What is the deal here. I can only find a coloum clearly marked Advertising. This has been done by UK sites for a while by the way. I feel sorry for Yahoo as I thought they were quite cool earlier on but now has pretty much nothing but "milk toast" to offer
The deal is, that from time to time, you'll click on a link but instead of being taken directly there, you will be taken to an ad page. After a short pause, the page will refresh itself, and actually be the news story that you want to read. But if you click on the ad page, it's like clicking a banner ad. It makes the web a bit more like TV advertising (which is what marketroids have been wanting to do for years, cos they understand TV a lot better) except that you don't know when it's going to happen. Lots of sites do this, even Reuters. Gotta make your money somewhere in these tough times for the dotcom scene.
The minister is (amongst other things) responsible for 'equality' and therefore pushes the plan to provide the less fortunate with a pc.
This smells like a belated attempt to jump on the Internet bandwagon to me. Why don't citizens get equal automobiles issued to them at the voting age? Why aren't citizens assigned to identical housing units? Why don't citizens queue every week at the supermarket to collect their equal shopping baskets of goods?
I strongly recommend that anyone who favors the idea of spending so much money on computers read Silicon Snake Oil by Clifford Stoll. In this book, he presents a compelling argument that, in education, the money would far better be spent on hiring more and better teachers, and actually taking the kids to museums rather than sitting them down in front of PCs loaded with CDROM encylopaedias. And in business, computers aren't the productivity panacea that they're touted as.
And, on/. at least, I would have expected a little more skepticism of a proposal that would give a government complete and unrestricted access to the majority of its citizens email accounts and hard drives. Would you be willing to sell your freedoms for some shiny new consumer electronics?
My translation of the Dagbladet (norwegian newspaper) article. Spelling and gramatical errors are mine, factual errors are those of Dagbladet and the norwegian Police.
Doh! Now they'll be after you for abusing the intellectual property rights of Dagbladet!
When you purchase a DVD, you are paying for the ability to play it on players approved by the people who made the disc.
If that's true, and I subsequently damage the physical DVD in a way that's no-one's fault but my own, I should be able to get a replacement from the publisher for no more than the cost of the media, duplication and shipping. The fact that this isn't the case suggests that there's little legal precedent for your point.
Obviously, accidental damage may be covered by insurance, and a faulty DVD has to be replaced for no extra charge because it's not fit for the purpose for which it was sold.
The argument that you're paying for the right to listen to a piece of music too falls apart, because if that's what you'd bought, then everyone should have been able to upgrade from vinyl to CD for cost of media and distribution. That wasn't the case either.
So, the media conglomerates are trying to have their cake and eat it, selling you a piece of commodity property and a contractual obligation in one go. The free market is in the process of solving this by disintermediating them. It will just take a while to get the technology out there for musicians and fans to interact directly.
For example, require that if people have nothing to share that they agree to devote a small part of their disk space to cache popular files which automatically get placed there by the system.
I believe this is the approach adopted by Mojo Nation. Resources cost mojo to access, but you gain mojo by providing resources (CPU cycles, storage space, network bandwidth) that others are willing to pay mojo for, whether it is your own content, or caches. It scales nicely for provider bandwidth, and allocates storage in a distributed fashion, you say how much space you want to give it, but not what you want to store there. But it's not strictly anonymous, and they respect intellectual property rights.
The Americans with Disabilities Act was designed to protect those people with disabilities that *severely* impair their ability to function day to day. To compare "pain and discomfort for several months" with, say, losing a leg, is more than insulting to those who are unfortunate enough to have a true disability and is a bastardization of the law's intended use.
I might agree with you, if US law didn't also favor the obese and drug addicts as "disabled".
A whole second program complete with it's own shuttles which made space runs to plant military satellites in orbit. There's a lot of very expensive & very powerful junk up there which uses classified technologies far in advance of what John Q. Private Sector is allowed to sell in his hard drives.
It would have to be pretty damn advanced if they were able to conceal shuttle re-entry... as in, beyond what's even theoretically possible according to the laws of physics as we understand them,
It was hypothesized that if one placed enough of these nukes in one spot, and detonated them simultaneously, one could knock the Earth of its axis.
