So iPods are successful, in part because they understood that what people need, above all else in a music player is simplicity. So you can't manage you music on the iPod, you manage them on your computer.
Now I can see that it is possible using the new search facility to access and select songs from the iTunes store (if the new iPods had wireless), but surely one of the great things about an iPod is that you can't.
Just because you can use a scroll wheel for text entry and pointing doesn't mean that you should.
This is how economics works. Something is only worth what somebody else is prepared to pay for it.
You may think that her vocal talent was worth more, but her fee represents two things:
- Bungie were more than happy to use a different actor should they need to but were polite enough to ask her to repeat the performance. - The actor believes that she was fairly compensated as nobody forced her to take the job. She may have wanted more (don't we all?) but she understood the weakness of her bargaining power.
If you feel that she deserved more money, maybe you could hire her yourself? Get a group of your friends together and contact her agent and offer her a gig - just think of the cool ring tones you could get for just a $500.
Personally I think $500 to $1000 is more than adequate for what was essentially half a days work. The programmers wouldn't have been on anything like that rate, nor would the script writers or the technitions. As an owner of Halo 1 and 2 I can say with some confidence that if the voice of Cortana, Master Chief or in fact any of the voices my reaction would have been similar to when I realised the the covenant would be speaking English and not their own languages throughout Halo 2, regardless of difficulty: "Hey, thats lame. Oh well", and then keep on playing. I don't think I'm alone.
Of all the people on the pay role at Bungie, why would you think that its the voice actors that need more compensation?
There are only 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand trinary, those that don't and those that refuse to learn it for religious reasons.
I don't see anything logical about going to wireless.
You've got to charge it at some point - might as well sync at the same time. I'd like to be able to share my songs freely via wireless, but that just ain't going to happen anytime soon.
Wireless sucks battery, is a potential security risk and is slower than a cable.
The feature I'm missing the most is DAB Radio, but thats unlikely to happen because Americans don't have it (don't you guys use satalite and/or a competing digital standard?).
I keep playing with the idea that I'd like to be able to connect my iPod to my bluetooth headset in my bike helmet, and control it via my TomTom, but battery drain, loudness, sound quality and bulk make cabled headphones look like a superior technology (even if you can't skip tracks or switch to radio without crashing).
In both those instances I'm quite happy to have them as accessories rather than built into the unit. I don't see why people should have to pay a premium for niche technologies they didn't want.
Doctors to tell politions that everything that is bad for us should be banned and force us to live in a bubble to to stop us from getting sick.
Armed Forces to say that we should destroy all other nations and force us to live in bunkers to prevent us from getting killed
Police Force to demand that they can monitor all people at all times in order to stop crime
Politians to defend our liberty from all of these people, inform you of all of their findings and to impose laws to protect your freedoms not increase security
You to make sure your elected officials are doing what you and your fellow country men
It is the guy from the FBIs job to demand that our freedoms be observered and monitored. It is his job to lobby politians to pass laws to make his job easier and minimize the tax burden of his department. Its the politians job to take him seriously, concider the facts and then tell him bollocks. If he fails to do this it is your job to make it very clear that this is unacceptable, and then not vote for him in the next elections. If he gets in, then thats democracy, and the freedom that you thought was important, was clearly not that important to your fellow countryman.
Its perfectly possible that, despite living in a liberal democracy at the moment what the people want is to live under the rule of a paternal dictatorship - people are stupid. If thats the case, then democracy will let that happen. All you can do then is either raise a militia or leave. I guess you could always try and educate people, but thats never worked in the past;)
Because Quake 2 looks like shit. Yes, you could turn the resolution up to 11, but the textures and models looked awful in comparison today so all you ended up with was a hi-res, blocky polygon (with no rag doll physics and canned animation). The also HEAVILY re-used models and textures - to the point where many levels looked the same.
Thats why Half Life came on a CD with space to spare, and Half Life Source doesn't. Has the game play improved? No. Has the experience improved? (I'd actually say it got worse, my MacBook struggles to play HL Source). But you have to admit that the graphics actually look good at HD reolutions (I'll be eating my words in another 5 years when Half Life is released with the next engine). Where did the storage space go? Bigger textures and huge models.
Then you can look at Half-life 2. Nearly 4 GB and not a single, pre-rendered cut scene. Everyones biggest critism of HL2 was that it was too short. Is it that hard to imagine that a 40 hour + version of HL2 could have approached the limits of BluRay? Is it impossible to think that given the power of new consoles that each enemy could have its own model, texture and behaviour as opposed to facing an army of drones?
