It seems to me any serious research into microprocessors will be hampered by the fact that it will be completely inapplicable unless it dumbs itself down to ape the x86 instruction set. All current and future processor design advances will be defined as better and faster ways of making modern silicon pretend it's a member of a chip family that was obsolete when the first President Bush was in office. That's not progress. That's just kind of sad.
Heaven help any researcher if implementing their new chip design requires a new software paradigm that doesn't fit neatly into the OS/Application model, too. We're living in the perpetual now of 2000, and it's some boring shit. I want my future back.
I have never, in the course of my IT career and in my daily personal web surfing experience, been affected by security exploits aimed at Firefox or any other Mozilla-based browser.
I can say with confidence that I have laughed mightily at colleagues, friends and family members running IE who have to juggle two or three anti-malware programs and still wind up shoulder-deep in the Windows Registry or re-install because of security holes in IE.
Symantic can only blow so much smoke up my ass before reality re-asserts itself. Theoretical vulnerabilities are bad. Giant screaming voids you could drive a Peterbilt through are worse. Open Source Software frequently gives you the former. Microsoft can be counted upon, in a lead-pipe cinch, to deliver the latter.
Only 20 tries on average, eh? Anyone who needs more than three tries to log into my systems needs to call the IT helpdesk to unlock their account. If it's a sensitive system, they need to have their manager call in for them. Game, set and match.
Allowing brute-force attacks is stupid, although not quite as stupid as scaremongering about loud typists.
1)KVMs with both VGA and DVI in, and a DVI out to a flat panel hanging on the wall behind the bench.
2) Big, scary Server PSU with a gazillion power connectors. Maybe two or three, and lots of extra molex connectors.
3) A universal notebook PSU with all the lead attachments. You know someone's gonna drop off a stinkpad and not leave their power brick.
4) A universal wall wart for powering troublesome peripherals that the owners neglected to bring the PSU for.
5) Multimeter
6) Nice soldering station, with adjustable temp and a variety of tips.
7) Big, honking USB drive for emergency backups.
8) Wireless Router with ethernet ports, and a gigabit hub to uplink to it, to test out networking ports, read Fark on company time.
9) Electrical tape in three colors, duct tape in two, gaffer's tape, superglue and a hot-glue gun.
10) Spare cables: USB in all its variations, ditto Firewire; Mini Din-8, DB9, DB25, Centronics and gender changers and adapters for all involved; PSU cords; Cat-5 patch cables, crossover cables; bluetooth mouse extenders, RJ-12 phone cords.
11) A n00b intern willing to go look for a bluetooth mouse extender cable.
12) A bluetooth mouse, to test bluetooth functionality.
15) Professional grade anti-static setup your technicians won't bother to use, all the while rubbing their shoes on wool sweaters and playing with styrofoam.
16: big magnifying glass on an articulated arm, preferable with a bright light.
17: Pin vise, and one of those aligator-clip armatures. And a real bench vise, too.
18: heat gun for heat-shrink connectors.
19) Locking toolboxes assigned to each tech, inventoried in the morning and at night. You'll save a ton of money on tools. What goes in those boxes is another post in and of itself.
You heard wrong, unless by "before government disaster relief" you mean "before there were governments and we all ate sticks and berries and ran from sabretooth tigers."
Serious. Check out the history of the Yangtzee and Ganges rivers going back almost 5,000 years, and the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia at the very dawn of civilization. Cities are generally built where they are useful, not where they are safe.
Those with a Libertarian or Conservative leaning sometimes forget that Taxes purchase something useful for you: civilization.
The government diaster relief you deride so much makes civilization happen in North America. Just the cost of doing business here. Move to Somalia if you want to live someplace where there's no tax burden.
The business plans of these companies... to fund billion-dollar operations with the wallets of monied space geeks... is nothing more than Heinlein-addled wishful thinking. Most of the bazillionaires would much rather spend their spare time at the French Riviera, or their private Greek island or shopping in Hong Kong. There just aren't enough people willing to shell out megabucks to fund the R&D and operating costs of space tourism.
I mean, the Renaissance-era European explorers weren't wealthy sightseers who wedged themselves into tiny wooden deathtraps to sight-see. They were businessmen after profitable trade routes. Money lauched the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria, not tourism. Explorers werre invested in with the expectation that the money spent would return with a huge profit, not a nice story about the local food and colorful customs.
But! Sending techs up to deploy, retrieve or even fix sattelites in orbit... now that's real money.
That sort of work requires an orbital spacecraft with a decent payload capacity. So, this is a very good step in the right direction to making private space enterprise possible.
None of the big chain theaters have picked this film up here in Newport, RI, so the Jane Pickens Theater, one of the last of the single-screen Movie Houses from the golden age of movies, gets to cash in.
It's got an enormous screen, bazillions of seats (including a balcony!) and a Dolby surround-sound system that became the prototype for the one found in most theaters today. It was one of the only places film conservators could show acetate-based films before restoration, because the projection booth still had all its steel fire-shutters from the '20s operational. (An equipment change in the late '90s, and the growing trend to preserve, duplicate and restore before screening, ended the practice.) They sometimes still show cartoon shorts before the movie, on reels they've had since the '60s.
The Pickens also ran Farenheight 9/11, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Chicago and The Nightmare Before Christmas when none of the chain multi-plexes would take the chance.
1) Games. They needed a "Killer App" in the worst way. I mean, even the Saturn had "Panzer Dragoon" and Dreamcast had "Soul Caliber." Instead, they seemed to pursue the most mediocre and middle-of-the-road games they could, the "premier" game being a warmed over version of Doom.
