I read an interesting article a couple of years ago, comparing US and European cell service. Basically, in the '80s the US had excellent analog cell service (for the time), while Europe completely bungled that one--remember how much analog cell phones and service used to be in 1990 or so in say Germany? So Europe pretty much decided to kill that bitch and go digital all the way; they didn't have much to loose, not too much analog infrastructure.
The US on the other hand had very extensive analog infrastructure, and the cell phone companies had a lot of investment that hadn't paid for itself yet. Therefore they had little incentive to switch to digital just yet. Only now they're finally switching over, simply because digital is much cheaper in the long run--the per-cell user densities are orders of magnitude higher, depending on technology. Add to that the NIH (Not Invented Here) factor, meaning that US companies couldn't simply take GSM without screwing with it, which led to several different digital technolgies in the US. True, European GSM wasn't the best technology--particularly the 900 MHz fiasco--but it was an established standard and off-the-shelf. Hence spotty coverage, slow deployment, etc...
So, does that mean that CDDB has no rights to their music database, since all the data was user-submitted? Or was there always some disclaimer when submitting info, remitting your rights to the data to CDDB? Or have they even contended that the data is theirs?
Thanks for clarifying that. Someone got confused there. I think the free compiler would indeed not be a bad idea. Most of the blood and sweat in Delphi is in the IDE (well, and the VCL), the compiler is relatively easy and portable. Proof is that they already demoed the compiler on Linux. I would not be surprised if eventually Borland chose to do exactly that.
The entire concept of RAD has been completely debased since Delphi, as far as I'm concerned. It used to mean: first prototype your app in a toy tool, click its buttons and try it out to see if it feels ok, then throw it away and code it in a real tool. Well, Delphi has made those real tools pretty much redundant. My current company, and the company before that one, and the one before that one, make a damn good living creating vertical Delphi apps which are sold as is. "Going back" and doing them in C++ would be a waste of time. Back in the days before the MFC itself created bloatware, maybe. Nowadays, its code size and speed advantage--if any--are academic.
Back in my Amiga days Down Unda', I remember this guy from New Zealand created a Mac emulator for the Amiga--I forget its name--from scratch. He first made himself a rudimentary 68k assembler--how beats me--then I believe he created a C compiler with that. Although he could have written the emulator in assembler directly. Anyway, point being, the guy bootstrapped himself from nothing to a very nice Mac emulator indeed.
Yeah, yeah, what load of crap! I guess REALLY good programmers don't even need an editor; they simply redirect stdin to a file and type away.
I came from the good old C/C++ school of thought myself. When I first saw Delphi, I thought "who the hell needs this Pascal shit?" I tried it out for a couple of weeks just for kicks, and never went back. Now I say "who the hell needs that Visual C++ shit?" I'll never have to create an OnClick handler by hand again; I'll never have to fool with resource IDs again. C++ would be nice, but I got so used to strings in Delphi, I never wanted to fool with string classes again, either.
As was said before, programmers are lazy bastards. If Delphi can write mindless code for me, and does it well, why on earth would I insist on doing it myself? To prove my manhood as a manly programmer?
Well, I did say "their quality also TENDS to be binary". I wouldn't fully stand by that statement, either, but in general it either runs sufficiently reliably, or it crashes frequently, in which case it doesn't. It's amazing how much work you still can get done on a poorly configured or operating machine. It's just that for slashdotters it wouldn't be much fun.
Welcome to the real world. Design "theft" is economic reality. Sure, you can sue--as Apple is doing--but you have to wonder if it's money well spent. Incidentally, Apple certainly has no room to talk about theft--the fact of where they got their OS design hasn't left and gone away, even if it's been beaten to death.
If you want to see industrial design theft at work, observe any better-known Japanese automobile. Take the Lexus LS400 for example--depending on the angle, you will recognize lines from the previous E-class Mercedes (esp. nose, trunk, rear lights), or the 7-series BMW. Or take their new SUV, is it the RX? I matched it line for line against the M-class: the hood lines, the silhouette, the shape of the rear side windows. It's more squat and slightly more petite, but if you saw artist's sketches of both, I will be damned if you could tell the difference. Are Mercedes and BMW going to sue? Hardly.
