#1 - Yourself Fitness. PC, PS2, Xbox all options for it (and the ps2 and xbox titles are both compatible with their "upgraded" counterparts).
#2 - Wii Fit. Surprisingly effective if you discipline yourself to doing it. Downside: not as organized.
And now we get to some of the better stuff.
#3 - Find a local swimming pool, strap on a pair of rollerblades, get a bicycle.
#4 - Join a sports league. Your local parks & recreation department is a good start here and can steer you to local team sports if nothing else. This will also help with your "introverted" problem.
#5 - Once you take care of the "introverted" problem... get a girlfriend and do a lot of the world's #1 calorie-burning exercise.
Fandango + Movietickets = MOVIE TICKET sales. I sometimes use them when I'm... oh... going to the theater (something I've done a lot this summer).
Amazon, Netflix - are you referring to renting/buying the DVD/Blu-ray? Or are you referring to their crappy-as-hell never-works-properly "online rental" setups?
iTunes - Great. Don't own an iPod. Not planning to. Decent video quality only if you plan to watch on tinyscreen.
Xbox Live Video - I've gotten precisely ONE video on it, before I realized there was no way to preserve what I bought (supposedly a "purchase" but going to die with the console).
Hulu - lower quality than broadcast TV. No way to download/preserve it or dump it to any portable option. Yeah, awesome. Not.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I actually think this is a good move on the MPAA's part.
You're missing a lot of things.
I do want to know where I can get movies legally, and this could help increase competition - better for my bottom line.
If I thought for a minute it would help increase competition, maybe that would be a point. I don't.
As for knowing where I can get movies legally? I already know. I also know that the supposedly "legal" methods today deliberately and ILLEGALLY infringe on my first-sale rights, and you won't catch me supporting that.
A) the PS3 does the home media player thing natively, without running any version of Linux, right from the XMB. I watch video and listen to music from my Linux media servers with it all the time.
Funny. I tried that with mine and it has all SORTS of problems with interesting file formats.
Plus, the PS3 knows shit-nothing about Samba. And some of us aren't going to waste 400+ hours of our life fucking with the linux crap trying to get it to work just so we can use a PS3 to do it, especially when we have a perfectly good samba-based NAS running already.
B) the PS3 runs _full_ (not stripped-down) versions of Linux that will run within its memory limitations and don't require 3D acceleration. I fail to see how a media client requires 3D accelerated graphics.
You just repeated what I said before: - PS3 limits its access to RAM - PS3 doesn't allow it proper access to the video card (which is VERY useful for media playback, scaling in particular).
- The Wii has a nifty built-in remote that can do all sorts of things... and homebrew offers learning coders the chance to play with it and come up with innovative ideas and neat tricks.
- A codebase set up to allow you to run burned discs with homebrew will hopefully be expanded to allow using the old (and quite solid) emulators that ran on the Gamecube. Being able to run my SNES/NES/Genesis/etc libraries from a burned CD rather than wasting space in the Wii's highly-limited 512MB of internal RAM would be a major benefit.
In fact, word behind closed doors indicates that Nintendo is going to HAVE to open up something to allow games to read the external SD card reader as normal storage shortly. Anyone who's spent any amount of money in the Wii online store is getting pretty close to the limitation as-is even without the ever-expanding savegame files eating it up. It's one of the Wii's few major mis-design problems (the other being the incredible dead-zone that prevents the wii from detecting small motion, like trying to putt a short put in Wii Sports Golf, reliably).
- The Wii has more than enough power to become a pretty nice streaming media player (say, a MythTV frontend) if you can build it properly. The original Xbox is nearing the end of its usable lifespan (unable to handle 720p or higher content and a few of the newest and most processor-hungry video codecs with its processor) and both the Xbox360 and PS3 are locked in ways that opening them up for homebrew code is far more difficult than rewriting something (though rumors have it that PS3 custom firmware is being worked on). While it's true the Wii couldn't put out a true 720p signal, it could very likely process high-def content and display it in extremely pretty 480p, which would put it a step above the aging Xbox.
And before you say "but the PS3 allows you to run linux natively"... no. It doesn't. It allows you to run a very stripped-down Linux, and segregates hardware control to prevent Linux from being able to do most of the things that you'd want Linux and associated programs to be able to do. For example, the XBMC team (who are porting to both Windows and Linux right now) have already said that the PS3 will not allow them enough direct access (processor, video, RAM writes) to do what the software needs to do.
- The Wii is in more homes. That means that more people are able to enjoy the fruits of their work when they get the nifty home-brewed programs running.
How the heck did Blu-Ray "win" when the only decent player is a freakin' PS3?
Simple: they sent young male prostitutes and briefcases full of cash to studio executives to "demonstrate" why Blu-Ray was "better." Said executives then directed that they should put their movies out only on Blu-Ray.
Once they had more than half the market like that, they had it sewn up, and now they can charge $5/disc in "licensing" for their proprietary Blu-Ray format.
This has always been Sony's strategy - "make the format and clean up on licensing fees."
(A) - a primary thing tossed around everytime someone screams "yay nonvolatile ram" is the idea that a computer could "recover" from an unscheduled power-down (someone kicks the surge strip and flips the switch, breaker flips from someone turning on a hair dryer, etc).
(B) - Computer is shut down - this is never that simple. When you power down, things get wonky. There's still power going through the system, but it's not controlled in any way. Ever seen a computer misbehave because the contents of working RAM got screwed up due to mains power dropping below 80V (that's AC) for a few seconds? I have.
