640k should be enough... meh. At some point, businesses approach diminishing returns with technology for the mass market. e.g. typical passenger jet versus Concorde. Another example, the AK-47 should be good enough for everyone, and was built in, you guessed it, 1947.
My daily needs have been well and truly provided for since the P4. In fact, I don't own a faster computer than a P4. This has been the case for something like 4 years now. I'm at the point where a typical consumer in the classic Moore's Law years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI
The last two computers I bought were under 300 Mhz and under $400. Neither has a video card, both completely solid state, completely silent, and fit in a coat pocket (not that they are portable of course). Both consume less than 10W. I don't anticipate buying another personal computer without similar characteristics.
You are right. The rise of the low cost computer is the beginning of the end for high profit margins on Windows. The only real way they have of combatting FOSS is to release Windows for next to nothing and hope to extract some sort of money with Office. But that is a losing tactic as well. As capable computers approach the cost of a VCR, consumers will have the choice of getting something that does the job, or something that does the job and costs twice as much.
What other options do MS have? They can't kill/buy off Via or the other commodity PC manufacturers that will spring up as know-how increases. Import restrictions can't stop world trade, are not popular and take a long time to implement.
Killer apps to increase future price of computers? The average human has only so many needs that can be filled by an increasing number of instructions per second, especially when those instructions must be executed in parallel. Computers are fast enough for our senses (HD video, sound) and communications needs (bottleneck is in the networking). Most of the killer apps are already here. Any extra functionality enabled by some sort of high powered Intel machine is a small percentage of total functionality provided by the current crop of computers.
In this sort of environment, owning a computer that will do almost everything is an easy decision for $200, even if it means acquainting yourself with a different operating system. Ubuntu is easy to install, but even easier if it just comes pre-installed on your device with all drivers working. With understanding comes trust, acceptance and consideration for use in other spheres of life. If anything, the killer app is a small, very low power, solid state computer (hence silent while requiring zero maintenance) - for firewalls, NAS, HTPC, portables, general PC use and home gaming. There is no real margin in any of this (except games), and no ability to fund the survival mechanisms of an operating system and office suite monopolist. Only niche players will find the margins.
With high profit margins comes the resources to lobby, to advertise, to muscle hardware vendors. Maintaining their monopoly has not been cheap, but while there was profit to be had it was a sound business proposition. Without the money coming in, the collapse will be reminiscent of the Soviet Union - without the resources to maintain the empire, the decay will accelerate rapidly and people will be surprised at how rapidly and pervasively it actually happens.
"Visit a construction site and check out the number of vehicles that use large diesel engines that are consuming vast quantities of energy."
Visit a highway in peak hour. Estimate the energy consumption by those cars and trucks. Now estimate how many minutes it would take for that consumed energy to equate to the energy used in constructing that highway. Now estimate the life of the highway and calculate where most of the energy is used. Divide the former by the latter and realize what an inconsequential part of energy usage is infrastructure creation.
Now take your bicycle with heavy, knobby tires and see how far you can travel on a dirt road with intersections. The rolling resistance kills your speed, and the frequent intersections slow you down even more, turning your energy output into worn brake pads. You'd be lucky to average 5km/h.
Put a bicycle with street tires on a highway with interchanges. 25km/h is now easy - road is smooth, you don't have to stop. Aerodynamically improve your bicycle, and you can nearly double that. You can also fit more bicycles per width of highway. Considering typical peak-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic, you have probably improved on the ICE powered status quo.
Any primitive civilization using knobby tired bicycles on dirt tracks, and uninsulated homes that can't almost be heated by body-heat alone will be steam-rolled by a civilization that can afford to stockpile energy for defensive purposes. If your hypothetical civilization is too stupid to figure out how to make crop harvesting net energy positive, something every farming civilization prior to the 1940s or so did as a matter of course... I really don't hold out much hope for them.
I suspect that vehicles of the future will get their safety from not going so fast.
Work done/ distance is roughly proportional to velocity squared. So too is kinetic energy, and the kinetic energy involved in pulverizing a person in a crash. Going a little slower yields so much benefit - safety and efficiency. You can also use smaller vehicles. Those vehicles can be human powered. This means less bumper-bumper traffic, and less pollution too (generated on-site or outsourced to a nearby coal station)
"eugenics came from the most educated of classes, it certainly didn't come from the bottom. And at the time it was hopelessly naive, there needs to be a check on human ignorance at all levels."