> Side note: Does anyone actually sign up for the > ISP rebates? I've been advising people to not > take them, and keep the freedom to use whatever > ISP you want, especially with cable and DSL > providers to choose from.
Yeah, a friend of my wife's just got one the other week. I advised him to pay the full price and skip the AOL "offer". Actually, he was quite well informed about the implications. He did the math correctly and is still mulling it over. I guess people aren't as stupid as we give them credit for.
Well, I believe even in the US there are some vague data privacy laws, which almost everybody chooses to ignore. How else could the Florida DOT sell mailing lists INCLUDING MUGSHOTS?
In Europe things are much stricter. At least in Germany, to my knowledge, a company has no right to have a record of you without your consent--this extends to the field level. So you might allow them to have your name and address information for a magazine subscription, but not your SSN. You could sue them for storing it. Anybody correct me if I'm wrong on this.
There are widereaching implications of this. Most credit cards in the world--including Europe (Eurocard=Mastercard?)--are handled by a clearinghouse in Texas. While in Europe the credit card companies are bound by tight data privacy laws, once the info reaches US shores, it's up for grabs. There was a big spat between the EU and the US regarding such things recently. I think they were talking about big fines or even license revokation for US companies treating European information nonchalantly. And rightly so, I might add.
There's as economic rule that says that if the number of defective widgets a company puts out is below a certain number, you're probably overpaying per unit because of "excessive" quality control. In other words, there is an intersection of the curves of rising quality and falling value, around which a company should try to center itself. I first heard of this notion with respect to airline ticket prices and flight safety.
The thing about computers is that their quality also tends to be "binary": they either work, or they don't. Luckily, it's usually the manufacturer who has to foot the bill for those that don't. So quite frankly, I don't see why people get too upset about shoddy computers. Send it back, get the next one, eventually one will work. Once you get a working computer, you never look twice at it--heck, it could be built into the desk hutch for all I care, I never look at the box. Computers are about the service they render, not the object they are.
This should rile up all the Southern Baptists in the readership! They've been preaching this crap for decades. Also, it's funny how our profession draws some of the looniest freaks on earth. Anything to do with conspiracies, big brother, lord knows...these insecurities must stem from not being loved as a child or something.
Just apply some logic, people: unique indentifiers are only useful if they are UNIQUE. A barcode is one of the most forgeable things on earth, whether on a box of cereals or the head of your penis. No selfrespecting government--let alone the US one--would give it a second thought. Still, this is great stuff for paranoia.
I don't see how multicast solves the video on demand problem. Let's define VoD: I go to a web site, search for a particular movie, click on its link, and it starts streaming in. Like we do RealAudio today.
Given a library of thousands of movies on a particular server, what are the odds that a paricular movie will be played by several people at the exact same time?
If, on the other hand, by VoD we simply mean DirecTV-style staggered broadcasts, sure, multicast is fine. But that's not what I would call true VoD.
So, given my definition of VoD, I don't see how even a Terabit backbone could carry the hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of asynchronous movies played on a particular night in a particular country. I guess we would still need some kind of centrally orchestrated broadcast system to manage that, which could indeed give you much more choice than today, but still wouldn't be true anything-anytime-anywhere, like that motel ad currently on TV.
Language is learned two different ways: early childhood learning, and anything after that. The first language you learn is imprinted into your brain like many other instincts you learn at that time. Languages you learn later are committed to long term memory, but never become part of your instincts. There are studies of brain damage that have demonstrated people reverting back to the first language they learned, after portions of long term memory were destroyed that contained languages learned later.
I only learned English at 17, having grown up with German. While most people can't tell I'm not a native speaker--well, native Australian anyway, since that's were I learned it--and I'm conversationally much more fluid in English nowadays than in German, English still isn't reflexive with me. Sometimes, particularaly when I'm tired, even the simplest terms can elude me--I look at the sky, but for the life of me I can't think of the word "cloud", and yet immediately the word "Wolke" comes to mind. These kinds of glitches remind me that English is an acquired language.
