I would like to see 3d gaming, i.e. game console support for the 3d displays all the major LCD manufacturers are coming out with. By 2012 3d might be a more-or-less standard feature in new TVs.
Yeah, I know most of slashdot hates 3d TV, doesn't think graphics matter in games, etc, etc.. but c'mon, gaming is the perfect application, because you actually DO have a 3d representation of the world that supports selecting your own viewpoint. For certain types of games such as car driving games, I think 3d could be become almost indispensable (try driving in traffic with one eye shut and see how you like it).
Agreed, except it's not just increasing gas prices making EVs viable, but also better EV technology. Look what's happened to battery density over the last 20 years. Sheesh, the EV1 was based on lead-acid batteries, which only have about 1/6 the specific energy (Wh/kg) of lithium-ion.
First nitpick, the Volt is not a pure EV and can go 300 miles between refueling, so it works for long commutes too. Maybe you meant the Nissan Leaf.
Anyways, whether you save money depends on what happens to gas and electricity prices in the future, over the life of the car.
It costs $24,000 to fuel a 25 mpg car for 150K miles. That happens to be almost identical to the purchase price of a Nissan Leaf, after tax credits. So paying extra upfront for a more efficient car is not crazy. Whether and how much it will actually pay off, nobody knows for sure.
Have you ever watched Who Killed the Electric Car? They interviewed people from the GM team itself, who were pariahs within the larger company because GM did not want to go in that direction - they just wanted the whole thing to die. After helping kill the policies that would have created a market for the EV1, GM refused generous offers for the ones they had already built, repossessed them, and then smashed them into cubes.
Then Toyota came in with the Prius - also viewed by Detroit as an impractical science experiment sure to be rejected by the American Consumer - and Toyota proceeded to make tons of money on it.
But these days computing is less esoteric than ever. Who still thinks of "computing as number crunching whose main application is business and engineering"? Computers are mundane now. As I was earning my CS degree, I got more comments like, "what's to research? You turn on the computer, do your word processing or whatever, and turn it off."
I guess I see your point, but with the Volt, I could drive it to work every day and never buy gas again. The Prius can't do that; all its power comes ultimately from gasoline. (It is supposed to have plug-in charging starting in 2012 though.)
That said, I would rather not have the weight and complexity of the gasoline engine at all. Even the 100 mile range of Nissan Leaf is way too much. The battery is very expensive and heavy, so I would rather just have enough batteries to go 40 miles or so. I wish the EVs would just let you decide how many power packs to purchase and lug around so each buyer could decide what they want.
UPS runs a few hundred hybrids (granted, a drop in the bucket) plus 20,000 other "green" vehicles (whatever that means) in their fleet.
I would have thought that with constant stop-and-go driving, regenerative braking would be a huge win. The article says it's a 35% fuel savings. But apparently even that isn't enough for them to switch all their new vehicle purchases to hybrid.
No. All unregulated markets devolve into monopolies - ultimately, political as well as economic. That's why dictatorship is the norm throughout human history.
The political innovation that made markets work so well is to counterbalance them with democracy, where the guiding principle is "one person one vote" (i.e. votes can't be traded away - the opposite of markets).
Governments are associated with monopolies when market forces overcome democratic forces within the government. Then you get illicit market activity, such as kickbacks, blackmail, and unwarranted granting of monopolies.
Car crashes, I mean. They're a tough issue in racing games. Some of what goes wrong:
* A griefer who wants to crash rather than race ruins the game
* You discover you can lap more quickly by driving into the hairpin at the end of a straightaway at full speed and crashing into the wall, saving time on deceleration
* You discover you can't crash the AI drivers. So you get the inside line and ride them around sharp corners.
Once you find a ridiculous tactic is highly effective, the game is spoiled. But for whatever reason, it's not fun to drive a game so slowly/safely you can go for an hour without crashing, so handling crashes realistically is problematic too.
Another very cool application would be a 3d object digitizer (say you want to put a 3d model of your own face into a video game). Instead of building a 3d model manually in e.g. 3d Studio Max (extremely laborious), you just turn the object over a few times and it combines the visual and depth fields to make a 3d, texture-mapped model of the object.
This is somewhat possible without the depth field, but vastly more accurate (and easy) with it.
Do you actually get the pose estimate parameters? That would be awesome. I had assumed that was being done in software on the XBox 360, and this just gives you the video and depth field (which is awesome in itself).
