I've got an n800. Trust me - you do not want to compare the actual web browsing experience.
microb was a big step forward, and I hear it's getting ever better in the dev builds. But even with the bigger screen and higher resolution, the act of browsing the web is more awkward on an NIT than the pan-n-zoom iPhone. Even on an NIT you need to pan and zoom a great deal. However, it's not optimized for that kind of use, and switching zoom levels and scrolling about is a choppy experience.
The Flash support is also largely theoretical; the device has neither the horsepower nor the video bandwidth to actually handle a flash file of any complexity. If you let it fully buffer a youtube video, it does 'ok'. If you save off smaller flash games to the internal memory, then dump the browser and play the files directly, it can do some files passably. But it's not the experience anyone thinks of when you say 'flash support'. It's the kind of experience that makes me disable the flash plugin because it's a net negative on the act of browsing.
And the points below about the horrible UI in general are sadly accurate. The Nokia Internet Tablets are still heavily stylus-focused, awash with lazy desktop-style interfaces, with a disappointing half-effort toward finger support. Don't get me wrong: I love having a stylus. I love being able to sketch, doodle and jot with accuracy. I just don't want the device to assume its presence means they can ask me to drag it out every time I need to choose between 'Ok' and 'Cancel'. Nor do I want the apps to assume that since it's there, they can load up every screen with tiny buttons, checkboxes, etc.
As the devices stand today - there's no contest. For a handful of geeks, the NITs are wildly superior devices. For everyone else, they're a mess; a promising mess, but a mess none-the-less. And a mess that Nokia doesn't seem to know what to do with.
Here's to hoping that their Trolltech acquisition means good things. But after comparing maemo's last two years to the iPhone's last one -- I have little reason to believe the NITs will ever be better browsing devices for the average user than the iPhone at any given point in time -- despite its advertised java and flash support.
I think you misunderstood. I said 'too reasonable' solely as pertains to the likelihood of 250GB being the real number. Clearly they're free to put whatever cap they want on the service.
But a rumor that they'll outright allow people to download almost three times as much as the 'superusers' it recently banned for 'abusing the network' is laughable.
If they do put a cap in writing, that will be good. If it happens. But if you meet someone who honestly thinks it might be 250GB/mo, you should pitch her some real estate opportunities.
It's all about public perception. The Linux machine can't run Windows apps (at least I don't think WINE's included, and WINE's never a good answer to that problem anyway.) Therefore, it's worse in many people's eyes.
The problem with that argument is that most consumers aren't buying and running Windows apps anymore.
Almost everything they do is web-based and no-one's going to bat an eye once they're told that OpenOffice is $0, works almost exactly like MS Office and can open/save to MS Office documents without a hitch. (Sure, there are exceptions to that, but average consumer isn't going to run into those obscure issues.)
The average consumer might even get outright excited when you mention that merely using Firefox on Xandros gives them better protection from virii and malware than XP, even if they'd paid for a copy of Norton or McAfee. (And without the slowdowns, compatibility problems and hassle of those packages)
And since the eee PC is an intensely personal sort of kit, it's doubtful that Joe or Jane Six-pack is going to pass on it just because it won't supplant the family PC that their kids run games on.
The eee PC simply doesn't have to match up to XP like desktop linux would. It doesn't have to solve all of someone's computing needs. It just needs to be good at the tasks people want a subnotebook for (almost entirely web usage and basic document creation).
250GB is far too reasonable to be their actual cap. They've already admitted to bumping people off the service entirely for downloading ~90GB/mo.
There's no way they'll let those guys back in and not even charge them overages.
This is Comcast we're talking about. I'm going to be skeptical of anything they say that even appears reasonable -- and I'm not going to waste any time entertaining such a notion so long as it's merely rumor.
We have to stretch the limits of plausible technological advancement to even theorize a more efficient von Neumann probe than a packet of life hurled toward a promising planet on an appropriated asteroid.
You'd barely have to dip into the solar system to kick that off and you certainly don't need to waste an interstellar-capable craft on every single system you have hopes for. Just seed and move on. The scale of the project would ensure some would make it. Sure, maybe a space-faring civilization had more 'traditional' colonies at first. But the scale of galactic exploration would ensure that such pursuits would be pared down for pure efficiency before long.
