They're "teardrop" shaped in order to minimize G-loading on the way in and out of the loop, not to provide maximum weightlessness time.
The first looping coasters were circular, but the problem is you enter and exit the loop with the most speed, and also have 1G pulling down, thus creating much more Gs than at the top.
The reason they reach a minimum of speed at the top is because that's how the conversion of kinetic to potential to kinetic energy works. When something goes up, and it has no additional force being added (no energy is added except by the lift chains in a roller coaster), then it slows down. So it is slowest at the highest points, just like in the non-inverted sections of the track.
Finally, it is my belief that these teardrop loops always keep the riders under positive Gs in their frame of reference. That means the car is accelerating downward faster than gravity pulls. As such, if you barfed at the top, it would merely fall to your feet, just like normal. Now, if the coaster had a double corkscrew after the loop like many early loopers did, the barf would I believe come off the floor there, because I think those are negative G.
I have my HD-TiVo connected to my Sony TV with an HDMIHDMI cable. All the data goes across encrypted.
But I can't tell, it just works. No problems here.
I don't like the protection being enforced, but it works in my case. Sounds like you have bad equipment.
Note that the spec for protection doesn't even prohibit analog HD output, it only speaks of the digital output. So Toshiba is going farther than required here.
I lived through both eras (I'm 36) and I can't agree.
Communism was already stalled long before the USSR invaded Afghanistan. There's little liklihood it would have taken root there.
And as to communists in Central America, Cuba, etc.? We handled that on a case-by-case basis. We did stop Cuba from using Grenada as a base to export communist revolution to South America. We totally messed up Nicaragua and Honduras.
Really I divide the "communist threat" in the new world (threat to us) into tow parts.
1. False threats we declared as communist, which were really countries just trying to get out from the thumb of US corporate ownership. See United Fruit Company and our repelling "communists", where communist was defined as someone who would nationalize property owned by Americans. 2. Actual USSR communists allies, meaning Cuba. In this case, Castro come to us first. He turned to the USSR (and thus communist) because we turned our back on him.
We could have done a lot smarter things than backing Jihadists in Afghanistan and still blunted the force of the already slow-moving soviet threat.
I know it doesn't seem like it, with all the devices out there that use it, but it's over.
XScale is ARM10 basically. It was the next faster core after ARM9, and ARM sold it lock, stock and barrel. But Intel, the current owners, don't know how to do much with it. They seem to have stopped updating it and it's dying.
ARM has released ARM11, is pushing hard with it. It's synthesizeable and thus a lot more flexible than the XScale. It also has a lot higher clock speeds (presumably meaning higher performance) than XScale at low power.
So, in short, you'll see a lot less switching to XScale in the future and a lot more switching from it.
First of all is that your mention that the "cream of the crop" has more sex and violence than TV allows is silly. Sex and violence do not make a movie better. A good movie is a good movie, if it has sex or violence, fine. But saying anything without them is automatically worse is just plain ridiculous.
How much better a movie would Glengarry Glen Ross been with sex and violence in it? Probably not at all. How about Iron Giant? Did the violence in Aliens make it a better movie than Alien?
I don't have any problem with sex and violence in movies, but I do have a problem with being biased against those that don't have sex or violence. The dumbasses in Hollywood have this bias too. To them, certain type of movies must have at least a PG-13 rating, and they will put in extra sex, violence or swearing to ensure it gets it. Their bias comes from how audiences respond to G and PG ratings. It makes financial sense to them, because they concentrate on ticket sales. To apply the same thinking to measuring quality is foolish.
As to your comment about time slots, TV execs want to pick up not just the audience who knows they want to see their shows, but also some people who just "drop in". This is especially true of one-time specials. So timeslots still matter. It doesn't matter as much for a well-established show with a strong following though. But anyway, they feel that they'll get more viewers in prime time than they will at 3AM, even if the increment is small. And they're probably right.
Oh, and bring back The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr.
SGI's business model involved selling you a hundred thousand dollar package of software and hardware to do 3D graphics. In the mid 90s you could put together a PC and software package that could do as well or better than the SGI for $10K. Now it's much less than that.
That's the long and short of it. No evil hand of MS needed here. If you want to blame someone, blame Matrox, NVidia or ATI. But personally, I blame SGI. They failed to adapt to the business environment, probably because the amount of belt-tightening required would have been so high their employees would rather leave for greener pastures. Especially during the.com boom.
I accidentally did my math with a whole day to install each base station, not a half day. Sorry about that. I can't really imagine municipal workers installing a net connection, power and the actual base station itself in a half-day, but if you think your local workers could do this, then the installation costs get a lot lower.
I still think that given how much cheaper installs will be with WiMax, cities would be foolish to enbark on a municipal network right now. But if they did, with the revised math, some of them could make it work.
The study says they won't break even in 5 years even assuming a cost-benefit of $30 per person/month.
That means that cost of infrastructure + maintenance costs 60 * $30 * users
Now, in your case, the right hand side is 60 * $30 * 13,000 or $23.4M.
