any app from anybody can get onto the iTunes store.
But it better not endanger the hardware "USER Experience."
That invalidates the statement about making "an app that makes that kind of money you can bet your ass Apple will kill it by copying it, extending it and including it in their base app set for the ipad."
However, Apple has some features that it wants to keep for itself, to create FaceTime for instance. That will sell a whole lot of iPhones to people with, uh, dirty minds. (DIY p0rn starring YOU!:-)
You have to stop with your 'Winner take all" mentality.
Apple is quite happy NOT making cars, GPS systems, kitchen cabinets or of being the sole provisioner of everything to everybody. (There is something very "Soviet Union" in that attitude.)
Apple makes cool products. Sometime those products USE computers to make them cool.
The problem with the tablets that were investigated at the bank where I consulted was that they brought nothing worth bothering about. With MS security problems, they weren't interested. (They had many tens of thousands of PCs. Saving money would have interested them.)
Changing form factor just to run MS stuff on a portable, (stealable,) insecure, low-power platform just was not an appealing option to people who were quite content to have everything done much cheaper on their locked-down LANs and intranets.
Microsoft has to fight their own existing customer base and that is NOT happening. The "palace eunuchs", the accountants, won't let it. In fact they're legally obliged NOT TO.
Microsoft has always made their money from selling their stuff to people who didn't have to use it.
Ergo, the Zune and the other flops. (The X-Box is the ONLY qualified success.)
While Balmer embarrasses himself doing the "developers dance" with a complete lack of style, poise or acumen, Microsoft still collects its "Microsoft Tax" from the locked-in and probably resentful buyers of PCs (who try NOT to make any changes but the planned obsolescence of the PC industry means that its cheaper to to buy new hardware than to take it in to be repaired [specially with the development of NAS with hot-swappable drives reaching even the smallest businesses.])
As long as Microsoft is making money, lets pray they don't get rid of "Ol' Clueless."
Microsoft's biggest handicap is the "fool on the hill."
Thus you might not be able to make yourself understood while speaking but you were quite clearly understood with the written word.
How else could the emperors and the entire bureaucratic apparatus, who spoke Mandarin, have made themselves understood, and obeyed, out on the provinces who spoke in the hundreds of dialects and tongues all over Asia.
What the US achieved through force of arms, everybody in th 'States SPEAKING, however poorly, some form of English, the Chinese achieved over all of Asia without having to bat anyone about the head. (That they did so however is not in dispute.:-)
There are three primary ways Japanese is written: Kanji, Hirangana and Katakana
Kanji is constructed in layers until the ideograph is complete. (Think of it as being able to write this entire sentence with over strikes. [non destructive ^Hs:-]) Being based on ideograms means that there can be thousands of these.
Katakana and Hirangaga are syllabarries where the ideogrammatic representation of the
five vowel sounds (a, e, i, o, u, [or a, i, u, e and o in Nihongo {Japanese}]) are paired with
fifteen consonant sounds (v, k, g*, s, z*, t, d*, n, h, b*, p**, m, y, r, w
[* and ** are constructed by adding diacritical marks to the preceding sound {note NO L sound!:-}])
There are some rules about voicing, or leaving unvoiced, vowel sounds but its pretty straight forward.
There is no rule for radix (or sortable value,) or at least there wasn't until the late 1990s, early 2000s, when UNICODE was finalized.
Due to the construction of the written representations of the language being done in layers and having diacritical marks Japanese calligraphy is DENSER than the equivalent text using any western alphabet.
That said, the density is only achieved at tremendous cost.
There are almost NO Japanese who are totally fluent in their own language as written.
Another UI "revolution" that is happening without Microsoft because, while the shareholders won't stand for it, Microsoft's own accountants are legally obligated to NOT approve the expenditures for it. Talk about getting squeezed between Scylla and Charibdes.
As a technology user, (I'm now out of development or even management,) I'm a bit of an Apple Fanboy, but I also like Linux and would definitely want one.
