We've had stream computing for several years on both platforms see "Metaprogramming GPUs with Sh" by McCool and DuToit. What is significant is that this follows the Purchase by AMD. Leveraging the purchase and providing closer coupling of the CPU and the GPU (HyperTransport?) for GPGPU could allow them to steal the march on Intel the same way they did with the 64 bit instruction set.
About one of my friends with a Math/Comp.Sci./Pol.Sci. who went on to be a very good patent attorney. "How anybody who understands math would go into law!"
Given that all of the players involved are interested in achieving "network lock in" with their proprietary technology and their proprietary players why would they incorporate all standards at once.
Secondly, it obviates the need to replace all of your DVDs or buy a new player or two.
Finally with all of the different standards, Sony might mess up their DRM and allow their drives to play the disk.
What is interesting is the lateral thinking that Nintendo is doing on all levels. It's not just the fun factor and the targeting of women, older gamers and families. It's the recognition that Moore's Law doesn't dictate that more power is the only option. Nintendo is focusing on making smaller cheaper consoles to exploit advances in technology, just as they have with the DS Lite. The DS is compact, elegant, and innovative. Sony on the other hand is focusing on more power at the cost of everything else, resulting in big shiny behemoths like the PSP and the PS3, brutally powerful but musclebound.
Electronic signals travel pretty damn close to c. The problem is that electrons are fermions and as a result are antisocial by the Pauli exclusion principle no more than 2 in each location. Charge makes this even worse. On the other hand photons are boson and they like to hang out in the same location. As a result electrons are handy when you want bits to interact (logic gates, memory) while photons are handy when you want bits to pass through each other (communications etc.). The advantage of using photons is that you can make connections without EMI or other cross talk problems. In addition there is some very nifty quantum computing you can do with such systems (the topic of my dissertation).
Hah! Arguably its easier now to do insanely cool stuff in line oriented code. I just knocked off the code to import a 3d model of Downtown Berkley and display an interactive stereoscopic model with texture mapping in 267 lines of Python using only the enthought python distribution and the PyXML module. If I wanted to add joystick support that would be 10 more lines and the PyGame module. All the tools are free as in beer and speech. The only development tools I used were a text editor and the interactive command line.
A few months ago I knocked off a few hundred lines of Python code which logged gps, and processed the logs to provide KML files which came up in google earth with commented 3d paths of the GPS positions. Once again using FOSS with a command line and a text editor.
Insanely cool code is much simpler these days with high level Python bindings to just about everything.
As for physics, while there is a lot of very expensive cool stuff (CERN etc.) a lot of very cool physics is going on with dirt cheap tools. Lasers, microprocessor controls, high end optics, computers that make a Cray I look like a calculator etc. are available for next to nothing, allowing the Mac Guyver's of physics to do astounding things in their garage.
The other part of the equation is that the expenditures are all in big chunks. I've got disposable income, but I tend to buy in small chunks. I'll buy a $20-30 game or DVD and a $150-250 console without too much indigestion. I tend to buy PC's in chunks the same way. On the other hand, get above $250 for the unit price of an item and the brakes go on real quick. At that point I really do a lot of research, rationalization and saving before buying a "big ticket" item. As a result I have a full set of Game Boys from the GBA to the DS Lite, and will probably get a Wii in short order. But a PS3? Cold day in hell.
Oh, you don't want to mess with the RI-double-A They'll sue you if you burn that CD-R It doesn't matter if you're a grandma or a seven-year-old girl They'll treat you like the evil hard-bitten criminal scum you are
The lack of an easy dock kills any Apple purchases for me. The only reason I buy iPods in the first place is that a dock allows my mom (who has limited vision) to dock her iPod without looking.
What kills me about the nano is the lack of video. My PlayYan equipped GBAs have allowed me to watch video (whole movies) from a flash player for years now. Just about any other PMP allows this too, why not oh so innovative Apple?
Kleptocracies and Oligarchies are bad. Most 'capitalist' countries which fail to enforce the rule of law fall into one of these categories.
