LOL.... everyone should be saying "mooo" or "baaah" whenever something linux or apple comes along as a subsitute for "linux r0xors" or "apple is the best." (Is it me, or is apple like the BMW of OSes?) What ever happened to *BSD and HURD? What about a distributed microkernel that allows you to send processes from one machine to another? Maybe an obscure goatse reference will hit the reset button on some people, or at least scar them for life.
Re:As much as I hate to say it...
on
Platform Evangelism
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
flash was developed by the same people that did demos back in da day.. it was pretty cool until full-screen flash ads came along that steal control of your computer. macromedia needs to work on security of flash, or there needs to be an OSS flash client w/ real security.
mac vs linux vs windows vs etc.
on
Platform Evangelism
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Motion trackers and stuff all seem to operate in the pillaged 2.4GHz zone. Cell fones, and coreless really muck things up... and the EM dynamics of us salty bags of mostly water tend to block 2.4 like a cut-out of tin foil. How good can a dense network mesh of 2.4 be w/ all this other crap? Not to mention that all this packet relaying will give u a ridiculous ping and network congestion.
But divx (not the codec) died a horrible death, thinking people would spend $8 for a demo disc, $50 for buying unlimited rights, and left with nothing but worthless crap. Circuit Shitty and some lawyers thought that people would be pay for the privlege of tying a disc to a particular player.
I think that puts this whole thing into perspective. We're too worried about our next/newest tech widget than *real* people suffering and dying of preventable diseases and stoppable atrocities. Shame on the US govt and elite media for ignoring 99% of the world. So what if napster trades songs, they should be swapping the formula & plans for antibotics and water treatment plants.
This page clearly shows they're already doing this in an industrial setting. Also, there's something called "sonication" that uses sound to make small particles of ice cream intermediate & pre-products of a powder-like consistency. And those ice-cream "dots" that are sold at malls are just ice cream mixture drops frozen in LN2.
The media, government and lay-people think there's some magic hydrogen deposits we're going to mine, or that somehow we'll convert oil into hydrogen and it'll be cleaner.
Well, we need to spend on the order of $100 Billion to make fusion power viable, since it seems that fusion power requires the economy of scale to produce a net output of power. Of course the by-products are helium and tritium and it seems these fusion plants would have to be giant industrial complexes.
It's these same Chicken-little pundits who claimed that the Chlorine atoms in Freon R-12 was the cause of the Great Ozone Hole. There's absolutely no way to prove it, and it's more likely that it is a natural occurence. Now these same jerks want to keep us sucking on the oil teats of our dealers in the Middle East. Hydrogen (H2) is an unstable atom, as well as Ozone (O3) which is a radical molecule, like Hydrogen Peroxide, which is good for blocking UV radiation and cleaning stuff. Let's all crawl under rocks and not live for fear we might hurt some part of the planet, maybe a microbe or two. Save the {ozone molecules,whales,trees,birdies,kittens,puppies,cow s}! Kill the humans!
Speaking of Unicode, 99% of linux tools dont use unicode either. I'm thinking the FSF should adopt coding standards and practices that every string in I/O and storage must be unicode. think of all the potential users are unable to represent their native language on the shell because of the Latin-1 ascii limitations. granted there's always UTF-8, but that's just not the same.
What about.la.ca.us ? It seems silly that some Laoatian biz people can sell out their own countrymen, so now what's the point of the TLD system? I think ill buy iraq's tld (.iq) for some smarty-pants mensa sites.
Wrong again! There is a finite amount of entropy you can squeeze out of a given channel... again, most compression relies on finding patterns in data through heuristsics, and the laws of diminishing returns come into play. you can't always wring any more bits out of a stream, even if you had a 64K node beowulf cluster dedicated to your 56k modem. You dont seem to understand how bandwidth works... there's no way in hell your going to reencoded a 1.3 Gbps HDTV over IP stream in real-time over even a T-1 without some huge losses and immense CPU horsepower. A quality MPEG-2 DVD has an avg bit rate (ABR) of about 8 Mbps, now you're going to tell me you're going to get me that over a laggy-ass 28.8k modem? F-that. Check your path latency pal, you need a refresher on network fundamentals.
