That could have a huge impact, if well-known and mainstream Ubuntu has binary pre-compiled apps that are seamlessly installable and "just work" on the OMAP.
And maybe the "web as a platform" is mature enough? Even tech people spend a high proportion of their time on the web ("online"). Most email is now web-based. eg. Google's office-webapps (spreadsheet, word processor, power point) provide sufficient functionality. Still non-mainstream are offline webapps (AIR, Silverlight, Google gears, javaFX). Alternatively, if connectivity is guaranteed (wireless, 3G?), maybe online-only is realy OK...
But I find webapps annoyingly slow on a low-powered device. A more efficient browser (maybe Chrome, Opera?) would fix this; and maybe there is a need for old-school non-bloated, efficient coders, just as in the early PC days.
I think this recession will help the coming disruption.
ARM's OMAP 3 is the news: it's a non-Intel netbook.
Maybe not today, but this is the way the Intel monopoly ends: a smaller, simpler, cheaper, more power-efficient chip that is customized for what is needed today, not weighed down by decades of legacy decisions.
A barrier is applications for the platform: I'm sure Windows doesn't run on it; and they'll be few binary linux applications. But I think the web is now mature enough, so web apps + multimedia.
Then again, Intel is an incredible competitor. Nothing stops them from disrupting themselves. They surely have internal non-legacy projects just like this. Several. (Andy Grove's blurb is on the cover of "The Innovator's Dilemma").
PS3's Cell is multi-core, which makes it fundamentally hard to program for.
It's failure may foreshadow the failure of multi-core, and instead we go low-power (Wii, eee PC netbooks); or specialized silicon (XBox, GPU, physics co-processor).
If software patents are abolished, it will enable foreign competitors to undercut US producers on their own creations (and therefore lose jobs etc).
I'm not saying it's a bad thing; this is what stopped the last movement to abolish patents...
Re:Or that history repeats itself
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 1
This is "disruption".
It's one way companies can fail, even if they are well-run. Its developer, Clayton Christiansen, was motivated by DEC's demise.
He studied disruption mainly in the HDD market, which went 16", 8", 5¼", 3½", etc. The bigger drives have greater capacity... but new markets valued other factors more (e.g. physical size, shock-proof in laptops). Over time, those smaller drives improved in capacity until they were also good enough for the original market. (NB: the physically bigger drives had even bigger capacity - but it was more than could be used). And now, SSD and USB drives are disrupting HHD.
Today, people say we need multi-core to get higher performance. True. But what if that higher performance isn't needed? Wii outsells PSX3. Netbook outsells Laptop. etc.
(1). Netbooks were already immensely popular even before the recession (the recession will only help them).
(2). Netbooks use slow single-core CPUs. e.g the first eee PC was 900MHz. They are far from maxing out the performance of single-core.
"Agent vs tool" seems to be a very old issue. I was amazed to see it come up in a 30 year old thesis in Architecture, about computers starting to be used in that field.
"Only Volvos drivers cause accidents" is a premise of the article.
Therefore, there is no danger of a side-swipe if all the other Volvos automatically brake.
Is there anything Microsoft could do to improve on Windows XP? Or have they run out of runway? DOS was improved on by Windows 3.1, improved on by Windows 95, improved on by Windows XP... but the previous systems all had serious limitations. What is the serious limitation of Windows XP?
The prettier aero GUI is an improvement - nice, but doesn't seem to be needed. They now sell XP home on eee PCs for $40 - that improves on price (but price-cutting is a company's last resort, when they have nothing better to offer). I guess security (viruses, malware) was a big issue. Microsoft might have done better by introducing a new OS to fix the security problems of Windows XP, instead of the free service packs (which were really quite excellent). Then, the upgrade would have been needed.
What should Microsoft do to make a new OS that's worthwhile? Improve on:
I had your idea working a few years ago with a HP200LX - a 300 gram handheld, running DOS on a 186, with a terminal-sized black-and-white LCD display. It used two AA batteries.
Today's laptops use too much power, even the netbooks like the eeePC. Maybe electronic-paper displays, as in Amazon's Kindle, will make this possible again...
Many of the things that maths attempts to show cannot be shown in an implementation. For example, a proof that an algorithm works correctly for every possible regular expression, or for all words in a regular language (because it could be infinite, such as a*, which represents the language: {0, a, aa, aaa, aaaa,... } ).
Of course, working code can show that it works in some cases, and may act as a bar, much like writing the paper in the correct style for the journal.
The other exciting alternative is to actually implement the proof itself - this can be done in a theorem proof assistant such as COQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq
> including obvious junk in the archive actually has relatively low social cost since nobody would ever cite it
This reminds me of search engines pre-Google. One of the key goals of Page and Brin was to rank pages by relevance, so you could find your result easily; as opposed to returning a whole bunch of results with the one you wanted somewhere in there. Google was so successful in this, that the top ranked result was often-enough the one you wanted to justify the "I'm feeling lucky" button.
Isn't a key function of a journal to rank papers by quality, and only include the good ones?
