He was mis-informed. Sony's _international_ divisions are floundering, with the exception of the Playstation. In Japan, There is still a lot of national pride, and a lot of loyalty to sony. Minidisc usage completely replaced the audio cassete, before recodrable CDs became wide spread enough to usurp the minidisk.
Sony is Definitely loosing mindhare in america, and internationally, though.
Still, I doubt it's anything that would cause them to shut down, or become bankrupt. Although the fact that they're only NOW closing 11 CRT manufacturing plants, to refurbish them to LCD manufacture suggests that indeed sony failed to see the 'death' of the CRT. on the plus side, since sony is shutting down their CRT plants (finally!) and going full bore with LCDs, that hopefully by 2008 most 'new' TV sets will be HD capable LCDs.
Now, I realize some people have problems with redhat, but really, the 'red hat' tax is a _lot_ better than the microsoft tax. Why? because sometimes redhat Has to improve open source GPLed code, and when they do, they keep that code under the GPL, because the gpl makes it very hard for one to not do so. imagine, people being paid to write and improve an open source operating system, and actually designing in features the customers are demanding, rather than 'just the features i wanted.'
Frankly i think desktop linux won't mature until somebody decides they can hire a bunch of programmers, start with a semi-mature 'open source' linux desktop, and 'design in' the added features and ease of use needed to satisfy customrs for Less than thaey're paying to microsoft now.
When you consider how your aunt or mother uses the computer, they really don't care much about what Os it's running, all they want to do is 'browse the web' send e-mail, etc, so in the truly 'budget pc' market linux preloads may make a lot more sense than using microsoft, especially when you consider the market segment budget systems are after. Open source gaming isn't as sophisticated as 'windows' in some aspects, but if you love card games then linux is a Field day for you compared to 'windows' where you can download a bunch of rotten shareware that is spyware laden and ready to bitrot your windows pc into oblivion... or (gasp) _Pay money_ for games that you can set up in a matter of minutes with a standard deck of playing cards or two...
Only now you have to go to pepsi.com, type in a code, and surrended your 'personal info' to even have a chance.
At least the 'free 20 oz of pepsi' is still written in plain english. I miss the good old days when the prize was written in the bottom of the can, and you had to squint just right to see it. all these 'efforts' to 'improve' the contests with online codes are silly, much worse than the failed attempt by coke to have cans that would dispense a note 'informing' the winner they had won a prize, only the can wasn't filled with soda, and the note could be accidently swollowed if the can wasn't 'opened properly' etc.
the $15, grand is for a drive development kit. not a drive itself, as the drives themselves are still in the 'research' phase, and cannot be 'bought' unless you're working with the drive developers to 'field test' the drives. good old wikipedia i'm too lazy to edit it though.
the media costs are because they're being produced at very low production runs. how fast the price of media comes down with mass production is anyones guess. paying 50 cents per gigabyte is pretty spendy compared to DVDs, but they only have to get the media price down to about the $30 and below range to be on a 'cost per gigabyte' range equivalent to good quality DVDs.
Yeah, i realize $30 a disc seems inanely high priced, but how often are 'consumers' going to even need 300 gb? other than people working with a lot of uncompressed video, there aren't a whole lot of people. the drives themselves can probabbly be made popular, but more than likely people won't need a whole 100 spindle of the media for quite a few years yet. dvd burners have been around for years, and the media finally started getting cheap.
Then again, VHS beat out betamax because it could hold 6 hours of video, and betamax couldn't.
then again, bd will be in ps3's hvd's and simmilar technolgies won't have the production volumes that bd will have because of that. at anyrate, it won't take long for us to find out what price point the holographic drive lists at when aimed at the consumer video/backup market.
I too have several spindles of blank data CDs that i will likely never run out of. unlike you i periodically use them, but i bought the spindles when i was using them for backup purpouses, only backing up became too complicated and difficult. I still use them for making the occasional audio CD (for use in a car etc) or copying files i might need on another computer not networked to mine, etc. but really, for most people one spindle takes a long time to go through.
they did pretty good in japan, and even though sega's cd drive systems faltered there were developers who knew what cd-rom media could be used for, which likely helped sony's playstation suceed.
is 300 GB per disc using RED lasers (1 or 2 tb using blue lasers) enough for you?
yeah, the technology is write once, read many, and not rewritable, but if you look at the cd and dvd market rewritable is more 'niche' use than write once. write once is what is cheap, so it's what people like.
inphase is definitely the darkhorse for completely usurping both blu-ray and hd-dvd. With 300 GB to play with, you have over 40 MB/second bitrates to play with for video streams. Lossless video compression, anyone? you can easily fit 720p using a 2:1 losseless compression, and leave plenty of room for a 5.1 audio stream or two.
nah, the system that didn't get the credit it deserved was the Turbograffix-16 and it's CD-rom system. it was the first console to have Cd-rom support, it had multiple processing cores, the game cards were compatable with both the home system and the portable. the portable had such a good screen it could be used as a TV! when 'nintendo' was still releasing portables with 4-shades of green.
