the USB tuners were likely selected for their ability to render the data in the final compression format over usb2.0 i don't know if you noticed, but 11 streams of mpeg-4 compression in HD resolutions takes well more horsepower than a single dual core P-4 can crank out. OTOH each of these usb tuners can have a nice, dedicated encoder chip that pipes the stream relatively raw, and the only task the cpu has is handling the data routing. true back plane cards could have the same chip, but then the higher bus speed capabilities of pcie aren't needed. since the card/USB device itself is doing the encoding.
External USB 1.0 devices were a joke, but there are some very nice external usb 2.0 tuners out there now, especially if you desire an output stream of mpeg-4 (divx, etc) as the native.
yes, but i can have a venice core 3000+ in s754 for $126 intel doesn't even have an entry in the 512k cache space... they go from 256k straight to 1 MB, and the prescott core there in the same perfomance level is almost $50 more.
For a buget performer/overclocker a socket 754 venice is nice, because you can overclock it by at least 400 mhz with quality air cooling alone.
so yeah, although the socket 939s are on a line with the intel pricing for that level or performance, amd has some nicely priced socket 754's.
well for one glass is a fluid (with a hot melting point). it may not corrode, but it sure does change shape as gravity pulls on it long enough. i say if we're going to use a fluid we may as well use WATER. afterall there is more of that than Anything else on the surface of the earth, and it's a Really good conductor, as good as copper.
actually, to increase the speed one doesn't create a vacume (which is vritually impossible to do anyways) one greates negative pressure in the direction the car is traveling EG you pump air above and out below for downward flow, and vice verse for upflow. instead of needing to create a fancy air tight shaft, etc all one needs is some reversible computer controlled fans of sufficient suction.
creating a perfect vacume tube with airlocks every floor etc would be an enginnering nightmare, and waaaay more expensive than a pair of high flow fans.
and the fans eliminate wind restiance far more effectively too, since the air flow can actually Create lift in the direction you wanted the elevator to travel, rather than trying to be at 0% drag one can acheive -1000% drag (or 1000% more lift than ordinary wind resistance alone could acomplish) (the actualy number depends on the size and power of the fans, but you get the idea)
you also missed the point other posters made, the faster the elevator is 'freefalling' the more breaking power the maglev elevator has to stop itself with (assuming it's using the drive engine to generate power, assuming it relies on the built in permanent magnets then it will slow down more gradually, but will come to a slow even if the electromagents themselves failed). and unlike the 'jarring' sudden stop of a total failure system that conventional cable elevators have, the maglev breaks could cause a nice gradual ride down, all the way to the bottom of the shaft where the doors can be opened manually. instead of being 'trapped' in ana elevator needing rescue by fire firghters you're just suck waiting to reach the first floor at a mind numbingly slow pace (for saftey reasons) a substantial improvement over existing elevator tech.
HOT girls to hang out with geeky guys because they now share similar interests. I'm talking about things like anime...video games...MMORPGs, etc.
that hot elf babe you picked up on wow -- she's not a girl. i know she sent you some 'pics' of her at her 'porn site' but dude, it's just a guy fucking with your head;)
If you enjoy the game you should at least pay for it.
I'll get bsck to you on that when i make more than mid-4 digit a year income. there is a little something called 'poverty' you may have heard of it, and yes it exists in the united states. something like food, and transportation consume about 90% of my income, when i have cash to spend on things it's generally the hardware i buy, not the expensive software. prior to reliable emulation i would rent video games... which meant i had limited access to titles and selection... and only until the rental was due back.
not everyone had parents that would foot the bill for college, and not everyone could go to some private school where they bother to try and inspire kids to learn. but yeah i made my own choices, none the less, and i'm still making them and they're still coming out abut the same.
I dunno i could i suppose go into business selling pirated movies on the street corner so i could 'afford' to buy your precious software titles, but oh wait, that would be doing basically the same thing only on a much larger and worse scale.
and FWIW some people actually own the NES SNES carts etc, but find that digging them out is a lot more hassle than having them all loaded on one flash linker that can play all of them on the go with a gba.
you're thinking way to past what this design is. this design is a PC where the 'media' you plug in (hds. dvd-roms. flash memory etc) are plugged in along the bookshelf design concept. not 'hardware perphrials' DRM protected content. so, you have a 'sony' book, this 'book' holds all your 'sony' DRM content. you can take your sony book to anyone's bookshelf and play your sony content on it, but you CANNOT move the content to say, your itunes 'book'. or any other book in the unit.
this 'design' is all about 'making DRM accessable to the home user' and nothing about 'simplifying' computer hardware, if anything it vastly complicates hardware, because now if your say OS has it's own module and your media files from each company has their owem module you may need 6 or more hard drives or other rewritable media devices installed in the system.
Sony _could_ have revived the 'walkman' name with a stylish portable mp3 player.. remember when everyone had to have a walkman? but sony was at odds with itself over DRM etc etc.. the last thing they wanted to be making and selling was a product that could be used to illegally trade mp3's. so, there were a lot of people trying to make a name in the portable mp3 market, and that's when apple hit with the ipod. and the ipod it was good, and people loved it, and the ipod became the 'walkman' of this generation. 'oh you're not cool, that's just some crappy mp3 player, too poor to get an ipod huh?'
The cat is already out of the bag, and yeah, sony was well aware of mp3 players, and had the hardware and engineering guys who could have designed an efficient one. they were banking on the mp3 format to 'just go away' so their record label could make more money selling CDs. or something like that.
