Conspicuously absent in TFA (TFPR?) are any mentions of energy cost to construct, energy break-even point, ongoing maintenance requirements, and useful lifespan. These things are made of some delicate looking stuff, mirrors get dirty and can be broken, the Stirling engines have seals that will degrade, and there are squillions of moving parts to wear out. Who's got the answers? Miracle cure or mammoth boondoggle?
Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert fossil fuels into food.
As the fossil fuels become unavailable, there won't be enough food to feed the world population, never mind fuel production.
Biofuels are worse than a joke because they actually aggravate the fossil fuel depletion problem. Each gallon of "biodiesel" encompasses more than a gallon of real diesel and lots of farmland destruction.
This is all good information, but I would add that it's not clear which resource is in worse shape from the U.S. POV: oil or gas.
The entire North American continent is in decline now despite manic drilling, and the tiny amount of gas that is transported as LNG suffers from an absurdly low energy profit ratio. The declines for gas wells are also far more sudden and drastic than the Hubbert curves of oil fields. Depending on how geopolitics plays out, we might actually see nation-wide rolling blackouts and/or impossibly high electricity and heating bills before the gasoline lines.
Ethanol, even if produced with net energy profit, is not a substitute for natural gas within our extensive existing infrastructure.
Never mind gamers, how are we going to cope with 150,000 soldiers suffering from varying degrees of shell shock returning from years of war? Now are you glad we let the assault weapons ban lapse?
Where does this madness end? The poor bastard threw $10,000 down the crapper to be infuriated in the course of attempting to watch nauseatingly boring content (or the propaganda they call the evening news) peppered with ever-increasing quantities of advertising. This sounds like the behavior of a crack addict desperate for that next fix.
Kill your television! You will wonder how you ever found so much time to waste on the damn idiot box. Spend that time bettering yourself and sharing your time with friends and family. Get informed, get inspired, get out of the house; but do yourself a favor and get rid of your television.
But let's not discuss my/. or NPR addictions, OK?:)
If the ICC is sufficient for Milosevic, why isn't it sufficient for American leaders? After all, we delivered Milosevic to the Hague:
"Professor Ingrao, in also this statement that was released on Milosevic's behalf today he blamed his arrest on this March 31 deadline that was imposed by the U.S. Congress for the new government there to cooperate with the war crimes tribunal or face a cut-off of aid."
If China or Russia had taken it upon themselves to preemptively invade Iraq, wouldn't the U.S. be petitioning the U.N.?
As long as we stay engaged with the U.N. and the ICC, we will have a say in how these bodies function. As soon as they fail to live up to our standards for justice and human rights, we can back away on sound moral grounds. In the meantime, it's a civil and sane way to exert influence even as a military superpower.
Calling All Nerds: You Don't Have Time To Waste On Television!
My wife and I gave away our TiVo and television and haven't looked back. I don't know and don't particularly care how long it's been since we unplugged from the Matrix, but I promise you this:
If you kill your television, the rest will follow.
But I swear I can stop/. any time, really! I swear!
I'll grant that my post was speculation, but it sounds to me like your post involves a violation of thermodynamics. Where's the extra energy coming from? You can't have more light _and_ more heat, can you? There must be some reasonable explanation in terms of the smear of the electromagnetic spectrum you get from each type of light bulb, but I don't know just what it is.
I suspect an incandescent bulb is a more efficient heat source for baking, because part of halogen's claim to fame is more light for the watt (and whiter light, of course) which implies that fewer watts end up being dissipated as heat.
How much of a performance hit will the average Photoshop user take waiting for this useless code to evaluate every image? What if it crashes the application for some inputs?
I see a lot of speculation here, and I remain unconvinced. I see it as a strength that TiVo knows how to be more diplomatic with the powerful media companies. We've seen them buy legislation--witness the DMCA.
I can still fast-forward commercials very effectively. And as long as I have a video-out, I'll archive anything I want for my personal use. If this becomes technically infeasible or illegal with future iterations of TiVo hardware, I'm not buying. We all get to vote with our wallets, and occassionally with a ballot.
