It's a stunning and amazing medical breakthrough -- finally, people don't have to be fat! In other news, eating a well balanced diet, excercise, seen sulking in the corner for not being hip enough. Dr. House overheard saying "It's stuff like this that makes me want to not dangle anymore."
You know, I see this a lot when news that could help the obese comes along. I think it's a bit ignorant. First, would you have the same reaction if it similiar news (possible breakthrough) about compulsive gamblers, smokers, alcohilcs, hard drugs, or any other addiction? What about the debilitating OCD like Howard Hughs suffered or any mental disease really? I mean, buck it up and have some will power!
I know many fat people who go days on in eating less than a 120lb person, maybe even losing the weight, only to be broken by one binge and rapidly going back to their old ways. I don't think it's just a lack of willpower, a lot of it is unnatural. Domesticated animals also get fat when there's always food in the bowl. Maybe it's in our nature: for so many generation, the next meal was uncertain, grab it while you still can.
And then there are things like HFCS which adds to the problem. 100 years ago, regular chocolate was a real WEEKLY treat for an average kid, if at all, 300 years ago, sugar was kept in silver lockboxes due to expensive nature, now we have this crap swamping the area.
Imagine in 100 years VR really gets there. I mean really, they bypass your eyeballs, wired right into the brain, touch, feel, smell, everything. Instant orgasm. Imagine how many people will be addicted. Not just because they lack the will power, but the human animal gets exposed to stimuli that in turn rewards its basest and most powerful areas of the brain and we act holier-than-thou when people actually get hooked.
Food, for some people, is the overriding addiction that make other addictions fail. Any help they get is good. And Dr. House would know that.
Games that are trying to get as close to realistic as possible are doing so because there is more immersion than in a top-down RPG like Pokemon. Not immersion in the sense that "I could play this game for hours" but immersion in the "I'm actually there" variety.
You make it sound as if the two are divorced ideas but their not. Immersion signifies an intense and active interest in something. Otherwise any real-life movie or photograph can be described as immersive simply by the fact that they are photo-realistic.
As for the idea "I'm actually there", maybe that will be a VR goal, especially when touch/feel can be digitized - although I would call it simple suspension of disbelief... (until it gets to the point you start having problems distinguishing reality from VR).
Immersion is when you are into a game, it doesn't have to mean you think you are in a game. It's when you are playing it and the outside world fades away, to the point that a persistent distraction can knock you out of it. The same way, I have been immersed into some movies I really love, but I never thought I was an actual character in those movies.
One drawback is I can't give directions at ALL, but thats minor to me.
GPS is not the sole cause of this. I drove for years without GPS. I know where I am, but I never bothered to read the street names. Most people can't give directions well, they'll try, but it's usually mangled and confusing (turn at the big yellow house, when there are 5 on the way there), or plain wrong.
As opposed to fake men? No, real men read articles telling them what real men do, because they can't think for themselves, don't want to take a gamble and need to mimic the pack.
Moran says that men seem to recoil from being given digital instructions by a woman, and read the satnav woman's pregnant pauses, or her curt phrases like 'make a legal U-turn' and 'recalculating the route', as stubborn or bossy.
I can see this, my father argues with the voice in particular, but I don't really care. Maybe it's because I know how computers work and don't really buy into the "personality" of the device and that the voice samples invoked could just as easily be from a guy, or just don't have the macho hang-up, or whatever. But even he went out and bought a GPS after I gave my mom one, because he found it useful. Even though he knew every area he was driving, he didn't know every nook and cranny, so the business trips are made much easier when you dont spend 10 minutes a day getting directions to some arcane street in the area, whether meeting people at some restaurant or going to a business prospect's house (and frustrating them with calls on how to get there) and being 1/2 hour late or nearly getting into an accident as you ogle street signs instead of paying attention to the road.
Still we don't quite trust the electronic voice to get us where we want to go.
In some ways, you would be stupid to do that. Not getting there, but having faith that it's the best route. GPS is great for finding streets in unfamiliar cities, but it's stupid in places you know or longer routes. Longer routes, you should always check a map, to see that it's the best place - I swear Garmins somehow just take the first route that completes the journey without comparing them - it once made me travel 60 miles extra on a 300 mile journey when a better highway was just nearby the starting point in the first place. GPS devices sometimes just don't know or calculate real world conditions eithers - like construction, or speed of a road, or # of stoplights or factor in things like proximity of a city and rushhour and decide to take the rural route around it instead.
Even on local driving, it really does stupid things. On a road on route to my house, inexplicably, where I would have to go straight for 1 more mile, and then turn left toward my home at intersection X (no more turns after that, home 3 miles straight ahead), with a 1 stop light in between my current spot and intersection X, it wants to veer off right. With a plethora of stop signs, turns, and lights. Just to arrive at intersection X again and resume the normal route. With or without the lights/signs, stupid routing either way anyone looks at it. Curiously, it never goes this time-consuming route when going the reverse direction.
GPS is great at finding unfamiliar things, but not optimized routing knowledge that a local or experience driver has yet.
Back when Garmin announced it's as-yet-to-be-delivered nuvifone, as a response to iPhone presumably, I wondered whether they were missing a big opportunity to sell a Garmin app to iPhone users and at the same time, with the guaranteed 2-way internet connection, collect data on the routes people (locals) really drive to improve their GPS routing systems in a major way over their competitors. But they saw Google Maps on it as competition and I guess the automatic reflex was too ingrained (too bad, Google's routing is really excellent in my limited experience, but the app doesn't seem to be useful for driving, is it?)
