I live just west of twin peaks in a forgotten neighbourhood nestled between Laguna Honda Gomer Home and the Sutro Tower. We have no line of sight to ANYTHING except my nieghbour's house and the top of Sutro Tower.
It took YEARS to get DSL up hear, and even so, the fasted I can get is 384 because of the distance to the telco.
I find WhyFi to be even more hype bloated than the "new Economy" balderdash that was washing around SF a few years back. Don't get me wrong: it's great to go into a cafe and get online for free: it's a lovely thing. But the broad swath of free online-ness approach is not all that it's cracked up to be, even (and oddly, ESPECIALLY) here in SF.
"And the first time any of them hose up the DB, would be thier last day of work on a mainframe."
I truly dislike being hostile, but: WHAT? Are you, stupid? Anyone who runs a DB this big is ALWAYS running it in multiples - so this way if it goes down (And they DO go down periodically) the "copy" is always already there pumping identical data. Anything that comes in during a switch is held in a buffer and then dumped in / out. Once the down one is up again, it runs a data integrity test, and then it's back on line.
In fact, it's usually a smart idea to do this on a continuous basis.
Anyone who would fire a DBA for the DB dying is a pig headed ass.
A number of people in academia (my profession, as it were) suffer from significant bouts of cranio-rectal inversion, and seem to think that webpages have less "validity" than books.
This is patently rubbish.
Example: Ann Coulter's book Treason. It's utter crap. Full of lies and innuendo. But, it's a book with an ISBN number. Why is it privileged over a webpage?
Another example: anything written by Bill O'Reilly. I know there are "liberal" examples, but the right wing nutjobs are so lacking in subtlety, that they make for simpler examples. Anyway: his book is also utter balderdash and plays fast and loose with the facts. But: it's a book, and so it gets privilege over some intelligent well reasoned webpage (regardless of political persuasion.)
He or Coulter get to go on book tours, travel the USA slogging their lies and stupdity on radio programs, all because ooks are privileged. Meanwhile, perfectly reasonable bloggers write incisive intelligent analysis and are completely ignored.
Now, when it comes to scientific papers, there is a thing about peer review in papers, and so for that reason, these publications do have privilege, but they needn't be printed on trees. Hence: there is a complexity involved: if there is peer review, the final resting place of the info is of less consequence: a peer reviewed paper on protiens that is published at a website and can be found years later on the same website, has a lot of privilege - nearly as much as the same document printed on paper and mouldering away in a library basement.
But without the conditionals, the peer review, etc., there is a vast gap in privilege, and I see that as essentially problematic for archiving the culture of our time. Perhaps it should all be printed in pH balanced paper and stored in a warehouse...
Another interesting problem is this: we're not going to have the same massive overpopulation in the future, that obtains in the present. There will be an order of magnitude fewer people looking at the stuff, and equally less interest in it. Given the volume and scale of the data set, we're looking at a catastrophic loss of information. Since it is all digital, ther won't be any recourse: it's nto like clay tablets that can be glued back together. I humbbly submit that people 1000 years fro mnow will know more about the 18th century than the late 20th or 21st centuries, and that's just very sad.
it was all flying machines, but I think there's a lot more idiotic stuff that hasn't come about for obvious reasons.
Sure, Trekky Warp Drives aren't a happnin' deal, but then neither is Artificial Intelligence. Minky and Kurzweil and that bunch have been selling that snake oil for decades and yet my Windoze box still goes goofy if it wakes up with a blank floppy in its mouth.
So yeah: thinking machines are another one of those dorky myths that haven't happened, and probably never will.
What other nonsense of THE FUTURE ! (tm) have we been sold over the years?
For any number of reasons, some of which have been discussed by other slashdotters here.
What the geeky pinhead who wrote the article (his name doesn't deserve remembrance) fails to understand is that there is a non-zero probability that computers may simply disappear in fairly short order, and the only programming that will be necessary is that of arranging a machine to do a certain function.
Think about it. It won't be that long before we have some scary punk ass teraHertz optical processors. What ever kind of computing that will be done will be to make machines do things for us, and that will be done at a level that makes Max/MSP look like machine code.
The secretary of the future is NOT going to know programming. The secretary of the future:
a. won't exist because the secretary of the future will be a machine
b. if he or she does exist, they probably won't have a computer on their desk. Their desk will simply be "smart", and not in the dorky sense of an electronic rolodex...
c. That desk will have been built using some super ultra high level language with a bevy of ultra-petaHertz processors with massive amounts of programming code, compilers, etc. *built directly into the chip itself*.
The only people who will have "computers" on their desks are the few thousand people who will be developing these high end languages and machine development machines.
THAT'S the future. CLI is an anachronism and the GUI is not much better. We will all be much better off and much much happier when computers disappear off our desks and into the wallpaper.
