We'll have wall-sized 20K TV's in 10 years, but computer monitors will still only be 1080p...because stupid.
Nah, The reason PC monitors have been stuck in the HD-age is because LCD TVs were damn cheap to produce and took practically nothing to repurpose into monitors. Since the death of CRTs, TVs and Monitors have converged into more-or-less the same device, at least as far as manufacturers are concerned. The second that 4K TVs become dirt cheap to produce in 13"-30" sizes, you will see 1080 monitors going the way of the dodo. Same with 8K, etc.
Cash, How else are you are supposed to bribe slippery government officials. They can't exactly covertly palm a credit card, charge $50 and slyly give it back! No one takes a check slipped in the pocket seriously. Besides, the best part of bribery, is no paper trail.
That is the situation we are in now. That is not how it has always been, and, if enough people can get angry enough to actually facilitate change, not how it has to be.
I've worked with quite a few of the "old timer" engineers, the ones who started working back in the late 60's, 70's and 80's. They would tell tales of how people would start at their companies as a lowly technician or engineer and stay for 30-50 years, moving up the corportauntil retirement. That it wasn't until the late 80's to 90's where everything went to hell. Multinationals would buy the company out, plunder the pensions, bring in foreigner for pennies on the dollar and fire everyone. There even used to be this mythical thing called job security where assuming that you didn't royally fuck up or the company didn't tank, you didn't have to worry about getting fired or laid off at the end of the week because one of the 40 VPs needs a few extra dollars to replace his company-paid three-month-old Porche with a more sporty Jaguar.
It reminds me of an Onion Radio News episode from 2008, 1998 was 10 Fucking Years Ago" It was almost a wake-up call because at that point as it did seem like almost yesterday.
What are you talking about, Half, if not more than half of CEs are programming. Sure, not game programming (as in the book) but still programming.
I'm a CE and I spend most of my time programming everything from Robots, PLCs, HMIs, Motors, FPGAs and Vision systems, to the communication that glues them all together. I still need to have a knowledge of electronics and electrical design, but still a good portion of my work is (usually low-level) programming.
If I can predict lightning, now I no longer need to rip off plutonium or travel into the future and waste my money on a Mr Fusion to power my DeLorean. I can just use free thunderstorms and save a metric shitload of money!
What's the point. I still need to go into the future to pick up a hoverboard and sports almanac anyway.
Mincome works for employers as well. If the government was picking up the tab for a living wage, the biggest advantage is that you no longer have to. There is no point to having a minimum wage if the government is paying a living wage. This is the same reason that Universal health care is in the interest of most companies, because they no longer have to pay for employee insurance.
Then there are the side benefits. If everyone has a safety net, you can be damn well sure that moral is going to improve, which generally correlates with a rise in productivity. You also will get rid of most of those employees who don't really want to work, but just want a paycheck.
So, I believe that cheaper, more productive workers are in the interest of corporations.
That is also an unfair comparison. You get disability benefits because you can't work. The option is either sit and collect a check or return to work. It is an either / or situation. The point of a Mincome is that if you decide to work you still get the check and you get paid from your employer.
If those on disability had the option to go back to work part time (or take a different job entirely, start a business, or what have you) and still collect benefits, how many do you think would go back to work?
Yeah, I miss the wholesome arcade games of the 80's, like Battlezone, Red Barron, Scramble, Rush 'N Attack, and Missile Command. No military propaganda there. Nope.
I don't know, ask the media why they like nicknaming executive-level governement offices, "Czars", as there are no positions with Czar as (or in) the official title. However, the tradition seems to go back to Franklin Roosevelt.
1-2 years? This was going on for a while. I remember watching Battle Bots on Comedy Central (Vlad The Impaler FTW) back around 2004. There was on on the Discovery Channel around the same time as well (Robotica, I think?), each with all types of merchandising behind it. Hell, Robot Wars was started in the early-mid 90's
They can just get into the education sector. You already have a captive clientele, School nurses are even cheaper than prison doctors, and cheap meals are still cheap meals. Plus you have ample facilities for punishment and detention, A yard for "recess," and if you don't want to deal with public schooling, plenty of room for boarding students as a private school.
