The ridiculous but true, there are sickos who will try to screw some random person really badly, and technology makes it easier for anyone to be a victim.
Imagine a totally faked video of you downloading kiddie porn or other heinous crime, that shows up on YouTube and then the cops are coming in the windows. You may consider recycling your identity and moving house monthly, or posing as the illegal basement tenant and wear a wig while at home.
Alternatively, surround yourself with video cameras that shoot yur entire life to prove that you are not a bad person. Or fake a video of yourself being comatose until the last few hours.
Chaos will rule if people feel that the homeland insecurity is done by those living inside their own borders, and the consequences of techno malice go farther than some inconveniently mangled files.
bottom-end Compaq laptop Celeron 540 @ 1.86GHZ with 512MB RAM and Vista was pre-installed. It ran like a dog
and Ubuntu (now 9.10) rarely goes above 600MB of RAM used.
600 > 512
What could you have used that wouldn't run like crap? Yet, it is reasonable to think that 1.8 Ghz and half a gig of RAM ought to behave like a supercomputer.
I have some low memory computers running Windows 2000 quite nicely, but all kinds of new software seem to dictate the latest Windows plus the latest service packs. Just a couple of years ago I could still install almost all productivity software on Windows 2000, but that doesn't work any more. It's such a farce, forcing people to buy more RAM so they can run a bloated OS, and all for what? The older versions of Windows might have trouble with large hard drives or something, but why make it a requirement to upgrade Windows?
On top of it all, the Windows memory management is so stupid. I have 4 Gb of RAM so there's always at least 1 Gb free, but the hard drive is always busy with the swapping little bits here and there. The older Windows never worked so hard to achieve so little.
Fortunately one of CS profs quickly suggested that the EE professors could fix wiring and changing light bulbs and the Civil Engineering profs could clean bathrooms and unplug toilets
Surely the Mechanical Engineering department would be doing the toilets. The Chemical Engineering profs can run the cafeteria! What do CS people know?
And while all this is going on, the students could just teach themselves. Slowly technology is drifting to the point where people will have enough knowledge in their computers to learn how to do any task. IF everyone was equally skilled, what would motivate people to do the stressful or high-risk work? Money? Honor? What would motivate people to keep doing the same boring challengeless low-paying thing every day?
While I was developing software for a company I did some IT just because there was no one else who knew computers, but I didn't want IT to be a career. I helped someone fix up a messed up database, and this kind of computer work was not glamorous.
The line between fun work and drudge work in computers is very easy to cross. Essentially there is a computer sitting on a desk with all the power just at the the fingertips. All it takes is the will to keep working until you really achieve something. That's not very stressful compared to other professions where you might have to crawl into a hole, carry massive equipment into a wilderness, or be adept with timing and touch.
Both the pen and the keyboard are very good input devices now, and touch screens are very good too. So let's have tablet PCs with no keyboard and two touchscreen tablet screens instead. Bingo - you have double the screen area if you want as well as tablet and keyboard interfaces even in the standard laptop look and feel of a horizontal and upright screen.
The price of a tablet screen is really affordable now - maybe around $600 now (6 months ago the price was around $700).
The difficulty may be in letting people use the machine regardless of which side is horizontal. It would have to be balanced with half the components on one side and half on the other. A one-screen tablet feels cool because the hot processor is under the screen, but in the summer with the processor really cranking even the screen feels hot. Mind you, the plastic keyboard also feels hot, but when you rest your hand on the screen and you are writing, heat isn't fun.
Look around, why do you think the economy is in the crapper? Because nothing is being produced anymore. The factory towns may not be glamorous but it is where the core of a country makes its living. Not the rich who rule the country, not the super poor, but the average worker who pays the taxes that allow the government to function, who deliver the soldiers for the army.
Empires collapsed before, the western empire will get a rude suprise sooner or later when China changes its tune. And no, I don't mean in an evil plot kinda way, I mean when China does what Japan did ages ago. Become an economic power with its own IP. Quick check, how many high-tech gadgets in your house are produced in cheap labor country Japan? PS3
I agree partially, but the question being begged is what will happen when China becomes the big economic power? Will wages rise and make it economically palatable to outsource? This chain of outsourcing goes only so far before every company is forced to produce domestically, because the earth is round.
