I'd just like to append this link to your post. Also note that "Jewish" refers to both a religion and an ethnicity, which makes it a big problem to determine religious affiliation accurately.
You're posting from 1987? And not claiming first post?
Since you have 22 years to think about it, please elaborate on how signing people up for drivers licenses and passports is similar to burning and looting their property, murdering them in the streets, and then rounding up the rest and sending them to concentration camps? I don't think that's what the Israeli government plans. If you don't like biometric databases that's fine, but at least add something intelligent to the discussion.
Good point. The funny thing is that if we consider the greater context, that's pretty much exactly what that particular government does to a certain segment of the population.
Surely you could be more explicit. What is the greater context? Which is the particular government? What is the certain segment of the population?
As long as we're being vague, I hear that some/. poster's mom had a particular type of relation with many other people, for a certain amount of currency.
There's no iPhone in the title. Everybody knows that if you want noise then you *must* include an "iphone", preferably twice. Also, if you want to remain competetive, using "privacy" is advisable.
This is what decades of living in fear will do to a population. The more the citizens are afraid, the more power they give to the government.
Hi, I'm an Israeli. I'm not sure about that last bit about "Why would a government make peace under such circumstances?", since that's a separate and extremely involved issue, but you got it right with the above quote. Most of the people I've talked to didn't even twitch at the mention of the new biometric database. News sources who are pointing to this as a very big exception compared other countries are met with feedback comprising of, mostly, "so what?" (when I say feedback I mean on online news sites, talkbacks and the like).
We're used to armed guards at every publicly accessible building, which includes malls, theaters, larger apartment complexes, and of course any government-run institutions. A big part of the police's job here is patrolling in search of signs of terrorism, not crime. We've sat in too many shelters, heard too many missile alarms go off, and seen too many scorched remains of explosions to give a damn about a photo and a fingerprint.
And yes, the Israeli census has been hacked -- not once, but several times. You can search and find several versions according to the date of retrieval.
Personally, I agree with most of the opinions I've head voiced around me -- who cares? Anyone can find my address, phone number, and family tree through the leaked census. Now they'll have my picture, which they could easily find elsewhere, and my fingerprint, which is something that they'll have of every citizen. If they do use the fingerprint to try to access something, they'll likely need additional information, because it will be *known* that this has become publicly available information.
There's a proverb in some european languages which translates roughly as: "you don't worry about a thief in the backyard when your house in on fire".
And V8 may not always be the best engine for that. And since the browser already does Javascript, I'd say leave it to the browser. If it's really a problem for people, the solution is to upgrade the browser, not to install a bigger plugin.
No, what I like about O3D -- and you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong -- is that WebGL is a very low-level wrapper around OpenGL, whereas O3D is high-level-ish, right? Or, put another way: Would it be possible for O3D to wrap either Direct3D or OpenGL, depending on the platform? That would be a definite win.
Other than that, from reading that discussion, the biggest thing I like about WebGL is that, like most of the other web standards I know and love, and like the Unix philosophy, it tries to do one thing and well.
For example, rather than having its own format for loading assets, it's counting on the browser to provide a more generic one -- maybe the ability to have URLs that refer to some location inside a zipfile (or something else reasonably standard). It occurs to me that data URLs could go a long way here as a hack, too.
WebGL's biggest advantage (IMHO) is its ease of implementation -- by the browser, natively. Webkit's on board, along with Mozilla and Opera. Ever since Flash, it seems like people have learned their lesson regarding plugins. Don't get me wrong, I think that Gears is very useful, but how often is it updated?
Getting users to install a plugin on any platform is becoming difficult, it takes the browser vendors themselves to push features. If every browser apart from IE implements canvas3D, then I think you're going to see gradual adoption by the same developers that build on canvas and/or SVG despite IE's lack of (native) support.
A common comparison that has been made is that WebGL would be used like Canvas whereas O3D would be more like SVG. (WebGL will be *part* of canvas, of course, but I mean in terms of uses and applications)
If you want links to many discussions about the approaches and comparisons, check out this page.
