Exactly so. PCs are a sunset business like cars are a sunset business. There won't be a lot of future growth but demand will continue for quite some time to come.
And just like cars, people are stretching the length of the upgrade cycle. Back in the 60s car odometers only had five digits (plus the tenths) and few cars lasted long enough to "turn over" the odometer. Nowadays people routinely keep cars past 150,000 miles and often 200,000. Back in the 90s people replaced their desktop computers every three years; now they routinely keep using them five years or more. But they still use them.
Lots of stuff lost support the last time Microsoft made a major change to the driver model, which was when Vista came out. That's one of the reasons people were so down on Vista; if you tried to install it on an existing computer there was a high probability that some of your hardware wouldn't work or would work badly. The Windows 7 launch went more smoothly because by then, most of the installed base that was likely to want to run it had hardware that worked.
But... how long will monochrome movie film still be produced? This could well be the last movie ever made on the stuff because the film will no longer be available; even monochrome still camera film is getting scarce. Color movie film is more widely used and should endure for a bit longer.
Comcast is offering 305Mbps in a few markets. Mine isn't one of them; 105Mbps is as fast as their service gets here. And that 105Mbps service costs more per month as Google's 1Gbps service; the 305Mbps service, where you can get it, is nearly three times what Google charges for a gigabit. Comcast will have to seriously step up its game to compete.
My fear is that in the short term, this competition will just exacerbate the divide between the internet haves and have-nots. The neighborhoods that the big corporations want will get competition, better service, and lower prices. The neighborhoods that are uninteresting to advertisers will get left out.
Not a complete solution. They could get your computer infected with malware because of visiting a site that exploits a vulnerability in the browser, for example.
Yesterday I found an old PC that was being thrown out. It turned out to be a Dell Dimension B110 - 2.53GHz Celeron D, 512MB RAM (the base configuration was 256MB but this one had more), 80GB hard disk, CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. Fully functional hardware; the Windows XP installation was messed up and wouldn't boot. Add another 1GB RAM, an old keyboard and mouse (the former owner presumably kept those for the new system), and a castoff monitor from my collection of parts, wipe the hard disk and install Ubuntu 12.04, usable computer. For $0 cash spent. I will either use it to upgrade one of the household servers or give it away to someone who needs one; haven't decided yet.
I don't know exactly how old this box is. Online reviews of that model are dated April 2006, so it might be almost exactly 7 years old, and it was a low-end system even when it was new. Unless something breaks it will probably still be a useful computer for at least three more years.
If I had wanted XP I could have made the effort to track down a Dell OEM install disk and reinstalled it; the Windows product key sticker is still in place. 1.5GB would be a bit thin for Windows 7 so I wouldn't put that on.
No, it's no barn burner. But it's at least as fast as a current low-end notebook, which means that it will run a lot of current software just fine.
That's assuming you want the entire album; in that case CDs are priced reasonably competitively. If you're talking about the typical album with a couple of good songs and a bunch of filler, the digital downloads are a much better deal.
It's a rich man's toy for now. Given the usual price curve of electronics it won't remain so forever, at least the rich part. Whether practical applications will arise or it will stay a toy remains to be seen.
Chromebooks won't be paperweights because you can install other software on them. The cheap Acer one, for example, is exactly the same piece of hardware as a netbook that they still sell, just different software installed. There is nothing keeping you from installing Linux or Windows on it except perhaps flashing a different ROM. The Samsung ARM-based one will never run Windows but people have put Linux on it.
It may not be common for a 22 year old to pay off his own mortgage or just buy a house with cash (and evidently not in this case) but it's not unheard of. He could have been a teen Olympian with a big post-Games endorsement deal, a pop singer, or that British kid who just sold his app to Yahoo for $30 million.
128 bit ADC/DAC - hee! In reality we don't even have 24 bit ADC/DACs yet except perhaps for exotic supercooled laboratory equipment; no real world converter actually has a full 24 bits of dynamic range, and we're not likely to ever get there because of thermal noise in the circuitry.
