The chip-making facilities themselves are not R&D, so they should be included in the $40 figure (the sheer cost of constructing the plants is considerable). Salaries and benefits too (not for R&D people but production people). This is not a completely useless number (if it is accurate). Of course, the only *really* useful number is the price you have to pay to get one, but it's interesting to see the actual costs of production and compare.
The article is wrong about why you can't buy and download tracks on the phone. Apple wants to do this, and it's not afraid that people won't buy computers because they don't need them to buy music (WTF?). The problem is that simply downloading the tunes over the phone network would be more expensive than the purchase price, because of the stupidly huge rates for data transfer charged by the cellphone companies. Not to mention that it would take forever.
The article may be right about the 100-song limitation being Apple's fault, but all the other design flaws of the Rokr are the fault of Motorola and/or cell carriers, not Apple.
The error pages enabled by that about:config setting in 1.0 totally suck compared to the new ones. They've had a makeover and they look way better (they even have a favicon that appears in the tab to notify you of the error inconspicuously). More importantly, they behave much better with respect to the back/forward buttons and the URL bar (previously the URL bar would show this giant ugly chrome:// monstrosity; now that's completely hidden and back/forward work as you would expect).
Previously pages loading in background tabs or even minimized windows could interrupt you with annoying error dialogs; having error pages as the default is a much better situation.
I've heard some people complain about them because they think Firefox will replace HTTP error pages pages sent from a server (such as a 404) with the new error pages (as Internet Explorer does). This is not true. The error pages only show when the server cannot be contacted for some reason (DNS error, timeout, etc).
Electric transmission over power lines is quite efficient. The figure I saw when researching my above post was 1.5% transmission loss, which is pretty darn good. Distributing the oil has transmission losses too, you know. I can't speak to the efficiency of the conversion in batteries, but I'm betting you don't have those figures either. Saying that it's "just another wash" is a completely indefensible position unless you have that data. I think it is quite likely to be much better than a "wash".
As a Minnesotan, I don't want our beautiful woods choked by massive coal plants
Of course it would be better if there was no pollution anywhere, but that's a pipe dream. Isn't it much better to be able to choose where the pollution goes? And don't forget that less pollution is generated overall due to higher central efficiency and better central pollution control.
we will continue to need oil for both commercial travel and our military capacity
Of course we will continue to need vast quantities of oil for the forseeable future. But a large reduction in the amount of oil needed would be welcome, and more importantly the flexibility for large amounts of energy production to switch away from oil at a moment's notice would be great. It would reduce the impact of oil price fluctuations on the economy and increase the effectiveness of the saftey net provided by the strategic oil reserve.
Mine has an off switch; it's on the bottom (logitech mx 1000 laser). But it goes for so long between charges I don't bother with it. I haven't measured, but I think it's normally over a week between charges, which is plenty for me.
True, but wireless mice are heavier because of the battery. I really prefer a light mouse with a soft wire, carefully suspended somehow so it doesn't restrict movement. It can be tricky to get right, but I prefer it to shoving a battery around all the time. Though there are occasions where being able to use your wireless mouse from across the room is handy. Heck, just use both, wired mice are dirt cheap anyway and having two mice connected simultaneously isn't a problem.
You don't gain any efficiency at all [with eletric vehicles].
You don't think one centralized fossil fuel powered turbine plant, operating with a huge economy of scale, with the latest efficiency technology and pollution scrubbers, running at one speed all the time, is more efficient than thousands of poorly-maintained piston engines, purchased more for their power than their efficiency, constantly being started and stopped?
The efficiency gain could be significant, even if electric cars were powered solely by fossil fuel-generated electricity. Furthermore, the pollution could be significantly reduced, and located where it is not as much of a problem (away from city centers).
And another huge advantage is that the energy source can be *changed* at any time, on a moment's notice, simply by switching power plants. We would no longer be dependent on any single energy source to the extent we are on oil today.
Wrong: firstly 4G cellular is not "already there", it will have to be rolled out at great cost like everything else. It's cheaper than last-mile wires but it's not free. Secondly, wireless will always suck for bandwidth because thousands of customers must share the very (artificially) scarce radio waves. 100Mbps to one phone is fine, but what happens when there are thousands of phones in range of the tower you're using? You're not going to get 100Mbps each, that's pretty much guaranteed. Furthermore the top wireless speed will only be attainable in perfect conditions; most of the time you will get much less than peak bandwidth even if nobody else is taking up your bandwidth.
