At this point, FOSS crypto would move outside of the US. We might lose some developers (US citizens who are forbidden from participating) but I don't think the USA could really shut down development of strong cryptography.
And for those who care about secure communications, US products would become a strong "don't use".
According to a friend of mine, who started out as a shooting competitor and only recently started hunting, many hunters are lousy shots. He got to see their results on the range in his shooting club.
We CAN hunt down pedo websites. BUT what is the price? Is the loss of freedom of speech and freedom of information worth saving a few kids?
Are you honestly claiming that if you don't have the freedom to distribute child porn, you don't have freedom of speech ?
The way some governments want to implement blocking child porn (with secret blacklists) is indeed a danger to free speech. Because it makes it easy to put stuff on the list The Government Party Does Not Like. I certainly don't trust the politicians in my country with the power to do so.
Imagine Afghanistan without a foreign occupation army that props up the government. I think the Karzai government would not be in power anymore without US support.
So yes, I think a universally despised government could lose. The bigger problem may be setting up a new, not totally corrupt government afterwards.
I'm living in Germany, where there is no general speed limit on the highways. But introducing one is discussed from time to time, at least in part because of the speed freaks.
In 2008/2009 I was out of work myself. When writing job applications, I picked ads where I had at least 2/3 of the listed qualifications. The number of interviews I got was still very limited. Now 2008/2009 was not the best time for finding a new job, but this example still illustrates the problem.
Depends on your definition of "driving like a little old lady". Sometimes I pass a truck doing 50 mph at 80 mph, and someone is coming from behind at 120mph and pissed off because I'm doing only 80. And yes, I will go back to the right lane after passing the truck. So don't care if some would-be racing driver has to slow down for a moment.
OK, let's do some math (if only an approximation), based on Wikipedia. Let us assume that -the formula sin(theta) = 1.220 * (lambda/D) from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution is a good approximation for the diffraction limit, theta being the angular resolution in radians -lambda=500nm (visible light, green tending to blue) -Aperture size D=2mm, based on the webcam on the notebook I have here. Let's pretend this is typical for a smartphone camera.
Then sin(theta) = 1.220 * 500nm / 2mm = 1.22 * 2.5 *(1/10,000) = 3.05/10,000. For small values of theta and a bit more rounding we get theta = 3/10,000 or 6.5 arc minutes for diffraction limited optics.
Now lets assume a camera with 30 degree field of view on the x-axis and a sensor with 2500 pixels along that axis. In that camera, each pixel would be responsible for covering 30/2500 = 0.012 degrees or in 0.5/2,500 = 2/10,000 in radians = 4.3 arc minutes. Compared to the diffraction limit, I'd say that sensor pushes the limits of what makes sense with that aperture size, assuming a very high quality lens.
Now consider that a typical smart phone won't have the best possible optics for cost reasons, and 5 megapixels on a cellphone are gimmick;-)
Good points, and it seems the list of requirements is often excessive because employers don't want to invest into training. So instead of hiring someone with generally good skills and giving him a few months to learn the specifics of the job, they insist on somone who already knows all the tools in the work environment.
When they don't find that perfect candidate, they whine about a lack of qualified candidates.
I think GP is talking about the fact that you only get the higher resolution with optics of matching quality. All optics have some inherent blurring, only the degree depends on quality (and with very high quality optics, you may run the diffraction limit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited)
So if you combine a high-resolution sensor with a second rate lens, all you achieve is that the blur where a sharp edge should be is spread across more pixels. To some degree this is OK because it makes the image appear less blocky, and a later interpolation to get smooth edges becomes unneccessary. But I think at some point the higher resolution of the sensor is just wasted.
I agree with all your points, and the consequences are obvious:
If a company wants to avoid this, they have to stop transferring sensitive work to India. First and second level support can stay there, because they deal with -already released products -and semi-public information (common support cases that are too frequent to keep the topic secret). What has to stay outside of India is most of development, and maybe third level support where more sensitive stuff is handled.
Maybe a C64 emulator could fill that role. I remember that the original (hardware) C64 was quite accessible too. The one thing you might miss for hardware projects, however, is the parallel port.
