Carmack's team is building a VTVL rocket, but it's A) manned and B) intended to just do hops. It's intended to be a technology prover, but it's going to be more like a flying rocket chair than a spaceship.
Plus, his budget is at least an order of magnitude less than the Japanese budget.
Who says Americans can't do small and cheap? Go John Carmack!
Jon Acheson
I don't think it will be cheaper.
on
Books on Demand
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· Score: 2
But conversely, printing out a book where you are is much more cost-efficient than printing it out halfway across the country and paying to warehouse and ship it to you. (How much does it cost to send one book through the mail, even at book rate?) These things should balance out--it might be less expensive to buy that book than you think.
No, it's not. Do the math: that three cents a page, which is generous, by the way, costs you $15 US for a 500 page book. Mass-producing the same book and shipping it to your local bookstore, it's going to cost you between $5 and $10. If the cost is four cents a page, it's $20 for the same book.
My point is, you're paying the SAME shipping fees for the materials, the only thing that changes is the point of assembly. And mass-production on dedicated high-speed presses is going to be much much cheaper than one-off production in the local book machine. There is wasteage in the distribution and sale of printed books, granted, and more middlemen, but that's the only thing that makes it even close. That $8 paperback they sell in the store only cost maybe a buck to print.
Plus, the quality of both paper and printing and binding are likely to be inferior to the mass-produced version.
If any of the people surveyed could even give an accurate definition of the greenhouse effect, as opposed to "global warming caused by bad greenhouse gases."
300 million sheep are not necessarily smarter than one person.
Science lesson: the accurate definition of the greenhouse effect, which I thankfully learned in astronomy class, is as follows:
greenhouse effect, n (1937): warming of the surface and lower atmosphere of a planet (as the earth or Venus) that is caused by conversion of solar radiation into heat in a process involving selective transmission of short wave solar radiation by the atmosphere, its absorption by the planet's surface, and reradiation as infrared which is absorbed and partly reradiated back to the surface by atmospheric gases."
In other words, any time any planet has an atmosphere, of any composition, that atmosphere will tend to be more transparent to sunlight than to infrared. So, light passes through the atmosphere, hits the planet's surface and warms it. The atmosphere then tends to hold in the heat which is reradiated from the planet's surface. This is a Good Thing: it helps keep the Earth at a habitable temperature.
What's even scarier are the people who were TAUGHT the Al Gore version in their classes!
Jon Acheson
How good is the binding, I wonder?
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 4
It says they use a hot-glue binding. That's not encouraging; they can be really cheap and nasty. What good is an expensive paperback book (and it will be at least 4 cents a page, more for color) that falls apart halfway through?
Now, if they had a quality paperback binding like you find on, say, Penguin paperbacks, that would be different.
Jon Acheson
They already HAVE it at the local Kinko's!
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 3
All of this technology is old stuff that's off the shelf, and all of it is already at your neigborhood Kinko's. You can already bring in a CD and walk out with a full-color hardbound book.
The difference is that this is all in one unit (though Kinko's may have that by now too), and that the method of distibution and payment isn't in place at Kinko's. Of course, it isn't in place yet with this guy's invention, either.
The real sticking point, and what this shoddily-researched article fails to mention, is that your insta-book is going to cost you several times as much as a mass-produced volume. Printing out pages one at a time is nowhere near as cost-efficient as printing out thousands of copies at a time. How much is your book coing to cost at 3 cents a page?
Fact: most people don't care about space programs and would like to see NASA go back to being a 3-geek university wing in exchange for a nationwide health care program.
Fact: the prospect of a nationalized American health care system fills most Americans with abiding horror. Two words: Veterans' Administration.
Space is cute'n'all, but until we discover/develop more efficient and cost-effective ways to get there and poke around, it will remain a very expensive venture of bullshit and speculation with ZERO investment returns for the time being.
The benefits to medicine alone have made the space program a great investment. Ask the people who built the latest artificial heart if they would have been able to do it without the technology developed for the space program.
Or, look at the computer industry. Or the benefits of satellites, both for global communications and for learning more about the Earth. Or, hell, mylar, which alone saves millions of lives by being used to line grain silos throughout the world and protect against spoilage.
What's the use in space exploration if we can't even live well on our own planet ?