2) Marketing. There was no buzz. They scored the incredible coup of getting their device prominently displayed in every CompUSA, but failed to advertise it, or even poisition it where it would be visible to it's target audience. (20-something professionals.) Take out a full page ad or two in Maxxim, fer chrissakes.
3) Not gearing themselves to succeed small, and grow big. They overreached themselves without a killer game and proper publicity. There are high-tech products that survive and thrive despite flying under the radar (see Sony's Qualia division, or McIntosh Audio, or Saleen supercars for good examples.) But, you need to batten down the financial hatches, and realize you're going to live on the edge of solvency for the first five ro ten years. (Alienware is a great example of such a company who actually made it.)
So, even tho the Tapwave was one of the sexiest pieces of kit on the market (that metal shell felt like a William Gibson wet-dream), it couldn't deliver the killer app, it wasn't advertised to it's target audience effectively, and Tapwave tried to grow too quickly, and drowned in venture capital it had no hope of repaying.
Ah, well, if I find one on clearance, I'll buy it regardless, because hey, it is a cool little gizmo.
Well, for one, Europe only ceeded its "science crown " to the USA because of the World Wars. Since then, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Western Europe are science and technology powerhouses. Taiwan is especially instructive, as they speak the same language and have many of the same cultural factors. Despite their miniscule sliver of the total Chinese population, they're way ahead. Population don't mean much if most of your people are living in squalor due to repressive and corrupt government.
The US's open-door policy for researchers from around the globe to study and research in the US had more to do with getting the "crown." The metling-pot mindset, especially popular with educators and institutions, allowed the best and the brightest to come to the US to do their work.
That, and the US is, like, you know, a first world country? Once China and India and Indonesia can get phone and power service to the medievil huts the majority of its population lives in, then I'd worry about the massive population difference.
New Zealand and Finland are good examples of miniscule countries in terms of population that are doing very, very, very well for themselves on the science and technology front. New Zealand is isolated by location, and Finland by language. They still have engineering firms and physicists that are world class.
As soon as the pipes get thick enough, the cable companies and the FTTH telcos will just expand their "on-demand" services exponentially and slash prices. No need to update your PC. No need to activate or de-activate movies. Just aim the remote at your set-top box, rent the movie for a buck or two, and watch, and watch it again for as long as you want to keep it in the DVR part of your set-top box. Cheaper and more convenient than Netflix.
The market for watching movies "on the go," be it on a Notebook or PMP, is pretty small, actually. Apple's not interested in it, despite the instant market dominance they'd get from it were they to put a "Video iPod" on the market.
If you look at the rate of progress throughout the '70s and '80's and the first half of the '90's in the personal computing industry, it seemed as if there was a new miracle on sale every month.
This is because there was intense competition between a number of personal computer and workstation and server vendors using an array of technologies and platforms.
Then, as smaller companies died off, instead of being replaced, thay were smothered outright by platforms seeking "world domination" - Linux is partly to blame, killoing the market for specialized server and workstation hardware, but really, most of the problem was and is Microsoft and Intel.
For a while, the Gaming industry bouyed the rate of innovation, but the game consoles are getting better and better, and the market for spiffy new peripherals for spiffy new games is slowly shrinking.
This isn't to say that there's nothing new under the sun. The computer industry outside the PC/Server market is berzerk with innovation at the moment: the next gen consoles, FPGA SOC's, 24 megapixel DSLRs and cheap 5mp digicams, HDTV solid-state digital camcorders, amazing new mobile phone technologies being rolled into smaller and sexier phones on almost a daily basis, PMP systems ranging from the simple and stylish iPod to HDTV DVR's.
It's just that the personal computing field and the server/workstation field has collapsed into singularity. You got your choice of Unix-derived OS's running GUI environments on top, running on the latest version of the bog-standard IBM PC Clone. Everything else has died off. No wonder it feels as if no more innovation is possible... of course new innovations are possible. It's just that the barrier to entry is now insurmountable.
So microprocessors to make cars and pacemakers go will be getting hot new tech, and cell phones will get smaller and easier to use and last hundreds of hours on a single charge, but your Linux workstation or iMac or Windows tablet, 5 years from now, will be featured and equipped exaclty as it is now. It might be marginally faster at doing what it already does... but it won't be doing anything new.
Every time I have a friend, co-worker or family memmber ask me what to do when their PC is wrecked by viruses or crippled by malware, I tell them, in my best Emeril Lagasse voice, "B.A.M! Kick it up a notch! B.A.M!"
They're like, "What does that mean, B.A.M?"
Buy a Mac. Problem solved.
I bill too much for my time to give them any other advice... and it wouldn't be as effective or easy as having them buy a Mac Mini or iBook, anyway.
BAM! Buy A Mac!
If they're too poor to buy a new Mac, have them buy a used Mac. A slot-loading gumdrop iMac can run Tiger just fine with 512mb of RAM.
Linux and OpenBSD would work as well, but it would require more effort on my part to walk them through the migration, and I'm lazy.
You assume that being a loser is a monopoly, an understandable assumption, as you run windows. No, I do hate to break this to you, but many people can all be losers at once, and compete with each other for uncoolness and anti-cred. OpenBSD users see Linux users as losers, but thet also see you as a loser. No coolness for you today, try tomorrow.
Apple already has an industrial grade spreadsheet app that's got a massive installed base, typical Apple UI goodness, a featureset that's deep and vast, and a thriving third party support market. It's called FileMaker Pro.
