"That might even make it a breach of license agreement for creative commons licensed music, because they demand that if you give a track to someone else, that person has to be able to pass it on, impossible with the Zune."
Zune doesn't give tracks to anyone, what it gives is a limited preview. In order to give the track to someone, you have to use a different method. In any case, the burden is on the user.
The "limited" in preview is exactly what the CC license forbids. You may add DRM to a track, but you may not pass that track on to anyone if it does not have the same rights/license as the track you received. A track someone got from another Zune via WiFi would have these restrictions, so it is not allowed to pass CC licensed songs (beside attribution licensed) from one Zune to another, unless the DRM is removed. Since the user initiates the transfer, it is always the burden of the user, who is the one who agreed to the license.
I don't know the media center interface, but similarity has not always worked out for Microsoft. The first generations of WinCE PDAs were more or less unusable, partly because the standard windows start menu simply took up ways too much screen estate. Only when PDAs got larger (in pixel) displays, it became acceptable. But still the Palm OS interface is much better suited for mobile operation, so no guarantee that the media center interface has any use on a mobile media player. Maybe even the old people that are familiar with the interface will despise it on the Zune.
Somehow I managed to mess up the formating of the first two arguments at the last second. It should have read:
1. Microsoft is hatching a consumer media "perfect storm."
The argument is that Microsoft will leverage any installed base they have (Windows, Xbox, Soapbox) and due to a similarity with the Windows Media Center user interface and Vista will have a strategic advantage. Also their 90% share in operating systems vs 5% for Apple [I think it's even less than that] will force the Zune into the market.
I guess that is the only real argument here, but nothing new. Microsoft failed to leverage their installed base before, eg with Smartphones, where they failed miserably even though the syncing with Outlook is so important. And the 5% of Apples market share does not seem to be a problem, the majority of iPod buyers already use it with windows.
2. The Zune is social and viral.
The article claims that the world has changed since the introduction of the iPod, obligatory citing anything with the Web 2.0 label as social and viral and therefore claiming a demand by todays youth to be able to share immediately anything, making Zune's WiFi hip and the iPod old fashioned.
Maybe, but I doubt it. Let's remember that P2P was big long before the iPod and iTMS, they introduced a business model that got accepted by people that were used to get everything for free due to it's ease of use. Due to Zune's DRM restrictions there will be no widespread sharing on school yards, so even if the world would demand to return to the early Napster days, the Zune will not allow this.
I think the article is somewhat too nice towards the Zune, eg they do not mention the problem that even your own unprotected recordings will be forced into a DRM wrapper, preventing them to be shared after three days. That might even make it a breach of license agreement for creative commons licensed music, because they demand that if you give a track to someone else, that person has to be able to pass it on, impossible with the Zune.
But more interesting the five points why Apple should be scared:
1. Microsoft is hatching a consumer media "perfect storm."
The argument is that Microsoft will leverage any installed base they have (Windows, Xbox, Soapbox) and due to a similarity with the Windows Media Center user interface and Vista will have a strategic advantage. Also their 90% share in operating systems vs 5% for Apple [I think it's even less than that]
2. The Zune is social and viral.
The article claims that the world has changed since the introduction of the iPod, obligatory citing anything with the Web 2.0 label as social and viral and therefore claiming a demand by todays youth to be able to share immediately anything, making Zune's WiFi hip and the iPod old fashioned.
I guess that is the only real argument here, but nothing new. Microsoft failed to leverage their installed base before, eg with Smartphones, where they failed miserably even though the syncing with Outlook is so important. And the 5% of Apples market share does not seem to be a problem, the majority of iPod buyers already use it with windows
Maybe, but I doubt it. Let's remember that P2P was big long before the iPod and iTMS, they introduced a business model that got accepted by people that were used to get everything for free due to it's ease of use. Due to Zune's DRM restrictions there will be no widespread sharing on school yards, so even if the world would demand to return to the early Napster days, the Zune will not allow this.
