The thing about 3G cellphones is that various companies in Europe spent exorbitant amounts of money to set up these networks, and these companies may end up having the EU bail them out because of this. The same probably applies for Korea and Japan, too.
As such, I don't think we'll see 3G phones widely in the USA until Cingular, Verizon, and Sprint can justify the enormous amounts of money needed to set up these networks.
Especially now with Yahoo! Mail offering 250 megabytes of storage for free and 2 gigabytes of storage for paid members. Not to mention what happens when Google Mail finally goes out of beta test. Even smaller portal sites like MyWay.com are offering 125 megabytes of email storage for free.
I remember reading back in the 1980's about how a Japanese company devised a special can for sake that when you puncture a hole at the bottom of the can that separates a small amount of water from calcium oxide it will heat up the sake to quite high temperatures (the Japanese like to drink their sake quite warm).
I think what will relagate plasma displays to the dustbin of history will be a combination of cheaper rear-projection TV's using DLP, HD-ILA or LCD projection technology and the arrival of long-life Organic LED diplays over the next 24 months.
Anyone who's seen the current Samsung HL-5063W DLP projection TV knows they've finally mastered the problems that plagued earlier DLP sets; for picture quality the current Samsung DLP sets are hard to beat. =)
MTV could allow uncensored rap/nudity/etc, but the advertisers are too conservative to alow such a thing. It's just capitalism at work.
You know, I wonder why some company has not seriously considered starting up a premium-subscription music video channel over satellite TV that has less censorship requirements than MTV. There are enough DirecTV and Dish Network users that such a thing is possible.
Of course, the AMD 64-bit CPU's also had a major advantage: they put the memory controller onto the CPU die itself, which made the CPU very fast for its clock speed.
I expect Athlon 64 sales to really take off when the x86-64 version of Windows XP arrives early in 2005.
I think Dan Gillmor has seen the power of Internet blogs and online discussion forums and notes they have become great places for the interchange of ideas.
After all, weblogs ("blog") and online discussion forums have become all the rage in 2004, essentially taking many of the ideas pioneered by Slashdot and expanding them to a very wide audience. Great examples of such discussion forums include Free Republic for conservatives and Democratic Underground for liberals; for blogs, you have things like Powerline and Captain's Quarters for conservatives and DailyKos for liberals.
Indeed, the blogosphere (as radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt calls the world of Internet blogs) was directly responsible for revealing the truth in regards to the now-fake memos about President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service that CBS News tried to foister on the American public.
I think the shrinking of the 40 gb hard drive from.8cm to.5cm is much more important than the creation of the 80gb model.
Maybe Toshiba has already developed such a drive and has not publicly announced it yet? I wouldn't be surprised that the iPod Mini gets a 20 to 40 GB hard drive within the next 18 months.
Bingo. I think people forget that Windows XP has a LOT of stuff included with a standard installation of the operating system, especially in terms of tightly-coupled multimedia functionality.
Linux is getting there but it still suffers from the lack of hardware driver support that Windows XP enjoys and the ease of adding driver support for newly-installed hardware.
I think Electronic Arts could be asking for trouble with this agreement.
I wouldn't be surprised that the lawyers for Sega/ESPN and Midway are looking for a way to sue Electronic Arts under the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts for what EA did with this agreement. The resulting case could be ugly.
I think if AOL was just a tad smarter they would not only offer a "shell" akin to Maxthon for IE 6.0x versions that allows access to AOL-only content, but also offer an extension suite for Firefox 1.0 that more or less does the same thing.
They are MUCH larger and turn much slower, the only way a bird will die from them is if they directly run INTO the turbine itself...and that is no more likely to happen than a bird slamming into the side of a house or utility pole.
However, given the opposition to the wind farm out at Nantucket Sound using these new large-sized slower-turning wind turbines.... (shrug)
That's why I am disappointed that we don't see a number of large wind turbines at Carquinez Strait in California. The wind there is strong enough to support 80 or more 1.5 MW wind turbines, good enough to put a good-sized contribution to the electrical power generation in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Besides, a GPS chip is only $5 and a GPS receiver with software is $150 retail. I suspect Galileo hardware won't be much more expensive.
That would be true for consumer-grade receivers, but receivers that need to be very accurate (automobiles, boats, and airplanes) could get quite expensive if they have to be designed to accommodate both GPS and Galileo.:-(
I'll push for more wind turbines first. In California, Altamont Pass, the Carquinez Strait, and Tehachapi Pass could all get wind farms with large-sized wind turbines that could generate around 2,000 MW of power combined.
California could get large-scale solar generator farms, but given the fragility of the ecosystem in much of the Mojave Desert....
Will the Galileo system require everyone to get all-new satellite navigation receivers to full take advantage of the system?
