Not a surprise to those of us that have followed the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle for a while. HD-DVD was rushed to market to compete with Blu-Ray. Their first significant demo in January of 2006 was an embarrassing failure with the disc failing to play. HD DVD Demo a Disappointment
It is amazing the HD-DVD camp hasn't folded yet. Listening to the HD-DVD fans it is clear that rabid hatred of SONY drives their insistence that HD-DVD will win in the end.
People where initially skittish of buy Blu-Ray until the Playstation-3 came out. People where initially skittish about buying a Playstation-3 until Blu-Ray prevailed (supply issues aside). As it becoming more and more clear Blu-Ray will win and win big (currently with a 4:1 sales ratio and GROWING) PS3 and Blu-Ray will now both feed into the success of the other. Sony took a gamble, but it appears to be one that will win big for them despite whatever people may think of their sales practices or DRM attempts.
I for one hope hatred of SONY doesn't keep HD-DVD alive -- I would like to only have to buy movies (any movie I want) in one HD format.
Much as everybody assumes this is all about fundamentalist Christianity, I have talked to many non-Christians around the world, even non-deists, and many find evolution hard to swallow.
I believe in Evolution, but for some it is a very disquieting concept. Many people generally want to believe in the transcendence of man and distance from animals. Christians just have more dogma to lean on to support this prejudice. People don't disbelieve out of ignorance, they disbelieve because they don't want to believe. Similarly many people believe in many strange and incredulous things because the do want to believe.
This said, just teaching people to set aside there natural biases when evaluating evidence in general would do a world of good in both science and politics. Evolution would take care of itself if we were successful in this.
NEW LAUNCH TIME. Liftoff is now targeted for 2345 GMT (7:45 p.m. EDT). Fueling of the rocket had been suspended while trying to correct the data transmission problem between Omelek Island and the company's headquarters in El Segundo, California. So the launch team is now working to get back on track for liftoff.
What a bunch of crap. Having been to China where piracy is a big time moneymaker they know how to do it right. High quality product in attractive packaging with a rock bottom price. Why would I download a DivX compressed file when I can get the original mpg for 50 cents to a dollar?
P2P only makes sense when there isn't an affordable convenient alternative. Tony just priced himself out of business evidently. It's all about volume and price point. If Tony had focused on improving his productivity so he could lower his sale price he'd probably still be in business. Even in the black market you have to continue to innovate.
Tony got in when he thought he could make money easy, he wasn't bothered by the ethics of his choices. I have no trouble believing he'd be too lazy to work harder and charge less to give the same product. Even so I am highly disinclined to believe this story at face value. There may be a high volume of Slashdotters out there doing P2P for video, but Joe-6-pack is just barely able to share mp3s and spends a lot on DRM products. Joe would easily plunk down two dollars for a bootleg DVD if Tony where selling them.
Since it will make it possible to retrieve more fingerprints, will it also make it more likely police detectives will try to retrieve more and more suspect prints that are damaged and distorted or not fully imprinted? While fingertip patterns might be truly unique, our means of distinguishing them by the residue they leave behind IS NOT. Usually only a few prominent points where there are easy to identify features like bifurcations, loops, and whorls are used, not the whole print. Where these features are relatively positioned one against the other is what is stored in fingerprint databases. When you have something like 8 points that match it is considered a "GOOD" match, but they are hardly the statistical homerun that things like DNA testing are. In some cases as few as five match points are used (I don't have the numbers, but this is like the lottery, much easier to match 5 even if not a winner -- much, much easier). Fingerprints might be a good way to get a good first pass for suspects, but in general the public has way too much confidence in how well the retrieved prints identify culprits.
$750,000 seems to be trying to get by on the cheep to me. I recently read an article labeling a $1,000,000 grant to the Allen Telescope Array as "pork barrel." Never mind most of its funds come from private sources, the fact that some (not all) of its science is for SETI makes it a target.
Religious types would explain its all about not wasting sources because it is a self-evidently pointless search. I would have to suspect there is an element of not-wanting-to-know because ignorance will make religious dogma true in some magical way.