Also, there's not much broadband "pentration" (deployment) because there's no killer app for it, and vice-versa, so it's stuck in a feedback-loop. There's plenty of fiber for the backbones, etc., (read "Dark Fiber") it's just that telco companies don't want to make capital investments on the edges and end-user side if there's no guarantee people will buy it. What is grandma going to do w/ a T-1? Setup a eDonkey2k server? I don't think so. People are turning away from TV, radio, broadcast, and print mediums, and toward the WWW, which doesn't need a huge-ass pipe (not yet). 99% of all the streaming video currently on internet sux ass because of bandwidth limitations (usually TCP or UDP). if multicast were truely deployed, there'd be a real chance of high-quality, live, streaming video sent in an efficient manner.
CTS was over-hyped into oblivion, and people w/ other MSDs & RSIs are paying the price. 70% of RSI problems aren't actually CTS, they're usually tendonitis, tendosvitis, or bursitis. I have major tendonitis in my whole right forearm, hand, etc. from computer "overuse." I also have a variable-expression heritable connective tissue disorder related to Marfans & Beals, but I dont know exactly what it is, it would require an expensive genetic test, which makes me tall, causing two risk factors for RSI & MSDs (mechanics & weaker tissue). The doctors can't find any nerve damage and wont run an MRI because it's an HMO and not Worker's Comp, so they make up some excuses (like my keyboard is in the wrong position, heck i use it on my lap) and blame the patient, saying it's psychosomatic (all in my head). So now I've been out of work and school for a year, and I only have a dozen units left, but if my body can't do the job, what's the point? Right now, I'm saying "fuck it," and have resumed using the computer, no matter the cost &&|| pain.
In addition, I spend waaay too much time at the computer, on the order of 5-10 hrs/day. I'm seriously consider buying a radical keboard, such as the DataHand ($1k-2k US), and then mapping it to dvorak. I find that mouse work is really hard on your body too, so I bought a trackball, and alternate on both.
Maybe I didnt read/. as much and write these big comments, my arms wouldnt hurt as much... nawh! Besides, you can also get real CTS and other RSIs from position u sleep in, if you draw your arms/hands into your upper chest "praying-mantis" style, you are at a severe risk for wrists aliments.
Yo, SCO! You don't matter. Your desperate attempts to scare up some royalties are falling on deaf ears. The parrot is dead and no, you don't get a refund.
SCO phone tree:
"Welcom to SCO, the leaders in leveraging mature intellectual property on de facto standards that we claim to own.
Press 1 if you need to pay your Linux royalties, press 2 if you want to be a target of a shakedown, press 3 if you are a cash cow that needs milking, press 4 for if you use any of the following: hair-dryer, phone, toliet paper, keys; if unsure press 5.
*Beep* [5]. You may owe us money, please wait while we check your medical records, credit card receipts, and hard drive for mp3s, pr0n and dvd rips..... please continue to hold..... please continue to hold.... You owe FIFTEEN-THOUSAND FOUR-HUND-RED SIXTYSEVEN dollars and TWE-LVE cents. Press 1 to pay by check, press 2 to pay by credit card. *click*
I know one of my prof at UCD used a UCB program that does a fuzzy match on code similarity in an undergrad course. It maintains a permanent record of every program submitted and compares every program against each other, even different code from other courses at other schools, years apart! Man, think of the computation complexity involved. This thing must be churning 24x7.
LMAO!! UC Berkeley itself has a lax policy on cheating... that might be why. You get -5% if you cheat. I think there should be an automatic expulsion. I one saw someone blantantly using a big-ass crib sheet in an upper div CS course that was closed-book, closed-notes and graded on a scale. You can bet your ass I told the TA, because that's just unacceptable. I also know that cheating is rampant, which is also as repungnant. Most of the cheating involves courses that have hours and hours of problem sets. Since I did not cheat, it took me hours and hours to complete and I did not always finish on time because there was just too much to do. In addition, I know there were people that cheated that got As, while I had to make do w/ Bs and Cs, even though I know more than them and learned the material.
As this applies to the SCO / *nix thing, the truth of the matter is that people cheat and cut corners everyday. Not to be an -ist or -ism, but the people these companies hire are not of necessarily the highest caliber or experience, or even legal citizens, most all companies are guilty of this... finding the cheapest and easiest, the people they hire are often desperate (in fear of death, sometimes) to get into the US or someplace similar. Desperate people do desperate things, so you inevitably get what you pay for.
Btw, I read in the paper that unemployed immigrants can get unemployment insurance. Great, now that the immigrants are here, there's no jobs to be had for more established people. Time to move to Russia.
