The linked article is actually very poorly written, and highly specious in its analysis.
"Save for the monthly subscription revenue, there was nothing much to the AOL business to begin with, as the first mild downturn in the economy has convincingly shown, with advertising revenues from the service having now collapsed in a heap."
Actually, AOL was making quite a lot of money on advertising, and though the online ad market dove after the merger, that doesn't qualify the statement that there was nothing there to begin with.
The whole tone (mocking poetry writing, yapping about black holes, colloquialisms instead of actual business terms, and the overly familiar 'I-you-we banter' show this article to be a sensationalist 'I told you so (even though I didn't) editorial rant, and not an 'analysis' of any kind.
I'd love to find out where the money went, but the only thing this article taught me is that Fox's online news is the equivalant to WB's prime time news.
Offset that with the fact that most distributed computing projects have redundant units, to check for cheaters, or simple faulty units. I bet the two come close to cancelling out...
Since when does PowerPC = G4? There are tons more G3 (and PowerPC 601, 603, 604, 604e, etc.) machines out there than there are G4s, and all those stats fall under the Power PC stat report. These machines run from 60Mhz (PPC 601) to 1Ghz (G4). I'm sure the avg megahertz for the Intel x86 stat are substantially higher.
When SETI first started, I remember similarly equipped PIIs and PPC604s took 32 hours and 19 hours respectively to handle a unit.
Not that I'm critical, but just because it's amusing: $500 is the prize for the half-billionth unit. That equates to 0.0001 cents per 17-hour CPU unit.
Looked at another way, the total number of FP operations to reach the 0.5 gigaunit mark is 1.5319e21. The brand new NEC Earth Simulator runs at 35,600 gigaflops. At that rate, the world's fastest supercomputer would take 43030061.73 seconds, or 498 days, to do the job.
I wish I could lease the world's fastest computer for $1 a day...
Quantum cryptography is great for securing one stage of the data transmission, but it's hardly perfect. For one thing people can't interpret quantum-encrypted photon streams, and so the machinery used to decrypt the quantum stream is still vulnerable to attack, as is the rest of the path from that machine to the reader's brain, including whatever wire, RAM, or CRT that involves.
Of course the same goes on the transmitting end.
Similarly, the one-time-pad that the QC system uses to encode the photons is vulnerable to attack or reverse engineering. (Note that this isn't highly likely, but likely enough to eliminate QC from being perfect.)
All Quantum Cryptography does is make one link in the chain more secure. That's it.
Language skills and chess skills are both things humans do well, and computers don't (because both are intractable problems, and humans are better at finding and using patterns.
Therefore I fail to see why a test requiring a human to differentiate between human and computer conversationalists is different than a human differentiating between human and computer chess players.
Forget conversational ability. I'd like to see a Chess Turing Test, where grandmasters go up against an unknown opponent, and have to ascertain whether they're playing a computer or a machine.
Wired had this great story about compact macs in Japan which, among other things, showed a G3 powerbook's innards ported to a Mac 128K enclosure, running OS X on the original 9" b/w 512.384 screen.
Start to MAKE music of your own! Not only do you have the freedom to do so, not only do you probably already have a CD burner that is the modern-day equivalent of a million-dollar mastering lathe in the 60s and 70s, but more and more software for working with music data is not only out there at no cost, but even Free.
You presume that I have any musical ability at all...
I am doing my part on the video front though, documenting my first skydive. Sit back, watch, and forget about renting that DVD tonight!:-)
Wouldn't it be interesting if we the listeners started a movement to boycott CDs in favor of those artists who choose to distribute their music electronically, free of charge?
If the movement were publicizen enough, the RIAA would no longer be able to credibly say that CD revenues fell because of mp3 piracy, because it could be countered that CD sales are slowing because people are listening to smaller, free artists instead.
"You can't loan them, you can't sell them, you can't even read them on more than one (or maybe 2) devices."
That's not so much a copy-protection issue as it is the domain of dighital rights management. I agree that you should be able to own the bits, and not just the non-transferable right to read on a single device, but I wouldn't be so against true 'copy protection' that inhibits duplication, as long as it retained the transferability of loaning an eBook to a friend or selling the unary copy to someone else.
"So unless you plan on standing close to somebody for a quite a while, the mental images of swapping mp3 collections or walking for warez can be put on hold for now. "
Hardly. If I wanted some cool stuff off your computer, does that mean I want everything on your computer?
You're my friend. We hang out for a half hour. That's time enough for 38 MP3 tracks, or 133 megs of whatever. A few days later, we hang out again. Swapping continues.
If you lose the 'must have everything now" mentality, this becomes pretty useful, especially if it happens automatically in the background whenever you're within range of a like-minded wearer. I could see people using these things in class, on the subway, or in traffic. At the end of the day you check out what your hip-scanner picked up for you.
Keep in mind that not all valuable files are as big as MPEG4 streams or MP3 collections. Back in the day, 500K of porn jpegs would get you through the day, and that would only take six seconds to transmit.
"* Many e-book vendors have crippling levels of copy-protection."
