It's been mentioned before . Many times the hardware may have features that are not yet fully developed or licensed. I remember Nvidia saying this about Linux driver and shader languages - that GLSL wasn't licensed for Linux or something. Then you have patent trolls who will jump at every keyword as evidence that you are violating the patents they bought off craigslist or ebay. Your mention of "geometry tree" might mean list of vertices, To them, it's their super-spiffy collision detection algorithm, so you end with paying lawyers large sums of money to fight it out on your behalf. You might also get the odd nutter or academic department who will go off and patent a future feature enhancement documented in the comments.
Like the early days of the PC, somebody figured out a way of reprogramming the real-time clock to drive 8 Kilohertz interrupts so low-quality sound could be played on the internal speaker. They actually patented it, even though it completely scrambled all file update and creation times.
Given the rate of change that is going on (GLES 3.0 is out today, it would be very confusing for developers if ARM had one version of the driver that supported the current standard, and the user community has their own with custom extensions.
What about that access to home routers by the cloud, set up by an auto-update. You have to give the website your password in order to get to your router.
If you are going to run simulations, then you have to take extremely small time-steps. Chemical simulations (reaction-diffusion equations have to sometimes work at the nano-second level to model individual atomic bond changes). For human civilisations, it would have to be down to the hour. One news report about one event can blow up an entire country like the Ceaucescu revolution in Romania. One minute Ceaucescu is at the football stadium doing a speech. Next thing the crowds are chanting and calling for support from the rest of the country.
Any simulation would have to factor in the various attributes for every person like: age, happiness level (subdivided into food, home (rent/utility bills/purchases), neighborhood, work, commute, social life, purchasing power, career progression, healthcare). This would change due to external events. Sudden inflation would hit food, home, commute, purchasing power. Sudden tax increases would hit work, purchasing power, social life). Education cutbacks would hit work and career progression. Constant strikes would hit healthcare, purchasing power and commute.
Past explanations were due to crop productivity related to long-period oscillations in ocean currents (El Nino / La Nina).
Major ENSO events were recorded in the years 1790–93, 1828, 1876–78, 1891, 1925–26, 1972–73, 1982–83, 1997–98 and 2009–2010,[50] with 1997-1998 being one of the strongest ever.
Going by the wiki page, 2020-2025 should also be a El Nino period
I've read Byte magazine since the 1970's, when the geekiest thing was to spend evenings running Life simulations at 32x32 resolutions. Back then, the S-100 rack system was the coolest thing to own. Users typically came to think that "big was best". IT directors would compete to have the largest department, the largest mainframe, the most number of rack units in their telecoms room. That carried on for a while as electronics miniaturized, you'd find a whole vertical rack dedicated to a single circuit board, with some loud noisy fans and an access cover only removable by a qualified engineer from the corporation.
When the PC came along in the mid 1980's, that carried onto to some extent with those tall tower units for servers. But IT directors saw that mini-desktop units were easier to manage and if nothing else made good monitor stands. They also liked their Filofaxes and pagers.
Desktop PC's have tried to become smaller, but they have power problems with the most powerful GPU boards. For the past 5 or 6 years, PC computers started to slip when there weren't any new killer applications for the CPU - word processing, WYSIWYG editing, spreadsheets, web browsing, video editing can all be done on a regular PC or laptop. On the GPU side, there has been a massive advances in lighting, geometry rendering, instancing, texture mapping (compression, resolution, bit-depth), shaders, super-scalar architectures, texture RAM and video resolutions.
Then the big clunky mobile phones and "luggable" computers came along. Those were popular too. Over time Nokia miniaturized those and added the LCD screen. That evolved to LED screens, which slowly became larger. SMS messaging replaced paging. Cameras were added, and then you could take pictures, make movies. Even back then, the worst thing to happen to a geek or yuppie, would be to lose their Filofax. It would be the corporate version of having brain damage.