In the video game arena, the Japanese are responsible for MOST of the innovation of the entire planet! (There are innovative American games, but they're definitely the exception rather than the rule.) There are whole categories of video games in Japan that don't even exist in the US (Princess Maker, Dating Sim, Super Robot Wars, etc).
Part of this may be due to the fact that their market is comparitively huge, and will support more niches, but still...
Sega's output for the Dreamcast alone had more new ideas than all of the PC games market put together for that year! I'm not saying that to put down Western programmers, but rather to give credit to the Japanese where and when it's due.
Firstly, as someone else already noted, video games. Some game programmers are household names within the industry, sucha as Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid) or Shigeru Miyamoto (Zelda, Mario).
I've seen a lot of Japanese-created software for the Palm Pilot too.
Or how about the TMPGEnc MPEG encoder written by Hiroyuki Hori? It's often called the best in its class.
Many corporations such as Unisys also have Japanese divisions which are run and staffed by Japanese.
I suppose this will get modded as a troll, and I'm no MS lover, but StarOffice(OpenOffice, whatever) pales in comparision to Office 2000.
Um, here on Planet Reality, Office 2000 has been rightly labelled as something to avoid. It's got lots of features, but it's just too buggy for professional use. I now have to go over my Word docs page by page in hardcopy to make sure that none of the cross-reference links have spontaneously failed on me (they do that now). Automatic numbering is broken. Version control is unusable (it causes bugs in automatic numbering of figures). Oh, and the Section Break bug from Word for Windows 2 is alive and well!
In my opinion, Word's usefulness peaked with Word 95, which had lots of useful features and was fairly stable, but has been going steadily downhill ever since. It makes my professional life miserable (I'm a tech writer).
Man o man I wish I could get a job at a Linux company so I could GET AWAY from Microsoft Office! Someday....
In his book The Ancient Engineers, L. Sprague DeCamp hypothesized that they used simple earthen ramps to right the stones, and that they transported them by dragging them through mud. In the ancient world, dirt was a LOT cheaper than timber, especially the kind of quality timber that could hold up Stonehenge blocks.
He thought they got the crosspieces in place by burying the uprights in a huge mound, then dragging the crosspieces into place on top and excavating the supports.
This kite thing is cool, but far-fetched, especially since the researcher has been using modern materials to build her kite. It also leaves you very dependant on the weather.
What are the hieroglyphs for "Keep it simple, stupid?"
Seems like he might have set himself up to be the target, if everyone was thinking "Quake-boy is dangerous. Get Quake-boy first, then worry about everyone else."
Not that I know anything about what was going on, mind you, I'm just reading into the previous post.
I'm waiting to see one in person so I can tell if I like the screen or not.
I also wish they had built in MP3. I'd have ordered one the day they came out if they'd done that. Maybe they'll come out with a CF MP3 card, or an SD one.
Once the pad of paper fills up, it sits at home and you can't access it. Plus, there is a lot of bulk after a while.
You can write for years and years and never fill up your Palm Pilot. I know; I have.
I used to have tons of those little notebooks that I jotted ideas down in. So I never had the one I needed when it came time to look something up. Now it's all in the Palm, and it all gets backed up regularly too.
My hunch is that they actually are keeping salaries down by not allowing school districts to evaluate teachers and introduce competition.
Not in my old school district. 5-10 years ago, the local paper did a major expose that revealed what the teachers in all the local schools were making (by average salary for each level of senoirity, not by person). God, that article should have won the Pulitzer.
It turned out that 5 years ago, the average salary for a teacher in my old school district was in the middle 50's. With the whole summer off, and way more vacation during the school year too.
I was stunned, I thought the average salary was in the 30's from the way the union carried on.
I'll never forget it.
Jon Acheson
Re:How about portable Ogg-Vorbis players?
on
MP3Pro Released
·
· Score: 2
Once PDAs with the processing speed to play back MP3/Ogg Vorbis files become widespread (Palm will be there next year, and the year after that it will be cheap; WinCE is there now, and in a year the current models will be cheap), there will be no reason to buy a dedicated MP3 widget, since the PDAs are at roughly the same price point and do more.
The exception might be the MP3/CD players, but for those the MP3Pro format really isn't a significant advantage (when you already get more than 12 hours of music on a disk, who cares?).
It says the airplane's net connection will be satellite-based (for obvious reasons), but the article says nothing about the makeup of the internal LAN. I'm betting they just provide Ethernet sockets, since it's way more standard than wireless.
