But upgrading CPUs has become much more attractive lately - you can go, say, from cheap singlecore (AMD still has some singlecore Semprons; plus singlecore Athlon64 AM2 was quite popular for some time) in original, cheap machine to...also cheap now quadcore. Getting huge boost for very little money (you might also upgrade memory while ddr2 is still cheap)
Of course Intel simply wants you to buy more; chipsets are also quite lucrative after all (maybe pointing out it's a horrible waste would work with current enviromental sentiments?)
I didn't say "aim it at Earth". Just somewhat...closer. If a very (think beyond Moon) high Earth orbit makes people nervous, it might just as well a high one around Mars or nearby solar orbit. So in a few decades we would have a realistic chance of visiting it, when we'll have a means to examine it in situ.
Those routes would require initial braking off from Saturn gravity though; something Cassini can't do anymore, with the miniscule amount of fuel it has (one could cosnider using Saturn moons I suppose...that still almost certainly wouldn't be enough)
I don't think it would "die" anytime soon. It uses RTGs which do age of course...but still supply plenty of power (all instruments functioning; and you could gradually shut most of them down on decades-long return trip). Heck, we still have contact with Voyagers; and the newer RTGs on Cassini were designed for very long lifetime (New Horizons uses a spare from Cassini...)
Cassini spent a lot of time in the vicinity of Enceladus and its water geysers; another place where there could be life, with some traces of it hatched for the ride on our spaceship.
Yes, it seems it was essentially a copy of View-Master.
And c'mon, only one person at a time usage shouldn't be much of a showstopper in the area of typical personal photos...certainly not when you want to remember something all by yourself ("relive your memories like you're again there!") or showing them to somebody. Upcoming 3D screens have similar limitations - you need to have 3D glasses for everybody ("a device you have to store away / get out all the time"; quite delicate to boot; and how weird will be sitting with your relatives all in those clunky glasses?) or...the area with properly visible 3D effect is quite narrow.
People really don't seem to care. Since you mentioned HD - look at certain consumer reports. In the UK around half of the people who think they are getting HD signal on their nice, new TV...in reality have only standard digital SD. And in case of SD -> HD there is actually an improvement across the spectrum. With 3D - sure, you have an added depth of field (plus even more than with HD inconveniences of setting it all up). But you have to get used to another unnatural "lack of focusing" scenario, much more irritating than in the case of "2D" IMHO. Plus totally wrong parallax.
Well, Opera historically has been quite revealing in regards to what will become of most browsers few years down the line...;p
Also, their financials are open / those are not any tricks; it's not that hard to find countries where Opera has great or even dominating position (interestingly, it's mostly ex Soviet Block); and...depending on how you count they are #1 mobile web browser. #2 if you throw all Webkit-based together.
Reading should remain a large part of "browser experience" for a long, long time; I'm not sure overlay displays work well for that unless they are really great.
Controlling UAVs / robotic arms / tanks OTOH...that should show up quite soon. And for us minions "where's the nearest pub?" (rarely) "damn advertisements everywhere!" (usually)
People don't have much means to see 3D photos "correctly" because they just don't care much beyond short amusement value, a gimmick. Take this 3D Yugoslav toy that I mentioned; I can't quickly find it via google, but it was essentially a cardboard disk with dozen or so pairs of small cliches (photos of various landmarks), which you put into small handheld viewer. From the 70's.
It worked really good, the effect was very convincing (of course minus usual inability to focus naturally and natural paralax...). No obvious faults with it. It would be trivial even back then to give people the opportunity of making disks with their own set of photos; making those photos would be a bit of a problem of course. Now making such viewer + disks is even more trivial, and 3D digicam could cheaply and easily provide source photos. Nobody has done it; perhaps because such technology can't work as a one time gimmick (returning every few years), but must be sustainable in photolabs around the world. Which it can't really do, people are perfectly satisfied with boring 2D photos.