I searched on "shit eating freaks" and got 6657 pages of hits. Rather than list the books (look it up yourself!), I'll give you the texts it found from the first page. It makes for very amusing non-sequitor reading. Aaaah - a new form of entertainment! Abusing the amazon search engine!
Excerpt from page 47: ". . . say, just loud enough for us to hear it, "Fuckin' freaks." Phoebe gives them a big shit-eating smile and blows them a huge kiss. They look away, . .."
Excerpt from page 97: ". . . stop" is counterproductive. The victim already feels like a "walking freak" and further blame- inducing language . . . of the severity of an eating disorder. If you suspect a loved one has an eating . .."
Excerpt from page 127: ". . . Big D are explaining the law to Floyd. BIG D Shit, any nigger say he don't . . . by the dominant white, pussy- eating ideology of America, bringing oppression . . . boys. And white boys are freaks for that shit... Then, after a while sisters get . .."
Excerpt from page 269: ". . . made me mad. "Are you swallowing your own line of shit, Arty Binewski? Aren't you forgetting . . . that you're just a two-bit freak with a gimmick?" "Get out," . . . make sure the twins were eating and not flushing their food. Arty let me do chores . .."
Excerpt from page 200: ". . . strain of depression remained impervious to lithium, and as Jenny's "shit year" ended and a new . . . forget how I feel about eating and won't think not to . . . basis." "My sisters are gonna freak out about my having shock treatments." "How do you feel . .."
Excerpt from page 156: ". . . in reception? She'd know that you left the office. She'd freak! It's not worth the risk. Hold on a sec-I11 get . .."
Excerpt from page 81: ". . . waves leapt up, if life went on as usual and freak accidents peppered a calm shore. That same week she found . .."
Excerpt from page 256: ". . . to have on him. "Look at me!" he shouts. "I'm shit and ev- erybody who looks at me knows I'm shit. . .."
Excerpt from page 176: ". . . signed her new identity on it below the little Irish freak. "I was just thinking of Billy," she explained. "Remember that . .."
Excerpt from page 90: ". . . been to that Salvadorian bistro on Eighty-third?" he asks. "We're eating there tonight." "Yeah. I mean . . . somewhere, and this, in turn, freaks me out. "The Fisher account," . . . Fisher account," Reeves says. "Oh shit," I say. "Don't remind us." "Lucky bastard," Hamlin says. "Has . .."
When gasoline becomes more scarce, its price will naturally climb in accordance with the law of supply and demand. Until then, gasoline is a much cheaper source of *portable* energy than anything else, at least when you take startup cost into account. (If someone fronted all the cost for R&D of a personal hydrogen transportation system, then fuel cells might be cheaper in the margin; but I'd rather that be funded privately instead of having the funds ripped from my wallet by Uncle Sam.)
Ummm, Unca Sammy is already pulling your pockets to support the oil addiction. For some stupid reason, people don't seem to be willing to lump the percentage we piss away on the military projecting/protecting the interests of the oil barons with the price of energy.
Take whatever money we've dumped bombing and invading Iraq, defending the Israelis, propping up the Saudis, Kuwaitis, etc. and then add in those idiotic depreciation allowances and other subsidies we give to the oil barons, then distribute that amount over each gallon of fuel sold over that time, and then you'll get a truer sense of the actual cost of oil and gas.
My back of the envelope calculations indicate that the REAL cost of oil is approximately just about double what we pay at the pump, making alternative energy sources and delivery systems that don't incure these collateral costs that much more economically attractive, in real money over time, as we could scale back our military, dispense with the subsidies, and let the middle east sink into the morass those petty eye for an eye pathetic freaking assholes are so good at. We could just sit back and watch the slaughter from the sidelines as the Arab economies collapse, blame America and take it all out on Israel, which is pushed into the mediterranean by armies of suicidal islamic poverty stricken palestinians, because the USA pulled all the funding for the tin horn fascists running the Jewish State.
So, yeah - we're already paying rediculous amounts of money for the energy, and getting off the merry go round of the middle east ASAP would only be good for the USA, and if the tards in that area want to blow each other up - fine - let 'em. Don't give any of them any money. Let 'em all crash and burn while I tool around in my hypercar.
it used to be that elements were named for gods and goddesses and other more "universal" objects. Then one day in the 20th century some ego centric dickwad decided that the element should bear the name of some scientist...
Great. So all we would need is a scientist named Boner, and we'd have boneronium. Now that's just SO inspiring.
There seems to be a trend to place names for elements, which is fine by me. I can deal with darmstadtium a damn site-ium easier than Hoffmannium or Oganessianium...
Frankly, I'd like to see all the elements named after people changed to something more impersonal. Nuclear binding notwithstanding, all you gotta do is cram a bunch of neutrons and protons together and you get new element. Sure, it's (WAY) more complex than that, but basically, that's all there is to it, and I think that putting personal ego gratification into it just sullies the waters for what could be much more inspiring and poetic responses to such work.
newyorkium. bostonium. londonium. muscovium. madridium. bernium. portlandium. stanfordium. etc.
