The PC and the handheld really are very different platforms, and what works well for one does not always work well for another. On the handheld you want big fat buttons you can hit with your thumbs. On a PC you want lots of info readily visible, and the precision of a mouse.
Which is why the interface will automatically change depending on how you're interacting with the device. It'll function like a traditional desktop if you're using a keyboard and mouse with an external monitor. It'll function like a tablet if you dock it with a portable multitouch display. On its own, it'll function like a smartphone. Apple is clearly moving to merge OS X and iOS, so one OS will be able to seamlessly transition modes.
Then there are the corporate beancounters - if the Apple laptop costs $1200, and the PC that runs the standard software costs $600, then they will buy the PC.
Apple won't be selling laptops. They'll be selling smartphones and docking stations of various form factors - desktop, laptop, tablet, etc. The docking stations will be fairly cheap, and the smartphones will cost the same as they do today (which corporations have already shown they're more than willing to pay for).
I'm not even sure the PC and laptop as we've known them will still be around in 5 years. I think the smartphone might displace both of them. When you're at your desk you'll dock it with your keyboard, mouse and monitor and use it in "desktop" mode. When you're on the road and need to produce content you'll dock it into a MacBook Air-like docking station with integrated keyboard and monitor and use it in "laptop" mode. And if you just want to browse and read you'll drop it into a tablet-like dock with a 10" screen for use as a "tablet".
Since Apple makes the second most popular consumer OS and mobile OS, they're in a unique position to pioneer this transition. Microsoft has already been frozen out of the handheld space, and Google is a big fat nothing on the desktop.
Maybe. Or maybe they think we're more interesting / entertaining to watch if we don't know they're here. After all, when scientists observe animals in the wild they typically don't interact with them.
Also, the probes might be very small and designed to evade detection for a number of reasons. For starters, what if there's some hostile alien race out there? Unlikely, but you could never be sure. You wouldn't want less powerful races to know much if anything about you - that could help a more powerful aggressor identify and locate you.
The Drake Equation isn't "conjecture" - it's just a way to formulate the question. The numbers you plug into it are largely conjecture at the moment, although we're about to have pretty specific values for many of the elements. This puts some bounds on the final number. The more certain you are regarding each element of the equation, the more tightly bound the final number becomes.
Unless hyperlight travel is actually possible, maybe they don't travel because nobody wants to be away from their home system for decades (or centuries) on a very expensive trip to visit some primitives.
If you have simulation technology that's sophisticated enough, you don't have to physically visit another world in order to experience it. Maybe you send probes, model the world, and then visit it whenever you want from the comfort of your own living room. So, maybe advanced civilizations are visiting us - and every other inhabited and uninhabited world - constantly, but only in their own simulators.
I mean, why travel for 50 years to visit one world when in 50 minutes you could visit a dozen?
Given a population of 200-400 billion stars in the Mikly Way, 7.6% are similar to ours for 15-30 billion stars...
And, keep in mind, a star doesn't have to be all that similar to ours to host life. A majority of the stars in our galaxy are much smaller than our sun, but most of them also have habitable zones plenty big enough to hold one or more planets (or moons) with earthlike surface conditions.
These smaller stars also have the advantage of longer lifespans. Red dwarf stars born a billion years before the sun will still be shining on their planets a billion years after our sun has died.
Stars larger than our sun have much larger habitable zones, so could in theory play host to a disproportionate percentage of all habitable planets. Life wouldn't have as much time to evolve on those worlds, though it isn't clear yet just how long it takes for life to evolve into the kind of complex forms which have dominated here on earth the past ~500 million years.
Well in excess of 50% of the stars in our galaxy likely could play host to habitable worlds. We won't have a good idea of the final number until we're able to get a more complete sampling of smaller terrestrial-planet sized worlds (including moons).
The findings so far are making the Fermi Paradox somewhat more disturbing, though...
Wait, the moron who bought Skype - and didn't bother to check to see if she was getting the patents - is going to somehow turn HP around?
Yeah. Right.
