Actually, I think everyone wants integration, if it works well. The problem so far has been most "integrated" devices have been overcomplicated crap. Sure hardcore geeks can use Windows Media Center PCs, and a few have been willing to shell out $1500 or whatever for one, but most folks want something easier and cheaper.
Enter Apple.
Integration can help ensure things "just work", if done correctly (Microsoft being the poster child for how not to do it correctly). The downside is, it's either Apple's way or the highway. But that's really already the case for any existing integrated solutions from every other consumer electronics vendor, from Bose to Nokia to, well, Microsoft.
Apple has successfully locked people into the iPod with the iPod's connector. They've leveraged their position as the #1 portable music player to build up a whole ecology of products that'll only work with their devices, a barrier to entry even Microsoft couldn't overcome. If they establish themselves as the lead integrator in the home, as I suspect is likely via the iPhone and future successors to the AppleTV, they're going to become virtually impossible to work around.
Their products aren't perfect, but I'm frankly glad it's gonna be them and not either Microsoft or Sony. Apple is at worst annoying - Sony and MS have already proven dangerous.
The eight essential pillars on which Apple will deliver this platform, based on four existing offerings and four new product concepts, are expected to be:
* Apple Macintosh home PC
* Apple TV digital media extender
* Apple Store
* iTunes and its successors
* Apple home server product
* AppleSound universal music controller
* Network-enabled gadgets
* In-home installation services
I think those all of those miss the biggest weapon in Apple's arsenal, and one of them isn't even going to be a factor anymore by 2013 - not as we've come to know it. The PC - including the Mac - is a dying form factor for all but high-end professional use (think workstations). Gamers are migrating to dedicated gaming machines (Apple may well release one themselves), while what we've traditionally used PC's for - web surfing, e-mail, word processing - can now be successfully handled by cell phones. Create a docking station for the iPhone that allows it to use a full-sized keyboard, mouse and monitor while you're at home - or a portable docking solution that allows it to function as a laptop - and a good 90% of all "PC" users won't need a PC anymore. They'll simply use their phone (which really isn't a phone, it's a tiny PC with phone features and a customized interface).
With advances in wireless technology you'll also be able to connect that iPhone to your home's NAS, to your stereo and to your television to share and display content. Apple's big advantage here is user interface design, plus its existing DRM-enabled relationship with major content providers. They've also proven they can market new concepts and new technologies to consumers in a way HP and Microsoft just can't (terd brown Zune, anybody?).
And of course the iPhone can be used as a portable music and video player as well. The next-gen iPhone may well sport 30GB of flash, and by 2013 could be toting 300GB. That's certainly enough on-the-go storage for most users, and with high-speed wireless networks becoming common if it's not enough space, you could always connect to the home NAS and synchronize with it to pull down additional content on-demand (or buy it directly at Apple's online store).
I could see Apple getting into the GeekSquad business as Forrester suggests, for installing and configuring their own hardware. They might even release their own line of displays, amps, speakers and such, although to date they've been pretty content at letting others provide iPod accessories. That might change though as they become more dominant in the consumer electronics space.
Their other big play between now an 2013 could be videogames. There's no reason why Apple can't release its own Xbox - I'm sure Intel would be happy to lend them a lot of engineering help in order to establish a presence in that market. Make the device function with iPhones and serve as a media hub, sell it for $300 or less and watch as it erodes the market for more expensive gaming devices from its rivals. The iPhone is already poised to become a successful portable gaming device in its own right.
Apple could also use their position to smash the high-priced game model that's dominated the market for the past two decades. Keep the price of games to $19.95 and win share away from more expensive rivals, who have been using their cut of game revenue to fund console development. Even if they aren't a huge success as a gaming platform, it won't cost them much to enter the space this way. And they could end up doing to Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft what Commodore did to Atari and Coleco back in the early '80s, when the C64 ate the consoles' lunch. Back then consumers were more than willing to abandon single-function gaming devices for a multi-function device that
One of these days the board will realize that the Xbox team is the only one left with a fucking clue and put them in charge.
Say WHAT?!? Microsoft has dumped in excess of $20 BILLION into the development and production of their gaming systems and other home entertainment products (mostly on the XBoxen, and also that brown turd the Zune). The 360's Red Ring of Death bug alone cost them a billion. So far, that division's only managed to turn a profit in a couple of quarters, and its been in the millions.
They'd have made more money burning $20 billion in bundles of dollar bills to drive a turbine to generate electricity. The XBox 360 is a fine videogame machine, but from a financial perspective it's been a disaster. If it weren't for the Windows Tax and the Office Tax they'd never get away with this kind of stupidity. And as personal computing moves away from the PC and toward mobile devices like the iPhone, they probably won't be able to get away with it much longer.
In a few years, laptops in bubble-packs for $89.95 will be hanging on racks at the drugstore. Microsoft isn't ready for that.
Oh, it's worse than that. In a few years Apple could be selling a cheap iPhone for $150 that's more than twice as powerful as today's model. It'll probably support an external monitor and wireless keyboard, via a little docking cradle. It'll have 160+ GB of internal storage, and the ability to connect to your network storage, at home or at work.
So why buy a "PC" at all? If you're a company, just outfit your employees with iPhones and wireless headsets. They dock them when at their desks, use a keyboard and full-sized monitor, then take their relevant data (and their work) with them wherever they go. If you're a consumer, why buy a "PC" when you can just use your phone? Apple could sell portable docking cradles with a built-in monitor, keyboard and a big battery. Instant "laptop".
The future belongs to companies that control both the hardware and the software. It'll be the only way to have the kind of product control it'll take to lure consumers and business to your platform, and it's also gonna be the only way to earn the margins it'll take to survive. I don't want to say MS is doomed, but I think they're gonna be pushed into the server and application space by this development. Sorta like what happened to IBM over the course of the PC revolution.
And the lesson we can now take is that trying to appease greens will never work, because we aren't even a year out from their great 'success' in forcing CFLs down our throats and they are pissed all over again.
