Your idea is exactly what Germany is trying right now. Their unemployment is approaching 15%. Would you rather have a living wage if it meant there were far fewer jobs available? In fact, the living wage increases the incentive for business to use robots.
Toshiba (the evil greedy capitalist corporation) is producing a new nano-battery in 2006 that has the potential to cut pollution dramatically as it'll be used in cars instead of gasoline. Greed leads to good things and cheaper products much faster and more efficiently than a gigantic, well meaning beuracracy, hence the fall of the Soviet Union and China's decision to free up their markets in the late 70s.
" Sony's 34-inch wide-screen tube-based direct-view HDTV, the KD-34XBR960, is simply the best-performing television of its kind on the market. Its screen boasts an incredible 1,400 lines of horizontal resolution, which allows it to resolve more detail with high-def sources than any other direct-view tube. It can deliver deeper blacks than any non-tube TV, and it offers two key improvements over last year's excellent KV-34XBR910: accurate color decoding and independent picture memory per input. In the smaller-than-40-inch category, the KD-34XBR960 earns its place as CNET's reference HDTV."
You can usually go into your cable/sat box and tell it what to output. If you de-select 1080i as an output format it will do the converting to 720p instead of the TV which should give better results. It's amazing how many times I've seen the cable guy screw up HD installs. They'll have the tv and the cable box stretching the picture which cuts off the edges.
If you're a real quality nut like me then get a tube based HDTV, they can actually get close to doing 1080i.
Now having said all that, I'll repeat that YOURadio is big news and good news for a few reasons:
First, it is big media recognizing that it's time to listen -- and do more than listen: Let the people speak. It is big media recognizing the value of citizens' media.
Second, it is an admission that the old, one-size-fits-all, top-down, one-way models of programming are broken and the audience can do it better.
Third, it an admission that the old business models are soon to break and that the people can provide more talent for less than the old talent could. It's nothing less than the economic salvation of old media... if old media is smart enough to financially support citizens' media and not just exploit it.
What's important is that a big media company knew it was time to stick some dynamite up the alimentary canal and push the plunger.
It is the tipping point.
Jay Rosen also has an interesting take on his blog, PressThink here.
"Anecdotes are useless to judge service."
Yeah, you're right, we should just rely on the obviously accurate marketing materials and press releases put out by the company. I mean, I don't know how I'd live without my copy of Duke Nuke'm Forever and New Coke.
As a Netflix customer I've noticed a steady decline in the quality of service. Lost disks, wrong disks, longer waits, etc. Maybe they're cutting costs or maybe my postman is a film nut.
I too hate BlockBuster, got burned to the tune of $40 after retuning a video to the wrong blockbuster, so the main reason I'm sticking with Netflix is for fear of the dark side. I don't think Blockbuster can compete with Video On Demand in the future, the doubters sound like long distance phone companies about five years ago.
High Definition Video is a max of 19.8 Mbits/s. If you had a good enough storage system you could stream 50 high definition videos at the same time with a symmetric 1Gb/s connection.
The terms cap the bandwidth to foreign countries which could have strange effects on the spread of culture as the mainstream media loses its grip on the production of video content. Maybe the best role for government in the bandwidth business would be the subsidization of ISP upstream bandwidth costs to foreign countries, it'd be good for trade defecits. Maybe the popularity of American culture in the rest of the world has as much to do with its availibility (satellite tv) as aestheitics.
An MIT prof just released a new book that you can read online called Democratizing Innovation. I haven't read the whole thing yet but it looks like he may be on to something. Also see Pro-Am Revolution.
Nikon sells software that can manipulate those raw files for $100 on top of the cost of the camera. A quote from a CNET Nikon camera review:
"Cons: Nikon's RAW-file editing software costs extra"
So it's a way for them to lower the retail price of the camera, similar to the way rebates work.
"
Unless you are emloyed in America, making software or hardware for a living."