Yes, I was aware of this development, but I didn't want to stray too far in my post. I suppose I should have been more specific than "crushed"--outside of geekdom, Replay/SonicBlue has far less mindshare and marketshare than TiVo. I was aware of Replay when I was making my initial purchase, but especially with Sony making their own branded units, I liked TiVo's chances of survival better than Replay's. Without a surviving entitity to conveniently obtain program listings, DVRs become a lot less useful. This seems to point to a first-mover _advantage_. I like to see competition, but I couldn't justify betting on the loose cannon. These new players are nice units though!
I have happily used my Series 1 Sony-branded TiVo for the past two years, and have generated extra $ for them by wowing friends who just had to have one too. And not just folks who dream in binary.
This article seems to predicate TiVo's demise on the assumption that their products will stagnate. On the contrary, I think they've been playing a smart game, and I expect them to continue to do so. Remember ReplayTV? They were crushed under an avalanche of lawsuits. TiVo intentionally omitted the controversial features (automatic commercial skip, video export) and sidestepped the avalanche. I have little doubt that when the time is right, they'll be offering DVD burning for long-term archiving.
Salon writes that consumers won't be convinced to replace their existing VCRs with TiVos. That is very short-sighted. The only convincing people need to buy TiVo, in my experience is to watch a program or two on it. You can just about watch the puddle of drool forming. What better marketing is there than word-of-mouth? And TiVo doesn't replace my VCR--it archives recordings from my TiVo now. To suggest, as this article did, that the lazy American consumer is going to start swapping recordable DVDs to record programs instead of using the couch-potato friendly, unattended TiVo solution is laughable. The argument that TiVo is too difficult to set up and maintain has been used before on PCs, and it's true, but that hasn't stopped PCs from peppering about half of US households.
You can pry my TiVo remote out of my cold, dead fingers! Uh-oh, I'm starting to sound like those Amiga guys...
I too welcome the 35mm-size CCD, but this is not the last piece of the puzzle. For example, lenses ought to be designed differently for a digital camera. Film essentially doesn't care about the angle of light striking it, while CCDs want the photons to strike perpendicular to the CCD plane.
This is a shame, because it would be nice for a pro photographer transitioning to digital to be able to capitalize on his/her existing investment in 35mm lenses.
These distributors are making the same mistake as Apple by charging $11 per CD. Apple enjoyed fat profit margins finishing out the 80s and it very nearly killed them.
If CDs cost the consumer, say, $3 or less, the industry would simply explode, and make a small lucky group even more astronomically wealthy. Let's say it cost $1 for a CD. People would buy them like Coca Cola at a vending machine; I'd buy a few CDs all the time and just throw out or give away those that were duds, which in the long run is a hell of a lot more profitable for the distributors, because they'd be moving an avalanche of product.
The first distributor to get their CD prices instantly down to $2 at retail will win big.
As one who enjoys using UNIX but misses the lack of certain software which is available only for Doze/MacOS (i.e. Adobe anything), I have been closely watching the evolution of MacOS X. As a Mac, it is subject to the availability of the software I wish to use, and as UNIX, well, it's UNIX; 'nuff said.
So I intend to take OS X for a test drive when it is released, as I hope many/. readers will. However, I've gotten spoiled by using an open source OS, and I hesitate to go back to a closed one. One thing I have read, though, is that OS X is Mach-based. If I could run GNU Hurd alongside OS X, both atop Mach, I wonder if some of my closed-source misgivings would be alleviated?
If only Macs weren't so expensive, I think they would be on the virge of being one killer platform. As far as getting people to jump ship from elsewhere, they offer gobs of backward compatibility: Linux/x86 & Windoze both run on Virtual PC, Old Mac apps run on OS X, all this fantastic software being developed openly for Linux and the BSDs could be compiled and run natively on OS X and/or HURD. Of course, much of this software is X based - that means the X Window System would have to be hacked in, maybe some combination of XFree for the libraries and a commercial X Server for Macintosh for integration with the Mac desktop? I'm just throwing this out there - if the Mac OS were running an X Server, would Hurd and OS X be able to share the Mac desktop? How about file system integration? Would one have to resort to NFS, or could filesystems be shared in a more close-knit and high performing fashion?
So does anyone care to comment on how feasible it would be to run OS X and Hurd atop Mach simultaneously?
