Do remember, practically speaking that's 500 MBps for all of your devices. If you have 3 hard drives, a monitor, a card reader, a keyboard and mouse, that's about 100 MBps left for each of them. And when this finally comes out, 500 MBps will seem even smaller.
I remember similar claims about Bluetooth. It was going to be the universal standard, trivial networking between everything, yadda yadda. Ultimately, it's kind of a pain to connect bluetooth devices. "Is this my mouse? No, it's not showing up. Oh, it's paired with you. To un-pair, I have to get a paperclip, hold this button down for five seconds. Now hold this other button for ten until it blinks. Now go into the bluetooth monitor, and look for it again. Is it under HDD's, HID's, HUD's... what are these things?"
When it comes right down to it, give me old fashioned dead simple cables with old fashioned dead simple connectors. If it's plugged in, it's working. There are some great applications for wireless technology, but removing all the wires from everything doesn't seem to be it.
It helps a lot that recently PC game developers have been targeting the Xbox 360 and PS3 as their main platforms. These platforms are unchanging, effectively locking developers to the state-of-the-art circa 2005. This keeps PC builds to a lower visual standard, which gives mainstream laptops a chance of actually keeping up.
Once we see new consoles launched (possibly 2012 or 2013), we'll see developers targeting Poly / RAM budgets of those machines. The PC build requirements will then go through the roof, and laptops will no longer be able to keep up... for a few years, until computers catch up again.
Thankfully, the 60 GHz spectrum is unlikely to get that polluted. It has severe penetration problems. If you have a cup of water (or a screaming child) between your laptop and a base station, the signal would likely be interrupted. Having a few walls between you and your neighbors should be fine.
This is in stark contrast to 802.11*, which can pollute for 1/2 a block.
Good analysis, though one caveat: fast enough to do 1080i is really just fast enough to do 720p. And 720p is really only adequate for very small laptops. Anyone attempting to do 1080i on a PC (instead of 1080p) either has no idea what they're doing or they don't need my validation.
Wireless disk readers and HDD's, though, are an interesting application. Inter-device networking at 500 MB/s might be fast enough for Avatar-style fast swapping of files between base stations and laptops. And 500 MB/s might also be fast enough to connect your laptop as a screen, keyboard, and hard drive to a stationary computer with a lot more umph (and a faster graphics card). You know, the way the old Powerbooks used to behave like SCSI drives if you plugged them into other computers ( I really miss that feature ). The base station would have the brains and would be tapping the resources of the laptop in that arrangement, rather than vice-versa.
I believe you mean 100ms iPhone lag. 5ms would be 1/3rd of a frame.
Mice and trackballs break all of the time. Optical mice break significantly less often than physical mice, because there are fewer real moving parts. An entirely camera-driven setup should break less often than that. There would be no physical object at all, and the user doesn't touch (or damage) the part of the device that actually is used to detect position and motion. Theoretically, you could potentially use such a setup underwater, on sand, or even on the glassy tables that everyone seems to have.
Cheap webcams and lasers can be had for under $20. That is, after all, basically what optical mice use inside.
I'd guess that once an initial run is produced, the non-mouse has a good chance of being more durable than traditional mice.
If it is being driven by a camera at all, you're probably much better off with a 2D interface.
Re:I like holding the mouse over fake holding one!
on
The Mouse Vanishes
·
· Score: 1
My thought exactly. Have a little setup off the left edge of the screen, and banish those terrible trackpads forever. Maybe even set the size of the laptop at the size of the keys + rest, and add back in full-sized function keys.
It could also be that the EPA felt the need to be dramatic in order to reach a compromise position with congress. We may very well have extra hundreds of thousands of unnecessary cancers a year due to Dioxin exposure. And maybe if they say 1200 times, they'll get from congress a bill that is just 400 times. If they had said 400 times, they might have gotten 100 times. Of course, they've been trying to get this stuff banned since the 70's, unsuccessfully. Maybe now they have a chance.
I suspect a 100 mile car is right for a lot of families as a second car... One used for getting to and from work cheaply, but not the car that's used to drive to the lake on weekends. My mother commutes 3 miles, for example. A car like this would be cheap for her to drive.