16 bits is not above the resolution of the human ear. But it is above the amount of dynamic range that is likely to be useful for music content; it will take you from the audible threshold in a quiet room to the quick ear damage threshold and that's certainly enough. See the xiph.org post quoted earlier. But you have to optimize the use of those 16 bits carefully and there is little room for error, which is why 24 bit recording is useful in the studio.
I think the jury is still out on whether there is a (small) benefit to higher sample rates. Even if humans are unable to directly perceive pure tones above 20 KHz it's possible that there are perceptible effects of their presence in a complex sound.
T-Mobile has already been offering similar plans for a while to prepaid customers - there it was 2GB of data for an extra $10 or 5GB for $20. The change is that they are now moving their postpaid business model to the no-subsidy model.
Don't blame T*Mobile for a lack of phones - they can't force manufacturers to support their frequencies (though AT&T GSM phones will work just fine on T*Mobile as long as you don't care about 3G or 4G data - I used an Android phone on T-Mobile that only worked with 2G and it was surprisingly usable despite the slow data speeds).
Exactly so. The bind for T-Mobile and phone availability is that they use 1700 MHz frequencies for 3G HSPA+ (and 4G LTE in the future) that nobody else in the world other than virtual networks based on T-Mobile US uses. Any phone with high speed data has to be built especially for them, or built for total worldwide HSPA+ access like the unlocked Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 (and for the tablet fans, the version of the Nexus 7 with cellular data). T-Mobile has to be able to promise a lot of sales before a manufacturer will be interested in making a special phone just for them, and that means carrying a limited selection.
Those small carriers that get new phones that T-Mobile doesn't have? They're using frequencies that the big boys use, so unless some large carrier tied up the phone with an exclusive deal they're free to have at it.
People who want to stop work to live a life of leisure mostly don't end up happy. People who want to stop unfulfilling work and instead spend their time working on things that interest them and help the world (but perhaps don't pay) might well end up happier by winning the lottery.
Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile (both owned by Sprint) are presumably sticking to older phones to avoid cannibalization of their parent company's contract business. (They may also feel that few of their customers are interested in buying a $500 phone.) Metro PCS, a completely non-contract company, does offer the Galaxy S III.
Yep, exactly right. There were two points that the court used to decide that MP3.com was making illegal use of music: that the company had bought copies of CDs and put those rips on their servers rather than using bits uploaded by users, and that the service used a digital signature check so you didn't have to actually upload all the bits of your song. (If your signature matched one of their purchased CDs they pointed you at those bits.) What this really meant was that MP3.com was ten years ahead of its time and that the court was technologically illiterate. MP3.com was doing data deduplication with distributed checking, but they couldn't say that in court because the terms didn't exist yet.
To address the two points in a bit more detail:
When MP3.com put a CD rip on their servers they had done nothing wrong. They had not yet shared any music with anybody, merely backed up music that they already owned, and the legal right to back up data is well established. There wasn't even a DMCA violation; CDs do not have any copy protection. At this point there is one copy of a CD (or an MP3 of it) on their server and it belongs to a legal owner of the music.
When they did the signature check and then shared the rip with a customer, they still hadn't done anything wrong in modern technological terms. The customer had stored a copy of those bits, and their server and client software used deduplication and pointed that customer's file system at the copy stored by MP3.com rather than at a copy uploaded by the customer. The result is exactly the same as if the customer's CD had been uploaded and a separate copy stored; it was just done at much lower cost to MP3.com and to the customer. There are now two virtual "copies" on the server; one belonging to MP3.com and one belonging to the customer. Both presumably legally own that music, and thus all is still well. Additional customer uploads add more virtual copies but don't change the legalities.
The only questionable thing about the MP3.com process is sorting out whether the customer owned the uploaded bits in the first place. But there are now many providers now that let you upload bits to the cloud: Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and many more. The storage provider is not legally liable if it turns out that the customer does not own the bits; the customer is. Those companies are not currently discussing whether they are doing any deduplication of customer-uploaded data but they probably are. Amazon DOES deduplicate MP3s bought from Amazon and the instant MP3 versions of CDs that were purchased from them.
