Why don't we skip this service thing and jump straight to the next major operating system, Excalibur? By then, they will decide to use the door, rather than the window, as a metaphor for what you see on the display. Doors Excalibur will be such an improvement in terms of usability. Its biggest feature will be a talking thumb tack that will detect when you're in a hurry to get something printed out or some other simple task, and cause the operating system to slow down, crash, reboot a zillion times, grind the hard drive until the platter is covered in scratches, discover a sudden incompatibility with your printer, or mouse, or your power cable, and just basically do everything it can to prevent you from printing that thing out. And if you try to transfer it over the network, voila! The network doesn't work! Try to put it on a floppy? Bam! The floppy drive can't seem to recognize any disk anymore! Burn it to optical media? It will burn half the file on purpose, inserting errors in random places, and then fail the burn so the disc can't be used anywhere!! And just when you are so enraged that you're about to commit suicide, it will delete the file, overwrite it with random data 10,000 times to make sure you can't retrieve it, and go, "Nah nah nah nah nah!" However, the moment this thumb tack detects that it's too late to print that document out, that its purpose has become obsolete, that you don't need it anymore, poof! It will suddenly pop out of the printer looking all shiny and glossy.
Doors Excalibur. Because you should have gotten a Mac.
A very, very cool project. I wonder if a similar project could produce colored lighting for artistic photography. Heh, by the scan of the schematic, it looks like he's using EAGLE for his PCB design. EAGLE is a very good program.
Why doesn't Apple simply come up with an UNBREAKABLE system? Instead of building this iPhone like a computer, they should build it out of a positronic brain, which doesn't boot or load software. They would simply teach it, in their lab, how to be an iPhone and how to avoid letting itself be hacked, and then it would go out into the world and do its thing without all these problems that plague typical computers.
I think what the video game industry needs right now is to reintroduce the text adventure game, a la ADVENT. I really think that this is what serious gamers, with overclocked machines, huge CPU fans, high end graphics cards, and all kinds of other nonsense hardware, want. In green text on a black background, like in the good ol' days.
I think it should be this way: They should take all kinds of identifying biological information, including a DNA sample, from every single baby that is born, and store this information in a worldwide database. The database should also, later in that person's life, hold every type of information that is collected by any government agency, health institution, bank, etc. Governments and law enforcement personnel will have access to this information, as will corporate subscribers, and it will be protected by UNBREAKABLE ROT-13 encryption on a publicly accessible URL in order to compromise everyone's privacy, increase the occurrence of identity theft, and thereby give governments another hot-button issue to endlessly promise to fix, a la American Social Security, border security, illegal immigration, and abortion, all problems which will never be solved, ever.
This all started because of one farmer who showered without flip flops in one of those disgusting public showers and then walked barefoot with his fungus-infected feet in the fields.
They should build these Terminator robots that look exactly like Arnold Schwartzenegger in his Mr. Universe days, that don't stop, ever, until their target is dead. Build ten million of these and deploy them all over the Middle East. That should solve the never ending Middle East conflict in about three days.
I have a feeling that over time, as people increasingly leave the Communist party in favor of the booming economic opportunities that are exploding all over China, these sorts of government abuses will simply go away. Sure, the government will fight to maintain its position of power over everything, but there's only so long they can keep this going.
I have this feeling that one of the terms of this deal will require Yahoo! to dump all its FreeBSD-based technology and migrate their entire system to Microsoft's newest Windows Server. This deal will undoubtedly create the same sort of chaos that ensued when Microsoft switched Hotmail's systems in the same manner, since there is this rule that goes something like, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Making such a large-scale migration is sure to create nothing but chaos until after completed and after all the bugs have been ironed out, and the only benefit is that Microsoft can later brag about how Yahoo!'s entire system runs on Windows. There can be no other benefit since the system evidently works fine under FreeBSD.