Interesting that Japan has a lot of IP and still has cheap labor. Is that the fate of all nations? Only thing is, at the point where all nations are neck and neck, the cheap labor might be far more robots - so what are people going to do? Will they find everything super affordable or will there be massive unemployment and tent cities? Hence putting people to work cheaply (or not!) instead of outsourcing is not a lasting scenario.
One way to break through is to flatten the earth or increase its surface area - that is, to move economic boundaries out. Outer space work comes to mind, or else people need to cooperate in order to solve major challenges. Perhaps Obama is right: tax the rich. In the future, that may be a path to take, but this isn't the future yet.
There is still a lot of room for innovation and small companies will not outsource their production - so people may have to wait for the brains to come up with some little ideas that can be produced domestically. If the little idea becomes a big success, it might be a waiting game again if local labor is too costly. People who can't wait might have to use their own brain - not that easy, but that's how come it pays! Is the observation "economy is in the crapper" basically implying that people just aren't thinking?
I recall Garfield strip where he's standing on a table, holding Jon's shirt, and has his face right up against Jon's, and he says "Gimme food. Lots of it. And right now." This was in an classic era when Garfield was typically quite funny.
On a more serious note, a machine that has the intelligence level of a cat (in consideration of problem-solving, memory, attention span, choice of action, conceptualization, etc.), one may easily ask What if the machine is scaled up 10 or 100 times? Could it become able to understand some advanced abstractions like baseball or electromagnetism? Perhaps scaling will help, but scaling some parts up by 1000 or 100000 while other parts only by 5 or 10 may be all that's required. Such partial scaling could be within reach.
So will we suddenly see a lot of competing brain simulations???
A desktop that spends half its use playing solitaire, 1/4 of its use surfing the web, and 1/4 of its use spamming the world under viral control only counts for half.
But isn't the weight for the machines holding public data? So your desktop isn't even addable unless it's sharing something.
Some things that may be considered: what does it take to pack it all up in boxes and carry it to another place in case the Earth/free world is no longer a viable place to host the Internet? A sense of the mining and manufacturing that was required to assemble the current state of the Internet is implied, though that would include things like buildings and food for researchers, factories, infrastructure (power, water, etc.)
There's a lot of physical hardware to make the Internet such a pervasive entity. What would be the impact as this hardware mass is multiplied? Speculation is hard to resist.
Perhaps one question should start to take hold - why isn't strong AI a reality? If a team or government agency was to just build a computer weighing 500 billion kg, it ought to solve problems intelligently, as in being able to understand problems and compute solutions without programming that targets the particular problem domains. The 500 billion kg system has now been demonstrated to be buildable - is it just a matter of time for the 500 billion kg computer to be assembled? Factoring in Moore's Law, long time no Cylon?
So when do our soldiers get to stop dying because of homemade street bombs?
When we stop invading other countries?
The logic chain in the forward direction: terrorist hijacks plane aimed for capitalist building. Shoot plane down from truck. Invasion of terrorist country is now not required.
The logic chain in the backward direction: when do we get to board a plane with ordinary household items that no one could use as a weapon unless they were ninjas?
Besides, if a terrorist wanted a weapon, now they can just get a laser!
None affects Windows 7. Of today's 15 bugs, Microsoft tagged three 'critical' and the remaining 12 'important.'
Critical and important patches but none affects Windows 7.
Solution?
Simple. Offer Windows 7 as a patch option (and keep it as only an option because some machines don't have enough hardware). It's hypothetical though due to the monopoly and antitrust problems of Microsoft.
After all the patching your XP or Vista or whatever becomes more and more like Windows 7 anyways.
How many of the people who've set up their computers to be 100% working are going to upgrade their Windows? They may get a new OS with a new computer because it hasn't been set up yet, but spend money to upgrade the machine that is working? The adage if it ain't broke, don't fix it is definitely the one to live by for people who've spent many frustrating hours making their computers just right.
Because computers are so affordable, it's not a big deal to get a new computer and a new Windows together, but letting Windows 7 be a free patch option to people with older systems shouldn't hurt Microsoft's bottom line since people aren't that likely to upgrade.
Lawmakers and people don't know shit about science and technology. There is no absolute speed or stationary point. If I drive at 100 mph, I could say that I got in the car, floored it, didn't move an inch while the Earth went 100 mph the other way. In fact, cars and most planes can't even hold still against the Earth's natural rotation, never mind the orbital speed around the sun. Speeding laws will have to be fixed up when ordinary people can fly their own spacecraft.