Well for one america isn't a 'free market' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Market Because, A. every citizen and buisness must pay taxes, or prove that they owe no taxes under current tax code etc. B. Numerous industries recieve 'subsidization' through the form of federal grants, pure subsudies etc. C. Numerous laws attempt to 'protect' against foreign trade, with some exceptions for 'favored' trading partners.
America was much closer to a true 'free-market' system in it's early history, however the 'great depression' and many other events trigerred a much greater intervention in the US 'economy' makking it even Less 'free-market' than it originally 'attempted' to be.
Believe you me, if we had a 'free' market real estate brokers would be begging on the streets and crying, because of the 2 'economic depressions' that have been sucessfully 'averted' through government intervention.
I built a comperable system to the one in the article one not long ago, only i opted for the slightly superior Dual-channel memory supporting ATI R200 chipset. I went with a full gig of ram, as it was dual channel. I also reserched my processor more carefully, and opted for a newer e6 core AMD64 with 512k cache. Currently my system and CPU temps are 30c in a stadard beige case, without Any case fans hooked in, just a dual variable fan PSU, and the Cool N Quiet fan on the amd CPU both fans are running around 1600 RPM. yup, and the fan speeds can rev up in the summer etc, as needed, but it's whisper quiet, so quiet, i hear every HD access loud and clear.
with a decent PCI-E card, this bad boy would be fully gamer ready, and because i reused a case, NEC DVD burner, psu (used a 20-24 pin adapter), and have a kvm the whole setup set me back less than $400, and i put in a 200 gig 16MB cache SATA drive instead of the pathetic 80 gig and have double the RAM.
In all fairness, the stupidity of the general public has been the number one deterrent to atomic power.
Was they guy who mass produced the infamous 'i survived three mile island' t-shirts an operative for the 'fossil fuel' industry? nope! just a capitialist looking to cash in on a fad!
and you know what, the fact that not a single person was injured in three mile island mattered to anyone. just the fact that a nuclear core could overheat and potentially go critical, that part of the early warning system failed, but that the fail safes managed to create a dicey, but controlled situation, where they were left no choice but to vent radioactive gasses into the atmosphhere after an ordered evacuation. well, the whole situtaion was controleld and handled remarkablly well, nothing like the slipshod handling of chernoble that the russians had to deal with.
That was all it took to 'doom' atomic energy in the united states. everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and not a single person died.
So because we had an awesome system that could prevent an atomic catastrophy like chernoble from occuring, even when the equipment failed, it was deemed unsafe by the public because we 'evacuated' people just 'to be on the safe side.' hey, atomic energy proved that if you put in the right people to do the job it Is safe. and Even with the right people, it's cheap! even if you consider the cost of building a 'long term' storage site the cost per killowatt hour is still far below 6 cents per killowatt hour.
and then there is the fact that apparently spent fuel rods can be 'recycled' into new fuel rods, and take up signifigantly less 'storage' space thanks to advances in robotics, etc. fission power is also the only source of energy that the longer we wait to tap it, the 'less' there is to tap (due to atomic decay) if recycling programs retrieved even 50% of spent fuel rods that would double the world supply of uranium (and there is PLENTY of uranium to be mined and refined yet)
I love eco friendly power, and frankly I can't imagine anything More ecologically friendly than atomic power. sure it takes some care and some precuation, but the science is good, it's proven, the technology is mature, we know how to build reactors and how to certify them. we know what level of staffing efforts it takes to train people to keep atomic energy facilities safe. Many many sites are projected to reach end of life, if we don't rebuild our atomic infrastructure and expand it, we're in serious trouble.
and we can even locate the plants many many miles away from 'major population centers' just to keep the 'scared public' from worrying. in smaller less populated areas the safety and benefits of atomic power can be more easily 'sold' to the residents... even if the 'power' is being sold to 'large communities' hundreds of miles away through high efficiency transmission lines. if the state of 'texas' can supply electricity to california, then it should be no problem to find plenty of suitable locations to place as many reactors as we need to provide lots and lots of cheap, atomic energy. and if we're looking for a 'cheap' fix for the 'oil and coal' addiction, well, converting more of the grid to atomic power would be the 'easy' answer.
browsers rely on 'end to end' security. either end had the capability to intercept the data. so let's say you'rve decide that the DRM scheme relies on ssh, so now a basic packet sniffer won't be reliable... okay, then simple, i simple on My end, keep a constant dump of all RAM writes. the data must at some point be invoked on my local system in an unencrypted state in order to be encrypted, and also to be decrypted. now i can still reverse engineer this process, but i now need a resident memory program to 'emulate' the response and authentication procedure.
