The console gaming market has shown that software vendors will cough up per-sale fees to Sony/Microsoft/etc to license titles to particular consoles.
Why couldn't Microsoft, under the auspices of Palladium (there's another name for that initiative now, if I recall), use DRM and per-sale license keys to "enable" third party applications on machines?
I don't think it would be feasible to charge on a time basis for use of Microsoft products (not yet, anyway, but when everything is WiFi-enabled and connections are ubiquitous... Microsoft Airtime?), so constructive lucritive licensing and support agreements and then getting software kickbacks seems like a great way to ensure that signing up with Microsoft is the gift that just keeps on giving... to Microsoft!
Personally, I'm all for it. The more obnoxious Microsoft gets at charging people for subpar software, the easier it is to make a case for alternative operating systems and applications (linux, *bsd, mac os, etc etc etc).
Actually, the first powermacs (6100,7100,8100) were released with a straight emulator.
Dynamic recompilation came later, but Gary Davidian sat down and wrote a hard-coded emulator with a big lookup table with one slot for each 68K instruction that pointed to some ppc code. It was probably the lowest-risk way to do it initially.
There was a large mix of native and 68K code in the released systems. The memory management code was in 68K, as was a lot of drawing code. As some may remember, there was no floating point support at all until John Neal wrote SoftwareFPU (he was actually an employee of Apple when he wrote and released it... with their blessing!). There wasn't yet a real mixed mode manager (later to become the code fragment manager), so all of the application ports were done with a lot of handholding and evangilism from Apple (developers were given or loaned AIX build systems).
Having seen the actual source code for the first emulator, I can tell you it was quite a read.
Didn't Apple manage to get their (admittedly smaller) user base to switch to a better processor?
Intel's argument against 64-bit computing seems to be an advertisement for the x86-64 concept. The article didn't mention gaming, but surely the gamer market will be a major early-adopter base. It sounds like preemptive marketing to me.
As for memory, the article, and presumably intel, don't seem to account for the ever-increasing memory footprint of Microsoft's operating system (or for the GNOME stuff on our favorite OS), and so are perhaps too dismissive of the need for a >4GB desktop. As we all know all too well, one can never have too much memory or disk space, and applications and data will always grow to expand to the limits of both.
Personally, I'm holding off on any new hardware for my endeavors until I see what AMD releases, though I would settle for a Power5-based desktop...
As you have pointed out in the world of the Internet no one "owns" an online customer. MSN will be just one place on the Internet...
And my favorite
This word open gets a lot of interesting definitions nowadays. I always think of it in terms of customer choices - under Windows the customer gets to choose their hardware supplier.
(Both of those were in emails "from billg@microsoft.com" and I'm going out on a limb to say that davewiner posted honestly on his site)
I guess BillG was feeling pretty chatty back in 1995.
How about a way to have my PVR determine when a program really starts and ends, so that a preempted or delayed show won't cause me to record 20 minutes of a news cast or the show that was on before the one I wanted. A particluar network may slip a few seconds per hour, causing a missed lead-in for a particular show (eg for CSI this can be disappointing), and there is a trend lately on broadcast networks to run shows together by a minute or two either way with little or no break between them, which also throws off recording.
It should be relatively easy to send this information, per channel in the overscan area (close caption area) in the current scheme of things, but with interactive television on the way, I would love to see the broadcast be able to interact with automation devices as well as people, if only for this one feature.
Unless they completely disable our ability to record by the time this stuff is in use...
Meganet Corporation's founder, Saul Backal, claims that its solution can put an end to these problems. Meganet offers a
patented non-linear data mapping technology[1], called VME (Virtual Matrix Encryption)[2], that creates exceptionally random cipher text[3] and combines it with a one million-bit key[4], which is unheard of in today's data security markets. Competing solutions offer a maximum of 256 bits[5].
