Oh that's easy to take care of. They'll just blow the air horn every now and then. By comparison, the roaring diesels will sound like the soft purr of a kitten.
Sorry, I just got back from San Diego where the trains come right past the nice hotels and blow their horns at 1 AM, or 2 AM, or even 3 AM. WHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!. WHAA WHAA WHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAHH!!! Man, I can't imagine some folks pay a million bucks literally to sleep next to that crap. But I digress...
If you don't think you have the ability to manage your own money, you would be free to continue to fling it into the current Ponzi scheme
I'm confused. Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme? Or is the stock market? While SS in many ways resembles a Ponzi scheme, it's been a remarkably sustainable one. On the other hand, hindsight has revealed that many Internet stocks not only resembled Ponzi schemes, but collapsed in short term screwing all but the early investors exactly as a Ponzi scheme should. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it promises huge returns, relies on an unsustainable number of new investors, and screws everyone but the top level, it's a Ponzi scheme. Good old fashioned Blue Chip stocks are fairly reliable. But a lot of the crap that the stock market has gotten away with over the last five years is just plain fraud.
i enjoy seeing them (the unsavory executives) personally fail
Except that the exec's rarely if ever "fail" by any common sense standard. They almost never end up in jail (where they belong), and invariably walk away with more money then you, me, and a hundred of our best friends will make in a lifetime. If failure is a bum resume and ten million bucks in the bank, I'll take that over a nice resume and a mortgage any day.
You are assuming that they were ever engaging in legitimate business practices. From outward appearances, the entire firm might have been no more than a bunch of con-men lawyers who figured out how to game the patent system.
Also, take a look at their stock price over the past two years. It takes a lot of revenue growth to make up for your stock price dropping from ~$126 to ~$6. And that was before the FTC investigation. Now it's down to ~$4. Ouch. I wonder if anyone will buy their near worthless patents at the bankruptcy?
You said: his administration is hesitant to interfere with market forces, which is patently false. The Bush administration, as was shown by example, has no problem with "interfering with market forces". If you think pointing this out is attacking a straw man, I suggest you stop building your arguments out of straw.
Eh, that's an overstatement. Lot's of people have gotten their AR film on perfectly, myself included. I'll admit that it might be easy to screw up, but it's far from next to impossible. To be honest, I was a little suprised. I've put WriteRight protectors on the front of my GBA in the past to protect it against scratches, and I never once got one of them to go on bubble-free. But I can honestly say I got the AR film on perfectly the first time. Go figure.
It claims to get 10 hours gameplay with the light on, which isn't bad in the slightest.
I haven't run any scientific tests, but the battery life seems pretty good with the Afterburner installed. However, I also switched to NiMH's at about the same time as I installed my AB so I can't say how much it dropped by. I probably get 6-8 hours out of a pair of 1800mAH batteries. Which is fine, since it's easy to carry around a spare pair. The light itself is just two surface-mount white LED's, so it probably isn't drawing more than 20mA tops. It's not like you can cram a couple of incandescent lights, or a CCF tube into a GBA easily.
The Afterburner is a great product...as long as you are not the one to install it.
I'll agree with the first part. I love my afterburner. The second part, well, that depends on the person. Myself, I had no problems installing it at all. I spent maybe an hour and a half one night modding my GBA case to make room the the light and the dimmer. Maybe another hour and a half the next night getting the soldering done, installing the dimmer, and finishing everything up. It plays great. Everybody I've shown it to thinks it looks great. Especially people who have stock GBA's.
If you really have no experience soldering (I don't have much myself) and no experience with a dremel, having it installed probably isn't a bad idea. But if you have even moderate skills and patience, you should be able to do it without any problems.
That's my guess too. If there was a way for white or black to force a win on the other, I'm sure somebody would have figured out how to do it by now. Chess is so well balanced, it's unlikely that a guaranteed win by one side is the final outcome.
Also, think of the draw outcome as being that you can play a 'perfect' game such that you will never lose. You (probably) won't win either. But forcing your opponent into a draw seems much easier than forcing them into a win. Especially if you plan for a draw from the first move. Such a 'perfect' game could easily lie undiscovered for centuries simply because nobody tries to play to a draw from the very beginning! I have no doubt that such a strategy would result in a rather undramatic game. Especially if both sides were going for a draw. I'm pretty certain that we will eventually find that the 'perfect' chess game has no winners, no losers, and is perfectly boring.