If you placed enough custard powder in one place and detonated it simultaneously, one could knock the earth off its axis. What's your point?
The problem with shooting asteroids is that they're very small, in relation to space, which is very big. You have to hit them while they're a long way off and deflect their trajectories, rather than trying to shatter them, because the bits might still hit us. Note that we can't even target ICBMs particularly accurately here on Earth, so we rely on the fact that you can be a couple of miles off, but shockwaves, heat and radiation will do the damage anyway - and they won't if there's no atmosphere.
It should make short work of a measely asteroid.
What good is a thermonuclear warhead, Mr Andersen, if you don't have any way to get it onto the target?
I've heard media reports of predictions of new computer technology of the future that will give us stable computers--they have no idea the *nix has been stable from day 1!!
Umm, on Day 1 Unix had no memory protection and ran one process at a time...;0)
Most career newsies I have ever met were Mac people, who loved stability, well-engineered applications that got the job done, and abhorred a command line.
Nah, they were just people who'd been told by Apple's marketing department that "creatives" used Macs, and that everyone using a PC was a dull drone. No, seriously, in terms of stability, MacOS before version X couldn't hold a candle to NT.
Macs are appliances for very specific tasks, like DTP and media editing, and just happen to have general computing capability. On the other hand, PCs are designed to be general purpose devices, which happen to be able to run some specialist software. That's the real difference between the two.
I find it ironic that many people who make thier living as professional communicators appear oblivious to things that shape the state of communication technology overall.
Why is it that everyone hates MS for being the majority OS vendor (the existance of Linux proves that despite their best attempts, they're not an absolute monopoly), whereas no-one seems to mind that Apple are a monopoly MacOS hardware vendor, and killed off all the cloners? Seems a bit of a double standard to me.
Why is this relevant? Because the majority of Windows stability problems originate in third party drivers (yes, it was an idiotic decision to run these in kernel space). Apple equipment evades most of this only because the vendor keeps a stranglehold on the platform.
What if brand new Levis were sold with hundreds of gaping holes, and you had painstakingly apply a dozen patches before you could wear them without your nuts hanging out.
Well, uhh, gee, I guess no-one here's ever had to recompile a kernel to get a device driver installed, huh?
Gotta love all the Red Hat I-booted-off-the-CD-look-Ma-I'm-running-Linux-woo! kids. You lot don't know how easy you've got it. When I was a young 'un...
The biggest cost sink in the government today is social security. Maybe we should kill that program eh?
I know that was meant to be a rhetorical question, but given that one cause of unemployment is lack of qualifications, in the medium to long term diverting welfare money into education does make a lot of sense.
To take it a step further, since education up until 18 is freely available, perhaps dropping out of school should reduce eligbility for state aid.
we need more money for education... well now you have a choice, either they can sell the code they have developed, or taxes can go up...
If NCSA hadn't been quite so... obstructive, the university probably have gotten a huge donation from Netscape Corporation at the height of the bubble, which if they were smart they'd have converted to cash money. The same's true for UCB and Cisco... probably many other situations too, where companies are spun off, or founded by graduates using intellectual property.
Universities aren't built to make money directly be releasing products per se. You can't even count degree-granting as such; your money buys you the right to attend classes and sit exams, not to pass them. Universities also earn money by conducting research for industry, but the nature of research is that it's open-ended and ongoing, more like a time-and-materials contract (like a consulancy) than a units-shipped model (like a games house).
Universities can make money in the private sector, but they way to do it isn't to imitate corporations. Taking equity in a spin off to exploit research funded by the university itself from an internal budget in return for facilities space is a proven model.
Finally, this scenario is different in the UK, where the majority of university funding comes from the taxpayer. The license attached to that code should make it free for use by UK citizens, but charge a fee to everyone else.
I mean, the public tore into them with a wrath usually reserved for child molesters and genocidal dictators.
IMHO, they deserved everything they got for their part in the demise of Looking Glass Studios. Thief was genuinely innovative, and Dire-Katana was always a disaster waiting to happen... only question was when, and how much it would cost. Looking Glass' only fault was that they thought that actually creating stuff was more important than buying ego-psycho advertising (the "Romero's Bitch" stuff).
Re:Xenophobia and pig headedness ?
