I completely agree. I used to be a hardcore gamer about 10-15 years ago, playing moon patrol, alleycat, round 42, Wolf3D, etc. They were FUN! The games these days have fancy graphics, require ridiculous 3D hardware to get a reasonable FPS and are no fun at all. Sometimes, I want to spend just 20 minutes playing a fun game. Instead, the games take 20 minutes (a slight exxageration) to load and have complicated gameplay that just turns you off
I'm not proposing skipping the part of theory creation at all. I'm just pointing out that one needs to consider that the theory can be completely wrong, without getting attached to the theory. The theory shouldn't become gospel truth without some experimental data is all I'm saying.
New theories are definitely needed and the better they explain current observations, the more likely they are to be reality. But, there is also a chance that they are way off base and reality is completely different. That's what we shouldn't forget while looking at these theories until we have the technology necessary to validate the theory.
While various Theories of Everything are being proposed, a lot of them are not based on observation. They are just complex mathematical magic created to explain reality.
It's like someone saying the earth is suspended in space on the back of a big turtle which is suspended on the back of another turtle, ad. infinitum. For a human who doesn't have any means of verification, the turtle theory can explain things as well as gravity. Similarly, there are currently no means to verify string theory. It is about as good as the turtle theory until then.
e-comics, e-books, et. al. just don't work for me because I cannot lie back on the sofa, sit on the toilet seat, read while eating, etc. Good old paper is my preference until there's a more handy way to read e-books. Handhelds don't work well for me either since they just don't contain as much information in 1 page as a book and require frequent scrolling.
The best application for consumers looks like the folding LCD displays. It would be great to have handhelds with a folding screen without a perceptible seam. Finally it won't suck to play games on handhelds.
Services such as OnDemand on cable are way too over-priced. It's usually $3.95 per movie. I'd much rather buy a used DVD for 10 bucks instead. It's the same reason I never rent anything from Blockbuster (Overpriced American movie rental store).
I don't see DVDs dying anytime soon. It may get marginalised like VHS in a few years, but it is unlikely to "end" as mentioned in the title
They are getting away easy only because they haven't sent extortion letters to Linux users, asking for licensing fees in Germany. The 10k fine was for just 1 incident.. something posted on a webpage. If they had sent 1000s of extortion letters, I suspect the fine would have been significantly higher.
I wish a US court would fine them for similar offenses. That could lead to a much bigger fine because of all the extortion letters sent by the thugs.
Here's what I use my cellphone for : Making phone calls. I don't particularly care for playing games with shitty graphics, using awkward controls. I don't particularly care for sending pictures of my beautiful face using a cellphone webcam.. Maybe I talk only from the bathroom. I'm sick of all the features they keep adding to the cellphones. How about giving cellphones a better antenna by default instead?
While mass-producing a learjet probably doesn't cost much at all, building the first prototype probably cost many 10s of millions in development costs. If this team is building a prototype for $1-2 million and that includes all material, development and testing costs, I'm definitely not buying a house in its flight-path.
The team is spending between $1 million and $2 million to build its craft.
How on earth do they intend to build a spacecraft carrying people for $1-2 million? Even an extremely used Learjet costs a few million! Am I missing something?
Why do video game prices have to go up because the the technology is improving? Computers have consistently become more complex, but their prices have been going down. The number of people playing video games is also going up quite rapidly, resulting in more customers for video game companies. Maybe they have to do more development, but that is the same for all new technologies. If video game companies are losing money, it's because of nothing but a crappy business model.
100 ms latency would affect a 10Mbps network and a 10 Tbps network almost equally if a clustered application is using very small packets to communicate. Only if the application is using very large packets, the bandwidth will overcome the latency. At small packet sizes the latency will largely overshadow the bandwidth. And considering that a lot of scientific applications use small payloads, latency is very important.
If ethernet wants acceptance in the High-Performance-Computing-Clusters world, something has to be done about the latency.
Bandwidth doesn't necessarily help play games with very little delay. For quick responses in games, you need low one-way latency. A network may be capable of throwing out 1000 zillion bytes/second, but if it takes too long to send out the first packet, the game isn't going to work very well. One-way latency is way more important than bandwidth when the goal is to send out many small packets as soon as possible. High bandwidth would greatly speed up large downloads, but for faster response in games, etc, lower latency is what you need.
Bandwidth is good, but what about latency? Ethernet has traditionally suffered from high latencies and doesn't work very well for High-Performance-Computing-Clusters. Myrinet and other ridiculously overpriced networking hardware works much better for clustering. I wish terabit ethernet does something about ethernet latency so that efficient clustering becomes a little cheaper.
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What is the price of the same configuration with Windows? Logically, the same configuration with Linux should cost slightly less
How about publishing online comics in a printer-friendly format?