3. Zune may have more programming.
The pick on Apple launching with videos only from Disney as a sign that Microsoft has more support from the movie industry. But as was discussed earlier today on slashdot, this may be simply due to Walmart and soon be a problem of the past. Even worse, if Apple made a deal with Walmart, they might try to push the Zune out.
Concerning other media formats like music and TV shows, as far as I understand basically everybody is currently trying to make deals with Apple as fast as possible to take their share of the cake.
4. Zune's screen is better for movies.
No doubt, that is true, and it will play into Microsoft's hands. There have been a lot of other media players already featuring larger screens, so this alone does not seem to be a reason for customers to switch. But more important might be all the signs indicating that Apple already has a full screen video iPod in the pipeline (their patents for the virtual scroll wheel), so this advantage for Microsoft might soon be gone.
5. Zune is actually pretty cool.
This boils down to taste, and from what I've read in a lot of forums (with a lot of not Apple friendly users), the design, color, DRM are not as cool as computerworld claims. We shall see.
The chip is not a kludge. It may seem that the right way would have been to build the four cores into one die instead of two, but according to some information Intel accidently slipped during the IDF (in German) due to the yield they get for Core2 chips the price for a monolithic 4-core die would be $36,13 compared to $29,37 for two 2-core dies. So this might simply be driven by economic reasons, till the process and the yield.
The difference between spam and ads is the amount I can throw at you. I can send you 10,000 spam mails each day, but I cannot put 10,000 ads on a webpage. So there is a natural limit, preventing ads from becoming as large a problem as spam. Also there is more diversity between sites, if a site shows too many ads, I can simply go somewhere else. In theory I could simply change my email address, but this is very inconvenient, therefore I cannot avoid the spam without a spam filter, but the ads without an ad blocker.
Also spam is illegal almost everywhere, so it is not part of the regular business, and a lot of newsletter distributers would like to get rid of it and therefore support spam filtering. Web ads on the other hand are part of the regular legal business and you will not find much support for ad filtering from major sites or ISPs.
I run a small (~500,000 PV/month) website with a free language trainer. The business model (which does not work) is based on ads, so I was concerned if people would filter out the ads. All of the pages on the site show either google ads or a single standard size non-flash banner, which is trivial to filter out. Some of the banners are in iframes and come from other sites, some come from our server. And as far as I can tell from the logs, the number of pageviews roughly equals the number of banner views. Now maybe all our users use ad blockers that actually load the banner, but do not display it, but I doubt it. Most of the users are from German speaking countries, so there may be a cultural difference, but I don't see any different behavior from the English speaking users either.
So I assume that most users are like me: I block pop-ups, because they annoy the hell out of me. If a site uses flash to aggressively, I turn on the flash blocker, but usually I do not because it is to often required for display or navigation and I'm to lazy to switch it on on demand. I don't mind most of the ads, since I realize they finance the content I'm watching.
Here at slashdot it always seems like almost everybody is blocking ads, but I think that the slashdot crowd is very untypical, ad blocking (apart from pop up blocking, which all browsers support directly) is not a mainstream thing.
The headline was "WGA Giving 42% false positives". I'm a subscriber, so I read the article based on the not yet published version from the news feed (I still see the old headline in NetNewsWire). Obviously I have to correct myself, we can no longer assume that the slashdot editor can not read statistics, otherwise he would not have changed the headline before publishing the story. And I should check whether the story/headline has already been changed before I complain about stupid headlines.
That should have read: "there's no insight how many failed attempts of validating your Windows license there are"
If there were 574,000 validations out of which 137 (the number they examined) failed, and of these 137 failed validations 42% were with valid licenses and activated product keys, these 42% ( = 57,54 attemps, very unlikely) would represent a 0,01% failure rate.
those who can read statistics and those who can't.
There is no way you can derive a headline like "WGA giving 42% false positives" from a statement like "42% of the users that reported problems with WGA ran genuine software". 42% of the problems sampled should not have triggered problems, but that's all, there's no insight how many attempts of validating your Windows license there are.
