I hadn't seen any headlines about semiconductor speed advances in awhile, so I was prepared to be impressed by this news, however having read the article and done a little Googling, it would seem to not be so impressive.
CPUs have stalled out at about 4ghz overall clocking, cutting edge transistors seem to be hitting a wall at about 500-600ghz.
Now granted faster gate transitions make for faster CPUs, but multiple gate operations are necessary for each state change, add signaling and propagation delay and who knows what you can really clock the CPU at (I am not an Electrical Engineer).
Here is a page link claiming a record 562ghz transistor switching in Oct. 2002
article
here is another claimed record of 509ghz, Nov, 2003
article
Obviously at odds with the 2002 anoucment. Undoubtedly it should narrow its claim for a specific transistor type.
Here is a U of I annoucment calming a record 382 ghz Jan. 30, 2003
article
But expects 700ghz by early 2004 (I'm guessing they didn't make it).
Lets assume 562ghz in 2002, so we - drum roll please --- 7.5% increase in speed in 2 ½ years!
This is not going to keep Moore's Law humming along.
Even stranger, here are claims of TerraHertz transistors at Intel in 2002
article
Ironically, while googling for transistor or gate speed will show hundreds of hits, you can't actually find the switching speed for individual gates in a P4 or AMD chip. This stuff seems to be super secret stuff, and only the overall CPU clock it published. I wouldn't be surprised if the individual gates and transistors are transitioning at several dozens of ghz if not a couple of hundred or more. While Moore's Law death claims may have been premature 10 and 20 years ago, they may not be now.
I hope I'm wrong, I want my Holodeck Playstation 5 in 2015.
Neat as this stuff is, I doubt it will really help the majority of mobility impaired like my father. My father suffered from severe arthritis that left his knees and hips unable to bear his weight, and of course flexing them was excruciating, assisted or not.
A lot of wear an tear is from load bearing, and perhaps these powered suite address this to a degree, but I suspect in many cases they would exacerbate the problem for arthritis sufferers by adding to the weight load on joints, even while enabling superhuman lifting capabilities.
Even if they address the load issue on joints, it is overkill from what is really needed by tens of millions. I have not seen such a thing, but does anyone know of some kind of lightweight synchronized brace system? Something that would distribute the body's load to the hips directly and lock when the joints aren't moving? I have seen leg braces before, but not articulated ones that auto-lock. One thing that my father believed contributed to the breakdown of his joints were the long periods he spent standing doing his job as a chef. Again, a locking brace system would seem the answer for people that need to be on their feet long periods, but may have the beginnings of joint break down.
My HDTV Trivails
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Voom No More
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I had thought about getting Voom and am conflicted about their demise. I hope the Content providers don't draw the wrong conclusions from Voom's failure. I went the homebrew setup way for HDTV with an MyHDTV board and a digital projector. It wasn't until the Olympics this last fall that I could get any HDTV channels OTA. About the same time my Cable provider started offering a small set of HDTV channels and PVRs. I am not happy with the limited selection of HDTV I have, 2 OTA and 6 Cable (one of which is HBO), but over 90% of my viewing is HDTV. If not for Fridays on Sci-Fi it would be about 100 percent.
If there had been an HDTV viewable media at HDTV introduction things would have evolved far differently. High-end equipment owners like myself would have bought HDTV content proving the marked for HDTV content. HDTV sets would have sold because even in HDTV signal deprived areas like the one I live in, people would still have had something to watch. And with more HDTVs, more OTA HDTV transmission would come quicker. With high end users and their larger amounts of disposable income watching mostly HDTV, advertising revenues would have switched to HDTV and again faster adoption.
Of course the poor choice of modulation scheme for US transmission didn't help. There were other more robust schemes, but ignored for cost cutting reasons (which by now would have made no difference I suspect as technology marches on and becomes more affordable).
Of course all this MPEG2 vs MPEG4 and obsoleted equipment that was suppose to be cutting edge HDTV, Joe 6-pack is going to be HDTV shy even longer.
Content providers are scared shitless of the digital age, they know that once this stuff is digital anyone that waits long enough will just be able to snare it for free at whatever quality he or she wants depending on download times. I suspect also that content providers are conflicted about providing upgraded broadband as it will start to eat into their content revenues. Why would I continue to subscribe to HBO when I can just download the episode for free off the same cable?
DirectTV is promising a shit load of channels soon, so maybe this did in Voom as much as anything else. If the DirectTV line is reasonable after the new HDTV channels come on line I will probably ditch Cable and go satellite. It seems I've made the smart move in the mean time with cable, the HDTV and PVR are very affordable, but probably aren't MPEG4 compliant. Soon I will have my Blu-Ray player, 20+ HDTV channels and viewing nirvana.
For those that think I'm a little over the top on my TV viewing, I suspect I watch an average or below average amount. But what I do watch is on a glorious 10-foot screen and I only want razor sharp images on it. I spent about $4000-$5000 putting my system together and I want to get the most out of it. I personally don't understand why people would pay $50-$100 a month for cable or $600-$1200 a year, and then watch it on a $200 set from Wal-Mart.
