when we are on the verge of retiring it, is ridiculous.
As for ISS, I say let's put it in mothballs until the CEV is ready -- and then restart ISS only if we can figure out what we're really going to use it for. Yeah, I know we have international agreements involving the ISS. We can re-negotiate them. Our partners have to realize the old plan no longer makes sense, if it ever did.
Performance might sometimes be a concern, depending on the nature of the app. Probably a bigger problem with any interpreted language is security. Maybe, just maybe, I don't want everybody out there picking over my source code and making changes to the program. I don't know if Ruby or Python have any way to tokenize or obfuscate source code -- but with a compiled language, it's clearly not something I need to worry about.