Actually, I'm just repeating what some professional Mac game developers have been saying, from quotes and interviews that got posted on IMG and other such places. I don't remember if any of them worked for Aspyr, and I don't know what Aspyr have been saying in their newsletters. Care to summarize for us? I'd be interested in hearing about it, if you can quell the hostile attitude long enough.
As for WINE being half-assed. . . I don't know, we'll see how that goes. WINE project isn't there yet, as it stands today, but I wouldn't write them off. X86-based Macs aren't here today either. Give them both a year or two to mature, and something good might come of it.
Here's news for you. . . The Mac game-porting houses (MacSoft, MacPlay, Aspyr, etc) already have their own in-house DirectX-to-OpenGL porting tools and libraries. And the move to X86 processors will help some. . . It'll resolve those nagging "endian" data issues, at any rate. (Unless you want to port a game from one of the new PowerPC-based game consoles! Ouch!) But it won't solve all their problems and it won't solve them very soon. The X86 transition hasn't even *started* yet, and they'll have to continue supporting PowerPC for several years to come.
Frankly, I'm more interested in seeing some gaming solution like WINE to let Mac OS X86 play most Windows games. Admittedly it might make MacPlay and MacSoft obsolete, but would that really be so bad? Maybe those companies could turn their energies toward creating new games instead of porting.
Can you elaborate on the "starving MacOS developer" comment? From what I've heard, Mac software business is going pretty well these days -- and not plagued by kinds of costs and cut-throat competition that Windows developers face.
Blizzard have supported the Mac long before WoW, that hasn't changed. Game support for Mac is still crummy on the whole, that hasn't changed either. In fact, WoW is one of a remarkably small minority of MMOGs that run on the Mac. I can might near count them on one hand.
SWG? No. . . EQ2? No. . .
Does anyone remember when Bungie was first and foremost a Mac developer? We were all talking about how Halo was going to sell Macs. So much for that plan.
Does anyone remember when Connectix Virtual Gamestation was going to make the Mac an attractive gaming platform, because it could run most Playstation games? Then Sony bought CVGS from Connectix and buried it.
I understand Civilization 4 and Call of Duty 2 were recently released for the PC. How many months will it be before they appear on Macintosh? How many features (like editors) will be left out of the Mac version, while we still have to pay full price?
So . . . I really don't see any upswing in Mac game development, much as I might wish for it. Computer gaming still completely revolves around Microsoft (and DirectX), Macs aren't on the radar screen of most game companies -- and if the Mac platform does accidentally get something good, there are always entities like Microsoft and Sony standing ready to buy and/or bury it.
I'm really not trying to rip on the Mac here at all. I'm just being realistic and telling what experience has shown. Games are the one big area where the Mac is weak, and I don't see anything in the works to change it. Apple could do some things to change it, but gaming just isn't in their corporate DNA.
For whatever its worth (not much to most people, I guess), the animated series was released some years back as a boxed set of Laserdiscs. You remember Laserdiscs, right? They were just as good as DVDs in most respects, only bigger. And yes, I have the discs, I just don't have a working LD player at the moment.
Wouldn't it be more productive to write to the US Dept. of Justice and urge them to open an investigation? They bust hackers who turn loose worms, they should be able to bust Sony for distributing trojan malware on their audio CDs. Putting a few Sony execs in a federal pen ought to *really* get the message across.
But haven't Apple already done practically the same thing by supporting Java apps as "first class citizens" in Mac OS X? Many of these programs are not particularly Mac-like, but the ability to run them transparently is still considered a selling point.
EULAs are money-making scams, and the victims are the gullible companies who slap EULAs on their products. The person who profits is the lawyer who convinced the company that they need a EULA to protect themselves from . . . whatever. Lawsuits, piracy, corporate espionage, legal liability, Al Qaeda, cosmics rays, etc. The lawyer paints a vision of a world full of risks which he can mitigate with a well-crafted EULA, for only a few thousand bucks.
And the companies pay. The lawyer gets his new Lexus, and the users are inconvenienced by having to click the "agree" button on a legal agreement that is, properly speaking, neither legal nor an agreement.
There's also an intimidation factor. The EULA doesn't have to be legally binding in order to have some effect on the behavior of users. If the company sends you a nasty-gram and threatens to sue you for violating the EULA, you don't want to be taken to court. Nobody does. Probably the company doesn't really want to go to court either, but are you willing to take that chance? Unfortunately, a large part of business in the USA is now based on this kind of intimidation tactic. Between companies it appears to be quite common. Between companies and customers it's less common, but hardly unknown.
If you study LED flashlights a bit, you'll find their strengths are long battery life and the quality of the beam -- not brightness. They produce a smoother and whiter-looking spot, and they don't become dim and yellowish as the batteries run down. But the sad fact is, one of the reasons the battery life is so good is because they simply don't put out as much light as incandescent.
If you want a good compromise, try to find a flashlight with green LEDs! They are more efficient, they're typically a lot brighter than white-LED lights. The only disadvantages are that you can't identify colors too well with it, and you can't get a tightly focused beam from a multiple-LED light. My favorite flashlight has 10 green LEDs. (I don't know what brand it is, it has NO markings, but it's the one from the Herrington catalog.) It puts out more light than any other LED light I've ever seen, but it's still no match for a halogen or krypton bulb with fresh batteries.
