> Palm has significantly more market share than Windows CE, because it does what it's designed to
> do a lot BETTER than CE.
Palm has the market share because it was the first that gave the consumers an affordable, pocketable device that got the job done. Previous attempts all went drastically wrong in at least one of those departments.
Palm is losing the market share because WinCE devices are starting to get that mix of features right also, and offer features above and beyond that. Given the choice of spending $400 on a basic device that gets the job done, or on a really fancy device that gets the job done, most consumers (you possibly excluded) would opt for the fancy device.
That is simply the reason why Palm needs to get with the program. Just look at the automobile industry, which could teach them a thing or two about minimum feature requirements. Manufacturers might disagree about the necessity or usefulness of this or that feature, but omitting it would remove them from the market.
That said, WinCE isn't quite there yet. Neither are the devices quite as usable as Palms, nor do they have satisfactory battery life (except for the most dedicated users), nor has the Palm price point quite been reached (except maybe with monochrome devices). But in another iteration or two, they might have Palm beat.
> am not going to waste my time ripping my CD's to MP3 when I can just store them in some raw
> audio format
Yeah, but once you realize that you're displacing an entire MPEG4 movie with that 650MB album, you might just change your mind. But if you're a ferocious audiophile, fine, have your way .
> Still the one big problem that I see is backup storage has not progressed similarly.
Very true, I've made this point a few months (years?) ago. Also, storage interface bandwidth hasn't kept up. Putting 1TB of data onto removable media (ha!) at IDE speeds will have you turning old and gray. Even before that I don't see any obvious and cheap solutions. Frankly, a large IDE drive in a 1394 enclosure that you can remove at any moment seems to me as good as any cartrige system.
Precisely (gotta get me one of those Audiotrons). Except that it will inevitably be taken to the next level with video, and used bi-directionally. In other words, your next DVD player might very well also have an Ethernet port and pull its files from a file server instead. And your next TiVo might very well have an Ethernet port and store its streams on a remote drive. 100BaseT has enough bandwidth for this type of application.
> Well, the average user just isn't filling up an 80 gig drive.
[...]
> I don't think much more will be needed until more people start using their computers for video recording
That the whole crux of the matter. Most people that predict that our storage requirements will taper off in the near future apply obsolete usage models. For application and non-multimedia data storage even a 30GB drive will last a long, long time. But as soon as audio and in particular video enter the scene, nothing is too much.
You seem to think that the main use of multimedia will be on a traditional PC, which couldn't be further from the truth. The future of multimedia computer equipment--in particular storage--belongs to the embedded/set-top market. We've seen the TiVo and the UltimateTV, but those are just the tip of a giant iceberg. Once their costs come down to the $100-$200 range, they will be as common-place as VCRs. Once manufacturers start incorporating PVRs in TVs and cable boxes, the appetite of the market for storage will explode. Just wait 5 years or so until HDTV becomes more mainstream and the same progams require a multiple of the storage space of today.
Another trend I think you'll see is home media servers. Essentially network-attached storage on which TiVo's, MP3 players and all the other new and wonderful toys of the near future are going to deposit their trash. Once they become plug-and-play, and keeping that re-run of Seinfeld around for all eternity is just a button push away, people will want to store more and more media garbage. As those file servers keep piling up in the living room entertainment center, that terabyte won't seem that large anymore.
I haven't seen a credible reason offered yet (neither in this thread nor by NASA etc) for why landing under rocket power is a desireable feature. It's a very cool engineering exercise, yes, for fooling around with extremely accurate feedback control of exhaust thrust vectoring. But it's neither energy efficient nor safe--for most of the landing procedure flawless performance of the engines and control systems is *vital*. Failure of either gives you no second chance, because you're hurtling straight towards your landing site.
Long term there's no substitute for aerodynamic assist. Putting a winged vehicle at 50,000 ft using aero engines takes a fraction of consummable liquid (fuel/propellant/oxidant) compared to a conventional rocket. Future space vehicles will without doubt carry either multiple or multi-modal engines to take advantage of each engine type's optimal performance environment. Considering that a conventional rocket consumes a substantial percentage of its fuel just to get out of the atmosphere, it only makes sense to take that first step with jet engines.