There's no way in hell they'll loan out wireless cards. Firstly, they'll lose them to absent-mindedness if not actual criminal activity. Secondly, your stewardress is NOT going to help you install it. Remember that your average travelling businessperson is a sales droid and would not be able to install the drivers themselves. Thirdly, there is a major issue with the emissions of wireless cards possibly interfering with the plane, which the FAA is not about to overlook.
Think about it: which is more palatable to the user: an extra $10k powerplant in a $10K economy car, or an extra $10K in a vehicle that already costs $50K?
Especially since the fuel cell/electric motor is whisper-quiet, a big plus for the luxury market, and provides freedom from guilt, which is a big luxury in and of itself. Plus, Caddy really needs some way of distinguishing itself from the rest of GM.
They should also try the tech out in their big truck chassis, where the improved mileage would really pay off when those chassis are used to build cargo vans and Winnebagos. God, an extra $10k would be just a blip on a $100K+ Winnebago, and the mileage would be a huge selling point.
Can you imagine how many people would buy a Caddy Suburban that got 30 MPG?
If all you want is a fast quarter mile, electric cars can already do it: modern electrical engines have enormous amounts of torque, and you can simplify the powertrain by moving the motors out near the wheels, saving weight and making it even faster.
The problem is range, but hopefully fuel cells can solve that problem.
People are already making electric dragsters that are seriously fast:
I thought from your first post that you might have been in a print shop, where you were merely proofing other people's jobs that were sent to you electronically.
The types of jobs I see being threatened by working high-res e-paper are things like "we're the marketing staff of XYZ Corp, and we need light box transparancies made up for a convention at the very last minute, 'cause we're just not very organized." A printer nowadays makes thousands off of chumps like that, albiet at the cost of increased job pressure. With e-paper, the companies will be able to DIY at the last minute and actually save money.
The American Civil War featured the first instance of germ/biological warfare, as a ship full of fever victims' blankets was sailed into a harbor in the hopes of touching off an outbreak of the disease.
Can't remember which harbor or who did it to whom, though...
If your dream comes true, it will wreak havoc on the printing industry, because users will be able to DIY a lot more. There will still be a need for print, but there will certainly be less need, and some types of jobs will completely go away.
Of course, you could get into the digital paper support industry...
As long as you're not right on top of it, 80 dpi is certainly good enough to use.
You could probably put solar cells on the top of the frame and a pager network download mechanism inside and run it without any outside connection, especially if it only has to update every 10 minutes or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Carmack's team is building a VTVL rocket, but it's A) manned and B) intended to just do hops. It's intended to be a technology prover, but it's going to be more like a flying rocket chair than a spaceship.
Plus, his budget is at least an order of magnitude less than the Japanese budget.
Who says Americans can't do small and cheap? Go John Carmack!
Jon Acheson
No, it's not. Do the math: that three cents a page, which is generous, by the way, costs you $15 US for a 500 page book. Mass-producing the same book and shipping it to your local bookstore, it's going to cost you between $5 and $10. If the cost is four cents a page, it's $20 for the same book.
My point is, you're paying the SAME shipping fees for the materials, the only thing that changes is the point of assembly. And mass-production on dedicated high-speed presses is going to be much much cheaper than one-off production in the local book machine. There is wasteage in the distribution and sale of printed books, granted, and more middlemen, but that's the only thing that makes it even close. That $8 paperback they sell in the store only cost maybe a buck to print.
Plus, the quality of both paper and printing and binding are likely to be inferior to the mass-produced version.
Jon Acheson
300 million sheep are not necessarily smarter than one person.
Science lesson: the accurate definition of the greenhouse effect, which I thankfully learned in astronomy class, is as follows:
In other words, any time any planet has an atmosphere, of any composition, that atmosphere will tend to be more transparent to sunlight than to infrared. So, light passes through the atmosphere, hits the planet's surface and warms it. The atmosphere then tends to hold in the heat which is reradiated from the planet's surface. This is a Good Thing: it helps keep the Earth at a habitable temperature.
What's even scarier are the people who were TAUGHT the Al Gore version in their classes!
Jon Acheson
It says they use a hot-glue binding. That's not encouraging; they can be really cheap and nasty. What good is an expensive paperback book (and it will be at least 4 cents a page, more for color) that falls apart halfway through?
Now, if they had a quality paperback binding like you find on, say, Penguin paperbacks, that would be different.
