In the earlier days of the Internet in Pakistan, say 1996, the connection cost Rs70 per hour. In fact the first connection was from Paknet, the govt ISP.
Their connection was like a BBS system, where you'd dial into a BBS, and see the Linux 1.3.x kernel. You'd get a curses menu and seleced lynx to browse the net.
You could also select another option after which you could close the telnet window and use IE or netscape 3.0 through ppp.
Turns out, they were using a gigantic NAT, whereby everyone in Pakistan was channeled through a single IP address. Everyone knew that IP address, which was blocked by many IRC servers like the Dalnet. The customers must've been less than 65535 to fit at any time I imagine.
You'd have to try dialling MANY times to get a connection. At one time, we crossed the 100th attempt to dial to read a single email.
And boy was hotmail slow.
In the telnet menu, you could also drop yourself into a shell, which was my first brush with UNIX. All we knew was ls and cd (dont know how we learnt those, possibly from trial and error). We copied/etc/passwd, which was plaintext and humungous. The passwords were a simple MD5 hashes and didnt take more than a cracking script with words like 'pakistan' 'sex' 'fuck' 'god' 'allah' 'cricket' and common names like Ali to produce a significant list of passwords.
Now why would you run a whole country on a Linux server with kernel 1.3.x with bad security? It is amazing that even in beta, Linux held up well enough to run the country of Pakistan's internet connection. After all who could afford a cisco over there? Or even multiple IP addresses?
Here in Canada, businesses are commonly provided with 64 IP address blocks by Bell and Telus, even if they really need one.
Its free and its for directing a domain name to your changing IP address. Several clients are available for XP... and its only too easy to download, install and setup.
Come to think of it, the campus should keep a list of all known MAC addresses, and they can then trace a stolen one REAL fast to the dorm or library. This is re-install proof, and only a smart thief could force on a new MAC address on the thing.
Even better, put some radioactive material on your daughters laptop and walk around with a geiger counter when its stolen.
Cryogenic sleeping is very interesting. For one, reaching Mars seems far more possible this way, heck even being lurched into the intergalactical space like the Pioneer spacecraft is doable.
Secondly, people can now pour their worth into high-yield savings accounts and freeze themselves for a few decades. Heck a better idea is to buy lots of empty land close to a city and freeze yourself for a decade. When you get up, the land will be in the middle of a downtown.
They say time is precious, partly because our lives are limited in time. This doesnt break the limit of time we live in, but breaks the limit of time we can exist in. Its half-way to being immortal and a dog is pretty darn close physiologically to humans.
Many people shop around, which accounts for the multiple 'purchases'. Theres a big difference between advertised and actual throughput, which is the first reason people continue to shop around. The number is higher in countries with broadband competition where people have more to 'test'.
Unfortunately the installed technologies for all these residential broadband connections have a limit... 4mb/800kbps for DSL and 8mb/1mb for cable. To switch to faster speeds in some newer technologies, you'd have to change the DSLAMS, all modems and reevaluate the cable and pots lines everywhere. It seems like 56k dialup, we have once again saturated our technological bandwidth.
To provide more spectrum of offerings, Bell canada actually downsamples connections to rediculously low speeds and others are following suite. Apparently todays broadband on average is much slower than the broadband 3 years ago here. This may be the first time average internet speeds have dipped across the years... and its because the technology isnt scalable beyond its current speed.
Ideally the govt will just put fibre to the door everywhere, allow ISPs to connect to the fibre mesh and let free economy take its course. Voters will be smart enough to make that happen in a few years.
Yeah thats game theory. Something that causes the player to decide between two different paths each of which apparently has equal chances of success. Thats what makes chess so complex.
I'd like the decision to use a unit to be difficult... cost vs attack and defence stats vs speed vs speed of manufacturing etc. The samurai in civ III if youre janapese, were too strong compared to other units, so you just make hundereds of samurai and youve won the game.
Real life is more complex and you have to balance many other variables. The most successful armies have a large diversity of units to succeed, and that should be reflected in civ.
Theres another thing that I've been wanting in the civ series for a while. You can make 'armies' in civiii but thats limited. You should be able to group units like in tiberian sun, make military units, and movement formations like in kohan, and do much more with a group of units than just select each and give them a destination.