I wish them all the success in overcoming the scaling obstacles they're going to encounter.
Window xxx #'s biggest problems are: 1) that its from Microsoft, (they're on your desktop at work, 'nuf said,) 2) that its based on Windows, (its on your desktop at work, 'nuf said,) 3) that its NOT something you actually bought for yourself,
(and never has been, [if it wasn't built into the box when it arrived, you wouldn't have it in the house,]) 4) that its from Microsoft, (who insist on shooting themselves in the foot by reminding you that its Windows xxx #.)
Microsoft's problems will remain for as long as: 1) the accountants in HR where you work have total control of what you can do, 2) the accountants at Microsoft have total control over what Microsoft can do, 3) all accountants are risk averse bunches of unimaginative, joy-killing non-entities.
I predict utter failure for Microsoft with complete certainty because of their past success, and how they achieved it.
They became dominant on the desktop by buggering and then beggaring all of their 'partners" until the margins were so thin that there are fewer PC chassis manufacturer left ACROSS THE ENTIRE PLANET than the average person has fingers and toes.
Microsoft so commoditized the PC industry that only the extremely risk averse are left.
Innovation costs money and is risky.
Nobody has any money left to risk.
Microsoft has effectively written its own epitaph: "A Computer On Every Desktop." To which a wag might add: "And that's IT!"
If your site IPv6 address is on the "naughty list" it doesn't matter what you spoofed the DNS to call the web site.
Its is also a lot faster to do a binary hash on a fixed bit length IP address rather than a variable length domain name.
Most of the current problems from miscreants and other forms of low-lifes will disappear, as will most script kiddies and pirate sharers out there when they realize that there is no more anonymity on the internet.
Most traffic will be point-to-point and one of the things it will be pointing is... your machine.
They actually manufacture things that a large enough number of people LIKE TO USE.
Microsoft is a software company which reduced, debased and beggared the hardware market until none of their "partners" can afford to do any but the most basic cosmetic changes to anything. Since that comes at a price so their understanding of color wheels is NOT a designer's. (The response to the original iMac was to put crappy colored plastic panels on the cases, like chrome plating a turd.)
Why, YEARS after the development of USB technology, do I still have PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse on my newest box?
Because there is an engineer utter failure to see that the world does NOT need a hundred-bladed switch bade knife.
Why, after Apple has changed hardware form factors several times on all their product lines and moving into different lines entirely, is the PC still hobbled by the same PC chassis that they used to make beige boxes for the last 20 years?
Because there isn't a single engineer out there with any sort of creativity or imagination, or if there is, there isn't a single accountant willing to let the engineers take the chance.
Microsoft said it wanted to put "A COMPUTER ON EVERY DESKTOP."
Corporate IT department didn't even want to switch to Windows XP; NT4.x was good enough.
They didn't want any Windows Vista either so it was D.o.A. except when forced to pay for it when buying any new replacement hardware.
They have thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of desktops to manage and they've been shedding SysAdmins for a decade now so they're short on staff.
They look forward to change like hospital patients look forward to surgery. Its gonna HURT!
If you want to see the new OS adoption rate, take a look at how often IT updates existing machines. (I know of some machines installed in several banks, securities firms and trust companies still running OS/2. Their function hasn't changed so their configuration hasn't changed. Regardless of how much money they handle per transaction.)
Take a look at IT acquisition of new machines. Is it actually falling because the old equipment is still working? (NAS with hot swappable storage was a Godsend for many IT departments. There is no need for huge storage capacities on the desktop, there is no need for huge processing capacities on the desktop.)
I was just in a bank running 327x emulation software because their transactions were actually running on IBM mainframes (probably Z Series.) How much horsepower do you need to screen scrape and push a screen's worth of transaction at a time? Not much... That bank probably has 15K to 20K desktops and there are a few thousand such banks, insurance companies, mortgage firms and other really BIG organizations. They're going to buy hardware in lengthening amortization cycles.