Let's be a bunch of overpopulation alarmists. Oh no, better yet, let's look at some facts: In most 1st world countries, you have tons and tons of people who are more interested in their career than in having children, so they're either single, or they're married with one or two children. Compare to the way things used to be, where people would have as many children as possible. So the population in these areas will either stay about the same or actually decline over time. Now let's talk about places where people still have a lot of children. They'll immigrate to the places where people have fewer children. No big deal. Besides, people in 3rd world countries have just as much of a right to live and procreate as do overpopulation alarmists. Oh, and the world could easily support a trillion people, and we're only at 6 billion right now.
I don't know how I'll ever use Windows again. I'm so accustomed to the way the hard drive grinds until the platter is most likely covered in scratches. When it finally settles down, you move the mouse and it starts again. It's almost as if the software is designed to scrape any magnetic material off the platters of your hard drive. A hard drive that takes away these sounds and makes things faster is a real bummer. When using Windows, you're supposed to "please wait while this," "please wait while that," "please wait," "please wait," "please wait," all while listening to the beautiful music of your hard drive crunching away. This is one of the biggest benefits of Windows, and one that inferior systems like a Mac running Mac OS X, definitely lack. On a Mac, you push a button and it just happens. Where's the joy of waiting for it to happen? Where's the suspense?! Faster hard drives without all the crunching noise will take something very beautiful away from mankind.
I think there is a very simple solution to the SPAM problem. Migrate the email platform to one that uses micropayments. Each person can set a price for delivery into their inbox. For example, I can decide that to send me a message costs 10 cents. Now every time someone sends me an email, they are charged 10 cents (after a confirmation of course) and I earn 10 cents. You could decide to set a higher price or a lower one. But the point is that people have to pay you to send you email, or it simply doesn't arrive in your inbox.
Spam will disappear. The email kind. The tasty kind will continue to appear at your local grocery store.
I would like to be called Burger King... now that's a name that has a great ring to it. But not Spam King. Oh man, that sounds awful! Imagine, you're driving down the street and you see two places next to each other. Burger King and Spam King. Which one will you go to?!
I have a great idea, and I'm going to take this one over to the monkey man to integrate into his company's newest over-bloated operating system, codename Excalibur.
Excalibur will be based on the fact that computer users want to wait as much as possible for their computers to do things. This already happens in the company's current flagship product (well, it happens if you can find a machine that's actually compatible with it). You push a button and the hard drive grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds until the platter is covered with scratches, and then, maybe, sometimes, once in a while, if it's not a Tuesday, the computer carries out some function, which is infrequently the one you wanted it to carry out. Then you push another button or move the mouse, and the same thing happens. You spend five nines of your time (that is, 99.999% of your time) waiting, and the remainder of the time is spent using the computer.
Ok, we've described their current flagship product which everyone loves. Now let's talk about the upcoming version, Excalibur, which they'll release after I take my idea to the monkey man. Excalibur will take this idea of making the user "please wait" as much as possible and run with it, or rather, slow to an even slower crawl. When you move the mouse or push a button, the hard drive will grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind until the platter is covered with scratches, and then the computer will freeze and begin downloading commercial videos. Once it's finished downloading the videos, it will download them a second time to compare the files bit per bit to make sure that this critically important data was not corrupted in transit. Then you'll have a commercial break with about 20 commercials. Once the commercials are finished, it will delete the commercial videos off your computer and then one of two things will happen. Either the computer will crash (this will be about a 49% chance) so that you can enjoy the process or rebooting it, which many people have expressed that they love to do, and a testament to this is the fact that the majority of the world's computer users have been buying this quality product, or the computer will carry out the action for which you pushed the button or moved the mouse. And then the process will start over again. Productivity will shoot through the roof, as will the fine OS maker's eternal perpetually increasing profits, to which it is entitled by law.
I think that a worldwide fundraising campaign should be put together to collect as much funding as possible for this fight, and that any lawyers who don't mind doing a little pro-bono work should jump on this one. Putting an end to this mafia is in the best interests of all who love freedom.
The best solution to the problem of increasing and unbalanced government and law enforcement power over the lives of everyday citizens is to educate the public as much as possible about the problem. Although the perpetually increasing powers of governments over our lives are being perpetrated in the name of protecting intellectual property today, they have nothing to do with the intellect or with anyone's property. Rather this is a ploy to gain control. Today it's IP. Yesterday it was the idea that everybody should be equal (Communism), tomorrow it'll be some other lame excuse.