In the 1990's, Palm came out with the Palm Pilot PDA, which had basic text input with a stylus and docking with a PC, and helped replace the Filofax.Those "luggables" became laptops with LCD screens. Eventually those screens became larger and had better color resolution. It was possible to make them mobile network devices by adding wireless broadband dongles, but even then battery power only lasts an hour or two, and you couldn't remain in contact if you were on a train or bus. So the Filofax/PDA merged with the mobile phone and became the tablet. The laptop has had to become the ultrabook.
But the rate of change was so fast that many consumer magazines recommended that the general consumer was better off buying a low-end £2000. If you do that, then you can buy a system every 2 years, rather than one every 4 years.
About the only things they could do would be to make the case from platinum, silver or gold, and then support satellite communications for when you are out of range of a mobile network, and multiple SIM cards. Maybe a leather and gold leaf wallet to put it in.
They are working towards that unified goal - if you visit the khronos.org site, you can see some of the discussions they have. It's really a matter of updating the GPU hardware and device drivers.
It was in theory, but a software implementation of OpenGL is always a magnitude slower that the hardware version. There wouldn't be any advantage to using hardware otherwise. The CPU only has eight hyperthreads per core, while the GPU is going to have hundreds per core, and then any number of GPU cores on top of that, on top of texture caching, hardware texture decompression, private memory space. Throw "shaders" on top of that (little matrix-vector programs that do texture loopup, lighting equations, and geometry transformation), dozens being used every frame, and the software can't really keep up.
In the past, you'd see dozens of Linux users asking why their games were being rendered so slow, only to be told to delete the software version of OpenGL.
Lot of people wanted to upgrade our hardware in the past. But around 2005 or so, the graphics card vendors decided to throw away all AGP support and move onto PCIx for graphics board sockets. Users who were used to upgrading their system every year or two with a new graphics card for around $500 were unable to do so, even when they had the money. Buy a new rig just so they could get "geometry shaders" wasn't justifiable in recession times.
This also applied to laptops as well. A laptop with half the performance of a similar graphics card will end up costing twice as much or even more. Just to get a laptop with the same performance as a desktop, and you are looking at l33t gam3r prices. For a desktop system that costs $1500, then a laptop with the similar capabilities (+16" screen) costs around $3000. Add a performance GPU, thats another $1000 for the laptop.
From an accounting point of view, if you are rendering 270 FPS and the monitor is only rendering 60 FPS, or 120 FPS then you are wasting the electricity and power of 210 FPS. Imagine if an admin kept printing out 270 copies of a document when only 60 or 120 were needed.
Seen the new HP Z-1 workstations? The motherboard and hard disk drive are built into a clam-shell monitor design.
I'm not too sure if that is going to take off, especially if the screen goes bust, you now have to send the whole system back, rather than just the monitor. But there isn't going to be any need for big iron in the closet. HP used to make workstations that were more deskstations rather than desktop, as one whole cupboard was essentially the PC chassis.
I'd imagine the mountains would be above the clouds, and you could have a couple of giant satellite dishes. Works for astronomers, so it might work for a data center too.
You use the basic laws of thermodynamics. Take a gas that can be easily compressed into a liquid through a narrowing of a pipe. When this happens, heat is given off, then the now liquid gas becomes cool and is pumped into the freezer compartment. Then the liquid absorbs heat from the freezer, cooling the freezer and heating the liquid. After passing through the cooling circuit, it is released into wider pipes where the liquid expands back into a gas and cools down. The cycle then repeats.
In the modern apartments of India, an Indian family is going to have the TV, DVD player, satellite dish, dish-washer, fridge, freezer, air-conditioners in the living room, bedrooms and kitchen, cooker, microwave, steamer, electric garage door and gates. They are even going to have power-pumps for the cold water supply to ensure they get their fair share of the water supply. The most critical are the cooker and washing/machines. Both of those on together will top 9 Kilowatts (We know, because our old house had a 9 Kilowatt trip switch, and it would trip right when these items were on, along with a TV and several laptops). Add a few air-conditioners on permanently and that goes over 15 Kilowatts. Add a water mains power-pump (because everyone else has one, and if you don't, you don't get any water), and that would go over 20 Kilowatts. Multiply that by several hundred million, and you've got massive demand in the Gigawatt range. Well beyond what the grid was designed for.