Nobody ever got fired for putting off a PC hardware upgrade. And that's the only time they'll consider getting now OS software.
They're a CONSUMER PRODUCTS company. As far as Apple is concerned, Apple doesn't do IT.
Just like all makers of gramophones benefited by the introduction of standard playback speeds, Apple benefits from the adoption of various standards.
Apple makes and sells HARDWARE.
Software is how hardware inter-operates.
Apple is only too glad to license somebody else's standard and beat the snot out of the competition with elegant hardware an software design.
None of the other hardware manufacturers understand elegance.
Consumers instinctively DO.
Ergo Apple sells millions upon millions of iPods, iPhones and iPads when Microsoft throws billions of dollars dollars in the same arena with lousy results.
Zune sales suck, PCs sell only to businesses who just want the damn things to not be such malware targets and they have to pull their mobile phone after a few weeks.
the use of decompression chambers. Then again its because he DIED from caisson disease (decompression.)
But MANDATING the use of decompression chambers, just like the use of collapsible steering columns in cars which would stop you from resembling a bug in a Victorian collection, (pinned through the chest,) had to be enacted by someone who wasn't in it just for the money.
The accountants told GM, Ford and Chrysler: "This will cost share holders $ and upset the P&L Statements".
The government and a whole bunch of the American public read "Unsafe At Any Speed" and said "Screw YOU GM, Ford and Chrysler! I'll pay the extra $300 to not get skewered..."
SOMEBODY has to take the reins from "Laisser Faire" at some point because businesses are too short sighted to look up from the balance sheet.
(I'm convinced that HELL has a special section for accountants where balance sheets DON'T, nobody gives a shit about P&L Statements and Journals are maintained up to the microsecond...)
Don't tell me you like the fact that if you want to start a radio station you need a certified course, a license, sponsors, a production studio, transmitters, radio towers, etcetera. Basically LOTS of $ for an evanescent footprint in the consciousness of the masses.
Your fiction of "two men with basic electronics knowledge" would land you in jail in every country on this planet.
N:M isn't about what wikileaks tell you but about the fact that there can even be a wikileaks.
I don't imagine ANY commercial sponsor for that kind of content and radio runs first and foremost on money.
With the internet its possible for an individual to make a difference in the world.
Apart from that, as Liebling said "the power of the press belongs to those who OWN one" and have been able to enter into the distribution and promotion deals that will at least grant you access to the masses.
Broadcasting of information from a single source over a scarce resource fundamentally puts up gates, gatekeepers and imposes an economic structure over the free flow of information. (It doesn't matter if its a rented town crier, paper, radio or stone tablet, its all scarce and controllable. It describes a monopoly or at best an oligopoly.)
The true power of the internet lies in subsuming the existing oligopolistic business models since N:M includes the ability of 1:N existentially.
The facts that the digital revolution happened and that the transmission of data is being done at a much lower cost point is at the heart of the problems that the existing oligopolies are having.
The media companies are only having problems with the revenue side of the equation, not the expense side. They love that it lowered their costs. They hate that it limited their sales.
It wouldn't be so bad for them if we had no consumer class devices, but we do. Devices like the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and similar devices are all terminal points on the internet.
We can now connect to the internet and using the web and other open, or semi-open, protocols can access data regardless of its actual rendering.
The mechanical transcription of content over some analog media is dead! Long live the digital file!
Look for these very mechanisms to be banned by congress, the senate and possibly by presidential decree as the kind of "wealth creation without effort but strictly through gaming the system" which led us down the same path that derivatives did.
All of the gains were wiped out and everybody but the insiders got stuck with the multi-trillion dollar tab when the music stopped and we found out the chairs were rented and had all be repossessed.
These are the kinds of games which should be outlawed.
I just bought a system which still has/uses PS2 mouse and keyboard ports.
I bought, used USB attached peripherals and have done so for years.
My keyboards, printers, scanners, cameras, DAW and MIDI keyboard etc are all USB.