I had prepared this rather long post in response to the Shuttle Rollout, but I'll sneak it in here since it mostly applies.
Shuttle Rollout -- What crack? We don't see no crack
I started to prepare this post when the rollout was in jeopardy, now: engineers determined the crack was a "minor imperfection" Hopefully not famous last words. I'm surprised the CNN.com article Shuttle Rollout Under Way hasn't been posted on Slashdot's main page yet.
These things are big, the external tank by itself if 154 feet long, so about the size of a 15-story building. Even though these things haven't been up in space for the last 2 years doesn't mean they are weathering and aging just sitting on the ground. The vertical assembly building has its own weather, so it's not like these things are sitting in an air-conditioned office 27-7.
The fleet is getting old and were expected to have been replaced by now, though after each having each done something like 50-100 missions individually -- numbers we will never see. What percentage of car owners are driving cars built in the early '80s?
Until a replacement vehicle comes along we should have been building at least one new shuttle every 5 years. Didn't get 50 missions in? Tough -- decommission at like 10 or 15 years. Sure it can cost more money to build things more slowly 1 at a time, but if you schedule for it, and budget for it, its not necessarily more expensive. Just make sure your build rate is commensurate with the mission increase. Then you get to use better materials, better technology in the newer vehicles. Granted there is something to be said for uniformity in guaranteeing safety, but the shuttles are not all identical by a long shot. Columbia couldn't dock with the ISS for instance, but could theoretically have brought the Hubble down from orbit.
There are costs in certifying old equipment, which may not equal new equipment cost, but I'll bet in the Shuttle's case they are getting close, or exceed what replacements costs would have been if we had kept a low turnout build process in place.
Now we are paralyzed and unable to do anything reasonable with our manned program.
My recommendations:
Build a catapult like launch assist device what can be used with a variety of to-space concepts. Even a slightly redesigned shuttle might get significant payload to orbit benefits from a maglift-assisted takeoff.
Quit obsessing on Going to Mars. Send robots to settle the Any-Life question once and for all. Current odds are shifting towards probably currently life. We can't afford to pollute that biosphere until we have studied it thoroughly and had automated sample return missions.
Find something for humans to do in Space other than going to Mars. It isn't like the New World. No big bang for the buck until launch costs are 100-1000 times cheaper. No colonization in our lifetime. Sorry. How about asteroid mining? We need an asteroid capture program that puts these things in stable Lagrange points. Working these things probably would be more efficient for humans than machines (at least for now). Lets start building stuff in space from in-situ materials.
Use the ISS as a way station for sample return missions and hype it that way. I'm not worried about Mars germs, but if we do detect life, I predict a huge row over possible accidental release during a direct return. This would placate the public and give the ISS a true research mission. And in the extremely unlikely event the critters are virulent to any degree to any animal specimens we expose them to then the samples never come Earthside. And should the Astronauts ever become exposed in any fashion (or suspected) they'll just have to resign themselves to living out the rest of their days in Space.
Spielberg could have saved himself a lot of money filming "Jaws" if this thing had existed then and been at all realistic. I'll bet Grade B movie producers are scrambling over themselves to offer to rent this thing. Of course CGI has made this kind of actual model filming largely unneeded, but probably for a few more years people might like a physically based special effect if the price is right.
Of course Cousteau (Jacques's son Fabian) is himself using the beast for filming -- so not so pure research after all.
They have been making brain implant vision systems since 1978
In late 2002 this method was up to 68 implanted electrodes (which would be about equal to an 8x8 matrix)
HOWEVER, you need more than 1000 (say 32x32 or 1028) or above for any really useful vision With 8x8 you might recognize one or two ASCII characters. A Face??? Only if it's an emoticon.
Now granted these are implants in the retina and not the visual cortex, but I have seen other claims for retinal implants over the last five years.
Why is this research taking so long to bear fruit? In 1978 progress was limited by the available CPU horsepower to translate images into usable grid stimulation patterns. Now it seems we are stalled out with our ability to put electrodes in organic systems.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is easy, but why doesn't this stuff scale like Moore's Law with integrated circuits? Given the state of research over a decade ago we should be up to VGA quality arrays of 640x480 by now.
In general prosthetics systems always seem to be on the verge of some "Steve Austin" "Million Dollar Man" arrival and then never makes it. I assure you when we watched Lee Majors in the early '70s wha-na-na-na-na'ing all over the place we assumed such feats would be common place by the year 2000. What the hell happened? Is this just hard like AI, or under-funded and poorly organized?
Leasing may work on paper for our company because we bill it to our clients as part of our services. But from an efficiency standpoint it sucks. We tend to run on cutting edge equipment leased at obscene rates, equipment that still costs an arm and a leg to purchase when the lease is up (mostly Sun and SGI). Then you have to migrate stuff (which seems to happen every time you turn around), change disks, scripts etc...
