"Welcome to the 3D Atomic NanoTechnology of the 3rd Millennium! Atomic Holographic Optical Data Storage NanoTechnology! Patents Granted on Revolutionary NanoTechnology for development of Rewritable Ferroelectric Volume Atomic Holographic Optical Storage NanoTechnology!...will NOT be effected by extreme high energy EMF or Cosmic Rays i.e. Solar Flares and Solar Winds!"
Gold!
This is what happens when you train monkeys to speak using only a 1950s physics textbook and a biography of PT Barnum.
With 100 TB, why not forgo the whole notion of removable media and make it a permanent, integrated storage device? As you say, you'd only need one disc and one drive.
If we're talking around $1000 for this type of capacity, one would think the advantages of an integrated device (longevity, reduced mechanical movement, ability to seal or create a vaccuum in the interior) would faaar outweigh the advantages of being able to remove data and carry it around in your pocket.
Of course, at this stage it's preposterous science fiction mumbo-jumbo anyway:)
Anyone care to fill us in on the rate at which the energy received by a surface decreases with distance? I imagine that, given the incredibly weak force applied by light, it would take one HUGE sail to get anything like meaningful acceleration for space travel. Surely be the time you are a few million kilometres from the Sun the amount of force being applied will have dropped off by a huge amount?
Anyway, we should get to Mars and back a few times before we try to get to the stars... baby steps.
As a small scale web developer I can attest to the fact that meta-tag 'spamming' can be very effective. Google may not respond, but other engines do. As soon as that happens, up goes your Google ranking.
Of course, I don't really consider it spamming to include variations, common misspellings, etc. etc., and any search engine worth its salt will ignore repeated words in a single meta tag.
As for Google - who knows how they do their rankings nowadays...
Am I right in thinking that most of the current crop of video cards don't really push AGP 8x at this stage? I seem to remember seeing some benchmarks where high end Radeons were not really that much faster on 8x vs 4x.
At least it will give 'gamers' a chance to brag about how fat their bandwidth is, I suppose.
Unless you're a total performance nutter your CPU and graphics card will do just fine for the next 12 or so months. You should be ok with Doom III at medium detail and 1024x768 resolution.
They are talking about a mid-range GeForce 6-series, most likely a '6600', i.e. the next generation version of your current card. I would relax and let the prices drop.
Also, your CPU is more than adequate for the time being. Don't listen to these idiots - they probably have aerodynamic fins and flourescent light tubes on their PCs.
Based on recent cinema experiences, you would have to say were still a hell of a long way from this. I just saw Spiderman 2, and a lot of the CG work still looks totally artificial. Likewise, the trailer for I, Robot made me cringe with its computer-generated aura. Even LOTR looked fake in places.
Considering these movies are using the absolute cutting edge of pre-rendered graphics technology, I would suggest we're still a decade or so from anything like 'real' looking PC graphics.
Don't they interlace the lines, with each card doing an alternate line?
I think that this is actually a rare case where you can actually get close to 200% performance. For one thing, the job that is being done is very well understood and the cards need zero flexibility - hence they can write very specialised software that does one thing and does it very efficiently.
For another thing, many of the common problems of parallel computing are caused by communications, and in the case of SLI the two 'nodes' do not need to communicate - the mothership (i.e. the CPU via the PCIx bus) does all the organisation and communicating, and even that is basically one-way, so there is very little in the way of latency related issues. From a software point of view, the only real task is to shovel half the data one way, and half the other way - significantly easier than, say, a system where you have to constantly send and receive data to a range of nodes operating at different speeds.
I seem to recall that the Voodoo II (bless its zombie bones) was able to get near 2x performance in parallel.
They pay hideous prices for hifi equipment and other electronics, too. As a rule it seems that UK prices for this type of stuff is about 1.5x Australian prices (where I am), which are about 1.2x US prices.
I have lived in the UK briefly, and EVERYTHING is horrendously overpriced, excepting maybe chocolate for some weird reason. The strangest part is that noone complains about it - they just seem to accept it.
Even weirder, wages are really not proportionally higher compared to the cost of living. A lot of Australians head to the UK because they will be 'earning the pound', only to find it costs them $15 Australian for a meal at McDonald's that costs $6 at home, yet their income has only risen by about 20% or so.