Meg Witless could barely run a taco stand, let alone HP. She made Carly Failorina look competent. eBay was a great idea - which she had nothing to do with - and Meg rode that idea along with the dot com boom to "success". Once the boom ended, so did eBay's growth. It's been pretty much stagnant since.
The only smart move eBay has made in the past decade or so was buying PayPal, and that was a no-brainer everybody and his brother suggested eBay do. Their attempt to become another Amazon has only succeeded in devaluing their core auction business.
Not sure if that's true or not, but if the planet had a dense, large, rocky core, it could hold on to a thick, massive atmosphere that's far less dense than liquid water, at least for much of its overall volume.
Saturn is a good example in our own solar system - it has an overall density less than the density of water. If you had a big enough bathtub, you could float Saturn in it.
Actually, the Shuttle was up to around $1 billion per-mission if you take into account the operating program costs. Unlike disposable launchers, the Shuttles required an army of maintenance and support people to keep them running.
New system: $15,000,000,000 per mission (Source copied below. [orlandosentinel.com])
That's true if they only launch two missions.
But keep in mind the Shuttles were nearing the end of their lifespans and would have needed to be replaced by new orbiters. Endeavuor, the replacement for Columbia, cost $2 billion, but was built largely with spare parts almost two decades ago. You'd be looking at something like $5 billion a pop to build new Shuttles - $25 billion to replace the entire fleet. And you'd still be stuck with their outrageous launch costs and operating expenses.
I see this plan as an improvement over the Shuttles - they won't have the operating expenses and obvious design flaws of the Shuttles - but still overpriced compared to what Falcon appears poised to accomplish.
A cost study done in 2009 states that Indianapolis would have saved half a billion if it bought every rider a car and 5 years of gasoline.
And did the ding-dongs who performed this alleged study determine how much worse traffic would be if all the cum filth mystery hair gel excreters were given their own cars to piddle around in? I'm guessing probably not. However, I've experienced a real-world example of what happens when public transit networks shut down in supposedly auto-centric cities. I was in Los Angeles about a decade ago when their transit system went on strike. My regular 20 minute, 11 mile drive home from Monterey Park to Downtown LA was transformed into a three hour bumper-to-bumper gridlock hell.
That's because roads can only carry so many cars, and when you tip them past a certain threshold total gridlock results. Building new roads (or expanding existing ones) is far, far more expensive than simply packing more people onto existing roads via buses (or utilizing rail to haul even greater passenger densities).
Of course, if you provide lots of affordable housing near where people actually work, the need for both automobiles and mass transit declines. You're starting to see the urban cores of numerous American cities revive as housing becomes available within them again (due to loft and apartment conversions of old commercial space). Downtown Los Angeles is a great example of this - I think almost as many people pack into the enormous downtown restaurant Bottega Louie on a Friday night as lived downtown when I left there in 2004. While some drive in, many live in those converted spaces, as well as in numerous new apartments and condos built over the past decade. In dense population centers like that, private automobiles make little sense.
Thanks, I was about to say something similar but you beat me to it.
Every single "multimedia experience" I've encountered on the Internet since day-one has been a sucktacular piece of shit. Flash is one of the leading reasons for that, but the whole concept of using a web browser to deliver "multimedia experiences" is idiotic, and every implementation I've seen has been a sad, buggy, bandwidth and CPU hogging joke.
You're seriously trying to support the assertion "they" do this "every couple of years" because of "Nebraska man"? "Nebraska man" hit the papers in 1922. Once a century != "every couple of years".
HP has already stolen market share from DELL because they have become so good at making PC's
Actually, HP clawed back some of the marketshare they lost to Dell in the PC business because the nature of the PC business changed dramatically over the past decade. From the mid-'90s until the middle of the last decade PC's were still pretty expensive, generally north of $1,000 a piece here in the US, and you could save a considerable amount of money by customizing your PC to sport only those features you really wanted. You could save even more by going mail order, potentially slashing the amount you paid in taxes and getting fresher inventory than the local CompUSA or Circuit City had in stock.
