Ah. Well, that's a third option that makes a fair amount of sense. Hopefully they'll pick out a better graphics chipset at some point.
And yes, I didn't pluck 230 randomly out of the air, though I did mis-remember the number slightly:) It's an incredible vehicle, and depending on the cost it would make a good every day city car. At that efficiency, gas could go to 20$ and you would still pay less per mile than most mid-sized cars do today.
It'd be nice, but safety will be a concern. It's fairly safe for it's size, but when it has a SUV that weighs 5 times as much as it merge into it or hit it head on... well, engineering with current materials only allows so much. Hopefully it, or ideas from it, find their way into at least a few cars stateside. It'd be a good idea for everyone involved, except perhaps those that sell oil.
1. There is a correlation between seniority and intelligence/common sense in many things. There may and can be outliers. Out of 99,999 users, you'd be bound to find a few trolls. 2. More likely it's because the poster seems to not care at all about a tiny 2W processor with reasonable performance. It's a fairly big step, but his choice of wording suggests he's completely... indignant.
"Car manufacturer comes out with car that gets 230 mpg"
Pfft. I'll care when they do that and give me a nice 0-60 time and 120 top speed. Oh, and when they seat 4 people. OR That's impressive, but the real test will be to see if they can make the vehicle usable, maintaining enough appeal to overcome American bias to large, powerful cars.
They say the same things, but there's a world of difference between how they come off.
I've read more than a few of their full tech summaries on the emerging trends, both by industry and year.
Generally from year to year half the items would disappear from the lists (even though they were supposed to cover the next 5-10 years). In addition another quarter would randomly move about the "You'll see this technology in X years".
Most of the rest were so obvious that it really wasn't worth mentioning, an up to speed person would have known that. Wireless will be big in the future (published 2005ish)? No way!
The descriptions given for a technology(typically 2-3 paragraphs) were filled with jargon, and not terribly useful. Reading Popular Science and Mechanics was about as useful and far cheaper.
So yes, the lesson is that you can't buy innovation or management skills for a company by spending 20,000 a year, but you can make a nice sum pretending to sell it.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe they're betting that at some point it will stop being cool for everyone to be able to see just about everything about you.
I think that point is typically when you get into a pretty competitive field.
Then the business model of "We can remove all photos of you for 50$, or delete your whole profile for a mere 100$. Can you really put a price on what those embarrassing wall posts could do to your career advancement?"
The only real hope I see is that people lighten up and go "Yea, so what? We all did stupid things in our teens/twenties."
If it's real, I'd be most interested in how they reacted to the helicopter as a tribe - not painting themselves and shooting arrows, but how they viewed the helicopter - was it a ship or beast of the gods, or simply humans with advanced technology. I'd be curious to know if they crossed Clarke's line of 'sufficiently advanced technology'.
Also I imagine the helicopter will have a somewhat serious impact on the tribe and their stories, at least if they were to remain uncontacted for a few more decades. Imagine if a large portion of our population saw something that they in no way could explain logically.
I'm glad someone thought that the picture frame idea was somewhat lacking.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) we've gotten to the point where technology, even free, is completely obsolete in 10-15 years. In a few years the cost of maintaining those systems as well as the extra electricity will probably make them more costly than a replacement. Still, if it's a few more good years, that's not bad.
What should be focused on more is safe disposal of computer equipment. We are very fast approaching the point of PC saturation. Almost everyone has a PC that wants one (in industrialized nations) and new models are very cheap. Very few people want the hassle of a PC after it's been handed down twice. (assume 5-7 years old.) Past that it's almost useless; the price, performance, size and features almost always win out for "buy new". You're going to likely be looking at 40+ million old PC/laptops disposed each year in the US alone, excluding businesses. (5 year lifespan, 2 in 3 people with a computer.)
Two guys are walking around, one has hurt his leg. They run into a zombie. The one without injuries runs, leaving his friend behind.
He now needs to outrun two zombies.
For targeted attacks, yes, having better security means attackers will likely pick easier targets. Since botnets carry out a fair portion of attacks though, the average computer user having better security means everyone has better security.