Besides sony was focusing it's effort at dominating the video game sector, they've done an awesome job at it, and they've managed to 'launch' the psp (against nintendo's iron grip on the handheld market) in every major country except the UK. And all this for a system that won't have a respectable* game title for another year, and has no back catalog of compatable games.
I know people who are very happy with their PSPs but most of them have hacked the firmware and are playing ROMs on emulators... frankly I'd rather buy a flash linker and play them on a cheap GBA SP, since DS linkers are still immature, and GBA linkers work with more systems than DS ones. http://www.gameboy-advance.net/nintendo_ds/neo-fla sh/neoflash-review.htm
for $300(or less) i can get a very nice car/portable dvd player with detachable screen(s). and i don't need to buy movies that only play on a psp, plus i can play dvd+-r's i've burned, or movies i've rented from netflix. so the movie playback capabilites don't impress me.
the NDS however has several games i love, and several i wouldn't mind owning.. plus works with my old gba titles, which i have about 20 of or so. I am still worried about nintendo's long term strategy, but they've beaten everyone else out of the portable market, so if they keep on making awesome systems with awesome games, then sony will remain the 'other' portable gaming device.
*= IMNSHO psps launch titles suck, a look at gamefaqs doesn't show much promise til you look at games with no us release dates, or release dates a year or more from now.
Re:Space travel isn't feasible
on
Return to the Moon
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· Score: 3, Interesting
you forgot space cannons. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/spacec annon.html hello 1950's technology we need your help again;) all weather launches of cargo to orbit or go to the moon (as long as they can survive 10,000 Gs of acceleration, and are narrow) for a fraction of the cost of conventional payloads.
Well, it's true i wasn't taking converion into account for the stated amps etc, but then there is efficiency to calculate, and and the 5 v rail, so by the time you have it all figured out having the PC plugged into a 15 amp line, that also powers a monitor can cause a breaker to trip every time. even if no other devices are on the same line, and most houses are wired so that each room or worse each floor has a single breaker for outlets. add in a UPS to deal with undervoltages and brownouts and the amperage requirement goes up yet again... it's pretty easy with high end equipment to wind up with a setup that exceeds the 15-20 amps normal wiring uses.
Anyways, i know how easy it is to trip breakers etc because i was on fuses, and replaced a 15 amp fuse with a 20 amp fuse to take care of problems i was having with power going out on me, and this was 4 years ago and i only had 4 computers (none of them high end) running. the high end has drastically increased power requirments because of dual graphic cards, dvd burners, affordable raid setups etc.
still, bad power does cause a lot of stability issues with a lot of electrical devices, including computers.
That reminds me of the bug windows 95 had where it you left it running for 40 days it would crash. it only took them 6 years to reproduce the bug so they could fix it.
XP at stock is very stable, though, but there is a wider problem in computing than just the 'OS' the electrical grid can have spikes (no problem a good PSU can protect you) and worse, undervoltages. there is Nothing (other than having massive redundent arrays of capacitors) that can be done about under voltaging, and even then it's just a matter of time before the undervolateges cause the capacitors to all blow... then we have people trying to plug everything on one 15 amp breaker that was designed when people had like a living room radio as 'entertainment'
PC power and cooling is selling a PSU that can draw 38 amps from Each 12 volt rail. Dude, my OVEN only operates on 60 amps. but i guess if you want that quad sli setup so you can run battlfield 2 at full resolution on a 40" LCD screen... call an electrician, and have em put in some 60 amp wiring to where your pc plugs in...
er, well there is more than just power issues there are 'reliability' a lot of technology is built on a 'pump and dump' model make it cheap as possible and who cares if it blows up, or sucks etc. they'll just buy more of the junk. still more hardware is designed and engineered broken, but it seems to work fine so they ship it and then find that it seems to work fine but only with one configuration of hardware etc.. it takes a lot of time and energy to really find out who's got a good solid product, and who's selling the flimsy ones.
If I remember my Physics elective from uni, Galaxies are internally gravitationally bounded, that is the entire 'clump' of things is held rougly in equalibrium with gravity providing the contracting forces.
Because if it wasn't bound by gravity it would be an open cluster nebula.
what really matters though is isf this cluster has 100 billion stars or not. if it only has 99,999,999,999 stars it's not a galazy at all. I assume someone counted before declaring this collection of distant stars a galaxy, but someone had best double check just to make sure. if it's lacking the numbers, it's just a cluster.
Well, again the problems of fusion reaction Haven't been solved. Most of the problems with algea production are known limitations, EG: algea production will never be as cheap as fusion even athe most efficient fleet of harvesting ships will yeild far less energy than fusion. It also creates a lot of jobs where mistakes don't cause a multi gigaton detonation of fusionable materials... I believe that the primary reason fusion research has failed so far is they've tried to keep the scope of the reactors so 'small' out of safety concerns. after all a self sustaining perpetually growing chain reaction of fusion would be Very, Very bad. and has been the subject of many science fiction stories, and even has snuck it's way into a few major hollywood motion pictures. (spiderman 2 comes to mind)
Oh and BTW iron fusion is essential for the creation of a number of heavier elements such as gold and uranium etc. iron fusion is Very difficult to produce, and our star may not be massive enough to do so, however other super giant stars over 10,000 times larger than our own have been known to continue fusion long after their atomic mass has been converted entirely into heavier/denser materials than iron.
