Apple took the plunge several years ago. The 27" iMac has been shipping with a 2560 by 1440 screen since its introduction in late 2009. I wouldn't be surprised to see them ship a 32" iMac sporting even higher resolutions at some point in the not-too-distant future.
It's sad and kind of shocking the degree to which Apple drives innovation in the PC market. Just what the hell do the thousands of employees and overpaid executives at Dell and HP do all day long? Play Angry Birds on their iPhones?
The funny thing is, I'm sure there's all sorts of gunk in a vinyl groove resulting in tiny stylus motions that are theoretically audible...but which weren't put there intentionally.
Whoops.
I grew up with vinyl and always thought it was a ridiculous audio format. Fragile, noisy, screeching high frequency harmonics, static, had to be cleaned every play, degraded, spindle holes always off center, warped, scratched, hum, rumble, wow & flutter, clipped, pure unadulterated shit. To add insult to injury a decent turntable and cartridge cost at least $300 bucks even in the early '80s (probably $600 in 2012 dollars), just to try and make that crap format sound reasonably acceptable.
By the early '80s and the arrival of Dolby C the lowly cassette sounded better in a decent deck, and that's pathetic when you consider cassette was invented as a dictation medium. Unfortunately most pre-recorded tapes were poorly made, and the only thing you had to record from was either FM radio or (you guessed it), f'in vinyl.
The dynamic range of vinyl does vary by frequency. For example, in that thread a poster notes he measured 84dB at 300Hz for vinyl. A 300Hz tone recorded to a 16-bit wave file with noise shaped dither exhibited a dynamic rage of 151dB!
Vinyl has extremely limited dynamic range in the bass - something like 30dB at 20Hz. The needle would pop out of the groove if you tried to record more than that. Vinyl also suffers from constant negative signal to noise ratio incidents, when impulse noise (clicks and pops from scratches, dust and defects in the groove, static discharge) completely drowns out the signal. Unacceptable, in any format.
See also this recent article, which, while skewering the distribution of 24-bit/192kHz audio, notes that 16-bit digital audio has an overall dynamic range of 120dB with dither:
Vinyl's a shitty format for reasons apart from its inferior dynamic range, but that's not terribly surprising since it's like 100 years old, mechanical, and prone to a plethora of issues - rumble, wow and flutter, phase issues caused by the RIAA equalization / de-equalization process, scads of unwanted harmonics and harmonic distortion, ultrasonic noise, preamp hum, static clicks, etc., etc., etc.
Probably should have been replaced by some other analog disc-based format by the early '70s - maybe something based on RCA's capacitance discs, which wound up being used for video, and had scads of bandwidth - more than enough for near-flawless reproduction of the original studio master tapes. But at the time most industry attention was focused on the emerging lo-fi but convenient tape formats, first 8-track then cassette, as well as the failed competing quad systems. And then by the middle of the decade everybody knew a digital format was coming, with Sony and Philips working first separately, and then by '79 or so together on what would become the Compact Disc.
Not really. The "loudness" button usually just pumped up the low bass and the treble when the volume was below a certain threshold. Useful, because at lower volumes the ear is less sensitive to both ends of the spectrum, and music sounded a bit flat at low volumes as a result.
Crushing the dynamic range by itself won't solve that problem.
Oversampling happens on playback - not on encoding. The brick wall filters that continue to gunk up 44.1kHz recordings are part of the analog to digital converters, not the digital to analog converters. Oversampling solves another problem with 44.1kHz audio, on playback, pertaining to inverted images of the baseband data above 22.05kHz up to 44.1kHz (and beyond) and the need to filter those out.
You still have to exclude frequencies above 22.05kHz during the encoding process however, or bad things will happen:
You do this either with analog 22.05kHz brickwall filters in the A/D converter, or by performing your A/D conversion at a higher sample rate and then downsampling the resulting signal, manipulating the signal to remove any information beyond the Nyquest frequency. Either way, it'll have impacts on the audible spectrum if you're downsampling to a rate as low as 44.1kHz - there are no perfect low-pass filters (even in the digital domain).
Encoding and distributing music at 96kHz or higher pretty much eliminates the need for filters that could have much audible impact on the signal, either when encoding or decoding the signal. 192kHz is probably overkill, but who cares - storage is cheap, and getting cheaper by the second (apart from when Thailand floods).
If human hearing goes up to 20kHZ, then sample the audio nice and high, FFT it, do a brick-wall filter at 22.05kHz and sample at 44.1kHZ. There will be no phase error or rolloff. You will get ringing, but only at inaudible frequencies, and then only if you have significant energy at 22.05kHZ.
So what magical properties does heavy metakl or string musich have that defeats anti-aliasing filters?
Where do you get the magical analog brickwall filter that can perfectly stop all frequencies at or beyond 22.05kHz without having any impact on signals below that threshold?
Oh, that's right - no such thing exists.