If the media companies really wanted to put an end to piracy, they'd lower the prices of music recordings, movies, and other media, so that people would purchase legitimate originals, since they're superior to pirated materials and since the cost is reasonable anyway.
The only reason, and I do mean the ONLY reason, that people waste their time to pirate this crap, is because they perceive its value to be much less than its cost. Take a newspaper dispenser for example. You can put in your 25 cents or whatever a newspaper costs nowadays, open the door, and jack all the papers inside the machine. How many times in the history of the world has this happened? NONE! You know why? Because the cost of a newspaper is sufficiently low (i.e., reasonable) that nobody would bother. I believe that the added sales of music and movies due to lower prices would more than compensate for the lower per-unit revenue, not because piracy would end, but because people would simply buy more music and movies given that they're much more affordable.
I can imagine that a company like Intel should be able to produce the things they can make now and sell fast, while simultaneously building things that have been mastered already (you gave the example of offloading) into new technologies, things they plan on introducing later in the game. It would be extremely important to keep these developments totally under wraps (the way Apple keeps things secret until the moment they are ready for announcement). This type of business planning would allow a company like Intel to make the slow, gradual improvements to their core product for several years, compete with its rivals, and basically appear to be playing the same old game, and then all of a sudden, introduce something revolutionary (something that appears revolutionary but is actually well tested with years of R&D behind it) that just blows its rivals out of the water because they have no way to compete with such a product. If Intel suddenly comes out with a "kilocore" processor that can be installed in laptops and run software ten times more bloated than Windows Vista running Emacs, but run it without breaking a sweat, well, then I'd say it would place them in such a position of prestige and superiority that no other company would be able to compete for years.
Show me the secret books of the Bible or the Qu'ran that only the followers who have ponied up tens of thousands of dollars get to see. You can't. There aren't any such books.
As a matter of fact, according to Jewish Halacha Law, it is ILLEGAL to charge money for the teaching of the Torah. The knowledge this work contains belongs to the whole world.
American law enforcement is so terrified of offending the delicate sensibilities of the muslims they'd NEVER enforce the law against wearing masks in public.
God forbid if we should offend someone! This is America. We don't walk around wearing masks, even if they're called burquas, hijabs, or whatever you call those green masks with Arabic writing that elected Hamas "officials" wear so you can't see their faces while they announce how they'll blow up Israel and America. People here walk around with their faces uncovered like normal people do.IF YOU DON'T LIKE THAT, GO LIVE IN ANOTHER COUNTRY! PREFERABLY ONE IN THE MIDDLE EAST!
The Church of Scientology. Hmph! How a religion can be invented so easily by someone who wakes up in the morning one day and just feels like making one up.
I am hereby inventing a new religion. My religion shall be called rice_burners_suck, and its adherents shall be called rice_burners_suckers. One important parameter of a religion is how many deities its adherents believe in. This is a religion of a unique type, where instead of zero, one, or multiple deities, the number of deities is negative one. This concept is often difficult for newcomers to grasp, since when counting anything, one must begin at one and proceed through the positive numbers. However, we believe that a person must work towards achieving faith in God, and believing that there is negative one of Him is part of achieving that faith.
Besides, if God can do anything, then He can choose to be counted in negative numbers.
I like the chip-scale atomic clock. In fact, with clock speeds of processors going sky-high nowadays, it would be extremely cool if our computer processors gained an atomic clock. Such a clock would come in very handy to synchronize the events going on within a processor chip containing, say, 1000 cores. I envision the number of cores in processors to increase to many thousands within the next decade, and clock speeds increasing to the terahertz. All of this technology will require an atomic clock to keep proper time.
