Where is my last generation Broadband?
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I used to drool over the 'next-generation-is-just-around-the-corner' stories, but lately I have been having second thoughts.
I live in the middle of Silicon Valley and they can't even serve me DSL better then 190Kbits/sec. No cable modem in my area eiter. It is so painfull, I almost posted this anonymous;-)
No really...when will last generations broadband stuff truly be available to the masses here in the US? Who and how will they fix the last-mile problem if the governament isn't stimulating this issue?
Same with the phone network. 3G you ask? HAHAHA, not in the mother-of-all-technology countries, nosir.
Devils advocate
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Sorry to play devils advocate here, but I am a 35 year old sensior software engineer myself I get to manage a group of engineers that vary in their age significantly and I do see some differences.
Some of the bad thing that older engineers are guilty of (and please do not flame, I know I am generalizing):
refusing to update their programming style and programming languages to match projects. No matter how good their assambly and C programming skills are, when I see them writing a GUI in a non-OO language, I take the project away.
You don't have to love Java/C++/C#, but refusing to look into it because 'you can do the same in C' is not an acceptable answer when we start a multi-site, multi-engineering project.
They have so "been there, done that" that they sometimes are not interested in "going there again". For example when asked to program yet another driver.
Experienced engineers are very demanding. Thats all very nice but sometimes simply gets in the way of the actual work that needs to be done. I partyally blame this on the spoiled period they all went through during the internet/economy boom.
They are expensive. Again, being spoiled with huge salaries in the last decade makes the experienced/older engineers demand for enourmous pay while only a hand full of them actually used the experience that they gained to justify their salary. So many around me are guilty of salary inflation based on years-of-service. This is ofcourse a mistake by our management system, but it is the engineers who will prevent it from beeing fixed.
Now for the handfull that feel offended by what I just said (and can back that up):
Teach the younger engineers around you the basics of engineering that they didn't get tought in school.
Discuss modern programming paradigms with the older engineers. Tell them it is not a bad thing to have to learn new skills (and re-learn the old ones).
I think it is more like spreading viruses is illegal while writing viruses is unethical. And I don't think you have to actually write a virus just to know how they work either.
from the article (my highlights): "At 15,000 degrees Celsius (27,032 degrees Fahrenheit), the plasma valve is about 50 times hotter than room temperature when measured in degrees Kelvin"
Did the reported think that by using 4 different temperature notations he would please everyone? Or did the reporter not think at all.:-)
Quite apart from the issue of security holes, does anyone trust AOL-TW to even *try* to make this secure? I'd be extremely surprised if they weren't keeping AIM keys in "escrow" where the NSA^W FBI^W Department of Homeland Security can access them
The alternative being that you don't encrypt your AIM messages and leave your 'secret-chat-sessions' visible for everyone.
What do you really have to hide from the governament?
Do you simply not trust your governament to recognize that your harmless chat wasn't a plot for terrorism? This is a valid concern and not nescecarily paranoia. But if you don't trust the governament, you surely don't trust large corporations and so by your own distrust wouldn't trust AIM encryption to start with.
or
Are you doing something ileagal, in which case you are a moron for using AIM (besides being a moron from doing something ileagal:-)
AIM adding encryption is going to be a BIG relief for all those 'secret love chat sessions' between the millions of anonymous people out there who are deadly afraid that there legal partner might stumble upon the un-encrypted chat session.
I liked the movie. Some cool action sequences combined with mellow moody scenes and, like the first movie, an abundance of philosophical topics. Sure, if you know anything about philosophy then you realize that the topics touched upon in the Matrix are hardly groundbreaking. "free choice", "fate", "alternate realities", "Artificial Inteligence", "AI Singularity concequences", etc. All these topics are good for the mind (free the mind imho) but are rarely presented in an accessable way to Joe Average. I have had more semi-philosopical discussions with friends about the Matrix then about any other recent box office success.
This AIBO competition has been going on for a few years now. I remember reading about it a few RoboCups back. The coolest thing at the time was to read that the team that eventually won the AIBO competition didn't just win by programming the best path algorithms and ball recognition algorithms, they went all out and re-programmed the core AIBO mechanics to make it 'walk' differently in a way that helped it manouvre more cleverly and outpace it's competition to the ball.
Got to love those journalists that start the article with a picture of a rival company's craft without specifically mentioning that this craft has nothing to do with Mr Bezos.