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
But IMO as a Brit the real reason is that we hate the fact that someone else came up with a better idea. Personally I can't wait to use the Euro in the UK as then it will make getting a mortgage or a loan from A.N. Other country much easier and I can pick the rates in a much more competative way.
The problem with that argument is that the Euro makes no economic sense at all, it's a purely political decision. Look at Greece and Germany: one's economy is more about agriculture and tourism, ones is about manufacturing and heavy industry. Can a single monetary policy suit both?
Germany's unemployment is rising, and they are going into recession. What's the Bundesbank doing to help? Nothing, there is no Bundesbank any more! Low interest rates are fuelling inflation in Ireland (which is in trouble with the EU over its deficit) and Holland - where are their central banks? There aren't any!
What good does a low mortgage rate do you, Mr Andersen, if you don't have a job?
In Britain, we have a hard enough time setting an economic policy that even worked in both the North and South of England. Look at the events in Argentina, that is a graphic illustration of what happens when a weak currency is forced into alignment with a strong one.
The ECB is going to be faced with a choice sooner or later, a monetary policy that favors Germany and France (leading to rebellion in the South) or one which tries to compromise, leading to rebellion in the North. But we shall see.
We could steal a much bigger march as the strongest fish in the Euro.
That simply isn't true. For example, the UK has an independent voice at the IMF and World Bank - all 12 Euro nations share a single seat. The UK is the 4th largest economy in the world - no one suggests that Canada needs to merge with the US to survive, do they?
The Euro is a political tool for an eventual federal superstate. Whether you feel that would be a good or bad thing, you must at least admit it.
... that will cause the citizenry to vote out their government (or in this case, demand withdrawal from the EU).
You can't. It's not like Texas, who wrote the legal framework for seceding from the Union into their Constitution. The only thing that can get a country out of the EU is, quite literally, a revolution.
Living in a fucking HOTEL, because there's a network drop in your room?
Umm, "telco hotel" is what you call a facility that's like a colo (or Internet Data Center, if you're Exodus) but used for telephone switching rather than web hosting. The question was, could you live in one of these when the company that paid muchos dineros to fit it out went bankrupt?
The answer is probably not, at least not without a lot of work, probably more than is economical. These are big open spaces designed to be efficiently air conditioned, the "rooms" are cages so air can flow for that reason, the floors are raised for cabling, there's no plumbing. If might be cool to get all or maybe half of one for a "loft space", but you couldn't really break one up into apartments without getting rid of all the stuff that made it useful as a telco hotel in the first place.
Accenture [accenture.com] -- formerly Andersen Consulting -- reckon this will happen by 2007 [accenture.com]. It's worth a read... especially the links at the bottom talking about cultural pollution (not necessarily in a negative sense!)
They're not often wrong.
Tell that to all the employees they've laid off this year... Ass-enter is as much a smoke-and-mirrors outfit as you're likely to see...
Money is money... Every penny that you can save helps you out. Would you willingly through away $1,000 just because you were buying a house on the same day, and $1,000 is only a small percentage of the house? I think not.
There really are two classes of Internet citizens: those who have a fixed IP and can be information sources; and those who have dynamic IPs or are forbidden to run servers, and are pretty much restricted to being information sinks. Sure it's an oversimplification, but the vast majority of people on the Internet through home-connections, are second-class Internet citizens.
That's a vast oversimplification, tho'. What about all the dialup users who simply use their ISP's static IP addresses to host web sites? Most dialup providers give a few MB of web site space for free.
The fact that they are second class citizens is not a problem of the technology; rather it is a matter of the individuals involved choosing to participate or not.
Well duh... sorry, that sounds rather america-centric. Do you really expect everyone else to learn english so you don't have to learn anything else?
Actually, yes I do. English speakers, whether or not that was the mother tongue of all the individuals involved, after all, developed practically all the technology involved. English is the lingua franca of international commerce. Air traffic control and hotel concierges all over the world speak English. Engineers in many disciplines use English terminology, even if the rest of their communication is in their native language, and international academic journals are published in English. Esperanto was a nice idea (I even learnt basic conversation in it once) but English, with maybe French (which I speak, altho' not fluently) or Spanish for backup, is the de facto common tongue, and will enable you to travel or to business almost anywhere in the world. Remember that English is not a static language, it freely adopts words and phrases from other languages as required. It can be both precise and expressive, as required.
