It's true. I even remember Nicholas Negroponte, at a CHI conference in the late 1980s, giving a talk about the future of high-speed network connections to the home -- he mentioned that fiber could gives speeds of more than a Gb/s, and went on to make the case (with a completely straight face) that no individual could ever use that much bandwidth.
I suppose I can't give myself too much credit for laughing at the time -- I was thinking of the bandwidth necessary to ship high-resolution images at video framerates, without giving a thought to compression. But even that long ago, I knew that anybody saying "we'll never need more than X" of a computational resource was setting himself up to look very silly in the future.
It's just a shame that so much of the demand for bandwidth (and computational power) is driven by the videos and ads we don't want.
Paying up front for capacity you'll need only later may make sense for a house, but not for a laptop.
When I bought each of my Mac laptops, I knew I'd want to upgrade their memory eventually. In general, "maxing them out" would have entailed spending thousands of dollars for memory that I wouldn't need for another year or two -- at which point I'd be able to buy it from a third-party seller at a tenth of the cost. Same thing with storage.
It's actually even worse than that -- for my first pro-level laptop (a G3 in 1999), the largest Apple-supplied memory configuration was 384MB, but third-party upgrades took it to 768. For my current daily driver (a last-of-the-line 17" MBP), Apple specs said its maximum RAM was 8GB, and that was all they'd sell you. I bought it from Apple's refurb store in 2012 or 2013, I think, when I saw that there would be no new 17-inch models. I immediately upgraded it from the stock 4GB to 16GB, at a total cost of something like $95 (I forgot to send in the $10 MIR). Buying an 8GB instead of a 4GB model would have increased the price by hundreds of dollars. And then there's storage -- I put up with the stock 500GB spinner for a couple of years, then popped in a 1TB SSD I got for under $300. When 4TB or 10TB SSDs are cost-effective, if I want one of those, it's another easy swap.
The "just buy all the machine you'll need up front" approach is wasteful. You'll get more capacity and spend less money in total by starting with just enough, then upgrading. But if cost is no object, or you're solidly committed to just replacing your machine every year, knock yourself out. At least with Apple gear you get good resale value.
Wow. Are there really that many folks out there who touch-type with their function keys? I mean, I honestly don't know -- maybe there are, but I certainly haven't seen them.
Think about how awful Apple's current scheme is, where fkeys are overloaded for brightness control, volume control, keyboard backlight control (really?), and whatever else.
Now picture mapping those controls onto a touch-strip with a display. A small cluster of controls to the left (right, whatever), one for screen brightness, one for volume, one for keyboard backlight (again, whatever).
Touch one, and a slider control expands out from it. Slide left to decrease, slide right to increase. Maybe, if extensive user testing supports it, "drag off the bottom" to commit your new setting or "drag off the top" to cancel it. Or maybe just lifting your finger commits it, and cancel isn't needed; we certainly don't get "cancel" with the current up/down key controls. Maybe touch detection only gives an x-axis value, but if I were sitting on Apple's patents, I'd certainly add at least a rudimentary y-axis measurement, and multi-touch detection.
Double-tap (or "mash") the volume control to mute or unmute.
Double-tap or mash screen brightness to blank or restore the screen.
Don't want controls? Map a simple out-of-band gesture (again, drag-up or drag-down seems ideal) to move between fkeys, system functions, and application functions.
I don't have any idea what Apple will actually do with this strip, but I hope it's less of a disappointment than their touch keyboard and multitouch stuff so far. I used the FingerWorks Touchstream keyboard for years, and I'm still bitter that Apple hasn't used more than 30% of the gestural technology they got when they bought out and shut down that company.
If you're building a "web-based word processor" that can lose work because a client goes away, You're Doing It Wrong, so much so that responding to a low-battery signal is pointless. What if a router goes down? What if the user moves out of range of an access point, or cellular data?
If Web developers (or the companies issuing their marching orders) wanted to respect my battery, they could start by ditching all the gratuitous animated ads, transitions, and whatnot. For bonus points, they could do it before my battery gets low, so that my battery doesn't get low in the first place.
My five-year-old laptop still gets up to six or seven hours off a charge -- as long as I'm not visiting typical Web sites. If I start browsing, especially without blocking Flash or ads, I'm lucky to get an hour and a half.
So I suppose we are all coming back at some point. My feeble mind does not know how that is going to work exactly given space constraints but trust he has a plan for that. Its not like he can't just make the earth a whole lot bigger if need be.
The good news: you live forever, on a remade Earth with 10 times the diameter and 100 times the surface area!
The bad news: you live forever, on a remade earth with 1000 times the mass and 10 times the surface gravity! Enjoy your eternal agony.
"Halfway to water's boiling point" is colder than dry ice.