There are at least 10 people who don't understand this: One slashdot poster and one slashdot editor.
Well, VMs won't help you much if you produce network equipment and want to test it. Unless you also stuff 24 ethernet ports into your server and assign one to each VM. And even then you'll probably get a different behavior simply because the simulated machines have a different timing than real machines. The fact that the emulating server switches between the VMs means that only one VM will be active at any time, so e.g. some problems with network collisions might never occur.
The article mentiones one of the first applications, using 24 of these to simulate a network at a network equipment vendor on his desktop. From there to your cluster is just a tiny step. SETI@desktop.
Nice: 200MHz XScale, 64 MB RAM, 16 MB Flash (3MB occupied by OS), 100MBit Ethernet, CF-II slot, 1-3/8 * 4-1/8 inches (35 x 103mm). Even nicer: the next version with integrated WiFi. All done by a company of 26, with no intention to grow, but to automate more if more work has to be done, so prices will fall.
Not so nice: $186.5 for one, $165 in volumes of 1000. I know, this is still very cheap for something in "industrial size", but too much to build one into my door bell, one into each phone, one into each light switch (the joy of being unable to turn of the light due to an 500 error), one into the fish tank, one into the fridge to finally order milk like we have been promised for years.
But give it some years, and I will have a log of how many minutes I brushed my teeth based on the report my eToothBrush send wirelessy to my server.
Since cold air has a lower capacity to hold water, warming the air should decrease the relative humidity of the air, bringing you farther from the dew point and make condensation less likely.
...
My only concern would be if the freezer was often open for long periods of time letting in warm moist air, but even then I would expect it to condence on cold surfaces like the outsides of your cases, etc, and not on places that will short out.
If e.g. the CPU warms the air inside the case and the air now is capable of holding more water, will not the humidity inside the case increase and then the water condensate when it contacts the case which is cooled from the outside? The water would not condensate on the CPU itself, but on the next thing that is colder than the CPU, e.g. the RAM. The only way to avoid this would be to warm everything to a similar temperature and make sure that water that condensates on the (cold) case is run out of the case immediately.
I have no experience with low temperature settings, but would assume that the main problem would be water condensating on the warmer parts of the computer. So the question would be how to make sure that the water does not short circuit anything. Experience may be taken not only from environments with low temperatures, but also from areas with very high humidity, which might cause similar problems.
In order to get to a useful system, each of these 'colours' have to be modulated, ie. switched on and off according to the bits you want to transfer. So you need to be able to switch on and off at a rate of at least a few gigahertz.
Moving polymer molecules are a bit similar to current LCD technology, in which liquid crystal molecules also physically move. Such processes are inherently slow.
Hm, that basically kills the idea. Luckily I had not already applied for a patent. Thanks for the insight, you saved me a lot of money (in lawyer fees when trying to sue everybody for patent breach). Now I'll have to look for another stupid idea.
I like the idea of reducing our current RGB model to a "true pixel" technology, because it will make displays smaller, sharper and more. But as far as I understand our vision system is itself based on a sort of RGB sensor and the human eye is not really capable of seeing e.g. orange, which is why the whole RGB (and CMY) display technology works in the first place. There are some high range displays (at least in research facilities) giving you a larger dynamic per color than the 256 scales of traditional 24 bit images, so the lack of "true colors" mentioned in the article might be solved by conventional technology.
But what about the use for data transfer over fiber? One of the nice things about fiber is that you can send several "colors" in parallel which will not disturb each other, something impossible with copper. Up till now they use laser diodes with a fixed wavelength, so the number of diodes determines how many parallel signals you can send.
Now there is a technology that can create any wavelength. Combined with matching optics, could one not use one of those polymer displays to create multiple wavelength signals and send them through one fiber, in theory allowing an indefinite number of signals? Still limited by the number of pixels on the display and the accuracy of the sensors on the other side, but much easier than to arrange several thousand laser diodes.
THEN we have to bring out the HEAVY weapons: schools, books, hospitals, family support, equality for women and kids, real laws.