Here's what I said in response to a previous/. story.
SCO copied Linux code?
Just a random, alternative explanation.
Or maybe, the same monkies they got to write Shakespear (sic) by random chance, wrote the same exact code in two different places. Let's think... the odd of randomly producing the same 1K of code have an upper-bound of about 1 in 64^1024, still not exactly zero. A Lower bound would be a big factorial expression. Ignoring the comments and differences in names and variables, most becomes VERY similar (hence OOP & patterns).
In a platform agnostic way, what's the best performance/$ ? I'm guessing it's a Duron box overclocked ($130 for a basic, functioning computer w/o video), but are their some cheap Sparcs out there or MIPS, PPC, RISC, AIX? Then again, what about high-end clones of sparcs etc?
The truth about advertising is that it doesn't work on the long term. They may convince some people by big, flashy ads to buy their product; but if their products aren't any good, people will stop buying them, usually, unless they're addictive: pr0n, drugs (alcohol), cigs, etc. Word of mouth advertising is truely a more powerful and cheaper means of informing people about your products. In fact, there can be a *negative* correlation w/ advertising and sales from consumer retaliation to over-funded, over-blown campaigns. Take "ditech.com" and the other predatory lenders that have every other commercial slot, I sure as $hit wont use them.
I'm not arguing for legislation with respect to commercial content distribution, but it seems that viewers are getting the short end of an increasingly smaller stick. For example, cable television was originally billed as the commercial-less alternative to free-to-air network TV. Well, look where that went? All there is left is HBO, Cinemax and a few others held by a small pool of mega media giants, with pay distribution channels numbering less than half-a-dozen.
If consumers had alternatives, it is likely they would take them, but the mega media giants are forcing a captive, anti-competitive market. In addition, fewer and fewer people are watching TV (dish, cable or air). Most everyone my age that I know (90%) do not watch any form of television. In addition, the upwardly mobile dont have time for such things. Video-on-demand and series-made-for DVD are going to be the only ways people will use their TV. Otherwise, their only choice is to go to the movies. (Don't get me started w/ product placement and commercials.)
The other issue is the pentration of advertising into basic, everday life. We have advertisements everywhere, even on the chalkboards in universities and in the games kids play. It shows that the advertising industry is way over-blown, over-spent and saturated to the point mfgrs may want to start cutting back. The only problem for us consumers, is that the unit cost of advertising is rapidly approaching 0 for all mediums except printed.
AFAIK, zip fragmentation is w/ the filename and allows for a ZIP to be broken simply by binary file-splitting. Example, you could split an existing ZIP w/ a binary spitter at, say 1.44M for floppies, and copy/b a+b the files back together and it would still work. In fact, who cares? Use binary splitting and DIY. Windoze winzip is for the lazy anyhow, let them screw it up.
I'm thinking that it seems mac's hardware is consisently one step ahead of x86's... if i were wanting uber hardware for a linux box, macs seem the way to go. note: i've never owned a mac, but it seems that they have cool stuff and better integration and are a more finished product that 99% of PCs. Granted I despise apple's os, but if u could toss the *bsd thing and have pure linux would be really cool.
Bluetooth is going to be and IS already used in all kinds of things... In fact, the company I worked for is going to replace all their silly serial cables and random cruft of proprietary data cables w/ all or mostly all bluetooth and 802.11. Bluetooth is perfect for short-range data sync'ing like Palm base, car computer diagnositic eqpmnt, and there's even bluetooth headsets that work w/ cell-phones and other things. Bluetooth is definitely not dead, it's just lost it's hype. And M$FT is trying to push it's UPnP as THE way, next wintel will push for their own wireless "STD."
