I'd think you'd get PRI circuit loops from the phone company. Depending on the interconnectivity required, you might end up ordering several PRIs connecting one site to another, forming a kind of backbone. Or you might pay the cable company to feed data upstream. (You'd have to compare the cost-per-MB/s of cable to that of multiple PRIs. In a large urban area, PRIs are going to run you something like three grand per month.) I don't know what's involved to get a fiber link between sites.
Even distributed computing in the sense of separate clusters, for parallelable computations, is faster than the same number of individual units in an @Home-style distributed system.
They started requiring typed papers as soon as I hit Junior High. (7th grade.) 12-point maximum for font sizes. (My teachers hated my three-page 8-point-font papers from my IBM Proprinter II. One actually marked it down for being unreadable.)
My brief stint in Pine Rest didn't require printed papers, though they did make me write legibly. (I've looked at papers from back then, and I'm astounded I could ever read them.) Born in 1983, btw.
A lot of us (myself included) have the software knowledge, but don't know much about how to safely put together a computer. (Until recently, I didn't appreciate how easily static electricity, sans, could fry a part. In electronics class, I discovered that touching the base lead of a transistor can seriously mess up its collector output, which means, for the uninformed, that you absolutely do not want to touch a live board, or drop a screw, no matter how many times you've gotten away with it.)
Others will just buy the product for the convenience of it already being put together and set up. Anyone have figures on how many people install Windows an Wal-Mart OS-less PCs?
The fact that it's a Linux-based PVR might convince me to get cable in the first place.
I have a TV and a DVD player. No cable, satellite, or even an antenna. My life is plugged into the wall, both for 110VAC and Ethernet access.
The idea of having a flexible, Linux-based system as the front-end for my TV stands a good chance of getting me to buy this PVR, even if it means subscribing to cable. I could dedicate its spare CPU cycles to something like fold@home or my home beowulf cluster. (currently consisting of a 166 laptop, a 200MHz computer, and a 700MHz Duron.)
Now picture Comdex...If geeks know that one particular hotel in Chicago has PVR's in every room, and chrooted shell-and-X11 access on a site-wide Beowulf cluster, where do you think they'll stay for a night?
Pretty powerful cluster, too. figure four floors of 100 suites each, an average of 1.5 TVs per suite (money can snag you a two-bedroom suite with a TV in each room.) That works out to be a 600-machine with a total cycle count of 420 GHz.
On the other hand, a chain of hotels, with just 10 hotels like this one, would be able to sell (ala IBM) 4.2THz of processing power as one large WAN, or parceled out in whatever division you please.
Take this to a large chain with a "two-in-every-state" approach to locations, and you'll have 42THz to work with. Anyone know the conversion from Hz to FLOPS?
Figure maybe five chains with this kind of roomage, and you've got 210THz of processing power, which, while probably not grouped into one network, would still be really helpful for research institutions into things like modeling the Big Bang, or examining star collisions. Protein folding would be a cinch.
Anyway, it's a massive potential revenue for hotel chains, as well as any other system that has a lot of cable TVs. (Schools, anyone? Talk about a fundraiser.)
Making it Linux-based brings in a whole new dimension...
I can just see some user implementing an authorization-required system for updates, so you'll be able to look at the changes and decide whether or not to implement them.
It'd probably have something to do with iptables, and whatever port the box receives updates on. Probably notifying a userland logger, which would move to quarantine any changes made by the updating software.
Then the question boils down to, is it opensource?
There just seems to be something really "insecure" (from the MPAA's perspective) in allowing unencoded data to be stored on a modular medium with a filesystem freely accessible.
It would require something like black-box encryption to prevent the data from being transferrable to another machine.
And the fact that these things can directly access the Internet on a high-speed connection, well, It must be giving the MPAA chairman nightmares.
Just because the Linux Kernel runs the device doesn't mean there's going to be a shell, or that there are going to be any of the normal utilities you find in a standard Linux distribution.
This machine is designed as an embedded system. However, given the level of flexibility Linux provides, a *nix-savvy person shouldn't find it too difficult to add shell support, and I'm sure that, if Moxi doesn't come with a full distribution, then I'm sure some group will wing one out within a month or two of initial release. After all, there's an open-source OS for Lego Mindstorms, isn't there?
If it's Linux-based, they'll have to release the sourceode for their version of the kernel, and any other programs derived from GPL'd software.
So unless interaction with the hardware was done at the userland level (ack!) with binary-only programs, then the code is available for you to hack at and change any way you want.
