On the other hand, it's a way for someone like me (who is tone deaf) to pretend to play a guitar and not sound completely horrible. If 4 years of band practice didn't solve my tin ear, but I can still rock out in Guitar Hero.
SGI hardware has fallen behind the curve as well, which was really the death knell for Irix. It's hard to argue against a renderfarm these days instead of a huge expensive SGI box, especially since rendering is the sort of thing that is extremely parallelizable.
SpaceShip Two is gearing up for private space flight as we speak. It has been less than three years since the X-Prize. Personal spaceflight is not an easy process, you shouldn't expect it to be commonplace tomorrow.
The Wifi was a great idea. The problem is the implementation. The ridiculously low limits make it embarrassing to share a song with a friend, and it's not as easy as it should be (albeit the test I saw was with the in initial release, maybe it's better now).
I love how MMORPGs can charge their players $10-$15/month and still get to say that they're giving away "free" content. When you consider how each additional piece of "free" content takes 3 to 6 months to develop and deploy, you're really paying somewhere between $30 and $90 for that "free" content.
And don't try to sell me that "it takes $10 a month to run the servers" crap either. The total bandwidth you suck down in those games isn't all that large (even though you do have to download great big patches every so often, which can add quite a bit), and the storage/admin costs are negligible when spread across the entire population of players. You're really paying for that new content, which is why it is such a shame that it's often lackluster.
Take City of Heroes for example. The original game had around 15 zones, not to mention the rest of the game. Well worth the $50. However, after that each expansion comes with maybe 1 zone (albeit better designed than the starting zones) and a handful of new features, yet it costs more than the original game when you add it up. It's no wonder MMOs are crazy popular with game publishers right now, it's like printing money after the first couple of months. You can even pare down the development staff to apparently almost nothing and still rake in money hand over fist.
Well, once you finish your paper you should go back and correct the errors you found in Wikipedia (don't forget to cite your sources). I find that in general the more citations an article has, the more reliable it generally is, at least for scholarly subjects.
95% of the time you can figure out what they're asking you do to and lie too. "No, reinstalling the driver didn't help, my network card still doesn't show up.".
If it's too much of a problem, backup your current system (backups are good), toss that reinstall copy of Windows on there, and go through the motions. I should mention that I virtually never call the support folks though unless it's a real problem. I hate going through 20 things that I've already tried just to get them to admit that yes, it is in fact busted.
Seriously, if you have a fairly open and shut case of hardware failure, then there is no need to tell the person on the other end that you're using Linux. If your machine has to go back to the shop for repair, then slap the "restore" copy of Windows on it (assuming it's not too hosed to even boot off of CD) and send it back more or less the way you got it. If you don't have backups, well, it sucks to be you because most of the times the RMA guys won't save your data either.
However, if in the process of reinstalling the backup copy of Windows everything starts working again, well, maybe it was a problem with Linux after all.
I don't know about the PS3, but the PS2 was in a similar situation with its DVD drive. Ultimately, the DVD drive in the PS2 wasn't the best. It worked ok on simple movies, but it tended to get edge cases wrong on more complex discs. You'd see this as messed up subtitles on foreign films, "camera angle" changes that were handled incorrectly, menu choices that don't get translated correctly in the film and so on. Granted, a lot of these were bugs on the disc itself, but better players managed to work around the bugs and work correctly regardless.
On the other hand, WTF is Nintendo doing that it can't catch up to demand after 3 months? Are the Wiis being hand assembled by Monks in Tibet? It's hard to even find the Wiimotes in stock anywhere. The only thing all of the stores have in abundance around here is the stupid carrying caddy and stand thing.
Then again, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Nintendo pulled this same stunt with the SNES.
And for one very good reason: The iPhone is supposed to be around $600. You can buy iPod Nanos for less than a third of that. iPods were a success, but not an unbelievable hit, until they managed to get the costs down to something your average person can afford as a Christmas or Birthday gift. Not to mention something someone could buy without having to work it in their budget for the next 3 months. The iPhone is just plain too expensive to kill the iPod yet. Maybe if iPhone v.3 or v.4 brings the price down to the point where it's not much more than a regular phone I'll entertain thoughts about it being an iPod killer, but right now I have to say no way.
Or more often, you buy the more expensive printer because you hear how good it is online, and then discover you can't buy replacement ink cartridges for love or money after a year or so.
Yeah, but who wants to sit through 20 years of gold/silver age shlock to get there?
The best example of how badly the CCA gutted the comics industry is to consider how America had a vibrant and thriving comics industry that was larger than Japan's before the CCA came around. Shortly afterward it was reduced to a sad husk of its former glory while the Japanese Manga industry flourished and produced works that are to this day considered classics of literature.
Such rating schemes are tantamount to censorship in the end. The Comics Code Authority proved this decades ago. Once you create the ratings it doesn't take long for municipalities to create laws that criminalize material with ratings above a certain point. Once that happens the publishers who publish material with those ratings (no matter how popular they were before) lose their business or end up dumbing it down to the lowest common denominator.