If it does, it could get pretty expensive as you'll need to buy new portable receivers, new navigation systems for motor vehicles, and new navigation systems for airplanes and boats.
i think we need to bring our gas prices in line with the rest of the world. (1.10 euro/liter last time i was in france. about $5 per gallon with the exchange rate at the time) then we'd really see some progress.
There's one problem with your idea: The USA is so large physically that the high price of petrol is NOT a good idea. You're forgetting that Europe has many excellent alternatives to driving a car, especially their high-speed rail networks built at mostly government expense.
For the USA, a better solution is probably to impose varying levels of excise tax on an automobile based on the EPA fuel mileage test of the vehicle. That will encourage automakers to come up with improvements to petrol-fuelled engines and to implement clean-burning turbodiesel engines widely, just like Europe is doing right now. Fortunately, that does not mean lower-powered vehicles like it was in the past; the Mercedes-Benz E320 CDI with a turbodiesel engine gets fuel efficiency more akin to a Honda Civic sedan but actually has MORE accelerating power than the E320 with the petrol-fuelled engine!:-)
Already required by law in the entire USA. New buildings built in the last 10-15 years usually sport quite thick insulation all the way around and double/triple pane insulated windows.
passive solar heating and electricity generation on every rooftop where it's feasible
That would pretty much limit it to the southwestern states from Texas west to California. Other states often have summer storms that interfere with solar heating/energy generation.
more public transportation
That may not be practical in many cities unless it's primarily close to downtown.
a crash program to incentivize use of fuel efficient cars
Actually fairly easy to implement with the arrival of low-sulfur motor fuels from September 2006 on. With low-sulfur fuels, gasoline engines can use direct fuel injection and stratified combustion for 10-15% better fuel efficiency compared to today's gasoline engines, and clean-burning turbodiesel engines using common-rail pressurized direct fuel injection and a new generation of combination catalytic converters/diesel particulate removers with 35-45% better fuel efficiency than gasoline engines of equivalent power output can be sold in all 50 US states.
Hell, there still isn't even a winner in the DVD-RAM/+RW/-RW recordable 'war', and that's been ongoing for two years now.
I have news for you. DVD-RAM is pretty much a dead format as far as home consumers are concerned. Besides, practically all new DVD burner drives support both DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW formats, so at least for recording DVD's compatibility is not an issue.
If HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs can use the same drive mechanism, given today's electronics technology and laser miniaturization technology it won't take long before we get optical disc player and recorder drives that will support BOTH formats. I'm glad that the Blu-Ray supporters got rid of the need to use a disc caddy, which would have put it as a major disadvantage against HD-DVD.
I think people are forgetting that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD uses more or less the same physical type of disc. That makes it possible for drive manufacturers to make player drives and recorder drives to incorporate all the necessary parts to record and playback both formats.
Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised that by 2007 dual-format console players/recorders and dual-format computer drives are on sale that support both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats.
Windows XP does run fairly well on a Pentium II-based system, but you definitely want to get a faster hard disk interface than the ATA-33 interfaces used on most motherboards that accept Pentium II CPU's.
If your motherboard supports ATA-66 IDE connections, then with 512 MB of system RAM Windows XP will run fine even on Pentium II-based systems.
Actually, well before Firefox 1.0 was released, anyone running the full Mozilla suite already had pop-up blocking anyway. Also, large ISP's already offered pop-up blocking tools running under Internet Explorer for a couple of years, so that also hurt pop-up ad click-through rates.
Here's the thing though: now that people are switching to Windows XP Service Pack 2--which adds a pop-up blocker to Internet Explorer 6.01 SP1--how will that affect advertising reading online?
I think online advertisers should have noted that once the big ISP's such as America Online and EarthLink started offering pop-up blockers a few years ago people will be far less likely to read pop-up ads in general.
I think a good portion of the growth of Linux has been due to IBM's very successful push to get users to run Linux on IBM's big iron AS/400 and S/390 machines for large-scale computing needs.
Mind you, I think that's a good thing because IBM gets to sell and/or lease out a lot more hardware in the long run.:-)
By 2010, you will see large-scale rollouts of optical-fiber to home Internet connections, where download speeds could reach the point you will need gigabit Ethernet adapters because the download speeds could well exceed 100 megabits per second. At these speeds, you will be able to watch multiple TV streams at broadcast quality AND surf the Internet at speeds that will make today's broadband look slow, and it will be the beginning of the arrival of true view on demand TV as instead of waiting for seeing the program at a pre-determined time schedule you just download the program(s) you want to your local computer or media server machine.
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The thing about 3G cellphones is that various companies in Europe spent exorbitant amounts of money to set up these networks, and these companies may end up having the EU bail them out because of this. The same probably applies for Korea and Japan, too.
