Fortunately there is a baseline low that MS can get down to. Linux has been steadily improving and while there have been many "This is the of Linux...next year...er... in one more year", it has been progressing forward, especially in areas perceived to be strongholds of MS and apple.
While there is consumer ignorance to account for, if windows 7 gets too annoying there will be people switching. Enough that it will impact MS's bottom line, even if businesses are tied into legacy applications and some consumers have no idea what is available or no desire to use it. Software (as with all intellectual property) is subject to the largest economies of scale imaginable - the cost to 'produce' another copy is trivial next to the fixed cost, especially if distributed over the internet. Unless MS innovates somehow to keep a uniqueness to windows, it can't be too greedy, or it will lose enough marketshare to hurt.
It's not a truly fair comparison, however I have some fair bit of insight to this. I'm pursuing two degrees, one in engineering and one in business, and the school has fairly good programs in both. I've found the engineering courses to be more consistent and easier, though some of this probably has to do with innate talent in one area over the other.
Business courses are hit and miss. I've found that accounting courses in particular can be very difficult. Finance also deserves some respect. Marketing and management have been truly pathetic. The concepts are simple common sense, one can go to classes and know everything the professor is going to say before he says it (and not read the book ahead of time), and you can still wind up with a grade below the class average from the fact that the courses are vocabulary courses. Can half the students in the class do independent thinking, or apply these theories out in the real world. I bet you they can't. Can they memorize definitions? Apparently.
Judging the arts part of the university would be more unfair, but the journalism that gets published by journalism majors is typically trite, contains poor writing, and generally lacks research. The journalism in another newspaper that's a bit more independent and written by students who tend to be engineers or scientists actually isn't bad. In fairness the typical topics are quite different - general campus news and issues VS world/national issues and more logical pro/con towards a given campus policy.
Repeat after me - "In terms of fundamental human behavior, the printing press has not and will not change anything."
Should all technological innovations should be ignored as they don't change human nature, nor could they influence something that does, such as education? I'll agree that humanity has changed very little in the past 2,000 years, and the fundamental nature of politics hasn't changed much - there's still deception, ambition, alliances, etc., however it has changed the effectiveness of certain aspects. Voters (a largely foreign concept 500 years ago) are now more educated, the butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world causes hurricanes where it was ignored before, ideas can spread to the masses very quickly, etc.
So while maybe the fundamental nature hasn't changed, but how things are gone about certainly does. Your position is akin to saying that because the objectives of war are the same (erode your enemy's will to fight), machine guns, airplanes and the drastically increasing importance of public opinion are unimportant in war, when in fact they've fundamentally changed how it is fought, even though the fundamental goal is the same.
Agreed. Furthermore if new technologies aren't given an opportunity to have flaws initially, they'll never mature. Venture capitalists can help bridge the gap between concept and commercial viability, but it's nearly impossible to bridge the gap between concept and perfection.
I can't name a single technology in recent times that when released was near perfection. We'd never have computers if we started out saying they had to be able to be the size of a washer, run at 200 Mhz, not use a city block's worth of electricity etc... Those requirements took 30 years past the first electrical computer to even begin to be true. And yet look at some cell phones today, which can run circles around a computer not even 15 years old.
You're a bit off on your generations, or rather those in the workforce. Even if all they needed was a HS diploma, they'd still need to be born in 1989. If they did have access to a computer at a young age, it had a floppy; USB didn't become popular until at least 98, and wasn't common until 2002 or so. I also bet they didn't get broadband until 2000+.
The point still remains that my brother has a far different experience with computers than I did, being younger. He's almost always had the internet and doesn't know the pain of a router with a 56k modem. All the same I know how to use a computer much better than he does, even when i was his age. He shows little to no interest in them, and that might make a certain age group have a sweet spot - They grew up comfortable with technological change (not any particular one, but fundamentally), but were still young enough to know a few of the inner workings of computers, back when you had to fool around for an hour or so to get a game to install or a driver to work, back when everything had different ports, and plugging something in meant rebooting, installing, rebooting... when it was cheaper to build your own computer, or when if something went wrong you couldn't just scrap the computer.
Some aspects of computing might be lost to those not computer science majors because we've done such a good job, just like much of our generation as a whole doesn't have a clue how to do carpentry, fix a car, or do basic home repair - these things are supposed to work, and when they don't you call someone else in to fix them.
Not to put the founding fathers on a higher pedestal than they deserve, but you make a few illogical conclusions...
