I really don't think M$ is selling things at a loss. Neither Apple or any gizmo manufacturer.
Fact of the matter is, they only do the design.. which most of the case.. putting together many available mature technologies together in to a nice shell and call it a new product + testing. Other than that, they don't pay ridiculously high price for the components (of course they buy in large quantities), materials (again they buy in massive numbers) or labour (of course, all are developed in china, where labour is unbelievebly cheap) chargers.
I think I can prove this by very recent act by iPhone. They suddenley dropped the price by whopping $200. Many reverse-engineers (who dismantled the iPhone) claim that iPhone only worth $270 (maybe even less due to mass-quantity componeny buy-outs)
Okay, forget about consumer electronics for a moment. If you take silicon products like Intel Pentium processors, might they have a price tag od 3-digits.. but the actual product cost is $40!
So, it is hard to believe a company losing money over a product, unless they find a bug and make a massive recall like SONY did last year.
I am from South Asia.. I have this strange feelinf that this (700MHz free phone) gonna work. I mean, it will be a hit in most of the Asia due to...
1. Asians love anything comes with free 2. Current operators (specially in my own country) aren't that cheap even the heavy telecom competition is out there. 3. Marketing is something larger than life in this part of the world. So.. Google won't run out of local advertisements. 4. Population and tech users are relatively high compared to total population.
Only problem is.... affording the Android phone. But it wouldn't be a problem after market saturation.
I have fair amount of doubt how this PDF as gonna work. After all.. i don't think it is a good solution to run the PDF reader in the background whenever Web Browser is running. Come on.. current memory leaks in fire fox and other popular browser + acrobot reader is a deadly combination I guess.
Anyway.. alternative would be a plug-in for each browser. Still... I don't know how it gonna make things easy..
Remember, during World War 2, Russians managed to penetrate into the Manhatten Project. And if you watch History channel... you can find many incidents like this.
I think end of cold war kinda gave some breathing space to American Intelligence. But now, there is the new space race and terrorists and other political foes. So... there are so many eyes on American activities, maybe far more than the cold war era.
I am not american, but I think it is a part of the american constitution 'not to poke finger in other's private lives' (in short.. privacy). I heard it sparked a controversy by the 'patriotic act' by current bush administration, as its clearly violates the 'privacy' clause in the constitution. If so, how can this NASA activity be legitimate??
(please delight me.. I am not an american citizen)
1. Less time to browse a book - you don't need to flip pages, just SEARCH.
2. Accessbility - In my university, library was not that big. So we had to share 2 copies among 400+ students. It was a nightmare, have to be in a que to get the book. Que usually last till the end of semester.
3. Unlimited reading time - it takes few weeks or months to extract all the details you want from a big-thick-book. But borrowing a book from library means, got to return in 2 weeks. Ahhh...
4. Reasonable in price point of view - In university, most books only need for a single semester, maximum 2. And most courses only concentrate few chapters in a book. So it is sometimes not worth to buy the big-book for a high price (well... general assumption, students are broke all the time), which you gonna use hardly after the course is done.
5. Ease in referencing - Sometimes.. when I write papers, we write things heard/read somewhere. It is much easy to find a reference by search in a digital library than browsing through in a library (most time, you don't find all the books in the shelf). Plus.. most interestingly, you have access to many titles.. which will definitley bring you a good reference at the end of the day.
Vista or Leopard.. they gonna need time to fix the problems and make it stable.
I am working with Ericsson telephone systems. When I first installl them.. they give real freak failures in first week or two. It won't stop there, about first 2 or 3 months, they tend to get problems. Some can be due to ambiguoty in wiring telephones.. some can be coding.. some can be actual hardware it self. One way or another.. it takes about 3 months for a telephone system to reach its stable state. After that.. it can run non-stop for few years till hardware fails.
OS is an event based big code. So the ambiguous nature is in tera-scale. Problem today is, testing any gizmo is a nightmare due to complexity and size. I think it is unfair to expect a "fault-proof" OS or a software from anyone.