Except this article wasn't brought to you by "the greens". It was brought to you by MSNBC, which is a partnership between Microsoft and NBC. And who owns NBC? Why, none other than General Electric - one of the world's largest producers of incandescent light bulbs.
Now, why would they have a stake in misrepresenting the "danger" posed by mercury in CFLs? Hmmmm. I wonder . . .
Here's the reality - even if you ship every used CFL off to a landfill and don't recycle a single one of them, their use will still lead to an overall reduction in mercury emissions into the environment. That's because they require only a quarter the electrical power to produce the same amount of light. Since much of our electrical power comes from burning coal, which releases copious amounts of mercury into the environment, the reduced power consumption more than offsets the amount of mercury in CFLs.
It's not rocket science.
I'd also question how much of the mercury in CFLs will ultimately end up in the environment, even if they're shipped off to landfills. Landfills - at least, here in the US - tend to be sealed on the bottom, so that they won't contaminate groundwater. Trash is typically rapidly buried with layers of dirt. My guess is that much of the mercury in CFLs, even if they end up in landfills, will be sequestered for decades or centuries at least. Which beats spraying it all over our land, freshwater and oceans, as is currently done when burning coal.
How is that a "combo" drive? Sounds like a "dual" drive to me. I could gaffer-tape a Blu-Ray player to an HD-DVD player, but that wouldn't make it a "combo". For that, they'd have to share the transport mechanism.
Not necessarily. They're still sharing power architecture, interface, and probably control and logic circuitry. They share the same chassis. Just because a gadget has multiple motors doesn't mean it's not a combo-whatever. I've got a combo DVD Recorder VHS Hi-Fi Recorder sitting over by my television. They clearly don't share the same mechanism, but there are some advantages to shoving both technologies into a single case, and the total cost of manufacture is probably less than building two separate devices with two separate power supplies, IR receivers, etc.
Anyhow, I'm not sure exactly what this has to do with HD-DVD & Blu-Ray. Your analogy comparing a combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive to a combo 5.25"/3.5" floppy drive still doesn't make any sense. HD-DVD & Blu-Ray both share the same form factor, can share much of the same control and decode logic, and can share the same drive mechanism. Combo drives are already available.
I agree that HD-DVD lacks the kind of installed base to encourage any kind of manufacturer support down the road, but I'm not sure how crucial that is. If you can rip the discs to a hard drive, you could always leave the content there as a backup, in case your player or your discs go tits up at some point in the future. Devices which can stream HD video are already available, and are sure to grow more common down the road. Hard drives grow cheaper by the day, so storing even a large library of HD-DVDs on a hard drive will cost next to nothing in a couple of years.
Somebody must have hit you with the stupid stick. The post you were replying to was referring to COMBO players, not being able to get obsolete devices. Did you ever see a 5.25"/3.5" floppy disk combo drive? No? Well, there's your analogy.
Speaking of being hit with the stupid stick, the 5.25" and 3.5" floppies used completely different form factors, which makes them a poor analogy for HD-DVD and Rlu-Ray, which share pretty much the exact same form factor. It would be a wee bit difficult to produce a "combo" floppy drive economically, though as I recall there actually were a few combo 5.25"/3.5" floppy drives made, with two separate slots, two separate read heads and I believe two separate drive motors. They were produced as a space saving solution for PCs without many drive bays.
There are already "combo" HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drives, and many of the components within them are shared between the two platforms. My understanding is it's just the lenses which have to be duplicated between the two platforms, because of the depth and optical characteristics of the plastic used on Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD (Blu-Ray uses a much thinner, harder plastic). That and the licensing fees . . .
I doubt we'll see any more "combo" players released simply because HD-DVD isn't being supported by its parent - or by the content providers - anymore. That'll suppress demand to the point where there just aren't the economies of scale in place to make manufacturing such devices economical. Had both formats continued to persist in the marketplace though, I think we would have seen combo drives become the norm, with any price premium being slowly quashed over time by increased economies of scale and advancing designs.
No they aren't - CU tracks the reliability of vehicles for a decade on their website. However, most vehicles are redesigned every few years, and the expected reliability figures CU provides for new vehicles are based on the performance of the current design.
The fact that it is possible to burn to an inconvenient physical format an then rip to a DRM free format does not make iTunes DRM free. There is an inevitable loss of quality in this time-consuming process.
Burn 'em to a CD-RW - takes a couple of minutes on my machine, surf the web while it's burning - then rip the resulting CD to FLAC, Apple Lossless or some other bit-perfect format. No quality loss (beyond the original lossy compression applied to the file you downloaded from iTunes).
I cannot begin to understand how Doctor Who took the award for best episode even when its fanbase was split between two nominated episodes.
Doctor Who didn't take home the Hugo because it's been around for a long time, although I don't see why that should be a consideration one way or the other. The episode "The Girl In The Fireplace" took home a well-deserved Hugo because it's one of the finest pieces of science-fiction to show up on the small screen in years. It's got crap to do with the age of the series or its many longtime fans. "The Girl In The Fireplace" makes Eureka, Heroes and Jericho look like crap (as did Battlestar Galactica's "Downloaded", but that's another story).
It's just a pity scriptwriter Moffett is only turning out a single Doctor Who episode a season instead of a dozen.
WMP is crap. MediaMonkey is far more useful, and even the free version sports more features and support for more formats and is faster. Best of all it uses Winamp plugins, which means I can stream audio to my AirPort Express without being a slave to iTunes (which I like only slightly more than WMP).
Whatever. Hex or not is irrelevant. It's 12 alphanumeric characters printed in 2 point font in groups of two separated by semicolons. Again, any dipshit who thinks Jane Homemaker (or Joe Grandpa) is gonna successfully read that mess off to some call center in the Philippines or wherever 100% of the time must be smoking some really good weed.
And even if it was, how hard is it to read off letters and numbers? The only thing that anyone that's argued my points has proven is that the customer is to lazy or to dumb to read off a series of digits/letters.