On top of that, the picture is Photoshopped (whoops, I mean "Gimped":-)
Compare the bottom of this picture closely to this image. Both are from Scaled Composites own site. Scaled Composites is one of the competitors for the X-price.
Note the following fakes: 1) The attachment of the crafts is a Photoshop job. They removed the wheels (look closely at the spot on the small plane that suposedly holds the wheels) and note that they forgot to remove the shadow of the front stand. Also, the shadow on the attachement between the planes is (nicely) faked. For that matter, so is the whole attachment. 2) The small plane does not actually have an exhaust (the red thingy). In all the pictures this thing looks a little different. Note how it is awkwardly in and out of shadow in the above pictures.
Why?
Do investors know about this? Is this common practice for a startup (ok, forget I asked that;-)? If I photoshop a cool plane, will you give me 1 Gazillion $$ too?
while we are doing that...your argument doesn't hold. The sequential (I incorrectly used the word 'serial' earlier) computer runs on a clock speed and all it needs to do EXACTLY what the parallel computer is doing is run at a higher clock speed. FPGA's are known for their slowness, so it is not trivial to claim that the parallel implementation of an algorithm on an FPGA can be done faster then with an equavalent ($$) amount of sequential processors.
A Parallel computer can't actually do anything that a serial computer can't do, other then doing things more efficiently. Any von Neumann based computer can simulate a parallel computer and thus achieve the same computed results.
The hyped 'we are on the eve of the next generation of computing era' seems added by the startup companies marketing departments and eagerly taken over by the reporters.
Not to say that the new generation of reconfigurable computers (FPGA are what...30 years old now?) arn't a cool thing to have.
This is what I understood of Paladium, and why it IS scary: In a Paladium box, the DRM starts with the hardware. Thus, uninstalling MS-WinPaladium and trying to install Linux/Win2K/other is not possible because the hardware will not allow you to run the 'unsigned' installer. Once Paladium, always Paladium.
Even if someone finds a hack/crack around this, installing an alternative OS on a Paladium box will probably not become widely excepted because this is illegal according to the DMCA.
So, let's fight the battle now. Why is or isn't Paladium good for 'the people'.
I could see that Hollywood is taking this approach to get a foot in the door for when the more interesting filters start appearing. For example, given the direction that modern advertisements are going I can forsee a future where they become an integrated part movies (they sometimes allready are). It would be in Hollywoods favor to have a case on it's side that helps the ban of 'advertisement-filters'.
Since I have allready seen most of the obvious choices mentioned, I'll go for some lesser knowns and trow in some warnings what to stay away from too (my $0.02 ofcourse):
(GOOD)Terry Pratchett but try his two SciFi books "Strata" and "The Dark Side of the Sun". Like his (excelent and funny) diskworld series, these books are light but extremely pleasant to read.
(BAD)Terry Goodkind I'll admit that I have only tried 1 book, but god was it awfull. It put me of so much that I refuse to read anything fantasy for another year or two (or at least untill Terry Pratchett's next book:-)
(BAD)Orson Scott Card You will no doubt have read the excelent "Enders game". Hopefully you have not read any of the later books in the series. "Speaker for the dead" might have been ok-ish, but "Xenocide" and the modern 'bean-series' books are horrible. Don't waste your time.
lastly I just have to mention:
(GOOD)Vernor Vinge "A Fire upon the Deep" is currently my alltime favorite sci-fi book. One of the very few grandiose space opera stories that mentions to touch upon the big picture as well as some of the detail in a convincing way.
actually, you CAN get a really long string from here to china. If you pull it however then each atom in the string will atract a nearby atom to 'stay close' and this information moves at best at the speed of light. So yes, your 'almost instantaneous' will turn out to be the speed of light.
Here is a case for why the speed of gravity could (and possibly is) instantaneous:
To measure the speed of gravity you have 1) point in space WHERE you measure 2) an object in space THAT you measure
the fastest that the object could ever travel is the speed of light, so the fastest change you could ever measure is the speed of the object, thus if we measure that the gravity changes with the speed of light, it might well be that the object changes position with the speed of light while gravity changes instantaneous.
I know that the way the two physisist measured the speed of gravity was indirect, yet that still means that the fastest any object was moving in their experiment was with the speed of light.