'Since before even the arrival of the car, people have worried that maps sever us from real places, render the world untouchable, reduce it to a bare outline of Cartesian lines and intersections,' writes Moran. 'Sat-nav feeds into this long-held fear that the cold-blooded modern world is destroying local knowledge, that roads n
And for aesthetic reasons, they need to be placed in fairly remote locations away from urban centers, which reduces efficiency.
Ah, more not-in-my-back-yardism that ruins most spoiled 1st world countries - they want their cake (electricity) and to eat it too (no sign of it's production anywhere). I happen to think wind turbines are pretty and the noise negligible (lived a couple months 50 yards from a really tall one, now live in view of the towers of nuclear plant). People should get over themselves on certain issues.
Imagine that, commissioned or sold? Are you saying he didn't retain lifelong copyright on his works and they could have been freely imitated without recieving royalities? That means he would have to keep on working rather than resting easy after the Mona Lisa and making the next project?
I find it 100x more disgusting that his descendents don't recieve their due royalties as copyright obviously should be artist's life + 9999999999999999999999 years.
No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment. Once the Internet community stops (I know it isn't everyone but it is enough to be a major problem) stealing content created by artists for profit, we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want. Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.
Good idea! I heard that all the artists of the world have been on strike since the advent of jpeg/gif/png, all the musicians since mp3/ogg/flac, all the filmmaker and animators since the advent of xvid/divx/etc. It's good that the authors finally join them, since they were delinquint since ascii was developed earliest of all.
Now all the inevitable DRM to sound, music, pictures, and movies will come. Apple fell off the bandwagon, but their music marketshare is low and they'll come running back. People love DRM, it feels good when you get to stare at the FBI screen for 10 seconds and at forced previews for 10 minutes. It'll be better than now, where no one is making money off the internet. No one at all.
And since no one at all is making money off the net, you'll be safe in your boycott of producing new material since obviously no one will step in your place to fill the niche instead. And because of that, DRM will come.
Because obviously no one makes money writing things for the internet. Otherwise you'd see words... and articles of words, and stuff. Maybe even like an electronic newspaper online and websites that mimic magazines.
BTW, magazines really oughta start printing on that paper that Xerox made that defies scanners and copy machines. It costs 2x more to publish, but isn't inconveniencing the customers worth it?
I for one am sick of these neo-pirates perverting the time-tested ideals of classical piratism. Copyright and patent reform?
I don't know if phasing out patents is actually "reform". If I have my history correct, patents were actually to open information up and get rid of secretive guilds. In exchange for opening info up, the government grants a limited-time monopoly on it's application to the inventor/discoverer.
I think nontrivial inventions (like Apple's implementation of multitouch, which itself was made by 2 University of Delaware Professors who started the Fingerworks company which was bought by Apple) deserve protection and the people behind it deserve compensation. It wouldn't do to allow vultures to sit by the sidelines and just copy the invention after all the hard work is done.
But yeah, the copyright and patent systems has been extended, abused, and gone beyond all its original perimeters, as bureacracies are prone to do. But is the other extreme much better here? Patents should be reformed, but how?
I don't know the economics of these for the average person, but right now America is consuming a big chunk of the energy the world produces and is way far ahead per capita than most other countries, even other 1st world countries with similiar standards of living (maybe except Canada), something like Germany. Some of it due to our car oriented culture (which no product will fix, but an infrastructure issue - go by a European high school vs American suburban high school and check out ratio of cars to bicycles in the parking lot). Another is just poor construction practices like inadequate insulation or outdated heaters. Etc.
Looking at this car, the profile doesn't seem any more efficient than a regular car, which is way something like the Aptera. It's electric, which is a good start, especially considering the possible modular nature of the energy source, and coupled with a tiny hybrid petroleum engine which only has to produce constant energy instead of big enough for a "peak" performance need.
But it doesn't push air out of the way more efficiently, the other side of the equation. Because electricity isn't "clean" right now, just a bit better. And the chemicals for batteries need to be mined, itself a dirty process, as well as being processed at the end of its life - so it makes a difference if a car can get a 300 mile range on X amount of units instead of 2X or 3X or more.
This model Tesla looks pretty sexy like it's bigger brother so it will have an easy time selling, but beyond the gas vs electric issue, I wonder really how efficient it truly is.
Riversimple predicts the car will achieve the energy equivelent of more than 300 miles to the gallon.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."
I have wished for open standard products for a long time, things like riding mowers where parts could be reasonably modular - like plugging in a video card into a PC, it doesn't care if it's nvidia, ati, or other. If nothing else than to keep the manufacturers honest when it comes time to repair things but also for cheaper ugrades/accessories as well as just less overlap in redundant but uninterchangeable parts.
OTOH, this car seems like vaporware, while produts like the Aptera are going to be unaffordable (unlike the Tesla) and which will have hybrid and electric available seem much more closer to market and probably could use a push to get it there. The car exists too and isn't just on the drawing board:
For example, in the US Constitution, the federal government isn't given any particular powers regarding the Internet (obviously). It's technically not even given the right to have an interstate highways system (obviously). However, the federal government is given the right to create roads for the purpose of delivering mail. So in this new constitution, what role do you want to assign the government in terms of creating/maintaining/regulating communications infrastructure?