Maybe the customer has bad eyesight. Maybe they're dyslexic. Maybe they're intimidated and nervous. Maybe they're anxious because they need to get online to bid on an eBay item. Maybe the customer is distracted because they need to get back to the office. In any event, they don't live to service YOU - your job is to service THEM. If a company can't handle that, they should do themselves a favor and get out of the service business. Any company that depends on having their customers read some cryptic shit off the bottom of THE COMPANY'S OWN DAMN EQUIPMENT is clearly run by idiots.
The company should already know what equipment the customer has, since the company provided it. The solution to this problem is called a database. Get one, then use it. If you can't manage that, your customers aren't half as lazy and stupid as you are.
That's just empathy, not complaining, and I'm guessing it's grounds for dismissal for telco employees.
Not empathy - common sense. Something the telcos apparently completely lack. These clowns actually think Jane Homemaker's gonna read some cryptic hexadecimal shit printed in 2 point font off of the underside of their cable modem.
Maybe on their planet it would work, but not here on earth.
You don't even realize how idiotic your comments are.
Pretty much all of the space cadets piling on Stross here at/. are equally clueless (if not even worse). This bunch couldn't run a taco stand, let alone design, build and operate fleets of interstellar spacecraft.
Seems like an opportunity for the rest of us to convince these guys to pile aboard the B Ark. Just don't ship off the telephone sanitizers time around.
I thought you weren't going to reply to me anymore?
Anyhow, here's the first paragraph of your original post in this thread:
This article is incredibly short-sighted and unreasonably pessimistic. He's using current technology, economics, and incentive to make specific conclusions about something that will most likely happen in the next few hundred years. Just consider how much science and technology has changed in the last 100 years - can you possibly imagine what will be possible 100 years from now, much less draw conclusions about feasibility?
And now you're saying this:
Why would an advanced race want to colonize earth? What does earth have to offer such a race?
So which is it? Is Stross "incredibly short-sighted" and using "current technology, economics and incentive" in assessing what's likely to happen in the next few hundred years? I love that you included "incentive" in that list, by the way. Because now you're seriously asking what *earth* has to offer an advanced technological race - in other words, you yourself are now questioning what incentive there is to travel interstellar distances, something you just criticized Stross for doing.
Ah, the sweet smell of hypocrisy.
If in 4.5 billion years a resource-rich planet like *earth* hasn't been a tempting target for colonization - or at least large scale resource extraction - by at least one pre-singularity alien civilization, then it's pretty obvious there aren't any targets out there to justify interstellar space travel, at least not the kind that sends living breathing beings as we know 'em hurtling around the galaxy. Post singularity all bets are off, as Stross indicates in his well-reasoned blog post.
I won't even bother to point out the fact that there isn't a stitch of evidence for the kind of large scale colonization or resource extraction activities a pre-singularity, interstellar traveling civilization would be capable of performing anywhere in this entire solar system. Not only have they never bothered with earth in 4.5 billion years, they've left the rest of the solar system untouched as well. Again, if interstellar travel made any sense, if there were any technological way around the limitations of physics (like FTL drive), after 4.5 billion years our solar system would be littered with such evidence. There would be alien junk everywhere. The lack of any such evidence speaks volumes about the practicality of interstellar travel using any kind of pre-singularity technology we would recognize.
Which is hardly surprising, given the distances involved, the timescales required and all of the other physical limitations Stross detailed in his post.
And don't misquote me. I didn't say he was "dumb", I said his paradox was. Just because he was a good physicist, doesn't mean he's right about everything. Only a real idiot would think he was.
Yeah, we heard you the first time when you called the Fermi Paradox "dumb". You still haven't provided any reasoning to back up that idiotic statement, and you certainly don't seem to have Enrico Fermi's impressive credentials as a scientist and thinker. So I'm not exactly sure why we should accept your statement that his paradox is "dumb", since you're even less qualified to speak on the subject than Fermi (as the AC in this thread pointed out last night).
FWIW, scientists who actually do work in fields like exobiology certainly don't consider the Fermi Paradox "dumb". Carl Sagan (to use probably the most prominent example) covered Fermi's Paradox at some length, both in his Cosmos miniseries and book as well as in later works. He certainly didn't seem to consider it "dumb". In fact, as memory serves he found the questions it raises quite unsettling.
I think the AC in this thread just pwned you, but I wanted to point out the ridiculousness of this specific argument of yours:
Aliens with any technical achievement have much better things to do with their time than bother with the likes of us. Sure, if they needed the colonization space and Earth were convenient, they'd be here. But they won't go out of their way to talk to us. We've got little to offer them.
See, it's this kind of half-baked thinking I see coming from the proponents of space colonization. It makes you guys look Scientologist nuts.
If interstellar travel were easy mate, the earth would have been colonized long, long before humans and our civilization ever came along. If colonization is practical, possible or desirable, our solar system would be crawling with aliens. They wouldn't have come here to visit us - they'd have come here for the same reasons why guys like you think we should be dumping billions of dollars into researching manned spaceflight. You know, god, country, capitalism, manifest destiny, sun's going nova, adventure, challenge, to get away from it all, riches, resources, energy . . . the whole irrational catalog.
The Milky Way is billions of years older than the earth. Even if you grant that technological civilizations are vanishingly rare, and that they would have had a hard time springing up long ago because of an increased frequency of gamma ray bursts and other sterilizing events, that still leaves a several billion year window for some alien travelers to stumble along and claim earth as their own. Their absence speaks volumes regarding fanciful space colonization plans.
But your comments are sophomoric and are becoming flamebait.
Coming from Mr. "Enrico Fermi is dumb" that's especially rich.
There is zero evidence presented that anything proposed is "impossible"
Actually, Stross's blog post talks a bit about impossible, "magic wand" technologies like FTL drive that would make interstellar colonization a lot more practical while, you know, totally violating the known laws of physics.
There is absolutely no rational reason to dismiss these possibilities as forever implausible, undesirable, or infeasible.
