Fair point, but it's not the customer on the street or even the person (well informed slashdot readers, etc...) who wants high performance at a cheap price that matters in this case. What they're really bothered about it the ability to say "We've got the fastest card and here are the benchmarcks to prove it! We lead the market! Nyah!"
Or something like that anyway. Right or wrong, that's the way it is.
I see a big problem with that. Word processing has already been done to death. You need to find a new type of app to make it viable in the money stakes.
And of course word processors allow communication. But they don't need to. While you can use just about every app on a computer to comunicate I still don't see major communications apps `as described in the article' (key phrase there) being necessary on every computer (browser, mail program, WP, spreadsheet). Now do you see my point?
It might just be me but for each of the problem types mentioned the article seems to be saying that the "killer app" which solves this problem will take the human factor out of the equation (not completely but close).
Maybe my problem is that I don't think social applications will be the next killer app. If you think back then most of the applications (or genres of applications) which have made it big have come about due to new technologies or by making existing applications more convenient in some way.
Examples from the article: Word processing apps (upgrade from typewriters - introduction of computer technology made this an almost inevitable step), spreadsheet programs (upgrade from, well, handwritten spreadsheets - again computer tech introduction), e-mail and web-browsing (not needed until the internet became a mass population creation rather than an academic or BBS thing).
My point being that none of the examples cited are social software based so why should the next killer app be? Not that I don't see social software coming up with something useful to a subset of people in the same way that modern programming suites (convenient drag and drop features and comprehensive debugging systems and code optimisation in comparison to simple text editor and command line compiling) are useful to programmers. But a necessary app for the entire computer user base? I find it more likely that anything that large will require a new technology development.
...that the integration of which you speak is all Mac based. And no, I'm not trying to start a flame war. You just don't (as far as I know, maybe someone out there with more recent knowledge can chip in) get the same integration from a Windows linked iPod. (I know nothing about the linux case but I'm guessing it's similar in lack-of-link)
How much of the problem is the lack of a decent sync-ing script? Can we just write a small script to transfer files and update playlists? OK it may be fiddling about but for twice the storage and a lower cost (not to mention the fact that once you've done it properly the first time you don't have to do it again) I'd be prepared to make one or two compromises.
Pay more for high quality, yes. But how much more quality do you get for your money? Is it right for the current hardware? Answers on a postcard...
It doesn't really matter if the cat knows whether it's alive or dead. Well, I guess it matters to the cat but...
Anyway. The thought experiment means that while the cat is in the box the outside observer doesn't know whether the cat is alive or dead (two possible states forming one wavefunction). When the box is opened in the observers frame of reference the wavefunction collapses into one of the two states (you find out if the cat is alive or dead). It's a simplified example designed to illustrate the superposition of 2 quantum states.
Of course you could also say that from the cat's perspective the observer could be alive or dead and it won't know until the box is opened so it also works from the cat's frame of reference (hey, stick the box opening mechanism on a timer - no observer intervention required). But now it's getting a bit silly...
Oh, I see. Just checked out the NXT website for more info and found the abstracts for the conference proceedings and such. That's actually pretty darn cool stuff.
Take the point now that you'd need two for stereo - possible to fit two together side by side on one screen perhaps? Don't need to contact them I suppose or maybe even join them with a material of sufficiently different properties...
Hah! Listen to me gabbin' away with work to do...
Cheers for the correction - gave me something to check out on my coffee break;)
Sigh. Alright, yes. Separates ARE better. I'll give you that. And yes, CD's and MP3's are not created equal. And yes, I'll even grant you the fact that devices that are integrated tend to be a bit crappy in comparison to good versions of the real thing.
BUT! All of the little things have their place in the big techie world. A speaker like this would be ideal for many applications like laptops (the sound there is already rubbish - this might even be better), they'll have a smaller footprint on your desk and less expensive than buying a separates system to hook up to your computer that for most people isn't going to be generating high quality sound in the first place. Load's more apps that I've not got the energy to think up right now. Wouldn't think it would ripple either - if it's done right anyway. Choose a material with a low refractive index for starters and all in all it shouldn't move much anyway - tap your desk. You hear a sound, right? Tap it harder. It still doesn't ripple. Even if you drive the desk with a piezo or someting (for that continuous wave effect) you wouldn't see it ripple. Same goes for a sheet of hard (or approx hard depending on tension or whatever) acryllic unless you're driving it at unfeasibly high levels.
