I remember reading a press release before Episode I came out regarding the licensing deal that Lego struck with Lucasfilm for the prequels.
I don't remember the actual amount, but it was STAGGERING. I couldn't believe Lego had that kind of resources.
Now, given that the prequels have been a disappointment, especially Episode I, I don't think the prequel-related merchandise has sold that well. If you look at boxoffice, they haven't been a big disappointment but I don't think when kids came out of the theaters they were so happy with the experience that they rushed to the toy store to pick up stuff like this.
The licensing deals assumed a huge ROI and it was just not going to be.
If that's the case, that wouldn't explain why they continued down the licensing path, so maybe it wasn't a bust on the SW sets after all, but overall I do think it's a good idea to stick with fairly generic sets.
You can easily make your own SW objects out of Legos without them being fabricated with that in mind. After the first few assembles I never used to go back to making the intended shapes anymore.
If Lego ever does go out of business it would either have to be due to gross mismanagement or the dumbing down of the world population. Legos are really for the more creative child who can focus, not the ADD kids who want instant gratification.
--- Globalisation is a fact that won't go away, as long as we're all on the same planet. ---
I'm no economic major, but what I'm trying to understand is if things weren't broke before, why change them?
My point being, the US economy had gone through boom periods before industry dominance in certain sectors was given up to other countries (autos, consumer electronics, and so on).
So when people say that this trend is unavoidable, I wonder what it is about the makeup of the world is FORCING it to be unavoidable where it was not necessary a decade ago.
Before the dot-com boom talented C++ programmers were still being paid six-figure salaries, were they not?
My point is that if you peel back the layers then I think it's possible to conceive of an environment where these changes aren't economically necessary, because if they were ALWAYS necessary then they could have happened a lot sooner.
So I think this is more of a CHOICE that big business is making rather than a NECESSITY, or at the very least there are a series of flaws in international policy and business law at work.
I don't think it's in the best interest of the US, a country which, in a pinch, really doesn't HAVE to rely on the rest of the world for natural resources or worker resources, to turn its back on those resources just to cut costs.
I think it's very important for a country to have a diversity of industries. Many countries suffer because they are one-trick ponies. Look at countries like Columbia. What does it have other than coffee? Is it any wonder then that the people there resort to the drug trade? It was even worse in Afghanistan, which has almost no natural resources at all.
The american dream is fuelled by the diversity of the job market. You can follow your dream here. If you dream is being a factory worker making automobiles or being a computer programmer, why can't you pursue it here?
Sure, you can't be on the assembly line making buggy whips, but shouldn't we expect a reasonably diverse choice in middle-class professions to be available? Or are we all supposed to eventually wind up being MBA businessmen, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and non-outsourceable workers like mechanics, waiters, and Wal Mart drones?
That must have been on an older version of the OS. The Amiga can prioritize memory allocation so that it uses FastRAM before ChipRAM without confusing applications. The only ChipRAM utilization on an Amiga would have to be for accesses to the chipset for gfx, built-in sound, and built-in I/O ports (serial, parallel, floppy, game ports). In such an environment ChipRAM can be thought of as dedicated video RAM as in a graphics card, but with the option of using it for regular program storage if you don't have enough (or any) fastRAM.
-- Then how about the American worker thinking it's his god given right to earn 10x more making the same/worse product than somebody else abroad can make (see under "US car industry"). --
Did you ever think maybe we NEED to make 10x more because our cost of living is 10x more than other countries?
What kind of unrealistic thinking leads people to believe that all countries should have identical economies, idential salary ranges, and identical costs of living...
Maybe so, but native american immune systems were going to have to adapt eventually anyway.
Are there any people on the early today that are so isolated that if they came into contact with other cultures they'd immediately die off? I don't think so. The world's population of humanity's immune system had to "standardize" so to speak.
I've been reading in the news that PDA sales are plummetting. Most people attribute this to the consumer need shifting from the old style PDA to a smartphone.
However, that's just ONE aspect of what I see as the convergence in the portable space.
There are several portable devices, all of which can be duplicated by a conventional laptop:
1) portable MP3 player (ala IPOD) 2) portable DVD player 3) PDA apps 4) cell phone (well, I'm assuming it's possible)
The big problem with PDAs are: 1) No optical storage options, and microdrives are still too small to be able to serve a healthy dose of media. 2) CPUs still too weak for truly decent digital video playback. 3) Screen orientation sucks for the web. 4) have to use an external keyboard, or if you use a thumbpad you are still stuck with portrait mode.
