The only reason that $2-$5 is called a "micropayment" is that nobody ever figured out how to deliver on the original target(fractions of a penny up to a dollar or so) in any way that wasn't swamped by transaction costs or some other failure mechanism.
Some years ago, there was a lot of quasi-utopian fluff about them floating around. Then all the companies in the field went out of business.
One day, the DMP guys invited the Nintendo suits in for a product demo. As soon as the Nintendo suits saw the promo posters scattered around the room with the demo board on the table, they all sprouted enormous anime-style eyes and shouted "PICA200, I choose you!".
Because customers like their hardware fast, cheap, small, and quiet?
If you make it slow, you barely have to bother cooling it.
If you make it expensive, you can invest in high-quality thermal engineering, loads of heat pipes, and whatever else is necessary.
If you make it big, you can just slap an obnoxiously gigantic heatsink and a couple of 120mm(or larger) fans on it, and it'll be fine.
If you make it loud, the magical world of 15k RPM fans is open to you(y hello thar, 1U servers...).
The fact that Microsoft are pretty much n00bs at hardware certainly didn't help the 360; but the industry-wide trend toward badly undercooled hardware, even wimpy stuff like routers that draw under 10 watts for the whole system and still flake out when it gets warm, can hardly be ascribed to their incompetence.
It would be pretty unsurprising if the performance of the DVD(though, in the DVD case, the improved performance may have been traded off in firmware for quieter operation at performance equivalent to the old one) and/or HDD drives received a slight bump, just because it makes no economic sense to buy anything but whatever the current industry sweet-spot is, and that tends to improve over time.
As for CPU/GPU, though, there is just no way that they would play the platform fragmentation game without very good reason.
Given that their definition of "open" seems to be "Why yes, you are welcome to make your application dependent on our proprietary binary and network through this set of defined interfaces, at least on such platforms as we have blessed for the purpose." I'm assuming that Skype is operating on the assumption that they will pick up some additional customers for their commercial offerings who might have been put off by having to use the Skype client itself.
It is also possible, given the omission of android, that they also hope to have their embedded version be something that companies have to pay for in order to integrate with their products(just as Flash was free on the desktop but licensed for inclusion in embedded devices, back before steve stole their lunch money)
Intel is shaving a few more pennies off the implementation cost for boring business boxes that will see no expansion at all, gamer boxes that will see no expansion beyond a so-new-the-solder-is-still-warm graphics card, and your basic home-user "everything-on-motherboard" use cases.
Given the availability of PCIe to PCI bridge chips(both ones for cheaply retooling a PCI design into a PCIe design, and ones for hanging an actual PCI bus off a PCIe bus), motherboards to accommodate PCI cards should be available at a fairly modest premium for another 5 years, and at an industrial/embedded/specialty premium for another decade or two....
He may not be here right now, in Microsoft Corporation Edition 2010; but a ground-up managed-code rewrite of him is definitely on the roadmap for Microsoft Corporate Edition 2012, as part of the Microsoft Enterprise Management Foundation suite of technologies. All his memos will take the form of powershell-compatible cmdlets remotely executed on his subordinates, and his rolodex will be replaced by a WinFS based structured-datastore.
I wouldn't pop it like candy(and there are very few things where heating/burning and then inhaling the result is a good plan); but methamphetamines used with care have a surprisingly adequate safety profile.
Desoxyn(oral methamphetamine, 5mg tablets) is, to the present day, available by prescription for the treatment of ADHD or exogenous obesity. There are some reports of adverse cardiac incidents, and suspicions about the potential for seizures in vulnerable individuals(as with other psychostimulants), and there is nothing stopping you from using it in such as way as to produce dependence; but the health outcomes of those who smoke fair quantities of whatever crap gets sold as "crystal meth" on the street are generally not seen in Desoxyn users...
Given that every iPhone has at least one unique ID burned into it(a serial number of its own, plus whatever IMEIs and whatnot being a GSM device implies), I'm guessing that it is a "anonymized identifier that can uniquely identify a user(but only Apple, or AT&T, or their extra special iAD friends, or anybody who knows something about drawing inferences from location data can link to his name/real-life place of residence/shopping habits/place of employment)...