And I'll see your Visual Basic and raise you an Applescript. You can create standalone GUI apps and server-run scripts based in Applescript using X-Code that will tie into all Applescript-aware apps (not just Apple's stuff), as well as give you hooks into the Unix shell and the various languages Apple ships by default. (Perl, python, Ruby, Java, C, C++, Obj-C, Fortran, etc.)
While you're correct to a certain extent about widely distributed vertical apps, as in the insurance example, the trend is to move away from client software and toward web apps. Lower cost of development and deployment, greater control over functionality, and the developer can stop caring if their stuff is gonna break under W2K, NT, XP or whatever. Just make sure it runs in IE, done. Safari does a pretty good job aping IE when it needs to...
Theo is not a benevolent dictator. He'd toss people into gulags and raze villages if he could. Since the work is all volunteer, the opressed masses of developers laboring under his lash like it that way. This means that unpleasant but necessary parts of the development process, like code auditing, just gets done, and done right.
One of the things he gets very, very, very right is clear and concise manpages, and another is accurate and methodical install process. Gimme well documented utilities over pointy-clicky eyecandy that's barely functional. I use MacOS X on my personal deck, so I'm spoiled. My lip arches of its own accord into a sneer whenever I see so much as a screenshot of the ludicrous configurators of the various Linuxen. (I laugh like the evil Quaker guy in the "Im on the Internet!" pic when I see the "graphical" FreeBSD installer...) Gimme a good curses-based text menu with clearly defined options and reasonable defaults coupled with well documented config files over eyecandy anyday.
OpenBSD servers are a joy to install, configure and maintain, because the project contributors really, really, really get it when it comes to the Unix Way.
Now, if only they'd do something about SMP support. Slackasses.
Since x86 is such a dominant processor family, you'd think they would have already tried all the tricks of adding in DSPs. They did, it's called SSE, and it sucks. Intel and AMD waste so many transistors translating the x86 instruction set, they can't adequately incorporate new technologies, like DSPs, vector processors, on-chip reconfigurable FPGA coprocessors, insane amounts of cache and heavy duty I/O.
If it were the slightest bit feasable, AMD or Intel or Transmeta or one of the smaller players would have done it already.
x86 is a high-volume, low cost solution. It offers nothing of worth apart from a depressing homogeneity and backwards compatibility with MS-DOS. This is why the embedded market is running away from x86 chips as fast and as far as they can... they need real featuresets and an ISA that isn't brain-damaged.
It's why IBM is raking in cash hand over fist from customers who jumped ship from HP/Compaq/Tandem and SGI... unlike AMD or Intel, they can manage a line of high margin, high performance microprocessors (or processors, in the case of the Z-series.) They aren't dependant on an antiquated instruction set, but I'd bet the newest AIX runs on RS/6000 kit older than PC's no longer supported by XP, and Z-OS runs software written back when Carter was in office.
x86 is the worst of all possible worlds, and is crippling the workstation/PC market with a race to the bottom.
The PA-RISC, Alpha, and Mips chip families were all way out in front of the x86 before they were put into maintenance mode by HP and SGI in anticipation of the IA-64 architecture, which never did deliver on it's price/performance promises.
Sun was having trouble keeping up, but this will probably not be the case once the unified Sun/Fujitsu SPARC team delivers the next generation chips. And even though it scores lower for raw number crunching, the UltraSPARC III systems have got a better overall latency under heavy load and a more graceful degredation under a crippling load, which is why anyone's still bothering to buy them for new infrastructure.
IBM's POWER is way out in front of the performance sweepstakes, and unlikely to be axed any time soon on the P and R series servers. Ditto the Z-series "SuperCISC" mainframe processors. I cannot see any situation where the glorified PC architecture that passes for a server in the x86 world could even come close to meeting the needs of something like a Z-Series.
x86 designs just can't compete in next generation processor sweepstakes, which is why none of the next generation game consoles will be using one. The "skin" required to make the instruction set work with bleeding edge designs like Cell just isn't worth the hassle or performance overhead. x86 chip designs cannot lend themselves to that degree of radical change in "packaging." This is also contributing to their demise in the embedded space as well. (See: Transmeta)
The x86 instruction set is bloated and crippled, and making the Itanium interoperable with it nearly sunk the chip entirely. Even now, you run with a severe performance penalty if you run x86 code on it as opposed to native-compiled stuff, something that wasn't supposed to happen with the VLIW code-morphing schtick.
Choice of instruction set can influence the way new features are (or aren't) implemented, and can seriously impede low-level "to the metal" programming and even affect development in higher level languages by being braindead about low level optimization.
Allan Kay was dead right in that hardware needs to accommodate the programmer, not the other way around. With x86 an inescapable standard, this ideal will never be realized in the workstation/server/personal computer arena.
This is a fairly sad state of affairs... the processor family really has some legs left to it, but it was killed by HP for mostly political reasons. Itanium has never really delivered the goods, and is likely to be killed sooner rather than later by Intel, who does not know how to run a small volume/high margin performance chip line. (See: i860, i960) nor does it really see the value in such products.
Wherer this will leave HP is anyone's guess. Off-the-shelf Pentiums or Opterons can't really compete with POWER or Fujitsu's next gen SPARC designs. x86 Unix systems have largely been also-rans... Data General, Sequent(Now IBM xSeries), even Sun's new Opteron boxes are largely a side show to their SPARC business.