Still, I disagree with the substance over style argument. Too many people use it as a copout from having to learn the language properly. My father has successfully used that argument, always getting annoyed when we corrected him, retorting with the standard "but you understand what I'm trying to say, yes?" Which hasn't helped him speak better English.
I don't think making fun of the language of a particular group quite rises to the level of non-PC. That's something THEY DO, versus something THEY ARE. After all, nobody thinks anything of making fun of a German accent and mispronunciations, or Italian, or Brooklyn for that matter.
You can already buy Compact Flash cards with well over 64MB of memory, at quite reasonable prices. Why don't the player makers concentrate on adding CF slots, rather than including more internal memory? No matter how much internal memory there is, it will never be enough anyway. Besides, the simplicity of changing an album by swapping out a card can't be duplicated with internal memory, even using USB--or even IEEE1394.
I think they should change their strategy to not include ANY internal memory at all, thus also lowering costs, and completely rely on storage media.
> I was taught that in order to be an attractive female, > I had to act less intellegent than I am "so I wouldn't > intimidate men."
Now, I know that's how the stereotype goes, but how does it actually happen in practice: did your parents take you aside on a sunny afternoon and say: "Honey, you know we really love you and all, but for heaven's sake, will you act a bit dumber please? You're scaring off all the boys, and we're NOT going to get stuck with you at home!"
Joke aside, it's interesting that when I was in school, many of the real brains in class were girls. Might have something to do with the earlier mental development of girls--at 14, most boys still care much more about goofing off than learning. Later on, though, the girls just drop off the map somehow. Could be the rising self-consciousness...
My wife is the prime example of this: very brainy overall, but when it comes to anything scientific, she locks up. Her first instinct is to delegate to me. But when I then explain how there's nothing to it, she goes: oh, yeah!
Anyway, my 1-year-old daughter will have none of that. She better turn out an exquisite geek, or there'll be hell to pay! There are plenty of role models in history, you just have to look.
Prediction: Microsoft on Linux!
on
Delphi for Linux
·
· Score: 1
I predict that within the next year, Microsoft will announce similar support for Linux with their major development products, at the very least as a matter of reflexive vaporware.
Seems someone stumbled upon some research into "holographic storage", read a couple of lines, and made a product announcement.
That technology is far from new. It's been around for over ten years, and anybody on/. shouldn't even raise a brow. Currently--as for the last ten years--it's still at the research stage. The storage media are all kinds of exocic pure crystals. Data is stored in parallel focal planes, one bitmp of "pixels" at a time, by polarizing the crystal molecules. One "page" of data is written to an LCD display in the form of a bitmap, which is then projected into the crystal and focused onto a particular plane with optics. Readout occurs by doing the reverse: projecting one plane onto a CCD and reading off the individual pixels. The operation is inherently parallel, so depending on the size of each bitmap, you can be reading a whole lot of data at once. Essentially, the technology is similar to MO disks, but in 3D and in parallel.
Currently the biggest holdback still seems to be the limited writing cycles these crystals can survive. Last time I read up, it was something like 1000 cycles, maybe they improved it an order of magnitude. Also, many researchers seemed to be targeting it not only as persistent storage, but as RAM replacement. Done right, it can offer access speeds many times above silicon RAM. Also, it offers the possilibity of purely optical parallel searches: the query data is written to the LCD, then projected into the crystal. Through interference patterns with matching data in the crystal, planes containing matches are found instantly without sequential searching. I only skimmed the theory on that one, so don't quote me on details.
Anyway, all this theory comes from people who don't also claim improved toilet brushes. I don't know about the guys at Keele, but this stuff is for real. When it'll crop up at Wal-Mart is another question.
What's the 3D equivalent of the click and the double-click? The squeeze and the double-squeeze?
Softmodems not that much cheaper
on
LinModems?
·
· Score: 1
I don't get this argument about softmodems being cheaper. I would understand if a softmodem cost a system integrator $10 to include, but a hardware modem $30 or so; with large unit counts, that adds up. However, these numbers are hardly ever invoked. Like here, we usually hear about $100 hardware modems and five times cheaper softmodems. Are these wholesale prices or retail now? Because I can get perfectly good hardware modems for $40 or less (even name brand, e.g. Creative Labs, in my experience a decent modem), but haven't found softmodems for much less than that. Looking at the high end, USRobotics WinModems are hardly cheap--you can get several decent brands of hardware modems for considerably less.