Probably nowhere near that high. E-ink screens are an oddball in process terms, so they don't share economies of scale with LCDs(which is why the real cheap seats in the e-reader market are black and white LCD devices, and why E-ink, inc. probably says a prayer of thanksgiving every time Pixel Qi's stuff gets delayed again). A fully pixel-addressable one of reasonable size and resolution is not inexpensive(unlike the cheesy region-addressable ones, which are fairly cheap). As discrete items, 3G modems suitable for computer use seem to go for 30-80 dollars. I'm assuming that they are cheaper in bulk; but that is still something extra on the old BOM.
We are probably talking at least 100% above BOM; but I'd be surprised at anything markedly higher than the consumer electronics average. The real rip-off, though, is in the fact that you are paying all that just for the right to purchase a bunch of fancy bitstreams, generally for at least as much as the paperback equivalent, sometimes more, from somebody's proprietary storefront.
Don't worry. You can just pin a virtual keyboard permanently to the lower touchscreen. It'll be just like a real laptop, only worse and more expensive!
On the other hand, this could really be the computer that takes the underground Nintendo DS emulator scene by storm....
While it might be true that "we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent", it is definitely also the case that laziness can and does lead to ignoring procedural correctness that would have caught error, stupidity can and does delay the recognition of error until it has had time to balloon into something more serious, and evil intent can cause the willfull application of anything that laziness or stupidity would lead to; but carried on much more intelligently(and thus dangerously). Not to mention, of course, that little class of statements we know as "lies", which are essentially calculated to cause errors in those receiving them.
Obviously, in a trivial sense, nobody wakes up in the morning and says "Gosh, I sure do feel like really fucking up today!"; but some people take measures that reduce the probability of error(and, where possible, measure it) and others do not. Just because virtually all human reasoning, outside of (some) math and syllogisms, is inductive does not imply that all human reasoning is on equally firm ground. In fact, given that deductive logic is useful pretty much only in certain types of math and in carefully controlled toy situations, the ability to distinguish various statements of inductive logic by quality or probability is probably the most vital aspect of epistemology as an applied science...
It already exists(though not in "home" versions), it just isn't turned on by default.
In anything XP or later, not sure about 2000, you can use software restriction policies to control the execution of programs and the loading of dlls by location, name, hash, or signature. Or some combination.
It's kind of a pain to use, which is why you don't see it too much; but it is there.
I suspect that the "specifiers" idea, unless restricted to a pre-canned list of them, with meanings spelled out somewhere, would be cumbersome; but the foolicence:$cost idea is eminently sensible, and quite arguably better than what they have in fact done.
This raises to possibilities, neither entirely encouraging:
1. They are stupid: During the course of what must have been at least several weeks, if not substantially longer, of hammering out the deal, flickr failed to come up with something that a slashdotter came up with within less than an hour of the article about it being up. That would be unimpressive.
2. They are evil: Someone involved in the flickr/Getty transaction wants it to be all-or-nothing, and it was set up to be so. I can only imagine that letting individuals do their own pricing would detract from Getty's role in doing that, and that it is better for them if the user, and their entire image collection, is kept as homogeneous fodder.
I'd be more inclined to suspect that those who presently occupy the "high quality" niche would have the most to lose with a scheme like this.
There is, certainly, a pantheon of "iconic" images that are functionally irreplaceable. For certain purposes, Nothing Else Will Do. However, there are a huge number of situations where some sort of photo of something is called for; but "almost as good and a lot cheaper" will be good enough. The vast hordes of flickr happy-snappers, while they do produce a lot of dross, also produce some perfectly adequate, even good, work. And, unless the occasion has been arranged well in advance, or has been occuring predictably, the odds are way better that Joe User will be there with his point-and-shoot when it happens than that Mr. Serious Professional will just happen to be on hand with the big bag o' lenses.
My prediction would be that, if it becomes easy to grab stuff off flickr for cheap(but with the "cleared by Getty" sticker, so legal doesn't freak out), the losers will probably be the serious professional photographers. They won't be wiped out entirely, of course; but they could be priced out of the market for any sort of relatively generic pictures quite swiftly.
To a nontrivial(though, certainly, not wholly comprehensive) degree, this system already exists de facto.