What a fucking perversion of the interstate commerce clause. The lawyers twist it to mean anything. How else do you think that states can really legalize pot now, even though that pot could stay within the state's borders the entire time? Via interstate commerce clause, they argue, because it COULD go out of state. Just like I may commit a crime one day, so lock me up now before it happens.
Mail was delivered for 160+ years in this country before the interstate highways. I never once thought "Gee, this highway is here to deliver mail". It never occured to me, because that's a benefit of the highway but not the main purpose. (I'm not saying highways aren't beneficial, but that's a seperate discussion).
because you can get the one song you like off of iTunes/amazon/whatever. Why always start from the assumption that it must be illegal activity that is adversely affecting sales.
The legal marketplace has changed to benefit the consumer economically, by not gouging them for $6/15 for a single/album respectively, now they can get what they wanted for around a $1. Some will buy more music but many others will move that savings to other avenues of entertainment.
Even if I could understand / appreciate the whole "anti-trust" thing, and conceded that it was the government's place to interfere to stop monopolies (which I can't), how is it EVER logical to suggest that it's up to a for-profit company to provide "consumer choice" by touting its competitors' products? That's just totally ridiculous. You say that Microsoft is breaking the law by bundling IE with its software, great, I could argue that, that shouldn't be against the law, et cetera (but I won't, because it's not really relevant to the matter-at-hand), but how can you suggest that rather than just making them not bundle IE, you should ALSO make them provide ipso facto advertising (for free) for their competitors by offering so-called "genuine consumer choice"?
Maybe for a quick history lesson: Microsoft was extremely suspicious that Netscape could usurp it's OS position via the browser (think google apps, etcetera) and making it's OS redundant. However, Netscape Navigator charged money for it's product.
Microsoft, otoh, bought Mosaic, and started giving IE out for free. In antitrust, this can be argued as "dumping", selling your product at below cost in order to obtain marketshare and drive competitors with smaller pocket out of business (often the good price is temporary too). Another argument is that Microsoft leveraged it's OS monopoly in order to gain another monopoly, which is illegal under US law. Standard Oil bought into railroads in order to charge their competition extravangantly more (or agree to SO's terms). As Steve Ballmer often said of Windows, it's the developers! However, they had a long history of seeing a good idea and stealing it for themselves, coming out with a product. Now, they can bundle it with their OS and make it default before the competition knows what hits them.
Although this is all long gone and the browser market is way different than back then. I think the EU should mandate that major sellers like Dell offer at least one computer model in each line with Linux (one netbook, one desktop, one notebook). That way MS cannot slap these companies with punitive terms when it feels like it because they are only following the law.
The DVD will be the last physical format, in that, if you want to bring a movie to someone's house you don't know very well or to school, you'll probably opt for a DVD.
The reason DVD will hang on is simple - people don't care so much for image quality as convenience. Consider the physical format. CD, the first and last widespread digital physical music format, conquered tape because you didn't need to rewind to listen to a song again and again, could go to any track you want immediately as well, and other such simple things. You could also hold 25 of them in a spindle much more than ever holding tape. It also doesn't have tape hiss... These benefits combine to draw enough early adopters and reach critical mass.
The DVD vs DVD had the exact benefits - rewinding, skipping around, size of format, and analog artifacts. Same result.
There have been challengers to the music CD - minidisc, DVD-Audio, SACD. There was/is a market for them, but it's not mainstream. The benefits are fewer and usually relegated to one easily identifiable one for the average person - size (minidisc), quality (DVD-Audio), SACD, etc.
When there is only one benefit, the existing one has to be so bad at it or the new alternative so groundbreaking superior. As the CD shows, there is just "good enough" for the average person they were a higher quality alternative as diminishing returns. Even the iPod didn't offer better sound quality, just an overall package of convenience, not just in lugging around your music collection, but in buying the content as well.
We had superior things to DVD before in terms of image quality - like Laser Disc (but it had other downfalls). So I don't think consumers care about that as much as other factors. Right now HD is just too fractured and confusing to the average consumer that I doubt the industry will really get it together by the time downloads.
If blu-ray reaches true mainstream, it will probably only have the PS3 to thank. There's enough of a market for walmart to cater to, but I just don't see DVD declining like VHS did anytime soon.
I'm looking pricewatch and 512mb 400mhz DDR2 ram is at $5, let alone what 96mb would cost to Nintendo... and it was released last year....
You don't sound like a very forgiving fellow, so it may not be possible to please you. But many people have enjoyed pointing their DSis to sites like DSiCade [dsicade.com], DSiPaint [dsipaint.com], and Hullbreach MMOG [hullbreachonline.com]. Perhaps you'll also find some entertainment in those places. Or maybe not.
Well, thanks for the links, I'll check them out.
Just getting back into gaming, but all I really want from a browser is to let me view my webmail account, digg, and slashdot. That's it. Once you turn webmail to standard html, it becomes easy enough to render, but/. and digg are hogs. The DS browser is rather ingenious in using one screen to view the whole page on an unreadable but thouroughly easy-to-navigate scale, and then one screen to read, and considering the low res screens, is surprisingly good, although they would probably benefit from wider screens such that some phones are coming out with - however at most sites such as these it just sits there rendering for seconds on end making reading text useless as you have many rows but often less than half a column. More ram probably would smooth things, I guess.