"Twice as hot as a hot day" is hot enough to melt lead.
"Three times as hot as a reasonably comfortable temperature" is hot enough to glow faintly red.
On the other hand, if you stubbornly refuse to learn about how temperature actually works, you could say "add up two days of that temperature and it's hot enough to boil water!"
And when that computer immune system starts interfering with the normal operation of the computer, we'd call it a computer autoimmune disorder. In humans, autoimmune disorders include lupus, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and so on. In computers, they include Norton, McAfee, Panda, Comodo...
Yes, very quickly -- even more quickly than with other approaches, because your eye saccadesreally fast. (Although you probably don't have to render intermediate frames during the saccade, because IIRC your brain sort of ignores incoming detail during the movement itself.)
The win is that you have to render a much smaller patch of high-resolution detail, which saves computation in some parts of the pipeline. You've still got to do all the intersection, bounding-pyramid, depth-sorting and whatnot for your whole model (I assume -- it's been close to thirty years since I've done much in 3D graphics), but you don't have to crank out as many pixels. To get "retina" resolution, you'd need a foveal patch no more than maybe 500 pixels in diameter, and the rest of the visual field could probably get by with another 500 pixels on a side. That's a lot less painting than the stack of 3840x2160 screens you'd need to fill the whole visual field at that resolution -- probably between one and two orders of magnitude smaller.
As far as the rest of the pipeline, I guess you win because those rapid saccades don't significantly change the viewpoint (head location), so there won't be a lot of changes to object order or occlusion. (Your pupil does shift its position, since the eye's center of rotation is obviously near the center of the eyeball, but any virtual object that close to your eye ought to be blurred anyhow, unless you're playing the final levels of Quest for Nearsightedness.)
Sorry, I know you hate people who put content in the subject, and I know we're looking for insightful commentary here, but... that's just all I've got at this point.
Since the summary stated a period for the orbit, we can assume it isn't hyperbolic. A truly circular or parabolic orbit would be news, since exact numbers like that are hard to come by. And if it were a radial (i.e. intersecting) orbit, well, that would be big news.
I know, I know, OMG GOOGLE BIG BROTHER, but I'd rather save my privacy outrage for proposals that don't offer a chance to substantially reduce human suffering.
Imagine that -- a brand-new and effective treatment for a formerly-intractable disease is kind of expensive, and doesn't offer a one-shot cure. The evil doctors who came up with this diabolical scheme should be stripped of their medical credentials, if not summarily executed.
If you'd rather just stare at your feet and hope really hard that nothing's wrong, that's still free, and nobody's stopping you.
I don't know about anybody else, but my data usage fluctuates pretty widely based on unpredictable travel and other circumstances. For my family, Ting (mentioned above) works out well -- I'm sure my son would love to be able to stream all the time over cellular data, but he's bearing up well under the strain of his deprivation. If we have to spend a week or two on the road, we'll bump up into another data bucket, and pay an extra $10 or so at the end of the month. If not, we get the usual low rate we expect. Same for minutes and messages.
I was on Verizon years ago, and clung to a very old plan with very old flip-phones because I knew pay-as-you-go had to be coming soon. It took a bit longer than I expected, but it eventually arrived, and I couldn't have been happier to kiss Verizon goodbye.
It's just that the general public doesn't realize that "cigarette lighter laser with enough stored energy to burn through armor" is perhaps more farfetched than "alien invaders".
With video, you can tell immediately whether the speaker is attractive or not, and ignore the ones who aren't. If you're reading text instead of watching someone talking, you're in mortal danger of paying attention to someone who isn't attractive. The horror.
It's not about the legitimacy of the case. It's about the realization that a large corporation can overwhelm any legal team a typical individual could hire, and that even in a fair system the corporation is risking far less than the individual. (As in, "a tiny percentage of one quarter's profits" against "entire life savings"). There's a big difference between "I'm confident enough to risk 10% of the quarter's legal budget" and "I'm confident enough to risk everything I own".
My apologies for not posting this in reply to each of the posts where you make this assertion. I don't have a full social-media damage-control team at my disposal.
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It's true. I even remember Nicholas Negroponte, at a CHI conference in the late 1980s, giving a talk about the future of high-speed network connections to the home -- he mentioned that fiber could gives speeds of more than a Gb/s, and went on to make the case (with a completely straight face) that no individual could ever use that much bandwidth.
I suppose I can't give myself too much credit for laughing at the time -- I was thinking of the bandwidth necessary to ship high-resolution images at video framerates, without giving a thought to compression. But even that long ago, I knew that anybody saying "we'll never need more than X" of a computational resource was setting himself up to look very silly in the future.