Alexander's army was successful because of their direct attacks into enemy units with a blitz. But Genghis was successful because he would attack, and withdraw, pulling enemy units out of their formation and stretching and confusing them. All these should be doable.
Another thing I would suggest in civ is the diplomatic alliance. The alliances should allow cold-war type superpowers to indirectly control other civilizations and get them to fight each other. And to implement embargoes against other civs to kill their economies and science.
Maybe someone can do all this with some fancy python scripting. Why didnt they use perl anyway?
Get a half-isa PC/104 board. Get a laptop harddisk. Get a USB Camera. Get a DD battery pack.
Unite all 4 with duck tape.
Go filming.
If the USB camera does 640x480 at 30fps or more, you have something that generally produces better pictures than a much more expensive and fragile digital camera, and you cant record movies on the same media too many times.
I think you have a chance. Just look much more closely at the facts than being an opensource evangelist or proponent of the proprietary.
What state is the software in? Whats the potential market and the competitors in them? How much money can the potential buyers spend on it?
After that, comes the feasibility of selling it at all. The code must be changed to make it installable on various platforms, multiple OSes and databasen etc. Must be TESTED. All that takes money which should be guaranteed in the return.
If you can prove that the effort put in is more than the GUARANTEED output, the other thing you can do with the software is to just opensource it to gain more eyeballs, and improve the software for free.
Now these are two different things.
In most companies you wont hear people say I want to release this software. Things have reasons and businesses only aim to make money. As an employee your ethical goal should be to make money for the company too (ethically and professionally of course).
So if you want to 'improve' the software, improve its quality or gain charity points, you opensource the software. If you are simply looking for a profit, you position your software for sale. Otherwise you dont.
So if the original impetus was to gain money, you either sell the software or you dont. Opensourcing it is a completely different thing. Shifting the 'selling' to 'opensourcing' part will probably not work, unless you change the original goal. So:
(1) Tell them they have NO chance of making a profit on selling.
if, and only if that works:
(2) Suggest the software quality can be improved by opensourcing.
Use it to block all ports and keep connection states.
See in a portscan, they send a SYN, and you send back an ACK... and back and forth. They try to connect to a port, your tcpip stack replies with a drop connection and the increment the port and repeat. The amount of data going in each direction is roughly equal when the ports are closed.
The amount of bandwidth you have is not symmetrical. The best ADSL can do is 4/.8 mbps for download/upload, and the best a docsis modem can do is similar. It is more likely that your upload bandwidth is chocked, since 4mbps of download bandwidth is plenty of room. Unless you have a 'lite' internet speed which is rediculously slow.
So a packet filter simply doesnt take the packet. No replies, either TCP or ICMP. That also means they will give up trying to keep their bandwidth efficient, and start portscanning another IP that actually replies. And since TCPIP is several back and forth packets to connect, you'll save on some download bandwidth, and you'll save ALL of your precious upload bandwidth.
Its even better if you have NO ports open at all from the outside, like ssh or http or smtp. That way intruders cannot know at all if you exist, and its just a waste to portscan all 4 billion IPs, all their TCP and UDP ports rather than just the IPs which actually reply.
My favorite packetfilter is OpenBSD for obvious reasons, they clearly had the best packet filter until recently. Now the competition is close, since everyone seems to be copying them. I dont have much experience with iptables and it confuses me, but it has a much greater install base, and commercial companies to back it.
I've tried the WRT56GX Linksys (latest wireless) router, and havent been impressed with its firewall options. I wonder if I can grab a linksys and replace the firmware with a much simpler OpenBSD embedded system (is there an Openbsd for ARM?). For serious outfits, I'd use OpenBSD on a pentium III-ish with two good nics and low power consumption for stability.
Now imagine if they sold both PPC and x86 versions of OSX. Which one would you buy? You get more bang for the buck for intel, cheaper to upgrade and the remote possibility of running windows.
There goes PPC hardware sales.
Now Apple will make intel-chip hardware to sell. So do others.
Unless Apple works hard to lock OSX into Apple hardware, that 75% will disappear. Even if the install base increases four-fold, theres not additional profit, and they become susceptible to risky competition with Microsoft.