That's how terrorists will lose, but I am afraid that this will not happen for a long time yet, until the entire world realizes what is going on.
This part of your post is absolutely true and the way to go. The rest of the post is ignorant rubbish and the fact that people still believe that you can end terrorism by increasing pressure and military force is one of the main reasons why people who disagreed with terrorism suddenly become supporters when they get hit by these "terror fighters" increasing the pressure. Terrorism is a mind game, not a power game. Guerilla wars cannot be won by normal military structures. None of this is new, but a lot of people are unwilling to accept that all their power still leaves them powerless when facing these problems.
As far as I remember the hijackers killed one stewardess in one of the planes when the pilot refused to open the cockpit. Till 9/11 most hijackings were solved peacefully (i.e. without anyone being killed), so protecting the crews/passengers live from a (minor) deadly threat like a carpet cutter was the "logic choice". Nobody had yet internalized the possibility of turning a whole passenger plane into a suicide bomber.
Today you couldn't hijack a plane with a knife alone, even if you killed someone with it. But how hard would it be to hijack 20 tank trucks near a major city with knifes? Not to hard I think.
The planes that were crashed into the WTC where hijacked with carpet cutters. The current threat was discovered when "classic police work" lead to an arrest in Pakistan.
The war against terror is not fought with technology and will never be won by technology. There is no way to guarantee safety from terrorists any more than there is a really secure computer system. The only way to live safely would be in a bunker, and that's no live.
Terror has to be fought by international politics. Anything else will fail, because there will always be loopholes left.
It's stupid to ask if Microsoft or Apple is the one stealing from the other. Most ideas we see successfully implemented today are taken from somewhere else and (hopefully) improved. Take e.g. Spaces. Yes, there have been virtual desktops for Linux for years (and I've been using Desktop Manageron OS X for this purpose for some), but spaces is neatly integrated into Expose and viewing all virtual desktops in miniature versions the way Spaces does might even be new, at least I haven't seen it before.
So is it copied? Or is it invented? None of both, it is evolved. Yes, Windows can already make system snapshots like Time Machine. No, it cannot do it in a way that it can be easily managed by a normal user. Copied? Invented? If Vista brings a nicer interface similar to Time Machine, did they copy it back?
The originator of an idea is less important in a world where evolution is as important as with operating systems and GUIs. So these comparisons try to artificially generate a difference where none exists. My personal reference will be which implementation works best for me, not who came up with the inspiration.
Last October, O2 Germany launched its music store, the first wireless music store based on Nokia's and Loudeye's technology. Still, the joint effort didn't gain as much traction as Nokia expected, analysts speculate.
Nokia also tried to become a content provider, only to be rejected by the carriers:
Already, Nokia tried selling ringtones, games, and other services through its own portal, Club Nokia. In response to carrier complaints, Nokia eventually stopped selling software via Club Nokia and converted the site into a customer community and service hub. If Nokia offered its own music service, "the carriers could react extraordinarily negatively," says Andrew Cole, an analyst at consultancy TNMG-Adventis. "They could lose revenues because of this."
So they will enter the music distribution area, but not competing with the carriers. Instead they will use Loudeye to compete with iTMS, making you download the music to your computer and then to your phone?
Thanks to the Loudeye acquisition, Nokia might have the technology and content components it needs to effectively compete with iTunes. After all, Loudeye has a catalogue of 1.6 million tracks and has more content rights to local music globally than any other music distributor in the world--including iTunes.
And why? To sell more phones?
A struggle between them would certainly be an interesting match-up. Apple sold 22.5 million iPod players in its fiscal year 2005 and could approach 50 million units by the end of 2006. But Nokia moved 265 million units in its most recent fiscal year, 40 million of which were capable of playing music.
But 100% of the 22.5 million iPod buyers bought it to listen to music. Most of the Nokia buyers bought it to make phone calls.
I'm not sure what Nokia is doing with Loudeye, but believing that they intend to attack Apple + iTMS directly instead of doing something with wireless music distribution seems pretty far fetched.