Jon Acheson
All of this technology is old stuff that's off the shelf, and all of it is already at your neigborhood Kinko's. You can already bring in a CD and walk out with a full-color hardbound book.
The difference is that this is all in one unit (though Kinko's may have that by now too), and that the method of distibution and payment isn't in place at Kinko's. Of course, it isn't in place yet with this guy's invention, either.
The real sticking point, and what this shoddily-researched article fails to mention, is that your insta-book is going to cost you several times as much as a mass-produced volume. Printing out pages one at a time is nowhere near as cost-efficient as printing out thousands of copies at a time. How much is your book coing to cost at 3 cents a page?
Jon Acheson
Fact: the prospect of a nationalized American health care system fills most Americans with abiding horror. Two words: Veterans' Administration.
The benefits to medicine alone have made the space program a great investment. Ask the people who built the latest artificial heart if they would have been able to do it without the technology developed for the space program.
Or, look at the computer industry. Or the benefits of satellites, both for global communications and for learning more about the Earth. Or, hell, mylar, which alone saves millions of lives by being used to line grain silos throughout the world and protect against spoilage.
And, hey, mud huts are really underrated, too.
Jon Acheson
Check it out:
http://www.megazone.org/ANP/
Jon Acheson
In the video game arena, the Japanese are responsible for MOST of the innovation of the entire planet! (There are innovative American games, but they're definitely the exception rather than the rule.) There are whole categories of video games in Japan that don't even exist in the US (Princess Maker, Dating Sim, Super Robot Wars, etc).
Part of this may be due to the fact that their market is comparitively huge, and will support more niches, but still...
Sega's output for the Dreamcast alone had more new ideas than all of the PC games market put together for that year! I'm not saying that to put down Western programmers, but rather to give credit to the Japanese where and when it's due.
Jon Acheson
Firstly, as someone else already noted, video games. Some game programmers are household names within the industry, sucha as Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid) or Shigeru Miyamoto (Zelda, Mario).
I've seen a lot of Japanese-created software for the Palm Pilot too.
Or how about the TMPGEnc MPEG encoder written by Hiroyuki Hori? It's often called the best in its class.
Many corporations such as Unisys also have Japanese divisions which are run and staffed by Japanese.
In short, this isn't much of an article.
Jon Acheson
Um, here on Planet Reality, Office 2000 has been rightly labelled as something to avoid. It's got lots of features, but it's just too buggy for professional use. I now have to go over my Word docs page by page in hardcopy to make sure that none of the cross-reference links have spontaneously failed on me (they do that now). Automatic numbering is broken. Version control is unusable (it causes bugs in automatic numbering of figures). Oh, and the Section Break bug from Word for Windows 2 is alive and well!
In my opinion, Word's usefulness peaked with Word 95, which had lots of useful features and was fairly stable, but has been going steadily downhill ever since. It makes my professional life miserable (I'm a tech writer).
Man o man I wish I could get a job at a Linux company so I could GET AWAY from Microsoft Office! Someday....
Jon Acheson
In his book The Ancient Engineers, L. Sprague DeCamp hypothesized that they used simple earthen ramps to right the stones, and that they transported them by dragging them through mud. In the ancient world, dirt was a LOT cheaper than timber, especially the kind of quality timber that could hold up Stonehenge blocks.
He thought they got the crosspieces in place by burying the uprights in a huge mound, then dragging the crosspieces into place on top and excavating the supports.
This kite thing is cool, but far-fetched, especially since the researcher has been using modern materials to build her kite. It also leaves you very dependant on the weather.
What are the hieroglyphs for "Keep it simple, stupid?"
Jon Acheson
Seems like he might have set himself up to be the target, if everyone was thinking "Quake-boy is dangerous. Get Quake-boy first, then worry about everyone else."
Not that I know anything about what was going on, mind you, I'm just reading into the previous post.
Jon Acheson
I'm waiting to see one in person so I can tell if I like the screen or not.
I also wish they had built in MP3. I'd have ordered one the day they came out if they'd done that. Maybe they'll come out with a CF MP3 card, or an SD one.
Jon Acheson
Once the pad of paper fills up, it sits at home and you can't access it. Plus, there is a lot of bulk after a while.
You can write for years and years and never fill up your Palm Pilot. I know; I have.