I think the whole argument revolves around the theoretical cheapness of the "soft" approach, which never really materializes. Problem is, you still have to have a substantial amount of hardware even for a softmodem--you really only save the controller chip itself and not much else. At volume prices I doubt a Rockwell chip amounts to more than a few dollars. The only way you can really save is by including the modem on the motherboard, taking advantage of a shared PCB and sundry circuitry. And that's were you usually do find big savings--look at emachines, which I think includes modem functionality on the m/b and where--considering the price--you basically don't pay for the modem.
After reading much of RMS's stuff, I can't shake the feeling that what really attracts him to the FSF is its obscurity. If his movement suddently became successful and everybody adopted his principles, he would probably run screaming for the hills and completely distance himself from the FSF.
Where have we seen that before? Oh yeah, Cobain and Nirvana. When people actually started liking the band, the guy couldn't handle it anymore and offed himself. Luckily RMS doesn't have that problem.
Besides, after reading several interviews with RMS, he strikes me as a highly hostile and disagreeable person, out to alienate the interviewer regardless of his/her intentions. How do you expect a guy like that to advance any cause whatsoever?
Looking at it your way, any old ignorance-drenched piece of writ--no matter how earnestly meant--could later be reinterpreted as "irony" to save face and maybe even pile on some brownie points. That pig won't fly here.
If you have read much Metcalfe (as I have over the last 3-4 years, back when he had slightly more intersting things to say than "Impeach Clinton"), you'd know that his irony comes in one form, and one form only: sledgehammer. Bob assumes that everybody else in the known universe is at least slighty more stupid than himself, so he signals irony and sarcasm in a very Monty-Pythonesque fashion.
This is a guy deeply in love with Big Corporate America--anything that benefits Big Money he loves. Linux and the Internet go so completely against that grain that he can't help but loathe them. A little less public visibility might benefit his personality hugely.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but what does it take to cover the whole Scandinavian population? Five towers? He, he...
I read an interesting article a couple of years ago, comparing US and European cell service. Basically, in the '80s the US had excellent analog cell service (for the time), while Europe completely bungled that one--remember how much analog cell phones and service used to be in 1990 or so in say Germany? So Europe pretty much decided to kill that bitch and go digital all the way; they didn't have much to loose, not too much analog infrastructure.
The US on the other hand had very extensive analog infrastructure, and the cell phone companies had a lot of investment that hadn't paid for itself yet. Therefore they had little incentive to switch to digital just yet. Only now they're finally switching over, simply because digital is much cheaper in the long run--the per-cell user densities are orders of magnitude higher, depending on technology. Add to that the NIH (Not Invented Here) factor, meaning that US companies couldn't simply take GSM without screwing with it, which led to several different digital technolgies in the US. True, European GSM wasn't the best technology--particularly the 900 MHz fiasco--but it was an established standard and off-the-shelf. Hence spotty coverage, slow deployment, etc...
So, does that mean that CDDB has no rights to their music database, since all the data was user-submitted? Or was there always some disclaimer when submitting info, remitting your rights to the data to CDDB? Or have they even contended that the data is theirs?
Thanks for clarifying that. Someone got confused there. I think the free compiler would indeed not be a bad idea. Most of the blood and sweat in Delphi is in the IDE (well, and the VCL), the compiler is relatively easy and portable. Proof is that they already demoed the compiler on Linux. I would not be surprised if eventually Borland chose to do exactly that.
The entire concept of RAD has been completely debased since Delphi, as far as I'm concerned. It used to mean: first prototype your app in a toy tool, click its buttons and try it out to see if it feels ok, then throw it away and code it in a real tool. Well, Delphi has made those real tools pretty much redundant. My current company, and the company before that one, and the one before that one, make a damn good living creating vertical Delphi apps which are sold as is. "Going back" and doing them in C++ would be a waste of time. Back in the days before the MFC itself created bloatware, maybe. Nowadays, its code size and speed advantage--if any--are academic.