It costs hundreds of millions to send these crafts to Mars. I would rate the possibility of finding life or past life on Mars as one of the most important things they could do, and thus deserving of a reasonably share of the cost in a mission, say 10%-20%, not the less than point-2-percent I reckon this is. Granted there are probably other life related experiments, but I'm betting they are feeble in scope in compared to the original Viking missions. They may be more effective with improved technology and decades to review Vikings' data, but they are pitifully small compared to what we could be doing I'll wager. Our little shop that works on Government contracts nets 5 million a year for a staff of about 70 people, and that's every year. I almost feel guilty getting a pay check when this kind of science appears to be starving.
The front page of the Business section of the Chicago Tribune has a graphic showing the burgeoning use of the internet over the last decade -- the trouble is I think it is off by several orders of magnitude. The graphic is labeled something to the effect of "Gigabytes over major internet backbones per month" then lists 2006 as 700. 700 Gigabytes per month? With some people downloading HD content there are a significant number of users downloading 700 Gigabytes all by themselves per month. Maybe it was intended to be Peta-bytes per month or Gigabytes per minute or second.
Does anyone else have a more reliable estimate for Bytes the internet is currently carrying per some unit of time?
They use lots of Natural Gas for taxis in China. I asked a driver about it,
he claimed it to be about half the cost per mile compared to gasoline. Seeing
how the tank dominated the trunk of these taxis, I suspect it could rupture in a rear end collision. I doubt these particular taxis would be permitted on
American roads, but perhaps the new "Corncob Waste" tanks will make them
smaller, safer, and economical for American use.
While methane releases CO2, it still decreases our reliance on foreign oil
sources. I think de-funding terrorism is higher on most Americans to-do lists
than stopping Global Warming. You can argue whether these priorities are out
of wack, but I'm sure this is the way most will see it.
I personally think we Should drill for oil in Alaska as well as pursuing these
other cleaner sources of energy. Failing to do so will only result in more
reliance on Coal and even worse ecological damage as we rip up the Earth for
Tar Sand and Oil Shale. Oil is a passing fad. We will have fusion someday,
but for now we have little choice but to use what is at hand. This isn't to
say conservation is not good also, just that some conservation measures fail
the unintended consequences test. The DOE has an over 20 billion dollar year
budget, the world barely can scrape together 15 billion over a 10 or 15 year
time span for ITER. If we through 5 billion a year at it, I bet we'd have
commercial fusion up and running in under 10.
Of course you if you had fueling stations you wouldn't rely on just tapping the grid in real time, you'll install big batteries to charge continuously. Then you only need scale up your batteries and electrical service as business scales upward. You know, like how they store Gas in the ground to fuel your car instead of materialize it instantly when you fill up.
Yes they'll be additional efficiency losses, but initially these stations will only have to service a few people that normally get their charge at either end of a commute. Once demand really takes off we'll think of something else more efficient.
This tends to be the trend with any useful technology. As technologies become more cost effective and energy efficient the rise in demand outpaces the energy savings as the economic advantage they offer is more fully utilized. This happened first with steam powered devices, then automotive, then air travel.
While it may seem disturbing that computers are consuming a larger percentage of energy usage, one has to realize they probably more than offset their own energy use -- this by allowing other resources to either be used more efficiently or by enabling other economic activity that discovers and distributes resources, energy among them.
More guessing here, but for a 16 qubit machine I'm guessing not much.
Also I don't think qubit is the right word any more because it sounds like each of the 16 qubits in this machine is really a whole value like a byte or a word, else it wouldn't be "analog"
Perhaps this thing will rock at some application that needs thousands or
millions of NP-complete approximations per second to be practical. Maybe it
can efficiently simulate neural networks. Maybe it can speed voice or vision recognition or assist other areas of AI. Of course this is all just conjecture. I think it will be of little value in one off NP-complete type problems, but they specifically mention it being essentially a co-processor, which leads me to believe it is expecting to be blasted with lots of sub problems to be solved quickly.
This would all be true for a Quantum Computer based on Binary, but this is an "Analog" computer. Back in the 40's and 50's Analog computers could run rings around digital computers in their domains, but they where only approximations, but for plotting flight plans and trajectories a few digits of precision where often enough.
I'm guessing similarly this machine might quickly calculate solutions to things like Traveling Sales Man problem and other NP complete problems, but not be guaranteed to have found the optimal solution, just a very, very, very good one quickly.
But, but, but... without Captain Copyright who will step forward to encourage 1st graders to turn their parents in for Copyright violation and pirating!?!?
If binoculars had never been invented I would say patenting them is fine, but given binoculars it seems absurd to be able to patent everything seen through them for the first time.