Since canvas is already known territory (comparatively), and JavaScript is being optimized like crazy by all browser developers, I'd bet that you should expect to see WebGL picked up much faster than O3D. Developers that are already comfortable using canvas for some 2D representations will have only a small step to take to reach WebGL.
You may want to look up previous postings on/. regarding SVG.
Here's a quick list: 1) The complete SVG standard is huge. While every modern browser "supports SVG", they really only support certain subsets, and these are not consistent between the different browsers. 2) You need development tools for designers in order for it to take off. Since Adobe bought Macromedia (and thus push Flash like crack), few companies have the manpower/skill to create a dynamic (animation-friendly) design/development environment targeted at web *designers*. You need SVG to be adopted by graphic designers, not just programmers. 3) Flash. 4) Flash. 5) Canvas is a much simpler and smaller standard, and it's much easier to implement. Browsers that integrate Canvas usually implement it in its entirety, and then they can place the "supports Canvas" sticker on their list of features. To do so with SVG would take too long and would require a lot more resources.
The path of least resistance is not SVG. It's a very promising standard, and programs like Inkscape have done wonders with it (and so has KDE), but in browser-land there are simpler solutions that are more widely supported.
To test if someone is female or not, just ask them to go out with a geek. If she says yes, then she can't be a female.
I think that you should place that within a list of questions:
- Did you see and like The Notebook?
- Do you watch and enjoy Grey's Anatomy?
- Did you manage to survive all the way through the Twilight movie?
- Do you play WoW?
A positive answer to any of these means female. No exceptions.
You already can, to some degree. Write the functions within Flash (in actionscript, which is also ECMAScript), and send the arguments to the functions that are within the.swf file. It's been done to hide/obfuscate/compact code (though it's not compiled, it's byte code, so it's not really hidden). This way the Flash VM does the processing, not the browser. You'd really need significant separation in functionality in order to improve performance (something that could be done entirely within javascript, and not require access to the browser/DOM), but it's possible.
I agree with that part, I just don't think that who is doing the selection is relevant -- that's why I quoted the "vain high school girls" bit. A perfectly amicable, kind, and intelligent person might decide that they don't want a short kid because people will make fun of them, so they'll save the kid a life of misery and abort. It doesn't take a "bad person" to make the decision to start selecting. People will start selecting traits they want in their children from the moment the technology exists.
Also, at which point is the selection no-longer-wrong? If you didn't even have to fertilize an embryo, but could just pick the sperm and eggs, and then "virtualise" the process in order to see what traits you get, would that be wrong? Do we *have* to keep being random? I agree that it's wrong to kill an embryo because of some cosmetic issue and repeat the process until you get a perfect child (and others will argue the opposite, especially if it's very early in the pregnancy), but what if you don't even need to begin the process? What if you can get a list of *possible* outcomes and pick, without the need to fertilize? (academic at this point, since fertilization will be required in order to examine the result, but it's a possible, if not probably future development)
You haven't been keeping up to date with the *hip* phishing sites. They'll have an arrow pointing to that yellow bar and saying "Hi! Look at the shiny pictures! Do this and that with that yellow bar to see more shiny pictures!"
On the other hand, you simply cannot ignore these things. Being a good web designer means you unfortunately need to compensate.
That depends on what audience you're targeting. If you're building a website for a government institution, then yes, you need to support IE, including IE6. If, on the other hand, you have commercial considerations, and can deliver a real *web app* by dropping IE, then you have some thinking to do. Maybe you could just drop IE6 -- if youtube can do it then it's probably a safe move. But if you know that you can provide a really significant improvement in usability by supporting only modern/compliant browsers, then being a "good web designer" would be to tell IE users that in order to fully experience this particular site, they need a better platform.
RTFA. They refer to "socially painful" -- you don't need a girlfriend, you just have to be rejected by someone. Being a/.er, it's likely most of us...*cough*...YOU are sitting on a goldmine.
Remember how vain and cruel those girls from high school were? Well, guess what, those girls become the vain and cruel wives of rich men
That's anecdotal.
