I got what you meant, but my point is that people in general will keep using tablets until someone comes up with an invention that defeats the benefit of owning multiple devices with multiple screens. If the tablet market dies it will be because we're all wearing contact lenses that paint images directly to our retinas.
Saying that tablets have found a niche is a bit like saying that hamburgers have found a niche. Tablets are cheap, or will be cheap once the surge in demand has been satisfied and the manufacturers have recouped their investments, and tablets can do 75% of what an average user does on a laptop, and more.
If you look at it from a hardcore user on a budget angle it makes sense to spend a little less on your laptop or desktop and monitor and direct some money towards a tablet or two. More machines and more screens make you more productive.
Then you're almost old enough to remember when IRC was created in 1988. I'm 29 and I clearly remember the splash that mIRC made on TV and in the newspapers when it came out in 1995 and IRC took off among normal people, or semi-normal people, and I clearly remember how everyone in school was trying to learn how to use it in 1996. Hell, you could be 18 and still have learned to use mIRC when significant numbers of people where still using it, if you were an early writer/typer and started using it at age 6.
I guess it could be that the rate at which software and electronics is changing causes us to over estimate the amount of time that has passed since technology x was hot.
What about the idea that was popular a few years ago about making stuff fail gracefully, both at the hardware level and the software level, so that the system could swallow the error and go on calculating without completely ruining the result? Could failures be reduced to essentially just another source of error?
Yeah, in-game purchases and chapters could work in theory. It probably will work at some point in the future, as soon as most customers have gotten used to in-game purchases and don't perceive it as scammy, which could take a while.
But I don't think you can ever get around the basic problem, which is that it's hard to make money selling designer vases through stores that focus on plastic souvenirs.
Mod this guy up. I don't find there to be much variety in tablet/phone gaming at the moment. It's just many (mostly mediocre) variations on 2 or 3 different game types. I find this surprising since so many of the games that were on the Super Nintendo or Genesis would seem to work perfectly on such a platform (as they did on handhelds). Where are all the tile-based RPGs?
Either drowning in $0.99 crap or not released because game companies predict that they will be drowning in $0.99 crap.
I think there needs to be a carefully curated invite-only game store for phones and tablets where game companies would agree to charge at least $9.99 for a game.
"Terrorists can make these guns and do some horrible things to an individual and then walk away scott-free [...]"
Now I'm not an expert on American law and I'm not an American and English is not my native language, but it sounds just a little bit implausible to me that there would be a law that said that it is not illegal to murder people if you make the gun yourself...
Or I guess maybe scott-free means something completely different than scot-free, like you're free like a character in a Scott movie, or something.
Or maybe the senator's best friend owns a gun factory.
Or I guess maybe the senator has a wildly inaccurate idea of what a 3-d printer is. I mean, it's probably easier to get fingerprints and DNA off of a metal gun than a plastic gun. A metal gun is really hard to destroy, but it would not exactly be trivial to destroy a plastic gun without the neighbors noticing.
Unless you have a good quality file and a lot of time...
Parent got modded funny, but I for one always needed a glass to stand my guild mates for more than 45 minutes. People who get "management" positions in guilds are like people in real life management, but with slightly squeakier voices.
Pay to play MMO:s are basically like a second job. If you play them with a group of awesome people they're fun and rewarding and may end up giving you one or two friends for life, otherwise, and much more commonly, they will slowly grind your life down until you're ready to cry.
Something like that is sure to happen in the research community, certainly in the military research community, but it's pretty unlikely to become a consumer product. Consumers tend to go for ease of use. 20 years from now the most popular consumer VR products will probably be small lightweight headsets that look like a pair of large sunglasses.
You could also create some pretty convincing additional effects for cheap. Imagine having a $30 variable speed fan pointed at your face while you're playing a game.
ZTE is a corporation with close to 100k employees with growing hardware and software businesses. All they lack is a brand, but if Samsung (which used to be the Yugo of home electronics) can be turned into a popular brand, then why not ZTE or Huawei?