Also we can't really blame for any software guy for bloated nature (mostly graphics add on) in their products. Only few people (mostly people in IT or Engineering) really appreciate the inner workings of a OS (stability, security etc.). But majority find GUI the main catch over others... in fact.. is the only way a software company can deliver the message "this is a new product"
Today, major home entertainment companies such as Microsoft, SONY, Ninetendo annouced the termination of their popular gaming consoles. These giant severely criticised by many health professionals regarding the dangerous nature of popular gaming consoles like XBOX, PS, Wii.
Over the years, many gaming fans died mainly due to the extreme stunts they engaged in possessing these consoles on the released day (i.e. Camping outside stores, not peeing to win a console).
All three giants openly disclosed their intention in focusing and investing money on the Tobacco business. They find it 'less dangerous' for the end user, which helps gamers to live a long life with good health.
Adding to that, giant companies can always drive the industry with their research efforts and amount of resources, money, people, experience they can throw on to a research. Taking an example... Intel's tera-scale project. Even its initial goal was to make a number crucnching multi-core processor, now they are trying ways bring that to x86 space, Brilliant!
Crushing giants doesn't mean everything will be perfect. For an example... AT&T was crushed with monopoly accusations. Which somewhat marked the end of bell research labs and great research outcome. IF you have checked the wikipedia, you can understand how much they contributed to telecommunication with their research. Now.. we see many doing research and coming up with their own versions of technologies (mostly incompatible), which is somewhat a mess (to understand this... fine examples would be 3G standards and 802.11n standards).
I am a windows user for a long time. Yes I used IE all the way until a recent day, now I am writing this reply on Opera. I kinda like the features comes with Opera for my daily use, that's why I've chosen it over IE. But still I want to be in WinXP as I don't find the same ease & reliability in other platforms. So.. that's pretty much the point I want to make. IF someone find it suits his/her daily use and choses it over other competetive products.. its fair. And if this number is 'majority', still it is fair.
Yes, we can get fibres to house really soon. Also I saw a nice 2D filter which can be used for Multiplexing fibre users in a single channel (Optical-CDMA).
But.. lets say all these goes really well... what about
1. Internet infrastructure... we here many people saying it will meltdown really soon. So what we really need is, upgrading the infrastructure/backbone of internet. I guess, still we can survive with last mile copper network with ADSL.
2. Regardles how much bandwidth you get, if your PC can't handle that bandwidth.. then all the killer apps won't be exciting.
I thing it is worth while to read journal papers written by Klienrock, he explains some of the things we really overlook in designing/building huge data networks.
Other than what is mentioned in the article, I believe these factors some what contributes in slowing down the IT...
1. Lack of Coherency between many IT giants
If you go back to 80s, there were hundreds of computer brands, hardware and software. If it remained the same way, we might never see the technological advent we saw during last decade.
In early days, different networks had their own protocols. After they all came to an agreement for a common protocol, TCP/IP.... now everyone enjoys internet.
As of today, we see many IT giants try to stick to their own tech standard rather coming to an agreement with other parties for a common platform, where everyone can contribute for its evolution. Even AMD, Intel both produce x86 chips.. SSE4 instructions are different. Only very recently Apple opened up their doors for Intel Chips and other popular hardware platforms.
I think proper, single standard is the key.
2. Global Warming
This is soon gonna be a big barrier. I think I don't need to explain.
3. Legacy support
Why many hardware/software platforms find it difficult to reach the next stage simple as they cannot give up the support for legacy applications.
I am working in a PABX providing company. Certain software we have to operate systems only works with windows 2000. So either present OS should support them OR software need to be upgraded (Which is highly unlikel after a product is retired)
4. Politics
To buy the 3G/WCDMA operating license in many countries on this planet earth requires some jaw dropping amount of cash. This is adversly affecting IT market, as telecom companies go bankrupt after buying the license.
Only 2 countries (to my knowledge) have free licensing schemes, they are Japan and S. Korea. Both countries help new technologies to be publicly tested. This level of flexibility and non-politic environment certainly helps in growing the IT sector.