Just as a note, technology is progressing increasingly fast, as is it's rate of adoption. Cell phones were a curiosity back in the 80's. If in or near a city, you could carry a briefcase sized object to call people. Arcane rituals had to be done to let your home provider know what zone you were in.
I'd claim cell phones are out of their infancy. Will they continue to improve? Yes. But at this point they're evolving into something far more than phones; they haven't improved much in that regard in years.
The internet is far more prevalent 15 (or 40) years after its introduction than most of the technologies you mentioned. It's also had far more resources poured into than any of those inventions, so it makes sense.
I'm not an expert, but I imagine the problem was the bit level of encryption, as well as the algorithm used.
For example, if you're using a 32 bit encryption, it doesn't matter how long your password is - the hash space is still too small, and the password can be trivially brute forced. (This is the case with DES - it's a 64bit algorithm (and only 56 bit effective strength. Your 20 character password isn't of strength 94^20, but 2^56.))
If the algorithm is found to have a weakness, this also makes it easier. Some algorithms become easier to attack if you have a certain amount of unencrypted and encrypted data.
Finally a simple password does make it easier for educated guesses; a machine that can make a billion guesses a second exhausts all possible 5 character passwords in a few seconds, but takes 94^3 to guess an 8 character string.
You're limited in security to the weakest link. 1&2 are somewhat related, 3 is independent. Brute force attacks 1, 2 is used to reduce the size of the attack by mathematics, and 3 is used if insufficient randomness or length is used.
Speculation is that the NSA has found ways to factor large numbers very fast (Factoring = P, not NP complete), has a very large amount of computing at their disposal, or has found a weakness in the algorithm (say, reducing search size by a factor of 2^40), and hence why they've gotten silent of public encryption
Not that deceptive practices are at all a good thing for software/services, however by doing that isn't OpenDNS indirectly providing users with automatic anonymounization of my queries? OpenDNS would have them I suppose, but splitting up who has what data makes each subset more useless.
With respect to your critiques of the iPhone, you're comparing a device that is 4-6 times as much and weighs almost 4 times as much as the iPhone.
It's got a number of features that the iPhone doesn't... but i could say the UX is a toy compared to a regular mobile laptop, and that such a laptop is a toy compared to a desktop replacement, so really everyone should lug around a desktop replacement.
The iPhone easily slips into a pocket, and fills it's intended role well. I'm very happy to see the shock it's given the market. There are 4-5 iPhone-esq phones that should be available in the US in 2008, which will hopefully encourage more than incremental improvements from apple.
The UX is 5.9x3.75x1.5 inches and weighs 1.2 pounds. It's certainly tiny, but it's not something that would fit into most pockets. They're built different roles, and should be judged as such.
If you have firefox or opera, you can add wikipedia as a search engine.
In opera I believe it is enabled by default. Typing "w [searchterm]" will load that page result, usually the direct wikipedia page.
In firefox 3b5 you can right click on any field and set it to be a search engine. Just go to wikipedia.org and use that one, or click the icon next to the search bar.
Regardless it's hard to beat f6 w searchterm for speed.
Just as an FYI, the media player they use has a p2p application, so the BBC probably streams significantly less than X streams for X users.
Granted it should also be noted that a well designed p2p application requires it's bandwidth go fewer jumps, as you stream from peers whom are hopefully closer to you than the source. This should reduce the net load on the network for all involved, including the ISP over a scenario where everyone streams from the BBC.
Probably because everything that exists today was influenced by everything that took place in the past. Some traits are probably just random mutations that neither increased nor decreased the chances for survival - human handedness, hair/eye color, ear shape... these have few impacts on survival save some extreme conditions. Until science can come up with a good reason why most of us are right handed, I doubt one could really call it evolution, rather random mutation.
An advanced immune system or rapid regeneration is certainly under the category of "increases chances for survival" This would be consistent with an evolved trait.
Since we've found few creatures with such traits, despite it being obviously beneficial, it stands to reason that there is a probable cause for such an evolution, different from other animals. Fast wound healing/superior immune systems would be a fair evolution of something that got injured frequently and was often immersed in unclean water.
It's very likely that your 8-bit processor had a 16 bit address bus, allowing the 64k memory limit, since 256 bytes was very restrictive, even back then.