In order for capitalism to function the rule of law, a consistent commercial code, a stable currency, basic commercial regulation and antitrust regulation must be provided by the goverment. In the absence of these prerequisites, individuals and businesses have no redress in the case of fraud and stop 'playing the game'.
Most ardent defenders of Capitalism should actually read Adam Smith, he was a staunch defender of a strong judiciary, the public sector, and was a public servant himself (commissioner of customs and professor) for the bulk of his life.
The modern concept of childhood is less than a century old. In the "golden age" of the past child labor was endemic and disease commonly wiped out several young children in each family.
In the same fashion, at the time of the idealized childhoods of "leave it to beaver" we were constantly informed that TV, and comic books were going to turn kids into homicidal gay couch potatos. In the 80's rap, crack and computers were going to breed a generation of "superpreadators". In the 90's the internet was going to rot their brains.
While I'm not saying that video games are perfect for children, obsessive and adictive personalities will find something to latch onto regardless of the tech level of the obsession.
I would submit that the far bigger threat is the cultural focus on jocks and bling as opposed to a deliberate focus on glorifying learning, literacy and cultural and scientific achievement.
...eating nothing but sugary, high glycemic foods... Unless caffene is a damper every nerd would be a superhero, and Beefy would dwarf superman (in strength).
Back to the point of DS9 the trek universe would have been perfect for a MMO game due to the consistency of the series and the strong naval discipline. But as B&B savaged the franchise, incorporating more and more inconsistencies and weak characters the potential for a game dropped. An old school pre-B&B game with a lot of exploration options, and some "cold war" level conflict would be excellent. A DS9 style game with lots of interaction in the alpha quadrant and conflict in the gamma quadrant would be great. DS9 also has the advantage of fielding runabouts that many players would be capable of flying without rising to the rank of captian. Of course my ultimate trek game is still a multiple lan party online game. Each lan party is a ship, forming bridge and engineering etc. (Imagine a lan party with everybody sporting dual screens arranged in a bridge layout with a projector for the main screen.) The online component would manage interaction of separate ships. This would be perfect, in that most ship to ship interaction would be either communications between ships or renders of the ships and sensor data. For non-landing party stories this would be perfect.
1.Raise Prices 2.Add more proprietary hardware 3.Add more DRM, not playing Blu-Ray isn't enough. Destroying the disc (on the faint possibility that it is pirated) while installing a rootkit is preferred. 4.Add exploding batteries
Working off of past history (which is actually overly static in rate of change) and extrapolating 200-300 years in the future, the Star Trek universe is probably far too dirty and run down in comparison. While we tend to idolize the past, and look back to a golden age, the lot of the common man has never been beter. If you were to pluck a common man from revolutionary war period and drop him in a US city, it would be incomprehensibly clean and peaceful. The technology, healthcare and standard of living for the common man in this era would easily exceed what a king could only dream of.
On the other hand, i've never found lasers that go out and stop at 1 meter and clank when you hit them together to be very realistic, or swpace craft what make banking turns in space for that matter.
In an interview several years back (when the StarTAC was the standard Motorola flip phone) Lenoard Nimoy recounted answering a call on his flip phone, with the guy next to him nearly fainting.
Imagine a few years down the road when a terrorist/pedophile uses the trusted computing features of his newish computer to confound the police as to the location of his victims and the **AA sues them under the DMCA to protect the criminal since IP rights trump national security and human life: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/05 16243
Actually there's a resurgence of C64 interest given the advent of DTV videogames based on an FPGA which implements the entire C64 on a chip. Radio Shack had a $20 Hummer road racing that could be used.
Slashdot Mirror
We've had stream computing for several years on both platforms see "Metaprogramming GPUs with Sh" by McCool and DuToit. What is significant is that this follows the Purchase by AMD. Leveraging the purchase and providing closer coupling of the CPU and the GPU (HyperTransport?) for GPGPU could allow them to steal the march on Intel the same way they did with the 64 bit instruction set.
I would be in heaven to be able to bring up a google or wikipedia search with the "select-right click" in a document !