Sadly, there is no way to unwind all the damage done by the court. That would require that Universal return MP3.com to its former owners, pay all their court costs, and restore all the music that became unavailable when MP3.com went offline. Not to mention that Universal would have to somehow repay all the money that MP3.com would have made in the intervening years, and repay all the people who had uploaded music to MP3.com all the money they would have made when people downloaded their songs. Figuring out who all the damaged parties are and the amount of the damages is obviously impossible.
This is a realm where 20 might not be better than 3. There are real advantages of scale here; if you suddenly need a LARGE ramp-up of facilities (your web site just got Slashdotted or mentioned on American Idol), a big provider can do it for you without breathing hard. A small company might not be able to provide the capacity you need on short notice.
It will be some work to make all the necessary international coordination happen but it should be feasible. The space companies need suitable spectrum to make their operations possible. But they shouldn't need vast quantities of it; they're presumably not going to be broadcasting multiple video streams from space or anything of the like, just some voice comms and telemetry.
Radio is likely the only viable option for launch and reentry, when the space ship is moving rapidly relative to the ground station. It's also the part of the operation when you have the greatest need for communications.
The problem is that the process of getting radio spectrum allocated takes time. The space companies have to start the process now to get spectrum in time for their large scale operations; they can't wait until the operations are in place and then apply because then they would be grounded for at least a couple of years.
LPFM licenses are readily available in places that have insufficient population density to support a station. Anywhere that enough people live to make a station viable, you can't get a license. Catch-22.
The amount of power used to produce the replacement light bulb also matters. A closet light is on perhaps a couple of minutes per day.
It's the same reason why I still have CRT monitors on my servers. Those monitors are only on for a few hours a YEAR (basically only during upgrades that can't be handled over a remote connection, or to restart them if things go wrong after a power outage), so the energy saved by replacing them would never offset the energy cost of manufacturing the new monitor. If those monitors ever die they'll probably be replaced with other castoff CRT monitors, unless castoff LCD monitors are essentially free by then.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly so. PCs are a sunset business like cars are a sunset business. There won't be a lot of future growth but demand will continue for quite some time to come.
And just like cars, people are stretching the length of the upgrade cycle. Back in the 60s car odometers only had five digits (plus the tenths) and few cars lasted long enough to "turn over" the odometer. Nowadays people routinely keep cars past 150,000 miles and often 200,000. Back in the 90s people replaced their desktop computers every three years; now they routinely keep using them five years or more. But they still use them.
Lots of stuff lost support the last time Microsoft made a major change to the driver model, which was when Vista came out. That's one of the reasons people were so down on Vista; if you tried to install it on an existing computer there was a high probability that some of your hardware wouldn't work or would work badly. The Windows 7 launch went more smoothly because by then, most of the installed base that was likely to want to run it had hardware that worked.
But... how long will monochrome movie film still be produced? This could well be the last movie ever made on the stuff because the film will no longer be available; even monochrome still camera film is getting scarce. Color movie film is more widely used and should endure for a bit longer.
Comcast is offering 305Mbps in a few markets. Mine isn't one of them; 105Mbps is as fast as their service gets here. And that 105Mbps service costs more per month as Google's 1Gbps service; the 305Mbps service, where you can get it, is nearly three times what Google charges for a gigabit. Comcast will have to seriously step up its game to compete. My fear is that in the short term, this competition will just exacerbate the divide between the internet haves and have-nots. The neighborhoods that the big corporations want will get competition, better service, and lower prices. The neighborhoods that are uninteresting to advertisers will get left out.
But he bought a laptop. Building one of those yourself isn't really a viable option.
Not a complete solution. They could get your computer infected with malware because of visiting a site that exploits a vulnerability in the browser, for example.
Yesterday I found an old PC that was being thrown out. It turned out to be a Dell Dimension B110 - 2.53GHz Celeron D, 512MB RAM (the base configuration was 256MB but this one had more), 80GB hard disk, CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. Fully functional hardware; the Windows XP installation was messed up and wouldn't boot. Add another 1GB RAM, an old keyboard and mouse (the former owner presumably kept those for the new system), and a castoff monitor from my collection of parts, wipe the hard disk and install Ubuntu 12.04, usable computer. For $0 cash spent. I will either use it to upgrade one of the household servers or give it away to someone who needs one; haven't decided yet.
