They consistently make high quality tech products. Blu-ray (despite being DRM crippled) will probably be the next CD. I sure hope it is.
I have no dog in the disk format wars but can Blu-ray's success really be chalked up to engineering? There are stories aplenty about how Sony paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the movie studios to get them to switch. This seems more like marketing (or something more nefarious) than technical excellence and doesn't support your argument very well.
Of course not. The important thing is that they weren't pushing a crappy format that was insufficient for our movie viewing needs. Toshiba, on the other hand, would have us adopt a format that can't hold Return of the King in 1080p on one disk.
That's Sony for you: All marketing, no brains. I wouldn't say they have no brains. They consistently make high quality tech products. Blu-ray (despite being DRM crippled) will probably be the next CD. I sure hope it is. They chose to throw their engineering might behind Plasma TVs because, while they cost more, they produce a better picture (too bad the market preferred cheaper LCDs). They produced the first handheld 1080p camcorder, and it's actually high quality. Now anybody can make their own home-pro-snowboarding video. Their Vaio laptops are known, industry wide, for having, hands-down, the best displays-- AKA "X-Bright". They managed to create a great, cheap to produce for, entertainment system (PS1) and managed to duplicate that success with the PS2-- this thing has so many games I'm probably going to go buy one, even though PS3 has been out for [a while]. Now that Blu-Ray has won, I bet a lot of people will be picking up PS3s instead of other players when they get around to purchasing one.
All I'm saying is I see Sony as a superb tech producer with simply misguided management.
Umm.. ooh I know! because then we'll have a heavily-guarded supply of Plutonium? As well as some mountain full of waste that will be radioactive for 10k years.
Who's going to pay for guarding that, making sure it stays stable after earthquakes and floods, etc., for 10000 years? Can I remind you that agriculture was invented about 10000 years ago; no need to saddle up the next 400 generations of our descendants with the environmental trouble caused in the 21st-22nd century. To put it in perspective, maybe in a few hundred years the CO2 levels and global temperature will be going down to current levels already, if we start reducing now. Then those people will wonder why they have to keep guarding that nuclear waste for the next 9500 years...
Weapons grade plutonium =/= reactor grade plutonium. By almost 3 orders of magnitude.
Maybe "whether this has ever been discussed before on Slashdot" isn't what most of us want to see the conversation devolve into? Honestly I think it needs to every single time it happens.
Can you imagine if NYT ran the exact same story twice, but a week apart? These sort of things are part of why people say "oh, you read it on/." and then dismiss your opinion.
Really? And how many guns does the IOC have? 'Cause the Chinese government has *lots*. They would never do this. They've been fighting tooth and nail to get an Olympics session; in hopes that by having one they can prove to the world they've entered the 21st century, are not North Korea, etc. This is a PR and China-Marketing event. Were they to do what you are insinuating, be most assured it would eventually get out, and in light of China feeling not-so-hunky-dory about their investment in the Dollar, and it's weakening value, it would be eaten up by the media as a means of shutting them up: "Who are you, that you threaten us about our dollar" etc. etc.
You know if they would just worry about doing their job we'd all be perfectly happy and they could continue electing and getting in office and nobody would care. Why must they make it so difficult on themselves?
Well, the first thing you'll find when you get kids of your own is that what worked for you doesn't work for everybody.
I know for sure I would have turned out a lot worse if I didn't have consequences-- because I took a very left minded approach: "This is fun, and I will do it unless for some reason it is not fun". The discipline helped with the not fun part in a way that the normal action/reaction consequences of life didn't at the time.
I don't know what I would do without/. Where else in the world would we have this level of sophisticated philosophical discussion? We simply wouldn't. Kudos to/. and the users that never cease to amaze me with their larger-than-the-box-thinking.
Everyone seems to be forgetting about space elevators. Sure, we might not be able to build a carbon nanotube elevator on earth that would not buckle under it's own weight, but seeing as the gravity on Titan is only 1/10th that of earths, we could build a space elevator 10x higher than the point of failure for carbon nanotubes on Earth. Shoot, we could build a steel structure 20 miles at that rate. Carbon nanotubes? 100? 1000? I don't know the current limit to building them here on Earth. At any rate, I'm certain it would be enough to where the anchor is in orbit.