"There is nothing stronger in existence,"[6] says 38-year-old Backal, a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen[7] who was a tank commander in the IDF in the Lebanon war[8]. "All other encryption methods have been compromised in the last five to six years."[9]
[1] A cool, wordy name for this new, fantastic technology
[2] An even cooler, trademark-able acronym
[3] Hand waving
[4] An excessively-large encryption key, to impress us
[5] A dig on current encryption key size, since smaller keys == less encrypted...
[6] Outlandish claim
[7] Mysterious lineage of the founder. Hmmmmm.
[8] Tank commanders. Does anyone understand encryption better than these guys?
[9] Article claims this one has been in development for 11+ years... see how long it takes to cryptanalyze having appeared on slashdot!
Even though this is probably bogus, the prize for breaking it looks interesting
In an attempt to prove VME's strength, Meganet began offering prizes such as a Ferrari or $1m. to anyone who could break into a VME-protected file. So far, two million people have attempted to crack the code, but none have managed.
As I read what SBC has in one of the patents, they claim the use of frame tags to make a static menubar frame that controls a dynamic target frame is covered...
Funny thing is, the frame and frameset tags were sort of designed for that...
I would liken this to patenting the notion of paragraphs when typewriters came out with carriage return keys.
This was always interesting to me, since it has storage AND the possibility of plugging in an 802.11b PC card (maybe even 802.11a? only supports 16-bit pcmcia), but there hasn't been much buzz about this product (though thinkgeek sells it
Something like this Toshiba device or the terapin mine seems like a great external storage device for PDAs (ipaqs and others with BT capabilities) or maybe a music store for a car player with BT capability (are there such things yet?)
I have my doubts about bluetooth for this, though... will not users suffer the same sort of issues as they do (did) with large-capacity mp3 players with serial or plain old usb 1.1 connections?
I wonder if we will start seeing something like the hologram certificates that came with windows install CDs, or maybe even the new holographic CDs themselves.
Eventually, one could just buy a site license for a particular artist's music, and receive upgrades for a nominal charge. Of course, if you buy a new CD player (or equivalent), you'll have to re-register.
All kidding aside, this sounds like an interesting idea (whether BJ is first with or not) and I hope similar creative ideas become popular over the more draconian RIAA plans we've been hearing about.
I've been talking about this issue lately with a friend of mine, with whom I am trying to do some interesting home automation stuff. For those applications, a machine that runs in the many megahertz is fine based on current uses, but...
The way I see it, the computer in the home should be a lot more like HAL or any of those other scifi computing devices. A lot of processing power today goes into drawing the GUI quickly and tracking user movements on the internet and whatnot, but where's the beef?
A 3 GHz processor should be recognizing speech, figuring out who really lives in the home and who is breaking and entering, which hot spot is the family pet and which is an iron that was left on, etc. It goes without saying that a single 3 GHz cpu should meet most of the comuting needs of a typical family.
I suggest that in order to sell high performance to the mainstream, something more useful than a Windows service pack will have to be available to soak up that performance (and this has already been suggested in other responses to this topic). The computer should stop being a thing that the family goes to a particular room to use... personally, I think the so-called "data furnace" or other similar approach is where the mainstream will begin to adopt this real computing power, when the home server starts doing really amazing things. Things more impressive than whatever it is WindowsXP does for people, anyway.
Voice recognition (that works very well), handwriting recognition (that works even better than that), maybe real time language translation, some simple learning algorithms, agents (web downloads should already happen automatically), intelligent security systems, family health monitoring, car-home networking... the list of applications to take advantage of this stuff is long and probably getting longer.
I know, I'll get modded into the basement for asking, but I wonder if Apache 2.x will do any better on intel's new hyperthreading processors.
There's an article here that mentions intel's future offerings and how they will all feature hyperthreading, and while the 25% performance increases must be mostly a marketing scam, I wonder how this new bullet item on the P4 feature list will work out.
Okay, I'm buying some of the hype for the time being, so sue me.
Maybe if Sun had spent time on a killer application or applet (or evangelizing for same), the Windows users of the world (and the rest of us as well) would be saying "Hey, keep the Java in there!"