5. Greediness
Most companies 'save the best for last'. For an example, Intel, didn't reveal many secrets of NetBurst Architecture based P4s. Only when Extreme Editions are in market... we all knew how many features were inside the architecture which never been enabled earlier, rather enabling them time to time as a strategy to keep the sales intact.
This level of greediness certainly not helps for the IT development. But nobody can do anything as Companies do things to earn better for a long time...
In the begining of my university degree, I was carrying bunch of Floppy Disks to carry important files back and forth from university to hostel. Later I got a Flash Drive (it was only 128MB!!).. but after getting 1 GB Gmail account, I kinda gave up on Flash drive as I can email stuff as attachments.
Recently.. I tried several online storage options such as MEDIAMAX, ESNIPS and very lately SKYDRIVE (Microsoft one). Both mediamax and esnips provide >1GB space but still their UI is heavily bloated and upload speeds are not that great. However, lately I am using skydrive, which initially offered my 512 MB.. now 1GB. So far so good, not much of drama.
I enjoy these online storage. As a researcher, I like to store my currently working documents on one of these virtual HDDs, so I can access from anywhere and edit. Anyway.. still we are far away from online editing a.doc file (yes there are sites allow you to do.. but its much more convenient to download and edit with something like openoffice).
But the critical thing is, the connectivity. If there is no internet connectivity, cannot access any of the applications or data. That's the only draw back and the possible dead end I see.
Waiting to see Google's online data offer... hope it would be interesting... '5GB and counting!'
Even though this article mainly talks about 2D, 3D interfaces, let me bring this idea.
In the 21st century, digital age... I think most of us still heavily involved in typing something on the computer. It could be anything from writing report on a word processing software to writing email on gmail to posting something here in/.
Wouldn't it be nice if we can get a connection between brain and computer.. so, instead of typing OR narrating.. we just can silently command the PC what to type. I find this is extrmely convenient and efficient rather taking time and energy to type/narrat ideas on to the computer. Furthremore, I think we lose most of our instantaneous ideas comes into our mind while we are typing (at least, that's the case for me).
If something worth noting in 20th century.. it is the space race. Two big powers, trying so hard, investing billions on research to conquere the space. WoW!!! We saw saturn-5, black bird, harrier and many other great stuff, at first look.. we just say "awesome" in that era.
Space race ended after the fall of berlin wall. In world peace sense, it is one of the greatest thing happened last century. But it also marks the end of some bleeding edge technology, creativity. If you think about many technologies which we enjoy today are infact directly or indirectly influenced by the technologies developed in those space-race days.
Tell you one nice example. Back in cold war, Americans sended these mini-sattelites. They just take photographs of russia, then land (more likely.. crash landing) somewhere. In that.. they didn't use typical film roles and stuff. Instead, they take gray images, pixel-ize, each gray shade has a distinct number in a scale.. which then printed in a recorder. Which is highly sophisticated and un-hackable by that times technology. (I saw this on Discovery) Think.. this is the start of pixel based digital imaging. Still I find it WoW!
Of course... small sized SSD HDD is essential for today's corporate users... as most of them are addicted to watching p0rn at work rather doing their job. nice!
Slashdot Mirror
welcome to the massive mobile pr0n era!
Oh noo.. I can't take calls now... hey.. stop downloading.. answer my call you idiot...
I really don't think M$ is selling things at a loss. Neither Apple or any gizmo manufacturer.
Fact of the matter is, they only do the design.. which most of the case.. putting together many available mature technologies together in to a nice shell and call it a new product + testing. Other than that, they don't pay ridiculously high price for the components (of course they buy in large quantities), materials (again they buy in massive numbers) or labour (of course, all are developed in china, where labour is unbelievebly cheap) chargers.
I think I can prove this by very recent act by iPhone. They suddenley dropped the price by whopping $200. Many reverse-engineers (who dismantled the iPhone) claim that iPhone only worth $270 (maybe even less due to mass-quantity componeny buy-outs)
Okay, forget about consumer electronics for a moment. If you take silicon products like Intel Pentium processors, might they have a price tag od 3-digits.. but the actual product cost is $40!