This is the GPL at its finest, allowing a competent user to implement his own ideas into an otherwise static featureset.
Does this thing have 3D accel functionality built-in? It'd be a perfect console. Imagine playing DOOM III on a big-screen TV. (Or, for the very rich, imagine it in a theater.)
Sorry, but the parent post was a troller's comment. It said precisely the opposite of what most of the people here will tell you they've experienced.
I've personally (Though you'll have to take my word for it) lost several WD drives; the last one made a frequent clicking sound for about a week before it went kaput.
I'm told by several of my friends (who build and sell computers) that IBM drives have usually been untouchable, while one of them said he'd shoot himself before putting a WD drive in a customer's machine.
Minor lesson:
How are you going to tell the difference between a troller's comment and a factual (or at least honest) comment? You really can't, without having been around to absorb the general opinion.
When I don't know much about a subject, I usually depend on the anecdotes and hyperlinks. Up to this point, even this post, by that criteria, is highly suspect.
Wouldn't it be neat if Slashcode had a sort of Bayesian (sp?) filter that tried to predict whether a particular user would reject or accept a post based on his past reactions?
While in training, it would merely tell you what it would have predicted, while you train it by performing personal moderations on comments. (personal mod points would be granted depending on the availability of CPU time to run the Bayesian analysis.) These personal moderations could even be made visible to friends and fans.
Granted, it's the worst form of censorship: I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would simply reject anything they don't agree with, and thus silence the opinions of any dissenters to their private world. It also has a large possibility for abuse, if you consider Slashdot admins to fulfill the "big brother" role.
But people who reject dissenting opinions automatically probably wouldn't listen to the opinions even if they did have to see them. So I think it would still be a nice, and useful, feature.
I'm going to put this in my personal journal, for those of you interested in following this topic.
What kind of computer needs to switch layout so often that this is worth it? Why not just buy another keyboard and a good keyboard switch box?
Any computer that plays games, does CAD, or uses any program where keyboard shortucts are useful.
What's wrong with a touch screen and a CRT?
The same thing as gloves used for modeling. Your hands and arms get tired from holding them up for so long. Aside from that, touchscreens wear out. Mechanical switches don't. (That's why my IBM Model M keyboard still works.:)
I have lost customers due to hardware issues...it usually ends with a, "Well, this whole damn computer thing is too much of a pain. I'll let my kids write me real letters."
From my experience with a thousand or so different people I've dealt with personally, I feel confident in my judge of character that a lot of them are just doing it, "because my kids bought me a computer," and even more of them try out computers because everyone else is doing it.
With their interest so teneuous, I'm rarely surprised when someone decides to give up trying, and give the computer to their 12-year-old grandson.
For one fleeting, imaginary moment, let's presume that most people who click "I Agree" know what they're doing.
On one hand, we have a demand counted in millions of potential customers. That's a huge demand.
On the other hand, we have this rather lopsided supply. Sure, we have at least a few million software developers in the world, but their distribution isn't even. We have huge, monolithic companies like Oracle, Microsoft and Apple, who have large big, well-known names, large customer bases, and fat profits.
Then we have thousands and thousands of OSS developers, most of whom give away their products for free.
The problem is with the monolithic companies. Big names shine like headlights in your face at night; you can't see the little guys. Like looking at the night sky in a big city, that reduces your visible options dramatically. So you have a small supply.
But a big demand. That means high costs.
Costs don't have to be in the form of dollars-per-sale; they can be in the form of freedoms lost, charges for technical support on a faulty product, and any number of practical costs intrinsic to closed-source, big name products. (Wish someone would compile a list of these, maybe, say, a thousand items.)
For home use, these costs are conveyed into personal freedoms like personal copies of music and choice of product.
(Okay, you can stop presuming Joe Average as intelligent. I know, it hurts. I do tech support.)
Keep in mind that even a 1600x1200x24bit display is only holding 5.5MB raw.
While the physical media remains in one state under a low-power mode, I highly doubt that much effort has been put towards reading the state of the physical media.
Interesting, though, that this technology could very easily be scaled to a much deeper bpp range. Say 16 bits per color, and you're now sporting 11MB raw.
But face it; do you really want someone to be able to walk up and photograph your 5.5MB of your data?
Though you might be able to store some data in the least significant bits, though. Say you have 16 bits per color; You can get 8 bits per color quality even if you dedicate the lower 8 bits to data storage.