Now if the DRM is managed by a 'special' chip on the motherboard, and the only place that the data 'occurs' unencrypted is on this special chip, now i need to pull out a solder sucker and remove this chip, or add a 'mod chip' between this chip and the system, to 'defeat' the drm.
So you see. DRM is a lot like making a 'steel' door, as long as you can 'get a man inside' to let you in, there is no security at all. and ultimately the only way to ensure that no one can 'be the man inside' is to completely outlaw hacking of hardware. True, the DMCA already does this. still it doesn't prevent 'criminals' from knowing how 'weak' DRM is, and how 'easily circumventable' it is. DRM only 'forces' the consumer into 'compliance' with the law.
Frankly, if the 'consumer' is your enemy, and not the 'criminals' who would like to make a 'profit' off the works you made.. well then there is something fucked up with your logic.
so the DRM must probably take care of that by unlocking the restriction part of the DRM after the copyright expires.
So in other words, my computer system clock just needs to be set 45 years into the future to unlock all drm files? Brilliant! seriously though how does the DRMed file know it's been 32 years or whatever arbitrary date the disney collective has manipulated congress into setting this week? okay it's some server on the internet, now all i need to do is run a packet sniffer load some drmed files, and anylize the resposnises and the address/lookup mechinizim, and i can now design a 'fake' server to tell my drm 'yeah it's okay all your drm expired' well let's say the drm program doesn't trust the internet or my system clock, it makes me call a 1-800 number, and i have to correctly write down some 64 character 'password' (never mind that people would cry outrage at that bs, they don't even like the 20 digit 'keys' for software!) well, a little reverse engineering, or someone with access to the source code that generates theyse 'unlock keys' can write a keygen that maybe doesn't always produce working keys, but has a lot better shot than some one trying to randomly guess.. so DRM can't do what you want, ultimately, once the copyright expires it's going to be up to 'internet libraries' to provide drm free content that no longer is protected by copyright law.
well in that case all my calculations are all off, as i had assumed that interlaced video had the same frame rate as progressive video.
since initial dvd specs were 480i (720x480) that means i needlessly halved the number of pixels being processed... or if i got the pixels correct, but that progressive scan footage is really at 15 fps, instead of the 30 fps that interlaced video is at... then the processing requirement drops sharply for progressive scan, to being slightly below what interlaced video requires (since normally one also has to 'deinterlace' the video as well)
still, my numbers came along the lines of what microsoft recommends for optimal playback of wmv9 so, perhaps any errors i made don't properly reflect real world decoding situations.
well, even with a 50% reduction that does make playback more feasible on slower cpus. and you assertions on high def, are they '1080p' high def? or what? remember that there are a number of sets out there that don't even support 720p, and finding one that supports 1080p will cost an armload, and 720p is about 2x superior for 'action' video than 1080i, so all things considered, shouldn't we be considering what the processing requirements of decoding 720p video is? since realistically without breaking the bank that's going to be the highest resolution that most people are going to be able to use.
not to mention, 720p is the resolution of choice for sports broadcasts, so the 'availability' (free) of those 720p streams means that most people are going to have access to 720p or lower high def.
and FWIW the oricinal spec for MPEG-2 compression allowed decoding by a single 166 MHZ mmx enabled pentium pro cpu. so, i don't see where the '2-3 ghz' requirement comes from. if a 166mhz cpu can handle a 720x480i (172,800 ppf) video stream from mpeg-2... then why would a 1920x1080p (2,073,600ppf) require more than 1992 MHz cpu for 'full' hardware decoding? ansd as yuyou said, the modern video cards can offload up to 50% of that cpu overhear, making the minimum CPU requirment for hardware decoding 1.0 ghz. of a mpeg-2 stream.
mind i realize mpeg-4 streams are more popular with high def, and require about 3x the cpu power to decode... which would put us back at your numbers... but again that's for 1080p. 720p would require an 886mhz cpu (443 w/gpu) for mpeg-2 and 2.656ghz/1.328ghz for mpeg-4.
since the c7 has up to 2ghz operation (not sure where that puts it in 'relation' to the pentium pro 166, which all my figures were based on) it should Easily handle 720p, even in mpeg-4 and might even be able to handle 1080i, although 1080p should be out of it's league...
i'm pretty sure that in a 'modern' pc all video decoding is handled on the video card. that's why when you try to 'screen grab' you just get a pink or blue image all the decoding is being done by the video card. so as long as you have a gpu capable of decoding HD video, and a media player that supports hardware decoding, the cpu overhead should be pretty low.
So how would propose I add another gig when it cannot even accept a single gig?
well, you could break out the solder, and a bread board, and pick up a memeory controller that can work across a pci bridge, preferably as an ide/scsi controller, and of course a memory socket or two (depepnding on the memory controller you picked out) and then , on boot up initialize that ram as a swap drive, using something like norton ghost, or dd;) and viola a gig of swap, with all the performance of 'real' ram. sure finding places where you can buy all the controllers, capacitors etc, and wiring up the breadboard is perhaps a little more than you want to do... but um yeah it's definitely something that puts you apart from the pack;)
I know many people who've bought just a console and a few games, then never bought another game. albeit they almost never buy 'launch' consoles... still it can happen.