Or do you regularly donate money directly to the artists whose music you download?
Actually, no I don't. I also almost never download music because for me it has almost no value. Basically 100% of the tunes in on my jukebox are ripped myself from CD's I've purchased (usually used.) I pay real money, and I get a real asset in return. Downloaded music is so ephemeral and often of such low quality that it's not even worth my time to bother finding, much less worth money.
If somebody was providing a quality online music service, I might consider it worth paying for. But they would need to be providing an actual service. Which means a large and easy to navigate catalog, so it's easier to find stuff than on P2P. It also means quality files (NOT 128Kbps MP3s) so they are worth downloading. And it also means tracking my purchases so that I can re-download anything I've paid for in the past in case I lose it. In this case, the service provider would be giving me a real service to me personally. Both in providing a well-connected server for me to download from, and by providing "insurance" against lost or corrupted files.
I don't buy the argument that I owe somebody money because I enjoy something. If they haven't done something for me personally, I don't think I owe them a thing. Do I owe my neighbors because I enjoy looking at their well-manicured lawns? Do I owe the birds because I enjoy hearing them sing? Do I owe a pretty lady I like watching walk down the street? Do I owe God because I like looking at the mountains? Do I owe Sprint because I like watching their cell phone ads? What makes a musician so special?
This is a total non-sequitor. If I have an investment banker, they get paid when they buy, sell, or recommend stock to me. They get paid for the services they provide me. Same thing with an advertising agency. They get paid to create ads for my specific product. Not to create a single generic ad that they sell to everybody. In all of your examples, the services are by necessity personalized. When I pay a broker, or a investment banker, or an ad agency, they are doing some specific work for me. Hence it's fine that they get paid. There is no "shrink wrap" market for any of these services because it doesn't make sense. My argument is that it doesn't make sense for musicians either. I should pay them for performing for me, and any pre-recorded music should just be considered an advertisement for that service. I mean really, why should I pay for the right to have a Jimi Hendrix song on my hard drive? None of the people I would pay money to had a damn thing to do with creating that music. They are getting paid for nothing. Nada. Zilch. If you think that's so cool, could you please send me some money for doing nothing?
The spare parts cost more. If you take your car apart, and sold the parts, they would be worth more than the car. People don't do this because it's too labor intensive, and most folks don't like used parts all that much. So to turn it around, if you bought all the spare parts you would need to build a car, it would cost more for the part alone than the whole car.
Which is just like with a PC and Windows. The PC and Windows are worth more apart than together, due to the steep discounts on OEM versions of Windows. But auto manufacturers can't stop you from parting out your car. Why is M$ allowed to stop you from parting out your PC? I should be able to buy a Dell, put Linux on it, and sell the new copy of WinXP for whatever I can get. Just like I can buy a new Ford, put in an Alpine stereo, and sell the OEM stereo.
I've always believed that the future of music was in Live music, i.e. performers must play to get paid.
There's a radical idea. Getting paid for doing something. Rather than getting paid to do nothing. This whole notion that I should have to pay somebody again and again for work that they did once will eventually have to go away.
At least in the case of buying a CD, the distributor did something for me personally. Sure, they didn't know I would be the one to buy that CD. But they had to expend both labor and materials to make that particular CD that I bought. So there is actually some exchange of real value in both directions.
But if I download a song on a P2P, the copyright holders have done absolutely nothing for me personally. They didn't write the music for me. They didn't perform it for me. And they didn't even have to make the copy for me. They did jack shit. Why should they get paid?
Musicians should get paid for providing a service just like everybody else. If you work hard, you can make good money as a live performer. Especially if you don't let the record labels steal it all. On the same note, programmers should get paid to write software. Not to just sit around and sell the same software over and over again.Personally, I have no problem with watching the entire shrink-wrap music and software business go away entirely. To anybody who insists that they should keep getting paid after they stop working, I say "Screw you. Get a real job."