I completely agree. I used to be a hardcore gamer about 10-15 years ago, playing moon patrol, alleycat, round 42, Wolf3D, etc. They were FUN! The games these days have fancy graphics, require ridiculous 3D hardware to get a reasonable FPS and are no fun at all. Sometimes, I want to spend just 20 minutes playing a fun game. Instead, the games take 20 minutes (a slight exxageration) to load and have complicated gameplay that just turns you off
I'm not proposing skipping the part of theory creation at all. I'm just pointing out that one needs to consider that the theory can be completely wrong, without getting attached to the theory. The theory shouldn't become gospel truth without some experimental data is all I'm saying.
New theories are definitely needed and the better they explain current observations, the more likely they are to be reality. But, there is also a chance that they are way off base and reality is completely different. That's what we shouldn't forget while looking at these theories until we have the technology necessary to validate the theory.
While various Theories of Everything are being proposed, a lot of them are not based on observation. They are just complex mathematical magic created to explain reality. It's like someone saying the earth is suspended in space on the back of a big turtle which is suspended on the back of another turtle, ad. infinitum. For a human who doesn't have any means of verification, the turtle theory can explain things as well as gravity. Similarly, there are currently no means to verify string theory. It is about as good as the turtle theory until then.
e-comics, e-books, et. al. just don't work for me because I cannot lie back on the sofa, sit on the toilet seat, read while eating, etc. Good old paper is my preference until there's a more handy way to read e-books. Handhelds don't work well for me either since they just don't contain as much information in 1 page as a book and require frequent scrolling.
The best application for consumers looks like the folding LCD displays. It would be great to have handhelds with a folding screen without a perceptible seam. Finally it won't suck to play games on handhelds.
Services such as OnDemand on cable are way too over-priced. It's usually $3.95 per movie. I'd much rather buy a used DVD for 10 bucks instead. It's the same reason I never rent anything from Blockbuster (Overpriced American movie rental store). I don't see DVDs dying anytime soon. It may get marginalised like VHS in a few years, but it is unlikely to "end" as mentioned in the title
They are getting away easy only because they haven't sent extortion letters to Linux users, asking for licensing fees in Germany. The 10k fine was for just 1 incident.. something posted on a webpage. If they had sent 1000s of extortion letters, I suspect the fine would have been significantly higher. I wish a US court would fine them for similar offenses. That could lead to a much bigger fine because of all the extortion letters sent by the thugs.
A better fine would be $10,800 each for every Linux user they sent an extortion letter to.
Here's what I use my cellphone for : Making phone calls. I don't particularly care for playing games with shitty graphics, using awkward controls. I don't particularly care for sending pictures of my beautiful face using a cellphone webcam.. Maybe I talk only from the bathroom. I'm sick of all the features they keep adding to the cellphones. How about giving cellphones a better antenna by default instead?
Maybe, at this rate, MIT will rename themselves to MOT - Ministry of Truth
. . . the rearrangement went a bit further, becoming a replicator. I could use a replicator in my cube right now.
While mass-producing a learjet probably doesn't cost much at all, building the first prototype probably cost many 10s of millions in development costs. If this team is building a prototype for $1-2 million and that includes all material, development and testing costs, I'm definitely not buying a house in its flight-path.
This is a tough paper to read. It's going to be a long time before an "Insightful" post.
Why do video game prices have to go up because the the technology is improving? Computers have consistently become more complex, but their prices have been going down. The number of people playing video games is also going up quite rapidly, resulting in more customers for video game companies. Maybe they have to do more development, but that is the same for all new technologies. If video game companies are losing money, it's because of nothing but a crappy business model.
True, but ethernet latency sucks even with user-level customized drivers.
100 ms latency would affect a 10Mbps network and a 10 Tbps network almost equally if a clustered application is using very small packets to communicate. Only if the application is using very large packets, the bandwidth will overcome the latency. At small packet sizes the latency will largely overshadow the bandwidth. And considering that a lot of scientific applications use small payloads, latency is very important. If ethernet wants acceptance in the High-Performance-Computing-Clusters world, something has to be done about the latency.
Bandwidth doesn't necessarily help play games with very little delay. For quick responses in games, you need low one-way latency. A network may be capable of throwing out 1000 zillion bytes/second, but if it takes too long to send out the first packet, the game isn't going to work very well. One-way latency is way more important than bandwidth when the goal is to send out many small packets as soon as possible. High bandwidth would greatly speed up large downloads, but for faster response in games, etc, lower latency is what you need.
Bandwidth is good, but what about latency? Ethernet has traditionally suffered from high latencies and doesn't work very well for High-Performance-Computing-Clusters. Myrinet and other ridiculously overpriced networking hardware works much better for clustering. I wish terabit ethernet does something about ethernet latency so that efficient clustering becomes a little cheaper.
How the hell is this offtopic? Read the article and you'll see there are a few lines about looking for water and life.
Europa looks like a far better candidate for water and life than mars. We should start sending probes to land on Europa as soon as possible.
NT