Now lets work on the left. A useable base station costs about $100. Maybe $80. In manpower, it probably takes at least half a day to install. with 3 people and equipment usage/acqusition costs, that's at least $1200. So let's say $1300 to install each base station. Additionally, you need to run a leased line to each base station and pay for the bandwidth to it. Those probably cost at least $5/mo/base station. So, over 5 years, thats 5*60 or another $300. We're up to $1600/base station. A base station probably provides effective coverage (into buildings not just on the street, you speak of it as being useful as people's ISPs) over a 100 ft radius. So each covers about 40,000 sq. ft. you have to cover 22 sq miles, or 613,000,000 sq. ft. So you need 15,333 base stations. That is $24.5M.
So, according to some rough math, using their figures, your city would not break even after 5 years, even assuming a benefit to users of $30/month. And this is if you don't have to replace any equipment over the 5 years.
Honestly, until WiMax comes around, this will be a tough equation. When WiMax comes around, the install of the base stations becomes much easier, you only need to plug it in, and you don't have to pay for separate bandwidth run to each base station. If you had base stations whose uplink was WiMax, you'd only need probably 4 WiMax "towers" to cover all these base stations (at least in sq. ft., perhaps more for aggregate bandwidth needs, I dunno).
Perhaps at that point you could even go to "spot coverage" where you just send an 802.11 base station with WiMax uplink capabilities to each family (say 20,000 of them), and let them self-install it (plug it in) in their house. This would remove another $15M in costs from the project, and provide better coverage for your customers.
I know you can poke holes in this, maybe you don't have to cover every square foot of your 22 miles, but I think the math in convincing enough to show that the benefit is on edge.
The US was involved in the very incident that began the modern Islamic revolution. That was when an Iranian revolution removed the Shah from power. We (the US) decided we liked the Shah's mode of operation, so we helped reinstall him in power in Iran. Islamic fundamentalists banded together and removed him from power again and took US hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran. Perhaps you remember that? They formed an Islamist republic after the removal the 2nd time of the Shah. Thus start the transition in the Middle East from dictatorial/monarchist countries to Islamic republics (not really republics at all, but run by the Mullahs).
This success and embarassment of the US emboldened the radical Islamists and gave leaders in the Middle East who wanted to organize a fighting force a great way to make one, by claiming that this was a battle for Islam. A tactic we (the US) exploited well in backing Bin Laden against the USSR in Afghanistan.
Our involvement in Iran also led us to believe we had to have someone to support in the Middle East against these radicals. This led to a period of nearly unconditional backing of Israel. Israel knew we were unlikely to drop support of them and thus engaged in many nasty actions against Arab people in neighboring countries. They even attacked one of our own ships. Our backing of Israel during this brutal period didn't help us in the eyes of Bin Laden and other radical Islamists with an axe to grind.
Now all of this isn't to say that if our opponent(s) were more reasonable that things wouldn't have gone differently. But we had plenty of warning in 1978 that there were people in the Middle East using Islam as a cause who would turn their fighters against us if we only gave them a reason to do so.
Apparently we didn't think it'd be a problem. We underestimated the trouble these people could cause of us. This continues under Bush as strong as ever. And that's how we got into two wars at once without the manpower to finish either of them correctly.
Bush stopped the attacks from happening for 4 years?
Prove it.
You're going on blind faith there. Or are you just measuring years? If you're measuring years, was Clinton then better against terrorism than Bush because there were longer intervals between the attacks during his time?
I personally would just say that the attacks happened when they did because of the timing attackers, not the president in charge at the time. And the war on terror has just been a diversion, it hasn't changed things at all. Yes, we do thwart a few attacks, but we did that before too. Al Qeada didn't suddenly get the resources during Bush's presidency to attack the US more frequently or more effectively.
In my mind, terrorism is fairly easy to commit. Look at McVeigh. The best way to reduce it is to stop spurring people to commit the acts, not to try to restrict the entire populace to stop them.
Look at Britain. They had almost weekly attacks from the IRA for a decade, was an increase in security responsible for the next 10 years having virtually no attacks? No, it was a more roundabout solution that attacked the roots of the problem.
We are completely failing to go after the roots of the problem. Roots which were never in Iraq, by the way. We started to work on the problem with our efforts in Afghanistan, but we had to scale back those efforts because of the unnecessary war in Iraq. It's very disappointing.
Also disappointing is people like you who measure the success of our government's efforts against terrorism by the number of times they (or someone else) fails to stop an attack. If we got attacked daily, Bush would be the best terror fighter ever?
First, and the biggest, was our backing of Islamic warriors against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. We sent the CIA to teach them (including Bin Laden) to fight to outst the Soviet Union. Kind of ironic that we boycott and Olympics and train people who would ultimately kill our own over the USSR invading and occupying a country we would later invade and occupy also.
Once the USSR left, we left the Mujahadeen twisting in the wind, warriors willing and able to fight for their beliefs with no one to fight against. Bin Laden then turned on the US, angry about this.
More importantly, the same warriors declared war on the US for invading parts of the Middle East (repelling the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait) and occupying the holiest land of all, the Arabian Penninsula.
These were the biggest factors that led to the attacks on the World Trade Center (both times). But despite all of our foolishness here, the blame lies with Bin Laden/Al Qaeda. Ultimately, they ordered the attacks.