Actually the stick that's being used to encourage the production of algeal farms is ironically, the kyoto convention. any 1,000 megawatt powerplant with roughly 3 square miles of land (2000 acres) nearby can produce about 40 million gallons of algea oil, and 50 million gallons of ethanol a year. and the algea thrives off of eating the co2 and nox from exhaust, while creating some potentially lucrative opportunities for the power companies.
by 2009 the system will be fully production tested, and they're currently installing several 'test sites' to make sure the system is ready to be brought online at any major fossil fuel plant world wide. http://www.greenfuelonline.com/
I also understand that the japanese are using a simmilar system, but rather than processing the algea into oil and ethanol, they 'mix' it back into coal, to be burned to produce the elctricity, that produces exhaust gas to feed the algea that gets mixed with the coal to, well you get the idea.
the ethanol and bio diesel markets may be more lucrative, than reducing annual fuel consumption by whatever 90 million barrels of ethanol and oil equate to in tons of coal.. although i found a handy calcualtor yay http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/science/en ergy_calculator.html which says about 150 gallons of diesel is equal to a short ton of coal, and about 167 gallons of 'gasoline' (closest thing to ethanol) equals the energy in a short ton in coal.. hrm... but i still have no idea how much coal a 1,000 megawatt plant uses per year. if i'm interperting the calculator correctly, it's saying that you're getting over 1,000 times as much energy from 'cleaning' the emmisions as the plant is using, anually.
hrm. i have a funny feeling the news site i read the article on had some of the details 'wrong' because according to the wiki on solar power 3 square miles of land only gets a million megajoules of energy a year, roughly 2 weeks worth of power output from a 1000 megawatt plant. meh, perhaps the figures of millions of barrels was only if every 1,000 megawatt plant in the us that had room to put up an algea farm did so. that would make a lot more sense, since there are at least 1,000 of them.
Apparently you've never heard of these guys i don't know anything that scales down better than 'microscopic organizims'.
and keep in mind, that presently these rural places are just burning the dung directly, there have been numerous people trying to get the people to use methane or electric cooking produced from the cow dung instead of cooking directly over the dung, but it's a 'cost' issue. sure there are a few villages here and there that have these kinda systems, but for the most part they were the pet projects of various people who simply couldn't afford to provide the system wide scale.
As an owner of one of them fancy Gateway monitors with HDCP... SHould have bought some vasoline while I was at it.
I'm sure Jack Valenti has some you can borrow, as he must have bought some hearing that you 'the consumer' are drooling over hardware that supports DRM to prevent 'unauthorized' viewing and copying of digital signals, and is in no other way different from the cheaper already widely available DVI enabled devices which can be bought anywhere(even wal-mart sells dvi enabled TVs).
I beg to differ, I recently built a 'media center' pc around an AMD Athlon 64 Socket 754 3000+ E6 model cpu.
this cpu only costs $126 and puts out WAY less heat than anything in the althonXP line. less heat, less noise, a decent sized copper base heatsink and you won't even need to plug in a fan to keep this chip cool. for a 'media' PC the noise factor is crucial!
http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/news/03/0724.html apparently you've never heard of bio-plastic. yes, good old plant esters can be converted into plastics too. it's just been really expensive to do so. and it's not going to get any cheaper until people demand the stuff in volume. the extent of the 'addiction' to oil has prevented technolgies that could have 'saved' us 30 years ago (when the us oil production 'peaked' prior to new technolgies being developed) such as wide scale algea farming. do you realize how much say, desert region could be converted into a continuous algea production center? a lot. and that was just the 'on land production' they were considering in the 70's algea grows in water, cheap ways of making water more 'algea friendly' to allow rapid growth fields of the stuff over deep water would greatly increase the amount of energy we can utilize that comes from the sun.
done right algea oil might be cheaper than petrolium. afterall harvesting something off the surface should cost a lot less than drilling very deep holes to pump stuff out of the ground, and diesel engines can be converted to run on straight up veggie oil, so the energy costs in comparisions to 'cracking' petrolium hydrocarbons is far far lower. but the $ needed to design, test, and deploy a global algea field capable of replacing the 'oil' addiction would be staggering, just the capital required to replace the Us oil needs would run in the billions. and wehn all is said and done we don't even know if it would be 'cheaper' than pertolium. what if it can replace the oil addiction but is 3 times as expensive? what then?
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He was mis-informed. Sony's _international_ divisions are floundering, with the exception of the Playstation. In Japan, There is still a lot of national pride, and a lot of loyalty to sony. Minidisc usage completely replaced the audio cassete, before recodrable CDs became wide spread enough to usurp the minidisk.