I really think that Intel needs to skip doing quad-core and whatever processors, and jump directly to doing a kilocore processor. Such a processor would have 1024 cores. It would be the pride of any self-respecting geek to own such a computer. Then they could improve on it by gradually going to two kilocores, four kilocores, etc. In a number of years, when the average computer processor has 250 gigacores, we'll laugh and poke fun at the good ol' days when 640 kilocores were enough for anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't we skip this service thing and jump straight to the next major operating system, Excalibur? By then, they will decide to use the door, rather than the window, as a metaphor for what you see on the display. Doors Excalibur will be such an improvement in terms of usability. Its biggest feature will be a talking thumb tack that will detect when you're in a hurry to get something printed out or some other simple task, and cause the operating system to slow down, crash, reboot a zillion times, grind the hard drive until the platter is covered in scratches, discover a sudden incompatibility with your printer, or mouse, or your power cable, and just basically do everything it can to prevent you from printing that thing out. And if you try to transfer it over the network, voila! The network doesn't work! Try to put it on a floppy? Bam! The floppy drive can't seem to recognize any disk anymore! Burn it to optical media? It will burn half the file on purpose, inserting errors in random places, and then fail the burn so the disc can't be used anywhere!! And just when you are so enraged that you're about to commit suicide, it will delete the file, overwrite it with random data 10,000 times to make sure you can't retrieve it, and go, "Nah nah nah nah nah!" However, the moment this thumb tack detects that it's too late to print that document out, that its purpose has become obsolete, that you don't need it anymore, poof! It will suddenly pop out of the printer looking all shiny and glossy.
Doors Excalibur. Because you should have gotten a Mac.
A very, very cool project. I wonder if a similar project could produce colored lighting for artistic photography. Heh, by the scan of the schematic, it looks like he's using EAGLE for his PCB design. EAGLE is a very good program.
Why doesn't Apple simply come up with an UNBREAKABLE system? Instead of building this iPhone like a computer, they should build it out of a positronic brain, which doesn't boot or load software. They would simply teach it, in their lab, how to be an iPhone and how to avoid letting itself be hacked, and then it would go out into the world and do its thing without all these problems that plague typical computers.
I think what the video game industry needs right now is to reintroduce the text adventure game, a la ADVENT. I really think that this is what serious gamers, with overclocked machines, huge CPU fans, high end graphics cards, and all kinds of other nonsense hardware, want. In green text on a black background, like in the good ol' days.
I think it should be this way: They should take all kinds of identifying biological information, including a DNA sample, from every single baby that is born, and store this information in a worldwide database. The database should also, later in that person's life, hold every type of information that is collected by any government agency, health institution, bank, etc. Governments and law enforcement personnel will have access to this information, as will corporate subscribers, and it will be protected by UNBREAKABLE ROT-13 encryption on a publicly accessible URL in order to compromise everyone's privacy, increase the occurrence of identity theft, and thereby give governments another hot-button issue to endlessly promise to fix, a la American Social Security, border security, illegal immigration, and abortion, all problems which will never be solved, ever.
This all started because of one farmer who showered without flip flops in one of those disgusting public showers and then walked barefoot with his fungus-infected feet in the fields.
They should build these Terminator robots that look exactly like Arnold Schwartzenegger in his Mr. Universe days, that don't stop, ever, until their target is dead. Build ten million of these and deploy them all over the Middle East. That should solve the never ending Middle East conflict in about three days.
I have a feeling that over time, as people increasingly leave the Communist party in favor of the booming economic opportunities that are exploding all over China, these sorts of government abuses will simply go away. Sure, the government will fight to maintain its position of power over everything, but there's only so long they can keep this going.
I have this feeling that one of the terms of this deal will require Yahoo! to dump all its FreeBSD-based technology and migrate their entire system to Microsoft's newest Windows Server. This deal will undoubtedly create the same sort of chaos that ensued when Microsoft switched Hotmail's systems in the same manner, since there is this rule that goes something like, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Making such a large-scale migration is sure to create nothing but chaos until after completed and after all the bugs have been ironed out, and the only benefit is that Microsoft can later brag about how Yahoo!'s entire system runs on Windows. There can be no other benefit since the system evidently works fine under FreeBSD.