And there may be absolutely no value in ever coming back to visit seeded planets. Seeding fulfills the biological imperative to hedge life's bet against the universe -- but there's likely nothing to be gained by hanging around or even leaving behind a calling card.
Even if civilization B somehow leap-frogged A, by the time B's information got there, A would almost certainly have caught up. The only advancement that would seem to be worth relaying back, would be the discovery of FTL travel. And that discovery itself would neatly ensure that civilization B would shortly locate A anyway.
But why bother trying to bridge certain language, culture and religious barriers between the mother civilization and its colonies as standard practice - when your own local population is so numerous as to overflow their own planet? Any idea worth having will have cropped up before transmissions make it back and forth -- and a meeting between civilizations is certainly not without risk.
Even leaving a calling card seems counter-productive if the goal is to protect life in the long term by spreading its prospects. A colony may assume from the existence of a monolith that their 'parents' are still out there and subsequently slack off in their own responsibility to protect life's prospects. Better they never know the truth and feel the deep need to be prudent and carry on the project.
This service strikes me as the networks and media companies desperately trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle.
Having enjoyed vidcasts, tivo recordings and dvd rips on my n800 for some months, I've seen the way forward.
And it certainly doesn't involve allowing broadcasters deciding the depth and breadth of available content, scheduling, monthly fees or further suffering proprietary transmission or encoding technologies.
I'll get whatever video I want, from wherever I care to find it and watch it when I want to watch it, thanks.
Appstore apps will almost certainly be locked to an iTunes account as they're downloaded and installed, the same way iTunes music and movies are.
I'm not saying piracy won't happen - but Apple's been doing this sort of thing for too long to make a rookie mistake like dropping a portable binary into a trivially accessible location.
There'll have to be additional work to crack the DRM. And unlike unlocking, the wider community of hackers is not going to uniformly support it and Apple is not going to be as laissez-faire about it.
Boot time is a red herring. I don't think I've actually turned my n800 off since I last updated the firmware. There is really no reason to do so. I just lock it and let it go to suspend.
As for battery life I can leave it in suspend over the weekend and on Monday still easily get 6ish hours of music playing and a lunch's worth of wifi browsing.
I'd love to see better battery life while watching video, playing games or with wifi on, but even when doing those things it'll still trounce the battery life of an eee PC. (by more than an hour) Overall the n800 has one of the longer usable battery lives of any mobile device I've ever owned. Most of the laptops I've dealt with have a hard time giving me three and a half hours of wifi browsing on a charge.
I agree 100% with the GP's general experience. The MIDs are a better 'ultramobile' for me than these subnotebooks. I just bring the laptop to meetings and such and bring the n800 everywhere.
And I completely agree with you about the dev situation on the Nokia tablets. It's a mess. (though there is Red Pill Mode, btw, if you need root on the device)
The n800 sold me on the potential of a pocket computer. It's a true shame that Nokia doesn't seem to have any real plan for it.
I have serious doubts that push media could account for my eclectic tastes. My friends can't even figure me out, how is a stupid computer going to?
Easy. They'll simply send you everything and then let you turn off whatever you find annoying. "the old concept of push media, but in a far spammier way"
Frankly, the idea is laughable. Never in the history of these half-baked schemes has a significant quantity of content honestly identified itself. So long as every incentive exists to game the system, and none exists to play by the rules, it will be useless.
6.3. Except as provided in Section 8, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content or the Application that you create, submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Service, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content and the Application (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf.
8.1. Google claims no ownership or control over any Content or Application. You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in the Content and/or Application, and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content on or through the Service you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Content for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy. Furthermore, by creating an Application through use of the Service, you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Application for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy.
8.2. You agree that Google, in its sole discretion, may use your trade names, trademarks, service marks, logos, domain names and other distinctive brand features in presentations, marketing materials, customer lists, financial reports and Web site listings (including links to your website) for the purpose of advertising or publicizing your use of the Service.
Terms of Service and Program Policy (afaics, just the usual hosting rules: no porn, gambling, piracy, spam, malware, hate speech, etc).
Also, adwords are pretty much 'Step 1' in trying to cover hosting costs for a fledgling webapp.