Still, if we hadn't decided to meddle in the Middle East (all the way back to replacing the Shah in Iran) we probably wouldn't have become the target of choice, and 9/11 wouldn't have occured. We really should spend more effort understanding people and less attacking them. Everyone loves to see a bully toppled, so the more we invade countries, the easier it is for our enemies to recruit members.
Launching Xbox 360 without a Halo title is stupid. And Gears of War and Perfect Dark Zero are not Halo. Good games? Perhaps.
But they're not founding inductees into the Video Game Hall of Fame.
If MS wants people to buy Xbox 360s, they need a Halo title (not just a halo title). It needn't be out on the first day, especially if Xbox 360 supplies are limited. But they need it as soon as they have sufficient quantites that they want to start selling boxes. And that means BEFORE PS3 somes out.
Saw Gears of War at E3. It's a total Halo knockoff. Plus the producer of the game was a total douche in the video. I couldn't figure out why they bothered with the game, other than perhaps because they're afraid Jones & Co. cannot get a Halo title out on time. But honestly is a pretty safe bet.
As to Perfect Dark Zero, Rare has done nothing but crap since MS bought them, and often very late too. No reason to think that's gonna change. Nintendo sure got the better of that deal (selling Rare to MS).
Anyway, back to the topic, good titles are nice, but honestly, they need big name titles at launch at least as much as they need good titles. Again, look at the examples of the Gamecube and the Saturn. When you launch a platform, bring your "A" properties or risk peril.
'Apparently, many accounts of alchemists include information such as "they had a furnace straight from hell" and that they "suddenly developed lesions and died a few days later."'
That's your quote. They put the stuff in the furnace, then they say the furnace is hotter than normal. For that to be the case, they'd have to be feeling the effects of the radiation, not feeling that the lump is 30C in a room that is 25C. I don't see how the self-heating of these lumps would fit in with the quote you posted. That was my original point.
Again, in your next quote, I said feel the heating effects of radiation and survive. I know you can survive radiation bursts, you normally do, you would survive 1-2 days without tons of medical treatment. And yes, radiation will burn/char you in high doses. I thought by the time you felt the heating effects, you would fall into this category. I was wrong.
Your enrichment post is a joke. Apparently you missed it though. You're not going to separate useful amounts of U235 with a bucket centrifuge. And remember also that your instructions have the advantage of understanding nuclear physics. How difficult is enrichment when you don't even know what it is or that you need to do it? Very.
And as to your comments about that mine in the Ozarks, even if it contains fissile material at all, it is very unlikely that it is a material that could be usefully used to create a critical reaction. And you're not going to feel the heating effects of a reaction that isn't at least very close to critical.
If you put an emitting source in a furnace, heck, even in a campfire, how would you tell now that it is emitting? Its warmth is not noticeable.
You'd need to feel the actual effects of the emitted radiation, to fit in the with the quote.
I didn't think that it was possible to feel the heating effects of radiation and survive. But it appears I am wrong, because down below ColaMan links to a site with info that seems to indicate that it happened.
I still think it is very unlikely alchemists were making piles (as you say). To create a criticality with materials you just find around is quite difficult. You really need enriched materials, and these are difficult to make even if you know you are making them, let alone by accident!
Alpha and beta radiation doesn't feel warm. Not like microwaves or something. If you had enough radiation coming out of your furnace to be felt over the infrared emitted just by the fires, then you wouldn't have time to develop lesions and die a few days later.
Those two kill me, and I see them a lot. People seem to think that "bias" is an adjective, instead of noun.
And I don't just mean the joking "HardOCP is bias" stuff, but people thinking that bias really is something a person can BE.
And I guess many people never saw ludicrous in print, so they think it is spelled ludacris, like the rapper. Maddening.
I don't see this as hackers, more internet message boards and IRC. And in re: the original poster, I saw "definately" a lot before the internet even became popular (like in 1990).
Xbox 360 comes out fall 2005. PS3 will likely debut in the US in fall 2006. Microsoft would be idiots to not ship a Halo game for Xbox 360 until a year after it ships.
You need halo titles (pardon the pun) to sell a console, MS wouldn't do well to withold their strongest one just to spite Sony on PS3 launch day.
Remember how much not having a Sonic title hurt Saturn? Dreamcast had a Sonic title on day one. And the Gamecube wasn't helped much by not having a true Mario (or Zelda) title at launch either.
Although I didn't buy one. I was still using my first-gen ($800) Sony DVP-S7000 at that point. But at the time, when I was pricing DVD players, I was pricing changers, so you're also spot-on there.
Also, I wan't pricing cheap junk (like the low-end Panasonics, 110s and 310s) I didn't have any reason to "upgrade" to a player which was just catching up with my first-gen player which still worked great.
Maybe you're right, maybe I wasn't pricing DVD players which were directly comparable to the PS2's capabilities. If I were, I'd maybe have seen more $250 prices and fewer $400 prices. But the PS2 still contains a lot more stuff inside than those $250-$300 DVD players.
Boy, remember the days when Sony would make a product like the DVP-S7000 and it would take other companies two generations to catch up? You don't see that much anymore.
The PS1 cost me $299 and the Saturn cost me $399. Both were bought in the US on the first day.