Sony is Definitely loosing mindhare in america, and internationally, though.
Still, I doubt it's anything that would cause them to shut down, or become bankrupt. Although the fact that they're only NOW closing 11 CRT manufacturing plants, to refurbish them to LCD manufacture suggests that indeed sony failed to see the 'death' of the CRT. on the plus side, since sony is shutting down their CRT plants (finally!) and going full bore with LCDs, that hopefully by 2008 most 'new' TV sets will be HD capable LCDs.
Now, I realize some people have problems with redhat, but really, the 'red hat' tax is a _lot_ better than the microsoft tax. Why? because sometimes redhat Has to improve open source GPLed code, and when they do, they keep that code under the GPL, because the gpl makes it very hard for one to not do so. imagine, people being paid to write and improve an open source operating system, and actually designing in features the customers are demanding, rather than 'just the features i wanted.'
Frankly i think desktop linux won't mature until somebody decides they can hire a bunch of programmers, start with a semi-mature 'open source' linux desktop, and 'design in' the added features and ease of use needed to satisfy customrs for Less than thaey're paying to microsoft now.
When you consider how your aunt or mother uses the computer, they really don't care much about what Os it's running, all they want to do is 'browse the web' send e-mail, etc, so in the truly 'budget pc' market linux preloads may make a lot more sense than using microsoft, especially when you consider the market segment budget systems are after. Open source gaming isn't as sophisticated as 'windows' in some aspects, but if you love card games then linux is a Field day for you compared to 'windows' where you can download a bunch of rotten shareware that is spyware laden and ready to bitrot your windows pc into oblivion... or (gasp) _Pay money_ for games that you can set up in a matter of minutes with a standard deck of playing cards or two...
But it can't suck if it blows. so clearly they got it right, windows vista doesn't _suck_ It _blows_ nasty chunks of drm into your lap.
Only now you have to go to pepsi.com, type in a code, and surrended your 'personal info' to even have a chance.
At least the 'free 20 oz of pepsi' is still written in plain english. I miss the good old days when the prize was written in the bottom of the can, and you had to squint just right to see it. all these 'efforts' to 'improve' the contests with online codes are silly, much worse than the failed attempt by coke to have cans that would dispense a note 'informing' the winner they had won a prize, only the can wasn't filled with soda, and the note could be accidently swollowed if the can wasn't 'opened properly' etc.
the $15, grand is for a drive development kit. not a drive itself, as the drives themselves are still in the 'research' phase, and cannot be 'bought' unless you're working with the drive developers to 'field test' the drives. good old wikipedia i'm too lazy to edit it though.
the media costs are because they're being produced at very low production runs. how fast the price of media comes down with mass production is anyones guess. paying 50 cents per gigabyte is pretty spendy compared to DVDs, but they only have to get the media price down to about the $30 and below range to be on a 'cost per gigabyte' range equivalent to good quality DVDs.
Yeah, i realize $30 a disc seems inanely high priced, but how often are 'consumers' going to even need 300 gb? other than people working with a lot of uncompressed video, there aren't a whole lot of people. the drives themselves can probabbly be made popular, but more than likely people won't need a whole 100 spindle of the media for quite a few years yet. dvd burners have been around for years, and the media finally started getting cheap.
Then again, VHS beat out betamax because it could hold 6 hours of video, and betamax couldn't.
then again, bd will be in ps3's hvd's and simmilar technolgies won't have the production volumes that bd will have because of that. at anyrate, it won't take long for us to find out what price point the holographic drive lists at when aimed at the consumer video/backup market.
I too have several spindles of blank data CDs that i will likely never run out of. unlike you i periodically use them, but i bought the spindles when i was using them for backup purpouses, only backing up became too complicated and difficult. I still use them for making the occasional audio CD (for use in a car etc) or copying files i might need on another computer not networked to mine, etc. but really, for most people one spindle takes a long time to go through.
they did pretty good in japan, and even though sega's cd drive systems faltered there were developers who knew what cd-rom media could be used for, which likely helped sony's playstation suceed.
http://www.physorg.com/news9607.html
is 300 GB per disc using RED lasers (1 or 2 tb using blue lasers) enough for you?
yeah, the technology is write once, read many, and not rewritable, but if you look at the cd and dvd market rewritable is more 'niche' use than write once. write once is what is cheap, so it's what people like.
inphase is definitely the darkhorse for completely usurping both blu-ray and hd-dvd. With 300 GB to play with, you have over 40 MB/second bitrates to play with for video streams. Lossless video compression, anyone? you can easily fit 720p using a 2:1 losseless compression, and leave plenty of room for a 5.1 audio stream or two.
nah, the system that didn't get the credit it deserved was the Turbograffix-16 and it's CD-rom system. it was the first console to have Cd-rom support, it had multiple processing cores, the game cards were compatable with both the home system and the portable. the portable had such a good screen it could be used as a TV! when 'nintendo' was still releasing portables with 4-shades of green.