The other registers were 8 bits, though they could likely be paired for some instructions, for example to add two numbers both over 255, but under 2^16-1 (unsigned)
I'm pretty sure all 32 bit CPUs use a 32 bit address bus, since when 32 bit CPUs were introduced the address space limit was no problem. Moore's law also ensured that we had more than enough transistors to make a true 64bit CPU when the memory limit became an issue (64 bit processors have been widely available since AMD made the transition in 2003)
That's going against the general notion of the packet switching, and quite difficult/expensive for the company to do (especially from an advertising standpoint.)
Perhaps a good compromise would be disclosing the total bandwidth available for a given street/town/etc and the number of users. Also average speeds during peak hours would be useful, or in general an explicit policy on bandwidth usage- you get X gb/time period, or you get X gb/month at 50 Mbps before you get moved down to lower priority (bandwidth is capped unless there is low usage.)
There may be some truth to what you say, I've never looked at any studies confirming or denying this... however there are obvious exceptions to this. A fair number of men I know (Caucasian) have an abnormally large draw toward asian women. Caucasian women have a preference towards those with a Mediterranean heritage if media is to be believed (the dark part of tall, dark and handsome).
If I had to wager a guess, it might be because certain characteristics are preferred for a given sex. Men are generally more physically attractive if they're tall, well built/broad shouldered, defined facial features - powerful in some sense. Certain races exhibit these traits more often than others. Conversely with women a different subset of features is preferred, often fairly different from those that are preferred for men.
Culture has a lot to do with determining beauty, but some things are fairly universal (tall men are more handsome), so races with higher average heights are probably perceived to have more attractive males, all else equal. On an interesting note studies have found that within the US, male preference for females varies depending on economic conditions. During poor economic times, the average weight of a model increases, during good times we prefer skinnier models.
One could probably reasonably argue that IP is becoming increasingly important to numerous economies, especially as manufacturing gets outsourced. High end manufacturing and manufacturing of certain large items will always remain to some degree, along with some service jobs, but IP of various natures will become increasingly important, from soft IP (software) to harder IP (patents for physical processes.)
It is almost entirely true. In my view America used to relish competition, because it gave us a chance to show off how great we were. We knew we were better than everyone else, and if anyone else had a problem with that, they could challenge us.
We now seem to be a shell of our former selves. Companies cry to the US Government because of unfair competition, even when most people on the street know what the CEOs don't. The reason why you're doing poorly isn't because the other countries have an unfair advantage, it's because you've adopted myopic views. Profit is created through accounting rather than actual value. Investment in future is disregarded, marketing is key. When you do develop a strategy that works, you take it to the Nth degree, ignoring that the market doesn't need 20 colors for their RAZR or an SUV that can tow a building. It's become all style over substance. Lee Iacocca once ran advertisements for cars of "if you can find a better car, buy it." We need that confidence again, not flags flying in the background and an "American Revolution"
At some point we need to stop this slash and burn style of management, or we will falter. Let's accept that we have competition and we actually need to try, that we can't go on forever simply by chanting "We're so great", we need to shut up and let it be implied by our actions.
There's also the possibility of auto-correcting spelling. Word does it fairly often if you transpose 1-2 lteters, or put as pace in the wrong place. The only place I can see this not working is password fields and other random digit areas, however these tend to be fairly uncommon, and when they pop up they're usually short. I do think that various combos requiring multiple keys would be slightly annoying. On the plus side the touch screen should be customizable for whatever program is open, so with the exception of programs that you need to type in and use ctrl or shift, there can be shortcut keys like the optimius keyboard. Again Word (and others) are quite good at automatically capitalizing the start of sentences, and I'm sure you could enable automatic capitalization of likely proper nouns or abbreviations.
To replace the keyboard entirely, one could use voice recognition, and if volume is a concern, they already have something that you can put on your jaw that will translate your movements into words. In 7 years both should be cheap and reliable enough for most use, and I'd be somewhat shocked if higher end PDAs/smartphones didn't make good use of this before then. (There was a phone 3 years ago that had voice recognition for texting, fairly good from what i read about it, so it should certainly be possible now)
Would either of these solutions dominate the need for a good, tactile keyboard? No. However they both offer advantages over a traditional keyboard, and together mitigate many of the problems. The second solution also requires nothing more than already comes standard on current laptops.