There are plenty of reasons. Stross outlines several, at least when it comes to flesh and blood humans as we know 'em. Assuming the singularity hits all bets are off as far as the plausibility and feasibility goes, but it's easy to argue the singularity would trash the desirability and any proposed necessity.
The path of advanced technological civilizations seems more likely to lead toward increasing efficiencies and ever-decreasing size, based on our own recent experience with microprocessors and nanotechnology. Instead of going offworld to procure ever more matter and energy, advanced post-singularity technology is at least as likely to turn inward, storing and processing more and more information in smaller and smaller spaces using less and less energy to do so.
Fermi's paradox is dumb.
Of course. That silly Enrico Fermi. What a maroon! Who would listen to the prattle of that crank?
Sigh.
Again, proponents of space colonization don't do themselves much justice by defensively deriding well reasoned arguments, especially those of accomplished scientists like Fermi. Especially when these proponents completely fail to present any well-reasoned counter arguments of their own. To wit:
We as a species have just barely come out of the muck. If there are advanced civilizations out there, why would they possibly waste their time with a primitive species like us?
So, are you saying that you think aliens would only colonize a planet if it's already inhabited by a technological civilization? Would the same hold true for us? And if so, why?
If that's the case, we'll never colonize the rest of the solar system, as there are no technological civilizations already established on the other bodies orbiting sol.
Sorry, but your little critique of Fermi's paradox is pretty dumb itself.
This article is incredibly short-sighted and unreasonably pessimistic.
No, his article is realistic and factually based. Just because we want some magic technology that violates the known laws of physics doesn't mean we're ever gonna get it, regardless of what nifty use we have in mind for it. Alchemists tried for centuries to turn lead into gold without any success, and we still can't do it apart from a few atoms at a time even with all of our space age, information age, gene age technology. Wishing on a star ain't gonna take you to the stars.
The amount of energy it would take to colonize just the rest of the solar system is staggering. Even assuming you had the energy and the technology to make it possible, or even practical, it isn't at all clear that such an effort would be necessary or desirable. We already have the technology to do lots of things, from building underwater cities to reclaiming vast deserts, that we choose not to do for a variety of reasons. The same technological advances which might make space colonization more practical would likely also lessen any need to build such colonies to begin with.
Practical interstellar colonization runs up against not only the staggering energy and materials requirements faced by any proposed colonization of our own solar system, but also against the laws of physics themselves, not to mention human nature. I've read a lot of handwaving criticisms of Stross which have invoked powered flight, jet engines, the speed of sound and rockets to the moon as examples of "impossible" things which became "possible" via technology. But the reality is none of those things were "impossible" according to the laws of physics - they were simply technologically impossible at the time. It's a huge difference that the folks criticizing Stross just don't seem to grasp, all of which lends further credence to the idea we aren't going anywhere in space anytime soon. I mean, if the biggest proponents of space colonization can't manage to grasp that simple concept . . .
In contrast to the "impossible" feats of yesteryear, getting around interstellar space quickly is physically impossible (at least in human form) regardless of how much energy and technology you've got, unless there are some awfully huge holes in our understanding of basic physics. Getting to nearby star systems in multiple decades or centuries is still possible, but from a societal standpoint appears utterly impractical, and the technology involved would be awe inspiring. With that kind of technology I'm not clear on why exactly you'd ever stray that far from home. You'd have everything you want there. Why take the risk?
If you're some nutball who wants to isolate yourself in a tin can for 500 years with 200 of your closest friends and relatives there's no reason to head for Tau Ceti at 5% the speed of light. Just chuck yourself out into the Oort Cloud and float around undisturbed for millennia. Vastly cheaper and less risky, although I still reckon your chances for longterm survival as pretty slim. You're one deranged nut away from extinction.
Of course, I suppose you could argue the whole of the earth is in a similar predicament, given the kind of political leadership which has its hand on the button in our various nuclear-armed states.
Speaking of which, the Fermi Paradox argues pretty convincingly that interstellar colonization is either impossible, impractical or undesirable. Were it otherwise, Earth would have already been colonized by extraterrestrials.
Since you can't even get your facts straight regarding who produced the program (it was made by Channel 4 in the UK, not the BBC), it sorta calls into question the rest of your post.
Beyond that, "The Great Global Warming Swindle" certainly seems aptly named, since the program itself sounds like quite the swindle. From the Wikipedia article on the program:
Carl Wunsch, professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT, was featured in the programme and said that he was "completely misrepresented" in the film and had been "totally misled" when he agreed to be interviewed.[20][4] He called the film "grossly distorted" and "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two."[21] Wunsch was reported to have threatened legal action[21] and to have lodged a complaint with Ofcom, the UK broadcast regulator.[22] Filmmaker Durkin responded, "Carl Wunsch was most certainly not 'duped' into appearing in the film, as is perfectly clear from our correspondence with him. Nor are his comments taken out of context. His interview, as used in the programme, perfectly accurately represents what he said."[21]
Wunsch wrote in a letter dated March 15, 2007 that he believes climate change is "real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component". He also says he had thought he was contributing to a programme which sought to counterbalance "over-dramatisation and unwarranted extrapolation of scientific facts". He raised objections as to how his interview material was used:
"In the part of The Great Climate Change Swindle where I am describing the fact that the ocean tends to expel carbon dioxide where it is warm, and to absorb it where it is cold, my intent was to explain that warming the ocean could be dangerous - because it is such a gigantic reservoir of carbon. By its placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important--diametrically opposite to the point I was making--which is that global warming is both real and threatening."[4]
It's this kind of misrepresentation of the facts, which seems positively endemic in the whole denier camp, that lends additional credibility to the argument that human activities will likely lead to global warming. If the deniers had better scientific arguments, they wouldn't need to resort to twisting the words of others.
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Besides, it's clearly a nipple.
Actually, I think everyone wants integration, if it works well. The problem so far has been most "integrated" devices have been overcomplicated crap. Sure hardcore geeks can use Windows Media Center PCs, and a few have been willing to shell out $1500 or whatever for one, but most folks want something easier and cheaper.