Analog low-pass filters have well known impacts on the signal - this has been an issue with 44.1kHz digital audio since day one. The filters have gotten better over the years - they still aren't perfect. Pushing the sampling rate up to 96kHz or beyond pretty much completely mitigates the issue, since any audible impact of the analog filters a 96kHz sampling rate requires will be far, far beyond the range of human hearing.
Storage space is cheap, so there's no reason not to use at least 96kHz, even for distribution.
You'd have to have a relatively small influence (mankind's greenhouse gas emissions) cause a huge out of proportion change.
There are all kinds of compounds that can cause huge "out of proportion" changes. Aflatoxin can cause serious illness in most animals at the parts per billion level, for example.
It's sad you need to be informed of something as fundamental to science as this. As little as 10 years ago you'd often encounter righties who at least knew a little basic chemistry, physics or biology. Today, unless they're on the payroll of BP or Monsanto or some other multinational, even the grown adults on the right usually know less about basic science than I did as a child.
I suspect this is because the Republicans have become totally reliant on easily-manipulated far right religious fanatics and bigots. All of the old school Rockefeller Republicans have been scared off or actively purged from the Party over the past couple of decades. The irony is, it was the Rockefeller Republicans who invited that goon squad into the Party in the first place, after the Democrats finally purged them during the 1960's. Now the inmates are running the Republican's asylum.
It's interesting to see that scientists have started researching the issue, too. Just why have conservatives gotten so incredibly ignorant?
I've had similar thoughts about the Wii U. Brings them to relative hardware parity with the current Sony and MS boxen. Will beat their rivals next-gen systems to market by at least a couple of years. May not move a zillion units, but should be profitable and keep Nintendo in the game.
Sony and Microsoft have bigger problems to contend with, too. For starters, developing a next-gen console that can blow the Wii U away will likely cost $5-$10 billion a piece. That's a ton of cash to sink into a very crowded space where success is certainly not assured.
Beyond the hardware there's an even bigger chicken and egg problem Sony and MS would face with a new platform. Developing games that fully exploit such a monster will tax the resources of all but the very largest developers. Will developers be willing to invest ungodly sums developing new games for bleeding edge platforms that - at least initially - will sport miniscule userbases? We're talking sinking maybe $100 million into building a single title that you can only sell to - at most - a couple million users (at least for a year or two). I just don't see how you can get the economics to work for a new console anytime in the near future. And without a library of games, why spend $300 or whatever on a new console? Hardcore gamers alone just can't support a platform by themselves - not with development costs reaching into the stratosphere - so you have to bring a bunch of casual gamers onboard fairly quickly. I just don't see that happening.
Especially not with Apple muscling its way into the gaming business with the iPhone, iPad and - soon, it would appear - their own TV. Yeah, I'm sure their devices won't have anywhere near the hardware specs of the PS4 or whatever, but it's hard to compete with a platform that's dead simple to use and where the games sell for $5 or less and you can play them anywhere you want. And if Apple has any luck as a "console" in the living room, you can bet Google will be right behind them with Android. How do you compete with free?
I wouldn't be surprised to see hardcore gaming migrate back to the PC. And if you do start to see that happening, it's game over for the consoles.
I'm seeing the same behavior from the latest version of Firefox. It's increasingly unstable, on both my home system as well as my laptop and desktop systems at the office. Each runs a different set of plugins (or no plugins, in the case of the laptop), so I know it's Firefox itself and not (just) the plugins. I get a crash every couple of hours on each system, often when the browser is just running in the background.
I'm considering switching to Chrome, or maybe even Safari since I trust Google even less than I trust Apple...
That joke wasn't very funny when a painfully unfunny Canadian made it in a teeth grindingly unfunny movie 10+ years ago even though there it was at least in context. It hasn't matured with age to become funny since then.
The Fiesta was a death trap compared to pretty much any modern car, though. And it surely wasn't as reliable as most modern cars. Modern engines are much more efficient - so are today's automatic transmissions - but the cars are also much heavier, sporting stronger structures, better brakes and gobs of safety equipment, and tend to feature much stronger acceleration. So the gains in efficiency are more than offset by other performance and safety enhancements, which in turn require larger, heavier engines.
The 800 was also much better-built than anything Commodore ever produced. The inside of that thing was a big hunk of stamped steel. We used to joke that in case of nuclear war we'd just climb inside of a friend's 800.
Of course the cost of producing it kept the price high. The suits at Warner Communications tried to replace it with the less expensive to manufacture Atari 1200, but they didn't lower the price as much as they should have, bungled the video output and had a couple of compatibility issues which killed its sales in the market just as the Commodore 64 came out. Terrible timing.
By the time they got the cheaper, smaller, more compatible Atari 800XL into the stores it was too late - Commodore's 64 was already the best-selling computer and Jack Tramiel had used that volume as a weapon in his price war with TI, Atari, Tandy and Coleco. He forced TI out of the market entirely, nearly bankrupted Coleco (granted, all the hardware issues with their Adam didn't help), halted Tandy's growth and left Atari an also-ran in a market it had pioneered.