Actually I have always wondered what a reasonable maximum would be for throughput in a pipe-dream situation where the FCC had a fit of sanity and decided to reallocate a ton of spectrum to public wireless internet services. If you could use any and all frequencies you wanted, what is the maximum kick-assness of the wireless broadband system you could design? Could you get tens or hundreds of miles in range and give gigabit speeds to each of tens or hundreds of thousands of users? Or is there just not enough spectrum? How good could wireless Internet be in a perfect world?
I played around with the Google translator for a while
No, you didn't. At least, not the one he's talking about. It only translates arabic and chinese to english so far AFAIK, and it's not available to the public. The one on their website is not theirs, it's licensed from Systran, same as every other internet translator. The new research one looks very impressive: in a comparison to old automatic translators, a sentence previously translated "alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms laden" was correctly rendered as "the white house confirmed the existence of a new bin laden tape."
As long as you have to put that force [to compress the hydrogen] into the system, you're not going to get surplus energy out of the system.
That's simply not true; fusion can output a lot more energy than it takes to compress the hydrogen (as is the case with a hydrogen bomb). The extra energy is not created, of course; it is also input to the reaction, but in a form that is normally useless. The extra energy is converted from the mass of the input hydrogen. You know, E=mc^2? Fusion releases that incredible energy bound up in mass, which can't normally be utilized. The end products of fusion are lighter than the inputs; the difference is converted to energy.
This is why fusion is so attractive; the supply of input mass is practically limitless, a tiny bit of mass can be converted into a huge amount of energy, and all that latent mass energy is sitting around useless until we can release it through fusion.
To me it seems a bit childish to parade around claiming knowledge of something cool that you won't reveal. If you're not willing to reveal it, which is perfectly fine, then keep your mouth shut about it. And I'm not claiming it's absurd to think Google might do these things. I'm saying it's absurd for the news media to go crazy reporting every single unsubstantiated rumor like it was a revelation from on high, without providing a shred of hard evidence other than the reported-to-death fact that Google has bought some dark fiber.
Oh come on. If you're not going to give any real information, you might as well not post. It's not like anyone can trace you posting as an AC on Slashdot. I'll bet you don't even have any real information, just more hearsay. Without hard information, I'm not going to believe this stuff until it's on Google Labs.
First it was VoIP, then it was IM, now it's Wi-Fi? Why does the news media keep reporting these *completely* unsubstantiated rumors about Google as if they were actually news? Why not wait until Google actually announces what it is going to do? It's not as if there won't be an interminable beta period between announcement and public release anyway. This rampant Google speculation that has gripped the tech media has moved past the "annoying" phase to the "just plain stupid" phase.
Seriously, I would appreciate some ads that are relevant to me. Instead of punch the monkey and Free* iPods, I could be getting discounts on stuff I'm interested in and might actually buy. If I could get a guaranteed higher quality of ad, I would definitely give up some of my personal information, especially to sites that I care about.
What are you talking about? This is ancient stuff. This is how the modchips have already been working for years! And none of it is helpful in making "undetectable" modchips, only in making modchips work in the first place. Making mods undetectable is a whole different problem. The hackers will never be able to create a mod for any game or system that is completely undetectable to an online service; at best they can keep working around the online service's fixes. OTOH the online service can never completely eliminate cheating, but they can make it arbitrarily hard by doing more research into cheating methods and coming out with fixes faster.
So if you want to blame anyone for cheating in your game, you should really look to the game company which is probably spending very little on combating online cheating, especially when you consider the full budget for creating the game. Blaming the cheaters and hackers might sound nice but it won't get you anywhere; your complaints aren't going to stop people from hacking and you're not going to stop lamers from using the hacks to cheat. The only real fix to online cheating is constant vigilance by the online service and a commitment to regular anti-cheat updates.
I believe ATI now provides a binary driver for 32-bit x86 Linux in much the same way as NVidia does. I can't vouch for its quality, and I have no clue about FreeBSD or other less popular OSes or platforms, but x86 Linux is really the biggie as it's the only open OS currently providing anything like a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop. As for 3DLabs, I believe they're pretty friendly to open source in general and they definitely have Linux drivers.
