... the capital required - we don't have it and couldn't raise it, Google wouldn't even know it's gone. Start this idea small and it will fail. So yeah if you know someone willing to invest a hundred mill or so, then I'd be developing it myself. And I'd still not have the brand loyalty Google has, so we'd split a market between us rather than getting the whole market to one place... %(
A colleague (well okay, a mate) and I have tried several times to get one of our development ideas to Google. It's a project that's just righ for Google and would dazzle Zazzle to a frazzle, it's an idea that's worth billions in turnover per year - and because Google seems to be full of dopey robots, we haven't had a response on even ONE of our dozen emails to any address we could find that seemed about right.
Is there some secret to getting a very good concept to the right ears in Google? Has anyone ever reached someone in R&D there? Because, the concept we have, will not work for any company lesser than Google. It might work for the MS Empire but it's such a cash cow that my colleague and I decided long ago that it couldn't go there. If anyone loves Google and knows a way to get our idea to someone in that there company we'd be stoked... Sorry this is probably OT but I really want to know how to get in contact, we can take it from there...
Yeap I see your point, as I said it's not sportsmanlike to exploit a hole in a game - but if the designers didn't want for something to be possible then they must make it impossible. I tend to think that if there's an exploitable out-of-game surface or whatever left laying around, then it's a piece of Yew just asking to be made into a longbow... %)
Compare to Real Life people - when the English archers made and used longbows, was that "cheating"? No way, that is exploiting the technology they had to hand in order to get an advantage. When the Nazi rounded up non-Aryan people, was that "cheating"? No, just misguided bigotry and zealotry. (And before I get flames, I'm Austrian born, just like Adolph...)
When the world put a moratorium on nuclear research a while back, did any country really stop? Probably not. And nowadays, with GM technology being alternately boycotted and boosted, is anyone going to stop using it?
No, because there is no such thing as "cheating." There's only exploiting things to your advantage, although of course there's a scale of "sportsmanship".
In every game I've ever played where someone has used cheats or unorthodox procedures, I've learnt to either deal with it, learn it, or avoid them. Because online, you can do that. It's not like someone's bringing an Uzi to a paintball skirmish...
So - it's not sportsmanlike, but it's not cheating. IMHO. EOF.
XP and Windows are valid operating systems, and there are more boxen running some form of Win than probably all the other boxes put together.
Like it or not, trying to turn a Wintel box into an Apple is not going to happen.
Where I work originally made their software to run on SG machines. Guess what? We are now a Windows shop because all our customers couldn't wait to throw out expensive O2s and Indis and Indigos in favour of standard Wintel.
Just two examples from a long list of fiascos I've seen in the past:
- community radio station ran a lot of cabling along a corridor ceiling. One night it just collapsed because no-one had thought to tie the cabling to struts, it was just lying full weight on a suspended ceiling. Approved cablers know to do this.
- Friend running CAT5 through his ceiling, suddenly his TV stopped working. I yelled at him to drop the cable and lucky he didn't touch any cores - the CAT5 had sawed through a power circuit... Again, licensed cablers know not to cause themselves a $200AUD electrician's callout bill for repairing a mains cable.
And for me, the main reasons to use an approved cabler - if anything goes wrong in my LAN, if any user or piece of equipment is harmed by a cabling fault, I am absolved. And I didn't have to lift a hand to get the cabling installed...
RFID tags are now pretty cheap, and available in stick-on rolls. RFID readers ditto. Your people have swipe cards. Now:
Person with swipe card operates the door to the hitech store room with their swipe card. PC records their entry. Person takes piece of gear with an RFID tag in it and swipes card to exit. PC records their exit, and RFID reader records the RFID of whatever gear they just took out.
Yes it's still possible for a second person to get in when someone else opens the door, or someone could take off the RFID tags somehow, but then every system has some way to get around it.
I tried around 12 - 15 years ago to use handsfree mic headsets with FM bug transmitters, which limited the range to 100 metres or less, and it did work after a fashion - you had the phones attached to a pocket FM radio, and every transmitter was on about 109.5 somewhere.
We had three cars kitted out, and I tried to interest someone - anyone - in the idea but it went across like a brick and tile hang glider - driver workload, too much chance of abuse, etc.
Also, when several people TXed at once you got weird results with the crap pocket radios, and it wasn't what I'd have called a huge success. But the thought surfaced again when I first played with mobile 802.11* stuff, I just wasn't convinced everyone would want to have a PC and soundcard in their car.