In the past, the solution to blackouts was simply to redirect the energy to whoever was complaining at the time.
Some people were getting so fed up, they were hiring the transgender community to party and dance outside the home of the electricity board's CEO at 2am in the morning. If they weren't going to get any sleep, neither was he.
Algebra is a subset of mathematics, and forms the basis for statistics. Statistical analysis is required in just about every science field as well as arts. Social studies and biology require analysis of population dynamics; geology and geography require understanding of hydrodynamic equations. Psychology requires statistical analysis in many different ways. There's even a mathematical package called SPSS - Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. Even history will require the use of probabilty analysis to determine the most likely chain of events.
Mobile / consumer electronics industry moves fast compared to the workstation market. The whole system is a pipeline of chip IP designs, circuit boards layouts and final OEM products. Each stage only moves onto designing the next generation product once sales start to decline for that product. Workstation vendors designed everything from the ground up in parallel over a few years. PC's are just a mish-mash of whatever components work together the best for that particular month based on commodity prices.
I did some investigation into that after completing my PhD, and had to clean out the file system, before it was stomped over with a fresh OS image. Took the opportunity to account for every byte of file system space. After removing my files, applications, device drivers, old web browser caches, thumbnails, application usage logs, turns out there were a couple of files related to logging the boot-up sequence of every device driver and application on the system. These were never cleared or deleted. They just got bigger and bigger (on the order of several Gigabytes after a few years). If for any reason, the PC failed to boot up the first time, these files would remain in a "locked state", so that they couldn't even be defragmented by the file system.
At the time (1990's), there were many proprietary internet protocols; HP used to give out a poster with their network analyzers which had a vendor list going across the poster horizontally, and the network layers going down the page. Just about every big company had their own protocol stack.
From a Microsoft point of view, it would be something that should have too, and did try, but as most web servers were UNIX based, they couldn't get them to replace their existing TCP/IP stacks with MSnet, so Microsoft had to purchase a TCP/IP stack from a third party company. The next best thing for them was to try and "own" the web browser in the same way that they owned the GUI.
It's easy to dominate the population when you are the CEO in a one company town. But once neighboring cities expand around you and grow into a metropolis, your influence rapidly diminishes.
IBM did the graphics with the CGA, EGA and VGA standards. Up until then Hercules was the other option. Then the graphics card vendors starting providing VESA resolutions which required pixblitting acceleration for windows. 3Dfx comes along followed by Nvidia. Audio advanced from PC speaker beeps to something called RealSound which required reprogramming of the PC clock to drive 8Khz audio to the speaker. That was replaced by AdLib and then Soundblaster.
MS was really driven by business customers who just wanted word processing, spreadsheets and poster printing.
Many users are choosing to buy a new smartphone instead of replace their desktop or laptop. For the few hundred dollars/pound or thousand kronar, you can buy a small PC (the smartphone) that has GPS, can view web-pages, allow you to visit Google Streetview, download documents as well as make phone calls and send SMS messages.Microsoft make their big bucks from selling an OS with every sale of a new PC, and lesser so when customers bought upgrade packs to a new OS.
They have to get into the smartphone market - they would be mad not to. There are a whole load of things that could be fixed or done better:
1. Text editing - the actual text edit box for sending messages is insane. It won't let you shrink the whole page so that you can see it in the screen. It "fixes" the size of the text for you. Then when you are typing along, for no apparent reason it will try and jump back to the opposite side of text box to where you want to type. You can't even move the cursor to where you want the text to go, because it then starts jumping left and right.
