All this talk of angular momentum and centripital force keeps making me think of what I've just started reading about: Newton's Bucket Argument.
If you don't know it, it has had physicists arguing about the nature of space, and naturally, angular momentum, for roughly 300 years. If you want to make your physics questions even more... hairy, think about them in the context of Newton's Bucket, and you'll really have something to wrap your head around;)
I guess the big issue now is --- once we all start publishing and remixing HD content, uh, where is the bandwidth gonna come from?
OMG. It's a huge conspiracy between Apple, Google, Adobe, AT&T, Verizon, and Level3 to get everyone to shell out more cash! Bigger/Higher quality videos. More bandwidth. Happier consumers. Larger bills. Richer companies! (Also: ???? Profit!!)
In all seriousness, it would be amazing to see something like this actually become the driving force for REAL broadband in the US.
Another key feature is the capability to use human blood or sweat to help power the battery.
"Combined with some form of fusion, the machines had found all the power they would ever need..."
For all we know, the next gen MMO could be Diablo III.
Don't you DARE. I like my life just the way it is, teeming with possibilities for productiveness each and every day. I refuse to lose any future job/marriage/children to that god damned Diablo series.
I run all sorts of RAID arrays on a single box, from 0 to 6, and I've had points in time where they're all read/writing simultaneously. When they're idle, I can't tell them apart from the fans I have in place to cool them or their enclosures, and even those aren't what I'd call loud. When all the disks seek at once, esp. for the RAID-6, the noise either gets relegated as background noise by my brain, or isn't heard at all over soft music. Sure, if you're running 15k U320's or something, maybe this is a good idea if you want that kind of performance in a desktop, but this just seems like it lacks a market. I'll continue to throw money at Seagate until the day I die, but not on something this stupid.
God damn Slashdot seems to get more and more inaccurate every year. It's the patent hating mob mentality here. You see, software patents are so ludicrous that we have become gracious enough to extend our hate to other flavors of patents. Especially the more, ahem, inventive ones.
Moreover, I'd be willing to bet that, among the average population of people who hear of a newly patented idea and think, "Why I thought of that YEARS ago," a larger percentage of them are probably among/. readers, thus, adding fuel to the patent hating fire.
TFS makes a point about storing 1 GB (presumably GigaBYTE) of data per second, but THAT feat is already in widespread use, spefically for the digital manipulation of 4k film. The company that produces the systems that process this film data is called Baselight.
Basically, 4k film, at a resolution of 4096x3112, requires approximately 50MB per frame @ 24 fps. That comes out to about 1.22GBps, and maninuplating the data doubles it to 2.44GBps. The systems[PDF] that Baselight sells run 8 nodes and 16 processors, and it's all built with commodity hardware and some flavor of Linux. Apparently they use 3ware RAID cards... and I found out about this by browsing 3ware's site when I was shopping for a RAID controller.
Either way, my point is, it's been done, and there's a real world application that requires that type of data storage bandwidth and has nothing to do with scientific data.:P
The US gov't indoctrination of "Anything against the government is terrorism" stance is obviously working.
ter-ror-ism [ter-uh-riz-uhm] -noun 1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes. 2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization. 3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.
I remember when all this shit started and "terrorism" was a word I could barely define, let alone give an example of. It took 20 minutes on 9/11 SEEING the towers burn, to actually say, "I know what this is... This is terrorism."
TEA LEAVES at the bottom of a harbor doesn't even come fucking close. And the LAST thing that was on King George's mind after hearing about the incident was FEAR about how a sleeper agent would come out of nowhere and---oh god help him---dump HIS tea into the sea!
The definition of terrorism is getting looser and looser these days. After you start using a word enough, it begins to lose its meaning and simply become degrogatory. Start clamping your mind around the dictionary before you let the same lawmakers that passed the Patriot Act do it for you.
I've iterated myself before many times, a couple on slashdot, and, having tried both browsers, I very fully prefer and endorse IE7, and yes, I'm also a nerd.