The colonies back then lacked any strong form of government. The articles of confederation were quite horrible from the perspective that none of the states wanted to help out other states; they each viewed themselves are independent entities. I'm not an expert, but i suspect the states under the articles loosely resemble the EU, which works fine - except that it was built on top strong governments that already worked. Clearly something needed to change, or the US wouldn't exist.
From this they made the constitution, and the current form of government. Perfect? Hardly. There were numerous compromises made, some of which the founding fathers hated. For example:
"In 1784 the provision banning slavery was narrowly defeated. Had one representative (John Beatty of New Jersey), sick and confined to his lodging, been present, the vote would have been different. "Thus," Jefferson later reflected, "we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment.""
The problem was that they faced a deadline, and they knew there were differences between what they wanted and what the states would accept. They chose to abandon idealism as little as possible, but did abandon it for the sake of getting something that would work. Getting 80% of what they wanted was better than chaos and perhaps foreign rule. However the fact that the document has held up remarkably well for over 225 years is impressive. Judge them how you want, however the men did have vision. Whether they saw forward into a future where things completely unimaginable could happen, or they simply looked into human nature and governments and attempted to provide a framework to allow no man undue influence over the actions of another, I cannot fully say. They may have gotten lucky, and ourselves as well in the process.
I don't see regular HDDs going by the wayside in the near future. SSD does have several key advantages, namely reliability (no moving parts) and much faster random seek times. Sustained read times will catch up to HDDs eventually, or at least enough for the benefits of seek time to crush sustained read times.
There will still be a reasonably large market for HDDs until the price/GB is within 125% of HDDs. Millisecond seek times are fine for HD movies, and they take up a huge amount of space. Eventually home media servers will become popular, and in that domain HDDs have a fairly large lead - SSDs weak points are those that HDDs excel at.
As another comparison, tapes are still used to back data up - despite being very slow they're cheap.
I'm guessing this can apply to more than just CPUs, however current CPUs would be tremendously hard to counterfeit. How many people have significant resources invested in the chip industry? I think intel is the only one that's on to 45nm and moving on. Would counterfeit chips be able to come close performance wise? (Assuming the user won't notice anything under a 20% drop in speed)
In other devices, the chips can probably be copied more easily, but replacing the chips would be quite difficult, like in say a PDA, and at that point it'd be easier to swap the PDA with an identical bugged copy.
As for the serial number database, it's not a bad idea for security, but if they were serious about it i'd go with some of the other poster's suggestions - online databases can be hacked. The companies producing the chips would have to have the backing of the government, and it's already been shown that with enough resources, hackers can hack the pentagon and los alamos. Given the amount of effort required to produce the chips in the first place, it's not hard to imagine that they could hack the secure registry and update a few values.
I don't know about not doing anything with it. My previous computer was roughly 4 years old at it's replacement, and was fairly high end when it was new. It can do everything that this new computer can do (with the exception of some games), but it can do them all at once. Do I need to close out of some office programs because I want to play a game? Exit out of everything RAM intensive when I want to burn a DVD?
It's also considerably faster at numerous tasks, particularly DVD burning (my old computer would take an hour to burn a DVD, this one does it in under 10 minutes). Running the antivirus doesn't kill performance. Accidentally hitting the windows key doesn't cause my computer to freeze for 30 seconds trying to minimize a game window. In reality can I focus on more than 2-3 of these tasks at once? Probably not. But it's nice to not have to worry about running X while Y is open, or being able to alt+tab between windows rather than opening up the program I closed to view a document.
In terms of things my old computer absolutely couldn't do? The upgrade in resolution on my new monitor is quite handy. Ripping and compressing DVDs is something that my old computer couldn't do. (didn't meet the minimum specs for handbrake); this one handles it fairly well. Graphics/video editing, encoding, some engineering applications, these things will eat up just about all the processing power you can throw at them. Rendering a file in 30 minutes opposed to 90 is certainly worth the upgrade.
All said and done, is Windows bloated? Compared to some versions of Linux, it's incredibly bloated. Have I had any real problem with my hardware running Vista? None, except bootup and shutdown times, which really is a flaw of the OS (and probably I/O on the HDD). Am I dissatisfied that I paid ~1100 for the new computer? Not at all.
To start, technology progresses. You sound like you don't want progress because it 'forces' you to spend money by making older hardware obsolete. This older hardware comes down precipitously in price; I'm not sure when the last time you looked at laptops was, but it can't have been recently. You can buy a good laptop for 1500, and one that will handle anything but graphics and some engineering software for 800, just not be quite as snappy.