Schools are practically part-time prisons as it is, might as well go that extra few steps and use actual former prisons.
I am joking, but sadly that case could easily be made.
No one was seriously expecting a new notebook from Apple. The new notebooks are most likely to feature Intel's new Broadwell chips, which have been delayed until what's looking like next spring.
Besides, the Macbook Pro was just given a refresh in the Summer.
I bought my white Macbook in 2007, paid $1200. One of my family members made the remark that they only ever buy the Walmart special, (whatever is on sale for around $300) and told me that $1200 for a computer was a crime and I was stupid to ever pay that much. In that time, the longest they have ever had a computer was 2 years meanwhile my Macbook is not only still kicking, it still works pretty damn well, though I did max out the RAM a few years ago, install Lion, and am on my third battery.
After all these years, it still works great as my portable computer, Software Radio terminal, and music server though my desktop PC is my primary computer.
Of course it is AI, not cutting edge AI, but it is still AI. Just because it is now a mature solved problem, doesn't make it any less valid.
It is like saying that someone doing the old "calculate the landing position of a cannonball fired at X velocity at Y angle" problem isn't doing physics because modern physics now involves super-tiny particles and / or traveling at speeds near the speed of light.
Slashdot has become just another cog in the internet hate machine. It is gotten to the point that for any story, 70% of the comments now are just bitching and moaning at the topic, even when it is really unwarranted. I am starting to wonder if this place had devolved into trolls and trolls trolling the trolls.
One thing that does bother me a little is that all the successes of any company get attributed to the CEO. They have a lot of hard working, very smart and creative people working for the company, who have their accomplishments left in shadow because of the the CEO being the public face of the company. It's not all The CEO!
FTFY. I mean, it isn't like Eric Schmidt wrote every line of Google, Gmail, and Youtube. Jeff Bezos didn't sit down and engineer the Kindle. And Steve Ballmer sure as fuck didn't build the XBox or write Office. Like it or not, these guys are the public faces of their companies, and in good times get all the credit and in bad times get all the blame.
You could always take a look at Japan. While I wouldn't say it has gone that far, it isn't too far off. That is one big reason why the birthrate is so low. Of course, those who aren't obsessing over their dating sims and sleeping with their anime-girl pillows can probably get all kinds of 'tang and from what I hear, adultery is pretty much standard operating procedure for any married man.
Plus it isn't that hard or expensive to "retrofit" a toilet to use less water. It can be done with either a pair of pliers (bend the rod that the float-ball is connected to so that it stops at a lower water level) or a bag of rocks (Place a sealed bag of rocks or really anything that is heavy and takes up volume in the reservoir tank to reduce the amount of water the tank holds).
No real point to buying a brand new toilet just to reduce water usage.
I'm sorry that you feel that way. As an Engineer who has experience with 3D CAD modeling, I love my printer. If I can design it, I can print it. I can understand that this is an extremely niche market right now and I don't expect everyone to want to run out and blow a grand or two on a personal printer, however that doesn't mean that the whole technology should be painted as irrelevant.
I don't expect these to be in every home in the next 20 years, but I can see them in more than a few garages. Just as most people don't need woodworking and metalworking tools there still plenty of hobbyists with table saws and welding gear in their garage. However, I think the real promise is going to be companies with high-end (think multi-million dollar printers able to print everything from ceramics to metals to plastics) catering to cheap one off or personalized knickknacks. It is already happening with outfits like Shapeways and as prices keep falling it will eventually become competitive with more traditional forms of manufacturing for low volume items.
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We'll have wall-sized 20K TV's in 10 years, but computer monitors will still only be 1080p...because stupid.