There are 4 possible scenarios. 1) The RAM and key were not corrupted, everything goes fine (presumably the likely case.)
Only if you're talking a deliberate "suspend-to-storage" style setup, which is what we have in modern "hibernation" modes anyways.
2) The RAM was corrupted, but the key wasn't (This is the other "hopeful" case.)
Actually the likely case... and now we get to wait for the OS to spend a normal load time booting and zeroing out the "nonvolatile" storage.
3) The RAM was not corrupted, but the key was, giving a false-positive (a whoopsies)
As likely as 2.
4)Both were corrupted, with two subcases: i) They now match, which would be *bad* possibly (the odds make this 100% negligble with a proper hashing function.) ii) They don't match, causing the same result as 1) which is desirable.
In only one relatively unlikely case (predicated on *knowing* that you need to shut down) did it work properly.
There are reasons to use nonvolatile storage (of many sorts) in devices. Honestly, though, this is not that impressive and all the "predicted" benefits are pretty much smoke and mirrors.
Now they want computers to boot faster? I happen to *like* the fact that it takes 15 minutes to get Vista up and running.
I don't. That's why I stuck with XP. I'm twice as fast as a Vista machine on half the hardware.
Hear, hear! I don't even know why they bothered developing processors after the 386, or anything faster than 1200 baud modems. They worked fine, it's just these damn kids were too impatient to wait 15 hours to download 50 megs, or 3 hours to render a single frame of Doom 3.
There's a difference between going for more power (when you know it's feasible) and just being silly and making unreasonable goals based on diminishing returns (the difference between a boot-up time of, say, 20 and 15 seconds). Improved processors allow you to make a lot more calculations in a shorter time space. This is a good thing. Managing to shave 5 seconds off boot? Not so much so, especially since it offers no other concrete advantages once you're booted.
And the GP even stated that they wanted an "integrity check" on the stuff (or at least on the OS files in it?) on boot. Clock how long it takes to do a memory integrity check of your 4GB RAM sometime. You're going to see it roughly on par for "boot time" on that alone.
Oh, and the reason for needing the memory integrity check? When you have lowered power or (especially) a spike followed by a brown spot in power that could cause the machine to turn off, it doesn't just shut you down cold. Heck, shutting the machine down doesn't immediately shut it down all the way, that's why you are advised to wait a few seconds on a hard reboot. You get all sorts of interesting problems, erroneous calculations, just plain bad data thrown around as the transistors start getting voltages that are out of their normal operating tolerances.
Would you trust a memory image that's been through that? Worse yet, would you trust a memory image of that sort to run an integrity check? No? So guess what - we're back to having to load that memory check routine from another source; hard drive, eeprom, etc.
Now that we've loaded that, of course, we can check the system files against the routine with a checksum, theoretically speaking.
But now what do we do with all the other data required for a "restore" of a powered-down system, one of the most popular pipe dreams of these ideas? Do we have a set of checks for each file in there? Where did we store it? How long will it take to check it? Are we recalculating it constantly on the fly, are we keeping a parity check bit for it in the same (problematic) storage and using space for that?
How much space, and extra processor overhead, will it take to ensure with even 90% confidence that you didn't get corrupt data back in your videogame when you powered the comp back up from an unexpected power outage?
If you have a system that updates a LOT less frequently with a lot less complexity... then you have a system that might as well just keep its system state on a pair of revolving images on the hard disk anyways. Only write to one at a time and you "know" with pretty good confidence that the other one should be good after a power outage.
Just don't let anyone with a head cold near your precious neural gel-paks, or else your doctor will have the whole crew running around injecting the computer's network systems with theraflu cold/sinus every 4 hours.
Plus, it's a bitch when the computer controlling the engines sneezes.
In theory, the OS could stay in RAM and just do a quick verification check to make sure it's not damaged/corrupted in some way
Reminds me of letting Col. Clink check on the prisoners. Letting the OS "integrity check" itself is an amusing thought and a very, very bad idea.
then boom, you're at your desktop in a matter of seconds.
We get this pipe dream every few years - people talking about the "instant-on" computer. Sleep modes, wake modes, hibernation, etc.
I have an idea: grow a few seconds' worth of patience.
It would certainly benefit the likes of embedded devices, set-top boxes and such that are starting to really take the piss with their multi-minute startup times.
Hmmm... I have an Xbox360, DVD player, DVD/vcr Recorder combo unit, Xbox, PS3, Wii, PS2, and a computer. The only one with a "multi-minute" startup time is the computer. And honestly, that stays on most of the time anyways since its primary purpose is as a NAS for the Xbox to feed media content from (gotta love XBMC).
Other than the computer, my TV is the longest-warming-up item. And that's because it's an lcd projection screen, and has to warm the bulb up.
Where are these "multi-minute startup" devices you're referring to? Let me guess, you grew up on Elmo and your generation has the attention span of a goldfish.
For reference's sake: older CRT televisions/monitors can take as much as a few minutes to fully warm up, and generally 30-45 seconds to wake and warm up. Projectors and most big-screen TV's, same deal. Want to know how long it used to take to fast-forward through the ads in a VHS movie? Actually, it's shorter than trying to get past the adcrap the movie studios are putting on DVD's these days.
And that's not even mentioning the fact that the MafiAA companies are illegally abusing the FBI warning code to prevent you from skipping/fast-forwarding past the aforementioned adcrap.
PVs are no god-send, but they are better than oil and coal in that area.
Run your numbers again. You are incorrect.