But even if it were true, then those same wealthy individuals would already have spread their own nature (vanity, cruelty, etc.) through their genes, as well as their behavior around their children, and those children will be sent to private schools and placed on a course to MBA-ish jobs when they graduate. If you were fearing the "dicks in high places" syndrome, it's already been deployed.
I do sniff for gecko. Instead of "FF3+" I should have said that I checked for a list of capabilities and infer from there. I never do a specific browser-sniff per say, but if "document.all" is there and so is "attachEvent", then I know what I'm dealing with. I always feature-sniff and then condition the imports, but in practice I meant that the newer crop of browsers are quite capable and require relatively little fiddling and vestigial bug-handling.
1) They were not given "bailout money". They landed a loan from a program set aside for loans.
I wasn't accusing them of doing something illegal. If you sell cigarettes, it's not you who is at fault, it's the government that allows you to do something morally wrong. Of course that was an extreme example, but the point is that I wasn't being critical of them -- they did what a company should do. I was criticizing the decision to give them the loan (which I've rethought somewhat, see next paragraph...).
2) The Roadster has nothing to do with the loan except to prove that Tesla isn't blowing smoke out their collective arses. The loan is 100% for the Model S. To get the Loan, Tesla had to show that they'd be profitble on the Roadsters on their own.
I wasn't aware that the loan was conditioned. If they really did point out the Model S at the beneficiary for the loan, then that changes things, to a degree. I still see them as a luxury-product company at the moment, but if the Model S gains traction, then I will have been proven wrong about the decision do grant the loan.
3) It's not true that Tesla "didn't bring anything truly innovative to the table". They dramatically improved on the AC-150, and point me to a single battery pack made before them like the marvel that they engineered.
There are discussions below about the alternatives to their battery systems, but I'm not versed enough to point something out specifically. I do, however, know that batteries for all electric devices have been improving across the board, and the most efficient ones commercially available (in terms of energy density) are found in laptops and cell phones. They simply had to address the new issue of scale, which no one had bothered to do up until then. They also patented the technology, so it's not like the public would benefit, and it is the public that funded the loan (this is circular, however. If the Model S succeeds, then arguably the public did benefit).
4) The GP was correct; most products start at the high-end and move their way down to the low end. You think that plasma TVs were something being pushed by businesses? Blu-ray? Smartphones? It doesn't matter whether something is for high-end consumers or businesses; they still start out expensive and become cheaper over time. And it doesn't matter the field. Today's Red5 camera will be tomorrow's Sony camcorder.
I think Tesla looked at the problem and made a very reasonable decision. With the tech available when they started, they could make a $60k low-end sedan or a $100k supercar. They realized that the market for the latter was a lot more solid.
This point is very easy to rebuke. We can go over your examples if you want:
Plasma TVs were sold primarily to companies/corporations/organizations at first, and so did projectors.
Blu-ray isn't technically luxury, not in the way that a $100k+ car is, but then it was still expensive enough that it's flopping even now, when there are $100 players on the market. You could also consider the PS3 a luxury product by that standard, and certainly the iPhone when it came out, but in absolute terms, their initial price wasn't astronomical.
The Red5 is currently used mainly by production companies. You don't see individuals carrying them around and taking vacation videos.
Smartphones really got their start in commercial use. They were products that paid for themselves. So were cellphones in general.
All of the above examples were used by companies, that could justify the expense. They were not driven into the market because rich people bought them, and by doing so paved the way for economies of scale. There's a difference between something that only a millionaire would likely be able to afford, and a product that a person with an average income can. Blu-ray, cell phones, and laptops were all expensive at first, but it wasn't the super-upper class that drove t
Oh look, it's a troll. Hi troll! Want some candy?
Computers and printers were sold to large companies, because they cost a lot to manufacture. If you needed something to be automated, however, you could do the math and if it would pay for itself after a while, you could *invest* in the new technology. Eventually these technologies would come down in price and private people could afford them. Relatively FEW technologies actually started out at luxury products, they were simply expensive to manufacture, and you'd have to prove commercially-sensible use.