Enter Apple.
Integration can help ensure things "just work", if done correctly (Microsoft being the poster child for how not to do it correctly). The downside is, it's either Apple's way or the highway. But that's really already the case for any existing integrated solutions from every other consumer electronics vendor, from Bose to Nokia to, well, Microsoft.
Apple has successfully locked people into the iPod with the iPod's connector. They've leveraged their position as the #1 portable music player to build up a whole ecology of products that'll only work with their devices, a barrier to entry even Microsoft couldn't overcome. If they establish themselves as the lead integrator in the home, as I suspect is likely via the iPhone and future successors to the AppleTV, they're going to become virtually impossible to work around.
Their products aren't perfect, but I'm frankly glad it's gonna be them and not either Microsoft or Sony. Apple is at worst annoying - Sony and MS have already proven dangerous.
According to that Forrester article:
The eight essential pillars on which Apple will deliver this platform, based on four existing offerings and four new product concepts, are expected to be:
* Apple Macintosh home PC
* Apple TV digital media extender
* Apple Store
* iTunes and its successors
* Apple home server product
* AppleSound universal music controller
* Network-enabled gadgets
* In-home installation services
I think those all of those miss the biggest weapon in Apple's arsenal, and one of them isn't even going to be a factor anymore by 2013 - not as we've come to know it. The PC - including the Mac - is a dying form factor for all but high-end professional use (think workstations). Gamers are migrating to dedicated gaming machines (Apple may well release one themselves), while what we've traditionally used PC's for - web surfing, e-mail, word processing - can now be successfully handled by cell phones. Create a docking station for the iPhone that allows it to use a full-sized keyboard, mouse and monitor while you're at home - or a portable docking solution that allows it to function as a laptop - and a good 90% of all "PC" users won't need a PC anymore. They'll simply use their phone (which really isn't a phone, it's a tiny PC with phone features and a customized interface).
With advances in wireless technology you'll also be able to connect that iPhone to your home's NAS, to your stereo and to your television to share and display content. Apple's big advantage here is user interface design, plus its existing DRM-enabled relationship with major content providers. They've also proven they can market new concepts and new technologies to consumers in a way HP and Microsoft just can't (terd brown Zune, anybody?).
And of course the iPhone can be used as a portable music and video player as well. The next-gen iPhone may well sport 30GB of flash, and by 2013 could be toting 300GB. That's certainly enough on-the-go storage for most users, and with high-speed wireless networks becoming common if it's not enough space, you could always connect to the home NAS and synchronize with it to pull down additional content on-demand (or buy it directly at Apple's online store).
I could see Apple getting into the GeekSquad business as Forrester suggests, for installing and configuring their own hardware. They might even release their own line of displays, amps, speakers and such, although to date they've been pretty content at letting others provide iPod accessories. That might change though as they become more dominant in the consumer electronics space.
Their other big play between now an 2013 could be videogames. There's no reason why Apple can't release its own Xbox - I'm sure Intel would be happy to lend them a lot of engineering help in order to establish a presence in that market. Make the device function with iPhones and serve as a media hub, sell it for $300 or less and watch as it erodes the market for more expensive gaming devices from its rivals. The iPhone is already poised to become a successful portable gaming device in its own right.
Apple could also use their position to smash the high-priced game model that's dominated the market for the past two decades. Keep the price of games to $19.95 and win share away from more expensive rivals, who have been using their cut of game revenue to fund console development. Even if they aren't a huge success as a gaming platform, it won't cost them much to enter the space this way. And they could end up doing to Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft what Commodore did to Atari and Coleco back in the early '80s, when the C64 ate the consoles' lunch. Back then consumers were more than willing to abandon single-function gaming devices for a multi-function device that
One of these days the board will realize that the Xbox team is the only one left with a fucking clue and put them in charge.
Say WHAT?!? Microsoft has dumped in excess of $20 BILLION into the development and production of their gaming systems and other home entertainment products (mostly on the XBoxen, and also that brown turd the Zune). The 360's Red Ring of Death bug alone cost them a billion. So far, that division's only managed to turn a profit in a couple of quarters, and its been in the millions.
At that rate, it'll take Microsoft a century to recoup their cost. See When Will MS Own Up to the XBox Bomb?
They'd have made more money burning $20 billion in bundles of dollar bills to drive a turbine to generate electricity. The XBox 360 is a fine videogame machine, but from a financial perspective it's been a disaster. If it weren't for the Windows Tax and the Office Tax they'd never get away with this kind of stupidity. And as personal computing moves away from the PC and toward mobile devices like the iPhone, they probably won't be able to get away with it much longer.
In a few years, laptops in bubble-packs for $89.95 will be hanging on racks at the drugstore. Microsoft isn't ready for that.
Oh, it's worse than that. In a few years Apple could be selling a cheap iPhone for $150 that's more than twice as powerful as today's model. It'll probably support an external monitor and wireless keyboard, via a little docking cradle. It'll have 160+ GB of internal storage, and the ability to connect to your network storage, at home or at work.
So why buy a "PC" at all? If you're a company, just outfit your employees with iPhones and wireless headsets. They dock them when at their desks, use a keyboard and full-sized monitor, then take their relevant data (and their work) with them wherever they go. If you're a consumer, why buy a "PC" when you can just use your phone? Apple could sell portable docking cradles with a built-in monitor, keyboard and a big battery. Instant "laptop".
The future belongs to companies that control both the hardware and the software. It'll be the only way to have the kind of product control it'll take to lure consumers and business to your platform, and it's also gonna be the only way to earn the margins it'll take to survive. I don't want to say MS is doomed, but I think they're gonna be pushed into the server and application space by this development. Sorta like what happened to IBM over the course of the PC revolution.
And the lesson we can now take is that trying to appease greens will never work, because we aren't even a year out from their great 'success' in forcing CFLs down our throats and they are pissed all over again.