I'd be interested to see some links on the flash data, though.
True, capacitors work by storing and releasing charge. This actually has two effects, when working with AC(not necessarily 120V):
As the capacitor charges, the current transfer into the capacitor is low, until the voltage level is at a maximum. Once the voltage reaches that maximum, the current level increases. At some point, the voltage level will drop, followed by the current level, 90 degrees later.
For DC current, a capacitor is like on open switch. The voltage on one side of the capacitor has no effect on the other side. However, if the voltage level changes, the effect of changing will cause a change in the voltage level on the other side of a capacitor. This means that AC current flows across a capacitor, even if it's not in the form of moving electrons.
A capacitor is never finished charging or dischargine, really. It's actually a curve of exponential decay. However, after five "time constants" (periods determined by the capacitor's value and the rate at which it is drained) a capacitor is considered to be charged, as it is filled to 98% of its capacity.
If you use a capacitor small enough so that it is "finished" charging before your voltage level starts to decrease, then you've stifled the transfer of A current across the capacitor. This has the net effect of behaving like a resistor, except it only affects AC current. This effect is called "reactance." Inductors (similar to capacitors except they depend on magnetic fields) have a similar effect, except they react more to high-frequencies than low frequencies. (Thus, in simple terms, they allow DC, but block AC.)
My descriptions here are based on putting the device in series with the current flow. The opposite effect can be reached by placing the device in parallel with your load. (The device whose input you're affecting.)
Minor nitpick:
Capacitors are actually in more common usage than crystals, though the frequency of their usage varies depending on the application. In the hobbyist realm, capacitors are almost always the prime choice for quick-built circuits, since their use is simple, and they require only a single resistor as support circuitry.
My electronics teacher told me about the shipment of electrolytics they got, whose polarity markings were reversed.
Took them a couple semesters to figure out why, when the circuit was hooked up with everything in spec, caps kept popping.
Incidentally, I was thinking about the functionality of capactiors. They're not always used explicitly to "store charge," they're more often used as a sort of resistor that reacts more to AC(in the case of inductors) or DC(in the case of capacitors) current.
Having a capacitor's plates short out would seem to be just like shorting a resistor; depending on the circuit layout, the device may still work. (Unlikely, though, since adding a ten-cent component to a production design scales up with the number of units produced. For thirty million units, you've added a total cost of three million dollars.)
I work at an ISP as technical support. I've helped several people who don't read licenses, and several more who get defensive whenever I say, "I'm going to have to change a setting on your computer."
Millions of computer users assume that they own their computer, as well as everything on it. They don't understand the concept of software licensing, and most would probably (Strange, but true) give up using a computer if they discovered they didn't own everything on it.
The whole reason license agreements have become terrible for those of us who read them is because of the vast majority who don't. Software companies have an easy time adding clauses to their license agreements, because most people don't read them. It reaches a point where what people are agreeing to, and what they think they're agreeing to, become two separate animals.
If these were physical, handwritten contracts, there'd be all sorts of legal battles citing extortion, but, last I checked, there haven't been any competent lawyers arguing that extortion is possible online.
For reference, ask an old-time geek about GIF and the LZW patents.
I'd really like to see a business demigod declare that software-licensing can become restrictive enough to be considered a "cybercrime."
A good first step? Take two graphs, both of which would be "restrictivity vs usercount" contract comparison graphs. One graph would be for some highly competitive market (like loans or mortages), the other would be for major software products like office products.
Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to graphically represent the choices for initial software that people have when they buy their computers.
Even an all-optical solution to memory storage wouldn't eliminate the advantages of(or, for that matter, the need for) having on-CPU cache.
We use on-die cache because CPUs operate at a datarate high enough to justify keeping frequently-used data close at hand. It's justified for the same reason that you'd want to use one Athlon 2800+ CPU, instead of a multiprocessor system using the same level CPUs, but at half the clock speed.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd think you'd get PRI circuit loops from the phone company. Depending on the interconnectivity required, you might end up ordering several PRIs connecting one site to another, forming a kind of backbone. Or you might pay the cable company to feed data upstream. (You'd have to compare the cost-per-MB/s of cable to that of multiple PRIs. In a large urban area, PRIs are going to run you something like three grand per month.) I don't know what's involved to get a fiber link between sites.
Even distributed computing in the sense of separate clusters, for parallelable computations, is faster than the same number of individual units in an @Home-style distributed system.