Does this make any sense? (just thought of it...not a lot of physics to back me up yet:-)
If the above hypothesis where true then one could (theoretically) build the following device: At place A we have a measurement tool that measures the gravitational pull of an object at place B. At place B we move the object back and forth based on a coded pattern (sending information). At spot A the difference in gravitational pull allows us to decode the pattern (reading information). The time it takes to send this information is based on the time it takes for the gravity 'waves' to reach from point B to point A. Our hypothesis says that this time is 0 so it means that we can now build a device that can send information FASTER then the speed of light. Einstein allready proofed that there is nothing faster then the speed of light.
Conclusion: The hypothesis is FALSE.
(disclaimer: bah, I'm no physicist, so don't flame me for not writing the above proof in a perfect physicist lingo...I tried:-)
As much as Foveon's well hyped and widely advertised (*cough*thanksslashdot*cough*) idea seems to make sense on the surface, their solution is far from perfect.
To sense an RGB (Red, Green, Blue) pixel one can use a veriety of methods. At the center of this technology lies the ability to turn a stream of photons into an electric current. This photodetector is colorblind, it is only capable of measuring the _amount_ of light, not it's color. To recognize color the estheblished method used to be to put several photodetectors near each other and put color filters in front of them. The most widely used color filter array is known as the Bayer pattern and consists of 2 green photodetectors (diagonal from each other) a blue and a red detector in a 2x2 grid. These 2x2 blocks are then repeated over and over to create the full image sensor. Specialized software or hardware needs to take these individual Red, Green or Blue pixels and recreate a single RGB pixel, this technique is known as demosaicing. The major advantage of this method is the simplicity of the photodiode (photodetector). It allows for the creation of very dense image sensors that are now passing the 10MegaPixel barrier while keeping the cost down (start seeing 5MegaPix sensors for less then $100 before the end of this year).
Foveon's approach is to layer these color filters vertically.
The good: - idealy you get R,G,B at each pixel.
The bad: - very complex layered photodiode technology, this makes the pixels significantly bigger. Currently the pixels are bigger then a 2x2 bayer image pixel. The complexity also adds to the manifacturing cost, these chips will not be cheap for the forseable future. - Color bleeding. For example: Photons in the green wavelenght do not nescecarily stop in the green layer, but might be picked up by the underlying red layer. This means that specialized hardware needs to apply a non-trivial color correction for each pixel layer.
Foveon's idea is a very interesting approach. Since they nicely pattented their idea shut, we will have to patiently wait for this single company to provide the world with this technology.
Side fact: The human eye see's colors using pigments that respond differently to different wavelengths. In the simplest model we can say that we see Red Green and Blue with spatially seperated pigments that resemble a bayer image sensor closer then the foveon's sensor.
No matter how many statistical guesses different scientists make, the question of habitable planets, not to mention the question of other intelligences, will not be answered without actually going out and visiting them. This will not happen in your lifetime. You will not know. Sorry!
Might want to see the movie "Contact" to update yourself on _how_ we will be able to detect life somewhere else. We do not have to go anywhere. All it takes is a good telescope (got those) and a lot of sifting through the data (SETI et el). Whether that will happend in our lifetime is part of scientific guesswork.
I like the research that refines our understanding of the (habitable) universe and helps us create a scientific model that allows predictions for 'life out there'. I'd like to stress the _scientific_ nature of this research. The splitting of the atom, the landing on the moon, the cloning of molly and most other human achievements will pale in significance once we proof that earth is not the only place for life in the universe.
"If we where the only life in the universe, wouldn't that be an awfull waste of space?" Now think Occams Razor!
as much as I think the article was a little light on interesting details, lets not get carried away by ridiculing mr Gartner.
If you can't figure out from the article that these statements and numbers are part of a bigger document then I'll do it for you:
Mindless extrapolation of the obvious: "... will remain keyboard- and mouse-based." Try the same sentence without the "keyboard- and mouse-based" part. It doesn't work.
Authoritative sounding numbers pulled out of the air: "... more than 95 percent... 0.6 probability..." One of many phrases that are probably pulled out of a document where those numbers are explained. Blame ZDNet on leaving out the link to the original work by mr Gartner.
Sheer idiocy: "... 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes)..." (If it's a percentage, then why does the unit matter?) Same as above. There are numbers that go with these phrases. The numbers are in gigabytes (duh) and the blame lies with the reporter Alexander Linden for not refering to the original document. The dork prolly just cut and paste without looking at the content.
Now if someone can be so good to find us the complete works of mr Gartner.
When searching for the right to carry guns, ask yourself which of the following statements you really want to discuss: I have a 'constitutional' right to carry guns. or I have a 'moral' right to carry guns.
