I'm sure all of you that complain about this Intel system using 400W when an AMD system would use perhaps 200W are also energy conscious in other ways, right?
You turn on power saving nodes (Intel's Speedstep, AMD's Cool n Quiet)? You use 55W fluorescent torchiere lamps instead of 300W halogen ones, right?
As a former user of CP/M, CP/M-86, even the UCSD p-system that came out for the PC, I can say: CP/M was a drop in the bucket.
Yeah, a few people brought up databases on it. dBase did start out on it, and CP/M was starting to perhaps make a name for itself, but MS-DOS quickly overtook it, and (later) IBM PCs wiped it right off the map.
The Apple ][ had a much bigger impact on computing in business than CP/M did. Honestly, I think you could say Apple did more actual work to make the microcomputer revolution happen than IBM did. Apple took a chance and positioned computers for business before anyone thought it could happen. IBM did do a good job on their PC (relatively), but largely it took off because "no one every got fired for buying IBM". They were smart to jump in, but they didn't really start the revolution.
Things might have been different if hard drives were affordably available (or even close) and easy to attach back when CP/M was making its way. But they weren't, and by the time they were big in the market (enabling a lot more databasing) the MS-DOS had solidly beat out CP/M and CP/M-86 and PCs and PC clones had already almost wiped non-PC-based MS-DOS machines too.
The video out is 640x480, but only photos can use the full res.
Videos can be up to 480x480 if they are MPEG-4 (although some other combinations work too, like 640x336), and are output at the resolution they are encoded at, not just at 320x240.
Also, it's not wider. It just plain isn't. It's easy to verify, it's ridiculous that someone would do a review and get that wrong.
GNU has done very little for application developers. No GNU platform is a viable platform for shipping consumer-level applications on, yet...
When I say developers, I don't mean people who toil away. I mean people who make a business of it.
I do agree Windows is not pleasant to develop for. But the money makes it worth it. When you're a businessman, not a hobbyist, it's the results that matter most. Windows created a platform that has lined many developers pockets with money.
And it doesn't matter where half the money of that low-cost systems goes to. That system would never have reached $500 with just Apple making GUI systems. Apple does not have an in-built tendency to reduce costs to make something available to wider audiences. It took the competition of Windows to make that happen.
It's great they donated something they thought was significant. But unless they expect that item to generate large cash amounts for the museum, they still should pony up dough, IMHO.
This is easy for me to say, as I've given the museum very little money myself.
That the reason is because he stifled development more than contributing to it?
Is it on the plaque in small print? Or did you just make it up?
I'm not quite so sure lately, but I think DOS and Windows 95 were incredibly important to innovation. Anyone who watched the PC platform when Windows 95 came out knows better than to say that MS stifled development. By creating a platform for developers, they allowed the lowly PC platform to catch up greatly to the Mac in usability and bring capabilities to buyers of low-cost hardware that might never have come to them otherwise.
And besides, MS-DOS supported 768K of RAM on other machines besides PCs (like the Victor 9000). It wasn't Microsoft or MS-DOS (or PC-DOS) that limited people to 640K RAM, it was IBM and their (project Chess) hardware design.
(Actually, some searching on the internet says the Victor 9000 could do up to 896KB of RAM. No one I used had that much. Perhaps that much RAM cost more than the onwers of the machines I used could afford?)
Although not quite innocuous, I fail to get overexcited about people moving in.
When people from Northern California (where I live now) bitch about people moving in from elsewhere, I don't exactly sympathize with them. So I don't automatically sympathize here.
Should I go and bury I-80 at Donner Lake because it just makes it easier for people to come over the (formerly protective) Sierra Nevada mountains and settle here?
Or should I go and pry out the "golden spike" in Promentory Point, Utah, because rails made it easy 100 years ago?
Of course China is investing in infrastructure to move people. We do it too.