I also suspect we'll see higher and higher ranges as these things hit real production and battery capacity issues are either solved or worked around. The Volt is a pretty good example: It's a battery-powered car until it runs out of juice, then it can recharge its own battery while driving using gasoline.
I've seen this happen with products that I've worked on too, and it's always a hard line to toe. The non-smarmy thing to do would be to make a single major thread that you start by posting a company position statement to. Then force all discussion about that topic into that thread. That way you keep the board from becoming all about this one non-flattering statement, and the company gets to frame the discussion for new readers, but you also don't Streisand the topic or anger your regular users.
Tesla range: 160-250 miles (depending on options) Subaru G4e range*: 125 miles Mini Electric: 100 miles Chevy volt: 40 miles Coda Sedan: 90 miles Nissan Leaf: 100 miles
A constant mid-high usage is basically the best case scenario for a power grid. This is especially true where nuclear power plants and other electricity producers can't actually be scaled back during low-load situations.
I'm just saying that "quality" is an inherently subjective metric. If you prefer an objective metric like "highest grossing," that's fine. But pretty much by definition you can't mix your metrics, or else you are mislabeling your variables.
"Best" is another big one. You can have a "fastest 0-60 in dry weather on asphalt" "least damage after a 2-story fall into sand" or "best selling" car. But you can't have an objectively "best" car without adding a modifier. That's an inherently subjective judgement, and pushing an objective measurement into it just mislabels your data.
Titanic's story and writing wasn't bad. It was a cheesy love story, told in a somewhat non-linear format, with a pretty painfully obvious MacGuffin. It was a pre/teen love story. But in the pantheon of Twilight and Ever After, Titanic was actually at the upper-end for writing in the genre.
And after Titanic was Dark Angel. Some of the writing of Dark Angel wasn't terrible, though Jessica Alba struggled with the role a bit.
Really, the only truly terrible writing that Cameron is responsible for is Avatar, (and some cringe-worthy lines in True Lies).
There is a big difference between being an event worth going to and being a well-written movie. Avatar is the highest grossing movie of all time. That makes it the highest grossing movie of all time, no more no less.
It's also widely derided for its lackluster characterizations and terrible writing. If you put it to a vote, you'd probably get far greater votes of "poor writing" than lots of other movies that released in 2009. Or to simplify things down, if you had a poll "Which had better writing, Toy Story 3 or Avatar?" I seriously doubt Avatar would gain more than 20% of the votes. Yet it made far more money. Does that mean one is better than the other? No. But the popular opinion that Avatar was a rehashed Dances With Wolves (or Ferngully) was pretty common.
Which is not to say that the movie was terrible. But that other parts of the movie were more important to the moviegoing public than the writing.
Alos, don't throw assessment to a misguided reliance upon unrelated facts. Think for yourself. Subjective assessments are fuzzy and unclean.
People don't base decisions on how many in the past have failed due to piracy. People base decisions on how things in the past have done in the marketplace. This may be based upon piracy, or bad timing, or just luck.
I'll throw two examples out there: PSP and PC games. The PSP was / is an incredibly well made little handheld. Worldwide it has outsold the Xbox by over 10 million units. Yet piracy on the PSP is rampant due to the ease of Memory Stick-based game playback. The 360 has nearly a 9-games-per-console attach rate. The PSP? 4. That diminished attach rate is largely attributed to the rampant piracy. And that, of course, reduces the amount of PSP games being created.
PC games similarly have seen major declines. A console release of a major title might push 5 million units across the 360 and PS3. PC? 500k. There are less PC players out there, but there aren't THAT many less PC players out there.
The Xbox 360 used to be a perfect example of this.
Buy a video of something in SD. Then buy it again in HD. Watch them both on an SD screen. Theoretically, they should be basically exactly the same. But as it stood, the HD version displayed on an SD screen had far less artifacting, smoother black gradients, and a more solid apparent framerate. Therefore, the "HD" rate was actually about adequate for SD video. Sadly, at least at first it wasn't up to the task of HD video.
The same can be said of cameras. You can have a 15 Megapixel CCD that has poor light absorption and comes up with terrible images. Some of the best images have come from 1 MP cameras with giant CCD's and huge lenses (like the ones NASA uses).
Now that I say all of that, YouTube might be making a play for Videos-On-Demand for theaters. Have an independent movie theater and want to show Casablanca on Valentine's Day? Why go to a distributor when you could go through YouTube's new Media On Demand service, pay a flat theater rate, and be ready to go in minutes?