BTW, lift efficiencies of 'thrust propellants' are greatly over rated. any type of space elevator greatly reduces the energy requirements of launch by creating the greatest efficieny method for launch into orbit. another possibity is some type of hybrid between space elevator, rocket and EM proultion system that uses a 'phase one' EM proulsion ramp (which could extend fairly high with the right materials EG: those needed to build a space elevator) once enough forward momentum is built and enough distance from the gravity well achieved convention thrusters 'finish' the job. saving vast amounts of energy in the process.
EM propulsion is the latest 'rage' in theme parks rides, because off the rapid acceleration, unlike the slow acceleration offered by 'chains' an EM proulsion ride can feel like it's moving the fastest at the very Start of the ride, simply because that's when you accelerate the quickest.
well, if one grows algea on land you run into the issue of harvesting enough, unless you're using controlled environments where every nutrient level is precisely tuned to the needs of the algea. in which case you're not producing a huge volume, but it's very useful for cleaning emissions from coal power plants. and if every coal plant in the us used algea tanks insted of conventional 'scrubbers' enough algea to produce enough biodiesel to run a large segment of our diesel market would be produced. now that's not using a lot of land at all, to replace a large portion (say as much diesel as every farmer in the US uses annually, plus every schoolbus)
growing algea on land is kinda silly though, when it grows on the ocean. but you're right 'algea' needs to be seperated from the sea water, it's harvesting and it would take a lot of acres of ocean to produce enough algea to say fill a harverster tanker, since you are probally only taking the top inch of water, and getting about 1% of the content of that inch of water back as 'concentrated' algea.
Unless of course you harvest at 'low tide' daily through some sort of automated growing field that's anchored off shore... you'd be expending a lot of energy just trying to collect the algea. it's something that's never beeen tried before, something that's never ben tested, and never been proven, Of course it's full of uncertainty. the only certainty though is that as long as everyone says 'it's unproven' and looks for more ways to exploit fossile fuels the longer it will 'stay' unproven.
BTW, on land algea production in controlled raceways has been researched, and is considered viable, but only at a 'certain' price point historically that price point has always been above the price of oil, but that's changing. the most heavily exploited fields have long since peaked, many fields are projected to peak soon, and the number of untapped fields are projected to grow a lot less slowly than the old over tapped sites begin to run dry, at least here in the US. and in certain parts of the mid-east as well. the united states is likely to 'hit' a new peak somewhere between 10-30 years from now, and if there had been a large outcry against possibly the worst oil spill in the history of mankind, our offshore rigs (the largest sector of field growth potential in the US) could cause that peak to hit even earlier.
I strongly believe that someone is going to come up with a viable business model to produce enough algea from free floating ocean harvesting to make it commercially viable. there is just too much 'under utilized' ocean water. some slow release 'wires' on boyoys could 'fertilize' the crop of algea, as slow moving harvester ships make 'runs' that allow them to harvest whichever 'field' was ripe, to concentrate the useful algea for processing into diesel and ethanol and oils and fertilizers etc. what would really get this going though are subsudies on production of biodiesel and/or ethanol. everyone likes no risk investments, so a government promising that you'll make a profit makes it a no brainer. I believe once the methods are designed, tested and proven, the 'need' for government assurances will go away. Consider sugar farming, sugar was once something only the rich could afford, but increasing production has reduced costs associated so much that it's now a very cheap commodity, so cheap that some growers would rather turn their sugar into ethanol in the hopes that they'll make more profit.
The same should also be true for algea, it will take time, and money, and research and risk taking to make algea viable, but once that has been done it will seem so easy some people will be wondering why we didn't do it 30 years ago. it took some bold risk takers in the 1980's to make soybeans the commodity they are today, and it will take bold risk takers to make algea the commodity it can be in the future.
now now, you have to consider the energy cost in bringing those materials To the earth. the loss fdrom inefficiency, etc etc... fusion power runs out when readily available hydrogen and helium on _earth_ runs out, unless we have a 'solution' whereby mining saturn and uranus and jupiter for helium and hydrogen becomes 'feasible' and even then the energy requirements to ship the materials out of their respective gravity pulls may be 'too high' to sustain the power as long as you claim.
the beauty of the sun is that we don't have to Do anything to recieve our share of the energy from it, we just have to utilize the energy that comes from it. some argue that the most efficient way to utilize the resource of the solar system effecively is to build a dyson sphere, which may require most of the mass orbiting the sun... and a lot of energy, meaning you almost need to build a dyson sphere to have the energy to build a dyson sphere. anyways, we've been chasing 'fusion' for over 60+ years, and the only controlled fusion devices we have require a trigger of fission or more laser energy than the device outputs.
remember most of they hydrogen and helium in the universe are already stars, or large gas giants. and anything outside our own solar system would take so long to transfer here, and use so much energy and resource in shipping it here that it may well be impossible to ever recover hydrogen or helium from distant star systems.
BTW, as an aside, the number of large gas giants in our own solar system would be a possible explaination for any extra teresstrial activity that wasn't otherwise explainable. if you were an advanced civilization with interstellar travel finding suitable systems with reserves of hydrogen and helium would be critical for developing colonies for when your own solar system was exhausted or near exhausted of resource. unless of course you're going to suggest that the ultimate technology would be a device that simply conserved all currently wasted energy with as close to 100% efficiency as possible.. but in that scenario, then even thermal death of the universe becomes negligable to outlast...
Old news, Tom sawyer patented distributed work over a century ago. His idea was slighly superior however in that people Paid him money to experience first hand the thrills of using their idle work-cycles.
So i'm afraid you owe old tom sawyer a good deal of royalties for infringing on his patented business models. Guess you shoulda charged people to show up at your door and clean your house for you.