Well for one america isn't a 'free market' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Market
Because,
A. every citizen and buisness must pay taxes, or prove that they owe no taxes under current tax code etc.
B. Numerous industries recieve 'subsidization' through the form of federal grants, pure subsudies etc.
C. Numerous laws attempt to 'protect' against foreign trade, with some exceptions for 'favored' trading partners.
America was much closer to a true 'free-market' system in it's early history, however the 'great depression' and many other events trigerred a much greater intervention in the US 'economy' makking it even Less 'free-market' than it originally 'attempted' to be.
Believe you me, if we had a 'free' market real estate brokers would be begging on the streets and crying, because of the 2 'economic depressions' that have been sucessfully 'averted' through government intervention.
I built a comperable system to the one in the article one not long ago, only i opted for the slightly superior Dual-channel memory supporting ATI R200 chipset. I went with a full gig of ram, as it was dual channel. I also reserched my processor more carefully, and opted for a newer e6 core AMD64 with 512k cache. Currently my system and CPU temps are 30c in a stadard beige case, without Any case fans hooked in, just a dual variable fan PSU, and the Cool N Quiet fan on the amd CPU both fans are running around 1600 RPM. yup, and the fan speeds can rev up in the summer etc, as needed, but it's whisper quiet, so quiet, i hear every HD access loud and clear.
with a decent PCI-E card, this bad boy would be fully gamer ready, and because i reused a case, NEC DVD burner, psu (used a 20-24 pin adapter), and have a kvm the whole setup set me back less than $400, and i put in a 200 gig 16MB cache SATA drive instead of the pathetic 80 gig and have double the RAM.
In all fairness, the stupidity of the general public has been the number one deterrent to atomic power.
Was they guy who mass produced the infamous 'i survived three mile island' t-shirts an operative for the 'fossil fuel' industry? nope! just a capitialist looking to cash in on a fad!
and you know what, the fact that not a single person was injured in three mile island mattered to anyone. just the fact that a nuclear core could overheat and potentially go critical, that part of the early warning system failed, but that the fail safes managed to create a dicey, but controlled situation, where they were left no choice but to vent radioactive gasses into the atmosphhere after an ordered evacuation. well, the whole situtaion was controleld and handled remarkablly well, nothing like the slipshod handling of chernoble that the russians had to deal with.
That was all it took to 'doom' atomic energy in the united states. everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and not a single person died.
So because we had an awesome system that could prevent an atomic catastrophy like chernoble from occuring, even when the equipment failed, it was deemed unsafe by the public because we 'evacuated' people just 'to be on the safe side.' hey, atomic energy proved that if you put in the right people to do the job it Is safe. and Even with the right people, it's cheap! even if you consider the cost of building a 'long term' storage site the cost per killowatt hour is still far below 6 cents per killowatt hour.
and then there is the fact that apparently spent fuel rods can be 'recycled' into new fuel rods, and take up signifigantly less 'storage' space thanks to advances in robotics, etc. fission power is also the only source of energy that the longer we wait to tap it, the 'less' there is to tap (due to atomic decay) if recycling programs retrieved even 50% of spent fuel rods that would double the world supply of uranium (and there is PLENTY of uranium to be mined and refined yet)
I love eco friendly power, and frankly I can't imagine anything More ecologically friendly than atomic power. sure it takes some care and some precuation, but the science is good, it's proven, the technology is mature, we know how to build reactors and how to certify them. we know what level of staffing efforts it takes to train people to keep atomic energy facilities safe. Many many sites are projected to reach end of life, if we don't rebuild our atomic infrastructure and expand it, we're in serious trouble.
and we can even locate the plants many many miles away from 'major population centers' just to keep the 'scared public' from worrying. in smaller less populated areas the safety and benefits of atomic power can be more easily 'sold' to the residents... even if the 'power' is being sold to 'large communities' hundreds of miles away through high efficiency transmission lines. if the state of 'texas' can supply electricity to california, then it should be no problem to find plenty of suitable locations to place as many reactors as we need to provide lots and lots of cheap, atomic energy. and if we're looking for a 'cheap' fix for the 'oil and coal' addiction, well, converting more of the grid to atomic power would be the 'easy' answer.
I dunno about that, but honda seems dead set to replace human workers with affordable robots. just don't let the old people find out about it!
Old Glory Insurance: Robot Insurance
As a senior citizen, you're probably aware of the threat robots pose. Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/95/95foldglory.phtml
browsers rely on 'end to end' security. either end had the capability to intercept the data. so let's say you'rve decide that the DRM scheme relies on ssh, so now a basic packet sniffer won't be reliable... okay, then simple, i simple on My end, keep a constant dump of all RAM writes. the data must at some point be invoked on my local system in an unencrypted state in order to be encrypted, and also to be decrypted. now i can still reverse engineer this process, but i now need a resident memory program to 'emulate' the response and authentication procedure.