The problem with the IPODs and portable DVD players are that they are single-purpose devices.
The problem with laptops is they are still too expensive and too bulky to be an everything-in-one solution. But it's still the best out there right now.
There is also a lot of corporate shortsightedness going on. PDA manufacturers are still thinking in terms of the "vertial marketplace" even though we're in a recession and corporations are not on any sort of buying sprees.
Computer manufacturers still look at laptops the way the big car makers look at SUVs. They can get more of a profit margin because of a perception in the consumers that the product costs a lot to manufacture.
So that explains why you have $400 desktops with decent specs and low end laptops are still close to a grand with sucky embedded graphics chips.
You've got Dell that is pushing the envelope in pricepoint on their PDAs, but they still aren't really marketing them to the average joe. They come out with yet another dead-end device, an IPOD clone, for that.
Now think what if...
What if PDAs could hook up to 1.8" hard drives or walkman-like CD/DVD drives to PDAs or sub-notebooks?
What I'm thinking is component-like devices all with their own power supplies that can interface with eachother. It's like if you chopped up a laptop into pieces you could decide how much you needed and when to deplete each component's individual batteries.
And the cool thing is that the individual components would still have a function separate from the core. A bluetooth-enabled IPOD is still an IPOD. But if you stored video files on an IPOD you'd only be able to play them back on a video-enabled device. An MP3 CD player can still play CDs on its own, but if you put a DVD disc in it you will only get audio out through the headphone jack. A cell phone is still a cell phone on its own but can also be used as a cellular modem. The PDA core boots off nonvolatile storage and doesn't require a hard drive.
I'm thinking that the logical solution to the dropped packets would be to try to stuff some kind of processing in as a display list interrupt.
I'm also pretty sure Contiki isn't optimized for the Atari's architecture. It's designed to be portable. I don't know at what rate it services the TCP/IP connection but it should be done at least once every frame in a vertical blank interrupt.
What people seem to forget is that there is not a linear increase in challenges between air travel and space travel.
The reason is that the energy required to lift an object into or beyond earth orbit is incredible, which is why the Saturn V was almost nothing but a fuel tank (or the Shuttle for that manner).
That plus the materials science necessary to protect said object upon reentry.
The most reliable manned launch platform remains the traditional multistage rockets currently employed by the Russians (and soon the Chinese). These are cheap by aerospace standards but are never going to reach the volume of flights or pricepoint of the airline industry.
The privatization of space requires new methods to escape the earth's pull. I'm actually rather skeptical that any new method can be devised that will reduce the cost enough to make mainstream tourism possible.
Remember, they just retired the Concorde. If we can't even create affordable supersonic travel, what makes you think we can have space tourism?
That's not to say it can't be done cheaper; clearly launching a rocket off of a jet at high altitude is a proven technique (satellites can be launched this way). I also think there is merit to high altitude balloon launch platforms, but it sure sounds risky to launch a rocket near a fragile balloon.
How much cheaper remains to be seen.
But since the X-Prize is for suborbital flights that require little heat shielding and less involved life support, I don't think it in itself is a good metric for the privatization of space. It's "space lite", not really the real deal.
If the challenge were to launch a craft that could dock with the ISS, that's a different story. I know Nasa could use a vehicle like that right now;)
--- Lets face it, in "A New Hope" the Rebels were 'terrorists'. ---
Don't even joke about this. Rebels are not by themselves terrorists. Being the underdog doesn't make you a terrorist. Firebombing a restaurant in order to kill civilians in Israel is terrorism, regardless of the political intent.
The Rebels in Star Wars attacked only military targets.
If the Death Star were intended to be used as an instrument of collective punishment, then you could rationalize it in the same way we rationalized Hiroshima, as a tool to end wars, but the Empire destroyed an entire planet with no weapons on it for no apparent reason other than to terrorize the galaxy into subservience.
That would be like if North Korea decided to nuke the Swiss.
Look, I realize in the modern world that the rules of engagement are pretty much "anything that works" and that there isn't much you can do about that, but please, get off your moral relativism high-horse.
I realize your mileage may vary depending on who did the rip and how good the original MPEG2 encoding was on the DVD, but the best DVD RIP I've ever seen was an XVID of Scooby Doo (live action).
These days I'm seeing 2-CD RIPs as the norm, but really, with XVID and a good DVD, if it's around 90 minutes, 700MB is more than enough to preserve DVD quality.
Now, DIVX, it can come close, but overall I don't think it's as good quality.
Also, the DIVX decoders are CPU hogs compared to XVID.