Ah, now I can actually read the forum posts. The news post on the homepage at opengl.org (which is what I read before) does seem unnecessarily alarmist, if Microsoft does indeed provide an API for new Vista-compatible OpenGL ICDs. In fact, I'm not sure why the 3dlabs guy is calling for people to act at all; perhaps he doesn't believe Microsoft is planning on cooperating?
As for the output of hardware being consistent, that doesn't require Microsoft to write all the memory management code themselves, thus hamstringing vendors (for example, as I said before, making it much more difficult to implement things like dual-head or SLI in a driver transparently, unless Microsoft specifically thinks of that and builds in support, but they can't think of tomorrow's features). AFAIK today DirectX doesn't have any real advantage over OpenGL in the consistency department despite the common Microsoft code DirectX drivers use.
That is an interesting link about the new memory management stuff in Longhorn. Does this mean we won't have to futz around with D3DPOOL_* any more? And we won't have our memory uncerimoniously trashed at the slightest provocation? Hallelujah! Finally sane automatic memory management, just like OpenGL has always had! It's about time Microsoft got with the program on that. Do you have any other links that go into more specifics on that?
It's not a problem today when you run 2 or 10 or however many windowed OpenGL apps at once along with some DirectX ones too; somehow Windows seems to cope just fine. If today's ICDs aren't "virtualized" enough, they're doing a pretty good imitation. If it is really true that vendors can easily supply new Longhorn ICDs that will run as first-class citizens in windowed Vista applications, then perhaps this is a tempest in a teapot by vendors who are too lazy to write a little new code. But I fail to see why they would be making such a big stink in that case.
I suspect this is all part of a bigger struggle where Microsoft is trying to take more of the graphics stack out of the control of vendor drivers by integrating it into Windows. I'll bet these newer driver APIs give vendors much less control over the internals of various parts of the graphics system. That will only result in stupid limitations down the road much like how today DirectX's multiple monitor support still sucks, compared to OpenGL where it's completely transparent since vendors implement the support themselves.
I understand that the article is slashdotted, so your mistake is forgivable. Here are the facts: MS is making vendor-supplied OpenGL implementations second-class citizens in Vista. When you use one, all the new graphics features they are including in Vista will be switched off. Users won't take kindly to your program disabling eyecandy across their entire desktop. This means that people must choose between using Microsoft's OpenGL supplied with Windows (which has always been and continues to be crappy, especially now that it will be layered on top of DirectX), or having their users hate them, or switching to DirectX. The people calling for action are the likes of ATI, NVidia, and 3DLabs, not just some random MS bashers.
I can only tell you that it didn't work for me. I installed GIMP, then GAIM, and it broke. This was some time ago, so I'm sure it's improved by now, but these problems will crop up from time to time as long as GIMP and GAIM insist on updating the same installed copy of a library which changes regularly. Including GTK with GIMP would only increase the download size by 30%, it would be more convenient and more fool-proof , and the "dll bloat" you speak of amounts to nothing more than a couple of megabytes of RAM at most, which I would gladly spare for trouble-free operation. At least having the option to do so would be nice. It's not that I can't maintain library dependencies manually, it's just that I don't *want* to, and I shouldn't *have* to in this day and age.
They could include GTK with the GIMP so you don't have to download and install two packages. They could keep GIMP's version of GTK separate so when you install the latest Gaim that requires installing a different GTK version it doesn't cause GIMP to stop working.
Just because HTTP URIs don't necessarily map directly onto files or directories doesn't mean you couldn't provide a nice index listing of possible URIs in many situations. In situations where you couldn't, then don't! No harm done. That shouldn't stop HTTP from including a feature that would be extremely useful in many other situations.
There's not really anything to stop you configuring your server to serve up directory listings
Many servers already do, in random HTML formats. That's not the point. The point is it's not standard so you can't rely on it. It should be standard.
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The chip-making facilities themselves are not R&D, so they should be included in the $40 figure (the sheer cost of constructing the plants is considerable). Salaries and benefits too (not for R&D people but production people). This is not a completely useless number (if it is accurate). Of course, the only *really* useful number is the price you have to pay to get one, but it's interesting to see the actual costs of production and compare.
The article may be right about the 100-song limitation being Apple's fault, but all the other design flaws of the Rokr are the fault of Motorola and/or cell carriers, not Apple.
