I once spent a good bit of time convincing someone that that was a conglomeration of many photos stitched together over time, and not one snapshot taken from the space station. And I though he was a smart guy, too. *sigh*
Since I don't doubt that Gates is a very smart guy, he has to realize that a lot of the success of MS has to do with being in the right place at the right time. He happened to drop out of college and start his business right at the beginning of this huge new market. No doubt it took a lot of work to get things done, but it's rare that the world will give anyone the opportunity to dominate an industry as large as computers are.
For every millionaire drop out in the computer industry, there's probably hundreds(thousands?) that ended up with basically nothing after the dot-com crash. While I'm sure they had fun while it lasted, and they may have even gotten some good experience, bailing on college certainly isn't a sure path to billions.
Look, just because someone will admit that raising a kid isn't the easiest thing in the world, and that they don't mind a little help doesn't make them a huge whiner hell bent on making themselves look like some special victim of circumstance.
Your answer, don't let them have internet access, is not much of a solution either. I think that parent can make a pretty good argument that technology/computers/internet are all going to be substantial factors in their children's lives, and exposing them to the technology has a lot of potential benefits. Of course there are also potential downsides, but here's a parent that's trying to navigate through these, and is grateful for any help they can get.
And I don't know where the rest of your argument came from. The parent poster said nothing about cellphone bills or drunk driving, you're just ranting to try and make your points seem more valid I guess. You're right that people have been raising children for eons. So what? Through those eons, I have no doubt that there were plenty of dumb or naive kids that made lots of stupid choices and had to face unpleasant consequences. I don't think the past offers us any easy solutions that we're just conveniently ignoring. People lived for eons without electricity too, I don't see what make the current generation so special that they deserve to have electric lights and refridgeration.
Locking children into boxes and not giving them any privileges or responsibilities is not a good way to prepare them for the real world. So your solution doesn't work. Letting a kid run free throughout the world usually isn't very successful either. You've obviously observed that. Maybe the correct solution is somewhere in the middle, where a parent tries to balance freedom and limits to allow their children to grow in a safer manner. That seems like a pretty tough task, and I don't think it's a bad thing for parents to appreciate support and help from the community.
Media won't go away, but some of the big companies that shovel it towards us right now might. Whether the new market realities bankrupt them, or if they just decide to take their ball and go home, those companies completely functioning within the traditional ways of media distribution won't be around forever. I can believe that.
What I can't believe, however, is that no one will come in to fill the void. It'll be a different kind of person/company/artist/whatever, but someone will show up. There will still be a market, it'll just be a slightly different one. It might not be one where you can make billions of dollars off of, but there will still be people who want to consume this media, and there will still be people who create and perform it.
Music is a no-brainer. The recording companies did not give birth to the industry, they just organized and took control of a large portion of it. Music was around before recording, and it will most likely exist for as long as the human brain is capable of processing sounds. I can't imagine movies ceasing to be produced, but the era of huge budget films could possibly end, or at least slow down, if the big studios start hitting financial difficulties. Then again, neato CGI and the like will probably pick up a bunch of the slack and make production costs cheaper eventually.
This isn't to say that the big media corporations are entirely doomed. I think there is still a niche for them, a good sized market, with plenty of potential for healthy profits. There are plenty of people who are willing to pay for something that they see value in. A company that wishes to try and provide that value should continue to make money. They just need to accept that piracy and sharing are part of the business. Maybe instead of spending dollars trying to stop it, they'll spend that money increasing the value of their product.
Just to restate something that's been said many times, the big problem with hard drives for consoles is that they don't get cheaper over time. They only increase in capacity for the same price. Advances in hard drive technology have relied more on increasing the density of data on the platters, and less on redesigns of the basic mechanism. Most of the parts of a HD are plain old mechanical stuff, things that humans have been building for a long time, and which have already been engineered just about as efficient as they're going to get. All the cost cutting that can be done on a HD has pretty much been done. You just need a particular amount of metals and plastics to make one. Except for the density of info on the platters, a 200GB drive is not that much different from a 20GB drive.
So basically, MS can't find someone who'll make them 20Gig drives for a whole lot cheaper than 120Gig drives, because it costs the same to manufacture either one. I can take some guesses as to why MS wouldn't want to ship 360's with 160 gig drives, but I don't know for sure. Whatever the reason, even if they go with smaller drives, they aren't going to get the quantities that they need for very cheap, plus they're probably adding their own custom enclosure, plus these sorts of peripherals are where the console makers traditionally try to hose gamers, so that's how it works.
I think blogs are different in that the majority of them are not out to make money. Most of them are started by people as part of a hobby, or as a way of communication, or a journal, or whatever. Now that there's some publicity of people making big bucks off of it, sure there will be some people trying to throw something together to collect some of those dollars, but the growth of blogs has had a whole lot less to do with profit, and more with people wanting to share and express themselves. Since humans are generally social creatures, I don't see that drive going away.