Well it's more like either We Make it economical, or we go back to horses and blacksmiths using wood fires. because at some point in time the energy just runs out. no matter how many people you kill to get more of it for yourselves. ironically china is one of the nations most suited to surviving a collapse of modern technology, since the poorest chinese have been living in much the same way for the past 5,000 years.
Well, at least my point about why sites were getting widely varied benchmarks was left intact;)
I was just drooling over the posibility of ddr3 as a system memory, because it simplifies the bus, so even though it's higher latency it has fewer 'hops' to run through. not grounded in reality sigh, but a man can dream can't he? plus DDR3 can read and write simultaneously across the bus, previous generations (ddr and ddrII) cannot perform that amazing feat. Just that fact alone compensates for a huge amount of latency, and allowed 512MB cards to finally start out performing 256MB cards in more benchmarks. DDRII is six years old already we need better tech:/
The reason why there is such a huge discrepency between performance between some review sites and others is that some sites are using abysmal 3-3-3-3 timings DDR memory for the FX-60 while others are using the better timed DDR chips. For gaming there is a HUGE advantage to having 2-3-2-2 timings because the entire content of the ram can be dumped almost twice as often as 4-4-4 timed DDR2, which because of it's better frequencies can pump more data at a slower rate.
Mind you AMD will need DDR2 support in the future, unless they somehow decided GDDR3 was better, because in about a few years DDR2 modules will be coming down to the 2-2-2 timings level, and will blow away the standard ddr modules. i mean technically if you look at video cards with ddr2 and ddr3 memory there is no engineering reason why someone couldn't make a ddr2 or ddr3 memory that worked awesome today, but there is plenty of 'marketing' reasons why they nead to have a 'clear' roadmap into the future.
DDR memory still has a lot of years of life left in it if you get the good timings stuff, like ocz or patriot. too bad ddr2 is 240 pin and ddr1 is 184 pin, so one can't make them pin compatable.. and no doubht ddr3 and ddr4 won't be pin compatable when they come out either.
ah well, tought to say, but if i was at AMD and trying to think of a way to 'counter' the DDR2 solution intel is using i'd instead opt for the simplified GDDR3 as main system memory. At least i'd consider the viability of doing so. the high end memory card market overnight decided to drop agp support and ddr2 support and go all pci-e with gddr3, because they were simpler more elgeant and properly working designs. agp is, was and remains a kludge to work around a problem that a better solution hadn't been thought of and ddr2 is full of legacy design needs from it's legacy heritage too.
Anyways, I'd rather see an AMD system (on 65 nm core) with GDDR3 modules than DDR-II modules.
soybeans are just the volume of today's imemdiate short term bio-diesel boom. aqua cultured algea is the source that is vastly more efficient than soybeans. the earth's surfaces is 2/3rds cover by water and at least 50% of that water would support at least seasonal biodiesel production... and frankly, production of even 1% of that surface area would exceed (after energy expended converting it) the entire energy consumption of today's united states. and that's assuming that you converted all of it. if you grew some algea specifically for producing electricity etc, you wouldn't spend as much energy converting it into bio diesel.
Besides, 1% efficiency beats -100% efficiency... if you consider that once used the energy in petrolium has been disapated (as light heat etc.) it is no longer there to be used again. a negative 100% efficiency by my logic. I'd hate to live in a world where soybeans biodiesel/ corn or cane ethanol etc powered every vehicle too, and all electricity had to come from them as well, but once you throw in algea into the equasion you've got real potential.
$10 a gallon isn't that bad considering that you know mineral oil will never have isssues.. however your basic cooking oil can be a lot cheaper, at around $2-10 a gallon depending on a number of variables. like if you're buying it from the local wholesaler in 5 gallon drums, or buying it by the quart at the grocery store at regular retail price....
nah the Real potential is in the sunlight hitting the earth that is unused/reflected back into space etc. more energy hits the earth in a day than ever existed in every coal and oil mine.
Bio diesel side-steps the problem of mass producing photo votaics, and all the promlems (durability, only provides power when it's sunny etc) related to them. because plants simply grow slower if they have less direct sunlight than they need. bio diesel and plant oils can be stockpiled like oil and can be held in 'reserves.' there are plenty of reasons to 'support' bio diesel via government subsidies... after all the petrolium oil industry is the most heavily subsudized industry in the US today.
Coal-oil costs as much or more to develop as developing a biodiesel industry would, and there isn't as much coal in the ground as there are days of sunlight left.
I'd much rather see people trying to wean us off foriegn energy get 'cronyism' benefits than those who say we have to kill other people to provide our economy with ever more petrolium. Yeah E85 benefits states like iowa and minnesota, and wisconsin etc etc etc.. and yeah biodiesel benefits any state where soybeans are grown.. but would you rather see that money heading to the mid-east? or to some people in minneapolis?
sure you'd rather have a perfect system, but I'll take one where we can at least have the logic to persue energy sources that won't runout before our days in this solar system do.
well, 320x240 is the lowest possible resolution they may be supporting.
They have announced the use of DivX codecs. DivX supports DVD resolution as well as 640x480 resolution, so they haven't actually announced a resolution, perhaps they will allow users to pick the resolution based on the size file they wish to dl. who knows.
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toledo is still on 90 nm tecnology, power consumption will go down a lot, and clockspeed will go up when amd makes a 65 nm based x2.