Right tool for the right job. That's all I'm saying here.;)
What I took from the article was that the sheet of material being used to generate the sound is excited by some means (ah, moving coil motors, that's it) with the result being vibration of the sheet at audio frequencies. If you want to create stereo all you'd have to do is set up one half of the sheet to vibrate and the other half not to for each different channel.
This (while presumably quite difficult to achieve in practice) is quite simple in theory. You can treat it as you would the old "waves on a string" bounding problem from your old physics course. Ignoring the additional dimension, a simple Fourier analysis will show that by adding frequencies in various combinations of phase and anti-phase you can replicate the situation where one side of the screen has signal and the other doesn't for any frequency you like (with obvious limitations due to physical factors). Vibrations in the sheet give vibrations in air and since you can control the two sides of the screen (approx) independantly you can get stereo sound.
I'd guess the only problems you'd run into would be the responsivity of the plastic sheet to vibrations at various frequencies but if you're only trying for signals across the audio band then that shouldn't be a worry.
And... if you can't get ethanol to power your laptop then, um, just plug it into the wall until the shortage is over? I'd guess that the bigger problem of crop fields being burnt (at least to the extent that no crops were available to provide fuel) would be people starving. Just a thought...
Um, software changes, yeah. Hardware though... as far as I can tell all you'd need is a dual head graphics card or something similar.
Send a slightly different image to each one and if the displays are overlayed with a parallax offset your brain sees a 3D image.
Like the file formats idea though. Just fix a widget into your web browser that hooks into the display to display 3D if the monitor supports it or 2D if it doesn't and suddenly you've got backwards compatability. Hmmmn... possibilities...
OK, I can accept that. I was really only thinking about the current state of play. And about Google's needs for processor power in particular.
I'm guessing they've done their math comparing new high end processors with old cheaper processors (complete with boxes and the like) and have come to the conclusion that THEY (specific case Google) don't need them. And that they know where their crossover point is. Anyone any idea how much processing power it takes to handle a data serving enterprise like Google? My guess is not as much as you might think, but I've been wrong before.
I'll definitely grant that other people need more powerful processors though.
Fair enough, if you're doing video processing or high performance 3D rendering or speech recognition then you're going to want more memory, larger address spaces and faster processors. For this reason alone it's worth working on more powerful computing hardware; more power means you can do more complex tasks which means you'll need more powerful hardware to do them faster which means you can do more complicated complex tasks which means you'll need more...
The point is that a bunch of slower 32-bit processors running Google will more than likely be better than one large 64-bit processor. More machines in parallel rather than one more powerful machine. Bottleneck, connection bandwidth perhaps? Just a thought. Feel free to slap me down for stupidity if you like.;)
All in all it depends entirely on what you want to do with your machine. Having just upgraded my office machine from a PII 350 to a PIII 800 (Whew! I know! Blistering speed!) I notice no real difference in my net-surfing and/or laTeX compiling speeds though. My home machine: not too fast but plays a mean game of UT2003 and renders checkerboard floors with chess pieces in acceptable times. Use the right tool for the job.
Oh, I don't know about that. We've all been there. That urge to block out the past few years and start again from pre-school level.
Go on! Calling on all Slashdotters to break out their squeaky rubber hammers and give the colourful plastic walls of your cubicles a sound thrashing! That'll show 'em!
The drivers are still at the same development point as the card. More worrying is the poor memory interface which the Extreme Tech article pokes the big-stick-o-blame towards.
I'm willing to give nVidia the chance to improve their drivers and work out the bugs before I make a final decision.
The huge PCI gobbling cooling solution just doesn't do it for me though. I mean, sure. If you're using it mainly for games and you don't want to be bothered by the noise doubling+ when you use any 3D functions then you can just turn up the volume and deal with it but can you imaging doing any serious graphical rendering?
You may well be right but I'd imagine the rear of the thing would be reflective (at least for the wavelength of light it emits) and so sends most of the light forward.
Hmmn. I'd also guess that there'd be a sort of cascade effect (you'd need more than one photon) like in a solid state laser where one photon begets another and so on. Stick a reflective surface on the back and you'd probably get almost 100% efficiency. Ignoring any transient start up effects that is.
