Concept computers are a dime a dozen. Let's not forget Kodak was making folding cameras decades before polaroid even existed. That Land did anything unique there is simply modern management folklore. Any design that requires technology THIS far ahead will not come to fruition simply because it will be forgotten and irrelevant newsfluff by the time the technology has been developed decades later. The only way I've ever seen cool concepts stick long enough to be developed is when they appear in good science-fiction TV or Movies. Then they capture people's imagination long enough to get implemented. Improbable concepts look cool, but we geeks have been burned way to often to trust them.
Well, some people are idiots. And idiots who shuffle money tend to get wined and dined by salespeople with good golf swings. What I find interesting about the article is the idea that bits of open source will become so commonplace, like bits of freeware and public domain, that it'll become part of the background mix of software. Sorta like how dosBox gets thrown in with re-released computer games these days, it's just that good that everybody uses it.
Don't forget silverlight though. There are much fancier things that can be done with the engine than what gets used for window management. No-one's using them for their programs but they could if they wanted to.
As for linux desktop migration, it may have something to do with Ubuntu combining debian's kick-ass package and repository management with some Mandriva style user friendlyness, a boatload of polish, and a lack of "let's install 5 apps for everything"-itis.
Bittorent is actually pretty much the only application I have ever seen to approach using the kind of bandwidth already available. The increased upload speed could probably be useful though.
My highschool was configured alot like that. The tools were never fully effective, and it didn't prevent kids from playing a copy of Jedi Knight stored on the filserver. That and the Shockwave games made our school an utter nightmare for the district IT guys.
To be honest if they ever manage to build a black hole it will just go pop in hawking radiation immediately. What would be interesting would be if they could actually get one to form large enough to do some damage to the chamber when it flashed-out.
I've long held the belief that somehow Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC are all owned by roughly the same group of aging scrooge-like investors who laugh at us as they rake in the cash from playing us all against eachother.
Ditching Creative is pretty easy since Microsoft destroyed their compatibility base with Vista anyway. C-Media based products are actually becoming valid competition, just look at stuff like the Xonar.
To put my point a little more verbose and a little less snarky: POTS providers tend to be very much opposed to change and competition precisely because of the state of regulation in which they operate. There is so much legislation that they have to comply with that allowing someone to change the rules of the game risks unexpected side effects that put them out of business. For example if they have new competition who through loopholes of legal definitions doesn't have to provide all the extras they are required to like 5 nines of uptime, E911 support, and subsidization of lower-income customers then they end up at an unfair competitive disadvantage simply because they have been around longer to attract legislators attention. Untested legislative restrictions are a potential noose around the head of a business, so it's no wonder they avoid it wherever possible.
Software keyboards suck. It's a simple fact of life. It's so much easier to type on something when you can tell you're in between keys by touch, before you click. It would take some very expensive advanced technology, very well developed, in a complete vacuum of demand, to make a touchscreen equal to the real thing. If you want to use a touchscreen for input you're much better off ditching the keyboard entirely and building a better-adapted input paradigm. Maybe something based on multi-touch and finger positioning to figure out which key the user actually wants just before they press it?
Hire retail merchandisers then. They almost all have to use computers on a daily basis, many have been made to use crappy handhelds for data entry before, and they're used to working for 2 or more companies part-time and dovetailing for more hours. They might have to pay a bit more in some regions, say at least $15/hr in California, but they really are a pretty optimum pool of labor.
Telstra is a bunch of evil bastards. This is news how? I've never even set foot on Australian soil and I know how bad their phone company is, that's how bad they are.
I never understood how there was a market for virtualization on the server end. It seems to me that any server apps that are actually designed properly would not have trouble coexisting on the same system, and would run more efficiently as separate threads in the same OS than given their own. Even running Linux alongside Windows makes very little sense as almost anything that runs on Linux can run on Windows as well. So, is this just a big bandaid applied over really bad programming, a form of sandboxing, or what?
Sorta how the "borrowed" copy I had of Civilization in elementary school got them sales of Civnet, Civ 2, Civ 3, Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire in the long run?