I took both apart. Although the Saturn did look more expensive (mostly unnecessarily, due to how it was put together with several boards instead of the PS1's one), I'd be shocked if it couldn't be built and shipped to the US for $399.
I took apart my first gen US PS2 ($299?), and I have to say that was probably on the fence. There was a huge cooling solution and a couple sandwiched boards in there, and DVD drives were a bit pricey at the time. The first-gen JPN PS2 was even crazier, with a PCMCIA slot and such, it surely would have been sold at a loss if it was $299, which it wasn't. Gord's declaration of $120 profit per PS2 sold is most definitely wrong, at least on the day of release.
I do agree with him the N64 wasn't losing N any money. That thing was a beauty. If you took it apart, there was NOTHING in it from day one. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It was probably the same cost to make as a SNES. Nintendo did an excellent job with that system (if you don't mind cartridges).
For the record, the Xbox seemed like a clear money loser to me. It's very complex inside, it steals more than just controller designs from Sega. They are fools for what they did, never significantly cost-reducing the box. And the hard drive, it's just a money sink. The dirty little secret of hard drives is they never get cheaper, only bigger. MS started out with 8 and 10G drives in the Xbox, probably paying $50/each for them. Now if you get an Xbox, it has a 40G drive in it (the only one on the market) with firmware to only do 10G of capacity. How much does Seagate charge for that drive? $40/each.
When you make a console, you plan to cost-reduce it over time to match the price drops. But you can't do that with the hard drive. I'm very surprised MS bundled the HD on Xbox 360, after learning that lesson the hard way with Xbox.
Anyway, back to the topic. I don't take what Gord says here as gospel. Of course, I also don't think Sony is going to pay $105 for a CPU chip or BluRay drive either. Finally, you left out parts of Gord's article. He mentioned other consoles which were sold at a loss (Dreamcast).
A lot of misinformation on all sides here. Especially that $120/PS2 at launch. Give me a break.
"Merrill Lynch Japan has conducted research that indicates that the Playstation 3 will retail for $399."
This is just research, not a Sony announcement. Also, consoles that debut in Japan first (as Japanese consoles usually do) often cost more there until they come out elsewhere. The Playstation was $400 in Japan when it came out. It was $299 when it hit the US (although it was not significantly cost-reduced, they just repriced it). The PSP was $350 or something in Japan, $250 by the time it came to the US.
I know Saturn was $400 in Japan and came to the US at $400, but quickly fell to $300. I don't know how much Dreamcast was in Japan, or any of Nintendo's consoles.
Honestly, like the PS2, supplies of the PS3 will probably be limited when it first comes out, due to supply constraints/yield problems. And as long as you sell every one you can make, you have a good price.
So I wouldn't get too worried about Sony ceding the market because of price just yet.
And I don't know that PS3 costs a lot more than Xbox 360 to make. As you point out, Xbox 360 includes a hard drive. That hard drive probably costs MS at least $40. I'm sure Sony is smart enough to not make a device that they cannot afford to sell at a competitive price.
It's longer, but slimmer and a tiny bit shallower too. In the end, both really are about the same size as the original PS2.
It's not fridge-sized.
I have an original US PS2 (SCPH-15000), and I've taken it apart before. I'd be shocked if it didn't cost more to make than sell at that time. The DVD drive alone must have hurt a lot. Have you forgotten when the PS2 came out, standlone DVD players were about $400-$500? The PS2 was $300 and contained a lot more stuff inside than a DVD player did. Plus that crazy complex (expensive) cooling solution.
In the case of the Neo-Geo, it was remarkably similar to a Genesis. Both had 68K CPUs and both had Z80 sound chips. The Neo-Geo couldn't justify a $500 cost over a Genesis which was virtually identical.
A 3D0 had significantly better hardware, like a CD-ROM drive. But even it couldn't justify its higher costs.
Jaguar had some good capabilities, but overall was a mess. And the controller! Oh boy. But most of all the problem was Atari's marketing. Atari couldn't market immortality.
When I spoke of Cell not having Altivec, I said regular Altivec for a reason. It doesn't execute regular Altivec code. So that means you have to break binary compatibility. Once you're gonna break binary compatibility, why go with 2nd best?
So Cell made no more sense for Apple than Intel. And Intel has a lot of non-CPU things to offer Apple. The Centrino chipset for example.
What people don't seem to talk about with Cell is that Cell is made up of CELLS. You can configure a Cell to have different things on it than Sony did. So it could have had two PPC cores for example, or 3. And no SPUs. So "Cell" isn't one big Altivec. Sony's Cell has a lot of vector processors though.
But one thing you can't put on a Cell processor is regular Altivec.
And as I said otherwise, Cell promises no forward or backward binary compatibility. This is a killer for a platform that will have a whole family of machines on it. But it's great for a console.
Slashdot Mirror
They're "teardrop" shaped in order to minimize G-loading on the way in and out of the loop, not to provide maximum weightlessness time.
The first looping coasters were circular, but the problem is you enter and exit the loop with the most speed, and also have 1G pulling down, thus creating much more Gs than at the top.
The reason they reach a minimum of speed at the top is because that's how the conversion of kinetic to potential to kinetic energy works. When something goes up, and it has no additional force being added (no energy is added except by the lift chains in a roller coaster), then it slows down. So it is slowest at the highest points, just like in the non-inverted sections of the track.