<predictions> The next technologies we'll see deployed are passive cavity (this is not a pun) resonator circuits (no on-board power) that emit an ID code or do some basic processing on nanopower. Your groceries wont have UPCs, they'll have some little "patch" or "splatch" circuit that'll emit some tiny RF signal when a RF beam is aimed at it. "That'll keep those nerds from constructing a UPC database of our products, and make those CueCats obsolete." </predictions>
Slashdot Mirror
LOL.... everyone should be saying "mooo" or "baaah" whenever something linux or apple comes along as a subsitute for "linux r0xors" or "apple is the best." (Is it me, or is apple like the BMW of OSes?) What ever happened to *BSD and HURD? What about a distributed microkernel that allows you to send processes from one machine to another? Maybe an obscure goatse reference will hit the reset button on some people, or at least scar them for life.
flash was developed by the same people that did demos back in da day.. it was pretty cool until full-screen flash ads came along that steal control of your computer. macromedia needs to work on security of flash, or there needs to be an OSS flash client w/ real security.
use whatever suits u the best. ;)
Motion trackers and stuff all seem to operate in the pillaged 2.4GHz zone. Cell fones, and coreless really muck things up... and the EM dynamics of us salty bags of mostly water tend to block 2.4 like a cut-out of tin foil. How good can a dense network mesh of 2.4 be w/ all this other crap? Not to mention that all this packet relaying will give u a ridiculous ping and network congestion.
But divx (not the codec) died a horrible death, thinking people would spend $8 for a demo disc, $50 for buying unlimited rights, and left with nothing but worthless crap. Circuit Shitty and some lawyers thought that people would be pay for the privlege of tying a disc to a particular player.
I think that puts this whole thing into perspective. We're too worried about our next/newest tech widget than *real* people suffering and dying of preventable diseases and stoppable atrocities. Shame on the US govt and elite media for ignoring 99% of the world. So what if napster trades songs, they should be swapping the formula & plans for antibotics and water treatment plants.
This page clearly shows they're already doing this in an industrial setting. Also, there's something called "sonication" that uses sound to make small particles of ice cream intermediate & pre-products of a powder-like consistency. And those ice-cream "dots" that are sold at malls are just ice cream mixture drops frozen in LN2.
The media, government and lay-people think there's some magic hydrogen deposits we're going to mine, or that somehow we'll convert oil into hydrogen and it'll be cleaner.
Well, we need to spend on the order of $100 Billion to make fusion power viable, since it seems that fusion power requires the economy of scale to produce a net output of power. Of course the by-products are helium and tritium and it seems these fusion plants would have to be giant industrial complexes.
It's these same Chicken-little pundits who claimed that the Chlorine atoms in Freon R-12 was the cause of the Great Ozone Hole. There's absolutely no way to prove it, and it's more likely that it is a natural occurence. Now these same jerks want to keep us sucking on the oil teats of our dealers in the Middle East. Hydrogen (H2) is an unstable atom, as well as Ozone (O3) which is a radical molecule, like Hydrogen Peroxide, which is good for blocking UV radiation and cleaning stuff. Let's all crawl under rocks and not live for fear we might hurt some part of the planet, maybe a microbe or two. Save the {ozone molecules,whales,trees,birdies,kittens,puppies,cow s}! Kill the humans!
Speaking of Unicode, 99% of linux tools dont use unicode either. I'm thinking the FSF should adopt coding standards and practices that every string in I/O and storage must be unicode. think of all the potential users are unable to represent their native language on the shell because of the Latin-1 ascii limitations. granted there's always UTF-8, but that's just not the same.
What about .la.ca.us ? It seems silly that some Laoatian biz people can sell out their own countrymen, so now what's the point of the TLD system? I think ill buy iraq's tld (.iq) for some smarty-pants mensa sites.
Wrong again! There is a finite amount of entropy you can squeeze out of a given channel... again, most compression relies on finding patterns in data through heuristsics, and the laws of diminishing returns come into play. you can't always wring any more bits out of a stream, even if you had a 64K node beowulf cluster dedicated to your 56k modem. You dont seem to understand how bandwidth works... there's no way in hell your going to reencoded a 1.3 Gbps HDTV over IP stream in real-time over even a T-1 without some huge losses and immense CPU horsepower. A quality MPEG-2 DVD has an avg bit rate (ABR) of about 8 Mbps, now you're going to tell me you're going to get me that over a laggy-ass 28.8k modem? F-that. Check your path latency pal, you need a refresher on network fundamentals.
Also, there's not much broadband "pentration" (deployment) because there's no killer app for it, and vice-versa, so it's stuck in a feedback-loop. There's plenty of fiber for the backbones, etc., (read "Dark Fiber") it's just that telco companies don't want to make capital investments on the edges and end-user side if there's no guarantee people will buy it. What is grandma going to do w/ a T-1? Setup a eDonkey2k server? I don't think so. People are turning away from TV, radio, broadcast, and print mediums, and toward the WWW, which doesn't need a huge-ass pipe (not yet). 99% of all the streaming video currently on internet sux ass because of bandwidth limitations (usually TCP or UDP). if multicast were truely deployed, there'd be a real chance of high-quality, live, streaming video sent in an efficient manner.