Before I upgraded my PC's motherboard I was limping along with a PII350 and while I was able to play Scooby and other XVIDs without a glitch, all the DIVX files were stuttering.
If you don't think CPU is important, think again. The next big killer app is going to be portable video.
These new codecs need to have a chance of playing back at full speed on PDA-grade hardware (think Xscale 400mhz).
And for the record, most DVDs don't look that great on large TVs, sad but true. ON those big widescreen rear projection and plasma screens, when letterboxed movies are stretched and cropped to fit the screen, you can see the artefacts all the time, especially in dark patches.
Skype crashed instantly when I tried to run it on my Win2K machine (which is running a modern PIV CPU with 512MB of memory, nothing nonstandard).
I'd like to see it get out of beta first before hyping it.
In the meantime, Yahoo's VOIP isn't that bad (with two broadband connections) and is built-into it. Yahoo is a pretty light-weight download also.
As long as Yahoo doesn't go out of business or start charging for the VOIP I don't see how a decentralized P2P approach is an improvement within this space.
The world is not infinitely big, and eventually this evolution will be complete. ----------
Not in our lifetimes it won't. There will always be some more 3rd world countries on the way up. Afghanistan, Liberia, etc...
From an energy perspective alone, the world's oil output won't be able to sustain complete industrialization (if you equate this evolution from 3rd to 1st world with industrialization as well).
This is going to cause some serious problems also.
Everyone in the world can never ever become a yuppie programmer driving an SUV. It just can't happen.
If corporations are obsessed with finding cheap labor to avoid employing their country's own workforce they will be able to continue playing musical chairs forever.
I keep on saying again and again that what the world needs is a new niche market which is a cross between a budget laptop and a high-powered PDA.
This would be very similar to the clamshell Zaurus, but about twice the speed, or have some kind of hardware video decoding acceleration so that it can play back CPU-hungry codecs like XVid/DivX without transcoding with ease.
Everything I've read about today's PDAs indicates that they BARELY, and I mean BARELY play video files at 30fps.
The Archos device costs more than most PDAs and hasn't the same kind of bang for the buck.
The Sony PSP that is in development promises to deliver great video playback, but only through proprietary mini DVD-like discs. And since this would be a game console, it would be difficult to convert it into a full fledged PDA/computer.
But I think the first company that really "does it right" will really make bank.
Right now computer manufacturers are having a field day with laptops because they have much higher profit margins than desktops. The problem is, the average joe has no intention of dropping even a grand on a laptop he knows is going to be obsolete and impossible to upgrade a year or two down the road.
I think the sweet spot is at the $500-600 pricepoint and laptops just haven't broken that barrier yet. The cheapest laptops are at least 200 dollars more and are so bare-bones you have to spend a few hundred more just to make them useable.
And used laptops? Used laptops that truly have the throughput it takes to play DivX movies effectively haven't really come down below $700 either.
I don't know about you, but I would want a Laptop running Win2K or XP to be fast enough to be able to do some multitasking in addition to stutter-free DivX as well. You need a LITTLE headroom there.
The biggest problem is the hardware itself...
Xscale isn't a Pentium. It has no floating point unit, and topping off at 400mhz it's cycle-per-cycle slower than what an x86 would need to clock at to play DivX effectively.
To make matters worse, there is still no strong push for hardware accelerated video on PDAs. Most have dumb framebuffers. PDAs singled out that contain ATI Imageons still don't seem to be able to play video files that great either.
So the industry needs to catch up. PDAs aren't just for appointment calendars anymore, and unlike Bill Gates' ideas, few people are going to pay thousands for tablet PCs.
There needs to be a new widget that has all the flexibility of a PDA/laptop and a media player but not necessarily top-of-the-line performance.
QUOTE: The result is an unprecedented mismatch between the workforce and the demands of a growing high-tech economy. Projections by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that the seven fastest-growing occupations this decade will all be in technology. Demand for applications software engineers and tech support specialists, for example, will double by 2010, according to the BLS. (See "The 10 Fastest-Growing Occupations," opposite page.) Even the seventh-ranked category, database administrators, is projected to grow by a stunning 66 percent. These high-demand tech fields will be the first to feel the labor crunch. By 2005, Carnevale says, "we'll start to see spot shortages all over the place." In some fields he predicts, employers will be reduced to filling desperate job shortages with unqualified workers. By the following decade, when the bulk of the baby boomers big their cubicles goodbye, a broad swath of corporate America will be scraping the bottom of the barrel for white-collar workers. UNQUOTE
India has the 2nd largest population in the world. I'm sure they can meet demand, and if they can't, other populous contries like China can.