Except this article wasn't brought to you by "the greens". It was brought to you by MSNBC, which is a partnership between Microsoft and NBC. And who owns NBC? Why, none other than General Electric - one of the world's largest producers of incandescent light bulbs.
Now, why would they have a stake in misrepresenting the "danger" posed by mercury in CFLs? Hmmmm. I wonder . . .
Here's the reality - even if you ship every used CFL off to a landfill and don't recycle a single one of them, their use will still lead to an overall reduction in mercury emissions into the environment. That's because they require only a quarter the electrical power to produce the same amount of light. Since much of our electrical power comes from burning coal, which releases copious amounts of mercury into the environment, the reduced power consumption more than offsets the amount of mercury in CFLs.
It's not rocket science.
I'd also question how much of the mercury in CFLs will ultimately end up in the environment, even if they're shipped off to landfills. Landfills - at least, here in the US - tend to be sealed on the bottom, so that they won't contaminate groundwater. Trash is typically rapidly buried with layers of dirt. My guess is that much of the mercury in CFLs, even if they end up in landfills, will be sequestered for decades or centuries at least. Which beats spraying it all over our land, freshwater and oceans, as is currently done when burning coal.
How is that a "combo" drive? Sounds like a "dual" drive to me. I could gaffer-tape a Blu-Ray player to an HD-DVD player, but that wouldn't make it a "combo". For that, they'd have to share the transport mechanism.
Not necessarily. They're still sharing power architecture, interface, and probably control and logic circuitry. They share the same chassis. Just because a gadget has multiple motors doesn't mean it's not a combo-whatever. I've got a combo DVD Recorder VHS Hi-Fi Recorder sitting over by my television. They clearly don't share the same mechanism, but there are some advantages to shoving both technologies into a single case, and the total cost of manufacture is probably less than building two separate devices with two separate power supplies, IR receivers, etc.
Anyhow, I'm not sure exactly what this has to do with HD-DVD & Blu-Ray. Your analogy comparing a combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive to a combo 5.25"/3.5" floppy drive still doesn't make any sense. HD-DVD & Blu-Ray both share the same form factor, can share much of the same control and decode logic, and can share the same drive mechanism. Combo drives are already available.
I agree that HD-DVD lacks the kind of installed base to encourage any kind of manufacturer support down the road, but I'm not sure how crucial that is. If you can rip the discs to a hard drive, you could always leave the content there as a backup, in case your player or your discs go tits up at some point in the future. Devices which can stream HD video are already available, and are sure to grow more common down the road. Hard drives grow cheaper by the day, so storing even a large library of HD-DVDs on a hard drive will cost next to nothing in a couple of years.
Somebody must have hit you with the stupid stick. The post you were replying to was referring to COMBO players, not being able to get obsolete devices. Did you ever see a 5.25"/3.5" floppy disk combo drive? No? Well, there's your analogy.
Speaking of being hit with the stupid stick, the 5.25" and 3.5" floppies used completely different form factors, which makes them a poor analogy for HD-DVD and Rlu-Ray, which share pretty much the exact same form factor. It would be a wee bit difficult to produce a "combo" floppy drive economically, though as I recall there actually were a few combo 5.25"/3.5" floppy drives made, with two separate slots, two separate read heads and I believe two separate drive motors. They were produced as a space saving solution for PCs without many drive bays.
There are already "combo" HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drives, and many of the components within them are shared between the two platforms. My understanding is it's just the lenses which have to be duplicated between the two platforms, because of the depth and optical characteristics of the plastic used on Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD (Blu-Ray uses a much thinner, harder plastic). That and the licensing fees . . .
I doubt we'll see any more "combo" players released simply because HD-DVD isn't being supported by its parent - or by the content providers - anymore. That'll suppress demand to the point where there just aren't the economies of scale in place to make manufacturing such devices economical. Had both formats continued to persist in the marketplace though, I think we would have seen combo drives become the norm, with any price premium being slowly quashed over time by increased economies of scale and advancing designs.
That's where I showered.
Wow. A D&D player who actually showered. I knew there had to be at least one.
Vogon would be pretty impressive.
Not when they start reading their poetry . . .
No they aren't - CU tracks the reliability of vehicles for a decade on their website. However, most vehicles are redesigned every few years, and the expected reliability figures CU provides for new vehicles are based on the performance of the current design.
The fact that it is possible to burn to an inconvenient physical format an then rip to a DRM free format does not make iTunes DRM free. There is an inevitable loss of quality in this time-consuming process.
Burn 'em to a CD-RW - takes a couple of minutes on my machine, surf the web while it's burning - then rip the resulting CD to FLAC, Apple Lossless or some other bit-perfect format. No quality loss (beyond the original lossy compression applied to the file you downloaded from iTunes).
Looks like the Victorians could copy and transmit data faster than Windows Vista!
The Galactica is closer to Earth than we thought!
Now hardware capable of running it is finally available, Duke Nukem Forever should be released any day now!
I cannot begin to understand how Doctor Who took the award for best episode even when its fanbase was split between two nominated episodes.
Doctor Who didn't take home the Hugo because it's been around for a long time, although I don't see why that should be a consideration one way or the other. The episode "The Girl In The Fireplace" took home a well-deserved Hugo because it's one of the finest pieces of science-fiction to show up on the small screen in years. It's got crap to do with the age of the series or its many longtime fans. "The Girl In The Fireplace" makes Eureka, Heroes and Jericho look like crap (as did Battlestar Galactica's "Downloaded", but that's another story).
It's just a pity scriptwriter Moffett is only turning out a single Doctor Who episode a season instead of a dozen.
WMP is crap. MediaMonkey is far more useful, and even the free version sports more features and support for more formats and is faster. Best of all it uses Winamp plugins, which means I can stream audio to my AirPort Express without being a slave to iTunes (which I like only slightly more than WMP).
Whatever. Hex or not is irrelevant. It's 12 alphanumeric characters printed in 2 point font in groups of two separated by semicolons. Again, any dipshit who thinks Jane Homemaker (or Joe Grandpa) is gonna successfully read that mess off to some call center in the Philippines or wherever 100% of the time must be smoking some really good weed.