I wouldn't be so sure that ten years from now this kind of research will be allowed
Whatever the rules are in 10 years means very little in the hindsight of one or two centuries from now. Like those who believe the Earth is flat, when the facts are verified about how life can take hold in the environs of large quantities of hitherto nonliving matter (or perhaps about how divinity exists and creates matter), people who still don't want to believe the truth, whatever that truth will turn out to be, can just be their own strange minority. Facts tend to overwhelm stupidity as time allows the facts to sink in.
Hopefully, the more truth that is discovered, the less disagreement there will be among people. Such hopes will probably be dashed because these truths will more than likely be applied to create Frankensteins and their ilk.
The biggest mistake the majority of people who go on a diet is that they approach it as a way to lose weight. Actually the only way to do this effectively is to approach it as a change in lifestyle
Lifestyle - that is a big problem. There are a lot of incentives to be sitting down, and the business world doesn't make it easy for people to get exercise while make it easier to get fat. People accumulate debt, pay exorbitantly for housing and transportation so they need to work long hours, commute for hours more, breathe polluted air, buy supersized packages of food (and eat it all so as to not waste their hard earned money), while having too many entertainment choices for purchase.
Some parents encourage their kids to exercise. It's something that needs to be instilled in the home, and parents running the rat race would be prone to set bad examples.
28MB of RAM requires the use of a great deal of swap... Partition the hard drive into a 250MB swap partition
That's a 10:1 swap ratio!
I remember working on Unix workstations about 20 years ago with X Windows and between 4 to 8 Mb of RAM. If I ran one or two "serious" applications (about as complex as MS Paint or WordPad for GUI) the machine would swap like crazy. But I doubt there was much being swapped - probably not more than 12 Mb, as the disks were maxing out at 20 or 30 Mb.
16 Mb was livable, and 28 Mb should start being fun, provided very little is being swapped. If you can run with a 20 Mb swap partition, things would be reasonable, but if 200 Mb is being swapped on a 486, doing anything could take on the order of 20 to 30 minutes.
Old hardware was designed as an interim measure to the world of better hardware
I hope that the Chinese exports to the US do not mean the USA loses all control of the technology behind the venture.
That's a lot of paranoia. Windmills and wind farms have been around for a long time. The only high tech here is that they're putting the stuff up high on poles.
ISPs are paid to provide Internet access. Ergo let ISPs pay for the free things that people buy broadband for.
Therefore, newspaper or news businesses should provide BOTH news and enhanced Internet bandwidth with subscriptions. A news-ISP service could enter the home on an extra phone line. Some people complain of download caps - well, how about increased caps with your newspaper subscription (why give your ISP the business if they cap your data volumes)? Not to mention an extra phone number?
I see that real estate agents are on the list... It's not a job I'm jealous of in any way
I don't have any sympathy for real-estate agents. In 1999 I shopped around for a house, and prices were on the rise but they were under $200,000 for average homes. Three years later, the prices were more than double in spite of the same demographics. Regardless that people were stupid enough to buy at such inflated prices, the agents that I talked to just tried to tell me that I had to play along. I refused to be a sucker. If someone was willing to outbid me, let them.
If a real-estate agent complains of hard work, well why was there so much work? If they didn't hype hype hype the market was a sure way of self enrichment - prices are always going to go up so get in now now now or you'll never get in (so how is any youngster going to get in now, according to that logic?). If I didn't call the agents I talked to, they were always calling me.
They show the crappiest houses, but they know where the good ones are. "Can you show me some better houses?" I would ask. There answer was always "This is about as good as it gets." Barefaced lies, because I did see better ones, but their strategy is to move the crap at inflated prices so that of course the best houses will attract outrageous crazy gotta have it bids.
I didn't trust their sleazy ways, and I didn't want to operate at their level, but for a few years, that was such a way to make no-brainer money.
A CPU for each sell processing its own value. Excel may almost run fast.
Old software typically runs in just a few threads. More cores won't help until new software is available.
I was doing some complex work on Excel 2007 and it was taking about a minute on a fast cpu. I checked the processor usage - it wasn't a disk intensive job but the usage graph was hovering only at the 40% level for the whole minute. Excel knows it has work to do, but something was still holding back the cpu. On a slower processor, the usage was into the 80 and 90% range though, and the time to finish was a lot longer.