At the opposite extreme from LEDs are the Surefire lights. For sheer brightness, nothing else I've seen matches them, they're like palm-sized car headlights. The catch there is, you have to feed them expensive lithium batteries and you get only 15 minutes of light from a set!
I've been watching for developments in nanotech ever since Engines of Creation was published back in 1985. It was a highly influential book for me, and I'm sure for many others. Progress has been a lot slower than some of us expected or hoped. This "car" brings forth two different feelings. . .
First, a dejected sigh. It's not useful for anything, and it's a long, awfully long way from the sophisticated "assemblers" that Drexler foresaw 20 years ago, with their thousands (or millions?) of molecular components.
On the other hand. . . These guys have actually built a mechanism with multiple moving parts at the molecular level. This is the first thing I've seen that looks anything like "real" molecular nanotechnology, as opposed to mere nanoscale particles.
So, is the glass half empty or half full? There's a temptation to laugh at this pathetic little "car" today -- but future generations might look back and say this is where the nanotechnology revolution first germinated.:)
I've just been reading through the other comments, and it seems like there's a lot of ignorance about animals, guns, cryptozoology, etc. So here are my thoughts. . .
1. If it's real, it's a leopard. Pumas (i.e. cougars) don't come in black. There have been rumours and legends of black pumas for a long time, but nobody's ever shown one. Melanistic leopards -- popularly known as a black panther -- by comparison are well known.
2. Leopards or pumas could survive in Australia, it's not far-fetched at all. In the Americas, pumas live in almost every environment: jungles, swamps, forests, plains, deserts, mountains. They are highly adaptable. If you drop one into the Australian wilderness, it has no way of knowing that this is supposed to be an "alien and hostile" land.
3. It is plausible for the head to be destroyed by the rifle shot. It's not common, but depending on the caliber and bullet used, it could possibly happen.
4. There are hillbillies where I live in central Texas. Yes, when they see a strange animal, their first impulse is to shoot it. It's not just a stereotype. On the other hand, that doesn't mean this hunter was a hillbilly. Shooting a black panther in Australia would appear to be justified for a number of reasons: it's an invasive, non-native species, and of course you'd like to have some proof to show they're out there.
5. As described in the story, it's a shot somebody could make. It's not a shot everybody could make, but hunters vary widely in their marksmanship skills, their coolness under pressure, and their damn fool luck. Here in Texas, pumas get shot once in a while by a random hunter or rancher (i.e. someone who isn't actively hunting pumas or tracking them with dogs). It's quite rare, it happens maybe once in 20 or 30 years, but it happens.
The hoax question is an interesting one. . . My first reaction when I saw the photo was: Let's see the skeptics dismiss THIS! You just don't get clear photos of mythical animals, it doesn't happen. Plus the tail and pending DNA test. . .
Then I thought it over, and. . . Yeah, it could be a hoax. Assuming the tail really has been sent for DNA analysis, that should go a long way to settle the issue (though, it's always possible that he could have smuggled in a piece of a leopard's tail from somewhere).
The question becomes: if this isn't proof, what would be? Do you have to capture one alive and put it on display? And if you did, would someone then claim it was smuggled into the country, and it's still a hoax? If you've got an issue where some people consider it worthwhile to expend some effort to fool the public, then it's tough because they can be quite devious and ingenious in their hoaxing.
Actually. . . If I'm not mistaken it was church doctrine that the heavenly bodies -- including the sun and moon -- were perfect creations. The dark and light areas on the moon were assumed to be a blurry image of the Earth reflecting from the moon's flawless mirror surface. The various "seas", craters, and other lunar features weren't recognized and named until after the telescope came along.
Right now this is something only astronomers are really interested in. It's kind of sneaking under the radar of the public at large. They are going to get a big shock someday. When the first truly Earth-like planet is discovered, with unambiguous signs of a living biosphere (for example, lots of free oxygen in the atmosphere), the psychological impact will be huge.
You don't think so? You think it can't really matter because visiting such a planet, or even sending a robot probe, is too far beyond our capabilities? Logically that may be true, but there's more than logic at work.
Try to imagine what it was like when Galileo pointed his primitive telescope skyward and realized planets weren't mere specks of light -- there were worlds up there! Even though nobody had any idea how to reach them, everyone's view of the universe had to change. From Galileo's time right up through the early 20th century, imaginations ran wild, and every celestial sphere was imagined to be inhabited. There were jungles on Venus, canals on Mars!
In the last 60 years or so, in some ways our view of the universe has regressed. Now we've looked around our solar system, and it's been a bit of a letdown. Mere specks of light have been replaced by barren balls of rock, or ice, or gas. In their minds, people have started sliding outer space back into the category of the uninteresting and unimportant.
When the first news comes back of an Earth-like planet. . . when one is shown to have life. . . when we get a fuzzy image of another cloud-swirled blue marble out there somewhere. . . It'll be just like Galileo all over again. Nobody will have any clear idea how to reach those worlds, but imaginations will run wild. And I think that's a good thing.