Let's be a bunch of overpopulation alarmists. Oh no, better yet, let's look at some facts: In most 1st world countries, you have tons and tons of people who are more interested in their career than in having children, so they're either single, or they're married with one or two children. Compare to the way things used to be, where people would have as many children as possible. So the population in these areas will either stay about the same or actually decline over time. Now let's talk about places where people still have a lot of children. They'll immigrate to the places where people have fewer children. No big deal. Besides, people in 3rd world countries have just as much of a right to live and procreate as do overpopulation alarmists. Oh, and the world could easily support a trillion people, and we're only at 6 billion right now.
I don't know how I'll ever use Windows again. I'm so accustomed to the way the hard drive grinds until the platter is most likely covered in scratches. When it finally settles down, you move the mouse and it starts again. It's almost as if the software is designed to scrape any magnetic material off the platters of your hard drive. A hard drive that takes away these sounds and makes things faster is a real bummer. When using Windows, you're supposed to "please wait while this," "please wait while that," "please wait," "please wait," "please wait," all while listening to the beautiful music of your hard drive crunching away. This is one of the biggest benefits of Windows, and one that inferior systems like a Mac running Mac OS X, definitely lack. On a Mac, you push a button and it just happens. Where's the joy of waiting for it to happen? Where's the suspense?! Faster hard drives without all the crunching noise will take something very beautiful away from mankind.
Spam will disappear. The email kind. The tasty kind will continue to appear at your local grocery store.
The REAL reason that I use Linux is... 42.
And while the Dead Sea Scrolls are mostly published, they were secret for a long time.
Secret, eh? They were lost in some caves by the Dead Sea, hence the name Dead Sea scrolls. They were no secret. They were simply lost.
I would like to be called Burger King... now that's a name that has a great ring to it. But not Spam King. Oh man, that sounds awful! Imagine, you're driving down the street and you see two places next to each other. Burger King and Spam King. Which one will you go to?!
BURGER KING of course!!! Burger King rocks!
I have a great idea, and I'm going to take this one over to the monkey man to integrate into his company's newest over-bloated operating system, codename Excalibur.
Excalibur will be based on the fact that computer users want to wait as much as possible for their computers to do things. This already happens in the company's current flagship product (well, it happens if you can find a machine that's actually compatible with it). You push a button and the hard drive grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds until the platter is covered with scratches, and then, maybe, sometimes, once in a while, if it's not a Tuesday, the computer carries out some function, which is infrequently the one you wanted it to carry out. Then you push another button or move the mouse, and the same thing happens. You spend five nines of your time (that is, 99.999% of your time) waiting, and the remainder of the time is spent using the computer.
Ok, we've described their current flagship product which everyone loves. Now let's talk about the upcoming version, Excalibur, which they'll release after I take my idea to the monkey man. Excalibur will take this idea of making the user "please wait" as much as possible and run with it, or rather, slow to an even slower crawl. When you move the mouse or push a button, the hard drive will grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind until the platter is covered with scratches, and then the computer will freeze and begin downloading commercial videos. Once it's finished downloading the videos, it will download them a second time to compare the files bit per bit to make sure that this critically important data was not corrupted in transit. Then you'll have a commercial break with about 20 commercials. Once the commercials are finished, it will delete the commercial videos off your computer and then one of two things will happen. Either the computer will crash (this will be about a 49% chance) so that you can enjoy the process or rebooting it, which many people have expressed that they love to do, and a testament to this is the fact that the majority of the world's computer users have been buying this quality product, or the computer will carry out the action for which you pushed the button or moved the mouse. And then the process will start over again. Productivity will shoot through the roof, as will the fine OS maker's eternal perpetually increasing profits, to which it is entitled by law.
I think that a worldwide fundraising campaign should be put together to collect as much funding as possible for this fight, and that any lawyers who don't mind doing a little pro-bono work should jump on this one. Putting an end to this mafia is in the best interests of all who love freedom.