Computers in the next 10 years will be quite different than the ones today. We've gotten to the point where things are more than fast enough for how we can input information. There will be an upgrade or addition to the mouse/keyboard soon, as well as 'smarter' computers which automatically do certain relatively easy tasks, freeing up the user's time. (think if the average user had a good grasp of unix command line functions)
If the pace of growth is to continue, it will likely require AI of some sort. Excessively cheap energy would be a close substitute - we can do a lot of things we couldn't do in 1958, they just aren't energy efficient. Could we build an air/space plane to go Sydney to NYC in 3 hours? Probably, however there wouldn't be much of a point.
Although that's an interesting take, I feel like we're on the verge for a number of advances. Genome sequencing has gone down in price from 300 million to 5,000 in under a decade; if this is the entire genome in both cases, or just the parts they find useful for determining diseases, I don't know, but it should have some impact to health. Computing is working hard on reaching disposable status - the growth is so fast most people don't keep a computer longer than 4 years, or cell phones longer than 2 - and those devices are readily obsolete by that point. The growth in performance may not continue, but the price declines/miniaturization will continue, to the point that it will become cheap enough to get small wireless nodes for various tasks, and they will become integrated with an increasing number of things. The home/office/auto integration of computers will continue as it becomes very cheap to place a computer in this or that and make it able to transmit small amounts of data to surrounding devices.
Keep in mind that the advantages of modern society are also starting to be enjoyed by the rest of the world. Bringing portions India and China population up out of poverty and into a relatively comfortable lifestyle takes significant resources. If all that new found wealth was concentrated in America, Europe (and Japan, Australia to some extent) as it was in 1968 I'm sure we'd have a few more advances, though probably relatively little leaps in this or that
To finish the thought, part of the reason why we probably haven't made so many advances in certain fields? Where's the motivation? Energy had been cheap, the developed world is relatively healthy until age 60+, warfare has run into a wall (there's little point in developing better bombs that if used ensure no one's happy), and to some extent much of the earlier advances were brute force attacks - a dam isn't terribly more complex than a waterwheel, whereas fusion is much harder than fission. New transportation? Well, we had air, water, land. Fundamentally different forms of transportation require very advanced physics (if even possible), faster forms of current transportation still require very advanced engineering due mostly to friction, and the amount of energy we can extract from fuel is limited by laws of thermodynamics. We also have the point that if you could have any innovation you could think of, what would it be? The average American has most of what they've desired for the past 50 years.
You are of course right on all counts. No one does anything that on some level they don't want to do among the options present. Do I want to go to the gym? Maybe not, but it helps my well being in the long term.
Some people do things for the pleasure or challenge, some do it for the indirect pleasure (money, prestige or good vibes from helping people), and when stuck between a rock and a hard place, you decide which decision you like most of the options present.
As for patents? I think there's little doubt there needs to be some reform, and there's been a number of interesting suggestions raised in various/. threads. Yes, most people who code do so for money, and those that do open source likely derive primary income from a job where they do make money for their coding expertise.
One of the more interesting solutions I've found (not my own idea) was a property tax on patents, to be assessed every 5-10 years (or when challenged enough). The patent goes up for bids at this time, and although the owner has the right to refuse any offer, the property is found to be of value equal to the amount bid for tax purposes. This encourages active use of patents, discourages patent trolls, and when there isn't interest in the patent, it expires into public domain.
Obviously this lacks some details, perhaps benefits for the inventor of a patent, a higher tax rate if the owner is found to be simply sitting on the patent, but it seems to solve most of the current issues with patents. This would entail a fair bit of overhead, but with some common sense the burden of much of the work would be placed on corporations who want a given patent, and the property taxes from patents should be more than enough to pay for the workers to review the patents.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. Well, that's a third option that makes a fair amount of sense. Hopefully they'll pick out a better graphics chipset at some point.
:) It's an incredible vehicle, and depending on the cost it would make a good every day city car. At that efficiency, gas could go to 20$ and you would still pay less per mile than most mid-sized cars do today.
