That Global Warming is a manmade, real phenomona is accepted by 99.9% of scientists in the fields involved. To trot out the "only a theory", "some experts dispute" etc routine is like getting the Flat Earth Society involved every time someone talks about circumnavigation.
That "99.9% of scientists" agree with the theory doesn't mean much. Scientists are generally as much herd animals as the rest of humanity, sadly enough. Since this particular topic also has a strong political aspect, it is even more prone to group-think issues. What percentage of scientists agreed with evolution the year after "The Origin of Species" was published?
In addition, even if global warming is a real effect, the speed with which it's happening is a highly critical aspect of the problem. There have been some big surprises in this area lately, including "global dimming" and the revelation that one of the biggest sources of pollution globally is Southeast Asian cooking fires, something Kyoto would have ignored. More research is clearly needed before we can claim to understand the current state of affairs and the likely scenario over the next few decades.
It should be obvious to most people that cleaner technologies are better, and it seems highly likely that technology will evolve in that direction over time. How fast we must get to cleaner technologies, and how we are going to disseminate such technologies to poorer, developing countries that will be the big polluters of the future otherwise are the pressing issues.
Personally, I find it sad that the US isn't investing heavily in new nuclear power generation. That would do a lot to ameliorate greenhouse gas generation in this country, as well as stopping many of the other nasty side effects of coal power generation.
"Heads in the sand" is going to be on our culture's gravestone when the next lot of intelligent life evolves here and starts wondering why parts of Nevada are 10,000 times the normal radiation level.
LOL. I doubt any part of Nevada is "10,000 times the normal radiation level" now, and certainly none of it would be hundreds of millions of years from now when some hypothetical intelligent species evolves. Thanks for the laugh though.
Should taxpayers be able to see information on secret military projects as well?
Not when the secret is current, and espionage is a concern. This is of course the current state of affairs.
Once the secret is no longer of military importance, all information that can be released should be released. In general that's what happens - note the wealth of information available on the WWII atomic weapon program for instance.
No, the mass of the black hole is simply being converted to energy ala e=mc^2.
You're turning useless energy removed from the system via entropy into useful energy you can work with again.
The net entropy is constant, and one thing that Hawking verified is that no information about what went into the black hole is being returned to the outside universe.
Given the correctly chosen size for a black hole at the core, you can pick one that produces energy at the same rate as the core feeds it, it heats the core, and you make sure to convert that energy to matter sufficiently to keep it fed.
Yes, though this would be a quite tricky process. Black holes in this size range would be very small, so they can't suck in matter at that high a rate. Further, since things go exponentially faster and more energetically as the object evaporates, it would be a dicey situation. I don't think I'd want to be near such a reactor.;-)
IIRC, the final explosion is "the equivalent of a million H-bombs or, depending on a not well known constant, a million times bigger than that.". Nice planet-destroyer weapon for the science fiction buffs.:-)
By the way, the existence of small black holes is quite uncertain, since the only way they could have formed is during the Big Bang. Eventually (many, many times the amount of time the universe will have shining stars) even large black holes should evaporate to these small sizes, but it's unlikely any observers will be around (depending on your religious views, of course;).
What obvious physical limitation am I missing?
None. Read "A Brief History of Time" it covers the topic well. In a nutshell, after a *very* long time, Hawking theorizes the open, ever-expanding universe reaches a state of heat death with no matter anywhere and the same temperature everywhere.
Seems unlikely. A black hole of any mass will consume stuff, as long as stuff gets close to it. The thing to bear in mind is that any black hole only has the gravitational pull of what went into it. The thing that makes 'em suck stuff up is that they're so small, so if one is in contact with the earth, it'll slurp up everything that gets too close, gradually gaining mass.