Traditionally, consoles have had extremely low ram compared to the PCs of their day and handhelds were even lower on the totem pole. That was okay when the games were tweaked for that specific machine to get every ounce of power out of it and trim every speck of bloat. However, with the iPhone becoming the first of many really capable truly-multiple purpose devices, traditional handheld makers are probably going to find their markets encroached upon, and things like the DS browser and playing music files is probably them starting to step over onto the other side on their offensive. Unfortunately, even the popular websites just aren't that focused on keeping requirements low.
Anyway, that's just how I see it. I just know performance-wise, they dragged their feet on the handheld console market for a long time although seem to be taking it much more seriously with the number of upgrades this second decade into it than the fist. Back then, they took nearly a decade to double the CPU speed and quadruple the memory (hardware-wise, their competition was probably more advanced in 1993 than Nintendo was in 1998) but they won on sheer library size.
And probably will continue to do so. It's a fun system. But they won't lose to traditional competitors, they'll probably lose a bit to convergence devices that will be your phone and browser at the same time.
On the upside, with it's controllers, Wii can do what Playstation can't do (except outlying cases like guitar hero and even then it's just buttons, if hardware such the controllers ain't default, developers don't really take advantage of it) and has games that just wouldn't be the same.
Just got my first DS(i) today after not getting anything since the original gameboy. The browsers sucks as much as on the kindle for different reasons (16mb ram, 4x more than original DSI? wow, that sucks, with ram prices, they could at least make it 96mb easy and a much more capable system), and the graphics don't match the PSP I suppose, but the two screens/touchscreen just add fun possibilities.
I like the differences between systems. Do the people who bitch and complain want one homogenized space? Is that so they can have a supersystem that plays everything? Nice fantasy, but probably get boring.
Think of Smart houses, in which by moving your mobile you can raise or lower the air conditioning and such.
I'm sorry, but I would not want something as expensive as airconditioning controlled by a few flicks of the wrist on some phone. Most anything I have seen from smart houses I would not want in my home. Old-fashioned mechanical switches were 1000x more reliable than any digital switch I ever had, and any convenience or imagined savings went out the door when the digital switches, easily 10x more expensive, inevitably broke down 10x sooner. I still shudder to think about the ceiling fans that had impossible to find propietary wall switches.
Programmable thermostats, photoelectric sensors, and timers is where I draw line. They're also about the only items that need regular replacement, can't imagine what an entire smart house would cost, probably much more just in idle electrical cost like the rest of the always-on gadgets of today let alone maintenance.
Until houses are built truly smart that promise real savings I'm not sure what so smart about these gadget homes.
Around a decade ago, it was enough to have a better search engine to get people to switch. But in the meantime, google has me hooked on mail, sites, and documents. Other people use other apps, but just like Microsoft snagged the desktop OS market based on it being the default on commodity hardware and then maintaining it with applications later, I believe Google will keep it's top spot on the same idea.
Migrating from a search engine simply is a lot of hassle now especially since it's diminishing returns, I have a feeling that "perfect" results and google and maybe even bing won't be that far apart from each other. Also, a decade ago, the internet was more of a wild west in terms of searching for information about some topics far and wide. You just didn't know what sites had relevant information. These days, a great majority of my searches start as "X Y wikipedia" because now there is a centralized spot for info.
I applaud Microsoft's effort though. Competition is always a good thing and might bring something unexpected or at least keep google honest and on its toes. Also, the bing page has learn/copied the good part of google, and that is the minimalization. A far cry from the horrendous "portal"idea that Yahoo, MSN, comcast.net, AOL, and others are still attached too.
I wouldn't call it "ultra small" resolution. The latest from eeePC in the economical range is the 1000HE and according to amazon, this 10" has 1024x600 res, worse than this with 3 more inches.
I believe Dell's offering has better res but not sure. (Of course, it could be bigger too, defeating the purpose.)
BTW, wtf is with slashdot and the random bars in my browser?
More importantly, the large ($353 million annually) adult game industry in Japan will now need to stay away from rape in their games if they wish to remain a member of EOCS. RapeLay seems to be available on Amazon's UK and JP sites, sparking outrage and causing a former US Ambassador to Japan to write an editorial criticizing Japan, saying, 'Only Japan allows people to possess these hideous images without penalty.
What is the former US ambassador talking about? This isn't child porn. Recent laws nonewithstanding (likely to be overturned anyway), I'm pretty sure the 1st amendment will keep any rendered/animate rape, regardless of "age" of "victim" legal.
And he's not talking about child porn in general, because that is illegal in Japan as well.
I can see the logic that large airships which are held aloft passively by lighter than air gases, requiring fuel only for movement being economical, but it might be different with standard planes which require fuel to generate lift.
Lighter than air has several problems.
One, two lift something, the balloon part has to be very big in comparison. It will never replace rail moving cars upons cars of freight.
Two, helium will get very expensive. Unless you want to go with flammable hydrogen, which at least has the benefit of greater lifting power. But having watched mythbusters, it wasn't really the skin that set it ablaze....