Now if the DRM is managed by a 'special' chip on the motherboard, and the only place that the data 'occurs' unencrypted is on this special chip, now i need to pull out a solder sucker and remove this chip, or add a 'mod chip' between this chip and the system, to 'defeat' the drm.
So you see. DRM is a lot like making a 'steel' door, as long as you can 'get a man inside' to let you in, there is no security at all. and ultimately the only way to ensure that no one can 'be the man inside' is to completely outlaw hacking of hardware. True, the DMCA already does this. still it doesn't prevent 'criminals' from knowing how 'weak' DRM is, and how 'easily circumventable' it is. DRM only 'forces' the consumer into 'compliance' with the law.
Frankly, if the 'consumer' is your enemy, and not the 'criminals' who would like to make a 'profit' off the works you made.. well then there is something fucked up with your logic.
so the DRM must probably take care of that by unlocking the restriction part of the DRM after the copyright expires.
So in other words, my computer system clock just needs to be set 45 years into the future to unlock all drm files? Brilliant! seriously though how does the DRMed file know it's been 32 years or whatever arbitrary date the disney collective has manipulated congress into setting this week? okay it's some server on the internet, now all i need to do is run a packet sniffer load some drmed files, and anylize the resposnises and the address/lookup mechinizim, and i can now design a 'fake' server to tell my drm 'yeah it's okay all your drm expired' well let's say the drm program doesn't trust the internet or my system clock, it makes me call a 1-800 number, and i have to correctly write down some 64 character 'password' (never mind that people would cry outrage at that bs, they don't even like the 20 digit 'keys' for software!) well, a little reverse engineering, or someone with access to the source code that generates theyse 'unlock keys' can write a keygen that maybe doesn't always produce working keys, but has a lot better shot than some one trying to randomly guess.. so DRM can't do what you want, ultimately, once the copyright expires it's going to be up to 'internet libraries' to provide drm free content that no longer is protected by copyright law.
well in that case all my calculations are all off, as i had assumed that interlaced video had the same frame rate as progressive video.
since initial dvd specs were 480i (720x480) that means i needlessly halved the number of pixels being processed... or if i got the pixels correct, but that progressive scan footage is really at 15 fps, instead of the 30 fps that interlaced video is at... then the processing requirement drops sharply for progressive scan, to being slightly below what interlaced video requires (since normally one also has to 'deinterlace' the video as well)
still, my numbers came along the lines of what microsoft recommends for optimal playback of wmv9 so, perhaps any errors i made don't properly reflect real world decoding situations.
well, even with a 50% reduction that does make playback more feasible on slower cpus. and you assertions on high def, are they '1080p' high def? or what? remember that there are a number of sets out there that don't even support 720p, and finding one that supports 1080p will cost an armload, and 720p is about 2x superior for 'action' video than 1080i, so all things considered, shouldn't we be considering what the processing requirements of decoding 720p video is? since realistically without breaking the bank that's going to be the highest resolution that most people are going to be able to use.
not to mention, 720p is the resolution of choice for sports broadcasts, so the 'availability' (free) of those 720p streams means that most people are going to have access to 720p or lower high def.
and FWIW the oricinal spec for MPEG-2 compression allowed decoding by a single 166 MHZ mmx enabled pentium pro cpu. so, i don't see where the '2-3 ghz' requirement comes from. if a 166mhz cpu can handle a 720x480i (172,800 ppf) video stream from mpeg-2... then why would a 1920x1080p (2,073,600ppf) require more than 1992 MHz cpu for 'full' hardware decoding? ansd as yuyou said, the modern video cards can offload up to 50% of that cpu overhear, making the minimum CPU requirment for hardware decoding 1.0 ghz. of a mpeg-2 stream.
mind i realize mpeg-4 streams are more popular with high def, and require about 3x the cpu power to decode... which would put us back at your numbers... but again that's for 1080p. 720p would require an 886mhz cpu (443 w/gpu) for mpeg-2 and 2.656ghz/1.328ghz for mpeg-4.
since the c7 has up to 2ghz operation (not sure where that puts it in 'relation' to the pentium pro 166, which all my figures were based on) it should Easily handle 720p, even in mpeg-4 and might even be able to handle 1080i, although 1080p should be out of it's league...
i'm pretty sure that in a 'modern' pc all video decoding is handled on the video card. that's why when you try to 'screen grab' you just get a pink or blue image all the decoding is being done by the video card. so as long as you have a gpu capable of decoding HD video, and a media player that supports hardware decoding, the cpu overhead should be pretty low.
So how would propose I add another gig when it cannot even accept a single gig?