2. Enabling/disabling wi-fi. You have to close whatever screen you are in, just to get at the settings menu to enable/disable wi-fi / network operator. Then you have to restart whatever window you are using.
3. Swype - The idea of just selecting a word based on a path traced by your finger seems a nice idea, but there are so many long words that you end up having to type them in automatically. Even worse, it will replace the word that you want to use with something completely out of context.
PC's weren't really that graphics/GUI focused at that time and there wasn't much to compete for. Everything was text based (40x25, 80x45, 132x50) resolutions. Using pixel based graphics was only needed for viewing pie-charts and bar graphs.
While Atari ST, Amiga and Apple computers had windows based GUI's, PC applications were still in the DOS prompt era. You were lucky if any application supported a mouse let alone audio.
Ftom their viewpoint it's perfectly logical. Many networks are state owned, and derive profits from long distance and international calls to balance their budgets and sudsidize local land lines.
All of s sudden, everyone starts using Skype and other video services to talk to each other, which eats into their profit margins. Some Canadian companies trief turning standard smartphone applications like Skype into value-added extras by offdring "Skype minutes.".
This is their way of trying again to restore profit margins.
The banks choose cto locate their trading computer systems right next to (if not in) the co-location centers where the fibre-optic routers of the trading network are connected. The boxes being discussed connect those computers to the trading network. Everyone else gets the slow as molasses "Internet".
The trading algorithms work by making frequent future price bids and sales, then cancelling those if the price isn't right. Then they can pocket the difference. Because of their proximity and short "hop" distance they can do this as fast as new values come in.
Your home PC is going to be 10 or more routers away and only get a new price every few seconds.
They tried keeping spy satellites secret in the past. Unfortunately, solar panels and Summer evenings are a bit of a giveaway. Once somebody sees that flash of light, next thing they are taking out their telescope, camera and taking photographs.
Slashdot Mirror
The test pattern image is the most watched program in Italy - though it does play music.
They used to call the early Internet, the . The theory being, you didn't have to worry about implementation details. You just had the X.25 network socket connected to the world somewhere in the data center, and your network router somewhere else. In between was one brightly colored cable connecting the two. That's all you needed to know. At least in theory.
That guy will probably have X.25 cloud in his keyword list.
It's been mentioned before . Many times the hardware may have features that are not yet fully developed or licensed. I remember Nvidia saying this about Linux driver and shader languages - that GLSL wasn't licensed for Linux or something. Then you have patent trolls who will jump at every keyword as evidence that you are violating the patents they bought off craigslist or ebay. Your mention of "geometry tree" might mean list of vertices, To them, it's their super-spiffy collision detection algorithm, so you end with paying lawyers large sums of money to fight it out on your behalf. You might also get the odd nutter or academic department who will go off and patent a future feature enhancement documented in the comments.
Like the early days of the PC, somebody figured out a way of reprogramming the real-time clock to drive 8 Kilohertz interrupts so low-quality sound could be played on the internal speaker. They actually patented it, even though it completely scrambled all file update and creation times.
Given the rate of change that is going on (GLES 3.0 is out today, it would be very confusing for developers if ARM had one version of the driver that supported the current standard, and the user community has their own with custom extensions.
What about that access to home routers by the cloud, set up by an auto-update. You have to give the website your password in order to get to your router.
If you are going to run simulations, then you have to take extremely small time-steps. Chemical simulations (reaction-diffusion equations have to sometimes work at the nano-second level to model individual atomic bond changes). For human civilisations, it would have to be down to the hour. One news report about one event can blow up an entire country like the Ceaucescu revolution in Romania. One minute Ceaucescu is at the football stadium doing a speech. Next thing the crowds are chanting and calling for support from the rest of the country.
Any simulation would have to factor in the various attributes for every person like: age, happiness level (subdivided into food, home (rent/utility bills/purchases), neighborhood, work, commute, social life, purchasing power, career progression, healthcare). This would change due to external events. Sudden inflation would hit food, home, commute, purchasing power. Sudden tax increases would hit work, purchasing power, social life). Education cutbacks would hit work and career progression. Constant strikes would hit healthcare, purchasing power and commute.