Eugenics works... do you think the Chihuahua, the Shire horse or the various highly intelligent breeds of sheepdog just happened to come into existence by themselves? Eugenics for various traits with humans has happened for a long time too. From aboriginal coming of age rituals to Judaism to ancient Sparta, selective breeding of humans (either by themselves, or by others) is pretty much as old as recorded history.
About the only hopelessly naive thing is to pretend that eugenics is something new or doesn't work. There is one failing with eugenics however, and that is you can't use it to build a class of easily herded consumers, happy to pay retail for worthless junk, happy to work, happy to believe in the puppet show of democracy, happy to go to war, and happy to indulge in the bread and circuses of the day.
'The English language has an advanced technology known as "metaphor".'
I'm not sure how knowledge of metaphors is supposed to handle reduced energy consumption. However, there are many overlooked technologies for surviving with less energy demonstrated in other countries or our own history. I'm unsure why a large part of the world seems content to use up all of the world's resources in a fraction of the span of our recorded history.
That's a good list. I guess "malware" would be filed under security. That's a REALLY good list. Well done.
On another level, the reason I use Linux is because I generally prioritize long term outcomes over short term gains. Learning how to set up and use a Linux or BSD system is a sensible investment.
I didn't used to think so, but now I do. I think it was reading about Project Orion on slashdot. It will probably pay to keep a supply of uranium on the planet in case we ever need it for that sort of use. Nuclear is the ultimate non-renewable energy source. Coal and oil can probably be synthesized eventually, taking the energy from solar. Creating uranium is a lot tougher.
"And if it takes a century to develop the replacement technology, do we freeze in the meantime?"
They have this technology called the "blanket". Apparently you can stack these on top of one another to increase the insulative effect. I even hear that they have blankets shaped like humans with holes for feet, hands and heads. They are called "clothes".
"People who actually read the bible realize that he is portrayed as neither."
I was thinking more of God as simulation programmer rather than the literal biblical version. It doesn't affect my point though, we have no information as to the powers of God outside of this universe. Maybe He has a budget and deadlines just like the rest of us.
If you were God, I don't see why you couldn't initialize the universe simulation at a point 6000 years ago with all the evidence in said universe pointing to a cosmological creation point 13.73 billion years ago (e.g. velocities, photons etc). If all God was concerned about was what the man-apes get up to on planet earth, why waste CPU cycles computing 2.3 * 10^6 as much history as necessary?
Maybe He is running a bunch of slightly different parallel universe simulations, so He has run the simulation to generate the 6000 year point snapshot once, and just uses values from that snapshot to start off the new simulations?
We should remember that within this universe, God is omniscient and omnipotent. However, outside our universe there is no reason God should be any more omnipotent or omniscient than, say, John Carmack. If so, he would certainly be pushed to optimize and cut corners. As long as what we see at the edges of the areas we can see and touch are accurately simulated, the rest can be simulated to with approximations so long as physical limitations prevent us from getting fine enough detail to know for sure.
Perhaps when we send out something like a Ulysses probe he is forced to start computing that region of space. He sees a pause, a "loading new level" type of wait, we don't see anything. In fact, whenever it starts to chug it just slows down in the mode of an 80s computer game instead of reducing the frame rate - the key point to keep the inhabitants of the universe from becoming aware of a glitch.
I suppose time being quantized would be an indication of this, seeing as the most logical way to compute such a simulation would be to compute minute iterations or "frames". A limited number of these would make up a second. Enough such that continuity is well approximated, as few as possible to keep the simulation from consuming unnecessary resources.
I know all this violates Occam's Razor, but Occam's Razor is only a heuristic. Simplicity is orthogonal to truth, humanity's urge for a working hypothesis notwithstanding.
"Now it looks like hybrids might dominate some day; but gasoline-only had quite a run, didn't it?"
True. What has enabled gasoline (and diesel) vehicles to predominate is the infrastructure, as well as the advertising.
Infrastructure and image are a lot less important in the computer arena. For most people, a desktop computer is not a status symbol comparable to a car, house or even a nice shirt. Hence the bog standard beige box. And an ultracheap ultraportable running linux has access to the same infrastructure as the desktop - standard wall outlets, network jacks, wifi etc.
The only difference is mental "infrastructure", where we expect things to be, what we expect things to look like and what we expect things to do. This is indeed important.
It is a lot easier for a motivated person to switch from MS to Ubuntu than from SUV to bicycle, say. The latter comes with a serious risk of death for a lot of commutes. The reason is that roads are built and legislated for cars. Having lots of stops (requiring excess energy), and driving to the limits of perceived safety rather than economy work out really well for large, heavy gasoline and diesel powered vehicles.