If you're spending more than that, you're either buying a desktop replacement (at which point just buy a desktop and a laptop for about the same price - a 1400$ desktop will generally be faster than a 3000$ laptop), or you're buying something with an SSD, likely an ultra thin laptop (which in general has performance worse than the 700$ laptop)
Ignoring developments in hardware would be a stupid thing for Microsoft to do. Assume a distribution curve for how often computers are replaced, and I bet you'll find most people keep theirs under 5 years before upgrading, with most in the 2-4 year range. If Microsoft didn't make the OS utilize the new hardware, everyone would complain. For all the complaints about Vista, you can buy a desktop for 800 that will almost max out the Vista user experience.
Progress in prices has only been made because of the rapid struggle for performance. Saying you don't want new stuff is mostly like saying you're pretty happy with prices the way they are (since lets face it, most drops in prices come from obsolescence)
Finally to answer your last point... processors are more advanced Turing machines, and in theory a pentium 2 can run the same things as a core 2 duo, provided there's enough memory at some level to allow the program to run (and said program has alternatives for upgraded instruction sets). Thus it's very hard to qualify when software doesn't run on a machine; if it takes 5 minutes to open up Word, does that count? It still runs, just not well. Increase the processor speed and memory and it'll take 4 minutes... etc. When you need to upgrade is then largely personal preference. I personally value my time a bit more than that so I have a faster machine, and the benefits that come with it (like being able to have 6 programs open + background processes with no slowdown)
Chances are they won't have too much of a choice in the matter; I doubt the proportions of people who do X have changed, but the evidence of it certainly has. The fact that society has managed to not implode despite going through the 70s is probably evidence of this.
So unless we can significantly reduce the number of workers we need (causing high unemployment, which would be even worse), it probably won't drastically impact hiring. The benefit would be that those that didn't engage in such behavior (or were somewhat smart about it) may be given preference over other candidates. This could even be beneficial to the employer, since they have more than just a resume and the brief time spent interviewing to judge a candidate by.
Given all this, perhaps I should be posting as AC more often...
Telling someone to mod your own post up makes you a whore.
Apparently a skinny, anorexic karma whore, but a whore nonetheless.
Irony having been paid it's dues, I'll agree with what you're saying. People may be people and we all have our emotional weak points, but the fact of the matter is that the world isn't a nice place, and people by and large aren't the most considerate creatures. I'm sorry if it offends 'you', but people's rights to post their opinions, right or wrong, isn't a crime. They may not post nice things, and they may cause you some distress; get over it. Personally if someone I barely know makes fun of me I generally don't care; if I think it's a valid point I'll consider changing, if not what do I care?
Secondly, you used CV. Maybe you're European in which case that'd make sense, but even at college quite a few people don't know what a CV is. It's a resume.
Finally, the grammatical mistakes were intentional.
Take that back. You're definitely European. I realized that on realise.
You've listed just a few of the current genres in MMOs. I predict in the future you'll take on the role of a denizen of a tough world. Initially you'll barely be able to do the simplest of things, but as you spend time, you'll level them up. Strange and arcane rules will be placed upon you, but as you level up you'll face less and less of the, until you hit the 2nd stage of the game where you rapidly level up abilities, but just as you're about to make use of them and rule the world, a new set of rules is placed upon you, and even tougher bosses appear, many of which you can't directly attack, unless you want agro from the mega boss force. Eventually after years of struggle, you'll slowly get promoted in whatever job you've chosen to level in - but the great thing is that you're almost unlimited in what 'jobs' you want to take, but various characters have aptitude for certain jobs based upon training and the options at character creation.
Of course they're already predicting that people will complain this is far too similar to 'life' and not want to play it, but that's expected to take a fair amount of time.
The reader posting this seems to be a bit naive on passwords, and 7 year olds.
In kindergarten I had to memorize my phone number and address. A phone number is a fairly random 7 digit code. A zip code is 5 more random digits. There is no reason to assume she couldn't memorize a 7 character string; even 5 digits worth of numbers is far more than sufficient to stop any manual attempts to guess the password.
Furthermore, even if she uses a common thing plus 1 number the search space is sufficiently large that it is quite unlikely that the parents would guess it. Beyond this she could write it down on a slip of paper and hide it in a book. Not the most secure, but it'll still take a fair bit of effort to get it.
This excuses several things, such as..
1. The child shouldn't have such access to a computer. It's just not a smart idea. 2. The parents are parents. The child is a child. Passwords have little effect when they say "you can't use the computer until we have the password" or "no sweets unless we get the password." Seriously, in terms of challenges it's trivial on both sides - the parents either can't crack the password regardless of complexity, or they can crack any password because they have physical access to the machine and the knowhow. The child can't withhold the password if the parents get serious about it, or she can, but she loses the benefit of the computer entirely.