Wind farms are neither disruptive nor noisy, provided you put them in the right place and build them right. Even older ones are silent when about half a mile away. Considering that they're built in the middle of nowhere, either on pastures, the ocean or mountain/hill passes, that's not an issue. How do I know? I bike past them about once a month. The real issue though is that when something does go wrong, it results in some spectacular failures.
You've obviously never been around the large-scale ones in western Texas.
I'm wondering though - who is the idiot who put a tidal generator into a lake?
Great Lakes plans have been developed. South Korea also tried it with the creation of Shihwa Lake - though admittedly that's more of putting a huge freaking dam on an ocean inlet, rather than a "true" lake.
And an earthquake that raises or lowers the ocean floor by more than a few feet is more than just "simple tectonic activity"... It's tectonic activity that will ruin the entire area.
Perhaps you would do better to relearn stuff you should have been aware of in second grade. The earth regularly changes - when it moves smoothly, you don't notice too much (until you find something like this, and you don't usually see the "day to day" effects because the soil and even some of the bedrock may slide along on top of the plate itself. However, the effects of all of the boundaries (as well as "hot spot" eruptions) mean that the plates sink and rise quite regularly, and wobble as well, and changes in the water line based on this are not unusual at all.
Biomass energy is not generated from edible food. Or at least, those who suggest it ought to be shot (see corn ethanol).
Agreed.
Biomass energy is generally generated by decomposition of fecal matter and refuse plant matter - think corn stalks.
The "refuse plant matter" and "fecal matter" you refer to, however, normally make their way back into the food system as compost and manure (they're what makes farmers' fields steam in the morning during the pre-planting season). Without these, we'd quickly deplete the soil on many farms and we'd have a major problem, which makes them far less of a "great source" of energy than you're giving them credit for. About the best idea is the collection of waste heat in the composting process, but so far with the exception of some amazingly energy-rich poo (such as elephant dung) the numbers don't work out. The capture of methane in the decomposition process has also been attempted, but overall results haven't been truly encouraging on that front either.
And I don't know anybody who creates animal feed from wood chips.... unless they're criminals.
However, you would get more energy back from wood chips if you simply would burn them, say in a stove or wood heater, rather than wasting time, effort, and chemicals trying to make ethanol from them.
I have to say, I've noticed that those who complain the most about being buried by unfair modding seem to be little more than barely literate trolls who communicate their lack of knowledge through caps, insults and repetitions of long-debunked myths. In other words, they are for whom moderation was introduced.
I have to say, I've noticed that there is an overwhelming political bias on Slashdot, and that the inevitable result of not bowing down to the left-wing sacred cows is that the moderation system gets abused, with people modding "-1 Troll" simply because they disagree with what is being said, especially if it's phrased intelligently and gets in the way of their foaming-mouthed "Chimpy McHalliBusHitler" ranting.
And all the furniture I buy from Ikea is solid wood.
Highly, highly unlikely. What you more likely have is particle board with a wood-looking veneer.
The only Ikea furniture that is "solid" wood is their outdoor patio tables/chairs/benches, which need to be able to withstand outdoor humidity shifts and rain.
The other half of his argument was that "if we don't reprocess nuclear materials, it'll be an example to other nations and they won't either."
And as a result, the following nations lack either Nuclear Weapons or Nuclear Weapon Programs today: North Korea, Pakistan, India, Syria, Iran, China... oh, right.
It's not necessarily the "funding" - it's getting past the NIMBY factor and all the hippy enviro-nutjobs who show up WHEREVER you try to build one causing trouble, trying to get your permits reconsidered/denied, making ludicrous false claims to force you to redo your impact studies a thousand times, and yes, even engaging in actual vandalism and destruction of property.
"Further, I suspect that by the time all the dust settles on bringing the next nuclear power plant online (10+ years is my off-the-cuff guess), that the cost for solar power will have dropped by an order of magnitude or two."
Howzat? The cost of raw materials for polysilicate is not going to go down, if anything it will go up. The cost of metal and the polishing sludge (which BTW is highly toxic and pretty much toxifies the soil forever even after the solar farm is removed from the area) for solar farms? Don't make me laugh.
My thought is to take all the nuclear public subsidy money and plug it into purchase contracts to install solar power on gov't facilities.
And if you had more than two brain cells to rub together, you'd realize why this is a fucking stupid idea. See above. No seriously, look up, see the cloud, and realize how EASY it is to get into a power deficit if you rely solely on solar.
People really need to start investing in sustainable renewable energy, things like tidal, wind, solar, and what IMO is the most untapped, geothermal. Seriously, we have all these active volcanos around the planet exerting kilotons of energy spewing gasses into the air and creating massive amounts of heat, why aren't we harnessing that more?
Let's take this one at a time.
Solar: producing the polysilica base necessary for the solar panels on housing produces TONS of toxic chemical waste that then has to be disposed of somehow. Mirrors in solar farms require tons of toxic chemicals for constant cleaning and shining. Power generation is only good for a few hours of the day when you're aligned right, when there's not a cloud in the way, during the right season of the year when the sun's at a good angle, etc.
Tidal: Can only be done on immense lakes or the ocean shores. Waterline shifts (not due to "global warming", just tectonic activity and seasonal fluctuation) quickly diminish the power production levels as the turbines fail to match the tidal movement. Requires taking up a large amount of coastline and tends to get a lot of dead waterlife caught in it. If that's not enough to make you pause, two words: Zebra Mussels.