The best solution to the problem of increasing and unbalanced government and law enforcement power over the lives of everyday citizens is to educate the public as much as possible about the problem. Although the perpetually increasing powers of governments over our lives are being perpetrated in the name of protecting intellectual property today, they have nothing to do with the intellect or with anyone's property. Rather this is a ploy to gain control. Today it's IP. Yesterday it was the idea that everybody should be equal (Communism), tomorrow it'll be some other lame excuse.
If the media companies really wanted to put an end to piracy, they'd lower the prices of music recordings, movies, and other media, so that people would purchase legitimate originals, since they're superior to pirated materials and since the cost is reasonable anyway.
The only reason, and I do mean the ONLY reason, that people waste their time to pirate this crap, is because they perceive its value to be much less than its cost. Take a newspaper dispenser for example. You can put in your 25 cents or whatever a newspaper costs nowadays, open the door, and jack all the papers inside the machine. How many times in the history of the world has this happened? NONE! You know why? Because the cost of a newspaper is sufficiently low (i.e., reasonable) that nobody would bother. I believe that the added sales of music and movies due to lower prices would more than compensate for the lower per-unit revenue, not because piracy would end, but because people would simply buy more music and movies given that they're much more affordable.
I can imagine that a company like Intel should be able to produce the things they can make now and sell fast, while simultaneously building things that have been mastered already (you gave the example of offloading) into new technologies, things they plan on introducing later in the game. It would be extremely important to keep these developments totally under wraps (the way Apple keeps things secret until the moment they are ready for announcement). This type of business planning would allow a company like Intel to make the slow, gradual improvements to their core product for several years, compete with its rivals, and basically appear to be playing the same old game, and then all of a sudden, introduce something revolutionary (something that appears revolutionary but is actually well tested with years of R&D behind it) that just blows its rivals out of the water because they have no way to compete with such a product. If Intel suddenly comes out with a "kilocore" processor that can be installed in laptops and run software ten times more bloated than Windows Vista running Emacs, but run it without breaking a sweat, well, then I'd say it would place them in such a position of prestige and superiority that no other company would be able to compete for years.
What is a belly roll?
As a matter of fact, according to Jewish Halacha Law, it is ILLEGAL to charge money for the teaching of the Torah. The knowledge this work contains belongs to the whole world.
God forbid if we should offend someone! This is America. We don't walk around wearing masks, even if they're called burquas, hijabs, or whatever you call those green masks with Arabic writing that elected Hamas "officials" wear so you can't see their faces while they announce how they'll blow up Israel and America. People here walk around with their faces uncovered like normal people do. IF YOU DON'T LIKE THAT, GO LIVE IN ANOTHER COUNTRY! PREFERABLY ONE IN THE MIDDLE EAST!
The Church of Scientology. Hmph! How a religion can be invented so easily by someone who wakes up in the morning one day and just feels like making one up.
I am hereby inventing a new religion. My religion shall be called rice_burners_suck, and its adherents shall be called rice_burners_suckers. One important parameter of a religion is how many deities its adherents believe in. This is a religion of a unique type, where instead of zero, one, or multiple deities, the number of deities is negative one. This concept is often difficult for newcomers to grasp, since when counting anything, one must begin at one and proceed through the positive numbers. However, we believe that a person must work towards achieving faith in God, and believing that there is negative one of Him is part of achieving that faith.
Besides, if God can do anything, then He can choose to be counted in negative numbers.
I like the chip-scale atomic clock. In fact, with clock speeds of processors going sky-high nowadays, it would be extremely cool if our computer processors gained an atomic clock. Such a clock would come in very handy to synchronize the events going on within a processor chip containing, say, 1000 cores. I envision the number of cores in processors to increase to many thousands within the next decade, and clock speeds increasing to the terahertz. All of this technology will require an atomic clock to keep proper time.
I really think that Intel needs to skip doing quad-core and whatever processors, and jump directly to doing a kilocore processor. Such a processor would have 1024 cores. It would be the pride of any self-respecting geek to own such a computer. Then they could improve on it by gradually going to two kilocores, four kilocores, etc. In a number of years, when the average computer processor has 250 gigacores, we'll laugh and poke fun at the good ol' days when 640 kilocores were enough for anyone.