Increase the use of product placement. Or make the ad breaks shorter but more frequent, so people are less inclined to fetch the remote. In actuality, a bit of both.
"the kids with the most on offer will become the most popular."
It works. When I was a pupil, it was the height of the pokemon craze. I supplied copies of no$gba and roms on floppy, site rips of the pokedex, episode guides, even whole episodes in realmedia format via spanned ZIP archives. Made me quite popular, so long as the flow of data was kept up. Then the internet came along, and suddenly noone needed my services.
Download... how? The only way you are getting files from USB device to Windows host is via FAT (or NTFS, or ExFAT - same problem). Besides which, adding filesystem support couldn't be done by just any user - only by a local administrator account. Fine for those on their home PCs, not so fine for those who want to quickly plug their phone in at a friend's or at work.
That said, it might be a good idea for Google to design and endorse an open patent-free FAT-replacement - as they are the only company who has even the slightest hope of getting it widely adopted. It's a long shot even for them though.
And in ten years, once Microsoft has destroyed Android and taken over it's place in the market for billions in revenue, the case might finally finish winding through the courts. We've been here with Netscape. Legal action runs at a snail's pace compared to most industries - but in the fast-moving world of technology, it's glacial.
For a phone's internal storage, no problem - they aren't even FAT, no problem there. But SD cards aren't internal storage. They are used to transfer files too. A means of putting data on and off a phone. Let's just say that Android did as you propose and put the card as ext3. All works very well, until you plug the phone into a PC with a USB cable and select storage device mode. At which point... nothing happens, if you're running a Windows desktop, as the vast majority do. Because Windows only supports but three filesystems on non-optical media: FAT(12/16/32), NTFS and ExFAT. All three of which are MS-developed and MS-patented. Sure, Android could run without FAT, but only by abandoning Windows compatibility - and in a world where almost everyone runs Windows and most of the rest run OSX (Which also supports only those three plus the apple-patented HPFS varients), that simply isn't an option.
The ideal solution would be for someone to design an open-standards unpatented FAT alternative and everyone to support that, but there isn't a snowball's hope in Hell that Microsoft would build support for such a filesystem into Windows, and no-one is going to bother designing it when they know that no removeable-media filesystem can catch on without Microsoft's blessing.
MS did invent both the original FAT filesystem and it's derivatives, and still holds some important patents - most noteably one on storing both a long filename and a short filename in one filesystem for backwards compatibility purposes. It's also the reason behind ExFAT: Everyone knows that FAT32's days are numbered, and Microsoft wants to make sure that what replaces it is a filesystem they still hold patents on, and not some open standard. ExFAT will eventually come to replace FAT for removeable media, simply because it's the only FAT-replacement that Windows supports without third-party extensions.
But the people have plenty of food, and entertainment via television and games. That's enough to silence any revolt. The romans figured that one out long ago. The most you'll see in the modern US revolt-wise is an increase in people going on forums and complaining that someone else really should start a revolt.
Europe has it's own copyright interests to protect. Still, it's possible that given enough time some country or other might simply declare copyright void.
It could make piracy substantially harder, or at least that piracy that uses centralised websites like torrents. Those sites take money to run, which typically comes either from advertising or user donations. A financial blacklist means no US company can transfer money to them, which means that unless they have a sponsor willing to foot the entire bill they can't operate. Worked on Wikileaks - currently unable to raise funds because it just isn't possible for supporters to send money.
The best GUI in the world is always the one you use. Familiarity is the key to GUI useability - that's why any change to GUIs is always met with an immediate backlash. Except Vista. The more you use that, the more you hate it.
Thunderbolt. The high-end mac pros still make nice workstation machines (Dual Xeon and a ton of RAM, and will happily run six screens), but other than that their desktops arn't anything special performance-wise. I had to get a third-party PCIe card on mine just to get eSATA support though. I notice that even the very newest macbooks don't have USB3, probably because that would ruin the only reason anyone has for using a Thunderbolt port. Why pay £600 for a thunderbolt accessory when you can get the USB3 equivilent for a tenth the price and no significent difference in performance?
Found one of those myself once, inside a wall. Turned out to be the very first server the then-school ever had. At the time there was no server room, and the computer lab was one room - so the only way to keep the server from being messed with by students was to open the (conveniently hollow) wall, put the server inside, and seal the wall up again. I only found it by following network and power cables that disappeared through a hole on one side and didn't come out the other.
Don't forget James Watt. Patented a few ideas related to the steam engine, then spent the rest of his life just stopping anyone else from making them. He didn't bother to improve the technology, and aggressively fought anyone else who tried, because he was already raking in the cash. If not for his own patent trolling, we might have had high-pressure steam technology ten years earlier. He is also noteable for a patent for using a sun-and-planet gear with steam, which is very similar to what you see in many software patents of the form "Use of (already well-known technology) with a computer." Amusingly enough, he switched to the sun-and-planet gear because another inventor had already patented the use of a crank with steam.