I wonder if a TDR or leakage sweep would find the unburied and ripped cable feed in my garden after I roto-tilled this spring? As a non-cable subscriber I could care less if my cable works. But I would hate for them to come and try to sue me for the cost of fixing the cable.:-)
Re:Star Wars creamed the spin-offs from day one.
on
The Empire Stumbles
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· Score: 2
So don't tell me he's selling out now. It may be even bigger and brasher this time round
Also don't forget that the spin-offs and marketing were slashed for AotC. The marketing for TPM got completely out of control, and really turned off a lot of people. It also completely saturated the market. Lucas got raked over the coals for letting it happen, and there is still a shitload of TPM merchandise sitting in warehouses (if it hasn't progressed to the landfill yet.) Newsweek had an article a few weeks back about what had been done to try to correct the mistakes of TPM when they made and released AotC. Massive cuts in the amount of marketing and merchandising were like the #1 change.
So yeah, I agree Katz is totally off the mark on this one. Quote he could have chosen at least somewhat of a classier route and put some limits on the marketing that now engulfs big movies. Instead he acted like Jabba the Hutt, gorging on every dollar he could get. Which is telling given that Lucas did in fact put limits on the marketing after the travesty of TPM. Where the hell has Katz been? Maybe he should spend less time bagging on "old" media and more time reading some of it. The reduced marketing was widely reported, as well as being blatently obvious to anybody who remembers TPM.
The land speed record is not how fast your network is in aggregate. It's how fast and how far you can push a single pair of hosts using TCP. How fast the backbone links are on CANet is entirely irrelevant. Lot's of big providers have links running at OC-12 or OC-48, both of which are faster than 400Mbps. Abilene itself routinely runs links at over 400Mbps 24/7. Check out the graphs
But how fast an aggregate link is isn't the point. It's how fast you can send data from one computer to another. If you've ever actually tried to send data at over 100Mbps on the WAN, you would know how hard it is. To get 400Mbps requires the link to not only be fast enough, but to have essentially zero loss. And to get several networks that are that clean, especially to Europe, is pretty amazing. If you don't believe me, try sending a CD's worth of data across your room at that speed. Never mind sending it across the Atlantic Ocean.
No doubt. That $149 price tag on the GC is looking pretty darn affordable. As long as I don't ruin my GBA trying to install my afterburner when it arrives:-o And I can convince my wife that yes, I would eventually emerge from Luigi's Mansion...
It means an end to cheaper faster computing power - and that means an end to expansion of the embedded sphere and the increasing use of computing power in business.
You're conclusions don't follow at all. If something happens and it becomes impossible to ramp up the clock speed, that doesn't mean chips won't get cheaper. If a fab can use a given process for say five years instead of the two or so years they can now, costs will go down. The R&D and fab's construction costs can be amortized over more time which should lead to real cost reductions.
If anything it will be a boon to embedded stuff as chips should be both cheaper and have more stable designs. Both good traits for embedded. As for hardware not getting any "faster", I don't think that will be a problem either. There are numerous ways to improved the performance of chips without changing a specific manufacturing process. Improved branch prediction. Improved cache controllers. Wider busses. Multi-core chips. While speed improvements might slow down, they wouldn't stop. The focus would just change from brute-force clock increases to better architectural designs.
Programmers won't be out of jobs either. Well, the less skilled ones might be. Because there is an unbelievable amount of room for improvement in the software industry. A lot of code out there today is crap which is only acceptable because of the huge improvements in clockspeed and memory density. If clockspeed's stop advancing, improving the software will be one of more effective means of increasing the performance of a given system. By the logic of what do we need you for - we have all the word processors we need, we should all be out of jobs because let's be honest, we had all the word processors we need about a decade ago.
I'm not an RF expert, but I'll tell you why I personally don't worry. The 2.4GHz band was set aside as an ISM band precisely because it is very well absorbed by water. Which is how a microwave oven works. The several hundred watts of microwaves emitted inside of the oven will bounce off the metal walls until they get absorbed by something. Usually this is your food. Or more accurately, the water in the food. Which is why it heats it up so well.
You don't want to be around the output of a microwave oven for precisely the same reason you don't want to stick your hand on the stove when it's on. You'll get burnt, plain and simple. With microwaves, you could actually get burnt on the inside. Most internal organs don't like extra heat. Witness how little of a fever you have to have before it becomes life threatening.