Back in my Amiga days Down Unda', I remember this guy from New Zealand created a Mac emulator for the Amiga--I forget its name--from scratch. He first made himself a rudimentary 68k assembler--how beats me--then I believe he created a C compiler with that. Although he could have written the emulator in assembler directly. Anyway, point being, the guy bootstrapped himself from nothing to a very nice Mac emulator indeed.
Yeah, yeah, what load of crap! I guess REALLY good programmers don't even need an editor; they simply redirect stdin to a file and type away.
I came from the good old C/C++ school of thought myself. When I first saw Delphi, I thought "who the hell needs this Pascal shit?" I tried it out for a couple of weeks just for kicks, and never went back. Now I say "who the hell needs that Visual C++ shit?" I'll never have to create an OnClick handler by hand again; I'll never have to fool with resource IDs again. C++ would be nice, but I got so used to strings in Delphi, I never wanted to fool with string classes again, either.
As was said before, programmers are lazy bastards. If Delphi can write mindless code for me, and does it well, why on earth would I insist on doing it myself? To prove my manhood as a manly programmer?
Well, I did say "their quality also TENDS to be binary". I wouldn't fully stand by that statement, either, but in general it either runs sufficiently reliably, or it crashes frequently, in which case it doesn't. It's amazing how much work you still can get done on a poorly configured or operating machine. It's just that for slashdotters it wouldn't be much fun.
Welcome to the real world. Design "theft" is economic reality. Sure, you can sue--as Apple is doing--but you have to wonder if it's money well spent. Incidentally, Apple certainly has no room to talk about theft--the fact of where they got their OS design hasn't left and gone away, even if it's been beaten to death.
If you want to see industrial design theft at work, observe any better-known Japanese automobile. Take the Lexus LS400 for example--depending on the angle, you will recognize lines from the previous E-class Mercedes (esp. nose, trunk, rear lights), or the 7-series BMW. Or take their new SUV, is it the RX? I matched it line for line against the M-class: the hood lines, the silhouette, the shape of the rear side windows. It's more squat and slightly more petite, but if you saw artist's sketches of both, I will be damned if you could tell the difference. Are Mercedes and BMW going to sue? Hardly.
> Side note: Does anyone actually sign up for the
> ISP rebates? I've been advising people to not
> take them, and keep the freedom to use whatever
> ISP you want, especially with cable and DSL
> providers to choose from.
Yeah, a friend of my wife's just got one the other week. I advised him to pay the full price and skip the AOL "offer". Actually, he was quite well informed about the implications. He did the math correctly and is still mulling it over. I guess people aren't as stupid as we give them credit for.
Well, I believe even in the US there are some vague data privacy laws, which almost everybody chooses to ignore. How else could the Florida DOT sell mailing lists INCLUDING MUGSHOTS?
In Europe things are much stricter. At least in Germany, to my knowledge, a company has no right to have a record of you without your consent--this extends to the field level. So you might allow them to have your name and address information for a magazine subscription, but not your SSN. You could sue them for storing it. Anybody correct me if I'm wrong on this.
There are widereaching implications of this. Most credit cards in the world--including Europe (Eurocard=Mastercard?)--are handled by a clearinghouse in Texas. While in Europe the credit card companies are bound by tight data privacy laws, once the info reaches US shores, it's up for grabs. There was a big spat between the EU and the US regarding such things recently. I think they were talking about big fines or even license revokation for US companies treating European information nonchalantly. And rightly so, I might add.
There's as economic rule that says that if the number of defective widgets a company puts out is below a certain number, you're probably overpaying per unit because of "excessive" quality control. In other words, there is an intersection of the curves of rising quality and falling value, around which a company should try to center itself. I first heard of this notion with respect to airline ticket prices and flight safety.
The thing about computers is that their quality also tends to be "binary": they either work, or they don't. Luckily, it's usually the manufacturer who has to foot the bill for those that don't. So quite frankly, I don't see why people get too upset about shoddy computers. Send it back, get the next one, eventually one will work. Once you get a working computer, you never look twice at it--heck, it could be built into the desk hutch for all I care, I never look at the box. Computers are about the service they render, not the object they are.