Tesla Motors didn't start out in the 80's. People were already converting conventional vehicles into electric ones using lead-acid batteries in their garages. They didn't bring anything truly innovative to the table, but they did manage to make the right bet and manufacture something that worked as advertised. They could have started out with a much cheaper vehicle, however, and they chose not to. That's their right, and it's my right to point out the absurdity of what is, in effect, bail-out money given to a small, luxury-product manufacturing company.
I thought of that only after posting it, I should've found a similar image somewhere else. Even if you link to an article (which is something you'd think they'd want) rather than an image, they may replace it with something seppuku-inducing if traffic spikes to somewhere specific. It's still safe at the moment of this writing, but I wouldn't click that link if you find this post later than about a week after it was posted...
Actually I was just speculating on what he meant by the "granted to them by the government" part, I wasn't weighing in with an opinion.
But I can if I must: So far, Tesla Motors have produced 1 product: the Tesla Roadster. This is a 2-seat, $100k+ vehicle. I don't care that it's electric -- it's an ultra-high-end luxury product. The money is from a "fund to develop fuel-efficient vehicles". What if I'm developing an electric yacht? Can I get some of that grant money then? I'm sure they showed nice slides of their Model S, and how this was a "means to an end". Still, they could have attempted to start off with a solution that was financially viable to more than 0.1% of the population.
And before someone draws comparisons to the Segway, that's a $5k device. A person with an average income could afford one, if they really wanted to. There are also many commercial(organizational) uses for it, and it's been used for these purposes. (I just threw in that Segway comment because for some reason that's the rebuttal I get whenever I complain about the funding Tesla gets... I don't really get the correlation)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd just like to append this link to your post. Also note that "Jewish" refers to both a religion and an ethnicity, which makes it a big problem to determine religious affiliation accurately.
You're posting from 1987? And not claiming first post?
Since you have 22 years to think about it, please elaborate on how signing people up for drivers licenses and passports is similar to burning and looting their property, murdering them in the streets, and then rounding up the rest and sending them to concentration camps? I don't think that's what the Israeli government plans. If you don't like biometric databases that's fine, but at least add something intelligent to the discussion.
Good point. The funny thing is that if we consider the greater context, that's pretty much exactly what that particular government does to a certain segment of the population.
Surely you could be more explicit. What is the greater context? Which is the particular government? What is the certain segment of the population?
/. poster's mom had a particular type of relation with many other people, for a certain amount of currency.
As long as we're being vague, I hear that some
There's no iPhone in the title. Everybody knows that if you want noise then you *must* include an "iphone", preferably twice. Also, if you want to remain competetive, using "privacy" is advisable.
This is what decades of living in fear will do to a population. The more the citizens are afraid, the more power they give to the government.
Hi, I'm an Israeli. I'm not sure about that last bit about "Why would a government make peace under such circumstances?", since that's a separate and extremely involved issue, but you got it right with the above quote. Most of the people I've talked to didn't even twitch at the mention of the new biometric database. News sources who are pointing to this as a very big exception compared other countries are met with feedback comprising of, mostly, "so what?" (when I say feedback I mean on online news sites, talkbacks and the like).
We're used to armed guards at every publicly accessible building, which includes malls, theaters, larger apartment complexes, and of course any government-run institutions. A big part of the police's job here is patrolling in search of signs of terrorism, not crime. We've sat in too many shelters, heard too many missile alarms go off, and seen too many scorched remains of explosions to give a damn about a photo and a fingerprint.
And yes, the Israeli census has been hacked -- not once, but several times. You can search and find several versions according to the date of retrieval.
Personally, I agree with most of the opinions I've head voiced around me -- who cares? Anyone can find my address, phone number, and family tree through the leaked census. Now they'll have my picture, which they could easily find elsewhere, and my fingerprint, which is something that they'll have of every citizen. If they do use the fingerprint to try to access something, they'll likely need additional information, because it will be *known* that this has become publicly available information.
There's a proverb in some european languages which translates roughly as: "you don't worry about a thief in the backyard when your house in on fire".
Unlimited energy is available on the moon.
They said that about earth. And look what happened with that.