Thats when the question of gameplay starts to get interesting. Is a game better if each of your opponents actually is different. MMORPG would certainly point to yes, I don't see why that shouldn't be the same for AI based games. FPS have been hinting at this for years, but the seeing the same model running or hiding definately takes the edge off the effect.
I hope you and every other homeowning geek is next to follow in their footprints.
Solar power is 'affordable' in the same way double glazing, central air and underfloor heating are affordable. Its not that you will EVER see the cost savings yourself, but the increase to your property's value covers the cost at resale (and government subsidies help too;) ) and you get that warm fuzzy feeling that you may be helping the environment.
Google have won this round of the search engine game. As far as keyword search goes, there is no reason for me to switch. They're free, they're fast, they almost always get the info I'm looking for in the first couple of links. There is simply no incentive to change. Unless google feck up (start to support wars/slavery so it becomes political, add one feature too many, finally stop with the search results and just returns ads)
However, its not sewn up. What I really want is a search engine that actually understands what I'm asking for. Rather than a library index, what I want is a librarian. The company that get that right will be the overal winners... but thats decades away - and I imagine it will come from left field, just like Google did.
I know Apple arn't the richest company in the world, but would they really sell out for a measly $1m? The corporation that pimps me out makes $3.5m a day (thats for 3500 staff) and we're no where near as big as Apple.
I have a pile of of books on my desk. Most of them are already replicated as pdfs on my harddrive. I have the option of two screens if I want them. I only ever fire up preview.app for pdfs when I don't own the book.
There is something eminantly more productive about having a book on my desk. I tried for months to get by without a Ruby book, there is a mountain of free and good documentation for a wonderful language. I actually finished my project a couple of days after getting Ruby for Rails in paper. Its easier to find stuff, I'm not constantly moving my mouse, or using expose to look at the info, I just look down. And I can find what I want far faster using a book, than I can with a pdf (even though preview/spotlight are good search tool).
If this is half as good as they say it is, the first product in the £100 bracket is going to winging its way to my desk. Being able to have every API, every manual and a few novels and it a few tracks to drown out the world whilst I read OUTDOORS, in SUNLIGHT! This could revolutionise IT.
I'd be tempted to buy a cheap laptop with this, even if its only available in black and white. Actually being able to leave the office, sit in a park and not spend the time squinting at very dark image sounds like a step in the right direction. I don't need a colour display to word process, crunch numbers, or cut code. Its a nice to have at best. A little sunshine and a chnge of sceen is probably worth more to me.
Mario 64 would of been half as long if only you didn't spend so much time running from one end of the castle to the other, or retreading the same landscapes.
Playing it reminded me of rock climbing, where you approach each face a different way depending on the difficulty. But by the time I'd got the 3rd or 4th coin from each level it was getting more than a little dull.
I still finished it, if only to satisfy my OCD, but I can't help feel that Nintendo robbed me of some time, just to make the game feel longer than it really was. (I had the same issue with KOTOR - should have been called Marathon of the Old Republic).
Of course then you have the other side of the coin: Half Life 2. Sure you don't feel like your re-treading the same maps, but you also feel pushed down a single path. With DVDs the norm, can't we reach a balance?
I used to work as a researcher for a diesel additive technology firm. The only time I've seen a diesel engine beat a gas engine was when they ran gas tests on a well tuned diesel. You might think that proves your point, you'd be wrong. Diesel engines produces some truely evil chemicals that petrol just doesn't, but the most obvious is black smoke or particulate matter.
In the good old days we used to test for PM6, or particles in of size greater than 10^-6 meters. Water injection, some metal additives and even ethanol-diesel blends (using an water absorbing mixing agent) have dramatic effects on reducing these emmissions, which in turn make the black soot and most of the smell dissappear. Good news?
No.
What happens is that the diesel is burnt more completely, the soot is burnt generating much better fuel economy. Again, isn't this good news?
No.
Why?
Because all it does is create smaller particles which are denoted PM9 (10^-9 meters across - nano particles). These are nasty little buggers. Too small to smell, see and perhapps more scarily for your body to recognise as foriegn bodies. They are super sticky, impossible to cough out (even if your body could be convinced it needed to) and there is a similar volume of these produced to the PM6 of old.
To put in words that polititians and the public understand: clean diesel emmisions kill children. (You don't see that written on the pumps, like you do on your pack of Marlboro).