Three, ground crew. The Hindenburg needed dozens to hundreds of ground crew (luckily, they always had volunteers). Zeppelins/Dirigibles/Blimps are not good in windy conditions and on landing you always need extra precaution. Lockheed Martin and others designed heavier than air blimps that get 80% lift from a lighter-than-air gas and the other 20% through aerodynamic flight, eliminating the need for ground crew in a smart and cool way (but how much can it lift?) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-791 http://www.metacafe.com/watch/907865/lockheed_martin_turbo_super_blimp/
Anyway, this report is BS. Government reports have long shown that train is much cheaper than truck is much cheaper than air.
By the fact that they are still used all the time. Freight trains are slow for moving things since there's lots of load/unload time, and you don't get to chose the routing as precisely as by truck.
This is really too bad. Imagine the fuel/road repair (trucks cause 200x more damage than average car) we could be saving if they could make trains so efficient as to relegate trucks as last mile/last leg part of the journey and train as the majority to the point you would hardly see a cross country truck anymore.
Now, I know trains don't currently support stuff like refrigeration and someone told me because of the unions, freight trains don't go Sundays (true?), but there really has to be a cheap technological way to overcome all that. Heck, with containers so standardized and with robotics, loading and unloading something like that should become the least of it. And supporting refridgeration shouldn't be that big of a deal.
It would seem the railroads could make a ton of money off this, but the devil is always in the details.
Re:Unix is over the hill
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Unix Turns 40
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Windows could take on board one thing from From Unix and be a much better product as a result: as David Korn (of ksh fame) says in TFA: "One of the hallmarks of Unix was that tools could be written, and better tools could replace them... It wasn't some monolith where you had to buy into everything; you could actually develop better versions.". Microsoft has a lot to learn. The progress from 1980's DOS to today's offering is pretty sad.
Does Unix philosophy actually mesh with Unix reality? A reason I ask is because in unix everything is supposedly a file, but there were enough exceptions, such as in networking, that in the seperate Plan9 OS, they sought to really make everything a file. And that by the original makers of unix.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I see this a lot when news that could help the obese comes along. I think it's a bit ignorant. First, would you have the same reaction if it similiar news (possible breakthrough) about compulsive gamblers, smokers, alcohilcs, hard drugs, or any other addiction? What about the debilitating OCD like Howard Hughs suffered or any mental disease really? I mean, buck it up and have some will power!
I know many fat people who go days on in eating less than a 120lb person, maybe even losing the weight, only to be broken by one binge and rapidly going back to their old ways. I don't think it's just a lack of willpower, a lot of it is unnatural. Domesticated animals also get fat when there's always food in the bowl. Maybe it's in our nature: for so many generation, the next meal was uncertain, grab it while you still can.
And then there are things like HFCS which adds to the problem. 100 years ago, regular chocolate was a real WEEKLY treat for an average kid, if at all, 300 years ago, sugar was kept in silver lockboxes due to expensive nature, now we have this crap swamping the area.
Imagine in 100 years VR really gets there. I mean really, they bypass your eyeballs, wired right into the brain, touch, feel, smell, everything. Instant orgasm. Imagine how many people will be addicted. Not just because they lack the will power, but the human animal gets exposed to stimuli that in turn rewards its basest and most powerful areas of the brain and we act holier-than-thou when people actually get hooked.
Food, for some people, is the overriding addiction that make other addictions fail. Any help they get is good. And Dr. House would know that.
You make it sound as if the two are divorced ideas but their not. Immersion signifies an intense and active interest in something. Otherwise any real-life movie or photograph can be described as immersive simply by the fact that they are photo-realistic.
As for the idea "I'm actually there", maybe that will be a VR goal, especially when touch/feel can be digitized - although I would call it simple suspension of disbelief... (until it gets to the point you start having problems distinguishing reality from VR).
Immersion is when you are into a game, it doesn't have to mean you think you are in a game. It's when you are playing it and the outside world fades away, to the point that a persistent distraction can knock you out of it. The same way, I have been immersed into some movies I really love, but I never thought I was an actual character in those movies.
GPS is not the sole cause of this. I drove for years without GPS. I know where I am, but I never bothered to read the street names. Most people can't give directions well, they'll try, but it's usually mangled and confusing (turn at the big yellow house, when there are 5 on the way there), or plain wrong.
As opposed to fake men? No, real men read articles telling them what real men do, because they can't think for themselves, don't want to take a gamble and need to mimic the pack.
I can see this, my father argues with the voice in particular, but I don't really care. Maybe it's because I know how computers work and don't really buy into the "personality" of the device and that the voice samples invoked could just as easily be from a guy, or just don't have the macho hang-up, or whatever. But even he went out and bought a GPS after I gave my mom one, because he found it useful. Even though he knew every area he was driving, he didn't know every nook and cranny, so the business trips are made much easier when you dont spend 10 minutes a day getting directions to some arcane street in the area, whether meeting people at some restaurant or going to a business prospect's house (and frustrating them with calls on how to get there) and being 1/2 hour late or nearly getting into an accident as you ogle street signs instead of paying attention to the road.
In some ways, you would be stupid to do that. Not getting there, but having faith that it's the best route. GPS is great for finding streets in unfamiliar cities, but it's stupid in places you know or longer routes. Longer routes, you should always check a map, to see that it's the best place - I swear Garmins somehow just take the first route that completes the journey without comparing them - it once made me travel 60 miles extra on a 300 mile journey when a better highway was just nearby the starting point in the first place. GPS devices sometimes just don't know or calculate real world conditions eithers - like construction, or speed of a road, or # of stoplights or factor in things like proximity of a city and rushhour and decide to take the rural route around it instead.