Support for HD televisions is hugely important. You say HDTV penetration is tiny. . . One of the large problems holding back HDTV has been the lack of a videodisc format. This is a product HDTV owners are crying out for, and it will sell a ton of HD sets. In my opinion the HD transition has been handled badly and has been going far more slowly than it should -- but it's still going. HD videodiscs are needed, they are badly overdue.
What about DVD? You wrote, "Now, look at all the advantages of DVD over VHS that convinced the public to convert." But. . . DVD wasn't a replacement for VHS. VHS is a recordable format, which DVD isn't -- or wasn't, until recently. DVD was pretty much a direct replacement for LaserDisc. What did DVD offer that LD didn't? Smaller discs? That's pretty much it. LD limped along for years with 12-inch discs, then DVD came along with 5.25-inch discs (and otherwise very similar specs), and wiped out LD.
So, one possible lesson is that a new format doesn't really need to be hugely improved over its predecessor in order to be successful, if the stars are aligned right.
Will the Mac version of the game have the same editors and customization options as the PC version? Or will we -- once again -- be left without any tools? It's a story that has gotten old, old and hurtful, in the Macintosh world.
On a different topic. . . I was disappointed to read that Civ4 will have lots of animation. Animation is cool when it corresponds with the user doing something. But simply staring at the map while it's "working alive" with units going through their little motions is awful. That only makes it hard to find your cursor. It's like camouflage.
I'm highly skeptical of all the religious stuff. Seems like something else I'll have to micro-manage in a game I thought should be made more streamlined, not more complicated. Just another complicating factor I have no interest in, that my enemies can use against me. (like culture. . . only worse?)
What I would really love to see in the game is an optional "Empire mode". It would be a simplified game mode where all the micro-management is bypassed, and the focus is just on fighting a war. Instead of having to spend hours and hours building up your civilization first, you could dive into military conflict quickly.
I have a 44" Mitsubishi rear-projection CRT set in my workroom. The picture is good, the set didn't cost too much, but it's really bulky and overly large for my room. Plus it's a hassle keeping the convergence adjusted. Plus there's the worry about "burn-in" when watching too much 4:3 aspect ratio material. And it's necessary to turn out the room lights before it can look really good.
Recently we got a new Mitsubishi LT-3050 for the living room, a 30-inch LCD panel. Man, I've been blown away by this set! I started to adjust it using my AV test DVDs and color filters -- but all the adjustments were already dead on the money, as it came from the factory. No "torch mode" like CRTs usually have, there wasn't even any red push in the color decoder. I've never seen that before, never imagined I'd see that. It just plain looks better that my old set, and HD material looks stunning.
Somebody complained that LCD panels have crummy black level, it makes them look washed out. That is true if you try to dim the lights in your room the way you would with any conventional CRT-based set. The LCD is so bright, it looks great in a normally lighted room, in the daytime. Then the black level is not a problem, glare and reflections aren't a problem. You have to take a completely different mindset, you actually want the room lit up, not darkened like a movie theater.
Having said all that. . . I'm not thrilled with HDTV in general. Yes it looks fabulous when everything comes together -- when you actually get some HD content showing, and it hasn't been compressed to Hell and back. But there are still no HD videodiscs (and when they arrive, they'll have crazy DRM). HD channels on the satellite are very limited, and they all cost extra. HD broadcasts over-the-air are often messed up in one way or another. And there's still not a whole lot of good stuff to watch on TV, going to high def doesn't really solve that age-old problem.
The transition to HD has gone a lot slower than I hoped and expected, and it's really been a disappointment so far. I think the lack of HD videodiscs is the worst, but the whole thing is just going badly.
A lot of this will be echoing the comments of others, but here are my gripes. . .
I don't see how some of these shows even remotely qualify as science fiction. I mean. . . Xena? Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman? Buffy? Tales from the Crypt? Weeding these out, even if it meant reducing the list to a top-30 list, would have given us something more focused.
I would also weed out "anthology" shows just on principle, like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and even Mystery Science Theater 3000 (cool tho it was).
For another thing, I don't understand what the criteria for ranking the shows could be. As somebody else said. . . Farscape may not be the best SF show ever, but it definitely belongs somewhere in the list. I would even put Planet of the Apes above some that are on the list. At times they seem to be picking out good-but-overlooked shows (i.e. Sliders, Logan's Run), but other times they seem to be following the guideline of mass popularity.
Futurama should definitely be ranked WAY higher than 41.
Looking at this, I'm reminded of just what a science fiction wasteland TV is. It's very hard to bring science fiction to TV successfully for a number of reasons. The economics are against it, for one thing, due to the cost of sets, props, special effects. It's much cheaper to produce another cop show, or another sitcom, or another reality show.
Another problem is that most TV SF is produced by TV people who aren't really into science or science fiction, aren't familiar with SF literature, and they are reaching for a mass market who largely share those same traits. It's not made by SF fans and it's not aimed at SF fans.
Add to that, TV is not a medium well suited to getting across complicated explanations. Time is constrained, extended dialog is often considered tiresome, and you can't afford to lose a bunch of viewers just because they missed an episode or two. Therefore most TV shows have to stick with the familiar (and tired) concepts that their viewers already understand.