Also DVD/CD are slow enough that they work pretty well over USB. They're powered by USB (no wall wart), and reasonably recent laptops can boot from them too. If you want to watch a DVD on the plane, it also saves battery life to copy it to the HDD before you leave instead of bringing the media along.
We might not know _exactly_ what it is, but we know what it isn't. Calling everything "cloud" is just ignorant.
It's a desirable sort of ignorance though - the whole point is a layered design so above a certain level the implementer doesn't need to think about the hardware. Sure, behind the magic curtain will be a team of people create the "cloud" abstraction, to whom it's all very concrete and not cloudy at all. Call it "ignorance" if you like, but in computer science we use the euphemism "separation of concerns":)
If you put a bunch of CEOs in a room they wouldn't agree on anything either.
Top-down control is good when making decisions quickly matters more than getting them right. Battle is the classic example.
Centrally planned economies (i.e. one corporation on a national scale) always go off the rails. On the other hand, everybody acting as individuals and simply contracting to each other would be way too inefficient. You need a certain amount of centralization; not too much, not too little.
No, I don't think they mean there should be a new separate Internet that is neutral.
What I think they're saying is that advertised speed and bandwidth for "internet service" must be the minimum allowed for any Internet site. If you then want to offer voip or video on demand services that use more bandwidth, fine, but those should be segregated so you can't advertize the speed those access as the speed of your "internet" offering.
In other words, the Internet should be neutral, and content delivery networks should be considered separate even if they use internet protocols.
Wow Yahoo, if you merge with AOL after throwing Microsoft's bid back in their face a couple years ago, there will be some serious questions of why you declined such an eligible suitor in favor of a bum. Have you lost all your self esteem? Or are you one of those hopeless cases in love with the idea of changing and redeeming your partner? That never works!
I think another major factor blocking adoption of digital textbooks will be the elimination of resale. Most people don't bother to resell paperback novels, so the price for a Kindle version vs. a paperback version can be about the same. In contrast, many students DO resell textbooks, so publishers would have to reduce the price of the digital version accordingly - which I'm guessing they'll be very slow to do.
Caveat, you don't need a PC or browser to watch Hulu Plus. Newer TV's (certainly Sony, I'm sure others too) have Internet connectivity and Hulu Plus "Coming Soon!" has been on the menu for months.
The ads kill it for me though. They're almost the only thing justifying my continued use of a PVR. Then again, they're the only thing justifying the broadcast of the programming in the first place, so, my thanks go out to all those sitting through them.
Well, it does "something" reliably (which might well beat a more ambitious but failed attempt). But compare Dance Dance Revolution style games on the two; with Kinect, you dance and it watches you dance and scores you; on the wii, you just tilt your hand in time with the music. Big difference.
Comparing the wii to the Kinect is absurd. One is an accelerometer, the other is a full-body skeletal pose estimator with probably 20 degrees of freedom. Like comparing a flashlight to an LCD display. The only question now is, will Kinect actually work?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know most of slashdot hates 3d TV, doesn't think graphics matter in games, etc, etc.. but c'mon, gaming is the perfect application, because you actually DO have a 3d representation of the world that supports selecting your own viewpoint. For certain types of games such as car driving games, I think 3d could be become almost indispensable (try driving in traffic with one eye shut and see how you like it).
For another image (or if you just want a lot more detail and a LOT more hype) here's a presentation by the researcher.
Agreed, except it's not just increasing gas prices making EVs viable, but also better EV technology. Look what's happened to battery density over the last 20 years. Sheesh, the EV1 was based on lead-acid batteries, which only have about 1/6 the specific energy (Wh/kg) of lithium-ion.
Anyways, whether you save money depends on what happens to gas and electricity prices in the future, over the life of the car.
It costs $24,000 to fuel a 25 mpg car for 150K miles. That happens to be almost identical to the purchase price of a Nissan Leaf, after tax credits. So paying extra upfront for a more efficient car is not crazy. Whether and how much it will actually pay off, nobody knows for sure.
Then Toyota came in with the Prius - also viewed by Detroit as an impractical science experiment sure to be rejected by the American Consumer - and Toyota proceeded to make tons of money on it.
But these days computing is less esoteric than ever. Who still thinks of "computing as number crunching whose main application is business and engineering"? Computers are mundane now. As I was earning my CS degree, I got more comments like, "what's to research? You turn on the computer, do your word processing or whatever, and turn it off."