Sure, a handful of people are going to try and get into the game to make money. Some companies are trying to make money providing the infrastructure for others to get in on the blogs. But I don't think that everyone is delusional and thinks that just by publishing something about anything that you'll find a market and be rolling in cash somewhere down the line. That was the false promise of the dotcom bubble, and that's why people were just throwing away money trying to put whatever they could find online. I don't think most investors are too eager to get burned again.
Please don't refer to them as "religious enough to be offended". A more proper term would be "out of touch with reality enough to be offended". There are many of us who have religious beliefs that we take very seriously, but those beliefs don't require us to take offense and whine anytime someone mocks our religion, or uses a part of it for something is strange as this bizarre ad campaign. Many of us are even the catholics that you despise so much.
It's not religious nutjobs trying to turn people against the devil. It's nutjobs who have lost perspective, and have for whatever reason, chosen religion as the outlet for their need to complain. It's not a problem strictly endemic to religious folk, there are plenty of people of all beliefs who are just looking for something to complain about.
I think he's trying to hard. He starts by asking why all of the momentum that Linux built up during the late 90's is hard to see today. I'm just going to take a guess and say that maybe a lot of that enthusiasm went down with the dot com crash. You know, when the big tech bubble burst, and pretty much everyone's hype fell through? When businesses finally realized that just throwing more and more money into their IT departments wouldn't magically increase their productivity by 600% each year, perhaps that something to do with it?
I don't think it's been a problem with Linux as much as a more realistic take on the tech industry. Plowing ahead at the blistering pace of the late 90's was fun, but it resulted in a whole lot of wasted money, and it's recent enough that people are still remembering that. It's just a little bit harder to sell that kind of hype right now, so we don't hear as much of it. Meanwhile, Linux is continuing to do what it's always done, there's plenty of development going on for it, and new people continue to adopt it. It might be a little slower right now, it's definitely quieter at the moment, but progress hasn't hit a brick wall.
I think this guy is looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
Well, when i picked "building roads" that was the first "pretty much anyone can do it" job that came to mind, but I didn't mean to imply that it's the worst job out there, or even a horrible job. I don't think manual labor is a horrible thing that we should all strive to avoid, I'm sure some people find it very fulfilling. I made a living for a while doing construction, and for the most part I enjoyed it, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to be doing it five days per week for the next 40 years of my life. I don't think my body could take it.
I do appreciate your recognition that physical labor is not inherently degrading or miserable, and that being an office gopher is hardly any better. Regardless of what you do for a living, the fact that it's your job, and you have to go pretty much every day, whether you feel like it or not, makes it unpleasant at times. Too much of just about anything and it gets old fast.
Well, yes, your life is very important, but it's certainly not a bad idea to grab what you can. Taking a little bit of stuff doesn't mean you're valuing it over your life. Grabbing an already prepared USB drive full of personal documents isn't stupid in the same way as, say, staying home to guard your comic book collection from looters.
If DC is your home, and it gets wiped off the map, let's just hope that you survive. And if you do survive, you'd certainly be glad to have anything that you did manage to bring with you.
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Mario 64 is a pretty crappy game to be judging the potential of a touch screen on, seeing as the game was originally designed to show off what an analog thumbstick could do. Meanwhile, there's been plenty of games released for the DS that could not be played without the touch screen controls.
I have no doubt that people looking to play N64 games on the backwards compatible revolution will use a more standard controller to do so. But you can be sure that when they release a new mario game specifically designed for the revolution, the new controller will be required.
Well, I never said it would be easy. Certainly, the world is full of greedy people who are loathe to ever give anything away. In fact, you can make a strong argument that human nature includes selfishness, and that society isn't capable of creating a "utopia", even if technology made it possible.
The driving force of evolution, for both humans and animals(and I guess plants too), is a competition for resources. Just like much of nature is selfish, humans are selfish, because of a need to obtain things to survive. This selfishness obviously goes beyond the simple fulfillment of needs, and extends to wants, desires, and sometimes wealth just for the sake of wealth.
Like you said, there's a difference between value and cost, and that would certainly keep people active. So would other things besides just hobbies, like politics, and lust for power. It would be more of a world without need, not without want. I'm not suggesting that economics will become entirely moot, just that they'll be different, and that the basics of survival will be seperate. Sort of like how oxygen now is so abundant that it doesn't cost anything, it's just there for the taking.
So say will create a world where everyone's needs can be easily met. And so the question becomes can we, as a whole, get past our 'instincts', and reinvent our society. It might require excessive optimism, but sometimes that's an interesting line of thought to follow.
No doubt, even if something like we're discussing is a potential outcome, the path to it would be messy and painful for many. I don't think there's any easy answers. The path might be too hard for humanity to walk. But the hypothetical end result sounds at least somewhat feasible to me, if we could find a way to get there.
While I'll agree that there's no guarantee that technology will solve all the world's problems, I don't think that saying that we haven't done it yet means we can't do it at all is pretty short-sighted.
Our technology has come far, but there's a lot of reasons why everyone isn't living the good life yet. The big one is that there's still not enough wealth in the world. To bring up the standard of living for billions of people, other people would have to see a decrease in theirs, and they aren't willing to do so.