And even if it was, how hard is it to read off letters and numbers? The only thing that anyone that's argued my points has proven is that the customer is to lazy or to dumb to read off a series of digits/letters.
Maybe the customer has bad eyesight. Maybe they're dyslexic. Maybe they're intimidated and nervous. Maybe they're anxious because they need to get online to bid on an eBay item. Maybe the customer is distracted because they need to get back to the office. In any event, they don't live to service YOU - your job is to service THEM. If a company can't handle that, they should do themselves a favor and get out of the service business. Any company that depends on having their customers read some cryptic shit off the bottom of THE COMPANY'S OWN DAMN EQUIPMENT is clearly run by idiots.
The company should already know what equipment the customer has, since the company provided it. The solution to this problem is called a database. Get one, then use it. If you can't manage that, your customers aren't half as lazy and stupid as you are.
That's just empathy, not complaining, and I'm guessing it's grounds for dismissal for telco employees.
Not empathy - common sense. Something the telcos apparently completely lack. These clowns actually think Jane Homemaker's gonna read some cryptic hexadecimal shit printed in 2 point font off of the underside of their cable modem.
Maybe on their planet it would work, but not here on earth.
You don't even realize how idiotic your comments are.
/. are equally clueless (if not even worse). This bunch couldn't run a taco stand, let alone design, build and operate fleets of interstellar spacecraft.
Pretty much all of the space cadets piling on Stross here at
Seems like an opportunity for the rest of us to convince these guys to pile aboard the B Ark. Just don't ship off the telephone sanitizers time around.
I thought you weren't going to reply to me anymore?
Anyhow, here's the first paragraph of your original post in this thread:
This article is incredibly short-sighted and unreasonably pessimistic. He's using current technology, economics, and incentive to make specific conclusions about something that will most likely happen in the next few hundred years. Just consider how much science and technology has changed in the last 100 years - can you possibly imagine what will be possible 100 years from now, much less draw conclusions about feasibility?
And now you're saying this:
Why would an advanced race want to colonize earth? What does earth have to offer such a race?
So which is it? Is Stross "incredibly short-sighted" and using "current technology, economics and incentive" in assessing what's likely to happen in the next few hundred years? I love that you included "incentive" in that list, by the way. Because now you're seriously asking what *earth* has to offer an advanced technological race - in other words, you yourself are now questioning what incentive there is to travel interstellar distances, something you just criticized Stross for doing.
Ah, the sweet smell of hypocrisy.
If in 4.5 billion years a resource-rich planet like *earth* hasn't been a tempting target for colonization - or at least large scale resource extraction - by at least one pre-singularity alien civilization, then it's pretty obvious there aren't any targets out there to justify interstellar space travel, at least not the kind that sends living breathing beings as we know 'em hurtling around the galaxy. Post singularity all bets are off, as Stross indicates in his well-reasoned blog post.
I won't even bother to point out the fact that there isn't a stitch of evidence for the kind of large scale colonization or resource extraction activities a pre-singularity, interstellar traveling civilization would be capable of performing anywhere in this entire solar system. Not only have they never bothered with earth in 4.5 billion years, they've left the rest of the solar system untouched as well. Again, if interstellar travel made any sense, if there were any technological way around the limitations of physics (like FTL drive), after 4.5 billion years our solar system would be littered with such evidence. There would be alien junk everywhere . The lack of any such evidence speaks volumes about the practicality of interstellar travel using any kind of pre-singularity technology we would recognize.
Which is hardly surprising, given the distances involved, the timescales required and all of the other physical limitations Stross detailed in his post.
And don't misquote me. I didn't say he was "dumb", I said his paradox was. Just because he was a good physicist, doesn't mean he's right about everything. Only a real idiot would think he was.
Yeah, we heard you the first time when you called the Fermi Paradox "dumb". You still haven't provided any reasoning to back up that idiotic statement, and you certainly don't seem to have Enrico Fermi's impressive credentials as a scientist and thinker. So I'm not exactly sure why we should accept your statement that his paradox is "dumb", since you're even less qualified to speak on the subject than Fermi (as the AC in this thread pointed out last night).
FWIW, scientists who actually do work in fields like exobiology certainly don't consider the Fermi Paradox "dumb". Carl Sagan (to use probably the most prominent example) covered Fermi's Paradox at some length, both in his Cosmos miniseries and book as well as in later works. He certainly didn't seem to consider it "dumb". In fact, as memory serves he found the questions it raises quite unsettling.
I think the AC in this thread just pwned you, but I wanted to point out the ridiculousness of this specific argument of yours:
Aliens with any technical achievement have much better things to do with their time than bother with the likes of us. Sure, if they needed the colonization space and Earth were convenient, they'd be here. But they won't go out of their way to talk to us. We've got little to offer them.
See, it's this kind of half-baked thinking I see coming from the proponents of space colonization. It makes you guys look Scientologist nuts.
If interstellar travel were easy mate, the earth would have been colonized long, long before humans and our civilization ever came along. If colonization is practical, possible or desirable, our solar system would be crawling with aliens. They wouldn't have come here to visit us - they'd have come here for the same reasons why guys like you think we should be dumping billions of dollars into researching manned spaceflight. You know, god, country, capitalism, manifest destiny, sun's going nova, adventure, challenge, to get away from it all, riches, resources, energy . . . the whole irrational catalog.
The Milky Way is billions of years older than the earth. Even if you grant that technological civilizations are vanishingly rare, and that they would have had a hard time springing up long ago because of an increased frequency of gamma ray bursts and other sterilizing events, that still leaves a several billion year window for some alien travelers to stumble along and claim earth as their own. Their absence speaks volumes regarding fanciful space colonization plans.
But your comments are sophomoric and are becoming flamebait.
Coming from Mr. "Enrico Fermi is dumb" that's especially rich.