You must be readig too many magazines. Maybe the US were quicker with initial broadband roll-out, but they've slacked off majorly lately. Forget DSL, the Bells are doing everything they can to drag their feet. Regarding cable, do a quick poll of user opinions of the major providers and you'll find they're all equally sucky. Cable has been available in some markets for what--over three years now?--and I only just was able to get it last week. I'm happy, yes, but let's not gush over the US' supposed leadership in the field. From talking to family and friends in Germany, broadband is becoming quite available in Europe as well. I think the US is losing its reason to gloat.
> 500 miles per tank? That's not a very ambitous goal, IMO.
Well, they're probably thinking of their darling Suburban, which thinks it's in heaven when it gets 10 mpg. On fuel cells, you might actually be able to drive it on vacation.
It seems the whole idea of stealth reached its hey-day prior to cheap, ubiquitous computing power. Nowadays it seems that detecting stealth aircraft should be just a firmware upgrade away (in a manner of speaking). If the F/A-117 has a radar signature the size of a large bird, the only problem would seem to be to be able to track a large enough amount of birds just long enough to differentiate those that fly at 400+ mph from those that don't. Some SAMs should be able to be retrofitted for ground vectoring into the general vicinity of the plane, at which point its on-board radar should be able to finish the job. I'm sure the plane will appear bigger than just a bird to a missle 200m on its tail. And even if it doesn't, small enough computing power to do stealth tracking on-board is readily available, to say nothing of optical tracking.
and will in fact go one step further and recommend that you also write your own compiler, and--better yet--design your own language. Because you know how fickle this industry is, C++ could turn out to have been just a fad, and even if it sticks around, those OS guys could lose interest in the GNU compilers any day now. What will you do then, C++ boy?
I guess I'm confused about what exactly JK's opinion regarding OS is now--or did he merely throw in the terms as a checklist item?
I think he's drawing some premature conclusions about Microsoft's imminent success. There are two major bet-the-farm strategies Microsoft has embarked upon, and they could succeed or fail to various degrees:.NET, and compulsory registration. If.NET fails or doesn't take off as imagined, Microsoft could be in serious poo-poo.
Regarding compulsory software registration, that's yet another case of sticking the head in the sand: large corporations like MS simply refuse to acknowledge how much of their market share is really due to full on or gray piracy. Once you will literally be forced to buy a copy of Windows and Office for EACH machine in your household, rather than just using the CDs that came with one of them, let's see how many people will still have the latest Windows and Office on all their machines. And that's not even considering the Big Brother aspect of it. I think Microsoft will get a sobering reality check within the next year or so (especially after Windows XP turns out not to be the expected cash cow).
If you buy peripherals that broadcast their data through the air, what the hell do you expect?! We take it as a given that true security with 802.11b even using encryption is an iffy thing, despite using pretty heavy duty hardware, and yet we're floored when a cheap input device with nary more horsepower than a CD player is insecure? Perhaps we should come up with a public key protocol for mice and keyboards? Given the required horsepower, we could then also use them as co-processors, offloading all those Quake computations on the mouse and keyboard. Hmm...
> How about we put some thought into something like Sun's OpenFirmware system: a small, simple
> virtual machine spec to initialize the card and provide any functions needed to boot.
> Lastly, since the purpose of this VM is very focused, it can provide very high-level
> operations to the system.
Are you talking about a VM just to boot the hardware, or for all communications to it? I've been thinking about a custom driver VM for a while, to have completely platform-independent drivers. Since the majority of cards depend on similar operations (mem move, read/write locations, trigger interrupts etc), those could be provided as optimized high level ops with negligible slowdown. Then you could have truly generic drivers for your hardware. Some ultra-high-bandwidth devices might suffer a bit, like video, but it might be acceptable.
> Nice idea but once your holding your PAD and you have the screen on the front where do you put
> the cells?