Now, that being said, I'm not in favor of ethnic cleansing or killing of any sort. But just people settling? Well, there's a lot of people on this planet now. Everyone has to make a little room for closer neighbors.
They're not automatically the same. In practice there is a link though, since many people will no longer continue to register with the unemployment office when there is no cash in it for them. If they do so (perhaps to avail themselves of job search tools there), they are counted.
But this is a slippery slope here. For example, when you ask the "real level of unemployment", I could say something like 40-50%.
Why? There are plenty of employable people who aren't employed. Like stay at home moms, teens who don't want jobs, college students who don't want jobs and just flat out rich people who don't want jobs either.
This isn't to say that the US numbers haven't been rigged to reduce the magnitude. It has been done at least twice in my lifetime, that I know of. For example, Reagan get the formula changed to count military as employed (instead of uncounted). Also, seasonally unemployed people (teachers, migrant farm workers) are not counted either.
Anyway, in summary, saying simply "what are the real numbers?" kind of sells the question short, implying that the current answer is specious and that there is a simple way to come to an accurate result.
I feel our US numbers are accurate and can be used on their own as a good measure of employment rates. So, to me, they are the "real numbers".
I can say that the vast majority of content out there is 4:3, not 16:9.
There are perhaps 20 HDTV channels, and a few shows that are letterboxed. Only primetime shows, Leno and sports are perhaps in HDTV, all other programs (including all reality shows in primetime and 7:00-8:00 shows) are in 4:3. Also there are hundreds of SDTV channels.
1.85:1 and 16:9 content don't look bad on the new iPod screen (I've seen them), 2.35:1 is pretty brutal.
So, you may thing TV is going to widescreen, but it will be a very long time before the majority of content is in widescreen. Cable channels show mostly reruns and cheap content, and neither of those are HDTV.
Leaving off the Swiss turbocharger thing (Americans made them practical).
Jets just flat out don't come from turbochargers.
Jets use fan blades, turbochargers do not. Turbochargers use impellers and are only compressors. Jets have different compression sections, burners (flame fronts) and actually make thrust.
It's like saying cars came from trains because both have round wheels. It just doesn't work.
I don't see how England invented TV. Nipkow (German) invented mechanical TV, and Farnsworth (American) invented electronic TV (far more important to getting us to where we are now).
The grandparent did miss that England invented RADAR. A great invention.
Note to other posters, Alexander Graham Bell was not Canadian. He resided there fora while, but never changed nationality, he was a Scot up intil he became American. He was a Scot (living in Boston?) when he invented the telephone.
Like you said, it's if you want it now. You can't get it on DVD until the end of the season. I don't think it's concidence that the two big shows offered are pretty serial, meaning what happens each week matters next week, as opposed to episodic. That means there is a big value to finding out what happened on a show if you missed it, before viewing the next one.
And as someone else mentioned below, ABC broadcasts in 720p, which is 1280x720p 60fps non-interlaced. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if it was only 30fps or even 24fps, since most HD content is created for 1080i (and thus converted), and a lot even comes from film.
Additional note, the picture quality on Lost, although better than DVD, isn't particularly good. Law and Order looks better, CSI looks far better. I don't know how Desparate Housewives looks.
Getting to 60 miles isn't easy. That's for sure. Getting higher is tougher still, because even without drag you still need to spend a lot of energy to fight gravity to go higher.
But all of that is NOTHING next to getting the speed you need to orbit.
Look at SpaceShipOne. It got to 62 miles. But it had approximately 0 horizontal velocity when it got there. In order to orbit, it needs well over 20,000 miles per hour horizontal velocity to orbit.
And since you did all the work at the start (you fired from a gun, right?) that means you have to be doing much much more when you leave the muzzle of the gun, so that by the time you get to 62 miles, you are still doing 20,000 miles per hour.
That means you have to impart a ton of speed to the "bullet". Of course, the faster the bullet goes, the more air resistance there is, so you have you go even faster.