Is it impossible that WebGL could ever be done that way?
I'm starting to think that the best way to deal with IE is to create a Webkit/V8 plugin.
Dibs on that idea!
And V8 may not always be the best engine for that. And since the browser already does Javascript, I'd say leave it to the browser. If it's really a problem for people, the solution is to upgrade the browser, not to install a bigger plugin.
No, what I like about O3D -- and you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong -- is that WebGL is a very low-level wrapper around OpenGL, whereas O3D is high-level-ish, right? Or, put another way: Would it be possible for O3D to wrap either Direct3D or OpenGL, depending on the platform? That would be a definite win.
Other than that, from reading that discussion, the biggest thing I like about WebGL is that, like most of the other web standards I know and love, and like the Unix philosophy, it tries to do one thing and well.
For example, rather than having its own format for loading assets, it's counting on the browser to provide a more generic one -- maybe the ability to have URLs that refer to some location inside a zipfile (or something else reasonably standard). It occurs to me that data URLs could go a long way here as a hack, too.
WebGL's biggest advantage (IMHO) is its ease of implementation -- by the browser, natively. Webkit's on board, along with Mozilla and Opera. Ever since Flash, it seems like people have learned their lesson regarding plugins. Don't get me wrong, I think that Gears is very useful, but how often is it updated?
Getting users to install a plugin on any platform is becoming difficult, it takes the browser vendors themselves to push features. If every browser apart from IE implements canvas3D, then I think you're going to see gradual adoption by the same developers that build on canvas and/or SVG despite IE's lack of (native) support.
A common comparison that has been made is that WebGL would be used like Canvas whereas O3D would be more like SVG. (WebGL will be *part* of canvas, of course, but I mean in terms of uses and applications)
If you want links to many discussions about the approaches and comparisons, check out this page.
Since canvas is already known territory (comparatively), and JavaScript is being optimized like crazy by all browser developers, I'd bet that you should expect to see WebGL picked up much faster than O3D. Developers that are already comfortable using canvas for some 2D representations will have only a small step to take to reach WebGL.
You may want to look up previous postings on /. regarding SVG.
Here's a quick list:
1) The complete SVG standard is huge. While every modern browser "supports SVG", they really only support certain subsets, and these are not consistent between the different browsers.
2) You need development tools for designers in order for it to take off. Since Adobe bought Macromedia (and thus push Flash like crack), few companies have the manpower/skill to create a dynamic (animation-friendly) design/development environment targeted at web *designers*. You need SVG to be adopted by graphic designers, not just programmers.
3) Flash.
4) Flash.
5) Canvas is a much simpler and smaller standard, and it's much easier to implement. Browsers that integrate Canvas usually implement it in its entirety, and then they can place the "supports Canvas" sticker on their list of features. To do so with SVG would take too long and would require a lot more resources.
The path of least resistance is not SVG. It's a very promising standard, and programs like Inkscape have done wonders with it (and so has KDE), but in browser-land there are simpler solutions that are more widely supported.
To test if someone is female or not, just ask them to go out with a geek. If she says yes, then she can't be a female.
I think that you should place that within a list of questions:
- Did you see and like The Notebook?
- Do you watch and enjoy Grey's Anatomy?
- Did you manage to survive all the way through the Twilight movie?
- Do you play WoW?
A positive answer to any of these means female. No exceptions.
You already can, to some degree. Write the functions within Flash (in actionscript, which is also ECMAScript), and send the arguments to the functions that are within the .swf file. It's been done to hide/obfuscate/compact code (though it's not compiled, it's byte code, so it's not really hidden). This way the Flash VM does the processing, not the browser. You'd really need significant separation in functionality in order to improve performance (something that could be done entirely within javascript, and not require access to the browser/DOM), but it's possible.
I agree with that part, I just don't think that who is doing the selection is relevant -- that's why I quoted the "vain high school girls" bit. A perfectly amicable, kind, and intelligent person might decide that they don't want a short kid because people will make fun of them, so they'll save the kid a life of misery and abort. It doesn't take a "bad person" to make the decision to start selecting. People will start selecting traits they want in their children from the moment the technology exists.