When I recently upgraded Netscape Communicator on my Linux machine, I was disappointed to see that not only was it no more stable, perhaps even less so, but also that no real advancements in basic functionality had been made; only bloat driven by the Marketing folks. For example, the Shop button.
I have never intentionally clicked the Shop button beyond that first time out of curiosity. But each time I download a new release, I wish for the Back button to function correctly. I've tried MSIE, and damn the thing, it goes Back to the point you left off. Netscape goes back to some random position in the document. This is unbelievably aggravating, for example, when reading/. comments. I hate hunting for the spot I left off at so much, I tend to middle-click to open a new window for each thread I want to follow and close them when done with the thread! However, with recent releases, this has become more and more problematic - every time, every thread, I have to keep my fingers crossed that Netscape won't crash when I close the window. And much of the time, it does. Less often if I use Alt-w, more often if I use the window manager's close button (WindowMaker). Netscape is virtually unusable. What's wrong with these people? Why are they wasting programmers' time with Shop buttons when there are long-standing bugs to hunt?
I decided to check out the IRC forum, and it's an obvious fake. Dan and Ed, the directors, supposedly came onto the channel. Ed immediately posted: "I'd like to start this off by announcing the launch of the site for our next movie. Please visit www.richent.com for all the info." Don't bother to visit that site, because it's a nasty porn site; the big splash screen says "Welcome to Steamy Dumps!"
I hate to admit that I got suckered into seeing this dreck, but I've put that behind me now.;) I'm rather upset, though, about the totally dishonest chat: boycott scifi.com!
Actually, he did yell "Yipee" in both scenes. I remember this clearly, as both scenes made me want to vomit.
This 'leaving mom' scene is so weak, I almost walked out of the theatre after it. Anakin is very much like that dope Culkin in Home Alone. I heard an amusing remark the other day, that they were "really scraping the bottom of the child actor barrel" with this one. It's so true. He came off as a bratty little shit in an interview I saw, and the same qualities began to leak through into the film when I saw it.
It's not quite as simple as Gassee puts it; there are other costs, not the least of which is tech support. It would probably cut badly into the (already slim) margins of most of these companies to ship a variety of operating systems. A better test, I think, is whether they will ship computers with no operating system at all, and not divert one red cent from that sale to Microsoft's coffers.
Slashdot Mirror
Conspicuously absent in TFA (TFPR?) are any mentions of energy cost to construct, energy break-even point, ongoing maintenance requirements, and useful lifespan. These things are made of some delicate looking stuff, mirrors get dirty and can be broken, the Stirling engines have seals that will degrade, and there are squillions of moving parts to wear out. Who's got the answers? Miracle cure or mammoth boondoggle?
Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert fossil fuels into food.
As the fossil fuels become unavailable, there won't be enough food to feed the world population, never mind fuel production.
Biofuels are worse than a joke because they actually aggravate the fossil fuel depletion problem. Each gallon of "biodiesel" encompasses more than a gallon of real diesel and lots of farmland destruction.
This is all good information, but I would add that it's not clear which resource is in worse shape from the U.S. POV: oil or gas.
The entire North American continent is in decline now despite manic drilling, and the tiny amount of gas that is transported as LNG suffers from an absurdly low energy profit ratio. The declines for gas wells are also far more sudden and drastic than the Hubbert curves of oil fields. Depending on how geopolitics plays out, we might actually see nation-wide rolling blackouts and/or impossibly high electricity and heating bills before the gasoline lines.
Ethanol, even if produced with net energy profit, is not a substitute for natural gas within our extensive existing infrastructure.
Never mind gamers, how are we going to cope with 150,000 soldiers suffering from varying degrees of shell shock returning from years of war? Now are you glad we let the assault weapons ban lapse?
Where does this madness end? The poor bastard threw $10,000 down the crapper to be infuriated in the course of attempting to watch nauseatingly boring content (or the propaganda they call the evening news) peppered with ever-increasing quantities of advertising. This sounds like the behavior of a crack addict desperate for that next fix.
/. or NPR addictions, OK? :)
Kill your television! You will wonder how you ever found so much time to waste on the damn idiot box. Spend that time bettering yourself and sharing your time with friends and family. Get informed, get inspired, get out of the house; but do yourself a favor and get rid of your television.