Hey I have a Pentium III machine. I bought it for $150 CDN used, a nice IBM machine with a 10GB disk and CDROM.
Hmm. What can I put on it? Add some ram and the decision becomes difficult. I can use: Windows XP Windows 2003 DOS OpenBSD NetBSD FreeBSD Any Linux distro BeOS (or ZetaOS) Solaris
See how many other OSes Linux is 'competing' with? Now add OSX to the list. Does it make a difference?
OSX isnt much of a threat to Linux because Linux's market isnt dependant on the i386. The more crowded i386 gets, the tougher life becomes for Microsoft. Theyre about the OS apart from ZetaOS in the list above to be completely dependant on x86.
Linux runs on almost ALL 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs in existance. The same is true for NetBSD. So on exotic chips Linux competes with NetBSD and other stuff like QNX and wxworks. On other massive machines Linux competes with z/OS, AIX and Solaris, and quite easily. OSX has only been released on x86 (or WILL BE released).
Now x86 is a huge market. Lots of people use it. Certain OSes compete in a SEGMENT of this market, like BSD and Linux competing in the free OS market, and Solaris and Linux competing in the server OS market (Solaris also joining the free market now). One SEGMENT of this market is the Commercial Desktop market. Linux is only trying to make inroads here. Microsoft has stranglehold, and noone else has a piece. In all the markets were Linux is strong, OSX will remain weak. The only possible loser will be Microsoft, GIVEN OSX will run on any Intel or AMD machine.
And apparently it wont. So even Microsoft wont be affected for now, and Linux is only standing beyond Microsoft in this submarket. Apparently they'll use something like CPUID to ensure OSX only runs on Apple machines, although I'd be surprised if someone doesnt hack the installer to get it to install on all wintel boxen. Darwin is already available, some might be able to just copy all Cocoa binaries and tweak it to run. Since thats illegal, no legal Linux installations will be affected by the 'warez' availibility of OSX on Intel.
The FSB, memory bandwidth and the general bandwidth through the northbridge as well as the hated disk bottleneck will be issues with multiple cores. More cores will mean more data into and out of the CPU, so we cant linearly increase cores. Some Intel motherboards do dual-channel memory. We'll need quad-channel DDR2 for memory not to be a bottleneck.
We'll also need more memory since more programs will be loaded before running, but that means the disk bottleneck will be less important.
As for the software, I wouldnt worry. If one OS takes advantage of the multiple cores, Microsoft, Sun and IBM will be hard pressed to use the cores too.
After spending the millions and waiting for years, isnt it a LITTLE apparent that work will be done on images to make them clear? Does it require a press conference to announce the very apparent?
There are thousands of bright minds looking for minimum wage, for working carelessly, casually and temporarily. Thats University.
And that may mean hundereds of bright CS minds in a large university. Most of those will not mind a part time job to pay for books and beer and contraception. Theyre not paying tuition from that work.
So if you look for work as a student, you'll get enough money to buy you coffee, and maybe bus tickets to here and there. If they're looking for fulltime positions which really hold the University structure up, they might post it elsewhere, or just give it to the student who'se worked in that department longest. You wont find those jobs posted in bright yellow and pink in the corridors, more like the city's newspapers.
Its Rs50 in Pakistan. The poorest people there make Rs50 in a MONTH. Would you pay your monthly salary for microsoft?
OK so they cant afford a computer or power lines either, but a dollar is definitely more than Lunch. More like breakfast+lunch+dinner of a day, more so if you cook at home.
Its a dollar more than what they'd have to pay for other OSes out there. They'd rather save up spend the money on the very expensive hardware.
Google with all their good intentions could also create a big MMORPG in which all city maps are real cities, and gamers can only start in, and own their actual home areas.
Great way to socialize and meet the ladies around.
Until people use the same maps to play UT and CS. You can kill the neighbors cat multiple times then.
These words are constantly repeated by many people around the world who have the experience, lived their lives and known women enough to know what makes them really happy.
Some grapes are actually sour, even if they've grown way up there.:)
White skin? you'd be surprised what nerds look like in some other countries.