Software inefficiencies just let my high speed processor idle. For older software, MHz still beats having a lot of cores, so Intel's turbo to let some cores run fast while others slow is just what we need.
If the Internet was turned off, all things being equal, people will hack up something with ubiquitous wireless routers (and anonymity and all the other wishful Internet hacks would reign), and Microsoft will offer a replacement in a week. Otherwise, some great oppressive force would be at work.
Do this to 3 or 4 Bobs, and pretty soon you'll have an understanding of the corporate org chart, upcoming projects, and most importantly you'll be able to target your future EvilMaid attacks with pinpoint accuracy.
Bob's my uncle. Let's play devil's advocate.
What does the consumer get in terms of higher competition, better products, lower prices, etc. if there was absolute transparency? Imagine a fantasy world where companies bent over because security was found out to have no value so they just gave the entire world access to their entire network?
Life might just stay the same old, same old for most people. There will be more frantic activity in some quarters as people find new opportunities, and some wackos will try to corner particular markets (but on this new pool table there will be way too many corners available to drop a ball into so that only goes so far). The status quo is that the most challenging problems are still going to be challenging. The most leading edge ideas are still risky. Consumers still have only a limited means of buying while there is far greater variety of classes of items than the number of classes that can be purchased from by the average individual.
As more and more knowledge becomes available on the Internet, would it even matter in business that some people have secrets? Someone may safeguard a work in progress for a long time until a product is released, only to have a competitor reverse engineer it in far less time.
Secrecy is valuable for businesses in terms of data integrity. If someone dressed up as a maid or as anyone trusted so that they can mess around with the data, one can tell if the data became corrupted. The cost of having someone copy the data is probably far less than the cost of having to rebuild the data.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely ridiculous
The ridiculous but true, there are sickos who will try to screw some random person really badly, and technology makes it easier for anyone to be a victim.
Imagine a totally faked video of you downloading kiddie porn or other heinous crime, that shows up on YouTube and then the cops are coming in the windows. You may consider recycling your identity and moving house monthly, or posing as the illegal basement tenant and wear a wig while at home.
Alternatively, surround yourself with video cameras that shoot yur entire life to prove that you are not a bad person. Or fake a video of yourself being comatose until the last few hours.
Chaos will rule if people feel that the homeland insecurity is done by those living inside their own borders, and the consequences of techno malice go farther than some inconveniently mangled files.
bottom-end Compaq laptop Celeron 540 @ 1.86GHZ with 512MB RAM and Vista was pre-installed. It ran like a dog
and Ubuntu (now 9.10) rarely goes above 600MB of RAM used.
600 > 512
What could you have used that wouldn't run like crap? Yet, it is reasonable to think that 1.8 Ghz and half a gig of RAM ought to behave like a supercomputer.
I have some low memory computers running Windows 2000 quite nicely, but all kinds of new software seem to dictate the latest Windows plus the latest service packs. Just a couple of years ago I could still install almost all productivity software on Windows 2000, but that doesn't work any more. It's such a farce, forcing people to buy more RAM so they can run a bloated OS, and all for what? The older versions of Windows might have trouble with large hard drives or something, but why make it a requirement to upgrade Windows?
On top of it all, the Windows memory management is so stupid. I have 4 Gb of RAM so there's always at least 1 Gb free, but the hard drive is always busy with the swapping little bits here and there. The older Windows never worked so hard to achieve so little.
Fortunately one of CS profs quickly suggested that the EE professors could fix wiring and changing light bulbs and the Civil Engineering profs could clean bathrooms and unplug toilets
Surely the Mechanical Engineering department would be doing the toilets. The Chemical Engineering profs can run the cafeteria! What do CS people know?
And while all this is going on, the students could just teach themselves. Slowly technology is drifting to the point where people will have enough knowledge in their computers to learn how to do any task. IF everyone was equally skilled, what would motivate people to do the stressful or high-risk work? Money? Honor? What would motivate people to keep doing the same boring challengeless low-paying thing every day?
While I was developing software for a company I did some IT just because there was no one else who knew computers, but I didn't want IT to be a career. I helped someone fix up a messed up database, and this kind of computer work was not glamorous.