Much nicer. More poetic than (John) Smithium, (Jim) Jonesium, or (Betty Jo) Bealovskium.
And why is it always "ium"? How about "an" or "gen"? Like darmstadtigen?
The problem with science geeks is the world they work in is visionless. The problem with art geeks is the world they work in is blind.
"You just can't fit a true DV compliant stream into 11 Mbit without lossy compression (and then it's not DV anymore.)"
DV is a lossy compression scheme unto itself. It starts right off at 4.1.1 and then does a block compression on top of that. Uncompressed 4.4.4 29.97fps video is like 30 megabytes or so per second.
He also wrote:
"Of course this is where firewire shines as well."
Completely agree. Firewire 1 was faster than USB 1, and now FW2 is faster than USB 2. The problem is, FW is seen as the province of Apple and Sony and the Wintel dittoheads don't want to admit that FW is better for highspeed data transfer and spend a few euros and put a superior Apple/Sony technology in their machines, Bog Ferbid. Especially as it took Apple to drag the wintel world into putting USB into Wintel computers by abandoning ADB / SVideo cable on Apple machines - the irony being that USB is an Intel technology...
Innovation in Wintel is almost impossible - they don't have the profit margins on each machine. So you pay the Apple Tax and get the latest trick kit or you pay the MS tax and run with the herd. Now, if Linux had a competent FW2 driver and a vvideo editor equal to FCP and AfterFX, I'd be all over Linux in a NY minute. But the software isn't there, so I'm sitting here on my G4 laptop editing and processing video...
If fast breeder reactors were researched a little more, we'd have good, relatively clean, power stations. Although, at the moment, combined cycle gas turbines take the prize.
Yeeeeeeah, suuuuure.... but carbon emissions are a GLOBAL problem, so you would need global implementation of the reactors. We should have breeder reactors ALL OVER THE PLANET so countries like Afghanistan, North Korea, Uganda, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Chechnya, and Libya can get their hands on weapons grade plutonium?
uuuuuh, don't think so chumly.
The future is: get rid of the grid. Make people responsible for their own energy production. Decentralised solar, wind, geothermal, hydrogen, etc. If people are made to be responsible for their own production, you will see an order of magnitude increase in energy efficiency.
When it comes to energy policy and carbon production, you have to think thousands of years into the future, not just 20 or 30 or even 100.
"Competitive privatized industries have -never- been a disaster."
Bloney. Operating systems. dominated by MS. Linux under attack by SCO, Apple marginalised, BeOS practicially nonexistent. Amiga and OS2 distant dreams from the past.
The OS industry is competitive, but the competition is skewed by a dominating competitor. this always happens. 100 years a go there were dozens of car makers. Now there's a handful. The idea of the free market is a myth. There is no such thing.
will have whole new levels of meaning with this technology...
Actually, I think the biggest immediate problems are going to be:
a. finding a camera with 4000 lines of resolution at Fry's for less than $1500.
b. finding a 4000 line projector at Good Guys for less that $2000.
c. finding a 60 terabyte drive to hold the media for your average stupid hollywood star vehicle, at any price.
Actually, there will prolly be all the money and drive space in the world for that crap. *sigh*.
Just what I need - 60 Tb of Leonardo DiCrapio.... or Demi Moore. or JLo... or Affleck...Urk. As if any of them are worth 4.7gigs of plastic and aluminium, much less 60Tb of hard earned drive space...
Oh, welll...Moore's law to the Rescue, doubletime!
As the other poster noted: this is just more scare tactics and FUD from Intel. Having some 64bit parts doesn't make it a 64bit chip., nor does their roadmap necessarily mean that AMD is going to be out priced and outperformed - I didn't see anything about AMD's roadmap...
Mod the parent up. He wasn't very articulate, but he was right on the money.
Let's look at the basics, and everything else becomes clear:
A redbook CD is about 650 megs (usually less) of uncompressed audio. With audio compression techniques, (MP3, Ogg etc.) the CD becomes about 100megs (at a compression rate that doesn't *completely* mangle the music.) and each track comes out to about 5 megs or so. A CDR can be had for much less than a dollar. The last CDRs I bought were FREE after discounts and rebates.
So, to copy the Original CDR at "full quality" Redbook audio costs nearly nothing and when compressed to MP3, eats 100 megs on my drive.
DVDs are already compressed, and if the movie is over 2 hours, they are often VERY compressed. The DVD eats (usually) about 4.2 GIGs of space on my drive.