CTS was over-hyped into oblivion, and people w/ other MSDs & RSIs are paying the price. 70% of RSI problems aren't actually CTS, they're usually tendonitis, tendosvitis, or bursitis. I have major tendonitis in my whole right forearm, hand, etc. from computer "overuse." I also have a variable-expression heritable connective tissue disorder related to Marfans & Beals, but I dont know exactly what it is, it would require an expensive genetic test, which makes me tall, causing two risk factors for RSI & MSDs (mechanics & weaker tissue). The doctors can't find any nerve damage and wont run an MRI because it's an HMO and not Worker's Comp, so they make up some excuses (like my keyboard is in the wrong position, heck i use it on my lap) and blame the patient, saying it's psychosomatic (all in my head). So now I've been out of work and school for a year, and I only have a dozen units left, but if my body can't do the job, what's the point? Right now, I'm saying "fuck it," and have resumed using the computer, no matter the cost &&|| pain.
/. as much and write these big comments, my arms wouldnt hurt as much... nawh! Besides, you can also get real CTS and other RSIs from position u sleep in, if you draw your arms/hands into your upper chest "praying-mantis" style, you are at a severe risk for wrists aliments.
In addition, I spend waaay too much time at the computer, on the order of 5-10 hrs/day. I'm seriously consider buying a radical keboard, such as the DataHand ($1k-2k US), and then mapping it to dvorak. I find that mouse work is really hard on your body too, so I bought a trackball, and alternate on both.
Maybe I didnt read
The new "touch-screen" version is really pissin' off the cleaning crew, sick of wiping smeared fingerprints off the mirror/tv.
Yo, SCO! You don't matter. Your desperate attempts to scare up some royalties are falling on deaf ears. The parrot is dead and no, you don't get a refund.
.... please continue to hold ..... please continue to hold .... You owe FIFTEEN-THOUSAND FOUR-HUND-RED SIXTYSEVEN dollars and TWE-LVE cents. Press 1 to pay by check, press 2 to pay by credit card. *click*
SCO phone tree:
"Welcom to SCO, the leaders in leveraging mature intellectual property on de facto standards that we claim to own.
Press 1 if you need to pay your Linux royalties,
press 2 if you want to be a target of a shakedown,
press 3 if you are a cash cow that needs milking,
press 4 for if you use any of the following: hair-dryer, phone, toliet paper, keys; if unsure press 5.
*Beep* [5]. You may owe us money, please wait while we check your medical records, credit card receipts, and hard drive for mp3s, pr0n and dvd rips.
LMAO!! UC Berkeley itself has a lax policy on cheating... that might be why. You get -5% if you cheat. I think there should be an automatic expulsion. I one saw someone blantantly using a big-ass crib sheet in an upper div CS course that was closed-book, closed-notes and graded on a scale. You can bet your ass I told the TA, because that's just unacceptable. I also know that cheating is rampant, which is also as repungnant. Most of the cheating involves courses that have hours and hours of problem sets. Since I did not cheat, it took me hours and hours to complete and I did not always finish on time because there was just too much to do. In addition, I know there were people that cheated that got As, while I had to make do w/ Bs and Cs, even though I know more than them and learned the material.
As this applies to the SCO / *nix thing, the truth of the matter is that people cheat and cut corners everyday. Not to be an -ist or -ism, but the people these companies hire are not of necessarily the highest caliber or experience, or even legal citizens, most all companies are guilty of this... finding the cheapest and easiest, the people they hire are often desperate (in fear of death, sometimes) to get into the US or someplace similar. Desperate people do desperate things, so you inevitably get what you pay for.
Btw, I read in the paper that unemployed immigrants can get unemployment insurance. Great, now that the immigrants are here, there's no jobs to be had for more established people. Time to move to Russia.
Here's what I said in response to a previous /. story.
SCO copied Linux code?
Just a random, alternative explanation.
Or maybe, the same monkies they got to write Shakespear (sic) by random chance, wrote the same exact code in two different places. Let's think... the odd of randomly producing the same 1K of code have an upper-bound of about 1 in 64^1024, still not exactly zero. A Lower bound would be a big factorial expression. Ignoring the comments and differences in names and variables, most becomes VERY similar (hence OOP & patterns).