;)
so yeah, conroe kicks butt over the existing x2's because the product amd will be selling that is comperable to it hasn't been released yet
the USB tuners were likely selected for their ability to render the data in the final compression format over usb2.0 i don't know if you noticed, but 11 streams of mpeg-4 compression in HD resolutions takes well more horsepower than a single dual core P-4 can crank out. OTOH each of these usb tuners can have a nice, dedicated encoder chip that pipes the stream relatively raw, and the only task the cpu has is handling the data routing. true back plane cards could have the same chip, but then the higher bus speed capabilities of pcie aren't needed. since the card/USB device itself is doing the encoding.
External USB 1.0 devices were a joke, but there are some very nice external usb 2.0 tuners out there now, especially if you desire an output stream of mpeg-4 (divx, etc) as the native.
yes, but i can have a venice core 3000+ in s754 for $126 intel doesn't even have an entry in the 512k cache space... they go from 256k straight to 1 MB, and the prescott core there in the same perfomance level is almost $50 more.
For a buget performer/overclocker a socket 754 venice is nice, because you can overclock it by at least 400 mhz with quality air cooling alone.
so yeah, although the socket 939s are on a line with the intel pricing for that level or performance, amd has some nicely priced socket 754's.
well for one glass is a fluid (with a hot melting point). it may not corrode, but it sure does change shape as gravity pulls on it long enough. i say if we're going to use a fluid we may as well use WATER. afterall there is more of that than Anything else on the surface of the earth, and it's a Really good conductor, as good as copper.
actually, to increase the speed one doesn't create a vacume (which is vritually impossible to do anyways) one greates negative pressure in the direction the car is traveling EG you pump air above and out below for downward flow, and vice verse for upflow. instead of needing to create a fancy air tight shaft, etc all one needs is some reversible computer controlled fans of sufficient suction.
creating a perfect vacume tube with airlocks every floor etc would be an enginnering nightmare, and waaaay more expensive than a pair of high flow fans.
and the fans eliminate wind restiance far more effectively too, since the air flow can actually Create lift in the direction you wanted the elevator to travel, rather than trying to be at 0% drag one can acheive -1000% drag (or 1000% more lift than ordinary wind resistance alone could acomplish) (the actualy number depends on the size and power of the fans, but you get the idea)
you also missed the point other posters made, the faster the elevator is 'freefalling' the more breaking power the maglev elevator has to stop itself with (assuming it's using the drive engine to generate power, assuming it relies on the built in permanent magnets then it will slow down more gradually, but will come to a slow even if the electromagents themselves failed). and unlike the 'jarring' sudden stop of a total failure system that conventional cable elevators have, the maglev breaks could cause a nice gradual ride down, all the way to the bottom of the shaft where the doors can be opened manually. instead of being 'trapped' in ana elevator needing rescue by fire firghters you're just suck waiting to reach the first floor at a mind numbingly slow pace (for saftey reasons) a substantial improvement over existing elevator tech.
HOT girls to hang out with geeky guys because they now share similar interests. I'm talking about things like anime...video games...MMORPGs, etc.
;)
that hot elf babe you picked up on wow -- she's not a girl. i know she sent you some 'pics' of her at her 'porn site' but dude, it's just a guy fucking with your head
If you enjoy the game you should at least pay for it.
I'll get bsck to you on that when i make more than mid-4 digit a year income. there is a little something called 'poverty' you may have heard of it, and yes it exists in the united states. something like food, and transportation consume about 90% of my income, when i have cash to spend on things it's generally the hardware i buy, not the expensive software. prior to reliable emulation i would rent video games... which meant i had limited access to titles and selection... and only until the rental was due back.
not everyone had parents that would foot the bill for college, and not everyone could go to some private school where they bother to try and inspire kids to learn. but yeah i made my own choices, none the less, and i'm still making them and they're still coming out abut the same.
I dunno i could i suppose go into business selling pirated movies on the street corner so i could 'afford' to buy your precious software titles, but oh wait, that would be doing basically the same thing only on a much larger and worse scale.
and FWIW some people actually own the NES SNES carts etc, but find that digging them out is a lot more hassle than having them all loaded on one flash linker that can play all of them on the go with a gba.
you're thinking way to past what this design is. this design is a PC where the 'media' you plug in (hds. dvd-roms. flash memory etc) are plugged in along the bookshelf design concept. not 'hardware perphrials' DRM protected content. so, you have a 'sony' book, this 'book' holds all your 'sony' DRM content. you can take your sony book to anyone's bookshelf and play your sony content on it, but you CANNOT move the content to say, your itunes 'book'. or any other book in the unit.
this 'design' is all about 'making DRM accessable to the home user' and nothing about 'simplifying' computer hardware, if anything it vastly complicates hardware, because now if your say OS has it's own module and your media files from each company has their owem module you may need 6 or more hard drives or other rewritable media devices installed in the system.
not at all what apple had envisioned.
Sony _could_ have revived the 'walkman' name with a stylish portable mp3 player.. remember when everyone had to have a walkman? but sony was at odds with itself over DRM etc etc.. the last thing they wanted to be making and selling was a product that could be used to illegally trade mp3's. so, there were a lot of people trying to make a name in the portable mp3 market, and that's when apple hit with the ipod. and the ipod it was good, and people loved it, and the ipod became the 'walkman' of this generation. 'oh you're not cool, that's just some crappy mp3 player, too poor to get an ipod huh?'
a sh/neoflash-review.htm
The cat is already out of the bag, and yeah, sony was well aware of mp3 players, and had the hardware and engineering guys who could have designed an efficient one. they were banking on the mp3 format to 'just go away' so their record label could make more money selling CDs. or something like that.