Not true. Read up on "Hawking radiation". Hawking theorized that virtual particle pairs created by tidal forces (which normally recombine for zero net result) would sometimes be split by one falling into the event horizon and the other proceeding into the outside universe. Since tidal forces become exponentially stronger the smaller a black hole is, so does the Hawking radiation. Since mass is conserved in this process, to an outside observer it appears as though the black hole is radiating energy and shrinking. Very small black holes shrink much faster than they can pull in Earth-density mass (small event horizon and total gravity), so such a black hole would simply explode rather than growing. This explosion is expected to be quite large by our standards, by the way.
(Hence, if the sun randomly imploded to a black hole, nothing would get sucked in - it'd just be a helluva lot colder and darker)
True, except the potential energy of the Sun's mass in it's current configuration would likely cause a highly energetic event as the mass was sucked into a black hole with a few kilometer event horizon. BTW, I assume you know that a star smaller than 1.4 solar masses can't naturally form a black hole.
Incidentally, 10 million, billion, billionths of a second sounds to me like 10 million seconds...
Hey, is anybody using the gnu java compiler much? How's the performance on java programs made with it?
Having seen some of the simplistic negative responses to this post, I have to say it's not that simple. gcj has its strengths and weaknesses, and for some things it's substantially faster than the commercial Java VMs.
Performance wise, its weak spot seems to be GC performance and some other specific areas like synchronization monitors and exceptions. However, if you tailor your code to gcc's strong points, by using techniques like object pools, you can achieve very strong performance. If you can avoid on-the-fly classloading (and thus any interpreted code) you can get excellent performance and the added benefit of totally deterministic execution speeds. This is good for real time code - dynamic runtime optimizers are scary for real time applications, as is GC in general (another reason object pooling is a nice technique).
Such scenarios are found ever more frequently in the real world. For example, no-one should venture onto the Internet without firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware protection. These services are constantly active and need appropriate resources. Likewise, operations such as data encryption or hard disk defragmentation can load the processor, while the user compresses streaming video or audio data. Under such usage patterns, the advantage of HT is particularly apparent.
This is basically BS. Firewally, anti-virus, and anti-spyware are either 1) dedicated hardware or 2) run sporadically without being CPU-bound. How many people defragment their disk other than at 3:00 AM Sunday morning? And "data encryption" is a non-starter for most except for SSL encryption.
Nice try, though...
That said, dual core and/or regular timeslicing will work for all this as well anyhow...
The problem with biases is, they stick around even when they're wrong.
What, exactly, is the difference between "opinion" and "bias"? Further, do you understand what an "editorial policy" is?
And fox news having the highest ratings doesn't make their news any more accurate, it just means they're misinforming more people.
I didn't state that its news was "more accurate". However, I would say that it's clear that more viewers prefer Fox's presentation of the news, than that of its competitors. The other channels also have their share of "bias". The fact that more people prefer Fox should tell you something, especially if you think democracy has merit. (Of course, there is the "masses are asses" theory as well...;)
Ironically, many people don't like Fox simply because of their bias against Bush et al.
Besides, Tom's Hardware is the Fox News of tech news, heavily intel/nvidia biased.
First, being the "Fox News" of tech news isn't necessarily bad - after all Fox has the highest ratings of any cable news channel.;-)
Further, having an NVIDIA bias isn't a bad thing either - NVIDIA has the best graphics tech right now, it makes *great* AMD64 chipsets, and it aggressively supports Linux with the best graphics and system drivers available. What's not to like?
On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of Intel at this point. Its chips are expensive, power hungry, and underperform AMD chips running at 2/3 the clock. I've hated the P4 design ever since I found out they created such a long pipeline merely to boost clock speeds without actually providing more performance. If Intel was smart, they'd start with the Pentium-M design, make it 64-bit, then improve it from there. It seems like a good chip, and uses very little power.
While AMD seems to have the upper hand in design, intel is stomping them into the dirt on sales.
That isn't really true...AMD has been gaining marketshare again recently. It is up to around 18% of the overall market, and is rapidly increasing its sales of server/workstation chips. Opteron went from 3.5% of server sales in 2003 to 6.5% in 2004. That is almost 100% growth, all at Intel's expense.