About one of my friends with a Math/Comp.Sci./Pol.Sci. who went on to be a very good patent attorney. "How anybody who understands math would go into law!"
Given that all of the players involved are interested in achieving "network lock in" with their proprietary technology and their proprietary players why would they incorporate all standards at once.
Secondly, it obviates the need to replace all of your DVDs or buy a new player or two.
Finally with all of the different standards, Sony might mess up their DRM and allow their drives to play the disk.
Far too consumer friendly to work!
What is interesting is the lateral thinking that Nintendo is doing on all levels. It's not just the fun factor and the targeting of women, older gamers and families. It's the recognition that Moore's Law doesn't dictate that more power is the only option. Nintendo is focusing on making smaller cheaper consoles to exploit advances in technology, just as they have with the DS Lite. The DS is compact, elegant, and innovative. Sony on the other hand is focusing on more power at the cost of everything else, resulting in big shiny behemoths like the PSP and the PS3, brutally powerful but musclebound.
If they put out enough power to be a threat their heat dissipation would destroy the chip. About as dangerous as a spread out red laser pointer
Electronic signals travel pretty damn close to c. The problem is that electrons are fermions and as a result are antisocial by the Pauli exclusion principle no more than 2 in each location. Charge makes this even worse. On the other hand photons are boson and they like to hang out in the same location. As a result electrons are handy when you want bits to interact (logic gates, memory) while photons are handy when you want bits to pass through each other (communications etc.). The advantage of using photons is that you can make connections without EMI or other cross talk problems. In addition there is some very nifty quantum computing you can do with such systems (the topic of my dissertation).
Hah! Arguably its easier now to do insanely cool stuff in line oriented code.
I just knocked off the code to import a 3d model of Downtown Berkley and display an interactive stereoscopic model with texture mapping in 267 lines of Python using only the enthought python distribution and the PyXML module. If I wanted to add joystick support that would be 10 more lines and the PyGame module. All the tools are free as in beer and speech. The only development tools I used were a text editor and the interactive command line.
A few months ago I knocked off a few hundred lines of Python code which logged gps, and processed the logs to provide KML files which came up in google earth with commented 3d paths of the GPS positions. Once again using FOSS with a command line and a text editor.
Insanely cool code is much simpler these days with high level Python bindings to just about everything.
As for physics, while there is a lot of very expensive cool stuff (CERN etc.) a lot of very cool physics is going on with dirt cheap tools. Lasers, microprocessor controls, high end optics, computers that make a Cray I look like a calculator etc. are available for next to nothing, allowing the Mac Guyver's of physics to do astounding things in their garage.
The other part of the equation is that the expenditures are all in big chunks. I've got disposable income, but I tend to buy in small chunks. I'll buy a $20-30 game or DVD and a $150-250 console without too much indigestion. I tend to buy PC's in chunks the same way. On the other hand, get above $250 for the unit price of an item and the brakes go on real quick. At that point I really do a lot of research, rationalization and saving before buying a "big ticket" item.
As a result I have a full set of Game Boys from the GBA to the DS Lite, and will probably get a Wii in short order. But a PS3? Cold day in hell.
Oh, you don't want to mess with the RI-double-A
They'll sue you if you burn that CD-R
It doesn't matter if you're a grandma or a seven-year-old girl
They'll treat you like the evil hard-bitten criminal scum you are
The lack of an easy dock kills any Apple purchases for me. The only reason I buy iPods in the first place is that a dock allows my mom (who has limited vision) to dock her iPod without looking.
What kills me about the nano is the lack of video. My PlayYan equipped GBAs have allowed me to watch video (whole movies) from a flash player for years now. Just about any other PMP allows this too, why not oh so innovative Apple?
Funny, I'm doing this each night w/ my PC. Been doing it for years. Not an apple in sight.
Cause Calvin Klein's no friend of mine
Don't want nobody's name on my behind
-RUN DMC "RockBox" (anticipating an alternative)
Kleptocracies and Oligarchies are bad. Most 'capitalist' countries which fail to enforce the rule of law fall into one of these categories.