If you aren't billing clients for the cost, I would recommend going with less bleeding edge equipment which can be purchased outright. Bleeding edge stuff tends to get leased because it's so expensive, and because those who get the stuff expect to stay leading edge by leasing newer stuff in a year or two.
BUT if you buy outright, always have a trickle of new equipment coming in that replaces the really old ratty stuff, else you end up with too much dependence on legacy equipment, which can be an even worse trap.
Bottom line -- only lease if you can bill someone directly for it. This often is the case because clients often won't pay to use equipment you own.
I wrote a story in 1991 entitled "Mixed Signals" (about 40 pages) a cautionary near-future tail about people using PDA like devices to hook up in social settings. Although in my story the craze took off.
Should anyone care to read this (possibly amateurish) story, please leave a comment on the comment page (currently empty) if you give it a try.
There are adult themes in this story, so I don't know whether to state that as a disclaimer or inducement (probably both).
My cell-phone has 320-240 resolution, more than adequate for reading, especially if the fonts where anti-aliased and well designed. BUT the interface totally sucks currently. Perhaps if it had a couple of easy to use scroll wheels that made scrolling through text a breeze, and you could choose to view in windscreen vs. the default portrait by holding it sideways, then we can talk about reading on your cell-phone.
Still might be nice to have for when standing in line somewhere and you've forgotten to bring a novel or magazine.
I assume someday soon cell-phones will be powerful enough to transcribe voice accurately enough that you could navigate around on the net reasonably enough or even get some work done.
This does give me an idea for making a cell-phone friendly version for people reading my Blogs.
Personal computers have gone through several generations since introduced in the late 70's. While many people bought Apple ][s and Commodores 64s, it wasn't until the graphics got much better and the internet that they become a true must have item for everyone, not just writers and information workers.
I doubt that voice controlled Robosapians will make robots must have household items, but it gets us to maybe generation-3 home robots with only a couple of more generations before they explode in usefulness and ubiquity.
In about 1980 Heath-Kit tried to make a generation 1 home robot take off in popularity - the HERO 1 - it didn't succeed. A shaky low mobility box manually programmed with a small keypad was no ones' idea of a personal 3PO or R2-D2, though Heath certainly was hoping to cash in on both the early computer craze and Star Wars popularization of robots.
Personal robots largely disappeared from public view until Honda of all people pioneered and popularized a walking robot - the P2 (of course P2 was far too expensive to be a personal robot). I was only aware of the P2 and P3 before Asimo, but this link shows a long research line stretching back to 1986 with the E0 through E6 predecessors to the P series. Still when one saw the P2 walking in 1993, one got the feeling we were on the edge of big things to come. Sadly things have not progressed quite as quickly as one might have expected. Like AI, making practical personal robots is proving to be quite challenging. Hopefully voice control in such an inexpensive walking robot takes us a little further along the curve.
In one sense this marketing strategy has already worked -- I have read Neil Gaiman and now have tried to follow the link (initially more interested in Gaiman references that programming tools). Though squeak.org is slashdotted, your link to seaside.st is not, and the tutorial references www.sqeak.org. While I'm not a web designer for a living, I find myself doing a fair amount of HTML, CGI, and Perl work. I will have to check this out in more detail latter. So the gambit has already gotten them a possible user.
So now instead of clicking on a link and getting some kind of web based virus or Trojan or exploit, we can just get it from Google's pre-fetching. Granted there are probably no viruses that work this way today, but how long before Slashdot is running a story with the headline "First Pre-Fectch Exploit" ?
Also while it may not actually show as loaded on your browser or history visits, I don't expect corporate would care to see all the Firewall hits that deny the pre-fetch, because they probably will still trigger the access denied mechanism.
Maybe this will work out for Google, maybe not. It could go either way.
I have nothing against going to the Library, I used to do it all the time when I seemed to have more free-time in my life (and less pocket change). However, most of my fiction reading I now do, I do at the gym while on the stair machine, in fact I have found this a good way to set aside quality reading and keep the pounds off. And of course as a programmer I like the idea of multi-tasking. Point is, I sweat as I do my workout and the book gets dog-eared and beat up pretty quickly bouncing up and down and getting moist from time to time. Wow, that last sentence wasn't meant to come out sounding so erotic, but I'll leave it. Plus, while I'm not a rich man, I do OK, and you have to support the Authors you like - you know, so that like maybe, they might make more stuff you like.
Lunchtime is set aside for reading nonfiction, mostly magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American from cover to cover. I really miss BYTE magazine from the '70s, '80s, and early '90s, I don't know of any computer magazine that currently fills the niche left behind. Yes I know BYTE lives on in BYTE.com, but for better or worse the Web has killed a lot of technical publications that use to exist. In fact BYTE.com purposely bought out BYTE magazine just to kill it. Maybe I should frequent the website, but I have never forgiven them.