"We need to encourage people to understand that customising your OS, playing with it, trying things out, should be the norm - and that you really have to be quite clever to "break" a computer!"
How right you are. If you don't have a second computer, or at least a second hard drive, you can't take the risks necessary to learn how things work. The ironic thing is that very, very rarely do you ever mess anything up to the point where you can't get it working again.
"I now know: becuse TCO is a meaningless measure which is not used in the real world. The real world measure used is ROI (return on investment)."
Now, that was insightful. In the real world, if you go FOSS you may (but not in my experience) have an initial higher investment taking into account research, training, etc. After that, the only cost is support, if you choose to buy it. There is no perpetual (and large) income stream going to the software vendor and no cost of retraining when the vendor decides it has to force an upgrade on the customer. So ROI is almost always better.
And in a recession, FOSS is that much better, because companies tend to want to keep necessary employees but stop large cash outlays.
"if you want to be a glass-half-empty kind of guy, then you could say that it's a poor testament to their ability to predict expectancies, rather than to exceed them."
Except for the fact that there is a good deal of statistical uncertainty involved with predicting part failure. Two identically manufactured bearings will rarely ever fail at the same exact time. You might draw a dud or you might draw a super-bearing. The same way as a given atom of carbon-14 might decay in one millisecond or in a billion years time.
There is also a small possibility that their design was flawed but they just got lucky with the parts, construction, modes of operation required and the particular inputs applied to their system. Remote, but possible. This is all related to the single event nature of the spacecraft. If they had sent up 30+ Ulysses, we'd be able to discount the "flawed but lucky" possibility.
Slashdot Mirror
640k should be enough... meh. At some point, businesses approach diminishing returns with technology for the mass market. e.g. typical passenger jet versus Concorde. Another example, the AK-47 should be good enough for everyone, and was built in, you guessed it, 1947.
My daily needs have been well and truly provided for since the P4. In fact, I don't own a faster computer than a P4. This has been the case for something like 4 years now. I'm at the point where a typical consumer in the classic Moore's Law years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI
The last two computers I bought were under 300 Mhz and under $400. Neither has a video card, both completely solid state, completely silent, and fit in a coat pocket (not that they are portable of course). Both consume less than 10W. I don't anticipate buying another personal computer without similar characteristics.
ME-2, ME-3,...ME-n, it's only going to force the price in one direction.
You are right. The rise of the low cost computer is the beginning of the end for high profit margins on Windows. The only real way they have of combatting FOSS is to release Windows for next to nothing and hope to extract some sort of money with Office. But that is a losing tactic as well. As capable computers approach the cost of a VCR, consumers will have the choice of getting something that does the job, or something that does the job and costs twice as much.
What other options do MS have? They can't kill/buy off Via or the other commodity PC manufacturers that will spring up as know-how increases. Import restrictions can't stop world trade, are not popular and take a long time to implement.
Killer apps to increase future price of computers? The average human has only so many needs that can be filled by an increasing number of instructions per second, especially when those instructions must be executed in parallel. Computers are fast enough for our senses (HD video, sound) and communications needs (bottleneck is in the networking). Most of the killer apps are already here. Any extra functionality enabled by some sort of high powered Intel machine is a small percentage of total functionality provided by the current crop of computers.
In this sort of environment, owning a computer that will do almost everything is an easy decision for $200, even if it means acquainting yourself with a different operating system. Ubuntu is easy to install, but even easier if it just comes pre-installed on your device with all drivers working. With understanding comes trust, acceptance and consideration for use in other spheres of life. If anything, the killer app is a small, very low power, solid state computer (hence silent while requiring zero maintenance) - for firewalls, NAS, HTPC, portables, general PC use and home gaming. There is no real margin in any of this (except games), and no ability to fund the survival mechanisms of an operating system and office suite monopolist. Only niche players will find the margins.
With high profit margins comes the resources to lobby, to advertise, to muscle hardware vendors. Maintaining their monopoly has not been cheap, but while there was profit to be had it was a sound business proposition. Without the money coming in, the collapse will be reminiscent of the Soviet Union - without the resources to maintain the empire, the decay will accelerate rapidly and people will be surprised at how rapidly and pervasively it actually happens.
Don't forget the $480 wooden knobs, for that rich, warm sound.
High oil prices, resulting inflation, recession, etc. That should sell it pretty well.
"Visit a construction site and check out the number of vehicles that use large diesel engines that are consuming vast quantities of energy."