If he hadn't been forced out of Commodore and ended up at Atari, that probably would have been the end of their 8-bit systems. Fortunately, Tramiel was able to bring financial discipline to Atari, slash the cost of production of the 800XL and 1050 drives, and launched a successful revival of the system in 1984 at a price point comparable to the C64's, making Atari the only US company to successfully challenge Commodore on their own turf with similar hardware.
Bought Atari enough time to complete and launch the ST series, although in hindsight they would almost certainly have been better off focusing their efforts on a next-gen console, instead. They never really had the resources to compete effectively with Apple, let alone Wintel, but they could have conceivably strangled Nintendo in the cradle and retained their dominant position in console gaming.
She was 1 years older than the US female average life expectancy at that time.
Life expectancy for a woman who was Mme Curie's age when she started working with radioactive stuff, or life expectancy at birth? Because childhood diseases and accidents were still a substantial source of overall mortality in Mme Curie's day, and life expectancy at birth was heavily influenced by that reality. Those who made it to adulthood had life expectancies far more comparable to today's (heart disease and cancer - two major contemporary killers - were both considered quite rare in those days).
and the reason we're still using 5 year old consoles is because the horsepower in them is still plenty and not being fully exploited.
No. The reason we're still using 5-year-old consoles is because it costs the console makers billions of dollars to design, produce, distribute and market a new console, which means it takes years of strong sales before they even recoup their investment on these expensive, dedicated devices.
The problem looming up ahead for the console makers is that they're a niche market compared to cell phones and - I suspect - tablets. Which means you're going to see rapid evolution in that mobile space, evolution which will make all but the most costly to develop and manufacture consoles look pretty lame in well under 5 years. Game developers are already starting to target more resources at the mobile space, which decreases the amount of time they'll have to spend on developing and improving upon their console games. Even if the console makers spend billions developing next generation devices, it isn't clear if developers will commit the resources it would take to fully leverage the capabilities of such devices.
Eventually, the console business is likely to hit a tipping point, one where it just doesn't make any sense to invest $5-$10 billion developing a "next generation" console, because developers won't be willing to support such a beast. Why, when they could make much more money developing games for the hundreds of millions of existing users on perfectly capable mobile devices?
Since social games continue to rise in importance, I also suspect that cloud-based gaming will reduce the need for bleeding-edge graphics hardware in the home. Users are already depending on good network connectivity to make their games playable, and that same connectivity enables developers to offload a lot of processing to the cloud. That's also hugely beneficial for mobile gaming developers, since it'll allow low-power mobile devices to deliver graphics performance rivaling power hungry dedicated gaming consoles.
We saw something like this happen back in the early '80s, when home computers dropped dramatically in price, and their capabilities outstripped those of the existing game consoles. Consoles eventually returned to prominence, as they were easier to use and their standardized featuresets made them easier to develop for. Mobile devices don't carry those limitations. They're as easy to use as consoles, and they're quite standardized compared to the personal computers of yesteryear (or even today). They're also deployed in truly staggering numbers, and users upgrade on a regular schedule (to largely compatible devices).
I wouldn't be surprised to see the console business shrivel over the next decade. With PC prices continuing to decline, I also wouldn't be surprised to see hardcore gamers migrate back to the computer, especially if the console makers decide to skip out on adding bleeding edge graphics to their next generation systems as a cost-cutting move (which seems likely).
That limit depends on how catastrophic the consequences of not planning for the event might be. A nuclear meltdown and the potential for burning nuclear waste are pretty catastrophic consequences, and should be mitigated accordingly. Of course, doing so probably renders nuclear power plants economically untenable, but that's their problem.
These events are simply too rare, and also the destruction caused by the event likely dwarfs the destruction caused by the nuclear reactor's problems. The latter argument can also easily be applied to the Fukushima plant.
Tsunami aren't particularly "rare" along the northern coast of Japan. That coast was hit by a similar event in the last 500 years - there are markers in the hillsides noting how high the last tsunami crept - and there is evidence of earlier events occurring on a roughly similar frequency. Since a nuclear power plant lasts at least 50 years, that gives a coastal plant in that area at least a 1 in 10 chance of being obliterated by a tsunami, given the evidence at hand.
The D.O.E. estimates coal at about $95 per mw/h. Nuclear is $114 per mw/h. Note that the nuclear plants aren't being held accountable for the total liability they represent, and they aren't being required to pay for the enormously expensive transportation and longterm storage of their nuclear waste and the liability that crap represents.
However, your post reeks of bias. Appratntly you believe that by reducing coal burning by using nuclear will increase greenhouse gas emissions, but reducing coal burning by increasing efficiency won't.
Economics lesson for you: the price of coal doesn't care why usage is reduced, only that it is.