First, you have FDA-approved drugs, treatments, and devices. Then, you have clinical trials of drugs, treatments, and devices hoping to join the first category; but not yet there.
This latter category recruits trial subjects from either the public at large(for the safety/tolerability portion of the studies) or from the patient pool for whatever the condition is(for the efficacy portion). This means that, in practice, a fair number of patients(weighted toward those for whom the FDA-approved stuff isn't cutting it) are taking experimental, unapproved, therapies, with effort being made to minimize the danger; but with the recognition that this isn't without its risks. Now, it is true that not everyone who wants to can necessarily get into a given trial. Some are just size-limited. In other cases, the group running the trial might be cherry-picking patients to try to get the results they want(ie. if you drug kills a bunch of people, or fails to cure, your odds of FDA approval go down. This creates an incentive to keep the hopeless cases away.)
There is also the intermediate category of off-label use. Once something is FDA-approved, doctors are not required to use it only for whatever it was originally approved for(the manufacturer can't market it for any unapproved use; but doctors are free to prescribe it for pretty much whatever they deem suitable, subject only to the risk of this being declared "malpractice").
In the variety of web-based (or web-frontended) systems I've seen, it is somewhere between common and ubiquitous for any serious printing(ie. where fidelity matters, not where somebody just needs a bunch of text to scribble on or take to a meeting) to be handled by having the server spit out a.PDF, as you suggest.
HTML, by design, Is Not a fixed-layout page description language. This is one of its great virtues. Assuming the designer doesn't muck it up, it should reflow nicely, or at least adequately, onto a variety of monitor shapes and sizes, and browser capabilities. However, that makes it a pretty terrible substitute for PDF in any situation where you want to spit stuff onto standard sized paper in a precise way.
The Reformation gets very little credit for the relative moderation(or at least contemporary impotence) of Christianity, outside of some real shitholes. Calvin's Geneva was a Protestant theocracy, and there were numerous examples at least as unpleasant.
Also, while Islam didn't have a "reformation", it also has the "two-substantially-dissimilar-and-mutually-displeased-with-one-another-sects-operating-under-one-heading" thing going, with the Sunni and Shia branches(plus some smaller oddball variants), and that hasn't exactly exposed its warm and fuzzy side.
Most of the credit for the West not being a ghastly theocratic hellhole, torn by endless wars between the terrorized papistical minions of Rome and the terrorized heretical minions of various protestant factions, with the occasional witch burning or crusade to bring people together, is due to the Enlightenment.
"Mankind will never be free until the last King is strangled with the entrails of the last Priest"(and the last advertising shill is buried alive alongside them)...
I think that there is a difference in the "lifespan" metric you two are using:
Carpetshark says that Nokia products have shit lifespans; because he is talking about the "lifespan" of a hardware product during which it continues to be updated to the latest software features(within the bounds of hardware limitations. For a pricey computer-in-a-cellphone-box like the N900, that isn't at all unreasonable, nor is Nokia's record in the area exactly unblemished.
Mdwh2 disagrees, because Nokia has been(if anything) rather retro in the pace at which they kill old OSes, and much of their hardware is among the more bulletproof stuff in the consumer sector. Even your $40 nokia candybar is quite likely to be in almost exactly the same shape it was purchased, after some years of none-too-careful use. This is also true, albeit more relevant to products that aren't the N900.
Nokia is, perhaps, the most talented of the previous generation of handset makers. Their OSes are a little quirky, and they aren't on the bleeding edge of hardware; but they churn out, by the million, solid handsets that will do whatever they did the day you opened them for a nice long while. I've had several that have done exactly that(which was what I wanted, so I was happy). Trouble is, if you are expecting the new support model, where "lifespan" means "serious software updates, not just a critical bugfix or two", they are rather tepid. Android has some dark corners that are even worse; but the N900 is the equivalent of the Nexus One, the company-endorsed OS flagship model.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason that $2-$5 is called a "micropayment" is that nobody ever figured out how to deliver on the original target(fractions of a penny up to a dollar or so) in any way that wasn't swamped by transaction costs or some other failure mechanism.
Some years ago, there was a lot of quasi-utopian fluff about them floating around. Then all the companies in the field went out of business.