Ah, but you forgot about the OTHER gadgets they presented at the same show. There's the solar cell sunshades with the directional antenna that constantly gets pointed at your PDA/cell phone and transmits the electricity as a focused microwave beam. Or, for the less fashion conscious and more power hungry, there's the solar cell helmet. It doubles as a motorcycle helmet and is completely coated with solar cells. It also features the same directional antenna as the shades.
> I don't believe in censorship in any form, regardless of how much the material might be
> found offensive.
I'm a bit ambivolent about that. There are valid points on both sides. I have a problem with sites like those tracking abortion doctors in the US and encouraging physical actions against them. Freedom of speech should be granted only when it doesn't limit others' freedoms, particularly the freedom to live.
Most people would not object to certain types of "censorship", such as the fight against child exploitation. The problem is that once you do decide to engage in censorship at all, the line between acceptable and unacceptable is very blurry. I think it's very important to maintain open dialog between policy makers and the public to keep this line on the acceptable side.
> Germany does, in many cases, provided it is nazi material.
Germany is a strange case precisely because of its recent history. It is really between a rock and a hard place: if they do away with the unconditional Nazi censorship, many will take that as being soft on faschism. If they keep enforcing it, many will (and do) accuse them of limiting freedom of speech. I think for the forseeable future it doesn't much matter what they do. In another fifty or a hundred years time might sufficiently buffer them from history to do away with the current anti-Nazi policies.
> So two 17 year olds can have sex, but they just can't take a picture of themselves doing it.
What's so unusual about that? You can also breast-feed your baby, or have it lie completely naked on a changing table and apply cream on its behind, yet you'd probably get in trouble if you gratuitously photographed and posted these acts.
In the US we can decide who runs our country (and by extension much of the world) at 18, but we can't decide to have a drink until we're 21.
> The flip side is that freedom of speech enables John Skinhead to spout Nazi propagander if he
> wishes - just as God-loving bible bashers are allowed to preach that we're all going to Hell.
> Just as I'm able to proclame my atheism and contempt for hate-mongers - as God-loving
> bible-bashers generally are.
You're making it sound like groups that actively incite and organize violence against minorities and groups that simply spout bias are essentially the same. Most countries' laws will disagree with you, and the difference between the two is usually used as a yardstick of censorship and denial of freedom of speech. There's a big difference between saying that you're a worthless human being, and saying, oh, yeah, by the way, let's organize some riots and gangs and bash your head in and kill you.
> The most important thing about selective censorship (which is what we are discussing here)
> is that you need to determine who decides what is offensive.
This conversation is getting too abstract. Even if Germany had decided to go through with the DoS attack, it would have been against entities and ideas that are highly illegal in that country. So in this case "what is offensive" is decided by the law. And it's not really a question of offensive material, but of illegal material. Since German law doesn't apply abroad, they sensibly decided that it wasn't a good idea after all. However, they would be legally fully justified to mount a DoS attack on German servers hosting NN material.
> The Palm expansion slot supports MMC and SD which includes SDIO cards. There isn't anything
> available yet, but is capable of everything the springboard slot is in a much smaller package.
Yeah, nice in theory. In practice, we don't even have 802.11b CF cards yet, which are much bulkier, let along SD form factor ones. No need to hold your breath there.
For small to medium sized installations of a couple of hundred users Interbase 6 makes a perfectly fine server. It has all the checklist items (transactions, triggers, stored procs, solid SQL support), is a robust, debugged application, and is now completely free. It stores each database with all the users, groups, stored procs etc in a single file, which makes backup and transfer a snap. Newsgroup support is also good, and will probably only get better with time. The management GUI is no Enterprise Manager, but that's a small price to pay for what you get. In certain market segments Interbase could eat MSSQL for lunch if it were marketed half-way decently.
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> Palm has significantly more market share than Windows CE, because it does what it's designed to
> do a lot BETTER than CE.
Palm has the market share because it was the first that gave the consumers an affordable, pocketable device that got the job done. Previous attempts all went drastically wrong in at least one of those departments.