I don't think smarter tech would make the problems of portals go away. The problem with portals is that the business model is to do everything for everyone. In the consequence there would be only one portal that fits everybody. Now if eg. you want to compete with Yahoo!, you have to offer everything that they offer, or else you will not be able to lure their customers away. You end up with a lot of sites that are basically copies of one another, so they add more features to become more attractive. Unfortunatly it is very hard to fit all these services into one easy interface, so most of these sites are not easy to manage for most users.
Often what follows is a backslash: Some site that does only one thing and does this right (Google, 37signals). This seems to be cyclic and is not limited to websites. Think also iPod vs. Zen or peoples fighting their mobile phones. It's hard to resist to expand your success in one area to others, so there is a natural tendency towards portals (or featuritis or Microsoft Office). But sometimes "more" is "just too much".
Slashdot Mirror
The "limited" in preview is exactly what the CC license forbids. You may add DRM to a track, but you may not pass that track on to anyone if it does not have the same rights/license as the track you received. A track someone got from another Zune via WiFi would have these restrictions, so it is not allowed to pass CC licensed songs (beside attribution licensed) from one Zune to another, unless the DRM is removed. Since the user initiates the transfer, it is always the burden of the user, who is the one who agreed to the license.
I don't know the media center interface, but similarity has not always worked out for Microsoft. The first generations of WinCE PDAs were more or less unusable, partly because the standard windows start menu simply took up ways too much screen estate. Only when PDAs got larger (in pixel) displays, it became acceptable. But still the Palm OS interface is much better suited for mobile operation, so no guarantee that the media center interface has any use on a mobile media player. Maybe even the old people that are familiar with the interface will despise it on the Zune.
Somehow I managed to mess up the formating of the first two arguments at the last second. It should have read:
1. Microsoft is hatching a consumer media "perfect storm."
The argument is that Microsoft will leverage any installed base they have (Windows, Xbox, Soapbox) and due to a similarity with the Windows Media Center user interface and Vista will have a strategic advantage. Also their 90% share in operating systems vs 5% for Apple [I think it's even less than that] will force the Zune into the market.
I guess that is the only real argument here, but nothing new. Microsoft failed to leverage their installed base before, eg with Smartphones, where they failed miserably even though the syncing with Outlook is so important. And the 5% of Apples market share does not seem to be a problem, the majority of iPod buyers already use it with windows.
2. The Zune is social and viral.
The article claims that the world has changed since the introduction of the iPod, obligatory citing anything with the Web 2.0 label as social and viral and therefore claiming a demand by todays youth to be able to share immediately anything, making Zune's WiFi hip and the iPod old fashioned.
Maybe, but I doubt it. Let's remember that P2P was big long before the iPod and iTMS, they introduced a business model that got accepted by people that were used to get everything for free due to it's ease of use. Due to Zune's DRM restrictions there will be no widespread sharing on school yards, so even if the world would demand to return to the early Napster days, the Zune will not allow this.
I think the article is somewhat too nice towards the Zune, eg they do not mention the problem that even your own unprotected recordings will be forced into a DRM wrapper, preventing them to be shared after three days. That might even make it a breach of license agreement for creative commons licensed music, because they demand that if you give a track to someone else, that person has to be able to pass it on, impossible with the Zune.
But more interesting the five points why Apple should be scared:
1. Microsoft is hatching a consumer media "perfect storm."
The argument is that Microsoft will leverage any installed base they have (Windows, Xbox, Soapbox) and due to a similarity with the Windows Media Center user interface and Vista will have a strategic advantage. Also their 90% share in operating systems vs 5% for Apple [I think it's even less than that] 2. The Zune is social and viral.
The article claims that the world has changed since the introduction of the iPod, obligatory citing anything with the Web 2.0 label as social and viral and therefore claiming a demand by todays youth to be able to share immediately anything, making Zune's WiFi hip and the iPod old fashioned.