In order for capitalism to function the rule of law, a consistent commercial code, a stable currency, basic commercial regulation and antitrust regulation must be provided by the goverment. In the absence of these prerequisites, individuals and businesses have no redress in the case of fraud and stop 'playing the game'.
Most ardent defenders of Capitalism should actually read Adam Smith, he was a staunch defender of a strong judiciary, the public sector, and was a public servant himself (commissioner of customs and professor) for the bulk of his life.
The modern concept of childhood is less than a century old. In the "golden age" of the past child labor was endemic and disease commonly wiped out several young children in each family.
In the same fashion, at the time of the idealized childhoods of "leave it to beaver" we were constantly informed that TV, and comic books were going to turn kids into homicidal gay couch potatos. In the 80's rap, crack and computers were going to breed a generation of "superpreadators". In the 90's the internet was going to rot their brains.
While I'm not saying that video games are perfect for children, obsessive and adictive personalities will find something to latch onto regardless of the tech level of the obsession.
I would submit that the far bigger threat is the cultural focus on jocks and bling as opposed to a deliberate focus on glorifying learning, literacy and cultural and scientific achievement.
...eating nothing but sugary, high glycemic foods...
Unless caffene is a damper every nerd would be a superhero, and Beefy would dwarf superman (in strength).
Back to the point of DS9 the trek universe would have been perfect for a MMO game due to the consistency of the series and the strong naval discipline. But as B&B savaged the franchise, incorporating more and more inconsistencies and weak characters the potential for a game dropped.
An old school pre-B&B game with a lot of exploration options, and some "cold war" level conflict would be excellent. A DS9 style game with lots of interaction in the alpha quadrant and conflict in the gamma quadrant would be great. DS9 also has the advantage of fielding runabouts that many players would be capable of flying without rising to the rank of captian.
Of course my ultimate trek game is still a multiple lan party online game. Each lan party is a ship, forming bridge and engineering etc. (Imagine a lan party with everybody sporting dual screens arranged in a bridge layout with a projector for the main screen.) The online component would manage interaction of separate ships. This would be perfect, in that most ship to ship interaction would be either communications between ships or renders of the ships and sensor data. For non-landing party stories this would be perfect.
1.Raise Prices
2.Add more proprietary hardware
3.Add more DRM, not playing Blu-Ray isn't enough. Destroying the disc (on the faint possibility that it is pirated) while installing a rootkit is preferred.
4.Add exploding batteries
My experience is about the same two or so movies or quite a few anime episodes. About as much as the battery life allows.
Of course my GBAs an DSes run 5-10 hours with a play yan. I've watched a full movie in a GBA micro with no trouble, suprisingly nice.
*cough*videora*cough*
I've had this cough for over a year now!
Working off of past history (which is actually overly static in rate of change) and extrapolating 200-300 years in the future, the Star Trek universe is probably far too dirty and run down in comparison. While we tend to idolize the past, and look back to a golden age, the lot of the common man has never been beter. If you were to pluck a common man from revolutionary war period and drop him in a US city, it would be incomprehensibly clean and peaceful. The technology, healthcare and standard of living for the common man in this era would easily exceed what a king could only dream of.
On the other hand, i've never found lasers that go out and stop at 1 meter and clank when you hit them together to be very realistic, or swpace craft what make banking turns in space for that matter.
In an interview several years back (when the StarTAC was the standard Motorola flip phone) Lenoard Nimoy recounted answering a call on his flip phone, with the guy next to him nearly fainting.
"There is only one PS3" and they're sticking to that production target. But it isn't expensive enough.
Imagine a few years down the road when a terrorist/pedophile uses the trusted computing features of his newish computer to confound the police as to the location of his victims and the **AA sues them under the DMCA to protect the criminal since IP rights trump national security and human life:5 16243
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/0
Actually there's a resurgence of C64 interest given the advent of DTV videogames based on an FPGA which implements the entire C64 on a chip. Radio Shack had a $20 Hummer road racing that could be used.