Also, at which point is the selection no-longer-wrong? If you didn't even have to fertilize an embryo, but could just pick the sperm and eggs, and then "virtualise" the process in order to see what traits you get, would that be wrong? Do we *have* to keep being random? I agree that it's wrong to kill an embryo because of some cosmetic issue and repeat the process until you get a perfect child (and others will argue the opposite, especially if it's very early in the pregnancy), but what if you don't even need to begin the process? What if you can get a list of *possible* outcomes and pick, without the need to fertilize? (academic at this point, since fertilization will be required in order to examine the result, but it's a possible, if not probably future development)
You haven't been keeping up to date with the *hip* phishing sites. They'll have an arrow pointing to that yellow bar and saying "Hi! Look at the shiny pictures! Do this and that with that yellow bar to see more shiny pictures!"
(*and by "shiny pictures" I mean porn)
On the other hand, you simply cannot ignore these things. Being a good web designer means you unfortunately need to compensate.
That depends on what audience you're targeting. If you're building a website for a government institution, then yes, you need to support IE, including IE6. If, on the other hand, you have commercial considerations, and can deliver a real *web app* by dropping IE, then you have some thinking to do. Maybe you could just drop IE6 -- if youtube can do it then it's probably a safe move. But if you know that you can provide a really significant improvement in usability by supporting only modern/compliant browsers, then being a "good web designer" would be to tell IE users that in order to fully experience this particular site, they need a better platform.
Oh cool, so I can install Flash, explorercanvas, and now SVG Web, and I'll finally have a browser that is half-way up to date.
Google: Please release V8 as a plugin for IE, along with CSS compatibility. Actually, scratch that -- please release Chrome as a plugin for IE.
(first /. post from my kindle!)
Honest question: huh?
I've actually never seen a kindle, but did I miss something on the spec list? You can browse from it? Did you hack it?
RTFA. They refer to "socially painful" -- you don't need a girlfriend, you just have to be rejected by someone. Being a /.er, it's likely most of us...*cough*...YOU are sitting on a goldmine.
That was 2000 years ago. He got over it. Look up WWII.
Why? Clearly he's already dead... what else could happen to him?
But I would look up where he lives and stay away from there. He might be craving brainz.
Remember how vain and cruel those girls from high school were? Well, guess what, those girls become the vain and cruel wives of rich men
That's anecdotal.
But even if it were true, then those same wealthy individuals would already have spread their own nature (vanity, cruelty, etc.) through their genes, as well as their behavior around their children, and those children will be sent to private schools and placed on a course to MBA-ish jobs when they graduate. If you were fearing the "dicks in high places" syndrome, it's already been deployed.
I do sniff for gecko. Instead of "FF3+" I should have said that I checked for a list of capabilities and infer from there. I never do a specific browser-sniff per say, but if "document.all" is there and so is "attachEvent", then I know what I'm dealing with. I always feature-sniff and then condition the imports, but in practice I meant that the newer crop of browsers are quite capable and require relatively little fiddling and vestigial bug-handling.
1) They were not given "bailout money". They landed a loan from a program set aside for loans.
I wasn't accusing them of doing something illegal. If you sell cigarettes, it's not you who is at fault, it's the government that allows you to do something morally wrong. Of course that was an extreme example, but the point is that I wasn't being critical of them -- they did what a company should do. I was criticizing the decision to give them the loan (which I've rethought somewhat, see next paragraph...).
2) The Roadster has nothing to do with the loan except to prove that Tesla isn't blowing smoke out their collective arses. The loan is 100% for the Model S. To get the Loan, Tesla had to show that they'd be profitble on the Roadsters on their own.
I wasn't aware that the loan was conditioned. If they really did point out the Model S at the beneficiary for the loan, then that changes things, to a degree. I still see them as a luxury-product company at the moment, but if the Model S gains traction, then I will have been proven wrong about the decision do grant the loan.
3) It's not true that Tesla "didn't bring anything truly innovative to the table". They dramatically improved on the AC-150, and point me to a single battery pack made before them like the marvel that they engineered.