And yes, I didn't pluck 230 randomly out of the air, though I did mis-remember the number slightly
It'd be nice, but safety will be a concern. It's fairly safe for it's size, but when it has a SUV that weighs 5 times as much as it merge into it or hit it head on... well, engineering with current materials only allows so much. Hopefully it, or ideas from it, find their way into at least a few cars stateside. It'd be a good idea for everyone involved, except perhaps those that sell oil.
Probably because...
1. There is a correlation between seniority and intelligence/common sense in many things. There may and can be outliers. Out of 99,999 users, you'd be bound to find a few trolls.
2. More likely it's because the poster seems to not care at all about a tiny 2W processor with reasonable performance. It's a fairly big step, but his choice of wording suggests he's completely... indignant.
"Car manufacturer comes out with car that gets 230 mpg"
Pfft. I'll care when they do that and give me a nice 0-60 time and 120 top speed. Oh, and when they seat 4 people.
OR
That's impressive, but the real test will be to see if they can make the vehicle usable, maintaining enough appeal to overcome American bias to large, powerful cars.
They say the same things, but there's a world of difference between how they come off.
I've read more than a few of their full tech summaries on the emerging trends, both by industry and year.
Generally from year to year half the items would disappear from the lists (even though they were supposed to cover the next 5-10 years). In addition another quarter would randomly move about the "You'll see this technology in X years".
Most of the rest were so obvious that it really wasn't worth mentioning, an up to speed person would have known that. Wireless will be big in the future (published 2005ish)? No way!
The descriptions given for a technology(typically 2-3 paragraphs) were filled with jargon, and not terribly useful. Reading Popular Science and Mechanics was about as useful and far cheaper.
So yes, the lesson is that you can't buy innovation or management skills for a company by spending 20,000 a year, but you can make a nice sum pretending to sell it.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe they're betting that at some point it will stop being cool for everyone to be able to see just about everything about you.
I think that point is typically when you get into a pretty competitive field.
Then the business model of "We can remove all photos of you for 50$, or delete your whole profile for a mere 100$. Can you really put a price on what those embarrassing wall posts could do to your career advancement?"
The only real hope I see is that people lighten up and go "Yea, so what? We all did stupid things in our teens/twenties."
If it's real, I'd be most interested in how they reacted to the helicopter as a tribe - not painting themselves and shooting arrows, but how they viewed the helicopter - was it a ship or beast of the gods, or simply humans with advanced technology. I'd be curious to know if they crossed Clarke's line of 'sufficiently advanced technology'.
Also I imagine the helicopter will have a somewhat serious impact on the tribe and their stories, at least if they were to remain uncontacted for a few more decades. Imagine if a large portion of our population saw something that they in no way could explain logically.
I'm glad someone thought that the picture frame idea was somewhat lacking.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) we've gotten to the point where technology, even free, is completely obsolete in 10-15 years. In a few years the cost of maintaining those systems as well as the extra electricity will probably make them more costly than a replacement. Still, if it's a few more good years, that's not bad.
What should be focused on more is safe disposal of computer equipment. We are very fast approaching the point of PC saturation. Almost everyone has a PC that wants one (in industrialized nations) and new models are very cheap. Very few people want the hassle of a PC after it's been handed down twice. (assume 5-7 years old.) Past that it's almost useless; the price, performance, size and features almost always win out for "buy new". You're going to likely be looking at 40+ million old PC/laptops disposed each year in the US alone, excluding businesses. (5 year lifespan, 2 in 3 people with a computer.)
http://xkcd.com/350/
It's difficult to have an idea that doesn't relate somehow to xkcd, particularly on slashdot.
Might I suggest an alteration...
Two guys are walking around, one has hurt his leg. They run into a zombie. The one without injuries runs, leaving his friend behind.
He now needs to outrun two zombies.
For targeted attacks, yes, having better security means attackers will likely pick easier targets. Since botnets carry out a fair portion of attacks though, the average computer user having better security means everyone has better security.
Just as a note, technology is progressing increasingly fast, as is it's rate of adoption. Cell phones were a curiosity back in the 80's. If in or near a city, you could carry a briefcase sized object to call people. Arcane rituals had to be done to let your home provider know what zone you were in.