The Itanium, and the bone-headed wintel-centric management who pursued the pipedream of IA-64, killed off a lot of prime high-performance processor srchitectures: Alpha, Mips, and now PA-RISC. These aren't market or competitive pressures ('cuz IBM's doing just fine with bespoke silicon at the high end), but political mangement dictates that turned some premier computer science powerhouses into shambling wrecks. I mean, what the hell has SGI done in half a decade that's caused anyone to talk about them in positive terms? Nada.
This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation. The Wintel PC is not the pinnical of hardware architectures, it's pretty bass-ackward and stone age compared to what used to be out there. Sad times.
Google's major earnings come not from licensing IP, but from advertising revenue, making it not unlike a traditional media outlet (e.g. TV station) as far as revenue model goes.
You tryin' to tell me Google's got better market penetration and distribution than Time Warner, one of the largest cable providers in the US? One of the largest periodical publishing houses in the world?
Nnnnnnah. Didn't think so, neither.
By way of comparison, Cosmo.com, the internet courier company, was profitable... before it had more venture capital than it could ever repay rammed down its throat. There were a lot of medium-sized dotcom business who were funded like multi-billion dollar ventures instead.
It's not Google's fault their stock is worth stupid money, and they've been very careful not to live beyond their means and to keep control of their company, but that won't prevent the shareholders from throwing a fit when the price comes back down to earth. It will probably clobber the just-now-recovering tech sector when it does, too.
This is the idiocy of defacto standards instead of real standards. With OSS, a defacto standard can be influenced by everyone, and is openly documented and understood in the code.
Closed source defacto standards means porting to new platforms is a feat next to impossible (see a flash plugin that works with any of the PowerPC-based Amiga variants? Howabout with RISC-OS on Arm? Open BSD on a Zaurus? Just 'cuz you don't run that platform doesn't mean that the platform is useless. Even if only a few thousand people use the platform, it shouldn't mean they're locked out of what has become a standard for content delivery.
With a closed flash, you can't develop a browser that deoesn't ape IE or Moz's plugin architecture. You can't come up with a swank new way to edit, view or serve flash content. It sucks. Free flash is an answer, as is a replacement vector graphic animation system that's based around a carefully engineered standard, or at least a decent RFC.
In some ways, I preferred the days of the BBS to the modern internet. It was easier to get together with the local geeks and freaks, and to have something of a social life based around the nerdvana of computers, comics, and sci-fi.
Back then, tho, I'd have given my eyeteeth for Usenet access... it was available at $95 for a dial-up shell across the state, out of reach broke-ass art student. Then a local ISP opened up, with shell accounts for $25/month. Woo! Usenet was almost everything I had hoped it would be, and then the Long September came and burned it all to the ground. By then all the local BBS's were out of the game, because the sysops used their extra line for internet access rather than running the BBS.
No point to all this, really. Just waxing nostalgic.
I think the issue is "selective memory loss" - Microsoft plays this card all the time in court. Emails from a relevant time period are "deleted" when convenient, while older or newer or even contemporaneous mail is saved... the judge in this case was simply smart enough to call shenanigans.
You can delete old email if you're that hard up for space, just have a rock-solid deletion policy you can prove you adhered to in a court of law.
It also helps to audit your archives and backups regularly, and document what data was lost when. 'Cuz face it, every admin at some point or other loses some data to corruption, hardware failure, bookeeping mixups or user error. Knowing what you forgot and when you forgot it can help in situations where not having the data on hand can cost a billion bucks or so.
1)Create an enormous webserver cluster using cheap hardware and cheaper (free) software.
2) Then think of clever things to do with it.
Step 3, instead of being ???, is "sell non-annoying text ads aligned with the context of what the user is viewing."
4) Profit!
Parts one, three and four are easy. Part Two is hard... really, really hard. Unsurprisingly, it's where Google is throwing the lion's share of their money and manpower. They foster a spirit and culture of top-tier creativity.
This culture has been crushed into line-toeing, bootlicking mediocrity by Microsoft management. They're great for incremental updates in line with whatever upper-management mandate Bill has in mind this year and aping what smaller competitors are doing, but they suck at breaking new ground.
So, MSFT will always be a step behind in a game Google engineered to reward only those who can think new things first. Even if Microsoft manages to invent or buy a new idea, Google will come up with a way of making it faster, cheaper, safer and more powerful. It's what they did to Microsoft's Hotmail.
Blaming Diebold for shaving a half-percent in Ohio is stupid.
Blaming the DNC for selecting Edwards for the Veep slot, who could not and did not deliver any of the southern Swing States, rather than Graham, who has =never= lost an election in Florida, is far more reasonable. A Kerry-Graham ticket would have delivered Florida and maybe Arkansas and West Virginia, too, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Dean made one hell of a run during the primaries with a shoestring budget and virtually no influence on the national scene... hopefully he'll bring some of that savvy to the Democratic party and have them stop pushing unelectable candidates. (Please note, electable does not mean "right-wing." Lieberman didn't help Gore's cause at all in 2000.)
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me any serious research into microprocessors will be hampered by the fact that it will be completely inapplicable unless it dumbs itself down to ape the x86 instruction set. All current and future processor design advances will be defined as better and faster ways of making modern silicon pretend it's a member of a chip family that was obsolete when the first President Bush was in office. That's not progress. That's just kind of sad.
Heaven help any researcher if implementing their new chip design requires a new software paradigm that doesn't fit neatly into the OS/Application model, too. We're living in the perpetual now of 2000, and it's some boring shit. I want my future back.
Bah.