The commercial shrinkwrapped game industry now takes in more money than Hollywood movies.
If you assume that the female demographic are mostly playing online card, board, and puzzle games for free at sites like Pogo.com, then they are of NO CONSEQUENCE to the commercial videogame industry.
What that means, is that there would be no reason for the big developers to tailor their games for women.
The implication of the original article is that this study should somehow lead to changes in the industry, which is not going to happen until it is proven that women are playing mainstream PC and console titles, which by and large I don't think they are doing.
I took a look at this thing for a new computer purchase and the first thing I noticed was how slow applications took to launch. Insane to tolerate that on a 1GHZ+ box, I don't care if it's a celeron or a duron or what. I don't know if it's the OS or if it has a really slow RPM drive or what. I also saw that it didn't have an AGP slot and realized it was a bad idea to buy it.
I wound up buying a new i865-based motherboard w/PIV 2.4ghz (hyperthreading capable) and CPU cooler for my existing PII case (and some other things to round out the upgrade).
Interesting story about that was that the sales rep told me to buy the wrong CPU cooler so I had to go back and swap it for the right kind!
In the end I spent about $600 or so after tax and wound up with a much better machine (reusing my existing modern peripherals I had recently added to my old box to prop it up) than the Linux monstrosity or other "low-end" machines from eMachines or Dell.
And I wasn't left with a lot of redundant peripherlas afterwards like you normally are when you buy a new PC.
The thing is, the era of entirely new custom hardware in a game console is quickly drawing to a close.
So the demand for game hardware designers is drying up.
Nintendo and Sony are the last two companies still doing custom chip designs. Xbox gets its hardware from nVidia. ATI and nVidia are the last two real "innovators" in PC graphics.
So it's great as a hobby but I don't think you can really get a job doing this sort of thing in the real world anymore.
You'd be shocked how poorly the videogame companies who own these rights have taken care of archiving and preserving their own intellectual property.
Even for commercial emulator rereleases there have been times where they've had to take advantage of things like MAME or the general collector community to piece back together their history.
This seems to be mostly a problem with American videogame companies. I haven't heard these same kinds of stories related to, let's say, Namco.
In many cases the owners have changed hands multiple times so something gets lost in each iteration. (Atari is the best example of this).
So it's more than possible that old artefacts can literally rot away, get thrown out, or forgotten entirely so that by the time these companies do decide to do something it might be too late.
The industry in general is so future-oriented that they just don't value the past enough to prioritize the preservation of their history.
It's the collectors who have to pick up the slack, and unfortunately, this involves stepping beyond the letter of the law.
Luckily we're at a point where most of the important arcade history and pre-crash console history is well preserved.
I don't think games for 8-bit home computers are as well preserved because there isn't as much interest from classic game enthusiasts and the libraries are much larger.
I also think there is a lot of work to do to improve emulation. For instance, what about all the early TTL-based arcade games that didn't have microprocessors? If you don't have a physical unit you'll never see the game run unless someone writes a simulator of some kind. What about sound emulation on things like the Cinematronics games? Sound in MAME is still a little rough in places.
All plugins I know of are separate entities from the rest of the page. Only Flash on IE can do transparency.
There is an advantage in supporting XML-based plugin specifications that can somehow interface with the rest of the HTML tags/CSS through the main rendering engine. That was Microsoft's idea with HTML+TIME, their implementation of SMIL.
BTW, IE also has an SVG-like vector drawing engine built in. It's pretty useful for reporting.
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-VML
However, time has shown that as far as cross platform goes, it's easier to use the existing plugin system (EMBED tags).
The reason why the tablet PC will never take off is that it's as expensive if not more so than the average laptop.
What's the point in that? The tablet, as far as the end-user goes, appears to be an oversized PDA. But there is an order of magnitude in pricepoints between even a high end PDA and a low end tablet PC.
As long as Microsoft thinks they are only going to sell these to the corporate market, that's fine, but what we really need is a new niche market for low-priced wireless computing devices that are more powerful than PDAs but not necessarily as state of the art as the most recent laptops, but have all the modern peripherals and wireless features (unlike a used laptop).
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like Skynet to me.
I remember reading a press release before Episode I came out regarding the licensing deal that Lego struck with Lucasfilm for the prequels.
I don't remember the actual amount, but it was STAGGERING. I couldn't believe Lego had that kind of resources.