And the result is, a list of SF movies would produce far more gold than a list of TV series, and a list of great SF novels would have even more potential than a list of movies.
I like it, but I also have questions and doubts.
on
NASA's New Shuttle
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· Score: 4, Interesting
NASA have needed a heavy lifter ever since they (foolishly) retired the Saturn V. Now they'll finally have one again, and that's good. However, it doesn't seem to me like a big step up from the Saturn V -- unless I'm missing something. How does the payload capacity to LEO compare? Off the top of my head, I thought the Saturn V was rated for 220 tons to LEO, the new rocket only 125 tons. But maybe I am mis-remembering something, or reading something wrong?
I'm a little disappointed that nobody seems interested in reviving the old Sea Dragon concept from the 1960s. If you were really serious about going to Mars, that would make a good foundation for it.
The CEV and associated launcher look sensible. I'm not sure about the CEV's crew capacity. NASA say it can carry four astronauts to the Moon or potentially six to Mars. Do I sense a problem with their math skills? Maybe another of those pesky metric conversion errors.:p Anyhow. . . To me it looks adequate (not great) for lunar missions. The idea of sending it to Mars is ludicrous, it would be like sticking Columbus in a rowboat with five other guys and sending him out to find America.
The good news is that NASA are finally picking up where they left off 30 years ago. The bad news is that NASA are picking up where they left off 30 years ago. . . and we have precious little to show for the decades, lives, and many billions of dollars sacrificed to the Shuttle.
Just Google for "thermal depolymerization" or "changing world technologies" and you'll find the American approach to this technology -- currently using turkey parts.
Some interesting points to observe. . .
The test plant is producing some kind of oil that they can successfully sell -- but they aren't producing profit. Problem one is, they aren't getting the tax break they expected, since what they make doesn't officially qualify as a bio-fuel (it's too similar to real crude oil?). Problem two is that they expected feeding of turkey parts to livestock would be banned, to prevent the spread of disease. It wasn't, so now they have to pay for the turkey waste instead of being paid to haul it off.
An extremely foul (not to mention fowl) odor was reported coming from the plant. I've read from one source that the odor may not have been caused by the refining process, but they were kind of vague about what actually caused it and whether it could be suppressed.
A noted expert (sorry I don't remember his name) in the field of industrial chemical recycling has called the whole "thermal depolymerization" concept a fantasy, a hoax, a scam. He said they are merely rendering animal fat from the turkeys and then portraying it to the public as something akin to transmuting lead into gold.
Just in case anybody forgot about them, my clunky first-generation iPod (still with its original battery, BTW) has the scroll wheel that physically turns and the buttons that physically move and click when pressed. And yeah, I like the controls just fine. I never saw a reason for all the hype about touch-sensitive controls. Maybe if I owned one, I would get it?
On the other hand. . . When you look at the size of the "nano" and how the components were squeezed in there, it looks pretty doubtful whether mechanical controls could have been miniaturized enough to work in it.
This example of format obsolescence just popped into my head. Back when Commodore-Amiga was a going concern, the IFF-ILBM graphics format was pretty widely used. It was a nearly universal standard on Amiga.
A fair number of artists and video producers used Amigas. One of Amiga's advantages was that practically all the graphics programs used ILBM format, which meant you could easily feed the output from one application into another, and then into another. It was good, and it wasn't all that many years ago.
Just trying finding a program on Mac OS X or Windows today that can read IFF-ILBM files! Go on, try it! Photoshop, for one, doesn't have a clue about them. The best you can hope is to find some obscure freeware IFF-to-PNG converter that someone has hacked together.
Another example: It's getting harder to find apps that play "tracker module" music, and the programs that are available tend to be awkward and unreliable. Everything went to MP3, and mod music was quickly forgotten.
So if the idea of today's commonplace formats becoming unknown in the future sounds far-fetched at all. . . It's not.
First some geeky trivia. . . In the movie "Alien", the Nostromo was bringing a load of crude oil to Earth. Earth's oil had all been refined into gasoline and burned up. Industry had long since switched to other energy sources, but they still needed oil to make: plastics, solvents, pesticides, synthetic rubber, and all the myriad other products that are produced from petrochemicals.
Let's not have it come to that in real life, okay?
The good news is, we've got huge amounts of tar sands, huge amounts of oil shale, and other low grade deposits like that. We shouldn't be thinking too hard about squeezing those low grade deposits for every drop of gasoline we can get out of them. We should be thinking about alternative energy, and saving those deposits for the petrochemicals we can produce from them.
As far as I know, Apple have never publicly stated that they aren't going to use AMD processors sometime in the future. If that's come out, I haven't seen it yet.
Re: No Obj-C support at all.
Then it's pretty damn useless for developing Mac OS X apps, isn't it?
It hasn't been long since I was reading (here on Slashdot, if I recall right) about how Intel sabotaged their own compilers to make their output run badly on AMD processors.
Add to that, we are going to be supporting both PPC and X86 on the Mac for many years to come.
Does Intel's compiler even have solid Objective-C support?