4k is a good way of hedging bets against future functionality.
Youtube might be making a play for something. Maybe they want to be the video source for Anime conventions. Maybe they hope to get projected before movies at low-end theaters who don't have advertising contracts but who do have digital projectors. Maybe they want better-than-1080p resolution for those pesky high resolution PC monitors. Maybe they're just trying to counter the image that Youtube is still all about postage-stamp sized videos of squirrels getting drunk.
Either way, 4K is pretty future proof. If source video started getting uploaded in 4k, they could display across Imax theaters, regular theaters, 1080p HDTV's, CRT's, and cellphones... Sort of the way that sound gets recorded in 24bits or higher, despite being generally played back in 16 bits.
The other question, is why would not selling you certain features in Microsoft Office reduce what the consumer has to pay?
1. The additional software features have zero per-unit cost. They don't save anything by not shipping it to you. 2. Microsoft already charges individual markets more or less whatever it thinks the market will bear. 3. Microsoft wants you to try out and get locked into the advanced features.
Now, there are end-user experience and programmatic reasons to kill the bloat. But from a business standpoint, selling you 5% of the functionality of Office would not actually reduce the cost.
I always wondered if you could use a whole lot of mini-actuators to have pieces "grow out" and "grow back" into the board. Perhaps in a 3x3 configuration, with 2 different height levels and a touch sensor on the middle actuator. Each piece could be arranged out of the 3x3 array of voxels, and moved by touching the middle of a piece, then touching the middle of an unused spot on the board. One could use blue and red LED's under the squares to show which piece belongs to whom.
That would still require 576 actuators, 64 touch sensors, and a whole lot of wiring. But it would be a fun project, and wouldn't use magnets (in *that* way).
Slashdot Mirror
Do remember, practically speaking that's 500 MBps for all of your devices. If you have 3 hard drives, a monitor, a card reader, a keyboard and mouse, that's about 100 MBps left for each of them. And when this finally comes out, 500 MBps will seem even smaller.
I remember similar claims about Bluetooth. It was going to be the universal standard, trivial networking between everything, yadda yadda. Ultimately, it's kind of a pain to connect bluetooth devices. "Is this my mouse? No, it's not showing up. Oh, it's paired with you. To un-pair, I have to get a paperclip, hold this button down for five seconds. Now hold this other button for ten until it blinks. Now go into the bluetooth monitor, and look for it again. Is it under HDD's, HID's, HUD's... what are these things?"
When it comes right down to it, give me old fashioned dead simple cables with old fashioned dead simple connectors. If it's plugged in, it's working. There are some great applications for wireless technology, but removing all the wires from everything doesn't seem to be it.
It helps a lot that recently PC game developers have been targeting the Xbox 360 and PS3 as their main platforms. These platforms are unchanging, effectively locking developers to the state-of-the-art circa 2005. This keeps PC builds to a lower visual standard, which gives mainstream laptops a chance of actually keeping up.
Once we see new consoles launched (possibly 2012 or 2013), we'll see developers targeting Poly / RAM budgets of those machines. The PC build requirements will then go through the roof, and laptops will no longer be able to keep up... for a few years, until computers catch up again.
Thankfully, the 60 GHz spectrum is unlikely to get that polluted. It has severe penetration problems. If you have a cup of water (or a screaming child) between your laptop and a base station, the signal would likely be interrupted. Having a few walls between you and your neighbors should be fine.
This is in stark contrast to 802.11*, which can pollute for 1/2 a block.
Good analysis, though one caveat: fast enough to do 1080i is really just fast enough to do 720p. And 720p is really only adequate for very small laptops. Anyone attempting to do 1080i on a PC (instead of 1080p) either has no idea what they're doing or they don't need my validation.
Wireless disk readers and HDD's, though, are an interesting application. Inter-device networking at 500 MB/s might be fast enough for Avatar-style fast swapping of files between base stations and laptops. And 500 MB/s might also be fast enough to connect your laptop as a screen, keyboard, and hard drive to a stationary computer with a lot more umph (and a faster graphics card). You know, the way the old Powerbooks used to behave like SCSI drives if you plugged them into other computers ( I really miss that feature ). The base station would have the brains and would be tapping the resources of the laptop in that arrangement, rather than vice-versa.