Why the hell would anyone want to ditch AC? The whole point of AC is that transformers allow you to arbitrarily change the voltage, even raising it, very efficiently. Standardizing on DC power would just make any device that didn't natively run at that voltage waste power converting it.
Actually there's a very valid reason to consider pirates: possible conversion into paying customers. If you provide a reason for someone who has already pirated to buy the game then piracy becomes a sort of free advertising. This is one of the good things about unique CD-key requirements on online games: it doesn't really prevent piracy, but it provides something extra for pirates to come into the fold in the form of multiplayer. It can even be legal. Just look at the spawn-copy and CD sharing systems blizzard implemented in Warcraft 2, Starcraft, and Diablo. Shareware also served much the same purpose. Sure you could get a full copy of a game off a pirate BBS back in the day, but if you already knew you liked the game you couldn't shake the lingering feeling you were being a total scumbag as you did it.
Superconductors would at best make a marginal difference in the efficiency of transmission lines. The nature of the AC power grid is such that upping the voltage reduces the portion of the power lost to resistance. That's why high-tension lines are so high off the ground. Power transfer across the grid is already pretty efficient, it's the only reason we even have a grid. To be honest the science involved in this sounds alot like the science of making synthetic diamonds. I highly doubt this material will ever be cheap enough to use to replace metal except where the application demands it. I'm guessing if it can even be produced in significant quantities (did they forget to mention it's probably flammable?) it will be limited to use inside critical components. So I could see maglev, and maybe more efficient motors and generators but it's never going to replace copper and aluminum for wires.
In my limited experience de-peering like this usually precedes an ISP death. Other people have probably figured this out so it wouldn't surprise me if this is having a negative effect on stock prices. It makes you wonder why anyone would ever consider it a valid option if they aren't just a rat jumping ship. It just looks bad.
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Concept computers are a dime a dozen. Let's not forget Kodak was making folding cameras decades before polaroid even existed. That Land did anything unique there is simply modern management folklore. Any design that requires technology THIS far ahead will not come to fruition simply because it will be forgotten and irrelevant newsfluff by the time the technology has been developed decades later. The only way I've ever seen cool concepts stick long enough to be developed is when they appear in good science-fiction TV or Movies. Then they capture people's imagination long enough to get implemented. Improbable concepts look cool, but we geeks have been burned way to often to trust them.
Well, some people are idiots. And idiots who shuffle money tend to get wined and dined by salespeople with good golf swings. What I find interesting about the article is the idea that bits of open source will become so commonplace, like bits of freeware and public domain, that it'll become part of the background mix of software. Sorta like how dosBox gets thrown in with re-released computer games these days, it's just that good that everybody uses it.
Don't forget silverlight though. There are much fancier things that can be done with the engine than what gets used for window management. No-one's using them for their programs but they could if they wanted to. As for linux desktop migration, it may have something to do with Ubuntu combining debian's kick-ass package and repository management with some Mandriva style user friendlyness, a boatload of polish, and a lack of "let's install 5 apps for everything"-itis.
Bittorent is actually pretty much the only application I have ever seen to approach using the kind of bandwidth already available. The increased upload speed could probably be useful though.
My highschool was configured alot like that. The tools were never fully effective, and it didn't prevent kids from playing a copy of Jedi Knight stored on the filserver. That and the Shockwave games made our school an utter nightmare for the district IT guys.
To be honest if they ever manage to build a black hole it will just go pop in hawking radiation immediately. What would be interesting would be if they could actually get one to form large enough to do some damage to the chamber when it flashed-out.
Because they aren't paid to. What? You thought they installed crippling levels of bloatware on their consumer's computers for free?
I've long held the belief that somehow Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC are all owned by roughly the same group of aging scrooge-like investors who laugh at us as they rake in the cash from playing us all against eachother.
It's decent to watch provided you are in the stands, reasonably close to the field. Otherwise you're just looking through a straw.
I'm not really sure Sluggy Freelance counts as obscure, at least in webcomics circles. Now a Miracle of Science reference probably would be.
Ditching Creative is pretty easy since Microsoft destroyed their compatibility base with Vista anyway. C-Media based products are actually becoming valid competition, just look at stuff like the Xonar.
I dunno. If they're viral alien critters invading the North pole with a nerf allergy there's reason to be afraid.