Past explanations were due to crop productivity related to long-period oscillations in ocean currents (El Nino / La Nina).
Major ENSO events were recorded in the years 1790–93, 1828, 1876–78, 1891, 1925–26, 1972–73, 1982–83, 1997–98 and 2009–2010,[50] with 1997-1998 being one of the strongest ever.
Going by the wiki page, 2020-2025 should also be a El Nino period
I've read Byte magazine since the 1970's, when the geekiest thing was to spend evenings running Life simulations at 32x32 resolutions. Back then, the S-100 rack system was the coolest thing to own. Users typically came to think that "big was best". IT directors would compete to have the largest department, the largest mainframe, the most number of rack units in their telecoms room. That carried on for a while as electronics miniaturized, you'd find a whole vertical rack dedicated to a single circuit board, with some loud noisy fans and an access cover only removable by a qualified engineer from the corporation.
When the PC came along in the mid 1980's, that carried onto to some extent with those tall tower units for servers. But IT directors saw that mini-desktop units were easier to manage and if nothing else made good monitor stands. They also liked their Filofaxes and pagers.
Desktop PC's have tried to become smaller, but they have power problems with the most powerful GPU boards. For the past 5 or 6 years, PC computers started to slip when there weren't any new killer applications for the CPU - word processing, WYSIWYG editing, spreadsheets, web browsing, video editing can all be done on a regular PC or laptop. On the GPU side, there has been a massive advances in lighting, geometry rendering, instancing, texture mapping (compression, resolution, bit-depth), shaders, super-scalar architectures, texture RAM and video resolutions.
Then the big clunky mobile phones and "luggable" computers came along. Those were popular too. Over time Nokia miniaturized those and added the LCD screen. That evolved to LED screens, which slowly became larger. SMS messaging replaced paging. Cameras were added, and then you could take pictures, make movies. Even back then, the worst thing to happen to a geek or yuppie, would be to lose their Filofax. It would be the corporate version of having brain damage.
In the 1990's, Palm came out with the Palm Pilot PDA, which had basic text input with a stylus and docking with a PC, and helped replace the Filofax.Those "luggables" became laptops with LCD screens. Eventually those screens became larger and had better color resolution. It was possible to make them mobile network devices by adding wireless broadband dongles, but even then battery power only lasts an hour or two, and you couldn't remain in contact if you were on
a train or bus. So the Filofax/PDA merged with the mobile phone and became the tablet. The laptop has had to become the ultrabook.
But the rate of change was so fast that many consumer magazines recommended that the general consumer was better off buying a low-end £2000. If you do that, then you can buy a system every 2 years, rather than one every 4 years.
About the only things they could do would be to make the case from platinum, silver or gold, and then support satellite communications for when you are out of range of a mobile network, and multiple SIM cards. Maybe a leather and gold leaf wallet to put it in.
They are working towards that unified goal - if you visit the khronos.org site, you can see some of the discussions they have. It's really a matter of updating the GPU hardware and device drivers.
It was in theory, but a software implementation of OpenGL is always a magnitude slower that the hardware version. There wouldn't be any advantage to using hardware otherwise. The CPU only has eight hyperthreads per core, while the GPU is going to have hundreds per core, and then any number of GPU cores on top of that, on top of texture caching, hardware texture decompression, private memory space. Throw "shaders" on top of that (little matrix-vector programs that do texture loopup, lighting equations, and geometry transformation), dozens being used every frame, and the software can't really keep up.
In the past, you'd see dozens of Linux users asking why their games were being rendered so slow, only to be told to delete the software version of OpenGL.
Lot of people wanted to upgrade our hardware in the past. But around 2005 or so, the graphics card vendors decided to throw away all AGP support and move onto PCIx for graphics board sockets. Users who were used to upgrading their system every year or two with a new graphics card for around $500 were unable to do so, even when they had the money. Buy a new rig just so they could get "geometry shaders" wasn't justifiable in recession times.