Besides sony was focusing it's effort at dominating the video game sector, they've done an awesome job at it, and they've managed to 'launch' the psp (against nintendo's iron grip on the handheld market) in every major country except the UK. And all this for a system that won't have a respectable* game title for another year, and has no back catalog of compatable games.
I know people who are very happy with their PSPs but most of them have hacked the firmware and are playing ROMs on emulators... frankly I'd rather buy a flash linker and play them on a cheap GBA SP, since DS linkers are still immature, and GBA linkers work with more systems than DS ones. http://www.gameboy-advance.net/nintendo_ds/neo-fl
for $300(or less) i can get a very nice car/portable dvd player with detachable screen(s). and i don't need to buy movies that only play on a psp, plus i can play dvd+-r's i've burned, or movies i've rented from netflix. so the movie playback capabilites don't impress me.
the NDS however has several games i love, and several i wouldn't mind owning.. plus works with my old gba titles, which i have about 20 of or so. I am still worried about nintendo's long term strategy, but they've beaten everyone else out of the portable market, so if they keep on making awesome systems with awesome games, then sony will remain the 'other' portable gaming device.
*= IMNSHO psps launch titles suck, a look at gamefaqs doesn't show much promise til you look at games with no us release dates, or release dates a year or more from now.
you forgot space cannons. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/spacec annon.html hello 1950's technology we need your help again ;) all weather launches of cargo to orbit or go to the moon (as long as they can survive 10,000 Gs of acceleration, and are narrow) for a fraction of the cost of conventional payloads.
Well, it's true i wasn't taking converion into account for the stated amps etc, but then there is efficiency to calculate, and and the 5 v rail, so by the time you have it all figured out having the PC plugged into a 15 amp line, that also powers a monitor can cause a breaker to trip every time. even if no other devices are on the same line, and most houses are wired so that each room or worse each floor has a single breaker for outlets. add in a UPS to deal with undervoltages and brownouts and the amperage requirement goes up yet again... it's pretty easy with high end equipment to wind up with a setup that exceeds the 15-20 amps normal wiring uses.
Anyways, i know how easy it is to trip breakers etc because i was on fuses, and replaced a 15 amp fuse with a 20 amp fuse to take care of problems i was having with power going out on me, and this was 4 years ago and i only had 4 computers (none of them high end) running. the high end has drastically increased power requirments because of dual graphic cards, dvd burners, affordable raid setups etc.
still, bad power does cause a lot of stability issues with a lot of electrical devices, including computers.
his brother could have narcolepsy, you insensitive clod!
That reminds me of the bug windows 95 had where it you left it running for 40 days it would crash. it only took them 6 years to reproduce the bug so they could fix it.
XP at stock is very stable, though, but there is a wider problem in computing than just the 'OS' the electrical grid can have spikes (no problem a good PSU can protect you) and worse, undervoltages. there is Nothing (other than having massive redundent arrays of capacitors) that can be done about under voltaging, and even then it's just a matter of time before the undervolateges cause the capacitors to all blow... then we have people trying to plug everything on one 15 amp breaker that was designed when people had like a living room radio as 'entertainment'
PC power and cooling is selling a PSU that can draw 38 amps from Each 12 volt rail. Dude, my OVEN only operates on 60 amps. but i guess if you want that quad sli setup so you can run battlfield 2 at full resolution on a 40" LCD screen... call an electrician, and have em put in some 60 amp wiring to where your pc plugs in...
er, well there is more than just power issues there are 'reliability' a lot of technology is built on a 'pump and dump' model make it cheap as possible and who cares if it blows up, or sucks etc. they'll just buy more of the junk. still more hardware is designed and engineered broken, but it seems to work fine so they ship it and then find that it seems to work fine but only with one configuration of hardware etc.. it takes a lot of time and energy to really find out who's got a good solid product, and who's selling the flimsy ones.
If I remember my Physics elective from uni, Galaxies are internally gravitationally bounded, that is the entire 'clump' of things is held rougly in equalibrium with gravity providing the contracting forces.
Because if it wasn't bound by gravity it would be an open cluster nebula.
what really matters though is isf this cluster has 100 billion stars or not. if it only has 99,999,999,999 stars it's not a galazy at all. I assume someone counted before declaring this collection of distant stars a galaxy, but someone had best double check just to make sure. if it's lacking the numbers, it's just a cluster.
Well, again the problems of fusion reaction Haven't been solved. Most of the problems with algea production are known limitations, EG: algea production will never be as cheap as fusion even athe most efficient fleet of harvesting ships will yeild far less energy than fusion. It also creates a lot of jobs where mistakes don't cause a multi gigaton detonation of fusionable materials... I believe that the primary reason fusion research has failed so far is they've tried to keep the scope of the reactors so 'small' out of safety concerns. after all a self sustaining perpetually growing chain reaction of fusion would be Very, Very bad. and has been the subject of many science fiction stories, and even has snuck it's way into a few major hollywood motion pictures. (spiderman 2 comes to mind)
Oh and BTW iron fusion is essential for the creation of a number of heavier elements such as gold and uranium etc. iron fusion is Very difficult to produce, and our star may not be massive enough to do so, however other super giant stars over 10,000 times larger than our own have been known to continue fusion long after their atomic mass has been converted entirely into heavier/denser materials than iron.