Wind: already (even at its low usage) a major killer of endangered bird species. Wind farms are large, INCREDIBLY (as in "you have to wear earplugs to avoid hearing damage") noisy, extremely susceptible to damage from even relatively minor storms, and only produce meaningful power on a relatively narrow band of wind speeds which rarely are sustained for a defined or predictable period.
Geothermal: Seriously, we have all these active volcanos around the planet exerting kilotons of energy spewing gasses into the air and creating massive amounts of heat, why aren't we harnessing that more?
You just answered your own question. The best locations are right next to explosively active volcanoes. You put the plant in, but then you have to worry about projectiles, blast area, lava flow path, toxic gases (chlorine belches as just one example) hazardous to workers, and all the rest of the problems inherent in the setup.
Plus, you have to be EXTREMELY careful drilling in, lest your own geothermal pipes provide an escape hatch for the bottled-up pressures and you wind up setting off the equivalent of the cherry-bomb-under-the-garbage-can routine, with your extremely expensive power plant as the garbage can. (Hint: the garbage can usually doesn't survive that routine.)
Hey jackass, where are you going to store all the nuclear waster? In your backyard? Let's sing you up. Do some research.
Better idea: put a breeder reactor RIGHT in my backyard. Reprocess the spent "waste" right back into fuel for reuse, like RESPONSIBLE people would (and DO) do in other countries.
The reason we don't have breeder reactors in America? Jimmy Carter thought the US could serve an "example" to tin-pot dictators like Syria, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Iran, China, etc... by having a "moratorium" on nuclear enrichment. Gee, how'd that work out so far?
The newer designs of reactors have no CHANCE of doing what either Chernobyl or 3-Mile Island did. Pebble-Bed reactors fail "safe" (without guidance, they simply hit their equilibrium temperature which is well within the structural design limits and stay there). Plus, they cool by inert gas rather than water so there's no chance of a contaminated steam-cloud explosion (which was why Chernobyl was so nasty).
Any time you mention the truth about the enviro-nutjob movement, some slashdot troll with a mod point will be there to bury you.
I'm all about SENSIBLE environmental policy. That means we have to balance OUR needs for resources with RESPONSIBLE environmentalism, not turn the entire fucking planet into an off-limits nature preserve.
And yes, it means that there just may need to be a power plant, or a chemical refinery, or any other of a large number of the usual items that trigger "OMGWTFNIMBYAAUGH" reactions from the enviro-nutjobs, NEAR to population centers so that we RESPONSIBLY reduce the transportation and delivery costs (not just monetary but WASTED FUEL ENERGY).
Think about it. It costs us at LEAST 25% more fossil fuel energy to turn OUR FOOD SUPPLY into ethanol fuel and deliver it where it needs to go, than we get back. Ethanol has been one of the biggest energy disasters we've ever gotten into. And at the same time we WASTE petroleum trying to do this, the price of food for starving countries is going through the roof because the US, an exporter of corn, is BURNING THE FOOD SUPPLY - LITERALLY.
Think of it this way: would you dump a gallon jug of Jack Daniels in your gas tank? Guess what - YOU JUST DID. Oh, and the reason you constantly have to get your injectors cleaned and serviced and buy injector cleaner to put in your tank? That's right - ethanol is incredibly corrosive to your rubber fuel line!
And yet the enviro-nutjobs keep screaming for ethanol production and refuse to consider how wasteful it is. They refuse to consider the fact that the "renewable" energy sources all have problems too: in order to make an order of solar panels from polysilicon, you create an immense amount of TOXIC WASTE that has to be dealt with. If you run a mirror-based solar farm, you've got to keep the mirrors polished (congratulations, keep a lot of toxic chemicals handy and be prepared to toxify the hell out of the soil) just as a start. And all it takes to lower or cut entirely your generating capacity is a nice cloud or two. Earth seems to be fairly old hat at generating those, somehow. Walk outside and take a quick peek at the sky, chances are there's one around.
Wind farms are INCREDIBLY noisy and disruptive, the power is intermittent at best with very minimal generating capacity for the land area used, and a major killer of endangered birds already.
Geothermal has limited areas in which it can be placed, areas which are invariably tectonically unstable (or worse yet: the "best" places are usually right in the expected lava flow/blast zone of a volcano).
Tidal power has the same problem, you can only do it on a shoreline, and a rise/fall in the shoreline (not due to "global warming" but simply tectonic activity or seasonal changes in large lakes) can kill it quite easily, since the turbines have to be set at the right place to match the incoming/outgoing tides... and even then, they ONLY generate power during the tidal shift.
Biomass is a nice thought, but you get back to the food supply and other effects. Wood chips? Watch the price of particulate board matter of all sorts (the sort likely most of your furniture is made of, especially if it came from Ikea) jack through the roof. Much of the rest is fed to animals or composted to create fertilizer in order to grow more food, which means you'll decrease crop yields and jack food prices up again.
Do I say we shouldn't use these? No. But if we had a SENSIBLE and RESPONSIBLE nuclear policy, including recycling "spent" fuel and refining it back for reuse rather than trying to stash it under a mountain, we could eliminate a LOT more of the oil/natural gas/coal portion of our energy than these sources are ever likely to manage.
Slashdot Mirror
#1 - Yourself Fitness. PC, PS2, Xbox all options for it (and the ps2 and xbox titles are both compatible with their "upgraded" counterparts).
#2 - Wii Fit. Surprisingly effective if you discipline yourself to doing it. Downside: not as organized.
And now we get to some of the better stuff.
#3 - Find a local swimming pool, strap on a pair of rollerblades, get a bicycle.