I used to have tons of those little notebooks that I jotted ideas down in. So I never had the one I needed when it came time to look something up. Now it's all in the Palm, and it all gets backed up regularly too.
I'll never go back!
Jon
Not in my old school district. 5-10 years ago, the local paper did a major expose that revealed what the teachers in all the local schools were making (by average salary for each level of senoirity, not by person). God, that article should have won the Pulitzer.
It turned out that 5 years ago, the average salary for a teacher in my old school district was in the middle 50's. With the whole summer off, and way more vacation during the school year too.
I was stunned, I thought the average salary was in the 30's from the way the union carried on.
I'll never forget it.
Jon Acheson
Once PDAs with the processing speed to play back MP3/Ogg Vorbis files become widespread (Palm will be there next year, and the year after that it will be cheap; WinCE is there now, and in a year the current models will be cheap), there will be no reason to buy a dedicated MP3 widget, since the PDAs are at roughly the same price point and do more.
The exception might be the MP3/CD players, but for those the MP3Pro format really isn't a significant advantage (when you already get more than 12 hours of music on a disk, who cares?).
Jon Acheson
Only the Slashdot commentary mentions wireless.
It says the airplane's net connection will be satellite-based (for obvious reasons), but the article says nothing about the makeup of the internal LAN. I'm betting they just provide Ethernet sockets, since it's way more standard than wireless.
There's no way in hell they'll loan out wireless cards. Firstly, they'll lose them to absent-mindedness if not actual criminal activity. Secondly, your stewardress is NOT going to help you install it. Remember that your average travelling businessperson is a sales droid and would not be able to install the drivers themselves. Thirdly, there is a major issue with the emissions of wireless cards possibly interfering with the plane, which the FAA is not about to overlook.
Jon Acheson
Think about it: which is more palatable to the user: an extra $10k powerplant in a $10K economy car, or an extra $10K in a vehicle that already costs $50K?
Especially since the fuel cell/electric motor is whisper-quiet, a big plus for the luxury market, and provides freedom from guilt, which is a big luxury in and of itself. Plus, Caddy really needs some way of distinguishing itself from the rest of GM.
They should also try the tech out in their big truck chassis, where the improved mileage would really pay off when those chassis are used to build cargo vans and Winnebagos. God, an extra $10k would be just a blip on a $100K+ Winnebago, and the mileage would be a huge selling point.
Can you imagine how many people would buy a Caddy Suburban that got 30 MPG?
Jon Acheson
If all you want is a fast quarter mile, electric cars can already do it: modern electrical engines have enormous amounts of torque, and you can simplify the powertrain by moving the motors out near the wheels, saving weight and making it even faster.
1 2, 00.html
The problem is range, but hopefully fuel cells can solve that problem.
People are already making electric dragsters that are seriously fast:
http://www.wired.com/news/topstories/0,1287,119
Jon Acheson
I thought from your first post that you might have been in a print shop, where you were merely proofing other people's jobs that were sent to you electronically.
The types of jobs I see being threatened by working high-res e-paper are things like "we're the marketing staff of XYZ Corp, and we need light box transparancies made up for a convention at the very last minute, 'cause we're just not very organized." A printer nowadays makes thousands off of chumps like that, albiet at the cost of increased job pressure. With e-paper, the companies will be able to DIY at the last minute and actually save money.
Jon Acheson
The American Civil War featured the first instance of germ/biological warfare, as a ship full of fever victims' blankets was sailed into a harbor in the hopes of touching off an outbreak of the disease.
Can't remember which harbor or who did it to whom, though...
Jon Acheson
But will the client still need you?
If your dream comes true, it will wreak havoc on the printing industry, because users will be able to DIY a lot more. There will still be a need for print, but there will certainly be less need, and some types of jobs will completely go away.
Of course, you could get into the digital paper support industry...
As long as you're not right on top of it, 80 dpi is certainly good enough to use.
You could probably put solar cells on the top of the frame and a pager network download mechanism inside and run it without any outside connection, especially if it only has to update every 10 minutes or so.
Jon Acheson
Which is thick for paper, but pretty thin compared to anything else.
Jon Acheson
I doubt shaking it would erase the image: as long as the correct electrode is still charged, it should attract the bead back to its proper location.
I wonder how long it holds the charge for, though?
Crumpling the paper would probably ruin it along the creases. And, it would be a whole lot more expensive than a sheet of paper, too.
Jon Acheson