If all Google wants in return for free-ish hosting is something most people do anyway, I'd imagine most people won't blink.
If nothing else, I'd imagine many niche discussion boards will transition to GAPE in short order, once vBulletin is ported.
Transportation really needs to move into 3 dimensions, it's the only way to resolve congestion
Or, and I realize this sounds crazy, we could just abandon the suburban nightmare.
Zone and build the cities so that residence and public transport make sense again. Provide tax breaks for telecommuting. That sorta thing.
If we're going to spend hundreds of billions on new infrastructure - let's skip trying to build the future 40 years early and just do what we know works.
Given that Apple doesn't talk about things like this, if they are in negotiations with the record companies then it must be the record companies who are leaking this information.
Which is probably why the rumors are heavy on the fairy-tale customer-facing product and the investor-pleasing record-company-facing revenues, and really light on the implicit restrictions and technical questions. I'd imagine the RIAA simply figured out that while $x/mo doesn't work for consumers, "$Y for as long as you own the device" does. (even when device turnover rates are used to ensure mathematical equivalence)
The only thing Apple seems to be 'getting', is pushed by the record companies to offer some of those seductive 'recurring revenues' that Napster/MS/et al keep promising.
As soon as they beg one of the C Block also-rans (google) into taking the D Block - so they can pretend that counts as competition to Verizon and AT&T.
The Tivo Desktop Plus software itself really only runs on Windows. The OSX version is a few updates behind, missing a number of features and isn't getting this functionality any time soon.
The 'compatible with' mobile platforms are simply all those that can play h264. TivoToGo will transcode tivo recordings (or web videos if you're running windows) to lower rez/bitrate h264 and leave the resulting files on your PC HDD.
Not for what you get. A console does not provide any real functionality outside of being a DVD player. PCs offer a very high level of functionality outside of gaming.
I don't know about that. First - my 360 is basically a front-end media box for my network now; piping family pictures, mp3s and my divx/h264 collection to my home theatre. That's not an insignificant feature. Second, the average user already enjoys the functionality of a PC, at an acceptable level of performance, in the box they bought 5 years ago. So the extra uses of a gaming PC are largely irrelevant.
I've not had any sort of driver and or compatibility problems for years now
That's the trick: these users gave up on PC gaming years ago. This isn't a new trend. The story's just catching more eyeballs this time around because the graph showed PC Gaming sliding under one of those big round numbers that gets peoples' attention.
PC Gaming certainly isn't going to die. It's just turning into something that your average geek doesn't think of when he hears the words "PC Gaming".
Whether it's the iPhone or not is debatable; but that sort of handheld-computer-masquerading-as-a-phone is going to be bigger than the personal computer.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that within 10 years, that sort of handheld will be most people's personal computers. Laptops are already edging out desktops, as they're typically as powerful and as expensive for most users - and far more flexible. It won't be long before handhelds edge out laptops for the same reason. And the longer that single-threaded performance stays bottlenecked, the sooner handhelds will catch up.
Given the recent advancements in mobile processing, headmounted displays, picoprojectors and brain-interface controllers -- i think your head would have to be pretty deep in the sand to not see this coming.
what's wrong with a clipboard: storage space is low edits are limited/lossy organizing/achiving/backing-up media is challenging and error prone beyond trivial use searching is slow long access time for reference data during work tasks network transmission is slow and lossy data re-entry to digital systems is time-consuming and error-prone.
It's a mark of how poorly tablets have been done thus far, that a clipboard still compares favorably. It's not unlike the early days of personal computing, when people snickered about not having to reboot their typewriters.
Yet, as with desktops before them, it's just a matter of time before tablets are done well-enough that their drawbacks are trivial next to their advantages. The form-factor is too perfect to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Eventually someone will create a tablet computer with hardware and software built from the ground-up for its task. And it will carve itself a very respectable slice of the computing market.
So you establish a reasonable period of monopoly that's tax-free. Say, for the first 5 or 7 or even 10 years a copyright is tax-free. The entrepreneur then has a reasonable window to derive value at no cost, but corporations still cannot exploit the system forever for zero cost.