AMD has been behind in mobile offerings, but Turion may change that - it competes directly with Pentium-M (the processor part of the 'Centrino' marketing package).
Plus, AMD is set to ramp up it's CPU production capacity quickly over the next couple years, to around 100 million processors per year. If it can sell all of them, that will put it close to 50% of the market at that point (give or take). Given the power savings and mostly superior performance with AMD chips, things are looking good...
I would say that whoever publishes Apple Insider or Think Secret fulfills all of those requirements.
Those are both "online magazines" but "magazines" nonetheless. They "process and research news intended for dissemination to the public". They are "for gain". Either the judge has a reading comprehension problem, or the California law (which applies) is quite different from the New York law cited here. I can't find the California law online, if anyone has a link I'd appreciate it.
All that said, I'm inclined to agree with other posters that shield laws simply allow journalists to print whatever they feel like, including stuff they make up. Perhaps Think Secret should go with the psychic defense: "my psychic had a vision of an Apple product code-named 'Asteroid'"! Might work...;-)
Java and Mono have chosen completely different paths at this point. It's futile to try to evangelize one language over the other at this point. Java has settled as a backend language for stuff like web services, while Mono/.NET competes with the incumbent C/C++, and Python to some extent, over the desktop. It's now a case of different tools for different jobs, and at this time it's already pretty clear that Mono is going to be a major force when it comes to the future of the Linux desktop.
I disagree. Java hasn't ceded the desktop, and C# hasn't won it. There is plenty of activity in both camps, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. You should check out gcj if you haven't already...
Actually, reading that statistic I was impressed by how well C# is doing -- 1/7th as many projects as Java, and really all in about 2 years, and in the OSS community which isn't exactly MS's core area.
OSS isn't Java's core area either. Considering the amount of badmouthing Java takes here on/., it's amazing that there are any Java Sourceforge projects at all...;-)
I think MS have recaptured a bit of their old magic here, in lowering the 'energy threshold' required to get a project going. That's what made VB and Excel so ubiquitous -- I'm not saying that that was a good thing, but it sure worked. The work you have to do to create, package and distribute a.net app is just significantly less than for a java app. If I never see another classpath or another teeny little xml file that has to just match the Java code in some other file, I will be sooooo happy.
You should try gcj, you can either end up with a single executable file, or an executable plus some shared libraries that reside in the same dir. No classpath or XML required.
Of course, I'm far from declaring victory for.net. But 2000 on sourceforge is a good sign, not a bad one.
Considering the glowing tone of the original article, you'd think the proportions were reversed...just thought I'd inject a little reality into the conversation.
(BTW the #5 most popular app on SF, Azureus, is a desktop Java app.)
Also, don't forget there is a very interesting ahead-of-time Java compiler as part of the gcc toolchain, gcj. It isn't complete, but it is constantly improving and can now be used to write SWT and Gnome applications. Good stuff!
I hate to see C# getting any uptake when all it is intended to do is allow Microsoft to co-opt all of Java's good ideas while stifling portability as much as possible. It is a transparent Java ripoff.
Isnt Nvidia doing the same with his new nforce serie motherboards? lowering cpu usage by adding network management code and a SPI firewall inside the chipset?
If you go with a Athlon64 Socket 939 nForce4 board, you get PCI Express, lower power consumption, a ton of great features, good Linux support, and plug-compatible dual core upgrades down the road. Intel's offerings just seem anemic by comparison.
(Personally, I'd also do an NVIDIA graphics board for the excellent Linux driver support. And no, I don't work for NVIDIA, I'm just a satisfied customer.)
That means there's absolutely no need to study the stars and planets and outer space, since the formation of life on Earth (and the creation of this planet itself) was handled by some divine being.
That's what Einstein believed. Yet, regardless, he was somehow able to make a contribution.[/sarcasm]
Regardless your argument doesn't hold water. No matter how it was all created, it looks like there are interesting places to go (and possibly exploit) out there. It'll happen someday, if the human race lasts long enough.