In my college upstate NY where over 90% of the student population was white, there was this one very nerdy african (not afro american) guy from Kenya who taught Math to other students and knew a bit about computers. He was the TA of his class.
And yet put him in a dark alley at night in Detriot or NYC, a pasty white nerd run away from him.
How about laser radio? The antennae could just aim in the direction of the receiver in an external orbital pod on the airplane (or even internal), and just send a thin concentrated wave in that direction. Ever since I heard about masers, ordiniary radio just sounds like so much waste. Scream in all directions, and hope the listener will hear somewhere. GPS makes pointing to the received easier.
Two such directional antennaes could point to the group cell the airplane is moving away from, and the ground cell the airplane is moving towards for uninterrupted communication. Since it will not interfere with many other frequencies this way, the airplane will have much more bandwidth available for say in-flight T3 connections and PPV HDTV.
I even wonder if such a technology could be put into cellphones. instead of mechanically moving antennae, a globe of emitters could oscillate EM waves slightly timeshifted so the wave goes in one direction only... to the nearest tower. The same antennas could be used to detect where the nearest tower is. We can then have Zaruses with funky bandwidths everywhere.
Only radios and aliens trying to contact humans should be allowed to blast EM waves in all directions.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll try to use all that ammunition to build spyware for Linux!
Hmm. Come to think of it, I wonder if anyone has even TRIED to make a Bonzibuddy for Linux
"How does the Slashdot community deal with network equipment inventories"
Excel sheets!
If thats not enough Access.
If thats not enough use something like mysql in the backend. I doubt you'd hit that limit with the number of routers and switches.
Ask Slashdot: How does the slashdot crowd sell hairtonic, to Bald Eagles, in Nebraska?
Dude, research a LITTLE.
My birthday!
In the earlier days of the Internet in Pakistan, say 1996, the connection cost Rs70 per hour. In fact the first connection was from Paknet, the govt ISP.
/etc/passwd, which was plaintext and humungous. The passwords were a simple MD5 hashes and didnt take more than a cracking script with words like 'pakistan' 'sex' 'fuck' 'god' 'allah' 'cricket' and common names like Ali to produce a significant list of passwords.
Their connection was like a BBS system, where you'd dial into a BBS, and see the Linux 1.3.x kernel. You'd get a curses menu and seleced lynx to browse the net.
You could also select another option after which you could close the telnet window and use IE or netscape 3.0 through ppp.
Turns out, they were using a gigantic NAT, whereby everyone in Pakistan was channeled through a single IP address. Everyone knew that IP address, which was blocked by many IRC servers like the Dalnet. The customers must've been less than 65535 to fit at any time I imagine.
You'd have to try dialling MANY times to get a connection. At one time, we crossed the 100th attempt to dial to read a single email.
And boy was hotmail slow.
In the telnet menu, you could also drop yourself into a shell, which was my first brush with UNIX. All we knew was ls and cd (dont know how we learnt those, possibly from trial and error). We copied
Now why would you run a whole country on a Linux server with kernel 1.3.x with bad security? It is amazing that even in beta, Linux held up well enough to run the country of Pakistan's internet connection. After all who could afford a cisco over there? Or even multiple IP addresses?
Here in Canada, businesses are commonly provided with 64 IP address blocks by Bell and Telus, even if they really need one.
Its free and its for directing a domain name to your changing IP address. Several clients are available for XP... and its only too easy to download, install and setup.
Come to think of it, the campus should keep a list of all known MAC addresses, and they can then trace a stolen one REAL fast to the dorm or library. This is re-install proof, and only a smart thief could force on a new MAC address on the thing.
Even better, put some radioactive material on your daughters laptop and walk around with a geiger counter when its stolen.
And I'm kidding too...
This has been the best slashdot news in days.
Cryogenic sleeping is very interesting. For one, reaching Mars seems far more possible this way, heck even being lurched into the intergalactical space like the Pioneer spacecraft is doable.
Secondly, people can now pour their worth into high-yield savings accounts and freeze themselves for a few decades. Heck a better idea is to buy lots of empty land close to a city and freeze yourself for a decade. When you get up, the land will be in the middle of a downtown.