Previously pages loading in background tabs or even minimized windows could interrupt you with annoying error dialogs; having error pages as the default is a much better situation.
I've heard some people complain about them because they think Firefox will replace HTTP error pages pages sent from a server (such as a 404) with the new error pages (as Internet Explorer does). This is not true. The error pages only show when the server cannot be contacted for some reason (DNS error, timeout, etc).
As a Minnesotan, I don't want our beautiful woods choked by massive coal plants
Of course it would be better if there was no pollution anywhere, but that's a pipe dream. Isn't it much better to be able to choose where the pollution goes? And don't forget that less pollution is generated overall due to higher central efficiency and better central pollution control.
we will continue to need oil for both commercial travel and our military capacity
Of course we will continue to need vast quantities of oil for the forseeable future. But a large reduction in the amount of oil needed would be welcome, and more importantly the flexibility for large amounts of energy production to switch away from oil at a moment's notice would be great. It would reduce the impact of oil price fluctuations on the economy and increase the effectiveness of the saftey net provided by the strategic oil reserve.
Mine has an off switch; it's on the bottom (logitech mx 1000 laser). But it goes for so long between charges I don't bother with it. I haven't measured, but I think it's normally over a week between charges, which is plenty for me.
True, but wireless mice are heavier because of the battery. I really prefer a light mouse with a soft wire, carefully suspended somehow so it doesn't restrict movement. It can be tricky to get right, but I prefer it to shoving a battery around all the time. Though there are occasions where being able to use your wireless mouse from across the room is handy. Heck, just use both, wired mice are dirt cheap anyway and having two mice connected simultaneously isn't a problem.
You don't think one centralized fossil fuel powered turbine plant, operating with a huge economy of scale, with the latest efficiency technology and pollution scrubbers, running at one speed all the time, is more efficient than thousands of poorly-maintained piston engines, purchased more for their power than their efficiency, constantly being started and stopped?
The efficiency gain could be significant, even if electric cars were powered solely by fossil fuel-generated electricity. Furthermore, the pollution could be significantly reduced, and located where it is not as much of a problem (away from city centers).
And another huge advantage is that the energy source can be *changed* at any time, on a moment's notice, simply by switching power plants. We would no longer be dependent on any single energy source to the extent we are on oil today.
That *is* what they're going to do.
Actually I have always wondered what a reasonable maximum would be for throughput in a pipe-dream situation where the FCC had a fit of sanity and decided to reallocate a ton of spectrum to public wireless internet services. If you could use any and all frequencies you wanted, what is the maximum kick-assness of the wireless broadband system you could design? Could you get tens or hundreds of miles in range and give gigabit speeds to each of tens or hundreds of thousands of users? Or is there just not enough spectrum? How good could wireless Internet be in a perfect world?
No, you didn't. At least, not the one he's talking about. It only translates arabic and chinese to english so far AFAIK, and it's not available to the public. The one on their website is not theirs, it's licensed from Systran, same as every other internet translator. The new research one looks very impressive: in a comparison to old automatic translators, a sentence previously translated "alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms laden" was correctly rendered as "the white house confirmed the existence of a new bin laden tape."
Quite right, thanks.
That's simply not true; fusion can output a lot more energy than it takes to compress the hydrogen (as is the case with a hydrogen bomb). The extra energy is not created, of course; it is also input to the reaction, but in a form that is normally useless. The extra energy is converted from the mass of the input hydrogen. You know, E=mc^2? Fusion releases that incredible energy bound up in mass, which can't normally be utilized. The end products of fusion are lighter than the inputs; the difference is converted to energy.
This is why fusion is so attractive; the supply of input mass is practically limitless, a tiny bit of mass can be converted into a huge amount of energy, and all that latent mass energy is sitting around useless until we can release it through fusion.
To me it seems a bit childish to parade around claiming knowledge of something cool that you won't reveal. If you're not willing to reveal it, which is perfectly fine, then keep your mouth shut about it. And I'm not claiming it's absurd to think Google might do these things. I'm saying it's absurd for the news media to go crazy reporting every single unsubstantiated rumor like it was a revelation from on high, without providing a shred of hard evidence other than the reported-to-death fact that Google has bought some dark fiber.
Oh come on. If you're not going to give any real information, you might as well not post. It's not like anyone can trace you posting as an AC on Slashdot. I'll bet you don't even have any real information, just more hearsay. Without hard information, I'm not going to believe this stuff until it's on Google Labs.