The line between fun work and drudge work in computers is very easy to cross. Essentially there is a computer sitting on a desk with all the power just at the the fingertips. All it takes is the will to keep working until you really achieve something. That's not very stressful compared to other professions where you might have to crawl into a hole, carry massive equipment into a wilderness, or be adept with timing and touch.
The time has come for a dual screen tablet PC.
Both the pen and the keyboard are very good input devices now, and touch screens are very good too. So let's have tablet PCs with no keyboard and two touchscreen tablet screens instead. Bingo - you have double the screen area if you want as well as tablet and keyboard interfaces even in the standard laptop look and feel of a horizontal and upright screen.
The price of a tablet screen is really affordable now - maybe around $600 now (6 months ago the price was around $700).
The difficulty may be in letting people use the machine regardless of which side is horizontal. It would have to be balanced with half the components on one side and half on the other. A one-screen tablet feels cool because the hot processor is under the screen, but in the summer with the processor really cranking even the screen feels hot. Mind you, the plastic keyboard also feels hot, but when you rest your hand on the screen and you are writing, heat isn't fun.
Look around, why do you think the economy is in the crapper? Because nothing is being produced anymore. The factory towns may not be glamorous but it is where the core of a country makes its living. Not the rich who rule the country, not the super poor, but the average worker who pays the taxes that allow the government to function, who deliver the soldiers for the army.
Empires collapsed before, the western empire will get a rude suprise sooner or later when China changes its tune. And no, I don't mean in an evil plot kinda way, I mean when China does what Japan did ages ago. Become an economic power with its own IP. Quick check, how many high-tech gadgets in your house are produced in cheap labor country Japan? PS3
I agree partially, but the question being begged is what will happen when China becomes the big economic power? Will wages rise and make it economically palatable to outsource? This chain of outsourcing goes only so far before every company is forced to produce domestically, because the earth is round.
Interesting that Japan has a lot of IP and still has cheap labor. Is that the fate of all nations? Only thing is, at the point where all nations are neck and neck, the cheap labor might be far more robots - so what are people going to do? Will they find everything super affordable or will there be massive unemployment and tent cities? Hence putting people to work cheaply (or not!) instead of outsourcing is not a lasting scenario.
One way to break through is to flatten the earth or increase its surface area - that is, to move economic boundaries out. Outer space work comes to mind, or else people need to cooperate in order to solve major challenges. Perhaps Obama is right: tax the rich. In the future, that may be a path to take, but this isn't the future yet.
There is still a lot of room for innovation and small companies will not outsource their production - so people may have to wait for the brains to come up with some little ideas that can be produced domestically. If the little idea becomes a big success, it might be a waiting game again if local labor is too costly. People who can't wait might have to use their own brain - not that easy, but that's how come it pays! Is the observation "economy is in the crapper" basically implying that people just aren't thinking?
Give me food. Now.
Ok. You've got me going.
I recall Garfield strip where he's standing on a table, holding Jon's shirt, and has his face right up against Jon's, and he says "Gimme food. Lots of it. And right now." This was in an classic era when Garfield was typically quite funny.
On a more serious note, a machine that has the intelligence level of a cat (in consideration of problem-solving, memory, attention span, choice of action, conceptualization, etc.), one may easily ask What if the machine is scaled up 10 or 100 times? Could it become able to understand some advanced abstractions like baseball or electromagnetism? Perhaps scaling will help, but scaling some parts up by 1000 or 100000 while other parts only by 5 or 10 may be all that's required. Such partial scaling could be within reach.
So will we suddenly see a lot of competing brain simulations???
A desktop that spends half its use playing solitaire, 1/4 of its use surfing the web, and 1/4 of its use spamming the world under viral control only counts for half.
But isn't the weight for the machines holding public data? So your desktop isn't even addable unless it's sharing something.
Some things that may be considered: what does it take to pack it all up in boxes and carry it to another place in case the Earth/free world is no longer a viable place to host the Internet? A sense of the mining and manufacturing that was required to assemble the current state of the Internet is implied, though that would include things like buildings and food for researchers, factories, infrastructure (power, water, etc.)
There's a lot of physical hardware to make the Internet such a pervasive entity. What would be the impact as this hardware mass is multiplied? Speculation is hard to resist.