So, it is hard to believe a company losing money over a product, unless they find a bug and make a massive recall like SONY did last year.
Once this massive exercise is done, when someone search for malware in google... suddenley a counselor shows up in the screen and say,
"Hey dork, don't download malware... download some pr0n"
#include
using namespace std;
int main()
{
cout "Hello World!";
return 0;
}
I am from South Asia.. I have this strange feelinf that this (700MHz free phone) gonna work. I mean, it will be a hit in most of the Asia due to...
1. Asians love anything comes with free
2. Current operators (specially in my own country) aren't that cheap even the heavy telecom competition is out there.
3. Marketing is something larger than life in this part of the world. So.. Google won't run out of local advertisements.
4. Population and tech users are relatively high compared to total population.
Only problem is.... affording the Android phone. But it wouldn't be a problem after market saturation.
Time to hand them to Mythbusters http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/19/2023202?
Probably, Wii is holding its Wee...
Anyway.. I don't want to see kids gonna punch the santa-clause to check his big bag for the Wii....that's awful
I have fair amount of doubt how this PDF as gonna work. After all.. i don't think it is a good solution to run the PDF reader in the background whenever Web Browser is running. Come on.. current memory leaks in fire fox and other popular browser + acrobot reader is a deadly combination I guess.
Anyway.. alternative would be a plug-in for each browser. Still... I don't know how it gonna make things easy..
Actually.. spammers learned plastic surgery is much popular across asia.. so their penis enlaegement products are not a hot-sell anymore..
Remember, during World War 2, Russians managed to penetrate into the Manhatten Project. And if you watch History channel... you can find many incidents like this.
I think end of cold war kinda gave some breathing space to American Intelligence. But now, there is the new space race and terrorists and other political foes. So... there are so many eyes on American activities, maybe far more than the cold war era.
I am not american, but I think it is a part of the american constitution 'not to poke finger in other's private lives' (in short.. privacy). I heard it sparked a controversy by the 'patriotic act' by current bush administration, as its clearly violates the 'privacy' clause in the constitution. If so, how can this NASA activity be legitimate??
(please delight me.. I am not an american citizen)
I find digitizing books is a cool thing, because
1. Less time to browse a book - you don't need to flip pages, just SEARCH.
2. Accessbility - In my university, library was not that big. So we had to share 2 copies among 400+ students. It was a nightmare, have to be in a que to get the book. Que usually last till the end of semester.
3. Unlimited reading time - it takes few weeks or months to extract all the details you want from a big-thick-book. But borrowing a book from library means, got to return in 2 weeks. Ahhh...
4. Reasonable in price point of view - In university, most books only need for a single semester, maximum 2. And most courses only concentrate few chapters in a book. So it is sometimes not worth to buy the big-book for a high price (well... general assumption, students are broke all the time), which you gonna use hardly after the course is done.
5. Ease in referencing - Sometimes.. when I write papers, we write things heard/read somewhere. It is much easy to find a reference by search in a digital library than browsing through in a library (most time, you don't find all the books in the shelf). Plus.. most interestingly, you have access to many titles.. which will definitley bring you a good reference at the end of the day.
Vista or Leopard.. they gonna need time to fix the problems and make it stable.
I am working with Ericsson telephone systems. When I first installl them.. they give real freak failures in first week or two. It won't stop there, about first 2 or 3 months, they tend to get problems. Some can be due to ambiguoty in wiring telephones.. some can be coding.. some can be actual hardware it self. One way or another.. it takes about 3 months for a telephone system to reach its stable state. After that.. it can run non-stop for few years till hardware fails.
OS is an event based big code. So the ambiguous nature is in tera-scale. Problem today is, testing any gizmo is a nightmare due to complexity and size. I think it is unfair to expect a "fault-proof" OS or a software from anyone.