These days, I don't really bother getting into arguments about it because I've found that most people who prefer Firefox tend to be fanboys. It's like arguing PC vs. Mac, or Windows vs. Linux. IE vs. Firefox will just be another age-old argument that absolutely no one will ever win.
In the end, it comes down to preference, cause arguments like RAM usage and such can really be mitigated the same way those other examples can be: Money. If you want a Mac, you'll shell out the cash for one. If you want to save some money, learn how to use Linux. If you want to run a more resource intensive browser, get some more RAM.
Really, slashdotters, quit the vicious fanboy modding and recognize this for what it is: a software dick-measuring contest.
This YouTube video demonstrates the effect of overcompression very well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ Wow. I see what you mean. I didn't know that this was a common practice, but it certainly explains a lot. I have noticed that older tracks tend to be more listenable at high volumes in my car, and in particular, how newer tracks tend to have treble that hurts my ears at the same volumes. Either way, I guess it goes to show what a nerd thinks of when he reads "Compression." Thanks for the info.
Wrong sort of compression. All audio CDs are compressed heavily so that this week's Best Thing Ever sounds just that little bit louder than last week's Best Thing Ever.
That's one way to explain the declining trend in the quality of music over the last several years.
I'm used to music sounding pretty good, but I go out of my way to do so. Care to elaborate?
While it's damn near impossible to get a hold of new music recorded in a high resolution, digital format, it's pretty safe to say that most music is widely available at a 44.1khz sample, 16 bit sound, with no compression. Music, in this fashion, can be digitally ripped from its source, with error correction, and then compressed to a lossless format, such as FLAC or WMA Lossless.
I don't settle for anything else when I don't have to, but when I do, it's 320k mp3.
Unless, of course, you're bitching about the professionals that record and mix the tracks? I find it hard to believe that they would use lossy compression techniques.
It's not that VMWare doesn't work on AMD chips, I run VMWare on several AMD's and it works just peachy. What they're getting at is support for a hardware Hypervisor. The hypervisor is that spiffy little bit of logic that keeps track of x86 instructions inside of a CPU and determines which machine, real or virtual, that said intruction belongs to. Traditionally, this has been done in software, but porting that intruction set over to hardware, as Intel has done, and I believe AMD won't be doing until their quad core line comes to market, significantly improves the speed of virtualization to the point where there is no difference between a real OS and a virtualized one (except for multi-OS overhead, of course). That was one of the whole points of that "Blue Pill" idea some months ago.
Very true. I'm highly familiar with the relation between max wattage, actual wattage at operating temperature, and efficiency in various PSU's. While it's not necessarily the case that a lower max wattage PSU will consume less power, it's not that far of a stretch to assume that it is, in practice, generally the case. If you really want to nitpick you can measure a PSU's actual consumption or read reviews or whatever, but in the end, max wattage (and of course, 120v draw as rated on the device) are pretty good indicators of how much power the computer is capable of consuming. Either way, it's just one of those highly unscientific cases of "No, I didn't measure it, but yeah, I know I'm right."
My friend canned his SFF box in favor of a mid size ATX tower about four months ago. He upgraded the video card to the GeForce 7 series, and after doing so, the temperature sensitive fan on the video card stayed at its maximum, and incredibly annoying, RPM's all the while it was on.
Shuttles won't be quiet and heat efficient for a long time. If you want a system with a fast, multicore processor, and a beefy video card, be a man and buy a tower.
Although, after my friend moved some components to a new case, I snagged an old processor from work and turned his SFF box into my server. With a 220 watt PSU, it's a very affordable "leave me on all day" type of PC that stays out of sight, and, since it doesn't do much, it is actually very quiet.
The same zealotry actually keeps me off of Firefox.
I used to use Opera, way back in the day, and one of my favorite features was the mouse gesture support... of course, that was before 5 button mice became popular. I stopped using it because it didn't render several web sites properly. (Although after later learning of CSS "hacks" that are required for proper IE6 rendering, it's ironic to realize that Opera likely did render those pages correctly.)