Just look at what happens to NC-17 films and how hard directors will work to cut something down to an R if they're threatened with it. There aren't even that many theaters that won't be able to show an NC-17 film and yet still the studios won't touch it.
I know a lot of people who were in Awe over the Neo Geo hardware, but almost nobody who actually ponied up the cash to buy one. That thing was wicked expensive, and the games where pricey too, especially since the gamer market in those days skewed young.
Your PS2 longevity can depend a lot on which version you got. From what I've seen, most slimlines are crappy, and the very early (v.1 and v.2) fat style PS2s are dodgy, but the v.3 through v.6 are ok, and the v.7 through v.9 are actually pretty good. The very early slimlines are apparently the worst, with the lasers burning out at an alarming rate due to a manufacturing defect.
It works because you don't realize the size of this thing. They're talking about millions of fake pages here, lots of them pointing at other fake pages to raise their pagerank so they can in turn point at yet more pages. You would think Google would have someone seeking these kind of sites out and applying a discount on their domain though (although when that happens the spammers just move on anyway).
Unfortunately, an air powered car won't be able to do regenerative braking. The reason is that you can't just pump regular air into the tank time and time again because the water will precipitate out and sit in your tank, reducing your capacity while increasing the weight and more importantly, freezing over the output lines and clogging the works up. You need to use dry air in a situation like this, so you can't just attach a pump to the tires (well, in a lot of ways it's just a pump running in reverse already) and pull air back in to stop the car.
Because even light cars weigh several hundred to a couple thousand pounds, not counting the reinforced compressed air tank you're going to need (although saving weight on the engine will be nice). Then you have to add people/cargo to the mix as well, and compressing air takes a lot of energy (although you can reclaim some of the energy in the form of heat). I haven't worked the numbers so there is a chance this is legit, but on the face of it I'm skeptical. If compressed air were that efficient of a power storage mechanism I'd have to think more people would be using it.
Well, if there's one thing India has a lot of it is hot weather.
Still, I'm highly skeptical of the 200km range out of $3 worth of compressed air. Even counting for the exchange rate the cost of the energy you put into compressing that much air seems like it should greatly exceed the $3 quoted in the article.
As for the "OMG, the Oil Goons are going to get him" types. I think this is how these kind of rumors get started. Someone sets up a scam that turns out to be too good to be true, and then suddenly they "disappear" right before the technology was supposed to debut, and all of their "working prototypes" and "schematics" disappear too. It must be evil Oil companies right? There's no chance it was a scam all along and the guy just ran off with the money...
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On the other hand, it's a way for someone like me (who is tone deaf) to pretend to play a guitar and not sound completely horrible. If 4 years of band practice didn't solve my tin ear, but I can still rock out in Guitar Hero.
SGI hardware has fallen behind the curve as well, which was really the death knell for Irix. It's hard to argue against a renderfarm these days instead of a huge expensive SGI box, especially since rendering is the sort of thing that is extremely parallelizable.
SpaceShip Two is gearing up for private space flight as we speak. It has been less than three years since the X-Prize. Personal spaceflight is not an easy process, you shouldn't expect it to be commonplace tomorrow.
The Wifi was a great idea. The problem is the implementation. The ridiculously low limits make it embarrassing to share a song with a friend, and it's not as easy as it should be (albeit the test I saw was with the in initial release, maybe it's better now).
I love how MMORPGs can charge their players $10-$15/month and still get to say that they're giving away "free" content. When you consider how each additional piece of "free" content takes 3 to 6 months to develop and deploy, you're really paying somewhere between $30 and $90 for that "free" content.
And don't try to sell me that "it takes $10 a month to run the servers" crap either. The total bandwidth you suck down in those games isn't all that large (even though you do have to download great big patches every so often, which can add quite a bit), and the storage/admin costs are negligible when spread across the entire population of players. You're really paying for that new content, which is why it is such a shame that it's often lackluster.
Take City of Heroes for example. The original game had around 15 zones, not to mention the rest of the game. Well worth the $50. However, after that each expansion comes with maybe 1 zone (albeit better designed than the starting zones) and a handful of new features, yet it costs more than the original game when you add it up. It's no wonder MMOs are crazy popular with game publishers right now, it's like printing money after the first couple of months. You can even pare down the development staff to apparently almost nothing and still rake in money hand over fist.
WTF are you talking about?
Well, once you finish your paper you should go back and correct the errors you found in Wikipedia (don't forget to cite your sources). I find that in general the more citations an article has, the more reliable it generally is, at least for scholarly subjects.
95% of the time you can figure out what they're asking you do to and lie too. "No, reinstalling the driver didn't help, my network card still doesn't show up.".
If it's too much of a problem, backup your current system (backups are good), toss that reinstall copy of Windows on there, and go through the motions. I should mention that I virtually never call the support folks though unless it's a real problem. I hate going through 20 things that I've already tried just to get them to admit that yes, it is in fact busted.
Seriously, if you have a fairly open and shut case of hardware failure, then there is no need to tell the person on the other end that you're using Linux. If your machine has to go back to the shop for repair, then slap the "restore" copy of Windows on it (assuming it's not too hosed to even boot off of CD) and send it back more or less the way you got it. If you don't have backups, well, it sucks to be you because most of the times the RMA guys won't save your data either.