Wrong. While increasing efficiency will also lower the cost of coal - the same as converting some coal-sourced power to nuclear would do - the techniques and technologies created in the process can be exploited by other coal-burning economies, ultimately reducing their carbon footprint as well.
Read Adam Smith sometime. He did a great job a couple hundred years ago explaining how markets work. If the price of coal falls, you can be certain more coal-fired plants will be built, especially by nations that want to maximize their return on investment or don't have a ton of capital to dump into nuclear power plants to begin with (they're far more expensive to construct).
Now, bear in mind that this area of the world is not susceptible to the kinds of earthquakes Japan
We don't know how susceptible that area of the world is to enormous earthquakes. We know they don't happen frequently, but we also know large quakes do happen hundreds - and in some cases thousands - of miles from plate boundaries, and at infrequent intervals. The New Madrid quakes that hit the middle of the United States in the 1800's are a prime example. Such events are infrequent, but because of the nature of the mid-continental crust, can cause enormous devastation over a much wider area than quakes along the mountainous margins of a continent.
Taking the risk of a few nuclear catastrophes during the next couple of centuries, or to keep dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ignoring the fact that it pretty darn definitely has some effect in the long term...
Nuclear power is far more expensive than coal power - especially if the plants were forced to buy private liability insurance. Even if a country the size of the United States replaced all of its coal burning plants with nuclear power plants, all that would accomplish would be to lower the price of coal, providing an incentive for poorer countries to build scores of coal fired plants.
So the idea that nuclear power is somehow going to save us from the horrors of global warming is an economic fantasy. You'd be better served praying to Zeus - at least that wouldn't waste a ton of energy building useless, dangerous nuclear power plants, ultimately increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses pumped into the atmosphere.
The best way to prevent global warming is to use less energy by boosting energy efficiency as quickly as possible. The next best way is by continuing research into alternative sources of energy which are carbon neutral. Finally, money that would otherwise be wasted on deploying nuclear power (and dealing with its dangerous waste) could instead be invested in researching and deploying better ways to sequester the CO2 emitted by plants which burn fossil fuels.
I work for a large scale nuclear generator and we're certainly not subsidized by anyone.
Oh, so you're at a U.S. plant that's started buying insurance in the private market then, and are paying whatever the going free market rate is for your liability insurance?
No?
So in other words, you're being heavily subsidized by the taxpayers already with sweetheart rates for government-run liability insurance. And when there's a catastrophic accident near a major city, the government fund that nuclear power plants have been paying into - for decades - doesn't have enough money in it to begin to cover the liability. Which means more money will be stolen from the taxpayers to clean up your mess.
I'll believe nuclear power is safe and practical when the nuclear industry can buy private liability insurance - from an adequately capitalized insurer, one who has the resources to actually pay out in case of a disaster or two - and still turn a profit.
Phone hardware is power-constrained, not just by battery, but also by heat management design of a phone.
Not if you offload a lot of the processing to either a docking station of some sort, or to a remote cloud service like OnLive. That stuff is the real threat to traditional consoles, especially for multiplayer internet games where you're already dealing with participants in remote locations.
Also, phones are on an annual development cycle, not these half-decade to decade-long dev cycles the console makers have locked themselves into. While it's true that today's phones aren't terribly impressive as standalone game machines, next years' models will be much better, and the year after they'll be better again. Having a kick-*ss gaming experience in your pocket for $300 makes blowing $300 on a game console feel like a waste of money to all but the most hardcore gamers. Sure the consoles might be better for a year or two, but the phones will rapidly catch up. And they're gonna have much larger game libraries.
I think the proliferation of smart phones will do to the modern console what the early home computer revolution - when the Commodore 64 and Atari 800XL dropped down into the price range of a game machine - did to the 1st gen consoles: it'll kill them off.
These are the people that eat all the food on the life raft.
Yes, but on the plus side, then the other people on the life raft kill and eat them. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered, as the old saying goes. So to some degree it's a self-correcting problem.
I have a feeling we're approaching just such a correction point.
Pity all the troops are overseas engaged in a massive war profiteering operation for the benefit of the 0.1%. Who will defend the hogs when the 99.9% come to slaughter them?
Or they could simply go back to taxing their rich people and regulating their banks, like they did in the 1950s when the United States had a functioning industrial economy, rock-bottom unemployment rates, a massive (and expanding) middle class, and world-class infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple took the plunge several years ago. The 27" iMac has been shipping with a 2560 by 1440 screen since its introduction in late 2009. I wouldn't be surprised to see them ship a 32" iMac sporting even higher resolutions at some point in the not-too-distant future.
It's sad and kind of shocking the degree to which Apple drives innovation in the PC market. Just what the hell do the thousands of employees and overpaid executives at Dell and HP do all day long? Play Angry Birds on their iPhones?
The funny thing is, I'm sure there's all sorts of gunk in a vinyl groove resulting in tiny stylus motions that are theoretically audible...but which weren't put there intentionally.
Whoops.