Finally, it is my belief that these teardrop loops always keep the riders under positive Gs in their frame of reference. That means the car is accelerating downward faster than gravity pulls. As such, if you barfed at the top, it would merely fall to your feet, just like normal. Now, if the coaster had a double corkscrew after the loop like many early loopers did, the barf would I believe come off the floor there, because I think those are negative G.
I have my HD-TiVo connected to my Sony TV with an HDMIHDMI cable. All the data goes across encrypted.
But I can't tell, it just works. No problems here.
I don't like the protection being enforced, but it works in my case. Sounds like you have bad equipment.
Note that the spec for protection doesn't even prohibit analog HD output, it only speaks of the digital output. So Toshiba is going farther than required here.
I lived through both eras (I'm 36) and I can't agree.
Communism was already stalled long before the USSR invaded Afghanistan. There's little liklihood it would have taken root there.
And as to communists in Central America, Cuba, etc.? We handled that on a case-by-case basis. We did stop Cuba from using Grenada as a base to export communist revolution to South America. We totally messed up Nicaragua and Honduras.
Really I divide the "communist threat" in the new world (threat to us) into tow parts.
1. False threats we declared as communist, which were really countries just trying to get out from the thumb of US corporate ownership. See United Fruit Company and our repelling "communists", where communist was defined as someone who would nationalize property owned by Americans.
2. Actual USSR communists allies, meaning Cuba. In this case, Castro come to us first. He turned to the USSR (and thus communist) because we turned our back on him.
We could have done a lot smarter things than backing Jihadists in Afghanistan and still blunted the force of the already slow-moving soviet threat.
I know it doesn't seem like it, with all the devices out there that use it, but it's over.
XScale is ARM10 basically. It was the next faster core after ARM9, and ARM sold it lock, stock and barrel. But Intel, the current owners, don't know how to do much with it. They seem to have stopped updating it and it's dying.
ARM has released ARM11, is pushing hard with it. It's synthesizeable and thus a lot more flexible than the XScale. It also has a lot higher clock speeds (presumably meaning higher performance) than XScale at low power.
So, in short, you'll see a lot less switching to XScale in the future and a lot more switching from it.
I have so much to say also.
First of all is that your mention that the "cream of the crop" has more sex and violence than TV allows is silly. Sex and violence do not make a movie better. A good movie is a good movie, if it has sex or violence, fine. But saying anything without them is automatically worse is just plain ridiculous.
How much better a movie would Glengarry Glen Ross been with sex and violence in it? Probably not at all. How about Iron Giant? Did the violence in Aliens make it a better movie than Alien?
I don't have any problem with sex and violence in movies, but I do have a problem with being biased against those that don't have sex or violence. The dumbasses in Hollywood have this bias too. To them, certain type of movies must have at least a PG-13 rating, and they will put in extra sex, violence or swearing to ensure it gets it. Their bias comes from how audiences respond to G and PG ratings. It makes financial sense to them, because they concentrate on ticket sales. To apply the same thinking to measuring quality is foolish.
As to your comment about time slots, TV execs want to pick up not just the audience who knows they want to see their shows, but also some people who just "drop in". This is especially true of one-time specials. So timeslots still matter. It doesn't matter as much for a well-established show with a strong following though. But anyway, they feel that they'll get more viewers in prime time than they will at 3AM, even if the increment is small. And they're probably right.
Oh, and bring back The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr.
SGI's business model involved selling you a hundred thousand dollar package of software and hardware to do 3D graphics. In the mid 90s you could put together a PC and software package that could do as well or better than the SGI for $10K. Now it's much less than that.
.com boom.
That's the long and short of it. No evil hand of MS needed here. If you want to blame someone, blame Matrox, NVidia or ATI. But personally, I blame SGI. They failed to adapt to the business environment, probably because the amount of belt-tightening required would have been so high their employees would rather leave for greener pastures. Especially during the
I accidentally did my math with a whole day to install each base station, not a half day. Sorry about that. I can't really imagine municipal workers installing a net connection, power and the actual base station itself in a half-day, but if you think your local workers could do this, then the installation costs get a lot lower.
I still think that given how much cheaper installs will be with WiMax, cities would be foolish to enbark on a municipal network right now. But if they did, with the revised math, some of them could make it work.
The study says they won't break even in 5 years even assuming a cost-benefit of $30 per person/month.
That means that cost of infrastructure + maintenance costs 60 * $30 * users
Now, in your case, the right hand side is 60 * $30 * 13,000 or $23.4M.
Now lets work on the left. A useable base station costs about $100. Maybe $80. In manpower, it probably takes at least half a day to install. with 3 people and equipment usage/acqusition costs, that's at least $1200. So let's say $1300 to install each base station. Additionally, you need to run a leased line to each base station and pay for the bandwidth to it. Those probably cost at least $5/mo/base station. So, over 5 years, thats 5*60 or another $300. We're up to $1600/base station. A base station probably provides effective coverage (into buildings not just on the street, you speak of it as being useful as people's ISPs) over a 100 ft radius. So each covers about 40,000 sq. ft. you have to cover 22 sq miles, or 613,000,000 sq. ft. So you need 15,333 base stations. That is $24.5M.