But it's a great idea - you can exchange voice and road info as stated, and if you added voice you could have a good communication route as stated. Also, if a vehicle near you had GPS, you could grab a very rough idea of where you were, as well.
If petrol stations had an access point, then cars could also swap information like how far to the next one and what price, and the car could decide if you needed to fill up now or could wait for a cheaper station. (Come to think of it that's probably EXACTLY why they wouldn't do this...)
And - oops, random breath test stations, portable speed traps, fixed speed cameras. Why am I getting the idea that the car manufacturers will NEVER make this an open source inititative? hehehe...
Amen to that, a written policy that each person has to agree to is the first line of control. And unless you have control you won't be able to manage the network.
Secondly, transparent proxy. It's great, the users don't actually see any "Nazism" so they don't kick up, and you get the advantage that you know exactly what traffic is going through your firewall and can even scan it.
I have an Axim X30 - it runs PocketPC and is stable, fast, and does things in a more file-oriented way. I've used a Palm, a Royal Da Vinci (crappy PDA-like thingie), BCom Mars, and the X30 and I have to say the little Dell wins hands down.
Did I mention that it's also cheap? I think the X50 is even cheaper, and has a VGA screen to boot. Wonder if they do trade-ins?
I'd suggest to you to borrow one of these, use it alongside the Palm, and then decide.
- tinfoil is perfect, we use it to cover rfid tags in the lab while testing.
The problem would arise when a person's passport falls open inside their baggage in a public space, they would be under the mistaken assumption their rfid couldn't be read so they would not be watching for skimmers.
Several people have now mentioned these devices that track locate and squirt moving targets such as rabbits and pests.
No-one's said that they can be filled with things other than cold water or fox pee. Like HiLite bright Dye... Combine your webcams with a nice bright dyemark and your perpetrators may well be a bit easier to find...
Not lethal, not (usually) harmful, but it might be effective. Especially if you have a few of these things set up around the place...
Check my blog for a lot of this sort of stuff I've collected together. It's a sporadic blog because suitable technology advances seem to arrive in bursts, but the archive has a few ideas for growing a nanotech brain alongside your own brain, with the attendant possibility of direct interfaces to whatever you want.
How? Simple. Develop a group of nanoparticles that have particular functions. Insert them in the brain (injection, operation, whatever) in the right order, voila, neural connections!
i.e. inject a very particular bunch of NPs. Their only function is to bind to neurons at a synapse, for example.
A few weeks (or however long it takes for the first NPs to attach themselves) you inject the second course. These connect any two of the preceding NPs together, preferably follwing existing connections.
A few more weeks, next course of particles. These (for argument's sake) attach to any junction of NP1 and NP2 above that has less than three connections. Do the same with another NP that works on four or more junctions. Rinse and repeat until the correct complexity is achieved.
Next course builds the connections from those to the "electronics layer" nanoparticles. Add NPs to build the interface and electronics layer by layer.
We're talking nano bits here, so yes, there is plenty of empty space between the brain components to insert NPs, and also, you'd soon get used to carrying another kilo or so on your shoulders.
It would mean a course of hospital visits over the course of a long time, perhaps a year or perhaps even two. But it would give the person who has had the course, a complete, invisible connection to anything they want. Internet, networks, mobile phone, whatever future connection methods arise - anything...
A businessman with his eye on the big goal would do this so that he could be speaking to his prospect in person, unobtrusively collecting data on the prospect, and possibly transmitting the meeting to his "back-end staff" who could, in real time and quite unbeknownst to the prospect, be coaching and guiding the businessman.
"Pupil narrowing, you're losing him. Steer it back to yachts for a while. And by the way he has a yacht, the SV Grot. HTH."
That's one use.
Imagine an officer in the field, directing a whole squadron of Predators, a bunch of Fireant style ground vehicles, is in communication with all his troops, with his command post, with the Pentagon, and who "sees" in the infrared and u/v, and can also "see" a superimposed map of the area over the top of all that?
What I'm saying, to cut off all those people who say it'll never happen, is that those who do this will be uniquely equipped for survival. Countries that back this research and use it will have an edge. Hell, even criminals who have this operation will be more successful at what they do.
No matter to anyone who says "this is so immoral and sacrilegious" - they are barking up the wrong tree, because in the shadows, somewhere, someone will develop this because the prize is so valuable... Has anyone noticed that the various moratoria on atomic research or genetic research etc achieved precisely nothing?