Also we can't really blame for any software guy for bloated nature (mostly graphics add on) in their products. Only few people (mostly people in IT or Engineering) really appreciate the inner workings of a OS (stability, security etc.). But majority find GUI the main catch over others... in fact.. is the only way a software company can deliver the message "this is a new product"
Today, major home entertainment companies such as Microsoft, SONY, Ninetendo annouced the termination of their popular gaming consoles. These giant severely criticised by many health professionals regarding the dangerous nature of popular gaming consoles like XBOX, PS, Wii.
Over the years, many gaming fans died mainly due to the extreme stunts they engaged in possessing these consoles on the released day (i.e. Camping outside stores, not peeing to win a console).
All three giants openly disclosed their intention in focusing and investing money on the Tobacco business. They find it 'less dangerous' for the end user, which helps gamers to live a long life with good health.
That's all for today. Good Night!!!
watch Michael Moore's "Farenheit 9/11", it will tell you the story...
I do agree with 'failedlogic'
Adding to that, giant companies can always drive the industry with their research efforts and amount of resources, money, people, experience they can throw on to a research. Taking an example... Intel's tera-scale project. Even its initial goal was to make a number crucnching multi-core processor, now they are trying ways bring that to x86 space, Brilliant!
Crushing giants doesn't mean everything will be perfect. For an example... AT&T was crushed with monopoly accusations. Which somewhat marked the end of bell research labs and great research outcome. IF you have checked the wikipedia, you can understand how much they contributed to telecommunication with their research. Now.. we see many doing research and coming up with their own versions of technologies (mostly incompatible), which is somewhat a mess (to understand this... fine examples would be 3G standards and 802.11n standards).
I am a windows user for a long time. Yes I used IE all the way until a recent day, now I am writing this reply on Opera. I kinda like the features comes with Opera for my daily use, that's why I've chosen it over IE. But still I want to be in WinXP as I don't find the same ease & reliability in other platforms. So.. that's pretty much the point I want to make. IF someone find it suits his/her daily use and choses it over other competetive products.. its fair. And if this number is 'majority', still it is fair.
With this new invention, people find it more less-painful to inject hard drugs to the blood stream and get high !!!
See you there in San Francisco with my Caravan, hippie clothes, vintage guitar and Flowers !!!
Yes, we can get fibres to house really soon. Also I saw a nice 2D filter which can be used for Multiplexing fibre users in a single channel (Optical-CDMA).
But.. lets say all these goes really well... what about
1. Internet infrastructure... we here many people saying it will meltdown really soon. So what we really need is, upgrading the infrastructure/backbone of internet. I guess, still we can survive with last mile copper network with ADSL.
2. Regardles how much bandwidth you get, if your PC can't handle that bandwidth.. then all the killer apps won't be exciting.
I thing it is worth while to read journal papers written by Klienrock, he explains some of the things we really overlook in designing/building huge data networks.
Other than what is mentioned in the article, I believe these factors some what contributes in slowing down the IT...
1. Lack of Coherency between many IT giants
If you go back to 80s, there were hundreds of computer brands, hardware and software. If it remained the same way, we might never see the technological advent we saw during last decade.
In early days, different networks had their own protocols. After they all came to an agreement for a common protocol, TCP/IP.... now everyone enjoys internet.
As of today, we see many IT giants try to stick to their own tech standard rather coming to an agreement with other parties for a common platform, where everyone can contribute for its evolution. Even AMD, Intel both produce x86 chips.. SSE4 instructions are different. Only very recently Apple opened up their doors for Intel Chips and other popular hardware platforms.
I think proper, single standard is the key.
2. Global Warming
This is soon gonna be a big barrier. I think I don't need to explain.
3. Legacy support
Why many hardware/software platforms find it difficult to reach the next stage simple as they cannot give up the support for legacy applications.
I am working in a PABX providing company. Certain software we have to operate systems only works with windows 2000. So either present OS should support them OR software need to be upgraded (Which is highly unlikel after a product is retired)
4. Politics
To buy the 3G/WCDMA operating license in many countries on this planet earth requires some jaw dropping amount of cash. This is adversly affecting IT market, as telecom companies go bankrupt after buying the license.