How many people seriously play games over this res?
For one thing, computers that can play Doom III and the like at higher than 1280x1024 are not expected to exist until sometime in the 24th century.
For another, there are several things that make serious gaming waaay more enjoyable than straight-out resolution, including graphics card quality settings and refresh rate. Most decent monitors will still start to lose refresh rate above 1024x768... if you want anything close to 85-100Hz at higher than 1280x1024 you are talking about insanely expensive equipement.
IMHO most modern games are best played at 1024x768 on a decent gaming rig. You get beautifully high frame rates, and with a decent video card you can have all the quality settings absolutely cranked, whilst running at 100Hz or higher on your monitor to go extra easy on the eyes.
Anyone who claims they 'need' much higher resolutions is full of it.
For example, everyone is ranting on about the atmosphere in Doom III, and a huge part of that seems to be a direct result of the awesome, surround sound audio experience.
A lot of other games recently have had incredible audio. Some examples that spring to mind include Deus Ex (atmospheric, surround sound, with great music), KOTOR (hard to make bad audio when you have the Star Wars themes and light sabre fight noises), Grand Prix 4 (motor racing in surround sound), and Vietcong (not a great game but it had cool music and sound). Less recently Red Alert 2 had great music, and I still think there's nothing quite like the sound of a fully fledged melee in Quake III, with rockets rumbling, railguns pinging, and shotguns banging away.
We're all nostalgic for old games. Some of my favourites sound-wise include UFO/XCOM, Sam and Max, Speedball 2, and pretty much anything on Amiga. But this doesn't mean that modern games, with surround sound and near-cinematic quality are somehow bad or boring. Maybe the difference is just simplicity - when you have very limited ability to use samples and only one or two channels, you have to come up with something catchy and simple.
No, not that microsoft, the kind from Neuromancer. The idea of placing fully functional software systems on small, portable pieces of data storage that can easily be slotted into different hardware reminds me a lot of Neuromancer and similar books, as well as games like Deus Ex. I don't know about the more complex microsofts from Gibson et al, but I can certainly imagine something that could translate spoken language being stored on something like this... visiting France? Just slot your French translator card into your portable wearable computer.
In the short term, this could be part of a counter-revolutionary movement against the notion of ubiquitous wireless computing - rather than making most devices dumb terminals that rely on a remote centralised server for their data repository, this could effectively make any dumb piece of hardware a fully fledged computer, even without a network connection (indeed, it might be preferable for security or logistical reasons not to have to worry about a network).
I wonder what kinds of things we'll be able to do with this type of technology when memory cards can hold 100s of gigabytes of data?
We (Australia) are scared shitless of asia. Not speaking for myself, but many Australians are very scared of Indonesia and more vaguely of China. After all, if there was a serious regional or even world war, we're not exactly in the best geographical location. Although many Aussies would deny this, it is certainly a subconscious thread that permeates our society.
As a result, we do everything in our power to suck up to the USA, in the hopes that if we are ever attacked Uncle Sam will roll in and rescue us. Given you Americans don't need much prompting to get involved in dubious wars, and Asia is an old favourite of yours, I'm sure this would happen. I seriously doubt, however, that all of Australia's obsequious toadying is really going to make a difference, other than to make us a prime nuclear target because we will be an integral part of your stupid missile defence shield.
It is proposed that there will be a corresponding increase in personal rights to match the US's 'fair use' rights. Part of this will allow the bypassing of encryption in order to exercise rights to use material that you own (e.g. viewing the data on a DVD).
The question is, will Australia follow through and actually implement these? If Howard gets reelected, don't count on it.
It may interest./ DOS gamers to know that there is also (finally) a fix to get UFO: Enemy Unknown, aka XCom, aka possibly the greatest game of all time, to work under Windows XP.
Must also agree with parent - this article is useless. The worst card they benchmark is the absolute top of the line for the generation of cards that is only just starting to be replaced. If I recall correctly the X800 and the new nvidia cards have been known about for what, 3-4 months, and available for even fewer.
I would like to see a benchmark from a Radeon 9600 or worse up. That might actually help.