They say time is precious, partly because our lives are limited in time. This doesnt break the limit of time we live in, but breaks the limit of time we can exist in. Its half-way to being immortal and a dog is pretty darn close physiologically to humans.
Many people shop around, which accounts for the multiple 'purchases'. Theres a big difference between advertised and actual throughput, which is the first reason people continue to shop around. The number is higher in countries with broadband competition where people have more to 'test'.
Unfortunately the installed technologies for all these residential broadband connections have a limit... 4mb/800kbps for DSL and 8mb/1mb for cable. To switch to faster speeds in some newer technologies, you'd have to change the DSLAMS, all modems and reevaluate the cable and pots lines everywhere. It seems like 56k dialup, we have once again saturated our technological bandwidth.
To provide more spectrum of offerings, Bell canada actually downsamples connections to rediculously low speeds and others are following suite. Apparently todays broadband on average is much slower than the broadband 3 years ago here. This may be the first time average internet speeds have dipped across the years... and its because the technology isnt scalable beyond its current speed.
Ideally the govt will just put fibre to the door everywhere, allow ISPs to connect to the fibre mesh and let free economy take its course. Voters will be smart enough to make that happen in a few years.
Yeah thats game theory. Something that causes the player to decide between two different paths each of which apparently has equal chances of success. Thats what makes chess so complex.
I'd like the decision to use a unit to be difficult... cost vs attack and defence stats vs speed vs speed of manufacturing etc. The samurai in civ III if youre janapese, were too strong compared to other units, so you just make hundereds of samurai and youve won the game.
Real life is more complex and you have to balance many other variables. The most successful armies have a large diversity of units to succeed, and that should be reflected in civ.
Theres another thing that I've been wanting in the civ series for a while. You can make 'armies' in civiii but thats limited. You should be able to group units like in tiberian sun, make military units, and movement formations like in kohan, and do much more with a group of units than just select each and give them a destination.
Alexander's army was successful because of their direct attacks into enemy units with a blitz. But Genghis was successful because he would attack, and withdraw, pulling enemy units out of their formation and stretching and confusing them. All these should be doable.
Another thing I would suggest in civ is the diplomatic alliance. The alliances should allow cold-war type superpowers to indirectly control other civilizations and get them to fight each other. And to implement embargoes against other civs to kill their economies and science.
Maybe someone can do all this with some fancy python scripting. Why didnt they use perl anyway?
What if KDE's own manuals and help system were rsynced with its original data in wikipedia? What if all manuals were rsynced from wikis?
We could type 'man ls' and get the latest page with comments and all.
Sure beats submitting manpage patches to developers.
Even better, like in wikipedia, you'd click on a word in a manual page, and you'd get the man page of that manual and all related pages...
Now combine that with the google search engine.
Get a half-isa PC/104 board. Get a laptop harddisk. Get a USB Camera. Get a DD battery pack.
Unite all 4 with duck tape.
Go filming.
If the USB camera does 640x480 at 30fps or more, you have something that generally produces better pictures than a much more expensive and fragile digital camera, and you cant record movies on the same media too many times.
Oh and you'll need lots of perl scripts.
I think you have a chance. Just look much more closely at the facts than being an opensource evangelist or proponent of the proprietary.
What state is the software in? Whats the potential market and the competitors in them? How much money can the potential buyers spend on it?
After that, comes the feasibility of selling it at all. The code must be changed to make it installable on various platforms, multiple OSes and databasen etc. Must be TESTED. All that takes money which should be guaranteed in the return.
If you can prove that the effort put in is more than the GUARANTEED output, the other thing you can do with the software is to just opensource it to gain more eyeballs, and improve the software for free.
Now these are two different things.
In most companies you wont hear people say I want to release this software. Things have reasons and businesses only aim to make money. As an employee your ethical goal should be to make money for the company too (ethically and professionally of course).
So if you want to 'improve' the software, improve its quality or gain charity points, you opensource the software. If you are simply looking for a profit, you position your software for sale. Otherwise you dont.