I don't know exactly how old this box is. Online reviews of that model are dated April 2006, so it might be almost exactly 7 years old, and it was a low-end system even when it was new. Unless something breaks it will probably still be a useful computer for at least three more years.
If I had wanted XP I could have made the effort to track down a Dell OEM install disk and reinstalled it; the Windows product key sticker is still in place. 1.5GB would be a bit thin for Windows 7 so I wouldn't put that on.
No, it's no barn burner. But it's at least as fast as a current low-end notebook, which means that it will run a lot of current software just fine.
That's assuming you want the entire album; in that case CDs are priced reasonably competitively. If you're talking about the typical album with a couple of good songs and a bunch of filler, the digital downloads are a much better deal.
Unless you bought one of the Chromebooks with a large hard disk rather than an SSD.
It's a rich man's toy for now. Given the usual price curve of electronics it won't remain so forever, at least the rich part. Whether practical applications will arise or it will stay a toy remains to be seen.
Chromebooks won't be paperweights because you can install other software on them. The cheap Acer one, for example, is exactly the same piece of hardware as a netbook that they still sell, just different software installed. There is nothing keeping you from installing Linux or Windows on it except perhaps flashing a different ROM. The Samsung ARM-based one will never run Windows but people have put Linux on it.
It may not be common for a 22 year old to pay off his own mortgage or just buy a house with cash (and evidently not in this case) but it's not unheard of. He could have been a teen Olympian with a big post-Games endorsement deal, a pop singer, or that British kid who just sold his app to Yahoo for $30 million.
128 bit ADC/DAC - hee! In reality we don't even have 24 bit ADC/DACs yet except perhaps for exotic supercooled laboratory equipment; no real world converter actually has a full 24 bits of dynamic range, and we're not likely to ever get there because of thermal noise in the circuitry.
16 bits is not above the resolution of the human ear. But it is above the amount of dynamic range that is likely to be useful for music content; it will take you from the audible threshold in a quiet room to the quick ear damage threshold and that's certainly enough. See the xiph.org post quoted earlier. But you have to optimize the use of those 16 bits carefully and there is little room for error, which is why 24 bit recording is useful in the studio.
I think the jury is still out on whether there is a (small) benefit to higher sample rates. Even if humans are unable to directly perceive pure tones above 20 KHz it's possible that there are perceptible effects of their presence in a complex sound.
T-Mobile has already been offering similar plans for a while to prepaid customers - there it was 2GB of data for an extra $10 or 5GB for $20. The change is that they are now moving their postpaid business model to the no-subsidy model.
Don't blame T*Mobile for a lack of phones - they can't force manufacturers to support their frequencies (though AT&T GSM phones will work just fine on T*Mobile as long as you don't care about 3G or 4G data - I used an Android phone on T-Mobile that only worked with 2G and it was surprisingly usable despite the slow data speeds).
Exactly so. The bind for T-Mobile and phone availability is that they use 1700 MHz frequencies for 3G HSPA+ (and 4G LTE in the future) that nobody else in the world other than virtual networks based on T-Mobile US uses. Any phone with high speed data has to be built especially for them, or built for total worldwide HSPA+ access like the unlocked Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 (and for the tablet fans, the version of the Nexus 7 with cellular data). T-Mobile has to be able to promise a lot of sales before a manufacturer will be interested in making a special phone just for them, and that means carrying a limited selection.
Those small carriers that get new phones that T-Mobile doesn't have? They're using frequencies that the big boys use, so unless some large carrier tied up the phone with an exclusive deal they're free to have at it.
People who want to stop work to live a life of leisure mostly don't end up happy. People who want to stop unfulfilling work and instead spend their time working on things that interest them and help the world (but perhaps don't pay) might well end up happier by winning the lottery.
Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile (both owned by Sprint) are presumably sticking to older phones to avoid cannibalization of their parent company's contract business. (They may also feel that few of their customers are interested in buying a $500 phone.) Metro PCS, a completely non-contract company, does offer the Galaxy S III.