Now, given that the prequels have been a disappointment, especially Episode I, I don't think the prequel-related merchandise has sold that well. If you look at boxoffice, they haven't been a big disappointment but I don't think when kids came out of the theaters they were so happy with the experience that they rushed to the toy store to pick up stuff like this.
The licensing deals assumed a huge ROI and it was just not going to be.
If that's the case, that wouldn't explain why they continued down the licensing path, so maybe it wasn't a bust on the SW sets after all, but overall I do think it's a good idea to stick with fairly generic sets.
You can easily make your own SW objects out of Legos without them being fabricated with that in mind. After the first few assembles I never used to go back to making the intended shapes anymore.
If Lego ever does go out of business it would either have to be due to gross mismanagement or the dumbing down of the world population. Legos are really for the more creative child who can focus, not the ADD kids who want instant gratification.
Spirit Rover 1
Spirit Rover 3
Spirit Rover 2
---
Globalisation is a fact that won't go away, as long as we're all on the same planet.
---
I'm no economic major, but what I'm trying to understand is if things weren't broke before, why change them?
My point being, the US economy had gone through boom periods before industry dominance in certain sectors was given up to other countries (autos, consumer electronics, and so on).
So when people say that this trend is unavoidable, I wonder what it is about the makeup of the world is FORCING it to be unavoidable where it was not necessary a decade ago.
Before the dot-com boom talented C++ programmers were still being paid six-figure salaries, were they not?
My point is that if you peel back the layers then I think it's possible to conceive of an environment where these changes aren't economically necessary, because if they were ALWAYS necessary then they could have happened a lot sooner.
So I think this is more of a CHOICE that big business is making rather than a NECESSITY, or at the very least there are a series of flaws in international policy and business law at work.
I don't think it's in the best interest of the US, a country which, in a pinch, really doesn't HAVE to rely on the rest of the world for natural resources or worker resources, to turn its back on those resources just to cut costs.
I think it's very important for a country to have a diversity of industries. Many countries suffer because they are one-trick ponies. Look at countries like Columbia. What does it have other than coffee? Is it any wonder then that the people there resort to the drug trade? It was even worse in Afghanistan, which has almost no natural resources at all.
The american dream is fuelled by the diversity of the job market. You can follow your dream here. If you dream is being a factory worker making automobiles or being a computer programmer, why can't you pursue it here?
Sure, you can't be on the assembly line making buggy whips, but shouldn't we expect a reasonably diverse choice in middle-class professions to be available? Or are we all supposed to eventually wind up being MBA businessmen, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and non-outsourceable workers like mechanics, waiters, and Wal Mart drones?
That must have been on an older version of the OS. The Amiga can prioritize memory allocation so that it uses FastRAM before ChipRAM without confusing applications. The only ChipRAM utilization on an Amiga would have to be for accesses to the chipset for gfx, built-in sound, and built-in I/O ports (serial, parallel, floppy, game ports). In such an environment ChipRAM can be thought of as dedicated video RAM as in a graphics card, but with the option of using it for regular program storage if you don't have enough (or any) fastRAM.
--
Then how about the American worker thinking it's his god given right to earn 10x more making the same/worse product than somebody else abroad can make (see under "US car industry").
--
Did you ever think maybe we NEED to make 10x more because our cost of living is 10x more than other countries?
What kind of unrealistic thinking leads people to believe that all countries should have identical economies, idential salary ranges, and identical costs of living...
What Starbucks should do is still require that you login to their network, but you would be given 1-hour credits for purchases of $5 or more.
That way there wouldn't be such a thing as a freeloader out the door. Anyone would either be paying $10/hr or would have at least bought something.
Few people will pay the $10/hr, but it won't matter anymore.
The end result is that most people will be buying more coffee. If their hour runs out they will buy another coffee or a couple muffins or something.
Maybe so, but native american immune systems were going to have to adapt eventually anyway.
Are there any people on the early today that are so isolated that if they came into contact with other cultures they'd immediately die off? I don't think so. The world's population of humanity's immune system had to "standardize" so to speak.
At least on SLASHDOT, yeah.
I've been reading in the news that PDA sales are plummetting. Most people attribute this to the consumer need shifting from the old style PDA to a smartphone.
However, that's just ONE aspect of what I see as the convergence in the portable space.
There are several portable devices, all of which can be duplicated by a conventional laptop:
1) portable MP3 player (ala IPOD)
2) portable DVD player
3) PDA apps
4) cell phone (well, I'm assuming it's possible)
The big problem with PDAs are:
1) No optical storage options, and microdrives are still too small to be able to serve a healthy dose of media.
2) CPUs still too weak for truly decent digital video playback.