All of those factors favored Dell, with their customize online, custom build, mail order model. You could save a couple hundred bucks going with Dell and get just what you wanted. Unfortunately for Dell all of those factors have since changed. A decent PC can be had well south of $1,000 today - even laptops are cheaper than that now (and they've grown to dominate the market). Customization doesn't save you hundreds of dollars anymore - you can generally buy your way into a much better class of computer for just $200, complete with whatever features you were seeking and then some. Laptops don't have as many customization options, anyhow. And even the cheapest PCs ship with rich feature sets to begin with. The fact that PCs are so cheap also means there isn't much money to be saved in sales taxes by going mail order. And inventory at the few remaining PC retailers - mostly Staples, Costco and Best Buy - is amazingly fresh compared to the old days because there's so much turnover. Retail distribution favored HP and its enormous distribution network, established for their printers, over Dell's direct to the consumers model.
HP leaving the PC market opens an enormous opportunity for Apple to move into the enterprise space with their post-PC products.
A cop murdered an unarmed man and got off with barely a slap on the wrist.
Unarmed.
Except for the vodka bottle he threw at the police (which I believe hit one of the officers in the head).
And the knife he subsequently pulled on them before they finally shot him.
I wish the police would take out more of the stabby, drunken, crazy assholes we have wandering our streets. Like the crazy bitch who stabbed the cashier at a pizza place near my apartment to death one night a couple of years ago. Us neighbors all enjoyed his horrified screaming at 1:00 in the morning as he lay dying on the sidewalk.
Curiously, Anonymous didn't turn up to protest this poor guy's death.
The Shuttle program and the ISS alone have cost us north of $200 billion.
With a space elevator, you could conceivably haul the components to build something as large as the ISS into orbit in just a month, for less than the cost of a single Shuttle launch.
Given that the cost differential between launching on chemical rockets and hauling cargo up on a space elevator is THOUSANDS of dollars a kilogram, you can pretty much guarantee that a space elevator will turn a profit. It'll cost around $200-$300 a kilogram to haul payload into orbit with a space elevator, compared to $4,000 and up - way up - with rockets. The operators of a space elevator could charge $3,500 a kg and pretty much monopolize the entire launch business, pocketing $3,000 a kg with each payload.
At least until somebody else builds a space elevator...
much like Microsoft with Windows/Office, it's a huge business riding on one innovation followed by market capture.
This nails it. Google is a fantastically successful advertising agency which started out as a search business. They were better than Alta Vista but not THAT much better. They were, however, less cluttered. Yahoo! took the opposite approach when it came to clutter, and look where that got 'em.
Which brings up another point - Google was lucky to have stupid competitors. Yahoo! has been run by idiots for years, and Alta Vista had the misfortune of being run by DEC. Microsoft was late to the game, as they've been late to pretty much every game, and their OS monopoly didn't prove as useful as they probably thought it would.
As with MS, where the OS (and their Office monopoly) funds pretty much everything else (like the $30 billion they blew getting into the videogame business), Google's torrent of ad revenues funds all of their unprofitable excursions into unrelated markets (YouTube, Android, Google+, etc.).
The only company in the IT space which truly impresses me is Apple. They've been way too successful in way too many markets for way too long for it to have been an accident. Steve Jobs is an asshole, but he's also a genius. I think he'll go down as one of the two or three greatest businessmen in American history.
I don't know, ask the Catholic Church that question. It's clearly an international child molestation racket which largely functions to protect its leadership from prosecution, yet to date no legal authority has moved to shut it down.
Slashdot Mirror
The PC and the handheld really are very different platforms, and what works well for one does not always work well for another. On the handheld you want big fat buttons you can hit with your thumbs. On a PC you want lots of info readily visible, and the precision of a mouse.
Which is why the interface will automatically change depending on how you're interacting with the device. It'll function like a traditional desktop if you're using a keyboard and mouse with an external monitor. It'll function like a tablet if you dock it with a portable multitouch display. On its own, it'll function like a smartphone. Apple is clearly moving to merge OS X and iOS, so one OS will be able to seamlessly transition modes.
Then there are the corporate beancounters - if the Apple laptop costs $1200, and the PC that runs the standard software costs $600, then they will buy the PC.