I'd claim cell phones are out of their infancy. Will they continue to improve? Yes. But at this point they're evolving into something far more than phones; they haven't improved much in that regard in years.
The internet is far more prevalent 15 (or 40) years after its introduction than most of the technologies you mentioned. It's also had far more resources poured into than any of those inventions, so it makes sense.
I'm not an expert, but I imagine the problem was the bit level of encryption, as well as the algorithm used.
For example, if you're using a 32 bit encryption, it doesn't matter how long your password is - the hash space is still too small, and the password can be trivially brute forced. (This is the case with DES - it's a 64bit algorithm (and only 56 bit effective strength. Your 20 character password isn't of strength 94^20, but 2^56.))
If the algorithm is found to have a weakness, this also makes it easier. Some algorithms become easier to attack if you have a certain amount of unencrypted and encrypted data.
Finally a simple password does make it easier for educated guesses; a machine that can make a billion guesses a second exhausts all possible 5 character passwords in a few seconds, but takes 94^3 to guess an 8 character string.
You're limited in security to the weakest link. 1&2 are somewhat related, 3 is independent. Brute force attacks 1, 2 is used to reduce the size of the attack by mathematics, and 3 is used if insufficient randomness or length is used.
Speculation is that the NSA has found ways to factor large numbers very fast (Factoring = P, not NP complete), has a very large amount of computing at their disposal, or has found a weakness in the algorithm (say, reducing search size by a factor of 2^40), and hence why they've gotten silent of public encryption
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard
If one assumes a perfectly accurate justice system, 1% of the population is criminal.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/28/ST2008022803016.html
Having said that, it wouldn't even bother me that much if there was real oversight on it, but that seems to be a vestigial notion in the US.
Not that deceptive practices are at all a good thing for software/services, however by doing that isn't OpenDNS indirectly providing users with automatic anonymounization of my queries? OpenDNS would have them I suppose, but splitting up who has what data makes each subset more useless.
With respect to your critiques of the iPhone, you're comparing a device that is 4-6 times as much and weighs almost 4 times as much as the iPhone.
It's got a number of features that the iPhone doesn't... but i could say the UX is a toy compared to a regular mobile laptop, and that such a laptop is a toy compared to a desktop replacement, so really everyone should lug around a desktop replacement.
The iPhone easily slips into a pocket, and fills it's intended role well. I'm very happy to see the shock it's given the market. There are 4-5 iPhone-esq phones that should be available in the US in 2008, which will hopefully encourage more than incremental improvements from apple.
The UX is 5.9x3.75x1.5 inches and weighs 1.2 pounds. It's certainly tiny, but it's not something that would fit into most pockets. They're built different roles, and should be judged as such.
If you have firefox or opera, you can add wikipedia as a search engine.
In opera I believe it is enabled by default. Typing "w [searchterm]" will load that page result, usually the direct wikipedia page.
In firefox 3b5 you can right click on any field and set it to be a search engine. Just go to wikipedia.org and use that one, or click the icon next to the search bar.
Regardless it's hard to beat f6 w searchterm for speed.
Well, it sounds like it's turning complete (the first machine to be), so in theory it can run any program runnable today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbage#Analytical_engine
As a practical matter you may want to invent a time machine and perpetual power source first.
Just as an FYI, the media player they use has a p2p application, so the BBC probably streams significantly less than X streams for X users.
Granted it should also be noted that a well designed p2p application requires it's bandwidth go fewer jumps, as you stream from peers whom are hopefully closer to you than the source. This should reduce the net load on the network for all involved, including the ISP over a scenario where everyone streams from the BBC.
Probably because everything that exists today was influenced by everything that took place in the past. Some traits are probably just random mutations that neither increased nor decreased the chances for survival - human handedness, hair/eye color, ear shape... these have few impacts on survival save some extreme conditions. Until science can come up with a good reason why most of us are right handed, I doubt one could really call it evolution, rather random mutation.
An advanced immune system or rapid regeneration is certainly under the category of "increases chances for survival" This would be consistent with an evolved trait.