I had noticed, I had to double check the author's name, it seems like a sequal to Neverwhere.
Time to Place orders on Amazon.com
on
2005 Hugo Nominations
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Seriouslly, I went through Slashdot's Book Review topics last summer compiling a summer-reading list. I ordered 10 to 12 books and I'm still working my way through it. I know some minimum of a book a week types would be aghast I'm not done, but I do a lot of technical reading as well, plus I haven't been completely exclusive to the books I picked up over the summer.
From last summer's reading list
Finished:
Perdido Street Station - China Melville
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
The Golden Age - John C. Wright
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Manifold Series - Stephen Baxtor
Currently Reading:
King Rat - Neil Gaiman
Still to Go:
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
Some other Authors I follow
David Bin, Ben Bova, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Frederik Pohl.
I find the quality of my reading much better on average following Slashdot suggestions rather than randomly picking books by title and pretty covers at Barnes & Noble.
Didn't quite care for Pattern Recognition, so just one clunker for me -- maybe I just didn't get it, I wanted more of a well defined plot.
Taking inordinate pride in making through all 1130 pages of Cyrptonomicon, but after you make it past the first 300 pages you'll find yourself screaming through it.
Slashdot is still using the 1976 Cray-1 as the icon for supercomputing, and I think its safe to say supercomputing styling has gone down hill since. Not that these things should be like cars, though here at Slashdot we tend to salivate over them like they were. Don't get me started on people who are into case mods.
I remember seeing a news article on TV recently about NASA and their upgrades to computer horse power for doing flight simulations and design work. The picture they showed? A late 80's connection machine. You know the beast, 8 black cubes glued together to make one big cube with hundreds of blinking LEDs over the faces, one for each of the 65536 simple processors. Sort of a Borg at Christmas time affair. Stock footage to be sure, and the news outlets trot it out every time the word supercomputer is used. At least they've quit showing IBM Model 726 Tape Units spinning reel-to-reel tapes back and forth as a show of awesome computing power.
These all sound like fine films I would like to see. I take it with a grain of salt the Loony Religious Right is what is preventing the screening. I'm an agnostic socially liberal individual, but this seems like a very oblique attack by the anti-Bush leftist elite. Lets frame something in the way of a censorship crisis, blame the far right for it and by extension the Bush administration. Both sides play this game, so please don't paint me as a Bush apologist. Just sayin' the left is having a hard time coping with the Bush reelection.
Has an aside, nothing would get IMAX theaters crowded like having a bunch of loons protesting science themed movies would. In fact we should hope this happens as it might finally get the general public interested in science.
Over 14 screens to get to the
http://www.mercurynews.com article
Talk about aggressive marketing overkill.
MercuryNews is EVIL!
I had to click through 12 advertising screens after finishing registering. This has to be some kind of record for the Internet (or at least a reputable news site).
That said, I will probably go and see the 3D re-releases (which has nothing to do with MercuryNews of course). Quit whining about Lucas raping your childhood. Just don't go. I didn't like Jar-Jar either. Get over it. Because it's based in space, many techie types feel they own the franchise more that Lucas and the public he is hawking it to. Last time I looked there are about 100 Star Wars novels available in bookstores. It's rapidly catching up with the Star Trek novels. To stop the movies, you would have to stop the books, which show how rabid people are for the saga to go on -- whether it meets your high standards for entertainment fair or not.
Maybe the 3-D will be good, maybe not. I have wondered why Disney/Pixar haven't re-released their films in 3-D. Some have been presented in IMAX (though not 3D IMAX as far as I know). Here you know the 3D re-rendering will be spot on. Technically it would have to me 2-orders of magnitude easier than converting 2D photographs.
Disney will be Making a Toy Story 3 (alone), I'll be very surprised if it isn't Toy Story 3D.
That said, my viewing experience at home on HDTV is often better than what you see at the Cineplex (especially stuff shot directly in digital, rather than converted from film). I would gladly pay full ticket price to watch my stuff at home while in recent release if I could get it. The point is Cinemas will increasingly have to compete with a viewing experience in the home that rivals that of the theater. Just going wider (Cinamscope) like they did in '50s (and wider yet in the late '60s with Cinerama) wont cut it. People will increasingly start to wait for Movies to come out in Blu-Ray or HD-DVD if the industry doesn't do something to augment the viewing experience. Start looking for things like Sensoround to make a comeback, introduced for the 1974 disaster flick "Earthquake." Also expect several variations of motion simulation, some quite cheap like tilting chairs, and other that require individual pods with 6 degrees of freedom and everything in-between.
I'm hoping Blu-Ray wins out, and am prepared to put a disc in my PC based HDTV system as soon as possible. Glorious 1080p/60fps would be a better experience than 24fps in the Theater (if movie/content makers wise up).
