Actually, it just may. If the price goes down to $150 (as the rumors are claiming) then I've just saved a boat load of money on my "media PC" that I've been meaning to build (but have been too lazy to actually get around to). A good box with TV out, sound and ethernet to stream my 10K+ mp3 collection. This def. saves me time and money.
My vote goes for the highway. Apparently they built a private, closed, partially elevated highway to shoot the chase scene because the W brothers couldn't find a strech of road "sinister enough" for their liking.
I bet some of the cameras being used by the photographers don't have "red eye" reduction....
C'mon folks, let's look at this more critically.
Ok... red eye reduction removes something that wasn't there originally. Unless the person you took a photograph has bright red eyes you are removing something that the camera artifically inserted into the image. The same goes with removing lense flair, colour balance correction, etc. This is *totally* different than manipulating the image by adding or subtracting content.
Apparently nobody is aware that Mac OS X CAN'T BE RUN (legally) on non-Apple hardware?
Apparently you're not aware that he is using Apple hardware. Apple motherboards to be precise.
Now, I'm not saying this guy's going to have a booming business: Apple may go after him for using the iBox name or try to cut off his motherboard supply, but others have done this before (Marathon Computers springs to mind).
Even if Apple does cut off his motherboard supply he may still eek out a niche business selling the enclosures (i.e. "add your own motherboard")
Can't say I have. I have way too many machines at home and currently its hooked up to my Win98 box (simply because it was the easiest way to get it up and running). I have poked around the net a little, and I think that there are a few projects to deal with the syncing, but to be honest I haven't mucked around with it yet. I'd rather have it set up with my iBook, so one of these days I'll get around to it.
Oh, one niggly thing that does suck, the IMAP feature on the Mail app reads everything in my entire account (on my server), not just the mail files. As far as I can tell there's no way to subscribe/unsubscribe to all of the non-mail files that it tries to download. Anyone know how to get around this?
I jumped on the HSN deal as well and incredibly short review: I like it. I'm not much of a PDA person (had a palm, played with it for a week, just sold it on eBay) but its worth its weight in gold for its wireless ability (with appropriate CF wireless adapter). My GF *always* grabs my iBook when she's at my place, now I can go back to surfing on the couch. Its also easier to carry to the local coffee shop (that has free access) so I can grab a cuppa tea and flame idiots on Plastic.
For me, for $160 (+$80 for the wireless card) it's been $$$ well spent.
The Bastard's Can't Go Wrong Underrated Film List: * Bachelor Party (Bad USA Up All Night movie done right) * Fear of a Black Hat (Rap mockumentry... damn funny) * Fandango / A Perfect World (yes, they have Costner, but he's damn good in both... shoot me) * The Italian Job (majorly appreciated in the UK, hardly anyone knows of it here in the states)
The first would be economy of scale. Power generating devices become more efficient as they become larger.
In theory yes, but reality has a way of kicking you in the teeth. You can only build things so big. You can only build a turbine so big. Technology improves them year after year, but not in huge leaps and bounds. And while turbines become more efficient over time so do car engines. But you are also discounting the fact that you then have to move all of that electricity over a distribution network, where quite a bit of it is lost.
The second would be a matter... {snip}
What does gasoline octane ratings have to do with efficiency vs. electricity. In fact, by your own argument you've show that there's potential for improvements in crude oil efficiency simply by producing lower octane gasoline.
Anyway, the savings between 70 octane and 91 octane gas is just a drop in the bucket. The process for turning crude oil into gas (and other things) is a mighty difficult one. Only a fraction of that crude oil is suitable to be used as gasoline without serious chemical work (cracking, reforming, coking, etc). There's lots of room for improvement.
That's exactly what it does. It means that your car gets more energy for the same amount of fuel used to generate that energy.
And this is no different than increasing gasoline yields from petroleum, which was my point. All the 'benefits' of increased conversion of energy to electricity hold true for increasing gasoline yields: more bang for your (crude oil / electrical) buck.
It was my understanding that the refining process was pretty efficient and that most of the available gasoline was obtained.