Oh, and don't think that running the engine off vegetable oil lets you get away with anything. The PM9s are still there. Diesel engines are a dangerous technology, the only reason we tollerate them is because they save more lives than they take (by not having people die in fields or in galleys from over work). As soon as we have an alternative, just watch Rudolf Diesel's biographers and the EPA change their tune.
In theory there is no difference in fueling agro fuel veheicles with the fuel your are producing, except for one scary fact: you use more fuel in the agro vehicle than you reep from the field. Thats what the GP was getting at. Its a genuine fudge up. You may think you are using less fossil fuels by using corn ethanol, but witha all the processing etc you end up using the same or more! (Sugar cane/beet are notable exceptions... by a small margin)
Now look at what you've written and tell me where the inefficiency is.
I'll agree that using corn to make ethanol is brain dead, but thats got more to do with voters in Iowa than it does about saving the environment. Sugar cane and sugar beet do a much better job and with a net gain in energy - even when using diesl machinary. But if you do grow corn for transportation energy it is possible, and with zero fossile fuel consumption - its called manpower. The Greek and Roman Empires ran off it, most of South America, India, China and Africa still do. So where is the inefficiency. Is it in the use of corn, the use of ethanol or the use of diesel guzzling mechinary.
I'm not going to tell you that working a corn field using ox/shire horse and man power is fun and good, honest work. Its not. But using fossil fuels to replace man power is a stop gap. It might mean that the US is able to compete with northern Africa or Asia for corn, but at some point, unless we figure out a way to replace the internal combustion engine, we will have to force the poor in to peasantry again - I guess we might get away with communism for a couple of years - that tends to take the edge off being a slave.
Then there is the other statement: "to fill up an SUV it takes enough ethanol to feed a family for a year" I'm not sure if thats entirely true, but I suspect its not that far off. Now is it the ethanol that is inefficient or the SUV?
The energy in gas, doesn't just appear, it had to be stored at some point so the surely the issue is that the SUV eats more in a week than your family eats in a year, be it fossil fuel or corn.
Lets look at some other options. Smaller EU cars like the Smart or Japanese minis like the Yaris get twice as much bang per gallon. 125cc four stroke motorbikes make Smart cars look like SUVs (two strokes are as bad as diesels for pollution). A 500cc bike will eat up american highways, carry a passenger and enough luggage for communting. They're faster than 90% of cars and still get over 50 mpg. Oh, and they're fun. If you can swap to a bike for your commute and all the single passenger journeys you'll actually save money, time and the environment. Better yet, fuel cell motorbikes are starting to be produced in the UK albeit with a very young technology (they kind of remind me space age Indians... you can see that they have the potential for greatness).
Then there is the use of horse. They sure eat a lot of grain, but is it anywhere near as much as an SUV? Sure you've got long highways to deal with, but America was forged with the horse. It can be so again, although I'd be suprised if it could stay a federation. Fedral government needs good communication to survive. Even was spilt into many kingdoms before the Romans came along and gave us roads (oh and Alfred the Great kicking some danish arse didn't hurt either).
Or perhaps the real answer is bread power. One loaf of bread contains enough energy to propel a bicycle for over a hundred miles. If you want to do a direct comparison, you could even run the bike of ethanol (although most civilized nations have rules about drink driving).
Like I said, I agree there are better options than ethanol from corn for powering an SUV. But you I think the real question is, is there a right way to power an SUV?
These things facinate me, but I want something slightly different.
Something this small and cheap I don't mind if it only has a single application like a web server, or mail server or home security monitor... so why does it need an OS on the scale of Linux?
I'd rather see an app cartridge, which can access an SD or similar for data, and have loads of the buggers, no mulitasking or SMP overheads, just one program running at full machine speeds.
Can you imagine having a compiler on a stick? You fire code in on USB or ethernet, and it get stored to the SD. Need faster compilation, by another 10. XML processing Sarvega stylie, or H.264 compression could become the realm of the slightly less nerdy hobbiest, and provide a platform for the Woz of the future.
How will Microsoft survive where they can't rely on piracy and an existing monopoly to gain marketshare (office), can't sell the hardware as a loss leader (xbox), and can't rely on others to sell it for them (windows).
Does this have a successful precident for Microsoft?
Its the same reason people bought tickets to see Star Wars 4,5,6,1,2,3 , read Harry Potter 1,2,3,4,5,6 go and see films like Doom in the Cinema, buy T-Shirts just becuase they have a specific band/celebrity on them.