I grew up with vinyl and always thought it was a ridiculous audio format. Fragile, noisy, screeching high frequency harmonics, static, had to be cleaned every play, degraded, spindle holes always off center, warped, scratched, hum, rumble, wow & flutter, clipped, pure unadulterated shit. To add insult to injury a decent turntable and cartridge cost at least $300 bucks even in the early '80s (probably $600 in 2012 dollars), just to try and make that crap format sound reasonably acceptable.
By the early '80s and the arrival of Dolby C the lowly cassette sounded better in a decent deck, and that's pathetic when you consider cassette was invented as a dictation medium. Unfortunately most pre-recorded tapes were poorly made, and the only thing you had to record from was either FM radio or (you guessed it), f'in vinyl.
112dB? Ha! Hilarious.
You're lucky to get 70dB out of audiophile grade vinyl. See http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Vinyl_Myths
There's also an interesting discussion of the dynamic range of both vinyl and 16-bit/44kHz digital audio here:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=47827&st=0&p=425794&#entry425794
The dynamic range of vinyl does vary by frequency. For example, in that thread a poster notes he measured 84dB at 300Hz for vinyl. A 300Hz tone recorded to a 16-bit wave file with noise shaped dither exhibited a dynamic rage of 151dB!
Vinyl has extremely limited dynamic range in the bass - something like 30dB at 20Hz. The needle would pop out of the groove if you tried to record more than that. Vinyl also suffers from constant negative signal to noise ratio incidents, when impulse noise (clicks and pops from scratches, dust and defects in the groove, static discharge) completely drowns out the signal. Unacceptable, in any format.
See also this recent article, which, while skewering the distribution of 24-bit/192kHz audio, notes that 16-bit digital audio has an overall dynamic range of 120dB with dither:
http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
Vinyl's a shitty format for reasons apart from its inferior dynamic range, but that's not terribly surprising since it's like 100 years old, mechanical, and prone to a plethora of issues - rumble, wow and flutter, phase issues caused by the RIAA equalization / de-equalization process, scads of unwanted harmonics and harmonic distortion, ultrasonic noise, preamp hum, static clicks, etc., etc., etc.
Probably should have been replaced by some other analog disc-based format by the early '70s - maybe something based on RCA's capacitance discs, which wound up being used for video, and had scads of bandwidth - more than enough for near-flawless reproduction of the original studio master tapes. But at the time most industry attention was focused on the emerging lo-fi but convenient tape formats, first 8-track then cassette, as well as the failed competing quad systems. And then by the middle of the decade everybody knew a digital format was coming, with Sony and Philips working first separately, and then by '79 or so together on what would become the Compact Disc.
Not really. The "loudness" button usually just pumped up the low bass and the treble when the volume was below a certain threshold. Useful, because at lower volumes the ear is less sensitive to both ends of the spectrum, and music sounded a bit flat at low volumes as a result.
Crushing the dynamic range by itself won't solve that problem.
.MP3 is capable of far, far greater dynamic range than any vinyl. Lossy compression has its issues, but dynamic range isn't one of them.
Though it does exhibit certain artifacts when the dynamic range and the bit rate are both low. Of course, vinyl has its own issues with hot signals.
Oversampling happens on playback - not on encoding. The brick wall filters that continue to gunk up 44.1kHz recordings are part of the analog to digital converters, not the digital to analog converters. Oversampling solves another problem with 44.1kHz audio, on playback, pertaining to inverted images of the baseband data above 22.05kHz up to 44.1kHz (and beyond) and the need to filter those out.
You still have to exclude frequencies above 22.05kHz during the encoding process however, or bad things will happen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing#Online_.22live.22_example
You do this either with analog 22.05kHz brickwall filters in the A/D converter, or by performing your A/D conversion at a higher sample rate and then downsampling the resulting signal, manipulating the signal to remove any information beyond the Nyquest frequency. Either way, it'll have impacts on the audible spectrum if you're downsampling to a rate as low as 44.1kHz - there are no perfect low-pass filters (even in the digital domain).
Encoding and distributing music at 96kHz or higher pretty much eliminates the need for filters that could have much audible impact on the signal, either when encoding or decoding the signal. 192kHz is probably overkill, but who cares - storage is cheap, and getting cheaper by the second (apart from when Thailand floods).
If human hearing goes up to 20kHZ, then sample the audio nice and high, FFT it, do a brick-wall filter at 22.05kHz and sample at 44.1kHZ. There will be no phase error or rolloff. You will get ringing, but only at inaudible frequencies, and then only if you have significant energy at 22.05kHZ.
So what magical properties does heavy metakl or string musich have that defeats anti-aliasing filters?
Where do you get the magical analog brickwall filter that can perfectly stop all frequencies at or beyond 22.05kHz without having any impact on signals below that threshold?
Oh, that's right - no such thing exists.