But technology is increasingly making this a world of plenty. The western world did not(for the most part) become wealthy by plundering the rest of the world, most of the wealth has been created. As production has continued to rise, the standard of living world wide has increased, albeit much more slowly in some places than others. Is there a reason to expect this trend to stop? Will there come a day when there's so much wealth that everyone will have more than they need? There's no way to predict for sure how humanity will react when that becomes possible, but here's to hoping it ends up positive.
Then the whole point of the "singularity" is that progress builds on progress, so that the rate of advancement in constantly accelerating. And so the big day when poverty and all that can be solved may come sooner than we expect.
Well, the hope is that technology will get us to a point where the cost of food/shelter/etc is so cheap that it's negligable. So even if you want to sit around and be a worthless bum, that's your call. Just like some wealthy parents support their bum children their whole lives, society as a whole will support everyone, even if they choose not to contribute. We might not approve of their lack of initative, but they're still part of the human family, so we won't let them starve. It's the same if someone's skills become obsolete, hopefully we'll have enough that society can support them, and we will do so.
It's true that many(most) people have the drive to better themselves in some way. In our current society, that usually has a strong economic side to it, but if the economics become a non-issue, I hardly think that will be problematic. There's plenty of other ways to pass the time. Just because you don't need to make furniture for a living anymore doesn't mean you're not allowed to build it anymore. There's plenty to do.
There's certainly social and political problems keeping a lot of people from improving their quality of life, but I think the whole point of the singularity is that technology will eventually reach a point where there's just no" good" reason for everyone not to be involved.
We've got lots of really cool stuff now, but much of our economy is still based on scarcity. Energy is not free, and the people who control the methods of production have a lot of influence. And so they want to keep it that way. The same thing is true of many raw materials.
But even more than that, there's the labor issue. I don't think anybody's personal utopia involves spending all day out in the sun building roads, but we require that a whole lot of people do that, and other crappy jobs, because it's the only way we have to get it done. The fact that some jobs are crappier than others creates some weird social layering. If there comes a point in the future where we could have machinery efficiently do all those jobs, then things can probably change.
But yeah, it won't be easy, it won't just magically happen because of any particular invention. But technology will continue to make it more likely.
The whole premise is actually kind of simple I think. There's three basic components to everything that we use in our lives. Raw materials, Energy, and Design. Stuff needs to be thought up(design), it requires ingredients to build(raw materials), and it takes energy to make/use/operate it. Some things, like digital media, have negligible raw material requirements, but they still fit the mold.
So if we can make computers that can actually think well enough to do the design, then getting design done faster just requires better computers. I think it's safe to assume that computers will continue to increase in power. Whether or not they'll become "intelligent" is harder to predict, but lets say for the sake of the singularity that they do.
We also need plentiful energy. If this whole fusion power thing ever pans out, we'll have that.
Raw materials are a little harder. Making things just out of dirt is a bit simplistic. because there's lots of different minerals and such present in dirt, and they're not all suitable for any purpose. There's lots of stuff available in the earth, but extracting it, even if it becomes easy, will most likely be rather destructive. The solution is to make spaceflight reliable enough that we can mine other places, asteroids and the like.
Although that seems to me to be a short term solution, because most things in space are pretty far away. Unless there's some sort of major star trek-ish breakthrough in propulsion, it's never going to be all that simple.
I guess the point is, design and energy are almost like a switch. Either we'll have a couple big breakthroughs that'll bust those two wide open, or we won't. But even if we got cheap brains and cheap energy, the raw materials issue seems like it'd be a harder problem. If you're looking for a long term investment, land would probably be a good one, because it's the hardest thing for us to make more of.
I might not have control over the features that MS office gives me, but I sure as hell know where all the files I produced are. I know that I'll be able to open them up forever with the copy of office that I already have. I know if I decide to delete those files, that I can be 100% sure that they are deleted, and not kept on some server in california somewhere. Office isn't some sort of paragon of freedom, to be sure, but that doesn't mean any possible change will be better.
Gmail ads are not particularly offensive, you're right, but I still don't have to like them. Having a good, free webmail system is worth enough to me personally that I'll put up with those ads in order to use their service. I have to wonder, however, if such things would fly in the corporate environment. Would you want your employees distracted by advertisements while they're doing word processing stuff for you? Topical ads? Would you want google reading your company's internal memos just so they can display relevant ads? You probably don't spend enough time in Gmail for the advertisements to get on your nerves. Start spending six hours per day working with it, having it take up screen real estate, see how long you're glad to have it around. Just like people have written new AIM clients to get rid of the ads, people will tire of them and start trying to find ways around it. That might actually be good in the long run, it might increase choices for us. But it won't make life easy for Google.
I guess technically that could work, but then the big question becomes, how are they going to make any money off of this? If they don't have a good plan, their stock price will tank, investors will become really pissed, and things will get really messy really fast. I don't think extending their advertising to this will work. The only thing that makes any sense to me would be a subscription based service, which I don't think will fly either. Service contracts? That isn't one of google's strengths.