SoupIsGood Food
I have never, in the course of my IT career and in my daily personal web surfing experience, been affected by security exploits aimed at Firefox or any other Mozilla-based browser.
I can say with confidence that I have laughed mightily at colleagues, friends and family members running IE who have to juggle two or three anti-malware programs and still wind up shoulder-deep in the Windows Registry or re-install because of security holes in IE.
Symantic can only blow so much smoke up my ass before reality re-asserts itself. Theoretical vulnerabilities are bad. Giant screaming voids you could drive a Peterbilt through are worse. Open Source Software frequently gives you the former. Microsoft can be counted upon, in a lead-pipe cinch, to deliver the latter.
SoupIsGood Food
Only 20 tries on average, eh? Anyone who needs more than three tries to log into my systems needs to call the IT helpdesk to unlock their account. If it's a sensitive system, they need to have their manager call in for them. Game, set and match.
Allowing brute-force attacks is stupid, although not quite as stupid as scaremongering about loud typists.
SoupIsGood Food
Some things to consider -
1)KVMs with both VGA and DVI in, and a DVI out to a flat panel hanging on the wall behind the bench.
2) Big, scary Server PSU with a gazillion power connectors. Maybe two or three, and lots of extra molex connectors.
3) A universal notebook PSU with all the lead attachments. You know someone's gonna drop off a stinkpad and not leave their power brick.
4) A universal wall wart for powering troublesome peripherals that the owners neglected to bring the PSU for.
5) Multimeter
6) Nice soldering station, with adjustable temp and a variety of tips.
7) Big, honking USB drive for emergency backups.
8) Wireless Router with ethernet ports, and a gigabit hub to uplink to it, to test out networking ports, read Fark on company time.
9) Electrical tape in three colors, duct tape in two, gaffer's tape, superglue and a hot-glue gun.
10) Spare cables: USB in all its variations, ditto Firewire; Mini Din-8, DB9, DB25, Centronics and gender changers and adapters for all involved; PSU cords; Cat-5 patch cables, crossover cables; bluetooth mouse extenders, RJ-12 phone cords.
11) A n00b intern willing to go look for a bluetooth mouse extender cable.
12) A bluetooth mouse, to test bluetooth functionality.
13) Ordered bins with commonly needed hardware (plastic washers, mounting studs, screws, etc.)
14) Lotsa wireties in various sizes and colors.
15) Professional grade anti-static setup your technicians won't bother to use, all the while rubbing their shoes on wool sweaters and playing with styrofoam.
16: big magnifying glass on an articulated arm, preferable with a bright light.
17: Pin vise, and one of those aligator-clip armatures. And a real bench vise, too.
18: heat gun for heat-shrink connectors.
19) Locking toolboxes assigned to each tech, inventoried in the morning and at night. You'll save a ton of money on tools. What goes in those boxes is another post in and of itself.
SoupIsGood Food
You have a funny idea of "most of the taxes." Perhaps it's those social studies and math teachers that can't teach.
Last I checked, the military, public works projects and corporate subsidies got ninety cents out of your tax dollar.
SoupIsGood Food
You heard wrong, unless by "before government disaster relief" you mean "before there were governments and we all ate sticks and berries and ran from sabretooth tigers."
Serious. Check out the history of the Yangtzee and Ganges rivers going back almost 5,000 years, and the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia at the very dawn of civilization. Cities are generally built where they are useful, not where they are safe.
Those with a Libertarian or Conservative leaning sometimes forget that Taxes purchase something useful for you: civilization.
The government diaster relief you deride so much makes civilization happen in North America. Just the cost of doing business here. Move to Somalia if you want to live someplace where there's no tax burden.
SoupIsGood Food
The business plans of these companies... to fund billion-dollar operations with the wallets of monied space geeks... is nothing more than Heinlein-addled wishful thinking. Most of the bazillionaires would much rather spend their spare time at the French Riviera, or their private Greek island or shopping in Hong Kong. There just aren't enough people willing to shell out megabucks to fund the R&D and operating costs of space tourism.
I mean, the Renaissance-era European explorers weren't wealthy sightseers who wedged themselves into tiny wooden deathtraps to sight-see. They were businessmen after profitable trade routes. Money lauched the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria, not tourism. Explorers werre invested in with the expectation that the money spent would return with a huge profit, not a nice story about the local food and colorful customs.
But! Sending techs up to deploy, retrieve or even fix sattelites in orbit... now that's real money.
That sort of work requires an orbital spacecraft with a decent payload capacity. So, this is a very good step in the right direction to making private space enterprise possible.
SoupIsGood Food
None of the big chain theaters have picked this film up here in Newport, RI, so the Jane Pickens Theater, one of the last of the single-screen Movie Houses from the golden age of movies, gets to cash in.
It's got an enormous screen, bazillions of seats (including a balcony!) and a Dolby surround-sound system that became the prototype for the one found in most theaters today. It was one of the only places film conservators could show acetate-based films before restoration, because the projection booth still had all its steel fire-shutters from the '20s operational. (An equipment change in the late '90s, and the growing trend to preserve, duplicate and restore before screening, ended the practice.) They sometimes still show cartoon shorts before the movie, on reels they've had since the '60s.
The Pickens also ran Farenheight 9/11, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Chicago and The Nightmare Before Christmas when none of the chain multi-plexes would take the chance.
Support your local movie house!
Zodiac had three problems:
1) Games. They needed a "Killer App" in the worst way. I mean, even the Saturn had "Panzer Dragoon" and Dreamcast had "Soul Caliber." Instead, they seemed to pursue the most mediocre and middle-of-the-road games they could, the "premier" game being a warmed over version of Doom.