Nope. Crude oil goes thru a lot to convert it to gasoline. A certain percentage of it is of the correct chemical makeup (which you separate via, essentially, a still) but most of it is the wrong molecular weight (either to light or too heavy). You can improve yields by cracking longer hydrocarbons to shorter ones (via Catalytic cracking, coking, etc), but these methods consume energy. Thus there is plenty of room for improvement in converting crude oil into sellable product. (side note: there's research looking into doing it biologically).
Within every litre (gallon) of oil pumped out is contained a certain number of particles that can be converted to gasoline.
And within every lump of coal, litre of petroleum product, pound of fissable material, cubic meter of natural gas there is only so much energy potential as well.
The potential for totally un-polluting electricity generation, however, does exist.
And how expensive is solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and wave power? And how much of the total energy supply around the world does it account for? i.e. electricity is still going to be generated by burning stuff (oil, coal, natural gas) or via nuclear reaction for the foreseeable future. Thus all you've done is move the pollution problem from the car to the generating plants. How efficient is the power plants / power distribution / electrical motors combo? I dare say not anywhere near the disparity from the Pump oil / refine / distribute / combust in engine to justify the HUGE capital outlay needed to make this work.: you will have to build a shit load of new power generation (and that isn't easy... people dont' like stuff in their back yard. Look at California), upgrade distribution ("What, you want to run high tension lines through my back yard? I think not. They cause cancer, don't they.")
Electrical car: good idea *one day*. But not for a good while yet.
Actually, compared to electricity, oil's very expensive indeed. It's a shame this has been abandoned, because electricity generation benefits from both obvious economies of scale, and the fact that there are fewer generators than cars.
HUH??? This means what exactly? There are fewer refineries than cars as well. Does that mean the gasoline powered automobiles benefit from economies of scale as well? That statement makes no sense.
If all cars became electric cars, you'd only have to upgrade the (relatively few) power stations to improve efficiency every time you found a better way of generating, rather than trying to persuade everyone in the population to change their car(s)!
HUH??? You're confusing two different points (and making some bad assumptions). There's the efficiency of making fuel (be it gasoline or electricity) and the efficiency of using fuel (by a gas engine or electrical motor).
A refinery can improve "efficiency" (i.e. turn more of its raw material into product) just as you claim a power plant can. Neither, btw, are cheap and easy. Capital improvements can be in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars.
On the other side you have the efficiency of the car. Improving the efficiency of the power plant doesn't magically improve the efficiency of your electrical car no more than a refinery improving its gasoline yield per barrel of oil makes my car get better gas mileage. Someone driving a first generation electrical car is still going to use more energy regardless of how the electricity was produced just like the driver of a 72 Nova is going to suck more gasoline than the driver of a 03 Civic no matter how the gasoline was refined.
The oil used in power plants is much, much cheaper than gasoline
Define "much, much". It all comes from the same source. Granted, if you're a power station you have some pricing power since you're buying in BULK, not to mention no highway taxes and stuff, but there are no massive savings involved, especially when you factor in all of the electrical generation and distribution costs on top of it.
The only thing MS would buy SCO for is to get out of their agreement to never release a Unix-like OS ever. And if they thought they needed to get out of that agreement then they would have just thrown some cash SCO's way. SCO would have gladly taken it. I doubt MS wants 'em.
Does simply adding the words "El Nino" makes people think this is a new, important idea? The planet's rotation speed is also affected by the impact of meteors and space dust, but I don't see anyone publishing studies to measure that infinitesimal effect.
No, but it allows the fringe environmentalists to scream "Stop global warming or stop the earth."
MS are happy campers. Mucho "IP hassles when chosing Linux" fodder for the Sales bots and white paper writers. If I was a paranoid, X-Files watching geek I'd wonder how much extra MS paid SCO (Caldera) to pull this crap when they settled thier civil anti-trust lawsuit?
Back in reality I think this is SCO's attempt at getting bought at a premium. Lets face facts, IBM can probably bitch slap them with their own IP, but I bet SCO thinks that buying out SCO is cheaper/easier than the time and effort (not to mention the FUD damage to IBM's linux/AIX biz) IBM would have defending this.