Google's stuff right now is competitive because it's basically free for the end user. I think they can only push that so far. In the end, they're a company, and they've got to be making money. While they might help accelerate MS's fall from power, they're not going to be taking its place, and they're going to be doing it alongside a handful of other companies plus the whole FOSS dealie.
Yeah, but you can have all of that without giving the server to someone else. I think corporations especially would be very wary of putting all their data on a remote server. If they want to go to network clients, it's all going to connect back to a server/server farm in their own building.
Once something becomes a standard at work, people are more likely to use it at home. Could google be developing this system to function in that manner? Maybe, but it didn't sound like it from the article.
I think there's a couple big points that the author of the article is missing. If this whole network apps replacing local apps really happens, it's not going to happen the way he thinks it is, for a couple reasons. One reason is open standards. Anyone who makes the switch from MS, a big reason for it is likely to be to escape the file format lock-in that MS inflicted for so long. Corporations won't blindly walk into that again. Along the same lines, I don't think any company, or too many people, will allow all their files to reside on some remote server somewhere. That doesn't make sense for a lot of reasons.
Second is an economic reason. If you're going to buy some software, wouldn't you rather have a copy of it on your desk, installed on your own machine? I would imagine Google trying a subscription style payment system, which i think people will be reluctant to accept. It just takes too much control away from the user, and gives it to the company.
But even if all of this does happen, I still don't see Google holding onto any sizeable monopoly for long. Open standards will allow just about anyone to offer a competing system. Google won't be able to pull the same underhanded tactics that MS did. And nobody wants to be subjected to another monopoly.
Google is just intensely overrated. Yeah, they make some cool stuff, and at one time, they had a search engine that was very useful. But I don't know how far that's going to take them. There's two things that they use to make money right now. Search, (which I don't think they do nearly as well as they used to), and advertisements (spam!). While portable email might be useful enough that people will cope with having it decorated with advertisements, I don't think they'll feel the same about word processors, or powerpoint, or whatever.
Anything that Google does to seriously threaten MS will mean them venturing away from what they're good at, and into new stuff. Sure, they've got smart employees, they might get it right, but they also might screw it up. The strongest thing Google has going for it right now is its brandname, but that's an easy thing to ruin.
Yeah, it looks like if you want to have guarantees on everything your computer is running, you're going to have to dive headfirst into what is a very dirty word on slashdot. Proprietary!
No one could even hope to guarantee a piece of software unless they had control over everything that it runs on top of (hardware/drivers/OS), and anything that could run on top if it or communicate with it (plug-ins, extensions, file formats). Really the PC is a multipurpose tool well beyond pretty much any physical object that I can think of. The same openness and unpredictability that has made the industry progress and innovate so quickly just might negate any guarantees of stability or security, and that's just the nature of the beast. You can't have it both ways.
Yeah, there are places that require much more stringent checks of their software. NASA doesn't just quickly throw together stuff and upload it onto the space shuttle, they test the hell out of it. And so they get high quality stuff written directly for their hardware. The downside to this is that development is slow, and it's expensive.
So basically, if you want software that's guaranteed, you're going to have to do a few things. A) Pay someone a whole lot of money to write it. B) Test the hell out of it before it gets put in place. C) Realize that this is going to take a long time D) Probably pick some very specific hardware for it to function with, and not have the option to easily upgrade in the future. E) Make sure you get all the feature requests and whatnot right the first time, because patches and stuff are not going to be easy or cheap.
The market, for the most part, has opted for halfway broken software for a couple reasons. Upfront costs, freedom to grow/update/expand more easily, and because brokenass Windows was good enough for a lot of stuff. Hardware increases allowed significant boosts in productivity, and to a large degree, software was just sort of along for the ride. Now that commodity hardware offers so much power that the drive to upgrade is much less of a factor, it might make more sense to focus more on software quality.
This is the very reason why the US won't do anything drastic with its "control" over the internet. Even if our government technically could find a way to isolate whole countries or whatnot, they wouldn't, because the economic fallout would be immediate and significant. Even for the current US administration, the only thing that takes precedence over ideology is money. They don't mind illogical economic policies that will cause us problems in the future, but if something that they did caused profits to fall for big companies today, you can be darn sure there would be a whole lot of noise that they couldn't ignore.
You're right in that too much specialization can lead to inefficiencies. Mostly because it can cause communication breakdowns. An example, my education was in architecture. An architecture firm designing a building nowadays will hire an engineering firm to do things like plan the HVAC system. An architect does not really need to know many details about HVAC. But we were still taught enough of the basics to have an informed enough conversation with the HVAC engineers. Otherwise systems wouldn't mesh, stuff would conflict, and everyone would get sued six ways to sunday. And that's just a technical issue, ignoring the more social aspects.
You hear a lot of whining on/. about engineers vs. marketing departments. Where each side sees the other as an enemy, when in reality their ultimate goal, to ship products, is the same. They're just so caught up in their own little part of it that they don't communicate well, and things get ugly.
That's why there should always be some people who don't delve so much into specialized knowledge. These people need to take big picture looks at things, and tie them all together. These people should be managers. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that the right people always get put into that position.