That said, Holographic methods of storage probably will probably be on the desktop soon. Blu-Ray or HD-DVD will probably still be the distribution method of choice until we get to UDVT (QWUGA 3840x2160). Even then the visual bump up isn't near as obvious as HD was over DVD which itself wasn't as apparent as DVD over VHS. In other words we've finally reached the point of diminishing returns. I have a 10' (yes foot) diagonal screen, and a good HDTV signal is better than most theater going experiences.
I digress. The point is your HD Movies will probably come on one Blu-Ray or HD-DVD because they get the job done for one movie.
If you want to make money, invent some way to securely backup your purchased HD content (however obtained) to Holo or Disc, but not be able to share, so I can have my collection online all the time. Don't get me wrong, I hate DMR, and think business models should go to something else, but know full well they wont.
OMG, I like Josh, but he could be signing on for a disaster.
Wonder Woman SUCKS!
Her weird beautiful but feminist odd semi deity origin might have worked in the '40s or '50s, but come on she's has just way too much muddled baggage in the way of what 13 years boys think women are or should be.
There are other much more interesting Female Superheroes to do movies about. Good origin stories etc... They're only doing Wonder Women because she's been around so long guys in their 60 and 70s might give the movie a look. I haven't read any Wonder Woman stories in over 30 years (and they sucked then), but if she has been reinvented in any reasonable manner (and I suspect not, having seen the animated Justice League) it will not sit well with the older fans looking to indulge in nostalgia.
Wow, how sad, I know this was largely an American event, but to just demolish this piece of history seems unconscionable, regardless if its scientific use had come to an end. Too bad the movie didn't come out till 2001. Maybe more people would have known and cared. I'm sure the American government would have pitched in dollars if the American public had known what was to be lost.
With the connectivity of the web these days, hopefully what seems obscure to some will find the wide audience needed to take proper action. I doubt many American papers carried the subject in 1981.
I doubt I will attend, but for those that do you may wish to take a small side trip to the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station. It and Parkes Observatory are what brought the first Apollo 11 moon walk Live to the world, being the only dishes of suitable power in proper position to receive the signal. Here is a link to some more info. You could also rent the little known, but well made movie "The Dish"
Wrong, they claim 120 Watts per square inch, no panel.
From the article: The flagship product, Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V. The company is now offering solar panels at below $1 per peak watt.
I find it hard to believe the 120 watts per square inch claim, but we can extract the cost of a panel from the information above. 14*12*10*12*120 = 2419200. 2 ½ Million Dollars per panel. Now for your laptop it would only need a 1 inch Square of material to supply 120 Watts and cost $120 for that square inch.
Unfortunately it must pay to be obnoxious, just like spam.
You are correct that many/most that have blocked pop-ups will be hostile towards the advertiser. On the other hand, like an organism, these pop-ups thrive by exploiting a territory with less competition, they standout more because less clever pop-ups do not appear, and because you really, really notice them since you had thought you had them blocked. The end result is a highly memorable product. Not everyone will punish them for their intrusive behavior so they accomplish exactly what they wanted.
If pop-ups weren't effective, why so much work to circumvent pop-up blockers? I suspect most people (most still use IE), don't have pop-up blocking enabled.
Since some percentage of viewers buy the advertiser's product... well then to quote Walt Kelly and Pogo "We has met the enemy, and he is us!"
Slashdot Mirror
CPUs have stalled out at about 4ghz overall clocking, cutting edge transistors seem to be hitting a wall at about 500-600ghz.
Now granted faster gate transitions make for faster CPUs, but multiple gate operations are necessary for each state change, add signaling and propagation delay and who knows what you can really clock the CPU at (I am not an Electrical Engineer).
Here is a page link claiming a record 562ghz transistor switching in Oct. 2002 article
here is another claimed record of 509ghz, Nov, 2003 article
Obviously at odds with the 2002 anoucment. Undoubtedly it should narrow its claim for a specific transistor type.
Here is a U of I annoucment calming a record 382 ghz Jan. 30, 2003 article
But expects 700ghz by early 2004 (I'm guessing they didn't make it).
Lets assume 562ghz in 2002, so we - drum roll please --- 7.5% increase in speed in 2 ½ years!
This is not going to keep Moore's Law humming along.
Even stranger, here are claims of TerraHertz transistors at Intel in 2002 article
Ironically, while googling for transistor or gate speed will show hundreds of hits, you can't actually find the switching speed for individual gates in a P4 or AMD chip. This stuff seems to be super secret stuff, and only the overall CPU clock it published. I wouldn't be surprised if the individual gates and transistors are transitioning at several dozens of ghz if not a couple of hundred or more. While Moore's Law death claims may have been premature 10 and 20 years ago, they may not be now.
I hope I'm wrong, I want my Holodeck Playstation 5 in 2015.
A lot of wear an tear is from load bearing, and perhaps these powered suite address this to a degree, but I suspect in many cases they would exacerbate the problem for arthritis sufferers by adding to the weight load on joints, even while enabling superhuman lifting capabilities.