So anyway, you can see how "gun to orbit" is many many times harder then just "gun to orbital altitude".
I'm not one of the ones who said that GM shouldn't have used inductive charging, BTW.
But either way, just because you lose some power in a wall wart doesn't mean you should go losing more somewhere else. Losses are cumulative, not substitutive. This device has a power supply of its own.
Most of my personal wall warts are efficient, BTW. But I actually buy devices based upon power consumption (my power bill is half what my friends' are) and measure it with a Kill-A-Watt. Most people don't do this, and yeah, they probably have a lot of space heaters down there.
For a mouse, I get it, it's exactly the same as the Wacom batteryless pen tables. EXACTLY. It's not new.
But for other stuff, this only adds complication. I mean, you might as well just say all devices should have the same charging connector so you don't have to have multiple wall warts. That would work as well as this.
And no better.
There's still problems with voltages/power draws and trying to charge multiple devices at once.
I can think of 5 other steps which are a lot better than this one, and each is closer to reachable than this.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure all of you that complain about this Intel system using 400W when an AMD system would use perhaps 200W are also energy conscious in other ways, right?
i ere-SMUD.html
You turn on power saving nodes (Intel's Speedstep, AMD's Cool n Quiet)?
You use 55W fluorescent torchiere lamps instead of 300W halogen ones, right?
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/torch
You could easily save as much power on lighting in your house as you do on computing costs.
As a former user of CP/M, CP/M-86, even the UCSD p-system that came out for the PC, I can say: CP/M was a drop in the bucket.
Yeah, a few people brought up databases on it. dBase did start out on it, and CP/M was starting to perhaps make a name for itself, but MS-DOS quickly overtook it, and (later) IBM PCs wiped it right off the map.
The Apple ][ had a much bigger impact on computing in business than CP/M did. Honestly, I think you could say Apple did more actual work to make the microcomputer revolution happen than IBM did. Apple took a chance and positioned computers for business before anyone thought it could happen. IBM did do a good job on their PC (relatively), but largely it took off because "no one every got fired for buying IBM". They were smart to jump in, but they didn't really start the revolution.
Things might have been different if hard drives were affordably available (or even close) and easy to attach back when CP/M was making its way. But they weren't, and by the time they were big in the market (enabling a lot more databasing) the MS-DOS had solidly beat out CP/M and CP/M-86 and PCs and PC clones had already almost wiped non-PC-based MS-DOS machines too.
TAANSTAFL.
Yes, I'm sure those tailings weren't pretty. But check out a coal mining town. Some towns are surrounded by tailings from years of mining.
You need to get a better HDTV.
There is no good reason that video should look worse on an HDTV than on an SDTV.
SDTV looks quite good (well, as good as SD gets) on my 1368x768 HDTV.
Early HDTVs did a terrible job rendering SD signals, but that was just becuase they sucked, not because it can't be done well.
608x352
and
640x336
at MPEG-4 simple profile (QT compatible).
Both work great both on the LCD and on the video out, and are not downsampled to 320x240 for the video out.
The video out is 640x480, but only photos can use the full res.
Videos can be up to 480x480 if they are MPEG-4 (although some other combinations work too, like 640x336), and are output at the resolution they are encoded at, not just at 320x240.
Also, it's not wider. It just plain isn't. It's easy to verify, it's ridiculous that someone would do a review and get that wrong.
Microsoft hating never gets modded off-topic. Mark it +5 Insightful.
the last one, and this one too.
I've been a Mac person (to the core) since 1987.
And I didn't shoot myself after typing it.
GNU has done very little for application developers. No GNU platform is a viable platform for shipping consumer-level applications on, yet...
When I say developers, I don't mean people who toil away. I mean people who make a business of it.
I do agree Windows is not pleasant to develop for. But the money makes it worth it. When you're a businessman, not a hobbyist, it's the results that matter most. Windows created a platform that has lined many developers pockets with money.