Analog low-pass filters have well known impacts on the signal - this has been an issue with 44.1kHz digital audio since day one. The filters have gotten better over the years - they still aren't perfect. Pushing the sampling rate up to 96kHz or beyond pretty much completely mitigates the issue, since any audible impact of the analog filters a 96kHz sampling rate requires will be far, far beyond the range of human hearing.
Storage space is cheap, so there's no reason not to use at least 96kHz, even for distribution.
You'd have to have a relatively small influence (mankind's greenhouse gas emissions) cause a huge out of proportion change.
There are all kinds of compounds that can cause huge "out of proportion" changes. Aflatoxin can cause serious illness in most animals at the parts per billion level, for example.
It's sad you need to be informed of something as fundamental to science as this. As little as 10 years ago you'd often encounter righties who at least knew a little basic chemistry, physics or biology. Today, unless they're on the payroll of BP or Monsanto or some other multinational, even the grown adults on the right usually know less about basic science than I did as a child.
I suspect this is because the Republicans have become totally reliant on easily-manipulated far right religious fanatics and bigots. All of the old school Rockefeller Republicans have been scared off or actively purged from the Party over the past couple of decades. The irony is, it was the Rockefeller Republicans who invited that goon squad into the Party in the first place, after the Democrats finally purged them during the 1960's. Now the inmates are running the Republican's asylum.
It's interesting to see that scientists have started researching the issue, too. Just why have conservatives gotten so incredibly ignorant?
Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice
http://www.livescience.com/18132-intelligence-social-conservatism-racism.html
Didn't the parents have to opt-in to this program to begin with?
I've had similar thoughts about the Wii U. Brings them to relative hardware parity with the current Sony and MS boxen. Will beat their rivals next-gen systems to market by at least a couple of years. May not move a zillion units, but should be profitable and keep Nintendo in the game.
Sony and Microsoft have bigger problems to contend with, too. For starters, developing a next-gen console that can blow the Wii U away will likely cost $5-$10 billion a piece. That's a ton of cash to sink into a very crowded space where success is certainly not assured.
Beyond the hardware there's an even bigger chicken and egg problem Sony and MS would face with a new platform. Developing games that fully exploit such a monster will tax the resources of all but the very largest developers. Will developers be willing to invest ungodly sums developing new games for bleeding edge platforms that - at least initially - will sport miniscule userbases? We're talking sinking maybe $100 million into building a single title that you can only sell to - at most - a couple million users (at least for a year or two). I just don't see how you can get the economics to work for a new console anytime in the near future. And without a library of games, why spend $300 or whatever on a new console? Hardcore gamers alone just can't support a platform by themselves - not with development costs reaching into the stratosphere - so you have to bring a bunch of casual gamers onboard fairly quickly. I just don't see that happening.
Especially not with Apple muscling its way into the gaming business with the iPhone, iPad and - soon, it would appear - their own TV. Yeah, I'm sure their devices won't have anywhere near the hardware specs of the PS4 or whatever, but it's hard to compete with a platform that's dead simple to use and where the games sell for $5 or less and you can play them anywhere you want. And if Apple has any luck as a "console" in the living room, you can bet Google will be right behind them with Android. How do you compete with free?
I wouldn't be surprised to see hardcore gaming migrate back to the PC. And if you do start to see that happening, it's game over for the consoles.
I'm seeing the same behavior from the latest version of Firefox. It's increasingly unstable, on both my home system as well as my laptop and desktop systems at the office. Each runs a different set of plugins (or no plugins, in the case of the laptop), so I know it's Firefox itself and not (just) the plugins. I get a crash every couple of hours on each system, often when the browser is just running in the background.
I'm considering switching to Chrome, or maybe even Safari since I trust Google even less than I trust Apple...
over one beeeellion dollars
That joke wasn't very funny when a painfully unfunny Canadian made it in a teeth grindingly unfunny movie 10+ years ago even though there it was at least in context. It hasn't matured with age to become funny since then.
Oh, behave!
The Fiesta was a death trap compared to pretty much any modern car, though. And it surely wasn't as reliable as most modern cars. Modern engines are much more efficient - so are today's automatic transmissions - but the cars are also much heavier, sporting stronger structures, better brakes and gobs of safety equipment, and tend to feature much stronger acceleration. So the gains in efficiency are more than offset by other performance and safety enhancements, which in turn require larger, heavier engines.
The 800 was also much better-built than anything Commodore ever produced. The inside of that thing was a big hunk of stamped steel. We used to joke that in case of nuclear war we'd just climb inside of a friend's 800.
Of course the cost of producing it kept the price high. The suits at Warner Communications tried to replace it with the less expensive to manufacture Atari 1200, but they didn't lower the price as much as they should have, bungled the video output and had a couple of compatibility issues which killed its sales in the market just as the Commodore 64 came out. Terrible timing.