I guess that is the only real argument here, but nothing new. Microsoft failed to leverage their installed base before, eg with Smartphones, where they failed miserably even though the syncing with Outlook is so important. And the 5% of Apples market share does not seem to be a problem, the majority of iPod buyers already use it with windows
Maybe, but I doubt it. Let's remember that P2P was big long before the iPod and iTMS, they introduced a business model that got accepted by people that were used to get everything for free due to it's ease of use. Due to Zune's DRM restrictions there will be no widespread sharing on school yards, so even if the world would demand to return to the early Napster days, the Zune will not allow this.
3. Zune may have more programming.
The pick on Apple launching with videos only from Disney as a sign that Microsoft has more support from the movie industry. But as was discussed earlier today on slashdot, this may be simply due to Walmart and soon be a problem of the past. Even worse, if Apple made a deal with Walmart, they might try to push the Zune out.
Concerning other media formats like music and TV shows, as far as I understand basically everybody is currently trying to make deals with Apple as fast as possible to take their share of the cake.
4. Zune's screen is better for movies.
No doubt, that is true, and it will play into Microsoft's hands. There have been a lot of other media players already featuring larger screens, so this alone does not seem to be a reason for customers to switch. But more important might be all the signs indicating that Apple already has a full screen video iPod in the pipeline (their patents for the virtual scroll wheel), so this advantage for Microsoft might soon be gone.
5. Zune is actually pretty cool.
This boils down to taste, and from what I've read in a lot of forums (with a lot of not Apple friendly users), the design, color, DRM are not as cool as computerworld claims. We shall see.
The chip is not a kludge. It may seem that the right way would have been to build the four cores into one die instead of two, but according to some information Intel accidently slipped during the IDF (in German) due to the yield they get for Core2 chips the price for a monolithic 4-core die would be $36,13 compared to $29,37 for two 2-core dies. So this might simply be driven by economic reasons, till the process and the yield.
A few weeks ago Anandtech already tried to plug two 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Clovertons (Xeons) samples into the new Mac Pro featuring two LGA-771 sockets. Worked like a charm, a nice eight core machine. And since dual socket motherboards are quite expensive, the Mac Pro might even be a cheap version.
The difference between spam and ads is the amount I can throw at you. I can send you 10,000 spam mails each day, but I cannot put 10,000 ads on a webpage. So there is a natural limit, preventing ads from becoming as large a problem as spam. Also there is more diversity between sites, if a site shows too many ads, I can simply go somewhere else. In theory I could simply change my email address, but this is very inconvenient, therefore I cannot avoid the spam without a spam filter, but the ads without an ad blocker.
Also spam is illegal almost everywhere, so it is not part of the regular business, and a lot of newsletter distributers would like to get rid of it and therefore support spam filtering. Web ads on the other hand are part of the regular legal business and you will not find much support for ad filtering from major sites or ISPs.
I run a small (~500,000 PV/month) website with a free language trainer. The business model (which does not work) is based on ads, so I was concerned if people would filter out the ads. All of the pages on the site show either google ads or a single standard size non-flash banner, which is trivial to filter out. Some of the banners are in iframes and come from other sites, some come from our server. And as far as I can tell from the logs, the number of pageviews roughly equals the number of banner views. Now maybe all our users use ad blockers that actually load the banner, but do not display it, but I doubt it. Most of the users are from German speaking countries, so there may be a cultural difference, but I don't see any different behavior from the English speaking users either.
So I assume that most users are like me: I block pop-ups, because they annoy the hell out of me. If a site uses flash to aggressively, I turn on the flash blocker, but usually I do not because it is to often required for display or navigation and I'm to lazy to switch it on on demand. I don't mind most of the ads, since I realize they finance the content I'm watching.
Here at slashdot it always seems like almost everybody is blocking ads, but I think that the slashdot crowd is very untypical, ad blocking (apart from pop up blocking, which all browsers support directly) is not a mainstream thing.
