If there is anything the history of computers has taught me it is that when you're looking like you're about to hit some sort of physical limit that will prevent you from increasing density, someone always comes along and breaks right through the limit with some lateral thinking. Hard Drives were supposed to cap out at 200GB or so last time I checked, but then someone decided to stand the little magnetic regions up on end. Chip density and clockrates have blown past several physical walls (cross channel interference, the speed of light not giving the cycles time to propagate across a chip, etc...). You just can't predict the future in this field.
Back maybe 5 years ago there were articles like this talking about how CRTs still had so much to offer and how they were so cheap and how LCD displays were still new and expensive...
Somehow I expect this article to have a similarly short shelf life and will look at best amusingly quaint in about 2-3 years when SSDs start getting really price competitive with spinning platters. Probably not cheaper, but close enough that people will be willing to pay the extra for the rather substantial performance improvement.
Is that 5.7 million miles of paved roads? There are a lot of unpaved roads in the US.
Besides, half a trillion doesn't seem to far out of the ballpark for me. Those costs are amortized over the lifetimes of the roads, and infrastructure is one of the big things government is supposed to spend money on.
A better question is why is it so expensive to hire a handful of guys to run a road grater and asphalt laying machine over an existing road. I don't know how much asphalt costs, but given that it's just gravel and oil it doesn't seem like it should be that expensive. It's not like the initial construction where you have to blast away mountains and prepare the road surface, it seems like it should be cheaper. Then again, construction costs always seem high to me, I guess that's why I'm not in the construction biz.
As was the case of many systems that were ahead of their time, they were competing with an established player that already had tons of lock in from software vendors, peripheral manufacturers, and the like. Worse, when a system is "ahead of it's time", that's often forgetting that it was considerably more expensive than the competition and quite possibly outside of the price range of most consumers. Good engineering isn't only about being the "best", but it's also about knowing what to cut to keep the price in line.
I'm sure there is a special place in hell for knockoff case manufacturers who didn't file down or round off the edges of their cases. Presumably they'll be forced to replace components in their own cases for eternity.
Two power leads for a GPU is the inevitable result of the graphics arms race that has caused video cards to outrace virtually every other component of the system. Just be glad you don't have to plug in an external power supply. That said, if you have a problem set that can be solved by a GPGPU, you'll get it done [b]way[/b] faster than you would have if you had just thrown a basic CPU at it. Modern GPUs are practically tiny supercomputers that almost anybody can afford.
My rule of thumb when looking at video cards is this: If it's Intel it's crap, just total crap. Don't buy it unless you really know for sure that you'll never want to do anything 3D. Otherwise, look at the second digit in the model number, the lower that number is the slower the card will be. Anything 4 or less is going to be slow, but still miles better than the Intel card. It doesn't always work, but typically it works reasonably well. Just be aware that you can't put a fast card in a small laptop and not melt the thing down and reduce the battery life to mere minutes. The smaller a laptop is, the slower the graphics will be in general. If you want fast graphics, you'll be stuck buying a huge heavy clunker that will make you wonder why you didn't just buy the tower instead unfortunately.
To be fair, people are always out there trying to find a use for those keys. Scroll Lock is used by console modes in various Linux and BSD flavors to stop the scrolling of the screen or open up access to the scrollback buffer. Num Lock is used by some games to change the layout of the numeric pad, and by laptops a lot when the number pad is overlaid on the right hand side of the keyboard.
There are a lot of keys that could be removed from a modern PC keyboard except that everybody has that one app that still requires them.
I had two blackberries on T-Mobile (a 7100t and a Pearl), and neither could deal with MMS at all. It could be the plan I was on (Blackberry plan), but if someone sent me one I had to go through the website rigmarole and there was no way for me to send one from the phone, not even on the Pearl with its built in camera.
Sadly, it's quite common for Smartphones to not support MMS. I'm not sure why this is, but I've seen many smartphones from Blackberries to Windows Mobile devices that do not get MMS in their data plan for some reason.
It's just awful when someone sends you an MMS and you have one of those phones too. The message comes in and it just says "go to this extremely long URL". You try to pull it up in your mobile browser, but the website is about 8MB and has another 4MB of javascript on it plus flash and it doesn't work at all. So you go home and use a real browser only to discover that the site is so slow that it times itself out 5 or 6 times before finally delivering you the tiny blurry photo.