I wondered whether the Bush administration's willingness to junk Hubble was a symptom of the same American retreat from Science as th pressure to give "Scientific Cretionism" equal support and prestige in America's schools.
In fact, this has happened to a very small extent, if at all, in terms of "Creationism" getting equal time in public school curricula.
Which is encouraging, since evolution is the only theory of biological diversification over time that has significant scientific backing...
Regarding Hubble, I'd be curious to see images from the Keck instrument and other diffraction-based dual telescopes compared to Hubble imagery. If Hubble's performance is now equalled by ground-based instruments, it makes more sense to let it go and wait for future, vastly improved space telescopes.
The only way this can be achieved is with a total rewrite or replacement of PocketPC/WindowsCE
It's called "PalmOS". PalmSource has announced a future version will be based on Linux, which is exciting.
Now if someone will just build some compelling hardware...:-)
Wearable devices are a dark horse in all this also, and might make a better base for converged comm/computer functionality (since you can comfortably carry bigger batteries that way).
(Sorry I didn't respond until now, I didn't see your post until today...I hope you notice this one!)
I seriously doubt if the desktop form factor will be around longer than me. We're already quickly approaching the point where the desktop has no advantages over portable. I can't imagine that in 20 years we'll still have boxes with approximately a cubic foot of space in them. That's only currently really being used for heat disappation and expandability. Heat disappation would be better served by making one entire side of the box a radiative surface. Expandability has already become largely unnecessary, or external, and I would expect that trend to continue.
So in 20 years I should still be around, but I expect my computer will be pretty thin, with a much larger surface area to volume ratio than today. That's in the least inventive future I can imagine. I actually expect things will be even more different by then.
My main point was that the "general purpose computer" would survive, as opposed to the gp's point about thin client or appliance devices. I did acknowledge that notebook marketshare was likely to rise.
I do think desktop machines will be around for a long time, as you can't carry a 30" display around. A MiniMac style system is still a desktop even if you carry it around with you. Plus it's not clear how the trend will go with power requirements/dissipation. It may be that the desktop system of the future will have hundreds or thousands of processors with corresponding power requirements. Graphics cards have also trended towards dissipating more power, not less over the last few years. The electronics might be physically small, but require substantial cooling.
Time will tell though...I hope to see what happens at least through 2040 or so.:-)
They also realize that they work in a corporate environment where MS Office is King, and may have been burned in the past with OpenOffice not handling all MS documents properly.
Not just Microsoft Office, but a ton of commercial software. Almost none of it is on Linux or other Unix systems. Macs also make terrific development systems.
Apple is looking more and more attractive, enough so to easily justify the higher prices. Good stuff!
Apple also is starting to realise that the desktop PC as a platform is dead, and will in the next couple of years be replaced by a thinclient running on anything from a console, plasma tv, fridge, or some sort of LG Internet Toaster.
Drinking some Kool-Aid are you?
While desktop PCs may lose some unit volume (not all that much though, since they are the most bang for the buck), that will be replaced by laptop volume. Apple makes very nice laptops.
General purpose computers will be around in volume for a long, long time. Longer than you and I, in fact.;-)
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That "99.9% of scientists" agree with the theory doesn't mean much. Scientists are generally as much herd animals as the rest of humanity, sadly enough. Since this particular topic also has a strong political aspect, it is even more prone to group-think issues. What percentage of scientists agreed with evolution the year after "The Origin of Species" was published?
In addition, even if global warming is a real effect, the speed with which it's happening is a highly critical aspect of the problem. There have been some big surprises in this area lately, including "global dimming" and the revelation that one of the biggest sources of pollution globally is Southeast Asian cooking fires, something Kyoto would have ignored. More research is clearly needed before we can claim to understand the current state of affairs and the likely scenario over the next few decades.
It should be obvious to most people that cleaner technologies are better, and it seems highly likely that technology will evolve in that direction over time. How fast we must get to cleaner technologies, and how we are going to disseminate such technologies to poorer, developing countries that will be the big polluters of the future otherwise are the pressing issues.