Visit a highway in peak hour. Estimate the energy consumption by those cars and trucks. Now estimate how many minutes it would take for that consumed energy to equate to the energy used in constructing that highway. Now estimate the life of the highway and calculate where most of the energy is used. Divide the former by the latter and realize what an inconsequential part of energy usage is infrastructure creation.
Now take your bicycle with heavy, knobby tires and see how far you can travel on a dirt road with intersections. The rolling resistance kills your speed, and the frequent intersections slow you down even more, turning your energy output into worn brake pads. You'd be lucky to average 5km/h.
Put a bicycle with street tires on a highway with interchanges. 25km/h is now easy - road is smooth, you don't have to stop. Aerodynamically improve your bicycle, and you can nearly double that. You can also fit more bicycles per width of highway. Considering typical peak-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic, you have probably improved on the ICE powered status quo.
Any primitive civilization using knobby tired bicycles on dirt tracks, and uninsulated homes that can't almost be heated by body-heat alone will be steam-rolled by a civilization that can afford to stockpile energy for defensive purposes. If your hypothetical civilization is too stupid to figure out how to make crop harvesting net energy positive, something every farming civilization prior to the 1940s or so did as a matter of course... I really don't hold out much hope for them.
I suspect that vehicles of the future will get their safety from not going so fast.
Work done/ distance is roughly proportional to velocity squared. So too is kinetic energy, and the kinetic energy involved in pulverizing a person in a crash. Going a little slower yields so much benefit - safety and efficiency. You can also use smaller vehicles. Those vehicles can be human powered. This means less bumper-bumper traffic, and less pollution too (generated on-site or outsourced to a nearby coal station)
"eugenics came from the most educated of classes, it certainly didn't come from the bottom. And at the time it was hopelessly naive, there needs to be a check on human ignorance at all levels."
Eugenics works... do you think the Chihuahua, the Shire horse or the various highly intelligent breeds of sheepdog just happened to come into existence by themselves? Eugenics for various traits with humans has happened for a long time too. From aboriginal coming of age rituals to Judaism to ancient Sparta, selective breeding of humans (either by themselves, or by others) is pretty much as old as recorded history.
About the only hopelessly naive thing is to pretend that eugenics is something new or doesn't work. There is one failing with eugenics however, and that is you can't use it to build a class of easily herded consumers, happy to pay retail for worthless junk, happy to work, happy to believe in the puppet show of democracy, happy to go to war, and happy to indulge in the bread and circuses of the day.
'The English language has an advanced technology known as "metaphor".'
I'm not sure how knowledge of metaphors is supposed to handle reduced energy consumption. However, there are many overlooked technologies for surviving with less energy demonstrated in other countries or our own history. I'm unsure why a large part of the world seems content to use up all of the world's resources in a fraction of the span of our recorded history.
The blanket reference came from Orlov.
http://www.survivingpeakoil.com/article.php?id=soviet_lessons
That's a good list. I guess "malware" would be filed under security. That's a REALLY good list. Well done.
On another level, the reason I use Linux is because I generally prioritize long term outcomes over short term gains. Learning how to set up and use a Linux or BSD system is a sensible investment.
"Nuclear fission is a poor solution anyway."
I didn't used to think so, but now I do. I think it was reading about Project Orion on slashdot. It will probably pay to keep a supply of uranium on the planet in case we ever need it for that sort of use. Nuclear is the ultimate non-renewable energy source. Coal and oil can probably be synthesized eventually, taking the energy from solar. Creating uranium is a lot tougher.
"And if it takes a century to develop the replacement technology, do we freeze in the meantime?"
They have this technology called the "blanket". Apparently you can stack these on top of one another to increase the insulative effect. I even hear that they have blankets shaped like humans with holes for feet, hands and heads. They are called "clothes".
"To be fair, it should be noted that the programs will be effective against foreign OR domestic brown people."
Brown... absorbs heat... hmmm. I haven't RTFA, but I'm picturing some sort of giant magnifying glass. Was I close?
Just don't make the weapons as idiot-proof, reliable, effective and easy to manufacture as the AK-47, otherwise we won't be the only ones using them.
"People who actually read the bible realize that he is portrayed as neither."
I was thinking more of God as simulation programmer rather than the literal biblical version. It doesn't affect my point though, we have no information as to the powers of God outside of this universe. Maybe He has a budget and deadlines just like the rest of us.
FWIW I'm agnostic.