Third hand's good enough for me. I don't need to do it though. It's been done before and written up. Published, one assumes. Unless it's being suggested the work of many other people is suspect then there's no need to verify the results. If we were to make a more frequency stable laser and develop suitable atmospheric correction techniques in order to get a moree accurate measure of the distance then it may be worth it. If we had to redo all the old scientific experiments ourselves then we'd never achieve anything new.
Oh, and I work with lasers on a daily basis so I've got a good idea how expensive the equipment would be.
In terms of financial cost - negligible (could borrow all I needed)
In terms of time and effort though... really need to be suitably motivated. Funding anyone?
True, you can't see the lander. But to the best of my knowledge (and I don't have any verification or proof of this since I haven't tried it to find out - but then that's what this is all about anyway, isn't it...) it is possible to bounce a laser beam off the surface of the moon from the earth. This is one way to measure the distance of the moon from the earth - the other ways aren't direct measurements but are based on calculations of orbits and times and other observations.
Anyway, the point is that the surface of the moon is not 'shiny' enough to reflect a laser beam back to earth. The only reason this is possible is due to the corner cubes scattered on the surface of the moon by the visiting astronauts. Yes it's a small area but large enough if you know where to point your laser.
And the light returns to it's source because that's the way corner cubes work rather than just reflecting the beam away into space.
So there we have it. A test you can do from the earth's surface. And if the doubters still doubt you can get them to check the equipment over. "Just look into the light. You'll see there's nothing wrong with it. Briefly anyway..."
"Step right up ladies and gentlemen! This is a once in a lifetime offer! This brand new, off the shelf Pentium4 machine - big wodges of RAM, hard disk space just ooooooozing out of every port and have a look at this graphics card! No previous owners but 10e20 users. And that's just this morning!"
Slashdot Mirror
Fair point, but it's not the customer on the street or even the person (well informed slashdot readers, etc...) who wants high performance at a cheap price that matters in this case. What they're really bothered about it the ability to say "We've got the fastest card and here are the benchmarcks to prove it! We lead the market! Nyah!"
Or something like that anyway. Right or wrong, that's the way it is.
So... basically you're approximating geckos and humans to a sphere?
I see a big problem with that. Word processing has already been done to death. You need to find a new type of app to make it viable in the money stakes.
And of course word processors allow communication. But they don't need to. While you can use just about every app on a computer to comunicate I still don't see major communications apps `as described in the article' (key phrase there) being necessary on every computer (browser, mail program, WP, spreadsheet). Now do you see my point?
It might just be me but for each of the problem types mentioned the article seems to be saying that the "killer app" which solves this problem will take the human factor out of the equation (not completely but close).
Maybe my problem is that I don't think social applications will be the next killer app. If you think back then most of the applications (or genres of applications) which have made it big have come about due to new technologies or by making existing applications more convenient in some way.
Examples from the article: Word processing apps (upgrade from typewriters - introduction of computer technology made this an almost inevitable step), spreadsheet programs (upgrade from, well, handwritten spreadsheets - again computer tech introduction), e-mail and web-browsing (not needed until the internet became a mass population creation rather than an academic or BBS thing).
My point being that none of the examples cited are social software based so why should the next killer app be? Not that I don't see social software coming up with something useful to a subset of people in the same way that modern programming suites (convenient drag and drop features and comprehensive debugging systems and code optimisation in comparison to simple text editor and command line compiling) are useful to programmers. But a necessary app for the entire computer user base? I find it more likely that anything that large will require a new technology development.
Could be wrong though...
...that the integration of which you speak is all Mac based. And no, I'm not trying to start a flame war. You just don't (as far as I know, maybe someone out there with more recent knowledge can chip in) get the same integration from a Windows linked iPod. (I know nothing about the linux case but I'm guessing it's similar in lack-of-link)
How much of the problem is the lack of a decent sync-ing script? Can we just write a small script to transfer files and update playlists? OK it may be fiddling about but for twice the storage and a lower cost (not to mention the fact that once you've done it properly the first time you don't have to do it again) I'd be prepared to make one or two compromises.
Pay more for high quality, yes. But how much more quality do you get for your money? Is it right for the current hardware? Answers on a postcard...
It doesn't really matter if the cat knows whether it's alive or dead. Well, I guess it matters to the cat but...