Perhaps one question should start to take hold - why isn't strong AI a reality? If a team or government agency was to just build a computer weighing 500 billion kg, it ought to solve problems intelligently, as in being able to understand problems and compute solutions without programming that targets the particular problem domains. The 500 billion kg system has now been demonstrated to be buildable - is it just a matter of time for the 500 billion kg computer to be assembled? Factoring in Moore's Law, long time no Cylon?
So when do our soldiers get to stop dying because of homemade street bombs?
When we stop invading other countries?
The logic chain in the forward direction: terrorist hijacks plane aimed for capitalist building. Shoot plane down from truck. Invasion of terrorist country is now not required.
The logic chain in the backward direction: when do we get to board a plane with ordinary household items that no one could use as a weapon unless they were ninjas?
Besides, if a terrorist wanted a weapon, now they can just get a laser!
In the UK they lock you in jail for year-after-year until you give them the encryption key
Then it's time for two keys - one to convert the data into harmless filth, and another to convert the data into the real filth.
None affects Windows 7. Of today's 15 bugs, Microsoft tagged three 'critical' and the remaining 12 'important.'
Critical and important patches but none affects Windows 7.
Solution?
Simple. Offer Windows 7 as a patch option (and keep it as only an option because some machines don't have enough hardware). It's hypothetical though due to the monopoly and antitrust problems of Microsoft.
After all the patching your XP or Vista or whatever becomes more and more like Windows 7 anyways.
How many of the people who've set up their computers to be 100% working are going to upgrade their Windows? They may get a new OS with a new computer because it hasn't been set up yet, but spend money to upgrade the machine that is working? The adage if it ain't broke, don't fix it is definitely the one to live by for people who've spent many frustrating hours making their computers just right.
Because computers are so affordable, it's not a big deal to get a new computer and a new Windows together, but letting Windows 7 be a free patch option to people with older systems shouldn't hurt Microsoft's bottom line since people aren't that likely to upgrade.
Lawmakers and people don't know shit about science and technology. There is no absolute speed or stationary point. If I drive at 100 mph, I could say that I got in the car, floored it, didn't move an inch while the Earth went 100 mph the other way. In fact, cars and most planes can't even hold still against the Earth's natural rotation, never mind the orbital speed around the sun. Speeding laws will have to be fixed up when ordinary people can fly their own spacecraft.
I wouldn't be so sure that ten years from now this kind of research will be allowed
Whatever the rules are in 10 years means very little in the hindsight of one or two centuries from now. Like those who believe the Earth is flat, when the facts are verified about how life can take hold in the environs of large quantities of hitherto nonliving matter (or perhaps about how divinity exists and creates matter), people who still don't want to believe the truth, whatever that truth will turn out to be, can just be their own strange minority. Facts tend to overwhelm stupidity as time allows the facts to sink in.
Hopefully, the more truth that is discovered, the less disagreement there will be among people. Such hopes will probably be dashed because these truths will more than likely be applied to create Frankensteins and their ilk.
The biggest mistake the majority of people who go on a diet is that they approach it as a way to lose weight.
Actually the only way to do this effectively is to approach it as a change in lifestyle
Lifestyle - that is a big problem. There are a lot of incentives to be sitting down, and the business world doesn't make it easy for people to get exercise while make it easier to get fat. People accumulate debt, pay exorbitantly for housing and transportation so they need to work long hours, commute for hours more, breathe polluted air, buy supersized packages of food (and eat it all so as to not waste their hard earned money), while having too many entertainment choices for purchase.
Some parents encourage their kids to exercise. It's something that needs to be instilled in the home, and parents running the rat race would be prone to set bad examples.
And women want a penis.
Introducing the new pointing device strapped to your joystick!
At the rate of this progress, the space elevator will be in place well before OBL is located. Well done.
Probably an old joke here - Mandriva ... makes me wonder if I should trust it more as a passenger, in contrast to Womandriva.
After I've been told over and over Windows 7 is faster, it really is. Free from pain at last!
28MB of RAM requires the use of a great deal of swap ... Partition the hard drive into a 250MB swap partition
That's a 10:1 swap ratio!
I remember working on Unix workstations about 20 years ago with X Windows and between 4 to 8 Mb of RAM. If I ran one or two "serious" applications (about as complex as MS Paint or WordPad for GUI) the machine would swap like crazy. But I doubt there was much being swapped - probably not more than 12 Mb, as the disks were maxing out at 20 or 30 Mb.