There are discussions below about the alternatives to their battery systems, but I'm not versed enough to point something out specifically. I do, however, know that batteries for all electric devices have been improving across the board, and the most efficient ones commercially available (in terms of energy density) are found in laptops and cell phones. They simply had to address the new issue of scale, which no one had bothered to do up until then. They also patented the technology, so it's not like the public would benefit, and it is the public that funded the loan (this is circular, however. If the Model S succeeds, then arguably the public did benefit).
4) The GP was correct; most products start at the high-end and move their way down to the low end. You think that plasma TVs were something being pushed by businesses? Blu-ray? Smartphones? It doesn't matter whether something is for high-end consumers or businesses; they still start out expensive and become cheaper over time. And it doesn't matter the field. Today's Red5 camera will be tomorrow's Sony camcorder.
I think Tesla looked at the problem and made a very reasonable decision. With the tech available when they started, they could make a $60k low-end sedan or a $100k supercar. They realized that the market for the latter was a lot more solid.
This point is very easy to rebuke. We can go over your examples if you want:
Plasma TVs were sold primarily to companies/corporations/organizations at first, and so did projectors.
Blu-ray isn't technically luxury, not in the way that a $100k+ car is, but then it was still expensive enough that it's flopping even now, when there are $100 players on the market. You could also consider the PS3 a luxury product by that standard, and certainly the iPhone when it came out, but in absolute terms, their initial price wasn't astronomical.
The Red5 is currently used mainly by production companies. You don't see individuals carrying them around and taking vacation videos.
Smartphones really got their start in commercial use. They were products that paid for themselves. So were cellphones in general.
All of the above examples were used by companies, that could justify the expense. They were not driven into the market because rich people bought them, and by doing so paved the way for economies of scale. There's a difference between something that only a millionaire would likely be able to afford, and a product that a person with an average income can. Blu-ray, cell phones, and laptops were all expensive at first, but it wasn't the super-upper class that drove t
Oh look, it's a troll. Hi troll! Want some candy?
Computers and printers were sold to large companies, because they cost a lot to manufacture. If you needed something to be automated, however, you could do the math and if it would pay for itself after a while, you could *invest* in the new technology. Eventually these technologies would come down in price and private people could afford them. Relatively FEW technologies actually started out at luxury products, they were simply expensive to manufacture, and you'd have to prove commercially-sensible use.
Tesla Motors didn't start out in the 80's. People were already converting conventional vehicles into electric ones using lead-acid batteries in their garages. They didn't bring anything truly innovative to the table, but they did manage to make the right bet and manufacture something that worked as advertised. They could have started out with a much cheaper vehicle, however, and they chose not to. That's their right, and it's my right to point out the absurdity of what is, in effect, bail-out money given to a small, luxury-product manufacturing company.
I thought of that only after posting it, I should've found a similar image somewhere else. Even if you link to an article (which is something you'd think they'd want) rather than an image, they may replace it with something seppuku-inducing if traffic spikes to somewhere specific. It's still safe at the moment of this writing, but I wouldn't click that link if you find this post later than about a week after it was posted...
Actually I was just speculating on what he meant by the "granted to them by the government" part, I wasn't weighing in with an opinion.
But I can if I must: So far, Tesla Motors have produced 1 product: the Tesla Roadster. This is a 2-seat, $100k+ vehicle. I don't care that it's electric -- it's an ultra-high-end luxury product. The money is from a "fund to develop fuel-efficient vehicles". What if I'm developing an electric yacht? Can I get some of that grant money then? I'm sure they showed nice slides of their Model S, and how this was a "means to an end". Still, they could have attempted to start off with a solution that was financially viable to more than 0.1% of the population.
And before someone draws comparisons to the Segway, that's a $5k device. A person with an average income could afford one, if they really wanted to. There are also many commercial(organizational) uses for it, and it's been used for these purposes. (I just threw in that Segway comment because for some reason that's the rebuttal I get whenever I complain about the funding Tesla gets... I don't really get the correlation)
I think that by that part he meant that a patent usually costs money.