Maybe (relatively) few Chinese speak English, but relatively few Chinese even speak to non-Chinese at all. That country is not a cultural and linguistic "melting pot" like the US or UK, it is remarkably homogenous for such a large country. The question really is, will the Chinese become like us, or will they choose an isolationist policy? And don't forget, Chinese characters are available on computers at all because Western corporations decided that they should be - we are being as accomodating as we possibly can! If the Chinese want their own information infrastructure, they are free to create it for themselves - or they can choose to use ours, which we are making available freely. Why is America always the bad guy in cultural discussions?
Besides, there are purely technical reasons why English is a "better" language than Chinese for computing - look at the numbers of characters in the alphabets, for example. English words are distinct, Chinese ideograms are much more dependent on context and the interpretation of the listener.
With technology like this advancing along with moore's law I can see that it shouldn't be a few more years before it'll be commonplace to carry devices with GBs of data in your pocket.
It's almost then now. Ever watched a DVD on your laptop while you're sitting on a plane?
How much do you really think YOU need to carry?
That question can't be answered unless we can also make assumptions about how much portable bandwidth is available to download data on demand from a (reliable, secure, vast) storage/distribution facility (whether that's an ASP or your always-connected desktop PC) and cache it. Then, the answer is, the optimal size of the cache.
If a private sector company has been able to climb the steep hill that is quantum computing, how far has the US govt been able to get with their nearly unlimited budget?
IBM is no ordinary corporation - it's practically a country in its own right. Remember that two of the largest revolutions in computing (desktop PCs and relational databases) were things that IBM created, then couldn't exploit commercially, and they not only survived but thrived after two disasters like that. If anyone can do it, Intergalactic Battle Machines can...
Slashdot Mirror
What is the deal here. I can only find a coloum clearly marked Advertising. This has been done by UK sites for a while by the way. I feel sorry for Yahoo as I thought they were quite cool earlier on but now has pretty much nothing but "milk toast" to offer
The deal is, that from time to time, you'll click on a link but instead of being taken directly there, you will be taken to an ad page. After a short pause, the page will refresh itself, and actually be the news story that you want to read. But if you click on the ad page, it's like clicking a banner ad. It makes the web a bit more like TV advertising (which is what marketroids have been wanting to do for years, cos they understand TV a lot better) except that you don't know when it's going to happen. Lots of sites do this, even Reuters. Gotta make your money somewhere in these tough times for the dotcom scene.
The minister is (amongst other things) responsible for 'equality' and therefore pushes the plan to provide the less fortunate with a pc.
/. at least, I would have expected a little more skepticism of a proposal that would give a government complete and unrestricted access to the majority of its citizens email accounts and hard drives. Would you be willing to sell your freedoms for some shiny new consumer electronics?
This smells like a belated attempt to jump on the Internet bandwagon to me. Why don't citizens get equal automobiles issued to them at the voting age? Why aren't citizens assigned to identical housing units? Why don't citizens queue every week at the supermarket to collect their equal shopping baskets of goods?
I strongly recommend that anyone who favors the idea of spending so much money on computers read Silicon Snake Oil by Clifford Stoll. In this book, he presents a compelling argument that, in education, the money would far better be spent on hiring more and better teachers, and actually taking the kids to museums rather than sitting them down in front of PCs loaded with CDROM encylopaedias. And in business, computers aren't the productivity panacea that they're touted as.
And, on
My translation of the Dagbladet (norwegian newspaper) article. Spelling and gramatical errors are mine, factual errors are those of Dagbladet and the norwegian Police.
Doh! Now they'll be after you for abusing the intellectual property rights of Dagbladet!
When you purchase a DVD, you are paying for the ability to play it on players approved by the people who made the disc.
If that's true, and I subsequently damage the physical DVD in a way that's no-one's fault but my own, I should be able to get a replacement from the publisher for no more than the cost of the media, duplication and shipping. The fact that this isn't the case suggests that there's little legal precedent for your point.