Anyway. The thought experiment means that while the cat is in the box the outside observer doesn't know whether the cat is alive or dead (two possible states forming one wavefunction). When the box is opened in the observers frame of reference the wavefunction collapses into one of the two states (you find out if the cat is alive or dead). It's a simplified example designed to illustrate the superposition of 2 quantum states.
Of course you could also say that from the cat's perspective the observer could be alive or dead and it won't know until the box is opened so it also works from the cat's frame of reference (hey, stick the box opening mechanism on a timer - no observer intervention required). But now it's getting a bit silly...
Heh. Cubits - qubits - ark - biblical reference. Qu-ark. Nice one. Funny on soooooo many levels.
;-)
Shame I seem to be the only one who gets it though.
...but my PC just wanted to snuggle. ;-)
Oh, I see. Just checked out the NXT website for more info and found the abstracts for the conference proceedings and such. That's actually pretty darn cool stuff.
;)
Take the point now that you'd need two for stereo - possible to fit two together side by side on one screen perhaps? Don't need to contact them I suppose or maybe even join them with a material of sufficiently different properties...
Hah! Listen to me gabbin' away with work to do...
Cheers for the correction - gave me something to check out on my coffee break
Sigh. Alright, yes. Separates ARE better. I'll give you that. And yes, CD's and MP3's are not created equal. And yes, I'll even grant you the fact that devices that are integrated tend to be a bit crappy in comparison to good versions of the real thing. BUT! All of the little things have their place in the big techie world. A speaker like this would be ideal for many applications like laptops (the sound there is already rubbish - this might even be better), they'll have a smaller footprint on your desk and less expensive than buying a separates system to hook up to your computer that for most people isn't going to be generating high quality sound in the first place. Load's more apps that I've not got the energy to think up right now. Wouldn't think it would ripple either - if it's done right anyway. Choose a material with a low refractive index for starters and all in all it shouldn't move much anyway - tap your desk. You hear a sound, right? Tap it harder. It still doesn't ripple. Even if you drive the desk with a piezo or someting (for that continuous wave effect) you wouldn't see it ripple. Same goes for a sheet of hard (or approx hard depending on tension or whatever) acryllic unless you're driving it at unfeasibly high levels. Right tool for the right job. That's all I'm saying here. ;)
What I took from the article was that the sheet of material being used to generate the sound is excited by some means (ah, moving coil motors, that's it) with the result being vibration of the sheet at audio frequencies. If you want to create stereo all you'd have to do is set up one half of the sheet to vibrate and the other half not to for each different channel.
This (while presumably quite difficult to achieve in practice) is quite simple in theory. You can treat it as you would the old "waves on a string" bounding problem from your old physics course. Ignoring the additional dimension, a simple Fourier analysis will show that by adding frequencies in various combinations of phase and anti-phase you can replicate the situation where one side of the screen has signal and the other doesn't for any frequency you like (with obvious limitations due to physical factors). Vibrations in the sheet give vibrations in air and since you can control the two sides of the screen (approx) independantly you can get stereo sound.
I'd guess the only problems you'd run into would be the responsivity of the plastic sheet to vibrations at various frequencies but if you're only trying for signals across the audio band then that shouldn't be a worry.
Why? They both burn.
And... if you can't get ethanol to power your laptop then, um, just plug it into the wall until the shortage is over? I'd guess that the bigger problem of crop fields being burnt (at least to the extent that no crops were available to provide fuel) would be people starving. Just a thought...
Fry: But why would a robot need to drink?
Bender: I don't NEED to drink. I can give it up any time I want!
Heh. I can see it now...
"I'm sorry Uncle George! I WAS bringing you that bottle of whiskey I got in duty free but, like, y'know, I was watching a DVD on the plane and..."
Um, software changes, yeah. Hardware though... as far as I can tell all you'd need is a dual head graphics card or something similar.
Send a slightly different image to each one and if the displays are overlayed with a parallax offset your brain sees a 3D image.
Like the file formats idea though. Just fix a widget into your web browser that hooks into the display to display 3D if the monitor supports it or 2D if it doesn't and suddenly you've got backwards compatability. Hmmmn... possibilities...
Nah. You don't have to worry 'bout that. Just wait until you start to think of defragging your hard drive as respawning. Then you can start to worry ;)
Does that mean the bark is worse than the sound-bite?
Sorry... sorry... bye... sorry...bye...