Since we've found few creatures with such traits, despite it being obviously beneficial, it stands to reason that there is a probable cause for such an evolution, different from other animals. Fast wound healing/superior immune systems would be a fair evolution of something that got injured frequently and was often immersed in unclean water.
It's very likely that your 8-bit processor had a 16 bit address bus, allowing the 64k memory limit, since 256 bytes was very restrictive, even back then.
The other registers were 8 bits, though they could likely be paired for some instructions, for example to add two numbers both over 255, but under 2^16-1 (unsigned)
I'm pretty sure all 32 bit CPUs use a 32 bit address bus, since when 32 bit CPUs were introduced the address space limit was no problem. Moore's law also ensured that we had more than enough transistors to make a true 64bit CPU when the memory limit became an issue (64 bit processors have been widely available since AMD made the transition in 2003)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_bit
That's going against the general notion of the packet switching, and quite difficult/expensive for the company to do (especially from an advertising standpoint.)
Perhaps a good compromise would be disclosing the total bandwidth available for a given street/town/etc and the number of users. Also average speeds during peak hours would be useful, or in general an explicit policy on bandwidth usage- you get X gb
There may be some truth to what you say, I've never looked at any studies confirming or denying this... however there are obvious exceptions to this. A fair number of men I know (Caucasian) have an abnormally large draw toward asian women. Caucasian women have a preference towards those with a Mediterranean heritage if media is to be believed (the dark part of tall, dark and handsome).
If I had to wager a guess, it might be because certain characteristics are preferred for a given sex. Men are generally more physically attractive if they're tall, well built/broad shouldered, defined facial features - powerful in some sense. Certain races exhibit these traits more often than others. Conversely with women a different subset of features is preferred, often fairly different from those that are preferred for men.
Culture has a lot to do with determining beauty, but some things are fairly universal (tall men are more handsome), so races with higher average heights are probably perceived to have more attractive males, all else equal. On an interesting note studies have found that within the US, male preference for females varies depending on economic conditions. During poor economic times, the average weight of a model increases, during good times we prefer skinnier models.
One could probably reasonably argue that IP is becoming increasingly important to numerous economies, especially as manufacturing gets outsourced. High end manufacturing and manufacturing of certain large items will always remain to some degree, along with some service jobs, but IP of various natures will become increasingly important, from soft IP (software) to harder IP (patents for physical processes.)
It is almost entirely true. In my view America used to relish competition, because it gave us a chance to show off how great we were. We knew we were better than everyone else, and if anyone else had a problem with that, they could challenge us.
We now seem to be a shell of our former selves. Companies cry to the US Government because of unfair competition, even when most people on the street know what the CEOs don't. The reason why you're doing poorly isn't because the other countries have an unfair advantage, it's because you've adopted myopic views. Profit is created through accounting rather than actual value. Investment in future is disregarded, marketing is key. When you do develop a strategy that works, you take it to the Nth degree, ignoring that the market doesn't need 20 colors for their RAZR or an SUV that can tow a building. It's become all style over substance. Lee Iacocca once ran advertisements for cars of "if you can find a better car, buy it." We need that confidence again, not flags flying in the background and an "American Revolution"
At some point we need to stop this slash and burn style of management, or we will falter. Let's accept that we have competition and we actually need to try, that we can't go on forever simply by chanting "We're so great", we need to shut up and let it be implied by our actions.
For those who want an interesting look at the current situation, spoken better than I can do, I'd refer you to Mr. Iacocca's except from his latest book. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17516.htm
There's also the possibility of auto-correcting spelling. Word does it fairly often if you transpose 1-2 lteters, or put as pace in the wrong place. The only place I can see this not working is password fields and other random digit areas, however these tend to be fairly uncommon, and when they pop up they're usually short. I do think that various combos requiring multiple keys would be slightly annoying. On the plus side the touch screen should be customizable for whatever program is open, so with the exception of programs that you need to type in and use ctrl or shift, there can be shortcut keys like the optimius keyboard. Again Word (and others) are quite good at automatically capitalizing the start of sentences, and I'm sure you could enable automatic capitalization of likely proper nouns or abbreviations.
