It also didn't work unless you had high quality floppies. Many ones I tried it with were write once, read never cause the data degraded on the other side since the disks we not rated for double sided.
not if they use a laptop, or a decent cheap computer which is what most people need anyways, not the 300W+ monsters that seem to be the norm these days for anything with a video card that is near the high end.
Most laptop power supplies are like 100->200W at the most. And they charge the battery as well as let you use the computer, so if you've got a full battery then it's probably less.
They are very good at doing research in making their chips very cheap to make and own the whole stack of production from start to finish. This is how they have managed to make it despite many many misteps along the way.
nVidia doesn't own the factories that they use to make their chips, they just design them and use factories like TSMC. nVidia would be stupid to compete with intel in the same space (x86 CPUs) until they own and can efficiently build chips like intel can.
AMD was the only ones doing it as they tried their best to own all their own fabs, however they are running in the red and are trying to sell some of them now. We'll see if they can pull it together but still they are one of the only other companies out there that actually tries to build the chips from start to finish.
Intel's latest graphics offering is going to fail, not because they don't have the hardware (actually their new larabee looks really fast). but because their graphics drivers have always stunk and there is little evidence to suggest that they will be able to make a leap forward in graphics driver quality that will make their solution better then AMD or nVidia. They have to write full DX9, DX10, and OpenGL drivers to really compete with nVidia, then they have to optimize all those drivers for all the popular games (cause nobody will re-write Doom, HL, UT, FarCry, etc.. just for this new graphics card).
It could happen, but will it?
I do hope that larabee turns out to be an awesome coprocessor for other tasks. We'l just have to see if people actually port their code to it.
Then your problem is storage, cause it's a lot of pixels to keep track, which is one reason that the CCTV cameras are so low res, it keeps the bitrate down so they can cheaply store so much footage.
how is this a new observation? The web has always been a mess. It's forever in some sort of alpha/experimental state with no real standard as to what technologies to use. There are security holes all the time that need to be fixed, bugs in browsers that make developers split their resources to handle multiple browsers.
And that's how we likes it. The web's craziness is also it's strength. It's really quite amazing what has been done on the web, considering that it works pretty much the same whether you are on a Windows, Mac, BeOS, Amiga, x86, PowerPC, ARM, or what have you. You can even fire up an old version of netscape and have lots of the web still work.
I don't think that less choice in technologies is a good thing for anyone, it won't reduce cost of development. It won't make it easier to learn how to program for the web. It won't increase the number of good web programmers. The more ways that we have to build web applications the better.
You can have light, safe and cheap, but you also probably won't get fast, luxurious, or large. You can easily get small, light, cheap and safe, but people don't want that. They want the extra room for their family, they want the extra DVD player in the seat back for their kids. They want to crank the AC during the summertime to sub zero temperatures. They want motorized windows.
These are all things that people could easily give up and would reduce weight while not reducing safety. Reducing the weight of a car is easy, but trying to sell it is not. For awhile now cars have seen more and more luxury features in low end cars, while seeing the same or slightly reduced fuel economy.
I think that 60 minutes just had a good program on recently that I was watching via yahoo news about how a subway sandwich meal had 1,300 calories. The shocking thing is that the people that they talked to had no idea that they were consuming that much food. This is the central problem with most diets and why most people fail. They have no idea how much they are consuming. They don't measure it and there is no good way to measure how much energy you expend on a day to day basis. The basic formula as many have pointed out is energy consumed - energy spent = energy stored/consumed from body. But one thing that is not true is that all energy that your body gets from your body comes from fat cells. Depending on your diet and eating habits, your body will not use fat for energy, but rather muscle or other tissues first. Maintaining the proper balance of hormones, fats and carbs in your system to ensure that you lose the proper amount is also hard.
Science is simply not being used to measure this I think. Most diet programs just seem to be of the type where they tell you to eat stuff and hope that you don't eat more. Then the people that actually follow their plan (or so they say) are held up as examples of the diet working.