Even on local driving, it really does stupid things. On a road on route to my house, inexplicably, where I would have to go straight for 1 more mile, and then turn left toward my home at intersection X (no more turns after that, home 3 miles straight ahead), with a 1 stop light in between my current spot and intersection X, it wants to veer off right. With a plethora of stop signs, turns, and lights. Just to arrive at intersection X again and resume the normal route. With or without the lights/signs, stupid routing either way anyone looks at it. Curiously, it never goes this time-consuming route when going the reverse direction.
GPS is great at finding unfamiliar things, but not optimized routing knowledge that a local or experience driver has yet.
Back when Garmin announced it's as-yet-to-be-delivered nuvifone, as a response to iPhone presumably, I wondered whether they were missing a big opportunity to sell a Garmin app to iPhone users and at the same time, with the guaranteed 2-way internet connection, collect data on the routes people (locals) really drive to improve their GPS routing systems in a major way over their competitors. But they saw Google Maps on it as competition and I guess the automatic reflex was too ingrained (too bad, Google's routing is really excellent in my limited experience, but the app doesn't seem to be useful for driving, is it?)
Ah, more not-in-my-back-yardism that ruins most spoiled 1st world countries - they want their cake (electricity) and to eat it too (no sign of it's production anywhere). I happen to think wind turbines are pretty and the noise negligible (lived a couple months 50 yards from a really tall one, now live in view of the towers of nuclear plant). People should get over themselves on certain issues.
Imagine that, commissioned or sold? Are you saying he didn't retain lifelong copyright on his works and they could have been freely imitated without recieving royalities? That means he would have to keep on working rather than resting easy after the Mona Lisa and making the next project?
I find it 100x more disgusting that his descendents don't recieve their due royalties as copyright obviously should be artist's life + 9999999999999999999999 years.
Good idea! I heard that all the artists of the world have been on strike since the advent of jpeg/gif/png, all the musicians since mp3/ogg/flac, all the filmmaker and animators since the advent of xvid/divx/etc. It's good that the authors finally join them, since they were delinquint since ascii was developed earliest of all.
Now all the inevitable DRM to sound, music, pictures, and movies will come. Apple fell off the bandwagon, but their music marketshare is low and they'll come running back. People love DRM, it feels good when you get to stare at the FBI screen for 10 seconds and at forced previews for 10 minutes. It'll be better than now, where no one is making money off the internet. No one at all.
And since no one at all is making money off the net, you'll be safe in your boycott of producing new material since obviously no one will step in your place to fill the niche instead. And because of that, DRM will come.
Because obviously no one makes money writing things for the internet. Otherwise you'd see words... and articles of words, and stuff. Maybe even like an electronic newspaper online and websites that mimic magazines.
BTW, magazines really oughta start printing on that paper that Xerox made that defies scanners and copy machines. It costs 2x more to publish, but isn't inconveniencing the customers worth it?
BMW had a good concept and product years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_C1
Unfortunately, it was too expensive and not enough people went for it. I have a perfectly capable car, but would want such a thing for short trips.
I don't know if phasing out patents is actually "reform". If I have my history correct, patents were actually to open information up and get rid of secretive guilds. In exchange for opening info up, the government grants a limited-time monopoly on it's application to the inventor/discoverer.
I think nontrivial inventions (like Apple's implementation of multitouch, which itself was made by 2 University of Delaware Professors who started the Fingerworks company which was bought by Apple) deserve protection and the people behind it deserve compensation. It wouldn't do to allow vultures to sit by the sidelines and just copy the invention after all the hard work is done.
But yeah, the copyright and patent systems has been extended, abused, and gone beyond all its original perimeters, as bureacracies are prone to do. But is the other extreme much better here? Patents should be reformed, but how?
I don't know the economics of these for the average person, but right now America is consuming a big chunk of the energy the world produces and is way far ahead per capita than most other countries, even other 1st world countries with similiar standards of living (maybe except Canada), something like Germany. Some of it due to our car oriented culture (which no product will fix, but an infrastructure issue - go by a European high school vs American suburban high school and check out ratio of cars to bicycles in the parking lot). Another is just poor construction practices like inadequate insulation or outdated heaters. Etc.
Looking at this car, the profile doesn't seem any more efficient than a regular car, which is way something like the Aptera. It's electric, which is a good start, especially considering the possible modular nature of the energy source, and coupled with a tiny hybrid petroleum engine which only has to produce constant energy instead of big enough for a "peak" performance need.
But it doesn't push air out of the way more efficiently, the other side of the equation. Because electricity isn't "clean" right now, just a bit better. And the chemicals for batteries need to be mined, itself a dirty process, as well as being processed at the end of its life - so it makes a difference if a car can get a 300 mile range on X amount of units instead of 2X or 3X or more.
That's why I woud always support something like the Aptera
http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/video_player.shtml?vid=1104622
This model Tesla looks pretty sexy like it's bigger brother so it will have an easy time selling, but beyond the gas vs electric issue, I wonder really how efficient it truly is.
FTFA:
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."
I have wished for open standard products for a long time, things like riding mowers where parts could be reasonably modular - like plugging in a video card into a PC, it doesn't care if it's nvidia, ati, or other. If nothing else than to keep the manufacturers honest when it comes time to repair things but also for cheaper ugrades/accessories as well as just less overlap in redundant but uninterchangeable parts.