How come when Microsoft gives away 'free' stuff to academic/government organisations the slashdot crowd slams them for unethical business practices, witchcraft and other unwholesome activities... but when Apple effectively locks in iPod and iTunes as the essential student/music listening tools for an entire university campus, the VERY SAME slashdot readers all post about how super kewl Apple is and how they wish they went to the University in question.
I have read this far down the comments list and not one comment has been critical of Apple, and only a few critical of the University. Is a little objectivity too much to ask? I know that it's not quite on the same level as MS using free software to try to wipe out competition across entire markets, but it is nonetheless a shameless commercial ploy to eliminate competition, albeit in a rather smaller market.
I'm betting you're never going to have a 'million dollar idea' and invent the 21st century equivalent of a Model T Ford with that attitude.
Grandparent was trying to suggest that fundamental innovation is a Good Thing. I would think most./ers would agree with this position, being (a) geeks and (b) outsiders who tend to dislike the mainstream.
Which games would you say are particularly great for the Cube? I have been trying to figure this out for ages, I just can't seem to find anything that rivals the greats of N64 (e.g. Goldeneye, 1080, Perfect Dark, Waverace, Mario 64).
I have played Metroid Prime and I really didn't think it was that great - kinda like an average PC FPS IMHO. Mario Sunshine was ok but not fabulous... and the only half decent FPS I have found is Timesplitters 2, but even that is no Goldeneye-beater and the controls are horrendous compared to the 64.
Not trying to pick a fight, just frustrated that I'm not feeling the love from the Cube like I did from the Nixty...
Is that why F9-11 was the number 1 movie in the US for the past week?
Oh, and nobody cares where you're from unless you're also ethnocentric.
Au contraire, mon ami, the poster was no doubt referring to the fact that there is sustained, mindless France-bashing from many Americans that even extends to quite a number of discussions here on slashdot. I have time and time again seen people refer to how the US 'saved' the 'cowardly frogs' in both world wars and attempting to contrast recent opposition in Europe to the Iraq war with the American intervention in the Second World War. This is so staggeringly disrespectful to the many, many French who died in those wars that it doesn't even deserve to be debated; however, the poster is quite right to imply that the word 'French' is an absolute magnet for idiot posters and moderators on./ .
You clearly don't understand. Apple, super-genius founder of the MPEG standards group, has created the AAC format just for you! It not only has virtually zero cross platform adoption, making your choice of computer and music player uncomplicated and simple, it also selectively chooses which bits and bytes in the music are actually functional and useful in your hectic iLife and discards the rest, leaving you with the pure functional essence of music, with none of those useless extra bits that slow down users of Clunky Alternative Systems.
Don't think of it as 'lossy', this of it as 'simplified!'
It only took till the second modded-up post for me to find someone defending Apple's infinite wisdom and being rewarded by the moderators for doing so.
I would like you to challenge yourself by doing a little thought experiment. Not just the original poster but everyone who read the post and said, right on, you tell those Windoze fools. Please try to wipe your pre-formed opinion from your mind and look at this story objectively, and then come up with several reasons why Apple *should* offer downloads in a lossless format or at least at a better bitrate. Can you even do it? Or are your preconceptions that everyone who criticises Apple is wrong and an ill-informed idiot so overpowering that you can't even conceive of a valid argument that goes against your programmed response?
What it comes down to is that Apple is charging 99c per song for a crappy bitrate. Most serious music listeners that I know do not rip below 192kbps MP3 and far more often above 256kbps. Myself I go for 320kbps as a baseline. On a decent stereo with a subwoofer there is absolutely no question that you can tell the difference between a 128kbps AAC and an uncompressed CD audio track for all but the simplest, slowest music.
As for the megahertz myth... whatever else you want to say about it, until recently Intel and AMD have been so insanely far ahead of Apple that even if you want to take a 2:1 'myth factor' into account you still come out ahead on a (real) PC. And let's not even THINK about dollars per unit of non biased performance (tm).
Now I prepare myself to be sacrificed to the gods of Apple and modded into oblivion... let the cleansing of the thought crimes begin (Mod -1: Failure to Think Different (tm)).