But I haven't seen anyone else doing it. I mean Mr. Pohl's work is awesome to look at and has even been covered here at slashdot before, but why isn't anyone else doing research into this field of real time ray tracing? I know it's young and all but it has to get more momentium before we will see it in games.
It's kinda like voxels, regardless of the technical merits of voxels, they never got enough momentum to really take off as a way to render graphics. That or tile based rendering like the way that the PowerVR (http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/38/) graphics chips did it. Both of these technologies probably have more potential then were realized by most people.
My personal hope is that with nVidia's CUDA and ATI's to the metal projects, we will see people writing engines that use all the strengths of the CPU and GPU together. Intel seems to be on this path as well, as they seem to want to integrate the GPU and CPU, though their aim is much different. A ray tracing engine that is optimized to use the graphics card would be possible in the future anbd offer even more speedup, as the current work is cpu only it seems.
It's just that even if they solve all these issues with games, and are able to render a true to life simulation with AI that can mimic a real person. It still doesn't even begin to solve the most important aspect of video games, which is FUN.
Fun cannot be realized through more processor power, better looking faces or AI.
All these problems are very hard to get 100% right and all they really need to do is to get it right enough that people pretend that they are in a fantasy world. Which is why old text based games like Zork can still do a good job of pulling a player into the world enough that it's fun. It's all about stimulating a person's imagination, not creating a photo realistic simulation of reality.
Sure it would be neat to have photorealistic fire that can burn the entire environment and interact with water in a realistic manner. But is that what you really want? I mean it's also very fun to be able to play as the human torch, which means that you have to bend the laws of physics in your game world to simulate such a being. So it's not really about being real as much as fun, no?
Art direction, character design, level design, are much more important then these issues, yet we are spending much more time on the motion capture of a video game then on the plot. Crazy, IMO.
I concur. If they really wanted people to be fit and trim (and thus lower costs for insurance) they would encourage people to exercise during work hours. Enforcing an exercise routine may seem unamerican, but that would actually be a POSITIVE way to encourage people to be healthy. This way seems to be saying that they pay people too much and the company just wants some money back through nickle and dimeing their own workers.
Which is just bad form. The workers need to make their voice heard, now.
This is why there will never be a linux desktop. It's because nobody really wants to pay for it. Like you say, if the operating system was free then MS would have no reason to exist.
Let me tell you something, people like MS because they spend their time trying (and not always succeding) on making those little support issues go away. They also cause many headaches, but for the COMMON user, they actually let them do REAL work. Linux not so much. Also dirt cheap laptops made in a foreign country with no support don't make for the best user experience. They don't have Apple's Genius Bar, a person to call and wait 3 hours on the phone with to 'help' you or even a decent support website. Most of the time these cheapo laptop guys barely have a person on email.
You do get what you pay for, and at this price point it's just the laptop.
Also it's very easy to unlock your phone, you just call customer service (the hard part) and get an unlock code. Enter that unlock code into your phone, and magically your phone works. At least on T-Mobile in the us that is how it works.
I completly agree. Look at all the games for PS3/XBox and you will see that while they have a lot of quality 'fun' games. Once you get past the shiny-ness of them, it's just another kill them all adventure. Lots of people like that, no question but not all of them are willing to upgrade their TV, Console and Games to have it. That's at least a thousand dollars of equiptment to buy to upgrade from the 'previous generation' of gaming. I am including the price of the HDTV but I don't think that's unfair as most people don't have them yet.
The Wii on the other hand is a small step and is delivering new experiences that many people enjoy. They want girls, grandmas, grandpas, dads, moms, and boys to play it. Sony/Microsoft are very focused on those people who want to play the hardcore shoot em ups, first person shooters and other games that appeal mostly to Teenage-20 something year old males. Nothing wrong with that either, but they are limiting their market on purpose because they know how to sell to those people.
that's why the Wii was only a GameCube 1.5, because it wasn't worth the risk of developing a true next generation High Definition system when only a small amount of people (those with money and want to buy a HDTV) would buy it. Their driving philosophy is known as the "Blue Ocean" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy) and they seem to be doing just fine.