The headline was "WGA Giving 42% false positives". I'm a subscriber, so I read the article based on the not yet published version from the news feed (I still see the old headline in NetNewsWire). Obviously I have to correct myself, we can no longer assume that the slashdot editor can not read statistics, otherwise he would not have changed the headline before publishing the story. And I should check whether the story/headline has already been changed before I complain about stupid headlines.
That should have read: "there's no insight how many failed attempts of validating your Windows license there are"
If there were 574,000 validations out of which 137 (the number they examined) failed, and of these 137 failed validations 42% were with valid licenses and activated product keys, these 42% ( = 57,54 attemps, very unlikely) would represent a 0,01% failure rate.
those who can read statistics and those who can't.
There is no way you can derive a headline like "WGA giving 42% false positives" from a statement like "42% of the users that reported problems with WGA ran genuine software". 42% of the problems sampled should not have triggered problems, but that's all, there's no insight how many attempts of validating your Windows license there are.
There are at least 10 people who don't understand this: One slashdot poster and one slashdot editor.
Well, VMs won't help you much if you produce network equipment and want to test it. Unless you also stuff 24 ethernet ports into your server and assign one to each VM. And even then you'll probably get a different behavior simply because the simulated machines have a different timing than real machines. The fact that the emulating server switches between the VMs means that only one VM will be active at any time, so e.g. some problems with network collisions might never occur.
The article mentiones one of the first applications, using 24 of these to simulate a network at a network equipment vendor on his desktop. From there to your cluster is just a tiny step. SETI@desktop.
Nice: 200MHz XScale, 64 MB RAM, 16 MB Flash (3MB occupied by OS), 100MBit Ethernet, CF-II slot, 1-3/8 * 4-1/8 inches (35 x 103mm). Even nicer: the next version with integrated WiFi. All done by a company of 26, with no intention to grow, but to automate more if more work has to be done, so prices will fall.
Not so nice: $186.5 for one, $165 in volumes of 1000. I know, this is still very cheap for something in "industrial size", but too much to build one into my door bell, one into each phone, one into each light switch (the joy of being unable to turn of the light due to an 500 error), one into the fish tank, one into the fridge to finally order milk like we have been promised for years.
But give it some years, and I will have a log of how many minutes I brushed my teeth based on the report my eToothBrush send wirelessy to my server.
Sorry, native German, English is my third language.
If e.g. the CPU warms the air inside the case and the air now is capable of holding more water, will not the humidity inside the case increase and then the water condensate when it contacts the case which is cooled from the outside? The water would not condensate on the CPU itself, but on the next thing that is colder than the CPU, e.g. the RAM. The only way to avoid this would be to warm everything to a similar temperature and make sure that water that condensates on the (cold) case is run out of the case immediately.
I have no experience with low temperature settings, but would assume that the main problem would be water condensating on the warmer parts of the computer. So the question would be how to make sure that the water does not short circuit anything. Experience may be taken not only from environments with low temperatures, but also from areas with very high humidity, which might cause similar problems.
Hm, that basically kills the idea. Luckily I had not already applied for a patent. Thanks for the insight, you saved me a lot of money (in lawyer fees when trying to sue everybody for patent breach). Now I'll have to look for another stupid idea.
I like the idea of reducing our current RGB model to a "true pixel" technology, because it will make displays smaller, sharper and more. But as far as I understand our vision system is itself based on a sort of RGB sensor and the human eye is not really capable of seeing e.g. orange, which is why the whole RGB (and CMY) display technology works in the first place. There are some high range displays (at least in research facilities) giving you a larger dynamic per color than the 256 scales of traditional 24 bit images, so the lack of "true colors" mentioned in the article might be solved by conventional technology.
But what about the use for data transfer over fiber? One of the nice things about fiber is that you can send several "colors" in parallel which will not disturb each other, something impossible with copper. Up till now they use laser diodes with a fixed wavelength, so the number of diodes determines how many parallel signals you can send.