3) Screen orientation sucks for the web.
4) have to use an external keyboard, or if you use a thumbpad you are still stuck with portrait mode.
The problem with the IPODs and portable DVD players are that they are single-purpose devices.
The problem with laptops is they are still too expensive and too bulky to be an everything-in-one solution. But it's still the best out there right now.
There is also a lot of corporate shortsightedness going on. PDA manufacturers are still thinking in terms of the "vertial marketplace" even though we're in a recession and corporations are not on any sort of buying sprees.
Computer manufacturers still look at laptops the way the big car makers look at SUVs. They can get more of a profit margin because of a perception in the consumers that the product costs a lot to manufacture.
So that explains why you have $400 desktops with decent specs and low end laptops are still close to a grand with sucky embedded graphics chips.
You've got Dell that is pushing the envelope in pricepoint on their PDAs, but they still aren't really marketing them to the average joe. They come out with yet another dead-end device, an IPOD clone, for that.
Now think what if...
What if PDAs could hook up to 1.8" hard drives or walkman-like CD/DVD drives to PDAs or sub-notebooks?
What I'm thinking is component-like devices all with their own power supplies that can interface with eachother. It's like if you chopped up a laptop into pieces you could decide how much you needed and when to deplete each component's individual batteries.
And the cool thing is that the individual components would still have a function separate from the core. A bluetooth-enabled IPOD is still an IPOD. But if you stored video files on an IPOD you'd only be able to play them back on a video-enabled device. An MP3 CD player can still play CDs on its own, but if you put a DVD disc in it you will only get audio out through the headphone jack. A cell phone is still a cell phone on its own but can also be used as a cellular modem. The PDA core boots off nonvolatile storage and doesn't require a hard drive.
I'm thinking that the logical solution to the dropped packets would be to try to stuff some kind of processing in as a display list interrupt.
I'm also pretty sure Contiki isn't optimized for the Atari's architecture. It's designed to be portable. I don't know at what rate it services the TCP/IP connection but it should be done at least once every frame in a vertical blank interrupt.
What people seem to forget is that there is not a linear increase in challenges between air travel and space travel.
;)
The reason is that the energy required to lift an object into or beyond earth orbit is incredible, which is why the Saturn V was almost nothing but a fuel tank (or the Shuttle for that manner).
That plus the materials science necessary to protect said object upon reentry.
The most reliable manned launch platform remains the traditional multistage rockets currently employed by the Russians (and soon the Chinese). These are cheap by aerospace standards but are never going to reach the volume of flights or pricepoint of the airline industry.
The privatization of space requires new methods to escape the earth's pull. I'm actually rather skeptical that any new method can be devised that will reduce the cost enough to make mainstream tourism possible.
Remember, they just retired the Concorde. If we can't even create affordable supersonic travel, what makes you think we can have space tourism?
That's not to say it can't be done cheaper; clearly launching a rocket off of a jet at high altitude is a proven technique (satellites can be launched this way). I also think there is merit to high altitude balloon launch platforms, but it sure sounds risky to launch a rocket near a fragile balloon.
How much cheaper remains to be seen.
But since the X-Prize is for suborbital flights that require little heat shielding and less involved life support, I don't think it in itself is a good metric for the privatization of space. It's "space lite", not really the real deal.
If the challenge were to launch a craft that could dock with the ISS, that's a different story. I know Nasa could use a vehicle like that right now
---
Lets face it, in "A New Hope" the Rebels were 'terrorists'.
---
Don't even joke about this. Rebels are not by themselves terrorists. Being the underdog doesn't make you a terrorist. Firebombing a restaurant in order to kill civilians in Israel is terrorism, regardless of the political intent.
The Rebels in Star Wars attacked only military targets.
If the Death Star were intended to be used as an instrument of collective punishment, then you could rationalize it in the same way we rationalized Hiroshima, as a tool to end wars, but the Empire destroyed an entire planet with no weapons on it for no apparent reason other than to terrorize the galaxy into subservience.
That would be like if North Korea decided to nuke the Swiss.
Look, I realize in the modern world that the rules of engagement are pretty much "anything that works" and that there isn't much you can do about that, but please, get off your moral relativism high-horse.
I realize your mileage may vary depending on who did the rip and how good the original MPEG2 encoding was on the DVD, but the best DVD RIP I've ever seen was an XVID of Scooby Doo (live action).
These days I'm seeing 2-CD RIPs as the norm, but really, with XVID and a good DVD, if it's around 90 minutes, 700MB is more than enough to preserve DVD quality.