OK, I can accept that. I was really only thinking about the current state of play. And about Google's needs for processor power in particular.
I'm guessing they've done their math comparing new high end processors with old cheaper processors (complete with boxes and the like) and have come to the conclusion that THEY (specific case Google) don't need them. And that they know where their crossover point is. Anyone any idea how much processing power it takes to handle a data serving enterprise like Google? My guess is not as much as you might think, but I've been wrong before.
I'll definitely grant that other people need more powerful processors though.
Fair enough, if you're doing video processing or high performance 3D rendering or speech recognition then you're going to want more memory, larger address spaces and faster processors. For this reason alone it's worth working on more powerful computing hardware; more power means you can do more complex tasks which means you'll need more powerful hardware to do them faster which means you can do more complicated complex tasks which means you'll need more... The point is that a bunch of slower 32-bit processors running Google will more than likely be better than one large 64-bit processor. More machines in parallel rather than one more powerful machine. Bottleneck, connection bandwidth perhaps? Just a thought. Feel free to slap me down for stupidity if you like. ;)
All in all it depends entirely on what you want to do with your machine. Having just upgraded my office machine from a PII 350 to a PIII 800 (Whew! I know! Blistering speed!) I notice no real difference in my net-surfing and/or laTeX compiling speeds though. My home machine: not too fast but plays a mean game of UT2003 and renders checkerboard floors with chess pieces in acceptable times. Use the right tool for the job.
Oh, I don't know about that. We've all been there. That urge to block out the past few years and start again from pre-school level.
Go on! Calling on all Slashdotters to break out their squeaky rubber hammers and give the colourful plastic walls of your cubicles a sound thrashing! That'll show 'em!
Hey! It's a life choice! *squeak* *squeak*
The drivers are still at the same development point as the card. More worrying is the poor memory interface which the Extreme Tech article pokes the big-stick-o-blame towards.
I'm willing to give nVidia the chance to improve their drivers and work out the bugs before I make a final decision.
The huge PCI gobbling cooling solution just doesn't do it for me though. I mean, sure. If you're using it mainly for games and you don't want to be bothered by the noise doubling+ when you use any 3D functions then you can just turn up the volume and deal with it but can you imaging doing any serious graphical rendering?
You may well be right but I'd imagine the rear of the thing would be reflective (at least for the wavelength of light it emits) and so sends most of the light forward.
Hmmn. I'd also guess that there'd be a sort of cascade effect (you'd need more than one photon) like in a solid state laser where one photon begets another and so on. Stick a reflective surface on the back and you'd probably get almost 100% efficiency. Ignoring any transient start up effects that is.
Third hand's good enough for me. I don't need to do it though. It's been done before and written up. Published, one assumes. Unless it's being suggested the work of many other people is suspect then there's no need to verify the results. If we were to make a more frequency stable laser and develop suitable atmospheric correction techniques in order to get a moree accurate measure of the distance then it may be worth it. If we had to redo all the old scientific experiments ourselves then we'd never achieve anything new.
Oh, and I work with lasers on a daily basis so I've got a good idea how expensive the equipment would be.
In terms of financial cost - negligible (could borrow all I needed)
In terms of time and effort though... really need to be suitably motivated. Funding anyone?
True, you can't see the lander. But to the best of my knowledge (and I don't have any verification or proof of this since I haven't tried it to find out - but then that's what this is all about anyway, isn't it...) it is possible to bounce a laser beam off the surface of the moon from the earth. This is one way to measure the distance of the moon from the earth - the other ways aren't direct measurements but are based on calculations of orbits and times and other observations.
Anyway, the point is that the surface of the moon is not 'shiny' enough to reflect a laser beam back to earth. The only reason this is possible is due to the corner cubes scattered on the surface of the moon by the visiting astronauts. Yes it's a small area but large enough if you know where to point your laser.
And the light returns to it's source because that's the way corner cubes work rather than just reflecting the beam away into space.
So there we have it. A test you can do from the earth's surface. And if the doubters still doubt you can get them to check the equipment over. "Just look into the light. You'll see there's nothing wrong with it. Briefly anyway..."
"Step right up ladies and gentlemen! This is a once in a lifetime offer! This brand new, off the shelf Pentium4 machine - big wodges of RAM, hard disk space just ooooooozing out of every port and have a look at this graphics card! No previous owners but 10e20 users. And that's just this morning!"