I believe you mean 100ms iPhone lag. 5ms would be 1/3rd of a frame.
Mice and trackballs break all of the time. Optical mice break significantly less often than physical mice, because there are fewer real moving parts. An entirely camera-driven setup should break less often than that. There would be no physical object at all, and the user doesn't touch (or damage) the part of the device that actually is used to detect position and motion. Theoretically, you could potentially use such a setup underwater, on sand, or even on the glassy tables that everyone seems to have.
Cheap webcams and lasers can be had for under $20. That is, after all, basically what optical mice use inside.
I'd guess that once an initial run is produced, the non-mouse has a good chance of being more durable than traditional mice.
Trackpads and touchscreens basically work without any more tactile feedback than this system would give.
If it is being driven by a camera at all, you're probably much better off with a 2D interface.
My thought exactly. Have a little setup off the left edge of the screen, and banish those terrible trackpads forever. Maybe even set the size of the laptop at the size of the keys + rest, and add back in full-sized function keys.
It could also be that the EPA felt the need to be dramatic in order to reach a compromise position with congress. We may very well have extra hundreds of thousands of unnecessary cancers a year due to Dioxin exposure. And maybe if they say 1200 times, they'll get from congress a bill that is just 400 times. If they had said 400 times, they might have gotten 100 times. Of course, they've been trying to get this stuff banned since the 70's, unsuccessfully. Maybe now they have a chance.
Or it could be that our Dioxin exposure is just damned out of proportion with safe reality. The wikipedia page for Dioxin reads like a Who's Who of western country malaises.
I suspect a 100 mile car is right for a lot of families as a second car... One used for getting to and from work cheaply, but not the car that's used to drive to the lake on weekends. My mother commutes 3 miles, for example. A car like this would be cheap for her to drive.
I also suspect we'll see higher and higher ranges as these things hit real production and battery capacity issues are either solved or worked around. The Volt is a pretty good example: It's a battery-powered car until it runs out of juice, then it can recharge its own battery while driving using gasoline.
I've seen this happen with products that I've worked on too, and it's always a hard line to toe. The non-smarmy thing to do would be to make a single major thread that you start by posting a company position statement to. Then force all discussion about that topic into that thread. That way you keep the board from becoming all about this one non-flattering statement, and the company gets to frame the discussion for new readers, but you also don't Streisand the topic or anger your regular users.
Tesla range: 160-250 miles (depending on options)
Subaru G4e range*: 125 miles
Mini Electric: 100 miles
Chevy volt: 40 miles
Coda Sedan: 90 miles
Nissan Leaf: 100 miles
*vehicle has not hit production yet
A constant mid-high usage is basically the best case scenario for a power grid. This is especially true where nuclear power plants and other electricity producers can't actually be scaled back during low-load situations.
I'm just saying that "quality" is an inherently subjective metric. If you prefer an objective metric like "highest grossing," that's fine. But pretty much by definition you can't mix your metrics, or else you are mislabeling your variables.
"Best" is another big one. You can have a "fastest 0-60 in dry weather on asphalt" "least damage after a 2-story fall into sand" or "best selling" car. But you can't have an objectively "best" car without adding a modifier. That's an inherently subjective judgement, and pushing an objective measurement into it just mislabels your data.
Titanic's story and writing wasn't bad. It was a cheesy love story, told in a somewhat non-linear format, with a pretty painfully obvious MacGuffin. It was a pre/teen love story. But in the pantheon of Twilight and Ever After, Titanic was actually at the upper-end for writing in the genre.
And after Titanic was Dark Angel. Some of the writing of Dark Angel wasn't terrible, though Jessica Alba struggled with the role a bit.
Really, the only truly terrible writing that Cameron is responsible for is Avatar, (and some cringe-worthy lines in True Lies).
There is a big difference between being an event worth going to and being a well-written movie. Avatar is the highest grossing movie of all time. That makes it the highest grossing movie of all time, no more no less.
It's also widely derided for its lackluster characterizations and terrible writing. If you put it to a vote, you'd probably get far greater votes of "poor writing" than lots of other movies that released in 2009. Or to simplify things down, if you had a poll "Which had better writing, Toy Story 3 or Avatar?" I seriously doubt Avatar would gain more than 20% of the votes. Yet it made far more money. Does that mean one is better than the other? No. But the popular opinion that Avatar was a rehashed Dances With Wolves (or Ferngully) was pretty common.