They started requiring typed papers as soon as I hit Junior High. (7th grade.) 12-point maximum for font sizes. (My teachers hated my three-page 8-point-font papers from my IBM Proprinter II. One actually marked it down for being unreadable.)
My brief stint in Pine Rest didn't require printed papers, though they did make me write legibly. (I've looked at papers from back then, and I'm astounded I could ever read them.) Born in 1983, btw.
That really is the Big Question.
After the dust settles on that one, there'll be another couple:
Were any companies seriously burned by embedding Linux in their otherwise proprietary systems? Will it serve as a warning?
A lot of us (myself included) have the software knowledge, but don't know much about how to safely put together a computer. (Until recently, I didn't appreciate how easily static electricity, sans, could fry a part. In electronics class, I discovered that touching the base lead of a transistor can seriously mess up its collector output, which means, for the uninformed, that you absolutely do not want to touch a live board, or drop a screw, no matter how many times you've gotten away with it.)
Others will just buy the product for the convenience of it already being put together and set up. Anyone have figures on how many people install Windows an Wal-Mart OS-less PCs?
The fact that it's a Linux-based PVR might convince me to get cable in the first place.
I have a TV and a DVD player. No cable, satellite, or even an antenna. My life is plugged into the wall, both for 110VAC and Ethernet access.
The idea of having a flexible, Linux-based system as the front-end for my TV stands a good chance of getting me to buy this PVR, even if it means subscribing to cable. I could dedicate its spare CPU cycles to something like fold@home or my home beowulf cluster. (currently consisting of a 166 laptop, a 200MHz computer, and a 700MHz Duron.)
Now picture Comdex...If geeks know that one particular hotel in Chicago has PVR's in every room, and chrooted shell-and-X11 access on a site-wide Beowulf cluster, where do you think they'll stay for a night?
Pretty powerful cluster, too. figure four floors of 100 suites each, an average of 1.5 TVs per suite (money can snag you a two-bedroom suite with a TV in each room.) That works out to be a 600-machine with a total cycle count of 420 GHz.
On the other hand, a chain of hotels, with just 10 hotels like this one, would be able to sell (ala IBM) 4.2THz of processing power as one large WAN, or parceled out in whatever division you please.
Take this to a large chain with a "two-in-every-state" approach to locations, and you'll have 42THz to work with. Anyone know the conversion from Hz to FLOPS?
Figure maybe five chains with this kind of roomage, and you've got 210THz of processing power, which, while probably not grouped into one network, would still be really helpful for research institutions into things like modeling the Big Bang, or examining star collisions. Protein folding would be a cinch.
Anyway, it's a massive potential revenue for hotel chains, as well as any other system that has a lot of cable TVs. (Schools, anyone? Talk about a fundraiser.)
Making it Linux-based brings in a whole new dimension...
I can just see some user implementing an authorization-required system for updates, so you'll be able to look at the changes and decide whether or not to implement them.
It'd probably have something to do with iptables, and whatever port the box receives updates on. Probably notifying a userland logger, which would move to quarantine any changes made by the updating software.
Then the question boils down to, is it opensource?
There just seems to be something really "insecure" (from the MPAA's perspective) in allowing unencoded data to be stored on a modular medium with a filesystem freely accessible.
It would require something like black-box encryption to prevent the data from being transferrable to another machine.
And the fact that these things can directly access the Internet on a high-speed connection, well, It must be giving the MPAA chairman nightmares.
Just because the Linux Kernel runs the device doesn't mean there's going to be a shell, or that there are going to be any of the normal utilities you find in a standard Linux distribution.
This machine is designed as an embedded system. However, given the level of flexibility Linux provides, a *nix-savvy person shouldn't find it too difficult to add shell support, and I'm sure that, if Moxi doesn't come with a full distribution, then I'm sure some group will wing one out within a month or two of initial release. After all, there's an open-source OS for Lego Mindstorms, isn't there?
Note to self: RTFA.
Here're the Big Questions:
Can the cable companies forbid us from modifying the source?
At least parts of it are going to be GPL. Will they still be able to resist giving us the source code?
Even if they do give us the source code, can they forbid us from patching it and modding the box?
Is there legal basis for charges based on "violating the spirit" of a contract?
If it's Linux-based, they'll have to release the sourceode for their version of the kernel, and any other programs derived from GPL'd software.
So unless interaction with the hardware was done at the userland level (ack!) with binary-only programs, then the code is available for you to hack at and change any way you want.