A couple of quick observations from someone married to a Chinese national and has been to China five times. There are far fewer unique names in China both first and last and generally no middle name. Being able to uniquely identify people in China is a huge problem for private industry and government alike.
I am all for national ID cards and a central database for all citizen info. You provide this info over and over and over to various local, state, and federal agencies. How about just one yearly form you update at tax time? Want to live off the grid? Tough, get over it. We are long past the point where armed insurrection is going to change the American government. The only people that NEED to live off the grid are criminals (I know I'll get some angry replies to that). Lets get rid of black markets, gray markets, and illegal immigration. Need jobs filled? Then either give a decent wage or issue enough citizenships to fill them. Guest Worker program? Just an excuse the screw the working class by artificially keeping wages low, not to mention creating a whole new officially sanctioned underclass.
There are potentials for abuse to be sure, especially if third parties are allowed access (a practice I would like to see barred by law). But the gains to out society probably outweigh any theoretical down side. We're not talking papers you have to carry around or be arrested. We talking about a card you use when applying for jobs or bank accounts. I really don't understand all the hysteria surrounding the resistance to national databases or national IDs, though I'm sure some here will be all to anxious to enlighten me.
I had posted a comment entitled Sure... lets just trust what the porn guys say predicting ALL of this early in the thread. It was not well moderated mostly I believe because at the time most Slashdotters wanted to HATE SONY so much they wanted to believe SONY would be insane enough to block all Porn on Blu-Ray.
With Disney a strong Blu-Ray backer they just didn't want to be seen as a strong porn advocate. All this crap about SONY forbidding Porn was just the Porn industry trying to swing the format war for monetary reasons. I'm surprised this article took so long to surface on Slashdot as the refutation of the no-porn-claims came within a day or two of the discussion mentioned.
Hmmmm, are I-told-you-sos get moderated +5 Insightful or -5 Troll?
Ermmm... Good plan except major movie studios will only release on Blu-Ray if it's DMR holds up (at least for the next couple of month). Then again maybe all you want to watch is Porn.
BTW, in yesterday's post about HD Porn and Sony not Allowing Porn on BETA, I assure you there was LOTS of porn on BETA. The adult industry may prefer HD-DVD for cost reasons, but if Blu-Ray wins, there will be Blu-Ray porn -- count on it.
The best thing might be for HD-DVD to fail, have Blu-Ray generally accepted, and THEN break the DMR Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha
Actually both articles read more like he-said she-said. No where is anyone quoting Sony as not allowing adult content. I suspect this will all turn out to be rumor and untrue motivated by a desire to swing the HD industry one way or the other.
The adult content industry is much more sensitive to distribution cost than major studios. Odd they are only now complaining when Blu-Ray seems to finally have the upper hand.
Call me a cynic, but this thing hardly looks ready for primetime. In fact it looks to work far worse than 3D prototype printers I saw demonstrated 5-7 years ago did.
For those that didn't watch the video, it looks like a time-lapse speed up of a caterpillar building a cocoon. Seriously it has an almost creepy organic look. There is no time mark on the video so there is no indication of how long this thing took to build. The shape is brain-dead simple. Can it spin anything more complex than a circle as it builds? What good is a printer that can only make balls, cylinders, and bulbs? Presumably this item is flexible being made of silicone rubber, but that seems to be more a side effect of it being built on the cheap with off the shelf materials. It even had to be "refilled" half way through building this rather small bulb, which is mostly air to start with!
For all the people than mentioned using this device to repair things around the house, I hope the only thing that ever breaks around your house is your turkey baster (assuming this thing can print a bulb that large).
As has been mentioned by other posters, these machines will only become truly useful when they can extrude a variety of materials with a variety of material properties. I would imagine you could get a range of properties in stiffness and heat resistance by varying proportions of two or three basic plastic polymers with perhaps a few additional curing additives. Rather than demand a 100% build from scratch perhaps a few standard sized metal reinforcement parts could be thrown into the mix, though this would require a pause while the machine requested user assistance to add screws, rings, dowels, or thread a wire or two.
Really useful auto manufacturing will require serious breakthroughs in AI and robotics to assembling a variety of fabricated parts into something useful, only then will manufacturing prices plummet. Keep in mind we have had auto-milling machines for decades and they haven't obsoleted most manufacturing processes. They can also mill into custom shapes a much wider range of materials.