So we have space elevator and the transportation into orbit becomes effectively free. Using nuclear powered transportation (whatever that rocket is that shoots ionized Xenon particles out the back at near-light-speed for propulsion; please forgive my terminology here), the transportation back takes a lot of time; but not a lot of energy.
Then we just need something to lower the fuel back to Earth. Maybe we don't have a space elevator, perhaps just a tether anchored to an asteroid we've directed into orbit will let us lower the fuel into the atmosphere far enough that a parachute becomes feasible.
As big of a problem this can be for some people; when I'm done with university and looking for a house, I'll simply be sure it's in a neighborhood where I can get FIOS, as well as AT&T and Comcast/whatever. Then I'll start with Comcast, switch to AT&T when they give me problem, and then go to FIOS. Or maybe just start with FIOS and forget about CC once and for all.
You guys aren't satisfactory geeks -- I think you've lost your geek roots. There's nothing IT-bound to geekdom. Instead, it's the simple notion of "screw it, I'll just figure it out myself". The entire computer geek world came about from having to learn something that no one else knows.
How can you advise someone capable of learning not to do so? No one's asking to become a professional marketting expert in ten days. The potser is asking to learn over a long period, and to start with something small.
That's certainly doable for someone clearly able to learn.
I seem to recal a book review on slashdot some year or six ago that proposed a web design book for programmers. It described basic colour and layout theory and such. I haven't the foggiest as to when or what, but certainly they do exist.
As a web developer myself -- I do handle both the programming and the design work. I shy away from the serious design work if only because it isn't worth my programming time, but the simple design work is easy and fun. Just sit there with the blank canvas and be patient. Many many iterations is the key. Just talk it out. Think about your design goals, break them down, try them out. It's really just pseudo-code and a paint-brush. The thing that's different here that makes me say "find a professional designer to do it" is that art is not something that you can easily learn. Perhaps I have not tried enough, but everything about how I learn, read, work, enginnering, is all left brained. There is zero right brain work going on.
If engaging your right brain (and getting nice results) were as easy as reading a book and trying your hand at some design, I think we'd have a lot more artists out there.
I just read on an rss feed that Steam just broke the 15 million users barrier, and I believe Blizzard is looking for a peice of that cake. And if Blizzard is looking to widen their audience with regards to their other products, they are going to need market penetration.
Hm...interesting...they should make an online version of Warcraft... give the game to people for free or very cheap for a month, and just charge them for online play...yeah, Steam is definitely on to something here....
are you talking about traveling outside the country? I've traveled various places inside the US and they've never asked me to log into my laptop. I once got asked to turn on my cell phone. Once with my laptop they dragged some white cloth material over it, in the cracks, etc; which presumably was for detecting chemicals that shouldn't be there or something. I've never been asked to show them anything.
However, planning to go to Europe this summer, maybe I should look into this Truecrypt after all.
Truecrypt program on your USB key for the partition on your harddrive?
Put it inside a zip file inside of my "Softwares" directory and name it something like "aol instant messenger installer.zip"? Not likely to stand out among the other 300 software installs I've saved up over the years.
Eh, I hear if you turn off UAC or something it stops bugging you left and right just because you want to turn NumLock on.
By the time XP no longer receives security updates (2014, or over 6 years from now) I'll probably move on over to Vista, turn off UAC because I don't like repeating myself, and turn off the minimize/close/maximize Aero animations (they make Vista feel sluggish).
I imagine that will be suitable for another 5 years, at which time we can take a look at Windows 7 or holding out for the next thing after Windows 7.
I'll probably upgrade to something just so I feel the need to upgrade my computer again, because that is fun, and my last computer already ran XP perfectly.
What about a rope supported from the top. Yes the figure that referenced as to how high we needed the carbon nanotubes to be able to support themselves structure wise was the number that was "several orders of magnitude" (~3 I seem to recall) higher than what the what the mathematically perfect nanotube structure could reach. That height that we needed the nanotubes to be able to reach structure wise was just as you say-- only far enough so that the rest of the tether could act as a counterbalance to the part of the tether closer to earth.
All in all their estimate of likelyhood was "50-100 years in the future" and to not get too excited about it given the technical hurdles to overcome (not just getting it high enough, but dealing with the vibrations such a long cable would experience, for example; or if we wanted to anchor it to an asteroid we have to get ourselves an asteroid first).