The problem is that the fluorescent bulbs have only so many power-on/off cycles in them. they last much longer if you don't turn them on/off all the time and just leave them on constantly. However, in a home environment that is less likely. Especially since people have been trained to shut off lights when leaving rooms to save electricity.
I really don't have a good solution to this problem. I don't know if there is, maybe automatic controls of the lights that don't turn off so much?
I love how it's necessary now to use tools that only pirates are supposed to use in order to get these dvd to play on a DVD player.
I know that Sony just wants to make sure that people can't pirate their movies, but it's too late for that. It's game over for DVD, at this point the toolchain for ripping dvds is so advanced that it's almost an open format. You might as well avoid all the pain and suffering of trying to encrypt the dvd and just release all DVDs as open format without encryption.
A simple download of a tool and the right DVD drive is all it takes to make a protected DVD into an open one.
I think that it was a smart move on the content producers part that they also used MPEG-2 for HD, when they could have used MPEG-4. MPEG-4 would to have increased the amount of content they could put on a BluRay/HD-DVD since the same movie would take less room on the disc. I think that they wanted the massive amount of data required for MPEG-2 HD content. It only makes it harder for the pirates to rip/burn/transmit a large movie if the source material is huge as well. It makes the pirate re-encode the movie since less people will download a 20+ GB movie. Re-encoding causes the resulting movie to look slightly worse then the original since it is very hard to re-encode a movie in a lossless fashion. It can be done, but usually takes multiple encodes as finding the right bitrate to keep the loss imperceptible is not something the tool does for you (AFIAK).
then a war in Iraq. I'd much rather have something ten times as expensive and doomed to failure then the war on terror or Iraq. It would be much cheaper. Why can't the govenment just build something here instead of destroying a nation all the way around the world?
Maybe you should rethink your position about synchronizing every method to make Java 'thread safe' Cause what that will really do is cause all your code to freeze when it is actually run in a multithreaded environment unless it is very simple.
You cannot just make code thread safe. You have to define where you are going to share memory between threads, and then figure out all interactions between the threads and define where the data can be shared. Otherwise you are asking for trouble. Using a process model makes it HARDER (but not impossible) to hang yourself, by forcing you to use shared memory, message passing, or other techniques to force you to think about the shared state of your code.
Writing code is easy, but the tools we choose to use make it hard to write good multithreaded code.
Why start at age 65? Why not every 5-7 years? Young people probably need more tests then the elderly especially right after they get their licenses so they can break their habits before they start.
But to me the number one thing that would reduce accidents is revoking licenses for drunk driving/ driving under the influence of drugs. One strike and you're out. I'm sorry if you like to drink and think you are safe after a few beers, but if you really need to drink then please either walk or get a cab. Driving a 2 ton death machine while impaired is not excusable. This should also apply to pot, crack, cocaine, even if prescribed.
What about all the software you need to do the same things on the iMac, iLife alone could run you 300+ in comparable windows software. Maybe you won't spend that much, but $300 in software adds up quickly.
I think that people will just be disappointed with results. Let's face it, most people, most normal people will not buy a new machine just because. It may be the new hotness, but the reality that people can barely afford one computer, let alone 2 will sink in. Apples may be more expensive then a PC, but anyone who can afford more then a low end pc can also probably afford a Mac instead of the PC.
We're in a replacement market for computers, people just don't buy new computers because, it has to be because their old one is too old these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Cause the population of slashdot is getting old. Once your hand turns red you're screwed, we're all red around here.
It also didn't work unless you had high quality floppies. Many ones I tried it with were write once, read never cause the data degraded on the other side since the disks we not rated for double sided.
Whine about it on the (slow) internet or sell it on ebay?
when they made link right handed for some unknown reason!