Even if they address the load issue on joints, it is overkill from what is really needed by tens of millions. I have not seen such a thing, but does anyone know of some kind of lightweight synchronized brace system? Something that would distribute the body's load to the hips directly and lock when the joints aren't moving? I have seen leg braces before, but not articulated ones that auto-lock. One thing that my father believed contributed to the breakdown of his joints were the long periods he spent standing doing his job as a chef. Again, a locking brace system would seem the answer for people that need to be on their feet long periods, but may have the beginnings of joint break down.
If there had been an HDTV viewable media at HDTV introduction things would have evolved far differently. High-end equipment owners like myself would have bought HDTV content proving the marked for HDTV content. HDTV sets would have sold because even in HDTV signal deprived areas like the one I live in, people would still have had something to watch. And with more HDTVs, more OTA HDTV transmission would come quicker. With high end users and their larger amounts of disposable income watching mostly HDTV, advertising revenues would have switched to HDTV and again faster adoption.
Of course the poor choice of modulation scheme for US transmission didn't help. There were other more robust schemes, but ignored for cost cutting reasons (which by now would have made no difference I suspect as technology marches on and becomes more affordable).
Of course all this MPEG2 vs MPEG4 and obsoleted equipment that was suppose to be cutting edge HDTV, Joe 6-pack is going to be HDTV shy even longer.
Content providers are scared shitless of the digital age, they know that once this stuff is digital anyone that waits long enough will just be able to snare it for free at whatever quality he or she wants depending on download times. I suspect also that content providers are conflicted about providing upgraded broadband as it will start to eat into their content revenues. Why would I continue to subscribe to HBO when I can just download the episode for free off the same cable?
DirectTV is promising a shit load of channels soon, so maybe this did in Voom as much as anything else. If the DirectTV line is reasonable after the new HDTV channels come on line I will probably ditch Cable and go satellite. It seems I've made the smart move in the mean time with cable, the HDTV and PVR are very affordable, but probably aren't MPEG4 compliant. Soon I will have my Blu-Ray player, 20+ HDTV channels and viewing nirvana.
For those that think I'm a little over the top on my TV viewing, I suspect I watch an average or below average amount. But what I do watch is on a glorious 10-foot screen and I only want razor sharp images on it. I spent about $4000-$5000 putting my system together and I want to get the most out of it. I personally don't understand why people would pay $50-$100 a month for cable or $600-$1200 a year, and then watch it on a $200 set from Wal-Mart.
I had prepared this rather long post in response to the Shuttle Rollout, but I'll sneak it in here since it mostly applies.
Shuttle Rollout -- What crack? We don't see no crack
I started to prepare this post when the rollout was in jeopardy, now: engineers determined the crack was a "minor imperfection" Hopefully not famous last words. I'm surprised the CNN.com article Shuttle Rollout Under Way hasn't been posted on Slashdot's main page yet.
These things are big, the external tank by itself if 154 feet long, so about the size of a 15-story building. Even though these things haven't been up in space for the last 2 years doesn't mean they are weathering and aging just sitting on the ground. The vertical assembly building has its own weather, so it's not like these things are sitting in an air-conditioned office 27-7.
The fleet is getting old and were expected to have been replaced by now, though after each having each done something like 50-100 missions individually -- numbers we will never see. What percentage of car owners are driving cars built in the early '80s?
Until a replacement vehicle comes along we should have been building at least one new shuttle every 5 years. Didn't get 50 missions in? Tough -- decommission at like 10 or 15 years. Sure it can cost more money to build things more slowly 1 at a time, but if you schedule for it, and budget for it, its not necessarily more expensive. Just make sure your build rate is commensurate with the mission increase. Then you get to use better materials, better technology in the newer vehicles. Granted there is something to be said for uniformity in guaranteeing safety, but the shuttles are not all identical by a long shot. Columbia couldn't dock with the ISS for instance, but could theoretically have brought the Hubble down from orbit.
There are costs in certifying old equipment, which may not equal new equipment cost, but I'll bet in the Shuttle's case they are getting close, or exceed what replacements costs would have been if we had kept a low turnout build process in place.
Now we are paralyzed and unable to do anything reasonable with our manned program.
My recommendations:
Of course Cousteau (Jacques's son Fabian) is himself using the beast for filming -- so not so pure research after all.
In late 2002 this method was up to 68 implanted electrodes (which would be about equal to an 8x8 matrix)
HOWEVER, you need more than 1000 (say 32x32 or 1028) or above for any really useful vision With 8x8 you might recognize one or two ASCII characters. A Face??? Only if it's an emoticon.
Now granted these are implants in the retina and not the visual cortex, but I have seen other claims for retinal implants over the last five years.
Why is this research taking so long to bear fruit? In 1978 progress was limited by the available CPU horsepower to translate images into usable grid stimulation patterns. Now it seems we are stalled out with our ability to put electrodes in organic systems.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is easy, but why doesn't this stuff scale like Moore's Law with integrated circuits? Given the state of research over a decade ago we should be up to VGA quality arrays of 640x480 by now.