I'm not sure which is the bigger factor, the greed or the stupidity on the part of the phone companies.
Most carriers don't want front facing cameras because then people will start asking for video conferencing and that goes against the philosophy of "If the customer buys a data plan, it must be as hard to use and crappy as possible to drive them back to the insanely profitable SMS and MMS instead". Video Conferencing doesn't qualify, it uses way too many bits unless you really work hard to make it near unusable.
Wasn't the airbus they were flying a fly-by-wire system? Is it possible to get such a system in a state where the pilots can be frantically struggling against the controls for an extended period of time?
The problem with that approach is that the computer becomes very very good at playing against itself, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is improving at the game in general, or especially against humans. It especially may favor short term success over long term strategic thinking.
I can't say anything about Punch Out, but Mario Kart works wonderfully for me on the motion sensor. I'm far more accurate with it than I ever was with thumbsticks.
The thing is, how often are game consoles going to want to send video and audio to other game consoles? That's the problem with including ethernet, chances are you could have done just as well with just a regular ethernet cable, especially if HDMI cables turn out to be really expensive in 200' runs (from the game console to your internet router). Plus, thanks to the DRM on there, chances are you wouldn't be able to use the video and audio transfer even if you wanted to (copying videos from your DVR onto your computer for watching later for instance).
Are you sure it wasn't just the especially overengineered stuff that tended to survive and the other 99% of the stuff broke down and was thrown away over the years, just like today? I'll maybe grant you that back in the day people tended to overengineer more because they were very close to the finished product and wanted it to have that little something extra, but my guess is that most of the stuff from back then is just as crappy as most of the stuff is today.
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If there is anything the history of computers has taught me it is that when you're looking like you're about to hit some sort of physical limit that will prevent you from increasing density, someone always comes along and breaks right through the limit with some lateral thinking. Hard Drives were supposed to cap out at 200GB or so last time I checked, but then someone decided to stand the little magnetic regions up on end. Chip density and clockrates have blown past several physical walls (cross channel interference, the speed of light not giving the cycles time to propagate across a chip, etc...). You just can't predict the future in this field.
Back maybe 5 years ago there were articles like this talking about how CRTs still had so much to offer and how they were so cheap and how LCD displays were still new and expensive...
Somehow I expect this article to have a similarly short shelf life and will look at best amusingly quaint in about 2-3 years when SSDs start getting really price competitive with spinning platters. Probably not cheaper, but close enough that people will be willing to pay the extra for the rather substantial performance improvement.
There is even a movie about Erlang that should give you a good idea of what its strengths are.
Guys, you don't have the feed the troll anymore. One snarky post is enough.
Is that 5.7 million miles of paved roads? There are a lot of unpaved roads in the US.
Besides, half a trillion doesn't seem to far out of the ballpark for me. Those costs are amortized over the lifetimes of the roads, and infrastructure is one of the big things government is supposed to spend money on.
A better question is why is it so expensive to hire a handful of guys to run a road grater and asphalt laying machine over an existing road. I don't know how much asphalt costs, but given that it's just gravel and oil it doesn't seem like it should be that expensive. It's not like the initial construction where you have to blast away mountains and prepare the road surface, it seems like it should be cheaper. Then again, construction costs always seem high to me, I guess that's why I'm not in the construction biz.
Yeah, Democrats, I'm sure that's the reason. It had nothing at all to do with the auto industry and loss of jobs or anything like that.
People forget that the reason everybody was looking for an alternative to the M68k was that Motorola's chip was quite expensive.
As was the case of many systems that were ahead of their time, they were competing with an established player that already had tons of lock in from software vendors, peripheral manufacturers, and the like. Worse, when a system is "ahead of it's time", that's often forgetting that it was considerably more expensive than the competition and quite possibly outside of the price range of most consumers. Good engineering isn't only about being the "best", but it's also about knowing what to cut to keep the price in line.
I'm sure there is a special place in hell for knockoff case manufacturers who didn't file down or round off the edges of their cases. Presumably they'll be forced to replace components in their own cases for eternity.
Two power leads for a GPU is the inevitable result of the graphics arms race that has caused video cards to outrace virtually every other component of the system. Just be glad you don't have to plug in an external power supply. That said, if you have a problem set that can be solved by a GPGPU, you'll get it done [b]way[/b] faster than you would have if you had just thrown a basic CPU at it. Modern GPUs are practically tiny supercomputers that almost anybody can afford.