But let's not discuss my
Calling All Nerds: You Don't Have Time To Waste On Television!
/. any time, really! I swear!
My wife and I gave away our TiVo and television and haven't looked back. I don't know and don't particularly care how long it's been since we unplugged from the Matrix, but I promise you this:
If you kill your television, the rest will follow.
But I swear I can stop
I'll grant that my post was speculation, but it sounds to me like your post involves a violation of thermodynamics. Where's the extra energy coming from? You can't have more light _and_ more heat, can you? There must be some reasonable explanation in terms of the smear of the electromagnetic spectrum you get from each type of light bulb, but I don't know just what it is.
I suspect an incandescent bulb is a more efficient heat source for baking, because part of halogen's claim to fame is more light for the watt (and whiter light, of course) which implies that fewer watts end up being dissipated as heat.
How much of a performance hit will the average Photoshop user take waiting for this useless code to evaluate every image? What if it crashes the application for some inputs?
"Whore?" My words were inflammatory? Geez.
I see a lot of speculation here, and I remain unconvinced. I see it as a strength that TiVo knows how to be more diplomatic with the powerful media companies. We've seen them buy legislation--witness the DMCA.
I can still fast-forward commercials very effectively. And as long as I have a video-out, I'll archive anything I want for my personal use. If this becomes technically infeasible or illegal with future iterations of TiVo hardware, I'm not buying. We all get to vote with our wallets, and occassionally with a ballot.
Yes, I was aware of this development, but I didn't want to stray too far in my post. I suppose I should have been more specific than "crushed"--outside of geekdom, Replay/SonicBlue has far less mindshare and marketshare than TiVo. I was aware of Replay when I was making my initial purchase, but especially with Sony making their own branded units, I liked TiVo's chances of survival better than Replay's. Without a surviving entitity to conveniently obtain program listings, DVRs become a lot less useful. This seems to point to a first-mover _advantage_. I like to see competition, but I couldn't justify betting on the loose cannon. These new players are nice units though!
I have happily used my Series 1 Sony-branded TiVo for the past two years, and have generated extra $ for them by wowing friends who just had to have one too. And not just folks who dream in binary.
This article seems to predicate TiVo's demise on the assumption that their products will stagnate. On the contrary, I think they've been playing a smart game, and I expect them to continue to do so. Remember ReplayTV? They were crushed under an avalanche of lawsuits. TiVo intentionally omitted the controversial features (automatic commercial skip, video export) and sidestepped the avalanche. I have little doubt that when the time is right, they'll be offering DVD burning for long-term archiving.
Salon writes that consumers won't be convinced to replace their existing VCRs with TiVos. That is very short-sighted. The only convincing people need to buy TiVo, in my experience is to watch a program or two on it. You can just about watch the puddle of drool forming. What better marketing is there than word-of-mouth? And TiVo doesn't replace my VCR--it archives recordings from my TiVo now. To suggest, as this article did, that the lazy American consumer is going to start swapping recordable DVDs to record programs instead of using the couch-potato friendly, unattended TiVo solution is laughable. The argument that TiVo is too difficult to set up and maintain has been used before on PCs, and it's true, but that hasn't stopped PCs from peppering about half of US households.
You can pry my TiVo remote out of my cold, dead fingers! Uh-oh, I'm starting to sound like those Amiga guys...
I too welcome the 35mm-size CCD, but this is not the last piece of the puzzle. For example, lenses ought to be designed differently for a digital camera. Film essentially doesn't care about the angle of light striking it, while CCDs want the photons to strike perpendicular to the CCD plane.
This is a shame, because it would be nice for a pro photographer transitioning to digital to be able to capitalize on his/her existing investment in 35mm lenses.
Then I'd say it's more like a specification, not a standard. :)
These distributors are making the same mistake as Apple by charging $11 per CD. Apple enjoyed fat profit margins finishing out the 80s and it very nearly killed them.
If CDs cost the consumer, say, $3 or less, the industry would simply explode, and make a small lucky group even more astronomically wealthy. Let's say it cost $1 for a CD. People would buy them like Coca Cola at a vending machine; I'd buy a few CDs all the time and just throw out or give away those that were duds, which in the long run is a hell of a lot more profitable for the distributors, because they'd be moving an avalanche of product.