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I once spent a good bit of time convincing someone that that was a conglomeration of many photos stitched together over time, and not one snapshot taken from the space station. And I though he was a smart guy, too. *sigh*
Since I don't doubt that Gates is a very smart guy, he has to realize that a lot of the success of MS has to do with being in the right place at the right time. He happened to drop out of college and start his business right at the beginning of this huge new market. No doubt it took a lot of work to get things done, but it's rare that the world will give anyone the opportunity to dominate an industry as large as computers are.
For every millionaire drop out in the computer industry, there's probably hundreds(thousands?) that ended up with basically nothing after the dot-com crash. While I'm sure they had fun while it lasted, and they may have even gotten some good experience, bailing on college certainly isn't a sure path to billions.
Look, just because someone will admit that raising a kid isn't the easiest thing in the world, and that they don't mind a little help doesn't make them a huge whiner hell bent on making themselves look like some special victim of circumstance.
Your answer, don't let them have internet access, is not much of a solution either. I think that parent can make a pretty good argument that technology/computers/internet are all going to be substantial factors in their children's lives, and exposing them to the technology has a lot of potential benefits. Of course there are also potential downsides, but here's a parent that's trying to navigate through these, and is grateful for any help they can get.
And I don't know where the rest of your argument came from. The parent poster said nothing about cellphone bills or drunk driving, you're just ranting to try and make your points seem more valid I guess. You're right that people have been raising children for eons. So what? Through those eons, I have no doubt that there were plenty of dumb or naive kids that made lots of stupid choices and had to face unpleasant consequences. I don't think the past offers us any easy solutions that we're just conveniently ignoring. People lived for eons without electricity too, I don't see what make the current generation so special that they deserve to have electric lights and refridgeration.
Locking children into boxes and not giving them any privileges or responsibilities is not a good way to prepare them for the real world. So your solution doesn't work. Letting a kid run free throughout the world usually isn't very successful either. You've obviously observed that. Maybe the correct solution is somewhere in the middle, where a parent tries to balance freedom and limits to allow their children to grow in a safer manner. That seems like a pretty tough task, and I don't think it's a bad thing for parents to appreciate support and help from the community.
Media won't go away, but some of the big companies that shovel it towards us right now might. Whether the new market realities bankrupt them, or if they just decide to take their ball and go home, those companies completely functioning within the traditional ways of media distribution won't be around forever. I can believe that.
What I can't believe, however, is that no one will come in to fill the void. It'll be a different kind of person/company/artist/whatever, but someone will show up. There will still be a market, it'll just be a slightly different one. It might not be one where you can make billions of dollars off of, but there will still be people who want to consume this media, and there will still be people who create and perform it.
Music is a no-brainer. The recording companies did not give birth to the industry, they just organized and took control of a large portion of it. Music was around before recording, and it will most likely exist for as long as the human brain is capable of processing sounds. I can't imagine movies ceasing to be produced, but the era of huge budget films could possibly end, or at least slow down, if the big studios start hitting financial difficulties. Then again, neato CGI and the like will probably pick up a bunch of the slack and make production costs cheaper eventually.
This isn't to say that the big media corporations are entirely doomed. I think there is still a niche for them, a good sized market, with plenty of potential for healthy profits. There are plenty of people who are willing to pay for something that they see value in. A company that wishes to try and provide that value should continue to make money. They just need to accept that piracy and sharing are part of the business. Maybe instead of spending dollars trying to stop it, they'll spend that money increasing the value of their product.
Just to restate something that's been said many times, the big problem with hard drives for consoles is that they don't get cheaper over time. They only increase in capacity for the same price. Advances in hard drive technology have relied more on increasing the density of data on the platters, and less on redesigns of the basic mechanism. Most of the parts of a HD are plain old mechanical stuff, things that humans have been building for a long time, and which have already been engineered just about as efficient as they're going to get. All the cost cutting that can be done on a HD has pretty much been done. You just need a particular amount of metals and plastics to make one. Except for the density of info on the platters, a 200GB drive is not that much different from a 20GB drive.
So basically, MS can't find someone who'll make them 20Gig drives for a whole lot cheaper than 120Gig drives, because it costs the same to manufacture either one. I can take some guesses as to why MS wouldn't want to ship 360's with 160 gig drives, but I don't know for sure. Whatever the reason, even if they go with smaller drives, they aren't going to get the quantities that they need for very cheap, plus they're probably adding their own custom enclosure, plus these sorts of peripherals are where the console makers traditionally try to hose gamers, so that's how it works.
I think blogs are different in that the majority of them are not out to make money. Most of them are started by people as part of a hobby, or as a way of communication, or a journal, or whatever. Now that there's some publicity of people making big bucks off of it, sure there will be some people trying to throw something together to collect some of those dollars, but the growth of blogs has had a whole lot less to do with profit, and more with people wanting to share and express themselves. Since humans are generally social creatures, I don't see that drive going away.
Sure, a handful of people are going to try and get into the game to make money. Some companies are trying to make money providing the infrastructure for others to get in on the blogs. But I don't think that everyone is delusional and thinks that just by publishing something about anything that you'll find a market and be rolling in cash somewhere down the line. That was the false promise of the dotcom bubble, and that's why people were just throwing away money trying to put whatever they could find online. I don't think most investors are too eager to get burned again.