Personally, I find it sad that the US isn't investing heavily in new nuclear power generation. That would do a lot to ameliorate greenhouse gas generation in this country, as well as stopping many of the other nasty side effects of coal power generation.
"Heads in the sand" is going to be on our culture's gravestone when the next lot of intelligent life evolves here and starts wondering why parts of Nevada are 10,000 times the normal radiation level.
LOL. I doubt any part of Nevada is "10,000 times the normal radiation level" now, and certainly none of it would be hundreds of millions of years from now when some hypothetical intelligent species evolves. Thanks for the laugh though.
Not when the secret is current, and espionage is a concern. This is of course the current state of affairs.
Once the secret is no longer of military importance, all information that can be released should be released. In general that's what happens - note the wealth of information available on the WWII atomic weapon program for instance.
No, the mass of the black hole is simply being converted to energy ala e=mc^2.
You're turning useless energy removed from the system via entropy into useful energy you can work with again.
The net entropy is constant, and one thing that Hawking verified is that no information about what went into the black hole is being returned to the outside universe.
Given the correctly chosen size for a black hole at the core, you can pick one that produces energy at the same rate as the core feeds it, it heats the core, and you make sure to convert that energy to matter sufficiently to keep it fed.
Yes, though this would be a quite tricky process. Black holes in this size range would be very small, so they can't suck in matter at that high a rate. Further, since things go exponentially faster and more energetically as the object evaporates, it would be a dicey situation. I don't think I'd want to be near such a reactor. ;-)
IIRC, the final explosion is "the equivalent of a million H-bombs or, depending on a not well known constant, a million times bigger than that.". Nice planet-destroyer weapon for the science fiction buffs. :-)
By the way, the existence of small black holes is quite uncertain, since the only way they could have formed is during the Big Bang. Eventually (many, many times the amount of time the universe will have shining stars) even large black holes should evaporate to these small sizes, but it's unlikely any observers will be around (depending on your religious views, of course;).
What obvious physical limitation am I missing?
None. Read "A Brief History of Time" it covers the topic well. In a nutshell, after a *very* long time, Hawking theorizes the open, ever-expanding universe reaches a state of heat death with no matter anywhere and the same temperature everywhere.
Not true. Read up on "Hawking radiation". Hawking theorized that virtual particle pairs created by tidal forces (which normally recombine for zero net result) would sometimes be split by one falling into the event horizon and the other proceeding into the outside universe. Since tidal forces become exponentially stronger the smaller a black hole is, so does the Hawking radiation. Since mass is conserved in this process, to an outside observer it appears as though the black hole is radiating energy and shrinking. Very small black holes shrink much faster than they can pull in Earth-density mass (small event horizon and total gravity), so such a black hole would simply explode rather than growing. This explosion is expected to be quite large by our standards, by the way.
(Hence, if the sun randomly imploded to a black hole, nothing would get sucked in - it'd just be a helluva lot colder and darker)
True, except the potential energy of the Sun's mass in it's current configuration would likely cause a highly energetic event as the mass was sucked into a black hole with a few kilometer event horizon. BTW, I assume you know that a star smaller than 1.4 solar masses can't naturally form a black hole.
Incidentally, 10 million, billion, billionths of a second sounds to me like 10 million seconds...
Much simpler to write it as 1.0e-24 secs.
Having seen some of the simplistic negative responses to this post, I have to say it's not that simple. gcj has its strengths and weaknesses, and for some things it's substantially faster than the commercial Java VMs.
Performance wise, its weak spot seems to be GC performance and some other specific areas like synchronization monitors and exceptions. However, if you tailor your code to gcc's strong points, by using techniques like object pools, you can achieve very strong performance. If you can avoid on-the-fly classloading (and thus any interpreted code) you can get excellent performance and the added benefit of totally deterministic execution speeds. This is good for real time code - dynamic runtime optimizers are scary for real time applications, as is GC in general (another reason object pooling is a nice technique).
Hope it was interesting...