Now, until very recently hard drives weren;'t all that cheap. The first one I could afford of consequence was in 1994 when I bought a 1 gig drive for $580 and I got a damn good deal on it. DVDs didn't exist, but even if they did, my computer didn't have a large enough drive to store a movie, unless I wanted to experience it at 180x240 at 15ips and compressed beyond all human imagining. Also, the computers were so slow, that to rip that much data would have taken....a reeeally long time, given I was running a 48 mHz machine...
So, music was the first to get digitised due to its file size. the rest follows, really.
When the $400 desktop computer I pick up at best buy has a 4 terabyte drive, and processes data in the multiteraflop range, and has 7.1 audio built right in, and the video card has a gigabyte of VRAM, Hollywood will be making the same kinds of noises that the RIAA are right now.
Compressed audio sounds lousy, but no more lousy than DVDs presently look. Once the file size for DVDs relative to the hard drives and CPU speeds isn't such a big deal, people will cheerfully rip DVDs and burn them for their friends, and their will be precious little Hollywood can do about it.
When will the bandwidth to my house via (whatever succeeds DSL / cable modems) in 10 years be? No idea, but I kind of doubt that it will be able to move movies around with the rate of speed I can move a title of MP3 / Ogg choonz.
therefore, the bandwidth for trading movies over the internet at a reasonable quality will lag far enough behind that Hollywood won't give a rats ass about it for quite a while.
However, as we all know, the bandwidth for trading music, even entire CD Titles, has been around for quite a while, and hence, the RIAA get their knickers in a twist.
Therefore: Hollywood comes off looking better than the RIAA, because they know that I might have 1000 CDs of music on my 120 gig drive at a quality not very different from the original, but there is no way I'lll have a 1000 movies on my 120 gig drive at the same relative level of quality. Consequently, they toss out DVD movie titles for not that much more money than the MSRP CD title prices...
Now, when I have a 60 terabyte drive in my machine loaded to the gunnels with movies, and the bandwidth is there and affordable for me to P2P a full length MPEG2 movie in 7.1 audio in less than a half hour, and I'm just sitting back and burning DVDRs for friends and fambly, Hollywood WILL hunt my ass down, just like the RIAA hunted down the Kazaalings.
Well, this is a welcome idea to chez Spoilsport, but, if our weasel-in-chief and the spineless wonders in congress keep up the insane deficits, there won't be enough money to fund the corner bus stop at the Johnson Space Center, much less space taxis to Mars.
If we:
ditich the insane war on drugs,
and stop these idiotic military adventures,
and impose progressive taxation to balance the budget,
then we *might* have a few extra Ameros left over for space exploration. I'd sooner fund a base on the moon than one in Iraq.
Was the circular hockey puck thingie Apple shoved down everyone's throats a few years back. Damn those things were nasty! It was like instant RSI just touching one.
Note: they didn't last too long, but in typical Apple Fashion (not too redundant, eh?) they lasted longer than they should have.
Now my happy little powerbook uses a Kensington optical and we all rejoice...
I used to do tech support for a graphics software company back in the mid 1990s. One day a gentleman called up and while I waited for some operation to duplicate his problem, we were talking about computers. I told him my first computer was very slow - an Atari 1040st. He laughed. He said he was a bit older and his first computer was REALLY primitive. How primitive? I asked.
Well, he said, there was this funky wired up typewriter type thing that was the data input. Once you entered your problem and the computer finished calculating it, you had to open a door and WALK INSIDE THE COMPUTER and count the lightbulbs. On = 1, off = zero. There were banks of bulbs...
He said the computer itself was huge and took up most of a warehouse in Northern Virginia. This was all in the late 1940s, and he worked for the Pentagon. He said the pocket calculator he got for opening a bank account was more powerful than the humungus machine he had to deal with in the 40s.
Sorta puts things in perspective.
I asked him about reliability of components, and he said they had a problem with mice for a while, but due to the large voltages this thing ran on, it was usually a self correcting pest problem, and one easily detected: the smell of burning fur is rather distinctive...
Actually now that I think about it, I thikn you're right - if the payload is large enough, then the device itself becomes expendable - why bring it back, when it can be used up there?
Rather than build re-entry trucks, just keep everything you send up there, up there.
We need to set up a forge on the ISS, so it can make stuff out of space junk... There's an idea - a kind of super recycling system for materials... Send an "Apollo" type machine up there, and KEEP the whole nasty thing up there - just send back the capsule to rotate the crews... Then hack up the rest of the modules and turn it into more ISS rather than let it all oxidise in the atmoshpere...
a more nuanced approach where both capsule and space planes work.
The capsules are fine for moving people, but space planes would be better as "trucks" hauling materials into space to build upon the ISS.
An active capsule system will also allow for better and more frequent moon visits and (wildly overdue) MOON BASES which could be visited by SPACE PLANES.
Then we'd be Rockin'... If we can build Moon bases, we can then look at Mars bases... We really need to rationalise this who space enterprise thing, and I think developing a multiplicity of space vehicles is a smart idea - capsule people movers, Spaceplane trucks, it all makes sense...