Now, back to wireless devices. The power output of your typical 802.11b device is between 30mW and 100mW. A typical microwave oven will produce up to 1000W of power. 10,000 times the power of your wireless card. Can the output of your wireless card or phone heat up your head? Of course. Will it heat it up enough to matter? Not likely.
Buy a cheapie inkjet for the occasional color print you need.
My experience is that if you let these things sit without making a print for a month or two, the cartridge is screwed up from dried out ink. At least that's the case with my Epson. Lately, it's completely flaked out and won't print at all. When I replace it, I'm going for a laser printer. At least it won't make me buy a new toner cartridge every three months whether I need it or not. Inkjet must me a good deal for somebody, but it's useless for me.
Yeah, I don't know either. I work with 802.11b stuff a fair amount, but I'm no R/F engineer. Still, I can't help but imagine this becoming an all to common occurence:
D: Greetings, Dell tech support.
A: Hi, this new desktop you sold me is junk.
D: What model is it?
A: The new 2.4GHz P4, with the integrated wireless ethernet and wireless bluetooth keyboard.
D: And what seems to be the problem?
A: Every time I try to make a call on my 2.4GHz cordless phone, the computer crashes! And when I surf the web, my phone rings! And everything I type is ending up in my Palm's ToDo list! Then while I was upstairs heating my coffee in the microwave, it caught on fire!
I mean really, how much stuff can we possibly cram into the 2.4GHz band anyway? Interesting times anyway.
The real fun won't hit until 2.4GHz memory busses come along. Only having the CPU core run at 2.4GHz is like having a radio with no antenna. But get a couple inch long PCB trace with a 2.4GHz signal on it, and things get more interesting.
On the same note, the VGA output nowadays is fast enough to generate AM broadcasts. Or so I'm told. I've never tried it personally.
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Oh that's easy to take care of. They'll just blow the air horn every now and then. By comparison, the roaring diesels will sound like the soft purr of a kitten.
Sorry, I just got back from San Diego where the trains come right past the nice hotels and blow their horns at 1 AM, or 2 AM, or even 3 AM. WHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!. WHAA WHAA WHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAHH!!! Man, I can't imagine some folks pay a million bucks literally to sleep next to that crap. But I digress...
If you don't think you have the ability to manage your own money, you would be free to continue to fling it into the current Ponzi scheme
I'm confused. Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme? Or is the stock market? While SS in many ways resembles a Ponzi scheme, it's been a remarkably sustainable one. On the other hand, hindsight has revealed that many Internet stocks not only resembled Ponzi schemes, but collapsed in short term screwing all but the early investors exactly as a Ponzi scheme should. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it promises huge returns, relies on an unsustainable number of new investors, and screws everyone but the top level, it's a Ponzi scheme. Good old fashioned Blue Chip stocks are fairly reliable. But a lot of the crap that the stock market has gotten away with over the last five years is just plain fraud.
i enjoy seeing them (the unsavory executives) personally fail
Except that the exec's rarely if ever "fail" by any common sense standard. They almost never end up in jail (where they belong), and invariably walk away with more money then you, me, and a hundred of our best friends will make in a lifetime. If failure is a bum resume and ten million bucks in the bank, I'll take that over a nice resume and a mortgage any day.
You are assuming that they were ever engaging in legitimate business practices. From outward appearances, the entire firm might have been no more than a bunch of con-men lawyers who figured out how to game the patent system.
Also, take a look at their stock price over the past two years. It takes a lot of revenue growth to make up for your stock price dropping from ~$126 to ~$6. And that was before the FTC investigation. Now it's down to ~$4. Ouch. I wonder if anyone will buy their near worthless patents at the bankruptcy?
You said: his administration is hesitant to interfere with market forces, which is patently false. The Bush administration, as was shown by example, has no problem with "interfering with market forces". If you think pointing this out is attacking a straw man, I suggest you stop building your arguments out of straw.
Republicans may not be any more honest, but at least when they're bought, they have the good grace to stay bought.
Yeah, tell that to Kenny Boy. I'm sure he appreciated having Bush turn a deaf ear when he cried out for help.