There is no legitimacy for keeping PS2 crap around except inertia and the fact that PC product engineers don't seem to be the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Why does Apple seem to have such a sharp design team?
They don't really but they shoot the engineers early, when they are drawing up the specs and then bury them in the back yard so they can fertilize something rather than pollute product ideas with the same-ol' same-ol', like putting on-board PS2 ports.
A far more likely scenario would be Frank Herbert's Dosadi Experiment.
But North Koreans are hardly going to be released on an unsuspecting universe like a plague of locust.
More likely, since the entire country has a population that barely rivals most major capitals (25million for the whole schmeer) they will revert to barbarism and neanderthal living condition. (Sort of like in Papua New Guinea but with a bitchin' cold climate...)
I would be more worried about them having enough fissionable materials to make a dirty bomb before I waste any sleep over their self-professed capacity to make clean thermo-nuclear fusion.
Slashdot Mirror
FUGGEDABOUDIT!
The iPad will never, NEVER, be powerful enough to run Office apps well.
Apple is now developing chip designs to get QuickTime run in hardware.
You're pushing a "general CPU" approach while Apple is going entirely in the other direction.
any app from anybody can get onto the iTunes store.
But it better not endanger the hardware "USER Experience."
That invalidates the statement about making "an app that makes that kind of money you can bet your ass Apple will kill it by copying it, extending it and including it in their base app set for the ipad."
However, Apple has some features that it wants to keep for itself, to create FaceTime for instance. That will sell a whole lot of iPhones to people with, uh, dirty minds. (DIY p0rn starring YOU! :-)
You have to stop with your 'Winner take all" mentality.
Apple is quite happy NOT making cars, GPS systems, kitchen cabinets or of being the sole provisioner of everything to everybody. (There is something very "Soviet Union" in that attitude.)
Apple makes cool products. Sometime those products USE computers to make them cool.
The problem with the tablets that were investigated at the bank where I consulted was that they brought nothing worth bothering about. With MS security problems, they weren't interested. (They had many tens of thousands of PCs. Saving money would have interested them.)
Changing form factor just to run MS stuff on a portable, (stealable,) insecure, low-power platform just was not an appealing option to people who were quite content to have everything done much cheaper on their locked-down LANs and intranets.
Microsoft has to fight their own existing customer base and that is NOT happening. The "palace eunuchs", the accountants, won't let it. In fact they're legally obliged NOT TO.
Microsoft has always made their money from selling their stuff to people who didn't have to use it.
Ergo, the Zune and the other flops. (The X-Box is the ONLY qualified success.)
While Balmer embarrasses himself doing the "developers dance" with a complete lack of style, poise or acumen, Microsoft still collects its "Microsoft Tax" from the locked-in and probably resentful buyers of PCs (who try NOT to make any changes but the planned obsolescence of the PC industry means that its cheaper to to buy new hardware than to take it in to be repaired [specially with the development of NAS with hot-swappable drives reaching even the smallest businesses.])
As long as Microsoft is making money, lets pray they don't get rid of "Ol' Clueless."
Microsoft's biggest handicap is the "fool on the hill."
regardless of how they were spoken.
Thus you might not be able to make yourself understood while speaking but you were quite clearly understood with the written word.
How else could the emperors and the entire bureaucratic apparatus, who spoke Mandarin, have made themselves understood, and obeyed, out on the provinces who spoke in the hundreds of dialects and tongues all over Asia.
What the US achieved through force of arms, everybody in th 'States SPEAKING, however poorly, some form of English, the Chinese achieved over all of Asia without having to bat anyone about the head. (That they did so however is not in dispute. :-)
your references aren't worth much.
There are three primary ways Japanese is written: Kanji, Hirangana and Katakana
Kanji is constructed in layers until the ideograph is complete. (Think of it as being able to write this entire sentence with over strikes. [non destructive ^Hs :-]) Being based on ideograms means that there can be thousands of these.