16 Mb was livable, and 28 Mb should start being fun, provided very little is being swapped. If you can run with a 20 Mb swap partition, things would be reasonable, but if 200 Mb is being swapped on a 486, doing anything could take on the order of 20 to 30 minutes.
Old hardware was designed as an interim measure to the world of better hardware
I hope that the Chinese exports to the US do not mean the USA loses all control of the technology behind the venture.
That's a lot of paranoia. Windmills and wind farms have been around for a long time. The only high tech here is that they're putting the stuff up high on poles.
Why can't the internet have Salaried journalists?
ISPs are paid to provide Internet access. Ergo let ISPs pay for the free things that people buy broadband for.
Therefore, newspaper or news businesses should provide BOTH news and enhanced Internet bandwidth with subscriptions. A news-ISP service could enter the home on an extra phone line. Some people complain of download caps - well, how about increased caps with your newspaper subscription (why give your ISP the business if they cap your data volumes)? Not to mention an extra phone number?
I see that real estate agents are on the list ... It's not a job I'm jealous of in any way
I don't have any sympathy for real-estate agents. In 1999 I shopped around for a house, and prices were on the rise but they were under $200,000 for average homes. Three years later, the prices were more than double in spite of the same demographics. Regardless that people were stupid enough to buy at such inflated prices, the agents that I talked to just tried to tell me that I had to play along. I refused to be a sucker. If someone was willing to outbid me, let them.
If a real-estate agent complains of hard work, well why was there so much work? If they didn't hype hype hype the market was a sure way of self enrichment - prices are always going to go up so get in now now now or you'll never get in (so how is any youngster going to get in now, according to that logic?). If I didn't call the agents I talked to, they were always calling me.
They show the crappiest houses, but they know where the good ones are. "Can you show me some better houses?" I would ask. There answer was always "This is about as good as it gets." Barefaced lies, because I did see better ones, but their strategy is to move the crap at inflated prices so that of course the best houses will attract outrageous crazy gotta have it bids.
I didn't trust their sleazy ways, and I didn't want to operate at their level, but for a few years, that was such a way to make no-brainer money.
A CPU for each sell processing its own value. Excel may almost run fast.
Old software typically runs in just a few threads. More cores won't help until new software is available.
I was doing some complex work on Excel 2007 and it was taking about a minute on a fast cpu. I checked the processor usage - it wasn't a disk intensive job but the usage graph was hovering only at the 40% level for the whole minute. Excel knows it has work to do, but something was still holding back the cpu. On a slower processor, the usage was into the 80 and 90% range though, and the time to finish was a lot longer.
Software inefficiencies just let my high speed processor idle. For older software, MHz still beats having a lot of cores, so Intel's turbo to let some cores run fast while others slow is just what we need.
hideout
Or OBL's hidey hole
If the Internet was turned off, all things being equal, people will hack up something with ubiquitous wireless routers (and anonymity and all the other wishful Internet hacks would reign), and Microsoft will offer a replacement in a week. Otherwise, some great oppressive force would be at work.
Do this to 3 or 4 Bobs, and pretty soon you'll have an understanding of the corporate org chart, upcoming projects, and most importantly you'll be able to target your future EvilMaid attacks with pinpoint accuracy.
Bob's my uncle. Let's play devil's advocate.
What does the consumer get in terms of higher competition, better products, lower prices, etc. if there was absolute transparency? Imagine a fantasy world where companies bent over because security was found out to have no value so they just gave the entire world access to their entire network?
Life might just stay the same old, same old for most people. There will be more frantic activity in some quarters as people find new opportunities, and some wackos will try to corner particular markets (but on this new pool table there will be way too many corners available to drop a ball into so that only goes so far). The status quo is that the most challenging problems are still going to be challenging. The most leading edge ideas are still risky. Consumers still have only a limited means of buying while there is far greater variety of classes of items than the number of classes that can be purchased from by the average individual.
As more and more knowledge becomes available on the Internet, would it even matter in business that some people have secrets? Someone may safeguard a work in progress for a long time until a product is released, only to have a competitor reverse engineer it in far less time.
Secrecy is valuable for businesses in terms of data integrity. If someone dressed up as a maid or as anyone trusted so that they can mess around with the data, one can tell if the data became corrupted. The cost of having someone copy the data is probably far less than the cost of having to rebuild the data.