Quite possible. Right now, patents are in their own interest - but China's dominating ideology is a form of hybrid free-market-communism that has no objection at all to protectionism, and would quite happily dump patents entirely if it would give them a significant economic advantage over other economies. They just need to improve their domestic engineering ability, and they are doing that very quickly.
You say rip-off like it's a bad thing. That's how technological advancement works: People take existing ideas and improve upon them. Or did, before every idea became patented.
Cool as that is, I can't see how it works - it appears to defy the laws of physics as I know them. This means either the designers have found something so clever I can't work it out, or the video is fake. If it works, it could render pole dancers obsolete.
A matter of flexibility. Lasers can't do complex shapes very well, while LCDs could. The downside is that you need a *lot* of LCDs. He doesn't have enough, but estimates that a hundred would be needed for a clear image - and keeping a hundred projectors in perfect alignment is quite a challenge in itsself.
The smoke-and-projectors system looks like a nice prototype, but it's a long way from practical. Needs more projectors, and some way to maintain uniform fog distribution in a room.
The problem with Numb3rs is that they tried to shoehorn mathematics into the action-crimefighting genre, which depends on fast pacing. Mathematics is usually *not* a fast-paced field. That's the main thing that Numb3rs made inaccurate - all their mathematical ideas were real, and many of them plausible, but they would take mathematicians weeks or months to put together. In Numb3rs, he was quite capable of writing even the most sophisticated programs in half an hour. The other annoyance was the writer's clear willful ignorance of a probability distribution. Math guy could predict anything, every time, without error, using his math. While the math was real, the way it was used was stupid.
Some years ago we had a president who said we would put a man on mars, and... no-one listened, because we all knew he was lying and the project would only be quietly forgotten in a year.
Just look at Numb3rs for a nice example. They tried to make the life of a mathematician exciting. They succeeded, but only my making his math skills into a superpower.
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Increase the use of product placement. Or make the ad breaks shorter but more frequent, so people are less inclined to fetch the remote. In actuality, a bit of both.
"the kids with the most on offer will become the most popular."
It works. When I was a pupil, it was the height of the pokemon craze. I supplied copies of no$gba and roms on floppy, site rips of the pokedex, episode guides, even whole episodes in realmedia format via spanned ZIP archives. Made me quite popular, so long as the flow of data was kept up. Then the internet came along, and suddenly noone needed my services.
I knew it works on optical media, but wasn't aware it supported UDF on hdd-like removeable media.
Actually OSX does support NTFS, but only in read-only. Can't write them with stock OSX. You can install fuse though, that'll do it.
Download... how? The only way you are getting files from USB device to Windows host is via FAT (or NTFS, or ExFAT - same problem). Besides which, adding filesystem support couldn't be done by just any user - only by a local administrator account. Fine for those on their home PCs, not so fine for those who want to quickly plug their phone in at a friend's or at work.
That said, it might be a good idea for Google to design and endorse an open patent-free FAT-replacement - as they are the only company who has even the slightest hope of getting it widely adopted. It's a long shot even for them though.
And in ten years, once Microsoft has destroyed Android and taken over it's place in the market for billions in revenue, the case might finally finish winding through the courts. We've been here with Netscape. Legal action runs at a snail's pace compared to most industries - but in the fast-moving world of technology, it's glacial.
For a phone's internal storage, no problem - they aren't even FAT, no problem there. But SD cards aren't internal storage. They are used to transfer files too. A means of putting data on and off a phone. Let's just say that Android did as you propose and put the card as ext3. All works very well, until you plug the phone into a PC with a USB cable and select storage device mode. At which point... nothing happens, if you're running a Windows desktop, as the vast majority do. Because Windows only supports but three filesystems on non-optical media: FAT(12/16/32), NTFS and ExFAT. All three of which are MS-developed and MS-patented. Sure, Android could run without FAT, but only by abandoning Windows compatibility - and in a world where almost everyone runs Windows and most of the rest run OSX (Which also supports only those three plus the apple-patented HPFS varients), that simply isn't an option.
The ideal solution would be for someone to design an open-standards unpatented FAT alternative and everyone to support that, but there isn't a snowball's hope in Hell that Microsoft would build support for such a filesystem into Windows, and no-one is going to bother designing it when they know that no removeable-media filesystem can catch on without Microsoft's blessing.