If people have a good experiance, the want to revist that experiance but they really want is a heady mix of novality and familiarity. New plots same charactors. Even if its bad, at least you get to know what your old friends (the charators) are up to... its bit like visiting an old Aunt. Its only when people don't care about new charactors, or old charactors loose interest that series really start to fall down. The other aspect is brand trust. If a creative individual is capable of capturing your imagination once, you hope they can do it again. Experiance teaches us that its worth the gamble. There are a lot of bad games, books and movies and life is too short to experiance them all.
But thats why people, myself included buy sequels. That's why I bought Half life 2, and that why if they ever release a decent version of Tie Fighter that works on Mac / XP I'll be buying it(the collectors CD seems to screw up on dual core machines - maybe I should try it on Parallels?) and why I'll be first in line if Audrey Niffeneger ever writes a new book. I guess the real question is: "Is it worth $60". The answer is yes. It may represent less effort from the vendor, but an items worth is represented not by the effort or cost that an item took to make, but by what the market will bare.
People are buying 360 and PC games. So they are worth $60... just not to you.
Recirculating the water: thats how the energy is generated. The more water your shifting the more energy your generating. I'm really concerned about that.
Temperature Difference: The differential only has to be great enough to preserve the syphone. I'm guessing that a lot of that is to do with how much energy is lost driving the turbine and friction in the pipes. I'd really need to do a lot more research on this, but it must be viable on some scale for Toronto to work
Motive Friction: I agree that this is probably the biggest problem. If the friction from the piping is too great there really isn't much point to the process. But I don't see whe pipes couldn't have a low friction crossection - a bit like the conning tower on a submarine.
Initial Pumping: This wouldn't have to be housed on the ship. Once the current has started, you'd have no need for the pump. Why not house it on an old oil rig?
Deep Seas: Agreed, but if it could take the edge off pan-oceanic (if there is such a word) I think we can let the Med, Black, Aegean etc... off (although the small bodies of water tend to be warmer at the surface... maybe that would be enough in summer?)
Towing: This all depends on the volume and rigidity of the pipes. Maybe they could be stowed externally, or trailed, or detached and anchored at a pumping station
There are issues with the system, but it has massive advantages: its free, reliable and its zero emission.
Oceans are great. Nothing in the way (bar a few icebergs and whales), few hills, low friction and its everywhere... well 2/3 of everywhere. Great for transporting huge amounts of stuff all over the world. Solar power not so much. Its only light for a few hours a day, its really hard to store, unless your a plant, and our currently technology extracts just over a third of the 1kW per square meter. I know container ships are measured in football pitches, but most of that surface area is doing something already. The other solar power, wind, is better, but we've done that already. If wind was a viable technology for the sort of sea transportation that we are used to we'd be using it. Wind power makes solar look reliable, and has a relatively low top speed - thats why we went to fossil fuels - its not because sea farers like change.
Why are people ignoring the temperature differencial? Toronto is already using one of the great lakes to generate power, there are trials in the Bahamas. Why not use it power ships? The oceans temperature is stable (at least in a human time frame) and there can be as much as 10 difference between deep sea and surface waters, thats plenty to drive a turbine using the syphon effect. Extend the range of tugs, and we have a winner.
Do you know whats better about it? Global warming makes it work better (at least until the deep seas catch up with the surface;)
I'm not sure what power you think the BPI has over here, but I assure you its not on the scale of outlawing the sale of digital media on these isles. They may enforce the copyright of the content owners, but Apple are already doing that, its not like thier giving the stuff away.
In many ways I can't see how setting up the movie store in the UK is any different to openning a DVD store on every high street - something that Apple could do without ever talking to our industrial bodies.
What this boils down to is Hollywood not wanting to make more money. What never ceases to amaze me is that home grown entertainment isn't allowed to take advantage of this. Brits still make films and I'm sure there are some stuggling independants that would love the opertunity to open their work to the world market, and yet Apple insists on courting nobody but hollywood big boys. What about Bollywood? What about the French, German and Spanish films that still have original plots? Why arn't they available for global release?
You're pissed off that its too blue and that videos don't have a play list?
How about being treated like a second class citizen and not even being ALLOWED to download movies!
Its bad enough that I have to put on a californian accent to play chess with my Mac or that the only concession UK Macs have to a UK keyboard is the replacment of # for £ but they insist on slapping us around the face with iTMS.