I don't care much for the first but rather be discussing the second. In other words, whenever I am discussing the gun issue with americans I do not want to be sidetracked from the real issues by "what the constitution says".
Slashdot Mirror
I used to drool over the 'next-generation-is-just-around-the-corner' stories, but
;-)
lately I have been having second thoughts.
I live in the middle of Silicon Valley and they can't even serve me DSL better then
190Kbits/sec. No cable modem in my area eiter. It is so painfull, I almost posted this
anonymous
No really...when will last generations broadband stuff truly be available to the masses
here in the US? Who and how will they fix the last-mile problem if the governament isn't
stimulating this issue?
Same with the phone network. 3G you ask? HAHAHA, not in the mother-of-all-technology
countries, nosir.
Some of the bad thing that older engineers are guilty of (and please do not flame, I know I am generalizing):
Now for the handfull that feel offended by what I just said (and can back that up):
I think it is more like spreading viruses is illegal while writing viruses is unethical. And I don't think you have to actually write a virus just to know how they work either.
from the article (my highlights):
:-)
"At 15,000 degrees Celsius (27,032 degrees Fahrenheit), the plasma valve is about 50 times hotter than room temperature when measured in degrees Kelvin"
Did the reported think that by using 4 different temperature notations he would please everyone? Or did the reporter not think at all.
Quite apart from the issue of security holes, does anyone trust AOL-TW to even *try* to make this secure? I'd be extremely surprised if they weren't keeping AIM keys in "escrow" where the NSA^W FBI^W Department of Homeland Security can access them
:-)
The alternative being that you don't encrypt your AIM messages and leave your 'secret-chat-sessions' visible for everyone.
What do you really have to hide from the governament?
Do you simply not trust your governament to recognize that your harmless chat wasn't a plot for terrorism? This is a valid concern and not nescecarily paranoia. But if you don't trust the governament, you surely don't trust large corporations and so by your own distrust wouldn't trust AIM encryption to start with.
or
Are you doing something ileagal, in which case you are a moron for using AIM (besides being a moron from doing something ileagal
AIM adding encryption is going to be a BIG relief for all those 'secret love chat sessions' between the millions of anonymous people out there who are deadly afraid that there legal partner might stumble upon the un-encrypted chat session.
sad, but true.
I liked the movie. Some cool action sequences combined with mellow moody scenes and, like the first movie, an abundance of philosophical topics. Sure, if you know anything about philosophy then you realize that the topics touched upon in the Matrix are hardly groundbreaking. "free choice", "fate", "alternate realities", "Artificial Inteligence", "AI Singularity concequences", etc. All these topics are good for the mind (free the mind imho) but are rarely presented in an accessable way to Joe Average. I have had more semi-philosopical discussions with friends about the Matrix then about any other recent box office success.
Bring it on Washowski brothers! We want more!
This AIBO competition has been going on for a few years now. I remember reading about it a few RoboCups back. The coolest thing at the time was to read that the team that eventually won the AIBO competition didn't just win by programming the best path algorithms and ball recognition algorithms, they went all out and re-programmed the core AIBO mechanics to make it 'walk' differently in a way that helped it manouvre more cleverly and outpace it's competition to the ball.
Very cool stuff.
I forgot one major fluke in those two (1, 2) pictures.
Check out the black exhaust on the big plane (and the lack of it in the other picture)!
DoH!
Got to love those journalists that start the article with a picture of a rival company's craft without specifically mentioning that this craft has nothing to do with Mr Bezos.
:-)
;-)? If I photoshop a cool plane, will you give me 1 Gazillion $$ too?
On top of that, the picture is Photoshopped (whoops, I mean "Gimped"
Compare the bottom of this picture closely to this image. Both are from Scaled Composites own site. Scaled Composites is one of the competitors for the X-price.
Note the following fakes:
1) The attachment of the crafts is a Photoshop job. They removed the wheels (look closely at the spot on the small plane that suposedly holds the wheels) and note that they forgot to remove the shadow of the front stand. Also, the shadow on the attachement between the planes is (nicely) faked. For that matter, so is the whole attachment.
2) The small plane does not actually have an exhaust (the red thingy). In all the pictures this thing looks a little different. Note how it is awkwardly in and out of shadow in the above pictures.
Why?
Do investors know about this? Is this common practice for a startup (ok, forget I asked that
funny to find a link to a 2.4GB 1-Inch drive article .... at the bottom of the slashdot linked article!