Apple won't be selling laptops. They'll be selling smartphones and docking stations of various form factors - desktop, laptop, tablet, etc. The docking stations will be fairly cheap, and the smartphones will cost the same as they do today (which corporations have already shown they're more than willing to pay for).
Yup, this pretty much nails it.
I'm not even sure the PC and laptop as we've known them will still be around in 5 years. I think the smartphone might displace both of them. When you're at your desk you'll dock it with your keyboard, mouse and monitor and use it in "desktop" mode. When you're on the road and need to produce content you'll dock it into a MacBook Air-like docking station with integrated keyboard and monitor and use it in "laptop" mode. And if you just want to browse and read you'll drop it into a tablet-like dock with a 10" screen for use as a "tablet".
Since Apple makes the second most popular consumer OS and mobile OS, they're in a unique position to pioneer this transition. Microsoft has already been frozen out of the handheld space, and Google is a big fat nothing on the desktop.
Maybe. Or maybe they think we're more interesting / entertaining to watch if we don't know they're here. After all, when scientists observe animals in the wild they typically don't interact with them.
Also, the probes might be very small and designed to evade detection for a number of reasons. For starters, what if there's some hostile alien race out there? Unlikely, but you could never be sure. You wouldn't want less powerful races to know much if anything about you - that could help a more powerful aggressor identify and locate you.
Couldn't you just record the tone for "1" on your cell phone or something, then play it back into the headset?
The Drake Equation isn't "conjecture" - it's just a way to formulate the question. The numbers you plug into it are largely conjecture at the moment, although we're about to have pretty specific values for many of the elements. This puts some bounds on the final number. The more certain you are regarding each element of the equation, the more tightly bound the final number becomes.
Unless hyperlight travel is actually possible, maybe they don't travel because nobody wants to be away from their home system for decades (or centuries) on a very expensive trip to visit some primitives.
If you have simulation technology that's sophisticated enough, you don't have to physically visit another world in order to experience it. Maybe you send probes, model the world, and then visit it whenever you want from the comfort of your own living room. So, maybe advanced civilizations are visiting us - and every other inhabited and uninhabited world - constantly, but only in their own simulators.
I mean, why travel for 50 years to visit one world when in 50 minutes you could visit a dozen?
Given a population of 200-400 billion stars in the Mikly Way, 7.6% are similar to ours for 15-30 billion stars...
And, keep in mind, a star doesn't have to be all that similar to ours to host life. A majority of the stars in our galaxy are much smaller than our sun, but most of them also have habitable zones plenty big enough to hold one or more planets (or moons) with earthlike surface conditions.
These smaller stars also have the advantage of longer lifespans. Red dwarf stars born a billion years before the sun will still be shining on their planets a billion years after our sun has died.
Stars larger than our sun have much larger habitable zones, so could in theory play host to a disproportionate percentage of all habitable planets. Life wouldn't have as much time to evolve on those worlds, though it isn't clear yet just how long it takes for life to evolve into the kind of complex forms which have dominated here on earth the past ~500 million years.
Well in excess of 50% of the stars in our galaxy likely could play host to habitable worlds. We won't have a good idea of the final number until we're able to get a more complete sampling of smaller terrestrial-planet sized worlds (including moons).
The findings so far are making the Fermi Paradox somewhat more disturbing, though...
Wait, the moron who bought Skype - and didn't bother to check to see if she was getting the patents - is going to somehow turn HP around?
Yeah. Right.
Meg Witless could barely run a taco stand, let alone HP. She made Carly Failorina look competent. eBay was a great idea - which she had nothing to do with - and Meg rode that idea along with the dot com boom to "success". Once the boom ended, so did eBay's growth. It's been pretty much stagnant since.
The only smart move eBay has made in the past decade or so was buying PayPal, and that was a no-brainer everybody and his brother suggested eBay do. Their attempt to become another Amazon has only succeeded in devaluing their core auction business.
Not sure if that's true or not, but if the planet had a dense, large, rocky core, it could hold on to a thick, massive atmosphere that's far less dense than liquid water, at least for much of its overall volume.