This is the GPL at its finest, allowing a competent user to implement his own ideas into an otherwise static featureset.
Does this thing have 3D accel functionality built-in? It'd be a perfect console. Imagine playing DOOM III on a big-screen TV. (Or, for the very rich, imagine it in a theater.)
MAME would be especially cool.
As an aside, if you get DoS'd, is your video going to get jumpy?
...for what Bill did to Paul's car in Pirates of Silicon Valley .
(Not sure it really happened, though.)
Sorry, but the parent post was a troller's comment. It said precisely the opposite of what most of the people here will tell you they've experienced.
I've personally (Though you'll have to take my word for it) lost several WD drives; the last one made a frequent clicking sound for about a week before it went kaput.
I'm told by several of my friends (who build and sell computers) that IBM drives have usually been untouchable, while one of them said he'd shoot himself before putting a WD drive in a customer's machine.
Minor lesson:
How are you going to tell the difference between a troller's comment and a factual (or at least honest) comment? You really can't, without having been around to absorb the general opinion.
When I don't know much about a subject, I usually depend on the anecdotes and hyperlinks. Up to this point, even this post, by that criteria, is highly suspect.
Wouldn't it be neat if Slashcode had a sort of Bayesian (sp?) filter that tried to predict whether a particular user would reject or accept a post based on his past reactions?
While in training, it would merely tell you what it would have predicted, while you train it by performing personal moderations on comments. (personal mod points would be granted depending on the availability of CPU time to run the Bayesian analysis.) These personal moderations could even be made visible to friends and fans.
Granted, it's the worst form of censorship: I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would simply reject anything they don't agree with, and thus silence the opinions of any dissenters to their private world. It also has a large possibility for abuse, if you consider Slashdot admins to fulfill the "big brother" role.
But people who reject dissenting opinions automatically probably wouldn't listen to the opinions even if they did have to see them. So I think it would still be a nice, and useful, feature.
I'm going to put this in my personal journal, for those of you interested in following this topic.
toms helpful hints: when you write code, paranoia is your best friend.
:)
But how do I know you're not trying to ruin my chances at producing a good product?
Whoops...forget I said that. Forgot to turn off paranoia mode.
What kind of computer needs to switch layout so often that this is worth it? Why not just buy another keyboard and a good keyboard switch box?
:)
Any computer that plays games, does CAD, or uses any program where keyboard shortucts are useful.
What's wrong with a touch screen and a CRT?
The same thing as gloves used for modeling. Your hands and arms get tired from holding them up for so long. Aside from that, touchscreens wear out. Mechanical switches don't. (That's why my IBM Model M keyboard still works.
I have lost customers due to hardware issues...it usually ends with a, "Well, this whole damn computer thing is too much of a pain. I'll let my kids write me real letters."
From my experience with a thousand or so different people I've dealt with personally, I feel confident in my judge of character that a lot of them are just doing it, "because my kids bought me a computer," and even more of them try out computers because everyone else is doing it.
With their interest so teneuous, I'm rarely surprised when someone decides to give up trying, and give the computer to their 12-year-old grandson.
For one fleeting, imaginary moment, let's presume that most people who click "I Agree" know what they're doing.
On one hand, we have a demand counted in millions of potential customers. That's a huge demand.
On the other hand, we have this rather lopsided supply. Sure, we have at least a few million software developers in the world, but their distribution isn't even. We have huge, monolithic companies like Oracle, Microsoft and Apple, who have large big, well-known names, large customer bases, and fat profits.
Then we have thousands and thousands of OSS developers, most of whom give away their products for free.
The problem is with the monolithic companies. Big names shine like headlights in your face at night; you can't see the little guys. Like looking at the night sky in a big city, that reduces your visible options dramatically. So you have a small supply.
But a big demand. That means high costs.
Costs don't have to be in the form of dollars-per-sale; they can be in the form of freedoms lost, charges for technical support on a faulty product, and any number of practical costs intrinsic to closed-source, big name products. (Wish someone would compile a list of these, maybe, say, a thousand items.)
For home use, these costs are conveyed into personal freedoms like personal copies of music and choice of product.
(Okay, you can stop presuming Joe Average as intelligent. I know, it hurts. I do tech support.)
Keep in mind that even a 1600x1200x24bit display is only holding 5.5MB raw.
While the physical media remains in one state under a low-power mode, I highly doubt that much effort has been put towards reading the state of the physical media.