I have 1370 titles of music in my collection. I need an 80 - 120 gig iPod. That's why I haven't bought one yet - what they offer is too SMALL!
Also, I need the room for growth of my collection. I used to buy a CD or two a week. Now it's down to a CD or two a month, thanks to my unemployment running out out...
What I would like to see is another kind of iPod where the storage capacity is arbitrary - a box that has room for several HDs and the iPod OS part of the machine, and with bluetooth and Airport Extreme so I can run a wireless central music server for Chez Spoilsport.
Now THAT would rawk. As it is, the iPod is just, well, too dinky for my needs.
Slashdot Mirror
It took YEARS to get DSL up hear, and even so, the fasted I can get is 384 because of the distance to the telco.
I find WhyFi to be even more hype bloated than the "new Economy" balderdash that was washing around SF a few years back. Don't get me wrong: it's great to go into a cafe and get online for free: it's a lovely thing. But the broad swath of free online-ness approach is not all that it's cracked up to be, even (and oddly, ESPECIALLY) here in SF.
RS
"And the first time any of them hose up the DB, would be thier last day of work on a mainframe."
I truly dislike being hostile, but: WHAT? Are you, stupid? Anyone who runs a DB this big is ALWAYS running it in multiples - so this way if it goes down (And they DO go down periodically) the "copy" is always already there pumping identical data. Anything that comes in during a switch is held in a buffer and then dumped in / out. Once the down one is up again, it runs a data integrity test, and then it's back on line.
In fact, it's usually a smart idea to do this on a continuous basis.
Anyone who would fire a DBA for the DB dying is a pig headed ass.
RS
France Telecom : 29,232 : Oracle : SMP : Oracle : HP : HP
AT&T: 26,269 : Daytona : SMP : AT&T : Sun : Sun
SBC : 24,805 : Teradata : MPP : Teradata : NCR : LSI
***Anonymous*** : 16,191 : DB2 for Unix : MPP/Cluster : IBM : IBM : IBM
16 terabytes, and anonymous.... Hmmmm.... I know! It's the motherlode of all porn sites! Either that or the NSA. Same thing, really...
Mmmmm Condeeeeeeeeee!
RS
This is patently rubbish.
Example: Ann Coulter's book Treason. It's utter crap. Full of lies and innuendo. But, it's a book with an ISBN number. Why is it privileged over a webpage?
Another example: anything written by Bill O'Reilly. I know there are "liberal" examples, but the right wing nutjobs are so lacking in subtlety, that they make for simpler examples. Anyway: his book is also utter balderdash and plays fast and loose with the facts. But: it's a book, and so it gets privilege over some intelligent well reasoned webpage (regardless of political persuasion.)
He or Coulter get to go on book tours, travel the USA slogging their lies and stupdity on radio programs, all because ooks are privileged. Meanwhile, perfectly reasonable bloggers write incisive intelligent analysis and are completely ignored.
Now, when it comes to scientific papers, there is a thing about peer review in papers, and so for that reason, these publications do have privilege, but they needn't be printed on trees. Hence: there is a complexity involved: if there is peer review, the final resting place of the info is of less consequence: a peer reviewed paper on protiens that is published at a website and can be found years later on the same website, has a lot of privilege - nearly as much as the same document printed on paper and mouldering away in a library basement.
But without the conditionals, the peer review, etc., there is a vast gap in privilege, and I see that as essentially problematic for archiving the culture of our time. Perhaps it should all be printed in pH balanced paper and stored in a warehouse...
Another interesting problem is this: we're not going to have the same massive overpopulation in the future, that obtains in the present. There will be an order of magnitude fewer people looking at the stuff, and equally less interest in it. Given the volume and scale of the data set, we're looking at a catastrophic loss of information. Since it is all digital, ther won't be any recourse: it's nto like clay tablets that can be glued back together. I humbbly submit that people 1000 years fro mnow will know more about the 18th century than the late 20th or 21st centuries, and that's just very sad.
RS
Sure, Trekky Warp Drives aren't a happnin' deal, but then neither is Artificial Intelligence. Minky and Kurzweil and that bunch have been selling that snake oil for decades and yet my Windoze box still goes goofy if it wakes up with a blank floppy in its mouth.
So yeah: thinking machines are another one of those dorky myths that haven't happened, and probably never will.
What other nonsense of THE FUTURE ! (tm) have we been sold over the years?
RS
What the geeky pinhead who wrote the article (his name doesn't deserve remembrance) fails to understand is that there is a non-zero probability that computers may simply disappear in fairly short order, and the only programming that will be necessary is that of arranging a machine to do a certain function.
Think about it. It won't be that long before we have some scary punk ass teraHertz optical processors. What ever kind of computing that will be done will be to make machines do things for us, and that will be done at a level that makes Max/MSP look like machine code.