Nah, The reason PC monitors have been stuck in the HD-age is because LCD TVs were damn cheap to produce and took practically nothing to repurpose into monitors. Since the death of CRTs, TVs and Monitors have converged into more-or-less the same device, at least as far as manufacturers are concerned. The second that 4K TVs become dirt cheap to produce in 13"-30" sizes, you will see 1080 monitors going the way of the dodo. Same with 8K, etc.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like bananas.
Don't leave your clocks sitting out or they'll draw bugs.
Cash, How else are you are supposed to bribe slippery government officials. They can't exactly covertly palm a credit card, charge $50 and slyly give it back! No one takes a check slipped in the pocket seriously. Besides, the best part of bribery, is no paper trail.
That is the situation we are in now. That is not how it has always been, and, if enough people can get angry enough to actually facilitate change, not how it has to be.
I've worked with quite a few of the "old timer" engineers, the ones who started working back in the late 60's, 70's and 80's. They would tell tales of how people would start at their companies as a lowly technician or engineer and stay for 30-50 years, moving up the corportauntil retirement. That it wasn't until the late 80's to 90's where everything went to hell. Multinationals would buy the company out, plunder the pensions, bring in foreigner for pennies on the dollar and fire everyone. There even used to be this mythical thing called job security where assuming that you didn't royally fuck up or the company didn't tank, you didn't have to worry about getting fired or laid off at the end of the week because one of the 40 VPs needs a few extra dollars to replace his company-paid three-month-old Porche with a more sporty Jaguar.
It reminds me of an Onion Radio News episode from 2008, 1998 was 10 Fucking Years Ago" It was almost a wake-up call because at that point as it did seem like almost yesterday.
What are you talking about, Half, if not more than half of CEs are programming. Sure, not game programming (as in the book) but still programming.
I'm a CE and I spend most of my time programming everything from Robots, PLCs, HMIs, Motors, FPGAs and Vision systems, to the communication that glues them all together. I still need to have a knowledge of electronics and electrical design, but still a good portion of my work is (usually low-level) programming.
If I can predict lightning, now I no longer need to rip off plutonium or travel into the future and waste my money on a Mr Fusion to power my DeLorean. I can just use free thunderstorms and save a metric shitload of money!
What's the point. I still need to go into the future to pick up a hoverboard and sports almanac anyway.
"That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I wanted...! That's not fair!"
Mincome works for employers as well. If the government was picking up the tab for a living wage, the biggest advantage is that you no longer have to. There is no point to having a minimum wage if the government is paying a living wage. This is the same reason that Universal health care is in the interest of most companies, because they no longer have to pay for employee insurance.
Then there are the side benefits. If everyone has a safety net, you can be damn well sure that moral is going to improve, which generally correlates with a rise in productivity. You also will get rid of most of those employees who don't really want to work, but just want a paycheck.
So, I believe that cheaper, more productive workers are in the interest of corporations.
That is also an unfair comparison. You get disability benefits because you can't work. The option is either sit and collect a check or return to work. It is an either / or situation. The point of a Mincome is that if you decide to work you still get the check and you get paid from your employer.
If those on disability had the option to go back to work part time (or take a different job entirely, start a business, or what have you) and still collect benefits, how many do you think would go back to work?
Yeah, I miss the wholesome arcade games of the 80's, like Battlezone, Red Barron, Scramble, Rush 'N Attack, and Missile Command. No military propaganda there. Nope.
I don't know, ask the media why they like nicknaming executive-level governement offices, "Czars", as there are no positions with Czar as (or in) the official title. However, the tradition seems to go back to Franklin Roosevelt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Don't forget their second attempt in 2004 with the SPOT Watch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
1-2 years? This was going on for a while. I remember watching Battle Bots on Comedy Central (Vlad The Impaler FTW) back around 2004. There was on on the Discovery Channel around the same time as well (Robotica, I think?), each with all types of merchandising behind it. Hell, Robot Wars was started in the early-mid 90's
They can just get into the education sector. You already have a captive clientele, School nurses are even cheaper than prison doctors, and cheap meals are still cheap meals. Plus you have ample facilities for punishment and detention, A yard for "recess," and if you don't want to deal with public schooling, plenty of room for boarding students as a private school.