Slashdot Mirror
"Welcome to the 3D Atomic NanoTechnology of the 3rd Millennium! Atomic Holographic Optical Data Storage NanoTechnology! Patents Granted on Revolutionary NanoTechnology for development of Rewritable Ferroelectric Volume Atomic Holographic Optical Storage NanoTechnology! ...will NOT be effected by extreme high energy EMF or Cosmic Rays i.e. Solar Flares and Solar Winds!"
Gold!
This is what happens when you train monkeys to speak using only a 1950s physics textbook and a biography of PT Barnum.
With 100 TB, why not forgo the whole notion of removable media and make it a permanent, integrated storage device? As you say, you'd only need one disc and one drive.
:)
If we're talking around $1000 for this type of capacity, one would think the advantages of an integrated device (longevity, reduced mechanical movement, ability to seal or create a vaccuum in the interior) would faaar outweigh the advantages of being able to remove data and carry it around in your pocket.
Of course, at this stage it's preposterous science fiction mumbo-jumbo anyway
Anyone care to fill us in on the rate at which the energy received by a surface decreases with distance? I imagine that, given the incredibly weak force applied by light, it would take one HUGE sail to get anything like meaningful acceleration for space travel. Surely be the time you are a few million kilometres from the Sun the amount of force being applied will have dropped off by a huge amount?
Anyway, we should get to Mars and back a few times before we try to get to the stars... baby steps.
As a small scale web developer I can attest to the fact that meta-tag 'spamming' can be very effective. Google may not respond, but other engines do. As soon as that happens, up goes your Google ranking.
Of course, I don't really consider it spamming to include variations, common misspellings, etc. etc., and any search engine worth its salt will ignore repeated words in a single meta tag.
As for Google - who knows how they do their rankings nowadays...
Am I right in thinking that most of the current crop of video cards don't really push AGP 8x at this stage? I seem to remember seeing some benchmarks where high end Radeons were not really that much faster on 8x vs 4x.
At least it will give 'gamers' a chance to brag about how fat their bandwidth is, I suppose.
Unless you're a total performance nutter your CPU and graphics card will do just fine for the next 12 or so months. You should be ok with Doom III at medium detail and 1024x768 resolution.
They are talking about a mid-range GeForce 6-series, most likely a '6600', i.e. the next generation version of your current card. I would relax and let the prices drop.
Also, your CPU is more than adequate for the time being. Don't listen to these idiots - they probably have aerodynamic fins and flourescent light tubes on their PCs.
Based on recent cinema experiences, you would have to say were still a hell of a long way from this. I just saw Spiderman 2, and a lot of the CG work still looks totally artificial. Likewise, the trailer for I, Robot made me cringe with its computer-generated aura. Even LOTR looked fake in places.
Considering these movies are using the absolute cutting edge of pre-rendered graphics technology, I would suggest we're still a decade or so from anything like 'real' looking PC graphics.
Moe: "And that's how, with a few minor adjustments, you can turn a regular gun into five guns." [applause]
Don't they interlace the lines, with each card doing an alternate line?
I think that this is actually a rare case where you can actually get close to 200% performance. For one thing, the job that is being done is very well understood and the cards need zero flexibility - hence they can write very specialised software that does one thing and does it very efficiently.
For another thing, many of the common problems of parallel computing are caused by communications, and in the case of SLI the two 'nodes' do not need to communicate - the mothership (i.e. the CPU via the PCIx bus) does all the organisation and communicating, and even that is basically one-way, so there is very little in the way of latency related issues. From a software point of view, the only real task is to shovel half the data one way, and half the other way - significantly easier than, say, a system where you have to constantly send and receive data to a range of nodes operating at different speeds.
I seem to recall that the Voodoo II (bless its zombie bones) was able to get near 2x performance in parallel.
They pay hideous prices for hifi equipment and other electronics, too. As a rule it seems that UK prices for this type of stuff is about 1.5x Australian prices (where I am), which are about 1.2x US prices.
I have lived in the UK briefly, and EVERYTHING is horrendously overpriced, excepting maybe chocolate for some weird reason. The strangest part is that noone complains about it - they just seem to accept it.
Even weirder, wages are really not proportionally higher compared to the cost of living. A lot of Australians head to the UK because they will be 'earning the pound', only to find it costs them $15 Australian for a meal at McDonald's that costs $6 at home, yet their income has only risen by about 20% or so.
How many people seriously play games over this res?