Unless I hear something new to change my mind, I have to presume that very few developers will show any interest in Intel's compiler. They'll almost all stick with GCC -- which is what I plan on doing, certainly.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm just repeating what some professional Mac game developers have been saying, from quotes and interviews that got posted on IMG and other such places. I don't remember if any of them worked for Aspyr, and I don't know what Aspyr have been saying in their newsletters. Care to summarize for us? I'd be interested in hearing about it, if you can quell the hostile attitude long enough.
As for WINE being half-assed. . . I don't know, we'll see how that goes. WINE project isn't there yet, as it stands today, but I wouldn't write them off. X86-based Macs aren't here today either. Give them both a year or two to mature, and something good might come of it.
Here's news for you. . . The Mac game-porting houses (MacSoft, MacPlay, Aspyr, etc) already have their own in-house DirectX-to-OpenGL porting tools and libraries. And the move to X86 processors will help some. . . It'll resolve those nagging "endian" data issues, at any rate. (Unless you want to port a game from one of the new PowerPC-based game consoles! Ouch!) But it won't solve all their problems and it won't solve them very soon. The X86 transition hasn't even *started* yet, and they'll have to continue supporting PowerPC for several years to come.
Frankly, I'm more interested in seeing some gaming solution like WINE to let Mac OS X86 play most Windows games. Admittedly it might make MacPlay and MacSoft obsolete, but would that really be so bad? Maybe those companies could turn their energies toward creating new games instead of porting.
Can you elaborate on the "starving MacOS developer" comment? From what I've heard, Mac software business is going pretty well these days -- and not plagued by kinds of costs and cut-throat competition that Windows developers face.
Blizzard have supported the Mac long before WoW, that hasn't changed. Game support for Mac is still crummy on the whole, that hasn't changed either. In fact, WoW is one of a remarkably small minority of MMOGs that run on the Mac. I can might near count them on one hand.
SWG? No. . . EQ2? No. . .
Does anyone remember when Bungie was first and foremost a Mac developer? We were all talking about how Halo was going to sell Macs. So much for that plan.
Does anyone remember when Connectix Virtual Gamestation was going to make the Mac an attractive gaming platform, because it could run most Playstation games? Then Sony bought CVGS from Connectix and buried it.
I understand Civilization 4 and Call of Duty 2 were recently released for the PC. How many months will it be before they appear on Macintosh? How many features (like editors) will be left out of the Mac version, while we still have to pay full price?
So . . . I really don't see any upswing in Mac game development, much as I might wish for it. Computer gaming still completely revolves around Microsoft (and DirectX), Macs aren't on the radar screen of most game companies -- and if the Mac platform does accidentally get something good, there are always entities like Microsoft and Sony standing ready to buy and/or bury it.
I'm really not trying to rip on the Mac here at all. I'm just being realistic and telling what experience has shown. Games are the one big area where the Mac is weak, and I don't see anything in the works to change it. Apple could do some things to change it, but gaming just isn't in their corporate DNA.
For whatever its worth (not much to most people, I guess), the animated series was released some years back as a boxed set of Laserdiscs. You remember Laserdiscs, right? They were just as good as DVDs in most respects, only bigger. And yes, I have the discs, I just don't have a working LD player at the moment.
Wouldn't it be more productive to write to the US Dept. of Justice and urge them to open an investigation? They bust hackers who turn loose worms, they should be able to bust Sony for distributing trojan malware on their audio CDs. Putting a few Sony execs in a federal pen ought to *really* get the message across.
But haven't Apple already done practically the same thing by supporting Java apps as "first class citizens" in Mac OS X? Many of these programs are not particularly Mac-like, but the ability to run them transparently is still considered a selling point.
EULAs are money-making scams, and the victims are the gullible companies who slap EULAs on their products. The person who profits is the lawyer who convinced the company that they need a EULA to protect themselves from . . . whatever. Lawsuits, piracy, corporate espionage, legal liability, Al Qaeda, cosmics rays, etc. The lawyer paints a vision of a world full of risks which he can mitigate with a well-crafted EULA, for only a few thousand bucks.
And the companies pay. The lawyer gets his new Lexus, and the users are inconvenienced by having to click the "agree" button on a legal agreement that is, properly speaking, neither legal nor an agreement.
There's also an intimidation factor. The EULA doesn't have to be legally binding in order to have some effect on the behavior of users. If the company sends you a nasty-gram and threatens to sue you for violating the EULA, you don't want to be taken to court. Nobody does. Probably the company doesn't really want to go to court either, but are you willing to take that chance? Unfortunately, a large part of business in the USA is now based on this kind of intimidation tactic. Between companies it appears to be quite common. Between companies and customers it's less common, but hardly unknown.
If you study LED flashlights a bit, you'll find their strengths are long battery life and the quality of the beam -- not brightness. They produce a smoother and whiter-looking spot, and they don't become dim and yellowish as the batteries run down. But the sad fact is, one of the reasons the battery life is so good is because they simply don't put out as much light as incandescent.
If you want a good compromise, try to find a flashlight with green LEDs! They are more efficient, they're typically a lot brighter than white-LED lights. The only disadvantages are that you can't identify colors too well with it, and you can't get a tightly focused beam from a multiple-LED light. My favorite flashlight has 10 green LEDs. (I don't know what brand it is, it has NO markings, but it's the one from the Herrington catalog.) It puts out more light than any other LED light I've ever seen, but it's still no match for a halogen or krypton bulb with fresh batteries.