By the time they got the cheaper, smaller, more compatible Atari 800XL into the stores it was too late - Commodore's 64 was already the best-selling computer and Jack Tramiel had used that volume as a weapon in his price war with TI, Atari, Tandy and Coleco. He forced TI out of the market entirely, nearly bankrupted Coleco (granted, all the hardware issues with their Adam didn't help), halted Tandy's growth and left Atari an also-ran in a market it had pioneered.
If he hadn't been forced out of Commodore and ended up at Atari, that probably would have been the end of their 8-bit systems. Fortunately, Tramiel was able to bring financial discipline to Atari, slash the cost of production of the 800XL and 1050 drives, and launched a successful revival of the system in 1984 at a price point comparable to the C64's, making Atari the only US company to successfully challenge Commodore on their own turf with similar hardware.
Bought Atari enough time to complete and launch the ST series, although in hindsight they would almost certainly have been better off focusing their efforts on a next-gen console, instead. They never really had the resources to compete effectively with Apple, let alone Wintel, but they could have conceivably strangled Nintendo in the cradle and retained their dominant position in console gaming.
She was 1 years older than the US female average life expectancy at that time.
Life expectancy for a woman who was Mme Curie's age when she started working with radioactive stuff, or life expectancy at birth? Because childhood diseases and accidents were still a substantial source of overall mortality in Mme Curie's day, and life expectancy at birth was heavily influenced by that reality. Those who made it to adulthood had life expectancies far more comparable to today's (heart disease and cancer - two major contemporary killers - were both considered quite rare in those days).
What people are saying is that since its advent, fewer people have died from nuclear power than coal
Give it time. Nuclear hasn't been around as long as coal, and with nuclear the plants themselves become more dangerous to operate as they age.
The massive stockpiles of highly radioactive waste that continue to accumulate also represent a not-so-slowly increasing risk.
and the reason we're still using 5 year old consoles is because the horsepower in them is still plenty and not being fully exploited.
No. The reason we're still using 5-year-old consoles is because it costs the console makers billions of dollars to design, produce, distribute and market a new console, which means it takes years of strong sales before they even recoup their investment on these expensive, dedicated devices.
The problem looming up ahead for the console makers is that they're a niche market compared to cell phones and - I suspect - tablets. Which means you're going to see rapid evolution in that mobile space, evolution which will make all but the most costly to develop and manufacture consoles look pretty lame in well under 5 years. Game developers are already starting to target more resources at the mobile space, which decreases the amount of time they'll have to spend on developing and improving upon their console games. Even if the console makers spend billions developing next generation devices, it isn't clear if developers will commit the resources it would take to fully leverage the capabilities of such devices.
Eventually, the console business is likely to hit a tipping point, one where it just doesn't make any sense to invest $5-$10 billion developing a "next generation" console, because developers won't be willing to support such a beast. Why, when they could make much more money developing games for the hundreds of millions of existing users on perfectly capable mobile devices?
Since social games continue to rise in importance, I also suspect that cloud-based gaming will reduce the need for bleeding-edge graphics hardware in the home. Users are already depending on good network connectivity to make their games playable, and that same connectivity enables developers to offload a lot of processing to the cloud. That's also hugely beneficial for mobile gaming developers, since it'll allow low-power mobile devices to deliver graphics performance rivaling power hungry dedicated gaming consoles.
We saw something like this happen back in the early '80s, when home computers dropped dramatically in price, and their capabilities outstripped those of the existing game consoles. Consoles eventually returned to prominence, as they were easier to use and their standardized featuresets made them easier to develop for. Mobile devices don't carry those limitations. They're as easy to use as consoles, and they're quite standardized compared to the personal computers of yesteryear (or even today). They're also deployed in truly staggering numbers, and users upgrade on a regular schedule (to largely compatible devices).
I wouldn't be surprised to see the console business shrivel over the next decade. With PC prices continuing to decline, I also wouldn't be surprised to see hardcore gamers migrate back to the computer, especially if the console makers decide to skip out on adding bleeding edge graphics to their next generation systems as a cost-cutting move (which seems likely).
There is a limit to what you should plan for.
That limit depends on how catastrophic the consequences of not planning for the event might be. A nuclear meltdown and the potential for burning nuclear waste are pretty catastrophic consequences, and should be mitigated accordingly. Of course, doing so probably renders nuclear power plants economically untenable, but that's their problem.
These events are simply too rare, and also the destruction caused by the event likely dwarfs the destruction caused by the nuclear reactor's problems. The latter argument can also easily be applied to the Fukushima plant.
Tsunami aren't particularly "rare" along the northern coast of Japan. That coast was hit by a similar event in the last 500 years - there are markers in the hillsides noting how high the last tsunami crept - and there is evidence of earlier events occurring on a roughly similar frequency. Since a nuclear power plant lasts at least 50 years, that gives a coastal plant in that area at least a 1 in 10 chance of being obliterated by a tsunami, given the evidence at hand.