For one thing, computers that can play Doom III and the like at higher than 1280x1024 are not expected to exist until sometime in the 24th century.
For another, there are several things that make serious gaming waaay more enjoyable than straight-out resolution, including graphics card quality settings and refresh rate. Most decent monitors will still start to lose refresh rate above 1024x768... if you want anything close to 85-100Hz at higher than 1280x1024 you are talking about insanely expensive equipement.
IMHO most modern games are best played at 1024x768 on a decent gaming rig. You get beautifully high frame rates, and with a decent video card you can have all the quality settings absolutely cranked, whilst running at 100Hz or higher on your monitor to go extra easy on the eyes.
Anyone who claims they 'need' much higher resolutions is full of it.
that audio in games is 'bad' or 'boring' today.
For example, everyone is ranting on about the atmosphere in Doom III, and a huge part of that seems to be a direct result of the awesome, surround sound audio experience.
A lot of other games recently have had incredible audio. Some examples that spring to mind include Deus Ex (atmospheric, surround sound, with great music), KOTOR (hard to make bad audio when you have the Star Wars themes and light sabre fight noises), Grand Prix 4 (motor racing in surround sound), and Vietcong (not a great game but it had cool music and sound). Less recently Red Alert 2 had great music, and I still think there's nothing quite like the sound of a fully fledged melee in Quake III, with rockets rumbling, railguns pinging, and shotguns banging away.
We're all nostalgic for old games. Some of my favourites sound-wise include UFO/XCOM, Sam and Max, Speedball 2, and pretty much anything on Amiga. But this doesn't mean that modern games, with surround sound and near-cinematic quality are somehow bad or boring. Maybe the difference is just simplicity - when you have very limited ability to use samples and only one or two channels, you have to come up with something catchy and simple.
No, not that microsoft, the kind from Neuromancer. The idea of placing fully functional software systems on small, portable pieces of data storage that can easily be slotted into different hardware reminds me a lot of Neuromancer and similar books, as well as games like Deus Ex. I don't know about the more complex microsofts from Gibson et al, but I can certainly imagine something that could translate spoken language being stored on something like this... visiting France? Just slot your French translator card into your portable wearable computer.
In the short term, this could be part of a counter-revolutionary movement against the notion of ubiquitous wireless computing - rather than making most devices dumb terminals that rely on a remote centralised server for their data repository, this could effectively make any dumb piece of hardware a fully fledged computer, even without a network connection (indeed, it might be preferable for security or logistical reasons not to have to worry about a network).
I wonder what kinds of things we'll be able to do with this type of technology when memory cards can hold 100s of gigabytes of data?
The spiritual successor to SS2...
We (Australia) are scared shitless of asia. Not speaking for myself, but many Australians are very scared of Indonesia and more vaguely of China. After all, if there was a serious regional or even world war, we're not exactly in the best geographical location. Although many Aussies would deny this, it is certainly a subconscious thread that permeates our society.
As a result, we do everything in our power to suck up to the USA, in the hopes that if we are ever attacked Uncle Sam will roll in and rescue us. Given you Americans don't need much prompting to get involved in dubious wars, and Asia is an old favourite of yours, I'm sure this would happen. I seriously doubt, however, that all of Australia's obsequious toadying is really going to make a difference, other than to make us a prime nuclear target because we will be an integral part of your stupid missile defence shield.
It is proposed that there will be a corresponding increase in personal rights to match the US's 'fair use' rights. Part of this will allow the bypassing of encryption in order to exercise rights to use material that you own (e.g. viewing the data on a DVD).
The question is, will Australia follow through and actually implement these? If Howard gets reelected, don't count on it.
It may interest ./ DOS gamers to know that there is also (finally) a fix to get UFO: Enemy Unknown, aka XCom, aka possibly the greatest game of all time, to work under Windows XP.
Just go here for more info, you can get the full game (including the XP fix) at The Home of the Underdogs.
Must also agree with parent - this article is useless. The worst card they benchmark is the absolute top of the line for the generation of cards that is only just starting to be replaced. If I recall correctly the X800 and the new nvidia cards have been known about for what, 3-4 months, and available for even fewer.
I would like to see a benchmark from a Radeon 9600 or worse up. That might actually help.