The secretary of the future is NOT going to know programming. The secretary of the future:
a. won't exist because the secretary of the future will be a machine
b. if he or she does exist, they probably won't have a computer on their desk. Their desk will simply be "smart", and not in the dorky sense of an electronic rolodex...
c. That desk will have been built using some super ultra high level language with a bevy of ultra-petaHertz processors with massive amounts of programming code, compilers, etc. *built directly into the chip itself*.
The only people who will have "computers" on their desks are the few thousand people who will be developing these high end languages and machine development machines.
THAT'S the future. CLI is an anachronism and the GUI is not much better. We will all be much better off and much much happier when computers disappear off our desks and into the wallpaper.
RS
Excerpt from page 47: ". . . say, just loud enough for us to hear it, "Fuckin' freaks." Phoebe gives them a big shit-eating smile and blows them a huge kiss. They look away, . . ."
Excerpt from page 97: ". . . stop" is counterproductive. The victim already feels like a "walking freak" and further blame- inducing language . . . of the severity of an eating disorder. If you suspect a loved one has an eating . . ."
Excerpt from page 127: ". . . Big D are explaining the law to Floyd. BIG D Shit, any nigger say he don't . . . by the dominant white, pussy- eating ideology of America, bringing oppression . . . boys. And white boys are freaks for that shit ... Then, after a while sisters get . . ."
Excerpt from page 269: ". . . made me mad. "Are you swallowing your own line of shit, Arty Binewski? Aren't you forgetting . . . that you're just a two-bit freak with a gimmick?" "Get out," . . . make sure the twins were eating and not flushing their food. Arty let me do chores . . ."
Excerpt from page 200: ". . . strain of depression remained impervious to lithium, and as Jenny's "shit year" ended and a new . . . forget how I feel about eating and won't think not to . . . basis." "My sisters are gonna freak out about my having shock treatments." "How do you feel . . ."
Excerpt from page 156: ". . . in reception? She'd know that you left the office. She'd freak! It's not worth the risk. Hold on a sec-I11 get . . ."
Excerpt from page 81: ". . . waves leapt up, if life went on as usual and freak accidents peppered a calm shore. That same week she found . . ."
Excerpt from page 256: ". . . to have on him. "Look at me!" he shouts. "I'm shit and ev- erybody who looks at me knows I'm shit. . . ."
Excerpt from page 176: ". . . signed her new identity on it below the little Irish freak. "I was just thinking of Billy," she explained. "Remember that . . ."
Excerpt from page 90: ". . . been to that Salvadorian bistro on Eighty-third?" he asks. "We're eating there tonight." "Yeah. I mean . . . somewhere, and this, in turn, freaks me out. "The Fisher account," . . . Fisher account," Reeves says. "Oh shit," I say. "Don't remind us." "Lucky bastard," Hamlin says. "Has . . ."
RS
There is no superior technology.
When gasoline becomes more scarce, its price will naturally climb in accordance with the law of supply and demand. Until then, gasoline is a much cheaper source of *portable* energy than anything else, at least when you take startup cost into account. (If someone fronted all the cost for R&D of a personal hydrogen transportation system, then fuel cells might be cheaper in the margin; but I'd rather that be funded privately instead of having the funds ripped from my wallet by Uncle Sam.)
Ummm, Unca Sammy is already pulling your pockets to support the oil addiction. For some stupid reason, people don't seem to be willing to lump the percentage we piss away on the military projecting/protecting the interests of the oil barons with the price of energy.
Take whatever money we've dumped bombing and invading Iraq, defending the Israelis, propping up the Saudis, Kuwaitis, etc. and then add in those idiotic depreciation allowances and other subsidies we give to the oil barons, then distribute that amount over each gallon of fuel sold over that time, and then you'll get a truer sense of the actual cost of oil and gas.
My back of the envelope calculations indicate that the REAL cost of oil is approximately just about double what we pay at the pump, making alternative energy sources and delivery systems that don't incure these collateral costs that much more economically attractive, in real money over time, as we could scale back our military, dispense with the subsidies, and let the middle east sink into the morass those petty eye for an eye pathetic freaking assholes are so good at. We could just sit back and watch the slaughter from the sidelines as the Arab economies collapse, blame America and take it all out on Israel, which is pushed into the mediterranean by armies of suicidal islamic poverty stricken palestinians, because the USA pulled all the funding for the tin horn fascists running the Jewish State.
So, yeah - we're already paying rediculous amounts of money for the energy, and getting off the merry go round of the middle east ASAP would only be good for the USA, and if the tards in that area want to blow each other up - fine - let 'em. Don't give any of them any money. Let 'em all crash and burn while I tool around in my hypercar.
RS
Great. So all we would need is a scientist named Boner, and we'd have boneronium. Now that's just SO inspiring.