MS did invent both the original FAT filesystem and it's derivatives, and still holds some important patents - most noteably one on storing both a long filename and a short filename in one filesystem for backwards compatibility purposes. It's also the reason behind ExFAT: Everyone knows that FAT32's days are numbered, and Microsoft wants to make sure that what replaces it is a filesystem they still hold patents on, and not some open standard. ExFAT will eventually come to replace FAT for removeable media, simply because it's the only FAT-replacement that Windows supports without third-party extensions.
But the people have plenty of food, and entertainment via television and games. That's enough to silence any revolt. The romans figured that one out long ago. The most you'll see in the modern US revolt-wise is an increase in people going on forums and complaining that someone else really should start a revolt.
Europe has it's own copyright interests to protect. Still, it's possible that given enough time some country or other might simply declare copyright void.
It could make piracy substantially harder, or at least that piracy that uses centralised websites like torrents. Those sites take money to run, which typically comes either from advertising or user donations. A financial blacklist means no US company can transfer money to them, which means that unless they have a sponsor willing to foot the entire bill they can't operate. Worked on Wikileaks - currently unable to raise funds because it just isn't possible for supporters to send money.
Because even with the counterfeit issues, it's still cheaper to manufacture in China where labor is cheap and pollution ignored.
But it's one hell of a password to have guessed, intercepted or lost.
The best GUI in the world is always the one you use. Familiarity is the key to GUI useability - that's why any change to GUIs is always met with an immediate backlash.
Except Vista. The more you use that, the more you hate it.
Thunderbolt. The high-end mac pros still make nice workstation machines (Dual Xeon and a ton of RAM, and will happily run six screens), but other than that their desktops arn't anything special performance-wise. I had to get a third-party PCIe card on mine just to get eSATA support though. I notice that even the very newest macbooks don't have USB3, probably because that would ruin the only reason anyone has for using a Thunderbolt port. Why pay £600 for a thunderbolt accessory when you can get the USB3 equivilent for a tenth the price and no significent difference in performance?
Found one of those myself once, inside a wall. Turned out to be the very first server the then-school ever had. At the time there was no server room, and the computer lab was one room - so the only way to keep the server from being messed with by students was to open the (conveniently hollow) wall, put the server inside, and seal the wall up again. I only found it by following network and power cables that disappeared through a hole on one side and didn't come out the other.
Don't forget James Watt. Patented a few ideas related to the steam engine, then spent the rest of his life just stopping anyone else from making them. He didn't bother to improve the technology, and aggressively fought anyone else who tried, because he was already raking in the cash. If not for his own patent trolling, we might have had high-pressure steam technology ten years earlier. He is also noteable for a patent for using a sun-and-planet gear with steam, which is very similar to what you see in many software patents of the form "Use of (already well-known technology) with a computer." Amusingly enough, he switched to the sun-and-planet gear because another inventor had already patented the use of a crank with steam.
Quite possible. Right now, patents are in their own interest - but China's dominating ideology is a form of hybrid free-market-communism that has no objection at all to protectionism, and would quite happily dump patents entirely if it would give them a significant economic advantage over other economies. They just need to improve their domestic engineering ability, and they are doing that very quickly.
You say rip-off like it's a bad thing. That's how technological advancement works: People take existing ideas and improve upon them. Or did, before every idea became patented.
Cool as that is, I can't see how it works - it appears to defy the laws of physics as I know them. This means either the designers have found something so clever I can't work it out, or the video is fake. If it works, it could render pole dancers obsolete.
A matter of flexibility. Lasers can't do complex shapes very well, while LCDs could. The downside is that you need a *lot* of LCDs. He doesn't have enough, but estimates that a hundred would be needed for a clear image - and keeping a hundred projectors in perfect alignment is quite a challenge in itsself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmGy9zPrWTU&feature=related
The smoke-and-projectors system looks like a nice prototype, but it's a long way from practical. Needs more projectors, and some way to maintain uniform fog distribution in a room.
The problem with Numb3rs is that they tried to shoehorn mathematics into the action-crimefighting genre, which depends on fast pacing. Mathematics is usually *not* a fast-paced field. That's the main thing that Numb3rs made inaccurate - all their mathematical ideas were real, and many of them plausible, but they would take mathematicians weeks or months to put together. In Numb3rs, he was quite capable of writing even the most sophisticated programs in half an hour. The other annoyance was the writer's clear willful ignorance of a probability distribution. Math guy could predict anything, every time, without error, using his math. While the math was real, the way it was used was stupid.
Some years ago we had a president who said we would put a man on mars, and... no-one listened, because we all knew he was lying and the project would only be quietly forgotten in a year.
Just look at Numb3rs for a nice example. They tried to make the life of a mathematician exciting. They succeeded, but only my making his math skills into a superpower.