2) Marketing. There was no buzz. They scored the incredible coup of getting their device prominently displayed in every CompUSA, but failed to advertise it, or even poisition it where it would be visible to it's target audience. (20-something professionals.) Take out a full page ad or two in Maxxim, fer chrissakes.
3) Not gearing themselves to succeed small, and grow big. They overreached themselves without a killer game and proper publicity. There are high-tech products that survive and thrive despite flying under the radar (see Sony's Qualia division, or McIntosh Audio, or Saleen supercars for good examples.) But, you need to batten down the financial hatches, and realize you're going to live on the edge of solvency for the first five ro ten years. (Alienware is a great example of such a company who actually made it.)
So, even tho the Tapwave was one of the sexiest pieces of kit on the market (that metal shell felt like a William Gibson wet-dream), it couldn't deliver the killer app, it wasn't advertised to it's target audience effectively, and Tapwave tried to grow too quickly, and drowned in venture capital it had no hope of repaying.
Ah, well, if I find one on clearance, I'll buy it regardless, because hey, it is a cool little gizmo.
SoupIsGood Food
Well, for one, Europe only ceeded its "science crown " to the USA because of the World Wars. Since then, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Western Europe are science and technology powerhouses. Taiwan is especially instructive, as they speak the same language and have many of the same cultural factors. Despite their miniscule sliver of the total Chinese population, they're way ahead. Population don't mean much if most of your people are living in squalor due to repressive and corrupt government.
The US's open-door policy for researchers from around the globe to study and research in the US had more to do with getting the "crown." The metling-pot mindset, especially popular with educators and institutions, allowed the best and the brightest to come to the US to do their work.
That, and the US is, like, you know, a first world country? Once China and India and Indonesia can get phone and power service to the medievil huts the majority of its population lives in, then I'd worry about the massive population difference.
New Zealand and Finland are good examples of miniscule countries in terms of population that are doing very, very, very well for themselves on the science and technology front. New Zealand is isolated by location, and Finland by language. They still have engineering firms and physicists that are world class.
SoupIsGood Food
As soon as the pipes get thick enough, the cable companies and the FTTH telcos will just expand their "on-demand" services exponentially and slash prices. No need to update your PC. No need to activate or de-activate movies. Just aim the remote at your set-top box, rent the movie for a buck or two, and watch, and watch it again for as long as you want to keep it in the DVR part of your set-top box. Cheaper and more convenient than Netflix.
The market for watching movies "on the go," be it on a Notebook or PMP, is pretty small, actually. Apple's not interested in it, despite the instant market dominance they'd get from it were they to put a "Video iPod" on the market.
SoupIsGood Food
If you look at the rate of progress throughout the '70s and '80's and the first half of the '90's in the personal computing industry, it seemed as if there was a new miracle on sale every month.
This is because there was intense competition between a number of personal computer and workstation and server vendors using an array of technologies and platforms.
Then, as smaller companies died off, instead of being replaced, thay were smothered outright by platforms seeking "world domination" - Linux is partly to blame, killoing the market for specialized server and workstation hardware, but really, most of the problem was and is Microsoft and Intel.
For a while, the Gaming industry bouyed the rate of innovation, but the game consoles are getting better and better, and the market for spiffy new peripherals for spiffy new games is slowly shrinking.
This isn't to say that there's nothing new under the sun. The computer industry outside the PC/Server market is berzerk with innovation at the moment: the next gen consoles, FPGA SOC's, 24 megapixel DSLRs and cheap 5mp digicams, HDTV solid-state digital camcorders, amazing new mobile phone technologies being rolled into smaller and sexier phones on almost a daily basis, PMP systems ranging from the simple and stylish iPod to HDTV DVR's.
It's just that the personal computing field and the server/workstation field has collapsed into singularity. You got your choice of Unix-derived OS's running GUI environments on top, running on the latest version of the bog-standard IBM PC Clone. Everything else has died off. No wonder it feels as if no more innovation is possible... of course new innovations are possible. It's just that the barrier to entry is now insurmountable.
So microprocessors to make cars and pacemakers go will be getting hot new tech, and cell phones will get smaller and easier to use and last hundreds of hours on a single charge, but your Linux workstation or iMac or Windows tablet, 5 years from now, will be featured and equipped exaclty as it is now. It might be marginally faster at doing what it already does... but it won't be doing anything new.
World Domination is never a good thing.
SoupIsGood Food
Every time I have a friend, co-worker or family memmber ask me what to do when their PC is wrecked by viruses or crippled by malware, I tell them, in my best Emeril Lagasse voice, "B.A.M! Kick it up a notch! B.A.M!"
They're like, "What does that mean, B.A.M?"
Buy a Mac. Problem solved.
I bill too much for my time to give them any other advice... and it wouldn't be as effective or easy as having them buy a Mac Mini or iBook, anyway.
BAM! Buy A Mac!
If they're too poor to buy a new Mac, have them buy a used Mac. A slot-loading gumdrop iMac can run Tiger just fine with 512mb of RAM.
Linux and OpenBSD would work as well, but it would require more effort on my part to walk them through the migration, and I'm lazy.
SoupIsGood Food
You assume that being a loser is a monopoly, an understandable assumption, as you run windows. No, I do hate to break this to you, but many people can all be losers at once, and compete with each other for uncoolness and anti-cred. OpenBSD users see Linux users as losers, but thet also see you as a loser. No coolness for you today, try tomorrow.