Only 2 countries (to my knowledge) have free licensing schemes, they are Japan and S. Korea. Both countries help new technologies to be publicly tested. This level of flexibility and non-politic environment certainly helps in growing the IT sector.
5. Greediness
Most companies 'save the best for last'. For an example, Intel, didn't reveal many secrets of NetBurst Architecture based P4s. Only when Extreme Editions are in market... we all knew how many features were inside the architecture which never been enabled earlier, rather enabling them time to time as a strategy to keep the sales intact.
This level of greediness certainly not helps for the IT development. But nobody can do anything as Companies do things to earn better for a long time...
In the begining of my university degree, I was carrying bunch of Floppy Disks to carry important files back and forth from university to hostel. Later I got a Flash Drive (it was only 128MB!!).. but after getting 1 GB Gmail account, I kinda gave up on Flash drive as I can email stuff as attachments.
.doc file (yes there are sites allow you to do.. but its much more convenient to download and edit with something like openoffice).
Recently.. I tried several online storage options such as MEDIAMAX, ESNIPS and very lately SKYDRIVE (Microsoft one). Both mediamax and esnips provide >1GB space but still their UI is heavily bloated and upload speeds are not that great. However, lately I am using skydrive, which initially offered my 512 MB.. now 1GB. So far so good, not much of drama.
I enjoy these online storage. As a researcher, I like to store my currently working documents on one of these virtual HDDs, so I can access from anywhere and edit. Anyway.. still we are far away from online editing a
But the critical thing is, the connectivity. If there is no internet connectivity, cannot access any of the applications or data. That's the only draw back and the possible dead end I see.
Waiting to see Google's online data offer... hope it would be interesting... '5GB and counting!'
Even though this article mainly talks about 2D, 3D interfaces, let me bring this idea.
/.
In the 21st century, digital age... I think most of us still heavily involved in typing something on the computer. It could be anything from writing report on a word processing software to writing email on gmail to posting something here in
Wouldn't it be nice if we can get a connection between brain and computer.. so, instead of typing OR narrating.. we just can silently command the PC what to type. I find this is extrmely convenient and efficient rather taking time and energy to type/narrat ideas on to the computer. Furthremore, I think we lose most of our instantaneous ideas comes into our mind while we are typing (at least, that's the case for me).
Am I insanely wishful here??
If something worth noting in 20th century.. it is the space race. Two big powers, trying so hard, investing billions on research to conquere the space. WoW!!! We saw saturn-5, black bird, harrier and many other great stuff, at first look.. we just say "awesome" in that era.
Space race ended after the fall of berlin wall. In world peace sense, it is one of the greatest thing happened last century. But it also marks the end of some bleeding edge technology, creativity. If you think about many technologies which we enjoy today are infact directly or indirectly influenced by the technologies developed in those space-race days.
Tell you one nice example. Back in cold war, Americans sended these mini-sattelites. They just take photographs of russia, then land (more likely.. crash landing) somewhere. In that.. they didn't use typical film roles and stuff. Instead, they take gray images, pixel-ize, each gray shade has a distinct number in a scale.. which then printed in a recorder. Which is highly sophisticated and un-hackable by that times technology. (I saw this on Discovery) Think.. this is the start of pixel based digital imaging. Still I find it WoW!
to get protection from nano-bots... use a pico-safety-schield today !!!
okay.. now you don't have to bother about wild imagination of your favourite actress without clothes... just scan...
Of course... small sized SSD HDD is essential for today's corporate users... as most of them are addicted to watching p0rn at work rather doing their job. nice!
I pretty much never used Vista except few days at a Test Rig in my office. I don't have a rig/laptop which has higher hardware profile to tame Vista.
But one of my office collegue was using it. He didn't find much problem except,
1. Drivers for non-popular-hardware is rare to not-existing
2. certain software application (i.e. SQL client) not working
Other than that.. he practically survived.... (anyway he switched back to XP last week)
I think what most people are pissed with Vista is lack of back-support (not for all.. but certain software). Anyway.. we have to move on after all...