This also applied to laptops as well. A laptop with half the performance of a similar graphics card will end up costing twice as much or even more. Just to get a laptop with the same performance as a desktop, and you are looking at l33t gam3r prices. For a desktop system that costs $1500, then a laptop with the similar capabilities (+16" screen) costs around $3000. Add a performance GPU, thats another $1000 for the laptop.
From an accounting point of view, if you are rendering 270 FPS and the monitor is only rendering 60 FPS, or 120 FPS then you are wasting the electricity and power of 210 FPS. Imagine if an admin kept printing out 270 copies of a document when only 60 or 120 were needed.
Seen the new HP Z-1 workstations? The motherboard and hard disk drive are built into a clam-shell monitor design.
I'm not too sure if that is going to take off, especially if the screen goes bust, you now have to send the whole system back, rather than just the monitor. But there isn't going to be any need for big iron in the closet. HP used to make workstations that were more deskstations rather than desktop, as one whole cupboard was essentially the PC chassis.
I'd imagine the mountains would be above the clouds, and you could have a couple of giant satellite dishes. Works for astronomers, so it might work for a data center too.
You use the basic laws of thermodynamics. Take a gas that can be easily compressed into a liquid through a narrowing of a pipe. When this happens, heat is given off, then the now liquid gas becomes cool and is pumped into the freezer compartment. Then the liquid absorbs heat from the freezer, cooling the freezer and heating the liquid. After passing through the cooling circuit, it is released into wider pipes where the liquid expands back into a gas and cools down. The cycle then repeats.
In the modern apartments of India, an Indian family is going to have the TV, DVD player, satellite dish, dish-washer, fridge, freezer, air-conditioners in the living room, bedrooms and kitchen, cooker, microwave, steamer, electric garage door and gates. They are even going to have power-pumps for the cold water supply to ensure they get their fair share of the water supply. The most critical are the cooker and washing/machines. Both of those on together will top 9 Kilowatts (We know, because our old house had a 9 Kilowatt trip switch, and it would trip right when these items were on, along with a TV and several laptops). Add a few air-conditioners on permanently and that goes over 15 Kilowatts. Add a water mains power-pump (because everyone else has one, and if you don't, you don't get any water), and that would go over 20 Kilowatts. Multiply that by several hundred million, and you've got massive demand in the Gigawatt range. Well beyond what the grid was designed for.
In the past, the solution to blackouts was simply to redirect the energy to whoever was complaining at the time.
Some people were getting so fed up, they were hiring the transgender community to party and dance outside the home of the electricity board's CEO at 2am in the morning. If they weren't going to get any sleep, neither was he.
Algebra is a subset of mathematics, and forms the basis for statistics. Statistical analysis is required in just about every science field as well as arts. Social studies and biology require analysis of population dynamics; geology and geography require understanding of hydrodynamic equations. Psychology requires statistical analysis in many different ways. There's even a mathematical package called SPSS - Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. Even history will require the use of probabilty analysis to determine the most likely chain of events.
Mobile / consumer electronics industry moves fast compared to the workstation market. The whole system is a pipeline of chip IP designs, circuit boards layouts and final OEM products. Each stage only moves onto designing the next generation product once sales start to decline for that product. Workstation vendors designed everything from the ground up in parallel over a few years. PC's are just a mish-mash of whatever components work together the best for that particular month based on commodity prices.
I did some investigation into that after completing my PhD, and had to clean out the file system, before it was stomped over with a fresh OS image. Took the opportunity to account for every byte of file system space. After removing my files, applications, device drivers, old web browser caches, thumbnails, application usage logs, turns out there were a couple of files related to logging the boot-up sequence of every device driver and application on the system. These were never cleared or deleted. They just got bigger and bigger (on the order of several Gigabytes after a few years). If for any reason, the PC failed to boot up the first time, these files would remain in a "locked state", so that they couldn't even be defragmented by the file system.