But yeah, Firefox OS looks like it's going to be DOA. The fact that this comment is only the 60:th comment is a bad sign. If Mozilla can't get people who read Slashdot excited about their OS then there's probably no hope for it. I suppose ZTE is primarily working with Firefox OS because they want to absorb knowledge from it for their own closed-source in house OS project, or projects, that they are sure to be working on.
...tells me that it is massively unlikely this was intellectual curiosity. Some kid thought it would be funny to make a huge bang at a place where huge bangs are known to cause massive administrative overreaction.
I don't understand, isn't that what intellectual curiosity is, at least if you're a teenager? This is how most scientists and engineers started out, by doing stupid experiments or building stupid things. That's how people learn.
Imagine where the economy would be today if every kid who tried to DDOS their school system had been tried for using a cyber weapon on school property.
It's pretty hard to make money selling $0.99 games on Android too when you're up against hundreds of other games being released per day.
Most of those games are crap, or fun but unpolished hobby projects, but some of them are serious and polished with hundreds if not thousands of man-hours of development gone into them. I suspect few of them come close to recouping their team's time investments even when you consider that many of the teams are working out of India and other countries with similar income levels. There are plenty of fun, quality games with fewer than 100,000 downloads of the free version and fewer than 1000 purchases of the paid version, which means the devs can't have made much more than $2000 on the market, less when you subtract Google's cut and even less when you subtract taxes. A team of, say, three Indians can't live six months on that.
Developing a game is a long shot on any platform unless you're a studio with a proven team of good developers and designers and marketers.
1. Hydrogen rises in gravity because it is less dense than air(mostly Nitrogen), So if there was no air/vacuum then hydrogen would fall towards the earth.?
I can't say anything to the other two questions, but this question is easily answered by something my high school physics teacher said to me. It has stayed with me since then as it is as eye-opening as it is obvious (in hindsight):
"The first mistake is to assume that helium rises. The truth is that it falls down towards the earth just like any other object. The reason for what you see is much simpler: It does not rise; it's just that everything else simply falls harder." (Freely translated from memory and German)
Helium only rises over the air, because regular air has the stronger draw to be below it. This explains why, in the absence of gravity; there is no lift. In the absence of a pull, the air has no impulse to displace the helium.
More generally, the same is true for liquid mixtures like oil/water. In gravity, the oil will rise above the water. In (close-to-)zero gravity, the oil and water will separate but stay where they are. That is because the water can't displace the oil without gravity pulling it more strongly down.
The same is true for solids. In meteorites with too little gravity, no submersion of the "heavier" elements like iron happen. This is why Earth has an iron core, but iron-rich asteroids have it distributed all over their volume.
That is true for a container (e.g. a balloon*) filled with helium. AFAIK it would also be true for individual helium atoms if the temperature was 0 Kelvin. They would basically fall like little rocks.
In reality the Earth is actually warm enough and light enough that unconfined helium atoms frequently reach escape velocity and fly away into space. They do this often enough that a cloud of helium will never settle on top of the atmosphere like oil on top of water. It will just diffuse into space. There is no particular reason why a helium atom would want to travel upwards, except in the big scheme of every direction is basically upwards so once an atom has moved a good distance it will have moved up and away from Earth.
All of this hold for hydrogen molecules too, except my understanding is that hydrogen will usually react with oxygen in the atmosphere and form water on the way up, and water molecules are too heavy to escape the Earth at a noticeable rate.
*Assuming it's an indestructible balloon that doesn't pop at altitude, of course.