I suspect that people working in this building day after day may find their sense of direction diminished in local surroundings. I once lived in a trailer that had to be moved. The 90 degree change in orientation grossly affected my navigation sense for months.
Is it just me, or is it annoying that neither the original news article
nor the slashdot summary have a link to Craigs List, the website under discussion?
Granted this one is an easy one to find, but in general, why are News sites so stingy with links to what they are reporting on.
Not providing pictures of some marvelous device they are reporting on is also a major gripe
Personally I think Sony should have kept the Abio pet dog going. Since the PS3 has WiFi they could create some kind of enhanced Aibo that uses the PS3 for for a second brain. It could capture all sorts of cool video's as it prowls around and it could even make a really inexpensive home security system that uploads pictures to the internet every time it detects movement in the house.
If you really insisted they could make some kind of cutesy push vacuum cleaner for it and do some light house work as well.
Sony engendered some ill will by not continuing to make the Aibo. They seem to put too much emphasis on the bottom line as opposed to customer goodwill. The Aibo was iconic and great overall advertising for Sony; now it isn't there to help support a rocky start for the PS3.
I'm not against finding humor in any situation, I'm sure the service men in the field are having a hay day with this. I have no truck with the various humorous riffs that will posted to slashdot. I just wouldn't lead with the humor icon when thousands and thousands of service men and civilians have been maimed and killed by IEDs. I personally think it is in poor taste. Maybe I'm wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a surprise to those of us that have followed the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle for a while. HD-DVD was rushed to market to compete with Blu-Ray. Their first significant demo in January of 2006 was an embarrassing failure with the disc failing to play. HD DVD Demo a Disappointment
It is amazing the HD-DVD camp hasn't folded yet. Listening to the HD-DVD fans it is clear that rabid hatred of SONY drives their insistence that HD-DVD will win in the end.
People where initially skittish of buy Blu-Ray until the Playstation-3 came out. People where initially skittish about buying a Playstation-3 until Blu-Ray prevailed (supply issues aside). As it becoming more and more clear Blu-Ray will win and win big (currently with a 4:1 sales ratio and GROWING) PS3 and Blu-Ray will now both feed into the success of the other. Sony took a gamble, but it appears to be one that will win big for them despite whatever people may think of their sales practices or DRM attempts.
I for one hope hatred of SONY doesn't keep HD-DVD alive -- I would like to only have to buy movies (any movie I want) in one HD format.
Much as everybody assumes this is all about fundamentalist Christianity, I have talked to many non-Christians around the world, even non-deists, and many find evolution hard to swallow.
I believe in Evolution, but for some it is a very disquieting concept. Many people generally want to believe in the transcendence of man and distance from animals. Christians just have more dogma to lean on to support this prejudice. People don't disbelieve out of ignorance, they disbelieve because they don't want to believe. Similarly many people believe in many strange and incredulous things because the do want to believe.
This said, just teaching people to set aside there natural biases when evaluating evidence in general would do a world of good in both science and politics. Evolution would take care of itself if we were successful in this.
From Space.com
MONDAY, MARCH 19, 2007
2257 GMT (6:57 p.m. EDT)
NEW LAUNCH TIME. Liftoff is now targeted for 2345 GMT (7:45 p.m. EDT). Fueling of the rocket had been suspended while trying to correct the data transmission problem between Omelek Island and the company's headquarters in El Segundo, California. So the launch team is now working to get back on track for liftoff.
What a bunch of crap. Having been to China where piracy is a big time moneymaker they know how to do it right. High quality product in attractive packaging with a rock bottom price. Why would I download a DivX compressed file when I can get the original mpg for 50 cents to a dollar?
P2P only makes sense when there isn't an affordable convenient alternative. Tony just priced himself out of business evidently. It's all about volume and price point. If Tony had focused on improving his productivity so he could lower his sale price he'd probably still be in business. Even in the black market you have to continue to innovate.
Tony got in when he thought he could make money easy, he wasn't bothered by the ethics of his choices. I have no trouble believing he'd be too lazy to work harder and charge less to give the same product. Even so I am highly disinclined to believe this story at face value. There may be a high volume of Slashdotters out there doing P2P for video, but Joe-6-pack is just barely able to share mp3s and spends a lot on DRM products. Joe would easily plunk down two dollars for a bootleg DVD if Tony where selling them.