SoupIsGood Food
Apple already has an industrial grade spreadsheet app that's got a massive installed base, typical Apple UI goodness, a featureset that's deep and vast, and a thriving third party support market. It's called FileMaker Pro.
And I'll see your Visual Basic and raise you an Applescript. You can create standalone GUI apps and server-run scripts based in Applescript using X-Code that will tie into all Applescript-aware apps (not just Apple's stuff), as well as give you hooks into the Unix shell and the various languages Apple ships by default. (Perl, python, Ruby, Java, C, C++, Obj-C, Fortran, etc.)
While you're correct to a certain extent about widely distributed vertical apps, as in the insurance example, the trend is to move away from client software and toward web apps. Lower cost of development and deployment, greater control over functionality, and the developer can stop caring if their stuff is gonna break under W2K, NT, XP or whatever. Just make sure it runs in IE, done. Safari does a pretty good job aping IE when it needs to...
SoupIsGood Food
Theo is not a benevolent dictator. He'd toss people into gulags and raze villages if he could. Since the work is all volunteer, the opressed masses of developers laboring under his lash like it that way. This means that unpleasant but necessary parts of the development process, like code auditing, just gets done, and done right.
One of the things he gets very, very, very right is clear and concise manpages, and another is accurate and methodical install process. Gimme well documented utilities over pointy-clicky eyecandy that's barely functional. I use MacOS X on my personal deck, so I'm spoiled. My lip arches of its own accord into a sneer whenever I see so much as a screenshot of the ludicrous configurators of the various Linuxen. (I laugh like the evil Quaker guy in the "Im on the Internet!" pic when I see the "graphical" FreeBSD installer...) Gimme a good curses-based text menu with clearly defined options and reasonable defaults coupled with well documented config files over eyecandy anyday.
OpenBSD servers are a joy to install, configure and maintain, because the project contributors really, really, really get it when it comes to the Unix Way.
Now, if only they'd do something about SMP support. Slackasses.
SoupIsGood Food
Since x86 is such a dominant processor family, you'd think they would have already tried all the tricks of adding in DSPs. They did, it's called SSE, and it sucks. Intel and AMD waste so many transistors translating the x86 instruction set, they can't adequately incorporate new technologies, like DSPs, vector processors, on-chip reconfigurable FPGA coprocessors, insane amounts of cache and heavy duty I/O.
If it were the slightest bit feasable, AMD or Intel or Transmeta or one of the smaller players would have done it already.
x86 is a high-volume, low cost solution. It offers nothing of worth apart from a depressing homogeneity and backwards compatibility with MS-DOS. This is why the embedded market is running away from x86 chips as fast and as far as they can... they need real featuresets and an ISA that isn't brain-damaged.
It's why IBM is raking in cash hand over fist from customers who jumped ship from HP/Compaq/Tandem and SGI... unlike AMD or Intel, they can manage a line of high margin, high performance microprocessors (or processors, in the case of the Z-series.) They aren't dependant on an antiquated instruction set, but I'd bet the newest AIX runs on RS/6000 kit older than PC's no longer supported by XP, and Z-OS runs software written back when Carter was in office.
x86 is the worst of all possible worlds, and is crippling the workstation/PC market with a race to the bottom.
SoupIsGood Food
The PA-RISC, Alpha, and Mips chip families were all way out in front of the x86 before they were put into maintenance mode by HP and SGI in anticipation of the IA-64 architecture, which never did deliver on it's price/performance promises.
Sun was having trouble keeping up, but this will probably not be the case once the unified Sun/Fujitsu SPARC team delivers the next generation chips. And even though it scores lower for raw number crunching, the UltraSPARC III systems have got a better overall latency under heavy load and a more graceful degredation under a crippling load, which is why anyone's still bothering to buy them for new infrastructure.
IBM's POWER is way out in front of the performance sweepstakes, and unlikely to be axed any time soon on the P and R series servers. Ditto the Z-series "SuperCISC" mainframe processors. I cannot see any situation where the glorified PC architecture that passes for a server in the x86 world could even come close to meeting the needs of something like a Z-Series.
x86 designs just can't compete in next generation processor sweepstakes, which is why none of the next generation game consoles will be using one. The "skin" required to make the instruction set work with bleeding edge designs like Cell just isn't worth the hassle or performance overhead. x86 chip designs cannot lend themselves to that degree of radical change in "packaging." This is also contributing to their demise in the embedded space as well. (See: Transmeta)
The x86 instruction set is bloated and crippled, and making the Itanium interoperable with it nearly sunk the chip entirely. Even now, you run with a severe performance penalty if you run x86 code on it as opposed to native-compiled stuff, something that wasn't supposed to happen with the VLIW code-morphing schtick.
Choice of instruction set can influence the way new features are (or aren't) implemented, and can seriously impede low-level "to the metal" programming and even affect development in higher level languages by being braindead about low level optimization.
Allan Kay was dead right in that hardware needs to accommodate the programmer, not the other way around. With x86 an inescapable standard, this ideal will never be realized in the workstation/server/personal computer arena.
SoupIsGood Food
This is a fairly sad state of affairs... the processor family really has some legs left to it, but it was killed by HP for mostly political reasons. Itanium has never really delivered the goods, and is likely to be killed sooner rather than later by Intel, who does not know how to run a small volume/high margin performance chip line. (See: i860, i960) nor does it really see the value in such products.