And dead tree books are easy to copy? Sure, if you want to photocopy each page and bind them together, but then with a reflective LCD, you could do that with an eBook as well, setting the reader upside down on a photocopier.
I hate copyright enforcement as much as the next guy, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that books are like MP3s.
If anything, eBooks are better in this capacity because you can get free copies of non-copyrighted works through Project Gutenberg. Try getting a free copy of Shakespeare at the bookstore...
To be clear, the restrictions don't say it's for educational use only, but rather that it's not for commercial use. This is an importnat distinction, especially when the person is looking for a product to use for a public open-source project which seemingly isn't a commercial venture.
There's more than enough Uranium and Plutonium to remove our dependence on oil, but that doesn't mean the oil industry will let it happen.
Solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, wind. If these technologies had the full support of the government and didn't have big oil lobbiests against then you might see a country that didn't care so much about fighting in the Middle East.
Don't use flash for a large-scale project, please. It's only going to make your trainging and maintenance costs skyrocket. HTML is open-source and is highly capable.
However, if you want cheap flash, the educational price for Flash MX is $99. Enroll in a community college course. Maybe a flash course... You'll need it.:-)
Trees are about as efficient for straining out CO2 as horses are at transporting people.
If we didn't replace horses with cars, we wouldn't have to replace trees with this thing.
Besides, trees aren't cutting it at the moment (err, so to speak) and trying to acquire and protect a new forest the size of the United States is harder than finding 60Km^2 in a desert.
This isn't 3D. 3D allows for vectors and surfaces along any possible plane. This allows for two levels of 2D. This is usually referred to as '2.5D', meaning 2D but layered so one flat 2D plane can obscure another parallel flat 2D plane.
further, 2.5D usually allows for an unlimited number of parallel 2D planes, and this only has two.
Cool, I guess, but hardly a 3D monitor in any practical sense of the term...
And therefore perpetuating that reality is okey-fie? I don't think so.
The United States is very much like the Roman Empire in its prime, where killing a Roman citizen would result in the deaths of 100 locals. Nevertheless such a superpower stranglehold ended up being unsustainable. Just becuase I benefit from being at the top of the pyramid doesn't mean I'm all about trodding on those beneath me. Call me an altruist, I guess...
Slashdot Mirror
The linked article is actually very poorly written, and highly specious in its analysis.
"Save for the monthly subscription revenue, there was nothing much to the AOL business to begin with, as the first mild downturn in the economy has convincingly shown, with advertising revenues from the service having now collapsed in a heap."
Actually, AOL was making quite a lot of money on advertising, and though the online ad market dove after the merger, that doesn't qualify the statement that there was nothing there to begin with.
The whole tone (mocking poetry writing, yapping about black holes, colloquialisms instead of actual business terms, and the overly familiar 'I-you-we banter' show this article to be a sensationalist 'I told you so (even though I didn't) editorial rant, and not an 'analysis' of any kind.
I'd love to find out where the money went, but the only thing this article taught me is that Fox's online news is the equivalant to WB's prime time news.
But when your motherboard gets fried, MS doesn't make you buy another copy of windows for the new motherboard...
So just make sure you snap each of those old MBs in half before installing the 'replacement parts.'
Offset that with the fact that most distributed computing projects have redundant units, to check for cheaters, or simple faulty units. I bet the two come close to cancelling out...
Since when does PowerPC = G4? There are tons more G3 (and PowerPC 601, 603, 604, 604e, etc.) machines out there than there are G4s, and all those stats fall under the Power PC stat report. These machines run from 60Mhz (PPC 601) to 1Ghz (G4). I'm sure the avg megahertz for the Intel x86 stat are substantially higher.
When SETI first started, I remember similarly equipped PIIs and PPC604s took 32 hours and 19 hours respectively to handle a unit.
So yeah, Steve was telling the truth.
I'm not missing that fact. I'm drawing a comparison about computing power, not the number of actual computers. It's allegorical.
Not that I'm critical, but just because it's amusing: $500 is the prize for the half-billionth unit. That equates to 0.0001 cents per 17-hour CPU unit.
Looked at another way, the total number of FP operations to reach the 0.5 gigaunit mark is 1.5319e21. The brand new NEC Earth Simulator runs at 35,600 gigaflops. At that rate, the world's fastest supercomputer would take 43030061.73 seconds, or 498 days, to do the job.
I wish I could lease the world's fastest computer for $1 a day...
Quantum cryptography is great for securing one stage of the data transmission, but it's hardly perfect. For one thing people can't interpret quantum-encrypted photon streams, and so the machinery used to decrypt the quantum stream is still vulnerable to attack, as is the rest of the path from that machine to the reader's brain, including whatever wire, RAM, or CRT that involves.
Of course the same goes on the transmitting end.
Similarly, the one-time-pad that the QC system uses to encode the photons is vulnerable to attack or reverse engineering. (Note that this isn't highly likely, but likely enough to eliminate QC from being perfect.)
All Quantum Cryptography does is make one link in the chain more secure. That's it.
Your post doesn't make sense to me.
Language skills and chess skills are both things humans do well, and computers don't (because both are intractable problems, and humans are better at finding and using patterns.