Which is not to say that the movie was terrible. But that other parts of the movie were more important to the moviegoing public than the writing.
Alos, don't throw assessment to a misguided reliance upon unrelated facts. Think for yourself. Subjective assessments are fuzzy and unclean.
Herbie Hancock helped form the roots of both Techno and Hip Hop, with a little ditty involving no "real" instruments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockit
People don't base decisions on how many in the past have failed due to piracy. People base decisions on how things in the past have done in the marketplace. This may be based upon piracy, or bad timing, or just luck.
I'll throw two examples out there: PSP and PC games. The PSP was / is an incredibly well made little handheld. Worldwide it has outsold the Xbox by over 10 million units. Yet piracy on the PSP is rampant due to the ease of Memory Stick-based game playback. The 360 has nearly a 9-games-per-console attach rate. The PSP? 4. That diminished attach rate is largely attributed to the rampant piracy. And that, of course, reduces the amount of PSP games being created.
PC games similarly have seen major declines. A console release of a major title might push 5 million units across the 360 and PS3. PC? 500k. There are less PC players out there, but there aren't THAT many less PC players out there.
The Xbox 360 used to be a perfect example of this.
Buy a video of something in SD. Then buy it again in HD. Watch them both on an SD screen. Theoretically, they should be basically exactly the same. But as it stood, the HD version displayed on an SD screen had far less artifacting, smoother black gradients, and a more solid apparent framerate. Therefore, the "HD" rate was actually about adequate for SD video. Sadly, at least at first it wasn't up to the task of HD video.
The same can be said of cameras. You can have a 15 Megapixel CCD that has poor light absorption and comes up with terrible images. Some of the best images have come from 1 MP cameras with giant CCD's and huge lenses (like the ones NASA uses).
Now that I say all of that, YouTube might be making a play for Videos-On-Demand for theaters. Have an independent movie theater and want to show Casablanca on Valentine's Day? Why go to a distributor when you could go through YouTube's new Media On Demand service, pay a flat theater rate, and be ready to go in minutes?
4k is a good way of hedging bets against future functionality.
Youtube might be making a play for something. Maybe they want to be the video source for Anime conventions. Maybe they hope to get projected before movies at low-end theaters who don't have advertising contracts but who do have digital projectors. Maybe they want better-than-1080p resolution for those pesky high resolution PC monitors. Maybe they're just trying to counter the image that Youtube is still all about postage-stamp sized videos of squirrels getting drunk.
Either way, 4K is pretty future proof. If source video started getting uploaded in 4k, they could display across Imax theaters, regular theaters, 1080p HDTV's, CRT's, and cellphones... Sort of the way that sound gets recorded in 24bits or higher, despite being generally played back in 16 bits.
It's still going, and is actually available for purchase.
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/23/review-phantom-force.html
http://www.amazon.com/Excalibur-Phantom-Force-Chess/dp/B0018PWUJA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and-games&qid=1278785244&sr=8-1
Ah, they're still making one! Not networked, of course, and a lot more off-the-shelf.
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/23/review-phantom-force.html
The other question, is why would not selling you certain features in Microsoft Office reduce what the consumer has to pay?
1. The additional software features have zero per-unit cost. They don't save anything by not shipping it to you.
2. Microsoft already charges individual markets more or less whatever it thinks the market will bear.
3. Microsoft wants you to try out and get locked into the advanced features.
Now, there are end-user experience and programmatic reasons to kill the bloat. But from a business standpoint, selling you 5% of the functionality of Office would not actually reduce the cost.
I always wondered if you could use a whole lot of mini-actuators to have pieces "grow out" and "grow back" into the board. Perhaps in a 3x3 configuration, with 2 different height levels and a touch sensor on the middle actuator. Each piece could be arranged out of the 3x3 array of voxels, and moved by touching the middle of a piece, then touching the middle of an unused spot on the board. One could use blue and red LED's under the squares to show which piece belongs to whom.
That would still require 576 actuators, 64 touch sensors, and a whole lot of wiring. But it would be a fun project, and wouldn't use magnets (in *that* way).