First we get to wait over a year to get it at all. Then we got to pay 79p for a track (close to $1.50 - I thought VAT was 17.5%) and so far the closest we have got to the TV Shows and Movies are the Pixar shorts.
And yet we still buy iPods like our lives depend on it, and no other online music store has come close to iTMS music store! What do we have to do? Draw blood? Invade France? Promise to fine Microsoft 2m a day - oh we're already doing that?
I suppose it could be worse. I could be Austrailian.
(I mean that purely from an iTMS perspective, I'm actually concidering being yet another Pom Downunder - sorry)
Slashdot Mirror
So iPods are successful, in part because they understood that what people need, above all else in a music player is simplicity. So you can't manage you music on the iPod, you manage them on your computer.
Now I can see that it is possible using the new search facility to access and select songs from the iTunes store (if the new iPods had wireless), but surely one of the great things about an iPod is that you can't.
Just because you can use a scroll wheel for text entry and pointing doesn't mean that you should.
This is how economics works. Something is only worth what somebody else is prepared to pay for it.
You may think that her vocal talent was worth more, but her fee represents two things:
- Bungie were more than happy to use a different actor should they need to but were polite enough to ask her to repeat the performance.
- The actor believes that she was fairly compensated as nobody forced her to take the job. She may have wanted more (don't we all?) but she understood the weakness of her bargaining power.
If you feel that she deserved more money, maybe you could hire her yourself? Get a group of your friends together and contact her agent and offer her a gig - just think of the cool ring tones you could get for just a $500.
Personally I think $500 to $1000 is more than adequate for what was essentially half a days work. The programmers wouldn't have been on anything like that rate, nor would the script writers or the technitions. As an owner of Halo 1 and 2 I can say with some confidence that if the voice of Cortana, Master Chief or in fact any of the voices my reaction would have been similar to when I realised the the covenant would be speaking English and not their own languages throughout Halo 2, regardless of difficulty: "Hey, thats lame. Oh well", and then keep on playing. I don't think I'm alone.
Of all the people on the pay role at Bungie, why would you think that its the voice actors that need more compensation?
Maybe its the AGNAA: American Gay Niggers Ass-ociation of America.
The polical wing?
There are only 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand trinary, those that don't and those that refuse to learn it for religious reasons.
I don't see anything logical about going to wireless.
You've got to charge it at some point - might as well sync at the same time. I'd like to be able to share my songs freely via wireless, but that just ain't going to happen anytime soon.
Wireless sucks battery, is a potential security risk and is slower than a cable.
The feature I'm missing the most is DAB Radio, but thats unlikely to happen because Americans don't have it (don't you guys use satalite and/or a competing digital standard?).
I keep playing with the idea that I'd like to be able to connect my iPod to my bluetooth headset in my bike helmet, and control it via my TomTom, but battery drain, loudness, sound quality and bulk make cabled headphones look like a superior technology (even if you can't skip tracks or switch to radio without crashing).
In both those instances I'm quite happy to have them as accessories rather than built into the unit. I don't see why people should have to pay a premium for niche technologies they didn't want.
It is the guy from the FBIs job to demand that our freedoms be observered and monitored. It is his job to lobby politians to pass laws to make his job easier and minimize the tax burden of his department. Its the politians job to take him seriously, concider the facts and then tell him bollocks. If he fails to do this it is your job to make it very clear that this is unacceptable, and then not vote for him in the next elections. If he gets in, then thats democracy, and the freedom that you thought was important, was clearly not that important to your fellow countryman.
Its perfectly possible that, despite living in a liberal democracy at the moment what the people want is to live under the rule of a paternal dictatorship - people are stupid. If thats the case, then democracy will let that happen. All you can do then is either raise a militia or leave. I guess you could always try and educate people, but thats never worked in the past
Because Quake 2 looks like shit. Yes, you could turn the resolution up to 11, but the textures and models looked awful in comparison today so all you ended up with was a hi-res, blocky polygon (with no rag doll physics and canned animation). The also HEAVILY re-used models and textures - to the point where many levels looked the same.
Thats why Half Life came on a CD with space to spare, and Half Life Source doesn't. Has the game play improved? No. Has the experience improved? (I'd actually say it got worse, my MacBook struggles to play HL Source). But you have to admit that the graphics actually look good at HD reolutions (I'll be eating my words in another 5 years when Half Life is released with the next engine). Where did the storage space go? Bigger textures and huge models.