As such, I don't think we'll see 3G phones widely in the USA until Cingular, Verizon, and Sprint can justify the enormous amounts of money needed to set up these networks.
Especially now with Yahoo! Mail offering 250 megabytes of storage for free and 2 gigabytes of storage for paid members. Not to mention what happens when Google Mail finally goes out of beta test. Even smaller portal sites like MyWay.com are offering 125 megabytes of email storage for free.
I remember reading back in the 1980's about how a Japanese company devised a special can for sake that when you puncture a hole at the bottom of the can that separates a small amount of water from calcium oxide it will heat up the sake to quite high temperatures (the Japanese like to drink their sake quite warm).
I think what will relagate plasma displays to the dustbin of history will be a combination of cheaper rear-projection TV's using DLP, HD-ILA or LCD projection technology and the arrival of long-life Organic LED diplays over the next 24 months.
Anyone who's seen the current Samsung HL-5063W DLP projection TV knows they've finally mastered the problems that plagued earlier DLP sets; for picture quality the current Samsung DLP sets are hard to beat. =)
MTV could allow uncensored rap/nudity/etc, but the advertisers are too conservative to alow such a thing. It's just capitalism at work.
You know, I wonder why some company has not seriously considered starting up a premium-subscription music video channel over satellite TV that has less censorship requirements than MTV. There are enough DirecTV and Dish Network users that such a thing is possible.
Of course, the AMD 64-bit CPU's also had a major advantage: they put the memory controller onto the CPU die itself, which made the CPU very fast for its clock speed.
I expect Athlon 64 sales to really take off when the x86-64 version of Windows XP arrives early in 2005.
I think Dan Gillmor has seen the power of Internet blogs and online discussion forums and notes they have become great places for the interchange of ideas.
After all, weblogs ("blog") and online discussion forums have become all the rage in 2004, essentially taking many of the ideas pioneered by Slashdot and expanding them to a very wide audience. Great examples of such discussion forums include Free Republic for conservatives and Democratic Underground for liberals; for blogs, you have things like Powerline and Captain's Quarters for conservatives and DailyKos for liberals.
Indeed, the blogosphere (as radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt calls the world of Internet blogs) was directly responsible for revealing the truth in regards to the now-fake memos about President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service that CBS News tried to foister on the American public.
I think the shrinking of the 40 gb hard drive from .8cm to .5cm is much more important than the creation of the 80gb model.
Maybe Toshiba has already developed such a drive and has not publicly announced it yet? I wouldn't be surprised that the iPod Mini gets a 20 to 40 GB hard drive within the next 18 months.
Bingo. I think people forget that Windows XP has a LOT of stuff included with a standard installation of the operating system, especially in terms of tightly-coupled multimedia functionality.
Linux is getting there but it still suffers from the lack of hardware driver support that Windows XP enjoys and the ease of adding driver support for newly-installed hardware.
I think Electronic Arts could be asking for trouble with this agreement.
I wouldn't be surprised that the lawyers for Sega/ESPN and Midway are looking for a way to sue Electronic Arts under the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts for what EA did with this agreement. The resulting case could be ugly.
I would tend to doubt that AOL users and Firefox users overlap much.
I disagree, especially now with 10 million copies of Firefox downloaded and its user base rapidly growing.
Firefox is an excellent web browser for Windows 98/Me/2000/XP users, with reasonably fast and pretty accurate Web page rendering.
I think if AOL was just a tad smarter they would not only offer a "shell" akin to Maxthon for IE 6.0x versions that allows access to AOL-only content, but also offer an extension suite for Firefox 1.0 that more or less does the same thing.
They are MUCH larger and turn much slower, the only way a bird will die from them is if they directly run INTO the turbine itself...and that is no more likely to happen than a bird slamming into the side of a house or utility pole.
However, given the opposition to the wind farm out at Nantucket Sound using these new large-sized slower-turning wind turbines.... (shrug)
That's why I am disappointed that we don't see a number of large wind turbines at Carquinez Strait in California. The wind there is strong enough to support 80 or more 1.5 MW wind turbines, good enough to put a good-sized contribution to the electrical power generation in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Besides, a GPS chip is only $5 and a GPS receiver with software is $150 retail. I suspect Galileo hardware won't be much more expensive.
:-(
That would be true for consumer-grade receivers, but receivers that need to be very accurate (automobiles, boats, and airplanes) could get quite expensive if they have to be designed to accommodate both GPS and Galileo.
I'll push for more wind turbines first. In California, Altamont Pass, the Carquinez Strait, and Tehachapi Pass could all get wind farms with large-sized wind turbines that could generate around 2,000 MW of power combined.
California could get large-scale solar generator farms, but given the fragility of the ecosystem in much of the Mojave Desert....