So if the original impetus was to gain money, you either sell the software or you dont. Opensourcing it is a completely different thing. Shifting the 'selling' to 'opensourcing' part will probably not work, unless you change the original goal. So:
(1) Tell them they have NO chance of making a profit on selling.
if, and only if that works:
(2) Suggest the software quality can be improved by opensourcing.
Use it to block all ports and keep connection states.
See in a portscan, they send a SYN, and you send back an ACK... and back and forth. They try to connect to a port, your tcpip stack replies with a drop connection and the increment the port and repeat. The amount of data going in each direction is roughly equal when the ports are closed.
The amount of bandwidth you have is not symmetrical. The best ADSL can do is 4/.8 mbps for download/upload, and the best a docsis modem can do is similar. It is more likely that your upload bandwidth is chocked, since 4mbps of download bandwidth is plenty of room. Unless you have a 'lite' internet speed which is rediculously slow.
So a packet filter simply doesnt take the packet. No replies, either TCP or ICMP. That also means they will give up trying to keep their bandwidth efficient, and start portscanning another IP that actually replies. And since TCPIP is several back and forth packets to connect, you'll save on some download bandwidth, and you'll save ALL of your precious upload bandwidth.
Its even better if you have NO ports open at all from the outside, like ssh or http or smtp. That way intruders cannot know at all if you exist, and its just a waste to portscan all 4 billion IPs, all their TCP and UDP ports rather than just the IPs which actually reply.
My favorite packetfilter is OpenBSD for obvious reasons, they clearly had the best packet filter until recently. Now the competition is close, since everyone seems to be copying them. I dont have much experience with iptables and it confuses me, but it has a much greater install base, and commercial companies to back it.
I've tried the WRT56GX Linksys (latest wireless) router, and havent been impressed with its firewall options. I wonder if I can grab a linksys and replace the firmware with a much simpler OpenBSD embedded system (is there an Openbsd for ARM?). For serious outfits, I'd use OpenBSD on a pentium III-ish with two good nics and low power consumption for stability.
As you said 75% of their revenue is hardware.
Now imagine if they sold both PPC and x86 versions of OSX. Which one would you buy? You get more bang for the buck for intel, cheaper to upgrade and the remote possibility of running windows.
There goes PPC hardware sales.
Now Apple will make intel-chip hardware to sell. So do others.
Unless Apple works hard to lock OSX into Apple hardware, that 75% will disappear. Even if the install base increases four-fold, theres not additional profit, and they become susceptible to risky competition with Microsoft.
Hey I have a Pentium III machine. I bought it for $150 CDN used, a nice IBM machine with a 10GB disk and CDROM.
Hmm. What can I put on it? Add some ram and the decision becomes difficult. I can use:
Windows XP
Windows 2003
DOS
OpenBSD
NetBSD
FreeBSD
Any Linux distro
BeOS (or ZetaOS)
Solaris
See how many other OSes Linux is 'competing' with? Now add OSX to the list. Does it make a difference?
OSX isnt much of a threat to Linux because Linux's market isnt dependant on the i386. The more crowded i386 gets, the tougher life becomes for Microsoft. Theyre about the OS apart from ZetaOS in the list above to be completely dependant on x86.
Linux runs on almost ALL 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs in existance. The same is true for NetBSD. So on exotic chips Linux competes with NetBSD and other stuff like QNX and wxworks. On other massive machines Linux competes with z/OS, AIX and Solaris, and quite easily. OSX has only been released on x86 (or WILL BE released).
Now x86 is a huge market. Lots of people use it. Certain OSes compete in a SEGMENT of this market, like BSD and Linux competing in the free OS market, and Solaris and Linux competing in the server OS market (Solaris also joining the free market now). One SEGMENT of this market is the Commercial Desktop market. Linux is only trying to make inroads here. Microsoft has stranglehold, and noone else has a piece. In all the markets were Linux is strong, OSX will remain weak. The only possible loser will be Microsoft, GIVEN OSX will run on any Intel or AMD machine.
And apparently it wont. So even Microsoft wont be affected for now, and Linux is only standing beyond Microsoft in this submarket. Apparently they'll use something like CPUID to ensure OSX only runs on Apple machines, although I'd be surprised if someone doesnt hack the installer to get it to install on all wintel boxen. Darwin is already available, some might be able to just copy all Cocoa binaries and tweak it to run. Since thats illegal, no legal Linux installations will be affected by the 'warez' availibility of OSX on Intel.