The first distributor to get their CD prices instantly down to $2 at retail will win big.
As one who enjoys using UNIX but misses the lack of certain software which is available only for Doze/MacOS (i.e. Adobe anything), I have been closely watching the evolution of MacOS X. As a Mac, it is subject to the availability of the software I wish to use, and as UNIX, well, it's UNIX; 'nuff said.
/. readers will. However, I've gotten spoiled by using an open source OS, and I hesitate to go back to a closed one. One thing I have read, though, is that OS X is Mach-based. If I could run GNU Hurd alongside OS X, both atop Mach, I wonder if some of my closed-source misgivings would be alleviated?
So I intend to take OS X for a test drive when it is released, as I hope many
If only Macs weren't so expensive, I think they would be on the virge of being one killer platform. As far as getting people to jump ship from elsewhere, they offer gobs of backward compatibility: Linux/x86 & Windoze both run on Virtual PC, Old Mac apps run on OS X, all this fantastic software being developed openly for Linux and the BSDs could be compiled and run natively on OS X and/or HURD. Of course, much of this software is X based - that means the X Window System would have to be hacked in, maybe some combination of XFree for the libraries and a commercial X Server for Macintosh for integration with the Mac desktop? I'm just throwing this out there - if the Mac OS were running an X Server, would Hurd and OS X be able to share the Mac desktop? How about file system integration? Would one have to resort to NFS, or could filesystems be shared in a more close-knit and high performing fashion?
So does anyone care to comment on how feasible it would be to run OS X and Hurd atop Mach simultaneously?
When I recently upgraded Netscape Communicator on my Linux machine, I was disappointed to see that not only was it no more stable, perhaps even less so, but also that no real advancements in basic functionality had been made; only bloat driven by the Marketing folks. For example, the Shop button.
/. comments. I hate hunting for the spot I left off at so much, I tend to middle-click to open a new window for each thread I want to follow and close them when done with the thread! However, with recent releases, this has become more and more problematic - every time, every thread, I have to keep my fingers crossed that Netscape won't crash when I close the window. And much of the time, it does. Less often if I use Alt-w, more often if I use the window manager's close button (WindowMaker). Netscape is virtually unusable. What's wrong with these people? Why are they wasting programmers' time with Shop buttons when there are long-standing bugs to hunt?
I have never intentionally clicked the Shop button beyond that first time out of curiosity. But each time I download a new release, I wish for the Back button to function correctly. I've tried MSIE, and damn the thing, it goes Back to the point you left off. Netscape goes back to some random position in the document. This is unbelievably aggravating, for example, when reading
Just picking a minor nit:
:)
The Visor has a slot for SpringBoards, so it
does have the tinker factor.
I decided to check out the IRC forum, and it's an obvious fake. Dan and Ed, the directors, supposedly came onto the channel. Ed immediately posted: "I'd like to start this off by announcing the launch of the site for our next movie. Please visit www.richent.com for all the info." Don't bother to visit that site, because it's a nasty porn site; the big splash screen says "Welcome to Steamy Dumps!"
;) I'm rather upset, though, about the totally dishonest chat: boycott scifi.com!
I hate to admit that I got suckered into seeing this dreck, but I've put that behind me now.
Actually, he did yell "Yipee" in both scenes. I remember this clearly, as both scenes made me want to vomit.
This 'leaving mom' scene is so weak, I almost walked out of the theatre after it. Anakin is very much like that dope Culkin in Home Alone. I heard an amusing remark the other day, that they were "really scraping the bottom of the child actor barrel" with this one. It's so true. He came off as a bratty little shit in an interview I saw, and the same qualities began to leak through into the film when I saw it.
just picking a small nit: it's SysRPL, not SysRPN
RPN = Reverse Polish Notation
RPL = Reverse Polish LISP
It's not quite as simple as Gassee puts it; there are other costs, not the least of which is tech support. It would probably cut badly into the (already slim) margins of most of these companies to ship a variety of operating systems. A better test, I think, is whether they will ship computers with no operating system at all, and not divert one red cent from that sale to Microsoft's coffers.