Eh, that's an overstatement. Lot's of people have gotten their AR film on perfectly, myself included. I'll admit that it might be easy to screw up, but it's far from next to impossible. To be honest, I was a little suprised. I've put WriteRight protectors on the front of my GBA in the past to protect it against scratches, and I never once got one of them to go on bubble-free. But I can honestly say I got the AR film on perfectly the first time. Go figure.
It claims to get 10 hours gameplay with the light on, which isn't bad in the slightest.
I haven't run any scientific tests, but the battery life seems pretty good with the Afterburner installed. However, I also switched to NiMH's at about the same time as I installed my AB so I can't say how much it dropped by. I probably get 6-8 hours out of a pair of 1800mAH batteries. Which is fine, since it's easy to carry around a spare pair. The light itself is just two surface-mount white LED's, so it probably isn't drawing more than 20mA tops. It's not like you can cram a couple of incandescent lights, or a CCF tube into a GBA easily.
The Afterburner is a great product...as long as you are not the one to install it.
I'll agree with the first part. I love my afterburner. The second part, well, that depends on the person. Myself, I had no problems installing it at all. I spent maybe an hour and a half one night modding my GBA case to make room the the light and the dimmer. Maybe another hour and a half the next night getting the soldering done, installing the dimmer, and finishing everything up. It plays great. Everybody I've shown it to thinks it looks great. Especially people who have stock GBA's.
If you really have no experience soldering (I don't have much myself) and no experience with a dremel, having it installed probably isn't a bad idea. But if you have even moderate skills and patience, you should be able to do it without any problems.
That's my guess too. If there was a way for white or black to force a win on the other, I'm sure somebody would have figured out how to do it by now. Chess is so well balanced, it's unlikely that a guaranteed win by one side is the final outcome.
Also, think of the draw outcome as being that you can play a 'perfect' game such that you will never lose. You (probably) won't win either. But forcing your opponent into a draw seems much easier than forcing them into a win. Especially if you plan for a draw from the first move. Such a 'perfect' game could easily lie undiscovered for centuries simply because nobody tries to play to a draw from the very beginning! I have no doubt that such a strategy would result in a rather undramatic game. Especially if both sides were going for a draw. I'm pretty certain that we will eventually find that the 'perfect' chess game has no winners, no losers, and is perfectly boring.
Or do you regularly donate money directly to the artists whose music you download?
Actually, no I don't. I also almost never download music because for me it has almost no value. Basically 100% of the tunes in on my jukebox are ripped myself from CD's I've purchased (usually used.) I pay real money, and I get a real asset in return. Downloaded music is so ephemeral and often of such low quality that it's not even worth my time to bother finding, much less worth money.
If somebody was providing a quality online music service, I might consider it worth paying for. But they would need to be providing an actual service. Which means a large and easy to navigate catalog, so it's easier to find stuff than on P2P. It also means quality files (NOT 128Kbps MP3s) so they are worth downloading. And it also means tracking my purchases so that I can re-download anything I've paid for in the past in case I lose it. In this case, the service provider would be giving me a real service to me personally. Both in providing a well-connected server for me to download from, and by providing "insurance" against lost or corrupted files.
I don't buy the argument that I owe somebody money because I enjoy something. If they haven't done something for me personally, I don't think I owe them a thing. Do I owe my neighbors because I enjoy looking at their well-manicured lawns? Do I owe the birds because I enjoy hearing them sing? Do I owe a pretty lady I like watching walk down the street? Do I owe God because I like looking at the mountains? Do I owe Sprint because I like watching their cell phone ads? What makes a musician so special?
This is a total non-sequitor. If I have an investment banker, they get paid when they buy, sell, or recommend stock to me. They get paid for the services they provide me. Same thing with an advertising agency. They get paid to create ads for my specific product. Not to create a single generic ad that they sell to everybody. In all of your examples, the services are by necessity personalized. When I pay a broker, or a investment banker, or an ad agency, they are doing some specific work for me. Hence it's fine that they get paid. There is no "shrink wrap" market for any of these services because it doesn't make sense. My argument is that it doesn't make sense for musicians either. I should pay them for performing for me, and any pre-recorded music should just be considered an advertisement for that service. I mean really, why should I pay for the right to have a Jimi Hendrix song on my hard drive? None of the people I would pay money to had a damn thing to do with creating that music. They are getting paid for nothing. Nada. Zilch. If you think that's so cool, could you please send me some money for doing nothing?