You may have missed my point - I didn't say the same graphics card cost that much secondhand, I said that the same card is still being manufactured but now a new one costs 10% of what it did when it was originally released. Not the "I've bought the car now it's secondhand goods" analogy, at all.
It's like buying a brand new Ford but a 2002 model, for $2,500. Not like someone buying it for $25,000 in 2002 and then unloading it for $2,500 secondhand in 2004. In point of fact, even a secondhand Ford that's two years old would probably cost a sight more than two and a half K, which just points out how much faster the rate of change is in hardware than in other technologies.
As petrol prices continue to go up, expect that A) vehicle prices WILL drop to keep tempting people to buy them despite the rising cost of running them, and B) that yes, petrol companies may even begin to subsidise the price of your next car in order to get you to keep buying petrol.
Because car manufacturers aren't stupid, they'll produce more alternate energy transport. And because petrol companies aren't stupid either, they will attempt to make it cheaper for car manufacturers to keep selling petrol engines.
Another thing that some folks seem to take as a given is that technology will remain the same. It won't. Manufacturing costs WILL drop to ridiculous lows, and what is manufactured will seem horrendously wasteful by today's standards, using terabytes and hugely overpowered CPUs to achieve tasks like watering your garden or controlling your microwave.
But this seeming overkill will still be cheaper than manufacturing controllers with less mental horsepower and requiring more complex mechanical systems to control.
Cars will begin using alternate fuel sources, looking less like cars and more like "transport mechanisms"; and the old "CPU on this chip, I/O on this, memory on that" paradigm will also disappear as new architecture is developed, giving way to one chip that could in theory replace your entire office but which you just use to stash your MP3 collection because it will be cheaper to do that than to buy 20 DVDs and a DVD burner and a PC to run all that on.
As to printer consumables. Yep there is a manufacturing cost associated with them but it's miniscule, and the fact of the matter is that again despite everything you say, it's a model that's working for those companies, otherwise they would be broke by now.
The DMCA / "hardware being altered to only be able to use own spares" - this just bears me out! Because it's cheap enough to change the hardware to require specific cartridges, it has been done.
In the same way, when hardware manufacturers realise that they can sell you a chip that needs to "phone home" and download their BIOS/OS/firmware each time it starts up, and that they can enforce that in the hardware by building it in then you have a very successful Gillette model indeed.
After all, as you pointed out, Gillette blades and printer cartridges have a manufacturing cost associated with them, and software doesn't...
Oh and OSS? Not in this particular race... OS relies, as the CS software industry does, on predictable hardware characteristics. These chips will each be running their manufacturer's firmware, and if you want that chip to look like Win XP then the manufacturere will lease you the emulation let you run XP on it. If you want to run something on a MIPS processor, the manufacturer will let you pay to have the chip emulate a MIPS for as long as you pay the fee.
If you want to sit and hack out an interface s/w between the chip in your toaster and a copy of Linux you want to install on it, best of luck to you. If you then want to also install Linux on the microwave, well then you'll have to hack that chip similarly. It won't be worth it, except for the most dedicated hardware hackers.
OS will continue to produce brilliant and free software of course, but the chip manufacturer will still be charging you monthly f
And as for hardware costs - no they will NOT be "significant" and no, they will not "stay the same for a lot more bang."
I suggest that instead of trying to figure out where to place swear words for best shock jock effect, that you look at just how fast nanotech has snuck up on manufacturing - in another year or two you'll be able to *print* custom chips in one-off quantities at less than the price of a C/GPU today, and that trend will only continue.
And as a matter of fact, a graphics card which cost $800 only two years ago (at two years ago's value of the dollar, that makes it about $1100 in today's dollars) is now available at around $70, I'd say that's a "considerable" drop in cost wouldn't you?
And no similarly-placed graphics card today costs anywhere near $1100, most don't even cost $800, and that too is proof that the "considerable" cost of hardware is being eroded.
I don't think Intel or any other of the acronym soups you mentioned will be averse to making their chips do more and more for lower and lower manufacturing costs and then selling those same chips for a peanuts price and the firmware on a lease basis. Can you say "residual income"? They can.
Now stop thinking that things will remain statically stuck in this age of huge dumb expensive oneshot factories making millions of identical chips, which have to be sold at one-off markups. Go look up "agile manufacturing" and "self-assembling nanotechnology" and then tell me if you still think the major players are still thinking they'll be producing Durons and Athlons and P4s in five years time...