That said, I would rather not have the weight and complexity of the gasoline engine at all. Even the 100 mile range of Nissan Leaf is way too much. The battery is very expensive and heavy, so I would rather just have enough batteries to go 40 miles or so. I wish the EVs would just let you decide how many power packs to purchase and lug around so each buyer could decide what they want.
I would have thought that with constant stop-and-go driving, regenerative braking would be a huge win. The article says it's a 35% fuel savings. But apparently even that isn't enough for them to switch all their new vehicle purchases to hybrid.
The political innovation that made markets work so well is to counterbalance them with democracy, where the guiding principle is "one person one vote" (i.e. votes can't be traded away - the opposite of markets).
Governments are associated with monopolies when market forces overcome democratic forces within the government. Then you get illicit market activity, such as kickbacks, blackmail, and unwarranted granting of monopolies.
* A griefer who wants to crash rather than race ruins the game
* You discover you can lap more quickly by driving into the hairpin at the end of a straightaway at full speed and crashing into the wall, saving time on deceleration
* You discover you can't crash the AI drivers. So you get the inside line and ride them around sharp corners.
Once you find a ridiculous tactic is highly effective, the game is spoiled. But for whatever reason, it's not fun to drive a game so slowly/safely you can go for an hour without crashing, so handling crashes realistically is problematic too.
Forgot? Heavens no. They're first on our list of companies to extort for intellectual property that we now own.
This is somewhat possible without the depth field, but vastly more accurate (and easy) with it.
Do you actually get the pose estimate parameters? That would be awesome. I had assumed that was being done in software on the XBox 360, and this just gives you the video and depth field (which is awesome in itself).
It's sort of sad. Then again, he is an heir. He didn't earn the money. The guys who stole it from him worked harder for it than he did.
Also DVD/CD are slow enough that they work pretty well over USB. They're powered by USB (no wall wart), and reasonably recent laptops can boot from them too. If you want to watch a DVD on the plane, it also saves battery life to copy it to the HDD before you leave instead of bringing the media along.
Not donwplaying your need for adequate storage, but SSDs cope with running near-full MUCH better than HDDs, since fragmentation is a non-issue.
It's a desirable sort of ignorance though - the whole point is a layered design so above a certain level the implementer doesn't need to think about the hardware. Sure, behind the magic curtain will be a team of people create the "cloud" abstraction, to whom it's all very concrete and not cloudy at all. Call it "ignorance" if you like, but in computer science we use the euphemism "separation of concerns" :)
Top-down control is good when making decisions quickly matters more than getting them right. Battle is the classic example.
Centrally planned economies (i.e. one corporation on a national scale) always go off the rails. On the other hand, everybody acting as individuals and simply contracting to each other would be way too inefficient. You need a certain amount of centralization; not too much, not too little.
What I think they're saying is that advertised speed and bandwidth for "internet service" must be the minimum allowed for any Internet site. If you then want to offer voip or video on demand services that use more bandwidth, fine, but those should be segregated so you can't advertize the speed those access as the speed of your "internet" offering.
In other words, the Internet should be neutral, and content delivery networks should be considered separate even if they use internet protocols.
Wow Yahoo, if you merge with AOL after throwing Microsoft's bid back in their face a couple years ago, there will be some serious questions of why you declined such an eligible suitor in favor of a bum. Have you lost all your self esteem? Or are you one of those hopeless cases in love with the idea of changing and redeeming your partner? That never works!
I think another major factor blocking adoption of digital textbooks will be the elimination of resale. Most people don't bother to resell paperback novels, so the price for a Kindle version vs. a paperback version can be about the same. In contrast, many students DO resell textbooks, so publishers would have to reduce the price of the digital version accordingly - which I'm guessing they'll be very slow to do.
The ads kill it for me though. They're almost the only thing justifying my continued use of a PVR. Then again, they're the only thing justifying the broadcast of the programming in the first place, so, my thanks go out to all those sitting through them.
I'm sure Microsoft put somewhere in the fine print of the EULA they can do whatever they want, and you can't. You can be sure of that.
Well, it does "something" reliably (which might well beat a more ambitious but failed attempt). But compare Dance Dance Revolution style games on the two; with Kinect, you dance and it watches you dance and scores you; on the wii, you just tilt your hand in time with the music. Big difference.
Comparing the wii to the Kinect is absurd. One is an accelerometer, the other is a full-body skeletal pose estimator with probably 20 degrees of freedom. Like comparing a flashlight to an LCD display. The only question now is, will Kinect actually work?