Firefox had tabs. That made it nicer than IE6. Firefox has an initial load time significantly higher than IE6. That made it worse than IE6.
IE7 came out, and in my eyes, Firefox lost its edge. IE now has my beloved tabs. IE7 also uses ClearType, which I think most websites look better with.
When it comes down to it, you should use the web browser that you prefer, and it's not my job to give a damn which one you use. I use IE7. It loads faster and looks cleaner and better than any other browser available for Windows. But try arguing that stance with another computer geek... You'll probably get moans about security woes. Geeks are the ones smart enough not to browse as an admin and also not to install every ActiveX control and "Magical Desktop Enhancer with 50 IE Toolbars" app that they run across on a daily basis. If that's the case, why the hell start the argument in the first place?
And most of the good bits of our brains have gone down the toilet (or wherever it is that the brainwash solution drains).
Being a computer junkie (hello fellow Slashdotters), I have all but ceased watching television, and I just recently poured money into a theater style HDTV setup.
My television most seriously gets its greatest use via the attached computer and gaming consoles. I watch at least four shows that air weekly... and they're all drama shows with good writing (Heroes, anyone?). I actually prefer to watch shows two or three days after they air, when I can snag them via means other than my cable DVR and view them without advertisements. Commercials make me sick, and they ruin good shows. Even fast forwarding through them ruins a show. When I actually do sit down at the television and start flipping through the channels, I flip through the movie channels cause I know I might find something of quality to watch. But the point: Commericals, Reality TV, MTV... whatever... watching it as-is makes me feel stupid. Getting force fed an advertisement for some new product or seeing the most generalized preview for some show I don't even watch as a ploy by a network to keep me "tuned in" to their advertisements (not their shows) makes me feel like an idiot. And yes, as the OP says, those little good bits of my brain go flushing down the toilet.
Instead, I prefer to specifically pull what good bits of entertainment that I can from a series of tubes rather than the networks' garbage filled firehose. Hell, I just might even drop my cable service and my premium channels altogether if only I could subscribe to commercial free programming delivered ala carte over the internet in high definition and.... oh wait
...But I see a point to the other poster's argument. I switched to Mac OS X from windows for about a week, and all the while I was using it, aside from mouse issues, it took me a while to get used to the single menu bar. It felt like something was missing from all of my apps, but seeing as how M$ is trying to do that anyway (see Office 2k7, WMP, and IE7 with default settings), it was easy to accept.
Nonetheless, as time wore on, I found myself clicking the menu very infrequently. I moved almost completely over to keyboard shortcuts and had to use the objectdock to determine what apps were open (because that damn X doesn't close anything, so I almost never used it) and I had to look at the menu bar to see what was in focus. I never even thought of what a nightmare multiple monitors might be with relation to that menu. Still, WinXP doesn't scale the taskbar to multiple monitors elegantly (or at all), but then again, it doesn't rely on the taskbar like OS X does on its menu.
While I don't forsee anyone switching to 18 monitors anytime soon, I always like to keep in mind that the only implementations that survive in the IT field are those that meet one demand: Scalability.
The point is that ads embedded in video will drive people away to something more convenient. The idea is to have the ad subsidized stuff, along with banner ads, to generate revenue for them, and the simple fact that user generated content will *not* have ads in it is what brings people to the site in the first place.
After someone is at the site, then, they see "24, All New Episode" on the left or right side of the screen and watch it, generating money, and also happy users.
Ads embedded into user content will kill that site, not make it money.
Even if sites like youtube were to start including ads, and much more importantly, DRM, there's no reason (other than greed) for them to start including ads in truly user generated content. The place for ads and DRM on youtube is bringing content that's not native to the site such as network TV that will eventually make a more serious move to the internet.
As copyrighted content becomes more prolific on the site, some entities (unlike Viacom) will realize that it would be much more profitable to put authentic videos up on youtube that are subsidized with ads rather then letting other people do it and then suing their cut out of the company.
But seriously, ads in John Doe's video of his baby eating cereal? Hell no. That would piss people off to no end, and let me tell you, there are a million sites out there that really want to be the next YouTube.