There seems to be a trend to place names for elements, which is fine by me. I can deal with darmstadtium a damn site-ium easier than Hoffmannium or Oganessianium...
Frankly, I'd like to see all the elements named after people changed to something more impersonal. Nuclear binding notwithstanding, all you gotta do is cram a bunch of neutrons and protons together and you get new element. Sure, it's (WAY) more complex than that, but basically, that's all there is to it, and I think that putting personal ego gratification into it just sullies the waters for what could be much more inspiring and poetic responses to such work.
newyorkium. bostonium. londonium. muscovium. madridium. bernium. portlandium. stanfordium. etc.
Much nicer. More poetic than (John) Smithium, (Jim) Jonesium, or (Betty Jo) Bealovskium.
And why is it always "ium"? How about "an" or "gen"? Like darmstadtigen?
The problem with science geeks is the world they work in is visionless. The problem with art geeks is the world they work in is blind.
RS
"You just can't fit a true DV compliant stream into 11 Mbit without lossy compression (and then it's not DV anymore.)"
DV is a lossy compression scheme unto itself. It starts right off at 4.1.1 and then does a block compression on top of that. Uncompressed 4.4.4 29.97fps video is like 30 megabytes or so per second.
He also wrote:
"Of course this is where firewire shines as well."
Completely agree. Firewire 1 was faster than USB 1, and now FW2 is faster than USB 2. The problem is, FW is seen as the province of Apple and Sony and the Wintel dittoheads don't want to admit that FW is better for highspeed data transfer and spend a few euros and put a superior Apple/Sony technology in their machines, Bog Ferbid. Especially as it took Apple to drag the wintel world into putting USB into Wintel computers by abandoning ADB / SVideo cable on Apple machines - the irony being that USB is an Intel technology...
Innovation in Wintel is almost impossible - they don't have the profit margins on each machine. So you pay the Apple Tax and get the latest trick kit or you pay the MS tax and run with the herd. Now, if Linux had a competent FW2 driver and a vvideo editor equal to FCP and AfterFX, I'd be all over Linux in a NY minute. But the software isn't there, so I'm sitting here on my G4 laptop editing and processing video...
RS
I pray for the day computers disappear.
RS
If fast breeder reactors were researched a little more, we'd have good, relatively clean, power stations. Although, at the moment, combined cycle gas turbines take the prize.
Yeeeeeeah, suuuuure.... but carbon emissions are a GLOBAL problem, so you would need global implementation of the reactors. We should have breeder reactors ALL OVER THE PLANET so countries like Afghanistan, North Korea, Uganda, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Chechnya, and Libya can get their hands on weapons grade plutonium?
uuuuuh, don't think so chumly.
The future is: get rid of the grid. Make people responsible for their own energy production. Decentralised solar, wind, geothermal, hydrogen, etc. If people are made to be responsible for their own production, you will see an order of magnitude increase in energy efficiency.
When it comes to energy policy and carbon production, you have to think thousands of years into the future, not just 20 or 30 or even 100.
RS
RS
Bloney. Operating systems. dominated by MS. Linux under attack by SCO, Apple marginalised, BeOS practicially nonexistent. Amiga and OS2 distant dreams from the past.
The OS industry is competitive, but the competition is skewed by a dominating competitor. this always happens. 100 years a go there were dozens of car makers. Now there's a handful. The idea of the free market is a myth. There is no such thing.
RS
Actually, I think the biggest immediate problems are going to be:
a. finding a camera with 4000 lines of resolution at Fry's for less than $1500.
b. finding a 4000 line projector at Good Guys for less that $2000.
c. finding a 60 terabyte drive to hold the media for your average stupid hollywood star vehicle, at any price.
Actually, there will prolly be all the money and drive space in the world for that crap. *sigh*. Just what I need - 60 Tb of Leonardo DiCrapio.... or Demi Moore. or JLo... or Affleck...Urk. As if any of them are worth 4.7gigs of plastic and aluminium, much less 60Tb of hard earned drive space...
Oh, welll...Moore's law to the Rescue, doubletime!
RS
the same kind of people who invented the 2 stroke kick start vibrator... RS dynamo hummmm....
Mod the parent up. He wasn't very articulate, but he was right on the money.
RS
A redbook CD is about 650 megs (usually less) of uncompressed audio. With audio compression techniques, (MP3, Ogg etc.) the CD becomes about 100megs (at a compression rate that doesn't *completely* mangle the music.) and each track comes out to about 5 megs or so. A CDR can be had for much less than a dollar. The last CDRs I bought were FREE after discounts and rebates.
So, to copy the Original CDR at "full quality" Redbook audio costs nearly nothing and when compressed to MP3, eats 100 megs on my drive.
DVDs are already compressed, and if the movie is over 2 hours, they are often VERY compressed. The DVD eats (usually) about 4.2 GIGs of space on my drive.