Then you can look at Half-life 2. Nearly 4 GB and not a single, pre-rendered cut scene. Everyones biggest critism of HL2 was that it was too short. Is it that hard to imagine that a 40 hour + version of HL2 could have approached the limits of BluRay? Is it impossible to think that given the power of new consoles that each enemy could have its own model, texture and behaviour as opposed to facing an army of drones?
Thats when the question of gameplay starts to get interesting. Is a game better if each of your opponents actually is different. MMORPG would certainly point to yes, I don't see why that shouldn't be the same for AI based games. FPS have been hinting at this for years, but the seeing the same model running or hiding definately takes the edge off the effect.
I hope you and every other homeowning geek is next to follow in their footprints.
;) ) and you get that warm fuzzy feeling that you may be helping the environment.
Solar power is 'affordable' in the same way double glazing, central air and underfloor heating are affordable. Its not that you will EVER see the cost savings yourself, but the increase to your property's value covers the cost at resale (and government subsidies help too
Google have won this round of the search engine game. As far as keyword search goes, there is no reason for me to switch. They're free, they're fast, they almost always get the info I'm looking for in the first couple of links. There is simply no incentive to change. Unless google feck up (start to support wars/slavery so it becomes political, add one feature too many, finally stop with the search results and just returns ads)
However, its not sewn up. What I really want is a search engine that actually understands what I'm asking for. Rather than a library index, what I want is a librarian. The company that get that right will be the overal winners... but thats decades away - and I imagine it will come from left field, just like Google did.
OK here is a good measure that I think the rest of the world would agree to:
We own the space above us for as far up as it takes before your spy satalites work, or we don't have the means to defend it.
That just got a lot futher up thanks to China.
I know Apple arn't the richest company in the world, but would they really sell out for a measly $1m? The corporation that pimps me out makes $3.5m a day (thats for 3500 staff) and we're no where near as big as Apple.
I have a pile of of books on my desk. Most of them are already replicated as pdfs on my harddrive. I have the option of two screens if I want them. I only ever fire up preview.app for pdfs when I don't own the book.
There is something eminantly more productive about having a book on my desk. I tried for months to get by without a Ruby book, there is a mountain of free and good documentation for a wonderful language. I actually finished my project a couple of days after getting Ruby for Rails in paper. Its easier to find stuff, I'm not constantly moving my mouse, or using expose to look at the info, I just look down. And I can find what I want far faster using a book, than I can with a pdf (even though preview/spotlight are good search tool).
If this is half as good as they say it is, the first product in the £100 bracket is going to winging its way to my desk. Being able to have every API, every manual and a few novels and it a few tracks to drown out the world whilst I read OUTDOORS, in SUNLIGHT! This could revolutionise IT.
I'd be tempted to buy a cheap laptop with this, even if its only available in black and white. Actually being able to leave the office, sit in a park and not spend the time squinting at very dark image sounds like a step in the right direction. I don't need a colour display to word process, crunch numbers, or cut code. Its a nice to have at best. A little sunshine and a chnge of sceen is probably worth more to me.
Mario 64 would of been half as long if only you didn't spend so much time running from one end of the castle to the other, or retreading the same landscapes.
Playing it reminded me of rock climbing, where you approach each face a different way depending on the difficulty. But by the time I'd got the 3rd or 4th coin from each level it was getting more than a little dull.
I still finished it, if only to satisfy my OCD, but I can't help feel that Nintendo robbed me of some time, just to make the game feel longer than it really was. (I had the same issue with KOTOR - should have been called Marathon of the Old Republic).
Of course then you have the other side of the coin: Half Life 2. Sure you don't feel like your re-treading the same maps, but you also feel pushed down a single path. With DVDs the norm, can't we reach a balance?
Pictures? In a story? Thats got the potential to be slashdotted? Thats just crazy talk! What a waste of ad space!
I used to work as a researcher for a diesel additive technology firm. The only time I've seen a diesel engine beat a gas engine was when they ran gas tests on a well tuned diesel. You might think that proves your point, you'd be wrong. Diesel engines produces some truely evil chemicals that petrol just doesn't, but the most obvious is black smoke or particulate matter.
In the good old days we used to test for PM6, or particles in of size greater than 10^-6 meters. Water injection, some metal additives and even ethanol-diesel blends (using an water absorbing mixing agent) have dramatic effects on reducing these emmissions, which in turn make the black soot and most of the smell dissappear. Good news?
No.
What happens is that the diesel is burnt more completely, the soot is burnt generating much better fuel economy. Again, isn't this good news?