This is basically BS. Firewally, anti-virus, and anti-spyware are either 1) dedicated hardware or 2) run sporadically without being CPU-bound. How many people defragment their disk other than at 3:00 AM Sunday morning? And "data encryption" is a non-starter for most except for SSL encryption.
Nice try, though...
That said, dual core and/or regular timeslicing will work for all this as well anyhow...
(So do Sun, IBM, HP and many others...)
What, exactly, is the difference between "opinion" and "bias"? Further, do you understand what an "editorial policy" is?
And fox news having the highest ratings doesn't make their news any more accurate, it just means they're misinforming more people.
I didn't state that its news was "more accurate". However, I would say that it's clear that more viewers prefer Fox's presentation of the news, than that of its competitors. The other channels also have their share of "bias". The fact that more people prefer Fox should tell you something, especially if you think democracy has merit. (Of course, there is the "masses are asses" theory as well...;)
Ironically, many people don't like Fox simply because of their bias against Bush et al.
First, being the "Fox News" of tech news isn't necessarily bad - after all Fox has the highest ratings of any cable news channel. ;-)
Further, having an NVIDIA bias isn't a bad thing either - NVIDIA has the best graphics tech right now, it makes *great* AMD64 chipsets, and it aggressively supports Linux with the best graphics and system drivers available. What's not to like?
On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of Intel at this point. Its chips are expensive, power hungry, and underperform AMD chips running at 2/3 the clock. I've hated the P4 design ever since I found out they created such a long pipeline merely to boost clock speeds without actually providing more performance. If Intel was smart, they'd start with the Pentium-M design, make it 64-bit, then improve it from there. It seems like a good chip, and uses very little power.
That's enough of a rant for now. ;-)
That isn't really true...AMD has been gaining marketshare again recently. It is up to around 18% of the overall market, and is rapidly increasing its sales of server/workstation chips. Opteron went from 3.5% of server sales in 2003 to 6.5% in 2004. That is almost 100% growth, all at Intel's expense.
AMD has been behind in mobile offerings, but Turion may change that - it competes directly with Pentium-M (the processor part of the 'Centrino' marketing package).
Plus, AMD is set to ramp up it's CPU production capacity quickly over the next couple years, to around 100 million processors per year. If it can sell all of them, that will put it close to 50% of the market at that point (give or take). Given the power savings and mostly superior performance with AMD chips, things are looking good...
Those are both "online magazines" but "magazines" nonetheless. They "process and research news intended for dissemination to the public". They are "for gain". Either the judge has a reading comprehension problem, or the California law (which applies) is quite different from the New York law cited here. I can't find the California law online, if anyone has a link I'd appreciate it.
All that said, I'm inclined to agree with other posters that shield laws simply allow journalists to print whatever they feel like, including stuff they make up. Perhaps Think Secret should go with the psychic defense: "my psychic had a vision of an Apple product code-named 'Asteroid'"! Might work... ;-)
If you consider a factor of about 1.8 (tops) "huge".
I disagree. Java hasn't ceded the desktop, and C# hasn't won it. There is plenty of activity in both camps, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. You should check out gcj if you haven't already...
OSS isn't Java's core area either. Considering the amount of badmouthing Java takes here on /., it's amazing that there are any Java Sourceforge projects at all... ;-)
I think MS have recaptured a bit of their old magic here, in lowering the 'energy threshold' required to get a project going. That's what made VB and Excel so ubiquitous -- I'm not saying that that was a good thing, but it sure worked. The work you have to do to create, package and distribute a .net app is just significantly less than for a java app. If I never see another classpath or another teeny little xml file that has to just match the Java code in some other file, I will be sooooo happy.
You should try gcj, you can either end up with a single executable file, or an executable plus some shared libraries that reside in the same dir. No classpath or XML required.
Of course, I'm far from declaring victory for .net. But 2000 on sourceforge is a good sign, not a bad one.
Considering the glowing tone of the original article, you'd think the proportions were reversed...just thought I'd inject a little reality into the conversation.