Now, DIVX, it can come close, but overall I don't think it's as good quality.
Also, the DIVX decoders are CPU hogs compared to XVID.
Before I upgraded my PC's motherboard I was limping along with a PII350 and while I was able to play Scooby and other XVIDs without a glitch, all the DIVX files were stuttering.
If you don't think CPU is important, think again. The next big killer app is going to be portable video.
These new codecs need to have a chance of playing back at full speed on PDA-grade hardware (think Xscale 400mhz).
And for the record, most DVDs don't look that great on large TVs, sad but true. ON those big widescreen rear projection and plasma screens, when letterboxed movies are stretched and cropped to fit the screen, you can see the artefacts all the time, especially in dark patches.
Skype crashed instantly when I tried to run it on my Win2K machine (which is running a modern PIV CPU with 512MB of memory, nothing nonstandard).
I'd like to see it get out of beta first before hyping it.
In the meantime, Yahoo's VOIP isn't that bad (with two broadband connections) and is built-into it. Yahoo is a pretty light-weight download also.
As long as Yahoo doesn't go out of business or start charging for the VOIP I don't see how a decentralized P2P approach is an improvement within this space.
Ultimately we're all selfish.
If it comes down to competing for the same job, I'd rather get the job vs. a guy down the street let alone India.
It's easy to feel compassionate when you are in a position of complacent security.
The world is not infinitely big, and eventually this evolution will be complete.
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Not in our lifetimes it won't. There will always be some more 3rd world countries on the way up. Afghanistan, Liberia, etc...
From an energy perspective alone, the world's oil output won't be able to sustain complete industrialization (if you equate this evolution from 3rd to 1st world with industrialization as well).
This is going to cause some serious problems also.
Everyone in the world can never ever become a yuppie programmer driving an SUV. It just can't happen.
If corporations are obsessed with finding cheap labor to avoid employing their country's own workforce they will be able to continue playing musical chairs forever.
I keep on saying again and again that what the world needs is a new niche market which is a cross between a budget laptop and a high-powered PDA.
This would be very similar to the clamshell Zaurus, but about twice the speed, or have some kind of hardware video decoding acceleration so that it can play back CPU-hungry codecs like XVid/DivX without transcoding with ease.
Everything I've read about today's PDAs indicates that they BARELY, and I mean BARELY play video files at 30fps.
The Archos device costs more than most PDAs and hasn't the same kind of bang for the buck.
The Sony PSP that is in development promises to deliver great video playback, but only through proprietary mini DVD-like discs. And since this would be a game console, it would be difficult to convert it into a full fledged PDA/computer.
But I think the first company that really "does it right" will really make bank.
Right now computer manufacturers are having a field day with laptops because they have much higher profit margins than desktops. The problem is, the average joe has no intention of dropping even a grand on a laptop he knows is going to be obsolete and impossible to upgrade a year or two down the road.
I think the sweet spot is at the $500-600 pricepoint and laptops just haven't broken that barrier yet. The cheapest laptops are at least 200 dollars more and are so bare-bones you have to spend a few hundred more just to make them useable.
And used laptops? Used laptops that truly have the throughput it takes to play DivX movies effectively haven't really come down below $700 either.
I don't know about you, but I would want a Laptop running Win2K or XP to be fast enough to be able to do some multitasking in addition to stutter-free DivX as well. You need a LITTLE headroom there.
The biggest problem is the hardware itself...
Xscale isn't a Pentium. It has no floating point unit, and topping off at 400mhz it's cycle-per-cycle slower than what an x86 would need to clock at to play DivX effectively.
To make matters worse, there is still no strong push for hardware accelerated video on PDAs. Most have dumb framebuffers. PDAs singled out that contain ATI Imageons still don't seem to be able to play video files that great either.
So the industry needs to catch up. PDAs aren't just for appointment calendars anymore, and unlike Bill Gates' ideas, few people are going to pay thousands for tablet PCs.
There needs to be a new widget that has all the flexibility of a PDA/laptop and a media player but not necessarily top-of-the-line performance.
QUOTE:
The result is an unprecedented mismatch between the workforce and the demands of a growing high-tech economy. Projections by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that the seven fastest-growing occupations this decade will all be in technology. Demand for applications software engineers and tech support specialists, for example, will double by 2010, according to the BLS. (See "The 10 Fastest-Growing Occupations," opposite page.) Even the seventh-ranked category, database administrators, is projected to grow by a stunning 66 percent. These high-demand tech fields will be the first to feel the labor crunch. By 2005, Carnevale says, "we'll start to see spot shortages all over the place." In some fields he predicts, employers will be reduced to filling desperate job shortages with unqualified workers. By the following decade, when the bulk of the baby boomers big their cubicles goodbye, a broad swath of corporate America will be scraping the bottom of the barrel for white-collar workers.