How come when Microsoft gives away 'free' stuff to academic/government organisations the slashdot crowd slams them for unethical business practices, witchcraft and other unwholesome activities... but when Apple effectively locks in iPod and iTunes as the essential student/music listening tools for an entire university campus, the VERY SAME slashdot readers all post about how super kewl Apple is and how they wish they went to the University in question.
I have read this far down the comments list and not one comment has been critical of Apple, and only a few critical of the University. Is a little objectivity too much to ask? I know that it's not quite on the same level as MS using free software to try to wipe out competition across entire markets, but it is nonetheless a shameless commercial ploy to eliminate competition, albeit in a rather smaller market.
I'm betting you're never going to have a 'million dollar idea' and invent the 21st century equivalent of a Model T Ford with that attitude.
./ers would agree with this position, being (a) geeks and (b) outsiders who tend to dislike the mainstream.
Grandparent was trying to suggest that fundamental innovation is a Good Thing. I would think most
It's way better... better controls, less annoying environments... all around a better game, despite worse graphics.
Which games would you say are particularly great for the Cube? I have been trying to figure this out for ages, I just can't seem to find anything that rivals the greats of N64 (e.g. Goldeneye, 1080, Perfect Dark, Waverace, Mario 64).
I have played Metroid Prime and I really didn't think it was that great - kinda like an average PC FPS IMHO. Mario Sunshine was ok but not fabulous... and the only half decent FPS I have found is Timesplitters 2, but even that is no Goldeneye-beater and the controls are horrendous compared to the 64.
Not trying to pick a fight, just frustrated that I'm not feeling the love from the Cube like I did from the Nixty...
he's marginalizing himself more and more.
./ .
Is that why F9-11 was the number 1 movie in the US for the past week?
Oh, and nobody cares where you're from unless you're also ethnocentric.
Au contraire, mon ami, the poster was no doubt referring to the fact that there is sustained, mindless France-bashing from many Americans that even extends to quite a number of discussions here on slashdot. I have time and time again seen people refer to how the US 'saved' the 'cowardly frogs' in both world wars and attempting to contrast recent opposition in Europe to the Iraq war with the American intervention in the Second World War. This is so staggeringly disrespectful to the many, many French who died in those wars that it doesn't even deserve to be debated; however, the poster is quite right to imply that the word 'French' is an absolute magnet for idiot posters and moderators on
You clearly don't understand. Apple, super-genius founder of the MPEG standards group, has created the AAC format just for you! It not only has virtually zero cross platform adoption, making your choice of computer and music player uncomplicated and simple, it also selectively chooses which bits and bytes in the music are actually functional and useful in your hectic iLife and discards the rest, leaving you with the pure functional essence of music, with none of those useless extra bits that slow down users of Clunky Alternative Systems.
Don't think of it as 'lossy', this of it as 'simplified!'
It only took till the second modded-up post for me to find someone defending Apple's infinite wisdom and being rewarded by the moderators for doing so.
I would like you to challenge yourself by doing a little thought experiment. Not just the original poster but everyone who read the post and said, right on, you tell those Windoze fools. Please try to wipe your pre-formed opinion from your mind and look at this story objectively, and then come up with several reasons why Apple *should* offer downloads in a lossless format or at least at a better bitrate. Can you even do it? Or are your preconceptions that everyone who criticises Apple is wrong and an ill-informed idiot so overpowering that you can't even conceive of a valid argument that goes against your programmed response?
What it comes down to is that Apple is charging 99c per song for a crappy bitrate. Most serious music listeners that I know do not rip below 192kbps MP3 and far more often above 256kbps. Myself I go for 320kbps as a baseline. On a decent stereo with a subwoofer there is absolutely no question that you can tell the difference between a 128kbps AAC and an uncompressed CD audio track for all but the simplest, slowest music.
As for the megahertz myth... whatever else you want to say about it, until recently Intel and AMD have been so insanely far ahead of Apple that even if you want to take a 2:1 'myth factor' into account you still come out ahead on a (real) PC. And let's not even THINK about dollars per unit of non biased performance (tm).
Now I prepare myself to be sacrificed to the gods of Apple and modded into oblivion... let the cleansing of the thought crimes begin (Mod -1: Failure to Think Different (tm)).