Most tablets sold are used for cutting fruits in games and just because "everyone has one".The years to come will test its real value and whether the tablet has any real uses. I believe that the sales will start declining soon , because it is not really essential to buisness or home and its uses are limited since phones can do most of the stuff a tablet can plus all the phone functionality. I am dissapointed by software makers that decided that they should ignore all their customers using laptops and desktops,and started adjusting everything just to fit in the tablet market(like windows8)
Most tablets sold are used for cutting fruits in games and just because "everyone has one".The years to come will test its real value and whether the tablet has any real uses. I believe that the sales will start declining soon , because it is not really essential to buisness or home and its uses are limited since phones can do most of the stuff a tablet can plus all the phone functionality. I am dissapointed by software makers that decided that they should ignore all their customers using laptops and desktops,and started adjusting everything just to fit in the tablet market(like windows8)
Not likely, certainly not in terms of number of units. More likely the price will drop and the profits of tablet manufacturing will slowly but surely approach zero. A product doesn't have to be that valuable if it sells for $99. It's a screen that lets you do the usual stuff plus a little more, and that's good enough at that price point.
He's pretty good at what he does, and it's great that he's carving out a niche, but I have a hard time seeing it work as stand up on TV because all of the biggest laughs that he gets are from interacting with the audience or with other people on stage and that does not fit most standard TV formats where it's one person up on a stage.
We're already dealing with automation in entertainment. It was one of the first industries to go in fact. Radio and Television replaced live theatre and live music. Then came tapes and VHS. Then CDs and DVDs. Now it all just streams from a server. Think of today's artists as robot programmers. They do it once then sit back and let the "robots" do the work.
But the number of man-hours needed to make a movie or a TV series or a video game has stayed the same or gone up over time because the audience reacts to efficiency gains by demanding more. After about 5 seconds of watching a scene in a movie or a character in a game someone will call out "obvious render" or "obvious script" and then it's back to work for the 'robot programmers', because the bar has just been raised for the next movie or game. I don't see any obvious end to that.
The problem is that we're probably not nurturing the demand side enough. Piracy is bad for demand. Insisting on selling physical copies is very bad for demand. Having working class people work so many hours that they don't have time to watch TV or movies or play games is extremely bad for demand.
As you point out, small scale 3d-printing will only ever be used to print one-off objects or prototypes, or any plastic object that you need in a relative hurry. Most of us probably don't need plastic objects in a hurry, but it may be very useful in science labs and in remote locations, especially very remote ones like Antarctica, or the Moon, or Mars...
I think us earthlings will probably mostly use 3d-printers to print custom toys for children and models for adults. Think Lego figures that have the faces of your kid and his or her family, friends and relatives. Obscure model trains. Spare parts for RC models that have gone out of production. That sort of stuff.
All in all, I suppose it could grow to be a multi-billion industry worldwide in the long run. It will be a nice thing, but it will not be the multi-trillion dollar industrial revolution that some have made it out to be, unless we get to actual replicators that can create almost anything, which seems unlikely or at least very far off into the future.
Congress has no business deciding what students should read in school. Leave that decision to:
students
parents
professional educators
Very true.
Ask a teacher or someone with a PhD in pedagogy. The problem is not that kids don't read enough quality literature or that they don't read a diverse enough range of genres.
The problem is that books are boring and iPads are fun and that consequently most kids don't read unless an adult is actively monitoring them and forcing them to read.
"The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us."
Sure, so a lot of aliens are probably going to be uninterested in colonizing or exploring (and those are two very different things) the universe, but all it takes is one species or one subgroup within one species) that does want to colonize and explore.
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is probably a combination of technological species being rare and interstellar spaceflight being expensive. I imagine the nearest interstellar species is probably far away and that they're making really slow progress on their interstellar empire.
Well, social networks are a different sort of beast because the networks are not the product. They people on them are the product. If for whatever reason popular people chose to spend their time on social network X then the ordinary, less popular people will flock to that social network too.
Slashdot Mirror
I got what you meant, but my point is that people in general will keep using tablets until someone comes up with an invention that defeats the benefit of owning multiple devices with multiple screens. If the tablet market dies it will be because we're all wearing contact lenses that paint images directly to our retinas.