While the economy would prosper from non-tariffed overseas sales of Microsoft and Dell goods, the resulting civil war from the Apple and Linux sympathizing states would most certainly bring it right back down.
Slashdot Mirror
All this talk of angular momentum and centripital force keeps making me think of what I've just started reading about: Newton's Bucket Argument.
;)
If you don't know it, it has had physicists arguing about the nature of space, and naturally, angular momentum, for roughly 300 years. If you want to make your physics questions even more... hairy, think about them in the context of Newton's Bucket, and you'll really have something to wrap your head around
I guess the big issue now is --- once we all start publishing and remixing HD content, uh, where is the bandwidth gonna come from?
OMG. It's a huge conspiracy between Apple, Google, Adobe, AT&T, Verizon, and Level3 to get everyone to shell out more cash! Bigger/Higher quality videos. More bandwidth. Happier consumers. Larger bills. Richer companies! (Also: ???? Profit!!)
In all seriousness, it would be amazing to see something like this actually become the driving force for REAL broadband in the US.
"Combined with some form of fusion, the machines had found all the power they would ever need
Admittedly, I tried that and it didn't work.
a 100% Mac OS X work place.
100%? So you work for Apple?
Don't you DARE. I like my life just the way it is, teeming with possibilities for productiveness each and every day. I refuse to lose any future job/marriage/children to that god damned Diablo series.
...that this is utterly stupid.
I run all sorts of RAID arrays on a single box, from 0 to 6, and I've had points in time where they're all read/writing simultaneously. When they're idle, I can't tell them apart from the fans I have in place to cool them or their enclosures, and even those aren't what I'd call loud. When all the disks seek at once, esp. for the RAID-6, the noise either gets relegated as background noise by my brain, or isn't heard at all over soft music. Sure, if you're running 15k U320's or something, maybe this is a good idea if you want that kind of performance in a desktop, but this just seems like it lacks a market. I'll continue to throw money at Seagate until the day I die, but not on something this stupid.
So, does this mean that if I attempt to turn on my TCP/IP enabled computer that I'm going to get a settlement offer from the MAFIAA?
I thought the exact same thing.
Moreover, I'd be willing to bet that, among the average population of people who hear of a newly patented idea and think, "Why I thought of that YEARS ago," a larger percentage of them are probably among
TFS makes a point about storing 1 GB (presumably GigaBYTE) of data per second, but THAT feat is already in widespread use, spefically for the digital manipulation of 4k film. The company that produces the systems that process this film data is called Baselight.
:P
Basically, 4k film, at a resolution of 4096x3112, requires approximately 50MB per frame @ 24 fps. That comes out to about 1.22GBps, and maninuplating the data doubles it to 2.44GBps. The systems[PDF] that Baselight sells run 8 nodes and 16 processors, and it's all built with commodity hardware and some flavor of Linux. Apparently they use 3ware RAID cards... and I found out about this by browsing 3ware's site when I was shopping for a RAID controller.
Either way, my point is, it's been done, and there's a real world application that requires that type of data storage bandwidth and has nothing to do with scientific data.
I remember when all this shit started and "terrorism" was a word I could barely define, let alone give an example of. It took 20 minutes on 9/11 SEEING the towers burn, to actually say, "I know what this is... This is terrorism."
TEA LEAVES at the bottom of a harbor doesn't even come fucking close. And the LAST thing that was on King George's mind after hearing about the incident was FEAR about how a sleeper agent would come out of nowhere and---oh god help him---dump HIS tea into the sea!
The definition of terrorism is getting looser and looser these days. After you start using a word enough, it begins to lose its meaning and simply become degrogatory. Start clamping your mind around the dictionary before you let the same lawmakers that passed the Patriot Act do it for you.
I happen to completely agree.
I've iterated myself before many times, a couple on slashdot, and, having tried both browsers, I very fully prefer and endorse IE7, and yes, I'm also a nerd.