Just to get some perspective on this, 18mm is about a third of the length of good quality wool fibres.
That puts it in the area of useable length for macro-sized application.
IIRC when Popular Mechanics discussed these nanotubes for building our space elevator, one of the technical hurdles they mentioned was needing nanotubes ~18" in length for the structure to be sound.
Obviously we've got a long ways to go then.
The other thing they mentioned was that given a mathematically perfect carbon nanotube structure, the highest building we could build before it would collapse on itself is something like 90 miles; and we need
Of course both of these are hearsay so take them with a grain of salt, but the important thing I remember is that whatever the max height of a carbon nanotube structure that we could build is, the height required for a space elevator/cable is several orders of magnitude greater.
Slashdot Mirror
They consistently make high quality tech products. Blu-ray (despite being DRM crippled) will probably be the next CD. I sure hope it is.
I have no dog in the disk format wars but can Blu-ray's success really be chalked up to engineering? There are stories aplenty about how Sony paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the movie studios to get them to switch. This seems more like marketing (or something more nefarious) than technical excellence and doesn't support your argument very well.
Of course not. The important thing is that they weren't pushing a crappy format that was insufficient for our movie viewing needs. Toshiba, on the other hand, would have us adopt a format that can't hold Return of the King in 1080p on one disk.All I'm saying is I see Sony as a superb tech producer with simply misguided management.
"(Score:-1, Insightful)"
heh.
Ever heard of Kalkar?
Weapons grade plutonium =/= reactor grade plutonium. By almost 3 orders of magnitude.Who's going to pay for guarding that, making sure it stays stable after earthquakes and floods, etc., for 10000 years? Can I remind you that agriculture was invented about 10000 years ago; no need to saddle up the next 400 generations of our descendants with the environmental trouble caused in the 21st-22nd century. To put it in perspective, maybe in a few hundred years the CO2 levels and global temperature will be going down to current levels already, if we start reducing now. Then those people will wonder why they have to keep guarding that nuclear waste for the next 9500 years...
Um, how about counterstrike?
Can you imagine if NYT ran the exact same story twice, but a week apart? These sort of things are part of why people say "oh, you read it on
For some reason "Triple Core" sounds cooler than "Quad Core".
You know if they would just worry about doing their job we'd all be perfectly happy and they could continue electing and getting in office and nobody would care. Why must they make it so difficult on themselves?
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY can hear a 50khz tone.
Well, the first thing you'll find when you get kids of your own is that what worked for you doesn't work for everybody.
I know for sure I would have turned out a lot worse if I didn't have consequences-- because I took a very left minded approach: "This is fun, and I will do it unless for some reason it is not fun". The discipline helped with the not fun part in a way that the normal action/reaction consequences of life didn't at the time.
I don't know what I would do without /. Where else in the world would we have this level of sophisticated philosophical discussion? We simply wouldn't. Kudos to /. and the users that never cease to amaze me with their larger-than-the-box-thinking.
So what? You're missing the point. The energy we can use to power an elevator into orbit comes from a non-mobile source-- nuclear power.
We use that nuclear power to obtain energy that we CAN take with us in a mobile fashion-- gas.
Everyone seems to be forgetting about space elevators. Sure, we might not be able to build a carbon nanotube elevator on earth that would not buckle under it's own weight, but seeing as the gravity on Titan is only 1/10th that of earths, we could build a space elevator 10x higher than the point of failure for carbon nanotubes on Earth. Shoot, we could build a steel structure 20 miles at that rate. Carbon nanotubes? 100? 1000? I don't know the current limit to building them here on Earth. At any rate, I'm certain it would be enough to where the anchor is in orbit.
So we have space elevator and the transportation into orbit becomes effectively free.
Using nuclear powered transportation (whatever that rocket is that shoots ionized Xenon particles out the back at near-light-speed for propulsion; please forgive my terminology here), the transportation back takes a lot of time; but not a lot of energy.
Then we just need something to lower the fuel back to Earth. Maybe we don't have a space elevator, perhaps just a tether anchored to an asteroid we've directed into orbit will let us lower the fuel into the atmosphere far enough that a parachute becomes feasible.
I never liked naysayers.