Palm is losing the market share because WinCE devices are starting to get that mix of features right also, and offer features above and beyond that. Given the choice of spending $400 on a basic device that gets the job done, or on a really fancy device that gets the job done, most consumers (you possibly excluded) would opt for the fancy device.
That is simply the reason why Palm needs to get with the program. Just look at the automobile industry, which could teach them a thing or two about minimum feature requirements. Manufacturers might disagree about the necessity or usefulness of this or that feature, but omitting it would remove them from the market.
That said, WinCE isn't quite there yet. Neither are the devices quite as usable as Palms, nor do they have satisfactory battery life (except for the most dedicated users), nor has the Palm price point quite been reached (except maybe with monochrome devices). But in another iteration or two, they might have Palm beat.
> Is it true that members of Mensa are telekinetic and can jerk off with only their mind?
That's the ONLY way they can accomplish it, I'm afraid. You win a little, you lose a little.
> am not going to waste my time ripping my CD's to MP3 when I can just store them in some raw
> audio format
Yeah, but once you realize that you're displacing an entire MPEG4 movie with that 650MB album, you might just change your mind. But if you're a ferocious audiophile, fine, have your way .
> Still the one big problem that I see is backup storage has not progressed similarly.
Very true, I've made this point a few months (years?) ago. Also, storage interface bandwidth hasn't kept up. Putting 1TB of data onto removable media (ha!) at IDE speeds will have you turning old and gray. Even before that I don't see any obvious and cheap solutions. Frankly, a large IDE drive in a 1394 enclosure that you can remove at any moment seems to me as good as any cartrige system.
> You mean like this and this?
Precisely (gotta get me one of those Audiotrons). Except that it will inevitably be taken to the next level with video, and used bi-directionally. In other words, your next DVD player might very well also have an Ethernet port and pull its files from a file server instead. And your next TiVo might very well have an Ethernet port and store its streams on a remote drive. 100BaseT has enough bandwidth for this type of application.
> Yeah, but the MPAA will take care of our storage needs by making it illegal to record anything...
Touche!
> Well, the average user just isn't filling up an 80 gig drive.
[...]
> I don't think much more will be needed until more people start using their computers for video recording
That the whole crux of the matter. Most people that predict that our storage requirements will taper off in the near future apply obsolete usage models. For application and non-multimedia data storage even a 30GB drive will last a long, long time. But as soon as audio and in particular video enter the scene, nothing is too much.
You seem to think that the main use of multimedia will be on a traditional PC, which couldn't be further from the truth. The future of multimedia computer equipment--in particular storage--belongs to the embedded/set-top market. We've seen the TiVo and the UltimateTV, but those are just the tip of a giant iceberg. Once their costs come down to the $100-$200 range, they will be as common-place as VCRs. Once manufacturers start incorporating PVRs in TVs and cable boxes, the appetite of the market for storage will explode. Just wait 5 years or so until HDTV becomes more mainstream and the same progams require a multiple of the storage space of today.
Another trend I think you'll see is home media servers. Essentially network-attached storage on which TiVo's, MP3 players and all the other new and wonderful toys of the near future are going to deposit their trash. Once they become plug-and-play, and keeping that re-run of Seinfeld around for all eternity is just a button push away, people will want to store more and more media garbage. As those file servers keep piling up in the living room entertainment center, that terabyte won't seem that large anymore.
I haven't seen a credible reason offered yet (neither in this thread nor by NASA etc) for why landing under rocket power is a desireable feature. It's a very cool engineering exercise, yes, for fooling around with extremely accurate feedback control of exhaust thrust vectoring. But it's neither energy efficient nor safe--for most of the landing procedure flawless performance of the engines and control systems is *vital*. Failure of either gives you no second chance, because you're hurtling straight towards your landing site.
Long term there's no substitute for aerodynamic assist. Putting a winged vehicle at 50,000 ft using aero engines takes a fraction of consummable liquid (fuel/propellant/oxidant) compared to a conventional rocket. Future space vehicles will without doubt carry either multiple or multi-modal engines to take advantage of each engine type's optimal performance environment. Considering that a conventional rocket consumes a substantial percentage of its fuel just to get out of the atmosphere, it only makes sense to take that first step with jet engines.