He's left handed before the twilight princess! LEFT!
Oh the humanity for us lefties!
FYI, Xbox360 runs windows, a stripped down version but it's still windows.
Windows NT originally ran on both PowerPC and Alpha CPUs as well.
Anyway, keep the flame alive.
not if they use a laptop, or a decent cheap computer which is what most people need anyways, not the 300W+ monsters that seem to be the norm these days for anything with a video card that is near the high end.
Most laptop power supplies are like 100->200W at the most. And they charge the battery as well as let you use the computer, so if you've got a full battery then it's probably less.
They are very good at doing research in making their chips very cheap to make and own the whole stack of production from start to finish. This is how they have managed to make it despite many many misteps along the way.
nVidia doesn't own the factories that they use to make their chips, they just design them and use factories like TSMC. nVidia would be stupid to compete with intel in the same space (x86 CPUs) until they own and can efficiently build chips like intel can.
AMD was the only ones doing it as they tried their best to own all their own fabs, however they are running in the red and are trying to sell some of them now. We'll see if they can pull it together but still they are one of the only other companies out there that actually tries to build the chips from start to finish.
Intel's latest graphics offering is going to fail, not because they don't have the hardware (actually their new larabee looks really fast). but because their graphics drivers have always stunk and there is little evidence to suggest that they will be able to make a leap forward in graphics driver quality that will make their solution better then AMD or nVidia. They have to write full DX9, DX10, and OpenGL drivers to really compete with nVidia, then they have to optimize all those drivers for all the popular games (cause nobody will re-write Doom, HL, UT, FarCry, etc.. just for this new graphics card).
It could happen, but will it?
I do hope that larabee turns out to be an awesome coprocessor for other tasks. We'l just have to see if people actually port their code to it.
Then your problem is storage, cause it's a lot of pixels to keep track, which is one reason that the CCTV cameras are so low res, it keeps the bitrate down so they can cheaply store so much footage.
how is this a new observation? The web has always been a mess. It's forever in some sort of alpha/experimental state with no real standard as to what technologies to use. There are security holes all the time that need to be fixed, bugs in browsers that make developers split their resources to handle multiple browsers.
And that's how we likes it. The web's craziness is also it's strength. It's really quite amazing what has been done on the web, considering that it works pretty much the same whether you are on a Windows, Mac, BeOS, Amiga, x86, PowerPC, ARM, or what have you. You can even fire up an old version of netscape and have lots of the web still work.
I don't think that less choice in technologies is a good thing for anyone, it won't reduce cost of development. It won't make it easier to learn how to program for the web. It won't increase the number of good web programmers. The more ways that we have to build web applications the better.
You can have light, safe and cheap, but you also probably won't get fast, luxurious, or large. You can easily get small, light, cheap and safe, but people don't want that. They want the extra room for their family, they want the extra DVD player in the seat back for their kids. They want to crank the AC during the summertime to sub zero temperatures. They want motorized windows.
These are all things that people could easily give up and would reduce weight while not reducing safety. Reducing the weight of a car is easy, but trying to sell it is not. For awhile now cars have seen more and more luxury features in low end cars, while seeing the same or slightly reduced fuel economy.
He's just following the lead of our president.
Attack first since they may be a threat in the future.
I think that 60 minutes just had a good program on recently that I was watching via yahoo news about how a subway sandwich meal had 1,300 calories. The shocking thing is that the people that they talked to had no idea that they were consuming that much food. This is the central problem with most diets and why most people fail. They have no idea how much they are consuming. They don't measure it and there is no good way to measure how much energy you expend on a day to day basis.
The basic formula as many have pointed out is energy consumed - energy spent = energy stored/consumed from body. But one thing that is not true is that all energy that your body gets from your body comes from fat cells. Depending on your diet and eating habits, your body will not use fat for energy, but rather muscle or other tissues first. Maintaining the proper balance of hormones, fats and carbs in your system to ensure that you lose the proper amount is also hard.