No.
Why?
Because all it does is create smaller particles which are denoted PM9 (10^-9 meters across - nano particles). These are nasty little buggers. Too small to smell, see and perhapps more scarily for your body to recognise as foriegn bodies. They are super sticky, impossible to cough out (even if your body could be convinced it needed to) and there is a similar volume of these produced to the PM6 of old.
To put in words that polititians and the public understand: clean diesel emmisions kill children. (You don't see that written on the pumps, like you do on your pack of Marlboro).
Oh, and don't think that running the engine off vegetable oil lets you get away with anything. The PM9s are still there. Diesel engines are a dangerous technology, the only reason we tollerate them is because they save more lives than they take (by not having people die in fields or in galleys from over work). As soon as we have an alternative, just watch Rudolf Diesel's biographers and the EPA change their tune.
In theory there is no difference in fueling agro fuel veheicles with the fuel your are producing, except for one scary fact: you use more fuel in the agro vehicle than you reep from the field. Thats what the GP was getting at. Its a genuine fudge up. You may think you are using less fossil fuels by using corn ethanol, but witha all the processing etc you end up using the same or more! (Sugar cane/beet are notable exceptions... by a small margin)
Now look at what you've written and tell me where the inefficiency is.
I'll agree that using corn to make ethanol is brain dead, but thats got more to do with voters in Iowa than it does about saving the environment. Sugar cane and sugar beet do a much better job and with a net gain in energy - even when using diesl machinary. But if you do grow corn for transportation energy it is possible, and with zero fossile fuel consumption - its called manpower. The Greek and Roman Empires ran off it, most of South America, India, China and Africa still do. So where is the inefficiency. Is it in the use of corn, the use of ethanol or the use of diesel guzzling mechinary.
I'm not going to tell you that working a corn field using ox/shire horse and man power is fun and good, honest work. Its not. But using fossil fuels to replace man power is a stop gap. It might mean that the US is able to compete with northern Africa or Asia for corn, but at some point, unless we figure out a way to replace the internal combustion engine, we will have to force the poor in to peasantry again - I guess we might get away with communism for a couple of years - that tends to take the edge off being a slave.
Then there is the other statement: "to fill up an SUV it takes enough ethanol to feed a family for a year" I'm not sure if thats entirely true, but I suspect its not that far off. Now is it the ethanol that is inefficient or the SUV?
The energy in gas, doesn't just appear, it had to be stored at some point so the surely the issue is that the SUV eats more in a week than your family eats in a year, be it fossil fuel or corn.
Lets look at some other options. Smaller EU cars like the Smart or Japanese minis like the Yaris get twice as much bang per gallon. 125cc four stroke motorbikes make Smart cars look like SUVs (two strokes are as bad as diesels for pollution). A 500cc bike will eat up american highways, carry a passenger and enough luggage for communting. They're faster than 90% of cars and still get over 50 mpg. Oh, and they're fun. If you can swap to a bike for your commute and all the single passenger journeys you'll actually save money, time and the environment. Better yet, fuel cell motorbikes are starting to be produced in the UK albeit with a very young technology (they kind of remind me space age Indians... you can see that they have the potential for greatness).
Then there is the use of horse. They sure eat a lot of grain, but is it anywhere near as much as an SUV? Sure you've got long highways to deal with, but America was forged with the horse. It can be so again, although I'd be suprised if it could stay a federation. Fedral government needs good communication to survive. Even was spilt into many kingdoms before the Romans came along and gave us roads (oh and Alfred the Great kicking some danish arse didn't hurt either).
Or perhaps the real answer is bread power. One loaf of bread contains enough energy to propel a bicycle for over a hundred miles. If you want to do a direct comparison, you could even run the bike of ethanol (although most civilized nations have rules about drink driving).
Like I said, I agree there are better options than ethanol from corn for powering an SUV. But you I think the real question is, is there a right way to power an SUV?
These things facinate me, but I want something slightly different.
Something this small and cheap I don't mind if it only has a single application like a web server, or mail server or home security monitor... so why does it need an OS on the scale of Linux?
I'd rather see an app cartridge, which can access an SD or similar for data, and have loads of the buggers, no mulitasking or SMP overheads, just one program running at full machine speeds.
Can you imagine having a compiler on a stick? You fire code in on USB or ethernet, and it get stored to the SD. Need faster compilation, by another 10. XML processing Sarvega stylie, or H.264 compression could become the realm of the slightly less nerdy hobbiest, and provide a platform for the Woz of the future.