You must be readig too many magazines. Maybe the US were quicker with initial broadband roll-out, but they've slacked off majorly lately. Forget DSL, the Bells are doing everything they can to drag their feet. Regarding cable, do a quick poll of user opinions of the major providers and you'll find they're all equally sucky. Cable has been available in some markets for what--over three years now?--and I only just was able to get it last week. I'm happy, yes, but let's not gush over the US' supposed leadership in the field. From talking to family and friends in Germany, broadband is becoming quite available in Europe as well. I think the US is losing its reason to gloat.
> 500 miles per tank? That's not a very ambitous goal, IMO.
Well, they're probably thinking of their darling Suburban, which thinks it's in heaven when it gets 10 mpg. On fuel cells, you might actually be able to drive it on vacation.
It seems the whole idea of stealth reached its hey-day prior to cheap, ubiquitous computing power. Nowadays it seems that detecting stealth aircraft should be just a firmware upgrade away (in a manner of speaking). If the F/A-117 has a radar signature the size of a large bird, the only problem would seem to be to be able to track a large enough amount of birds just long enough to differentiate those that fly at 400+ mph from those that don't. Some SAMs should be able to be retrofitted for ground vectoring into the general vicinity of the plane, at which point its on-board radar should be able to finish the job. I'm sure the plane will appear bigger than just a bird to a missle 200m on its tail. And even if it doesn't, small enough computing power to do stealth tracking on-board is readily available, to say nothing of optical tracking.
and will in fact go one step further and recommend that you also write your own compiler, and--better yet--design your own language. Because you know how fickle this industry is, C++ could turn out to have been just a fad, and even if it sticks around, those OS guys could lose interest in the GNU compilers any day now. What will you do then, C++ boy?
I guess I'm confused about what exactly JK's opinion regarding OS is now--or did he merely throw in the terms as a checklist item?
.NET, and compulsory registration. If .NET fails or doesn't take off as imagined, Microsoft could be in serious poo-poo.
I think he's drawing some premature conclusions about Microsoft's imminent success. There are two major bet-the-farm strategies Microsoft has embarked upon, and they could succeed or fail to various degrees:
Regarding compulsory software registration, that's yet another case of sticking the head in the sand: large corporations like MS simply refuse to acknowledge how much of their market share is really due to full on or gray piracy. Once you will literally be forced to buy a copy of Windows and Office for EACH machine in your household, rather than just using the CDs that came with one of them, let's see how many people will still have the latest Windows and Office on all their machines. And that's not even considering the Big Brother aspect of it. I think Microsoft will get a sobering reality check within the next year or so (especially after Windows XP turns out not to be the expected cash cow).
If you buy peripherals that broadcast their data through the air, what the hell do you expect?! We take it as a given that true security with 802.11b even using encryption is an iffy thing, despite using pretty heavy duty hardware, and yet we're floored when a cheap input device with nary more horsepower than a CD player is insecure? Perhaps we should come up with a public key protocol for mice and keyboards? Given the required horsepower, we could then also use them as co-processors, offloading all those Quake computations on the mouse and keyboard. Hmm...
> How about we put some thought into something like Sun's OpenFirmware system: a small, simple
> virtual machine spec to initialize the card and provide any functions needed to boot.
> Lastly, since the purpose of this VM is very focused, it can provide very high-level
> operations to the system.
Are you talking about a VM just to boot the hardware, or for all communications to it? I've been thinking about a custom driver VM for a while, to have completely platform-independent drivers. Since the majority of cards depend on similar operations (mem move, read/write locations, trigger interrupts etc), those could be provided as optimized high level ops with negligible slowdown. Then you could have truly generic drivers for your hardware. Some ultra-high-bandwidth devices might suffer a bit, like video, but it might be acceptable.
> Nice idea but once your holding your PAD and you have the screen on the front where do you put
> the cells?