If someone in India or China invented some new technology that raised your standard of living, either through innovation or due to dramatically cheaper products, would you refuse those because they're not made in America?
Would you refuse to use the automated checkout lines now appearing at grocery stores and Home Depots? After all, you're lowering the checkout person's standard of living. In other words, are you anti automation or just anti foriegner (xenophobic)?
Hitachi's new nano-battery looks like it'll do more to clean up the environment more than any amount of well meaning legislation. I did the math and unless I'm horribly mistaken it could wipe out our dependence on gasoline, saving the average american about $2,000 pre-tax dollars a year.
"The Florence-based Innocenti Research Centre of UNICEF, which carried out the study, says children are in poverty when they live in households with an income per head that is 50 percent or less of the national average for their country. "
So if we suddenly doubled the income of every American guess how many would still live in poverty. You guessed it, the exact same amount. Poverty is relative, it has nothing to do with a standard of living.
"UNICEF regional director in Geneva, Philip O'Brien, says that definition is relative. "The child living in poverty in the U.S. is clearly not as badly off as the child in Mexico," he said in a statement Tuesday (Mar. 1).
Didn't it already pass pluto and the major asteroid belts? Unless it's travelling at the speed of light it'll be a long time before it runs into something interesting.
$4M could fund a small array of telescopes that might give us a better view of the universe than an historic but outdated artifact.
First of all, I'm not a republican and think Bush isn't qualified to be president.
This slashdot article is really about Socialism. Should the government prevent free markets. In Germany the answer is yes. High minimum wages, extreme unemployment benefits, lots of government jobs, etc. "The number of people out of work increased by 92,000 to 4.97 million, according to seasonally adjusted figures from the Federal Labour Office.
That pushed Germany's jobless rate to 12%, compared with about 5% in the UK and the US. "
Does anybody here really believe that the lower taxes in the US and UK have nothing to do with that fact that we're more wealthy? That extra 10% unemployed are better off? Poverty is lower in Germany? Nobody, even the most right wing, would argue that capitalism is perfect but preventing competition is a sure way to stifle innovation in the long run. Hitachi's new nano-battery for instance could cut pollution by huge amounts. Why did they invent it? Because it's going to make them incredibly rich. The whole earth saving thing is a side effect. Now what if the government had set up gigantic bureacracy to invent that battery? Hitachi never would have tried to create it and unless you think communism was efficient you have to concede that the earth would have suffered while we waited for the bureaucrats to get the job done.
Wow. I didn't vote for Bush but this site is getting out of hand. A "paltry" 4 million dollars? That money could buy a lot of engineers that could build great new things instead of maintaining something old.
I think most here would rather engage in a lifelong love fest with NASA than to consider starting a business that turns space into a tourist destination like Burt Ruttan has.
To someone in the middle, the left's rejection of the theory of economics is just as disturbing as the right's rejection of the theory of evolution.
According to this link 250hp electric motors are about 95% efficient. Not 100% but compared to the ~20% we're getting now it's not bad.
I didn't even factor in the part about electric cars recharging batteries while braking so five times cheaper might even be a little low. In Europe where gas is $6.50 a gallon this will be a big deal. Check the link to Toshiba's new nano-battery it's really pretty amazing technology.
That's sort of misleading. Modern combustion engines are only about 20% efficient at best, most of the energy is lost as heat, so using electricity from the utility company would be roughly FIVE times cheaper.
Power plants are much much more efficient than an engine that has to fit into a car and run at a wide range of RPMs. So even with coal this is a much better alternative.
Toshiba's new nano-battery should make this an even more attractive technology. A quote:
"For example, the battery's advantages in size, weight and safety highly suit it for a role as an alternative power source for hybrid electric vehicles."
I wonder if they're thinking ahead enough to consider a combination of the new Physx chip with a few of these things on a multicore chip. George Lucas just merged his game and movie production studios, seems to be a real trend.
We're all going to be out of work in a few years if this continues!/sarcasm I really like advances like this because it saves us time. Imagine what politics would look like if all of the IT brains that are writing redundant perl scrips suddenly applied their brains to history and politics. It'd probably change the world.