Saying that tablets have found a niche is a bit like saying that hamburgers have found a niche. Tablets are cheap, or will be cheap once the surge in demand has been satisfied and the manufacturers have recouped their investments, and tablets can do 75% of what an average user does on a laptop, and more.
If you look at it from a hardcore user on a budget angle it makes sense to spend a little less on your laptop or desktop and monitor and direct some money towards a tablet or two. More machines and more screens make you more productive.
Then you're almost old enough to remember when IRC was created in 1988. I'm 29 and I clearly remember the splash that mIRC made on TV and in the newspapers when it came out in 1995 and IRC took off among normal people, or semi-normal people, and I clearly remember how everyone in school was trying to learn how to use it in 1996. Hell, you could be 18 and still have learned to use mIRC when significant numbers of people where still using it, if you were an early writer/typer and started using it at age 6.
I guess it could be that the rate at which software and electronics is changing causes us to over estimate the amount of time that has passed since technology x was hot.
So I guess in North Carolinian schools they only teach twin primes that consist of one odd prime and one even prime.
What about the idea that was popular a few years ago about making stuff fail gracefully, both at the hardware level and the software level, so that the system could swallow the error and go on calculating without completely ruining the result? Could failures be reduced to essentially just another source of error?
Here's an early preview... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v91m_F2NhfU
Yeah, in-game purchases and chapters could work in theory. It probably will work at some point in the future, as soon as most customers have gotten used to in-game purchases and don't perceive it as scammy, which could take a while.
But I don't think you can ever get around the basic problem, which is that it's hard to make money selling designer vases through stores that focus on plastic souvenirs.
Mod this guy up. I don't find there to be much variety in tablet/phone gaming at the moment. It's just many (mostly mediocre) variations on 2 or 3 different game types. I find this surprising since so many of the games that were on the Super Nintendo or Genesis would seem to work perfectly on such a platform (as they did on handhelds). Where are all the tile-based RPGs?
Either drowning in $0.99 crap or not released because game companies predict that they will be drowning in $0.99 crap.
I think there needs to be a carefully curated invite-only game store for phones and tablets where game companies would agree to charge at least $9.99 for a game.
why don't they just use python for the high level stuff. Its a great stable, fun, easy to program, powerful language.
heck its already cross platform, it runs on windows, osx and linux, with native support for just about all interfaces and toolkits.
Because Python != Java Script. I don't even know that Python runs in Firefox, but I could be wrong...
"Terrorists can make these guns and do some horrible things to an individual and then walk away scott-free [...]"
Now I'm not an expert on American law and I'm not an American and English is not my native language, but it sounds just a little bit implausible to me that there would be a law that said that it is not illegal to murder people if you make the gun yourself...
Or I guess maybe scott-free means something completely different than scot-free, like you're free like a character in a Scott movie, or something.
Or maybe the senator's best friend owns a gun factory.
Or I guess maybe the senator has a wildly inaccurate idea of what a 3-d printer is. I mean, it's probably easier to get fingerprints and DNA off of a metal gun than a plastic gun. A metal gun is really hard to destroy, but it would not exactly be trivial to destroy a plastic gun without the neighbors noticing.
Unless you have a good quality file and a lot of time...
Parent got modded funny, but I for one always needed a glass to stand my guild mates for more than 45 minutes. People who get "management" positions in guilds are like people in real life management, but with slightly squeakier voices.
Pay to play MMO:s are basically like a second job. If you play them with a group of awesome people they're fun and rewarding and may end up giving you one or two friends for life, otherwise, and much more commonly, they will slowly grind your life down until you're ready to cry.
I quit the game soon after realizing this.
Something like that is sure to happen in the research community, certainly in the military research community, but it's pretty unlikely to become a consumer product. Consumers tend to go for ease of use. 20 years from now the most popular consumer VR products will probably be small lightweight headsets that look like a pair of large sunglasses.
You could also create some pretty convincing additional effects for cheap. Imagine having a $30 variable speed fan pointed at your face while you're playing a game.
how it will make them money.