Also, tell me why any CEO worth his salt to his shareholders wouldn't begin charging for software which as you point out has neglible ongoing costs associated with it, on an ongoing basis, and forego the hassle of having to make all their profit off the one-shot sale of a piece of silicon, carbon, or diamond?
Think really really carefully here: A few years ago printer manufacturers did something that imroved their bottom line immensely? Can you remember what that was? Yes! They sold their printers at cost or just above, and sold consumables at huge whacking markups. Have you noticed any of the major printer manuf's foundering? Thought not...
And did you notice? I didn't launch a personal attack on you even though I consider that you wrote your own epithet extremely well. And I used not one bad word, unless you count words you can't understand as automatically bad. So I didn't end up looking like a total loser...
by He, I meant the AntiGates of course. And what was said was that hardware would soon be free with your software. I think Slashdot had a story on that.
And I'm about to agree with him (much as that chokes me) because the price of chips and bits is due to head South at a great rate of knots.
Pretty soon you'll be able to buy a terabyte of nonvolatile storage with a PC thrown in for free, on what will amount to a single chip in a cheap plastic case, which will talk to all the other consumer gear around you. It will be cheap because it will not need much in the way of IO devices, just a wireless connection or something to connect to the TV or whatever.
The money you'll pay will not be for that miniscule piece of hardware but for the lease of the applications / firmware / operating system you'll run on it...
Why would you store your data on a slice of plastic with a limited lifetime and which needs all sorts of mechanical contortions to write and read, when a chip can have the writer, the reader, and the IO/display all built into it?
And why would a manufacturer sell you that chip as a piece of hardware when they could sell it to you as a vehicle for leasing you their firmware?
Hey, they'll have you by the short and curlies then, so why wouldn't they do it this way? (As in, your data is now stored in a truly long-lasting medium, but unless you pay your lease fee, the operating system goes West, and with it your data...)
... then the paper notepad is probably the best alternative. hehehe.
But. Coming close to a dumb paper pad, the good, really really REALLY old Tandy Model 200 was a light piece of gear, ran for weeks on four penlight cells, and includes nothing more computer-like than a text editor, BASIC, and has timer functions you can use for alarm and time functions.
It's not tiny but it is light and very rugged because it has no moving parts aside from the power switch. And serial communications when you get back, yippee! (okay okay - and the keys, which by the way are a good solid feeling set.)
Not widely available these days, though there are some people who still have a few, just they don't often like to part with them. (I'm hanging onto mine because it's just the best serial datalogging machine I've ever had.) If you do find one grab it fast, they are THE ultimate holiday note taker.
Re:Setting up an MP3 Server is a bad idea.
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yeap like some poor worker in some thirdworld country who ends up poisoned by the byproducts while extracting the micrograms of precious materials. Which they're extracting for some conglomerate which ends up owned by the same people who made the damn things in the first place, at which time they used - what was it again? - 90 tonnes of materials to make it. Most of it probably mined by the poor guy's father...
Sorry - don't know where that rant could have come from. Perhaps from the knowledge that in those underprivileged countries there are government departments and small businesses that could put that PC to good use, and then that worker wouldn't have to work in a lethal job because the PC would still be being used.
Except that no-one wants to be responsible for shipping them there, and most governments would prefer to put red tape in the way rather than instituting such a recycling scheme...
LEDs are good. The apartment is a step in the right direction, and we should congratulate the company for pioneering that. But. What a. Frightening. Unnatural. Implementation.
I asked my other half, she wouldn't use the bathroom for all the rice in China. Point-blank no way. "How could I work out my makeup in that light?" was her first question.
I am thinking about the kitchen. How do I get a meal looking right in those ghastly hues? How can I enjoy a steak when it will look like a Quake gib under that light?
So while this is a noteworthy effort, it may have set the cause of LED lighting back by years... (kidding, okay? I'm pretty sure other architects and designers will see the advantages and adopt them pretty quickly...)
Which is sad because the idea of using LEDs to light a living space (or indeed a workspace) is sorely needed in view of the air pollution that our thirst for light and convenience creates.
I read somewhere that a 100W consumed for a year produces a cupful and a half of pollutants in that year. (I.e. collect all the pollutants and scrunch 'em together, bingo, 1 1/2 cups of waste...)
That means that for every 100W lightbulb in your place, which stays on for an average of a quarter of a day or so, over a quarter of a cup of crap per year... The average home has seven lightbulbs, that's over two cups of pollution per house per year.