Please don't refer to them as "religious enough to be offended". A more proper term would be "out of touch with reality enough to be offended". There are many of us who have religious beliefs that we take very seriously, but those beliefs don't require us to take offense and whine anytime someone mocks our religion, or uses a part of it for something is strange as this bizarre ad campaign. Many of us are even the catholics that you despise so much.
It's not religious nutjobs trying to turn people against the devil. It's nutjobs who have lost perspective, and have for whatever reason, chosen religion as the outlet for their need to complain. It's not a problem strictly endemic to religious folk, there are plenty of people of all beliefs who are just looking for something to complain about.
I think he's trying to hard. He starts by asking why all of the momentum that Linux built up during the late 90's is hard to see today. I'm just going to take a guess and say that maybe a lot of that enthusiasm went down with the dot com crash. You know, when the big tech bubble burst, and pretty much everyone's hype fell through? When businesses finally realized that just throwing more and more money into their IT departments wouldn't magically increase their productivity by 600% each year, perhaps that something to do with it?
I don't think it's been a problem with Linux as much as a more realistic take on the tech industry. Plowing ahead at the blistering pace of the late 90's was fun, but it resulted in a whole lot of wasted money, and it's recent enough that people are still remembering that. It's just a little bit harder to sell that kind of hype right now, so we don't hear as much of it. Meanwhile, Linux is continuing to do what it's always done, there's plenty of development going on for it, and new people continue to adopt it. It might be a little slower right now, it's definitely quieter at the moment, but progress hasn't hit a brick wall.
I think this guy is looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
Well, when i picked "building roads" that was the first "pretty much anyone can do it" job that came to mind, but I didn't mean to imply that it's the worst job out there, or even a horrible job. I don't think manual labor is a horrible thing that we should all strive to avoid, I'm sure some people find it very fulfilling. I made a living for a while doing construction, and for the most part I enjoyed it, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to be doing it five days per week for the next 40 years of my life. I don't think my body could take it.
I do appreciate your recognition that physical labor is not inherently degrading or miserable, and that being an office gopher is hardly any better. Regardless of what you do for a living, the fact that it's your job, and you have to go pretty much every day, whether you feel like it or not, makes it unpleasant at times. Too much of just about anything and it gets old fast.
Well, yes, your life is very important, but it's certainly not a bad idea to grab what you can. Taking a little bit of stuff doesn't mean you're valuing it over your life. Grabbing an already prepared USB drive full of personal documents isn't stupid in the same way as, say, staying home to guard your comic book collection from looters.
If DC is your home, and it gets wiped off the map, let's just hope that you survive. And if you do survive, you'd certainly be glad to have anything that you did manage to bring with you.
Mario 64 is a pretty crappy game to be judging the potential of a touch screen on, seeing as the game was originally designed to show off what an analog thumbstick could do. Meanwhile, there's been plenty of games released for the DS that could not be played without the touch screen controls.
I have no doubt that people looking to play N64 games on the backwards compatible revolution will use a more standard controller to do so. But you can be sure that when they release a new mario game specifically designed for the revolution, the new controller will be required.
Well, I never said it would be easy. Certainly, the world is full of greedy people who are loathe to ever give anything away. In fact, you can make a strong argument that human nature includes selfishness, and that society isn't capable of creating a "utopia", even if technology made it possible.
The driving force of evolution, for both humans and animals(and I guess plants too), is a competition for resources. Just like much of nature is selfish, humans are selfish, because of a need to obtain things to survive. This selfishness obviously goes beyond the simple fulfillment of needs, and extends to wants, desires, and sometimes wealth just for the sake of wealth.
Like you said, there's a difference between value and cost, and that would certainly keep people active. So would other things besides just hobbies, like politics, and lust for power. It would be more of a world without need, not without want. I'm not suggesting that economics will become entirely moot, just that they'll be different, and that the basics of survival will be seperate. Sort of like how oxygen now is so abundant that it doesn't cost anything, it's just there for the taking.
So say will create a world where everyone's needs can be easily met. And so the question becomes can we, as a whole, get past our 'instincts', and reinvent our society. It might require excessive optimism, but sometimes that's an interesting line of thought to follow.
No doubt, even if something like we're discussing is a potential outcome, the path to it would be messy and painful for many. I don't think there's any easy answers. The path might be too hard for humanity to walk. But the hypothetical end result sounds at least somewhat feasible to me, if we could find a way to get there.
While I'll agree that there's no guarantee that technology will solve all the world's problems, I don't think that saying that we haven't done it yet means we can't do it at all is pretty short-sighted.
Our technology has come far, but there's a lot of reasons why everyone isn't living the good life yet. The big one is that there's still not enough wealth in the world. To bring up the standard of living for billions of people, other people would have to see a decrease in theirs, and they aren't willing to do so.