To replace the keyboard entirely, one could use voice recognition, and if volume is a concern, they already have something that you can put on your jaw that will translate your movements into words. In 7 years both should be cheap and reliable enough for most use, and I'd be somewhat shocked if higher end PDAs/smartphones didn't make good use of this before then. (There was a phone 3 years ago that had voice recognition for texting, fairly good from what i read about it, so it should certainly be possible now)
Would either of these solutions dominate the need for a good, tactile keyboard? No. However they both offer advantages over a traditional keyboard, and together mitigate many of the problems. The second solution also requires nothing more than already comes standard on current laptops.
Computers in the next 10 years will be quite different than the ones today. We've gotten to the point where things are more than fast enough for how we can input information. There will be an upgrade or addition to the mouse/keyboard soon, as well as 'smarter' computers which automatically do certain relatively easy tasks, freeing up the user's time. (think if the average user had a good grasp of unix command line functions)
If the pace of growth is to continue, it will likely require AI of some sort. Excessively cheap energy would be a close substitute - we can do a lot of things we couldn't do in 1958, they just aren't energy efficient. Could we build an air/space plane to go Sydney to NYC in 3 hours? Probably, however there wouldn't be much of a point.
Although that's an interesting take, I feel like we're on the verge for a number of advances. Genome sequencing has gone down in price from 300 million to 5,000 in under a decade; if this is the entire genome in both cases, or just the parts they find useful for determining diseases, I don't know, but it should have some impact to health. Computing is working hard on reaching disposable status - the growth is so fast most people don't keep a computer longer than 4 years, or cell phones longer than 2 - and those devices are readily obsolete by that point. The growth in performance may not continue, but the price declines/miniaturization will continue, to the point that it will become cheap enough to get small wireless nodes for various tasks, and they will become integrated with an increasing number of things. The home/office/auto integration of computers will continue as it becomes very cheap to place a computer in this or that and make it able to transmit small amounts of data to surrounding devices.
Keep in mind that the advantages of modern society are also starting to be enjoyed by the rest of the world. Bringing portions India and China population up out of poverty and into a relatively comfortable lifestyle takes significant resources. If all that new found wealth was concentrated in America, Europe (and Japan, Australia to some extent) as it was in 1968 I'm sure we'd have a few more advances, though probably relatively little leaps in this or that
To finish the thought, part of the reason why we probably haven't made so many advances in certain fields? Where's the motivation? Energy had been cheap, the developed world is relatively healthy until age 60+, warfare has run into a wall (there's little point in developing better bombs that if used ensure no one's happy), and to some extent much of the earlier advances were brute force attacks - a dam isn't terribly more complex than a waterwheel, whereas fusion is much harder than fission. New transportation? Well, we had air, water, land. Fundamentally different forms of transportation require very advanced physics (if even possible), faster forms of current transportation still require very advanced engineering due mostly to friction, and the amount of energy we can extract from fuel is limited by laws of thermodynamics. We also have the point that if you could have any innovation you could think of, what would it be? The average American has most of what they've desired for the past 50 years.
You are of course right on all counts. No one does anything that on some level they don't want to do among the options present. Do I want to go to the gym? Maybe not, but it helps my well being in the long term.
/. threads. Yes, most people who code do so for money, and those that do open source likely derive primary income from a job where they do make money for their coding expertise.
Some people do things for the pleasure or challenge, some do it for the indirect pleasure (money, prestige or good vibes from helping people), and when stuck between a rock and a hard place, you decide which decision you like most of the options present.
As for patents? I think there's little doubt there needs to be some reform, and there's been a number of interesting suggestions raised in various
One of the more interesting solutions I've found (not my own idea) was a property tax on patents, to be assessed every 5-10 years (or when challenged enough). The patent goes up for bids at this time, and although the owner has the right to refuse any offer, the property is found to be of value equal to the amount bid for tax purposes. This encourages active use of patents, discourages patent trolls, and when there isn't interest in the patent, it expires into public domain.
Obviously this lacks some details, perhaps benefits for the inventor of a patent, a higher tax rate if the owner is found to be simply sitting on the patent, but it seems to solve most of the current issues with patents. This would entail a fair bit of overhead, but with some common sense the burden of much of the work would be placed on corporations who want a given patent, and the property taxes from patents should be more than enough to pay for the workers to review the patents.