In general prosthetics systems always seem to be on the verge of some "Steve Austin" "Million Dollar Man" arrival and then never makes it. I assure you when we watched Lee Majors in the early '70s wha-na-na-na-na'ing all over the place we assumed such feats would be common place by the year 2000. What the hell happened? Is this just hard like AI, or under-funded and poorly organized?
If you aren't billing clients for the cost, I would recommend going with less bleeding edge equipment which can be purchased outright. Bleeding edge stuff tends to get leased because it's so expensive, and because those who get the stuff expect to stay leading edge by leasing newer stuff in a year or two.
BUT if you buy outright, always have a trickle of new equipment coming in that replaces the really old ratty stuff, else you end up with too much dependence on legacy equipment, which can be an even worse trap.
Bottom line -- only lease if you can bill someone directly for it. This often is the case because clients often won't pay to use equipment you own.
Should anyone care to read this (possibly amateurish) story, please leave a comment on the comment page (currently empty) if you give it a try.
There are adult themes in this story, so I don't know whether to state that as a disclaimer or inducement (probably both).
Still might be nice to have for when standing in line somewhere and you've forgotten to bring a novel or magazine.
I assume someday soon cell-phones will be powerful enough to transcribe voice accurately enough that you could navigate around on the net reasonably enough or even get some work done.
This does give me an idea for making a cell-phone friendly version for people reading my Blogs.
I doubt that voice controlled Robosapians will make robots must have household items, but it gets us to maybe generation-3 home robots with only a couple of more generations before they explode in usefulness and ubiquity.
In about 1980 Heath-Kit tried to make a generation 1 home robot take off in popularity - the HERO 1 - it didn't succeed. A shaky low mobility box manually programmed with a small keypad was no ones' idea of a personal 3PO or R2-D2, though Heath certainly was hoping to cash in on both the early computer craze and Star Wars popularization of robots.
Personal robots largely disappeared from public view until Honda of all people pioneered and popularized a walking robot - the P2 (of course P2 was far too expensive to be a personal robot). I was only aware of the P2 and P3 before Asimo, but this link shows a long research line stretching back to 1986 with the E0 through E6 predecessors to the P series. Still when one saw the P2 walking in 1993, one got the feeling we were on the edge of big things to come. Sadly things have not progressed quite as quickly as one might have expected. Like AI, making practical personal robots is proving to be quite challenging. Hopefully voice control in such an inexpensive walking robot takes us a little further along the curve.
In one sense this marketing strategy has already worked -- I have read Neil Gaiman and now have tried to follow the link (initially more interested in Gaiman references that programming tools). Though squeak.org is slashdotted, your link to seaside.st is not, and the tutorial references www.sqeak.org. While I'm not a web designer for a living, I find myself doing a fair amount of HTML, CGI, and Perl work. I will have to check this out in more detail latter. So the gambit has already gotten them a possible user.
Also while it may not actually show as loaded on your browser or history visits, I don't expect corporate would care to see all the Firewall hits that deny the pre-fetch, because they probably will still trigger the access denied mechanism.
Maybe this will work out for Google, maybe not. It could go either way.
Lunchtime is set aside for reading nonfiction, mostly magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American from cover to cover. I really miss BYTE magazine from the '70s, '80s, and early '90s, I don't know of any computer magazine that currently fills the niche left behind. Yes I know BYTE lives on in BYTE.com, but for better or worse the Web has killed a lot of technical publications that use to exist. In fact BYTE.com purposely bought out BYTE magazine just to kill it. Maybe I should frequent the website, but I have never forgiven them.
I had noticed, I had to double check the author's name, it seems like a sequal to Neverwhere.
From last summer's reading list
Finished:
Perdido Street Station - China Melville
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
The Golden Age - John C. Wright
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Manifold Series - Stephen Baxtor
Currently Reading:
King Rat - Neil Gaiman
Still to Go:
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
Some other Authors I follow
David Bin, Ben Bova, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Frederik Pohl.
I find the quality of my reading much better on average following Slashdot suggestions rather than randomly picking books by title and pretty covers at Barnes & Noble.
Didn't quite care for Pattern Recognition, so just one clunker for me -- maybe I just didn't get it, I wanted more of a well defined plot.
Taking inordinate pride in making through all 1130 pages of Cyrptonomicon, but after you make it past the first 300 pages you'll find yourself screaming through it.
I remember seeing a news article on TV recently about NASA and their upgrades to computer horse power for doing flight simulations and design work. The picture they showed? A late 80's connection machine. You know the beast, 8 black cubes glued together to make one big cube with hundreds of blinking LEDs over the faces, one for each of the 65536 simple processors. Sort of a Borg at Christmas time affair. Stock footage to be sure, and the news outlets trot it out every time the word supercomputer is used. At least they've quit showing IBM Model 726 Tape Units spinning reel-to-reel tapes back and forth as a show of awesome computing power.