Interesting, though, that this technology could very easily be scaled to a much deeper bpp range. Say 16 bits per color, and you're now sporting 11MB raw.
But face it; do you really want someone to be able to walk up and photograph your 5.5MB of your data?
Though you might be able to store some data in the least significant bits, though. Say you have 16 bits per color; You can get 8 bits per color quality even if you dedicate the lower 8 bits to data storage.
I'd be interested to see some links on the flash data, though.
Some clarification:
True, capacitors work by storing and releasing charge. This actually has two effects, when working with AC(not necessarily 120V):
As the capacitor charges, the current transfer into the capacitor is low, until the voltage level is at a maximum. Once the voltage reaches that maximum, the current level increases. At some point, the voltage level will drop, followed by the current level, 90 degrees later.
For DC current, a capacitor is like on open switch. The voltage on one side of the capacitor has no effect on the other side. However, if the voltage level changes, the effect of changing will cause a change in the voltage level on the other side of a capacitor. This means that AC current flows across a capacitor, even if it's not in the form of moving electrons.
A capacitor is never finished charging or dischargine, really. It's actually a curve of exponential decay. However, after five "time constants" (periods determined by the capacitor's value and the rate at which it is drained) a capacitor is considered to be charged, as it is filled to 98% of its capacity.
If you use a capacitor small enough so that it is "finished" charging before your voltage level starts to decrease, then you've stifled the transfer of A current across the capacitor. This has the net effect of behaving like a resistor, except it only affects AC current. This effect is called "reactance." Inductors (similar to capacitors except they depend on magnetic fields) have a similar effect, except they react more to high-frequencies than low frequencies. (Thus, in simple terms, they allow DC, but block AC.)
My descriptions here are based on putting the device in series with the current flow. The opposite effect can be reached by placing the device in parallel with your load. (The device whose input you're affecting.)
Minor nitpick:
Capacitors are actually in more common usage than crystals, though the frequency of their usage varies depending on the application. In the hobbyist realm, capacitors are almost always the prime choice for quick-built circuits, since their use is simple, and they require only a single resistor as support circuitry.
My electronics teacher told me about the shipment of electrolytics they got, whose polarity markings were reversed.
Took them a couple semesters to figure out why, when the circuit was hooked up with everything in spec, caps kept popping.
Incidentally, I was thinking about the functionality of capactiors. They're not always used explicitly to "store charge," they're more often used as a sort of resistor that reacts more to AC(in the case of inductors) or DC(in the case of capacitors) current.
Having a capacitor's plates short out would seem to be just like shorting a resistor; depending on the circuit layout, the device may still work. (Unlikely, though, since adding a ten-cent component to a production design scales up with the number of units produced. For thirty million units, you've added a total cost of three million dollars.)
The situation will be a whole lot more complex when hardware-based copyright protection is forced by law.
I work at an ISP as technical support. I've helped several people who don't read licenses, and several more who get defensive whenever I say, "I'm going to have to change a setting on your computer."
Millions of computer users assume that they own their computer, as well as everything on it. They don't understand the concept of software licensing, and most would probably (Strange, but true) give up using a computer if they discovered they didn't own everything on it.
The whole reason license agreements have become terrible for those of us who read them is because of the vast majority who don't. Software companies have an easy time adding clauses to their license agreements, because most people don't read them. It reaches a point where what people are agreeing to, and what they think they're agreeing to, become two separate animals.
If these were physical, handwritten contracts, there'd be all sorts of legal battles citing extortion, but, last I checked, there haven't been any competent lawyers arguing that extortion is possible online.
For reference, ask an old-time geek about GIF and the LZW patents.
I'd really like to see a business demigod declare that software-licensing can become restrictive enough to be considered a "cybercrime."
A good first step? Take two graphs, both of which would be "restrictivity vs usercount" contract comparison graphs. One graph would be for some highly competitive market (like loans or mortages), the other would be for major software products like office products.
Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to graphically represent the choices for initial software that people have when they buy their computers.
Won't this result in the same problems the Game Boy Advanced has?
One of the major things I like about my laptop is I can use it at night...
Even an all-optical solution to memory storage wouldn't eliminate the advantages of(or, for that matter, the need for) having on-CPU cache.
We use on-die cache because CPUs operate at a datarate high enough to justify keeping frequently-used data close at hand. It's justified for the same reason that you'd want to use one Athlon 2800+ CPU, instead of a multiprocessor system using the same level CPUs, but at half the clock speed.