It's just a shame that so much of the demand for bandwidth (and computational power) is driven by the videos and ads we don't want.
LOL, "sonny". I was probably using vi before you were born. I also understand that Fitts' Law applies to more than just on-screen controls.
Paying up front for capacity you'll need only later may make sense for a house, but not for a laptop.
When I bought each of my Mac laptops, I knew I'd want to upgrade their memory eventually. In general, "maxing them out" would have entailed spending thousands of dollars for memory that I wouldn't need for another year or two -- at which point I'd be able to buy it from a third-party seller at a tenth of the cost. Same thing with storage.
It's actually even worse than that -- for my first pro-level laptop (a G3 in 1999), the largest Apple-supplied memory configuration was 384MB, but third-party upgrades took it to 768. For my current daily driver (a last-of-the-line 17" MBP), Apple specs said its maximum RAM was 8GB, and that was all they'd sell you. I bought it from Apple's refurb store in 2012 or 2013, I think, when I saw that there would be no new 17-inch models. I immediately upgraded it from the stock 4GB to 16GB, at a total cost of something like $95 (I forgot to send in the $10 MIR). Buying an 8GB instead of a 4GB model would have increased the price by hundreds of dollars. And then there's storage -- I put up with the stock 500GB spinner for a couple of years, then popped in a 1TB SSD I got for under $300. When 4TB or 10TB SSDs are cost-effective, if I want one of those, it's another easy swap.
The "just buy all the machine you'll need up front" approach is wasteful. You'll get more capacity and spend less money in total by starting with just enough, then upgrading. But if cost is no object, or you're solidly committed to just replacing your machine every year, knock yourself out. At least with Apple gear you get good resale value.
Wow. Are there really that many folks out there who touch-type with their function keys? I mean, I honestly don't know -- maybe there are, but I certainly haven't seen them.
Think about how awful Apple's current scheme is, where fkeys are overloaded for brightness control, volume control, keyboard backlight control (really?), and whatever else.
Now picture mapping those controls onto a touch-strip with a display. A small cluster of controls to the left (right, whatever), one for screen brightness, one for volume, one for keyboard backlight (again, whatever).
Touch one, and a slider control expands out from it. Slide left to decrease, slide right to increase. Maybe, if extensive user testing supports it, "drag off the bottom" to commit your new setting or "drag off the top" to cancel it. Or maybe just lifting your finger commits it, and cancel isn't needed; we certainly don't get "cancel" with the current up/down key controls. Maybe touch detection only gives an x-axis value, but if I were sitting on Apple's patents, I'd certainly add at least a rudimentary y-axis measurement, and multi-touch detection.
Double-tap (or "mash") the volume control to mute or unmute.
Double-tap or mash screen brightness to blank or restore the screen.
Don't want controls? Map a simple out-of-band gesture (again, drag-up or drag-down seems ideal) to move between fkeys, system functions, and application functions.
I don't have any idea what Apple will actually do with this strip, but I hope it's less of a disappointment than their touch keyboard and multitouch stuff so far. I used the FingerWorks Touchstream keyboard for years, and I'm still bitter that Apple hasn't used more than 30% of the gestural technology they got when they bought out and shut down that company.
So we'll get your flip phone when we pry it from your cold, dead, arthritic fingers?
I am sorry to say it looks like digital computing is a dead end: we won't be seeing AI or the Singularity everyone wishes for with digital computers.
Where did THAT come from? I'm not trying to run God on my laptop.
If you're building a "web-based word processor" that can lose work because a client goes away, You're Doing It Wrong, so much so that responding to a low-battery signal is pointless. What if a router goes down? What if the user moves out of range of an access point, or cellular data?
If Web developers (or the companies issuing their marching orders) wanted to respect my battery, they could start by ditching all the gratuitous animated ads, transitions, and whatnot. For bonus points, they could do it before my battery gets low, so that my battery doesn't get low in the first place.
My five-year-old laptop still gets up to six or seven hours off a charge -- as long as I'm not visiting typical Web sites. If I start browsing, especially without blocking Flash or ads, I'm lucky to get an hour and a half.
So I suppose we are all coming back at some point. My feeble mind does not know how that is going to work exactly given space constraints but trust he has a plan for that. Its not like he can't just make the earth a whole lot bigger if need be.
The good news: you live forever, on a remade Earth with 10 times the diameter and 100 times the surface area!
The bad news: you live forever, on a remade earth with 1000 times the mass and 10 times the surface gravity! Enjoy your eternal agony.
"Halfway to water's boiling point" is colder than dry ice.
"Twice as hot as a hot day" is hot enough to melt lead.
"Three times as hot as a reasonably comfortable temperature" is hot enough to glow faintly red.