#4 - Join a sports league. Your local parks & recreation department is a good start here and can steer you to local team sports if nothing else. This will also help with your "introverted" problem.
#5 - Once you take care of the "introverted" problem... get a girlfriend and do a lot of the world's #1 calorie-burning exercise.
Huh? Which universe are you in?
I believe they call his universe "plantville."
Or "Shillverse."
Fandango + Movietickets = MOVIE TICKET sales. I sometimes use them when I'm... oh... going to the theater (something I've done a lot this summer).
Amazon, Netflix - are you referring to renting/buying the DVD/Blu-ray? Or are you referring to their crappy-as-hell never-works-properly "online rental" setups?
iTunes - Great. Don't own an iPod. Not planning to. Decent video quality only if you plan to watch on tinyscreen.
Xbox Live Video - I've gotten precisely ONE video on it, before I realized there was no way to preserve what I bought (supposedly a "purchase" but going to die with the console).
Hulu - lower quality than broadcast TV. No way to download/preserve it or dump it to any portable option. Yeah, awesome. Not.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I actually think this is a good move on the MPAA's part.
You're missing a lot of things.
I do want to know where I can get movies legally, and this could help increase competition - better for my bottom line.
If I thought for a minute it would help increase competition, maybe that would be a point. I don't.
As for knowing where I can get movies legally? I already know. I also know that the supposedly "legal" methods today deliberately and ILLEGALLY infringe on my first-sale rights, and you won't catch me supporting that.
A) the PS3 does the home media player thing natively, without running any version of Linux, right from the XMB. I watch video and listen to music from my Linux media servers with it all the time.
Funny. I tried that with mine and it has all SORTS of problems with interesting file formats.
Plus, the PS3 knows shit-nothing about Samba. And some of us aren't going to waste 400+ hours of our life fucking with the linux crap trying to get it to work just so we can use a PS3 to do it, especially when we have a perfectly good samba-based NAS running already.
B) the PS3 runs _full_ (not stripped-down) versions of Linux that will run within its memory limitations and don't require 3D acceleration. I fail to see how a media client requires 3D accelerated graphics.
You just repeated what I said before:
- PS3 limits its access to RAM
- PS3 doesn't allow it proper access to the video card (which is VERY useful for media playback, scaling in particular).
Let's see:
- The Wii has a nifty built-in remote that can do all sorts of things... and homebrew offers learning coders the chance to play with it and come up with innovative ideas and neat tricks.
- A codebase set up to allow you to run burned discs with homebrew will hopefully be expanded to allow using the old (and quite solid) emulators that ran on the Gamecube. Being able to run my SNES/NES/Genesis/etc libraries from a burned CD rather than wasting space in the Wii's highly-limited 512MB of internal RAM would be a major benefit.
In fact, word behind closed doors indicates that Nintendo is going to HAVE to open up something to allow games to read the external SD card reader as normal storage shortly. Anyone who's spent any amount of money in the Wii online store is getting pretty close to the limitation as-is even without the ever-expanding savegame files eating it up. It's one of the Wii's few major mis-design problems (the other being the incredible dead-zone that prevents the wii from detecting small motion, like trying to putt a short put in Wii Sports Golf, reliably).
- The Wii has more than enough power to become a pretty nice streaming media player (say, a MythTV frontend) if you can build it properly. The original Xbox is nearing the end of its usable lifespan (unable to handle 720p or higher content and a few of the newest and most processor-hungry video codecs with its processor) and both the Xbox360 and PS3 are locked in ways that opening them up for homebrew code is far more difficult than rewriting something (though rumors have it that PS3 custom firmware is being worked on). While it's true the Wii couldn't put out a true 720p signal, it could very likely process high-def content and display it in extremely pretty 480p, which would put it a step above the aging Xbox.
And before you say "but the PS3 allows you to run linux natively"... no. It doesn't. It allows you to run a very stripped-down Linux, and segregates hardware control to prevent Linux from being able to do most of the things that you'd want Linux and associated programs to be able to do. For example, the XBMC team (who are porting to both Windows and Linux right now) have already said that the PS3 will not allow them enough direct access (processor, video, RAM writes) to do what the software needs to do.
- The Wii is in more homes. That means that more people are able to enjoy the fruits of their work when they get the nifty home-brewed programs running.
How the heck did Blu-Ray "win" when the only decent player is a freakin' PS3?
Simple: they sent young male prostitutes and briefcases full of cash to studio executives to "demonstrate" why Blu-Ray was "better." Said executives then directed that they should put their movies out only on Blu-Ray.
Once they had more than half the market like that, they had it sewn up, and now they can charge $5/disc in "licensing" for their proprietary Blu-Ray format.
This has always been Sony's strategy - "make the format and clean up on licensing fees."
(A) - a primary thing tossed around everytime someone screams "yay nonvolatile ram" is the idea that a computer could "recover" from an unscheduled power-down (someone kicks the surge strip and flips the switch, breaker flips from someone turning on a hair dryer, etc).
(B) - Computer is shut down - this is never that simple. When you power down, things get wonky. There's still power going through the system, but it's not controlled in any way. Ever seen a computer misbehave because the contents of working RAM got screwed up due to mains power dropping below 80V (that's AC) for a few seconds? I have.
There are 4 possible scenarios.
1) The RAM and key were not corrupted, everything goes fine (presumably the likely case.)
Only if you're talking a deliberate "suspend-to-storage" style setup, which is what we have in modern "hibernation" modes anyways.
2) The RAM was corrupted, but the key wasn't (This is the other "hopeful" case.)