The problems in patent and copyright law, while they may seem similar, are actually quite different. I agree that a patent tax would likely cause more problems than it solves. But copyright is a different animal. Copyright law doesn't have broad coverage, trolls or rewards for gaming the system -- not until you hit the megacorp level and game the system via lobbyists.
The biggest problem in copyright law is simply that copyright terms are far, far too long. The real drawback to TFA's proposal is that it gives permission to megacorps to hold copyright in perpetuity, so long as they kick back some cash to Uncle Sam. Under the proposed scheme, Mickey Mouse will -never- fall into the public domain.
Now, I don't have a very optimistic view that lobbying won't manage such perpetual copyright -anyway-. But that doesn't mean I'm comfortable in embracing it up-front, just because Washington would get a taste.
Actually, there's a ton of evidence that you can make a mint off purely cosmetic items.
I'd imagine if you had a game where a couple pieces of clothing were purely cosmetic and not 'gear', you could do quite well with for-pay cosmetic stuff. Blizzard has basically done it themselves with tabards and non-combat pets alone. Though they're currently using that demand to drive people to Blizzcon and their CCG.
Imagine what they could pull off with housing, decorations or even just 'exclusive' guild logos for tabards and arena flags.
This isn't a wifi replacement -at all-. This is a wireless USB replacement and then some.
At 5Gbps you'd have enough throughput to put a hypothetical smartphone on your desk, and not only use your desktop monitor/keyboard/mouse for comfort, but to be able to use your desktop's processor and ram to accelerate the apps that still basically 'live' on your phone.
So imagine a setting where work data is coming off the network, personal settings and user data are coming off your phone, and desktop workstations are glorified accelerator appliances with more comfortable input interfaces that can be swapped out, time-shared, simultaneously-shared, etc. Neat, huh? Any desk would be functionally equivalent and not being at your desk would just mean less convenient peripherals and slower processing.
That level of throughput is also overkill for wireless video from a portable to a headmounted display -- or even a more mundane wireless HDMI replacement for your TV, game console, BDR, DVD, Tivo, etc. Say good bye to that tangle of wires and video switches! There's also killer peer-to-peer networking capabilities you could build onto portables. (low-power, high-speed peer-to-peer internet for social apps, gaming and data sharing? yes please!)
If, in real world use, it could only go 3m at half that throughput and couldn't penetrate through so much as rice paper, it's -still- an incredibly exciting technology that could facilitate a staggering array of apps.
Because malicious breakages haven't happened -here-, you assume it must necessarily be more difficult? What sense does that make? We're not covering our cables in sea mines or concrete vaults. Our ocean isn't acidic or patrolled 24x7.
The simpler explanation is just that no-one has perceived a worthwhile ROI for sabotage or theft of US-cables. Yet.
Last march, pirates stole some undersea cable around SE Asia to sell as scrap. If those guys could just swing by and _take_ 11km (100 tons) of cable, merely _damaging_ the cable would definitely fall under 'easy'.
Slashdot Mirror
In any respectable future we have at least foolproof voice-to-text, if not sub-vocal mics and/or brain-interfaces.
http://www.christies.com/Lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4205385
QED
I've got an n800. Trust me - you do not want to compare the actual web browsing experience.
microb was a big step forward, and I hear it's getting ever better in the dev builds. But even with the bigger screen and higher resolution, the act of browsing the web is more awkward on an NIT than the pan-n-zoom iPhone. Even on an NIT you need to pan and zoom a great deal. However, it's not optimized for that kind of use, and switching zoom levels and scrolling about is a choppy experience.
The Flash support is also largely theoretical; the device has neither the horsepower nor the video bandwidth to actually handle a flash file of any complexity. If you let it fully buffer a youtube video, it does 'ok'. If you save off smaller flash games to the internal memory, then dump the browser and play the files directly, it can do some files passably. But it's not the experience anyone thinks of when you say 'flash support'. It's the kind of experience that makes me disable the flash plugin because it's a net negative on the act of browsing.
And the points below about the horrible UI in general are sadly accurate. The Nokia Internet Tablets are still heavily stylus-focused, awash with lazy desktop-style interfaces, with a disappointing half-effort toward finger support. Don't get me wrong: I love having a stylus. I love being able to sketch, doodle and jot with accuracy. I just don't want the device to assume its presence means they can ask me to drag it out every time I need to choose between 'Ok' and 'Cancel'. Nor do I want the apps to assume that since it's there, they can load up every screen with tiny buttons, checkboxes, etc.