OK, I can imagine a chip built to do "3D 3D" more efficiently (for example, two essentially independant renderpaths in the style of hyperthreading, with some logic between them that allows using roughly the same graphical assets from VRAM & caches at the same time (since they use nearly the same assets)). But you still want raw processing power to be roughly two times more than if you'd just render the same image once. There's still drain.
3D gfx doesn't work by constructing the scene and then simply taking a snapshot of what "camera" sees (so no big overhead if you add second "camera", moved a little to the side, right?)
It goes "backwards", draws each frame from the point of view of the camera. If you have two cameras, that means doing it two times. Sure, it's not complete doubling of work done by GPU - for example the same assets in VRAM or local caches can be used at the same time, if done smartly. Or the far background and skybox probably could be made to render only once. But it's still very considerable overhead.
Still a gimmick, even if it generated some publicity lately. Where is the stream of big, good releases? Oh, could it be that we just had another "must see" 3D movie, just like it happens once every few years?
To see better what it is...where's the huge uptake of 3D photographs? I mean, "3D photography" (stereography) is here only slightly shorter than "normal" one - over 150 years. Surely it would be more by now than gimmick of novelty, gimmick for trade shows, gimmick for world expo, or Yugoslav-made toy that collects dust on top of bookshelf? Heck, with cheap CMOS sensors some P&S 3D digicam should take over the world by now...after all it would be only slightly more expensive in production, but so much better...
You're not supposed to provide balanced, reasonable, fairly probable explanation as part of the summary. What are we supposed to write about? (no, really, give your suggestions below)
Slashdot Mirror
But upgrading CPUs has become much more attractive lately - you can go, say, from cheap singlecore (AMD still has some singlecore Semprons; plus singlecore Athlon64 AM2 was quite popular for some time) in original, cheap machine to...also cheap now quadcore. Getting huge boost for very little money (you might also upgrade memory while ddr2 is still cheap)
Of course Intel simply wants you to buy more; chipsets are also quite lucrative after all (maybe pointing out it's a horrible waste would work with current enviromental sentiments?)
One would think somebody at Intel noticed by now that it's good to write motherboard specs with bigger headroom for lower voltages...
Of course, they simply don't want it; Intel chipsets bring quite a lot money, too.
Don't give them any more ideas.
Easy customisation to your needs, has few virtual machines as targets.
http://susestudio.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Studio
Ha! But who put the planet to explore right there?
I don't think Orwell saw that one coming...
Well, happens; perhaps kdawson managed to, say, avoid contact with MS software in the last week and hence wasn't traumatised by it.
I didn't say "aim it at Earth". Just somewhat...closer. If a very (think beyond Moon) high Earth orbit makes people nervous, it might just as well a high one around Mars or nearby solar orbit. So in a few decades we would have a realistic chance of visiting it, when we'll have a means to examine it in situ.
Those routes would require initial braking off from Saturn gravity though; something Cassini can't do anymore, with the miniscule amount of fuel it has (one could cosnider using Saturn moons I suppose...that still almost certainly wouldn't be enough)
I don't think it would "die" anytime soon. It uses RTGs which do age of course...but still supply plenty of power (all instruments functioning; and you could gradually shut most of them down on decades-long return trip). Heck, we still have contact with Voyagers; and the newer RTGs on Cassini were designed for very long lifetime (New Horizons uses a spare from Cassini...)
Cassini spent a lot of time in the vicinity of Enceladus and its water geysers; another place where there could be life, with some traces of it hatched for the ride on our spaceship.
Alas, there's way too litle fuel even for routes with lowest energy requirements :(
Yes, it seems it was essentially a copy of View-Master.
And c'mon, only one person at a time usage shouldn't be much of a showstopper in the area of typical personal photos...certainly not when you want to remember something all by yourself ("relive your memories like you're again there!") or showing them to somebody. Upcoming 3D screens have similar limitations - you need to have 3D glasses for everybody ("a device you have to store away / get out all the time"; quite delicate to boot; and how weird will be sitting with your relatives all in those clunky glasses?) or...the area with properly visible 3D effect is quite narrow.