The name of this chip is the "PICA200".
One day, the DMP guys invited the Nintendo suits in for a product demo. As soon as the Nintendo suits saw the promo posters scattered around the room with the demo board on the table, they all sprouted enormous anime-style eyes and shouted "PICA200, I choose you!".
That's how it went down. True Facts.
Because customers like their hardware fast, cheap, small, and quiet?
If you make it slow, you barely have to bother cooling it.
If you make it expensive, you can invest in high-quality thermal engineering, loads of heat pipes, and whatever else is necessary.
If you make it big, you can just slap an obnoxiously gigantic heatsink and a couple of 120mm(or larger) fans on it, and it'll be fine.
If you make it loud, the magical world of 15k RPM fans is open to you(y hello thar, 1U servers...).
The fact that Microsoft are pretty much n00bs at hardware certainly didn't help the 360; but the industry-wide trend toward badly undercooled hardware, even wimpy stuff like routers that draw under 10 watts for the whole system and still flake out when it gets warm, can hardly be ascribed to their incompetence.
It would be pretty unsurprising if the performance of the DVD(though, in the DVD case, the improved performance may have been traded off in firmware for quieter operation at performance equivalent to the old one) and/or HDD drives received a slight bump, just because it makes no economic sense to buy anything but whatever the current industry sweet-spot is, and that tends to improve over time.
As for CPU/GPU, though, there is just no way that they would play the platform fragmentation game without very good reason.
Given that their definition of "open" seems to be "Why yes, you are welcome to make your application dependent on our proprietary binary and network through this set of defined interfaces, at least on such platforms as we have blessed for the purpose." I'm assuming that Skype is operating on the assumption that they will pick up some additional customers for their commercial offerings who might have been put off by having to use the Skype client itself.
It is also possible, given the omission of android, that they also hope to have their embedded version be something that companies have to pay for in order to integrate with their products(just as Flash was free on the desktop but licensed for inclusion in embedded devices, back before steve stole their lunch money)
True, but Scan-line Interleave and Scalable Link Interface share not much more than an acronym and a marketing strategy...
Freaky. I wonder if the manufacturer provides driver support for Windows for Workgroups and OS/2 warp...
You are thinking of the (never released) Voodoo 5 6000.
The Voodoo 3 actually fell into a quite modest size and power envelope.
This seems like a fairly minimal matter.
Intel is shaving a few more pennies off the implementation cost for boring business boxes that will see no expansion at all, gamer boxes that will see no expansion beyond a so-new-the-solder-is-still-warm graphics card, and your basic home-user "everything-on-motherboard" use cases.
Given the availability of PCIe to PCI bridge chips(both ones for cheaply retooling a PCI design into a PCIe design, and ones for hanging an actual PCI bus off a PCIe bus), motherboards to accommodate PCI cards should be available at a fairly modest premium for another 5 years, and at an industrial/embedded/specialty premium for another decade or two....
He may not be here right now, in Microsoft Corporation Edition 2010; but a ground-up managed-code rewrite of him is definitely on the roadmap for Microsoft Corporate Edition 2012, as part of the Microsoft Enterprise Management Foundation suite of technologies. All his memos will take the form of powershell-compatible cmdlets remotely executed on his subordinates, and his rolodex will be replaced by a WinFS based structured-datastore.
Version N+1 is going to be the best version ever!
I wouldn't pop it like candy(and there are very few things where heating/burning and then inhaling the result is a good plan); but methamphetamines used with care have a surprisingly adequate safety profile.
Desoxyn(oral methamphetamine, 5mg tablets) is, to the present day, available by prescription for the treatment of ADHD or exogenous obesity. There are some reports of adverse cardiac incidents, and suspicions about the potential for seizures in vulnerable individuals(as with other psychostimulants), and there is nothing stopping you from using it in such as way as to produce dependence; but the health outcomes of those who smoke fair quantities of whatever crap gets sold as "crystal meth" on the street are generally not seen in Desoxyn users...
Given that every iPhone has at least one unique ID burned into it(a serial number of its own, plus whatever IMEIs and whatnot being a GSM device implies), I'm guessing that it is a "anonymized identifier that can uniquely identify a user(but only Apple, or AT&T, or their extra special iAD friends, or anybody who knows something about drawing inferences from location data can link to his name/real-life place of residence/shopping habits/place of employment)...