Actually the likely case... and now we get to wait for the OS to spend a normal load time booting and zeroing out the "nonvolatile" storage.
3) The RAM was not corrupted, but the key was, giving a false-positive (a whoopsies)
As likely as 2.
4)Both were corrupted, with two subcases:
i) They now match, which would be *bad* possibly (the odds make this 100% negligble with a proper hashing function.)
ii) They don't match, causing the same result as 1) which is desirable.
In only one relatively unlikely case (predicated on *knowing* that you need to shut down) did it work properly.
There are reasons to use nonvolatile storage (of many sorts) in devices. Honestly, though, this is not that impressive and all the "predicted" benefits are pretty much smoke and mirrors.
Now they want computers to boot faster? I happen to *like* the fact that it takes 15 minutes to get Vista up and running.
I don't. That's why I stuck with XP. I'm twice as fast as a Vista machine on half the hardware.
Hear, hear! I don't even know why they bothered developing processors after the 386, or anything faster than 1200 baud modems. They worked fine, it's just these damn kids were too impatient to wait 15 hours to download 50 megs, or 3 hours to render a single frame of Doom 3.
There's a difference between going for more power (when you know it's feasible) and just being silly and making unreasonable goals based on diminishing returns (the difference between a boot-up time of, say, 20 and 15 seconds). Improved processors allow you to make a lot more calculations in a shorter time space. This is a good thing. Managing to shave 5 seconds off boot? Not so much so, especially since it offers no other concrete advantages once you're booted.
And the GP even stated that they wanted an "integrity check" on the stuff (or at least on the OS files in it?) on boot. Clock how long it takes to do a memory integrity check of your 4GB RAM sometime. You're going to see it roughly on par for "boot time" on that alone.
Oh, and the reason for needing the memory integrity check? When you have lowered power or (especially) a spike followed by a brown spot in power that could cause the machine to turn off, it doesn't just shut you down cold. Heck, shutting the machine down doesn't immediately shut it down all the way, that's why you are advised to wait a few seconds on a hard reboot. You get all sorts of interesting problems, erroneous calculations, just plain bad data thrown around as the transistors start getting voltages that are out of their normal operating tolerances.
Would you trust a memory image that's been through that? Worse yet, would you trust a memory image of that sort to run an integrity check? No? So guess what - we're back to having to load that memory check routine from another source; hard drive, eeprom, etc.
Now that we've loaded that, of course, we can check the system files against the routine with a checksum, theoretically speaking.
But now what do we do with all the other data required for a "restore" of a powered-down system, one of the most popular pipe dreams of these ideas? Do we have a set of checks for each file in there? Where did we store it? How long will it take to check it? Are we recalculating it constantly on the fly, are we keeping a parity check bit for it in the same (problematic) storage and using space for that?
How much space, and extra processor overhead, will it take to ensure with even 90% confidence that you didn't get corrupt data back in your videogame when you powered the comp back up from an unexpected power outage?
If you have a system that updates a LOT less frequently with a lot less complexity... then you have a system that might as well just keep its system state on a pair of revolving images on the hard disk anyways. Only write to one at a time and you "know" with pretty good confidence that the other one should be good after a power outage.
Just don't let anyone with a head cold near your precious neural gel-paks, or else your doctor will have the whole crew running around injecting the computer's network systems with theraflu cold/sinus every 4 hours.
Plus, it's a bitch when the computer controlling the engines sneezes.
In theory, the OS could stay in RAM and just do a quick verification check to make sure it's not damaged/corrupted in some way
Reminds me of letting Col. Clink check on the prisoners. Letting the OS "integrity check" itself is an amusing thought and a very, very bad idea.
then boom, you're at your desktop in a matter of seconds.
We get this pipe dream every few years - people talking about the "instant-on" computer. Sleep modes, wake modes, hibernation, etc.
I have an idea: grow a few seconds' worth of patience.
It would certainly benefit the likes of embedded devices, set-top boxes and such that are starting to really take the piss with their multi-minute startup times.
Hmmm... I have an Xbox360, DVD player, DVD/vcr Recorder combo unit, Xbox, PS3, Wii, PS2, and a computer. The only one with a "multi-minute" startup time is the computer. And honestly, that stays on most of the time anyways since its primary purpose is as a NAS for the Xbox to feed media content from (gotta love XBMC).
Other than the computer, my TV is the longest-warming-up item. And that's because it's an lcd projection screen, and has to warm the bulb up.
Where are these "multi-minute startup" devices you're referring to? Let me guess, you grew up on Elmo and your generation has the attention span of a goldfish.
For reference's sake: older CRT televisions/monitors can take as much as a few minutes to fully warm up, and generally 30-45 seconds to wake and warm up. Projectors and most big-screen TV's, same deal. Want to know how long it used to take to fast-forward through the ads in a VHS movie? Actually, it's shorter than trying to get past the adcrap the movie studios are putting on DVD's these days.
And that's not even mentioning the fact that the MafiAA companies are illegally abusing the FBI warning code to prevent you from skipping/fast-forwarding past the aforementioned adcrap.
PVs are no god-send, but they are better than oil and coal in that area.
Run your numbers again. You are incorrect.
Wind farms are neither disruptive nor noisy, provided you put them in the right place and build them right. Even older ones are silent when about half a mile away. Considering that they're built in the middle of nowhere, either on pastures, the ocean or mountain/hill passes, that's not an issue. How do I know? I bike past them about once a month. The real issue though is that when something does go wrong, it results in some spectacular failures.
You've obviously never been around the large-scale ones in western Texas.