There is zero evidence presented that anything proposed is "impossible"
Actually, Stross's blog post talks a bit about impossible, "magic wand" technologies like FTL drive that would make interstellar colonization a lot more practical while, you know, totally violating the known laws of physics.
There is absolutely no rational reason to dismiss these possibilities as forever implausible, undesirable, or infeasible.
There are plenty of reasons. Stross outlines several, at least when it comes to flesh and blood humans as we know 'em. Assuming the singularity hits all bets are off as far as the plausibility and feasibility goes, but it's easy to argue the singularity would trash the desirability and any proposed necessity.
The path of advanced technological civilizations seems more likely to lead toward increasing efficiencies and ever-decreasing size, based on our own recent experience with microprocessors and nanotechnology. Instead of going offworld to procure ever more matter and energy, advanced post-singularity technology is at least as likely to turn inward, storing and processing more and more information in smaller and smaller spaces using less and less energy to do so.
Fermi's paradox is dumb.
Of course. That silly Enrico Fermi. What a maroon! Who would listen to the prattle of that crank?
Sigh.
Again, proponents of space colonization don't do themselves much justice by defensively deriding well reasoned arguments, especially those of accomplished scientists like Fermi. Especially when these proponents completely fail to present any well-reasoned counter arguments of their own. To wit:
We as a species have just barely come out of the muck. If there are advanced civilizations out there, why would they possibly waste their time with a primitive species like us?
So, are you saying that you think aliens would only colonize a planet if it's already inhabited by a technological civilization? Would the same hold true for us? And if so, why?
If that's the case, we'll never colonize the rest of the solar system, as there are no technological civilizations already established on the other bodies orbiting sol.
Sorry, but your little critique of Fermi's paradox is pretty dumb itself.
This article is incredibly short-sighted and unreasonably pessimistic.
No, his article is realistic and factually based. Just because we want some magic technology that violates the known laws of physics doesn't mean we're ever gonna get it, regardless of what nifty use we have in mind for it. Alchemists tried for centuries to turn lead into gold without any success, and we still can't do it apart from a few atoms at a time even with all of our space age, information age, gene age technology. Wishing on a star ain't gonna take you to the stars.
The amount of energy it would take to colonize just the rest of the solar system is staggering. Even assuming you had the energy and the technology to make it possible, or even practical, it isn't at all clear that such an effort would be necessary or desirable. We already have the technology to do lots of things, from building underwater cities to reclaiming vast deserts, that we choose not to do for a variety of reasons. The same technological advances which might make space colonization more practical would likely also lessen any need to build such colonies to begin with.
Practical interstellar colonization runs up against not only the staggering energy and materials requirements faced by any proposed colonization of our own solar system, but also against the laws of physics themselves, not to mention human nature. I've read a lot of handwaving criticisms of Stross which have invoked powered flight, jet engines, the speed of sound and rockets to the moon as examples of "impossible" things which became "possible" via technology. But the reality is none of those things were "impossible" according to the laws of physics - they were simply technologically impossible at the time. It's a huge difference that the folks criticizing Stross just don't seem to grasp, all of which lends further credence to the idea we aren't going anywhere in space anytime soon. I mean, if the biggest proponents of space colonization can't manage to grasp that simple concept . . .
In contrast to the "impossible" feats of yesteryear, getting around interstellar space quickly is physically impossible (at least in human form) regardless of how much energy and technology you've got, unless there are some awfully huge holes in our understanding of basic physics. Getting to nearby star systems in multiple decades or centuries is still possible, but from a societal standpoint appears utterly impractical, and the technology involved would be awe inspiring. With that kind of technology I'm not clear on why exactly you'd ever stray that far from home. You'd have everything you want there. Why take the risk?
If you're some nutball who wants to isolate yourself in a tin can for 500 years with 200 of your closest friends and relatives there's no reason to head for Tau Ceti at 5% the speed of light. Just chuck yourself out into the Oort Cloud and float around undisturbed for millennia. Vastly cheaper and less risky, although I still reckon your chances for longterm survival as pretty slim. You're one deranged nut away from extinction.
Of course, I suppose you could argue the whole of the earth is in a similar predicament, given the kind of political leadership which has its hand on the button in our various nuclear-armed states.
Speaking of which, the Fermi Paradox argues pretty convincingly that interstellar colonization is either impossible, impractical or undesirable. Were it otherwise, Earth would have already been colonized by extraterrestrials.
Since you can't even get your facts straight regarding who produced the program (it was made by Channel 4 in the UK, not the BBC), it sorta calls into question the rest of your post.
Beyond that, "The Great Global Warming Swindle" certainly seems aptly named, since the program itself sounds like quite the swindle. From the Wikipedia article on the program:
Carl Wunsch, professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT, was featured in the programme and said that he was "completely misrepresented" in the film and had been "totally misled" when he agreed to be interviewed.[20][4] He called the film "grossly distorted" and "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two."[21] Wunsch was reported to have threatened legal action[21] and to have lodged a complaint with Ofcom, the UK broadcast regulator.[22] Filmmaker Durkin responded, "Carl Wunsch was most certainly not 'duped' into appearing in the film, as is perfectly clear from our correspondence with him. Nor are his comments taken out of context. His interview, as used in the programme, perfectly accurately represents what he said."[21]
Wunsch wrote in a letter dated March 15, 2007 that he believes climate change is "real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component". He also says he had thought he was contributing to a programme which sought to counterbalance "over-dramatisation and unwarranted extrapolation of scientific facts". He raised objections as to how his interview material was used:
"In the part of The Great Climate Change Swindle where I am describing the fact that the ocean tends to expel carbon dioxide where it is warm, and to absorb it where it is cold, my intent was to explain that warming the ocean could be dangerous - because it is such a gigantic reservoir of carbon. By its placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important--diametrically opposite to the point I was making--which is that global warming is both real and threatening."[4]
It's this kind of misrepresentation of the facts, which seems positively endemic in the whole denier camp, that lends additional credibility to the argument that human activities will likely lead to global warming. If the deniers had better scientific arguments, they wouldn't need to resort to twisting the words of others.