Now there is a technology that can create any wavelength. Combined with matching optics, could one not use one of those polymer displays to create multiple wavelength signals and send them through one fiber, in theory allowing an indefinite number of signals? Still limited by the number of pixels on the display and the accuracy of the sensors on the other side, but much easier than to arrange several thousand laser diodes.
[Just speculating, no real clue about optics.]
This part of your post is absolutely true and the way to go. The rest of the post is ignorant rubbish and the fact that people still believe that you can end terrorism by increasing pressure and military force is one of the main reasons why people who disagreed with terrorism suddenly become supporters when they get hit by these "terror fighters" increasing the pressure. Terrorism is a mind game, not a power game. Guerilla wars cannot be won by normal military structures. None of this is new, but a lot of people are unwilling to accept that all their power still leaves them powerless when facing these problems.
As far as I remember the hijackers killed one stewardess in one of the planes when the pilot refused to open the cockpit. Till 9/11 most hijackings were solved peacefully (i.e. without anyone being killed), so protecting the crews/passengers live from a (minor) deadly threat like a carpet cutter was the "logic choice". Nobody had yet internalized the possibility of turning a whole passenger plane into a suicide bomber.
Today you couldn't hijack a plane with a knife alone, even if you killed someone with it. But how hard would it be to hijack 20 tank trucks near a major city with knifes? Not to hard I think.
Please remember:
The planes that were crashed into the WTC where hijacked with carpet cutters. The current threat was discovered when "classic police work" lead to an arrest in Pakistan.
The war against terror is not fought with technology and will never be won by technology. There is no way to guarantee safety from terrorists any more than there is a really secure computer system. The only way to live safely would be in a bunker, and that's no live.
Terror has to be fought by international politics. Anything else will fail, because there will always be loopholes left.
It's stupid to ask if Microsoft or Apple is the one stealing from the other. Most ideas we see successfully implemented today are taken from somewhere else and (hopefully) improved. Take e.g. Spaces. Yes, there have been virtual desktops for Linux for years (and I've been using Desktop Manageron OS X for this purpose for some), but spaces is neatly integrated into Expose and viewing all virtual desktops in miniature versions the way Spaces does might even be new, at least I haven't seen it before.
So is it copied? Or is it invented? None of both, it is evolved. Yes, Windows can already make system snapshots like Time Machine. No, it cannot do it in a way that it can be easily managed by a normal user. Copied? Invented? If Vista brings a nicer interface similar to Time Machine, did they copy it back?
The originator of an idea is less important in a world where evolution is as important as with operating systems and GUIs. So these comparisons try to artificially generate a difference where none exists. My personal reference will be which implementation works best for me, not who came up with the inspiration.
Simply quoting the article
Nokia has already tried to enter the music area
Nokia also tried to become a content provider, only to be rejected by the carriers:
So they will enter the music distribution area, but not competing with the carriers. Instead they will use Loudeye to compete with iTMS, making you download the music to your computer and then to your phone?
And why? To sell more phones?
But 100% of the 22.5 million iPod buyers bought it to listen to music. Most of the Nokia buyers bought it to make phone calls.
I'm not sure what Nokia is doing with Loudeye, but believing that they intend to attack Apple + iTMS directly instead of doing something with wireless music distribution seems pretty far fetched.
I don't think smarter tech would make the problems of portals go away. The problem with portals is that the business model is to do everything for everyone. In the consequence there would be only one portal that fits everybody. Now if eg. you want to compete with Yahoo!, you have to offer everything that they offer, or else you will not be able to lure their customers away. You end up with a lot of sites that are basically copies of one another, so they add more features to become more attractive. Unfortunatly it is very hard to fit all these services into one easy interface, so most of these sites are not easy to manage for most users.
Often what follows is a backslash: Some site that does only one thing and does this right (Google, 37signals). This seems to be cyclic and is not limited to websites. Think also iPod vs. Zen or peoples fighting their mobile phones. It's hard to resist to expand your success in one area to others, so there is a natural tendency towards portals (or featuritis or Microsoft Office). But sometimes "more" is "just too much".