But technology is increasingly making this a world of plenty. The western world did not(for the most part) become wealthy by plundering the rest of the world, most of the wealth has been created. As production has continued to rise, the standard of living world wide has increased, albeit much more slowly in some places than others. Is there a reason to expect this trend to stop? Will there come a day when there's so much wealth that everyone will have more than they need? There's no way to predict for sure how humanity will react when that becomes possible, but here's to hoping it ends up positive.
Then the whole point of the "singularity" is that progress builds on progress, so that the rate of advancement in constantly accelerating. And so the big day when poverty and all that can be solved may come sooner than we expect.
I guess we have to hope that things don't go that way. And if they do, hopefully there's a revolution or something, and things get put right.
Well, the hope is that technology will get us to a point where the cost of food/shelter/etc is so cheap that it's negligable. So even if you want to sit around and be a worthless bum, that's your call. Just like some wealthy parents support their bum children their whole lives, society as a whole will support everyone, even if they choose not to contribute. We might not approve of their lack of initative, but they're still part of the human family, so we won't let them starve. It's the same if someone's skills become obsolete, hopefully we'll have enough that society can support them, and we will do so.
It's true that many(most) people have the drive to better themselves in some way. In our current society, that usually has a strong economic side to it, but if the economics become a non-issue, I hardly think that will be problematic. There's plenty of other ways to pass the time. Just because you don't need to make furniture for a living anymore doesn't mean you're not allowed to build it anymore. There's plenty to do.
There's certainly social and political problems keeping a lot of people from improving their quality of life, but I think the whole point of the singularity is that technology will eventually reach a point where there's just no" good" reason for everyone not to be involved.
We've got lots of really cool stuff now, but much of our economy is still based on scarcity. Energy is not free, and the people who control the methods of production have a lot of influence. And so they want to keep it that way. The same thing is true of many raw materials.
But even more than that, there's the labor issue. I don't think anybody's personal utopia involves spending all day out in the sun building roads, but we require that a whole lot of people do that, and other crappy jobs, because it's the only way we have to get it done. The fact that some jobs are crappier than others creates some weird social layering. If there comes a point in the future where we could have machinery efficiently do all those jobs, then things can probably change.
But yeah, it won't be easy, it won't just magically happen because of any particular invention. But technology will continue to make it more likely.
The whole premise is actually kind of simple I think. There's three basic components to everything that we use in our lives. Raw materials, Energy, and Design. Stuff needs to be thought up(design), it requires ingredients to build(raw materials), and it takes energy to make/use/operate it. Some things, like digital media, have negligible raw material requirements, but they still fit the mold.
So if we can make computers that can actually think well enough to do the design, then getting design done faster just requires better computers. I think it's safe to assume that computers will continue to increase in power. Whether or not they'll become "intelligent" is harder to predict, but lets say for the sake of the singularity that they do.
We also need plentiful energy. If this whole fusion power thing ever pans out, we'll have that.
Raw materials are a little harder. Making things just out of dirt is a bit simplistic. because there's lots of different minerals and such present in dirt, and they're not all suitable for any purpose. There's lots of stuff available in the earth, but extracting it, even if it becomes easy, will most likely be rather destructive. The solution is to make spaceflight reliable enough that we can mine other places, asteroids and the like.
Although that seems to me to be a short term solution, because most things in space are pretty far away. Unless there's some sort of major star trek-ish breakthrough in propulsion, it's never going to be all that simple.
I guess the point is, design and energy are almost like a switch. Either we'll have a couple big breakthroughs that'll bust those two wide open, or we won't. But even if we got cheap brains and cheap energy, the raw materials issue seems like it'd be a harder problem. If you're looking for a long term investment, land would probably be a good one, because it's the hardest thing for us to make more of.
I might not have control over the features that MS office gives me, but I sure as hell know where all the files I produced are. I know that I'll be able to open them up forever with the copy of office that I already have. I know if I decide to delete those files, that I can be 100% sure that they are deleted, and not kept on some server in california somewhere. Office isn't some sort of paragon of freedom, to be sure, but that doesn't mean any possible change will be better.
Gmail ads are not particularly offensive, you're right, but I still don't have to like them. Having a good, free webmail system is worth enough to me personally that I'll put up with those ads in order to use their service. I have to wonder, however, if such things would fly in the corporate environment. Would you want your employees distracted by advertisements while they're doing word processing stuff for you? Topical ads? Would you want google reading your company's internal memos just so they can display relevant ads? You probably don't spend enough time in Gmail for the advertisements to get on your nerves. Start spending six hours per day working with it, having it take up screen real estate, see how long you're glad to have it around.
Just like people have written new AIM clients to get rid of the ads, people will tire of them and start trying to find ways around it. That might actually be good in the long run, it might increase choices for us. But it won't make life easy for Google.
I guess technically that could work, but then the big question becomes, how are they going to make any money off of this? If they don't have a good plan, their stock price will tank, investors will become really pissed, and things will get really messy really fast. I don't think extending their advertising to this will work. The only thing that makes any sense to me would be a subscription based service, which I don't think will fly either. Service contracts? That isn't one of google's strengths.