However, if in the process of reinstalling the backup copy of Windows everything starts working again, well, maybe it was a problem with Linux after all.
I don't know about the PS3, but the PS2 was in a similar situation with its DVD drive. Ultimately, the DVD drive in the PS2 wasn't the best. It worked ok on simple movies, but it tended to get edge cases wrong on more complex discs. You'd see this as messed up subtitles on foreign films, "camera angle" changes that were handled incorrectly, menu choices that don't get translated correctly in the film and so on. Granted, a lot of these were bugs on the disc itself, but better players managed to work around the bugs and work correctly regardless.
On the other hand, WTF is Nintendo doing that it can't catch up to demand after 3 months? Are the Wiis being hand assembled by Monks in Tibet? It's hard to even find the Wiimotes in stock anywhere. The only thing all of the stores have in abundance around here is the stupid carrying caddy and stand thing.
Then again, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Nintendo pulled this same stunt with the SNES.
And for one very good reason: The iPhone is supposed to be around $600. You can buy iPod Nanos for less than a third of that. iPods were a success, but not an unbelievable hit, until they managed to get the costs down to something your average person can afford as a Christmas or Birthday gift. Not to mention something someone could buy without having to work it in their budget for the next 3 months. The iPhone is just plain too expensive to kill the iPod yet. Maybe if iPhone v.3 or v.4 brings the price down to the point where it's not much more than a regular phone I'll entertain thoughts about it being an iPod killer, but right now I have to say no way.
Of course it's easy to ship enough stock when your demand is low.
Yeah, but this is early Windows, people reinstalled weekly anyway.
Or more often, you buy the more expensive printer because you hear how good it is online, and then discover you can't buy replacement ink cartridges for love or money after a year or so.
Yeah, but who wants to sit through 20 years of gold/silver age shlock to get there?
The best example of how badly the CCA gutted the comics industry is to consider how America had a vibrant and thriving comics industry that was larger than Japan's before the CCA came around. Shortly afterward it was reduced to a sad husk of its former glory while the Japanese Manga industry flourished and produced works that are to this day considered classics of literature.
Such rating schemes are tantamount to censorship in the end. The Comics Code Authority proved this decades ago. Once you create the ratings it doesn't take long for municipalities to create laws that criminalize material with ratings above a certain point. Once that happens the publishers who publish material with those ratings (no matter how popular they were before) lose their business or end up dumbing it down to the lowest common denominator.
Just look at what happens to NC-17 films and how hard directors will work to cut something down to an R if they're threatened with it. There aren't even that many theaters that won't be able to show an NC-17 film and yet still the studios won't touch it.
I know a lot of people who were in Awe over the Neo Geo hardware, but almost nobody who actually ponied up the cash to buy one. That thing was wicked expensive, and the games where pricey too, especially since the gamer market in those days skewed young.
Your PS2 longevity can depend a lot on which version you got. From what I've seen, most slimlines are crappy, and the very early (v.1 and v.2) fat style PS2s are dodgy, but the v.3 through v.6 are ok, and the v.7 through v.9 are actually pretty good. The very early slimlines are apparently the worst, with the lasers burning out at an alarming rate due to a manufacturing defect.
It works because you don't realize the size of this thing. They're talking about millions of fake pages here, lots of them pointing at other fake pages to raise their pagerank so they can in turn point at yet more pages. You would think Google would have someone seeking these kind of sites out and applying a discount on their domain though (although when that happens the spammers just move on anyway).
Unfortunately, an air powered car won't be able to do regenerative braking. The reason is that you can't just pump regular air into the tank time and time again because the water will precipitate out and sit in your tank, reducing your capacity while increasing the weight and more importantly, freezing over the output lines and clogging the works up. You need to use dry air in a situation like this, so you can't just attach a pump to the tires (well, in a lot of ways it's just a pump running in reverse already) and pull air back in to stop the car.
I think the grandparent is asking for the real cost of that much compressed air, not what the probably bogus article quoted.
Good thing this is being developed for India then.
Because even light cars weigh several hundred to a couple thousand pounds, not counting the reinforced compressed air tank you're going to need (although saving weight on the engine will be nice). Then you have to add people/cargo to the mix as well, and compressing air takes a lot of energy (although you can reclaim some of the energy in the form of heat). I haven't worked the numbers so there is a chance this is legit, but on the face of it I'm skeptical. If compressed air were that efficient of a power storage mechanism I'd have to think more people would be using it.
Well, if there's one thing India has a lot of it is hot weather.
Still, I'm highly skeptical of the 200km range out of $3 worth of compressed air. Even counting for the exchange rate the cost of the energy you put into compressing that much air seems like it should greatly exceed the $3 quoted in the article.
As for the "OMG, the Oil Goons are going to get him" types. I think this is how these kind of rumors get started. Someone sets up a scam that turns out to be too good to be true, and then suddenly they "disappear" right before the technology was supposed to debut, and all of their "working prototypes" and "schematics" disappear too. It must be evil Oil companies right? There's no chance it was a scam all along and the guy just ran off with the money...