Instead, Sun has the bloated Swing with some cute little demos. The world has created java game applets, animated signs, weird ui elements, and memory-hogging eye candy.
Why do I need Java in my web browser client or on my desktop?
While I agree that this is definitely double-plus ungood, this has to make the front of national newspapers (in US and Canada) and be an issue that makes the evening news before anyone can even think of putting up a fight.
Big brother help us if this eavesdropping prevents a terrorist act or, more topical (and I don't mean to sound callous), another little girl from being abducted and murdered. There will be no going back there, since it WILL make the news with the wrong spin.
eWeek has a slightly interesting article here about a company putting together a bonded sender program, where people who receive unwanted mail from such a sender would be able to charge against the bond.
Interesting, though it won't work of course. As the article points out, legitimate mass emailers are less likely to have large scale complaints compared with unbonded/unwanted mass mailers, but personally I wouldn't mind being able to charge for each Viagra, HGH, mortgage, and credit repair email I've gotten just today.
eWeek has a couple of articles on spam (see the homepage), and Spam is the cover banner on the hardcopy magezine this week.
Rather than re-typing everything mitzman already wrote, I suppose "ditto" fits the bill.
In my case, it is software and services in the construction industry, which happens to be doing well in Arizona (the construction industry... I've just been at my venture for about 3 months now, fingers cross, and business is starting to pick up). In the general case, finding a need that is not being addressed WELL is probably the key.
It doesn't help to have friends... in my case, family ties have helped get a foot in the door. Anyone out there who needs help with computer ANYTHING is a potential client. To get the ball rolling, don't be afraid to take on something that seems simple to you... those easy ones that you do correctly set the tone and get your reputation rolling in the right direction.
I hesitate to suggest doing some work at deep discount or free rates, but it worked in my case and helped me get some demonstrations of my work out there... so I was paid in marketing value, which will hopefully turn into cash.
Finally, I will repeat something, regarding the outdated DOS stuff.... completely true. You would be amazed, and it is true in so many areas, from my state government (I speak from direct knowledge) to a furniture store that is about to open their second store-- that one couldn't generate a report of their inventory and dump it to a file, only to paper, because they didn't understand much about how it all worked (I didn't want to press them).
A few months ago, I was a bit uncertain about starting something, but I actually have far too diverse a resume (ie I worked in silicon valley and took advantage of the high mobility and salary potentials) to get a job in conservative Arizona, where everyone wants 5-10 years doing the same thing, usually doing something very specific and dated, and sometimes requiring either MCSE certification or a secret clearance.
I've made similar comments like this before, but in this case it is worth repeating (well, I'll find out whether it is).
The sooner the general public begins to experience the real issues behind DRM, DMCA, Palladium, UCITA (or whatever they're calling it this week), etc, the sooner the issue will rise to the importance of other issues that get real (ie political, financial) attention.
It will probably be painful for a while, since the entire public won't realize the impact of this sort of thing at first, but give it time... the general public let their opinion be known about DivX and it didn't take long for CC to back down and toss that idea (or at least table it for a while).
With the advent of these new standardized 3D file and render formats (see here)
I would think that there would be plenty of room in the virtual museum business, along with maybe virtual architecture, virtual chamber of commerce, etc, to construct virtualized cities from the past and present for everyone with a copy of Mozilla 2.0 to view and enjoy.
Granted, it is a lot of work...
I really like this one, a temple in ancient Thailand reconstructed for walktroughs and everything. It's only a small area, of course, but this sort of thing would at the very least change the way history is taught in the future... especially if it is easily editable.
Of course, being able to play 2nd generation and later online multiplayer games in super-accurate virtual cities from around the world would be pretty cool, to say the least.
If you are lucky enough to find a confident woman who has been waiting for just the right guy, not the right guy with all of the peer-pressured fantasy trimmings (ring, white wedding, picket fence, etc etc), then immortalizing the moment is definitely the idea (especially if it really does happen only once).