Since it will make it possible to retrieve more fingerprints, will it also make it more likely police detectives will try to retrieve more and more suspect prints that are damaged and distorted or not fully imprinted? While fingertip patterns might be truly unique, our means of distinguishing them by the residue they leave behind IS NOT. Usually only a few prominent points where there are easy to identify features like bifurcations, loops, and whorls are used, not the whole print. Where these features are relatively positioned one against the other is what is stored in fingerprint databases. When you have something like 8 points that match it is considered a "GOOD" match, but they are hardly the statistical homerun that things like DNA testing are. In some cases as few as five match points are used (I don't have the numbers, but this is like the lottery, much easier to match 5 even if not a winner -- much, much easier). Fingerprints might be a good way to get a good first pass for suspects, but in general the public has way too much confidence in how well the retrieved prints identify culprits.
$750,000 seems to be trying to get by on the cheep to me. I recently read an article labeling a $1,000,000 grant to the Allen Telescope Array as "pork barrel." Never mind most of its funds come from private sources, the fact that some (not all) of its science is for SETI makes it a target.
Religious types would explain its all about not wasting sources because it is a self-evidently pointless search. I would have to suspect there is an element of not-wanting-to-know because ignorance will make religious dogma true in some magical way.
It costs hundreds of millions to send these crafts to Mars. I would rate the possibility of finding life or past life on Mars as one of the most important things they could do, and thus deserving of a reasonably share of the cost in a mission, say 10%-20%, not the less than point-2-percent I reckon this is. Granted there are probably other life related experiments, but I'm betting they are feeble in scope in compared to the original Viking missions. They may be more effective with improved technology and decades to review Vikings' data, but they are pitifully small compared to what we could be doing I'll wager. Our little shop that works on Government contracts nets 5 million a year for a staff of about 70 people, and that's every year. I almost feel guilty getting a pay check when this kind of science appears to be starving.
Has I understand it, it should be simple enough to just have somebody just slip this new Mandatory Read law in.
Anyone here at Slashdot know someone on the inside?
The front page of the Business section of the Chicago Tribune has a graphic showing the burgeoning use of the internet over the last decade -- the trouble is I think it is off by several orders of magnitude. The graphic is labeled something to the effect of "Gigabytes over major internet backbones per month" then lists 2006 as 700. 700 Gigabytes per month? With some people downloading HD content there are a significant number of users downloading 700 Gigabytes all by themselves per month. Maybe it was intended to be Peta-bytes per month or Gigabytes per minute or second.
Does anyone else have a more reliable estimate for Bytes the internet is currently carrying per some unit of time?
Coming on the heals of this article Fuel Tanks Made of Corncob Waste, this could be quite serendipitous.
They use lots of Natural Gas for taxis in China. I asked a driver about it, he claimed it to be about half the cost per mile compared to gasoline. Seeing how the tank dominated the trunk of these taxis, I suspect it could rupture in a rear end collision. I doubt these particular taxis would be permitted on American roads, but perhaps the new "Corncob Waste" tanks will make them smaller, safer, and economical for American use.
While methane releases CO2, it still decreases our reliance on foreign oil sources. I think de-funding terrorism is higher on most Americans to-do lists than stopping Global Warming. You can argue whether these priorities are out of wack, but I'm sure this is the way most will see it.
I personally think we Should drill for oil in Alaska as well as pursuing these other cleaner sources of energy. Failing to do so will only result in more reliance on Coal and even worse ecological damage as we rip up the Earth for Tar Sand and Oil Shale. Oil is a passing fad. We will have fusion someday, but for now we have little choice but to use what is at hand. This isn't to say conservation is not good also, just that some conservation measures fail the unintended consequences test. The DOE has an over 20 billion dollar year budget, the world barely can scrape together 15 billion over a 10 or 15 year time span for ITER. If we through 5 billion a year at it, I bet we'd have commercial fusion up and running in under 10.
Of course you if you had fueling stations you wouldn't rely on just tapping the grid in real time, you'll install big batteries to charge continuously. Then you only need scale up your batteries and electrical service as business scales upward. You know, like how they store Gas in the ground to fuel your car instead of materialize it instantly when you fill up.
Yes they'll be additional efficiency losses, but initially these stations will only have to service a few people that normally get their charge at either end of a commute. Once demand really takes off we'll think of something else more efficient.