Katakana and Hirangaga are syllabarries where the ideogrammatic representation of the :-}])
five vowel sounds (a, e, i, o, u, [or a, i, u, e and o in Nihongo {Japanese}]) are paired with
fifteen consonant sounds (v, k, g*, s, z*, t, d*, n, h, b*, p**, m, y, r, w
[* and ** are constructed by adding diacritical marks to the preceding sound {note NO L sound!
There are some rules about voicing, or leaving unvoiced, vowel sounds but its pretty straight forward.
There is no rule for radix (or sortable value,) or at least there wasn't until the late 1990s, early 2000s, when UNICODE was finalized.
Due to the construction of the written representations of the language being done in layers and having diacritical marks Japanese calligraphy is DENSER than the equivalent text using any western alphabet.
That said, the density is only achieved at tremendous cost.
There are almost NO Japanese who are totally fluent in their own language as written.
Another UI "revolution" that is happening without Microsoft because, while the shareholders won't stand for it, Microsoft's own accountants are legally obligated to NOT approve the expenditures for it. Talk about getting squeezed between Scylla and Charibdes.
As a technology user, (I'm now out of development or even management,) I'm a bit of an Apple Fanboy, but I also like Linux and would definitely want one.
I wish them all the success in overcoming the scaling obstacles they're going to encounter.
Hooray!
I trust bureaucrats very little but I trust politicians not at all.
I live in New Jersey... I KNOW better.
A promise is something a politician breaks at the first smell of a dollar bill waved in his tax fattened face.
We'd do a lot better without elected officials (who owe favors and/or money to the people who paid for 'em.)
Window xxx #'s biggest problems are:
1) that its from Microsoft, (they're on your desktop at work, 'nuf said,)
2) that its based on Windows, (its on your desktop at work, 'nuf said,)
3) that its NOT something you actually bought for yourself,
(and never has been, [if it wasn't built into the box when it arrived, you wouldn't have it in the house,])
4) that its from Microsoft, (who insist on shooting themselves in the foot by reminding you that its Windows xxx #.)
Microsoft's problems will remain for as long as:
1) the accountants in HR where you work have total control of what you can do,
2) the accountants at Microsoft have total control over what Microsoft can do,
3) all accountants are risk averse bunches of unimaginative, joy-killing non-entities.
I predict utter failure for Microsoft with complete certainty because of their past success, and how they achieved it.
They became dominant on the desktop by buggering and then beggaring all of their 'partners" until the margins were so thin that there are fewer PC chassis manufacturer left ACROSS THE ENTIRE PLANET than the average person has fingers and toes.
Microsoft so commoditized the PC industry that only the extremely risk averse are left.
Innovation costs money and is risky.
Nobody has any money left to risk.
Microsoft has effectively written its own epitaph: "A Computer On Every Desktop." To which a wag might add: "And that's IT!"
Who the [expletive deleted] would want to mess with a TI?
You're much better off using an HP.
RPN got me into stack architecture, FORTH, Smalltalk and lots of other things.
If your site IPv6 address is on the "naughty list" it doesn't matter what you spoofed the DNS to call the web site.
Its is also a lot faster to do a binary hash on a fixed bit length IP address rather than a variable length domain name.
Most of the current problems from miscreants and other forms of low-lifes will disappear, as will most script kiddies and pirate sharers out there when they realize that there is no more anonymity on the internet.
Most traffic will be point-to-point and one of the things it will be pointing is ... your machine.
Hee Hee...
Just show up a some doc's walk-in clinic and tell him you got one fuck of a case of angina. (Sorry R. Crumb. I couldn't resist. :-)
They actually manufacture things that a large enough number of people LIKE TO USE.
Microsoft is a software company which reduced, debased and beggared the hardware market until none of their "partners" can afford to do any but the most basic cosmetic changes to anything. Since that comes at a price so their understanding of color wheels is NOT a designer's. (The response to the original iMac was to put crappy colored plastic panels on the cases, like chrome plating a turd.)