Will the Galileo system require everyone to get all-new satellite navigation receivers to full take advantage of the system?
If it does, it could get pretty expensive as you'll need to buy new portable receivers, new navigation systems for motor vehicles, and new navigation systems for airplanes and boats.
i think we need to bring our gas prices in line with the rest of the world. (1.10 euro/liter last time i was in france. about $5 per gallon with the exchange rate at the time) then we'd really see some progress.
:-)
There's one problem with your idea: The USA is so large physically that the high price of petrol is NOT a good idea. You're forgetting that Europe has many excellent alternatives to driving a car, especially their high-speed rail networks built at mostly government expense.
For the USA, a better solution is probably to impose varying levels of excise tax on an automobile based on the EPA fuel mileage test of the vehicle. That will encourage automakers to come up with improvements to petrol-fuelled engines and to implement clean-burning turbodiesel engines widely, just like Europe is doing right now. Fortunately, that does not mean lower-powered vehicles like it was in the past; the Mercedes-Benz E320 CDI with a turbodiesel engine gets fuel efficiency more akin to a Honda Civic sedan but actually has MORE accelerating power than the E320 with the petrol-fuelled engine!
Insulation of every building
Already required by law in the entire USA. New buildings built in the last 10-15 years usually sport quite thick insulation all the way around and double/triple pane insulated windows.
passive solar heating and electricity generation on every rooftop where it's feasible
That would pretty much limit it to the southwestern states from Texas west to California. Other states often have summer storms that interfere with solar heating/energy generation.
more public transportation
That may not be practical in many cities unless it's primarily close to downtown.
a crash program to incentivize use of fuel efficient cars
Actually fairly easy to implement with the arrival of low-sulfur motor fuels from September 2006 on. With low-sulfur fuels, gasoline engines can use direct fuel injection and stratified combustion for 10-15% better fuel efficiency compared to today's gasoline engines, and clean-burning turbodiesel engines using common-rail pressurized direct fuel injection and a new generation of combination catalytic converters/diesel particulate removers with 35-45% better fuel efficiency than gasoline engines of equivalent power output can be sold in all 50 US states.
Hell, there still isn't even a winner in the DVD-RAM/+RW/-RW recordable 'war', and that's been ongoing for two years now.
I have news for you. DVD-RAM is pretty much a dead format as far as home consumers are concerned. Besides, practically all new DVD burner drives support both DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW formats, so at least for recording DVD's compatibility is not an issue.
If HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs can use the same drive mechanism, given today's electronics technology and laser miniaturization technology it won't take long before we get optical disc player and recorder drives that will support BOTH formats. I'm glad that the Blu-Ray supporters got rid of the need to use a disc caddy, which would have put it as a major disadvantage against HD-DVD.
I think people are forgetting that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD uses more or less the same physical type of disc. That makes it possible for drive manufacturers to make player drives and recorder drives to incorporate all the necessary parts to record and playback both formats.
Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised that by 2007 dual-format console players/recorders and dual-format computer drives are on sale that support both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats.
Windows XP does run fairly well on a Pentium II-based system, but you definitely want to get a faster hard disk interface than the ATA-33 interfaces used on most motherboards that accept Pentium II CPU's.
If your motherboard supports ATA-66 IDE connections, then with 512 MB of system RAM Windows XP will run fine even on Pentium II-based systems.
Actually, well before Firefox 1.0 was released, anyone running the full Mozilla suite already had pop-up blocking anyway. Also, large ISP's already offered pop-up blocking tools running under Internet Explorer for a couple of years, so that also hurt pop-up ad click-through rates.
Here's the thing though: now that people are switching to Windows XP Service Pack 2--which adds a pop-up blocker to Internet Explorer 6.01 SP1--how will that affect advertising reading online?
I think online advertisers should have noted that once the big ISP's such as America Online and EarthLink started offering pop-up blockers a few years ago people will be far less likely to read pop-up ads in general.
I think a good portion of the growth of Linux has been due to IBM's very successful push to get users to run Linux on IBM's big iron AS/400 and S/390 machines for large-scale computing needs.
:-)
Mind you, I think that's a good thing because IBM gets to sell and/or lease out a lot more hardware in the long run.
I think that will happen sooner than you think.
By 2010, you will see large-scale rollouts of optical-fiber to home Internet connections, where download speeds could reach the point you will need gigabit Ethernet adapters because the download speeds could well exceed 100 megabits per second. At these speeds, you will be able to watch multiple TV streams at broadcast quality AND surf the Internet at speeds that will make today's broadband look slow, and it will be the beginning of the arrival of true view on demand TV as instead of waiting for seeing the program at a pre-determined time schedule you just download the program(s) you want to your local computer or media server machine.