;-)
Nitpicking is fine :-)
while we are doing that...your argument doesn't hold. The sequential (I incorrectly used the word 'serial' earlier) computer runs on a clock speed and all it needs to do EXACTLY what the parallel computer is doing is run at a higher clock speed. FPGA's are known for their slowness, so it is not trivial to claim that the parallel implementation of an algorithm on an FPGA can be done faster then with an equavalent ($$) amount of sequential processors.
A Parallel computer can't actually do anything that a serial computer can't do, other then doing things more efficiently. Any von Neumann based computer can simulate a parallel computer and thus achieve the same computed results.
The hyped 'we are on the eve of the next generation of computing era' seems added by the startup companies marketing departments and eagerly taken over by the reporters.
Not to say that the new generation of reconfigurable computers (FPGA are what...30 years old now?) arn't a cool thing to have.
> I've said that no transmission method of bandwidth will ever exceed, in my lifetime, the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes
You forgot to include distance.
Your truck runs at 100 km an hour. So 7000GB * 100km/h = 700TBkm/h
Now lets compare to the internet2. 6.7GB traveled at 11000km/s (40.000.000km/h). So the data traveled at 265PBkm/h!!
Data transport was 400 times more effective when transported over internet2, then per truck!
This is what I understood of Paladium, and why it IS scary:
In a Paladium box, the DRM starts with the hardware. Thus, uninstalling MS-WinPaladium and trying to install Linux/Win2K/other is not possible because the hardware will not allow you to run the 'unsigned' installer. Once Paladium, always Paladium.
Even if someone finds a hack/crack around this, installing an alternative OS on a Paladium box will probably not become widely excepted because this is illegal according to the DMCA.
So, let's fight the battle now. Why is or isn't Paladium good for 'the people'.
I could see that Hollywood is taking this approach to get a foot in the door for when the more interesting filters start appearing. For example, given the direction that modern advertisements are going I can forsee a future where they become an integrated part movies (they sometimes allready are). It would be in Hollywoods favor to have a case on it's side that helps the ban of 'advertisement-filters'.
Since I have allready seen most of the obvious choices mentioned, I'll go for some lesser knowns and trow in some warnings what to stay away from too (my $0.02 ofcourse):
:-)
(GOOD)Terry Pratchett
but try his two SciFi books "Strata" and "The Dark Side of the Sun". Like his (excelent and funny) diskworld series, these books are light but extremely pleasant to read.
(BAD)Terry Goodkind
I'll admit that I have only tried 1 book, but god was it awfull. It put me of so much that I refuse to read anything fantasy for another year or two (or at least untill Terry Pratchett's next book
(BAD)Orson Scott Card
You will no doubt have read the excelent "Enders game". Hopefully you have not read any of the later books in the series. "Speaker for the dead" might have been ok-ish, but "Xenocide" and the modern 'bean-series' books are horrible. Don't waste your time.
lastly I just have to mention:
(GOOD)Vernor Vinge
"A Fire upon the Deep" is currently my alltime favorite sci-fi book. One of the very few grandiose space opera stories that mentions to touch upon the big picture as well as some of the detail in a convincing way.
actually, you CAN get a really long string from here to china. If you pull it however then each atom in the string will atract a nearby atom to 'stay close' and this information moves at best at the speed of light. So yes, your 'almost instantaneous' will turn out to be the speed of light.
Here is a case for why the speed of gravity could (and possibly is) instantaneous:
:-)
To measure the speed of gravity you have
1) point in space WHERE you measure
2) an object in space THAT you measure
the fastest that the object could ever travel is the speed of light, so the fastest change you could ever measure is the speed of the object, thus if we measure that the gravity changes with the speed of light, it might well be that the object changes position with the speed of light while gravity changes instantaneous.
I know that the way the two physisist measured the speed of gravity was indirect, yet that still means that the fastest any object was moving in their experiment was with the speed of light.
Does this make any sense? (just thought of it...not a lot of physics to back me up yet
Hypothesis: The speed of gravity == infinite
:-)
If the above hypothesis where true then one could (theoretically) build the following device: At place A we have a measurement tool that measures the gravitational pull of an object at place B. At place B we move the object back and forth based on a coded pattern (sending information). At spot A the difference in gravitational pull allows us to decode the pattern (reading information). The time it takes to send this information is based on the time it takes for the gravity 'waves' to reach from point B to point A. Our hypothesis says that this time is 0 so it means that we can now build a device that can send information FASTER then the speed of light. Einstein allready proofed that there is nothing faster then the speed of light.