These days, I don't really bother getting into arguments about it because I've found that most people who prefer Firefox tend to be fanboys. It's like arguing PC vs. Mac, or Windows vs. Linux. IE vs. Firefox will just be another age-old argument that absolutely no one will ever win.
In the end, it comes down to preference, cause arguments like RAM usage and such can really be mitigated the same way those other examples can be: Money. If you want a Mac, you'll shell out the cash for one. If you want to save some money, learn how to use Linux. If you want to run a more resource intensive browser, get some more RAM.
Really, slashdotters, quit the vicious fanboy modding and recognize this for what it is: a software dick-measuring contest.
Wow. I see what you mean. I didn't know that this was a common practice, but it certainly explains a lot. I have noticed that older tracks tend to be more listenable at high volumes in my car, and in particular, how newer tracks tend to have treble that hurts my ears at the same volumes. Either way, I guess it goes to show what a nerd thinks of when he reads "Compression." Thanks for the info.
Wrong sort of compression. All audio CDs are compressed heavily so that this week's Best Thing Ever sounds just that little bit louder than last week's Best Thing Ever.
That's one way to explain the declining trend in the quality of music over the last several years.
I'm used to music sounding pretty good, but I go out of my way to do so. Care to elaborate?
While it's damn near impossible to get a hold of new music recorded in a high resolution, digital format, it's pretty safe to say that most music is widely available at a 44.1khz sample, 16 bit sound, with no compression. Music, in this fashion, can be digitally ripped from its source, with error correction, and then compressed to a lossless format, such as FLAC or WMA Lossless.
I don't settle for anything else when I don't have to, but when I do, it's 320k mp3.
Unless, of course, you're bitching about the professionals that record and mix the tracks? I find it hard to believe that they would use lossy compression techniques.
It's not that VMWare doesn't work on AMD chips, I run VMWare on several AMD's and it works just peachy. What they're getting at is support for a hardware Hypervisor. The hypervisor is that spiffy little bit of logic that keeps track of x86 instructions inside of a CPU and determines which machine, real or virtual, that said intruction belongs to. Traditionally, this has been done in software, but porting that intruction set over to hardware, as Intel has done, and I believe AMD won't be doing until their quad core line comes to market, significantly improves the speed of virtualization to the point where there is no difference between a real OS and a virtualized one (except for multi-OS overhead, of course). That was one of the whole points of that "Blue Pill" idea some months ago.
Very true. I'm highly familiar with the relation between max wattage, actual wattage at operating temperature, and efficiency in various PSU's. While it's not necessarily the case that a lower max wattage PSU will consume less power, it's not that far of a stretch to assume that it is, in practice, generally the case. If you really want to nitpick you can measure a PSU's actual consumption or read reviews or whatever, but in the end, max wattage (and of course, 120v draw as rated on the device) are pretty good indicators of how much power the computer is capable of consuming. Either way, it's just one of those highly unscientific cases of "No, I didn't measure it, but yeah, I know I'm right."
My friend canned his SFF box in favor of a mid size ATX tower about four months ago. He upgraded the video card to the GeForce 7 series, and after doing so, the temperature sensitive fan on the video card stayed at its maximum, and incredibly annoying, RPM's all the while it was on.
Shuttles won't be quiet and heat efficient for a long time. If you want a system with a fast, multicore processor, and a beefy video card, be a man and buy a tower.
Although, after my friend moved some components to a new case, I snagged an old processor from work and turned his SFF box into my server. With a 220 watt PSU, it's a very affordable "leave me on all day" type of PC that stays out of sight, and, since it doesn't do much, it is actually very quiet.
The same zealotry actually keeps me off of Firefox.
I used to use Opera, way back in the day, and one of my favorite features was the mouse gesture support... of course, that was before 5 button mice became popular. I stopped using it because it didn't render several web sites properly. (Although after later learning of CSS "hacks" that are required for proper IE6 rendering, it's ironic to realize that Opera likely did render those pages correctly.)
Firefox had tabs. That made it nicer than IE6. Firefox has an initial load time significantly higher than IE6. That made it worse than IE6.