;) and viola a gig of swap, with all the performance of 'real' ram. sure finding places where you can buy all the controllers, capacitors etc, and wiring up the breadboard is perhaps a little more than you want to do... but um yeah it's definitely something that puts you apart from the pack ;)
well, you could break out the solder, and a bread board, and pick up a memeory controller that can work across a pci bridge, preferably as an ide/scsi controller, and of course a memory socket or two (depepnding on the memory controller you picked out) and then , on boot up initialize that ram as a swap drive, using something like norton ghost, or dd
I know many people who've bought just a console and a few games, then never bought another game. albeit they almost never buy 'launch' consoles... still it can happen.
Actually the stick that's being used to encourage the production of algeal farms is ironically, the kyoto convention. any 1,000 megawatt powerplant with roughly 3 square miles of land (2000 acres) nearby can produce about 40 million gallons of algea oil, and 50 million gallons of ethanol a year. and the algea thrives off of eating the co2 and nox from exhaust, while creating some potentially lucrative opportunities for the power companies.
n ergy_calculator.html
by 2009 the system will be fully production tested, and they're currently installing several 'test sites' to make sure the system is ready to be brought online at any major fossil fuel plant world wide. http://www.greenfuelonline.com/
I also understand that the japanese are using a simmilar system, but rather than processing the algea into oil and ethanol, they 'mix' it back into coal, to be burned to produce the elctricity, that produces exhaust gas to feed the algea that gets mixed with the coal to, well you get the idea.
the ethanol and bio diesel markets may be more lucrative, than reducing annual fuel consumption by whatever 90 million barrels of ethanol and oil equate to in tons of coal.. although i found a handy calcualtor yay http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/science/e
which says about 150 gallons of diesel is equal to a short ton of coal, and about 167 gallons of 'gasoline' (closest thing to ethanol) equals the energy in a short ton in coal.. hrm... but i still have no idea how much coal a 1,000 megawatt plant uses per year. if i'm interperting the calculator correctly, it's saying that you're getting over 1,000 times as much energy from 'cleaning' the emmisions as the plant is using, anually.
hrm. i have a funny feeling the news site i read the article on had some of the details 'wrong' because according to the wiki on solar power 3 square miles of land only gets a million megajoules of energy a year, roughly 2 weeks worth of power output from a 1000 megawatt plant. meh, perhaps the figures of millions of barrels was only if every 1,000 megawatt plant in the us that had room to put up an algea farm did so. that would make a lot more sense, since there are at least 1,000 of them.
Apparently you've never heard of these guys i don't know anything that scales down better than 'microscopic organizims'.
and keep in mind, that presently these rural places are just burning the dung directly, there have been numerous people trying to get the people to use methane or electric cooking produced from the cow dung instead of cooking directly over the dung, but it's a 'cost' issue. sure there are a few villages here and there that have these kinda systems, but for the most part they were the pet projects of various people who simply couldn't afford to provide the system wide scale.
As an owner of one of them fancy Gateway monitors with HDCP... SHould have bought some vasoline while I was at it.
I'm sure Jack Valenti has some you can borrow, as he must have bought some hearing that you 'the consumer' are drooling over hardware that supports DRM to prevent 'unauthorized' viewing and copying of digital signals, and is in no other way different from the cheaper already widely available DVI enabled devices which can be bought anywhere(even wal-mart sells dvi enabled TVs).
You certainly don't need a 64bit Athlon CPU
I beg to differ, I recently built a 'media center' pc around an AMD Athlon 64 Socket 754 3000+ E6 model cpu.
this cpu only costs $126 and puts out WAY less heat than anything in the althonXP line. less heat, less noise, a decent sized copper base heatsink and you won't even need to plug in a fan to keep this chip cool. for a 'media' PC the noise factor is crucial!
http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/news/03/0724.html
apparently you've never heard of bio-plastic. yes, good old plant esters can be converted into plastics too. it's just been really expensive to do so. and it's not going to get any cheaper until people demand the stuff in volume.
the extent of the 'addiction' to oil has prevented technolgies that could have 'saved' us 30 years ago (when the us oil production 'peaked' prior to new technolgies being developed) such as wide scale algea farming. do you realize how much say, desert region could be converted into a continuous algea production center? a lot. and that was just the 'on land production' they were considering in the 70's algea grows in water, cheap ways of making water more 'algea friendly' to allow rapid growth fields of the stuff over deep water would greatly increase the amount of energy we can utilize that comes from the sun.
done right algea oil might be cheaper than petrolium. afterall harvesting something off the surface should cost a lot less than drilling very deep holes to pump stuff out of the ground, and diesel engines can be converted to run on straight up veggie oil, so the energy costs in comparisions to 'cracking' petrolium hydrocarbons is far far lower. but the $ needed to design, test, and deploy a global algea field capable of replacing the 'oil' addiction would be staggering, just the capital required to replace the Us oil needs would run in the billions. and wehn all is said and done we don't even know if it would be 'cheaper' than pertolium. what if it can replace the oil addiction but is 3 times as expensive? what then?