That, and how the competition won't catch up with you. Be sure to mention any and all patents that you have.
ZTE is a corporation with close to 100k employees with growing hardware and software businesses. All they lack is a brand, but if Samsung (which used to be the Yugo of home electronics) can be turned into a popular brand, then why not ZTE or Huawei?
But yeah, Firefox OS looks like it's going to be DOA. The fact that this comment is only the 60:th comment is a bad sign. If Mozilla can't get people who read Slashdot excited about their OS then there's probably no hope for it. I suppose ZTE is primarily working with Firefox OS because they want to absorb knowledge from it for their own closed-source in house OS project, or projects, that they are sure to be working on.
...tells me that it is massively unlikely this was intellectual curiosity. Some kid thought it would be funny to make a huge bang at a place where huge bangs are known to cause massive administrative overreaction.
I don't understand, isn't that what intellectual curiosity is, at least if you're a teenager? This is how most scientists and engineers started out, by doing stupid experiments or building stupid things. That's how people learn.
Imagine where the economy would be today if every kid who tried to DDOS their school system had been tried for using a cyber weapon on school property.
It's pretty hard to make money selling $0.99 games on Android too when you're up against hundreds of other games being released per day.
Most of those games are crap, or fun but unpolished hobby projects, but some of them are serious and polished with hundreds if not thousands of man-hours of development gone into them. I suspect few of them come close to recouping their team's time investments even when you consider that many of the teams are working out of India and other countries with similar income levels. There are plenty of fun, quality games with fewer than 100,000 downloads of the free version and fewer than 1000 purchases of the paid version, which means the devs can't have made much more than $2000 on the market, less when you subtract Google's cut and even less when you subtract taxes. A team of, say, three Indians can't live six months on that.
Developing a game is a long shot on any platform unless you're a studio with a proven team of good developers and designers and marketers.
3 questions.
1. Hydrogen rises in gravity because it is less dense than air(mostly Nitrogen), So if there was no air/vacuum then hydrogen would fall towards the earth.?
I can't say anything to the other two questions, but this question is easily answered by something my high school physics teacher said to me. It has stayed with me since then as it is as eye-opening as it is obvious (in hindsight):
"The first mistake is to assume that helium rises. The truth is that it falls down towards the earth just like any other object. The reason for what you see is much simpler: It does not rise; it's just that everything else simply falls harder." (Freely translated from memory and German)
Helium only rises over the air, because regular air has the stronger draw to be below it. This explains why, in the absence of gravity; there is no lift. In the absence of a pull, the air has no impulse to displace the helium.
More generally, the same is true for liquid mixtures like oil/water. In gravity, the oil will rise above the water. In (close-to-)zero gravity, the oil and water will separate but stay where they are. That is because the water can't displace the oil without gravity pulling it more strongly down.
The same is true for solids. In meteorites with too little gravity, no submersion of the "heavier" elements like iron happen. This is why Earth has an iron core, but iron-rich asteroids have it distributed all over their volume.
That is true for a container (e.g. a balloon*) filled with helium. AFAIK it would also be true for individual helium atoms if the temperature was 0 Kelvin. They would basically fall like little rocks.
In reality the Earth is actually warm enough and light enough that unconfined helium atoms frequently reach escape velocity and fly away into space. They do this often enough that a cloud of helium will never settle on top of the atmosphere like oil on top of water. It will just diffuse into space. There is no particular reason why a helium atom would want to travel upwards, except in the big scheme of every direction is basically upwards so once an atom has moved a good distance it will have moved up and away from Earth.
All of this hold for hydrogen molecules too, except my understanding is that hydrogen will usually react with oxygen in the atmosphere and form water on the way up, and water molecules are too heavy to escape the Earth at a noticeable rate.
*Assuming it's an indestructible balloon that doesn't pop at altitude, of course.
Most tablets sold are used for cutting fruits in games and just because "everyone has one".The years to come will test its real value and whether the tablet has any real uses.