This tends to be the trend with any useful technology. As technologies become more cost effective and energy efficient the rise in demand outpaces the energy savings as the economic advantage they offer is more fully utilized. This happened first with steam powered devices, then automotive, then air travel.
While it may seem disturbing that computers are consuming a larger percentage of energy usage, one has to realize they probably more than offset their own energy use -- this by allowing other resources to either be used more efficiently or by enabling other economic activity that discovers and distributes resources, energy among them.
More guessing here, but for a 16 qubit machine I'm guessing not much.
Also I don't think qubit is the right word any more because it sounds like each of the 16 qubits in this machine is really a whole value like a byte or a word, else it wouldn't be "analog"
Perhaps this thing will rock at some application that needs thousands or millions of NP-complete approximations per second to be practical. Maybe it can efficiently simulate neural networks. Maybe it can speed voice or vision recognition or assist other areas of AI. Of course this is all just conjecture. I think it will be of little value in one off NP-complete type problems, but they specifically mention it being essentially a co-processor, which leads me to believe it is expecting to be blasted with lots of sub problems to be solved quickly.
This would all be true for a Quantum Computer based on Binary, but this is an "Analog" computer. Back in the 40's and 50's Analog computers could run rings around digital computers in their domains, but they where only approximations, but for plotting flight plans and trajectories a few digits of precision where often enough.
I'm guessing similarly this machine might quickly calculate solutions to things like Traveling Sales Man problem and other NP complete problems, but not be guaranteed to have found the optimal solution, just a very, very, very good one quickly.
But, but, but... without Captain Copyright who will step forward to encourage 1st graders to turn their parents in for Copyright violation and pirating!?!?
If binoculars had never been invented I would say patenting them is fine, but given binoculars it seems absurd to be able to patent everything seen through them for the first time.
The first week of January it was 2 to 1 for sales of BD
The second week of January it was close to 3 to 1 for sales of BD
The HD-DVD camp Shot back that there where more title released on Blu-Ray the first two weeks (11 vs 21).
So what to make of this weeks releases? 12 titles to 1
It seems the distributors have decided for us.
HD DVD and Blu-ray releases on February 13th, 2007
Blu-ray
* Broken Arrow (Fox)
* Chain Reaction (Fox)
* Chronos (Koch)
* The Departed (Warner)
* Entrapment (Fox)
* Ladder 49 (Buena Vista)
* The Marine (Fox)
* Phone Booth (Fox)
* Planet of the Apes (Fox)
* Reign of Fire (Buena Vista)
* The Sentinel (Fox)
* The Usual Suspects (Fox)
HD DVD
* The Departed (Warner)
Titles to date HD DVD 159 vs Blu-ray 171.
and remember HD-DVD had a big head start and is now fading fast.
A couple of quick observations from someone married to a Chinese national and has been to China five times. There are far fewer unique names in China both first and last and generally no middle name. Being able to uniquely identify people in China is a huge problem for private industry and government alike.
I am all for national ID cards and a central database for all citizen info. You provide this info over and over and over to various local, state, and federal agencies. How about just one yearly form you update at tax time? Want to live off the grid? Tough, get over it. We are long past the point where armed insurrection is going to change the American government. The only people that NEED to live off the grid are criminals (I know I'll get some angry replies to that). Lets get rid of black markets, gray markets, and illegal immigration. Need jobs filled? Then either give a decent wage or issue enough citizenships to fill them. Guest Worker program? Just an excuse the screw the working class by artificially keeping wages low, not to mention creating a whole new officially sanctioned underclass.
There are potentials for abuse to be sure, especially if third parties are allowed access (a practice I would like to see barred by law). But the gains to out society probably outweigh any theoretical down side. We're not talking papers you have to carry around or be arrested. We talking about a card you use when applying for jobs or bank accounts. I really don't understand all the hysteria surrounding the resistance to national databases or national IDs, though I'm sure some here will be all to anxious to enlighten me.
In January 11th's discusion on Adult Film Industry Chooses HD-DVD
I had posted a comment entitled Sure... lets just trust what the porn guys say predicting ALL of this early in the thread. It was not well moderated mostly I believe because at the time most Slashdotters wanted to HATE SONY so much they wanted to believe SONY would be insane enough to block all Porn on Blu-Ray.