We hear about incredibly romantic proposals and odd weddings (skydiving, underwater, walmart, 7-11, etc) because those couples chose to buck tradition and do something that they would remember forever as opposed to something that everyone else does.
However, while those eccentric proposals and nuptials always get some attention, look at the facts. During a football game, on The Tonight Show, on Jerry or Oprah, or right here on Slashdot, nothing will get you more points in life than announcing to the world, possibly on one knee, likely with ring in hand, that the woman that everyone is looking at (or reading about) at that moment is the one you want to marry. That is a story that will be told and retold for the rest of your time together.
The ring is the common way to go, but it is the univeral symbol (in North America, anyway) for that immortalized event.
I wasn't suggesting that no diamond is automatic termination of the relationship... if it were, then this comment is right on.
However, it is a disappointment to most women when their man doesn't do what she's waited for all her life and get her a ring that she can show her friends and family, then meet her at the end of the aisle, etc etc.
Imagine this: if you ask a woman whether she would forego the ring for the sake of, say, purchasing a home, the answer will not come as easily as one might expect (in most cases), because while the home is an investment in the future, the ring is your investment in her.
But being a guy, I'll never really know what is up with this...
Recently the XHTML 2.0 standard became a topic of discussion, and it is touted as essential to move forward in the publication of content to new and exciting platforms, including web browsers on computers of course, cell phones and small devices, and of course television.
That last one got me thinking. I wonder if this effort is going to be aimed at any 3D content publication (especially advertising...).
Another platform is digital books... suppose your eTextBooks (for which you have no doubt paid a small fortune for LICENSE FEES), are filled with some secure form of XHTML content and standardized 2D and 3D image formats and rendering. How cool would it be to have a medical textbook with a 3D walkthrough of the colon?
Perhaps the content will be displayed on those billboards as seen in Minority Report, or maybe 3D content will be sent to your TiVo or Replay device over a special channel for nifty commercials. Or maybe some interesting user interface devices will start appearing on screens to navigate hundreds of channels, especially since we won't be able to record a lot of them.
Anyway, my point is, thinking of "web technologies" in the context of a web browser downloading content over a modem (or better) onto your PC is fast becoming a dated concept. It's not pages and browsers so much as content and platforms, and both of the latter will only become more commercial and, if we're luck, cool over time.
Slashdot Mirror
The console gaming market has shown that software vendors will cough up per-sale fees to Sony/Microsoft/etc to license titles to particular consoles.
Why couldn't Microsoft, under the auspices of Palladium (there's another name for that initiative now, if I recall), use DRM and per-sale license keys to "enable" third party applications on machines?
I don't think it would be feasible to charge on a time basis for use of Microsoft products (not yet, anyway, but when everything is WiFi-enabled and connections are ubiquitous... Microsoft Airtime?), so constructive lucritive licensing and support agreements and then getting software kickbacks seems like a great way to ensure that signing up with Microsoft is the gift that just keeps on giving... to Microsoft!
Personally, I'm all for it. The more obnoxious Microsoft gets at charging people for subpar software, the easier it is to make a case for alternative operating systems and applications (linux, *bsd, mac os, etc etc etc).
Actually, the first powermacs (6100,7100,8100) were released with a straight emulator.
Dynamic recompilation came later, but Gary Davidian sat down and wrote a hard-coded emulator with a big lookup table with one slot for each 68K instruction that pointed to some ppc code. It was probably the lowest-risk way to do it initially.
There was a large mix of native and 68K code in the released systems. The memory management code was in 68K, as was a lot of drawing code. As some may remember, there was no floating point support at all until John Neal wrote SoftwareFPU (he was actually an employee of Apple when he wrote and released it... with their blessing!). There wasn't yet a real mixed mode manager (later to become the code fragment manager), so all of the application ports were done with a lot of handholding and evangilism from Apple (developers were given or loaned AIX build systems).