So, according to some rough math, using their figures, your city would not break even after 5 years, even assuming a benefit to users of $30/month. And this is if you don't have to replace any equipment over the 5 years.
Honestly, until WiMax comes around, this will be a tough equation. When WiMax comes around, the install of the base stations becomes much easier, you only need to plug it in, and you don't have to pay for separate bandwidth run to each base station. If you had base stations whose uplink was WiMax, you'd only need probably 4 WiMax "towers" to cover all these base stations (at least in sq. ft., perhaps more for aggregate bandwidth needs, I dunno).
Perhaps at that point you could even go to "spot coverage" where you just send an 802.11 base station with WiMax uplink capabilities to each family (say 20,000 of them), and let them self-install it (plug it in) in their house. This would remove another $15M in costs from the project, and provide better coverage for your customers.
I know you can poke holes in this, maybe you don't have to cover every square foot of your 22 miles, but I think the math in convincing enough to show that the benefit is on edge.
The US was involved in the very incident that began the modern Islamic revolution. That was when an Iranian revolution removed the Shah from power. We (the US) decided we liked the Shah's mode of operation, so we helped reinstall him in power in Iran. Islamic fundamentalists banded together and removed him from power again and took US hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran. Perhaps you remember that? They formed an Islamist republic after the removal the 2nd time of the Shah. Thus start the transition in the Middle East from dictatorial/monarchist countries to Islamic republics (not really republics at all, but run by the Mullahs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_revolution
This success and embarassment of the US emboldened the radical Islamists and gave leaders in the Middle East who wanted to organize a fighting force a great way to make one, by claiming that this was a battle for Islam. A tactic we (the US) exploited well in backing Bin Laden against the USSR in Afghanistan.
Our involvement in Iran also led us to believe we had to have someone to support in the Middle East against these radicals. This led to a period of nearly unconditional backing of Israel. Israel knew we were unlikely to drop support of them and thus engaged in many nasty actions against Arab people in neighboring countries. They even attacked one of our own ships. Our backing of Israel during this brutal period didn't help us in the eyes of Bin Laden and other radical Islamists with an axe to grind.
Now all of this isn't to say that if our opponent(s) were more reasonable that things wouldn't have gone differently. But we had plenty of warning in 1978 that there were people in the Middle East using Islam as a cause who would turn their fighters against us if we only gave them a reason to do so.
Apparently we didn't think it'd be a problem. We underestimated the trouble these people could cause of us. This continues under Bush as strong as ever. And that's how we got into two wars at once without the manpower to finish either of them correctly.
Bush stopped the attacks from happening for 4 years?
Prove it.
You're going on blind faith there. Or are you just measuring years? If you're measuring years, was Clinton then better against terrorism than Bush because there were longer intervals between the attacks during his time?
I personally would just say that the attacks happened when they did because of the timing attackers, not the president in charge at the time. And the war on terror has just been a diversion, it hasn't changed things at all. Yes, we do thwart a few attacks, but we did that before too. Al Qeada didn't suddenly get the resources during Bush's presidency to attack the US more frequently or more effectively.
In my mind, terrorism is fairly easy to commit. Look at McVeigh. The best way to reduce it is to stop spurring people to commit the acts, not to try to restrict the entire populace to stop them.
Look at Britain. They had almost weekly attacks from the IRA for a decade, was an increase in security responsible for the next 10 years having virtually no attacks? No, it was a more roundabout solution that attacked the roots of the problem.
We are completely failing to go after the roots of the problem. Roots which were never in Iraq, by the way. We started to work on the problem with our efforts in Afghanistan, but we had to scale back those efforts because of the unnecessary war in Iraq. It's very disappointing.
Also disappointing is people like you who measure the success of our government's efforts against terrorism by the number of times they (or someone else) fails to stop an attack. If we got attacked daily, Bush would be the best terror fighter ever?
There were two major factors that triggered 9/11.
First, and the biggest, was our backing of Islamic warriors against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. We sent the CIA to teach them (including Bin Laden) to fight to outst the Soviet Union. Kind of ironic that we boycott and Olympics and train people who would ultimately kill our own over the USSR invading and occupying a country we would later invade and occupy also.
Once the USSR left, we left the Mujahadeen twisting in the wind, warriors willing and able to fight for their beliefs with no one to fight against. Bin Laden then turned on the US, angry about this.
More importantly, the same warriors declared war on the US for invading parts of the Middle East (repelling the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait) and occupying the holiest land of all, the Arabian Penninsula.
These were the biggest factors that led to the attacks on the World Trade Center (both times). But despite all of our foolishness here, the blame lies with Bin Laden/Al Qaeda. Ultimately, they ordered the attacks.
Still, if we hadn't decided to meddle in the Middle East (all the way back to replacing the Shah in Iran) we probably wouldn't have become the target of choice, and 9/11 wouldn't have occured. We really should spend more effort understanding people and less attacking them. Everyone loves to see a bully toppled, so the more we invade countries, the easier it is for our enemies to recruit members.
Launching Xbox 360 without a Halo title is stupid. And Gears of War and Perfect Dark Zero are not Halo. Good games? Perhaps.