I'm wondering though - who is the idiot who put a tidal generator into a lake?
Great Lakes plans have been developed. South Korea also tried it with the creation of Shihwa Lake - though admittedly that's more of putting a huge freaking dam on an ocean inlet, rather than a "true" lake.
And an earthquake that raises or lowers the ocean floor by more than a few feet is more than just "simple tectonic activity"... It's tectonic activity that will ruin the entire area.
Perhaps you would do better to relearn stuff you should have been aware of in second grade. The earth regularly changes - when it moves smoothly, you don't notice too much (until you find something like this, and you don't usually see the "day to day" effects because the soil and even some of the bedrock may slide along on top of the plate itself. However, the effects of all of the boundaries (as well as "hot spot" eruptions) mean that the plates sink and rise quite regularly, and wobble as well, and changes in the water line based on this are not unusual at all.
Biomass energy is not generated from edible food. Or at least, those who suggest it ought to be shot (see corn ethanol).
Agreed.
Biomass energy is generally generated by decomposition of fecal matter and refuse plant matter - think corn stalks.
The "refuse plant matter" and "fecal matter" you refer to, however, normally make their way back into the food system as compost and manure (they're what makes farmers' fields steam in the morning during the pre-planting season). Without these, we'd quickly deplete the soil on many farms and we'd have a major problem, which makes them far less of a "great source" of energy than you're giving them credit for. About the best idea is the collection of waste heat in the composting process, but so far with the exception of some amazingly energy-rich poo (such as elephant dung) the numbers don't work out. The capture of methane in the decomposition process has also been attempted, but overall results haven't been truly encouraging on that front either.
And I don't know anybody who creates animal feed from wood chips.... unless they're criminals.
However, you would get more energy back from wood chips if you simply would burn them, say in a stove or wood heater, rather than wasting time, effort, and chemicals trying to make ethanol from them.
I have to say, I've noticed that those who complain the most about being buried by unfair modding seem to be little more than barely literate trolls who communicate their lack of knowledge through caps, insults and repetitions of long-debunked myths. In other words, they are for whom moderation was introduced.
I have to say, I've noticed that there is an overwhelming political bias on Slashdot, and that the inevitable result of not bowing down to the left-wing sacred cows is that the moderation system gets abused, with people modding "-1 Troll" simply because they disagree with what is being said, especially if it's phrased intelligently and gets in the way of their foaming-mouthed "Chimpy McHalliBusHitler" ranting.
And all the furniture I buy from Ikea is solid wood.
Highly, highly unlikely. What you more likely have is particle board with a wood-looking veneer.
The only Ikea furniture that is "solid" wood is their outdoor patio tables/chairs/benches, which need to be able to withstand outdoor humidity shifts and rain.
The other half of his argument was that "if we don't reprocess nuclear materials, it'll be an example to other nations and they won't either."
And as a result, the following nations lack either Nuclear Weapons or Nuclear Weapon Programs today: North Korea, Pakistan, India, Syria, Iran, China... oh, right.
Carter is, and has always been, a moron.
You DO realize that the only way to cause something to "no longer" be a Noble Gas involves either Fusion or Fission, right?
It's not necessarily the "funding" - it's getting past the NIMBY factor and all the hippy enviro-nutjobs who show up WHEREVER you try to build one causing trouble, trying to get your permits reconsidered/denied, making ludicrous false claims to force you to redo your impact studies a thousand times, and yes, even engaging in actual vandalism and destruction of property.
"Further, I suspect that by the time all the dust settles on bringing the next nuclear power plant online (10+ years is my off-the-cuff guess), that the cost for solar power will have dropped by an order of magnitude or two."
Howzat? The cost of raw materials for polysilicate is not going to go down, if anything it will go up. The cost of metal and the polishing sludge (which BTW is highly toxic and pretty much toxifies the soil forever even after the solar farm is removed from the area) for solar farms? Don't make me laugh.
My thought is to take all the nuclear public subsidy money and plug it into purchase contracts to install solar power on gov't facilities.
And if you had more than two brain cells to rub together, you'd realize why this is a fucking stupid idea. See above. No seriously, look up, see the cloud, and realize how EASY it is to get into a power deficit if you rely solely on solar.
then we still need to repurpose Yucca Mountain.
After all, we'll need it for the 100's of 1,000's of tons of toxic waste left over from making the polysilicate for all those solar panels.
Mod Parent up - this is AMAZINGLY well stated.
Ever been to Pasadena, TX?
We live it. So get over yourself.
People really need to start investing in sustainable renewable energy, things like tidal, wind, solar, and what IMO is the most untapped, geothermal. Seriously, we have all these active volcanos around the planet exerting kilotons of energy spewing gasses into the air and creating massive amounts of heat, why aren't we harnessing that more?
Let's take this one at a time.
Solar: producing the polysilica base necessary for the solar panels on housing produces TONS of toxic chemical waste that then has to be disposed of somehow. Mirrors in solar farms require tons of toxic chemicals for constant cleaning and shining. Power generation is only good for a few hours of the day when you're aligned right, when there's not a cloud in the way, during the right season of the year when the sun's at a good angle, etc.
Tidal: Can only be done on immense lakes or the ocean shores. Waterline shifts (not due to "global warming", just tectonic activity and seasonal fluctuation) quickly diminish the power production levels as the turbines fail to match the tidal movement. Requires taking up a large amount of coastline and tends to get a lot of dead waterlife caught in it. If that's not enough to make you pause, two words: Zebra Mussels.