The spare parts cost more. If you take your car apart, and sold the parts, they would be worth more than the car. People don't do this because it's too labor intensive, and most folks don't like used parts all that much. So to turn it around, if you bought all the spare parts you would need to build a car, it would cost more for the part alone than the whole car.
Which is just like with a PC and Windows. The PC and Windows are worth more apart than together, due to the steep discounts on OEM versions of Windows. But auto manufacturers can't stop you from parting out your car. Why is M$ allowed to stop you from parting out your PC? I should be able to buy a Dell, put Linux on it, and sell the new copy of WinXP for whatever I can get. Just like I can buy a new Ford, put in an Alpine stereo, and sell the OEM stereo.
I've always believed that the future of music was in Live music, i.e. performers must play to get paid.
There's a radical idea. Getting paid for doing something. Rather than getting paid to do nothing. This whole notion that I should have to pay somebody again and again for work that they did once will eventually have to go away.
At least in the case of buying a CD, the distributor did something for me personally. Sure, they didn't know I would be the one to buy that CD. But they had to expend both labor and materials to make that particular CD that I bought. So there is actually some exchange of real value in both directions.
But if I download a song on a P2P, the copyright holders have done absolutely nothing for me personally. They didn't write the music for me. They didn't perform it for me. And they didn't even have to make the copy for me. They did jack shit. Why should they get paid?
Musicians should get paid for providing a service just like everybody else. If you work hard, you can make good money as a live performer. Especially if you don't let the record labels steal it all. On the same note, programmers should get paid to write software. Not to just sit around and sell the same software over and over again.Personally, I have no problem with watching the entire shrink-wrap music and software business go away entirely. To anybody who insists that they should keep getting paid after they stop working, I say "Screw you. Get a real job."
I wonder if a TDR or leakage sweep would find the unburied and ripped cable feed in my garden after I roto-tilled this spring? As a non-cable subscriber I could care less if my cable works. But I would hate for them to come and try to sue me for the cost of fixing the cable. :-)
So don't tell me he's selling out now. It may be even bigger and brasher this time round
Also don't forget that the spin-offs and marketing were slashed for AotC. The marketing for TPM got completely out of control, and really turned off a lot of people. It also completely saturated the market. Lucas got raked over the coals for letting it happen, and there is still a shitload of TPM merchandise sitting in warehouses (if it hasn't progressed to the landfill yet.) Newsweek had an article a few weeks back about what had been done to try to correct the mistakes of TPM when they made and released AotC. Massive cuts in the amount of marketing and merchandising were like the #1 change.
So yeah, I agree Katz is totally off the mark on this one. Quote he could have chosen at least somewhat of a classier route and put some limits on the marketing that now engulfs big movies. Instead he acted like Jabba the Hutt, gorging on every dollar he could get. Which is telling given that Lucas did in fact put limits on the marketing after the travesty of TPM. Where the hell has Katz been? Maybe he should spend less time bagging on "old" media and more time reading some of it. The reduced marketing was widely reported, as well as being blatently obvious to anybody who remembers TPM.
The land speed record is not how fast your network is in aggregate. It's how fast and how far you can push a single pair of hosts using TCP. How fast the backbone links are on CANet is entirely irrelevant. Lot's of big providers have links running at OC-12 or OC-48, both of which are faster than 400Mbps. Abilene itself routinely runs links at over 400Mbps 24/7. Check out the graphs
But how fast an aggregate link is isn't the point. It's how fast you can send data from one computer to another. If you've ever actually tried to send data at over 100Mbps on the WAN, you would know how hard it is. To get 400Mbps requires the link to not only be fast enough, but to have essentially zero loss. And to get several networks that are that clean, especially to Europe, is pretty amazing. If you don't believe me, try sending a CD's worth of data across your room at that speed. Never mind sending it across the Atlantic Ocean.