It's just like the industrial age, we can put down our sledge hammers(mice) and redirect our energy to more important things.
From their website:
"Jim Kartes is the president of Maui-X Stream... He later worked as a news and documentary cameraman for CBS News in New York." (emphasis mine)
I guess we should have seen the writing on the wall.
Slashdot Mirror
Your idea is exactly what Germany is trying right now. Their unemployment is approaching 15%. Would you rather have a living wage if it meant there were far fewer jobs available? In fact, the living wage increases the incentive for business to use robots.
Toshiba (the evil greedy capitalist corporation) is producing a new nano-battery in 2006 that has the potential to cut pollution dramatically as it'll be used in cars instead of gasoline. Greed leads to good things and cheaper products much faster and more efficiently than a gigantic, well meaning beuracracy, hence the fall of the Soviet Union and China's decision to free up their markets in the late 70s.
Here's the Cnet Review.
You can usually go into your cable/sat box and tell it what to output. If you de-select 1080i as an output format it will do the converting to 720p instead of the TV which should give better results. It's amazing how many times I've seen the cable guy screw up HD installs. They'll have the tv and the cable box stretching the picture which cuts off the edges.
If you're a real quality nut like me then get a tube based HDTV, they can actually get close to doing 1080i.
"Anecdotes are useless to judge service."
Yeah, you're right, we should just rely on the obviously accurate marketing materials and press releases put out by the company. I mean, I don't know how I'd live without my copy of Duke Nuke'm Forever and New Coke.
As a Netflix customer I've noticed a steady decline in the quality of service. Lost disks, wrong disks, longer waits, etc. Maybe they're cutting costs or maybe my postman is a film nut.
I too hate BlockBuster, got burned to the tune of $40 after retuning a video to the wrong blockbuster, so the main reason I'm sticking with Netflix is for fear of the dark side. I don't think Blockbuster can compete with Video On Demand in the future, the doubters sound like long distance phone companies about five years ago.
High Definition Video is a max of 19.8 Mbits/s. If you had a good enough storage system you could stream 50 high definition videos at the same time with a symmetric 1Gb/s connection.
The terms cap the bandwidth to foreign countries which could have strange effects on the spread of culture as the mainstream media loses its grip on the production of video content. Maybe the best role for government in the bandwidth business would be the subsidization of ISP upstream bandwidth costs to foreign countries, it'd be good for trade defecits. Maybe the popularity of American culture in the rest of the world has as much to do with its availibility (satellite tv) as aestheitics.
An MIT prof just released a new book that you can read online called Democratizing Innovation. I haven't read the whole thing yet but it looks like he may be on to something. Also see Pro-Am Revolution .
Thats from a of a Sub $1000 Nikon (D70). 10% of the price of the camera is no small thing, at least IMO.
Nikon sells software that can manipulate those raw files for $100 on top of the cost of the camera. A quote from a CNET Nikon camera review:
"Cons: Nikon's RAW-file editing software costs extra"
So it's a way for them to lower the retail price of the camera, similar to the way rebates work.
Sounds scary but an important detail from that sentence is non-exclusive which makes their TOS similar to an open source license like the BSD.
This might explain their recent fiber-optic buying spree.
" Unless you are emloyed in America, making software or hardware for a living."
If someone in India or China invented some new technology that raised your standard of living, either through innovation or due to dramatically cheaper products, would you refuse those because they're not made in America?
Would you refuse to use the automated checkout lines now appearing at grocery stores and Home Depots? After all, you're lowering the checkout person's standard of living. In other words, are you anti automation or just anti foriegner (xenophobic)?
Hitachi's new nano-battery looks like it'll do more to clean up the environment more than any amount of well meaning legislation. I did the math and unless I'm horribly mistaken it could wipe out our dependence on gasoline, saving the average american about $2,000 pre-tax dollars a year.