Wind: already (even at its low usage) a major killer of endangered bird species. Wind farms are large, INCREDIBLY (as in "you have to wear earplugs to avoid hearing damage") noisy, extremely susceptible to damage from even relatively minor storms, and only produce meaningful power on a relatively narrow band of wind speeds which rarely are sustained for a defined or predictable period.
Geothermal:
Seriously, we have all these active volcanos around the planet exerting kilotons of energy spewing gasses into the air and creating massive amounts of heat, why aren't we harnessing that more?
You just answered your own question. The best locations are right next to explosively active volcanoes. You put the plant in, but then you have to worry about projectiles, blast area, lava flow path, toxic gases (chlorine belches as just one example) hazardous to workers, and all the rest of the problems inherent in the setup.
Plus, you have to be EXTREMELY careful drilling in, lest your own geothermal pipes provide an escape hatch for the bottled-up pressures and you wind up setting off the equivalent of the cherry-bomb-under-the-garbage-can routine, with your extremely expensive power plant as the garbage can. (Hint: the garbage can usually doesn't survive that routine.)
"drool drool gotta mod down anyone who talks the truth about St. Barack drool drool droll"
the website of an Ethanol consortium says that?
Gee, I'm not surprised.
How about some honest research instead.
Also here.
And then there's the other effects...
Hey jackass, where are you going to store all the nuclear waster? In your backyard? Let's sing you up. Do some research.
Better idea: put a breeder reactor RIGHT in my backyard. Reprocess the spent "waste" right back into fuel for reuse, like RESPONSIBLE people would (and DO) do in other countries.
The reason we don't have breeder reactors in America? Jimmy Carter thought the US could serve an "example" to tin-pot dictators like Syria, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Iran, China, etc... by having a "moratorium" on nuclear enrichment. Gee, how'd that work out so far?
Any time you tell the truth about "Saint Carter" or "The Blessed Barack", you get slashdot trolls attacking you left and right.
The newer designs of reactors have no CHANCE of doing what either Chernobyl or 3-Mile Island did. Pebble-Bed reactors fail "safe" (without guidance, they simply hit their equilibrium temperature which is well within the structural design limits and stay there). Plus, they cool by inert gas rather than water so there's no chance of a contaminated steam-cloud explosion (which was why Chernobyl was so nasty).
Any time you mention the truth about the enviro-nutjob movement, some slashdot troll with a mod point will be there to bury you.
I'm all about SENSIBLE environmental policy. That means we have to balance OUR needs for resources with RESPONSIBLE environmentalism, not turn the entire fucking planet into an off-limits nature preserve.
And yes, it means that there just may need to be a power plant, or a chemical refinery, or any other of a large number of the usual items that trigger "OMGWTFNIMBYAAUGH" reactions from the enviro-nutjobs, NEAR to population centers so that we RESPONSIBLY reduce the transportation and delivery costs (not just monetary but WASTED FUEL ENERGY).
Think about it. It costs us at LEAST 25% more fossil fuel energy to turn OUR FOOD SUPPLY into ethanol fuel and deliver it where it needs to go, than we get back. Ethanol has been one of the biggest energy disasters we've ever gotten into. And at the same time we WASTE petroleum trying to do this, the price of food for starving countries is going through the roof because the US, an exporter of corn, is BURNING THE FOOD SUPPLY - LITERALLY.
Think of it this way: would you dump a gallon jug of Jack Daniels in your gas tank? Guess what - YOU JUST DID. Oh, and the reason you constantly have to get your injectors cleaned and serviced and buy injector cleaner to put in your tank? That's right - ethanol is incredibly corrosive to your rubber fuel line!
And yet the enviro-nutjobs keep screaming for ethanol production and refuse to consider how wasteful it is. They refuse to consider the fact that the "renewable" energy sources all have problems too: in order to make an order of solar panels from polysilicon, you create an immense amount of TOXIC WASTE that has to be dealt with. If you run a mirror-based solar farm, you've got to keep the mirrors polished (congratulations, keep a lot of toxic chemicals handy and be prepared to toxify the hell out of the soil) just as a start. And all it takes to lower or cut entirely your generating capacity is a nice cloud or two. Earth seems to be fairly old hat at generating those, somehow. Walk outside and take a quick peek at the sky, chances are there's one around.
Wind farms are INCREDIBLY noisy and disruptive, the power is intermittent at best with very minimal generating capacity for the land area used, and a major killer of endangered birds already.
Geothermal has limited areas in which it can be placed, areas which are invariably tectonically unstable (or worse yet: the "best" places are usually right in the expected lava flow/blast zone of a volcano).
Tidal power has the same problem, you can only do it on a shoreline, and a rise/fall in the shoreline (not due to "global warming" but simply tectonic activity or seasonal changes in large lakes) can kill it quite easily, since the turbines have to be set at the right place to match the incoming/outgoing tides... and even then, they ONLY generate power during the tidal shift.
Biomass is a nice thought, but you get back to the food supply and other effects. Wood chips? Watch the price of particulate board matter of all sorts (the sort likely most of your furniture is made of, especially if it came from Ikea) jack through the roof. Much of the rest is fed to animals or composted to create fertilizer in order to grow more food, which means you'll decrease crop yields and jack food prices up again.
Do I say we shouldn't use these? No. But if we had a SENSIBLE and RESPONSIBLE nuclear policy, including recycling "spent" fuel and refining it back for reuse rather than trying to stash it under a mountain, we could eliminate a LOT more of the oil/natural gas/coal portion of our energy than these sources are ever likely to manage.