OTOH, this car seems like vaporware, while produts like the Aptera are going to be unaffordable (unlike the Tesla) and which will have hybrid and electric available seem much more closer to market and probably could use a push to get it there. The car exists too and isn't just on the drawing board:
http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/video_player.shtml?vid=1104622
What a fucking perversion of the interstate commerce clause. The lawyers twist it to mean anything. How else do you think that states can really legalize pot now, even though that pot could stay within the state's borders the entire time? Via interstate commerce clause, they argue, because it COULD go out of state. Just like I may commit a crime one day, so lock me up now before it happens.
Mail was delivered for 160+ years in this country before the interstate highways. I never once thought "Gee, this highway is here to deliver mail". It never occured to me, because that's a benefit of the highway but not the main purpose. (I'm not saying highways aren't beneficial, but that's a seperate discussion).
because you can get the one song you like off of iTunes/amazon/whatever. Why always start from the assumption that it must be illegal activity that is adversely affecting sales.
The legal marketplace has changed to benefit the consumer economically, by not gouging them for $6/15 for a single/album respectively, now they can get what they wanted for around a $1. Some will buy more music but many others will move that savings to other avenues of entertainment.
Maybe for a quick history lesson: Microsoft was extremely suspicious that Netscape could usurp it's OS position via the browser (think google apps, etcetera) and making it's OS redundant. However, Netscape Navigator charged money for it's product.
Microsoft, otoh, bought Mosaic, and started giving IE out for free. In antitrust, this can be argued as "dumping", selling your product at below cost in order to obtain marketshare and drive competitors with smaller pocket out of business (often the good price is temporary too). Another argument is that Microsoft leveraged it's OS monopoly in order to gain another monopoly, which is illegal under US law. Standard Oil bought into railroads in order to charge their competition extravangantly more (or agree to SO's terms). As Steve Ballmer often said of Windows, it's the developers! However, they had a long history of seeing a good idea and stealing it for themselves, coming out with a product. Now, they can bundle it with their OS and make it default before the competition knows what hits them.
Although this is all long gone and the browser market is way different than back then. I think the EU should mandate that major sellers like Dell offer at least one computer model in each line with Linux (one netbook, one desktop, one notebook). That way MS cannot slap these companies with punitive terms when it feels like it because they are only following the law.
The DVD will be the last physical format, in that, if you want to bring a movie to someone's house you don't know very well or to school, you'll probably opt for a DVD.
The reason DVD will hang on is simple - people don't care so much for image quality as convenience. Consider the physical format. CD, the first and last widespread digital physical music format, conquered tape because you didn't need to rewind to listen to a song again and again, could go to any track you want immediately as well, and other such simple things. You could also hold 25 of them in a spindle much more than ever holding tape. It also doesn't have tape hiss... These benefits combine to draw enough early adopters and reach critical mass.
The DVD vs DVD had the exact benefits - rewinding, skipping around, size of format, and analog artifacts. Same result.
There have been challengers to the music CD - minidisc, DVD-Audio, SACD. There was/is a market for them, but it's not mainstream. The benefits are fewer and usually relegated to one easily identifiable one for the average person - size (minidisc), quality (DVD-Audio), SACD, etc.
When there is only one benefit, the existing one has to be so bad at it or the new alternative so groundbreaking superior. As the CD shows, there is just "good enough" for the average person they were a higher quality alternative as diminishing returns. Even the iPod didn't offer better sound quality, just an overall package of convenience, not just in lugging around your music collection, but in buying the content as well.
We had superior things to DVD before in terms of image quality - like Laser Disc (but it had other downfalls). So I don't think consumers care about that as much as other factors. Right now HD is just too fractured and confusing to the average consumer that I doubt the industry will really get it together by the time downloads.
If blu-ray reaches true mainstream, it will probably only have the PS3 to thank. There's enough of a market for walmart to cater to, but I just don't see DVD declining like VHS did anytime soon.
I'm looking pricewatch and 512mb 400mhz DDR2 ram is at $5, let alone what 96mb would cost to Nintendo... and it was released last year....
Well, thanks for the links, I'll check them out.
Just getting back into gaming, but all I really want from a browser is to let me view my webmail account, digg, and slashdot. That's it. Once you turn webmail to standard html, it becomes easy enough to render, but /. and digg are hogs. The DS browser is rather ingenious in using one screen to view the whole page on an unreadable but thouroughly easy-to-navigate scale, and then one screen to read, and considering the low res screens, is surprisingly good, although they would probably benefit from wider screens such that some phones are coming out with - however at most sites such as these it just sits there rendering for seconds on end making reading text useless as you have many rows but often less than half a column. More ram probably would smooth things, I guess.
Traditionally, consoles have had extremely low ram compared to the PCs of their day and handhelds were even lower on the totem pole. That was okay when the games were tweaked for that specific machine to get every ounce of power out of it and trim every speck of bloat. However, with the iPhone becoming the first of many really capable truly-multiple purpose devices, traditional handheld makers are probably going to find their markets encroached upon, and things like the DS browser and playing music files is probably them starting to step over onto the other side on their offensive. Unfortunately, even the popular websites just aren't that focused on keeping requirements low.