It does.
Probably nowhere near that high. E-ink screens are an oddball in process terms, so they don't share economies of scale with LCDs(which is why the real cheap seats in the e-reader market are black and white LCD devices, and why E-ink, inc. probably says a prayer of thanksgiving every time Pixel Qi's stuff gets delayed again). A fully pixel-addressable one of reasonable size and resolution is not inexpensive(unlike the cheesy region-addressable ones, which are fairly cheap). As discrete items, 3G modems suitable for computer use seem to go for 30-80 dollars. I'm assuming that they are cheaper in bulk; but that is still something extra on the old BOM.
We are probably talking at least 100% above BOM; but I'd be surprised at anything markedly higher than the consumer electronics average. The real rip-off, though, is in the fact that you are paying all that just for the right to purchase a bunch of fancy bitstreams, generally for at least as much as the paperback equivalent, sometimes more, from somebody's proprietary storefront.
The groundwork is there: "Secure Remote Attestation"...
Don't worry. You can just pin a virtual keyboard permanently to the lower touchscreen. It'll be just like a real laptop, only worse and more expensive!
On the other hand, this could really be the computer that takes the underground Nintendo DS emulator scene by storm....
While it might be true that "we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent", it is definitely also the case that laziness can and does lead to ignoring procedural correctness that would have caught error, stupidity can and does delay the recognition of error until it has had time to balloon into something more serious, and evil intent can cause the willfull application of anything that laziness or stupidity would lead to; but carried on much more intelligently(and thus dangerously). Not to mention, of course, that little class of statements we know as "lies", which are essentially calculated to cause errors in those receiving them.
Obviously, in a trivial sense, nobody wakes up in the morning and says "Gosh, I sure do feel like really fucking up today!"; but some people take measures that reduce the probability of error(and, where possible, measure it) and others do not. Just because virtually all human reasoning, outside of (some) math and syllogisms, is inductive does not imply that all human reasoning is on equally firm ground. In fact, given that deductive logic is useful pretty much only in certain types of math and in carefully controlled toy situations, the ability to distinguish various statements of inductive logic by quality or probability is probably the most vital aspect of epistemology as an applied science...
It already exists(though not in "home" versions), it just isn't turned on by default.
In anything XP or later, not sure about 2000, you can use software restriction policies to control the execution of programs and the loading of dlls by location, name, hash, or signature. Or some combination.
It's kind of a pain to use, which is why you don't see it too much; but it is there.
I suspect that the "specifiers" idea, unless restricted to a pre-canned list of them, with meanings spelled out somewhere, would be cumbersome; but the foolicence:$cost idea is eminently sensible, and quite arguably better than what they have in fact done.
This raises to possibilities, neither entirely encouraging:
1. They are stupid: During the course of what must have been at least several weeks, if not substantially longer, of hammering out the deal, flickr failed to come up with something that a slashdotter came up with within less than an hour of the article about it being up. That would be unimpressive.
2. They are evil: Someone involved in the flickr/Getty transaction wants it to be all-or-nothing, and it was set up to be so. I can only imagine that letting individuals do their own pricing would detract from Getty's role in doing that, and that it is better for them if the user, and their entire image collection, is kept as homogeneous fodder.
I'd be more inclined to suspect that those who presently occupy the "high quality" niche would have the most to lose with a scheme like this.
There is, certainly, a pantheon of "iconic" images that are functionally irreplaceable. For certain purposes, Nothing Else Will Do. However, there are a huge number of situations where some sort of photo of something is called for; but "almost as good and a lot cheaper" will be good enough. The vast hordes of flickr happy-snappers, while they do produce a lot of dross, also produce some perfectly adequate, even good, work. And, unless the occasion has been arranged well in advance, or has been occuring predictably, the odds are way better that Joe User will be there with his point-and-shoot when it happens than that Mr. Serious Professional will just happen to be on hand with the big bag o' lenses.