Science is simply not being used to measure this I think. Most diet programs just seem to be of the type where they tell you to eat stuff and hope that you don't eat more. Then the people that actually follow their plan (or so they say) are held up as examples of the diet working.
But I haven't seen anyone else doing it. I mean Mr. Pohl's work is awesome to look at and has even been covered here at slashdot before, but why isn't anyone else doing research into this field of real time ray tracing? I know it's young and all but it has to get more momentium before we will see it in games.
It's kinda like voxels, regardless of the technical merits of voxels, they never got enough momentum to really take off as a way to render graphics. That or tile based rendering like the way that the PowerVR (http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/38/) graphics chips did it. Both of these technologies probably have more potential then were realized by most people.
My personal hope is that with nVidia's CUDA and ATI's to the metal projects, we will see people writing engines that use all the strengths of the CPU and GPU together. Intel seems to be on this path as well, as they seem to want to integrate the GPU and CPU, though their aim is much different. A ray tracing engine that is optimized to use the graphics card would be possible in the future anbd offer even more speedup, as the current work is cpu only it seems.
It's just that even if they solve all these issues with games, and are able to render a true to life simulation with AI that can mimic a real person. It still doesn't even begin to solve the most important aspect of video games, which is FUN.
Fun cannot be realized through more processor power, better looking faces or AI.
All these problems are very hard to get 100% right and all they really need to do is to get it right enough that people pretend that they are in a fantasy world. Which is why old text based games like Zork can still do a good job of pulling a player into the world enough that it's fun. It's all about stimulating a person's imagination, not creating a photo realistic simulation of reality.
Sure it would be neat to have photorealistic fire that can burn the entire environment and interact with water in a realistic manner. But is that what you really want? I mean it's also very fun to be able to play as the human torch, which means that you have to bend the laws of physics in your game world to simulate such a being. So it's not really about being real as much as fun, no?
Art direction, character design, level design, are much more important then these issues, yet we are spending much more time on the motion capture of a video game then on the plot. Crazy, IMO.
I concur. If they really wanted people to be fit and trim (and thus lower costs for insurance) they would encourage people to exercise during work hours. Enforcing an exercise routine may seem unamerican, but that would actually be a POSITIVE way to encourage people to be healthy. This way seems to be saying that they pay people too much and the company just wants some money back through nickle and dimeing their own workers.
Which is just bad form. The workers need to make their voice heard, now.
This is why there will never be a linux desktop. It's because nobody really wants to pay for it. Like you say, if the operating system was free then MS would have no reason to exist.
Let me tell you something, people like MS because they spend their time trying (and not always succeding) on making those little support issues go away. They also cause many headaches, but for the COMMON user, they actually let them do REAL work. Linux not so much. Also dirt cheap laptops made in a foreign country with no support don't make for the best user experience. They don't have Apple's Genius Bar, a person to call and wait 3 hours on the phone with to 'help' you or even a decent support website. Most of the time these cheapo laptop guys barely have a person on email.
You do get what you pay for, and at this price point it's just the laptop.
Locking is not illegal to remove in the US, in fact it is allowed by an excemption to the DMCA law.
Also it's very easy to unlock your phone, you just call customer service (the hard part) and get an unlock code. Enter that unlock code into your phone, and magically your phone works. At least on T-Mobile in the us that is how it works.
I completly agree. Look at all the games for PS3/XBox and you will see that while they have a lot of quality 'fun' games. Once you get past the shiny-ness of them, it's just another kill them all adventure. Lots of people like that, no question but not all of them are willing to upgrade their TV, Console and Games to have it. That's at least a thousand dollars of equiptment to buy to upgrade from the 'previous generation' of gaming. I am including the price of the HDTV but I don't think that's unfair as most people don't have them yet.
) and they seem to be doing just fine.