Having seen the actual source code for the first emulator, I can tell you it was quite a read.
Didn't Apple manage to get their (admittedly smaller) user base to switch to a better processor?
Intel's argument against 64-bit computing seems to be an advertisement for the x86-64 concept. The article didn't mention gaming, but surely the gamer market will be a major early-adopter base. It sounds like preemptive marketing to me.
As for memory, the article, and presumably intel, don't seem to account for the ever-increasing memory footprint of Microsoft's operating system (or for the GNOME stuff on our favorite OS), and so are perhaps too dismissive of the need for a >4GB desktop. As we all know all too well, one can never have too much memory or disk space, and applications and data will always grow to expand to the limits of both.
Personally, I'm holding off on any new hardware for my endeavors until I see what AMD releases, though I would settle for a Power5-based desktop...
Trying again...
email with BillGIt must be late or something.
Since we're riding the wayback machine here...
http://davenet.userland.com/1995/02/27/emailwithbChoice quote from billg:
And my favorite
(Both of those were in emails "from billg@microsoft.com" and I'm going out on a limb to say that davewiner posted honestly on his site)
I guess BillG was feeling pretty chatty back in 1995.
How about a way to have my PVR determine when a program really starts and ends, so that a preempted or delayed show won't cause me to record 20 minutes of a news cast or the show that was on before the one I wanted. A particluar network may slip a few seconds per hour, causing a missed lead-in for a particular show (eg for CSI this can be disappointing), and there is a trend lately on broadcast networks to run shows together by a minute or two either way with little or no break between them, which also throws off recording.
It should be relatively easy to send this information, per channel in the overscan area (close caption area) in the current scheme of things, but with interactive television on the way, I would love to see the broadcast be able to interact with automation devices as well as people, if only for this one feature.
Unless they completely disable our ability to record by the time this stuff is in use...
From the press release or whatever that is:
Even though this is probably bogus, the prize for breaking it looks interesting
As I read what SBC has in one of the patents, they claim the use of frame tags to make a static menubar frame that controls a dynamic target frame is covered...
Funny thing is, the frame and frameset tags were sort of designed for that...
I would liken this to patenting the notion of paragraphs when typewriters came out with carriage return keys.
Or more specifically, the Mocha
This was always interesting to me, since it has storage AND the possibility of plugging in an 802.11b PC card (maybe even 802.11a? only supports 16-bit pcmcia), but there hasn't been much buzz about this product (though thinkgeek sells it
Something like this Toshiba device or the terapin mine seems like a great external storage device for PDAs (ipaqs and others with BT capabilities) or maybe a music store for a car player with BT capability (are there such things yet?)
I have my doubts about bluetooth for this, though... will not users suffer the same sort of issues as they do (did) with large-capacity mp3 players with serial or plain old usb 1.1 connections?
John Cleese?
He's probably too old now, but perhaps circa Fish Called Wanda I think he would have had something to offer.
Alan Cumming?
For Zaphod, one that comes to mind is Billy Connoly. He's a Scott, but has a certain odd quality that I think would be fun.
I wonder if we will start seeing something like the hologram certificates that came with windows install CDs, or maybe even the new holographic CDs themselves.
Eventually, one could just buy a site license for a particular artist's music, and receive upgrades for a nominal charge. Of course, if you buy a new CD player (or equivalent), you'll have to re-register.
All kidding aside, this sounds like an interesting idea (whether BJ is first with or not) and I hope similar creative ideas become popular over the more draconian RIAA plans we've been hearing about.
I've been talking about this issue lately with a friend of mine, with whom I am trying to do some interesting home automation stuff. For those applications, a machine that runs in the many megahertz is fine based on current uses, but...
The way I see it, the computer in the home should be a lot more like HAL or any of those other scifi computing devices. A lot of processing power today goes into drawing the GUI quickly and tracking user movements on the internet and whatnot, but where's the beef?