You know, it's a real pity that there is no competent organization that can offer this that's in theory not motivated by profits and has the resources, like say... the US government. Everything aside, this kind of information is something that should be likely held by the government, if only people trusted this to not expand into a serious invasion of their privacy. It's a pity that the one organization that's supposed to regulate everything and hold such information (if anyone beyond yourself is) is considered too untrustworthy to do so.
I suppose it all comes back to things being run by human nature, and sooner or later you'll have to make a deal with the devil and give him his due; increased convince (eventually to the point that it will be impossible to function without it) for a decreased amount of privacy. In theory your SSN is only related to taxes; in practice you can't get through life easily without giving it to every Tom, Dick, and Harry.
Security by obscurity might be the only measure of protection we have, but that's not terribly comforting when someone *thinks* you did something wrong, or when someone *gets* your data (though google seems much better at protecting data than most banks and governments).
On the plus side it might be nice to see spam for drugs that you can actually use, compared to everyone getting offers to increase penis size with drugs to keep it up for hours.
Assuming that you can create a nearly human intelligence, the problem is nearly solved. How much faster would certain tasks be if computers had even some semblance of intelligence; as you're coding it guesses (with good accuracy) a possible solution, or if you could meta-program, i.e. describe what you wanted a function to do in a formalized language, but much closer to a natural language. What would happen if you just had to tell a computer input:desired output for a few cases and have it build the function itself, perhaps to be optimized by a human later. You've sped things up significantly for complex tasks, and you'd allow a computer to dynamically build programs to solve a simpler class of tasks. That's a quite advanced AI in my opinion, depending on how general you let it get.
Once humans have these tools, with the AI helping to speed up lower level tasks, we can build a better class of meta-programs to handle more and more tasks, until you get to the point of a real AI; You simply dictate a task to the computer and it solves it, much like a boss might expect you to do.
From there we have a true AI, although perhaps not a human based one. However it wouldn't matter if the abstracted hardware was a simulation of neurons or something completely different, and it wouldn't matter if it had emotional intelligence or not; in theory it could build a program to add this to itself.
I in general agree with you, however if we play devil's advocate...
The new office was designed to be easier to use by everyone. My understanding is that it is easier to use if you've never used it before, however experienced users found it less intuitive. I've yet to do anything terribly advanced with it, however I suspect it may have made the best case slower, but improved the average case.
That having been said, I find keyboard shortcuts for most tasks to be quite invaluable; I'm very glad the latest beta of firefox now easily allows you to do press f6 and type "w [search term]" enter and open up the wikipedia page for it. Opera did that for a year or more and I always loved that feature.
Tonight? It's been a long while since there's been one show on a night that I consider watching, let alone in the nerd genre.
Impressively enough the networks have gotten about 3 shows that I'll watch regularly (24, Heroes, Terminator), and I know of a few others I'm missing (BSG, The Office, some other cable shows) I'd probably watch more, but without a DVR I generally forget to watch most of them. At some point I'll probably pony up the money for a few DVD box sets, preferably in a year or two when HD is the rage and I can get them cheaply... I won't have a big enough TV and most of them I won't watch more than 2-3 times.
I suppose you and I probably differ on what works fine, and I will admit that my ability to use a command line to get around isn't great. However I can't imagine it can browse most websites easily, the screen it's hooked up to is probably 15" or less, and you probably can't use more than 2-3 programs at once. To me being able to run open office isn't too useful if I can't browse wikipedia at the same time, and I'd like to be able to listen to some music while doing so; having an IM client and e-mail open is nice as well.
I guess the point is that I wouldn't be nearly as productive (or maybe I would, since i'd stay focused on whatever i was working on) if I wasn't able to do those things and at this point you can likely get a computer for under 50 (or free) that has 4 times the specs of yours. If it works for you that's great, but i'd consider the extra functionality more important.
There is something to be said for clean code, however if you can save a significant amount on development or add functionality to the end user by using an amount of ram that's commonly available, I'd say that's a better solution.
You can't find a new machine out there with under 512 MB, and 2GB is exceedingly common. If the software was written that you never needed anything over 512 MB, people would complain that they aren't using hardware properly and they could be doing more.
Also I'm not sure about you, but I generally don't consider it an accomplishment when my computer doesn't thrash when I run excel or word. Granted it's impressive that you've got current software running on that configuration, however I haven't seen a computer with those specifications in at least 5 years.
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Fortunately there is a baseline low that MS can get down to. Linux has been steadily improving and while there have been many "This is the of Linux...next year...er... in one more year", it has been progressing forward, especially in areas perceived to be strongholds of MS and apple.