In a platform agnostic way, what's the best performance/$ ? I'm guessing it's a Duron box overclocked ($130 for a basic, functioning computer w/o video), but are their some cheap Sparcs out there or MIPS, PPC, RISC, AIX? Then again, what about high-end clones of sparcs etc?
The truth about advertising is that it doesn't work on the long term. They may convince some people by big, flashy ads to buy their product; but if their products aren't any good, people will stop buying them, usually, unless they're addictive: pr0n, drugs (alcohol), cigs, etc. Word of mouth advertising is truely a more powerful and cheaper means of informing people about your products. In fact, there can be a *negative* correlation w/ advertising and sales from consumer retaliation to over-funded, over-blown campaigns. Take "ditech.com" and the other predatory lenders that have every other commercial slot, I sure as $hit wont use them.
I'm not arguing for legislation with respect to commercial content distribution, but it seems that viewers are getting the short end of an increasingly smaller stick. For example, cable television was originally billed as the commercial-less alternative to free-to-air network TV. Well, look where that went? All there is left is HBO, Cinemax and a few others held by a small pool of mega media giants, with pay distribution channels numbering less than half-a-dozen.
If consumers had alternatives, it is likely they would take them, but the mega media giants are forcing a captive, anti-competitive market. In addition, fewer and fewer people are watching TV (dish, cable or air). Most everyone my age that I know (90%) do not watch any form of television. In addition, the upwardly mobile dont have time for such things. Video-on-demand and series-made-for DVD are going to be the only ways people will use their TV. Otherwise, their only choice is to go to the movies. (Don't get me started w/ product placement and commercials.)
The other issue is the pentration of advertising into basic, everday life. We have advertisements everywhere, even on the chalkboards in universities and in the games kids play. It shows that the advertising industry is way over-blown, over-spent and saturated to the point mfgrs may want to start cutting back. The only problem for us consumers, is that the unit cost of advertising is rapidly approaching 0 for all mediums except printed.
The outline would read something like this:
Chapters:
- Introduction
- Background
- Picking a new whore nick
- Troll yourself using a different alias
- So... You want to be a karma whore?
- The top 5 ways to get your first
/. posting
- How to be more than a OPW, a One-Post-Wonder
- Making fun of the
/. editors
- Not going for the first post
- Submit comments early
- Instant Karma: Talk about random, chic geek crap
- Know WTF you're talking about, or at least act like it, and defend your BS position vigorously
Will be available in the Universal eBook format known as PostScript; also available on dead, flat, pressed trees with oil-based pigment markings.AFAIK, zip fragmentation is w/ the filename and allows for a ZIP to be broken simply by binary file-splitting. Example, you could split an existing ZIP w/ a binary spitter at, say 1.44M for floppies, and copy /b a+b the files back together and it would still work. In fact, who cares? Use binary splitting and DIY. Windoze winzip is for the lazy anyhow, let them screw it up.
I'm thinking that it seems mac's hardware is consisently one step ahead of x86's... if i were wanting uber hardware for a linux box, macs seem the way to go. note: i've never owned a mac, but it seems that they have cool stuff and better integration and are a more finished product that 99% of PCs. Granted I despise apple's os, but if u could toss the *bsd thing and have pure linux would be really cool.
Unicode + greatest common subsequence fuzzy match == catch T's. Soundex == stupid.
Bluetooth is going to be and IS already used in all kinds of things... In fact, the company I worked for is going to replace all their silly serial cables and random cruft of proprietary data cables w/ all or mostly all bluetooth and 802.11. Bluetooth is perfect for short-range data sync'ing like Palm base, car computer diagnositic eqpmnt, and there's even bluetooth headsets that work w/ cell-phones and other things. Bluetooth is definitely not dead, it's just lost it's hype. And M$FT is trying to push it's UPnP as THE way, next wintel will push for their own wireless "STD."
<predictions>
The next technologies we'll see deployed are passive cavity (this is not a pun) resonator circuits (no on-board power) that emit an ID code or do some basic processing on nanopower. Your groceries wont have UPCs, they'll have some little "patch" or "splatch" circuit that'll emit some tiny RF signal when a RF beam is aimed at it. "That'll keep those nerds from constructing a UPC database of our products, and make those CueCats obsolete."
</predictions>