Why, YEARS after the development of USB technology, do I still have PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse on my newest box?
Because there is an engineer utter failure to see that the world does NOT need a hundred-bladed switch bade knife.
Why, after Apple has changed hardware form factors several times on all their product lines and moving into different lines entirely, is the PC still hobbled by the same PC chassis that they used to make beige boxes for the last 20 years?
Because there isn't a single engineer out there with any sort of creativity or imagination, or if there is, there isn't a single accountant willing to let the engineers take the chance.
Microsoft said it wanted to put "A COMPUTER ON EVERY DESKTOP."
Well, they've succeeded, all too well...
Corporate IT department didn't even want to switch to Windows XP; NT4.x was good enough.
They didn't want any Windows Vista either so it was D.o.A. except when forced to pay for it when buying any new replacement hardware.
They have thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of desktops to manage and they've been shedding SysAdmins for a decade now so they're short on staff.
They look forward to change like hospital patients look forward to surgery. Its gonna HURT!
If you want to see the new OS adoption rate, take a look at how often IT updates existing machines. (I know of some machines installed in several banks, securities firms and trust companies still running OS/2. Their function hasn't changed so their configuration hasn't changed. Regardless of how much money they handle per transaction.)
Take a look at IT acquisition of new machines. Is it actually falling because the old equipment is still working? (NAS with hot swappable storage was a Godsend for many IT departments. There is no need for huge storage capacities on the desktop, there is no need for huge processing capacities on the desktop.)
I was just in a bank running 327x emulation software because their transactions were actually running on IBM mainframes (probably Z Series.) How much horsepower do you need to screen scrape and push a screen's worth of transaction at a time? Not much... That bank probably has 15K to 20K desktops and there are a few thousand such banks, insurance companies, mortgage firms and other really BIG organizations. They're going to buy hardware in lengthening amortization cycles.
Nobody ever got fired for putting off a PC hardware upgrade. And that's the only time they'll consider getting now OS software.
They're a CONSUMER PRODUCTS company. As far as Apple is concerned, Apple doesn't do IT.
Just like all makers of gramophones benefited by the introduction of standard playback speeds, Apple benefits from the adoption of various standards.
Apple makes and sells HARDWARE.
Software is how hardware inter-operates.
Apple is only too glad to license somebody else's standard and beat the snot out of the competition with elegant hardware an software design.
None of the other hardware manufacturers understand elegance.
Consumers instinctively DO.
Ergo Apple sells millions upon millions of iPods, iPhones and iPads when Microsoft throws billions of dollars dollars in the same arena with lousy results.
Zune sales suck, PCs sell only to businesses who just want the damn things to not be such malware targets and they have to pull their mobile phone after a few weeks.
The jury isn't in yet as far as game consoles.
Zimbabwe dollars. (Essentially impossible. :-)
McBride ties to Mugabe aren't in question but it will be revealed that they have a mutual admiration society going.
If only Derle had an army ... and his word was law ... and it didn't matter that the country was now worthless.
If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there'd be no trade for tinkers.
the use of decompression chambers. Then again its because he DIED from caisson disease (decompression.)
But MANDATING the use of decompression chambers, just like the use of collapsible steering columns in cars which would stop you from resembling a bug in a Victorian collection, (pinned through the chest,) had to be enacted by someone who wasn't in it just for the money.
The accountants told GM, Ford and Chrysler: "This will cost share holders $ and upset the P&L Statements".
The government and a whole bunch of the American public read "Unsafe At Any Speed" and said "Screw YOU GM, Ford and Chrysler! I'll pay the extra $300 to not get skewered..."
SOMEBODY has to take the reins from "Laisser Faire" at some point because businesses are too short sighted to look up from the balance sheet.
(I'm convinced that HELL has a special section for accountants where balance sheets DON'T, nobody gives a shit about P&L Statements and Journals are maintained up to the microsecond...)