Obviously, accidental damage may be covered by insurance, and a faulty DVD has to be replaced for no extra charge because it's not fit for the purpose for which it was sold.
The argument that you're paying for the right to listen to a piece of music too falls apart, because if that's what you'd bought, then everyone should have been able to upgrade from vinyl to CD for cost of media and distribution. That wasn't the case either.
So, the media conglomerates are trying to have their cake and eat it, selling you a piece of commodity property and a contractual obligation in one go. The free market is in the process of solving this by disintermediating them. It will just take a while to get the technology out there for musicians and fans to interact directly.
For example, require that if people have nothing to share that they agree to devote a small part of their disk space to cache popular files which automatically get placed there by the system.
I believe this is the approach adopted by Mojo Nation. Resources cost mojo to access, but you gain mojo by providing resources (CPU cycles, storage space, network bandwidth) that others are willing to pay mojo for, whether it is your own content, or caches. It scales nicely for provider bandwidth, and allocates storage in a distributed fashion, you say how much space you want to give it, but not what you want to store there. But it's not strictly anonymous, and they respect intellectual property rights.
The Register points out, there are now no proprietary unices being actively developed on x86.
Isn't Sequent Dynix/ptx still being developed?
It's x86 Jim, but not as we know it.
The Americans with Disabilities Act was designed to protect those people with disabilities that *severely* impair their ability to function day to day. To compare "pain and discomfort for several months" with, say, losing a leg, is more than insulting to those who are unfortunate enough to have a true disability and is a bastardization of the law's intended use.
I might agree with you, if US law didn't also favor the obese and drug addicts as "disabled".
A whole second program complete with it's own shuttles which made space runs to plant military satellites in orbit. There's a lot of very expensive & very powerful junk up there which uses classified technologies far in advance of what John Q. Private Sector is allowed to sell in his hard drives.
It would have to be pretty damn advanced if they were able to conceal shuttle re-entry... as in, beyond what's even theoretically possible according to the laws of physics as we understand them,
It was hypothesized that if one placed enough of these nukes in one spot, and detonated them simultaneously, one could knock the Earth of its axis.
If you placed enough custard powder in one place and detonated it simultaneously, one could knock the earth off its axis. What's your point?
The problem with shooting asteroids is that they're very small, in relation to space, which is very big. You have to hit them while they're a long way off and deflect their trajectories, rather than trying to shatter them, because the bits might still hit us. Note that we can't even target ICBMs particularly accurately here on Earth, so we rely on the fact that you can be a couple of miles off, but shockwaves, heat and radiation will do the damage anyway - and they won't if there's no atmosphere.
It should make short work of a measely asteroid.
What good is a thermonuclear warhead, Mr Andersen, if you don't have any way to get it onto the target?
I've heard media reports of predictions of new computer technology of the future that will give us stable computers--they have no idea the *nix has been stable from day 1!!
;0)
Umm, on Day 1 Unix had no memory protection and ran one process at a time...
Most career newsies I have ever met were Mac people, who loved stability, well-engineered applications that got the job done, and abhorred a command line.
Nah, they were just people who'd been told by Apple's marketing department that "creatives" used Macs, and that everyone using a PC was a dull drone. No, seriously, in terms of stability, MacOS before version X couldn't hold a candle to NT.
Macs are appliances for very specific tasks, like DTP and media editing, and just happen to have general computing capability. On the other hand, PCs are designed to be general purpose devices, which happen to be able to run some specialist software. That's the real difference between the two.
I find it ironic that many people who make thier living as professional communicators appear oblivious to things that shape the state of communication technology overall.
Why is it that everyone hates MS for being the majority OS vendor (the existance of Linux proves that despite their best attempts, they're not an absolute monopoly), whereas no-one seems to mind that Apple are a monopoly MacOS hardware vendor, and killed off all the cloners? Seems a bit of a double standard to me.
Why is this relevant? Because the majority of Windows stability problems originate in third party drivers (yes, it was an idiotic decision to run these in kernel space). Apple equipment evades most of this only because the vendor keeps a stranglehold on the platform.
What if brand new Levis were sold with hundreds of gaping holes, and you had painstakingly apply a dozen patches before you could wear them without your nuts hanging out.