If you could reduce the amount of power required to produce the same amount of light to around a fifth or less, you'd reduce that contribution to pollution due to light from two cups to a quarter cup.
Slashdot Mirror
... the capital required - we don't have it and couldn't raise it, Google wouldn't even know it's gone. Start this idea small and it will fail. So yeah if you know someone willing to invest a hundred mill or so, then I'd be developing it myself. And I'd still not have the brand loyalty Google has, so we'd split a market between us rather than getting the whole market to one place... %(
A colleague (well okay, a mate) and I have tried several times to get one of our development ideas to Google. It's a project that's just righ for Google and would dazzle Zazzle to a frazzle, it's an idea that's worth billions in turnover per year - and because Google seems to be full of dopey robots, we haven't had a response on even ONE of our dozen emails to any address we could find that seemed about right.
Is there some secret to getting a very good concept to the right ears in Google? Has anyone ever reached someone in R&D there? Because, the concept we have, will not work for any company lesser than Google. It might work for the MS Empire but it's such a cash cow that my colleague and I decided long ago that it couldn't go there. If anyone loves Google and knows a way to get our idea to someone in that there company we'd be stoked... Sorry this is probably OT but I really want to know how to get in contact, we can take it from there...
There are 11 kinds of people in the world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Yeap I see your point, as I said it's not sportsmanlike to exploit a hole in a game - but if the designers didn't want for something to be possible then they must make it impossible. I tend to think that if there's an exploitable out-of-game surface or whatever left laying around, then it's a piece of Yew just asking to be made into a longbow... %)
Compare to Real Life people - when the English archers made and used longbows, was that "cheating"? No way, that is exploiting the technology they had to hand in order to get an advantage. When the Nazi rounded up non-Aryan people, was that "cheating"? No, just misguided bigotry and zealotry. (And before I get flames, I'm Austrian born, just like Adolph...)
When the world put a moratorium on nuclear research a while back, did any country really stop? Probably not. And nowadays, with GM technology being alternately boycotted and boosted, is anyone going to stop using it?
No, because there is no such thing as "cheating." There's only exploiting things to your advantage, although of course there's a scale of "sportsmanship".
In every game I've ever played where someone has used cheats or unorthodox procedures, I've learnt to either deal with it, learn it, or avoid them. Because online, you can do that. It's not like someone's bringing an Uzi to a paintball skirmish...
So - it's not sportsmanlike, but it's not cheating. IMHO. EOF.
No Way
http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/myblogs/archives/05-0 1-2005_05-31-2005.html#6321 on my blog.... never mind cringely...
XP and Windows are valid operating systems, and there are more boxen running some form of Win than probably all the other boxes put together.
Like it or not, trying to turn a Wintel box into an Apple is not going to happen.
Where I work originally made their software to run on SG machines. Guess what? We are now a Windows shop because all our customers couldn't wait to throw out expensive O2s and Indis and Indigos in favour of standard Wintel.
Get used to it...
Just two examples from a long list of fiascos I've seen in the past:
- community radio station ran a lot of cabling along a corridor ceiling. One night it just collapsed because no-one had thought to tie the cabling to struts, it was just lying full weight on a suspended ceiling. Approved cablers know to do this.
- Friend running CAT5 through his ceiling, suddenly his TV stopped working. I yelled at him to drop the cable and lucky he didn't touch any cores - the CAT5 had sawed through a power circuit... Again, licensed cablers know not to cause themselves a $200AUD electrician's callout bill for repairing a mains cable.
And for me, the main reasons to use an approved cabler - if anything goes wrong in my LAN, if any user or piece of equipment is harmed by a cabling fault, I am absolved. And I didn't have to lift a hand to get the cabling installed...
... we're letting Microsoft raise the kids!
Yeap, that's what universities and educational institutions do...
RFID tags are now pretty cheap, and available in stick-on rolls. RFID readers ditto. Your people have swipe cards. Now:
Person with swipe card operates the door to the hitech store room with their swipe card. PC records their entry. Person takes piece of gear with an RFID tag in it and swipes card to exit. PC records their exit, and RFID reader records the RFID of whatever gear they just took out.
Yes it's still possible for a second person to get in when someone else opens the door, or someone could take off the RFID tags somehow, but then every system has some way to get around it.