Saturn is a good example in our own solar system - it has an overall density less than the density of water. If you had a big enough bathtub, you could float Saturn in it.
It would leave a ring, though...
That's their cash flow, you halfwit. This is their income statement: http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/invsub/results/statemnt.aspx?symbol=US%3AGM&stmtView=Qtr
They paid out a huge chunk of cash as dividends, because they're doing so well.
Shuttle: $450,000,000 per mission
Actually, the Shuttle was up to around $1 billion per-mission if you take into account the operating program costs. Unlike disposable launchers, the Shuttles required an army of maintenance and support people to keep them running.
New system: $15,000,000,000 per mission (Source copied below. [orlandosentinel.com])
That's true if they only launch two missions.
But keep in mind the Shuttles were nearing the end of their lifespans and would have needed to be replaced by new orbiters. Endeavuor, the replacement for Columbia, cost $2 billion, but was built largely with spare parts almost two decades ago. You'd be looking at something like $5 billion a pop to build new Shuttles - $25 billion to replace the entire fleet. And you'd still be stuck with their outrageous launch costs and operating expenses.
I see this plan as an improvement over the Shuttles - they won't have the operating expenses and obvious design flaws of the Shuttles - but still overpriced compared to what Falcon appears poised to accomplish.
They actually are including an orchard on the grounds...
A cost study done in 2009 states that Indianapolis would have saved half a billion if it bought every rider a car and 5 years of gasoline.
And did the ding-dongs who performed this alleged study determine how much worse traffic would be if all the cum filth mystery hair gel excreters were given their own cars to piddle around in? I'm guessing probably not. However, I've experienced a real-world example of what happens when public transit networks shut down in supposedly auto-centric cities. I was in Los Angeles about a decade ago when their transit system went on strike. My regular 20 minute, 11 mile drive home from Monterey Park to Downtown LA was transformed into a three hour bumper-to-bumper gridlock hell.
That's because roads can only carry so many cars, and when you tip them past a certain threshold total gridlock results. Building new roads (or expanding existing ones) is far, far more expensive than simply packing more people onto existing roads via buses (or utilizing rail to haul even greater passenger densities).
Of course, if you provide lots of affordable housing near where people actually work, the need for both automobiles and mass transit declines. You're starting to see the urban cores of numerous American cities revive as housing becomes available within them again (due to loft and apartment conversions of old commercial space). Downtown Los Angeles is a great example of this - I think almost as many people pack into the enormous downtown restaurant Bottega Louie on a Friday night as lived downtown when I left there in 2004. While some drive in, many live in those converted spaces, as well as in numerous new apartments and condos built over the past decade. In dense population centers like that, private automobiles make little sense.
Thanks, I was about to say something similar but you beat me to it.
Every single "multimedia experience" I've encountered on the Internet since day-one has been a sucktacular piece of shit. Flash is one of the leading reasons for that, but the whole concept of using a web browser to deliver "multimedia experiences" is idiotic, and every implementation I've seen has been a sad, buggy, bandwidth and CPU hogging joke.
Browsers. Aren't. Built. For. That.
No "plugin" will fix it.
Use a dedicated app, fools.
You're seriously trying to support the assertion "they" do this "every couple of years" because of "Nebraska man"? "Nebraska man" hit the papers in 1922. Once a century != "every couple of years".
Basic math fail.
HP has already stolen market share from DELL because they have become so good at making PC's
Actually, HP clawed back some of the marketshare they lost to Dell in the PC business because the nature of the PC business changed dramatically over the past decade. From the mid-'90s until the middle of the last decade PC's were still pretty expensive, generally north of $1,000 a piece here in the US, and you could save a considerable amount of money by customizing your PC to sport only those features you really wanted. You could save even more by going mail order, potentially slashing the amount you paid in taxes and getting fresher inventory than the local CompUSA or Circuit City had in stock.