No doubt. That $149 price tag on the GC is looking pretty darn affordable. As long as I don't ruin my GBA trying to install my afterburner when it arrives :-o And I can convince my wife that yes, I would eventually emerge from Luigi's Mansion...
It means an end to cheaper faster computing power - and that means an end to expansion of the embedded sphere and the increasing use of computing power in business.
You're conclusions don't follow at all. If something happens and it becomes impossible to ramp up the clock speed, that doesn't mean chips won't get cheaper. If a fab can use a given process for say five years instead of the two or so years they can now, costs will go down. The R&D and fab's construction costs can be amortized over more time which should lead to real cost reductions.
If anything it will be a boon to embedded stuff as chips should be both cheaper and have more stable designs. Both good traits for embedded. As for hardware not getting any "faster", I don't think that will be a problem either. There are numerous ways to improved the performance of chips without changing a specific manufacturing process. Improved branch prediction. Improved cache controllers. Wider busses. Multi-core chips. While speed improvements might slow down, they wouldn't stop. The focus would just change from brute-force clock increases to better architectural designs.
Programmers won't be out of jobs either. Well, the less skilled ones might be. Because there is an unbelievable amount of room for improvement in the software industry. A lot of code out there today is crap which is only acceptable because of the huge improvements in clockspeed and memory density. If clockspeed's stop advancing, improving the software will be one of more effective means of increasing the performance of a given system. By the logic of what do we need you for - we have all the word processors we need, we should all be out of jobs because let's be honest, we had all the word processors we need about a decade ago.
Once Blizzard employees stop using up all the bandwidth for P2P apps, perhaps BattleNet will get the bandwidth it needs.
I'm not an RF expert, but I'll tell you why I personally don't worry. The 2.4GHz band was set aside as an ISM band precisely because it is very well absorbed by water. Which is how a microwave oven works. The several hundred watts of microwaves emitted inside of the oven will bounce off the metal walls until they get absorbed by something. Usually this is your food. Or more accurately, the water in the food. Which is why it heats it up so well.
You don't want to be around the output of a microwave oven for precisely the same reason you don't want to stick your hand on the stove when it's on. You'll get burnt, plain and simple. With microwaves, you could actually get burnt on the inside. Most internal organs don't like extra heat. Witness how little of a fever you have to have before it becomes life threatening.
Now, back to wireless devices. The power output of your typical 802.11b device is between 30mW and 100mW. A typical microwave oven will produce up to 1000W of power. 10,000 times the power of your wireless card. Can the output of your wireless card or phone heat up your head? Of course. Will it heat it up enough to matter? Not likely.
I paid $25,000 to your campaign, and I want my $95M in revenues, dammit!"
Ya know, it doesn't suprise me that much that politicians are for sale. But I never cease to be amazed at how low their prices seem to be.
Buy a cheapie inkjet for the occasional color print you need.
My experience is that if you let these things sit without making a print for a month or two, the cartridge is screwed up from dried out ink. At least that's the case with my Epson. Lately, it's completely flaked out and won't print at all. When I replace it, I'm going for a laser printer. At least it won't make me buy a new toner cartridge every three months whether I need it or not. Inkjet must me a good deal for somebody, but it's useless for me.
Yeah, I don't know either. I work with 802.11b stuff a fair amount, but I'm no R/F engineer. Still, I can't help but imagine this becoming an all to common occurence:
D: Greetings, Dell tech support.
A: Hi, this new desktop you sold me is junk.
D: What model is it?
A: The new 2.4GHz P4, with the integrated wireless ethernet and wireless bluetooth keyboard.
D: And what seems to be the problem?
A: Every time I try to make a call on my 2.4GHz cordless phone, the computer crashes! And when I surf the web, my phone rings! And everything I type is ending up in my Palm's ToDo list! Then while I was upstairs heating my coffee in the microwave, it caught on fire!
I mean really, how much stuff can we possibly cram into the 2.4GHz band anyway? Interesting times anyway.
The real fun won't hit until 2.4GHz memory busses come along. Only having the CPU core run at 2.4GHz is like having a radio with no antenna. But get a couple inch long PCB trace with a 2.4GHz signal on it, and things get more interesting.
On the same note, the VGA output nowadays is fast enough to generate AM broadcasts. Or so I'm told. I've never tried it personally.