It's in the latest nightlies, I'm using it right now. It will be in 1.5 when it is released.
First it was VoIP, then it was IM, now it's Wi-Fi? Why does the news media keep reporting these *completely* unsubstantiated rumors about Google as if they were actually news? Why not wait until Google actually announces what it is going to do? It's not as if there won't be an interminable beta period between announcement and public release anyway. This rampant Google speculation that has gripped the tech media has moved past the "annoying" phase to the "just plain stupid" phase.
Seriously, I would appreciate some ads that are relevant to me. Instead of punch the monkey and Free* iPods, I could be getting discounts on stuff I'm interested in and might actually buy. If I could get a guaranteed higher quality of ad, I would definitely give up some of my personal information, especially to sites that I care about.
So if you want to blame anyone for cheating in your game, you should really look to the game company which is probably spending very little on combating online cheating, especially when you consider the full budget for creating the game. Blaming the cheaters and hackers might sound nice but it won't get you anywhere; your complaints aren't going to stop people from hacking and you're not going to stop lamers from using the hacks to cheat. The only real fix to online cheating is constant vigilance by the online service and a commitment to regular anti-cheat updates.
I believe ATI now provides a binary driver for 32-bit x86 Linux in much the same way as NVidia does. I can't vouch for its quality, and I have no clue about FreeBSD or other less popular OSes or platforms, but x86 Linux is really the biggie as it's the only open OS currently providing anything like a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop. As for 3DLabs, I believe they're pretty friendly to open source in general and they definitely have Linux drivers.
As for the output of hardware being consistent, that doesn't require Microsoft to write all the memory management code themselves, thus hamstringing vendors (for example, as I said before, making it much more difficult to implement things like dual-head or SLI in a driver transparently, unless Microsoft specifically thinks of that and builds in support, but they can't think of tomorrow's features). AFAIK today DirectX doesn't have any real advantage over OpenGL in the consistency department despite the common Microsoft code DirectX drivers use.
That is an interesting link about the new memory management stuff in Longhorn. Does this mean we won't have to futz around with D3DPOOL_* any more? And we won't have our memory uncerimoniously trashed at the slightest provocation? Hallelujah! Finally sane automatic memory management, just like OpenGL has always had! It's about time Microsoft got with the program on that. Do you have any other links that go into more specifics on that?
I suspect this is all part of a bigger struggle where Microsoft is trying to take more of the graphics stack out of the control of vendor drivers by integrating it into Windows. I'll bet these newer driver APIs give vendors much less control over the internals of various parts of the graphics system. That will only result in stupid limitations down the road much like how today DirectX's multiple monitor support still sucks, compared to OpenGL where it's completely transparent since vendors implement the support themselves.
I understand that the article is slashdotted, so your mistake is forgivable. Here are the facts: MS is making vendor-supplied OpenGL implementations second-class citizens in Vista. When you use one, all the new graphics features they are including in Vista will be switched off. Users won't take kindly to your program disabling eyecandy across their entire desktop. This means that people must choose between using Microsoft's OpenGL supplied with Windows (which has always been and continues to be crappy, especially now that it will be layered on top of DirectX), or having their users hate them, or switching to DirectX. The people calling for action are the likes of ATI, NVidia, and 3DLabs, not just some random MS bashers.
I can only tell you that it didn't work for me. I installed GIMP, then GAIM, and it broke. This was some time ago, so I'm sure it's improved by now, but these problems will crop up from time to time as long as GIMP and GAIM insist on updating the same installed copy of a library which changes regularly. Including GTK with GIMP would only increase the download size by 30%, it would be more convenient and more fool-proof , and the "dll bloat" you speak of amounts to nothing more than a couple of megabytes of RAM at most, which I would gladly spare for trouble-free operation. At least having the option to do so would be nice. It's not that I can't maintain library dependencies manually, it's just that I don't *want* to, and I shouldn't *have* to in this day and age.
They could include GTK with the GIMP so you don't have to download and install two packages. They could keep GIMP's version of GTK separate so when you install the latest Gaim that requires installing a different GTK version it doesn't cause GIMP to stop working.
There's not really anything to stop you configuring your server to serve up directory listings
Many servers already do, in random HTML formats. That's not the point. The point is it's not standard so you can't rely on it. It should be standard.