While there is consumer ignorance to account for, if windows 7 gets too annoying there will be people switching. Enough that it will impact MS's bottom line, even if businesses are tied into legacy applications and some consumers have no idea what is available or no desire to use it. Software (as with all intellectual property) is subject to the largest economies of scale imaginable - the cost to 'produce' another copy is trivial next to the fixed cost, especially if distributed over the internet. Unless MS innovates somehow to keep a uniqueness to windows, it can't be too greedy, or it will lose enough marketshare to hurt.
It's not a truly fair comparison, however I have some fair bit of insight to this. I'm pursuing two degrees, one in engineering and one in business, and the school has fairly good programs in both. I've found the engineering courses to be more consistent and easier, though some of this probably has to do with innate talent in one area over the other.
Business courses are hit and miss. I've found that accounting courses in particular can be very difficult. Finance also deserves some respect. Marketing and management have been truly pathetic. The concepts are simple common sense, one can go to classes and know everything the professor is going to say before he says it (and not read the book ahead of time), and you can still wind up with a grade below the class average from the fact that the courses are vocabulary courses. Can half the students in the class do independent thinking, or apply these theories out in the real world. I bet you they can't. Can they memorize definitions? Apparently.
Judging the arts part of the university would be more unfair, but the journalism that gets published by journalism majors is typically trite, contains poor writing, and generally lacks research. The journalism in another newspaper that's a bit more independent and written by students who tend to be engineers or scientists actually isn't bad. In fairness the typical topics are quite different - general campus news and issues VS world/national issues and more logical pro/con towards a given campus policy.
Repeat after me - "In terms of fundamental human behavior, the printing press has not and will not change anything."
Should all technological innovations should be ignored as they don't change human nature, nor could they influence something that does, such as education? I'll agree that humanity has changed very little in the past 2,000 years, and the fundamental nature of politics hasn't changed much - there's still deception, ambition, alliances, etc., however it has changed the effectiveness of certain aspects. Voters (a largely foreign concept 500 years ago) are now more educated, the butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world causes hurricanes where it was ignored before, ideas can spread to the masses very quickly, etc.
So while maybe the fundamental nature hasn't changed, but how things are gone about certainly does. Your position is akin to saying that because the objectives of war are the same (erode your enemy's will to fight), machine guns, airplanes and the drastically increasing importance of public opinion are unimportant in war, when in fact they've fundamentally changed how it is fought, even though the fundamental goal is the same.
Agreed. Furthermore if new technologies aren't given an opportunity to have flaws initially, they'll never mature. Venture capitalists can help bridge the gap between concept and commercial viability, but it's nearly impossible to bridge the gap between concept and perfection.
I can't name a single technology in recent times that when released was near perfection. We'd never have computers if we started out saying they had to be able to be the size of a washer, run at 200 Mhz, not use a city block's worth of electricity etc... Those requirements took 30 years past the first electrical computer to even begin to be true. And yet look at some cell phones today, which can run circles around a computer not even 15 years old.
You're a bit off on your generations, or rather those in the workforce. Even if all they needed was a HS diploma, they'd still need to be born in 1989. If they did have access to a computer at a young age, it had a floppy; USB didn't become popular until at least 98, and wasn't common until 2002 or so. I also bet they didn't get broadband until 2000+.
The point still remains that my brother has a far different experience with computers than I did, being younger. He's almost always had the internet and doesn't know the pain of a router with a 56k modem. All the same I know how to use a computer much better than he does, even when i was his age. He shows little to no interest in them, and that might make a certain age group have a sweet spot - They grew up comfortable with technological change (not any particular one, but fundamentally), but were still young enough to know a few of the inner workings of computers, back when you had to fool around for an hour or so to get a game to install or a driver to work, back when everything had different ports, and plugging something in meant rebooting, installing, rebooting... when it was cheaper to build your own computer, or when if something went wrong you couldn't just scrap the computer.
Some aspects of computing might be lost to those not computer science majors because we've done such a good job, just like much of our generation as a whole doesn't have a clue how to do carpentry, fix a car, or do basic home repair - these things are supposed to work, and when they don't you call someone else in to fix them.
Not to put the founding fathers on a higher pedestal than they deserve, but you make a few illogical conclusions...
The colonies back then lacked any strong form of government. The articles of confederation were quite horrible from the perspective that none of the states wanted to help out other states; they each viewed themselves are independent entities. I'm not an expert, but i suspect the states under the articles loosely resemble the EU, which works fine - except that it was built on top strong governments that already worked. Clearly something needed to change, or the US wouldn't exist.