4) System requirements. If I need a PC greater than the one I have, I won't look at the game. I don't buy PC's to fit the games, I buy games to fit my PC. There is no excuse any more for slow-running games on modern dual-core processors with Gb's of RAM available to them. Dogfighter CRAWLED on my PC and to get it to run smoothly required me to put it into 800x600 with no texture detail - it looked like a version of F29 Retaliator from my DOS days, without the fun, and with broken textures everywhere - and still my PC struggled (in fact, I loaded up F29 Retaliator in DOSBox soon after and had much more enjoyment out of it). If Tom Clancy's HAWX can work fine on my PC without me changing any options, Dogfighter should as well. If you require Windows Vista or 7, that's me done too. There's no reason for that. If you require a particular Service Pack, I will be suspicious and want to play the demo to be sure that you're just fibbing - most games run fine on SP2 even if they demand SP3 for example. If you require gobs of disk space, that's probably the biggest killer because my hard drive space and bandwidth is my most precious commodity.
I agree with most of that. Except the service pack level (I presume you mean SPs for Windows XP?).
Unless you have some really important application that refuses to run on SP3, it is a good idea to run the latest service pack. SP2 recently went out of support and does not get security patches anymore. And surfing the net with unpatched Windows is not so good, as I found out myself some years ago. I even had the latest SP for Win2000, but forgot to install the post-SP patches =>Hello MSBlast...
I predict that the next revolution in gaming will come from AI-directed procedural generation of content on the fly
That is probably correct, as far as the use of procedural generation goes. I'm not so sure if it will always be on the fly, however. Maybe we will see a generation of games that say "start me now and wait five hours while I build the game world". Or the developer studio will do the generating inhouse and just ship a stack of DVDs.
Either way, the makes of game consoles might need to upgrade their memory sizes a lot to handle the resulting flood of data;-)
Yes, that appears a bit greedy. For games with a recurring subscription fee, it seems smarter to make getting in cheap. Like CCP did with EVE Online: IIRC purchasing the game was 20 Euros, including the first month. Not too bad. So I got in, found I liked the game and stayed (and payed) for a few years.
There is also a growing trend of "free to play" MMOs, where you only pay for in-game advantages like faster leveling or special items. That is an even more consequent version of making the entry threshold low.
Yes you can buy them in game. But why anyone would fly them around instead of using them up on station is beyond me. And then transporting them in a fragile ship like a Kestrel...:-))))
To produce the fuel, the energy that will be stored in it has to come from somewhere> .
That's why the idea of a vehicle creating its own fuel out of thin air is stupid, you'd want to use the input energy to drive the car directly. More efficient.
On top of that, it has been possible to put heat sensors on the chip and throttle the clock in case of overheating for several years now. IIRC Intel introduced this with the Pentium 4, and in some PCs with poorly cooled 3GHz+ P4 models this throttling actually kicked in. Annoying for the users, but at least their systems did not die.
Maybe AMD/ATI and NVIDIA should copy that feature? (apologies for dissing them if they have actually done so).
Similar here (German university in the late 80s/early 90s). The hard tests were in the mandatory courses, but in the electives where students could choose their classes, good grades were amazingly easy to get.
One might almost suspect that the professors were paid by the number of attendees;-)
AFAIK there are now statutory damages in the USA on copyright violations. A few hundred to thousand dollars per infringement, and that is how the RIAA adds up their huge claims against file sharers: One infringement per track, and thus a directory full of shared stuff is reason for a lawsuit over $100.000.
If you consider suing them, these sums may actually make it worthwhile (depending on the number of works they have filched). But definitely ask a lawyer first.
Personally, I would prefer a more long-lifed battery type, even at the expense of having to lug around a bit more wight for the same capacity. LiFePO4 batteries are said to be pretty durable. There is a list of materials at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Cathodes.
*notices Li(LiaNixMnyCoz)O2 and starts searching for more information*
Interesting analysis. Personally I think that strategy will fail, because it only works in a limited context: If most customers already have a Microsoft product they are used to, extending that product with the same features as the new competitor can indeed kill the new contender. That is what happened to OS/2 and Netscape.
It also needs to happen early after the new product category shows up, or the competition will be too entrenched to get rid of. Examples for this are: -Java: While.Net has indeed taken a lot of market share, Java is not dead and will probably stay around for a long time -Oracle: Still considered the #1 product for high end installations, MS SQL Server failed to push it out. -XBox: At the expense of several billion $, the XBox brand is now on equal footing with the PS3 and Wii. But Microsoft is still far from controlling that market.