But they're not founding inductees into the Video Game Hall of Fame.
If MS wants people to buy Xbox 360s, they need a Halo title (not just a halo title). It needn't be out on the first day, especially if Xbox 360 supplies are limited. But they need it as soon as they have sufficient quantites that they want to start selling boxes. And that means BEFORE PS3 somes out.
Saw Gears of War at E3. It's a total Halo knockoff. Plus the producer of the game was a total douche in the video. I couldn't figure out why they bothered with the game, other than perhaps because they're afraid Jones & Co. cannot get a Halo title out on time. But honestly is a pretty safe bet.
As to Perfect Dark Zero, Rare has done nothing but crap since MS bought them, and often very late too. No reason to think that's gonna change. Nintendo sure got the better of that deal (selling Rare to MS).
Anyway, back to the topic, good titles are nice, but honestly, they need big name titles at launch at least as much as they need good titles. Again, look at the examples of the Gamecube and the Saturn. When you launch a platform, bring your "A" properties or risk peril.
In the early 90's, OSI was going to take over. Several interoperating implementations of the OSI services (X.509, etc.) were shown at InterOp 1991.
OSI was hot, and everything was going to have to be fully OSI-compliant or die.
It may not have really happened (IP of course still remains dominant), but it was the hot thing in the industry, and DEC had to respond.
I even used the ISO/OSI replacement for FTP once (over IP) back then, I forget the name of it. Anyone remember?
'Apparently, many accounts of alchemists include information such as "they had a furnace straight from hell" and that they "suddenly developed lesions and died a few days later."'
That's your quote. They put the stuff in the furnace, then they say the furnace is hotter than normal. For that to be the case, they'd have to be feeling the effects of the radiation, not feeling that the lump is 30C in a room that is 25C. I don't see how the self-heating of these lumps would fit in with the quote you posted. That was my original point.
Again, in your next quote, I said feel the heating effects of radiation and survive. I know you can survive radiation bursts, you normally do, you would survive 1-2 days without tons of medical treatment. And yes, radiation will burn/char you in high doses. I thought by the time you felt the heating effects, you would fall into this category. I was wrong.
Your enrichment post is a joke. Apparently you missed it though. You're not going to separate useful amounts of U235 with a bucket centrifuge. And remember also that your instructions have the advantage of understanding nuclear physics. How difficult is enrichment when you don't even know what it is or that you need to do it? Very.
And as to your comments about that mine in the Ozarks, even if it contains fissile material at all, it is very unlikely that it is a material that could be usefully used to create a critical reaction. And you're not going to feel the heating effects of a reaction that isn't at least very close to critical.
That is in a furnace?
If you put an emitting source in a furnace, heck, even in a campfire, how would you tell now that it is emitting? Its warmth is not noticeable.
You'd need to feel the actual effects of the emitted radiation, to fit in the with the quote.
I didn't think that it was possible to feel the heating effects of radiation and survive. But it appears I am wrong, because down below ColaMan links to a site with info that seems to indicate that it happened.
I still think it is very unlikely alchemists were making piles (as you say). To create a criticality with materials you just find around is quite difficult. You really need enriched materials, and these are difficult to make even if you know you are making them, let alone by accident!
"A furnace straight from hell"?
Alpha and beta radiation doesn't feel warm. Not like microwaves or something. If you had enough radiation coming out of your furnace to be felt over the infrared emitted just by the fires, then you wouldn't have time to develop lesions and die a few days later.
Those two kill me, and I see them a lot. People seem to think that "bias" is an adjective, instead of noun.
And I don't just mean the joking "HardOCP is bias" stuff, but people thinking that bias really is something a person can BE.
And I guess many people never saw ludicrous in print, so they think it is spelled ludacris, like the rapper. Maddening.
I don't see this as hackers, more internet message boards and IRC. And in re: the original poster, I saw "definately" a lot before the internet even became popular (like in 1990).
Xbox 360 comes out fall 2005. PS3 will likely debut in the US in fall 2006. Microsoft would be idiots to not ship a Halo game for Xbox 360 until a year after it ships.
You need halo titles (pardon the pun) to sell a console, MS wouldn't do well to withold their strongest one just to spite Sony on PS3 launch day.
Remember how much not having a Sonic title hurt Saturn? Dreamcast had a Sonic title on day one. And the Gamecube wasn't helped much by not having a true Mario (or Zelda) title at launch either.
Although I didn't buy one. I was still using my first-gen ($800) Sony DVP-S7000 at that point. But at the time, when I was pricing DVD players, I was pricing changers, so you're also spot-on there.
Also, I wan't pricing cheap junk (like the low-end Panasonics, 110s and 310s) I didn't have any reason to "upgrade" to a player which was just catching up with my first-gen player which still worked great.
Maybe you're right, maybe I wasn't pricing DVD players which were directly comparable to the PS2's capabilities. If I were, I'd maybe have seen more $250 prices and fewer $400 prices. But the PS2 still contains a lot more stuff inside than those $250-$300 DVD players.
Boy, remember the days when Sony would make a product like the DVP-S7000 and it would take other companies two generations to catch up? You don't see that much anymore.