How will Microsoft survive where they can't rely on piracy and an existing monopoly to gain marketshare (office), can't sell the hardware as a loss leader (xbox), and can't rely on others to sell it for them (windows).
Does this have a successful precident for Microsoft?
The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, but practice there always is. -- Someone far cleverer than me
Its the same reason people bought tickets to see Star Wars 4,5,6,1,2,3 , read Harry Potter 1,2,3,4,5,6 go and see films like Doom in the Cinema, buy T-Shirts just becuase they have a specific band/celebrity on them.
If people have a good experiance, the want to revist that experiance but they really want is a heady mix of novality and familiarity. New plots same charactors. Even if its bad, at least you get to know what your old friends (the charators) are up to... its bit like visiting an old Aunt. Its only when people don't care about new charactors, or old charactors loose interest that series really start to fall down. The other aspect is brand trust. If a creative individual is capable of capturing your imagination once, you hope they can do it again. Experiance teaches us that its worth the gamble. There are a lot of bad games, books and movies and life is too short to experiance them all.
But thats why people, myself included buy sequels. That's why I bought Half life 2, and that why if they ever release a decent version of Tie Fighter that works on Mac / XP I'll be buying it(the collectors CD seems to screw up on dual core machines - maybe I should try it on Parallels?) and why I'll be first in line if Audrey Niffeneger ever writes a new book. I guess the real question is: "Is it worth $60". The answer is yes. It may represent less effort from the vendor, but an items worth is represented not by the effort or cost that an item took to make, but by what the market will bare.
People are buying 360 and PC games. So they are worth $60... just not to you.
There are issues with the system, but it has massive advantages: its free, reliable and its zero emission.
Oceans are great. Nothing in the way (bar a few icebergs and whales), few hills, low friction and its everywhere... well 2/3 of everywhere. Great for transporting huge amounts of stuff all over the world. Solar power not so much. Its only light for a few hours a day, its really hard to store, unless your a plant, and our currently technology extracts just over a third of the 1kW per square meter. I know container ships are measured in football pitches, but most of that surface area is doing something already. The other solar power, wind, is better, but we've done that already. If wind was a viable technology for the sort of sea transportation that we are used to we'd be using it. Wind power makes solar look reliable, and has a relatively low top speed - thats why we went to fossil fuels - its not because sea farers like change.
;)
Why are people ignoring the temperature differencial? Toronto is already using one of the great lakes to generate power, there are trials in the Bahamas. Why not use it power ships? The oceans temperature is stable (at least in a human time frame) and there can be as much as 10 difference between deep sea and surface waters, thats plenty to drive a turbine using the syphon effect. Extend the range of tugs, and we have a winner.
Do you know whats better about it? Global warming makes it work better (at least until the deep seas catch up with the surface
I'm not sure what power you think the BPI has over here, but I assure you its not on the scale of outlawing the sale of digital media on these isles. They may enforce the copyright of the content owners, but Apple are already doing that, its not like thier giving the stuff away.
In many ways I can't see how setting up the movie store in the UK is any different to openning a DVD store on every high street - something that Apple could do without ever talking to our industrial bodies.
What this boils down to is Hollywood not wanting to make more money. What never ceases to amaze me is that home grown entertainment isn't allowed to take advantage of this. Brits still make films and I'm sure there are some stuggling independants that would love the opertunity to open their work to the world market, and yet Apple insists on courting nobody but hollywood big boys. What about Bollywood? What about the French, German and Spanish films that still have original plots? Why arn't they available for global release?
You're pissed off that its too blue and that videos don't have a play list?
How about being treated like a second class citizen and not even being ALLOWED to download movies!
Its bad enough that I have to put on a californian accent to play chess with my Mac or that the only concession UK Macs have to a UK keyboard is the replacment of # for £ but they insist on slapping us around the face with iTMS.
First we get to wait over a year to get it at all. Then we got to pay 79p for a track (close to $1.50 - I thought VAT was 17.5%) and so far the closest we have got to the TV Shows and Movies are the Pixar shorts.
And yet we still buy iPods like our lives depend on it, and no other online music store has come close to iTMS music store! What do we have to do? Draw blood? Invade France? Promise to fine Microsoft 2m a day - oh we're already doing that?
I suppose it could be worse. I could be Austrailian.
(I mean that purely from an iTMS perspective, I'm actually concidering being yet another Pom Downunder - sorry)