In case of Android and similar systems, I think Microsoft will be too late as well. They seem to have no convincing lightweight operating system for small mobile devices right now. Current netbooks are barely capable of running Windows 7 well, but for anything smaller it eats too many ressources. The GUI design eats too much screen real estate as well. Let alone the limitation to x86 processors.
IMHO Microsoft should stop to spend spend spend to block Android& Co. and focus on its strengths on the desktop. One Exception: Another go at the mobile OS market might be a good idea if the new product works as a meaningful extension of the Windows desktop "ecosystem". But Microsoft sucks at breaking into new markets without a connection to their existing products.
You can still make money by not innovating, and sucking the blood and energy out of a marketplace that you don't own by doing it patiently. It takes Microsoft a half-dozen versions to get close to 'right'.
Then you put your heal on the throats of your OEMs, and banish them from the money kingdom if they don't tote the line. You pour FUD where possible, get sued successfully in many jurisdictions, and don't believe that anything you didn't think up could be any good.
Even if you disregard the "being sued successfully", that works only if you have a near-monopoly in the first place.
Microsoft could do that with Windows vs. Linux, because not getting a good deal on the OS with 90+% market share was sufficent to scare OEMs into toeing the line and dropping Linux. With XBOX vs. PS3 and Wii (for instance), that won't work because selling PS3s, Wiis and the games for them brings too much money. In other lines of business, Microsoft's market position is even weaker (mobile phones? AFAIK both Apple's iPhone and Android are ahead of the Microsoft products).
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At this point, FOSS crypto would move outside of the US. We might lose some developers (US citizens who are forbidden from participating) but I don't think the USA could really shut down development of strong cryptography.
And for those who care about secure communications, US products would become a strong "don't use".
According to a friend of mine, who started out as a shooting competitor and only recently started hunting, many hunters are lousy shots. He got to see their results on the range in his shooting club.
We CAN hunt down pedo websites. BUT what is the price? Is the loss of freedom of speech and freedom of information worth saving a few kids?
Are you honestly claiming that if you don't have the freedom to distribute child porn, you don't have freedom of speech ?
The way some governments want to implement blocking child porn (with secret blacklists) is indeed a danger to free speech. Because it makes it easy to put stuff on the list The Government Party Does Not Like. I certainly don't trust the politicians in my country with the power to do so.
Imagine Afghanistan without a foreign occupation army that props up the government. I think the Karzai government would not be in power anymore without US support.
So yes, I think a universally despised government could lose. The bigger problem may be setting up a new, not totally corrupt government afterwards.
plus AMD does not sell the Energy Efficient (EE) any longer except to OEMs; at least in this country.
What is "this country"?
In Germany, you can still get some "Energy Efficient" models, although they have a small "e" instead of the "EE" now. For instance the Athlon_II_X2_240e:
http://www.alternate.de/html/product/CPU/AMD/Athlon_II_X2_240e/137074/?tn=HARDWARE&l1=Prozessoren+(CPU)&l2=Desktop&l3=Sockel+AM3
2 x 2.8GHz at 45W TDP, for 65 Euros. That is pretty nice.
I'm living in Germany, where there is no general speed limit on the highways. But introducing one is discussed from time to time, at least in part because of the speed freaks.
In 2008/2009 I was out of work myself. When writing job applications, I picked ads where I had at least 2/3 of the listed qualifications. The number of interviews I got was still very limited.
Now 2008/2009 was not the best time for finding a new job, but this example still illustrates the problem.
Depends on your definition of "driving like a little old lady". Sometimes I pass a truck doing 50 mph at 80 mph, and someone is coming from behind at 120mph and pissed off because I'm doing only 80.
And yes, I will go back to the right lane after passing the truck. So don't care if some would-be racing driver has to slow down for a moment.
OK, let's do some math (if only an approximation), based on Wikipedia. Let us assume that
-the formula sin(theta) = 1.220 * (lambda/D) from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution is a good approximation for the diffraction limit, theta being the angular resolution in radians
-lambda=500nm (visible light, green tending to blue)
-Aperture size D=2mm, based on the webcam on the notebook I have here. Let's pretend this is typical for a smartphone camera.