I tried around 12 - 15 years ago to use handsfree mic headsets with FM bug transmitters, which limited the range to 100 metres or less, and it did work after a fashion - you had the phones attached to a pocket FM radio, and every transmitter was on about 109.5 somewhere.
We had three cars kitted out, and I tried to interest someone - anyone - in the idea but it went across like a brick and tile hang glider - driver workload, too much chance of abuse, etc.
Also, when several people TXed at once you got weird results with the crap pocket radios, and it wasn't what I'd have called a huge success. But the thought surfaced again when I first played with mobile 802.11* stuff, I just wasn't convinced everyone would want to have a PC and soundcard in their car.
But it's a great idea - you can exchange voice and road info as stated, and if you added voice you could have a good communication route as stated. Also, if a vehicle near you had GPS, you could grab a very rough idea of where you were, as well.
If petrol stations had an access point, then cars could also swap information like how far to the next one and what price, and the car could decide if you needed to fill up now or could wait for a cheaper station. (Come to think of it that's probably EXACTLY why they wouldn't do this...)
And - oops, random breath test stations, portable speed traps, fixed speed cameras. Why am I getting the idea that the car manufacturers will NEVER make this an open source inititative? hehehe...
Amen to that, a written policy that each person has to agree to is the first line of control. And unless you have control you won't be able to manage the network.
Secondly, transparent proxy. It's great, the users don't actually see any "Nazism" so they don't kick up, and you get the advantage that you know exactly what traffic is going through your firewall and can even scan it.
I have an Axim X30 - it runs PocketPC and is stable, fast, and does things in a more file-oriented way. I've used a Palm, a Royal Da Vinci (crappy PDA-like thingie), BCom Mars, and the X30 and I have to say the little Dell wins hands down.
Did I mention that it's also cheap? I think the X50 is even cheaper, and has a VGA screen to boot. Wonder if they do trade-ins?
I'd suggest to you to borrow one of these, use it alongside the Palm, and then decide.
... at my blog http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/mydynes/ - i'd been looking for this gizmo for ages...
sorry for linkwhoring, but y'all may find it interesting...
- tinfoil is perfect, we use it to cover rfid tags in the lab while testing.
The problem would arise when a person's passport falls open inside their baggage in a public space, they would be under the mistaken assumption their rfid couldn't be read so they would not be watching for skimmers.
Several people have now mentioned these devices that track locate and squirt moving targets such as rabbits and pests.
No-one's said that they can be filled with things other than cold water or fox pee. Like HiLite bright Dye... Combine your webcams with a nice bright dyemark and your perpetrators may well be a bit easier to find...
Not lethal, not (usually) harmful, but it might be effective. Especially if you have a few of these things set up around the place...
How? Simple. Develop a group of nanoparticles that have particular functions. Insert them in the brain (injection, operation, whatever) in the right order, voila, neural connections!
i.e. inject a very particular bunch of NPs. Their only function is to bind to neurons at a synapse, for example.
A few weeks (or however long it takes for the first NPs to attach themselves) you inject the second course. These connect any two of the preceding NPs together, preferably follwing existing connections.
A few more weeks, next course of particles. These (for argument's sake) attach to any junction of NP1 and NP2 above that has less than three connections. Do the same with another NP that works on four or more junctions. Rinse and repeat until the correct complexity is achieved.
Next course builds the connections from those to the "electronics layer" nanoparticles. Add NPs to build the interface and electronics layer by layer.
We're talking nano bits here, so yes, there is plenty of empty space between the brain components to insert NPs, and also, you'd soon get used to carrying another kilo or so on your shoulders.
It would mean a course of hospital visits over the course of a long time, perhaps a year or perhaps even two. But it would give the person who has had the course, a complete, invisible connection to anything they want. Internet, networks, mobile phone, whatever future connection methods arise - anything...
A businessman with his eye on the big goal would do this so that he could be speaking to his prospect in person, unobtrusively collecting data on the prospect, and possibly transmitting the meeting to his "back-end staff" who could, in real time and quite unbeknownst to the prospect, be coaching and guiding the businessman.
"Pupil narrowing, you're losing him. Steer it back to yachts for a while. And by the way he has a yacht, the SV Grot. HTH."
That's one use.
Imagine an officer in the field, directing a whole squadron of Predators, a bunch of Fireant style ground vehicles, is in communication with all his troops, with his command post, with the Pentagon, and who "sees" in the infrared and u/v, and can also "see" a superimposed map of the area over the top of all that?