Anyway, that's just how I see it. I just know performance-wise, they dragged their feet on the handheld console market for a long time although seem to be taking it much more seriously with the number of upgrades this second decade into it than the fist. Back then, they took nearly a decade to double the CPU speed and quadruple the memory (hardware-wise, their competition was probably more advanced in 1993 than Nintendo was in 1998) but they won on sheer library size.
And probably will continue to do so. It's a fun system. But they won't lose to traditional competitors, they'll probably lose a bit to convergence devices that will be your phone and browser at the same time.
On the upside, with it's controllers, Wii can do what Playstation can't do (except outlying cases like guitar hero and even then it's just buttons, if hardware such the controllers ain't default, developers don't really take advantage of it) and has games that just wouldn't be the same.
Just got my first DS(i) today after not getting anything since the original gameboy. The browsers sucks as much as on the kindle for different reasons (16mb ram, 4x more than original DSI? wow, that sucks, with ram prices, they could at least make it 96mb easy and a much more capable system), and the graphics don't match the PSP I suppose, but the two screens/touchscreen just add fun possibilities.
I like the differences between systems. Do the people who bitch and complain want one homogenized space? Is that so they can have a supersystem that plays everything? Nice fantasy, but probably get boring.
I'm sorry, but I would not want something as expensive as airconditioning controlled by a few flicks of the wrist on some phone. Most anything I have seen from smart houses I would not want in my home. Old-fashioned mechanical switches were 1000x more reliable than any digital switch I ever had, and any convenience or imagined savings went out the door when the digital switches, easily 10x more expensive, inevitably broke down 10x sooner. I still shudder to think about the ceiling fans that had impossible to find propietary wall switches.
Programmable thermostats, photoelectric sensors, and timers is where I draw line. They're also about the only items that need regular replacement, can't imagine what an entire smart house would cost, probably much more just in idle electrical cost like the rest of the always-on gadgets of today let alone maintenance.
Until houses are built truly smart that promise real savings I'm not sure what so smart about these gadget homes.
Around a decade ago, it was enough to have a better search engine to get people to switch. But in the meantime, google has me hooked on mail, sites, and documents. Other people use other apps, but just like Microsoft snagged the desktop OS market based on it being the default on commodity hardware and then maintaining it with applications later, I believe Google will keep it's top spot on the same idea.
Migrating from a search engine simply is a lot of hassle now especially since it's diminishing returns, I have a feeling that "perfect" results and google and maybe even bing won't be that far apart from each other. Also, a decade ago, the internet was more of a wild west in terms of searching for information about some topics far and wide. You just didn't know what sites had relevant information. These days, a great majority of my searches start as "X Y wikipedia" because now there is a centralized spot for info.
I applaud Microsoft's effort though. Competition is always a good thing and might bring something unexpected or at least keep google honest and on its toes. Also, the bing page has learn/copied the good part of google, and that is the minimalization. A far cry from the horrendous "portal"idea that Yahoo, MSN, comcast.net, AOL, and others are still attached too.
I wouldn't call it "ultra small" resolution. The latest from eeePC in the economical range is the 1000HE and according to amazon, this 10" has 1024x600 res, worse than this with 3 more inches.
I believe Dell's offering has better res but not sure. (Of course, it could be bigger too, defeating the purpose.)
BTW, wtf is with slashdot and the random bars in my browser?
What is the former US ambassador talking about? This isn't child porn. Recent laws nonewithstanding (likely to be overturned anyway), I'm pretty sure the 1st amendment will keep any rendered/animate rape, regardless of "age" of "victim" legal.
And he's not talking about child porn in general, because that is illegal in Japan as well.
Lighter than air has several problems.
One, two lift something, the balloon part has to be very big in comparison. It will never replace rail moving cars upons cars of freight.
Two, helium will get very expensive. Unless you want to go with flammable hydrogen, which at least has the benefit of greater lifting power. But having watched mythbusters, it wasn't really the skin that set it ablaze....
Three, ground crew. The Hindenburg needed dozens to hundreds of ground crew (luckily, they always had volunteers). Zeppelins/Dirigibles/Blimps are not good in windy conditions and on landing you always need extra precaution. Lockheed Martin and others designed heavier than air blimps that get 80% lift from a lighter-than-air gas and the other 20% through aerodynamic flight, eliminating the need for ground crew in a smart and cool way (but how much can it lift?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-791
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/907865/lockheed_martin_turbo_super_blimp/
Anyway, this report is BS. Government reports have long shown that train is much cheaper than truck is much cheaper than air.
This is really too bad. Imagine the fuel/road repair (trucks cause 200x more damage than average car) we could be saving if they could make trains so efficient as to relegate trucks as last mile/last leg part of the journey and train as the majority to the point you would hardly see a cross country truck anymore.
Now, I know trains don't currently support stuff like refrigeration and someone told me because of the unions, freight trains don't go Sundays (true?), but there really has to be a cheap technological way to overcome all that. Heck, with containers so standardized and with robotics, loading and unloading something like that should become the least of it. And supporting refridgeration shouldn't be that big of a deal.
It would seem the railroads could make a ton of money off this, but the devil is always in the details.
Does Unix philosophy actually mesh with Unix reality? A reason I ask is because in unix everything is supposedly a file, but there were enough exceptions, such as in networking, that in the seperate Plan9 OS, they sought to really make everything a file. And that by the original makers of unix.