Then sin(theta) = 1.220 * 500nm / 2mm = 1.22 * 2.5 *(1/10,000) = 3.05/10,000.
For small values of theta and a bit more rounding we get theta = 3/10,000 or 6.5 arc minutes for diffraction limited optics.
Now lets assume a camera with 30 degree field of view on the x-axis and a sensor with 2500 pixels along that axis. In that camera, each pixel would be responsible for covering 30/2500 = 0.012 degrees or in 0.5/2,500 = 2/10,000 in radians = 4.3 arc minutes. Compared to the diffraction limit, I'd say that sensor pushes the limits of what makes sense with that aperture size, assuming a very high quality lens.
Now consider that a typical smart phone won't have the best possible optics for cost reasons, and 5 megapixels on a cellphone are gimmick ;-)
Good points, and it seems the list of requirements is often excessive because employers don't want to invest into training. So instead of hiring someone with generally good skills and giving him a few months to learn the specifics of the job, they insist on somone who already knows all the tools in the work environment.
When they don't find that perfect candidate, they whine about a lack of qualified candidates.
I think GP is talking about the fact that you only get the higher resolution with optics of matching quality. All optics have some inherent blurring, only the degree depends on quality (and with very high quality optics, you may run the diffraction limit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited)
So if you combine a high-resolution sensor with a second rate lens, all you achieve is that the blur where a sharp edge should be is spread across more pixels.
To some degree this is OK because it makes the image appear less blocky, and a later interpolation to get smooth edges becomes unneccessary. But I think at some point the higher resolution of the sensor is just wasted.
I agree with all your points, and the consequences are obvious:
If a company wants to avoid this, they have to stop transferring sensitive work to India. First and second level support can stay there, because they deal with
-already released products
-and semi-public information (common support cases that are too frequent to keep the topic secret).
What has to stay outside of India is most of development, and maybe third level support where more sensitive stuff is handled.
Maybe a C64 emulator could fill that role. I remember that the original (hardware) C64 was quite accessible too. The one thing you might miss for hardware projects, however, is the parallel port.
4) System requirements. If I need a PC greater than the one I have, I won't look at the game. I don't buy PC's to fit the games, I buy games to fit my PC. There is no excuse any more for slow-running games on modern dual-core processors with Gb's of RAM available to them. Dogfighter CRAWLED on my PC and to get it to run smoothly required me to put it into 800x600 with no texture detail - it looked like a version of F29 Retaliator from my DOS days, without the fun, and with broken textures everywhere - and still my PC struggled (in fact, I loaded up F29 Retaliator in DOSBox soon after and had much more enjoyment out of it). If Tom Clancy's HAWX can work fine on my PC without me changing any options, Dogfighter should as well. If you require Windows Vista or 7, that's me done too. There's no reason for that. If you require a particular Service Pack, I will be suspicious and want to play the demo to be sure that you're just fibbing - most games run fine on SP2 even if they demand SP3 for example. If you require gobs of disk space, that's probably the biggest killer because my hard drive space and bandwidth is my most precious commodity.
I agree with most of that. Except the service pack level (I presume you mean SPs for Windows XP?).
Unless you have some really important application that refuses to run on SP3, it is a good idea to run the latest service pack. SP2 recently went out of support and does not get security patches anymore. And surfing the net with unpatched Windows is not so good, as I found out myself some years ago.
I even had the latest SP for Win2000, but forgot to install the post-SP patches =>Hello MSBlast...
I predict that the next revolution in gaming will come from AI-directed procedural generation of content on the fly
That is probably correct, as far as the use of procedural generation goes. I'm not so sure if it will always be on the fly, however. Maybe we will see a generation of games that say "start me now and wait five hours while I build the game world". Or the developer studio will do the generating inhouse and just ship a stack of DVDs.
Either way, the makes of game consoles might need to upgrade their memory sizes a lot to handle the resulting flood of data ;-)
Yes, that appears a bit greedy.
For games with a recurring subscription fee, it seems smarter to make getting in cheap. Like CCP did with EVE Online:
IIRC purchasing the game was 20 Euros, including the first month. Not too bad. So I got in, found I liked the game and stayed (and payed) for a few years.