As the devices stand today - there's no contest. For a handful of geeks, the NITs are wildly superior devices. For everyone else, they're a mess; a promising mess, but a mess none-the-less. And a mess that Nokia doesn't seem to know what to do with.
Here's to hoping that their Trolltech acquisition means good things. But after comparing maemo's last two years to the iPhone's last one -- I have little reason to believe the NITs will ever be better browsing devices for the average user than the iPhone at any given point in time -- despite its advertised java and flash support.
I think you misunderstood.
I said 'too reasonable' solely as pertains to the likelihood of 250GB being the real number. Clearly they're free to put whatever cap they want on the service.
But a rumor that they'll outright allow people to download almost three times as much as the 'superusers' it recently banned for 'abusing the network' is laughable.
If they do put a cap in writing, that will be good. If it happens. But if you meet someone who honestly thinks it might be 250GB/mo, you should pitch her some real estate opportunities.
Almost everything they do is web-based and no-one's going to bat an eye once they're told that OpenOffice is $0, works almost exactly like MS Office and can open/save to MS Office documents without a hitch. (Sure, there are exceptions to that, but average consumer isn't going to run into those obscure issues.)
The average consumer might even get outright excited when you mention that merely using Firefox on Xandros gives them better protection from virii and malware than XP, even if they'd paid for a copy of Norton or McAfee. (And without the slowdowns, compatibility problems and hassle of those packages)
And since the eee PC is an intensely personal sort of kit, it's doubtful that Joe or Jane Six-pack is going to pass on it just because it won't supplant the family PC that their kids run games on.
The eee PC simply doesn't have to match up to XP like desktop linux would. It doesn't have to solve all of someone's computing needs. It just needs to be good at the tasks people want a subnotebook for (almost entirely web usage and basic document creation).
250GB is far too reasonable to be their actual cap.
They've already admitted to bumping people off the service entirely for downloading ~90GB/mo.
There's no way they'll let those guys back in and not even charge them overages.
This is Comcast we're talking about. I'm going to be skeptical of anything they say that even appears reasonable -- and I'm not going to waste any time entertaining such a notion so long as it's merely rumor.
6.b) They're us.
We have to stretch the limits of plausible technological advancement to even theorize a more efficient von Neumann probe than a packet of life hurled toward a promising planet on an appropriated asteroid.
You'd barely have to dip into the solar system to kick that off and you certainly don't need to waste an interstellar-capable craft on every single system you have hopes for. Just seed and move on. The scale of the project would ensure some would make it. Sure, maybe a space-faring civilization had more 'traditional' colonies at first. But the scale of galactic exploration would ensure that such pursuits would be pared down for pure efficiency before long.
And there may be absolutely no value in ever coming back to visit seeded planets. Seeding fulfills the biological imperative to hedge life's bet against the universe -- but there's likely nothing to be gained by hanging around or even leaving behind a calling card.
Even if civilization B somehow leap-frogged A, by the time B's information got there, A would almost certainly have caught up.
The only advancement that would seem to be worth relaying back, would be the discovery of FTL travel. And that discovery itself would neatly ensure that civilization B would shortly locate A anyway.
But why bother trying to bridge certain language, culture and religious barriers between the mother civilization and its colonies as standard practice - when your own local population is so numerous as to overflow their own planet? Any idea worth having will have cropped up before transmissions make it back and forth -- and a meeting between civilizations is certainly not without risk.
Even leaving a calling card seems counter-productive if the goal is to protect life in the long term by spreading its prospects. A colony may assume from the existence of a monolith that their 'parents' are still out there and subsequently slack off in their own responsibility to protect life's prospects. Better they never know the truth and feel the deep need to be prudent and carry on the project.
This service strikes me as the networks and media companies desperately trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle.
Having enjoyed vidcasts, tivo recordings and dvd rips on my n800 for some months, I've seen the way forward.
And it certainly doesn't involve allowing broadcasters deciding the depth and breadth of available content, scheduling, monthly fees or further suffering proprietary transmission or encoding technologies.