Wrote about it on my old blog here.
"The Florence-based Innocenti Research Centre of UNICEF, which carried out the study, says children are in poverty when they live in households with an income per head that is 50 percent or less of the national average for their country. "
So if we suddenly doubled the income of every American guess how many would still live in poverty. You guessed it, the exact same amount. Poverty is relative, it has nothing to do with a standard of living.
"UNICEF regional director in Geneva, Philip O'Brien, says that definition is relative. "The child living in poverty in the U.S. is clearly not as badly off as the child in Mexico," he said in a statement Tuesday (Mar. 1).
OK, you have a point :)
Didn't it already pass pluto and the major asteroid belts? Unless it's travelling at the speed of light it'll be a long time before it runs into something interesting.
$4M could fund a small array of telescopes that might give us a better view of the universe than an historic but outdated artifact.
First of all, I'm not a republican and think Bush isn't qualified to be president.
This slashdot article is really about Socialism. Should the government prevent free markets. In Germany the answer is yes. High minimum wages, extreme unemployment benefits, lots of government jobs, etc.
"The number of people out of work increased by 92,000 to 4.97 million, according to seasonally adjusted figures from the Federal Labour Office. That pushed Germany's jobless rate to 12%, compared with about 5% in the UK and the US. "
Does anybody here really believe that the lower taxes in the US and UK have nothing to do with that fact that we're more wealthy? That extra 10% unemployed are better off? Poverty is lower in Germany? Nobody, even the most right wing, would argue that capitalism is perfect but preventing competition is a sure way to stifle innovation in the long run. Hitachi's new nano-battery for instance could cut pollution by huge amounts. Why did they invent it? Because it's going to make them incredibly rich. The whole earth saving thing is a side effect. Now what if the government had set up gigantic bureacracy to invent that battery? Hitachi never would have tried to create it and unless you think communism was efficient you have to concede that the earth would have suffered while we waited for the bureaucrats to get the job done.
Wow. I didn't vote for Bush but this site is getting out of hand. A "paltry" 4 million dollars? That money could buy a lot of engineers that could build great new things instead of maintaining something old.
I think most here would rather engage in a lifelong love fest with NASA than to consider starting a business that turns space into a tourist destination like Burt Ruttan has.
To someone in the middle, the left's rejection of the theory of economics is just as disturbing as the right's rejection of the theory of evolution.
According to this link 250hp electric motors are about 95% efficient. Not 100% but compared to the ~20% we're getting now it's not bad.
I didn't even factor in the part about electric cars recharging batteries while braking so five times cheaper might even be a little low. In Europe where gas is $6.50 a gallon this will be a big deal. Check the link to Toshiba's new nano-battery it's really pretty amazing technology.
That's sort of misleading. Modern combustion engines are only about 20% efficient at best, most of the energy is lost as heat, so using electricity from the utility company would be roughly FIVE times cheaper.
Power plants are much much more efficient than an engine that has to fit into a car and run at a wide range of RPMs. So even with coal this is a much better alternative.
Toshiba's new nano-battery should make this an even more attractive technology. A quote:
"For example, the battery's advantages in size, weight and safety highly suit it for a role as an alternative power source for hybrid electric vehicles."
John Deere Unveils Lawn Mower to Mow Lawns
I wonder if they're thinking ahead enough to consider a combination of the new Physx chip with a few of these things on a multicore chip. George Lucas just merged his game and movie production studios, seems to be a real trend.
We're all going to be out of work in a few years if this continues! /sarcasm I really like advances like this because it saves us time. Imagine what politics would look like if all of the IT brains that are writing redundant perl scrips suddenly applied their brains to history and politics. It'd probably change the world.
It's just like the industrial age, we can put down our sledge hammers(mice) and redirect our energy to more important things.
From their website:
"Jim Kartes is the president of Maui-X Stream... He later worked as a news and documentary cameraman for CBS News in New York." (emphasis mine)
I guess we should have seen the writing on the wall.