There is also a growing trend of "free to play" MMOs, where you only pay for in-game advantages like faster leveling or special items. That is an even more consequent version of making the entry threshold low.
In highsec, a battleship is good for transporting expensive stuff because it will usually hold out long enough for Concord to kill the attackers.
In war, lowsec or 0.0, use a CovOps(best) or an interceptor. Fly manually, no autopilot.
Yes you can buy them in game. But why anyone would fly them around instead of using them up on station is beyond me. And then transporting them in a fragile ship like a Kestrel... :-))))
To produce the fuel, the energy that will be stored in it has to come from somewhere> .
That's why the idea of a vehicle creating its own fuel out of thin air is stupid, you'd want to use the input energy to drive the car directly. More efficient.
On top of that, it has been possible to put heat sensors on the chip and throttle the clock in case of overheating for several years now. IIRC Intel introduced this with the Pentium 4, and in some PCs with poorly cooled 3GHz+ P4 models this throttling actually kicked in. Annoying for the users, but at least their systems did not die.
Maybe AMD/ATI and NVIDIA should copy that feature? (apologies for dissing them if they have actually done so).
Similar here (German university in the late 80s/early 90s).
The hard tests were in the mandatory courses, but in the electives where students could choose their classes, good grades were amazingly easy to get.
One might almost suspect that the professors were paid by the number of attendees ;-)
AFAIK there are now statutory damages in the USA on copyright violations. A few hundred to thousand dollars per infringement, and that is how the RIAA adds up their huge claims against file sharers:
One infringement per track, and thus a directory full of shared stuff is reason for a lawsuit over $100.000.
If you consider suing them, these sums may actually make it worthwhile (depending on the number of works they have filched). But definitely ask a lawyer first.
AFAIK most of these still use the "traditional" LiCoO2 cathodes. Good energy density but known for degrading even without being used. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Shelf_life.
Personally, I would prefer a more long-lifed battery type, even at the expense of having to lug around a bit more wight for the same capacity. LiFePO4 batteries are said to be pretty durable. There is a list of materials at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Cathodes.
*notices Li(LiaNixMnyCoz)O2 and starts searching for more information*
Interesting analysis. Personally I think that strategy will fail, because it only works in a limited context:
If most customers already have a Microsoft product they are used to, extending that product with the same features as the new competitor can indeed kill the new contender. That is what happened to OS/2 and Netscape.
It also needs to happen early after the new product category shows up, or the competition will be too entrenched to get rid of. Examples for this are: .Net has indeed taken a lot of market share, Java is not dead and will probably stay around for a long time
-Java: While
-Oracle: Still considered the #1 product for high end installations, MS SQL Server failed to push it out.
-XBox: At the expense of several billion $, the XBox brand is now on equal footing with the PS3 and Wii. But Microsoft is still far from controlling that market.
In case of Android and similar systems, I think Microsoft will be too late as well. They seem to have no convincing lightweight operating system for small mobile devices right now. Current netbooks are barely capable of running Windows 7 well, but for anything smaller it eats too many ressources. The GUI design eats too much screen real estate as well. Let alone the limitation to x86 processors.
IMHO Microsoft should stop to spend spend spend to block Android& Co. and focus on its strengths on the desktop. One Exception:
Another go at the mobile OS market might be a good idea if the new product works as a meaningful extension of the Windows desktop "ecosystem". But Microsoft sucks at breaking into new markets without a connection to their existing products.
You can still make money by not innovating, and sucking the blood and energy out of a marketplace that you don't own by doing it patiently. It takes Microsoft a half-dozen versions to get close to 'right'.
Then you put your heal on the throats of your OEMs, and banish them from the money kingdom if they don't tote the line. You pour FUD where possible, get sued successfully in many jurisdictions, and don't believe that anything you didn't think up could be any good.
Even if you disregard the "being sued successfully", that works only if you have a near-monopoly in the first place.
Microsoft could do that with Windows vs. Linux, because not getting a good deal on the OS with 90+% market share was sufficent to scare OEMs into toeing the line and dropping Linux. With XBOX vs. PS3 and Wii (for instance), that won't work because selling PS3s, Wiis and the games for them brings too much money. In other lines of business, Microsoft's market position is even weaker (mobile phones? AFAIK both Apple's iPhone and Android are ahead of the Microsoft products).