On the other hand, if you stubbornly refuse to learn about how temperature actually works, you could say "add up two days of that temperature and it's hot enough to boil water!"
Yep, remove all the chemicals from milk, and what's left will keep forever. As long as you can keep air from seeping into the resulting hard vacuum.
And when that computer immune system starts interfering with the normal operation of the computer, we'd call it a computer autoimmune disorder. In humans, autoimmune disorders include lupus, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and so on. In computers, they include Norton, McAfee, Panda, Comodo...
Yes, very quickly -- even more quickly than with other approaches, because your eye saccades really fast. (Although you probably don't have to render intermediate frames during the saccade, because IIRC your brain sort of ignores incoming detail during the movement itself.)
The win is that you have to render a much smaller patch of high-resolution detail, which saves computation in some parts of the pipeline. You've still got to do all the intersection, bounding-pyramid, depth-sorting and whatnot for your whole model (I assume -- it's been close to thirty years since I've done much in 3D graphics), but you don't have to crank out as many pixels. To get "retina" resolution, you'd need a foveal patch no more than maybe 500 pixels in diameter, and the rest of the visual field could probably get by with another 500 pixels on a side. That's a lot less painting than the stack of 3840x2160 screens you'd need to fill the whole visual field at that resolution -- probably between one and two orders of magnitude smaller.
As far as the rest of the pipeline, I guess you win because those rapid saccades don't significantly change the viewpoint (head location), so there won't be a lot of changes to object order or occlusion. (Your pupil does shift its position, since the eye's center of rotation is obviously near the center of the eyeball, but any virtual object that close to your eye ought to be blurred anyhow, unless you're playing the final levels of Quest for Nearsightedness.)
Sorry, I know you hate people who put content in the subject, and I know we're looking for insightful commentary here, but... that's just all I've got at this point.
Now, there's a shocker!
Since the summary stated a period for the orbit, we can assume it isn't hyperbolic. A truly circular or parabolic orbit would be news, since exact numbers like that are hard to come by. And if it were a radial (i.e. intersecting) orbit, well, that would be big news.
Maybe they were looking for "highly eccentric"?
If a white-hat hacker had found this exploit, he would've gone ahead and deleted all Medium posts. And there would have been much rejoicing.
See, I have to give you that one. I think I'd be too squeamish to chicken my own rabbits.
There was a bit of news coverage a while back about childhood eye cancers being diagnosed from snapshots taken with on-camera flash. I have no doubt that detailed scans, processed against a very large dataset, could reveal other diseases that doctors currently don't catch early.
I know, I know, OMG GOOGLE BIG BROTHER, but I'd rather save my privacy outrage for proposals that don't offer a chance to substantially reduce human suffering.
Imagine that -- a brand-new and effective treatment for a formerly-intractable disease is kind of expensive, and doesn't offer a one-shot cure. The evil doctors who came up with this diabolical scheme should be stripped of their medical credentials, if not summarily executed.
If you'd rather just stare at your feet and hope really hard that nothing's wrong, that's still free, and nobody's stopping you.
I don't know about anybody else, but my data usage fluctuates pretty widely based on unpredictable travel and other circumstances. For my family, Ting (mentioned above) works out well -- I'm sure my son would love to be able to stream all the time over cellular data, but he's bearing up well under the strain of his deprivation. If we have to spend a week or two on the road, we'll bump up into another data bucket, and pay an extra $10 or so at the end of the month. If not, we get the usual low rate we expect. Same for minutes and messages.
I was on Verizon years ago, and clung to a very old plan with very old flip-phones because I knew pay-as-you-go had to be coming soon. It took a bit longer than I expected, but it eventually arrived, and I couldn't have been happier to kiss Verizon goodbye.
It's just that the general public doesn't realize that "cigarette lighter laser with enough stored energy to burn through armor" is perhaps more farfetched than "alien invaders".
...only outlaws will have codepoints.
Okay, and anybody who understands how to look things up in a character set.
With video, you can tell immediately whether the speaker is attractive or not, and ignore the ones who aren't. If you're reading text instead of watching someone talking, you're in mortal danger of paying attention to someone who isn't attractive . The horror.
...I'll stick with the Rockers.
I'm sure this will be full of well-reasoned, cogent discussion. Just give me a moment to polish my monocle...
It's not about the legitimacy of the case. It's about the realization that a large corporation can overwhelm any legal team a typical individual could hire, and that even in a fair system the corporation is risking far less than the individual. (As in, "a tiny percentage of one quarter's profits" against "entire life savings"). There's a big difference between "I'm confident enough to risk 10% of the quarter's legal budget" and "I'm confident enough to risk everything I own".
My apologies for not posting this in reply to each of the posts where you make this assertion. I don't have a full social-media damage-control team at my disposal.