The PS1 cost me $299 and the Saturn cost me $399. Both were bought in the US on the first day.
I took both apart. Although the Saturn did look more expensive (mostly unnecessarily, due to how it was put together with several boards instead of the PS1's one), I'd be shocked if it couldn't be built and shipped to the US for $399.
I took apart my first gen US PS2 ($299?), and I have to say that was probably on the fence. There was a huge cooling solution and a couple sandwiched boards in there, and DVD drives were a bit pricey at the time. The first-gen JPN PS2 was even crazier, with a PCMCIA slot and such, it surely would have been sold at a loss if it was $299, which it wasn't. Gord's declaration of $120 profit per PS2 sold is most definitely wrong, at least on the day of release.
I do agree with him the N64 wasn't losing N any money. That thing was a beauty. If you took it apart, there was NOTHING in it from day one. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It was probably the same cost to make as a SNES. Nintendo did an excellent job with that system (if you don't mind cartridges).
For the record, the Xbox seemed like a clear money loser to me. It's very complex inside, it steals more than just controller designs from Sega. They are fools for what they did, never significantly cost-reducing the box. And the hard drive, it's just a money sink. The dirty little secret of hard drives is they never get cheaper, only bigger. MS started out with 8 and 10G drives in the Xbox, probably paying $50/each for them. Now if you get an Xbox, it has a 40G drive in it (the only one on the market) with firmware to only do 10G of capacity. How much does Seagate charge for that drive? $40/each.
When you make a console, you plan to cost-reduce it over time to match the price drops. But you can't do that with the hard drive. I'm very surprised MS bundled the HD on Xbox 360, after learning that lesson the hard way with Xbox.
Anyway, back to the topic. I don't take what Gord says here as gospel. Of course, I also don't think Sony is going to pay $105 for a CPU chip or BluRay drive either. Finally, you left out parts of Gord's article. He mentioned other consoles which were sold at a loss (Dreamcast).
A lot of misinformation on all sides here. Especially that $120/PS2 at launch. Give me a break.
I am showing how American nationalism is all I care about.
Facts are facts, and errors are errors. It is an error to say that iTron created write-once-run-anywhere, and that Java is an attempt to catch up.
It's that simple.
If you want to read that as nationalism, then fine. That's your biases getting in the way.
I merely corrected a factual error and thus questioned the conclusions drawn, since they no longer have a firm factual foundation.
"Merrill Lynch Japan has conducted research that indicates that the Playstation 3 will retail for $399."
This is just research, not a Sony announcement. Also, consoles that debut in Japan first (as Japanese consoles usually do) often cost more there until they come out elsewhere. The Playstation was $400 in Japan when it came out. It was $299 when it hit the US (although it was not significantly cost-reduced, they just repriced it). The PSP was $350 or something in Japan, $250 by the time it came to the US.
I know Saturn was $400 in Japan and came to the US at $400, but quickly fell to $300. I don't know how much Dreamcast was in Japan, or any of Nintendo's consoles.
Honestly, like the PS2, supplies of the PS3 will probably be limited when it first comes out, due to supply constraints/yield problems. And as long as you sell every one you can make, you have a good price.
So I wouldn't get too worried about Sony ceding the market because of price just yet.
And I don't know that PS3 costs a lot more than Xbox 360 to make. As you point out, Xbox 360 includes a hard drive. That hard drive probably costs MS at least $40. I'm sure Sony is smart enough to not make a device that they cannot afford to sell at a competitive price.
It's longer, but slimmer and a tiny bit shallower too. In the end, both really are about the same size as the original PS2.
It's not fridge-sized.
I have an original US PS2 (SCPH-15000), and I've taken it apart before. I'd be shocked if it didn't cost more to make than sell at that time. The DVD drive alone must have hurt a lot. Have you forgotten when the PS2 came out, standlone DVD players were about $400-$500? The PS2 was $300 and contained a lot more stuff inside than a DVD player did. Plus that crazy complex (expensive) cooling solution.
In the case of the Neo-Geo, it was remarkably similar to a Genesis. Both had 68K CPUs and both had Z80 sound chips. The Neo-Geo couldn't justify a $500 cost over a Genesis which was virtually identical.
A 3D0 had significantly better hardware, like a CD-ROM drive. But even it couldn't justify its higher costs.
Jaguar had some good capabilities, but overall was a mess. And the controller! Oh boy. But most of all the problem was Atari's marketing. Atari couldn't market immortality.
When I spoke of Cell not having Altivec, I said regular Altivec for a reason. It doesn't execute regular Altivec code. So that means you have to break binary compatibility. Once you're gonna break binary compatibility, why go with 2nd best?
So Cell made no more sense for Apple than Intel. And Intel has a lot of non-CPU things to offer Apple. The Centrino chipset for example.
What people don't seem to talk about with Cell is that Cell is made up of CELLS. You can configure a Cell to have different things on it than Sony did. So it could have had two PPC cores for example, or 3. And no SPUs. So "Cell" isn't one big Altivec. Sony's Cell has a lot of vector processors though.
But one thing you can't put on a Cell processor is regular Altivec.
And as I said otherwise, Cell promises no forward or backward binary compatibility. This is a killer for a platform that will have a whole family of machines on it. But it's great for a console.