My prediction would be that, if it becomes easy to grab stuff off flickr for cheap(but with the "cleared by Getty" sticker, so legal doesn't freak out), the losers will probably be the serious professional photographers. They won't be wiped out entirely, of course; but they could be priced out of the market for any sort of relatively generic pictures quite swiftly.
To a nontrivial(though, certainly, not wholly comprehensive) degree, this system already exists de facto.
First, you have FDA-approved drugs, treatments, and devices. Then, you have clinical trials of drugs, treatments, and devices hoping to join the first category; but not yet there.
This latter category recruits trial subjects from either the public at large(for the safety/tolerability portion of the studies) or from the patient pool for whatever the condition is(for the efficacy portion). This means that, in practice, a fair number of patients(weighted toward those for whom the FDA-approved stuff isn't cutting it) are taking experimental, unapproved, therapies, with effort being made to minimize the danger; but with the recognition that this isn't without its risks. Now, it is true that not everyone who wants to can necessarily get into a given trial. Some are just size-limited. In other cases, the group running the trial might be cherry-picking patients to try to get the results they want(ie. if you drug kills a bunch of people, or fails to cure, your odds of FDA approval go down. This creates an incentive to keep the hopeless cases away.)
There is also the intermediate category of off-label use. Once something is FDA-approved, doctors are not required to use it only for whatever it was originally approved for(the manufacturer can't market it for any unapproved use; but doctors are free to prescribe it for pretty much whatever they deem suitable, subject only to the risk of this being declared "malpractice").
In the variety of web-based (or web-frontended) systems I've seen, it is somewhere between common and ubiquitous for any serious printing(ie. where fidelity matters, not where somebody just needs a bunch of text to scribble on or take to a meeting) to be handled by having the server spit out a .PDF, as you suggest.
HTML, by design, Is Not a fixed-layout page description language. This is one of its great virtues. Assuming the designer doesn't muck it up, it should reflow nicely, or at least adequately, onto a variety of monitor shapes and sizes, and browser capabilities. However, that makes it a pretty terrible substitute for PDF in any situation where you want to spit stuff onto standard sized paper in a precise way.
"Scenic Afghanistan: The Nigeria of the Middle East"...
The Reformation gets very little credit for the relative moderation(or at least contemporary impotence) of Christianity, outside of some real shitholes. Calvin's Geneva was a Protestant theocracy, and there were numerous examples at least as unpleasant.
Also, while Islam didn't have a "reformation", it also has the "two-substantially-dissimilar-and-mutually-displeased-with-one-another-sects-operating-under-one-heading" thing going, with the Sunni and Shia branches(plus some smaller oddball variants), and that hasn't exactly exposed its warm and fuzzy side.
Most of the credit for the West not being a ghastly theocratic hellhole, torn by endless wars between the terrorized papistical minions of Rome and the terrorized heretical minions of various protestant factions, with the occasional witch burning or crusade to bring people together, is due to the Enlightenment.
"Mankind will never be free until the last King is strangled with the entrails of the last Priest"(and the last advertising shill is buried alive alongside them)...
I think that there is a difference in the "lifespan" metric you two are using:
Carpetshark says that Nokia products have shit lifespans; because he is talking about the "lifespan" of a hardware product during which it continues to be updated to the latest software features(within the bounds of hardware limitations. For a pricey computer-in-a-cellphone-box like the N900, that isn't at all unreasonable, nor is Nokia's record in the area exactly unblemished.
Mdwh2 disagrees, because Nokia has been(if anything) rather retro in the pace at which they kill old OSes, and much of their hardware is among the more bulletproof stuff in the consumer sector. Even your $40 nokia candybar is quite likely to be in almost exactly the same shape it was purchased, after some years of none-too-careful use. This is also true, albeit more relevant to products that aren't the N900.
Nokia is, perhaps, the most talented of the previous generation of handset makers. Their OSes are a little quirky, and they aren't on the bleeding edge of hardware; but they churn out, by the million, solid handsets that will do whatever they did the day you opened them for a nice long while. I've had several that have done exactly that(which was what I wanted, so I was happy). Trouble is, if you are expecting the new support model, where "lifespan" means "serious software updates, not just a critical bugfix or two", they are rather tepid. Android has some dark corners that are even worse; but the N900 is the equivalent of the Nexus One, the company-endorsed OS flagship model.