At the opposite extreme from LEDs are the Surefire lights. For sheer brightness, nothing else I've seen matches them, they're like palm-sized car headlights. The catch there is, you have to feed them expensive lithium batteries and you get only 15 minutes of light from a set!
I've been watching for developments in nanotech ever since Engines of Creation was published back in 1985. It was a highly influential book for me, and I'm sure for many others. Progress has been a lot slower than some of us expected or hoped. This "car" brings forth two different feelings. . .
:)
First, a dejected sigh. It's not useful for anything, and it's a long, awfully long way from the sophisticated "assemblers" that Drexler foresaw 20 years ago, with their thousands (or millions?) of molecular components.
On the other hand. . . These guys have actually built a mechanism with multiple moving parts at the molecular level. This is the first thing I've seen that looks anything like "real" molecular nanotechnology, as opposed to mere nanoscale particles.
So, is the glass half empty or half full? There's a temptation to laugh at this pathetic little "car" today -- but future generations might look back and say this is where the nanotechnology revolution first germinated.
I've just been reading through the other comments, and it seems like there's a lot of ignorance about animals, guns, cryptozoology, etc. So here are my thoughts. . .
1. If it's real, it's a leopard. Pumas (i.e. cougars) don't come in black. There have been rumours and legends of black pumas for a long time, but nobody's ever shown one. Melanistic leopards -- popularly known as a black panther -- by comparison are well known.
2. Leopards or pumas could survive in Australia, it's not far-fetched at all. In the Americas, pumas live in almost every environment: jungles, swamps, forests, plains, deserts, mountains. They are highly adaptable. If you drop one into the Australian wilderness, it has no way of knowing that this is supposed to be an "alien and hostile" land.
3. It is plausible for the head to be destroyed by the rifle shot. It's not common, but depending on the caliber and bullet used, it could possibly happen.
4. There are hillbillies where I live in central Texas. Yes, when they see a strange animal, their first impulse is to shoot it. It's not just a stereotype. On the other hand, that doesn't mean this hunter was a hillbilly. Shooting a black panther in Australia would appear to be justified for a number of reasons: it's an invasive, non-native species, and of course you'd like to have some proof to show they're out there.
5. As described in the story, it's a shot somebody could make. It's not a shot everybody could make, but hunters vary widely in their marksmanship skills, their coolness under pressure, and their damn fool luck. Here in Texas, pumas get shot once in a while by a random hunter or rancher (i.e. someone who isn't actively hunting pumas or tracking them with dogs). It's quite rare, it happens maybe once in 20 or 30 years, but it happens.
The hoax question is an interesting one. . . My first reaction when I saw the photo was: Let's see the skeptics dismiss THIS! You just don't get clear photos of mythical animals, it doesn't happen. Plus the tail and pending DNA test. . .
Then I thought it over, and. . . Yeah, it could be a hoax. Assuming the tail really has been sent for DNA analysis, that should go a long way to settle the issue (though, it's always possible that he could have smuggled in a piece of a leopard's tail from somewhere).
The question becomes: if this isn't proof, what would be? Do you have to capture one alive and put it on display? And if you did, would someone then claim it was smuggled into the country, and it's still a hoax? If you've got an issue where some people consider it worthwhile to expend some effort to fool the public, then it's tough because they can be quite devious and ingenious in their hoaxing.
Actually. . . If I'm not mistaken it was church doctrine that the heavenly bodies -- including the sun and moon -- were perfect creations. The dark and light areas on the moon were assumed to be a blurry image of the Earth reflecting from the moon's flawless mirror surface. The various "seas", craters, and other lunar features weren't recognized and named until after the telescope came along.
Right now this is something only astronomers are really interested in. It's kind of sneaking under the radar of the public at large. They are going to get a big shock someday. When the first truly Earth-like planet is discovered, with unambiguous signs of a living biosphere (for example, lots of free oxygen in the atmosphere), the psychological impact will be huge.
You don't think so? You think it can't really matter because visiting such a planet, or even sending a robot probe, is too far beyond our capabilities? Logically that may be true, but there's more than logic at work.
Try to imagine what it was like when Galileo pointed his primitive telescope skyward and realized planets weren't mere specks of light -- there were worlds up there! Even though nobody had any idea how to reach them, everyone's view of the universe had to change. From Galileo's time right up through the early 20th century, imaginations ran wild, and every celestial sphere was imagined to be inhabited. There were jungles on Venus, canals on Mars!
In the last 60 years or so, in some ways our view of the universe has regressed. Now we've looked around our solar system, and it's been a bit of a letdown. Mere specks of light have been replaced by barren balls of rock, or ice, or gas. In their minds, people have started sliding outer space back into the category of the uninteresting and unimportant.
When the first news comes back of an Earth-like planet. . . when one is shown to have life. . . when we get a fuzzy image of another cloud-swirled blue marble out there somewhere. . . It'll be just like Galileo all over again. Nobody will have any clear idea how to reach those worlds, but imaginations will run wild. And I think that's a good thing.