Google's stuff right now is competitive because it's basically free for the end user. I think they can only push that so far. In the end, they're a company, and they've got to be making money. While they might help accelerate MS's fall from power, they're not going to be taking its place, and they're going to be doing it alongside a handful of other companies plus the whole FOSS dealie.
Yeah, but you can have all of that without giving the server to someone else. I think corporations especially would be very wary of putting all their data on a remote server. If they want to go to network clients, it's all going to connect back to a server/server farm in their own building.
Once something becomes a standard at work, people are more likely to use it at home. Could google be developing this system to function in that manner? Maybe, but it didn't sound like it from the article.
Although your analogies are dumb.
I think there's a couple big points that the author of the article is missing. If this whole network apps replacing local apps really happens, it's not going to happen the way he thinks it is, for a couple reasons. One reason is open standards. Anyone who makes the switch from MS, a big reason for it is likely to be to escape the file format lock-in that MS inflicted for so long. Corporations won't blindly walk into that again. Along the same lines, I don't think any company, or too many people, will allow all their files to reside on some remote server somewhere. That doesn't make sense for a lot of reasons.
Second is an economic reason. If you're going to buy some software, wouldn't you rather have a copy of it on your desk, installed on your own machine? I would imagine Google trying a subscription style payment system, which i think people will be reluctant to accept. It just takes too much control away from the user, and gives it to the company.
But even if all of this does happen, I still don't see Google holding onto any sizeable monopoly for long. Open standards will allow just about anyone to offer a competing system. Google won't be able to pull the same underhanded tactics that MS did. And nobody wants to be subjected to another monopoly.
Google is just intensely overrated. Yeah, they make some cool stuff, and at one time, they had a search engine that was very useful. But I don't know how far that's going to take them. There's two things that they use to make money right now. Search, (which I don't think they do nearly as well as they used to), and advertisements (spam!). While portable email might be useful enough that people will cope with having it decorated with advertisements, I don't think they'll feel the same about word processors, or powerpoint, or whatever.
Anything that Google does to seriously threaten MS will mean them venturing away from what they're good at, and into new stuff. Sure, they've got smart employees, they might get it right, but they also might screw it up. The strongest thing Google has going for it right now is its brandname, but that's an easy thing to ruin.
Yeah, it looks like if you want to have guarantees on everything your computer is running, you're going to have to dive headfirst into what is a very dirty word on slashdot. Proprietary!
No one could even hope to guarantee a piece of software unless they had control over everything that it runs on top of (hardware/drivers/OS), and anything that could run on top if it or communicate with it (plug-ins, extensions, file formats). Really the PC is a multipurpose tool well beyond pretty much any physical object that I can think of. The same openness and unpredictability that has made the industry progress and innovate so quickly just might negate any guarantees of stability or security, and that's just the nature of the beast. You can't have it both ways.
Yeah, there are places that require much more stringent checks of their software. NASA doesn't just quickly throw together stuff and upload it onto the space shuttle, they test the hell out of it. And so they get high quality stuff written directly for their hardware. The downside to this is that development is slow, and it's expensive.
So basically, if you want software that's guaranteed, you're going to have to do a few things.
A) Pay someone a whole lot of money to write it.
B) Test the hell out of it before it gets put in place.
C) Realize that this is going to take a long time
D) Probably pick some very specific hardware for it to function with, and not have the option to easily upgrade in the future.
E) Make sure you get all the feature requests and whatnot right the first time, because patches and stuff are not going to be easy or cheap.
The market, for the most part, has opted for halfway broken software for a couple reasons. Upfront costs, freedom to grow/update/expand more easily, and because brokenass Windows was good enough for a lot of stuff. Hardware increases allowed significant boosts in productivity, and to a large degree, software was just sort of along for the ride. Now that commodity hardware offers so much power that the drive to upgrade is much less of a factor, it might make more sense to focus more on software quality.
This is the very reason why the US won't do anything drastic with its "control" over the internet. Even if our government technically could find a way to isolate whole countries or whatnot, they wouldn't, because the economic fallout would be immediate and significant. Even for the current US administration, the only thing that takes precedence over ideology is money. They don't mind illogical economic policies that will cause us problems in the future, but if something that they did caused profits to fall for big companies today, you can be darn sure there would be a whole lot of noise that they couldn't ignore.
You're right in that too much specialization can lead to inefficiencies. Mostly because it can cause communication breakdowns. An example, my education was in architecture. An architecture firm designing a building nowadays will hire an engineering firm to do things like plan the HVAC system. An architect does not really need to know many details about HVAC. But we were still taught enough of the basics to have an informed enough conversation with the HVAC engineers. Otherwise systems wouldn't mesh, stuff would conflict, and everyone would get sued six ways to sunday. And that's just a technical issue, ignoring the more social aspects.
/. about engineers vs. marketing departments. Where each side sees the other as an enemy, when in reality their ultimate goal, to ship products, is the same. They're just so caught up in their own little part of it that they don't communicate well, and things get ugly.
You hear a lot of whining on
That's why there should always be some people who don't delve so much into specialized knowledge. These people need to take big picture looks at things, and tie them all together. These people should be managers. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that the right people always get put into that position.