If you were God, I don't see why you couldn't initialize the universe simulation at a point 6000 years ago with all the evidence in said universe pointing to a cosmological creation point 13.73 billion years ago (e.g. velocities, photons etc). If all God was concerned about was what the man-apes get up to on planet earth, why waste CPU cycles computing 2.3 * 10^6 as much history as necessary?
Maybe He is running a bunch of slightly different parallel universe simulations, so He has run the simulation to generate the 6000 year point snapshot once, and just uses values from that snapshot to start off the new simulations?
We should remember that within this universe, God is omniscient and omnipotent. However, outside our universe there is no reason God should be any more omnipotent or omniscient than, say, John Carmack. If so, he would certainly be pushed to optimize and cut corners. As long as what we see at the edges of the areas we can see and touch are accurately simulated, the rest can be simulated to with approximations so long as physical limitations prevent us from getting fine enough detail to know for sure.
Perhaps when we send out something like a Ulysses probe he is forced to start computing that region of space. He sees a pause, a "loading new level" type of wait, we don't see anything. In fact, whenever it starts to chug it just slows down in the mode of an 80s computer game instead of reducing the frame rate - the key point to keep the inhabitants of the universe from becoming aware of a glitch.
I suppose time being quantized would be an indication of this, seeing as the most logical way to compute such a simulation would be to compute minute iterations or "frames". A limited number of these would make up a second. Enough such that continuity is well approximated, as few as possible to keep the simulation from consuming unnecessary resources.
I know all this violates Occam's Razor, but Occam's Razor is only a heuristic. Simplicity is orthogonal to truth, humanity's urge for a working hypothesis notwithstanding.
"Now it looks like hybrids might dominate some day; but gasoline-only had quite a run, didn't it?"
True. What has enabled gasoline (and diesel) vehicles to predominate is the infrastructure, as well as the advertising.
Infrastructure and image are a lot less important in the computer arena. For most people, a desktop computer is not a status symbol comparable to a car, house or even a nice shirt. Hence the bog standard beige box. And an ultracheap ultraportable running linux has access to the same infrastructure as the desktop - standard wall outlets, network jacks, wifi etc.
The only difference is mental "infrastructure", where we expect things to be, what we expect things to look like and what we expect things to do. This is indeed important.
It is a lot easier for a motivated person to switch from MS to Ubuntu than from SUV to bicycle, say. The latter comes with a serious risk of death for a lot of commutes. The reason is that roads are built and legislated for cars. Having lots of stops (requiring excess energy), and driving to the limits of perceived safety rather than economy work out really well for large, heavy gasoline and diesel powered vehicles.
"We need to encourage people to understand that customising your OS, playing with it, trying things out, should be the norm - and that you really have to be quite clever to "break" a computer!" How right you are. If you don't have a second computer, or at least a second hard drive, you can't take the risks necessary to learn how things work. The ironic thing is that very, very rarely do you ever mess anything up to the point where you can't get it working again.
"I've used software from the C64 age. Guess what: IT SUCKED."
Next time, try vi instead of emacs.
Actually, the rest of the world watches and poaches their best ideas and people (e.g. autobahn and Operation Paperclip).
"What's the Excel formula for getting laid?"
#VALUE!
South Park? That show cracks me up! I just don't understand how busy men such as Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz found the time to write half the episodes!
"I now know: becuse TCO is a meaningless measure which is not used in the real world. The real world measure used is ROI (return on investment)."
Now, that was insightful. In the real world, if you go FOSS you may (but not in my experience) have an initial higher investment taking into account research, training, etc. After that, the only cost is support, if you choose to buy it. There is no perpetual (and large) income stream going to the software vendor and no cost of retraining when the vendor decides it has to force an upgrade on the customer. So ROI is almost always better.
And in a recession, FOSS is that much better, because companies tend to want to keep necessary employees but stop large cash outlays.
"if you want to be a glass-half-empty kind of guy, then you could say that it's a poor testament to their ability to predict expectancies, rather than to exceed them."
Except for the fact that there is a good deal of statistical uncertainty involved with predicting part failure. Two identically manufactured bearings will rarely ever fail at the same exact time. You might draw a dud or you might draw a super-bearing. The same way as a given atom of carbon-14 might decay in one millisecond or in a billion years time.
There is also a small possibility that their design was flawed but they just got lucky with the parts, construction, modes of operation required and the particular inputs applied to their system. Remote, but possible. This is all related to the single event nature of the spacecraft. If they had sent up 30+ Ulysses, we'd be able to discount the "flawed but lucky" possibility.
... cites RSI.