>Nuclear power is far more expensive than coal power
Rubbish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#US_Department_of_Energy_estimates
The D.O.E. estimates coal at about $95 per mw/h. Nuclear is $114 per mw/h. Note that the nuclear plants aren't being held accountable for the total liability they represent, and they aren't being required to pay for the enormously expensive transportation and longterm storage of their nuclear waste and the liability that crap represents.
However, your post reeks of bias. Appratntly you believe that by reducing coal burning by using nuclear will increase greenhouse gas emissions, but reducing coal burning by increasing efficiency won't.
Economics lesson for you: the price of coal doesn't care why usage is reduced, only that it is.
Wrong. While increasing efficiency will also lower the cost of coal - the same as converting some coal-sourced power to nuclear would do - the techniques and technologies created in the process can be exploited by other coal-burning economies, ultimately reducing their carbon footprint as well.
Read Adam Smith sometime. He did a great job a couple hundred years ago explaining how markets work. If the price of coal falls, you can be certain more coal-fired plants will be built, especially by nations that want to maximize their return on investment or don't have a ton of capital to dump into nuclear power plants to begin with (they're far more expensive to construct).
Now, bear in mind that this area of the world is not susceptible to the kinds of earthquakes Japan
We don't know how susceptible that area of the world is to enormous earthquakes. We know they don't happen frequently, but we also know large quakes do happen hundreds - and in some cases thousands - of miles from plate boundaries, and at infrequent intervals. The New Madrid quakes that hit the middle of the United States in the 1800's are a prime example. Such events are infrequent, but because of the nature of the mid-continental crust, can cause enormous devastation over a much wider area than quakes along the mountainous margins of a continent.
Which is worse:
Taking the risk of a few nuclear catastrophes during the next couple of centuries, or to keep dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ignoring the fact that it pretty darn definitely has some effect in the long term...
Nuclear power is far more expensive than coal power - especially if the plants were forced to buy private liability insurance. Even if a country the size of the United States replaced all of its coal burning plants with nuclear power plants, all that would accomplish would be to lower the price of coal, providing an incentive for poorer countries to build scores of coal fired plants.
So the idea that nuclear power is somehow going to save us from the horrors of global warming is an economic fantasy. You'd be better served praying to Zeus - at least that wouldn't waste a ton of energy building useless, dangerous nuclear power plants, ultimately increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses pumped into the atmosphere.
The best way to prevent global warming is to use less energy by boosting energy efficiency as quickly as possible. The next best way is by continuing research into alternative sources of energy which are carbon neutral. Finally, money that would otherwise be wasted on deploying nuclear power (and dealing with its dangerous waste) could instead be invested in researching and deploying better ways to sequester the CO2 emitted by plants which burn fossil fuels.
I work for a large scale nuclear generator and we're certainly not subsidized by anyone.
Oh, so you're at a U.S. plant that's started buying insurance in the private market then, and are paying whatever the going free market rate is for your liability insurance?
No?
So in other words, you're being heavily subsidized by the taxpayers already with sweetheart rates for government-run liability insurance. And when there's a catastrophic accident near a major city, the government fund that nuclear power plants have been paying into - for decades - doesn't have enough money in it to begin to cover the liability. Which means more money will be stolen from the taxpayers to clean up your mess.
I'll believe nuclear power is safe and practical when the nuclear industry can buy private liability insurance - from an adequately capitalized insurer, one who has the resources to actually pay out in case of a disaster or two - and still turn a profit.
I'm not holding my breath.
Phone hardware is power-constrained, not just by battery, but also by heat management design of a phone.
Not if you offload a lot of the processing to either a docking station of some sort, or to a remote cloud service like OnLive. That stuff is the real threat to traditional consoles, especially for multiplayer internet games where you're already dealing with participants in remote locations.
Also, phones are on an annual development cycle, not these half-decade to decade-long dev cycles the console makers have locked themselves into. While it's true that today's phones aren't terribly impressive as standalone game machines, next years' models will be much better, and the year after they'll be better again. Having a kick-*ss gaming experience in your pocket for $300 makes blowing $300 on a game console feel like a waste of money to all but the most hardcore gamers. Sure the consoles might be better for a year or two, but the phones will rapidly catch up. And they're gonna have much larger game libraries.
I think the proliferation of smart phones will do to the modern console what the early home computer revolution - when the Commodore 64 and Atari 800XL dropped down into the price range of a game machine - did to the 1st gen consoles: it'll kill them off.
These are the people that eat all the food on the life raft.
Yes, but on the plus side, then the other people on the life raft kill and eat them. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered, as the old saying goes. So to some degree it's a self-correcting problem.
I have a feeling we're approaching just such a correction point.
Pity all the troops are overseas engaged in a massive war profiteering operation for the benefit of the 0.1%. Who will defend the hogs when the 99.9% come to slaughter them?
Or they could simply go back to taxing their rich people and regulating their banks, like they did in the 1950s when the United States had a functioning industrial economy, rock-bottom unemployment rates, a massive (and expanding) middle class, and world-class infrastructure.
Naaaaaaaah!