Apparently the kernel and some core OS pieces have been released as OPEN while some 'binary stuff' is still closed.
/bin/* /kernel/* etc?
Does anyone care to share if the free stuff alone is enough to have a bootable and runnable system? Do we have libc, init,
BTW I saw nVidia has released drivers for Solaris too as of June 1st. The free OS market suddenly is crowded... for the better.
And each virtue exactly when you dont need it.
It will be used in a new chemical warfare that will be FAR more painful and inhumane. Entire generations will be lost this way.
The FSB, memory bandwidth and the general bandwidth through the northbridge as well as the hated disk bottleneck will be issues with multiple cores. More cores will mean more data into and out of the CPU, so we cant linearly increase cores. Some Intel motherboards do dual-channel memory. We'll need quad-channel DDR2 for memory not to be a bottleneck.
We'll also need more memory since more programs will be loaded before running, but that means the disk bottleneck will be less important.
As for the software, I wouldnt worry. If one OS takes advantage of the multiple cores, Microsoft, Sun and IBM will be hard pressed to use the cores too.
"We will alter images to make them clear"
-NASA
My answer: no WAY! Really?
After spending the millions and waiting for years, isnt it a LITTLE apparent that work will be done on images to make them clear? Does it require a press conference to announce the very apparent?
There are thousands of bright minds looking for minimum wage, for working carelessly, casually and temporarily. Thats University.
And that may mean hundereds of bright CS minds in a large university. Most of those will not mind a part time job to pay for books and beer and contraception. Theyre not paying tuition from that work.
So if you look for work as a student, you'll get enough money to buy you coffee, and maybe bus tickets to here and there. If they're looking for fulltime positions which really hold the University structure up, they might post it elsewhere, or just give it to the student who'se worked in that department longest. You wont find those jobs posted in bright yellow and pink in the corridors, more like the city's newspapers.
Its Rs50 in Pakistan. The poorest people there make Rs50 in a MONTH. Would you pay your monthly salary for microsoft?
OK so they cant afford a computer or power lines either, but a dollar is definitely more than Lunch. More like breakfast+lunch+dinner of a day, more so if you cook at home.
Its a dollar more than what they'd have to pay for other OSes out there. They'd rather save up spend the money on the very expensive hardware.
Google with all their good intentions could also create a big MMORPG in which all city maps are real cities, and gamers can only start in, and own their actual home areas.
Great way to socialize and meet the ladies around.
Until people use the same maps to play UT and CS. You can kill the neighbors cat multiple times then.
In a few years, people will get a green jacket who will tip the most cows.
These words are constantly repeated by many people around the world who have the experience, lived their lives and known women enough to know what makes them really happy.
:)
Some grapes are actually sour, even if they've grown way up there.
White skin? you'd be surprised what nerds look like in some other countries.
In my college upstate NY where over 90% of the student population was white, there was this one very nerdy african (not afro american) guy from Kenya who taught Math to other students and knew a bit about computers. He was the TA of his class.
And yet put him in a dark alley at night in Detriot or NYC, a pasty white nerd run away from him.
How about laser radio? The antennae could just aim in the direction of the receiver in an external orbital pod on the airplane (or even internal), and just send a thin concentrated wave in that direction. Ever since I heard about masers, ordiniary radio just sounds like so much waste. Scream in all directions, and hope the listener will hear somewhere. GPS makes pointing to the received easier.
Two such directional antennaes could point to the group cell the airplane is moving away from, and the ground cell the airplane is moving towards for uninterrupted communication. Since it will not interfere with many other frequencies this way, the airplane will have much more bandwidth available for say in-flight T3 connections and PPV HDTV.
I even wonder if such a technology could be put into cellphones. instead of mechanically moving antennae, a globe of emitters could oscillate EM waves slightly timeshifted so the wave goes in one direction only... to the nearest tower. The same antennas could be used to detect where the nearest tower is. We can then have Zaruses with funky bandwidths everywhere.
Only radios and aliens trying to contact humans should be allowed to blast EM waves in all directions.