I'll get whatever video I want, from wherever I care to find it and watch it when I want to watch it, thanks.
Appstore apps will almost certainly be locked to an iTunes account as they're downloaded and installed, the same way iTunes music and movies are.
I'm not saying piracy won't happen - but Apple's been doing this sort of thing for too long to make a rookie mistake like dropping a portable binary into a trivially accessible location.
There'll have to be additional work to crack the DRM. And unlike unlocking, the wider community of hackers is not going to uniformly support it and Apple is not going to be as laissez-faire about it.
Boot? Battery life?
Boot time is a red herring. I don't think I've actually turned my n800 off since I last updated the firmware. There is really no reason to do so. I just lock it and let it go to suspend.
As for battery life I can leave it in suspend over the weekend and on Monday still easily get 6ish hours of music playing and a lunch's worth of wifi browsing.
I'd love to see better battery life while watching video, playing games or with wifi on, but even when doing those things it'll still trounce the battery life of an eee PC. (by more than an hour) Overall the n800 has one of the longer usable battery lives of any mobile device I've ever owned. Most of the laptops I've dealt with have a hard time giving me three and a half hours of wifi browsing on a charge.
I agree 100% with the GP's general experience. The MIDs are a better 'ultramobile' for me than these subnotebooks. I just bring the laptop to meetings and such and bring the n800 everywhere.
And I completely agree with you about the dev situation on the Nokia tablets. It's a mess. (though there is Red Pill Mode, btw, if you need root on the device)
The n800 sold me on the potential of a pocket computer. It's a true shame that Nokia doesn't seem to have any real plan for it.
Hopefully Android will pan out.
"the old concept of push media, but in a far spammier way"
Frankly, the idea is laughable. Never in the history of these half-baked schemes has a significant quantity of content honestly identified itself. So long as every incentive exists to game the system, and none exists to play by the rules, it will be useless.
Terms of Service and Program Policy (afaics, just the usual hosting rules: no porn, gambling, piracy, spam, malware, hate speech, etc).
Also, adwords are pretty much 'Step 1' in trying to cover hosting costs for a fledgling webapp.
If all Google wants in return for free-ish hosting is something most people do anyway, I'd imagine most people won't blink.
If nothing else, I'd imagine many niche discussion boards will transition to GAPE in short order, once vBulletin is ported.
Zone and build the cities so that residence and public transport make sense again. Provide tax breaks for telecommuting.
That sorta thing.
If we're going to spend hundreds of billions on new infrastructure - let's skip trying to build the future 40 years early and just do what we know works.
Given that Apple doesn't talk about things like this, if they are in negotiations with the record companies then it must be the record companies who are leaking this information.
Which is probably why the rumors are heavy on the fairy-tale customer-facing product and the investor-pleasing record-company-facing revenues, and really light on the implicit restrictions and technical questions. I'd imagine the RIAA simply figured out that while $x/mo doesn't work for consumers, "$Y for as long as you own the device" does. (even when device turnover rates are used to ensure mathematical equivalence)
The only thing Apple seems to be 'getting', is pushed by the record companies to offer some of those seductive 'recurring revenues' that Napster/MS/et al keep promising.
As soon as they beg one of the C Block also-rans (google) into taking the D Block - so they can pretend that counts as competition to Verizon and AT&T.
The Tivo Desktop Plus software itself really only runs on Windows.
The OSX version is a few updates behind, missing a number of features and isn't getting this functionality any time soon.
The 'compatible with' mobile platforms are simply all those that can play h264.
TivoToGo will transcode tivo recordings (or web videos if you're running windows) to lower rez/bitrate h264 and leave the resulting files on your PC HDD.
PC Gaming certainly isn't going to die.
It's just turning into something that your average geek doesn't think of when he hears the words "PC Gaming".
Whether it's the iPhone or not is debatable; but that sort of handheld-computer-masquerading-as-a-phone is going to be bigger than the personal computer.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that within 10 years, that sort of handheld will be most people's personal computers. Laptops are already edging out desktops, as they're typically as powerful and as expensive for most users - and far more flexible. It won't be long before handhelds edge out laptops for the same reason. And the longer that single-threaded performance stays bottlenecked, the sooner handhelds will catch up.