BTW, lift efficiencies of 'thrust propellants' are greatly over rated. any type of space elevator greatly reduces the energy requirements of launch by creating the greatest efficieny method for launch into orbit. another possibity is some type of hybrid between space elevator, rocket and EM proultion system that uses a 'phase one' EM proulsion ramp (which could extend fairly high with the right materials EG: those needed to build a space elevator) once enough forward momentum is built and enough distance from the gravity well achieved convention thrusters 'finish' the job. saving vast amounts of energy in the process.
EM propulsion is the latest 'rage' in theme parks rides, because off the rapid acceleration, unlike the slow acceleration offered by 'chains' an EM proulsion ride can feel like it's moving the fastest at the very Start of the ride, simply because that's when you accelerate the quickest.
well, if one grows algea on land you run into the issue of harvesting enough, unless you're using controlled environments where every nutrient level is precisely tuned to the needs of the algea. in which case you're not producing a huge volume, but it's very useful for cleaning emissions from coal power plants. and if every coal plant in the us used algea tanks insted of conventional 'scrubbers' enough algea to produce enough biodiesel to run a large segment of our diesel market would be produced. now that's not using a lot of land at all, to replace a large portion (say as much diesel as every farmer in the US uses annually, plus every schoolbus)
growing algea on land is kinda silly though, when it grows on the ocean. but you're right 'algea' needs to be seperated from the sea water, it's harvesting and it would take a lot of acres of ocean to produce enough algea to say fill a harverster tanker, since you are probally only taking the top inch of water, and getting about 1% of the content of that inch of water back as 'concentrated' algea.
Unless of course you harvest at 'low tide' daily through some sort of automated growing field that's anchored off shore... you'd be expending a lot of energy just trying to collect the algea. it's something that's never beeen tried before, something that's never ben tested, and never been proven, Of course it's full of uncertainty. the only certainty though is that as long as everyone says 'it's unproven' and looks for more ways to exploit fossile fuels the longer it will 'stay' unproven.
BTW, on land algea production in controlled raceways has been researched, and is considered viable, but only at a 'certain' price point historically that price point has always been above the price of oil, but that's changing. the most heavily exploited fields have long since peaked, many fields are projected to peak soon, and the number of untapped fields are projected to grow a lot less slowly than the old over tapped sites begin to run dry, at least here in the US. and in certain parts of the mid-east as well. the united states is likely to 'hit' a new peak somewhere between 10-30 years from now, and if there had been a large outcry against possibly the worst oil spill in the history of mankind, our offshore rigs (the largest sector of field growth potential in the US) could cause that peak to hit even earlier.
I strongly believe that someone is going to come up with a viable business model to produce enough algea from free floating ocean harvesting to make it commercially viable. there is just too much 'under utilized' ocean water. some slow release 'wires' on boyoys could 'fertilize' the crop of algea, as slow moving harvester ships make 'runs' that allow them to harvest whichever 'field' was ripe, to concentrate the useful algea for processing into diesel and ethanol and oils and fertilizers etc. what would really get this going though are subsudies on production of biodiesel and/or ethanol. everyone likes no risk investments, so a government promising that you'll make a profit makes it a no brainer. I believe once the methods are designed, tested and proven, the 'need' for government assurances will go away. Consider sugar farming, sugar was once something only the rich could afford, but increasing production has reduced costs associated so much that it's now a very cheap commodity, so cheap that some growers would rather turn their sugar into ethanol in the hopes that they'll make more profit.
The same should also be true for algea, it will take time, and money, and research and risk taking to make algea viable, but once that has been done it will seem so easy some people will be wondering why we didn't do it 30 years ago. it took some bold risk takers in the 1980's to make soybeans the commodity they are today, and it will take bold risk takers to make algea the commodity it can be in the future.
now now, you have to consider the energy cost in bringing those materials To the earth. the loss fdrom inefficiency, etc etc... fusion power runs out when readily available hydrogen and helium on _earth_ runs out, unless we have a 'solution' whereby mining saturn and uranus and jupiter for helium and hydrogen becomes 'feasible' and even then the energy requirements to ship the materials out of their respective gravity pulls may be 'too high' to sustain the power as long as you claim.
the beauty of the sun is that we don't have to Do anything to recieve our share of the energy from it, we just have to utilize the energy that comes from it. some argue that the most efficient way to utilize the resource of the solar system effecively is to build a dyson sphere, which may require most of the mass orbiting the sun... and a lot of energy, meaning you almost need to build a dyson sphere to have the energy to build a dyson sphere. anyways, we've been chasing 'fusion' for over 60+ years, and the only controlled fusion devices we have require a trigger of fission or more laser energy than the device outputs.
remember most of they hydrogen and helium in the universe are already stars, or large gas giants. and anything outside our own solar system would take so long to transfer here, and use so much energy and resource in shipping it here that it may well be impossible to ever recover hydrogen or helium from distant star systems.
BTW, as an aside, the number of large gas giants in our own solar system would be a possible explaination for any extra teresstrial activity that wasn't otherwise explainable. if you were an advanced civilization with interstellar travel finding suitable systems with reserves of hydrogen and helium would be critical for developing colonies for when your own solar system was exhausted or near exhausted of resource. unless of course you're going to suggest that the ultimate technology would be a device that simply conserved all currently wasted energy with as close to 100% efficiency as possible.. but in that scenario, then even thermal death of the universe becomes negligable to outlast...
Old news, Tom sawyer patented distributed work over a century ago. His idea was slighly superior however in that people Paid him money to experience first hand the thrills of using their idle work-cycles.