Of course, PageRank was inspired by citation ranks of papers, and so this could work just as well. Except that we already have this (Citeseer, google etc) without journals.
Is there an opportunity here for a good quality journal? It could be socially driven. It could be advertising supported. The only problem is that it won't help you get paid - but it will help for the purported purpose of academia: research and education.
Linux might have made inroads during a recession, especially on the cheaper netbooks, except that Microsoft recognized this took the drastic step of unretiring Windows XP, making it available on the eeePC. They actually arranged pricing so the Windows version is cheaper than the linux version.
The value of Windows is not any intrinsic quality (not its performance, reliability, usability etc), but the software that runs on it.
Therefore, wine is the greatest threat to windows.
I wonder if convergent evolution is more likely than it appears. Given that birds can evolve most easily in typical ways, with the same selection pressure, the effect would be similar. As an example, a pressure for a mammal to be taller can be met in a limited number of ways (longer legs, longer torso, longer neck, longer arms, two-legged stance) - some will be easier for the mammal to evolve in than others (especially given if other environmental selection pressures are the same, including diet for building material, gestation period), and one of those is more likely to be selected for. Perhaps very often, one way is significantly easier, and so will be very likely the one selected for.
I'm suggesting that a species has affordances in how it responds to selection pressure. There are favored dimension of change. Another example is that to increase intelligence, the easiest way, affordance or dimension of change seems to be neoteny.
If XP:linux sell at 7:3, dropping linux sacrifices 30% of sales... Odd.
OTOH, the linux-subnetbook category is a deadly threat to MS (that's why they un-retired XP for it, @ $40 each). I think they'd do whatever is necessary to protect themselves.
It's easy to explain the problem with filtering the internet, China-style. One symptom is the silence of the mainstream media in Australia (reports have been from blogs and other countries...).
The real, underlying problem is obvious as soon as you say *********.
Slashdot Mirror
That could have a huge impact, if well-known and mainstream Ubuntu has binary pre-compiled apps that are seamlessly installable and "just work" on the OMAP.
And maybe the "web as a platform" is mature enough? Even tech people spend a high proportion of their time on the web ("online"). Most email is now web-based. eg. Google's office-webapps (spreadsheet, word processor, power point) provide sufficient functionality. Still non-mainstream are offline webapps (AIR, Silverlight, Google gears, javaFX). Alternatively, if connectivity is guaranteed (wireless, 3G?), maybe online-only is realy OK...
But I find webapps annoyingly slow on a low-powered device. A more efficient browser (maybe Chrome, Opera?) would fix this; and maybe there is a need for old-school non-bloated, efficient coders, just as in the early PC days.
I think this recession will help the coming disruption.
ARM's OMAP 3 is the news: it's a non-Intel netbook.
Maybe not today, but this is the way the Intel monopoly ends: a smaller, simpler, cheaper, more power-efficient chip that is customized for what is needed today, not weighed down by decades of legacy decisions.
A barrier is applications for the platform: I'm sure Windows doesn't run on it; and they'll be few binary linux applications. But I think the web is now mature enough, so web apps + multimedia.
Then again, Intel is an incredible competitor. Nothing stops them from disrupting themselves. They surely have internal non-legacy projects just like this. Several. (Andy Grove's blurb is on the cover of "The Innovator's Dilemma").
PS3's Cell is multi-core, which makes it fundamentally hard to program for.
It's failure may foreshadow the failure of multi-core, and instead we go low-power (Wii, eee PC netbooks); or specialized silicon (XBox, GPU, physics co-processor).
Imagine a server room full of these things...
Ask on this excellent eee PC forum: http://forum.eeeuser.com/
There's also a wiki listing several different linuxes: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ (see table of contents on right-hand side)
If software patents are abolished, it will enable foreign competitors to undercut US producers on their own creations (and therefore lose jobs etc).
I'm not saying it's a bad thing; this is what stopped the last movement to abolish patents...
This is "disruption".
It's one way companies can fail, even if they are well-run. Its developer, Clayton Christiansen, was motivated by DEC's demise.
He studied disruption mainly in the HDD market, which went 16", 8", 5¼", 3½", etc. The bigger drives have greater capacity... but new markets valued other factors more (e.g. physical size, shock-proof in laptops). Over time, those smaller drives improved in capacity until they were also good enough for the original market. (NB: the physically bigger drives had even bigger capacity - but it was more than could be used). And now, SSD and USB drives are disrupting HHD.
Today, people say we need multi-core to get higher performance. True. But what if that higher performance isn't needed? Wii outsells PSX3. Netbook outsells Laptop. etc.
(1). Netbooks were already immensely popular even before the recession (the recession will only help them).
(2). Netbooks use slow single-core CPUs. e.g the first eee PC was 900MHz. They are far from maxing out the performance of single-core.
A list of radically new innovations that were adopted during the Great Depression, please.
"Agent vs tool" seems to be a very old issue.
I was amazed to see it come up in a 30 year old thesis in Architecture, about computers starting to be used in that field.