IE7 came out, and in my eyes, Firefox lost its edge. IE now has my beloved tabs. IE7 also uses ClearType, which I think most websites look better with.
When it comes down to it, you should use the web browser that you prefer, and it's not my job to give a damn which one you use. I use IE7. It loads faster and looks cleaner and better than any other browser available for Windows. But try arguing that stance with another computer geek... You'll probably get moans about security woes. Geeks are the ones smart enough not to browse as an admin and also not to install every ActiveX control and "Magical Desktop Enhancer with 50 IE Toolbars" app that they run across on a daily basis. If that's the case, why the hell start the argument in the first place?
Being a computer junkie (hello fellow Slashdotters), I have all but ceased watching television, and I just recently poured money into a theater style HDTV setup.
My television most seriously gets its greatest use via the attached computer and gaming consoles. I watch at least four shows that air weekly... and they're all drama shows with good writing (Heroes, anyone?). I actually prefer to watch shows two or three days after they air, when I can snag them via means other than my cable DVR and view them without advertisements. Commercials make me sick, and they ruin good shows. Even fast forwarding through them ruins a show. When I actually do sit down at the television and start flipping through the channels, I flip through the movie channels cause I know I might find something of quality to watch. But the point: Commericals, Reality TV, MTV... whatever... watching it as-is makes me feel stupid. Getting force fed an advertisement for some new product or seeing the most generalized preview for some show I don't even watch as a ploy by a network to keep me "tuned in" to their advertisements (not their shows) makes me feel like an idiot. And yes, as the OP says, those little good bits of my brain go flushing down the toilet.
Instead, I prefer to specifically pull what good bits of entertainment that I can from a series of tubes rather than the networks' garbage filled firehose. Hell, I just might even drop my cable service and my premium channels altogether if only I could subscribe to commercial free programming delivered ala carte over the internet in high definition and.... oh wait
...But I see a point to the other poster's argument. I switched to Mac OS X from windows for about a week, and all the while I was using it, aside from mouse issues, it took me a while to get used to the single menu bar. It felt like something was missing from all of my apps, but seeing as how M$ is trying to do that anyway (see Office 2k7, WMP, and IE7 with default settings), it was easy to accept.
Nonetheless, as time wore on, I found myself clicking the menu very infrequently. I moved almost completely over to keyboard shortcuts and had to use the objectdock to determine what apps were open (because that damn X doesn't close anything, so I almost never used it) and I had to look at the menu bar to see what was in focus. I never even thought of what a nightmare multiple monitors might be with relation to that menu. Still, WinXP doesn't scale the taskbar to multiple monitors elegantly (or at all), but then again, it doesn't rely on the taskbar like OS X does on its menu.
While I don't forsee anyone switching to 18 monitors anytime soon, I always like to keep in mind that the only implementations that survive in the IT field are those that meet one demand: Scalability.
The point is that ads embedded in video will drive people away to something more convenient. The idea is to have the ad subsidized stuff, along with banner ads, to generate revenue for them, and the simple fact that user generated content will *not* have ads in it is what brings people to the site in the first place.
After someone is at the site, then, they see "24, All New Episode" on the left or right side of the screen and watch it, generating money, and also happy users.
Ads embedded into user content will kill that site, not make it money.
Even if sites like youtube were to start including ads, and much more importantly, DRM, there's no reason (other than greed) for them to start including ads in truly user generated content. The place for ads and DRM on youtube is bringing content that's not native to the site such as network TV that will eventually make a more serious move to the internet.
As copyrighted content becomes more prolific on the site, some entities (unlike Viacom) will realize that it would be much more profitable to put authentic videos up on youtube that are subsidized with ads rather then letting other people do it and then suing their cut out of the company.
But seriously, ads in John Doe's video of his baby eating cereal? Hell no. That would piss people off to no end, and let me tell you, there are a million sites out there that really want to be the next YouTube.
While the economy would prosper from non-tariffed overseas sales of Microsoft and Dell goods, the resulting civil war from the Apple and Linux sympathizing states would most certainly bring it right back down.