It was exactly this that convinced me that the record companies were truely short sighted. I can actually see their point when it comes to piracy (although I think they've been hamfisted in dealing with it) but when they went out of their way to squash internet radio they ended up cutting their own wrists. A 56k stream (if encoded correctly) is about FM quality to my ears: good enough to listen to, not good enough to go through all the time and effort to rip. Listening to various streams made me do what regular radio hasn't done in a long, long time: run out and buy a CD. By essentially killing the small to medium internet radio scene the Big 5 have essentially kicked in the teeth one of their greatest marketing opportunites for the near future.
Actually I see one, big "No Brainer" for half of the purchace (the unnamed, unreleased VMWare-like software) and am slightly baffled by the second (VirtualPC).
I really don't buy the "we bought this to kill competition" for the VMWare-like "virtual computer image" software. I see it as their answer to IBM, HP, Sun, et al in the Big Iron space. MS are making squatola of a dent in the big mainframe business... Unisys is the only provider of Windows Enterprise Edition (or whatever its called) hardware and they're finding it tough to crack that market. Look where IBM is having a lot of success: Mainframes with virtual servers. They sell it as a great way to save money by consolidating a bunch of boxen under one high uptime mainframe. MS are just trying to copy that approach: "You can have virtual servers for exchange, SQLServer, IIS, Great Plains, etc, and adjust each one's slice of computing power on demand." I bet that the Connectix software finds itself rolled into the high end Windows first, then trickles its way down to 2, 4 and 8 way machines later.
Now, the real stumper is why they bought VirtualPC. I can see it if they bought the entire company, then they'd be saddled with the product. But to specifically cherry pick it does lead to some interesting questions.
Comparing this to the browser battle isn't a good example. I doubt that MS will allow other OSs to run, thus VMWare will still have the market for running Non MS OSs on Win2k/XP. Plus, I doubt that MS will offer any functionality where you can run a MS OS on top of a non MS OS (although they may, since they'll still sell licenses in that situation), thus VMWare keeps that market too.
VMWare isn't going away. They just may take a hit on the running multiple Windows on Windows market.
Also, what I don't understand is WHY Microsoft abandoned all those other platforms (MIPS, Alpha et al) and decided to go with IA32 only, which was a fundamentally STUPID move (also IMHO).
I can think of a few... no application support, MIPS, Alpha, PPC harware was not as available / cheap as the i386 platform. If I'm a buyer of systems and I have a choice of buying hardware from the i386 market (Compaq, IBM, HP, Dell, etc.) AND have, while not the best, but pretty good backwards compatibility with my DOS apps which system am I going to choose?
Cheap and backwards compatible is going to crush not as cheap (nor abundant) and not backwards compatible. That's how the market shook out.
Being stuffed into a locker has nothing to do with intelligence - it has to do with being "nerdy." In school, and hung out with a lot of nerdy people who were not particularly bright.
I wouldn't put it as people who weren't "bright" but having the ability to hold a conversation with someone who's interests are maybe different than your own is the key. I've heard people say "well, all those dumb jocks wanted to talk about is sports" which, to me, is no different than "all those geeks wanted to talk about was C++ (or, closer to reality, Star Wars)." If you can't hold a conversation above and beyond a small core of what you find interesting, you're going to be stuck with a small circle of friends. If you can talk a little football, guess what: chances are you can have a conversation with the football player in your homeroom. Not saying you're going to become best friends, but at least you've got someone to talk to during home room... chances are you'll learn more about football (and he'll learn a little more about whatever you're into) as well.
Being a Nerd doesn't mean automatically lead to daily asskickings. Being socially inept (er... socially underdeveloped) might though.
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Actually, it just may. If the price goes down to $150 (as the rumors are claiming) then I've just saved a boat load of money on my "media PC" that I've been meaning to build (but have been too lazy to actually get around to). A good box with TV out, sound and ethernet to stream my 10K+ mp3 collection. This def. saves me time and money.
My vote goes for the highway. Apparently they built a private, closed, partially elevated highway to shoot the chase scene because the W brothers couldn't find a strech of road "sinister enough" for their liking.