What I'm saying, to cut off all those people who say it'll never happen, is that those who do this will be uniquely equipped for survival. Countries that back this research and use it will have an edge. Hell, even criminals who have this operation will be more successful at what they do.
No matter to anyone who says "this is so immoral and sacrilegious" - they are barking up the wrong tree, because in the shadows, somewhere, someone will develop this because the prize is so valuable... Has anyone noticed that the various moratoria on atomic research or genetic research etc achieved precisely nothing?
So think about it you
It's like buying a brand new Ford but a 2002 model, for $2,500. Not like someone buying it for $25,000 in 2002 and then unloading it for $2,500 secondhand in 2004. In point of fact, even a secondhand Ford that's two years old would probably cost a sight more than two and a half K, which just points out how much faster the rate of change is in hardware than in other technologies.
As petrol prices continue to go up, expect that A) vehicle prices WILL drop to keep tempting people to buy them despite the rising cost of running them, and B) that yes, petrol companies may even begin to subsidise the price of your next car in order to get you to keep buying petrol.
Because car manufacturers aren't stupid, they'll produce more alternate energy transport. And because petrol companies aren't stupid either, they will attempt to make it cheaper for car manufacturers to keep selling petrol engines.
Another thing that some folks seem to take as a given is that technology will remain the same. It won't. Manufacturing costs WILL drop to ridiculous lows, and what is manufactured will seem horrendously wasteful by today's standards, using terabytes and hugely overpowered CPUs to achieve tasks like watering your garden or controlling your microwave.
But this seeming overkill will still be cheaper than manufacturing controllers with less mental horsepower and requiring more complex mechanical systems to control.
Cars will begin using alternate fuel sources, looking less like cars and more like "transport mechanisms"; and the old "CPU on this chip, I/O on this, memory on that" paradigm will also disappear as new architecture is developed, giving way to one chip that could in theory replace your entire office but which you just use to stash your MP3 collection because it will be cheaper to do that than to buy 20 DVDs and a DVD burner and a PC to run all that on.
As to printer consumables. Yep there is a manufacturing cost associated with them but it's miniscule, and the fact of the matter is that again despite everything you say, it's a model that's working for those companies, otherwise they would be broke by now.
The DMCA / "hardware being altered to only be able to use own spares" - this just bears me out! Because it's cheap enough to change the hardware to require specific cartridges, it has been done.
In the same way, when hardware manufacturers realise that they can sell you a chip that needs to "phone home" and download their BIOS/OS/firmware each time it starts up, and that they can enforce that in the hardware by building it in then you have a very successful Gillette model indeed.
After all, as you pointed out, Gillette blades and printer cartridges have a manufacturing cost associated with them, and software doesn't...
Oh and OSS? Not in this particular race... OS relies, as the CS software industry does, on predictable hardware characteristics. These chips will each be running their manufacturer's firmware, and if you want that chip to look like Win XP then the manufacturere will lease you the emulation let you run XP on it. If you want to run something on a MIPS processor, the manufacturer will let you pay to have the chip emulate a MIPS for as long as you pay the fee.
If you want to sit and hack out an interface s/w between the chip in your toaster and a copy of Linux you want to install on it, best of luck to you. If you then want to also install Linux on the microwave, well then you'll have to hack that chip similarly. It won't be worth it, except for the most dedicated hardware hackers.
OS will continue to produce brilliant and free software of course, but the chip manufacturer will still be charging you monthly f
Personal attack isn't a good rebuttal.
And as for hardware costs - no they will NOT be "significant" and no, they will not "stay the same for a lot more bang."
I suggest that instead of trying to figure out where to place swear words for best shock jock effect, that you look at just how fast nanotech has snuck up on manufacturing - in another year or two you'll be able to *print* custom chips in one-off quantities at less than the price of a C/GPU today, and that trend will only continue.
And as a matter of fact, a graphics card which cost $800 only two years ago (at two years ago's value of the dollar, that makes it about $1100 in today's dollars) is now available at around $70, I'd say that's a "considerable" drop in cost wouldn't you?
And no similarly-placed graphics card today costs anywhere near $1100, most don't even cost $800, and that too is proof that the "considerable" cost of hardware is being eroded.
I don't think Intel or any other of the acronym soups you mentioned will be averse to making their chips do more and more for lower and lower manufacturing costs and then selling those same chips for a peanuts price and the firmware on a lease basis. Can you say "residual income"? They can.