Now, until very recently hard drives weren;'t all that cheap. The first one I could afford of consequence was in 1994 when I bought a 1 gig drive for $580 and I got a damn good deal on it. DVDs didn't exist, but even if they did, my computer didn't have a large enough drive to store a movie, unless I wanted to experience it at 180x240 at 15ips and compressed beyond all human imagining. Also, the computers were so slow, that to rip that much data would have taken....a reeeally long time, given I was running a 48 mHz machine...
So, music was the first to get digitised due to its file size. the rest follows, really.
When the $400 desktop computer I pick up at best buy has a 4 terabyte drive, and processes data in the multiteraflop range, and has 7.1 audio built right in, and the video card has a gigabyte of VRAM, Hollywood will be making the same kinds of noises that the RIAA are right now.
Compressed audio sounds lousy, but no more lousy than DVDs presently look. Once the file size for DVDs relative to the hard drives and CPU speeds isn't such a big deal, people will cheerfully rip DVDs and burn them for their friends, and their will be precious little Hollywood can do about it.
When will the bandwidth to my house via (whatever succeeds DSL / cable modems) in 10 years be? No idea, but I kind of doubt that it will be able to move movies around with the rate of speed I can move a title of MP3 / Ogg choonz.
therefore, the bandwidth for trading movies over the internet at a reasonable quality will lag far enough behind that Hollywood won't give a rats ass about it for quite a while.
However, as we all know, the bandwidth for trading music, even entire CD Titles, has been around for quite a while, and hence, the RIAA get their knickers in a twist.
Therefore: Hollywood comes off looking better than the RIAA, because they know that I might have 1000 CDs of music on my 120 gig drive at a quality not very different from the original, but there is no way I'lll have a 1000 movies on my 120 gig drive at the same relative level of quality. Consequently, they toss out DVD movie titles for not that much more money than the MSRP CD title prices...
Now, when I have a 60 terabyte drive in my machine loaded to the gunnels with movies, and the bandwidth is there and affordable for me to P2P a full length MPEG2 movie in 7.1 audio in less than a half hour, and I'm just sitting back and burning DVDRs for friends and fambly, Hollywood WILL hunt my ass down, just like the RIAA hunted down the Kazaalings.
RS
If we:
ditich the insane war on drugs,
and stop these idiotic military adventures,
and impose progressive taxation to balance the budget,
then we *might* have a few extra Ameros left over for space exploration. I'd sooner fund a base on the moon than one in Iraq.
RS
Note: they didn't last too long, but in typical Apple Fashion (not too redundant, eh?) they lasted longer than they should have.
Now my happy little powerbook uses a Kensington optical and we all rejoice...
RS
His response:
"So, Tellers dead, eh? Finally..."
RS
Well, he said, there was this funky wired up typewriter type thing that was the data input. Once you entered your problem and the computer finished calculating it, you had to open a door and WALK INSIDE THE COMPUTER and count the lightbulbs. On = 1, off = zero. There were banks of bulbs...
He said the computer itself was huge and took up most of a warehouse in Northern Virginia. This was all in the late 1940s, and he worked for the Pentagon. He said the pocket calculator he got for opening a bank account was more powerful than the humungus machine he had to deal with in the 40s.
Sorta puts things in perspective.
I asked him about reliability of components, and he said they had a problem with mice for a while, but due to the large voltages this thing ran on, it was usually a self correcting pest problem, and one easily detected: the smell of burning fur is rather distinctive...
RS
Rather than build re-entry trucks, just keep everything you send up there, up there.
We need to set up a forge on the ISS, so it can make stuff out of space junk... There's an idea - a kind of super recycling system for materials... Send an "Apollo" type machine up there, and KEEP the whole nasty thing up there - just send back the capsule to rotate the crews... Then hack up the rest of the modules and turn it into more ISS rather than let it all oxidise in the atmoshpere...
Hmmmmm...
HW
The capsules are fine for moving people, but space planes would be better as "trucks" hauling materials into space to build upon the ISS.
An active capsule system will also allow for better and more frequent moon visits and (wildly overdue) MOON BASES which could be visited by SPACE PLANES.
Then we'd be Rockin'... If we can build Moon bases, we can then look at Mars bases... We really need to rationalise this who space enterprise thing, and I think developing a multiplicity of space vehicles is a smart idea - capsule people movers, Spaceplane trucks, it all makes sense...
RS
Also, I need the room for growth of my collection. I used to buy a CD or two a week. Now it's down to a CD or two a month, thanks to my unemployment running out out...
What I would like to see is another kind of iPod where the storage capacity is arbitrary - a box that has room for several HDs and the iPod OS part of the machine, and with bluetooth and Airport Extreme so I can run a wireless central music server for Chez Spoilsport.
Now THAT would rawk. As it is, the iPod is just, well, too dinky for my needs.
RS
Bluto did it...