I bet some of the cameras being used by the photographers don't have "red eye" reduction....
C'mon folks, let's look at this more critically.
Ok... red eye reduction removes something that wasn't there originally. Unless the person you took a photograph has bright red eyes you are removing something that the camera artifically inserted into the image. The same goes with removing lense flair, colour balance correction, etc. This is *totally* different than manipulating the image by adding or subtracting content.
Apparently nobody is aware that Mac OS X CAN'T BE RUN (legally) on non-Apple hardware?
Apparently you're not aware that he is using Apple hardware. Apple motherboards to be precise.
Now, I'm not saying this guy's going to have a booming business: Apple may go after him for using the iBox name or try to cut off his motherboard supply, but others have done this before (Marathon Computers springs to mind).
Even if Apple does cut off his motherboard supply he may still eek out a niche business selling the enclosures (i.e. "add your own motherboard")
Can't say I have. I have way too many machines at home and currently its hooked up to my Win98 box (simply because it was the easiest way to get it up and running). I have poked around the net a little, and I think that there are a few projects to deal with the syncing, but to be honest I haven't mucked around with it yet. I'd rather have it set up with my iBook, so one of these days I'll get around to it.
Unfortunatly there's no option at setting the mail root :(
Oh, one niggly thing that does suck, the IMAP feature on the Mail app reads everything in my entire account (on my server), not just the mail files. As far as I can tell there's no way to subscribe/unsubscribe to all of the non-mail files that it tries to download. Anyone know how to get around this?
I jumped on the HSN deal as well and incredibly short review: I like it. I'm not much of a PDA person (had a palm, played with it for a week, just sold it on eBay) but its worth its weight in gold for its wireless ability (with appropriate CF wireless adapter). My GF *always* grabs my iBook when she's at my place, now I can go back to surfing on the couch. Its also easier to carry to the local coffee shop (that has free access) so I can grab a cuppa tea and flame idiots on Plastic.
For me, for $160 (+$80 for the wireless card) it's been $$$ well spent.
Please, please, please don't remind me. I'm in total denial. That movie is going to be the suckiest suck that ever sucked.
The DVD situation kinda blows too. Apparently they're supposed to be releasing it here at some point. Until then I put up with my old VHS copy.
We are the self preservation society...
The Big Hit: I've seen better film on teeth.
The Bastard's Can't Go Wrong Underrated Film List:
* Bachelor Party (Bad USA Up All Night movie done right)
* Fear of a Black Hat (Rap mockumentry... damn funny)
* Fandango / A Perfect World (yes, they have Costner, but he's damn good in both... shoot me)
* The Italian Job (majorly appreciated in the UK, hardly anyone knows of it here in the states)
Is there a way to exploit this method into a better system for factoring large primes?
Sorry for being snarky (because I understand what you're trying to say) but factoring large primes is simple: its one and the large prime.
The first would be economy of scale. Power generating devices become more efficient as they become larger.
In theory yes, but reality has a way of kicking you in the teeth. You can only build things so big. You can only build a turbine so big. Technology improves them year after year, but not in huge leaps and bounds. And while turbines become more efficient over time so do car engines. But you are also discounting the fact that you then have to move all of that electricity over a distribution network, where quite a bit of it is lost.
The second would be a matter... {snip}
What does gasoline octane ratings have to do with efficiency vs. electricity. In fact, by your own argument you've show that there's potential for improvements in crude oil efficiency simply by producing lower octane gasoline.
Anyway, the savings between 70 octane and 91 octane gas is just a drop in the bucket. The process for turning crude oil into gas (and other things) is a mighty difficult one. Only a fraction of that crude oil is suitable to be used as gasoline without serious chemical work (cracking, reforming, coking, etc). There's lots of room for improvement.
That's exactly what it does. It means that your car gets more energy for the same amount of fuel used to generate that energy.
And this is no different than increasing gasoline yields from petroleum, which was my point. All the 'benefits' of increased conversion of energy to electricity hold true for increasing gasoline yields: more bang for your (crude oil / electrical) buck.