Now stop thinking that things will remain statically stuck in this age of huge dumb expensive oneshot factories making millions of identical chips, which have to be sold at one-off markups. Go look up "agile manufacturing" and "self-assembling nanotechnology" and then tell me if you still think the major players are still thinking they'll be producing Durons and Athlons and P4s in five years time...
Also, tell me why any CEO worth his salt to his shareholders wouldn't begin charging for software which as you point out has neglible ongoing costs associated with it, on an ongoing basis, and forego the hassle of having to make all their profit off the one-shot sale of a piece of silicon, carbon, or diamond?
Think really really carefully here: A few years ago printer manufacturers did something that imroved their bottom line immensely? Can you remember what that was? Yes! They sold their printers at cost or just above, and sold consumables at huge whacking markups. Have you noticed any of the major printer manuf's foundering? Thought not...
And did you notice? I didn't launch a personal attack on you even though I consider that you wrote your own epithet extremely well. And I used not one bad word, unless you count words you can't understand as automatically bad. So I didn't end up looking like a total loser...
Pretty soon you'll be able to buy a terabyte of nonvolatile storage with a PC thrown in for free, on what will amount to a single chip in a cheap plastic case, which will talk to all the other consumer gear around you. It will be cheap because it will not need much in the way of IO devices, just a wireless connection or something to connect to the TV or whatever.
The money you'll pay will not be for that miniscule piece of hardware but for the lease of the applications / firmware / operating system you'll run on it...
Why would you store your data on a slice of plastic with a limited lifetime and which needs all sorts of mechanical contortions to write and read, when a chip can have the writer, the reader, and the IO/display all built into it?
And why would a manufacturer sell you that chip as a piece of hardware when they could sell it to you as a vehicle for leasing you their firmware?
Hey, they'll have you by the short and curlies then, so why wouldn't they do it this way? (As in, your data is now stored in a truly long-lasting medium, but unless you pay your lease fee, the operating system goes West, and with it your data...)
Welcome to Dystopia...
But. Coming close to a dumb paper pad, the good, really really REALLY old Tandy Model 200 was a light piece of gear, ran for weeks on four penlight cells, and includes nothing more computer-like than a text editor, BASIC, and has timer functions you can use for alarm and time functions.
It's not tiny but it is light and very rugged because it has no moving parts aside from the power switch. And serial communications when you get back, yippee! (okay okay - and the keys, which by the way are a good solid feeling set.)
Not widely available these days, though there are some people who still have a few, just they don't often like to part with them. (I'm hanging onto mine because it's just the best serial datalogging machine I've ever had.) If you do find one grab it fast, they are THE ultimate holiday note taker.
yeap like some poor worker in some thirdworld country who ends up poisoned by the byproducts while extracting the micrograms of precious materials. Which they're extracting for some conglomerate which ends up owned by the same people who made the damn things in the first place, at which time they used - what was it again? - 90 tonnes of materials to make it. Most of it probably mined by the poor guy's father...
Sorry - don't know where that rant could have come from. Perhaps from the knowledge that in those underprivileged countries there are government departments and small businesses that could put that PC to good use, and then that worker wouldn't have to work in a lethal job because the PC would still be being used.
Except that no-one wants to be responsible for shipping them there, and most governments would prefer to put red tape in the way rather than instituting such a recycling scheme...
I asked my other half, she wouldn't use the bathroom for all the rice in China. Point-blank no way. "How could I work out my makeup in that light?" was her first question.
I am thinking about the kitchen. How do I get a meal looking right in those ghastly hues? How can I enjoy a steak when it will look like a Quake gib under that light?
So while this is a noteworthy effort, it may have set the cause of LED lighting back by years... (kidding, okay? I'm pretty sure other architects and designers will see the advantages and adopt them pretty quickly...)
Which is sad because the idea of using LEDs to light a living space (or indeed a workspace) is sorely needed in view of the air pollution that our thirst for light and convenience creates.
I read somewhere that a 100W consumed for a year produces a cupful and a half of pollutants in that year. (I.e. collect all the pollutants and scrunch 'em together, bingo, 1 1/2 cups of waste...)
That means that for every 100W lightbulb in your place, which stays on for an average of a quarter of a day or so, over a quarter of a cup of crap per year... The average home has seven lightbulbs, that's over two cups of pollution per house per year.
If you could reduce the amount of power required to produce the same amount of light to around a fifth or less, you'd reduce that contribution to pollution due to light from two cups to a quarter cup.
That has to be worth going for...