Yep, exactly right. There were two points that the court used to decide that MP3.com was making illegal use of music: that the company had bought copies of CDs and put those rips on their servers rather than using bits uploaded by users, and that the service used a digital signature check so you didn't have to actually upload all the bits of your song. (If your signature matched one of their purchased CDs they pointed you at those bits.) What this really meant was that MP3.com was ten years ahead of its time and that the court was technologically illiterate. MP3.com was doing data deduplication with distributed checking, but they couldn't say that in court because the terms didn't exist yet.
To address the two points in a bit more detail:
When MP3.com put a CD rip on their servers they had done nothing wrong. They had not yet shared any music with anybody, merely backed up music that they already owned, and the legal right to back up data is well established. There wasn't even a DMCA violation; CDs do not have any copy protection. At this point there is one copy of a CD (or an MP3 of it) on their server and it belongs to a legal owner of the music.
When they did the signature check and then shared the rip with a customer, they still hadn't done anything wrong in modern technological terms. The customer had stored a copy of those bits, and their server and client software used deduplication and pointed that customer's file system at the copy stored by MP3.com rather than at a copy uploaded by the customer. The result is exactly the same as if the customer's CD had been uploaded and a separate copy stored; it was just done at much lower cost to MP3.com and to the customer. There are now two virtual "copies" on the server; one belonging to MP3.com and one belonging to the customer. Both presumably legally own that music, and thus all is still well. Additional customer uploads add more virtual copies but don't change the legalities.
The only questionable thing about the MP3.com process is sorting out whether the customer owned the uploaded bits in the first place. But there are now many providers now that let you upload bits to the cloud: Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and many more. The storage provider is not legally liable if it turns out that the customer does not own the bits; the customer is. Those companies are not currently discussing whether they are doing any deduplication of customer-uploaded data but they probably are. Amazon DOES deduplicate MP3s bought from Amazon and the instant MP3 versions of CDs that were purchased from them.
Sadly, there is no way to unwind all the damage done by the court. That would require that Universal return MP3.com to its former owners, pay all their court costs, and restore all the music that became unavailable when MP3.com went offline. Not to mention that Universal would have to somehow repay all the money that MP3.com would have made in the intervening years, and repay all the people who had uploaded music to MP3.com all the money they would have made when people downloaded their songs. Figuring out who all the damaged parties are and the amount of the damages is obviously impossible.
This is a realm where 20 might not be better than 3. There are real advantages of scale here; if you suddenly need a LARGE ramp-up of facilities (your web site just got Slashdotted or mentioned on American Idol), a big provider can do it for you without breathing hard. A small company might not be able to provide the capacity you need on short notice.
It will be some work to make all the necessary international coordination happen but it should be feasible. The space companies need suitable spectrum to make their operations possible. But they shouldn't need vast quantities of it; they're presumably not going to be broadcasting multiple video streams from space or anything of the like, just some voice comms and telemetry.
Radio is likely the only viable option for launch and reentry, when the space ship is moving rapidly relative to the ground station. It's also the part of the operation when you have the greatest need for communications.
The problem is that the process of getting radio spectrum allocated takes time. The space companies have to start the process now to get spectrum in time for their large scale operations; they can't wait until the operations are in place and then apply because then they would be grounded for at least a couple of years.
LPFM licenses are readily available in places that have insufficient population density to support a station. Anywhere that enough people live to make a station viable, you can't get a license. Catch-22.
You don't use the lights as much in the summer because the days are longer, so the balance isn't even. Your point is still valid though.
The amount of power used to produce the replacement light bulb also matters. A closet light is on perhaps a couple of minutes per day. It's the same reason why I still have CRT monitors on my servers. Those monitors are only on for a few hours a YEAR (basically only during upgrades that can't be handled over a remote connection, or to restart them if things go wrong after a power outage), so the energy saved by replacing them would never offset the energy cost of manufacturing the new monitor. If those monitors ever die they'll probably be replaced with other castoff CRT monitors, unless castoff LCD monitors are essentially free by then.