It was my understanding that the refining process was pretty efficient and that most of the available gasoline was obtained.
Nope. Crude oil goes thru a lot to convert it to gasoline. A certain percentage of it is of the correct chemical makeup (which you separate via, essentially, a still) but most of it is the wrong molecular weight (either to light or too heavy). You can improve yields by cracking longer hydrocarbons to shorter ones (via Catalytic cracking, coking, etc), but these methods consume energy. Thus there is plenty of room for improvement in converting crude oil into sellable product. (side note: there's research looking into doing it biologically).
Within every litre (gallon) of oil pumped out is contained a certain number of particles that can be converted to gasoline.
And within every lump of coal, litre of petroleum product, pound of fissable material, cubic meter of natural gas there is only so much energy potential as well.
The potential for totally un-polluting electricity generation, however, does exist.
And how expensive is solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and wave power? And how much of the total energy supply around the world does it account for? i.e. electricity is still going to be generated by burning stuff (oil, coal, natural gas) or via nuclear reaction for the foreseeable future. Thus all you've done is move the pollution problem from the car to the generating plants. How efficient is the power plants / power distribution / electrical motors combo? I dare say not anywhere near the disparity from the Pump oil / refine / distribute / combust in engine to justify the HUGE capital outlay needed to make this work.: you will have to build a shit load of new power generation (and that isn't easy... people dont' like stuff in their back yard. Look at California), upgrade distribution ("What, you want to run high tension lines through my back yard? I think not. They cause cancer, don't they.")
Electrical car: good idea *one day*. But not for a good while yet.
Actually, compared to electricity, oil's very expensive indeed. It's a shame this has been abandoned, because electricity generation benefits from both obvious economies of scale, and the fact that there are fewer generators than cars.
HUH??? This means what exactly? There are fewer refineries than cars as well. Does that mean the gasoline powered automobiles benefit from economies of scale as well? That statement makes no sense.
If all cars became electric cars, you'd only have to upgrade the (relatively few) power stations to improve efficiency every time you found a better way of generating, rather than trying to persuade everyone in the population to change their car(s)!
HUH??? You're confusing two different points (and making some bad assumptions). There's the efficiency of making fuel (be it gasoline or electricity) and the efficiency of using fuel (by a gas engine or electrical motor).
A refinery can improve "efficiency" (i.e. turn more of its raw material into product) just as you claim a power plant can. Neither, btw, are cheap and easy. Capital improvements can be in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars.
On the other side you have the efficiency of the car. Improving the efficiency of the power plant doesn't magically improve the efficiency of your electrical car no more than a refinery improving its gasoline yield per barrel of oil makes my car get better gas mileage. Someone driving a first generation electrical car is still going to use more energy regardless of how the electricity was produced just like the driver of a 72 Nova is going to suck more gasoline than the driver of a 03 Civic no matter how the gasoline was refined.
The oil used in power plants is much, much cheaper than gasoline
Define "much, much". It all comes from the same source. Granted, if you're a power station you have some pricing power since you're buying in BULK, not to mention no highway taxes and stuff, but there are no massive savings involved, especially when you factor in all of the electrical generation and distribution costs on top of it.
The only thing MS would buy SCO for is to get out of their agreement to never release a Unix-like OS ever. And if they thought they needed to get out of that agreement then they would have just thrown some cash SCO's way. SCO would have gladly taken it. I doubt MS wants 'em.
Does simply adding the words "El Nino" makes people think this is a new, important idea? The planet's rotation speed is also affected by the impact of meteors and space dust, but I don't see anyone publishing studies to measure that infinitesimal effect.
No, but it allows the fringe environmentalists to scream "Stop global warming or stop the earth."
MS are happy campers. Mucho "IP hassles when chosing Linux" fodder for the Sales bots and white paper writers. If I was a paranoid, X-Files watching geek I'd wonder how much extra MS paid SCO (Caldera) to pull this crap when they settled thier civil anti-trust lawsuit?