Google's "I'm feeling lucky" is a step towards agent philosophy - that works really well.
"Only Volvos drivers cause accidents" is a premise of the article.
Therefore, there is no danger of a side-swipe if all the other Volvos automatically brake.
We have now created symbols that can represent simple meanings cross-culturally and cross-linguistically
Emoticons are the XML of human language.
Is there anything Microsoft could do to improve on Windows XP? Or have they run out of runway? DOS was improved on by Windows 3.1, improved on by Windows 95, improved on by Windows XP... but the previous systems all had serious limitations. What is the serious limitation of Windows XP?
The prettier aero GUI is an improvement - nice, but doesn't seem to be needed. They now sell XP home on eee PCs for $40 - that improves on price (but price-cutting is a company's last resort, when they have nothing better to offer). I guess security (viruses, malware) was a big issue. Microsoft might have done better by introducing a new OS to fix the security problems of Windows XP, instead of the free service packs (which were really quite excellent). Then, the upgrade would have been needed.
What should Microsoft do to make a new OS that's worthwhile? Improve on:
features? performance? reliability? convenience? price?
The separation of I/O into the two components of the screen and keyboard is an artificial one. Consider paper.
However, typing text does seem to be an improvement on writing (speed, machine readable).
The problem is power usage.
I had your idea working a few years ago with a HP200LX - a 300 gram handheld, running DOS on a 186, with a terminal-sized black-and-white LCD display. It used two AA batteries.
Today's laptops use too much power, even the netbooks like the eeePC. Maybe electronic-paper displays, as in Amazon's Kindle, will make this possible again...
Many of the things that maths attempts to show cannot be shown in an implementation. For example, a proof that an algorithm works correctly for every possible regular expression, or for all words in a regular language (because it could be infinite, such as a*, which represents the language: {0, a, aa, aaa, aaaa, ... } ).
Of course, working code can show that it works in some cases, and may act as a bar, much like writing the paper in the correct style for the journal.
The other exciting alternative is to actually implement the proof itself - this can be done in a theorem proof assistant such as COQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq
> including obvious junk in the archive actually has relatively low social cost since nobody would ever cite it
This reminds me of search engines pre-Google. One of the key goals of Page and Brin was to rank pages by relevance, so you could find your result easily; as opposed to returning a whole bunch of results with the one you wanted somewhere in there. Google was so successful in this, that the top ranked result was often-enough the one you wanted to justify the "I'm feeling lucky" button.
Isn't a key function of a journal to rank papers by quality, and only include the good ones?
Of course, PageRank was inspired by citation ranks of papers, and so this could work just as well. Except that we already have this (Citeseer, google etc) without journals.
Is there an opportunity here for a good quality journal? It could be socially driven. It could be advertising supported. The only problem is that it won't help you get paid - but it will help for the purported purpose of academia: research and education.
Linux might have made inroads during a recession, especially on the cheaper netbooks, except that Microsoft recognized this took the drastic step of unretiring Windows XP, making it available on the eeePC. They actually arranged pricing so the Windows version is cheaper than the linux version.
The value of Windows is not any intrinsic quality (not its performance, reliability, usability etc), but the software that runs on it.
Therefore, wine is the greatest threat to windows.
I wonder if convergent evolution is more likely than it appears. Given that birds can evolve most easily in typical ways, with the same selection pressure, the effect would be similar. As an example, a pressure for a mammal to be taller can be met in a limited number of ways (longer legs, longer torso, longer neck, longer arms, two-legged stance) - some will be easier for the mammal to evolve in than others (especially given if other environmental selection pressures are the same, including diet for building material, gestation period), and one of those is more likely to be selected for. Perhaps very often, one way is significantly easier, and so will be very likely the one selected for.
I'm suggesting that a species has affordances in how it responds to selection pressure. There are favored dimension of change. Another example is that to increase intelligence, the easiest way, affordance or dimension of change seems to be neoteny.
yet another danger of humoring rude doctors.
Singapore has a very successful land reclamation project, to increase the size of the island.
Why not a land elevation project? It would be a huge project, but straightforward, and more convenient than losing your homeland.
If XP:linux sell at 7:3, dropping linux sacrifices 30% of sales... Odd.
OTOH, the linux-subnetbook category is a deadly threat to MS (that's why they un-retired XP for it, @ $40 each). I think they'd do whatever is necessary to protect themselves.
I think there is demand for the smaller size; if so, it will be met by the several competitors who followed ASUS.
A light, lower wattage, slimmer, cheaper - yet faster, more RAM, more "disk", better graphics - will be possible as the months go rolling by.
In a depression, cheap wins.
It's easy to explain the problem with filtering the internet, China-style. One symptom is the silence of the mainstream media in Australia (reports have been from blogs and other countries...).
The real, underlying problem is obvious as soon as you say *********.
images of text, not images of things. To obtain text from a photograph of a person, or a painting, is beyond even Google at the moment...
BTW: I wish Adobe used this OCR, so search works on a pdf of scanned text.