This should rile up all the Southern Baptists in the readership! They've been preaching this crap for decades. Also, it's funny how our profession draws some of the looniest freaks on earth. Anything to do with conspiracies, big brother, lord knows...these insecurities must stem from not being loved as a child or something.
Just apply some logic, people: unique indentifiers are only useful if they are UNIQUE. A barcode is one of the most forgeable things on earth, whether on a box of cereals or the head of your penis. No selfrespecting government--let alone the US one--would give it a second thought. Still, this is great stuff for paranoia.
Paul Radu
I don't see how multicast solves the video on demand problem. Let's define VoD: I go to a web site, search for a particular movie, click on its link, and it starts streaming in. Like we do RealAudio today.
Given a library of thousands of movies on a particular server, what are the odds that a paricular movie will be played by several people at the exact same time?
If, on the other hand, by VoD we simply mean DirecTV-style staggered broadcasts, sure, multicast is fine. But that's not what I would call true VoD.
So, given my definition of VoD, I don't see how even a Terabit backbone could carry the hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of asynchronous movies played on a particular night in a particular country. I guess we would still need some kind of centrally orchestrated broadcast system to manage that, which could indeed give you much more choice than today, but still wouldn't be true anything-anytime-anywhere, like that motel ad currently on TV.
Language is learned two different ways: early childhood learning, and anything after that. The first language you learn is imprinted into your brain like many other instincts you learn at that time. Languages you learn later are committed to long term memory, but never become part of your instincts. There are studies of brain damage that have demonstrated people reverting back to the first language they learned, after portions of long term memory were destroyed that contained languages learned later.
I only learned English at 17, having grown up with German. While most people can't tell I'm not a native speaker--well, native Australian anyway, since that's were I learned it--and I'm conversationally much more fluid in English nowadays than in German, English still isn't reflexive with me. Sometimes, particularaly when I'm tired, even the simplest terms can elude me--I look at the sky, but for the life of me I can't think of the word "cloud", and yet immediately the word "Wolke" comes to mind. These kinds of glitches remind me that English is an acquired language.
Still, I disagree with the substance over style argument. Too many people use it as a copout from having to learn the language properly. My father has successfully used that argument, always getting annoyed when we corrected him, retorting with the standard "but you understand what I'm trying to say, yes?" Which hasn't helped him speak better English.
I don't think making fun of the language of a particular group quite rises to the level of non-PC. That's something THEY DO, versus something THEY ARE. After all, nobody thinks anything of making fun of a German accent and mispronunciations, or Italian, or Brooklyn for that matter.
theoretically anyway. I don't know if they have any decent database software on it to test that, though.
You can already buy Compact Flash cards with well over 64MB of memory, at quite reasonable prices. Why don't the player makers concentrate on adding CF slots, rather than including more internal memory? No matter how much internal memory there is, it will never be enough anyway. Besides, the simplicity of changing an album by swapping out a card can't be duplicated with internal memory, even using USB--or even IEEE1394.
I think they should change their strategy to not include ANY internal memory at all, thus also lowering costs, and completely rely on storage media.
> I was taught that in order to be an attractive female,
> I had to act less intellegent than I am "so I wouldn't
> intimidate men."
Now, I know that's how the stereotype goes, but how does it actually happen in practice: did your parents take you aside on a sunny afternoon and say: "Honey, you know we really love you and all, but for heaven's sake, will you act a bit dumber please? You're scaring off all the boys, and we're NOT going to get stuck with you at home!"
Joke aside, it's interesting that when I was in school, many of the real brains in class were girls. Might have something to do with the earlier mental development of girls--at 14, most boys still care much more about goofing off than learning. Later on, though, the girls just drop off the map somehow. Could be the rising self-consciousness...
My wife is the prime example of this: very brainy overall, but when it comes to anything scientific, she locks up. Her first instinct is to delegate to me. But when I then explain how there's nothing to it, she goes: oh, yeah!
Anyway, my 1-year-old daughter will have none of that. She better turn out an exquisite geek, or there'll be hell to pay! There are plenty of role models in history, you just have to look.