Ah, but you forgot about the OTHER gadgets they presented at the same show. There's the solar cell sunshades with the directional antenna that constantly gets pointed at your PDA/cell phone and transmits the electricity as a focused microwave beam. Or, for the less fashion conscious and more power hungry, there's the solar cell helmet. It doubles as a motorcycle helmet and is completely coated with solar cells. It also features the same directional antenna as the shades.
> I don't believe in censorship in any form, regardless of how much the material might be
> found offensive.
I'm a bit ambivolent about that. There are valid points on both sides. I have a problem with sites like those tracking abortion doctors in the US and encouraging physical actions against them. Freedom of speech should be granted only when it doesn't limit others' freedoms, particularly the freedom to live.
> so I think we can count this out.
:-)
My feeling also. Don't know about the kicking in doors thing
Most people would not object to certain types of "censorship", such as the fight against child exploitation. The problem is that once you do decide to engage in censorship at all, the line between acceptable and unacceptable is very blurry. I think it's very important to maintain open dialog between policy makers and the public to keep this line on the acceptable side.
> Germany does, in many cases, provided it is nazi material.
Germany is a strange case precisely because of its recent history. It is really between a rock and a hard place: if they do away with the unconditional Nazi censorship, many will take that as being soft on faschism. If they keep enforcing it, many will (and do) accuse them of limiting freedom of speech. I think for the forseeable future it doesn't much matter what they do. In another fifty or a hundred years time might sufficiently buffer them from history to do away with the current anti-Nazi policies.
> So two 17 year olds can have sex, but they just can't take a picture of themselves doing it.
What's so unusual about that? You can also breast-feed your baby, or have it lie completely naked on a changing table and apply cream on its behind, yet you'd probably get in trouble if you gratuitously photographed and posted these acts.
In the US we can decide who runs our country (and by extension much of the world) at 18, but we can't decide to have a drink until we're 21.
> The flip side is that freedom of speech enables John Skinhead to spout Nazi propagander if he
> wishes - just as God-loving bible bashers are allowed to preach that we're all going to Hell.
> Just as I'm able to proclame my atheism and contempt for hate-mongers - as God-loving
> bible-bashers generally are.
You're making it sound like groups that actively incite and organize violence against minorities and groups that simply spout bias are essentially the same. Most countries' laws will disagree with you, and the difference between the two is usually used as a yardstick of censorship and denial of freedom of speech. There's a big difference between saying that you're a worthless human being, and saying, oh, yeah, by the way, let's organize some riots and gangs and bash your head in and kill you.
> The most important thing about selective censorship (which is what we are discussing here)
> is that you need to determine who decides what is offensive.
This conversation is getting too abstract. Even if Germany had decided to go through with the DoS attack, it would have been against entities and ideas that are highly illegal in that country. So in this case "what is offensive" is decided by the law. And it's not really a question of offensive material, but of illegal material. Since German law doesn't apply abroad, they sensibly decided that it wasn't a good idea after all. However, they would be legally fully justified to mount a DoS attack on German servers hosting NN material.
Oh yeah? Well, I'm announcing an anti-gravity belt today. If anyone else actually ships one before me, they'll just be blatant thieves!
> The Palm expansion slot supports MMC and SD which includes SDIO cards. There isn't anything
> available yet, but is capable of everything the springboard slot is in a much smaller package.
Yeah, nice in theory. In practice, we don't even have 802.11b CF cards yet, which are much bulkier, let along SD form factor ones. No need to hold your breath there.
For small to medium sized installations of a couple of hundred users Interbase 6 makes a perfectly fine server. It has all the checklist items (transactions, triggers, stored procs, solid SQL support), is a robust, debugged application, and is now completely free. It stores each database with all the users, groups, stored procs etc in a single file, which makes backup and transfer a snap. Newsgroup support is also good, and will probably only get better with time. The management GUI is no Enterprise Manager, but that's a small price to pay for what you get. In certain market segments Interbase could eat MSSQL for lunch if it were marketed half-way decently.
> conclusing
> This man can't write!
And neither can I!