Don't tell me you like the fact that if you want to start a radio station you need a certified course, a license, sponsors, a production studio, transmitters, radio towers, etcetera. Basically LOTS of $ for an evanescent footprint in the consciousness of the masses.
Your fiction of "two men with basic electronics knowledge" would land you in jail in every country on this planet.
N:M isn't about what wikileaks tell you but about the fact that there can even be a wikileaks.
I don't imagine ANY commercial sponsor for that kind of content and radio runs first and foremost on money.
With the internet its possible for an individual to make a difference in the world.
Apart from that, as Liebling said "the power of the press belongs to those who OWN one" and have been able to enter into the distribution and promotion deals that will at least grant you access to the masses.
I now have an expensive TiTanium slab that boots to a DOS prompt but NO GUI.
I'd be plenty pissed off if I didn't have other hardware available. As it is, I'm merely peeved.
OS X 10.5.x is the end of the line for Apple's support of the PPC anyway.(I thought development on Ubuntu PPC was stopped a few years ago.)
If you know of somewhere I can download Linux for PPC I'd appreciate an email charles [at] msbpodcast.com
Broadcasting of information from a single source over a scarce resource fundamentally puts up gates, gatekeepers and imposes an economic structure over the free flow of information. (It doesn't matter if its a rented town crier, paper, radio or stone tablet, its all scarce and controllable. It describes a monopoly or at best an oligopoly.)
The true power of the internet lies in subsuming the existing oligopolistic business models since N:M includes the ability of 1:N existentially.
The facts that the digital revolution happened and that the transmission of data is being done at a much lower cost point is at the heart of the problems that the existing oligopolies are having.
The media companies are only having problems with the revenue side of the equation, not the expense side. They love that it lowered their costs. They hate that it limited their sales.
It wouldn't be so bad for them if we had no consumer class devices, but we do. Devices like the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and similar devices are all terminal points on the internet.
We can now connect to the internet and using the web and other open, or semi-open, protocols can access data regardless of its actual rendering.
The mechanical transcription of content over some analog media is dead! Long live the digital file!
McLuhan is dead! Long live post-McLuhan!
I admire the sentiment.
You bought stock and it should not be thought of as currency.
Its a brilliant idea, and unenforceable unless we stick a middle-man in there.
Money is a "fungible" resource.
Its also very perishable (How's your Zimbabwean Dollars keeping their value there? :-)
Stocks must be convertible to and from currency but the speed of the transactions must be slowed to twenty four hours from inception to execution.
That
Look for these very mechanisms to be banned by congress, the senate and possibly by presidential decree as the kind of "wealth creation without effort but strictly through gaming the system" which led us down the same path that derivatives did.
All of the gains were wiped out and everybody but the insiders got stuck with the multi-trillion dollar tab when the music stopped and we found out the chairs were rented and had all be repossessed.
These are the kinds of games which should be outlawed.
... not just Early Adopters.
I just bought a system which still has/uses PS2 mouse and keyboard ports.
I bought, used USB attached peripherals and have done so for years.
My keyboards, printers, scanners, cameras, DAW and MIDI keyboard etc are all USB.
There is no legitimacy for keeping PS2 crap around except inertia and the fact that PC product engineers don't seem to be the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Why does Apple seem to have such a sharp design team?
They don't really but they shoot the engineers early, when they are drawing up the specs and then bury them in the back yard so they can fertilize something rather than pollute product ideas with the same-ol' same-ol', like putting on-board PS2 ports.
Otherwise the politician won't have learned a thing.
A far more likely scenario would be Frank Herbert's Dosadi Experiment.
But North Koreans are hardly going to be released on an unsuspecting universe like a plague of locust.
More likely, since the entire country has a population that barely rivals most major capitals (25million for the whole schmeer) they will revert to barbarism and neanderthal living condition. (Sort of like in Papua New Guinea but with a bitchin' cold climate...)
I would be more worried about them having enough fissionable materials to make a dirty bomb before I waste any sleep over their self-professed capacity to make clean thermo-nuclear fusion.