! kids. You lot don't know how easy you've got it. When I was a young 'un...
Well, uhh, gee, I guess no-one here's ever had to recompile a kernel to get a device driver installed, huh?
Gotta love all the Red Hat I-booted-off-the-CD-look-Ma-I'm-running-Linux-woo
The biggest cost sink in the government today is social security. Maybe we should kill that program eh?
I know that was meant to be a rhetorical question, but given that one cause of unemployment is lack of qualifications, in the medium to long term diverting welfare money into education does make a lot of sense.
To take it a step further, since education up until 18 is freely available, perhaps dropping out of school should reduce eligbility for state aid.
we need more money for education... well now you have a choice, either they can sell the code they have developed, or taxes can go up...
If NCSA hadn't been quite so... obstructive, the university probably have gotten a huge donation from Netscape Corporation at the height of the bubble, which if they were smart they'd have converted to cash money. The same's true for UCB and Cisco... probably many other situations too, where companies are spun off, or founded by graduates using intellectual property.
Universities aren't built to make money directly be releasing products per se. You can't even count degree-granting as such; your money buys you the right to attend classes and sit exams, not to pass them. Universities also earn money by conducting research for industry, but the nature of research is that it's open-ended and ongoing, more like a time-and-materials contract (like a consulancy) than a units-shipped model (like a games house).
Universities can make money in the private sector, but they way to do it isn't to imitate corporations. Taking equity in a spin off to exploit research funded by the university itself from an internal budget in return for facilities space is a proven model.
Finally, this scenario is different in the UK, where the majority of university funding comes from the taxpayer. The license attached to that code should make it free for use by UK citizens, but charge a fee to everyone else.
I mean, the public tore into them with a wrath usually reserved for child molesters and genocidal dictators.
IMHO, they deserved everything they got for their part in the demise of Looking Glass Studios. Thief was genuinely innovative, and Dire-Katana was always a disaster waiting to happen... only question was when, and how much it would cost. Looking Glass' only fault was that they thought that actually creating stuff was more important than buying ego-psycho advertising (the "Romero's Bitch" stuff).
But IMO as a Brit the real reason is that we hate the fact that someone else came up with a better idea. Personally I can't wait to use the Euro in the UK as then it will make getting a mortgage or a loan from A.N. Other country much easier and I can pick the rates in a much more competative way.
The problem with that argument is that the Euro makes no economic sense at all, it's a purely political decision. Look at Greece and Germany: one's economy is more about agriculture and tourism, ones is about manufacturing and heavy industry. Can a single monetary policy suit both?
Germany's unemployment is rising, and they are going into recession. What's the Bundesbank doing to help? Nothing, there is no Bundesbank any more! Low interest rates are fuelling inflation in Ireland (which is in trouble with the EU over its deficit) and Holland - where are their central banks? There aren't any!
What good does a low mortgage rate do you, Mr Andersen, if you don't have a job?
In Britain, we have a hard enough time setting an economic policy that even worked in both the North and South of England. Look at the events in Argentina, that is a graphic illustration of what happens when a weak currency is forced into alignment with a strong one.
The ECB is going to be faced with a choice sooner or later, a monetary policy that favors Germany and France (leading to rebellion in the South) or one which tries to compromise, leading to rebellion in the North. But we shall see.
We could steal a much bigger march as the strongest fish in the Euro.
That simply isn't true. For example, the UK has an independent voice at the IMF and World Bank - all 12 Euro nations share a single seat. The UK is the 4th largest economy in the world - no one suggests that Canada needs to merge with the US to survive, do they?
The Euro is a political tool for an eventual federal superstate. Whether you feel that would be a good or bad thing, you must at least admit it.
... that will cause the citizenry to vote out their government (or in this case, demand withdrawal from the EU).
You can't. It's not like Texas, who wrote the legal framework for seceding from the Union into their Constitution. The only thing that can get a country out of the EU is, quite literally, a revolution.
Living in a fucking HOTEL, because there's a network drop in your room?
Umm, "telco hotel" is what you call a facility that's like a colo (or Internet Data Center, if you're Exodus) but used for telephone switching rather than web hosting. The question was, could you live in one of these when the company that paid muchos dineros to fit it out went bankrupt?