Given the recent advancements in mobile processing, headmounted displays, picoprojectors and brain-interface controllers -- i think your head would have to be pretty deep in the sand to not see this coming.
what's wrong with a clipboard:
storage space is low
edits are limited/lossy
organizing/achiving/backing-up media is challenging and error prone beyond trivial use
searching is slow
long access time for reference data during work tasks
network transmission is slow and lossy
data re-entry to digital systems is time-consuming and error-prone.
It's a mark of how poorly tablets have been done thus far, that a clipboard still compares favorably.
It's not unlike the early days of personal computing, when people snickered about not having to reboot their typewriters.
Yet, as with desktops before them, it's just a matter of time before tablets are done well-enough that their drawbacks are trivial next to their advantages. The form-factor is too perfect to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Eventually someone will create a tablet computer with hardware and software built from the ground-up for its task. And it will carve itself a very respectable slice of the computing market.
So you establish a reasonable period of monopoly that's tax-free. Say, for the first 5 or 7 or even 10 years a copyright is tax-free. The entrepreneur then has a reasonable window to derive value at no cost, but corporations still cannot exploit the system forever for zero cost.
The problems in patent and copyright law, while they may seem similar, are actually quite different. I agree that a patent tax would likely cause more problems than it solves. But copyright is a different animal. Copyright law doesn't have broad coverage, trolls or rewards for gaming the system -- not until you hit the megacorp level and game the system via lobbyists.
The biggest problem in copyright law is simply that copyright terms are far, far too long.
The real drawback to TFA's proposal is that it gives permission to megacorps to hold copyright in perpetuity, so long as they kick back some cash to Uncle Sam. Under the proposed scheme, Mickey Mouse will -never- fall into the public domain.
Now, I don't have a very optimistic view that lobbying won't manage such perpetual copyright -anyway-. But that doesn't mean I'm comfortable in embracing it up-front, just because Washington would get a taste.
Sounds more like he was describing APB, a new MMO being developed by Realtime Worlds.
Actually, there's a ton of evidence that you can make a mint off purely cosmetic items.
I'd imagine if you had a game where a couple pieces of clothing were purely cosmetic and not 'gear', you could do quite well with for-pay cosmetic stuff. Blizzard has basically done it themselves with tabards and non-combat pets alone. Though they're currently using that demand to drive people to Blizzcon and their CCG.
Imagine what they could pull off with housing, decorations or even just 'exclusive' guild logos for tabards and arena flags.
... who cares?
This isn't a wifi replacement -at all-. This is a wireless USB replacement and then some.
At 5Gbps you'd have enough throughput to put a hypothetical smartphone on your desk, and not only use your desktop monitor/keyboard/mouse for comfort, but to be able to use your desktop's processor and ram to accelerate the apps that still basically 'live' on your phone.
So imagine a setting where work data is coming off the network, personal settings and user data are coming off your phone, and desktop workstations are glorified accelerator appliances with more comfortable input interfaces that can be swapped out, time-shared, simultaneously-shared, etc. Neat, huh? Any desk would be functionally equivalent and not being at your desk would just mean less convenient peripherals and slower processing.
That level of throughput is also overkill for wireless video from a portable to a headmounted display -- or even a more mundane wireless HDMI replacement for your TV, game console, BDR, DVD, Tivo, etc. Say good bye to that tangle of wires and video switches! There's also killer peer-to-peer networking capabilities you could build onto portables. (low-power, high-speed peer-to-peer internet for social apps, gaming and data sharing? yes please!)
If, in real world use, it could only go 3m at half that throughput and couldn't penetrate through so much as rice paper, it's -still- an incredibly exciting technology that could facilitate a staggering array of apps.
Because malicious breakages haven't happened -here-, you assume it must necessarily be more difficult?
What sense does that make? We're not covering our cables in sea mines or concrete vaults. Our ocean isn't acidic or patrolled 24x7.
The simpler explanation is just that no-one has perceived a worthwhile ROI for sabotage or theft of US-cables.
Yet.
it has been done before.
Last march, pirates stole some undersea cable around SE Asia to sell as scrap.
If those guys could just swing by and _take_ 11km (100 tons) of cable, merely _damaging_ the cable would definitely fall under 'easy'.