To put my point a little more verbose and a little less snarky: POTS providers tend to be very much opposed to change and competition precisely because of the state of regulation in which they operate. There is so much legislation that they have to comply with that allowing someone to change the rules of the game risks unexpected side effects that put them out of business. For example if they have new competition who through loopholes of legal definitions doesn't have to provide all the extras they are required to like 5 nines of uptime, E911 support, and subsidization of lower-income customers then they end up at an unfair competitive disadvantage simply because they have been around longer to attract legislators attention. Untested legislative restrictions are a potential noose around the head of a business, so it's no wonder they avoid it wherever possible.
Software keyboards suck. It's a simple fact of life. It's so much easier to type on something when you can tell you're in between keys by touch, before you click. It would take some very expensive advanced technology, very well developed, in a complete vacuum of demand, to make a touchscreen equal to the real thing. If you want to use a touchscreen for input you're much better off ditching the keyboard entirely and building a better-adapted input paradigm. Maybe something based on multi-touch and finger positioning to figure out which key the user actually wants just before they press it?
Hire retail merchandisers then. They almost all have to use computers on a daily basis, many have been made to use crappy handhelds for data entry before, and they're used to working for 2 or more companies part-time and dovetailing for more hours. They might have to pay a bit more in some regions, say at least $15/hr in California, but they really are a pretty optimum pool of labor.
You rock! Seriously, digging up the original author is ultimate comment-fu, at least when the author is a guy like this.
You also realize that POTS providers are complete and utter monopolistic jackasses. Perhaps this explains why.
Telstra is a bunch of evil bastards. This is news how? I've never even set foot on Australian soil and I know how bad their phone company is, that's how bad they are.
I never understood how there was a market for virtualization on the server end. It seems to me that any server apps that are actually designed properly would not have trouble coexisting on the same system, and would run more efficiently as separate threads in the same OS than given their own. Even running Linux alongside Windows makes very little sense as almost anything that runs on Linux can run on Windows as well. So, is this just a big bandaid applied over really bad programming, a form of sandboxing, or what?
Sorta how the "borrowed" copy I had of Civilization in elementary school got them sales of Civnet, Civ 2, Civ 3, Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire in the long run?
Why the hell would anyone want to ditch AC? The whole point of AC is that transformers allow you to arbitrarily change the voltage, even raising it, very efficiently. Standardizing on DC power would just make any device that didn't natively run at that voltage waste power converting it.
Actually there's a very valid reason to consider pirates: possible conversion into paying customers. If you provide a reason for someone who has already pirated to buy the game then piracy becomes a sort of free advertising. This is one of the good things about unique CD-key requirements on online games: it doesn't really prevent piracy, but it provides something extra for pirates to come into the fold in the form of multiplayer. It can even be legal. Just look at the spawn-copy and CD sharing systems blizzard implemented in Warcraft 2, Starcraft, and Diablo. Shareware also served much the same purpose. Sure you could get a full copy of a game off a pirate BBS back in the day, but if you already knew you liked the game you couldn't shake the lingering feeling you were being a total scumbag as you did it.
Superconductors would at best make a marginal difference in the efficiency of transmission lines. The nature of the AC power grid is such that upping the voltage reduces the portion of the power lost to resistance. That's why high-tension lines are so high off the ground. Power transfer across the grid is already pretty efficient, it's the only reason we even have a grid. To be honest the science involved in this sounds alot like the science of making synthetic diamonds. I highly doubt this material will ever be cheap enough to use to replace metal except where the application demands it. I'm guessing if it can even be produced in significant quantities (did they forget to mention it's probably flammable?) it will be limited to use inside critical components. So I could see maglev, and maybe more efficient motors and generators but it's never going to replace copper and aluminum for wires.
In my limited experience de-peering like this usually precedes an ISP death. Other people have probably figured this out so it wouldn't surprise me if this is having a negative effect on stock prices. It makes you wonder why anyone would ever consider it a valid option if they aren't just a rat jumping ship. It just looks bad.
It's nice to see the technology of the Stargate program like Unmanned Ground Vehicles and standard-issue PDWs finally reaching the mainline military.