So i'm afraid you owe old tom sawyer a good deal of royalties for infringing on his patented business models. Guess you shoulda charged people to show up at your door and clean your house for you.
if they can ever make it economical
Well it's more like either We Make it economical, or we go back to horses and blacksmiths using wood fires. because at some point in time the energy just runs out. no matter how many people you kill to get more of it for yourselves. ironically china is one of the nations most suited to surviving a collapse of modern technology, since the poorest chinese have been living in much the same way for the past 5,000 years.
Well, at least my point about why sites were getting widely varied benchmarks was left intact ;)
:/
I was just drooling over the posibility of ddr3 as a system memory, because it simplifies the bus, so even though it's higher latency it has fewer 'hops' to run through. not grounded in reality sigh, but a man can dream can't he? plus DDR3 can read and write simultaneously across the bus, previous generations (ddr and ddrII) cannot perform that amazing feat. Just that fact alone compensates for a huge amount of latency, and allowed 512MB cards to finally start out performing 256MB cards in more benchmarks. DDRII is six years old already we need better tech
DDr2 ram isn't being used because of it's abysmal timings. http://www.ocztechnology.com/aboutocz/press/2005/1 48
compare that to the 2-3-2-2 timings one can get on DDR modules.
The reason why there is such a huge discrepency between performance between some review sites and others is that some sites are using abysmal 3-3-3-3 timings DDR memory for the FX-60 while others are using the better timed DDR chips. For gaming there is a HUGE advantage to having 2-3-2-2 timings because the entire content of the ram can be dumped almost twice as often as 4-4-4 timed DDR2, which because of it's better frequencies can pump more data at a slower rate.
Mind you AMD will need DDR2 support in the future, unless they somehow decided GDDR3 was better, because in about a few years DDR2 modules will be coming down to the 2-2-2 timings level, and will blow away the standard ddr modules. i mean technically if you look at video cards with ddr2 and ddr3 memory there is no engineering reason why someone couldn't make a ddr2 or ddr3 memory that worked awesome today, but there is plenty of 'marketing' reasons why they nead to have a 'clear' roadmap into the future.
DDR memory still has a lot of years of life left in it if you get the good timings stuff, like ocz or patriot. too bad ddr2 is 240 pin and ddr1 is 184 pin, so one can't make them pin compatable.. and no doubht ddr3 and ddr4 won't be pin compatable when they come out either.
ah well, tought to say, but if i was at AMD and trying to think of a way to 'counter' the DDR2 solution intel is using i'd instead opt for the simplified GDDR3 as main system memory. At least i'd consider the viability of doing so. the high end memory card market overnight decided to drop agp support and ddr2 support and go all pci-e with gddr3, because they were simpler more elgeant and properly working designs. agp is, was and remains a kludge to work around a problem that a better solution hadn't been thought of and ddr2 is full of legacy design needs from it's legacy heritage too.
Anyways, I'd rather see an AMD system (on 65 nm core) with GDDR3 modules than DDR-II modules.
soybeans are just the volume of today's imemdiate short term bio-diesel boom. aqua cultured algea is the source that is vastly more efficient than soybeans. the earth's surfaces is 2/3rds cover by water and at least 50% of that water would support at least seasonal biodiesel production... and frankly, production of even 1% of that surface area would exceed (after energy expended converting it) the entire energy consumption of today's united states. and that's assuming that you converted all of it. if you grew some algea specifically for producing electricity etc, you wouldn't spend as much energy converting it into bio diesel.
Besides, 1% efficiency beats -100% efficiency... if you consider that once used the energy in petrolium has been disapated (as light heat etc.) it is no longer there to be used again. a negative 100% efficiency by my logic. I'd hate to live in a world where soybeans biodiesel/ corn or cane ethanol etc powered every vehicle too, and all electricity had to come from them as well, but once you throw in algea into the equasion you've got real potential.
$10 a gallon isn't that bad considering that you know mineral oil will never have isssues.. however your basic cooking oil can be a lot cheaper, at around $2-10 a gallon depending on a number of variables. like if you're buying it from the local wholesaler in 5 gallon drums, or buying it by the quart at the grocery store at regular retail price....
The real potential is in alternative oil sources
nah the Real potential is in the sunlight hitting the earth that is unused/reflected back into space etc. more energy hits the earth in a day than ever existed in every coal and oil mine.
Bio diesel side-steps the problem of mass producing photo votaics, and all the promlems (durability, only provides power when it's sunny etc) related to them. because plants simply grow slower if they have less direct sunlight than they need. bio diesel and plant oils can be stockpiled like oil and can be held in 'reserves.' there are plenty of reasons to 'support' bio diesel via government subsidies... after all the petrolium oil industry is the most heavily subsudized industry in the US today.
Coal-oil costs as much or more to develop as developing a biodiesel industry would, and there isn't as much coal in the ground as there are days of sunlight left.
I'd much rather see people trying to wean us off foriegn energy get 'cronyism' benefits than those who say we have to kill other people to provide our economy with ever more petrolium. Yeah E85 benefits states like iowa and minnesota, and wisconsin etc etc etc.. and yeah biodiesel benefits any state where soybeans are grown.. but would you rather see that money heading to the mid-east? or to some people in minneapolis?
sure you'd rather have a perfect system, but I'll take one where we can at least have the logic to persue energy sources that won't runout before our days in this solar system do.
well, 320x240 is the lowest possible resolution they may be supporting.
They have announced the use of DivX codecs. DivX supports DVD resolution as well as 640x480 resolution, so they haven't actually announced a resolution, perhaps they will allow users to pick the resolution based on the size file they wish to dl. who knows.