Schools are practically part-time prisons as it is, might as well go that extra few steps and use actual former prisons.
I am joking, but sadly that case could easily be made.
No one was seriously expecting a new notebook from Apple. The new notebooks are most likely to feature Intel's new Broadwell chips, which have been delayed until what's looking like next spring.
Besides, the Macbook Pro was just given a refresh in the Summer.
I bought my white Macbook in 2007, paid $1200. One of my family members made the remark that they only ever buy the Walmart special, (whatever is on sale for around $300) and told me that $1200 for a computer was a crime and I was stupid to ever pay that much. In that time, the longest they have ever had a computer was 2 years meanwhile my Macbook is not only still kicking, it still works pretty damn well, though I did max out the RAM a few years ago, install Lion, and am on my third battery.
After all these years, it still works great as my portable computer, Software Radio terminal, and music server though my desktop PC is my primary computer.
Of course it is AI, not cutting edge AI, but it is still AI. Just because it is now a mature solved problem, doesn't make it any less valid.
It is like saying that someone doing the old "calculate the landing position of a cannonball fired at X velocity at Y angle" problem isn't doing physics because modern physics now involves super-tiny particles and / or traveling at speeds near the speed of light.
This issue?
Slashdot has become just another cog in the internet hate machine. It is gotten to the point that for any story, 70% of the comments now are just bitching and moaning at the topic, even when it is really unwarranted. I am starting to wonder if this place had devolved into trolls and trolls trolling the trolls.
One thing that does bother me a little is that all the successes of any company get attributed to the CEO. They have a lot of hard working, very smart and creative people working for the company, who have their accomplishments left in shadow because of the the CEO being the public face of the company. It's not all The CEO!
FTFY. I mean, it isn't like Eric Schmidt wrote every line of Google, Gmail, and Youtube. Jeff Bezos didn't sit down and engineer the Kindle. And Steve Ballmer sure as fuck didn't build the XBox or write Office. Like it or not, these guys are the public faces of their companies, and in good times get all the credit and in bad times get all the blame.
No, Bean counters and MBAs have wrecked HP. Pointy Haired Bosses know no gender.
You could always take a look at Japan. While I wouldn't say it has gone that far, it isn't too far off. That is one big reason why the birthrate is so low. Of course, those who aren't obsessing over their dating sims and sleeping with their anime-girl pillows can probably get all kinds of 'tang and from what I hear, adultery is pretty much standard operating procedure for any married man.
So was (is) Obama. Anyone who is just left of Right-wing Extremist is labeled a "far-left communist".
I would bet that if Nixon or Reagan ran today they would be lambasted as tree-hugging pinkos by the current "conservative" leadership.
Plus it isn't that hard or expensive to "retrofit" a toilet to use less water. It can be done with either a pair of pliers (bend the rod that the float-ball is connected to so that it stops at a lower water level) or a bag of rocks (Place a sealed bag of rocks or really anything that is heavy and takes up volume in the reservoir tank to reduce the amount of water the tank holds).
No real point to buying a brand new toilet just to reduce water usage.
I'm sorry that you feel that way. As an Engineer who has experience with 3D CAD modeling, I love my printer. If I can design it, I can print it. I can understand that this is an extremely niche market right now and I don't expect everyone to want to run out and blow a grand or two on a personal printer, however that doesn't mean that the whole technology should be painted as irrelevant.
I don't expect these to be in every home in the next 20 years, but I can see them in more than a few garages. Just as most people don't need woodworking and metalworking tools there still plenty of hobbyists with table saws and welding gear in their garage. However, I think the real promise is going to be companies with high-end (think multi-million dollar printers able to print everything from ceramics to metals to plastics) catering to cheap one off or personalized knickknacks. It is already happening with outfits like Shapeways and as prices keep falling it will eventually become competitive with more traditional forms of manufacturing for low volume items.