(BTW the #5 most popular app on SF, Azureus, is a desktop Java app.)
Java (14080 projects)
C# (2206 projects)
Also, don't forget there is a very interesting ahead-of-time Java compiler as part of the gcc toolchain, gcj. It isn't complete, but it is constantly improving and can now be used to write SWT and Gnome applications. Good stuff!
I hate to see C# getting any uptake when all it is intended to do is allow Microsoft to co-opt all of Java's good ideas while stifling portability as much as possible. It is a transparent Java ripoff.
You should try gcj with the SWT or gnome-java bindings. Nothing doggy about it. :-)
BTW, gcj is the gcc Java compiler.
The proper term is "water ice" as opposed to "dry ice" which is frozen carbon dioxide.
Yes. The nForce4 chipsets offload most TCP/IP processing and firewall from the main CPU.
If you go with a Athlon64 Socket 939 nForce4 board, you get PCI Express, lower power consumption, a ton of great features, good Linux support, and plug-compatible dual core upgrades down the road. Intel's offerings just seem anemic by comparison.
(Personally, I'd also do an NVIDIA graphics board for the excellent Linux driver support. And no, I don't work for NVIDIA, I'm just a satisfied customer.)
That's what Einstein believed. Yet, regardless, he was somehow able to make a contribution.[/sarcasm]
Regardless your argument doesn't hold water. No matter how it was all created, it looks like there are interesting places to go (and possibly exploit) out there. It'll happen someday, if the human race lasts long enough.
In fact, this has happened to a very small extent, if at all, in terms of "Creationism" getting equal time in public school curricula.
Which is encouraging, since evolution is the only theory of biological diversification over time that has significant scientific backing...
Regarding Hubble, I'd be curious to see images from the Keck instrument and other diffraction-based dual telescopes compared to Hubble imagery. If Hubble's performance is now equalled by ground-based instruments, it makes more sense to let it go and wait for future, vastly improved space telescopes.
It's amazing how many people have not only selective hearing and memory, but thinking as well...
It's called "PalmOS". PalmSource has announced a future version will be based on Linux, which is exciting.
Now if someone will just build some compelling hardware... :-)
Wearable devices are a dark horse in all this also, and might make a better base for converged comm/computer functionality (since you can comfortably carry bigger batteries that way).
I seriously doubt if the desktop form factor will be around longer than me. We're already quickly approaching the point where the desktop has no advantages over portable. I can't imagine that in 20 years we'll still have boxes with approximately a cubic foot of space in them. That's only currently really being used for heat disappation and expandability. Heat disappation would be better served by making one entire side of the box a radiative surface. Expandability has already become largely unnecessary, or external, and I would expect that trend to continue.
So in 20 years I should still be around, but I expect my computer will be pretty thin, with a much larger surface area to volume ratio than today. That's in the least inventive future I can imagine. I actually expect things will be even more different by then.
My main point was that the "general purpose computer" would survive, as opposed to the gp's point about thin client or appliance devices. I did acknowledge that notebook marketshare was likely to rise.
I do think desktop machines will be around for a long time, as you can't carry a 30" display around. A MiniMac style system is still a desktop even if you carry it around with you. Plus it's not clear how the trend will go with power requirements/dissipation. It may be that the desktop system of the future will have hundreds or thousands of processors with corresponding power requirements. Graphics cards have also trended towards dissipating more power, not less over the last few years. The electronics might be physically small, but require substantial cooling.
Time will tell though...I hope to see what happens at least through 2040 or so. :-)
Not just Microsoft Office, but a ton of commercial software. Almost none of it is on Linux or other Unix systems. Macs also make terrific development systems.
Apple is looking more and more attractive, enough so to easily justify the higher prices. Good stuff!
Drinking some Kool-Aid are you?
While desktop PCs may lose some unit volume (not all that much though, since they are the most bang for the buck), that will be replaced by laptop volume. Apple makes very nice laptops.
General purpose computers will be around in volume for a long, long time. Longer than you and I, in fact. ;-)