Support for HD televisions is hugely important. You say HDTV penetration is tiny. . . One of the large problems holding back HDTV has been the lack of a videodisc format. This is a product HDTV owners are crying out for, and it will sell a ton of HD sets. In my opinion the HD transition has been handled badly and has been going far more slowly than it should -- but it's still going. HD videodiscs are needed, they are badly overdue.
What about DVD? You wrote, "Now, look at all the advantages of DVD over VHS that convinced the public to convert." But. . . DVD wasn't a replacement for VHS. VHS is a recordable format, which DVD isn't -- or wasn't, until recently. DVD was pretty much a direct replacement for LaserDisc. What did DVD offer that LD didn't? Smaller discs? That's pretty much it. LD limped along for years with 12-inch discs, then DVD came along with 5.25-inch discs (and otherwise very similar specs), and wiped out LD.
So, one possible lesson is that a new format doesn't really need to be hugely improved over its predecessor in order to be successful, if the stars are aligned right.
Will the Mac version of the game have the same editors and customization options as the PC version? Or will we -- once again -- be left without any tools? It's a story that has gotten old, old and hurtful, in the Macintosh world.
On a different topic. . . I was disappointed to read that Civ4 will have lots of animation. Animation is cool when it corresponds with the user doing something. But simply staring at the map while it's "working alive" with units going through their little motions is awful. That only makes it hard to find your cursor. It's like camouflage.
I'm highly skeptical of all the religious stuff. Seems like something else I'll have to micro-manage in a game I thought should be made more streamlined, not more complicated. Just another complicating factor I have no interest in, that my enemies can use against me. (like culture. . . only worse?)
What I would really love to see in the game is an optional "Empire mode". It would be a simplified game mode where all the micro-management is bypassed, and the focus is just on fighting a war. Instead of having to spend hours and hours building up your civilization first, you could dive into military conflict quickly.
I have a 44" Mitsubishi rear-projection CRT set in my workroom. The picture is good, the set didn't cost too much, but it's really bulky and overly large for my room. Plus it's a hassle keeping the convergence adjusted. Plus there's the worry about "burn-in" when watching too much 4:3 aspect ratio material. And it's necessary to turn out the room lights before it can look really good.
Recently we got a new Mitsubishi LT-3050 for the living room, a 30-inch LCD panel. Man, I've been blown away by this set! I started to adjust it using my AV test DVDs and color filters -- but all the adjustments were already dead on the money, as it came from the factory. No "torch mode" like CRTs usually have, there wasn't even any red push in the color decoder. I've never seen that before, never imagined I'd see that. It just plain looks better that my old set, and HD material looks stunning.
Somebody complained that LCD panels have crummy black level, it makes them look washed out. That is true if you try to dim the lights in your room the way you would with any conventional CRT-based set. The LCD is so bright, it looks great in a normally lighted room, in the daytime. Then the black level is not a problem, glare and reflections aren't a problem. You have to take a completely different mindset, you actually want the room lit up, not darkened like a movie theater.
Having said all that. . . I'm not thrilled with HDTV in general. Yes it looks fabulous when everything comes together -- when you actually get some HD content showing, and it hasn't been compressed to Hell and back. But there are still no HD videodiscs (and when they arrive, they'll have crazy DRM). HD channels on the satellite are very limited, and they all cost extra. HD broadcasts over-the-air are often messed up in one way or another. And there's still not a whole lot of good stuff to watch on TV, going to high def doesn't really solve that age-old problem.
The transition to HD has gone a lot slower than I hoped and expected, and it's really been a disappointment so far. I think the lack of HD videodiscs is the worst, but the whole thing is just going badly.
A lot of this will be echoing the comments of others, but here are my gripes. . .
I don't see how some of these shows even remotely qualify as science fiction. I mean. . . Xena? Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman? Buffy? Tales from the Crypt? Weeding these out, even if it meant reducing the list to a top-30 list, would have given us something more focused.
I would also weed out "anthology" shows just on principle, like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and even Mystery Science Theater 3000 (cool tho it was).
For another thing, I don't understand what the criteria for ranking the shows could be. As somebody else said. . . Farscape may not be the best SF show ever, but it definitely belongs somewhere in the list. I would even put Planet of the Apes above some that are on the list. At times they seem to be picking out good-but-overlooked shows (i.e. Sliders, Logan's Run), but other times they seem to be following the guideline of mass popularity.
Futurama should definitely be ranked WAY higher than 41.
Looking at this, I'm reminded of just what a science fiction wasteland TV is. It's very hard to bring science fiction to TV successfully for a number of reasons. The economics are against it, for one thing, due to the cost of sets, props, special effects. It's much cheaper to produce another cop show, or another sitcom, or another reality show.
Another problem is that most TV SF is produced by TV people who aren't really into science or science fiction, aren't familiar with SF literature, and they are reaching for a mass market who largely share those same traits. It's not made by SF fans and it's not aimed at SF fans.
Add to that, TV is not a medium well suited to getting across complicated explanations. Time is constrained, extended dialog is often considered tiresome, and you can't afford to lose a bunch of viewers just because they missed an episode or two. Therefore most TV shows have to stick with the familiar (and tired) concepts that their viewers already understand.