The answer is probably not, at least not without a lot of work, probably more than is economical. These are big open spaces designed to be efficiently air conditioned, the "rooms" are cages so air can flow for that reason, the floors are raised for cabling, there's no plumbing. If might be cool to get all or maybe half of one for a "loft space", but you couldn't really break one up into apartments without getting rid of all the stuff that made it useful as a telco hotel in the first place.
I agree with you, but i find it kinda funny that you use a Latin phrase meaning "French language" to illustrate your point that English is top dog.
:0)
I was setting up the bit where I say that English makes a good international language because it freely adopts words from foreign languages
Accenture [accenture.com] -- formerly Andersen Consulting -- reckon this will happen by 2007 [accenture.com]. It's worth a read... especially the links at the bottom talking about cultural pollution (not necessarily in a negative sense!)
They're not often wrong.
Tell that to all the employees they've laid off this year... Ass-enter is as much a smoke-and-mirrors outfit as you're likely to see...
Money is money... Every penny that you can save helps you out. Would you willingly through away $1,000 just because you were buying a house on the same day, and $1,000 is only a small percentage of the house? I think not.
Surely if you buy a Sun, you get Solaris too?
There really are two classes of Internet citizens: those who have a fixed IP and can be information sources; and those who have dynamic IPs or are forbidden to run servers, and are pretty much restricted to being information sinks. Sure it's an oversimplification, but the vast majority of people on the Internet through home-connections, are second-class Internet citizens.
That's a vast oversimplification, tho'. What about all the dialup users who simply use their ISP's static IP addresses to host web sites? Most dialup providers give a few MB of web site space for free.
The fact that they are second class citizens is not a problem of the technology; rather it is a matter of the individuals involved choosing to participate or not.
Well duh... sorry, that sounds rather america-centric. Do you really expect everyone else to learn english so you don't have to learn anything else?
Actually, yes I do. English speakers, whether or not that was the mother tongue of all the individuals involved, after all, developed practically all the technology involved. English is the lingua franca of international commerce. Air traffic control and hotel concierges all over the world speak English. Engineers in many disciplines use English terminology, even if the rest of their communication is in their native language, and international academic journals are published in English. Esperanto was a nice idea (I even learnt basic conversation in it once) but English, with maybe French (which I speak, altho' not fluently) or Spanish for backup, is the de facto common tongue, and will enable you to travel or to business almost anywhere in the world. Remember that English is not a static language, it freely adopts words and phrases from other languages as required. It can be both precise and expressive, as required.
Maybe (relatively) few Chinese speak English, but relatively few Chinese even speak to non-Chinese at all. That country is not a cultural and linguistic "melting pot" like the US or UK, it is remarkably homogenous for such a large country. The question really is, will the Chinese become like us, or will they choose an isolationist policy? And don't forget, Chinese characters are available on computers at all because Western corporations decided that they should be - we are being as accomodating as we possibly can! If the Chinese want their own information infrastructure, they are free to create it for themselves - or they can choose to use ours, which we are making available freely. Why is America always the bad guy in cultural discussions?
Besides, there are purely technical reasons why English is a "better" language than Chinese for computing - look at the numbers of characters in the alphabets, for example. English words are distinct, Chinese ideograms are much more dependent on context and the interpretation of the listener.
With technology like this advancing along with moore's law I can see that it shouldn't be a few more years before it'll be commonplace to carry devices with GBs of data in your pocket.
It's almost then now. Ever watched a DVD on your laptop while you're sitting on a plane?
How much do you really think YOU need to carry?
That question can't be answered unless we can also make assumptions about how much portable bandwidth is available to download data on demand from a (reliable, secure, vast) storage/distribution facility (whether that's an ASP or your always-connected desktop PC) and cache it. Then, the answer is, the optimal size of the cache.
If a private sector company has been able to climb the steep hill that is quantum computing, how far has the US govt been able to get with their nearly unlimited budget?
IBM is no ordinary corporation - it's practically a country in its own right. Remember that two of the largest revolutions in computing (desktop PCs and relational databases) were things that IBM created, then couldn't exploit commercially, and they not only survived but thrived after two disasters like that. If anyone can do it, Intergalactic Battle Machines can...