From this they made the constitution, and the current form of government. Perfect? Hardly. There were numerous compromises made, some of which the founding fathers hated. For example:
"In 1784 the provision banning slavery was narrowly defeated. Had one representative (John Beatty of New Jersey), sick and confined to his lodging, been present, the vote would have been different. "Thus," Jefferson later reflected, "we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment.""
The problem was that they faced a deadline, and they knew there were differences between what they wanted and what the states would accept. They chose to abandon idealism as little as possible, but did abandon it for the sake of getting something that would work. Getting 80% of what they wanted was better than chaos and perhaps foreign rule. However the fact that the document has held up remarkably well for over 225 years is impressive. Judge them how you want, however the men did have vision. Whether they saw forward into a future where things completely unimaginable could happen, or they simply looked into human nature and governments and attempted to provide a framework to allow no man undue influence over the actions of another, I cannot fully say. They may have gotten lucky, and ourselves as well in the process.
I don't see regular HDDs going by the wayside in the near future. SSD does have several key advantages, namely reliability (no moving parts) and much faster random seek times. Sustained read times will catch up to HDDs eventually, or at least enough for the benefits of seek time to crush sustained read times.
There will still be a reasonably large market for HDDs until the price/GB is within 125% of HDDs. Millisecond seek times are fine for HD movies, and they take up a huge amount of space. Eventually home media servers will become popular, and in that domain HDDs have a fairly large lead - SSDs weak points are those that HDDs excel at.
As another comparison, tapes are still used to back data up - despite being very slow they're cheap.
I'm guessing this can apply to more than just CPUs, however current CPUs would be tremendously hard to counterfeit. How many people have significant resources invested in the chip industry? I think intel is the only one that's on to 45nm and moving on. Would counterfeit chips be able to come close performance wise? (Assuming the user won't notice anything under a 20% drop in speed)
In other devices, the chips can probably be copied more easily, but replacing the chips would be quite difficult, like in say a PDA, and at that point it'd be easier to swap the PDA with an identical bugged copy.
As for the serial number database, it's not a bad idea for security, but if they were serious about it i'd go with some of the other poster's suggestions - online databases can be hacked. The companies producing the chips would have to have the backing of the government, and it's already been shown that with enough resources, hackers can hack the pentagon and los alamos. Given the amount of effort required to produce the chips in the first place, it's not hard to imagine that they could hack the secure registry and update a few values.
Am I missing something? 20 million is .02% of 100 billion. .02% is 250 times smaller than 5%; the taxes would be 5 billion...
I don't know about not doing anything with it. My previous computer was roughly 4 years old at it's replacement, and was fairly high end when it was new. It can do everything that this new computer can do (with the exception of some games), but it can do them all at once. Do I need to close out of some office programs because I want to play a game? Exit out of everything RAM intensive when I want to burn a DVD?
It's also considerably faster at numerous tasks, particularly DVD burning (my old computer would take an hour to burn a DVD, this one does it in under 10 minutes). Running the antivirus doesn't kill performance. Accidentally hitting the windows key doesn't cause my computer to freeze for 30 seconds trying to minimize a game window. In reality can I focus on more than 2-3 of these tasks at once? Probably not. But it's nice to not have to worry about running X while Y is open, or being able to alt+tab between windows rather than opening up the program I closed to view a document.
In terms of things my old computer absolutely couldn't do? The upgrade in resolution on my new monitor is quite handy. Ripping and compressing DVDs is something that my old computer couldn't do. (didn't meet the minimum specs for handbrake); this one handles it fairly well. Graphics/video editing, encoding, some engineering applications, these things will eat up just about all the processing power you can throw at them. Rendering a file in 30 minutes opposed to 90 is certainly worth the upgrade.
All said and done, is Windows bloated? Compared to some versions of Linux, it's incredibly bloated. Have I had any real problem with my hardware running Vista? None, except bootup and shutdown times, which really is a flaw of the OS (and probably I/O on the HDD). Am I dissatisfied that I paid ~1100 for the new computer? Not at all.
To start, technology progresses. You sound like you don't want progress because it 'forces' you to spend money by making older hardware obsolete. This older hardware comes down precipitously in price; I'm not sure when the last time you looked at laptops was, but it can't have been recently. You can buy a good laptop for 1500, and one that will handle anything but graphics and some engineering software for 800, just not be quite as snappy.