All of those factors favored Dell, with their customize online, custom build, mail order model. You could save a couple hundred bucks going with Dell and get just what you wanted. Unfortunately for Dell all of those factors have since changed. A decent PC can be had well south of $1,000 today - even laptops are cheaper than that now (and they've grown to dominate the market). Customization doesn't save you hundreds of dollars anymore - you can generally buy your way into a much better class of computer for just $200, complete with whatever features you were seeking and then some. Laptops don't have as many customization options, anyhow. And even the cheapest PCs ship with rich feature sets to begin with. The fact that PCs are so cheap also means there isn't much money to be saved in sales taxes by going mail order. And inventory at the few remaining PC retailers - mostly Staples, Costco and Best Buy - is amazingly fresh compared to the old days because there's so much turnover. Retail distribution favored HP and its enormous distribution network, established for their printers, over Dell's direct to the consumers model.
HP leaving the PC market opens an enormous opportunity for Apple to move into the enterprise space with their post-PC products.
That doesn't justify shooting them.
Are you nuts, or just stoned? If you come at me with a knife and I have a gun, you're toast. Don't like it? Don't come at me with a knife.
Last time I checked, a Taser has a slightly longer range than a knife.
Not if you throw the knife... Which the officers could reasonably expect the drunken nut to do, since he'd already thrown a bottle at them.
The one the GP is talking about happened a couple of years ago
At another station. In another city. Which has fuck all to do with the protest BART wisely shut down, which was to protest the more recent shooting.
Because god forbid the police protect us from dangerous psychotics on a violent rampage!
Oh look - another uninformed angry idiot!
A cop murdered an unarmed man and got off with barely a slap on the wrist.
Unarmed.
Except for the vodka bottle he threw at the police (which I believe hit one of the officers in the head).
And the knife he subsequently pulled on them before they finally shot him.
I wish the police would take out more of the stabby, drunken, crazy assholes we have wandering our streets. Like the crazy bitch who stabbed the cashier at a pizza place near my apartment to death one night a couple of years ago. Us neighbors all enjoyed his horrified screaming at 1:00 in the morning as he lay dying on the sidewalk.
Curiously, Anonymous didn't turn up to protest this poor guy's death.
The Shuttle program and the ISS alone have cost us north of $200 billion.
With a space elevator, you could conceivably haul the components to build something as large as the ISS into orbit in just a month, for less than the cost of a single Shuttle launch.
Given that the cost differential between launching on chemical rockets and hauling cargo up on a space elevator is THOUSANDS of dollars a kilogram, you can pretty much guarantee that a space elevator will turn a profit. It'll cost around $200-$300 a kilogram to haul payload into orbit with a space elevator, compared to $4,000 and up - way up - with rockets. The operators of a space elevator could charge $3,500 a kg and pretty much monopolize the entire launch business, pocketing $3,000 a kg with each payload.
At least until somebody else builds a space elevator...
much like Microsoft with Windows/Office, it's a huge business riding on one innovation followed by market capture.
This nails it. Google is a fantastically successful advertising agency which started out as a search business. They were better than Alta Vista but not THAT much better. They were, however, less cluttered. Yahoo! took the opposite approach when it came to clutter, and look where that got 'em.
Which brings up another point - Google was lucky to have stupid competitors. Yahoo! has been run by idiots for years, and Alta Vista had the misfortune of being run by DEC. Microsoft was late to the game, as they've been late to pretty much every game, and their OS monopoly didn't prove as useful as they probably thought it would.
As with MS, where the OS (and their Office monopoly) funds pretty much everything else (like the $30 billion they blew getting into the videogame business), Google's torrent of ad revenues funds all of their unprofitable excursions into unrelated markets (YouTube, Android, Google+, etc.).
The only company in the IT space which truly impresses me is Apple. They've been way too successful in way too many markets for way too long for it to have been an accident. Steve Jobs is an asshole, but he's also a genius. I think he'll go down as one of the two or three greatest businessmen in American history.
Backscatter Xray gives a dosage far far lower than the dosage you will receive on your flight.
Assuming the machine is working correctly...
Wait...I thought that was al-Qaeda?
I don't know, ask the Catholic Church that question. It's clearly an international child molestation racket which largely functions to protect its leadership from prosecution, yet to date no legal authority has moved to shut it down.