Has an aside, nothing would get IMAX theaters crowded like having a bunch of loons protesting science themed movies would. In fact we should hope this happens as it might finally get the general public interested in science.
Talk about aggressive marketing overkill. MercuryNews is EVIL! I had to click through 12 advertising screens after finishing registering. This has to be some kind of record for the Internet (or at least a reputable news site).
That said, I will probably go and see the 3D re-releases (which has nothing to do with MercuryNews of course). Quit whining about Lucas raping your childhood. Just don't go. I didn't like Jar-Jar either. Get over it. Because it's based in space, many techie types feel they own the franchise more that Lucas and the public he is hawking it to. Last time I looked there are about 100 Star Wars novels available in bookstores. It's rapidly catching up with the Star Trek novels. To stop the movies, you would have to stop the books, which show how rabid people are for the saga to go on -- whether it meets your high standards for entertainment fair or not.
Maybe the 3-D will be good, maybe not. I have wondered why Disney/Pixar haven't re-released their films in 3-D. Some have been presented in IMAX (though not 3D IMAX as far as I know). Here you know the 3D re-rendering will be spot on. Technically it would have to me 2-orders of magnitude easier than converting 2D photographs. Disney will be Making a Toy Story 3 (alone), I'll be very surprised if it isn't Toy Story 3D.
That said, my viewing experience at home on HDTV is often better than what you see at the Cineplex (especially stuff shot directly in digital, rather than converted from film). I would gladly pay full ticket price to watch my stuff at home while in recent release if I could get it. The point is Cinemas will increasingly have to compete with a viewing experience in the home that rivals that of the theater. Just going wider (Cinamscope) like they did in '50s (and wider yet in the late '60s with Cinerama) wont cut it. People will increasingly start to wait for Movies to come out in Blu-Ray or HD-DVD if the industry doesn't do something to augment the viewing experience. Start looking for things like Sensoround to make a comeback, introduced for the 1974 disaster flick "Earthquake." Also expect several variations of motion simulation, some quite cheap like tilting chairs, and other that require individual pods with 6 degrees of freedom and everything in-between.
That said, Holographic methods of storage probably will probably be on the desktop soon. Blu-Ray or HD-DVD will probably still be the distribution method of choice until we get to UDVT (QWUGA 3840x2160). Even then the visual bump up isn't near as obvious as HD was over DVD which itself wasn't as apparent as DVD over VHS. In other words we've finally reached the point of diminishing returns. I have a 10' (yes foot) diagonal screen, and a good HDTV signal is better than most theater going experiences.
I digress. The point is your HD Movies will probably come on one Blu-Ray or HD-DVD because they get the job done for one movie.
If you want to make money, invent some way to securely backup your purchased HD content (however obtained) to Holo or Disc, but not be able to share, so I can have my collection online all the time. Don't get me wrong, I hate DMR, and think business models should go to something else, but know full well they wont.
Wonder Woman SUCKS!
Her weird beautiful but feminist odd semi deity origin might have worked in the '40s or '50s, but come on she's has just way too much muddled baggage in the way of what 13 years boys think women are or should be.
There are other much more interesting Female Superheroes to do movies about. Good origin stories etc... They're only doing Wonder Women because she's been around so long guys in their 60 and 70s might give the movie a look. I haven't read any Wonder Woman stories in over 30 years (and they sucked then), but if she has been reinvented in any reasonable manner (and I suspect not, having seen the animated Justice League) it will not sit well with the older fans looking to indulge in nostalgia.
This is exactly the kind of thing that leads to the motivation for robots to build hoards of rampaging kill-bots.
With the connectivity of the web these days, hopefully what seems obscure to some will find the wide audience needed to take proper action. I doubt many American papers carried the subject in 1981.
From the article: The flagship product, Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V. The company is now offering solar panels at below $1 per peak watt.
I find it hard to believe the 120 watts per square inch claim, but we can extract the cost of a panel from the information above. 14*12*10*12*120 = 2419200. 2 ½ Million Dollars per panel. Now for your laptop it would only need a 1 inch Square of material to supply 120 Watts and cost $120 for that square inch.
I am extremely dubious of these claims.
You are correct that many/most that have blocked pop-ups will be hostile towards the advertiser. On the other hand, like an organism, these pop-ups thrive by exploiting a territory with less competition, they standout more because less clever pop-ups do not appear, and because you really, really notice them since you had thought you had them blocked. The end result is a highly memorable product. Not everyone will punish them for their intrusive behavior so they accomplish exactly what they wanted.
If pop-ups weren't effective, why so much work to circumvent pop-up blockers? I suspect most people (most still use IE), don't have pop-up blocking enabled.
Since some percentage of viewers buy the advertiser's product... well then to quote Walt Kelly and Pogo "We has met the enemy, and he is us!"