A 3 GHz processor should be recognizing speech, figuring out who really lives in the home and who is breaking and entering, which hot spot is the family pet and which is an iron that was left on, etc. It goes without saying that a single 3 GHz cpu should meet most of the comuting needs of a typical family.
I suggest that in order to sell high performance to the mainstream, something more useful than a Windows service pack will have to be available to soak up that performance (and this has already been suggested in other responses to this topic). The computer should stop being a thing that the family goes to a particular room to use... personally, I think the so-called "data furnace" or other similar approach is where the mainstream will begin to adopt this real computing power, when the home server starts doing really amazing things. Things more impressive than whatever it is WindowsXP does for people, anyway.
Voice recognition (that works very well), handwriting recognition (that works even better than that), maybe real time language translation, some simple learning algorithms, agents (web downloads should already happen automatically), intelligent security systems, family health monitoring, car-home networking... the list of applications to take advantage of this stuff is long and probably getting longer.
I know, I'll get modded into the basement for asking, but I wonder if Apache 2.x will do any better on intel's new hyperthreading processors.
There's an article here that mentions intel's future offerings and how they will all feature hyperthreading, and while the 25% performance increases must be mostly a marketing scam, I wonder how this new bullet item on the P4 feature list will work out.
Okay, I'm buying some of the hype for the time being, so sue me.
Maybe if Sun had spent time on a killer application or applet (or evangelizing for same), the Windows users of the world (and the rest of us as well) would be saying "Hey, keep the Java in there!"
Instead, Sun has the bloated Swing with some cute little demos. The world has created java game applets, animated signs, weird ui elements, and memory-hogging eye candy.
Why do I need Java in my web browser client or on my desktop?
Yep, Microsoft is to blame.
While I agree that this is definitely double-plus ungood, this has to make the front of national newspapers (in US and Canada) and be an issue that makes the evening news before anyone can even think of putting up a fight.
Big brother help us if this eavesdropping prevents a terrorist act or, more topical (and I don't mean to sound callous), another little girl from being abducted and murdered. There will be no going back there, since it WILL make the news with the wrong spin.
Let's see some similar sanity with the JPEG patent
eWeek has a slightly interesting article here about a company putting together a bonded sender program, where people who receive unwanted mail from such a sender would be able to charge against the bond.
Interesting, though it won't work of course. As the article points out, legitimate mass emailers are less likely to have large scale complaints compared with unbonded/unwanted mass mailers, but personally I wouldn't mind being able to charge for each Viagra, HGH, mortgage, and credit repair email I've gotten just today.
eWeek has a couple of articles on spam (see the homepage), and Spam is the cover banner on the hardcopy magezine this week.
I guess you didn't read this one
Most of us don't get algebra, much less this proof craziness!
Rather than re-typing everything mitzman already wrote, I suppose "ditto" fits the bill.
In my case, it is software and services in the construction industry, which happens to be doing well in Arizona (the construction industry... I've just been at my venture for about 3 months now, fingers cross, and business is starting to pick up). In the general case, finding a need that is not being addressed WELL is probably the key.
It doesn't help to have friends... in my case, family ties have helped get a foot in the door. Anyone out there who needs help with computer ANYTHING is a potential client. To get the ball rolling, don't be afraid to take on something that seems simple to you... those easy ones that you do correctly set the tone and get your reputation rolling in the right direction.
I hesitate to suggest doing some work at deep discount or free rates, but it worked in my case and helped me get some demonstrations of my work out there... so I was paid in marketing value, which will hopefully turn into cash.
Finally, I will repeat something, regarding the outdated DOS stuff.... completely true. You would be amazed, and it is true in so many areas, from my state government (I speak from direct knowledge) to a furniture store that is about to open their second store-- that one couldn't generate a report of their inventory and dump it to a file, only to paper, because they didn't understand much about how it all worked (I didn't want to press them).