As big of a problem this can be for some people; when I'm done with university and looking for a house, I'll simply be sure it's in a neighborhood where I can get FIOS, as well as AT&T and Comcast/whatever. Then I'll start with Comcast, switch to AT&T when they give me problem, and then go to FIOS. Or maybe just start with FIOS and forget about CC once and for all.
How can you advise someone capable of learning not to do so? No one's asking to become a professional marketting expert in ten days. The potser is asking to learn over a long period, and to start with something small.
That's certainly doable for someone clearly able to learn.
I seem to recal a book review on slashdot some year or six ago that proposed a web design book for programmers. It described basic colour and layout theory and such. I haven't the foggiest as to when or what, but certainly they do exist.
As a web developer myself -- I do handle both the programming and the design work. I shy away from the serious design work if only because it isn't worth my programming time, but the simple design work is easy and fun. Just sit there with the blank canvas and be patient. Many many iterations is the key. Just talk it out. Think about your design goals, break them down, try them out. It's really just pseudo-code and a paint-brush. The thing that's different here that makes me say "find a professional designer to do it" is that art is not something that you can easily learn. Perhaps I have not tried enough, but everything about how I learn, read, work, enginnering, is all left brained. There is zero right brain work going on.
If engaging your right brain (and getting nice results) were as easy as reading a book and trying your hand at some design, I think we'd have a lot more artists out there.
I just read on an rss feed that Steam just broke the 15 million users barrier, and I believe Blizzard is looking for a peice of that cake. And if Blizzard is looking to widen their audience with regards to their other products, they are going to need market penetration.
Hm...interesting...they should make an online version of Warcraft... give the game to people for free or very cheap for a month, and just charge them for online play...yeah, Steam is definitely on to something here....My laptop at work a year ago had a driver in Add/Remove Programs called "TPM something or the other".
Yeah.
They've preemptively cracked mine already thanks to the stuff they put on the radio. Can't get away from it either, cause EVERYBODY listens to it.
By the way, it really bothers me that some people feel uncomfortable with the radio off; as if they're afraid of thinking.
I don't get it;
are you talking about traveling outside the country? I've traveled various places inside the US and they've never asked me to log into my laptop. I once got asked to turn on my cell phone. Once with my laptop they dragged some white cloth material over it, in the cracks, etc; which presumably was for detecting chemicals that shouldn't be there or something. I've never been asked to show them anything.
However, planning to go to Europe this summer, maybe I should look into this Truecrypt after all.
Truecrypt program on your USB key for the partition on your harddrive?
Put it inside a zip file inside of my "Softwares" directory and name it something like "aol instant messenger installer.zip"? Not likely to stand out among the other 300 software installs I've saved up over the years.
Me too; although I think it's part of growing up not necessarily games getting less good.
I still play FPS's though for the simple adrenaline rush.
Eh, I hear if you turn off UAC or something it stops bugging you left and right just because you want to turn NumLock on.
By the time XP no longer receives security updates (2014, or over 6 years from now) I'll probably move on over to Vista, turn off UAC because I don't like repeating myself, and turn off the minimize/close/maximize Aero animations (they make Vista feel sluggish).
I imagine that will be suitable for another 5 years, at which time we can take a look at Windows 7 or holding out for the next thing after Windows 7.
I'll probably upgrade to something just so I feel the need to upgrade my computer again, because that is fun, and my last computer already ran XP perfectly.
All in all their estimate of likelyhood was "50-100 years in the future" and to not get too excited about it given the technical hurdles to overcome (not just getting it high enough, but dealing with the vibrations such a long cable would experience, for example; or if we wanted to anchor it to an asteroid we have to get ourselves an asteroid first).
IIRC when Popular Mechanics discussed these nanotubes for building our space elevator, one of the technical hurdles they mentioned was needing nanotubes ~18" in length for the structure to be sound.That puts it in the area of useable length for macro-sized application.
Obviously we've got a long ways to go then.
The other thing they mentioned was that given a mathematically perfect carbon nanotube structure, the highest building we could build before it would collapse on itself is something like 90 miles; and we need
Of course both of these are hearsay so take them with a grain of salt, but the important thing I remember is that whatever the max height of a carbon nanotube structure that we could build is, the height required for a space elevator/cable is several orders of magnitude greater.
So why were we funding this stuff again?