Wherer this will leave HP is anyone's guess. Off-the-shelf Pentiums or Opterons can't really compete with POWER or Fujitsu's next gen SPARC designs. x86 Unix systems have largely been also-rans... Data General, Sequent(Now IBM xSeries), even Sun's new Opteron boxes are largely a side show to their SPARC business.
The Itanium, and the bone-headed wintel-centric management who pursued the pipedream of IA-64, killed off a lot of prime high-performance processor srchitectures: Alpha, Mips, and now PA-RISC. These aren't market or competitive pressures ('cuz IBM's doing just fine with bespoke silicon at the high end), but political mangement dictates that turned some premier computer science powerhouses into shambling wrecks. I mean, what the hell has SGI done in half a decade that's caused anyone to talk about them in positive terms? Nada.
This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation. The Wintel PC is not the pinnical of hardware architectures, it's pretty bass-ackward and stone age compared to what used to be out there. Sad times.
SoupIsGood Food
Google's major earnings come not from licensing IP, but from advertising revenue, making it not unlike a traditional media outlet (e.g. TV station) as far as revenue model goes.
You tryin' to tell me Google's got better market penetration and distribution than Time Warner, one of the largest cable providers in the US? One of the largest periodical publishing houses in the world?
Nnnnnnah. Didn't think so, neither.
By way of comparison, Cosmo.com, the internet courier company, was profitable... before it had more venture capital than it could ever repay rammed down its throat. There were a lot of medium-sized dotcom business who were funded like multi-billion dollar ventures instead.
It's not Google's fault their stock is worth stupid money, and they've been very careful not to live beyond their means and to keep control of their company, but that won't prevent the shareholders from throwing a fit when the price comes back down to earth. It will probably clobber the just-now-recovering tech sector when it does, too.
SoupIsGood Food
Compatibility
This is the idiocy of defacto standards instead of real standards. With OSS, a defacto standard can be influenced by everyone, and is openly documented and understood in the code.
Closed source defacto standards means porting to new platforms is a feat next to impossible (see a flash plugin that works with any of the PowerPC-based Amiga variants? Howabout with RISC-OS on Arm? Open BSD on a Zaurus? Just 'cuz you don't run that platform doesn't mean that the platform is useless. Even if only a few thousand people use the platform, it shouldn't mean they're locked out of what has become a standard for content delivery.
With a closed flash, you can't develop a browser that deoesn't ape IE or Moz's plugin architecture. You can't come up with a swank new way to edit, view or serve flash content. It sucks. Free flash is an answer, as is a replacement vector graphic animation system that's based around a carefully engineered standard, or at least a decent RFC.
SoupIsGood Food
In some ways, I preferred the days of the BBS to the modern internet. It was easier to get together with the local geeks and freaks, and to have something of a social life based around the nerdvana of computers, comics, and sci-fi.
Back then, tho, I'd have given my eyeteeth for Usenet access... it was available at $95 for a dial-up shell across the state, out of reach broke-ass art student. Then a local ISP opened up, with shell accounts for $25/month. Woo! Usenet was almost everything I had hoped it would be, and then the Long September came and burned it all to the ground. By then all the local BBS's were out of the game, because the sysops used their extra line for internet access rather than running the BBS.
No point to all this, really. Just waxing nostalgic.
SoupIsGood Food
I think the issue is "selective memory loss" - Microsoft plays this card all the time in court. Emails from a relevant time period are "deleted" when convenient, while older or newer or even contemporaneous mail is saved... the judge in this case was simply smart enough to call shenanigans.
You can delete old email if you're that hard up for space, just have a rock-solid deletion policy you can prove you adhered to in a court of law.
It also helps to audit your archives and backups regularly, and document what data was lost when. 'Cuz face it, every admin at some point or other loses some data to corruption, hardware failure, bookeeping mixups or user error. Knowing what you forgot and when you forgot it can help in situations where not having the data on hand can cost a billion bucks or so.
SoupIsGood Food
Google's business model is simple:
1)Create an enormous webserver cluster using cheap hardware and cheaper (free) software.
2) Then think of clever things to do with it.
Step 3, instead of being ???, is "sell non-annoying text ads aligned with the context of what the user is viewing."
4) Profit!
Parts one, three and four are easy. Part Two is hard... really, really hard. Unsurprisingly, it's where Google is throwing the lion's share of their money and manpower. They foster a spirit and culture of top-tier creativity.
This culture has been crushed into line-toeing, bootlicking mediocrity by Microsoft management. They're great for incremental updates in line with whatever upper-management mandate Bill has in mind this year and aping what smaller competitors are doing, but they suck at breaking new ground.
So, MSFT will always be a step behind in a game Google engineered to reward only those who can think new things first. Even if Microsoft manages to invent or buy a new idea, Google will come up with a way of making it faster, cheaper, safer and more powerful. It's what they did to Microsoft's Hotmail.
SoupIsGood Food
Blaming Diebold for shaving a half-percent in Ohio is stupid.
Blaming the DNC for selecting Edwards for the Veep slot, who could not and did not deliver any of the southern Swing States, rather than Graham, who has =never= lost an election in Florida, is far more reasonable. A Kerry-Graham ticket would have delivered Florida and maybe Arkansas and West Virginia, too, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Dean made one hell of a run during the primaries with a shoestring budget and virtually no influence on the national scene... hopefully he'll bring some of that savvy to the Democratic party and have them stop pushing unelectable candidates. (Please note, electable does not mean "right-wing." Lieberman didn't help Gore's cause at all in 2000.)
SoupIsGood Food