The Wii on the other hand is a small step and is delivering new experiences that many people enjoy. They want girls, grandmas, grandpas, dads, moms, and boys to play it. Sony/Microsoft are very focused on those people who want to play the hardcore shoot em ups, first person shooters and other games that appeal mostly to Teenage-20 something year old males. Nothing wrong with that either, but they are limiting their market on purpose because they know how to sell to those people.
that's why the Wii was only a GameCube 1.5, because it wasn't worth the risk of developing a true next generation High Definition system when only a small amount of people (those with money and want to buy a HDTV) would buy it. Their driving philosophy is known as the "Blue Ocean" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy
The problem is that the fluorescent bulbs have only so many power-on/off cycles in them. they last much longer if you don't turn them on/off all the time and just leave them on constantly. However, in a home environment that is less likely. Especially since people have been trained to shut off lights when leaving rooms to save electricity.
I really don't have a good solution to this problem. I don't know if there is, maybe automatic controls of the lights that don't turn off so much?
I love how it's necessary now to use tools that only pirates are supposed to use in order to get these dvd to play on a DVD player.
I know that Sony just wants to make sure that people can't pirate their movies, but it's too late for that. It's game over for DVD, at this point the toolchain for ripping dvds is so advanced that it's almost an open format. You might as well avoid all the pain and suffering of trying to encrypt the dvd and just release all DVDs as open format without encryption.
A simple download of a tool and the right DVD drive is all it takes to make a protected DVD into an open one.
I think that it was a smart move on the content producers part that they also used MPEG-2 for HD, when they could have used MPEG-4. MPEG-4 would to have increased the amount of content they could put on a BluRay/HD-DVD since the same movie would take less room on the disc. I think that they wanted the massive amount of data required for MPEG-2 HD content. It only makes it harder for the pirates to rip/burn/transmit a large movie if the source material is huge as well. It makes the pirate re-encode the movie since less people will download a 20+ GB movie. Re-encoding causes the resulting movie to look slightly worse then the original since it is very hard to re-encode a movie in a lossless fashion. It can be done, but usually takes multiple encodes as finding the right bitrate to keep the loss imperceptible is not something the tool does for you (AFIAK).
then a war in Iraq. I'd much rather have something ten times as expensive and doomed to failure then the war on terror or Iraq. It would be much cheaper. Why can't the govenment just build something here instead of destroying a nation all the way around the world?
Maybe you should rethink your position about synchronizing every method to make Java 'thread safe' Cause what that will really do is cause all your code to freeze when it is actually run in a multithreaded environment unless it is very simple.
You cannot just make code thread safe. You have to define where you are going to share memory between threads, and then figure out all interactions between the threads and define where the data can be shared. Otherwise you are asking for trouble. Using a process model makes it HARDER (but not impossible) to hang yourself, by forcing you to use shared memory, message passing, or other techniques to force you to think about the shared state of your code.
Writing code is easy, but the tools we choose to use make it hard to write good multithreaded code.
Why start at age 65? Why not every 5-7 years? Young people probably need more tests then the elderly especially right after they get their licenses so they can break their habits before they start.
But to me the number one thing that would reduce accidents is revoking licenses for drunk driving/ driving under the influence of drugs. One strike and you're out. I'm sorry if you like to drink and think you are safe after a few beers, but if you really need to drink then please either walk or get a cab. Driving a 2 ton death machine while impaired is not excusable. This should also apply to pot, crack, cocaine, even if prescribed.
What about all the software you need to do the same things on the iMac, iLife alone could run you 300+ in comparable windows software. Maybe you won't spend that much, but $300 in software adds up quickly.
I think that people will just be disappointed with results. Let's face it, most people, most normal people will not buy a new machine just because. It may be the new hotness, but the reality that people can barely afford one computer, let alone 2 will sink in. Apples may be more expensive then a PC, but anyone who can afford more then a low end pc can also probably afford a Mac instead of the PC.
We're in a replacement market for computers, people just don't buy new computers because, it has to be because their old one is too old these days.