Conclusion: The hypothesis is FALSE.
(disclaimer: bah, I'm no physicist, so don't flame me for not writing the above proof in a perfect physicist lingo...I tried
As much as Foveon's well hyped and widely advertised (*cough*thanksslashdot*cough*) idea seems to make sense on the surface, their solution is far from perfect.
To sense an RGB (Red, Green, Blue) pixel one can use a veriety of methods. At the center of this technology lies the ability to turn a stream of photons into an electric current. This photodetector is colorblind, it is only capable of measuring the _amount_ of light, not it's color. To recognize color the estheblished method used to be to put several photodetectors near each other and put color filters in front of them. The most widely used color filter array is known as the Bayer pattern and consists of 2 green photodetectors (diagonal from each other) a blue and a red detector in a 2x2 grid. These 2x2 blocks are then repeated over and over to create the full image sensor.
Specialized software or hardware needs to take these individual Red, Green or Blue pixels and recreate a single RGB pixel, this technique is known as demosaicing. The major advantage of this method is the simplicity of the photodiode (photodetector). It allows for the creation of very dense image sensors that are now passing the 10MegaPixel barrier while keeping the cost down (start seeing 5MegaPix sensors for less then $100 before the end of this year).
Foveon's approach is to layer these color filters vertically.
The good:
- idealy you get R,G,B at each pixel.
The bad:
- very complex layered photodiode technology, this makes the pixels significantly bigger. Currently the pixels are bigger then a 2x2 bayer image pixel. The complexity also adds to the manifacturing cost, these chips will not be cheap for the forseable future.
- Color bleeding. For example: Photons in the green wavelenght do not nescecarily stop in the green layer, but might be picked up by the underlying red layer. This means that specialized hardware needs to apply a non-trivial color correction for each pixel layer.
Foveon's idea is a very interesting approach. Since they nicely pattented their idea shut, we will have to patiently wait for this single company to provide the world with this technology.
Side fact: The human eye see's colors using pigments that respond differently to different wavelengths. In the simplest model we can say that we see Red Green and Blue with spatially seperated pigments that resemble a bayer image sensor closer then the foveon's sensor.
No matter how many statistical guesses different scientists make, the question of habitable planets, not to mention the question of other intelligences, will not be answered without actually going out and visiting them. This will not happen in your lifetime. You will not know. Sorry!
Might want to see the movie "Contact" to update yourself on _how_ we will be able to detect life somewhere else. We do not have to go anywhere. All it takes is a good telescope (got those) and a lot of sifting through the data (SETI et el). Whether that will happend in our lifetime is part of scientific guesswork.
I like the research that refines our understanding of the (habitable) universe and helps us create a scientific model that allows predictions for 'life out there'. I'd like to stress the _scientific_ nature of this research. The splitting of the atom, the landing on the moon, the cloning of molly and most other human achievements will pale in significance once we proof that earth is not the only place for life in the universe.
"If we where the only life in the universe, wouldn't that be an awfull waste of space?"
Now think Occams Razor!
...viagra... :)
;-)
Now we just need a pill that makes old men attractive to their wives again.
Not having much experience with old wives, but alcohol works pretty well for the younger once...
as much as I think the article was a little light on interesting details, lets not get carried away by ridiculing mr Gartner.
... 0.6 probability ..."
..." (If it's a percentage, then why does the unit matter?)
If you can't figure out from the article that these statements and numbers are part of a bigger document then I'll do it for you:
Mindless extrapolation of the obvious: "... will remain keyboard- and mouse-based."
Try the same sentence without the "keyboard- and mouse-based" part. It doesn't work.
Authoritative sounding numbers pulled out of the air: "... more than 95 percent
One of many phrases that are probably pulled out of a document where those numbers are explained. Blame ZDNet on leaving out the link to the original work by mr Gartner.
Sheer idiocy: "... 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes)
Same as above. There are numbers that go with these phrases. The numbers are in gigabytes (duh) and the blame lies with the reporter Alexander Linden for not refering to the original document. The dork prolly just cut and paste without looking at the content.
Now if someone can be so good to find us the complete works of mr Gartner.
When searching for the right to carry guns, ask yourself which of the following statements you really want to discuss:
I have a 'constitutional' right to carry guns.
or
I have a 'moral' right to carry guns.
I don't care much for the first but rather be discussing the second. In other words, whenever I am discussing the gun issue with americans I do not want to be sidetracked from the real issues by "what the constitution says".