If you're spending more than that, you're either buying a desktop replacement (at which point just buy a desktop and a laptop for about the same price - a 1400$ desktop will generally be faster than a 3000$ laptop), or you're buying something with an SSD, likely an ultra thin laptop (which in general has performance worse than the 700$ laptop)
Ignoring developments in hardware would be a stupid thing for Microsoft to do. Assume a distribution curve for how often computers are replaced, and I bet you'll find most people keep theirs under 5 years before upgrading, with most in the 2-4 year range. If Microsoft didn't make the OS utilize the new hardware, everyone would complain. For all the complaints about Vista, you can buy a desktop for 800 that will almost max out the Vista user experience.
Progress in prices has only been made because of the rapid struggle for performance. Saying you don't want new stuff is mostly like saying you're pretty happy with prices the way they are (since lets face it, most drops in prices come from obsolescence)
Finally to answer your last point... processors are more advanced Turing machines, and in theory a pentium 2 can run the same things as a core 2 duo, provided there's enough memory at some level to allow the program to run (and said program has alternatives for upgraded instruction sets). Thus it's very hard to qualify when software doesn't run on a machine; if it takes 5 minutes to open up Word, does that count? It still runs, just not well. Increase the processor speed and memory and it'll take 4 minutes... etc. When you need to upgrade is then largely personal preference. I personally value my time a bit more than that so I have a faster machine, and the benefits that come with it (like being able to have 6 programs open + background processes with no slowdown)
Chances are they won't have too much of a choice in the matter; I doubt the proportions of people who do X have changed, but the evidence of it certainly has. The fact that society has managed to not implode despite going through the 70s is probably evidence of this.
So unless we can significantly reduce the number of workers we need (causing high unemployment, which would be even worse), it probably won't drastically impact hiring. The benefit would be that those that didn't engage in such behavior (or were somewhat smart about it) may be given preference over other candidates. This could even be beneficial to the employer, since they have more than just a resume and the brief time spent interviewing to judge a candidate by.
Given all this, perhaps I should be posting as AC more often...
Telling someone to mod your own post up makes you a whore.
Apparently a skinny, anorexic karma whore, but a whore nonetheless.
Irony having been paid it's dues, I'll agree with what you're saying. People may be people and we all have our emotional weak points, but the fact of the matter is that the world isn't a nice place, and people by and large aren't the most considerate creatures. I'm sorry if it offends 'you', but people's rights to post their opinions, right or wrong, isn't a crime. They may not post nice things, and they may cause you some distress; get over it. Personally if someone I barely know makes fun of me I generally don't care; if I think it's a valid point I'll consider changing, if not what do I care?
ur givn em way 2 mch crdt.
Firstly, you used the right they're.
Secondly, you used CV. Maybe you're European in which case that'd make sense, but even at college quite a few people don't know what a CV is. It's a resume.
Finally, the grammatical mistakes were intentional.
Take that back. You're definitely European. I realized that on realise.
You've listed just a few of the current genres in MMOs. I predict in the future you'll take on the role of a denizen of a tough world. Initially you'll barely be able to do the simplest of things, but as you spend time, you'll level them up. Strange and arcane rules will be placed upon you, but as you level up you'll face less and less of the, until you hit the 2nd stage of the game where you rapidly level up abilities, but just as you're about to make use of them and rule the world, a new set of rules is placed upon you, and even tougher bosses appear, many of which you can't directly attack, unless you want agro from the mega boss force. Eventually after years of struggle, you'll slowly get promoted in whatever job you've chosen to level in - but the great thing is that you're almost unlimited in what 'jobs' you want to take, but various characters have aptitude for certain jobs based upon training and the options at character creation.
Of course they're already predicting that people will complain this is far too similar to 'life' and not want to play it, but that's expected to take a fair amount of time.
The reader posting this seems to be a bit naive on passwords, and 7 year olds.
In kindergarten I had to memorize my phone number and address. A phone number is a fairly random 7 digit code. A zip code is 5 more random digits. There is no reason to assume she couldn't memorize a 7 character string; even 5 digits worth of numbers is far more than sufficient to stop any manual attempts to guess the password.
Furthermore, even if she uses a common thing plus 1 number the search space is sufficiently large that it is quite unlikely that the parents would guess it. Beyond this she could write it down on a slip of paper and hide it in a book. Not the most secure, but it'll still take a fair bit of effort to get it.
This excuses several things, such as..
1. The child shouldn't have such access to a computer. It's just not a smart idea.
2. The parents are parents. The child is a child. Passwords have little effect when they say "you can't use the computer until we have the password" or "no sweets unless we get the password." Seriously, in terms of challenges it's trivial on both sides - the parents either can't crack the password regardless of complexity, or they can crack any password because they have physical access to the machine and the knowhow. The child can't withhold the password if the parents get serious about it, or she can, but she loses the benefit of the computer entirely.