With Disney a strong Blu-Ray backer they just didn't want to be seen as a strong porn advocate. All this crap about SONY forbidding Porn was just the Porn industry trying to swing the format war for monetary reasons. I'm surprised this article took so long to surface on Slashdot as the refutation of the no-porn-claims came within a day or two of the discussion mentioned.
Hmmmm, are I-told-you-sos get moderated +5 Insightful or -5 Troll?
Ermmm... Good plan except major movie studios will only release on Blu-Ray if it's DMR holds up (at least for the next couple of month). Then again maybe all you want to watch is Porn.
BTW, in yesterday's post about HD Porn and Sony not Allowing Porn on BETA, I assure you there was LOTS of porn on BETA. The adult industry may prefer HD-DVD for cost reasons, but if Blu-Ray wins, there will be Blu-Ray porn -- count on it.
The best thing might be for HD-DVD to fail, have Blu-Ray generally accepted, and THEN break the DMR Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha
Actually both articles read more like he-said she-said. No where is anyone quoting Sony as not allowing adult content. I suspect this will all turn out to be
rumor and untrue motivated by a desire to swing the HD industry one way or the other.
The adult content industry is much more sensitive to distribution cost than major studios. Odd they are only now complaining when Blu-Ray seems to finally have the upper hand.
Call me a cynic, but this thing hardly looks ready for primetime. In fact it looks to work far worse than 3D prototype printers I saw demonstrated 5-7 years ago did.
"Two Carnegie Mellon researchers..." translation: "Two graduate students' thesis project"
For those that didn't watch the video, it looks like a time-lapse speed up of a caterpillar building a cocoon. Seriously it has an almost creepy organic look. There is no time mark on the video so there is no indication of how long this thing took to build. The shape is brain-dead simple. Can it spin anything more complex than a circle as it builds? What good is a printer that can only make balls, cylinders, and bulbs? Presumably this item is flexible being made of silicone rubber, but that seems to be more a side effect of it being built on the cheap with off the shelf materials. It even had to be "refilled" half way through building this rather small bulb, which is mostly air to start with!
For all the people than mentioned using this device to repair things around the house, I hope the only thing that ever breaks around your house is your turkey baster (assuming this thing can print a bulb that large).
As has been mentioned by other posters, these machines will only become truly useful when they can extrude a variety of materials with a variety of material properties. I would imagine you could get a range of properties in stiffness and heat resistance by varying proportions of two or three basic plastic polymers with perhaps a few additional curing additives. Rather than demand a 100% build from scratch perhaps a few standard sized metal reinforcement parts could be thrown into the mix, though this would require a pause while the machine requested user assistance to add screws, rings, dowels, or thread a wire or two.
Really useful auto manufacturing will require serious breakthroughs in AI and robotics to assembling a variety of fabricated parts into something useful, only then will manufacturing prices plummet. Keep in mind we have had auto-milling machines for decades and they haven't obsoleted most manufacturing processes. They can also mill into custom shapes a much wider range of materials.
I suspect that people working in this building day after day may find their sense of direction diminished in local surroundings. I once lived in a trailer that had to be moved. The 90 degree change in orientation grossly affected my navigation sense for months.
Is it just me, or is it annoying that neither the original news article nor the slashdot summary have a link to Craigs List, the website under discussion?
Granted this one is an easy one to find, but in general, why are News sites so stingy with links to what they are reporting on.
Not providing pictures of some marvelous device they are reporting on is also a major gripe
BTW
Craig's List
Personally I think Sony should have kept the Abio pet dog going. Since the PS3 has WiFi they could create some kind of enhanced Aibo that uses the PS3 for for a second brain. It could capture all sorts of cool video's as it prowls around and it could even make a really inexpensive home security system that uploads pictures to the internet every time it detects movement in the house.
If you really insisted they could make some kind of cutesy push vacuum cleaner for it and do some light house work as well.
Sony engendered some ill will by not continuing to make the Aibo. They seem to put too much emphasis on the bottom line as opposed to customer goodwill. The Aibo was iconic and great overall advertising for Sony; now it isn't there to help support a rocky start for the PS3.
I think they were dark humor yes, but fiction.
I'm not against finding humor in any situation, I'm sure the service men in the field are having a hay day with this. I have no truck with the various humorous riffs that will posted to slashdot. I just wouldn't lead with the humor icon when thousands and thousands of service men and civilians have been maimed and killed by IEDs. I personally think it is in poor taste. Maybe I'm wrong.