UNQUOTE
India has the 2nd largest population in the world. I'm sure they can meet demand, and if they can't, other populous contries like China can.
The commercial shrinkwrapped game industry now takes in more money than Hollywood movies.
If you assume that the female demographic are mostly playing online card, board, and puzzle games for free at sites like Pogo.com, then they are of NO CONSEQUENCE to the commercial videogame industry.
What that means, is that there would be no reason for the big developers to tailor their games for women.
The implication of the original article is that this study should somehow lead to changes in the industry, which is not going to happen until it is proven that women are playing mainstream PC and console titles, which by and large I don't think they are doing.
I took a look at this thing for a new computer purchase and the first thing I noticed was how slow applications took to launch. Insane to tolerate that on a 1GHZ+ box, I don't care if it's a celeron or a duron or what. I don't know if it's the OS or if it has a really slow RPM drive or what. I also saw that it didn't have an AGP slot and realized it was a bad idea to buy it.
I wound up buying a new i865-based motherboard w/PIV 2.4ghz (hyperthreading capable) and CPU cooler for my existing PII case (and some other things to round out the upgrade).
Interesting story about that was that the sales rep told me to buy the wrong CPU cooler so I had to go back and swap it for the right kind!
In the end I spent about $600 or so after tax and wound up with a much better machine (reusing my existing modern peripherals I had recently added to my old box to prop it up) than the Linux monstrosity or other "low-end" machines from eMachines or Dell.
And I wasn't left with a lot of redundant peripherlas afterwards like you normally are when you buy a new PC.
The thing is, the era of entirely new custom hardware in a game console is quickly drawing to a close.
So the demand for game hardware designers is drying up.
Nintendo and Sony are the last two companies still doing custom chip designs. Xbox gets its hardware from nVidia. ATI and nVidia are the last two real "innovators" in PC graphics.
So it's great as a hobby but I don't think you can really get a job doing this sort of thing in the real world anymore.
You'd be shocked how poorly the videogame companies who own these rights have taken care of archiving and preserving their own intellectual property.
Even for commercial emulator rereleases there have been times where they've had to take advantage of things like MAME or the general collector community to piece back together their history.
This seems to be mostly a problem with American videogame companies. I haven't heard these same kinds of stories related to, let's say, Namco.
In many cases the owners have changed hands multiple times so something gets lost in each iteration. (Atari is the best example of this).
So it's more than possible that old artefacts can literally rot away, get thrown out, or forgotten entirely so that by the time these companies do decide to do something it might be too late.
The industry in general is so future-oriented that they just don't value the past enough to prioritize the preservation of their history.
It's the collectors who have to pick up the slack, and unfortunately, this involves stepping beyond the letter of the law.
Luckily we're at a point where most of the important arcade history and pre-crash console history is well preserved.
I don't think games for 8-bit home computers are as well preserved because there isn't as much interest from classic game enthusiasts and the libraries are much larger.
I also think there is a lot of work to do to improve emulation. For instance, what about all the early TTL-based arcade games that didn't have microprocessors? If you don't have a physical unit you'll never see the game run unless someone writes a simulator of some kind. What about sound emulation on things like the Cinematronics games? Sound in MAME is still a little rough in places.
All plugins I know of are separate entities from the rest of the page. Only Flash on IE can do transparency.
There is an advantage in supporting XML-based plugin specifications that can somehow interface with the rest of the HTML tags/CSS through the main rendering engine. That was Microsoft's idea with HTML+TIME, their implementation of SMIL.
BTW, IE also has an SVG-like vector drawing engine built in. It's pretty useful for reporting.
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-VML
However, time has shown that as far as cross platform goes, it's easier to use the existing plugin system (EMBED tags).
The reason why the tablet PC will never take off is that it's as expensive if not more so than the average laptop. What's the point in that? The tablet, as far as the end-user goes, appears to be an oversized PDA. But there is an order of magnitude in pricepoints between even a high end PDA and a low end tablet PC. As long as Microsoft thinks they are only going to sell these to the corporate market, that's fine, but what we really need is a new niche market for low-priced wireless computing devices that are more powerful than PDAs but not necessarily as state of the art as the most recent laptops, but have all the modern peripherals and wireless features (unlike a used laptop).