Back in reality I think this is SCO's attempt at getting bought at a premium. Lets face facts, IBM can probably bitch slap them with their own IP, but I bet SCO thinks that buying out SCO is cheaper/easier than the time and effort (not to mention the FUD damage to IBM's linux/AIX biz) IBM would have defending this.
I believe you may be able to do this with the PGP tools. Not sure if that capability is included with the free version of the tool or not.
It was exactly this that convinced me that the record companies were truely short sighted. I can actually see their point when it comes to piracy (although I think they've been hamfisted in dealing with it) but when they went out of their way to squash internet radio they ended up cutting their own wrists. A 56k stream (if encoded correctly) is about FM quality to my ears: good enough to listen to, not good enough to go through all the time and effort to rip. Listening to various streams made me do what regular radio hasn't done in a long, long time: run out and buy a CD. By essentially killing the small to medium internet radio scene the Big 5 have essentially kicked in the teeth one of their greatest marketing opportunites for the near future.
Actually I see one, big "No Brainer" for half of the purchace (the unnamed, unreleased VMWare-like software) and am slightly baffled by the second (VirtualPC).
I really don't buy the "we bought this to kill competition" for the VMWare-like "virtual computer image" software. I see it as their answer to IBM, HP, Sun, et al in the Big Iron space. MS are making squatola of a dent in the big mainframe business... Unisys is the only provider of Windows Enterprise Edition (or whatever its called) hardware and they're finding it tough to crack that market. Look where IBM is having a lot of success: Mainframes with virtual servers. They sell it as a great way to save money by consolidating a bunch of boxen under one high uptime mainframe. MS are just trying to copy that approach: "You can have virtual servers for exchange, SQLServer, IIS, Great Plains, etc, and adjust each one's slice of computing power on demand." I bet that the Connectix software finds itself rolled into the high end Windows first, then trickles its way down to 2, 4 and 8 way machines later.
Now, the real stumper is why they bought VirtualPC. I can see it if they bought the entire company, then they'd be saddled with the product. But to specifically cherry pick it does lead to some interesting questions.
So, VMWare just publish their own and say "Hey, ours will run Non windows on Windows better than MS's own."
Again, I still fail to see how this is MS stomping out VMWare.
Comparing this to the browser battle isn't a good example. I doubt that MS will allow other OSs to run, thus VMWare will still have the market for running Non MS OSs on Win2k/XP. Plus, I doubt that MS will offer any functionality where you can run a MS OS on top of a non MS OS (although they may, since they'll still sell licenses in that situation), thus VMWare keeps that market too.
VMWare isn't going away. They just may take a hit on the running multiple Windows on Windows market.
Also, what I don't understand is WHY Microsoft abandoned all those other platforms (MIPS, Alpha et al) and decided to go with IA32 only, which was a fundamentally STUPID move (also IMHO).
I can think of a few... no application support, MIPS, Alpha, PPC harware was not as available / cheap as the i386 platform. If I'm a buyer of systems and I have a choice of buying hardware from the i386 market (Compaq, IBM, HP, Dell, etc.) AND have, while not the best, but pretty good backwards compatibility with my DOS apps which system am I going to choose?
Cheap and backwards compatible is going to crush not as cheap (nor abundant) and not backwards compatible. That's how the market shook out.
Being stuffed into a locker has nothing to do with intelligence - it has to do with being "nerdy." In school, and hung out with a lot of nerdy people who were not particularly bright.
I wouldn't put it as people who weren't "bright" but having the ability to hold a conversation with someone who's interests are maybe different than your own is the key. I've heard people say "well, all those dumb jocks wanted to talk about is sports" which, to me, is no different than "all those geeks wanted to talk about was C++ (or, closer to reality, Star Wars)." If you can't hold a conversation above and beyond a small core of what you find interesting, you're going to be stuck with a small circle of friends. If you can talk a little football, guess what: chances are you can have a conversation with the football player in your homeroom. Not saying you're going to become best friends, but at least you've got someone to talk to during home room... chances are you'll learn more about football (and he'll learn a little more about whatever you're into) as well.
Being a Nerd doesn't mean automatically lead to daily asskickings. Being socially inept (er... socially underdeveloped) might though.