I believe that the sales will start declining soon , because it is not really essential to buisness or home and its uses are limited since phones can do most of the stuff a tablet can plus all the phone functionality.
I am dissapointed by software makers that decided that they should ignore all their customers using laptops and desktops,and started adjusting everything just to fit in the tablet market(like windows8)
Most tablets sold are used for cutting fruits in games and just because "everyone has one".The years to come will test its real value and whether the tablet has any real uses.
I believe that the sales will start declining soon , because it is not really essential to buisness or home and its uses are limited since phones can do most of the stuff a tablet can plus all the phone functionality.
I am dissapointed by software makers that decided that they should ignore all their customers using laptops and desktops,and started adjusting everything just to fit in the tablet market(like windows8)
Not likely, certainly not in terms of number of units. More likely the price will drop and the profits of tablet manufacturing will slowly but surely approach zero. A product doesn't have to be that valuable if it sells for $99. It's a screen that lets you do the usual stuff plus a little more, and that's good enough at that price point.
He's pretty good at what he does, and it's great that he's carving out a niche, but I have a hard time seeing it work as stand up on TV because all of the biggest laughs that he gets are from interacting with the audience or with other people on stage and that does not fit most standard TV formats where it's one person up on a stage.
Here's a clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R25DAYbgRVc
We're already dealing with automation in entertainment. It was one of the first industries to go in fact. Radio and Television replaced live theatre and live music. Then came tapes and VHS. Then CDs and DVDs. Now it all just streams from a server. Think of today's artists as robot programmers. They do it once then sit back and let the "robots" do the work.
But the number of man-hours needed to make a movie or a TV series or a video game has stayed the same or gone up over time because the audience reacts to efficiency gains by demanding more. After about 5 seconds of watching a scene in a movie or a character in a game someone will call out "obvious render" or "obvious script" and then it's back to work for the 'robot programmers', because the bar has just been raised for the next movie or game. I don't see any obvious end to that.
The problem is that we're probably not nurturing the demand side enough. Piracy is bad for demand. Insisting on selling physical copies is very bad for demand. Having working class people work so many hours that they don't have time to watch TV or movies or play games is extremely bad for demand.
As you point out, small scale 3d-printing will only ever be used to print one-off objects or prototypes, or any plastic object that you need in a relative hurry. Most of us probably don't need plastic objects in a hurry, but it may be very useful in science labs and in remote locations, especially very remote ones like Antarctica, or the Moon, or Mars...
I think us earthlings will probably mostly use 3d-printers to print custom toys for children and models for adults. Think Lego figures that have the faces of your kid and his or her family, friends and relatives. Obscure model trains. Spare parts for RC models that have gone out of production. That sort of stuff.
All in all, I suppose it could grow to be a multi-billion industry worldwide in the long run. It will be a nice thing, but it will not be the multi-trillion dollar industrial revolution that some have made it out to be, unless we get to actual replicators that can create almost anything, which seems unlikely or at least very far off into the future.
Congress has no business deciding what students should read in school. Leave that decision to:
Very true.
Ask a teacher or someone with a PhD in pedagogy. The problem is not that kids don't read enough quality literature or that they don't read a diverse enough range of genres.
The problem is that books are boring and iPads are fun and that consequently most kids don't read unless an adult is actively monitoring them and forcing them to read.
"The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us."
Sure, so a lot of aliens are probably going to be uninterested in colonizing or exploring (and those are two very different things) the universe, but all it takes is one species or one subgroup within one species) that does want to colonize and explore.
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is probably a combination of technological species being rare and interstellar spaceflight being expensive. I imagine the nearest interstellar species is probably far away and that they're making really slow progress on their interstellar empire.
Mark your preferred definition of probability
[ ] Bayesianism
[ ] Frequentism
[x] Ridiculous frequentism
Well, social networks are a different sort of beast because the networks are not the product. They people on them are the product. If for whatever reason popular people chose to spend their time on social network X then the ordinary, less popular people will flock to that social network too.