Therefore I fail to see why a test requiring a human to differentiate between human and computer conversationalists is different than a human differentiating between human and computer chess players.
Explicate, please?
Err, a computer or a human, that is... I didn't mean to disparage grandmasters...
Forget conversational ability. I'd like to see a Chess Turing Test, where grandmasters go up against an unknown opponent, and have to ascertain whether they're playing a computer or a machine.
Wired had this great story about compact macs in Japan which, among other things, showed a G3 powerbook's innards ported to a Mac 128K enclosure, running OS X on the original 9" b/w 512.384 screen.
Start to MAKE music of your own! Not only do you have the freedom to do so, not only do you probably already have a CD burner that is the modern-day equivalent of a million-dollar mastering lathe in the 60s and 70s, but more and more software for working with music data is not only out there at no cost, but even Free.
:-)
You presume that I have any musical ability at all...
I am doing my part on the video front though, documenting my first skydive. Sit back, watch, and forget about renting that DVD tonight!
Wouldn't it be interesting if we the listeners started a movement to boycott CDs in favor of those artists who choose to distribute their music electronically, free of charge?
If the movement were publicizen enough, the RIAA would no longer be able to credibly say that CD revenues fell because of mp3 piracy, because it could be countered that CD sales are slowing because people are listening to smaller, free artists instead.
In other words, I'm not against DVDs, but I'm against DIVX (you know, the old one, where you could only use a disc on a single machine).
"You can't loan them, you can't sell them, you can't even read them on more than one (or maybe 2) devices."
That's not so much a copy-protection issue as it is the domain of dighital rights management. I agree that you should be able to own the bits, and not just the non-transferable right to read on a single device, but I wouldn't be so against true 'copy protection' that inhibits duplication, as long as it retained the transferability of loaning an eBook to a friend or selling the unary copy to someone else.
"So unless you plan on standing close to somebody for a quite a while, the mental images of swapping mp3 collections or walking for warez can be put on hold for now. "
Hardly. If I wanted some cool stuff off your computer, does that mean I want everything on your computer?
You're my friend. We hang out for a half hour. That's time enough for 38 MP3 tracks, or 133 megs of whatever. A few days later, we hang out again. Swapping continues.
If you lose the 'must have everything now" mentality, this becomes pretty useful, especially if it happens automatically in the background whenever you're within range of a like-minded wearer. I could see people using these things in class, on the subway, or in traffic. At the end of the day you check out what your hip-scanner picked up for you.
Keep in mind that not all valuable files are as big as MPEG4 streams or MP3 collections. Back in the day, 500K of porn jpegs would get you through the day, and that would only take six seconds to transmit.
"The device also have a USB port for large data transfert."
USB (USB1.0) isn't any faster...
"* Many e-book vendors have crippling levels of copy-protection."
And dead tree books are easy to copy? Sure, if you want to photocopy each page and bind them together, but then with a reflective LCD, you could do that with an eBook as well, setting the reader upside down on a photocopier.
I hate copyright enforcement as much as the next guy, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that books are like MP3s.
If anything, eBooks are better in this capacity because you can get free copies of non-copyrighted works through Project Gutenberg. Try getting a free copy of Shakespeare at the bookstore...
To be clear, the restrictions don't say it's for educational use only, but rather that it's not for commercial use. This is an importnat distinction, especially when the person is looking for a product to use for a public open-source project which seemingly isn't a commercial venture.
Really??? I have the educational version of Flash 5 and I didn't notice that...
There's more than enough Uranium and Plutonium to remove our dependence on oil, but that doesn't mean the oil industry will let it happen.
Solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, wind. If these technologies had the full support of the government and didn't have big oil lobbiests against then you might see a country that didn't care so much about fighting in the Middle East.
Don't use flash for a large-scale project, please. It's only going to make your trainging and maintenance costs skyrocket. HTML is open-source and is highly capable.
:-)
However, if you want cheap flash, the educational price for Flash MX is $99. Enroll in a community college course. Maybe a flash course... You'll need it.
Trees are about as efficient for straining out CO2 as horses are at transporting people.
If we didn't replace horses with cars, we wouldn't have to replace trees with this thing.
Besides, trees aren't cutting it at the moment (err, so to speak) and trying to acquire and protect a new forest the size of the United States is harder than finding 60Km^2 in a desert.
This isn't 3D. 3D allows for vectors and surfaces along any possible plane. This allows for two levels of 2D. This is usually referred to as '2.5D', meaning 2D but layered so one flat 2D plane can obscure another parallel flat 2D plane.
further, 2.5D usually allows for an unlimited number of parallel 2D planes, and this only has two.
Cool, I guess, but hardly a 3D monitor in any practical sense of the term...
And therefore perpetuating that reality is okey-fie? I don't think so.
The United States is very much like the Roman Empire in its prime, where killing a Roman citizen would result in the deaths of 100 locals. Nevertheless such a superpower stranglehold ended up being unsustainable. Just becuase I benefit from being at the top of the pyramid doesn't mean I'm all about trodding on those beneath me. Call me an altruist, I guess...