A few months ago, I was a bit uncertain about starting something, but I actually have far too diverse a resume (ie I worked in silicon valley and took advantage of the high mobility and salary potentials) to get a job in conservative Arizona, where everyone wants 5-10 years doing the same thing, usually doing something very specific and dated, and sometimes requiring either MCSE certification or a secret clearance.
That's my $0.02, hope that helps, and good luck!
I've made similar comments like this before, but in this case it is worth repeating (well, I'll find out whether it is).
The sooner the general public begins to experience the real issues behind DRM, DMCA, Palladium, UCITA (or whatever they're calling it this week), etc, the sooner the issue will rise to the importance of other issues that get real (ie political, financial) attention.
It will probably be painful for a while, since the entire public won't realize the impact of this sort of thing at first, but give it time... the general public let their opinion be known about DivX and it didn't take long for CC to back down and toss that idea (or at least table it for a while).
This too shall pass? I hope so.
With the advent of these new standardized 3D file and render formats (see here) I would think that there would be plenty of room in the virtual museum business, along with maybe virtual architecture, virtual chamber of commerce, etc, to construct virtualized cities from the past and present for everyone with a copy of Mozilla 2.0 to view and enjoy.
Granted, it is a lot of work...
I really like this one, a temple in ancient Thailand reconstructed for walktroughs and everything. It's only a small area, of course, but this sort of thing would at the very least change the way history is taught in the future... especially if it is easily editable.
Of course, being able to play 2nd generation and later online multiplayer games in super-accurate virtual cities from around the world would be pretty cool, to say the least.
If you are lucky enough to find a confident woman who has been waiting for just the right guy, not the right guy with all of the peer-pressured fantasy trimmings (ring, white wedding, picket fence, etc etc), then immortalizing the moment is definitely the idea (especially if it really does happen only once).
We hear about incredibly romantic proposals and odd weddings (skydiving, underwater, walmart, 7-11, etc) because those couples chose to buck tradition and do something that they would remember forever as opposed to something that everyone else does.
However, while those eccentric proposals and nuptials always get some attention, look at the facts. During a football game, on The Tonight Show, on Jerry or Oprah, or right here on Slashdot, nothing will get you more points in life than announcing to the world, possibly on one knee, likely with ring in hand, that the woman that everyone is looking at (or reading about) at that moment is the one you want to marry. That is a story that will be told and retold for the rest of your time together.
The ring is the common way to go, but it is the univeral symbol (in North America, anyway) for that immortalized event.
I wasn't suggesting that no diamond is automatic termination of the relationship... if it were, then this comment is right on.
However, it is a disappointment to most women when their man doesn't do what she's waited for all her life and get her a ring that she can show her friends and family, then meet her at the end of the aisle, etc etc.
Imagine this: if you ask a woman whether she would forego the ring for the sake of, say, purchasing a home, the answer will not come as easily as one might expect (in most cases), because while the home is an investment in the future, the ring is your investment in her.
But being a guy, I'll never really know what is up with this...
Recently the XHTML 2.0 standard became a topic of discussion, and it is touted as essential to move forward in the publication of content to new and exciting platforms, including web browsers on computers of course, cell phones and small devices, and of course television.
That last one got me thinking. I wonder if this effort is going to be aimed at any 3D content publication (especially advertising...).
Another platform is digital books... suppose your eTextBooks (for which you have no doubt paid a small fortune for LICENSE FEES), are filled with some secure form of XHTML content and standardized 2D and 3D image formats and rendering. How cool would it be to have a medical textbook with a 3D walkthrough of the colon?
Perhaps the content will be displayed on those billboards as seen in Minority Report, or maybe 3D content will be sent to your TiVo or Replay device over a special channel for nifty commercials. Or maybe some interesting user interface devices will start appearing on screens to navigate hundreds of channels, especially since we won't be able to record a lot of them.
Anyway, my point is, thinking of "web technologies" in the context of a web browser downloading content over a modem (or better) onto your PC is fast becoming a dated concept. It's not pages and browsers so much as content and platforms, and both of the latter will only become more commercial and, if we're luck, cool over time.