I predict that within the next year, Microsoft will announce similar support for Linux with their major development products, at the very least as a matter of reflexive vaporware.
Seems someone stumbled upon some research into "holographic storage", read a couple of lines, and made a product announcement.
/. shouldn't even raise a brow. Currently--as for the last ten years--it's still at the research stage. The storage media are all kinds of exocic pure crystals. Data is stored in parallel focal planes, one bitmp of "pixels" at a time, by polarizing the crystal molecules. One "page" of data is written to an LCD display in the form of a bitmap, which is then projected into the crystal and focused onto a particular plane with optics. Readout occurs by doing the reverse: projecting one plane onto a CCD and reading off the individual pixels. The operation is inherently parallel, so depending on the size of each bitmap, you can be reading a whole lot of data at once. Essentially, the technology is similar to MO disks, but in 3D and in parallel.
That technology is far from new. It's been around for over ten years, and anybody on
Currently the biggest holdback still seems to be the limited writing cycles these crystals can survive. Last time I read up, it was something like 1000 cycles, maybe they improved it an order of magnitude. Also, many researchers seemed to be targeting it not only as persistent storage, but as RAM replacement. Done right, it can offer access speeds many times above silicon RAM. Also, it offers the possilibity of purely optical parallel searches: the query data is written to the LCD, then projected into the crystal. Through interference patterns with matching data in the crystal, planes containing matches are found instantly without sequential searching. I only skimmed the theory on that one, so don't quote me on details.
Anyway, all this theory comes from people who don't also claim improved toilet brushes. I don't know about the guys at Keele, but this stuff is for real. When it'll crop up at Wal-Mart is another question.
What's the 3D equivalent of the click and the double-click? The squeeze and the double-squeeze?
I don't get this argument about softmodems being cheaper. I would understand if a softmodem cost a system integrator $10 to include, but a hardware modem $30 or so; with large unit counts, that adds up. However, these numbers are hardly ever invoked. Like here, we usually hear about $100 hardware modems and five times cheaper softmodems. Are these wholesale prices or retail now? Because I can get perfectly good hardware modems for $40 or less (even name brand, e.g. Creative Labs, in my experience a decent modem), but haven't found softmodems for much less than that. Looking at the high end, USRobotics WinModems are hardly cheap--you can get several decent brands of hardware modems for considerably less.
I think the whole argument revolves around the theoretical cheapness of the "soft" approach, which never really materializes. Problem is, you still have to have a substantial amount of hardware even for a softmodem--you really only save the controller chip itself and not much else. At volume prices I doubt a Rockwell chip amounts to more than a few dollars. The only way you can really save is by including the modem on the motherboard, taking advantage of a shared PCB and sundry circuitry. And that's were you usually do find big savings--look at emachines, which I think includes modem functionality on the m/b and where--considering the price--you basically don't pay for the modem.
Paul Radu
After reading much of RMS's stuff, I can't shake the feeling that what really attracts him to the FSF is its obscurity. If his movement suddently became successful and everybody adopted his principles, he would probably run screaming for the hills and completely distance himself from the FSF.
Where have we seen that before? Oh yeah, Cobain and Nirvana. When people actually started liking the band, the guy couldn't handle it anymore and offed himself. Luckily RMS doesn't have that problem.
Besides, after reading several interviews with RMS, he strikes me as a highly hostile and disagreeable person, out to alienate the interviewer regardless of his/her intentions. How do you expect a guy like that to advance any cause whatsoever?
Looking at it your way, any old ignorance-drenched piece of writ--no matter how earnestly meant--could later be reinterpreted as "irony" to save face and maybe even pile on some brownie points. That pig won't fly here.
If you have read much Metcalfe (as I have over the last 3-4 years, back when he had slightly more intersting things to say than "Impeach Clinton"), you'd know that his irony comes in one form, and one form only: sledgehammer. Bob assumes that everybody else in the known universe is at least slighty more stupid than himself, so he signals irony and sarcasm in a very Monty-Pythonesque fashion.
This is a guy deeply in love with Big Corporate America--anything that benefits Big Money he loves. Linux and the Internet go so completely against that grain that he can't help but loathe them. A little less public visibility might benefit his personality hugely.