And the result is, a list of SF movies would produce far more gold than a list of TV series, and a list of great SF novels would have even more potential than a list of movies.
NASA have needed a heavy lifter ever since they (foolishly) retired the Saturn V. Now they'll finally have one again, and that's good. However, it doesn't seem to me like a big step up from the Saturn V -- unless I'm missing something. How does the payload capacity to LEO compare? Off the top of my head, I thought the Saturn V was rated for 220 tons to LEO, the new rocket only 125 tons. But maybe I am mis-remembering something, or reading something wrong?
:p Anyhow. . . To me it looks adequate (not great) for lunar missions. The idea of sending it to Mars is ludicrous, it would be like sticking Columbus in a rowboat with five other guys and sending him out to find America.
I'm a little disappointed that nobody seems interested in reviving the old Sea Dragon concept from the 1960s. If you were really serious about going to Mars, that would make a good foundation for it.
The CEV and associated launcher look sensible. I'm not sure about the CEV's crew capacity. NASA say it can carry four astronauts to the Moon or potentially six to Mars. Do I sense a problem with their math skills? Maybe another of those pesky metric conversion errors.
The good news is that NASA are finally picking up where they left off 30 years ago. The bad news is that NASA are picking up where they left off 30 years ago. . . and we have precious little to show for the decades, lives, and many billions of dollars sacrificed to the Shuttle.
Just Google for "thermal depolymerization" or "changing world technologies" and you'll find the American approach to this technology -- currently using turkey parts.
Some interesting points to observe. . .
The test plant is producing some kind of oil that they can successfully sell -- but they aren't producing profit. Problem one is, they aren't getting the tax break they expected, since what they make doesn't officially qualify as a bio-fuel (it's too similar to real crude oil?). Problem two is that they expected feeding of turkey parts to livestock would be banned, to prevent the spread of disease. It wasn't, so now they have to pay for the turkey waste instead of being paid to haul it off.
An extremely foul (not to mention fowl) odor was reported coming from the plant. I've read from one source that the odor may not have been caused by the refining process, but they were kind of vague about what actually caused it and whether it could be suppressed.
A noted expert (sorry I don't remember his name) in the field of industrial chemical recycling has called the whole "thermal depolymerization" concept a fantasy, a hoax, a scam. He said they are merely rendering animal fat from the turkeys and then portraying it to the public as something akin to transmuting lead into gold.
Just in case anybody forgot about them, my clunky first-generation iPod (still with its original battery, BTW) has the scroll wheel that physically turns and the buttons that physically move and click when pressed. And yeah, I like the controls just fine. I never saw a reason for all the hype about touch-sensitive controls. Maybe if I owned one, I would get it?
On the other hand. . . When you look at the size of the "nano" and how the components were squeezed in there, it looks pretty doubtful whether mechanical controls could have been miniaturized enough to work in it.
This example of format obsolescence just popped into my head. Back when Commodore-Amiga was a going concern, the IFF-ILBM graphics format was pretty widely used. It was a nearly universal standard on Amiga.
A fair number of artists and video producers used Amigas. One of Amiga's advantages was that practically all the graphics programs used ILBM format, which meant you could easily feed the output from one application into another, and then into another. It was good, and it wasn't all that many years ago.
Just trying finding a program on Mac OS X or Windows today that can read IFF-ILBM files! Go on, try it! Photoshop, for one, doesn't have a clue about them. The best you can hope is to find some obscure freeware IFF-to-PNG converter that someone has hacked together.
Another example: It's getting harder to find apps that play "tracker module" music, and the programs that are available tend to be awkward and unreliable. Everything went to MP3, and mod music was quickly forgotten.
So if the idea of today's commonplace formats becoming unknown in the future sounds far-fetched at all. . . It's not.
First some geeky trivia. . . In the movie "Alien", the Nostromo was bringing a load of crude oil to Earth. Earth's oil had all been refined into gasoline and burned up. Industry had long since switched to other energy sources, but they still needed oil to make: plastics, solvents, pesticides, synthetic rubber, and all the myriad other products that are produced from petrochemicals.
Let's not have it come to that in real life, okay?
The good news is, we've got huge amounts of tar sands, huge amounts of oil shale, and other low grade deposits like that. We shouldn't be thinking too hard about squeezing those low grade deposits for every drop of gasoline we can get out of them. We should be thinking about alternative energy, and saving those deposits for the petrochemicals we can produce from them.
As far as I know, Apple have never publicly stated that they aren't going to use AMD processors sometime in the future. If that's come out, I haven't seen it yet.
Re: No Obj-C support at all.
Then it's pretty damn useless for developing Mac OS X apps, isn't it?
Thank you, Nostradamus!
Please tell me what else Apple will be doing five years from now, since you have this mysterious power to see the future.
It hasn't been long since I was reading (here on Slashdot, if I recall right) about how Intel sabotaged their own compilers to make their output run badly on AMD processors.
Add to that, we are going to be supporting both PPC and X86 on the Mac for many years to come.
Does Intel's compiler even have solid Objective-C support?
Unless I hear something new to change my mind, I have to presume that very few developers will show any interest in Intel's compiler. They'll almost all stick with GCC -- which is what I plan on doing, certainly.