And it doesn't matter where half the money of that low-cost systems goes to. That system would never have reached $500 with just Apple making GUI systems. Apple does not have an in-built tendency to reduce costs to make something available to wider audiences. It took the competition of Windows to make that happen.
Queue would be to place it in line. If you queued it, it might never happen.
He's referring to "cue", which is when you start something (a process?) on a signal.
Since we saw the jokes, I have to assume they were "cued", and not just "queued".
It's great they donated something they thought was significant. But unless they expect that item to generate large cash amounts for the museum, they still should pony up dough, IMHO.
This is easy for me to say, as I've given the museum very little money myself.
That the reason is because he stifled development more than contributing to it?
Is it on the plaque in small print? Or did you just make it up?
I'm not quite so sure lately, but I think DOS and Windows 95 were incredibly important to innovation. Anyone who watched the PC platform when Windows 95 came out knows better than to say that MS stifled development. By creating a platform for developers, they allowed the lowly PC platform to catch up greatly to the Mac in usability and bring capabilities to buyers of low-cost hardware that might never have come to them otherwise.
Would they display a collection of JPEG artifacts?
And besides, MS-DOS supported 768K of RAM on other machines besides PCs (like the Victor 9000). It wasn't Microsoft or MS-DOS (or PC-DOS) that limited people to 640K RAM, it was IBM and their (project Chess) hardware design.
(Actually, some searching on the internet says the Victor 9000 could do up to 896KB of RAM. No one I used had that much. Perhaps that much RAM cost more than the onwers of the machines I used could afford?)
I do agree with your sentiment though.
The tax break is on the money you donate.
So, he gives $15M, and saves the taxes on that $15M. Those taxes could be 40% or so. So he saves $6M in taxes.
But he's still out at least $9M no matter how you slice it.
I'm glad he donated some money. And yeah, I'm sure some MS stuff will show up there, but that's okay.
Now perhaps Google should to pony up. They're only like 200 yards away from the museum.
It'd be great if Steve Jobs would too.
I've been to the museum. Nice place. Really empty. Let's hope for the best.
Although not quite innocuous, I fail to get overexcited about people moving in.
When people from Northern California (where I live now) bitch about people moving in from elsewhere, I don't exactly sympathize with them. So I don't automatically sympathize here.
Should I go and bury I-80 at Donner Lake because it just makes it easier for people to come over the (formerly protective) Sierra Nevada mountains and settle here?
Or should I go and pry out the "golden spike" in Promentory Point, Utah, because rails made it easy 100 years ago?
Of course China is investing in infrastructure to move people. We do it too.
Now, that being said, I'm not in favor of ethnic cleansing or killing of any sort. But just people settling? Well, there's a lot of people on this planet now. Everyone has to make a little room for closer neighbors.
AVC is H.264, not H.263.
I think you overstate the level of compression possible without losing quality though.
I don't believe PSP videos are encoded at 720x480. But time will tell, I suppose.
Not "collecting unemployment".
They're not automatically the same. In practice there is a link though, since many people will no longer continue to register with the unemployment office when there is no cash in it for them. If they do so (perhaps to avail themselves of job search tools there), they are counted.
But this is a slippery slope here. For example, when you ask the "real level of unemployment", I could say something like 40-50%.
Why? There are plenty of employable people who aren't employed. Like stay at home moms, teens who don't want jobs, college students who don't want jobs and just flat out rich people who don't want jobs either.
This isn't to say that the US numbers haven't been rigged to reduce the magnitude. It has been done at least twice in my lifetime, that I know of. For example, Reagan get the formula changed to count military as employed (instead of uncounted). Also, seasonally unemployed people (teachers, migrant farm workers) are not counted either.
Anyway, in summary, saying simply "what are the real numbers?" kind of sells the question short, implying that the current answer is specious and that there is a simple way to come to an accurate result.