My rule of thumb when looking at video cards is this: If it's Intel it's crap, just total crap. Don't buy it unless you really know for sure that you'll never want to do anything 3D. Otherwise, look at the second digit in the model number, the lower that number is the slower the card will be. Anything 4 or less is going to be slow, but still miles better than the Intel card. It doesn't always work, but typically it works reasonably well. Just be aware that you can't put a fast card in a small laptop and not melt the thing down and reduce the battery life to mere minutes. The smaller a laptop is, the slower the graphics will be in general. If you want fast graphics, you'll be stuck buying a huge heavy clunker that will make you wonder why you didn't just buy the tower instead unfortunately.
Scroll Lock would like a word with you.
To be fair, people are always out there trying to find a use for those keys. Scroll Lock is used by console modes in various Linux and BSD flavors to stop the scrolling of the screen or open up access to the scrollback buffer. Num Lock is used by some games to change the layout of the numeric pad, and by laptops a lot when the number pad is overlaid on the right hand side of the keyboard.
There are a lot of keys that could be removed from a modern PC keyboard except that everybody has that one app that still requires them.
We've detonated way more than just 2 nukes. You should really say that we've only detonated two nukes in anger.
I had two blackberries on T-Mobile (a 7100t and a Pearl), and neither could deal with MMS at all. It could be the plan I was on (Blackberry plan), but if someone sent me one I had to go through the website rigmarole and there was no way for me to send one from the phone, not even on the Pearl with its built in camera.
Sadly, it's quite common for Smartphones to not support MMS. I'm not sure why this is, but I've seen many smartphones from Blackberries to Windows Mobile devices that do not get MMS in their data plan for some reason.
It's just awful when someone sends you an MMS and you have one of those phones too. The message comes in and it just says "go to this extremely long URL". You try to pull it up in your mobile browser, but the website is about 8MB and has another 4MB of javascript on it plus flash and it doesn't work at all. So you go home and use a real browser only to discover that the site is so slow that it times itself out 5 or 6 times before finally delivering you the tiny blurry photo.
I'm not sure which is the bigger factor, the greed or the stupidity on the part of the phone companies.
It's apparently tied to MobileMe, so as long as you don't share your password it hopefully won't be a problem.
For real life? We'll have to see.
Of course this might be a good time to point out that MobileMe isn't free.
The Nokia N79 would like to have a word with you.
Most carriers don't want front facing cameras because then people will start asking for video conferencing and that goes against the philosophy of "If the customer buys a data plan, it must be as hard to use and crappy as possible to drive them back to the insanely profitable SMS and MMS instead". Video Conferencing doesn't qualify, it uses way too many bits unless you really work hard to make it near unusable.
Wasn't the airbus they were flying a fly-by-wire system? Is it possible to get such a system in a state where the pilots can be frantically struggling against the controls for an extended period of time?
The problem with that approach is that the computer becomes very very good at playing against itself, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is improving at the game in general, or especially against humans. It especially may favor short term success over long term strategic thinking.
I can't say anything about Punch Out, but Mario Kart works wonderfully for me on the motion sensor. I'm far more accurate with it than I ever was with thumbsticks.
Don't worry, this is Valve, it will be delayed until 2012.
"Expensive" cables are really just a store markup problem. See this article about the situation and you will see just how crazy it is out there.
The thing is, how often are game consoles going to want to send video and audio to other game consoles? That's the problem with including ethernet, chances are you could have done just as well with just a regular ethernet cable, especially if HDMI cables turn out to be really expensive in 200' runs (from the game console to your internet router). Plus, thanks to the DRM on there, chances are you wouldn't be able to use the video and audio transfer even if you wanted to (copying videos from your DVR onto your computer for watching later for instance).
Posting this to undo a mistaken moderation. Sometimes I miss the having to hit the "moderate" button.
If your liquid cooled rig needs sound proofing you've done it wrong.
Are you sure it wasn't just the especially overengineered stuff that tended to survive and the other 99% of the stuff broke down and was thrown away over the years, just like today? I'll maybe grant you that back in the day people tended to overengineer more because they were very close to the finished product and wanted it to have that little something extra, but my guess is that most of the stuff from back then is just as crappy as most of the stuff is today.
What do you mean they're not cheap? The corrugated steel roof has been the roof of choice for people who can't afford tarpaper for ages.