You know, it's a real pity that there is no competent organization that can offer this that's in theory not motivated by profits and has the resources, like say... the US government. Everything aside, this kind of information is something that should be likely held by the government, if only people trusted this to not expand into a serious invasion of their privacy. It's a pity that the one organization that's supposed to regulate everything and hold such information (if anyone beyond yourself is) is considered too untrustworthy to do so.
I suppose it all comes back to things being run by human nature, and sooner or later you'll have to make a deal with the devil and give him his due; increased convince (eventually to the point that it will be impossible to function without it) for a decreased amount of privacy. In theory your SSN is only related to taxes; in practice you can't get through life easily without giving it to every Tom, Dick, and Harry.
Security by obscurity might be the only measure of protection we have, but that's not terribly comforting when someone *thinks* you did something wrong, or when someone *gets* your data (though google seems much better at protecting data than most banks and governments).
On the plus side it might be nice to see spam for drugs that you can actually use, compared to everyone getting offers to increase penis size with drugs to keep it up for hours.
Engineering: Is there anything it can't solve?
Assuming that you can create a nearly human intelligence, the problem is nearly solved. How much faster would certain tasks be if computers had even some semblance of intelligence; as you're coding it guesses (with good accuracy) a possible solution, or if you could meta-program, i.e. describe what you wanted a function to do in a formalized language, but much closer to a natural language. What would happen if you just had to tell a computer input:desired output for a few cases and have it build the function itself, perhaps to be optimized by a human later. You've sped things up significantly for complex tasks, and you'd allow a computer to dynamically build programs to solve a simpler class of tasks. That's a quite advanced AI in my opinion, depending on how general you let it get.
Once humans have these tools, with the AI helping to speed up lower level tasks, we can build a better class of meta-programs to handle more and more tasks, until you get to the point of a real AI; You simply dictate a task to the computer and it solves it, much like a boss might expect you to do.
From there we have a true AI, although perhaps not a human based one. However it wouldn't matter if the abstracted hardware was a simulation of neurons or something completely different, and it wouldn't matter if it had emotional intelligence or not; in theory it could build a program to add this to itself.
I in general agree with you, however if we play devil's advocate...
The new office was designed to be easier to use by everyone. My understanding is that it is easier to use if you've never used it before, however experienced users found it less intuitive. I've yet to do anything terribly advanced with it, however I suspect it may have made the best case slower, but improved the average case.
That having been said, I find keyboard shortcuts for most tasks to be quite invaluable; I'm very glad the latest beta of firefox now easily allows you to do press f6 and type "w [search term]" enter and open up the wikipedia page for it. Opera did that for a year or more and I always loved that feature.
The house of the future and we're not even using Betamax?! They lie!
Tonight? It's been a long while since there's been one show on a night that I consider watching, let alone in the nerd genre.
Impressively enough the networks have gotten about 3 shows that I'll watch regularly (24, Heroes, Terminator), and I know of a few others I'm missing (BSG, The Office, some other cable shows) I'd probably watch more, but without a DVR I generally forget to watch most of them. At some point I'll probably pony up the money for a few DVD box sets, preferably in a year or two when HD is the rage and I can get them cheaply... I won't have a big enough TV and most of them I won't watch more than 2-3 times.
You're right, it's really not that new, or rather it's old enough that there was a play with this topic as a highlight that came out about a year ago.
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/05/landscape-with-weapon.html
I suppose you and I probably differ on what works fine, and I will admit that my ability to use a command line to get around isn't great. However I can't imagine it can browse most websites easily, the screen it's hooked up to is probably 15" or less, and you probably can't use more than 2-3 programs at once. To me being able to run open office isn't too useful if I can't browse wikipedia at the same time, and I'd like to be able to listen to some music while doing so; having an IM client and e-mail open is nice as well.
I guess the point is that I wouldn't be nearly as productive (or maybe I would, since i'd stay focused on whatever i was working on) if I wasn't able to do those things and at this point you can likely get a computer for under 50 (or free) that has 4 times the specs of yours. If it works for you that's great, but i'd consider the extra functionality more important.
There is something to be said for clean code, however if you can save a significant amount on development or add functionality to the end user by using an amount of ram that's commonly available, I'd say that's a better solution.
You can't find a new machine out there with under 512 MB, and 2GB is exceedingly common. If the software was written that you never needed anything over 512 MB, people would complain that they aren't using hardware properly and they could be doing more.
Also I'm not sure about you, but I generally don't consider it an accomplishment when my computer doesn't thrash when I run excel or word. Granted it's impressive that you've got current software running on that configuration, however I haven't seen a computer with those specifications in at least 5 years.