At the time (1990's), there were many proprietary internet protocols; HP used to give out a poster with their network analyzers which had a vendor list going across the poster horizontally, and the network layers going down the page. Just about every big company had their own protocol stack.
From a Microsoft point of view, it would be something that should have too, and did try, but as most web servers were UNIX based, they couldn't get them to replace their existing TCP/IP stacks with MSnet, so Microsoft had to purchase a TCP/IP stack from a third party company. The next best thing for them was to try and "own" the web browser in the same way that they owned the GUI.
It's easy to dominate the population when you are the CEO in a one company town. But once neighboring cities expand around you and grow into a metropolis, your influence rapidly diminishes.
IBM did the graphics with the CGA, EGA and VGA standards. Up until then Hercules was the other option. Then the graphics card vendors starting providing VESA resolutions which required pixblitting acceleration for windows. 3Dfx comes along followed by Nvidia. Audio advanced from PC speaker beeps to something called RealSound which required reprogramming of the PC clock to drive 8Khz audio to the speaker. That was replaced by AdLib and then Soundblaster.
MS was really driven by business customers who just wanted word processing, spreadsheets and poster printing.
Many users are choosing to buy a new smartphone instead of replace their desktop or laptop. For the few hundred dollars/pound or thousand kronar, you can buy a small PC (the smartphone) that has GPS, can view web-pages, allow you to visit Google Streetview, download documents as well as make phone calls and send SMS messages.Microsoft make their big bucks from selling an OS with every sale of a new PC, and lesser so when customers bought upgrade packs to a new OS.
They have to get into the smartphone market - they would be mad not to. There are a whole load of things that could be fixed or done better:
1. Text editing - the actual text edit box for sending messages is insane. It won't let you shrink the whole page so that you can see it in the screen. It "fixes" the size of the text for you. Then when you are typing along, for no apparent reason it will try and jump back to the opposite side of text box to where you want to type.
You can't even move the cursor to where you want the text to go, because it then starts jumping left and right.
2. Enabling/disabling wi-fi. You have to close whatever screen you are in, just to get at the settings menu to enable/disable wi-fi / network operator. Then you have to restart whatever window you are using.
3. Swype - The idea of just selecting a word based on a path traced by your finger seems a nice idea, but there are so many long words that you end up having to
type them in automatically. Even worse, it will replace the word that you want to use with something completely out of context.
PC's weren't really that graphics/GUI focused at that time and there wasn't much to compete for. Everything was text based (40x25, 80x45, 132x50) resolutions. Using pixel based graphics was only needed for viewing pie-charts and bar graphs.
While Atari ST, Amiga and Apple computers had windows based GUI's, PC applications were still in the DOS prompt era. You were lucky if any application supported a mouse let alone audio.
Ftom their viewpoint it's perfectly logical.
Many networks are state owned, and derive profits from long distance and international calls to balance their budgets and sudsidize local land lines.
All of s sudden, everyone starts using Skype and other video services to talk to each other, which eats into their profit margins. Some Canadian companies trief turning standard smartphone applications like Skype into value-added extras by offdring "Skype minutes.".
This is their way of trying again to restore profit margins.
The banks choose cto locate their trading computer systems right next to (if not in) the co-location centers where the fibre-optic routers of the trading network are connected. The boxes being discussed connect those computers to the trading network. Everyone else gets the slow as molasses "Internet".
The trading algorithms work by making frequent future price bids and sales, then cancelling those if the price isn't right. Then they can pocket the difference. Because of their proximity and short "hop" distance they can do this as fast as new values come in.
Your home PC is going to be 10 or more routers away and only get a new price every few seconds.
They tried keeping spy satellites secret in the past. Unfortunately, solar panels and Summer evenings are a bit of a giveaway. Once somebody sees that flash of light, next thing they are taking out their telescope, camera and taking photographs.