I feel our US numbers are accurate and can be used on their own as a good measure of employment rates. So, to me, they are the "real numbers".
I can say that the vast majority of content out there is 4:3, not 16:9.
There are perhaps 20 HDTV channels, and a few shows that are letterboxed. Only primetime shows, Leno and sports are perhaps in HDTV, all other programs (including all reality shows in primetime and 7:00-8:00 shows) are in 4:3. Also there are hundreds of SDTV channels.
1.85:1 and 16:9 content don't look bad on the new iPod screen (I've seen them), 2.35:1 is pretty brutal.
So, you may thing TV is going to widescreen, but it will be a very long time before the majority of content is in widescreen. Cable channels show mostly reruns and cheap content, and neither of those are HDTV.
Leaving off the Swiss turbocharger thing (Americans made them practical).
Jets just flat out don't come from turbochargers.
Jets use fan blades, turbochargers do not. Turbochargers use impellers and are only compressors. Jets have different compression sections, burners (flame fronts) and actually make thrust.
It's like saying cars came from trains because both have round wheels. It just doesn't work.
I don't see how England invented TV. Nipkow (German) invented mechanical TV, and Farnsworth (American) invented electronic TV (far more important to getting us to where we are now).
The grandparent did miss that England invented RADAR. A great invention.
Note to other posters, Alexander Graham Bell was not Canadian. He resided there fora while, but never changed nationality, he was a Scot up intil he became American. He was a Scot (living in Boston?) when he invented the telephone.
Like you said, it's if you want it now. You can't get it on DVD until the end of the season. I don't think it's concidence that the two big shows offered are pretty serial, meaning what happens each week matters next week, as opposed to episodic. That means there is a big value to finding out what happened on a show if you missed it, before viewing the next one.
And as someone else mentioned below, ABC broadcasts in 720p, which is 1280x720p 60fps non-interlaced. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if it was only 30fps or even 24fps, since most HD content is created for 1080i (and thus converted), and a lot even comes from film.
Additional note, the picture quality on Lost, although better than DVD, isn't particularly good. Law and Order looks better, CSI looks far better. I don't know how Desparate Housewives looks.
Getting to 60 miles isn't easy. That's for sure. Getting higher is tougher still, because even without drag you still need to spend a lot of energy to fight gravity to go higher.
But all of that is NOTHING next to getting the speed you need to orbit.
Look at SpaceShipOne. It got to 62 miles. But it had approximately 0 horizontal velocity when it got there. In order to orbit, it needs well over 20,000 miles per hour horizontal velocity to orbit.
And since you did all the work at the start (you fired from a gun, right?) that means you have to be doing much much more when you leave the muzzle of the gun, so that by the time you get to 62 miles, you are still doing 20,000 miles per hour.
That means you have to impart a ton of speed to the "bullet". Of course, the faster the bullet goes, the more air resistance there is, so you have you go even faster.
So anyway, you can see how "gun to orbit" is many many times harder then just "gun to orbital altitude".
I'm not one of the ones who said that GM shouldn't have used inductive charging, BTW.
But either way, just because you lose some power in a wall wart doesn't mean you should go losing more somewhere else. Losses are cumulative, not substitutive. This device has a power supply of its own.
Most of my personal wall warts are efficient, BTW. But I actually buy devices based upon power consumption (my power bill is half what my friends' are) and measure it with a Kill-A-Watt. Most people don't do this, and yeah, they probably have a lot of space heaters down there.
Smart makes whiteboards.
Good makes wireless PDA-like email stuff.
For a mouse, I get it, it's exactly the same as the Wacom batteryless pen tables. EXACTLY. It's not new.
But for other stuff, this only adds complication. I mean, you might as well just say all devices should have the same charging connector so you don't have to have multiple wall warts. That would work as well as this.
And no better.
There's still problems with voltages/power draws and trying to charge multiple devices at once.
I can think of 5 other steps which are a lot better than this one, and each is closer to reachable than this.