People really don't seem to care. Since you mentioned HD - look at certain consumer reports. In the UK around half of the people who think they are getting HD signal on their nice, new TV...in reality have only standard digital SD. And in case of SD -> HD there is actually an improvement across the spectrum. With 3D - sure, you have an added depth of field (plus even more than with HD inconveniences of setting it all up). But you have to get used to another unnatural "lack of focusing" scenario, much more irritating than in the case of "2D" IMHO. Plus totally wrong parallax.
Yes, it was very close. A copy essentially (Yugoslav-made, I'm sure of that)
Well, Opera historically has been quite revealing in regards to what will become of most browsers few years down the line... ;p
Also, their financials are open / those are not any tricks; it's not that hard to find countries where Opera has great or even dominating position (interestingly, it's mostly ex Soviet Block); and...depending on how you count they are #1 mobile web browser. #2 if you throw all Webkit-based together.
Reading should remain a large part of "browser experience" for a long, long time; I'm not sure overlay displays work well for that unless they are really great.
Controlling UAVs / robotic arms / tanks OTOH...that should show up quite soon. And for us minions "where's the nearest pub?" (rarely) "damn advertisements everywhere!" (usually)
I'd guess it's effectivelly indeed doing 60, but since each of your eye only sees half of those...
People don't have much means to see 3D photos "correctly" because they just don't care much beyond short amusement value, a gimmick. Take this 3D Yugoslav toy that I mentioned; I can't quickly find it via google, but it was essentially a cardboard disk with dozen or so pairs of small cliches (photos of various landmarks), which you put into small handheld viewer. From the 70's.
It worked really good, the effect was very convincing (of course minus usual inability to focus naturally and natural paralax...). No obvious faults with it. It would be trivial even back then to give people the opportunity of making disks with their own set of photos; making those photos would be a bit of a problem of course. Now making such viewer + disks is even more trivial, and 3D digicam could cheaply and easily provide source photos. Nobody has done it; perhaps because such technology can't work as a one time gimmick (returning every few years), but must be sustainable in photolabs around the world. Which it can't really do, people are perfectly satisfied with boring 2D photos.
OK, I can imagine a chip built to do "3D 3D" more efficiently (for example, two essentially independant renderpaths in the style of hyperthreading, with some logic between them that allows using roughly the same graphical assets from VRAM & caches at the same time (since they use nearly the same assets)). But you still want raw processing power to be roughly two times more than if you'd just render the same image once. There's still drain.
3D gfx doesn't work by constructing the scene and then simply taking a snapshot of what "camera" sees (so no big overhead if you add second "camera", moved a little to the side, right?)
It goes "backwards", draws each frame from the point of view of the camera. If you have two cameras, that means doing it two times. Sure, it's not complete doubling of work done by GPU - for example the same assets in VRAM or local caches can be used at the same time, if done smartly. Or the far background and skybox probably could be made to render only once. But it's still very considerable overhead.
Still a gimmick, even if it generated some publicity lately. Where is the stream of big, good releases? Oh, could it be that we just had another "must see" 3D movie, just like it happens once every few years?
To see better what it is...where's the huge uptake of 3D photographs? I mean, "3D photography" (stereography) is here only slightly shorter than "normal" one - over 150 years. Surely it would be more by now than gimmick of novelty, gimmick for trade shows, gimmick for world expo, or Yugoslav-made toy that collects dust on top of bookshelf? Heck, with cheap CMOS sensors some P&S 3D digicam should take over the world by now...after all it would be only slightly more expensive in production, but so much better...
I wonder if some interesting contributors could be noticed in founding sources...
Hm, also that cadre at CS departments is much more likely to be able to sensibly use "computers" (hence also plagiarism tools) can only help...
You're not supposed to provide balanced, reasonable, fairly probable explanation as part of the summary. What are we supposed to write about? (no, really, give your suggestions below)
Maybe you should check out what Nokia offers. Specifically E51, E52, C5, etc. Yes, small candybars. And great battery life.
Journalism? Just site with a bunch of gadget lovers writing for...quite a lot of gadget lovers. They're bound to live on hype.
People often use "the best tool available" even if they hardly need it.